The Pervocracy

Rescripting sex.

2012-01-24T23:11:00.000-05:00

Life has scripts. Little socially-agreed plays that we enact rather than trying to figure out all our interactions from scratch every time. Many of them are very simple. There's the script you follow when you're checking out at a store ("have a nice day"), the script for talking to someone who's sad ("I'm so sorry"), and of course the script for talking to a dog ("WHOOZAGOODBOY").

And there's scripts for sex. Unfortunately, the most common script out there sucks.

Script: Consent Roulette

Active partner (generally male) and receptive partner (generally female) are alone together. They're chatting, drinking, or watching a movie. Active partner detects (or wishful-thinks) the whiff of romance/lust in the air. Active partner gradually increases his physical closeness to receptive partner and makes some sexual innuendos. Eventually A goes ahead and kisses R. If she doesn't object, A leads R to a bed or sofa and lies her down. A kisses R more and gropes her. If she doesn't object, A then puts on a condom and R is expected to spread her legs and stuff. Intercourse happens.

The above script is, let me be clear, not rape. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that it's crappy. It doesn't give people the chance to have any sex besides kissing->groping->intercourse, it doesn't have any emotional component except A's uncertainty how far R will go, and it's just not all that fun. Even if A is female and R is male, all that does is ease the man's anxiety a bit; it doesn't fundamentally change the story.

And it's "roulette" because it makes consent all about luck. If you have this kind of sex with a woman and it turns out she wanted it, then yay--by sheer luck, you're not a rapist! On the other hand, if she doesn't want it, now she has to play roulette--if she says "stop," will he stop, or will he start holding her down?

This isn't just a first-time-sex script, either. I've had relationships where every time was kinda like this. It gets abbreviated and informalized a little with familiarity, but it's the same basic scene: guy senses "the mood" is right and guy starts doing his thing unless girl says "stop." After a while, even if it's totally consensual, it's just boring.

A big problem with getting people to break that script is that they think you're trying to get them to do this one.

Hypothetical Script: Robot Lawyers Consenting To One (1) Act Of Intercourse

Active partner and receptive partner are alone together. They're chatting, drinking, or watching a movie. Active partner detects (or wishful-thinks) the whiff of romance/lust in the air. A breaks into the conversation and asks R, "may I kiss you?" If she says yes, they kiss, although he is careful not to place his hands anywhere not specifically pre-approved. A breaks off the kiss, ceases all physical contact, stares politely into the middle distance, and asks R, "may I touch your left breast? may I touch your right breast also?" If she says yes, he touches her breasts. After some silent, tentative, arms-length touching he breaks off again and composes himself before asking, "would you like to have sex?" If R responds positively, he clarifies: "with me?"

No question, that shit is dull and awkward and probably would work excellently as Vagina Repellent in an emergency vagina-attack situation. (I'm overstating my case. I've totally had sex with guys like that. But I'm kinda charmed by awkwardness.)

But the problem with it is not that it's too sex-positive. The problem is that it's not sex-positive enough. It's still one-sided, it still treats sex like a linear progression from first base to home run, and it still doesn't give R much of a chance to say anything beyond "yes" or "no." It may include explicit consent, but it's not a negotiation.

The other problem is that it's kind of a strawman, since explicit consent doesn't magically vaporize all your social skills. People seem to imagine that talking about sex means talking in the dorkiest possible way, and I honestly don't know why. Personally, I've never seen the romance in no-talking sex. I know it's supposed to be all "swept off your feet by the heat of the moment" and shit, but in practice it always seems more clumsy and oafish, like trying to convey the concept of "Deleuze's Plane of Immanence" in Pictionary. With your feet. There's shit you can't just convey, you know? Even in long-standing relationships, it's pretty goddamn hard to say "I want to gently pull your hair while we fuck and whisper sweet dirty things in your ear" with raised eyebrows and meaningful looks.

And then you end up taking a chance and just grabbing their hair when it seems like a look has been meaningful enough, and then they stop everything and go "what the hell are you doing?", and boy, you think you've seen awkward. Even the most stilted negotiation has nothing on the awkwardness of that crushing moment when you're forced to admit you don't have Sexy ESP after all.

So the structure of this post requires me to write a good script at this point. But I'm having trouble coming up with just one, because the essence of the good script is that you're dealing with each other as humans, that you're enacting your sexuality and not some stock scene. So I can't write you the good script. But I'll write one possible one.

Script: Communicative Sex That Doesn't Suck

Partners A and B are alone together. A detects (or wishful-thinks) the whiff of romance/lust in the air. A says to B, "You are so goddamn cute, you know that? I'd really like to make out with you." B answers by leaning in and passionately kissing him.
B puts a finger on A's top button and asks "may I?" with a wicked grin and a raised eyebrow. He nods and she opens his shirt, touching and kissing down his chest. "Shall we take this to the bedroom?" she asks, looking up at him, her lips brushing his skin just above the line of his jeans. A responds by taking her hand and leading her there. B sits on the bed and starts undoing her clothes. She pulls A into the bed with her.
"Do you want to have sex?" A asks.
"Oh hell yes," B says, and starts kissing A again. She brings her hand down to the level of his zipper but hesitates, making eye contact before going further.
"Hang on," A says, "just so you know, I really don't like having my balls touched."
"Okay," B says, "but can I play with your cock?"
"Please," A replies, and she slips her hand into his pants, his answer turning to a groan as she wraps her hand around his cock and begins to stroke.

And you know, so forth. I'm not trying to make this particular scenario a prescriptive thing. People communicate in different ways. What really matters is that you know rather than hope that whatever your communication style is, it's in sync--that the other person is intentionally sending all the signals that you're receiving, and vice versa. It's also nice to get in a little more specificity, both physically and emotionally, than "sex or not sex." Also, when you're used to this degree of extremely engaged back-and-forth, it's really obvious when something's wrong or the other person isn't really into it.

For me, this is sexy. What I remember, what turns me on, isn't just the fact that I did stuff to someone, but that I know they wanted it. The physical action of stroking a dick is boring, it's just rubbing my hand on some skin, whatever, I can take it or leave it. What's exciting is stroking a dick that wants to be stroked. It's so hot to know that for certain. It's not the dick that makes my night; it's the "please."

This is the kind of sexual script we need. Not necessarily one that's based in talking a lot (although that's what works for me, and you do have to talk some), but one that's based in desire and shared humanity. One that's based not in "can I do sex to you?" but in "let's do sex together."

Consent culture.

2012-01-18T22:13:00.002-05:00

Today I'm going to fulfill a promise I made quite a while ago, and talk about what a consent culture would look like.

A consent culture is one in which the prevailing narrative of sex--in fact, of human interaction--is centered around mutual consent. It is a culture with an abhorrence of forcing anyone into anything, a respect for the absolute necessity of bodily autonomy, a culture that believes that a person is always the best judge of their own wants and needs.

I don't want to limit it to sex. A consent culture is one in which mutual consent is part of social life as well. Don't want to talk to someone? You don't have to. Don't want a hug? That's okay, no hug then. Don't want to try the fish? That's fine. (As someone with weird food aversions, I have a special hatred for "just taste a little!") Don't want to be tickled or noogied? Then it's not funny to chase you down and do it anyway.

The good news is, there are things you can do to bring this about. Things beyond just "don't rape people" (although that's an excellent start).

Ways You Can Work Toward The Creation Of a Consent Culture
1. Don't rape people. It does bear saying. And I don't just mean "don't put on a ski mask and jump on strangers in dark alleys" rape, either. Don't have sex with someone who is not unambiguously, enthusiastically, and continually consenting. Don't have sex with someone who says "I guess so" or "okay, fine" (unless they are grinning lasciviously as they say this). Don't convince someone to have sex. If they don't want you, really want you from the bottom of their heart and/or groin, respect that.

2. When someone doesn't want to have sex with you and so you don't, talk about it. Share that you're bummed but also that you take pride in your ability to take it gracefully.

When you didn't want to have sex with someone and so they stopped, talk about it. Share that despite the awkwardness you're glad they took it gracefully.

These are tough things to discuss (in part because they sound kind of Captain Obvious, like, no shit it was nice of you not to rape someone), but they're important narratives to put out there. Others' stories shape our ideas about sex, and hearing stories that fall outside the "have sex or you're a failure" mindset are important in changing those ideas.

3. When someone tells you about pressuring or tricking someone into sex (and you're in a situation where it's safe to do so), call them the hell out on it. "That's not cool. It doesn't sound like he/she wanted it." You don't have to use the R word, you don't have to tell them they should be arrested, you don't have to call them a rapist piece of shit--you just have to make it clear they're not getting any goddamn high fives. When you hear someone bragging about sex like it was a prank they pulled on their partner, bring the mood in the room the hell down.

You can do this with fictional stories, too. You don't even have to be no-fun then. "Wow, you guys, 'Baby It's Cold Outside' is totally a date rape song." Without requiring a rant or a buzzkill, it just quietly plants the idea that no, that is not a "totally legit way to get sex" song.

4. When you see something that looks abusive or nonconsensual going on, don't turn your back. At least be a witness--just the presence of another person can be someone's biggest guarantee of safety. Stepping in and checking if everything's okay is even better.

5. Ask before touching people. Say "do you want a hug?" and if they say no then don't hug them--and also don't give them any shit about not being friendly or affectionate. Don't make a big deal out of it, just make it part of your touching-people procedure. If they say "you don't need to ask!" nod and smile and keep on asking.

6. Negotiate sex! Explicitly negotiate sex play, and BDSM play if you do that. Be eminently clear about the fact that play is not a package deal for you, and your partner is free to change their mind about any part of it at any time--as are you. Err on the side of blunt, and say corny shit like "can I kiss you now?" and "I'd like to touch your chest."

Once in a blue moon (really not as often as some people would have you think), you may run into a partner who refuses to negotiate, or who says "I would have done it before you killed the mood by asking." Do not have sex or play with this person. Their loss. This is you putting the principle of "consent matters" above the principle of "have sex at all costs!", and you can brag about it when you're busy changing narratives.

7. Re-negotiate sex! While I don't think every step of "can I kiss you now?" is necessary in a long-term relationship (although Rowdy and I really do ask every time about intercourse), it's important to keep talking about what you want and don't want. You're not strangers anymore, no, but you're also not merged into the same person. Keep active consent alive in your relationships.

8. Learn to love consent. I worry that I've made getting consent sound like a chore. It's anything but. Asking for consent is a moment of delicious tension, of emotional connection.

A "yes" brings the joy of knowing someone is really hot for you, really wants you. It means that they're going to not just go along with but be into the stuff that comes next. That's not "prerequisite checked off," that's "awesome, this is going to be so much better now."

A "yes, conditionally" helps you be a better lover to them, someone who can give them just what they want and nothing they don't want.

9. Learn to appreciate "no." A "no, not at all" is bittersweet--or okay, sometimes it's fucking crushing--but it brings some finality and certainty with it. If you're not going to have sex anyway (and you're not, unless you were going to rape this person), at least you get to banish the "maybe I could have, why didn't I try" thoughts.

Remember that ultimately asking for consent is not asking someone to make a decision whether they want sex with you or not. That decision's going to get made, one way or another. Asking for consent is simply asking to know about that decision.

10. Talk about consent. Make consent part of the stories you tell about sex. Just a natural part of the process, something that ought to be taken for granted will be part of a sex story.

"So last night I asked Sandra if she wanted to hook up and she totally said yes."
"Ohmygod, Jane asked me to have sex with her, and it was awwwwesome."
"I heard that Rob and Josie--I'll totally kill you if you tell anyone--totally agreed to have sex at Jesse's party!"
"Kirk laid Spock tenderly across the science console and whispered hoarsely in the Vulcan's pointed ear, 'Do you want this? Do you want me inside you?'"

11. Bring consent out of the bedroom. I think part of the reason we have trouble drawing the line "it's not okay to force someone into sexual activity" is that in many ways, forcing people to do things is part of our culture in general. Cut that shit out of your life. If someone doesn't want to go to a party, try a new food, get up and dance, make small talk at the lunchtable--that's their right. Stop the "aww c'mon" and "just this once" and the games where you playfully force someone to play along. Accept that no means no--all the time.

Beyond what's necessary for their health and education (and even that touches iffy territory), I don't believe in doing this to kids, either. The size and social-authority advantages an adult has over kids shouldn't be used to force them to play games or accept hugs or go down the big slide. That sets a bad, scary precedent about the sort of thing it's okay to use your advantages over someone for.

It's good to practice drawing your own boundaries outside of the bedroom, too. It can be shockingly empowering to say something as small as "no, I don't want to sit with you." "No, you can't have my phone number." "I love hugs, but please ask me first." It's good practice for the big stuff. Simply learning to put your mind in the frame of "this person does not want me to say no to them, and they will resist me doing it, but I'm doing it anyway" is a big, important deal.

Consent culture is a tough thing to build. I think it's got a foothold in BDSM--we at least talk big about consent--but it's far from established here. It's barely starting to get tiny little footholds in the mainstream culture. But it grows in little microcultures, tiny bubbles of sex-positivity and circles of friends where consent is the norm, and it has potential to grow so much more. Give it a hand. Make it part of your own life, and it becomes just a little bit bigger part of the world. Start living consent culture.

What would you do?

2012-01-13T15:31:00.001-05:00

Today on the Pervocracy we're going to play "You Be The Armchair Quarterback," because I don't think I did the right thing in this situation, and yet I don't know what the right thing to do was.

I was at a party that had a hot tub, toweling off after a good soak. A man and a woman were in the hot tub together. I don't know their relationship--I knew the guy only as a vague acquaintance, the woman not at all--but they were obviously some kind of intimate.

The man tried to push the woman's head underwater.

It was a laughing, silly thing for him--he wasn't acting aggressive, he was acting like a kid giving his little brother a noogie. The woman was a little less amused. She started out gigglingly resisting, but when he tried really hard to drag her underwater, she said "No, I don't want that, stop it." He kept going. They were sorta laughing and sorta not; it still had the tickle-fight atmosphere but it looked to me like he was putting a bit of strength in trying to shove her underwater.

The woman never yelled for help, never tried to get out of the hot tub or hit him, never even stopped smiling, and yet it was clear that she for-serious did not want to get dunked. There was a lot of her saying "ha ha, but no, really, don't do that," and a lot of him responding "haha, nice try, I'm gonna getcha!"

Watching this, I was paralyzed. Part of me was "oh my god, fucking stop this" and part of me was "they're just messing around, maybe she's a little annoyed, this situation does not call for Feminist Batman." I ended up deciding that I wasn't going to interrupt them (heroic, I know) but I was also not leaving the room while this was going on. I sorta gave him stink-eye until he stopped and I stayed in the room until they left the hot tub.

I'm going to toss this one to the audience. Some factors to keep in mind:
A) There are a lot of people at this party.
B) There are two or three other people in the hot tub room, but as far as you can tell they're ignoring the situation. None of them are well known to you.
C) The hosts of the party are in some random other room in a large building, and it might take 10-15 minutes to track them down.
D) This party is slightly extra-legal (ahem) and anything that gets the police called there would be extremely upsetting and legally-risky for a lot of people not involved in the Hot Tub Dunking Situation.

What would you have done?

Cosmocking: February '12! Part Two!

2012-01-12T12:21:00.000-05:00

I set out on this ridiculous quest to read every goddamn issue of Cosmopolitan, and now I guess I'm committed. So let's get on with it!

[My husband's] lack of stereotypical maleness became particularly obvious when a piece of baseboard in our hallway broke off, and he suggested I "just call someone" to fix it. I did; the guy hammered three nails into the wall and was too embarrassed to charge me for his brief time and effort. When stuff like this happens, I wish Scott would just man up, deal with random repair hiccups, and in general, do more traditional guy stuff. Why do women like me marry our evolved, sensitive soul mates then secretly wish they'd be more macho?

So now I'm in a Triple Feminist Fury.

Fury 1: That being "evolved" and sensitive is treated as the opposite of being male.
Fury 2: That mechanical competence is treated as a masculine trait.
Fury 3: That mechanical competence is treated as not just masculine, but exclusive to men. The writer couldn't get her man to man up, so she had to call another man--these were the only options!

Ideas like this construct a crappy world. Women who can hammer are unattractively masculine; women who can't hammer are dependent; men who can hammer are insensitive caveman clods; men who can't hammer aren't Real Men. There's no goddamn way to win!

Meanwhile in the real world I'm a manly woman who can hammer and cuddle, and I am a whole lot happier than Cosmo would ever let me be.

The move that makes him forgive you: Tilt your head so that you're gazing up, exposing your neck. This is a submissive posture that lets him know you genuinely understand you're in the wrong.

Are you dating a wolf?

To really up the ante while he's down there, ask him to take your clitoris into his mouth and suck on it--it'll boost the pressure and feel awesome for you.

On its own, there's nothing egregious about this quote. A little questionable if this should be a categorical imperative--"if this sounds good to you, then try having him do this" would be better wording--but by Cosmo standards it's fine.

It only becomes bizarre in the context of Cosmo (the Costext? no) because it tells women to ask their partners for something sexual. This is an act all the advice and relationship columns forbid or treat as unthinkable in the first place. How does "ask him to suck your clit" fit into a world where you can only ask for things via subtle hints and odd body language? In the real world it's no big deal, but in the Cosmos (yeah, I'm owning that one), you can only ask for a sexual fantasy by leaving a romance novel open on the table or claiming it was a dream you had. How are Cosmo readers supposed to make requests this immediate and explicit of their partners? Every other article in the magazine explicitly disallows them the tools they'd need to do so.

Deadly Decision: Ditching Your Friends At Night
[Kenia Monge was a young woman who was abducted and murdered by Travis Forbes.]

[...]Kenia and her girlfriends were partying happily that night. During the evening, she excused herself from their table to go to the restroom. She left her purse, car keys, and phone with them, giving every indication that she planned to return, according to the Denver district attorney's office.

[...]What went wrong for this girl who seemed to have everything going for her? The alcohol she drank must have blurred her thinking and led her to make the error that endangered her life: breaking away from her friends and leaving the club with a guy--not Forbes--she'd just met. Minutes later, she was caught on surveillance tapes alone, no longer with the guy she'd left with, wandering between an apartment building and a hotel blocks from the club.

In other words, it was all her mistake. Travis Forbes was a force of goddamn nature and bears no human responsibility for his decision to abduct and murder her. Nope, the real problem here was that she took the wildly dangerous action of going outdoors. How can we ever stop the tragic scourge of women going outdoors? If only we could keep all the women indoors. Then murderers would surely go home and go "aw drat, I guess I just can't murder anybody."

Why is Cosmo fucking doing this? It really pisses me off, not even joking pisses me off, that they're framing this as some sort of suicidal recklessness on Monge's part. (Hey... why is she "Kenia" and her killer "Forbes"?) All she did was step outside for a couple minutes. Forbes is the one who randomly murdered her. Gosh, which one do you think made the worse decision that night? Fucking hell.

Oh, okay, maybe she wasn't to blame, but maybe she could have been safer, right? Maybe if she'd stayed home at her apartment altogether, right?

Something Cosmo doesn't mention: Travis Forbes assaulted another woman a month later. He raped, beat, and tried to kill Lydia Tillman (trigger warning, everything in that story is horrible and will make you cry) in her own apartment. What mistake did she make, how did she secretly doom herself? She was in her home.

I guess it's too horrifying to face the idea that bad people are out there and they can't always be stopped. (Then again, if Travis Forbes had been caught sooner, Lydia Tillman could have been saved. Talking about what the victims did wrong obscures things like that.) We want to find some way to say "the victims were stupid, and because I'm smart, nothing bad will ever happen to me!"

The sickest part--sicker than the insult to the victims, sicker than the attention taken off the perpetrators--is that the criminals themselves sometimes use the same logic. "She should have known better than to be out there alone." Perpetuating the idea that women who take innocuous actions are asking for trouble isn't just insulting. It's dangerous.

You find an amazing LivingSocial deal for a tropical vacation. Immediately, you:
A. Decide if it pops up again, it's a sign you should buy.
B. Forward it to your BFFs and ask if they'd be into it too.
C. Enter your credit-card info and handle any pesky details later.

Along with "colors," "the nervous system," "testicles," and "human decency," I think we can add "browser cookies" to the list of things Cosmo doesn't understand.

Cosmocking: February '12! Part One!

2012-01-11T12:11:00.003-05:00

Light pink cover! With light yellow text! Shouldn't they run this stuff past a grown-up at some point between crayon-based layout and printing 3 million copies? Anyway the thing that is "Too Naughty To Say Here!" is 69! How can that be too naughty? It's a number! "This Decision Could Cost You Your Life!" They mean the decision for a woman to be alone at night! Because it's too goddamn dangerous for us to live like fucking humans!

The Naughtiest Thing I've Ever Done: "I had sex in the middle of my wedding--twice"

I wanted this to mean on the altar. That would be a much better naughty thing. If the minister is halfway through reading them the vows and has to take a break for "for richer or for poorer... oh come on, knock that off!" And then again during the reception they just swept a bunch of chaffing dishes off the buffet table and started going at it with "I dare you to tell me to stop" looks on their faces.

Instead, though, it means this:

As [the maid of honor] was bustling my dress, John walked in.
"Is everything okay?" he asked.
"Just a minor emergency," I said.
"Can I help?" He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. Knowing that my maid of honor's vision was blocked by the layers of my dress, I mouthed "Seriously?" He nodded. We were really going to do it.

This might be a matter of feminism making me all sensitive, but is anyone else kinda sketched by how that went down? She didn't go "oh yeah," she went "seriously?" That's the reaction of someone who's being told not asked. If she was uncomfortable with having sex during the wedding--you know, not "I absolutely will not," uncomfortable, but just "I don't actually feel good about this" uncomfortable--did she have a graceful way out?

I'm not saying it was literally rape. But it reflects an ucky, ucky view of consent that this was presented as an enviably sexy story.

Caught Two-Timing!

This is photos of celebrities wearing the same clothing item more than once. Seriously. In one case it's shoes. If it's gauche to rewear shoes, I've been caught eight-hundred-timing.

Guys told us the topics they're dying to quiz you on.. but don't for fear of being bitch-slapped.
"Are you on birth control?"

Dying to quiz you on? That's a question that's important to ask before sex and utterly irrelevant otherwise. Unless they're still in some sort of high school mindset that taking birth control means you're a slut who will totally put out, I guess.

[Clue he's secretly into you] His thumbs point up. A guy is mentally giving you a good review if he unknowingly does something like holding his beer glass with his thumb to the sky.

Oh Cosmo. There's also one where he's secretly into you if he makes the ASL sign for "I love you," which raises a fascinating question: What if he doesn't know ASL? Is this some kind of Jungian collective unconscious ASL springing forth? That could revolutionize our understanding of language and the brain!

Shocker: This Word Is a Turn-Off To Guys
It's not "marriage" or "period." According to our most recent crop of Cosmo Bachelors, it's the F bomb--more than half said it's unattractive. [...] Experts say it's like burping. He knows you do it, but he'd rather think you don't... so you maintain a sexy, girlie mystique.

Yeah... Fuck that fucking steaming mound of fucking bullshit. I'm a fucking person and I will use all of the words available to fucking people. I will talk like I fucking want. I will accustom men to the idea that some women say "fuck" a fuckload and others don't because we're fucking people and we're fucking different.

My ninth grade English teacher tried to convince the girls not to swear by saying "if you say it, people will think you do it." Slut-shaming aside... so "shit" is still cool then, right?

Probably not by Cosmo standards. Do you really want everyone knowing you have a digestive system?

Q: I asked my guy to spank me, and he said no. Does he think I'm a total freak?
A: [...] The next time you're having sex, grasp his hand, put it on your ass, and tell him you'll do anything if he gives you a light smack.

Pre-feminism: "No means try harder, guys!"
Post-feminism: "No means try harder, everyone!"
Progress.

If you want to be focused during a big presentation, try this: wear red nail polish. [...] Because it has the longest wavelength in the color spectrum, people might need to look longer to process it, so all eyes will be on you.

The furthest visible red is about 750 nanometers. Divide that by the speed of light, and you get... 2.502 x 10^-15 seconds to view a cycle of red light. That's 2.5 femtoseconds. Your audience will be captivated for femtoseconds.

(The human eye and brain take about 1/15th of a second to process images anyway, but we're already so far into the realm of cartoon logic, I hate to even bring that up.)

There is too much terrible in this Cosmo to finish in one entry! Part Two will be up late today or early tomorrow! Thanks to Rowdy for color math and @tinam2011 for co-Cosmocking!

A sex lesson from a cat.

2012-01-03T14:30:00.000-05:00

You can learn an important lesson about sex by petting a cat.

Oh God, no, not like that! Pet the cat's head! This is metaphorical!

That aside... if you have a friendly cat handy, go give the kitty some scritches. Cats, even (or especially) the neutered ones, are shameless pleasure-seekers. They know what feels good and they have no inhibitions about going for it. You'll never hear a cat say "I'd love to eat some houseplants, thoroughly lick my own genitals, and spend the rest of the day napping on the sofa, but I'm so worried what people would think!" Cats don't have those hang-ups.

So when you pet the cat, if you're not quite in the right spot, kitty will help you along. If you're scratching the right ear but kitty's left ear needs some love, kitty will turn its head.

What you can learn is to not compensate for this. Instinctively, you'll move your hand and follow kitty's right ear around so you're still scratching the same spot. This isn't what kitty wants. Kitty wants you to hold your hand still and let kitty work around you. Otherwise you're at cross purposes, canceling each other out.

Learn to accept messages like this. If kitty pushes harder against you, don't back off; understand this means kitty wants more pressure and has just showed you exactly how much more pressure would be good. If kitty pulls away, don't follow; understand this means kitty wants a break.

In this regard, sex partners can be a lot like cats. (Also sometimes in terms of sounds they make and the ability of a tiny one to somehow crowd you off a huge bed.) They'll show you what they need with their bodies, and you'll miss the cue if you try to move in sync with them. If someone tilts their hips differently, presses into you or pulls back a little--keep moving just the way you were moving and make a little mental note, because how they shifted things is how they like it.

Myself, I like real firm pressure on my vulva. Real firm, grinding right up against the bone, pushing against me like a wrestling hold, hard muscular sex with absolutely no surface delicacy to it. I try to say this with my words, but I'll also say it with my hips. When your hand is down my pants and I move my hips up hard against you, don't back up and make me chase you. Understand that it's a message and listen to it.

Kitties know what they want. Bodies know what they want. And sometimes all you have to do is a very deliberate nothing to learn what that is.

[OBVIOUS PUN INTENTIONALLY OMITTED FROM THIS POST]

This is what negotiation looks like.

2012-01-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

Friday night, Rowdy and I had a pretty major re-negotiation of our relationship. It was a hard conversation to have, the kind with a lot of sentences like "I want... well, I shouldn't want... but I'll just tell you... I mean to say... nnngh," but ultimately a productive one. So I figured I'd post the meeting notes up here to give a concrete example of what relationship negotiation looks like. (A couple items are omitted for privacy, but you get the idea.) I talk big about this kind of negotiation, but what does it actually look like?

Minutes on 12/30/11 Meeting Between Holly and Rowdy at Boston's Most Generically Irish Pub
1. We love each other super-much. Yay.

2. Because it's not sex but relationships that make me insecure, you will keep me in the loop about your relationship status/prospects with other people you're seeing.
(2b. You are not actively seeking a new partner, but have not ruled out the development of a new relationship, and I am not asking you to rule it out.)

3. I will tell you when I'm uncomfortable or feel ignored instead of just making mopeyface.
(3b. When you're following our agreements and there's nothing I actually want changed, I will not go around making mopeyface anyway.)

4. Because always planning our dates makes me feel unwanted, you will ask me out on dates sometimes.

5. Yep, I'm genderqueer, and I'm not entirely sure what that means, but something along the lines of "I'm still 'officially' a woman and don't plan to change that, but I want to start expressing myself more as a boy." You are outstandingly understanding and supportive about this.

6. Because both of us feel our current sex life is too vanilla but we've had difficulty developing a repertoire of kinky activities we enjoy together, we will specifically and explicitly negotiate new kinky things to try.

7. We will make an effort to do fun and interesting activities together, because a "shlump around the bedroom all day" date is kind of the relationship equivalent of eating an entire jar of peanut butter in one sitting--tastes good but you just feel wrong afterwards.

8. Neither of us really knows how much time together is good vs. overdose, so we still need to figure out by experimentation how many dates per week works for us.

It's difficult exposing and working on the guts of a relationship--if this stuff comes naturally and painlessly to you, you're probably the Kwisatz Haderach--but God do you feel better afterwards. The only thing more uncomfortable than making explicit agreements is trying to live without them.

Cosmocking: January '12!

2011-12-23T19:14:00.000-05:00

[I'm heading out of town on Christmas business for a few days. I hope all the Pervocrats have a merry and, if applicable, sexy holiday season!]

White cover! Scarlett Johansson! She's a redhead now so I guess that's exciting if that's the sort of thing that excites you! "Sexiest. Body. Ever."! I wonder if the person who write that headline even knew it was a Simpsons reference! "Your Other G-Spot!" Spoiler: They just mean nipples! Cosmo is bringing you the breaking new discovery that nipples exist!

I know I complain about this with every issue but I really want to teach the Cosmo cover artists a remedial lesson on How Necks Work! (Lesson 1: You cannot point your head in a different direction than your neck!)

Q: I have a crush on a taken guy. Should I make a move?
A: It depends--you don't want to lower yourself to home-wrecker status over a rando crush. But if you're convinced he could be the love of your life, tell him "I would never want to break up a great couple, but if things don't work out, let me know."

One of the problems with Cosmo not knowing the difference between "she's a bad girl, she has dirty sex" and "she's a bad girl, she does unethical things" is that when they start trying to encourage bad-girledness, they still don't know the difference.

Also, "rando"? Really? "Rando"? I changed my mind; it's totally okay to be a homewrecker if The Amazing Rando is at stake.

If he's stressed... Stroke his earlobe between your thumb and index finger.

Sure, why not.

Because it's not just bizarre, it also avoids the much thornier topic of how to really help someone who's under stress while still respecting your own needs and boundaries? Actually, that's a pretty good reason why not.

Sometimes my real problem with Cosmo isn't what it is (sometimes sexist, sometimes harmlessly ridiculous) but what it isn't. They touch on stuff that could be important, could be a real issue and a chance to learn something real, and then leave their readers with nothing but pop-psych nonsense and gender stereotypes. I know people don't read Cosmo for in-depth life advice (oh God, I hope not), but at the same time it makes me sad to see a magazine with a circulation over 3 million standing as a grandiose monument to missed possibilites.

If you really want a first date to turn into something more, there's an easy way to avoid any confusion: go home alone.

Right, because in Backwards Land, not showing sexual interest in someone is how you say you want a sexual relationship with them. Also in Backwards Land: the apples taste just like sardines. I know you think I was going to say "oranges," but nope, turns out the opposite of apple is sardine. The opposite of orange is brake fluid. Don't eat the oranges there.

I sort of intellectually know that this is, like, a signal that you're not just in this for sex or whatever. But in Forwards Land, I like to say "I'm not just in this for sex" before and after the sex and that's actually worked pretty well for me. If he doesn't trust me, or he is just in this for sex? Well, shit, that sucks, but at least I got laid.

Hand him your vibrator, and tell him to use it on himself while you watch.
[icons below indicate:] Freaky! He never wants to try it!

That's sad. Not just because every issue of Cosmo asks women to masturbate for men. But also because Cosmo is encouraging women to not even ask about doing things the other way around, and that's a damn shame.

If you don't even ask you won't have even a chance of getting to do something completely awesome, something that lets you see his body and his pleasure in a way you never did before. You won't even open the door to watching his muscles tighten and his face contort and then feeling his reaction as you take him in your hands and finish the job yourself.

I'm just saying. It's worth asking.

Before you start 69, lube up your fingers. When you get started, reach up and alternate running your slippery digits over his perineum and the area around his anus.
[icons below indicate: Totally kinky! He never wants to try it!

That's mighty specific for something not to do. Is there some briar-patch shit going on here?

Spice up missionary by rubbing your lacy undies over [your nipples].

Oh Cosmo.

Someone, somewhere, is super-seriously planning to rub her underpants on her nipples during sex. She's picking the pair out and finding a good spot to pre-stash them for easy access and everything. Godspeed to you, underpants-nipple-woman, wherever you are.

"I dated this guy who tasted really funky down there, but I didn't want to confront him about it. So I told him I was going to suck on a strong mint while going downtown to give him a tingly sensation... which he loved."

I think that tingly sensation is my lunch on its way back up.

You know how when there's an awful smell and you spray air freshener it doesn't really help, it just smells like Country Garden and awful smell? That's sort of what I picture unwashed-crotch-and-mint being like.

We owe nipples an apology.

Yes, Cosmo, yes you do.

Survival Sex.

2011-12-20T14:12:00.003-05:00

[I'm still working on a Cosmocking but urrrgh it's terrible trying to make something interesting out of Cosmo. In the meantime, here's a not-at-all-disturbing story from my richly wayward teenage years. TRIGGER WARNING for emotional abuse and survival sex.]

When I was 16, I ran away from home. My mother was abusive, I'd just brought home bad grades (I'd started college at 15 and that was a mistake) and she'd exploded and kept exploding. It was mostly emotional abuse, with only occasional and mild hitting, but as bad as emotional abuse can get, it got.

She'd wake me up in the middle of the night to scream at me. She'd scream at me for literally (as in, I checked the clock) hours on end and I would say nothing but "yes, you're right" and "I'm sorry" the whole time, just standing there quivering and waiting for it to be over. She'd scream at me for doing anything I wanted--you don't deserve to sit around reading a book!--and scream at me for doing anything she wanted--you think just because you cooked some shitty dinner that makes it okay? I wasn't allowed to close my door and I wasn't allowed to leave the house. I didn't know when it was going to end, I had long since resorted to self-mutilation to deal with the stress, and I was afraid my life would be a living hell for months or years if I didn't get out.

So I got out. I was, despite being a Child Prodigy™, a very young 16 and I didn't have a plan, or any realistic idea of what it would be like to be a runaway. I just stuffed some clothes in a backpack and (after waiting for my mother to leave the house) walked out the front door. I didn't know where I was going. I just wanted to get far enough away she couldn't find me.

The first night, I slept in a park. Or tried to sleep. I think I got about two hours, curled up in the little concrete alcove outside a locked-up park bathroom, trying to hide. I was painfully aware of how much I had to hide from--the weather, criminals, cops, even animals. I didn't eat anything the next day. I was not good at being homeless.

The next night, I met up with a guy I knew. He was a lot older than me, sort of a friend, sort of a weirdo, still lived with his parents, but he had a private entrance to his basement. He used to screen porn films for me and some other underage girls. Never did anything to us, just watched them with us, and we thought he was so cool for being over 18 and allowed to buy porn.

Let's be fair here; he didn't offer me food and lodging for sex, not in so many words. I "seduced" him. I got food and lodging out of it. He didn't hurt me but he did make it clear that I'd have to leave if I stopped sleeping with him. For banging him every night and most mornings, I got about four days of a safe bed to sleep in and the food in his fridge.

It was vanilla sex, with condoms, not painful or demanding, and frankly it was even kind of enjoyable on a surface level--I had orgasms and everything. But it was also... detached. I had no illusion that I was doing it because I was horny. I was doing it because it was the only way I could think of to stay alive without my mother. The guy knew this, but I think he also thought of himself as my rescuer, and me the grateful damsel happy to give herself to her rescuer.

My parents knew this guy, so before long the cops came by his place and dragged me home. (He didn't get in any legal trouble for any of this. Although I did find out much later that my dad threatened to kill him. High five, Dad.) Shit with my mom got even worse after that and I ended up leaving home for several months, but that's another story and one that fortunately doesn't involve survival sex.

This is the kind of thing that I'm reluctant to talk about, because I worry that it hurts my credibility as a sex-positive person and especially as a BDSM-positive person. It fits too neatly into a narrative of "she's fucked up and that's why she does freaky shit." I don't think that's true--I was freaky before this, I know freaky people who weren't abused and abused people who aren't freaky--and I also don't think I should care so long as my freakiness isn't hurting me now.

But I'm wary of the "damaged goods" pity-smear, of being reduced to my traumas, and sometimes it silences me. I don't want to make this blog into a narrative of "ex-child-prostitute/emotional abuse survivor/sexual assault survivor has promiscuous and painful sex!" Every part of that is technically true but it's not my story. It's ridiculous just how little it's my story.

I want to share it, though, because it's a complicated story. I wasn't quite the stereotypical "runaway forced into prostitution"--I knew the guy, it was only one guy, I wasn't forced into anything, I was free to leave, and most importantly, I would have (in fact did) fought tooth and nail against someone "rescuing" me in any way that either put me back with my mother or dumped me out on the street. But I certainly wasn't the happy hooker making a free choice to do sex work as a career. (I don't mean to deny their existence, just to say that obviously I wasn't one.) It wasn't forced sex nor was it chosen sex--it was survival sex.

Sometimes I feel like I haven't grown up; I feel like I've finally run away and gotten away with it. I may have a job and an apartment and be back in school, but it doesn't make me feel like an adult. It makes me feel like a runaway who finally made it away.

What do you want?

2011-12-14T18:28:00.000-05:00

[Finals are over! WHEEE! Big serious essay today! Cosmocking next!]

I talk a lot on this blog about how sex should be dictated by what the partners want and the most important thing is to communicate and respect everyone's desires. And I totally stand by that, but I also know that it's not always that simple. It's not something I do flawlessly in my own life, that's for damn sure.

Because I am not always sure what my desires are. My sexuality sometimes seems frustratingly opaque to myself. I want something, I don't just want to kiss my boyfriend good night and go to sleep, but what on Earth is that something? Why don't I know what I want?

I have been taught not to credit my own desires. In part that's personal--one of my mom's favorite baffling insults was "you're so selfish, all you want is the things you want!"--and in part it's cultural. The socialization of young women is all about how to not indulge your desires: don't choose food because it tastes good, don't choose clothing because it's comfortable, don't come on too strong to boys, don't be a needy girlfriend, don't say "no" too stridently or "yes" too enthusiastically. It's not the charitable or ascetic kind of self-denial, but there's a lot of desire-denial, of doing things correctly instead of the way you want.

(I don't think that young men have it so easy either--it's not the same but it's fucked up in different ways--but I don't have much personal experience with being treated like a young man. My impression is that guys have more permission to express "acceptable" desires, but there's a pretty narrow range of which desires are acceptable.)

And sometimes when you do break through, when you do the things you want, it's impulsive. It's not gourmet cooking but a binge on raw cookie dough. It's not an ethical-slut lifestyle but a furtive tryst with a stranger. It's not truly escaping repression, it's just acting-out. It lets you indulge some of your more primal desires, but it doesn't let you lucidly understand them.

But now you're done with that crap. You're not crowd-following or acting-out any more; you're committed to dealing with sex like an adult. You read feminist sex blogs. You have self-respect and you're ready to respect your desires. ...Now what?

Simply saying "that was all bullshit! have the sex you want!" isn't going to cut it. Maybe intellectually, but not emotionally. Here I am all prepared to acknowledge and communicate my desires, and my desires are... uh... hm. I'm so used to putting the "no it's bad and selfish to want things" mental block between my desires and myself that I don't even know what's on the other side.

So here are some questions I've started asking myself.

"What do I fantasize about?"
It took years (okay, the years from 12 to 17, but still, those are years!) for me to go from masturbating while fantasizing about scenarios of sexual submission to realizing that I was into sexual submission. I know it sounds silly, but I hadn't really made the connection between "thing I like to think about" to "thing I want to do."

"What are my best memories?"
Kevin only held me down and spanked me once, ever, in a yearlong relationship. It still stands out in my mind as the best sex we ever had.

"What am I fascinated with?"
Another thing I did when I was a teenager: I used to read a lot of blogs and websites about kink, thinking that I was merely curious about this strange world I'd discovered, nothing personal, just something I took a detached academic interest in. (Hi there, by the way, if you're reading this with detached academic interest.) I had the same experience with healthcare, interestingly--I was reading medical textbooks "just for fun" before I realized it was a field I would actually enjoy working in.

"What am I stopping myself from saying?"
I've had a lot of conversations with partners that started "I... no, never mind, I shouldn't bother you with this, it's silly." (Sometimes in my head, sometimes out loud, which is my way of forcing myself to continue the thought because very few boyfriends will go "oh, okay then" to an opener like that.) They usually turned out to be really really important conversations once I broke through that.

The obvious extension of this is "What do I say when I'm drunk?" Which is not the safest (emotionally as well as physically) way to get your truths out, but it sometimes works.

"What's the bad, obviously incorrect idea I came up with off the top of my head, the one that's weird and gross so I'm trying to revise it so it doesn't sound ridiculous?"
Pretty much always, that's the truth.

"What would I want?"
Imagine you were in Magical Fairy Land where you could have anything you wanted and a genie would give it to you and there would never be any consequences--what would you want then? Yeah, that's probably what you want now too.

"Let's try this once and see how it goes."
Sometimes you can't learn without experimentation. So I can't treat everything like a declaration or a commitment. Sometimes I have to give myself permission to say (and to make sure my partner knows too), "hey, this might not work out, I might need to stop it halfway through, but I won't know until I try it." It's almost impossible to be right without having a space in your life where it's okay to be wrong.

I'm not promoting selfishness here. Knowing what you want doesn't mean always doing what you want; if you want polyamory and your partner is monogamous, or if you want to tie up your partner and they're terrified of that, then your job is not done here. You still have to negotiate and compromise and possibly sacrifice some of your desires. But you can't even start that process until you know exactly what you're negotiating about, and that requires you to know exactly what your own raw, impractical, selfish desires are.

Me, I want four things real bad right now:
1) To have boy clothes and do boy things and sometimes be a boy in sex, but to still be a woman in the end--a really boyish woman.
2) To focus deliberately on reaching altered states through sex and BDSM, rather than having it just accidentally happen to me.
3) To be a primary to my boyfriend. Which I am, no question, but it's something I want to keep happening and to feel secure in.
4) To get fisted, like, all the time. Oh man is that just the awesomest thing.

And even after all this preaching I've been doing, typing those out was hard, and pressing "publish" without deleting them was harder. This "wanting things" business is a tough skill to learn.

Guest Post: What it's like to go to an STD clinic.

2011-12-10T12:27:00.001-05:00

[I'm busy studying for finals. In the meantime, enjoy this guest post by Jack. I think it's important information for people who've learned testing is important but are unsure what to expect when they actually go through the process. -Holly]

A good friend of mine recently had an STD scare. I figured I might as well get a physical/emotional clean slate myself, and more importantly, go through the experience to support my friend, who has been distraught and has a horror of needles that rivals yours.

[Jack once stuck me with a play piercing needle because we were curious if I would like it. My reaction was a calm and level-headed "GET IT OUT GET OUT OH GOD GET IT OUT AUUUUGH." -Holly]

She did the basic research over the internet and phone; two places in Boston, Boston Medical Center and Mass General Hospital, offer free STD clinics. If you work normal day hours like me, expect to take a day off to get in to be tested – the late Wednesday hours are generally packed, they said. You have to give your name, address, and date of birth to book an appointment.

[I edited out some Boston-specific details here; after finals I'll put together a "Boston sexual health resources" page to accompany the kink resources. -Holly]

They take almost every insurance plan. They also do testing free if you have no insurance (and they’re a public health clinic, so they ask if you have insurance but don’t look into it – and don’t much care – if you say you don’t), but only if you are symptom-free. This struck me as kinda odd, and I wasn’t able to ascertain the reason behind it. They test for gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and HIV; they'll also test for hepatitis C if you request. They also offer the three-shot hepatitis A and B vaccines for free if you want them. This is a separate appointment from your STD testing.

So you walk in and take the elevator up to the clinic; when you walk up to the desk, the desk workers are rather apathetic. “You’re here for what? Huh? Oh. Fill out the form.” They have you fill out a basic form with name/address/phone number/do you have insurance/how did you hear about us, then call you in when it’s your turn.

You have to go in alone; it’s completely private – they wouldn’t let me go in with my friend, despite her and I asking if I could. The actual person who does the testing is polite, warm, and professional, very matter-of-fact but not cold. They explain that the HIV screening is a rapid reaction test with results in 20 minutes, and that the other results take a week or so to come back from the state lab – they do a pretty good job of calmly, simply walking you through everything, showing you lists of information and such, and answering your questions.

One big catch: If you come back positive for anything, you have to come back in to the clinic within a week of that call for more information and (free) treatment, or they turn your information over to the state, which will track you down as a public health risk. Aside from the threat-to-the-public good aspect, everything is 100% confidential regardless of age/status/etc. – apparently even if they have to track you down with the police it’s a private deal; the police bring you to a state doctor who works with you in private.

[Don't get too scared by this--it's actually pretty extraordinary for the cops to hunt someone down for medical treatment--but do be aware you take this risk if you get tested for anything you're not willing to be treated for. -Holly]

The physical part of the procedure is fairly simple: they do the standard spring-loaded finger prick for the HIV test; they put a very small needle (21 gauge) into your arm and draw two small tubes of blood (the needle’s in your arm for less than two minutes, I never even felt it); then they walk you down to the bathroom and hand you the urine cup (“half full, please”) and wait for you, then take it from you when you walk out. The whole thing is very private, very professional, standard doctor’s-office, alcohol-swab-and-stick routine. Your name is not written on the specimens; you're identified only by a number and barcode.

After that they send you back to the lobby (and give you juice and cookies, if you’re like my friend and look chalky-white and like you’re going to die after the needle stick). Within 20 minutes they call you in and tell you that your HIV test was negative (I’m not sure what they do if you’re positive – Bells and whistles? Herd of lemmings? Dunno), and that that roughly means that you aren’t positive, although if you were infected in the last few weeks it may not show up. The other tests take 48-72 hours; if they don't call you, after a few days you can call the phone number and and hear your results over the phone--but if you test positive, they will call you.

[What actually happens if you test positive for HIV is a lengthy meeting with a counselor to tell you "this does not mean you're dying, you can be healthy for many years after this, but we need to get you started on treatment ASAP and here's how that's going to work." They also retest you with a slower but more accurate method to make sure. -Holly]

They reiterate the we’ll-call-you-if-bad, you’ll-hear-a-few-days-later-if-it’s-good, feel-free-to-call-after-a-few-days-if-you-want-to routine, and then they wish you a good day. Other than the apathetic desk attendants it was professional and friendly friendly, anonymous, non-judgmental, and pretty low-key.

From slutty to horny.

2011-12-07T16:14:00.001-05:00

Female horniness is an important, and missing, narrative in our culture. We have a well-developed idea of female sluttiness, but that's a different thing.

Sluttiness, as popularly perceived, is:
•External. A woman looks slutty, she dresses slutty, she acts slutty. Whether she feels slutty is not something we generally talk about.
•Indiscriminate. We seem to draw very little line between "will have sex with multiple people" and "will have sex with anyone and doesn't care if it's an alley cat."
•Mysterious. Why is a slut slutty? There are some attempted answers out there--need for attention, trying to get something from men--but most often she just is. It's a character flaw or something. Just as a slut's internal experience of sluttiness doesn't get talked up much in the popular narrative, neither does her reason for choosing the slutlife.

Whereas female horniness in the popular imagination is rare. Admittedly our idea of male horniness is pretty scrambled too, but we have some concept of it as a near-universal male experience. On the rare occasion a woman is horny in the mainstream culture, usually it's comical or even threatening.

This is getting better over the years. Slowly. But it's still not an accepted thing that a woman can just plain want to get her grind on. (Actually, seeing women as horny isn't new; it's just undoing the work of the Victorians. In medieval Europe women were often described as lustful and desiring--the ideal of the sexless woman in Western culture is only about 200 years old.)

Here are the things about horniness that seem to make people nervous:
•Horniness is internal. It's defined entirely in terms of a woman's experience of her own body and feelings.
•Horniness is selective. I'm horny for some of the men but not all of the men, and that's some sort of radical statement apparently.
•Horniness is humanizing. Women get horny just like people do! It's impossible to get all "woman, she is a mystery" on this; if you've ever had that warm tickly feeling in your pants, you know exactly where a horny woman is coming from.
"Nervous" is an understatement. These are the things about horniness that drive people--male and female--to completely deny that women's sexual desire exists and matters.

I don't want to make this post just about "slutty is bad and horny is good." The behaviors commonly called "slutty" are not bad or dirty; that was the point of the Slutwalks. But they're a painfully incomplete portion of female sexuality. Without understanding that women can not just invite sex but actually want it, we can't make sense of any of the issues surrounding women's sex lives.

The biggest one being: Only when we accept that women can want can we accept it when they don't want. If sex is only ever something women tolerate, then being forced to tolerate it is not so fundamentally different from tolerating it to sustain a relationship. This isn't just about rape either. It's also about women in the condition of tolerating sex and not expecting anything more; women who have learned to disregard their own desires. Women are taught how to say no, and more recently how to say yes, but we're still not up to saying "I want it."

I feel sort of weird living in a society where it's radical to say that I want my good-to-rub parts rubbed, that I want to choose who does it and how, and I'm not going to apologize for this. But it is. I guess I'm a revolutionary then. Slutwalk is old news; let's have a Hornywalk.

[Programming note: I have finals this week, hence the light posting. I have a guest post about STI testing queued up next and I'll try to get things back on schedule after finals.]

How to Buttsex Someone Up But Good.

2011-11-25T19:57:00.001-05:00

You want a buttsex post? I'll give you a buttsex post! I'll give it to you right up your... Internet connection!

How to Buttsex Someone Up But Good
1. Make sure your butt-buddy wants it. Really wants it. If you're doing this to widen their perspective on masculinity or femininity or sexuality, that's the wrong reason. If you're doing this to prove something or score some sort of points, that's a really wrong reason. Do it because they and their butt want it. Ask them how they want it and prioritize that above anything I say here.

(Special note to cis men who have never "pitched" in anal sex: from what I hear, it's not transcendently pleasurable for a penis. It's fun, sure, but it's not like a magical penis-amazing wonder above all wonders. It feels like PIV intercourse only sort of different. It will not bring you some ultra-mega-tight satisfaction that a vagina never could. So control your expectations here, and if your partner isn't up for it, don't think you're missing out on the best thing ever.)

2. Make sure you're up for it. Just because you're the penetrating partner doesn't mean it's no big deal for you and you have no basis to object. It's fine to be uncomfortable with the idea of penetrating someone anally, or to have reservations or specific wishes about how to do it. Just because you're not putting your ass on the line doesn't mean you don't get a say.

3. Be prepared for poop. You cannot have buttsex if you don't have some level of comfort with poop. It's usually not a lot, though; we're talking "smear" here, not "load." Even so--put down a towel. Put a glove on your hand and a condom on your dick or any toys. Have some wipey things available. There's no need for your partner to have an enema, but they probably shouldn't do this if they've got a poop on deck, if you know what I mean.

4. Be prepared for different reactions. For some people, it'll be "OH GOD YES OH GOD," for some it'll be "mmm nice," for some it'll be "no, take it out." People don't deal with anal stimulation in one way, especially if they're new to it. And the same person on different days doesn't deal with it the same way. Roll with however it goes.

5. Okay, let's do this thing! Let's start with... how about some kissing and cuddling, actually? Just because you're using a different hole doesn't mean you gotta be all brusque about it. Or some wrassling and spanking, if that's how you warm up. But when your fore is played, let's start with a finger. A finger with a glove on it, to spare you their butt-germs and to spare them your fingernail. Lube it up real good. You can't use too much lube. Spread it all over your finger and use as much as will stay on it. Put the pad of your finger on their anus, not pushing, just touching. Have your partner relax and breathe and when you feel their anus relax a little, just slowly slide your finger on in there.

You'll feel two separate sphincter muscles. The outer one is under voluntary control; the inner one isn't, at least not directly. If the inner one won't let you in, don't try to push through, just let your partner work on relaxing and opening up. (If it really won't let you in, your partner may just not be made for buttsex, at least not on that day.) Gently massaging it can help.

6. This is the awesome part. Or the start of the awesome part. People's butts are hot and smoothly soft inside and you can feel the tiniest contractions of their muscles. Despite all the warnings you hear about the rectum being fragile, it's also strong; it can grab your hand so hard you worry about yourself more than your partner. But the first thing you want to do after putting your finger in them, if they're new to this, is nothing. Don't get all thrusty. Give them a moment to adjust. Give yourself a moment to just enjoy it.

7a. If your partner is the sort of person who has a prostate, look for the prostate. (Well, don't look for it.) It's going to be on the front--i.e., crotchward--side of their rectum, about two inches in. (If they're Canadian or something it will be five centimeters in.) A finger slid in all the way and bent should just reach it. You feel it through the rectal wall, so it's sort of indirect, but you'll know it because:
A) It'll feel like a distinct bump about the size of a walnut, smooth and round.
B) Your partner is likely to go "OH MY GOD RIGHT THERE."

7b. There's two directions you can take this now. (There's infinity directions. I'll talk about two.) One is to continue on to the fuckin'. The other is to just focus on the prostate, because you can get a lot of people the hell off that way. Just keep rubbing it while you or your partner plays with their genitals, and it's likely to give them an incredibly powerful, I mean blasting orgasm. I mean, I once made a guy accidentally hit himself in the face this way and he didn't even notice for a little bit. Then he noticed and it was pretty amusing.

8. If you turned to page 238 to "continue on to the fuckin'," add another finger. Slowly, gently, and lubily. Pay attention to how they adjust to this--both in their anus and in their face. You can gently slide your fingers in and out all sensual-like, but unless your partner asks you to, don't start thrusting like you're trying to churn butter in there. Anuses aren't vaginas and it won't feel the same way that thrusting into a vagina does.

9. PENIS TIME! Or dildo time. Or, I'm not judging here, eggbeater time? Take your fingers out of your butt-buddy's butt. Put a condom and heaps and loads of lube on your implement of choice and do like you did with the fingers--just place it against their butt, and wait to feel them relax before pushing. And again, give them a moment to just adjust to you inside them before you start doing anything.

You will probably not hit the prostate directly with an average-size penis or equivalent toy. Maybe it'll get some driveby stimulation in some positions, but buttfucking isn't really prostate work. Not the way Step 7 is.

10. I think you know what to do now. But do it a bit less vigorously than you normally would. A lot of in-and-out isn't really how butts work. Unless your partner is encouraging you to do more, you want to err more toward the "sliding" than the "pounding" end of the scale here. Check in with them; they may not want you to thrust at all but just be happy with you in their ass. They may or may not want you to play with their genitals (or let them play with their own junk) while you're in there. They may be able to go the distance, or they may need you to stop after a bit; again, the only way to know is to check in with them and give them permission to tell you to stop.

11. Clean up (probably don't do this on white sheets) and give your partner a hug and tell them they're awesome.

SAFETY NOTES:
-If you're doing this with a bio-dick, use a condom even if you don't for vaginal sex. Butt-germs can get in your urethra.

-Blood and pain are not normal, even the first time. This isn't like losing your hymen; there's no reason the first time should hurt. (People seem to vary on whether it's okay for it to hurt a little bit. Personally I think it isn't, but at any rate any pain more than "a little bit" is too much. If you're gritting your teeth to get through it, you're getting hurt.)

-Lube lube lube lube lube. And then add more after you've been going for a bit. Butts not only don't make their own lube, they suck moisture out of the lube you put in them. Keep things messy wet.

-There are bacteria in the ass that can make you sick if they get in any non-ass body openings. Don't put anything that's been up someone's butt in anyone's mouth or vagina.

-Your butt-buddy is putting their ass in your hands. (And vice versa.) That's one hell of a gift. Treat it good.

Cosmocking! December '11! Part Two!

2011-11-23T13:30:00.001-05:00

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. (Or a nice completely regular day if you're not from the US, I suppose.) I got to spend it with some people I love and it was wonderful. I'm thankful for pervy sex and all the wonderful things it's brought to my life, of which "pervy sex itself" is really the least of it.

Anyway. Back to this Cosmo shitshow so I can finally get around to writing about buttsex.

Wrap a belt around each of his thighs. This will push more blood into his penis, making his erection feel even harder.

Oh dear God. I cannot make this shit up.

(Since constriction squeezes veins shut but not arteries, belts tight enough to affect circulation would actually trap blood in his legs. Let it go long enough and they'll turn purple and swell up and possibly sustain permanent damage. Pretty sexy, huh?)

Heat up a water bottle, and roll it back and forth over his nerve-packed pubic mound.

Rowdy: "It's cool that they're suggesting doing more than just, y'know, poundy-poundy, but... really?"

[how to film yourself having sex] Use candlelight, put the camera as far away as possible, and shoot through a piece of cheesecloth.

Maybe you have a high-end, very sensitive video camera and you know how to use candlelight to create dramatic a yet effective lighting setup that nonetheless allows you and your partner room to move. Or maybe your video will come out looking like Sasquatch fucking the Chupacabra, and for some reason there's a cheesecloth in front of them.

(Also, I put the camera as far away as possible, and it should be crossing the orbit of Jupiter in early 2014.)

Seduction Secrets French Women Know

This isn't the first time Cosmo's used "France" to mean "magical land full of romance and unicorns." I'm guessing Cosmo's never been on the Paris metro.

French women incorporate those things [sexaaay things] into their daily lives--they spend an estimated 20 percent of their income on lingerie.

The median household income in France is about 3100 Euro a month, or about $4125 USD. 20 percent of that is $825. Oh come on seriously.

...If these French unicorns spend 20% of their money on underwear, can you imagine what their budget for shirts is? Add in shoes and you'll be living on whatever the French equivalent of ramen is. (La soupe de nouilles ramen.)

"I love how pregnant women focus on their babies instead of silly stuff like work drama or what's going on with their friends."

"I love how pregnant women, or what I imagine a pregnant woman to be like, focus on their babies instead of silly stuff like their own lives."

There's an article on "raunch culture" and how it's totally awesome. The distinction between raunch culture and sex-positivity is too complicated to get into here and the Cosmo article is far too superficial, but I want to pull one quote:

If you know what you want--a hot coworker, your own cupcake shop, a good reason to wear a slutty tube top--don't ever apologize for going after it with balls-to-the-wall determination.

I agree with that, as far as it goes. Where I part ways is in remembering that some women want their coworkers to leave them alone, their own auto repair shop, or a good reason to wear a long consersvative dress. You can be balls-to-the-wall without being a sexied-up Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.

[from a romance novel excerpt] Sawyer wiggled out of his own jeans, revealing what was undoubtedly her favorite body part of his--the one bouncing happily at the sight of her.

EDIT SINCE APPARENTLY THEY DO BOUNCE: "Happily"?

"Awww! He likes you!"

Cosmocking: December '11! Part One!

2011-11-21T09:51:00.001-05:00

Pink cover! Adele! Oh my God there's a woman over 120 pounds on the cover of Cosmo oh my God! I'm vaguely insulted they put her in leopard print because maybe I'm reading too much into this but I feel like leopard print is kinda code for "She may be fat, but she's fabulous" in a condescending sort of way! "When He Shouldn't See You Naked!" Hopefully this will include when you are in public or meeting his parents! Unless his parents are nudists, then it's only polite! "Shit My Guy Says: Where's a Muzzle When You Need One?" Oh no Cosmo no Cosmo no!

The Naughtiest Thing I've Ever Done: "I hooked up with my professor!"

[Ending line:] Peter and I ended our fling soon after I graduated. I knew it wasn't right, but hey: My school prides itself on cultivating close student-professor relationships. Let's just say it succeeded. Oh, and I got an A in the class.

The whole article is written in that sort of smirking ain't-I-a-stinker tone. Which nicely avoids the real issues involved, which go way beyond "it's so naughty." Like: what would happen if you wanted to stop seeing him while you were still in the class? Is this why you didn't break it off until graduation? Would you consider adding a line or two about how this generally isn't a good idea when you publish it in a magazine widely read by high-school and college girls?

[How to tell if a guy is lying about his "number"]
-He grabs an object, like his pillow.
-He repeats the question.
-He bites his lip.

...So, basically, if your boyfriend is lying to you, he'll start speaking like Kristen Stewart. (Actually, the pillow-clutch is just silly and the question-repeating is "cartoon bad liar," but lip-biting can also mean "I'm nervous about how you're going to react to the truth, but here I go.")

[A completely random listing of penis nicknames, including "dick" and "cock" and whatnot, but also:]
Winston Churchill
Squirt gun
Pogo stick
Twinkie
Lizard
Dolphin
Hog

What? Why? What? ...Hog? ...Winston Churchill???

Push an exercise ball up against the wall, have him sit on it, and bounce on him.

Another word for those balls is "balance balls." Because most of the exercise you get from them is due to the added effort of trying not to fall off. Do I have to spell out the problem here? Okay, here's another one--most of those balls are rated to 250 pounds. If he's 180 and you're 120, and you're bouncing, that poor thing doesn't stand a chance.

A study determined that guys lose their desire if they're not mentally turned on.

That must be from the same issue of the The Midwestern Journal of Tautology Studies where they found that people who weigh more pounds tend to be heavier.

Bind his wrists before you perform oral on him. A study discovered that women find fellatio empowering, and restricting him heightens that ballsy feeling.

Clearly the work of the MJTS's intellectual rival, The New England Journal Of Anally Derived Knowledge. I don't know about you, but I feel empowered when I'm able to make important decisions and see the things I decided carried out. I do not feel so empowered when I have a dick in my mouth. It's not necessarily disempowering or whatever, it's just... I'm having sex. I'm anywhere on the range of power dynamics that sex can have, which is to say seriously anywhere.

There's a lot of power that women can exert in their lives, in their relationships, and in their sexuality. "The power to move my head up and down and do that thing with my tongue" is not one of the major ones.

Augh! I'm gonna be late for school! More later.

The Pervocracy Guide To Not Doing Stupid Things Because You're Angry.

2011-11-17T19:50:00.001-05:00

A number of people on the de-escalation post asked for a post on de-escalating yourself. I'll say up front: I'm on shakier ground here. I have professional training and personal experience in de-escalating others, and I can't say the same for self-de-escalation. I'm a naturally meek person (offline); I'm more likely to apologize and back off than to press a confrontation, and the last time I struck someone in anger, a camp counselor put me in time-out. But I'll try and bring my Armchair Psychology A-Game here.

Let your body relax.
A fun fact I learned from mental health workers: your hands know that you're losing control before you do. They'll make fists before you realize that you're about to explode. Catch them and undo it. Close your eyes, take a big deep breath, and as you slowly let it out, unclench your hands and let them hang. You can only get so angry if you have relaxed hands.

Do all the cliche touchy-feely yoga things. They're cliche because they actually work. Deep breaths. Relaxed muscles. Count numbers in your head. Imagine peaceful things. It'll slow down your bodily response--the pounding heart and pumping adrenaline--and it's a lot easier to think clearly when your body isn't screaming "RUN IT'S A BEAR!" at your brain.

Figure out what you want.
If you're upset, it's because something in the world is different than you want it to be. Ask yourself what that thing is, and how you realistically want the other person to change it. This isn't Occupy Wall Street; there's no point in having an argument if you don't have a demand. It may not be tangible--it may be "I want you to promise to be more considerate" or "I want you to express appreciation for my work"--but it has to be something. If all you can express is "I have angry feelings," there's nothing they can do about that unless you can lay out a plan that would make you less angry.

If there's nothing they can do, if they've firmly established there's nothing they will do, or if they've given you what you asked for and you're still angry: stop arguing with them. There's literally nothing you can accomplish. Remove yourself and calm yourself, because there's nothing left to argue about.

Don't attack.
It's okay to have a heated discussion to convince someone to behave differently. It's not okay to have a heated discussion to convince them that they're bad. That's not a decent thing to do to a person and it cannot possibly produce a useful result. If you find yourself arguing the thesis "you are bad and you should feel bad," stop. There is absolutely nowhere good that can go. If you want them to apologize, change their ways, or make amends to you, say so directly. A litany of why they're so bad--even if every bit of it is true--will only make both of you feel terrible.

Don't poke your own sore spots.
In my case, this means "Don't read YouTube comments." Here's the Chrome plugin that lets you hide them, and it's saved me gallons of wasted adrenaline. (The tipping point was looking at videos of astronauts, and seeing pages upon pages of "hilarious" comments that the female astronauts should get back in the space kitchen. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.) I also shouldn't read MRA websites, news articles about "the latest disturbing teen trend," or letters from my mother that start with "I'm very concerned."

If there's a particular situation or topic that sets you off every time--just stay away from it. It can be very tempting to seek out these things because they grab your attention and set your mind going, but you always feel worse after exposing yourself to them. Go look at puppies instead. Unless puppies make you angry; then you have to know your limits and stop yourself before you start getting sucked down into the puppy-hatred-spiral.

Distract yourself.
I wasn't kidding about the puppies. When you're cooling down from something enraging, go do something you enjoy, something totally unrelated. Play your favorite videogame, go for a run, knit a few more rows on your project, something that keeps your mind and body busy. Give yourself permission to have fun with it and totally lose yourself in it for a little while. Even if the angry thing still bothers you afterwards, it won't have the same heat and bite it did before.

Hurting yourself, damaging your possessions, or "letting it out" by pounding pillows or screaming are not helpful distractions. Do something nice for yourself.

When all else fails, physically remove yourself.
If you feel like you truly can't handle yourself--if you feel certain that the next thing out of your mouth is going to end your relationship or your job or reduce the other person to tears or make them afraid for their safety--just leave. Walk away. Put a closed door between yourself and the person you might attack. Is it weird and rude to walk out of the room mid-argument? Yes. It's just not nearly as weird and rude as what you were about to say. It'll be easier to apologize later for walking out than it would be to apologize for acting like a complete shithead.

And if you feel like you're at risk of physically lashing out at the other person in any way, you have a moral obligation to stop yourself by getting far enough away that you can't reach them. You're not going to slap your lover or shake your kid if you're in a different room, not unless you have advanced tele-slapping technology installed in your house, and avoiding that is worth any amount of weirdness.

Get real help if you need it.
As with the other de-escalation article, these tips (and especially the last one) are Sometimes Foods. If you find that you need them frequently, that you're always easing yourself down from an explosion, you need more help than a sex blog with pop-psych pretensions can give you. A professional counselor can give you a whole lot more help than I can if you have a serious anger problem. Here's a guide to finding low-cost mental health care in the US and Canada.

Phew. I really want to write about sex again. Next post is a Cosmocking.

Strong woman.

2011-11-14T19:10:00.001-05:00

It's a school night. Quick one. (Several people asked for a post on "self-de-escalation," so I'll try to put one together in the next couple days.)

I want to address a misconception that I had when I first started getting into feminism, and a misconception that's gotten thrown in my face a few times. Most recently, it came up in Katie Roiphe's terrible New York Times editorial about how sexual harassment is no big deal and chicks should just suck it up and learn to run with the big dogs etcetera. The misconception is: "Feminism is the idea that women are strong."

No. Feminism is the idea that women are as strong as men, but no stronger. Some men can cut off their own arm to survive; some women can lift a car to save their child. But lots of men are delicate little crybabies and lots of women are delicate little crybabies. Women, being people, run about the same range of personal strength as people. And this ought to be okay. Feminism is the idea that a woman shouldn't have to be exceptionally strong to get by. Feminism makes no predictions on whether a particular woman can survive slings and arrows, bullying and belittling, mistrust and self-doubt. Feminism asks "hey, who the fuck said women had to run this bullshit gauntlet, anyway?"

Am I a Strong Woman? I think I'm kinda strongish, both in the "arm-wrestling" sense and the "doing emotionally difficult things for a greater good" sense. But that's not feminism; that's good luck. Feminism is thinking "gosh, maybe going to work while female shouldn't be an emotionally difficult thing."

"I thought feminism meant women were strong" is rarely the full argument. The full argument is: "I thought feminism meant women were strong, so why are you complaining if you're so strong?" The implication here isn't just that women should have to be strong to survive, but that strength consists of shutting up and taking it. That the strongest thing to do is to keep your head down and grind away at whatever task is set before you, silently stronging your way though every obstacle, for your entire life.

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is complain.

Living every day with being the "girl" of the office and having your ass grabbed and everyone laughing about how funny it is that your ass gets grabbed--no, that's not easy. But speaking up about it is even harder. It's taking initiative. It's taking a risk. It's facing pushback, retaliation, skepticism, red-tape brush-offs, ostracism, the shit you get for being female compounded with the shit you get for being a troublemaker. Complaining about how you're treated as a woman is anything but the coward's way out. There have been times I should have done it but wasn't strong enough.

(Oh, and you also have to face people saying "guess you're not such a strong woman after all, huh?" Forgot to put that one on the list.)

Doing what people want you to do can be hard. Doing what they don't want you to do, and standing up for yourself instead--that's strong.

Escalation.

2011-11-10T14:02:00.000-05:00

This week in Developmental Psychology class I presented a paper on dating violence in teenage relationships. I'm not going to rehash the paper here, because it's boring and Google-vulnerable, but I wanted to share the most interesting conclusion I found.

How much conflict there is in a relationship, or the seriousness of the conflict issues, are not predictors of whether there will be violence. The biggest predictor is the degree to which conflicts in the relationship escalate.

The studies I read looked at dating violence, which is not the same thing as dating abuse, although obviously there's lots of overlap. Dating violence simply means that there's hitting/shoving/slapping; emotional abuse and controlling behavior aren't factored in. Dating violence, unlike abuse, is most often bidirectional--roughly 70% of the time both partners had struck each other. (I wish there was more distinction drawn between a relatively equal fight and "bidirectional" violence that's really self-defense, but that's a hard thing to determine in one case, let alone establish statistics on.)

The takehome is that we shouldn't be teaching teenagers (and grownups) to avoid conflict. We should be teaching them "don't hit people," but that's hardly sufficient. What we should really teach is de-escalation.

De-escalation means bringing someone down from an irrational, emotionally hyperaroused, screamy-hitty state, but it does not mean appeasement. It can sometimes mean talking someone down by comforting and reassuring them, but that's far from the only method and it's only useful if they're just mildly agitated. If they're screaming or threatening violence, saying "honey please honey it's okay" is usually not the best way to de-escalate them. Setting firm limits is not just more empowering for the de-escalator; it's more effective.

A full method for de-escalation is really a whole class, but here's some pointers for dealing with someone who's upset to the point that they're losing control:

•De-escalate yourself first. If you're on the verge of screaming at the upset person or slapping some sense into them, either take some deep breaths and get yourself back to a "level tone of voice, no swear words, muscles relaxed" level of arousal, or walk away. You can't make someone stop fighting you if you're fighting them.

•Project calmness. No anger, no fear. Use a low, quiet, almost monotonous conversational tone. Talk to them like you're explaining the tax code. Have your hands in view and open. Stay out of their personal space and don't stare them in the eyes. (These last two--having your hands up and keeping a little distance--will also make it easier to protect yourself if they lash out physically.)

Respond to questions with answers ("where is my fucking wallet?") with matter-of-fact answers like they asked you a question about the tax code. Don't respond to questions without answers ("why are you such a jerk?") at all. If they're ranting, let them rant. Imagine the words are just meaningless chunks of wordmeat and patiently wait for them to run out of wordmeat.

•Don't try to win the fight. It doesn't matter if you were originally talking about "who gets the last cookie" or "were you cheating on me"; if the fight has gotten to the point of insults, ranting, or yelling, presenting evidence and arguments is not helpful. Your only goal right now is to encourage them to calm down; or to physically leave the situation if they don't.

•Set limits in the form of "If you X, I will Y." Not "don't talk to me like that!" but "if you keep talking in that tone of voice, I will end this conversation." Make it something you can and will do. Don't use it as a threat or a punishment; just remind them where the lines of reasonable adult behavior are. At the same time, offer them positive options: "If you have a seat and tell me what you need me to do, I will listen."

•If they start to calm down, they'll probably be exhausted and trying to save face; they probably won't be able to rationally discuss the issue right away. Give them time and space.

•If they threaten to physically harm you, take it seriously. If they physically harm you just a little bit--just a little frustrated shove or a quick grab but then they let go--take it super seriously. Get out. Just leave. This is not a matter for talking any more. This is a matter for not-dying. (Even if it's not nearly that severe, it's still extremely important to set the limit that "anything physical immediately revokes all your privileges to interact with me.") Walk away.

If they're not calm when you come back, leave again and give them more time. If they don't get calm, if they try to punish you for walking away instead of saying "I've cooled down now," leave for good and bring a goonish friend or the cops with you when you pick up your stuff. I'm uncomfortably aware that doing this is not always possible, but if it's an option for you, take it.

•If you have to do this a lot, get out of the relationship if at all possible. Things are not okay. "De-escalator" is a role you can play in an extraordinary crisis, not over the course of a relationship. Without using the "abuse" word or not, if you're frequently getting in fights of escalating severity, it's not okay, it's probably not going to get better on its own, and it's not safe. Relationships should be better than that.

"Why do you care what other people think?"

2011-11-07T16:41:00.001-05:00

This came up in comments on an earlier post, but it's worth a post of its own: why do I care and fret so much about whether or not people accept my deviant sexuality/unfeminine gender/polyamorous relationship? Isn't it just paranoia to be upset when people don't acknowledge the existence of people like me?  Isn't it just attention-seeking to demand that everyone approve of my lifestyle? Can't I just do my thing and not worry about what other people think?

No. I can't.

For starters, I'm not a wall of iron. I have human emotions. Keeping important parts of my life secret makes me feel bad and being judged harshly makes me feel very bad. This is not a personal weakness, this is not something for me to grow out of, this is not a challenge I must overcome.  Emotional support is a human need.

But getting frowned at is the tip of the iceberg. I don't just need social cceptance for fuzzy-wuzzy reasons. I need it for my livelihood and potentially my life.

For example, I could be fired or kicked out of school if the wrong person learns I'm a sexual deviant--it happens, and "perv" is not a protected class. It doesn't even have to be about direct hatred from the administration; it can also be litigation-fear. I mean, my program has a pediatrics rotation. I don't want to think about the chances parents will be calm and rational if they find out a person with sexual deviancies involving consenting adults was touching their child.

When I was in high school, I got bullied for being unfeminine and dating a girl. It wasn't just words. I had obscenities Sharpied on my clothes, I had beer bottles hucked at my head, I had things stolen from me, I had someone spit in my lunch, and I just got straight-up hit a few times. Once three kids threatened me with Bic lighters, which is a little hilarious in hindsight because with no fuel and tiny lighters I don't think they could have done anything worse than put little scorch marks on me. But I can't just "ignore the haters!" when the haters are threatening to set me on fire.

Here's a positive one. Recently I went to get STI testing, and I went to Planned Parenthood and explained my relationship status--polyamorous and open--to them. They didn't tsk-tsk, didn't lecture, just talked about condom use and swabbed my crotch. Feeling safe there makes it much easier for me to get tested on a regular basis, which is pretty damn important for my health. (Yes, I could overcome this by being a Wall Of Iron. But I shouldn't have to be.  Tender-delicate-flower poly people should have the same access to healthcare that tender-delicate-flower monogamous people do.)

These are examples from my relatively comfy middle-class-white-American life and my relatively mild deviancies. Once you get outside that sphere (and sometimes inside it), people are literally killed for doing their own thing and not worrying about what other people think.

Caring what other people think isn't a weakness. Being aware of what other people think, and seeking to change it for greater compassion and understanding, is a god damn survival skill.

Slavering Beast Theory.

2011-11-02T19:25:00.003-04:00

Photo credit: Lindowyn Stock

(Trigger warning for rape and abuse.)

I've been seeing a common underlying idea lately in a lot of discussions about violence against women. It's an idea that explains a lot of what appear to be blindingly sexist--or just baffling--ideas about why violence happens, what it looks like, and what steps society should take against it. I'm going to call it the Slavering Beast Theory.

In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. (I've seen people go so far as to claim that Slavering Beasts are the result of evolution, which might make them literally a subspecies.) There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting.

You don't have to have a PhD in Racismology to sniff out one idea often lurking beneath the surface here, but "frat boys" and "dudebros" are often suspected of being Slavering Beasts too, along with a lot of mentally ill people, counterculture members of any stripe, and sometimes even geeks. But I don't want to make too much of this, because Slavering Beast diagnostics are almost always ex post facto--he committed violence? Well, no wonder, he's a Slavering Beast! You should have seen it coming!

Slavering Beasts have a couple other characteristics, besides being dangerous and easy to spot:
•They are brutal. If they want to hurt you, they will physically beat you and leave marks.
•They are isolated. Nobody's son, father, best friend, favorite teacher, or golf buddy is a Slavering Beast.
•They are consistent. They are cruel to everyone, and have no history of positive relationships.
•They are inarticulate and bad liars. They never have a convincing alibi or a genuinely sympathetic personal story.
•They are useless. They never have any impressive life accomplishments or any exceptionally good qualities.
•I am not one. I'm here talking to you, right? So obviously I'm not a Slavering Beast.

If a person does not meet these criteria, they are not a Slavering Beast. Which means that they would never commit violence. Maybe if they were pushed to their absolute limit for a very good reason, but they would never be predatory. That's a Beast thing.

This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn't go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men--those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won't listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.

More than anything, it gives people a way to say "I'm not a Slavering Beast, so none of this applies to me." Learning about gaining consent or recognizing abuse is pointless--Slavering Beasts will always be violent for no reason and ordinary guys never will.

Fighting this attitude without looking paranoid or accusatory ("any guy could be a rapist" seems to hit some ears as "every guy is a rapist") is tricky. But it's necessary. It's necessary to prevent rape--to teach people that they do have to worry about whether they, personally, are getting consent, even though they are nice people. And it's necessary to punish rapists--to break down that mental barrier protecting Julian Assange and Roman Polanski and umpty-zillion sports players, the one that says "a likeable person who's done good things can't possibly commit rape." Finally, it's necessary to stop blaming survivors for not having the psychic powers to know they were going to be assaulted.

This is personal to me, because I just found out that someone I knew well--someone I would never have suspected of it, a guy who was the absolute opposite of what you think a "ticking time bomb" looks like--had the cops called on him for beating his girlfriend. But I'm resisting the knee-jerk response of insisting there must be some mistake, some extenuating circumstance, some "other side of the story." The story is he was a jokey friendly guy and he beat up his girlfriend. Rape and abuse are acts, not people, and it's impossible to know a person so well that you know exactly which acts they can engage in. (ETA: There were outside witnesses and she was injured; this was not a he-said-she-said case.)

This is why I don't like the statement "she didn't get raped because of something she did; she got raped because she was in the presence of a rapist." I think we need to say "she didn't get raped because of something she did; she got raped because her attacker decided to rape her.

Edit: I deliberately didn't include female or queer perpetrators of violence here because I think they don't get fit into the same stereotypes, and a friend pointed out on Twitter that this is another harm of the whole "bad men do bad things" myth--it casts straight men as the only possible Slavering Beasts.

Test tubes.

2011-10-28T19:31:00.003-04:00

I know I promised a buttsex post, but there's something you should know about me: I am a liar. Also something more outrageous happened.

I'm in nursing school. I'm an "adult learner," since I'm 25 and already have a bachelor's (in film and rhetoric, seemed like a good idea at the time), as are about half the people in my class--some are in their 50s and are grandparents. Which made Tuesday's lab even more inappropriate.

It's a microbiology lab, and usually we do things like isolating and culturing bacteria, doing stains, preparing and viewing microscope slides, and the like. Not real politically charged. So I was taken aback when Tuesday's lab was straight out of an abstinence-only horror story.

The lab procedure, in brief: each of thirty students was given a test tube with a few milliliters of nutrient broth. One of the test tubes contained a sample of harmless bacteria; the other twenty-nine were sterile. We had to randomly partner up and transfer fluid between our test tubes, then find another partner and do the same, for four rounds. At the end we swabbed our broth onto agar plates, and next week we'll see which ones grow bacteria. All this was supposed to represent the spread of an STD.

It made me very uncomfortable, because it's a demonstration that works on two levels. On one level, it's modeling an epidemic, which is appropriate subject matter for a microbiology class for nurses. On another level, however, it's all about how people who have sex are dirty. We're going to have sixteen (or slightly fewer) people turn up with the "infection," and then we're all going to shake our heads and reflect upon how dirty and dangerous sex with four people (so slutty!) is. It's spherical racehorses--it's intended to be--but it's racehorses made spherical in a way that grossly magnifies the riskiness of sex and "simplifies" away the existence of safer sex and STD testing and treatment.

The frustrating part is that it's almost impossible to argue with this, because the attitude I'm facing isn't opposition; it's impatience and apathy. I asked if we could do a round with condoms on our test tubes, and the professor laughed and brushed me off not with "we're trying to show how sex has consequences, don't interfere" but with "we're trying to get this done on time, don't slow us down." When I talked to other students about the lab, most of them expressed the same sentiment--whatever, let's just go through the motions and get this done with--although one of them said to me "It's a good thing I've only slept with one person!"

I don't think this apathy makes the lab okay. I think it makes it insidious. "Yeah yeah, sex is dirty, sluts have diseases, just copy the answers off the board and we'll get out of here before ten" is a much nastier and more dangerous thing than if we'd had an overtly ideological discussion of the subject. It makes it a given thing, a thing not needing discussion, that sex is dirty and nothing can be done about it.

It also makes me seem like a bit of a sex-obsessed weirdo for getting all fluffed up about it. But this is an attitude with consequences. "She's probably got STDs" is a synonym for "ewww, slut" that I've heard many, many times. And equally bad: "He wanted to use a condom with me? I'm not the sort of person who has diseases!" (Yes, I've heard that. It was in college, in fact, during my first go-round.) Linking sex to inevitable STDs--and STDs to dirtiness--is not merely obnoxious, it's dangerous. It stands in the way of condom use, STD testing, and honest disclosure with partners, and it reinforces the idea of sexually active people as tainted and less valuable.

I'll try to bring these issues up when we get our results in the next class. I'm also considering talking to the professor about it although I'm not quite sure what to say or what constructive suggestions to make.

Mostly I'm just flabbergasted that the professor had the nerve to walk into a college class with grown adults in attendance and host one of the old "you have to keep your scotch tape sticky for your future husband!" shenanigans.

Sex-Pozzie.

2011-10-21T13:45:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been criticized by other feminists for being a "sex-pozzie"--a sex-positive feminist, someone who believes that unraveling our culture's sexual repression is a key part of fighting women's oppression. On this MetaFilter thread, for instance, there's quite a few accusations that I'm "pointing out that she loves trotting merrily back into the kitchen and that being in the kitchen is what feminism is all about." Or in this article I was linked yesterday, which is positively dripping with disdain for women who appeal sexually to men, and full of conflation between women whose "sexy" pictures are being used without their consent and women who are intentionally presenting themselves as sexy.

This hearkens back to those "Twisty Faster Is Fucking Insane" posts I did, and I admit, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have called them that. "Fucking insane" is ableist language; Twisty Faster and similar-minded feminists who look down upon "sex-pozzies" are merely obnoxious, elitist, sexist, and counterproductive.

Here are some of my dogs in this fight:

Most critics of sex-positive feminism have not bothered to figure out what sex-positivity is.
It's not the giggling, hair-twirling exclamation of "it's feminist to be sexayyy!" It's really not. I'm not going to defend that strawman. (I also think it's funny how often I get accused of being a Hooters-girl-bot, when I'm about the least Hooters-looking-person ever.)

This is what a sex-pozzie
funfeminist looks like!

Nor is it the demand that everyone be sexy or have sex. Nor is it the claim that everything that involves sex is beyond criticism. Nor is it the suggestion that sex will fix all the problems of feminism.

Instead, sex-positivity is the belief that sex and sexiness are... okay. It's the belief that people shouldn't be judged by the sex they have. It's the belief that consent matters and social norms do not. It's the belief that porn and erotica are valid media of expression (not that the current porn industry is hunky-dory, cause it's not) and that sex work ought to be just work (not that it currently is). It's the belief that neither "slut" nor "prude" should be an insult. It's the belief that every sexual and gender identity is valid.

Sex-positivity is, in a nutshell, the belief in sexual freedom as a key component of women's freedom and of having a better world in general.

If you want to argue with that belief, we can talk. But if you want to argue with "everyone should be a Hooters girl because showing men your boobies is like totally the most feministical choice!" you're not really arguing with me. I just think that I'm in no position to judge Hooters girls or assume that they're dimwits, sexists, or helpless victims because of what they do for a living.

Criticism of sex-positive feminism is often sexist.
A lot of criticism of sex-positive feminism is really criticism of sexy women. It's hard to find a piece that isn't dripping with disgusted descriptions of women who wear high heels and shave their legs and then they giggle and they act all flirty and give blowjobs, oh my God. And it's hard for me to see the difference between this and plain old slut-shaming. It always seems undercut with the implication that sexy women aren't just unfeminist, they're icky.

If you treat sexy women with disgust and pity, you're not protecting their rights; you're just gleefully participating in their public humiliation. (You're also often attacking them on a subject that's highly intertwined with culture, class, age, and even body shape. Not everyone who looks "sexy" to you is doing it on purpose, much less doing it to serve the patriarchy.)

And you're falling into the old sexist trap of judging women by their sexuality. A woman being sexy doesn't make women part of "the sex class"; refusing to see a woman as a powerful individual because she's sexy absolutely does. It says that her sexiness speaks louder than her actual voice, that who she is sexually tells you everything you need to know about who she is as a person. It's hard to get more sexist than that. At least Playboy publishes little interview blurbs with their sex objects.

This criticism goes beyond mere criticism, and into denying sex-positive feminists' agency.
If you tell me that I'm wrong, I can talk to you. I'll probably use bad words and too many italics, but I'll talk to you. We disagree. But if you tell me that I don't really think what I'm saying, that the words coming out of my mouth aren't mine, how the fuck do I answer that?

Here's a bit from the XOJane article:

So you should go ahead and do things that are patriarchy-approved, if you want to. Buy new nail polish! Care about celebrities! Have a giant wedding! Wear a thong in your hair! Put your picture on the Internet! Look good according to particular patriarchal ideas of what looks good! Be flattered when men wolf whistle at you, literally or metaphorically! Whatever aspects of being a “Hot Chick” work for you, enjoy them. Maybe except the hair thong.But don’t fool yourself that you’re doing so of your own unconstrained free will.

That's right; women who are sexy are victims of mind control. You can tell by looking at them. There's no way a woman can choose to wear nail polish or care about celebrities. I know I've been harsh on femininity myself at times (mostly I'm just harsh at the idea of me being feminine), but this goes beyond criticism of femininity. This is a claim that femininity is a symptom of Borg assimilation.

(Even worse than the Borg claim is the claim that feminine women are deliberately sucking up to men to get cookies from their oppressors. Ugh.)

It's also, implicitly, a claim that women who reject femininity aren't influenced by patriarchy, which is even more unfortunate. You don't break free from our entire social system and all the behaviors and preconceptions that come with it just by growing out your armpit hair. If we are all blinded by the culture we live in and the privileges we have, then it's the height of arrogance to claim that you're so enlightened you've risen above all that. If women don't have full agency in the patriarchy, where the fuck do you get off claiming that you do?

Sex still matters.
So these are all reasons that people who think it's okay to call me a stupid cock-sucking bimbo under the guise of "feminism" are poopyheads. But what's my reason for remaining a cock-sucking bimbo? Why do I think sexual freedom is important to feminism?

Well, for the long answer, see this entire blog. But for the short answer: because it's impossible for women to be accepted as human beings if we aren't accepted as sexual beings. If women's dignity is contingent on our not being too sexy, we're never going to have dignity. We have to accustom ourselves to the idea that someone can be highly sexual, publicly sexual, sexual in a way that we would totally never do ourselves because whoa... and still have dignity.

If there's a secret motive to my making my sexuality public, it's that I want to show someone can be sexual and also other things. I want to show that I can be sexual and also funny and interesting; I want to show that I can be sexual and also ornery and argumentative; I want to show that I can be sexual and also save lives and get colds and play with guinea pigs.

Finally, part of making life better is about making sex better. I don't just talk about sex to say "HEY EVERYBODY I'M INTO SEX"; I talk about it in terms of promoting enthusiastic consent, promoting body acceptance, promoting the idea of finding out and coming to terms with your own sexual desires. I think having the sex life that's right for you is an important part of being a self-actualized person. And I'm not going to avoid these discussions just because someone might think they're titillating.

And beyond finally, I do like sex. I do think about sex a lot. That's not a political position; it's hormones or something. It's who I am and I'm not going to hide it.

...Wow, that got long and preachy. Next post is about buttsex.

Cosmocking: November '11! Part Two!

2011-10-19T19:49:00.001-04:00

Let's finish this! Mostly because I've been sitting on it in "ugh, do I have to?" misery and it's been stopping me from writing a real post! Sadly nothing in the second half can possibly top "penis mommy!"

People expressed curiosity last week about what the "kinky sex" would consist of, and now the big reveal: underpants. Kinky now means underpants. I don't even question these things anymore. (Phase 1: Collect underpants. Phase 2: ????? Phase 3: Kinky!) And then it's all the fun you'd expect from an article themed "underpants" in a magazine too conservative for anything genuinely edgy but too salacious to be bound by good taste.

Use your underwear as a scrunchie.

Either no one can tell that it's underpants, in which case it's not doing that much to spice up your love life, or everyone can tell that it's underpants, in which case I wholly support this plan and would love to see lots of Cosmo girls doing it in public because I could use that kind of entertainment.

Be a down-south dominatrix... with yourself. Touch your lady parts through your underwear in front of him.

So now we have this week's "can anyone explain the connection between these two sentences?" challenge. I guess it's because to Cosmo "dominatrix" is a generic word meaning "sexy woman of some sort," and touching yourself, wow, that's pretty sexy?

Have him place his ankles in the holes of your underwear, almost like you're tying his feet together. He'll feel dominated--aka massively turned on.

The dynamics of this work a little differently if I'm not a wispy little thing with wispy little underpants. (Several other tips, like planting your "tiny thong" for him to find, also assume dainty proportions.) Otherwise he's just going to be standing there looking goofy with his feet in my underpants.

...Actually, no, I'm pretty sure this looks goofy no matter what your underpants size.

Q: My boyfriend wants to have sex all the time. Even if I tell him no, I end up waking up to him humping my leg. How do I let him know what a turn-off that is?

A: I'm no scientist, but I think there are two reasons why he constantly wants to have sex with you: One, he is a dude. Two, he thinks you're hot.

Does she mean literally? Because that's not normal. It's not normal and not okay to hump someone in their sleep. (Unless you work it out in advance, but obviously that's not an option in Cosmoland.) And it doesn't strike me as an innocent expression of dudely appreciation. It strikes me as a passive-aggressive way to punish for her not putting out, to prove that she can't stop him from using her body anyway. If I were her, I'd be very clear about saying "Please stop trying to do sexual things with me after I've said no. If you don't commit to stopping this, I don't feel safe sleeping in the same bed as you."

Cosmo's suggestion is "I love having sex with you, but when I'm sleepy, I don't feel sexy." Because God forbid you actually not want it sometimes; you have to give a better excuse than that! And then they go on to recommend that she have more "spontaneous" sex with him, because clearly his real issue here is that he's just a spur-of-the-moment sort of guy!

I don't have much more to say than "ugh." I'm not a sexless shrew-harpy, I swear, but I don't think the answer to every problem is "gently coddle his ego while sexually servicing him." Men are grownups and they won't crumble into tears or leave you forever if you talk to them in grownup language.

Announce your big O on Twitter:
Go all the way on November 4, then announce your orgasm by tweeting #CosmoDontFakeItDay

Right, because there's nothing that'll help out a woman who has trouble orgasming like being expected to perform on a specific date and announce it publicly! Someone who takes this stuff to heart is going to end up faking her "Don't Fake It Day" tweet, and that's every kind of wrong.

Earlobes: These spots are packed with nerves that connect directly to the brain, so stroking them feels particularly amazing.

This is how Cosmockings seem to work, lately. I read some stuff that genuinely angries me up, and some stuff that just makes me giggle and point. I'm pretty sure every part of your head "connects directly to the brain," but hey, earlobes, super sexy.

Signs You May Be Dealing With A Psychopath
Serial killers often blend into society, but there are clues to look for that hint something is wrong below the surface.
-He stands stiffly
-He speaks only about himself
-His words seem rehearsed
-He is detached
-He exaggerates tiny gestures

Oh no! He's a serial killer! Or he's socially awkward! Maybe he even has one of those mental illnesses that don't make you murder people but just make you talk awkwardly! About half of these describe me, the other half describe plenty of my friends, and none of us have serial-killed hardly anybody. Considering how many serial killers have been described as normal or even charming, this bit of "people who act different really are as horrible as you always suspected" isn't even helpful.

Describe your dream sex life.
A. Hot quickies with your man whenever and wherever you want them
B. A mix of sensual encounters as well as wilder ones, like in the bathroom at a party
C. Tons of foreplay plus a new position or prop every time

B is correct. The other ones are incorrect and indicate some sort of problem. It doesn't matter what you like, because Cosmo has figured out what you should like.

I guess that's Cosmo in a nutshell for ya.

Cosmocking: November '11! Part One!

2011-10-15T18:45:00.004-04:00

White cover! Nicki Minaj! What the hell is going on with her neck?! Sex secrets, kinky sex... sexify your eyes! I am not sure I want my eyes sexified! I might get conjunctivitis! This image is stolen from the Internet; for some reason the "bigger, better pleasure" headline isn't on my copy! Maybe because "enlarge someone else's penis" is the kind of thing even 3209wjarola@notaspambot.com doesn't promise!

[quiz result] This guy is crazy for you... and crazy intimidated. Men are terrified of rejection, so you have to make it clear that if he makes a move, it'll be well-received.

Apparently it's not just men who are terrified of rejection. I'm not even sure how I'd let him know a move was welcome without that being in itself a move, but knowing Cosmo, it probably involves standing with my shoulders at a slightly different angle. Something quietly receptive. Funny thing is, if you think rejection anxiety is bad, it's got nothing on the anxieties that come up when she's thinking "does he not like me or is he just not getting the signal?" and he's thinking "does she not like me or is she sending a secret signal?"

Never even mind more political stuff about rape culture and women's roles as objects versus actors and whatnot--if you follow Cosmo's advice, your dating life is going to be like trying to get asked to slow dance at the seventh grade social... forever.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 65 percent of financial analysts are men. So head to the neighborhood Starbucks during your lunch hour.

I will buy a venti triple mocha skinny caramel macchiato for anyone who can explain the connection between these two sentences.

We spoke to experts, who gave us the full monty behind five boner-improving secrets. Obviously, we don't want you to become his penis mommy, which is why we came up with ways to implement these on the sly.

Penis mommy. Penis mommy. PENIS MOMMY.

The secrets, if you're curious, are that you should feed him blackberry jam, make sure he had enough sleep, make sure he isn't drunk, make sure he isn't on a full stomach, and have sex twice in a night because he'll last longer the second time. So that's four obvious but decent points to one "blackberry jam? guh?"

Penis mommy.

Run a pair [of your underwear] under hot water, then wrap it around his shaft and squeeze. The heat helps increase his blood flow down there, making him rock hard and explosion-ready.

This doesn't say "hot and sexy" to me. This says "oh my God, he's filthy... I have to find some way to sponge him off before I'm going to touch that thing."

Two words: Edible underwear. It exists. Wear a pair and let him devour it.

...That's twelve words.

My man went to guys' night at his buddy's house. When I called to say hi, I heard a female voice. I asked about it, and he said it was just guys. Later, he called to say he was coming home because a girl started undressing in the room he crashed in! I feel betrayed--why did he lie?

I don't have the whole story here, but I'm guessing he lied because he was in a relationship where he wasn't allowed to socialize with other women ever, not even in a group, not even if he was going out of his way to avoid any sexual involvement with them, and that wears down a human soul after a while.

Maybe I'm a fatalist, but I think that if someone wants to cheat on me, they'll cheat. If they don't want to cheat on me, they can go to a skinny-dipping-and-soapy-Twister party with thirty-eight beautiful single women and not cheat. But trying to keep them from cheating by having weird rules (other than "don't cheat on me") about who they can associate with--that falls somewhere between creepy and downright abusive in my book.

[Part of the answer to the above scenario:] If he says he lied because he knew you'd be angry that women showed up, then you need to have a discussion about how the lie undermined your trust far more than if he'd just come clean.

I had this discussion with my mom often. On other occasions I'd "come clean" and we'd have the discussion about what a horrible monster I was anyway. "I'm even angrier because you tried to protect yourself" is on any well-qualified abuser's top list of mindfucks.

I might be overreacting here. She doesn't say that she ordered him not to associate with other women. He may have just decided to be sneaky anyway. But I feel like this is taking place in a universe where it's reasonable to assume partnered people aren't allowed to interact with 50% of humanity, and that gives me all kinds of the willies.

...How does Cosmo figure bisexual people handle this kind of scenario? (By not existing. Duh.)

[Ways to flatter your guy's friends:] "God help the person who tries to go up against you in Duck Hunt."

"Totally radical Pac-Man skills!" "Bodacious Pong moves, dude!" "Cowabunga, Tennis For Two played on an oscilloscope screen using a room-sized mainframe with vacuum tubes!"

Hey, I can make a lot of you feel old: Duck Hunt came out before I was born.

One of the other suggestions is "Hanging with you guys is like watching a funnier version of Jackass," which is practically a cutting-edge reference considering that show has only been off the air for nine years. (Also it's kind of insulting, unless they're the sort of guys who are really, really into shooting bottle rockets out of each other's anuses.)

But wait, there's more! But you will have to wait because I'm all out of time now. Next week we'll explore "kinky" things you can do with your underwear! Hint: all of them involve "put your underwear somewhere on his or your body, okay, now you're kinky!"

Penis mommy.

Beyond not rape.

2011-10-11T18:36:00.000-04:00

Everyone (well, everyone cool) agrees that consent is the most important thing in sexual activities. It's the difference between harassment and flirting, groping and foreplay, BDSM and abuse, between sex and rape.

But is that all it's about? Not violating your partner? Obviously that's a big deal, but...

Yesterday Rowdy and I had amazing sex. It was loving and passionate and messy and rough, the kind of sex that scares the neighbors and soaks the mattress, the kind of sex that left me literally high afterwards, falling asleep spooned around Rowdy and whispering "I'm flying" into his ear.

You know what I didn't say to him afterwards? "Oh baby, that was so not rape."

Having sex that isn't rape is like cooking food that isn't poison. It's the bare goddamn minimum. If your list of sex tips consists of nothing but "don't rape" and then goes straight into physical details, you're missing something in the middle.

Few things worry me more than people (okay, men) who say it's difficult to know if someone's consenting or not. This suggests to me not just that they could be violating someone's consent, but that even if they aren't, they're having terrible sex. If your idea of sex is limited to "one partner silently gets on and grinds away and the other tolerates it," it can be consensual, but it's probably not much fun.

Sexual communication does have gray areas and fuzzy middle grounds. It's just that they aren't between rape and not rape--if that isn't a bright glowing line then you have a bright glowing imperative to stop cold until it is. No, the gray area is between okay sex and great sex, between compromise sex and consensus sex, between "alright, sure" sex and "oh my god yeah let's do this" sex.

The lowest level of communication between Rowdy and me was "do you want to have sex?" That's the part that made it not rape. But it wasn't the end of the process. Things like "I want to fuck you while you're doing yourself with the Hitachi" and "I want you to fist me"--and even smaller things, bits like "squeeze me tight" and "kiss me, kiss me now." (By the way, I'm just flabbergasted by people who think talking during sex isn't sexy. I mean, you don't talk about the weather, but if these quotes aren't sexy, what is sexy like on your planet?)

So it saddens me when sexual communication is treated as being about consent only. Consent is step one. Consent is getting the keys to the car. But it isn't knowing how to drive it.

And it flat-out horrifies me when sexual consent is treated as fuzzy, because if you don't know for sure if your partner even wants to be doing this, you definitely don't know what they actually like.

Seeking enthusiastic consent is awesome! By all means, keep it up! Not raping people is super important! But it's not nearly enough to build a sex life on.

Police action.

2011-10-11T08:37:00.001-04:00

Last night, Occupy Boston got ugly. The police ordered media away and violently attacked a peaceful protest in the middle of the night. Veterans for Peace were beaten, medics were arrested, and protestor's personal property and medical supplies were thrown in garbage trucks. 100 people are in jail right now and I'm sure some of my friends are among them.

I was out there last night but left before the arrests began, because I was told I might not get a nursing license if I had a "disorderly conduct" on my record. It was infuriating to walk out when I had friends staying behind and standing their ground, but one of the ugly dynamics of this movement is that too many of the people who need it can't afford to protest.

The protestors were peaceful and unarmed and were attempting open communication with the police and city. Their only crime was occupying a public park.

It scares and saddens the hell out of me, both for my friends who were there and for the idea of protest in this country. Free speech and assembly doesn't mean much if they're subject to the whims of the police deciding "no, we meant approved speech and assembly through the proper channels."

I'm also infuriated by the persistence of the "dirty hippies and creepy anarchists" image of Occupy Boston. A lot of media outlets have been selectively interviewing and photographing the weirdest-looking and least coherent people there--ignoring the presence of nurses, ironworkers, veterans, teachers, and other such fringe subversive elements. (This is a tricky issue because I don't want to devalue the voices of hippies and anarchists and funny-lookin' people, but at the same time, I know the public does, and selectively showing those people in the media is definitely encouraging a bias against the movement.) Most of us either have jobs or want jobs; most of us are intelligent people who know exactly what we're doing out there; none of us were violent. And if it makes you feel better, plenty of us were nicely dressed with clean hair and everything.

The only good news is that Occupy Boston just got a whole shit-ton of free publicity, public sympathy, and new supporters, courtesy of the Boston Police Department.

I intend to head back out there and make the most of that.

Occupy Boston.

2011-10-05T21:38:00.001-04:00

I marched with Occupy Boston today. I'll be back tomorrow. (I'll be working as a first aid volunteer. Come say hi! Or if necessary come say "oh god please get this pepper spray out of my eyes.")

It's scary and inspiring. It's flawed in a whole bunch of ways. It's worth being a part of.

It struck me as a very different kind of protest than any other I've seen. Because it encompasses so many issues--healthcare, education, war, corporate personhood, national debt, jobs--and yet the central one is clear and emotional and obvious: "99% of us are eating the crumbs of 1%, and fuck that shit."

It's a different kind of protest because in many ways, it's less a protest than a forum. There was a lot of talking at the Occupy Boston camp. A lot of disagreement. A lot of different issues being raised. The camp was being run as a mini-democracy, not a party headquarters. This is why the Occupy movements aren't releasing demands--because their goal isn't "enact a solution now" but "we need to start working on solutions." That's a confusing, messy cause to be marching for, and also a tremendously humble and important cause.

The Occupy movement is also a different kind of protest because of the strange way it encompasses both the radical and the eminently reasonable. Or really, how it shows that the reasonable has become radical.

The radical-looking people in the photo--the dirty-hippy types and the scary black-masked folks--most of them weren't screaming for the downfall of the State or the overthrow of capitalism. They were shouting things like "fund healthcare and education" and "reduce the deficit." I live in a country where people are putting on masks and writing a defense attorney's phone number on their arm so they can say things like "rich people should pay more taxes."

Maybe the crystallizing moment came when some doofus yelled "get a job" at us, and the crowd yelled back--not "fuck the system," but "we want jobs."

There was another crystallizing moment, though, of a different sort. We were gathering and preparing to march, and one woman asked timidly, "are we allowed to march here?" The answer: "we're always allowed to march."

Maybe all that we're proving is that protest still exists in this country--that a person with no "power" except the ability to stand in the street and hold up a sign is still a person with a voice. That's pretty fucking important right there.

I don't know, now, if this is the start of a powerful snowball of dissent or if it's a little blip. I don't know if it's going to be co-opted by people with ulterior motives or if it's just going to whither away as people have to go back to school and work. I don't know if it's going to turn scary and violent or if it's going to turn big and important. I don't know if it's going to change the country.

All I can say right now is that I'm glad it wasn't just another day in the Financial District.

P.S. Occupy Boston is ongoing in Dewey Square just outside South Station. If you're going tomorrow, tweet me @pervocracy and I'll say hi!

P.P.S. The people who are saying "this is just a bunch of silly hippies who don't even know what they want" are the same people who said "this is just a bunch of silly girls who want to wear slutty clothing" about the Slutwalks. Pay them no mind.

Economics vs. apples.

2011-10-02T00:33:00.003-04:00

A day doesn't go by I don't see an article like this one. I'm not going to try to deconstruct it point by point, because it's the same old shit. I'm just going to pull some quotes and talk about my weekend. I suspect you'll get my point.

Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.

Rowdy and I had agreed to a date, but neither of us was feeling in the mood for a "date" date on the night. Instead, we just got snacks and juice at the drugstore and sat together on the cover of the subway tunnel, listening to street musicians in the square, laughing at little kids playing run-in-circles-really-fast games, laying back and cuddling on the concrete. Because of the kids around, I whispered the dirty things into his ear, very quietly, so they wouldn't know why he was laughing.

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

We split up to head back to his home; he biked and I drove. On the way I stopped at the liquor store to surprise him with a pack of beer from his hometown. At home we drank the beer (he dressed his in a little lederhosen first), undressed, and cuddled naked while watching porn. It didn't turn into sex. The porn was too ridiculous for that. It turned into giggling--helpless, naked, wiggly giggling.

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

At the end of the night, I stroked his cock, at first slowly and gently, almost comfortingly, then for real. I kissed the tip of his cock and when he groaned appreciatively I took the whole thing in my mouth. It was a long, sloppy blowjob, popping his cock out of my mouth and then swallowing it down again, both of us still a little giggly.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same -- one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered.

It was my turn next. I slipped a condom on his vibrator and went to town while he held me, stroked my breasts, gently pulled my hair, and whispered fucking filthy sweet nothings in my ear. I came and didn't want to stop. So I didn't. I just kept pleasuring myself over and over, Rowdy's hands on my ass and his lips on my cheek, until I was exhausted.

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future -- that is, committing to marry?”

We slept late into the morning, curled around each other. It's been more than a year of nights like this and I'm still stupid in love--the kind of love where I think his snoring is cute, the kind where I'm charmed and a little turned on when he scratches his balls. When he woke up he held me and kissed me and reminded me that with him I'm safe enough to be that stupid.

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable.“Sexual strategies for making men ‘fall in love’ typically backfire, because men don’t often work like that,” Regnerus says.

Later in the day, Sprite came over and we went apple picking. It really makes no sense to pick your own apples, economically; I'm sure we paid three times what it would have cost at the store. What we were really paying for was a day in the orchard, walking through rows of trees in light misty rain, eating impossibly sweet and crisp apples right off the trees.

So, what can women do to return the balance of sexual power in their favor? Stop putting out, experts say. If women collectively decided to cross their legs, the price of sex would soar and women would regain control of the market. Like a whoopie cartel.

After we gathered our apples, we sat together at a picnic bench under a tree, drinking hot mulled apple cider, talking about our childhoods and our schoolwork and tractors (that one was mostly Rowdy) and various forms of perverted sex we were planning to have.

The point here isn't that my relationship is super special, or that my relationship represents every relationship. But my relationship exists in the real world--the messy, complicated, wonderful real world. It's a place that has masturbation and apples, cuddles and really bad street musicians, group sex parties and muddy shoes.

I'm sure there are relationships in this big ol' world where women coldly trade sex to men for commitment and compete joylessly to see who can get the biggest diamond for the fewest fucks. It's just that there's a universe of other relationships out there, and they're way more fun. I mean, shit, if the woman's withholding sex strategically or having it pried out of her economically, when does she get to enjoy feeling a man's arms tighten around her as she comes? And if the man's only giving as much love as he needs to get sex, when does he get to enjoy sneaking kisses behind an apple tree?

So I don't just want to brag here. I want to tell stories to show that no one has to live that way. And oh my God is life better when you don't.

Next time we're together, we're going to bake apple crisp.

The end of normal.

2011-09-28T17:17:00.001-04:00

Us polyamorous folk can get a little bit... evangelical, sometimes. We're so enlightened, you know. So evolved. We deal with our jealousy like rational beings, we don't attempt to impose control on our partners, we base everything in open communication and trust--we're so goddamn more advanced than the average human, we ought to glow blue or something. Right?

Well, kinda. But what this poly boosterism is missing (other than its manners) is that you don't actually have to date other people to do any of this. For that matter, dating other people doesn't guarantee that you'll do this--oh boy does it not. Dating other people is just somewhat more likely to bring these issues into the open.

Likewise, you don't have to actually hit each other to use BDSM methods of negotiation and consent-centrism. "What kind of play do you want today?" is an important question to ask of someone who doesn't have any Officially Designated Fetishes, but still has desires and limits--which would be, yeah, everyone.

And you don't have to be non-heterosexual to question what gender means to your relationship. If "which one of y'all does the dishes?" is a stupid question to ask a gay couple, it ought to be an equally stupid assumption to make about a straight one. The fact that assigned gender roles are available for a straight couple doesn't mean they ought to take them on without question.

What kind of relationship you have is your choice, and one choice isn't better than another. What's important is that you make a choice. That even if you're you're monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual--you're doing it because it's what you want and because you and your partner have agreed to it, not because that's what people do. What's important isn't what path you take, but that you know there are paths.

Paths? Fuck, there's an entire open world out there once you get past "man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates. (Or rather, a world including "man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates," because, hey, if that's your thing.) There's a million goddamn ways to love, a billion things "partner" or "lover" or "fuckbuddy" or "spouse" can mean to you, and you get to decide.

How fucking cool is that?

When there is no "normal," there's no reason to take pride in being "abnormal." You just are. People who have heterosexual PIV sex for 3.5 minutes once a week just are. Poly/kinky/queer enlightenment wouldn't mean anything at all if everyone were responsible for choice and communication in their relationships.

Who cares how many people you fuck or how you do it? The only thing worth being evangelical about is consciousamory.

Ten shades of "false rape accusations."

2011-09-23T18:10:00.001-04:00

[TRIGGER WARNING for rape and post-rape legal/social mess]

There's a lot of talk out there about "false rape accusations," which tends to come up in every discussion of a rape that did not involve a virgin in a prairie dress screaming "NOOOO" while being beaten on videotape in front of thirty-eight witnesses who were all members of the clergy and decorated war heroes. The statistics on how many rape accusations are false range from above 40% to under 2%, and (as is usually the case) which number someone chooses to use in their argument tells you more than the number itself.

In the middle of this mess, of hearing that Julian Assange and Dominique Strauss-Kahn and whoever the fuck it is this week are victims of our Giant National Epidemic Of False Rape Accusations, I want to offer a point of clarification. When someone says "false rape accusation," it can mean any of the following scenarios.

1. Alice goes to the police and falsely accuses Bob of raping her. Bob is arrested, tried, and convicted.
This one's the boogeyman. And for good cause; it is horrible. I'm sure it has happened. Unfortunately, by its nature we can almost never know when it's happened--which should make you very suspicious of someone who claims it happens constantly. A handful of people have been cleared by new evidence, but only a handful--nowhere near a significant proportion of the people in prison for rape. Obviously there are people who are innocent and we don't know it, but you can't get statistics on a thing nobody knows.

Therefore, when people talk about the prevalence of "false rape accusations," it never ends there. Here's some other things that phrase can mean:

2. Alice goes to the police and falsely accuses Bob of raping her. Bob is arrested but the charges are dropped.
3. Alice goes to the police and falsely accuses Bob of raping her. Bob is arrested, tried, and acquitted.
In these cases, the justice system is working exactly as it should. An innocent person is found to be innocent, and the horrifying possibility of a man thrown away for a crime he didn't commit is averted. If there's an epidemic of these, then there's also an epidemic of them being appropriately dealt with.

Does Bob's good name get besmirched anyway? Sometimes it does, and that sucks. But it's no excuse for not taking rape accusations seriously--you don't know they're false until after they're investigated.

4. Alice does not go to the police, but falsely tells all her friends that Bob raped her.
This is the only one that's happened to anyone I know. Again, it sucks and it really can fuck up Bob's life. But since it doesn't involve the legal system in the first place, changes to rape law would do nothing to prevent this. This is slander, but it's not exactly an "accusation."

5. Alice falsely tells the police that someone raped her, but does not name names.
6. Alice falsely tells all her friends that someone raped her, but does not name names.
It's fucked up, but it's a victimless fucked up. Believing Alice wastes police time and friend sympathy, but no one is seriously harmed. A lot of cases touted in the media as "false rape reports" are actually Type 5, and while that's a wrong thing to do, it's definitely not "innocent man thrown in prison as a rapist" wrong.

7. Chuck rapes Alice. Alice tells the police that Bob raped her.
This is usually an innocent mistake, and often one that has more to do with bad police work than with Alice being dishonest. And Alice really was raped, so any solution to this problem that comes down to "just ignore her" is inappropriate.

Note that this is the case in almost every situation where someone was cleared by DNA evidence. If there was DNA to test, then it's very likely that someone raped Alice, and calling her a "false rape accuser" is wrong.

8. Alice and Bob have sex that Bob thinks is consensual. Alice does not. Alice accuses Bob of rape.
I think a surprising proportion of rapists are in such severe denial about what it means to have sex with a deeply drugged person, or a person who said "no" until they were cornered and held by their wrists and then they said "yes," that they honestly believe they're victims of false accusal. All they did was have sex with someone who didn't want it, and here they are, being falsely accused of rape! The injustice!

9. Bob rapes Alice. Alice goes to the police and Bob is arrested, but the charges are dropped or he is acquitted.
When you see the wildly huge statistics claiming 40% or more of rape accusations are false, this is almost always what they mean--40% or more of rape accusations are not proven true. However, if you think that means they were proven untrue... um, I don't have a witty simile here but you're wrong. Guilty people are released all the time and sometimes for terrible reasons.

10. Bob rapes Alice. Alice goes to the police and Bob is arrested, proven guilty, and convicted. But some people still think Bob is innocent.
And this is where all this talk of false rape accusations ends up. It ends in a place where rape can never be discussed, under any circumstances, even in the most clear-cut cases, without people crying "false rape accusations are everywhere!" It ends with "innocent until proven guilty"reinterpreted as "the accuser is guilty until proven innocent." It ends with "a court of law should not convict on this evidence" being confused with "we should not show the victim any sympathy on this evidence."

Ultimately, all too often, it ends with a huge number of rapes going unreported, because sometimes it's easier for a survivor to live with the knowledge that their rapist is free than it is for them to go through years of being under constant suspicion of being an evil false accuser. It ends with misogyny justifying and reinforcing itself, as the concept "women lie about rape" becomes both proof of and proven by "women are untrustworthy, manipulative, and malicious." It ends with rapists who tell their victims "no one will ever believe you" being right, with society standing behind them.

Every time we reinforce the common wisdom that "women lie about rape all the time," rape gets a little easier to commit.

Do I have an awesome, pat solution for this whole mess, an idea that would totally fix our judicial system and society to ensure justice for all? Fuck no! I'm not Professor Fucking X. Nothing short of psychic powers will ensure that the guilty are always punished and the innocent never are.

But I do have this to say: if someone tells you they've been raped, and you are not acting in official capacity as a judge or juror, just go ahead and believe them. The odds they're lying are a pretty small minority, and the odds they're lying in a way that hurts someone are even smaller. Just go ahead and take that risk.

I'd rather live in a world where a hundred false accusers are told* "I believe you, I care about you, and I'll stand up for you," than where one rape survivor is told "gosh, this story has two sides and I really need to consider him innocent until proven guilty."

*not in court, but by their friends, families, and people who figure they have a right to comment because they read about it on the Internet and everything

Everything gets better.

2011-09-21T12:59:00.001-04:00

As I may or may not have bothered to mention, I've started classes in nursing school. Classroom prerequisites this year, two years of nursing classes and clinicals, and if all goes well, I'll be 28 when I become an Actual Real Nurse For Real.

The weirdest, and best, part of going back to school as an adult is how terrifying the professors aren't. I always used to think of professors as bosses who wanted me to work and could fire me, or (much worse) parents who wanted me to be good and could punish me. They're not. They're working for me. I don't mean that in the sense of "you're working for me, so give me an A," but in the sense of "you're working for me, so give me the knowledge and skills I'm buying from you." My Microbiology professor isn't an authority over me; he's someone who knows more about microbiology than me so I'm paying him to tell me about it.

I still need a good grade, of course; and I still have some anxiety about that. But it's nothing like the anxiety I felt as a teenager. It's a matter of "I'll learn the stuff and I'll tell them what I learned," not of facing judgement. I wouldn't say that school is easier now--but it doesn't scare me.

---

Sex with Rowdy last night was amazing. Amazing like a drug, amazing like the physicality of it didn't even matter any more--I was flying. I slipped into a state where everything felt good. He fucked me and it felt good; he kissed me and it felt good; he bit me and it felt good; he touched me and it felt good. I was moaning and squirming every time he did anything to me, and he did oh so many things.

We didn't have sex this good a year ago. We had good sex, but it wasn't like this. We didn't know each other's bodies and minds well enough. It's the difference between driving a good car--and driving your good car, the one where you know exactly how tightly it takes every curve, exactly how it responds to every gram of force on the pedals.

Our sex just keeps getting better.

I was still flying when I fell asleep, his whole body wrapped around mine.

---

Yesterday, I went and got a cup of coffee between classes. I asked the coffee lady for a medium drip coffee, she told me "that'll be a dollar thirty," I gave her a dollar thirty, and I took my coffee and went to class.

I know this sounds like a really, really pointless story. But what struck me is how easy it all was. Specifically, how much easier it was. Even such a minor transaction used to be fraught with weird anxiety for me--anxiety I would never admit to, because how can you admit something like "I have great difficulty with the social nuances of buying a cup of coffee"?

I didn't know what kind of coffee I was supposed to order, or how I was supposed to phrase the order. Should I call it "java" or "joe" to show I was a cool, experienced coffee drinker, or should I use precisely the name on the menu? Were there certain drinks that only dorks ordered? Would it be rude to act chummy with the coffee lady, or rude to not act chummy with her? If I fumbled my change and she got impatient with me, did that mean she hated me? Could I ever show my face again at the coffee stand if I made the coffee lady hate me?

These goofy-ass things tormented me when I was about eighteen. It feels almost magical that they don't any more. Not by figuring out all the secret social codes, but by figuring out that there aren't any secret codes, I became one of the cool, experienced coffee drinkers.

I can order coffee in total comfort now. It's a wonderful feeling of power. Eighteen-year-old me would never have believed it.

---

I'm taking Human Growth and Development right now. The professor's in his late fifties or early sixties, and told us that in his experience, each stage of life is better than the last one.

So far, it's true.

I don't get bullied any more--I take for granted that I won't get bullied any more--but that's the least of it. As I've gotten older, gotten more established in my relationship, gotten more perspective on the world, gotten more comfortable in my body and my life, everything has gotten better.

The biggest secret we keep from young people is that being an adult is actually pretty freaking awesome.

Also, I can have pizza whenever I want. I don't even like pizza that much though. We have secret adult foods that are better than pizza.

Cosmocking! October '11! Part Two!

2011-09-19T10:58:00.000-04:00

I had a very nice weekend. There were robots (pictured above), dinosaurs, ice cream, and sex. The only thing it was missing on the list of "things that make Holly go eeeeee" was spaceships. The real world is such a strange contrast from Cosmo. There's so much more in it.

But I didn't finish last time, and so, because of my sick little self-imposed challenge, I have to dive back into Cosmoland, into the bare white box of a world where there are only two kinds of person, only one kind of love, and you're usually doing it wrong.

Our new obsession: ipickupsports.com. It's like Craigslist for sports--you search your zip code, and it pulls up a map with all the pickup games (like basketball, football, and even tennis) going on nearby. Translation: it pinpoints exactly where you can find sweaty, shirtless eye candy at, oh, 2:30 in the afternoon this Sunday.
In other news, this fall's hottest fashion accessory is a knee-length stained trenchcoat!

I guess it's not considered creepy if you're a woman? If you were less feminist than me, you might say that the guys probably like it as long as it's a hot chick leering at them; if you were more feminist than me, you might say that their male privilege means they aren't as sexually vulnerable to her as women would be to a man. But I'm just feminist enough to say no, that shit is fucking creepy.

"My girlfriend told me that I had 60 minutes to use whenever I wanted and for (almost) whatever I wanted. I definitely used all my 'rollover' minutes on her that weekend!"
...is she doling out sex by the minute?

If it's "all about him" sex, that makes some sense, sort of. (Although I think your relationship's in trouble if that looks very different from your everyday ordinary sex.) If it's sex, period, that he's accumulating rollover minutes on, then... well, if it was me I'd be shooting myself in the foot by giving him a limited timeframe, wouldn't I?

At a club, you notice a hottie across the room has been eyeing you shyly all night. To help him along, you:
a) Walk over and say that you saw him looking and now the ball is back in his court.
b) Get your friends to relocate to the opposite side of the room, close to where he is.
c) Write down your name and number and ask a bartender to pass them on.
If you chose "a," you were too "bold." The correct answer was "c."

And even "a," the option described as "so forward, it's intimidating," only barely involves talking to him. Apparently saying "I saw you looking, and I figured I'd say hi--what's your name?" would be just unthinkably man-devouringly slutty.

The new dude you've been seeing waits until the day of to ask what your Saturday-night plans are. You answer:
I'm not going to bother typing out the answers. I'm just going to point out that none of them are "by telling him what your plans are." Regardless if you're Cosmo-bold or Cosmo-shy, artifice and manipulation are the only options.

After happily dating your man for two months, you're itching to be exclusive. You nudge him to kick it up by:
a) Making a flirty comment on a guy friend's wall--jealousy will spur him to talk LTR.
b) Changing your relationship status on Facebook--when he sees it, he'll just go with it.
c) Swapping your profile picture to a cute shot of you two together--it'll plant the seed.
The "correct" answer is "c." (Am I the only one who's annoyed when people do that? I mean, even if they're married. Your profile pic should either be just you, or something devastatingly clever. Otherwise it's less "I am in a relationship" and more "Personality Merger In Progress.")

What is it with the not-talking? How can you have an entire relationship that way? What does a relationship even mean in this universe--the person you silently stand next to most often? Why does it matter if you do that exclusively? If you can't even ask your boyfriend if he is your boyfriend, what chance in hell do you have of asking actually difficult things?

Here's two from the sex advice columns that I didn't go over in detail because I've done it a million times:
I want to handcuff my husband in bed, but I feel weird initiating it. What's the best way?
When my guy wants oral, he does this thing where he pushes my head down--not a turn-on! What can I say to explain how unsexy it is without ruining the moment?
The answer, in both cases, is anything besides "freaking tell him."

If you start a relationship by not talking to the guy, make it official by not talking to him, and have sex without talking to him--well, no fucking wonder so much of the relationship advice is about coping with the fact that you have absolutely nothing in common.

You want to conduct your entire relationship on Facebook? Great. Try a private message--"so am i like ur gf now? lol."

Cosmocking: October '11! Part One!

2011-09-15T14:25:00.003-04:00

Yellow cover! I'm not sure why I still describe the cover now that you can see it! Force of habit I guess! Minka Kelly! She looks like she's got B-cups under the tank top and DDs worth of cleavage! I know they do amazing things with push-up bras these days but I'm pretty sure that's just Photoshop! "Shrink Your Inner Thighs!" Just the inner ones?! "Times He Wants You to Be Jealous!" Apparently this is a headgame where you assume the other person is playing a headgame and that can't possibly end badly!

Sexy vs. Skanky
Sexy: Girl power
Skanky: Slut shaming

A dude's set of wheels is always a hot place to do it. Of course, we're talking about his other mode of transportation... from when he was a teen: his skateboard.
I have to confess, I actually like this about Cosmo. In with all the ludicrous "a relationship is two people in madly passionate love who don't trust each other and don't talk to each other" ideas, sometimes they're just wacky. I enjoy the wacky.

I don't enjoy it so much that I'm going to actually have sex on a skateboard--way too much potential for slapstick comedy and severe spinal trauma--but I appreciate the innocent goofiness of the idea.

50 Things You Should Never Stop Doing in a Relationship
As opposed to this article, which is far, far less charming.

6. Never letting the cracks show in public. Even if he starts doing that thing where he contradicts every damn thing you say, wait until you get home to call him out on it.
If he's contradicting every damn thing I say, the cracks are already showing. While I agree we shouldn't be hashing all our shit out in public, if he's taking deliberate digs at me, it's not my job to keep up the appearance that this is peachy. A "crack" that size needs at least a "honey, can I talk to you for a minute?", not a sweet tolerant smile.

And the funny thing is, if he's a decent person, he may actually appreciate that you didn't just let him make an ass of himself in public.

7. Maintaining your feminine mystique by never putting on deodorant, cleaning your ears, or clipping your toenails in front of him.
Apparently the "feminine mystique" consists of carefully maintaining the distinction between "woman" and "person." (I'm not the first person to pick up on this.)

8. Swiping on some lip gloss even if you two are just running Sunday errands. We're not clutching our pearls and insisting that you do up your whole face, but a little touch-up isn't exactly going to set back the whole feminist movement or anything.
No, but telling me I have to do this, and that it's a big favor to me that you aren't demanding more, is doing just that.

After the Gender Wars Of A Few Weeks Ago, I kind of came to a conclusion with a friend; femininity and masculinity are things to be practiced as consensual kinks. If being feminine is your desire, your kink is okay! But if being feminine is something you go along with grudgingly, then it's no longer truly consensual. And if it's something you do only because you've been told that your natural lips are unacceptably unshiny--well, that's nowhere near what enthusiastic consent should be.

11. Screening his call and waiting 10 minutes before returning it. Then be all mysterious about where you were when asks why you didn't pick up.
There's a fine line between "feminine mystique" and "concealing a dark secret," huh?

"I thought she was just a very mysterious woman who played hard to get and only let me see her at her best, but it turned out she was hiding her zombie mother, a nurse, and a priest in the basement and surreptitiously feeding them animal tranquilizers."

42. Quickly running to the bathroom to brush your teeth before morning sex.
I've skipped over a whole bunch of "never let him see you're a real person" stuff, because I think we all get the picture by now, but this one stood out by actually obstructing sex in favor of sexiness. The awesome part about morning sex is that you're still all warm and cozy together in the bed and half-awake. And being disheveled, even stinky, is also part of the charm. Morning sex is about being comfortable with each other, and it's hard to do that when you have to jump up and demonstrate that you're painfully uncomfortable with yourself.

I know that there's no "masculine mystique" because they're just people, but it seems like this could make a guy awfully self-conscious if he didn't brush his teeth,

[picture of what's-his-face with Snooki, holding a pink purse] Snooki's ex was careful with her Hello Kitty tote--it's where his balls were hiding, after all.
Oh, my bad, there is a masculine mystique. But it's about not being a woman (made pretty explicit with the "balls" comment), not about not being a human, so I still say it's an easier standard.

4 Words That Seduce Any Man... Anytime
[...]"I want you now."
That's not seduction. That's just an invitation. That's like saying you "entranced" your friends because you asked them "hey, wanna come over?"

Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of invitations. They're a hell of a lot easier to use and more effective than subtle innuendos, and they don't leave nearly as many dangerous ambiguities on the table. "I want you now" is a fine way to tell a young gentleman your intentions for the evening, but there's nothing mystiquey about it.

There's a quote in this article from Warren Farrell. The quote itself is innocuous (or, you know, not particularly bad), but Warren Farrell is a big-time anti-feminist in the "men's rights" movement. I'm skeeved that he's talking to Cosmo.

...Or, possibly, unsurprised.

He consistently won't tell you who he's texting.
You are: Kinda Jealous
You should be: Freaking The Hell Out
---
A certain level of privacy in a relationship is necessary, but you'd have to be crazy to put up with this secretive behavior[...] [ask him to show you the screen] If he has nothing to hide, he'll fork it over. If not, there's a good chance he's involved with another woman... or the Mob.
So now Cosmo is the TSA. "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" is the refrain of everyone--government agency, parent, school official, or romantic partner--who can't think of any other reasons someone might not want you reading their diary and digging through their underwear drawer.

Maybe he's trying to get a friend's advice on a relationship problem. (Like that his girlfriend has no boundaries, for instance.) Maybe he's dealing with a family issue that's somewhat private. Maybe he and a friend are trading crude jokes that might offend you. Maybe it's just nothing to do with you at all.

A relationship is not a personality merger. I'm glad for the things Rowdy chooses to share with me (and I'd leave him if he never shared anything), but I know it's always his choice. The access I have to his life is a privilege, not a right. I trust that he isn't hiding anything from me that would seriously affect me, but all I can do is trust--I cannot enforce. That's not a relationship any more. It's a Panopticon.

There's still more ripe bits left, there's bad kink and slut-shame and bizarre gender roles, but this post is already unconscionably long. More to come... unfortunately.

Squirt.

2011-09-14T16:53:00.002-04:00

I've started squirting during sex. The last two times Rowdy and I have gone at it, I've soaked the bed. I don't know what changed, since we weren't doing any activities we hadn't done before; maybe my body just decided it was squirtin' time. Maybe it's like riding a squirty bike, and now that I've done it once I'll always be able to.

The disappointing news is: it's not a mega ultra orgasm. I wish I could describe for you about how it's an intensely spiritual and powerfully erotic whatever whatever, but at least for me, it's really not. It's like a regular orgasm and then there's a puddle. The sex afterwards can be extra fun because it's super wet and slippery and messy, but the squirting itself doesn't feel like anything different.

The one thing that bothers me is that I find myself having tremendous anxiety over whether it's pee. It can't be pee, I keep saying. There have been studies and stuff, right? No way did I just uncontrollably pee on his dick during sex.

The problem is... even if it's not all pee, I can't really convince myself that it's 100% pee-free. It's coming out of my urethra, presumably out of my bladder, and, let's face it, that's a pretty pee-intensive area. What I can believe is: so what if it's pee?

Bodies are messy things. We're sixty percent water, and zero percent of that is water in its nice cool clear form; it's blood and lymph, chyme and mucus. People are made of goo, and to express love of the physical human body is to glory in goo. We don't just tolerate but take joy in the ooze and gush of saliva, of sweat, of semen, of vaginal fluids. What's one more flavor of goo? Why is it acceptable to me that I produce this gooey human fluid and not that one?

It'd be interesting, in a sort of "huh, did you know opossums had forked penises" way, to know whether my squirts are pee or not. But I'm not pinning my ego on the answer. I can take pride in "I came so hard that I peed!" as well.

How I met Holly

2011-09-13T06:34:00.003-04:00

[Guest post by Rowdy]
(a not-rape-culture narrative, and why we need more of them)

I’d seen her before, she’s in my group of friends - a bouncy-happy girl with a cherubic face and bright red hair. We were out for coffee with a group of friends, and we started talking. The conversation was easy and engaging, meandering through various topics in feminism, kink, and affirmative consent. It was getting late, and it was time for the coffee shop to close. We stood out in the brisk nighttime air as our friends said goodbye for the night while others made plans to meet at Denny’s.

“Yeah, I never quite know how to bring up my interest in a person," I said. "I’m not the best at reading people, so I don’t know if they’re into me, and I usually end up not saying anything. Sometimes I’ll find out later that they were into me, but they thought I wasn’t into them. It’s a conundrum.”
“Well, which way do you live?” she asked.
“Just up the road by the parkway, not too far.”
“Want to head back and have sex?”
“Absolutely.”

The conversation continued as we walked, turning to experiences of new partner sex and communicating interest. Then, standing in my room, the conversation continued a bit and then died down into an awkward moment, both of us caught in an instant of “um, what now?”We embraced and kissed, tentatively at first and then passionately.

She spoke up. “Ok, thing you should know. I really really don’t like direct clit stimulation; it’s so intense it’s unpleasant. Any things I should know about you?”
“Not that I can think of; if anything comes up I’ll let you know”, I said.
We wrassled each other’s clothes off, joking and laughing and touching and kissing the whole time. "So, how do you like to masturbate?” I asked.
“Usually indirect pressure, on the pubic mound.”
“Like this?” I asked as I pressed my hand just above her vulva and tried to imitate the motion she made.

Holly adjusted my hand a bit and it was clear to my neighbors I’d hit the spot. We fucked, cuddled, exchanged backrubs, and fucked some more into the wee hours of the morning. In Holly’s words:

It was by turns cuddly and athletic, and always... happy. I love happy sex. There was something so delightfully straightforward about it.

That’s how I met Holly a year ago last night. We had sex purely for fun; there was apprehension and passion, it had its awkward moments, but both of us wanted it, both of us communicated it, and look what disastrous things came of such casual and communicative sex! It’s been an amazing year filled with more love than I can put to words, and more good times than I can count. Dinosaurs and robots and hovercrafts and sex, lots of sex.

Stories like this are important: narratives are how we learn to interact and relate. When we don’t have the time or inclination to think critically about our actions, or when we’re looking for direction or affirmation, we look to the behavior of others to model our own actions after. If our sex-positive, affirmative consent, relationship self-deterministic culture is to gain traction in the mainstream, we need our narratives to get out there - for examples of how it’s done (even partially or imperfectly) to be readily at hand.

I’ll write more on narratives later. If you’ve got a narrative to share, I encourage you to do so: on your blog, in your feed, or in the comments.

Functional.

2011-09-11T14:13:00.003-04:00

Rowdy and I came up with another idea for Positive TV.

In the style of Intervention and Hoarders, Positive TV presents: Functional. Our camera crews will go inside the homes of functional families and observe how they treat each other with love and respect. Trained psychologists will interview family members and we will bring you shocking revelations on this little-seen way of life in our midst.

Experience it from the inside:
Resiliency!
Honesty!
Emotional stability!
Forgiveness!
Compromise!
Responsibility!
Unconditional love!

"On the surface, we probably looked like the perfect suburban family. ...That was about right, actually."

"Our family was close-knit and loving until our father, who had been the core of our lives, died suddenly. Then we really came together and learned to be there for each other."

"After some time, our mother remarried. Her new husband was very different from our father. But he's always been very good to us and really became a part of the family."

"Another shock came when my brother came out as gay. We were shocked that he'd taken so long to tell us, when he should know that he's safe telling us anything that's important to him. Still, we understood it was his decision when to share it with us."

"Growing up, you know, you don't question these things. You think of your family as normal. I just assumed everyone's parents included the kids in major decisions."

"The moment when it really crystallized for me--when I became aware of how we'd been living--was when I looked around the dinner table and realized that I didn't just love my family, I actually liked them."

Don't miss tonight's riveting season premiere, in which the Ramirez family realizes that their teenage daughter's spending is out of control, so they talk to her about it and she agrees to create a budget and stick to it!

Desensitized.

2011-09-08T14:05:00.002-04:00

I heard my new roommate (I have a new roommate, by the way) masturbating today. She had a vibrator going and was making surprisingly loud grunts and gasps by masturbation standards. I don't think she meant for me to hear; she just has a not-very-soundproof door and probably didn't even know I was home.

What I felt, hearing this, was absolute neutrality. It was just "Oh hey, masturbation. Fancy that." I wasn't aroused, nor awkward, nor grossed out. It was like noticing that she was brushing her teeth. Look, it's a thing people do, and there's a person, doing it!

I only noticed my lack of reaction because that's a relatively new thing for me. It used to be that other people's sexuality always provoked something in me, whether it was jealousy or lust or head-under-the-pillow "oh god tell me when it's over" avoidance. The further back I go in my memory, the worse it was; when I was past puberty but not yet having sex, it was agonizing sometimes, even when it wasn't actual sex, even when it was just seeing someone wearing a little less clothes than normal. Sometimes that agony was horror and sometimes it was fascination, sometimes it was uncontrollable giggling; but it was always a reaction. It was always emotionally heightening and attention-monopolizing.

I've seen a lot of naked people since then.

And each time, it's dulled my response a little. Each time I'm in a room (or a bed) with people fucking, it's gotten a little less "OH MY GOD SEX" and a little more "oh. sex." Each time I've had a conversation with a buck naked attractive person, it's gotten a little easier to maintain eye contact. The fact that they're attractive registers with me, and it still makes me happy, but it's a level-headed and low-key happiness, the kind of happy you might get from a pleasant cup of tea. The enjoyment is still there, but the excitement is gone.

I think that's a good thing. And I think that it's a good thing even though I've lost something in the process--I've lost a lot of the frisson of sex, the pounding pulse of anticipation, the electric intensity of even the suggestion of sexuality. But what I've gained in exchange is much more important--I've gained the ability to think rationally about sex. Not losing my shit over the mere idea of fucking has made me much better at negotiating sex, at thinking lucidly about sex, at accepting other people's sex lives even when they're not my cup of tea, and... well, at not losing my shit.

I don't think our problem as a society is being oversexed or undersexed, exactly. I think our problem is valuing the frisson over the ability to keep ahold of our shit. We value passion over companionate love, and wonder why relationships always seem to go cold. We value spontaneity over clarity, and wonder why our sexual communication and safety suck. We value innuendo over education, and wonder why kids grow up with completely fucked-all-to-hell ideas of what their sex life as an adult is going to be like. We make sex into a Big Hairy Deal, into practically all the good and bad in the world, and then wonder why it causes Big Hairy Problems.

By a nudity taboo, by a language taboo, by slut shame, and by terrible education, we've created a world where sex keeps its dark, intense mystery--and good fucking luck coherently negotiating what kind of dark, intense mystery you want to experience.

The feeling of still being hyperaroused by sex is delicious (or was), and it's a genuine sacrifice you make when you start thinking and talking lucidly about sex. But I can tell you this: when you're used to seeing naked people and don't make a big deal about it... you get to see a lot more naked people.

Survivor.

2011-09-06T01:00:00.011-04:00

[trigger warning for nasty abusey/assaulty business]

I am a survivor of child abuse. I am a survivor of sexual assault.

Oh my god, I feel like such a drama queen putting it like that. Yeah, my mom was mean to me, but she wasn't, you know, A Child Called It mean. And yeah, Benny did some sexual things to me that I didn't want him to, but it wasn't, you know, Irréversible bad. I don't have PTSD, I don't have scars, I was never threatened with death, I doubt anything that happened to me would stand up in court, and I just have this general feeling that it wasn't... a big enough deal.

I want there to be smaller words that mean the same thing. I want to be able to say I was "child treated-mean-sometimes" and "sexually not-so-niced." It would let me talk about my experiences without sounding all dramatic, without making myself out to be some sort of victim, without diluting the horrors experienced by people who went through this stuff for real. It would be so convenient.

It would be really fucking convenient for child treat-meaners and sexual not-nicers too.

Looking at the comments for the post I wrote on why victims stay with their abusers, by far the one most commonly mentioned in comments was #19: "It's not that bad."

This is something the abuser will encourage, of course. I know it sounds ridiculous to take your abuser's word on whether they're abusing you, but you don't have that kind of perspective when you're in the middle of it and you don't call them "my abuser." My mother told me that calling her discipline "abuse" was wrong and hurtful, and I didn't think "maybe she's trying to cover her ass" or "maybe she doesn't know it herself"; I thought "oh my gosh, I don't want to be a wrong hurtful person, that was not abuse."

It's also something bystanders will encourage, because they don't want to have to deal with what it would mean if you had been For Real Big Deal abused. Cops downplay because they don't want to make an entire investigation into something that probably wouldn't lead to a conviction anyway. Social services downplay because putting a kid in foster care or adult in a shelter is expensive and difficult and often causes huge damage in its own right. Friends downplay because they don't want to have to confront the abuser or live with the knowledge that they're ignoring abuse. Fellow survivors downplay because they're downplaying their own experiences. And everyone downplays just because they don't want to live in the kind of world where abuse is happening right in front of them, in their own town, among nice folks who mow their lawn and volunteer at the PTA bake sale, and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it.

And why do you downplay yourself? For all of the reasons above, plus... a weird sense of humility, I think. As if it would be somehow self-aggrandizing to call yourself a survivor of abuse. And if there's one thing every long-term abuse victim gets taught by their abuser, it's that they mustn't think too much of themselves--in fact, it would be most polite and considerate if they went ahead and hated themselves.

There's also the issue of our cultural stereotype images of abuse. It's mostly unspoken, but there's a very specific and narrow definition of abuse in most people's minds--striking with a closed fist or a weapon, hard enough to cause lasting marks, multiple times. When abuse doesn't involve violence, or involves very little, it's hard to label. Or when the "good times" aren't just non-painful but very good--my mother threw me lavish parties and took me on fancy vacations, and how the hell do you say a sentence like "when my abuser took me to Cancún"? (Although she did hit me while we were there--she wanted me to show off my Spanish to an English-speaking cabdriver, and when I balked out of embarrassment, she hit me in the face. Still, I also did a good share of tanning and boogieboarding in this abusive situation.) Or simply when your abuser is human. We're so invested in the idea of the rapist as filthy creeper or chortling fratboy that it's hard to call Benny a rapist when he was a friendly, geeky guy who could be silly and sympathetic. Abuse is almost never a simple case of a monster being monstrous, and that makes it hard to define when you've only heard about monsters.

Finally, I think a lot of people in abusive situations have a strange sense that they're an exception, even if they're not sure why. Just a sense that our family couldn't possibly be like that, because... because it's our family. I joked to the older guy who slept with me when I was fifteen, "ha ha, technically this is statutory rape, can you imagine," and it was a joke because obviously it wasn't statutory rape in our case. When my mother ripped my sister's clothes off and threatened to march her outside naked for not drinking her milk (my sister is lactose intolerant), I thought "wow, this is the sort of thing that would seem like abuse if you didn't understand how it's different for us."

I don't think everything unpleasant is abuse, of course. People fight and even if it's unpleasant it isn't abuse; people have crappy relationships that aren't abusive ones. How do I define abuse? I don't think abuse can be defined in terms of actions. Abuse is an emotional dynamic that manifests in a variety of actions--the same physical actions that might be far less harmful outside an abusive relationship. I don't think my mother was abusive because she hit me. I think she was abusive because she taught me I was bad inside. I think she was abusive because she did not want me to have an existence outside her. I think she was abusive because she systematically attacked my sense that I was a person and deserved to be treated like a person; the fact that she slapped me a couple times in the process is, honestly, barely relevant.

With sexual assault, it's more clear-cut. If you didn't want something sexual done to you, and they knew this and did it anyway, it was sexual assault. (It gets fuzzier if you can't be certain that they knew, but not much; if a reasonable person with a reasonable sense of context and nonverbal communication would have picked up that you didn't want it, I think you can go ahead and call that assault.)

So.

1) Go ahead and call it abuse. Call it assault. Call it rape. If you've done a whole lot of waffling about your experience with not-very-niceness, it probably was whatever you don't want to call it. It'll give you a sense of legitimacy when you feel hurt or angry. It'll give you, and the people you disclose to, a cue to take your experiences and their impact on your life seriously. It doesn't "cheapen" anything--do you think it's wrong to call influenza "illness" because really ill people have cancer oh my god don't cheapen the I-word like that? And it'll stop you doubting or devaluing your own emotions. If you survived something painful, you're a survivor, and it's not drama but simple fact to say "I'm a survivor."

2) The label isn't the most important thing. If I can only say to myself that I'm recovering from not-very-niceness, at least I'm recovering from it. If I could only say that I left Benny because he was kind-of-disrespectful-sometimes, at least I left him. While I think it's helpful to label your situation, you can still take appropriate action without doing so. Getting out and getting better matter more than whatever words you use or don't use.

3) One consequence of expanding your definition of "abuse" beyond A Child Called It stuff: you'll realize that not every abuser can be punished. It's no use advocating for emotional abusers, or she-never-said-no rapists, to all be locked up and the key thrown away. There's no law providing for that--there can't be a law, these things are so complicated and emotional--and there's no brute-force fix for it. I won't be friends with an abuser and I'll try to give their victim any assistance I can without putting them at further risk, but I can't be Batman. The most painful part of recognizing non-mega-violent abuse is that sometimes you see it and you just have to let it keep going on, not because it isn't abuse but because most abuse is beyond the reach of simplistic "just throw the monsters in Monster Jail" solutions.

This is a big grim post. I want to end this on a good note. And that note, for me, is simply waking up in the morning and knowing that I'm safe. It's yawning and stretching and looking up at the ceiling and thinking "Nobody will hurt me today." It's talking with Rowdy and knowing that I don't have to worry about saying something that will make him explode, because he does not explode and exploding is not a part of my life anymore. It's getting a parking ticket and realizing that the punishment is "now I have to pay the ticket," not "now I'm in a world of shit." It's saying "don't touch me like that" and having Rowdy immediately stop touching me like that. It's being free to live, free to make mistakes, free to make my own decisions even if they're silly ones, free to eat ice cream for breakfast (which isn't that appealing once you get over the novelty), free to set boundaries, free to speak honestly.

The best part about living through abuse--er, the only good part, really--is all the living you get to do afterwards.

"Is this spot taken?"

2011-09-03T01:27:00.013-04:00

Far too often, patients at the ER try to hit on me. (If you are picturing someone cute and polite who is in the ER for reasons that have nothing to do with being in a drunken bottle fight, then you are picturing the exact opposite of the sort of person who does this.) And most of the time, they do it in the format: "Gosh, ain't you a little sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Sometimes, for extra comedy/discouragement value, I'll say "yes, and he's really mean." This is a straight up lie, as Rowdy is barely mean enough to use sternly worded I-statements with a fly. (And the implications here are horrifying; am I suggesting that Rowdy would beat someone up for having consensual sex with me, or that only his "meanness" protects me from sexual assault?)

So the real answer is: "Yes, and he's not mean at all, but Roger The 250-Pound Security Guard sure is. If you try something, guess which one I'm going to call?"

Stupid Human Tricks.

2011-08-31T00:03:00.001-04:00

The other night, I was topless and locked in a cage at a party.

Funny thing is, it wasn't very sexy. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It was relaxing, being curled up in an enclosed space. It was playful, hanging on the bars and acting like an animal. It was sociable, being in an area where people could come by and chat, have a seat on my cage and say hey. And, not to deny the kinkiness of it all, it was also a submissive experience having my freedom of movement cut off and being okay with that.

But hot? No. My undies were dry, my body relaxed, my mind not on sex. It was nothing to masturbate over, nothing to get you breathing heavy. It was just good clean fun.

Kink, for me, divides into two very distinct types. There's kink as a rollercoaster, a wild escape from the world and from the bounds of sensation itself, a feeling that has me screaming and groaning and losing my grip on reality and flying through endorphins and pleasure and agony. And then there's kink as a Stupid Human Trick.

It's obviously a bit context-dependent and idiosyncratic what qualifies as what, but for me, flogging is a rollercoaster; fireplay is a Stupid Human Trick. Punching is a rollercoaster; elaborate ropework is a Stupid Human Trick. Biting is a rollercoaster; fisting is, though a very intense sensation, not an intensely kinky one for me, and thus a Stupid Human Trick. Being dominated during rough sex is a rollercoaster; being dominated to "go make me a sandwich" is a Stupid Human Trick.

I probably shouldn't say "stupid" human trick, because they're not stupid at all. They're lots of fun. But they're more about "interesting ways to play with bodies and minds" than about being swept away by an all-consuming wave of sexual power. Maybe the clearest difference I could draw is that I think you have to be innately kinky to like rollercoaster kink, but anyone with an open mind can understand the appeal of Stupid Human Tricks kink.

This is of more than academic interest to me. It helps me get a handle on a problem that's been bugging me--namely, why I don't like receiving pain in most BDSM situations, and yet I fantasize and crave about receiving pain. It's not just because I'm hopelessly fickle and inconsistent. It's because there's two very distinct headspaces I associate with kink, and I only enjoy pain in one of them.

It takes a very particular sort of chemistry to get me ready to ride the rollercoaster that is pain. But I'm almost always up for the kind of kink that's more like "hey everybody, check out what I can do!"

The Praises of Phases.

2011-08-27T14:48:00.007-04:00

(Programming note: I live, as many of you are aware, in the Boston suburbs. It's starting to get a trifle stormy up here. If my power or cable are knocked out or my home is damaged, there may be some interruption in your Pervocracy service. As opposed to the usual "I slept late and then I totally had to, like, do a thing" interruptions.)

I've been through some goofy phases in my life. Various things I have been, and am not now:
-Animal rights advocate
-Hardcore liberal
-Hardcore libertarian
-Anime fan
-Fanfic reader and writer
-Horror fiction writer
-Indie filmmaking nerd
-Shapeshifter roleplayer (don't judge me!)
-Observant Jew
-Obnoxiously condescending atheist
-Eclectic pagan (okay, still sort of this)
-Definitely gay
-Definitely straight

Sometimes I worry that things I see as fundamental parts of my identity now--kinkiness and masculinity, in particular, but really all of it--are just phases. I was kinkier a year ago, and girlier. (Then again, I can look at this entry from four years ago and see that this isn't my first time feeling uncomfortable with the trappings of girlness.) But sometimes I worry that even thinking about these things is just my youthful exploration. What if all of my current identity--gender and sexuality and beliefs--turns out to be some goofy phase? What if, ten years from now, I've "grown out" of all this and I'm totally "normal"?

Then I will have had a great ten years. And I'll know so much, too! The awesome thing about going through a lot of phases is that even if the convictions don't stick with you, the knowledge does, so I'm a non-fan who can tell you all about OTPs and Mary Sues and plot bunnies, a non-observant Jew who can tell you which bugs are kosher and what the prayer is for going to the bathroom (you thank God that none of your holes are closed up), and a non-filmmaker who knows what to do if the best boy sends you to the grip truck to get a box of F-stops (punch him). If I'd had one cohesive identity from birth to death, I don't think that my knowledge and experience of the world would be as broad as it is right now.

So "just a phase" shouldn't be used to discount things that were genuine parts of your life and self but didn't happen to be permanent. You were real then and you're real now, no matter how different; and you'll be real tomorrow no matter what changes. I'm embarrassed of some of my past identities, but it's an "I was pretty annoying, huh?" embarrassed, not an "I wasn't expressing the real me" embarrassed. It was the real me.

Is all this just a passing phase? Maybe it is. That's okay. It's real right now.

Four years!

2011-08-24T07:18:00.010-04:00

Today is my fourth bloggiversary! That's 1264 posts spanning across 5 homes, 4 relationships, 3 jobs, a move across the country, and a massive refocus from "my vagina: let me tell you about it" to "my vagina: it is a tool for liberation." Also, 43 issues of Cosmo.

I'm looking back at my archives from the very beginning, and it strikes me, to the point of cringing, just how much I've changed. Changing minds is something I wonder about a lot--sometimes I worry it can't be done at all, that people who are now assholes will be forever assholes.

So it's good to see that I used to be an asshole. Not a complete one, but I used to be a very different person, and I learned and changed. There was no one moment where someone said something to me that made me go "holy shit, I've been wrong all along, and I must change everything!" Instead, it was water dripping on a stone; over time, though I often looked very resistant, I was changing bit by little bit until I'm so different I don't feel like the early entries are my own voice any more. (And not just because I used to throw out "lame, retarded, crazy" insults like they were candy. Sorry about that.)

I mean, look at this asshole:
I feel like sexuality has no legitimacy unless you're hot. If you're hot it's sexy, if you're ugly it's just ridiculous.
Sure, she admits that she's voicing her own insecurities, but those insecurities are leaking out into judgement of everybody on some completely unspoken beauty standard, and people who don't meet that... aren't allowed to be sexual? Christ, past-Holly.

Or, oh jeez, what was she thinking?
There's a well-known sex/BDSM club with a relatively low skeeve factor in town and I've visited a couple times. I suppose I should join but I just never make the commitment. Partly because the median age is kind of "hi there, dad," but partly because I don't want a community. I like being a little furtive, a little unhealthy, a little freaky. Nothing ruins the illusion of being an outlaw like going to a "spanking enthusiasts social."
Not only is she being incredibly snobby about age (and not even correct about the demographics, as it turns out), but she's so dedicated to feeling like an "outlaw" that she won't deign to talk to her own community and get actual friends and allies who understand what she's doing. Is her little fantasy really more important than learning anything or connecting to anybody? Cripes.

And then there's this post where she really gets going:
Call me a rich white het cis privilegebunny, but I don't feel very oppressed. Sometimes insulted, sometimes worried, sometimes concerned for the oppression of people in other places, but in my own life I just don't feel the boot on my neck. At work, at school, socially, nobody acts like I'm less than human or tries to enforce the Patriarchy on me directly. For me, in my daily life, I don't feel like being female is difficult or painful.
I still have my issues with the concept of "privilege," but I don't just disdainfully make fun of it and then deny that there's any oppression of women as well. I mean, we've got the vote and everything, right? What more could you need once they let you vote?

Overall, though, there's less in the old entries that's "asshole," and more that's just "ouch":
Sometimes I think that if I were strong enough to say "I'm not seeing you unless you treat me well, and I'm not fucking you unless you treat me like a goddamn princess," my relationships would go a lot better. But the problem is that I'm so damn happy to be seeing/fucking the guys at all, I can't stand to withhold it for any reason.
It's incredibly clear that she knew from the beginning that Benny was treating her horribly. I thought there was a "honeymoon," some sort of time when the relationship was going well, but there really wasn't. The first entries about him make it clear that he's a huge jerk but at least he'll deign to fuck her. That she stuck with him for years until he actually assaulted her is... a major source of shame for me and frankly one of the reasons I'm hesitant to talk much about it. I don't think she "should have seen it coming"--who does?--but I think she should have long since dumped him for all the other reasons.

I can't believe she went and just threw this in as an embarrassed little parenthetical (well, I can, but I feel terrible for her):
(Benny, always happy to be on the worse side of any comparison, once actually fucked me against a "no," and not in scene or anything--we were just hanging out naked in bed and he got on me and I wasn't really ready and said so and he started anyway. Again, it was mere moments until things got sorted out, but... I could swear I was audible the first time, goddammit.)
Holy shit, past-Holly.

I'm not here to lick the wounds of my past. I'm here to marvel at just how much growth and change and learning is possible. I'm here because what I said here was my belief and no longer is:
I've been a little wary of feminism, because my initial exposure was way too academic and way too unrealistic. No, I don't feel that my life is unbearably suffused with phallic energy, and no, I don't believe that the world used to be a utopian matriarchy, and no, I don't think that having sex with boys--including nasty filthy sex, including sex on camera--is betraying the Sisters.
So I stand as living proof that people aren't lost causes if they don't agree with you, and they aren't lost causes if you try to teach them and they spit it back at you. Change is something that happens on a person's own schedule and not on yours, and often when they do change you won't even hear about it, but it happens. People really can learn.

I hope that what I'm writing now will embarrass the hell out of me in another four years.

Feels good.

2011-08-23T10:21:00.005-04:00

When we had D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse something something don't do it kids) at my elementary school, they talked about reasons kids might start doing drugs: peer pressure, low self-esteem, media glamorization, dealers getting you hooked. There was one glaring, obvious omission from that list and from every other discussion in D.A.R.E. - drugs get you high.

Drugs, at least all the ones I've tried, feel good. Alcohol helps you laugh and socialize more easily. Cigarettes simultaneously wake you up and calm you down. Amphetamines make you euphoric and energetic (and skinny). Opiates make you utterly relax and feel like all is right with the world. Marijuana makes you think that you're really smart and deep and insightful, and so is everyone else here, oh my god we are like so connected you know right now and we're like connected to the Earth too you know, maybe connection itself is what connects us, whoa.

Obviously, I'm not saying to do drugs. Everything listed above comes with catch-22s ranging from "you should do it with caution and infrequently" to "you could seriously die." But I'm acknowledging that the temptation is real--that although they're not good for you, even dangerous drugs (maybe especially those) feel good. Because you just look like a liar who can't face up to the obvious if you don't admit that. The conversation on pros and cons is hopelessly stifled if you can't be honest about the pros.

When I had my first sex ed class, they told me that the man would get an erection and put it in the woman's vagina. (They did not tell me about other configurations, which is kind of a shame considering how much those other configurations have become a part of my life. It's like taking an Auto Shop class that has a moral stance against any discussion of the radiator.) What they didn't tell me was why people would do such a thing. To have kids, okay, and... peer pressure? Low self-esteem? Media glamorization? Dealers?

By the time sex ed rolled around again, I'd gone through puberty. (And gotten an Internet connection.) I understood quite well now. And I also understood that the teacher, being post-pubescent and married herself, probably was also familiar with those funny feelings that make you want to do the baby thing. And yet those funny feelings didn't come up at all in sex ed class this time either. In a room full of people who more or less all knew full well what it feels like to have a boner or get wet or masturbate or have a wet dream, we spent an entire semester pretending to wonder why people would do such a thing. Peer pressure, perhaps...

This stalwart denial of the bleeding obvious is still following me around as an adult. Almost every discussion about sex--even the ones by the "good guys"--seems to footnote pleasure if it doesn't ignore it altogether. We can talk about freedom and safety, but we rarely get direct about what exactly we want to be free and safe to do, and why it matters so much to us. Why am I kinky, why am I poly, why am I slutty, why do I support sexual diversity and self-expression, why do I think and write and talk about sex all the time?

Gosh. Peer pressure?

"No means no."

2011-08-20T18:21:00.001-04:00

[Possible trigger warning for sexual assault]

When I had my first sexual encounter, he didn't ask. We were just friends and we were hanging out in his basement watching movies, and then he put his arm around me and I didn't object, and then he put his hand on my breast and I didn't object, and then he started rubbing my vulva and I didn't object.

I'm making that sound worse than it was. I didn't object because I had a total crush on him and it felt great and I was happy and excited this was happening. But I didn't say any of that--I was 15 and extremely socially awkward and had absolutely no idea of how to respond to sexuality, so I was completely silent and frozen. Silent, frozen, and happy, as it turned out. But he had no way of knowing that. All he knew was that I didn't stop him.

Would he have stopped if I said "no"? Almost certainly. But... almost certainly. Some other factors to bear in mind: I was at his house, which was not close to any bus route and was about ten miles from my home. We were alone in the house. He was much bigger, stronger, and older than me. He owned weapons. He was more or less my only friend at that time in my life. And he was not someone who could maturely talk through conflict--I never saw him get violent or threaten violence, but he tended to go to direct to TantrumVille without stopping in CommunicationTowne.

I want to stress again that I just liked having my pussy stroked; none of this was running through my head at the time. But I wish it had been running through his. Because if I had been doing the rape math in my head, if I had been going along with it out of fear or obligation, he wouldn't have known. He didn't rape me--but it would have looked exactly the same to him if he had.

That's the problem with "no means no." There's a lot of reasons someone might not say "no," and being into the sex is only one of them.

Is it "really" rape if you don't know the person isn't consenting? Probably not legally, but in terms of the effect on the person who's being used sexually while they're paralyzed with fear, might as well be. Accidentally shooting someone isn't murder but it leaves them just as dead.

Anyway, this question ought to be irrelevant. Whether fucking someone who doesn't want it but doesn't object is rape or not, it's crappy and it's avoidable. It's not like good sex ever comes out of a situation where one partner is silent and immobile.

There's a little more finesse than just asking--you need to ask in a way that makes it clear "no" is an acceptable answer, and be sensitive to the difference between "...okay" and "OH YES"--but even without finesse, just asking makes 90% of the difference.

I know why he didn't ask. He didn't ask because he thought I might say "no." But this doesn't mean that he wanted to rape me. What it means is that he was afraid I was in some sort of strange, precarious mental state in which I would have to say "no" if I was asked, even though I really did want it, but once I had said "no" he couldn't do it.

Unfortunately, this mental state does exist--although far less often than people think, really--and I lay the blame for that squarely on slut-shaming culture and the myth of "spontaneous" romance. I lay it on every romantic drama where one character forces a kiss on another but it's okay because it was the kiss of true love and they understand as soon as they get into the kiss. I lay it on every teen sex comedy where the girl who says "let's fuck, baby" is gross-out comic relief and the girl who says "ooh, I shouldn't" is the real sexy one. I lay it on every girl who thought it was coy to say "no" when she meant "yes" and every guy who told the whole school that his date said "yes" too quickly. I even lay some of the blame on Cosmo and all the times it describes sex as something that spontaneously breaks out when the mood is right, like laughter or a bad case of the contagious yawns.

Until "yes" means "yes, sex would be lovely right now" and not "yes, I am an icky slut with no sense of romance," it's going to be hard to live in a world where only yes means yes.

But it's not all down to society. In my personal world, yes means yes fully and right now--Rowdy and I still ask before we fuck and we still take nos gracefully and unenthusiastic yeses with "we can just cuddle and that would be fine," and enjoy the enthusiastic yeses that much for it. I haven't fixed Western culture yet, but I've fixed my bedroom, and that's a start. If enough people can just say that, maybe the culture can change a little after all.

Cosmocking: September '11!

2011-08-19T13:00:00.004-04:00

Red cover! Also a white cover and a... nother white cover! They are all of Dianna Agron in different outfits! One is "elegant sexy," one is "wild sexy," and one is "badass sexy"! You're supposed to pick your favorite! So that's exciting! "What Your Va-jay-jay is Dying to Tell You!" Why is it okay to say this and not "vagina"? I can understand not saying "pussy" or "cunt" on the cover, but I think "va-jay-jay" is actually ruder than vagina! And it is all the same damn body part anyway! "The Smile That Gets You What You Want!" I would prefer to be the person getting smiled at since that seems like the position with the real power if you think about it!

Talk Dirty To Him
But none of that generic "Oh, right there, that's it" stuff. Instead, describe in detail what you want him to do to you, using specific verbs and anatomy. Guys are action-oriented, so giving him an "assignment" ("Put your ____ in my ____"; "____ that ____ harder") guarantees that he'll stay mentally checked in.
Cosmo really can't get through the simple things without sweeping gender-wide generalizations, can they? I don't know what "action-oriented" even means, though. I guess different from "sensation-oriented"? Which is why dudes hate passive sensory stuff like receiving backrubs and blowjobs.

Also, is there really more than one way to fill in those blanks? I guess there's a few synonyms (and the always-available juvenile option of "Put your anteater in my Velveeta" etc.), but I don't think you can really do much with those beyond some variation on "put your wanger in my cooter" and "slam that ladyflower harder." Fingers, mouths, and asses? Probably not asses.

When I was a teenager, I thought "harder" was just a generic expression of enthusiasm, and didn't realize the guy would take it as an actual instruction to, you know, go harder. We had a few "Oh, harder, harder" and "for chrissakes, I'm going as hard as I can" exchanges before I figured that one out.

White Lies You Should Tell Your Guy
The White Lie: "Nope, I've never done that in bed before either."
The Truth: You totally did that with your ex... a lot.
Why It's Worth It: No guy wants to be reminded that he isn't your first.
But he's not. I get that most guys don't want to hear "my ex did XYZ in bed" all the time, but claiming that I've never done something seems beyond the pale. If I'm dating a guy whose reaction to "I love doing XYZ in bed!" isn't "ooh, let's do that" but "ugh, you slut, I don't want to imagine you having an independent existence before I came along"--I'm dating the wrong guy.

I'm using "XYZ" for flexibility, but I suspect Cosmo's using it because of a lack of imagination. Given the incredibly limited repertoire in this magazine, what could you possibly not have done unless you're a virgin?

Put your nipples on his testicles, I suppose.

[On dating a slacker] Just because a guy lacks a regular paycheck doesn't mean he lacks ambition. It just might not be immediately apparent--a guy who seems to be screwing around on his iPhone may be brainstorming killer apps of his own. A guy who plays Xbox all day might be working out an idea for a video game.
Oh please. I've dated unemployed guys before and not had a problem with it--if he's an interesting person and fun to be around, where he gets his money is his problem--but I didn't delude myself. I'd rather date a guy who said "yeah, I'm pretty much a big slacker right now" than one who said "honey, I'm hard at work researching trends in gaming." (For one thing, if that's the case, he should be doing more reading and writing about gaming than actual gaming.) The first guy is playing Xbox all day; the second guy is playing Xbox all day and he's full of shit.

I like it when my guy touches my clitoris during sex, but is it too much "work" for him?
Really? Oh, come on. To be fair, the A to this Q says pretty much the same thing, but the idea that someone (even a presumably fictional someone) was so self-effacing she didn't want to burden her partner with wiggling his finger a little is... kinda horrifying.

I'm not much of a clit person, but if getting me off during sex is too much "work," then having sex with you is, well, work, and I'd expect to be paid market rates.

Q: How many times a week do men like to have sex?
A: Live-in GF: four or five. GF we don't live with: five or six.
...what?

I guess there's some implication here that living with someone makes you not lust for each other anymore (because the only attractive partner is a mysterious sultry stranger who's also a virgin, and every deviation from that takes the sexometer down just a little more), but how does this make sense logistically? Seems like there's a lot more opportunities when you're sharing a bed every night.

Q: How do we know if you're having sex or making love?
A: If the guy is focusing a lot on your pleasure, it's probably more than "just" sex to him.
Then I never, ever want to have "just" sex. Sort of weird to hear that I made love with that dude off craigslist, though.

Famous Bad Boys:
James Dean, Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen, Mick Jagger, Han Solo, Matt Dillon, Johnny Depp
Uh... Cosmo? I don't know how to break this to you, but... Han Solo isn't a real person.

I know, I know, it broke my heart too when I found out.

You can thank--or blame--our cavewoman ancestors for [women's supposed attraction to "bad boys"]. They noticed that these types would do whatever it took to protect them from danger and put mammoth burgers on the table, even if it meant pissing off other cavemen.
I've actually been skipping over "cavemen" (and "neurotransmitters") in this issue because I feel like I've pounded those issues into the ground, but for fuck's sake.

First of all, pissing off other people in your tribe probably created way, way more danger than any external threat possibly could.

Secondly, "mammoth burgers" were probably a rarity in most climates compared to fruits and seeds and boring ol' root vegetables.

And thirdly, if he's doing these things at the expense of other people in your tribe, he's probably being not just bad but evil, and my longtime experience with "he's such a bad person, but he's a total sweetie to me" types is that they just haven't been evil to you yet. As soon as you displease them--and in any lasting relationship, you will--they'll treat you just like any other person who displeased them.

Are Some Guys Just Not Wired to Marry?
[...]Maybe not, according to a new study from Sweden's Karolinska Institute. Researchers discovered that there's a particular gene variant linked to men who resist marriage.
This is one of the rare cases where Cosmo gives enough detail to find the specific study they're talking about. And here it is! (Or at least here's a press release that's one fewer game of "Telephone" away from the actual study.)

Genetic variation in the vasopressin receptor 1a gene (AVPR1A) associates with pair-bonding behavior in humans

"The team found that men who carry one or two copies of a variant of this gene allele 334 often behave differently in relationships than men who lack this gene variant.
The incidence of allele 334 was statistically linked to how strong a bond a man felt he had with his partner. Men who had two copies of allele 334 were also twice as likely to have had a marital or relational crisis in the past year than those who lacked the gene variant."

So while Cosmo's sort of in the ballparkish region of what the study actually said (and to be honest, I'm impressed), "ballparkish" hardly seems like justification for writing a full-page article on how some men just don't have the magic marriage gene.

Also, all this has me wondering if women, too, could have genes! Some day perhaps science will address this Medical Mystery. I guess it's just taken for granted that women all want to get married, because, you know, women.

A recent University of Michigan study found that whenever people washed their hands after making a decision, they were less likely to second-guess the choice they had already made than those who skipped sudsing up did.
Uh... wow. Fascinating idea for a study, Professor Pilate.

You want to.. make a tough decision
The trick: Hold a heavy object, like a paperweight.
You want to... figure out the next step in your career/love life/etc.
The trick: Lean your upper body forward.
Presented without commentary. Oh Cosmo.

The Habit: Leaving the lights on all the time
The Cost: $250/year
What You Could Have Bought: Seven digital cameras
I've already taken Cosmo to task for their "instead of spending money on something stupid, spend money on something stupid!" theory of household budgeting, so I'll just ask... who buys a $35 digital camera? Isn't that going to be worse than the one on your phone?

(In the incredibly unlikely event that a Cosmo reader doesn't already have a cameraphone, you can get one for $250. Or, you know, a decent camera.)

Your new guy wants to show you off to his posse at an upcoming house party. What do you wear?
A numbered pinny and judging clipboard?

A. A slinky bandage dress that lets you flaunt your sick bod
B. Skinny jeans, a tank top, and ankle boots
C. The sexy mini your man loves you in plus a trendy tee
The correct answer is C. If it's A you're clearly too slutty and if it's B you're clearly too prudish.

I'm really starting to wish this slut/prude stuff came with diagrams. If you want to slut-shame, fine*, but at least tell me what a slut is! If dressing like a slut is so terrible, can we establish some universal standard of what that even looks like? It's irrational enough to say "these are the good clothes and these are the naughty clothes," but when you extend that to "you mustn't wear naughty clothes and you should just know which those are," you completely break my brain.

I guess I'll go to the party wearing my usual party outfit: shorts or underpants and my own exceedingly comfortable skin. See, no "slutty" clothes at all!

...unless my shorts are a little too short, I guess, or my underpants are black or lacy or something. That could look sort of slutty.

*not actually fine

Pink just isn't my color.

2011-08-17T22:40:00.007-04:00

A question I've been mulling over: Is the reason feminine things make me uncomfortable because I'm unfeminine, or because feminine things suck?

Makeup, for a forinstance. Am I annoyed by it because I don't like the way it makes me look and feel? Or is it a legitimate problem that women are expected to spend significant amounts of time and money masking their faces, often with an underlying message that their real face isn't good enough?

Do I like wearing men's clothes because they're generally more comfortable, practical, and dignified--or because I like dressing up in men's clothes?

Did I hate pink things and dolls as a child because boy's toys were more interesting and more empowering, or because I wanted to play like a boy?

Did I idolize (and dress up as) male superheroes and action heroes because they got all the best parts, or because they were hypermasculine?

Am I bothered by being called a "girl" because it's infantilizing, or because I don't want to be a girl?

I don't like being treated like a woman. But sometimes I don't see how anyone would like being treated like a woman, the way we treat women.

I think that it's some from column A, some from column B. Which is why I'm a feminist, and also, unrelatedly, unfeminine. I haven't yet decided on a label for my unfemininity--for right now, let's just go with "unfeminine woman."

(I also realize that my inability to distinguish has ticked off some happily-feminine people, probably even in this very post, and I'm sorry about that.)

Or... here are some things that I really haven't confessed to anyone, even Rowdy, but I guess I'll just have out with them. I've been, at home or out when I wouldn't run into anyone I know, binding my chest and packing. Just to see what it was like? And what it was like was... kinda gleeful. It made me happy. Some of that was just "I'm doing a different and unusual thing!" happiness, which I certainly do get. I don't know if it all was.

I know what my name would have been, if I were born male. I really like it.

Sometimes I pee standing up.

I don't know what this means, if anything. I'm really, really hesitant to say "hey everybody, I'm a guy now!", for about a million reasons. I don't feel strongly, certainly male. Although I'd love it if my overall body shape was more masculine--and in fact I lift weights partly for this reason--I'm fairly happy with my vagina. I've had some masculine tendencies for a long time, but this hardcore gender uncertainty is a relatively recent thing for me. And I sort of feel like I'd be trivializing trans people by taking myself super seriously when this is more like "a thing I've been fucking around with lately" than "a thing I have to do."

I keep wishing there was some kind of test you could take to determine your gender, but then I keep thinking that if I need a test and don't just know, it must not be that big a deal to me. (Also, I found several such tests, and they were all like "do you like pink and flowers, or do you like blue and trucks?" See the first half of this post...)

So... "unfeminine woman." At least for now. Holly, she, her, and retaining the ability to thunder at Cosmo, "Why, I'm a woman, and I never..."

I'm a woman, and uncomfortable with a lot of the crap that comes with that, and some of that's me, and some of that's the crap.

I've gotten through this whole post without really facing the question of what "feminine" or "woman" even mean, but that's just because I don't have any freaking idea.

Relationship Ed.

2011-08-15T11:22:00.003-04:00

I'm glad schools teach Sex Ed, even if they do make an awful mess of it; knowing how your sexy parts work, what risks sex carries, and how to use contraception are important life skills. They're skills the kids may need right away, or may not need until they're married, but either way, they're safer and better prepared.

But one of the things I'm realizing lately is that for all the drama and angst and danger it can entail, sex is easy. Love is hard. So here's a message I wish kids got:

"Our society sends a lot of confusing messages about love, and you may feel pressured to fall in love. And that's a natural urge; it's okay. But you have to be careful. Make sure you're ready for love. Make sure you're doing it with the right person, and for the right reasons. And above all else, make sure you're being safe."

Of course, I would never advocate abstinence-only Relationship Ed. So here's some other things I'd like to see on the curriculum:

-The different types of relationships that you can have. This would include mention of sexual orientation, but wouldn't mainly be about that. It would be about the spectrum from a casual date to a lifelong love commitment, and the many, many options in between. We'd talk about how one relationship script--even an "enlightened" one, Science Club members, I'm on to you--can never work for everybody and there is no "ideal" relationship.

-How to negotiate, communicate, and argue with your partner. The biggest focus here would be on the difference between "an argument" and "a fight." You know the way you talk to a guy talking shit about your mom, or the way you talk to a customer service agent who's not giving you what you want, or the way you talk to a cop who's pulling you over? None of these are how you talk to your partner when you disagree.

-How to identify a destructive relationship. This would include a lot of discussion about abusive relationship dynamics, but not only that; it would also go through the warning signs of a relationship that's turning to crap or ruining your life even if there's no abuse involved. If it was me teaching the class, I don't think I could get through this unit without a screening of Twilight.

-How to not abuse someone. "Don't hit them" would be mentioned but wouldn't be the focus. The focus would be on "don't try to control them." We'd talk about the fears relationships can stir up--fear of cheating, fear of losing their respect, fear of losing the relationship--and appropriate and inappropriate responses to these fears.

-How to end a relationship. Students would be given a script for ending a relationship peacefully, if not painlessly; for separating from someone even though they don't hate them. Maybe more than anything, they'd be told that it's normal and okay for a relationship to end, and that a relationship can be meaningful even though it's temporary.

-"It's okay to be single." This wouldn't be pushing singledom, but it would be destigmatizing it. Now, class, let's talk about some bad stereotypes of people who are single, and why those are wrong. Let's talk about how a romantic relationship can be a good thing, but it can never complete you. Let's talk about how whether you're a "real" man or woman is defined by you, and not by the relationships you have. Let's talk about why--especially at your young age, but really any time--it's better to be single than to be in a relationship just for the sake of being in a relationship.

These are all crucial skills, yet they're ones that most people have to learn by trial and error, from the dubious and pseudoscience-ridden mess of self-help books and websites, or when they're already in therapy. If we really want to prepare kids for the adult world of sex, dating, and even marriage, teaching them how to put on a condom is the very tip of the iceberg. Teaching them how to say "I don't agree with you and I'm not changing my mind, but I still love you"--now that's a life skill.

This isn't just fuzzy stuff. It's public health. Good relationship ed could cut down massively on teen pregnancy, STI transmission, intimate partner violence, suicide, and sexual assault. Knowing how to have a respectful relationship isn't just about self-help. It can save lives.

Sinsational!

2011-08-11T13:57:00.000-04:00

When did "sin" become synonymous with sex?

The Bible has a few commandments relating to sex--no adultery, no gay stuff, no fucking sheep, no letting the sheep fuck you, no... oh come on you guys, you can't do that with a sheep either, what's wrong with you--but honestly, it's got more to say about humane treatment of livestock than it does about sex. (And, in the case of sheepfucking, there's some overlap.)

If you open the Bible to a random page, odds are very good the message on it will be one of the following:
1) "God is a really really super important big deal."
2) "Love your neighbor, give to the poor, and be a generally decent person."
3) "Want to hear about Mediterranean political intrigues from 2000 years ago? Course ya do!"

Odds are extremely low it will have anything to do with sex, and lower still that it'll be explicit directions for sexual morality. The Bible's a lot of things, but a sex manual's not one of them.

So why are the "culture wars" between religion (well, Christianity) and secularism in this country almost entirely about sex? Why do the "turn from your sins and follow God" sign-holder guys show up at Gay Pride and not at trade summits? (Or slaughterhouses?) Why are the most religiously divisive issues things like homosexuality, "modesty," marriage, gender roles, and abstinence?

To be honest, I'm not enough of a politics/history/psychology wonk to fully answer that question. But I do know that it lies in politics, history, and psychology, and not in religion. Jesus saved adulterers and prostitutes. He didn't see their sins as some special extra sin that was worse than pride or cruelty or the generally sinful life of any mortal.

And yet in modern American culture, sex is practically the only sin there is. When's the last time a Christian kid got thrown out of the house because they coveted others' possessions or they made fun of a homeless person? When's the last time a Christian lawmaker made hyperbolic, slightly-unhinged-sounding promises to a church group to fight the sin of avarice? When's the last time churches protested a movie because it depicted violence? This attitude has even been sardonically co-opted by the pro-sex folks; strip bars don't have names like "Club Sin" because you can go bear false witness against your neighbor there.

I think a lot of people assume that kinksters and sex-positive folk are all atheists, maybe pagans. The truth is, a lot of us are still in Judeo-Christian traditions. (I've prayed with other kinky Jews.) And more of us would be if those traditions were open to us. I spent several years as an atheist based on feeling, essentially, that religion was all about how you were allowed to fuck. Coming back into spiritual life required a lot of reconstructing it to be about the virtues that I could uphold--only to find out that those were the original virtues all along. I'm still not a good Jew and I don't really intend to be, but I'm a believer in the sacred, and I don't think the sacred gives a good goddamn if I have a little fun with my friends.

The religious hang-up on sex is horrible because it destroys families, because it leads people to hate themselves, and because it drives people away from a religion that otherwise might bring them peace and meaning. Not only does it harm the "sinners" it casts out, but it harms the religions themselves. When you close your church to people who fuck funny, you close your church to people who might strengthen it as a community center, a support network for its members, and a contributor to charity. Faith-based programs do genuinely good work in this country and abroad, and if they directed their energies away from policing sexual "sin," they'd be able to do so much more.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

I don't see a "but it doesn't count if you have dirty sex" anywhere in there.

Condom Failure.

2011-08-09T14:47:00.005-04:00

Here's another interesting statistic from my medical textbooks: the failure rate of condoms in preventing pregnancy is 2% (over a year) with perfect use. It's 10-18% with typical use.

Holy shit! Condoms fail up to 18% of the time! That's pretty bad! I wouldn't get in a car that crashed 18% of the time! Condoms must be pretty crappy birth control!

Well, no. Condoms are 98% effective. The catch lies in the concept of "typical use" as opposed to "perfect use." It makes it sound like "perfect use" is some theoretical expert condom application, where the condom is applied with absolute precision by a team of professional condomifiers in a way that mere "typical" civilians could never replicate.

Nope. All "perfect use" means in the case of condoms is using them every time, and using them for the entire duration of PIV sex. There's a few more catches--you shouldn't reuse condoms, you should throw them away instead of turning them inside out if you put them on wrong the first time, you should use lube but nothing oil-based, and you shouldn't double-bag--but honestly, most of those are statistically minor. The biggest factor in "perfect use" of condoms is actually using them.

So what's "typical use"? Well, if someone says that condoms are their primary method of birth control, but only uses them sometimes, they're counted as a "typical" user. When they get pregnant, they go in that 18%. The number one cause of condom "failure" is not using a condom.

It's sort of amazing to me that people would use condoms only sometimes and expect that to work, but I know from work (we talk about condom use with STI and Pelvic Inflammatory Disease patients) that it's not uncommon. People don't have a condom handy and they go "aw fuck it," boyfriends complain that it doesn't feel as good for them, women try to do a kind of half-baked rhythm method only using condoms when they think they're fertile, people have sex drunk or high and forget about condoms, and some people really just seem to only use them when they feel like it.

In large part, this is an educational problem. We're sending two very dangerous messages in regards to condoms:

1) "Condoms are for dirty sluts." Hell, there's places where condom possession can be used as evidence of prostitution. There's long arguments about whether making condoms available in high schools--or even colleges!--will cause kids to have sex, which would be terrible because sex is dirty. Women's magazines run articles on how a guy will think you're a slut if you open up your bedstand and there's a lot of condoms. Many drugstores keep condoms behind locked doors to add even more awkwardness and embarrassment to the purchase. (I know this is often because of shoplifting, but in practice, it does increase the shame factor.)

When everyone is shamed for using condoms, and women are extra-shamed, then people are less likely to have them around when they have sex, and more likely to go ahead with it anyway.

2) "Condoms fail all the time." This one is enshrined and exaggerated in abstinence-only education, but not limited to it. I've had a doctor tell me that condoms alone aren't "really" birth control. Hell, until I did more reading, I believed this one myself. And of course condoms aren't perfect--but they're a lot better than I thought.

The problem with this one is that it encourages fatalism. If a condom doesn't really help, why bother? Might as well have unprotected sex and take your chances, since you're taking them anyway. Abstinence-only education has been repeatedly shown to discourage condom use, and this is one of the reasons--when they say "condoms don't work," they aren't telling kids "don't have sex, even with a condom." They're telling them "don't have sex with a condom."

In this way (and it affects adults too), the 18% statistic is feeding itself. The more people believe condoms don't work, the more often people who use condoms for birth control won't really use them. The more people feel like condoms are a crapshoot, the more comfortable they'll feel taking real crapshoots.

Condoms are great! They're cheap, completely confidential and anonymous, involve no hormones or other funny chemicals, require no prescription, and they work really really well. All you have to do is use them.

Barnacle Bill.

2011-08-07T11:26:00.005-04:00

When I was in high school, they showed us a slideshow of various sexually transmitted infections. All of the pictures were outrageously gruesome and their sole purpose was to scare us out of having sex. Everything was red and swollen and dripping and crusted and ew--because sex is dirty and if you have sex you'll be dirty, kids! There was one in particular they called "Barnacle Bill." It was a penis covered in warts--warts upon warts upon warts until it didn't look like a penis anymore. Poor Bill was nothing but barnacles. We laughed but we also cringed. "Now who in this class thinks it's a good idea to have sex?"

The other day at work, I was leafing through a dermatology textbook. Right there, somewhere in "Infections and Infestations," was old Barnacle Bill! It was the very same picture. Except this time, it had a caption.

Human papillomavirus in an immunosuppressed patient. Patient suffered from dementia and was unaware of the progress of the infection.

Oh.

That changes the moral of the story a bit, doesn't it? It's no longer a matter of "this is what sluts look like under their slutty pants!" It's more like "sometimes life is cruel for no good reason."

Sometimes life is cruel for no good reason, and then after you're (probably) dead someone uses the most embarrassing picture imaginable of your body to lie to schoolkids and make them associate pleasure with filth.

I'm sorry, Barnacle Bill.

A head cold.

2011-08-05T17:00:00.002-04:00

I have what I will freely admit is very mild and very occasional depression. But it had been hitting me kinda bad the last couple weeks. I started taking antidepressants and now the fog's finally starting to lift.

What helps me the most--both as a person with rather unreliable neurology and as someone who works with psychiatric patients in the ER--is to think of it as a cold. Or if it's chronic and bad, something more like pneumonia. An ordinary physical disease. You can't make a cold go away by recontexualizing it, but if you've been thinking "ugh, it's so gross and inconsiderate of me to cough all the time; why can't I just use a little willpower and decide to not cough?" it helps to know the coughing is a reflex. Likewise, knowing I'm depressed won't make me stop feeling sludgy and miserable, but it'll stop making me thinking that feeling is justified. It'll stop me trying to "snap out of it" and getting frustrated when I can't just decide to be perky. My brain isn't being an asshole; it's coughing.

When I was about 11, I got a wicked case of pertussis. I'd had the shot, but I got it anyway--the vaccine is 85% effective and I was in the lucky 15%. I spent a good six weeks on the couch hacking and wheezing. My sister couldn't stand it. The coughing grossed her out, it kept her up at night, it made her worry she was going to get sick. So she'd scream at me, "Stop coughing! God, just stop it!"

This is what I aspire not to do to the psych patients in the ER, or to the people I know with mental illness. It's not necessarily that I accept their illness; but I accept that it is an illness. When they annoy me or offend me or confuse me, it's not about me. It's not even about them. It's about the fact that telling someone with mania to settle down, or someone with schizophrenia to stop being so weird, is like saying "just stop coughing." It's not just insensitive but totally ineffective to treat a symptom like a choice.

(I also think it's important to never lose sight of the magic phrases "significant distress or impairment" and "danger to self and others." Because these are the things we treat in mental health--when someone is suffering, when they're unable to do their daily tasks of living, or when they are harming or likely to harm themselves or someone else. What we don't treat is being wrong. Someone can be wrong all day long--can think they have five arms and the CIA has put a chip up their butt--and as long as they're okay with their life and getting enough to eat and not hurting anyone, it's really none of our business. The point of mental health care is to promote wellness, not enforce the correct reality. Nobody has the job title Clinical Philosopher.)

The person is separate from the illness--and this doesn't mean that the person is blameless or without agency. Mentally ill people come in all flavors, including being really nice or really rotten people. Their disease has changed their brain, not replaced it. They're able to make choices. But whether to be mentally ill isn't one of those choices.

The best things in life.

2011-08-05T11:14:00.002-04:00

I'm in bed with Rowdy, half-asleep, curled up against his warm skin, his head on my arm and my other hand on his belly, and I can feel his breathing deepen as he falls asleep and softly snores. I untied him before he fell asleep, taking off the thick black rope that had been bound around his chest and shoulders, the rope I'd held while we fucked, at first using it to tease and restrain him and then losing all control and just hanging on as he pounded me into ecstasy.

And I don't want to cheapen this. It's a wonderful feeling--the best feeling--to share physical and emotional joy with someone I love, and I don't want to make it be about anything else. Trying to apply some dry ulterior motive to this, making it all be about economics or competition or gender dynamics or reproductive urges, just feels to me like the ultimate party pooping. Making sex into a rational transaction is the "why go trick-or-treating when you can just buy a bag of candy?" of armchair sociology.

Is this an anti-science, anti-intellectual, "fuckin' magnets, how do they work?" sort of thought? Maybe it is. Maybe it'll advance human knowledge to analyze sexual desire and interaction in ways other than "gosh, sexual desire and interaction are so beautiful." But that knowledge should never take the place of the beauty. If I learn that, say, smell has a place in sexual attraction, I don't want to throw that out because it doesn't fit my personal ideology--but I also don't want to run my fingers through Rowdy's hair and think "really, this is all just about smell." There is still some magic left in it.

Rowdy's skin is smooth and freckled and feels like electricity everywhere it touches me. This isn't something I won. This isn't something I bought. This isn't the mindless, joyless enactment of hormonal urges or sexual politics. This is just awesome.

OMG!

2011-08-04T15:19:00.004-04:00

I haven't mentioned this on the blog before, but I was in the process of applying to nursing school for the last couple months. It was iffy, because my work experience is great but my academics are a bit patchy.

I just got in.

PERVOCRACY: CONFESSIONS OF A SEXY NURSE.

This ass is (not) money.

2011-08-01T19:22:00.006-04:00

On my list of Things That Seriously Need To Stop, somewhere below "violence" and "hatred" but well above "having the Ducktales theme in my head, whooo-ooo," are conversations in which attractiveness is described as the female equivalent of wealth. It's a concept formally described as "erotic capital", the "economy of sex", and various other euphemisms for "whoreswhoreswhores."

For starters, the entire concept of a "female equivalent" gets my hackles up to begin with. I prefer to think that the female equivalent of a suit and tie is a suit and tie, the female equivalent of working on your car is working on your car, and the female equivalent of money is money. To say--about almost anything--"it's not the same, but it's the lady version!" is a cop-out, a way to assign fixed gender roles while pretending it's "fair." Equivalence is the enemy of actual equality.

This is a particularly evil equivalence, though. In fact, it's so evil that it contains almost all of sexism folded up inside it. Let's see, we've got:
-"Women are only useful for their bodies."
-"Women are only important as they relate to men."
-"Women don't need/deserve their own money."
-"Women's bodies are a product with monetary value."
-"Women are never really attracted to or aroused by men."
-"Women's beauty can be objectively judged."
-"Women are worthless if they're ugly."

and a bonus dish of:
-"Men's bodies can't be sexy, and men's personalities can't be lovable."
-"Men are all johns."
-"Men can't think straight when they're turned on."
-"Men are worthless if they're poor."

and an extra bonus dish of:
-"Everyone's heterosexual, right?"

and an extra extra extra bonus dish of:
-"Love? Attraction? Companionship? Do not confuse me with your strange Earth emotions!"

But the biggest problem is liquidity. Financial wealth almost always includes some very liquid assets--ones that you can turn into dollars, and then into groceries or rent or toy dinosaurs, today and at market value.

A woman's purported "assets," on the other hand, are extremely illiquid. (And, in many people's opinions, rapidly depreciating.) There may be a ready "market," but making the sale is... well, it's so unlike making a sale that the metaphor falls to complete pieces around here. The options are:

1) Prostitution. Illegal, stigmatized, sometimes dangerous, and not really that well-paying. To develop a prostitution business that brings in an amount comparable to a "successful" ordinary job, you have to be a pretty good businessperson, schmoozer, and self-promoter--at which point you're profiting from those skills more than you are from your raw attractiveness.

2) Dating or marrying a rich guy. This can get you money--but unless you divorce him and you do very well in court, it's not really your money. The nice house you live in isn't your house and ultimately you're only there at his pleasure. You have luxury, but not power.

3) Modeling or acting. These are both heavily skill-dependent and crapshoots, and there's only room for like a hundred women to be really successful in each field. Lots of extremely beautiful models and actresses are living on ramen.

If any of these sound as easy, straightforward, and reliable as going to the ATM, then I guess a woman's beauty really is her wealth.

Otherwise... sorry, sexists, but we do need money when we look like that, honey.

My kinky world.

2011-07-31T14:30:00.001-04:00

With only a few sharply-delineated exceptions, I live in a sexy little bubble. There is not a single friend I see regularly who isn't kinky and pretty firmly entrenched in the sex-positive, enthusiastic-consent, gender-liberated, social-justice-for-people-who-fuck-funny mindset. I spend a lot of my time in an apartment where all the roommates are kinky, I go to parties where everyone is kinky; hell, I play board games where everyone around the table is kinky. If I knitted, I'm sure I would be in a kinky knitting circle. It's a god damn way of life.

The funny thing is, it's gotten to the point where I have a bit of culture shock in the real world. When I go to work or talk to my family, the social rules are different--and not just in the "whether it's okay to talk about your cooter" sense, but in the entire way people interact. The unkinky world is simultaneously more reserved and less polite, if that makes sense; there's more concern about being obscene and less about being intrusive. (Also, I think my coworkers don't understand why I jump three feet when they casually lay a friendly arm across my shoulders.) They talk a lot about "men do doobidy do, women do daddidy dah" and I always grit my teeth a little, because I suspect that my own thoughts on gender would be just as annoying to them. I don't want to lay all this on "I'm so much more enlightened;" in many ways, I'm just acclimated to a different set of social expectations.

I'm glad to be a part of the kink community, although in many ways, I could get the same benefits from being part of the Albanian-American community, or perhaps an Elks Lodge. It's a circle of closely interconnected friends who meet regularly, include each other in their social events, and have just a little more warm feelings and trust for "one of ours" than we do for "an outsider." The group, while by no means a fair demographic sample, has some people from just about every walk of life. There's little sub-cliques and people who are "big fish in a small pond" types and people on the fringes of the group. We don't all like each other, but we definitely know each other. And even with all the intra-group gossip and grudges and micro-wars, that's a warm happy thing.

Really, there's only one major downside to the whole kink community thing: If you're an Elk, you can tell people about it. (Although, in fairness, if you're an elk, you cannot.) The particular warm happy community I belong to is one that's considered obscene by a lot of outsiders and dangerous by quite a few. So when I try to say "I'm a member of a lovely group of friends," what comes out sounds more like "I'm sexually aroused by human suffering." For good and ill, this makes the kink community even more insular, because there's a lot of things--things as big as our committed intimate relationships--we only feel really comfortable talking about with each other.

Still, I'm glad to have this community. It's good to be part of an "us," it's good to have a little prefab pool of friends, and I'll take it over the Elks any day, for one simple reason: I never got nearly this many screaming orgasms from an Elk.

The results are in!

2011-07-29T13:24:00.005-04:00

Remember The Great Female Survey from a few posts back? Well, they've collected their data, such as it is, and the results are...

Pretty reasonable, actually.

In most cases the plurality of the answers went to the least evil option. (Which frequently was "none of the above," because who would have expected women to be not-evil?)

Although I was sad to hear that women become sluts at 20 partners (which, credit where credit's due, was at least the same as the point for a man becoming a "man-whore"). Because... well... I lost track somewhere in the teens. I had this list, and it went up to thirteen, and then the computer I had it on died, and I know I've had sex with a bunch of people since then... what I'm trying to say is I don't know if I'm officially a slut or not.

Also, it's hardly a fair survey of women in general--only 10% of respondents said they had children. So taking these data and saying things like "62% of women have 10 or more pairs of shoes!" is going to be every kind of wrong. It's more like 62% of a horrible hodgepodge of Cosmo readers, trolls, outraged feminists, and people who are "random" visitors but not in the scientific sense.

Now let's see how the men fared.

It's interesting just to look at the parallels between the questions asked.
Women's Version:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN MARRIAGE?
Yes, definitely!
Yes, but it is not for me.
No, I don't believe in marriage.

Men's Version:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE?
Yes, I believe it is a necessary institution and one in which I will participate to help preserve.
Yes, I believe in it as an institution, but it is not for me.
No, I do not believe in it.

That's right; the men got bigger words.

33% of the women report being single. 46% of the men do. Polyamory isn't that popular and the survey pretty effectively excludes gay people, so this is yet another reason to roll your eyes any time the results here are trotted out as "40% of men think a woman starts losing her looks at 40!" Not to mention the fact that only three percent of the men report having children. Really, I can't stress enough how things like this make the survey entirely meaningless. I'm not even going to talk about the results--only the questions--because the methods here are as sensible as me doing a headcount in my house and determining that Boston is 100% white, 100% employed, 66% male, and 33% people who replace the toilet paper roll when they finish it.

Although it's worth noting that as with the women, the plurality of men chose the most decent-human answers despite being transparently baited to do otherwise. In the face of "WOULD YOU DUMP A GIRLFRIEND IF SHE BECAME FAT?" and "HAVE YOU EVER READ YOUR PARTNER'S FACEBOOK MESSAGES, EMAIL OR OTHER ELECTRONIC CORRESPONDENCE?", most men in the survey answered "no."

The men are asked how many partners makes a woman a "slut," (10) but not how many makes a man a "man-whore."

Men's Version:
OF THE CHOICES LISTED BELOW, WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE MALE STATUS SYMBOL?
A family.
A high-profile career.
A beautiful wife or girlfriend.
A beautiful house.
A beautiful car.
A membership to an exclusive club (like a country club).

Women's Version:
FOR WOMEN, WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS THE ULTIMATE STATUS SYMBOL?
A beautiful house
A very successful husband or boyfriend
A beautiful wardrobe
A huge engagement ring
An expensive car

I'll spot them the engagement ring and country club as being gendered things, but what the fuck is up with women not getting the option to take pride in their family or their career? And of course the husband is "successful" but the wife is "beautiful." I... shit. I gotta write a whole post on this one.

The men get questions like "HOW SHOULD AMERICA REBOOT THE ECONOMY?" and "DO YOU FEEL YOUR COUNTRY IS PREPARED IN THE CASE OF A NATURAL DISASTER SIMILAR TO THE EARTHQUAKES / TSUNAMIS THAT RECENTLY HIT JAPAN?" The women do not.

Men's-only question:
WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN CUT SOME SLACK BY THE MEDIA FOR HIS SEXUAL TRANSGRESSIONS?
None of the above. They all got what they deserved.
Anthony Weiner.
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
John Edwards.

One of these things is not like the other things, one of these things is not the same... because one of these things is being accused of rape. I'm really frustrated by the way sexual assaults by famous people get positioned as "sex scandals" instead of "crime scandals." Violent felonies don't belong in the same "oh, boys" category as accidentally Tweeting your junk.

Last question on the men's survey:
HAS OBAMA CHANGED THE INTERNATIONAL PERCEPTION OF THE UNITED STATES?

Last question on the women's:
AT WHAT AGE DO YOU WANT TO START A FAMILY?

Why I want to fuck my boyfriend up the ass.

2011-07-27T13:37:00.002-04:00

Because he enthusiastically consents to it, yeah yeah, and because it's a morally neutral act that carries no shame, sure sure, of course. But these are only reasons not to not do it. Let's talk about why I want to do it.

I want to do it because I love my boyfriend's butt. I love my boyfriend, much more--but I love his butt in a completely separate way. Frankly, my relationship with my boyfriend and his butt is nearly polyamory. Rowdy has an exceptional butt, a truly world-class ass, round and strong and smooth, and it's a joy just to touch. To outright fuck it, to have that amazing ass tightening beneath me and that smooth skin pressing against my groin, would satisfy a primal lust for a thing of beauty.

I want to do it because it fucks around with gender. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm not very comfortable with being a girl? I love the feeling of having a cock. Obviously I can't feel it exactly (although with the base right up against my clit, quite a bit of sensation gets through), but I love having my cock stroked and sucked. And fucked. It's the thrill of sex mixed with the thrill of violating gender roles, and that's a lot of thrill right there. (I'd have to ask my boyfriend to get his perspective on this, but I don't think of it as making him more feminine. I want to look down and watch a man get fucked.)

I want to do it because it could hurt him. Not that I would! Psychologically, I can't. I've tried to hit him several times (with his agreement and encouragement), and the relevant Batman sound effect is not "bam" but "piff." I can't bring myself to do it. Nor could I bring myself to cause him pain by fucking his ass, but the fact that I could is powerful. It means that I have to be conscious of myself during sex, be responsible rather than impulsive in my actions, and be highly, highly sensitive to his reactions. I'm usually pretty uninhibited, so that's a new way for me to experience sex. It's also sexy as hell to have someone at my mercy because I am inside his body.

I want to do it because it turns me the fuck on for reasons I can't even elaborate here because I don't understand them myself. I want to do it because thinking about it gets me wet and squirming. I want to do it because I've had dreams about it. I want to do it because every time I've played with a man's ass is a crystal clear and thrilling memory in my mind. I want to do it because it's fucking hot and hotness is a thing unto itself.

I want to do it because umf. Yeah.

The puzzle of persuasion.

2011-07-27T05:34:00.003-04:00

What makes someone change their mind?

It's a fundamental problem in almost any kind of activism, and a major one in feminism. How do you persuade someone that what they're thinking is wrong, and they should think like you instead? Sometimes it feels almost impossible--people will come up with all kinds of justifications and defense mechanisms to defend their beliefs. (I sure do!) And the situation is unquestionably worse on the Internet, where politics often takes the form of a direct battle, and changing your mind would be tantamount to "losing."

But people do change their minds. Check out this graph of the growing acceptance of gay marriage:

That represents millions of people going from "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" to "they're here, they're queer, and I'm getting used to it."

I might be the worst person to write about persuasion, because I was a high school and college debater and had a major in Rhetoric. The techniques of formal debate and classical rhetoric are terrible for changing minds. They assume that the most logically sound arguments will win, that emotion is a mere flourish and facts are the most important thing for winning, and--worst of all--that "winning" is the same thing as persuasion. If I wanted to learn how to really get inside people's heads, I should have studied advertising.

I also, frankly, don't really try to change minds with this blog. Sometimes I find out that I did, and that's a wonderful thing; but I'm under no illusions that this is an outreach project. I'm mostly trying to educate and entertain people who already agree with most of my basic beliefs.

But feminism, if not this blog, has to go beyond preaching to the choir. If we want to sell the most fundamental beliefs of feminism--"men and women have equal potential and deserve equal treatment," "women deserve control of their bodies and lives," "differences in gender expression and sexuality should be respected"--we have to learn how to persuade people who aren't our buddies. Here's what little I know about that.

What Doesn't Work
•Calling people assholes. It's useful (and cathartic) when rallying the anti-assholes, but you're never going to convert someone with the pitch "agree with me and be my friend, asshole." (This is a problem that's particularly bad with religious--or atheist/skeptic--arguments, where it's traditional to call nonbelievers deluded morally-bankrupt sheep, then ask them if they'd like to join your club.)

•Direct debate. Especially the kind with point-by-point deconstruction of opposing arguments. Again, fun for the choir, but too intellectual and too combative. This is the fundamental flaw of formal debate--no one ever changed their mind because their points were systematically refuted. Worse, debate has the tendency to create "sides," and once someone's established loyalty to a side it takes a lot to get them to cross over.

•Facts as a primary argument. Facts can back up an emotional argument, but I don't think people come to favor gay marriage because they learn that children of gay parents have similar outcomes to those of straight parents, but because they feel better about gay marriage. (Also, in most of the major gender and sexuality debates, each side has its own statistics, so everyone's choosing their facts anyway.)

What Works
•Education. Here's who we are, here's what we believe, and briefly, here's why. We're not trying to persuade you; we just want to teach you. Never mind what our opponents say, or what we aren't--this is our honestly presented story on what we are. We're matter-of-fact, upbeat, and not defensive; we speak as if it's taken for granted that our cause is legitimate and straightforward, and hope you'll share that assumption.

•Polish. Take a look at the website for Fathers & Families. Now at the website for Fathers 4 Justice. They're both fathers' rights organizations, but F&F has a professional-looking website and speaks in what I can only characterize as "grown-up language." F4J has a website straight outta 1994, nominates an "Asshole of the Month" (and it's the President), and uses all caps and exclamation points like they're going out of style. Which they are. Both groups are advocating similar positions, but the one that looks like a "legit" organization is the one that made me go "hm, these guys sound pretty reasonable actually."

•Social pressure. I suspect that one of the biggest factors helping the increased acceptance of gay marriage is... the increased acceptance of gay marriage. When everyone else at your work or in your family believes a thing, it's easier to go along than not, and easy to think it's the "normal" belief. Obviously this one is pretty hard to get started, but you can create the impression of social pressure even when you're in the minority by presenting your view as socially normal and accepted by lots of nice-looking folks-next-door types, and by painting your most vocal opponents not as major threats but as fringe lunatics.

This, by the way, is where "asshole" rhetoric can be useful. Not in calling people assholes directly, but in picking out a particularly egregious and not very popular opponent, and telling them "you're too smart to listen to that asshole."

•Friendship. Man, when did my sex blog turn into Mr. Roger's Neighborhood? Next post is on buttfucking. But it's true; this is the most powerful form of social pressure. I can argue with strangers on the Internet all day long, I can ignore education, I can snark on ads. But when my friends tell me that they sincerely disagree with something I believe, that's when I give it real consideration. If I care about someone, and care what they think of me, then I'm going to take their opinions really, really seriously.

An organization, even a social movement can be a "friend" in some ways--it can have a particularly charming person who serves as a human face, and it can build a welcoming community of friends among its followers. If you can convince someone that you (or your group) are just nice people who are nice to be around, then convincing them of your actual positions is often secondary. Whatever arguments you make, the real argument is "You'll fit in and be liked if you agree with us."

Does any of this sound evil or manipulative? It's only evil if you use it to advance evil positions. And as for manipulation--you know, none of us came to our beliefs by cold logical analysis of all possible options. All argument is psychology, so I don't think it's unethical to happen to do psychology right.

Being professional and friendly and shrugging off insults isn't cathartic. It doesn't make for a ripping blog post or good entertainment for the converted. (And that's why I don't do it very much.) But if your goal is to truly change minds, I think that's where you have to start.

Simply naming it.

2011-07-26T05:24:00.009-04:00

As a fat person, the number one most common insult I've gotten isn't any reference to pigs, or to how I eat too many cheeseburgers, or how sexually unattractive I am. The most common insult is "fat." There's no implicit "you're fat, and therefore something"--just letting me know, in case I forgot or something. Fat is supposed to be bad in itself.

This is why I'm glad my boyfriend calls me fat. Don't get me wrong--he also calls me cute, smart, wonderful, adorable, sexy--but if my body shape comes up, he has no qualms in calling me fat. Affectionately. And I'm glad he does, because I think he's coming from the same place as me on this: euphemizing it would legitimize the insult. If he called me "curvy" or "solid" or "a bit larger" or simply dodged the issue altogether, the implicit message would be "but you're not fat, because fat is terrible."

This is the same reason that I hate to respond to "dyke" with "I'm not gay!" Even though I'm not--the correct answer is "so what if I am?" "Slut"--so what if I am? "Whore"--so what if I were? "Cocksucker"--yep, did that Saturday night!

So many insults in our culture consist of simply naming a thing, a morally neutral human quality, and every time you fight back by denying it, you play into the idea that the thing they described is bad. I don't think the insults can lose all their power through simple acknowledgement--sometimes the tone of voice and threatening delivery are enough to intimidate you even if all they said was "YOU ARE A MAMMAL AND YOU BREATHE AIR!" But it helps to keep the perspective--how much can someone hurt me by simply telling me what I am? I already know that. And how much can someone hurt me by telling me that I have a neutral quality that I don't happen to have? That's incorrect, but it shouldn't even hurt. I'm not yet emotionally armored to the point where the only effective insult is "YOU CAUSE SUBSTANTIVE HARM TO OTHERS!", but I hope to get there some day.

So why is the post image a sad pig? Because pigs are adorable creatures that are quite intelligent and tidy. But someone just called it a "pig" and now it feels bad, even though it knows how incredibly stupid that is.

How to go to a play party (and not play).

2011-07-25T18:33:00.006-04:00

I've talked before about how to go to a BDSM play party. A very common question I've gotten is: "What if I don't want to play?" Is it okay to go to a play party just to watch and socialize? How do you do that and still stay within BDSM etiquette and the good graces of your local community?

First of all, yes, you can do this. It's okay to go to play parties and not play. A small proportion of parties are "players only" and they will let you know with the invitation. Your average, generic party absolutely allows people to come without playing. Really, since most people will be playing for 15 minutes and hanging out for 3 hours, nobody's even keeping track of who played and who didn't.

Be friendly. A play party can be an intimidating environment for shy people, but if you can make (or bring) even one ally who's a little more familiar with the lay of the land, you'll have a much more positive experience and make a better impression. If you're not playing because you're new, your ally can help you understand the scene better; whether you're new or not, a person who hangs out and makes friends is a better addition to the community than someone who only watches. However, don't feel that people will hate you if you do hang out by yourself--as long as you're respectful, people will catch on that you're just shy.

It's okay to watch scenes, but respect boundaries. This means, specifically:
-Leave some space between yourself and the scene you're watching. There should be at least enough room for the top to swing their arms in a big circle, and preferably another arm-length for comfort.
-Often the bedrooms or back rooms at a party will be reserved for more private play. Stay out unless someone invites you.
-Don't ever talk to the players during a scene. A scene puts the players in a very intense mental and emotional state, and you can ruin the scene or even compromise the safety of the players by jarring their concentration. If you have a question or a safety concern, ask someone in the social space or a host or dungeon monitor.
-Don't ever ever ever touch people during a scene. I wish I didn't have to say this, but it's happened.
-Use a lot of judgement in commenting on scenes. If you have anything negative or "funny" to say, keep it to yourself; other comments should be made quietly and far from the players. You don't have to watch in silence, but before you speak, remember: these are ordinary people, not performers, and they are extremely emotionally and physically exposed. Don't say anything that you wouldn't want to overhear in a moment like that.
-I don't know how to say this, but... don't make ogle-face. Do you know what I mean? Don't do that. Look don't stare, lean back not forward, smile don't leer. Look like you're interested in the players, not like you want to eat them for dinner with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. (If you don't know if you're making ogle-face, you're probably not. Don't drive yourself nuts over this one.)

Don't be afraid to be blunt about your intention not to play. In BDSM, as everywhere else, "no" means "no." If someone tries to start an argument over "why not?", makes a scene or starts following you around, or asks repeatedly, talk to a host; they're crossing a line. However, do be aware: in part because of the consent-conscious culture, people in BDSM are more likely to ask you if you want to do something with them. If they simply ask and take the first "no" graciously, they're not violating any rules.

If you don't understand something, ask! Kinksters are sex nerds, and they will be tripping over each other with their eagerness to educate you. Just make sure you ask a bystander or a host, and not an active participant in a scene.

Don't be a tourist. If you're at a play party, you're one of us. This doesn't mean you have to play--but it does mean that you can't look down on the people who do heavy or unusual play, or act like you're an objective observer of our quaint culture. Don't--even mentally--point and laugh at the freaks, because by showing up, you are a freak.

No wanking! This is obvious, right? Unless it's a designated wank-friendly party (these exist), don't wank at a party. Seriously.

Asymmetrical perceptions.

2011-07-25T14:33:00.007-04:00

I like kinky porn. Because of conflicting and troubling stories about the consent/enthusiasm of the performers, I've gotten pretty picky about the video/photo kinky porn I use (it's pretty much come down to "do I know the people who made it?"), but I still read kinky erotica. What I don't read, if I can possibly help it, is other people's comments on the stories.

The problem is, there are two ways you can enjoy a story about a woman letting her lover tie her down, beat her, and fuck her. The first is as a depiction of consensual BDSM that is fulfilling to both participants. The second is as the humiliation of a dirty slut. And reading the comments on a lot of BDSM erotica sites makes it clear that some people see it as the latter--and they like it.

This asymmetry plagues almost any sex-positive endeavor that's open to the public. Hold a BDSM demonstration that involves nudity, and some people are going to ogle it like a strip show. Produce enthusiastic-consent-modeling dyke erotica celebrating diverse body types, and some people are going to watch it as girl-girl porn. Host a gathering for kinksters to meet and socialize, and some people are going to see it as a great place to meet slutty chicks who are into freaky shit.

I'm phrasing these as differences of semantics, but they often result in differences in behavior. Someone who sees a play party as 360-degree porn for their entertainment is going to be bad company at best, an intrusive wanker at worst. (A literal wanker, sometimes.) Every person who thinks of munches as pure meat markets makes the community less safe and less welcoming. And it's disgusting and horrifying to have what you thought was a mutual exploration of sexuality with someone, only to learn that they just thought of you as a disposable slut who was giving it up easy.

I think this asymmetry of perceptions is mainly due to two factors: context and participation.

Context:
Being involved in sex-positive activities in good faith requires education. If you come into a sex-positive activity with only the knowledge you learned in the cultural mainstream--that sex is dirty, sluts are gross, women's sexuality exists for men's amusement, and kink is freaky-weird--then you're going to misinterpret everything you see. This is one of the reasons that I'm a big proponent of people settling into a kink community socially before attending parties.

I think that every sex-positive activity that's open to the public should come packaged with some sort of education on its context. It may be tiresome for the old hands, but when there are people in the audience who may never have been exposed to sexuality without judgement before, it's important to spell out both your ground rules--no wanking, ya wankers--and your conceptual foundations--this is a place for sexuality without judgement, ya judgers.

Participation:
A big cause of asymmetrical perceptions at live events is when people are playing asymmetrical roles. People who put themselves in the role of "audience member" or "customer" at sex-positive activities tend to cause many more problems than people who put themselves in the role of "participant." When I've felt exploited after sex, it's because my partner saw himself as a normal guy fucking a slut, rather than one slut fucking another.

I don't think everyone at BDSM parties has to play. But I think everyone at BDSM parties should have to identify themselves as a kinkster, as part of the party, not as a spectator. In practical terms, I think it would help to require everyone to help in some way to create the event. This could be an entirely token thing--bring one bag of chips, pick up one piece of trash--and it would still help people feel more like community members, less like consumers. And this is a second reason that I think "munch before you party" is so important.

In a way, this is simply another aspect of providing context--letting people know that by engaging with sex-positive culture, they are now a part of it. Whatever false dichotomy someone had between "perverts like them" and "normal people like me" should be destroyed the instant they start getting enjoyment from the perverts.

Like watching what perverts do? You're a pervert yourself now--so you'd better come to terms with why that's not a bad thing. Like having sex with sluts? Guess what that makes you...

Not the destination that matters.

2011-07-23T14:24:00.011-04:00

In all this kerfuffling about my gender identity, I've come to realize one thing for certain. And it's not what gender I am.

It's that I am fucking lucky, goddamn privileged, to be surrounded by people who are comfortable with my uncertainty and willing to accept whatever decision I do make. I don't have a boss telling me "the dress code specifies females must wear makeup." I don't live with anyone who will kick me out if I start dressing or acting funny. I don't live in a country where my gender expression is regulated by law.

Whether I'm butch, transmasculine, genderqueer, genderfluid, tomboy, boi, androgynous, genderless, or just a different sort of cis woman--I'm glad to have found a subculture and a group of friends where these are all recognized identities. I'm glad that I can tell my boyfriend "I don't feel like I'm really a woman" and he can answer with "hm, I know what you mean, gender's a funny thing" and not "of course you are" or "then get out." I'm glad I can post about this on my blog and get a wide variety of thoughtful responses and not a "lol wat, ur gay."

Having the freedom to question and change my role in sex and society, and to do that in an atmosphere without one right answer (or even two), is one of the biggest and best freedoms I know. I just wish more people had it.

What I really want to say to the public, to the blogosphere, to whoever reads this, with all my hemming and hawing about my gender is not what gender I am. What I really want to say is that it's okay to hem and haw about your gender, or about the way you express that gender. There's a lot of possibilities--including never knowing for sure--and not one of them makes you less of a person.

I woke up as a man today. Maybe you didn't.

2011-07-23T11:58:00.005-04:00

My last post has gotten pretty heavily criticized. And I think the critics are right.

I think the problem I have is that, for me, femininity is something artificial, something added on. Obviously not everyone experiences it this way.

I, personally, feel masculine when I'm not trying and feminine only when dolled up. I, personally, feel like femininity is uncomfortable and inconvenient. I, personally, feel like femininity is something that requires me to make effort and make changes, and masculinity is just how I am when I wake up.

I, personally, am not everyone.

I, personally, really may not be a woman.

I woke up as a man today.

2011-07-23T00:30:00.003-04:00

This morning at 7 AM, the alarm went off, I woke up, and I was a man.

Oh, no penis or anything like that. All the effects of that second X chromosome were in place as usual. But as I wiped the sleep-crusties out of my eyes and kissed Rowdy good morning, I was presenting as a man. I wasn't wearing makeup. My hair wasn't blow-dried nor ironed. I hadn't shaved my legs or armpits. Still foggy with sleep, I wasn't talking in the high lady-voice I can put on, but in my normal much deeper and much less sing-songy tones. I scratched and farted like a man. I even--being still sticky from sweat from the current heat wave--smelled like a man.

Butt-ass naked and half-asleep, in a completely "default" state for a human being, I was about as masculine as a person can get. Sure, I was a shower, some deodorant, and some clothing away from performing tidy masculinity--but that's beside the point. A man rolling disheveled out of bed is in no way feminine.

I suppose a nightie and girlier mannerisms would've helped a little, but there's no way to roll out of bed fully feminine. Femininity is work! After you get up, you gotta put your lady on, or you'll look like a man all day! I haven't done it in a while, but it takes me about eight products and sixty minutes to be fully not a man.

This is a major problem I have with gender. On one hand, I want to value masculinity and femininity equally--every form of gender expression is equally good, right? On the other hand, I often feel like certain aspects of femininity are impositions or hindrances. High heels and men's shoes may be equally valid fashion statements; but if I've gotta run somewhere (or, in my case, walk), I know which one I'd choose. It seems to me that a lot of expressions of femininity are inconvenient, labor and money intensive, or submissive. The fashions and mannerisms expected of women are generally more sexualizing and less useful than the ones expected of men.

As I sometimes do, I'm ending this post still unresolved. I don't want to be one of those feminists--the ones who tell women that if they wear makeup, they're supporting the patriarchy, so their individual choices are invalid. But I can't shake the feeling that some individual choices are a lot more--inconvenient,if nothing else--than others, and those are the ones women are traditionally encouraged to make.

In a world where many women have grown up believing that they shouldn't leave the house without putting their face on, how do I reconcile "it's sexist that women are expected to put on makeup" with "it's a woman's choice if she wants to put on makeup"?

EDIT: This post offended a lot of people. See this for my amendment/apology, and this for my last word (for today) on gender identity.

Cosmocking: The Great Female Survey!

2011-07-21T15:19:00.010-04:00

I need to lighten the mood around here. So, Cosmocking!

AskMen.com and Cosmopolitan are running the Great Female Survey to... see what women think. About stuff.

The very idea of a "Great Male Survey" and "Great Female Survey" already irks me, because if you split people in two you can always create the appearance of two deeply divergent groups--I'm sure the "Great Brown-Eyed Survey" would reveal just how different they are from blue-eyers while creating the impression that all brown-eyers speak with one voice. Cosmo has a history of taking survey results saying "51% of women do X" and interpreting them as "women do X," and I can see that coming from a mile off, here.

But let's look at the questions! Let's put them in italics and make them look silly!

PLEASE SELECT YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Heterosexual Bisexual Homosexual Rather not say
This is a red herring. The very first question is:
Q1. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSONALITY TRAIT THAT MAKES A GUY "RELATIONSHIP MATERIAL"?
And the survey continues in that fashion. Tough luck if you picked "homosexual," ladies!

Q2. IS IT IMPORTANT FOR A BOYFRIEND TO HAVE "HUSBAND POTENTIAL"?
So this isn't really "The Great Female Survey." This is "The Great Female Survey About Males." Activities that a woman might engage in that don't include men (or at least don't include sex/romance with men) don't get much of a look in.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I saw some attempt to raise sympathy for female victims of violence with "what if this was your sister, your daughter, your wife?" There was no "what if this was you?" Women are so often described in terms of our relationships, instead of in our own right. This survey isn't about me--it's about the parts of me that are useful to men.

Q11. HOW MANY DATES SHOULD BE PAID FOR BY THE MAN?
I realize that this survey is written in a world where many people do believe the man should pay for dates, and in some ways it's simply reflecting that world. At the same time... augh. Would it have killed ya to ask "How should couples split the cost of dates?"

Q13. IF YOU HAD THE ABILITY TO, WOULD YOU TRACK YOUR BOYFRIEND/HUSBAND'S PHYSICAL MOVEMENT (WITH A GPS IMPLANT, FOR EXAMPLE)?
Oh fucking hell. And one of the options is "Yes, but only if he didn't know about it." The biggest problem with questions like this isn't that they're gross and creepy, and it isn't that it legitimizes an obviously controlling and abusive idea. The biggest problem is that some percentage of people will say "yes" to anything on a survey (especially an anonymous Internet survey), and then "3% of women are in favor of control and abuse" easily turns into "women are in favor of control and abuse."

Q20. OF THE CHOICES BELOW, WHAT BEST MOTIVATES YOU TO BE ROMANTIC?
Feeling close to my partner
The possibility of having sex
It's a good way to apologize
Needing a personal favor
I'm not that romantic
I'm glad they left one whole option open for "I'm not being manipulative and crafty and pretending to be romantic to get my way. Like women do."

Q29.THE MALE BIRTH-CONTROL PILL IS CURRENTLY BEING DEVELOPED. IF/WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE, WOULD YOU WANT YOUR BOYFRIEND/HUSBAND TO TAKE IT?
Yes.
No.
"It's his body, his choice" is not an option.

Q35. AT WHAT POINT DOES A GUY BECOME A MAN-WHORE?
Q36. AT WHAT POINT DOES A WOMAN BECOME A SLUT?
Each one lists numbers of partners: 10, 20, 50, 100, and "never." I guess "never" sort of covers my answer, but it doesn't encompass the sheer depth of "these aren't even real words" that I feel about questions like this. It's like asking how many times your car has to be driven around the block before it's a car-whore. That's just not a thing that cars should have to worry about.

Q37. AT WHAT AGE DO YOU THINK MEN START LOSING THEIR LOOKS?
The bidding starts at 18. 18! There's an option for "never," but no option for "men can gain looks because it's not all about youth" and definitely none for "hey, depends what you're into."

And the worst part is knowing that this is almost certainly being asked because there's a counterpart answer on the Great Male Survey.

Q38. DO YOU THINK THE KIND OF DRINK YOU ORDER REFLECTS ON YOUR FEMININITY?
Really now?

Q39. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE WOMAN'S DRINK?
Cosmo.
White wine.
Vodka tonic.
Margarita.
Light beer.
Really now. Not only is this missing a "none of the above," but it's missing all the good drinks! The ultimate woman's drink is a hefeweizen with a wedge of orange, god dammit.

Q40. WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE MAN'S DRINK?
A beer
Whisky
Scotch
Martini
Whatever Don Draper from Mad Men is drinking
I never knew drinks were this major an area of gender identification. They aren't served in pink and blue glasses, either, so sometimes I have to guess!

...And I guess that anything enjoyed by a person identifying as a man is a man's drink, for fuck's sake, because how the hell else would you define it?

Q42. HOW MANY PAIRS OF SHOES DO YOU OWN?
I don't like this survey any more. I want to go home. Before it asks me "WHICH IS MORE AWESOME: THE COLOR PINK, TRYING ON CLOTHING, OR DOMESTIC SUBMISSION?"

Q49. DO YOU THINK IT'S EVERY OK FOR EVERY MEN TO CRY?
I can't believe I have trolls accusing me of misandry. Shit, son, you ain't seen misandry until you've seen how misogynists talk about men!

Q52.DO YOU THINK WOMEN PUT TOO MUCH VALUE ON A MAN'S FINANCIAL WORTH?
Yes, and it bothers me that women are so shallow.
Yes, but men put a lot of value on women's looks so it balances out.
Yes, but it works to my advantage.
No
So my options are, basically:
Women suck
Women suck, but men also suck, and additionally, a woman's ass is her "money" (how a woman may purchase gasoline and groceries with ass is not quite determined, as ass liquidity remains a problem)
Women suck, and I love it
No

Um... I choose "no?"

Oh fuckshit, now I look like a gold-digger.

Q61. FOR WOMEN, WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS THE ULTIMATE STATUS SYMBOL?
A beautiful house
A beautiful wardrobe
A very successful husband or boyfriend
A huge engagement ring
An expensive car

Um, actual accomplishm... oh fuck it.

And fuck this survey. Fuck its no-win scenarios for any woman who acts like a reasonable human being, fuck its erasure of any woman who isn't straight and feminine and middle-class, and fuck its lack of ambition to learn anything other than exactly which shallow misogynist stereotype fits women best.

He didn't lay a finger on me.

2011-07-19T10:53:00.003-04:00

I do plan to get back to sexual perversion soon. I have neither the inclination nor the ability to make this into a full-time Serious Blog About Serious Issues. Or rather, I believe that sexual pleasure in all its forms is a Serious Issue. Pursuing kinky joy is a genuine quality-of-life factor.

But I wanted to tell a grim little story from my first week working as an EMT.

[TRIGGER WARNING]

We were called to a domestic violence complaint, one where the woman was severely injured and had "fallen" in a way that convinced absolutely 0% of the people involved. I loaded her into the back of the ambulance and got in with her, and because of my inexperience and the cops not managing the situation well, her boyfriend got in with us.

Fortunately it was a short drive to the hospital, but he spent it screaming at me. He was inches from my face, much bigger than me, and very loud. Why wasn't I helping his girlfriend, why wasn't I giving her morphine and making her all better right then and there, I was incompetent, I was stupid, he oughta, why he oughta, YOU CUNT.

Since that night, I keep thinking that what I should have said is: "Shut the fuck up, I know what you did, everyone knows what you did, you're not a man at all and I bet you don't have the balls to hit anyone but your poor scared girlfriend. I'm just a little girl and I bet you're just going to sit there and take this from me. You pussy. You faggot." (I know this is horrible language and I'm ashamed of it, but I think that sort of thing would push his buttons hardest.) Because then maybe he would have hit me. There'd be witnesses and evidence and I sure as hell wouldn't cover for him. He'd go to jail like he deserved and his girlfriend might get a little time on her own to maybe get away.

That's not what I said, of course. What I said was something more like "i'm really sorry i'm trying really hard sorry please don't be mad sorry." I was very green, very intimidated, and thinking more about how much it would hurt to be hit than about what it might accomplish.

And so, in a weird way, I colluded with him--not only did I show him just how useful terrorism is (especially on small young women), but I could have gotten him sent to jail and I didn't. My self-defense was also defending him. In similar situations, people ask "why did you let him do that to you?", but because I didn't let him do anything, I had nothing to accuse him of.

Of course it's not an EMT's job to lay her facial bones on the line just to get some random asshole in trouble. (It's not anyone's job.) But this scenario plays out a lot in violent situations--a victim makes the choice between "I let them hurt me, and it's scary and dangerous" and "I give in, and then I can't say they hurt me." When my mother said "tell me how you've been lying to me and taking advantage of me or I'll get very angry," I had the choice: humiliate myself and have a mother who's blameless because she didn't hit me (this is what I did), or get the chance to call the cops but at the cost of terror and pain and maybe injury. And it's an incredibly common scenario for people to have nominally consensual sex when they feel at risk of rape--thus saving themselves from a possibly violent rape, but also keeping their "partner" legally Not A Rapist.

The other important thing to note in my little anecdote is that it's quite possible that if I'd baited the guy, he would have done nothing (or yelled louder but kept his hands to himself). A lot of people who "just lose control" and "can't manage their anger" are shockingly good at demonstrating control and management in the face of actual consequences. Just as I knew that laying hands on me would be crossing the line, he knew it as well. My mother never exploded at me at school and almost never hit me in front of my father or sister--she acted like a person out of control when she was exploding, and I'm sure on one level she was, but on another level, she was quite aware of where and when she could get away with it.

I'm not saying that someone should be treated exactly like an assailant when they did not, in fact, assault anyone. But I do think it's very important--in social, ethical, and feminist contexts, if not legal ones--to realize that under conditions of intense intimidation or emotional abuse, "it never got got physical" is not necessarily a mitigating factor. It may just be an indicator of how well the intimidation worked.

"Why does she stay with that jerk?"

2011-07-17T16:55:00.020-04:00

If there's one thing I've learned from working in an emergency room, it's that people are terrible liars. Maybe I only think that because the good liars don't get caught? But a lot of people are just awful at it. They make their "I'm lying now!" faces and they tell stories that defy physics, biology, and logic, then forget their own stories.

And a lie I hear almost every day in the emergency room is "I fell down the stairs. My partner loves me. They would never hurt me."

(In this post, I will be mixing up genders randomly in the examples, to illustrate that members of every gender abuse members of every gender. This is not the post to talk about "who does it more/who does it worse.")

For a long time, I just couldn't understand this. We'd get the victim in a private room locked away from the abuser, and they'd sit there with bruises or wounds or even broken bones, in a safe place surrounded by people who wanted to help them, and they'd tell us, often through tears... "I fell down the stairs." It drove me nuts. It made me furious at the victims. Why did they do this? Did they like pain? Did they want to get murdered? Were they just unbelievably stupid? Why the HOLY LIVING FUCK would someone choose to protect and return to a partner who just broke their arm?

Well, then I worked in the ER a little longer, talked to a lot more abuse victims and survivors, thought back upon my own reasons for not getting out of certain situations, and it turns out there's a lot of reasons. I'm sure this isn't comprehensive, but I'm going to make a long list here--and often many of these reasons are working together. Some of them are deeply wrapped up in the psychology of abuse; some of them are just depressingly sensible. Each of these is based on a real person, or several of them are based on one real person--most of them are based on many real people.

1. "I don't want to die."
Her husband has told her that if she leaves he will kill her, and she believes this. (She may well be right.) The instant he gets a whiff of where she's staying--and he probably will, at some point, from a well-meaning friend or through the legal system or by persistent stalking or random chance--he's going to come there and he's going to do something very, very bad to her. Staying with him may be horrible, but at least she gets to live. She believes that if she leaves, no one and nothing can protect her from his vengeance.

2. "I'll die without her."
He lives in his girlfriend's apartment. He's unemployed, or minimally employed, and has no education or good experience on his resume. He has no friends besides her. He's gotten to the point where he doesn't know how he'll get food without her help, much less navigate all the challenges of life. And if he leaves her, he'll be leaving everything--she'll destroy any of his stuff that he leaves behind, stalk him so he can't stay at the same job, and even kill his pets. If he leaves her, he's certain that he'll end up living on the streets.

3. "He'll die without me."
Her boyfriend lives in her apartment. He's unemployed, or minimally employed. He probably doesn't know how to get food without her help, much less navigate all the challenges of life. He tells her he'd be homeless without her, maybe even kill himself if she left him. She just couldn't stand to be responsible for something like that; even though he's hurt her, it would cut her to the bone to know that she had ruined or killed him.

4."What about the kids?"
Right now, she protects the kids from her husband. He may rage at her, but she shelters them from the worst of it and she makes sure they have the best home she can give them under the circumstances. If she leaves, she doubts she can get sole custody of the kids without visitation, much less get it immediately. And if the kids are alone with him, something very bad will happen. He'll hurt them, or turn them against her, or take them away and she'll never see them again. Maybe all three. Her kids are her life and she can't bear to let something like that happen.

5. "I tried once, and it made things worse."
This isn't the first time. He did call the cops on his husband before, and he ran away that night. The cops didn't find enough evidence, and when he came back to get his stuff, his husband was... tearfully apologetic, actually. Somehow he talked him into staying and not taking his stuff. The punishment came later--once he'd more or less committed to staying around--and it was horrible. But he's afraid that if he tried to leave again, he'd go through the same cycle again.

6. "I reached out once, and was rebuffed."
In a rare moment of courage, he--with shaking hands, summoning all his strength--told someone he thought he could trust what his wife was doing to him. They told him to think about her point of view for once, to not use big drastic words like "abuse," and to take care of his own damn problems without airing his dirty laundry. He just knows that if he reaches out again, it's going to be the same thing. He's lucky she didn't find out about that time and doubts if it's worth taking the risk again.

7. "If I call the cops, I'll be in trouble."
She's a prostitute. On the side, she sells drugs. She owns guns she shouldn't have and lives in a place she shouldn't be. Hell, she shouldn't even be in this country. Her lifestyle is so far outside the law that any attention from the police is likely to get her thrown in jail--so she can't very well tell the police that her girlfriend beats her.

8. "Run away? Call the cops? I can't even get away with sneezing!"
Her boyfriend controls every second of her time and every inch she moves. Whenever they're apart she has to call him and check in constantly; whenever she leaves the house she has to tell him where she's going and how long and why; he doesn't let her think without telling him about it and getting his approval. And he enforces this--reading her mail, listening to her phone conversations, showing up randomly at her work or when she's with friends (if she's allowed to have any). When she's not allowed so small a rebellion as using the wrong word, really rebelling against him seems impossible. She figures he'd catch her if she even thought about trying.

9. "If it were so bad, someone would have done something."
Everyone knows what's going on in his life. His friends have seen his girlfriend hitting him; his parents have heard him say "I can't do that, she won't let me" about a million things; the neighbors have heard the screams and crashes when she explodes. He knows everyone knows already, and knows that they haven't done anything even though they know. So, he figures, what difference would it make to tell them? Clearly they've already decided that this isn't bad enough to call in the authorities over.

10. "It's a joke to him, so it should be a joke to me."
His boyfriend hits him and treats it like a joke, laughing uproariously and expecting his victim to laugh along. To make a big deal out of this kind of violence would just be humorless, and he's got a sense of humor, doesn't he? Even when the only punchline is "ha ha, you're in pain!" And how do you go to the cops with a story like "he played a joke on me?" Cops don't arrest people for jokes.

11. "I'm just terrified to hurt her feelings."
Abuse has made her telepathic. Years of desperately trying to keep her girlfriend happy so bad things won't happen have made her keenly aware of her girlfriend's every fleeting emotion. Her girlfriend is a tiny bit moody and she rushes to coddle and comfort her; her girlfriend is a tiny bit happy and she just about throws a party for her. She's so used to reading her girlfriend's feelings and translating them into her own that she can't stand to do something that would really hurt her girlfriend's feelings. Just the thought of dealing with that much anger--when even a tiny amount of anger is a big deal in their house--is too terrifying to imagine.

12. "I'm so embarrassed I let him do this to me."
He's been abusing her for years. She doesn't see herself as some cowed little victim; she's a smart woman, an independent woman to all appearances, maybe even a declared feminist. So to come out now and say he's been hurting her all along just feels stupid. Everyone's going to ask "why did you stay with that jerk?" and she's not going to have an answer. She tells everyone her relationship is wonderful and a paragon of communication and respect, and the longer she keeps up the charade, the harder it is to say not only "turns out I'm a cowed little victim" but "turns out I'm a cowed little victim and also a liar."

13. "I've learned to live in her system."
He knows all the rules by now. As long as he always treats his wife with the utmost politeness and gentleness, and always has dinner ready before she comes home, always is up for sex when she wants it, and always lets her make the decisions, things are okay. He actually feels pretty safe when he's being "good." So it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with the relationship, because it goes great so long as he does as he's supposed to.

14. "We're outsiders; no one cares about our problems."
They're a lesbian couple, one of them is transgendered, and they're kinky to boot. She's had enough problems just explaining to the "authorities" that their relationship exists; how the hell is she supposed to convey that there's something wrong with it? She's internalized enough prejudice that she figures it's sort of her own fault for being in such a strange relationship, and she doesn't figure anyone cares that much about the troubles of a weirdo.

15. "After all he's done for a jerk like me?"
Her husband has put up with so much from her. This isn't #13; these were genuinely bad things. He helped her pay off the nasty credit card debt she was in. He stayed with her even after she got fired from her job and flunked out of school; he even bailed her out of jail when she really fucked up. Who could blame the guy if he loses his patience now and then? She figures she really is a very difficult person to live with, she deserves some punishment for all she's screwed up, and she should be grateful that he's kept her around at all. As he reminds her when she's pushed him too far--who else would love her?

16. "She's really nice... mostly."
Her wife is super sweet and loving. She's a flowers-and-chocolates romantic, a believer in true love and love at first sight, and she treats her just like a princess. Except now and then, things get tense in the relationship, and bad things happen. Really bad things. Her wife just doesn't seem like herself and she explodes. But the apology is even sweeter and lovinger than before and things are good again. Maybe it was a one-off. Or a two-off. A three-off? Maybe this really is the last time and from now on she'll just have the nice wife she fell in love with. She's certainly being nice now, and how could you leave someone like that?

17. "It just isn't done in our community."
In her culture, the husband is the leader of the household and what he says, goes. He has the right to hit his wife if he feels it's necessary. Divorce is a taboo. Good women don't leave their husbands; good women make their husbands happy. She feels like going against her husband would be going against her entire culture, and she can't bear to do that. The community wouldn't support her and she'd feel like a traitor to her own people.

18. "Actually, I'm abusing her."
When she explodes, she doesn't tell her boyfriend "I hate you;" she tells him "you hate me." She tells him that he's hurting her, that she's responding the way she is because she just can't take his abuse any more, and he believes her. He's trying desperately to treat her right, to treat her the way she deserves, and he just keeps fucking up. Often when she's yelling he yells back--sometimes he even hits back--and that makes him more sure than ever that he's the real abuser here.

19. "It's not that bad."
She firmly believes that real abuse is when they punch you--and her husband's only slapped her with an open hand. Real abuse is when they beat you--and he only yells at her until she cries and then yells at her to stop crying. Real abuse is when they rape you--and he always makes her say "yes" before he has sex with her, no matter how little she wants it. She recognizes there's something wrong in their relationship, but could never call it like, abuse abuse, and so she can't react to it like it's real abuse.

20. "This is how relationships work, isn't it?"
Her parents' relationship was a constant cycle of drama and violence. Her relationship with her parents was just as bad. Her high school boyfriend hit her and her college boyfriend made her have sex when she didn't want it. She kinda figures everyone else's relationship is just the same behind the scenes. All she worries about is how to make the best of an abusive relationship; while she knows it intellectually, she doesn't believe deep down that a non-abusive relationship is possible, at least for her.

The one thing that isn't on the list, anywhere, is "the victim is just weak and stupid." Victims of abuse come in all types and lots of them really are flawed in big and small ways--but their reasons for staying with their abusers are not "just stupid." They're complicated, insidious, and saddest of all, sometimes right.

Usually I end these "long-list" posts with a cheery little "add your own!", and while that invitation remains open (sadly, I'm sure there are tons that I missed), I'm going to add something to this one:

If any of these sound like you--even if they sound like you in a "yeah, but" sort of way--even if your partner never laid a finger on you physically, it was just some yelling--even if you're a man and she's a woman and it doesn't work like that--even if you swear your situation isn't abuse because--call this number:

1−800−799−SAFE(7233)
TTY: 1−800−787−3224

It's the National Domestic Violence Hotline and they will talk to you. They are not going to call the cops on your partner (or you). They are not going to tell you that you have to leave your relationship. Calling them is not a commitment of any kind--you can always call them and decide to stay in your relationship after all. All they're going to do is talk to you, give you an outside perspective from people who are trained to recognize and deal with abusive situations, and help you find resources for getting out of your situation if you decide that you want them.

How to not be creepy.

2011-07-16T12:01:00.001-04:00

My name is Holly Pervocracy, and I used to be a creep.

Not the worst kind of creep; I was certainly never dangerous, and it wasn't to the point where I drove everyone away, but I was definitely called creepy a few times. And given the side-eye-while-edging-away a few more times. I had a strong and unusual sex drive, a tendency to be attracted to pretty much everyone I was friends with and a lot of people I wasn't, and didn't know how to express these appropriately. I made jokes that weren't jokes about "ha ha, we should totally make out right now, wouldn't that be hilarious," I shared my fetishes too loudly and way too publicly, and I expressed attraction by puppydogging my crushes pathetically. I gave people the goddamn creeps.

I don't agree with Clarisse Thorn that "creepy" is a meaningless or sexist term. (See Pandagon's response.) I think it has a very clear meaning: someone who is creepy is someone who makes you feel unsafe and uncomfortable in a sexual way. And while you may be unfair in your discomfort--for example, if you feel uncomfortable around anyone who admits they're into BDSM--it's still real. When it's realest are the times when you don't know why you feel it. If someone strikes you as "creepy" and you can't put your finger on it, you feel a little unfair applying the label because they're clearly so nice but you just keep having this feeling--do not get alone with them. "Creepy" may be a pejorative sometimes; other times it's the goddamn Gift Of Fear.

But what if people think you're a creep, and you don't deserve it? I don't think the answer is to tell them that they're being wrong and unfair--you can't argue with a feeling, and trying to debate a person into not being afraid of you is kind of creepy in itself. Sometimes you may just need to move on to another social group. But sometimes there are things you can do to make people feel safer and more comfortable around you, even as you continue to pursue sex and romance. Take it from a recovering creep.

1) Work on your social skills in general.
I'm not going to go in-depth on this because it's an entire topic unto itself. I wrote a post about social skills a while ago that expresses my thoughts on the topic; Succeed Socially is another good resource. If you don't know how to talk to people at all, you're going to come off double-extra-awkward when you try to talk to them about going home with you.

2) Don't treat your life as a quest for sex.
I've done this. I've shaved my pubes before going to social gatherings, gone to them with "am I gonna get laid, am I gonna get laid?" foremost in my mind, and come home alone with my head hanging. Not only did this make me miss out on all the other fun I could have had, not only did this hurt my chances of getting laid by someone who'd like to get to know me a little first, but it was creepy. It meant that I'd do things like:
-Only talking to people I wanted to bang, and ignoring others (people really notice this)
-Turning the conversation around to sex (and specifically, to my sexual desires) too eagerly and too often
-Propositioning people as soon as they seemed remotely friendly
-Giving the impression that I was desperate and would fuck anyone (people are not flattered by "so, you seem to have a pulse" as a come-on line)
-Publicly sulking when it became clear I wouldn't be getting laid
-Emitting loud, obvious vibes of "I'm only here to get laid" (people are amazingly good at receiving those vibes)

All of these were creepy-ass things to do. Once I started going to social events to socialize, with an attitude of "if I get laid, great, but if not, I'll definitely get to hang out with my friends and meet new people," not only did people feel more comfortable around me, but I got laid more often to boot.

3) Don't try to "cheat the system" to avoid rejection.
That is, if you want to date someone, don't come up with elaborate schemes to force yourselves together in inescapable situations--oh look, we got assigned to the same work/class group, guess we're stuck together now--or ask them on clearly not-date activities that you plan to secretly turn into dates. Don't try to arrange any romantic-comedy "coincidences." Don't target your efforts at people who seem like they'd have trouble saying "no" (whether because they're young, new to the area or the social group, or just meek)--you don't have to ignore these people, but everyone will notice if you're going after them preferentially.

And if you want to have sex with someone, for God's sake don't be this guy. In every case, just freaking ask. The point of asking someone is not to get a "yes" by any means necessary; it's to find out how they feel about you.

Realize that, post-high-school, most people are not cruel in saying no. Rejection is awkward and painful for the rejector too, and anyone worthy of your affection is going to be gentle about it. If you know each other at all as people (and sometimes even if you don't), they're not going to laugh or insult you or tell all their friends how gross you are. They're just going to tell you that you won't be dating them, which is a situation you were already living with.

If someone says no, that means no. Don't keep asking and don't ask "why not?" The answer to "why not" is never something you want to hear, and forcing it out of someone will never change their mind; it'll just be excruciating for both of you.

4) Don't get angry or resentful.
It shows. Oh god does it show. If you feel like you're not being treated "fairly" when you ask for dates or sex, if you feel like you're not getting what you "deserve," if you're just angry and frustrated by the world in general and by attractive members of your preferred gender in particular--go home, pour yourself a beer, watch some TV, take some deep, deep breaths, and don't go back in the dating pool (or, ahem, commenting online) until your head has cleared.

When it comes to sex and romance, get the concept of what you "deserve" out of your vocabulary--and as much as possible, out of your mind. You deserve safety and respect... but someone can give you those without going out with you. When it comes to deserving a particular person, or deserving to have a partner or to have sex--think of a job interview. Would you hire the candidate who tells you that they really need this job and it would be unfair to give it to someone else, or the candidate who seems like they'd be good at the job?

5) Don't scare people.
The feeling of being "creeped out" is, ultimately, a feeling of fear. And if you make people afraid that you could genuinely harm them, then it doesn't matter how smooth and sexy you are; you're going to be treated like the worst kind of creep.

Here are my handy-dandy hints on how to not be scary:
-Don't corner people. Propositioning someone in an elevator, a moving vehicle, a deserted area, or in the metaphorical corners created by their job or their academic career--super creepy.
-Don't talk about violence. When you say "I oughta have punched that guy for how he talked to me," what I hear is "if you talk to me wrong, I might punch you."
-Keep your grubby little mitts to yourself unless you have their enthusiastic consent. (If you're not in a BDSM/feminist setting, this consent may be with body language and implications rather than explicit words, but there's still a very obvious difference between "consent" and "not resisting.")
-Don't publicly insult your preferred gender or advocate politics that degrade them. No one believes you when you try to turn on a dime and say "but you're different, honey."

6) Aspire to be a friend to everyone; the sex will follow.
Not in the Nice Guy sense of "be a friend to get sex." But if you can become popular in a social group--be someone that people like to talk to and laugh with, someone they call when everyone's heading to the bar and someone who's likely to show up to help out before the party--then you're much less likely to be perceived as creepy. And you'll probably get laid, just because knowing people and having connections means that you're likely to know and be connected to someone who wants to fuck you.

The least creepy people I know are the ones who can socialize with everyone in a pally, casual, undemanding way and just relax and have fun with it. This might be more important than everything else on this list; if you're good at being a friend, I think uncreepiness comes along almost inevitably.

7) Brush your teeth.
And don't wear a raincoat indoors, especially when it's not even raining.

On not taking the bait.

2011-07-14T21:22:00.003-04:00

On the anti-fun (er, I mean, pro-"meaningful relationships," but in a way that excludes most of the actually meaningful relationships in my life) blog Hooking Up Smart, Susan Walsh posted the following chart on the economic costs of promiscuity:

(Click to embiggify)

My reactions, in no particular order:
-"EVENTUAL ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!"
-"That's not even a real flowchart."
-"That's not even like a flowchart."
-"Rape is just another kind of casual sex?!?!?" (I could write a whole post about this. But Manboobz already did.)
-"Wait, so a declining birthrate is bad for the economy, but having babies is bad for the economy?"
-"Gosh, prosecuting rape sure is hard on the economy."
-"Having kids with a father present leads to substance abuse, violence, crime, and prison?"
-"Wait, you can't list 'promiscuity' as a drawback of promiscuity. That's a feature."
-"So having consensual sex with a condom and not getting an STD or getting pregnant leads you to 'whew'? Since that's actually not rare at all, that's kind of an endorsement, isn't it?"
-"Y'know, not everyone who has casual sex is on welfare. If I have a job, and I pay those $$$$$ out of my own pocket, am I still ruining the economy?"
-"EVENTUAL ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!"

And then I made a chart of my own. I made a chart of reasons why promiscuity is good for the economy!

I mean, I don't know. Maybe it is good. Maybe it's actually bad? I'm guessing it doesn't really make a difference, but I don't know that. Like Susan Walsh, I'm no economist. Unlike her, I'm not going to pretend I am. And exactly like Susan Walsh, I'm not in this for the economics anyway.

Is sex good or bad for the economy? I don't give a shit. It's a personal freedom.

You know what else is an extremely fucking important personal freedom to me? Not having sex. Saving it for marriage, or saving it for a meaningful relationship, or saving it for when you're "ready," or saving it for never if that's what you want to do.

Reading someone rip into sluttiness and promote prudishness (to put it crudely on both sides, but you get my gist), it's easy to be tempted to take that bait, to make yourself a mirror image of their assholery, to say "sluts rule, prudes drool!"

But that's what the assholes expect (and maybe what they want). And most of the time it kinda makes you an asshole too. The right answer is "sluts rule, prudes rule, and anyone who has a problem with either of them... drools."

This comes up a lot when facing misogyny. When reading someone saying "women commit all the abuse, women have all the advantages, women are trained to be unreasonable to men," there's a certain temptation, in the heat of the argument, to point out that men commit all the abuse, etc. And whether you're statistically/sociologically right or not, ultimately, it doesn't prove that much. What I really want to say is:

Abuse, unfair advantages, and unreasonableness suck. Let's get rid of them.

Because this feminism stuff isn't supposed to be about "sides." It's about envisioning a better world. And the people on the other side just never seem to understand that!

Cosmocking: August '11! Part Two!

2011-07-12T17:01:00.000-04:00

(He's so whipped, he vacuums hardwood!)

[On sexual fantasies]Having sex with another woman.
Why it's so hot: It doesn't mean you're gay or you want to do it for real, but seductive images of women are so embedded in our society, it's only natural to think about--and get turned on by--what it'd feel like to be with the same sex.
Wow. I never expect Cosmo to dissect the concept of the Male Gaze more or less lucidly.

...And then to completely miss the point and use it to prove why the reader couldn't possibly be bisexual. I mean, sexuality is complicated. You can be straight and fantasize about people of your gender. But you can also be not straight and have those fantasies. That does happen sometimes. Not all female-female attraction requires a hasty, almost desperate attempt to explain why this doesn't mean you're attracted to females or anything.

It's not a shocker that this scenario has flitted across his mind too... but with him as a participant.
Oh my. They're acknowledging this? Gosh, this author's going places Cosmo doesn't usually...
The thing that really revs him up about threesomes...
Oh. Never fucking mind.

Cosmo isn't openly homophobic; at least in the last few years, they've never printed anything negative about queer people. Instead, they just pretend that queer people don't exist. Or more specifically, they exist, but they couldn't possibly be you or anyone you know. It's inconceivable--incontheivable!--that those queer people we talk so big about accepting could be our own partners or ourselves.

"I'm fine with people out there doing whatever they want, but me and my folks are normal" is a very subtle form of bigotry, but it's bigotry. And it's not harmless bigotry, either.

If we extrapolate this to, say, Tyler Clementi as he was driving towards the George Washington Bridge to end his own life in the wake of being cruelly and voyeuristically outed over the Internet, I’d bet my bottom dollar that he felt even the songs on the radio weren’t meant for him, but for “normal people” more relatable to the singer and deserving of the song’s message.
-Jesse Bering, Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself, Scientific American

If you're feeling feisty, switch it up by swatting his hand away when he makes a move during foreplay and telling him he has to wait until you say he can touch.
He always has to wait until I say he can touch. That's how consent works.

The problem with this game is that if it's a game, then it's acceptable for him to be bratty and grab you without "permission," and you may even be baiting him to do that. If it's not a game, then that same "brattiness" is at best annoying, at worst terrifying. So I don't want to play this game in any relationship where we don't have very clear communication about when we're playing and when we're not, and no Cosmo relationship would seem to have that.

Give yourself goose bumps by sweeping a new, clean toothbrush over the curves of your neck and collarbone.
Phew. After all the Serious Business above, it's a nice breather to see Cosmo being just plain old goofy.

The brand-new hot spot to show off: your spine.
Brand-new! Notochords are so last season.

Cosmocking: August '11! Part One!

2011-07-10T19:30:00.003-04:00

White cover! Kim Kardashian! Sort of a... sweatshirt dress? Is that a thing? Yet another "bet you can't do that with your neck" Photoshop pose! It's August, so it's "The HOT Issue!" This means nothing! "50 Sex Moves!" I never really feel like my sex acts consist of "moves," I just have the sex until I am done having the sex! "How To Outsmart A Bitch!" I know I am sheltered but in my social circle "bitch" is actually a pretty nasty slur! "Flatten Your Abs!" My abs already are flat; it's just the big pad of fat over them that's rounded!

Q: Does showing my tan lines at work make me seem unprofessional?
A: Yup. Even though the best of us can fall victim to zebra skin by accident, exposing your sun stripes at work would be flaunting your bad judgement (baking does lead to skin cancer, after all). Perhaps worse, as far as your boss is concerned, it suggests you spend lots of your free time being at one with your beach towel--not exactly impressive.
While I'm sure there are bosses who think this way, I'm also sure that those bosses are assholes. Free time is free time, and if you're not stealing cars or selling company secrets, I don't think you're being paid to give a shit about "professional." Going outdoors in the summer isn't a sign you're a slacker or you have bad judgement; it's a sign you're a fucking human being.

That said, I actually agree it's probably a good idea to cover tan lines at work. But I don't have to buy into the "we want our employees to represent us 24 hours even though we only pay them for 8" mentality to do that.

"I like a woman who doesn't necessarily care if other people like her."
Do you think she gives a damn what you like?

I'm not being hostile; I'm being logical. If you want to fetishize independence in a "ooh, she's feisty" sort of way, be prepared for the objects of your fetish to not be fawningly grateful for your approval.

"I fully believe females are smarter and more evolved."
How we got to be "more evolved," when we only breed with males, is a mystery evomulotuionary scientists have yet to solve. (They're still working on an evolmultionary model that explains how 1950s American gender roles and 2010s American beauty ideals are the correct ones for all times and all places, according to evomolution.)

Coin Slots
This is a feature--which you'll forgive me if I don't scan--showing famous men's buttcracks, as captured by paparazzi when the men happened to bend over in public.

I have never been so grateful to not be famous.

36 percent of men say they're more attracted to a woman if she's using an iPad.
This would have come off a little smoother (if even more random and unlikely) if there weren't an ad for a Cosmo iPad app on the very next page.

How To Tell He's Married... Even If He's Not Wearing a Ring
-He can direct you to the nearest Bed Bath & Beyond.
-He's walking a dog. An itty-bitty, fluffy dog.
-He can hold his own in a "Real Housewives of New York City" versus "Real Housewives of New Jersey" debate.
-He pronounces Target "tar-jay."
This is what we call "gender enforcement." Because this isn't a list of things single guys don't do, not really. It's a list of things single guys aren't allowed to do. Cosmo's just one of a whole lot of self-appointed enforcers making sure of that.

...Although not very effectively, because everyone I know says "tar-jay." I didn't even know that was supposed to be a girl/pussywhipped thing.

For really pulse-pounding sex, you know it's good to mix it up and try new things. But as you're, say, pouring hot wax onto your guy's chest, you're probably wondering just how much he's into it.
Er... maybe you should ask him? Preferably before you light the candle.

Now the guessing game is over. We polled thousands of guys to learn exactly which turn them on and which tank.
And if I wanted to have sex with a homunculus created from the average preferences of several thousand guys, this would be really fucking useful!

Of course, it is really fucking useful. Now, when Rowdy tells me he doesn't like having his nipples licked, instead of thinking "I should have psychically intuited that; I suck", I can think "men are supposed to like this; he sucks." Doesn't make our sex life any better, but it sure takes a weight off my shoulders.

Handcuffing him to the bed without saying a word [rated "go for it"]
I've been over this before. I've been over most of the survey items before. Which is understandable; it's tough for Cosmo to come up with 50 ways to have sex while insisting there's only one way to have sex.

Nonetheless, it weirds me out that I--someone who regularly gets punched and bitten and choked during sex--would react to surprise handcuffs with a very nervous "um, you better tell me what you're planning to do here," and some utterly-vanilla guy is supposed to be totally cool and just go along with it.

I know I've said this before and I don't doubt I'll say it again, but: WHY IS COSMO ALLERGIC TO WORDS? Why can nobody ever talk about sex? Why is nobody ever allowed to ask any questions or make any suggestions? Is sex like some kind of goddamn ethereal spirit that goes away if you look directly at it? Is sex like a birthday present, where it's no fun if you ruin the surprise? Is sex like Charades, where if someone talks it's spoiled because it's only fun if you guess?

Sex isn't a game to me. Sex often involves games, but sex itself is Serious Business. It's an activity that has the potential to make my body, emotions, and life much better or much worse. And it's an activity that isn't the same for any two people. The only way to know if I'm doing the "much better" for my partner is to freaking ask.

As for unsexy... "I want to handcuff you to the bed and use your cock for my pleasure. Don't worry, I won't hurt you... I just want you to be bound up and helpless while I suck your cock and ride you and touch your whole body. I want to touch your bound hands and feel your fingers curl when you come. Does that sound good to you?"

He may say "yes" or "no," but any guy who hears that and goes "ugh, never mind, the moment's gone, I'm just going to sleep" wasn't worth fucking in the first place.