Monthly Archives: March 2013
If Gays Can Marry Can I Marry My Dog?
Nutty Supreme Court banterings on gay marriage rights:
Justice Samuel Alito:
Same-sex marriage is very new. It may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing.
NYTimes Columnist, Maureen Dowd, in response:
If the standard is that marriage always has to be “a good thing,” would heterosexuals pass?
Charles Cooper, the lawyer arguing against marriage equality:
Marriage should be reserved for those who procreate.
Justice Elena Kagan in ironic response:
Should couples over the age of 55 be refused marriage licenses, then?
NYTimes Columnist, Maureen Dowd on the pro-creation status of Supreme Court Justices, et al:
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Sonia Sotomayor was married and didn’t have kids.
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Clarence and Ginny Thomas did not have kids.
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Chief Justice Roberts’ two kids are adopted.
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George and Martha Washington? They only procreated a country.
In light of this insanity one of my blog posts from a while back has suddenly resurged in popularity and so I am reposting it in homage to our unenlightened Supreme Court:
If Gays Can Marry Can I Marry My Dog?
When will people understand that tradition is just a stumbling block in the pursuit of progressive thinking? My dog and I are very much in love. She has been my friend, protector and lover for eight years. I firmly believe that we are both deserving of a legal domestic partnership, too. If the gay/lesbian community can be granted such a thing, then why can’t we? Heck, I’d be willing to bet that there would be less uproar over me kissing my dog on the front page.
This was an actual letter written by Joe Freeman and published in the San Jose Mercury News on May 21, 2008, on the cusp of gay marriage becoming legal in California, and amidst visions of husbands kissing husbands and wives kissing wives.
While some fear immanent bestiality, others worry that if gays can marry, next thing you know, adults will be marrying kids. It’s all the same, right?
At the very least, what about consent?
An adult man can give consent to marry another man. An adult woman can give consent to marry another woman. But children are too young to fully understand what they would be getting into by agreeing to marriage — if they were asked their opinion at all. Children cannot give consent. Neither can dogs or cats or birds or lizards or cows… Bestiality and child marriage are nothing like gay marriage. Funny that ol’ Joe couldn’t make the distinction.
Joe is also worried about going beyond tradition, or traditional morality that is based in religion. But after all the atrocities committed in the name of religion, whether the Crusades or 9/11 or cutting women’s genitals from their bodies (female genital mutilation), I don’t find religion to be the best guide to ethics.
So religious morality can seem hardly moral at all, and too often the opposite.
Better to base morality on whether someone is being harmed.
I can see how homophobia hurts people. Gay bashing harms victims. Homophobia inflicts emotional suffering, sometimes so severe that gays and lesbians take their lives. At the least self-worth can greatly suffer. But those who bash also lose their humanity.
When parents can’t marry, children may not be able to visit a sick parent in the hospital, they may lose out on social security or inheritance if a parent dies, they aren’t guaranteed child support if parents separate. These kids miss out on the support and stability that other kids take for granted.
On the other hand, I don’t see how gay marriage harms anyone. And no one seems to be able to figure that one out.
We would all be better off extending love instead of hate and contempt.
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Gentlemen Prefer Big Boobs?
A new study on men’s breast size preferences may or may not be surprising.
University of Westminster researchers showed 361 British men 3-D models of women with different bust sizes and asked which woman they found most attractive.
A lot of women think that men only like big breasts, but this study says otherwise. Yes, nearly half – 44% – favored larger busts. But more than half didn’t, with one third preferring medium-sized gals and another quarter saying smaller is better. So there’s a range.
And, the researchers focused on white men because prior studies showed that preference varies by ethnicity. Once again, it’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.
It all goes against pop evolutionary psychology which claims men want bigger breasts because they indicate health and fertility. First of all, most men don’t prefer larger over smaller. Second, if men preferred larger, then those genes would have been spread more widely and we’d have a lot more large busted women around today. Finally, there is no evidence that large breasts are associated with better health or fertility.
And even men who love big breasts may come to love more petite women, and vice-versa, as many can attest.
So ladies, you needn’t get expensive and potentially dangerous surgeries (which need to be redone every ten years) for implants.
And here’s another reason you don’t need them: Men who preferred big boobs were more likely to be sexist.
After indicating their breast preferences the guys were surveyed on how much they objectified women, felt hostility toward them and practiced benevolent sexism (seeing women as weak and needing protection).
Turns out, a preference for large breasts was most common among men in all three of those sexist categories, and most especially, among those who saw women as weak.
Now, men who are partial to buxom women aren’t always sexist. The Western world acts like “bigger is better” so no surprise that many men come to think so.
At the same time, the pattern makes a certain amount of sense. One researcher suggested that,
It is arguable that benevolently sexist men perceived larger female breasts as attractive because larger breast size on a woman is associated with perceived femininity.
And if you are going to objectify, it helps to easily see the crucial body parts.
That said, women should be confident and proud of their bodies, however they are shaped. That confidence will attract the best guys.
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Men Know My Sexuality Better Than Me
Men think they understand my sexuality better than I do. At least some of them.
Some are sure I want sex with them even when I’ve said I don’t. Some Mormon guys thought I’d enjoy a polygamous marriage in Heaven. (No. That sounds like Hell.) Another guy thought I’d like to bring in another woman and have a threesome relationship, or at least periodic threeways. That’s because I told him about research showing that women got more genitally aroused by a nude man than a nude woman. Or, that when women watched hetero couples in foreplay through goggles tracking eye movement, they spent half their time looking at men’s faces and the other half looking at women’s bodies.
Later, I wrote about this research in a blog post called, “Women Learn the Breast Fetish, Too” and followed up with another entitled “Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men.”
The strange pattern of women seeing women as sexier is not about sexual orientation. As I’ve said before:
I’m straight, but ask me which image I find more erotic, a nude female or a nude male, and I’ll choose the girl. Many of my straight female students nod in agreement.
But men have “informed me” that I am bisexual. Or that all women are either lesbian or bi:
You are a great person but you aren’t straight.
Or:
I’m afraid I don’t agree with you… doesn’t matter if you say that you are not interested in having sex with women, if you feel sexual arousal with female images, it is more than enough to be bisexual… Definitely, women are bisexual.
The comments come often enough that I’m writing this post so that I can simply insert a link in response to future comments because I’m tired of repeating myself.
On the breast fetish being learned and not biological, here’s what I said in one post:
Women’s bodies are obsessed over, with breasts selectively hidden and revealed, creating a captivation, leaving us wondering about that which is hidden. The camera gazes, zeroes in on women’s bodies. We talk about women’s breasts as alluring. So they become a sexual signal to both men and women. We don’t treat any part of the male body in the same way.
When cultures don’t fixate on breasts that are selectively concealed they are no big deal. So tribal men, who see them all the time, aren’t especially interested. European men’s attraction waned in the 80’s when topless women appeared all over local beaches and billboards. And men can become numbed to titillation with overexposure to porn.
I could add that mere covering has managed to make women’s hair erotic in the Middle East. A student of mine said that when she lived in Iran she would sometimes draw back her veil to reveal a hint of, shall we say, hair cleavage. It drove men wild.
In a culture obsessed with boobs is it any surprise that both men and women learn the fetish (though hetero women may experience it a bit differently)?
Sexual appeal is a part of being human, but must it be turbo-charged with women and withheld with men?
I’d like to see balance: women portrayed more multidimensionally in addition to sex appeal, and I’d like to see sexuality attached more often to men. But not narrow notions that say you have to look like “this” to be attractive. Variety is the spice of life!
On the breast fetish being no indication of sexual orientation, I have explained to various guys that:
Being a guy you likely associate the fetish with attraction to the woman who’s attached to the breasts. I don’t. It’s the breasts, only, that are arousing. I was in Nice, France, where some women were topless at a beach. I found that arousing but was not drawn to any of the actual women. I suspect a lot of the arousal came from a sexual breach: Topless women in a public place! Scandalous!
Tribal men are the opposite. They are drawn to women but aren’t aroused by breasts. So if they don’t get aroused by breasts they’re not hetero, right?
Now, given the research, some guys insist that all women are either gay or bi. Yet tribal women aren’t aroused by breasts, either. So they’re the one exception to all women being lesbian or bi?
You can’t seem to understand that breasts have been made into such a strong sexual symbol in our culture that they can provoke a fetish response in the West, on some level, among men and women alike, but not in places like tribal societies, where they are not sexualized.
And oddly – or maybe not — it is not uncommon for a woman in Western society to get aroused by seeing her own sexy self through her lover’s eyes. As she imagines his arousal over her body and lives through it, on some level she vicariously makes love to herself. After all, he’s not a sex object to focus on. She is. Yet it’s hetero because she needs his gaze and his lust to get aroused. This may sound strange to a lot of guys, but plenty of women recognize themselves in this.
Meanwhile, I know quite a few lesbians and bisexual women and more than one has offered to have sex with me. But I’m just not interested.
If despite all this explanation it’s important to you to believe that I’m bi, go ahead. No big deal. I’m interested in educating people but I’m tired of trying to explain something that you may never understand.
Now, it could even be that I have a natural ability to be bisexual but that that potentiality is so repressed in our homophobic culture that I no longer have access to it. In fact, one time I found myself rather drawn to one woman, but still didn’t want sex with her. So it just seems weird to me to think of myself as bisexual when I have no interest in actual sex.
But the thing is, the breast fetish has nothing to do with male heterosexuality, either.
In fact, men are more likely than women to like enormously large and unnatural breasts. How could being drawn to something that does not exist in nature be biological? In fact, when some men get so that they can only appreciate large, unnatural breasts, they get less aroused by natural, smaller ones. And that makes perpetuation of the species less likely.
Also, when men have been with a particular woman for a while the fetish disappears. A number of men have remarked on this, some on this blog. A man may still find his partner’s breasts attractive, just as he finds her legs attractive — and new lingerie may help create a sense of newness and mystery — but her naked breasts will not provoke a fetish response in the way a new woman’s breasts would. Or in the way that hers did the first few time he saw them. There’s a reason why men needed a new Playboy pinup each month, back when Playboy was the porn of choice. Guys won’t keep getting aroused by the same woman’s breasts over and over again. And yet, he will continue to be turned on by her, and will still want to have sex with her, over and over again. And to repeat: In tribal societies where women are topless all the time men don’t get aroused by breasts. In 1980’s Europe, when men saw plenty of naked breasts on topless beaches and billboards, the fetish disappeared. Men who are overexposed to pornography stop finding breasts attractive.
What’s arousing is the hiddenness and intrigue behind that which is hidden, heightened by a culture obsessed with breasts as a sex signal.
Apparently, many women are confused about experiencing a breast fetish while being sexually drawn to men and not women. “How is that possible?” they have wondered? So my posts have found their way to various sites like “Yahoo! Answers.” Or, a number of women have found my blog by googling something like, “I’m a straight woman but like boobs.” When I put “Women Learn the Breast Fetish, Too” on StumbleUpon, it received a 97% “like” rating. So there must be plenty of women who can relate. I doubt they’re all bi.
That said, women’s sexuality does seem to be more flexible than men’s, which I’ve written about here. Women’s sexuality is also more repressible, as I written about here. And I have suffered major sexual repression as I’ve written about here. So it’s entirely possible that I’m just out of touch with my sexual self so that these two forces are working at cross-purposes for me. But based on my own experience and the experiences that other have reported to me, women can actually find breasts arousing without desiring sex with a woman.
Being bi would probably make me – and all women — more intriguing. Sorry to disappoint.
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TRIGGER WARNING:
The following includes descriptions, photos, and video that may serve as a trigger for victims of sexual violence.
Please be advised.
Someone asked me today, “What is ‘rape culture’ anyway? I’m tired of hearing about it.”
Yeah, I hear ya. I’m tired of talking about it. But I’m going to keep talking about it because people like you keep asking that question.
Rape culture is when a group of athletes rape a young girl, and though there are dozens of witnesses, no one says, “Stop.”
Rape culture is when a group of athletes rape a young girl, and though there are dozens of witnesses, they can’t get anyone to come forward.
Rape culture is when a group of athletes rape a young girl, and adults are informed of it, but no consequences are doled out because the boys “said nothing happened.”
Rape culture is when a group…
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Women Rating Men
A new “Lulu” app calls itself the first database of men, built by women, for women. Here’s how Slate’s Amanda Hess says it works:
You sign into Lulu via Facebook to prove you’re a woman (or rather, that you’ve indicated your Facebook gender as “female”). You page through a list of all your male Facebook friends, award them points based on their looks, manners, spending habits, and ambition, then assign them hashtags for their strengths (#SexualPanther, #NotADick) and weaknesses (#NapoleonComplex, #WearsEdHardy). Then, the next time you’re circling a romantic or sexual prospect in real life, just plug his name into Lulu to see what your (totally anonymous) virtual girlfriends have to say about him… Women may then publicly sexualize (#KinkyInTheRightWays) and shame (#BabbyDaddy) the men in their lives without their consent.
The app’s creator, Alexandra Chong, came up with the idea as she talked about a date who wasn’t right for her but might be perfect for someone else.
Maybe it’ll help a few women and men get together. And maybe it’ll help a few good women avoid a few bad men. But I wouldn’t care to be ranked on this sort of forum so I’m guessing that men won’t be thrilled to find themselves on it, either.
As the judge makes her pronouncements from on high, the judged may feel diminished, powerless and at her mercy.
But we women are so used to being judged in that way that it might be hard to resist turning the tables.
Plenty of men, on the other hand, are in a tizzy: “WE are the ones to judge and hold power over how others are defined” some seem to say.
Hess points out the hypocrisy of male Redditors denouncing Lulu as anti-male harassment even as they defend their own right to post and unleash anonymous commentary on unauthorized nude photos of women on the Web. Which sounds a lot worse to me. Yet these guys don’t get that. Probably because they’re so used to being the judges, the ones in power.
How about that Golden Rule: Do unto others as ye would have done unto you. We could all take a lesson in non-judgment.
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It Ain’t Sex Unless It’s Pleasuring
“It isn’t sex unless you’ve had an orgasm” says Jessica Valenti on losing virginity.
I’d take that a step further and apply it to rape: It ain’t sex unless it’s pleasuring. That makes sex and rape two different things.
When words fail to make distinctions things can get fuzzy and merge together. In places like Korea no words distinguish between blue and green, leaving people unable to see a difference.
We may need to distinguish between sex and rape to stop confusing one with the other. Sex is about consensual, mutual pleasure. Rape is not.
The Steubenville rape, and reaction to it, has got me thinking about this.
A semi-conscious, non-responsive 16-year-old girl is digitally penetrated. So what happens? Someone films it. Next she’s photographed naked, gossiped about, joked about, and it’s all passed around on the web as the girl’s former friends, other students and local townsfolk defend the assailants.
Evan Westlake said he didn’t stop the assault, because,
It wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I thought it was forcing yourself on someone.
After a guilty verdict a defendant wails that his life is over. CNN, ABC and NBC seem sympathetic to the perpetrators, whose lives are forever ruined. Just sex gone bad? Bad decisions surrounding sex? It’s easy to make a mistake?
If sex were only thought of as consensual, mutual and pleasurable for all involved then maybe more people could see that entering a semi-conscious girl’s vagina is not sex, it is rape.
And if a woman or girl were raped, or lost her virginity through rape, maybe she’d feel a lot better if she redefined “sex” and “virginity loss” in terms of pleasuring sex, not mere penetration.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable thinking of sex and rape as being different forms of the same thing.
It ain’t sex unless it’s consensual.
It ain’t sex unless it’s mutual.
It ain’t sex unless it’s pleasurable.
It ain’t sex unless everyone feels good afterwards.
And real men love sex, but real men don’t rape.
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It Ain’t Sex Unless You Ooooo
By Erica Dalton
When it comes to virginity, Jessica Valenti says, “It isn’t sex unless you’ve had an orgasm.”
How different things would be if virginity were explained to young girls that way. Sex is so much more than the old in-and-out.
I can relate all too well. And I cannot help but reassess the image of virginity that I had created long before I knew that I was creating it. An image that I had been mindlessly guided to by my culture.
To this day a lot of us are taught to wait for that one man or woman who will rock our world. But once you get that not everybody experiences sex the same way, you lose grasp of the image that has been pushed down our throats.
If you believe that staying a virgin until marriage will make your first sexual encounter better, followed by a happier and healthier marriage, you may be disappointed. Virginity is not proven to make marriage any simpler or happier. And your marriage could end up worse. I know unhappy couples who are not sexually well-matched. But this problem of ignorance is kept from youth, who are encouraged to stay abstinent to obtain that ultimate magical moment.
It all keeps people uneducated about their bodies and their sexuality. And that does NOT make for better sex.
Until I saw Valenti’s definition, I had not thought that losing virginity meant anything more than a dull night that carries much more expectation than it delivers. But now that I see virginity differently I understand a little more of who I am.
Losing virginity is so much more than that moment of penetration.
This piece was written by one of my students who gave permission to post it.
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Sex Sells — To Women?
Sex sells, they say.
Last month’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition featured bikinied women and women whose nude bodies were painted to look like they were wearing bikinis. (Swimsuits are related to sports, get it?). The scantily clad ladies sell a lot of magazines.
Now SI wants to appeal to its female audience of 18 million. The ladies will get makeup tips. And after all the lovely swimsuit models, women readers may feel badly enough about themselves to want them – a common advertising trick.
But why no Beckham in the buff for us? We aren’t supposed to enjoy ogling sexy men? Instead, we are supposed to be sexy ourselves, so that men can enjoy ogling us?
But SI is hardly alone.
Cosmo, Glamour, Elle, et al., highlight sexy ladies, and at best, lowlight sexy men. In fact, Cosmo and Maxim look an awful lot alike.
But it’s not just magazines. Nearly nude women, but rarely men, draw our eyes to billboards peddling products. The camera hones in on women’s boobs and butts on TV and film. You don’t see much focus on men’s buns and chests.
Why are sexy women marketed to both men and women?
And why aren’t sexy men marketed to women?
Historically, men have controlled media and they put out what they find attractive. Then, flooded with pretty women, we all drink them in. They sink into our minds, and we unconsciously develop notions that that’s the way the world is and the only way things could be.
But the unsaid message is that women’s sexual needs aren’t primary. Men’s are. We are meant to be beautiful decorations for men. We are there to turn men on. Men need sexual pleasure, and we are the one’s to give it to them.
Not the reverse.
As a result, when men look at nearly-nude women, they love it. But when women look at nearly-nude men they can feel uncomfortable.
Shouldn’t women’s sexual pleasure be as important as men’s? And wouldn’t men and women both enjoy sex more if it were?
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Outrage at Blaming Rapists, Not Women
A proposal: “Blame the criminal, not the victim.” And there’s an uproar?
Last week rape survivor, Zerlina Maxwell, went on Fox’s “Hannity” to discuss rape and guns. But instead of saying women should drink less, dress modestly, arm themselves and learn self-defense, like she “should have,” she told Hannity:
I don’t think that we should be telling women anything. I think we should be telling men not to rape women and start the conversation there… If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.
And all hell breaks loose. The Blaze calls her words “bizarre.” Blogs and tweets say she should get raped.
“Thanks for the feedback, Internet dopes. Why would anybody think that you need some sensitivity training?” responds Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.
Maxwell tells Salon that, “We need to teach (men) to see women as human beings and respect their bodily autonomy.” Williams points out that when you do, things change:
After Canada launched a “Don’t be that guy” consent awareness campaign in 2011, the sexual assault rate dropped for the first time in years — by 10 percent.
In fact, violence against women is much lower in non-patriarchal cultures that respect women. Both rape and battering were pretty much nonexistent among American Indians before Europeans arrived. Rape and battering have also dropped in the U.S. with a rise in feminism, according to Justice Bureau surveys of victims.
But why the rage when the focus of rape prevention turns from women to men?
Actually, the outrage hasn’t come from everywhere. It comes from right-wing groups — Fox News viewers and the like — who bolster the haves over the have-nots: typically whites, the rich, heteros and in this case, men, over everyone else.
Here, the matter relates to who is free and who is not. Do not even think about asking men to limit themselves. Women, on the other hand, should limit themselves: what they wear, what they drink, what time of day they leave the house… They must prepare themselves for defense against men who refuse to limit themselves. And continuing the right-wing rant, women must be stripped of freedom over their reproductive lives, entirely. No right to your own body in any way.
In this worldview even if rapists ACT, responsibility for the act must fall on the victim. Because men must be free, but women must not.
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Women, Men Face Opposing Repressions
![hodgins-and-angela-in-jail[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/hodgins-and-angela-in-jail1.jpg)
Men and women are both repressed, but sometimes in opposing ways. Too many women feel emotionally open but sexually unresponsive, while too many men easily come even while their emotions lie submerged. Either way, when it comes to sex, they lose.
But should we be surprised when (among other things) buddies push each other to have sex with lots of women who they feel nothing for. Successful “players” are celebrated for “scoring” with the ladies – who may be shamed for “giving it up.”
But as players have sex with women they don’t know and don’t care about, and whose reputations they may destroy, they must check their emotions. But checking emotions goes beyond the bedroom. Boys don’t cry, and shouldn’t express much else, either. When Norah Vincent passed as a man for 18 months, she missed feeling and expressing emotion.
Here’s one man’s response to a post I wrote called “Twilight vs Porn” which contrasts women’s emotionally charged erotica with men’s proclivity for body parts.
It took years for me to untangle the damaging messages I received as a man and to get underneath them to a more genuine understanding of what sex was. I, too, think male sexual modes are primarily culturally reinforced – and exclude men from the best sex within intimacy, leaving them with a series of shallow orgasms and striving egos.
A young woman named Valerie saw it from the other side. She complained about guys gaping at her body and manipulating her into popular porn positions. It’s cold, she says:
I don’t just want to become Body A. I want men to feel like they are with me, Valerie, a particular woman with a particular body and my own unique personality.
Surprisingly, advice to non-orgasmic women may have something in common with helpful advice for non-emotional men.
Sex therapist, Lonnie Barbach encourages women to explore their bodies — without trying to come (because trying to climax just leads to worry that they won’t and keeps them out of the erotic experience). Notice the subtleties of the sensations, she says, feel into them, let them grow.
A guy once told me that he’d had to do the reverse to experience connection. Orgasm was easy. He needed to notice emotional subtleties and center on those as a way to move beyond cold porn sex. And then he couldn’t believe how amazing sex could be — even though he’d thought it was awesome before.
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