So where does Naomi Wolf get off thinking she can write a correspondingly bogus book claiming vaginas are distal lobes of women's brains?

This is not a "what about the menz" question, incidentally.  Going back to antiquity are already plenty of books and letters asserting pretty much that men's penises do much of our thinking for us.  Some of them even assert it proudly. Though others who make the case call it phallocentrism.

And it's not like plenty of others have written long and loud, again dating back to antiquity, making cases disturbingly similar to Wolf's!  Only for most of them it's not vaginas, it's "wombs."  And they didn't call it "depression" they called it "hysteria."

Sorry gang, we're not our genitals, m'kay?

This does not mean we don't or can't express ourselves through our genitals.  We can! But only in the same way we can express ourselves with our hands (see violins, typing, massage, fooseball) or our mouths (see arias, lectures, kissing, epicurian cuisine) our eyes, feet, etc.  But usually when we say an artist or athlete has a direct connection between his or her hands or bodies we recognize we're speaking metaphorically.

Heck, even when we say something coarse like "he lets his dick do the thinking" we still recognize we're speaking metaphorically.

Oh.

Oh! 

Back to that phallocentrism business for a second.  Wolf claims she and all women have a special, unique connections between vaginas and brains.  Unique erotic/sexual ones too, not just spiritual ones.  Ones that men couldn't possibly share.

It would be cool if she said women, being human beings, can discover (if they haven't already, um, noticed) a connection between mind and genitals that thanks to, oh, maybe, the bogus Two Rules of Desire women have traditionally been pressured to deny or repress in ways that men often have not.  But she didn't.  Which I think is a mistake.

I dunno.  Outside of harsh traditions of gender binding it's either a mundane observation or a really dumb one.  So what the heck?

Cropped image from TheAtlanticWire.com.

I was sorry to hear Shulamith Firestone, author in 1968 1970 of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, passed away late last week.

Her book is, I think, harder to read today than it was when it came out now nearly half a century ago. The world has really changed since then. Medical science, academia, feminism, and even mainstream, non-complete-wingnut conservative chauvinism(!!) have changed since then. And I think to at least some extent her book was responsible for some of that change.

Some of the things she said, though, still resonate like a bell. While I wasn't as taken by her "futurist" passages I learned a lot when, too late in life, I finally read the darn book.  I liked it, and her, a lot.  She hugely influenced how I wrote thereafter.

Update: By the way, when I said things have changed since 1970 (I mistakenly said Firestone's book came out in 1968) I obviously didn't mean everything's changed. But, especially considering it came out years before Roe vs. Wade was handed down, society was really, really different then. For one thing, unlike us, she didn't have 40+ years of radical, moderate, and progressive feminism to lean on. Instead she had nada. (In fact one of Firestone's widely-noticed "radical feminist" pieces was an answer to the "father of abortion rights" Bill Baird, who had opined that maybe someday actual women would become angry enough about limits on reproductive rights to become activists in what he largely considered to be his movement.) So. Yeah. We're not living in utiopia here in the 21st Century. But the world was radically different then.

Photo by Flickr user craighamnett. Used under a Creative Commons license.

That is all.

Photo by Flickr user DoctorWho. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Drinking and sex in College? I'm not a big fan of alcohol and sex. (And not just because I've got a faulty gene that keeps me from enjoying alcohol myself.) So I really appreciated this list of tips for college students from Em & Lo. The whole list is great but #3 is a real keeper.

Don’t do it drunk. You will get drunk. Too drunk. Way too drunk. Probably on more than one occasion. We’re not talking about a good, healthy buzz — because let’s face it, that’s the only time sex is going to happen for you this year — no, we’re talking completely sloshed. And when that happens, when your balance starts to fail and your voice gets really loud and the room spins a bit, try with all your might NOT to hook up. The chances of it not going well are exceedingly high. Think: poor sexual performance, blackouts, accusations of date rape, actual date rape, mid-sesh vomiting, forgotten birth control, accidental pregnancy, the list goes on.

Source: Today on EMandLO.com

What's great is their acknowledgement that asking students to refrain from drinking entirely is unproductive. Instead they just lay out the conditions and consequences: a glass of wine with dinner, or a couple of drinks over a night of dancing and romancing? Not the end of the world.

But past the point where responsible friends would ask for your car keys? Oh yeah, if you're too sloshed to make a competent decision not to drive you're definitely too sloshed to competently decide that, yes, you really want to be doing this right now. Let alone deciding your (possibly equally sloshed) acquaintance has competently decided he or she wants to be doing it with you as well.

Seriously. Most of the stuff that gets in the papers? That gets friends shaking their heads? That gets guys (especially) branded as a creep or a loser or someone To Be Avoided? The ones where someone ends up getting battered or worse?

Yeah, there are exceptions to every rule but alcohol is behind just a heck of a lot of very bad sex-related behavior.

I'm not going to say never get technicolor-yawningly drunk. I certainly won't say never have sex, or even have sex! But I gotta agree, based on a ton of first-, second-, and third-hand experience, that mixing the two is a heck of a recipe for more regrets than fond memories.

Photo by Flickr user DJOtaku. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tumblr blogger STFU Fauxfeminists passes along the following comment following a series of posts about penile circumcision. I'm passing it along too because it makes a point that seems to be increasingly difficult to get across. Emphasis mine.

I know there were a million other things wrong with the male circumcision ask that you needed to address, but I think it should be pointed out that every time someone starts a question with "why don't feminists do X" they should do a Google search to see if it actually is true that no feminists do that. Plenty of feminists are against male circumcision; I feel like there are probably more than who are for it. We're just not into false equivalencies to female genital cutting.

Source: STFU Fauxminists!

Speaking personally as the victim of a botched, unauthorized circumcision initiated by a nurse against my mom's and my (pediatrician!) grandfather's direct order that I not be circumcised, I'm still on board with this.

Heck, despite the fact that I'm personally opposed to male circumcision of all sorts I'm still on board with this!

Male circumcision is generally a bad, stupid idea and when it's done on people who are unable to consent (particularly to gratify the esthetic, habitual, economic, or even "religious imperative" urges of third parties) it's not just bad and stupid, it's bad, stupid, and wrong!

But even in my case, where the consequence of my genital mutilation included considerable sensation loss I gotta say there's a false equivalence between conventional female and conventional male genital mutilation.

How can that be? I'll tell ya.

The stupid, sullen, class-obsessed nurse who caused me to be circumcised against my family's wishes nevertheless would have been appalled that I lost sensation over much of my penis and would have been thankful to know I at least retained a couple of "good spots." Because loss of erotic sensation in men is never the intention of male circumcision.

The intention of female "circumcision," however, is absolutely and unapologetically the complete erasure of erotic sensation in women.

In other word my circumcision was considered botched because I lost some sensation. A woman's circumcision, on the other hand, is considered botched if she retains even partial erotic sensation.

Does any of the above make male circumcision right, ok, tolerable, or anything less than bad, stupid, or wrong? Duh no! It's still completely bad, stupid and wrong.

But anybody who thinks either the intention or the result of routine male genital mutilation is equivalent to routine female genital mutilation is... well.. bad, stupid, and worse-than-Todd-Akin-and-Paul-Ryan wrong.

Speaking about his own daughter's unplanned, unwanted pregnancy Tom Smith is generally considered to have equated the serious matter of criminal sexual assault with unwed pregnancy. Believe it or not, the American Taliban Republican Senate candidate is an even bigger capital-P Patriarchal knuckle dragger than that! Check out Christine Roberts' succinct summary of Smith's remarks. (Emphasis mine.)

"Now don't get me wrong. It wasn't rape."

When pressed by another reporter, the 66-year-old reiterated the comparison of his daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy to becoming pregnant from rape.

"Put yourself in a father's position. Yes, it is similar," he said.

Source: Daily Kos

Never mind how the daughter might feel about an unwanted pregnancy with a lover vs. a criminal sexual assailant, to conservative Republicans (oh, and the Taliban) what's important is how her father feels about it! Contrary to the common interpretation he's not saying it's no difference to her! Just that it makes no difference to him!

As a father!

Either way in Tom Smith's old-fashioned Patriarchy all that matters is she's damaged goods and a burden on her family so what difference could it possibly make?

Basically these guys don't just want to repeal the Sermon on the Mount and the 14th - 24th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, they want to repeal the whole fucking 20th and 21st Centuries and get back to the good old days of English Common Law, which defines rape -- both statutory and "forcible," as property crimes with the father, husband, or other custodial male as the victim rather than, well, the actual victim.

Sweet Mother of Pearl!

Photo by Flickr user Trevor Coultart. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So my heart sank when I read the headline at Medical Daily: How Oral Sex or Having Sex Without a Condom Can Be Good For Women's Health. My heart sank even further at the lead sentence:

Performing oral sex or having sex without a condom may benefit both mental and physical health in women, according to scientists who analyzed the effects of semen's "mood-altering chemicals."

It sank because I assumed the "new" research the blogger, Catharine Hsu, referred to was finally going to corroborate "evolutionary" psychologist Gordon Gallup's ten year old "research" paper that made the same claim.

I needn't have worried.

Following the link it turns out that yet again someone's stumbled across Gallup's original paper -- Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 31, Number 3 (2002), 289-293, DOI: 10.1023/A:1015257004839 and breathlessly reported on it as if it were new. Or news. Or fact. Or, um, science.

This isn't new research. Gordon Gallup's (grievously suspect) paper was published 10 years ago, in 2002, not 2012. In those 10 years no researchers have reproduced his results. Nor has Gallup followed up with further research on what, on the face of it, one would consider pretty significant news.

Even more tellingly, in those 10 years pharmaceutical companies have conducted clinical trials, let alone primary research, on semen-based anti-depressants. When you consider the seemingly limitless market for depression treatments this is the most significant "market based" refutation of Gallup's alleged research.

Add in the part about how married women, who are presumably most likely to be regularly "exposed" to "doses" of semen, typically report being less happy and healthy than when they were single.

Add in the fact that men, even straight men, are rather routinely exposed to semen without it seeming to do us much good in the mood department ("even after adjusting for intercourse.")

Add in that Gallup is a psychologist, not an MD nor even a biologist.

Don't get me wrong. As a straight man I think it would be really, really nice if my semen had health benefits for young college women. Even nicer if the (small) benefits Gallup claimed to be able to detect in completely unprotected sex outweighed the (very large) adverse consequences we tend to be more familiar with. Instead it's old-guy, frat boy, and shock-jock wish fulfillment, not actual, you know, medical science.

Note: More than five years ago I wrote nearly the same post when Psychology Today breathlessly exhumed the same too-good-to-check zombie "research. But as I said then and I'll say now.

Like a lot of other stories along these lines this one continues to circulate not because the research was credible (it wasn’t!) or the researcher widely respected by his peers (he doesn’t appear to be.) Instead it circulates because it’s too good to fact check. Too good for lad-magazines and anti-feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s another line for doods to use on chix. Too good for for feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s outrageous. Too good for health professionals because, hey, it’s a chance to fret about increased risk of infectious disease.

...

If you like semen that’s just great. If you don’t, well, that’s great too. If you’re hungry for it, well cool, but it’s not addictive. If you wouldn’t go near the stuff, it’s not like you’re missing out on anything. I propose that you should enjoy it, or not enjoy it because it’s semen, not because it might cure anything.

I said it here.

Till next year. When yet another reporter will pop up with the same old too-good-to-fact-check "news."

See also my post from 2007: What the Hard-Core Anti-Choice Crowd Jacks Off to

Yikes! Check out this week's "wise guys" question from (justifiably) anonymous Em & Lo reader

Advice from three of EMandLO.com’s guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Do guys know when they’re in love?“

Source: Today on EMandLO.com

Do we know when we’re in love?

Is this a trick question?

There’s sort of a difference between feeling something and admitting it. But that’s not the same thing, at all, at all, as not knowing it at all.

So. Short answer? Um. Yeah.

More could and probably has been written about why men might be so reluctant to admit it. Even more could and should be written, preferably focusing on outside social, economic, and gender-convention pressures that overload such admissions with all manner of social expectations.

But actual love? Yeah, men know what that is, we know when we feel it. We definitely know what it’s like to feel it and worry that it might not be reciprocated.

I will say that one thing men, and women, don’t seem to know very well is that “love” is not the same thing as “validation.” You know that really, really over-the-top-stupid Eagles lyric from the 1970s that goes “I want to know if your sweet love is going to save me?” The one sung to a complete stranger in a truck? The one the singer would like to have become the eighth woman on his “mind?” At least in western civilization that little rascal’s the source of all kinds of interpersonal anguish, humiliation, and alienation from “bridezillas” to “no-strings” sex. But validation doesn’t really have anything to do with love.

Let’s put it this way. Pretty much all human beings, not just men, not just women, know when they’re in love. What we’re missing is knowing what to do about it when we feel it.

Note: See the corresponding, and equally goofy question "do women know when they're horny?" Some times you get the feeling it's gender construction all the way down. "No-sex" class much? (Remember, in the dominant paradigm of the "no-sex" class, men are assumed to be only about sex while women are assumed to be only about love or romance.)

The nasty thing about "male" or "female" libido is that individuals never have a "high" libido.  Nor do they have "low" one.  In fact individual people don't even have average libidos.  Not even the average ones!

Instead all individuals ever have are... libidos.

Ok, actually, they have libidos and partners.

Partners who may (in fact probably) don't have libidos identical to theirs.

See, the problem we have is looking at individuals as if we were in the aggregate.  Which of course is fine in the aggregate!  Except, of course, again, we're individuals rather than aggregates.

This lack of absolute high or low libido isn't particularly a problem.  I mean, sure, if one does have a partner, or maybe a prospective one, there can be negotiation and frustration or satisfaction or whatever.  But left to our own devices we're pretty much horny now or we're not.  Unless maybe we're Samuel Pepys we don't really chart it.

This, as I say, isn't particularly a problem.  Except, of course, in the context of partnership.  But for the most part we have a lot of social scripting and narratives for coping.

Until we reach somewhere a little north of middle age, anyway.

After middle age a certain problem can arise.

It arises out of the confirmation-bias-leaning phenomenon of individuals when left to their own devices only saying "gee, I'm horny" when they are.  But never really "wow, I'm sure not thinking about having sex right now."

The problem being that up until slightly north of middle age, men are defined -- by themselves, by society, and often by their partners, as the baseline-normal of libido. 

Again, he grows up never really having to think about being horny when he's not because, in the normal order of things he's ususally horny before his female partner so a) she pretty much never has to wait for him and b) he pretty much never thinks "I'd better get up to speed here, she's putting the moves on me."  (You probably remember hearng narratives about men thinking about baseball statistics and great aunts to slow themselves down.  Remember all those narratives of men urgently skimming fantasies in order to get themselves caught up with their partners?  No, I didn't think so.  It might happen but there's not a lot of social scripting for it.)

Anyway.

Somewhere between, say, ages 55 and 65... maybe a decade earlier, maybe a decade later... men stop being horny as frequently as they were in, say, their teens or even their 30s.

Very often, at some point, their partner's libidos -- the ones which might have been "lower" for the first few decades of their relationship -- can become higher.

Sometimes considerably higher.

Which, if you only notice when you're horny, and especially when you've grown up thinking sex only happens when you're horny...

Friction can arise for which there's not a lot of social scripting for coping.

If you're conscious about such things... about recognizing it when it happens, and acknowledging it... then you're probably going to be fine in your relationships.  Maybe not great, maybe still a little frustrated or a little harried in ways you didn't grow up expecting to be.  But still, if the possibility is on your horizon you'll still probably be fine.

If not?

Look out.  Not all unexpected surprises are pleasant ones.