Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

BarbinMD of Daily Kos snarks John Ensign to the bone over his dismissal of an F.B.I. inquiry into whether strong-arming a company to hire the husband of a woman with whom he had an affair.

According to Ensign’s spokeswoman:

“Senator Ensign has consistently acted in an ethical manner to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”

No word on whether Mrs. Ensign agrees.

She said it here.

Background: Nevada Sen. John Ensign got in a little hot water when he conducted an affair with a campaign employee. He then got in a little more hot water when the employee’s husband (also an Ensign staffer!) discovered the affair and threatened to take the story public. Then he got in a little more hot water by paying the husband quite a bit of hush money out of his parent’s bank account. He now seems to be in considerably more hot water with, for instance, the F.B.I., for possibly suggesting that if a company wanted favors from him they’d have to hire the husband as a consultant.

Actually, unless you follow seriously left/progressive/Democratic bloggers like Barb you may not have heard about any of that. That’s because only sex-and-coverup scandals that really seem to have legs are those of Democrats like John Edwards or Bill Clinton.

There are all manner of excuses bandied about for the seeming double standard. The right-wing noise machine being one, progressive’s peculiarly tone deafness to the importance of public relations being another. Sometimes it’s attributed to the press’s peculiar affection for Republican silverbacks like John McCain. And sometimes (perhaps least improbably) it’s that while the general population and even members of the news industry might be progressive, advertisers, especially major advertisers likely to buy time in major outlets, tend to be very conservative.

Personally I think that for all the narrative about liberals and progressives being the party of Godlessness, Gays, and “Sodom and Gomorrah,” the general public perhaps, well, perversely expects better of Democrats, which makes their misbehavior feel like news. Meanwhile, again for all their talk about sanctity, patriotism, and moral standing it’s… contrary to the lamenting IOKIFYAR acronym (“it’s ok if you’re a Republican”) the real problem is it’s just not news when yet another Republican Senator disgraces himself, when a “homophobic” California legislator turns out to be openly gay, when a “family values” televangelist turns out to be a drug addict or pedophile or to hire male or female prostitutes, or when an “upright” rising star in the Senate turns out to not just cheat on his wife, and not just cheat on his wife with prostitutes, but cheats on his wife with prostitutes who indulge his fetish for wearing diapers. It’s just not news.

Update Oh and this just in the (Republican, naturally) Majority Leader of the Utah House has just admitted that he took a nude hot tub with a 15-year-old. Which might not be an issue (who goes in a hot tub with clothes on) except he evidently took her somewhere to do it, they were alone, and most suspiciously, he paid her $150,000 of hush money. TPMMuckraker caps the post with the IJNNWARD news that “After the confession, lawmakers lined up to embrace Garn and his wife.” Sweet mother of pearl!

Hugo Schwyzer takes conservative nepotism beneficiary Jonah Goldberg to task for arguing that women should be given a little more power in “backwards” cultures. You’d think that would be a good thing but Goldberg’s arguing only that women should have only enough power to be more effective “gatekeepers.” (Emphasis mine.)

Jonah concludes his piece … with this gem:

“Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.”

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

Read the quote and Schwyzer’s analysis in context here.

Goldberg says “Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow.”

Which would be… Goldberg, a man, setting expectations for male behavior. Very low expectations, sure, but not ones set by women.

Which is, of course, the nice little trap men like Goldberg want to set for us: expect to be able to indulge your more infantile and/or animal impulses; then either blame women letting us live up to the expectations we ourselves set, or else resenting women for using sexual access (the only leverage we permit them to have) in order to get us to act like actual adult men. The minor “upside” for anti-feminists like Goldberg is that men are absolved of all responsibility for, well, responsibility. The infinitely larger downside is that women are expected to have all the responsibility but none of the authority (we just call them “bitches” when they try to make us do the task Goldberg assigns them.) The end result isn’t even zero sum, it’s negative sum: grown men and women are reduced to Cathi Hanauer’s acute phrases The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch

Quick question for Goldberg: what does he imagine, say, Aristotle, or Augustine, or, Confucius or, I dunno, Maimonides, or even Tolstoy would think of his assertion that women are a civilizing influence on men? I happen to think all those gentlemen were dead wrong to believe men are uniquely moral and civilizing compared to women. But Goldberg and his desperately anti-feminist ilk just as wrong to imagine their fantasy of essential gendered women’s morality is any more real.

Another quick question: Goldberg, like Satoshi Kanazawa and millions of other anti-feminists, believes women’s magic lady part… and their “power” to withhold it... are the only thing that civilizes men. To which I’ll just rephrase Holly’s observation: Does that all those gay artists and writers and politicians and freakin’ gay fry cooks for that matter never get around to contributing to society because they’re way too busy not withholding sex from each other?

In fact we men set expectations all the time. In fact the whole idea that women don’t have anything better to do with their own sexuality than to use it to manipulate men’s behavior (coughno-sex classcough) is a completely male expectation.

Screw Goldberg and the coin-operated horsie he rode up on. I expect better of him.

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.

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?