Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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.

Hugo Schwyzer says

The blogosphere and the mainstream media have … had much to say about the Pew study released Tuesday that shows that more than ever before, men are likely to marry women with more education and earning potential than they themselves have. From the Times story:

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s.

He said it here.

Seems to me that part of the effect would just naturally follow from an equalization in earning rates and earnings potential. Past a certain point it just doesn’t make sense that on the one hand earnings would be approaching parity but on the other people would still be scrambling to find men who earned more than women.

I mean, yeah, I strongly suspect that urge is still there. (You can actually sort of see that effect where, for whatever reason, men in relationshps tend to be, say, taller or older than their women partners even though in aggregate there’s obviously substantially more overlap in men’s and women’s heights and ages. And I’m certainly aware of individuals who won’t consider a woman partner who earns more or, in a couple of cases even more emphatically, women who won’t consider a partner who earns less. Preference has a strong pull. And I’m guessing that’s partly why why the marriage numbers aren’t already closer to aggregate earnings ratios.

Still, past a certain point a lot of marriage-inclined heterosexuals are going to have to, well, “settle” for relationships where close to 50% of the time the woman earns as much as or more than the man. Not that that’s the end of the world — 50% of men would by-definition also be earning the same as or more than the woman.

Or am I missing something here?

The best thing from my perspective would be that since women who have children still spend some time out of the workforce (in my experience three months for the rarely mentioned “fourth trimester” isn’t unreasonable) and therefore put some fraction of their earnings potential on hold (at least till we get solid progressive family leave policies) then it makes sense that women ought to at least start out with higher incomes. (It makes sense that their partners would also support that.)

The advantages are considerable: there’s be no particular intra-family earnings imbalance due to children, there’s be no strong incentive for the partner who stayed at home with the first child to stay at home with the next, etc. And if the family did decide to go the “traditional” avenue where the woman stays home with succeeding children she’d still have an easier path towards reaching income parity when she chooses to return to the workforce.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be that way As we see in parts of Scandinavia for instance a really strong public/private/family network can be pretty powerful. But at least for now it is that way. And so a trend towards women earning more, at least initially, at least in theory, ought to support more egalitarian — and therefore stronger — long-term relationships.

Over time people are going to stop hauling out traditionalist “silver linings” the way the article Hugo cite does, and instead start noticing that the end results are more egalitarian. I’m guessing it’ll take one more generation but I’m pretty sure we’ll see the first articles discovering the virtues before then.

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One other thing, by the way. The article Hugo quotes in turn quotes political economist Stephanie Coontz

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

I’m… kind of curious whether the well-documented tendency for married men to be healthier and happier in marriage than women is an artifact of them having what amounts to a stay-at-home personal caregiver. And consequently I’ll be curious if those numbers hold up when divisions of labor equalize inside as well as outside the home. My intuition would be yes. Although based on personal experience and those I’ve seen of other relationships with lower-earning and stay-at-home dads is that their partners really are going to have to give up the traditional and/or “second shift” notions about who establishes and enforces domestic standards and practices. Also based on experience this will have a lot more to do with when working women stop being judged by themselves and others on domestic decor, schedules, etc., even when it’s very, very clear it’s not their responsibility. (For instance how often are working men judged personally when their stay-at-home partner doesn’t iron the sheets?)

Following up on my previous post about problems with blaming the victim: You might have noticed that throughout the post it looked like I was assuming all rape and sexual assaults are committed by men.

Actually, no, I’m not making that assumption at all — if for no other reason then because when I was roughly pre-school age I was physically sexually assaulted by a roughly middle-school aged girl. (And, of course, there are plenty of other reasons.) I also wasn’t making that assumption even the vast preponderance of sexual assaults really actually happen to be perpetrated by men. I wasn’t even making an assumption because narratives about male predation are even more prevalent than actual male predation.

Nope. I made the calculated decision to speak about men in the context of “she asked for it” victim blaming because…

you ready?...

When a woman sexually assaults or rapes someone — a man, another woman, a child, whatever, you know what they don’t say?

They don’t say “well, the victim was asking for it.”

They don’t say “well, she just couldn’t help herself.”

You know, the way they do when a man sexually assaults or rapes someone.

What do they say instead when a woman does it? That she’s mentally ill? That she’s traumatized from her own abuse (as, incidentally, I strongly suspect was the case with the girl who assaulted me.) That, in other words, she was broken, damaged, crazy, or otherwise not an otherwise perfectly normal person who’s hormones just got away from her in the face of irresistable provocation.

In other words when a woman does it there’s never any question about who’s at fault. No question that she deliberated, made a decision, and then acted on that decision. No question that it’s the assailant’s fault and not her victim.

Yes, yes, if you thought about that for very long you notice the bitter irony that whether as victim or assailant rape is always held that the woman is at fault. Believe me that hasn’t escaped me but while it’s not a small issue it’s one that’s heavily dependent on the main point of this post:

Notice how the characterizations of women perpetrators do not mitigate the assumptions about men’s inherent weakness and sub-human dependability and responsibility inherent in the standard “blame the victim” scripts mentioned in the preceding post: in one important regard women are held responsible for their victimization because men aren’t expected to be responsible in the first place.

And, once again, they say feminists hate men!

Clearing out a backlog of un-posted drafts I ran across this snippet. I’d gotten stalled on it back in November, mainly, I think, because I’d been missing the most obvious point: misogynists also thoroughly despise men!

Jill Filopovic of Feministe gets to the crux of the problem with columnist Chris Surette’s, um, fascinating piece in the Fairfield University “Mirror.” Surette thinks a partner’s “walk of shame” is a feature of sex, not a bug, and in his opinion the greater the partner’s shame the better for the man “responsible.”

The point of Chris Surette’s column is that men bond over sexually humiliating women, and it’s a “victory” when everyone else sees your “victim” doing the walk of shame back to her dorm.

I’m pretty sure we don’t use words like “victim” to talk about women who engage in consensual sex.

Read the quote in context here.

Well, unless your head is buried so far up the ass of the bogus Two Rules of Desire you can’t comprehend that the mere fact of having sex with you isn’t automatically humiliating

Rule #2, you’ll recall, is “It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.”

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Y’know, they say feminists hate men, right? But what is this guy Surette and his demographic saying about men?!?!?!?

They say feminists are the ones making it hard for college-age men to get laid? Who’s doing more to police women’s sexual activity

I mean, seriously, the fact that someone like Surette is still walking around with a full set of teeth refutes at least one common stereotype about men solving their problems with violence. If I imagined myself a “Pickup-Artist” in the “Seduction Community” I’d think one way to improve the overall odds of getting laid would be to go all Mary Daly on anybody who sneers at women for… being actively heterosexual?!?