Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

I probably would have let this post continue gathering dust in my Drafts pile but this post by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about the peculiarities of gay closeting among conservative homophobes in politics made it percolate back up for me.

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In a post about arty films that at least in retrospect suck, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon made a poster child of the 1999 Oscar-winning American Beauty. Which in an awful lot of the ways she lays out really did suck.

Amanda mistakenly thinks the movie was about the reduction of Kevin Spacey to a state of pure privilege — a narrative arc that begins with him masturbating in the shower and, um, ends shortly after we’re supposed to see him as some kind of hero for not having sex with a 14-year-old… when it turns out (surprise!) that she wasn’t as ready as he (and she) had imagined.

That interpretation of the movie always surprises me. And if you see it that way then yeah, it doesn’t just suck pretentiously, it sucks gratuitously. Look at it that way and everything about it from the pseudo poetic voice overs to the floating plastic bags to the abrupt murder to the whole he saw / we saw comedy-of-errors between the Spacey character and the dope-dealing boyfriend just reeks phony/artsy.

But I always saw it as a gay morality play where the happy, well-adjusted out gay couple represent true suburban paradise, where the self-loathing, desperate-to-pass closeted gay neighbor on the other side represents Hell, and the Spacey character’s obliviously “latent homosexuality” is the metaphorical battlefield between the forces of the good of being ordinary and out and the evil of the closet. Throw in that all slightly tin-eared representations of heterosexuality are the result of “colonization” and… well, I’m not sure that’s what the producers really had in mind but it’s a lot easier to appreciate the movie that way.

Anyway, after a bit of rumination over irony, hypocrisy and petard-hoisting, Marshall closes his piece with this thoughtful observation

...as Andrew Sullivan puts it, these are all examples of their tragedy of the closet. Not just the inability to live full lives and all the self-loathing that’s painfully obvious in these men, but the soul-crushing and character-distorting effects of a life of denial and toxic secrecy.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. It’s not the hypocrisy, it’s the toxicity that drives it.

Pulling together several themes from the last couple of days, here’s in interesting post from last month by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper about a mediated sexual assault on rapper Lil Wayne when he was 11 years old. She’s quoting from a movie about him where he’s telling a protégé nicknamed “Twist” about an incident his own mentor, nicknamed “Baby,” instigated. (Emphasis hers.)

Wayne tells Twist that Baby, Wayne’s father figure, was one of the men encouraging the woman to perform oral sex on him. “I’m a do you like Baby and them did me,” Wayne informs him.

After the documentary was filmed, Lil’ Wayne spoke about his childhood sexual assault again, in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Kimmel goaded Wayne into talking about “losing his virginity” at the age of 11. Then, Kimmel—along with, oddly, Charlie Gibson, who was also a guest on the show that night—teamed up to tease Wayne over the incident, which they presented as an impressive display of Wayne’s manhood. Except that this time, Wayne was no longer up for joking about the matter, and he finally explained to Kimmel that the experience was a negative one. It was also revealed that the woman who was being encouraged to “suck little Wayne’s little dick” was 14 years old.

After the Kimmel segment aired, Cara at the Curvature wrote an excellent piece about the cultural tendency to respond to sexual assaults against males by recasting the assault as a positive sexual experience for the victim…

She said it here.

Quick note, Cara’s post at the Curvature really is a great one, as is a post from Sociological Images that inspired her.

Anyway, Hess concludes with

When sexual assault against males is excused as a joke or even held up as a badge of honor, that doesn’t just work to erase victims after the fact. This attitude directly causes sexual assaults. Twist is told he needs to have sex whether he wants to or not, just like Wayne did before him.

Yikes!

Here’s a handful of ideas we probably need to spend a little more time thinking about… and encouraging others to think about as well.

• sexual assault on male victims is not well-understood, and consequently not taken seriously
• male sexual awakening begins considerably later than most people seem to assume
• gendered allegations that it’s “natural” for boys to already be ready for sex are incorrect, and therefore if a boy ends up in a sexual situation at age 11 (as in Wayne’s case) or even 4 (as in mine) the presumption is that “he’s just getting an early start” is also (deeply) incorrect.
• Pressure to become precociously sexual has consequences on boys or, more subtly but no less incorrect…

• if the consequences for boys look different than the consequences for girls then they are thought to be of no consequences at all

and finally

• if boys are pressured and/or feel pressured to be precocious — either by their elders, other boys, or by girls who may already be beginning to feel sexual — they may try to fake their degree of knowledge and interest and may try to rely on social scripts from… less than ideal sources

Something else to consider: as adults it sure seems like a lot of us have a general sense of amnesia and/or avoidance of memories of that part our lives. Nevertheless it seems to be a pretty formative period where a huge number of general social assumptions are put into practice. Those of us with children, at least, and really I think everyone who plans to live among peers who are even slightly younger than we are need to reassess our own experiences and, where possible, see if we can provide more structure for children in, especially, their very early adolescence.

Boy, where would Evolutionary Psychology and its more deterministic uncle Sociobiology be without the sexual revolution?

All that seed-spreading. All that “natural promiscuity” among men. All that “natural reticence” (coughRule Number Onecough) in women.

What do you suppose it would have looked like if it had been proposed not in 1975 but in, say, 1875. That was at the height… but also near the end… of the 3,000-year-old male-chastity and semen-conservation movement when Kellogg’s corn flakes and Graham’s flour and crackers were sold over the counter as it were to promote what was then the very, very popular idea of sexual and seminal “continence” in men. What if it had been proposed in India today, where Ayurvedic medical theory still holds that semen is a vital essence, even single drops of which are expended only at a man’s peril?

What if it had been proposed by the ancient Greek athletes, warriors, philosopher, and physicians?

What if it had been proposed in the U.S. or England as recently as 1957?!?!?

I’m… pretty sure you’d hear all manner of research “proving” that instead of profligately screwing anything that moved and then moving on you’d hear earnest, intent, and scrupulously collated research papers “proving” that men value marriage as a way to insure the products of their “investments” of precious-bodily fluids were kept safe and healthy until they reached their own reproductive years. I’m sure you’d hear “just so” stories about how harem-owning Sultans and polygamist Mormons did their level best to sequester and impregnate their myriad wives as conservatively as possible in order to protect their own health. I’m also pretty sure Satoshi Kanazawa would still be implying that Russian women are whores, but based instead on suppositions about their “evolutionary” desire to ruthlessly and promiscuously extract as much semen as possible from as many men as possible.

In other words there still might be such a thing as evolutionary psychology but I’m pretty sure that when it came to research human sexual behavior it would look almost completely different than it does today.

For one thing I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be so single-mindedly obsessed with proving that sexual attitudes that are scarcely more than a century old… and possibly less than 35 years old!... have been the sexual status quo since time out of mind.

Which, I might add, the highly-contingent timing of evolutionary psychology and sociology don’t undermine the concept that components of behavior are shaped by selective pressure. Such behavior is clearly demonstrable in animals and even plants. And it’s very hard to imagine human behaviors, even sexual ones, weren’t similarly shaped.

It does however tend to undermine many of their most often-repeated, and lurid, popular, and bias-confirming hypotheses about gender.

Not sure you can get there without registering, but after my server logs told me a poster on sex-fetish forum site Fetlife.com had linked to my post about the g-spot researcher’s other theories about women’s orgasms I found a startlingly common but I think pretty backwards assertion by another poster who said

It’s a fact that the study of female sexuality lags decades (or perhaps centuries) behind that of male sexuality so we shouldn’t be surprised that stuff like this continues to surface…

You might have to register to see it but she said here.

Instead I think we know almost exactly nothing about male sexuality except, pretty much…

1. men will put their penises in anything vaguely orifice-like
2. men have orgasms effortlessly if they put their penis in anything vaguely orifice-like
3. the two items above are obviously and universally true of every man
4. unless there’s something wrong with the man

This would be yet another consequence of assuming men are the “norm” against which everyone else is “other.” (Update: A consequence which would more tolerable if items 1-4 were even superficially correct. See also Holly.)

In fact what we don’t know about men’s sexuality would fill bookstores. Assuming anyone was a) curious and also b) unintimidated by item #4, above.

Penises aren’t uniformly sensitive, for instance. Nor, as I’m pretty sure anyone with more than a couple of male partners could tell you, is each man’s penis sensitive in the same spot. If we were curious, in fact, I’m pretty sure we could map homologous “spots” on men, from the glans (“obvious!” except when it’s not) to the frenulum to various spots in the corpus spongeousum between the corpus cavernosa to the base to the perineum to the prostate.

But we’re not. So we don’t.

Quick question for Dr. Spector: What would you get if screened out gay and bisexual men who’s “digital manipulation” might bias the results, then asked 1500 paired-twin men “do you believe you have a so-called prostate gland, a walnut-sized area on the front wall of your rectum that is sensitive to deep pressure?”

Quick answer: Proof that there’s no such thing as a prostate gland.

Just sayin’