Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Emily Nagoski of Sex Nerd jumps hard on Jesse Bering, one of Scientific American Magazine’s go-to guys for sex reporting for being a giant squeamish prick jerk. In an article that starts out weird (wondering if Minnesota water was responsible for a lurid erotic dream) and then gets gynophobic while trying to winnow out something to do with differences in sperm count between ejaculation from masturbation and ejaculation from intercourse.

He seems to think collecting semen from masturbators is easy but when discussing collecting semen from hetero intercourse he… um… editorializes. (Emphasis mine, and Nagoski’s)

Well, Baker and Bellis are clever empiricists. They also apparently have stomachs of steel. One way that they tested their hypotheses was to ask over 30 brave heterosexual couples to provide them with some rather concrete samples of their sex lives: the vaginal “flowbacks” from their post-coital couplings, in which some portion of the male’s ejaculate is spontaneously rejected by the woman’s body.

He said it here.

Emily calls him out (emphasis hers)

I’m going to move straight to the plain old RUDENESS of that paragraph.

Apparently collecting ejaculate requires no particular digestive toughness, but ejaculate in cervical mucus requires industrial strength gastric abilities.

Should we conclude that Dr. Bering himself has felt nauseated by the fluids of any female sex partners he may have had? Indeed, the blatant, unapologetic, flinching gynophobia made me wonder if he’s gay, which it turns out he is, but that doesn’t make it okay for him to discuss female fluids as physically disgusting.

In Scientific American.

She said it here.

The “In Scientific American“ part is important. You can argue that it’s somewhere between annoying, edgy, and maybe cute when Dan Savage opines on his disinterest in, say, cunnilingus in his Savage Love columns. In that capacity he’s a columnist. In that capacity his sexual orientation is part of his schtick. Maybe a core part. And that sort of edginess is a core part of his alt-weekly employer, The Stranger as well. While I think it’s fair to say Scientific American has lowered its standards somewhat in recent decades Jesse Bering is still no Dan Savage and Scientific American is no The Stranger. So he should keep his opinions to himself and/or his editors should keep them for him the same way we’d expect them to shut the pie hole of a heterosexual who opined about the ick factor in an article about research into gay or lesbian sexuality.

It’s not about some ideal of having no personal opinions. Heck, it’s not even a matter of covering up ones opinions in the interest of “journalistic objectivity.” It’s about assuming everybody else is going to share your opinions. Or share your knee-squeezing prudishness.

My one quibble would be that Bering is by no means alone in his prejudice, nor is his orientation necessarily a factor: any number of gay and straight people, male and female, from any number of cultures appear to be completely appalled when anything at all flows from someone’s vagina. Including ordinary lubrication from ordinary arousal.

And no, it wouldn’t have been any better, nor could it have been less professional, if someone else had spoken enviously instead of disdainfully of collecting flowback because he assumed everyone shared his “creampie” fetish.

Sheesh!

[Note: I originally called Bering a prick, which is a highly-gendered insult. I’ve revised the wording but left the original to remind myself that it’s harder than one thinks to get away from using gendered insults. —fl]

In her introduction to Feminism is for Everyone bell hooks mentions that her mother was the most patriarchal person she ever knew. But even though it’s unlikely the words “just wait till your father gets home” were often spoken by a 20th-Century man this isn’t about “but women do it too.” It’s about how deeply that conditioning goes.

You could spend all afternoon unpacking the gender assumptions, the disempowerment, the paradoxes of traditional “wisdom” (who’s supposed to be the authority in the domestic and child-rearing spheres?) and still not reach the bottom.

Discuss.

Copyrighted image from Danielle Corsetto. Visit her site for full-size version.

I’ve been really enjoying Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Slingshots comic strip since being turned on to it by an anonymous commenter on a previous post.

Her portrayal of 10-year-old boys in the strip behind this link is a little off. I mean, yes, yes, I get that the boy saying “Booobies” nicely reverses Hazel’s concern that she wouldn’t be a safe babysitter and her friend’s reassurance that the 10-year-old is “probably much more mature than you think.”

But still, when you say 10-year-olds you’re talking 4th and 5th graders. I’ve been spending… quite a bit of time with about 47 fifth graders lately. And even for the “mature” ones we’re still talking very pubescent children, not college freshmen!

Comics are funny in very large part because they’re precisely not actual real life. If a real-life little kid behaved the way this one does in this comic, the next one (“so how was baby-sitting last night?” “Hormonal, nerdy, perverted, and gross.” And, sardonically, “My, how unlike a 10-year-old-boy!”) and the way he and his on-line friends behave in this one that wouldn’t be “par for the course.” It wouldn’t be “boys will be boys.” It wouldn’t be “what a surprise.” It would be “speak immediately to the parents” and/or “talk to a child psychologist” and/or “contact child-protective services.”

Because, seriously, a 4th or 5th-grader addressing an adult only in terms of sexual body parts (e.g. “boobies!” and “oh, hi tits”) or, as in this strip, is making out aggressively with another child his age is, has been seriously and prematurely sexualized.

Funny in the funnies (no, really, it’s great bleak/dark/edgy humor) but at the same time it’s factually-incorrectly framing the narrative of all men, of all ages including childhood, as obligate, reflex, obsessive sexual beings.

The “no-sex” class paradigm* is a habit of mind, not reality. It’s a habit we want to break in ourselves. It’s a habit we don’t even want to start in children. Let alone encourage by setting expectations.

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Just to be clear I’m really, really not knocking Corsetto. The comic that was current when I first visited her site was also bleak, also a good poke at gender stereotypes, and also pretty funny. Particularly funny when you’re aware that both the gay man and the straight one in the final panel are deluding themselves — a point Corsetto makes clear with, for instance, the perpetually dateless main character Hazel.

* With apologies to Plymouth

Bond of Dear Diaspora, who wrestles productively with questions of gender, has some gender-clarifying questions of her own.

The following questions are intended to help one’s own thinking only — there are no right answers, nor right interpretations of answers. Some of them are questions posed to me by others, some are questions I stumbled across in one or many places, and some are questions I’ve asked myself. I apologize for not being able to cite them all properly — credit is given where possible, but I’ve consumed a huge volume of information on this topic and I can’t trace it all back now.

I’m aware that the way I’m using phrases like “born as” is somewhat problematic. Keep in mind these are questions, not answers, and that responses like “I have no idea” and “neither” are very much allowed.

Bond asked these questions here.

I’ve pulled the answers out of the block quote so I could answer as best I could. I’m assuming they all wish-related questions relate to gender and not general-purpose. So I won’t say “I wish I could fly” in response to “if a genie came to me…” Answering the questions leave me feeling I’m a strongly cis-gendered, sexually male, impatient-with-gender-impositions man. Which might not be a surprise to you, and which surprised me mostly by how strongly born-cis-male (if not born gendered male) I turn out to be.

#1 If a genie came to you and offered you one wish, to change your body in any way you like, what would your wish be? (Thanks to Rebecca for asking me this one some months ago.)

For me it would be mostly about hair, maybe. I had a friend who by about age 15 could grow a full beard and mustache in just a few weeks. With the result that he could fiddle his appearance endlessly — a pencil-thin mustache one week, and nearly a full cossack in a month. I have more of a classic Scottish/Southerner beard that takes forever to grow and leaves bare patches on my cheeks. And unlike the rest of my hair it’s nearly red! On the other hand he now might wish he had my head hair. I also wish I had either less body hair or else softer and less prickly.

Stepping only slightly further away from gender I’d love it if I’d been less ferociously asthmatic as a kid — skinny boys with sunken chests who can neither run nor roughhouse are tailor made for bullying and gendered taunts. But then I might not be as impatient with that as I’ve turned out to be.

#2 If you could either a) be born in the body of the other sex, with your same gender identity, or b) be born in this body, but be someone who never had gender dysphoria, which would you choose? Why?

It’s sort of cheating since I don’t have gender dysphoria, but B. I suspect if I was born in the body of the other sex, with the same gender identity I have now, I’d spend as much time grappling with these issues as Bond does.

#3 If you could either a) change yourself to have the body of the other sex or b) change the world so you’d be accepted unconditionally as your gender without changing your body, which would you choose? Why?

I think this is a $64,000 question. Also a possibly real-world relevant one. I’ve heard from several sources, each with differing degrees of sympathy for trans issues, that cultural climate seems to have a very strong influence on people’s sense of identity and dysphoria, one that ties in quite a lot with corresponding levels of tolerance vs transphobia and homophobia. And so before I’d ask individuals to undergo the (at present) considerable hassle of surgical and medicinal transition I’d want to do what I could to make present society (including the affected individuals themselves) more comfortable with the ambiguity that seems to be part of ordinary human nature. So my strong preference would be B. (Not that my preference counts for a whole lot — I’m not conflicted about my identity. But then for

#4 If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

In the dimension of male gender stereotype I wish my vocal range could be a little deeper. In the dimension of female gender stereotype I wish I was more physically flexible and that I had a better sense of smell. I also dearly wish I could (still) hear higher frequencies — traditionally high-register hearing loss is a masculine trait but in my case I think it has a lot more to do with rock and roll in my youth.

#5 What would your gender identity be if you’d been born as the other sex? How masculine or feminine would you be? (This comes from an old one for when one is questioning her sexual orientation: What would your sexual orientation be if you were the other sex?)

I gotta say if I had been born as the other sex my brain says I’d probably identify as female, assuming I was as cis-bodied then as I am now. My hindbrain says I’d identify as I am now. Which happens to be male. As for how feminine or masculine, I imagine if I was born female I’d still be pretty dour about gender constructions and work towards the middle. As for orientation since I’m straight now I assume I’d be straight then as well. Which is intellectually easy to imagine but conceptually difficult.

#6 When given the opportunity to construct a persona, such as online, in writing, or in video games, what gender do you make yourself, and why?

When I’ve constructed online personalities I’ve always constructed male ones. I think maybe because of my introverted, couldabeen Aspergers-y personality most of my constructed personalities (including attempts at dialogue in ordinary fiction) come out sounding exactly like me.

#7 Jewish tradition teaches that each person has three names: the name she is given at birth, the name she is called, and her real name. What is your real name?

Interesting question. In a lot of ways my real name could almost be figleaf! I spend an awful lot of time in my head and I write best when I’m pouring my thoughts out with as little editing as possible. I vastly prefer to be called David in person, however. :-)

#8 What gender were you in your past life?

What sex is easy: Intuition (the only possible way to answer something like this) says I’ve always been male. What gender? That would depend on the culture and language I was born into.

#9 What questions have helped you understand your gender issues? What questions would you ask someone struggling with hers? Feel free to share answers [with Bond], too.