I just ran across a pretty cool insight from Svutlana, in a post advising a woman who’s partner’s kink is mummification (he wants to be bound in layers of fabric or vinyl) Svutlana says (in her trademark fractured syntax)

Read me lot about mummy community today and, like many sex practice that at first maybe seem odd, once Svutlana become immerse in threads, notice me how quick mummify begin for sound like everybody do.

She said it here.

To be honest till I started reading the post I hadn’t thought much about mummification either. And to be honest the appeal of either being mummified or mummifying a partner is lost on me. But Svutlana’s right that it doesn’t take that long to realize it’s just one more thing some people enjoy during sex.

Which brings me back to a point I keep returning to: the remarkable subjectivity of the terms “kink” on the one hand and “normal” or “vanilla” on the other.

But check this out: many of the same people who think wrapping each other up in shrink wrap is extremely kinky think it’s hopelessly romantic to set fire to a bunch of insect secretions, drink yeast poop out of vitrified sand, and rubbing each other with intigumentary strutures yanked from the asses of living ratites or chemically-preserved flesh of lagomorphs or (for really special occasions) mustelids!! Eww!

Until, of course you think about it, in which case candles, wine, and feathers or fur seems almost boringly cliché

Unless of course you’re an ethical vegan or equivalent culture, in which case touching each other with animal parts (animals often injured or killed for the purpose, no less!) is passing kinky on its way to utterly gruesome… whereas binding someone up in linen bandages or plastic wrap might seem merely peculiar.

Who’s kinky now?

Update: See also the remarkable confluence between the Catholic Church’s recent clarification of “normal” sex or former Satanist-cult dabbler Christine O’Donnell’s campaign against masturbation and the… interesting fetish of orgasm denial. Which forces the question who’s kinky now?

* indicative joke from the early 1960s: Newlywed Husband: Sweetheart, why do you always wear your hat to bed? Newlywed Wife: Mother told me I should never let you see me completely naked.

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 Khan 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 Khan 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.