Archive for the 'sex' Category

Love, labours, lost.

Published on January 22, 2008 in beauty, emotions, love, racism and sex. 0 Comments

This was a very difficult Martin Luther King Day. Someone very important to me needed to tear me up this morning. Maybe I needed to be torn up. Truths needed to be told; screws tightened.

I spent the day surrounded by beautiful things: the words of Dr. King. People who love me. Beautiful music inspired by the day, by San Diego, by the divine, by the erotic. Dancing and difference and queer bodies. Food made with love and shared with love.

The Sex Worker’s Art Show came to San Diego, and along with it inspiration and beauty and celebration. Bodies of different colors, shapes, sizes, and genders. Bodies laughed about, spoken through, and hungered for. Words sweated over and delivered passionately.

But today I felt wounded, despite all this beauty. Continually unable to smile, or only able to smile briefly. Able to connect my love to another human being for a moment, only to lose it; to wander back into a place of fear.

I think, for better or for worse, Dr. King’s message got lost in this.

Privilege

Published on July 14, 2007 in being queer, feminism, gender, male feminist acts, patriarchy, politics, queering gender, racism and sex. 4 Comments

The reality of social movements is that they tend to be populated by the people who are most effected by the movement. The civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s was predominantly African American. The feminist movement is driven by women. I’ve found myself more and more interested in participating in these movements, but I often find myself without good role models. It’s not appropriate for me to emulate Claudette Colvin or Malcom X or Dead Prez. I’m not black. Nor can I emulate Virginia Woolf or Andrea Dworkin or Liz Phair. I’m not a woman.

But I’ve found a few good role models. I see pro-feminist things in the men around me that I can emulate, even men who don’t identify as pro-feminist. And really, many things that women feminists do are totally appropriate for men to do: defying gender stereotypes, calling people out on sexism, spreading information about sexist events as they happen around us.

One of the best recommendations I think I’ve gotten from women feminists is that I should be constantly checking my privilege. That whenever I am doing something or expecting someone else to do something I should think about what role privilege played in making it easier or harder for us.

The trouble is: I’m a white, straight-acting male, and that simple fact makes me blind to a lot of things. I’ve never had to think about whether people thought I got a job because of my gender. I’ve never had to try to reverse that, and until fairly recently I wasn’t aware that some women and minorities have to worry about that. Not every woman and every minority has to worry about it, but I’ve certainly benefited by the fact that I was born into a group of people who is categorically exempt from that concern.

To make this job easier, a number of “Privilege Checklists” have been fashioned, to help people see privileges that might be invisible to them:

White Privilege Checklist

Male Privilege Checklist

Straight Privilege Checklist

Non-Trans Privilege Checklist

Update:

Being Poor

Average Sized Privilege Checklist

Able-Bodied Privilege Checklist

Obviously, it’s useful to read those checklists that apply to you. But the ones they don’t apply to you (because you’re a person of color or queer or female or transgendered) might be worthwhile to look at too. Because maybe there are privileges you enjoy that others in your gender/orientation/race do not. There are privileges on the Straight Privilege Checklist that apply to me, and privileges that don’t.

I kind of feel like these things are important to know.

Criminalizing heterosexual sex

Published on May 13, 2007 in being queer, feminism, men, relationships, sex and women. 6 Comments

Note: Sorry if you tried to comment on this post earlier and couldn’t.  Comments should now be available.

Yesterday on I Blame The Patriarchy, Twisty asked provocatively: what if all heterosexual sex were deemed a criminal act perpetrated by the male? What if “consent” was irrelevant, and all it took to get a man thrown in jail for rape was proof that he had had sex with a woman and testimony from her that it was rape?

You can almost hear the collective sharp inhalation coming from the lungs of men all over the world. I certainly had the immediate “what about false accusations?” reaction when I first read her post. “Think of all those poor innocent men in jail!”

But I held my tongue and trudged on through the hundreds of comments. It was a comment from “Cunning Allusionment” that started to convince me that there was some sense in Twisty’s Law:

That raging injustice you [men] feel about this hypothetical situation? That’s how women feel about the real situation. And given the fact that we’re [men] the one’s with massive institutions of oppression behind us, maybe we can afford to give up a little of that privileged security they don’t have.

In other words, yes it opens the door for injustice against men, but the current legal system so ridiculously favors men that said injustice is a small price to pay for the, presumably, massive gain in justice which will result from empowering women to convict their rapists much more easily. The number of rapes that go unpunished under the current system is disgusting.

[A minor aside: Cunning Allusionment is a man. Why is it that all the female arguments seemed less than reasonable to me, but his argument got through my thick skull? Is it that I subconsciously give men more credibility, or is it just that because Cunning is a man, he knows which parts of the argument men have a hard time with and is, because of his experience having a penis, better able to speak to those?]

So I am pretty open to entertaining even the strongest version of Twisty’s suggestion. What’s frustrating to me about the comments on IBTP is that people keep asserting that Twisty is making a much weaker proposal: that men should bear the burden of proving consent, rather than the courts requiring a woman to prove that consent was not given. That’s not how I read Twisty’s post. After all, she did say:

I grasp that, technically, the plan criminalizes all male participants in heterosexual sex.

That means even sex with a consenting woman is criminalized. Any evidence of consent, other than the testimony of the woman, would be irrelevant in the courtroom. It seems like almost half of the commenters on IBTP aren’t grasping the radicality of Twisty’s proposal.

But I think those who do understand the full radical proposal are also being short-sighted when they suggest that Twisty’s Law would not change the behavior of men who are already adequately mindful of consent and of their female partners’ real, genuine desires. Twisty herself says in a comment, “this law would change nothing for dudes who don’t go around raping women. Their lives would remain exactly the same.” (bear in mind Twisty’s definition of rape is far on the liberal end of the scale).

I don’t think that’s true. Risk assessment involves considering both the probability of consequences and the severity of consequences. If a man trusts a woman deeply and has clear verbal consent which was freely given, the probability of him being accused of rape is very low. Under Twisty’s law that doesn’t change. What does change is the severity of consequences if she does bring charges against him. Under current law, armed with evidence of consent he’s almost certainly not going to jail, and under Twisty’s Law he almost certainly is. And on days when such men are feeling risk averse, they will walk away from sex, even if a woman is asking for it, out loud. So even men who hold this standard for sex, which is the only decent standard under any law, will change their behavior. And the woman who wants to sleep with him will have to find something else to do with her time.

The one critique of Twisty’s proposal that really makes good sense to me from a feminist stanpoint is this comment from “Repenting”. She points out that the notion that women are incapable of giving consent equates women and children, and is strongly anti-feminist. You can read Twisty’s response for yourself, but the jist of it is that she never said women were incapable of giving consent, she just said that consent shouldn’t be the litmus test for rape trials. She seems to be saying that consent is a good thing to communicate between people, but consent doesn’t give a man the right to have sex with a woman. It’s her sovereign body, no matter what agreement she makes with a him, and it’s her choice whether his penetration is rape or not.

And again, the longer I dwell on that idea, the fairer it seems. But damn, that was a painful thread to read.

Man’s Conscience

Published on December 19, 2006 in Comics, Uncategorized, ethics, feminism, global empire, love, men, romance, sex, sexism and women. 2 Comments

I had this idea recently to use false names for people in blog posts, the idea being that this would allow me to write a little more freely. I expect people reading about themselves will know it is them, as will people close to them. But in that case, I’m not really revealling much they didn’t already know. It might not work, but I think I’ll give it a try.

I just read a passage in Confessions of an Economic Hitman in which John Perkins, the author, is essentially chewed out by a women who is one of a party he’s having coffee with. She is direct, telling him that what he’s doing, as part of the corrupt long arm of the global American economic engine, is doomed for catastrophe, and that we, as Americans must overcome or arrogance, or face certain demise at the hands of the rising Islamic revolution.

After quoting her at length, he says…

“The memory of that dalang stuck with me. So did the words of the beautiful English major.”

At this point in his life, Perkins was, essentially, hard up. He craved female contact, and was highly engrossed in any kind of female contact he made. I get the same vibe from Jeffrey Brown (a comic artist I’ve been enjoying) to some extent. And I feel that vibe in myself sometimes.

And I’ve been thinking about women who have played this role in my life. When I first started really spending time with Enomwoyi in college, we had extensive conversations about religion. She stated her beliefs and I probed them, questioning them relentlessly into the night. I loved it, she hated it. It was transformative for me, and I think it ended up being a bonding experience for us in some way. But I wonder if she would have preferred not to go through all of it.

And recently Hiari, and to a lesser extend Azibo, have played this role too. I have a lot of traditional beliefs about relationships and marriage and love and intimacy, and I brough all of these into my relationship with Hiari and she resoundedly rejected them. And since then I’ve questioned all of those things, usually in private, and sometimes out loud to her and other people, although I’m not sure I’ve found a receptive audience anywhere. Maybe Enomwoyi wasn’t really a receptive audience either, so much as a captive one.

But nonetheless, I think I’ve changed more in the last few months than I have in years, due in large part to Hiari’s rejection of my beliefs and my subsequent intellectual thrashing about. The fact that I thought she was beautiful and interesting, and that I was sexually attracted to her, and that I could easily imagine her in all sorts of romantic visions of the future certainly fueled this thrashing. And although I think I accept the course of our relationship now, and my interest in romance is highly atrophied, my continued self-analysis probably continues to be fueled by my desire to find a way though the thicket of rejection.

So here’s the punchline: all of this fits right in line with the old notion of woman as man’s conscience, and women as man’s muse. I’d always thought I was honoring women by paying such close attention to their beliefs and how they differed from mine, but I wonder if there’s a deeply set bit of sexism in these relationships in my life.