So I've been thinking a lot (a lot) about issues of consent, of sexual abuse, of "gray areas," of stereotypes and assumptions, and, especially, about accountability. Last summer, here on this blog, at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz, and in various comment threads around the intertubes, I started digging deeper into what I saw as just one or two incidents of violent sexual assault I experienced as a child -- one at age four at the hands of a ~12-year-old neighbor girl, one around age 14 at the hands of a ~17-year-old neighborhood bully.

The more I've been digging into it the more I've come to realize that, you know, I grew up in a culture that was pretty rife with sexual abuse -- enough so that I only really registered the above-mentioned incidents. But the kid who was the closest thing to a best friend in elementary school? Duh, let's see, he and his sister were foster kids who's father taught them all about "corn-holing" and "fuck-rubbers?" Gee, only this summer did it occur to me to wonder why they were foster kids? The core of the new-to-town teens I hung out with in late high-school and after I dropped out but before I left home? The variously emancipated and/or runaway boys and girls who at times seemed voraciously sexual(ized) but spoke in fluent 70's-era "sexual liberation?" The ones who's attitudes and behaviors deeply influenced much of my own early sexual aspirations? It only recently occurred to me that a contemporary assessment would be that they'd been groomed to the nines both by adult influences. And speaking of grooming and sexual abuse, how about the handful of distinctly predatory adult "youth counselors" (inside a much larger group of entirely decent, appropriate ones) who advocated boundary-crossing in ways that, while not necessarily unsound advice overall, nevertheless advanced their own "hands on" agendas with various "promising young people?"

Let's not even talk about the barkingly predatory "pre-date-rape" alcohol, cocaine, and Quaalude drenched college music bar culture I lived and worked in where it seemed at the time to be perfectly "cool" for more experienced bar patrons and bartenders to take over-intoxicated young men and women home to "crash." Where what this year would be called morning-after gaslighting was considered just helping the erstwhile partner get "perspective."

And all that's got me wondering where have those early influences left me!?!?! What else has been done to me? What else have I let happen? What else have I done in all earnestness? What impact have I had on others?

It's been bugging me a lot. Sort of a hard, fast replay of the old Will Rogers line, which I cite frequently, that "it's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you know that just ain't so."

Anyway, while I could launch into how my latest runaway train of thought about consent and assumptions has been accelerated by Clarisse Thorn's controversial but excellent exploration of forgiveness vs. accountability in On Change and Accountability, or how it was set rolling by Rachel Hills' Best of 2010: “But women don’t rape!”: sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse, and how at the moment I'm feeling a bit like the only people one should really trust in sexual situations are the meticulous negotiation fetishists in the kink community (for instance see item #4 in Andrea Zanin's Expectations of Dominance: Picking Through the Tangle.) But I'm still not feeling completely collected about it, and besides, at the moment I'm feeling all Maslow's hammer about unstated assumptions that can interfere unspoken and even verbal consent... and so at this point any conclusions I draw are likely to be, um, over the top.

So instead I'd like to point out this cute little 2004 video short Jason Reitman and his then-partner Michele Lee called "Consent." It's not perfect (the text "romance deserves better than this" at the end of the credits is a little ambiguous) but it nicely captures how little we're able to communicate with simple yeses, nos, and you-want-tos.

YouTube link via Caitlin.

I don't remember the source but a few weeks ago I emailed this to myself. The link is to somewhere in Politico.com. The question is not about politics, or even erstwhile front-runner-of-the-week Newt Gingrich. Instead it's about terminology.

Lede of the day: "Oh, Newtie, excite us, delight us, make our knees grow weak."

Weak in the knees?  I've heard the phrase for years, and read or heard the phrase in works going back till at least the beginning of the 20th Century.  But where did this come from?

Do people really get weak in the knees from enthusiasm or excitement?   Political, or erotic, or otherwise?

"Weak knees" has been used to imply fear for millinea.  That makes sense.

But weak in the knees from excitement, delight, or arousal?

I usually feel anything but weak then.  But maybe that's just me.

What's your take?

Photo by Flickr user Vik Cuban. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Svutlana, in her signature fractured English, turns the tables on a correspondent who's partner "has said she has squirted before, so I know she can"

Oh, thank you too much for squirt question that give Svutlana one more opportunity for address sexual tyrannies that decree ideal female orgasm come with espresso cup of clear fluids and originate with mysterious g-spots.

Imagine for one moments, Mr Squirt, phenomenon of male anejaculations in which minority of mens have orgasm but no ejaculations. By way, orgasm with no ejaculates be true phenomenon and no something Svutlana pull out of ass, but unfortunate male orgasm in absence of ejaculations no be fetishize so that mens can experience taste of tyrannies that many womens experience with squirts.

Source: Svutlana

Nice one! I'd add it would turn the tables in more than one way. The gentleman asking the question reveals what I think is a big source of the appeal of "squirting" when he tells Svutlana "To me, it's a huge turn on and the ultimate way of knowing I've pleasured her."

In other words if he can get her to "squirt" he'll know she's not faking it. This even though the vast, vast, vast majority of "female ejaculators" in porn are just peeing.*

Now imagine the consternation if male actors began faking anejaculation during unbukkake porn? "I know his moans sound real but how do I know he's not faking it?"

As someone who occasionally actually, really doesn't ejaculate** I would of course applaud the fetishization of anejaculation...

...but...

...since most men actually do ejaculate with their orgasms, just like most women don't "ejaculate" I'm pretty sure it would just be as stressful for men who reflexively do as the whole "squirting" thing is for women who don't.

Note: My experience of women who "squirt" when they come is that you mostly have to change not just the sheets but beds before going to sleep. I'm not at all adverse to messy sex (mmm, messy sex) but one rarely hears of hopping out of bed to flip the mattress in lists of favorite after-play activities.

* Incidentally, contrary to popular assumption since roughly the Elizabethan period there's been nothing unethical, immoral, or misleading about actors, you know, enacting in professional contexts. So there's nothing wrong with porn actors enacting moans, groans, or exudations at work.

** My "dry orgasms," when I have them, are perfectly lovely. This has occasionally disappointed my partners, so I'm not without sympathy for men who wish their partners "squirted."  But... when it comes to verifying that one's partner has had an orgasm there's this crazy thing called "trust" that works almost as well as fluid evidence.  The good news, at least for me, is when I have an orgasm but don't also ejaculate I can be "up" for another very quickly.

Lynn Gazis-Sax points out that the problem with comparing abstinence with other forms of birth control or safer sex isn't about the typical vs. ideal failure rate of the method. As methods go, abstinence is an almost* 100% effective.

Instead what's important is the typical vs. ideal rate of use. (Emphasis mine.)

One flaw in arguments for abstinence is that they often compare perfect use effectiveness rates for abstinence with typical use effectiveness rates for contraception. Maggie Gallagher, for example, places great emphasis, when speaking of contraception, on the typical use failure rates, to supply an estimate that your chances of getting pregnant if you use the Pill are actually not that low. And she has a point. If you assume a typical use effectiveness rate, for the Pill, of around 92%, and if you further note that that typical use effectiveness rate is the chance that you successfully avoid getting pregnant for just one year, the chance that you will ever be pregnant, over the course of your entire reproductive life, while you were attempting to avoid pregnancy with the Pill, may not be that small. The same is true of condoms, which have a lower typical use effectiveness rate than the Pill.

...

Condoms are better at preventing AIDS than abstinence is, for the simple reason that, however often people may fail to use condoms, they fail to abstain even more often. And most methods of birth control have a better “typical use” success rate than abstinence, in the sense that people are much better at using birth control mostly reliably than they are at abstaining from sex until they’re ready for kids.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

* Lynn mentions the obvious case where it didn't work when Mary had Jesus, and pretty much by-definition abstinence isn't effective for someone forced to have sex against her or his will.