Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Yet another complete but unposted draft.

You can find out all about the deeply anti-feminist National Organization for Marriage’s “Ruth Institute” project from DailyKos’s Dante Atkins starting here and continuing here. The short version is that the Ruth Institute’s founder, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse disagrees with Atkins’ evidence that the intent is not just to encourage women (that would be white American women) to make a choice to stay home, be supported by men (that would be white American men), and have babies (those would be white American babies) in order to stave off the brown menace but to force them to do so through social, political, religious, and legal legislation.

Morse evidently apoplectically disagrees with Atkins’ assertions… not so much by refuting the considerable evidence Atkins presented but instead by claiming that’s what some women want.

You can follow the links above to assess the evidence yourself, and assess for yourself some of the excellent points Atkins raises that I really agree with and think you might too, but I want to talk about one particular point about willingness vs. coercion that really gets to the heart of the question of choice.

[I]n Dr. Morse’s opinion, it’s not sexist of her to advocate that women’s economic and social advances be rolled back. Why? Because many women actively want take on what one could call a traditional domestic role. That is definitely true: many women do actively seek that role, just as there are many men who actively desire the corresponding role of economic provider. What Dr. Morse seems to want, by contrast, is to force all women to reject the technological, medical and social advances that guaranteed their freedom to choose something else.

Read the quote in context here.

There are certain points in adolescence, during the formation of adult identity, where it really can feel like a threat to one’s own validity when other people make choices different from your own.

On the other hand in adulthood healthy individuals have completed the work of finding their identities with the result that they may be annoyed by, or attracted to, or otherwise influenced by other people’s choices but they no longer feel threatened by them. Indeed I’d argue that this is the definition of adulthood — the thing that distinguishes full-sized post-pubescent humans from full-sized mature humans. (It also, incidentally, distinguishes when I think people ought to wait till they — and even more importantly their partners! — begin having, well, real adult sex.)

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Also, not to put too fine a point on it but how, exactly, is Roback Morse’s assertion that society should be bent to satisfy her 24/7 M/f master/slave sex fetish than for it to be bent in favor of, say, NAMBLA’s fetish for pedophilia? I mean, it wasn’t all that long ago that sexual subjugation of boys was as institutionally acceptable as subjugation of women. Why privilege either?

Following up on my previous post on the urban mythos/pathos of cuckoldry, Razib Kahn mentioned another group besides the furiously bitter “I poked her so I should own her” MRA crowd that’s evidently fascinated with misattributed paternity.

Yes, I’m making a normative assumption here that if you’re male you should be displeased if you find out that children whom you assumed were your biological offspring turn out not to be. If, on the other hand, you think it’s fun and adds more zest to your life, you’re just kind of weird. Sorry if I sound prejudiced, but I know that the cuckold community is going to link to this post, so I’m hoping you guys don’t start leaving angry comments for disabusing you of your fantasies, as has occurred before when I post on this.

Value judgments notwithstanding it’s interesting that people are kinked about cuckoldry and/or “hot wife” fantasies would have challenged Kahn in previous posts. And without casting judgment of my own I’m fairly mystified by that particular fetish. Nancy Friday gave the fetish an entire chapter back in the 1980s in her book of male fantasies Men in Love. She took brief but unpersuasive crack at an explanation. I think it might have something to do with the male worthiness trap, where the idea that a partner’s interest in someone else holds out promise that she might be interested in one’s self. But I dunno. If you’ve got insights and/or experience comments are open. I’m all ears.

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!