Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Froth of harshly indicts contemporary sex education

For five years I was given “sex education”. It mostly consisted of periods and condoms. It didn’t talk about consent. It didn’t talk about the actual mechanics of sex, about arousal and lubrication and oscillation. It didn’t tell me a single thing about relationships and it didn’t tell me I had a clitoris.

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That makes me angry. What makes me even angrier is the certainty that there are other girls like me, being “educated” in sex by their schools and their local health providers, and given so little information about their bodies that only luck and stubbornness will ever give them the ability to have orgasms.
That makes me furious.

Read the rest (which is equally well-said) here.

Froth titles her post “Sex Education, or, What Boys Will Want From You,” which is pretty much the no-sex class construction you’d expect from a curriculum based on 1950s notions of gendered (coughwomen’scough) responsibility… and gendered (coughmen’scough) irresponsibility… plus denial, squeamishness about enjoyment, the high premium placed on womens’ utter inexperience, and the blunt pragmatics of the undesirability to parents and teachers of teen pregnancy.

That boys would have no idea what they’d want from girls, except the sports-analogy affirmation that comes with “scoring” was never considered either, of course. With the result that in addition to not telling women about their clitorises or that there are myriad ways to effectively have shared, parallel, or individual orgasms, the curricula also rarely covers ways boys can manage their own orgasms, to communicate their own wants and needs and vulnerabilities, or, for that matter, to say no when they feel pressured to “perform.”

It’s just taken for granted that enjoyable for boys is “easy,” even automatic, even unavoidable. So don’t bother teaching them anything. And that girls are “hard” so… again don’t bother!

For nearly four years the most popular post at Real Adult Sex, by far, has been How to find someone’s clitoris (if you don’t already know). As Froth points out, for men and women both that’s just the tip of the ignorance iceberg.

What’s the one thing you really wish had been covered in your sex education classes? Assuming you had classes at all?

Summary: This post is a meditation on the consequences to the public of academic journals charging very high fees for access to research. Includes references to Ezra Klein on gated political-science research and examples from me on gated human-sexuality research. —fl

So just yesterday I was reading another mostly-methane science-news “report” full of the reporter’s speculations about how this or that “makes sense because…” evolution something hunter gatherers something else that all sounded a lot like Betty Draper in a bearskin with a reed basket.

And so as I often do I started researching the actual scientist’s work and… it sounded pretty promising, and it actually didn’t seem to have much at all to do with primitive ancestry, or excruciatingly gendered behavior wired into our genes, but instead regular cognitive science on thousands of contemporary humans. And I thought pretty cool, I’d like to read about it and…

There’s the for-profit academic journal online. And the title and a one-paragraph abstract of the paper. And titles and abstracts of two other papers by the same author that look tangentially related but interesting in their own right. And just to look briefly at each one of them to see if I want to read more I’d have to… cough up $35.00 per article.

Consequently. Well, consequently I just tucked my children into bed, kissed my sweetie good night, locked the doors, turned out the lights, and went to bed instead.

Fortunately I woke up this morning to see Ezra Klein’s summary of political scientist Seth Masket’s persuasive argument about how academic political science, which is widely dismissed in Washington D.C., ought to have more relevance. Klein’s take:

[P]olitical scientists make it extremely hard for the rest of us to benefit from all that study. The papers are locked away in obscure journals accessible only by expensive subscriptions. There are relatively few blogs dedicated to applying the insights of political science to the events of the day (but more than there used to be!). I don’t know of any organizations in the District dedicated to guiding journalists through the thickets of the discipline. Nor do many think tanks in Washington employ political scientists (one reason that economists are so dominant in this town is that they’re everywhere, and they spend most of their time talking to journalists on the phone).

I really like the papers I’ve come across from Yale’s David Mayhew. Brilliant, careful stuff that’s vastly enriched my understanding of Congress. But I’ve only read them because another political scientist thought to send them to me. And there’s no obvious way for me to get more of them without badgering people for things that I don’t yet know that I want. Similarly, Frances Lee’s publisher recently sent me her book ‘Beyond Ideology.’ Great stuff, and it led to this post. But I never would’ve found out about it if it hadn’t shown up on my doorstep.

Masket is right that journalists are making a terrible error if they judge political scientists irrelevant to the debate. But political science could do a lot more to meet those of us who want to listen halfway.

He said it here.

You’ll note that Klein isn’t complaining about how hard life is for him because he can’t easily or inexpensively access academic papers than I’m complaining that (for instance) I’d have to squander $34.00 to see whether, say, Lucia F. O’Sullivan and colleagues’ A Cognitive Analysis of College Students’ Explanations for Engaging in Unprotected Sexual Intercourse from the journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” contained helpful insights for a post on sex safety. It just means I’m not going to bother.

Or, worse, if I was on assignment and working on deadline I might just grab the university’s press release on their paper, throw something in about primitive Don Drapers hunting giraffes, and call it a day.

My gain. The researcher’s loss. The public’s loss. End of story.

Oh, another good real-world example I just stumbled across a few minutes ago (ok, ok, I often have 10 things going on all at once.)

One item in a link roundup from Em & Lo says

A study finds that some women may have lower sex drives because they experience guilty feelings about being sexually aroused. If you thought libido was a tough problem to fix, try guilt…

Read the quote in context here.

If you follow that link to the New York Daily News the reporter writes…

“Self-reported sexual arousal is subject to impression management – as in the greater reluctance among women high in sex guilt to report feeling sexually aroused,” the report reads. In other words, women with lots of guilty feelings about sex may not admit to feeling aroused, or may even convince themselves that they aren’t.

You can read that here.

So you go look for the original research and discover (somewhat by coincidence) that it too is published in the journal “Archives of Sexual Behavior” and will therefore (once the for-profit umbrella publisher, Springerlink Netherlands, gets around to putting it online) cost roughly $35.00 to read. Unless your employer or library pays the $35.00 for you, making it “free” the same way your phone calls, copier, and administrative assistant is “free.” For you.

But, since the paper itself isn’t yet available to the general public you go searching for other interviews with the author or principle investigator, Meredith Chivers, and discover an interactive Q&A with the author hosted by the Globe and Mail from around the time the paper was being prepared. Reading Chivers’ replies to sometimes very specific questions you learn that rather than drilling down on women and guilt Chevers very carefully says very general things like

Women have different experiences of societal constraints on their sexuality, depending on many factors such as culture, religion, and geographical location.

and

...there are many factors that are likely to influence women’s sexual response.

My research has examined only a small number of these factors in the laboratory and I plan study others using other methods of investigation as I continue my program of research.

Oh! Gold mine! Chivers concludes her conversation with something I wish I’d seen when I started.

I am grateful to The Globe and Mail for this opportunity to educate women and men, and to have a dialogue about sexuality with readers.

I would encourage interested readers to obtain the actual research papers themselves for more specific information about this and other research.

Media coverage of research is rarely able to provide a high degree of resolution on any topic because of factors such as space limitations, and readers should be aware that they receive only very limited information on any topic if they do not read the primary sources themselves.

I don’t know what the Globe and Mail’s circulation is and so I don’t know how many people read her interview. I do know that between direct visits and RSS/Newsreader subscriptions roughly 3,000 people will read this post… or at least see it. If we all wanted to take her advice that would be… um… let’s see, $35.00 times 3,000 readers, carry the 1… $105,000.00 dollars for the publisher, Springerlink Netherlands. Exactly zero dollars of which would go to Dr. Chivers by the way.

With the result that, well, exactly none of the general public is going to see it. Nor are any media people who might want to report on her work to the general public. Nor are any responsible bloggers like Em & Lo (or me) who are going to cross-post in good faith about it.

And with the further result that headlines are going to mostly say stuff like “Women may have lower sex drives due to guilty feelings about being aroused, study says”, for instance. (And, as in anonymous example that set me off last night, eternal speculation about immutable gender traits based on what reporters remember from the movie One Million Years B.C.)

And no one but Chiver’s colleagues and the occasional random university student with library access is going to know whether that was the main point of her study (unlikely) or a juicy-looking footnote.

One last thing? Trust me, if the Washington Post isn’t giving its reporters paid access to academic research then no other reporters are getting it either. Just saying.

Jeff Fecke of Alas, a blog says

[L]ast night I went into the doctor with pain in my…er…boy parts. The doctor sent me directly to the emergency room, where I got an ultrasound, which showed I likely have testicular cancer.

So that’s not fun.

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At any rate, this is of course not the most fabulous news, but it is what it is. The good news — and it is good news — is that testicular cancer is extremely treatable, and the vast majority of men who suffer from it are treated successfully, even if the cancer has metastasized. So the odds are in my favor. And there is still a chance it isn’t cancer at all, but just a painful benign tumor, in which case the gonad has to come out, but treatment afterward won’t include any not-fun things like chemotherapy or radiation.

All that said, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit scared by this; cancer is not something you ever want to get. But something’s going to get all of us in the end. I’m just hoping that something, in my case and yours, is extreme old age.

So please, do forgive me if posting is a bit light over the next few days; I’ll update as I have updates. Oh, and men, since this is something I never bothered to do, let me suggest you listen to Mr. Tom Green here.

He said it here.

The good news is that as cancers go the most common forms of testicular cancer really are pretty treatable. Most of the men I know who’ve had it have gone on to lead productive, even reproductive lives. If it’s caught early. But you won’t catch it early unless you check.

The other good news, for those of you who clicked the YouTube link, is that since testicular cancer often shows up between the late teens and late 20s Mr. Green’s sort of juvenile-sounding message is actually pretty age-appropriate. And accurate.

The only thing I’d add is that it’s very common to find a soft, spongy “lump” on the lower end of your testicles. That’s probably the epididymis, but guess what? A) Your doctor won’t mind (or be embarrassed or dismayed or “turned on”) if you ask him or her to check just in case, and B) keep that in mind if you’re ever asked if your sex education was comprehensive and current. Oh, and C) if you’re a man and you’re not sure what your healthy epididymis feels like it’s a very good idea to check more often.

Anyway, best wishes to Jeff and here’s hoping for a speedy and complete recovery.

Summary: Carrie Prejean disgraced herself by publicly opposing same-sex marriage, not for either having a sex life or camera-phoning herself. Sungold proposes an unusual but sensible way she could at least partly redeem herself. Further down, reflections by Sungold, Blue Gal, and Melissa McEwan on the way Prejean’s partner only disgraced himself.

Sungold of Kittywampus says, in all earnestness, that it would be an all-round good thing if conservative-Christian Carrie Prejean just let go of the “scandal” about the private masturbation videos she emailed her erstwhile fiance and let everyone who’s “scandalized” about it fall on their keisters.

After mentioning the disgraceful dismissal of Clinton-era Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders for recommending that we teach young people that masturbation is a safe and effective alternative to partnered sex, Sungold says

Maybe it’s time for us to catch up with history. Here’s where Prejean could play a pivotal role. She could go on Larry King and say, “I’m not here to talk about that tape, which my asshole ex had no right to release. But I will say this: What I did on that tape was perfectly normal. Self-pleasure is perfectly compatible with my Christian beliefs. It’s a great way to get to know your body before you’re ready for partnered sex. It’s a wonderful way to extend your pleasure with a partner. If you’re waiting for marriage to have intercourse, masturbation can help you wait, and you’ll be a better lover when you do say yes.”

I’m still not snarking. If we could just get all those “good Christians” to admit they do it, all of us might be able to have open conversations about it without anyone getting fired or censored.

Read the quote in context here.

Incidentally I’m not snarking either. I’m aware that Prejean might decline to do so, but I’m… pretty sure she’s got the really, seriously, no twits-vs-substance credentials to do so. It would be doing the world a favor and, very likely, do more to promote alternatives to intercourse and other forms of partnered sex than any number of conventional abstinence messaging.

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On a side note I’d add that the less-than-forthright way Prejean has dealt with the revelations seem to have been more damaging to her reputation than the existence of the tapes themselves. They were, after all, perfectly ordinary communications with a partner she was committed to and trusted… which means pretty much the only thing the partner “revealed” was that not only should no future partner trust his honesty, integrity, or discretion but neither should any future employer or client. Further down in her post Sungold nicely addresses the issue of the former partner by the way.

Update: Although see also Blue Gal’s The Donald advises Carrie to become “major porn star”? I’m not going to say the fact that Trump’s recommendation is diametrically opposite Sungold’s is itself a demonstration that she’s on the right track. But…

Update: And also see Melissa’s awesome dissection of Prejean and twits vs. substance at Shakesville.