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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.

Monica Potts of TAPPED mulls a new, more optimistic study on the non-death of marriage in America. (Emphasis mine.)

Lately, there have been a number of articles on marriage and women, particularly black women, as if the behavior of the American couple were fodder for a Discovery-channel nature show. But people don’t get married because they’re enacting some sort of population plan. They get married and stay married when they’re happy, mature, and meet someone with whom they have something in common. To the extent that policy is aimed at marriage, maybe we should worry about improving everyone’s quality of life first.

She said it here.

Funny about that. It’s also highly contrary to the traditional/conservative (and, I think, traditionally male) notion that marriage ought to be a burden or imposition — something forced on women, say, by economic necessity, forced on men by, say, desire for sex, forced on everybody by unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, etc.

Of course by the same progressive expansive opportunity-enhancing standards, and contrary to conservative coercive opportunity-limiting ones, marriage rights should be accessible and accepted for all relationships.

The bottom line, though, is that marriage is part of a social infrastructure not separate from it. The better the infrastructure the better the prospects for marriage.

Note: Speaking of which, read TAPPED’s A. Sewer on Washington D.C.‘s recently passed and so far not blocked marriage equality act.

Cool discussion related one of my earlier posts, On Learning to Recognize “Gray Area” Sexual Pressure Where You Least Expect It, going on over at Feministe

I’ve been posting a lot of comments over there. I may sort them out into a proper post here but for now here are some rough notes. The references of the form “Chava #181” are to other (numbered) comments in the thread.

—- #110 —-

What Natalie #93 said a couple of comments back!

If we didn’t tell ourselves that men always want sex and are always ready for it, and if he’s not it’s a judgment on his partner, then men would feel free to say no and women would be able hear no without feeling judged.

If we didn’t tell ourselves that women always want sex less often than male partners and that sex is always a bargaining chip to get something else then women wouldn’t feel humiliated for wanting sex at a time when a man doesn’t want it.

Yes! Those two scripts seriously distort the hows and even whethers of consent. Because in that construction a man “can’t be raped” because if he doesn’t want it all the time our transactional ideology of heterosexuality breaks down. Similarly straight-up sexual aggression is invisible in women because sexual expression is culturally defined as predicated on men’s initiative.

That’s what’s so cool about Pluralist and Rachel Hills posts, and why Jill and others are reposting them: they confront those assumptions from a direction the usual scripts aren’t at all prepared for. With the result that [rote] apologetics and absolutism sound reflexive rather than reflective.

When you dig a little deeper into the question of consent you stop looking at its nature (was it enthusiastic, grudging, resigned, gradually warmed-up-to) and reach the more fundamental question of whether the person making the decision is being respected. There’s clearly quite a bit of room for thoughtful people to debate whether Pluralist’s acquaintance’s overtures to her long-term partner were coercive. (I say yes she was, for instance even, though he eventually consented. But for their own nearly opposite reasons S.L. or Olo might credibly disagree.)

There’s no question, though, that she failed to respect his decision when, whatever her reasons, she decided to continue pressuring him.

Sexual consent is bogglingly important. But it’s also only a legally-definable and -determinable proxy for a much more complex human decision-making interactions. Recognizing this expands rather than refutes what we know about who can rape and be raped.

—- #137 —-

Chava and ThankGoddess [see #128.] I think a good way to resolve your current impasse would be to say that while everyone needs to be equally attentive we also need to be particularly wary of the gendered scripts our respective sexes are exposed to.

For instance because of scripting women are inclined to assume rejection implies personal inadequacy. (See for instance Marle’s assumption it must be ugliness in comment #1) with the result that something about them must be especially bad about them, if they fail. The alternative, which I think may have fueled Pluralist’s friend, is the assumption that if a woman is rejected there must be something wrong with the man. Obviously neither of these things need to be true.

Meanwhile men’s scripting assumes rejection is universal and therefore something has to be really special about them if they succeed. (The telling line there is men call it “getting lucky.”) Or else something has to be really wrong with the woman (“fallen,” “crazy,” or “wild.” Or else “easy,” as if that was a bad thing.) None of this needs to be true either.

The result for both men and women can be identical failures to respect a partner’s decision to decline that nevertheless come from very different social conditioning.

Point being that Chava’s right that straight men need to be particularly careful, but ThankGoddess is right that so does everyone else.

—

Quick note to ThankGoddess — I really, seriously admire your willingness to identify and rewrite scripting. I’m skeptical that they can be rewritten as easily as you make it sound in part because social scripts sort of by-definition can’t be changed unilaterally. One of the things I like about posts like this, though, is that the reconsideration of roles it forces creates openings for new, more realistic narratives about gender to emerge.

—- #176 —-

Butch Fatale #157

Many people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what happened to them as rape – including people whose experience was actually pretty common, because what we hear about how it has to happen to “count” is a pretty limited set of circumstances.

If you also add “any people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what they did as rape” then you’ve got the crux of this post — of why Pluralist, and Rachel Hills, and Jill, and I think this is such a crucial topic.

We’re all aware… some of us tragically so… that there are individuals who are conflicted about, or even oblivious to, rape because it wasn’t a “jump out of the bushes with a knife” scenario. There are people who think it didn’t happen to them, and people who think what they did couldn’t have been.

This might sound like a slight digression but earlier this year we had an incident of girls beating up another girl in a local Metro transit center. Just the other day I overheard, I think, Rachel Simmons on a local public radio show talking about assumptions what were made about what defines bullying. She made the point that “as usual” researchers initially focused only on bullying by socialized boys-to-boys, which tends towards direct physical violence, with the result that socialized girls-to-girls bullying, which tends towards emotional and social rather than physical violence was ignored or disregarded.

The point being that just as it was an error to make assumptions about bullying it’s almost certainly as large a mistake to assume that everyone will commit rape using the same methods stereotypically used by the most stereotypical perpetrators. Date- and domestic-partner rapists got away with that for generations.

With that in mind what’s important about Plurality’s friend’s action isn’t whether the degree of what she did was actionable — even though that seems to be the focus of a lot of the discussion here and elsewhere. Instead it’s interesting for indicating one corner a whole domain of coercion that has been overlooked because it didn’t conform to our (highly gendered!) assumptions about what rape, and rapists, and rape victims look like.

A corollary of that, by the way, which really shows up in Plurality’s story and which I saw as the point of Butch Fatale’s comment, is that we also have incomplete assumptions about what non-consent looks like, and therefore of what victims look like.

The man in Plurality’s story felt conflicted enough to have not gotten over what happened even months later. That’s a big clue that non-consent was involved. I’m reluctant to go further into that because this really has nothing to do with “what about the men.” Instead I’ll point out that the woman in Plurality’s story also felt conflicted enough about it to tell Plurality about it, instead of, say, to blow it off. That’s another big clue.

There’s a lot of 2nd- and 3rd-person conversation in this thread, for instance, along the lines of “well if this man…” or “well a cis-person might…” And there’s (probably for obvious reasons when you think about it) an awful lot of comments by people who are confident about having been victims. There have even been digressions into what constitutes privilege. All of which are of course perfectly relevant.

What Pluralist’s story suggests is that what we’re not hearing are whole classes of comments that would be even more relevant: the cis persons, the trans persons, the straight persons, the genderqueer persons… the women or men who like Pluralist’s friend can and may have been perpetrators — and who therefore might be able to contribute cautionary perspectives — are silent.

Though not, I ardently hope, silenced. Because this very large, very important bottle wouldn’t have been uncorked in the first place had Pluralist’s friend not disclosed her own conflicted feelings about her own assumptions that led to her own inability to respect her partner’s decision when he declined her overtures.

Bottom line is that addressing Butch Fatale’s broader point about identifying who can be victims and perpetrators undermines the two-sphere model of gender. Even if, as, say, Bond of Dear Diaspora argues, we should have tolerance for some degree of gender construction, the exclusivity of the two-sphere model, and the denial and lies needed to maintain it, leaves everyone vulnerable.

—- #196 —-

Following up on [my previous comment, #176] I really want to add that rather than absolving men with some kind of “but women do it too” shenanigans (as if two wrongs had ever made a right), breaking down gendered notions of what constitutes coercion and/or consent leaves less “gray area” for men to hide it. For instance no matter who you are it really is questionable at best do to one’s partner what Pluralist’s friend did to hers. Understanding that takes away cancels any form of “it must be ok because women do that too” defenses.

—

Richard Jeffrey Newman #178: I can’t speak at all to cultural Korean values so I can’t assess whether that’s really how couples in that situation are expected to save face. Instead I’ll just emphasize again that the critical distinction between role-playing and reality is recognition and respect for each player’s decision to participate or to decline.

Chava #181. Similar to #178 the measure is whether we recognize and respect each player’s decision. For better or worse, we probably can’t unilaterally make the assessment of our effect on others or how far over the line we’ve crossed. That’s not an indictment, by the way. It’s great that you stepped up. Grounding dialogue in how we have acted and how we act now makes dialogue about how we could act more practical and a lot more powerful.

Sailorman #184: I’ll keep stressing that the objective isn’t to create ever wider definitions of rape and assault. But neither is it to engage in further hairsplitting at the margins. In your “can I get you interested” scenario the question would be whether your partner was respecting your decision and, in particular, whether she was seeking to clarify it (ok, especially in a trusting relationship) or to disregard and override it (not at all ok.)

And for Natalie #175 and Faith #188: Yes, absolutely. I grew up believing women and girls couldn’t commit sexual assault. I believed it so thoroughly that I even said it to the director of a local Rape Relief program when I interviewed her for a college newspaper story. When she gently but with considerable authority corrected me I had an almost cinematic sense of perspective shift. It resolved a coercive sexual childhood experience when I was very young that I grew up thinking shouldn’t have bothered me, and that I’d thought I maybe even should have felt lucky for (one of the dads who was in on the rescue said something to another adult about me “getting an early start”) that had nevertheless affected me. Victimized? No, social scripting about male gender might have, for once, possibly unfairly, helped mitigate some of that. Traumatized? Any consequences were nothing compared to the consequences ruthless, sustained, but non-sexual bullying I experienced later. But just those few words from the shelter director were exactly what I’d needed to get resolution.

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.

...

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?