Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Quick follow up on that post about Jonah Goldberg, who wishes (coughthirdworldcough) women could have a little more power so they could “civilize” their men.

Goldberg actually has it exactly backwards. It’s not that women civilize men, it’s that oppressing women uncivilizes us.

When men have the idea that we automatically have dominion over half of humanity an obvious question becomes “why not have dominion over the rest?” And when men believe we can automatically ignore the agency of half of humanity, rob them of their power, and use them as objects of our own convenience or gratification it’s a quick leap to “why not make similar use of all of humanity?”

Where Goldberg goes wrong is he thinks that just giving women enough power to better withhold sex creates civilization. Instead it’s that taking away any power from women as a class makes us all uncivilized.

And once you get that it’s easy to see how, in this case, his plea to give women a little bit of power so that they can trade sex instead of just having it taken from them, is completely anti-feminist. And uncivilized.

Hugo Schwyzer takes conservative nepotism beneficiary Jonah Goldberg to task for arguing that women should be given a little more power in “backwards” cultures. You’d think that would be a good thing but Goldberg’s arguing only that women should have only enough power to be more effective “gatekeepers.” (Emphasis mine.)

Jonah concludes his piece … with this gem:

“Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.”

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

Read the quote and Schwyzer’s analysis in context here.

Goldberg says “Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow.”

Which would be… Goldberg, a man, setting expectations for male behavior. Very low expectations, sure, but not ones set by women.

Which is, of course, the nice little trap men like Goldberg want to set for us: expect to be able to indulge your more infantile and/or animal impulses; then either blame women letting us live up to the expectations we ourselves set, or else resenting women for using sexual access (the only leverage we permit them to have) in order to get us to act like actual adult men. The minor “upside” for anti-feminists like Goldberg is that men are absolved of all responsibility for, well, responsibility. The infinitely larger downside is that women are expected to have all the responsibility but none of the authority (we just call them “bitches” when they try to make us do the task Goldberg assigns them.) The end result isn’t even zero sum, it’s negative sum: grown men and women are reduced to Cathi Hanauer’s acute phrases The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch

Quick question for Goldberg: what does he imagine, say, Aristotle, or Augustine, or, Confucius or, I dunno, Maimonides, or even Tolstoy would think of his assertion that women are a civilizing influence on men? I happen to think all those gentlemen were dead wrong to believe men are uniquely moral and civilizing compared to women. But Goldberg and his desperately anti-feminist ilk just as wrong to imagine their fantasy of essential gendered women’s morality is any more real.

Another quick question: Goldberg, like Satoshi Kanazawa and millions of other anti-feminists, believes women’s magic lady part… and their “power” to withhold it... are the only thing that civilizes men. To which I’ll just rephrase Holly’s observation: Does that all those gay artists and writers and politicians and freakin’ gay fry cooks for that matter never get around to contributing to society because they’re way too busy not withholding sex from each other?

In fact we men set expectations all the time. In fact the whole idea that women don’t have anything better to do with their own sexuality than to use it to manipulate men’s behavior (coughno-sex classcough) is a completely male expectation.

Screw Goldberg and the coin-operated horsie he rode up on. I expect better of him.

fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives stands up for feminism and men (I’ve mildly reformatted her post)

So there’s this one debate, you may be familiar with it . . .

One side of this debate says stuff like:

• Feminists hate men.
• Feminists attack men.

• Feminists want to weaken men.

And I hear many of these same people saying:

• Men only think (or care) about one thing.
• Men  don’t have a strong moral compass and need women to (gently) guide them to do the right thing.
• A man’s pride controls him, so don’t bruise it by being bossy.  It’s okay to get your way, just so long as he thinks it’s his idea and feels strong and manly about it.
• Men are visual, they can’t help it, so cover up because he can’t control himself.
• Men are simple creatures who need food, sex, sports, money, and fast cars.  Don’t expect him to have (or express!) a complicated inner life with emotions and crap.
• Men are naturally less righteous than women, so they need this here God-powered crutch gift to raise them up (nearly) to our level.
• Men have to think they’re in charge, or they quit trying. So we’ll just tell’em they preside (even if we really are equal partners), and let’em assign someone to say the prayer.
• You also gotta let men have all the leadership positions, cause otherwise they’ll stay home and watch football.

• If we don’t let men have the priesthood (and make the money, and protect us from spiders ‘n rapists), then women wouldn’t really need men. (Since other than that all they’re good for is sperm donors?)

So wait . . .

Who is it that attacks, weakens, and hates men?

I nicked her whole post from here.

An even better question? Who created the stereotype of men that feminists are supposed to hate so much? Anti-feminists hate, fear, and are strongly disgusted by men. Feminists? Exasperated sometimes, when we men mistake anti-feminist stereotypes for compliments maybe. But hate? Not so much. Certainly not the way anti-feminists hate us.

So over the decades I’ve slowly graduated from Hershey’s-style milk chocolate to progressively stronger and stronger, darker and darker kinds.

Towards the end of last year a local boutique chocolatier started making some (very tasty) 91% varietal chocolates that were… pretty darn good.

So about two weeks ago I was out of all the good stuff. And I wondered to myself…

How would plain old Baker’s unsweetened taste?

Turns out it’s pretty good.

Awfully strong in the theobromine department, so you can’t eat that much without getting “overcaffeinated.” But minus all the cheap sugars and flavorings and such that goes into cheap sweetened chocolates it’s pretty darn good.

I realize it’s taken (inadvertent) years to get to this point so I don’t recommend jumping into it. And I seriously don’t recommend giving it, or any other 100% chocolate, as a gift to anyone else.

Note: I’m not about to give up half-and-half cream in my coffee.

It’s good sex if you feel as good or better about yourself and your partner(s) as you did before.

It’s bad sex if you feel bad or worse about yourself and your partner(s) after than you did before.

And that’s it. Orgasm count isn’t part of it. The specific type of relationship isn’t part of it. Whether it’s for or not for reproduction only isn’t part of it. Neither is age, or gender, or interest or orientation. Neither is skill nor experience. Nor what you actually do, or could do, or won’t do.

So those are very high-level definitions. And you can choose different ones. But that’s what I mean when I use those terms.

(Note: I’m aware that the spirit of the definitions could be lawyered or otherwise subverted, but then so can, say, the Geneva Conventions Against Torture. And I briefly considered changing them to the form “It’s good sex if you and your partner(s) feel…” But that introduces its own complexities and besides, no amount of qualifications will stop someone sufficiently determined to violate their spirit.)

I probably would have let this post continue gathering dust in my Drafts pile but this post by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about the peculiarities of gay closeting among conservative homophobes in politics made it percolate back up for me.

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In a post about arty films that at least in retrospect suck, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon made a poster child of the 1999 Oscar-winning American Beauty. Which in an awful lot of the ways she lays out really did suck.

Amanda mistakenly thinks the movie was about the reduction of Kevin Spacey to a state of pure privilege — a narrative arc that begins with him masturbating in the shower and, um, ends shortly after we’re supposed to see him as some kind of hero for not having sex with a 14-year-old… when it turns out (surprise!) that she wasn’t as ready as he (and she) had imagined.

That interpretation of the movie always surprises me. And if you see it that way then yeah, it doesn’t just suck pretentiously, it sucks gratuitously. Look at it that way and everything about it from the pseudo poetic voice overs to the floating plastic bags to the abrupt murder to the whole he saw / we saw comedy-of-errors between the Spacey character and the dope-dealing boyfriend just reeks phony/artsy.

But I always saw it as a gay morality play where the happy, well-adjusted out gay couple represent true suburban paradise, where the self-loathing, desperate-to-pass closeted gay neighbor on the other side represents Hell, and the Spacey character’s obliviously “latent homosexuality” is the metaphorical battlefield between the forces of the good of being ordinary and out and the evil of the closet. Throw in that all slightly tin-eared representations of heterosexuality are the result of “colonization” and… well, I’m not sure that’s what the producers really had in mind but it’s a lot easier to appreciate the movie that way.

Anyway, after a bit of rumination over irony, hypocrisy and petard-hoisting, Marshall closes his piece with this thoughtful observation

...as Andrew Sullivan puts it, these are all examples of their tragedy of the closet. Not just the inability to live full lives and all the self-loathing that’s painfully obvious in these men, but the soul-crushing and character-distorting effects of a life of denial and toxic secrecy.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. It’s not the hypocrisy, it’s the toxicity that drives it.

This might sound weird at first but I’ve had more disappointing sexual encounters with long-term partners than with casual friends-with-privileges and/or one-night-stand partners. Chances are actually reasonably good that you have too. Here’s how.

With first-time sex even with casual partners, even when one or both don’t come, you’re both generally highly attentive of each other, highly excited, and pretty darned interested. (If you weren’t both interested and excited one or both of you will tend to put it off till you were enthusiastic about it.) So the odds of dull, off, unpleasant, or just bad hookup/casual sex are relatively low.

In long-term relationships you tend to have sex way more often, and generally under more varied circumstances. And while, especially as you grow familiar with each other’s wants and needs the sex can get better, you’re also going to have more times when one or both of you aren’t in sync, aren’t comfortable, you and/or they are just going through the motions, or otherwise you’re just not so attentive.

Percentage-wise I’d expect sex in non-casual relationships to be better, and percentage-wise it is. But terms of absolute numbers I’ve had fewer overall bad encounters with casual partners than with non-casual ones.

I wouldn’t have expected that.

Obligatory but I hope obvious caveat: I’m obviously talking adult or at least peer partners making competent mutual, and mutually respected, decisions to be sexual with each other. This may not be the case for everyone, whether in long-term or casual relationships and I think it would be a bad idea to try and extrapolate my observation to their situations.

Update See also Amanda Hess and Sady Doyle.

Matthew Yglesias has a serious, legitimate beef with an NPR piece on campus rape researcher David Lisak. Yglesias says the piece (which I haven’t heard) first covers men who admit having sex with women against their will and then… maybe out of some perverse j-school “to be sure” reflex… brought up another professor, Stetson University law professor Peter Lake, who says naah, a lot of college students just drink too much, engage in risky behavior, and then regret it later.

The two concepts are not a good combination in a single piece. Says Matt, emphasis his:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He said it here.

That sounds right.

You wanna know something else about the mentality that brings us the bogus Two Rules of Desire? If you’re convinced it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for women to have sexual desire then of course you’re going to believe they’re going to claim rape ever time they have a drunken hookup.

In fact most people who have drunken hookups just say “oh well, that was dumb.” You know who tends to claim rape instead? People who were actually raped.

Just a thought.

I’m passing this along for three reasons, because Heather’s a friend, because she’s doing good work, and because I hope I can help her find adults in their late 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond who are willing to complete a confidential survey for what I consider to be a worthwhile project.

Heather Corinna is doing a large study on multigenerational experiences with and attitudes about casual sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

There’s a lot of buzz now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike most of the buzz out there, she’s not interested in telling anyone how to have sex, warning people off any given kind of sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as “the best way.” She’s just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and experiences among a diverse array of ages, genders and sexual identities, races and sexual ideologies/constructions. The only requirements for participating in this study are being over the age of 16, and having had some kind of sexual partnership before, even if none has been casual. The study will take around twenty minutes.

She would like the study to show as diverse an array of people as possible, especially since so often media representations or cultural conversations about casual sex are usually only about heterosexual white women or about gay men. She particularly wants to be sure LGBT people, people of color, those over 45 and social conservatives are adequately represented, so please share this link with your networks after you take the survey yourself, especially if your networks include people in any or all of those groups.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S97WR6H

If you don’t know who Heather is, she’s been working in human sexuality for around 12 years. She is the founder and executive director for Scarleteen.com, does sex education outreach at youth shelters and women’s clinics in Seattle, and has been a sex columnist and writer online for sites like The Guardian and RH Reality Check. She has also been published in a handful of anthologies and is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College (DaCapo Press). If you have any questions, you can contact Heather at hcorinna@mac.com

Considering that so flipping much of what we “know” about human sexuality is based on research conducted on undergraduates I’m always enthusiastic about efforts to include the other 85% of the adult population in the research! Thanks to Heather for doing the research and thanks to you if you choose to participate.

Mia of the interesting and, I think, fairly new Sexpertise website addresses a fascinating question: should vegetarians swallow semen?

...semen is a product of an animal (like an egg), but not the flesh of an animal (like meat) and not a substance whose production causes cruelty to animals (unlike the miserable dairy cows in PETA commercials, I have a feeling your semen was harvested with your enthusiastic consent). It contains glandular fluid and single cells, also known as sperm. Depending on your girlfriend’s reasons for being vegetarian, it is possible that she could logically conclude that semen is off-limits. Or, maybe she just doesn’t like it.

Read the quote in context here.

The question was asked by a young man who seems to be clear that some people don’t like to swallow, and doesn’t mind that his partner doesn’t swallow his. He’s just intrigued by the reason.

I know I’m hopelessly out of date on the, er, ins and outs of vegetarianism but in addition to the ethical-vegetarian reasons Mia reminds us of there are, among other major schools of though, health-minded vegetarians who are wary of eating animals because, being higher on the food chain, they can carry higher loads of accumulated metals and other toxins plus they can be exposed to artificial hormones, environmental hormone precursors, and anti-biotics.

In other words she could be declining to swallow not so much because she’s a vegetarian per se but because he, like pretty much every other human being on the planet any more, isn’t organic.

Something to think about.

Lest this sound silly or esoteric (ok, worrying that a partner’s semen isn’t vegetarian/organic is least a little silly) there’s considerable concern about metals and other toxins in breast milk.

Also lest the question sound silly Mia wisely closes on a serious note:

Since it doesn’t sound as if the actual act of swallowing is a big deal to you, I would suggest getting yourself out of this semantic black hole. Communicate to your girlfriend that you understand and respect her right to decide what goes into her body, whether you agree with her rationale or not. I don’t know if your girlfriend is making excuses, as you say, but if for some reason she feels that simply saying she doesn’t like swallowing isn’t good enough, then you have a communication problem. You can remedy this by showing her that you appreciate her right to make her own choices in the bedroom, and that you care about her enjoyment and comfort more than you care about this disagreement.

Sound advice in all events.