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Jessi Fischer of The Sexademic, who’s just received her masters degree in sexuality from San Francisco State University says

This blog has seen its fair share of feminist bashers, quoting Valerie Solanas and Andrea Dworkin as if they represent a synthesized doctrine of Feminism. But those fools have it all wrong. In all the gender studies and women’s studies courses I took I never once read those women.

You want classic feminist theorists? Try Mary Wollenstonecraft. Try Virginia Woolf. Try Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Try Sojourner Truth. Try Simone de Beauvoir. Fuck, how about John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass or Henrick Ibsen? How about our modern feminists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem or Susan Faludi?

Feminism is not about man-bashing, porn-censure or making sure every woman works outside the home.

Feminism is about choice.

And because we are individuals with vastly differing opinions, feminist theorists contradict each other and argue with each other. There is no unifying feminist doctrine except choice.

She said it here.

That sounds about right. There are a lot of ideas about what feminism is all about. And even more ideas about how best to express feminism. And yeah, some of them can be as bitterly and sometimes even violently in conflict as any other broad social and political philosophies as broad as Christology to as (seemingly) obscure as taxonomy.

The other major element in her post is a pean to condoms, which she introduces with…

I know what you’re thinking. Condoms? Yes. My contraceptive method of choice allowed me to take control of reproduction and, consequently, my life.

I try to imagine worlds where sex with a man often leads to pregnancy. Or worlds without protection against STIs. The freedom to learn and develop my mind could be hindered by childrearing or health complications.

If you had a very narrow or, particularly, a very conservative notion of feminism (where “conservative” refers both to the right-wing conservatism of, say, Nikki Haley or the separatist conservatism of Mary Daly) you’d might raise an eyebrow, at least, at the idea of sex with men, let alone sex with men using the iconically “male” condom as contraception. Eh. Maybe so. Some schools of feminism really do balk at the idea of contraception (Haley) or men (Daly) let alone using contraception while having sex with men. But just as it would be a mistake to confuse their thin-ice edges with the more-literally-central ideas it would be an even bigger one to pick either one of those arguably doctrinally choice-limiting extreme cases and decide it represented the whole.

You know, the anonymously-authored blog 25 Things About My Sexuality provides an imperfect but still very good window into other people’s takes on their own sexuality. The premise is you email 25 things about your sexuality to the listed address and, as far as I can tell, whereupon they’re published. I have no idea whether and/or how they’re selected, filtered, or edited — which is part of what I mean about its imperfection. But the results are varied enough to offer insights into sexual experience one might not otherwise get.

At any rate, an entry from June 15, 2010 begins 1. This account is going to be less colorful than some, but it may also be more typical. Us vanilla people have stories to tell, too.

If you follow the link you’ll find a perfectly average, and perfectly wonderful, account of a 21-year-old heterosexual, self-defined vanilla woman who’s very comfortable with her sexuality in the context of the relationships she’s had with her partners.

After a couple of great conversations last week in New York and D.C., some brief and some very long, with a number of very thoughtful people it’s just been really sinking in lately how deeply we take relationships as a given when we confer about sex, kink, gender, and media.

It’s not that we don’t take relationships into account. We do! It’s just that we tend to treat them sort of the way birds treat air or fish treat water.

I’d really like to see that changed. A one-night stand is a relationship. Two people watching porn together are in a relationship, even when they’re not also long-term partners. A customer who hires a sex worker is in a relationship, and, more significantly, may be in a domestic relationship with another partner as well. Conversely, those who’s sex and romance life is limited to vibrators, lube, and/or tissues in the solitude of their own bedrooms may not be in relationships — a phenomenon that also tends to be handwaved away with terms like “loser,” “low status,” “cat lady,” “loner,” or even “asexual,” rather than considered as a social being. But I digress…

It seems to me that the most of most people’s sex lives more or less resemble the anonymous poster’s, which we tend to dismiss as the neutral flavor to which all the more interesting flavors of kink may be added. And yet… and yet… without that base what’s left is often just a bunch of pretty syrup and sprinkles puddled in the bottom of the bowl. And even without the added flourishes the base tends to still be… pretty fucking fantastic.

Again that’s not to say the extra flavors, textures, aromas, and sprinkles of kink are without merit. Quite the opposite, they’re often delightful. I just think we should stop taking “vanilla” for granted.

Not least, I might add, it should stop being taken for granted by “vanilla” people themselves.

If you, like the organizers and presenters at the Stop Porn Now conference underway in Boston this weekend, accept the strict definition of “pornography” I mentioned in Define Your Terms Before Debating: The Social Construction of Porn and Erotica then you’re going to have to go to considerable effort to deny that people like Matie Fricker and Molly Adler, the narrators in the video below, exist.

Again, it’s highly unlikely that Fricker and Adler are any more tolerant of exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful porn than they’re likely to tolerate dangerous and phthalate-laden sex toys. But they call what they do sell “porn.”

Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think, takes on Slate’s Hanna Rosen, who attempted to make the case that Colleen Rose, named “Jihad Jane” in the press, is somehow a feminist. In the process she nicely explains a kind of central point that Rosen overlooked (possibly only to meet Slate’s fetish for “contrarian” writing.)

As far as feminism goes, LaRose allegedly swore allegiance to al Qaeda, one of the most sexist organizations in the world — the guys who brought us global war for perpetual patriarchy.

Rosin incorrectly assumes that any woman who strives to get ahead a male-dominated organization is automatically a feminist. If feminism means anything at all, it is an ideology of women’s liberation. In order to be a feminist, you have to value women’s equality and women’s liberation in general. There are different ways to state that basic commitment, but it doesn’t change the bottom line: If you self-consciously dedicate your life to subordinating women as a group, you maybe be hypocrite or a fool (or an alcoholic nutcase like LaRose), but you’re not a feminist — even if you have to ruffle some male feathers to get what you think you deserve. The idea that female ambition equals feminism is a serious and widespread misconception.

She said it here.

This gets to the heart of the difference between empowerment and what Twisty Faster mockingly calls “empowerfulment.”

On the one hand, yes, in the extremely mechanical sense the Equal Opportunity Employment Act would indeed prohibit al Qaeda from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in the extremely mechanical sense it would indeed be “progress” for a woman to fight for the right to, say, plan and execute acid attacks on girls who go to school. And after such an attack succeeded al Qaeda might even agree that indeed women could do the job as well as men.

The “on the other hand” speaks for itself: there’s no doubt that one could accumulate personal power in such an organization; there’s also no doubt that doing so would in no way be empowering. It’s just not empowerment if she would be valuable only as long as she remained faithful and useful to the purpose of suppressing… other people exactly like her. And if over time she began to balk, or to advocate for a reversal of policy, her personally-accumulated power would evaporate and she’d find herself back in the pool with all other women and her erstwhile companions would instead say “let’s not trust someone like that again.”

(It’s a general situation unrelated to gender, of course: the same not-really-a-paradox would apply to, say, an al Qaeda operative who accumulated personal power in the ranks of an antagonistic country’s foreign service in the capacity of… subverting Afghan or Pakistan’s diplomatic initiatives. To the extent they succeeded they wouldn’t be empowering other members of al Qaeda; to the extent they betrayed their employers they’d be effectively closing the door on other al Qaeda members who might have wished to follow in their footsteps.)

Of course waving around al Qaeda is a semi-invocation of Godwin’s Law — it’s just too ridiculously obvious and/or extreme an example to really be instructive. (Same for the blogger, going all the way the other side, who claimed that, say, it’s disempowering and/or appeasement for a woman to nurture her male newborn.)

That there are middle grounds is kind of achingly obvious. That there can be disagreement over particulars in the middle is, or ought to be, similarly obvious.

Where it gets interesting (and why I’m bothering to bring up all the previous, obvious stuff) is the process where by following a long chain of perfectly logical steps, beginning from a perfectly reasonable position, a perfectly sensible person like Hanna Rosen can reach… the perfectly illogical conclusion she reached about Colleen Rose.

It’s one of a set of fallacies that are basic opposites of the classic slippery slope fallacy. Slippery-slope arguments say stuff like “if you allow people of the same sex to marry then before you know it you’ll have people (for some reason usually men) trying to marry animals (usually dogs but sometimes horses.)

This slippery-up-slope fallacy is similar to the camel’s back fallacy where it makes logical imagining that you can keep loading straws on a camel’s back without it ever collapsing because for each previous straw it didn’t collapse. The flaw being that it eventually will collapse. Another version is sometimes called the bigger-hammer fallacy: to conclude that if something started working when you hit it with a hammer that hitting it harder or with a bigger hammer will make it work even better.

It’s both admirable and a sign of progress in the general case when women or men pioneer the way into roles traditionally denied or discouraged of them. That part’s ok. On top of that it can be significant when an individual is able to take advantage of that general progress to not only excel but gain power inside an organization that might previously have been closed to them. That part’s ok too. And on top of that you can even add that it’s demonstrative of the principles of equal capability that someone like, say, Phyllis Schlaffley was able to pioneer a career first in arch-conservative McCarthy-era anti-communist organizing and then later found and lead the extremist, and extremely-effective anti-feminist Eagle Forum. Same as it’s empowering when, say, women politicians have affairs or, when stay-at-home dads become domineering and obsessive-compulsive domestic divas. (Or, in perhaps not that long, if they ever figure out a way for them to have babies, if men started treating pregnancy as the same competitive sport Quiverfull women do now.)

Anyway, again, the trick here is to recognize that individuals have always been able to rise in organizations and social groups one might instead have expected to reject them. But you probably can’t say they represent change unless they actually bring about change! “Jihad Jane” LaRose wasn’t poised to empower women inside Al Qaeda than Sana’a Mehaidli empowered Palestinian or Syrian women or Thenmozhi Rajaratnam empowered Tamal separatist women. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, it’s that it doesn’t happen automatically!