Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Echidne of the Snakes had to dig, and dig, and dig through pop reports all talking about the “biological” inevitability behind a new study that suggests elderly men are more interested in sex than elderly women.

One complicating factor that’s mentioned by the lead investigator but not so much by the breathlessly gender-confident reporting?

One reason why older women are less sexually active than men may be because they don’t have a partner, or because their partner is no longer healthy enough to have sex. “Women outlive their marriages and their relationships,” Dr. Lindau says.

She and her colleagues found that as women aged, they were far less likely than men to be married or living with a partner. In one of the surveys the authors used, just 58% of the women ages 65 to 74 had a partner, compared to 79% of men in the same age bracket. Among 75- to 85-year-olds, 72% of men still had a partner, compared to just 39% of women.

Lindau said it here.

If you’re a woman between maybe 40 and 50, with a male partner over maybe 45-55, raise your hand if your partner’s health, his libido, or both allows him to keep up with your libido? (I’m not saying everybody’s in that boat but… it’s a fairly common lament of partners of older men.)

What makes this particularly funny, in a not-so-funny way, is all the “happy tradeoff” lead sentences Echidne tracks down where in reporters smirk stuff like “Women may live longer, but it appears men are more likely to go out with a smile” and “Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage.” (Um, “advantage?” fuck you, dudes?!?!)

Oh wait, and look, here’s a nifty, but related “advantage” that’s not going to show up so often in the popular press, again from Dr. Lindau.

When women did have a partner, they were almost as likely as their male counterparts to be sexually active, although they tended to give their sex lives lower marks than men did. In every age group included in the surveys, a smaller percentage of women than men described their sex life as “good” overall.

Read the quote in context here.

As Echidne says “Women tend to have older husbands and the ill health of their husbands could well be one of the reasons for not much sex even in intact relationships.” Yup. Funny how blood-pressure medications, prostate problems, and even bad backs, hips, and knees can take the, um, wind of of a fella’s sails. And, again, funny how demoralized even the most enthusiastically consenting adult can become when sex requires not only candle light and slow dancing but also… repeat trips to the bathroom, penis-pumps, and other erectile interventions.

If you or your partner still have it — and not all men lose it — that’s great. But with even the most attentive partner in the world the disappointment levels are likely to be lower. And while I’m not positive, it might be particularly wearing on both older women and older men if they grew up back when heteros expected that men would take the lead in sex, and do nearly all the work as well.

Another little tidbit Echidne mentions:

I should also tell you that this study defined sex as heterosexual activity with someone else. People not engaged in heterosexual activity were not included (which the researcher would have liked to have changed) and neither was masturbation counted. Only heterosexual activity with someone else. That’s worth repeating, because the quality of that sex does also depend on that “someone else.”

Echidne says it here.

One final thing, something Echidne doesn’t mention but I’ve noticed that pulls the above snippets into a common thread. Even today, but certainly in the past, “interest in sex” was men’s domain. Consequently, as I mentioned in my first real post about the no-sex class paradigm (The limits of “no means no”), men grow up expecting to be interested in sex when they’re interested in sex, with the happy (for them) consequence that when we’re not interested in sex we… pretty much don’t notice. Whereas if our partner isn’t interested in sex we do. Meanwhile women are expected to notice when their partners are interested in sex, yes, but… that pesky no-sex class paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, leads men to imaging women don’t notice when their partner’s aren’t interested.

See the trick? A man can be interested in sex only once a year. But! If he has sex once a year then… he’s going to mark his sex life as “satisfactory.” Even if his partner mentions it he’s still go the weight of the two rules on his side. Meanwhile his female partner? If he wants sex more often than he she’s going to mark down “dissatisfied.” But! If he wants (or is capable of having) sex less often than she does she’s also going to mark down “dissatisfied.”

Advantage? Men. All over. Although that advantage might be one hidden reason men’s shorter lifespans.

Just a though.

This might sound weird at first but I’ve had more disappointing sexual encounters with long-term partners than with casual friends-with-privileges and/or one-night-stand partners. Chances are actually reasonably good that you have too. Here’s how.

With first-time sex even with casual partners, even when one or both don’t come, you’re both generally highly attentive of each other, highly excited, and pretty darned interested. (If you weren’t both interested and excited one or both of you will tend to put it off till you were enthusiastic about it.) So the odds of dull, off, unpleasant, or just bad hookup/casual sex are relatively low.

In long-term relationships you tend to have sex way more often, and generally under more varied circumstances. And while, especially as you grow familiar with each other’s wants and needs the sex can get better, you’re also going to have more times when one or both of you aren’t in sync, aren’t comfortable, you and/or they are just going through the motions, or otherwise you’re just not so attentive.

Percentage-wise I’d expect sex in non-casual relationships to be better, and percentage-wise it is. But terms of absolute numbers I’ve had fewer overall bad encounters with casual partners than with non-casual ones.

I wouldn’t have expected that.

Obligatory but I hope obvious caveat: I’m obviously talking adult or at least peer partners making competent mutual, and mutually respected, decisions to be sexual with each other. This may not be the case for everyone, whether in long-term or casual relationships and I think it would be a bad idea to try and extrapolate my observation to their situations.

Update See also Amanda Hess and Sady Doyle.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors expresses uncharacteristic suprise at findings about women in a recent report on sexual abuse in the criminal justice system.

The statistics are staggering.  Kaiser and Sannow explain the importance and implication of the studies, as well as their deficiencies and strengths.  In describing one of the findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (available here) the authors note:

Nearly 62 percent of all reported incidents of staff sexual misconduct involved female staff and male inmates. Female staff were involved in 48 percent of staff-on-inmate abuse in which the inmates were unwilling participants. The rates at which female staff seem to abuse male inmates, in jails and in juvenile detention, clearly warrant further study. Of the women in jail, 3.7 percent reported inmate-on-inmate sexual abuse; 1.3 percent of men did. Does this mean that women are more likely to abuse each other behind bars than men, or that they’re more willing to admit abuse? We don’t know—but if they’re simply more willing to admit abuse, then the BJS findings on men may have to be multiplied dramatically.

I was astounded at the rate of reported sexual abuse of male inmates by female staff members.  It illustrates that in some circumstances, women use sexual violence as a form of domination and power over men in a way that is not so different from what men do to women.  The authors point out that it is difficult to know why female inmates are more likely than their male counterparts to be sexually abused by another inmate of the same sex.  It may be that women are more abusive of each other than men are. 

She said it here.

I’m not at all sure why anyone should be surprised. Here are three reasons that skip off the top of my head:

1) Sexual abuse and sexual assault are excitations of power, not of sex… or gender. Yes, historically we see far, far more sexual abuse and assault by men but I believe historically power has been also see far, far more likely to accrue to men. As we make progress towards parity of power it’s inevitable that we’re going to see more parity in its abuse.

2) The standard gender assumptions about women as vaguely and passively “sugar and spice and everything nice” make the standard gendered scripts for behavior for women in dominant, potentially sexual situations, let alone scripts for men in sexually dominated-by-women ones, are inadequate. Both narrative and scripting need to adjust to the reality of women as autonomous human beings who’s moral compasses are neither more nor less flawed than anyone else’s. (I ought to add that because we do have a lot of scripting about men and abuse of sexual power there may also be better developed policies for managing or deterring it.)

3) Both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire make it more difficult to confront or transcend our (mis)understanding of sexual (mis)use of power. When society believes to its core that it’s not only intolerable and inconceivable for women to manifest sexual desire, and equally intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, you’re just going to find women poorly prepared to forgo opportunities to exploit sexual vulnerability, you’re going to find men, and women, poorly prepared to resist such exploitation, and you’re going to find social and prison policies ill equipped to police it.

So. You wanna know just how entrenched our gender narratives about sexual abuse really are? All this seems to be seriously old news, at least among rape-crisis community professionals. I’ve mentioned several times in this blog an interview I had back in the very early 1980s with the director of a rape-relief and domestic violence shelter. I mentioned my ignorant impression that men can’t be raped, not by women, and she said no, that it was actually relatively common. The common denominator, she told me nearly 30 years ago, was that perpetrators were very likely to have custodial power over their smaller (i.e. children), or weaker (i.e. elderly, disabled) victims. Given that prisoners, and particularly juvenile ones, are in custodial power and there should be no surprise nor shock at all that they would be just as subject to sexual abuse by women as by men.

That it wouldn’t have soaked in to general awareness even 30 years after I first heard about it is the only really shocking thing about the whole story.

I gotta say I’m less enamored of this whole gender business, as distinct from more tangible qualities like biology, body, identity, and orientation. But people like Bond of Dear Diaspora or Sinclair of Sugarbutch argue passionately and often very well that no, there is such a thing, and what’s wrong with that?

It still gives me hackles. Especially when it sure looks like (as turned up in conversation with a friend today who’s struggling with her relationship with male partner) the gendered female trope of “disappointment” and the gendered male one of “resignation” sure… look awfully similar. Except for the names, of course. And the genders they’re ascribed to.

In fact I think one big clue came today when I was talking with my friend and she asked me how it can be that the person you can be almost sick to death of being different than could have been so rivetingly appealing when you first met. And it occurred to me that that’s one more domain where over time all the stuff you have in common — maybe 99% or more — just cancels out from familiarity, overuse, complacency, and especially confidence and comfort… and therefore take up only a very small percent of effort and energy. Compared to that nagging 1% difference that, because everything else fades figuratively into your literal background that… the difference takes up nearly all your effort and energy. With the result that you’re saying “irreconcilable differences” when externally friends and loved ones can’t imagine what the problem is.

Well. I think it’s the same with gender. A lot. Human beings aren’t 100% alike. (That’s a common but moronic straw-person argument often held up by gender essentialists.) But we are 99% alike. Even when we’re biologically different we’re very often still functionally alike. (Consider for instance that in many parts of the world both sexes squat to pee even though with practice nearly all men and most women can pee perfectly well standing up.)

So like I say, there are very clearly differences between heterosexual cis-gendered biological sexes. But just the fact that I have to add all those qualifications is a reminder of just how small those differences can actually be.

Small differences, however, aren’t the same as no differences. And while I’m not persuaded that the difference is big enough to bring in a whole ‘nother social institution called “gender” to help explain those differences, stereotype those differences, or police those differences when people go “astray” from them I’m willing to accept that they’re there and they might even be unavoidable.

Especially if other people seem to believe they’re there it doesn’t even help if you don’t. Consider that if men look you in the chest instead of the eyes you’re being gendered, like it or not. Consider that if women cross the street rather than walk past you after midnight you’re gendered it doesn’t really matter how long you’ve spent deconstructing gender in yourself.

So…

So I got a big epiphany the other day that it’s not actually gender itself that bugs me. Like Sinclair I feel comfortable wearing pants, for instance, nor am I inclined to skirts. On the other hand a number of bio-women and at least one bio-man who just strongly prefer conventional skirts or dresses.

In fact Sinclair and I are really quite a lot alike. In gender terms we have quite a lot in common! In fact, even though she’s thoroughly and even cheerfully not a man in a lot of ways she’s better at being “masculine” than I am. Or at least more consistently so.

Which gets me to that sticking point again. Because the way gender is constructed it’s “good” when I do some of the gendered things I do because I’m biologically male. But when she does it it’s “bad” because she’s not. Except that, as I just mentioned, she’s really good at it.

So my epiphany was that I’m actually not so much down on gender as I’m really down on the 50/50-split, yin/yang, I’m hairy so you must be hairless, you’re nurturing so I must be aloof, Mars/Venus, everything-about-us-must-be-opposite two-sphere model of gender. I’m seriously impatient with the exclusivity that goes with gender essentialism.

In other words I’m fine with gender… as long as it’s completely independent of sexual biology, or anatomy, or identity, or orientation.