Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Political blogger Blue Gal has a wonderful takedown of some “shocking and daring” fashion photos of a celebrity couple in a popular magazine. The photos are allegedly sexy. And real kinky-like.

...this whole bs “shocking” sexual images in advertising thing has got to stop. Because whenever sex is used to sell something, even sex, it’s not shocking, it’s boring. Terribly terribly boring. That’s why the coral suited lady newscasters on CBS Morning can cover it, do “on the street interviews,” re the “shocking” Threesome Calvin Klein ad in Soho.

It’s boring because it’s commerce rather than carnality, which means it is expressly designed for the public space and public sphere, something that is the opposite of illicit sex. If someone gets sexually excited by doing something illicit, shocking, and unacceptable to polite society, they will NOT do that thing on a five foot high billboard. That ruins the fun. We are not seeing Bruce and Emma’s private honeymoon photos in W. That’s perhaps the fantasy they were going for, but really. Who packs Fox fur? (Don’t answer that. Furries can go with God and all that, but sex with animals is not what He in His Divine Wisdom had in mind. Nevermind Nevada Senators, don’t get me started about those poor horses.)

But if Bruce and Emma are actually exhibitionists, this would still not be the result. Face it, to slake their thirst for real exhibitionism, they would have ‘leaked’ actual honeymoon sex video to some sleazy celebrity scandal website (no link but you know the one, dahlink) and the lighting would have been terrible and Alexander McQueen would have asked for his made-to-order harness back. Instead we have a “spread” designed to create [blog] buzz for a printed magazine, and look, it succeeded.

She said it here.

Of course she’s right — a photo that shows up on morning TV, even morning cable TV, pretty much by-definition isn’t shocking. Or, as she says, if it was they wouldn’t consider running it.

By and large it’s hard to sympathize with people who’s fetish really is shocking people. In the long run they’ve got to support priggishness or else risk having to do stuff they can’t stand either in order to get the “transgressive” thrill they need.

I mean, like, yeah, Bruce Willis on his back in an industrial kitchen with his partner dressed like a fur-suiter in a metal hat is just so daring and graphic I’m shocked the giant staff of professional photographers, assistants to the photographers, assistants to the models, assistants to the assistants, gophers, producers, schedulers, gaffers, makeup artists, hair artists, drapers, consultants, and stainless-steel polishers could stay awake keep their clothes on for the hours it took to setup and take those hot, hot, shocking, daring, naughty, naughty pictures!

The rest of Blue Gal’s piece, including her shorter Madonna Sex book tagline “No sex please, we’re posing,” is pretty great reading.

Jessica Valenti Julia Serano of the, um, mainstream feminist website Feministing raises the alarm about proposed revisions to psychiatry’s main reference, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.

...do you happen to be attracted to, or in a relationship with, someone who is differently-abled or differently-sized? Or someone who is gender-variant in some way? Well congratulations, you may now be diagnosed with a paraphilia!

Seriously.

[Contributing author Ken Zucker and Ray] Blanchard and other like-minded sex researchers have coined words like Gynandromorphophilia (attraction to trans women), Andromimetophilia (attraction to trans men), Abasiophilia (attraction to people who are physically disabled), Acrotomophilia (attraction to amputees), Gerontophilia (attraction to elderly people), Fat Fetishism (attraction to fat people), etc., and have forwarded them in the medical literature to denote the presumed “paraphilic” nature of such attractions. This tendency reinforces the cultural belief that young, thin, able-bodied cisgender women and men are the only legitimate objects of sexual desire, and that you must be mentally disordered in some way if you are attracted to someone who falls outside of this ideal. It’s bad enough that such cultural norms exist in the first place, but to codify them in the DSM is a truly terrifying prospect.

Another frightening aspect of Blanchard’s proposal is that any sexual interest other than “genital stimulation or preparatory fondling” is now, by definition, a paraphilia. In his presentation, he claimed that paraphilias should include all “erotic interests that are not focused on copulatory or precopulatory behaviors, or the equivalent behaviors in same-sex adult partners.” Copulatory is defined as related to coitus or sexual intercourse (i.e., penetration sex). So, essentially, all forms of sexual arousal and expression that are not centered around penetration sex may now be considered paraphilias.

She said this, and a lot more, here.

Quite a (dry, bitter) mouthful in my excerpt, above, but Valenti has more in her post. Read it and weep.

Or, possibly, not weep. A lot of ordinary, mundane worries, fantasies, and interests show up in the DSM — worrying that you forgot to turn off the stove, losing sleep over finances or politics, and stuff like that for instance — but is technically only a problem when taken to extremes. There’s a point on the way to the airport where my partner almost always remembers something we forgot and wonders if we should go back for it. That’s not crazy — not least when, sometimes, it’s something we really should go back for… like my wallet. Instead it’s a quirk. If she were instead immobilized and unable to leave the house because she obsessively catalogued the things we might otherwise leave behind then one of the DSM diagnoses would kick in and treatment might be sought, approved, and (assuming her insurer agreed… a big assumption) undertaken.

But still, as Valenti points out, perfectly functional people are sometimes saddled with DSM disorders. And some of the proposed “disorders” are actually nobody’s flipping business if conducted in privacy on one’s own or with other adults who decide they want to participate.

Interestingly, there’s been a lot of pressure to back off the so-called gender identity disorders that umbrella transvestism, transgender, and transsexualism. Valenti doesn’t mention whether those are still in. (The tactical and strategic reasons for keeping it in, including insurance mandates for sex reassignment, possibly makes this more complicated than it might be.) But adding being attracted to trans-men and women seems like upping the ante: it seems… disordered to attach a disorder to someone who’s something it’s not a disorder to be.

And along those lines I’m more than a little uncomfortable with designating attraction to the aged or infirm. Not least because, last I heard, it’s not a disorder to be aged or infirm. In which case you’re really aiming to screw up the lives of otherwise perfectly ordinary people by… scaring off or nailing their prospective partners.

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This is not, incidentally, an abstract issue. I’m fairly confident the bill died in session (as most, um, quirky bills do) but… well, remind me to post about the (now dead-in-session one hopes) Massachusetts bill “protecting” anyone and everyone over age 60 by adding “and anyone older than 60” to all child sexual assault statutes!

Annajcook of Future Feminist Librarian-Activist re-reads Freud’s Five Lectures and asks a great question:

While none of his basic views were startlingly new to me, I was struck as I read this chapter by two things: 1) how closely Freud’s description of childhood sexuality corresponds with current, twenty-first century progressive, feminist views of human sexuality, and 2) how strongly Freud seems to feel the need to contain, organize, and channel that sexuality within the circumscribed space of heterosexual intercourse for the purposes of reproduction.

Of childhood sexuality he writes:

A child’s sexual instinct turns out to be put together of a number of factors; it is capable of being divided into numerous components . . . independent of the reproductive function . . . it serves for the acquisition of pleasurable feeling, which, basing ourselves on analogies and connections, we bring together under the idea of sexual pleasure.

He describes masturbation, dominance/submission activities, the “desire for looking,” fantasy, sexual play and emotional bonds all under this broad umbrella. He also points out that “at this early period of childhood difference in sex plays no decisive part.” In sum, “widespread and copious” is the sexual life of children, loosely organized around the principle of pleasure (p. 46-48).

It is only after this rich description of sexuality, replete with possibility for variation, fluidity, and individuality which (crucially, in my opinion) places the recognition of pleasure at the heart of sexual feeling, that Freud retrenches. In the paragraph immediately following the descriptions above, he suggests that all of this abundant energy must, in order for “mature” adult sexuality to emerge, be “brought together and organized” into genitally-centered, reproductive activity (p. 48).

. . . Why? What is so terrifying to Freud (and any others who resist it) the first, “childhood,” model of sexual-sensual experience? This week in class, I’m looking forward to sitting down with this fear and trying to understand what, exactly, is so freaky about “widespread and copious” pleasure.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s a great, great question. Especially considering that the life of adults as described by Freud (especially the perpetually angry, violent, alienated, weak outside the home but tyrannical at home men of Victorian-era Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the U.K.) makes one wonder what the benefit was supposed to be.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I think we should all remain as sexually unfocused or even unconcerned as small children can be. Grown ups really are better at, better equipped for, and more broadly prepared for, well, a lot of things than are children. It’s just that since people who are more sexually expressive really do seem to be better adjusted adults than are people who are more sexually repressed it’s probably a good idea to nurture healthy, adult expression instead of trying to channel (pervert?) it to the single, and singularly rare function of intentional reproduction.

I think (obviously for someone with my blog title) it’s more appropriate to encourage sexual expression in adults after we’ve gone through a lot of healthy identity formation. (One of the problems with children, ironically, is that because they’re polymorphous they’re more easily manipulated down convenient-for-adult narrow pathways (gee, sound familiar?)... as opposed to organically developing their own.

Oh, also note: there I go trying to be all purposeful about it instead of acknowledging that there’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying “widespread and copious pleasure.” As long as (as Freud said elsewhere… or maybe it’s just the DSM-IV) it doesn’t impair everyday function.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!) Assembled from other images posted under Creative Commons license.

Speaking (probably for the last time) of books not to read during sex, quite a few people nominated anything by Ayn Rand.

Hmm… You know… I only read Rand once, for an assignment in my first year of college. I think and thought she was insufferable — a Russian princess till age 16 who almost walked on peasant’s backs so her feet never touched the ground gets kicked out by the (equally egregious) Soviets and turns her outraged sense of privilege into a political ideology of unadulterated selfishness. I used to intersect with a bunch of junkies and they just loved her essential justifications for their behavior. But I digress…

In addition to a couple of essays about how her boyfriend magnficently ignored other people I also read Rand’s The Fountainhead, which seemed like a lot of 40’s-era pulp science fiction only with architects instead of space jockies, and including the fairly routine lamentations that we all couldn’t be more like Mussolini and Franco and less like those smarmy do-gooders helping the poor and downtrodden.

At the time I was also deeply offended by all the whips n’ granite bondage-fetish, I’ve-got-you-in-my-power-so-force-me-to-fuck-you sex scenes. Oddly, now I think D/s is fine… but I’m still offended by her neurosis-driven vision of it. Which, now that I think about it, makes me wonder how many little rational positivists kick-started their fantasy lives over the haughty Dominique Francon character’s perpetual submissions and degredations?

Or (based on a little more Googling around) Dagny Taggart, the heroine in Atlas Shrugged, opining that

There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man… oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of… that which gave it meaning and sanction…[:] the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom…

Randomly Googled Source: Premise of Post-Objectivisim

Yep, I guess nothing gives more meaning and sanction to sex than a woman doing cooking for a man. Although, mercifully (The Dagny character having previously run her father’s trans-continental railroad company) evidently not in a 27/7 D/s sort of way.

(Actually it’s been a tough week for Rand all around, so these latest nominations would merely be icing on the cake.)