Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Quick follow up on my previous post about privilege. From comments in to the same Slacktivist post I cited previously, a commenter called “Mark Z” had this nifty illustration of the hidden benefits of classic “white, male Baptist” privilege.

It’s like running in a race in which half your competitors have had their shoes stolen. You benefit from it even if you didn’t steal their shoes. You don’t normally see that they have no shoes because they’re behind you and in a foot race you keep your eyes forward. If they fall far enough behind, you might forget they’re even in this race.

He said it here.

That analogy seems even more apt than the standard “wind at your back” or the snarky “born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple” ones.

So a couple of weeks ago Slactivist said something that I, even though I’m not specifically a white male Protestant Baptist, should have said because, hey Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, agnostic-but-with-a-vaguely-Protestant-sounding-last-name, it’s all the same thing with us people.

Head’s up: it starts out sounding ordinarily Jon-Stewart-y snarky…

Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated

As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.”

I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists, others are entitled to assume that every white male Baptist is fully in agreement with the actions of Patrick Gray Sharp and to therefore deny white male Baptists the rights others enjoy.

So I denounce this attack and state unequivocally that we white male Baptists do not believe in this kind of violent extremism. I beg you all not to condemn all of us for the actions of this lone member of our community, although of course I will understand if you decide that you must do so and will humbly accept whatever restrictions on our full participation in society that you see fit to impose. That’s only fair.

I further beg your forgiveness for my not denouncing this violent act sooner. Unlike the nearly identical failed attack in Times Square, this attack wasn’t the lead story on our local news and the newspaper I work for somehow didn’t mention it at all. Then today I was outside most of the afternoon cutting the grass and just didn’t hear about the story until now. I plead with you to understand that as soon as I learned of this incident, I rushed to post this denunciation.

Read the quote in context here.

...but the twist makes it not only generally relevant to the context of grossly unfair expectations that all even-vaguely Muslim people should apologize for and denounce violence committed by other equally vaguely Muslim people (even if they’re, say, Shiite and the perpetrator was Suni, even if they’re ethnically Persian or Turkic and the perpetrator was ethnically Arab or Pashtun.) The twist makes it appropriate to the context of sex, gender, and relationship blogs like this one. Slactivist continues…

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. This is so embarrassing — I totally skimmed past the fine print on the unwritten rules and completely missed the exemption for hegemonic classes. It turns out that we white people, males and Protestants never have to worry about extravagant displays of vicarious contrition. As a white male Protestant, apparently, I don’t need to promptly denounce every evil act committed by any and every other white male Protestant.

This is awesome. Do you realize how much time this is going to save me? Plus just the relief of no longer having to watch the news on pins and needles, worrying every time there’s a crime or a gun-nut on a spree that it’ll be some white male Protestant guy and that everyone is going to assume we’re all like that. What an enormous relief to be judged only as an individual and not prejudged according to the worst thing ever done by anyone ever claiming to belong to my faith community, or sharing my gender or my ethnicity. It’s not just a relief it’s a … oh, what’s the word? ... privilege. Yes, that’s what it is — a fantastic privilege.

Two points to this twist, incidentally.

1) If you’re white, male, and Protestant it really is a privilege that you don’t have to apologize ever time another fuckwad shoots up a school, a church, an office, a clinic, his family, random passers by, an Oklahoma City federal building, a Texas or California IRS office, random police officers, and so on. No, really, it’s a privilege. Not a resentment-driven, anxiety induced, demanded for male-privilege privilege, I mean it’s a real actual privilege. One that should be extended to anyone else who isn’t directly responsible for supporting, endorsing, instigating, or participating in such incidents should receive.

2) Yeah, Mary Daly was really separatist. Yeah, Catharine MacKinnon is really anti-fellatio. Yeah, Twisty Faster is really antagonistic towards men. And sure, somewhere, some time, someone who identifies herself as a feminist… or more to the point someone you identify as a feminist (even though like Lorena Bobbit or Wendy Vitters they aren’t) may have said or done something that hurt your feelings. But unless you want to start taking responsibility for the behavior of Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney, David Koresh, Scott Roeder, and Randall Terry and you might want to ask why you think every feminist should be held responsible for the most extremist, and occasionally even obscure feminist positions.

Of course none of this means one can’t take on responsibility for wrongs committed by others. Whether or not they resemble you in some way superficial or real. It just means your resemblance doesn’t oblige you to.

An old blogging friend I just rediscovered, who took her blog private a few years ago (it’s here but you need a login) says

You all may know that I’m kind of handsy. Tactile. PDA machine. But. I have recently decided to start being more assertive about my personal space. I think most women struggle with this because we’re always making ourselves smaller based on some old patriarchal something or other — cross your arms, cross your legs, let someone pass before you go, move to the side when you pass someone, etc. Well, fuck that. Men don’t do that. They just walk past. They spread out their legs. And I want to do that to.

So I am. I stand my ground on the sidewalk and in halls. Make space for me — ESPECIALLY if you are part of a group! Suck it up and realize you’re in a town with narrow sidewalks and you can’t walk in a group like in Reservoir Dogs. I go first. I make eye contact with drivers (the law says you MUST stop for pedestrians in crosswalks in MA … yeah, ALL crosswalks without lights) and cross in front of them. I take the FULL seat on the T. I even do the spread leg thing (not the huge obtuse angle version that some guys do that goes beyond their seat boundary.

I am reclaiming my space. Not all the space. Just what I can rightfully grab.

I understand why she’s private, and she’s always been more of a diarist than a pundit anyway. But it’s great how she can just put her finger on the pulse.

What’s great about it is that while I’m a big guy I tended small and sickly for my age as a kid. I still see myself as almost invisibly small (when I sat sideway in class the teacher counted me absent, ba-da-da-bump.) It’s only been the last few years that I realized I ought to occupy my own space more responsibly.

Here’s one of Holly of The Pervocracy more delightful kinks.

I find that serving others’ kinks is, for me, a kink in itself. The archetypal example is foot fetishism. It does, really, nothing for me. Feets is feets, and might as well be elbows or nostrils for all I care. But when a guy is into feet — that does something for me. The nothing-in-particular I feel having my toes sucked turns into an oh holy God YES when I see what it does to him. I don’t want my toes sucked, but I want my toes sucked by a foot fetishist.

Read the quote in context here.

I don’t know how common that particular kink is. If you even want to call it that. It might be common enough that you wouldn’t even call it a kink.

Anyway, I’m often that way. Vanilla sex with a vanilla partner is delightful. Outdoor sex isn’t usually my thing but it’s been wonderful with a partner who loved it. Same with dirty talking, which usually makes me want to roll my eyes.

Although truth be told it took me a while to get over some of my social hangups. In the pre-G-Spot days there was the partner who tried to convince me she only got off on penetration. That kind of freaked me out since I “knew” vaginal sensation was a myth and a sign of self-oppression… and so I broke things off. And I practically ran away from someone who said she fantasized about spankings. But… in retrospect all I want to do is look them up some day and apologize. It’s not just that I was being a big jerk who was sure he know what other people should or shouldn’t be turned on by, it was that if I’d let myself listen to myself then they and I would have had perfectly delightful times together.

Another wayback post from my pile of inexplicably never-published drafts.

Via Matthew Yglesias we learn that former Bush minion and permanent-war proponent John Bolton is also a follower of pull-it-out-of-your-ass evolutionary psychology. Quoth Bolton

You know, homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter I think reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.

Yglesias’s reply refutes not only Bolton but the core assumption of every pop evolutionary psychologist who’s ever flunked a biology, statistics, history, psychology, or logic course.

For comparison’s sake, note that homo sapiens are hard-wired to use stone spears to hunt and kill grazing animals for food. And yet, hunting grazing animals has become a pretty marginal phenomenon in human existence. Doing it as a primary means of subsistence, as opposed to a hobby, has become even more marginal. Doing it with stone tools is even more marginal, though it does of course still happen.

Read the quotes in context here.

Nicely put. If in just a generation or two we can transcend something that was so immediately, directly, and incontestably essential to human survival as the use of stone tools… something that dates back at least 1.5 million years no less… then we can probably also transcend impulses as marginally adaptive as 3-5% biases towards hip-waist ratios in mate selection. Assuming those ratios were ever really shaped by evolution to begin with.

Because whatever other “hard wiring” we’ve got (and sure, we’ve clearly got a lot of it) we’re also clearly hard-wired for something called technology and culture. Not to mention stuff anticipation, learning by example, and, especially, learning from your mistakes. Natural mistake for Bolton to have missed all those, but it’s not due to his “hard wiring.” Having no personal experience of the kind of violence he imagines we’re hard-wired for, nor experience* of the actual capacity for the unprecedented violence of modern warfare (itself only a few generations old!) he’s developed his theories only through the channels of culture and technology he imagines can have no impact on our “hard-wired” natures.

* Like virtually all Bush administration warmongers John Bolton used cultural leverage to dodge military service himself, thus demonstrating his own ability to transcend the “hard-wiring” he alleges we’re stuck with.

Karen Rayne of Adolescent Sexuality who teaches sex ed both directly to K-12 students and at the college level to prospective sex-ed teachers, answers a really critical question: why begin teaching sex ed no later than middle school? (Emphasis mine.)

Most middle school students are not yet sexually active.  I know I already said that, but it’s really important.  Most of the middle school students in my classes are open to conversation – and perspectives that may differ from their own – on many topics.  My co-teacher and I are able to broaden their perspectives through thoughtful, age-appropriate activities and discussions in really amazing ways.  When I have students in my classes who are more sexually active, they are just not as open to thoughtful discussions because the outcomes of these discussion hold meaning for their own understanding of themselves and their identity.

It is simply far better for young people to discuss sexuality with breadth and in-depth for the first time as a theoretical topic that does not hold bearing on their own sexuality rather than as an emerging sexually active individual who now has a whole new raft of conversations and thoughts with which to evaluate their past decisions and therefore their own identity.

She said it here.

Last night I had a long discussion with my 11-year-old about addiction (she asked.) It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to wait till she reached the age where most children begin experimenting with potentially addictive substances to have that conversation. A few days ago I had a conversation with my 13-year-old about driving consciousness. It probably would be a terrible idea to wait till he was driving to bring it up. And while babysitting has a nice balance of rewards and responsibilities, and is almost completely value-neutral at least in our corner of the world, I’m still going to make sure that before they start they take the locally-offered babysitting classes so they’ll be prepared not only for the entertaining elements (which I’m pretty sure they can figure out for themselves) but also stuff like boundaries, first aid, negotiating with adult caregivers (which I’m dead certain has never once crossed either of their minds.)

Considering the complexity and nuance of sex and relationships, their rewards and responsibilities, and of course their potential consequences, it’s hard to argue that children should learn about it long before they’re more than theoretically interested in doing any of it.

Lovely, supportive snark from Holly of The Pervocracy the other day in an aside about social attitudes about men’s orgasms.

(Male orgasms are not interesting, of course. Because women’s orgasms are like intricate flowers blown in fierce waves under a sky of fireworks, and men’s orgasms are like “splurt.” Sigh. It’s tough being a flower, but at least my sexuality isn’t comic relief. Instead it’s the experience of the Other and must be documented for the edification of humans. But anyway.)

She said it here.

My version of this insight is one of the things that made me decide to invert the feminist “sex class” construction such that men are the “sex class” and women the “no-sex class.” Men are considered so automatically, intrinsically, reflexively, and obligately sexual that it’s just assumed that the only possible interesting things about us is when there’s something wrong with our ability to have orgasms. The top two being premature ejaculation and impotence, plus occasional grumblings about refractory periods.

But interest in healthy, non-dysfunctional, normal human male orgasms? Aside perhaps from a peculiar and probably porn-influenced obsession with volume, not so much.

One more bit of evidence, if we didn’t already have railroad cars full, that scientific and medical principal investigators are still overwhelmingly male.

That’s not to say that male orgasms will be the first thing women researchers tackle when they start breaking the glass ceilings of grant administration boards. But it is to say that women, unlike men, probably wouldn’t have the acute performance-related and homophobic “nothing to see there, let’s move along” anxiety combined with “I do it all the time how could anyone possibly be interested” arrogance I think a lot of male researchers have.

Holly of The Pervocracy, talking about normal vs. kinky brings up one interesting data point…

All I know is that if I have to sit through another conversation at work on the topic of “my husband and I are never in bed together and that’s awesome because gosh it’s such a pain having to deal with those icky things he wants”, I’m going to explode and tell them everything.

She said it here.

and one of her commenters brought up another…

Is ‘icky things he wants’ non-vanilla sex or is it sex at all? I’m over on the asexual end of the spectrum, and if I came out with something like, “Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to never bother with sex again,” at work, I would be stuck spending the rest of the season putting up with well-meaning busybodies demanding that I justify my marriage.

He or she said that here.

Pretty wild, right? If you’re “too” sexual (in Holly’s emergency-medical staff workgroup that evidently includes owning a vibrator) you get branded a wild child. But! On the other hand, as the commenter pointed out, if you’re not sexual you’re in for a world of scrutiny as well. All made worse by our general reluctance to discuss whatever “happy medium” it is we’re all supposed to “naturally” have.

Or, as yet another of Holly’s commenters, Mousie76, puts it

I don’t think normal, vanilla people know what normal and vanilla is like, because part of being normal and vanilla is not really talking about it.

Much hilarity does not ensue.

While reassuring yet another correspondent who’s concerned about being able to… I dunno… perform vaginal orgasms Jessi Fischer of The Sexademic nails the crippling folly of making orgasms the stat-counter of sex. That and the equally crippling trap of distinguishing “foreplay” from the “real thing” of intercourse.

Of course, none of this is to suggest you should toss penetrative vaginal sex off the list of enjoyable sexual stimulation. Kissing may not make you come, but damn it feels good.

She said it here.

There’s so much about sex that feels good. Orgasms? Oh yeah, and woe betide those who arbitrarily decides they’re not necessary for their partners! But if the only point was orgasms then why would anyone ever bother with kissing?

It’s not a trick question. There are plenty of things that feel good about sex, sometimes very good, that don’t* make you come. Kissing is only the most obvious.

* Ok, ok, someone somewhere will always pipe in that THEY are able to come from activity X, Y, or Z. But while that’s obviously wonderful for them, if most people don’t come that way it doesn’t refute the point.

Referencing a study comparing continued use of the pill between women who could buy it over the counter in Mexico vs. matched women who received it through standard U.S. insurance or health-clinic plant, blogger Emmma of The Well-Timed Period says

Researches wanted to test the hypothesis that making access to the Pill more convenient — by 1)removing the prescription requirement, and 2) providing users with more Pill packs — could increase Pill use and continuation.

They recruited 1046 current Pill users living in El Paso, TX, a setting where low-income women can obtain the Pill without a prescription by crossing the border into Mexico and buying the Pill OTC from a Ciudad Juarez pharmacy. [532 women received Pill packs with a prescription from an El Paso clinic and 514 women purchased the Pill OTC from a Ciudad Juarez pharmacy.]

The study found that discontinuation was significantly lower for women who used the pharmacy to buy the Pill than for clinic users. When the number of Pill packs was taken into account, discontinuation rates were higher…for clinic users who received one to five pill packs. Only clinic users receiving 6+ pill packs had continuation close to pharmacy users.

Read the quote in context here.

If you’re talking about medications with short-term use like antibiotics or
pain killers there might be an excellent case for distributing only limited supplies. For most women who take the pill it’s a long-term proposition. And while many women discontinue use because they have side effects they don’t enjoy, studies like this one (see also) suggest inconvenience is a big factor as well.

I mean, it would be bad enough if you could only by a month’s worth of toothpaste or floss at a time… and then you could only get new supplies at the store you bought it the first time.

Bwahaha, listen to me talking about it as though it was a hypothetical instead of how it works basically everywhere in the U.S.

Sheesh!