Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Holly of The Pervocracy just… gets it.

I agree that human behavior is evolved, but I believe that we evolved into humans. If we still had the hierarchies and behaviors of apes on the savannah, we’d be apes on the savannah. (Also, even apes are often more complex than Kanazawa assumes.) It’s like saying “dolphins are descended from land creatures with legs, therefore dolphins have legs.” And the idea that men are harem-keeping sperm machines and women are antler-contest-judging baby machines is some serious dolphin legs. Morality, creativity, abstraction, empathy—these are our flippers.

Read the quote in context here.

Hannah Arendt warned against what she called “ratomorphization” of humans (and sorry I couldln’t find the full quote.)

I do wonder sometimes whether we directely evolved the behavior of comparing ourselves to other animals or whether it’s just an indirect mutation of evolved religion-forming behavior?

You rarely see people saying things like “bulls charge the way they do because they have a common ancestor with tigers, which charge after prey.” Even though bulls and tigers do have hair because they share common ancestors.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about.

I just think you should go read the rest of Holly’s post on reproductive success (“in purely number-of-toes terms, that girl in India with four legs was the most successful woman in the world”) or women as “gatekeepers” (“If men will go for anything with a vagina, how can they also be such picky fucks?”) or women and “power” (“If I have a choice of having armies at my command and millions of acres of land and billions of dollars, or being able to fuck a dude… I’m not going go rub my chin and go ‘hmm, seems about even.”) Or how she summarizes her disdain for pop-ev-psych maestro Satoshi Kanazawa (“Sure he’s just some crazy fuck on the Internet, but he’s getting paid for this shit. By actual serious grownups. It blows my mind.”)

Awesome.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus writes very powerfully about extracting herself from a very deeply-ingrained local culture of abuse. Parental abuse. Sexual abuse. Partner abuse. Often intertwined with drug abuse and alcohol abuse. She now works in or around the field of social services related to family and child courts. (I’m trying to be even more vague about what she does than she tries to be.)

Wow. She’s some writer. With some past. And some really great insights about it. And she’s got what sounds like an awesomely insider job in an area of law and society that very much needs to be better understood. And she writes very well about that too.

While there’s an excellent chance I’m the only one who wasn’t already reading her a quick Google search doesn’t turn up that many references to her. Which is a shame. As I said she has sometimes chillingly important things to say. For those likely to be triggered by any manner of abuse at all her topics are all pretty much triggering.

An example of something triggering would be the following quote about the (internal) logic of abusive relationships in the context of perilous/subsistence social situations… made even more trigger-y by the circumstances her abusive relationship made it possible to avoid! (Emphasis hers.)

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

She said it here.

That resonates very seriously for me, though obviously from a slightly different perspective. The kinds of people she describes hanging around with, and for that matter being, sound so similar to the people I hung around with during my transition from homelessness into mere desperately marginality. A life where “good guys” only sold or used pot, coke, alcohol and maybe occasionally non-meth speed while “bad guys” sold coke, pot, tranquilizers, and more-directly addictive “hard stuff.” A life where “up and out” meant “working my way up” into a “Clerks” like assistant manager position in an exurban fast-food joint with only the most peripheral contact with my former friends. And “friends.” And before moving away completely to the Northwest where I discovered college, real friends (including many of my old, true friends), work, life, health, and eventually love and family.

In other words, while my situation was nowhere near as dire as Jacobs I completely recognize the logic that comes from the realization that “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits.” Instead inside that culture being a “good guy” means hanging out with the good drug dealers and good crooked cops who don’t beat up their girlfriends and who think it’s “bad form” to have sex with women who’ve passed out. The way “those losers” do.

Sigh. There’s a lot more at her blog. Not just about the downsides but about how to deal with the downsides. But from within and, once out, from without.

Jacobs has just taken a new job, an important one, that requires a great deal more circumspection in her blogging, and which takes up more of her time and energy. So who knows if she’ll continue writing the way she has been. That said she’s got a couple of very powerful new pieces. For instance one about how society, personality, and personal circumstance conspires with the law to constrain reproductive choice for the very young and very vulnerable even more than you think it does. And another about how one very anonymous department of a very-deliberately not-identified administrative entity helps getting judicial waivers of parent-notification requirements merely difficult in a system that’s otherwise not really well-designed to give them at all.

Via Facebook Heather Corinna says: “@Scarleteen’s matching campaign this w/e we’ve $746 & only one day left: please help us get to $2,500 & I can STFU & leave you alone! :)”

They’ve actually got a couple hundred dollars more since she made the request but there’s still a long way to go. You can help. So if you’re interested in highly appropriate, non-gender-judgmentalsex education for a desperately underserved population (middle-school through college aged people) don’t stop, don’t think, click the Scarleteen donation page and donate anywhere from a couple of dollars (what they mostly get, mostly from kids who are digging deep) to the roughly $1,000 they need to snag the matching grant to, well, enough to properly endow a foundation to give the site, its founder, its scores of volunteers, and its countless (ok, 1,000,000,000+ a year) users the backing they deserve.

The place to click, again, is Help Support Scarleteen.

Speaking of which, one of my projects for the following year is to try and find some more stable, and serious, sources of funding for Scarleteen. More on that later.

For now, though, at the risk of sounding too much like an NPR host during pledge week, you can double the impact of your donation if you can do it today. So do it today right now: Help Support Scarleteen at Scarleteen.com.

Photo by Flickr user digital-anger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Summary: Naomi Mc rocks and so does her blog; genital odor as gender Rorschach.

I just stumbled across Naomi Mc’s provocatively-named blog about the sociology, politics, and science of (would it be redundant to say gendered?) reproductive health, Vagina Dentata. It’s hard describing how I feel reading her posts — it’s some kind of combination of familiarity, amusement, envy, awe, delight, and recognition you might feel upon meeting a long-lost cousin. To put it as weirdly as possibly my blog wants to go to a family reunion with hers. Anyway, she’s pointed, thoughtful, irascible, creative as hell, has an amazingly dry wit, and I highly recommend her blog.

Anyway, while discussing the stupid vaginal breath-mints business that cropped up in advertisements last week Vagina Dentatashe thoughtfully (and earthily) addresses the usual reservations and then drops a nifty gender bombshell.

There is nothing peculiarly smelly about women’s bits. Any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy – male as well as female.

She said it here.

It’s a killer point. It’s not that vulvas smell, it’s that genitals smell. As do armpits. And feet. So does hair. So does breath. So does behind a lot of people’s ears. In particular vulvas smell, yes, but so do men’s (ok, no vulva-like word for the combination so…) penises, testicles, and perineums. And yes, the 12% of the worldwide population represented by 96% of all research (credit to Mc) are inclined to lament body smells in general…

But in the narrow spectrum of “intimate” aromas it seems neither accurate nor fair to single out one gender’s bits over the other. Predictable, yes, for half a dozen reasons. Fair or accurate, though, no.

Despite occasional, mostly lockerroom references to “smells like balls in here” and maybe “dick breath” there’s just not as much acknowledgment of just how much men can smell. For the same “any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy” reasons women do.

A couple of reasons come to mind (and you’re welcome to add your own in comments)

• Until very recently men have overwhelmingly written, lectured, published, and otherwise controlled public discourse about sex in general and body smells in particular.
• If 90-96% of the male population is heterosexual then most of any discourse about partner’s smells are going to be about vulvas.
• If 10-15% of the population has at least one lifetime close encounter with same-sex genitals, until extremely recently they’ve been under considerable pressure to keep quiet about it.
• As several bloggers have mentioned this week, going back at least as far as Leviticus (call it 4,000 years) women have been considered unclean because they menstruate, with sometimes fantastic steps being taken to avoid contact. Since this makes about as much sense as the (Biblically) even more “unclean” practice of blended fiber in woven cloth (no poly-cotton for you “sayeth the LORD”) it seems likely that folks would make up all manner of reasons why that might be. And hey, maybe smell would be one of them. (Wow, do I sound like an Evolutionary Psychologist here or what? Where’s my invitation to blog for Psychology Today?)
• As Twisty Faster, James Dobson, your average MRA, and all perpetuators of the no-sex class’s Rule #2 all “know,” women never get their noses anywhere near male genitals (or at least shouldn’t) so they wouldn’t know.
• And as Twisty Faster, James Dobson, and your average MRA will tell you, if a woman does get their noses anywhere near male genitals they better not like it.
• And whether women like it or not they’d darn-tootin’ better not brag about it.
• And finally, and most likely, men are aware that they smell, but don’t care because we have a WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, credit Mc again) cultural heritage of considering ourselves baseline neutral, the standard against which all other is measured… and women as the “other” in question.

• Treatments for endemic-to-men “jock itch” are sold in the sports aisle in pharmacies instead of next to yeast-infection medication on the feminine “hygiene” aisle, so unlike yeast infections jock itch is all vigorous and healthy and not at all smelly.

Couple of other points:

First, you can’t even argue that “yeah, well women get them stinky yeast infections” without studiously avoiding the point visible in any corner pharmacy that for every over-the-counter creme or concoction for treating yeast infections there’s a corresponding nostrum for treating equally stinky “jock itch” fungal infections.

Second, as Mc puts it

This impacts on women’s health because if they always think that the pink clink stinks then they are less likely to notice changes which may signify infection or seek help and advice (similarly vibrator use actually increases sexual health). Plus being self-conscious of your wookie effects your enjoyment of oral sex which instead should be savoured.

The same can be said of men in reverse: there’s lots of residual messaging out there, including myriad anguished and often clichéd laments from men, that women don’t like giving blowjobs. Lacking self-consciousness, or indeed consciousness at all, that their balls can smell of yeast, fungus, stale urine, and perspiration this seeming mystery to men might be easily resolved with more diligent use of soap and water. Or perhaps the same (or maybe “manly” rebranded) wipes that are heavily marketed to self-conscious women.

Bottom line: pretty much any way you look at it the special emphasis on “smelly vaginas” is gendered out the (non-gender-specific) wazoo.