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Proposition 8 Defenders and the No-Sex Class Paradigm

Thu, 2010-08-19 17:16 — figleaf

AlwaysArousedGirl has a nice catch related to the real interest ‘wingers have in keeping marriage heterosexual. This time it’s Sam Schulman writing in the Christian Science Monitor, even though he’s more often found in rabidly conservative and neocon rags like The Weekly Standard, the Wall St. Journal, Commentary, and Orthodoxy Today.

Marriage is not about couples or lovers – it’s about the physical and moral integrity of women. When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.

...

Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament…

...

Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect.

Read the quote in context here.

This guy Schulman is a real piece of work when it comes to understanding the dominant paradigm’s insistence on the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the whole general ideology of women as the “no-sex” class.

Writing more confidently in Orthodoxy Today, for a readership he knows to be more conservative than the relatively liberal Christian Science Monitor he wrote

...marriage benefits women, again not just in law but essentially. A woman can control who is the father of her children only insofar as there is a civil and private order that protects her from rape; marriage is the bulwark of that order. The 1960’s feminists had the right idea: the essential thing for a woman is to control her own body. But they were wrong that this is what abortion is for; it is, rather, what marriage is for. It is humanity’s way of enabling a woman to control her own body and to know (if she cares to) who is the father of her children.

Yes, marriage tends to regulate or channel the sexual appetite of men, and this is undoubtedly a good thing for women. But it is not the ultimate good. A husband, no matter how unfaithful, cannot introduce a child who is not his wife’s own into a marriage without her knowledge; she alone has the power to do such a thing. For a woman, the fundamental advantage of marriage is thus not to regulate her husband but to empower herself—to regulate who has access to her person, and to marshal the resources of her husband and of the wider community to help her raise her child­ren.

...

Every human relationship can be described as an enslavement, but for women the alternative to marriage is a much worse enslavement — which is why marriage, for women, is often associated as much with sexual freedom as with sexual constraint. In the traditional Roman Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and South America, where virginity is fiercely protected and adolescent girls are hardly permitted to “date,” marriage gives a woman the double luxury of controlling her sexuality and, if she wishes, extending it.

He said it here.

It gets worse, by the way. You know how everyone goes around saying it’s radical feminists who think all heterosexual sex is rape? Check out Schulman (who incorrectly identifies the very conservative feminist Catharine Mackinnon as a radical feminist.)

Radical feminists were right, to an extent, in insisting that men’s and women’s sexuality is so different as to be inimical. Catharine MacKinnon has proclaimed that in a “patriarchal” society, all sexual intercourse is rape. Repellent as her view is, it is formed around a kernel of truth. There is something inherently violative about sexual intercourse—and there is something dangerous about being a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she is not yet married. Among the now-aging feminists of my generation, no less than among their mothers, such a woman is commonly thought to be a victim.

Marriage is a sign that the ever-so-slight violation that is involved in a heterosexual relationship has been sanctioned by some recognized authority.

Call me a radical here but I’m… pretty sure marriage is not MacKinnon’s preferred solution to the problem of heterosexuality-as-rape (to the limited extent even she sees it that way.) I’m even more sure her solution does not include further extending “fiercely protecting” women’s virginity and “hardly permit[ting] them to ‘date.’”

In fact, call me a real radical here but I’m… pretty certain that no matter how conservative, and no matter how genuinely leery of sex she might be, and even no matter how superficially similar the outlines of her strategies might be to Schulman’s and those of his ilk, MacKinnon’s solution is precisely antithetical to his: the way to give women agency, sexual and otherwise, is to give them agency, not to immure them in deep and often outright murderous traditions that are merely less worse than enslavement… not to construct them into traps that are at best “ever-so-slight violations” of their autonomy, their integrity, and their right to be independent human beings who’s decisions are to be respected.

And finally, what exactly do Schulman and his kind think of men that they imagine this enslavement of women to be better, safer, more dignified, more sacred at the hands of tradition than at the “mercy” of the monsters they imagine men to be? Sweet Mother of Pearl! And these are the folks who imagine that feminists hate men!

—-

The remaining points against Schulman have been better expressed by others but they bear repeating

  • The most dangerous place for a woman is in her home.
  • Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered in their homes.
  • Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered by a husband, domestic partner, or male family member.

and finally

  • If the goal of traditional marriage really was the protection of women from men rather than the protection of their property value* as exchanged between men then, as AAG so nicely puts it, women would be far better off marrying 80-pound Rotweiler/pit-bull-mix attack dogs. Or as one of her commenters put it, they could marry their cans of pepper spray. Or as Holly Pervocracy would probably say, a handgun. (Although as Holly also points out, one rarely has one’s handgun, well, handy when you tend to need them most: when around male friends, dates, and partners. Just sayin’)

But of course the traditional institutions of marriage were never meant for the protection of women. And the extent it ever was necessary, the advent of classical-liberal conservative institutions as manifested in the notions of, say, rule of law founded on principles of individual rights held self-evident in our and other constitutions has made it less so.

Sheesh! Where do they get these guys? Who’d want to marry one of them?

Oh, right. And at the end of the day, of course, Schulman says (after claiming, naturally, that some of his best friends are gay) marriage must remain forbidden to same-sex couples because if you let just anybody get married then the special role marriage carves out for women might be lost.

He says it as if that were a bad thing.

* As in “thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his house, nor his cattle, nor his man servant nor maid servant, nor anything else that is thy neighbor’s.”

Why Women's G-Spots Are Considered More Mysterious than Men's B-Spots (Never Heard of B-Spots? I Rest My Case.)

Sun, 2010-08-15 13:37 — figleaf

Via the authors of the NCBI ROFL Discover Blog, medical researchers used ultrasound to record the anatomy of penis-in-vagina intercourse. Their shocking conclusion?

We focused on the size of the clitoral bodies before and after coitus. Results. The coronal section demonstrated that the penis inflated the vagina and stretched the root of the clitoris that has consequently a very close relationship with the anterior vaginal wall. This could explain the pleasurable sensitivity of this anterior vaginal area called the G-spot. Conclusions. The clitoris and vagina must be seen as an anatomical and functional unit being activated by vaginal penetration during intercourse.”

Read the quote in context here.

It’s basically confirmation that the nominal controversy over the “g-spot” is more semantic than anatomical: there’s a spot. It might or might not be “the Gräfenberg Spot.” Or instead it could turn out to be something else in the same location that responds to stimulation in the same way that we just call the G-spot.

This might sound a bit like oversharing (although I think I haven’t been sharing enough lately) but it occurs to me that a big part of the controversy is that it’s considered a problem that 100% of women don’t respond to stimulation in the area. Except that a) it’s not considered a problem that some women don’t respond, or don’t respond “correctly” to stimulation of any number of other locations including direct contact with the external clitoral body. And also that b) it’s not considered a problem (in fact it doesn’t appear to be considered at all that different men respond best to stimulation of different parts of their genitals too.

The oversharing bit would be that I’m really only orgasmically sensitive in one spot on my penis. It’s about the size of a nickel about a quarter of the way down from the top. Other men are evidently sensitive in other areas. I know this because until they had the time to figure out how I worked other partners have tended to concentrate their attention on other spots — ones that worked for their own previous partners. The glans itself for some. The corona for others. The frenulum seems to be very popular. And one partner, who hadn’t had a lot of partners, was completely baffled when I asked her why she concentrated so much at the very base of my penis. Turns out that had been a holy-grail spot for her two previous partners.

Let’s call that last spot the male “B-Spot.” And do a bunch of MRIs, and electromyography, and write dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of blog posts and tweets about whether it does or doesn’t exist. Let’s spend a lot of energy demonstrating that anatomically there’s no special gland, duct, specialized tissue, or ganglia at that location that could possibly account for reports that it might in fact respond well to stimulation in some men. We can call the glans area the male “g-spot,” the corona the “c-spot,” the frenulum the “f-spot,” and my spot “the other f-spot” just to make it all sound more obfuscating. Oh, and for extra credit let’s spend a little time castigating men for either claiming they prefer stimulation in some of those spots. Or for instead claiming they don’t. I know, we’ll call them “immature,” or “repressed,” or “not in touch with their bodies,” or even thralls of penetrative ideology” if they can’t find theirs. Then let’s sell a bunch of books and videos demonstrating how men can “find” theirs. And finally we’ll create a whole ‘nother culture around saying how if they ever could find them they’d have mind-blowing orgasms instead of the perfectly lovely orgasms they already have.

Oh wait, no, for men it’s just one spot, “the penis,” and everybody knows all about that. Never mind that men’s “g-spot” is about the same number of centimeters distant from their “b-spots” as clitorises are from women’s “g-spots.” And if it doesn’t work the same way then they’re probably latent homosexuals if they prefer female partners, or maybe latently hetero if they prefer men.

Or we could just acknowledge that genitals, men’s and womens, are delightfully diverse puzzles for which there’s usually no “right” answer.

That’s how I like to read research like the one cited as “ROFL” whacky. And while I strongly agree with Sungold that we might want to keep electromyography (ouch!) to a minimum, I’d still like to see more rather than less interest in the ways all our different spots work.

Since Only Women Care About Their Appearance Nosehair Trimmers Must Be Recreational Devices for Men

Mon, 2010-06-07 19:13 — figleaf

In a single blow (no pun intended) CokeTalk of Dear Coke Talk addresses several… misperceptions about male beauty standards.

Q: I’m a 30 y/o guy who despite beating the family average is finally losing his hair. Problem is, I have one of those ungainly scalps that is not suited to straight-up shaving it.

I swore I’d never be beholden to my hair and have no interest in forking over cash and dignity to pharm companies or miracle cures.

I just can’t find a style that allows me to bald gracefully. Suggestions?

A: No interest in forking over cash and dignity? Fuck your dignity.

Do you have any idea how much money we [women] spend and pain we endure chasing unattainable standards of beauty?

We’re over here nipping, tucking, lasering, injecting, dying, tanning, waxing and whitening every square inch of our bodies. The least you lazy bastards could do is show a little effort when you start losing your hair.

She said it here.

Actually I guess she can’t have said it there because, as we all know, women are never “visual” creatures so how could they care? And for that matter he never could have asked her either because, as we also know, when it comes to their own appearances men are “natural” creatures who never once worry about how they look.

Or, more technically, if we didn’t believe that kind of crap we’d surely notice how much time and effort men put into almost everything about their appearances, from sucking in their guts at the beach to hair plugs to Bruce Springsteen’s lyric “I combed my hair till it was just right / and commanded the night brigade,” to heel lifts, to gym memberships, to $200,000 for a sports car we can look good in. And lately, manscaping pubises, laser hair removal of torsos front and back, lasering and/or waxing monobrows

Oh yeah, and (according to an internal AmazonAssociates tool) exactly four hundred and three products for nose hair removal!

Extra credit? The bogus Two Rules of Desire, since it really is intolerable and inconceivable either for a woman to have desire or a man to be desired, all that invisible time, money, and effort men put into their appearance? Well, if women don’t care, and men aren’t interested, then it’s all got to be done out of pure, unadulterated narcissism.

Right?

Well, of course wrong! But that’s not as interesting as the further effort we put into maintaining the belief that it mustn’t be wrong.

CokeTalk on the Alienating Fallacy of Relationships as Impossible Dreams

Mon, 2010-06-07 01:33 — figleaf

Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing. Today I discovered Radical advice-columnist blogger CokeTalk of Dear Coke Talk via Calico Lane. Yesterday I wrote a post I wasn’t really satisfied with about how valuing relationships that are hard to is almost inherently alienating. If I’d done those things in reverse order I think the post I wrote would have been a lot shorter and I would have felt less uncertain about it.

Here’s CokeTalk’s post, very lightly edited to look more Q&A in quotes, and with emphasis mine.

On the best girls.

Q: WHY, oh, WHY, must all the best girls be straight?

A: Gay girls bitching that all the best girls are straight is just as silly as straight girls bitching that all the best boys are gay.

In either case, it usually means the girl doing the bitching has a taste for forbidden fruit. Is that it? Is there a ripe, delicious peach just out of arm’s length? Mmm. It looks so good up there, glistening and ready to be plucked. If only you could reach up and grab it.

Oh please, straight pussy doesn’t taste any sweeter than gay pussy. If you think it does, it’s all in your head. Maybe you love a challenge. Maybe it’s a bit of self-sabotage to prevent you from being in a position where you’re truly vulnerable.

Whatever it is, chill the fuck out and recognize that you’re the one making a problem for yourself. After all, the best girls are the ones that love you back.

She said it here.

Call me a prudish libertine if you like, but at the end of the day wanting to be lovers with someone for reasons other than their ability to love you back… being partners with someone for any reason beyond their ability to be your partner is inherently alienating.

Someone who’s structurally hard to get (e.g. he or she is straight and you’re gay, she or he is gay and you’re straight, they’re both happily and monogamously married, he or she is a “free spirit” who will never commit, he or she is so emotionally damaged you might be able to “rescue” but never reach) may feed all manner of needs for you, but a) if in fact you do ever leap the high hurdle and “get” them they’ll turn out to be approximately the same as someone who’d just say “I’d love to” if you just asked them out. And meanwhile, while you’re crawling across all that burning sand and swimming through those shark-infested waters to “prove” yourself… you’re very, very likely crawling or swimming past more people who could love you back than you could possibly imagine.

It’s not that I don’t think people should dream impossible dreams. Becoming a doctor, or performing at Carnegie Hall, “ever walking again” or running a marathon are all laudable, challenging, and fulfilling goals that, if they move you and shake you you should strive for.

I just think other people are people and impossible dreams are things.

Once you get that a lot of other stuff about relationships falls into place. I’m not positive I’d follow all of CokeTalk’s advice but her last line in that post is solid gold.

Is "Outlet Mall" Consumer Satisfaction an Imperfect Clue to Men's Perverse Fondness for Sexual Scarcity?

Sun, 2010-06-06 16:17 — figleaf

Ok, first of all I’m a little wary about this post because it feels like the potential for misunderstanding is really, really high. So in anticipation I’ll say up front that I’m going to try and explain one reason I think men gravitate to, support, and even contribute to the idea of heterosexual sex scarcity in the face of considerable counter-evidence. A post titled “Outlet Malls: Location as Marketing Strategy” by Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images suggests that consumers who go to greater effort to purchase items appear to feel better about the “value” of those purchases even when the prices they pay are comparable or even identical to local prices. Because I’m feeling eek-y about it I just want to make clear I’m interested in how that might relate to men’s persistent conviction that a) women are “hard to “get,” but also that b) women who are “easy” instead of “hard to get” are somehow damaged, dysfunctional, undesirable, or otherwise wrong.

Those are part of the story. But there’s some interesting psychology going on, too, as Ellen Ruppel Shell explains in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. It turns out that being difficult to get to is, in fact, part of the appeal of outlet malls. The fact that they often require a drive of an hour or more signals to consumers that they must have really good deals. That’s the payoff for inconvenience — it’s harder and more time-consuming than going to your local mall, but in return you’re getting a great bargain. Right?

Well… not really.

...

It turns out that the more trouble people go through to get to an outlet, the more they overestimate the amount of savings compared to prices at regular stores. The very fact that it was hard to get to convinces people that it must provide something fantastic; if you aren’t saving a lot of money by going there, why on earth would it be so far out of the way? And the more remote it is, the cheaper the products must be!

She said it here.

By itself Sharp’s post provides interesting insights into the way we value the things we obtain, with those things that take more effort to obtain being (or at least so we appear to believe) more valuable to us than those which are easy to obtain. The grass on the other side, in other words, appears to be valuable not for its own intrinsic “green-ness” but because of the effort required to get to the other side.

That’s fine, of course, for valuing and acquiring things.

People not being things, however, it’s a problematic way to value relationships.

Recognizing the impulse, though, does shed light on a couple of… interesting attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors of heterosexual men towards women inside the dominant paradigm.

  • Why men so often dismiss women if they’re perceived as “easy.”
  • Why it’s usually considered more of an insult to call someone a “slut” than a “bitch.” Or why even “whore” (i.e. someone who at least demands payment) is less of an insult that “slut” (i.e. someone who doesn’t even bother to charge.)
  • Why men often profess willingness to cross burning deserts or swim shark-infested waters (though almost never to clean bathrooms) for love.
  • Why men are consistently drawn to “attractive” women even though what constitutes “attractive” varies wildly from culture to culture and even decade to decade within the same cultures. (Hint: the standards that constitute “attractive” from culture to culture almost invariably also constitute features that are locally rare and difficult to achieve — weight in subsistence cultures, for instance, or slimness in cultures of nutritional abundance and automation, naiveté for the urbane and world-weary, worldliness when innocence is abundant, blonde-ness… or even better “natural” blonde-ness when fair hair is uncommon, or “exotic” “asian-ness” when hair coloring is common, someone who’ll give blowjobs when “sex” means almost exclusively intercourse, or someone who’ll have intercourse when blowjobs become mundane. You get the picture.)

Point being that since people really are pretty much uniformly alike, in the sense that what’s deemed most “valuable” in courtship is rarely what’s most appreciated in actual partnership, it’s a really bad idea to try and evaluate our relationships in terms of how much effort is required to form one.

- – -

Hmm…

As my disclaimer up top says I initially thought, and I still (I think?) think Sharp’s point about effort and assessment of value provide insight into men’s objectification of women in relationships I’m suddenly wondering whether the “Cosmo” effect, where women are encouraged and/or possibly self-motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to be “attractive” might not have a similar component. (It’s not that being attractive isn’t nice, but consider the 19th Century phenomenon of women having ribs removed so they could cinch their corsets even tighter, or, oh, say, Vajazzling one’s already waxed pubis with glue-on cut crystals.) Standard criticism of the Cosmo effect says it’s driven entirely by insecurity. And the general editorial stance certainly seems to encourage it. But while I’d no more endorse striving to maximize relationship-forming effort in women than I did in men earlier in this post, I think looking performance of appearance in terms of effort to achieve something rather than insecurity to avoid it is probably both more generous and more often accurate.

- – -

Oh well. I’m still not crazy about this post both in the sense that I’m afraid it’s really subject to misinterpretation and in the sense that I still don’t have a well-formed way to articulate how I think the very-real phenomenon of valuing relationships by the effort required to get into them dangerously alienates us from the actual people we form relationships with. But if I’m right that there’s something there, but don’t mention it, nobody will help move the conversation forward. And if I’m wrong but don’t mention it then nobody will say I’m being a knucklehead again and that I should drop it.

Update:

I wrote the above paragraph (and most of this post) on a plane bound for the east coast (I’ll be in D.C. and New York City all next week.) And since I wouldn’t have lot of battery left on this old laptop I also picked up Steve Johnson’s “The Invention of Air,” a biography of the 18th-Century scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestly that doubles as a very nice history of the late-18th-Century scientific revolution.

Anyway, while talking about the perceived importance back then of what we’d now call “open source” sharing of ideas Johnson quotes a letter by Ben Franklin about his own trepidations about sharing ideas before they’re properly incubated.

These Thoughts my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ‘till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought and accurate Philosopher.

Pg. 71

Aside from sharing his tendency towards run-on sentences I’m no Ben Franklin, but that sentiment that somebody could make something useful out of it, even if I end up sounding like a bumpkin, is enough reason to press “submit.”

Men, like gravity in the 1600’s or air in the 1700’s, are woefully understudied. Like gravity they’re just assumed to be there, sometimes helpfully, sometimes to no purpose, and sometimes (as with gravity when you sit under an apple tree) under-studied effects can thump you on the head. At this point even tossing out new ideas that go beyond “they’re just there” might help.

Game For Losers: Unenthusiastic Consent Isn't "Winning Ugly"

Sat, 2010-06-05 09:50 — figleaf

The other day someone who calls himself realitybeam left the following comment on a post by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon

"My definition of consent is not enthusiastic. Passion is an ideal, not a moral obligation. ... This is how humans operate and everyone is guilty of applying “pressure(s)” regularly to get a desired result or yielding to “pressure(s)” to get a desired result. What makes sex so sacred?

Comment by "realitybeam" here.

To which Amanda pithily replied

Here’s what I hear when I hear anyone say, “Enthusiastic consent is too high a bar.” I have to wonder why you’re advertising that you can’t get laid honestly like most people do.

Obviously, if sex is actually your job, treating it like a job is understandable. But that you feel that your girlfriend or even casual sex partner should approach this like a job she has to get through in order to what? What’s the payment? What’s the compensation? Approval? Being left alone? How sad.

She said it here.

Yup. Y'know that old (American-style) football metaphor where they say "an ugly win is still a win?" They're talking about a game where all parties are on the same field, playing with the same rules, with _the same goals in mind!_ So if one team happens to win by the skin of its teeth, or because of an opponent's error or inexperience or even plain bad luck... or despite one's own!... the outcome of the game is consistent with the same rules for both sides: whichever team that carries or kicks the ball across a line for more points than the other side does. Since _both sides_ playing by the same rules, and as long as a win is defined the same way for both sides, then an "ugly" win really is still as much a win as any other.

Compare that to men's unfortunate (but unfortunately frequent) mistaken belief that an analogous thing can be said of sex: if any win between two football teams is a win no matter how ugly, then it _must_ be true that any male "win," i.e. sex, must be a good win too.

Um.

Except, of course, the dominant, bogus Two Rules of Desire of mainstream heterosexuality make the "game" of sex _nothing at all_ like the rules of football.

For one thing, according to rules only men can "win." Rule #1, you may remember, is that it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual interest. Rule #2 is it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Thus any woman who tries to win by the same rules men can win by is automatically disqualified! Enough so that a man who has sex with a woman who's too "easy" is still considered the winner... but it's considered and "ugly win." Charming, I'm sure.

So that's the first problem!

The next problem, though, and the one that pertains to Mr. Realitybeam's assertion, is that sex with an unenthusiastic partner is still a "win." Even if it's not just a loss for her but an "ugly" one.

Which is pretty fucked up. No matter how you look at it. I mean it's obviously fucked up if you assume he means some form of outright coercion, intimidation, intoxication, or misrepresentations that constitute sexual assault and rape. And from the context of his other comments I'm... pretty sure that's not what he was talking about.

But riffing on Amanda's point, it's fucked up even if you just mope, whine, beg, or just _not go away_ until the woman says what the hell and says yes just to get him to shut up.

I mean, yeah, sure, if sexual relationships actually were a game, the way football is a game, then any win would be a win no matter how pathetic.

Sexual relationships aren't that kind of game, though. Consequently any consent short of enthusiastic consent makes the "winner" a seriously pathetic loser.

----

The problem with the football analogy, of course, is that to the extent there's competition it's competition _between men,_ not between men and women. And in that competition women aren't the opposing team, they're the _ball._ Just one more reason you'll hear men asking each other if they "scored" with a date. And exactly why you almost never, ever hear a woman asked if _she_ "scored." And I'm pretty sure I've never heard a woman say instead that her partner "scored" on her.

One more reason why I'm so skeptical of the terms and terminology, and why I'm so convinced that things like the Rules of Desire, and the whole no-sex class business in general, is a paradigm generated by men.

Feminist Expectations: What Men Can Do to Make Sure "No Means No"

Tue, 2010-06-01 11:18 — figleaf

Way down in comments about a seriously disturbing “celebrity sex tape” / revenge-porn issue, Amanda Marcotte of says pretty much all that needs to be said about the erotics of “no doesn’t always mean no.” It’s radical because it’s feminist to the core. But because it’s feminist to the core it’s extravagantly empowering for men.

...to the inevitable rejoinder: “Well, sometimes no doesn’t mean no”, I say that if a man immediately stopped every time he heard no and refused to continue until she had spent at least 5-10 minutes explaining why she said no when she meant yes, then that behavior would stop pretty quickly. Don’t let the girls who say no when they mean yes get away with it. Make them choose.

She said it here.

The bogus, anti-feminist Two Rules of Desire rule out the possibility that men could be responsible enough, let alone confident enough, let alone in control enough of his “animal” nature to put the brakes on sexually inappropriate behavior by a partner.

In a related vein the Rules insist that women are already so ambivalent and/or averse to sex and, particularly, so unlikely to anticipate or experience sexual gratification for herself that if you stop when she says “stop” she’ll never say “go” again. That leads to yet another expectation that men must “strike while the iron looks at least a little warm or at least maybe not outright cold is hot” rather than communicating, let alone doing anything that might discourage a potential partner from giving an ambiguous “no” that wasn’t previously negotiated. (Because, seriously, there’s nothing wrong with role-playing any kind of games you both enjoy — you just have to be fucking clear you’re both playing the same game!)

Anyway, this is something I’ve noticed most feminists, hetero ones especially, understand perfectly. And something that seems to perpetually baffle non- and anti-feminists.

Heck, you can even confirm it with standard anti-feminist accusations of feminists! For instance anti-feminists are frequently outraged at assertions that men could ever be lucid enough to use, for instance, rape or sexual harassment strategically to control women rather than merely to satisfy unslakable, animal lust. (Proving, by the way, both my point that feminists have higher expectations of men and my point that anti-feminists think men have less self-control than your average three-year-old.)

Anyway, Amanda’s dead right that when men climb off the ledge of imagined sexual scarcity long enough to confront seriously inappropriate behavior when, or possibly if, it happens then the quality of sexual discourse (and very likely intercourse) will improve dramatically.

Sex 2.0 Conference Takeaway Edition: The Cultural Invisibility of Male Sex Workers, No-Sex Class Edition

Tue, 2010-05-25 08:55 — figleaf

The first session block on Sunday morning at this weekend’s Sex 2.0 Conference was The Whore Madonna Complex in Contemporary Society, presented by sex-worker activist Veronica Monet.

Since the subject was about the madonna/whore dichotomy the subject matter was mainly about women in heterosexual contexts. One issue that’s sort of inextricably linked to comprehensiveness of the dichotomy is just how little room there is in contemporary society for male sex workers.

For instance, Monet pointed out, in San Francisco back in the days before the internet female escorts who placed ads in the backs of the local alt-weekly newspapers had to be freakishly circumspect. For instance they had to avoid too much physical description. Nor could they mention what a customer might expect. You even had to say “no sex” in your ads. If I recall correctly from discussion back in the day it wasn’t just that the papers wouldn’t print your ad if you were anything but circumspect, it’s that the police would answer them! That would have been just for women escorts, mind you. She said at the same time gay male escorts, on the other hand, could get away with saying how long their cocks were, or, say, what they charged for blowjobs without worrying much about either censorship or law-enforcement scrutiny. In other words as far as local law enforcement was concerned male sex workers were invisible.

There were upsides and downsides to that, by the way. On the one hand (this is my recollection, not Monet’s) women prostitutes had higher visibility to law enforcement than men… but on the other hand when male sex workers were robbed, beaten, or murdered it was generally chalked up as “gay bashing” rather than sex-worker abuse.

So that’s one thing that came up about the invisibility of men in sex work.

Another point came up when Graydancer mentioned trying to convince a journalist that being hired to have heterosexual sex with other sex workers for johns made him a sex worker. The journalist remained unpersuaded. Even though I’m… pretty sure he’d have agreed that another woman being hired to perform sex while a customer watched would make her a sex worker. (Surprise! Guess what customers sometimes hire sex workers to do!?!?!)

Aaand finally, thinking about the discussion reminded me how really invisible men are in conversations about sex work and human trafficking on the one hand, and (see the San Francisco ads mentioned above) in conversations about how prostitution is by definition trafficking because no one ever “prostitutes” themselves willingly.

Think this peculiar blind spot for men who have sex for money has anything to do with a dominant paradigm that both believes and demands that women be reluctant to have sex and that men be unable to resist it, or that women must be interested in sex only for the things it can be exchanged for… and that men must be interested in things only for the sex they can be exchanged for? Why yes, I believe it does!

Aside: I’ll need to do at least one entire post to her observations and answers about not just men’s, not just “square” or “straight” people, but everybody’s participation and/or complicity in the madonna/whore complex. I hate to tease the subject like that but it’s probably not surprising what sort of insights someone who was an active feminist before she because a sex worker or sex-worker activist can bring to or bring out in a discussion like that. I’ll just say I’m extraordinarily glad I made it.

* Good to remember, as Veronica pointed out, not all women who have heterosexual sex are necessarily heterosexual themselves. Nor does the reminder apply only to women doing sex work.

John Hawks on Misunderstandings About the Sex of Eurasian Human's Neandertal Ancestors

Sat, 2010-05-15 15:13 — figleaf

Anthropologist john hawks weblog uses a rather blunt stick to beat what’s at hints of the dominant but bogus “no-sex” class paradigm, and at worst plays to what could be called ancient racism. The issue? Genetic assays show that, thanks to interbreeding, modern humans have traces of Neanderthal genes… but no evidence of Neandertal genes in maternal mitochondrial DNA. If you want to skip ahead the last sentence reveals the problem.

I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men mating with modern human women, and not the other way around.

You see, they’re fixated on the idea that the mtDNA showed no signs that the Neandertal clade survived into the present-day population. That result really convinced some people that interbreeding was impossible. They’re flummoxed that some of the rest of the genome has significant signs of intermixture. It’s like their world is spinning out of control. I’m not naming any names, but if you’ve followed much of the press around the Neandertal genome, you’ve probably seen this suggestion.

I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to them that the Neandertal mtDNA type was probably lost because of natural selection.

To avoid raising the awful specter of Darwin, they’ve been talking about weird mating restrictions. Well, I suppose that if you really have to find a way to get Neandertal nuclear genes into us, without bringing mtDNA along, a total lack of Neandertal women contributing genes is formally one way to get that.

I’d just like to see these people explain how exactly we managed not to get any Neandertal Y chromosomes, either.

He said it here.

If your biology’s a little shaky you just need to know the Y chromosome (which determines gender) is passed down only through male parents, mitochondria only by female parents. (X chromosomes are shared by both genders. They’re more easily mixed and so they’re not as helpful for determining geneology as mtDNA and Y chromosomes.)

Anyway, the point is that a) it’s really hard to explain how natural selection (itself a taboo topic) can winnow out genes and b) easy to play on stereotypes of prognathic cavemen dragging winsome and probably-unwilling modern-human women back to their caves and so given a choice? We’re going to get a lot more of the latter than the former.

What Does it Say About Rape Culture in General That Prison Rape Must Be Presented as a Health Risk?

Sat, 2010-05-08 09:08 — figleaf

The editors of the big-media blog Big Think interviewed Robert Perkinson, author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire,” about the social and moral consequences of the 500% increase in the American prison population over the last 20-30 years.

One point stood out, about how our attitudes about prison have affected our attitudes about prison rape, are illustrative in a couple of interesting ways.

Perkinson also talks about the fact that the issue of prison rape is starting to be taken more seriously. “There’s so many people in prison that sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of the sexual victimizations in the society as a whole,” he says . Aside from the injustice of these in-prison crimes, Perkinson notes that prison rape now constitutes a growing public health risk, as facilities have become incubators of hepatitis B, HIV and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. “All of that has consequences beyond prison walls,” he says. “It’s yet another reason to try to use incarceration as a penalty of last resort than a penalty of first resort, as we have started doing in recent years.”

They said it here.

The first point about the statistics of prison rape is a big deal: between the (relative but obviously not absolute) effectiveness of rape prevention among free people and the increase in prisoner populations this is no longer your father’s or mother’s culture of rape. And just to be extremely clear about what I mean that the same things that are true about rape in free culture are true in prison culture: the majority of rapes isn’t just violent attacks referenced in those “hilarious” B-movie/sitcom drop the soap situations, it’s also sexual intimidation, corralling, grooming, “date rape,” “gray area” rape, harassment, deal-offering, calculated seduction, and all the same forms of leveraged, transactional acquiescences we have learned to recognize outside of prison. Rape isn’t just “rape rape” in Whoopie Goldberg’s infamous phrasing, it’s also, y’know, rape. It just happens in prison. And, as Perkinson says, there’s now a lot of it, enough so that it ought to be dominating some of the discourse about rape culture.

I happen to think its not, in part, because the vast majority of prisoners, and thus imprisoned victims, are men and because of the inconceivable clause of bogus Rules of Desire #2: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. In this case the inconceivable part, along with the intentionally (and, as Perkinson notes, increasingly) punitive context trumps its intolerability.

Notice also how Perkinson, probably accurately, understands he needs to recruit other social tropes in an effort to get the problem taken seriously. Check out the wording in the middle of the quote above: “Aside from the injustice of these in-prison crimes, Perkinson notes that prison rape now constitutes a growing public health risk…”

A society that wasn’t dominated by the same paradigm responsible for the Two Rules of Desire, there would be no need to say “Aside from the injustice…” Our society is dominated by it, though, and dominated by rape culture in general.

Seriously,! Among other things if people think prison rape is just one more thing makes people want to avoid prison and thus to avoid committing crimes then what does that say about our attitude towards rape as social control in the rest of society?!? Consider further that to the extent society condones prison rape as part of social control it must also to the same extent condone prison rapists. Which to a startling degree it does. And consider what that says about our attitude towards rapists in non-prison society? And dear sweet mother of pearl what do we imagine happens when such prisoners — victims or assailants alike — finally leave prison. As most of them eventually do, even these days. Hmm? But I digress.

Getting back to the point, our attitudes towards prison rape, including both tolerance and denial, appear to be so ingrained that Perkins must appeal not to our sense of morality, ethics, or respect for human rights but our sense of self preservation. “Aside from the injustice…” the conditions that permit prison rape also incubate those incurable diseases “nice” people like you are petrified of.

In a decent society Perkins would instead be able to say “Aside from the incubation of diseases that could spread to the general population, prison rape now constitutes growing injustice.” And, I’d add, a growing reservoir of tolerance for that could reemerge, despite marvelous inroads since the days in the early 1970s when the local press handled a campus fad for raping student nurses with the same bemused “kids these days” bafflement that they had for streaking. And back when some people thought a man coming home drunk and pinning his sleeping, fed-up wife was just really bad at “foreplay.”

Part of making sure that doesn’t come back involves making sure it’s not being preserved in prison. But… see… I’m doing it too — appealing to social self preservation when the real issue remains, front and center, that rape is rape and that to ignore it, anywhere, is not only to condone it but to condone injustice.

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