Sexuality Summer School

Sexuality Summer School 2010

Heather Corinna, founder and executive editor of the indispensable site Scarleteen, is doing a large study on multigenerational experiences with and attitudes about casual sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

There’s a lot of buzz now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike most of the buzz out there, she’s not interested in telling anyone how to have sex, warning people off any given kind of sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as “the best way.” She’s just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and experiences among a diverse array of ages, genders and sexual identities, races and sexual ideologies/constructions. The only requirements for participating in this study are being over the age of 16, and having had some kind of sexual partnership before, even if none has been casual. The study will take around twenty minutes.

She would like the study to show as diverse an array of people as possible, especially since so often media representations or cultural conversations about casual sex are usually only about heterosexual white women or about gay men. She particularly wants to be sure LGBT people, people of color, those over 45 and social conservatives are adequately represented, so please share this link with your networks after you take the survey yourself, especially if your networks include people in any or all of those groups. I know I have a number of readers who fall into those groups, and urge them to take part.

You can take the survey by clicking here.

If you don’t know who Heather is, she’s been working in human sexuality for around 12 years. She is the founder and executive director for Scarleteen.com, does sex education outreach at youth shelters and women’s clinics in Seattle, and has been a sex columnist and writer online for sites like The Guardian and RH Reality Check. She has also been published in a handful of anthologies and is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know-Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College (DaCapo Press), a book which I regard as the single best sex education text available anywhere.

If you have any questions, you can contact Heather at hcorinna@mac.com

The study, published in the February issue of the journal Sexual Health, randomly surveyed 486 adults, most of them heterosexual, between the ages of 18 and 96. They were asked the following question: "Would you say you 'had sex' with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was [blank]," and then followed more than a dozen "behavior specific items." A press release reports that "two out of ten people did not concur that penile-anal intercourse was sex, and three out of ten said 'no' to oral-genital activity, as did half of the respondents about manual-genital contact." And, while 95 percent classified penile-vaginal penetration as sex (one has to wonder what does count for the remaining 5 percent), that number dropped to 89 percent in cases where the man doesn't ejaculate.

Last week, Rachel Hills guest-posted an explosive piece at Feministe: But Women Don’t Rape. Rachel began by reflecting on this post at the Feministing Community which dealt with a woman’s sudden awareness that one of her female friends had coerced her boyfriend into having sex. The comment threads at both Feministing and Feministe are substantial and well worth a read.

Rachel and her commenters note the constellation of factors that make us believe that women cannot force men into unwanted sex: our misconceptions about male physiology (the “guys can’t have erections or ejaculate against their will” myth); our belief that men are more resistant to psychological pressure and invariably less eager to people-please: our notion that, as the Feministing post put it, “nice girls” (especially feminists) simply are incapable of forcing their boyfriends to do anything against their will.

Please join the great discussion at either site. I have posted a bit on the issue of men-as-victims, as well as on the notion that pleasure is not evidence of consent. In a 2005 post about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau I wrote:

For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with (being a victim of) sexual violation. But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.

I’d amend that to say that the statement holds fairly well even if we remove the “adolescent” from it.

But there’s another issue that Rachel raised at Feministe that I’d like to tackle: the way in which we socialize women to believe that they ought never be the higher-desire partner in a heterosexual relationship. She writes:

…one of the interesting threads that has come through in my interviews is how very poorly many women take it when their male partners don’t want to have sex with them. They don’t like it at all. For these women, being turned down for sex – even if only occasionally, even if only once – is read as communicating a whole lot of nasty things about them and their relationship. That their partner doesn’t find them attractive anymore, that he’s cheating, that their relationship lacks passion, that they’re bad in bed, that he’s not into women at all.

(For more on Rachel’s research and to take her survey, visit here.

I think that Rachel’s right. The male sexual desire discourse tells us that men are always in the mood, invariably hornier than women. Indeed, our whole notion about the myth of male weakness is linked to assumptions about the overwhelming power of men’s libidos. But as countless women have discovered in relationships with heterosexual men, this discourse founders on the rocks of reality. As Rachel says, many women are confused when boyfriends or husbands evince less interest in sex than they themselves do. Rather than question the discourse, many choose to blame themselves, assuming that they are insufficiently attractive. Sometimes, they externalize that self-doubt, accusing their male partners of being gay or of having an affair.

As several of the commenters have pointed out, there’s an old axiom in marital therapy: the lower-desire partner has more power than the higher-desire partner. The one who has the power to please or disappoint by saying “yes” or “no” gains the upper hand. (I’ve posted about that a couple of times. Sorry to always link to myself, but here’s a post on that subject too.). And of course, one of our most traditional (and loathsome) discourses with which we raise young women is the one that teaches that a woman’s power comes from her ability to control men sexually. Sex is a bargaining chip, and its value is created by men’s impetuous libidos.

Though most younger women today, particularly young feminists, intellectually reject the “sex as leverage” trope, the idea continues to exert an uncomfortable hold on many. Many women don’t realize the degree to which they had “bought in” to the discourse until they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own. And while it’s never easy to be rejected, and never easy to deal with sexual frustration and self-doubt, men are more insulated than women from the effects of that rejection. That doesn’t mean men are less sensitive, or less vulnerable to hurt. But a man whose sex drive is higher than his female partner’s can comfort himself that theirs is “a normal relationship.” His frustration is par for the proverbial course; his masculinity is not called into question when his girlfriend is not in the mood.

We have many inanities that pass for common wisdom about men and women and their different attitudes towards sex. We say things like “Women need a reason; men just need a place” or, when describing the speed of arousal, that “Men are lightbulbs, women are ovens”. My readers can probably think of more. And while like all cliches, they prove true in some instances, the exceptions are sufficiently numerous as to disprove the rule altogether. The problem is, of course, the effect on the many for whom the opposite of these “truisms” is true. A woman who does “feel like a lightbulb” when it comes to arousal is made to feel abnormal, as is a man who is more “like an oven.” And while these bits of common nonsense comfort “higher desire men”, reassuring them that they are normal, they suggest that all sorts of things are wrong with a woman if she finds herself more easily and frequently turned on than her boyfriend.

It is axiomatic that the fewer freedoms women have, the more their beauty is valued. Some of the most repressive societies on earth value that beauty by concealing it from all but her husband, who is entitled to possess it as he pleases: others encourage young women to display their bodies (whether they want to or not) for men’s consumption. This isn’t about burqas and bikinis again. It’s about the idea that we raise our daughters to see their beauty as a particular source of power. And while most of us would like to be found attractive, our craving to be wanted sexually is often in inverse proportion to the amount of leverage we can achieve using our other talents.

A decade into the 21st century, and many of us still believe that a woman’s desirability is among her most valuable assets. And many women who don’t think that they believe that nasty old sexist notion discover that it still has a strange hold upon them –and they discover it at the moment that they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own.

In many of my posts (most recently, here), I’ve made the case that sexual desire is more malleable than we think it is. I tend to argue against reparative therapy (the pseudo-science of helping gays become straight, repudiated by every serious professional body of psychologists and psychiatrists) not on grounds of inevitable ineffectiveness but on grounds that it attempts to fix something that isn’t broken. I do think we can shift our desires, and that to a far greater degree than we realize, our desires are less inherent in our make-up and more a response to external influences. I realize that the pendulum of popular thinking is in the opposite direction — the last quarter-century has seen the hegemony of the evolutionary psych crowd, the sort who insist that virtually every aspect of our identity is coded in our genes and driven by our hormones. In the nature v. nurture debate, the trendy thing to believe now is that nature has won in a cakewalk. But — to mix my metaphors recklessly — pendulums do swing back, and I think the turn of the tide approaches.

To that end, this very interesting article in last weekend’s Science Blog: ‘Straight Men, Gay Porn’ and Other Brain Map Mysteries (h/t to reader Jo for sending it along). It opens:

For most of the last century, neuroscientists were convinced that adult brains were pretty much set. Now, recent neuroscience reveals that our brains are surprisingly plastic throughout our lives. By learning techniques that help us sidestep unwanted wiring, we can even direct the re-wiring process—with seemingly miraculous results.

Read on. It’s nice to have something I’ve been saying for a long time validated by some of the latest research. It doesn’t end the argument, but it’s the beginning of a counter-narrative.

I got a note from a former student of mine last week. Sophrosyne writes:

I know it has been a while since I’ve spoke to you, but I am going to lose my mind or at least it feels like it. I have been dating this man for seven months and two weeks ago I made the mistake of driving drunk. This is an extremely sensitive issue for him because three years ago he lost a girlfriend (she got hit by a drunk driver while driving) and a best friend (similar scenario). I know it was a terrible mistake to make, it was something I’d never done before and am quite sure I will never, ever do again. I didn’t get caught or into an accident, and that is a miracle. But my boyfriend found out anyway.

I feel like a fool for tolerating his behavior, but at the same time I did make a mistake. In his mind, he feels that driving drunk is worse than cheating. I need advice…I am having difficulty sleeping, eating, studying, just functioning. I don’t know what to do.

Soph gets that she made a mistake, one that could have had deadly consequences. Since she gives her word it was a one-off, I don’t know that there’s much more that can be said about her drink driving incident.

Many years ago, when I was much younger and far more willful than I am now, I behaved similarly with a girlfriend of mine. “Ethel” and I had met in a sober living house, and despite warnings from those who knew our fragile state better than we, we embarked on an instant and intense relationship. We ended up spending eighteen months together on and off, moving into our own place when we were both thrown out of the sober living situation. As it turned out, I had an easier time getting sober than she did (though this was long before my last relapse in 1998). While I began to put weeks and months together, Ethel had a hard time staying clean for more than a few days at a time. For the first time in my life, I found myself in a co-dependent relationship with an addict whose disease was, at least in its obvious manifestations, worse than my own. I drove home from school each day, my stomach in knots, wondering if Ethel would be sober — and if not, in what condition she and our little apartment would be.

Eventually, I started cheating on Ethel. My rationalization was much the same as that of Soph’s boyfriend: I was giving myself some emotional protection from hurt by seeking consolation with others. Ethel found out (when it came to covering up my infidelities, I was about as subtle as a kibbutznik at a D.A.R. convention). We had volcanic arguments. I justified my cheating by pointing to her drinking, suggesting that if she wanted me to be faithful, she needed to be sober. I insisted that I was entitled to a quid pro quo relationship (I remember that even as I made it, the argument sounded false, ugly, and hollow.) Ethel pointed out that the thought of me sleeping around was hardly an encouragement to get sober. And on it went, month after month. I “cheated at” Ethel; she “drank at” me. It was one of the more painful relationships of my life, both because I was (despite my inability to live up to any sort of commitment) desperately in love with Ethel, and because I was choking on my own sense of fraudulence and narcissism.

Soph and her boyfriend aren’t quite where Ethel and I were. But it seems clear that he too is using the “quid pro quo” argument; he too is “cheating at” his girlfriend. Soph is not chronically drink-driving (something Ethel did with alarming regularity, even after her license was suspended), but she is being punished just the same. Of course, her boyfriend’s fears are powerful, linked as they are to his own painful memories of loss. Many of us respond to fear by trying to anesthetize ourselves, which is one reason why I so regularly cheated on Ethel. Flirtation and intrigue with others outside of our primary relationship, even if physical sex doesn’t take place, is a powerful prophylaxis against getting hurt — it is a marvelously passive-aggressive response. On some level, Soph’s boyfriend probably knows that he is dodging the issue and taking the easy way out, and I suspect that stings him.

Fidelity, for the umpteenth time, is not just a promise to a partner. It’s a promise to ourselves: a promise that we are not the sort of person who will quickly turn into a liar or a cheat. Obviously, if a relationship comes to a clear and final end, then the expectation of fidelity ends with it. But while a monogamous relationship continues, part of being a grown-up is not making one’s fidelity contingent on the other person’s day-to-day behavior. If my wife is cross with me, or annoys me in some way, I am not justified in seeking sexual or romantic solace with someone who will, ahem, “understand.” The whole “I’ll show you!” aspect of conditional monogamy is not only juvenile and reflective of an incomplete understanding of what a relationship requires, it is clear and incontrovertible evidence of fear and the inability to self-soothe. Soph’s boyfriend is entitled to be angry that she drove while drunk. He is entitled to share with her his own particular reasons for reacting so strongly to the incident. And she does owe him a promise that it won’t happen again.

But Sophrosyne doesn’t owe her beau her patience while he displaces his anger and anxiety into flirtations, intrigues, or worse with his exes. Her mistake is not a justification for his abrogation of his commitment to put all of his romantic and sexual energy into her. And despite her serious error, she has not lost her right to demand that he not only bring her all of that energy, but bring her his pain and fear and his truth as well.