The No-Sex Class

Actual Researchers Prefer Not to Speculate, But For Ev Psych the EADR Gene Has Gotta Be About Hair and Boobs

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2013-02-23 14:37

Ermahgerd Ervarlershanery Psercholerghy!!!
Image by figleaf published with a Creative Commons license.

So some evolutionary biologists, Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti, recently published a paper about a relatively recent (only 35,000 years old) gene mutations in humans that appears almost exclusively in East Asians. The mutated gene, EADR, appears to be responsible for thick hair, distinctively-shaped teeth, small breasts, and extra sweat glands. It's not carried by populations of European or African descent. With me so far? Great! So far we're just talking about regular, everyday genetics research.

The problem arises, as it usually does, in the interpretation of regular, everyday genetics research. Because sooner or later -- usually sooner -- some asshat "evolutionary psychologist" or sociobiologist is going to come along and insist it couldn't be about anything but sex.

Katy Waldman has the scoop.

Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [says] it all comes down to pretty ladyparts.

According to Akey, “thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.” In fact, he claims, “the sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands.”

Basically, the genetic mutation flourished because men wanted to do the no-no-cha-cha with women who carried it. Oops, I’d forgotten that science, the world, etc., revolves around what males find attractive. Never mind that this assumes an alarming passivity on the part of the females. Did they have no say in their mating partner? (That’s a rhetorical question: Studies throughout the animal kingdom show that it’s usually the females who decide who gets action and who doesn’t.) And even supposing that the women had no agency, were prehistoric East Asian men really so very picky? Did they typically refuse intercourse with large-breasted or fine-haired women? I am trying to imagine a caveman turning down a willing sexual partner on account of a triviality like insufficiently luxuriant tresses, and not just one caveman but the entire sperm-producing Pleistocene population.  

Source: Slate.com

So let's review. Here we've got a gene mutation that codes for four characteristics.. If one of those characteristics increases the survival prospects of one's descendants the whole mutation will likely be conserved and might even eventually outcompete all other variations on the gene. So it could be better ability to sweat -- but how useful would that have been in the extremely hot, muggy climate of east Asia 35,000 years ago? It could have been the teeth. It could have been the hair. It could even have been the breasts. And even if it was the breasts, it could have been that the particular configuration of smaller breasts were more efficient for nursing, less subject to infection, less likely to interfere with running or other physical activities. And sure, they could even have been more attractive to men, although given how many generations it takes for a characteristic to evolve and how fickle fashionable preferences tend to be in humans, it would have had to have been hella more attractive than all other breast types to have consistently been preferred by mating decision makers (men or, often as not, matchmaking parents) over tens of thousands of years.

But one way or another, if all characteristics are encoded by a single gene and just one of them confers a reproductive advantage then all the rest are just carried along for the ride.

Which, without considerable further research, makes it essentially a value judgement and/or an expression of conscious or unconscious bias to proclaim that one and only one of those characteristics "must" be the important one.

Now. Did the original researchers, Kamberov or Sabeti, make any such claim? No. Did their co-author Daniel Lieberman, another genetics researcher make the claim? Quite the contrary. Instead when Waldman asked him outright he said " “The problem with all selection, but especially sexual selection, is that it’s impossible to test on humans. We were careful not to make assumptions about the selective benefits of the gene.” And did Jerry Coyne, another evolutionary geneticist Waldman spoke to make any such claim? Nope! Once again an actual evolutionary geneticist said the idea was "extremely dubious" and, besides, sexually selected traits tend not to work that way anyway. (They usually arises in one sex only and generally impose that would otherwise be filtered out by increased mortality if the other sex didn't preferentially select it.)

Nope. The only scientist to jump on the titties and hair bandwagon was someone from the David Barash school (literally! Barash and Akey are both at the University of Washington) of just-so storytellers, a.k.a. making shit up to fit your expectations.

And what a story it is! A mutation crops up that affects teeth and chest shape, number of sweat glands, and hair thickness in both men and women. Some of these characteristics -- thick, shiny hair in particular -- are considered attractive in both men and women. And yet, somehow, the only possible advantage a nominally professional geneticist can imagine the mutation might convey is to make women more sexually desirable to men. But not the other way around? Really? No woman might be more attracted to a man with thicker, more luxurious hair? And therefore preferentially want to "mate" with him (a.k.a. jump his bones?)

Oh right. Based on all the evidence the primary purpose of reflex "evolutionary psychology" speculation is to buttress the dominant paradigm: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire; it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Therefore it's doubly inconceivable to Mr. Akey and his kind that nicer hair would make any difference to a woman's partner preference. End of story.

Fortunately there are other kinds of scientists.


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How the Dominant "No-Sex Class" Paradigm Complicates Sex-Work Acceptance

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2013-02-20 16:47

Via Miri at BruteReason there was a bit of a kerfuffle at Jadehawk's Blog over a post about sex work by Jill Filipovic at Feministe called Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex.

You can follow the links to see who said what. Here's my take on the conflict.

The fact that full-service sex work has declined nearly 90% since the beginning of the post-modern, feminist, "sex-positive" era suggests that Jill has a point about the likely role of sex work in a feminist future: while it won't go away any more than ballroom dance instruction has gone away, it will no longer be considered the necessity (literally the "necessary evil") it once was. The reason being, according to economists, that as legal, social, and economic barriers to women's equality have fallen women have been more able to choose to have sex when they want to, without worrying about ruining their "chances."

That tends to reinforce Jill's point that after feminism sex work as we know it will all but disappear. It already has! It already is! I'll go a step further here and say that for all our tolerance and/or advocacy of sex work (and while I'm a curmudgeon about it I'm still an advocate) I'm... pretty sure nobody thinks we should go back to, say, the 1940s when between one in three and one in four men regularly went to brothels or otherwise hired sex workers.

So if those particular bad old days are gone and if perfectly credible free-agency sex workers are able to advocate for themselves and their professions what's the problem?

The sticking point, I think, with sex work as it continues to be constructed in popular culture (and consequently in much of feminist culture) is that it's seen as one end of a continuum of heterosexual sex as transactional sex where there are women (only women sex workers count in pop culture) who men can marry for sex, and other women men can pay cash for sex, and maybe somewhere in the middle there are women who will or at least are expected to trade sex for dinner and a movie.

Oh, and inside the paradigm of transactional sex there are the reviled-by-pop-culture "sluts" who screw everything up by "giving it away." Them and assault victims who are eternally scrutinized and blamed for somehow "asking for it." Them, and assault victims, and men who "resort to" all those demeaning, deprecating euphemisms for masturbation all screw thing up "for the rest of us." And finally inside that paradigm it's almost impossible to imagine women (it's always women in the popular imagination, remember) doing it of their own free will, without being enslaved, induced, degraded, addicted, abused, broken, or otherwise appearing to themselves and the public as "damaged goods."

Inside the dominant paradigm wherein men may desire sex and women may only be interested in what they can get for sex with men (cough), no matter how interesting, intentional, or freely chosen sex workers and their customers are still going to be part of the problem. In other words, like a lot of the rest of patriarchy the problem isn't individuals, it's the system.

It doesn't have to be that way. And obviously for a lot of individual participants it's nothing like that at all! But for too much of the rest of contemporary civilization (let's not even start talking about "traditional" civilization!) it's still not like that at all!

So here's the metric I've used to think about sex work for about the last five years: sex work will stop being problematic from a feminist/gender-consciousness perspective when as many women hire sex workers as men... and when men's motivation to hire sex workers are the same as women's. To the extent that metric seems impractical, idealistic, outrageous, or ridiculous sex work will continue to be problematic. And further, until we get there I don't necessarily agree that Jill's right... but those who disagree with her won't be right either.


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On My 8th Anniversary I've Finally Connected My 1st Post And My 2nd Bogus Rule of Desire

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2013-01-21 00:31

Photo by Flickr user ejpphoto. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user ejpphoto. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So eight years ago today I began this blog with the following post

Regarding Cock-suckers
Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2005-01-20 08:49

Cock-sucker: The term has many unfortunate uses and connotations, which is a shame since very very few of the connotations have anything to do with actually sucking cock. Let’s go one step further. Just as boys in the lockeroom stop bragging about sex as soon as they actually begin having it, it’s hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you’ve met someone who knows how to do it.

Even before I wrote that first post I'd been puzzled by "cocksucker" as a nigh-unto-nuclear taunt and insult. Because first because it's so frequently said by men, and so often said about women. What always seemed so weird about it was that second of all... well... most men kind of enjoy getting them!

This morning I finally figured it out. Which just goes to show I'm either a slow learner or else pretty indoctrinated into something I posted about a few years later.

A few years later I wrote what's turned out to be a productive for me and modestly popular post

The Bogus Two Rules of Desire (a.k.a. the Shorter No-Sex Class Paradigm)
Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2009-01-30 10:29

Over the years I've written hundreds of entries for my "no-sex" class category. Without ever feeling I'd gotten it exactly right.

Then one day I got a brainstorm and streamlined it to two basic, bogus, but amazingly deeply ingrained rules.

  • It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
  • It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.

I hadn't put it together before, eh. The reason that a) men generally enjoy receiving fellatio while b) using it as an insult most vile would be c) that second bogus rule of desire, right?

Sigh.

That it's taken me this long to twig to something both as vexing and as obvious as that just shows how far I've still got to go.

That it's actually still true that it's inconceivable enough to imagine that no one would ever desire to perform fellatio, and that it's actually still true that it's intolerable that there are those who nevertheless do, and that it's men ourselves who are most likely to condemn it socially (even while perhaps enthusiastically receiving them in private) shows how far society still needs to go.

The good news, actually, is that in the last eight years the inviolability of both Rules have softened considerably, particularly among those who've come of age in that time. It's not likely another President would be impeached for receiving one. And increasingly it's no longer barkingly taboo, let alone illegal, that men who desire to perform fellatio on each other might finally marry each other, as women who sexually desire each other may. It's been years since I've heard anyone (mostly my generation or older) imply or outright state that fellatio is not vanilla. Even longer since I've heard anyone imply that only a "closet homosexual" would let his female partner "go down" on him. Or that only a "fallen woman" or one who didn't "care about herself" would willingly (let alone enthusiastically) do so.

So. Progress in one dimension anyway.

But people still use the epithet.

And mean it.

Maybe in the next eight years we'll grow past it.


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What Women Think About Penises That Probably Don't Occur to Most Men

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-12-14 13:34

Photo by Flickr user Anne Petersen. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesyPhoto by Flickr user Anne Petersen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Geekyvamp, commiserating with another woman sex blogger about the number of unsolicited penis photos she gets sent to her Tumblr dashboard, raises and interesting point about how women feel about men's bodies vs. how men feel about our bodies. (Emphasis mine.)

Hah! I often wish I had a dick too, so I could a) not send it to people, and b) have sword fights. I see guys all over my dash playing meat-sword jousty-time, so it must be common, eh?

Source: A Heart Like Crazy Paving

Just because she doesn't like getting unsolicited penis photos doesn't mean GV doesn't like men. Or penises. (The idea that not liking unsolicited penises equals not liking penises at all is, of course, embedded in bogus Rule of Desire #1. Also rape culture. But I repeat myself. And digress...)

Instead GV likes penises, and men, quite a lot. In fact she thinks we can be pretty hot. In ones, and, as in the case of men playfully sword-fighting each other with their penises, in multiples. (See for instance her animated outtakes from Supernatural.)

I'm pretty sure most hetero Anglo/Austro/American men don't spend much time thinking about sword-fighting each other with our penises. (Hmm... there's no doubt about rape culture but I think old 70s-style feminists were mistaken about the part about men routinely regarding our penises as actual weapons. But I'm digressing again...)

As I said before I so rudely interrupted myself (as men evidently do tend to do... Dang it I'm doing it again!)

As I said, again, it's a good bet most hetero men don't think of male/male genital contact as erotic. And it's a sure bet almost no hetero men think such contact would be erotic to women.

There are probably numerous reasons for this -- both Rule 1 (it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to have sexual desire) and Rule 2 (it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired) play a big role obviously. The accompanying cultural belief (perpetrated not least by Cosmopolitan Magazine) that heterosexuality is all about men's gratification probably contributes to the notion as well.

The biggest reason, I think, is the deep cultural belief that men and women are not just poles apart but whole planets! And so it never occurs to... well... either sex that it stands to reason that if men think female/female contact is erotic, which many men do, then women would be just as likely to be similarly aroused by male/male contact.

And for the same reasons! Especially for hetero men and women! In fact, the more hetero (I'm guessing) the more likely seeing the opposite sexes together is going to seem erotic because sort of by-definition if we're hetero we're not only attracted to the opposite sex we're not particularly attracted to the same sex. Which means that two members of one's opposite rather than one of the opposite and one of your own means not only twice as many of your preferred sex to look at, it also means one less of your non-preferred sex.

Which in turn means less distraction and/or dismay (if you're phobic.) It means less self-conscious comparison. It means no matter how they arrange themselves the view of individuals you want to see aren't obscured by individuals you're indifferent to and/or uncomfortable with (again if you're phobic.) It means no particular source for envy. It means no particular source for competition. It means you can identify with the actions of either partner. And so on.

These are fairly obvious observations. Or would be if we weren't all gendered out the wazoo. When we're gendered, especially when that gendering assigns all sexual focus on one of those genders, then it's not obvious at all.

One area where we are different is plain old anatomy. For this reason in fantasy it's easy to imagine members of the opposite sex doing things actual members of the opposite sex probably wouldn't. Like sword-fighting each other with your erections. Because, gender constructions of brutal, domineering men not withstanding, penises are actually pretty sensitive. And easily sprained or even fractured(!!!)


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The Bogus Two Rules of Desire and "What Do You Wish You Had Known About Sex When You Were Younger?"

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-11-28 15:09

From time to time I'm asked to answer a question for Em & Lo's "Wise Guys" feature as one of their "straight married guys." The other day the question was "What do you wish you had known about sex when you were younger?"

Here's what I said:

Wow. There are probably hundreds of things I wish I’d known about sex when I was younger but the number one-with-a-bullet thing I wish I’d known when I was younger is that, contrary to the Santa Clause maxim, it’s actually as good to receive as it is to give. Really. No kidding! I grew up in the “she comes first” era which, while certainly an improvement of the earlier “she comes?” era, still had a big element of putting women on pedestals and treating them like dainty, passive, recipients rather than participants in sex. I remember being really, literally shocked* out of the mood when one partner pushed my knees apart, popped me into her mouth, then popped back up a moment later with this huge grin and said, “Oh, I just love doing this.”

At the time it simply hadn’t occurred to me that she might enjoy making me moan as much as I enjoyed doing the same for her.

Anyway, that’s the lesson: if you’re used to only giving, or only receiving, you’re missing half the fun.

Source: Em & Lo

There are so many other things I wish I'd known about sex back then. And relationships. And... ok, a bunch of other stuff too but especially sex and relationships. Because in retrospect there's so much to flinch, cringe, and outright make apologize for.  My old blog tagline remains depressingly true: "learning from mistakes so you won't have to."  Sigh.

* I know, I know, use of "literal" in the context of "shocked." Yeah, yeah. I was literally shocked in the sense of "experiencing an acute stress reaction," not "muscular convulsions induced by electrical conduction." And not literal shock as in "life-threatening medical condition that occurs due to inadequate substrate for aerobic cellular respiration" either. But I digress...


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Wait a Second! Paula Broadwell is a 40-year-old West Point Grad, Veteran, and Kennedy School Post-Grad!

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2012-11-13 12:06

This is going to sound a bit flame-y but I'm kind of stuck over an uncharacteristic, probably just off-the-cuff snippet in an overall very good post by E.J. Graff at The American Prospect. The main subject of the post, the knee-squeezing twittery by press and politicians about what appears to be a fairly routine affair between David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell.

I can easily see how that intense connection could become erotic—especially when it’s between a powerful man and an ambitious younger woman who’s trying to borrow some of that power for herself, that traditional method of exchanging power. (It may not be a feminist-approved method, but I’m writing about the real here, not the ideal.)

Source: TAPPED

Yes, Petraeus is 60, but Broadwell is 40.  At age 34, when they would have met, she was already a West Point grad, a military reservist with active duty experience, an accomplished athlete, and a Kennedy School grad student.  Meanwhile Petraeus was still just a colonel.  They had a common academic and professional interest in the then-still-under-appreciated field of counterinsurgency.

None of that overrules the possibility that Broadwell is just some older-than-usual groupie to Petraeus's Charlie Watts (the "superstar" drummer for the Rolling Stones, and yes I had to look up his name because as superstars go drummers aren't really at the top of the list.) But it does make it less attractive to leap to that assumption when other factors might make more sense.

Perhaps by working out of the D.C. based Prospect Graff has more of an inside scoop on their relationship than I do out here on the west coast.  But unless she's willing to spill I'm still more inclined to look at Broadwell and Petraeus as two mature, successful professional heterosexuals with a too-long, too-close history of common interests in situations where they were too often too far from their respective spouses. For too long at a time.

I'm sensitive to this in part because I'm really creeped out by the dominant male belief that women have no intrinsic interest in sex beyond its exchange value (Bogus Rule of Desire #1)  And so I'm creeped out by the implication that Broadwell's interest in Petraeus would have been that of a groupie or "gold digger" hoping to reflect herself in his power. (Because, see Bogus Rule #2, who ever heard of, or could stand the idea of, a man being sexually desirable?!?!?)

It's just weird coming from Graff instead of, say, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Satoshi Kanazawa.  And her parenthetical "It may not be a feminist-approved method, but I’m writing about the real here, not the ideal?"  Seriously?  That's also something I'd expect to hear on right-wing radio before I read it on TAPPED.  I mean, eww!

Probably a typo.


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Note To Angry White Guys: Since Entitlement Can't Buy You Love It Sure Isn't Going to Buy You Electoral Majorities

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2012-11-08 10:17

It has been much noted in electoral politics that demographics in the U.S. are changing. Said notations have come with much rending of garments by "traditional" right-wing extremists. Who for some reason imagine an overwhelmingly majority-white population would give them the conservative/libertarian paradise they believe they'd be able to enjoy.

As South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham complained to the Washington Post last month

We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

Source: The Guardian

The issue, according to a bunch of those same angry white guys, is that all "those people" are reproducing at rates higher than rates higher than angry white guys.

They think that's a problem.

I'm...

Gonna have to agree.

I'd just state the problem a little differently than they would.

Because... well... ok, quick question: who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy?

Or even more pointedly: Who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy willingly?

Not to grind this in too deep but this is yet another area where feminism would actually improve matters for the angry white guys who feel most threatened by it.

Part of why they feel threatened is that if feminism wins then they will no longer be entitled to effectively coerce partners to reproduce with them.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to support themselves on their own incomes and consequently will not be obliged to couple with them in order to keep rooves over their heads and shoes on their and their children's feet.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to walk down the street or sleep in their own beds with no further need of angry white guys to protect them from "big, angry non-white men."  If feminism wins, they fear, women (as members of the sexually-indifferent "no-sex" class!) will have no interest sexual or even social intercourse with men.

In other words, they fear, if feminism wins then a) no one will want to reproduce with angry white men, and therefore angry white men are doomed to extinction.

 I dunno.

Seems to me that the issue is that sense of entitlement.  And a big source of the anger is over a sense of loss of that entitlement.

And yet...

I've noticed...

By and large hetero women (the vast, vast majority in other words) seem perfectly interested in forming relationships with non-angry, non-entitled men. Short-term relationships.  Long-term relationships.  One-night-stand relationships.  Even long-term let's have a family relationships!  No coercion, leverage, wheedling, required.  And defniitely no anger required.

Just something to think about.


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The No-Sex Class: Dan Savage Mistakenly Thinks It's Prudish and Sex-Negative to OBJECT to "Sexy" Women's Halloween Costumes

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-10-31 13:19

Image via Facebook. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Image via Facebook user 'A girl's guide to taking over the world.'

Amanda Marcott, writing at Tapped, gives a nice analysis of the annual excoriation of "sexy" Halloween costumes for women.  It's a good read (it starts like this.)

Every year, Halloween comes with its own predictable traditions: trick-or-treating, pumpkin recipes, costumes based on bad puns, and increasingly, the tradition of women wearing ever-skimpier Halloween costumes and feminists online decrying the trend through blogs and social networks. To quote the movie Mean Girls: “In Girl World, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

Mocking oversexed Halloween costumes is catnip to feminists. For one thing, it’s one of those arenas where the double standard is undeniable. Men’s costumes, at least those sold in Halloween stores, tend to be basic scary costume fare. Women’s costumes are so oversexed it gets silly. Sexy bacon? Sexy Finding Nemo? A sexy melon that is so sexy you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be?

Source: The American Prospect

Further down in her post Amanda mentions that Dan Savage has weighed in on the matter. 

This season, Dan Savage criticized feminist bloggers on his podcast, Savage Lovecast, saying that some of the arguments he’s heard are sex negative, shaming women for exploring their sexuality. He celebrated Halloween for being a heterosexual version of a pride celebration—an opportunity to celebrate sexuality and have some fun—and said that sexy costumes are a natural an unobjectionable part of this. He acknowledged the double standard, agreeing that it’s unfair that women are the ones who strip down while men don’t, but pointed out that the culture at large expects women to be put on display, an expectation which carries over into Halloween traditions. All this negativity around sexy female Halloween costumes just comes across as prudish, he argues.

While I think Dan Savage has a good point on the Pride March for Straight People business I think he's still off base. Yes, there are a number of "sex negative" reasons to scold women for wearing a "sexy XYZ" costume. But I think there are far more, and far more legitimate, sex positive reasons for objecting. The biggest being the underlying message that women who are actually sexual in their own right and not just "sexy" are scary.

Adults tend to dress for Halloween as people (or occasionally things) that make society anxious. I think off-the-shelf and/or Victoria's Secrets-style "sexy" costumes for women demonstrate social anxiety about the possibility of women being sexual for real instead of, you know, just for pretend one night a year.

I think it just reinforces my thesis that so many of those pre-fab "sexy" women's costumes like auto mechanics, cops, gangsters, pirates, soldiers, tax collectors, Big Bird, pimp(!), and even murder victims in body bags(!) are almost always "sexy" versions of trades or situations that are traditionally male.

Finally, compare and contrast the mainstream "sexy" women's costumes with those worn in more authentically sex positive (or at least not sex-anxious) contexts like comic and anime conferences. When they dress sexually they don't dress like, I dunno, "sexy" generic-male Ninja Turtles, R2D2s, Wolverines, or Doctor Whos. Instead they dress like actual sexual women characters. One can quibble about the construction of women's attire in comics, games, and fantasy fiction but after that fact the decision to create and wear that attire in person is rarely either nervous or apologetic.

figleaf

p.s. If it Savage was right that women dressing "sexy" for Halloween wasn't more about cultural anxiety than about actual sexiness, then I'd expect more men would take up your suggestion to take it off for Halloween as well. And now that you mention it, if I was going to a party tonight instead of answering the door for neighborhood trick-or-treaters I think I'd try going as the guy in towel from last year's landmark Old Spice ad. :-)


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Masturbation and the "No-Sex Class:" Captain Awkward Advises Mom About Gendered Assumptions About Young People and Masturbation

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2012-10-15 16:29

Photo by Flickr user MassDistraction. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user Sharyn Morrow. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jennifer P, a.k.a. Captain Awkward takes a crack at one of the giant double standards that, despite two decades of Sex and the City re-runs, plus maybe 50 years of Cosmopolitan magazine, continues to persist about young people and masturbation.  Particularly young women and masturbation. (See also Rule of Desire #1.)

The question was from a mom who asked her teenage daughter if she'd like a vibrator, expecting the daughter to say "eww, no." Instead the daughter said "heck yeah," at which point the mom started feeling a little "eww" about it. And asked Captain Awkward for advice. The advice, is, as usual, a masterful combination of diplomacy and non-common sense, and you should go read it yourself.

What I'd like to call out, though, is her quick summary of the whys and hows of that immediate squeamishness and surprise at the daughter's enthusiasm. (Hint: it also echos reasoning used by former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder, Oprah, Heather Corinna, and others.) Check it out (emphasis mine.)

Teenage boys are FAMOUS for spending long periods of time alone in the bathroom or their bedrooms, and everyone knows what they’re doing and laughs it off as no big deal. It’s only fair that teenage girls get that same privacy and room to become their own first and best sex partners. I think that feeling that this makes you a bad parent is that old double standard you were raised with lurking in the back of your mind, the one that says that the sexuality of teen girls MUST BE CONTAINED or else SOCIETY CRUMBLES. I think that a teen girl who understands her own desires is going to be a better advocate for herself when she does start having sex. If you feel like people in your life would be judgy, invoke privacy. There is no reason that you have to share this decision with anyone other than your daughter or seek anyone’s approval.

Source: Captain Awkward

Quick aside: I gotta say that it's probably not ok that the theory, practice, and needs of teenage boys are left pretty much unspoken as well, leaving them in a lurch of their own when the time comes for them to have sex. Most notably, whereas society acts scandalized at the inconceivability that girls might masturbate, it acts disgusted that boys do. With the assumption that no "man" would masturbate if he could instead, including by hook or by crook, "get" sex from someone else. But I digress...

I can't find the link but there's a point in one of the CherryTV round-table discussions where one of the women says something like "growing up we thought masturbation was just a guy thing." So she ended up going much longer before trying it than she might have done. One doubts she was alone.

Anyway, I have it on very good authority that teenage boys spend a great deal of time in their rooms not masturbating (don't ask me how I know but even, um, 20 times a day leaves a young person quite a few hours in between for non-masturbatory pursuits.) And so it's a bit creepy that people laughingly assume that's what they're all doing just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of men as the obligatory "sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Meanwhile I have it on somewhat less-personal authority that some of the time teenage girls spend in their rooms sometimes does involve masturbation. And it's just as creepy that so many people primly assume they don't, wouldn't, maybe even couldn't just because gender stereotypes (not to mention the dominant paradigm of women as the disinterested, rather-knit-or-talk-about-their-feelings "no-sex class") insist that's how it must be.

Instead, left to our own devices (huh, huh, I said "devices") boys and girls probably would end up distributed across bell curves that largely overlap. Better to acknowledge it than pretend it ought to be some other way.


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Men as the "Sex Class:" "Not Particularly Choosy"

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2012-09-28 18:39

In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)

But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.

Source: Huffington Post

Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?

And even if they are is it really because of biology?  Or is it maybe more about 

Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?  Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men?  Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up."  (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)

I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy.  But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.  

I mean...

Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces.  Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces."  That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.

And speaking of normal circumstances...

Really?

Really?

Men aren't particularly choosy?

Are you kidding me?  First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it?  If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there?  If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all.  Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick."  Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter.  Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.

More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!

Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.

Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:"  reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it.  And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.

But...

But...

Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check.  (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)


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