Not So Different.

The first time I touched a penis, I was amazed: it's just skin!  It didn't feel all that different from the skin anywhere else on his body.  I'd been expecting... I don't know what I was expecting. Something exotic, something totally new and different and dirty and scary and strange.  Like maybe it would feel like a squid, or be electrified, or cause the world to tastefully fade to a view of fluttering curtains.

Because it was a sex thing, and everything I had learned in life up to that point had primed me with the idea that sex things are nothing like ordinary thing things.  Sex ed was always set apart from ordinary life skills teaching.  Sex movies were special secret movies I wasn't supposed to see.  Sex wasn't just a taboo; it was a mystery, an esoteric alternate dimension where people became their animalistic sex-selves.

But there I was, touching a penis, and it turned out to be completely continuous with the rest of his body.  It was just a part of him.  And the sex we had was just a part of life.  A fun part, sure--sometimes a magnificently, transcendently pleasurable part--but it did not take place in a different universe nor did it make us into different people.  The me who fucked until I was sweat-slick and screaming was the very same me who got up the next day and made my bed and went to class.  The line between "sex" and "life" had been a lie.



Sometimes people say "sex is a part of life" to mean "sex isn't a big deal."  I don't agree with that.  I think sex is a big deal--but only a big deal.  Not a magical mystical none-of-the-normal-rules-apply deal.

Which is to say: the normal rules do apply.  Everything you learned from Mister Rogers about how you treat other people--that's how you treat other people when you're fucking them, too.  It's simple stuff, mostly, and you don't need some Sex Expert to dispense Sex Wisdom to know it: Be honest. Ask permission before touching things that aren't yours. Be safe.  Don't bully or make fun of people.  Don't  throw tantrums when you don't get everything you want.  Keep your promises.  Use your words.  Brush your teeth.

Really, this is the whole foundation of my sexual ethics.  It's not Betty Dodson and it's not Susie Bright.  It's Fred McFeely Rogers.

"Is it okay to cheat on my partner if they won't have sex with me?"  Keep your promises.
"Are people who've had too much sex icky bad people?"  Don't bully or make fun of people.
"Is it okay to have sex with someone who's asleep, if they've had sex with me before?" Ask permission before touching things that aren't yours.
"What should I do if I want an open relationship?" Use your words.

I don't want to make this sound oversimplified--there are lots of questions where it's not immediately clear which option is "being honest" versus "throwing a tantrum", or what exactly constitutes a "promise"--but it's simple at the core of it.  Everything you know about how to be a decent person still applies when sex is involved.  You don't need to figure out (or more often, not figure out, but excuse your behavior by claiming they exist) special different Sex Rules for everything.  Sex isn't a special case in ethics. It's just a case.



The other night, a friend and I kidnapped a man. We blindfolded him and threw him in the back of a car and drove in circles to disorient him (or possibly because I forgot that you can't turn left at the end of White Street), marched him around in public and treated him as our captive, tackled him when he tried to escape, then took him home and interrogated him.  (Then we fed him cake.)

This wasn't okay because the guy was kinky, or because we were.  It wasn't okay because we didn't really hurt him.  It wasn't okay because it was fun and sexy and you can let your morals slip a little for funsexiness.  It wasn't okay because we followed some obscure set of specifically kinky rules for how to do this in a correct kinky way.  It was okay because we used our words, got permission, and kept our promises.

What I Mean When I Say I'm Sex-Positive.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A puppy, and maybe-jokes.

I just got back from Christmas with Rowdy's family!  It was happy and cozy and his parents cooked like they were fattening us up to eat us.  And Rowdy gave me a 350-million-year-old fossil trilobite for a present. It was good times. I hope you all had good times in your own ways as well.

Rowdy's sister and her husband stayed with the family as well, and they brought a puppy with them!  An adorable, hyperactive, cuddlywuddly, toe-nipping little puppy!  (They were claiming it was an "Olde English Bulldogge," but it was clearly not.  We're guessing boxer-pitbull mix.  Cute, whatever it was.)  This struck Rowdy a little bit odd, because his sister never liked dogs.

So Rowdy asked his brother-in-law what was up.  He said, laughing, "Your sister said the only way we'd ever have a dog is if I'd already brought one home and she had no choice.  The next day, I brought home the puppy!"

Ew.

Concerned, Rowdy asked his sister about this, and she said, "Oh, we talked for a long time about getting a dog and we agreed we'd do it around now.  I didn't use to be a dog person, but I love this puppy!"

Huh.

The brother-in-law had been kidding, but the weird thing is, he was kidding in a way that made him sound like a kinda scary asshole.  He would've come off as a much better person if he'd told the truth.  So why did he make up this story about forcing an unwanted burden on his wife?  And why, on some level, does the fact that he made up the story not really bother me, but strike me as a pretty ordinary bit of humor?



There's this widely told jokey narrative that marriage is a state of passive-aggressive warfare where the wife has to be pressured into allowing fun things and the husband has to be nagged into doing responsible things.  People in relationships, good and bad, joke about getting along like the Lockhorns.  See also: every sitcom ever, every issue of Cosmo ever, every social gathering where "my husband is such a manchild/my wife is such a ball-and-chain" is a joke about as edgy as "airline food tastes bad."

The problem is, it's not a joke for everyone.  It's one of those insidious things that hits some people as "ha ha, yeah, I kid about him being a manchild, but really we talk stuff out," and hits others as "so I see, husbands are supposed to be irresponsible and you're supposed to berate them for it."  Even though Rowdy's brother-in-law wasn't really coercing his wife into a major responsibility she didn't want, he was cheerfully playing into a story created by, and validating for, men who really would.



Credit where credit's due, this is Rowdy's theory: One of the major steps toward creating a consent culture is making consent look different from coercion.  It's making a man who respects his wife's right to participate in decisions sound so different in casual conversation from a man who doesn't, that no one could confuse them.

Because our values aren't that screwed up, really.  If you ask people, point-blank and not-joking, if a man should listen to his wife when making a decision that affects her life, people are going to say yes.  Most people--even most not-at-all-feminist people--are going to say, yeah, of course that's basic respect.

So imagine a world where it was really, really obvious who respected their wife (husband, partner) and who didn't.  If people who respected their partners never told these maybe-jokes, people who didn't wouldn't have that maybe-joke plausible-deniability to hide behind.  They'd either have to tell outright lies (which some would, but it would require them to be consciously aware that they had something to lie about) or their "she didn't want it, but I did it anyway" story wouldn't be jokey, it would be a straight-up confession of evil.

Making the distinction between respectful and abusive relationships blunt wouldn't end abusive relationships.  But it sure as hell would make them a whole lot less popular at parties.

The Worst Thing In The World.

Because Nothing is Scarier.

I used to believe there was such a thing as The Worst Thing In The World.  It's a pretty nebulous thing, more a feeling than a thought, but God does it push you to irrational desperation to avoid it.

TWTITW is a yawning chasm of failure, constantly open beneath you, and there is no describing the horror at the bottom.  You just go around with the knowledge that if you make a mistake big enough, you can fall in.  If a relationship fails, if you get fired, if you get rejected... you'll fall into TWTITW, so you put everything you've goddamn got into that relationship.  You'll try anything to keep the relationship. Because it's literally unthinkable what will happen if it ends.

That unthinkability is how it traps you.  Because it's like Stephen King says in Danse Macabre--knowing that there's something horrible behind a door is terrifying.  Once you open the door, it's ruined.  Even if it's a really terrible thing behind that door, even if it's a six-foot cockroach, any horror you feel is going to be mixed with relief.  "Oh, thank God, it's just a six-foot cockroach. It could've been a sixty-foot cockroach."


I remember when my first "I love you" relationship ended.  I couldn't abide the thought.  I screamed.  I cried.  I tried to seduce him.  (While still crying. Sexxxay.)  I threatened to harm myself if he didn't come back.  I called him until he stopped taking my calls.   The ridiculous thing is, I didn't even like him that much.  It wasn't about getting the joy of the relationship back.  It was about avoiding TWTITW.

At some point I bawled myself to sleep, and the next morning I woke up and had to pee.  Because even in the wake of The Worst Thing In The World, you still have to pee.   I peed and went to work. It was the day after the end of eeeeeverything, but the bus still picked me up at 7:08 and I still got a half-hour and a chicken sandwich for lunch.  I was in pain, I was in bad pain, but I had thought it would be infinite pain, and it was finite.  It was only a six-foot cockroach.

I can't say "and then I never believed in TWTITW again," but it was the start of a journey.  Failing a class helped too, as did getting fired from a job, as did very messily breaking up with a very close friend.  Not because these things weren't bad.  All of them sucked, all of them cost me opportunities I would never get back, all of them caused real and irreparable harm, yet the morning after... I still had to pee.

Eventually I started to understand.  The next time a relationship ended, I cried and yelled plenty, but I didn't do anything inappropriate or harmful.  I didn't want to let it go, but I wasn't filled with blind animal terror of letting it go.  Breaking up was a bad thing--just not The Worst Thing.


I think belief in The Worst Thing In The World is at the heart of a lot of abusive and dysfunctional relationships.  I believe that many abusers believe that breaking up, being rejected, feeling emasculated, or losing their power in a relationship are TWTITW, and that's why they're willing to go to desperate lengths and hurt people to avoid it.

What I did to my ex-boyfriend--threatening myself and refusing to leave him alone--was abuse.  Fortunately it didn't go on very long, but it was abusive.  And I didn't do it because it felt good to scare and upset him.  I did it because I was so deeply afraid of losing him.  You get ugly when you're really afraid--anyone with a phobia can empathize with this.  If you're phobic of snakes and suddenly you fall in a snake pit, it doesn't matter what kind of nice gentle person you normally are. You'll do whatever it takes to get away--you'll step on people, you'll scream at them, you'll shove them out of your way even if it hurts them.  What I felt when I screamed "talk to me or I'll hurt myself" at my ex wasn't a power trip or an evil cackling glee. What I felt was snake-fleeing desperation.

I don't think this accounts for all forms of abuse, but I think it's a pretty common motivation.  I think cultural narratives of Perfect Love and Forever Love play into it big-time, too.  We don't teach kids "someday your Prince Charming will come, and hopefully you'll have good times together even if it doesn't work out in the end."  We teach them that people are expected to hook up permanently and seamlessly, and if they don't... we don't really address that possibility.  It's left hanging, unspoken but definitely undesirable, perfect conditions for setting something up as TWTITW.  The idea that maybe a relationship problem can't be fixed or maybe you will be single when you don't want to be, that these are painful but not infinitely painful, doesn't come up much in any media or education aimed at people under thirty.

I suspect a class on "rejection happens to the best of us, and it's painful and awkward for everyone involved, so here's how to take care of yourself during and after a rejection" would prevent more abuse than just repeating the messages of "no means no" and "hitting is bad."


Realizing that emotional pain is a cockroach, but only a six-foot cockroach, has given me comfort and self-control.  I can't say that being rejected or broken up with wouldn't hurt.  But I can say it would only hurt some.  I can face "some" if I have to.



[Obligatory awkwardly self-effacing comment about not writing an on-topic or timely post.  I'm gonna try super hard to get back on schedule and write a kink post Tuesday.]

Models of Sex.

When I was sixteen, my boyfriend Kevin brought me a vibrator.  (His mom had bought it, which... awwwwkward, but it was her well-intentioned effort to keep me from getting pregnant by her son. It didn't stop us having intercourse, but I didn't get pregnant so it all worked out in the end.)  The first time he used it, it was mind-blowing.  I'd never used a vibrator before, it happened to be an exceptionally powerful "back massager," and it was a goddamn revelation in sensation.  I came hard, immediately, and repeatedly.  I screamed and writhed and clutched his arm.

For about a minute.  Then he stopped.  He didn't look aroused.  He looked concerned.

"That was amazing!  Do it again!" I said, very happily.

"No," he said.  "I don't want to do any more of that."

Well okay then, that's certainly his decision to make.  We put the vibrator away and had a bunch of non-mechanically-assisted sex, which went fine.  When Kevin was about to leave for the night, I asked him to leave the vibrator behind, and he refused.  He told me he was going to throw it out.  I asked him, in roughly the tone of voice of a puppy that's just been told it can't go to Disneyland, why.

"I'm afraid it can pleasure you better than I can," he said.  So I couldn't have it.

Because I was sixteen, and meek, and naive, and did not have much power in the relationship, I said "oh okay," and then I burbled out a lot of nonsense about of course you pleasure me most of anything in the whole entire world, baby.  But even at sixteen and naive, I knew this was some bullshit.



What interests me now, at twenty-six (and still a bit meek but definitely not naive), is not that it was bullshit.  Telling me I'm not allowed to masturbate in certain ways because I might enjoy it more than The Mighty Penis is clear and obvious bullshit, now.  What interests me is why my boyfriend bought into that bullshit.

I believe it comes down to models.  There are many different ways to model sex, many answers to the questions "So, what exactly is sex? What is it for?"  I believe that once you know someone's answers to those questions, you can understand why their sexual choices make sense to them.

In the economic model, sex is a consumable good, produced by women and sold to men.  (And, in the nastiest implications of the model, sex can be "stolen" without losing value.)  In Thomas Macaulay Millar's performance model of sex, sex is like a cooperative musical performance, ephemeral and existing only in the moment of cooperation between performers.

I've seen people talk about sex in a maintenance model, in which sex is a task a women has to perform fairly regularly to keep her man contented in the relationship.  There's also an achievement model, in which the goal is to do the "naughtiest" or "sexiest" thing, regardless of whether you really like it or not--Cosmo espouses this a lot, and porn tends to encourage it.  And, famously, there's the competition model of sex, in which women are the mile-markers in a race men run against each other.

Or sex can be modeled as a cooperative sport, with the participants acting as teammates encouraging and challenging each other.  There's a communication model of sex, in which sex acts are a way for partners to express and strengthen their feelings for each other.  Personally, I tend toward almost a utilitarian model of sex, in which the goal is to work together to attain the greatest net pleasure.



Kevin's problem, I think, was that he had internalized a shitty macho-culture model of sex.  Going beyond "it's wrong to tell your girlfriend not to use a vibrator," why would it even make sense to tell your girlfriend not to use a vibrator?  In a utilitarian model of sex, it makes no sense--I gain fabulous pleasure, he experiences no harm to his body or his autonomy--this obviously ought to be a win-win, or at least a win-neutral, situation.

But in a competition model of sex, I was making him come in second place to a piece of plastic.  If he believed sex was about showing off his prowess, it was an embarrassment that his prowess couldn't compare to a machine--and it was as cruel and unfair as making a runner race against a motorcycle.

Because I believed that my pleasure was my pleasure, I thought the vibrator was harmless fun.  Because he believed that my pleasure was his measure as a man, he thought the vibrator would make him the loser in a race I didn't even know he was running.  It's no wonder he took it away.  He wasn't pointlessly depriving me of pleasure.  He was depriving me of pleasure because, in his model, he had to.



If I have a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything, it's this: I believe that people always do things that make sense to them.  Hard as it is to believe with all the hurting out there, almost nobody hurts others just to be a jerk.  So if you want to change human behavior on a grand scale, you can't tell people "stop being a jerk."  You have to dissect and then recreate their models of the world until being a jerk doesn't make sense.



[So here's the deal, scheduling-wise.  I'm going to try and have a post up every Tuesday night.  (Last week didn't go so well because Comcast accidentally cut off my cable for most of the week.)  Cosmocking is "extra", not one of the Tuesday posts, and I'll do other "extra" posts as time/inspiration allow.

Also, I just got this month's Cosmo, so that's coming up sometime this week, whee!]

Just one ally.

When I worked on an ambulance (this is my personal "one time in band camp"), we were at a nursing home, dropping a patient off after a routine transport, when we saw something disturbing.  A nurse was giving liquid medication to another patient who was clearly choking on it.  The patient was gagging horribly, the nurse was holding his head in place and forcing the oral syringe down his throat even as he was thrashing and making drowning noises, and after she finished she walked away even though he was coughing up medication all over his pillow.

My work partner and I saw this, and, with that creeped out feeling of "did I just see what I think I saw?" and "something's not right," we... left and took another call and went off to the hospital.  Then we grabbed some lunch.  Then one of us--I don't even remember which one--blurted it out.

"That thing at the nursing home... you saw that too, right?  That was kind of fucked up, right?"

Those two sentences started the chain of events that lead to us filing a formal elder abuse report.



When we see something going on that's Not Right, often we face ourselves with a false dichotomy--either do The Right Thing, confront them or call the cops or blow a whistle... or do nothing because you blew it.  And doing The Right Thing can be hard if you're not sure that what you saw was wrong, or real, or any of your business.

It's easy to judge people for seeing something horrible and not responding, but I think most of us have been there.  We've been in that nail-biting state of being horribly distressed by what we saw, but unable to act in the moment--more afraid of making a fuss over nothing than about letting someone get away with something horrible.  Sounds stupid when you spell it out.  But it's a real state that humans are really subject to, and saying "well, don't do that" doesn't fix it.  I wrote about one of my experiences here.

Here's another one: I went to a Jewish summer camp one year when I was a preteen.  On the bus ride back, I heard the administrators telling all the boys from the eight-year-olds' cabin not to tell anyone about Counselor X.  Especially don't tell anyone about how he touched your butts.  Otherwise we won't be able to have camp next year and it'll be all your fault!  You'll ruin it for everyone!  You don't want that!

I was young, but I was not so young that I didn't know exactly what they were talking about.  But I didn't tell anyone.  Mostly because I had this sense of "it couldn't be."  I thought it couldn't really be molestation because molestation is a big serious deal and this was just some confused boys and a counselor who looked like an ordinary guy and everything seemed really quiet and normal except for those few sentences I overheard.  I managed to convince myself that the counselor had done some things that might sound like molestation, but obviously weren't, but if the boys told anyone then the camp might be shut down because of a misunderstanding.

I know how fucking stupid that sounds.



But calling it stupid doesn't help.  Giving me speeches about "enabling" and "all evil needs is for good people to stand by" and so forth doesn't help.  What would've helped?  Just one ally.  Just one person who turned to me and said "they're trying to get us to cover up for a molester, right?" would've made all the difference.  Just one person who let me know my concerns weren't all in my head.  Just one person to check myself against, and I might have been able to say "we're telling about this."

So I don't wish that I'd called the cops, or told my parents, or CPS or anything.  Not directly. I wish that I'd turned to one of the kids sitting next to me on the bus and gone "did they just say what I think they said?"



Next time you see something that seems wrong, but "oh my gosh maybe not really maybe I shouldn't say anything I don't know," you don't have to go right to the cops or the boss or run into the situation with your fists up.  What you do have to do--this is a goddamn order--is tell someone about it.  Someone as confused and powerless as you are.  Just check in.  "This seemed off to me, does it seem off to you?"

Sometimes it isn't even about how the other person reacts.  Sometimes it's just about putting it into words.  You hear yourself describe the situation and you realize what you're describing.

Sometimes it's just about taking a step, even if it isn't the perfectly right step, that makes you realize you are allowed to act on this; now that you've done something you can do more.

And sometimes they look back at you and say "yeah, that was fucked up. I was thinking the same thing but didn't want to say anything.  You think we should go tell someone about it?"

And that, two people realizing they're not the only one in the universe who has a problem with what's happening, much more often than any spectacular act of lone-hero courage, is how evil gets dragged into the light.






[Wow, I've been writing a lot of dark shit lately. Which is partly a reflection of things that have been going on in my life--working in an ER and dealing with ugly scene politics doesn't always prime you to see the good in everyone--but nonetheless, it's not all I want the blog to be.  I'll try to write something positive about sex next.]

The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex.

xkcd

With all apologies to the original, which all geeks should read...

I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing.  God knows it's the only sexuality I've ever known.  Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex.  Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between "geek" and "kinkster" is, like, 90% of both groups.

But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention.  Here's some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex.

GSFS 1: People can voluntarily control their emotions about sex.
This manifests a couple different ways:
"We've agreed this is casual sex, so as long as we decide not to develop feelings, we won't."
"Sex is just a physical activity, so adding it to our dating/friendship won't change our relationship."
"My partner promised not to feel jealous because I'm not monogamous, but they're betraying me by feeling jealousy anyway!"  (Note that in this example both partners are apparently carriers of this fallacy.)

Pretending you can just decide whether you'll feel any emotions at all is a geek fallacy stemming from the idea that you should be able to optimize your own brain to not do anything unproductive or unintended.  But geeks ought to know better, because come on, you can't even get a computer to do that.  This stuff comes on you, it gets you by the heart and the gut, and it doesn't ask you "pardon me, I'm an emotion, are you okay with experiencing me?" first.

What you can and should voluntarily control is how you express your emotions.  It's okay to feel strong emotions; it's not okay to attack people or break promises and use "I was emotional" as an excuse.  This is when it's time to tell your partner "hey, we need to talk, I'm feeling an emotion!"  Solving the problem may involve changing your relationship boundaries, it may just involve talking it out, or it may mean you have to end the relationship.  But the solution is never "that is an incorrect emotion, please stop experiencing it."


GSFS 2: The weirder your sex, the more enlightened you are.
I've done a whole post on this, so go there if you want extended pontification.  The short of it is: geeks have a tendency to mistake "less mainstream" for "better," and to conclude that sex that least resembles the mainstream is both the sexiest and the most virtuous.  So polyamory gets seen as more enlightened than monogamy, kink gets seen as sexier than vanilla, and monogamous vanilla geeks get a big steaming pile of "I guess you're just not very open-minded."

I think polyamory and kink have great things to offer geeks of all sorts, but "having sex with multiple people" and "having ouchy sex" aren't those things.  Those are just neutral activities, things to do if you like and not if you don't.  The real takeaways are conscious and explicit communication.  That's what makes us cooler than the squares.


GSFS 3: Cool chicks don't worry about sexism.
This isn't exactly a sex thing but God does it plague some geek circles.  I know because I've been the cool chick.  I've played the "don't worry, I'm not like those other girls, I'm not into gossip and drama" card; I've played the "well, you have my permission to objectify me, because I take it as a compliment" card; I've even played the "that mean lady was such an uptight no-funster for having boundaries" card.

Those cards are the fuck out of my deck now.  And I've paid the social price for that.  There's definitely some people in my circles who've put me in their "uptight no-funster" mental box since then, or who deliberately bait me about "watch out, Holly, I'm going to patriarchally oppress you!" because ahahaha she's an angry little lady isn't that cute.

I don't blame a woman who sees this go on, decides she wants friends more than she wants to start fights about some abstract problem that doesn't seem to affect her personally, and starts telling her male friends not to worry, they can be sexist around her, she's cool.  The problem isn't her.  The problem is all the people who made it so much easier and more pleasant for her to be a "cool chick" than a woman who gives a damn how people think of her gender.


GSFS 4: Drama is always worse than the thing the drama is about.
I guess the xkcd comic has a little bit of this one.  Drama's never fun, but it beats the fuck out of suppressing real issues.  In my time in geek circles, I've seen reports of sexual harassment and even outright assault silenced with "well, I don't want to make drama" or "but whatever, that's just drama."  A woman in the group is a sexual predator? Gosh, I don't spread gossip.  A man needs to be disinvited from parties because he's repeatedly threatened people at them? No, kicking him out would make a scene, it would make drama.

In geek sexual communities, the illusion of smooth functioning and of everyone being bestest friends with everyone can supersede people's needs for comfort and safety.  A lot of this has to do with the "Ostracizers are Evil" non-sex GSF, but it gets worse when you add sex to the mix, because defensiveness about our non-traditional sexuality suppresses important issues even further.  Like, if you admit that people violate boundaries in BDSM circles, then you're admitting that BDSM isn't a perfect haven of consent and negotiation, and that's just going to play right into the mainstream idea that BDSM is abusive!  So we end up defending abusers to prove BDSM isn't abusive.

"Drama" is a trivializing word.  Let's try "conflict," instead.  "I don't want to treat him any differently just because he gets a little handsy with women, that would cause conflict."  It doesn't sound so superior and level-headed now, does it?


GSFS 5: Sex should be no big deal.
This is related to GSFS 1, but even nastier.  This is the idea that since sex is just a super simple physical act--you rub some bits together, it feels good, the end--that there shouldn't be anything complicated or difficult about sex.  That casual sex should be easy for everyone, that having multiple partners should be as simple as "it's like having a sexual partner, but more than one of them," that everyone who makes sex into a big complex issue is being dramatic (GSFS 4) or no-fun (GSFS 3) or narrow-minded (GSFS 2).

Sex is complicated as fuck, and if you think understanding sex is easy, you don't understand sex.  I've written 1300 posts on sex and I've already changed my mind about roughly half of them.  It amazes me that the same people who admit that games about rolling dice can hide deep complexity and meaning will go on and claim that sex is just some squishy bits coming together.  It's not.  Sex is two (or more) people interacting in a huge diversity of ways, and while it can be great, it's never simple.



I love geek sex.  I love the way we're endlessly willing to rethink and improve and break stereotypes about sex.  But we gotta stop buying into this crap.  We're geeks; we oughta be smarter than that.

"Why do you care what other people think?"

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.

The end of normal.

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.

Feels good.

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?

Relationship Ed.

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!

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.

A head cold.

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.

Asymmetrical perceptions.

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...

"Why does she stay with that jerk?"

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.

When love is more destructive than sex.

When I was 19, I had casual sex with a much older man for no good reason. I kind of regret it, but it didn't really hurt me; it was just sort of awkward and embarrassing. I thought it would be fun and it wasn't fun; but whatever, I could say the same thing about the Transformers movie. It wasn't coerced or painful, and a day later I was over it.

When I was 15, I fell in love with an older man. It was a huge fucking mess. He never had much connection with me except for sex, but I missed classes to be with him, got reported as a missing person when I was with him, my parents filed a restraining order against him, they tried to charge him with statutory rape, and the drama built to the one and only time in my life when I've threatened suicide. Basically, any kind of up that can be fucked, was.

I thought of these two men when I read that 51-year-old Doug Hutchinson married a 16-year-old, and I realized exactly why I was horrified.

I don't think an older person having sex with a teenager is that bad. It's kind of icky to me, but if it's consensual and legal, you have the right to be icky.

I think an older person saying "I love you" to a teenager is horrifically wrong.

Of course there's a special place in Hell for people who do this intentionally just to get some of that hot teenager sex, but I think it's wrong even if it's true. Because what a teenager thinks of as "love" is very rarely the same thing an adult means by that word. I might only be speaking for white suburban middle-class girls here, but at least in my experience, teenage love is stupid. It's idealized, over-dramatic, volatile, impractical, and often destructive. When two teenagers fall in love, they may do stupid things, but they really didn't know any better. An adult should know better.

I don't think it's always about sex, either. I think the experience of being idealized by someone, having them treat you like you're Edward Cullen and you're made of unicorn kisses and it's so cool that you have a car, can be an even bigger draw for adults who aren't very good at coping with other adults--or are so narcissistic that they don't see why they should have to.

When I was a teenager, I thought True Love conquered all. I thought if it was really True maybe it would last forever and we'd get married and have babies and a house of our own. I wanted to be by my True Love's side all the time, damn the damage to the rest of my life--in fact, I even thought the damage was sort of romantic, because it meant I was sacrificing for Love. I thought that True Love means thinking that your Lover is perfect and worshipping them. And if he asked me to do things I didn't want to (rarely sexual, more often in terms of disrupting my studies and friendships), saying "no" wouldn't be very Loving, would it?

I slept on his floor. We'd have sex, and he told me he wasn't comfortable sharing a bed, so I slept on the wooden floor next to his bed, like a dog. I don't want to make him out to be a complete monster here; I could have gone out and slept on the couch, but I preferred the floor. At 15, that was my idea of Love.

It took me quite a few years, and getting burned rather badly, and a whole lot of learning and thinking, to get to the point where I could be cool about love. To go from saying "I love you so much I'd jump in front of a train for you" to saying "I love you so much that I trust you to get off the goddamn tracks." To be able to argue with someone--and not back down, and maybe not ever completely resolve it--and still love them. To be able to say "no, I don't want to do this" (and I'm not just talking about sex acts; I'm also talking about "can you take the day off Tuesday to help me out?") and know that real love, if not True Love, is when they say "well, that's a bummer for me, but I understand you have a life too."

When I read about Doug Hutchinson marrying a 16-year-old, I don't worry that it's "gross" or that they're in different "leagues" or even that they won't have much to talk about over the dinner table. I worry that she's sleeping on his floor.



(Metaphorically. You guys.)

DSMocking!

May 2013! Blue cover, maybe! No famous actress or model on the cover because that would be really weird! The major resource codifying the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders! Yes, folks, it's the proposed draft of the DSM-V! This being the Pervocracy, let's look at the sexy parts!



In my opinion, the entire Paraphilias section is coming at things wrong by listing out specific fetishes. I don't think it matters whether you're an exhibitionist or a masochist; what matters is the problems it causes. In my perfect world, all the specific paraphilias would be out of the DSM and replaced with:

Sexual Adjustment Disorder: A person has difficulty accepting their fetish, orientation, or form of sexual expression (often but not always exacerbated by the attitudes of their friends, family, and community). They experience significant distress or impairment not from the fact that they have the fetish, but from the fact that they haven't healthfully integrated the fetish into their identity.

Sexually Abusive Disorder: A person has a persistent desire to sexually coerce, exploit, or abuse others--the specific form of the coercion is not as significant as the fact that it is coercion.

I realize that the DSM is only intended for diagnosis and not treatment, but diagnosing someone as "your problem is that you have Fetishistic Disorder" suggests that the treatment is to get rid of the fetish, rather than to help them express the fetish in healthy ways.

The particular shame of the Paraphilias section is Transvestic Disorder.
A. Over a period of at least six months, recurrent and intense sexual arousal from cross‑dressing, as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behaviors.
B. The person has clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning.
The concept that there are "right" and "wrong" ways for people to dress according to gender is bad enough without codifying it into the medical literature.

It's also sexist, in that I wear "men's" clothing all the time, but I'm unlikely to be considered a transvestite because it's only weird when men do it. Which is sexism against men in limiting their clothing options; and sexism against women in saying that our clothes are so weird that you'd have to have some kind of funky fetish to want to wear them.

I realize that the language includes the "significant distress or impairment" loophole that almost everything in the DSM does, but this loophole isn't a "get out of bad idea free" card. For example, many people are significantly distressed or impaired by being gay, but we don't list homosexuality as a disorder with the "but don't worry, that's only if it's hurting you!" caveat, because the sexuality itself isn't a disorder. It's a matter of, as I described above, adjustment, and should be diagnosed as such.

I also wonder--and this isn't an accusation but a question--how much the "sufferers" of each condition have been included in the construction of the DSM-V. I get the impression that much of it is written from the perspective of "these are some patients that, I, a totally normal person who never does anything weird at all, have objectively observed," verus how much input was received from people willing to say "as someone with a thorough education in psychology who also happens to like wearing frilly panties, these are my experiences."



And then we have the minefield that is Gender Dysphoria. Unfortunately, this can't simply be tossed out with "being trans isn't a disorder!", because currently a diagnosis is often necessary for trans people to get drugs or surgery or alter legal documents listing their sex. And the wording has certainly improved from when it was "Gender Identity Disorder."--referring to "assigned gender" rather than "his or her sex," and being considerably more specific of what the manifestations of gender dysphoria might be.

Nonetheless, it still calls being transgendered a disorder. It still veers close to the "identifying the wrong part as the problem" issue present in the paraphilias section. And it also necessarily buys into gender roles and the concept of two fixed genders.

Being cis myself and not having a full view of either the legal or the psychological implications of a Gender Dysphoria diagnosis, I don't have specific alterations to propose, but I do want to point out that it's problematic.

Reading through this section, I couldn't help noticing that I would have handily qualified for a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria in Children. Which is weird, because I'm cis; I'm somewhat masculine and rather uncomfortable with the entire idea of gender as a package deal, but ultimately I'm okay being called a lady and having lady parts. But I played "male" roles extensively as a child, to the point of asking to be called by various male names (including Batman, okay, but woe betide anyone trying to make me be dumb ol' Batgirl) and refusing to play with any toys or games I considered "girly." How much of this was true gender dysphoria, how much was internalizing the sexism of "boys are tougher and awesomer, so I want to be a boy!", how much was reaction to the fact that due to sexism a lot of boy games were awesomer, and how much was simple preference independent from gender? Shit, I still don't know.

I do know that "treating" me, either to make me into a proper girl or to transition me to a boy, would probably not have been a good course of action compared to simply allowing me to grow up as a masculine girl. I'm not saying this is the case for all non-gender-conforming kids, but it illustrates the difficulties in a diagnosis that hinges on accepting traditional gender roles.

The good news is that the people writing the DSM-V are accepting public comment, and they are still very actively in the process of revising the diagnoses. If you disagree with the way they're defining identities as disorders, you can do more than shake your fist at the sky; you can up and tell them. I'm going to.