As usual these days I'm decades behind in my reading.  But just in case you haven't seen it, or perhaps have forgotten it, I just want to give a big shout to Em & Lo for their December 2 post about how to politely reject overtures.  What's golden is the perspective (and advocacy) they bring to it for hetero men and women.

A note to straight guys: You are less frequently hit on, and thus you have less practice at rejecting an unwelcome pick-up. Which means you’re frequently awkward and weird about it. But women especially need to be encouraged in their attempts at seduction — if only because you guys are constantly complaining that they don’t make the first move often enough! Don’t go along with a hook-up just to avoid hurting her feelings, but don’t treat her like a desperate Donna either. She’s not desperate for hitting on you (who made off with your self-esteem, anyway?), she just knows what she wants and goes after it when she wants it. And ladies, don’t take it personally if he blows you off rudely; he’s just had less practice than you.

A note to the straight gals: You are less frequently the picker-upper, and thus you’re less familiar with the sting of rejection. (Which is why all of you should attempt at least one pick-up to experience it first-hand, in the same way we should all wait tables at least once in order to empathize with servers the world over.) Approaching a stranger in a bar takes more bravery than root canal surgery or listening to a Celine Dion album in its entirety. So be gentle, ladies. And guys, don’t take it personally if she blows you off rudely; she’s just heard a lot of dirty catcalls and cheesy pickup lines in her time and is used to putting up walls.

Source: Em & Lo

It's true -- once you've been part of a pickup situation where the traditional gender roles are reversed you get not only a ton of perspective but also a great deal of sympathy.

Also it's just a darn good idea to kick to the curb most of the assumptions underlying the he asks / she answers tradition of dating.  They were really nasty assumptions back when we could assume that nearly any man had more economic and social power than nearly any woman.  And while it's 100% true that we don't yet have real gender parity it's also 100% true that the difference is small enough that the nasty logic of tradition no longer holds.

Image from Italian website Bioetica.
Original source unknown.

Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log dispenses with one evident miscommunication… but raises another. First, the big news policy-wise.

The Pope has changed his mind about condoms: they can be used after all!

That’s what the world’s media has decided to splash over the front pages this weekend. (“Pope Benedict’s condom U-turn” said the headline over Andrew Brown’s blog piece at The Guardian.) They are being scandalously irresponsible as usual: the Pope has said nothing of the kind. Rather, he grudgingly acknowledged, in one answer during a book-length interview, that perhaps in some cases perhaps the use of a condom by a prostitute (una prostituta) might be “a first step toward a moralization… Absolutely no sign of a Catholic Church volte face on contraception there.

Source: Language Log

Pullum points out that the issue appears to be a mistranslation of gender in the term “una prostituta” in Vatican’s official Italian-language edition. The Pope, however, is a native speaker of German, as was his interviewer, and there’s considerable evidence that he was talking about condom use for male prostitutes. The Italian version strongly suggests he meant prostitutes who are women. Thus the misunderstanding that the Church might somehow be moderating its opposition to contraception. No such luck there.

But if the ambiguous gendering of una prostituta has been reduced to a problem of mistranslation. Or possibly a problem of euphemism if, say, some of the target languages are culturally less tolerant and/or more prim about the possibility of male prostitution, Pullum introduces another language speed bump when he says (emphasis mine)

[S]ome of the odd things about the foggy passage just quoted might be relevant to my linguistic puzzle. One is the fact that using a condom generally means putting one on one’s own penis, and if that is to count as an assumption of responsibility, Pope Benedict must be envisaging an infected male prostitute whose service consists of active penetration and ejaculation of a passively participating client. I know very little about the world of prostitution, but it is my understanding that it is much more typical for it to be the other way round, in which case the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it, and the motivation would be the selfish one of protecting the prostitute’s own health, hence not an assumption of responsibility at all.

In which case, as Language Log commenters such as John, Aaron Toivo,and other have hinted, we can still delve into the function of the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

I am so not a linguist, nor do I claim competency with language tools. And I don’t think Google page counts qualify as reliable for statistical purposes. That said, a quick check suggests “he used a condom,” “we used a condom,” and “she used a condom” are all used with some frequency.

Also, considering that just as it wouldn’t be unusual for a restaurateur to say “I used plastic wrap to cover the customer’s leftovers” it wouldn’t seem unusual for a prostitute to say he or she uses a condom to cover a customer’s penis. Thus while getting a condom on to a customer may be a problematic element for at least some sex workers, it’s not necessary to say “receptive sex workers don’t use condoms, their customers do.”

There are other instances where receptive partners are presumed to be condom users but the most glaring would probably be the controversial ordinance in New York Washington, D.C., that allows police to detain a woman on suspicion of prostitution if she has more than a certain number of condoms in her purse.

Final note: if I was a linguist I’d probably write a post about how the assumption that being the penetrating partner makes one the active agent conditions the way we employ the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

-=

p.s. you learn something new every day at Language Log, and in this case the commenters really came through. Even though I’ve been a fairly active sex blogger for years I hadn’t known that more same-sex customers seek penetration than seek to penetrate. Several commenters, including at least one former male sex-worker, set the record straight. Knowing that makes sense of a number of differences in rates of condom acceptance between those who are straight and those who are not.

Holly Moyseenko Kossover of My Sex Professor has some very welcome news. (Emphasis mine.)

A friend of mine recently pointed an interesting article in Newsweek about another benefit of aging. No, not discounted coffee at McDonald’s (I prefer the stuff that I make at home anyway) – but better sex!

Just when I think I’m living in a culture possibly a little too obsessed with youth, articles like this remind me that getting older definitely brings its own benefits. I’m all about aging gracefully (trying to stay healthy, washing my face every thing) but there are aspects of aging that seem to at least somewhat dance across the minds of even my most zen friends. However, articles that boast how sexy Helen Mirren looks are a nice reassurance (and damn, she is a gorgeous woman – at my age I’d be pleased to look how she does now).

The article points out that studying sexuality in older populations is still relatively new. Why is that? Did we just believe that after a certain age, there is no sex? Sure, the way someone engages in sex may change, but they can still be an extremely sexual individual and enjoy a healthy and fun sex life.

Source: Holly Moyseenko Kossover of My Sex Professor.

Considering how very thoroughly studied sex before, say, age 25 it’s important to understand how older people have sex not just because it’s somehow “fair” but because so much of what we assume to be just plain universal and true about all humans derives from ages when we’re just barely getting basic adulthood under our belts. As it were.

Those studies that have been done suggest, over and over, that a lot of assumptions about immutability — girl’s reticence, boy’s impetuousness for instance — not to mention assumptions about orientation “fluidity” or lack thereof seem to fade as early as the early thirties.

Anyway, it’s not just a case of “but older people have sex too.” That’s rather a foregone conclusion. We just don’t know enough about how everybody has sex to draw very well-informed conclusions about human behavior — sexual or otherwise! I mean, yeah, the light’s better under the street light of college campus-based academic researchers. But, metaphorically speaking anyway, there’s a heck of a lot more sex happening in the dark.

Photo by Flickr user kenyee. Used under a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.

BDSM activist Clarisse Thorn usually blogs at Pro-Sex Outreach, Open-Minded Feminism. This morning she has a pretty important guest post at Feministe about the tricky intersection between BDSM and abusive relationships.

BDSM is a tricky space, not least because it’s extraordinarily poorly understood. (Example joke from my adolescence “‘Beat me, beat me, please’ said the masochist; ‘no’ said the sadist.”) And also because, like the egregious opinion that raping a prostitute is merely theft of service, there’s the equally false assumption that BDSM fundamentally is abuse.

While I think it’s really important that you go read her whole piece, which includes an intelligent analysis of both the heightened awareness and intolerance of abuse in BDSM communities and the conflicting pressure to minimize what abuse does occur, I’d like to make sure everyone gets a look at a checklist she presents that I think strongly distinguishes one from the other.

One workshop — “The Emotional Aspects of BDSM Play”, taught by San Francisco’s EduKink — gave a detailed list of ideas for how to tell BDSM from abuse, which I wrote down:

1) Consent. BDSM is consenting; abuse is not.

a) Assuming consent was given — was it informed consent? Did everyone know what they were consenting to?

b) Was consent coerced or seduced from the partner? Did everyone feel like they could say no if they wanted? Was anyone worried about suffering negative consequences if they said no?

2) Intent. A BDSM partner intends to have a mutually enjoyable encounter; an abusive partner does not.

a) Did everyone leave the scene feeling somewhat satisfied?

3) Damage. A BDSM partner tries to minimize the actual damage inflicted by their actions; an abusive partner does not.

a) Did the two partners learn what they were doing before they did it? Did they learn how to perform their activities safely?

b) Were the partners aware of the potential risks of their activities?

4) Secrecy. Abuse often happens in secret. This is the hardest one on this checklist, because — due to the fact that BDSM is a very marginalized, misunderstood sexuality — BDSM often happens in secret, too. But this is one of the benefits of having an entire subculture that deals with BDSM: we try to look out for each other.

a) Were the two partners involved in the local BDSM scene? Did they get advice from knowledgeable, understanding BDSM people during rough patches in their relationship?

Read the rest of her post here.

Growing up in a physically active but decidedly non-sports-oriented family I didn’t really distinguish football from mob violence until my 20s, when an environmental activist roommate who’d played ball in college sat down and explained the rules. Including the rules of physical contact, which otherwise seemed to me indistinguishable from the “rules” of criminal assault and battery that ought to bring criminal charges.

As Thorn makes clear, BDSM has similar rules that, when observed by all parties, makes it too distinguishable from criminal assault and battery.

Rules, incidentally, that, as in football (or hockey, wrestling, boxing, or even something like poker) when breached really can and should lead to criminal charges.

But, like any other form of consensual recreation, otherwise shouldn’t.