Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Unrelated conversations overheard in a community-college cafe: at one nearby a young man telling someone he thought another lip ring would “help;” at another table an older woman telling a friend that getting breast implants made her feel like she “had herself back” after her children grew up.

Boy, it’s really up to each of us how we choose to modify our bodies. Tattoos, piercings, braces, haircuts and shaving, dieting, working out, tanning, hair plugs for men, and so on are all ok, I guess. And if we can stick things in our ears, noses, bellybuttons, scalps (hair plugs again) and lips then I guess you can stick things in your chest too.

Which is a long way of saying yeah, if you want to modify your body then go for it. Just don’t do it because you feel inadequate, or unattractive, or “if only I had…” because, you know, it doesn’t “improve” other people. So why should it “improve you?” On the other hand, just like a tattoo or a tan or all the other things we do to ourselves it will decorate you. And if you’re into self-decorating, and not “improving” then, again, that’s completely up to you.

Which gets to my main point: I don’t think you’d let someone browbeat you into getting a tattoo because they wanted you to have one. And I don’t think many people would buy someone else saying “if you’d just dye your hair blue could find a partner.” And so, thinking about implants as decoration you can sort of immunize yourself from what you think anyone else would like, in favor of what you’d actually like.

Anyway, keeping in mind that some things, like tans and haircuts can grow out while tattoos and implants… not so much, the real question being not just so much what you do as what’s the long-term impact on your health. A boob job is a much bigger risk than body piercing. (Take it from me: recovering from general anesthesia is not the same as the day after Quaaludes and tequila. And recovery from surgery hurts! Complications from surgery can hurt too.)

On the other hand in the long run it may have less health impact than, say, chronic tanning. Which we tend not to think of as “body modification” at all.

Photo by Flickr user stevegatto2, who I’m sure looks perfectly presentable with or without back hair. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors has a thoughtful analysis of body-hair removal in the face of increasing marketing of shaving products and services to men. (She reports one Gillette tagline goes “you might say when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.”)

While I strongly disagree that shaving one’s pubic hair makes one look prepubescent (when was the last time you heard that description of a man who shaves?) I agree with Crawford that body-hair removal for both women and men is closely associated with the culture of youth.

Example A? The “problem” of back hair. Back hair doesn’t really start to sprout in men till middle age. And so ads for back hair removal (either temporary or permanent) are a staple of aging-youth-oriented alt-weekly newspapers, where such ads are at least as common as ads for “bikini line” waxing.

Crawford says, sensibly,

[H]airlessness — obtained naturally or by grooming — is a sign of youth (the pre-pubescent look), body-consciousness (I can see those abs glisten!), self-care (when you trim your nails, trim your hairs) and other-regarding (how thoughtful of you to anticipate that I wouldn’t like hair up my nose — wait a sec, did you assume I’d be visiting this part of your anatomy on a first date?).

A marketing technique will be a sure winner if it appeals to men’s desire to feel, um, large. There’s a reason that Trojans don’t come in size “small.”

The hairless look? Shows off a guy’s “equipment,” in Gillette’s lexicon.

Anyone who’s eagerly looking forward to her or his partner sprouting those tufty little middle-age patches of hair on his back, shoulders, and the backs of his upper arms pipe up.

But if, as I suspect, anti-ancillary hair bias is as strong against men as it is against women, an even more effective marketing strategy would be to taunt men for looking like skeevy old men.

Also, her sentence “how thoughtful of you to anticipate that I wouldn’t like hair up my nose” can be read two ways for anyone over 40, for whom lushly abundant nose hair may be “perfectly natural” but is rarely greeted by partners with any hint of enthusiasm.

Another post I’ve been meaning to get to. Back in April Margaret Jezebel let us know about a new dating website.

Do you hate wasting your time dating guys and learning all about their thoughts and feelings only to find out later that they have an average-sized penis? Then 7orbetter.com is the dating site for you.

7orbetter.com is a new site for people interested in meeting men with penises that are seven inches or longer. According to the website, the mission of 7orbetter.com is to let women know “upfront if a man has what it takes to satisfy you sexually.”

She said it here.

Margaret quotes Washington City Paper writer Amanda Hess’s wry reaction

Isn’t society just terrible? A “properly behaved woman” who is only interested in men with huge penises may have to wait months-months!-before figuring out that the man that she has spent months falling in love with has been hiding a dick that’s slightly too small to deserve that love. Now, with Seven or Better, that woman can know from the first date the exact dimensions of that penis she doesn’t want to see yet.

Hess said it here.

Margaret adds that the site welcomes people of all persuasions including men seeking men and, perhaps less intuitively, women seeking women. She also says the editors want some sort of 3rd-party verification and they take a dim view of “any photograph [they deem] to be of such superior quality (i.e. modeling shots, magazine pages, etc,) that it raises the question of that photograph not being a reasonable representation of said member.” It’s not clear what exactly they mean by “said member.”

I know men are raised to believe that length of erection is better but, at least on the heterosexual side most people I know who’ve expressed a preference seem to prefer girth over length.

It’s all moot to me, of course. I may be tall, and I may have big hands, but I’m otherwise perfectly average.

NSFW Caveat: If you’re an adult you can click here to see a disappointingly (according to 7orbetter.com) average cock. In a disappointingly cluttered environment.

Even further follow-ups on Kink in Exile’s post about erotic appeal and men. Shulamith Firestone, one of the original 60’s-era radical feminist and author of Dialectics of Sex actually has some seriously cool stuff to say about beauty and eroticism. In a way that pushes forward her agenda, not at all backing it off. Check it out.

And eroticism becomes erotomania. ... From every magazine cover, film screen, TV Tube, subway sign, jump breasts, legs, shoulders, thighs. ... Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to focus on anything else. ... But in all this barrage of erotic stimuli, men themselves are seldom portrayed as erotic objects. Women’s eroticism, as well as men’s, becomes increasingly directed towards women.

Hmm… no wonder critics accused Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd of being “‘hard-headed feminists’ ‘do gooders’ and, um, ‘lesbians‘” for thinking erotic photos of men are hawt!

Firestone continues

I want to add a note about the special difficulties of attacking the sex class system [Note: seriously, “no-sex class system” would have been better nomenclature —fl] through its means of cultural indoctrination. Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts taht they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way – does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props – or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal?

I say “no-sex class” is more appropriate than “sex class” precisely because women as ideal sex objects are projected as wood or stone — faces and forms frozen… literally “statuesque,” eyes on the horizon, jaws tilted and knees locked just so. (One wonders whether the seemingly enforced breakdowns of… almost exclusively… women at Kink.com is fired by desire not so much to see them break down as to see how much they can “take” before they do.)

It gets better though,

To attack eroticism creates similar problems. Eroticism is exciting. No one wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least taht spark. That’s just the point. Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid waste? When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over – there’s plenty to go around, it increases with use – the spectrum of our lives.

That’s so cool! Everybody thinks radical feminists are anti-sex, or, even better, “sex negative.” It’s more like… you know that old joke “I like both kinds of music, country and western?” Or “We have both kinds of wine, red and white.” Or, maybe more accurately, “We only serve the best beer — if it doesn’t come in a green bottle we won’t sell it.” It’s like they’re objecting to that kind of view of sex — not that there’s something wrong with country music, or beer in green bottles, or even no-strings simulated sex with submissive skinny supermodel sibling sluts from Sweden and Saskatchewan but that that’s the only valid kind, and only if you “pass the test” of either beauty for women or worthiness for men and if you don’t fit you don’t count.

Because great hand-blown hummingbird feeders that view of sex, relationships, and sexuality isn’t just “sexist” or bad for women (though obviously it is) it’s also a desperately, starvingly impoverished view for everybody.

What. Ever.

It’s funny but even though I don’t always feel comfortable or welcome claiming I’m a plain old feminist it’s stuff like this that makes me say, unhesitatingly, that I identify as a radical feminist.