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January 20, 2008

A Typical Kid Picking Her Nose

Via Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex, I have learned about a way of depicting young girls as sexualized known as “lolicon,” a bastardization of “lolita complex,” which (I am not making this up) “has a nicer ring to it than pedophile."

I have three things to say.

1. GROSS.

2. Ditto to everything Figleaf says in his response to the topic.

3. Have any of those people proclaiming their interest in lolicon ever read Nabokov’s damn book? Because it doesn’t make sex with a budding pubescent (a.k.a. nymphet) particularly appealing.

Ten years ago or so, I got an email from one of my friends, who’d snagged an easy gig writing up a piece on “the ten sexiest novels of all time” for some women’s mag. She wanted suggestions. I don’t remember what I told her she should include, but I do remember telling her two books I thought SHOULD NOT be on the list.

The first was The Story of O. I said something like, “I know everyone thinks this is all sexy, because it has fetishwear and fucking and bondage and total submission to sexual servitude, and that turns a lot of people on. I just don’t buy it. I don’t see why O goes along with the whole thing--why she doesn’t say, ‘Look, I really need to get back to my apartment and feed my cat, and oh yeah, I promised to call my mother this weekend.’ What happens to all her stuff back in Paris? Who pays her rent? Don’t any of the people she knew who didn’t want to turn her into a sex slave ever wonder what happened to her? I realize I’m not staging much of an argument for why it’s not sexy, except to say that I’m more persuaded by fantasies I can believe, so for me, The Story of O is just too impractical to be genuinely erotic.”

Of course my friend included it in her list anyway.

The other book I said shouldn’t be on the list was, of course, Lolita. I defy anyone to find a passage from that book that is really truly sexy. Consider this example in all its euphemistic obscurity and see if its depiction of a young girl's reaction to sex is hot--or not:

I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove.

Yeah. A naked adult man in a leather armchair, straddled by a girl he has had to bribe into allowing him to touch her, and even still, the only way she’ll tolerate sex with him is if she can read the comics while it’s happening and completely ignore what she's sitting on. I don’t think that’s hot, and I don’t think for a second that Nabokov wants us to find it hot.

There’s a way in which Humbert Humbert doesn’t even LIKE Lolita. He complains that “Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl.... She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” And she doesn’t much care for him--in fact, he realizes very early on that to her he was “not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn” and she hates sex with him. OK, he claims that the first time they have sex, she seduced him. But aside from that one time, he has to bribe or blackmail her in order to get her to consent to anything at all.

How sexy is this?

Her weekly allowance, paid under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start....and went up to one dollar five before [the] end.... She was, however, not easy to deal with. Only listlessly did she earn her three pennies--or three nickels--per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed--during one schoolyear!--to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks... she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot.... then I would burgle her room.... what I feared most was not that she might ruin me but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away.

He knows just how much she wants to run away, because he would hear “her sobs in the night--every night, every night--the moment I feigned sleep.”

He knows this. And he keeps her prisoner anyway, until she is lucky enough to escape him. And Nabokov wants us to know that HH knows this; wants us to know that HH understands what his question and her refusal mean when, after he finds her, married and pregnant, he asks her to leave her husband and go with him:

“I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. "You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”

“No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”

She had never called me honey before.

“No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean--”

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally. (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”)

This isn’t a book about the tragedy of being a monster in love with a nymphet. It’s a book about how tragic it is to be the nymphet a monster makes captive. HH is intelligent and articulate, a very compelling narrator, far more articulate and sophisticated than Dolly Haze could have been. But at crucial moments, Nabokov undercuts HH’s lust and ecstasy with the very real and poignant grief of a little girl who has realized “during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif.” And Nabokov has HH state this:

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Which is why I always think people who worry about whether or not HH loved Lolita sort of miss the point. I personally think he did love her, as much as he could love anyone, but SHE HATED HIM.

I love the novel Lolita. I think it’s amazing, and compelling, and brave, and wise. It’s one of the few books narrated by a monster--Grendel by John Gardner is another--that I really admire. But how someone can read it in any but the most superficial way and think it’s sexy, I don’t understand. I told my friend all that. But of course she found something to quote from it, and included it in her list of the ten sexiest novels, and earned about $4,000 for 1,000 words, most of them written by someone else. (Yeah, I admit, I was jealous of that.)

Anyway. All of this has to do with this larger meditation on lust I’m working on. Humbert Humbert’s lust is overwhelming, all-consuming; Lolita’s lust is either non-existent or irrelevant--the one person she wants, Quilty, wants only to watch her screwing someone else.

I’ll continue with this later.

Posted by Holly at 10:07 PM | Comments (12)

December 24, 2007

Someone Else's Argument About How Porn Skews Our Expectations of Sex

As one my recent entries should make clear, in many regards I'm often a fan of explicit depictions of sex: I can appreciate them for their artistic and erotic value. But I'm not a fan of most porn, either in theory or in practice, because I find most of it joyless, predictable and exploitative.

Within the corner of the Blogosphere concerned with sex and gender, there are only five bloggers who haven't already commented on the infamous Details blog piece from the summer asking if it's OK for men to demand anal sex from women. As I'm one of those five, I should probably get that duty out of the way before the year ends. I'll do it, however, by seconding everything Twisty Faster says about it in her critique. Twisty argues that the phenomenon "is an escalation of porn culture," which seems likely enough to me. And in this piece from The Guardian UK, Marina Hyde makes the same argument about another way men are showing contempt for women during sex: they apparently feel entitled to ejaculate on a woman's face, without asking, on the first date.

I especially like this statement from Hyde: "porn is screwing up sex. Not sex in relationships, but the kind of casual sex in which it would be nice to think people could indulge in a mutually enjoyable, non-exploitative fashion." From what I hear from young women in the dating trenches, I think that's right, and it's no doubt one more reason educated, successful women who have aquired an appropriate sense of their own worth and what they deserve in a relationship are more likely to have orgasms during sex than their less educated female counterparts, and one more reason feminists have the most rewarding sex lives.

Posted by Holly at 2:26 PM | Comments (6)

December 19, 2007

Maybe It Really Was Two Minutes In Heaven

Episode 18 of VM, which I discussed yesterday, opens with Veronica making out with Deputy Leo (whose reappearance near the end of season 3 is a much needed bright spot) before her front door. He wonders why he’s never been invited in and wants, he says, “to get a really good, long look at your bedroom ceiling.”

“Wow! College girls must be easy,” she replies.

The focus of the scene is the talking, not the kissing. There’s no dramatic music, nothing unusual in the camera shot. You understand, from everything in the scene itself, that these two people like each other, but you also understand that Leo likes Veronica a lot more than she likes him. I thought Deputy Leo was a great character and was sorry Veronica wasn’t nicer to him. But the show doesn’t intend for them to have incredible chemistry, and they don’t. The show does intend for Veronica and Duncan to have incredible chemistry, and they still don’t.

The show intends for Veronica and Logan to have incredible chemistry, and they do. And it makes sense that they do. Because as they work together on things like finding out who stole the money at the poker game, what’s going on with the various witnesses who claim to have seen Lynn Echolls jump off the bridge or ride away in a van, who is using the credit cards of Logan’s supposedly dead mother, they come to see one another’s virtues and vulnerabilities.

The kiss signifies something complicated and wonderful: they’ve discovered they have an emotional connection. As they acknowledge this emotional connection, it allows for an embodied attraction. (I use that slightly odd phrase because I think it covers more than calling the attraction merely “physical,” as opposed to some other sort, like “emotional” or “intellectual.” Emotions and thoughts are not just emotional and intellectual, they are embodied, and can cause physiological changes, including alterations in blood pressure, pulse, expression, posture, digestion, etc; and embodiment includes things like the way we carry ourselves, what our voices sound like, and how we adorn or decorate our bodies.) Admitting and acting on that attraction allows their emotional connection to deepen. And lust is part of every aspect of the embodied attraction and connection.

These people want each other, and the kiss makes it clear. OK, it’s a pretty tame kiss in a lot of ways: it’s just a first kiss, and just first base, and they’re juniors in high school, and while Veronica isn’t a virgin in that she was roofied and raped while unconscious, she’s never had consensual sex she remembers, so she could be considered a kind of psychological virgin. But there are little things, aside from the camera work and soundtrack, that show how passionate this kiss is. One gesture I particularly love is when Logan slides his hand down to the small of Veronica’s back and stops there for a moment: he knows that according to the protocol of a first date, his hand can’t venture any farther down, but it then allows him to slide his hand back up along her spine--not too far up, mind you--but this time, his hand is under her shirt. The kiss continues a moment longer, before they break apart and stare at each other, alarmed, excited and confused. There’s an awkward disengagement from the embrace, then Veronica goes to her car and shrugs at Logan before she gets in and drives away. Days later, after an inconsequential conversation about something else, Veronica will think to herself, “All right-y, Logan. We’ll just skip over the two minutes in heaven we had. You want to pretend it never happened? No argument here. My lips, for all intents and purposes, are sealed,” but there’s virtually no talking involved in this kiss. And it wasn’t two minutes in heaven: it was closer to a minute.

I acknowledged Monday that I could watch a fairly explicit, completely naked sex scene I enjoyed and admired, and still not get worked up, because the sex wasn’t about me. Whereas this kiss I’ve just described is, as I’ve already acknowledged, pretty tame. And yet, as I imagine my account of the details make clear, watching it is a complete turn-on. This is because the kiss replicates both my experience and my fantasies in really lovely ways. The kiss is a nice, accurate representation of what I have been taught to consider the early stages of how you act when you want to deepen not feelings of friendship, nor admiration or respect or esteem (though I think things develop more nicely when you feel all those things), but feelings of lust. And I have found, that just as turned out to be the case with Veronica and Logan, lust can make you feel more kindness, affection, respect and tenderness for the person with whom you explore it.

I grew up being told, flat-out, “Lust is evil.” We had countless lessons on it in every venue the church could provide. Lust is evil. Love is pure and virtuous, and completely unconnected to lust, which is evil. Lust is an evil feeling, and the actions that proceed from it are, from start to finish, evil. Never mind that, more than just about any other branch of Christianity, Mormonism is obsessed with sex, scorning and condemning celibacy as abnormal and insisting everyone get married, while the big whoop-de-doo reward of Mormon heaven is that you get to have sex for all eternity, which you wouldn’t find much of a prize if you didn’t have an active enough libido to experience lust to some degree and with some frequency. In Mormon culture and doctrine, you get married, you have sex, but somehow, you’re supposed to do it without feeling lust, feeling only this other, pure desire for children or SOMETHING that is divorced from anything erotic or bodily--again, ironic, since Mormons claim to love bodies, and insist that God has a body.

I don’t believe lust is evil, any more than hunger or illness or being incredibly, incredibly cold, or even buoyant good health, all of which can also prompt people to commit evil acts. (I think people get up to mischief sometimes when they’re feeling REALLY good.) I believe that the Mormon church’s vilification of lust is evil, and one more reason that Utah is the most depressed state in the nation.

All right. I have to run off to meet a student now and I’m going to be late. But I’m still moving towards my final point, and I promise to get there eventually. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Holly at 1:45 PM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

October 31, 2007

Sex, Misogyny, and My Blog Stats

I am not religious about checking my site meter or my blog stats, particularly when I’m not blogging much, and lately I haven’t been. But I generally try to check them once a week or so, just because.

About a year ago I noticed that there was a lot of traffic to my blog from some site called Real Adult Sex. This totally freaked me out, for so many reasons. First of all, I figured it was a porn site, and I didn’t want to visit it, because (believe it or not) I’ve never consumed internet porn and sort of wanted to keep it that way, plus I have heard that a lot of porn sites infect your computer with all sorts of nasty spyware and so forth. Secondly, I couldn’t imagine why a site devoted to “real adult sex” would be linking to mine, because although I write a lot about sex, I write about things like how it sometimes sucks and how I used to be a prude (and sort of still am--hence the fact that I’ve never visited an internet porn site). I didn’t see why that would appeal to the readers of a site discussing real adult sex.

Then traffic from that site dropped off--though it didn’t go away completely--and I just quit worrying about it. Recently, however, it picked up again, and I thought, all right, I don’t care if it is a porn site; I have to know what’s going on. So I followed the links back.

And it’s not porn. (At least I wouldn’t consider it a porn site, though some people might, because it’s got photos of human bodies without a lot of clothes on.) It’s a blog about sex, written by a straight guy who uses the name Figleaf and takes feminism seriously. He refers to himself as both “a libertine prude” and “a prudish libertine,” which are each a label I think I could apply to myself, so I can see why he might find my stuff worth noticing from time to time. His blog is actually pretty great, and I feel stupid and sad that I missed out on reading it for a year because I was overly cautious about sex, in all the ways my church taught me to be. The most recent link to my blog has to do with cheese and why it’s a nice thing to lick off a body. (Just one more thing I’m really glad to know about--it sounds way better than the chocolate sauce or whipped cream business--but don’t see myself doing any time soon, ‘cause I’m feeling more prudish than libertine these days.)

I added Figleaf to my blog roll, though I had to think about where to include him, because I don’t have a section for sex. I almost went with feminism, because as I say Figleaf writes about feminism and critiques patriarchy, but decided in the end on "not so easily classified" which is not accurate, because the blog is quite easily classified; it just doesn't fit into the classifications I use. (There's a lesson there.)

The other thing showing up a lot lately in my blog stats are a score of google searches for “Ben Christensen misogynist.” Longtime readers will remember Ben--the gay man who married a straight woman in a Mormon temple wedding, wrote a really uninformed and poorly reasoned essay about doing so (which was published in Dialogue), and likes to google himself so he can see all the unpleasant things people say about him and then get angry and indignant and bothered, which led him to my blog, since I had pointed out both the dubious nature of his choices as well as the inadequacy of his defense of them.

Anyway, I’m not sure what’s up with the 20 “Ben Christensen misogynist” searches these days--probably has something to do with the fact that the most recent issue of Sunstone includes an essay based on the paper I presented at the 2006 symposium as part of the panel I organized on marriages between straight women and gay men. The essay appears in an issue foregrounding women’s voices; if you’re interested in Mormon women, you should check it out.

I’m pretty happy with my essay, which is the longest piece in the issue. There’s one subtle thing about it I wonder if anyone will notice unless it's pointed out to them: I tried to include references to lesbian experience wherever possible (which wasn’t so often because the essay is, after all, on relationships between straight women and gay men) and to privilege them whenever I mention them, writing, for instance, “lesbians and straight women” or “lesbians and gay men” or “gay women and men,” etc, so that lesbians always come first. I did this because the more I examine the issue of homosexuality and Mormonism, the more I notice how lesbians and their concerns are excluded from most discussions of the topic--so often it’s as if lesbians don’t even exist, or if they do, their experiences and concerns don’t matter as much as those of gay men. I wanted to show that although I was not focusing on the concerns of lesbians, I was at least aware of their existence and advocate for their rights.

I’m also fairly satisfied with the critique I offer of Christensen’s position, which I purposely kept pretty restrained. I talked to the editor quite a bit about how lousy and misogynist Christensen’s essay was, and how remarkable it was that the editors and respondents at Dialogue didn’t see this. I worried that some folks at Dialogue would be upset by the fact that I also take them to task ever so briefly for not seeing how truly reactionary, conservative and unenlightened Christensen’s essay is, but the folks at Sunstone pointed out to me that Dialogue published it, and they needed to take their lumps.

Anyway, for those of you who are here because you want to know why I applied the title misogynist to Ben Christensen, well, here are a few of the primary reasons:

1. He is so thoroughly the beneficiary of patriarchy that he can’t even recognize where his privilege begins. He can’t see, for instance, as I pointed out in yesterday’s post, that his decision to court a straight woman proceeded from the very beginning from a position of power and privilege.

2. In his essay, he shows that he is concerned only with the ways that hetereonormativity and its attendant customs and practices have hurt him, even though the primary victims of heteronormativity are women.

3. In his comments on my blog, he reveals that he is so indifferent to and ignorant of the impact of patriarchy in the lives of women that he believes, as he states explicitly, he is above it and can define his relationships with women entirely on his own, despite a list of the ways he chafes at how society defines and restricts him as a gay man.

4. As I discuss in my essay, he felt entitled to expect the support of women and feminists for his positions and arguments, just because, even though he never stopped to think about the ramifications for women of his positions and arguments. Seriously: would women’s lives be better if even more gay men decide to court and marry straight women, asking them to agree to lifelong fidelity in a marriage that forecloses the possibility of true erotic attachment, just so the guys can be dads the heteronormative way and "fulfill heavenly father’s plan," which is what Christensen’s argument boils down to? (Why not just let gay men marry and adopt, so they can be dads in a way that has far less impact on women, and makes them happier in the first place?) And is someone who expects the support of women and feminists but never stops to ask a question like that, a friend or a foe of the feminist cause and women in general (however decent or not he might be to individual women)?

5. He doesn’t bother to learn about the context.

6. In other words, he advocates for the continued privileges of men, at the expense of the well-being of women, and he does so from a position of ignorance and entitlement.

Anyway, my thanks to Figleaf for the links, and to Ben, well, I hope you get whatever you want most, because as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t know what to wish for you: that you never fall madly in love and so find it easier to stay in the marriage you committed to (even though you can admit in your writing some of the ways in which it is deficient), or that you do fall in passionately, madly in love but end up dealing with divorce. I want the world to be a place that makes it easier for you to be happy, provided your happiness doesn't come at the expense of someone else's full humanity--actually, that's what I want for everyone. I just wish you were able to want the same for women--but for you to want that, you'd have to renounce the position you took in "Getting Out/Staying In," and I doubt you're ready to do that.

Posted by Holly at 7:43 AM | Comments (6)

October 9, 2006

Women, Education and Orgasm

I found the links featured in this entry in Broadsheet, Salon's blog on women. I would have simply included a link to their post, but reading Salon requires a subscription and I know several of my readers don't subscribe, so I decided to be nice and go back to the source.

According to the headline of a story in Toronto's Globe and Mail, "Smart, rich women more likely to have orgasms, study suggests." That's right: for the more than 9,100 straight women polled, (the study, conducted in Australia, focused on straight men and women) there's a link between education, income, profession and sexual pleasure, but

Becoming sexually active before age of 16, length of time they were sexually active, number of past sexual partners, whether they masturbated, trolled Internet porn or watched X-rated videos had little association with a woman's ability to have an orgasm.

The results were much different when it came to the 10,100+ men who responded to the survey: education, occupation, income made no difference in whether or not a man could have a "toe-curling climax."

These statistics were also interesting:

Confirming a widely held belief, the research also found that men were far more likely than women to experience an orgasm during their last sexual encounter, 98.4 per cent and 68.9 per cent respectively.

and

Almost all the men surveyed said they reached orgasm from vaginal intercourse. Roughly 80 per cent said they did from oral sex.

For women, however, it was a different picture. Only 50 per cent reached orgasm from vaginal sex, while 70 per cent said they did through manual or oral stimulation.

That last bit might explain results reported in this story from the Australian Herad Sun: According to "The Turbo Twenties" study, a study of 570 Australian women in their 20s, if given an option between a nice dinner, a massage or sex, dinner is the first choice for women and sex the last:

About 30 per cent of participants said they preferred a romantic dinner to bedroom action, while a further 22.5 per cent rated a massage as better than sex.

Only 16.6 per cent said they would rather have sex.

Posted by Holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (3)

April 8, 2006

License and Licentiousness (Or, Self-Portrait as Loud-Mouthed Slut)

Here are some examples of what I looked like as a painfully inexperienced 25-year-old Mormon virgin. (They're popups instead of embedded because that way they don't end up anywhere else on the internet; sorry if this inconveniences anyone.) The first is the portrait of me my mother still displays in her home:

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This next one was taken in Provo, Utah, before I went to my second mission president's homecoming talk. Check out the shoes! I still have them but I hardly ever wear them, these great peau de soie pumps with rhinestones on them.

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This last one was taken in the family room in my parents' house. I like how this huge television (by the standards of the late 1980s) is still surrounded and dwarfed by this massive wall of books. There were heavily-laden bookshelves in every room of the house I grew up in, with the exception of the bathroom--and in that room, there was a magazine rack built into the wall by the toilet. I think that explains something about who I am.

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Anyway, the quality of the photos isn't the greatest: they were scanned on an old scanner and resized with old software. Still, I think I am not flattering myself excessively when I suggest that although the photos are blotchy and blocky in the way that digitized images sometimes are, they nonetheless suggest that I was a reasonably attractive young woman--at least, I had good hair and great ankles, and I knew how to work a clutch purse.

Now, I realize that this might sound like sour grapes, but the fact of the matter is, that at the point in my life when I was pretty much the hottest I'll ever be, I hardly ever dated. Why? Because I was Puritan feminist with a piss-poor attitude about pretty much everything, but especially religion and relationships.

That state of affairs had a lot to do with my mission, which I've written about in bits here on the blog and which was the greatest trauma of my life. I finished it six days before my twenty-third birthday. When I returned to college to finish my bachelor's degree a few months later, I attended Church meetings sporadically and tried to cultivate friendships with non-Mormons, but since I didn't drink, hated going to bars, was constantly obsessed with God and usually melancholy, I met with little success.

You would have been hard-pressed to find someone more virginal and uptight than I was. I had thoroughly absorbed the message about sex crammed down our throats at church: "Sex is filthy and disgusting; save it for someone you love." Occasionally some non-Mormon guy would ask me out, but I ended things the second he asked me to put out. I just wasn't going to do that, for so many reasons, ranging from fear of religious reprisals to deep-seated prudery.

As for how things fared with Mormon guys, well, let's see: a grand total of, hmm...TWO asked me out between the time I returned from my mission and the time I left the Church nearly three years later. The first guy asked me out after I first invited him to see Depeche Mode with me (I won tickets on the radio--about the only time in my life I've done that) and we dated for a while, until he got too thoroughly on my nerves. The second guy--well, he was a 20-year-old missionary, which means he was expressly forbidden to date, but since we'd fallen in love at first sight I hung out with him anyway, made plans with him to get married and live happily ever after, etc, none of which happened because he was, it turns out, gay, though we're still good friends to this day.

Why wouldn't Mormon men date me? I was pretty; I was bright; I had FABULOUS homemaking skills--I cooked, baked, sewed, knitted, and kept a clean house. I was good with babies. I managed my finances well. I would have made an ideal wife. Except there was that piss-poor attitude part....

I was outspoken, you see--outspoken to the point of being confrontational, and I simply could not muster any reverence for patriarchy, which translated into a profound cynicism. If I thought something was full of shit, I said so, even if I was talking to a priesthood leader in direct authority over me. And the fact that I was outspoken and not cowed by male authority was a sign, someone finally told me, that I was also a slut.

I'm not kidding.

Like I said, I was about as virginal and uptight as a girl can be. But plenty of people at church believed I had been sexually active for years. The logic went like this: I was outspoken and critical; because I claimed license to speak, I had to be licentious. It's a very old argument. It has gotten many women in trouble, including Anne Hutchinson, who liked to elaborate on each Sunday's sermon later in the week in her seventeenth-century New England Puritan home. That was fine as long as she only taught other women as they sewed together, but she acquired a reputation for wisdom and insight--and men began showing up to hear her. But church leaders knew that women could not possibly teach men, and stepped in to stop it. Hutchinson was put on trial, where she claimed the authority to preach the word of God. The prosecution argued that any woman who formulates doctrine and interprets the word of God must by definition be sexually promiscuous, for she has betrayed her sex by claiming a role allowed only to men. Hutchinson was convicted of a number of crimes and expelled from the community--she was excommunicated.

Which is why I shouldn't have found it the least bit remarkable that when a Mormon man wanted to shame me into shutting up in the discussion on John's blog, he resorted to criticizing what he knew about how I have conducted my sex life, information he gained from reading the sex archives of my blog. After first belittling my credentials and questioning my professionalism (which was every bit as offensive as he intended it to be, but I could live with it), he wrote:

And since when is sleeping around enlightened behavior Holly? You yourself have come to the conclusion that casual sex outside of a committed relationship is unlikely to bring you any kind of lasting emotional or physical satisfaction. I sincerely hope that isn't what you meant by "working one's ass off to figure certain things out." You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking your average Beehive or Mia Maid about the law of chastity; they would tell you (standing on the shoulders of their enlightened ancestors) that it wasn't intended to keep you from having fun, but rather to bring happiness and trust, and save you from heartache and unhappiness, in your personal relationships.

A Beehive, by the way, is the name given to 12- and 13-year-old girls in the Church youth group; a Mia Maid is the name for girls in the 14- and 15-year-old category. As I said, I thoroughly absorbed the church's message on sex and could have spouted it back to myself, but it wouldn't have saved me any trouble, since it never told me how to deal with getting my heart broken by a man I never slept with, or by one who dumped me in the midst of one of the most committed relationships I've ever been in. "Fun" had little to do with it, and I also can't help thinking that if I'd been given healthier messages about sex when I was indeed a Beehive and Mia Maid, I might not have had such problems figuring out how to navigate gracefully through the challenges involved in sex when I finally started having it.

I said a bit of that to him.... I also wrote,

I want to point out something else you've done in this conversation that I haven't: I haven't heretofore resorted to pointedly denigrating your personal decisions about how to live your life. I admit I read your comments to John about why you stick with the church and thought, "Here's another one of those cowards who knows the church is a crock of shit, but doesn't have the guts to do anything about it." But I refrained from bringing that up, or trying to use it against you.

To the guy's credit, he did apologize for getting personal, and acknowledged the accuracy with which I characterized him. But it was small comfort after he got Melchizedek* on my ass, talking to me like he was some priesthood leader empowered to discuss the details of my life while the details of his were off-limits.

And I think that's all I have to say on that topic for the time being. My next post will have nothing to do with Mormonism, I promise.

*The Melchizedek priesthood is the authority by which adult men wield power in the Mormon church.

Posted by Holly at 2:06 PM | Comments (16)

January 7, 2006

In Praise of the C Word

In the January 1, 2006 Sunday NY Times Magazine, there is a piece by Daphne Merkin as part of "The Way We Live Now" column that begins, "These are cruel times for vaginas." The piece goes on to describe various procedures that can be done to "improve" the appearance of external female genitalia, ranging from the "so-called Brazilian waxes" to labiaplasty, which "fixes" labia that are too big or too small or otherwise "defective."

I rather like the tone of the article: Merkin makes it clear that she finds the whole business hogwash, though I think the best section is devoted to the silliness of "hymen-reattachment surgery,"

once a desperate stratagem undertaken by young women from Muslim, Asian and Latin American cultures that demonized the loss of virginity before marriage, [which] is now being hawked as a way to enjoy a second honeymoon. If it's unclear whom this procedure is meant for--aging women hoping to catch a flagging penis with the semblance of undeflowered innocence?--it's even more ontologically ungraspable how stitching a hymen back together vitiates the psychological experience of having already lost your virginity.

Nonetheless, I was bothered by the fact that in her opening sentence, Merkin uses the term "vagina" when she should have used the term "vulva" or "pudendum."

Don't believe me? Consider these definitions:

vulva: The external genital organs of the female, including the labia majora, labia minora, and vestibule of the vagina. [Latin, womb, covering.]

pudendum: the human external genital organs, especially of a woman. Often used in the plural. [Latin, neuter gerundive of pudere, to make or be ashamed.] (The fact that the term is literally rooted in shame is the main reason I will avoid using it.)

vagina: The passage leading from the opening of the vulva to the cervix of the uterus in female mammals. [Latin, vagina, sheath.]

I know, I know: some of you are pointing out that we've covered this territory before: there's a section on it in Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues: Ensler includes a letter from Jane Hirschman, honorary chair of the Vulva Club, membership in which cannot be extended to Ensler (much to the dismay of those already in the club), because membership is "predicated on the understanding and correct usage of the word vulva and being able to communicate that to as many people as possible, especially women." Ensler includes the letter without responding directly to it, and although she names the next monologue "The Vulva Club," once that piece is done, she goes right back to using the word vagina to mean both vagina and vulva.

I think it's good that we can talk openly about the vagina, but I wish we could talk openly about the vulva too. I think how awkward it would be if, when we wanted to talk about an arm, we never used that word--even though it was available to us--opting instead to use the word hand, which was supposed to mean both that thing at the end of your arm with fingers on it, and the arm itself, in contexts that didn't always make it clear which body part you were actually referring to.

Sadly, in pop culture, the generally accepted and acceptable term meant to invoke all of female genitalia is vagina. Vulva, apparently, is too fastidious and precise; cunt and pussy are too crude. (More about those terms later.) But that raises the question: WHY is vagina the more familiar, accepted term?

In 2001, at Sunstone, I participated in a Mormon version of The Vagina Monologues, though it had to be retitled: it went by the name "Sacred Spaces: Mormon Women's Faith and Sexuality," though I thought it should have been called "The Vagina Testimony Meeting." I began my piece by stating that

I am happy to participate in the project of claiming the sexuality of Mormon women as sacred spaces. But I'd like to ask: what does space mean? Are we talking geometry, as in "the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field of every day life"? Are we referring to "sufficient freedom from external pressure to develop or explore one's needs, interests, and individuality," as in, "I need my space"? Or are we talking about "a blank or empty area"? I'd like to cast my vote for the freedom to explore our needs, interests and individuality, but I have a feeling that first we'll have to carve out a blank or empty area in which to claim "sufficient freedom from external pressure"--in particular, pressure from the dogma that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is evil--in order to make that exploration.

I go on to ask

Should I think of my vagina as a space? I know that in the male world, a vagina, mine included, is defined primarily as a space, an empty area. But unless you're giving birth, spaciousness is not a vaginal virtue--tightness is what makes for a good vagina, and exercises are prescribed to tighten a loose vagina up.

The vagina, spacious, tight or otherwise, is not the only organ of female sexuality. Why, aside from the fact that it is a receptacle for a penis, is the vagina so often the focus of discussions of female sexuality? The vagina is a deep subject but I would like to broaden this discussion, add a few contours. I would like to say the word pussy. I would like to say the word cunt. These words, unmentionable in many circumstances, refer not to the vagina but to the vulva, which includes the major and minor labia, the clitoris, and the "vestibule" of the vagina. I need these words to help me answer another question: What is the female equivalent of phallic? It can't be vaginal, which sounds as clinically medical as penile or testicular. It better not be hysteric, which, derived from the Greek word for womb, has too many negative connotations. Phallic refers not just to genitalia but the symbolic power of masculinity. What is the female equivalent, what word refers not only to genitalia but the symbolic power of femaleness? And what is that power? If such a word already exists, I don't think I've heard it, and so I propose a word: vulvic. I want to invoke the power to unsettle present in the word cunt. I want a word involving not just a sacred space but a sacred presence.

So that's right: I'm one of the few people--if not the only person--to say cunt at Sunstone, in front of an audience that included 75-year-old Mormon men. An audible gasp of astonishment rose when I said the word, and a few people strode from the room in outrage, but I kept right on going. I'm used to pissing off Mormons.

I admit that like Kate at Cruella-Blog, I am and have long been a fan of the C word. (Scroll down for Kate's defense of the word. As for why I include a euphemizing asterisk in the spelling of it, it's just so my blog doesn't come up when people are googling the term for porn sites. Note: I finally decided that writing "c*nt" was silly, and I came back and just wrote the word properly, as it deserves to be written: CUNT.) I like how strong it is: one clipped syllable, with plenty of firm consonants. I much prefer it to the term pussy, even though I quite like cats. I don't like that pussy is diminutive or animalistic, and I HATE that it's used by men as a term of derision for a weak, cowardly man: it really bothers me when straight men, who claim to take pleasure in women's bodies, invoke women's bodies as a way to insult other men. Admittedly, calling someone a cunt is about the worst insult you can hurl at him/her (compare it to calling someone a dick) in part because of the term's generalized ability to unsettle people, but to me, that's one indication of the word's inherent strength, one more reason it deserves my usage and respect.

I praise not only the word itself, but what it represents, and I also praise women who love their cunts as they are.

A follow-up to this is posted here.

Posted by Holly at 5:24 PM | Comments (8)

December 12, 2005

I'm Getting in on the Slayage

I'm happy to report that my proposal for a paper on "Bad Sex in Buffy" has been accepted for the Slayage Conference 2 to be held at the end of May 2006.

Please read all about my introduction to Buffy, and check out this brief reference to my initial attempts to sketch out some broad ideas about the topic. I want to share, because Buffy is my favorite TV show, and I'm thrilled that I'll be able to spend time researching and thinking about the show, and then get to spend a nice long weekend hanging out with other Buffy-philes.

Here's my abstract for the paper I'll be delivering in May:

‘Sex Is Bad?' ‘We All Knew That': Sex and the Consequences in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

After Cordelia recovers from being impregnated with demon spawn, she tells Wesley and Angel she's learned that "sex is bad," to which Angel replies, "We all knew that" (A1012). This is not Caleb's simplistic condemnation of sex as dirty and wicked, but an observation about the consequences of sexual activity in the Buffyverse. Much has been written on the sexualized nature of vampirism, and Justine Larbelestier provides a provocative binary of human (or vanilla) vs vampire (or BD/SM) sex in "The Only Thing Better than Killing a Slayer." But given how the range of characters populating the Buffyverse traverse the roles of human/demon, I argue that sex can't be categorized until after it has occurred (unless it involves someone "old" like Giles or Joyce, and then it's "gross"), and no criticism I've read adequately addresses how perilous sex often is in the Buffyverse, not only for Buffy and her demon lovers but for all the Scoobies. Seemingly "safe" sex not only produces dire consequences (supernatural pregnancy, the loss of one's soul, the need to kill one's lover); sexual behavior often attracts danger from outside the relationship, as when Tara is killed by a wayward bullet after she and Willow resume their relationship (Buffy 6019) or when Willow turns into Warren after kissing Kennedy (7013); furthermore, Anya's very presence reminds us that sex is often used to hurt women and women find ways to hurt back. Everything--even birthday parties--can be dangerous on the hell mouth, but sex is especially dangerous. Inhabitants of the Buffyverse constantly negotiate life-or-death issues of vulnerability and power; I examine how they negotiate vulnerability and power with regards to sex, and why these negotiations so often fail--the earth may not be doomed after all, but what about everyone's sex life?

I'll be most grateful for any suggestions and insights anyone wants to offer.

Posted by Holly at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 30, 2005

Call It Intimacy

I am suspicious of individuals and institutions who refer to a whole range of sexual activities with the bland, modest, careful euphemism, "intimacy."

Mormons in particular do this. For Sunstone this past year Laura L. Bush and I planned to do a presentation on Mormon sex manuals, and the first thing you notice about them is that pretty much none of them (not a one that we found) mention sex explicitly in the title; instead, they have titles like Sacred Intimacy or Becoming One: Intimacy in Marriage or Purity and Passion: Spiritual Truths about Intimacy That Will Strengthen Your Marriage.

If you don't believe me, go to Deseret Books (a publisher of LDS books) and search Intimacy. Then go to Amazon.com and search books on Intimacy. You'll see how differently the words are used: at Deseret Books, "intimacy" is shorthand referring almost entirely to sexual intimacy; on Amazon, the titles that come up cover a range of topics, and if the focus is sexual intimacy, that's usually made clear in the title. In fact, after doing just some basic research, I've learned that in the non-Mormon world, there are FOUR types of intimacy: intellectual, experiential, emotional and sexual.

Anyway, at first this project aroused in me the restrained but palpable anticipation a bevy of 15-year-old Mormon mall goths would feel pawing with feigned nonchalance through a new shipment of Evanescence t-shirts at Hot Topic. Laura and I both thought it would be a good follow-up to the presentation we did about Mormon women's sexual training, but then Laura sent me one of the books she found in the BYU bookstore. I sat down, flipped through it, read some of the saccharin prose and doctrinaire pronouncements and thought, "Omigod, to write this paper, I will actually have to READ this book and many more like it," and that excited me as much as the prospect of wearing an Evanescence t-shirt myself.

Emotional intimacy can and often should be a part of sexual activity; sexual activity can complement and increase emotional intimacy. But they can also exist separately, and no doubt there are times when they should--for instance, siblings can be very emotionally intimate, but I admit I believe there is good reason for our society's taboo against incest. And I will also admit to engaging in certain mild forms of sexual behavior (i.e., making out) with someone with whom I was not particularly emotionally intimate, and still feeling the experience was pleasurable and worth my time. So when someone or some institution consistently conflates the two, it suggests to me that they Have Issues They Don't Want to Deal With.

Mormons have to change "acceptable sex" into the blanket term "intimacy" because they work so hard to make sex in general dirty and disgusting--and they do a pretty good job in the Bible dictionary and topical guide that accompanies my Mormon scripture. There's no entry on "sex" or "sexuality" in the Bible dictionary. In the topical guide, the only entry found in the S's where "sex" would appear is "sexual immorality," which includes the invitation to "see also Adultery; Excommunication; Fornication; Homosexuality; Lust; Whoredom."

Which is quite a list.

So I looked up Lust; all the scriptures listed for Lust were resolutely negative; the same goes for all the references provided under the heading "sensuality," which was cross-listed with Lust.

So then I looked up Love, and found this invitation: "see also Affection; Benevolence; Brotherhood and Sisterhood; Charity; Family, Love within; Fellowshipping; Friendship; God, Love of; Grace; Kindness; Marriage, Continuing Courtship in; Neighbor."

That "Marriage, Continuing Courtship in" looked as promising as an gold-plated engagement ring with a diamond the size of a dust speck; indeed, when I turned to it, I found references that included Ephesians 5:22: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." Whoo! That's a turn-on.

All in all, the basic message the Church communicates about sex is this: "Sex is Filthy and Disgusting; Save it for Someone You Love." So you save it for someone you love, marry them, and then you call it "Intimacy," which somehow makes everything "healthy" and OK.

For anyone who wants more on this topic, check out the comments John and I posted on Venus Pandemos.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)

September 23, 2005

Three Rules for Before You Get Involved with Them, Two Rules for After

Or, Why I Am Not a Swinger

For the introduction to this post, read Bad Coffee in Bed, September 22, 2005

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed that he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed that I liked sex.

But I decided at some point that I'd had enough bad sex to last a lifetime, and that I'd like to limit its occurrence in the future. This has pretty much resulted in celibacy, which I'm fairly OK with. The fact of the matter is, if celibacy is the price I have to pay for not having sex I regret later, I will pay it.

What happened is this: I had one too many one-night stands with someone who A) had no investment in my life and B) was a bad lay to boot. This last guy couldn't muster enough courtesy or decency to call me even ONCE after having two orgasms in my bed while I went thoroughly unfulfilled. There had been a moment, when, in a drunken haze, I thought getting naked with this guy was a FABULOUS idea, but many hours later when he was gone and I was left with my hangover, I realized that all I got out of the experience was some very troubled sleep and a few weeks of wondering if my contraceptives had really worked.

So I figured I needed some rules to have sex by. These are the rules I came up with.

1. I will never sleep with anyone BEFORE the first date. This means I will never again pick someone up at a bar, take him home and f*ck him, though there are things I am willing to do that stop short of that. I think there are circumstances where it is OK to engage in certain forms of sexual behavior with someone with whom I am not (yet?) emotionally intimate; I think it can be both thoroughly fun and perfectly harmless to make out for a while with some unattached (see Rule #2) hottie (whether this hotness comes from a fabulous exterior or a really exciting mind) you just met. But as far as any activity for which a healthcare professional would recommend that you use some type of "protection,"--well, that ain't going to happen ever again in my life (at least not consensually) until AFTER there has been a phone call, dinner and a movie, or some equivalent, pre-arranged activity. I want the guy to demonstrate some investment, you know?

2. I will never sleep with someone who is sleeping with someone else. I have a real problem with infidelity. I've pushed the boundary a time or two: dating, the second he became single, some guy who had made it clear before he broke up with his girlfriend that he was interested in me; dating someone who wasn't the least bit over his ex; kissing someone who still had a girlfriend, though it was pretty obvious the relationship was about to die a miserable painful death. But I have never carried on a full-fledged "affair," and I don't want to start now--in fact, I want to back off even from the boundaries I was willing to push before. It's just weirdly complicated and I prefer unencumbered clarity.

I'm also not interested in swinging, or being involved with anyone who swings. I know it's often done successfully among gay men, who, according to those of my acquaintance who live the lifestyle, tend to know both the playing field and the rules. I have also met straight swingers from time to time, and some have suggested to me that my insistence on monogamy makes me a prude. Of course a prude is the last thing my Mormon mother would EVER call me, but perhaps it's true, since when I went to Amazon and looked up titles on polyamory, or being free to have sex with as many partners as possible, what I found pretty much turned my stomach. If the reviewers (even the enthusiastic ones giving the books five stars) are to be believed, the best books spend lots of time detailing how to avoid jealousy and breaking people's hearts--and, they admit, even with the books' advice, those things are hard to avoid. I once got hurt by a swinger who didn't seem to play by or even understand the rules. He told me simultaneously that A) there were no marriages like his that could serve as models to help him figure out how to deal with other women and B) there was this really great book called The Ethical Slut that he wanted to read but hadn't got around to buying. I wish he had read the goddamn book before pursuing me--apparently there are many marriages like his.

In fact, some of my ancestors had marriages rather like his. Something in the rhetoric about how "it's not infidelity if everyone knows what's going on" smacks too much of the rhetoric in the "revelations" Joseph Smith produced, in which God told him that there was not only nothing wrong but something deeply righteous about having sex with lots of women as long as he was married to all of them, then "commanded" him to go out and start doing just that. It's perhaps a strange condemnation, but it's true: heterosexual swinging is just too close to historical Mormonism to appeal to me.

(For information on Joseph's wives–-at least the ones historians are fairly certain about, go here:
http//www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/)

There is of course a belief in Mormonism that at some point polygamy will be reinstated, when humanity is finally ready to live that "higher" law. Some men say they have no interest in acquiring a second wife, since it's hard enough making one marriage work; some men don't bother to conceal their delight at the prospect of having more than one sanctioned sex partner. When I was still active in the church, more than once some married man paid me what he thought was a fabulous compliment: "Holly, when polygamy is reinstated, you'll make the greatest second wife." Gee! Thanks ever so much, but I'll pass.

3. I will never have another one-night stand. They're just too goddamned depressing! As Liz Phair points out, you wake up from them disoriented, and almost immediately you feel sorry. I don't ever want to feel sorry quite that way again. This means that anyone who wants to sleep with me has to agree to do it on two separate occasions, separated by at least 24 hours. I'm not asking for a HUGE commitment: we're talking a weekend. And then, if the first occasions aren't horrible, there can be future occasions; and if they are horrible, well, sometimes there's no reason to test out the old adage that "third time's a charm."

I began making it a practice to share these rules with any man who made it clear that he was interested in sleeping with me. They never had a problem with Rule #1 and Rule #3, but Rule #2 took many a man by surprise. They sputtered out their disappointment and surprise to me.

"But...but...but I just moved to town and I don't know that many women yet and I'm already sleeping with this other woman I met and I don't know who I like better so far, you or her," one said.

"I think it's clear that you like HER better," I replied. "That's great! I hope things work out really well for the two of you."

There were a couple who said, "But... but... but I'm still sleeping with my ex-girlfriend!"

"Hey, whatever works for you!" I said. "I can completely understand why you would prefer to continue sleeping with someone with whom things didn't work out right the first time instead of investing in a new relationship. It makes things easier, after all."

Recently I have been thinking about the ways in which my evil ex Adam screwed me up and screwed me over. I would not have violated any of those rules in sleeping with him, but what was awful about him was not that he wanted irresponsible sex from me, but that he wanted irresponsible sex with everyone else, and he wanted me to provide an emotionally stable and supportive friendship while he was having that irresponsible sex, even after he dumped me cruelly. In case you've forgotten, this is the guy who said to me, "I can't sleep with anyone who knows me as intimately as you do," and "After a week of sleeping with you, I've begun to feel a commitment not just to you, not just to the relationship, but to being a person I'm not yet ready to be, so I'm going to sleep around with undergrads," then DEMANDED that I remain his best friend while he conducted these shallow sexual relationships. Which resulted in Rule #4:

4. I will not remain emotionally intimate with a man who extends and then withdraws the offer of sexual intimacy.

Even more recently, prompted by the advice of friends who hate to see me fret endlessly over some guy who has treated me badly, I have come up with yet another rule:

5. I will not remain emotionally intimate with--or even continue to speak to--a man who deceives me, either deliberately or through carelessness, about his status or intention with regards to the other rules.

The thing is, although that rule seems emotionally and ethically healthy to me, I'm bad at cutting people off. I always want to give people another chance, and while that has prolonged my misery in some cases, in others it has turned out well. I mean, yeah, there have been plenty of mistakes in my sex life. But even some of the guys who were jerks when I dated them turned out to be decent guys later, and I'm really glad to be friends with them. How many chances do you give someone to turn into a decent person?

So those are the rules for what I won't do. As for what I will do, well, right now it all seems kind of moot, given the dating pool where I live, and the paucity of men who are truly interested in 40-something women with PhDs and bad attitudes. Not that I'm complaining. I've always been fond of solitude, even as a child, which I shall discuss in the future.

And I might also talk about good sex at some point–-I actually have had some, in case you wondered.

Posted by Holly at 7:34 AM | Comments (5)

September 22, 2005

Bad Coffee in Bed

Monday afternoon I called Wayne, because a conversation with Wayne was what my Monday afternoon needed. At one point he said, without a segue, "So, I've decided I need to be more of a snob." I figured there was a good reason for this pronouncement, so I waited to hear it. "I started drinking tea a while ago," he said, "mostly chais, because they seemed healthier than coffee. Green chais, herbal chais--there was a vanilla chai I really loved and couldn't get enough of for a while. Lately I've been drinking black tea and I really like it, and I realized it's not really that different from coffee. But I just like it better than coffee. And then I realized that part of the problem was that I drank so much bad coffee."

He was on a roll and it was interesting, so I didn't interrupt him.

"You know how for a long time I was all about coffee?" I made some noise of acquiescence. "Well, good coffee is really good. But bad coffee is really bad. And I realized today that I needed to be more of a diva when it comes to coffee. Not once, when I was presented with a cup of really awful coffee, did I taste it, then spit it out and say, ‘How can you expect me to drink this shit?! This is vile! This is beyond vile! I will not pollute my mouth or any other part of me with a substance so thoroughly foul!"

"Does this mean you're going to start drinking coffee again?" I asked.

"Maybe," he said. "But only good coffee. If I do, I will be a complete coffee snob. I'm ashamed to tell you about all the bad coffee I've had, Holly. I mean, coffee from some awful container that's been on the back of a caterer's truck for hours and hours if not days and days.... We're talking some of the worst coffee in the world. Coffee that even before you sugar and cream it up, you can just tell is going to take the enamel right off your teeth--both the smell and the look of it just tell that it's not OK."

There was a pause, and I imagined him staring at the painting of Gabriel Garko he had just finished, and shaking his head. "But I would drink it, I would drink that bad coffee, because it was coffee and I believed I liked coffee. I would drink the whole cup, thinking at some point, it would get better, but a bad cup of coffee never gets better, though it often gets worse."

"That pretty much sums up my feelings about sex," I said. And then we both laughed--after all, as both Karen Walker and Homer Simpson said, it was funny because it was true.

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed I liked sex. I did say, on more than one occasion, "I'm not willing to have sex right now," but on those occasions when I said OK to sex and it turned out to be bad, I never said, "This sex is really bad! How dare you subject me to such bad sex! Get out of my bed!" That, after all, didn't seem polite. No, I just did what I could to make it end sooner, and hoped it would be better the next time.

Details tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 7:17 AM | Comments (2)

September 20, 2005

Mormons, Male Feminists, and Sex

This post continues ideas discussed in three earlier posts: Ripe Peaches and Peach Schnapps, Venus Pandemos, and Male Mormon Feminists-–it's Part II of MMF, actually. For background information on all these topics, see Mormon Links.

When the panelists had finished and the session was opened to questions, I was (I think) the first one out of my seat. I thanked the guys for their comments, complimented them on having the courage and the conviction to declare themselves feminists, and said something like this--or rather, this is a more coherent version of what I wish I'd said:

"I've spent most of my adult life in academia in the humanities, which is someplace where almost everyone, male and female, is a feminist. In a graduate program in English or film studies or philosophy or the likes, it's hard to find a man who doesn't call himself a feminist--probably partly because he knows if he doesn't espouse it, chances are good he won't get laid very often. But despite these guys' declarations that they're feminists, they often treat the women they're involved with very badly."

I have dated enough myself and watched enough episodes of Sex and the City that I feel safe asserting that in conventions of heterosexual courtship, seduction and dating, men still retain most of the power of acting and choosing, while women have the role of waiting, and accepting or refusing. It is generally the man who is supposed to say, after a date or after sex, "I'll call you," and it is the man who is generally supposed to call. Certainly, there are women who are take the initiative in sexual matters. But there was only one Samantha to the other three more traditional, passive women in the cast of S&tC--it is not only Mormon women who are trained to be objects rather than subjects.

Of course there are women who treat the men they date very, very badly. But that does not change the basic facts of how power is generally understood and distributed in our society when it comes to courtship and sex.

There are plenty of men in the world who know it is wrong to disempower women politically and economically, but have little compunction about deceiving and demeaning women when it comes to dating and sex. Their reason for doing so is, according to Greg Behrendt, author of He's Just Not That Into You, that most men are willing to sleep with women they don't really like, but not so willing to call them afterwards.

OK, OK, that's a fairly harsh summary. But I did read the book, and Behrendt does provide a fairly long list of really bad behavior that men engage in and women put up with, because... because they hope the guy will change? Because they hope the mixed messages aren't really so mixed? Behrendt's mantra is, "Don't waste the pretty," or don't expect a guy who treats you badly to stop treating you badly, because even if he's the nicest guy in the world, he won't stop--until he meets the right woman. (And supposedly that causes a huge improvement in his character and behavior.)

Well, maybe. Maybe that's true. But if it's true, it's one of the issues feminism needs to confront. Because if a guy finds it OK to treat women with contempt, discourtesy and unkindness in the most personal of relationships, does he really respect women and have an understanding of their lives?

And as I considered issues like these in that session on male Mormon feminists, it occurred to me that perhaps the average Mormon guy, who was probably much less promiscuous than most of his non-LDS counterparts, who might have been (technically, at least) a virgin when he married a woman who was also a virgin, and who might even be extremely faithful to his wife, might also treat her better than the average 20- or 30-something single guy who served as Greg Behrendt's examples of the guys whom smart, pretty women should kick to the curb.

So I tried to say that, or something to the effect that, "It occurs to me that one way in which Mormon women--at least, the ones lucky enough to be married to decent guys with feminist sensibilities--might be treated better than their secular counterparts is when it comes to courtship and sex. I just started thinking about this, and I don't know if it's true. But I want to think about it some more. And I want to ask all of you about it. John is the only one who mentioned sex, but sex and reproduction are pretty fundamental to feminism. So what about sex? How do you reconcile your ideas of being a male Mormon feminist with how you think women should be treated when it comes to sex?"

And then I sat down, and everyone stared at me, and the room was very silent.

The guys on the panel looked at each other. It was becoming obvious to me that I had not phrased my question very well, since no one knew what to do with it. Finally one man took the microphone, and from his answer it was clear that he had interpreted my question to mean, "Do you as a feminist like sex with women?" And while I was glad to know that he did, it wasn't really what I had asked.

It also became clear to me after the panel that I'd phrased the question badly, since throughout the next few days, people approached me and asked me for clarification. But it also became clear to me that a lot of people just didn't get the issue to begin with. One guy asked me what I could have possibly meant, and I said, "Well, it kind of changes how seriously you take a guy as a feminist if he date-rapes you, or bites your nipples until they bleed and won't stop even when you're screaming in pain and begging him to quit, or stops you in the middle of sex and says, ‘I don't really like it when a woman gets that worked up.'" (And yes, all those things happened to me--the last one more than once, in slight variations. I know other women who have heard something similar as well. By no means did the majority of men I slept with express such a sentiment, but still, it's remarkable how many men prefer passive sex partners.)

And the guy said, "Huh. I can see how that would be true, but I never thought of feminism as anything other than a political movement."

And then a bunch of us stood around after the session and had a long argument about feminism, loyalty to the church, and whose family was most terrifyingly conservative, which I have written about in two posts--click here for Part I and here for Part II.

Posted by Holly at 5:59 AM | Comments (4)

September 15, 2005

Venus Pandemos

In 1987, when I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona (at that point I was still primarily a poet), a beloved teacher and friend loaned me a copy of Little Star, Mark Halliday's first book. I loved it. It was one of my major influences. The title poem is about wondering who sang lead on some 1950s pop song. Halliday acknowledges that the poem

is not the first time I've tried to
get a rock-&-roll song into a poem and it won't be
the last; it is my need to call out
This counts too!

After reading Halliday, I began writing all kinds of poems with rock & roll songs in them, or inspired by rock & roll songs; I wrote a poem about the video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" and I wrote a bunch of poems about death by hanging inspired largely by "Gallows Pole" by Zeppelin and I wrote a poem called "1812 Overture" but despite the reference to Tchaikovsky the poem is really about how much I love the song "Close to Me" by the Cure, how sad I always was when the song ended, how it was over far too quickly.

Because I was poor, I never bought Little Star; I just returned my teacher's copy after reading it once, then got a copy from the library and kept it until I finished my master's degree four years later. And then it went out of print and I didn't think much about it, aside from the poem "Why the HG is Holy," which is one of my all-time favorite poems.

But a few months ago, I mentioned to Tom how much I loved that book, and as he had a copy, he loaned it to me. And I got to reread a few of the poems I had rather forgotten about, including the longest poem (seven pages) in the collection, which is called "Venus Pandemos."

When I first read that poem, I thought it was funny, mostly because I didn't have much personal reference for what it was talking about. I was an incredibly naive Mormon virgin who had little experience with dating and had never been in love, and though at that point I quit riding the bus to campus because I found enduring the catcalls and whistles I got while I waited at the bus stop on a busy street too upsetting, I still laughed at this poem, thought he was saying something clever. In fact, I once read much of it aloud to one of my friends who ran the women's center before she stopped me, almost heaving with distress. The poem begins

What am I going to do with my desire
for women?

To be more specific, what am I going to do
with my interest in women's bodies?

and continues its exploration of this

energy–-
I am a little excited just to describe it–-
the quick expert evaluation of
face
breasts
ass
and then the instant summary judgment:
"I crave her"
"I'd take her"
"Maybe if I was a little drunk and she threw herself on me"
or, more often:
"Forget it, honey."

Then he spends a stanza discussing breasts, and another discussing ass, and then wonders "if any intelligent feminists will ever read this poem." Then we get

"Ass" . . . "Shoving home"–the fantasy here
is of seizing the woman's buttocks, holding them and
entering her vagina from behind;
why from behind? Bestial mastery. I guess.

He says it's not about conquest; rather,

it's
to do something about
her beauty.

To do something about her beauty!

Is it a defining quality of beauty
that it won't leave us alone?

He also states that

of course what I'm talking about
has nothing to do with rape. (Nothing?)
So I'm left to rely on my technique of
covert ogling-in-passing–-
I eat them with my eyes.
–-Is it like eating? It's a job of
disposing of them, one by one:

All right, I see that body,
I have seen it.

–-Which means, that body is taken care of now,
that body is disarmed, normalized,
brought under control, it is forgivable now:
I have disposed of it through ritual,
the ritual of snapshot glancing, and now
its power is dead.
ah. So is it, then, a kind of murder fantasy?

And ultimately, he acknowledges,

Yes. I guess that's what I'm saying.
–-But it's your fault, baby,
for being so GOD DAMN BEAUTIFUL.

As for why he is writing this, it's because

every day
I think about strange women, for quick seconds,
in ways I consider dehumanizing.
Should I be ashamed?
I suspect my sexual fantasies are
among the tamest (most repressed?) anywhere;
and I can claim that my relations with the women I know
are relatively
nonsexist . . .

and he goes on for another page and a half before writing

In 1973 and ‘74 I worked in a feminist theatre group;
my awareness of the women's anger reached the point where
it seemed a crime for men to whistle at women on the street.
Now I'm not going to say it isn't.
But I'm admitting to an enduring energy in me that says
an attractive woman is not simply one more comrade on earth,
nor is she just another nice thing about life;

an ATTRACTIVE WOMAN is a PROBLEM.

And that's the real end of the poem, despite one final throwaway stanza.

Now, I'm not trying to dismiss Halliday or his work. I still admire a lot of the poems in Little Star and I was very inspired by his most recent book, Jab. I like how straight-forward and energetic his voice is. But when I reread "Venus Pandemon" for the first time in a long time a few months ago, I didn't react to it the way I did at 23. Eighteen years after first reading it, after enduring several incidences of sexual violence, after hearing a boyfriend say to me, "Look, I'm sorry I date-raped you" (which isn't really all that comforting), after being sexually demeaned by men who claimed simultaneously to care about my welfare and to be feminists, I don't find that poem funny any more. And I feel entitled to assert that a man who finds an attractive woman a PROBLEM, is something of a PROBLEM himself.

And as I listened to that panel on male Mormon feminists, I thought about the fact that any discussion of feminism needed to include a discussion of this issue.

Posted by Holly at 7:14 AM | Comments (3)

August 10, 2005

The Ultimate MF

Yesterday on campus I told my colleague Tom that one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to share with the world my recent insight that the Mormon god is the ultimate motherf***er: he's up there in the celestial kingdom, having sex with all those mothers in heaven.

Tom wanted some elaboration. I said, "According to Mormon doctrine, we are supposedly all the literal spiritual offspring of a father and mother in heaven. Our spirits were conceived by the sexual intercourse of God with one of his wives--according to Joseph Smith, he might have plenty--that's the whole polygamy thing."

"So this is real sex," Tom said. "It's not just some spiritual thing, or is it? Does it involve actual body parts?"

"Absolutely," I said. "God has a body, parts and passions. It's a basic tenet of Mormon doctrine." I told him about being a teenager and being shepherded into the cultural hall with all the other young men and women, where a high councilman told us in no uncertain terms what was at stake in the phrase "families are forever": only in the celestial kingdom, the highest level of Mormon heaven, would people allowed to be sexually active; everywhere else--and this is a quote I remember almost 30 years later--"You'll all be just steers and heifers." In other words, the promise of an eternity of sex in the next life was why we better not have any until we were married in this life.

"Huh," said Tom, who is the son of a Baptist minister. "Heavenly sex."

"But it's all about reproduction, not fun, which means eternal PMS and endless celestial pregnancies for some of us," I cried.

"I like it," he said. "It's a metaphor for something. I just don't know what."

But I, on the rag, heavily drugged by the muscle relaxant ibuprofen and aware throughout the conversation of the blood gushing from my body, doubled over in horror and buried my face in my hands.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)