There's another kerfuffle going around about why it is/isn't possible to be a "sex positive" feminist and/or whether "sex positive" is even a valid concept. An anonymous poster at 25 Things About My Sexuality inadvertently puts her finger on what I consider to be one of the acid tests of "sex positive" culture (emphasis mine.)

3. Over the past year I’ve realized that I am asexual, and I only feel comfortable with that label because I know that I’m not straight or gay.

4. Everyone thinks I’m a lesbian, especially my lesbian friends. A few have hinted that they’re waiting for me to come out. When I told one of them that I was asexual, hoping for solidarity, she paused and said, “Just stick with ‘queer.’”

Source: 25 Things About My Sexuality

People get this idea that "sex positive" means "anything goes." Or, even more off-by-a-mile, that it means "everything goes." Instead in a thoroughly sex-positive culture nobody needs to be warned "just stick with 'queer.'"

Incidentally  I'm not suggesting the friend herself was being ace-intolerant for giving that advice. Instead she was just acknowledging the reality that the unsexuality of asexuality alarms a lot of people and can sometimes provoke uncomprehending and suspicious "what's your damage, you have to have been damaged" interrogations.

People can, and seemingly do, argue all day month year century long about the perennial bugaboos of BDSM or sex work and where, how, or whether they fit in "sex positive" culture.  Contrary to partisans of those topics they're just not the best place to look for negative attitudes about people's sexuality.

Holly is talking about not just the down and outers emergency room patients who, as she picks beer-bottle glass out of their scalps drunkenly tell her "Gosh, ain't you as sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Source: The Pervocracy

She doesn't say, but I'd like to imagine, that drunken women patients in similar circumstances ask Holly's male colleagues similar questions about whether they have girlfriends. Based on my experiences as a beer-bar bartender that catered to the young, hip, and alive crowd only at night, I'm guessing that too does at least occasionally happen.

Aside: This does not mean "oh well, then if women really do ask men then it's all hunky dory. In particular if you read the comments on Holly's post it's pretty clear that while women sometimes do pull the ownership card, even the drunken well-too-bad-you're-"taken" version, it's rarely done in the context of what amounts to an extension of street harassment.

That said, there really is a sort of general respect for relationship "ownership" that goes beyond respect for particular individuals in those relationships. Since gender is socially constructed I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that different genders might have different reasons for honoring relationship "ownership." For instance it could be that men want to know because an angry boyfriend might confront him over messing with "his" partner. And it could be that women are just disinclined to mess with another woman's partner for fear that said partner would eventually just mess around with her. And no, seriously, it really could be those things.

I'd just point out that what makes it gendered isn't that men might respond more to one concern than another. What makes it gendered is that outside of gender thinking both concerns -- confrontation with a transgressed partner and the prospect of being run around on in turn -- are exactly equally probable outcomes regardless of the sex of either or both parties. (Because, seriously, relationship ownership transcends sex, orientation, identity, etc.)

Anyway, years and years ago, maybe as far back as the late 1980s, one of the local mainstream newspapers briefly carried a syndicated arts-and-leisure section columnist who focused on intentional single life. At one point he wrote a column about how the implications of saying "my boyfriend" or "my wife," or "my date for the evening," or even "my friend" are problematic in terms of presumption and ownership. He said it would probably be a better idea to just say "this is John, we're married" or "Joan and I went out last night."

I can't remember if the columnist said it outright, but I was really struck by the notion that speaking about your relationships in terms of shared experience rather than possession wasn't just excruciatingly "correct." Instead it also carries the implication that instead of being with you because, well, they're obliged to be because they're "yours," if someone's not a possession they're probably with you because want to be with you.

Call me crazy, here, but this seems like yet another lesson people with experience in polyamory and promiscuity can bring back to the culture of monogamy: in all but the most toxic relationships you're not partners with people because as "your" partner they have to be, any more than (again for the most part) you're partners with someone else not because you're "theirs" but because you actually kind of like, love, have the hots for, are interested in, like being around, and so on.

Unbearable Lightness of Being DVD cover from Criterion Productions.

In comments to my post A Prudish Libertine's Thoughts on Jealousy, which is short enough to restate in its entirety: "One of the things I've learned as a reluctant but sincere monogamist is that a heck of a lot of what we construct as jealousy amounts not to possessiveness but longing," Ms.Inconspicuous said

"Can you elaborate on this please; what you mean by longing?"

I began to reply in comments and realized it was turning into a separate post.

As far back as my first long-term relationship in high school what I usually felt and called jealousy was about wishing for something that wasn't happening, and wasn't going to happen, and maybe even couldn't happen.

When my first girlfriend came back from a college course saying "I met this guy and we had sex so now I have to break up with you" it didn't bother me at all that she'd met someone, or that she'd had sex with them. It was that it meant (to her!) that we couldn't have our relationship too. It wasn't "hey, she's mine, nobody else can have her," it was a feeling of longing for what could no longer be.

Like when a friend I had a crush on hooked up with someone else. It wasn't that I didn't want them in each other's arms, it's that I wanted her in my arms too. It wasn't "hey, she shouldn't want to be with anyone but me." Instead it was a feeling of longing for a sense of closeness *right now,* even if I knew (as we could know such things in those days) that another night she *would* be with me.

And even now, to use an example from Ms. Inconspicuous's blog, even though I'm happily in a relationship when I hear her describe lying in bed with a lover, away from the world, reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being between bouts of sex and melting ice cream I'm filled with an impractical ache to do that with her. It's not that I think "it should have been me instead of him," and *certainly* isn't "it should be her instead of my partner!" Not at all. Instead it's knowing her and liking her even through the little windows of her writing, and longing to have known her better... known her well enough... to have done the same.

Multiply that by dozens of friends and hundreds of writers and thousands of situations and all the vagaries of time and age and distance and preference and it stops being about jealously "coveting my neighbor's wife nor his house nor his cattle" and so on, nor is it about jealous fear or anger that a neighbor might covet (or even have) a relationship with my partner. Instead it's an emptiness of knowing or fearing that what I long for will never be.

I guess in the simplest terms, at least for me, what I feel when I feel jealous isn't "I want that" as it is "that would be so nice." That, for me, is the difference between possessiveness and longing.

Incidentally, and speaking of impossibilities, what inspired my original post was reflecting on the experiences and expressions of first-time crushes, romance, love, and loss chiming softly through the newly-minted class of high-schoolers in my oldest child's circle of friends. I'd not go back, not least because I remember the anguish as well as the exhaltation. And for that matter I couldn't do that because I've already known first-time love, romance, danger, and lust. But I was feeling wistful jealousy for them and on reflection it occurred to me that, well, as I said the first time one heck of a lot of what we construct as jealousy amounts not to possessiveness but longing.

Update: I think poly people have a word, compersion, "a state of empathetic happiness and joy experienced when an individual's current or former romantic partner experiences happiness and joy through an outside source, including, but not limited to, another romantic interest." That's sort of the opposite of what I mean.  Or maybe the opposite of the opposite -- a genuine but wistful or empty happiness for the good fortune of others.  Oh, and for what it's worth, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera had a great word, litost, for the desire for or action of self-sabotaging revenge that can arise through jealous longing.

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

In an interesting comment to an extraordinarily dry post on the welfare economics of elevators that somehow concluded with the sentence "this explains the otherwise inexplicable glass elevators, and raises the puzzle of why we don’t see them in office buildings" someone named Tylerh said

Actually, glass elevators are nifty topic for a social welfare discussion.

Joel Garreau argued in Edge City that glass elevators where a direct response to women moving into sales & management positions in the 70s. These pioneer women felt safer from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s of the world in glass elevators then in an enclosed box, so business hotels quickly learned that glass elevators meant more women professionals (and there colleagues) as customers.

Source: Cheap Talk

It's a good point, I think, and a more compelling reason for glass elevators in office buildings that the original author's marginal rider vs. single-floor rider welfare-inconvenience-factor expostulations.

I remember my home state Senator Patty Murray saying she'd been advised never to get in an elevator alone with then-geriatric Senator Strom Thurmond or a number of other senators and congressmen because they'd been groping the shit out of women staffers for decades and hadn't been able to adjust to the possibility that some of their colleagues might now be women. I'm pretty sure similar... uh... social adjustments were common in other closed-space settings. (Note: I'm guessing security cameras have probably affected the glass-elevator argument in recent years.)

On the gender-equivalence beat I'm curious whether senior (age-wise and/or power-wise) women ever grope men. It's something I don't think I've ever heard of outside of, possibly, geriatric-care facilities (where I think it's at least been made light of in comedies.) Intuition says it probably happens anywhere there are power imbalances. And Penelope Trunk's upwards-harassment hypotheses not withstanding I'm pretty confident that subordinate men would take groping no more willingly, and no further, than subordinate women would. Anyway, if you've heard of, experienced, been tempted to conduct, or (if you're willing to admit it) have conducted groping of subordinate men or boys feel free to let me know in comments. Same if you've got non-cliché theories for why it either never happens or why, if you think it does, we never hear about it.

Update: Although see also.