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How About Step One: Admitting They're Powerless Over Their Addiction to Demonizing Sex?

Tue, 2010-03-02 22:53 — figleaf

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, who was writing mainly about the usual moronic assumptions pop evolutionary psychologists are making out of the Tiger Woods imbroglio has a wonderfully pithy (and earthy) takedown of the “sex addiction” meme. (Emphasis mine.)

I don’t like the framework around “sex addiction” not because I think that every man is a natural dog who will fuck every woman he sees if given the chance, and that women are fools to expect otherwise (or have the duty to milk our men 3-5 times a day to stop him—-most men wouldn’t want that, either).  I don’t like it because the framework demonizes sex itself, even as those who push it deny that.  Do I think people act out with sex?  Sure, but it’s usually in service of some other neurotic need.  Call Tiger Woods a “sex addict” distracts from the more mundane reality.

She said it here.

I’ll note in passing that as usual it’s usually ardent feminists like Amanda who understand that most men are not, in fact, the uncontrollable sperm hydrants of anti-feminist fantasy. Which begs the question of which side really hates men.

I’ll also note that while “sex addiction” is nearly always represented as a male condition at least one counselor (who specializes in men) says it’s about 20% women but the (not trustworthy enough to link to) sources say it’s mostly because women are way less likely to report it or to seek counseling or attend “sexaholics anonymous” meetings. And something called the Sexual Recovery Institute suggests many women may prefer to call themselves “love addicts” instead, though according to SRI’s checklist it all amounts to the same thing. But which might skew reported ratios anyway.

I’ll also note in passing that by belittling conceits such as sex, fishing, or shopping addictions I’m belittling real, actual, biochemical-substance addictions such as alcohol and narcotic addictions. I’m pretty sure literally nothing could be further from the truth.

Why Kelly Diels Blogs (Subversively) About Sex

Mon, 2010-01-04 11:06 — figleaf

For some reason I’m suddenly discovering all these cool bloggers who’ve been well known for years. To everyone except, seemingly, to me. Oh well, I’ve alway been a slow learner. For instance…

Kelly Diels of Cleavage recently wrote so passionately about why she blogs about sex that it made me wish it was why I did.

The first time I had sex, I said, Let’s do that AGAIN!

Read the quote in context here.

She talks about how unflappably happy she was in her newfound discovery of herself, of her partner… of what can be done, of her transformation.

Slings and arrows and fashion digs aside, I glowed all day. I wondered if it was obvious I was glowing. I glowed about glowing.

And all these flowing, glowing paragraphs of giddiness she writes of has a lovely, polemical, political purpose… to confront how uncomfortable societies can be with such newfound ecstasy.

Virginity, she says, can not be lost because there is no loss, there is only gain.

Feeling uncomfortable yet? I have to admit little winces here and caveats there — oooh, it’s not so wonderful for everyone. Oooh, he could get a disease. Ooh, she could get a reputation. Ooooh, they could be exploiting each other. Oooh, the first time isn’t so great for lots of people. You know what I mean, right? You read something as obliviously joyous as that and you find yourself thinking “that’s wonderful, hon, and sure it’s like that for some people but…”

And as if in anticipation, and maybe to illustrate on of her main points, she writes

This, of course, is why there are so many rules about sex. Sexuality is a basis for power and agency and awe. Stepping over the divine line into the miracles of body and self makes you wonder: what else is possible? What could possibly be impossible?

This is why cults encourage celibacy or polygamy. Dyads are dangerous to cult authority. They give you an ally. Directing your passion towards the cult with celibacy or fracturing your affection across multiple relationships is a great way to ensure that your first loyalty is your guru. Religions, too, encourage celibacy or monogamy or rigidly circumscribed polygamy. How would the Vatican get rich if priests had families? Families tend to accrete resources rather than direct them to the Church. In any case, in any system, the first order of business is to regulate sexuality.

Which gets to what motivated me to blog about sex: if you pay attention you begin to notice, as Diels does, that pretty much all the negative consequences of sex derive from our negative attitudes about sex. Even religious ones. Even feminist ones. Even irresponsible, over-the-top exploitative ones. Even 70’s-style mafia-tainted pornographer ones. Even mine. Even yours.

STIs? Unwanted, unplanned pregnancy? Exploitation? Yep. “Love-em-and-leave-em?” Yep. Sexual assault and rape? Yep. The extraordinarily banal way that sex as selling is smeared across magazine cover after billboard after police procedural after liquor bottle? Yep, yep, and yep. (I’ve skipped the details but if provoked I can bloviate about them for… longer than you probably care to read about it.)

Even things claimed by “natural law” conservatives like that whole homophobia business are frowned on for exactly the same reason contraception and abortion are: it short-circuits sexual scarcity, without which… um… well, trust them when they say the end of sexual scarcity would be a Really Bad Thing. And, really, if you didn’t trust them there wouldn’t be anything bad about sex at all.

All of which makes Diels’ orthodoxy anathema even to people who grin grimly and assure us they’re “sex positive:”

Sex is a language. Kisses and touch and connection are the vocabulary of personal, heartfelt, libidinous expression.

Despite what our culture tells us – that chick flicks and chick lit and pursuit of romance and love are frothy and frivolous – relationships can provide a grammar for growth.

And that’s why I write about sex. I write about sex as an antidote to the titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn, again-and-again pornification of our world. I write about sex because sex is a school and love is an ashram. They are sacred sites for learning, laughing, growing, stretching, unfurling.

It’s ok if such unbridled exuberance makes you a little nervous. But if it does please take a little time to ask yourself why. Especially if you think it’s obvious why.

—-

Along similar lines see: Amanda Marcotte’s “The ‘Sex Addiction’ model isn’t harmless“ or Heather Corinna’s “With Pleasure: A View of Whole Sexual Anatomy for Every Body“

Bulk Porn Photo Research Findings #1: It Keeps Reminding Me an Awful Lot Like...

Sat, 2009-12-12 11:35 — figleaf

Summary: After skimming thousands of images one pattern that’s emerging is it’s striking similarity to religious imagery.

I’ve glancingly mentioned it several times that I’ve undertaken a really massive review of porn and/or erotic photos on the web as digested and reposted and redigested and reposted on the Twitter-like photo-blogging service Tumblr.com. It’s been neither as enlightening, nor as distracting as I thought it might be, and obviously the format of any one site, and the obvious tendency of linkers-in-common of photos to have tastes in common as well. So I can’t call the experience at all random.

That said, after skimming something close to 10,000 images on more than 100 sites a couple of points (beyond a lot of probably obvious ones) stand out.

The biggest one, one that finally percolated through this morning, is…

Golly but a lot of porn looks like church.

Downturned heads, skyward gazes, repose, shadows, and over, and over, and over the “Jehovanist” facial expressions (interrupted most often by transgressive but equally gnostic ones), the drapes, the sheets, the clothes, the marble or tile or even the peeling wainscoting and dingy lamps speak as much of the attributes of worship as the attributes of sex. The models often appear as saints, or sinners penitent or unrepentant, taking each other’s offered bits as much as sacrament as satisfaction. Even the stylized agonies and ecstasies of bondage mimic the mortal endurance or higher-purposed stoicism of saints. And then there’s the highly church-like lack of non-ritual eye contact with either camera or each other. Ritual eye-contact, yes, as in “take this may it serve you well,” or “am I doing this right” or during moments of “do you take this person as your lawfully-wedded…?”

That’s totally subjective, of course. And perhaps porn isn’t intended to be consumed in such tremendous gouts, any more than words are meant to be repeated over and over and over till all that’s left is the sound in your mouth.

But if you were to ask me now what porn most reminds me of… what the spatial grammar seemed most like… I’d say church.

—-

Doh! Just to be clear, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong, at all, with taking sex very seriously any more than it would be wrong to be serious about church. It’s just that…

I guess…

Thing is that it’s not so much about what happens in bed, any more than what happens in church.

It’s a correspondence in the ways both are presented in photography.

Because in church as in bed, and in bed as in church, more happens in reality than in our representations of it. Again that’s all fine — when we approach events as institutions we tend to filter strongly for that which meets our expectations.

What’s interesting (or maybe just revealing about me if I’m the only one) is that the representations seem so similar.

—-

What’s also interesting is how thoroughly refreshing it is when little bits of humanity poke through the solemnity. When it looks like people are having fun — not “behind the scenes” between-takes fun but old fashioned “I love this part” or “let’s remember that for next time” comfort/contact fun.

—-

And a final disclaimer: I’m not so much being critical as curious. When I take my own half-nekkid Thursday photos I’ll usually chuck ten or twenty pictures for every one I post, and I’m sure if I photographed other people instead I’d end up hewing to much the same doughty/dreamy seriousness I’ve been talking about. But now I’d be a lot more curious about what could be found in the spaces between poses.

Hmm. Something to think about.

Naomi Mc, Gendered Stereotypes, and Obvious Questions Nobody Asks About Oral Sex and Body Scent

Fri, 2009-12-11 11:34 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user digital-anger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Summary: Naomi Mc rocks and so does her blog; genital odor as gender Rorschach.

I just stumbled across Naomi Mc’s provocatively-named blog about the sociology, politics, and science of (would it be redundant to say gendered?) reproductive health, Vagina Dentata. It’s hard describing how I feel reading her posts — it’s some kind of combination of familiarity, amusement, envy, awe, delight, and recognition you might feel upon meeting a long-lost cousin. To put it as weirdly as possibly my blog wants to go to a family reunion with hers. Anyway, she’s pointed, thoughtful, irascible, creative as hell, has an amazingly dry wit, and I highly recommend her blog.

Anyway, while discussing the stupid vaginal breath-mints business that cropped up in advertisements last week Vagina Dentatashe thoughtfully (and earthily) addresses the usual reservations and then drops a nifty gender bombshell.

There is nothing peculiarly smelly about women’s bits. Any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy – male as well as female.

She said it here.

It’s a killer point. It’s not that vulvas smell, it’s that genitals smell. As do armpits. And feet. So does hair. So does breath. So does behind a lot of people’s ears. In particular vulvas smell, yes, but so do men’s (ok, no vulva-like word for the combination so…) penises, testicles, and perineums. And yes, the 12% of the worldwide population represented by 96% of all research (credit to Mc) are inclined to lament body smells in general…

But in the narrow spectrum of “intimate” aromas it seems neither accurate nor fair to single out one gender’s bits over the other. Predictable, yes, for half a dozen reasons. Fair or accurate, though, no.

Despite occasional, mostly lockerroom references to “smells like balls in here” and maybe “dick breath” there’s just not as much acknowledgment of just how much men can smell. For the same “any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy” reasons women do.

A couple of reasons come to mind (and you’re welcome to add your own in comments)

  • Until very recently men have overwhelmingly written, lectured, published, and otherwise controlled public discourse about sex in general and body smells in particular.
  • If 90-96% of the male population is heterosexual then most of any discourse about partner’s smells are going to be about vulvas.
  • If 10-15% of the population has at least one lifetime close encounter with same-sex genitals, until extremely recently they’ve been under considerable pressure to keep quiet about it.
  • As several bloggers have mentioned this week, going back at least as far as Leviticus (call it 4,000 years) women have been considered unclean because they menstruate, with sometimes fantastic steps being taken to avoid contact. Since this makes about as much sense as the (Biblically) even more “unclean” practice of blended fiber in woven cloth (no poly-cotton for you “sayeth the LORD”) it seems likely that folks would make up all manner of reasons why that might be. And hey, maybe smell would be one of them. (Wow, do I sound like an Evolutionary Psychologist here or what? Where’s my invitation to blog for Psychology Today?)
  • As Twisty Faster, James Dobson, your average MRA, and all perpetuators of the no-sex class’s Rule #2 all “know,” women never get their noses anywhere near male genitals (or at least shouldn’t) so they wouldn’t know.
  • And as Twisty Faster, James Dobson, and your average MRA will tell you, if a woman does get their noses anywhere near male genitals they better not like it.
  • And whether women like it or not they’d darn-tootin’ better not brag about it.
  • And finally, and most likely, men are aware that they smell, but don’t care because we have a WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, credit Mc again) cultural heritage of considering ourselves baseline neutral, the standard against which all other is measured… and women as the “other” in question.
  • Treatments for endemic-to-men “jock itch” are sold in the sports aisle in pharmacies instead of next to yeast-infection medication on the feminine “hygiene” aisle, so unlike yeast infections jock itch is all vigorous and healthy and not at all smelly.

Couple of other points:

First, you can’t even argue that “yeah, well women get them stinky yeast infections” without studiously avoiding the point visible in any corner pharmacy that for every over-the-counter creme or concoction for treating yeast infections there’s a corresponding nostrum for treating equally stinky “jock itch” fungal infections.

Second, as Mc puts it

This impacts on women’s health because if they always think that the pink clink stinks then they are less likely to notice changes which may signify infection or seek help and advice (similarly vibrator use actually increases sexual health). Plus being self-conscious of your wookie effects your enjoyment of oral sex which instead should be savoured.

The same can be said of men in reverse: there’s lots of residual messaging out there, including myriad anguished and often clichéd laments from men, that women don’t like giving blowjobs. Lacking self-consciousness, or indeed consciousness at all, that their balls can smell of yeast, fungus, stale urine, and perspiration this seeming mystery to men might be easily resolved with more diligent use of soap and water. Or perhaps the same (or maybe “manly” rebranded) wipes that are heavily marketed to self-conscious women.

Bottom line: pretty much any way you look at it the special emphasis on “smelly vaginas” is gendered out the (non-gender-specific) wazoo.

The Fallacy of the 50's as the Height of "Tradition" and Not a Singular Event

Sun, 2009-10-18 17:13 — figleaf

Lisa of Sociological Images says

In the U.S., when people refer to the “traditional family,” they usually mean a family that they associate with the 1950s.  But the 1950s was a really unusual time in American history.  Elsewhere I’ve written about how the husband breadwinner/wife homemaker model is an American anomaly.  The data below, put together by the New York Times, shows that the 1950s was an unusual time in terms of age of marriage also:

Though the data is rough (five points across 107 years), you can see a distinct dip in the age of marriage that includes the ’50s. 

Read the quote in context here.

There’s actually a little more bounce and jitter over the centuries but whatever else one might want to say about it, it seems extravagantly peculiar to pick a historical low point in age of marriage (and a correspondingly high point in overall percentage of marriage) and label that “traditional.” It would be as dumb as, say, a conservative Fed Chairman picking the narrow point where interest rates their historically lowest point to recommend that everyone go out and refinance with adjustable-rate mortgages. (Oh wait!)

I have to say, by the way, that there were some interesting correspondences between the early age of marriage in the 1950s and the popularity of the ARM-driven housing boom of the 2000’s (the “aught naughts” as a 90’s wag predicted we’d call them and I suspect we may still.)

Both points were driven by a huge increase in material prosperity (a worker-productivity-driven one in the 50’s, an open-ended debt-driven one in the 00’s) that amounted to… well.. whatever you’d call a happy emergency — a situation where under the circumstances it makes sense to at least temporarily have a social breakdown because otherwise people aren’t going to just feel left out of but be left out of the response.

In the 1950s the breakdown was a massive and really, highly, conscious, and intentional exit of women from the workforce in order to process and organize a largely unprecedented influx of domestic infrastructure made possible (in folk-Keyensian terms anyway) by redirection of “war surplus” industrial infrastructure and spending to civilian use accompanied by the economic demand to rebuild much of the so-called 1st-World after it had been rubbled during the war. And at least in the 1950s this wasn’t a minor deal — as Stephanie Coontz points out in Marriage, a History, the prosperity of the 1950s wasn’t build on a foundation of pretty-much-normal. Instead it came a the end of at least 20 years of really, really awful — sometimes ordinary-Americans-starved-in-the-streets awful! And in those circumstances what happened made a lot of sense. (The bizarro-world version of the 00’s — the oh-oh’s? — started from a largely excellent standard of living and tried to build… literally build in this case… on that. But in that case what you got left out of if you didn’t reorganize everything to do it was… rolling bankruptcies and foreclosure on too-large houses in places nobody wants to live after evaporating years worth of home equity in what would have been more sustainable standards of living. But let’s get back to my glowing-if-temporary enthusiasm for the 1950s…)

See what’s going on here though? The 1950s were a happy emergency (I’m still wondering what to call that.) They exactly weren’t a status quo to rest an entire “tradition,” of marriage or anything else on! (No more than getting a “pineapple express” warm spell one winter makes it a “tradition” to buy sandals instead of boots for the next.

So yeah! Great! The 50s were a point in history where various trends converged to make it an intelligent, rational decision for women and men to marry (even non-straight ones who experienced not only social but economic pressure to at least play the part!) and start a household very early, and for women to stay home and be (sometimes literally!) homemakers rather than enter the workforce at all.

But also, yeah, great, it would have been a moronic mistake to say that that brief — maybe only 8-10 year! — moment in time, a “happy emergency” ought to be the baseline against which all else is measured. And you’d have to be an idiot to believe that just because it was like that at the dawn of the television and Kodak era it was always like that. And you’d have to be an extraordinarily dour, sour, short-sighted, and unimaginative wet blanket to say that it’s all been downhill ever since. (Oh wait!)

See? Even if you’re progressive and feminist you can look back at that moment in time and say wow, that was something else. Which of course it was! Something else! Unique. Unprecedented. And also fleeting!

Something, in particular, that was already beginning not to unravel but to return to normal_ by the beginning of the Kennedy era. At which point the homes were prepared, the giant boom of children were out of the nurseries and in school much of the day. And either quietly or loudly there began to be “wait a minute” moments as well. People who’d participated in working in the boom but not reaping it’s rewards — women, “minorities,” the impoverished rurals, the young, and those who, um, couldn’t marry… or at least couldn’t marry the people they wanted — entered the conversation.

Which, again, when you look at the 1950s as a windfall, a happy emergency, isn’t even a threat to that new prosperity! After all, adding mazillions of previously dispossessed or otherwise othered people to the middle class expanded the middle class! And triggered a frankly amazing expansion of culture — yes, Frank Sinatra and Frank Lloyd Wright were amazing but, y’know what? Without taking anything at all away from them so were Prince and Maya Lin and millions of others who 60 years ago would have been decidedly excluded from the original 50’s boom.

Anyway, all that’s a big way of saying that even the crankiest, fringiest “traditionalist” could be right about the 1950s… while still being almost 100% dead wrong to imagine that’s the way it always was or that such a singular event ought to be the standard against which all else should be measured.

The Limits of Presentation Guidelines in the Face of Real People

Sun, 2009-10-04 13:52 — figleaf

Melissa Gira Grant left a comment at Geek Feminism Blog about proposed guidelines to mitigate the seriously painful practice of men in tech “sexing up” dull presentations with… um… call it sexual-assumption-laden references or images of women. The problem being, as is often the case, the difficulty of distinguishing twittery vs. substance. Melissa lays it out nicely, and hits exactly the crux of the problem (emphasis mine.)

I think I get the thinking around these guidelines — and the totally male-dominated conference circuit that needs to hear this sort of guidance — but I just am stuck on this:

How do we keep guys (or anyone) from non-sensically using sexual or sexualized imagery and language in their presentations and preserve the right of people to use that information when it’s actually really, really what the presentation concerns?

This might be beyond the scope of these guidelines, but I am thinking back to the first BlogHer, during a “Birds of a Feather” session organized by self-identified mommybloggers, who were irritated that when they discussed the biological particulars of childbirth and childrearing, they were told they were being unprofessional, NSFW, or “overshare-y” — or, obscene.

It’s hard to address intent in this stuff. And I don’t want to sit through anymore stuffed-shirted dude “presos” on boring web marketing that just have some naked women sprinkled throughout to “sex things up” — because usually, those are the same dudes who don’t actually want to hear women talk honestly about sex, either.

Read the quote and follow links to the original sources here.

I think that’s about right. The problem isn’t the guidelines themselves. Or perhaps more accurately the problem isn’t insufficiently fine-grained guidelines. The problem is subsets of participants for whom the notion of the objects of their desire as biological human beings is both figuratively and literally TMI.

I’m emphasizing the notion of alienation from biological reality because, as this FAQ from Gender Shouldn’t Matter (also via Geek Feminism) demonstrates by reference that men are actually perfectly capable of acknowledging women as intellectual peers… under, um, certain conditions.

[Q] Free Software communities are meritocracies. Aren’t your recommendations purely discriminative?

[A] Everyone likes a true meritocracy. A community fails to achieve it, however, whenever female members resort to hiding behind male usernames.

I found the FAQ here.

The conditions being, um, when they don’t realize the intellectual peers they’re interacting with are biological women. Which, again, makes it a twits vs. substance issue — twittish sexual ideals (“it’s just harmless fun,” “we’re all men here,” “eww, you’re feeding babies with those things?!?!?!”) vs the corporeal, biological substance of those peers.

And, sigh, the problem in this case isn’t solvable by the standard 1st Amendment “the answer to bad images is more bad images.” (Although one imagines the rhetorical impact of PowerPointing a Wikipedia-derived photos of micro-penises into the graph at Gender Shouldn’t Matter as “just a light-hearted illustration” of the small face-to-face participation of women in Free/Open-Source Software venues as a response to the highly influential developers who angrily deny the women’s breasts they present in their own graphs might be objectionable.)

Instead it’s going to take something closer to confrontation. And possibly intervention. And it’s going to be a tricky intervention not so much because you have to overcome resistance (though there’s plenty of that) but because you also have to overcome this conception of the role of women in tech as not only things-not-people but as unapproachable/unachievable things.

Which, sad to say, is just an exaggerated version of the mainstream vision of women. Which is yet another consequence, of course, of the vision of sex as transactional.

Dumb Question About Privilege

Wed, 2009-09-30 10:02 — figleaf

So I was over at Jill’s I Blame the Patriarchy a couple of minutes ago and she made the point that even BDSM submissive men have privilege.

...whether he likes it or not, when Nigel hoists up his Dockers and saunters out of your dungeon into the public square, he’s enjoying the privileged status he has had the pleasure of internalizing all his life. You are not.

Read the quote in context here.

This is, of course, true in the same sense that her Nigel enjoys privileged status whether he’s sauntering out of a dungeon, sauntering down the aisle of a church, sauntering through the produce section at Whole Foods, or sauntering (or maybe wheeled on a stretcher) out of an alley where he was beaten and robbed.

Anyway, “privilege” is one of those words where I know it’s used in reference to imbalance of privilege — something you’ve got that I don’t, or I’ve got that you don’t. Or we’ve got that they don’t, and so on. And of course one of the fun things about the idea of kyriarchy is that depending on context privilege can be something almost anybody can have next to someone who doesn’t have it.

So what makes my question dumb is that I can’t figure out whether the idea, when the term “privilege” is used to indicate power imbalance, is to extend privilege to those who don’t have it, or take it away from those who do.

Incidentally just because it’s a dumb question doesn’t mean it’s a trivial one. Or a “just semantics” one. In theories of politics there are some pretty strong disagreements about privilege in the context of, say, rights vs. opportunities. For instance to turn an old cliché on its head, even when rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under railroad bridges — or give lap dances in Detroit — it’s generally considered a privilege not to have to do so.

Love 'Em and Hate 'Em: The "Ex-Hole" Paradox

Tue, 2009-09-01 22:29 — figleaf

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon on one of the paradoxes of relationships.

To call someone a “bitch” for dumping you is to imply that she was wrong and mean-spirited to do so, but the fact that you wield the word “bitch” to describe women who believe they own their own selves is evidence that she was actually a wise woman for getting rid of your sorry ass.

Read the quote in context here.

Amanda links the specific sentiment (referencing the intro to the movie (500) Days of Summer, which I haven’t seen) to misogyny but similar iterations of the paradox can be found at the end of quite a few relationships regardless of the erstwhile participants’ gender, orientation, or outlook on life.

An indication of the insincerity of the sentiment often derives from the point that the angered or scorned individual often genuinely wishes their relationship with the accused was still intact.

Complicating (but not, I think, diluting) Amanda’s point, I’d add that proprietary attitudes towards partners isn’t limited to men toward women partners. In English at least, even after a relationship ends we refer to each other as “my ex.” Or (relating this back to the more general version of Amanda’s point) “my ex-hole.” Which is what an old friend used to call hers.

Related: Regina Lynn on how to sever your online connections in How to Delete Your Ex.

Actually My Love is *Not* a Rose... Or an Apple, Lollypop, a Piece of Tape, or Gum, etc.

Mon, 2009-08-31 20:48 — figleaf

In comments to my sports/virginity question where I questioned why, for instance, losing one’s virginity was supposed to destroy your life but blowing your knee out in high-school sports isn’t; why getting an STI (even a bad one like HIV) is supposed to ruin your life but picking up hepatitis while trekking in Nepal isn’t, MinorityReport (who blogs at, well, Minority Report) said

Great point. I wish that would have been the gist of my high school sex-ed classes.

An example: The school hired chastity speaker, Molly Kelly. I forget most of her talk. However, I do remember one very clear image she used. Throughout her speech Molly repeatedly dropped an apple. At the end of her presentation she held up the apple she had dropped and an apple that had been set aside. She then asked which we would rather eat, the apple that had been dropped on the floor (repeatedly) or the apple that had been set aside. It drove her point home, and for me at least it made an impact.

I would have been nice to hear something like, “But if you do _______, it’s not the end and life goes on.”

She said it here.

Oohhh, I had this realization after reading her Molly Kelly story and now I’m kind of beside-myself irritated.

You know all those abstinence-only metaphors of apples, roses, even gum and tape? Every one of them is a single-use consumable good. Bouncing an apple into apple sause just takes the cake though. The difference between apples and, oh, say, your body is even if you managed to get bruised during sex you’d still recover quickly. And most of the time, for most women and men, you’re not bruised during sex to begin with.

Apples, gum, roses, tape, suckers, etc., don’t recover at all but they’re fucking things, not people!

You want a better, but still-inanimate metaphor for a man or woman who’s had sex? Try a rubber ball. In fact try a superball since those seem to bounce with more energy than they begin with. How about a book? Try a deep pool that a pebble has been tossed in. A painting, an alarm clock, a window, a fireplace, a chicken and an egg (which came first?), a ski hill, a piano or flute.

And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for any of those because humans aren’t inanimate nor are we, women or men, either literally or figuratively consumed in the course of, well, intercourse.

A dropped apple is simply marvelous for propaganda in the service of patriarchy but evilly inaccurate for sex education.

The Social Construction of External Ejaculation

Tue, 2009-08-25 01:09 — figleaf

Via Jessica Valenti (here and here) a couple of post have turned up about “facials” in porn and real life. (One by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon’s Broadsheet, one by Amanda Hess at Washington City Paper)

The politics of facials in particular and external ejaculation in general are… interestingly complex.

  • On the one hand it’s, seriously, not nearly as physically enjoyable for men to ejaculate outside their own partner. On the other hand there’s this business where men are supposed to enjoy the psychological aspect of “marking” their partner with their semen.
  • On the one hand it’s more “natural” for the man to ejaculate inside his partner’s body. On the other hand external ejaculation drastically minimizes risks of pregnancy and STI transmission.
  • On the one hand so-called “money shots” can be constructed as masturbatory conclusion to sex-with-a-partner-as-porn self-stimulation. On the other hand a very large number of women require manual stimulation to have orgasms when “sex” is defined as intercourse.
    • *On the one hand women are perceived to be the passive recipient of external ejaculation. On the other hand women are very often directly rather than passively involved in the stimulation leading to ejaculation.
  • On the one hand people (men and women) are criticized for being overly fastidious about women’s bodily fluids. On the other hand people are criticized for not being sufficiently fastidious about men’s bodily fluids.
  • On the one hand many women are either unable to register male ejaculation (vaginal intercourse) or to find its taste or texture disagreeable. On the other hand droplets of body-temperature liquid landing on the body is easily felt and, depending on the circumstances, pleasant. (For instance warm oil dripped on the back, face, legs, or torso during a massage is uncommon but feels heavenly.)
  • On the one hand internal ejaculation is just about as (Biblically) Patriarchal as it gets. On the other hand external ejaculation violates virtually every principle of traditional Patriarchal heterosexuality.
  • On the one hand it’s supposed to be very bad for semen to land on a woman’s body. On the other hand during masturbation semen routinely lands on men’s bodies.
  • And so on…

All these different hands leave aside entirely the very real and not necessarily contradictory notions that external ejaculation is demeaning and/or empowering.

My point is that by combing through the very broad range of reactions and responses one can produce (a.k.a. construct) meanings towards which one is predisposed. If one is disposed against it one misses quite a few interesting patriarchy-subverting and risk-mitigating possibilities. If one is disposed in favor one must overlook some deep (lower-case p) patriarchal elements.

If I may sound deeply cynical, if you really object to external ejaculation of any sort, especially in porn, the best way to reverse the trend is to advocate strongly feminist constructions of it. To the extent porn is reflexively anti-feminist that ought to sharply reverse the trend. :-(

As for the porn thing: given that everything in the kind of porn you’re talking about, including use of the words “and” and “the” are presented as subjugating of women I’m unpersuaded by arguments that facials are uniquely degrading because they appear in porn. To give up everything that happens in porn, and that’s presented as subjugating, would be to give up everything. Including elevator rides, pizza deliveries, and masturbation at home alone. That doesn’t mean that porn is hunky dory. It’s very often the opposite. It does mean that just as one shouldn’t rely on porn as a model for appropriate sexuality one also shouldn’t use it as the basis for one’s approval or disapproval.

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Note: once again this isn’t an argument for but also certainly not against penetrative sex. Instead it’s a set of observations about the pros and cons of different constructions of non-penetrative sex.

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