Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

In comments to my sports/virginity question where I questioned why, for instance, losing one’s virginity was supposed to destroy your life but blowing your knee out in high-school sports isn’t; why getting an STI (even a bad one like HIV) is supposed to ruin your life but picking up hepatitis while trekking in Nepal isn’t, MinorityReport (who blogs at, well, Minority Report) said

Great point. I wish that would have been the gist of my high school sex-ed classes.

An example: The school hired chastity speaker, Molly Kelly. I forget most of her talk. However, I do remember one very clear image she used. Throughout her speech Molly repeatedly dropped an apple. At the end of her presentation she held up the apple she had dropped and an apple that had been set aside. She then asked which we would rather eat, the apple that had been dropped on the floor (repeatedly) or the apple that had been set aside. It drove her point home, and for me at least it made an impact.

I would have been nice to hear something like, “But if you do _______, it’s not the end and life goes on.”

She said it here.

Oohhh, I had this realization after reading her Molly Kelly story and now I’m kind of beside-myself irritated.

You know all those abstinence-only metaphors of apples, roses, even gum and tape? Every one of them is a single-use consumable good. Bouncing an apple into apple sause just takes the cake though. The difference between apples and, oh, say, your body is even if you managed to get bruised during sex you’d still recover quickly. And most of the time, for most women and men, you’re not bruised during sex to begin with.

Apples, gum, roses, tape, suckers, etc., don’t recover at all but they’re fucking things, not people!

You want a better, but still-inanimate metaphor for a man or woman who’s had sex? Try a rubber ball. In fact try a superball since those seem to bounce with more energy than they begin with. How about a book? Try a deep pool that a pebble has been tossed in. A painting, an alarm clock, a window, a fireplace, a chicken and an egg (which came first?), a ski hill, a piano or flute.

And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for any of those because humans aren’t inanimate nor are we, women or men, either literally or figuratively consumed in the course of, well, intercourse.

A dropped apple is simply marvelous for propaganda in the service of patriarchy but evilly inaccurate for sex education.

Photo by Flickr user Saffanna. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Part A: Observation
So Sam Sugar of SugarBank reports that

The Mainichi Daily News, my breakfast read, reports that vaginal ejaculation disorder affects 70% of Japanese males… Supposedly it’s a byproduct of masturbatory techniques which don’t feel like a vagina.

See the rest of Sugar’s take on the story here.

And here’s a bit more detail from the actual Mainichi Daily News article

Tsueno Akaeda, a doctor who runs a clinic in Tokyo’s Roppongi, agrees with urologist Nagao.

“There are definitely more people with vaginal ejaculation disorder than there used to be,” he says. “There has been incredible progress made in masturbation goods and there are plenty of people who can ejaculate into an artificial vagina, but not the real thing. I get more than a few men come to see me about that. And those in their 20s and 30s have grown up watching adult movies. They find masturbation easier and more satisfying than intercourse.”

Experts say one of the main reasons men develop vaginal ejaculation disorder is that they learn how to masturbate using methods that feel distinctly different from vaginas, such as rubbing up against pillows or lying face down and moving back and forward for stimulation until climax.

“Naturally picking up somewhat unnatural methods has to be the main reason,” Nagao says. “Or, some guys obtain pleasure from some method they’ve happened to discover almost by accident and keep on doing it that way. It used to be that your bad buddies would tell you the best way to jerk off.”

Source: Mainichi Daily News, which appears to be the online, English-language version of Japan’s oldest newspaper but may or may not be its most respectable.

Sometime last year I think I linked to a post by a young man recounting to other young men how actual sex with actual women isn’t so much what one might expect when one’s entire prior experience has been masturbating to porn.

Which, now that I think about it, might explain the otherwise inexplicable popularity of porn-style “money shot” masturbation during real, actual sex with another person.

And this actually makes sense. Male masturbation really doesn’t feel very much like vaginal intercourse, and depending on how long one has been doing it then it really might take a little practice to learn to have orgasms another way. (Take that, evolutionary “male-orgasms-are-easily-tied-to-reproduction” psychologists!)

Oh, and while I’m at it, men obviously aren’t alone in this. My newsfeed reader informs me that “Slut Machine” of Jezebel just posted her own variation on a very familiar theme

I would read about “mind-blowing” sex in Joan Collins and V.C. Andrews books, passages that likened women’s orgasms to lightning strikes and bells sounding, so I had really hyped up sex in my mind. I knew I wouldn’t come on my first couple tries at sex with a boy. Finally, after fooling around with my boyfriend for a month or two, I came while he was going down on me, and I remember being like, “Oh! That’s what that is? I can do that better and faster by myself!” By then, I realized that what would happen when I touched myself was an orgasm, but for some reason I thought it would be different — or better — with a partner. And sometimes it is.

Read the quote in context here.

Part B: Inquiry

But here’s an interesting question: to what extent is the notion that penis-in-vagina intercourse as the inevitable, “natural” conclusion to heterosexual sex a social construct and how much of it really is biologically imperative? Seriously! For real! Totally serious question.

Because it seems to me that while some men and women obviously take to it like cats take to landing on their feet, and while many others figure it out sooner or later, and while pretty much every story anthropological or erotic, dry as dust or tongue in cheek, assumes that intercourse is the natural, the inevitable, and the quintessential erotic experience for men and that women’s “problem” is that their architecture just isn’t “designed” to “properly” or “naturally” enjoy intercourse. Heck, the “fore” in “foreplay” is a contraction for the “playing around” men are supposed to do to “help” get our partners ready do before getting down to the… what?... the serious work of intercourse?

And yet along comes word that, left to their own devices men’s ability to have “vaginal” orgasms (ok, orgasms in their partner’s vagina) can easily approach the same rates commonly attributed to women.

But…

See…

Not to put on my tinfoil hat about evolutionary behaviorism again or anything but here’s one of my big problems with their most fundamental assumptions: all flatworm sex might be reproductive sex but not all human sex is reproductive sex. Instead much, in fact nearly all human sex appears to be recreational. When left to our own devices anyway. And, as Tsueno Akaeda in the Mainichi article or pretty much every Babeland page will tell you, the devices we can leave ourselves with demonstrate incredible progress in masturbation goods. Which, contra sociobiology, isn’t a issue at all unless a species becomes so incompetent at sex for reproduction that we manage do it at less than 2.2 times in our sexual lifetimes.

And…

Meanwhile…

I actually enjoy intercourse quite a lot, especially when a partner and I have been together long enough to be able to learn each other’s rhythms and rhymes well enough to both have orgasms that way. And given the subtle signals I’ve sometimes gotten from my partners (“I want you *here,” with a pull and a push, for instance) I’m not the only one who enjoys it.

But intercourse is a bit problematic orgasmically for me. It took me a couple of tries the first time I had intercourse. Later I had the opposite problem and had to wrestle with coming in the first moments which, platitudes about machismo not withstanding, deprives the victim as well as his partner of quite a lot of longer-term, slower-to-develop, deeper sensations and eventual orgasms. And even when I was experiencing prematurity with some partners there were others with whom I never came at all either because of fit, or degrees of lubrication, or how they would grind into the relatively sensation-free upper length instead of the highly sensitized bottom or sides of my cock.

But…

Then…

So if with just a little masturbatory habit-formation men as well as women can learn to have better orgasms without intercourse, and if vaginal intercourse is, on aggregate, the highest risk activity as far as pregnancy and social/sexual disease transmission (funny how the CDC never reports “honeymoon cystitis” as a sexually-transmitted disease even though it’s caused primarily by intercourse), then…

Part C: Recommendation

Why not make the heads of the Abstinence-Only/True-love-Waits/Virginity-Pledge/social-control-through-sexual-scarcity crowds explode (not to mention the heads of their minority-viewpoint “all heterosexual intercourse is rape” bedfellows) by recommending that young heterosexuals not bother with intercourse till marriage. Oh, heck, not to bother even after marriage except for procreation!

But not to avoid it because intercourse is precious, or special, or the seat of sexual oppression but because…

...once you strip away all its socially-constructed significance intercourse is actually kind of boring compared to all the other things one or more people can do with each other!

Ok, so according to the (randomly Googled) National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy roughly one out of three teenage girls become pregnant before age 20.

And according to The U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006 there were roughly forty million girls under the age of 20.

Put it all together and, at least at projected rates, thirteen million of them will be, have been or currently are pregnant.

The teen pregnancy group also says birth rates for U.S. girls age 15-19 rose to 41.9 per 1000 in 2006. The U.S. Census says there were roughly 10,389,322 U.S. girls age 15-19. Put it all together and 435,300 teenage girls gave birth this year.

One of them has a TV show and cut a million-dollar deal with a “celebrity” gossip magazine to talk about it. At that rate, if the “celebrity” gossip magazine wanted to get each pregnant teenager’s story it would have to pay what? $43.5 billion? Something like that anyway. But I digress.

The partner of the soon-to-be-millionaire pregnant child is himself a legal adult.

The partners of nearly all the other 435,299 girls 15-19 who gave birth this year were adults as well.

Social conservatives, “traditional values” activists, and anti-feminists all believe it’s the 15-19-year-old girl’s fault they got pregnant. Rather than their 18-67-year-old partner’s fault because…

...um

...you can’t expect grownups to act responsibly?

...if you were a man you’d tap that too?

...you can’t blame men because they have sex drives but girls never get horny and therefore have sex only after careful consideration?

...we go to all that trouble to spend $143,000,000 on abstinence-only curriculum that focus almost entirely on girls without wasting so much as a penny of it on education for boys and therefore we expect girls to be a little more grateful?

...they’re sluts?