Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise asks

I wonder if Hollywood luminaries will sign manifestos in defense of James Phillip Edwards, a 60-year-old Kansas City man who admits to drugging little girls and molesting them

Read the quote in context here.

I wonder further if they'd consider 42 days adequate should Edwards be found guilty, since that's all Polanski served for drugging and assaulting a 13-year-old before skipping the country and they think that's all the time he should ever serve.

Fran Langum of Blue Gal raises one of those points that frustrate the dickens out of transactional traditional-values types (emphasis mine)

I came across this LA Times article about a plastic made in China gadget which allows a woman to “fake” virginity, presumably on her wedding night. It’s got jockstraps-in-a-twist for the double-standard bearers of the right wing Islamic world.

And no where in the debate is the sense that women are supposed to enjoy themselves sexually either before or after marriage. We don’t hear from the female sex partners, to put the term most generically, of Ensign, Sanford, Vitter, and even Letterman as to whether or not they enjoyed the sex.

She said it here.

Well certainly not! The no-sex class paradigm’s Rule of Desire #1 says it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for a woman to have sexual desire. In a system where heterosexual sex is supposed to be transactional (i.e. men get sex and women get security, love, support, gifts, money, not getting beaten up, etc in exchange) it would be totally inconvenient if women enjoyed the actual sex part of sex! That would be like a dollar bill suddenly having a say in where it was spent.

(Sheesh, Cosmopolitan writers and editors get the Two Rules of Desire 100% right 100% of the time and they’re morons! So how hard can it be? But I digress…)

Twisting the knife on no-sex class cultural assumptions Blue Gal passes along the following little joke that’s made the rounds.

Q: What did the prostitute do for David Vitter that his wife wouldn’t?
A. Everything.

Ha. Ha-ha-ha! You see… he’d already done the wedding-ring transaction, see, and he’d gotten in trouble with her before about some sort of sexual peccadillos, see, which means that even if she had been interested in sex (which would be intolerable and inconceivable) she’d be off the hook for sex. Get it? See, and even if she was still on the hook she’d still withhold sex to punish him. Got it? No, see, prostitutes do things human women won’t because they’re paid to. Or, even better, because they’re coerced! Because, see, even prostitutes — and you know they’re all women! — wouldn’t do it if they either a) weren’t force into it or b) weren’t so greedy and avaricious they were willing to hold their noses and do it for mon… are you paying attention? This is serious! Because you won’t get that it’s funny!

Sheesh, Maxim writers and editors get jokes like that 100% right 100% of the time and they’re morons! So how hard can it be? But I digress…

Getting back to Fran’s original question, inside the dominant paradigm it’s in incredibly bad taste to ask whether Vitter’s, Letterman’s or anyone else’s partners enjoyed sex with them. Just identifying them as having had sex (marred or not, willingly or not, whether they enjoyed it or not) would rob them of the opportunity to use one of those plastic virginity things from China with male partner so he could at least pretend he was getting something of value. Even to suggest they might have enjoyed it would further reduce the exchange value of their sexuality. Inside the dominant paradigm to identify one of the partners at all could still (literally in some cultures) destroy her.

(Yes, outside the dominant paradigm there are matters of sexual harassment by employers, general and not just sexual rights to privacy, and whether there was choice in the matter. There’s also the little matter of professional stigma where career advancement based on merit can tarnished by assumptions about favoritism and/or compensation for sexual behavior. And outside it there’s even a perfectly non-controversial presumption that, y’know, to the extent they were grownups who decided to have sex then yeah, they probably enjoyed themselves. But inside it that’s just crazy talk.)

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There are a lot of other really good points in Fran’s post. She tackles some disturbing public perceptions about the agency of Britney Spears and her younger sister and of men who feel entitled to have sex with them. She raises the issue of what she calls the orgasm gap — the time, sometimes years, between when women first have intercourse and when they have their first (possibly non-solo) orgasms. Go check it out.

Well this is kind of weird. Ampersand of Alas, a blog passes along one of those classic gotcha stories that combine double standards, overzealous prosecutors, and young people exchanging nude photography…

Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.

From a pretty good link-roundup post here.

... that for some reason I foolishly started following links back through the story. And discovered that, as they say on Facebook, “it’s complicated.” There’s more to it than will fit in any two-sentence summary.

Let’s get the willy-waiving policeman out of the way first: According to The Agitator (the site Ampersand links to) a Pennsylvania police officer was reinstated after an arbitrator determined he was improperly fired because his employers (the police supervisor he exposed himself to?) didn’t follow “progressive disciplinary guidelines, which involve a series of verbal and written warnings.” (That would be “progressive” in the procedural rather than political sense.)

The child-porn conviction business, though, just keeps getting deeper and weirder.

Most surface/gotcha-level view of the story: man convicted earlier for possessing naked photos of his then-17-year-old wife is sent to prison for 3 years for failing to notify a sex-offender registry of a change of address. Extra irony/quirk/outrage/overreach/whatever: his now-adult wife and child they had together are now an impoverished single-mother family and will remain so till the husband gets out of prison around 2012. Ouch, right?

Well, yes, ouch. The next complication, though, from the Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle after the man was originally convicted: in 2003 a 23-year-old man has a hotel-room party with his 17-year-old girlfriend who takes pictures of the two of them having sex, and of two other girls, 15 and 16, kissing, touching, and showering naked. Girlfriend swears she took the photos and made a photo album of them and then gave it to him.

Ok, that’s more complicated but still way more of a sorrow-than-anger situation. (Update: Making the very big assumption that since court and news reports don’t say otherwise that contact was limited to his fiance and she really did take all the photos. But in current comments Sungold is persuading me to lean towards her interpretation, in which case eww, and throw the book at him.)

Except there’s the next level complication: The man allegedly kept the photo album in his vehicle for a year. It didn’t turn up till he had a traffic accident and a police officer found the album in his car. Oh, and they didn’t just charge him with child porn they also charged him with providing alcohol to minor.

Yeah, I’m starting to feel a little sympathy fading too here. Tough, and all that, but still, WTF, right? Well, yeah.

It gets even more complicated though.

The police officer who found the photo album was the man’s brother in law (or possibly his step-brother.)

The brother-in-something held on to the album for a year before someone else on the police force found it in his desk. When police searched his computer they found 120 other photos of naked minors.

That too got complicated. The brother-in-something was charged with possession of child-pornograhy but, since the photo album was evidence against the original man he wasn’t charged for possessing that.

It gets even more complicated: first, it sounds like the man and his erstwhile partner are separated. So it’s not clear what’s going on with her. And comments by a local in one of the articles said the brother-in-something eventually escaped conviction, which sounds like a bit more of a scandal — the photos aren’t characterized but it doesn’t sound like they were of people he was involved with.

But wait! It gets even more complicated! The brother-in-something was actually convicted and sentenced to six months house arrest. For possessing those 120 computer photos. Oh, and peeping in windows. So there you go.

Meanwhile the original man, having served his original sentence, is still back in prison for three years under the state’s Megan’s Law provisions for failing to let authorities know he’d moved.

So end of the story? Yes, it’s scandalous that a different police officer was reinstated after exposing himself to his superior and a bystander.

And yes it’s on-balance unfortunate that the man went to prison a second time after serving what may have been a shorter first sentence for exercising what could only optimistically be called really, really, really bad judgment and somewhat more generously for canoodling with someone still a minor but past the age of consent and… her two minor friends who certainly weren’t. And not-at-all generously, for either getting minor children drunk, having sex with one of them, and taking and keeping naked photos with them, or, nearly as bad, getting drunk and naked with minor children and keeping the resulting photos. No really good way to spin that and… it’s not really clear why one would bother.

I’ve still got questions, though, about double standards on police vs. civilian conduct. Because one final Reading Eagle story, on the conviction of the brother-in-something adds one final complication. Turns out it wasn’t the brother-in-something who found the photo album in the first man’s truck after an accident. Instead some other officer found it and turned it over to the brother-in-something. Who put it in his desk. Where it was discovered a little more than a year later by someone else. Who, if I’ve got the chronology right, may actually have been investigating allegations of window peeping. But, having finally seen the light of day, resulted in charges against the original man for child porn, the brother for otherwise-unrelated child porn… but not withholding evidence… and… what?... disciplinary charges? Tampering with evidence charges? Nothing at all? ...for the officer who handed the photo album to the brother-in-law.

Point being that yeah, in its bare bones the story fits that two-line gotcha, “Reading, Pennsylvania: Where you get three years in prison for taking consensual nude pictures of your girlfriend, but cops who expose their penises in the office aren’t penalized at all.” But where the rest of the stories (I’m just a regular Paul Harvey, eh?) ought to raise even more eyebrows.

Echidne being right again, this time about the unanswered question about Sarah Palin’s inadequacy as a mother of five and governor of a state…

Now for the invisible elephant. I think it’s called Todd, a stay-at-home dad whose parenting skills are not much discussed. You remember? The guy married to Sarah Palin. I’m not sure what his role in that family is supposed to be if Sarah Palin is the one expected to mind the children and do politics, too.

Just do a reversal on that. Pick any male politician with a stay-at-home wife. Then ask how he manages to both work and care for the children. Make him the responsible party in anything the children do wrong. Try that and see the humongous waves of discussion you develop, even among feminists. It’s probably because we prefer the elephant invisible.

She said it here.

Another interesting question is why so many people wish the elephant should stay invisible. Double standards cut both ways. Yeah, it’s fine to say the Governor should or should not have kept up. But where’s the expectation that Todd Palin should have stepped up? Oh right, we only set low expectations for men.

As I’ve said often enough to make some of you sick of hearing it, human beings are very good at meeting expectations but usually more miss than hit at exceeding them. If you set low expectations the results are going to be… just about what you expected.