Once in awhile, you have a moment where you really see how the Equal Rights Amendment would, contrary to the claims of opponents, have a positive effect on our laws. Lily Ledbetter would have won her case, I suspect, because even the most law-bending reactionary justices would have had trouble denying her claims. Same story with Gonzales v. Carhart, or any abortion restriction really, since they’re all based on the idea that women are second class citizens who can legally have fewer rights than men, and in the case of Carhart, can be treated as mentally inferior as a class to men. I have to wonder if it would make it much easier to challenge abstinence-only education in schools, since the materials invariably come from religious organizations with anti-woman and homophobic agendas.

Maybe not. These groups do try to scrub some of their more offensive beliefs about gays’ and women’s inferiority out of the textbooks, with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s a strange situation, as if our government was accepting history textbooks written by SPLC-recognized hate groups, so long as they make a half-assed effort to cover up their more odious racist assumptions. Because once you get into the thick of the Christianist world, where they’re letting their hair down, their jaw-dropping ideas about women (basically, that they’re property) will shock even the hardened wingnut watchers.

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I suppose we should have seen this coming, but still: Oh my god. (Hat tip.) The headline is pure scare tactics.

‘Sex and the City’ Fiend: Show Turned Me Into Samantha

I’ve never understood the nation’s paranoid obsession with that show. Well, I do, but I also don’t. This headline really gets at it—there’s a real fear that women across the nation are going to watch the show and start getting ideas about how it’s not only okay not to get married and start having babies fairly young, but that being single and living independently is fun and exciting. Because no matter how some of us feminists wrung our hands because the characters on “Sex and the City” weren’t empowered enough (i.e., two of them openly yearned for marriage and one was somewhat disorganized and compulsive in her life choices), there’s no denying that the show did really portray single women with independent incomes as exciting, fun people. (With flaws, of course, but good lord, if every show portrayed all women as pillars of strength at all time, they’d be too damn boring to watch.) From the point of view of some of us who’ve tasted the life of independent living, we don’t see what the fuss is, but the show was wildly popular with women who went straight from the home to perhaps a college/young adulthood situation with roommates to marriage without ever having that part of your life where you answer to no one but yourself. And it’s those women that are feared might get ideas.

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Monogamy: Made for a woman, like fancy jewelry.

Update: I just want to make sure this post is understood not to be talking about marriages where the sex life has actually dwindled inside the marriage. Both men and women can and do suffer from a spouse who loses all interest in sex, a problem that I think compounds itself over time, because if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. This article is more another whine from a guy who wants to screw around and wants his wife to “understand”, i.e. tolerate it without demanding her own right to screw around.

Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.

Survey takers guessed that twice as many people are having extramarital affairs as really are, estimating that 44 percent of married men and 36 percent of married women are unfaithful. The reality is it’s not as rampant as we think, with 28 percent of married men and 18 percent of married women admitting to having a sexual liaison, the survey found.

I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.

I bring it up, because Salon blogged this maudlin “woe is men” story that claims, among other things, that evidence is growing that the need to cheat is hard-wired in men. Interesting, the only “evidence” that is growing that men are hard-wired to cheat, rape, and act like pigs is the number of times a single hack psychologist named David Buss is quoted. Sure enough, the author goes sniveling to Buss to give him “science” to prove to his wife and women of the world that he has to cheat, and Buss complies. Buss admits women cheat, but has to hedge, implying that men just roam around fucking anyone, whereas women just like to keep an extra boyfriend in reserve so they’re never going without should the current husband croak. You’d think the combination of male desire for variety and the supposed oodles of scientific evidence would cause one of the writers who tackles this subject to talk to someone besides Buss, but maybe full-blown hackery of his sort is hard to come by.

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Guess someone told Goodtime Vito “it’s game over man.” The reason Fossella, who was arrested for DUI in Virginia (and was fornicating and procreating outside of his sacred marital bond), isn’t resigning is because there would have to be a special election held for his seat, and the Republicans don’t want to lose it. (Staten Island Advance):

In a bombshell announcement that brings the curtain down on one of the most storied careers in Staten Island political history, fifth-term Republican Rep. Vito Fossella will not seek re-election this fall.

Mired in scandal after revelations about the secret daughter he fathered with Virginia divorcee Laura Fay became public, Fossella (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) tells constituents in a letter to be posted on his Web site tomorrow that he will no longer serve them in Congress after his current term expires on Jan. 3, 2009.

“After a great deal of consideration, I have made the decision not to seek re-election to the United States House of Representatives this November,” Fossella says in the statement. “This choice was an extremely difficult one, balanced between my dedication to service to our great nation and the need to concentrate on healing the wounds that I have caused to my wife and family.”

Related:
* Fossella’s judgment day?
* Another Republican protects the sanctity of marriage

They are getting a little punchy in bible-beating newsgathering land.

With films such as “Dark-Haired Sluts” and “Next Door Panties” on its movie menu, Marriott International is coming under heavy fire from family activists urging the hotel giant to banish such sexual fare from its bedrooms.

Focus on the Family met with hotel executives in Washington, D.C., yesterday and provided Marriott with a petition signed by 102,000 concerned citizens who want pornographic films purged from the list of movie offerings.

Daniel Weiss, media and sexuality analyst for the group, said Marriott has billed itself as a family-lodging establishment, and its decision to provide adult films to its customers is contrary to its reputation.

“In a sense, they’ve kind of put themselves out there,” he told WND. “We saw that offering pornographic content was incongruent with the image they were really going after.”

OK, well maybe not that one.

PZ reports that researchers have discovered a link between HPV and oral cancers in men, justifying another look at vaccinating young men for HPV (which also improves herd immunity). So now, as PZ notes, the religious right is facing a major dilemma. It’s one thing to tolerate thousands of deaths from cervical cancer, which only affects women, in order to show that the wages of sin are death. But the sin of fornication is a much different thing for men and women—which is why the nuts say that a woman who has sex is impure and contaminated, but a man who does has just let his integrity slip a little, which is something you can get back by giving your bus seat up to a few old ladies. Certainly, we don’t need straight men getting physically contaminated for real to show that sex is contaminating, when the only spiritually contaminated party is the woman. That’s why, after all, it’s not a sign of integrity for a man to have sex with a woman before marriage, because you’re fouling up someone else’s virgin.

Anyway, PZ has a question.

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It doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year since the last International Mr. Leather. See The Peter’s report last year, “Photos Reveal Twisted Perversions at Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton Hotel.”

Since we know Peter LaBarbera reads my blog, I’ll just post the ticket information link for him (also, here’s the contest application form, Peter). The fetish event, which draws hets and homos, a fact that Peter tries to minimize, is celebrating its 30th year. It will be at the Hyatt Regency Chicago May 22 - May 26. If Peter plays his cards right, he might meet special guest Andy Bell of Erasure, who will perform on Sunday night at the International Mr. Leather Contest.

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While we’re on the topic of the Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (in my basement) honcho, Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has a couple of items on Peter. One is on a Christian web site’s embarrassment at the obsessive bleatings at AFTAH:

And why is it just homosexuality. They act as if that is the BIG sin in the scriptures, dismissing all other destructive behaviors and choices. So, I will faithfully be waiting for the following websites to emerge, if these people are really trying to get biblical truth out there

Americans for Truth about Lying
Americans for Truth about Gossip
Americans for Truth about Bitterness
Americans for Truth about Slander
Americans for Truth about Poverty
Americans for Truth about Widows

I say to McSame — please consider the recently heterosexually paired governor!

Whoops. We haven’t had a good one like this in, oh, a few weeks. This NY pol was not only fornicating outside the marital bond, he was procreating with a sex partner other than his wife. He receives bonus points for being charged with driving while intoxicated! (NYT):

Representative Vito J. Fossella, a Staten Island Republican who was arrested on May 1 in Alexandria, Va., and charged with drunken driving, issued a statement on Thursday acknowledging that he had had an extramarital affair with Laura Fay, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel, and that the two of them have a 3-year-old daughter together.

The prospect that Mr. Fossella could face a mandatory jail sentence if convicted had already threatened to bring to an end his decade-long career in the House, where Mr. Fossella is the only Republican representing New York City.

…Mr. Fossella, 43, was driving with a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit when he was pulled over. He faces a mandatory five days in jail if convicted.

…In the Democratic stronghold of St. George, the neighborhood nearest the ferry to Manhattan, patrons at the Cargo Cafe weighed in on the scandal.

“Vito Fossella’s behavior is a disgrace to himself, his family and to Staten Island,” said an anesthesiologist, Dr. John Ferguson, 44. “Given the fact that he votes along the Bush-Cheney line 90 percent of the time, which means he sees himself as a moral values candidate, I find his behavior completely, but not surprisingly, hypocritical. He should resign immediately.”

Hat tip, Linda.

Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.

Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.

Well, actually, as an asset, virginity ranks below toilet paper in terms of holding value, because after you use the toilet paper, it’s still there. But virginity is gone the second you make use of your “property”. If an asset is utterly demolished to non-existence after one use, it’s not really an asset by any real measure.

And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.

I suspect the Abstinence Clearinghouse folks think the way to get around this is for women (who these messages are mainly aimed at) to marry when they’re really young, so that they don’t get a whole bunch of job skills and independent ideas and therefore escape hatches before the fateful day. But that’s just a guess; I suppose we’ll have to keep reading to find out the whole story.

On the horrid article itself (instead of just the jaw-dropping quote), which isn’t technically about the casual cruelty that men inflicted on women in the conservative-romanticized utopia of the 50s, well, Lance Mannion has the long takedown that this article deserves. It’s by Michael Wolff and he at least does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.

Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.

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Image from Gretchen Schermerhorn.

So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc. Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.

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If pressed, most of us bicycling fans will say we do it for the exercise, to save money on gas, and for the environment. But now this Hungarian PSA promoting bicycling has exposed the truth. You might not want to play this where office mates can hear it. (Via, with translation.)

But I can’t help but think that as silly as it is, there’s a grain of truth to the claims. Lack of exercise is brutal to the sex drive, and something as well-rounded as bicycling to get exercise probably does have some health benefits that carry over to the bedroom.

The plan is for me to be on KVRX live in Austin tonight on “On The Fringe“. It’s right when 91.7 switches from KOOP to KVRX, so Austinites can hear me on-air on 91.7, but for those of you not in the Austin area, you can stream KVRX by pressing the “Listen Now” button on their homepage.

Discussion link: He said he wanted to wait until marriage for Jesus. But what if it was just because he knows you won’t buy the cow when you find out the milk isn’t so good?

Now this had me roaring. EHarmony was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who had close ties to Daddy Dobson before expanding his online dating service beyond Christian singles. J.P. Duffy, a subscriber who married through the service — and is also media director for the Family Research Council — got wind of the service’s new advice newsletter, “Navigating the one-night stand,” from a friend…and, well, there was an eruption.

“Our friend read the first few lines: ‘So you’re a swinging single, and you’ve had a one-night stand. What’s the etiquette for establishing boundaries, calling the day after and getting out without hurting feelings?’” the couple wrote.

“Promoting such high-risk, promiscuous behavior is outrageous and irresponsible,” they wrote. “The advice column glosses over the risks of sexually transmitted diseases … ,” they wrote. “Also glossed over is the increased risk for violence among those who ‘navigate’ multiple sexual partners.”

“eHarmony is committed to helping its members find highly compatible, long-term relationships and I regret that the inappropriate content and tone of the column could lead our members to believe that we were not interested in their long-term relationship success.”

…You deserve and expect the best from eHarmony and we are dedicated to providing information that resonates with our diverse, vibrant, and thriving community,” he continued. “Please be assured that we are immediately upgrading our editorial review process and are also reviewing our existing content to make sure that it is consistent with the interests of our members.”

When I first heard about the Open Source Boob Project, I was sort of overwhelmed by the dipshittery and couldn’t really begin to tackle the multi-layered asshole levels required to be a part of this thing. (Summary: A bunch of dudes at some comic con decided that it would be awesome to trade on a handful of women’s serious insecurities and get some fondling. Gack, it’s complicated—just read the link.) Now that it’s been thoroughly dismantled by the rest of the feminist blogosphere, I feel like I can safely make fun of the whole thing without feeling like I’m missing something.

You have to give the assholes credit. Most men who have a strong need to have women flail around doing humiliating things (like being likened to open source software—aka, those other bitches you got to pay for, but you guys give it away for free) have to go the long, hard road and get a woman financially or socially dependent on them. You need to either go the Hugh Hefner route and just pay women openly for the favor or you go the route of any abusive fuckwit Joe Blow U.S.A. and charm her first with talk of love until you get her into a committed relationship and then start humiliating her, secure in the knowledge that it’s going to take her a lot, emotionally and financially, to break the commitment. In other words, you got to work for it most of the time. But these guys just waltzed in, declared themselves the judges of female beauty, and next thing you know, women are making absolute asses of themselves seeking the approval of these self-appointed judges. Nice racket if you can work it.

Not that I’m blaming the she-geeks that were sucked into this. As a she-geek of sorts, I fully understand that when you are old enough to vote but probably not old enough to drink, you are still getting over the fact that everyone who told you that you were too ugly and unsexy for admission in the human race in high school was probably exaggerating the case. And thus, you might be vulnerable to the flattery of some asshole who says, “Your tits are just good enough to be groped by random dudes who think showering every day is for peons.” But I promise you, young ladies, you don’t need the affections of men who hate you in order to get your grope on. Time passes and even those of us with the most unfortunate nicknames in high school can often go on to be considered full members of the human race, and attractive even to decent people.

Holy mother of Disco Ball, is this just wrong. It’s a semen detection kit that is marketed for catching cheating spouses and teenagers who have unruly amounts of autonomy. Naturally, they are trying to suggest that it’s for catching both men and women, but of course, we know that’s just some ass-covering and defies all common sense that tells us that since men shoot the semen away from their bodies, clean-up to the point of avoiding detection would be simple enough. Also, as blogger Slut Machine notes, this would be really good at catching male masturbators (i.e., all men), if not cheaters. I’m sure some woman out there will try it, and much sorrow will be had as she discovers that her husband is a man and thus has trace amounts of semen in his underwear all the time, but on the whole, I see this being marketed towards men who are looking for novel ways to control wives and daughters now that the law is less cooperative than it used to be.

My main concern here is that the abstinence-only nuts are going to find out about this. (Probably shouldn’t blog about it, since many of them read this blog to get their daily titillation thinking about women who have sex without apologizing for it.) You think the metal detectors at school doors are ridiculous? Or think about all the annual dust-ups with over-zealous, perverted school officials start doing underwear checks on high school students. This could make the situation a thousand times worse, with school officials getting the brilliant idea of having panty drills, like fire drills except everyone has to submit to panty-testing to make sure that they’re not having Teh Sex. Sure, various civil liberties organizations would sue them into the ground, but don’t think the idea isn’t attractive. Though I suppose it would encourage young women to use condoms.

Anyway, it’s a rip-off. If you want to find out that there’s biological material in people’s underwear, you can just assume that there is. And if you’re skeptical, I recommend the black light as a cost effective alternative to satisfy your doubts.

And it was caught on tape by Houston station KTRK. Add this foul man to the list of moralist sexual hypocrites.

The founder of a Christian school is confronted after 13 Undercover catches him soliciting sex from a parent, who’s trying to get her daughter a high school diploma.

At graduation ceremonies he talks about God, but you’ll hear the founder of a Houston-area Christian school not only talk about sex, but ask for it on tape.

It’s the middle of the day when a white pickup truck pulls into the back of a motel on 1960. Then it goes to the very back to park for a long while. We already know who the driver is. His name is LaVern Jordan and he runs Parkway Christian School.

Rebecca Traister has a great article about the 10th anniversary of “The Vagina Monologues” in New Orleans, and ends up having the same reaction that a lot of what you might call advanced patriarchy-blamers have when seeing this play: a reluctant appreciation for how fun it is to see it, after a period of intense irritation at the hoopla around it. I’m definitely in the rationalist category of feminism, as it were, and have little to no patience with the Earth Mother feminism that tries to make a big deal out of the feminine essence. It’s true that we are awash in a culture where anxious men have a submissive relationship to The Phallus, but seriously, the way to correct that is not to make a great emblem out of vulvic energy or whatever you want to call it. There are some men who have a healthy relationship with the penis—they like it, but see it as a tool that belongs to them. I think that route out of shame over having ladyparts is to take that pathway. But, as Traister notes, Ensler surrounds the play itself with this Earth Mother goddess stuff that makes me squirmy.

In Ensler’s megalomaniacal V-universe, everything from voter registration to the Iraq war is seen through the speculum, er, spectrum, of the vagina, and moist metaphor and love for Eve (and beav) rule the day. It often seems, in fact, that Ensler has taken her laudable grass-roots success and turned it into a celebrity-centric, glitzy franchise — one that has, in its unrelenting and patronizing focus on women-as-cootches, often felt as reductive and objectifying as the language Ensler originally set out to fight.

All that is true, but at the end of the day, the “Monologues” continue to draw huge audiences because the play itself is so good. You don’t have to love Ensler’s approach to love the play, because what makes the play awesome is that the monologues are all built from the direct words of a bunch of ordinary women. The factors that were in play 10 years ago when the play made its debut—shame about sexuality, the belief that women are inferior and that control of the ladyparts belongs to men, because women can’t be trusted with it—are only more pronounced now than they were then, and have been enshrined into the law. I think women flock to the play, because it’s refreshing to hear other women talk about their vaginas…..much in the way that men with healthy masculine identities see their penises. It’s mine, but it does not own me. Ensler may skirt the edge of “women as cootches”, but the play itself sends home the all-too-uncommon message that women own their cootches. And because of its emphasis on personal narrative, it does this without being preachy or driven by ideology, and it’s really funny and entertaining.

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I guess the letters from Don Wildmon weren’t enough to get the Marriott chain to drop the profitable in-room porno flick service in its rooms, so Daddy D, Tony Perkins and Bishop Harry Jackson signed on to another letter, along with a few dozen other professional “Christians,” to put the pressure on Marriott.

Another letter has been sent to Marriott Hotels asking that pornography be removed from its in-room televisions. This one carries the signatures of almost 50 pro-family leaders — including Dr. James Dobson, founder and chairman of Focus on the Family.

“We’re asking Marriott to discontinue showing the in-room porn movies,” said Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association. “Very simple. It’s not a big request.”

At least two other letters from pro-family leaders have been sent, with similar messages.

Wildmon said the move would cost Marriott millions of dollars in lost revenue, but the company can handle it.

All good feminist men mark women as their property.

The Feministe Feedback question from yesterday is too juicy not to tackle. M. LeBlanc has a good answer. Here’s the question:

Your most recent entry - on what a feminist relationship looks like - is primarily pitched at female feminists. I, as a well-intentioned but nonetheless male participant in relationships, would really like to know the answer to that question. i don’t commit the obvious sort of mistakes that non-feminist guys do, or at least i hope i don’t. Nonetheless there are certainly crimes of ignorance, so to speak.

In fact, you should write a book answering this question - “how to be a feminist boyfriend.”

I thought, “Hell, I could write that book,” but when I actually started to think about it, I found myself drawing a blank. There’s a lot of trite, obvious answers like, “Eat pussy and don’t make PMS cracks,” but I’m committed to treating people like they aren’t stupid and I don’t think anyone interested in this question is so stupid they haven’t thought of this. So I opened the comments and immediately found that I was disagreeing vehemently with the first comment:

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Okay, this article that Jill linked to is so worth blogging. It’s this weird, semi-guilty article about those oh-so-picky-bitches who just want men they partner with to clear certain basic standards in conversation ability. Okay, well, dumping someone just because he’s never heard of Pushkin is a little extreme, at least if he demonstrates good taste overall. Some women need to learn the joys of introducing a lover to something new, though of course you always run the danger that he’ll hate it.

But the notion that holding potential mates to a taste standard is shallow frankly blows my mind. I think, and said this in the comments at Feministe, that the admirable liberal movement against being judgmental sometimes suffers from what can only be considered a definitional issue. Judging someone for their race, religion, sex life, whatever, when it comes to their basic human rights and access to involvement in the political system is clearly wrong. Judging someone on these things and refusing to be friends or lovers with them is your right, but it makes you stupid and limits you more than anything else. But judging someone that you share a friendship with, much less your life, on personal qualities strikes me as perfectly reasonable and the only efficient way to handle your social life. If you can’t stand someone’s horrible taste or sense of humor, it seems that it’s best for everyone involved to go their separate ways.

With that in mind, I offer the same discussion question Jill did: What are your deal-breakers with someone you’re dating?

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(UPDATE: Jesus’ General has a hilarious letter to Smid: “I’ll never forget the day I first heard you speak about how your “wife’s vagina was enough.” I remember silently praying as I heard it, ‘please God, give me what this man has. I too want to be satisfied by my wife’s vagina.’”)

“I’m sorry, but my wife’s vagina is enough. I’m going to be honest. It’s enough. It is enough for me. If it is not enough for me, then that’s my problem. You know, I really have to be honest about that. God created her for my fit, he created that and I need to honor and respect my wife. I need to respect that.”

The rumors are true. I spoke with Josh Morgan, communications manager at Love In Action. He has confirmed that John Smid has resigned from the Memphis-based residential ex-gay program. A quiet announcement was made to staff and supporters, and an official announcement will be made in their April 1st newsletter to subscribers. Josh had no further details or statement about the announcement.

Boy, I hope this quote was taken out of context. (Hat tip.)

Some insist it can be explained by basic biology. Feminist author Robin Morgan says men “stow their brains in their crotches. Women do seem to approach work differently. And women tend to regard sex differently. They like to at least like the person.”

There’s nothing about the quote that inclines me to think Morgan was speaking about biological imperatives or any evo psych nonsense that exists to justify “middle-aged professors sleeping with their younger graduate students.” But still, I’m wary of the language that shames sexual desire, or more importantly, credits certain kinds of sexual misbehavior to sexual desire, when I think a lot of it is about power desire. Women are as fully capable as men of letting our lusts overcome our reason, but that’s not what a lot of these scandals are about.

Let me elaborate. The article in question is a Newsweek piece about why female leaders don’t get caught up in sex scandals as often as male leaders. The most likely explanation, albeit the least conducive to essentialist sexist arguments, is that there are simply a lot less female leaders. Women do, after all, cheat almost as much as men, and so if every adultery turned into a sex scandal and representation was 50/50 in the halls of power, we’d see an equal number of women getting outed as adulterers. But I’m not going to dust off my hands and call it a day with that, because I think the Newsweek article does make a good point about the qualitative difference. Women have been outed for garden variety adulteries, but with men, it’s often about sex with prostitutes, interns, grooming the next younger wife while the current one is sick with cancer, etc.

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I simply don’t want to hear any more from the Sally Kerns or Jim Naugles of the world about my ability to destroy civilization when they cannot even keep their own horny, depraved heteroworld in order.

In this story out of Sanderson, Florida, we also learn about an alternative spelling for brassiere. That or the woman was going to toss a few shrimp on the barbie after the holy rolling.

Deputies in Baker County arrested a couple caught having sex in a church. Baker County Sheriff’s Deputies say they received a call about a suspicious person outside the Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church, on the night of March 11th.

…”Her drawers [were] in the stands. Her brazier was over on the outside the stands,” Deacon Lonzie Altman recalled from his conversation with deputies.

According to the offense report, deputies found Crystal Rowland, 24, behind the altar. Rowland was taken into custody. She told deputies that Matthew Pearce, 28, was still inside. Deputies found him underneath the church, partially dressed.

Red tea candles were also collected from the church. Deputies say there was splattered red wax all over the altar. “I don’t know what has become of the people [that] somebody would just do something like that in a church,” said Altman.

…When asked why they decided to have sex inside the church, police say Rowland told them she wanted a “spiritual and sexual experience.”

…”Don’t think that the lord ain’t got something for them,” said Altman.

Update: I also want to give Kerry Howley a chance to respond to a quote about prostitutes that may just “love sex” that was taking out of context. She definitely does not want anyone to think she’s under the misimpression that prostitution is glamorous or that most prostitutes wouldn’t get the fuck out given half a chance. I apologize to Kerry for misrepresenting her position. We are in full agreement that no one should go to jail for selling sex. I will admit I’m skeptical of the idea that legalizing prostitution will do anything to reduce the stigma—most legalization schemes preserve the stigma, understanding that a non-degraded prostitutes is an oxymoron in the eyes of many, probably most customers, and that without the atmosphere of degraded womanhood, there’s nothing to buy and so the trade would slow to a trickle.

One great thing about being a fan of reading blogs and general internet writing is that you flit around from piece to piece, all short attention span theater, and you occasionally have serendipitous justapositions.* I liked this one. First I read this:

Well, Caitlain, in a patriarchy, the cornerstone of which is a paradigm of male dominance and female submission, women do not enjoy the same degree of personal sovereignty that men do. This oppressed condition obtains a priori to all other conditions, and nullifies any presumption of fully human status on the part of women. A woman, therefore, cannot freely “consent,” because her will is obviated by her status as a subhuman…..

No sane radical feminist could possibly support the assertion that women are “incapable” of making decisions; we are merely prevented by an oppressive social order from exercising our capability to its fullest extent.

And then I read this:

Last night I participated in a reading of “The Vagina Monologues” at a local university. I didn’t tell my husband what I was doing, since his politics are more conservative than mine and I just didn’t want to get into it over something I had already decided was the right thing to do. (The benefits supported a local women’s shelter.)

That said, I have to say I really liked this part of Twisty’s post:

I suspect that the rampant willingness among young feminists to deny this grim truth stems from the wholly untenable position into which it thrusts’em. They’re young, they’re fit, they wanna boink; who can blame them if they just aren’t ready to accept that nothing short of an exhaustive, uncompromising overthrow of the social order will put them in complete control of their own selves?

The interesting thing about this is that while you buck the idea that your full consent is always being pinched in these intellectual discussions, out there in the sexual field, as it were, you behave as if this were true. When sex education activists talk about teaching negotiation skills in the classroom, usually we’re thinking specifically, “Teaching young women to hold out for the condom, despite wheedling and even threats.” (Or being offered more cash to go without.) Young women who wanna boink have to become adept at working around the fact that many of their bedmates are simply not ever going to accept the idea that they’re full human beings instead of just sex toys that happen to have heart beats. (See this thread for many examples.) And if you get really good at getting yours and not letting the assholes trying to come on your face get you down, you get rewarded with being called a slut. Personally, I admire the navigational skills that many women develop and find it to be a tragedy, albeit an entirely predictable one, that the intelligence that it takes to be a good slut gets redefined as “dumb” in our culture.

In all honesty, considering this state of affairs, I can see how some “happy hookers” develop. If the price of just trying to have some fun-loving sex is frequent encounters with guys who think being gracious to sex partners defeats the purpose of fucking someone, then it’s just a matter of time before you start thinking you should be getting financially compensated, I’m sure. I just want it to be clear that while I hold men who visit prostitutes in very low esteem, I would never judge a prostitute, who is either a survivor or someone who took stock of a certain situation and decided that she’s going to game it. As well she should, since the system’s out to get her.

*New band name.

Original context.

This piece is semi-contrarian, and I feel the strong need to be contrarian against it. Well, not against the general idea that a sex scandal just to have one is a bad thing—I still maintain that garden variety adulteries and kinks are nobody’s business but their own, and the media needs to butt out of it, barring other factors that make the story news. But let’s face it, everyone agrees to those rules these days, barring the Clinton sex scandal, where the whole “perjury” trap was set up just so there could be an excuse for a pointless, salacious sex scandal that helped distract our nation’s capital right when more attention needed to be paid to the movement of terrorists that, you know, wanted to kill us all as we soon found out.

But outside of that, most of the sex scandals that have rocked the political world as of late might better be called “patriarchy scandals”, and since they involve the very same politicians who make a living preening around as great patriarchs, ripping their mask off and showing the squirmy insides is a favor to us all. Which is why I blanched at this:

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In the comments the other day, I suggested that legalization of prostitution would be an argument I’d entertain if I was convinced that a legalization scheme was concocted with the improvement of the lives of prostitutes in mind. Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for stepping in and shining some light on the subject. Romanticizers of prostitution will not be pleased with the facts, so maybe you should just skip over this if your illusions are important to you:

One response would be: Prostitution is inevitable, so we might as well legalize and regulate it. That’s a pragmatic argument that I used to find persuasive. If brothels were legalized and inspected, I believed, then we could uproot child prostitution and reduce AIDS and sexually transmitted infections.

I changed my mind after looking at the experiences of other countries. The Netherlands formally adopted the legalization model in 2000, and there were modest public health benefits for the licensed prostitutes. But legalization nurtured a large sex industry and criminal gangs that trafficked underage girls, and so trafficking, violence and child prostitution flourished rather than dying out.

As a result, the Netherlands is now backtracking on its legalization model by closing some brothels, and other countries, like Bulgaria, are backing away from that approach.

In contrast, Sweden experimented in 1999 with a radically different approach that many now regard as much more successful: it decriminalized the sale of sex but made it a crime to buy sex. In effect, the policy was to arrest customers, but not the prostitutes.

Some Swedish prostitutes have complained that the policy reduced demand and thus lowered prices, while forcing sex work underground. But the evidence is strong that the new approach reduced trafficking in Sweden, and opinion polls show that Swedes regard the experiment as a considerable success. And the bottom line is that if you want to rape a 13-year-old girl imported from Eastern Europe, you’ll have a much easier time in Amsterdam than in Stockholm.

I propose that the problem with prostitution is unique not because sex as a service is unique exactly. I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash. In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one. In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.

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This article in the San Francisco Chronicle about why political wives allow themselves to be put through the humiliating “stand by your man” routine, wherein you literally stand by your man while he admits (or issues a semi-admission/semi-denial) to fucking a mistress, another man, or a prostitute to the press, is pretty interesting. Of course, to hear Dr. Laura speak it, the women being put through this humiliation at the behest of their beloveds (or at least sources of prestige and income) are being let off easy. They probably should be the ones apologizing, since they the reason men cheat, and if they were more submissive, this wouldn’t happen. But I suppose standing silently with pain written all over your face while your husband tells the press about his extra-marital dalliances is the first step on the long road to proper wifely submission.

All joking aside, it’s more painful when it’s a Democrat, isn’t it? Republican wives are a little easier to understand, aren’t they? Being a political wife is their career, and so standing by your man is basically just shoving through a major issue at your job, with the hopes that things will continue as normal soon. But the Democratic men are another story altogether—the high power, professional wife with a life of her own has become the standard. As the Chronicle states, Silda Wall Spitzer fits into this mold, with her history of being a handsomely paid Wall Street attorney. Same story with Hillary Clinton clutching Bill’s hand in 1992 to wave away his infidelities. These are women you can imagine just packing their things and walking straight into a brand new life without him.

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Scott Swenson draws the link that needs to be drawn in all this sturm und drang about Spitzer and the prostitutes: Funny how this is going on while reproductive justice and health activists are fighting a pointless item in PEPFAR—put in by Democrats, mind you—that requires health organizations who do outreach to sex workers sign pledges condemning sex work. Why don’t some of the people defending Spitzer turn some of that energy to defending prostitutes? I can’t help but conclude, with sadness, that we’re looking at further evidence that both pro- and anti-legalization people tend to treat the actual prostitutes as an afterthought. I’m with Scott. Instead of asking health organizations to sign pledges that might alienate the very clients they’re trying to reach, how about we start by making politicians sign pledges swearing not to visit prostitutes?

I’ll show my hand up front—while I’m happy to play partisan Democrat a lot of the time, my sympathy for Spitzer is short to non-existent. I’m with Jeff. Sure, Spitzer is the victim of a double standard here, one that doesn’t apply to Republicans, but that mainly shows that the problem is that Republicans are being held to a too-low standard. First of all, prostitution is illegal, and public officials who help enforce the law against the rest of us need to be held accountable to that law. Second of all, doubly so when it comes to prostitution, because prostitutes are citizens, too, and deserve our protection. But it seems that Spitzer needed so much damn money for his hobby because he enjoyed doing things that were quite likely dangerous to prostitutes, probably asking to go condomless. Do you think, if one of the prostitutes he visited were arrested, he would have come clamoring to her defense? Yeah, neither do I. After all, he helped make his career by busting prostitution rings.

Invariably during these discussions, you get a push and pull between the “sex slaves” people and the “happy hooker” people, with some admitting that both kinds of women exist and most prostitutes are somewhere in between. The only thing I’ve concluded about that is that no one should be arrested for selling sex. Either they’re happy hookers hurting no one or victims of the system who don’t need the state to add to their misery, or some combination of the two, but either way, they shouldn’t go to jail.

For me, the jury’s still out on whether or not it should be illegal to buy sex. On one hand, I am convinced by arguments pointing out that vice laws don’t usually work well enough to justify the loss of freedom, and that there’s a weird nonsensical nature to the argument that it’s okay to sell but not to buy, and inverse of the already-ridiculous drug laws that make selling a worse crime than buying. On the other hand, I’m disgusted by some of the intellectual dishonesty employed by people defending prostitution. By that, I mean the invocation of the Sad Unfuckable John. You know the image—in any debate about prostitution, the pro-legalization ones will overplay their hand and argue that prostitution is this positive thing, because it makes sex available to men, who by virtue of being ugly or deeply nerdy or whatever, are basically unable to get sex from volunteers.

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Using this picture because I dig it.

The best part about being a voracious reader is the juxtapositions. Yesterday, while taking a blow-off day to be very sick, I laid on the couch and read through the most recent edition of Bitch, and I was impressed by an article by Jessica Wakeman called “Slap Happy” describing the practice of domestic discipline, which is something that really seems to have started with Christians who wish to return to an era where women were “managed” by their husbands through regular spankings. (The social acceptance of spanking women is something that seems to have disappeared so rapidly during the feminist era that it’s nearly forgotten that it was socially acceptable to the degree that images of men taking their wives or fiances over their knees and spanking them were on TV and in movies on occasion without too much fanfare up through the 50s.) But Wakeman isn’t interested in the fundamentalist Christians who want to return everyone to a Victorian era of gender roles that are mandated by law. She’s interested in the practice’s spread to couple that aren’t religious really and may even call themselves feminist.*

The article, and the whole issue really, are great and I’m not just saying that because they have the first review out of my book.** Wakeman lets the DD participants speak for themselves, but doesn’t fall into the “I’m okay, you’re okay” trap and lets that speaking-for-themselves make it very clear that these people are fucked the fuck up. DD is not BDSM, which is a sexual game, though some DD couples do also enjoy incorporating BDSM elements into their relationships. No, it seems that domestic discipline is a way of thwarting conflict in your relationship by assuming that every conflict or problem in the heterosexual relationship is the woman’s fault (because she’s childish, scattered, rebellious, whatever) and that it’s up to her man to discipline her. As Wakeman points out, it’s like The Surrendered Wife, except with spankings and time outs in the corner and women having to crawl over to their husbands or boyfriends on their hands and knees to beg forgiveness. There is no equality here; conflict appears to mainly and possibly always be solved by blaming the woman and wielding punishment. I failed to see how it’s much different from domestic violence, except that the women in this situation tend to minimize the conflict through stylizing the violence and submitting to it in a tacit exchange for their partners’ agreeing to have a limit on how much beating and abuse is handed out.

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