Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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!

Piny of Feministe hits back at the stupid “it’s ok to use sexist slurs if the target is conservative” idea.

I thought I’d talk a bit about the “Ann Coulter is a tranny” thing, and why it’s transphobic. It’s based on a bunch of transphobic ideas. Trans women all look alike. Trans women all look like men. Trans women all look totally different from “real” women. Trans women are obvious, and oblivious to their inability to blend in: cis people are much more perceptive about gender cues than trans people: trans women are delusional. Trans women are ugly and pathetic. Women who look like trans women are ugly and pathetic.

Read the quote in context here.

Um. Yeah. Whether Coulter is or isn’t is sort of beside the point. The point is if you “know better” than to sexualize someone on your side of the aisle but not to sexualize an opponent then you don’t know better.

Also, mocking a transsexual is approximately as funny as making fun of a diabetic (who needs hormones — insulin in this case — to be healthy), of someone who needs glasses (who needs prosthetics to function comfortably), or someone who wears or wore orthodontic braces (who had medical intervention to correct the way their body did or would have otherwise grown without intervention.)

Also, “trannie?”

Ok, so earlier I upset maybe everybody with my total breakdown over customers of prostitutes. And seriously, I just got this sort of cognitive blank spot like the ones you get where there’s a word you’ve said all your life and then one day you say it and you hear the sounds of this word coming out of your mouth, maybe even a beloved word, and it just. Doesn’t. Make. Any sense. And there was this whole unreeling-through-history sensation (sort of like that scene in Trainspotting where the Ewan McGregor character overdoses and sinks into this square red-satin hole) where I thought about the whole virgin/whore dichotomy that’s plagued women for all these millennia and it hit me with all the ways it’s hit men as well, and I just freaked out.

Carefully reading everyone’s comments, and having some time to sleep on it, and continuing to try to integrate what amounts to a pretty unsettling chain of ideas has been really helpful. Helpful enough that I think I might be able to clarify all the gallons of virtual ink I’ve spilled in the last two prostitution-related posts into one semi-simple point:

People who think the “joke” that “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think” have a serious problem. The problem isn’t prostitution, though, it’s people who think that “joke” is funny.

There. That’s the point. I just didn’t get it.

And no, obviously not all customers feel that way (though quite a few prostitute’s customers I’ve dealt with over the years seem to have felt that way.) And plenty of people who aren’t customers believe the “joke” or think it’s funny, including anti-prostitution crusaders who can’t conceive of prostitutes as anything but stupid, and uncultured.

Now sure, there are other considerations — for instance I wonder if the time, money, and effort spent trying to “root out” prostitution wouldn’t be better spent smashing the whole oppressively centrifugal virgin/whore dichotomy (“if you’re a woman you have to decide which you’ll be, and if you’re a man you can sort of pick one from category A and another from category B but it’s bad form to mix them”), and smashing the whole ageist/abilist/classist/monculture-monogamist/beauty-worthiness/busy-ness business that leaves people believing they have no recourse but to pay each other to do things you wouldn’t even ask your partner to do because you’d divorce them if you thought they’d say yes. And if we did that then an assertion like “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think” would stop being funny and, in fact, would stop making any sense at all.

And if we did do all that then you bet, then there would, could, and (who knows) maybe even should be a whole sector of sex professionals that raised no more eyebrows, and no more concerns than body workers, physicians, psychiatrists, hospitality specialists, personal trainers, or food-service professionals do no. And if so then cool! In that world you could probably sign me or my partner, since she, like me, loves to be indulged and pampered and totally respects the skill and integrity of the people who provide us with those things. But! I still think that world must grow on the decayed, composted detritus of “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.” Because that sentence? That’s some kind of fucked up way of looking at women, of looking at men, of looking at the world.

Sorry for any prior confusion.