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Laura Clawson of Daily Kos delves into why, by Republican standards, it’s fine for Sen. Vitter to keep his committee appointments after fetish-y sex with prostitutes even though Sen. Ensign felt obliged to resign from his assignments after an vanilla love affair with a campaign staffer.

The most obvious interpretation is therefore that what Ensign did was worse (though Vitter’s was still a very serious sin!). But a Louisiana pollster quoted in Roll Call has another theory:

“I don’t think this will help or hurt Vitter,” Pinsonat said. “If anything, it leans towards helping him because … the more this stuff happens the more it becomes ho-hum. You can’t say it’s just David Vitter. ... It happens so often, I don’t think it’s as stunning an event as it was 15 years ago.”

So two lessons to keep in mind when planning your adultery: Better a professional than an employee, and if you’re lucky enough to be a Republican lawmaker, thanks to the efforts of Vitter, Larry Craig, Newt Gingrich, John Ensign, and so many others, you are now good to go.

She said it here.

To be honest that’s probably, approximately, right. Neither Ensign nor Vitter should resign anything because their sex lives don’t match conventional demands. Although they probably ought to resign for continuing to advocate legislation and policy that contradicts their direct knowledge and experience.

If you set aside snark, priggishness, twittery, and sarcasm the issue isn’t moral hypocrisy, it’s a question of — as I first said in the case Bush-era “AIDS czar” Randall Tobias — how they can continue to advocate public health, education, and legal programs intended to sometimes-harshly enforce abstinence, monogamy, and, say, heteronormativity when their personal experience makes it clear that those policies aren’t, and perhaps can’t be effective.

There’s an integrity problem here, but it’s not about who wets his whistle where.

Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy digs up a howler of a sociobiology-oriented “research” article from the BBC.

Chimpanzees enter into “deals” whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.

It goes without saying, since “male” is always the default, that by “chimpanzees” the article means male chimpanzees, and that by “sex” it means “copulation.” Female chimpanzees do not, apparently, exchange meat for sex. Their role is not active. The females passively accept meat from males whereupon they are adjudged to be under an obligation put out over the long term. The article portrays them as recipients of male largesse and as receptacles.

Read the quote in context here.

After various not-inappropriate fulminations Twisty quotes the author committing a classic fallacy of appeal to (self) authority.

This has got me really interested in humans,” [said researcher/chimp voyeur Cristina Gomes]. “I’m thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers.”

Tempting as it is to flame the implicit racism in the idea of “moving on” to hunter-gatherers and skip straight to the part about how a primate researcher qualified enough to make credible pronouncements about chimpanzee sex-for-food behavior has no more qualifications to study humans than a veterinarian would be qualified to treat people.

Heck, let’s skip that part too and go straight to the part where people who call themselves scientists ought to think twice before anthropomorphizing animals in ways that confirm dominant paradigms about human society.

Stephanie Coontz, who was and is a radical Trotskyite and hard-core radical feminist professor at the school I went to, used to tell her students that the difference between science and propaganda is that propagandists look for evidence that supports what they believe while scientists look for evidence that disproves what they believe. By her criteria Ev-Psych flunks the “it’s science” test stem to stern.

Not to try to get too (lower-case) twisty about it or anything but of course people who are so indoctrinated with patriarchy they think their justifications are scientific are going to assume that offering of food and/or sex has to be some kind of proto-prostitution. They can’t help themselves! Same with the original BBC article’s, um, wrong claim that female chimps don’t hunt. It doesn’t fit patriarchal ideology so they say it doesn’t happen. (It’s hard to Google for counterexamples at the moment because so many knee-squeezingly twittish sites are talking about this Christina Gomes character’s work but if you scroll down far enough you start seeing actual scientists saying they’re not only perfectly capable but innovative and sophisticated at it.**)

Anyway, what really chaffs my armpit hair is that while everybody’s running around trying to prove that we’re all helpless against patriarchy because monkeys, or ducks, or microscopic parasitic worms do it too they’re missing the chance to look for different metaphors in animal behavior we could, I dunno, use to subvert patriarchy.

I mean… if one is going to bother anthropomorphizing why not say female chimps decide that males that can hunt are just less boring? Or smell better? Or remind them of their mothers who brought them food when they were little? I mean, sure, patriarchy can’t see anything but hapless females and male coercion but… last I looked that was a problem with observer bias, not what might actually be going on.

[** Consider that researchers studied chimps for generations before noticing they ate meat at all, let alone killed and ate meat, let alone involved it in mating behavior. So… exactly what are the odds the first recorded instance of a female chimp improvising a spear to stab and fish out hibernating squirrels is the first time a female chimp has done it? Small? Or really, really small? —fl]

Some of the comments to Courtney Martin’s perfectly ordinary, sensibly inquiring post about a re-released 1985 movie about sexual surrogates were a little, um, over the top. But that’s ok, they were substantially uninformed too.

“Word..I haven’t seen the movie or anything, but the concept creeps me out. Will another form of therapy address “anger issues” where the client gets to stab the therapist to get over his insecurity?”

...

“Does anyone have any information on why this is not considered prostitution? She is having sex for money? [For the record, I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with prostitution or sexual surrogacy, I just don’t understand what the difference is.]”

...

“oh please, somebody just wants a “valid” excuse to make money while having sex with random people. Nothing’s wrong with that, but don’t pretend otherwise.”

...

“we act like the only possible way for a sexual part to ‘function/ is to do something. But having that part do nothing is as normal and natural and predictable as having it do something, so why do we automatically call it doing nothing ‘dysfunction’?”

...

I’m not clear, was [Bay Area psychologist Bernie] Zilbergeld implying that he was pimping out the sex surrogates he worked with for non-therapeutic purposes?

Found in comments here.

What. Ever!

[To be honest the rest of this post is a bit of an old-fashioned curmudgeonly rant. If you’re not into that sort of thing I’ll totally not be offended if you don’t read on. —fl]

Yeah, it’s really nice hearing so many people just being dead sure that sex surrogacy is prostitution. Really nice. It’s like all those small-town types who are just as dead sure that massage therapists are prostitutes (the customer undresses; the therapist touches them; naked+touch=prostitution Q.E.D.)

And hey, it’s not even a totally bogus conclusion to draw: during the 1970s “massage parlour” was basically a legal euphemism for “brothel.” That this mistake drives actual non-sex-worker massage practitioners absolutely insane (from the community accusation, stigma, and avoidance standpoint) and puts them at risk of physical danger and professional embarrassment (from confused customers hoping for “happy endings) should not be “just a cost of doing business.”

But please, by all means, go ahead and assume based on very little knowledge and a 1985 movie that sexual surrogates, like massage therapists, are glorified whores.

—-

Let’s think for a minute about the premise of this post. Hmm. Let’s see. A movie maker decides to make a movie. His backers hint that they’d like to see a return on their investment. Society is a big knee-squeezing, voyeuristic, patriarchal mess. So the movie maker makes his decision to… surprise!... choose scenarios that he hopes are informative but that, necessarily, have maximum salacious value. Which would be, what? Women taking money to have sex with men with cliche dysfunctions like 40-year-old virginity and bad divorces.

Riiigght! Why don’t we base all our assumptions on Hollywood contingencies. Did you know Vulcans can interbreed with humans? That CSI labs are all glass, chrome, and edgy lighting with multi-million dollar machines that work every time? Did you know innocent bystanders always dive out of the way in the nick of time during high-speed car chases?

Yeah, and sex surrogates are really just prostitutes with no training, really mostly women, really working mostly with men, really working with problems they should just suck up and get over, yada yada yada.

Hey, sometimes it’s true. More often not.

I don’t know what the state of the art in surrogacy is, but I used to know someone who did. She wasn’t a sex therapist, she was (if I recall correctly) a psychiatric nurse who moonlighted on a largely volunteer basis and took what she did very seriously. She didn’t work to “cure” erectile dysfunction, she worked with mostly men who for various reasons wanted to be able to have sex but had (mostly) psychological problems that weren’t always related to sex itself but to, say, body boundary issues, PTSD. Other times the point was to overcome conditioned aversions to sexual contact, to overcome childhood sexual trauma, or to overcome issues of emotional trust. Also I’m not sure where people got the idea that surrogates only work with single men. Many patients are, or at least were, in partnerships.

And finally, it’s just not the case that sexual surrogates have actual sex with their clients. Because unless you’ve totally drunk the coolade of “sex” meaning only PIV intercourse there are generally quite a few steps… and roadblocks… before you get to intercourse. Or even get close to intercourse.

But no, please, let’s all squeeze our knees together and insist it’s illegitimate, insist it violates ethics, insist therapists “pimp out” surrogates to their clients, insist it’s all about patriarchy, insist that all clients are men and all surrogates are women, insist they’re all heterosexual, insist clients are all unkempt shlubs who should get over it, insist (dear sweet mother of pearl!) that it’s some kind of “sacred temple” revival thing, and insist it’s all about Teh Intercourse because what else could something related to sex therapy possibly be about? Because we all feel so much better when we do that we don’t have to actually, you know, think about whether it a) serves a purpose, b) meets a need, or c) might be undertaken competently, professionally, and, believe it or not, sometimes surprisingly non-salaciously.

Clue? Eight seconds with Google (try it some time) turns up lewd, suggestive code words like “These therapeutic experiences include partnerwork in relaxation, effective communication, sensual and sexual touching, and social skills training.”

“Effective communication?” Nudge, nudge, eh? “Social skills training?” A wink’s as good as a nod to a bloind man, say no more!

Another clue? (21 seconds with Google): “Often female clients will ask their therapists, or seek out therapists who are open to the possibility, to find a male surrogate with whom they might work. Largely because of the sexual double standard that continues to operate in many, if not most, therapists, however, most clients of surrogates continue to be male.” (Admittedly that was from a 1984 paper.)

Final clue? From a 2007 post about sex therapy: “a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found surrogate therapy was significantly more effective than couples therapy alone in treating vaginismus.”

Sheesh!

So. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that sex toys are called “toys” instead of, say, sex appliances or masturbation devices for a reason. Nor would you be surprised to learn they’re called toys, or, more specifically, “novelty items” specifically because so many jurisdictions either explicitly or implicitly regulate commercial activities anything having to do with sex, let alone anything having to do with masturbation.

Ironic, then, that whereas the sale of sex devices are heavily regulated around the country (until very recently they were flat illegal in Texas) the manufacture of “novelty items” isn’t regulated at all. With the classic twittery vs. substance consequence that many such toys contain toxic and/or carcinogenic chemicals that would be prohibited if they were sold for actual use!

What? You actually use your vibrators, dildos, butt plugs, sleeves, and other items instead of having a good laugh at their novelty and then chucking them out? Who knew?!?!? :-)

That’s where Grist comes in. They’ve teamed up with Babeland to promote a funny, disarming video that both mocks the lack of safety in some products and promotes healthier, and hotter (njoy vibrators and glass dildos anyone?) alternatives.

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This isn’t Grist’s first foray into eco-friendly sex advice. See also

• Naughty by Nature
• A Valentine’s Day’s Night
• Sermon on the Mounting – How to green your love life

• Bleeding hearts – An eco-friendly Valentine’s Day guide for the bitter and alone

Hat tip to Jennifer Prediger