the opoponax
July 31, 2007 at 8:40 pm

Also, I have to say the concept that your first time will be anything short of horribly awkward and dissapointing.

Well, my very first PIV experience, which was also my first experience with doing anything sexual with a partner beyond just kissing (and those 2 experiences were fleeting and not part of a real relationship) was neither awkward nor disappointing. I am sure though that this was partially because my partner was experienced and forthright, and because I was probably as prepared as anyone could be by just booklearning and self-pleasuring and having pretty successfully jettisoned patriarchial hooey. I was also over 20. And of course being male I didn’t have the sheer anatomical issues I suppose are normal for a woman w/o that particular experience.

Demanding and getting a standard of total virginity for both partners prior to one, death-do-you part, marriage, is clearly a formula for awkwardness and disappointment, and a set-up for endless nagging curiousity about how much greener the grass might be over the next fence, even if by good fortune the two happen to be a good sexual match for each other. Demanding that only the woman meet this standard, which would allow for the possibility of a considerate husband bringing useful experience into the relationship, is an obvious crying injustice (which fundies and sexists in general attempt to pave over with ideologies about inherent differences between the desires of each sex) and seriously subverts the alleged pragmatic virtues of monogamy–since the men would occasionally have children by liasons with other women before marriage even if they stayed faithful after marriage, and venereal diseases would have an opportunity to spread.

OTOH a relaxed attitude toward premarital sex is a clear danger to patriarchial ideology–and only a danger to such ideologies, not one to a society that perhaps strongly values fidelity after a partnership is declared but not on patriarchial grounds.

In such a society, I suspect that a reasonable norm might be to expect and encourage short-term relationships between young adults and older ones, with due protection from possible predatory purposes of the latter. And of course in many societies it is accepted that young adults will experiment with sex with each other before choosing a final partner.

The madness of the “romantic” version of patriarchy (”There is One True Spouse for you out there; God or some vague stand-in for God will magically bring you together and signal you both”) is guaranteed to result in massive bad faith on all sides; either there is some kind of de facto arrangement going on or everyone is more or less cheating on the ideal. In its most sincere form it boils down to the idea of God, or perhaps the infallible wisdom of evolutionary psychology or some such scientistic theocracy, is in fact the great Matchmaker. Insofar as we get away from the structural bases and social reinforcements of patriarchy, which consistently makes women objects and not subjects, the myth falls apart, and the social factors that seek or tend blindly to enforce the myth are clearly reactionary.

Steady now. Some of us are 22 and haven’t had a first kiss yet (unless you count drunken nightclub stranger hijinx), and it has nothing to do with “waiting for marriage” or some other BS. Sometimes it’s hard/impossible to find someone who likes you back. Which gives lie to the whole “women have power! sexual power! They can seduce any man with their feminine wiles and that power has to be controlled!” crap.

So yes, both military men and thier wives were fooling around on each other. And fundamentalist men were among the worst. Ask me about the ship’s corpman who tried to convert everyone and self treated himself for STD’s after every port.

Well, at least she didn’t have to kiss his feet as part of the ceremony like you do in a Hindu wedding.

Eh? I’ve been involved in countless Hindu weddings, and I’ve seen the bride’s parents wash the groom’s feet, the groom put toe-rings on the bride’s toes, and the bride’s friends run off with the groom’s shoes, but I’ve never seen a single instance of the bride kissing the groom’s feet, even among people who went with the ultra-traditional three-day ceremony.

When it comes to arranged marriages (and make no mistake, Lauren had an arranged marriage), they work best when the participants go into them with fairly modest expectations. Either the couple settles into a steady, companionable relationship, in which case they’re not disappointed because they weren’t expecting grand passion, or they really do have the heady, woozy falling-in-love experience after marriage, which comes as a pleasant surprise. A fundie who believes in true love is going to end up bitterly disappointed in the stranger that daddy picked for her.

The thing that puzzles me about fundamentalists in the military is that military people are the sluttiest people alive. I used to frequent a sex club that was driving distance from a military base, and half the people there were from the military. The most interesting were the wives whose husbands were deployed, who would club to the club alone to get laid. I thought it showed a sophisticated understanding of human behavior. No one wants to go a year plus without having sex, so a sex club is a safe way to have sex without risking your relationship.

Also, I thought Hawker Hurricaine’s story about how his wife could get him exciting by telling him she’d never done something before, even though he knew perfectly well she had, totally hott.

he incest taboo is a commonly cited universal, though i think that one in particular is a little shakier than the others for a variety of reasons.

This would be the area of deviance, would it not. Every society sets rules for behavior and punishment (of a wide variety of forms) for breaking them….deviance. Whether or not it need be incest, there is deviance.

to clarify, the above conversation about universality pertains to humans within societies/cultures, not humans individually. These qualities may be connected in some way we don’t yet understand with biology — in the case of language, we know this to be the case. But social scientists generally aren’t overly interested in asking what biological structure accounts for the universality of art or music.

Hence the social science clarification “cultural universals”.

Which do exist. All humans have language, art, family structures, marriage (to an extent, and depending on how you define the term), cuisine/food prep/cooking, religion/philosophy/metaphysics, etc. the incest taboo is a commonly cited universal, though i think that one in particular is a little shakier than the others for a variety of reasons.