virginity

The Two Rules of Desire and How to Have First-Time Sex Instead of Just "Losing" Your Virginity

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-08-19 09:38

An anonymous guest-blogger at Em & Lo has written the best, most useful useful and myth-busting sex-related post I've read in a very long time.

As a 21-year-old virgin I thought sex was going to be the most overwhelming, painful, awkward, terrible, awful experience ever.  Why did I think this?  Because friends, magazines, and blogs all over the place said so. Not so! Yes, cashing in your V-card is a big deal: your first experience can set the tone for how you approach and engage in sex for years to come. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t stress and fret about the impending deed for weeks or months (or even years!) beforehand like my boyfriend and I did. If you follow these 10 prep rules, then when you’re ready, you can relax and just do it

Source: Em & Lo

You really, really want to go read the post for details on the ten prep steps she recommends but here's the simple list:

  1. Make sure you’re with a partner that you trust completely
  2. Admit it’s your first time
  3. Share your expectations with each other.
  4. Get your protection lined up beforehand.
  5. Speak up in the moment.
  6. Related to #5: Even if you think it’s a stupid question – ask!
  7. Be sensitive to your partner’s concerns.
  8. It’s okay if you laugh!
  9. Lower your expectations.
  10. Help the sex feel great.

Again, each item makes sense enough.  Her explanations make them even better. Go read them.

What I love about the post is that any one of those items, let alone all ten, dismantles almost everything that makes stereotypical virginity "loss" disappointing or worse.  More to the point, if you use any (or preferably all) of your 10 items first-time sex can become the beginning of something new rather than the end or “loss” of something irreplaceably valuable.

It's probably no surprise that I've noticed the interplay between the standard narratives about virginity "loss" for women and both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire. Of course sex for the first time is supposed to have all kinds of symbolic value and of course the pragmatic experience for women is supposed to be over on the negative side of the dial! Inside the dominant paradigm that drives the Two Rules, women aren't really supposed to enjoy sex in the first time, the adjustment from "naturally" never having sex to having it is supposed to be about as jarring as a fish getting hooked, and thanks to rule #2 she's certainly not supposed to be enthusiastic -- instead she's supposed to be chastely "submitting" in order to seal some kind of transactional deal for love, support, or duty.

Note: If you were to transpose a few adverbs and adjectives in the blogger's introductory paragraph you've got the corresponding v-card myth for young men.  But what I really like about her list is that each of those items would benefit for men and boys for their first times as well.

And one last thing: That list of 10 ways to make your first time positive is also a list of 10 great reasons why it’s ok to wait. First because why do something when you’re not ready, and second, when you are ready why settle for anything less than making it good for you?

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Mistress Matisse on Losing Your Virginity on Camera: "The Right to" is Not the Same as "A Good Idea"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-01-28 01:21

Respected and respectable BDSM, porn, and sex-work authority Mistress Matisse worries she'll get shit for her column in The Stranger about Nikki Blue's recent "innocence sacrificing" video from Kink.com.  I'd be surprised if she gets too much -- it's a very professional and well-though-out opinion not about marketing or audience or producers, which was where I took issue.  Instead it's about the work.  Which I'm not really qualified to opine about but Matisse categorically is.  Here's the way she says it in her column

Critics were quick to assure us they supported Blue's choice to do the show; it was just the promotional language they deplored. I cannot say the same. If Ms. Blue were a friend of mine, I'd say, "Don't do this." True, Nicki Blue didn't just fall off the turnip truck—she's modeled nude and performed solo in webcam shows. She says having her first vaginal intercourse live on camera is her fantasy, and obviously she has the right to choose that.

But has the right is not the same as a good idea. An inexperienced woman getting into Big Porn to "explore her sexuality"? That's a seriously bad idea. Porn is a business. It doesn't exist to create a safe place for models to fulfill their fantasies; it exists to create entertainment for paying customers and to make money.

Source: The Stranger

And here's how she expanded on the idea on her blog.

[Y]ou should not do porn, or any kind of sex work, to explore your sexuality. A happy and emotionally-healthy sex worker is someone with the tools and the desire to facilitate other people exploring their sexuality. As you go along in sex work, you’ll learn what particular types of sexuality you most enjoy participating in, and gravitate towards the appropriate setting for that. But getting into corporate porn to "explore your sexuality" is rather like joining the military to explore your issues with aggression and formalized hierarchies. You certainly will get an education, but it’s unlikely to be a smooth and enjoyable process.

Virgins aspiring to sex work, think it like this: Actors rehearse, athletes train, and musicians practice. If you want your sexuality to enrich the lives of other people, and you want to be happy doing so, learn your skills in private. Then go forth and make the world a sexier place.

Source: Mistress Matisse's Journal

As it happens I do know someone who joined the military to explore his aggression and to get a taste of formal hierarchies. Turns out you can't just walk away from some things once you've been in long enough (maybe 5 weeks) to figure out you're not that into it after all. And, it turns out, that when something important to you doesn't go well you can wind up considerably more vulnerable than you might have anticipated. So I think that part of Matisses' opinion is great. Same, though, for her point about it just not being irresponsible not only to yourself but to your colleagues or customers to try providing a service while just assuming that if you enjoy it they will too. Considering the relatively low consequences of the alternative of actual assessing your abilities beforehand that's not a good idea either.

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Speaking of Virginity, Does Jessica Grose Really Think You Shouldn't Speak of It?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-06-23 16:41

Shelby Knox of The (Ms) Education of Shelby Knox really jumps hard on Slate’s Double XX editor Jessica Grose, who posted what Knox calls “a misguided, finger-wagging analysis of the recent Reclaiming Virginity conference held at Harvard, at which I spoke on a panel.”

Here’s Knox…

As Jessica Valenti noted, via Twitter, Ms. Grose took in the Rethinking Virginity conference as “lady bloggers rethinking their slutty ways.” Grose spends most of her post laying out conference organizer Lena Chen’s past as a sex blogger, including the slut-shaming she endured at the hands of fellow students and print and online publications. It’s obvious she views Chen’s decision to give up her blog (for the moment) and identify herself as a “Third Wave Marxist feminist” as a defection to what she describes as ‘Generation Scold’ – “deeply conventional and traditional” millenials determined to stamp out sexual promiscuity.

In what I can only call a lapse in journalistic ethics, Jessica Grose leaves out both the actual and political context in which the Rethinking Virginity conference occurred.

Read the quote in context here.

From the Rethinking Virginity conference’s “About” page on Tumblr you can see that Gross really did miss the boat

Half a century after the sexual revolution, the concept of virginity remains as contentious as ever. While the sexual abstinence movement preaches in classrooms and college campus the dangers of premarital sex and “hooking up”, feminists decry scare tactics and “slut-shaming”. What are the religious, legal, and economic origins behind ideas of sexual purity? How does queer sexuality complicate the equation? Is a sex-positive vision of abstinence possible?

The Rethinking Virginity Conference at Harvard University seeks answers to these questions and more. Join us on May 3rd, 2010 as our panelists — sexual health educators, professors, feminist activists and bloggers, a documentary filmmaker — explore what it means to be a virgin and what the future of sexual abstinence should look like.

Stop by for one panel, meet speakers at the Boloco-sponsored lunch, or stay all day to experience the full diversity of our conference programming. Women’s, LGBT, and sexual health organizations will be tabling throughout the conference as well.

Hosted by the Harvard College Queer Students and Allies with support from the Harvard College Women’s Center and Boloco.

This conference is free and open to the public. For all press inquiries, please email the QSA Women’s Events & Outreach Chair at lenachen[at]fas.harvard.edu.

Read the quote in context here.

And yeah, personally I’ve always thought those Harvard College Queer Students and the Harvard College Women’s Center were a bunch of finger-wagging prudes too. :-p

Just based on the fact that Shelby Knox or Lena Chen or anyone else can be simultaneously damned if you do (by, say, Laura Sessions Stepp) and damned if you don’t (by, evidently, Jessica Grose) I can’t imagine what other concept on the big blue marble needs to be rethought more urgently than virginity. And rethought, by the way, in the terms it sounds like the conference intended to address.

The culture of virginity (as bought into by both its defenders and detractors) makes it extremely difficult to have complete conversations about choice. The culture puts extraordinary pressure on boys and young men. It puts gruesome and sometimes murderous pressure on girls and young women. It’s hard to imagine Chen would have caught so much grief for her blog without it. It’s hard to believe “frat” culture would be so toxically rapacious without it either. And without it “purity rings” would just be some kind of trademarked gimmick on cheap water filters. And let’s not even start with what it means for same sex, intersex, non-penetrative-obligate fetishists, auto-erotic asexuals, or others who aren’t likely to have heteronomative intercourse — not least because, um, for those people you actually can’t start talking about virginity-related sex.

So yeah, why on earth would anyone want to rethink the basis of all that?

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Abstinence as a Source of Gratification, Ending Abstinence as a Source of Disillusion

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2010-06-22 17:36

Katherine Chen, guest contributor at Em & Lo makes a compelling, progressive case for abstinence as personal gratification rather than the traditional duty-bound approach where it’s all about “saving yourself” for a husband… i.e. for someone else’s gratification.

Virginity has always been a very significant part of who I am. I can’t deny my mother certainly influenced my perspective on sex: she raved about how all my female classmates were sluts and whores just for going out with a boy on Saturday night. But I’ve also had two friends get pregnant and then undergo abortions before they turned 18. The pain and agony they went through by taking a chance on someone they hoped was Mr. Right (who turned out to be Mr. Wrong) did not seem worth it at all.

...

Despite my fairly old school views, I don’t think virginity should be viewed as a treasure, much less a curse or a stigma. The fact that female virginity is so prized among certain (if not all) cultures confirms that women are still viewed as sex objects. I’m not down with that. Nor do I think losing one’s virginity should be considered an automatic rite of passage for young people, like attaining one’s first driver’s license or graduating from high school. When the situation and circumstances are genuinely right, it can happen quite naturally and in its own sweet time, but until then you should have the right to protect your feelings and your body without undergoing external pressures to conform to any arbitrary sexual standards — whether that’s doing it before you hit a certain age to avoid being seen as a freak or not doing it until you get married because of some religious ideology.

She said it here.

But as part of her clear-eyed endorsement of abstinence she also addresses a downside of waiting for the “right” person that I hadn’t considered before.

Studies have shown (see here and here) that when women don’t receive the relationship they anticipated after losing their virginity, they feel like their sexual power has been taken away from them. Of course, there is also the emotional and spiritual devastation that comes with feeling deceived, even if that was not the intention of the other party.

She said it here.

I think this is a really cool post. Also an important one because she’s saying if you’re going to go there then you need to locate the gratification of abstinence in yourself instead of the usual (basically universal, no-sex class) way of “saving yourself” for the benefit of another.

The word “sex-positive” gets tossed around a lot and there’s obviously some disagreement about it’s meaning. In its most original sense it doesn’t mean being open to everything early and often. Which is great because that would rule out a lot of people’s positive experience of their sexualities. Instead it meant being tolerant of other people’s sexualities and comfortable with and able to express your own sexuality whatever that might be*. I’ve pointed out in the past that that means making room for asexuality. What she’s done is make a great case for abstinence as it’s own form of erotic anticipation and enjoyment and as an expression of one’s own sexuality. That’s cool.

Quick, really important note… actually really important in terms of the discussion here: abstinence doesn’t have to equal virginity. Which brings me to the most important part of her post.

“Studies have shown … that when women don’t receive the relationship they anticipated after losing their virginity, they feel like their sexual power has been taken away from them.”

I think that’s right, and I think it’s really critical to get how much that belief in the value or “power” of women’s virginity influences our notions of “innate” gender difference. Because when you’re raised nearly from birth with the expectation that you’ve got this property value that’s independent of… and maybe even more important than… everything else about you it’s going to overload your actual experience of it with all sort of cultural and emotional freight. Even if it’s not always treated as an outright ‘treasure’ it’s still something you’re expected to assess every potential partnership in terms of whether this is the person you’re going to “bestow” or “give” it to. Or who will “take” it from you.

And since you’re only allowed one chance (remember, traditionally virginity is valued way more than abstinence itself) you’re just wonderfully setup to have that feeling of loss of power because mythology notwithstanding sex really is just sex: the next day you really do still have to “chop wood, carry water” as the Zen guys say about enlightenment.

And once it’s gone it’s gone, and if the lights don’t flicker all over the Eastern Seaboard when you stop being a virgin then you’re setup to feel screwed.

And here’s my main point: whereas one can “lose” one’s virginity only once, if someone discovers a preference for it he or she can resume abstinence the next day! And, contrary to end-of-the-world protestations by Laura Sessions Stepp and the whole used-chewing-gum crowd, be very little the worse for wear.

Aside: That’s another problem with the standard virginity/wait for the right man theory — unlike abstinence, once you stop being a virgin you’re supposed to lose not just your virginity value but your ability to own your sexuality at all: you’ve given it to someone else!

* with the obvious caveats, e.g. respecting partner’s decisions, adulthood, etc.

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

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-08-31 19:48

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.

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Gender Neutral Language Can Still Be Optimized

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-03-14 08:43

Cool, sweet post from Ily of asexy beast about one of my fondest subjects: the way language influences, and is influenced by, our thoughts and actions.

“Falling in love”

“Getting kissed”

“Losing your virginity”

We all know I love to talk about words and their “hidden meanings”. But I’ve never really talked about them as a group before. This post is all about words and phrases related to sexual and romantic comings-of-age, and the fact that they use such passive language. Here’s a few things that this sort of language implies to me:

  • Inevitablility. I don’t know where or when, but it’s pretty much certain that I will lose my favorite lip gloss. Apparently, your virginity is just as easy to misplace.
  • On that note, effortlessness. None of the above concepts imply any work on our part. But if getting kissed is what you’re after, sitting around with closed eyes and pursed lips won’t do much for you.
  • Lack of power. When love comes at you, you may be powerless to stop it. But when the same ideas apply to sex…we have a problem.

Maybe this all seems a little far-fetched. But welcome to my world of words.

...

Another interesting thing about these phrases is that they’re gender-neutral. I would expect in our double-standard-happy culture for women, delicate flowers that we are, to lose our virginity, while men ruggedly get to have sex for the first time. Apparently, we are all delicate flowers when it comes to this stuff. But in my opinion, we shouldn’t have to be.

She said it here.

To be honest, I think it would be far better if we could all say we got to have sex for the first time, and lose the whole “losing virginity” concept.

Because, seriously, in terms of coherent, thing-in-the-world-identifying language, if there was ever a thing that was only conceptual it would be the idea of having this thing called “virginity,” that referred to something you don’t have… that can be lost when you have the thing that makes it lost. (I’m sure, say, George Carlin could have put that more clearly. But he’d have made it funny too. And considering the mayhem the notion of virginity has caused both men and women over the last, oh, 6,000 years anyway, a sober analysis seems more appropriate.)

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Traditional-Biblical Law

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2008-12-10 18:24

Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos quotes a commenter on a DKos diarist.

[T]his comment by gladkov was particularly excellent. In short, if we are to let the Bible define what “traditional marriage” should look like, then our marriage laws should be amended as such:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

Follow the links from here.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Masterfully articulate Biblical conservatives have explained over and over how nothing in the Bible counts (the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t count, for instance, and certainly nothing in the sermon at the Last Supper, the Golden Rule, or Matthew 25:40) except the teensy fragments they say counts.

Lucky for them.

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Hymens, Hormones, and... Age

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2008-12-03 19:08

One more dismal thing about the whole virginity=bleeding+pain business.

According to a randomly-Googled Australian Government safe-sex site called of “I Stay Safe”

The thickness and elasticity of the hymen varies according to the level of oestrogen [spelled “estrogen” in American English —fl] (female hormones) in the body. Before puberty, the hymen does not have much stretch, so would usually be damaged if a large enough object passed through it. Once you go through puberty and start to develop oestrogen, the hymen becomes thickened and more elastic in nature. At this point it looks like a hair scrunchy. It will easily accommodate an object such as a tampon or penis and simply stretches out and back.

Read the quote in context here.

In other words the ancient tradition of expecting blood and, for that matter, innocence and inexperience on a woman’s wedding night probably has an uncomfortably large something to do with the also ancient (and still practiced in parts of the world today) tradition of marrying girls very young — at or soon after menarche, before normal adult estrogen levels are well established.

Eww.

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Discard or Discontinue Use If Seal is Broken

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2008-12-03 16:57

Referring to an article from nurse Carol Roy in Women’s eNews Megan of Jezebel raises two cool, cool points about what people really tend to mean when they say “virginity.”

Given how little most people know of what a hymen “ought” to look like — as though there’s only one way for it to look, which there isn’t — what exactly are these doctors reconstructing?

Roye notes, rightly, that a hymen is mostly known for its supposed effects, which is to say, the blood that is shed when a woman is first penetrated. Most people have never looked carefully at their own, let alone someone else’s, and don’t know what they are looking at. So when a doctor is supposedly reconstructing a hymen — which is as different on each woman as the rest of her external genitalia — he’s mostly making the geneialia into something that will bleed, and what people expect to see. In effect, doctors who perform the surgery are not only perpetuating the fetishization of virginity but actually constructing a new myth of what it’s supposed to look like and be.

She said it here.

Got that? People may not even know what an actual hymen is (for instance it’s amazing how many even otherwise well-written virginity-porn stories place hymens way deep inside the vagina instead of right at the vestebule) but they know what they want: pain and blood. Oh, and sometimes tightness. And never mind that they sometimes survive until childbirth or that they sometimes don’t exist at all. And really never mind that, in terms of physical sensation rather than novelty or scarcity value, for the male partner actual traditional first-time intercourse with a traditionally-passive virgin is generally more distracting than interesting**. Nope. People may not know what they want but they know what to expect! And now thanks to surgery they’ve got the technology to create it.

So that’s the physical side. Even more important though?

Roye is often asked by parents to examine their daughters and prove that they are still intact — though, under state law, she’s only allowed to answer if given permission by the teenager. The problem is that, if she can tell at all whether a hymen is intact or broken, she can’t tell whether it’s due to sexual intercourse or not. Those answers aren’t helpful to young women, or their parents, seeking some sort of yes or no without even knowing what they are asking the doctor to examine.

As someone who had sex for months with an intact hymen after losing my virginity, the larger point Roye wants to make rings the most true for me.

I believe that virginity is what the individual thinks it is. It certainly is for men, who bear no tell-tale signs of lost virginity.

The concept of virginity has an emotional connotation. It is more than just the physical disruption of hymenal tissue.

If a young woman has had a sexual relationship with her partner, and she feels that she has lost her virginity, then she has, regardless of what actually happened to her hymen during the encounter.

The problem with Roye’s logic, of course, is that it gives the woman agency over her body, her choices and her opinions. The kind of people that want their daughters’ or potential wives’ hymens parsed — or restored — want exactly the opposite.

Yup. That’s true too. One of the, um, peculiarities about the whole traditional virginity fetish is that it’s ultimately about male consumption and, consequently, about the commodity rather than human value of the unfortunate women who’s expected to preserve, maintain, and eventually surrender it — often under pressure first from her family, second from her prospective partner and (traditionally, anyway) his family — to whichever partner she chooses (if she’s fortunate enough to be born where her choice is relevant) or chosen for her.

Which, when you think about it, makes a prospective (male) partner who actually cares about such things… not much of a partner at all. A proprietor, sure. A “husband,” almost certainly. But a partner? I don’t think so. An insecure, proprietary oaf who can’t connect intimately on an equal basis with another human being as a human being? I’m afraid so.

Weird how virtually every anti-feminist assertion of male “superiority” boils down to an insistence that men must retain the emotional maturity of “but my peas are touching my mashed potatoes” three-year-olds… and an insistence that in order to preserve such “superior” immaturity women’s health, lives, autonomy, capacity for personal fulfillment, and even humanity must be sacrificed.

Um… thanks but no thanks.

—-

Quick note: Please don’t construe any of this post as dismissing the significance of anybody’s first time having sex. But as evidenced in Megan’s two points about surgery and disdain for women’s agency what I’m concerned about is the way virginity as a cultural fetish interferes with too many people’s first times.

[** I mean seriously! What kind of moron says “if I get a triple bypass I hope it’s the surgeon’s first time? Who says “I travel the globe searching for tennis partners who’ve *never played before?” Sure, you find people who seek mountains that have never been climbed, or plants that have never been described, but those tend to be a bit more unilateral experiences. —fl]

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Repealing the "Snot-Nosed Punk"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2008-11-28 13:06

Anastasia of Sexualité mentions what may (or may not) be a trend that’s getting way less attention than women auctioning their virginity on eBay.

Just as there are women auctioning their virtue, there are women that are paying professionals to be deflowered.

I can see the positives of paying a male escort for that very first time. If I recall all the sex surveys I’ve read over the years, the first time is a so-so event. Disasters outweigh the triumphs; the disappointment can be a shock, influencing one’s view of sex – until they have a better experience.

Professional sex workers are just that – professional. While paid sex may not compare to ordinary sex, it may be good for that first time. I think if you have a good first sexual experience, you’ll expect more of the same or have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. A crap experience is something else.

She said it here.

Growing up it was a bit of clicé for older men to deprecate the “fumblings” of “snot-nosed punks” when assessing… well… the asses of attractive young women. In favor, not surprisingly, of “old bulls” who “knew what they were doing.” Said snot-nosed punks were supposed to be taken to a brothel to be “broken in.” Nobody considered that, gee, maybe if young men weren’t supposed to be, or more often pretend to be “broken in,” and maybe if young women weren’t, or weren’t supposed to pretend to be passive and ignorant then maybe they could work out the details, you know, together!

Shocking I know. As Scarleteen’s Heather Corinna says, though, the benefits of mutual fumbling are terribly underrated — unless you think you have something to prove… and maybe if you don’t think it’s “supposed to hurt” then getting there together can be kind of fun. Not to mention a whole lot more egalitarian.

But still, if collaboration between equals is one way to take control of a situation tradition says should be the domain of men then, perhaps ironically, yeah, hiring someone you’re confident can be competent and (at least professionally) courteous would be another.

[Note: I object so strongly to the current construction of transactional sex as currently constructed not because it’s selling sex — I don’t have a problem with that — but because it’s so unilaterally gendered: men desiring sex, women desiring compensation. See also The Oldest Profession Nobody Wanted. Therefore the idea of some women preferring to hire sex professionals not just to “break them in” but because they themselves would be more likely to enjoy it seems like a qualitative rather than quantitative development. (See also the last chapter of Pepper Schwartz’s Prime. —fl]

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