phallocentricity

"Barebacking" vs. Sex Safety: Not Just Protection *From!*

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2010-04-26 20:01

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out yet another one of those fascinating cases of gender blindness. This one’s over an article in the blog of well-established but new-to-me LGBT Just Out Newspaper. Hess quotes the article and says (emphasis mine)

“For all the flack gay men get for their sexual antics, it turns out the ladies have them beat for an oft-chastised but ever-present-in-porn act -— barebacking.” Hey, way to get personal! It takes two to bareback, so why focus all the shaming on the receptive partner?

Read the quotes in context here.

Before jumping all over the Just Out author’s assumptions I’m going to agree with the underlying message: heterosexual partners are at least as inclined to practice “barebacking” as are gay partners. But I have to agree with Hess that thinking about condoms and sex safety in general only in terms of the “receptive partner” isn’t just phallocentric and one-sided, it increases the risks for all concerned.

You might think it also takes two to transmit a sexually or socially transmitted illness. Instead it actually takes at least three since whoever gives the STI to the “recipient” (who, by the way, isn’t necessarily the sexually “receptive partner”) by definition will have received it from a previous partner.

You saw that, for instance, from both sides of the recent HPV vaccine debate. It was touted as “protecting girls” from cervical cancer, which is in fact a very real risk and which in fact the vaccine offers protection from. And yes, unlike many forms of HPV which can be transmitted from any skin-to-skin contact the varieties the vaccine was designed to stop are transmitted primarily sexually, and especially though penis-in-vagina insertions. And so in one way it made sense to focus on “receptive partners” to the exclusion of, I guess, “penetrating partners.”

But on the other hand the debate largely overlooked HPV in terms of women’s partners. Well, that’s not completely true. Most opponents of the vaccine were abstinence-only advocate who argued with passion verging on hysteria that the only way “real” way women could be safe from HPV was complete and thorough avoidance of Teh Cock. But even more rational proponents tended to miss that with STIs it always takes three or more to tango: every heterosexual man who gives a woman HPV pretty necessarily first got HPF from a different woman. Who, in turn, got it from a different man who in turn… through thousands, or tens of thousands or millions of turns!

That same focus on the “receptive partner” also disregarded the minor point that the same virus that causes cervical cancer also causes cancer of the penis, of the throat, of the anus, and very likely other parts of the body not normally associated with sexual activity.

HPV, like HIV and other STIs, isn’t a unique event of concern only for “receptive partners.” Nor is it something only one partner “gives” to their current partner. Instead it’s a chain with those same thousands or millions of prior links.

The point of practicing sexual safety isn’t just to protect one partner from another. It’s to protect everybody by breaking those chains. Not just the “receiving partner” but their next partners too. And not just the “receiving partner” but their current partners: infections aren’t all one-way — one partner who has HIV or syphilis will still need protection if his or her partner has herpes, or HPV, or chlamydia, or another strain of HIV, or…


Tags:

Vagismus, Dyspareunia, the Best Not-Foreplay and Not-Sex Ever... Oh, and Twisty Faster Too

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2009-02-06 01:10

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy, while fulminating against the ills of vaginal penetration in general, efforts to relieve vaginismus and, especially, to treat it with injections of brand-name botulism toxin, also has a good point. In a footnote, sure, but still a good point.

This psychnet-uk.com is a real peach. It appears to reject the notion that anything short of “actual intercourse” may be classified as sex. Orgasms achieved through clitoral stimulation are categorized as “foreplay.” Seriously! in 200-fucking-9!

Read the quote in context here.

Um. Yeah, by their definition the partner I had the most memorable, whole-body-shuddering, hands-trembling, heart-thumping, can’t-speak-in-complete-words-let-alone-sentences, years-later-wake-up-dreaming-about umm… um… series of physical-relationship engagements while hardly ever having “sex” at all.

Frequent vaginal penetration, yes, but not with the body part Twisty loathes most, and frequently no part of mine at all. Nor at my instigation. Nor for that matter by my hand or any other part. (Well… actually sometimes with my hand, or most of it.)

But as far as I can tell since it wasn’t vaginal penetration with Teh Cock none of that was sex either.

Hmm… since she didn’t have (external) clitoral orgasms it wasn’t foreplay either.

Dang, we must have been bored senseless!

Worse, since what we did do never counted as sex then none of the other ways we gave each other and ourselves sometimes almost painfully intense orgasms wouldn’t have been foreplay either.

You know what we did do though? We talked a lot (we didn’t always live in the same place.) And we showed each other what we liked to do to ourselves. And we spent a lot of time with each other. Naked. Touching each other. All over. No, I mean all over. Like massage. Only erotic. Like back scratching. Like shoulder rubs. Like exploring each other, your hands on top of theirs not guiding but following, their hands on yours but again not guiding but following. Like tracing each others faces, and backs, bellies, toes, ribs, throats, insides of forearms, insides of knees, curling little wisps of unshaved hair and always, always trying to get as close to tickling as possible… without tickling at all… till your skin was almost electric, till just warm breath was erotic fire. Like licking, sucking, mouthing each other, slurping fingers, ears, lips, toes, breasts, labia, cock, throats. Like oiling each other and then sliding over and across each other, reveling in not just the sensation but the weight. Like cupping each other’s groins, hers wet, mine hard, glowing in the infrared with hot blood heat. Like jacking and jilling ourselves and each other…

But since she loved penetration… but was never moved by intercourse… at least not with me and maybe not with anyone mortal… what we discovered together instead was, well, some of the most erotically profound not-foreplay-nor-sex-according-to-psychnet-uk* I’ve ever had in my life.

—-

Here’s the thing about Twisty though. Everybody assumes she’s a lesbian. Or asexual. Or a survivor of this or that. Or an internet troll. Maybe so although unless she says so out loud it’s really none of our business. But even if she turned out to be the founding matriarch of the F(eminist)LDS with 131 husbands stashed away in a compound somewhere near Waco it still makes sense that patriarchal crap (like Psychnet-UK’s assertion that another vagina-related psychological disorder, dyspareunia, can be caused by insufficient foreplay or infection and can be treated by counseling and psychotherapy or with medication or lubrication) would drive her batshit insane.

Actually it would make more sense that the grand matriarch of 131 husbands would have zero tolerance for standards of phallocentrism so rigid that sex isn’t even defined for a woman without a jack lodged firmly in her pulpit. For that matter just assuming that she’s a polyandrist would also explain her sense that women, being human, should have sovereignty, acknowledgement, place, compensation, and co-location with men on the species definition of H. Sapiens Sapiens.

I’m not saying she is or isn’t any particular way because I either don’t know or don’t remember. Just saying it wouldn’t be necessary to be a radical feminist separatist lesbian to carry on the way she does. And therefore it’s not terribly useful to assume she is… and to use that assumption to rule out everything she says… instead of just the stuff you disagree with.


Tags:

It's How You Play

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2008-10-15 15:24

Vixen of Secrets of a Blue-Eyed Vixen says

Shay at The S Spot covered an interesting subject in a post “Blow, Blew, Blowing” that I wanted to bring up here. She had a friend who felt it isn’t really a “BJ” if he doesn’t cum at the end… “because it’s just not the same act anymore”. She questioned if you could still call it ‘sex’ if there’s penetration but nobody orgasms? Her friend wasn’t sure.

So what do you think? Is a BJ still a BJ if it’s incomplete? Does it need a new term?

Is a hand job still a handjob if no one cums- or is it just feeling someone up? Is masturbation still masturbation, or is it just playing with yourself? Is sex still sex if no one cums????

Read the rest of the discussion here.

Vixen sensibly, I think, says sure. I agree. Because the question is directly about fellatio the following ruminations will be somewhat phallocentric. But a more general discussion would follow very similar contours.

Maybe because I was pretty sexually active in high-school, but… I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been persuasive to assure an angry parent/teacher/boyfriend/girlfriend/vice-principal/cop/judge/etc. “oh, nobody’s ejaculated so this isn’t a blowjob.” I’m also pretty sure none of the above would have said “oh, well in that case sorry I interrupted… I was just worried someone was about to have an orgasm but I guess it’s all good.” :-)

Who was it, Wittgenstein who deflated the idea there could be one single ideal thing that perfectly represents all other things like it? His example was chairs, where you can have chairs with no legs, chairs with no backs, chairs you can’t sit on (doll chairs, for instance), and so on through every description of “chair” in the dictionary. Well, I think it’s the same thing with “sex.”

Last year I read in a college-level sex-ed textbook that eyebrow-raising number of people won’t even agree that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-etc. definition of full penile penetration of an orifice, with ejaculation counts, as sex so… I think it’s a better idea to pull back the other way and say anything that one or more people can do, with themselves alone or together with one or more additional people, that gives them a little erotic bounce counts as sex. That could definitely include kissing and might include promising, over the phone, just to hold hands when you meet in person.

The nice thing about that approach is you don’t get silly parsing questions like the “well, I put it in but nobody came so it doesn’t count… except he ejaculated a little while his partner was helping him take out his butt-plug so it does count… except he says he didn’t really feel anything so it doesn’t count… except since his partner’s really into orgasm-denial his partner got off when he said that so it does count…” :-)

Sound definitive to you? As opposed to just saying “sure, that’s all sex.”

To grab a wryly apt analogy from sports if you’re on the field playing it’s still soccer even if no one scores a goal.


Tags:

Purloined Letters and Penis Purposes

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2008-01-21 22:09

Did you ever get something like the following in one of your sex ed classes?

Although the clitoris is structurally analogous to the penis (it is formed from the same embryological tissue), its sole function is sexual arousal. (The penis serves the additional functions of urination and semen ejaculation.)

Particular source: Human Sexuality: Diversity in Contemporary America, Chapter Three, but plus or minus a few words you’ll find the same thing in most texts.

A bit later the text adds that

The vagina … encompasses the penis during coitus … so that sperm will be deposited near the entrance of the uterus…”

In the next chapter, on male sexual anatomy, we learn, in a variety of ways, that the penis is mostly useful for urination and delivering semen although they sort of omit that the penis serves a function of sexual arousal, if in a somewhat less specialized way than the clitoris. We also get some handwaving about depositing sperm near the uterus but no real mention of where the uterus might be.

So I want to be a little fussy about the dimorphism of the standard descriptions of… well… dimorphism. Yes, the “sole function” of the clitoris is arousal, yes, the vagina functions to encompass[**] a penis, but c’mon, if the penis is going to deposit semen near the entrance to the uterus it’s going to do so during intercourse…

and if there’s going to be intercourse then the penis and vagina are going to be conjoined…

Which suggests a third common function of the penis might be intromission into the vagina.

Conjoined, intromission. Enjoying these terms? Me too, actually, since they, like “encompass,” can indicate function while remaining descriptively neutral.

Now!

If you thought I was a typical axe-grinding gender crank you’d probably expect me to start bawling about the short shrift given to men and men’s role in reproduction. (And I actually do have a mild beef with the way the ideology of masculinity minimizes men’s contributions.) Instead of complaining about being left out I’m going to assert instead that we tend to be so phallocentric we merely forget to mention the obvious.

Thus we can describe the clitoris as functioning only for arousal — it doesn’t have anything to do with his dick so let’s mention what its doing there. And we can describe what the vagina does to the penis because, dudes!, that’s the point. And we can talk about the less comes-to-mind uses for penises — urination and ejaculation — but …

Anybody remember reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter? It’s the one about a very clever blackmailer who thwarts the Parisian police, known experts at finding evidence no matter how cleverly hidden, by “hiding” a letter that would compromise the Queen in plain sight. Well, what I’m afraid of is that, rather than being some sort of slight, the idea that you’d have to explain what the penis does or where it goes is so obvious people forget to mention it.

Bit of a shame, though. I had my tongue in cheek the first time I ever mentioned it, but I really do think that in a slightly less phallocentric/androcentric universe where the penis wasn’t so hidden in plain sight, textbooks and sex manuals might not that in men the embryological clitoris develops into the only organ who’s function is to caress a partner.

And, that in turn, is a bit of a shame because lacking such clarification we imagine other purposes for it, some of which are tragic, some of which are brutal, and others (such as estimating some kind of pecking order at urinals) are outright silly.

[** Kudos to the authors, by the way, for finding an active, non-passive word for what one’s vagina does during intercourse — the paradigm of active male penetration leaves very few suitable English words. I was pretty sure I’d posted about the language problem before but couldn’t think of any unique keywords to Google with. —fl]


Tags:

User login