Figleaf's Real Adult Sex - Confessions of a libertine prude / grumblings of a prudish libertine

Acronym Replacement: It's Not IOKIYAR, It's IJNNWARD (It's Just Not News When A Republican Does It)

figleaf — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:55:13 +0000

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!

"Vajazzled" Vulvas: Privilege Rorschach Test?

figleaf — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:33:55 +0000

Lisa of Sociological Images succinctly describes the concept behind “vajazzling.”

In any case, the video below, in which a woman documents the vajazzling of her “vagina,” reveals that the term refers to the placing of a field of tiny crystals where your public hair would be. So, first you essentially replace your pubic hair with shiny objects.

See the video, and read Lisa’s text in context, here.

Succinctly but not completely. That should read shiny, sharp cut-glass crystal objects! Which at the very, very least would tend to limit one’s partner’s interest in face-to-face intercourse. And assuming men are being honest who say they don’t want pubic hair in their mouths ought to be just even more balky about chipping their molars on Swarovski crystals.

My guess is that the hair-in-the-mouth thing is a red herring. As Holly says, if men are so all-fired indiscriminating and sex-crazed they sure are a demandingly picky bunch. And nothing says demanding like “scrape off your pubic hair with a razor, or pull it out with hot, sticky wax,” I’m guessing saying “and encrust it with jewels instead” just seems extra special.

My second guess, though, is that it’s scarcely any of my business how an intimate partner chooses to groom herself and no business at all of mine how anyone else goes about it. Part of privilege would be assuming people who get themselves vajazzled are interested in men’s opinion in the first place.

Ayn Rand: Wretched Philospher, Lousy Pornographer, Even Worse Sex Educator

figleaf — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 03:25:23 +0000

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper points out an interesting side effect of Ayn Rand’s highly-influential fiction: it’s a platform for forced-sex fantasies.

[Rand-oriented dating-site founder Joshua] Zader says that many Randians experience their first contact with her books between the ages of 14 and 21. “Her books appeal to youthful idealism, to people who are at the point in their lives where they’re trying to figure out what’s important,” Zader says.

It’s also when they’re trying to figure out sex. Rand’s influence on young people can’t be overstated—her fans have described her books as “life-changing,” “my Bible,” and “hot.” “I know that your sexual inclinations can be kind of stamped into you when you’re going through puberty,” says Kate. “So it’s a little disconcerting that at 12, 13 years old, I was stamping myself with this complete and total interest in submission, when I didn’t have any experience with sex at all,” she says. “It’s an interesting seed to plant in a teenager’s mind that that’s how sex operates.”

She said it here.

Actually based on my (limited, repulsed) reading of Rand I got the impression she deeply believed that sex is ordinarily cooperative and mutual the only possible way to have sex with any integrity at all is to force yourself on someone who, whether she’s “secretly” interested or not, is resisting by all means at her disposal. Anything less would be corporeal compromise with another human being, and that appears to be a fate far worse than death for Rand. (For someone who claimed to be such an iconoclast she sure was into making the bogus Two Rules of Desire a central feature of her sex scenes!)

Far be it from me to suggest that between competent, consenting adults that kind of kink should be denied or resisted.

I will say, though, that unless a middle-schooler has received a solid, comprehensive sex education that includes sections on autonomy and negotiation I’d probably steer them towards works with more neutral sexual content. Indoctrinating children to specific types of kink before they’ve begun to develop sexual expression on their own is as likely to limit their development as thoroughly as advocating the lights-off, man-on-top, only-to-ejaculation, only-for-reproduction kink the Victorian missionaries were so enamored of.

The No-Sex Class and Differential Sexual Satisfaction For Elderly Men vs. Elderly Women

figleaf — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:57:16 +0000

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.

Goldberg Gets it Backwards: Free Women Don't Make Men Civilization, Owning Women Makes Men Uncivilized

figleaf — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:21:39 +0000

Quick follow up on that post about Jonah Goldberg, who wishes (coughthirdworldcough) women could have a little more power so they could “civilize” their men.

Goldberg actually has it exactly backwards. It’s not that women civilize men, it’s that oppressing women uncivilizes us.

When men have the idea that we automatically have dominion over half of humanity an obvious question becomes “why not have dominion over the rest?” And when men believe we can automatically ignore the agency of half of humanity, rob them of their power, and use them as objects of our own convenience or gratification it’s a quick leap to “why not make similar use of all of humanity?”

Where Goldberg goes wrong is he thinks that just giving women enough power to better withhold sex creates civilization. Instead it’s that taking away any power from women as a class makes us all uncivilized.

And once you get that it’s easy to see how, in this case, his plea to give women a little bit of power so that they can trade sex instead of just having it taken from them, is completely anti-feminist. And uncivilized.

Jonah Goldberg Wishes All Women, and Not Just White Ones, Had Enough Power To Withhold Sex From Unworthy Men

figleaf — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:24:10 +0000

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.

Anti-Feminism and Misandry: More Reasons Why Real Men Should Never Feel Threatened by Feminism

figleaf — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:59:26 +0000

fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives stands up for feminism and men (I’ve mildly reformatted her post)

So there’s this one debate, you may be familiar with it . . .

One side of this debate says stuff like:

Feminists hate men.

Feminists attack men.

Feminists want to weaken men.

And I hear many of these same people saying:

Men only think (or care) about one thing.

Men don’t have a strong moral compass and need women to (gently) guide them to do the right thing.

A man’s pride controls him, so don’t bruise it by being bossy. It’s okay to get your way, just so long as he thinks it’s his idea and feels strong and manly about it.

Men are visual, they can’t help it, so cover up because he can’t control himself.

Men are simple creatures who need food, sex, sports, money, and fast cars. Don’t expect him to have (or express!) a complicated inner life with emotions and crap.

Men are naturally less righteous than women, so they need this here God-powered crutch gift to raise them up (nearly) to our level.

Men have to think they’re in charge, or they quit trying. So we’ll just tell’em they preside (even if we really are equal partners), and let’em assign someone to say the prayer.

You also gotta let men have all the leadership positions, cause otherwise they’ll stay home and watch football.

If we don’t let men have the priesthood (and make the money, and protect us from spiders ‘n rapists), then women wouldn’t really need men. (Since other than that all they’re good for is sperm donors?)

So wait . . .

Who is it that attacks, weakens, and hates men?

I nicked her whole post from here.

An even better question? Who created the stereotype of men that feminists are supposed to hate so much? Anti-feminists hate, fear, and are strongly disgusted by men. Feminists? Exasperated sometimes, when we men mistake anti-feminist stereotypes for compliments maybe. But hate? Not so much. Certainly not the way anti-feminists hate us.

Birthday Confessions of a Chocolate Mainliner

figleaf — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:30:11 +0000

So over the decades I’ve slowly graduated from Hershey’s-style milk chocolate to progressively stronger and stronger, darker and darker kinds.

Towards the end of last year a local boutique chocolatier started making some (very tasty) 91% varietal chocolates that were… pretty darn good.

So about two weeks ago I was out of all the good stuff. And I wondered to myself…

How would plain old Baker’s unsweetened taste?

Turns out it’s pretty good.

Awfully strong in the theobromine department, so you can’t eat that much without getting “overcaffeinated.” But minus all the cheap sugars and flavorings and such that goes into cheap sweetened chocolates it’s pretty darn good.

I realize it’s taken (inadvertent) years to get to this point so I don’t recommend jumping into it. And I seriously don’t recommend giving it, or any other 100% chocolate, as a gift to anyone else.

Note: I’m not about to give up half-and-half cream in my coffee.

Figleaf's Ultimate Definitions of Good and Bad Sex

figleaf — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:28:35 +0000

It’s good sex if you feel as good or better about yourself and your partner(s) as you did before.

It’s bad sex if you feel bad or worse about yourself and your partner(s) after than you did before.

And that’s it. Orgasm count isn’t part of it. The specific type of relationship isn’t part of it. Whether it’s for or not for reproduction only isn’t part of it. Neither is age, or gender, or interest or orientation. Neither is skill nor experience. Nor what you actually do, or could do, or won’t do.

So those are very high-level definitions. And you can choose different ones. But that’s what I mean when I use those terms.

(Note: I’m aware that the spirit of the definitions could be lawyered or otherwise subverted, but then so can, say, the Geneva Conventions Against Torture. And I briefly considered changing them to the form “It’s good sex if you and your partner(s) feel…” But that introduces its own complexities and besides, no amount of qualifications will stop someone sufficiently determined to violate their spirit.)

Kevin Spacey's American Beauty as Metaphor: Andrew Sullivan on the Toxicity of the Closet

figleaf — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:30:12 +0000

I probably would have let this post continue gathering dust in my Drafts pile but this post by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about the peculiarities of gay closeting among conservative homophobes in politics made it percolate back up for me.

—-

In a post about arty films that at least in retrospect suck, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon made a poster child of the 1999 Oscar-winning American Beauty. Which in an awful lot of the ways she lays out really did suck.

Amanda mistakenly thinks the movie was about the reduction of Kevin Spacey to a state of pure privilege — a narrative arc that begins with him masturbating in the shower and, um, ends shortly after we’re supposed to see him as some kind of hero for not having sex with a 14-year-old… when it turns out (surprise!) that she wasn’t as ready as he (and she) had imagined.

That interpretation of the movie always surprises me. And if you see it that way then yeah, it doesn’t just suck pretentiously, it sucks gratuitously. Look at it that way and everything about it from the pseudo poetic voice overs to the floating plastic bags to the abrupt murder to the whole he saw / we saw comedy-of-errors between the Spacey character and the dope-dealing boyfriend just reeks phony/artsy.

But I always saw it as a gay morality play where the happy, well-adjusted out gay couple represent true suburban paradise, where the self-loathing, desperate-to-pass closeted gay neighbor on the other side represents Hell, and the Spacey character’s obliviously “latent homosexuality” is the metaphorical battlefield between the forces of the good of being ordinary and out and the evil of the closet. Throw in that all slightly tin-eared representations of heterosexuality are the result of “colonization” and… well, I’m not sure that’s what the producers really had in mind but it’s a lot easier to appreciate the movie that way.

Anyway, after a bit of rumination over irony, hypocrisy and petard-hoisting, Marshall closes his piece with this thoughtful observation

...as Andrew Sullivan puts it, these are all examples of their tragedy of the closet. Not just the inability to live full lives and all the self-loathing that’s painfully obvious in these men, but the soul-crushing and character-distorting effects of a life of denial and toxic secrecy.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. It’s not the hypocrisy, it’s the toxicity that drives it.