Greta Christina's Blog

Sex, Spontaneity, and the "Swept Away" Myth

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

So why is the myth of sexual spontaneity so damaging?

I know. I've written about this before. Buy why else?

I've written before about the myth of sexual spontaneity: the myth that, for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately. I've written about how unrealistic the myth is, how poorly it fits into the reality of many people's sex lives; I've written about the narrow and limiting definition of sexual desire it creates.

But I've been thinking lately about another -- and in many ways more serious -- problem with the myth of sexual spontaneity.

And that's that it contributes to the idea that sex is dirty and bad... and thus makes people feel like sex is only okay if they don't take responsibility for it.

A lot of other feminists have talked about this: the myth of being "swept away." It's the myth that sexual desire should overpower you with blinding passion -- and that if it doesn't, if you plan for it, that's somehow cold and calculating and missing the point. And it's a myth that fucks up sex lives from beginning to end. It keeps teenagers from using birth control. It keeps people from talking with their partners about what they like and don't like in bed. It keeps people from educating themselves about sex, on the grounds that it should be "natural." It keeps long-term couples from making dates for sex.

And I would argue -- as many feminists have argued before me -- that the "swept away" myth essentially comes from the idea that sex is bad.

Let's look at another primal animal desire, one that we don't have as much negative baggage about. Let's take the desire to eat. We don't think that eating a meal is somehow diminished by planning for it; that eating is only true and beautiful if the desire strikes us out of the blue and we act on it at once. Sure, we'll stop and buy funnel cake if we smell it at a street fair... but we also buy groceries a week in advance, and make reservations for busy restaurants, and think in the morning or afternoon about what we might want for dinner, and make careful plans for special, festive meals.

Why?

Because we basically think that eating is okay. We have some complicated and messed-up feelings about food in our culture, sure; but most of us accept that food is a necessary and valuable part of life. We don't think there's anything wrong with planning a meal... because we don't think there's anything wrong with eating one.

But that's patently not the case with sex. Our culture tends to see sex, either as a sin that we must resist, or as a selfish luxury we can do without. We don't see it as a necessity, and we definitely don't see it as a central and valuable part of the human experience.

And yet -- obviously -- we still want it.

Which is where the "swept away" myth comes in. The "swept away" myth lets us have sex, while pretending to ourselves and everybody else that we didn't really want it, and didn't consciously choose it, and can't be blamed for it.

It's essentially a way of abdicating responsibility for sex. It's a way of convincing yourself that you didn't really choose this. You were overwhelmed by passion, by an animal urge or emotional flood that couldn't be controlled. You couldn't help it. It wasn't your fault.

It's like fantasies about bondage or rape: fantasies that, for many folks, let them enjoy sex, or enjoy thinking about sex, while still feeling like it's against their will and they're not responsible for it. Now, there's not a damn thing wrong with these fantasies. There's not even anything wrong with acting these fantasies out. But it's no way to live your entire sex life. (Unless you're into the 24/7 dom/sub thing... and even that takes a lot of thought and conscious choice, more even than most sex lives.) It's not grownup. It's not responsible.

And ultimately, it's not even that much fun. The "swept away" myth of spontaneity seriously limits your opportunities to learn about sex; to learn more about your partners desires and your own; to expand your sexual repertoire. It limits the kinds of sex you can have: if planning for sex ruins it, that pretty much rules out the acquisition of sex toys. Not to mention sex education materials, or smut, or birth control. And -- especially if your life is stressful and overbooked, or you're getting older and the spontaneous urge to boff is diminishing -- it limits your sex life in the most blunt and obvious way... namely, how often you have it.

And maybe more importantly, the "swept away" myth feeds the monster of sex-negativity. It feeds the monster in our culture and in all of us that says that sex is a sin, and that while letting yourself be overcome with lust might be forgivable, consciously choosing to make room for it in your life makes you guilty of first- degree sex. With premeditation and passion aforethought.

I actually have nothing against spontaneous sex. I love spontaneous sex. Being overwhelmed with lust, blowing off your dinner reservations because your lover's ass has suddenly become way more important... that's lovely. It's like an adventure, like riding a rollercoaster. It lets you feel like your entire life isn't being measured out in coffee spoons; like you still have the capacity to surprise yourself, and to be surprised.

My problem isn't with spontaneous sex. It's with the myth of spontaneous sex. It's with the idea that spontaneous sex is the best sex, the sex we should all be having all the time, the only sex that counts. As one kind of sex among many, spontaneous sex is great. But as The One True Sex, it severely limits your sexual options. And it feeds into the monstrous idea that making sex a priority makes you a bad person.

So buy a vibrator. Make a sex date. Have a conversation with your partner about sexual things you might like to do. Call San Francisco Sex Information, and ask them a question you have about sex. Read a book about a kind of sex you're curious about. Do something that says, "Sex is a priority for me, and I am making a conscious choice that will shape what my sex life looks like."

And let's starve the monster together.

Sex, Moods, and a Wife's Selfless Duty: And We Are in What Century Again?

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

The fascinating thing is this.

There's this.... thing on the Internet. A pair of columns by conservative writer/ radio host Dennis Prager, exhorting wives who aren't in the mood for sex with their husbands to suck it up and do it anyway, pretty much whenever he wants. You really have to read it for yourself (if you have high blood pressure, be sure you've taken your medication first), but here's the gist:

A man know that his wife loves him by "her willingness to give her body to him." Therefore, she should only rarely refuse to have sex with him when he wants it. And her decision to accept or refuse sex should have nothing to do with whether she's in the mood for it, or whether she thinks she's going to enjoy it. A considerate husband will of course recognize that "there are times when a man must simply refrain from initiating sex out of concern for his wife's physical or emotional condition"... but apart from "those times," a wife should pretty much never say "No." And her mood should have nothing to do with that decision. Sex is an obligation that a wife owes to her husband, and for a wife to refuse it simply because she's not in the mood is just plain selfish. (Oh, and by the way: This isn't just how nature made us. It's how God wants it.)

No, really. I'm serious. It'd be laughable if it weren't so appalling. I could scarcely believe it was written in this decade. It reads like a marriage manual from the '50s... and not a very modern marriage manual from the '50s at that. It almost makes me want to call parody on it and invoke a sexual version of Poe's Law ("it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that can't be mistaken for the real thing").

But the fascinating thing is this.

If you take out all the content about gender roles?

If you take out all the sexist, retrograde, "sex is an obligation that women owe to men," "women's sexual desires are less important than men's," "close your eyes and think of England," Total Woman dreck? If you leave out the creepy, oft-repeated language about a woman "giving her body"? If you disregard the bizarre assumption that sex is always something men initiate and women either accept or reject? If you ignore the unsubstantiated at best, blatantly wrong at worst assertions about women's and men's sexualities... including the assertion that experiencing sex as a sign of love is somehow exclusive to men? If you overlook the idea that sex with a passive, compliant meat puppet will make men feel loved and satisfied? If you pass over the glaring omissions... such as the idea that men have an obligation to pay attention to women's sexual pleasure, and if women are repeatedly saying "No" to sex, maybe it's because their men are inconsiderate lovers who treat sex as something women do for them, instead of something they both do for each other?

If you can squint real hard and somehow ignore all that?

What he's saying is not radically different from stuff I've said in this very blog.

I, myself, have argued that you don't always need to be in the mood when you start sex. You just need to be willing to be in the mood. If you always wait until you're both in the mood -- especially if either or both of you are stressed, getting older, parents, a couple who's been together for a while, or just insanely busy -- you may wait a good long while, and will wind up having a lot less sex than either of you wants. But starting to have sex can get you in the mood, even if you weren't in the mood to start with. It's a good idea sometimes to let yourself be seduced, to start having sex before you're in the mood and let yourself get drawn in it as you go.

I've even argued -- very controversially -- that if a person unilaterally and permanently refuses sex to their partner without being willing to discuss or negotiate it, it is not automatically the worst moral choice for that partner to seek out sex elsewhere. An argument that was based on the idea that sex -- not sex on demand whenever and however you want it, but some amount of some kind of sex -- is one of the things we have a right to expect in a romantic relationship. (And no, I don't want to start that argument again. Please, for the sweet love of Loki, let's not start that argument again.)

And I certainly wouldn't argue with the proposition that sex is one of the main ways that people in a relationship feel loved. Like, duh.

But what on earth does any of that have to do with gender?

What on earth does it have to do with what men want, and what women should do about it?

If you spend even a cursory amount of time reading sex educators, sex therapists, sex advice columns, etc., a glaringly obvious pattern will jump out and smack you across the face. The pattern is this: A lot of couples have significant differences in how often they like to have sex... differences that can cause serious problems in their relationship.

And that pattern has little or nothing to do with gender.

Lesbian couples can have significant differences in how often they like to have sex. Gay male couples. Couples where one or both partners are trans or unconventionally gendered. People in triads and other non-coupled relationships.

And opposite sex couples can certainly have significant differences in how often they like to have sex... differences that most definitely cut across gender lines. In hetero couples with differing libidos, sometimes it's the man who wants it more often -- and sometimes, it's the woman. Pretty often, it's the woman.

It's certainly possible that, on average, men tend to want sex more often than women. (I haven't seen any good research on this one way or the other... but it wouldn't shock me.) But even if that's true, it's hardly a universal rule. Plenty of women want sex more often than their male partners. In fact, a disturbing number of these women have had the crummy experience of being insulted, mocked, and rejected by their male partners for their high libidos.

So I ask again: What's gender got to do with it? Why was this framed as a salvo in the battle of the sexes?

Let's try an experiment. Let's take the gender stuff out of this piece of advice, and see what happens.

Here's what you get when you take the gender stuff out. Sex is one of the important ways that people in a relationship feel good about themselves and know that they're loved. Sex is an important part of a romantic relationship, and people have a right to expect it. Often, however, people in relationships have differences in how often they want sex. These differences need to be worked out, since they can cause real problems in the relationship, including the problem of one or both partners not feeling accepted and loved. That working-out may involve a reasonably happy-medium compromise, in which one partner winds up having sex somewhat more often than they'd normally be inclined to, and the other winds up having it somewhat less. (It can involve other solutions as well, such as non-monogamy or redefining what you think of as sex... but let's stay on topic, just this once.) And if you always wait until you're in the mood to have sex, you may end up having sex a lot less often than either of you wants, and a lot less often than is good for your relationship. You don't always have to be in the mood; you just have to be willing to get into the mood.

See? That wasn't so hard, was it?

But when you put all that gender stuff in? When you make this about women's sexual responsibilities to men, instead of people's sexual responsibilities to their partners?

It's not just wrong. It's not even just sexist. It taps into a toxic mythology that made people miserable and ruined relationships and marriages, for decades and indeed centuries. It is a revival of a sexual system that was demeaning and depressing for both women and men: a system in which women's sexual pleasure was considered trivial at best and non-existent at worst, in which sex was a service women were expected to provide for men on demand without concern for their own desires, in which women's bodies were a commodity that men were entitled to and women were obligated to "give." It is a form of relationship between men and women that our society has largely been rejecting... and with good reason.

And that's the real tragedy of this sorry piece of writing: It didn't have to be this way. There was a germ of a good idea buried in the toxic waste: a germ of an idea about how, in sex as much as in the rest of your life, you have to look after your partner's needs as well as your own; to be willing to be flexible and accommodating; to not let your moods control how you treat each other; to take pains to make sure your partner knows they're loved.

But the toxic waste was so overpowering that it makes me seriously question whether the germ of a good idea was really what Prager cared about. It makes me seriously question whether his crucial issue was "men need to know that they're loved"... or whether, instead, it was "women need to know their place."

Sexual Freedom In A Shopping Bag: “Sex And The City”: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It's a review of the new "Sex and the City" movie... if by "review" you mean "vituperative tongue- lashing of the movie's retrograde attitudes towards sex." It's called Sexual Freedom in a Shopping Bag: "Sex and the City," and here's the teaser:

I should tell you right now: I am not a fan of the show. At all. I’ve seen roughly a dozen episodes, and every one made me want to throw the remote through the TV screen. So I did not come to this movie with the proper, unbiased film- critic attitude. I came thoroughly prepared to despise it and everything it stood for.

But I've come to movies before with that attitude, and have found myself pleasantly surprised.

Not this time.

And so we come to the problem at hand. The attitudes about sex in the "Sex and the City" movie are deeply conventional, as facile and unimaginative as anything else in the movie... and yet it presents itself, in this smug, self-congratulatory way, as an example of brave, ground- breaking, "I am woman watch me fuck" sex- positivity for the modern age. It offers glib platitudes as if they were profound insights, and its approach to sex is as consumerist and status- oriented as its approach to... well, everything.

To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Multiple Marriage and the Texas Polygamy Case: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog, about the Texas polygamy case. At first I didn't think I was going to write about it, since I didn't think I had anything original to say about it. (Pretty much what I had to say about it was, "Oh, my god, that is so awful.") But then someone asked me what I thought of the question of legalizing multiple marriage -- in general, as well as in light of the polygamy cults -- and I decided to write this piece. It's called, somewhat unimaginatively, Multiple Marriage and the Texas Polygamy Case, and here's the teaser:

One of the main objections to legalizing multiple marriage is that, in the world as it is today, multiple marriages tend to be abusive. Groovy polyamorous triads aren't the norm, the argument goes. The norm for multiple marriage, in this country and around the world, is coercive and abusive religious cults that effectively imprison women and children. And if we don't have laws against multiple marriage, these abusive cults will be legitimized, and there will no protection for their victims.

I’m not sure whether that's true or not. I don't know if anyone has ever done a good, careful study on the frequency of multiple relationships, either in this country or around the world, to see if the coerced cult variety really does outnumber the consensual free-adult variety. If there has been such a study, I haven't seen it.

But here's the point I want to make.

When the Texas polygamy compound got raided and arrests were made, nobody was charged with bigamy.

The charges so far have all been related to child abuse. And the case seems to be largely in the hands of Child Protective Services.

So how does the illegality of multiple marriage help the victims of these situations?

To read more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

A question was raised recently on the Denialism science blog, and it has all sorts of interesting implications about sexual trust between men and women.

The question: Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?

My knee-jerk response to this question has always pretty much been, "Because the pharmaceutical industry are a bunch of sexist pigs." But this post -- and the fascinating discussion that follows -- is making me realize that the question is actually a tad more complicated than that.

For starters, it turns out that there are genuine biological reasons why a pill for men is trickier than a pill for women. What with our reproductive systems being different and all.

But that doesn't seem to be the main obstacle. The main obstacle to a male pill seems to be that there simply might not be a big enough market for it.

Which, in all fairness, I can understand.

Because this isn't simply a question of sexist men dumping the responsibility for birth control onto women. It's a question of whether women would be willing to place the responsibility for birth control into the hands of men.

Or, as Mark Hoofnagle put it in his Denialism post: "Men are liars."

A bit harsh, but I can see his point.

(And yes, women are liars too. I'll get to that in a moment.)

If I were in a trusting, long-term relationship with a man, I might be willing to let him take care of the birth control. But if I were just dating and screwing around, the way I used to in my younger days, there'd be no way I'd trust some guy I'd just met at a party or a nightclub or an orgy, who told me, "Don't worry, baby, I'm on the pill." That's way too big a gamble to leave in the hands of someone I barely know.

Besides, I'd want to use condoms anyway -- since the pill doesn't protect against AIDS or other STIs.

But for exactly this same reason, I think Mark at Denialism may be mistaken. I think there might be a real market for a male contraceptive pill.

And it comes back to my earlier parenthetical remark:

Women are liars, too.

If I were a single guy, dating and screwing around, I wouldn't want to leave the contraception question in the hands of some woman I'd just met, either. I mean, think about it. If, as a woman, I wouldn't trust some strange guy who told me, "Don't worry, baby, I'm on the pill" -- then why on earth should men trust some strange woman to tell them the same thing? The consequences for men of an unwanted pregnancy aren't as intense as they are for women... but they're not negligible. (Can you say, "child support"?)

And I think that might point to the real market for the male pill. (Or patch, or injection, or however the drug winds up getting delivered.)

Mark thinks that, even if pharmaceutical researchers could make it effective, male hormonal contraception will always be a niche market, mainly limited to men in committed long-term relationships with women who trust them enough to leave the contraception in their hands. But while I can see his point, I think he may be overlooking another key market: the market of single men who want control of their own damn reproduction, just as much as women do. I think the biggest market for the male pill might well be single men who want the moral equivalent of a temporary vasectomy: a way to guarantee that they won't get stuck with offspring they didn't expect or want.

In other words -- single men who would want the pill for the exact same reasons single women want it.

The reality is that both women and men have sex with people they don't entirely trust. They have sex with people they trust enough: people they trust not to beat them up, not to steal their car, not to paint their living room hot pink while they sleep. But both women and men have sex with people who they don't trust enough to let them handle the responsibility, and make the decisions, about pregnancy and children. I think plenty of men would be happy to take a pill to ensure that their decisions about pregnancy and children weren’t being made by the hot number they met on Craig's List three weeks ago.

If I were a single man, I'd sure as hell want that.

Carnivals: Godless and Feminists

Carnival of the Godless #83 is up at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. My pieces in this Carnival: The 100% Solution: On Uncertainty, And Why It Doesn't Matter So Much, and What's the Harm in a Little Woo? My favorite other piece in this Carnival: The Religious Right vs. Young People at Letters from a Broad.

And Carnival of Feminists #52 is up at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique. My piece in this Carnival: All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Porn -- Or Not. My favorite other piece in this Carnival: High School, Hair Color and Choices, at Me, My Kid and Life.

If you blog about godlessness or feminism and want to participate in the Carnivals, here are the submission forms for the Carnival of the Godless and the Carnival of the Feminists. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog, a rethinking about the science, the economics, and the gender politics of the question, "Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?" The piece is titled, Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill, and here's the teaser:

The reality is that both women and men have sex with people they don’t entirely trust. They have sex with people they trust enough: people they trust not to beat them up, not to steal their car, not to paint their living room hot pink while they sleep. But both women and men have sex with people who they don’t trust enough to let them handle the responsibility, and make the decisions, about pregnancy and children. I think plenty of men would be happy to take a pill to ensure that their decisions about pregnancy and children weren’t being made by the hot number they met on Craig’s List three weeks ago.

If I were a single man, I’d sure as hell want that.

To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From Porn -- Or Not

This piece originally appeared on the Blowfish Blog.

Porn is not sex education.

I'll say it again: Porn is not sex education.

I'm saying this to everyone who's reading this. But I'm especially saying it to parents: Porn is not sex education. So you need to make sure your kids are getting actual sex education. Because if you don't, then all they really need to know about sex they'll learn from porn -- and they're going to get it completely wrong.

This came up because of a piece I heard on the NPR radio show, "This American Life." The program was on the topic of "talking to kids," and it had a whole segment on talking to kids and teenagers about sex. The entire segment was excellent... but the part that jumped out at me was the teenagers saying that they didn't have good information about sex. Specifically, they didn't have good information about the actual mechanics of sex, what goes where and how.

And so they looked at porn.

And I didn't know whether to vomit, throw things, or cry.

It wasn't just the appalling state of sex education in our country that made me want to cry. Although that was a big part of it. The sex education these kids are getting from their schools is pathetic and insulting, and they know it.

No, what was really making me want to throw bricks through windows was that these teenagers were getting their sex education from porn... and I know, in great and vivid detail from the many years I've been watching porn, exactly how lousy that education will be.

Here is a very short list of things that people will get grotesquely wrong if they get their sex education from porn.

What women's genitals look like. This is a biggie. If you're looking at porn video to satisfy your curiosity about what a pussy looks like -- well, standards of female beauty in porn are almost as rigid with pussies as they are with basic body types, and female genital cosmetic surgery in the porn industry is getting increasingly and depressingly common.

What male genitals look like. Another biggie -- literally. Every time I read a letter to a sex advice columnist from a guy complaining that his dick is pathetically small -- not like the guys in the porn videos -- I want to scream and bite people. Male porn actors are specifically selected for their large genitalia. They are not a statistically representative sampling. Statistically speaking, they represent the far, far end of the bell curve.

The realities of female sexual response. This may be the worst offender of the bunch. There's already enough ignorance about what gives women sexual pleasure and what gets us off, without "porn as sex ed" adding to the mix. Look, I have no doubt that there are some women out there who don't need foreplay, get very aroused by giving blowjobs, have intense multiple orgasms from intercourse alone, and couldn't care less if you touched their clit. But if that's how you're trying to get a woman off, you're really not playing the percentages. Trust me on this.

The realities of male sexual response. If you're getting your sex education from porn, you're going to think that it's normal for men to get rock-hard immediately, at will, and to stay rock-hard throughout the encounter until they come. You won't necessarily know that (a) male porn actors are specifically selected for their ability to get wood and keep it; and (b) the omnipresence of wood in porn videos is due in large part to the miracle of video editing (and more recently to the miracle of Viagra).

To round it all off, we have the actual mechanics; the "What happens during sex?" stuff that the teenagers in the NPR story were desperately looking for. The sex in porn videos is choreographed to give a clear, unobstructed view of the penetration. It's choreographed to look good -- not to feel good. I shudder to think of a generation coming into their sexual prime thinking that reverse cowgirl and that stupid position where the woman sticks her leg up on the wall are the gold standard of the sexual nuts and bolts.

And all of that is just the tip of the sexual misinformation iceberg.

So I want to say a few things to parents:

1. Sex education in our country is in an appalling state. It has huge holes in it at best, and dispenses gross misinformation at worst.

2. If you think your kids aren't seeing porn, think again. Even before the Internet, kids and teenagers were looking at porn. (How many of us swiped our dad's Playboys for a peek? I sure did.) And with the Internet, the horse is definitely out of the barn

So do something. If you're not comfortable talking frankly with your kids about sex yourself -- and I have more sympathy for that position than you might imagine, I sure didn't want to talk with my parents about sex -- you need to make sure they have a way to get the information they want and need. Get them books. Point them at the Scarleteen or San Francisco Sex Information websites. Send them to the sex education programs offered by the Unitarians. Make sure there's an adult in their life they can talk about sex with. Or suck it up, get over your discomfort, and talk to them yourself.

But for the love of all that is beautiful in this world, do not let them grow up thinking that they can get accurate, useful sex information from porn. They can -- once they're adults, of course -- use porn to get entertainment, inspiration, arousal, even some interesting new ideas. But the sex information they'll get from porn will be, if possible, even more useless and misleading than the sex information they're getting from their schools.

Carnivals: Godless #81 and Feminists #50

Blog carnival time!

Carnival of the Godless #81 is up at Unscrewing the inscrutable. My pieces in this edition: Atheist Funerals, and How Sweet the Sound: Atheism and Religious Music. My favorite other piece in this Carnival: Christmas Hermeneutics at Ooblog, a hilariously dry piece on the Santaist/ parentist debates, and why radical asantasists are "addressing a naive conception of Santa Claus."

Also, Carnival of Feminists #50 is up at The Jaded Hippy.

If you're a godless or a feminist blogger and want to participate in these Carnivals, here are the submission forms for the Carnival of the Godless and the Carnival of Feminists. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Carnival of Feminists #49 and Skeptic's Circle #75

Carnival of Feminists #49 is up at Days in a wannabe punk's life.

Skeptic's Circle #75 is up at Pro-Science.

If you're a feminist or skeptical blogger, and want to submit a blog post to one of these carnivals/ circles, here are the submission forms for the Carnival of Feminists and Skeptic's Circle. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Carnivals and Circles: Liberals, Feminists, and Skeptics

I missed putting these up when I was away on vacation. Sorry!

Carnival of The Liberals #52 at Yikes!

Carnival of Feminists #48 at Feminist Fire

Skeptic's Circle #74 at Med Journal Watch

If you're a liberal, feminist, or skeptical blogger, and want to submit a blog post to one of these carnivals/ circles, here are the submission forms for the Carnival of The Liberals, Carnival of Feminists, and Skeptic's Circle. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

Carnivals: Godless, Feminists, and Pozitivities

Blog carnivals!

Carnival of the Godless #79 is up at Aardvarchaeology. My pieces this time: How Can You Have Meaning Without... ? and The Meaning of Death: Part One of Many. My favorite other posts in this Carnival: Why I Am an Optimist by Franklin, on why he finds atheism to be a more optimistic philosophy than theism; Religious Privilege: How Religion, Religious Groups, and Beliefs are Privileged from Austin Cline at About.com; and The Night I Stopped Believing by Susie Bright. This is, I believe, Susie's first entry into the Carnival, so go say hi and make her feel welcome.

Carnival of Feminists #47 is up at Ornamenting Away. I don't have any pieces in this carnival, but it still manages to be a good carnival nevertheless. My favorite piece: The Rule, by Natasha at Homo Academicus, on Alison Bechdel's Movie Rule ("1. There must be two or more women in it; 2. Who talk to each other; 3. About something other than a man") and how it applies to Pixar films.

And the International Carnival of Pozitivities is up at Slimconomy. This is the first time I've been in this carnival, a carnival devoted to HIV and AIDS, and I'm pleased and honored to be part of it with my piece Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance. My favorite other piece in this carnival: HIV/AIDS: The Brazilian Response at The AIDS Pandemic. Happy reading, everybody!

Blog Carnivals: Liberals, Feminists, and Skeptics

Carnival time! Carnival of the Liberals #50 is up at That Is So Queer. Faith has done a lovely Edgar Allen Poe theme for this Carnival. And I'm extra excited this time: Carnival of the Liberals is a selective carnival, they only pick the ten best submissions for each roundup... and this time I have not one but two pieces in it! Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance, and Atheists and Anger! They like me, they really like me! My favorite other piece in this carnival: I Write Letters by Melissa McEwan at Shakespeare's Sister, on how slamming Ann Coulter for her looks makes you no better than she is.

Carnival of Feminists #46 is up at Cubically Challenged. My piece this time: Male Dom Female Sub, from the Blowfish Blog. My favorite other piece in this carnival: In Search of My Rhetorical Penis by Grrlscientist at Living the Scientific Life (a blog I clearly need to check out more), on why female science bloggers get overlooked.

And Skeptic's Circle #72 is up at Quackometer. I'm not in the circle this time around, but it's a good blog carnival nonetheless. My favorite piece: Holford Watch, on why newspapers only print "miracle cure" stories and not "negative findings."

If you're a liberal, feminist, or skeptic blogger and want to be in an upcoming Carnival, here are submission guidelines and info for the Carnival of the Liberals, Carnival of Feminists, and Skeptic's Circle. Happy reading, and happy blogging!

She Blogs Carnival #1

There's a new blog carnival in town: She Blogs, Issue #1. Unlike most carnivals, it's not devoted to one particular topic; instead, it's devoted to blogging by women on all topics, making it more like a general-interest magazine a la the New Yorker, rather than a special interest magazine like The Nation or The Skeptical Inquirer. They were kind enough to include my piece The Catholic Church: Pedophilia as a First Amendment Right, so many thanks for that.

If you're a female blogger and want to participate in the She Blogs Carnival, here's their submission form. Happy blogging!

Carnivals: Feminists and Liberals

Carnival of Feminists #45 is up at Feminist Philosophers.

And this slipped through the cracks while I was on vacation: Carnival of the Liberals #47 is up at Plural Politics. I didn't get in the Big Ten this time, but they were kind enough to include my piece Is Atheism What Makes Happy Atheists Happy? as an Honorable Mention.

If you're a feminist blogger and want to get in on the Carnival of Feminists, here's their submission form. If you're a liberal blogger who wants to submit a post to the Carnival of the Liberals, here's the submission form for them. Happy blogging!

Carnival of Feminists #44

Carnival of Feminists #44 is up at Reproductive Rights Blog,

Blog Carnivals: Feminists, Liberals, and Humanists

It's blog carnival time!

Carnival of the Liberals #45 is up at The Greenbelt. They included my piece on the Blowfish Blog, Right Wing Hypocrisy, or Why Sex Guilt Fucks Things Up For Everyone, which makes me really happy since I think that's one of the better pieces I've written of late. Carnival of the Liberals is a very selective carnival: they only include ten posts per issue, so I'm always extra-happy and honored to be included. And they illustrated the posts with cute pictures of dogs in birthday hats, so that's a good time right there.

Carnival of the Feminists #43 is up at Femtique. They included my feminist rant on The Devil Wears Prada and its fucked-up view of professionalism in women, so thanks for that.

And The Humanist Symposium #6 is up at A Load of Bright, with its usual excellent collection of positive atheist blogging. I didn't get a piece in this time -- I've been Miss Negative Cranky-Pants lately when it comes to the atheist blogging -- but if you want written proof that atheists have more to say about atheism than just complaining about religion, be sure to check it out. Ta!

Playing the Race Card: Candida Royalle's "Caribbean Heat"

This piece was originally published by Adult FriendFinder magazine in 2005.

Playing the Race Card:
Caribbean Heat

Produced by Candida Royalle. Directed by Manuela Sabrosa. Starring Felinia, Nicole, Susan, Paola, Yinna, Sol, Max, Spider, Bruce, Danny Boy, Red Phoenix, and Adrian. 84 minutes. Femme Productions.

First, let me ask you this: Have you seen any of Candida Royalle's movies before?

If you haven't, let me explain real quick. Candida Royalle was the first smut producer to make movies specifically for women, and she pretty much single-handedly invented the "couples" video. Her company, Femme Productions, makes videos aimed at what women want to see in dirty movies: compared to most mainstream pornos, they feature more foreplay, a slower and more sensual pace, less focus on genitals and insertion shots, more full-body sensuality, better production values, greater variety in body types, more plot and character development, an emphasis on sex in the context of relationships and romance, greater attention to the woman's experience and pleasure, fewer money shots, and better-looking men. Much, much better-looking men. Candida's work has been hugely influential on the porno industry: her success made other producers realize, not only that straight couples liked to rent dirty movies, but that both women and men were hungry for passionate, labor-of-love porn with good production values and not-completely-stupid writing and acting.

Although I usually prefer my pornos to have lots of raunchy sex and not much plot, I've always been fond of Candida's movies. She does a great job of conveying the unique pleasure of sex with someone you actually love and care about, something most dirty movies don't even get close to. And even if the sex in her videos isn't usually my favorite type to watch, her work does a beautiful job of expressing passion and enthusiasm, getting across what the characters are feeling and why they're enjoying it... which automatically makes it hot. (That's often true in porn, video or written or whatever -- if you get a good strong sense of the characters' excitement, it doesn't necessarily matter whether the kink they're enjoying is your personal fave.) I'm always happy to watch Candida's videos, and I'm always curious to see what she'll do next.

So anyway. Candida Royalle has a new-ish video out, "Caribbean Heat." Now, this one Candida didn't actually direct. She produced it, and supervised the direction; but unlike every other movie Femme has made, this one was directed by someone else: a new female director, Manuela Sabrosa.

And Candida's absence does show. I liked "Caribbean Heat" a fair amount, but I didn't wildly adore it, and I don't think it's one of Femme's stronger efforts. It does have many of the company's usual good points: a patient pace, a relative dearth of cum shots, attention to female pleasure in general and foreplay in particular, women who don't look like Barbie dolls, and some seriously fine-looking men. But it has some weaknesses that are unusual for a Femme production. The editing is often awkward and choppy, with oddly abrupt jumps that skip over some nice bits and generally interrupt the erotic flow. There's an odd lack of focus and direction; there's no clear sense of mounting excitement and passion, and while the performers' pleasure is visible, it's not particularly infectious. And the format (five separate, unconnected vignettes) means that one of the things I like best about Femme videos -- namely, a reasonably well-written story sustained long enough to get me caring about the characters and their sex lives -- is completely absent from this one.

More to the point, the sex didn't really wind me up that much -- although to be fair, that's largely a matter of taste rather than actual artistic failure. The sex in "Caribbean Heat" is sweet rather than fierce, gentle rather than intense, romantic rather than passionate. This is often the case with Candida's movies, but it's even more so in this one. Even the "casual sex with strangers" fantasies are more romantic than they are nasty. And even the supposedly kinky scene -- the master and maid one, with the leash and the cage and the riding crop -- is quite gentle overall, with the actual kinky elements getting very minimal play. The pacing adds to this quality as well: instead of insistently building a driving tension towards an intense release, the sex scenes feel more like rolling hills of sensuality, with arousal rising and falling in gentle waves. I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing; for porn viewers who are sick of being pounded like a jackhammer by conventional smut videos, it may be a positive blessing. It's just not my style. (As anyone who's been regularly reading this column knows, it's really, really not my style.)

But "Caribbean Heat" does have something good going for it: something very special, almost unique, a trump card that all by itself makes the video worth checking out.

That trump card is race.

Here's the thing. Virtually all contemporary porn videos fall into one of two categories. The vast majority of them are white as the driven snow: their performers are 100% lily white, with not even a single person of color onscreen to upset the delicate sensibilities of the porn-watching public. And the ones that aren't all-white tend to be racial fetish videos: nasty black women with big booties, fiery Latina tamales, mysterious and submissive Asian ladies, hugely hung black studs fucking dainty white women, that sort of thing. Adult videos starring people of color that treat their performers like regular people instead of stereotypes and that don't descend into creepy fetishization of their race... those are rarer than hen's teeth. There are some exceptions (the interracial Romeo-and-Juliet movie "West Side" leaps to mind), but there are damn few.

"Caribbean Heat" is one of them. With a vengeance.

"Caribbean Heat" was filmed on location in Central America, and features an all-Latino cast. But unlike most adult videos with a non-white cast, this movie treats its Latino characters like... well, like characters. Like people, with their own sexual feelings and desires and experiences. They're depicted as the subjects of their own sex lives, not the exotic hot-tamale objects of white lust; the sex is seen from their perspective, not the perspective of white people who are hot for them. To add even more to the authentic "this is how we see ourselves, not how others see us" quality, the dialogue is almost entirely in Spanish. (Subtitles are added when they're really necessary; but of course this is porn, and not particularly chatty or plot-driven porn at that, so subtitles mostly aren't needed. If you don't speak Spanish, you can still get the gist.)

The video was directed by a Latina woman, which almost certainly makes a huge difference. The box cover says that director Manuela Sabrosa "shows you what lovers in her corner of the world do," and for once, the box cover does not lie. Sabrosa is revealing her own erotic world in this video, and she's clearly seeing the skin and flesh of her performers, not from the outside, but from within.

And this quality alone makes me give "Caribbean Heat" a solid thumbs-up. Racism in porn is one of the largest and most active bees in my porn-critic bonnet. And it's not just about politics, either -- it's about pure, selfish pleasure. All-white casts don't just seem racist to me; they seem freakishly artificial, and they add hugely to the ticky-tacky "they all look just the same" look of so many dirty movies. And the racial fetish videos just make me queasy. But "Caribbean Heat" is a delight. It's such a sweet and rare pleasure to see a beautifully wide range of naked skin colors in a porno, without those skin colors being framed as exotic, alien, slightly bizarre fetish-objects. It's so much fun to see non-white porn performers revel in the pleasure of their bodies, without those bodies getting slotted into someone else's kinky pigeonholes. To some extent, all pornos display their performers as objects of other people's lust, and I don't usually have a huge problem with that. But when it comes to race in porn, the objectification thing gets grotesquely out of hand, to the point where it's impossible for me to enjoy it at all. It's a genuine treat to see a porn video that shows people of color as regular hot people who are fun to watch while they fuck.

Right Wing Hypocrisy: The Blowfish Blog

I have a somewhat unusual take on the recent slew of right-wing politico sex scandals -- David Vitter, Bob Allen, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, etc. etc. etc. -- over at the Blowfish Blog. The piece is called Right Wing Hypocrisy, or Why Sex Guilt Fucks Things Up For Everyone, and instead of just ranting about these folks' hypocrisy (although I do a certain amount of that as well), I ask the question:

Why are the the specific taboo sex acts they engage in so often the exact same ones they publicly campaign against?

Here's a teaser:

Admittedly, a big part of this pattern comes from the media focus. Hypocrisy in powerful public figures is big news, and I’m sure there's some cherry-picking in the coverage. After all, "Married Congressman caught with hookers -- and he campaigned on the sanctity of marriage!" makes great headlines. "Married Congressman caught with hookers -- and he voted to renew the Farm Bill!" isn't going to make headlines anywhere but the Surrealist Times.

But even given that, there's a precision to the match-ups between the public condemnation and the private behavior that seems like more than coincidence and media focus.

To find out what I think is behind this "preach in public against the exact things you're doing in private" pattern -- and why I find myself having a smidgen of compassion for these assholes -- check out the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Carnivals: Of Feminists #42 and Of the Liberals #44

It's blog carnival time again! Carnival of the Liberals #44 is up at The Richmond Democrat, with its usual excellent collection of fine lefty pinko blogging. This is actually a selective carnival -- unlike many blog carnivals, they only select the ten best blog postings from the previous fortnight -- so I'm pleased and honored to have been selected again, with my piece on why civil unions aren't equal to marriage either theoretically or practically: One In Seven: Why Civil Unions Aren't Enough.

And Carnival of Feminists #42 is also up at Uncool (wicked cool blog name, btw), with tons of nifty feminist blogging. They also included my One In Seven: Why Civil Unions Aren't Enough piece, so I'm excited. Enjoy the blogging!

Professionalism = Selling Your Soul: A Feminist Rant on "The Devil Wears Prada"

"The Devil Wears Prada" has been on HBO recently: I watched it again a few days ago (I do think it's a funny, entertaining, well-crafted movie), and I was reminded of a feminist rant I had when the movie first came out.

Here's the deal. (Spoiler alert.) The purported arc of the movie is that our heroine, Andrea (Anne Hathaway), is a young would-be journalist in New York who can't find the kind of serious work she wants, and thus takes a job as assistant to the editor-in-chief at the biggest fashion magazine in the country. She justifies this as (a) a source of a much-needed paycheck, and (b) an entry-level position that could earn her some experience and gain her some connections in the profession.

But she sells out. She sells her soul. She is seduced by the glamour of the fashion industry into abandoning her high ideals; she prioritizes her work over her personal relationships; she stabs her colleague in the back; and she even winds up defending her abusive control-freak boss, Miranda (Meryl Streep) against her many critics. Eventually she realizes the error of her ways, walks out on her job, finds a better one, and grovels for forgiveness to everyone she injured along the way.

So here's my problem with the movie:

I couldn't see anything she did wrong.

I was watching very carefully the second time around, and almost every "soul-selling" step that the heroine took seemed perfectly reasonable and defensible.

And more to the point, just about everything she did would have been accepted without blinking in a male protagonist.

Let's take it a piece at a time. Here are the sins against her soul that Andrea supposedly committed.

1) She stayed in a job she didn't much care about, in an industry that's a snakepit of ego and ambition, working for a boss who treated her abysmally... just to get ahead in her career.

Well, yes. If you're serious about a career, "take this job and shove it" isn't always an option. Especially if you're just starting out. Sometimes you have to put up with very bad situations temporarily, to get what you need on your resume (not to mention to keep the paychecks coming). And sometimes you start out at a company you don't much like or care about, to gain experience you'll need to eventually work for someone you do care about. That's not selling your soul. That's having long-term goals, and the stick-to-it-iveness to go through the necessary, if sometimes unpleasant, preliminary steps to get there. That's being willing to prioritize your long-term goals over your immediate happiness and comfort. And theoretically, that's a quality our society values.

In men, anyway. This especially bugs me because her boyfriend, who's super-critical of her choices throughout the movie, is an equally ambitious, young, struggling would-be chef... and it's not like the world of high-end restaurants isn't a snakepit of ego and ambition, in which people stick with crappy jobs and asshole bosses to get the experience and contacts they need. But somehow, that's different.

And as it turns out, Andrea was right to do what she did. She did get useful experience and contacts, and at the end of the movie when she applies for the serious journalism job at the lefty newspaper, her recommendation from her old fashion-magazine boss is the tipping point that gets her the job. The job she cares about, and is good at, and that matters in the world.

But somehow, she was still selling her soul.

2) She prioritized her job over her friends and her lover -- including, sin of sins, skipping her boyfriend's birthday party because of a work emergency.

Let me ask you this. Ingrid currently has a job that she loves -- and it currently requires her to travel out of town two and a half days a week. This is a little hard on me, and puts some stress on our relationship. I also currently have a job I love (freelance writing) that currently requires me to spend weekends and evenings writing... time that would otherwise be part of the diminishing time we can spend together. This is a little hard on Ingrid, and puts some stress on our relationship.

Is either of us doing something terribly wrong?

I don't think so. I think we're both doing exactly the right thing -- supporting each other in our respective careers, making space for each other to do what we need to do, and making a point of savoring the time we do have together. That, in my mind, is what you do when you love someone. Obviously there's a limit -- if Ingrid's job required her to move to Antarctica, I'd put my foot down -- but especially when a situation is a temporary, experience-gaining or stopgap situation, cutting your partner some slack so they can get where they're going in a career they care about is just part of being in a relationship.

And, as Ingrid pointed out when I first shared this rant with her, "If you had a work emergency and had to skip my birthday party, I'd be disappointed, but I wouldn't think you'd done anything horribly wrong." Thinking that a birthday party is the most important thing in the world... that's not what sane adults do. (In fact, Andrea stayed at the emergency work event only as long as she needed to fulfill the requirements of her job, and when given the chance to stay longer to fulfill her own personal ambitions, she cut out and went home to be with her boyfriend.)

But women aren't supposed to think like this. Nobody blinks an eye when men have to work late or miss special personal events for job emergencies... but women are supposed to be loving and emotional and think family and love are always, always, always more important than work. Andrea was making a difficult but reasonable decision... but somehow, she was still selling her soul.

3) She got sucked into the world of fashion -- a world she didn't care beans about before she took the job.

Yes. Interestingly enough, when you take a new job in a field you're not familiar with, you often get excited about it and drawn into it. For fuck's sake, that's one of the best things about taking a job in a field you're not familiar with. You learn new things. You expand your horizons. I didn't know that much about women's health care before my job at the Feminist Women's Health Center; or about gay politics before my job at the gay newspaper; or hell, about the music industry before my crappy job at Ticketmaster. I grew to know and care about these things more because of these jobs. That doesn't make me a sell-out. That makes me an open-minded person who's eager to learn.

You can argue that fashion is a vapid, trivial thing to care about. But you can also argue, as many characters in the movie do, that fashion is an art form, one that touches everyone's life. Nobody thinks Hank Hill of "King of the Hill" is a sellout because he's grown to care passionately about propane and propane accessories... but when Andrea grows to see that fashion isn't as vapid and trivial as she'd originally thought, somehow it means she was selling her soul.

4) She stabbed her friend and colleague in the back.

Now, this is an interesting one. Andrea's most serious sin, in her mind and everyone else's, is that, when Miranda told her that she would be going on a coveted trip to Paris instead of her fellow assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), her initial reaction was to say, "I can't do that, the Paris trip means too much to Emily." But when Miranda made it clear that refusing the Paris trip would mean risking not only her job, but her chance at a recommendation and her career prospects (I believe her words were, "I'll assume you're not serious about your career, here or anywhere else"), Andrea caves and accepts.

In other words:

Her boss decides (somewhat unreasonably, but not entirely so) that Andrea is a better and more capable choice for the Paris trip than Emily. Her boss offers her the assignment. She accepts it.

And this is bad because...?

That's what the working world is like. If you're a boss, you don't offer assignments based on how much it means to your employees. You offer assignments based on who you think the best person for the assignment will be. And if you're an employee, you don't refuse assignments because taking them would hurt someone's feelings. It's not like the dating world -- it's not rude or bad to take the job your friend is hot for.

It's not like Andrea connived and schemed for the trip. It's not like she tried to undercut Emily or make her look bad so she could get the trip. In fact, she tried to turn the trip down, and she tried to give it to Emily.

But in the end, she acted like a professional. She treated her job like a job, not like a social relationship. She accepted an assignment that her boss offered her, an assignment her boss decided she was better suited to than her colleague -- and this, in her own eyes and in everybody else's, makes her a selfish, backstabbing power-slut. Nobody would blink twice if a man did exactly the same thing -- but for Andrea, somehow it means she was selling her soul.

5) She began to have understanding and sympathy for her abusive, control-freak boss.

My very, very favorite line in the movie -- and one that I think sums up in a nutshell the movie's real message -- is when Andrea says to a fellow writer (I'm paraphrasing here), "If a man acted the way Miranda does, nobody would say anything at all except what a great job he does."

Yup.

That pretty much says it all.

I think Andrea's character arc when it comes to Miranda is 100% reasonable. She starts out hating and fearing her; she grows to have some respect and compassion for her; and in the end, she decides that the compromises Miranda has made (personal and ethical) aren't compromises she would be willing to make.

But somehow, the fact that she ever had respect for Miranda's professionalism, and compassion for the pain that her sacrifices caused her... somehow, that means she was selling her soul.

*****

There's an essay I read in "Harry Potter and Philosophy," arguing that ambition (the defining quality of the Slytherin house) is, in fact, a virtue. And I would agree. Like most virtues, taken to extremes it can become a vice... but the willingness to focus on long-term professional goals, and to work hard and make sacrifices to reach them, is definitely a virtue. And it's a virtue that our society generally values quite highly.

But not in women. In women, ambition -- being willing to put up with shit to get where you want to go, sometimes prioritizing your career over your personal life, becoming engaged with a job even though it's ultimately not what you care about most, treating it like a job instead of a slumber party, having respect for successful high-achievers in your field, and generally taking your career seriously -- isn't considered a virtue at all.

In fact, it's more than just not a virtue. It means that you're selling your soul.

Carnival of Feminists #43

The Carnival of Feminists #43 went up today, with a great collection of feminist blogging. This is the first time I've been in this carnival, and I feel a little silly that my debut wasn't my piece on hate crime laws or sex education or even Christopher Hitchens, but my silly little piece on Angelina Jolie and Us Magazine. But there you have it. You go to the carnivals with the blog you have. Anyway, there's some good feminist blogging there, and I encourage all y'all to check it out.

"A price I was willing to pay": Hard Porn, Sex Work, and Consent

This is one of the smartest, most thoughtful things I've read lately about sex -- not just porn or SM, but sex -- and I wanted to call y'all's attention to it and talk about it a little.

It's by spanking model Adele Haze (I don't know why spanking models are called models instead of actors or performers when they work largely in movies, but except for curiosity I don't really care). In this piece, Haze talks about a shoot she did with Lupus Pictures, a kinky video production company that's renowned/ infamous for making movies with extremely heavy content: very hard spankings/ beatings, done with intense implements, causing real suffering and serious bruises and marks.

Haze makes no bones about the fact that the actual "getting caned" part of making this video was very difficult and not at all pleasurable. But she also makes it clear that she found the experience extremely satisfying, and doesn't regret it in the slightest. She found it professionally satisfying -- Lupus's production standards are apparently very high, and as a performer it was an artistic pleasure to be working with them. And she found it sexually satisfying -- the caning itself was far from enjoyable, but the prelude and the aftermath were an intense erotic pleasure, and she was able to tap into some very dark fantasies of non-consent in a way that she hadn't been able to before in a professional setting.

Pertinent quote: "So yes, I knew there would be pain, and I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it. I wrote it off as a side-effect: a price I was willing to pay. In hindsight, I’m glad to say that my judgement on this was sound."

I think the thing I like so much about this piece is that it makes the parallels between making spanking porn and doing any other kind of job vividly clear. And it makes the parallels between making spanking porn and being in any other kind of sexual relationship vividly clear as well.

See, in any kind of job, and in any kind of relationship, there are things you like and things you don't. Even if it's a job or a relationship that you're basically happy with, there are going to be parts that are hard to deal with. What makes a job or relationship a healthy one is that the good parts make the bad parts worth putting up with -- and that you're free to make that decision.

And that's true for porn -- all porn, not just spanking porn -- as much as it is for any job. I think some people have a tendency to think that if every single thing on a porn shoot isn't a perfect erotic dream for every performer, it's therefore exploitation at best and coercion at worst. (Eros Blog, the blog where I found this piece, has an excellent analysis of this coercion/ exploitation question with porn in general and with Lupus Pictures in particular, in his piece Evil Porn Werewolf Enslavers Debunked.) But if you look at making porn as (a) a job and (b) a sexual relationship, you realize that porn doesn't have to make all its performers perfectly happy in order to be a healthy job. It just has to make them happy enough. There has to be enough about it that they like, sexually and professionally, for the stuff they don't like to be worth putting up with.

(Via Eros Blog, who got it via Spanking Blog. God, I love the Internets.)

What This Blog Is -- And What It Isn't: A Reply

A recent comment on my Us Magazine "Jolie Drove!" piece took this blog to task for writing about such trivial matters, with all the terrible sexist stuff that happens to nonwhite women. I mostly didn't agree with the comment, but it raised some interesting questions, and I want to take a moment, not only to reply to the comment, but to talk a little about what this blog is -- and what it isn't.

First. Are my porn commentaries and my Us Magazine rant the "only" things I can say about sexism? Of course not. I've blogged about hate crime laws, abortion laws, the Duke rape case, body image, abstinence-only sex education, whether gender roles are learned or innate or a combination of both, and the disturbingly thin line between consensual spanking fetishism and domestic violence in the Christian domestic discipline scene. Among other things. The Us Magazine rant was only one of many posts I've written about sexism.

Was it a bit silly and trivial? Yes. Absolutely. And I'm not going to apologize for that. I write about serious things and frivolous things in this blog, and I think that's one of the best things about it. And I sometimes find a kernel of seriousness in something utterly trivial. I think a lot of how sexism and other -isms work is in the little things that people often don't notice, and I think it's interesting to point them out.

Why did I decide to write about this particular thing? No tremendously good reason. I was stuck on a plane for an hour and a half and was reading my girlfriend's Us Magazine over her shoulder, and it just jumped out at me. But that's one of the things I like best about blogging -- I can gas on about whatever happens to catch my attention me at the moment, and I don't have to worry about whether a publisher or editor thinks it's relevant. I can write about the place of religion in politics one day, porn videos the next day, the scientific method the next. How to keep artisanal bread fresh, sexual differences in relationships, hate crime laws, blasphemy, the future of the novel, grilled chocolate chip and peanut butter sandwiches, the new Harry Potter book, facing death without a belief in an afterlife, bisexuality, theocracy, blowjobs, a really annoying parking garage in my neighborhood. All of it is relevant, because all of it is relevant to my life.

Which brings me to what this blog isn't:

This blog isn't the New York Times. I'm not pretending to be an objective source of news and commentary on subjects of general interest to everyone. This blog is an extremely subjective source of news and commentary, on subjects of specific interest to me. People are free to read it or not as they like. If anyone thinks it's too frivolous, too serious, too lefty, not lefty enough, too focused on atheism, too focused on sex, too long-winded, whatever... well, there's a great big blogosphere out there, full of other blogs with different focuses. (Foci?) I suppose it's a bit arrogant of me to assume that anyone would be interested in mine. But that sort of arrogance is an inherent part of being a writer, or indeed any sort of artist -- the colossally arrogant assumption that anyone in the world outside your circle of family and friends will give a flying fuck about what you say and do. All I can say is that experience seems to be bearing me out -- my blog traffic isn't huge, but it doesn't suck either, and it's growing.

Now. Why don't I blog about sexism in gangster rap? Mostly because I don't listen to much gangster rap. Just about none, in fact. (Remember my post about being a hopelessly out of touch 45-year-old in pop culture land?)

But perhaps more to the point, I don't have anything to say about sexism in gangster rap that hasn't been said a thousand times. One of my quirks with this blog is that, if I don't have something original to say on a subject, I tend to keep my mouth shut. I don't like being just another voice in the lefty blogosphere chorus, so if I don't have a unique observation or twist on a topic, I usually don't say anything at all. (With the Us Magazine post, I wasn't just writing about how sexist it was -- my twist was how bizarrely retro and outdated the sexism was.)

Why do I write so much about porn? Ummm... I gotta say, criticizing my blog for having so many posts about porn is a little like criticizing Pharyngula for having so many posts about creationism, or Cute Overload for having so many pictures of cute kittens. That's what I do. I'm very interested in porn, both as a consumer and a cultural observer, and I write about it a lot. People do what we're inspired to do, and writers write about what we're inspired to write about. I realize this seems like circular reasoning, but I don't write about things like Darfur because I don't have much to say about them, other than "Oh my God, that is so awful," which isn't very interesting. I do have a lot to say about porn -- and so I say it.

And now we come to the part of this critique that I think has some real validity:

Why don't I write more about race and class?

In my own defense, I do write about it some: in my Katrina piece, my hate crimes piece, my Duke rape case piece, the comment discussion in my Barack Obama piece, a couple of other places. (I've also written about it in some of my porn reviews, although not in any of the ones I've posted here yet.) But it's true: I don't do it very much, and when I do, it's often a secondary mention in a piece on some other topic.

Why is that?

I have an answer, although it's probably not a very good one.

I think that when middle-class white people open their mouths to talk about race and class, a good half of the time we wind up sounding like idiots or worse. And I don't just mean conservatives, either. So much liberal white middle-class writing about race and class winds up sounding patronizing and clueless at best.

And I have something of an aversion to sounding like a patronizing, clueless idiot.

So when it comes to race and class, my usual inclination is to shut my mouth and listen.

Like a lot of people, my identity-politics identities are a mish-mosh of privilege and oppression. I'm white, middle-class, college-educated, American -- all of which make me pretty damned privileged. I'm female, queer, atheist, fat -- all of which really don't. And not surprisingly, I'm a lot more comfortable writing about identity politics and -isms when I'm on the short end of the privilege stick. (That's another reason I don't write about sexism in gangster rap, actually -- I think the phenomenon of white people scolding black rappers for being sexist often falls squarely into the "patronizing and clueless" category.)

Now, I realize that that's something of a weak excuse. I realize that middle-class white people have an obligation to not stay silent in the face of racism and classism. And I realize that one of the things that perpetuates racism and classism is people's discomfort with the subject, and our unwillingness to even bring them up. That's something I can and should pay attention to. If nothing else, I can do more pointing to other people's blogging on the subjects than I do.

But again, we come back to the basic fact of this blog: It isn't the New York Times. It isn't even the Daily Kos. It's my very personal, very subjective view of the world and the parts of it that I feel I have something to say about. I do write about politics, and I can and should try to buck up my courage and expand my horizons and risk making an ass of myself to talk about important subjects I don't know so much about, including race and class. But ultimately, I'm writing a personal blog from my own personal perspective And it's always going to be written from a white, middle-class, college-educated, American perspective, in the same way that it's always going to be written from a queer, fat, female, atheist perspective -- because that's who I am.

Jolie Drove! (And We Are In What Decade Again?)

Ingrid and I flew out this weekend to see our new niece (baby pictures coming soon!), and as is the way of our people, we picked up a copy of Us magazine at the airport to read on the plane. (To be more accurate, Ingrid picked up a copy of Us magazine to read on the plane, and I mocked her mercilessly for it and then read it over her shoulder. As is the way of our people.)

So there was a bit about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt taking some sort of driving trip... with the parenthetical remark, "Jolie drove!"

And I've been in a pop-culture snit about the remark ever since.

Why the fuck should that be in any way remarkable? Why should it be surprising, or even worth commenting on, that the woman in a hetero relationship did the driving on a family trip?

It's the exclamation point that really got my goat. If there were simply a parenthetical remark saying "(Jolie drove)," it might have just been a passing remark to set the scene in more detail for a celebrity-obsessed public. It's the exclamation point that makes the meaning clear. Wow! How strange! How fascinating! A movie-star couple went on a driving trip -- and the woman drove the car! Heavens!

For fuck's sake. This is the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a movie magazine from the Fifties. It's straight out of the era of woman-driver jokes.

And I think that's why it got my goat. I'm used to your garden-variety early-21st-century sexism -- the hyper-critical body fascism, the glass ceiling, the "have it all" pressure to be successful at work while keeping a perfect happy home while maintaining a flawless personal appearance, the denial that sexism is still a problem, yada yada yada. And I'm used to the kinds of sexism that have been around for decades and indeed centuries: the virgin/whore complex, the contempt and hostility towards female sexual assertiveness, the characterization of powerful women as unfeminine shrikes. Again, yada yada yada. They tick me off, but unless they're unusually egregious, I rarely feel inspired to blog about them.

But this was so dated, such a trope of sexism from another era, that I felt like it didn’t have any excuse. It's not one of those forms of sexism that's so prevalent it's invisible. If it is invisible, it shouldn't be. This is the sort of sexism that shouldn't even be an issue anymore. This is the sort of clumsy, obvious, ham-handed gender rigidity that I thought our culture was at least making a token gesture towards avoiding.

Jolie drove!

For fuck's sake.

Christian Spanking Porn: The Blowfish Blog

(I don't really talk about my own sex life in this piece, but it may still be too much information for family members and others with, you know, boundaries. So be advised.)

This one is a doozy, folks. If you read only one piece I write this week, make it this piece.

It's Christian Spanking Porn. One of the stranger cultural twists I've come across in some time. It's got sex, religion, kink, gender politics, questions about consent... all mixed up in a fascinating, disturbing, completely bizarre stew. And I blog about it over at the Blowfish Blog. The gist of it... well, here's the teaser.

A CDD (Christian Domestic Discipline) marriage is "set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household. The wife is submissive to her husband as is fit in the Lord and her husband loves her as himself... He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment... " Etc.

There are, of course, websites. And this website (apparently the main one) has advice, information... and spanking fiction.

"Romances," with spankings at the core, labeled for sale by how heavy the spankings are ("contains moderate spanking," "moderate to slightly severe spanking," "the spanking in this novel is very mild").

In other words -- spanking porn.

And it creeps me out.

So I’m trying to decide whether that creeped-outedness is fair.

Fascinating. Disturbing. Completely bizarre. Check it out.

No Sex Please, We’re Democrats: The Blowfish Blog

So a a House subcommittee recently voted, not only to continue funding abstinence-only sex education, but to increase funding for it by $27.8 million.

To see me rant about this -- er, analyze it and put it in context -- come visit the Blowfish Blog. Here's a taste:

Very few people -- and even fewer politicians -- are willing to look at teenage sex and say in public, "It turns out this really isn't a big problem." Very few politicians are willing to say, "We have bigger issues to worry about than 16-year-olds having sex." Very, very, very few politicians are willing to say, "You know, I had sex when I was 16, and it didn't do me any harm."

Check it out. And then write your Congressperson.

Joined At the Brainstem: Relationships and Privacy

Several years ago, I read a piece of relationship advice that always stuck with me. (I wish I could find it now; but I can't, so I'm going to have to paraphrase.) It was by a lesbian relationship adviser, and she said that in the first six months of her relationship with her partner, they had a rule that, if one of them asked, "What are you thinking right now?" the other had to answer, completely honestly and spontaneously.

The advice writer said that, while this obviously was difficult and painful at times -- both for the asker and the askee -- it "worked." At the end of the six months, she said, "we were joined at the brainstem."

This was before I got together with Ingrid, back in my single days, and at the time, I remember thinking, "What a bad idea." In fact, it struck me so strongly as a bad idea that I remembered it all these years.

But now that I've been in a serious relationship for close to ten years, my feelings have changed somewhat. Now I think about the idea of sharing every passing thought with your partner on demand, and I don't think, "What a bad idea."

I think, "What an appalling, unbelievably stupid, extraordinarily horrible idea."

Okay. Two reasons. First, we have the actual stated goal of this little exercise: joining with your partner at the brainstem.

Why is that a good idea? Why is that something you'd want?

I like that Ingrid has her own brain. I like Ingrid's brain. It's a good brain. And it's good in ways that are often very different from my own. The fact that Ingrid has her very own brain means that she can surprise me. She can make me think about things differently. She can make me question my ideas and assumptions. And possibly more important than any of this, she can make me laugh.

None of which she could do if we were "joined at the brainstem."

After close to ten years together, of course we know each other very well indeed. Of course we sometimes finish each other's sentences, sometimes know exactly what the other person is going to say. But not always. And while of course I treasure how well we know each other and how close we are, I also treasure the fact that, nearly ten years into our life together, we're still learning about each other.

Second, and maybe more importantly:

Having your own thoughts and feelings -- which you can share with others or not as you choose -- that's one of the central defining characteristics of being, you know, a person. An individual. A being with some sort of selfhood.

And the idea that you should give that up when you get in a relationship gives me chills.

Now obviously, when you get into a relationship, you give up a certain amount of privacy. The closer the relationship gets, the more privacy you give up. And of course, different people need different amounts of privacy. Some couples are fine having their partner in the bathroom with them while they pee; others need to live in separate apartments.

But the privacy of the inside of your own head? That's really basic. That's a huge part of what makes you who you are.

Why would you want to take that away? Either from your partner or yourself?

And I'm not even getting into the potential rudeness and hurtfulness of the exercise. I mean, it's not as if every fleeting thought that passes through my head is one that I really stand by, or even think is true. If I have to hurt Ingrid by telling her something she doesn't want to hear, I bloody well want it to be something that matters -- not some petty, selfish, mean-spirited bitchiness that happened to be crossing my synapses at the exact moment she was asking, "Honey, what are you thinking?"

Maybe I'm being unfairly judgmental here. Maybe this "complete and unedited honesty on demand" thing is just a greater degree of intimacy and a lesser degree of privacy than I'm personally comfortable with. But it just seems like an unbelievably bad idea. Especially for lesbian couples. Lesbian couples already have enough of a tendency to merge, to lose their individual identities in each other and in the couple-identity. And the whole thing that's cool about a relationship is that it's a balance between intimacy and selfhood. You can't have intimacy if you don't have different people, with different identities, to come together and connect. The idea that more closeness is always better in a relationship is, IMO, a seriously dumb one.

So am I being too judgmental here? Have any of you ever done the "complete and unedited honesty on demand" thing in a relationship? If so, how did it work out? If not, is it an idea that appeals to you? I'm weirded out -- but I'm also curious.

Hate Crime Laws, and the Difference Between Speech and Evidence

As you may have heard, there's a bill winding its way through Congress that would expand the current Federal hate crime law to include hate crimes committed over sexual orientation, transgender identity, gender, or disability. (The current law covers hate crimes committed because of race, color, religion, or national origin.)

I'm not just writing this to beg everyone reading this blog to write or call your Senators. (Although I'm doing that, too. Please, for the love of all that is beautiful in this world, write or call your Senators. This passed in the House, but it's facing a fight in the Senate, and I'm hearing that the calls against the legislation are far outstripping the calls supporting it. It takes two minutes. Google your Senators' names, find their official Websites with their phone numbers, and call them. Please do it.)

But that's not the only point of this post. I've had a rant brewing for some time about hate crime laws, and now seems like the obvious time to do it. (Important disclaimer: I'm a smart observant person, but I'm not a legal expert. If any legal experts see any flaws in my understanding of the law, please point them out.)

**********

There's a common misconception about hate crime laws -- which is that they criminalize hateful speech or writing. They don't. There is an enormous difference between hate speech laws or rules -- such as the ones that exist on many college campuses (and which I do, in fact, vehemently oppose) -- and hate crime laws.

Hate crime laws don't criminalize speech. What hate crime laws do is say that, if a crime is motivated by hatred or bias towards a group -- a race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc. -- then extra time should be added to the sentence.

In other words, they say that certain motives for crimes are worse than other motives, and deserve a more severe punishment.

And that's a legal principle that is both extremely well-established and widely accepted.

Look at the difference between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, etc. Our laws say that it's worse to kill someone in cold blood for money than to kill someone in the heat of passion for anger; which is worse than killing someone recklessly and stupidly in an accident; which is worse than killing someone in self-defense. It's a clear legal principle: different reasons for killing people deserve different degrees of punishment.

Now, some people argue that the problem with hate crime laws is that they are de facto laws against hateful speech -- since hateful speech is typically what distinguishes between a hate crime and a regular crime. If you're screaming, "Die, faggot," when you're beating someone up, that's evidence that it's a hate crime -- and some people argue that this makes hate crime laws a violation of the First Amendment. (I've seen this argument made -- unopposed -- not just in political and punditry circles, but in otherwise generally intelligent and more or less progressive pop culture arenas, such as Law & Order, The West Wing, and South Park.)

But that's just silly. There's a huge difference between speech as speech, and speech as evidence of motive.

Again, let's look at the difference between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, justifiable homicide, etc. If a person who's killing someone is heard to say, "Ha ha, after months of careful planning, my scheme to kill you for your insurance money is finally coming to fruition," you can bloody well believe that those words are going to be used as evidence of first-degree murder. Nobody on Earth is going to oppose that on First Amendment grounds.

(And if the killer is heard to say, "You bastard, I can't believe you're having sex with my wife, I'm so angry I could kill you," or "I can't believe how drunk I am -- whoops!", or "Get your hands off me! Help!", or "I'm sorry, but the ghost of Millard Fillmore spoke to me through the fillings in my teeth and told me to kill the first redhead I saw," then that's going to be used as evidence to support second-degree murder, or self-defense, or an insanity plea, or whatever.)

That's what hate crime laws do. They don't make hateful or bigoted words into a crime. They allow those words to be evidence of a particular motive for the crime.

And they do this to support the principle that hurting or killing someone because of bigotry and hatred is an exceptionally bad reason to hurt or kill someone. They say that this sort of crime harms not just the victim, but all of society. They say that our society is exceptionally appalled by crimes committed because of bigotry, and finds them even more intolerable than garden-variety crime.

Now, I'll remind you here: We already have a federal hate crime law on the books, adressing crimes committed because of race, color, religion, or national origin.

So to oppose this latest law is to say that hurting or killing someone because of any of those reasons is exceptionally bad… but killing someone because of gender, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or disability is nothing special. No big deal. When someone gets beaten up because they're black or Jewish or Italian -- that's exceptionally serious. When someone gets beaten up because they're queer, female, transgendered, or disabled -- not so much.

That is some fucked-up shit.

Please call your Senator, and ask them to vote yes on the hate crime law. Please do it now.

Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell, talking with Pat Robertson on The 700 Club, September 13, 2001. Commenting on the 9/11 attacks, two days after they happened.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'"

Let's just not forget, people.

So Christopher Hitchens Walks Into A Bar...

You know, there are so many things wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin.

"This" being Christopher Hitchens's recent piece in Vanity Fair about why women aren't as funny as men. The key sentence: "For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing." Because we bear and raise children, women are both more nurturing and take life more seriously than men, and thus lack both the mean-spiritedness and the frivolousness required of humor. That's a gross over-generalization of Hitchens's piece; but then, Hitchens's piece is pretty gross, so I guess it's appropriate.

I don't even know where to start. And no, I'm not going to start with the absurdity of "For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing." I have better things to do than shoot that particularly slow and stupid fish in that exceptionally small barrel.

So I guess I should start with the obvious: It isn't true. Flat out, plain, R-O-N-G Rong. Other bloggers have been busily coming up with lists of counterexamples, so I'm not going to bother. (Google it yourself if you like; I'm putting some of my personal favorites in my illustrations.) Instead, I'll just say: He obviously hasn't met my friends. Or my co-workers. Or my family. Or my girlfriend. Or the commenters on this blog. Or... well, you get the drift. It's as if Hitchens spent 2700 words carefully pondering the question of why birds don't fly.

And of course, there is the slow, stupid fish in the tiny tiny barrel -- the assumption that all women are focused on baby-making above all other forms of human endeavor, a focus that drives everything that might interfere with it clean out of our pretty little heads. (And that no men are like that at all.)

But what really kills me is the assumption that we are all -- women and men alike -- either completely nurturing or completely mean-spirited; utterly serious or utterly frivolous. You have to be one or the other -- you can't be both. You can't make chicken soup for your sick girlfriend and then make mean-spirited snarky jokes on the Internet; you can't spend all week taking care of mentally ill homeless people with AIDS and then spend an hour and half on Saturday night getting dressed up to go to a drag show. Nope. One or the other, please. Pick now, all of you. NOW, dammit!

This is the thing that irritates me most about this sort of simplistic "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" gender analysis. It's the ham-handed division of the human race into two easily distinguishable camps, with everyone in one camp having A, B, and C qualities in unadulterated proportions, and everyone in the other camp having X, Y, and Z qualities in an equally pure form.

The reality is that, whatever gender-differentiated behavior trait you can think of -- aggressiveness, competitiveness, co-operation, empathy, whatever -- we all of us have all of them to at least some degree, and there's an enormous amount of overlap between the genders. Even in the areas where women's and men's behavior is pretty demonstrably different -- the tendency to get into physical fights, for instance -- it's not as if all women are lumped from 1 to 5 and all men are lumped from 6 to 10. It's more like we're on overlapping bell curves -- with women bell-curving from, say, 1 to 8, and men bell-curving from 3 to 10. (I'm literally and physically pulling those numbers out of my ass as we speak, by the way. But I'll bet you that my science analysis is still better than Hitchens's. A small Russet potato could analyze the science in this story better than Hitchens did.) And leaning towards the male end of one particular spectrum (spatial relations, say) is no guarantee that you'll lean towards the male end of any other spectrum (like verbal ability).

And maybe more to the point: I've seen studies that show that people -- both women and men -- who aren't rigidly gender-typed, people who have lots of typical characteristics of both genders, tend to be happier and better-adjusted and more satisfied with themselves and their lives than people who adhere to rigid gender roles and expect others to do the same.

And I bet we're funnier, too.

Ogle Therapy

I've been thinking a lot about this whole "how to maintain your sexual self-esteem when you're a short, chubby, middle-aged woman" thing that I was talking about in The Aging Slut. It's such a complicated circle -- thinking that you're hot and being confident in your hotness makes you hotter, thinking that you're dumpy and being insecure about your looks makes you dumpier... but then how do you break out of the dumpiness/ insecurity circle and break into the confidence/ heat one?

I was re-reading what I wrote in Woman Eats Brownies, Gets Laid:

... what I wind up doing is seeking sexual affirmation, not by looking in the mirror, but by looking at other women who look like me. When I catch myself drooling over some hot babe with a nice meaty body that I'd really like to get my hands on, I remind myself that other people -- especially other women -- probably feel the same way about me.

And so lately I've been doing something I'm calling Ogle Therapy. When I see an attractive woman who looks something like me -- forties, chunky, strong muscles, big tits and ass -- I make a point of taking a moment to look at her. And I mean really look at her. I try not to be obvious and obnoxious about it, but I take a moment to enjoy the view, to luxuriate in her hotness and really take it in... and to remind myself that if I can look at this woman in this way, then chances are at least some other people are looking at me the same way.

I realize this isn't much help to the heterosexually-inclined. But I had an opposite-sex version of this experience the other day -- and it gave me a whole new perspective on this question.

I was at the gym, getting ready to use the bench press (my favorite weight set -- it's so fucking hot). Both benches were being used, so I waited... and while I waited, I watched the guys who were benching.

One was a very short, skinny, wiry guy in a Picasso T-shirt, in I'm guessing his late thirties or early forties, benching about 85 pounds. The other was a tallish, youngish (early 20s), well-muscled guy in a college sports team tank top, conventionally handsome in a frat-boy/ Tom Cruise/ Rock Hudson sort of way, benching about 150 or 175.

And if a fairy godmother had appeared to me at that moment and said, "You can have sex with either of these two men -- pick one," I would have picked the short, skinny, Picasso guy in a heartbeat.

He just looked... I don't know. Interesting. Smart. A character, a guy with a mind of his own. Like someone I could relax and have a conversation with. Like someone with potentially interesting ideas about sex. The other guy looked... bland. Not bad or anything, but just kind of boring.

But it occurred to me: It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that the short, scrawny guy was insecure about his looks. Every bit as insecure as I can be. The beauty myth doesn't just hit women, after all. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that he was comparing himself unfavorably to the big, beefy guys at the gym, just like I compare myself to the slender young women.

And yet here I was, thinking he was the hottest thing in the weight room.

And I realized: If I'm hot for the wiry little slip of a guy in the Picasso T-shirt, chances are someone at that gym has looked at the tough, chubby, forty-something dyke with the scary Jabberwock tattoo and thought, "Yeah, I'd do her."

And for the rest of the evening, I was back on the confident/hot circle.

So at least sometimes, it works. What works for y'all?

Sex Crazed Sex Goddesses of Sex: Women Who Like Sex, and the Men Who Don't Appreciate Them

Dan Savage (of the Savage Love sex advice column) did this very clever thing recently. He ran a column pretending to agree with the proposition that women across the board simply aren't as interested in sex as men... and then waited for the letters to pour in, from legions of outraged women with high libidos insisting that they, you know, existed. (I almost wrote him one myself.)

But what struck me about these letters wasn't so much the raw fact of them. It wasn't that plenty of women do have high libidos, or that the problem of differing libidos in relationships cuts across gender lines. Like, duh.

What really struck me about these letters was how many of these horny women got insulted and jeered at by their male partners for being horny. Women who love sex, and who've had male partners who didn't want sex as often as they did, wrote to Dan saying they'd been called nympho, whore, a dog in heat.

It's hard to know what exactly is going on with these guys. Is this some macho thing -- the men get freaked out because men are supposed to be the sex-crazed ones who want it all the time, and if your woman wants it more than you do then that somehow makes you less of a man? Is it just a generic "blame your partner for your problems and differences" reaction -- you know, the classic "we want different things, I'm perfect, therefore my partner must be fucked-up" logic? Is it something else entirely?

I really don't know. I've never encountered this exact phenomenon. I've never had a sex partner of either gender insult me for wanting lots of sex. I've never had a sex partner call me a slut or a whore or a nympho or a dog in heat -- except in a good way.

But I have encountered something similar. Back when I was (a) screwing around a lot and (b) at least sometimes screwing around with men, I ran into this scene a fair amount: Men who said they wanted casual, no strings-attached sex -- but then got totally weird once we'd had it. ("Weird" meaning avoiding eye contact, being distant or jumpy when they'd been friendly and relaxed, doing the approach/ avoidance dance, and just being generally, you know, weird.) This wasn't true across the board... but it happened often enough for me to go, "Hm."

I'm not quite sure what that was about. Maybe these men thought they wanted casual sex... but really wanted some sort of love and commitment. Maybe they really did want casual sex, but didn't want me to want it as much as they did -- like the fact that I was so okay with it was a blow to their pride, I wasn't supposed to be able to walk away from their sweet, sweet loving so easily. Maybe the sex stirred up feelings and emotions for them -- not necessarily true love, but some sort of tenderness or vulnerability -- and my freewheeling, sang-froid attitude was actually making me an insensitive jerk. (Like I wrote in my 1996 piece Being Single, "There are times when I feel like a caricature of a straight man, and an asshole straight man at that.")

And maybe any or all of this was true, for any or all of these men -- but because men are supposed to be the ones who want casual sex, when it turned out that they didn't want it as much as they thought they did, it made them feel less manly.

Just like not wanting sex as much as the woman in their life might make some men feel less manly.

But maybe not. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. Thoughts? Men -- have you ever been involved with a woman who wanted sex more than you did, or who wanted sex to be casual when you weren't sure about that? If so, what was that like? And women -- have you ever been with guys who wanted it less than you did, or who didn't want something casual when you did? And what was that like? And if you're gay or lesbian, has this ever been an issue -- have you had these kinds of differences with partners, and how did they play out? And if you're bi, how does that play out differently? Nosy minds want to know.

A Fat Rant (Hilarious Video Week Part 2)

Continuing with Hilarious Video Week, we have this gem that I ran into on the Other Magazine Blog. This one falls into the "funny social commentary" category. It's hilarious, it's smart, it's sexy -- and it's saying stuff that I think is important. (Video below the fold.)

Credibility and the Duke Rape Case Fiasco

I was going to chime in on the weird fucked-up-edness of the whole Duke University rape case fiasco. But the SmackDog Chronicles already said pretty much what I wanted to say about it. So I'm just going to point you to his blog instead. The quotes that really struck me:

But what really saddens and angers me about this case is that it simply reimposes all the usual memes and biases about sexually proactive women and women who do sex work voluntarily; in effect, if you are overtly sexual and happen to be violated in any way, you can expect to have no support or sympathy from the general public and damn near little or no support from the "feminist community"…especially if you happen to be a person of color, poor, or a sex worker or sex entertainer. And especially if your perpetrator just so happens to be either White or a person of privilege who has the full weight of his privilege behind him.

and

All of this makes my duty as a sex radical, a radical Black man, a feminist sympathizer/supporter, and a sex-positive activist that much tougher…but also that much more important. If there ever was a time for a sex-positive Left perspective, it is now.

All this is reminding me of the Lynn Griffiths case. (I tried to find a link about it, but it happened in the pre-Internet days, and I couldn't find anything on the Web.) Back in the '90s in San Francisco, there was a very public, all-over-the-news incident of a lesbian named Lynn Griffiths who had been badly queer-bashed. The gay community and the gay press was all over it, in a "See, this is what homophobia looks like, this is what we have to be afraid of" way. And when the police started commenting that there were holes in her story, the community got irate about police insensitivity.

Except it turned out that there were holes in her story. Because it didn't happen. She turned out to be kind of a nutjob -- she injured herself, and claimed she was gay-bashed to get attention. When the holes in her story started getting impossible to ignore, she actually did the same thing a second time -- and then, in the face of increasing anger and incredulity, fled the state.

Which just made it harder for everybody. Because it's not as if queer-bashing didn't -- doesn't -- happen. But after this incident, everyone who really did get queer-bashed -- or who fought against anti-gay violence -- suddenly found themselves a little less credible.

And it's not as if African-American women, and sex workers, and African-American sex workers, don't get raped by privileged white guys. But now the ones who do are going to have a much harder time of it. There are thousands of times that this happens, and it never makes the papers -- but this is the case that people are going to remember.

But... oh, just go read the piece on the SmackDog blog. He says it better than I can. And it's a really good blog generally, and worth checking out.

Define Your Terms, Dammit! Teens and the Emotional Consequences of Oral Sex

How do you do a study on the emotional consequences of oral sex, and not distinguish between blowjobs and muffdiving?

There's this study by UCSF on teens and sex, focusing not on pregnancy and STDs and stuff, but on teenagers' emotional reactions to sex. Specifically, it focuses on how teenagers react differently to intercourse and oral sex.

A lot of things about this study are interesting -- including the fact (overlooked or minimized by several news sources) that overall, teens report positive consequences from sex of all kinds. But more relevantly to my rant, the study found that teens' reactions to sex, both positive and negative, varied depending on whether they were having intercourse or oral sex. And most relevantly to my rant of all, girls who had oral sex were twice as likely as boys to feel bad about themselves, and three times as likely to feel used.

Why is this important?

Because in none of the stories I read about it (by Reuters, SF Gate, and WebMD) did they mention whether the oral sex was fellatio, cunnilingus, or both.

Which is a pretty big issue, don't you think?

I don't know if this is bad reporting by the media, or bad science by UCSF. But whichever it is, it's bad.

See, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the "oral sex" we're talking about is fellatio. A lot of blowjobs for the boys, not much muffdiving for the girls. And if I'm right -- if girls are giving oral sex to boys and not getting it in return -- then it's no fucking wonder that girls feel more used than boys. They are being used.

A lot of how the news media is running with this story is "all teen sex is bad" (not what the study shows at all, really), and "parents need to warn their kids that oral sex can be as bad as intercourse" (also not what the study shows). But I'd bet you many dollars to many donuts indeed that, if you did another study comparing teenagers who had fellatio only, cunnilingus only, or both, the girls would be a lot less likely to feel used and/or bad about themselves if their oral sex lives were reciprocal.

In which case, the lesson we need to be teaching teenage girls isn't "Sex is bad," but "Your sexual pleasure matters as much as your partners'."

Brain, Brain, What Is Brain? or, Is Gender Hard-Wired?

I read over on the ScienceToLife blog (a cool blog about science news affecting people's lives) a piece on a BBC science program regarding differences between male and female brains. And on the BBC website, you can take the tests that they used in the series, and see whether you have a male or a female brain. (Fun test, although it does take some time.)

Not too surprisingly, I scored more male than female on their test. On a spectrum from 100% typically female, to evenly balanced between the two, to 100% typically male, I scored significantly more male than female -- 25% on the male side of neutral. (For point of comparison, the men they tested averaged 50% on the male side of the spectrum.) Among other things, I'm better at spatial relationships than I'd expected, worse at identifying facial expressions, and I apparently tend to make decisions more rationally than intuitively.

Obviously, I'm not going to change my philosophies about life and gender based on pop-culture TV psychology (although this piece of it seems more based in real science than, say, your average Cosmo personality quiz). But it reminded me of a rant I've been wanting to make on a rather large question:

Is gender born, or learned, or some combination of the two? And if it's a combination, what combination?

Now, I'm hardly going to be able to answer this question once and for all. Smarter people than me who actually do research in this area have been trying to answer this question for decades But I do have some thoughts on the subject that I've been mulling over for many years, and this seems like a good excuse to blather on about them.

*****

One: No matter what, nurture is definitely part of the picture. A big part. If nothing else, the fact that gender roles have been changing and are different in different cultures and historical periods is proof enough of that. What's more, I've seen research showing that people treat infants they think are male and infants they think are female significantly differently -- in ways they're not even aware of, and will even deny. (Specifically, people encourage physicality and assertiveness in infants they think are boys, sweetness and sociability in infants they think are female.)

So when people say, "Of course gender is hard-wired, look how different my five-year-old boy and my six-year-old girl act," my reaction is, "Well, yes -- they've been getting intensive gender-role training for five/six years. That proves exactly nothing."

Two: If research does show that male and female brains tend on average to be different, that doesn't prove nature over nurture. My understanding is that the brain is shaped -- literally, physically -- by experience as well as by genetics. The differences could easily be learned.

And both Thought One and Thought Two point up the difficulty of coming to any final conclusion on this subject. Given what a huge part nurture clearly plays -- and from the day we're born, no less -- it may prove damn near impossible to tease out the learned behaviors from the hard-wired ones (if there are any).

All that being said…

Three: We tend to forget that people are animals. We are not separate from nature: we are a species of life, in the animal kingdom, in the mammalian class. And most animal species have some sort of gender-differentiated behavior that, as far as we can tell, is genetically based. This obviously doesn't prove that human gender differences are hard-wired -- we could certainly be one of the exceptions -- but it wouldn't completely surprise me to learn that they were.

Four: I think it's a very bad idea to critique a scientific theory on the basis of its political implications. A theory is either true or it isn't. It either describes reality or it doesn't. A theory or a study may be flawed because of political prejudices and biases, and that's certainly worth looking at. But the fact that we may not want a theory to be true doesn't make it not true. That's the kind of bullshit the creationists pull -- I really don't think feminists should be pulling it.

I remember reading/hearing about/participating in the "constructionism/essentialism" debates back in my early queer-theory days, and while in my heady youth I was very taken with strict constructionism, I became more frustrated with it as time went on. The theory didn't really seem to based on anything -- not research, not neurology, not logic, nothing except the fact that people who held it wanted it to be true (or, more accurately, didn't want essentialism to be true). And that is really not okay.

Now, all THAT being said…

Five: Even if there is a genetic component to gender differences, it's clear that it's true only as a generalization, and a pretty gross generalization at that. There are tons of exceptions, and huge areas of overlap on the scales. Just look at my "25% more male" score on the silly BBC brain-sex test. (And if you take the test yourself, do post your scores in the comments here!)

Plus, there are dozens of different types of behavior that are commonly believed to be gender-based, and individual men and women are all going to rank differently on all of them. (I scored male in my spatial relation ability, female in my verbal ability, neutral on some other scales that I can't remember now.)

Six: Humans seem to have a unique ability to transcend our genetic programming and choose our own behavior. Our ability to do so is almost certainly limited, but it doesn't seem to be nonexistent. (Example: Given my genealogy of alcoholism all over both sides of my family tree, it's a fucking miracle that I'm not an alcoholic. And I'm not an alcoholic, at least in part, because I know that it could be a problem and choose to be very careful about my alcohol use.)

My point? Even if there is some basis for believing that some gender differences are hard-wired, that's no excuse for sexist behavior or policy. Even if it's true that men are, on the whole, better at spatial relations, and women are, on the whole, better at verbal skills, we still have to treat people as individuals, and assess them as individuals.

In a perfectly non-sexist society, it's possible that we might still have more male engineers than female, more female teachers than male. I don't know. I don't think any of us knows. But we sure as hell would have more female engineers and male teachers than we do now. Good ones. Ones who now aren't living up to their potential.

The Aging Slut

It's not just about clothes.

Although a lot of it is about clothes.

Here's what I want to know: How do you dress like, act like, be like, a sexy slut, when you're in your mid-forties? What about in your fifties? Your sixties?

The sexy slutty clothes I used to love so much just don't look good on me now. I don't know if it's that my body's different, or my personality, or what. But ripped fishnets and miniskirts and skimpy tops don't make me look like a punk rock waif any more. They make me look like an aging tramp.

And I don't know why that is -- or whether I'm okay with it.

Is it just cultural standards, mainstream perceptions of what makes women sexy, blah blah blah? Because if it is, then fuck that. I didn't pay attention to the beauty myth when it told me that fat women weren't sexy, or that dykey women weren't sexy – so why should I pay attention when it tells me that middle-aged women aren't sexy, and I should just shroud myself in Land's End and call it a day?

But what if it's something else? What if it's me that's a different person -- with a different character and different ways of seeing my sexuality -- and the old ways of displaying my sexuality don't actually represent who I am now?

I think it might be. At least partly.

Which brings me to my next question: What represents my sexuality now? How is my sexuality different at 44 than it was at 25 or 32 – and how do I dress and act in a way that's authentic to who I am now?

Some of it is that I'm married now, and while I'm in a non-monogamous marriage and thus theoretically still available for a fling, in practice I'm not chasing tail with nearly the same verve I did when I was younger. So even though I still want to dress with sex in mind, it's because I'm a very sexual person and I want to be true to that – not because I'm trying to bait the hook.

Some of it is that I've been on a downward slide on the Kinsey scale lately. Ingrid apart, I've been in a phase where I'm paying more attention to guys than to women. (And before you ask, the Alan Rickman/Snape fetish is only part of that…) And while I feel pretty confident about my attractiveness to other dykes, my experience has been that men tend to be, not more picky exactly, but less likely to be attracted to unconventionally attractive women – and so as I get older, I feel a lot less sexually confident with them. (That actually makes me feel better about this whole question, since a downward slide on the Kinsey scale is almost certainly a phase that'll pass.)

And some of it is that I don't feel the same about my body as I did when I was younger. My body is crankier, harder to take care of, both more fragile and more demanding. When I'm feeling my never-quite healed elbow and my bad knee, my allergies and my asthma, when I'm watching my cholesterol or scheduling a colonoscopy, it's harder to feel like my body is a gorgeous, well-oiled machine that I want to parade all over town.

But some of it is more complicated than that, more fucked-up. I don't feel the same now about my body, not just because of how it feels, but because of how other people see it. I hate that that's true, but it is. When I see myself through my own eyes, I see a smart, sexy, fun, adventurous bi-dyke slut who can bench press 60 pounds. But when I see myself through the eyes of the world as a whole, I see a chubby middle-aged lady.

I want to dress in a way that challenges that. I want to dress in a way that reclaims my sexual power. But I want to do it in a way that doesn't make me look, or feel, pathetic and desperate.

And I'm not sure how to do that.

Any thoughts? How do you age gracefully without giving up on sex and sexiness? If you're dealing with this and have ideas about it; if you have lovers or sex partners who are dealing with this and you have ideas about it; or if you just have opinions about it; I want to hear about it.

Tee Corinne, and my other mothers and fathers

Someone I never knew died on August 27, and I sat at my computer at work yesterday writing an obituary and trying not to cry.

In case you're not familiar with her, Tee Corinne was one of the earliest pioneers of the modern lesbian and women's erotica movements -- in photography, writing, and art. She's probably best known for the "Cunt Coloring Book," but I mostly knew her from her photography. She was one of the first women to create sexual images and writing for women, from a woman's point of view, outside the male-driven porn machinery -- and to do it publicly and shamelessly.

And by "one of the first," I don't mean she was doing it before it was cool. I mean she was doing it before it was being done. Her doing it is one of the things that made it possible for the rest of us to do it. She paved the way. She made a space.

I never met Tee Corinne. But she's one of the people who made my life easier.

No, strike that. She's one of the people who made my life possible. I'm not a pioneer -- I'm an early adapter, but I'm not a pioneer -- and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't have had the nerve to step into those woods if there hadn't been Tee and people like her cutting through the brush and stamping out a trail first.

I feel bad that I never took the time to write her while she was alive and thank her. So I want to do that now -- not just Tee, but all the people who've made talking about sex, and making art about sex, and providing/getting accurate information about sex, that much easier. I always get pissy when young sex writers/artists act like it's always been this easy and don't acknowledge the debt of gratitude they have towards the people who came before them. So I want to say thank you now.

I want to say thank you, not only to Tee Corinne, but to Joani Blank and Betty Dodson, to Pat Califia and Honey Lee Cottrell, to Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, to Priscilla Alexander and Scarlot Harlot, to Michael Rosen and Mark I. Chester, to Layne Wincklebleck and Kat Sunlove, to the founders of San Francisco Sex Information, to Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle, to Isadora Allman and Susie Bright. And I know there are more. I know I'm forgetting some people, and for that I apologize. If you think you should have been on this list, you probably should have.

To all of you I want to say: I am not an ungrateful child. I am more grateful than I could possibly say.

Going Wild: A Feminist's Defense of the "Girls Gone Wild" Girls

In case you haven't read this already, Joe Francis, the guy who runs the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, has been revealed by the L.A. Times to be a crazy, abusive, profoundly fucked-up asshole. I don't actually have a lot to add on that particular topic apart from "Damn, what a crazy, abusive, profoundly fucked-up asshole." Actually, the phrase "crazy, abusive, profoundly fucked-up asshole" would seem to be an understatement.

But I do feel somewhat compelled to comment. I wrote a fairly lavish think piece about the "Girls Gone Wild" videos for the big Disinformation anthology Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong (you can read it on my website if you like), and since then, I feel like I've become the Feminist Sex Writer Who Thinks The "Girls Gone Wild" Videos Are At Least Somewhat Defensible. So whenever the topic of these videos comes up, I feel like I need to chime in.

What I want to talk about now is not the people who run the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, but the "Girls Gone Wild" videos themselves -- and the women who perform in the videos.

And more specifically, I want to talk about what's being said about the women in the videos.

The writing I've seen about Girls Gone Wild is largely taking two directions. One is pity/concern for the poor exploited girls who are being taken advantage of when they're too excited/too young/too drunk to know what they're doing. The other is pity/contempt for the vulgar idiot girls who are squandering their feminist heritage by pulling their shirts up on camera... and are ruining things for the rest of us.

And I have much the same problem with both. I think there's more than a whiff of patronization, and elitism even, in both attitudes.

Let me talk about the first one first. In the strict Marxist sense, of course the women in GGW are being exploited. They're being paid a disproportionately low amount for their labor -- they're getting paid in T-shirts and Mardi Gras beads, so duh -- and someone else is getting rich off that labor. But I've seen a few of these videos, and it sure looks to me like most of these girls know what they're doing and very much want to be doing it. They like the attention; they get off on exhibitionism; they enjoy feeling sexy and wild; they like having an excuse to do dirty things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

Will they regret it later? Maybe. Some of them almost certainly will. But you know, a lot of us have done things in our youths that we now regret and can't take back. (My entire first relationship leaps to mind.) Making dumb choices that you regret is part of being young. It's the flip side of risk-taking and adventure.

As to the women being too drunk to consent goes, I'm not seeing it. I've seen tipsiness in the GGW videos, high spirits, probably even some impaired judgement -- but not blackout drunkenness, not drunkenness that would obliterate consent. I could be wrong, I'm not there on the streets of Spring Break with a Breathalyzer and a lie detector test (those don't work, anyway)... but it sure looks to me like, hammered though many of them are, most of these girls know what they're doing and know what they want.

Which brings me to my second point: the "they're squandering their feminist heritage" argument.

This is the one that really bugs me. It's as if sexual liberation is only for those of us with the right sex-positive feminist credentials -- not for yahoo sorority girls who want to pull their shirts up on camera. Like they don't deserve to have sexual choices, because they'll make the wrong ones.

But we all deserve sexual liberation. We all deserve the freedom to make sexual choices -- even dumb ones or crass ones. As someone whose name I can't remember once said, not all censorship battles can be about Ulysses. (Does anyone know the source for that quote, btw? I couldn't find it.) And the battle for sexual liberation and the right to sexual expression can't always be about brilliant sex-themed performance art, or beautiful ecstatic lovemaking in loving long-term relationships. Sometimes it's about college girls at big drunken parties pulling their shirts off for the video cameras. That's the whole point of feminist sexual liberation -- we don't get to go around scolding other women for their consenting sexual choices. (Not on moral or political grounds, anyway. On aesthetic grounds... that's another story.)

I've seen arguments that the problem with GGW isn't the girls whipping their tops off for the camera -- it's the people behind the camera, the crassness of the videos and the company and the grotesqueness of the main man behind them. It's not liberated or empowering if you're whipping your top off for exploitative assholes, or so goes the argument. But while I'm certainly not going to defend the motives of the GGW empire (especially not now), I still think we should support the sexual agency of the wild girls themselves. Do you think every single porn movie that Annie Sprinkle or Nina Hartley ever made was a delicate work of artistic beauty and profound insight, made by sensitive feminists, with the profits going to rape crisis centers and saving the rainforest? I sure don't. I'm sure that at least some of their movies were silly and dumb, and that the profits from at least some of them went to pay for the sports cars and coke habits of nitwit Silicone Valley porn producers. That doesn't negate Nina and Annie's sexual agency and power.

And I think a lot of the "won't somebody please think of the children?" hysteria about the women in the GGW videos is just flat-out sexist. The same company that makes the "Girls Gone Wild" videos also makes "Guys Gone Wild" videos as well... and I think it's extremely interesting that nobody, not one person that I've heard or read on this subject, has gotten upset about the poor stupid young college boys with low self-esteem who got drunk and let themselves be manipulated into flashing their asses and dicks on camera, and who are going to feel violated and ashamed the next morning and will regret it for the rest of their lives. It's apparently just young women who are incapable of making their own sexual decisions and living with the consequences.

So here is my plea. Can we please, please, try not to extend our excoriation of Joe Francis to an excoriation of the women who've performed in his videos?

Can we please treat them like adults, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they do what they do because they want to do it?

Can we please at least try to remember that other people like different sexual things from what we like... and not jump to the conclusion that if someone is doing something sexual that we wouldn't enjoy, therefore they don't enjoy it either, and therefore they're only doing it out of manipulation, desperation, coercion, drunkenness, low self-esteem, cultural brainwashing, etc.?

Because when we treat the Girls Gone Wild with patronizing pity and contempt, when we stop respecting them and their sexual agency, it's a small step to disrespecting Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino and Annie Sprinkle and Carol Queen and all the other great exhibitionists of the world. And it's a small step from there to disrespecting every woman -- and every man -- who makes unpopular sexual choices.

Oral Arguments

I was originally going to call this post “A Dyke’s Defense of Blowjobs,” but lots of my readers get these posts sent as email, and I thought some of you might not appreciate having that subject line show up in your In box....

Anyway...

I recently found out that there’s been an entertaining flare-up in the blog-world about blowjobs. It all started when Twisty of “i blame the patriarchy” said, on the topic of blowjobs, that “no woman, since the dawn of the patriarchal co-option of human sexuality, has ever actually enjoyed this submissive sexbot drudgery.” Several other folks have been joining in the fun, including on Salon and even the Daily Kos (although there the conversation quickly degenerated into a argument over whether it was a waste of time and energy to discuss blowjobs when people are dying in Darfur).

So of course, I have to throw my belated hat into the ring. Here it is: my dyke’s defense of blowjobs.

Please note: Very personal sex talk ahead. If that will embarass you, please turn the page.

*****

I love going down on my lover. I love it partly because I love it -- but I love it largely because I love giving her pleasure. And I don’t mean that in a noble, self-sacrificing, martyred way, or even in a kinky submissive way. Giving her pleasure is unbelievably hot. When I go down on her, I get completely lost in her pussy and in her pleasure. It works almost like a meditation to get me out of my head and into my body, and when it’s going especially well, it feels like my tongue is a clit. It’s fun. It’s sexy. I love it. And besides, it feels so very lesbian.

But in fact, I’m not a lesbian. I’m bisexual. It’s not completely inconceivable that I might have wound up in an LTR with a man instead of a woman.

And if I had, I’d feel exactly the same way.

Okay, not exactly the same way. I’m not quite as crazy about cock as I am about pussy. But pretty damn similar. I’ve certainly felt that way when I’ve been involved with men in the past.

And here’s what I want to know. If you don’t feel that way -- then what the hell are you doing involved with men? If you think giving men sexual pleasure is patriarchal drudgery, why on earth would you have sex with them at all?

Of course, there should be some sort of reciprocation. It always bugs me to see studies about how more teenagers today are having oral sex instead of “regular” sex -- because I know damn well that means blowjobs for the boys, not muff-diving for the girls. Of course men shouldn’t be assholes about it -- no hair-grabbing or deep-throating without specific negotiation beforehand, guys. And of course, if you absolutely hate giving blowjobs (or any other particular sex act), naturally you shouldn’t do it.

But don’t act like your personal gross-out is some sort of righteous political stance. That’s just ridiculous. Most people like giving their lover pleasure. Some of us like doing it with our mouths. If you don’t, then don’t do it. You have every right to your quirks -- but they don’t make you a superior feminist.

And for God’s sake, please don’t start pulling the “no woman likes that and if she says she does she’s a co-opted tool of the patriarchy” bullshit. I’ve now heard that about spanking, buttfucking, porn-watching, porn-writing, and just about every other kind of sex that I love. I’m sick unto death of it. Can feminists please stop telling other women what they do and don’t like in bed -- and stop trying to make other women feel bad because they don’t like the right things?

Thoughts? About blowjobs, or the political complications of male-female sex, or how we should all be ashamed of ourselves for wanting to talk about this instead of the slaughter in Darfur?

Oh, and a quick shout-out to the Nettles here (my longsword dance team). I polled them tonight about whether my next blog posting should be about North Korea, Matthew Barney, or blowjobs -- and blowjobs won unanimously. Global politics and conceptual art are just going to have to wait.

The CDC "pre-pregnancy" report -- argle-bargle or fooferaw?

Okay. Dan Savage has ranted about it. Susie Bright has ranted about it. The blogosphere is supposedly going apeshit over it. And I have a giant question: Is it really that bad?

I'm talking about the recent CDC report about pre-conception health care -- the one that the Washington Post reported on, the one that supposedly advises treating all women of child-bearing age as "pre-pregnant." (BTW, that's the Post's phrase -- the CDC doesn't use it at all).

I read the actual report -- not the Washington Post story about the report, not the opinion pieces about the Post story about the report, but the actual CDC report itself. And to me, it seems pretty reasonable. Am I missing something?

Here’s my layperson's summary of what the report actually says:

1) Most women by far (85%) in the U.S. give birth by the time they’re 44.
2) Many problems in pregancy and childbirth (birth defects, complications, premature delivery, etc.) are preventable.
3) Therefore, the health care system should be trying to, you know, help prevent them.
4) Ways to help prevent these problems include planning your pregnancies if you're going to have them, and taking care of your health in an assortment of ways before you get pregnant.
5) This is harder for poor women, and this disparity should be recognized and addressed.

Here, I think, is the key sentence:

"Preconception care offers health services that allow women to maintain optimal health for themselves, choose the number and spacing of their pregnancies and, when desired, prepare for a healthy baby."

Please note the "When desired."

As far as I can tell, they're not saying "All women are baby factories and we have to treat them as such." They’re saying "Most women of childbearing age will eventually bear children -- so we should help make this a conscious, planned choice with a good outcome."

The one part of the report that I think is even remotely problematic is the recommendation that all women -- and men, for that matter -- of child-producing age be given "pre-conception health care," regardless of whether they currently plan to have children. But given that their idea of "pre-conception health care" centers on planning ahead of time when -- AND WHETHER -- you're going to have kids... well, I don't see the bad.

The CDC is saying -- it seems to me -- that since (a) most women of childbearing age do wind up bearing children, and (b) many pregnancies are currently unplanned, therefore primary care providers and gynecologists (who are the medical professionals most people see most of the time) should initiate discussions about the patient's plans -- if any -- for having kids, and if they want kids, help them do it in a conscious, healthy way.

Again I ask: Why is this bad?

A final key sentence: "Each woman, man, and couple should be encouraged to have a reproductive life plan."

You know -- planned parenthood.

And once again I ask: Why is this bad?

So am I missing something? I'll admit that I didn't painstakingly read every sentence of this report -- there's a lot of medical and public-health jargon that I didn't understand and therefore skimmed. If anyone out there works in public health/reproductive health/related fields, or is familiar with them, or even just knows how to read a CDC report, please speak up:

Is the hysteria over this report justified -- or do we all need to just chill the fuck out?

P.S. Apropos of nothing: When I was doing an image search on Google for images of pregnant women (before settling on The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians), fully one out of four images on the first search page were of Britney Spears pregnant. I don't know what that says about us as a society, but it can't be good.

The South Dakota Thing

I've been thinking about this whole terrifying fucked-up South Dakota anti-abortion law, which completely outlaws abortion in the state, without even the usual exceptions for rape or incest. And I've been thinking about the pro-choice response to it... much of which has been to focus on the horror of rape, and why rape survivors should be allowed to get abortions.

I may get drummed out of the club for saying this. So I want to say first: I am absolutely 100% pro-choice, and 100% against this God-awful law.

But I've always thought that the "rape/incest" exception idea is bullshit. If you believe that a six-week-old embryo is a human being, what possible difference could it make how that human being was conceived? If you're deciding whether it should be legal to terminate its life, why would that question be relevant? After all, you wouldn't say it was okay to kill a two-year-old child (or a twenty-year-old adult) because he/she was conceived by rape or incest. If it's a person, it's a person.

The "rape/incest" exception that most anti-abortion activists make has always struck me as unimpeachable proof that anti-abortionists are actually not concerned about "life." They're concerned about sex. They think women who have sex outside marriage should be "punished" by having to have babies. (What a great life for that baby, huh?) That's the only reason for a rape/incest exception -- that rape/incest survivors didn't have sex on purpose, and therefore shouldn't be punished for it. (Other unimpeachable proof of this includes the fact that most anti-abortionists are also against easily accessible birth control and sex education.)

Anyway. My point is this: I actually think that refusing to make an exception for rape/incest is a more morally consistent position on abortion. As enormously as I disagree with it, if people really believe a
fertilized embryo is a human being with full civil rights, there's no reason they should make a distinction between embryos conceived by women who wanted sex and women who didn't.

The best and most consistent piece of anti-abortion writing I ever read (not a wide field, to be sure) was from a priest/minister (I forget which), who believed abortion was immoral... but also believed it should be legal. He said that if people wanted to stop abortion, they should be fighting to make birth control cheap and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it, including teenagers; to get good, realistic sex education in the schools; to make day care cheap and widely available; to improve funding for public schools; to make family leave a legal requirement; to make national health care a reality; etc. etc. etc. In other words, his position was that the best way to stop abortion was to make it unnecessary -- to make sure that nobody got pregnant who didn't want to, and to make sure that anybody who wanted a child could have one without it ruining their life.

And I don't entirely disagree with him. I absolutely don't agree that abortion is immoral -- but I do think it's usually sad. And I sure agree with his vision for a world in which it didn't have to happen very often.

I actually feel some understanding for the more thoughtful, rational anti-abortion people (again, not a wide field). I sometimes think the pro-choice movement gives short shrift to the real ethical question at the heart of the abortion debate: namely, at what point does a fertilized embryo become a human being? I don't actually think that's an easy question to answer. In fact, the foundation of my pro-choice position is that it's a damn near impossible question to answer -- and that it therefore should be up to each woman to answer it for herself. But if I didn't believe that -- if I believed that an embryo was a human being -- I'd be appalled by abortion too, and trying like hell to stop it.

But once again, for all their "baby-killing" rhetoric, I don't think that's really the issue for most anti-abortionists. I think the issue is that they hate the idea of women having sex without consequences.

A seriously classy gig: Hastings Women's Law Journal 2006 "Sex and Reproduction" Symposium

This is one of the coolest, classiest speaking engagements I've done to date. The Hastings Women's Law Journal is having a symposium on sex and reproduction law this Wednesday... and because of my book "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients," I'm going to be on the panel discussing sex workers. (Hastings, in case you're not familiar with it, is one of two law schools in the Bay Area connected with the University of California, and is the oldest law school in the state. So this is a serious goddamn gig.)

It's a little daunting -- after all, I'm not anything resembling an expert in sex work law. But I told the organizers that, and they said that was fine: they already have legal experts, and they want my perspective on the effects of sex work laws on the day-to-day working lives of sex workers. Which I now do seem to be an expert in. What with the book and all.

Best of all, I just found out that the event is open to the public. So if a scholarly symposium on sex and reproduction law is your cup of tea, do come check it out. It's going to be Wednesday, February 15, starting shortly after 4:00. There will be two panels before the one on sex work; one on same-sex parenting at 4:30, and one on late-term abortion and disability law at 5:30. The sex worker panel begins at 6:30; there will be a reception afterwards. It's in San Francisco, at 198 McAllister, room A, on the first floor.

For this particular gig, friends and family are requested not to bring giant foam rubber "We're Number One" hands and shout "Woot, woot!" Thank you for your co-operation.