The Myth of the Boner Werewolf.

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I was having sex with Rowdy.  I was on my knees, and he was behind me, thrusting, slapping my ass, biting my back.  We were far into our headspace and our rhythm, powerfully slamming into each other.  And I just got overloaded.  I was bruised and couldn't take any more pain, thoroughly pounded and couldn't take any more pounding.

"Red," I squeaked out.

He stopped instantly.  He let go with his teeth, pulled out, and lay down next to me.  He still had an erection, of course.  I'm sure he still had the urge to keep fucking.  But he put his arms around me and asked if I was okay, and I was, and we cuddled and went to sleep.

There's a pernicious myth out there that the male sex drive is unstoppable and irresistible--that once a man is aroused, he literally cannot control his actions.  We tell jokes about "thinking with the other head" and "all the blood went out of his brain" that aren't entirely jokes.  We have a cultural narrative in which sexual arousal makes a man into a goddamn werewolf.

And we expect women to tiptoe around this uncontrollable male sexuality.  We tell them to watch how they dress, lest they wake the beast.  We tell them "some guys can't control themselves"--not won't, but can't.  We tell them to be careful what they start, because they'll be expected to finish it.  Hell, way too often we outright tell them that they have no right to withdraw consent once sex has started.

My response to myths like this, more and more, is "shit, if I believed that, I'd never have sex with a man again."  I wonder if the story would change if more guys realized that saying "if a woman gets me turned on, she'd better be ready to go all the way" is the same as saying "getting me turned on is dangerous, better not take the risk."

Then again, I wonder why more men aren't just insulted by the whole concept.  If someone started telling stories about how my gender was controlled by our genitalia and sexual arousal turns us into rapist automatons, I would be outraged.  I would explain in very small, very loud words that I am a person and I can goddamn control myself.  I wish more men would speak up to say "actually, even when I can't turn my erection off, I can sure as hell use the rest of my body to put it somewhere it won't bother anyone."

I wish our culture prized self-control as much as it does virility, and even more, I wish our culture didn't act like they were opposites.  Even I can't 100% shake the worry that the story at the top makes Rowdy sound desexualized or submissive, (or super nice and extra feminist, rather than "bare minimum of human decency") even though all it describes is him not raping me.

Men aren't rollercoasters. They aren't werewolves.  They aren't walking penises.  They're people.  They make decisions.  Let's stop talking about "he couldn't stop himself" and start talking about "he decided not to stop."  Men deserve that dignity, and the responsibility that comes with it. 



[I've just started clinical rotations at school!  Which is exciting, but means that I need to get my shit together, writing-wise, because WOW did all my free time just evaporate.  And my updates were already slipping.  I'm thinking of making the Pervocracy officially a weekly blog, and committing to regular Tuesday-night updates, rather than stringing everyone along with the "I'll post when I have a post, dammit" irregularity.  How does everyone feel about this?]

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.

Rescripting sex.

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."

What would you do?

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?

What do you want?

[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 the most insults I've been subjected to 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.

From slutty to horny.

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.]

Strong woman.

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.

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.

Ten shades of "false rape accusations."

[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

"Is this spot taken?"

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?"

A small request.

An open letter to everyone I've engaged in BDSM with:

Please do not, in social situations or even vanilla sex, just come out and whomp me.

Don't hit me because I said something "bratty" and it would be funny. Don't hit me because we're joking about what a totally kinky kinkster I am. Don't hit me to show that you're the UberDom and you don't take sass. Don't hit me because my butt is just sticking out there, like right out there, and it's just too tempting.

And for the love of God don't hit me because you think I'd like it.

There are people who are okay with this sort of thing, who really are in bottom mode all the time, and I've got no problem with that. And there are other people who aren't physically enjoying it, but are in D/s relationships where they've agreed to take it. But neither of these covers everyone in BDSM. There are a lot more people--and I'm one of them--whose reaction being casually whomped is "well, it didn't hurt that bad, and I don't want to bring everyone down by making a big deal out of it, and I don't want people to be afraid to play with me because I'm too touchy, and I guess it was kinda funny... but ugh."

Hitting's kind of a big deal, you know? We're aware of that in BDSM-land, so we talk real big about consent and negotiation--we know that consent is the difference between What It Is That We Do and kidnapping, assault, and rape. The problem is, then we get comfy with it. Once you've crossed the social boundaries and gotten used to the feeling of striking another person who does not hit back, you can get to feeling a little too casual about it.

Please don't. I like to be hit--when I'm in bottom mode, when I'm ready for it. Enjoying being hit is a psychological and physical challenge. It's not something you can just toss at me. When I get hit in the context of casual conversation or horsing around or making out, I feel exactly the same as a normal person who just got hit. Scared, pissed off, and just plain hurt.

I'm not talking here about strangers in the community; that really would be straight up assault. I'm talking about people that I like, people that I've played with or slept with, people that I did give my consent to some BDSM activities with. I've gotten in habits like sitting with my back to the wall so I can't be grabbed from behind, or not wanting to walk up stairs ahead of certain people. It's a little bit of a playful "ha ha, gotta keep 'em from gettin' to me, I'm so wily!"... and a little bit of a "I'm quite seriously trying to protect myself from unwanted pain." There are moments when I've really felt like I was in a situation where I couldn't avoid being hurt or predict when it was going to happen. Not in the fun way.

It's easy to understand why you can't do a full scene with someone without negotiating--obviously you can't tie someone to a chair or beat them bloody without a little "you're sure you're cool with this?" first. But just because a playful slap isn't Big Important Deal BDSM doesn't mean that it's not BDSM. Even a playful slap requires consent.

If you want to hit someone in a terrifying, edge-of-real-danger, intensely sensual and perverse way, negotiate it and get their consent. If you want to casually dope-slap someone for being a totally goofy little dingus.... negotiate it and get their consent.

Peggle and the Smurfette Principle.

I've been playing Peggle lately, because I'm easily amused by bright shiny colors and cheerful dink dink sounds that make it sound like I'm doing something very important and successful when I'm barely even interacting with the game. And I know this isn't exactly on the "children starving in the streets" level of importance, but I couldn't help noticing there was something funny about the cast of characters.

In Peggle, you play as one of ten cutesy cartoon critters. There's Jimmy Lightning, the surfer-dude beaver! Master Hu, the wise owl! Claude, the inexplicably French lobster! ...And Tula, the female flower! All of the characters have a different silly quirk, and her quirk is "female!"

The total, then, is nine male characters and one female character. (One character is an alien and is arguably alien-gendered. Eight males and one female, anyway.) This is what TvTropes would call the Smurfette Principle: For any series not aimed solely at females, odds are high that only one female will be in the regular cast.

The implications of the Smurfette Principle are numerous and pretty smurfing offensive:
-Men are the default gender, and women are a variation
-It's normal for there to be more men than women in a group that is doing something interesting
-Men have a variety of personalities; women don't
-Women won't mind playing a male character, but men would be embarrassed or unwilling to play as female
-If a game had a lot of female characters, it would be a "girl game," and those are widely known for being condescending and technically incompetent

The tricky part is: I don't think the Peggle dev team were trying to say any of the things above. I do not suspect them of hating women or participating in some grand conspiracy against women. I'm sure they were just trying to design a cute little ensemble of cartoon animals, and this is what came to mind. (It may not have helped that the Peggle dev team consisted of... nine men and one woman.)

This is what's meant by "ingrained sexism"--not hatred of women, but unintentional disregard. It's not a problem of thinking women are inferior so much as it is a problem of forgetting to think about women at all. It's pretty benign when it comes to cartoon videogame characters; not so much when you can look at a picture of the newly elected members of the 112th US Congress and not immediately see What's Wrong With This Picture.

Women are half of everybody. I hope I live to see the day when we're half of the people who get talked about and written about, too.

How to become invisible.

Boston's a great walking city; whether it's socializing, shopping, studying, or just getting outside, I spend a lot of time on the sidewalk, and so do lots of my neighbors. When I go out alone, people talk to me. Friends say hi, tourists ask for directions, street people ask for money, shop clerks say "can I help you?", cellphone salesmen make obnoxious pitches, clipboard people ask for signatures and donations, and people randomly comment on the weather and whatnot.

When I go out with a guy... friends say hi. Sometimes. Everything else goes through the guy. It doesn't matter who the guy is--a guy my age looks like my boyfriend, an older guy looks like my dad, and a guy with a group looks like the leader. Anyone with a question to ask goes to him.

Maybe it's just me. I do have a meek side. Sometimes I let the other person do the talking when I'm with female friends too. I went back and forth over whether this post was a little too paranoid, and it might be.

But every time a man and I walk up to a counter together and hear "can I help you, sir?", it serves as a very subtle, polite little reminder that I've been transformed from "a person" to "a person and the girl with him."

Naming, shaming, and victim blaming.

[Because this issue has already been addressed elsewhere, all names in the following story have been replaced with names from Saturday morning cartoons. DO NOT discuss details of the original issue in comments on this post. DO NOT name the group or event or use the legal names, scene names, or usernames of anyone involved.]




There's been a problem recently in a BDSM group I belong to, the Thundercats, with a particular member, Captain Planet, inappropriately touching or creepily hitting on people at Thundercats meetings and events. This had been ongoing for more than a year, had scared me and other people away from attending certain Thundercats meetings, and several people had talked to Captain Planet with the only result being that after several talking-tos he would switch targets. The Thundercats has had a couple other creeper incidents, but he was one of the most persistent, although relatively less severe--he was more inclined to creepily stroke women's hair or backs than to go for the "swimsuit area."

Then a couple days ago I heard that he had been creeping on my friend April O'Neil to the point of triggering PTSD symptoms, and I just snapped. We'd talked before in the Thundercats about having trouble with "some people" violating "some boundaries" and it always just ended in the conclusion that tsk, tsk, that was very naughty of "some people." I was fucking sick of this culture of silence, of sheltering someone just for being "one of ours" and of throwing women to the wolves of "personal responsibility" if they were too intimidated to confront him or too new to know who to watch out for.

In short, I was sick of worrying myself too damn much about his feelings.

So I posted basically what I wrote above to the Thundercats website, only with his (scene) name and a lot more details on specific incidents. It was a rehash of a lot of the "some people" posts, but I went ahead and said "no, not 'some people.' THIS DUDE."

A lot of people, Thundercats and bystanders, were very supportive of this. Three other women came forward to say they had also had problems with Captain Planet. And Captain Planet himself came on, took it with relatively good grace considering that I was pointedly not gentle in my writing, fessed up and promised to change his behavior. I have to say I'm impressed by that, hope he stands by it, and it makes me feel that I might have actually accomplished something.

But then something weird happened. Even though the person accused had already confessed and apologized, third parties took it on themselves to explain why I, and the other women complaining, were in the wrong. I got a mountain of hostile comments and emails. These fell into three broad categories:


1. "Are we supposed to take the word of a woman?"
There wasn't a ton of this, but I got a few. Funny thing was, Captain Planet had already confessed. (God only knows where things would have gone if he'd denied it.) But I still got people speculating that I was making things up, that I was blowing innocent casual touch out of proportion, and that perhaps people should watch out for me since clearly I'm the sort of person who's dangerously prone to going around accusing men of... um, things they did and admit to doing.


2. "Whatever happend to personal responsibility? For you, I mean. Not him."
Quite a bit of this. People noted that he'd picked on women who didn't seem "strong-willed," which is not entirely true anyway--I'm a noted marshmallow rollover, but some of the other women complaining were pretty tough. Or they said that we were just responsible for setting our own boundaries and dealing with our own problems. But the problem here is threefold:

a. If I'm having to exert a strong will, there's already a problem. Not having to defend myself is vastly preferable to getting good at self-defense.
b. Some women are, because of past events or simply by nature, "weak-willed." They still don't deserve to be creeped on.
c. By making this all about the women, Captain Planet and his actions kind of... disappear. He becomes this weird force of nature, like a pressured fluid naturally rupturing weak spots, instead of a person making choices. That isn't the case. He's much more able to control himself than anyone else is able to control him.


3. "Okay, that's bad, but how dare you talk about it."
This was a really, REALLY depressingly common opinion. I was accused a bizillion times on the thread and in private emails of acting "childish," because apparently an adult shuts up and takes it. I was also told that because the accusations weren't "that bad," weren't sexual assault or anything, I shouldn't be making them.

Note that I and other people had talked to Captain Planet in private previously, and it hadn't worked. Here are some other justifications for naming names:

a. Not everyone can be assumed to be "in the loop." New people or people not in the rumor mill deserve to know who to watch out for.
b. People who thought it was just their own problem with Captain Planet are helped by knowing it's not just them.
c. If you don't have the right to violate people's boundaries, you sure as hell don't have the right to violate them in private. We avoid "outing" because being outed as kinky could hurt you even though it isn't a bad thing. Being outed as creepy doesn't meet the "isn't a bad thing" criterion.
d. All I did was say what had happened and what I thought of it. If people want to do this with my actions ("She sat in a chair and talked to some people. I was pretty okay with this."), they're welcome to.
e. As consequences for bad behavior go, simply having people know about it is a pretty mild and natural one.
f. People who are tempted to violate boundaries should have something to be afraid of. Being politely talked to in private isn't very scary. Hopefully, being publicly shamed is.


So for everyone saying that victim-blaming doesn't happen, that it isn't that bad, or that the victims deserved to be blamed (whoa), there's my little story about what happens when a woman speaks out about a relatively minor and non-criminal issue.

"Feminism."

It seems like there's a lot of criticism out there of "feminism" as a label. Often the criticism isn't of any of the actual beliefs of a particular feminist, but simply of the fact that they're identifying as a feminist. Frankly I think it's a bit silly to get too much into the label--would it help if I called myself an oogyboogykajoogyist and changed none of my beliefs?--but I wanted to take a moment to defend it from two of the most common criticisms.

Because I'm not an "equalist," a "humanist," a "supporter of equal rights for both genders, but don't label me," or a "I'm not a feminist, but." I'm a feminist.



1. The "fem" in feminism.
Some people seem weirdly offended that feminism would dare to refer to women, instead of being about men and women absolutely equally. Feminism is about gender and sexual equality, feminism certainly addresses masculinity, but yes, feminism is mostly about women and women's issues. Suck it up, deal, and go ask the gay rights people what they've done for straight people today, or something. (Actually, they got "sodomy" laws that also applied to straight people repealed, so there's that.)

Here are some statistics on why dealing with women's issues is still relevant:
-For full-time, year-round workers in the United States, the average woman earned 77 cents for every dollar the average man earned. [US census data.] (Yes, this is partly because women work in different careers than men. That's the problem.)

-1 out of every 6 American women will experience a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. [National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.] (And for that matter, 1 out of every 33 American men wil experience a rape or attempted rape in his lifetime. That's not a counterargument, it's a second problem that feminism is facing more directly than any other movement.)

-Men are 1.2 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than women... but 4.8 times more likely to be perpetrators. [US Department of Justice and FBI statistics.]

-Right now 17 out of 100 Senators are women. 72 out of 435 Representatives are women. 28 of the Fortune 1000 companies have women as CEOs. [CNN Money.]

-Women's cultural contributions are continually ghettoized, trivialized, minimized, and generally treated like "whatever, chick stuff," while our bodies are put on display as objects completely divorced from our personhood. Men's cultural contributions form the vast majority of the "mainstream." [I have a television.]

Understand, these aren't just complaints. These aren't things that I expect to slap on the table and say "so you better be nice to me" or "so I'm a saint just for living through this" or "so go fix this, people." But these are the reasons the "fem" in feminism is relevant and necessary. They're the reasons to keep doing the work of feminism in the big and small ways that I can, if it means donating to women's shelters and rape crisis centers, if it means supporting girls' education and career planning, if it means advocating for victims of violence at my workplace, if it means educating people about gender and sexuality. Declaring these things is not the end of feminism--it's the beginning.

And no, feminism isn't a movement for female superiority or rulership. That's a misreading of the name as facile as thinking that Libertarians are fetishists of the Statue of Liberty.



2. The association with fringe radical feminists.
Yes, some outrageous things have been said in the name of feminism in the last forty years. Andrea Dworkin said all sex is rape, doncha know! Well...

A) Andrea Dworkin actually never said that. In fact, a lot of "radical feminist goes too far" quotes are urban legends.

B) Some of these supposedly "radical" quotes kinda have a point. A recent criticism of one of my posts on feminism, for instance, linked to an article about Stanford University reducing its burden of proof in sexual assault cases. This was, I guess, supposed to prove that Feminism Has Just Gone Too Far, but my only reaction was "well... good." Stanford isn't a government agency and doesn't have the force of law, so this isn't a Constitutional issue, and this brings them in line with national guidelines and helps combat the ongoing huge fucking mess that is sexual assault on college campuses. If this is feminism gone too far, I'm all for it.

(The implicit harm, of course, is that this will further our Huge National Epidemic of False Rape Accusations. God I'm so fucking sick of that bullshit. You know what? I'm sick of playing along and going "yeah, false accusations are terrible, I really feel for any man caught in that evil female trap, blardy blah." You know what I really think? I think these dudes know damn well that false rape accusations are rare and almost always lead to acquittal, and they're not actually worried about being randomly accused. It's just a way to shame, discredit, silence, and punish women who've been sexually assaulted.)

C) So what. So there are things really said by certain feminists that I really don't agree with. That's a reason for me to criticize them, either as "that's not really feminist" or "yeah, I guess that's feminist, but it's just wrong." Besides, it's a big, relatively old movement with a lot of members and subsections and internal disagreements. It'd be weirder if we were in lockstep.

Think of it this way:
Do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and in the salvation of human souls through Christ?
Then you're a Christian.
But wait! Some people call themselves Christians and commit horrible acts of discrimination, selfishness, and even violence! People have been murdered by Christians!

Is your response:
i. "Well, those were some suck-ass Christians. I hope to be a better one, myself."
ii. "Oh shit! I better stop calling myself a Christian!"



I believe in the equal status, rights, and safety of all genders and sexualities, and for this reason, I am a feminist.

The eternal contradiction.

"Women can get laid whenever they want. Their only job is deciding who they don't want to sleep with. Women don't even know what sexual scarcity is like."

"Men aren't attracted to women who don't have large breasts and small waists and symmetrical faces and no body hair and no blemishes and long hair and tasteful makeup and good dress sense and cheerful feminine personalities and correctly groomed toenails. Or if they're over 35."



I've never heard this explained. Although I suspect the answer--at least the honest one--is that "women" never included creatures like me and most of my friends in the first place.

(Also, the deeper you get in this shit, the harder it is to remember that gay people exist. Or any other kind of gender non-conformance. Really, the hardest thing to remember sometimes is that joy exists. That in the real world, sex is fun and love is wonderful, and both of them are often silly and sweet. That when I spend time with my boyfriend, it's not the culmination of an intense sexual power game, it's a chance to grill sausages and talk about robots and see his owl impression. [Owls, in our world, shake their heads rapidly from side to side and go "WHEEEE!" It's... complicated.] Reducing all this giddy humanity down to gender and sex and power isn't just wrong, it's incorrect.)

Imaginary Feminism 101.

I was reading the blog Manboobz, which is fascinating in a sort of constantly infuriating way, and has, er, "lively" debate in most of the comments sections, and realized that there was a fundamental disconnect there between the Men's Rights types (MRA, Men's Rights Activists) and the feminists. The feminists were arguing in favor of feminism, but the Men's Rights fellas were arguing against Imaginary Feminism, or IF. And they were right to do so! This is a truly toxic movement! Let's explore IF in detail.



Imaginary Feminism is monolithic.
This is very important. Anything said by anyone calling themselves a feminist can be assumed to be true of anyone else calling themselves a feminist. Some random thing Andrea Dworkin said in 1973 is tattooed on all IF's chests backward so they can read it in the mirror. All IFs simultaneously subscribe to the beliefs of Valerie Solanas, Catharine McKinnon, Betty Dodson, Phyllis Schlafly, Twisty Faster, and that person who wrote those weird articles about Firefly. Or, I mean, all the beliefs you know about. Don't feel over-pressured to actually learn anything about these people.

If an IF tells you she does not hold a particular belief, there are two possibilities, and only two:
1. She's lying. She's got the SCUM Manifesto printed on her ceiling so it's the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and you know it.
2. She's not really a feminist at all! And she didn't know it, poor thing! She's been suckered! Pat her on the head for being "one of the good ones" and welcome her into the MRA fold.



Imaginary Feminism is playing a zero-sum game against men.
"Women's rights" are entirely obtained by reducing men's rights. For example, when women got the vote, men saw the value of their votes decrease by half! There's no justice in this world. And they want to push it further. The ultimate goal of IF is for women to have all of the rights and men to have none of the rights, and the only way to oppose them is to advocate the opposite. "Feminism helps men too" is a meaningless statement, because the very definition of feminism is opposition to men.

This can be applied to just about every issue, although you will have to sorta squint at times. For example, when IFs ask for reproductive rights, that's their way of evilly killing men's babies... or evilly bearing men's babies and then having the gall to want child support. Or when IFs ask to be protected from sexual harassment and assault, that's their way of setting up men for false accusations!

You may be noticing at this point that everything IFs do is really about men. This is correct. For example, when IFs set up women's shelters, they're doing that specifically to exclude men--the whole "sheltering women" thing is kind of a side effect. When IFs advocate for more representation of women in media and government, this really means less men. The actual impacts of these things on women are secondary.



IF has no real grievances.
Women got the vote in 1920, and since then, IF has been totally irrelevant. The truth is that our current society is totally ruled by women. For example, IFs claim that women earn less than men, but the truth is that men do all their work to support women--every woman has a supporting man and spends her spare time on the couch eating bon-bons. [What even is a bon-bon? Is it a chocolate thing? I've seriously never had one.] Or IFs claim that women are kept out of high-status professions, when really women just don't like being powerful or successful and don't choose those paths.

Worst of all, IFs claim that women are subject to harassment, intimidation, and violence, when a cursory glance at crime statistics will show you that men are also victims of violence. This makes violence against women okay, because as long as violence is something that happens to everyone, it's kind of a non-issue and we should all just suck it up. Plus, the fact that women sometimes abuse men proves that women are evil anyway.



Imaginary Feminism is virulently opposed to sex.
IFs hate porn because it's sexy. IFs hate sex work because it involves sex. IFs hate pick-up Game because it gets men laid. IFs hate women being sexy because, you know, sexy. IFs are sticklers about consensual sex because asking for consent is never sexy, and because they know that if men have to ask for consent they won't get laid. IFs favor a world of gray coveralls where women are never troubled by men's baser needs.

There are three possible explanations for this, which aren't contradictory in the slightest:
1. IFs are uggos who can't get laid, so they want to ruin the fun for everybody else.
2. IFs are actually very traditional ladies who want people to only have sex after making a major chocolate-and-diamonds commitment, and they're pissed that men are getting away with having casual sex.
3. IFs, like all women, have no sex drives of their own. But unlike other women, they don't understand that they're supposed to sell their sex to men for money or ego boosts or to award a particularly deserving man.



Imaginary Feminism is recklessly sexual.
Forget everything I just said. IF is all about letting sluts be sluts. IF believes that women should walk down the streets with their boobies out, fuck tons of men and run away without any consequences. IF just wants to enable hypergamy, which is women's desire to fuck successful, confident, and attractive men, which is horrible of women. So maybe it's most correct to say that IFs want to deprive nice decent guys of the sex they deserve, but bed-hop relentlessly between aggressive hyper-masculine Alpha Males. That's the real meaning of "sexual empowerment"--chasing their biological urge toward hypergamy.

IFs also want to tease men with their bodies, put themselves in compromising positions with men, and then get out of having sex. This doesn't accomplish any basic female goals, it's just funny.



IFs love to shame men into silence.
Any time an IF calls you a "sexist," "misogynist," "chauvinist," or anything along those lines, she is merely trying to shame you into silence, and you shouldn't fall for that old trick. In fact, the shaming language just got you out of listening to anything else in her argument! Anything an IF says is invalid in toto if she failed you to address you as "Gentle Scholar."

Particularly note the old IF trick of acting "angry." She does this to shut you up and intimidate you. Women never actually experience anger. Feel free to test this by needling and insulting her repeatedly, and watch how her facade of reasonable answers to your questions quickly crumbles as she gives in to acting "angry," an IF's last and basest resort.

Remember: if anything, ever, makes you feel bad about yourself and your actions, it's because people are evilly trying to make you feel bad! Don't fall for it.



Any time a man does something good or a woman does something bad, this disproves Imaginary Feminism.
Well, duh. The entire thesis of IF is "women are better than men... just better," so this is a direct contradiction.



IFs are just old-fashioned proper ladies at heart.
You know what an IF really wants? She wants a man to commit to her and take care of her, kill mastodons for her and give her lots of babies. She's just going about it all wrong.

Scott Adams Quick-Fisk.

Oh lord, he's like a kid who's just discovered that yelling "fuck" makes everyone look at him and make a big fuss. (Analogy stolen from LabRat's excellent post here.) Scott Adams is still at it.

No point-by-point, but a few things that were just so egregious.

Take the question of equal pay for equal work. If you see it as a gender issue, aren't you leaving out a few dimensions that are also important? I saw an interview the other day with the woman who is the lead plaintiff for the class action suit against WalMart. Her complaint is that WalMart discriminated against her for being a woman. The thing that fascinated me is that somehow she managed to discern that the discrimination she experienced was because of her gender and not the fact that she's also obese, unattractive, and African-American. Based on the interview, she also seems to have a sketchy command of grammar. I couldn't judge her height or personality, but those are two more factors that have a big impact on career advancement.
Classy motherfucker, ain't he? And then he goes on to acknowledge that he's a "a short, hair-challenged, nearsighted, unattractive, over-the-hill individual" so he's faced discrimination too ya know, plus even more discrimination for being a white male... while somehow missing the part where he's rich and famous.

I don't really get the point here, though. It's a huge class action lawsuit, so presumably there are some skinny pretty white women in the class too. And if Wal-Mart was "only" discriminating against her size/appearance/race, that would be... okay?

(In fact, here's a picture of some of the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart suit. Three are white, at least one is definitely not fat, and "attractive" is subjective but c'mon, they're definitely not "too ugly to promote," whatever the fuck that would even mean in what wasn't exactly a glamor industry to begin with.)

So I propose a simple test to determine if you, individually, are a victim of gender unfairness. If a genie gave you the chance to magically switch your gender, and become a member of the other sex, would you do it? And let's say the new you would be about the same as now on the scale of attractiveness, intelligence, ethnicity, circumstance, and health. The only real change would be gender. Do you take the offer?
If your answer is no, then maybe fairness isn't what you really want. Maybe what you want is all the advantages you have now plus the good stuff that other people have. I totally understand. I want the same thing.
Actually, yeah. I do want all the advantages I can possibly get. Um... how terrible? I want women to have all the good stuff available to men and vice versa. That actually sounds just dandy to me.

The whole point of feminism (at least my feminism, blardy blah) isn't that men have it so much better than women. The point is that gender roles screw everything up for everybody. I don't want to be a man. (Well, I'd like to try it, but this isn't about me.) I want to be a person.

I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post.
I repeat: classy motherfucker.

Why feminists have no sense of humor.

I'm a feminist, or at least a believer in sexual freedom and equality who uses the label "feminist" because that takes less syllables and means the same goddamn thing dammit. And I think I have a sense of humor. I enjoy comedy and sometimes write it, and if I haven't got the knack of creating laugh-till-you-fall-over material entirely consistently, I know it when I see it. For example, the following clip, while being completely idiotic, consistently makes me laugh until I'm leaking bodily fluids: NWS dialogue and also terminally nerdy.

But there's two kinds of jokes out there:
1) Jokes which hinge on absurdity. "Ha ha, that could never happen!" A horse walks into a bar...
2) Jokes which hinge on recognizability. "Ha ha, that always happens!" What's the deal with airline peanuts...

The first kind is pretty reliably inoffensive, at least to me. There are no crypto-patriarchal implications to robot boners. It's also why I'm generally okay with dead baby humor and "The Aristocrats"--the content may be offensive, but the real joke is that nobody wants to kill babies and nobody would put on a show like that, so it's ridiculous to even consider.

The second kind, well, it depends what you're positing as the "always happens." If your joke is only funny in a universe where women are shallow/stupid/sexless/etc., and you think your joke is funny... then yes, you actually are accountable for believing that. The fact that it had a setup and a punchline doesn't mean it exists in some parallel Joke Universe where nobody is responsible for anything they say about anything.

The same joke can be either kind, depending on the person telling them. This can cause some hurt feelings when I understand that my friend isn't really sexist and thinks it's absurd to say that about women, but someone else doesn't know him and thinks he really means it. This is the reason that we have the "it's only okay to tell that joke if you're in the group it's mocking" rule, too.

Funny thing, though; people who tell offensive jokes don't usually use the "I was saying it's absurd to think that!" defense when they're called out on it. Instead they're usually quite willing to say "c'mon, you know it's true." And the next thing, of course: "don't you have a sense of humor?"

I have a great sense of humor! That's why I have a pretty good sense of when something's funny, and when it's not.

I feel bad that this post, ironically, wasn't funny. Here, have some genuinely funny jokes about rape! (NWS dialogue, but definitely not the "rape jokes" you're thinking of.)