Recently in Sex Category

I just read another post in this community about conflict between being a feminist yet not feeling like a feminist because of self-esteem issues. (And I apologize if I am putting my words into her mouth...) I have the same feelings, but dealing with a different issue. 

I can't masturbate.

Well, physically I can, but it takes a lot of nerve for some reason and I can't actually enjoy it. No one ever told me it was wrong. No one told me about it period. I have older sisters and drunkenly asked them one day if they had ever masturbated. They hadn't. One is 10 years older than myself, but never has.

When looking inward, I note that I feel ashamed of that part of my body. It's foreign to me and uncomfortable to think about. The one time I actively masturbated, I didn't get anything out of it. 

I feel silly admitting this, but I didn't know where my clitoris was until I was out of college. I don't remember any of my sex ed classes ever mentioning that and no boyfriend deemed it worthy of attention either. 

I'm not ashamed of my body anymore, but I'm also not comfortable with it. I've come to realize that I like my body because the man in my life likes my body. He is reassuring and loving and very comfortable with his body. Yet during sex I have never orgasmed.  And since I've never successfully masturbated, that means I've never ever orgasmed. 

I own a vibrator but never worked up the nerve to use it. Sex feels good, but stimulation is so full of sensation it hurts. I honestly don't blame my husband for me not orgasming, because if I can't relax to give myself one, an outside force is not the answer. I'm not sure if this post means I'm looking for answers or that I'm just trying to write down what I've been feeling for years now. Any response is welcome. Even while writing this, I'm still confused about what, if anything, is wrong.

From Terry Allen at In These Times:

"Convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them."

The full article is here .

This post is cross-posted from Taboo Trinity.

The Sunday Times last weekend had an article on the new book the Freakonomics authors recently published, Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance . Interesting title. The Times chose to publish the sex worker portion of the book which parades the idea that entrepreneurial women can make $500 an hour working as free lance sex workers. The Times, and the male writers of SuperFreakonomis come to the conclusion that women are missing an important economic opportunity by not selling sex for cash, especially during these hard economic times. Point taken. However, what the SuperFreak writers fail to recognize, or possibly what the Times fails to mention, is the social and cultural issues that keep women from pursuing sex work as a career. Their question, ‘why don’t more women try sex work,’ should be thrown back in the media's face. I believe more women don’t work in the sex industry because of the negative/fallen woman image culture has of sex workers. This stereotype is replicated in popular culture, society and the law. All women know that working in the sex industry can help pay one's rent, however, most weigh the cost and benefits of sex work and decide that the cost of being portrayed as “fallen” outweighs the monetary benefits of selling sex for cash. Why don’t more women try it? Because most do not want to be viewed as unhuman by the rest of society and the law. The question is why do we judge these women, not why don’t more women join.

OK, so first things first: Let's get the criticisms out of the way.

There are many problems with the nature of Halloween costumes that are considered "sexy." The sexualization of youth and young girls, for one thing, is of course a big problem, such as the iconic "sexy schoolgirl" costume, or the sexualization of children's characters (sexy Hermione, of the Harry Potter franchise, is a rather telling example). This is also related to the sexualization of submission (sexy French maid) and, in turn, the sexualization of pink-collar professions (think sexy nurse, sexy librarian) and, on the reverse, sexualization of positions of authority (sexy cop) or "bad girl" stereotypes (sexy pirate). These things are problematic because they point to the old-fashioned ideas about what sexiness is and/or what it should be, and because they define women's sexuality in narrow, black-and-white terms.

There are also problems with selection; there are very few options for adult women's Halloween costumes that aren't in the sexy category. Almost every costume is a "sexy" spin on something and if you aren't comfortable or interested in wearing provocative clothing, and don't have the time, technical skill or energy to make your own, you can be hard-pressed to find a costume. And that isn't fair, because Halloween shouldn't be explicitly about one kind of dress-up. The selection available to you even if you do want to go the "sexy" route can be an issue as well; if you are above a size 14 or so (and, in my experience, really that means a 12 or even 10, because the sizes of costumes almost always fit very snugly) then good luck finding something as easily as your slighter friends can. I think the (un)availability of alternative costumes, including costumes in a wider range of sizes, definitely points to a problem in our society with how we perceive women's roles. We are not all here to be size 6 sex kittens, but costume manufacturers would have you think otherwise.

However, I love dressing sexy at Halloween. I really do. And until this year, I've always felt that was in conflict with my feminism--until I decided to make the choice to not think that way.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a guy friends going away party, and his girlfriend and brother got him a stripper.

I did not know what to expect having never seen a female stripper in action, I wasn't going to watch at first but the 3 other females convinced me to stay and oh my it was a sight.

I'm not judging or criticising women for being strippers and I'm sure there might be feminist strippers out there, and I'm not trying to offend anyone here. But what this stripper did in a suburban backyard in the barbecue area on a rug on the floor in front of young drunk men makes kinda think, have things have gone to far I mean what is next. (Let me just say Lots of lube a lollipop and various adult toys were involved)

It made me sad watching her she had no expression on her face, like she disconnected herself from what she was doing. I suppose it was way of coping with the disgusting behaviour or the young guys watching.

Just to compare things I was at a hens night once and there was a male stripper, he danced around and it wasn't till the end of his routine that he was in all his glory which lasted like 1 minute tops. I'm not saying that male strippers should be making balloon animals with their bits and pieces but compared to what female strippers do there is a huge difference.

I know strippers have been around for a long time now but Is what I witnessed the "NORM" now? The party was in my home town of Brisbane, Australia. Just out of interest has stripping outside of strip clubs become so out there in other parts of the world like the UK, America and Canada?

I always thought of vaginas as pretty central to feminism (or at least my version of it). Of course the umbrella of feminism covers a wide range of topics and causes, but the sexual liberation of women certainly struck me as one of them. Unfortunately, I am not just referring to having sex and openly talking about it, which is certainly something everyone seems to be happy to discuss. What I am talking about is not having sex and being silenced. I guess I never thought that of all places I would feel marginalized on a feminist website.

I have been suffering from vulvodynia (sexual pain disorder) for the past seven years and I am not the only one. According to the only post on feministing I found about this very sensitive topic, one in six women suffer from this very same condition and yet no one is talking about it. Not even here, where the experiences of women should be central to the topic of conversation. Sure, there is no great media buzz about this topic, but why are we not discussing the fact that this is a problem? Why are we not talking about the fact that women are misdiagnosed and untreated? Why are we normalizing sex (aka, vaginal penetration) and forgetting the painful experience of those of us who cannot have it?

I am not putting this out there is a criticism, but more of a call to action. I cannot be the only person who reads this blog and suffers from this condition, but even if I am, all I want is to have my voice heard...

Vagina Hero. Classy. At least it's not called "Pussy Hero", they actually used the correct term.

Came across this while checking out some video games. Apparently it's some kind of joke...yah cause its.."funny".

Anyway, I thought it was real cause in japan they actually HAVE virtual sex games with sex toys for your PS3/2 etc.

I don't really consider this appalling, nor funny. I think it'd be useful in getting a guy to understand how to pleasure a woman correctly (if the game was made properly, preferably by a woman)

I guess it sort of freaked me out at first cause I realized we are getting very close to this kind of...leisure activity...becoming mainstream. Anyways, what do you think?

via ripten

These days there seems to be a lot of quite unwarranted confusion surrounding sexual freedom on the one hand, and commodification or over-the-top sexualization of women on the other hand.

Some people don't seem to know which is which. They see young women who want choice and the freedom to choose sexual partners without "slut-shaming", and to them, it's the same thing as the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or the Girls Gone Wild videos.

Okay. Here's a tutorial to tell the difference. Not that this should ever be necessary, but there you are.

Sexual freedom is...
- choosing men, not necessarily being all about men choosing you.
- control over when, why, where, how and if it happens - and over what happens, and how much does.
- looking how you want to look, not how the culture thinks makes you look sexy - and knowing that men will find you sexy even if you are wearing a potato sack and ashes, because there were no makeup or breast implants 10,000 years ago and guys still managed to get woodies, and they still get them today, even when we don't want them to, and we're totally not trying.
- knowing that, however much you want this one guy, and flirt your ass off with him, this absolutely does *not* mean you will sleep with his buddy, or the guy across the room who saw you being sexy, because those guys are supposed to know it is *not* about them until *you* say so. And the law supports you on this.
- getting drunk, with nobody trying to pin you down on the ground, on the couch, or against the wall, or dragging you into closets. Passing out drunk, and waking up with all your clothes on and nobody on top of you.
- doing what you want, with no videos getting posted without your consent. Ever.
- dancing naked in your room without some creep looking through your window.
- ... (insert your own statement here)...

Commodification / sexual exploitation of women is...
- creating images of women with unrealistic bodies who squeal in delight and run up to be sexually available at the slightest indication men are consuming the products being advertised (cars, burgers, whatever other stupid thing is getting pitched)
- making women feel ugly or inadequate unless they diet/get surgery/buy globs of gunk/dye their hair/shave all over/otherwise modify their natural selves so when they bend over and say ooooo, men will approve, and thereby, validate the existence of the women doing so.
- ensuring that all role models of women doing anything at all, including fighting aliens or winning the Nobel Prize for Saving Humanity, look like Barbie blowup dolls with ridiculous body proportions, while male achievers get to look like anything they want. Just so women know their *real* jobs in life.
- making sure the images of women that are most approved of in society are primarily sexual and pleasing to men, so that women who are just, oh, geniuses or something, feel like there must be something missing in their lives.
- blaming rape victims for doing anything resembling what men dictate they should do to be pleasing to society (i.e., men).
- explaining to women how to avoid being victims, even though doing this will make them "totally uncool", or otherwise, well, unable to participate in society in general without bodyguards bearing lethal weapons.
- ... (insert your own statement here)...

Of course, there are hundreds of other possibilities here. Do feel free to post your own.

Crossposted from Yes Means Yes Blog.

There's a running joke between my spouse and me: "one is not enough, and three is too many." It's a joke about threesomes, but not about the number of people. It's a joke about one that got away.

Before I get to the story, I'll say this: I feel like I can't tell other adults much about reasonable alcohol use. I have a skewed perception of what that is. Both my parents had alcohol problems, and in my early teens I decided I didn't drink, and that remains true. For lots of reasons, I don't think I can drink in moderation, and the consequences of being correct are too high to test the hypothesis. My wife can and does drink socially, knowing that she always has a designated driver, and is well acquainted with, for her, the difference between alcohol as social lubricant and drinking to suppress judgment. It's a distinction other folks draw for themselves, and one I only see from a distance.

So. We were out of town with a group of my wife's school friend from all over the country. This was a long time ago, before the demands of renovating a fixer-upper and raising a brood of small children. Shannon was newly free from a bad marriage. I flirted with her constantly, and she had told my wife she liked the attention, all the more so because of the thrill that came with knowing that I was entirely serious and potentially available. We made a week of it, and we were with Shannon just about the whole time.

By the night of the big dinner, Shannon was hinting that she was going to cash in the pile of rainchecks with my wife and I. She was nervous, but she was grinning ear-to-ear. After the first Long Island Iced Tea, she was loosened up. Her marriage at a young age had stifled her. She had missed a lot. As the years went on, she didn't feel attractive or fun or sexy anymore, and in her (then) early thirties, she wanted to make up for lost time. After the second Long Island Iced Tea, I was pretty convinced that she had decided. She was clear-headed and lucid. She was sounding like she was coming back to our room with us. She was crossing a personal Rubicon: the churchgoing "good girl" was going to have a little fun on her own terms and take the ride that was on offer. My wife and I were nodding - though she's always said she wasn't entirely sure Shannon had quite committed, and I've always been sure that Shannon had made up her mind. We had seen this coming a long way off and had talked about Shannon many times. We had navigated the MFF waters with friends before and we could work with whatever kinds of play she wanted.

Cross-posted on Amplify

Trojan Evolve is, as far as I can tell, a marketing concept by Trojan to sell more condoms.They want to make using condoms seem very cool and hip, which in general is great.  Their main message (played at the end of most videos they make) is "Evolve.  Use a Condom Every Time."  They advertise for Amplify (on the bottom left of their website), which is awesome!  

They sponsor Warped Tour, Spring Break '09, and other events that look very young and hip.  I don't know much about what these are, but check out these pictures from their Spring Break 09 event:

I'm not sure how I feel about these photos.  Trojans efforts seem to only focus on heterosexual sex and sexual health, and they seem to reinforce many traditional gender roles in some of their material (check out the above photos of the girls on the bar).  Part of me thinks that   anytime anyone tells people to use condoms it is a good thing.  Another part of me thinks that Trojan needs to be more inclusive, and that they should not hypersexualize the roles of women in the way that they do.  What do you think?  Is making condoms seem cool a good thing automatically, even if they don't do it in the most culturally competent ways?  

There is another important question I find myself asking: Is Trojan Evolve just a shameless marketing ploy, or is is a substantive and legitimate attempt to increase condom use and protect people's sexual health?   I guess, because they are a condom company, it can be both. 

My mom's attitude on sex when I was a teen was, "I don't want to hear about it!"  She wouldn't discuss it with me at all.  She was okay answering questions about my body ("are black chunks in my period normal, or am I dying?") but as far as she was concerned, anything having to do with me + sex was none of her business.

I agree that my sexual choices were none of her business, but she never actually gave me the birds and the bees talk, nor would she give me an explanation of male anatomy or its functions, or how sex worked, or what a healthy sexual relationship is like.  I think she assumed my older sisters would hear about all that stuff from their friends and pass it onto me.  (She never gave my sisters The Talk, either.  They ultimately learned everything about sex from me.)

Living somewhere that sex education in school was focused primarily around abstinence meant that most of what I learned was from reading romance novels, erotic fanfic, and finding explicit photos online.  As you can imagine, I was very confused for a long time about Actual Sex, because porn and erotica aren't exactly modeled after reality.  The one person in my life that could have given me the information I needed was my mom, and she wasn't talking.

I somehow patched together that sex should be fun and consensual and that condoms were very important.  I'm not really sure how I figured that out, considering my information sources, but thank goodness I did.

When I first had sex with a guy, it was, suffice to say, a jarring and generally unpleasant experience.  I kept it as a secret for the most part because the guy I had sex with was dating another girl.  I told one friend and she accused me of being stupid for having sex-- what if I got pregnant or something?  My sisters, who live to this day in the virtual monastery of my parents house, were likewise horrified and unsupportive.

Lost and confused, I tried to tell my mother and ask for her advice.  Her reaction?  "I don't want to hear about it."

Ok,

here's another theoretical consent question. So I went for a drink with a friend and at the bar I started talking to a student, 22-23. She was pretty drunk, "touchy feely"-drunk and "I may not remember everything that happened last night"-drunk but not "unconscious drunk", clearly not, both my friend and I had one beer at this point. So this girl is instantly all over my friend, tries to stick her tongue down his throat, rubbed her pelvic are against his thigh, and even actually suggested sex in the toilet about 5 minutes after saying hello. He's got a girlfriend, so nothing happened, here except that she almost violently insisted on me taking her number an call her, presumably to stay in contact with my friend. It was good fun, particularly given that there was another guy standing right behind her paying for her drinks whom she completely ignored.

So here's my question. What's the feminist consent position on this kind of sex with girls in bathrooms... she was, well, well beyond enthusiastically participating, she was definitely the sexual "aggressor" (in ways no guy would ever attempt to be, in my opinion). But she was also rather drunk, while my friend was pretty sober. So assuming he would have had sex with her, according to all her expressed!!! wishes, would there, in your opinion, still be a consent question? How drunk do you think women are allowed to be to make such decisions for themselves? How drunk is ok to take their decisions seriously when they are as direct as in this case...

A few weeks ago I was in a 7-11 when I picked up a Cosmo. And I haven't been able to get something I read in it out of my mind. The page I turned to held an extensive quiz of men of all ages. Some questions were completely benign, some were silly. Only one was really unequivocally scary. (Only 35% of men said they'd stop if they were having sex with a drunk woman and she seemed like she was out of it or didn't know what was going on. Ugh.) But there was one that caught my attention because I simply didn't know what to make of the results.

When asked what they like a woman to taste like when they kiss her, men over 35 mostly said "mint" and men under 35 mostly said "alcohol." There is a part of me that attributes this to nothing but sense memory. Many younger men go to college and meet people at parties or at bars, which means often they are drinking. Older men are more likely to be married or committed, and probably enjoy knowing their spouse took the time to get minty fresh for them.

But I'm not sure. I worry that young men like a woman to taste like alcohol because it might mean her defenses are down. Maybe it means she's likely to "consent" to more action than she normally would. Maybe the fact that she drinks means she is not a "good girl," and as we all know- "bad girls" are women who will put out.

Really I have no idea. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. Is that result disturbing? Is it just that young men like going out drinking and think alcohol tastes good? I can't decide, so I thought it a worthy question to pose.

Our research team at Indiana University is recruiting adult women (18 and older) to participate in a study related to the use of creams during sexual activities that occur alone or with a partner.

Many women use creams, oils or lubricants on their genitals during sexual activity alone or with a partner and for many different reasons related to pleasure, curiosity or novelty. Other women have never used such products during sexual activity that occurs alone or with a partner.

The study that we are recruiting for, the Women's Sexual Health Study, takes place entirely online. Women who participate in the study will receive two (2) bottles of creams and will be asked to use them during sexual activity that occurs alone or with a partner, and to respond to online questionnaires about their experiences using these creams.

Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues, friends or members of your organization who may be interested in learning more about this study. Women who would like to read additional information about the study and decide whether they would like to participate can go to this web site: www.womenshealth.iu.edu

If you have additional questions about the study, please feel free to send us an email at cshp@indiana.edu.

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards,

Debby Herbenick, PhD, MPH
Associate Director, Center for Sexual Health Promotion
School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation
Indiana University

Just came across this article on CNN.com:

I've yet to read it, and I'm sure that there will be some good, solid information in there...it's just that I'm not expecting to see a follow-up called "Why Men Have Sex" anytime soon. Interesting. 

I came across these panties (which read on the front "i said yes" and on the back "congratulations," many weeks ago and found them terribly stereotypical. I was unable to post the picture within the post so please check it out at here.
I can't quite describe my annoyance with this product but I think any feminist will understand what I mean.

This post is going to be a little scattered and wonky so hold onto your hats! 

I have a job which allows me to frequently communicate with teenagers.  This means the topic of conversation often leads to sex.  Teenagers have to figure out their sexuality and stay safe and process a whole lot of information to do so.  Sometimes I might be the only adult in their lives that they feel safe enough to ask their sex questions.  Their parents might just tell them to never, ever do it or to make sure to use birth control.  This is fairly inadequate but an improvement on the sex education that I received.  It does nothing to address sexual pleasure or issues of consent.

Anyway, the topic of penis size came up and the comment was made that the reason the girl had bad sex was that the guy had a small penis.  I cringed at this remark but I simply did not know how to answer it.  I later kicked myself for not saying that penis size doesn't matter and good sex is not based on that.  Of course, this sort of conversation would make a lot of co-workers uncomfortable.  And I have to admit it makes me uncomfortable to say that to impressionable youths, even though it's completely true.

But my discomfort with teenagers is not the reason I wanted to post here.  I often fear that denigrating men based on their penis size may be one of the most pervasive anti-feminist things that people say.  It reinforces the idea that everything revolves around the mighty peen.   And it gives an easy, neat way to insult a man, just like calling a woman a whore or a slut.  There are so many terrible stereotypes reinforced by the penis myth:  Sexual pleasure is a male responsibility and sex with a guy with a huge penis will always be great.  The reality is that great sex can happen in the absence of a penis and a really big penis leads to pain rather than pleasure.

Yesterday there was an interesting and powerful piece from Amanda Hess at the Sexist on the difference between a "rape" fantasy and an actual rape.

" A typical rape fetishist isn't into rape fantasies because she likes being raped (by definition, that's impossible). She isn't even into rape fantasies because she simply likes being dominated, abused, silenced, and blamed. She's into rape fantasies because they offer a chance to flip the script of domination, abuse, and silencing. Rape fantasies turn a normally horrific encounter into a sexual experience that the fantasy "victim" can control and orchestrate herself. She's into rape fantasies because they allow her to convert her fears and weaknesses into sexual power. "

This piece stands out to me a lot, because (and this might be a bit TMI at this point, but) I have had these sorts of fantasies. I have had the fantasies of being submissive, being tied up, and yes, being raped. But I have never mentioned these to any of my partners, nor have I actually wanted to try to live them out. The real, honest-to-god threat of rape is always right there in my mind, so sharing these fantasies felt way too dangerous for me. As it is, the one boyfriend I confessed my fetish of bondage to, was also the same boyfriend who later hit me and tried to strangle me. I've not shared that one again.

Recently I read a post* which mentioned the idea of waiting until marriage to have sex ultimately ruining the relationship. I was curious about the idea, but you can imagine how a quick search of terms like "waiting until marriage ruining relationship" or "abstinence hurting relationship" came back:  All anti-sex websites with "cool tips on how to abstain." Blech.

I'm looking for stories on people who either have had experience with, know someone who's had experience with, or could direct me to some stories or research about abstinence ultimately being bad for the relationship. Stories of how not "testing the car before you buy it" ended up proving that two people were not compatible. It's an incredibly intriguing idea to me, I just am unsure of how to find out more about it.

*I'm incredibly sorry I can't remember the post or the name of the poster. If it's you, speak up and I'll be sure to edit this post to give you proper credit.

Let me start out by saying that I honestly don't get the concept. I have a slut-shaming friend (who, ironically, falls into her own definition of the word, even if you make allowances as far as 'have as much sex as you want but don't deliberately set out to bed someone else's committed partner')who, for years, introduced herself and another of her friends as "she's the whore, I'm the virgin". Why? I don't know. The only difference was that she still had a hymen. Other than that, they were pretty much equal in terms of sexual experience or "fooling around".

I've seen other posts where interpretations of the word 'virgin' have been bandied about. Some say you can still call yourself a virgin if you've done everything short of PIV, while others point out that this is a bit heterocentric and means all lesbians must still be virgins. Personally, I find this a bit pointless and, well, silly. I'm sure I just stepped on somebody's personal beliefs, and if so I apologize, but I don't see any reasoning -outside of countries where it can get you killed- that a woman should have to call herself a virgin on the wedding night when she's already given and received orgasms and done everything short of vaginal intercourse. That's my personal definition of the word: virginity is gone the first time you allow someone else to take an active part in getting you off.

I have come across a lot of viewpoints on female strippers and whether or not they are exploited etc.. but very little on male strippers and men in the sex industry in general.
I'm 20 years old and among my peers male strippers like Chippendales are dismissed as 'gay' and the women who go are apparently giggling more than salivating.

Now I've been to a male strip show in Vegas and I thought some of the guys were gorgeous , others were over-tanned and over-oiled but I enjoyed the night as did my friends and here we were thinking women weren't visual.lol!. One of the things that interested me was that afterwards the guys came out to greet their 'fans' and hawk signed calenders. I can't imagine female strippers mingling like this nor can I imagine any of my male friends wanting an autograph!

So male strip shows tend to be more 'burlesque' , even 'concerty' in nature than lapdancing clubs but they are still taking their clothes off and many male strippers work solo giving lapdances at parties.

I'm wondering why there isn't more about male strippers being exploited/objectified.

I figured this had to have been posted somewhere already, but I searched several terms and straight looked through a week of archives and didn't see it.

Sweden's Film Institute provided $69k for a mobile phone-recorded, twelve-film montage that explores... well, a lot of stuff that gets talked about here.  I'll just repeat the article if I explain it, so go check it out.  Don't forget to check the link to the film's site at the bottom of the article.

Too often it seems that any discussion of female sexuality either disregards or ignores transgender women (e.g. here ).  If being female is defined by having a female gender identity and not biology, then female sexuality can't reasonably be defined purely in terms of having a vagina either.

I accept that if transgender female and cisgender female sexuality were completely different, then they'd be a valid reason to treat them seperately, but I don't think this is the case.  Obviously there are some physical differences in having sex for pre/non-op transgender women but that has little bearing on sexuality in general.  And there are also obvious differences in sex for straight and gay women.

But there is still a great deal in common in experiences of female sexuality regardless of being transgender, or sexual orientation, or any other category you want to use.  To start with, any situation where a transgender woman is stealth  will be treated by society exactly the same as if she were cisgender,  and as such I won't comment on any further.

It is other situations where society doesn't (largely) treat a transgender woman as their true gender, namely pre-transition and situations where she is out as transgender, that I'll focus on.  And despite my earlier criticism, I think that the above linked post made valid points, so will just add a transgender perspective to it.

Recently I bought “Holy Sex: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling, Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving” by Gregory K. Popcack, PH.D. It is a gift for my recently married cousin, but I read it for myself as a representative piece on Catholic sex.

A very large part of the book is repeatedly dispelling the notion that Catholicism is anti-sex or anti-pleasure. Popcack explores some of the thinking that results in anti-sex attitudes, or separates sex and spirituality, and explains why it is non-catholic. Chastity is not the complete repression of sex, but rather the ability to control sexual urges until the appropriate time.

In the book Popcack describes what he calls “Holy Sex”, sometimes contrasting it to “eroticism”. As per chapter 2: Holy sex is “very pleasurable, driven by intimacy and arousal, overcomes shame, works for the good of the other, welcomes children, shares the whole self, more joyful and vital with time, gives life and health.” Meanwhile Eroticism, is also very pleasurable but is “driven solely by arousal, causes shame, uses the other, fears children, withholds the self, more stagnant and boring with time (like a drug) and brings disease and death”. Achieving Holy Sex requires improvements to one’s character and the relationship with one’s spouse. This means Love (self donative), responsibility (self discipline and stewardship), Intimacy, Cooperation, Joy, and personhood. From chapter 3 conclusion “Gentiality is an important aspect of sexuality, but the authentic sexuality expressed by Holy Sex is about taking full advantage of every moment to be the best lover this moment allows you to be.”

Popcak approximates the feminist concept of sexual objectification when he describes eroticism. Where as in Holy Sex you give yourself entirely, in eroticism one turns the other into a mere instrument of pleasure. Holy Sex is about making love, where as eroticism is “scratching an itch”.

Part Two: The Five Great Powers of Holy Sex

1. Holy Sex has the power to make the common holy

2. Holy Sex has sacramental and redemptive power

3. Holy Sex has the power to be a physical sign of God’s passion for us

4. Holy Sex has the power to unite

5. Holy Sex has the power to creative

Holy Sex involves loving one’s spouse the same way God loves him or her. God loves all things and all people in an extremely self less manner. Otherwise God wouldn’t have bothered creating us, nor would he have let his son/himself be crucified. By achieving this ultimately kind of love, one is doing God’s work (thus making the common holy), one becomes better prepared for the afterlife where we face God’s love directly (thus redeeming us) and we make our earthly relationship’s and sex lives into a physical sign of God’s love (which is explained to be very passionate). While explaining power 2, Popcack quotes a women who was tormented by her inability to accept her husband’s love, and describes hell has a similar experience.

Have you heard that Dan Savage may be coming to HBO? Yes, Dan, “I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there…are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color,” Savage.
 
As an African American woman who spends a considerable amount of time studying sexual health policy and reading and writing about sexuality, I haven’t been able to pick up Savage’s column since he made that statement. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was a sophomore in college fawning over the City Paper newspaper stand waiting until it arrived so I could imminently flip to the back page for Savage Love. I even blew my shrinking discretionary income on The Commitment and can still recite passages from it by memory. But I can no longer deny the parts of me he spoke against to indulge the parts of me he speaks to.

I truthfully can’t say when or if I’ll ever be able to patronize any of his stuff ever again. While he’s among many who have denied the contemporary reality of racism and made callous race, sexuality comparisons, (I abandoned my support for The Advocate after that “Gay is the New Black” cover, too) his cut deep.  This is because now more than ever it’s apparent to me that sex and sexuality education work suffers in the absence of multiple analysis, race, class and gender for starters.

Despite Dan’s witticisms, he is sorely lacking on bringing a lens that isn’t just white and male to his gay marriage crusade and by extension his sexuality advocacy and education. While HBO is still in the “consideration” stage of bringing him on, it’s also worth noting that they have yet to materialize a series that truly speaks to the experiences of women of color — be it same-gender-loving or straight — in America. HBO is actually operating on a deficit considering their typecasting of the sexuality of women of color in series like “Hookers at the Point.” And I, for one, am still recovering from “The Wire’s” 5-season-long attack on Black women, particularly Black single mothers.  The prospects of programming that emphasizes race, class, gender and sexuality get dimmer and dimmer, now that a bigot like Dan Savage may be doing their sex-ed leg work.

In terms of gender, class and/or race-conscious suggestions for your own reference, Violet Blue is getting a lot of read-time from me these days. While I haven’t read enough of her stuff to vouch for her on the racial and class front, she does grapple with gender. For some really great intersectional work on sexuality, of course I gotta big up Feministing’s Samhita, Cathy Cohen and Patricia Hill Collins.  In a course I took by Cathy Cohen this summer, these names were also referred to me: Vicki Mayes, Tricia Rose, Gail Wyatt and Orlando Patterson. Do you know any of these scholars? Can you offer more names of folk that are doing sexual health advocacy, advice, media criticism or academic research that brings a combination of multiple lenses to bear on their work?

Of course there are millions of unnamed lenses. But I simply have started with the lenses that have been salient for me in my work.

This is something that I wanted to address on Feministing Community, since I know I need input on this from a feminist perspective.

Our modern, patriarchal society appears to send mixed signals about whether "pickiness" in women is a good thing.  On the one hand, sexist studies continually try to prove that women are somehow choosier than men: perhaps confirming the ideal of men as the pursuers, chasing after women, and women as the pursued, carefully considering whether the men chasing them are worth their time.  Men are allowed to be indiscriminating in their sexual conquests, whereas women who have too many sexual partners or show a lack of choosiness with them are shamed as "sluts" and "whores."

On the other hand, we see in countless sitcoms and romantic movies how unassuming "nobodies" of guys woo smart, accomplished women who initially didn't give these "losers" a second glance, and encourage these women to throw their carefully-constructed goals to the wind and follow their romantic whims.  Women who are intelligent or conventionally attractive are expected to lower their standards for men who are less so, or are considered "snobs," whereas attractive men are allowed to outright dismiss unattractive women.

I know it is rare that I am the only one who feels a certain way about something, yet in this situation I certainly feel unique and am hoping to find out that I am not the only one so deeply affected.

A little background: I grew up fairly active in the church, a Disciples of Christ church.  Within the denomination the churches can be either more liberal or more conservative, it varies with each individual church.  However my youth minister was definitely conservative.  Through him, various camps led by the more conservative adults, and conferences we attended, I heard the "don't have sex until you are married" speech many times and it really stuck with me. I am pretty sure I heard it some in college too, and definitely from some people I sought out to talk to about my issues with sex.

I first had sex when I was 17, with my boyfriend of 7 months who was not a Christian.  I felt so extremely guilty but not enough to stop having sex.  I realize now I was fighting with having natural human desires and pleasures but also wanting to please God.  For the next 8ish months we were together I kept going back and forth on whether what we were doing was ok, that I wanted to stop, that I wanted to do it, etc.  A few years later I had sex with someone else, and although I questioned it I didn't feel as bad about it.  Then 2 years after that I met my (now) husband.  He was in seminary when we started dating and he was much more liberal than I was used to.  Eventually we did decide to have sex, even before we were engaged (and he's a minister!! GASP!!).  Even then I still questioned if what we were doing was ok, I would constantly ask him and constantly wonder if I was somehow disappointing God again.  Plus there was also the added issue that I had had sex before and he hadn't.  "Oh wait isn't the man supposed to be more experienced?" is what I would tell myself.  At the same time I enjoyed sex and I wanted sex, there was just the small part of me that always wondered if I was ok.

We have now been married for 8 months and our sex life is not really great.  Currently, I feel like a horrible person whenever we do have sex.  That somehow I am a bad person or that I am doing something wrong.  I tell myself: sex is bad, wanting sex is bad, enjoying sex is bad, initiating sex is bad, and at the same time not pleasing my husband is bad.  I don't understand where this is all coming from.  Have I really had much deeper issues with sexuality that I was just able to put in to a more simplistic "oh it's just b/c I feel bad for having sex before marriage?"  Shouldn't my issues with sex be over and done with now that I am married?  I don't understand and it is really frustrating.  

Luckily I have a very caring, extremely understanding husband who is not trying to push me into having sex in any way.  Things would be much worse if he wasn't like that.  There for awhile I thought it was a physical issue b/c sex hurt and b/c of that sometimes I couldn't go long enough for him.  So is part of my fear that I won't be good enough for him?

I feel like I put all this guilt on myself.  I love reading and learning about sexuality on here but I can't seem to apply what I am learning to myself.  It's been almost 6 years since I've first had sex and not only do I want to let go of that guilt, I'd like to understand what's going on with myself now and be able to let that go as well.  My husband and I used to be so sexually compatible and it would be really nice to have that back again!

I really hope other people have had similar experiences.  If so, please share, and I am also open to any and all advice people have!  (And I am currently in counseling working on this and some of my other depression/anxiety related issues.  I just felt like it was time I got support from more than just her and my husband)

Operating within mainstream cultural frameworks, female sexuality (in this context meaning biologically female with a "feminine" gender performance) never wins. Consider the options:

1) As a female, your sexuality is repressed and/or heavily regulated (I won't even get into the whys and the hows)

AND/OR

2) As a female having and acting out on sexual desire, you are "shamed" through pejoratives and other degrading remarks.

AND/OR

3) As a female, an expression or discussion of sexuality is an attempt to gain (male heterosexual) attention.

AND/OR

4) As a female, whatever your sexual preferences are, they are undermined as your authentic desires and instead cast as having been shaped by an all-pervasive male sexuality and patriarchal order.

I am not denying that some or all of these factors may be applicable to varying degrees in varying circumstances, but I resent the fact that all of these factors are active within the hegemonic mind at all times.

Give a girl a break.

The Colonic

x-posted from my blog: The Jaded Hippy

It's been a while since I wrote a post from a specifically sex positive perspective. But that all changes tonight because a few days ago I had a run in that sent my mind off in that direction.

In comments at fem.men.ist's place a conversation began about sex positive feminism, with a very angry radical feminist who was hearing about it for the first time and didn't like what she was reading. Needless to say, she and I exchanged words. But since then I've been going over and boiling down my argument and though it's getting to the same point as my very first post about sex positivity, I thought it might be worth going into again.

The radfem's main argument (in the comments conversation, though her argument in her blog post appears similar) consisted of two points 1) certain sexual behaviors are inherently degrading to women (she also threw in there that heterosexual sex can never truly be consented to, which I would take to mean is "always rape" as the famous quote goes, but I never got to follow up on that point) and 2) that by supporting and accepting women who choose to engage in such behaviors for pleasure, sex positive feminists are supporting and enabling the sexual exploitation and degradation of women.

So here's my problem: this line of arguing is utilizing the master's tools.

Generally I shy away from popular magazines, specifically men's magazines. Living with my parents though, my bathroom is stocked with Maxim, Cigar Aficionado, and Details, my Dad's favorite magazines. When I forget to bring a book into the bath with me, I will wave my white flag and page through one of the afore-mentioned magazines while I let the tub fill up around me. I never read Maxim, the cover alone gets my skin boiling and Aficionado might as well be called WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE. So, generally I succumb to reading Details, in a pinch.

I found myself paging through this magazine in the bathtub last week and came across an article called "Generation XXX" in the September 2009 issue. Intrigued by the sub -headline ("Forget awkward fumblings in the back of the bus, Junior's thinking more along the lines of reverse-cowgirl anal. Raised on internet porn, today's teenagers are sowing the seeds of a sexual revolution.") I began to read.

Fury ensued.

The recent video post about Current Tv's Girls kissing girls reminded me of the following:

There was a rescent sociological study done on the reasons why College aged girls kiss other girls while identifying as heterosexual. What researchers found were three main reasons

1) For attention from heterosexual men (which then gets exploited in the media so that a lesbian identity in the media is "pornified" for men)

2) Experimentation (which is easier to do for women in a public setting especially if they are attractive by narrow societal norms)

3)They have same sex desires but no outlet or knowledge on how to express them

They also came across types of fluid sexual identity for indivisual within the college subculture. Known by the acronyms of L.U.G, B.U.G, G.U.G

L.U.G = lesbian until graduation

B.U.G - Bisexual until graduation

G.U.G Gay until graduation

This might be because, I hypothesize, that college is a cultural microcosim (sp) that exists with different social rules and norms than the larger society. Effectively it seems people regularly employ the " whatever happens in college, stays in college" mentality (which I hate , just like the vegas slogan; this promotes no accountability for personal actions). Therefore, regardless of what people do in college and how they Identify their sexuality (or not) they are expected to "shake it off" after 4 years (or more adding for graduate work) and embrace Heterosexuality. No wonder individuals who discover their [homo][bi]sexuality (or act on it for the first time) in college may be met with great resistance (to their sexuality) right out of college.

This can even apply to those indiviuduals who become sexual in college, which is a social norm and almost cultural rite of passage, as long as they follow the proper Gender Scripts i.e women can have sex as long as it is in a long term relationship, and Men can have anonymous casual sex without consequence.

If a woman is indeed having causal sex she is met with words of caution or stern words of disaproval. Meanwhile, the image of the heterosexual, sexually aggressive female in the media is seen as desirable. Thus once again all students (male and female) experience a culture shock and a period of resocialization (or attempted re socialization by the heterosexual patriarchy) of their sexuality or sexual identity when they enter and exit the college subculture.

On some level, I suppose this rip off of the Twilight is harmless.  It's a dildo designed for Twilight fans.  As there has been so much pop culture criticism directed toward the vamp craze and what it means in terms of women's sexuality, though, I thought that it was interesting to see that this market has moved from the sexless fantasy it was claimed to be (because Bella and Edward are abstinent for a while) to one in which the sexualization of the vampire and the erotic capacity of the market is being recognized.

This dildo also has the special option of being available hot or cold, with the cold option intended to give you "that authentic experience."  Uh, the authentic experience of doing a corpse.

The description of the product is full of language about how it will "seduce" you and how you will be "tantalized by the Vamp" with their promise that it "won't be the only thing coming for you in the night."  

Let it be said, I am pro-vamp erotica.  I think that the vamp appeal for women is primarily an erotic fantasy.  Sure, it may be based in some desires and social influences that we wouldn't herald as feminist, but sexual desire is supposed to be about just that, not about agendas and critiquing what it would mean in the public sphere.  (I once knew a girl who refused to have sex in any position other than woman on top because she thought it was degrading to women.  I always thought it was worse for women to choose sexual positions for that reason rather than their own satisfaction.)

 I'm also pro-sex toy.  So I don't really have any qualms with this product, but rather I find it interesting that a sex toy which is very much about women satisfying themselves still reiterates the idea (which seems pretty integral to the fantasy) that they are being overtaken by a vampy seducer.  I can't quite work out the power dynamics that are going on there. 

(cross-posted at Oh, You're a Feminist?!)

Can men and women be (just) friends?

I first began thinking about this question years ago after watching the quirky and timeless classic, When Harry Met Sally. The movie revolves around the idea that men and women can never be just friends because "the sex part always gets in the way." They try to navigate through the conversation by setting obscure rules like they can only be friends if both are in committed relationships because then "the pressure of possible involvement is lifted."

Aside from being a heteronormative question, assuming that all men are attracted to women, it is also a question engrossed in strict gender roles and stereotypes. For these two reasons I hoped this would cease to be debated in 2009, when apparently we live in a post feminist society where men and women are equal and free thinking... (that was snark if you couldn't tell).

Fast forward to today as I engaged in my sleepy morning let's-get-the-day-started routine, pouring coffee and turning on the often trite Good Morning America. In the segment I linked they too discuss this "timeless question" of an impossible platonic friendship between men and women. The segment was an obvious scheme to promote Steve Harvey's new book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (which i won't link because of the strict gender roles and stereotypes that even the title doesn't fail to perpetuate). For 'empirical evidence' GMA referenced a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found that an opposite sex friendship can end in an affair 15% of the time. (emphasis mine.) What about the other 85% of the time? That sure doesn't seem like enough statistical evidence to back up the claim to me...

The whole "timeless question" leaves me more than prickly. It assumes that men can't think with their appropriate brain and that they are sexually attracted to every woman they meet. It also ascertains that women are 1) naive and 2) not sexually driven. This sort of thinking is damaging for men because it sets men up to be the ultimate perpetrators. They are always on the prowl and are singly sex minded. It promotes the idea that it's always a man's responsibility to get into a woman's pants and it's solely a woman's role to guard her virginity, pureness, sex, whatever.

For women it's a double whammy. Not only are women once again regarded as naive, helpless, and meek, doing whatever they can to protect their one and only precious commodity, but they are determined to not have the same sex drive that their male counterparts posses.

Continuing to think in the heteronormative way in which this question is presented, I think that mature and responsible men and women can absolutely have platonic relationships that don't deteriorate into a let's rip each other's clothes off and make passionate love in the bedroom situation. I think the dynamic between opposite sex friends has to be different, and that your partners have to be involved in the friendship (for example, it shouldn't be a secret friendship because that sets up a sketchy relationship from the beginning). But all in all, i think it is entirely possible for heterosexual men and women to have close friends of the opposite sex.

Readers, what do you think?

I can't tell you how many people I've had sex with.

It's not a large number (I guess, relatively...), and I was cognizant for all of them (including the non-consensual one). I can tell you all of their names, if I thought it were any of your business. It's just that none of us, even we gender-normative heteros, can agree on what "sex" means.

Is oral-only sex? Is frottage sex? Orgasm-less intercourse? What about dirty talk? What about really, really nice kissing? And what about that pesky rape?

That's what really got me thinking about this. A long-time friend and I were comparing notes during a wine-and-girl-talk session, and she asked, "Does that include XX?" And I thought, I guess it depends.

For me, The Number is something I only care about for two reasons: Do you have any kids? Do you have any diseases? Those are pretty much the only things I want to, or need to, know about a partner. Under that definition, then yes, I would have to count the a-hole rapist. After all, we did exchange bodily fluids, whether I wanted to or not.

But I feel like The Number is more than that, at least for women. I feel like there's this idea that The Number somehow correlates with our morality in some sort of Whore Index. "Well, I've had sex with X men, but I only *wanted* to have sex with Y of them," so my Whore Index is lower or something.

Only one of my post-virginity partners has asked about my Number. (I demurred, because it wasn't any of his business.) But what does The Number even mean? If I tell you that, at age 29, I've had sex with, say, 10 men, what do you then know about me? I could've had 10 long-term monogamous relationships that each involved sex. Or I could've landed numbers 5-10 in a really freaky party just last weekend. Does one make me better than the other? Safer, maybe, but "better" as a person? Sorry, no.

I can only look at this from the perspective of a heterosexual cis-woman. Anybody else have any thoughts?

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about sex. Not as much about doing it, as much as about NOT doing it. As feminists, we often address the societal pressures surrounding sex and the importance placed on women being sexual objects. There IS a lot of pressure to have sex, it’s everywhere and it seems like “everybody’s doing it”. But, there is also a lot of pressure NOT to do it. Especially for young women, we are taught all the time how to say no.  Sex is a commodity, and women are the keepers of it. We are in charge of the “no” in order to stay pure. This is because men (who are the only people women have sex with, because we are all straight) are sex driven maniacs who can’t control their urges and need to push us to have sex and we must say no in order to maintain our virginity, which is essentially our self-worth, so that we don’t become damaged goods. Obviously.

Recently, I came across an article on the subject in the Trentonian called “Orgasm or I Do?” about how the push for young women to say no to sex until marriage isn’t making them NOT have sex, it’s just making them get married earlier. Is this really what the religious right is pushing for? These people are basically threatening young people that the natural, sexual desires they feel towards their partner will put their eternal life in danger if they act on them. So, if you have sex with the man you love, you’re responsible for him burning in fiery hell. Good job. How fucked up is that? Let me be clear, when I say the religious right I’m not referring to individual religious people. I grew up in a religious (Catholic) household and I know that my mother wanted me to wait to have sex until it was with someone I loved and cared about. But if I came home at 19 and announced I intended to get married so that I could have sex in order to avoid “sexual sinning”, I’m fairly confident she would have bought the condoms for me… well not literally but you get the point.

This may be an unpopular sentiment morally, but just looking at the decision to have sex versus the decision to get married, getting married is a WAY bigger deal. Marriage is a legally binding contract. There’s a lot of benefits to being married but there are also a lot of hurdles to jump through if you decide to divorce. And considering that marrying young is one of the biggest indicators for what couples will get divorced, this is really something that should be thought through before such a lofty commitment is decided on just to have sex. The choice to have sex has it’s own possible consequences as well (the possibility for pregnancy in hetero couples, as well as the risk of STIs all around, just to name a couple) but with responsible use of safer sex and/or birth control practices, these risks are minimized. Not to mention, these risks don’t magically go away with a ring on your finger!

The decision of whether or not to have sex is often not an easy one, especially for young women being bombarded with all of the different messages. If you don’t have sex, you’re a prude and probably weird and so no one wants to bone you anyway, but if you do it you’re a slut and clearly going to hell. The best advice for talking to young women about sex is not only telling them how to say no so that they don’t feel pressured by their partners to do something that they don’t want to do, but also encourage them that when they’re ready, it’s okay to say yes. If we continue to encourage women that there’s no ding ding without the wedding ring (thanks, Robin Hood Men in Tights!) we just end up hurting them more in the long run. 

Cross posted at www.RCNJWC.blogspot.com

I don't know how I feel about the concept of the age of consent.

This isn't much of a post, I just honestly want to know what some of you think of this.

I think it is kind of obscene that the state in which I reside in allows a woman of my age to operate a motor vehicle and get a part time job, yet I can't be seen as mature enough to decide whether or not I can have sex.

However, I do think the thought of a 9-year-old being able to "consent" to sex with a 19-year-old is also kind of obscene.

I'm really torn here. Where do we draw the line? Age 11? 13? Do we make some kind of special exception that says a 15-year-old can have sex with someone who is 18-20 but not 26-30-ish?

I really want to hear your opinions on this.

REMOVED AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.

Just a quick hit here.  A dear friend and I were thinking of spending part of Saturday in DC trying to find some new toys :)  And while I remember seeing several posts on the subject here, I can't recall any shop names.  If any one could suggest some great sex shops in the DC area to check out, we would really appreciate.  I've heard good things about some places in Balitmore, but we are stuck in DC proper for our shenanigans.  Thank you!

I have been thinking about getting my first vibrator for a long time now, but living at home with my parents/in a dorm room hasn't made that easy. So today, I found out I was going to have the house to myself for the day and evening. I decided to take a trek to the amazing store a few towns over. Now this is by far, the closest and only real sex store in the area. And it was completely surrounded and worked by men. I worked up the courage to drive there and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes before going in.

First thing, I get carded (good thing, I guess?) Then I notice the creepy looking old men in who are the sole customers in the store (paranoid?). I look around for a while, and find something that is discreet, inexpensive, and not scary looking. I walk up to the register. The guy who works there is nowhere to be found. I wait. He walks out of the bathroom. Apparently there are three doors which all say restroom on them (I don't want to think about why there are so many). He tells me there are no returns (very good!) and tests it for me. I really hope he washed his hands. He tells me to "Have a fun afternoon" with a straight face. How he did that I am totally unsure. He knew exactly what I was going to do when I left (trip to Barnes and Noble obviously).

I survived relatively unscathed, but I can't think of how much better I would have felt if I had the opportunity to go to a woman-owned or woman-friendly place. And in liberal Massachusetts I would think we'd be able to find that. But there is still so much stigma attached to women who dare to have sexual feelings. I was upset with how ashamed I was to be going in there, when I know logically, that it should be something that accepted and encouraged.

Crossposted to my blog.

An observation on what ensues in every single feminist argument about porn:

At which point I have to wonder when feminism became all about letting men off the hook for being assholes.

A decent human being of normal intelligence can watch lots and lots of porn, and, upon finally discovering that actual sex is not entirely the same thing, can accept that without being a dick.  A decent human of normal intelligence can watch hentai rape porn without thinking that women mean yes when they say no. A decent human of normal intelligence isn't going to go around copying everything he sees on TV.

And I'm sorry, but the problem isn't porn. The problem is your asshole boyfriend.

I'm sorry, he's not a "nice normal guy" who just happened to get afflicted with TEH PORNZ. He's an asshole who just happens to watch porn. And he'd still be an asshole if we lived in a sad, boring society without porn.

Let's try putting the blame on the asshole rather than the naked chick.

Rantiness crossposted to my blog.

Lately I've run across this idea quite a bit: Sex workers are rape victims.

It pisses me off.

I'm pretty new to sex work. It's been a little more than a month since I went on my first call. I've dabbled in pretty much every form of sex work with the exception of stripping -- I dance like a frog in a blender -- and I can pretty honestly say that I have not been raped.

I've done porn. I've done S&M porn. I've cut back on the escorting -- I didn't want to work for an agency, and without an agency it's not exactly safe -- but I still have quite a few regular clients and I see them. I also work in a dungeon where I both dom and sub, and I have done sessions naked.

None of this is rape. All of this was consensual.

Money wasn't even a huge problem. I got into sex work because I wanted to make money -- and trust me, I've been quite successful in that respect -- but I wasn't about to starve or end up homeless. I knew my parents would bail me out if I couldn't pay my rent. 

So saying I'm a rape victim because I had no other choice but sex work isn't at all accurate, and it also implies that all other workers are slaves. (The cashier at the grocery store doesn't do it because it's fun. She does it because she has to pay her rent. And it's really difficult to find another job in this economy. SLAVERY!)

I consented. To say I am a rape victim deprives me of my ability to consent. It's infantilizing and patronizing. 

Talk all you like about how sex work and porn objectify women and fuck up the way we think about sex. I might disagree with you, but unless you're saying something really dumb, I will also respect you. Talk about how trafficked women are rape victims, and I will agree with you. Talk about your own experiences in the sex industry, and I will take your word at face value, even if you don't give me the same courtesy.

You can argue all you like over whether my choice was feminist, or neutral, or anti-feminist man-pleasing stupidity -- and I will have an opinion on that, as well -- but keep in mind that it was my choice.

DO NOT TELL ME I AM A RAPE VICTIM. I am an adult woman. I am capable of making my own decisions. I chose to have sex with my clients and co-stars, and it may not have been a choice you personally would have made, but it was still my choice and by definition, not rape.

Making me a victim so I fit into your political philosophy is scummy.

I was sitting on the couch with my partner the other day, mooching around and watching some trashy sitcom, I don't remember which one. It doesn't matter anyway this storyline is so generic its a staple of comedy. The wife in the show wasn't interested in sleeping with her husband, she had "a headache", and as they talked it was obvious that the idea was that she, like all women didn't want to have sex, ever.

This went on while me and my partner exchanged uncomfortable looks, as this was something that we'd had a conversation about the other day, except I was the one complaining that he never initiated sex, and that when we did it, I was worried that it was out of obligation, which is so not hot, at all.

I just made me consider how hurtful this myth is to both of us. It hurts me, because I feel like I'm some sort of freak for actually liking, and wanting sex. It hurts my partner because he feels like a freak for not wanting sex all the time, and it hurts our ability to communicate openly about our wants and needs. I'm sure that I'm not the only lady around with a high libido, so whats with the no sex after we are committed jokes?

While sitting in the theater waiting for a movie to start, a clip of Condensed Soup with Joel McHale (from the E! network) played. The clip was so ridiculous that I thought it was a joke, and I didn't think much about it. But last night, my friend mentioned the same clip and said it is indeed real.
The clip is from the ABC Family show "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." I don't watch the show because from what I know of it, it's nothing I want to support. But in this clip, one of the teenage girls is talking with her mother about her dad's recent death. Here is a link to the clip.

In case you can't watch the video, the following is what the teenage girl says. I really wish I were making this up, but unfortunately, it is verbatim:

There's a reason it didn't just happen. It's not a mystery. I had sex and now Dad is dead. He had a horrible death because I had incredible sex. It's just the way life works. And death. I did this. I did it. And if I hadn't done it; if I hadn't had sex, and if I hadn't enjoyed having sex so much, then Dad would still be alive and you know it mom.

This is just so ridiculous that at first I couldn't decide if I should laugh or be angry. But the more I think about it, the more upset I become. The fact that such an absurd line of reasoning even made it onto a television show is beyond me. It seems as if ABC Family is suggesting that if you have sex as a teenager, you are risking your father's life. Not your life, because we all know that people risk their own lives all the time. But people are less likely to engage in behavior that risks the life of a loved one. It also seems as if they are portraying God as the harbinger of doom who is just waiting on you to have sex so he can smite your family members as a form of punishment.

The last thing this world needs is another form of media telling young girls that sex is evil and can only be associated with very bad things. What are you thoughts? Does anybody actually watch the show?

There is a fascinating conversation going on right now over at NPR’s On Point about the current status of Romantic love. Writer, essayist and critic Cristina Nehring claims that for modern people passionate love has become not an ideal to celebrate and strive for but a source of embarrassment and vulnerability.

Who’s to blame? Well there are the usual culprits, i.e feminism and the “hook up culture” (yawn) but thankfully Nehring goes beyond the tired scapegoating of feminism for the unravelling of  everything good and decent in our society and probes at the truth beyond the hype. 

Modern people live such chaotic and hectic lives that finding true love seems sort of frivolous in the face of trying to gain those status symbols that show we’re living worthy lives. Whether it’s a doctorate, a six figure job, or a chance at fame, taking time to cultivate romance seems like an unnecessary detour on our paths to achievement. After all, love may be fleeting, but that Fullbright Scholarship is forever. Heck, now they even write books about the dangers of marrying for love! 

 I see a lot of myself in Nehring’s description of the intellectual woman who feels the need to apologize for  or hide her passionate feelings as if they are somehow a handicap, something that makes her less strong, intelligent and credible. According to Nehring I’m in good company. In her research she found that great women from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Margaret Fuller and Simone de Beauvoir all had precarious relationships between their intellectual and love lives. 

I just started seeing a new guy and have already decided that I don't want to have sex with him right away (I'm far from a virgin though, so this isn't about virginity at all.)

The problem is, I'm not sure what I'm waiting for, and the answers I get are always arbitrary ("wait one month"), not so feminist (wait til you're married or you're a whore), or vague... "it'll feel right to you."

It actually never feels like "the right time" to me. I'm a survivor and I've had other bad experiences with men. I still enjoy sex and want to continue having it, but I just need help figuring out what "the right time for me" is because I don't have much experience with healthy relationships. I think there are conversations that I should have with him to help me decide when the right time is, but I don't really know what those conversations are.

So does anyone have suggestions of questions and conversations two people should have before first having sex with each other (aside from STDs, birth control, and what we'd do if I got pregnant)?

I heard somewhere that a couple should talk about what each of their expectations for the relationship after the first time are. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for.

Sorry for being kind of vague and scattered, I'd appreciate any advice anyone has for me!

A local story near my city involves a 16-year old boy who received a nude picture from a 14 year old girl. The article says the boy loaded the picture to the internet and distributed it across the nation. When the police raided his house, they also found a large amount of child pornography. The boy is on probation (computers, cell phones, etc) until he is 19 years old. At the end of the article it suggests that the girl might be charged too.

So here's my question: By charging the girl, is this a case of blaming the victim? I feel like the girl has already had enough damage done to her by the boy spreading around the picture of her. So why should she be charged? Yes, she was only 14 years old but the picture was supposed to be private.

Thoughts, anyone? 

I've been researching and thinking about trafficking since before I knew the term. The publication of this year's Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) prompts me to think back to where I was 15 years ago when I first saw the tremendous hostility towards women who go to richer countries where they sell sex. I've written many times in multiple places about how the desire to save prostitutes from misery fails to address what many of them perceive to be preferable in their lives, in the moment. When I first wrote about these things, few had heard the kind of stories I told. Now that has changed, and my book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry has evoked much more response than I expected (2007 Zed Books).

In 1994 I attended a conference in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) organised in part by women who participated in the HIV-AIDS prevention project of a local NGO (where I also worked). The women called themselves sex workers, they were mostly mothers and they were not white. Such an event had not been held there before, and I had never known such events were held at all. I sat in the back and listened to the contradictory ideas presented by local feminist writers, legal experts and the women themselves. The word trafficking may have been uttered, but this took place before the idea had spread around the world, and I failed to register its importance. Within the NGO, we talked about travel and work abroad and the problems migrants encountered. We didn't presume to tell people they should not give working abroad a try but tried to think of ways to reduce the dangers involved, such as preparing a little flier with addresses and telephone numbers of sympathetic projects in Europe. Sympathetic was defined as: the Europeans here will not yell at you for being a prostitute or call the police because you are undocumented, and they may have helpful information on places to stay or how to find a doctor. One sex worker gave a talk at the conference about her bad experience in Spain; all sex worker speakers demanded the right to make their own decisions.

I've been researching and thinking about trafficking since before I knew the term. The publication of this year's Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) prompts me to think back to where I was 15 years ago when I first saw the tremendous hostility towards women who go to richer countries where they sell sex. I've written many times in multiple places about how the desire to save prostitutes from misery fails to address what many of them perceive to be preferable in their lives, in the moment. When I first wrote about these things, few had heard the kind of stories I told. Now that has changed, and my book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry has evoked much more response than I expected (2007 Zed Books).

In 1994 I attended a conference in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) organised in part by women who participated in the HIV-AIDS prevention project of a local NGO (where I also worked). The women called themselves sex workers, they were mostly mothers and they were not white. Such an event had not been held there before, and I had never known such events were held at all. I sat in the back and listened to the contradictory ideas presented by local feminist writers, legal experts and the women themselves. The word trafficking may have been uttered, but this took place before the idea had spread around the world, and I failed to register its importance. Within the NGO, we talked about travel and work abroad and the problems migrants encountered. We didn't presume to tell people they should not give working abroad a try but tried to think of ways to reduce the dangers involved, such as preparing a little flier with addresses and telephone numbers of sympathetic projects in Europe. Sympathetic was defined as: the Europeans here will not yell at you for being a prostitute or call the police because you are undocumented, and they may have helpful information on places to stay or how to find a doctor. One sex worker gave a talk at the conference about her bad experience in Spain; all sex worker speakers demanded the right to make their own decisions.

As an occasional reviewer of sex-related products, I sometimes find "surprise" packages at my front door. Two weeks ago I received a nondescript cardboard box, but the content was anything but ordinary. What did I discover when I rummaged through the tissue paper? The cone vibrator.

Now the cone has been around for a while but this was my first chance to test-drive it.

*Possible Trigger*

Something has been bothering me for a while. Well, a couple somethings actually... The first thing is this: Is having sex with a drunk girl always considered rape? I ask because a while ago I went to a party with my boyfriend and got extremely trashed. I don't remember anything about that night, but the next day was told that I had sex with my boyfriend (who wasn't trashed like i was). At the time I was just relieved that it was my boyfriend I'd had sex with instead of a stranger, but it really bothers me that if no one had said anything to me, I would still have no idea that I had sex. I have no idea if I initiated it, or how it occurred, or where. I don't think it's rape, since it was with my boyfriend and I probably would have sex with him anyway, right? Or is it always rape no matter what? I'm just confused in general how to interpret this situation.

Another thing that has been bothering me, is that recently when having sex with my boyfriend, he tried to go down on me and I said no at least four times. I told him it made me uncomfortable and I didn't want to do that. He wouldn't take no for an answer, saying "please, just a little bit" and "come on" and pushing my hands out of the way and my legs open. Instead of continuing to argue, I just laid there and let him continue. It was very awkward and uncomfortable, but not completely traumatic. I'm not sure what to make of this either.

No one wants to think of their loved one as a rapist or a creep that can't take no for an answer. No one wants to consider themselves a victim either. So I am not sure if I'm just making a big deal out of these situations, or if I should be making a bigger deal out of them. The latter situation bothered me a lot more than the first one. Perhaps because I made it clear that I didn't want to participate in that particular act, but he refused to accept that. Even if it isn't rape, it was really disrespectful and it made me feel awful afterward. It also isn't anything really new, he constantly 'begs' for sex if I say no, he keeps asking or doing things to "get me in the mood" until I just give in because it is easier to lay there for 10 minutes instead of explain over and over why I am saying no... I know this is not rape because I am (reluctantly) consenting, it's still really hurtful.

I just don't really know what to think, and I was looking for opinions or insight.

As I was waiting for my partner to get off the phone with her mother, I picked up a copy of our local newspaper. I was scrolling through, I saw an interesting headline in the advice column entitled "Woman Sees Intimacy as Unnecessary." I read it and was more than a little appalled by what I saw.

The woman seeking advice told the story of her husband, Danny. He was, by her account, a sweet and upstanding man to whom she'd been married to for almost 40 years. He does chores around the house, maintains a yard that is the "envy of the neighborhood," and treats her like a queen. Her problem is that he expects sex once a week:

"Since Day One, I would submit to him because I believed it was my duty, but after 37 years, I consider sex an unnecessary task. When I turn him down, Danny gets depressed and mopes around the house for days."

She concluded that she couldn't imagine her life without her husband and she just wanted to figure out a way to explain to him that even though she doesn't want to be intimate, she loved him dearly. The response struck me:

"Please don't do this. Danny has been a full partner in your marriage. You should be one too, and sex is part of that. When you love someone, you accommodate them in ways that make them happy, whether you get anything out of it or not. Sex once a week is not excessive. Have a doctor check your hormone levels, which we suspect have always been out of balance, and consider therapy."

I'm not sure why, but the response made me sick. I've been in a relationship with someone who "expected" sex and it was a fucking nightmare. By the end of it, I wasn't sure who I hated more, me or her.

No, I cannot claim to be any kind of relationship guru, but I do know this: in my five-year relationship with my partner, she has never "expected" sex. What she does expect is my love, devotion, and fidelity, which I give freely and unconditionally and expect nothing less in return. Yes, we have our little tiffs over sex, but I most certainly don't "mope around the house for days" and guilt trip my partner until she feels so worthless that she "submits" to me. Don't get me wrong, I like sex. A lot. But if I am having sex and my partner honestly doesn't want to, I feel as though I am violating her. Sex can be a very beautiful thing, but if it is a duty, then it ceases to be anything more than that.

Instead of blaming the woman and suggesting therapy, would it not have been more productive to suggest that they just talk about it openly and honestly? Maybe it's him. Maybe he's doing something that hurts her. Maybe she has had an awful experience with sex and he doesn't take her feelings into consideration. Or maybe, just maybe, she doesn't like sex. Again, I am no expert.

Am I wrong to take offense to this article? Is this what we are supposed to think marriage is about? Is it normal to trade household chores for sex, whether that person wants to or not? I'm just so happy that I don't have to "pay" my partner to get her to do the dishes.

What careers are avaliable for me? I'm having a difficult time googling this...

My area of expertise is sex. I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with it, but I love talking about it, I am very open about it, and I know quite a bit about it (for not just my age group, but many age groups). I'd really love to turn it into a career of sorts, but I'm not quite sure how to. I really don't want to spend 6 to 8 years in school on some sort of pyschology major, and I don't want to get into anything medical. Does anybody have any other suggestions? I'm pretty decent at writing, painting, and I love researching. If that helps at all. I really need a clear goal in life, to be honest.

FIT TO BE TIED: THE POWER OF CORSETS

By Athena Bradford 

I was browsing the aisles of my favorite sensuality boutique, when Raye Andrews, the owner, help up a black leather corset.  “Try this on,” she urged. I had been fingering satin camisoles and silk kimonos to add to my collection.  Reshaping my torso with busks and binding was not on my agenda.

Raye knows me well, so she hit me with her best shot.  “I’ve had it in the backroom for weeks, and I’ve been waiting until just the right woman walked in. Flattered and feeling adventurous and slightly naughty, I agreed to put on the intimidating intimate apparel.

Once in the dressing room, however, I discovered that this was easier said than done. Fumbling with the laces, I tried to figure out the construction plan.  Did the zipper go in the front or back?  Were my boobs supposed to go inside or outside the scalloped edge?  Could anyone’s waist possibly be so tiny?

Coming to my rescue, Raye reoriented both the bodice and my breasts and began to adjust the grip. “Take a deep breath and hold it. Don’t let it out until I’m finished.” Before I could object, she took hold of the strings and began to pull.

Anticipating a tourniquet, I discovered temptation.  As the bumps in my road took on a decidedly hourglass shape, I kept urging her, “Tighter, make it tighter.”

I know what you’re thinking: “What sane woman would willingly subject herself to the bondage of a corset?”

Well, I am the first to admit that my passion for corseting defies logic. 

First, I’m not the sort of person who concocts potions of pain, for myself or anyone else. Power struggles interest me, but when the tightening and turning of the screws crosses over into masochistic torture, I’m out of there: “If you ever do that again, I’ll fucking kill you,” have proven to be very effective safe words.

Second, like most women I know, I Hate, Hate, Hate wearing bras, and trust me; I’ve tried every possible variation. I’ve poured my 34B breasts into demi-cups and caged them in wire. I’ve supported them with water wings and pressurized them with gel. My poor tired tits have taken the plunge, endured the full press, and weathered full-frontal assaults.

"But have you examined?"

This is a question that most kinky people have heard at some point or another. The answer is always, always yes. 

When you realize you are significantly different from most of the people around you, you will always wonder why. This is human nature. Kinky people have almost all "examined" far more than their vanilla counterparts.

And I think that's a shame. There are far more vanilla people than kinky people, and if anyone should examine the way society has affected their sexuality, it's Team Vanilla. Vanilla people have the luxury of thinking that their sexuality is totally normal and that they don't actually have anything to examine. 

Hello All! I just felt like posting this link to a book/documentary that recently came out.  It is called "Oral Sex is the New Goodnight Kiss," documenting the lives of young teenage girls (ages 13-15) living in Canada (A suburban area, unsure of the name) who engage in a sex trade.  These are young girls who exchange sexual favors to young guys for the attention and the money to go shopping.  WOW.  I was pretty surprised when I heard about this.  Just wanted your thoughts on this.  The fundamental ideal of a woman celebrating her sexuality has been taken completely out of context.  Clearly, media and its obsession with sexual body parts and the attention that sex gets is the culprit in my opinion.  But what do you all think?  

I’m not sure if anyone on here is interested in reading this, but it doesn’t much matter. It pertains to feminism, at least some, and I really, really need to get this off my chest, and the internet allows me to spill my guts without properly identifying myself.

I’m 17 years old, male, and a strong believer in feminism. I know everyone’s first thought will be that my mother probably had a lot to do with that. Unfortunately, that is not the case. There were three or four very serious things that happened to my sister, and to a couple of very close female friends of mine that drew my attention to sexism when I was about twelve. Later, something very sexist and hurtful was done my girlfriend, when I was 15. I learned about feminism by accident, when I was randomly screwing around on the internet, and came across a feminist web site. I read about it, and started identifying myself as a feminist the next day. It turned out I already was a feminist, and I just didn’t know about that label. That would have been two years ago, and I have learned more, and become more engaged in it since. I found this movement by my self. As it happens, my mother is actually the main cause of my problem at the moment.

Strange, how the feelings in your body can totally change your mind.

About last night...... I feel empowered and truly POWERFUL in my body, for the first time in a long time.

And what did it take? Two very gentle, caring men and a camera!

Editor's Note: This content may be considered sexually explicit and may be NSFW, and has been placed behind the jump.

I've been leaving some pretty long comments on the BDSM-related posts, and I figured since I have so much to say it made more sense to just flat out say it.

This might seem a little out of the blue to some people, those who haven't been following the larger conversation about BDSM and whether it's an "acceptable" practice for a feminist, whether its existence is a feminist issue, etc.

Some people say that we who have these sorts of fetishes, be it for submission, for pain, for humiliation, for simulations of peril, or what have you... essentially, anything that if played out with a man in one position and a woman in another ends up seeming to mirror a real-world power dynamic... that we need to examine where these kinks come from.

Perhaps there are some well-meaning folks who are simply intellectually curious, who wonder if there might be some danger, and who think that's worth thinking about. A lot of people in the BDSM community actually think that, too.

But in many cases, it seems this talk of "examining" is actually a little disingenuous because the people who are pushing it think they know the source of all these non-standard desires, they think they know how the practice of such things interacts with society, and they think the only solution is to abstain, to get rid of these desires or at least keep them to ourselves and not practice them.

It's a simple thing, obviously. We like to be "beat up" because Patriarchy taught us we should and when we realize that through our "examination", we'll realize they're not our actual desires and we'll become healthy women.

That's the idea, anyway.

I say trying to figure out where a deeply rooted preference "comes from" is a fool's errand.

Okay, everyone knows by now that Oprah and Dr. Laura Berman endorse mothers giving daughters vibrators. As an amorous overachiever, I've already selected the perfect vibe and written my accompanying letter.  Although we have several years to go before she reaches 15, I'm ready.

Darling Daughter,

You have ripened before my eyes, and I marvel at the incandescent changes. Your hormones are in overdrive, and I swear that I can hear them humming as they reshape your body and wreck havoc with your moods.

As your mother, I want your journey into womanhood to be only filed with rich discoveries and free of fear; as a woman, I know that is asking the impossible.  But here is what I can offer:  some advice and a very practical gift.

So, BDSM is not a new topic here on feministing, and after reading a good deal of posts & comments I feel like a considerable number of people are missing a few important points.

Many of these posts deal with a particular topic: reconciling feminism with submissive sexual behavior (of women particularly).

[A/N: I would like to link to these, but my internet is not cooperating with a search function. If someone wants to do so in the comments it would be helpful. I know there was a Prof. Foxy one and a submission (pun?) by sleepybones2.]

One argument I hear from a lot of people who identify as anti-BDSM is that submissive sexual behavior is a product of a highly patriarchy society, and that practitioners are contributing to the subjugation of women by acting out behavior that would be seen as abuse if consent were absent (the definition of consent is also contentious, apparently, and probably worthy of its own post).

The first problem is people have different definitions of what BDSM is, and what constitutes abuse. Some commenters seem to think that BDSM automatically implies violence - hitting, verbal abuse, rape fantasies, etc. But it's used as a term to encompass a large variety of things - getting tied up, blindfolded, role playing, etc. Sexual play is highly individualized, and assuming that everyone who enjoys BDSM likes getting slapped or called degrading names isn't doing them or the community justice.  

The second issue, and the one that bothers me the most, is that many of these arguments are treating women as a monolith. This ties back into the individualized nature of sex in general, but most importantly it casts everyone as an ambassador for their entire gender...

When you tell your boyfriend to spank you, you're telling him it's ok to strike women. When you ask your spouse to tie you up, you're telling them that it's fine and dandy to oppress all men/women because you like the fell of rope against your skin. See the problem here?

  What's missing is the personal element. If Billy and Jane are dating, and Jane gets off on getting spanked (let's just go with the previous example), Billy doesn't see it as an act that legitimizes violence against women everywhere. He sees Jane: the 5'4", 25 ACT score, redhead, chess-playing woman who he's in a relationship with. She likes getting spanked. He likes getting her off.

Now if he said "Sorry, It would be hot as hell to do, but I'm against rape and partner violence." Her reaction would probably be "Um... what the fuck?"

Now if he was uncomfortable with that type of sexual play, then he has every right to say so. And it would be her responsibility to respect that. But if both partners are sexually satisfied by it and come out happy then what is the harm? [And any argument that claims they don't REALLY know when they're happy/satisfied just reeks of paternalism.]

And let's not diminish the importance of personal connection. If I blindfolded my boyfriend and started talking dirty to him, he would love it. If he was blindfolded and suddenly heard ANOTHER women's voice, he'd be like "What the hell? Who are you?! Get me the hell out of here!!" What's important here is not the gender of the person, but the INDIVIDUAL.

A big part of feminism is a belief in the idea that gender is inconsequential - I'm an individual, I just happen to be a woman/man. I shouldn't be treated any differently because of that. If we are forced to be representatives of our entire gender at all times - even with the people we are closest to, and in our most personal moments - then we have elevated gender as THE thing, not just A thing that describes us.

Hi Feministing! I've only left one or two comments here and there, but this is something I've been wanting to write about for a long time now but could never think of a venue that would be open to a topic like this. I've wanted to put this out as a facebook note, but then I realise that 105 people could see it, including the lady who used to babysit me, my sister-in-law, and people who really don't know me all that well.

So, I chose a group of strangers who've infuriated me, awed me, humbled me, taught me, and caused me to avoid countless assignments over the past semester.

I'm going to turn 19 in 8 days, I've always had feminist sensibilities. My parents encouraged me to think independently, logically, and freely - something you might not expect being raised in a Southern Baptist church, but then Mom is pretty much a secret second-wave agent and Dad was a true-blue hippie who meshes together Christian Science and Buddhism and worships the ground my brother and I walk on.

Not that they don't have faults - there's still a lot of turmoil here, which I'll have to face in this coming summer of being home from my first year of college. But one of their faults is, I now realise, pretty egregious.

My parents cannot talk about sex.

I'm having fun reading about penises today.  I've learned that when men are timed, sexual intercourse lasts between 2 and 40 minutes, with an average of just over 7 minutes.  Not to worry, chimpanzees only have sex for 8 seconds and gorillas for one minute.  Why is that?  Well, suggests the author, animals have to move fast or they'll be eaten.  Apparently nature and evolution are lined up against us women.  Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am is in our genes.

This is a pretty common view.  Except it's missing something.  Chimpanzees don't have sex for 8 seconds and stop.  They go into heat and screw every male in sight for six days.  Female chimps have been known to have sex 20 times in one day, although the daily average is only 6.  Then again, they may have sex every 10 minutes for half the morning.

Male chimps, meanwhile, fight each other for as many turns as they can get.  Luckily, they're able to get it up again after five mintues.

Coming fast probably isn't about avoiding predators at all.  Maybe a chimpanzee comes fast because he needs to get his sperm in before the next guy shows up.  And saying sex only lasts 8 seconds is missing the big picture, at least for a female chimpanzee.

Gorillas are another story entirely.  A dominant male keeps a harem of females.  When they go into heat, he has sex with them.  When he's not looking, they sneak off with other males.  Once again, we don't need to look for predators to explain anything:  the male gorilla is probably coming fast to avoid being attacked by another gorilla.

The facts about primate sex life are well known.  We just forget them when they don't fit into our ideas about men and women.

Here's an alternative explanation of human evolution.  As humans became more monogamous, the male didn't have to come as quickly as his primate relatives.  The women didn't all belong to one polygamous male who would beat you up if you went near them.  Nor did you have to fight the rest of your troop for your turn.

Still, in order to keep his woman faithful, the male human had to be able to keep her satisifed.  He couldn't give her sex twenty times a day, but he didn't want her to go elsewhere.  Men evolved large penises and the ability to last up to 40 minutes.  Nature and evolution are working for women's pleasure, not against it.  The 60-minute-man is in our genes.

I originally wrote this for my personal blog () after reading He's A Stud She's A Slut And 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, specifically chapter "He's 'Lucky,' She's Lolita." I chose to cross-post it here because I feel like everyone can identify with my experience. Whether you've hooked-up with someone you later found to be an idiot, been rejected, or humiliated, sexual experiences cause similar emotions across the board. And everyone has their virginity story. This is mine, kind of.

During what can only be described as a make-out session, I made it clear to this guy I had been seeing that I wanted to have sex, but that I was a virgin. At first he was really fidgety and clearly uncomfortable by the idea and I couldn’t quite understand it. I thought men loved virgins.

The first time this happened he rejected me by saying, “This is the first time I’ve ever touched you and this room smells like cigarettes.” Uh, what? We were in his room. I should have left that very moment and never returned. But we all have to date our sclubs, right? So I returned a few weekends later only to hear “I have to go to sleep” under the same circumstances.

At first, I viewed his rejection as a reflection of his own insecurities but after the second time I couldn’t help but feel humiliated. His excuse this time was original but highly questionable. Why invite me over to spend the night, take my pants off, then deny me when I consent to sex? I should’ve known right then and there that this guy was shit. Pure shit. Immense shit even.

After reading “He’s ‘Lucky,’ She’s Lolita” I felt empowered, really. Here’s why: I am a woman comfortable expressing my sexual desires. I was not in the wrong by any means. I should not feel humiliated by this experience because, as far as I see it, what he did was wrong. Sexist, even.

The logic here is that, as a young virginal woman, I do not have the capacity to make my own decisions about sex. The time wasn't "right" and the experienced man knows better; the experienced man knows when it's "right" to de-flower a young girl. (Think: candles, the absence of cigarettes smells, apparently).

I encourage you not to make assumptions about my character as that is not the point of my sharing this. I stopped seeing this guy and that should be enough. My point is: Men are terrible people. Just kidding. But really, how many times have we applauded a man for not fucking a virgin because it wouldn’t have been “right”? I’m sick of all this my-first-time shit. Sex is sex. Whether it’s the first time or the 47th time, it’s all the same. And, as women, we are undeniably capable of deciding what the time is “right,” thanks.

A young man I know was on the feministing.com blog and by clicking through a series of links, he apparently came across an article on this theme, and then, asked me what I thought.

I read some of the literature and was shocked that nobody was really mentioning what I thought was perhaps the core issue: blowjobs are not inherently anti-feminist, but the fact that oral sex is so infrequently reciprocated in heterosexual relationships probably is.

There is a certain generation of people, I would venture to say perhaps 25 and younger (although that boundary is fuzzy) for whom fellatio is not and has not been especially taboo: the generation of people about whom TIME and Newsweek articles are written, proclaiming with statistics meant to unnerve the middle-age readership about X% of girls under the age of 14, 15, 16, etc. who have given oral sex.

It would seem that, for this generation, fellatio is "third base" of heterosexual relationships; some logical interim between fondling and sex.

I would contend, perhaps, that this is true because men feel more entitled than women do to sexual pleasure.

*cross-posted at wearethethirdwave*

In the few months I have been a volunteer for the Seattle Aquarium, I have realized that this place perpetuates and teaches gender roles. Of course, so do most places. The three reasons why I think the aquarium's situation is worthy of discussion are 1) humans are projecting our ideas about gender roles onto animals 2) impressionable kids are the ones absorbing these ideas 3) I am guilty of most of the behaviors I'm about to criticize. Before I go further, I also want to acknowledge that by “our ideas about gender roles” I am limiting myself to the ideas from the culture that most aquarium visitors and I share  (American, white, middle class,  culturally Christian, etc.) and am not claiming that all people construct gender roles in the same way.

When we look at statistics on rape, sexual harassment, and other types of sexual and gender-based violence, it's clear that women are disproportionately the victims of these crimes. If so many women in every single country and context have suffered, or continue to suffer, sexual violence, then it's also clear that we are at risk. A woman I know was raped in the shower when a group of men broke into her home. Another woman I read about was raped and tortured when leaving the parking lot at her office building. That could be anyone, we think. That could be me.

Rape seems like an extreme illustration of the phenomenon, although the word 'extreme' appears inappropriate to describe a crime so common. But still, there are the lesser, more paltry examples of sexual violence that we have become so used to that they barely seem like violence at all: a boyfriend pressuring us into having sex, a colleague or client in a business meeting ogling our breasts instead of listening to what we are saying, walking the streets of a city (some cities more than others) and receiving a disgusting whistle, moan or comment on how fine and how fuckable we are. We don't need to have been raped to understand how disarming it feels to be violated.

Equipped by this new consciousness, I search the dusty drawers of my memory (you know, the ones that keep the souvenirs you'd rather forget about) and I, like any other woman, can find many occurrences of this particular feeling. When I was 10, a man put his hand up my little skirt with little apples on it as I looked at postcards at the market. When I was 15, a man relentlessly tried to get into my pants although I was unresponsive and quasi-catatonic with grief. When I was 18, a stranger masturbated in front of me. When I was 19, my boyfriend made me feel dirty and shameful because I was not a virgin the first time we had sex. When I was 23, I let a guy pressure me into having sex (for the last time). It seems like a lot, although I'm certain it is quite average and I'm not particularly 'unlucky' ... and this is not counting the guys who grabbed my ass while riding public transportation, or the looks I got when I wore a skirt to certain areas of town. I'm not overly scarred or traumatized by these events, but I still believe they are appalling and unacceptable.

The ingredients that go into this feeling are shame, vulnerability, and fear. We are afraid because this happened to us and it could happen to us again. We are afraid that it could happen to our sisters, our friends, our daughters. And we are right to be afraid. The fear is not only justified on account of the terrifying data and anecdotes, but precisely because it is familiar. It is this fear that leads us to be careful and avoid certain situations where the violence is more likely to happen, even if there are no guarantees. I'm all for taking care of ourselves and our bodies, and I support any woman who will try to protect herself. The fear is useful if it works as an incentive for us to be stronger.

However, this same fear is suspect when used as an instrument of control. Fear can be used to control our sexuality and limit our pleasure, as it has been used since the beginning of time. The message has always been the same: sex is dangerous. Don't have sex or you'll get hurt. As much as I recognize that sexual violence is heinous and painful, I also refuse to perpetuate the idea that sex in itself is dangerous.

Growing up I can always remember that I had a "cool mom", she was the mom that took me an my friends across 2 state lines to see our favorite band play, she would get us pizza in the middle of the night because we sounded bored and she was always there to help us with any questions we had about (gasp) sex. She was a single mom who had to work just to get us by. She was a heavy set red head in the midst of thin blondes. We lived in a upper class white neighborhood, but we were always the odd ones. The other moms were not so open with their children and didn't always like the things I would come to school spouting off the things I learned at home.

There are times I can remember coming home from elementary school and asking such questions such as "What is a blow job?", and sure enough my mother told me. The one incident that always stuck with me was the time I questioned her about masturbation. The look on my mothers face was horrific, you would have thought I told her about committing murder. At that point I knew that things were changed. Quickly my once fun and open mother became less willing to answer my questions. That was 7 years ago.

I am a female who is an open book when it comes to sexuality and my opinions on it, but the one thing I never talk about is masturbation. This stems from that awkward day with my mother. I can tell my friends anything and vice versa, but yet we never get to the topic of how often and if we even do masturbate. We crack jokes while in sex shops and make occasional comment about what kind of porn we watch. But we never really discuss it. Guys are able to give gritty details about jerking off and sometimes do it while around each other, but that is a rarity. Women should be able to talk openly about masturbation with one another.

I am a woman. I throughly enjoy watching pornography (Shine Louise Houston has made some great stuff for those of you who are to scared to ask). And I masturbate.

I was wondering what others thought of the No Comment page in the last issue of Ms (spring 2009).  They are encouraging readers to protest a Calvin Klein ad for jeans that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.  I'm not sure what's offensive about the ad, so I wondered if there was something more that I don't know about.

The ad shows an attractive young woman with three young hunks.  Two of the guys are making out with her and the third is lying on the floor looking spent.  There's nothing that looks coercive or violent in the picture.  They all look quite happy.  Am I missing something?

Do you need to be sexually active and happy about it to be empowered? Do you need to be "ready" to have sex? Do you need to experiment  sexually? Do you need to be comfortable when experimenting? Or is it something else.

I'm a young woman a month away from reaching the age of consent. So these thoughts about being a sexually empowered young woman have been occurring to me.

First community post . . . *eek!*  But I wrote this and really want to kind of hash it out in a discussion, and I know everyone here would do wonderfully.  So please, be kind, but definitely dissect it.

I just finished reading Russell Brand's autobiography, or, should I say, his first autobiography, "My Booky Wook".  And, by the way, I am rapidly falling into fannish love with him- he is utterly charming, almost enough to make me want to throw away all my Libertarian principles and and everlasting faith in democracy to join in his revolution and as-of-yet-unrealized utopian commune . . .  But I digress; back on topic.  Russell is especially tabloid-worthy (in British press, at least), for his amorous escapades, following in the footsteps of Casanova and Don Juan, having been given the somewhat notorious award of "Shagger Of The Year" three years in a row.  He's not apologetic for it, either, in his book, and there was one quote in particular that has stuck with me:

"To this day, I feel a fierce warmth for women that have the same disregard for the social conventions of sexual protocol as I do. I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it's apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard." ['Cupboard' here being Britspeak for 'closet'.]

I couldn't quite put my finger on why this quote resonated so strongly with me, and then it kind of hit me all of a sudden- it has a completely different tone than anything I've heard from men of similar sexual repute.  Typically when I hear about promiscuous men (a term that feels funny to write, even- so well-entrenched is the idea that promiscuity is a female phenomenon, its male equivalent considered merely average), my mind instantly conjurs up these words and judgments- womanizer, player, playboy.  They are predatory images, ones that imply a loss on the part of the woman, a victory on the part of the man.  In this model, sexual encounters are cons, ruses meant to "get in her pants".  She is passive in contrast to his aggressive pursuit, and as in all chases, once "caught", she has lost the game.

It’s nearly impossible for me to orgasm during sex without clitoral stimulation.  With my first sex partner, I NEVER had an orgasm during sex. I was with him an entire year, and the sex was really good, but it felt unfair because he always got to finish but I never did. After sex, he was all satisfied and I still felt like I was going to die from how horny I was, and usually he‘d go to sleep and I'd get myself off. (Ha, sorry if that‘s too graphic)

Not that he didn't try to make me cum, he did, but he only tried to give me a G-spot orgasm. He sort of thought that if it wasn't going to happen in this, or that position, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Eventually me and the ex broke up, and I found a new boyfriend and thought maybe this time we'd have a better connection, better sex and then I’d cum during sex.
NOPE. Still nothing. For weeks and weeks, we'd have sex and he'd always get to cum and I didn't.

A year ago if you asked me if I would commend Oprah for anything, much less for defending feminist viewpoints in the face of conventional social disapproval...well, I'd have to shrug because in all my life I had never watched an Oprah show.

A schedule change over the past year made it so that her show was on during the exact time I was home and awake. So I watched. I watch.

And became interested in this woman who, yes, is very accepting of a number of problematic things: extreme consumerism; American ignorance of non-Western societies; reification of essentialized gender; Steve Harvey's relationship advice (need I say more?), BUT, who is also, I feel, moving incrementally toward the humanist light.

Last night and today, her two shows combined constitute a "Shocking Oprah Sex-Ed Win."

It was shocking because she took a powerful humanist stance, called out members of her own audience and her own friends on their sexism, fought with her friends on national TV, and stuck by her sex-ed guns in the face of others' conventional social disapproval.

Here's what went down**:

Last night, her sex-ed expert, Dr. Laura Berman, was teaching the audience about how to teach their kids about sex. She recommended a number of things, including that women should teach their 15 year old daughters about the benefits of masturbation, and that things such as vibrators are a-okay to explore with.

The audience reacted negatively, with women shaking their heads and standing up to tell her off.

But Oprah stepped in to say: "Why do you think knowing about masturbation is wrong?"

A very young Afr-Am woman [possibly teen] audience member began railing against Dr. Berman, saying, "it sounds like she [Dr. berman] goes home and [masturbates] every day."

Dr. B and Oprah said, "Yes? And? That's a bad thing... why?"

Another audience member, this time a blonde Euro-Am mother in her early forties, said urgently, "But, Oprah, where's the SELF-CONTROL? Teaching your kids to touch themselves whenever nature calls is tying them to their urges and teaches them they don't have to use willpower."

[Cut to commercial. DAMN, wanted to hear Oprah's answer]

[back from break]

Oprah: "I think you all missed something very important in what Dr.Berman's talking about. If you think about it, a girl who masturbates and learns about pleasure on her own will be far less likely to get swept up in the moment and to idolize or cling to the first guy who comes along who gives her those feelings. She'll realize that it's not HIM that gives that to her, but that it's her own body's reaction that she's already enjoyed on her own, and that she doesn't have to be beholden to him."

Gayle King, best friend and mag editor: I just can't get behind this, Oprah [shaking her head and throwing up her hands, tsk-tsking ] "it's just too much information" [TMI about their OWN BODIES, Gayle? Is that even possible?].

The show ended.

Today's show was a live group talk session similar to THE VIEW's format--a roundtable with Oprah, Gayle, a blonde actress/comedian, and a generally useless man who's apparently there to be a male prop.

(Cross-posted at Women's Glib)

From the Feministing main page, a disheartening story of under-the-radar slut-shaming and bullshit beaurocracy: the Washington Post reports that a teenage girl has been suspended for two weeks - with the possibility of expulsion - for getting caught taking her birth control pill during lunch.

For two decades, many schools have set zero-tolerance policies on drugs. That means no over-the-counter drugs, no prescription drugs, no pretend drugs in student lockers or pockets. When many teens have ready access to medicine cabinets filled with prescription medications such as Xanax and Vicodin, any capsule or tablet is suspect.

Still, some parents and civil rights advocates say enforcement has been overzealous. Stringent rules have ensnared not only drug dealers and abusers, but a host of sniffling and headachy students seeking quick medical relief. The Supreme Court will consider this month the case of a 13-year-old Arizona student who was strip-searched in 2003 by an administrator who suspected that she was carrying ibuprofen pills.

Fairfax [Virginia] School Board members have debated over time whether to allow students to carry Tylenol or other over-the-counter medicines without registering them with the school nurse.

But I think this whole charade about over-the-counter and widely used prescription drugs reveals a profound distrust of young people, and a desire by the education beaurocracy to get involved in the private lives of the families it serves. I'm a high school student who is currently pursuing the pill as a birth control option (the personal is political, right?), and, feminist as I am, I imagine I'd be upset if the entire school were to hear about my sex life in such a humiliating way. I'm worried about the shame this young woman might feel - shame that's entirely irrational, since using contraception (with condoms) is in fact the most responsible choice straight sexually active teens can make. And I'm thrilled that she'd made the decision to use the pill with her family, so the administration's call home wasn't a total shock - but, as Miriam points out, what about women who don't tell their families they're using birth control? They'd likely face jeers and rumors at school and surprise and anger at home.

According to school policies, her pills should have been kept in the school clinic. But the student said she did not see the logic in making a special trip to see the nurse, a relative stranger, each day during her 25-minute lunch break. She preferred to take the pill on her own. She tried to be discreet but she got caught.

The teenager and her mother maintain that the decision to take birth-control pills is personal. Now that private choice has been shared with her principal and many teachers.

As far as I can tell, the student - who declined to publish her name (hooray respecting privacy rights!) - seems to be taking this mayhem with a grain of salt.

During two weeks of watching television game shows and trying to keep up with homework online, the Fairfax teen, an honor student and lettered athlete, had time to study the handbook closely. If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have.

This may be NSFW? It talks about porn...

QUESTION: What do all of these words and phrases have in common?

"Fuck You"
"Fucker"
"Fuck Him"
"Fuck that"
"Fuck head"
"You are an Asshole"
"He is an ass"
"You are a Bitch"
"You are a Slut"
"She is a Whore"
"She is such a Tramp"
"He is such a Dick"
"What a Prick"
"What a Fag"
"That is Gay"
"He is a Mother-Fucker"
"You are a Vagina"
"He is a Pussy"
"What a Cunt"
"He is a Twat"

Okay, now what do all those words, have in common with these words...........

"Let's Fuck"
"That is Fucking Great"
"We got married, and then we fucked"
"I want to fuck her in the ass"
"Damn look at that ass"
"Hey, Bitch, Hey!"
"Hey, Slut!"
"Just act slutty!"
"You look so hot today, slut"
"Hey, Whore!"
"Oh your boyfriend is so fine, you little whore!"
"Suck my dick"
"I want his dick"
"I want his prick"
"I am gay"
"Touch my Vagina"
"Lick my pussy"
"I touched her cunt"

Is anybody else wondering why cuss words in the English language are also words describing sex, sexuality, or body parts? I'll tell you why. It makes it a lot easier for a person to feel shamed and objectified. It makes it easier for sexual relationships to be completely unhealthy. How many people will enjoy expressing themselves sexually, if the same words you use to tell someone they are a complete waste of space are also the same words you use to have sex with them? That is why sexuality is so controversial and confusing in the United States.

It's always Fucking or making love, Screwing or doing It, Boning or Banging, piping (my absolute least favorite) or bumping uglies. You are either seen as an object or a baby machine. I am neither.

Let me start off me saying that I'm not talking about abstinence education or forcing it on people who want to have sex!

Lately I have been having sex for all the wrong reasons. I went to my friends and was talking about it with them and I told them that I was considering abstinence for a while in order to get myself back on track and feel like I am the one who controls my body again. Their response was that I should either continue to have sex with the boyfriend or dump the boyfriend and sleep around. It seemed that to willingly stop having sex was somehow anti-feminist and anti-sex.

What I really hoped to achieve by posting here was to maybe create some discussion about whether or not becoming abstinent can be a feminist choice. I don't really want to be giving my body to anyone anymore but the argument seems to be that as a feminist I should not be giving my body during sex but simply using it for pleasure but I am a romantic at heart and don't think I really want to give that up in order to be 'truly' feminist. Is it possible for abstinence to be a feminist act? Or is abstinence (either chastity or stopping once you started having sex) only capable of being an anti-sex act?

In respond to the recent discussions on feminism and submission I'd just like to say this: if what you really want is an open discussion, read this and try to understand where kinky people are coming from.  We are defensive because we have been treated poorly, not necessarily by you but by those who sound a great deal like you.  If what you really want is for my examination to yield the result that who I am is harmful to society and I should just come to terms with that, this probably won't help.

It's not that I have a problem with cultural critiques of sexuality, I don't.  I am fine with discussing theory.  Really, we can all sit around and talk about how patriarchy affects sexuality all day long (although I'd really prefer the conversation included all kinds of sexuality), but we need to be aware of the effect that our words and our opinions have on people.  The problem comes when theory begins to interfere with practical reality.  

Several recent discussions here and on other blogs have gotten me thinking about a certain communication pattern that gets repeated again and again on feminist blogs. I'm curious about it, and a bit discouraged over the way it often serves as a conversation stopper and thread hijacker. The emotions surrounding the topic are often heated, and it touches on very personal experiences, so I'm sure this (understandably) plays a role as well.

So here's the initial problem. On many threads discussing things like porn, BDSM, prostitution, stripping, rape fantasies, etc many commenters will defend one of two different claims. They are:
(A) The choices that a consenting adult makes are valid expressions of their sexuality and we should support them;
(B) Sexual desires and choices do not occur in a cultural vacuum, and it's a worthwhile feminist pursuit to investigate the cultural influences that give rise to our sexual desires/choices.

In my mind A and B are compatible. From a strictly logical perspective, B does not entail the negation of A. In other words, it's not the case that if you affirm B then you are denying A. That doesn't follow logically. And yet, there seems to be a very strong consensus that it does. The claim is made repeatedly that if you believe that our sexual desires are deeply influenced/constructed by our cultural context or would like to investigate the relationship between culture and sexual desire, then that amounts to shaming people, invading their bedrooms, and trying to dictate their behavior. The fact that this is such a compelling position to many people that nonetheless makes no sense to me makes me curious. For those who think that A and B are not compatible, is there some sort of connotation or implied premise connected with B that makes it incompatible with A? Does your response have anything to do with the tone of commenters who argue in support of B that somehow makes you feel that A is under attack? Have you had some negative experience in the past that led you to conclude that in general those who believe B also believe not-A?

The fact that this is almost always such a polarizing issue is interesting and a bit troubling to me. I get the sense that maybe there's some residue leftover from earlier feminist encounters or encounters with sex-negative (or homophobic) abstinence-only types at play here. Does anyone have any textual or experiential support for a historical trend of connecting B with not-A in feminism or the larger cultural context? If so, I'd be really interested to hear about it.

I'm in college, and have a fantastic relationship with my boyfriend. He's incredibly caring, just as silly as I am, thoughtful, and extremely intelligent, AND we have an amazing sex life. I haven't gotten him to self-identify as a feminist (typical f-word fear), but he might as well for how he treats me and others. Except for this one issue that has come up recently.. porn. We've talked about it a few times at length, but I still don't feel comfortable with it. Here's the story..

MAYBE I'm a bit nosy.. I admit this. However, let's ignore this for the moment and get to the facts. I was snooping on my bf's computer a while ago and found his porn stash. (It didn't take much - Macs are lovely things.. "recently viewed pictures") There was normal misogynistic porn, but also a large number of obviously pornographically perused pictures taken from facebook.. of people I know.  None of our good friends, but acquaintances. These pictures seemed to be preferred over the typical porn. I have two reactions to this:

1 - Immediate reaction = fury and disgust and worthlessness. I'm officially ok with porn, but it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel less desirable, like he's "settling" for me. The facebook stuff, however, I consider a gross infringement of personal privacy. These people did not consent to having their bodies appropriated in this way - professional porn actors do. I definitely object to that use of facebook (and apparently it's way widespread).

2 - Very much the lesser reaction = maybe it's good that he prefers semi-normal standards of beauty to pornography standards? These girls are not typical porn fare - they look basically like me, and I'm no porn star. BUT I still don't like running into them at school and thinking.. oh my bf masturbates to you. EWW.

Call me prude, call me overly sensitive, but please, please, give me some advice. Is pornography ok in moderation? We've talked about this, and he did agree with me and promise to stop looking at facebook as porn (we'll see how that one goes..), but he couldn't really explain to me how it wasn't misogynistic. He just went back to the "it's a guy thing" argument (ARRGHH). He definitely cares about my feelings, and tried to comfort me in every possible way, but I still can't make myself feel comfortable with porn. I really want to - logically, I understand having a high sex drive - I masturbate all the time (no porn).  Emotionally, I feel completely unsexy, undesirable, and sidelined when I imagine him looking at porn.. any porn. I want to be a good feminist! I want to be fair! But I can't get those images out of my head. :-/

Well, I remember the debate about this when it first opened, a month or two ago...

It seems he does have both female and male waitstaff, which essentially makes this a unisex strip club. I personally don't care what people do: I did see a lot of quotes about "so happy to have ANY job" in the story, which raises a spectre of exploitation, of course. However, this honestly doesn't seem so bad to me: especially if the people running it aren't assholes.

Thoughts?

A report released by a watchdog group, Texas Freedom Network, revealed that most public schools in Texas "use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information."

The report, which was put together from a two-year study of education materials from 990 districts statewide, showed that abstinence only programs are used in 94 percent of schools. Specifically, the study stated "94 percent of public schools use abstinence-only programs that usually pass moral judgments while either downplaying or ignoring contraception and health screenings."

Two percent of the schools studied ignore sex education, which leaves four percent of schools that have a decent curriculum. Schools surveyed blamed fear of religious groups and administrators fear of controversy.

The fact that Texas has one of the nation's highest teen pregnancy rates isn't coincidental...it is a direct result of these irresponsible techniques used to educate teens about sex. Texas also receives more federal abstinence funding than any other state...see a pattern?

One of the report's writers, David Wiley from Texas State University, put it best when he said:

"I thought I was no longer capable of being surprised by the ignorance among our students. Then last year a sincere male student asked aloud, 'What is my risk for cervical cancer?' Clearly, ignorance surrounding sexuality and health is a problem among young people today."

The Star-Telegram article on the report has all kinds of other information, such as since 2001 the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district has taught that condoms are 80 percent effective, while the true number is 97 to 98 percent. Read more here.

Crossposted at Fort Worth Feminism.

I just came across this site, Scarleteen (dot) com, via Alternet and I think it's just amazing.  It's the most inclusive, rational and compassionate sex-ed source that I've ever come across, and I feel like more people should know about it so they have some counter to all of the junk like Loveline out there that not only reinforce unhealthy attitudes  but often also spread inaccurate information and are dismissive of people's concerns.  I wish I'd read this as a teenager, maybe it wouldn't have taken me so long to figure out some of this stuff!

Anyhow, this may have already come to your attention but it's a great site, everyone of any age should take a looksie.  They need donations right now too, so consider spreading the love! (har har har)

I find it rather interesting that in my time reading feministing (which I admit is relatively brief) I have seen absolutely no discussion of female ejaculation, or what is usually called squirting.  If there has been discussion that I've missed, please bring it to my attention.  My reason for writing about this is because I've become more and more frustrated with the majority of conversations I hear about squirting.  These conversations usually come from a popular radio show in Los Angeles that deals with relationship and sex issues (I'm not going to name it because I feel somehow that could bring about problems) that is, not surprisingly, hosted by two men.  However, I hear similar discussions among men and women I know if the issue of squirting happens to come up (which it has on multiple occasions.)  Usually it goes something like this:

"I saw this video where this guy claimed he could make any girl squirt.  He even demonstrated on like 6 different chicks."

Or a caller from the radio show:

"Do you have any advice on how I could make a girl squirt?"

The conversation continues how you might expect: treating women that squirt as some novelty item.  There seems to be this obsession among men about making women squirt.   In my experience, I can only come to two conclusions as to why this is.

I'm going to get very personal and so I hope that everyone can be gentle if they are going to criticize me.

I've always been passionate about sex I love it, I love talking about it, doing and everything. It is a huge aspect of myself and I masturbate all the time (sorry if that's TMI.) have always had a high sex drive and I like to fuck often, not abnormally often, but everyday or every other day or whatever. I've had 2 serious boyfriends before my current one and that's exactly what we did and I never had many complaints, and I was satisfied.

Eric* was a virgin when I met him, I was his first girlfriend. We rarely had sex in the first couple years of our relationship. I always wanted to, but he always turned me down. He said that he was tired, he said he wasn't in the mood, there was always some reason. When we did have sex, it was okay, but not amazingly fantastic or anything.
I began to get frustrated and I started to wonder why he always said no to me. So one day I confronted him about it and he got really defensive, but he eventually just told me that he "had a low sex drive."

So I tried to let it go, I tried to rationalize that it had nothing to do with me, and that he is the one with the problems. It still took a toll on my self esteem and I felt like he didn't think I was sexy or pretty or whatever else and I have never felt that way about  myself. I got resentful and began wondering if he was cheating on me (which is so not his character.)

I have not really seen a post on Feministing that discusses pornography straight on, porn is usually  mentioned tangentially or comes up in the comments.

So I am wondering what the view of porn are here.  How it affects men, women, society.  Good affects, bad affects, all that stuff.

For dudes, I think porn creates skewed and unrealistic desires.  Not really expectations, but desires, if that makes sense.  I think most guys know that porn is unrealistic, so I think some of the affects are mitigated if men where more gullible.  I think many Feministing readers would disagree, and I am curious to see the response.

In regards to women, if I knew I would not be asking Feministing .  I suspect that some resent the skewed desires porn men get after watching porn.  Others may enjoy porn, others may detest the influence the social effects.

For the LGBT community... No idea...

For society...  I think porn makes some sex acts more socially acceptable than they where in the past.  There always seem to be some 'new' thing popularized by porn, oral sex, threesomes and so forth.  In regards to objectification, I am uncertain...

I don't want to go too in-depth in the original post because I want to see the responses develop, if I have not covered something hopefully it it is because I wan to avoid a tl ;dr response and not because I am oblivious.

Thoughts?

Thank god(s) someone's finally exploring the true dynamics behind the orgasm gap. The fact that women are only 50% as likely to orgasm as men in a casual sexual encounter, and 80% in a relationship has often been explained in some hokey and sexist ways by evolutionary psychologists and the like. The research featured in this article seems to be far more constructive and even-handed. My favorite parts:

The male psychology on women's orgasms is comparable to their psychology on housework: Men don't pull their weight on either front because no one makes them.

and

The bright spot of the study is this: Even though folklore has it that women don't achieve orgasms with strangers because they need emotional attachment to feel that sort of pleasure, the truth is that women's orgasms are not usually the result of emotional attachments, but simple physicality. Which is why [Natalie]Angier says she believes the sexual paradigm of women as passive receiver and man as sexual agent needs to be stamped out if women are going to get serious about their orgasms.

Nice!

Last Tuesday, in my intellectual history class ("The Modern Imaginary"), we discussed Therese Philosophe, a bawdy, "forbidden best-seller" of pre-revolutionary France. The novella is an erotic novel and philosophic treatise in which the titular character, a young woman named Therese, recounts her sexual and philosophic coming-of-age to her present lover, the unnamed Count. Not having previously read any one complete example of Enlightenment-era pornography, I had few pre-conceptions about the genre when I sat down to read Therese.

This is an anonymously-written work, published in 1740s, tentatively attributed to a marquis named Jean-Baptiste de Boyer and was a runaway best-seller, according to translator Robert Darnton. Yet even though the author is likely male, and his understanding of the pleasures of sexual activity is definitely phallo-centric, the novel presents us with a complex, possibly even (early) feminist, understanding of sexuality. The novel is told from the point of view of a woman who discovers that sexual fantasy and sexual activity (whether alone or with a partner) can be a "healthful" and deeply gratifying part of her life. Sexual activity is assumed to be pleasureable for both women and men, and there is little differentiation between how women and men experience that pleasure, at least physically. Women, as well as men, for example, are encouraged to masturbate. At the same time, the characters acknowledge the material vulnerability of women who engage in heterosexual activity: the fear of pregnancy and death in childbirth; potential loss of social standing which will threaten their ability to contract a financially stable marriage. Therese and her female mentors negotiate with their sexual partners over what sexual activities are acceptable given these real-world constraints, and those conversations serve as both philosophical debates and integral to the erotic encounters themselves.

Some of the students in my seminar were skeptical that this text constituted "intellectual history," and in addition there was a lot of resistance to reading the sexually-explicit passages as necessary or integral to the intellectual importance of the work. Their impulse was to argue that either the smut was a ploy to sell the philosophy, or the philosophy was an excuse to write the smut. Either way, they considered the sex was gratuitous to the historic or intellectual importance of the piece. I would actually argue the opposite. In Therese Philosophe, it's not the sex or the philosophy that are the "real" reason for the novel's existence -- it's the sex and the philosophy. Both are necessary to make the story work. More importantly, I would argue that it's not just the philosophy that works better because of the sex, but the sex that works better because of the philosophy.

Reading this one example made me curious to sample more 18th-century erotica and see how gender and sexual negotiation are portrayed. Is Therese an exceptional voice? And is is possible to uncover why her story was so compelling to the readers who purchased it is such great numbers that it became a best-seller? I am also fascinated by the similarities, as well as the differences, I see between how human sexuality and sexual relations are portrayed in Therese and how they are written in modern-day erotica. Perhaps that project can be thesis number three or four . . . !

Has anyone else out there read examples of early pornography, and if so what are your thoughts about the way sexuality is portrayed, particularly female sexuality? How does it compare to the present-day narratives about women's sexuality and sexual experience?

Cross-posted at Future Feminist Librarian-Activist.

First, I just want to say how thrilled I am that after two years of sign-up and login troubles, I've finally succeeded!  I've been a lurker for a while, itching to comment on the brilliant Feministing posts but unable to do so, and now I've made it through and what better time than now, when there's a community blog where I can say hello to all you beautiful ladies (and pro-woman dudes)?

The reason I'm writing tonight, even though I'm only a third of the way through the book and even though I'm coming home after thirteen hours in the law building and pretty darned tired, is that I'm just bursting to talk about my experience with Yes Means Yes , which I know you all know and love by now.  I'm not someone schooled in feminist literature or women's studies at all.  For a long time, I assumed that there wasn't much I could learn from books about feminism or female sexuality.  At very first glance the topic seemed very interesting, but when I thought about reading a book on the subject I thought "well what else could there possibly be to learn?"  "What don't I know already about women's rights or my sexuality?"  As it turns out, a heck of a lot.

A while ago, I read Felice Newman's amazing The Whole Lesbian Sex Book .  I was sure that there was nothing I could learn from a lesbian sex manual.  How much can there be?  Touch, lick, rub, okay, you're running out of options.  As it turns out, the book was absolutely amazing, and I learned all sorts of new things about sexuality and how to approach sexuality.  So far, Yes Means Yes has been the same experience for me, multiplied.  This is going to sound ridiculous, coming from a twenty-three year old who's done a fair amount of reading and research on gender and sexuality issues, but I've never personally known the meaning of "empowerment."  I've never felt personally empowered.  Reading the first few essays in this book, including Margaret Cho's foreword, I finally understand what it means to feel empowered.

As a psychologist studying women taking pole dance classes this video on CNN.com reminds me of a curious and common perspective shared amongst adult recreational pole dance students - it's not about sex.

I began this project to study the pole dance class phenomenon.  I wanted to understand what the possibilities and limitations of pole dancing classes as a path to empowered embodiment and transgressive sexual expression. I interviewed 25 between the ages of 24-56, women enrolled in a pole dance school with locations across the US. The school invites women to "tone your body, blow your mind!"

During my interviews with participants of the study many interesting themes emerged such as

·      Awareness of Body as Process.  Women speak of the class as providing a renewed sense of their body as a fluid process rather than a fixed object for observation and criticism.

·      Self-Celebration through Other-Celebration.  A key part of women’s experience is participating in the celebration of their fellow students as aesthetic, sensual beings.  This affirmation of different kinds of women leads to the social construction within the class community of more aesthetic ideals that are more realistic and pluralistic than those in mainstream culture.     

Most interestingly with regards to why a school might introduce pole dance into a Phys Ed. program...

·      Cult(ure) of Denial.  the tendency to disavow the notion that classes are associated with strippers or even with sexuality.  This denial seems to be institutionalized within the culture of the classes and rhetoric that students internalize from the classes.  It may be a defense against the taboo of participating in illicit, “dirty” activity.  

(crossposted at The Pursuit of Harpyness)

A drably colored peahen has her pick of peacocks with whom to mate. The peacocks flash their gaudy plumage, just begging to be the one she chooses. In the animal kingdom, females set the rules, and males will do whatever it takes - elaborate dances, fancy ornamentation, serenades - to make them happy.

Charles Darwin was the first scientist to recognize that it's almost always a species' females who select mates; he outlined his theory of sexual selection in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. The males compete with each other for the females' acceptance. But even as recently as the 1970s, people balked at the notion of female choice. According to Evolutionary biologist Michael Ryan, "One writer even said that all you had to do was look at our own species to see that females had no input whatsoever in mating decisions."

Here in the human world, we women are the ones doing most of the "peacocking." Dyeing our hair, painting our faces, wearing uncomfortable yet "sexy" outfits, getting breast implants. Oh, sure, women do those things "for themselves," not to attract men! But why would doing those things be personally satisfying if not partly because they are accompanied by social approval and patriarchal praise? How often do you see a really hot man with a plain Jane on his arm? How often do you see the reverse?

How did we humans manage to flip sexual selection completely on its head? I know the answer is "patriarchy, duh," but I'm still curious about exactly how. Women's eggs are scarce and men's sperm abundant, just like in the animal kingdom. Maybe our advanced intelligence allowed men to strip women of their perceived selection power, using their superior physical strength to enforce the rules.

From Socialogical Images comes this German advertisement for Men's Health (reads "It's all about men") that suggests they think everything a woman does is done in an effort to attract them, and that women's masochism is funny and flattering.

Early and often, women are hit with the message that they're nobody until a man - any man - chooses them. See: the offerings "for women" at your local cinema. Knowing that we human females are relatively alone among our non-human sisters adds an extra layer of meaning to the word "backwards."

For further reading: Animal Attraction

My co-contributor and co-blogger Cara has a post at Feministe about Natalie Dylan. Probably you've read the broad outlines: auctioning virginity, bidding at $3.8 million, etc. I am not interested in rehashing the same discussion that has happened elsewhere.

I am interested in the invisible man -- or men (or perhaps women or even folks who reject either label, but I'm guessing men). I'm interested in the bidders. It seems that everyone wants to have a discussion about what she's doing -- she has a women's studies degree, she says this is in part a sociology experiment to study the response. Well, the response is that everyone wants to talk about her virginity, her morality, whether she's a good or bad feminist (which is the secular lefty version of talking about her morality), and whether she's really a virgin. I am not going to engage any of that shit, but if that's what she wanted to know, she has her answer.

I'm not going to wag a judgment finger at her, or even try to answer any of those questions. I want to know who offers $3.8 million to have sex with a partner who has not had sex before.

. . . Can't it be both/and?

(community member Bethany L. has also posted on this story)

Meghan O'Rourke, over at Slate's xx factor blog has a post up, The Sexual Fluidity of Women about this weekend's article on sexuality research and women's desire in the New York Times Magazine . In the post, O'Rourke argues that the implicit question of the article is this: "Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want?"

Don't you just love it when questions and answers are framed in terms of what "women" (as a single corporate entity) experience or desire? The article itself, which appears to be an interesting round-up of contemporary research of women's sexuality (I'll have to sit down and read it more carefully when I have the time -- alas, assigned reading takes priority this morning), poses the tiresome "what do women want?" question . . . as if we, as a some inexplicable half of the human species, are a problem to be solved. Women (unlike men, the question implicitly suggests): they're so complicated and confusing!! They confuse us with their sexuality!  Isn't the answer to the question "what do women want?" self-evidently "each one of us wants something slightly different"?  While I'm glad people now recognize that generalizations about human sexuality made from studying primarily male subjects is inadequate, redressing the problem by making generalizations about "women" doesn't seem like a very useful response. 

I also do not understand why it's useful to recycle the body/mind dichotomy when talking about sexual desire and experience. Regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor you can think of.  Our bodies and our minds desire different things in different contexts, at different points in our lives.  In my experience (in sex as well as elsewhere in life) it's also quite possible to desire two seemingly contradictory things at the same time -- without losing your mind or your integrity.  Framing a so-called dissonance between physical arousal and self-reported desire (an example O'Rourke highlights from the article) as a "schism" imagines that, just because our bodies and minds operate on different levels simultaneously, they are in opposition to one another -- why should this be the case? Sexuality is beautifully complicated. Human beings are beautifully complex. In sex, as in everything else, our Selves -- both body and mind -- act and react in an ever-shifting composition of ways that scientific studies will likely never be able to fully document and explain.

cross-posted at the Future Feminist Librarian-Activist

Initially, I wanted to ignore this article in this weekend's New York Times Magazine because it made me feel so many different things that I wasn’t sure I would be able to process them coherently. Let’s just say that by page two, my feminist defenses were way up, by page four, my eyes were welling up with water (despite the enacted defenses) and by page eight I was having trouble reading the words for the blurry, teary eyesight they were producing.

I don’t know why I had such a strong reaction to the material. It certainly wasn’t written insensitively, in the most objective sense. It seemed the author (Daniel Bergner, a guy apparently writing an upcoming book on the issues of “Lust and Longing”) had done a relatively thorough, if not terribly brave, job of summarizing the latest research in this “field”. From what I could tell, the article was politically correct. It had journalistic integrity. It was relatively “impartial” in that it didn’t seem to be trying to advance any nut-brained scheme or political agenda. In fact, the author barely had a voice- he let the opinions and studies of the scientist he interviewed sort of speak for themselves. I found it to be, on whole, a rather safe piece, as interesting and provocative as someone can be when they are presenting a summary of science with a punch line that points only to how inconclusive it all is. Still, the effect it had on me was as if an anti-feminist hate-monger had come into my own bedroom to spew personal attacks at me and my vagina.

This began as a comment I wrote regarding a post on abortion rights. Specifically, I wrote of how sexuality has been used by patriarchy as a form of social control.

Human sexuality is a highly complex and broad topic encompassing many diverse sociological and philosophical concepts. I operate on the belief that at one point in time there existed matrilineal societies in which the power of women as bringers of life was revered. Many writers who hold this view postulate that the role of human sexual behavior in procreation was not well understood at this time; at some point, however, this role became evident. Unfortunately, it also became evident that this knowledge could be exploited as a form of social control.

As all people are in many aspects of their lives sexual beings, from childhood identity development to advancing age, human sexuality became significant for social control under patriarchy. Through the development of a false dichotomy of male versus female, nature versus rationality; through the problematization and denaturalization of sexuality; through the association of women's sexuality with temptation leading to the fall of man, as evidenced by patriarchy's religious dogma; and through the use of androcentric language, sexuality became a locus for control, aggression, and intimidation.

Throughout all this there have been individuals who have sought to reconceptualize the essence of sexuality in positive ways, through philosophy, through teaching, through doing their best to live on their own terms, and through sharing with others. At this point, I would like to ask a question posed by another commenter: Can we explore sexuality outside the realm of a controlling patriarchy? Can we reconceptualize sexuality as encompassing sharing, equality, self expression, intimacy, and beauty?

I was curious to see what others thought about this article on female sexual desire from upcoming NY Times Magazine.

Saw this while reading the news this morning. The comment thread gets a little frustrating.

This is the first time the age of consent has been raised since 1892. However, while they are raising it from 14 to 16, there is a "close-in-age exception" which allows 14 and 15 year olds to have sex with someone less than five years older than them, which I admit addresses one of the issues this had me raising an eyebrow at.

"It is now illegal for adults in Canada to have sex with a partner under the age of 16, one of the new provisions of the Tories' violent crime law that came into effect on Thursday.

The Tackling Violent Crime Act raises the legal age of sexual consent in Canada to 16 from 14, the first time it has been raised since 1892.

But the law includes a "close-in-age exception," meaning 14- and 15-year-olds can have sex with someone who is less than five years older.

The Tories said they raised the age, in part, to deal with internet predators. The new law puts Canada's age of consent in line with those in Britain, Australia and most of the United States."

What does everyone think?

So Im sure a lot of you have already heard about Natalie Dylan, the woman who is auctioning her virginity off to pay for college. The highest bid is $3.8 million according to CNN.

Now, there are some out there who will think this is appalling because somehow it makes her less valid or less of a person because she didn't "lose it" in some special way with candles and romance and all that crap.

What I find appalling is that someone is willing to pay $3.8 million just to have first crack at someone's pussy. What does this say about the world? People are losing their jobs, businesses are closing, but some dude will gladly blow this much moola to boldly go where no man yet has?

That's sad for him; it's sad for our society.

I understand the biological theory on why (allegedly) men prefer virginity - if they are the only man a woman has had sex with then they know any children are theirs. There was a time in the history of the human race where that actually mattered. This aside, I have really never understood the cultural fascination with virginity. There's no special title for someone who has never driven a car or never been on an airplane, so why put a title on it when sex is involved? It's a part of life, as are millions of other things.

What matters to the bidders is not that they get to have sex with her but that they get to be the first person to have sex with her. That's the part that disturbs me. I'm not opposed to prostitution. In fact, I think that if it were legalized it would be great because then regulations could be installed to protect the health and safety of the prostitutes (male and female both). I'm not going to judge someone because they paid to have sex. The issue is that the value and the price are based on the fact that she hasn't had sex before, which implies that once the act is over, she is no longer of use.

The whole thing implies that as soon as this woman has sex she is no longer of value. Which, of course, implies that once any woman has sex she is devalued. And we all know that's just not true.

I am not sure if "Dear Prudence " has been discussed here on Feministing or not (and I admittedly lack the restraint to check-before-I-post), but I must confess to reading it every week, and sometimes discussing some of the letters with friends.

Today my former room-mate and I had a disagreement about a letter that I saw as coming from a "blame the victim" mentality and she saw as nothing to be concerned about, particularly as it wasn't a woman. The letter in question was from a man who, as a seventeen-year-old, had what he describes as an "affair" with his step-mother and never told his father. Prudie's advice is to tell his father in a restaurant and suggests that he:

Give as brief an account as possible and emphasize that you were a minor when she seduced you. (It would help if you were also a virgin.)

(Emphasis obviously mine.)

My perspective is that this kind of statement propagates the idea that if he had not been a virgin it would have been somehow more his fault than if he had never had intercourse. My friend thinks that this is reasonable because if he was a virgin he would be "more naive" and "susceptible" and so if he was not he would be more to blame. (I also consider their "affair" "rape", while she considers it "tragic love".)

Am I completely off here? Is there something I'm missing?

(This is my first post. Please don't crucify me!)

I understand the idea of having a sexy get-away for a racy weekend to live out fantasies, but having a toddler room? With a child's fair ride and pictures of small children on the walls? A subway room--you know, for those men who can't grope women on real subways anymore. This is just terrifying.

Hello, everybody. Before we get into this post, I would first like to say that I am very interested in everyone's opinions. I know this is a sensitive topic but I don't think it's been brought up before. I wish this wouldn't offend anyone, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. I worry that I will be attacked for what I'm about to bring up. This subject may cause triggers, so I urge you to read with discretion.

One of the foremost causes of the feminist movement deals with female sexuality and its place in society. It's not uncommon for females in Western society to be sexualized in ways that leave them victimized or brutalized. Women in this society are encouraged to be the "chased" instead of "chasing". They're objectified and suffer horrendous violent acts - particularly rape.

The issue I would like to address ties in closely with victimized sexuality. I would like to discuss the "rape fantasy".

Rape fantasy is fairly popular. It can be seen in milder forms in romance novels and movies, for instance, but is usually portrayed as when a woman previously unwilling is grabbed and kissed, etc, until she gives in and even enjoys the intercourse.

A very important thing to note is that rape and rape fantasy are significantly different in that a woman engaging in a rape fantasy is consenting. She has agreed to act out a scenario that simulates rape but is not actually being forced. She has a safeword or a hand gesture that immediately guarantees the end of the sexual role play, but if it is not obeyed, it is rape. Ideally, her partner and she have discussed all aspects of the scenario, including do's and don'ts and are both aware of the terms.

But the issue lies in the inherent violence of such an interaction. It is essentially a subset of BDSM (bondage/discipline, sadism/masochism), which means that it is about an exchange of power, and it makes me wonder:

Is BDSM naturally misogynistic? Does it only serve to reinforce gender roles? (Even in the cases of dominatrixes?) Are couples that engage in BDSM and rape fantasies violent or unhealthy, even if they don't hit or verbally abuse each other outside of their designated BDSM scenarios?

And what does this mean for the female's sexuality? Is she backtracking, so to speak, by reverting to archaic ideas of violent, sexual, male dominance? Can she actually enjoy and want to engage in such a role or does the context of her society make that an impossibility?

In defense of women who enjoy rape fantasies, I would like to quote (rather than discuss because I would rather not turn this into an essay) an article by Sharon Lamb entitled "The "right" sexuality for girls". In it, she discusses female sexuality and desire, and there are a few points that I feel relate to this subject. The first is:

"In the useful essay "Objectification," the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum describes several forms of objectification. She notes that it is possible in an equitable relationship for one person to sexually objectify another without being exploitative or demeaning. She suggests that longing to be admired, wanted, and looked at as an object of desire is part of human nature, and it is possible to admire, want, and look fairly. In a just society, all people -- male and female; heterosexual, gay, bisexual, transgender -- should be able to have a sexual life in which they are both subjects and objects of desire, without exploitation."

The key idea here is that it is possible to be objectified without being exploited.

That sex is supposed to be sacred is something we've all heard - and in some ways, we all have accepted, somehow. It's supposed to be special. It's only supposed to be with someone we're emotionally connected with - that it's making love.

In the end, it's not - and it only prevents us all, especially women, from truly loving ourselves and enjoying the biological pleasures nature was so kind to have bestowed on us.

What bothers me most about making sex out to be more than what it really is - just an act (although just like walking, eating dinner or any other biological things we enjoy, it can be special if it's with someone special) - is that there is a double standard - not just gender wise, but also age wise.

Boys and men are supposed to seek out sex. We're supposed to have it as much as we can, however we can. This not only leads to men and boys thinking of sex as just a tool to further their masculinities and to rise on the social ladder, it also leads to things like date rape.

For women and girls, however, nice girls don't - and thus, women are supposed to only have sex with someone special, someone who "sweeps [them] off [their] feet," rather than just enjoying it. Further, my making sex special, a heterosexist society also indicates that sex is only to be enjoyed, of course, between a man and a woman - and penis in vagina. Nevermind the throves of people who enjoy sex with people who have the same equipments as they do!

While a lot has been said about the double standard of sex when it comes to gender, I want to also focus on the double standard when it comes to age. By no means am I advocating that adults should be having sex with young teenagers, but can we please stop treating sexual desires as something that gets turned on by a switch at someone's 18th birthday?

I like sex. You like sex. Sixteen-year-olds like sex, 13-year-olds like sex, everyone likes sex - or at least the physical feelings brought forth by sex. Yet, we treat those under 18 as though they are asexual, that they have no feelings "no there." Worst yet, boys are encouraged to explore and have sex, whereas girls, while sexualized and dressed up as adult women, are not supposed to enjoy it - but rather, simply serve as eye candy for men desiring sex with them. What sense does that make, really?

The whole notion of innocence and virginity, too, works to the disadvantage of young women. Apparently, losing a piece of tissue is more traumatic than losing out on enjoying the pleasures your body gives you. Innocence and virginity at something women are supposed to be the gatekeepers of, yet a man, who is a virgin, is considered a loser.

I am a liberal feminist who focuses more on the political movement than I am on the sexual liberation movement, but does it bother me that, because boys are taught to explore, that the majority of boys and young men will learn to enjoy their bodies - through masturbation or otherwise, than the majority of women will? That is to say, women, overwhelmingly, will have their first orgasm at a much later age than will men.

Lastly, it seems the issue of making sex into something special only done in marriage, and the issue of innocence, is also hurting young people in that they are not getting the information they need to keep them safe - and to save their lives. I was horny at 13, so were you, and it hasn't changed within the last decade or so. Thirteen-year-olds, nowadays, also get horny. I was lucky enough to have grown up in the Unitarian Church, and sexuality was dealt with and talked about openly. Imagine if you were 13, horny, ignorant of what you can do to protect yourself, and are still having sex ...your life would be ruined.

My point in all this is that to reduce the numbers of abortions, to ensure everyone can enjoy the pleasures of sex, whether with a partner or with themselves, and to make sure that women's sexuality and pleasures are taken as seriously as men, we need to do away with trying to "protect" young women from the "evils" of sex.

After all, if a 13-year-old can decide to take a walk and be safe, she can also decide to have sex and be safe.

This is something I wrote because it's been stewing in my mind for the past...who knows how long.  I finally decided to get all the thoughts flying around in my head down on paper.

One of the things that always gets me upset is when I see tv shows and movies depicting men spouting these stupid lies in order to get a girl in bed with him on the first date, or the first time they’ve met.  Afterward, if the woman finds out about the lies she always get pissed and yells at him for deceiving her.  Surprisingly, I don’t get mad at the men who are lying.  I get mad at the women who sleep with these men and then get mad.  See the thing that I never understand is why these women choose to sleep with men based on what they say.  On a first date, or when you’ve first met a man, what he says is virtually irrelevant.  You have no way of knowing whether he actually is a doctor or likes opera or writes poetry or whatever bullshit he might say.  And quite frankly, when it comes to the decision of whether or not to have sex with him after that date, why on earth would these things matter?  Does the fact that he might be a doctor mean that he’s more worthy of having sex with you on the first date?  That’s ludicrous. 
   
The truth is, the only thing that should affect a woman’s choice of whether to have sex with a man she just met is what she wants and how she feels.  If you’re at dinner and just can't stop thinking about being in bed with the guy, then you should sleep with him if the opportunity presents itself.  Whether he says he’s a doctor, a lawyer, or anything else shouldn’t matter in the slightest. 

As I was reading this NYT Op-Ed about this craze known as "The Hookup Culture", I was worried at first, and then almost relieved, b/c Mr. Blow seemed to be handling it rather fairly, until he consulted his "expert".  His facts from the CDCaP and the JoAR show positive  effects of "hooking up" over dating.  He could have dug a little deeper there.  He could have stopped there.  There showed a decrease in the amount of sex that teens were having, as well as no increase in diseases.  There was even some indication that self esteem was on the rise.  I am a fan of building up the self esteem of teenagers, especially teenage girls (having been one myself, once).

My Fuck You of the Day goes to Mr. Blow, and to Kathleen Bogle, a professor at LaSalle University, and author of the book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus, for this little gem of information:

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse.

Yeah.  Girls get tired of sex b/c they would rather be in a relationship than be able to make grown up decisions about their own lives, and guys don't want yucky strings attached.  Girls are crazed trying to find a husband before all their eggs dry up.  We are just ticking wombs on legs.

She also adds that it used to be that we were trained our whole lives to date.  I am so sorry to disappoint her, but I wasn't "trained" my whole life to do anything but be a grown up.  One who knows how to make decisions about what she wants from life, and then figure out how to achieve it.  I don't know about you, Ms. Bogle, but I am so much more than my ability to find and catch a husband, and The Guy is so much more than some Prize Catch to be mounted on my wall.

BTW, Mr. Blow, it's not sad that I wasn't trained to date.  It's my life.  One lived by a woman who is in charge of her sexual freedom and autonomy.

Sky Bully forbid that I enjoy sex.

BTW, I fuck on the first date if it suits me.  And it did.

I wound up w/ a pretty good life.  It's what I wanted.  And it isn't for Ms. Bogle nor Mr. Blow to judge.

(cross posted)

This Salon article is so interwoven with stereotypes is seems less like a personal memoir and more like bad chick lit fiction.

All single men are gay, the ones who aren't want younger women, married couples don't have sex, she wants meaningful sex and to change the men she's with, she likes cats and despises football and appreciates having the toilet seat down.  And, also, my least favorite part: "I adore men -- they are so different from women -- and I'm intrigued by the way they think."

There are a whole range of men out there, just like there are a whole of women out there.  While you can always point to a beer guzzling Neanderthal and a primadonna to make the case that men and women are worlds apart, I strongly resist the idea that men and women are like two different species.  We overstate and focuse on the evidence that confirms this idea rather than acknowledging that we have more in common than we don't.

I am currently enrolled in an online psychology class about human sexuality.  Since it is an online course there are message board discussions for class participation grades.  The questions given are opinion based and meant to be controversial.  I have been increasingly agitated by the responses by the class to some of these questions.  The most recent question is as follows:

Does oral sex qualify as “sex?” Bill Clinton didn’t seem to think so, and a number of teens today see oral sex as a “loophole” of sorts—a safe alternative to intercourse. What is your opinion? Does the definition of sex differ in different contexts or situations to include or exclude oral sex?

I had to chuckle when I first read the question because, for me, if it has sex as part of it’s name, then yes, oral sex is sex.  It’s like asking “is the hot tea, tea?”

I soon discovered that a majority of board posters personally defined sex as penetrative, favouring penis in vagina penetration with a specific bent on virginity.  I pointed out that such a definition of sex is heterocentric and phallocentric and that it excludes individuals, such as lesbians. I also thought that it was a dangerous definition that in the past has been used to define what actions are and are not rape, therefore disregarding and devaluing experiences of sexual assault.

It turns out the class wasn’t having any of my explanation.  Even when one individual who agreed with me went to Webster’s Dictionary to find an “official” definitions which read as follows:

SEX - 3 a: sexually motivated phenomena or behavior b: sexual intercourse

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE - 1 : heterosexual intercourse involving penetration of the vagina by the penis : coitus
2 : intercourse (as anal or oral intercourse) that does not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis

Individuals still held to claims of sex only meaning that which includes a penis penetrating something.  People have flat out written that they do not think lesbians are having or can have sex.  I am most disturbed with the fact that these individuals do not see what is wrong with their argument.

The bottom line is that it is heterocentric and phallocentric to define sex around the “all mighty” penis.  These arguments logically lead to understandings of sexual behaviour that centre around men and their pleasure.  If the penis is the tool that defines when sex is occuring, that this means that men alone are “having sex” while women “have sex done” to them.   This definition ignores any number of sexual experiences and behaviours that include sexual orientation, preference, and physical ability and it is harmful to devalue these experiences of others.

I don’t know why I am so surprised that a majority of people posting define and want adherence to a definition that is heterosexual and sexist… All I have to do is glance at the front cover of a Cosmo magazine and remember how our society defines sex and who is favoured within that definition.

A little while back there was a thread here on feministing there was a post about Max Hardcore's conviction (here ). Someone mentioned a new film called "The Price of Pleasure ", just recently I discovered that it was viewable online. I discovered a site run by the Media Education Foundation , which I hadn't heard of until just now, Bell Hooks, Susan Fauldi (and others) are on the advisory board (awesome! ) anyway, the full-length documentary can be viewed there if anyone is interested.

The link to the film is HERE (click on "view full length program")

I'd be interested to hear what other think if anyone happens to watch the film and wants to share thier opinion. I'll probably post some comments in the thread a little later, but right now, without providing any commentary from me, I just wanted to simply let people know this film is there if interested.

"The Price of Pleasure" (Summary ):

Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has emerged as one of the most visible and profitable sectors of the cultural industries, assuming an unprecedented role in the mainstream of our popular culture at the same time that its content has become more extreme and harsh, more overtly sexist and racist. This eye-opening and disturbing film tackles the complexity behind this seeming paradox, placing the voices of critics, producers, and performers alongside the observations of men and women as they candidly discuss the role pornography has played in shaping their sexual imaginations and relationships. Honest and non-judgmental, The Price of Pleasure moves beyond the liberal versus conservative debates so common in the culture to paint a myth-busting and nuanced portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, liberty and responsibility have become intertwined in the most intimate area of our lives. An ideal tool for initiating classroom discussion about this notoriously difficult subject. 

[Directed by Chyng Sun & Miguel Picker]

Note : (From the site): "Viewer discretion advised: contains violence, nudity, and sexual imagery."

People who aren't interested in seeing "The Price of Pleasure", however, might be interested in viewing some of the other films on the site, which include documentaries under the categories of race, gender, health, politics, consumerism, etc.

Her is the actual URL for "The Price of Pleasure" is here just in case you can't link from the above links.

This essay has been floating around the internet since 2001, and I'm sure I read it a couple years back. I rediscovered it the other day and it's still very powerful. It's the best take on the sexual double-standard I've ever read.

Go read it.

Here's an excerpt:

"Slut" is for kissing boys with tongue. "Slut" is for kissing lots of different boys with tongue. "Slut" is for craving kissing lots of different boys with tongue. That's not right, you know. It says so in the Bible, and in social hygiene films. "Slut" is for loving sex. "Slut" is for needing sex. "Slut" is for thinking sex isn't shameful. Sex is for married people, for diamond owners, for nice girls in twin sets whose mothers hid the Erica Jong, for people totally and completely, like, in total and complete love, and it takes place behind closed doors, with the lights out. Sex isn't fun. Sex isn't casual. Sex is a deadly serious, disgusting, dirty, degrading business. Just lie there. Don't move around. Don't use your fingernails or moan or anything; that's slutty. Don't get on top. Don't go down. Going down is really slutty, especially if you like it as much as he does. Ew. That's so gross. Only a slut would like that. That's so sickening. I bet you masturbate, too. Ew, I can't even think about that. That's so foul — touching yourself down there like that? That's — well, it's dirty and sticky and gross, dude! Nobody does that. Well, boys do, but that's different.

Enjoy.

The room was Pepto-Bismol bright pink with books and clothes strewn about in a messy, cant see the floor way. From the various nick-knacks you could tell that the inhabitant was a science-fiction fan, a writer, a believer in unicorns, and lastly a virgin.

Normally, one’s sexual encounters are not obvious in their everyday decorations, but Natalie Holden’s room yells it out from just one wall.

Above the 20-year-old, NYU sophomore’s headboard hangs a hand drawn poster that is almost an exact copy of the poster for the Steve Carrell movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” It is almost exact in that where Steve’s face should be appears Holden’s face and where 40 should be there is a bolder, underlined 20.

After allegedly contracting the herpes virus from a woman who he had sex with, Oregon man Cyrus Sullivan created a website which essentially, "outs," those who have STDs.

"If we know you will," reads the poorly edited home page of Sullivan's site, a disorganized mess of red, white, and blue. Clicking upon the, "STD Carriers," link takes you to a relatively short list of alleged carriers of a variety of STDs, organized by name, city, state, gender, ethnicity, and type of STD. You may obtain additional details about the alleged, "STD Carriers," including full names and ages, as well as height, weight, hair and eye color, MySpace links, even photographs.

I often don't agree with Cary Tennis' advice, but I read his column on Salon pretty regularly as an amusing way to procrastinate. I was catching up on some columns, taking a break from work and reading about the election, when I read this letter, and I thought his response was really solid:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2008/10/23/being_single/index.html

While some of Tennis' tone is weird, I thought his message was right on. I especially loved this metaphor, which I'd never heard before for why feminism is still relevant and necessary, even after so many gains:

"Consider this analogy. Psychotherapy has changed many individuals. But your mother's psychotherapy will not protect you from life's struggles any more than your mother's feminism will inoculate you against the difficulties of negotiating your freedom as a woman."

Thoughts?

Some folks weren't comfortable with Barack Obama's assessment of sex as "sacred," but in a way, I agree with him.  Certainly not in the "within the bonds of a holy marriage" rubbish or some sort of prize to be given to one person, especially if you are female, but sex is awe-some.  And there is nothing wrong with saying that.  And please excuse me if I get a little hippy-dippy from here on out.

I wish that sex was considered "sacred" and not about turning into that cup of spit water, or fuzzy piece of duct tape.  That does nothing to foster the notion that your body is special and important.  Knowledge is sacred.  Consent is sacred.  Safety is sacred.

When I experience sex, either with my self or shared with my partner, I am doing something that is beyond the normal.  Sex is supposed to feel good, it is supposed to be a pleasurable, orgasmic experience.  Whether I'm having sex because I just want to feel good, make my partner feel good, because I'm craving closeness, or I want new and exciting sensations, I'm doing it because it is a selfish endevour to reach beyond what I feel when im watching tv, or making dinner.  Who hasnt had mind-blowing sex, where afterwards you feel in love with the world and are filled with a special glow?   That sounds like a lot of religious experiences if you ask me.

TIME has an article with this namesake on the sexuality of teenage girls. It's a worth-while read, so go on.

This part stood out to me:
"Like steak-house owners trying to raise vegetarians, we idealize youth and sexiness but recoil if our young want to be sexy. What has complicated things recently is that girls are literally getting older younger. Their bodies are hitting physical maturity sooner, often before they are ready to deal with the issues of sexuality that go along with it."

Exactly, folks!

Who hasn't heard about this yet? Max Hardcore, a pornographer known for very violent degrading porn just got sentenced to more than three years in prison for obscenity. 

I'm sure a lot of you are cheering. I think that's sad.

There are problems with Max Hardcore, and I'll get to those in a second. But the charges that got him thrown in jail are bullshit. I'm not saying this just because I believe in free speech, although that's a lot of it. I don't think there's anything wrong with his videos. 

Crescent moon

    By Karin Zeitvogel

 His name meant ‘moon’ in Arabic. Hilal. Crescent moon. He was a young Bedouin, a man-child with eyes of translucent amber and skin as smooth as the sandstone aqueducts leading to Petra, Jordan’s wonder of the world, that have been burnished by the ceaseless passage of water.

It's easy enough to dismiss the constant screams of sexism from the conservative bloggers, media, and neighbors when it comes to Sarah Palin. After all, these are the same people that encourage the existence of an anti-Hillary Clinton group called Citizens United Not Timid. The group was founded by Professional Republican Douchebag Roger Stone, whose Wikipedia article can only be false; if such a person actually existed, it would signify the End of Days.

Despite this, we find that some of the accusations of sexism are true. Perhaps not from Obama's corner, but rather from America's bastion of good taste and fair play: the sex industry.

I present to you, gentle reader, the Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll. You can tell it's not Sarah Palin because it says so.

So since I've been blogging here for a while, it's probably safe now for me to admit something that rarely do I admit: I have feminist guilts when it comes to certain sexual pleasures.

While our feminist argument is that we are all sexual creatures, and thus, should not feel guilty about certain sexual acts - so long as they are legal and consensual, I feel as though at times, the things I enjoy can be somewhat unfeministic.

As an example, without going into too much details, I enjoy role-playing during sex at times. Sometimes, the roleplays my partner(s) and I engage in tend to cross the line of "taboo," and, no doubt, unfeministic.

Sure, we're sexual creatures, but aren't the things we desire also a reflection of who we are, in general? If the personal is indeed political, is it okay for us to enjoy the eroticism of situations that, in real life, we would stand up scream and fight for political?

One of the many things I strive for is to be a consistent feminist - yet, in the bedroom, it seems as though the eroticism I and my partners enjoy, is every bit inconsistent with what defines us as feminists.

Thoughts?

I believe prostitution should be legal. I have several reasons for this, mostly that I think legalization could help sex workers a lot, and because I don't like anyone telling me what I can and can't do with my body. I'm not going to get more into it that that here. If you're interested in reasons for supporting legalized sex work, there's a whole lot of writing about it online and you should check it out.

My main point here is that there's a huge variation in the experiences of sex workers.

Patriarchy fucks as all (or gather doesn’t fuck at all)

Below is a brief “chat” with a man who is relatively progressive – a good friend, and used to be rather kinky back in the day.

Which is something I keep running into online and off.  Deep concern with people asking me if they can help fix me when they ask about matters and I mention I'm not interested in doing it.  With suggesting that getting the appropriate toys would help 'put the spark back'.  With talking about how medical treatment such as surgery or testosterone injections would be good.  Telling me that my lack of interest is a phase, and that although I am thirty three years old I will eventually know what I really want.

If it isn't the concern over my own horrible situation, it's concern over my partner.  Are they okay with this?  Poor dear.  When will they be leaving me?  They're so understanding, they must suffer so.

The world, my workplace, and my frienships are full of jokes about sex that assume I want to have it.  Billboards, movies, more.  People grin and raise eyebrows. It is boring.  It is tiresome.  And incrediably alienating.

It is absolutely clear that the fact I am happy with who and what I am means nothing.  I have had the people I trust the most take me on one side and tell me I need psychiatric counselling.  I have had suggestions about how to cope with having sex when neither I nor my body want to do it, things I can do to make sure sex does not damage me so I can perform for the pleasure of others.  Because the whole concept that I might be happy with not having intercourse is dismissed out of hand.

People are deeply concerned about me because I am happy and I should be despairing.

I have been a reader in the Feministing community and on the main page for quite an amount of time, but this is my first time contributing a post.  Never did I feel more strongly in my feminist feelings than I did last night.  I attempted to post an article last night but apparently it was lost somewhere.

Never have I felt the need to just scream, cry, and beg for the comforting words that only someone who supported feminist ideas could provide as much as I did last night.

Last night I could not fall asleep until well after four in the morning after being shaken up by a "friend" I have known for quite some time.  I was talking to him online when I brought up a situation from this summer.  Over two months ago I slept with him.  It was only once, and it was just at a time when I felt like being with someone.  We have been just friends for about three years and that was the only time we were together.  That night, he said that he wasn't sure if he wanted to go all the way and have intercourse.  I simply replied, "Oh ok, are you sure?"  He then changed his mind.  (Remember this little fact, it comes up later in the story).

Every time this comes up, a lot of people write that they believe labeling yourself as sex-positive is divisive and stereotypes feminists as being sex-negative. I don't believe that. Here's why:

One argument that comes up a lot is that by calling yourself sex-positive, you are saying that most other feminists are man-hating anti-sex lunatics. There's a tiny minority of feminists who are against consensual sex, and they do not represent feminism.

You're not sex-positive just because you don't think that heterosexual sex is rape. I label myself as sex-positive because I do disagree with the larger feminist community on a lot of issues, and most of them have to do with sex. 

Is it just me, or did anyone else find Jordin Sparks' VMA comments about purity ring showboating just a weenzy bit offensive?

Now, it's not the defense of the purity rings part that annoys me. It's more of the "hey, if you don't save yourself for marriage, like me and the Disney Channel chastity brigade, you're a total slut and deserve to be spit on" part. 

Of course, nothing against those who do choose to save it for their wedding night. If that's what you want and truly feel is the best, most correct decision for you and your body, then I absolutely applaud you for it. Any major decision regarding sex - to have it, not to have it - is usually very difficult, so having the maturity to decide what's best for you is, I think, generally considered a good thing.

I know that for some of you all sexy advertising is sexist, because it is objectifying. I disagree.

I'm a sex-positive feminist. I'm fine with porn. I hate the way that sexuality is treated in our society. Anything that deviates from the norm is "sick" and "disgusting" and not really discussed.

Recently, the European Parliament voted to scold advertisers for sexist ads. And while I've seen some very sexist ads, I'm not sure this is the right way to go about fixing them. I hate censorship. My belief in free speech comes before my feminism. More practically, banning sexist ads would require everyone to agree on what constitutes sexism, and that's just about impossible.

Through this morning's perusal of blogs-news-everything-else-on-the-WWW, I stumbled upon this realization:

I have totally forgotten what it is like to sleep with someone who in no way identifies with feminist ideals and notions.

Thankfully, this morning's realization will forever prevent me from un-learning that sex with a feminist is the most empowering and fulfilling type of sex. And that everything else has the potential to drain your soul.

I am a sex-positive feminist, and I wanted to write about what exactly that means to me.

The last time the idea of sex-positivity came up on the community blog, people said that they don't like the term, because it creates a false divide, because who identifies as sex-negative? I disagree. I've come across some very sex-negative ideas in feminist circles.

The first time I read someone (I believe it was Twisty at I Blame The Patriarchy, which I'm not going to link to, because I don't like her.) seriously claim that women cannot consent to sex because we are oppressed, I understood how a lot of Christians feel about Jerry Fallwell. Aren't conservatives the ones who are supposed to tell me I can't make decisions because I'm a woman?

This is what I think it means to be sex-positive.

Here we go again with CNN articles about studies that include no critical analysis. This "gem" is called Bartering sex for stuff and services :

"A recent study of 475 University of Michigan undergraduates ages 17 to 26 found that 27 percent of the men and 14 percent of the women who weren't in a committed relationship had offered someone favors or gifts -- help prepping for a test, laundry washing, tickets to a college football game -- in exchange for sex. On the flip side, 5 percent of the men surveyed and 9 percent of the women said they'd attempted to trade sex for such freebies."  ...

"It's the biology, stupid

This is my first post here so bear with me! (Oh gosh, what category does this go under? *flails*)

Are condoms really that far out there when birth control options are considered? Are they simply used to prevent STIs when the sexual health of another partner is unknown?

I ask these questions because I tend to get really strange looks from my peers when I mention that my birth control method of choice is condoms. I'm 21 years old and I have been in a monogamous relationship for close to a year now. And this whole time my partner and I use condoms. Yes, I know the plethora of pros and sound reasoning people use to explain why they don't use condoms. It's a hassle, it doesn't feel as good, condoms can be more expensive, it takes away the spontaneity, it's not as intimate. Also some women are allergic to condoms. These are all good points to not want to use condoms, and I'm glad these couples have found a birth control method that works for them. Yet, I wonder if this decision in my relationship is really all that uncommon? And sometimes it seems like condoms for some couples are not even considered. Is it just expected that if there's a monogamous couple who have been dating longer than a month that they don't use condoms?

So reading this article it says during a sting the cop had sex with a sex worker. Twice? Why twice? That sting was awesome- let's do it again? "I had to have sex with her for my job." WTF? And now he's on trial. Interesting....

Carolyn Hax is the fantastic relationship advice columnist at the Washington Post. She was away this week, but when she's gone she runs columns with advice or personal testimonies from readers. Today's writer's story made me feel so sad for her loss but so lucky at the same time to be alive during this time in history, and not the time she was raised in:

Note: this post makes reference to things that may not be considered pornography in the academic sense, but which I believe are being used for the same purposes as porn.

* * *

Theoretically, I'm okay with people choosing to look at pornography.

I feel about it similarly to the way I feel about bondage, swingers, etc.: Those choices should be available to the people that want them, but they are not for me or my loved ones.

It's the "or my loved one" part that's causing me problems of late.

When I log into Feministing, I can't help but notice Jessica's new book "He's a Stud, She's a Slut..." Although I haven't read it, the advertisement on the side has caused me to think about that particular double standard and how it has affected my life. I don't think I fully realized, until recently, just how much damage the slut-double-standard has done to my self-concept.

So, in an effort to help myself get past some of these painful memories and the shame that comes with them, I decided to write about them here.

I have seen the term “sex positive” pop up a lot in the blog world lately, but I am still not entirely sure what it means.
I think I have a better grasp on what it is to be “sex negative.”
To me, that would be someone who considers sex and sexuality to be shameful and dirty and wrong, especially for women, who should consider it their distasteful duty to their husbands. I also think those who only want sex to be reserved for reproduction -- no contraceptives for you!  -- are sex negative, since it’s pretty clear that sexuality is about a lot more than just baby-making.

The adult entertainment industry is a subject rife with controversy.  Modern society has a deep love/hate relationship with pornography, exotic dancing, and prostitution.  As time goes on, we have become more accepting of the less tangible facets of adult entertainment, namely pornography and exotic dancing, coming to see both as private, harmless recreation, but this is only with the consumer in mind.  The bureaucratic view of the entertainers is tinged with contempt.  For this article I will focus on stripping and the legal red tape surrounding the business. 

In many areas the laws governing strip clubs can be obscenely strict, or even plain out strange.  Many of these laws are enacted to “protect” the entertainers and reduce prostitution, but in reality these laws are thinly veiled misogyny.  They frankly insult both the dancer and the customer in that they must be protected from themselves, that they do not know how a naked girl will negatively affect them.  A common sentiment in these laws seems to be that the naked female body, considered by politicians who author these laws to be so vulgar and obscene, will somehow scar both she and the patron so horribly that it must be outlawed.  In a number of locations a dancer cannot remove her bottoms, or even her top to reveal her nipples, instead forced to wear pasties.  There is nothing so vulgar about a nipple, or even her entire body that the transactional revelation of a such should be made illegal.  It holds a woman’s body in contempt, something that must be covered up in order to be deemed acceptable. 

First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for the support I got from my last message. I've tried to talk to friends in real life but they're not supportive at all and wouldn't understand why it hurted so much what my boyfriend (sorry ladies, not ex'b) said.

I took all comments in consideration but decided to talk to him first, seeing as I've been with him since I was 15 (am 18 now). I wouldn't carelessly let a relationship of 3 years go to waste without having a talk first.

I told him how his comments hurted me and made me feel utterly useless, seeing as he said the only gift I could give him was sex because men don't care about love and other "girly" stuff (as he named it). I stared at him in disbelief -- once again -- not understanding why the guy I thought I knew was blurting out such things. He made it clear that he loved me but if I denied any sexual act, he would leave me.

I'm an utter fool because I didn't go against him, I simply bowed my head and said "understood". Five minutes later I was orally pleasuring him.

Call me a weakling and a fool, because that's how I feel and that's what I probably am. But I don't have the backbone to go against him.

Thanks for reading, it's a relief to write this as well.

I've never been the kind of girl that denies sex to her guy, I've never done that... until yesterday. My boyfriend nudged me, made some efforts to have sex with me, but I said I didn't feel like it today. He looked at my in disbelief and started ranting on how women should NEVER deny sex to their man, that their only worth and gift to men is sex. It surprised me how he thought, I never heard him like this before. It made me feel worthless and disgusted, knowing I gave my body to someone who doesn't care about my mind/personality.

The only gift I can give to my boyfriend is sex.

I am useless.

I feel so over-joyed that I could cry right now.

I have been on the Yaz birth-control pill for 2 years now (I'm 19). Since I've been on it, I haven't had a lot of side effects. There were three side-effects that I noticed, and all of them were major ones. Unfortunately, I only linked one to my birth-control.

The three side effects are:
1. Missing periods.
2. Lack of libido.
3. Lack of natural lubricant.

Here's what I would tell my daughters (if I had them) and little sisters about sex.

Young women (18 or older),  go ahead and engage in pre-marital sex.  Make plans for your life that have nothing to do with marriage.   You can get an education, work towards buying your own property & starting your own business all while enjoying a healthy, active sex life. 

As you know, having sex is not just for those wanting to procreate. You can use birth control, and have the day after pill handy for those rare occasions when B.C. fails.  If your body can handle the pill (research it and speak to your doctor), go to an OBGYN you feel respected by and get a prescription.  You can get fitted for a diaphragm too.  Know your cycles and do not trust birth control to work during your ovulation cycle- that is the time to abstain from intercourse with fertile males.  As you probably already know, you ovulate once a month.   It's a short time to abstain every month.  You can get a kit from the pharmacy that helps you determine when you are ovulating.  Some of us can feel ovulation, but, that kit can help us confirm our cycle.  Abstaining during your ovulation cycle is not a method of B.C. on it's own.  Combine that knowledge of your cycle with other forms of B.C. and you can remain single, while enjoying your sex life.

I was reading a post on Violet Blue’s blog and she mentioned that Fleshbot (Gawker’s Sex and Porn blog) was doing a series on requests for sexual material that the readers want to see. I thought “cool” and checked it out, only to disappointedly discover the series has only been of women bodies. Sure, they had redheads or small-breasted women, but considering how hard impossible it is to find decent quality free pics of het guys for het women, I would have expected some of that.

But, as I would soon find out, my expectations were based on faulty assumptions. Because curiously, the tabs at the top of the main page say “gay” and “straight.” Guess what images are in the “gay” section? Naked men. And to their credit, just glancing down the 1st few archived pages, it seems like most of them are either actually gay or at least do gay male porn. The images in the “straight” section? Glancing at the first few archived pages, all women. One het couple, that was clearly focusing on the woman’s dirty bits. And several female couples or groups.

Wow. So the other night I was just mindlessly watching “The Soup” on E! as I got ready to go out, and let me tell you, I needed a drink after that. Can I just say that I saw this coming long ago when my women’s studies students informed me there’d be a new romance reality show featuring a bisexual woman, and thus, both male and female contestants. (First aside, this show could have never happened with a male bisexual, which is so unacceptable in our culture.) Yes, I’m talking about Tila Tequila’s “A Shot at Love.”

And yes, I realize I’m actually spending time discussing the Myspace queen who stupidly takes credit for making gay marriage acceptable.

Now I didn’t see the whole show in question but I looked it up later to watch the relevant snippets. “The Soup” reported that the final episode of “A Shot at Love” had Tequila choosing between a woman and a man, and during the episode the woman has some sort of breakdown. Apparently, being chosen by Tequila must be a huge commitment because she is SOO torn over…wait for it…if she “wants a man or a woman.” (follow this link for the clip of the actual episode-the scene in question is at 1:05 remaining on the clip). As the host Joel McHale rightly comments, “I thought that was sort of implied when you said you were a bisexual.” Of course, Tequila chooses the woman, and, on cue, the woman declines.

I just read a really good post in the community about feminism and sex workers and left a comment there about it but decided to cut out my last paragraph and expand it to make it a blog post.

My partner is going to Las Vegas for a work conference in August and some of his coworkers plan to go to strip clubs and they've been teasing him about how I won't let him go. I never forbid him from doing anything (um he's his own person), but he knows I'd likely be upset if he went so he'd rather not upset me. I don't really like it when he watches porn either but he still watches it sometimes. I don't know if my feelings regarding porn/clubs are from my conservative religious upbringing or because of feelings of jealousy but I guess probably both.

To address the latter, I know I'm not as beautiful or as sexy as the women in the videos or at strip or exotic dance clubs, so I worry about how my partner will be satisfied with me if he watches so many better looking women. Like if he finds another woman's perfect body attractive what will he think when he sees my not-perfect body? Will he still be physically attracted to me? (especially since we've been together over 5 years now) I've been around some of his friends & coworkers who watch a good amount of porn and go to strip clubs and they have no problem being very rudely judgmental of women's physical appearance - women passing by, women on tv, women they meet at parties - even in front of me. I'm sure their attitude was not caused by porn or clubs but I doubt they helped curb their mindset because then they've seen perfection.

I guess similar to models, in a way I feel like sex workers perpetuate the ideal bodies that aren't attainable for all women but are held up as the best - to the point that people pay them to see their bodies, etc. It just makes me feel jealous, uncomfortable and ashamed of my own body... Which is something I probably just need to get over but it's hard! Does anyone else grapple with this?

Abbey O'Reilly at The F Word wrote Do you love a bad boy? in response to an article (to which she links) in the Daily Mail about why women love so-called bad boys. She begins with a hypothetical situation: you walk into a bar. At one end, sitting alone doing a crossword puzzle (so he appears interesting and smart, rather than a boring loner), who seems polite but isn't exactly going to spark up any conversations in order to prove that one way or the other. At the other end of the bar is your typical James Bond type, with his arm around one girl and his eyes around another, but as soon as any other female comes near him it is his prerogative to rape her with his eyes. He's a schmuck, but completely surrounded by women because they feel special around him, flattered, and don't mind that he's going to try to "fuck and chuck" each and every one of them, all in the same night if he can.

After giving this hypothetical, O'Reilly asks, "If you had to, which one would you choose?"

Uh. Neither. Professors of psychology, experts in all fields, any given heterosexual man, and just about everyone on earth likes to hypothesize about what (heterosexual) women want -- because lesbians are no mystery: lesbians want other lesbians, mystery solved; but straight girls are to be analyzed and tested to see to which stereotype of the heterosexual man they react to the strongest. Nevermind that the author of the study cited in the Daily Mail article did this by asking 200 male college students how many women they had slept with. (Because obviously the best way to assess what kind of straight guy women like is to ask the straight guys. I guarantee you almost every single one of those guys said "women love me, just look how many I've fucked". That is air-tight logic right there.)

I am a young woman.  I am 22 years old (at the time of this post), a student in college, and a sex worker.  I'm currently an exotic dancer at a local club.  It's a job I enjoy for more than it's pay, namely it's flexibility, which comes in handy for scheduling around tests and personal events.  I'm a clean dancer and I'm not ashamed of being a sex worker. 

I am also an ardent feminist.  To some, sex work and feminism do not mix.  Double standards are constant.

A former regular customer of mine and myself were sitting at a bar having a couple beers together, discussing economics, his son, my job.  We met at my club five months prior and continued the friendship when he decided he no longer wanted to come to the club anymore (due to an ex-girlfriend now working there.)  He's deeply protective of me, and had mentioned more than once he worried about me when I went to work.  I mentioned I was fine, that I had a number of bouncers around me at any given time, that this club has had very few incidents in the 15 years it's been open, and that I was never alone with a customer ever.  He knew that from the several months he came to see me and me alone.  He took a long swig of his beer and dipped his head.  

First and foremost, I wanted to emphasize that I was born a statesman (or statesperson if you want to break the gender binary and be politically correct), thus I am more interested in solutions than opinions. Lately, however, I've been caught up in the argument of pornography (and prostitution) in regards to feminism. So, with that, I wanted to get your opinions on said issue.

What follows is an argument for both sides: the 2nd-wave anti-porn feminists, and the 3rd-wave pro-sex feminists.

Regarding the objectification of women, 2nd-wave feminists argue that women are all linked via gender - the subjugated gender under patriarchy, and thus have shared interests as one. As such, what one woman chooses to do has an effect on another woman. As such, a woman who chooses pornography as a career affects other women in that while she might feel empowered by her choices, other women are viewed as sex objects as the indirect result of her presenting herself as such. For these feminists, feminism isn't just being able to do what you want, but rather, doing what is good for ALL women.

Another argument from 2nd-wave, anti-porn feminists is that while women are given economical autonomy through sex work, they are still seen as objects in the eyes of men, rather than complete and whole people. To further complicate matters, the issue of international sex trade also comes into question. That is: while sex work may prove lucrative for some, for others, it's not a choice. Even when the choice is made freely, many second-wave feminists argue, it's not really a choice, because women do not have the same economic autonomy as men. Because of that, the 2nd-wave feminist argues that the power is false power, hidden behind economic gain.

For the 3rd-wave feminist, the basis of feminism is self-empowerment and choice. If a woman so chooses to be a sex worker, she should be able to do such without judgment under patriarchy, because she is her own person and able to make her own choice. Further, unlike 2nd-wave feminists, 3rd-wavers do not assume that feminism is the same for all women, and that all women face the same plight. Thus, what is correct for a woman at a certain place in her life may not be correct for another woman. Further, 3rd-wave feminism believes in the power of reclaiming one's body, celebrating one's sexuality and being able negotiate the public sphere without fear of patriarchy. In sum, 3rd-wave feminism is about the individual, rather than the collective, and because of that, women are encouraged to pursue what they want. Rather than basing their arguments on theories, 3rd-wave feminists focus on the reality - instead of talking about the moralities of sex work, 3rd-wave feminists talk about sex workers' rights. Rather than rejecting concepts of beauty, which 2nd-wavers may see as a sign of seeking male approval, 3rd-wavers embrace such, not for the patriarchy, but for themselves.

I am torn, really - I can see the views of both the 2nd and 3d-wave. I can understand where both camps are coming from. But I can't make a decision. I can also see the link between pornography and rape; yet, I also see the link between the legalization of prostitution and a decrease in rape cases. Throw feminist theories of power and the intersections of gender, race, and class into it, and I am as confused as a Unitarian at a religious convention.

I suppose my place in feminism isn't to make that decision. As an aspiring politician, my place is to provide those who I fight for with the most opportunities, so those who do not wish to engage in sex work do not have to, but those who do can do so in safe environments. I am not making a stand on sex workers, and it seems wrong. After all, not only am I an activist, I am a scholar. I should be able to make up my mind.

One last question: do you think the things we enjoy sexually are a product of pornography, or is pornography merely a representation of our desires?

What are your thoughts?