Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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.

Jezebel of Evil Slutopia quotes right-wing troll Glenn Beck who, after deciding it’s not enough to slander his own partner, three daughters, plus the remaining 51% of the population decides to slander men as well. (Their source is from Beck and a colleague discussing Scott Brown’s victory speech.)

GLENN: Guys you can figure out: Food, sex. That’s it.

STU: Two step process.

GLENN: It really is. Feed me, make love to me, let me sleep.

STU: Sleep, yeah. That would be the third, sleep.

GLENN: Come on.

STU: That’s pretty much the bottom line.

Read the quotes in context at here.

Actually, technically, what Beck and his broadcast partner are doing is setting an expectation for men: anything besides sex and food should be irrelevant to us or, being a little more specific, everything else a man might want should be secondary. Dispensable. Defer-able.

Note also the expectations he sets: the main things men need “Feed me, make love to me” must be given to him. He can’t do them himself!

Given by or… maybe with a diamond, maybe with a couple of roofies… gotten from someone.

And given Beck’s presumption that all men are heterosexual who, exactly, is he expecting to “feed me, make love to me, let me sleep?” Women, or as he puts it, “psychos.” Who just don’t understand that all they should bother men with are feeding him, fucking him, and letting him sleep.

Yeah, that would make me psycho too. I fear for his little girls. Not because he’ll expect them to feed him and fuck him. But because he’s saying he’ll give them absolutely no support… and just tell them they’re psychos… if when they’re older they want more from a partner than someone to feed or fuck to sleep.

Listen, flipping male flatworms want more out of life than food and sex and all they’ve got is primitive notochords, but Beck is adamant that’s all men want?

Round-y side of the spoon down when you try to eat soup, dude.

In a perfectly lovely, long post on complications of our casual understanding of the term “casual sex” Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones shines a bright spotlight on what’s got to be the biggest source of wariness about it (italic emphasis mine, bold emphasis hers.)

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex.

You’d probably enjoy reading the whole thing, here.

Mild-reflex reservations aside (reflex says it sounds like she’s stereotyping, reflection says not) I think this is the $64,000 problem. There really are at least two types of people interested in “casual sex” and one of those two types is very different from the other one.

Fairly or unfairly, it’s very, very easy to see how involvement, even glancing involvement, with individuals from one group could make you wary about the whole approach.

Lynn really crystalized the difference.

The flip and/or “sex positive” solution is to say stuff like “well, it’s unfair to judge my intentions by the actions of of others.” This is perfectly true — thus my mention of reflex reservations, above.

It’s also, unfortunately, 100% victim-blaming.

So it occurs to me that if you enjoy the idea of casual sex then it’s your responsibility to challenge, aggressively and consistently, the actions and intentions not of the victims but of the perpetrators.

You see a guy cat-calling someone from a window? Hear a guy in a dorm, frat, office, or party talking about spiking the punch with odorless/tasteless PGA, let alone roofies? You hear someone saying “cash, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free?” You see someone with a “shut up and suck” t-shirt? You see someone not taking no for an answer whether out of cluelessness, drunkenness, eagerness, privilege, arrogance, impatience, or barely-suppressed rage at the entire class of people they’re sexually oriented towards? You hear someone running someone else down for their weight, or for their body parts, or their (real or hypothesized) sexual behaviors or proclivities, someone referencing another strictly in terms of their sexual utility instead of their humanity? You see or hear any of that you’re not just seeing the oppression of their intended victim. You’re seeing your own oppression.

By convention you don’t have to do or say anything when you see that kind of oppression. But don’t imagine it has nothing to do with you.

Abhay of The Savage Critics discovers a near-terminal case of the “no-sex” class paradigm in a semi-standalone X-Men title from Marvel Comics

The comic opens with the Green Goblin angry that Namor has quit the Masters of Evil, and has instead joined the X-Men. As retaliation, the Green Goblin has decided to weaponize the horniness of Namor’s ex-wife.

Here is the dialogue explaining his weaponize-the-horniness plan: “She’s part human and part Plodex— the Plodex are some kind of alien race apparently— and when you mix’em up you get this. We’ve modified her to keep her perpetually in estrus which explains her rotten attitude… but the result is a genetic W.M.D.”

...

In the monster genre, the origin of the monster frequently contains a warning to the reader. The Frankenstein Monster is a folly of science. Godzilla is awoken by the atom bomb. The Host is created by pollution the United States forces Korea to inflict upon itself. The origin of a monster is the part that speaks to the audience’s true fears.

...

The obvious conclusion to draw from DARK REIGN: THE LIST— X-MEN #1 is that at the close of 2009, a woman with an appetite for sex is apparently the very definition of fear and horror for Marvel comic creators and their audience.

Read the quotes in context here.

Nicely put. Rule #1 of the paradigm’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, remember, is “it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.” In the case of the monster ex-wife the intolerable part that’s in play.

Men don’t have to live like this. But for some reason we think we do.

Via a blog roundup by John Brownlee of SciFi Scanner who adds

I think this is more a result of the fact that mainstream comics enthusiasts tend to have… well… tentative connections with the opposite sex.

He said it here.

It’s stuff like this that insures it’ll remain tentative. And another generation of boys who are going to grow up wondering… or, worse, dreaming up bad answers for… why women who want to date them are so scarce.