Amanda Marcotte on the (no, seriously) bright side of right-winger comparisons of homosexuality to alcoholism.

Here's what I find fascinating about all this: the "homosexuality is like alcoholism" thing actually came about because social conservatives are trying to sound more tolerant of gays.  It's actually an attempt to evade accusations of bigotry.  The old line was basically that gays are molesters and perverts who only do gay stuff because they're bad people.  The narrative is that gays are broken people with a disease, a compulsion---and that they need "help" to overcome it.  But the public saw through that attempt at revisionism as quickly as it was concocted.  

Source: Pandagon

She reminds us that this latest slur is just, well, the latest in a slow but steady retreat from raw demonization. For many conservatives it's more a matter of, well, resistance to change -- they're still at least nominally opposed but their hearts just aren't in it anymore. See also their similarly reluctant but nevertheless evolving attitudes towards women in the workplace.

Again, it's not that they wouldn't slam on the brakes if they could -- that was pretty much the iconic William F. Buckley's definition of conservatism. It's just that as more and more gay people come out... and, as Dan Savage has pointed out, turn out to be just about as boring as anyone else, there's just not all that much to get the shrieking kajeebees about.

Holly is talking about not just the down and outers emergency room patients who, as she picks beer-bottle glass out of their scalps drunkenly tell her "Gosh, ain't you as sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Source: The Pervocracy

She doesn't say, but I'd like to imagine, that drunken women patients in similar circumstances ask Holly's male colleagues similar questions about whether they have girlfriends. Based on my experiences as a beer-bar bartender that catered to the young, hip, and alive crowd only at night, I'm guessing that too does at least occasionally happen.

Aside: This does not mean "oh well, then if women really do ask men then it's all hunky dory. In particular if you read the comments on Holly's post it's pretty clear that while women sometimes do pull the ownership card, even the drunken well-too-bad-you're-"taken" version, it's rarely done in the context of what amounts to an extension of street harassment.

That said, there really is a sort of general respect for relationship "ownership" that goes beyond respect for particular individuals in those relationships. Since gender is socially constructed I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that different genders might have different reasons for honoring relationship "ownership." For instance it could be that men want to know because an angry boyfriend might confront him over messing with "his" partner. And it could be that women are just disinclined to mess with another woman's partner for fear that said partner would eventually just mess around with her. And no, seriously, it really could be those things.

I'd just point out that what makes it gendered isn't that men might respond more to one concern than another. What makes it gendered is that outside of gender thinking both concerns -- confrontation with a transgressed partner and the prospect of being run around on in turn -- are exactly equally probable outcomes regardless of the sex of either or both parties. (Because, seriously, relationship ownership transcends sex, orientation, identity, etc.)

Anyway, years and years ago, maybe as far back as the late 1980s, one of the local mainstream newspapers briefly carried a syndicated arts-and-leisure section columnist who focused on intentional single life. At one point he wrote a column about how the implications of saying "my boyfriend" or "my wife," or "my date for the evening," or even "my friend" are problematic in terms of presumption and ownership. He said it would probably be a better idea to just say "this is John, we're married" or "Joan and I went out last night."

I can't remember if the columnist said it outright, but I was really struck by the notion that speaking about your relationships in terms of shared experience rather than possession wasn't just excruciatingly "correct." Instead it also carries the implication that instead of being with you because, well, they're obliged to be because they're "yours," if someone's not a possession they're probably with you because want to be with you.

Call me crazy, here, but this seems like yet another lesson people with experience in polyamory and promiscuity can bring back to the culture of monogamy: in all but the most toxic relationships you're not partners with people because as "your" partner they have to be, any more than (again for the most part) you're partners with someone else not because you're "theirs" but because you actually kind of like, love, have the hots for, are interested in, like being around, and so on.

Rachel Hills catches of some author pushing the line that men and women are so different they need to have seminars to figure them out in a little bit of double-standarding.

In What Men Want, for instance, she argues that men have an insatiable need for variety. But she also says that women are more likely to go off sex in long term relationships – not because they don’t want it at all, but because they don’t want it from their husbands.

Source: Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

When you think about it you realize how difficult it is to maintain the facade of women being from Mars and men from Venus or however that story about interplanetary differences goes. Because, seriously, can it really be that difficult to say that both men and women, being human beings, like novelty? And call me a rebel here but has no one really ever noticed that, again like all human beings, men no less than women simultaneously crave stability?

Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.XXXX" class="imagecache-Normal" />

Kate McCombs says

Sometimes “hand jobs” get a bad rap. “Intercourse’s [or a blow job’s] poor cousin,” some people say. And as it applies to women, “fingering,” while an accurate descriptor for some vulva/vagina stimulation activities, evokes a rapid in-out motion of finger-in-vagina, which is insufficient for most women to to experience orgasm. The phrase often invoked to bring some legitimacy to the act, “mutual masturbation,” brings to mind more routine self-pleasure rather than the exchange of delicious, playful climaxes. Despite the negative press, the manual pleasuring of your partner’s sexy bits can be a delightful addition to your sexual repertoire. Variety is, after all, the spice of (sex) life.

Source: Debby Herbenick's My Sex Professor

I'm really not sure why we're so quick to pooh-pooh manual pleasuring, although as McCombs laments, compared to almost every other kind of sex act there are very few euphemisms for it and few of those make it sound either interesting, desirable, or very pleasurable.

Which is a shame because while like pretty much everything else about sex it takes time and practice but, once taken, the results can be elegant, intimate, erotic, and eye-rollingly enjoyable.

I mean, seriously, to the extent we're able to use our hands* is there any limit to the situations our hands can't be central to?  We already use our hands for timid first-time explorations, for gleefully surreptitious mischief, for foreplay, for massage, and for even the most operatic moments of domination and submission.  And as I pointed out years ago in Giving everybody a warm round of (self) applause "let's get over even the faintest fantasy that women's orgasms from hands-free intercourse are 'normal' or 'real' orgasms.  Nor should we forget about using our hands on ourselves to show our partners what we enjoy.  And while we're at it let's remember that very often our partners are able to take their own pleasure seeing, or at least knowing, when we touch ourselves.

And finally, while McComb is careful to point out that there are some illnesses that can be transmitted hand to hand, she also reminds us that while hands are a great way to transmit pleasure to each other, they really are a remarkably safe way to minimize transmitting other things.

Anyway, point is, rather than look at... darn it all I really want more vocabulary for this... rather than look at "manual stimulation" as high-school substitutes for "real thing" activities we should recognize and embrace what we can do with them, in bed and... elsewhere.

* It would be ableist to assume that everybody has uses of their hands.

Photo by Flickr user spike55151. Used under a Creative Commons license.XXXX" class="imagecache-Normal" />