Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Economics blogger Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution reviews Joan Roughgarden’s The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. And while he’s not convinced (a libertarian economist probably wouldn’t… and if he’s going to be consistent maybe shouldn’t be) he’s impressed.

The book rejects the “Red Queen” hypothesis for why there is sex (e.g., outracing parasites by frequently rolling the genetic dice) and presents a “portfolio diversification” view:

“The explanation for why asexual species keep popping up and quickly dying compared with sexual species would seem to be completely explained by thinking of asexual species as genetic versions of get-rich-schemes and of sexual populations as genetic versions of long-term mutual funds, without any need to invoke cost-of-meiosis considerations.

In other words, sex brings a genetic diversity which protects against rapidly changing environmental conditions and thus favors parental genes.

The author also argues against signaling theories of the peacock’s tail and against sexual selection more generally (especially on that latter topic I was not convinced but the discussion of sexual dimorphism and why it doesn’t always hold is nonetheless interesting).  She presents “social selection” as an alternative and if you turn to pp.237-8 you will see an excellent page-and-a-half summary of what the book is about.  Male promiscuity, for instance, is viewed as a genetic “tactic of last resort.”

Recommended, but with caution.  It is a must for anyone who reads about evolutionary biology and by the end of the book I was less skeptical than when I started it.

He said it here.

Not being either an economist or a biologist (but having studied social theory and the history and philosophy of science) I’m less wary that Cowen… and possibly less certain that Roughgarden sounds from various reviews. Like nurture vs. nature debates the question of whether there is or isn’t sexual selection in species is sort of like debating whether sunlight or the fire heats a room with windows and a fireplace. The commonest answer is often “it’s complicated.”

It’s unlikely that no sexual behavior (i.e. mate-attracting or rival-repelling) is selected for. But it’s really unlikely that, as ev-psych people too often imply, that everything behavioral (women preferring symmetrical men’s wallets when they’re ovulating — the wallets, not the women… or something like that) and many things non-behavioral (women evolved big boobs because men can’t do rear-entry sex but needed something that looked like buttocks — the men, not the boobs… or something like that) is sexually selected for.

The point being that even if Roughgarden’s work were no more well-founded than the average ev-psych “report” it would still be a useful corrective because it strengthens the case for “it’s complicated.”

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Note: it’s surprising how many reviews include a disclaimer along the lines “Roughgarden believes in evolution, she just doesn’t…” I mean duh she believes in evolution. It’s rather well-established. Not believing the persistently biased, background-noise-ridden, poor-statistically-sampled, and tradition-reinforcing, and behaviorally extremely complex blather of the kind of ev-psych that gets coverage in the press** has nothing to do with not believing in evolution.

Update: The bit about male promiscuity being a last resort rings true. At least in non-herd animals. (I dunno, maybe it works for elk and elephant seals.) As I mention here, if women are all so sure-fired dependent on keeping men around to help raise offspring then it stands to reason that partners of promiscuous men are not going have men around to help raise those offspring… in which case (assuming, remember, that the grand theory was true) the offspring of such unions wouldn’t themselves be likely to survive to reproduce… let alone pass on their promiscuous father’s genes for, well, promiscuity. So sure, as a reproductive last resort male promiscuity might work. But in general, over the multitudes of generations required to establish such traits, I don’t see it.

I think the reason I keep cognitive-dissonant-ifying over the hair and boys and fashion/preference thing boils down to to strongly anti-feminist and anti-male… but also strongly contradictory assertions about men:

How can men simultaneously be so fussy that women can’t have a stray hair loose (or a stray hair period!) while at the same time men are supposed to be ready to hump anything that moves (or doesn’t?)

No. Seriously! One or the other can be true — and either one would be pretty inexcusable. But they can’t both be true. Seriously! They can’t!

On the other hand… here’s a a follow up on my previous, possibly overoptimistic post. Laura Woodhouse of reviewed a British TV program allegedly intended to contrast sex education and pornography and turns up… well a whole raft of issues. Some of which are not just wrong but (just from my privileged, future-dead-white-hippie-male perspective?) sick and wrong.

Last night’s first installment of Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Pornography focused on the way in which pornography affects young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of the female body…

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The programme’s findings were unsurprising: boys find big, fake, firm, round breasts most attractive; girls want big, fake, firm round breasts because ‘that’s what the boys want’. Boys preferred hairless genitals; girls felt pressurised to shave because they ‘want to make the boys happy’.

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Well, aside from showing them photos and real naked women and telling them that porn bodies are not natural (making the mistake of claiming that being slim with big boobs is unnatural – way to further alienate girls who get picked on for being just this shape), not much. She didn’t challenge the boys’ sense of entitlement to porn style bodies, simply laughing when a boy said that if he came across a girl with pubic hair he’d tell her to get rid of it. She didn’t actively tell the girls that it was perfectly OK not to shave all your pubes off, that they shouldn’t feel pressurised to conform to what boys want, and instead gave them advice on reducing shaveburn and ingrowing hairs and suggested that they shave ‘for themselves’ rather than for the boys. Considering the series is supposed to be challenging the ‘pornification’ of our culture, it seems rather ironic that the presenter is using the typical anti-feminist backlash tactic of convincing women to do things men want by persuading us we’re doing it for ourselves. Yes, some women do like to shave it all off, but this is hardly the most empowering or helpful advice for teenage girls.

In general, the programme stank of repressed British, seaside postcard style boob-enduced hilarity…

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[I]t completely failed when it came to actively recognising the clear sexism and gender divide here and challenging it: the main solution being put forward is simply to prevent kids having access to porn by persuading PC companies to install child block software on their products. I hope to see boys in particular actually being asked about how they feel men and women are presented in the porn they watch, but it looks like subsequent episodes are focusing mainly on the body, orgasms and performance.

She said it here.

I gotta say, while totally acknowledging my privileged-hippie standpoint it baffles me to no end that grownups would imagine telling girls how to avoid fucking razor burn instead of maybe that what boys want (or say they want… or even cluelessly imagine they want!) isn’t the only possible frame of reference in the universe.

I mean… there’s loss of power, sure, but there’s also surrender of power. And not to put too fine a point on it, in the case of letting 11-year-old boys (the average age, according to Woodhouse’s sources, that boys are getting their exposures to porn) have the power to dictate feminine standards is… is… what the fucking hell moron universe does anybody let an adolescent child, of any gender, establish beauty standards?

I mean… Shiva up the stovepipe, of course little boys are going to want women to have no pubic hair — boys don’t start getting pubic hair till they’re maybe 13! They don’t even go into puberty on average for two years after girls their age! It’s… it’s… Dick Cheney on stilts! Ask an 11-year-old boy… even a 13-year-old boy what he thinks girls ought to look like and he’s going to say they ought to have an exoskeleton and a compartment for their favorite Magic™ card decks and a spigot for grape soda! And not to get overwrought or anything but at least when I was growing up boys started playing with their father’s or grandpas old empty safety razors and pretending to shave from… pretty early on. And searching our faces, with generally increasing anxiety, through 5th, 6th, 7th, and sometimes later grades for the first hint that finally we can start… not to grow a beard or mustache but to begin shaving.

So of course we’re going to be totally, utterly, and (literally!) juvenile-y wiggy, conflicted, and just generally to-the-bone not the people to be cool-hunting what women ought to look like!

Not to put too fine a point on it but… I stumbled across my URL by accident, but I chose to use it when I started sex-blogging for absolutely intentional, purposeful reasons. Children are a lousy source of standards for human sexuality. If we designed cars to suit children’s driving habits they’d need big red rubber bumpers and windshield-wipers on the inside because when children drive they stick out their tongues and go “blpblpblpblplpblpblpt!”

But we stand by and let children… unsupervised boys (because I’m pretty sure that by-definition 11-year-old-boy porn-viewers, or 13-year-old, or 16-year-old, are not being supervised) or girls establish, let alone dictate, what’s supposed to be “normal” adult appearance.

And for adults to let this happen? Or just mope about it? Or, worse, enable it either by suggesting restricting access is sufficient (criminy!) or by offering (to girls, natch) “helpful” suggestions like how to avoid flipping razor burn, or by shrugging helplessly and saying “woah, even 11-year-old hot-wheels-decal Y chromosome-rays are just so Teh Powerful how can we fight it?” Or, worst of all, not getting in there and raising your fucking children by maybe, y’know, making sure their first (and second, third, tenth, and 87th) exposures to information about sexuality from sex education instead of porn… or peers… or possibly well-intentioned but otherwise ill-prepared magazine editors and television programmers.

Seriously! It’s obviously not benefitting boys. And it’s sure not empowering girls. It’s abdication in the worst possible, lest responsible, most thoroughly non-real-adult way possible.

Sheesh!

No, really, WTF, OMG, !=LOL sheesh! I… I… At this point I need a windshield wiper on my laptop screen!

fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives has a great rundown on the obligation women feel to shave their legs. And by extension anywhere else.

I was sitting on mfranti’s couch, when the evening light hit my legs at the right angle and she (in that uber mormon-nice way of hers) screeched, “Ahhh! Leg Hair! Ewww!” while pulling her gag face. I don’t really blame her, truth be told, I often have the same reaction. Especially when I put on my dressy boots and the leg hair kinda flops out over the top, ewww. Run Away!

So why not shave? you ask, and save yourself the horror of the leg-hair boot flop.

Well, I’m totally lazy.

Plus the getting old thing, simultaneously less attractive (chin haired, boob sagged, and wrinkled) and more comfortable with myself (dude I’m totally awesome, I kid you not).

And then there’s the ideology. Though I’m never really sure if my ideology is an excuse for the laziness or my laziness is an excuse for my ideology (one wouldn’t want to come off as a militant weirdo).

She said it here.

This is going to sound like a total digression. It’s not.

Back before I was “figleaf,” in fact back before blogs, I spent a lot of time on the old Usenet newsgroups pertaining to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting. And because I was a stay at home dad I talked occasionallly about shopping and cooking.

One day, sort of out of the blue, I got an email from a reporter from a national cooking magaine asking if she could interview me about being a dad in the kitchen. I said sure and after a little back and forth I sent her my phone number. When she called she spent a minute or two asking a couple of general how-are-you question like how did I like being a stay-at-home dad and how often did I cook. But then she started asking me how my mother’s cooking influenced my cooking. I said not at all, my mom hated to cook and except for a couple of pretty good scratch recipes she relied heavily on cans, freezers, and (when it came on the market) Hamburger Helper. I started to tell her instead that I’d gotten the idea when an african american woman from our church stayed with us for a week when mom needed surgery and mentioned that, since she worked during the day, her son, who was my age and in my Sunday school class, would cook his own lunches.

No, no, says the interviewer, can you tell me more about how you learned recipes from your mom. And I said, well, I didn’t really learn any recipes from my mom. Instead I was bored one summer and read the Joy of Cooking cover to cover and… No, no, says the interviewer, what recipes did your mom use that you use now? And I said, well, I guess I make macaroni and cheese from a box the way she did but, really, I read this short story about a chef in upstate New York who… And the interviewer said “it sounds like you didn’t really learn to cook from your mom.” And I said no, I learned… And she said thank you, but my editor wants stories about stay at home dads and how they learned from their mothers. And she thanked me again.

And that was the end of that.

I mention this because a friend and I were talking today about gender and fashion and somehow shaving came up. And I opined, based on my old hippie friend’s experiences with “straight” boys and men, that men aren’t really as concerned about shaving (legs and armpits back then) as they were made out to be. I mean, sure, they might say something. But they didn’t run screaming from the room. And, for that matter, later many of them became hippies themselves. And stopped shaving. Their faces.

My friend brought up the point that thanks to porn men are insisting that women shave not just legs and armpits but pubic hair before they’ll have sex with them. And I was thinking… you know… it wasn’t that long ago that men, not just hippie men but “mainstream” men, were suspicious of women who shaved their pubic hair. (We won’t even go into the whole, stupid “does the rug match the drapes” business, m’kay?) And it wasn’t that much longer before that that porn would rave on and on and on about “luxuriant” pubic hair being an indication of sexual appetite. So I said I still didn’t think that many men are really refusing to have sex with their partners because they don’t shave.

And my friend said (and here’s where my digression stops looking so digress-y) that she didn’t know. “Even” Cosmopolitan is obsessed with the importance of shaving body hair. And she mentioned that any time they run an “ask men” feature that involves pubic hair, sure enough, all the men insist they can’t even get it up for sex with someone with anything less than a full-on Brazilian wax.

And I thought about how the article the reporter who contacted me was all about men who were influenced to cook by their mothers.

Hmm….

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. It absolutely does. But probably no more often than women insist they won’t go near a man with back hair. In other words, it happens. But in one case word of every instance carries a ton of freight; in the other it vanishes with scarcely a ripple.

Which brings me to my next point. The Las Vegas Courtesan (l’ll link in a minute) writes intelligently and in the first person about sex-worker issues. She also does self-photography and posts them. The photos are not “half-nekkid” and, since photos like that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea I wanted to let you know that if you following this link would take you to a photo of LVC minus underwear, plus pubic hair.

I mention this because the comments are are relevant. And again for those who’d rather not check out the photo I’ve quoted them below. (The second comment is from LVC.)

#Nice shot. Very hot! Love the nude and the hands, so much more erotic.
Glad to see the “bald” look hasn’t completely taken over. (Much sexier IMHO).
March 29th, 2009 at 7:15 pm

1. lasvegascourtesan Says:

Yea I am going to take some more photos before I get waxed again because I know quite a few people like the natural look. :)
March 29th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

1. Thru.Blu.Eyes Says:

Stomach and legs are awesome! I agree about the “bald” look. It seems so predominant everywhere you look now. I prefer smooth lips and a little hair on the mound. Landing strip, triangle, heart, doesn’t matter. I just like women to look like, well, women. Love your pictures on the site, LVC. Very erotic and sexy.
March 29th, 2009 at 8:52 pm

1. John Says:

Awesome picture! Very erotic and I love the not so bald look. Slightly trimmed is a much better look in my opinion. Mmmm, thanks for sharing!
March 30th, 2009 at 4:19 am

1. Jeff Says:

Very nice picture… I agree with previous notes about liking a little patch of hair more than simply bald. Don’t be fooled though! I personally don’t like the forest look

Say anything you like about the overall tone of the comments, but it’s kind of inescapable that

a) the four men who chose to comment affirmed a bias towards at least some pubic hair.
b) only the last one, Jeff, chose to say anything even slightly negative (he doesn’t like a lot of pubic hair.) Another commenter said affirmatively that he likes slightly trimmed pubic hair. (Call it a cliché, or call me a whiner, but since pubic hair really does go up your nose I prefer trimmed pubic hair too.)
c) LVC acknowledges that “quite a few people like the natural look.”

Again, it could just be that commenter #5 hasn’t come along. Or it could be that would-be commenters #5 through #5000 all retired to their fainting couches a la the Romantic artist John Ruskin on (allegedly) his wedding night. But I doubt it. Instead, the first four outside comments about a (literal!) “pornstitution” photograph said, more or less, “cool, pubic hair.”

As opposed to “‘Ahhh! Leg Hair! Ewww!’ while pulling her gag face.”

Question Authority, m’kay?

Oh, and go read the rest of fMhLisa’s post. Compared to my rambling anecdotes she directly articulates why the pressure (in her case from other women, but from men as well) is overblown. And generally worth ignoring.

Another pretty crucial but little-often-discussed point from that post by Sungold Kittywampus

[T]here’s a pesky little Kantian ethical issue with regarding sex, and by extension one’s partner, as a mere means to an end. I don’t much care whether the end is “getting some pussy” or “getting married.” Either way, it dehumanizes and disrespects one’s partner.

She said it here.

Call me a prudish libertine if you like, but promising or using sex to get commitment (a la “The Rules” ...or the last 2000 years of patriarch) is ultimately as invalid as promising or using commitment to get sex.

Not least because each exploit demeans both seeker and sought. And, for that matter, overloads both sex and commitment.

Via Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, The U.K.‘s Times Online: “Are women sexually liberated, or just confused?” demonstrates the confusion between what in the 1960s were called, respectively, women’s liberation and the “sexual revolution.”

Fifty years ago, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described womanhood as a socially constructed activity; today, after several waves of feminism, and a recognised right to contraception, sexual pleasure and all that, we still find our sexuality defined by pop music, glossy magazines, advertising and pornography.

Dr Petra Boynton, a sex psychologist, sees the very commercialisation that makes us seem so free as the reason we’re not satisfied. “The scented candles, the lingerie, the stuff — it doesn’t explain how anything works, it just presents a dream,” she says. “Sex has become mandatory, competitive and commercialised. Vested commercial interests suggest it could be great, if only you had their product.”

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Boynton was invited to go on GMTV recently. “They wanted to do something about empowering women [sexually]. I said: ‘Let’s talk about the clitoris.’” They didn’t like that, “but they were having a pole-dancer on”. No wonder we’re paranoid…

Read the quote in context here.

Yesterday I expanded on Sungold’s point about the separation between feminism and the “sexual revolution” that began in the 1960s to clarify that while they came into public consciousness around the same time the former, feminism, was about increasing women’s opportunities in all dimensions while the latter was almost entirely oriented around increasing women’s opportunities to… consent** to sex when men initiated it. (Or, as more conservative factions inside and outside feminism might put it, to decrease opportunities to decline it.)

What I didn’t get much into was that Sungold was prompted to write her history in response to a young woman who says feminism is bad because she thinks men are icky aliens and wants no part of the casual sex and hook-up culture she blames feminism for! (Blaming feminism for hook-up culture? Um… Amy009 meet Twisty Faster. And seriously, even though she’s currently still in the “I just want a no-strings-attached marriage” stage I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks Amy is thiiiis close to crossing over to radfem-ism.)

Dr. Boynton’s experience makes it pretty clear why Amy, or Twisty for that matter, might make a distinction between empowerment and what Twisty mockingly calls “empowerfulment.” It also illustrates pretty nicely Sungold’s distinction between the feminist revolution and the almost exclusively male-oriented “sexual revolution.”

That’s not (obviously) to say it’s particularly bad if GMTV’s programmers wanted to do a piece on pole-dancing as empowerment. But great mother of pearl it’s bad — really bad — that they were ready to do a piece on pole dancing but ran like bunnies from doing a piece on “the, uh, nether-type zone“ empowerment at all.

[** I actually make with the little joke here. Actual sexual consent didn’t really come into use as a legal concept until the 1980s. —fl]

Jill of Feministe says

Now that boys may be getting vaccinated for HPV, we’re suddenly worried about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy – and not a peep about how vaccination may turn boys all slutty.

Read the quote in context here.

(The Washington Post article she links to is pretty sharply worded as well.)

Ever wonder why people never peep about things that turn boys all slutty? I actually do. Because, seriously, even if they really cared about girl virginity they have to have noticed they’re way into diminishing-returns territory on pressuring girls. (And no, I’m not talking about that purity-ring-auxiliary thing where boys are encouraged to protect girl chastity. I’m talking about talking boys into protecting their chastity.) But nope, no dice, they don’t worry about boys turning all slutty.

Ever wonder why people never peeped about girls and safety and effectiveness? Even though, y’know, the whole theoretical reason for opposing the HPV vaccine for girls and women was to “keep them safe” because they’re such delicate flowers? I wonder about that too.

Sungold of Kittywampus has written an awesome analysis of the relationship of feminism and the “sexual revolution.” It’s part of a larger post trying to explain this persistent and knuckleheaded notion that “casual sex” and the entire hook-up culture is a direct result of feminism. Here’s the key part of her “Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and ‘Getting the Milk for Free’”

Where Amy and other anti-feminists blame feminism for bringing on the sexual revolution and leading directly to the shattering of young female psyches, the history is much more complicated, and most of it has little to do with feminism. Heartbreak goes back at least as far as Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The sexual revolution on the 1960s had its roots in youth culture, drugs, and rock and roll. The advent of the birth control pill in 1961 enabled young women to try out sex – whether in hippie communes, bars or with a committed boyfriend – without fear of pregnancy paralyzing their pleasure.

Second-wave feminism was generally chilly toward the sexual revolution, at least as most young heterosexuals were experiencing it in the 1960s and 1970s. Nowhere in The Feminist Mystique did Betty Friedan suggest that the path to women’s liberation required shagging anything that moves. By 1970, Anne Koedt was assailing men’s sexual incompetence in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.“ The Redstockings saw men as well-nigh irredeemable; why would you want to sleep with the enemy? While the Redstockings Manifesto (1969) didn’t go so far as to repudiate all relations with men, within a few years political lesbianism and separatism became a major current within feminism. Needless to say, none of these women were advocating casual sex with men, either. Third-wave feminism has generally repudiated separatism and criticized slut-shaming, but that’s not the same as positively advocating hookups and casual sex for all women.

Where feminism made a difference was, of course, in opening up historically new educational and economic opportunities for women. These made it possible for women to defer marriage and to enjoy sex without bartering it for economic security. This, to my mind, was the real sexual revolution. It’s just not the one people mean when they blame feminism for the failings of the hookup scene.

So yes, in a materialist sense, feminism enabled casual sex. But more importantly in the long run, feminism has opened the possibility of for us (men and women alike) to have sex only when we want to, not under duress, and not for economic security or survival. In a perfectly feminist world, no one would stay married against their will, for example, or submit to a spouse’s unwanted advances. We don’t live in that world yet. Plenty of people stay married for economic reasons. (Some of them are men.)

For those of us who aren’t trapped by economics, feminism allows us to say no to the sex we don’t want, and an enthusiastic, lusty, happy yes to the sex we do want. That’s revolutionary, all right. It’s just not identical with “the sexual revolution.” It’s also antithetical to the idea that anyone needs to participate in hooking up.

Read the quote in context here.

It’s totally fine to stop right here. One of the peculiarities of reading text is that my reaction, which follows, can seem like an immediate reaction to what Sungold wrote. It’s not. I’ve been thinking about it, a lot, for several days. Nor is the following text likely to be my final reaction. If you want to read the rest of this post feel free to read it as a snapshot. And not necessarily any more relevant than a pundit’s color commentary on an original work.

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For the record, by all accounts “hook-up” culture predates the 1960. I’m sure people can chase the beginning as far back as they like.** Suffice to say, though, that since sociologists estimated that one in three first pregnancies in the decidedly non-feminist 1950s were conceived in the backs of cars I’m going to say the only “revolution” part of the sexual revolution was that men didn’t have to worry as much about getting their hook-ups pregnant. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there.

Sungold didn’t mention Andrea Dworkin but, yeah, from roughly 1968 (the Redstocking Manifesto) to 1986 (Dworkin and MacKinnon’s testimony before Ed Meese’s Attorney General’s Report on Pornography taskforce) mainstream feminism was more interested in curtailing men’s sense of innate entitlement to sex with women than encouraging hookups. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there either. (Yes, there was dissent in feminism let by 70s stalwarts like Erica Jong and 3rd-wave vanguards like Susie Bright, but note the implication of the standard definitions of “mainstream” and “dissent.”)

And through all that the (frustratingly slow, multi-generational) accumulation of social, political, economic, and legal power led to an alteration of expectation of equal power in feminism (even if not yet exactly or always reality of equal power) resulted in members of newer generations feeling… well… entitled to make their own damn decisions about who, what, when, where, how, why and if they have sex. Or work, go to school, walk, worship, eat, drink, play, think, make mistakes or fail, vote, reproduce, spend, date, marry, volunteer, read…

Of course there really are people who think that entitlement make decisions a big mistake. And there are plenty of people who would dearly, dearly like to roll that back — either out of fear or cultural fundamentalism. And for them, surprise, women having Teh Sex would seem like the biggest affront…

But here’s the trick with that: the actual “sexual revolution” was about only one thing and that was, basically, attempting to eliminate as many obstacles to women granting “consent” as possible. And while it might have had some interesting and productive side effects that’s about it.*** So I’m going to say that contemporary anti-feminist objections to the “sexual revolution” are actually part and parcel of the culture that produced it.

Meanwhile feminism has indeed produced a revolution. But as Sungold so elegantly lays out, sexual activity is something closer to a side effect… and “as well,” rather than the main event. And for all the residual sexual-revolution echos about “obtaining consent,” or even “obtaining enthusiastic consent,” the real revolution of feminism is about being able to decide. Where the decision can include sex but isn’t limited to it.

Oh, another thing? As Sungold says, unlike the “sexual revolution” the feminist revolution is not limited to creating more consent… to sex initiated by men. Including “casual sex” and “hookups.” The feminist revolution is about women’s power to decide to participate. Or (the big threat to anti-feminists and an even bigger threat to the “sexual revolution”) not to.

Failure to distinguish the difference between the “sexual revolution” and the feminist revolution is not limited, by the way, to anti-feminists.

[** My vote for the beginning of the sexual revolution has always been the introduction not of the pill in the 1950s or 1960s but of penicillin in the 1940s. Remember that until herpes and then HIV reached critical mass in the 1980s antibiotics handily cured all significant STDs, reducing them from serious chronic and often life-threatening illnesses to minor nuisance. —fl]

[** Consider that “but you’re not going to get pregnant now that you’ve got the pill” happens to be a very good excuse to grant consent. And the benefits of being able to manage one’s fertility beyond one’s ability to more safely consent to sex are manifold. But if you read most of the popular literature about the pill in the 1950s and 1960s anything that wasn’t about “regulating periods” or “controlling acne” was about enabling sex. Now why would this seem more women-centric? One clue would be that men (at least, and even women) didn’t start “discovering” things like “foreplay” and women’s orgasms till nearly a decade into the “revolution.” And I’d like to argue that that even that wasn’t as much about feminism as that the next factor limiting consent after pregnancy fear of pregnancy was women beginning to ask “so what’s in this for me anyway?” And even then, soon after that, in men’s eyes anyway, conversation about one’s ability to “give” orgasms became another metric of male prowess. Rather than, say, women’s opportunity, or affirmative, self-motivated interest in enjoying it more. (And people wonder why I call myself a prudish libertine!) —fl]

Following up on my mildly controversial “she deserves better” post I’ve been thinking about how deeply, deeply “no-sex” class the mostly-male, entirely anti-feminist fear is that if women have parity in economic, political, and social power then men will become redundant, useless, unlovable, and unloved.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon runs into an instance of the sentiment and renders her own judgment. She’s entirely too generous.

Like check out this guy who commented at Hugo’s place:

How can (men) feel valued as a human being if there’s basically nothing only they can do that women cannot while there’s a lot of things men cannot do that women can’t[sic]? You either get detachment or service in this situation, but service, of couse, is requiring social checks on women – some kind of affirmative action for men, which one may call patriarchy. Which leaves a bit of a problem: reject patriarchy and you’ll get male detachment.

I’m not going to pretend to understand why conservative men are so damn jealous of women’s reproductive and sexual functions, though I can see why they’re scared that women will reject them if we don’t need them.  (Because I myself reject these men out of hand for sucking, and I’m sure they have every reason to believe the women in their lives would, too.) But there it is, in all its naked glory—-the belief that half the human race needs to be subjected to violence, coercion, and abuse to keep us as a permanent underclass so the other half can feel good about itself.  (Of course, as Hugo points out, it doesn’t even work that way and a lot of men don’t feel good about themselves in this circumstance.)

Read the quote and commentary in context here.

As I said I think it’s mighty generous of Amanda to say it’s about jealousy and/or misogyny and/or power-hogging. I think it’s about astonishing self-pity, insecurity, and utter failure to recognize that, being human and all, and, having sexual and social orientations in pretty much direct proportion with men, women are going to want men around pretty much no matter what. And for approximately the same reasons men want women around.

Also, as Amanda hints, men who realize the no-sex class Two Rules of Desire was some weird shit we made up to make ourselves feel worse… and therefore realize we don’t have to be a) belligerently resentful b) pity-party mopers… women would be even more happy to have us around. I mean, seriously! Would you want to have sex with some dude with such absent self-esteem he calls it “getting lucky?”**

I mean, seriously, the only reason we even use the word “consent” in the context of is because men can’t get it through our heads that as autonomous human beings women might instead, you know, decide to have sex because they want to have sex.*** Instead of because they feel sorry for us.

I mean, seriously!

[** Believe it or not, yes. Because it happens all the time. That doesn’t mean it might not a) happen more often, or b) be more fun for all concerned, because c) it would be because sex feels really, really nice and not because men think they need women to (reluctantly?) “consent” sex with them in order to feel validated. —fl]

[*** I always feel a bit creepy talking about how much women do or don’t, would or wouldn’t want sex if this, that, or the other condition became true. Especially if the condition had something to do with men. Not least because the whole notion of sex and conditionality is a pillar of the no-sex class paradigm, but also because it sounds so presumptuously arrogant. In fact, as I hint in the preceding footnote, there’s very good reason to believe the chief outcome of dismantling the dominant male paradigm might be a net decrease in the amount of sex we seek! Because we’d only want sex when we’re horny instead of when we’re horny or feeling insecure. But if I say that to someone while he’s still inside the paradigm he’s likely get all wiggy about this men-and-feminerism business. So apologies to all concerned but that’s how I’m choosing to talk about it. For now. —fl]

Wayne Hooke of The Psychology of Beauty says

Using photographs of real men, Peters, et.al (2009) found no evidence of a preference for either masculinized or symmetric male faces or bodies in ovulating women.

Photos by Flickr user spongemonkey.
Used under a Creative Commons license.Previous studies that have found a relationship between ovulation and attraction to masculine features have used computer-morphed images that are weak in ecological validity. This study used photographs of actual men, like the ones below.

Masculinity, attractiveness, and symmetry ratings of the stimuli appear to approximate a normal distribution, strengthening the ecological validity of this study. The only noteworthy limitation in this design is that there were no objective measurements of masculinity or symmetry – only subjective ratings were used.

The authors were also careful to use precise measurements of ovulation to ensure that the ratings of women in the ovulatory phase were well-within the previously identified six-day long sexually active phase of the menstrual cycle.

Read the quote in context here.

Evolutionary Psychologists, of course, had proposed that magic uteruses make women… what?... pickier during ovulation? And it sounds like if you cherry pick your criteria sufficiently you can get that result. The tricky thing about science isn’t that it’s flawless. Quite the opposite (being a human endeavor, not because it’s science.) What’s cool about science, though, is over time it’s institutionally self-correcting. Scientist A says X, scientist B says that doesn’t sound right, scientist B tries to reproduce scientist A’s findings.

I often carp that pop Ev-Psych (the Ozzie-and-Harriet-assumption-conserving stuff you’re likely to hear about, not the real stuff that’s still mostly in the basic foundation-building phase) is made up mostly of loser types trying to justify why they can’t get dates with “superior” men or women. For which reason, ironically, ginning up data that says ovulating women prefer symmetrical jock types a) makes sense but also b) also shows lack of imagination. Here’s how.

Near as I can understand it, the original researchers were saying that when women ovulate they prefer more handsome men. They also claim that women are more horny when they’re ovulating. Put the two together and you get an explanation for why horny babes never hook up with ev-psych doods.
Photos by Flickr user spongemonkey. Used under a
Creative Commons license.

But let’s slow that waaaaaayyyyy down and play it again. Ev-psych assumes that no matter how much it looks like we use sophisticated mental processes to modify or even disregard bodily impulses we’re actually really, really, really simple moist robots utterly controlled by extraordinarily sophisticated, highly conditionally-expressed genes. Like the alleged genes in women for both extra pickiness and horniness during ovulation.

But…

Doesn’t it seem like the whole idea of horniness is to override pickiness? And aren’t women only something close to ovulating six days out of the month? Which means women usually aren’t ovulating? And don’t women usually decline dates with ev-psych doods?

So doesn’t it seem like ev-psych doods should be cherry-picking data to show that women won’t date them prefer more symmetrical-looking men even more when they’re not ovulating instead?

And when women are ovulating and their adolescent-porn-fantasy genes are turning them into helpless fembots of lust and they still won’t date sociobiologists? Sadly for the EP community Holly offers only non-genetic explanations.

(via ResearchBlogging)