Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

AlwaysArousedGirl has a nice catch related to the real interest ‘wingers have in keeping marriage heterosexual. This time it’s Sam Schulman writing in the Christian Science Monitor, even though he’s more often found in rabidly conservative and neocon rags like The Weekly Standard, the Wall St. Journal, Commentary, and Orthodoxy Today.

Marriage is not about couples or lovers – it’s about the physical and moral integrity of women. When a woman’s sexuality is involved, human communities must deal with a malign force that an individual woman and her family cannot control or protect.

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Marriage is a necessary defense of a woman’s sexuality and her human liberty from determined assault by men who would turn her into a slave, a concubine – something less than fully human. Human communities need to give women some additional degree of protection – through law, custom, religious decree, or sacrament…

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Modern marriage is only the least worst version of marriage that has emerged from all this – but it is still necessary for women. What protects women, ultimately, is that marriage laws and customs confer upon her independence something extra – dignity, protection, sacredness – that others must respect.

Read the quote in context here.

This guy Schulman is a real piece of work when it comes to understanding the dominant paradigm’s insistence on the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the whole general ideology of women as the “no-sex” class.

Writing more confidently in Orthodoxy Today, for a readership he knows to be more conservative than the relatively liberal Christian Science Monitor he wrote

...marriage benefits women, again not just in law but essentially. A woman can control who is the father of her children only insofar as there is a civil and private order that protects her from rape; marriage is the bulwark of that order. The 1960’s feminists had the right idea: the essential thing for a woman is to control her own body. But they were wrong that this is what abortion is for; it is, rather, what marriage is for. It is humanity’s way of enabling a woman to control her own body and to know (if she cares to) who is the father of her children.

Yes, marriage tends to regulate or channel the sexual appetite of men, and this is undoubtedly a good thing for women. But it is not the ultimate good. A husband, no matter how unfaithful, cannot introduce a child who is not his wife’s own into a marriage without her knowledge; she alone has the power to do such a thing. For a woman, the fundamental advantage of marriage is thus not to regulate her husband but to empower herself—to regulate who has access to her person, and to marshal the resources of her husband and of the wider community to help her raise her child­ren.

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Every human relationship can be described as an enslavement, but for women the alternative to marriage is a much worse enslavement — which is why marriage, for women, is often associated as much with sexual freedom as with sexual constraint. In the traditional Roman Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and South America, where virginity is fiercely protected and adolescent girls are hardly permitted to “date,” marriage gives a woman the double luxury of controlling her sexuality and, if she wishes, extending it.

He said it here.

It gets worse, by the way. You know how everyone goes around saying it’s radical feminists who think all heterosexual sex is rape? Check out Schulman (who incorrectly identifies the very conservative feminist Catharine Mackinnon as a radical feminist.)

Radical feminists were right, to an extent, in insisting that men’s and women’s sexuality is so different as to be inimical. Catharine MacKinnon has proclaimed that in a “patriarchal” society, all sexual intercourse is rape. Repellent as her view is, it is formed around a kernel of truth. There is something inherently violative about sexual intercourse—and there is something dangerous about being a woman in a sexual relationship with a man to whom she is not yet married. Among the now-aging feminists of my generation, no less than among their mothers, such a woman is commonly thought to be a victim.

Marriage is a sign that the ever-so-slight violation that is involved in a heterosexual relationship has been sanctioned by some recognized authority.

Call me a radical here but I’m… pretty sure marriage is not MacKinnon’s preferred solution to the problem of heterosexuality-as-rape (to the limited extent even she sees it that way.) I’m even more sure her solution does not include further extending “fiercely protecting” women’s virginity and “hardly permit[ting] them to ‘date.’”

In fact, call me a real radical here but I’m… pretty certain that no matter how conservative, and no matter how genuinely leery of sex she might be, and even no matter how superficially similar the outlines of her strategies might be to Schulman’s and those of his ilk, MacKinnon’s solution is precisely antithetical to his: the way to give women agency, sexual and otherwise, is to give them agency, not to immure them in deep and often outright murderous traditions that are merely less worse than enslavement… not to construct them into traps that are at best “ever-so-slight violations” of their autonomy, their integrity, and their right to be independent human beings who’s decisions are to be respected.

And finally, what exactly do Schulman and his kind think of men that they imagine this enslavement of women to be better, safer, more dignified, more sacred at the hands of tradition than at the “mercy” of the monsters they imagine men to be? Sweet Mother of Pearl! And these are the folks who imagine that feminists hate men!

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The remaining points against Schulman have been better expressed by others but they bear repeating

• The most dangerous place for a woman is in her home.
• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered in their homes.

• Women are most likely to be assaulted, battered, or murdered by a husband, domestic partner, or male family member.

and finally

• If the goal of traditional marriage really was the protection of women from men rather than the protection of their property value* as exchanged between men then, as AAG so nicely puts it, women would be far better off marrying 80-pound Rotweiler/pit-bull-mix attack dogs. Or as one of her commenters put it, they could marry their cans of pepper spray. Or as Holly Pervocracy would probably say, a handgun. (Although as Holly also points out, one rarely has one’s handgun, well, handy when you tend to need them most: when around male friends, dates, and partners. Just sayin’)

But of course the traditional institutions of marriage were never meant for the protection of women. And the extent it ever was necessary, the advent of classical-liberal conservative institutions as manifested in the notions of, say, rule of law founded on principles of individual rights held self-evident in our and other constitutions has made it less so.

Sheesh! Where do they get these guys? Who’d want to marry one of them?

Oh, right. And at the end of the day, of course, Schulman says (after claiming, naturally, that some of his best friends are gay) marriage must remain forbidden to same-sex couples because if you let just anybody get married then the special role marriage carves out for women might be lost.

He says it as if that were a bad thing.

* As in “thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife, nor his house, nor his cattle, nor his man servant nor maid servant, nor anything else that is thy neighbor’s.”

Emily Nagoski of Sex Nerd jumps hard on Jesse Bering, one of Scientific American Magazine’s go-to guys for sex reporting for being a giant squeamish prick jerk. In an article that starts out weird (wondering if Minnesota water was responsible for a lurid erotic dream) and then gets gynophobic while trying to winnow out something to do with differences in sperm count between ejaculation from masturbation and ejaculation from intercourse.

He seems to think collecting semen from masturbators is easy but when discussing collecting semen from hetero intercourse he… um… editorializes. (Emphasis mine, and Nagoski’s)

Well, Baker and Bellis are clever empiricists. They also apparently have stomachs of steel. One way that they tested their hypotheses was to ask over 30 brave heterosexual couples to provide them with some rather concrete samples of their sex lives: the vaginal “flowbacks” from their post-coital couplings, in which some portion of the male’s ejaculate is spontaneously rejected by the woman’s body.

He said it here.

Emily calls him out (emphasis hers)

I’m going to move straight to the plain old RUDENESS of that paragraph.

Apparently collecting ejaculate requires no particular digestive toughness, but ejaculate in cervical mucus requires industrial strength gastric abilities.

Should we conclude that Dr. Bering himself has felt nauseated by the fluids of any female sex partners he may have had? Indeed, the blatant, unapologetic, flinching gynophobia made me wonder if he’s gay, which it turns out he is, but that doesn’t make it okay for him to discuss female fluids as physically disgusting.

In Scientific American.

She said it here.

The “In Scientific American“ part is important. You can argue that it’s somewhere between annoying, edgy, and maybe cute when Dan Savage opines on his disinterest in, say, cunnilingus in his Savage Love columns. In that capacity he’s a columnist. In that capacity his sexual orientation is part of his schtick. Maybe a core part. And that sort of edginess is a core part of his alt-weekly employer, The Stranger as well. While I think it’s fair to say Scientific American has lowered its standards somewhat in recent decades Jesse Bering is still no Dan Savage and Scientific American is no The Stranger. So he should keep his opinions to himself and/or his editors should keep them for him the same way we’d expect them to shut the pie hole of a heterosexual who opined about the ick factor in an article about research into gay or lesbian sexuality.

It’s not about some ideal of having no personal opinions. Heck, it’s not even a matter of covering up ones opinions in the interest of “journalistic objectivity.” It’s about assuming everybody else is going to share your opinions. Or share your knee-squeezing prudishness.

My one quibble would be that Bering is by no means alone in his prejudice, nor is his orientation necessarily a factor: any number of gay and straight people, male and female, from any number of cultures appear to be completely appalled when anything at all flows from someone’s vagina. Including ordinary lubrication from ordinary arousal.

And no, it wouldn’t have been any better, nor could it have been less professional, if someone else had spoken enviously instead of disdainfully of collecting flowback because he assumed everyone shared his “creampie” fetish.

Sheesh!

[Note: I originally called Bering a prick, which is a highly-gendered insult. I’ve revised the wording but left the original to remind myself that it’s harder than one thinks to get away from using gendered insults. —fl]

In the midst of a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-probably-fire stroll through other Republican National Committee expense-report filings Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think says of the RNC’s notorious expensing of a trip to a “girl on girl” bondage-themed strip club. (Emphasis mine.)

Even the infamous trip to the strip club was legitimate from a campaign finance point of view, despite being a PR nightmare. The staffers were apparently courting donors: These hard-driving captains of industry are not putting down cash on some vague promise of overturning Roe. Apparently, rich Republicans won’t cough up the big bucks until they actually see women in bondage.

She said it here.

The rest of her article, which is about other… questionable expense items and the remarkable lack of oversight for campaign fundraising expenditures is pretty good too. But those last two sentences? Ouch!

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.