Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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Pluralist of Feministing Community has a really cool post up about the near side of non-consensual “gray area” sex.

What makes it a great illustration is that the sexes were reversed! (Emphasis hers.)

Since November my best friend has been having relationship problems. She is cis and het as is her boyfriend and they’ve been a committed and monogamous relationship for about 4 years now. The whole story is too long to recount, but as of a week ago they began a “break they need in order to stay together”.

Suffice it to say the first two days were hellish as I talked to one of the loves my life breaking down over the phone. But during one of the more lucid moments, she told me that – among a lot of alleged grievances – she had (unknowingly) forced her boyfriend into sex.

Apparently he had said things along the lines of “I’m too tired right now, let’s just go to sleep” and she had continued to proposition him thinking “welll, this will help you sleep better!” My immediate reaction was that there was no way she had coerced or pressured him into sex. After all, he should’ve just said “No really, I don’t want to do this right now” if she kept at it. It was his fault for not stopping the encounter.

And then I realized that had this been a woman in his place – not to mention my best friend – I would never have given this consideration. I was victim-blaming, basing my assumptions in tropes of male hypersexuality and female passivity. She didn’t handcuff him to a heater and force-feed him viagra . She’s a nice girl, she couldn’t have done that!

Read the quote in context here.

I talk a lot more about the paradigmatic social assumptions that women belong to the “no-sex” class — sugar, spice, everything nice, sure, but also possessing no autonomous sexual agency. Unless they’re somehow “broken,” or “damaged goods.” I don’t talk so much about the other side, the equally strong assumption that men are the sex class — obligate, reflexive, indiscriminating, and single-mindedly ready for sex. Unless, again, there’s something wrong with them. But it’s just as big a deal.

Inside the dominant paradigm it’s as unheard of for a man to say “no” as for a woman to say “yes.” Inside the paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, the ratchet of initiative alway clicks in one direction.

This too has its consequences. It doesn’t just assume women never mind not having sex, it also assumes men never mind having it. One consequence would be Pluralist’s friend assuming her partner was having a momentary brain fart or something therefore his “no” couldn’t possibly really mean no. So she kept trying.

As I said up at the top this is way over on the near side of the “gray area.” A little persistence, especially in a long-term relationship where one partner’s behavior is perhaps uncharacteristic, is an unfortunate failure to recognize that no means no, but not an appalling one.

That said, whereas it’s way over this way verging into “no harm then no foul” territory, as Pluralist hinted and one commenter stated very clearly, however mild-sounding the incident

Obviously, something went wrong in this particular case if the guy is bringing it up as a grievance.

Therefore not “no harm then no foul.”

So if her failure to acknowledge or respect his decision wasn’t appalling it wasn’t benign either.

So there’s definitely still something to talk about.

Well here’s an interesting tidbit on maintenance of the two-sphere model of gender that I stumbled across on a coffee-shop “library.” The book is called Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. In a coffee-shop setting I’ve only been able to read the introduction but the rest of the book looks interesting as well.

Here’s an eye-opening couple of paragraphs from the introduction though.

To link female honor to purity would have proven sexually inconvenient for southern white men, however, had they not bifurcated the sexuality of white and black women. The creation of Jezebel provided the rationale for allowing sexual relations between white men and black women. Southern proslavery ideologue William Harper made no apology for the sexual degrading of black women by white men. He simply extended his theory that “slavery anticipates the benefits of of civilization and retards the evils of civilization” into the realm of sexual relations.

By regarding black women as a “class of women who set little value on chastity,” he argued that slavery protected black women by saving them from the alternative of being cast out of society in the manner “justly and necessarily applied to promiscuous free women.”

Harper further argued that the sexual access to enslaved women discouraged white men from debauching “pure” white women and provided them with “easy gratification” for their “hot passions” without violating the code of southern honor. Finally, he reasoned, such sexual access made white men “less liable to those extraordinary fascinations, with which worthless [white] women sometimes entangle their victims.”

Source: Introduction, pg #9

What’s really boggling is that Harper, like Aquinas, Augustine, and countless others who’ve endorsed this view of heterosexuality imagined they could endorse this outlook and still go to Heaven when they died.

This would sound more shocking if virtually the same sentiments didn’t turn up in the Middle Ages and even earlier: a relatively small number of “jezebels:” prostitutes, slaves, and occasionally even boys are sacrificed at the alter of, well, unalterable male lust in order to… what? To preserve the nigh-unto-asexually disinterested sexual “purity” of “true womanhood.

One can only imagine how actual true women felt about it… all of them obviously — both the “bad,” “debauched,” or “fallen” ones were overborn sexually, and the “pure,” “true,” and “virtuous” who were allowed no sexual expression at all.

Anyway, it’s a totally horrifying but also very tidy encapsulation of the dominant paradigm of women as the obligatory no-sex class and men as the compulsive sex class.

Anyway, knowing nothing else about the book (though I’ll see if I can get back to the coffee shop to read more of it) the very quick skim I was able to give it looks like a seriously interesting look at a usually seriously overlooked population and the dynamics women of all social and economic classes were subject to before, during, and after the Civil War.

On the very off-hand chance anyone else has read more of it feel free to let me know what you think in comments.

Via DemFromCT of Daily Kos, Kevin Huffman of the Washington Post says

On Sunday, as I hunker down with family and friends for the Super Bowl, I can rest easy knowing that CBS is working hard to defend my heterosexual sensitivities. On the surface, heterosexuality doesn’t seem like a particularly distinctive trait or one in need of broad institutional protections, but many seem to believe that we heterosexuals are delicate souls.

The media, the government, the military — all are ready to head off potential sightings of gay people.

In the case of the Super Bowl, CBS has refused to broadcast an ad by the gay dating Web site ManCrunch.

He said it here.

Sometime soon I’m going to have to write a post about “privilege,” which while technically accurate as it gets, and also glaringly obvious to those who don’t have it, is also nearly-by-definition, completely invisible to those who have it. That said, I like the way Huffman’s point illustrates a really huge problem with the invisibility of being the “normal” against which all else is “other.”

What I really wish people would get is that heterosexuality is as real and durable an orientation as homosexuality. I mean, it’s a peculiar condition of imagining one’s self “the norm” that it’s hard to understand you’re the way you are for exactly the same reasons others aren’t. You’re that way by accident of birth a.k.a. nature.

And by not getting that you’re also going to miss that you’re not “normal” temporarily, you’re not “normal” by whim, you’re not “normal” because you were exposed to the “right” or “wrong” social influence, and you’re definitely not “normal” by choice.

Any more than any given sexual “the other” is.

And that’s the thing. Being gay isn’t a choice! And one of the coolest things about getting that is that if you just thought about it you’d get that your heterosexuality wasn’t a choice either.

And if more people got that they’d get that they really don’t need the media, the government, the clergy, U.S. Marines and the Canadian Mounties, and, especially, various posses of gay-panic-stricken vigilantes to protect their heterosexuality. Or anyone else’s.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus again, this time on an extremely prickly subject I’ve discussed previously: the blurred boundary between subsistence and dependency at the real margins of society. In this case the difference between assistance and exploitation or… well… she puts it rather pithily (emphasis mine.)

I had a social worker friend who once described a conversation she’d had with a female client who was trying to get back on her feet. She had met a new guy that she was very excited about. Oh, sure, there were problems, but who doesn’t have problems? Anyway, he was so committed to her, so committed to working out everything. The woman brushed off the few times he’d encouraged her to have sex with his friends as times that they were all just sooooooo drunk, but it totally strengthened their relationship because they’re not even the jealous types. And, of course, there were all the times that she was just trying to “help him out” on a drug deal. And then those times that she had “cheated” when a friend of his came by and locked her in the bedroom. At the end of her description, the social worker had to try and explain that this woman didn’t have a relationship, or a boyfriend: she had a pimp.

She said it here.

You wouldn’t think this kind of denial could happen. It could.

What’s really harsh, by the way, is that since in circumstances like this the pimp “boyfriend” may be trading his partner for favors or status or cargo rather than cash he may not, strictly speaking, recognize that he’s being a pimp either. Although mostly I’m guessing he’s pretty clear about he’s doing he still might not think of it as pimping.

That would be another problem with stereotypes, especially for those living really marginal lives.

As I said in my own post a couple of years ago

speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or “crashing” at other people’s apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized I’d been homeless. And it wasn’t till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as “in some kind of hot water” probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I’m guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they’re not there but because there’s there’s so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it’s hard to tell even when you’re in it, let alone from the outside.

I said it here: Between Transience and Trafficking, a Personal Perspective

This isn’t by the way even remotely anything like an excuse. It’s a complication in any scheme to legalize prostitution, which I would still like to see. Or to keep it illegal, which many more people would evidently like to see. Which means, at least to me, that no matter how the pro/anti activism turns out this particular issue will probably need to be addressed by separate policy initiatives.

I don’t have much else to say about it. Except maybe that I think it could be distinguished pretty unambiguously in a page, or even a sidebar, in a comprehensive sex-education curriculum. And so if anyone’s listening I’d really like to lobby for its inclusion. Of course it would also be nice if we could count on students receiving comprehensive sex education in the first place…

I’ll just reiterate that I think Jacobs writes powerful stuff.

Incidentally she closes her post this way…

it’s impossible to ignore rape culture when it calls and makes an appointment, in a whisper and obviously hiding in a closet. When it arrives late on the bus, alone and lost. When it walks in the front door, comes over to your desk, and whispers on the verge of tears, “I need, um, I need, I need the thing.” It’s hard to ignore when it’s curled up in your lobby, unresponsive and unwilling to come back, to interact with you or any representative of the world. It’s hard to ignore when it’s made manifest in a real live girl, a real live girl who has been stripped of the right to disallow strangers access to everything from the waist down. I am acutely aware that many of these girls have been violated, and that I constitute a further violation; my presence announces to them that not only are they not allowed to choose when and with whom they have sex, but they are not allowed to choose how to deal with the consequences of being abused. All I did was pass a job interview, and I am temporarily LordGodKing of her uterus. All she did was own the uterus; why should she get to decide what to do with it? It’s not like she can type up the paperwork. She doesn’t even have a desk.

Again, she said it here.

Powerful stuff.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus writes very powerfully about extracting herself from a very deeply-ingrained local culture of abuse. Parental abuse. Sexual abuse. Partner abuse. Often intertwined with drug abuse and alcohol abuse. She now works in or around the field of social services related to family and child courts. (I’m trying to be even more vague about what she does than she tries to be.)

Wow. She’s some writer. With some past. And some really great insights about it. And she’s got what sounds like an awesomely insider job in an area of law and society that very much needs to be better understood. And she writes very well about that too.

While there’s an excellent chance I’m the only one who wasn’t already reading her a quick Google search doesn’t turn up that many references to her. Which is a shame. As I said she has sometimes chillingly important things to say. For those likely to be triggered by any manner of abuse at all her topics are all pretty much triggering.

An example of something triggering would be the following quote about the (internal) logic of abusive relationships in the context of perilous/subsistence social situations… made even more trigger-y by the circumstances her abusive relationship made it possible to avoid! (Emphasis hers.)

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

She said it here.

That resonates very seriously for me, though obviously from a slightly different perspective. The kinds of people she describes hanging around with, and for that matter being, sound so similar to the people I hung around with during my transition from homelessness into mere desperately marginality. A life where “good guys” only sold or used pot, coke, alcohol and maybe occasionally non-meth speed while “bad guys” sold coke, pot, tranquilizers, and more-directly addictive “hard stuff.” A life where “up and out” meant “working my way up” into a “Clerks” like assistant manager position in an exurban fast-food joint with only the most peripheral contact with my former friends. And “friends.” And before moving away completely to the Northwest where I discovered college, real friends (including many of my old, true friends), work, life, health, and eventually love and family.

In other words, while my situation was nowhere near as dire as Jacobs I completely recognize the logic that comes from the realization that “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits.” Instead inside that culture being a “good guy” means hanging out with the good drug dealers and good crooked cops who don’t beat up their girlfriends and who think it’s “bad form” to have sex with women who’ve passed out. The way “those losers” do.

Sigh. There’s a lot more at her blog. Not just about the downsides but about how to deal with the downsides. But from within and, once out, from without.

Jacobs has just taken a new job, an important one, that requires a great deal more circumspection in her blogging, and which takes up more of her time and energy. So who knows if she’ll continue writing the way she has been. That said she’s got a couple of very powerful new pieces. For instance one about how society, personality, and personal circumstance conspires with the law to constrain reproductive choice for the very young and very vulnerable even more than you think it does. And another about how one very anonymous department of a very-deliberately not-identified administrative entity helps getting judicial waivers of parent-notification requirements merely difficult in a system that’s otherwise not really well-designed to give them at all.

Pulling together several themes from the last couple of days, here’s in interesting post from last month by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper about a mediated sexual assault on rapper Lil Wayne when he was 11 years old. She’s quoting from a movie about him where he’s telling a protégé nicknamed “Twist” about an incident his own mentor, nicknamed “Baby,” instigated. (Emphasis hers.)

Wayne tells Twist that Baby, Wayne’s father figure, was one of the men encouraging the woman to perform oral sex on him. “I’m a do you like Baby and them did me,” Wayne informs him.

After the documentary was filmed, Lil’ Wayne spoke about his childhood sexual assault again, in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Kimmel goaded Wayne into talking about “losing his virginity” at the age of 11. Then, Kimmel—along with, oddly, Charlie Gibson, who was also a guest on the show that night—teamed up to tease Wayne over the incident, which they presented as an impressive display of Wayne’s manhood. Except that this time, Wayne was no longer up for joking about the matter, and he finally explained to Kimmel that the experience was a negative one. It was also revealed that the woman who was being encouraged to “suck little Wayne’s little dick” was 14 years old.

After the Kimmel segment aired, Cara at the Curvature wrote an excellent piece about the cultural tendency to respond to sexual assaults against males by recasting the assault as a positive sexual experience for the victim…

She said it here.

Quick note, Cara’s post at the Curvature really is a great one, as is a post from Sociological Images that inspired her.

Anyway, Hess concludes with

When sexual assault against males is excused as a joke or even held up as a badge of honor, that doesn’t just work to erase victims after the fact. This attitude directly causes sexual assaults. Twist is told he needs to have sex whether he wants to or not, just like Wayne did before him.

Yikes!

Here’s a handful of ideas we probably need to spend a little more time thinking about… and encouraging others to think about as well.

• sexual assault on male victims is not well-understood, and consequently not taken seriously
• male sexual awakening begins considerably later than most people seem to assume
• gendered allegations that it’s “natural” for boys to already be ready for sex are incorrect, and therefore if a boy ends up in a sexual situation at age 11 (as in Wayne’s case) or even 4 (as in mine) the presumption is that “he’s just getting an early start” is also (deeply) incorrect.
• Pressure to become precociously sexual has consequences on boys or, more subtly but no less incorrect…

• if the consequences for boys look different than the consequences for girls then they are thought to be of no consequences at all

and finally

• if boys are pressured and/or feel pressured to be precocious — either by their elders, other boys, or by girls who may already be beginning to feel sexual — they may try to fake their degree of knowledge and interest and may try to rely on social scripts from… less than ideal sources

Something else to consider: as adults it sure seems like a lot of us have a general sense of amnesia and/or avoidance of memories of that part our lives. Nevertheless it seems to be a pretty formative period where a huge number of general social assumptions are put into practice. Those of us with children, at least, and really I think everyone who plans to live among peers who are even slightly younger than we are need to reassess our own experiences and, where possible, see if we can provide more structure for children in, especially, their very early adolescence.

Between all the things we “know” about the differences between boys and girls on the one hand, and things we “know” about men and women on the other hand, there’s this roughly three-year gap that… we don’t “know” much about at all.

It’s not that it’s not studied (I’m sure it must be) and it’s obviously experienced by everybody. It’s just that you don’t hear many people talking about it.

It’s that gap between early childhood and early adulthood, the gap where girls hit their growth spurts, and puberty, and cognitive and social expansion, and start developing romantic and/or early sexual identities while boys in their classes mostly… aren’t.

And yes, mileage varies, yes there’s overlap, yes, yes, yes. But…

There’s this little one, or two, or maybe three year window. One that probably seems small to most adults. It’s maybe 20% of an early adolescent’s life.

It’s not talked about much. Outside of middle-school administrator’s offices anyway.

Seems like it probably has an impact disproportionate to how much it’s discussed though.

—-

Another point about this that’s pretty important though: the gap I mentioned between middle-school aged girls and boys would be a gap relative to middle-school aged girls and boys. Not compared to, say, high-school aged girls, not to high-school aged boys, definitely not to adults.

Seems like that probably has an impact too.

Failing to understand it, though, probably has an even bigger impact. Much bigger.

—-

And finally, (and this point is a lot more speculative) I’m not sure when exactly boys start catching up. I’m guessing somewhere between average late high-school and, say, mid-college age.

That definitely seems to have an impact, one that’s probably a little better recognized. And one that I think is considerably exploited by military recruiters and other adults, vendors of gendered-male products and services, and, for better or worse, peers.

Failing (sometimes, I think, willfully failing) to understand that one has, I think, tremendous impact.

—-

Anyway, two questions:

• What’s your recollection of your own middle-school experiences?

• What’s your recollection of the experiences of middle-schoolers you might have watched grow up?

Speaking of restating “all men are potential rapists” as “to a woman, any man can be a potential rapist,” I’d like to talk for just a second about what I think is an overlooked problem with the traditional phrase.

If I can just try it out for a second it goes something like this:

1) The overt obstacle for men… even more so for progressive ones… is that to acknowledge being seen as a potential rapist goes against everything we’re taught to believe as Americans, as progressives, etc., about the evils of stereotyping and blanket oppression of members of a class.

2) The covert obstacle for men is that the accusation blends seamlessly with the way we perceive ourselves anyway — it’s just one more obstacle we believe we have to “seduce” our way through anyway if we want to be in any sort of relationship with women at all (not just sexual ones!)

3) Consequently the grammar of all “but I’m an exception, I’m not a rapist” is identical to every other attempt to form a heterosexual relationship, with the additional and particularly nettlesome layer for men of “well great, not only do I now have to demonstrate first that I’m not a loser and second that I’m not a cad but also third that I’m also not a class-one felon.”

4) In other words minus the perceived criminal allegations the entire relational interactions take place on ground heterosexuals… at least heterosexual men… have already worn into deep, familiar ruts.

5) The problem with all “but I’m not a rapist” arguments is there’s a tacit “unlike all the others who probably are.”

6) With the really problematic… well… problem with number five being yet another tacit clause: “... but I nevertheless feel no obligation to do anything about.”

That last one’s a doozy and, I think, cracking it is one big key to solving the problem with, on the one hand male defensiveness and on the other male indifference. I think rhetorically restating the problem as “to a woman, any man is a potential rapist” makes shirking that obligation a lot more difficult. Not impossible, no*, but definitely more difficult

—-

I ought to mention that the lightbulb for this went off for me after reading Britni Daniell’s post of A Different Defense of Schrodinger’s Rapist. In which she responds to previous objections by Champagne and Benzedrine and extensively quotes Hugo Schwyzer (from here and here.)

* Because another thing that shakes out of the construction, above, is you know how men appear to value a relationship in proportion to how hard he thinks he has to work for it? Well, to the extent that’s true he’s going to be personally frustrated by the additional layer of mistrust but… I wonder if he’s going to feel more “worthy” if he can “win” a woman over in spite of that? If so then it’s definitely not a good dynamic.