Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Echidne of the Snakes had to dig, and dig, and dig through pop reports all talking about the “biological” inevitability behind a new study that suggests elderly men are more interested in sex than elderly women.

One complicating factor that’s mentioned by the lead investigator but not so much by the breathlessly gender-confident reporting?

One reason why older women are less sexually active than men may be because they don’t have a partner, or because their partner is no longer healthy enough to have sex. “Women outlive their marriages and their relationships,” Dr. Lindau says.

She and her colleagues found that as women aged, they were far less likely than men to be married or living with a partner. In one of the surveys the authors used, just 58% of the women ages 65 to 74 had a partner, compared to 79% of men in the same age bracket. Among 75- to 85-year-olds, 72% of men still had a partner, compared to just 39% of women.

Lindau said it here.

If you’re a woman between maybe 40 and 50, with a male partner over maybe 45-55, raise your hand if your partner’s health, his libido, or both allows him to keep up with your libido? (I’m not saying everybody’s in that boat but… it’s a fairly common lament of partners of older men.)

What makes this particularly funny, in a not-so-funny way, is all the “happy tradeoff” lead sentences Echidne tracks down where in reporters smirk stuff like “Women may live longer, but it appears men are more likely to go out with a smile” and “Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage.” (Um, “advantage?” fuck you, dudes?!?!)

Oh wait, and look, here’s a nifty, but related “advantage” that’s not going to show up so often in the popular press, again from Dr. Lindau.

When women did have a partner, they were almost as likely as their male counterparts to be sexually active, although they tended to give their sex lives lower marks than men did. In every age group included in the surveys, a smaller percentage of women than men described their sex life as “good” overall.

Read the quote in context here.

As Echidne says “Women tend to have older husbands and the ill health of their husbands could well be one of the reasons for not much sex even in intact relationships.” Yup. Funny how blood-pressure medications, prostate problems, and even bad backs, hips, and knees can take the, um, wind of of a fella’s sails. And, again, funny how demoralized even the most enthusiastically consenting adult can become when sex requires not only candle light and slow dancing but also… repeat trips to the bathroom, penis-pumps, and other erectile interventions.

If you or your partner still have it — and not all men lose it — that’s great. But with even the most attentive partner in the world the disappointment levels are likely to be lower. And while I’m not positive, it might be particularly wearing on both older women and older men if they grew up back when heteros expected that men would take the lead in sex, and do nearly all the work as well.

Another little tidbit Echidne mentions:

I should also tell you that this study defined sex as heterosexual activity with someone else. People not engaged in heterosexual activity were not included (which the researcher would have liked to have changed) and neither was masturbation counted. Only heterosexual activity with someone else. That’s worth repeating, because the quality of that sex does also depend on that “someone else.”

Echidne says it here.

One final thing, something Echidne doesn’t mention but I’ve noticed that pulls the above snippets into a common thread. Even today, but certainly in the past, “interest in sex” was men’s domain. Consequently, as I mentioned in my first real post about the no-sex class paradigm (The limits of “no means no”), men grow up expecting to be interested in sex when they’re interested in sex, with the happy (for them) consequence that when we’re not interested in sex we… pretty much don’t notice. Whereas if our partner isn’t interested in sex we do. Meanwhile women are expected to notice when their partners are interested in sex, yes, but… that pesky no-sex class paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, leads men to imaging women don’t notice when their partner’s aren’t interested.

See the trick? A man can be interested in sex only once a year. But! If he has sex once a year then… he’s going to mark his sex life as “satisfactory.” Even if his partner mentions it he’s still go the weight of the two rules on his side. Meanwhile his female partner? If he wants sex more often than he she’s going to mark down “dissatisfied.” But! If he wants (or is capable of having) sex less often than she does she’s also going to mark down “dissatisfied.”

Advantage? Men. All over. Although that advantage might be one hidden reason men’s shorter lifespans.

Just a though.

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.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors expresses uncharacteristic suprise at findings about women in a recent report on sexual abuse in the criminal justice system.

The statistics are staggering.  Kaiser and Sannow explain the importance and implication of the studies, as well as their deficiencies and strengths.  In describing one of the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (available here) the authors note:

Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically.

I was astounded at the rate of reported sexual abuse of male inmates by female staff members.  It illustrates that in some circumstances, women use sexual violence as a form of domination and power over men in a way that is not so different from what men do to women.  The authors point out that it is difficult to know why female inmates are more likely than their male counterparts to be sexually abused by another inmate of the same sex.  It may be that women are more abusive of each other than men are. 

She said it here.

I’m not at all sure why anyone should be surprised. Here are three reasons that skip off the top of my head:

1) Sexual abuse and sexual assault are excitations of power, not of sex… or gender. Yes, historically we see far, far more sexual abuse and assault by men but I believe historically power has been also see far, far more likely to accrue to men. As we make progress towards parity of power it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more parity in its abuse.

2) The standard gender assumptions about women as vaguely and passively “sugar and spice and everything nice” make the standard gendered scripts for behavior for women in dominant, potentially sexual situations, let alone scripts for men in sexually dominated-by-women ones, are inadequate. Both narrative and scripting need to adjust to the reality of women as autonomous human beings who’s moral compasses are neither more nor less flawed than anyone else’s. (I ought to add that because we do have a lot of scripting about men and abuse of sexual power there may also be better developed policies for managing or deterring it.)

3) Both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire make it more difficult to confront or transcend our (mis)understanding of sexual (mis)use of power. When society believes to its core that it’s not only intolerable and inconceivable for women to manifest sexual desire, and equally intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, you’re just going to find women poorly prepared to forgo opportunities to exploit sexual vulnerability, you’re going to find men, and women, poorly prepared to resist such exploitation, and you’re going to find social and prison policies ill equipped to police it.

So. You wanna know just how entrenched our gender narratives about sexual abuse really are? All this seems to be seriously old news, at least among rape-crisis community professionals. I’ve mentioned several times in this blog an interview I had back in the very early 1980s with the director of a rape-relief and domestic violence shelter. I mentioned my ignorant impression that men can’t be raped, not by women, and she said no, that it was actually relatively common. The common denominator, she told me nearly 30 years ago, was that perpetrators were very likely to have custodial power over their smaller (i.e. children), or weaker (i.e. elderly, disabled) victims. Given that prisoners, and particularly juvenile ones, are in custodial power and there should be no surprise nor shock at all that they would be just as subject to sexual abuse by women as by men.

That it wouldn’t have soaked in to general awareness even 30 years after I first heard about it is the only really shocking thing about the whole story.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon calls out a hidden heavy lifter in the no-sex class arsenal:

There’s a bit of polite fiction about premarital sex—-not that it doesn’t happen, but we don’t discuss it in detail around relatives—-but all in all, women dating, flirting, and sleeping with men is considered a normal, healthy way to meet people, fall in love, and yes, even find someone to marry, if you’re into that sort of thing.  We know that the most common thing that happens is that you date someone, sleep with them, and it doesn’t work out.  But sometimes it does, so we keep plugging.  But sometimes someone rapes someone else, and then all of a sudden people start acting like going out with men and allowing yourself to be alone with them—-and god forbid, floating the possibility of having sex with them!—-is outrageous behavior and anyone who engages in it should expect nothing short of being raped and possibly beaten severely. 

She said it here.

In other words though most people won’t say anything at all before the fact, when it goes bad they’ll say “I told you so.”

Call it the “being a pirate is all fun and games / till somebody loses an eye” principle corollary of the bogus Rule #2

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You can see the same sort of thing with unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, by the way. The usual way “shotgun wedding” is used implies only the male party is the only one who isn’t ready to marry or, more precisely, settle down when the couple gets “caught.” That impulse to force women, even more than men, to settle down is, I believe, an absolutely huge driver of nominally “pro-life” activism.