Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out an interesting side effect of Ayn Rand’s highly-influential fiction: it’s a platform for forced-sex fantasies.

[Rand-oriented dating-site founder Joshua] Zader says that many Randians experience their first contact with her books between the ages of 14 and 21. “Her books appeal to youthful idealism, to people who are at the point in their lives where they’re trying to figure out what’s important,” Zader says.

It’s also when they’re trying to figure out sex. Rand’s influence on young people can’t be overstated—her fans have described her books as “life-changing,” “my Bible,” and “hot.” “I know that your sexual inclinations can be kind of stamped into you when you’re going through puberty,” says Kate. “So it’s a little disconcerting that at 12, 13 years old, I was stamping myself with this complete and total interest in submission, when I didn’t have any experience with sex at all,” she says. “It’s an interesting seed to plant in a teenager’s mind that that’s how sex operates.”

She said it here.

Actually based on my (limited, repulsed) reading of Rand I got the impression she deeply believed that sex is ordinarily cooperative and mutual the only possible way to have sex with any integrity at all is to force yourself on someone who, whether she’s “secretly” interested or not, is resisting by all means at her disposal. Anything less would be corporeal compromise with another human being, and that appears to be a fate far worse than death for Rand. (For someone who claimed to be such an iconoclast she sure was into making the bogus Two Rules of Desire a central feature of her sex scenes!)

Far be it from me to suggest that between competent, consenting adults that kind of kink should be denied or resisted.

I will say, though, that unless a middle-schooler has received a solid, comprehensive sex education that includes sections on autonomy and negotiation I’d probably steer them towards works with more neutral sexual content. Indoctrinating children to specific types of kink before they’ve begun to develop sexual expression on their own is as likely to limit their development as thoroughly as advocating the lights-off, man-on-top, only-to-ejaculation, only-for-reproduction kink the Victorian missionaries were so enamored of.

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.

Monica Potts of TAPPED mulls a new, more optimistic study on the non-death of marriage in America. (Emphasis mine.)

Lately, there have been a number of articles on marriage and women, particularly black women, as if the behavior of the American couple were fodder for a Discovery-channel nature show. But people don’t get married because they’re enacting some sort of population plan. They get married and stay married when they’re happy, mature, and meet someone with whom they have something in common. To the extent that policy is aimed at marriage, maybe we should worry about improving everyone’s quality of life first.

She said it here.

Funny about that. It’s also highly contrary to the traditional/conservative (and, I think, traditionally male) notion that marriage ought to be a burden or imposition — something forced on women, say, by economic necessity, forced on men by, say, desire for sex, forced on everybody by unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, etc.

Of course by the same progressive expansive opportunity-enhancing standards, and contrary to conservative coercive opportunity-limiting ones, marriage rights should be accessible and accepted for all relationships.

The bottom line, though, is that marriage is part of a social infrastructure not separate from it. The better the infrastructure the better the prospects for marriage.

Note: Speaking of which, read TAPPED’s A. Sewer on Washington D.C.‘s recently passed and so far not blocked marriage equality act.

Summary: As promised (here: The Perversely Non-Perverse Reason You Don’t Need the Kings Navy to Protect Heterosexuality), here’s why I think the word “privilege” is a perfectly accurate but also in communications terms perfectly lousy term.

The problem with the word “privilege” is that people who have it never get to enjoy it. Or even appreciate it. Or, generally speaking, even recognize it.

Consider the old brain twister “we don’t know who first discovered water but we can be sure it wasn’t a fish.” When you’re totally surrounded and supported by something it’s literally invisible to you.

Viewed objectively it makes total sense that the technical term an observer would give it would be “privilege.” After all it’s visible only to those who don’t have it.

Rhetorically, though, it’s a total catastrophe. Because the term’s non-technical usage implies knowing luxury — one the recipient experiences knowingly, not unconsciously. Sort of like my grandfather talking about his childhood in Scotland in the late 1800s when instead of plain oatmeal three times a day his family had oatmeal boiled with bits of mutton in it for Sunday dinner after church. He thought that was pretty wonderful.

Ok, so now we’re getting to the point: Imagine that the only protein in your diet, every day, was oatmeal boiled in dead sheep. You probably couldn’t imagine the tedium of having to live that way. Until just now it might never have occurred to you that anyone would daydream about living like that.

My grandfather, who was 5’1” tall and had legs as crooked as a goat, and gazillions of other people throughout history, would snort at you with contempt. (As he would snort at his grandchildren, including me.)

The privilege part isn’t not eating the diet, or not being so well-fed you wouldn’t look forward to it the way my grandfather would have. Privilege is having it so far removed from your reality you’re not just unaware of it, you can’t even imagine it.

That you can’t even imagine it is precisely why calling it “privilege” is such a lousy choice: people who have it don’t have the experience of, well, experiencing it! Even though its existence is glaringly obvious to everyone who doesn’t have it.

If you want to try and discuss such a very, very real thing with… anyone who’s got it, you’re going to have to find a way to communicate their condition such that they a) get it but b) are not alienated by it. For instance if I see you popping open a Yoplait and call you privileged you are you’re going to totally eyeball-roll me. Nor would you be mollified if I then tried to explain that that the very fact of your eye-rolling was an exercise of your privilege. It’s not that I wouldn’t have communicated it to you. And (as, for instance, my grandfather or roughly 10,000,000 Hatians could tell you) it’s not even that you’d be very, very mistaken for thinking having an 89-cent yogurt didn’t make you privileged because anybody can have one any time they want. It’s that by naming your privilege I’d have alienated you to a point where further communication was shut down.

That’s going to be exactly the same experience when you tell a man he’s privileged because he can walk down the street without ever noticing that nobody’s checking out his ass, let alone groping it. Or, more specifically, if you try to tell a white one he’s privileged because he can walk down the same street completely oblivious to whether he passed a police officer, let alone whether the officer noticed his passing.

It’s not that there’s something to be communicated. It’s just way more tricky than you probably imagine.

Thus even though technically it’s a marvelously accurate word we need a better one for actual communication.