feminist blogs

Corina C. sent in this ad for Ché, a Belgian men’s magazine (found at Yes, ICantSeeYou), in which we learn what men’s “dream” of a “better world” would be like:

That’s right: in a better world, guys, your wife would rent you a hot chick and then take the kid and get out.

Ché appears to be an all-around classy mag. I went to their website, and to celebrate their ten-year anniversary, they present a game called The Blow Job, where you “blow into your microphone and see what our girl’s got on underneath that little dress”:

If you don’t do well enough, you get messages like “Pussy, blow harder!”

It’s insulting to women and men. Wives are presented as annoyances who should take the kid and give their husbands some alone time with hot younger women, or as sex objects. And once again we see men depicted as immature boy-men who view their families as obstacles to the type of fun they supposedly had as bachelors.

A loss for everybody, all around.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Hi all, sorry for the late start over here, but I’m Monica from The American Prospect and PostBourgie. I was happy to get an invite to blog for a couple of weeks, and will work really hard to squeeze in time between my work at Tapped and PB.

I wanted to kick it off by bringing up a minor annoyance of mine: the assumption that the sexual exploration of a pre-teen always necessarily means she was sexually abused. That’s the discussion over at Slate, in the comments section, about the latest episode of MadMen. In a pivotal scene, Sally’s friend’s mom catches her masturbating on the couch, and rushes Sally home to complain to Betty. Some commenters wonder whether this brings up uncomfortable possibilities about Grandpa Gene’s closeness with his granddaughter. His death, Betty points out to the psychiatrist Sally is taken to see after the episode, precipitated Sally’s misbehavior.

Child abuse is a serious issue and, truthfully, is most often perpetrated by family members and friends. It’s not impossible Gene was an abuser, and maybe that’s where the show’s producers are taking it. But honestly, a ten-year-old boy masturbating wouldn’t arouse the same suspicions, and it’s not crazy that a ten-year-old would start exploring his or her sexuality. We have a tendency to think of the middle part of the last century as this pristine era, right before the sexplosion of the 60s, in which girls wouldn’t have known how to do those things. But think about it: did anyone have to tell you what to do? We certainly don’t talk much about masturbation now, and lots of girls do it.

So, while the commenters have pointed to a lot of creepy-in-retrospect scenes from last season, I’m not convinced. I don’t remember anything seeming weird or untoward, but, chances are, if I viewed them with a suspicious lens, I would now. It doesn’t mean that’s not where the show is taking the Sally storyline. It just means I’ll be disappointed if it is.

In Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers, Joane Nagel looks at how race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are often used to create new national identities and frame colonial expansion. In particular, White female sexuality, presented as modest and appropriate, was often contrasted with the sexuality of colonized women, who were often depicted as promiscuous or immodest. qout sent in an 1860s advertisement for Peter Lorillard Snuff & Tobacco that illustrates these differences.

According to An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World, the ad drew on a purported Huron legend of a beautiful white spirit bringing them tobacco. There are a few interesting things going on here. We have the association of femininity with a benign nature; the women are surrounded by various animals (I can’t tell what they all are, but I think there’s a fox and a rabbit) who appear to pose no threat to the women or to one another. The background is lush and productive.

Racialized hierarchies are embedded in the personification of the “white spirit” as a White woman, descending from above to provide a precious gift to Native Americans, similar to imagery drawing on the idea of the “white man’s burden.” And as often occurred (particularly as we entered the Victorian Era), there is a willingness to put non-White women’s bodies more obviously on display than the bodies of White women. The White woman above is actually less clothed than the American Indian woman, yet her arm and the white cloth are strategically placed to hide her breasts and crotch (I can’t tell if we can just barely see her left nipple or if that’s shading). On the other hand, the Native American woman’s breasts are fully displayed. (This pattern continues; for instance, in Reading National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins discuss the way non-White women’s breasts are frequently displayed in the magazine while only recently have a few exceptions occurred where topless light-skinned women were included, all shot from behind rather than the front.)

So the ad provides a nice illustration of the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender (particularly ideas of feminine gentleness and innocence), sexuality, and marketing.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Via Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon’s Broadsheet, a recent study from the University of Iowa suggests that “hooking up” can actually lead to meaningful relationships sometimes!

Honestly I find nothing more tiresome than oldsters (not to over-stereotype, but it does seem to be a certain brand of baby boomer — ahem, Laura Sessions Stepp), who warn young women not to give away the milk for free. They often seem appalled that younger women have sexual agency. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that research shows that hooking up after meeting someone by chance at a bar or a party is just another way to meet someone. Sometimes you meet a dud and sometimes you meet someone worthwhile. It’s also worth remembering that this is related to the study a while back from the University of Minnesota that showed casual sex wasn’t emotionally damaging.

Granted, there are several problems with this study: They only examined 642 heterosexual adults. As we all know, LGBT folks have experiences with hooking up (and not hooking up) too. One of the researchers, sociologist Anthony Paik, was also quoted in the press release reinforcing some pretty heinous stereotypes about hooking up: “The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.”

Hear that, ladies? You can be like Samantha from “Sex and the City” and still get that ultimate relationship!

But for all the stereotypes about women getting warned of the dangers of hooking up, I’d argue that it’s actually the reverse that’s the danger. It’s not sexual freedom and casual hookups that are disastrous for women. After all, as Jaclyn Friedman found hooking up to be liberating. What is disastrous for young women is that they’re raised with cookie cutter expectations about what their sex lives will look like.

The rules young women encounter about their sex and dating lives are near endless. A young woman are supposed to lose their virginity to someone she loves (unlike when a boy loses his virginity in movies, which, as Jessica Wakeman over at The Frisky pointed out, is just an epic quest to get laid). If she doesn’t, she’s damaged goods or a slut. (I could go on about this virginity point, but instead will just refer you to Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth.) Women are also supposed to withhold sex when it comes to someone they really care about. A woman is supposed to be into boys and only boys. A woman is supposed to want marriage and children — in that order. The thing is, a young woman is never handed a list of these rules, but she still picks it up along the way.

It is the very existence of this amorphous laundry list of sexual expectations that leads some young women into thinking that sex equals love. Therefore if she engages in sex outside of love than she is a slut. Or if she lets herself believe that perhaps sex will lead to love and she’ll withhold sex only become emotionally invested before she knows if the relationship works sexually.

The good thing is that I think this narrative is slowly changing. People these days (at least most normal, rational people I meet) are starting to view hooking up as a natural part of their general sexual experiences. This changing attitude about hooking up is sort of what Kathleen A. Bogle tried to document when she wrote her sociological book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (which I reviewed for Bitch when it came out). Still, Bogle but she still managed to slip in many stereotypes about what women and men should do. She asserted that “Men’s greater control has lead to sexual exploitation of women in both the dating and the hooking-up eras” and that hooking up can lead to “postponing adulthood.” She also discovered that many young adults of the college-going variety sometimes revisit a more traditional form of dating once they become Grown Ups with Real Jobs.

Now that’s not to say that women don’t suffer emotionally sometimes because of a bad hook up. Sometimes they do. (I’d almost argue that encountering an asshole or two in the realm of hooking up is necessary for young women so they can improve their bullshit detectors later on.) It’s also true that men suffer emotionally sometimes — a side of the hook-up equation that almost never gets discussed. Of course, I should also note that hooking up isn’t without risk. Increasing the number of one’s sexual partners also increases the exposure and risk of STIs and pregnancy. And hooking up isn’t for everyone. But. Many people still manage to emotionally and physically survive hooking up relatively unscathed.

We need to not fear the fact that people are sometimes taking on sexual agency when they decide they want sex — and sometimes just sex. Instead maybe we should start to realize that people’s sexual experiences are diverse and that sometimes hooking up is included in that.

Monica C. sent along images of a pamphlet, from 1920, warning soldiers of the dangers of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In the lower right hand corner (close up below), the text warns that “most” “prostitutes (whores) and easy women” “are diseased.” In contrast, in the upper left corner, we see imagery of the pure woman that a man’s good behavior is designed to protect (also below).  “For the sake of your family,” it reads, “learn the truth about venereal diseases.”

The contrast, between those women who give men STIs (prostitutes and easy women) and those who receive them from men (wives) is a reproduction of the virgin/whore dichotomy (women come in only two kinds: good, pure, and worthy of respect and bad, dirty, and deserving of abuse).  It also does a great job of making invisible the fact that women with an STI likely got it from a man and women who have an STI, regardless of how they got one, can give it away.  The men’s role in all this, that is, is erased in favor of demonizing “bad” girls.

See also these great examples of the demonization of the “good time Charlotte” during World War II (skull faces and all) and follow this post to a 1917 film urging Canadian soldiers to refrain from sex with prostitutes (no antibiotics back then, you know).

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

by Amanda Marcotte

Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time.  I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows that half of American women would “give up sex” rather than gain 10 pounds.  But I find the whole thing too suspect to take seriously.  And it’s not because, or at least just because, of what Tracy Clark-Flory pointed out, which is that 66% of survey respondents felt like they have to lose weight to feel sexy, which is a sad result of the widespread fat-shaming in our culture.  (The survey suggested the average amount that had to be lost to reach that goal was 23 pounds, which is such an abstract number as to be meaningless.  Is that a number that includes all the women that feel they’re 5 pounds away from getting into a size four averaged with people who want to lose 100 pounds, or is it just a lot of people who feel they need to lose 23 pounds?  No idea.) But it’s because they poisoned the well to make sure they got the results they wanted. 

See, they didn’t ask if people would give up sex rather than gain weight.  They asked if you’d give up sex for the summer rather than gain weight.  Considering that’s only 3 months, I’m surprised more people didn’t say yes.  A lot of Americans go 3 month stretches without getting laid all the time, often even if they’re in relationships.  I’m sure people who’ve had 3 month dry spells outnumber people who haven’t many times over.  It’s not a super fun idea to go 3 months without sex, but most of us have plenty of assurance we’d survive.  (Unless they’re rolling masturbation into their definition of “sex”, which I’m almost positive they aren’t.)

But what really pissed me off about this survey was that it’s indicative of the entire problem with the American diet industry, which is basically built to encourage yo-you dieting. You’ve heard the statistic that 95% of diets don’t work?  That’s because they’re designed not to.  The entire pitch of diet programs is, “Deprive yourself of pleasure for short periods of time, and then, when you reach a goal, go right back to your old habits.  In a few years, when you’ve gained it all back, come back and we’ll do it all over again.” There’s no natural reason to connect sexual deprivation with weight control---on the contrary, I’d guess frequent sex actually burns a fair number of calories---but the diet industry’s logic is just this.  The whole notion is that you “earn” pleasure by being skinny enough to deserve it, and the only way to earn it is to lose weight.

Silvana has a really long, interesting post on the way that getting married can provoke body anxiety in even the most stalwart opponents of that kind of crap, and she mentions something that has always bothered me, too.

As a fat chick, I am well aware of the MUSTLOSEWEIGHTBEFOREWEDDING cultural imperative. I was aware of this before I ever knew what Fat Acceptance was. And I knew before I ever got engaged that I would be doing no such thing. Frankly, I wasn’t even tempted. I know people who have gone on serious diets in the year or so before they get married, women who have attended “boot camp,” and companies who have made a lot of money off of fueling those anxieties. I wanted no part of it.

I’ve always been perplexed by the “lose weight before the wedding” mandate for a few reasons:

1) It’s assumed that every bride to be, no matter what size she is, will spend the time before her wedding anxiously dieting.  This mandate is so universal that it’s applied to the skinny and the fat, as well as anyone in-between.  Even within the logic that accepts that weight loss for aesthetic reasons should be a goal, this has never made sense to me.  If you’re already skinny, why do you have to lose weight?  If you’re fat, it’s not like you’re going to get skinny by the wedding.  But this is universally applied and assumed of every bride, no matter what her realities.

2) This whole mandate is straight from the ugliest corner of heteronormativity, but it doesn’t make sense even assuming the logic of heteronormativity.  After all, you were validated by a man’s love when he proposed to you; I highly doubt most marriage proposals come with the caveat that you’ll be loved and adored if you can just be 10 pounds thinner.  You just got your heteronormative female validation!  Can’t you enjoy it for a second, or do you have to punish yourself by doubling down on the belief that you, being female, will never be good enough?

3) If you reject #2 and believe that there’s a caveat to “you’re the one”, which is “if you lose 10 pounds”, then aren’t you being a little deceitful with a diet program that’s basically built around the belief that those 10 pounds are only going to be off your body long enough for you to get married, at which point you’ll abandon the diet and probably put it right back on?

None of these points are me suggesting that there’s anything good and right about the logic that makes women obsess over their bodies.  I’m just saying that even within that system, the wedding day diets have always struck me as irrational.  They are emblematic of the entire problem with the diet industry, which is that it encourages you to set a target day that you’re supposed to be at some goal weight, and then basically you’re pretty much expected to put it all back on.  But yo-yo dieting isn’t like having your hair get a little shaggy before getting a haircut---it’s hard work and it’s really bad for you. 

But now that I’ve read this survey that irrationally conflated depriving yourself of sex with not gaining weight, I think the internal logic of the yo-yo dieting system makes sense.  The diet industry really works off the puritanical self-punishment mentality, where you only deserve pleasure if you’ve punished yourself sufficiently through self-deprivation.  So, a bride (no matter her beginning weight) only deserves to enjoy her wedding if she went through the hellish ropes of self-deprivation for a year beforehand.  Or you only get to enjoy sex if you lose 23 pounds.  Or, most troubling in terms of people’s health, is this survey result:

Nearly half (46 percent) of the country chose not to diet, even when they knew they needed to lose weight, because they didn’t want to give up their favorite foods.

There’s the logic of diets in a nutshell---you deprive yourself of your favorite food until you lose the weight, and then you go right back to eating like you did before.  It’s an all-or-nothing culture, feast or famine.  Moderation, maintaining healthy habits will not depriving yourself of pleasure, and god forbid, actually enjoying the process of staying healthy?  Doesn’t even register.  There’s no suggestion that favorite foods can be enjoyed in moderation or that many delicious foods aren’t necessarily bad for your health.  And there’s not even a whiff of discussion about the importance of exercise and heart healthiness regardless of one’s dress size.  If you were trying to design a toxic culture around food and exercise, you couldn’t do better than the one that’s evolved in the U.S.

Previously we’ve posted on the sexy makeovers recently given to Dora the Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, Holly Hobby, and the Sun Maid.  Here we have three more.

Lisa Frank

Andy Wright at the SF Weekly recently posted about a new look for Lisa Frank art.  If you’re a woman in your 30s, like me, you probably remember this art vividly.  As Wright describes it, it “…was a branded line of school supplies consisting of Trapper Keepers and folders that looked like they were designed by a six-year-old girl on acid.”

When I was a kid, Lisa Frank didn’t include any people. But today it appears that they’ve added, well this:

Wright: “I have to wonder if little girls actually are more interested in bizarrely proportioned nymphets dressed like sexy hippies than a righteous day-glo tiger cub.”

Trolls, now Trollz

Remember Trolls?  Growing up, I remember them looking something like this (source):

But apparently now they look like this (source):

Cabbage Patch Kids

This is a vintage Cabbage Patch Kid from 1983 (source):

This is the front page of the website today:

They still make “Classic” Cabbage Patch Kids, but now they also make “Pop ‘N Style”:

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Given the intense publicity given to Chris Brown’s violent beating of singer, Rihanna, and the subsequent release of her domestic violence-themed single, Russian Roulette, it’s hard to interpret her partnership with Eminem on the new song, Love the Way You Lie, as anything but symbolic.  Unfortunately, it’s also hard to interpret this video as anything other than the message that true love is violent.

Eminem sings about how he hates the woman he loves, and alternates between expressing shame for his violence and describing how badly he wants to hurt her.  Simultaneously, Rihanna’s beautiful vocals tug at the heart strings, representing the love side of the coin against Eminem’s angry voice.  Add to this the acting by Lost’s Dominic Monaghan and super-sex-symbol Megan Fox, who alternate between beating each other and appearing to be deeply, profoundly in love.  Eminem closes by threatening to kill her if she ever tries to leave him and, in the end, they lie in each others arms.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a beautiful song.  Rihanna’s vocals are gorgeous; it’s was hard to not feel heartfelt while listening to them.  And that’s the problem.  It’s a powerful form of socialization.  That we might internalize the message that passionate love and incontrollable rage go hand-in-hand is really very scary. It suggests not only that you should tolerate interpersonal violence but that, if there is no violence in your relationship, perhaps you don’t really love one another.  Better go out and find someone who will beat you.

I’ve never been in an abusive relationship of that sort but as a young adult I thought I knew what love felt like.  To me, it felt like fear.  I knew that I was in love when I became deeply frightened that someone would leave me.  It took me until around my 30th birthday to realize that a strong, loving relationship should make me feel secure, not terrified.  These messages are insidious and ubiquitous and I do believe they shape real relationships.  That Rihanna of all people, a woman who could have made a powerful statement against this type of message, is participating in glamorizing the very violence she suffered, is very disheartening.

But why should she be immune to the conflation of love and hate in our society?  And the cycle continues.

——————————

Thanks to my colleague, politics professor Caroline Heldman, for sending this along.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

This is a guest post by Heather Corinna.

Last week, this eloquent missive arrived in the Scarleteen general email box:

From: na@aol.com
Subject: [General Contact] Heather Corinna
Date: July 29, 2010 8:50:10 AM PDT

bob sent a message using the contact form at http://www.scarleteen.com/contact.

her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna is a SLUT

I don’t know Bob. I also have never slept with anyone named Bob — I have a near-exclusive partiality to lovers or partners with names that start with the letter J or M, followed by A, C and D. The two lone male B’s I recall have both been Brians. This begs the question of how, exactly, Bob knows I’m a slut in the first place. Bob’s agenda is also a mystery. Maybe he thought I had some kind of supervisor who would see this…actually, I don’t know what on earth Bob’s intent was here. No sense trying to suss it out. All I know is that it came in, I read it, and I said, “Umm, okay. It just might. And?” Perhaps obviously, I cannot ask Bob what sort of actionable response he wanted from this very important piece of news, because he, demonstrating exceptional courage, did not use a real email address.

There’s been a lot of talk about sluthood on the interwebs this week, mostly stemming from Jaclyn Friedman’s fantastic piece here and a couple patronizing, backlashy replies. I hesitate to link to them because I hate to send them traffic, but it’s never fair to call someone’s words idiotic without sharing the evidence you’re basing that judgment on.

When Jaclyn’s piece came out, I read it, thought it was great, so real of her, and clearly something that resonated with a lot of women. Jaclyn and I are friends, so I also had a little more inside scoop on what a big deal putting that out there was for her. While I very much appreciated the piece, it didn’t resonate with me on a personal level all that much. I’m quite certain this is not because it wasn’t a powerfully-written and important piece, because I think it was.

I just got off the phone with Jaclyn, in part because some I wanted to try and figure out WHY it didn’t resonate with me, and make sure that in figuring that out, I wasn’t making any assumptions about Jaclyn and her experiences or thoughts.

(By the way, an etiquette tip it appears some people never learned? When someone puts out something exceptionally personal, no matter who they put it out to or where, if you want to have anything resembling manners, you at least try and engage with them directly before you psychoanalyze them for the whole world, and probably mostly for your own benefit. No, no one HAS to do that, but anyone arguing for “values” or “respect” is going to lose an awful lot of face if they have the social graces of a mosquito.)

Back to that email. I got it, had that reaction to it, which was pretty much no reaction. That was followed with momentary amusement at the idea either I, or my mystery supervisor (oh, if only!), was supposed to have some kind of reaction.

See, to me, a statement like that is about as powerful and about as true as statements like:
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna has a BIG NOSE
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna is SHORT
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna was RAPED
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna ENJOYS HULA-HOOPING
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna likes giving and getting HEAD
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna has a PUG
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna is A BIG QUEERO
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna STUDIES SEXUALITY
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna is IRISH-ITALIAN
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna has been a TEACHER FOR 20 YEARS
• her advice comes from fact that Heather Corinna HAS RENT TO PAY

All true, all part of who I am and what life I live and have lived, and likely all part of what influences the advice that I give to others. Etymologically, being a slut means being untidy and/or being someone with a twat who has either bonked a lot of people or, as the awesome Kelly Huegel pointed out, is a female person who has had sex with more people than any one person calling them a slut considers acceptable. One supposes you can add in the frequent implication that being a slut means being someone of “loose” or questionable character or values.

So, am I a slut? Sure, okay. I am untidy. I have had sex with more people than some people consider acceptable, and on the bell curve of what folks report with a lifetime number of partners, I have had more than most. Since I have routinely questioned both my own values and character for myself all my life as a regular practice, and try to keep flexible, I suppose it’s also true to say mine are both questionable and loose. When you tell me or others something that is true about myself, I’m not likely to get my feelings hurt or be offended, particularly when we’re talking about things that have been my choice, like my sex life.

Jaclyn is getting some of the negative reactions she is just because some people are just idiots. But Jaclyn is also probably getting that kind of reaction because some of what she said is exactly what those people want to hear if they read very, very selectively. She’s a solid writer, which makes it easy to take her statements out of context.

In the piece, one thing she voiced was that what she most wants right now is a long-term relationship; that she has been able to have casual sex of late, and that it has been positive, but what she really wants and does not have is an LTR. While she did not voice a causal relationship between the two (quite the opposite), what she said allowed people who are seeking out such things to cling on to that notion, one they desperately want to believe and want others to believe. She also voiced she had feelings about casual sex that were not unilaterally positive, something else they want to hear and spotlight. And because she said what they wanted to hear and because it resonated with some other women, she’s a great sort of poster child for a carnival show where people pretend to be showing others the poor, broken girl who just doesn’t know any better so that they can avoid her same, terrible fate.

She also disclosed she survived sexual trauma. As I’ve said about a million times, if and when any of us do that, while it’s important we do do that, both politically and because being able to be honest about any part of our lives is major, we become very easy marks. Almost anything we do or experience ever-after, anything that is anything less than perfect, will often be attributed not even to our rape, but to us being a person who has been raped. I’ve decided my new comeback to this when I get hit with it, by the way, is going to be “Okay, let’s say everything wrong with me or that I’m unhappy about sexually or interpersonally IS because I was raped. So… what the hell happened to YOU that made YOU so screwed up?”

Anyway, in thinking about my non-reaction to that email since last week, to my less-than-super-pow reaction to Jaclyn’s post and to the responses to it, positive and negative, I’ve come to some conclusions.

Jaclyn was considered “the good girl” in her family. In mine, that was my sister, not me. Her good girl distinction and my bad girl one were affixed before either of us engaged in any kind of sexual behavior or even thought about it. Mind, my family was not a unified front in this. One of my parents was extraordinarily sex-positive and very strongly and loudly against slut-shaming and against the whole good girl/bad girl epoch, while my other parent — raised in a very religiously-oppressive household where this stuff was a staple — and particularly my stepparent (an abuser, so no surprises there), slut-crowned me pretty much on the basis of having a first kiss and on trying so hard to meet gender presentations that didn’t feel authentic to me, but that they required. It appears I erred on the side of presenting that way too well. Talk about a backfire. Not girly enough? You’re a dyke. Too girly? You’re a slut. It’s a tough game to win, and one I perpetually lost. It’s also why when I was assaulted at 11 and 12, after one attempt to tell my mother, I didn’t tell anyone for years. I knew my stepparent would feel proved right and I knew it would be used against me in his abuse. I couldn’t bear the thought of giving him any more ammo.

That consistent verbal slur or implication was also based in homophobia: I knew about my feelings for girls, or experienced them, anyway, before I knew about my feelings for boys. I didn’t recognize those feelings for what they were very clearly until high school, but in hindsight, it’s obvious my family did. That may be part of why, while the word “slut” doesn’t hold particular power with me, either as a slur or as something to reclaim, the word dyke very much did and has. I think that has to do with my own journey in getting right with other women and with my gender. Mostly, though, I think it’s about been called a dyke and not being far enough in those journeys that I did internalize it as a slur — something I never did with slut because when it was hurled at my in my pre-teens and early teens, I knew it wasn’t true. About feeling bad about something I wished I’d instead felt good about and had had the strength to refuse to internalize as bad.

Jaclyn and I talked about what our differences in some of this might be, and some of what came up was privilege. While we have or have had some similarities (the self-defense, the communication skills, the fact that we’re both white), we’re also a bit different in that arena. The trajectory of our lives and sexualities have been different: with each decade, for instance, my number of sexual partners has declined: in the last ten years, I’ve only been outside LTRs and single with casual partners for around 2. I have had my work or the credibility of my work impacted by my actual or perceived sexual behaviour. But I also tend to experience a weird kind of privilege in often having little privilege. I figure if it isn’t going to be one thing, it’ll be another, so I may as well just be who I am and put who I am on the table. Like Janis sang, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Like Jaclyn, I have had times in my life when I have wanted an ongoing, intimate relationship and have not had one, though with me that’s rarely abstract. When I want one of those, it tends to be about wanting one with someone specific (or, let’s be frank: about wanting relationships where I can get some privilege and be spared some of the judgment we get while in other models). It’s fair to say I’ve usually been far more cautious about getting into romantic relationships than I have been about getting into bed with someone.

The first person I deeply romantically loved and wanted a lifelong relationship with died, and I had a while in my teens and early 20’s where I struggled with the idea that I had my shot with romantic love; I met My One Person and since apparently there was but The One, I had had mine and was shit out of luck because that person was dead. I got over that, but it took a while, and all the bullshit about there being only one big love people shove down everyone’s throat did not help at all. Given the fact that in many ways, the people closest to me growing up turned out to be who I could trust the least, I absolutely have had intimacy issues because getting close has always equaled a fear of not just being hurt, but the fear-via-experience of being abused and seriously neglected. I could go on, but the point is I have a very good idea about the why of that (and have already had and enjoyed the psychoanalysis to help me get there, thanks), and it’s simply What Is: don’t see it as anything broken I need to fix, but the person I am based on the life I’ve lived, a person I like, love and respect.

I’ve had a handful of long-term relationships in my life, most of which I’d class as fruitful and beneficial: I had good experiences in them and got good things from them, so did the other person or people. Sparing the death of my sweetheart in high school, the person who has left or adjusted almost every one of them? That’s usually been me. Why? It depends, really, but more times than not it’s just been because various needs or wants I had weren’t being met in those relationships or the relationship had morphed from something romantic into a different kind of relationship that felt a better fit for everyone. First time at bat with my current partner, I skeedaddled because of PTSD whacking me in the face without warning or preparation and I dealt with it very badly as a result.

However, I’ve also had just as many times when I wanted more casual sex partners or experiences than I had. Like most parts of life and like many people, I’ve had both feast and famine, and have been delighted about the feast and distressed about the famine. In what things or areas there was bounty or drought strikes me as irrelevant. Bounty almost always feels great while drought pretty much always sucks, for everyone, with everything. Rocket science, this ain’t.

I even miss casual sex when I’m not having it. I can’t always say that so plainly when I’m with someone long-term. But blessedly, my partner (who’s known me on and off for 20 years, a relationship that began in 1989 with a three-night-stand) knows with certainty that I very much enjoy the sex that we have as a currently monogamous couple and also understands that while there are plenty of common threads between sex we have in LTRs and casual sex, also groks the differences and is evolved enough and smart enough not to see them as being in a cagematch.

When I miss it, what I miss is the adventure, the uncertainty, the dance of the thing. I miss sudden, often unexpected connectivity. For me, there was always something spiritually very cool in experiencing sex as one of the many ways people who aren’t deeply connected can wind up very deeply connecting quickly, be that with the sex itself or with the conversation before or after. While I’m all for taking the cultural unacceptability out of casual sex for those who still cling to it or are very impacted by it, at the same time, there’s this sort of partners-in-crime thing I’ve sometimes had with casual sex partners, where you’re both doing this thing you know some people think is not okay, which can make it all the more playful.

There’s a kind of abandon that I experience in sex period, but which for me has been particularly strong with casual sex. There’s that thing where it’s really very much up for grabs as to whether or not you’ll have sex that day or night or not that’s a lot tougher to come by with sex in ongoing relationships, long or short-term. There’s a lack of expectation I appreciate. Heck, I miss being able to blog more about the sex I have: that’s a lot more tricky when you’re having it outside casual situations. As well, given some of my history, it’s often been easier for me to say what I want when there are no strings attached than when there are. I can either way, it’s just that doing so with someone who knows me very well is more of a challenge, and feels much more vulnerable to me, so it’s scarier at first than in casual sex.

I clearly prefer ongoing or long-term relationships that start with casual sex. Not that I honestly know much about the alternative, since I’ve almost unilaterally had that thing happen that so many of us are told will NEVER happen with casual sex. Almost all of my ongoing romantic relationships have started with casual sex. Many of my friendships have, too. One of the things I miss when I’m missing casual sex are the friendships that I have found stem from it. Casual sex has rarely meant a lack of love for me. I’ve given and received a lot of love and care in most of my sexual relationships of all sorts; the casual ones have been no exception.

I know a lot of people are very scared of STIs with casual sex, but this is one of those areas where I know too much. Coming of age with a parent working in some of the earliest AIDS care meant I got and saw facts, not fictions. My personal life and those around me have reflected the reality that it’s lack of barrier use and lack of sexual healthcare most responsible for STIs, not what kind of sex we have. Having more partners certainly increases the risks, but only having one or two and not using barriers and having everyone regularly tested presents even larger ones. If I didn’t know this before I went into working in sexual health, including in clinical work, I sure know it now. Someone can tell me all they want STIs are about casual sex, but they’re usually not people working in these fields because we know better. When I hear someone say “she’s risking her life for casual sex!” I tend to wish I could require compulsory volunteering in domestic/intimate partner violence.

I’m aware, especially after going on 13 years of sex and relationships being my full-time work, that there is NO human interaction in which we cannot get hurt; NO one way of having sex or sexual relationships that removes the risk of heartbreak or abuse. There are some bare basics — consent, communication, self-awareness — and then each of us doing our best to make choices and interrelate in the ways that feel a best fit for us and anyone else involved at any given time of our lives.

I know that for people like the two I linked to shredding Jaclyn, of course, there’s also a gender script pretty much running the show. However, it’s not even worth addressing here because it’s absolutely meaningless and irrelevant for those of us who are queer and who aren’t gendernormative. (You also can’t make it meaningful by trying to change the facts of someone’s orientation and partnerships, calling them all male or hetero when they haven’t been. Just a tip.) I’d posit that even for those who are, much of the time it’s only relevant because they’re so susceptible to those messages, not because there’s some sort of biological or sociological essentialism that rule all.

With both casual and non-casual sex I have not had radically different dynamics when it comes to my partners and their/our gender. In fact, some of the most pervasive messages about gender in the hetero scripts about casual sex sound like science fiction through the lens of my own experiences. For example, in my own sex life, it’s not usually been men who were hardest to hold onto when holding on is what I wanted, but women. It’s not been women who have expressed feelings hurt by casual sex the few times that’s happened, but men. Whoever these “all men” are that fuck and run? I’m not sure I’ve slept with any of them, and if I have, I must have just run through the finish line myself before I saw them start their own sprint.

There’s another difference Jaclyn and I talked about this morning, which is that being slut-shamed is new for her, whereas it’s something I grew up with and which has been pervasive for me for a long time.

I think it’s safe to say I haven’t ever been hurt by my own actual sluttery, per what that word actually means and per how it’s most often colloquially defined. Even being called one when I was young mostly hurt within the context of every name I got called and every way I was intentionally isolated and abused. There’s even a flip side to that, though, which is that being called a slut also gave me permission to go and be one: after all, if you’re going to get called something that involves doing things you may enjoy, it feels silly not to do those things. Maybe if I hadn’t gotten called one, it would have been harder for me to explore that part of my nature, which has involved some of the best parts of my whole life.

The personal disrespect to me in slut-shaming isn’t really what has stung, since it’s generally been clear people who throw that word at others don’t have much respect for anyone, not just me. They also most often seem to be most strongly reacting to women having sex outside the system of sex-for-goods, be those goods marriage, shelter, children, social status, hat have you. That’s a big reality for many women in the world I acknowledge and understand, for sure, and also acknowledge and understand is inescapable for some, but I also feel is nothing close to ideal. I’m lucky to have been able to live outside that system for most of my life with only a few brief exceptions. This is usually also clearly why so many of the folks so attached to that way of codifying sex are so anti-prostitution: it’s critically important their sexual exchanges be seen as radically different, even though I don’t see the big diff myself.

The few times I have felt deeply hurt by being a “slut,” wasn’t in any of the sex (or untidiness) I was having or had, but in the way people who call me or other people sluts; in the way “being a slut” is presented, something Jaclyn spoke so aptly about. It was the verbal abuse — like any verbal abuse — that hurt, not my own sexual life used as a vehicle for that abuse. That’s probably a big duh for those past the 101 of abusive dynamics, interpersonal relationships and sexuality. But for some strange reason, it escapes people’s minds who think that they can say the issue isn’t THEIR chosen words or actions, but what WE did to CAUSE their words and actions to burst forward from their mouths and fingers, which they apparently have no control over because of how our own lives, of which they often have been no part. It’s amazing that the same people who tell women they should just shut their legs don’t seem to have the same standards for their own mouths.

The times I’ve been attacked and nonconsensually deconstructed per what a slut/whore/insert-your-fave-sexual-chick-shame-here I am and it has hurt, the hurt was centrally about something different than I think the folks doling out that epithet imagine it to be. It’s not been about my feeling ashamed of myself or my choices. It’s instead been about profound disappointment and weariness that we still, at this point in history, can’t all be real about who we are in our sex lives and have our divergence simply recognized as the diversity human sexuality and life is, with the understanding that none of our lives is everyone’s right answer. That so many people still just cannot get that because they put themselves and their lives out there as prescriptions doesn’t mean we all do. When those attacks are about you having casual sex and about how much that sex shows how little self-respect you have or how little respect you’re getting, the ironic icing on that cake is that I’ve been very respected and cared for, as have my partners, in most of the sex — casual and not — that I have had. Where I’m not getting that respect isn’t from the people everyone says didn’t or won’t respect me, but from the people presenting themselves as experts on respect who clearly know nothing about it at all.

As someone who has worked many years and long hours to try and repair some of this stuff culturally, it’s particularly frustrating and tiresome and makes me feel like Don Quixote all too often. Which is really no fun at all without a Sancho Panza to have witty, existential banter with or without getting your very own musical.

There’s also a subtext to all of this that has to do with who is perceived as redeemable and who isn’t. If YOU, yourself, are seen as potentially redeemable, you get talked to one way: often with what is presented as gentleness, but tends to feel an awful lot like being patronized. If you are NOT seen as redeemable, the language tends to be more angry and rough. If who might be influenced by you or what you voice is seen as redeemable and YOU also are, you all get talked to like you’re stupid little lambs. If you are NOT seen as redeemeable, but who hears or sees you is, you’re really in the shit. And if you get so lucky, you and anyone you might influence are all seen as unredeemable, because that usually nets you a complete and blissful silence where you can just support one another and enjoy your private lives in peace.

I was accused by Walsh yesterday of having “many young women drinking my Kool-aid” who “were unhappy about it.” I’m not sure who these young women are or what my Kool-Aid is exactly. I asked, I got silence. Thus far, in the work I do, I have yet to see reports about how upset someone is that they did something Heather Corinna told them to do, sparing a few people I’ve told to get a GYN exam or a test for something and who got poor care from healthcare providers when doing so. Since I don’t tell anyone to have this kind of sex or relationship that kind of sex or relationship — quite the contrary — I’m not sure what that was all about.

Lest dumb assumptions be made, the reason this is not at Scarleteen isn’t because I feel ashamed of myself or my friends or that I think my sex life is de facto inappropriate. It’s because as much as possible, especially when the young people there don’t ask me for it, I limit what I share anecdotally and about my personal sex life. I have these funny things we call boundaries. I’d do the same even if I had only had one partner, married them and was with them for 25 years exclusively. The young people I provide sexuality education to usually know precious little about my sex life, because they come wanting to talk about theirs, and because my own sex life often has little to do with them or what they’re asking. How my sexual history would be pertinent to how to use their birth control method, where their own clitoris is or how to figure out what, if any, kind of sex or relationships they want is beyond me. Adults who assume I sit and talk turkey about what’s going on in my bedroom with young people usually do because that’s what they do, not because it’s what I do. Young people also tend to voice to me that older people’s anecdotes about their sexual experiences can feel like pressure, no matter WHAT those anecdotes are. Just a few weeks ago, a few of them were talking about how they feel pressured by a lot of abstinence-messaging TO have intercourse because it presents it as the only REAL sex. Go figure.

Some of the reaction to Jaclyn’s piece, or this business about my Kool-Aid clearly was about the poor, vulnerable young women we are perceived as having corrupted or may corrupt. Often evidence for this is stated in that wild, crazy “hookup culture” all the cool kids are purportedly part of. Beyond the fact that I’m not sure how people like myself or Jaclyn can be held responsible for any casual sex young women may be having now, I also want to make clear that I feel quite certain a lot of the hookup-culture assignments are pretty much exactly what happened to me when I was young. It’s calling people sluts who often haven’t even engaged in any sexual behaviour, or if they have, haven’t been doing anything different than what generations before them have.

Sparing a few limited populations, as far as I can tell and based on what young people talk about in droves in my work, this “hookup culture” where they’re apparently having ALL this sex or ALL this casual sex is mostly adultist sex panic. (The funny thing is, the only interaction I had with Walsh before this was on a panel where if I recall correctly, Logan Levkoff and I were calling her and another panelist out on exactly that issue.) From what I can tell, they’re more sexually conservative than my generation and a lot of my parent’s generation was, and are having around the same or fewer sexual partners than we were as a whole generation, not more. Which also makes them a lot more vulnerable to messaging about sluts, whether they’re going to do the name-calling or are going to get name-called; whether they are or are not sluts at all.

In fact, it’s entirely possible Bob is a 15 year-old kid who sees me as a slut simply because I’m a woman who is talking about sex, which he has been told, in umpteen different places, means I must be a slut and means he must try to shame me accordingly. Hopefully, Bob will grow up, which is more than I can say for many adults talking this way.

P.S. Some other entries have come up today around some of the fracas I wanted to point out:
• From Amanda Marcotte: http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/no_laughing_no_screwing_no_l…
• From The Sexademic: http://sexademic.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/girl-fight-sluts-vs-prudes/ (who also wrote about Oxytocin, oddly enough, as I’m trying to finish a piece on it I keep putting off)
• From Jessica Valenti: http://jessicavalenti.com/?p=592

by Amanda Marcotte

Damn you, Jessica Valenti.  I was about to leave the woolly, weird world of Susan Walsh behind after yesterday’s post, but your email tip pointing out that Susan straight up lied (oh no! so surprised!) on Twitter has sucked me back in.  The lie is simple---Susan was squawking about sluts, so I asked her to tell me how many partners a woman could have before she was a slut, and she demurred, claiming to care not for this tawdry discussion of numbers.  But on her blog, she straight up says you’re a lonely, used up slutbag if that number is too high, and maybe you should consider a little dishonesty to cover up the stink. 

Your number is too high. OK, fine, you don’t want any guy who cares about how many people you’ve slept with. Problem is….that’s most guys. You don’t have to tell anyone your personal data. Just be aware that when you’re making the rounds within a certain community or group of friends, word gets out fast. I don’t think there has ever, ever been a guy who got laid and didn’t tell anyone about it afterwards. If your number is high and that fact is well known, you have every right to find a new pack of males and revirginate reinvent yourself.

I suppose the more generous interpretation is just that Susan’s a man-hater, and thinks all men are uptight yet sleazy at the same time.  Again, I’m not sure why women are supposed to want so desperately the validation of a relationship from men, if men are so terrible, but I guess it’s because we’re accept on faith that they may suck but they are our superiors and we need them to validate us. 

But I link this not just to call Susan a liar, because I did that on Twitter.  I’m linking this because it’s great evidence of a pet theory I’m working on about how skeptical tools often used to debunk horoscopes and psychics can also be used to debunk reactionary dating advice.  In particular, the confirmation bias.  It’s why psychics or astrologers can just throw a bunch of shit out there, and you’ll attach yourself to the one that seems true about you and forget all the rest.  “Do I sense a John that died of something in the heart/stomach region? No.... A name that starts with M....something in the head.... You say Mary died of brain cancer?  Yes, I’m feeling a Mary.” Or a horoscope that says, “Today there will be some trials, but you will get through them.” If that’s true, then you remember the horoscope being accurate.  If, in fact, you didn’t get through them, then well, you have other things on your mind, if you still have a mind.  You see how it works.

This link provides a particularly blunt version of this tactic.  Let’s start with the title: “20 Reasons You Don’t Have a Boyfriend”.  Well, I have a boyfriend, so if I was an ordinary reader instead of a feminazi hellbeast bent on revenge, I’d probably skip this article and forget the whole thing.  Things written therein that are true of me won’t be used to disprove the thesis, since I never bothered to do a rigorous experiment to find out if, as Susan suggests, sluts with some too high number that we won’t ever actually name don’t get boyfriends.  (Evasion of specifics is another tactic of charlatans.) Unfortunately, I’m not an ordinary reader.  Or fortunately, depending on your point of view. 

But let’s dig in to the reasons that you without boyfriends don’t have them.  And no, don’t be all smart with your thinking jokes are funny shit and saying things like, “Because I have a girlfriend who would disapprove” or perhaps, “Because I just threw his shit out the front door and changed the locks.” Because, if you’ll recall from earlier, jokes are only performed by people who think having fun is clever, and they really should know better.  Also, women who crack jokes never have boyfriends, because jokes put your oxytocin levels at the level where no man can be snagged.  It’s science, people.  I peer-reviewed it, i.e. showed it to some misogynist blog commenters and they liked it. 

1. You’re needy.

Right off the bat, we get that this is straight up bullshit.  If being needy runs the guys off, then wouldn’t the first step be to put down the blog post examining why OMFGURSTILLSINGLEWHATSWRONGWITHU, go out on the town with your girls, pick some guy up, fuck him, and then push him out the front door as soon as he starts getting that I-kinda-like-you smile?  Or at least start by not reading blog posts whose very existence says, “You, the reader, are kind of desperate and needy.” I suspect, however, Susan Walsh doesn’t want you to stop reading her bullshit.

2. You like players. You say you want a nice guy, but you fall for the same lines again and again. You can’t resist the bad boys, the ones who have dumped on other women.

Confirmation bias in action, with a dose of tautology. Rejection is just part of dating, but every guy who rejects you gets rounded up to a “player” and every guy you rejected gets turned into the one who would have totally been the best boyfriend ever.  It’s easy to be deluded by this, because if you just say yes to every guy who asks, even if you’re not attracted to him, you will have a boyfriend by definition.  But probably not one that you like, which is something Susan doesn’t seem to think matters very much. 

3. You’re a princess. You want a man who will proclaim to the world that he is whipped as butter. He will worship the very ground you walk on. Trouble is, the only men who will happily inhabit a one-down position in a relationship have no balls. Do you really want a guy who will eagerly go to a bunch of chick flicks with you? Wouldn’t you rather accompany him to Transformers from time to time?

This is in there to destabilize premises you have that might make you resistant to her arguments, the main one being the idea that relationships should be built on rapport and mutual admiration.  The princess shit is a cover for the real argument, which is, “You will never actually find a man who you could have a real relationship with, since men and women are completely different in any way.  So drop that love model and accept my relationships-are-transactional model.”

4. You flirt too much.......

5. You’re not in the game. If you’re shy, reserved, or aloof, you are not approachable.

Confirmation bias in action.  Pick one and forget she said the other thing.  (Oh sure, I’m sure she’d say that there’s a happy medium, but of course, has no solid suggestions on what it is.) These two start to approach what I discovered was the general theme of the post, which is, “To find out what you’re doing wrong, look down your pants.  If you find a vagina there, then you’re bound to be fucking up all the time no matter what you do.” Much of it was basically setting women up to feel uncomfortable having self-respect or standards, for fear that they’re bitchy, high maintenance, self-absorbed, fill in your misogynist stereotype.  But what was really awesome was the continuing theme of straight up contradictions. 

Like:

16. You’re flaky. A plan is a commitment. Don’t blow someone off when something better comes along......

19. You’re rigid. You have plans for Saturday night, but his buddies are going to a game that night, would Friday be OK? You say, “No, you made plans with me first. And Saturday is date night.”

So the advice is to make it clear that you’re just an object to be manipulated, right?  He can flake, change plans, and waste your time, but his plans are sacrosanct and your commitments to him should be honored.  So, you need to be like a toy for men, that they can just take off the shelf and play with when they like, but that has no life of her own worth mentioning, right?

No, after insulting your very dignity, she’s going to make it clear that you can’t win.

20. You’re a pushover. You put up with all kinds of crap. You allow yourself to be booty called and stood up.

So, treat his time as sacrosanct, your time as endlessly flexible, your commitments to him as unbreakable, his commitments to you as irrelevant....but don’t be a pushover.  Got it.  Perhaps you should throw darts at this and figure out which one is why you don’t have a boyfriend?  Because a lot of these can’t be true at the same time.

Still, this may have been my favorite of the “can’t win for losing, straight ladies” contradictions:

14. You’re too hard to get. Yes, everyone likes a challenge. No one likes eager or desperate. But employing “The Rules” or some other silly tactic is just going to leave you solo......

15. Your number is too high.

Don’t be easy, except you should be easy.  Whichever one applies to you, pick it and that’s the reason you don’t have a boyfriend.  Unless you do.

There’s, I suppose, another way to read this list, but it’s no more generous.  She could just be suggesting that having a personality is your problem, and that you should moderate your traits out of existence.  If anything about you starts to form into a “trait”, someone out there probably won’t like it, and so you should get rid of it for fear it might get you rejected.  Of course, “bland” is also a trait. 

Starting advice from the position that rejection-avoidance should be your goal above all others, including finding someone compatible or being happy with yourself, is the perfect baseline to hand out reactionary gender ideology and pretend that it’s “advice”.  Conservatism in general trucks in fear as a tactic, so why not when it comes to dating “advice”?  But of course, as Jaclyn noted in her essay that kick started this whole thing, learning to take rejection with aplomb is probably one of the most valuable skills you can have in the real world of dating and sex.