chastity

Speaking of Virginity, Does Jessica Grose Really Think You Shouldn't Speak of It?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-06-23 16:41

Shelby Knox of The (Ms) Education of Shelby Knox really jumps hard on Slate’s Double XX editor Jessica Grose, who posted what Knox calls “a misguided, finger-wagging analysis of the recent Reclaiming Virginity conference held at Harvard, at which I spoke on a panel.”

Here’s Knox…

As Jessica Valenti noted, via Twitter, Ms. Grose took in the Rethinking Virginity conference as “lady bloggers rethinking their slutty ways.” Grose spends most of her post laying out conference organizer Lena Chen’s past as a sex blogger, including the slut-shaming she endured at the hands of fellow students and print and online publications. It’s obvious she views Chen’s decision to give up her blog (for the moment) and identify herself as a “Third Wave Marxist feminist” as a defection to what she describes as ‘Generation Scold’ – “deeply conventional and traditional” millenials determined to stamp out sexual promiscuity.

In what I can only call a lapse in journalistic ethics, Jessica Grose leaves out both the actual and political context in which the Rethinking Virginity conference occurred.

Read the quote in context here.

From the Rethinking Virginity conference’s “About” page on Tumblr you can see that Gross really did miss the boat

Half a century after the sexual revolution, the concept of virginity remains as contentious as ever. While the sexual abstinence movement preaches in classrooms and college campus the dangers of premarital sex and “hooking up”, feminists decry scare tactics and “slut-shaming”. What are the religious, legal, and economic origins behind ideas of sexual purity? How does queer sexuality complicate the equation? Is a sex-positive vision of abstinence possible?

The Rethinking Virginity Conference at Harvard University seeks answers to these questions and more. Join us on May 3rd, 2010 as our panelists — sexual health educators, professors, feminist activists and bloggers, a documentary filmmaker — explore what it means to be a virgin and what the future of sexual abstinence should look like.

Stop by for one panel, meet speakers at the Boloco-sponsored lunch, or stay all day to experience the full diversity of our conference programming. Women’s, LGBT, and sexual health organizations will be tabling throughout the conference as well.

Hosted by the Harvard College Queer Students and Allies with support from the Harvard College Women’s Center and Boloco.

This conference is free and open to the public. For all press inquiries, please email the QSA Women’s Events & Outreach Chair at lenachen[at]fas.harvard.edu.

Read the quote in context here.

And yeah, personally I’ve always thought those Harvard College Queer Students and the Harvard College Women’s Center were a bunch of finger-wagging prudes too. :-p

Just based on the fact that Shelby Knox or Lena Chen or anyone else can be simultaneously damned if you do (by, say, Laura Sessions Stepp) and damned if you don’t (by, evidently, Jessica Grose) I can’t imagine what other concept on the big blue marble needs to be rethought more urgently than virginity. And rethought, by the way, in the terms it sounds like the conference intended to address.

The culture of virginity (as bought into by both its defenders and detractors) makes it extremely difficult to have complete conversations about choice. The culture puts extraordinary pressure on boys and young men. It puts gruesome and sometimes murderous pressure on girls and young women. It’s hard to imagine Chen would have caught so much grief for her blog without it. It’s hard to believe “frat” culture would be so toxically rapacious without it either. And without it “purity rings” would just be some kind of trademarked gimmick on cheap water filters. And let’s not even start with what it means for same sex, intersex, non-penetrative-obligate fetishists, auto-erotic asexuals, or others who aren’t likely to have heteronomative intercourse — not least because, um, for those people you actually can’t start talking about virginity-related sex.

So yeah, why on earth would anyone want to rethink the basis of all that?

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Twits vs. Substance on Rep. Mark Souder's Affair and Resignation

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-05-19 00:33

Jed Lewison of Daily Kos nicely summarizes the recently announced resignation of extremist “family values” Congressman Mark Souder. One key point? Turns out the “interviewer” in a campaign-related video on the importance of promoting abstinence and chastity was Souder’s non-marital parter.

As you know, I’m usually very harsh about the twits-vs-substance nature of these scandals, where in people enjoy the schadenfreude of a public scold’s downfall for canoodling while missing the larger point. And I’m feeling pretty harsh about this time too because the substantive problem is that Rep. Souder is, or at least was, a major leader and shaper of legislation aimed at preventing precisely the behavior he engaged in. And the nature of his role pretty much implies that he knew, understood, had access to, and a professional as well as personal interest in applying the most current and most effective abstinence-promoting, chastity-keeping, and fidelity-maintaining methods known. And yet knowing what he knew, and having access to what he had, it still didn’t work for him! And so presumably whatever it was he was promoting, and legislating, would almost certainly be even less likely to work for people with less knowledge and less support. You want a scandal? Well that’s the scandal!

One other thing, by the way. One that really does deserve singling out Souder for hypocrisy. Lewison says (emphasis mine)

GOP Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana — the leading advocate for abstinence education in Congress —  will resign after an affair with one of his female staffers became public.

He said it here.

If Souder had had even an ounce of the integrity he doesn’t just demand but also legislates for, he’d have resigned before his affair became public.

See also: Acronym Replacement: It’s Not IOKIYAR, It’s IJNNWACDI (It’s Just Not News When A Conservative Does It)

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The Other Shoe Drops: Huffington Post on Coverups of Sexual Abuse of Women and Girls in the Catholic Church

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2010-04-11 21:17

The other day I mentioned my passionate conviction that if there was anything to them (besides being one more front for bashing feminism) then so-called Men’s Rights groups should be taking the lead in calling for investigation, prosecution, exposition, and shaming of the systematic abuse of boys by priests in the Catholic church.

In that post I briefly mentioned that evidence of abuse of women and girls might turn up as well. Sounds like that other shoe has now dropped — on my non-figleaf Facebook account I found the following link from my progressive but also sensibly-religious sister-in-law.

Angela Bonavoglia: The Catholic Church: Abusing, Endangering, And Intimidating Women

It was indeed outrageous that Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, in his Good Friday homily at St. Peter’s Basilica, with Pope Benedict in eyeshot, compared the public denunciation of the Catholic Church hierarchy for harboring child molesting priests to the homicidal viciousness of anti-Semitism.

But there was another reason to be troubled by that homily: Cantalamessa also talked about the need to end violence against women, which is crucial, but he did so without any acknowledgment of the Church’s own culpability in the abuse, endangerment, and intimidation of women.

Cantalamessa talked about the need to end violence against women, which is crucial, but he did so without any acknowledgment of the Church’s own culpability in the abuse, endangerment, and intimidation of women.

Source: Huffington Post

Bonavoglia goes on to point out that in addition to what amounted to casual disregard for female victims as well as male ones, these are the same people who absolutely condemn birth control, abortion, and use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

If my sister-in-law is ticked off enough to post about this, publicly, on Facebook, then resentment and revulsion has got to be running pretty deep in the rank and file

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Actually My Love is *Not* a Rose... Or an Apple, Lollypop, a Piece of Tape, or Gum, etc.

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-08-31 19:48

In comments to my sports/virginity question where I questioned why, for instance, losing one’s virginity was supposed to destroy your life but blowing your knee out in high-school sports isn’t; why getting an STI (even a bad one like HIV) is supposed to ruin your life but picking up hepatitis while trekking in Nepal isn’t, MinorityReport (who blogs at, well, Minority Report) said

Great point. I wish that would have been the gist of my high school sex-ed classes.

An example: The school hired chastity speaker, Molly Kelly. I forget most of her talk. However, I do remember one very clear image she used. Throughout her speech Molly repeatedly dropped an apple. At the end of her presentation she held up the apple she had dropped and an apple that had been set aside. She then asked which we would rather eat, the apple that had been dropped on the floor (repeatedly) or the apple that had been set aside. It drove her point home, and for me at least it made an impact.

I would have been nice to hear something like, “But if you do _______, it’s not the end and life goes on.”

She said it here.

Oohhh, I had this realization after reading her Molly Kelly story and now I’m kind of beside-myself irritated.

You know all those abstinence-only metaphors of apples, roses, even gum and tape? Every one of them is a single-use consumable good. Bouncing an apple into apple sause just takes the cake though. The difference between apples and, oh, say, your body is even if you managed to get bruised during sex you’d still recover quickly. And most of the time, for most women and men, you’re not bruised during sex to begin with.

Apples, gum, roses, tape, suckers, etc., don’t recover at all but they’re fucking things, not people!

You want a better, but still-inanimate metaphor for a man or woman who’s had sex? Try a rubber ball. In fact try a superball since those seem to bounce with more energy than they begin with. How about a book? Try a deep pool that a pebble has been tossed in. A painting, an alarm clock, a window, a fireplace, a chicken and an egg (which came first?), a ski hill, a piano or flute.

And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for any of those because humans aren’t inanimate nor are we, women or men, either literally or figuratively consumed in the course of, well, intercourse.

A dropped apple is simply marvelous for propaganda in the service of patriarchy but evilly inaccurate for sex education.

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Your Tax Dollars at Work: Abstinence-Only Education in Action

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-05-14 13:16

Thomas, writing at Yes Means Yes Blog explains why an abstinence-only counselor assaulting a young woman is a textbook example of the no-sex class paradigm in action.


What he’s done is in a sense hypocrisy, but there is a core consistency. He’s urging young women to say no. He’ll keep telling them to say no, while he sexually molests them. He may even see nothing wrong with his behavior … and he is probably very upset by any woman’s display of actual sexual agency.

Say no; get raped. As long as women have no voice in how their bodies are sexual, he’s happy.

Read the quote in context here.

Yup. When you think about it sexual assault is almost the purest expression of women’s sexuality inside the dominant paradigm: you’re not supposed to want it, it “ruins” you to have it, you’re coached to decline it, therefore it’s “best” or “most natural” to be forced into it.

My only quibble with Thomas would be that while there might be no internalhypocrisy in a 31-year-old abstinence counselor assaulting a 16-year-old girl there is hypocrisy… not to mention total breakdown of predicate logic… in the idea that women must be taught to be naturally chaste.

If it were natural it wouldn’t need to be taught. If it’s not natural then there must be an agent making the decision when to and when not to. And with whom. And if there’s an agent his or her decision must be respected. Since Rule #1 of the Two Rules of Desire says it’s both inconceivable and intolerable for a women to feel sexual desire, it’s inconceivable and intolerable for her to have agency at all. Thus the no-sex class emphasis on women having “natures” rather than intention or agency. With the result that a counselor thinks nothing of assaulting someone he’s teaching to not have sex.

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Taking "Playing House" To Its (Il)logical Extreme

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-01-04 15:37


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

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, riffing off a public interview with Alaska Governor Palin’s minor daughter, points to the basic contradiction of “abstinence-only” marketing, especially as it’s presented to girls.

In other words, it’s “obvious” that you shouldn’t take the greatest step in your life that fills it with joy and perfection and bliss and did I say perfection?  Getting pregnant at 17 will complete you, girls, so don’t do it!  That trifling boyfriend of yours will, the second you get pregnant, become so devoted to you that he’ll tattoo your name on his finger, and your mother will give you a year to plan the perfect wedding you’ve been encouraged to dream about since you could first turn a page in a bridal magazine.  Having a baby in high school is so fucking great, so girls, don’t do it!

Pardon me if I find the whole situation disingenuous.

Read the quote in context here.

What’s weird about this whole business to me is that in terms of reproductive topography it’s not even a bad idea in social-theory terms to encourage young people to a) have their own children while their parents are still young enough to provide in-home support and assistance and b) parents are themselves still young enough when their children go off on their own (to grandparent their own children’s children part-time!) that, still in their own 30s, they can then launch full-blown and reproductively-unencumbered careers, lives, etc. As opposed to, say, getting up a full head of steam career-wise and then… interrupting it to go “nuclear” (family) in your 30s and then try and get back off the parent track it in your 40s or 50s (or 60s as will be the case for me!)

And not to put too fine a point on it, with such a model it really wouldn’t matter as much if one or the other parent was a massive flake or not long-term, grow-old-together compatible because… there’d still be plenty of close supporting infrastructure, not only for, say, the abandoned father but also the interested-in-resuming-dating daughter.

I’m not saying that’s the best model, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.** If that were the conservative model. Which it manifestly also isn’t.

Instead the model seems to be to trap children in these weird double-binds that result in a) high expectations, b) sense of personal failure, c) making poor interpersonal/partner choices that d) you’re then stuck with that result in…

e) What midwife and birth instructor Penny Simpkin rather hauntingly refers to as “the empty years” where, especially if you’re a “traditional” woman, your children are out of the home and you have, basically, nothing left to live for because all you were raised to believe in was being a stay-at-home mom or a work-yourself-to-death dad.

So, sort of like Marcotte, I’m thinking would be fine if they wanted to have it one way — teenagers really are fucked up by pregnancy if they’re not really ready — or fine the other — when you get pregnant we’ll lavish you with a wedding and tons of parental support. But trying to have it both ways — if you get pregnant you’re really fucked up but we’re going to lavish you with big wedding and tons of support — just… ruins it for everybody! The joy of sex. The joy of parenting. The joy of having a career. Even the joy of grandparenting!

[** It wouldn’t even be the end of the world population-increase-wise if everyone still limited themselves to two children. In fact as long as I’m speculating wildly I suspect a start-your-life-after-kids model would actually increase interest in smaller rather than larger families. —fl]

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Recasting Romance Narratives as Historical Reproductions

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-11-01 21:07


Photo “Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck, 1434” by Flickr user geekulr.
Used under a Creative Commons license.

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy says

I did watch a few minutes of an old movie on TCM last night, though, and was repelled enough by its Yay Patriarchyness to embark on a series of contemplations on how Western literature would scarcely exist if plots did not so consistently revolve around the purity of the female lead’s vagina, puritanical conceits concerning marriage and divorce, and whose-baby-is-it. Seriously, if you take away bastards, fallen women, and dominion-over-the-uterus as plot devices, nearly the whole canon instantly evaporates. I honestly don’t know how TCM broadcasts this crap with a straight face. “The story of a man who lived a man’s life, the story of a woman who believed in one man.”

She said it here.

Good call.

You know that blogospheric aphorism that insanity is defined as repeatedly trying the same thing expecting a different outcome? Contemplating Twisty’s observation I’m left wondering if the endless repetition she mentions has a similar basis. I mean… sure, if the dominant culture was still a semi-nomadic one that considered women a) one more form of domestic animal that b) nevertheless produced male offspring for men to bequeath their assets to then maybe we could tell the story once and make it stick. Instead we keep trying to watch, or read, listen to, or even re-enact those narratives and…

It’s not really relevant any more — no more than fathers “giving away” their daughters at their weddings.

And by the way, what would bequeath left after evaporating that bulk of the canon there’s still plenty of room for romance, adventure, lust, discovery, betrayal, achievement, loss, joy, and tragedy. In other words it needn’t be reduced to variations on the Travel Channel. Because at this point who one has or hasn’t slept with in the past is, or should be, as relevant to romance as whether they have a dowry, can churn butter, rope a calf, or sharpen a quill pen.

Almost completely-random aside: Speaking of churning butter I made some for the first time last weekend. It’s astonishingly easy. For the record (should I be posting this on Recipe Tuesday?) two pints of heavy whipping cream makes almost exactly one pound of the best-tasting, authentically rich golden-yellow butter I’ve ever eaten. It takes maybe 20 minutes with an electric mixer. I mention this now because with the holidays upon us you can expect to see whipping cream on sale from time to time, and while it’s probably not cost effective to make all your butter yourself it could be a real eye-opener for a holiday dinner, breakfast, or brunch.

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NIYBY (Not In *Your* Back Yard) Social Policy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-06-24 13:29

Speaking of community standards, Christina Page of RHRealityCheck.org puts in a single paragraph what ought to be the foundation of all discussion of contraception policy in America.

Most American families want (and have) two children meaning women spend about seven years, on average, getting and being pregnant and about 23 years preventing pregnancy. Planning a pregnancy leads to dramatic declines in both maternal mortality and infant mortality. Indeed, the countries on earth with the lowest maternal and infant mortality rates are those with the greatest access to and use of contraception. Those with the highest death rates are countries that deny women and families access to family planning—many are nations that took Saletan’s route and simply ignored the fanatics into power.

Read the quote in context here.

Approximate years of fertility: thirty years
Pregnant or trying to be: seven years
Therefore trying not to be: twenty three years.

What’s really irritating is the pharmacists in question are just as likely to have two children as anyone else so…

Interview after interview suggests that what “pharmacists for life” are really worried about is maintaining a “community standard” they see as somehow declining or debased somewhere else.

You see the same effect in Planned Parenthood and abortion-services provider clinics as well — conservatives coming in insisting “they’re different” because their pregnancy is different because they’re not “those people” who have… what… recreational abortions?

#!#$~$~VB

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Yeah But Who's Gate? Part 27,630

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2008-05-09 09:43


Photo by Flickr user John Kannenberg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says

Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.

Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.

...

And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.

She said it here.

Yeah, I sort of have to agree with Marcotte’s question and… I’m sort of wondering why the Abstinence Clearinghouse doesn’t have a whole section celebrating 30-year-old, 50-year-old, and life-long virgins. Because sort of by (their) definition the longer you hold out the better.

John Ruskin kept his virginity from February 8, 1819 all the way to January 20, 1900 yet a search of Abstinence Clearinghouse yields nothing! Thoreau isn’t found either, but maybe that’s because he only made it 44 years (before dying, not before having sex.)


Image source: Wikipedia.What stuns me, though, is that they completely ignore John Harvey Kellogg (he of corn flake fame) kept his virginity for 91 years, including more than forty years of marriage! Kellogg was a tireless advocate for abstinence. According to his Wikipedia entry

He warned that many types of sexual activity, including many “excesses” that couples could be guilty of within marriage, were against nature, and therefore, extremely unhealthy. He drew on the warnings of William Acton and expressed support for the work of Anthony Comstock. He appears to have gone beyond his own advice, since though he and his wife were married for over forty years, they never had sexual intercourse and had separate bedrooms all their lives.

I mean, here’s a guy who’s said to have worked on Plain Facts about Sexual Life, a major, best-selling pro-abstienence tract on his honeymoon! If anyone’s virginity held it’s value well then surely it was he!!! And yet they totally turn their backs on him!

Oh wait, all the people I’ve mentioned were abstinent men! Nobody values chastity in men because nobody’s willing to pay for male virginity.

Seriously, I grew up in the south where there were (and are!) still “dry” counties where the sale of all beverages containing alcohol. Consequently those counties also have “moonshiners,” who make money (sometimes huge money) smuggling and selling alcohol into those dry counties. And ya wanna know a secret? If those counties dropped their own private prohibitions then moonshiners would be off the gravy train and so… they make darn sure the most abolitionist ministers in those counties get the biggest donations, with little notes saying “keep up the good work, Reverend.”

And that’s what folks like the Abstinence Clearinghouse are really up to as well — trying to keep a tradition from previous centuries alive in order to reward one set of people (men) with access to an artificial scarcity (one-time-deal sex with women.) And for people who are into that it’s a seriously good deal — men who buy in get something of (artificial) value, women who buy into it get “bonus” economic points, everybody who buys into it gets to claim virtue points. And, of course, women who don’t conform and therefore undercut the “market” get to be sluts and (tellingly) cheap whores!

What bitter, cynical expectations of human beings — women and men — they have. What bitter, cynical expectations of women and men they create!

#

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Radically Redefining Vanilla

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2008-02-17 09:43


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

Part A: Observation
So Sam Sugar of SugarBank reports that

The Mainichi Daily News, my breakfast read, reports that vaginal ejaculation disorder affects 70% of Japanese males… Supposedly it’s a byproduct of masturbatory techniques which don’t feel like a vagina.

See the rest of Sugar’s take on the story here.

And here’s a bit more detail from the actual Mainichi Daily News article

Tsueno Akaeda, a doctor who runs a clinic in Tokyo’s Roppongi, agrees with urologist Nagao.

“There are definitely more people with vaginal ejaculation disorder than there used to be,” he says. “There has been incredible progress made in masturbation goods and there are plenty of people who can ejaculate into an artificial vagina, but not the real thing. I get more than a few men come to see me about that. And those in their 20s and 30s have grown up watching adult movies. They find masturbation easier and more satisfying than intercourse.”

Experts say one of the main reasons men develop vaginal ejaculation disorder is that they learn how to masturbate using methods that feel distinctly different from vaginas, such as rubbing up against pillows or lying face down and moving back and forward for stimulation until climax.

“Naturally picking up somewhat unnatural methods has to be the main reason,” Nagao says. “Or, some guys obtain pleasure from some method they’ve happened to discover almost by accident and keep on doing it that way. It used to be that your bad buddies would tell you the best way to jerk off.”

Source: Mainichi Daily News, which appears to be the online, English-language version of Japan’s oldest newspaper but may or may not be its most respectable.

Sometime last year I think I linked to a post by a young man recounting to other young men how actual sex with actual women isn’t so much what one might expect when one’s entire prior experience has been masturbating to porn.

Which, now that I think about it, might explain the otherwise inexplicable popularity of porn-style “money shot” masturbation during real, actual sex with another person.

And this actually makes sense. Male masturbation really doesn’t feel very much like vaginal intercourse, and depending on how long one has been doing it then it really might take a little practice to learn to have orgasms another way. (Take that, evolutionary “male-orgasms-are-easily-tied-to-reproduction” psychologists!)

Oh, and while I’m at it, men obviously aren’t alone in this. My newsfeed reader informs me that “Slut Machine” of Jezebel just posted her own variation on a very familiar theme

I would read about “mind-blowing” sex in Joan Collins and V.C. Andrews books, passages that likened women’s orgasms to lightning strikes and bells sounding, so I had really hyped up sex in my mind. I knew I wouldn’t come on my first couple tries at sex with a boy. Finally, after fooling around with my boyfriend for a month or two, I came while he was going down on me, and I remember being like, “Oh! That’s what that is? I can do that better and faster by myself!” By then, I realized that what would happen when I touched myself was an orgasm, but for some reason I thought it would be different — or better — with a partner. And sometimes it is.

Read the quote in context here.

Part B: Inquiry

But here’s an interesting question: to what extent is the notion that penis-in-vagina intercourse as the inevitable, “natural” conclusion to heterosexual sex a social construct and how much of it really is biologically imperative? Seriously! For real! Totally serious question.

Because it seems to me that while some men and women obviously take to it like cats take to landing on their feet, and while many others figure it out sooner or later, and while pretty much every story anthropological or erotic, dry as dust or tongue in cheek, assumes that intercourse is the natural, the inevitable, and the quintessential erotic experience for men and that women’s “problem” is that their architecture just isn’t “designed” to “properly” or “naturally” enjoy intercourse. Heck, the “fore” in “foreplay” is a contraction for the “playing around” men are supposed to do to “help” get our partners ready do before getting down to the… what?... the serious work of intercourse?

And yet along comes word that, left to their own devices men’s ability to have “vaginal” orgasms (ok, orgasms in their partner’s vagina) can easily approach the same rates commonly attributed to women.

But…

See…

Not to put on my tinfoil hat about evolutionary behaviorism again or anything but here’s one of my big problems with their most fundamental assumptions: all flatworm sex might be reproductive sex but not all human sex is reproductive sex. Instead much, in fact nearly all human sex appears to be recreational. When left to our own devices anyway. And, as Tsueno Akaeda in the Mainichi article or pretty much every Babeland page will tell you, the devices we can leave ourselves with demonstrate incredible progress in masturbation goods. Which, contra sociobiology, isn’t a issue at all unless a species becomes so incompetent at sex for reproduction that we manage do it at less than 2.2 times in our sexual lifetimes.

And…

Meanwhile…

I actually enjoy intercourse quite a lot, especially when a partner and I have been together long enough to be able to learn each other’s rhythms and rhymes well enough to both have orgasms that way. And given the subtle signals I’ve sometimes gotten from my partners (“I want you *here,” with a pull and a push, for instance) I’m not the only one who enjoys it.

But intercourse is a bit problematic orgasmically for me. It took me a couple of tries the first time I had intercourse. Later I had the opposite problem and had to wrestle with coming in the first moments which, platitudes about machismo not withstanding, deprives the victim as well as his partner of quite a lot of longer-term, slower-to-develop, deeper sensations and eventual orgasms. And even when I was experiencing prematurity with some partners there were others with whom I never came at all either because of fit, or degrees of lubrication, or how they would grind into the relatively sensation-free upper length instead of the highly sensitized bottom or sides of my cock.

But…

Then…

So if with just a little masturbatory habit-formation men as well as women can learn to have better orgasms without intercourse, and if vaginal intercourse is, on aggregate, the highest risk activity as far as pregnancy and social/sexual disease transmission (funny how the CDC never reports “honeymoon cystitis” as a sexually-transmitted disease even though it’s caused primarily by intercourse), then…

Part C: Recommendation

Why not make the heads of the Abstinence-Only/True-love-Waits/Virginity-Pledge/social-control-through-sexual-scarcity crowds explode (not to mention the heads of their minority-viewpoint “all heterosexual intercourse is rape” bedfellows) by recommending that young heterosexuals not bother with intercourse till marriage. Oh, heck, not to bother even after marriage except for procreation!

But not to avoid it because intercourse is precious, or special, or the seat of sexual oppression but because…

...once you strip away all its socially-constructed significance intercourse is actually kind of boring compared to all the other things one or more people can do with each other!

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