Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

So late last week there was a Richard Feynman quote buzzing around the Twitosphere

“Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

A while ago Heather Corinna of Scarleteen made a similar but much more specific about an element of sex and sexual anatomy that’s overlooked surprisingly often. (Emphasis mine.)

Usually, when we’re looking at a layout of sexual anatomy it’s through the lens of reproduction, so it’s all about penises and vaginas, testes and uteri. But from a standpoint of pleasure and sexual response, sexual anatomy is about far more than genitals and is far less about reproductive organs. Ultimately, all the parts of the body are potential or actual sexual organs in the context of pleasure, though some parts or areas, overall, tend to play a bigger part for most people than other parts do.

She said it here.

Something to keep in mind next time you hear someone talking about sex as if it was all one thing and, especially, as if it all leads to a certain conclusion. When we’re concerned with reproduction and/or avoiding it then yeah, the straight-up (and, err, straight) emphasis on interlocking genitalia is relevant. Just don’t confuse that with sex. And especially don’t confuse it with the ways we enjoy sex!

If I can be downright ornery for a moment, consider what happens when two 100% chaste, abstinent, and virginal individuals responsibly end their date with an hour of humid but hands-outside-the-pants necking and petting… or even just longing looks while holding hands across the malt-shop counter and talking about how much they have to look forward to on their wedding night.

M’kay, usually at this point a lot of us are going to stop them right there and start talking realistically about how first times usually go, and not to build up expectations, and how it sometimes takes more times than you image before those nearly-mythical bells can begin to ring, and even how for some significant fraction of people (more-often women but men too) those bells remain forever mythical, etc., etc., etc.

But that’s in their future, this is now. And now, after sharing thoughts and maybe kisses and caresses, the parties in this chaste couple virtuously retire to their respective beds in their respective homes to… cope with their respective activated libidos as they see fit. (Including, for the purpose of this example, nothing more than combinations of cold showers and fevered dreams.) And as they do, with considerable pleasure and affection, week after week, date after date.

If you think of sex purely in terms of genital copulation then there’s no way you can say my hypothetical couple is having sex. And certainly no way is it reproductive! But… But… their experiences are erotic, their enjoyment is of a sexual nature, and they take enough pleasure in it to continue, cold showers notwithstanding.

I say that’s sex. And if that’s sex then so’s quite a lot of the rest of what we do (including, obviously very enthusiastic genital intercourse) even though most of that doesn’t produce “practical results” either. What do you say?

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.

Paleoanthropologist and population geneticist John Hawks takes one look at a… questionable trend piece in the New York Times about “paleolithic diets” (notable quote from one practitioner “‘I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,’ Mr. Durant said.”) and finds the notion wanting. (Emphatic emphasis his.)

I’m the last person to promote gatekeeping in science. But a piece of free advice: Don’t get your information about human evolution from non-anthropologists who charge you money for subscriptions and seminars!

He said it here.

I think that’s actually pretty good advice by the way. And by profession Hawks pretty interested in ancestral diet and dietary practices. (See for instance You are what your ancestors ate, part 1 or Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines, although if you’re into that sort of things most of his posts on diet are fun to read.) And yet you don’t see him selling, or even offering, dietary advice.

Another one of his posts on food gets why that might be harder than it sounds. It also gets to the heart of the general problem with “ancient ancestors adapted for…” lines of reasoning.

[T]he idea that we are adapted to the Pleistocene can’t literally be true. [NYT science writer Marlene Zuk hits on the reasons very well: (a) the Pleistocene encompassed huge temporal and ecological variability, so that no human population was ever optimally adapted to any given time or place; (b) various historical and structural constraints make such optimization impossible; and© we’ve been evolving rapidly for the last few thousand years.

He said she said it here.

Proponents of evolutionary psychology bristle at accusations that their methods are “reductionist.” Which would be a bigger problem if a) they were all reductionist and b) there was anything wrong with a little reductionism in science. Instead, like proponents of “cave man” diets, the problem is more about radical oversimplification.

Photo by Flickr user digital-anger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Summary: Naomi Mc rocks and so does her blog; genital odor as gender Rorschach.

I just stumbled across Naomi Mc’s provocatively-named blog about the sociology, politics, and science of (would it be redundant to say gendered?) reproductive health, Vagina Dentata. It’s hard describing how I feel reading her posts — it’s some kind of combination of familiarity, amusement, envy, awe, delight, and recognition you might feel upon meeting a long-lost cousin. To put it as weirdly as possibly my blog wants to go to a family reunion with hers. Anyway, she’s pointed, thoughtful, irascible, creative as hell, has an amazingly dry wit, and I highly recommend her blog.

Anyway, while discussing the stupid vaginal breath-mints business that cropped up in advertisements last week Vagina Dentatashe thoughtfully (and earthily) addresses the usual reservations and then drops a nifty gender bombshell.

There is nothing peculiarly smelly about women’s bits. Any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy – male as well as female.

She said it here.

It’s a killer point. It’s not that vulvas smell, it’s that genitals smell. As do armpits. And feet. So does hair. So does breath. So does behind a lot of people’s ears. In particular vulvas smell, yes, but so do men’s (ok, no vulva-like word for the combination so…) penises, testicles, and perineums. And yes, the 12% of the worldwide population represented by 96% of all research (credit to Mc) are inclined to lament body smells in general…

But in the narrow spectrum of “intimate” aromas it seems neither accurate nor fair to single out one gender’s bits over the other. Predictable, yes, for half a dozen reasons. Fair or accurate, though, no.

Despite occasional, mostly lockerroom references to “smells like balls in here” and maybe “dick breath” there’s just not as much acknowledgment of just how much men can smell. For the same “any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy” reasons women do.

A couple of reasons come to mind (and you’re welcome to add your own in comments)

• Until very recently men have overwhelmingly written, lectured, published, and otherwise controlled public discourse about sex in general and body smells in particular.
• If 90-96% of the male population is heterosexual then most of any discourse about partner’s smells are going to be about vulvas.
• If 10-15% of the population has at least one lifetime close encounter with same-sex genitals, until extremely recently they’ve been under considerable pressure to keep quiet about it.
• As several bloggers have mentioned this week, going back at least as far as Leviticus (call it 4,000 years) women have been considered unclean because they menstruate, with sometimes fantastic steps being taken to avoid contact. Since this makes about as much sense as the (Biblically) even more “unclean” practice of blended fiber in woven cloth (no poly-cotton for you “sayeth the LORD”) it seems likely that folks would make up all manner of reasons why that might be. And hey, maybe smell would be one of them. (Wow, do I sound like an Evolutionary Psychologist here or what? Where’s my invitation to blog for Psychology Today?)
• As Twisty Faster, James Dobson, your average MRA, and all perpetuators of the no-sex class’s Rule #2 all “know,” women never get their noses anywhere near male genitals (or at least shouldn’t) so they wouldn’t know.
• And as Twisty Faster, James Dobson, and your average MRA will tell you, if a woman does get their noses anywhere near male genitals they better not like it.
• And whether women like it or not they’d darn-tootin’ better not brag about it.
• And finally, and most likely, men are aware that they smell, but don’t care because we have a WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, credit Mc again) cultural heritage of considering ourselves baseline neutral, the standard against which all other is measured… and women as the “other” in question.

• Treatments for endemic-to-men “jock itch” are sold in the sports aisle in pharmacies instead of next to yeast-infection medication on the feminine “hygiene” aisle, so unlike yeast infections jock itch is all vigorous and healthy and not at all smelly.

Couple of other points:

First, you can’t even argue that “yeah, well women get them stinky yeast infections” without studiously avoiding the point visible in any corner pharmacy that for every over-the-counter creme or concoction for treating yeast infections there’s a corresponding nostrum for treating equally stinky “jock itch” fungal infections.

Second, as Mc puts it

This impacts on women’s health because if they always think that the pink clink stinks then they are less likely to notice changes which may signify infection or seek help and advice (similarly vibrator use actually increases sexual health). Plus being self-conscious of your wookie effects your enjoyment of oral sex which instead should be savoured.

The same can be said of men in reverse: there’s lots of residual messaging out there, including myriad anguished and often clichéd laments from men, that women don’t like giving blowjobs. Lacking self-consciousness, or indeed consciousness at all, that their balls can smell of yeast, fungus, stale urine, and perspiration this seeming mystery to men might be easily resolved with more diligent use of soap and water. Or perhaps the same (or maybe “manly” rebranded) wipes that are heavily marketed to self-conscious women.

Bottom line: pretty much any way you look at it the special emphasis on “smelly vaginas” is gendered out the (non-gender-specific) wazoo.