rattlings

street talk OR Stuff I Don't Get Part 2

2010-01-13T16:00:00.000-06:00

This is the second post in a series about Stuff I Don't Get. Go here for the first post and an explanation of the series.

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I've been thinking a lot over the past few months about the concept of cross-gender harassment, personal space and politeness. I've read about it on blogs; hashed it out with friends; even written about it a little. As with body image, I just fundamentally did not get the aversion so many women seemed to have to talking to strange men. I've been hit on by strange men, and it never bothered me. I've been cat-called since I was twelve, and have never really felt negatively about it. I didn't understand why so many women did, and resented the implication that I somehow should.

What I didn't get was that no one was saying that I should. What I didn't get was that none of this is about how I should feel about my experiences but how other women's experiences have shaped their reactions to certain interactions. What I really, hugely, massively didn't get was that this wasn't about me. This was about an insidious, dangerous piece of social programming that teaches women that their boundaries don't matter - one that I never got.*

Women, it is commonly said, are taught to be solicitous, agreeable, friendly, and nice. We are taught to not get aggressive and to be polite. We are not taught how to stand up for ourselves or take control of situations, simply told that we should have after the fact. We are not taught to speak our minds without considering the consequences; on the contrary, we are taught to think first of the consequences.

...At least, that's what I'm told. Because I missed all of that. Every breath. And hearing about this particular brand of social programming used to make me angry, because it utterly erased my subjective experience. I'd never been in a classroom where I was overlooked because I was a woman. I'd never been judged negatively for expressing myself (except for when I was legitimately being a cock). I'd never felt disrespected or marginalized because I spoke my mind. And I'd never felt threatened by a cat-call or a flirtation of any sort. Now, I realize that the reason I never felt threatened was because I'd never been told to keep quiet, and that if I was disrespected for opening my mouth, I never noticed. Now I realize that my lack of this particular lesson in femininity has, in part, allowed me to react in a more "masculine" fashion to certain types of challenges. But realizing that has come hand in hand with realizing that I'm not as free of this particular brand of programming as I thought I was. In specific, I'm talking about that relating to women's interactions with strange men.

I was recently out walking with a friend and I commented to her that I'd like to stop walking soon because after awhile my shoes would start to hurt my feet. About thirty seconds later, I hear over my shoulder, "Someone's having trouble walking in them heels!" I say nothing and continue talking to my friend. He repeats it twice, and then moves on to, "Someone's got a real sweet voice!" He repeats this two more times as well, despite neither of us having given any indication that we wanted to talk to him. At this point he'd drawn even with us and started in with the usual litany: "come on baby don't be shy just want to talk bla bla." When we reached the corner and it was clear that we were going in separate directions, I yelled, "I have better things to do than talk to assholes who yell at me on the street!" He responded with "ahhh fucking slut!" and walked away.

This sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill interaction to which a fairly standard response might be, "What a bitch! He was just trying to talk to you." That's something I might have said myself in the past. But let's take this interaction apart, piece by piece, giving the greatest possible latitude to my interlocutor, and see what emerges.

I was walking with a friend and he was behind me. He had no reason whatsoever to believe I might be interested in talking to him, but spoke to me anyway. Leaving aside for a moment the idiocy of his opening line, I'm willing to give him a pass on this for two reasons. First, I think it's important to contextualize actions culturally. His presentation, his dialect of English, his race, and our geographic location all make it quite plausible that I was dealing with a man from an urban area that is primarily lower-income. These types of neighborhoods often utilize non-demarcated public spaces as social arenas. It therefore is entirely plausible, at this point in the interaction, that he was approaching me in a way that is normalized and has been successful for him before. I also don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with approaching someone who isn't giving outward signs of interest in being approached. It's maybe not the best thing ever, but it's not totally rude or unacceptable. So at this point, we're okay.

I give no recognition whatever to his comment, though. Why? I have a boyfriend; even if I didn't, I'm out with my friend and therefore not interested in meeting anyone; someone whose approach to a lady he finds attractive involves yelling at her on the street and I probably don't have too much common ground; and the line was really, really stupid. By not responding or even turning around, I am indicating that I do not wish to continue this interaction any further.

Then he repeats himself. This is slightly more questionable, but in my book, still ok. It's possible I didn't hear him, or didn't realize his comment was directed at me. But again, I don't respond, making crystal clear that I am disinterested in interaction with him. From here on out, I don't give a shit about cultural conventions. He's no longer "just trying to be nice," or "just trying to talk." He's trying to insert himself into my space where I have made clear that I don't want him there. If, rather than continuing to shout at my back, he'd come up to me and said something like, "Excuse me, I'm sorry, I don't know if you heard me but you're really beautiful and I'd love to talk you a little bit" - something that indicates that he is genuinely interested in talking and is truly unsure whether or not he'd gotten my attention with his first two comments - then maybe he gets a pass. But he didn't. He continued shouting at my back, and when I returned his rudeness with some rudeness of my own, called me a "fucking slut" - making crystal clear that he at no point was interested in being genuinely nice.

This individual who had not even seen my face felt entitled to my time, entitled to a response to his attentions, and entitled to me being receptive and nice about all of it. None of this has anything to do with being nice.

Talking about this episode with my friend after, I affirmed the following points for myself for the first time as more than interesting points in a discussion: Women are allowed to choose our interlocutors.

We are allowed to pick who does and doesn't get our attention.

We're allowed to make those decisions based on sexual attraction if we want to.

If someone doesn't respect the boundaries we clearly set, we're allowed to curse at them.

If someone doesn't respect the boundaries we ambiguously set, we're allowed to curse at them.

We're allowed to be every bit as assertive and self-determining in our interactions as men are, and no one can hold that against us.

For me, affirming these things was at most interesting and useful. For a woman who has long believed that she doesn't get to affirm them ... I get why this turns into not wanting to talk to any strange man ever. I get why this turns into not wanting to be hit on by strangers ever. I get why many women erect boundaries that women like me think are a little excessive. In the same way that a lifetime of being objectified might lead to a huge resistance to discussions of bodies and attractiveness, it makes sense that a lifetime of unwanted openness to interaction would lead to a resistance to it. And this is not something anyone deserves to have held against them.

*No, I don't agree with Sweet Machine's analysis of the xkcd strip in question, but I think the rest of her point is 100% relevant, and the comment thread attached to this post is invaluable.

"if at first you don't succeed, stalk, stalk again."

2009-11-22T20:58:00.003-06:00

With the new Twilight movie out, the feminist blogosphere is once again abuzz with commentary and critique. Most of the really salient sociological commentary on Bella and Edward's relationship has been done already, seeing as the first book was published in 2005, and I'm not going to try to restate what has already been admirably stated (not least of all because I wouldn't read those books unless there was a gun to my head, and even then, I don't know which I'd resent more). I'm more interested in talking about the prevalence of dangerous, anti-woman tropes in pieces of media that aren't under the cultural studies microscope. Specifically, I'm interested in Sports Night and The West Wing, the two flagship productions of liberal darling Aaron Sorkin.

I want to make clear that the reason I'm able to speak intelligently about Sports Night and The West Wing is that I love both of them to teeny tiny pieces. I've watched every episode of SN at least three or four times and am currently in the process of rewatching TWW for the second time, having finished my first watch-through in August. When it comes to understanding and distilling tentpole liberal issues, very few do it better than Sorkin. He's smart and funny and compelling and his projects made me feel patriotic during the Bush administration (no small feat, I assure you). But none of that makes up for the fact that homeboy consistently and spectacularly fucks up when it comes to representing women on his shows.

I could go on about how the number of mistakes made by press secretary C.J. Cregg, the only woman on Senior Staff for much of TWW, far outpaces those made by male staffers. I could talk about how every man on TWW has a bad case of mansplaining syndrome triggered by the strong tendency of the show's women to misunderstand or underestimate the value of important issues (Sam teaching CJ about the census stands out as a particularly egregious example). I could mention the strange tendency of TWW'S men to heap adulation on women for doing things they would not blink twice if men did. Or I could talk about how SN can't seem to find a non-neurotic professional woman with two hands and a flashlight except for when it found Sally, the classic careerist sleeps-her-way-to-the-top man-eater.

But none of that is what I'm going to focus on! (Although I can. Believe me. Just ask my mother, with whom I'm rewatching TWW and who has begun to join my games of "Spot the Sexism.") No, I'm going to focus on Sorkin's favorite way of bringing couples together: stalking.*

SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW SN OR TWW RESOLVE, STOP READING.

Season 1 of Sports Night features a multi-episode arc wherein Dan, one of the show's protags, pursues and eventually begins to date a woman named Rebecca. Although he initially pursues her because he's told she likes him, it rapidly becomes clear that she doesn't know who he is and would in fact like him to go away. However, that's not enough to deter Dan, who we later learn asks her out nineteen times before she says yes. We also learn that she said no all those times because Dan is a sports anchor and her previous marriage to a sports anchor left her burned. End result: Dan and Rebecca date successfully until her ex-husband decides he wishes to rekindle their marriage. When that fails, she comes running back to Dan (season 2), only to be rebuffed because she broke his heart last time.

Hold that in your minds for a moment while we turn to Season 1 of West Wing, which features the all-too-familiar arc of the relationship between press secretary CJ and reporter Danny Concannon. Despite CJ repeatedly telling Danny that she doesn't want to date him and furthermore can't without compromising her professional credibility, Danny is relentlessly persistent, "sensing" CJ's growing affection for him. There's a business-dinner-cum-date, the gift of a fish, a kiss in CJ's office - and then nothing, as CJ asserts her authority and ends the flirtation. It all works out, though, in Season 7, when Danny reappears at the end of Bartlet's second term and reminds now-Chief-of-Staff CJ that their shifted professional responsibilities now allow for a relationship. End result: TOGETHER FOREVARRRRRRR.

The myth being propagated here is that all any man has to do to get the girl he wants is ask enough times - "she's just playing hard to get," or "she just needs to be shown what he has to offer," or "she just needs to be convinced." This trope has been used literally countless times in movies and on TV, but Sorkin really has a gift for it. The reasons why it is bad and dangerous are many, and I am going to present them in handy list form.

1) It devalues women's "no."
The women in Sorkin say no. They say it repeatedly, emphatically and unambiguously. Rebecca says it nineteen times, and though we never get a count on how many times CJ says no, it's probably close to the same. By portraying women's "no"s as building up towards an inevitable "yes," this trope devalues women's "no," thereby helping contribute to rape culture.

2) It propagates the outdated myth that women just play hard-to-get.
While Rebecca is initially entirely disinterested in Dan, CJ is shown to be interested in Danny from the get-go and only saying no out of concern for her career. In the abstract, she's a classic hard-to-get narrative: Danny can only "get" her when he passes the necessary "test" (in this case, getting a career where there's no conflict). I don't deny that there was a time when women commonly played hard-to-get as a means of testing the seriousness of prospective male suitors, but it wasn't healthy or reasonable behavior when it was common. Acting as though it's par for the course now, when it's not, normalizes what is in fact dysfunctional behavior on the part of women brought on by a set of oppressive gender norms defining a woman who says yes too early as "slutty." On the flip side, given that this is no longer common or accepted behavior, its normalization only further works to devalue women's "no." When women say no, they need to be believed, because 99 times out of 100, no means no. And is the off chance that this is that one time, is it worth the 99 other times when it's stalking?

3) It propagates the offensive and outdated myth that women can be "convinced" to love any man who wants them.
Both CJ and Rebecca break down and date their respective Daniels after a great deal of effort and self-promotion on behalf of the men. I have said this a million times to a million people, and I'll say it here: no one can convince anyone else to love them. (There's a great xkcd strip about this.) In the vast majority of cases, it's either there or it's not, and there's nothing anyone can do either way. That doesn't mean people shouldn't get to know each other, nor does it mean that "it" can be discerned before the first date. It does mean, however, that no one can make someone like them unless they would have anyway. I would bet heaps of money that this is true of 98.5% of people. The idea that women can be convinced to care about any man who wants them leads directly to my next point...

4) ... that since men can convince any woman they want to love them, there should be no woman they can't convince - men deserve whatever woman they want. Therefore, any woman who will deny them what they deserve is a "bitch."
I, um, really don't know any other way to explain this, so if you're confused, let me know and we'll take a bang at it.

5) It normalizes disturbed behavior.
Ignoring someone when they are repeatedly telling you no indicates a marked separation from reality on your part, as well as dangerous tendencies. It is how stalkers and rapists behave. By showing this as perfectly normal behavior, it makes it that much harder for women to spot individuals whose behavior towards them is disturbed and, when they do, to speak up about it and be believed that the behavior in question is in fact Wrong. ("Boys will be boys!")

6) It erases the very real trauma that can be experienced by women who are the recipients of this type of behavior.
Why might a woman who has repeatedly say no finally say yes? Maybe she fears for her safety if she continues saying no. Maybe she thinks that if she says yes, she'll finally be left alone. Maybe she, like so many women, has been so conditioned to be a good girl that she can't conceive of being so assertive, and so she says yes to avoid being that worst of things, not-nice. Whatever the reason, I can virtually guarantee it's not that the nineteenth sales pitch suddenly illuminated everything she missed the first eighteen times, and she now finds Man X deeply compelling. She said yes for some reason that has almost certainly damaged her.

Before anyone says that "it's just tv," I'd ask you to realize how utterly foolish that sounds. Media normalizes, or to put it differently, teaches us what's normal. Media propagates. Media teaches us how things in the world work by showing us things working that way over and over and over. It's not that people are stupid and believe whatever the TV tells them; it's that media influences us in ways a lot more subtle than "HEY YOU, THINK THIS." Additionally, before anyone busts out the "OMG DAN AND DANNY ARE SO SWEET AND CJ AND REBECCA CLEARLY LOVED THEM FROM THE BEGINNING," we'll put aside for a moment the fact that that reading is highly questionable and say: fine. That doesn't change the fact that in reality, the men who do this aren't sweet, and the women they do it to don't love them from the beginning. And well-intentioned men who do this to women - men who are, in fact, sweet, and are just trying out something that they've repeatedly been told is okay - are unwitting contributors to a culture that doesn't listen when a woman says no.

*Various Googling has reminded me that he did this as well on his most recent short-lived show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. And the character who did it there was also named Danny. That officially moves this from a lol-Sorkin-trope to downright creepy territory.
**Yeah, this one goes under Stuff I Didn't Get. There'll be a post about that in the future.

bodies are objects, and that's okay OR Stuff I Don't Get Part 1.

2009-10-29T13:26:00.000-05:00

I recently had a gigantic epiphany which probably should have occurred to me years ago: the reason so much of feminism was illegible to me when I first got there was because my experiences are not that of the typical American woman. I simply did not receive much, if not most, of the social programming women are supposed to receive (thanks mom and dad!), and as a result what I bring to the feminist table is not unlike male privilege*. Sometimes it makes me feel alienated from feminist discourse. Sometimes it makes me angry, because my experiences are so often erased from feminist conversations. Sometimes it makes me really angry, because my experiences are sometimes not only erased but actively denied as possible experiences for an American woman to have had. Usually it makes me grateful. And sometimes - stupidly, massively arrogant as this sounds - I feel like an example of what can happen if we could just raise kids without filling them full of stupid gendered baggage. The end result of all of this is that I've had to discern typical female experience through a very different lens than most women. And I think what I've found is kind of interesting. I hope you do too.

This is the first post in a series about Stuff That I Don't Get.

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The world is full of gorgeous people. I love to look at them. When I'm with a friend and I see a gorgeous person, I will often mention said person to my friend. More than once I've been questioned about this by confused friends. They find it puzzling how I can talk a good game about gender, yet objectify individuals right and left. It seems incongruous to them. It didn't seem at all incongruous to me, but I wasn't sure why that was, so I thought about it. The answer, as they so often are, is complicated.

I was raised in a house where beauty was discussed a lot. My mom has always been very vocal about people she finds beautiful (and they are many), sometimes going so far as to tell complete strangers how lovely their faces are. When watching movies, she'd always mention the actors she found attractive. I grew up thinking that it was totally normal for women to be vocal about people we find attractive, be they actors or fellow humans. I didn't realize this was uncommon until a few years ago.

Along the same lines, I was told how beautiful I was by my parents pretty much from the time I was born, so unlike many women, I never felt pressure to be beautiful - I believed I already was. However - again, unlike most women - there was never a comparative or evaluative element to my perception of my own beauty. One of feminism's most important points is that patriarchy works to turn women against each other, and one of the most mundane ways this happens is in comparisons of beauty. Women are encouraged, in ways both subtle and obvious, to judge their beauty not by internal standards - how pretty they feel - or external standards - how pretty people tell them they are - but by what I'm going to call internal perceptions of external standards: how pretty they think they are as compared to other girls. By this logic, astoundingly pretty women should make girls feel bad. And since girls and women are held to external beauty standards that are in most cases physically impossible, most girls and women think everyone else is prettier than them.

This was always baffling to me, not to mention occasionally infuriating when I spotted this behavior in my friends. My attitude for as long as I can remember has basically been, "Hey, I'm beautiful! And you are too! And so's she over there! Isn't it great?!" It never occurred to me to compare myself to other women. I had moments of comparison-sadness, certainly, but those were always based in my ability to present myself in a stereotypically feminine way rather than on anything inherent to my appearance. I pretty much always liked the things that were inherent to my appearance.

The third piece of my psychological puzzle is that although I've always had a positive conception of my own beauty, it never had a ton to do with my self-worth. It weighed about as much as everything else - intelligence, talent, sense of humour - with all of those dominated by the thing I was raised to believe is most important in anyone: how well do I treat the people around me? Unlike many women, I was not raised to believe that my self-worth and my beauty have anything to do with each other. Yes, I thought I was pretty, but more importantly I thought I was a pretty okay person. In measuring myself - or anyone else - it never would have occurred to me to factor appearance in. (I'm not denying that there are unconscious impulses we take towards people we find attractive, simply that my calculations of whether or not someone was a good person never took their physical appearance into account.)

An important caveat to all of this is that while we talked about attractiveness frequently in my house, we never talked about unattractiveness. It was never "she's gorgeous, but she's ugly" or "I would bone him but not him". We just never went there. We thought about beauty; we didn't think about its reverse. The only times I can remember us talking negatively about someone's appearance is when we were shit-talking them anyway and it was just one more thing we could add to the list of reasons why they suck. That's not good, obviously, but it's a far cry from placing everyone we meet on a spectrum from beautiful to ugly.

So, to summarize: I was raised to figure out whether people are attractive to me and to talk about it. I was raised to think I'm beautiful. I was not raised to compare myself to other women. I was not raised to use beauty as part of the calculation of someone's worth. All of this adds up to a person who thinks of the human body as, along with everything else it is, an aesthetic object capable of incredible beauty, which beauty says absolutely nothing about that person's worth. And here's the thing: even now, as a foot-stomping feminist, I think that's totally okay. I think it's okay to see someone, think they're beautiful, and comment on it. (Whether or not it's okay to comment to them is a different and much longer conversation.) I think it's okay to want to have sex with someone only because they're beautiful and for no other reason, as long as they are not led to believe otherwise. I think it's okay for people to want to have sex with me for no reason other than that they find me beautiful. I think it's okay to see someone beautiful and have no thought go through your head other than that they're beautiful and you'd like to see them naked - no thoughts regarding their conversation acumen or life goals. Bodies - all bodies, regardless of size or shape - are beautiful, and it's okay to think that about the ones that are beautiful to you personally.**

However. And this is a huge "however."

As a woman, I have never had my thoughts about beauty reinforced by the dominant culture. Men's bodies are not socially objectified in the same way that women's are. Men's bodies are not acceptable objects for discussion, like women's are. Men's bodies are very very rarely used to sell items, like women's are. Media is made with the male gaze rather than the female one, and so I could not turn to magazines or television to bolster my opinions on men. Never did I hear the proposition that a man should be valued primarily for his body or appearance. Never was I told that men were there for me to look at and I had the right to their space and time. Never was I told that anyone I found attractive should sleep with me and deserves to be cursed at if they won't. On the flip side, men are not told - constantly, repeatedly - that their main value lies in their appearance. Men are not under the same pressure to be attractive (and one kind of attractive at that) as women are. Men are almost never encouraged to play up the parts of them deemed by society to be most attractive as a means of securing favours or getting what they want. In short, the appreciation for bodies, and specifically the male body, that I grew up with was never warped by society into a belief that reduces men to nothing more than their bodies.

So you know what? I get it. I get why many feminist women argue against any viewing lens that incorporates the body. When you've been viewed as nothing but a body for so long, and in many cases viewed yourself thusly, it makes perfect sense that transcending that sort of degrading self-image would entail its total rejection. I get that, and I respect it. Further, I get that trying to get a non-feminist person who thinks that sort of body-centric assessment of those around them is a-ok to move away from that sort of understanding is a whole lot easier if you frame it as "yer doin' it wrong" than as "well, you're doing it wrong, but it's not wrong if I do it this way, but it's wrong if I do it this way, but you can do it this way." So I'm not arguing against the feminist response.

I am, however, really fucking sorry that we've lost touch so totally with the beauty of the body. In tying women's appearance so deeply to their worth and barely even talking about men's appearance (hello, het-male-dominated discourse!) we've trampled nearly any possibility of a genuine discourse of bodies. And as someone who loves bodies - looking at them, touching them, experiencing them, playing with them - this strikes me as really sad.

I don't know how to fix this. There's so much that needs to be unpacked and thrown out and reconstructed before we can even start. But I do hold out hope that it can be fixed. I'd like to be able to talk about bodies as things to be appreciated aesthetically without being damaging. Even as I write this, I'm worried that some misogynist asshole will take it as license to continue being misogynist. But I think it's important to say. Feminism is, in some sense, about tearing down the current structures, and I'm all for that - but we can't, in the process, lose certain things entirely. In upending misogynist and damaging perceptions of the body, we shouldn't discard it entirely. So maybe this is my attempt to build something.

*My own shorter definition of male privilege: being able to just not think about stuff that women are forced to think about every day on account of you're a dude.

**Yes, beauty is 100% subjective, and yes, I believe every person is beautiful, because every single person on the planet is someone else's perfect physical specimen. If the only people I was capable of admitting are beautiful are the ones I want to fuck, then most of the world ain't gettin' fucked.

dating courting mating.

2009-05-14T20:06:00.002-05:00

I recently read part of a really cool history of 20th century courtship through the 1960s for my masculinity class, and it got me thinking about dating and courtship and how we handle this stuff in the 21st century. I've had occasion to think about this in detail before, when I've found myself in the difficult position of trying to make modern dating habits legible to my dad. (Results have been mixed.) Let me make something clear: I'm not talking about relationships that develop organically between people who are initially friends, or relationships that start with casual hook-ups. I'm talking about the process of investigating another person in a non-sexual context to see if there might be romantic compatibility between you. I think that process operates differently for us than it has for previous generations, and that's what I'm interested in discussing.

From my perspective, the characteristic that most distinguishes modern courtship is its informality. I've been on a lot of dates, but very few of those were explicitly defined as such prior to the date itself. More commonly, I'd meet a guy who interested me (or was interested in me) and we'd mutually plan to meet for dinner. At this point, romance status is entirely unclear. Are we interested in each other, or is it one-sided? Does someone just want to be friends? (Usually one can err on the side of mutual interest, but with nothing stated explicitly it's wise to not come down on either side of the question.) Typically, dinner is necessary to figure this out.

Ever since I was in high school, my first step in determining whether or not something was a date was whether or not the dude paid. (Hypothetically I could have paid for myself and him and settled the matter, but that would mean I was assuming that we both thought it was a date, and a wrong assumption would embarrass me so much that I would probably die on the spot. Therefore, I usually follow the gentleman's lead to avoid spontaneous combustion.) This has nothing to do with me thinking the guy "should" pay and everything to do with what I have termed The Code. The Code (which we all understand without talking about it) says that the payer pays in order to send the signal, "HEY. THIS IS A DATE. IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING. YOU ARE HERE IN ORDER THAT WE MIGHT FIND OUT IF WE ARE INTERESTED IN PURSUING THIS FARTHER DOWN THE MORE-THAN-FRIENDS PATH." This is usually the guy, because we're still somewhat trapped in a 1950s model of courtship - but what makes that really interesting is that in my experience guys don't pay because they think it's Right For Men to Pay. They pay for one of two reasons: either they think it's right to pay when you ask someone on a date (and they're not afraid of affirming that that's what they've done), or they explicitly pay to send the coded signal described above. What was once a rigid social convention has become almost entirely semiotic. And if you don't think that's cool I'm not entirely sure what to do with you.

Anyway. At this point, if the guy has paid, I am left with a choice. If I want to say "Yeah, this is totally a date, and I'm cool with it - let's see where this goes," I'll make a token protest for politeness' sake but let him pay. If, however, I do not wish to agree to the date, I'll raise holy hell. I don't think I've ever actually succeeded in buying my own dinner in these cases, but I do usually insist on buying dessert or coffee. This is my way of saying "No dude, this is not a date. We're friends having dinner. Get it?" My active refusal to let him buy me dinner means I don't agree to continue down the road of romance. It doesn't mean we can't be friends - it just means I don't want to get involved. What it also means is that most dates are only defined retrospectively. I've been on dates that I was at the time very careful to not label as such, which I'm perfectly comfortable calling dates now.

Lest I appear down on this system, I'm not. I think it's great. I think it's fabulous. It allows for the complicated waters of acceptance and rejection to be navigated without ever having to have an awkward conversation, and because of that, it allows people to become friends in a way that may not have been possible before. Guys who I've tried to date, and guys who have tried to date me, have become my dear friends once we moved past the trying-to-date phase, and I think that was able to happen because we were able to investigate each other as potential romantic partners without ever having to own that - and therefore without ever having to reject each other.

Of course, this isn't the only system out there. I've been on dates that were explicitly defined as dates beforehand, and for all that I love the system I just described, it's always been a bit of a relief to know what I was getting into! However, more important to the development of relationships than explicit dates are the sort of extremely casual, non-date-related interactions that have given me, and most of the people I know, our most serious relationships. The thing is, dating, while fun, often isn't based on much. I go on dates with guys who I'm interested in seeing if I could be interested in. I get into relationships with guys who I'm interested in from the start.

It tends to look like this: I meet a guy. Maybe I meet him at a coffee shop or in class or on a plane. And I find myself thinking about him a lot because talking to him was in some way Good. My first thought isn't "Let's go on a date and see where this could lead," because that's the thought I'd have if I was marginally interested and was curious to test the waters for more. It's "wow, this person is cool, and I want to get to know him better." It's much more organic than I've found dating to be. Dating, in my experience, is something I do when I want to meet Someone (Anyone) and am curious to see what's out there. When I meet the right person, we can just hang out. And stuff happens.

In discussing this with a friend (hello RJ!), she pointed out that there is a sense where we're more formal than previous generations: we frown on dating multiple people at any one time, whereas this used to be the norm. I think the difference here isn't in action but in terminology. I've definitely been in situations where there's a few people who I'm pursuing and who are pursuing me, and I've never felt there was anything morally "off" about it. The difference between us and previous generations, I'd argue, is that our generation tends to put more weight on named things than our parents did. We frown on dating multiple people because for us, calling something "dating" means more than it did for our parents.

I know this system can backfire, and backfire hard. I've had that happen to me numerous times. But I still put my faith in it. (I also think that any system probably has the same capacity to backfire as this one, just in different ways.) What we lose in clarity - sometimes, I freely admit, to the detriment of everyone involved - we gain in space and safety. By space, I mean space to come to our own understandings of what we're doing with each other without external pressure. I mean space to let feelings develop organically, without labels telling us what we're supposed to feel and when. By safety, I mean the rejection cushion I was referring to above. Ambiguity can be dangerous, and assholes exploit it to avoid having to commit to things - but it can also allow for people to find their own way to each other in a manner that didn't used to be possible. Call me crazy, but I think that's valuable.

numbers.

2009-04-24T15:54:00.001-05:00

I've been gone for awhile. Turns out it's really difficult to blog about sex and gender without referring to one's personal experiences. As those tend to involve other people, all of whom would be identifiable to anyone who knows me well, I am uncomfortable writing about them. It's been difficult for me to see a way through this, and so I disappeared. I've been looking for a way to come back for awhile, though, and I've decided to do so.

I'm taking a class right now called Masculinity in America, and we recently read a chapter from a book discussing Victorian courting practices. The chapter goes into some detail about the ideal Victorian relationship, which was understood as a meeting of two souls that were "sympathetic" to one other. It stresses that romantic relationships were conceived of as largely desexualized until marriage, and that reflection on one's partner's sexuality threatened to destabilize the delicate balance Victorian men had to find between the aggressiveness they were taught to cultivate in their personalities and the ideal of self-control, sexual and otherwise, that predominated during this period. Just one catch: this romantic ideal was entirely impossible. Men's and women's social spheres were so separate as to preclude "meetings of the minds" almost entirely. For any man to become interested in any woman, it would have to be rooted in sexual attraction, simply because there was literally no other way for something to begin. Victorians just pretended that's not what was going on so they didn't get cognitively dissonant and crazy. Thinking about this brought me back to one of the stranger phenomenons I've experienced in my life: getting asked for my phone number by random men I've exchanged maybe ten words with. This has happened twice, once on a bus and once at a park, and both times it struck me as weird.

Asking me for my phone number is generally understood to mean you'll call me and we'll have coffee or dinner, something along those lines. This may be where I differ from most people, but I'm not usually interested in having coffee or dinner with someone unless I think we might have things to say to each other. This information cannot typically be discerned from a fifteen-word conversation on a bus or a two-minute one in a park. What can I get from those conversations? A sense that you're probably/probably not deranged and a sense of whether or not I think you're physically attractive. If I was willing to go on a date with every attractive man I saw who probably wasn't deranged, I'd have a list of numbers as long as my arm, most of whom wouldn't have worked out anyway due to sheer statistics. (Not even to mention my taste, but we'll get to that later.)

My point, then, is getting asked for my phone number by a random guy seemed to me the equivalent of saying, "Hey, you're pretty hot. Can I bone you sometime?" Since he's got no other information about me other than my looks and maybe ten words I've said, what else could he be asking? I had to be missing something. I also thought there might be a different cultural dating norm at work than what I'm used to, since I've only ever had this happen with guys from inner-city Chicago. I decided to ask a friend of mine about it who I thought might have some insight on the matter. He did indeed. His argument, basically, was that if he and a girl have exchanged some pleasant chatting and some flirty looks, there's no reason not to extend that into a drink and see if there's some compatibility there. Basically, he's advocating being largely non-discriminating in one's choices of people to go on dates with. This is where I differ completely.

I've been on a lot of first dates, and I've flirted with a lot of guys, but I've had only a few boyfriends. I've also had very few legitimate crushes. (In fact, when I started college, I hadn't had one in so many years that I was scared I'd never have one again. True story.) This isn't because I'm an ice queen or something - it's because I don't fall for people easily, and I have no control over that process. I wish I did - my love life would be a lot more interesting (or maybe a lot less interesting) - but I don't. I also have a Type, in terms of personality. It's thin on the ground, I can spot it pretty quickly - more accurately, I can spot not-it pretty quickly - and I've never really deviated from it. Again, this is not by choice. This is by having no control over what I fall for, just like everyone else on the planet. Because of this, I see very little point on going on dates that are virtually guaranteed to be failures.

You could call this conservatism or fear if you want, but I prefer to call it realistic honesty. I know what I want, and I know what I like, and I know where it flocks. I also know what I don't want, and that's something casual. I've done that. It was great. I'm very, very over it. I want something serious, something long-term. Something with legs. And the chances of me finding that on a cross-town bus, while there, are so slim as to be non-existent. So while I no longer perceive random number requests as code for "let's bang sometime" - and let me be clear, I don't necessarily see anything wrong with it if they are - I'm no more interested in them than I used to be.

Share with me your thoughts on dating liberally versus dating conservatively! Also, your random-stranger-on-the-bus-asks-for-your-number stories.

this is for you.

2008-11-30T20:54:00.004-06:00

I've mentioned on here a few times how grateful I am for feminist men.

This is why.

This Is For You, This Is All I Can Do

one thought.

2008-11-12T19:49:00.002-06:00

it's been a long time, but all I've got is one thought:

it makes me viscerally angry, and a little bit sick, when women call themselves Mrs. Husband's-full-name. You are not Mrs. John Smith. You have your own name and your own identity, and there is no goddamn reading of that action that can be even remotely feminist. It is disgusting. Take his name if you want - I've talked about that - but for the love of Christ, your first name is still your own.

I will never be Mrs. Anyone. Jesus fuck.

random musings.

2008-09-03T16:46:00.003-05:00

There are a lot of things I want to write about, but I can't seem to get my head around any of them coherently enough for a full post. So, bullet points.

- This whole Sarah Palin fiasco. I don't give a shit that her daughter's pregnant, and I have no interest in getting within ten feet of any slut-shaming conversations. (I haven't actually seen any judgments of Bristol Palin because of this, just of her mother and her mother's utterly broken political beliefs - but I have no doubt they're out there.) I give a shit that her daughter is living breathing evidence that the sexual ethic Palin would impose on all Americans doesn't work. I've said it before and I'll say it again: abstinence is a sexual choice every bit as valid as any other, but it needs to remain a choice, and not become a prescription.

- My current man situation. I'm becoming one of those women I could never stand growing up, who have My Dream Man all figured out and allow no flexibility. My only defense is that it's not within my control. I fall for a very specific personality type, and I've figured out what that is down to pretty small details. Just my luck that one of those details is "frighteningly intelligent." Result: I develop genuine feelings for people very rarely. Bitch bitch moan moan.

- Genderfuck. It stinks of cisgendered privilege to me and leaves a rotten taste in my mouth. Then again, it also fits perfectly into the fantasy world I described here. Contradiction? I think so!

That's more or less the gamut of stuff that's in my head w.r.t. gender and sexuality these days. I will probably write more intelligently about the first two at some point and will probably not write more intelligently about the third, since I don't see a way of doing it that will avoid me sticking my foot in my mouth pretty spectacularly. However, I'd welcome any thoughts to be had on the third one, since it's something I'm thinking about pretty heavily.

choices.

2008-08-15T14:20:00.006-05:00

Can the choice to do something sexist still be a feminist choice?

The corners of the internets where I lurk (don't judge) have been arguing about this recently in the context of weddings and name-changing. In case you don't feel like wading through 1,000+ comment threads: Side A is arguing that even an informed choice to do something sexist (like taking one's husband's last name as part of marriage, a tradition with painfully sexist roots) is an indefensibly unfeminist choice, and Side B is arguing that that's not necessarily the case.

I find this to be a really compelling argument and I'd like to think it through. Let's stick with a woman changing her name when she gets married, for ease of example. On the one hand, the tradition of name-changing derives from the notion of women as property and marriage as a property exchange. This is - let's not argue - sexist. It's a whole lot sexist. It's also pretty impossible to argue that the tradition as it is today has nothing to do with those roots, otherwise why would it just be the woman changing her name (in the vast, vast majority of cases)? It's all about the subordinate status of women, and there's really no getting around that. Taking the husband's last name perpetuates a sexist tradition and enacts outdated and sexist ideals of male and female status in a way that should give any feminist pause. Given this, it's easy to see how it could be argued that choosing to change your name is an unfeminist choice.

On the other hand, though, women can't ignore the existence of a tradition of name-changing. I straight-up don't believe that there is a single woman in the United States who is unaware that if/when she marries, she will have to make a decision with regard to her last name. Simply keeping one's own name and acting like that's a nonpolitical action (because the tradition of name-changing shouldn't have existed in the first place, so why should we acknowledge it) ignores the history associated with that action in a way that I'd argue is impossible. There are many things I'm willing to give folks a free pass for not knowing, but the fact that American women are expected to change our names when we marry is not one of them. Any choice a woman makes with regard to this is loaded; any choice a woman makes with regard to this is political. Choosing to keep one's name needs to be done in cognizance of this.

There's a huge amount to be said for reclaiming and reinventing former tools of oppression. (This goes right along with the reclamation of language which, while I'm not a fan of myself, I can see the value of for others.) Taking a tool of oppression and remaking it as a tool of liberation dilutes much of the power of that tool to oppress, and while this is obviously somewhat extreme language, the point stands: things can take on new meaning, can be infused with new meaning, and can be used for purposes other than that for which they were initially intended. And if a woman decides that she's taking her husband's name because she likes it better than her own, or because she wants to show her happiness at shedding her old family and becoming part of a new one, or because she doesn't want to deal with the additional paperwork of being a wed couple with two different last names - if she decides this in full cognizance of the history of name-changing, that's a choice I have to acknowledge and respect. Feminism, after all, is about a woman's freedom to make whatever choice she likes.

However - and this is a big however - choices are not made in a vacuum. Choosing to reclaim a sexist tradition and remake it in a nonsexist way doesn't change the fact that reclamation wouldn't have to happen if sexism didn't exist in the first place. The choice to take one's husband's name for personal reasons (thereby reclaiming the choice) is still a choice made in the context of societal expectation that it is what one will do. And it does, as I said above, perpetuate a sexist system and sexist ideas of What Women Should Do. Do I think a woman can be aware of this and still choose to do it? Absolutely. Tons of women do. Does that make their action feminist? Not necessarily.

Choices are complicated things, and feminism is all about choice. If a woman is making an informed choice to do a sexist thing, I have to support her right to her choice - but I don't have to support her choice. It seems to me that her informed, thought-out action of making a choice is 100% feminist - but the choice itself is to do a sexist thing and participate in a sexist system. So in answer to my original question, yeah, I think the choice to participate in a sexist system can be a feminist choice. But that doesn't mean it's a choice I will necessarily support. I support and respect everyone's right to an opinion and a choice. That doesn't mean I respect their opinion or their choice - but I will defend their right to make that choice, come hell or high water.

In answer to the question begged by this post, no, I don't like either alternative. Were I to marry, I would do one of two things: either we both hypenate (Ms. Hisname-Myname and Mr. Myname-Hisname), or we combine our names to make a new name. Both of these acknowledge the tradition of name change, and therefore the fact that this decision wasn't made in a vacuum, while acknowledging the new family we are creating together - which is really what the whole name thing should be about anyway.

Please share your thoughts.

signifier vs. signified OR applications of saussurean linguistics to daily life.

2008-07-29T23:15:00.003-05:00

I saw A. today for the first time since March and, uncharacteristically for me, declined sex when he offered it. In trying to explain why I wasn't feeling casual sex these days, I said, "I really want to be in a relationship. I want to sleep with someone and have it mean something." I immediately felt like an ass - he and I had lots of sex outside the context of a relationship, and it absolutely meant something - and tried to backpedal, but it was unnecessary. "You want it to be a signifier, to mean something outside of the act itself," he said. "I get it." He did get it, and managed to put into words exactly what I've been feeling for awhile.

I've said for a long time that it's entirely possible to have sex and have it mean something in and of itself. My opinion on that hasn't changed. However, what I want in my life right now is exactly what A. said: I want sex that isn't just meaningful because two people right now are making it meaningful. I want sex that is meaningful because it's part of something bigger, because this person and I care an awful lot for each other and might even be building something together. I want sex that has context. To steal A.'s word, which he stole from Ferdinand de Saussure, I want sex that is a signifier, as opposed to the signified. This basically means that I want to be in a relationship pretty badly. Takers, form a line beginning on my left.

Tied up in here are thoughts on my overactive flirting response mechanism (which goes back to the delight I take in being desired (which I'm not convinced is entirely unfeminist, although it's at least partially rooted in insecurity)); the general openness to banginz I've have for pretty much my whole sexual life; and, due to the combination of the two, the fact that it was actually kind of an interesting step for me to turn down banginz when they were offered. But that stuff is more complex, and can wait for another day. For now, I'm stuck on this whole signifier v. signified thing.

Never thought literary theory could possibly be useful.

And now, the lyrics to The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure by the Magnetic Fields:
I met Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this
On love he said, "I'm not so sure I even know what it is.
No understanding, no closure
It is a nemesis
You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids"

He said: "So we don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing without love."

I'm just a great composer and not a violent man
But I lost my composure and I shot Ferdinand
Crying, "It's well and kosher to say you don't understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland"

His last words were:
"We don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing without love."

His fading words were:
"We don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing without love."

giving thanks.

2008-06-27T13:39:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I'm sick of being grateful.

I was chatting with a friend recently, and she mentioned how grateful she is to be in a relationship with someone who has never tried to pressure her into sex. I often comment on how grateful I am for the feminist men in my life. Even more frequently, I ponder how incredibly lucky I am to have had sexual encounters with exclusively kind men who never made me feel insecure or umcomfortable, who were supportive and pressure-free.

How enormously fucked up is it that we live in a society where this is stuff worth commenting on?

Of course, there's always space to be grateful for the things you normally take for granted. My mother, for instance, is extremely grateful every day that she has a roof over her head, clean water coming out her faucet, and no one at her door trying to kill her. But most of us are not my mother, and 98% of the time, the things we are actively grateful for are the exceptional things. I'm grateful for the feminist men in my life because I know that most women are not surrounded by them. I'm grateful for my positive sexual history because I know most women have not been nearly so lucky.

Sometimes, just the act of saying "I'm grateful" is enough to infuriate me. And that's good - sometimes we need to be infuriated. Anger is a good wake-up call, and in this case, anger reminds me of what I need to be doing: fighting for a world in which the things my friend and I are grateful for don't need to be stated as exceptional.

tying up loose ends.

2008-06-23T18:37:00.002-05:00

I've been in one serious relationship. It lasted a year and a half and was something of a disaster from beginning to end, but it was my first serious relationship, and it taught me an enormous amount. I am still learning from it. It ended in a good and healthy break-up which turned into a hideous break-up about six months after the fact. Suffice to say, he is no longer in my life in any capacity; this was not my choice; and I am still angry about it. (In my defense, it did not become evident to me that he had really exited my life until the end of April, so I actually haven't had that long to process the idea. I'm still within the acceptable time limits of anger.)

Mostly, having him out of my life has been better than having him in it. I'm happier and less stressed; my close friends will attest to this. And anyway, it's so easy to remember the bad parts of any situation that one does not feel fondly towards, and so hard to remember the good parts. But sometimes things happen, and I feel angry, and I want to smash his head in, and I want to cry. For instance, when I run into someone I haven't seen in a year who, during that year, has done with himself exactly what Ex and I always wished he would, and this is momentous to me, and the only person with whom I could share it is Ex. Or when a webcomic we both love brings back an old joke that we used to quote constantly, and I want to share the joke with someone, but the only someone with whom it would matter is him. Or when, today, I found the first gift he ever gave me.

For all that he was hideously insecure about it, he always did a great job with giving gifts, and this one was no exception. It set the precedent, really: it was funny, it was personal, and his personality showed through every inch of it. I'd forgotten about its existence, but today I was unpacking a box I haven't unpacked since I moved out of dorms over a year ago, and I found it at the very bottom. Finding it gave me a choice. I could throw it away, which I knew I'd regret; I could display it, which would mean thinking of him (and the good parts) whenever I enter my room, which would mean getting angry every time I enter my room; or I could keep it, but put it away somewhere.

I sat there, pondering, and decided: I'm going to treasure it. I'm going to put it away and keep it as a remembrance of when things were good, before they went to hell. Before we started cycles of bad and wrong that we were never able to break out of. Before we started eating away at each other, evoking every word of Good Woman (and god knows, when your relationship reminds you of that song, it should tell you something. when you know it should be telling you something and resolutely ignore it, that should tell you something). When things were still good, and when I called him, in a note I wrote to myself, "an incredible gift that I cannot shake from my mind even in sleep."

Maybe deciding to do this is the first step of what I hope will be the last steps I'll ever have to take with regard to that relationship: getting over this final surge of anger.

ding dong the bells are gonna chime!

2008-06-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

WARNING: This one's a doozy and about thirty-seven pages long. Don't say you weren't warned. Maybe read it in pieces?

Marriage is a funny thing.

I've had objections to marriage for awhile now, both ideological and personal. (Don't worry, you'll hear them in a little while.) In order to express those objections, I had put together a well-crafted argument bursting with nuance. Somewhere along the line, though, I'd forgotten a crucial piece of information about myself: when I'm able to articulate clearly something I've been kicking around for awhile, that generally means it's a closed case and I should find something new to think about. Without realizing it, my objections to marriage had become more of a script than a set of beliefs - and so, really, it shouldn't have been a surprise when they couldn't stand up to the challenges they recently faced.

My ideological issues with marriage as a concept are myriad, and will be dealt with below. For now, though, I'm concerned with my personal issues with marriage as an action I might potentially take, which issues are endemic to how I view the world. I was raised to live for the moment in a very serious way, and although I fought this when I was a little kid, I now embrace it with gusto. I pride myself on my ability to go with the flow of change, to focus on what matters right this second, and to recognize that any notions we have of the future are ultimately insignificant because we never know what new and unforeseen doors will open tomorrow. This viewpoint has allowed me to simultaneously be deeply committed to a relationship, fighting constantly to make it last, and yet be perfectly aware that the very next day either one of us might meet someone else. It has allowed me to plan for my future in a good deal of depth, but to abandon those plans as soon as I realized that they no longer spoke to what was right for me. I consider this adaptability one of my greatest strengths, and because of it, I found marriage baffling. How on earth could I promise someone to love them forever - for that, to me, was what marriage meant - when I didn't believe in forever? All I could in good conscience promise someone was that I loved them right now, I loved them today, and I hoped to continue loving them for as long as possible. That, to me, was more real than what I understood marriage to be.

Because of this, I found the emphasis we as a society place on marriage as the necessary and ultimate commitment particularly befuddling. In high school, I remember my cousin's now-wife threatening to leave him if he wouldn't marry her, which struck me as utterly ridiculous. If he's loving you now, I thought, why do you need the promise of forever? Do you think he'll flee? If he's going to flee, he'll flee anyway - and so on and so forth. A commitment for eternity, to me, meant so much less than the commitment that's realized every morning by waking up next to someone and actively choosing life with them, in the now, which is all we have. Getting married, to me, implied a knowledge of the future that we cannot have.

This is the point where people usually jump on me and accuse me of fearing commitment and wanting an easy out. Neither of these sentiments could be further from the truth. Choosing each day to live your life with someone is not a noncommittal thing. The longer one does it - the longer one actively chooses to live their life alongside another person - the more gets built and invested in that building. In unchoosing that life, one unchooses years of building. I wanted that choice to always remain in the front of my mind. I wanted never to feel as though the choice had been made for me by a piece of paper. I felt that remaining unmarried would force me to be an active participant in my relationship in a way that getting married would perhaps seem to obviate the need for.

None of that has changed - except my definition of marriage.

Two things were operative in this. The first was a wedding I recently attended, of my childhood priest to his second wife. He's over sixty by now, and clearly feels that he can have whatever wedding he damn well pleases. One of the Scripture readings was a poem by Pablo Neruda, and the recessional was a live performance of "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Stones (albeit with altered lyrics). There were more folks in vestments than I have ever seen in my life, and half the audience was in kilts or tartan. The wedding was spectacular.

Full disclosure: I cry at weddings. I've cried at every wedding I've been to as a grown person. Despite everything I said above, the enormity of the action being taken overwhelms me every time. This was no exception. It was also the first wedding I've been to that was largely free of social baggage. The groom was sixty-two, for heaven's sake. There is no earthly reason to get married when you're sixty-two, unless you are genuinely just wanting to celebrate the new love you've found. This wedding was more clearly a celebration of love, and nothing more, than any I'd been to in the past.

Throughout the wedding, though, my mind kept returning to my friends at college and from high school. We're in our early twenties, and this is when the weddings start. In fact, they've already begun; an acquaintance of mine here at school recently got married. One of my best friends here, R., is in a very serious relationship that will pretty unquestionably lead to white dresses and teary eyes. Of everyone I know, she's probably the closest to marriage, and she and I talk about marriage a lot. During this wedding, I couldn't stop thinking about her. I kept picturing her in a white dress - in my head, it's long sleeved and there is a complicated veil - and trying to conceive of how the ceremony would go. I knew I would cry. (I'm operating under the assumption that when I attend my friends' weddings in the next few years, I will cry pretty much from the beginning of the ceremony until the end, with intermittent crying during the reception. The enormity overwhelms me utterly.)

And so I went to my priest's wedding, and spent the entire time thinking about R.'s semi-approaching nuptials, and could feel my previously held beliefs on marriage shift. I wasn't sure where they were going, but I knew they would never be the same. The final assault came a few weeks later over milkshakes with my friend J. J.'s best friend from high school is getting married this summer, and J. is going to be the best man, and when I hear about people my age actually getting married, rather than just talking about it ... well, it's a lot to take. I earnestly explained my whole worldview to J., and all the stuff about promises of eternity, and all we have is today, knowing all the while that I didn't entirely believe it any more - to which J. said, "If you believe that, how can you ever make any promises?" I'm sure I said something entirely ridiculous, but I don't remember what it was, because of what J. said next: "Isn't every promise really just a promise to try?"

I was bowled over, although it hadn't quite sunk in yet. If every promise was a promise to try, then weddings didn't have to be about seeing the future. They could just as easily be about promises to try and public celebrations of love. Somehow I'd overlooked that possibility in my careful calculations of What Marriage Means to Me. (This is why it's always important to talk to people!) Between J., R. and my childhood priest, I'd been given a new vision of what marriage can mean to a person - and what it could maybe mean to me someday. I'm still not sure that a marriage will be how I choose to celebrate the realization that the person I'm choosing to wake up beside is someone I want to choose to wake up beside for the rest of my life, but it's no longer not an option, as it had been.

My ideological issues with marriage, however, have not changed. As an institution, I have major beef with it.

It bothers me deeply that marriage is a default. If a couple has been together for several years, the question is always "When are you going to get married?" It absolutely flabbergasts me that this information matters to anyone other than the individuals involved. Why should anyone care how two people are choosing to celebrate their love, and moreoever, why is the Right way to celebrate love marriage? These are important questions that it often seems like no one is asking - even the folks getting married. Because I work hard to make sure that the decisions I make are coming organically from me and not from some external source (and obviously this is never entirely possible, but one can make an effort), it frustrates me when others don't do the same.

More troublesome than that, though, is the sentiment that exists among women that being a bride is important. Not spending your life with someone special, but inhabiting the roles of "bride" and "wife," strangely conceptually independent of a partner. (Don't believe me? Check PostSecret for overwhelmingly corroborative anecdata.) There is enormous social pressure on women to get married, to settle down, to find someone - not to wait for the right person, but to find an acceptable someone - and I see a direct link between this and our society's overall emphasis on marriage. I also see this as completely fucking unacceptable.

Weddings also just freak me out. The amount of patriarchal baggage is genuinely absurd. There's the whole white dress thing, for one. White dresses are actually a relic of the Victorian era with no original connection to virginity, but we've given them that link, and how. It makes me want to get married in scarlet. Then there's the giving away of the bride, which makes me nauseous, and which I know would be an epic showdown with my father. Then there's bridal showers, which are deeply boring affairs, not to mention culturally irrelevant because if I were to marry someone you'd better believe I'd live with him beforehand (thus negating the need for showering me with salad spinners), not to mention deeply offensive in their implication that only the woman needs this stuff and she's going to be excited about it because women love salad spinners! Then there's all the marketing and woman-centered sexist ideology surrounding wedding planning, which is just so un-fun. Then there's the whole name-changing thing - I'm of the opinion that both people should change their names, and I can imagine that could be quite the uphill battle with a partner. It's enough to make me ... decide not to get married!

Those ideological issues are firm, and are never going to change. I'm never going to be okay with unconsidered decisions, and I'm never going to be okay with cultural sexism. But the personal stuff .... well, let's just say I'm no longer completely opposed to being Ms. Myname+hisname=newname some day.

sex plans and awkwardness.

2008-06-01T19:48:00.005-05:00

The problem with sex plans is that, unlike other kinds of plans, you really have to be in the mood for them. I'll see a movie almost any time, but I actually don't always want to get boned. (Shocking, I know.)

I had sex plans for tonight. They were with a guy I met yesterday who is super hot in a dirty rock-and-roller way, and thinks I'm super hot. I would have boned him last night, except that I had to be up really early this morning and wanted to get some sleep. (I wound up sleeping through my alarm anyway, thus negating the non-boning, but no use crying over spilled milk.) So when he texted me earlier about getting together tonight, I was really pepped, and made plans. But as the time got closer, I realized - I just wasn't feeling it tonight. It's not that I don't want to tap that, because I do. Just not tonight.

As per my norm whenever I decide to cancel plans for no good reason, I started concocting an elaborate lie I could tell him to avoid saying something that might possibly reflect poorly on him - something about having too much homework or a friend with a crisis or something. I was vacillating about what to say when I messaged A., bitching about not knowing how to cancel these plans. I didn't even ask for advice, but because A. is a spectacular person, I got the following:

A.: just call him and be like
A.: "i'm not feeling banginz tonight, but i'll make it up to you at *unspecified date*"
A.: just be really clear
A.: that it's not him
A.: it's your lack of banging wantingness at the current
A.: juncture
A.: and not as a long term situation

I find it incredibly telling that this blatantly obvious, and clearly far superior, solution did not occur to me, but did occur to A. This is because of a key difference between A. and me: I am terrified of both rejection and awkwardness, and embarrass easily. A. is none of the above.

When I was seeing A., this drove me up the wall on a semiregular basis. He once - without consulting me - asked Estra and Mischief if they were interested in a foursome with us, which they respectfully declined. When A./Estra/Mischief told me about this, I was completely mortified. It seemed blindingly obvious to me that sex of that sort would be disastrous, and even if I had thought there was a chance it might not be disastrous, I wouldn't have asked due to the - in my eyes, fulfilled - potential for awkwardness. Feeling sure that everyone involved agreed with me (except A.), I immediately began making excuses - only to have Estra and Mischief tell me that it was totally fine, they weren't embarrassed at all, and in fact, they thought it was cool that A. was comfortable just approaching them like that.

This response stunned me. I'm generally good at reading situations, and I was shocked to find that a situation I thought inarguably awkward (propositioning folks whose interests clearly don't intersect with yours, and getting turned down) could be read as not only non-awkward, but kinda cool. Since then, I've come to realize that those things about A. that drove me nuts are in fact super cool, and were really just my jealousy at his confidence in one of the few areas of my life where I lack confidence rearing its ugly head. (This response is frightening shades of my ex manifesting in me - even more reason to stamp it out!)

This brings us back around to tonight, where A. gave me the earth-shatteringly obvious suggestion to just tell the truth, and I did, and it worked out just fine. What I thought would be an awkward situation that would leave me mortified after was, in fact, a perfectly chill interaction with a perfectly chill dude.

I feel like this is the place for a moral, or for me to say how I'm now going to have the balls to approach every dude I want to bang and proposition them, but that's clearly not the case. #1 on my need-to-screw list will saunter off to South America for the summer unscrewed, almost guaranteed. I'm still terrified of awkwardness, and rejection, and I don't see that changing any time soon - but as A. and I were discussing earlier, baby steps. Or, as they say in one of my fave sci-fi flicks ever, small moves.

(R., I know this isn't the post I promised you - I'm sorry! I'm working on it!)

why I am not anonymous, or: fucking own it.

2008-04-10T00:50:00.002-05:00

There was an article in the Times recently about virginity and chastity clubs at various universities around the country, specifically Harvard. It's an interesting article, although the journalism gets somewhat inexcusable towards the end, and I highly recommend you check it out.

It enraged me.

I don't know if I'm a feminist or not. I actively rejected the label for awhile; now I'm not sure. However, I do know what my feminist issues are. They're not the most important or the most pressing or the most urgent, but they make sense when you remember that my activism is conversation, and that I believe that the quickest way to change the world is to change minds. And my number one top of the list feminist issue is the destruction of the virgin-whore dichotomy. I am as sex-positive as I can be, and for me that means nonjudgmentally accepting all (consensual!) sexual choices as valid. (Of course, my intellectual elitism is rearing its ugly head and inserting "considered" between "consensual" and "sexual." This is totally true, but less relevant here.) Yes, this includes abstinence. You want to be abstinent? Great! I'm glad you've found the right choice for you. No one should ever but ever have sex they don't want to have, and the right time for you to have sex is something only you can know. But don't assume that what's right for you is what's right for me.

This is my problem with the pro-abstinence movement. In fighting for the acceptance of their lifestyle, they are doing to me what they're tired of having done to them. And for the most part, they seem to be okay with that. This is what enrages me. As a sex-positive woman, I support the right of every person to make their own sexual choices. If these folks want to be abstinent, I support their choice whole-heartedly. I would fight for their right to make that choice. But they would not fight for mine.

There's a quote from St. Francis of Assisi on how to be a good Christian: "Preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words." I've taken this sentiment to heart in all aspects of my life, because I deeply believe that the quickest way to make my principles reality is by living them - showing the people who are predisposed against my choices that one can make them and still be happy, healthy and successful. All premarital
sex is self-destructive and will lead to personal disaster? Really? Well, I'm living proof that that's not true. And if I continue to live the things I believe fully and confidently, maybe those around me will see in those beliefs a way of being that they didn't think could exist.

Which brings me to the title of this post: why I am not anonymous. Given my milieu, it's a valid question. All my sex-bloggin' friends are, and I'm sure they have their various valid reasons - not the least of which probably have to do with the kind of sex they have versus the kind I have. (Visit Eileen for a sobering series on what the consequences of being outed as kinky can be.) Part of it is that I've never liked internet anonymity. If I'm out there, I'm out there, and no amount of hiding my name or where I go to school will make it any less easy for a determined individual to find me. But more than that, bigger than that, is my desire to live my beliefs, and live them publicly. I link this thing off my facebook, for fuck's sake. And yes, I have had some individuals tell me they read this who I would honestly rather not have thinking about me naked. But you know what? So much the better if people I don't sexualize read this. I want desperately for people to be thinking about this stuff. I want desperately for the big wide world to critically examine its beliefs on sex (as in banginz) and gender and how those intersect. I want desperately for everyone to be able to have as much or as little sex as they desire with whom they desire without being judged, and right now, I specifically want women to have that right.

In my day-to-day life, I move in spheres where these things aren't thought about nearly as much as in those spheres my sex-bloggin' friends are in. Because of that, I feel it's even more important for me to be out there talking about this stuff publicly in a way that is absolutely and indelibly linked to who I am. If I want to change things, I need to own them. So that's what I'm trying to do. By using my name, by linking this off my facebook, I am owning my words and making myself known as someone who does what I do. I am also making myself accessible. And that, to me, is the best and most valuable kind of activism.

barely fleshed-out shreds of an idea.

2008-04-04T00:08:00.002-05:00

We'll return to fear and trembling pt. 2 later. (And oh heavens, do I have a lot to say. I have so much to say that I'm not even sure I've got words for it yet. In fact, I'm pretty certain that I do not.) Right now, I'm thinking about the normalization of sexual behavior in public spaces, how various acts/behaviors/postures can be desexualized and therefore more allowable in public spaces, and what is gained and lost by non-negatively calling attention to sexual behavior in public spaces. I'm thinking about the idea of objectivity, which I still cling to despite everything I study telling me to discard it, and whether or not something can be objectively more positive given XYZ (which breaks objectivity right there!). I'm also, let's be honest here, thinking intensively about how to find out whether the overwhelmingly hot dude I am acquainted with and have classes with would be interested in some casual sex with me without actually, oh, asking him. And by "thinking intensively about" I of course mean "planning the Looney-Tunes-style traps into which he will fall."

If you have thoughts about any of the above (especially the last one), please do let me know. And if you think you know what incited the first few questions and have thoughts specifically pertaining to/incited by that, please share them.

I'll flesh all of this out more later. But this is what's on my mind.

fear and trembling: part 1.

2008-03-16T22:56:00.005-05:00

This started as a post about my threesome-related panic, but it has evolved into a whole different animal.

This is a post about what I am afraid of. It's about realizing that I've been talking the talk for a really long time completely sincerely, but that walking the walk is a very different story. It's about what happens when roles are reversed, what happens when you are faced with realities you didn't realize existed. It's about what's been going on inside my head for weeks.

Much of my current attitude towards sex can be traced back to Dan Savage and his brilliant sex advice column, Savage Love. One of Dan's big concepts is GGG. This stands for good, giving, and game. Wikipedia can tell you more (and they're conveniently hyperlinked above!) but the basic gist is that if you're in a loving and functional sexual relationship, you and your partner should be willing to try new things for each other while being respectful of each other's wants and needs. The more I think about this idea, the more concepts I want to pull under its umbrella - but generally, that's what it means. Kindness, openness, and respect.

I've been reading Dan Savage since I don't remember when, and for about as long, I've bought GGG hook, line and sinker. I think it's brilliant. I've identified as GGG for a while with the sincere belief that I would, in fact, be willing to try more or less anything my partner was into. Well, that belief is finally being tested, and my desire to be GGG is running smack into something I didn't even think I had: a hefty dose of irrational sexual hangups.

I'm copy-and-pasting this from an e-mail I wrote to A., because I describe it better there than I think I could a second time. Certain details omitted.

"One of my biggest priorities in bed is being open to suggestions for new activities. I think this is super, super important. However, I also have a somewhat crippling fear of screwing up in bed.

Clearly, these are two very contradictory forces.

Basically how it shakes out is that I'm totally willing to do new things to my partner, but I'm a lot less willing to have new things done to me. So, you ask me to incorporate your butt into things? I'm all about it. You ask me to do something that involves me in a more me-centered way? I freak out some. I'm not totally certain why this is, because it would make a lot more sense the other way around. I'm pretty sure it has its roots in having been the more experienced partner for a year and a half, and I'm also pretty sure it has to do with the fact that if I'm doing something to you, I can really focus on getting it right, whereas if you want to do something to me/something that involves my pleasure as well as yours, I'm not able to control the outcome as well. So I can't be sure I'll get it right.

Actually, that probably has a lot do with it. That probably is it.

I'm scared of screwing it up. I don't know what I'm scared of, because I trust you completely and I don't for a minute think you'd ever do anything to make me feel bad, or be nasty or whatnot. And I've never, ever had anyone be anything but kind to me in bed, so it's not like I'm projecting some past negative experience onto you. But I'm scared of messing up, and getting it wrong, and making an ass of myself. And feeling like an idiot."

I wrote that about a month ago, and I've been thinking about it on and off since. The conclusion I've come to, at least for now, is that my fear of messing up comes from a combination of intimidation and the desire to fulfill expectations. A. is the first dude I've been with who's more experienced and confident than I. I've always been more experienced than my partner, in the exact same place as my partner, or exploring new territory with my partner. But A.'s sexual experience dwarfs mine, and this makes me want to stick to what I know I can do, in particular what I know I can do well. I seem like a very sexually confident person, and the way I talk about/think about sex makes me seem like I have a more varied history than I do. (You my lovely readers would probably be astonished by what I haven't done.) This isn't a conscious act of deception on my part, it's just a reality of how I present due to where my head is at versus where my body's been. What it means, though, is that once I actually get in bed with a dude, I feel the need to live up to the image I realize I've created. I don't want to sell him short. Normally, this isn't a problem; in fact, before I met A., I hadn't even realized this was the situation. But with A., the obvious disparity between our experiences has caused this sentiment to come to the forefront. I don't want to disappoint him, and I'm afraid that I will by failing at some activity or other. So, paradoxically, I am less willing to take risks than I would be with a less experienced dude.

In fear and trembling: part 2, we will explore other, more deeply personal reasons for this set of fears and hang-ups. For now, finals call.

why i am not straight. or gay. or anything at all.

2008-02-28T00:13:00.004-06:00

Tonight, sitting in the coffee shop trying to do homework, I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation. Two girls were discussing the process of coming to terms with their sexual orientations - one identified as a lesbian, the other (I believe) as queer - and the importance of labeling themselves as such. I didn't really know them, so any interjection into this deeply personal (albeit loud and conducted in a very public space) conversation would have been wildly inappropriate, but what they were talking about is a topic very close to my heart.

For awhile now, I've chosen not to label my sexual orientation. This isn't because my orientation is so unique and special as to defy labels. On the contrary, there are several labels that would do just fine, depending on your perspective and what you wish to emphasize. However, I don't like them. To quote the always insightful Matisse, I've come to believe that all those labels should be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. And so, I begin my coversation of no labels with you.

My first legitimate crush on a girl happened when I was 14. I was a freshman in high school, she was a senior, and seeing her walk past me in the hall was enough to make me trip, or drop a book, or something equally silly. (Funnily enough, my crushes on girls tend to follow this pattern: infrequent and so intense as to cause physical manifestations of stupid.) The realization that this was an actual crush didn't freak me out at all. I just kind of accepted it and carried on, quietly drooling on myself whenever I'd see her and creating all manner of young adolescent fantasies involving me, her and empty locker rooms.

I want to emphasize that this wasn't a girl-crush. This was a legitimate, straight-up (no pun intended) physical attraction, same as I'd had to boys all through elementary and middle school. No difference whatever. I knew that at the time - and like I said, it didn't freak me out. I just sort of quietly assimilated this new part of my identity. Guys remained my focal point, but I started looking at girls a whole lot more, and acknowledging my crushes on girls as such. I also became a lot freer about referring to girls as hot, rather than using the totally unsexy (sometimes in a good way!) words pretty or beautiful.

At no point, though, did I identify as bisexual. I always felt that it would have been a lie. (Now I just think it kind of misses the point.) Part of that is because I do genuinely prefer dudes, but the bigger part is that while I can imagine having sex with a girl - and would gladly sign up to do so, did such a sign-up sheet exist - I cannot conceive of falling in love with a girl. I'm certainly not closed off to the possibility, but I think it's wildly unlikely. And that, for me, was the difference between me and a queer individual. Liking chicks is a part of who I am, but it doesn't really matter all that much. I don't have to wake up and worry that I might be harassed, or beaten up, or disowned, for loving someone. I don't have to watch what I say on the off-chance that the wrong person might hear. For all that I think chicks are sexy, if I never sleep with one, well .... tough shit. With that being my situation, I would have felt like the worst kind of hypocrite casually adopting a label that so many have to fight so hard for. I don't like labels, but I fully recognize and respect why and that they matter to people, and I didn't ever feel I'd earned the right to call myself bisexual/queer/whatnot. This wasn't a point of contention or sorrow - it was, for me, a simple fact. And if I still thought labels mattered, I would still stand behind this paragraph 100%.

But now ... my perspective has shifted a bit.

Like most Idealistic Young Thangs (which I guess I sort of am maybe if you close your eyes), I have a world I'm fighting for. I'm not particularly vocal about it. I'm not in any activist groups, I've never been to a march of any kind, and I don't have money I can afford to throw at charities. (Even if I did, I don't think there's a charity working to achieve my goal.) But I do have an ideal world.

In my world, no one gives a shit.

In my world, no one bothers to ask you if you're straight/gay/lesbian/bi/queer because no one cares. In my world, we don't celebrate labels - because they are unnecessary. We stop worrying about what makes people gay. We accept that there are some Kinsey 0s and some Kinsey 6s and the rest of us probably fall somewhere in the middle. We allow everyone to express their sexuality without judgment, and if that means that someone is sleeping with women for awhile and then men for awhile and then women for awhile, we don't bat an eyelash. In my world, there is no coming-out drama, because giant proclamations aren't necessary. Sexual expression is okay. Gender expression is okay. All attractions and connections are celebrated.

Given that this is the world I ardently wish for, the world I'm very quietly fighting for, you can see why I might find labels problematic.

There are a lot of rights activists who think we have to build up the oppressed before we can tear down the power structures that oppressed them. While I respect this position, I couldn't disagree with it more. (This ties into why I am not a feminist, which is another post entirely.) I think we should start tearing things down right now - and I'm starting with me. So: I am a mostly heterosexual woman. I think chicks are hot, and I wouldn't mind sleeping with them, but at the end of the day, dudes are where it's at for me. That's my label.

If you're willing to share, I'd love to hear about what you identify as and what led you to that label.

pulling tail.

2008-02-24T01:54:00.002-06:00

"If I wanted to get laid tonight, I could. Any girl who wants to get laid and isn't is doing something wrong."

I've been saying this for years, and I've always said it with 100% sincerity. Fact is, it is incredibly easy for a woman who is even moderately attractive to get laid. Very few heterosexual men who've gone as far as to talk to, let alone dance with, a girl will say no when she says, "Come on, let's get out of here." We can talk about the social and societal reasons for this later. Right now, I want to talk about the reality. Because for all the years I've been saying that, tonight was the first time it really sunk in.

I was in a serious monogamous relationship for five of my first six quarters of college. (That's most of the first two years, for those of you keeping track at home.) Prior to that, casual hookups weren't really on my radar - or rather, they were, but not in any realistic sort of way. I was much more focused on getting into a relationship. Also, I was 18 and younger. A bit early for casual sex/hookups, IMO.

Fast forward to today. I'm 21, I've been out of that serious monogamous relationship since before September, and I am, as they say, "on the prowl." I remember when it first really sunk in that my idle thoughts of, "Man, I would totally bone that" could become reality. It was after my first two casual hookups this academic year (one of which happened with someone I was idly considering pursuing more seriously and one of which was with a friend) and before the casual hookup to end all casual hookups, sleeping with A. (The observant (read: awake) among you will remember how that has turned out.) The individual who prompted that realization wasn't in and of himself a big deal. Nothing ever happened, and I never tried to make anything happen. But the realization that I could see someone, find them attractive, and pursue them for banginz - that this was entirely possible - was pretty startling. Not because I hadn't believed it, but because I'd never seriously considered the possibility.

I was at a party tonight of the sort I don't usually attend - lots of people, only some of whom I knew well, and lots of dancing. I realized pretty early on that I wanted to take someone home with me, although the time of the month made that pretty well impossible. (I can think of hotter pickup lines than, "Baby, I'm up for it if you're up for hemorrhaging!") It also became relatively clear pretty quickly that there was a dude who would have been more than happy to be brought home with me. Not really my type (nerdy in a way I can appreciate but don't really go for), but certainly not patently unattractive. Either way, the facts were pretty clear. If I'd said, "Let's go," he'd have gone with me. And honestly, had the timing been different, I probably would have. Then again, if the timing had been different, I might have gone a bit more out of my way to nab a more attractive dude.

I've never done this before, though. I've never gone out with the intention of getting someone in bed and seriously pursued someone to that end. The knowledge that I can do that is pretty empowering. And honestly, even though it often seems like fully half this school is in committed monogamous relationships, there are people here to sleep with. I just need to go to the places where they'll be.

thinking about writing.

2008-02-17T21:37:00.003-06:00

It's been hard to write anything since I realized that I can't keep it impersonal.

I wanted to write about yelling at people with sex, but the story I have to tell isn't just mine, and the observant in my life (of which there are roughly five thousand) would see through whatever clever aliases I use. I'd rather not talk about this with the person who holds the other half of this story, so I'm at an impasse.

I wanted to write about the misconception that vanilla folks don't really have to think about sex that much, but that story really isn't just mine to tell. The love I have for the person who holds the other half of it brings me up short when I think about committing it to "paper." He'd have to consent, in a major way. And I don't have the energy for that conversation yet.

I wanted to write about how sex is never, ever like they tell you it's going to be, but I honestly am not prepared to talk that much about my vagina on the internets just yet.

Mostly, as I think about stuff to write about here, I'm realizing that it's impossible to separate my sex life from my thoughts on sex. And that's complicated.

Then again, I met three people this weekend whose sex blogs I read, and all three of them greeted me with some friendly variation of, "Hey! You've read a whole lot about the sex I have in incredible, excruciating detail!" (Mischief and Switch and Boy were all very gracious and friendly as I explained how they'd been pointed out to me across a crowded room earlier in the day, and I'd quietly freaked out, feeling like I should introduce myself but not wanting to be the creepy chick who says, "Hey! I'm Estra's friend! I read about your sex lives in excruciating detail on the internets!" Why I consistently tell people whom I want to like me about the most ridiculous aspects of myself, I do not know.) The degree of friendly cool they exuded about this made me think, hell - maybe I should just go for it. Then again, a later conversation with Switch was excellent food for thought on this very topic.

The atmosphere in which I met these individuals was pretty fascinating for me, for a number of reasons. I was at their university visiting my non-boyfriend A. for the weekend (to whom I was introduced by Estra back in December). A., Estra, and the above-mentioned folks all belong to a residential Greek-esque organization (which organization confuses the fuck out of me if I think too hard about it). A. and I spent a good portion of my visit at the organization's house. The dynamic at that house is the atmosphere I'm referring to above.

I generally have extremely strict rules about PDA which stem from a lot of very negative experiences with PDA-tastic friends. I think PDA can be incredibly isolating and rude, and often sends the message that you'd rather be alone in a room with that person than out with your friends. I think when hanging out with friends, the onus is on couples to make as little of their status as possible/necessary for the general comfort of the group, always erring on the side of caution. Of course, the standard of appropriateness is fluid and changes depending on whom one is with. But in my experience, the less couple-y physical contact in front of friends, the better. However, the standard for appropriateness in this house was completely different from anything I've ever experienced. The threshold for affection within couples was super high, and as such, expressions of affection were non-isolating. Having A. on my lap with my arms around his waist didn't tell anyone that I was jonesing to get him alone in a room naked - it told them that hey, I'm A.'s friend visiting from out of town, the girlfriend-but-not. (At least, that's what I hope! That was certainly my impression of public affection.) I was more publicly affectionate with A. over the course of this weekend than I ever was with my ex-boyfriend, whom I dated for a year and a half.

Among the people who hang around this house, sex was far more a part of the public sphere than I'm used to, and not in an exhibitionistic way or a sketchy way, for the most part. It was part of the public sphere in a completely normalized way. I liked that a lot. I shared stupid sex stories with Mischief and disastrous sex stories with Switch in the same way that I might share stupid and disastrous cooking stories with someone from the U of C, my academic home base. That's not to say that there aren't people at the U of C with whom I share sex stories. There are lots, and often, I share even when I'm not 100% sure how the share-ee will respond. It was the normalization in public spaces that marked the difference this weekend. (The distinction I make in my behavior is almost never for my personal benefit, and almost always for the benefit of the perception of me by those around me who maybe haven't gotten to know me yet, and maybe wouldn't give me a chance if the first thing they heard me talk about was my vagina. [Yes, I'm aware this can be problematic, because why would I want to be friends with someone who would judge me for that? But honestly, the world isn't that black and white. If the first thing I heard X talk about was their drug use, I probably wouldn't give them much of a chance. And some of my dear friends use drugs a fair bit. So that toning-down for the benefit of my public perception - honestly, imo, just a concession to a reality that I don't actually find that problematic.])

Negotiating these dynamics was really, really interesting. Of course, I had A., Estra and Mischief to help/guide/bulldoze the way through for me. But I still found the nuances of each interaction full of fascinating dynamics to be parsed.

I'm trying to figure out how much to share, how open to be, how much privacy I owe the people who play into stories that are at least 50% mine. My experiences this weekend will doubtlessly play into those calculations. So that's where I'm at.

casual sex: a further explication

2008-02-01T02:15:00.001-06:00

So maybe it's just me, but casual sex seems to come up in conversation a lot. The perspectives I've heard recently have all been along similar lines, and I'd like to share them before I discuss my own views.

- A new friend and I were discussing conceptions of sin, and judging-not-lest-ye-shall-be-judged. (Yes, I'm Christian and sex-positive! Mind-boggling, are we not?) She gave the example of promiscuity, and said her problem isn't the act in and of itself, but the fact that, in her experience, it tends to hurt people. The statement she made that I found most relevant for the purposes of this discussion was, "I just can't turn off my emotions like that."
- A very close friend with whom I've hooked up a few times decided that casual sex is not for him. His logic was similar to that of the friend above.
- A certain significant individual has told me that while he cares about the girls he hooks up with, he generally tries to avoid hooking up with friends, because he gets confused about how to treat them and how to care about them in non-sexy contexts.

This was all very interesting to me, and completely mind-boggling. Maybe I've just spent too much of my life mingling sexy activities and friendship, but the idea that one would turn off one's emotions in a sexual encounter is just not something I can process. Emotions are what it's all about! They just don't have to be romantic emotions. (Here, I suspect, is where I and the people alluded to above diverge greatly.)

For me, any kind of sexual activity is about a connection with another person. (And, you know. Orgasms.) Ideally, both people should be going into things with the midset of "Hey, let's have a good time together and make each other feel awesome." That is, both parties should be on the same page. I've done this. It's been completely kickass. I've also had sexual encounters where I thought we were on the same page and it later turned out that we most patently were not. (Of course, no one realized this until after the fact - so in those cases, the sexy activity was still great.) This has resulted in ridiculous, negative situations. I've also also initiated sexual encounters I didn't really want to have (so sometimes I use sex as a way of yelling at people? this should probably be addressed in another post) and, needless to say, my partner and I were not on the same page. This has left me feeling like an idiot.

Point being, I've had enough disasters and learning experiences to know the importance of both people being on the same page. I've also had emotionless sex enough times to know that it's totally worthless (and by enough times I mean once. That's really all it took for me to figure it out). So what, then, is different about my approach to that of the people I described above?

Like I said, sex for me is about connection. But I think that connection can be achieved simply by both people having the mindset of, "Let's have fun and make each other feel good." That mindset, of consideration for your partner, can lead to an enormously significant connection, even if it only lasts as long as the sex. It's not about turning emotions off - it's about realizing that sex, like most activities, can have numerous significances, and they don't all have to be about love.

I've felt this way for pretty much as long as I've been thinking significantly about casual sex. But I'm moved to write about it now in light of all the conversations I've been having lately that seem, to me, to imply a binary between emotional-romantic and unemotional-unromantic sex that I don't think needs to exist. And even though this is pretty elementary to thinking about sex (is it? actually, I'm not sure), it's something I feel needs to be reiterated every now and again. Maybe if I say it often enough, people will listen.

the many shades of vanilla.

2008-01-30T01:24:00.001-06:00

today I was chatting with my darling Estra (who, in case you missed the memo, is kinky) and I made a crack about being "the vanilla friend." by this I meant the friend who is a member of a group you don't generally associate with that is in some way opposite to your group, playing off the stereotype of "the black/gay/Latino friend" ("no, I'm not racist! I have many black friends! In fact, here comes Shamiqua now..."). Estra's response, however, really got me thinking. She said:

estra: you're not that vanilla!whatever vanilla means

you think about sex too much to be vanilla =P

(because that is inherently a property of nonvanillaness to me, at least)

This isn't the first time Estra has said this to me, and I think she might be on to something. So: what does vanilla mean?

I call myself vanilla because my sexual activity, at this point, hasn't gotten terribly Creative, and what's going on in my head during sex tends to go something along the lines of, "Wow, that feels good." I bring this up because certain bloggers of note have written semi-extensively on what goes on in their heads during orgasm and how it's always got power-exchangey elements. What's going on in my head during orgasm tends to be lots of nothing, other than trying to make the orgasm keep going. For these reasons, I tend to describe myself as vanilla. Is a decent-sized aspect of this just not having taken the opportunity to try things in different flavors? Sure. If there's one thing I pride myself on, it's being GGG. But I don't think that should change the reality of the situation at this present moment. So: vanilla.

However, when people think "vanilla," they tend to think "missionary twice a week if no one is too tired." And that's about as far from my attitude towards sex as you can get. I've written about casual sex before, so my attitude towards that should be understood. That's really my attitude towards all sex in general. And I think about sex a lot. So I clearly don't think sex is something to be engaged in and not interacted with as a concept. I also have taken it upon myself to self-educate about all the expressions of human sexuality that I can find, and think I've done a pretty good job. As I put it to a friend once, "I almost certainly haven't done what you're doing, but chances are I can tell you the commonly-used name for it, how to do it/where to find out how to do it, and the various risks associated with it."

Are we moving away from vanilla yet?

I generally hate labels. (That's another post.) I mean, wow, do I hate labels. Among the rather important aspects of myself that I choose not to label are my sexuality, my current relationship status, and my relationship to gender issues. So maybe vanilla is just another useless label. (Of course it is. It's not like I'll ever be stopped and forced to declare my sexual preference in this manner. "Vanilla, sir!") Maybe. I'll probably keep describing myself that way for awhile, anyway. It amuses me to be the vanilla one among kinksters, and nothing has really happened yet to change that. But the very fact that I am the vanilla one among kinksters indicates, I think, an openness on my part that is often lacking in the vanilla world.

So. What does vanilla mean? I'm going to say that it can describe an attitude, a way of interacting with sex that is fundamentally disinvolved. And while that's clearly not true for me, I don't want to let go of the useless label just yet. Part of that is me wanting to defend the kind of sex I have and my general attitude towards sex. My respect for the kink community is huge, and the thought that it as a monolithic whole might look down on the kind of sex I have as somehow less, or think I don't think about/have to think about sex because I'm not kinky is ... disheartening. I feel like I need to be a spokesperson for vanilla sex, the lone non-kinkster beating the sex-is-cool-you-should-have-lots drum. I feel like I need to speak up to remind kinksters that just because we don't use props doesn't mean we're not thinking. Doesn't meant we don't need to think in order to have successful sexual experiences. Basically, I am adopting the label to both represent and subvert it. (I'm sure there's some badass literature out there about this, and if you know of any kick it my way!)

NOTE: I'm writing assuming that you (my potential readers) know what I'm talking about. However, keeping in mind that I honestly have no idea who's reading this (since I linked it from my facebook), I'm going to be doing my best to provide links with any words or terms that might be unfamiliar. If there's something you'd like defined, please let me know! 80% of the reason I think talking about sex and gender is valuable is because someone somewhere might stumble across this and be able to educate themselves through it.

the why of it.

2008-01-30T01:13:00.000-06:00

For as long as I've been aware of blogs and blogging, I've felt that everyone else should post their entire lives on the internet for me to peruse - but I didn't want to do the same. Anything I've ever blogged has been in essay form, review form, three second rant form ... generally non-personal, or only personal insofar as it's personally reflective or informative to those around me.

That's not going to change here.

However, I think about sex an awful lot, and very often have no one to bounce my thoughts off of who I think would appreciate them/want to engage them. Let's face it - when I say "an awful lot" I don't mean "occasionally." I mean that almost every paper I've written for school directly engages ideas of sex and/or gender, and I'm an anthropology and English major. I mean that about half the conversations I have wind up wrapping back around to something sex-related. I mean that I spent all summer - you know, relaxing-time? - intensively exploring feminism, and while I don't know that the experience was a net positive, man oh man did I learn a lot. I mean, basically, that I'm sick of boring the people who don't care and not getting to engage the people who do.

So here it is: my very own sex/gender/sexuality blog. I'm going to be engaging ideas from all of those realms here, and fair warning: it could get graphic. Explicit. But will it get personal? Probably not, except insofar as the personal is political. And while I'm aware that that's a pretty big "insofar as," I'm going to do my best to keep this more general. You're not here to read about my sex life, and I'm not here to write about it.