Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

So a couple of weeks ago Slactivist said something that I, even though I’m not specifically a white male Protestant Baptist, should have said because, hey Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, agnostic-but-with-a-vaguely-Protestant-sounding-last-name, it’s all the same thing with us people.

Head’s up: it starts out sounding ordinarily Jon-Stewart-y snarky…

Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated

As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.”

I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists, others are entitled to assume that every white male Baptist is fully in agreement with the actions of Patrick Gray Sharp and to therefore deny white male Baptists the rights others enjoy.

So I denounce this attack and state unequivocally that we white male Baptists do not believe in this kind of violent extremism. I beg you all not to condemn all of us for the actions of this lone member of our community, although of course I will understand if you decide that you must do so and will humbly accept whatever restrictions on our full participation in society that you see fit to impose. That’s only fair.

I further beg your forgiveness for my not denouncing this violent act sooner. Unlike the nearly identical failed attack in Times Square, this attack wasn’t the lead story on our local news and the newspaper I work for somehow didn’t mention it at all. Then today I was outside most of the afternoon cutting the grass and just didn’t hear about the story until now. I plead with you to understand that as soon as I learned of this incident, I rushed to post this denunciation.

Read the quote in context here.

...but the twist makes it not only generally relevant to the context of grossly unfair expectations that all even-vaguely Muslim people should apologize for and denounce violence committed by other equally vaguely Muslim people (even if they’re, say, Shiite and the perpetrator was Suni, even if they’re ethnically Persian or Turkic and the perpetrator was ethnically Arab or Pashtun.) The twist makes it appropriate to the context of sex, gender, and relationship blogs like this one. Slactivist continues…

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. This is so embarrassing — I totally skimmed past the fine print on the unwritten rules and completely missed the exemption for hegemonic classes. It turns out that we white people, males and Protestants never have to worry about extravagant displays of vicarious contrition. As a white male Protestant, apparently, I don’t need to promptly denounce every evil act committed by any and every other white male Protestant.

This is awesome. Do you realize how much time this is going to save me? Plus just the relief of no longer having to watch the news on pins and needles, worrying every time there’s a crime or a gun-nut on a spree that it’ll be some white male Protestant guy and that everyone is going to assume we’re all like that. What an enormous relief to be judged only as an individual and not prejudged according to the worst thing ever done by anyone ever claiming to belong to my faith community, or sharing my gender or my ethnicity. It’s not just a relief it’s a … oh, what’s the word? ... privilege. Yes, that’s what it is — a fantastic privilege.

Two points to this twist, incidentally.

1) If you’re white, male, and Protestant it really is a privilege that you don’t have to apologize ever time another fuckwad shoots up a school, a church, an office, a clinic, his family, random passers by, an Oklahoma City federal building, a Texas or California IRS office, random police officers, and so on. No, really, it’s a privilege. Not a resentment-driven, anxiety induced, demanded for male-privilege privilege, I mean it’s a real actual privilege. One that should be extended to anyone else who isn’t directly responsible for supporting, endorsing, instigating, or participating in such incidents should receive.

2) Yeah, Mary Daly was really separatist. Yeah, Catharine MacKinnon is really anti-fellatio. Yeah, Twisty Faster is really antagonistic towards men. And sure, somewhere, some time, someone who identifies herself as a feminist… or more to the point someone you identify as a feminist (even though like Lorena Bobbit or Wendy Vitters they aren’t) may have said or done something that hurt your feelings. But unless you want to start taking responsibility for the behavior of Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney, David Koresh, Scott Roeder, and Randall Terry and you might want to ask why you think every feminist should be held responsible for the most extremist, and occasionally even obscure feminist positions.

Of course none of this means one can’t take on responsibility for wrongs committed by others. Whether or not they resemble you in some way superficial or real. It just means your resemblance doesn’t oblige you to.

Holly of The Pervocracy, talking about normal vs. kinky brings up one interesting data point…

All I know is that if I have to sit through another conversation at work on the topic of “my husband and I are never in bed together and that’s awesome because gosh it’s such a pain having to deal with those icky things he wants”, I’m going to explode and tell them everything.

She said it here.

and one of her commenters brought up another…

Is ‘icky things he wants’ non-vanilla sex or is it sex at all? I’m over on the asexual end of the spectrum, and if I came out with something like, “Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to never bother with sex again,” at work, I would be stuck spending the rest of the season putting up with well-meaning busybodies demanding that I justify my marriage.

He or she said that here.

Pretty wild, right? If you’re “too” sexual (in Holly’s emergency-medical staff workgroup that evidently includes owning a vibrator) you get branded a wild child. But! On the other hand, as the commenter pointed out, if you’re not sexual you’re in for a world of scrutiny as well. All made worse by our general reluctance to discuss whatever “happy medium” it is we’re all supposed to “naturally” have.

Or, as yet another of Holly’s commenters, Mousie76, puts it

I don’t think normal, vanilla people know what normal and vanilla is like, because part of being normal and vanilla is not really talking about it.

Much hilarity does not ensue.

Echidne of the Snakes, riffing on anti-feminist angst over women’s armpits, says something deep and true about what the “shaving” wars say about the effort required to construct gender from the mostly-undifferentiated material of corporeal humanity.

I would love to stop discussing the “to shave or not” topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.

I see an analogous case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two “opposite sexes” as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.

She said it here.

Once again it’s not that there are no differences between men and women. It’s that the real differences are enough. Oh yeah! And hooray for all of our respective orientations and our shouldn’t-be-surprising discernment of those we’re drawn to. By which I mean there are enough differences that it’s foolish, willful, conceited, and fundamentally insecure about or orientations and of those around us to require more than nature gives us.

And once again it’s not that there’s no need nor interest in decoration of ourselves, others, or our environs. Quite the opposite — decoration appears to be a fundamental quality of humanity!

But while referencing the expectation that we participate in gender construction, Echidne puts the problem in context (even more emphasis mine)

...we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).

Sticking with hair for the moment, the classic example being that in some cultures in the world today men can be punished for having a beard on the one hand (in most of the U.S. military, for instance) yet be punished for not having a beard in others (in most of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance.) Another being that for women to have no body hair is considered sexy in some parts of the world (white America for instance) because of its association with high-status femininity while in other parts of the world (white/European South America for instance) women’s body hair is associated with high-status femininity because “native” South American women are believed to have relatively sparse body hair.

In each case, in each culture, in each time, in each location, gender might be constructed, yeah. But if it’s constructed differently in different places…

Sigh.

You know what’s most peculiar of all? For roughly 99.999% of the .001% of cases where for whatever reason someone else’ biological sex really matters, but where for some reason you’re not able to tell, you can usually ask.

Ed Yong of Discover Magazine’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog has… discouraging news for abstinence-loving social “biologists” who hang their hats on oxytocin as a reason women should be virgins until marriage and monogamous thereafter. A psychology researcher at UCSB, Heejung Kim, has some interesting preliminary results showing that the human oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) doesn’t just vary in between genetically diverse people*, and not only does it sometimes produce opposite responses in genetically diverse people but, uh oh!, even among genetically homogenous people it can produce different results if they’re affected by different cultural upbringing! Definitely not what abstinence ‘wingers are going to want to hear.

(Emphasis mine.)

The OXTR gene exerts its influence against the background of these contrasting cultural conventions. Distressed Americans with one or more copies of the G version were more likely to seek emotional support from their friends, compared to those with two copies of the A version. But for the Koreans, the opposite was true – G carriers were less likely to look for support among their peers in times of need (although this particular trend was not statistically significant). In both cases, the G carriers were more sensitive to the social conventions of their own cultures. But the differences between these conventions led to different behaviour.

And in a further example of the influence of the environment, Kim only found this pattern among people who were experiencing a lot of stress. In the low stress group, she found that Americans were indeed more likely to seek emotional support than Koreans, but their OXTR gene had no bearing on their choices.

Of course, Koreans and Americans differ not just in their cultures, but in their genes (including many others beyond OXTR). To account for that, Kim also worked with a small group of 32 Korean-Americans who were born and raised in the US, but were genetically Korean. Kim found that the link between OXTR and emotional support among these volunteers was much closer to the culturally similar Americans than the genetically similar Koreans.

Read the quote in context here.

Never mind that the plain old biochemistry says no dice to the “oxytocin exhaustion” theory. And really never mind that there’s also genetic variation in homogenous populations. Those are old school, common sense refutations of the “oxytocin exhaustion” theory of abstinence.

Although it’s a small-scale study which requires much larger samples to verify, he new-school refutations implied by this study would be (duh!) that like a lot of other nominally “behavior-controlling” genes, culture influences expression.

Call it a wild-assed guess here but I’m… pretty confident that you wanted to conduct an experiment on cultural differentials on OXTR in the context of romantic-bond formation instead of socialization under stress I think you’d find that the effects of cultural slut-shaming is more detrimental to bond formation in women than is their number of actual partners.