I love me some Debauchette. She’s got a post that’s just dear to my heart. (Italics mine.)

I just read this: A man should always give a woman an orgasm before he lets her please him. Nice sentiment, but it bothers the hell out of me.

There are plenty of things about that sentence that make me uncomfortable, but I’m especially hung up on this word “give.” I don’t think orgasms can be given. Maybe other people feel differently, but to me, they’re more alchemy than entity.

I think that sentence bothers me because it puts the responsibility on men to make that orgasm happen, to “give” it (and it suggests that it’s theirs to give), when it’s also a matter of being physically sensitive, responsive, and receptive as a woman. It makes me think of the men I’ve been with who seemed so stressed at the prospect of sex; they approached my pussy like they were defusing a bomb. I think we tend to do that generally, as a culture, teach men to think that our pussies are dormant and dependent on their fingerwork and/or cockplay to come alive. Which I don’t want to downplay — my sexual world revolves around those cocks and those hands, and wrists and forearms, and… mm. But I imagine that we shift the responsibility to men because we encourage women to be sheltered from sexual knowledge, something I strongly disagree with. It does nothing for communication between the sexes when one is supposed to know everything and the other is supposed to remain ignorant.

Read the quote in context here.

I totally get what motivated the whole “she comes first” movement (previously it was something more like “she comes at all? eww!“ so it was a big step up)I don’t think I became a considerate lover, or really even a good one, till I figured that orgasms, let alone what happens after “consent,” wasn’t all up to me. Or, ahem, all about me.

She also highlights the other sour note in that “he gives first” philosophy.

Another thing I don’t like about that sentence up there? The idea that sex is just a sequence of acts or, worse, a bartering system where perfectly good sex acts are reduced to tit for tat (unless you’re doing some hot secretary/boss roleplay). The best sex I’ve had has never been a sequence of anything. Just a deeply satisfying, bruising blur of motion.

Sure, “give her an orgasm first” sounds nicer than, say, “give her 50 bucks before you let her…” or “give her a ring before you let her…” but it’s still kind of transactional that way.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with transactional sex, but it’s kind of gotta be an agreement from both parties, and that “give her an orgasm before letting her pleasure you” sounds awfully unilateral. Not to mention all about him. Which would be fine if he was a fucking customer, or if women really were supposed to be up there on pedestals passively waiting for men to bring them stuff but…

You’d think sex was a lot more intimate than, say, car-pooling but I don’t really remember anyone saying “you give a carpool buddy a ride before you let them give you one.” And it’s because with something like car-pooling you’re really being partners — you’re taking care of each other.

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Nerd digression: Ya know, if I was a sociologist or cultural anthropologist I think it would be interesting to investigate whether or what kind of cross-pollination there might have been between the post-1980s devolution of top-down, hierarchical business industrial organizational models into more “bubble up” team-focused tech-style models on the one hand and the emergence of post-80s agency-based models of sex and intimacy? I’m definitely not saying one derives from the other, just that it’s interesting that both developed around the same time and I’m wondering how much of a coincidence it might be.

I’m not bringing that up to be completely random (as the one-time flat-hierarchy/small-group-organization advocate Bill Gates used to say) but because when I gave up my own “heirarchical” model of sex I discovered that two contributors bring way more creativity to a relationship than just one can.

And speaking of that (and perhaps speaking also of the strong responses disputing the imagined decline of sex writing) Scott Adams had something interesting, and apropos, to say about creativity today at Dilbert.com Blog

Recently I was asked if human creativity is nearing its limits. It seems as if every idea has already been done. Regular readers of this blog know that every time I describe what I think is a new idea, someone provides a link to an earlier description of the same idea.

I don’t think creativity is coming to an end. I think creativity is increasing at an increasing rate, and always will.

Creativity is generally a combination of existing ideas. If there were only two concepts in the universe, creativity would be “What happens if we put them together?” If you add a third and fourth concept to the universe, the number of creative combinations shoots up.

The Internet allows you to check the originality of your idea quickly, so it sometimes seems that all the good ideas have been taken. But the Internet also seeds us with many more concepts than we would otherwise be exposed to.

It’s pretty inspiring, especially in these doomy, gloomy times. Read the rest here.

Just saying