While recounting her analysis of femme guilt and women slut-shaming other women in conversation with Charlie Glickman Rachel Rabbit Write gave me the jog I've been needing for... oh, a couple of years now to put my finger on a common misconception about the term "sex-positive."

Charlie said to me, “Just because someone considers themselves part of a sex positive culture or a kink community doesn’t mean that these things (sexism) aren’t still around.”

Source: Rabbit Write

Here's the deal. "Sex-positive" is a comparative or intensifying adjective, like "hotter" or "thicker," not a noun like "a gold star."

Thus one can't simply congratulate one's self for being "sex-positive." Yes, "my ladies always come first" is more sex-positive than "He pays for dinner so sex is for him." And the former really is preferable to the latter. And yes, there's a threshhold past which you can start feeling pretty good about yourself. But if nothing else, bragging about how you're "sex-positive" is probably a good sign that there's still more to uncover.

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So today on a whim I was looking through my old "not safe for work" Half-Nekkid Thursday posts (which you now sort of have to know to look for.)  I sort of forget how much time and effort I used to put into those photos (even the nominally spontaneous ones) and I also forget that considering what I had to work with (i.e. my physique and almost zero input on non-cliche-porn depictions of hetero men) some of them came out really, really well.

Anyway, one in particular caught my eye (item #1,above) because I really, really liked the light and shadows, the lines, and my behind and just for the heck of it I installed it in place of my old gravatiar image (Item #2, above.)

But then I immediately got cold feet.

I'm not sure why.  My site's already pretty much hopelessly branded as "nsfw" even though it's been years since I've actually been that "unsafe" (again you have to know where to look for my HNT and other photos, and many of the old photos are no longer there at all.*)  And I actually think it's really important to push for more casual acceptance of erotic imagery of heterosexual men.  And in a lot of ways the old image isn't any less "erotic" than the new one.  (Also, while we don't usually think of it that way, item #3 even more directly implies heterosexual activity.)

But just for the heck of it, rather than just guess I thought I'd ask you which of the three candidate gravatars you'd rather see at the top of my page.  Feel free to chime in in comments.  Also feel free to explain why.

Thanks!

* For the record, since I stopped posting a photo a day my traffic has declined nearly 85% from its peak.  !!!  Since my posts had become mostly about politics, sociology, and gender long before I stopped posting photos I'm pretty sure not doing photos has a lot to do with the dropoff.)

While talking about how it's often pretty relevant for researchers to know where a woman is in her menstrual cycleEmily Nagoski nevertheless keeps things in perspective.

[T]he literature on something like sexual interest across the menstrual cycle is far from definitive: while on the one hand there seems to be a small peak in many women’s sexual activity around ovulation, there’s a much more pronounced peak around the weekend. Context is a crucial component in understanding women’s bodies.

Source: Sex Nerd

In other word does it matter? Yes. Does it matter enough to be the holy grail some researchers make it out to be? You tell me.

Actually, while I think the main reason ev psychs and sociobiologists spend so much flinkin' time obesssing about women's levels of horniness has a lot to do with the paradigmatic inability to get that women are sexual creatures "just like people are," I have to admit that a more objective reason is that women's hormone levels are just a lot easier to track.  They take a whole month to cycle!  You can keep pretty much up to date with women's cycles by collecting pee once a day.  Or even just daily diary entries.  Women already frequently chart things like periods and ovulation.  And there's lots of collateral studies one an surf data from, what with them being kind of intimately related to fertility or infertility, maternity, menarche and menopause, and so on.

I'm pretty sure the main reason ev psych and, for that matter, a lot of real scientists spend very little time thinking about men's levels of horniness is because a) men are considered the baseline normal against which women's libidos are measured and b) healthy men are assumed to be horny all the time so why bother?  And also, given that on average researchers have tended to be straight men, eww, who could possibly be interested in horny men?  But I have to admit that a more objective reason is that men have definite hormone cycles but they cycle daily.  Which makes tracking them a heck of a lot harder more difficult: collecting hourly urine samples is doable but, um, distracting for most people.  Especially if what you're trying to track are libido peaks.

None of that means that where women are in their cycles is completely irrelevant.  Just that it's important to keep track of why there might be such disproportionate differences in available research.

Photo by Tumblr user allinone. Don't know the original source.

Last night I ran into yet another version of the same old "men want more sex than women" thing.  This one from a commenter on that Laura Schlessinger post at Feminist Mormon Housewives I referenced here.

Men value sex very highly. We have a drive for it which is rather insistent, and which every source I’ve seen indicates is, on average, higher than the drive of the average woman.  Husbands who feel deprived of sex aren’t likely to be happy about it, and may do things which are bad to try to feed that drive.

We've all seen variations on this hundreds or (if you're a sex, relationships, or gender blogger and follow such things) thousands of times.  So I don't know why yesterday was different.  The commenter was frustrated but not all that belligerent, nor was he wrong -- every source he's seen probably has indicated that men have higher sex drives.  But for whatever reason when I read it I had a little scientific-wild-assed guess epiphany. 

It’s not that men want more sex than women. In decades of first, second, and third-hand observation I’ve noticed that women want just about same number of hours of sex in a month… just not the same number of minutes of sex in a day. They don’t always want it with the exact same frequency we men do, but when they do they often want it to last longer than men can usually provide.

Don’t assume that women’s sexual “insufficiency” is more of a burden on us than men’s “insufficiency” are a burden for women. The frustration cuts both ways.

The main difference is that social expectations (see, for instance, Schlessinger's The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands) tell women, basically, “hold your nose and bite your lip and it’ll all be over soon… and then you can make him a sandwich.” Which is actually precisely the problem, not the solution!

I also want to be really clear that in saying this I'm not bashing men for "premature" ejaculation, and I'm definitely not perpetuating the myth that "prowess" in men means being able to pound and thump away for hours on end.  It's not about "inadequacy" or "insufficiency" at all! (Which is why I keep scare-quoting it.)  It's just about recognizing that to the extent men and women have different approaches to sex it's not a good idea to make one wrong and the other right.  It's maybe a better idea to give both realities equal weight... and seek to accommodate each other. 

One last thing.  That it sometimes works the other way for hetero couples, or that the same issues arise with same-sex or intersex partners or poly partners obviously doesn't change or invalidate the basic point that when drives are different it's a good idea to converge on each other rather than demand that one of you needs "fixing."  If you're both, or all, just naturally synchronized then great!  But you're still not doing it "right."  Because "luck" and "correct" aren't in the same domain.

Anyway, that's my hypothesis. I think it's testable. And maybe even has been. And while I don't think I am I could be completely wrong. So I'm posing the question: what's your experience? What do you think?