Maybe there’s another reason poly people exert guilt trips—they’re trying to grow the pool of potential partners.

Also, it’s not all about holes! For chrissakes. Hello intercourse-specific heteronormativity insert extra $10 word here.

But I’m afraid I have to agree that some women probably do like the rose petals and candles silliness.

Sure. But there are lots of men with similarly silly ideas about how romantic (not just sexual) relationships are supposed to go — Nice Guyness often involves a fair bit of this. Savage indulges in a bit of back-slapping with Mr. “Real Men Are Not Sweet Or Considerate”, delivers a gratuitous lecture to women in general about votive candles and rose petals on the bed (he brings those subjects up out of nowhere), then lamely concludes that, oh yeah, some women are kinky too. But really if you look at the amount of column space given to each thing, it’s about the back-slapping. Those crazy dames and their Julia Roberts movies! What a racket, am I right?

Yeah, I’ve seen the poly people slam monogamous people. But I don’t know if that’s sexism, since most people who get to the point of being poly have rejected sexism.

I don’t think it’s that simple, any more than I think it’s simple for a person raised in a racist society to get to the point of rejecting racism. People who consider themselves anti-racist continue to carry around ideas that they don’t even realise are rooted in racism. I think the same goes for sexism.

The rest of the blog post I linked to specifically talks about poly men who talk equality and enlightenment but really like the idea of having some kind of Hefner-style harem; I also see poly or non-monogamous women who like to one-up women who prefer monogamy (”I’m better at serving men because…”).

I suspect they slam monogamy out of defensiveness, so it doesn’t really bother me that much.

As I said, if they were the only ones doing it, it wouldn’t bother me, but they’re not the only ones doing it. Evo-psychos do it (higgamous-hoggamous), MRAs do it (the evil wifely “sex monopoly”), religious conservatives do it (a man’s respect and fidelity has to be earned by perfect premarital ignorance).

All the kinksters I know are pretty geeky, especially the ones who go to S&M parties and the like, but I can deal with that. I can deal with judgmental BDSM-ers, for example, a lot more easily than I can deal with judgmental open relationship types, because their criticisms of my lifestyle don’t intersect with the crap coming at me from multiple other directions.

For the record, I’m interested in only the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, which sadly, has already happened for 2008.

Now, as for the Fox report, it was a heap of bullshit coming from Hannity.

*That is, people who claim to be sex positive. Whether they are what they claim to be is arguable.

Yeah, I’ve seen the poly people slam monogamous people. But I don’t know if that’s sexism, since most people who get to the point of being poly have rejected sexism. I suspect they slam monogamy out of defensiveness, so it doesn’t really bother me that much. And since most of them had to go on a journey where they believed in monogamy, because it’s the cultural norm, and moved away from it and so it becomes easy to assume that other people are just as repressed as you were.

I guess I just don’t feel threatened by holier-than-thou kinksters. I always think about Margaret Cho’s routine where she talks about going to an S&M club and just realizes it turns her off because it’s so over-the-top. She has a great line about the overlap between Trekkies and S&M enthusiasts. I think that gets to the heart of it. Kinkiness is a form of geekiness. The costumes, the lingo, all signs of geekiness. I giggle when I hear the word “polyamory”, because the word just screams, “I was a nerd in high school and I’m still totally psyched that people want to have sex with me now.” I utterly sympathize with that point of view, of course. I share it. And I’m pretty geeky myself in a lot of respects. (Dude, blogger? ‘Nuff said.) Nothing against geeks, but 99.9% of geeks with attitude problems is that they feel defensive about their geekiness. If they came to terms with it, they’d probably be a little less hostile to people who are disinterested in their particular geek obsession/kink.

Also explains why Dan Savage is always saying there’s a lot more kinky guys than kinky girls out there. I bet dollars to donuts he’s right on that. There’s also a lot more geeky guys than geeky girls. Women are just under a lot more pressure to squelch certain kinds of interests. But that’s changing.

Beefcake Tuesday– either I’ve been busy Tuesdays or we haven’t had them as often lately.

Samantha, (and everybody else who misses it) this blast from the 80s past starring Streisand and three hawt guys (plus one silly pudgy guy with a string of pearls.) is for you.

Maybe a condescending tone, but even then I’ve only heard that from the “happy hooker” types who assume that your husband/boyfriend is paying for sex from someone else behind your back.

That’s primarily what I mean. I don’t have an exhaustive list of links for it, although I can probably scare some up — basically any comment by Anthony Kennerson will have some element of the “if you don’t want to do what I want to do, you’re an erotophobe” shaming crap, but that’s not the only place to find it. Generally I sense that it’s almost pro forma among certain stripes of sex-pozzers — like, for example, in this post here where, before the blogger can get on with her very intelligent and sensitive dissection of her own relationships, she has to slam married monogamy, not just as something that doesn’t work for a lot of people, but as something that’s inevitably boring and miserable. (Granted, she doesn’t specifically attack women, but again, this occurs in a cultural context wherein every sexist, from religious conservatives to liberal evo-psychos, assumes that sexual monogamy is something straight women extract from unwilling straight men.)

I agree that Dan Savage is generally just fine. However, every so often he’ll come out with something like this (read the last letter and response).

Maybe a condescending tone, but even then I’ve only heard that from the “happy hooker” types who assume that your husband/boyfriend is paying for sex from someone else behind your back.

That’s primarily what I mean. I don’t have an exhaustive list of links for it, although I can probably scare some up — basically any comment by Anthony Kennerson will have some element of the “if you don’t want to do what I want to do, you’re an erotophobe” shaming crap, but that’s not the only place to find it. Generally I sense that it’s almost pro forma among certain stripes of sex-pozzers — like, for example, in this post here where, before the blogger can get on with her very intelligent and sensitive dissection of her own relationships, she has to slam married monogamy, not just as something that doesn’t work for a lot of people, but as something that’s inevitably boring and miserable. (Granted, she doesn’t specifically attack women, but again, this occurs in a cultural context wherein every sexist, from religious conservatives to liberal evo-psychos, assumes that sexual monogamy is something straight women extract from unwilling straight men.)

I agree that Dan Savage is generally just fine. However, every so often he’ll come out with something like this (read the last letter and response).

Well, that’s fair. The majoritarian sentiment is something I would agree is anti-woman. I just wasn’t clear on how you were defining” “sides” here. Your statement seemed a bit too broad.

“That survey about attitudes about teenage sexuality below was sobering. Most American adults, liberal or conservative, rejected the idea that kids could have healthy, loving sexual relationships.”

To be fair, most of that probably reflects peer pressure. To use an antiquated phrase, it’s not currently “politically correct” to admit that teen sex can be positive under the right circumstances. That’s an issue you have to bring out into the open, along with the fact that all consensual sex can be positive and rewarding under the right circumstances. You can change a lot of minds once the dark cloud of internalized repression is removed from our culture.