[Content Note: Hostility to consent; painful sex.]
"Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure. They've gamely pursued love and sexual fulfillment despite tearing and bleeding and other symptoms of 'bad sex.' They've worked in industries where their objectification and harassment was normalized, and chased love and sexual fulfillment despite painful conditions no one, especially not their doctors, took seriously. Meanwhile, the gender for whom bad sex sometimes means being a little bored during orgasm, the gender whose sexual needs the medical community rushes to fulfill, the gender that walks around in sartorial comfort, with an entire society ordered so as to maximize his aesthetic and sexual pleasure — that gender, reeling from the revelation that women don't always feel quite as good as they've been pressured to pretend they do, and would appreciate some checking in — is telling women they're hypersensitive and overreacting to discomfort? Men's biological realities are insufficiently appreciated?"—Lili Loofbourow, in a terrific, must-read piece, "The Female Price of Male Pleasure."
After reading this piece, all I could think was: Most men will never allow themselves to really contemplate and internalize how painful sex is, emotionally and physically, for so many women, because that would be such a boner killer.
If that sounds like a joke, it isn't. It is a lamentation.
[H/T to Fannie.]
Quote of the Day
The Grossest
[Content Note: Misogyny; sexuality policing; slut-shaming.]
Marisa Kabas: "With 'no hymen, no diamond' mantra, men's rights activists hunt for the perfect virgin."
These men are the absolute fucking worst. There aren't enough hours in the day to detail everything that is wrong with these slut-shaming objectifiers.
I have but only one comment, in response to this nonsense:
"Some women admitted to me that they lie about their sexual history to avoid being judged and shamed," Leora Tanenbaum, author of I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, told the Daily Dot. "They are right to be concerned, since many men make relationship decisions based on the number of the woman they are interested in."Listen, I don't tend to dispense unsolicited or blanket relationship advice, but if any person's "standards" require you to lie about who you are in order to meet with their approval, turn tail and run like the wind and never look back.
Let's Talk (More) About Sex
[Content Note: Discussion of consent and boundaries.]
One of the things that came up during the discussion of talking about sex during sex is the idea that some people don't feel okay talking about sex because they've been entrained to be ashamed of sex. That's something I addressed a little bit in my tweets on the subject, but I wanted to talk about it a little bit more.
We've discussed in this space how, despite our being grown-ass adults who don't actually need anyone's permission to live our lives how we want, or to dress how we want, or to make other personal choices, it's sometimes helpful, empowering, freeing, to have someone else just say: You have permission to do this thing.
So, in that spirit, here are a few things that we all have permission to do:
1. We are allowed to want to have sex. We are also allowed to not want to have sex. We are allowed to have the urge for sexual interaction with another person(s). We are allowed to not have any sexual urges.
2. We are allowed to enjoy sex.
3. We are allowed to ask someone if they are interested in engaging in sexual activity. We do not have to wait to be asked. We do not have to abide ancient rules established by the Sexuality Police about who should ask whom, how long we have to know someone before asking, how many dates we have to go on. We don't have to only ask people who look one way or another. We don't have to be married to have sex. We can ask whom we want, when we want, provided that there is no possibility for coercion (i.e. a student-teacher relationship), that the other person is capable of consent, and that we are willing to respect their answer, even and especially if that answer is no.
4. We are allowed to say no, if someone asks us.
5. We are allowed (and obliged) to talk frankly about taking precautions to have safer sex, to protect against sexually transmitted diseases and/or unintended pregnancy.
6. We are allowed to set ground rules and boundaries for sexual activity. What we like to do; what we don't want to do. We are allowed to establish safewords.
7. We are allowed to talk about relevant sexual history and/or abuse history that informs our sexuality and/or our feelings of safety.
8. We are allowed to ask a potential partner, straightforwardly, if they are willing to respect the concept of ongoing consent and make sure they understand that either partner is allowed to withdraw consent and stop sexual activity at any time by request.
9. We are allowed to talk to a potential partner about our expectations and our desires. We are allowed to say what we want.
10. We are allowed to not engage with sexual activity with anyone unless and until we feel safe. (And so do they.)
11. We are allowed to talk during sex, about what is happening. We are allowed to ask: "Will you do this thing to me?" We are allowed to ask: "Do you want me to do this thing to you?" We are allowed to want to be able to say, and to hear, "Yes." Over and over.
12. We are allowed, provided our partner is into it, to talk dirty during sex. Nasty, naughty, filthy talk, without shame.
13. We are allowed to get very, very good at weaving these two things together—consent talk and dirty talk. We are allowed to be turned the fuck on by giving and receiving enthusiastic, breathless, urgent consent.
14. We are allowed to tell our partner(s) during sex what feels good and what doesn't.
15. We are allowed to have whatever consensual kinks we want, without shame.
16. We are allowed to define "having sex" in a way that makes the most sense for us, depending on our partner(s) and our preferences. "Having sex" does not just have to mean PIV intercourse between a cis man and a cis woman.
17. We are allowed to make our sex lives look like whatever we want them to look like, without shame. And without any feelings of being "abnormal," if our sex lives don't look always or ever like some traditional "foreplay-intercourse-cuddling" routine. Maybe your whole sex life is what someone else calls "foreplay." That's okay. Maybe you want your entire sex life to consist of kissing, and nothing more. That's okay. Maybe your sex life centers around activities or role-playing or fetishes or toys that don't get talked about very much, or get called "deviant" when they do. That's okay. It's fine. It's cool. We're allowed. Find someone who wants to do your thing with you, and do it. Without shame.
18. We are allowed to want to do different things with different partners. What works with one partner might not work with the next.
19. We are allowed to have multiple partners. Successively, or concurrently. We are allowed to negotiate that in a way that keeps everyone safe.
20. We are allowed to talk about sex after having sex, to say what we liked (or what we didn't like).
21. We are allowed our sexual agency. We are allowed our own individual seuxality. We are allowed to own it without shame.
This is, obviously, not a comprehensive list. I could easily write all day, covering everything from masturbation to scheduling sex romps between long-term partners with mismatched libidos. But it's a start.
We are all allowed these things. (Though we are not entitled to them.) A lot of us are socialized in various subcultures that tell us in explicit and implicit ways that we are not allowed these things, and that we should be deeply ashamed if we want some or all of them.
And some of these things, some of us may not even want them for ourselves. That's okay, too.
The point is simply this: You are allowed to talk frankly about sex, to make sure that your sex life is safe and fulfilling.
* * *
I'm happy to field questions in comments, if anyone is starting out on a talking-about-sex sort of journey, or doesn't even know how to begin to start a consent-centered approach with a long-term partner, or any related issues. We are allowed to not be ashamed if we don't know how to do this on our own! There are not, after all, not a hell of a lot of good models for building this sort of sexual framework.
Sex. And Consent. And the Flutter of Hearts.
[Content Note: Hostility to consent.]
In case you're not on Twitter, or just happened to miss it, I spent part of this afternoon tweeting responses to this gross article in Elle in which the author makes the (yawningly familiar) argument that talking about sex during sex is killing passion blah blah fart.
Here is a Storify of my tweets, about the importance of talking about sex and the centering of consent, for both a safe and fulfilling sex life.
(If, of course, you are a person who is even interested in being sexually active with another person.)
I hate pretty much every single thing about that article, but this passage in particular just makes my teeth fucking grind:
All great love stories have a moment when the protagonists abandon the codified rigidities of language for the fluent river of sensuality. Take Dante's famous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, as captured perhaps most concisely in a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay: Studying literature together one long afternoon, one of the two smitten scholars—till recently an awkward jumble of elbows and explanations—"lets fall the coloured book upon the floor." Or as Dante put it: "That day they read no more."Oh, do shut up.
In our safety-checked and responsible culture, in our endlessly chattering, texting, blogging, brownnosing, apologizing, analyzing, verbalizing culture, eroticism may be the last frontier we can explore intuitively. Like dance, sexuality is at once preverbal and transverbal: It predates the word and outstrips it. To pin it down with questions and formulas is like pinning a butterfly to a wall. You can see it better there, but it no longer flutters. And neither, in all likelihood, does your heart.
Clearly, I'm biased, but I think Iain and I have a pretty great love story. (It's great as far as I'm concerned, in any case.) I fell in love with him over exchanged words. I loved him before I ever saw what he looked like. Language has been the centerpiece of our relationship since the day it started—and we still write each other love letters, fourteen years later.
We talk about sex during sex. We talk about sex before and after sex. Before—what we want to do. After—what felt so fucking good. During: We look deeply into each other's eyes and ask, Do you want me to do this thing to you?, and we wait for the breathless and urgent reply: Yes. Yes.
(Or, occasionally, no. Which simply leads us elsewhere.)
My heart still flutters. It flutters every time he walks in the door, every time we kiss. Because we use language to build a fortress of intimacy inside which we are both safe, and thus both free to explore. Ourselves and each other.
I understand, I do, why it might seem to any person socialized inside a rape culture that sex can only be exhilarating when it happens under the ever-present threat of being hurt, of something—or someone—going too far. That anything else is just a butterfly pinned to a wall.
But that's only because it's the only construct we're taught, the only model we're shown.
I am a person with a partner who has built something different with me. And, in my experience, there is naught that casts aside every last remnant of inhibition like profound trust.
Nothing is more exhilarating than that.
Safe
[Content Note: Discussions of sexuality and consent.]
So, there's one more thing I want to say about the release of Beyoncé's new album and video, with my thanks to Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) for inspiring me to tease out these thoughts.
There has been, already, a fuckheap of feminist and unfeminist criticism directed at Beyoncé because of the way she expresses her sexuality in the video portion of the release. It's described (shittily) in the LA Times thus: "Beyoncé vamps as the trophy wife to her lust-filled husband, Jay Z, in the video to 'Drunk in Love,' does a steamy striptease for him in another clip."
I won't rehash the criticisms, because they're exactly what you'd expect them to be.
Here's the thing: I am a survivor of sexual violence, and the particular way in which Beyoncé is sexy with her partner feels to me like a demonstration of sexual trust. That's something I had to work for so hard, and it is profoundly compelling to me to see images of a woman in a sexual context who clearly feels safe. That's powerful.
Those sorts of images of women are so rare. Utterly in control. Not in imminent threat of being exploited. Respected in a sexual context.
I don't know if I'm a sex positive feminist, because I've seen that defined a lot of different ways, some of which resonate with me and some of which don't, but I am without question a consent positive feminist.
Feeling safe with and trusting one's sexual partner(s) is central to meaningful consent, and it seems to me like it ought to be central to any definition of sex positivity.
Not every human is a sexual being, but lots of us are, and many of us are women whose sexuality includes sexual interactions with men. When I see images of women partnered with men expressing their sexuality, what I want to see is a woman who feels safe with her partner.
Of course I can't know whether Beyoncé is truly safe, any more than I can know it about anyone else outside my own intimate partnership. But I'm not asserting to know. I'm suggesting that there is another way to view images of female sexuality. I'm offering that maybe the most important thing isn't assessing the act itself, but the interaction creating the space in which it happens.
And maybe it's worth questioning what ends it serves to engage in criticism of a woman of color being sexy in this way or that way, while casually eliding evidence of her being loved and safe and in control of her choices.
Condoms for Everyone!
In a policy statement that will surprise no one who has ever paid attention to teenagers, sex, or facts, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Adolescence has said that making condoms available to teens is a good idea.
[The AAP committee] said schools are a good place to make condoms available. To be most effective, they should also be accompanied by sex education programs.It should basically be raining condoms anywhere there is a concentration of teenagers.
There is still some resistance to making condoms more accessible for young people, researchers said.
"I think one of the main issues is the idea that if you provide condoms and make them accessible, kids will be more likely to have sex. But really, that's not the case," Amy Bleakley said. "Getting over the perception that giving condoms out will make kids have sex is a real barrier for parents and school administrators," she told Reuters Health.
...She said some studies suggest teenagers with access to condoms and comprehensive sex education actually start having sex later than their peers who don't.
...The new policy statement, an update to the AAP's 2001 statement on condom use by adolescents, was published Monday in Pediatrics.
"The biggest difference is that we have more evidence about how effective they are against sexually transmitted infections," Dr. Rebecca O'Brien, the policy statement's lead author, said. That's especially true for viruses like herpes and HIV, she added.
...In its recommendations, the committee said doctors should support consistent and correct use of condoms. They should also encourage parents to discuss condom use and prevention of STIs with their adolescent children.
Sexually active teenagers should have access to free or low-cost condoms, such as in pediatricians' offices and schools, the committee emphasized. At retail stores, condoms sold in multi-packs typically cost 25 to 50 cents each.
"For teens to use them, they have to have them available, and they're not going to come in necessarily asking for them," O'Brien said.
O'Brien specializes in adolescent medicine at Boston Children's Hospital. She said her office has a fishbowl full of condoms.
"Having them available, not just in healthcare settings is really important," she told Reuters Health. "Have them in the mall. They should be everywhere."
This idea that making contraceptives available to teenagers will encourage, enable, tacitly permit them to have sex is absurd and tiresome. That's not the way humans work, at any age. The availability of condoms will not make a huge difference in the number of kids having sex; it will only make a difference in how many kids have safer sex.
The "Sex Is Natural" Trope, and Its Communication Corollary
[Content Note: Rape culture; violence; disappearing people of various stripes.]
So, there's this trope about how sex is the most natural thing in the world for humans. It's a trope that acts in service to a whole lot of things—reproductive policing, evo psych explanations for gendered behavior, the rape culture (that's not a comprehensive list)—and it's harmful for a whole lot of reasons.
Treating sex as natural (and inevitable) disappears people who are asexual. Not every human being is desirous of sex. That doesn't make them "unnatural," but part of a long and varied spectrum of human sexuality.
It also disappears people who have survived sexual trauma, for whom sex may no longer be "natural," even if it's something they still desire. And people who have other aversions to or difficulties around sex, as a result of genital cutting, physical disability, health concerns resulting in painful sex, medications that cause diminished libido, and all sorts of other individual circumstances that make sex something less than the "natural," freewheeling, spontaneous activity that we're all meant to understand it to be.
Sometimes partners who want each other more than anything and have no other ostensible barriers just happen to have bodies that don't line up right, that don't fit together perfectly. When it can take experimentation just to achieve the basics, the "sex is natural" trope can make people feel like failures at the whole sex thing, which adds a whole other layer of unnecessary pressure. Virgins often expect sex to look like it does in the movies, instead of the fumblefucking that our first time looks like for many of us.
For lots of people, sex takes some planning, some creativity, some ingenuity. And it also takes communication.
The corollary to the "sex is natural" trope is that sex shouldn't need to be something about which people communicate—that it should just happen, and that talking about sex ruins it.
This is a terrible piece of misinformation for about eleventy-twelve different reasons, not least of which is that it serves to reinforce precisely the sort of aversion to explicit consent-seeking that was demonstrated in the "Luring Your Rapebait" frat bro letter.
Sex is so natural that you shouldn't have to talk about it; it should just happen through reading each other's body language. So goes the trope. But, as the letter amply and revoltingly demonstrates, coercion is a language all its own. "If she starts putting her hair over her ear," writes the author of the vile missive, "THAT MEANS SHE WANTS A KISS. Therefore, try to give her a kiss on the cheek."
Signals are just communication for people who don't want to risk talking and possibly hear "no."
The desire for sex is not intrinsic in every human being, but the desire for agency is. That's natural. And because that is natural, sex without explicit communication cannot be—because sexual interaction sans communication is exponentially more likely to be sexual violence.
So, fuck this trope, basically. Not only is it actively harmful to anyone who, for any reason, experiences sex at some point or forever as something less than totally natural, but it acts in service to rapists, who rely on the idea that sex just "naturally happens" to justify indifference to explicit consent.
Today in Rape Culture
No means no.
The absence of a yes also means no.
The absence of a no does not mean yes.
The only thing that means yes is yes.
And if you are privileged enough to be a neurotypical person who hasn't any problems interpreting non-verbal communication in a long-term relationship with another neurotypical person who hasn't any problems interpreting non-verbal communication, and the two of you have managed to define and maintain good boundaries around sexual activity, have ongoing conversations and negotiations about consent as your relationship grows and changes, and have developed an intimate shorthand of verbal and non-verbal cues to communicate consent that would almost look like "implicit consent" if there were such a thing, congratulations to you! You are very lucky!
But that doesn't change the fact that you're saying yes. And it really, really doesn't change the fact that the only thing that means yes is yes.
Do You Want to Know Why Sex Is Great?
Flula is here to explain:
These are my reasons why sex is great: Sex is amazing, you know?! It is like this movie, Lethal Weapon—have you seen this, with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover? Oh, it's amazing! Right?! Riggs is there, and he's like a tough boy, "I don't care nothing," right? And then Murtaugh, he's like fifty years old and he's like, "I just, I just wanna make a retire right now!" Riggs is like, "No! No! I'm gonna hurt my shoulder and then I'm gonna jump from a building and then I'll put my, put my stuff on the beach, and I'll put my pants down—all the people see my booty!" And my dog is there, and machine guns with helicopters, and shooting everything around! And then like foreign peoples are there, like, "We're gonna get you; we're gonna kill you really good," or something like this from South Africa, and everyone dying—and saxophone! Always saxophone playing! Everywhere, all the scenes. He probably hiding like Kenneth G in the background. [mimes saxophonist] Brrring! "I must retire!" Brrring! Play it right out! And then Riggs is jumping and then they got a giant mobile phone—it's like eight hundred pound! Doo-doo-byew-dee-boo! And the everything happening! And then KWWVEEWWW! [mimes explosion] Credits! Yeah! [mimes credits scrolling down the screen] So, to conclude it: Sex is great!This is not my favorite Flula ever (that would be "Daddy Long Legs, Who Did Name You?" followed closely by his deconstruction of the idiom "Shooting Fish in a Barrel"), but it's up there.
True Fact: "Kenneth G" made me LOL for fully one nonillion hours.
Film Corner!
Know what's even worse than an insufferable dudebro comedy that objectifies women and treats having sex with them as a trophy for being a Nice Guy…? An insufferable Christian dudebro comedy that objectifies women and treats having sex with them as a trophy for being a Nice Guy. With what appears to be a budget of five bucks.
This, Shakers, is a real thing in the world:
It's all a big party set to "You Can't Hurry Love" as our protagonist, Jack, high-fives his office mates at CubicleCorp, and says, while lounging in his desk chair looking self-satisfied, "Do you realize what I've achieved?" Onscreen text informs us: "Jack saved himself for marriage." Back to the montage of Jack fist-bumping and dancing with his coworkers, because that's obviously something coworkers do. He says, in voiceover, "Only three percent of Americans have accomplished what I've done."
What—don't you and your coworkers keep tabs on what percentage of Americans do and do not have sex before marriage? You and your coworkers are so weird. They've got Excel spreadsheets for that shit at CubicleCorp. True fact.
Jack's sassy female coworker—who, because this is a Christian dudebro comedy for affluent white people, obviously cannot be black or gay and thus is the white conservative Christian equivalent: a white woman who is middle-aged and thus axiomatically meant to be read as unattractive and thus unfuckable—peeks around the border of her cubicle to quip, "And three percent of accountants haven't even kissed a girl!" I guess this is what passes for a "joke" among abstinence-promoting white conservative Christians.
Onscreen text informs us Jack "can't wait for the wedding night." He looks at himself in his dresser mirror and says, in what I think is supposed to be a movie voiceover voice, "He remains a virgin no longer." And then does some other dumb shit, like makes muscles at himself and recreates an iconic scene from The Karate Kid substituting "clothes on, clothes off" for "wax on, wax off." He also sings "Let's get biblical!" to the tune of Olivia Newton-John's 80's
Hey, makers of Christian cinema—you realize that inserting allusions to heathen films and songs in your pictures might make people seek out those films and songs, or remember them, and realize that they are SO MUCH BETTER, right? (P.S. Awesomely current references.) Anyway.
Onscreen text: "But on his wedding day…" This is followed by a scene of Jack being left at the altar. Onscreen text: "Jack is going to play…" Jack watches his bride depart with another dude, possibly one who isn't treating her virginity like a door prize, and says to his friend to the sound of a deflating erection, "I'm not going to do it tonight, am I?" Onscreen text: "The Waiting Game."
That is the game Jack is playing, and it is also the name of this shitty, shitty film.
Some more things happen. Jack—who is a GREAT ACTOR, by the way—goes all rebel sex fiend and complains to his friend, "I'm so frustrated. You know, I'm just going to do what I want to do anyway. It's not like it's going to wind up on the front page of the newspaper." But wait! Noted sex scandalist Ted Haggard is at the next table! He leans over and says, "Hey, buddy—I wouldn't do that if I were you." HA HA! Way to make lemonade out of snorting meth off a lemon's ass, Reverend Cameo.
Jack tells his friend about a series of terrible dates while they play Wii. Obviously he cannot fall in love with a woman who has hairy toes, or sings off-key, or doesn't act Christian in the One Right Way to Be Christian, of which Jack is the arbiter no doy. WHY WON'T GOD SEND HIM A PERFECT WOMAN TO FUCK?! DOESN'T HE DESERVE AT LEAST THAT—A PHYSICALLY PERFECT WOMAN TO BE HIS WIFE FOR ALL ETERNITY?! GOD!!!
Are you there, God? It's me, Jack.
Hang on a second! Jack bumps into a girl he knew from school. She is also a great actor, FYI. Montage of Jack falling for her and trying to make out with her, while she remains totally oblivious. Not like her attention matters: God has matchmade this perfect match for Jack, to reward him for not having sex with any other ladies, so her will is obviously totes irrelevant.
Montage of stupid garbage scenes, set to some barfy Christian music.
Also some awesome jokes, like two dudes hugging, and HEY YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAVE YOUR WII CONTROLLER AROUND SO WILDLY IF YOU'RE PLAYING CHESS! Jack, you scamp.
Onscreen text: "Abstinence never felt so good. TheWaitingGameMovie.com." Sure.
[Commenting Guidelines: Please refrain from making comments that treat being sexually active as "normal," or, conversely, being sexual abstinent for any reason as "abnormal." The topic of the post is not individual choices or orientations regarding sexuality. On-topic discussion for this post is how a specific flavor of Christianity, and, by extension, this film, treats women's virginity as (literally) God's gift to men who remain "virtuous" by practicing abstinence until marriage. Also on-topic: How much ass this movie sucks. H/T to Deeks.]
On Surviving and Sex Ed
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
In addition to the assault on reproductive rights in Republican-held state legislatures across the nation, there has been a resurgence of interest in mandating abstinence-only sex education. Earlier this week, the North Dakota Senate "approved an amendment to a sex education bill (HB 1229) that would require public schools to teach abstinence-only sex education. The bill passed in the Senate by a vote of 39 to 8 and will now move to the state House for a vote."
It will certainly not come as a surprise to anyone who's spent more than about five seconds in this space that I am categorically disdainful of abstinence-only sex ed and support comprehensive sex education, so I'm pretty unthrilled about what's happening in North Dakota.
In this space, I've written a lot about the relationship between comprehensive sex education and reproductive rights: Empowering young people, especially young women, with good information about their reproduction is the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
But there's another reason, more personal, about which I haven't written as much.
One of the most intractable complications of processing for me, after surviving sexual trauma as a teenager, was my Christian upbringing—a tradition on which a huge premium is placed on purity. (I don't mean to suggest this is true in all Christian traditions, but it was in the one in which I was raised.) I was quite explicitly expected to be a virgin bride.
My mother had been a virgin bride. My father had been a virgin groom. They expected their daughters to be virgins when we married, and we were expected to marry. It wasn't just from my parents that I learned of this expectation: In Sunday school, in confirmation class, in sermons—everyone from my ministers to my peers to Martin Luther himself admonished me to fiercely protect my virginity until I gifted it to my husband on my wedding night.
I was assumed to be straight and exhorted to get married and expected to be a virgin when I did.
I frankly wasn't even sure that I wanted to get married when I was raped at 16, but, after I was, I was sure that I wasn't going to be a virgin bride.
I had deeply internalized the Christian narratives about premarital sex sullying my very soul, and such was the lack of discussion surrounding consent in my young life that the idea nonconsensual sex might not "count" to whatever galactic referee was keeping score of such things never even crossed my mind.
I had also deeply internalized the cultural stereotypes of raped women being irreparably broken, women with broken minds and broken bodies.
Regarding myself as damaged goods, in both spirit and flesh, I figured it didn't matter if I engaged in sexual activity henceforth. And, beyond that grim calculation, that horrible, sad, shrugging relinquishment of my decision-making regarding sex because the decision had been made for me, was something yet worse: I didn't feel like I had any value anymore.
I'd spent my life learning that my worth as a female person was attached to my virginity.
My value as an unsullied cunt was gone; I tried instead to find value as a girl who knew how to give great head.
And, you know, that almost worked for awhile.
There exists a stereotype, a myth, that sexual trauma makes women more promiscuous. (And some women to react to sexual violence with promiscuity; there is no one singular, textbook, universal response to rape, no "right way" to be a survivor.) But it wasn't rape that made me more promiscuous than I otherwise might have been; it was the idea that I had lost my worth as a human and some fundamental goodness which had been wrapped inside my virginity.
Abstinence-only sex ed advocates insist that they're only trying to tell young people that the only 100% effective way to prevent pregnancy in abstinence, but, if that's all they wanted to convey, that line could be part of a comprehensive sex ed program. What they want to convey is that young people's worth, especially young women's worth, is predicated on maintaining their virginity.
That can be a mind-fuck for young women who lose their virginity consensually. For young women who are raped, it can be truly devastating.
I support comprehensive sex education not merely because it is a smarter and more effective program, but because it does not embed in young people bullshit narratives that stand to revictimize those among them who are victimized by sexual violence.
I am unsurprised to find, once again, the GOP does not share my concern.
Discussion Thread: Good Relationship/Sex Advice
[Trigger warning: Many of the responses to this question may reference narratives of the rape culture, by way of being good advice that one does not have to abide by the "conventional wisdom" that is the superfluity of consent.]
As the natural follow-up to yesterday's thread on terrible relationship/sex advice, this thread is about the best advice we've ever gotten.
Please note that advice or mentoring regarding sexual orientation (including asexuality) and/or gender presentation are absolutely on topic for this thread.
What is the best advice you've ever gotten about dating, romantic relationships, marriage, or sex?
Discussion Thread: Terrible Relationship/Sex Advice
[Trigger warning: Many of the responses to this question may be vague or explicit narratives of the rape culture.]
Maybe you were the child of a parent who substituted antiquated adages for serious discussions about dating and/or sex. Maybe you had awful religious instruction about dating and/or sex. Maybe you're gay/bi and constantly get heterocentrist dating advice from coworkers. Maybe you're someone who doesn't seem to have any friends who aren't fully indoctrinated defenders of the rape culture. Maybe everyone around you is smart enough to give good advice (or none at all), but you still hear shit advice like "you're only complete with a partner" in the movies.
Whoever you are and whatever your experiences, we've all gotten shitty messages on dating and/or sex. This thread is about the worst advice we've ever gotten.
What is the worst advice you've ever gotten about dating, romantic relationships, marriage, or sex?
Sex in the US
I've got a new piece up at The Guardian's Comment is free America about the newly released results of Indiana University's National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior:
"The surprise we found in this survey is the variability and diversity of the way people conduct their sex lives," says [Logan Levkoff, a New York University sexologist].Read the whole thing here.
Frankly, I'm more surprised by the surprise with which the findings – that teens are sexually responsible, sex lives are varied, and people view themselves on a sliding scale of sexuality – are being met. The shock that Americans are not puritans is not only outdated – surely, we've all known Americans aren't doing it missionary-style through hole-punched fuck sheets ever since Dr. Kinsey got a boner staring at gall wasps – but, ironically, seems indicative of the false puritanism that guides much of the US's public discourse about sex and sexuality.
We insistently believe ourselves to be puritans despite all evidence to the contrary, an intractable myth periodically punctuated by the findings of some sex researcher or another, who reveals to us the true nature of our naughtiness – and, oh, how we love to gasp at our scandalously sexy sexbusiness!
But even the actual Puritans weren't puritans. (This lady knows what I'm talking about.) And despite the collective apoplexy about the appearance of a boob at a football game or a naked butt in primetime, what happens behind closed doors has never had any relationship to the public sanctimony about sex and sexuality peddled by pecksniffs who parade a contrived virtue to bored busybodies.
The profound disconnect between who we are and who we regard ourselves to be would be amusing if it weren't so dangerous.
Discussion Thread: Let's Talk About Sex, Part Two
In yesterday's "How to Fuck" thread, Shaker Jon_Erikson brought up a question about how to have a discussion with a sex partner about frequency without being indirectly coercive.
Lots of conversations with partners about sex can be fraught for the same reasons: Discussions about frequency, about the time of day you prefer having sex, about the ways you like have sex, about fetishes.
And conversations with children about sex can be fraught for other reasons altogether. It's also one of the most frequent subjects about which I get emails soliciting advice and/or good reading materials.
So, this is a thread to talk about how to have conversations about sex.
"How do I talk to my partner about wanting more/less sex?"
"What should we do when I like sex at night and zie likes it in the morning?"
"How do other people navigate one partner's natural lulls in sex drive?"
"How do I introduce the subject of sex to young children in an age-appropriate way?"
"How do I talk to my kids about sex without being heterocentrist?"
"How to I broach the subject with older kids on the cusp of sexual experimentation without alienating them?"
This thread is about sex-related communications. The thread about the physical aspects of sex is here.
Discussion Thread: Let's Talk About Sex, Part One
The last two days, we've done Questions of the Day about masturbation, and, in both threads, there were "Is this normal?"/"I didn't realize lots of people did that!" discussions.
Sex is one of those subjects about which it's tough to get good information as a kid, and, then, seemingly overnight, one may start feeling "too old" to not know the answers to lingering questions, presuming to ask them at this age will elicit laughter and mockery, that the people asked will think you're a rube, or don't know your own body, or are (horrors!) bad in bed, or some other conclusion that makes you wish you'd just kept your mouth shut.
So, this is a thread for all those questions, free of judgment.
"Is X normal?"
"Have other people experienced Y?"
"Is it weird that I like Z?"
This thread is about the physical aspects of sex. The thread about sex-related communications is here.
How to Fuck
1. Find a consenting partner (or partners).
2. Get your partner/s' explicit consent. Give your explicit consent. Compliance is not the same as consent. Your partner/s should be as excited and ready as you are. Don't try to talk anyone else, or yourself, into fucking.
3. Use whatever combination of prophylactics (condom, dental dam, etc.) and birth control (condom, the pill, Today Sponge, etc.) you need to prevent the transmission of disease and/or pregnancy (unless you're trying to get pregnant).
4. Do whatever feels good for you and your partner/s. Communicate as you go to make sure your partner/s is/are still feeling safe and having fun. There's no one right way to fuck—and exploration, even and maybe especially when it's awkward, is part of the joy of fucking.
5. Rinse and repeat. As often as feels right to you and your partner/s.
[For some reason, "how to fuck" is perennially a search term that brings people to Shakesville. Currently, the results bring searchers to Portly Dyke's How to Fuck Up post, which is good universal reading, but I thought it might be nice to provide a post that offered the instructions for which people are actually searching, too.]
