Well, no, I agreed–I give them advice on how to be a human being, as best I can–it’s true that I never try to advise them on how-to-be-a-MAN. The conversation then shifted to giving them relationship advice, especially our seventeen-year-old, and I found us unfortunately returning to the how-to-be-a-MAN meme in the form of “–and then I told him, you know, that we’re not naturally monogamous–that it’s all religion that’s forced that on us.”

“Um,” I said, “I’m actually pretty monogamous. By nature. I mean, that’s how I’m happy. And certainly I don’t feel that way based on religion–”

“Oh, well,” said the kids’ dad. “I meant MEN. Women, you know, are programmed for serial monogamy, and men are programmed to–”

“–spread the seed, right!” we chorused together. This disconcerted him long enough for me to invent a hasty excuse to get off the phone before I either burst out laughing right in his ear or started yelling at him for attempting to imprint my precious offspring with some evo-psych bullshit that he doesn’t even understand the feeble biological underpinnings of in an attempt to justify to himself why he probably wants to screw around on his wife–! (pant, pant!) But no, they’re also his precious offspring, you know–I don’t get to interfere with whatever ideological crap he wants to feed ‘em. All I get to do is present my opposing viewpoint to them, which I made a huge mental note to do ASAP.

…but it brought back to mind a recent post on Feministe about monogamy–well, about nonmonogamy really and the consensual practice thereof. (Nonconsensual nonmonogamy is otherwise known as cheating, and I think we all already know how I feel about that, right?) I am totally on board with consensual nonmonogamy, just like I am totally on board with pretty much anything and everything emotional and/or sexual that consenting adults want to practice amongst themselves.

However, I don’t agree that nonmonogamy is somehow more feminist than monogamy, which the blogger in question was more or less contending, though I understand why someone might take that stance. As I said in comments:

I would say traditionally that relationships (between men and women) were structured specifically so that the women were monogamous and the men were nonmonogamous–the main cultural variant was whether or not the men were openly nonmonogamous or applied a thin veneer of pretend monogamy to their nonmonogamy. This relationship was clearly structured to go against feminist views, but it wasn’t the monogamy that was the problematic structure, it was that only one gender was expected/forced to practice it (and on the other end, there was often a great deal of social pressure for men to practice nonmonogamy even if it went against their personal inclinations as well).

It does lead me to try to understand better my own definite preference for a monogamous relationship, though. Firstly, do I feel the same degree of need or desire for monogamy on both an emotional and a sexual level? or am I more definitely monogamous in one of those than the other? Secondly, what is the basis for both preferences? Is it something I can really, logically define, or is it an irrational conviction that I’m unable to defend logically but am still passionately attached to? (An example of the latter would be a belief in Creationism.)

I will figure that out and post a “Part Two,” but in the meantime I’d love to hear from any of you out there: Are you by preference monogamous or non, and why? What do you think about the intersection of monogamy and feminism? Harking back to the phone conversation I had with the kids’ dad, do you believe there are any genuine, inborn differences between the genders in terms of tendencies towards or away from monogamy? Shout it out!

BUT anyway, this is what the two aforementioned men (you know, though, now that I mention it, I’m not actually 100% sure what Quin’s precise sexual orientation is–it hasn’t come up as a conversational topic between us to date–if you’re not het, Quin, I apologize for making the assumption!) had to say:

Quin, fellow PAB blogger:

I think you may be being a bit overly charitable to men right now. In that this ever-deepening spiral towards “harder” porn is not a result of men not caring about the women’s enjoyment. Seems more likely to me that it’s a result of men desiring to see humiliation in women. It’s fucked up, but popular concepts of masculinity are knotted up in a thorny tangle with sex, dominance, and violence.

D, ex-spouse of PAB blogger:

I don’t think that it isn’t that men actively prefer to see a woman who is bored or otherwise totally unengaged in sex–an object–it’s just that that is what’s most commonly out there. I know you [Lisa] are saying that porn is a completely consumer-driven market, but I don’t think you’re taking into account that it is by far the easiest and cheapest porn to make–the porn that shows a woman just laying there or kneeling there and doing whatever without really caring. It would take a lot more effort, and probably a lot more money, to find a large number of women who really want to make porn, really get off on doing it on camera, etc.–also think of acting skills–in porn women actors like that are probably in high demand and get the best pay. But anybody can just offer somebody else fifty bucks to just lay there and, like you said, “get pounded.”

Another commenter, whose gender and orientation I can’t even guess at and is therefore appropriately self-named Nobody, said this as well:

I recall reading an interview a while back with a person who worked the register in a porn shop (I believe this was back before the www was ubiquitous). She said that there were a lot of costumers who might come in once or twice a year, and a few who were in and spending money every week; they provided the bulk of the shop’s income.

If that’s the case then “mainstream” porn isn’t what the majority of random folks on the street want to see, but what the relatively small group that spends significant $$$ on porn wants to see.

So Quin and D are addressing two different facets of the issue–hurt/humiliation porn vs. passive object porn–and Nobody seems to be addressing both issues, to a point. D’s contention makes a lot of sense to me in terms of the latter style of porn, and I find myself a little better pleased with the average het porn-watching man because of it–certainly that would be and no doubt is the easiest type of porn to make and that’s why it is in such massive proliferation everywhere. I suppose it would be nice if het men turned their noses up at it and demanded better fare, but if that behavior was an integral part of human nature, McDonald’s wouldn’t be the multibillion-dollar empire that it is today, eh?

Quin’s contention is a thornier one, for me. Not because I don’t agree with it, but because I would prefer not to agree with it but don’t see how to avoid doing so. I am quite aware of the sexual power dynamics between the genders, and I can’t say that the precise dynamics that make porn like Animal Trainer so popular with het dudes aren’t exactly the same dynamics that have resulted in me having such positive sexual experiences overall as an adult with het dudes. All the guys I’ve been intimate with, as an adult, even the one casual one–those guys had a real, vested interest in me thinking well of them. Nearly all of them have been a coworker, and not just a coworker, but a member of the same after-work social clique that I inhabited. And I was well-thought-of, in that clique–I was universally regarded as a good girl–it would not have been possible for any of those men to treat me poorly in an intimate way and have survived the social fallout unscathed. And they all found me quite physically attractive–in other words, they all desired several repeat performances, at the minimum, if they could get them, and the only way to strengthen that likelihood was, obviously, to please me as thoroughly as possible. In short, I was the one in the position of power, psychologically, in those interactions, in the minds of those men–so I didn’t get hurt or humiliated or bored in bed.

But how many men find that massively, even unbearably at times, frustrating, and want to get back their own, especially on a hot woman..? Must I accept that it’s the majority of them..? It seems inescapable that it’s a significant number, though here I am trying to find some comfort in Nobody’s post–perhaps it’s not a majority, simply an obsessed and driven minority that pumps the majority of the cash into that market. That does make sense…but still–Animal Trainer has won multiple industry awards. How to reconcile that with it not being some kind of majority desire amongst the men who watch porn?

Quin had a few suggestions, neither of which are remotely achievable in our current sociopolitical clime: 1) Spread universal human empathy to every person on the planet, and 2) Make sex so socially acceptable that simply stopping people to ask the time regularly leads to a a roll in the hay. (Yes, I’m pretty sure no. 2 is a wee bit snarky, and honestly, I’m quite sure I will never want to have sex with at least 99% of the people who ask me what time it is during the course of a day–but you get the drift in terms of stripping off the insane taboo systems we have built up around the sex act, yeah?) I suppose that really just goes back to me plowing forward determinedly with the sex-positive feminism, which I was doing anyway. Maybe things will be better for my great-grandchildren?

I got to thinking on this topic today after a brief hop over to Feminsting’s community blogsite where I saw an article entitled “Feminist Critique of Hetero Male Culture Causes Mass MRA Hysteria.” I wasn’t too intrigued by the header there, I’ll admit, because most feminist critiques of anything to do with men and sexuality send most MRAs over the edge of rationality–in other words, well okay but so..? but I was also waiting for about 5 million work emails to finish printing out on my feeble home printer and I had time to kill. So I read it, and followed the embedded link to the original blog post by the author on her own website and read that too.

It wasn’t a bad article, even if the author had to start out with the tired old refrain of “when I was a little girl I was really more like a little boy! because 99% of little girls, unlike me, were all about Barbies and gossip and hated physical activity of any sort–!” I do get tired of that one. It certainly does incline me to agree that the female writers who regularly prop up this stereotype did, indeed, have zero little girlfriends growing up or they’d know better than that. But then, if they acknowledged that to be true, they might have to reconsider why they didn’t actually have more little girlfriends, eh..? I’m sure it’s much more pleasant to imagine that one didn’t because one was simply too guyishly cool for all those little pink rainbow wussies! rather than it being, perhaps, for some other less self-congratulatory reason.

But moving on to the actual point she was trying to make–she certainly got it right about the prevalence of men using being on the receiving end of anal sex as a euphemism for a miserable situation. However, I think she rather missed the boat on why. Men also, just as frequently if not more so, use being raped in the same euphemistic fashion. So, when men are talking about being fucked up the ass by their boss, or the government, or their ex-wife’s lawyer, they’re not actually referring to the mechanics of anal sex–they’re referring to being raped. Since women don’t rape men (yes, I know they do, but bear with me), men are simply using the phrase “fucked up the ass” synonymously with “getting raped.”

That whole idea did strike me as interesting, though–because men also use “rape” euphemistically, with themselves as the main actor, to describe how they absolutely defeated some other person or persons in competition (the competition can be either formal, as in a softball game, or informal, as in getting the best parking space at Wal-Mart). However, they do not ever (that I’ve witnessed) describe themselves as “fucking someone else up the ass” in that way. So the distinction is made, and the distinction seems pretty clear-cut in cause to me. It is homophobic, specifically male-homophobic, and all of a piece with how the most common thing I hear out of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys’ mouths as an insult exchanged with other boys (and since I have a twelve-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old son, I get to hear a lot of this kind of exchange) is, “You’re gay.”

Men, therefore, who use all these euphemisms, have a clear grasp of the essentials–only women and faggots, ie, persons with status less than the standard issue heterosexual man, get fucked up the ass. To be fucked up the ass is to have your human status reduced. If something happens to you that reduces your status in the eyes of others, you have been fucked up the ass. If you soundly defeat another man, you have reduced his status to that of a woman–you have raped him–but you don’t quite want to say that you fucked him up the ass, as he is male like you, because that would make you a faggot and reduce your status too.

This is why we have the seeming paradox of these men fearing rape more than any other crime that could be committed against them, with the possible exception of castration, yet having no issues at all regularly blowing off and otherwise dismissing the rape of women by men, with the sometimes-exception of the rape of a prepubescent woman or a virgin. For them, rape is psychologically devastating because it makes you a homo, and physically painful because while pussies are clearly designed for dicks, assholes aren’t. They accept that rape might also be psychologically damaging because a girl child’s brain probably hasn’t fully accepted adult concepts yet and a virgin is probably saving herself for some special man, and physically damaging because a child’s vagina isn’t quite done developing to full readiness for a man’s penis and because they can imagine that the rupture of the physical membrane that is the hymen could be painful. However, once a female has begun to menstruate and no longer possesses a hymen, her getting fucked in the vagina is totally natural both physically and psychologically–it’s how we were all designed, right?–so it really can’t be considered anything nearly as psychologically or physically devastating as a man getting raped anally by another man. And it doesn’t reduce a pubescent, non-virgin female’s status–she’s already not a virgin, which is the only status boost she could possibly stack onto her pre-existing undeniable femaleness, and once that’s gone, she has no more to lose.

An interesting conundrum that this can present for men who find that they really enjoy receiving anal stimulation–I was in a long-term, monogamous relationship with one (I won’t say which one). He asked me, very hesitantly and shame-faced, after the first time we really made a point of trying it out, if I thought that that meant he had homosexual urges. I said, I don’t think so–who do you want to be doing this to you? Me, or a man? You! he said, very definitely, and I said, Well, I think that’s what defines you as homosexual or not–who you’re doing whatever you’re doing with, not what exactly you happen to be doing. But men who want to perform anal sex on women don’t have this agonizing conflict–because, again, it is getting fucked that reduces your status and puts you in your place, not doing the fucking.

I used to wonder why men seemed to have so much trouble empathizing with most types of rapes, when a woman was the victim, or even why they en masse never seemed to take it seriously when a man was raped by a woman, yet clearly had no trouble at all wildly overempathizing with the horror that was a man getting raped by another man. This is the answer, and it’s a pretty sad one.

On an end note, though, I can’t help but preemptively sympathize with the author of the original Feministing community blog post–one of the very first responses to her article was the following, by a self-described “MRAman:”

If you don’t like butt sex you should just say so. Nobody would be surprised anyway, since everyone knows feminists are always opposed to things men like.

Sigh. Yes, that must be it…well, if I’m lucky, our periodic trollers won’t be around to read this particular blog post and visit me with such sage perceptions as well. Fingers crossed.

What ties these two posts together for me, and is a continuation of a slowly evolving set of thoughts in my head on the general subject, is the underlying query in both: What makes sex so attractive, desirable, pursuable to the point of single-minded obsession at times? Specifically, what makes sex involving people other than oneself like that? As I was saying to the husband just the other night, clearly it isn’t all about the orgasm, or we’d all stick to masturbating. Frankly, nobody is ever going to be as good as you are at getting you off; you have all the right moves every single time and no conflicting interests that might otherwise bar total fulfillment. One easy answer, though still a bit of a mystery in of itself, is that it’s more attractive with other people in the exact same way that it feels better when somebody else rubs your aching feet than when you rub them yourself, even though you know better than they do exactly what part of your feet ache the most, exactly how much pressure you want applied, etc. But of course there’s a lot more to it than that.

Hugo has this to say on the subject:

I remember helping to lead a panel discussion (back in 1988 or so) on the question “Why Have Sex?” It was a strange title, and it drew a good-sized audience. The premise of the talk was that too many discussions about sex talked about why folks shouldn’t have it (at least until marriage), or about how to have it properly — but no one was talking about the perfectly reasonable question of why one ought to do it in the first place. The easy answer, of course, was “it feels good.” But that raises the question — what feels good? Is it arousal? Is it anticipation? Is it emotional closeness? Is it orgasmic release? What one person likes best about sex isn’t always what the person they’re being sexual with likes best.

At the time we had this panel, I was at the stage where the honest answer to why I liked sex best was that it made me feel validated as desirable…The honest-to-God truth was that at nineteen or twenty, still struggling to overcome a tremendous sense that I was fat and unattractive, the best thing about sex was not the physical pleasure or the emotional intimacy but the sheer wonder in discovering that I could be wanted. And of course, the more people I could “get” to “want me”, the better I felt.

I can understand his personal feelings via second-hand experience; I’ve intimately known someone for whom that entire attitude about sex was a phase he underwent as well. However, that was never what sex was about for me. The public admiration of men, sure, especially as we go farther and farther back in time–but to actually have sex with all those people? Bleh. Nobody was actually touchin’ me for any reason other than that I was out of my mind with sheer physical lust.

Amanda’s post featured, among others, the following calendar shot that is, I suppose, one of the artistic-nude-glamour-photos-pushing-the-boundaries-of-photography-yawn-gag:

The only reason I can imagine that anyone would find this erotic is that there are naked tits in it. However, obviously there are many better pictures of naked tits out there, so that’s clearly not the a-r-t-i-s-t’-s main foci in terms of the beauty and sexuality he is daringly probing the boundaries of with this photo. Let’s see: People, overwhelmingly male with aggressive facial expressions, grabbing and stretching a naked woman with a terrified facial expression out in midair–gee, I wonder what has to do with sex that one would be reminded of there? Wow, what an innovator–nobody else has ever tried to eroticize gang-rape before! Yes, what an unheard-of concept!

One reason that it has suddenly become much more important to me to analyze the underpinnings of two- (or more, if we want to get really risque here) person sexual pleasure and motivators is that my older son is sixteen years old. He’s a serious and introverted type and has not yet begun to date, but I’m fairly sure that sometime in the next few years, he will–and the day he turns eighteen, he’ll be a legal adult, and there will abruptly be a lot less of both authority over and responsibility for him on my end. Let us say that I am feeling the pressure of receding time in which to set him up for happy and successful adulthood.

He and I have some time eked out together in the next several months–a few mom-son dinners out, a few discussion sessions here and there planned for a non-busy Friday night, etc.–and they will be my last big chance to help him get his head screwed on straight for adulthood. Yes, and if only I was 100% sure that mine was screwed on straight at age thirty-five! Am I REALLY the best person to be handing out advice..? But I’m really the only person there is. I would absolutely love it if his father would step up to the plate–and his father does, indeed, step up to the plate, on many many topics–but, his father is also completely unable to discuss sex with his sons. Oh, he’s willing to discuss the bare basics of anatomy and the differences therein between the biological genders male and female, which is good. However, as far as providing some guidelines as to when should I and why should I and so forth…his idea of this is to snap out, “Well, you should probably wait til you’re married, but if you can’t, use a condom.” (This is especially un-useful to a teenager who has consistently stated, without drama, that he has no interest in getting married for a long, long time, if ever–I doubt he has a similar interest in remaining celibate!)

So, I’m stuck with it. I’m pretty sure neither my son nor I are thrilled that I am his opposite-sex parent in this specific case, but it is what it is. I can’t imagine that anything I would say to him will end up being worse than if I say nothing at all, so I at least have that going for me. So you all may have to suffer through my future cogitations on this sticky subject. Any advice anyone may have is, of course, always welcome. Stay tuned!

“Huh, huh-uh, huh…she said STICKY.”

This entire blog post was actually supposed to be a comment, in response to another commenter’s question on my take on sex work and its inherent feminism or lack thereof. However, once I started writing said comment, it became clear that I had WAY too much to say on the topic to inflict my response in the little comment section of a post! So I asked the commenter how she’d feel about a blog post and she said Sounds fine! (Of course, it’s taken me so long to get around to writing it, she probably isn’t even looking for it anymore.) And then, once I started writing the blog post, I realized that what I really needed to do was write an entire book in response to that query, because it is extremely complicated! and so, apparently, are my feelings on the subject.

(Note: In an attempt to keep this post from turning into the aforementioned book-length commentary, I’m restricting myself to discussing prostitution, not any other kind of sex work.)

When I was younger, up until around my mid-twenties, I hated prostitution. Not prostitutes–what I felt for prostitutes in general was enraged (on their behalf) and horrified (on their behalf too). My reasons for this were twofold–the lesser reason was because I was stuck in the throes of the self-centric worldview that most teens and young adults tend to have–the assumption that everyone if not in possession of the exact same feelings and reactions as oneself, can’t be far off, and I knew how I would feel if I were a prostitute. I was by nature a private person with personal space zone even larger than that of most Americans, who culturally already on average have very large ones. On top of that, I had suffered through some unfortunate childhood incidents that had given me a specific horror of having anyone touch me in a sexual fashion in any situation where I was required to submit for any reason other than my own sexual desire for that person. On top of that, I had left home at age sixteen and discovered very rapidly that there is a decent-sized population of men out there that enthusiastically seize upon any very poor young girl outside the protective circle of a family–they behave very much like someone finding a leprechaun in their backyard and are quite aggressive in pushing her to perform sexual services in exchange for the material help they perceive she is in desperate need of. So I was already not in the best frame of mind in terms of viewing prostitution in any favorable light whatsoever when I first met the greater reason for my hatred of prostitution in general and my agonized contemplation of the horrors that prostitutes must endure in particular.

Let’s call the greater reason “Cyndi;” that isn’t really her name and the chances are slim to none that she’d ever be exposed by this blog even if I used her real name, but I think I’m more comfortable assigning her a nom de plume anyway. She was “retired” from prostitution–that was how she referred to it, though even then it startled me to hear anyone describe herself as “retired” from anything at the tender age of 22. She had been a practicing prostitute for five years, from ages 15 to 20. She was the fiancee of a man I knew and absolutely could not stand, but she was happy with him because, she said, he knew what she’d been before and genuinely didn’t care. (The reason I hated him was because he was in his late thirties and before becoming engaged to Cyndi, had been “dating,” if you want to call it that, a sixteen-year-old with such severe self-esteem issues that she let him tie her up and engage in painful anal sex on a regular basis because afterwards he would tell her how sexy she was.) But anyway, Cyndi at various times related the circumstances of how she became a prostitute and some of her experiences during her professional days as one–without going into the details of her personal life here, suffice it to say that any suspicions I had had of the awfulness that it was to be a prostitute were wildly overconfirmed, setting my resistance to the whole notion in irrevocable stone.

It wasn’t until after I had divorced my first husband and gotten to know many women, and men, from a much broader variety of socioeconomic backgrounds than the one I hailed, that I began to think that my stony convictions about the basic, flat-out evilness period of prostitution might not be an entirely fair and accurate picture. My feelings about Cyndi’s career path in particular and that of all underage girls abused into prostitution in general didn’t change one whit (still haven’t, actually)–however, I started considering the idea of women, fully adult and emotionally healthy women, choosing to sell sex with themselves to others as a completely voluntary choice. Once I had managed to accept that yes, there were such women, I was finally able to start looking at the situation from a more philosophical standpoint. I ended up with the following collection of questions (among others, but I’m restricting myself also to the is-sex-work-as-practiced-by-women-inherently-antifeminist aspect of the situation) to ask myself:

1. Is the selling of the use of one’s body for sex wrong morally in of itself, without the element of coercion or underage or emotionally damaged providers?
2. Is the selling of the use of one’s body for sex for a woman empowering, subjugating or some hazy gray area in-between or even outside the two?
3. Does the practice of prostitution harm women in general and overall, help women in general and overall, or neither?

My conclusions:

1. No. Because (a) it’s your body and whatever you do with it of your own free will, as a fully mentally and emotionally capable adult, is absolutely and only your business and nobody else’s and (b) sex between two consenting and fully mentally and emotionally capable adults is not morally wrong, regardless of what some religious types appear to think.

2. This is a harder question, because in a perfect world, the answer would be very different than it is the real one we actually live in. In a perfect world, where women didn’t have a thousands-of-years history as being legal property of men with the provision by them of sexual services to said men being a fully embedded part of that–in a perfect world where there was no economic and social divide between the genders with women usually far to the bottom of the heap, the answer would be “neither.” Is being a nail technician, a pedicurist, for instance, empowering or subjugating? Neither–it’s an intimate physical service being provided by a professional that gives physical and emotional pleasure to the recipient for an exchange of cash. It’s empowering in the sense that any work a person does for cash renumeration empowers her; it isn’t subjugating at all unless you are a person who thinks that providing intimate physical services to someone else that make them feel good is demeaning, in which case you need to also include, say, doctors and nurses in that category.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and not only have women had the history described above, they are still far behind men as a gender in terms of political and financial power. If you are a man getting a pedicure from a woman working as a nail technician, say, and you decide to try to rape her while you’re at it, you will unquestionably be arrested for it. However, if you’re a man getting a blowjob from a woman working as a prostitute and you decide to try to rape her while you’re at it, you won’t–you can almost do whatever you want to her short of severely physically damaging her or killing her. In our imperfect world, purchasing a woman’s sexual services culturally translates to the actual purchase of her entire physical body–slavery–in the minds of too many men specifically and our culture in general. Some customers and some practitioners like to play at “empowerment,” that he is the slave, the slave of his sexual desire and she is really the one in control of the situation, but the actual fact is that it is only his self-restraint that allows her any real “control” at all. And that means she doesn’t really have any, does she?

So my answer is, in a perfect world, consensual adult prostitution would not be subjugating, and it would be empowering in the sense that any job providing financial independence is empowering. However, in the world we live in, it is subjugating.

3. Back to the perfect world/our world dichotomy–in a perfect world, the answer would be “neither”–it would be JOB. It’d help out the individual in question by being one and therefore providing cash to live off of, but other than that it’d have no impact on that woman in particular or women in general at all. However, unfortunately, we live in this world.

In this world, women’s bodies and the idea of spending money to induce one to have sex with you (you=men) are used to sell everything from coffee to cars. The last five movies I’ve watched, for instance, all have at least one scene where the main female character goes in the bathroom, takes her clothes off on-camera, and showers, and in only one of those movies was there any point to this in terms of plot at all. Women, in short, are presented all the time as a bombardment of something you want to buy and fuck–something you can buy and fuck–all you need is enough money. By validating this outright, female prostitutes help hold up the structure of the patriarchy that assigns women to be objects rather than fully human autonomous people like men.

From an interpersonal relationship standpoint (finally!! she gets around to actually relating it to the original Edwards post–lol) when a man and a woman choose to vow to be monogamous to one another, the woman is really the only one who is actually EXPECTED to do so. A big part of the reason that it is statistically much more epidemic in men than women to break this vow is because there is a plethora of women’s bodies offered to him for cash, quite discreetly–women who make it clear that they are perfectly fine with him treating his vow to another woman like so much bullshit, who have an active interest in encouraging men who have vowed monogamy to break that vow as that is the big majority of their customers. By enthusiastically endorsing that societal double standard, women who practice prostitution are enabling it to a degree that would be impossible without their active cooperation.

So my answer to this last question is, in a perfect world, consensual adult prostitution would neither hurt nor help women in general. However, in the world we live it, it hurts all women, including the ones engaging in prostitution, a lot.

(Note: Now I wanna start passionately discoursing how “well how do we fix this then?!” but seriously, it’ll run into book length. I will throw out there that I think the illegality of prostitution is a stupendously bad idea in terms of fixing the situation–s’matter of fact, that enables it even MORE as a “bad” thing! Well, I take that back–I don’t think that anyone who sells sex should ever fall afoul of any law, but I do enthusiastically support the idea of slapping together a really draconian law package punishing anyone who tries to buy sex from anybody underaged.)

We’ve had a few adventures since then–like him discovering that by far the best place to buy condoms is the grocery store, where they are openly and innocuously stashed next to the disposable razors in the toiletries aisle; drugstores lock ‘em up next to the “Nicorette” at the prescription counter and glare suspiciously even at a man who is clearly well beyond the age of consent who expresses an interest in purchasing some. He also neglected to read the varietal descriptors on the box and, for anyone out there who is curious, “Climax Control!” condoms do indeed work, to the point where the poor sucker who innocently put the thing on may never achieve one. (I’m still trying to figure out who thought that the icy numbness which results after inserting your penis into a condom filled with lidocaine-spiked lubricant was some kind of brilliant sexual invention, and if anybody ever buys these twice.)

Oh, the joys of condoms! And apparently I’m not the only one who wishes they were anywhere near as conducive to fun or even efficient sex as they are to pregnancy- and disease-free sex. There’s a guy out there who has spent a lot of his adult life working on just that–Jan Vinzenz Krause, a German sex-ed instructor. Actually, he sounds like a very cool and useful guy–

As a teenager, Krause, now 30, had trouble finding the right size condom, which set him on a quest to aid other similarly befuddled young men. In 2001 he developed an online condom adviser, which provides printable measuring tapes and instructions to help men determine which condom, out of all the brands available in Germany, will fit the best. According to Krause, more than 300,000 people have used the free service.

This really is a problem–I have had in the past both a boyfriend who could barely keep the condom on, obviously not a reassuring situation, and another who lost his erection every time he put one on because they were so tight they literally cut off the blood flow to his penis. So among other things, this guy has invented spray-on condoms, which I think I actually did read about in the fairly recent past:

The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. “The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom’s, and it feels more natural.”

Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs in the system. I’m not too worried about the first few bugs mentioned–

The men who tested the spray-on condom had a few hesitations, Krause says. Some were “a little bit afraid to use the tube” and would only try it on their fingers. Others worried that the mechanism, which hisses as it sprays, might ruin the mood.

Dingalings with this level of “techno-fear” probably have a multitude of other issues that dwarf this one and possibly don’t even use condoms at present due to the level of technical difficulty and intimidation presented by the packaging and unrolling phases of the operation so we can discount them, and unless you or your partner has some kind of snake phobia, I really doubt that a brief hissing sound is going to make anybody incapable of functioning. However, the next bug is a little more significant–

But the most serious problem with the design — which is what has kept the product off the market thus far — is that the latex takes too long to dry. Liquid latex currently takes two to three minutes to vulcanize, making it impractical. “For people to buy it,” Krause says, “it needs to be ready in five to 10 seconds.”

Well yeah. Three minutes is a long time, especially if you can’t touch anything to help it maintain its, er, turgid state and have to be super-careful not to move around and accidentally bump into or brush off the drying latex, and of course the are-we-there-yet?-are-we-there-yet?-how-bout-now?-well-how-bout-now? mindset is a mood-killer even when all you’re doing is driving to Grandma’s. So hopefully some genius chemists out there will figure out the secret of fast-drying latex soon. Of course by that time I’ll be back on the pill…

So we’ve been fomenting cupcake revolution for a few months now, and I just now learned from her blog that V.C.T.O.T.W. has a blog, written by Isa, which is just as delicious as the book.

This is all backstory, of course, for an exciting, erotic tale about graham crackers.

While introducing a recipe for vegan graham crackers, Isa mentions that Graham crackers were invented by the good Rev. Sylvester Graham as a staple of the Graham Diet—a rather simple, back-to-basics kind of diet of his own making, devised to suppress amongst other things unhealthy carnal urges. Like, for example, masturbation (or as he calls it, self abuse, which is I think a pretty clear indicator that he was doing it wrong). He founded a whole school of thought dedicated to the notion that people—particularly women—ought to suppress any sexual thoughts, desires, or heaven-help-you practices by eating really bland food.

A follower of his by the name of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg contributed to this diet by inventing corn flakes, which rather goes to show how deep this commitment to blandness went.

It also indicates the state of western nutritional science in 1822. It’s true: a bowl of cornflakes is pretty unlikely to put me in the mood, unless I was already most of the way there myself (or with help). But it’s also rather unlikely to take me out of the mood. And if you fed me only cornflakes? Between the sheer boredom and the time saved not cooking, I would probably become rather, um, sore. Granted, my just-so story isn’t scientifically any better than Kellogg’s or Graham’s, but at least (1) it isn’t contributing to the oppression of women, sexuality, and particularly women’s sexuality, (2) it isn’t informing people in power what they should make people eat. Graham’s diet, by contrast, was adopted by Oberlin College of all places, where students were justifiably peeved, and one professor was apparently fired for bringing his own pepper to meals. The Army got in on the cornflake act, resulting in this priceless passage:

In contrast [to spicy or sweet foods], cornflakes would have an anaphrodisiac property and lower the sex drive. This theory was carried out in the U.S. Army, which not only applied the theory orally, but also processed the cereal as a suppository.Corn Flakes article on Wikipedia

I am inclined to believe that suppository application would increase the anaphrodisiacal properties of corn flakes substantially. Particularly in the Army.

I had actually already heard about Dr. Kellogg because of the maybe-apocryphal story surrounding Tori’s “Cornflake Girl” song. Sadly, I can’t find anything more than second-hand accounts, but the story goes that her use of cornflakes (and raisins) in the song is a nod to Dr. Kellogg’s interesting (and, evidently, popular) views on women’s sexuality. The raisin (girls) in her song are transgressing the dominant cornflake paradigm, pushing their agency and sun-dried deliciousness into a space where it’s considered taboo.

It’s a fun story even if it isn’t true, particularly because it makes adding raisins to breakfast cereal a radical act. Which maybe isn’t strictly accurate, but it is nice metonymy for women resisting even mere culinary oppression. I mean, pseudo-scientific/pseudo-religious diets are ways of controlling women that haven’t exactly become less popular since 1822. It can be an enormously effective way of enforcing psychological compliance: you will eat what I tell you to, and only that. You will take what I define into your body, and so you will become an extension of my desires. You will do this because you want to—after all, you don’t want to be a nymphomaniac / an onanist / fat, do you?

In conclusion: fuck that, be a rasin girl, and have a cupcake.

So instead I’m gonna talk about sex!

Note: The phenomenon I am about to discuss may only be a dynamic of heterosexual encounters.

Something I have noticed over the years is that my focus during sex and the focus of my partner, while complementary, are really very different. Generally, when we are having genital intercourse, I am striving to have an orgasm. My partner, on the other hand, generally is striving not to have an orgasm.

I cannot help but think that this makes sex a very different sort of situation for each of us. Complimentary, as I said–the reason he is striving not to have an orgasm is to give me time to have one. (Or more, if Fortuna favors me!)

The psychological divide alone is kind of fascinating. The ultimate pleasure is something that he has without question–the only question is how long he can force his body to delay it. There is usually no doubt that he will have it; it is the natural conclusion of his every genital sexual encounter. For me, there is no “natural” conclusion; I do not by default end every genital sexual encounter in orgasm. As a general rule, it is a result of effort and concentration by both parties–much more of a deliberately created event.

Men and women both often say to a cared-for partner, “I get the most pleasure out of pleasing you!” And they may or may not both mean it, depending upon the individuals in question…but even if they both do mean it, they don’t really mean the same thing by it. For a man, there is no sacrifice inherent in that statement–he is going to have his pleasure eventually no matter what if genital intercourse is part of the encounter. It’s perhaps a less self-sacrificing stance than the same attitude displayed by a woman–a woman with this attitude might well be giving up her own orgasm completely by acting out this noble sentiment.

The situation in which this dynamic shifts and becomes a truly equal situation is when one partner is performing oral sex on the other. I wonder if that’s one reason why so many women like receiving it so much, and why the men who really like doing it tend to be the men who are the most interested in their partner’s successful orgasm. I also wonder if that’s one reason some women don’t like performing it–tired already of a general lack of ultimate sexual satisfaction, engaging in an act that doesn’t even carry the slim hope of an orgasm for them really just becomes an overly intimate chore.

See, now, wasn’t this more fun than discussing the Democratic primaries?

That was me, fainting from astonishment. Could it be trooooooo…?

I did not make that headline up for the purposes of this post. No, that is actually, really the headline of this article from MSNBC Health.

Bisexuality.

I tend to subscribe to the theory that human beings* are innately bisexual as a group, with massive individual variance in degree of bisexuality.

I have a close female relative who has been married twice (to men) and sometimes does indeed want a man, though overall she prefers women; I have another female relative who has only dated one man and definitely, strongly prefers women; I have two female friends who had a very close relationship that sometime spilled into the sexual before one of them married–the one who married genuinely has no preference between men and women, the one that is still single has a definite, strong preference for men. Then there’s me–of the about 1,000,000 sexual fantasies I have had during the course of my lifetime thus far, probably about 10 of them have involved women, and those 10 fantasies also constitute the entirety of my intragender sexual experience.** So when I saw this headline, my first reaction was confusion. Why would anyone think it WAS a phase..? Isn’t it just what is?

Then I remembered two things.

Firstly, this:

Hot young chikkx tonguing on the dance floor! to quote the subject line of one of the latest batches of spam to find its way into my inbox.

The close female relative of mine I first mentioned is also fond of pornography, though finding genuine good lesbian pornography, she used to tell me, was a challenge. That was over ten years ago and I was fairly fresh out of the Army and I said, “Clearly you are not looking in the right places ’cause trust me, there is lesbian porn EVERYWHERE–”

“No,” she said patiently. “What’s everywhere is heterosexual male fantasies of what two women–not REALLY lesbians because the male viewer definitely wants the option to join in whenever he feels like it–would do together.”

Or, as the article says:

Bisexuality in women could be a lifelong sexual orientation, not a phase, a new study suggests. The finding runs counter to the idea that bisexuality is an experimental or transitional period for women who, for instance, are uncertain or have fear of commitment.

“There were clearly some theorists who suggested that bisexuality is a transitional stage, but that was largely based on anecdotal, rather than empirical, data,” said psychologist M. Paz Galupo, director of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Studies at Towson University in Maryland. “This view is popularized, also, by the stereotypes that our culture holds regarding bisexual individuals.”

It amazes me that we dignify the proponents of this idea as “theorists,” but then again, that’s no more bizarre than calling Creationism a “theory.”

As it turns out, bisexual desire ISN’T something that women feel because they are trying to turn men on, or because they are afraid of men, or–! Is it so hard to believe that a woman’s innate sexual feelings weren’t placed there nor are sourced from the existence of the monolith that is man? That she is not desiring whom she is desiring or performing the sexual acts she is performing every second of her life for the vast, omniscient masculine audience? For without men, a woman’s sexuality does not exist as an indepedent entity–it is solely a reflection of or a reaction to men? If a tree falls in the forest and a man isn’t there to hear it, does it make a sound..? Apparently not, according not only to popular culture, but to scientific theorists.

Secondly, this:

“One challenge facing bisexually identified women is that their identity is challenged by others,” Galupo told LiveScience, “and that identity becomes assumed based on the relationships that they form — either lesbian if in a same-sex relationship or heterosexual if in an other-sex relationship.”

Back to my close female relative–while she was married to her second husband, she had affairs with at least two women. Her husband was aware of them. She told me that it didn’t bother him, because he didn’t consider it “cheating.” After all real sex is something that has to involve a penis-bearing person in some capacity! (Harking back to point 1, above. Sigh.) However, her second relationship ended badly. Why? Because her lover got angry at her for having a sexual relationship with her husband…not because she was jealous, apparently, but because she just knew that my relative didn’t really want to have sex with him and was obviously just caving into what society expected of her–she was allowing herself to be brainwashed into thinking she wanted a man and in total denial that she was, in fact, a lesbian. My relative was quite sure she wasn’t a lesbian–not because she had any problems with the idea, but because she genuinely sexually desired men as well as women. But her lover couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that. My relative told me, with an air of sadness, that she had encountered this attitude before.

So. I believe, as I said, that we’re all basically bisexual. Some of us, like me, are so heavily oriented towards the opposite sex that we can reasonably be called heterosexual, and some are so heavily oriented towards the same sex that they can reasonably be considered homosexual, but these are in no way absolute, concrete definitions–they are tags for convenience only. Why is it so impossible to accept that human sexuality is a fluid thing? Is our need to label ourselves and others so great? Is it such a threat to the patriarchal structure of most of human society?

*I haven’t ever personally known a man who openly admitted to being bisexual. However, I observed enough group porn-viewing behavior during my Army days and surprised a few confessions out of a drunk specimen or four that I am relatively sure that innately, men span the same sort of spectrum as women.

**Other than passes made at me, of course.

Abstinence.

This is not something I have ever practiced on purpose except during limited periods and for a specific reason (example: my husband would be sent on a training tour of duty for several weeks) since I made the decision to become sexually active at the age of 17. Obviously I was not sexually active before then, but I wouldn’t have considered myself to have been practicing abstinence either; for about a year beforehand, I had been purposefully searching for someone with whom I really wanted to have sex. Why was I doing this? Well, I was sure I wanted to have sex because my body was telling me so, quite emphatically. However, I’d seen way too many other girls’ deep regret about how their “first time” had come about, and if I could possibly help it, that wasn’t going to happen to me–I already knew that I had a lot of potential to be really, totally crazy about the act of sex! and darn me if that was gonna get ruined right out of the gates.

Other girls’ poor experiences seemed to me to fall into one of two categories: (1) they had not really been ready to either have sex in general or have sex with that person in particular, and he had pressured them into it (2) they were ready to have sex in general and wanted to have it with that person in particular, then were subsequently treated like a trashy whore by that person or by family/friends/church for putting out the night before. Family, friends and church were not an issue for me; I was rather unusually free of societally-induced hangups on the subject; while I thought vaguely that I might end up married “someday” it certainly had no prominent place in my plans for the next ten years or so of my life, nor did I understand the peculiar double message of “You should be in looooooooooooorve with the boy you Give Yourself To!” and “Really wanting to have some s-e-x means, if you are a girl, you are some kinda slut nympho!” However, I did come to the conclusion that it was definitely the best idea to zero in on a guy who really cared about you, one who was preferably in love with you–not the possessive it’s-all-about-me kinda in love, but the kind that involved a more selfless devotion. This kind of guy, I reasoned, had a much higher chance of refraining from pressuring you when you weren’t ready and would subsequently treat you well after the deed was finally done. So, I searched out such a guy (I won’t go into the list of losers I fended off along the journey to his bed) and ya know, it worked out well. Admittedly the mechanics of the first actual completed sexual encounter were not top ten lifetime list material (two virgins together, well, you do know what the standard operating procedure is supposed to consist of, let’s say, but you lack comprehension of the fine details and intricacies of the female genitalia). However, such a guy is very interested in helping you find out what makes you tick, so going forward from that point becomes very rewarding in a short amount of time. In short, I had no regrets at the time nor did any ever come to haunt me in the future.

So I watch this abstinence obsession with a kind of bemusement. Why is it so important to not have sex? Why the obsession? After having read multiple articles and surfed too many websites, I have come to the following conclusion:

There is no abstinence movement that is not based in an organized patriarchal religion. If anyone out there is aware of one that does not originate in an organized patriarchal religion, please pass that info on to me, cause I couldn’t find any.

So if you either lack religious beliefs or have beliefs that aren’t rooted in organized patriarchy, such as an affiliation with Wicca, there is clearly no reason to ever practice abstinence outside of a purely personal choice based upon your specific life circumstances (for instance, you’re ill or injured in some way, or you simply aren’t in the mood to have sex for an extended period of time, or your partner of choice is unavailable for an extended period of time).

However, these groups do also try to couch their promotion of abstinence in secular terms, clearly realizing that not everyone on the receiving end of their message is a member of one of their various cults. Here is a boiled-down version of all the arguments I read to convince the non-cult members:

1. Your marriage will be more successful if you practice abstinence until you are married and people who are not abstinent while unmarried are more unhappy than people who practice abstinence while unmarried.
2. If unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease are concerns of yours, abstinence is the most effective method of preventing both.

Let’s examine those.

1. If you have no plans to marry, this argument holds no value for you, similar to the fact that the argument that Mr. God doesn’t like it when you’re not abstinent holds no value for those who have no belief that a Mr. God actually exists. But let’s say you would like to get married someday. Will your marriage really be more successful?

This message tends to be much more overwhelmingly aimed at the teen-to-young-adult group, as opposed to those roughly over the age of 25. To the them, what tends not to be overtly stated but is an obvious corollary is that you won’t be waiting that long, like ten years! or longer, to get married. In other words, you’ll marry when you are well below the current average age at first marriage in the US, which is late twenties or so. However, if you do do this, your chances of staying married to that person are a lot lower than they are if you wait til at least that average age, and the older you are when you first marry, the more likely you are to stay married to that person. This is also never mentioned, of course, though lots of studies promoting the physical health benefits to you and your baby should you choose to give birth long before the age of 30 are often pushed forward by the same groups.

There is a small vocal minority pushing abstinence for the grownups as well, one of the more notable members being our friend Dawn Eden. They do not base this advice on any studies, as those overwhelmingly tend to show that the nonabstinent over the age of 25 are a much happier, healthier group overall than the abstinent. They often have no evidence that the fact that they had large amounts of indiscriminate sex themselves as teenagers and/or young adults (very common in these folks) has anything to do with the fact that they personally are not happy now, but by God, they aren’t! and that has just got to be the reason why. (Other reasons, sadly, might point to personal character and intellectual deficiencies in themselves, and whoa now, they KNOW those can’t be the problem.) Going even further out into the land of unreason, they then decide that if everyone else also isn’t really that happy, it must be because EVERYONE ELSE TOO has spent some time having lots of sex with various random people, and since they all have that one thing in common, well, that’s definitely got to be it!!! Er…yeah.

Now, it is true that teens, especially girls, do exhibit higher levels of depression between the sexually active and the non, at least up through age 17. Also, a lot more express regret and wishes of having waited to have sex for the first time, especially the farther back in time from age 17 you go. And I totally believe those studies, because I witnessed it myself in that age range. And was quite determined to avoid it, as I was unconfused as to the reasons why…there is nothing wrong with having sex, nothing wrong or damaging at all in the performance of the act itself, as I proved in my personal practical sex-life experiment at the age of 17. What’s wrong is being pressured to have sex with someone before you want to have sex at all, being pressured to have sex with someone you don’t want to have sex with period, and being treated like a turd afterwards because you had sex by either the other person or society in general. There are no other reasons for it to ever be a bad experience, as long as you also practice contraception and safe sex.

That does bring us to 2. It is true that perfect use of abstinence gives you a 100% protection rate from both unplanned pregnancy and STDs. However, very few people perfectly practice any form of contraception or safe sex. A much better estimate of your risk rates for both comes from looking at typical use rates. The typical use effectiveness rates for the three most popular forms of contraception (tubal ligation, birth control pills and latex condoms) is for the first, over 99%, for the second over 90% and for the third, over 85%. Typical use for abstinence would fall somewhere between the statistics for the “withdrawal” method and the “bareback” method, which are between 25-75%. Looking at abstinence from this aspect alone, in terms of best practices for your pregnancy and STD rates, unless you know you are the kind of person that does everything procedural to maximum efficiency at all times, I would seriously consider using a combination of two or more methods for maximum safeguarding. Abstinence alone? Could very well be your absolute worst bet.

So, are there any arguments, outside of a determined belief in the existence of a Mr. God and what other people have said they can tell he wants you to do, to supporting remaining abstinent against your will, with someone decent that you want to be with, in private, with sensible precautions against unplanned pregnancy and STDs taken? No?

No.