Once again, in her mission to be an awesome cataloger of sex-and-dating fail, Jill posted an affirmation that one is well within one's rights to dump a dude because he no tasteth the pussy.  This common sense observation was met mostly with amen-sisters in the comments, but there was the inevitable showing of people who live to make sure no feminist blogging thread can be free of the kind of hand-wringing that makes outsiders think we're all fucking nuts.  It is asserted that dumping someone for being bad in bed somehow cuts against the grain of the feminist concept of "enthusiastic consent".  But no, it really doesn't.  In fact, I'd argue it's part and parcel of the whole concept. Jill puts it well:

Sure, you have to respect his boundaries — but that doesn’t mean you have to keep on having sex with someone who doesn’t respect you, or that you have to keep your mouth shut as to why it’s offensive that he makes a gross-out face in response to your vagina.

While you’re obligated not to pressure him, I think you are entitled to be like, “Well, we appear to be done here.” And I think you’re entitled to tell him that his vagina-phobia is why.

I think a lot of the people protesting this are women who imagine some dickwad demanding something they don't like at all, such as peeing in your face or something, and saying, "I'll dump you if you don't do it," and that idea makes them very sad.  No one likes to be dumped.  But as I often remind folks, feminism isn't a birthday party thrown for you by your mother, and therefore isn't insulation against being rejected or lonely.  Feminism doesn't exempt you from the impeccable logic of the Ramones.

Enthusiastic consent is a concept that extends beyond sex, but should encompass relationships.  No one is entitled to a certain sex act with a certain person, yes.  But in addition to that, no one is entitled to a relationship with another person.  If refusal to give head causes the person you like to say they don't want to walk around with you, it's on you to stop wanting to walk around with them.  Find someone who likes to play tiddlywinks or whatever instead. 

Obviously, the way this plays out in individual relationships is complicated---what isn't?---but the principle is secure. If you're not doing it for someone, they don't have to be with you.  In fact, it's just better to rip that band-aid off, I'd say. Nothing sadder than looking back over the past couple of years and realizing it was doomed for a long time and you just wasted your time.  

Plus, overall I think women have more to lose with the guilt trips over dumping someone over "just" sex.  When a guy pulls away sexually from a relationship, women are socialized to blame themselves for not being hot enough.  The original story that Jill linked demonstrated this problem; even though the woman who wrote it was having sex with all sorts of men who loved going down on her, she still thought that the reason the guy she liked wouldn't do it was her and that waxing, scrubbing and wearing fancy panties would somehow change the equation.  (It didn't.)  Over time, spending a lot of time and money on beauty rituals that don't get the sexual results you want can really be demoralizing to your self-esteem, and I wouldn't recommend it.  The world is harsh enough on women's self-esteem.  You don't need to invite it into your bed to pull faces at the idea that you have a yucky vagina. 

We feminists are big on talking about double standards, with the stud/slut dichotomy being a particular favorite, in fact often referred to as the double standard.  But I think one that we tend to circle around in discussion around sex, consent, sex work, etc. is the way that the continuing model of heterosexuality is based on the he's buying/she's selling model.  That's the most obvious when it comes to sex work, where men are literally buying and women are literally selling, but I think that the assumption that men are the choosers and women are the chosen is the functioning one in even more liberal circles.  (And in misogynist circles, the assumption isn't concealed in neat little euphemisms, and the free market ideology causes them to whine that minor girls aren't legally available for sale.)  But generally I don't see feminists tackle this problem directly, unless they're Twisty Faster, and obviously she's talking on an experimental plane that is interesting for provoking thought but doesn't have a whole lot of bearing on the lives of those of us who aren't playing footsie with a separationist kind of thing.  

I'd really like to see more discussion of this double standard as a double standard.  I think that it underpins a lot of rape culture and creepy demands from so-called Nice Guys®, because the women are selling/men are buying model of heterosexuality has the side consequence of convincing the public that men are entitled to partner sex.  After all, in our economic systemm, as long as you have the money, it's unheard of to turn you away as a customer, often because of non-discrimination laws.  Now, the price in the heterosexual dating system isn't always money---this is a metaphorical, not a literal economy---but consider the whine of the Nice Guys®.  They paid the price of giving a woman attention and pretending to listen to her, and now she has to sell, right? Most interestingly, since women are considered a product and men the buyers, women are also considered a resource, and arguments about equitable distribution come into play.   

Women, on the other hand, are the sellers in the heterosexual economy.  Our job is to make sure the product is worth buying.  We are no more entitled to partner sex than a company is entitled to move all its widgets when customers aren't buying.  

Dating advice tends to get gendered along these lines.  When women aren't getting any action, it's pretty much standard to tell them to look at themselves and see if they're charging too high a price for the product they have on offer.  The advice from there is to either improve the quality of the product or lower the price.  Granted, upbeat American society being what it is, most of the advice industry aimed at women is about improving the quality of the product.  

But you definitely get your share of people griping that women are too full of themselves and think they deserve more than they do, i.e. that they charge too high a price for a crappy product. Advice to settle isn't as rampant as advice to learn how to suck cock better and tighten those abs more, but it's definitely out there.  The assumption in a market view also is that the seller really has to sell, but the buyer has an option not to buy.  Thus, in our heterosexual dating model, women are often cast as so desperate to get the man to sign on the dotted line and drive off with his new car-wife.  Men are buyers, of course, and therefore are cast as hesitant to spend the money, and thus commitment is seen as a tense negotiation between a woman trying to move product and a man worried that he's paying too much.  Many conservatives warn that because women are willing to have sex outside of marriage now, that has made it all the much easier for men not to buy at all, much like the way that an avid bicyclist is probably going to be that much harder to sell a new car to. 

Men's sex and dating advice tends to be more on the grounds of being a better consumer.  Pick-up artist books and websites aren't interested in teaching men how to improve the product so more women want to buy.  Seriously, PUA guides read like guides on buying a car---show up looking like money, demonstrate to the salesman that you fill out the checklist of requirements to get a car, talk down the price (which PUA guides suggest you do by insulting women, hoping the loss of esteem in their product will cause them to sell at a lower price), and you're done.  Actual improvement of one's self is as strange an idea as suggesting that you have to have good character and a tight waistline to get a car.  You just need to have the cash, the credit rating, and a solid ability to bargain. 

So much of what causes strife and 500 comment threads on heterosexuality online is when feminists challenge this model of heterosexuality, though again,  I think we usually peck at various manifestations of it as opposed to directly attacking this metaphorical understanding of dating. Elevatorgate caused strife for this reason.  In the market model of dating, men are allowed to drive a hard bargain, just like consumers are allowed to haggle. Offense at being told that this is scary resembled the offense one might take if one is thrown out of a car dealership because you weren't wearing a suit---hey, you don't know if he  has the money!  He should be allowed to at least make an offer!  The reason feminists flinch when using the "I have a boyfriend/husband" strategy to get a pest off them is because that's basically saying that you aren't for sale, because someone has already paid for you.  

And of course, the reason that threads about men who buy sex blow up to epic proportions here is that there's always a handful of guys pushing the Sad Unfuckable John myth, i.e. the belief that men who go to sex workers are just sad sacks who can't get laid through normal means and so are forced---because men are entitled to partner sex---to pay for it.  The fact that women don't turn to paying men for sex if they can't get it through normal means isn't even acknowledged.  After all, women are the sellers, and sellers don't have the right to sell in the way that buyers have the right to buy if they can get the money together.  Feminists are told we're supposed to sympathize with the largely mythical (in reality, most johns have wives or girlfriends, don't actually enjoy the paid-for sex in and of itself, and are mainly shoring up their masculine bona fides by proving they can buy and control women) Sad Unfuckable John, because you know, women are a resource and as good liberals we should want more equitable distribution. 

A lot of us feminists who came up online have been promoting a model of sexuality called "enthusiastic consent", and I think that one thing that could strengthen this is tackling the market model of heterosexuality.  Because, to put on my Twisty Faster hat, if we cast men as buyers and women as sellers, that means that women are assumed to be in a perpetual state of consent just as that gallon of milk at the store is assumed to be on sale for anyone who can cobble together the $5 to buy it.  As long as the market model of heterosexuality is in play, the notion that sex should be a mutual exchange between two individuals will not make so much sense to people.  

What brings all this to my mind was reading Tracy Clark-Flory's examination of when "violent sex", aka sex that involves violence without enthusiastic consent, is okay.  To those of us who don't buy into the market model of heterosexuality, the answer is simple: never.  It's  never okay to have sex with someone who isn't saying yes, and it's especially never okay to make someone feel afraid or threatened.  If a man can't get enthusiastic consent for rough sex from an equal, well, too bad.  Clark-Flory comes to these conclusions, but it was heart-breaking to see how much the idea that men are entitled to partner sex infects our ability to see the ethics of these situations clearly.

How should rough (or "brutal") sex be appropriately negotiated? What should we call an encounter where brutality and dominance is not requested, but also not objected to? Is it the responsibility of the aggressor to OK it with their partner, or is it the "receptive" partner's responsibility to object if it's undesirable?

For those of us who don't believe men are entitled to partner sex, but that it should be a mutual exchange between enthusiastic partners, these aren't complex questions: 1) By open communication between two people who put each other's safety first.  2) It's always wrong, and it's often straight up rape. 3) The responsibility is on the person doing the asking, always. People speaking up for themselves is good, but it's not required.  Making sure you aren't assaulting someone is the responsibility of the person pushing for more. 

All of this is obvious if you don't believe men are buyers and women are sellers.  The notion that she's consenting until she says "no" is ridiculous when applied to other social situations.  For instance, we invite people to parties.  We don't tell them where to be at what time and expect them to work up the courage to say no. We especially don't lure people into our homes under false pretenses and then bar the door and demand they plead a little before we let them out. We don't show up at people's houses uninvited, bags in hand, and start making ourselves comfortable unless they throw a fit and toss us out.  Sex is a social situation, and should be treated as one. But instead, it's treated like a market and so we all have to wonder if it's acceptable to pressure an unwilling person as long as that person isn't fighting back.  

Of course, people are notoriously bad at actually communicating during sex -- whether it's outright stating what they want or asking what their partner wants.

I think that this sentence is a clear example of how the notion that men are entitled to partner sex can creep up even on feminists.  Some men are bad negotiators!  Feel sorry for them!  We certainly can't tell them that it's just too bad if they can't charm someone into having enthusiastic sex with them, because that implies they aren't entitled to partner sex.  To be clear, that's not what Tracy's saying by any means.  But the stance of pity towards a man who struggles to get things like consent is rooted in the largely unexamined male entitlement to women's time and affections. 

I actually would say that my ideal is a world where everyone is kind of selling a little, but no one is cast as a buyer.  I think that people's friendships work this way, in fact.  People shouldn't feel entitled to have the time or affection of others, but instead should assume the responsibility of being charming enough to have people give it to them of their own free will. I do see a turn towards this in our culture somewhat, with men actually starting to think a little harder about being what women want instead of just meeting the metaphorical price tag that they are socialized to think is hanging off women.  We just have a long way to go. 

Oh lord, Elevatorgate is continuing to go on, as these things do when a bunch of men (and their pathetic female supporters) swear up and down that the biggest problem this world faces is a bunch of nice, well-meaning guys can't get laid because women are meanies.  Every time I've written about Nice Guys®, I've picked up at least one man who makes a permanent enemy out of me, proving often how "nice" he is by sending me a bunch of nasty emails or blog comments about how I understand how his niceness keeps him from getting laid and women are all shallow bitches that like to be abused.  Indeed, the "niceness" I've experienced at the hands of self-proclaimed Nice Guys® has done little to convince me that they're actually nice guys who've been edged out of the sexual market by women's inconstancy and evilness, and has instead convinced me they strike out a lot because their entitlement issues make them irritating to be around.  

Unfortunately, the fantasy that there are scores of genuinely nice guys whose decency can be measured in how often they strike out with the ladies persists.  Psychology Today, which is basically a right wing rag that uses pseudo-science to argue for a view of race and gender on par with Bill O'Reilly's, has unsurprisingly weighed in on the whole notion of whether it's okay to corner women in elevators, hoping that raising the stakes of saying no will get you to "yes".  David has the whole disturbing spectacle, but the sum of it is, "Women shouldn't scold men who do predatory, frightening things because they're all just Nice Guys® who are shy, which is identical to meaning well."  

There are a couple of fallacies with the "men just corner women because they're shy and fear rejection" argument.  The first is the assumption that shyness precludes ill intent.  There is no evidence for this assertion.  On the contrary, many self-proclaimed "shy" men online are also eager defenders of "pick-up artists", i.e. their sense of entitlement to women's bodies allows them to believe that it's acceptable to see a "no" from a woman as a challenge, instead of respecting her wishes.  That's not nice at all.  Many shy people are nice, and they tend to be the shy people who say no means no.  My point isn't that shy people are bad, just that shyness in and of itself doesn't mean anything about the rest of your personality.  There are shy assholes, and shy saints.  If a man starts with the assumption that sex is a zero-sum game and getting laid is about getting one over on a woman, he's an asshole, no matter how hard it is for him to work up the courage to do this. 

But more importantly is the fallacy that choices made from shyness are indistinguishable from choices made by belligerent sexual predators. 

In order to understand what I mean, let's review actual research done on sexual predators.  Thomas at Yes Means Yes did a great job of summarizing the findings of researchers who actually bothered to interview rapists and figure out what their patterns are. I think it's worth reading the whole thing, but the relevant piece here is a summary of the standard M.O. of sexual predators:

In the course of 20 years of interviewing these undetected rapists, in both research and forensic settings, it has been possible for me to distill some of the common characteristics of the modus operandi of these sex offenders. These undetected rapists:

• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;

• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;

• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;

• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;

• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.

Emphasis mine.  At least three of these behaviors are displayed immediately by a man propositioning a woman who has been drinking in an elevator.  Once the target has displayed strong boundaries, a smart rapist moves on to his next victim.  This one is just too much trouble.  

Now, let's be clear.  Not all men who isolate women and start testing their boundaries are rapists, i.e. men who won't take no for an answer.  But, as I argued before, they are still sexual predators who use the implication of violence to raise the stakes for saying no.  If you've been cornered by a man, you don't know if he takes no for an answer or not.  You just know that he's the kind of guy who has so little respect for you as a human being he would do something like corner you, which tends to drastically raise concerns that he doesn't take no for an answer.  (It is worth noting that the research indicates that setting strong boundaries quickly can be protective, because actual rapists do tend to test them for weakness before making their move.  That said, there is no foolproof way to avoid being raped.)  Men who do this live in the world and grasp this.  They know women are told not to meet strange men in isolated places, told not to go to dinner on a first date with a stranger (instead choosing coffee or drinks, which makes it easier to bail politely), and they know that they have the B-word in their pocket to fling at women who are firm in rejecting them.  They also know that women know this.  They manipulate all these things---which everyone knows----for their benefit.

I've been cornered by men, though now that I've grown older and don't give a flying fuck if someone calls me a bitch, it hasn't happened in a long time.  I tend to pass the initial boundary-testing, I suspect.  But when I was younger and still stuck in my feminine conditioning to be nice and assume the best of everyone (even men who creep me out), I got cornered a number of times.  Luckily, never by a rapist.  But every time, it was by someone who was willing to let the idea of rape hang in the air while I tried to figure out how to say no and get out of there without provoking someone who might be a rapist.  The way it usually went is that they found some pretext for isolating me, often by having a male friend distract any female friend I was with, but I've also been followed into isolated areas.  Then they made me feel uneasy by acting outside of the normal bounds of human interaction---usually by immediately introducing the idea of sex without any prior flirting or indication from me that this was welcome.  On the contrary, they knew damn well I wasn't into them, often to the point where it was painfully obvious.  And yet, I often found myself pondering the notion that maybe the quickest way to get out of this situation safely would be to tolerate some sexual interaction with the hopes he'd be pleased with himself and let me go quietly.  It never happened, because I would be so disgusted and angry at the idea that I'd stop caring if I was perceived as a bitch.  But the amount of effort it took to say no was outrageous, and has included trawling a party for a friend who has disappeared and demanding that I be taken home right now because I'm having a miserable night. This has happened to me and I've rescued friends that it's happening to, and one thing I can safely say about all these interactions is never once did I pick up a "shy" vibe off the Guy Who Corners Women. 

Thus, I'm intensely skeptical that the behavior of shy guys who are well-meaning but awkward is indistinguishable from cocky assholes who think it's acceptable to obtain sexual favors from unwilling women by using heavy-handed tactics.  I personally cannot think of another situation where people claim behavior that is usually associated with pushy assholes is indistinguishable from behavior of shy people.  

But let's assume for the sake of argument that there are cadres of shy but well-meaning men who somehow manage to behave exactly like predatory assholes.  Hey, three left turns equals a right turn, you know?  It's possible, though highly unlikely.  (And as a skeptic, I'm forced to point out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.)  If this is true, then by definition, the response to hearing "don't corner women in isolated spaces and proposition them, forcing them to wonder if you're going to let them go without violence or abuse" is, "Holy shit!  Thank you for the excellent advice.  I shall, being a well-meaning guy, never ever do that to a woman.  Any women I have done that to, my sincerest apologies.  As a well-meaning person, the last thing I would ever do is make a woman fear rape. I'm ashamed and appalled at any instances where I awkwardly caused fear."

But the reaction that Rebecca Watson got instead was, "How is a guy supposed to get laid if he can't corner women in elevators?" or "How dare you tell men what to do?" or "Being against cornering women is being against sex, strawman strawman."  By definition---this is tautological---that reaction cannot come from a well-meaning but shy person.  That reaction may come from a shy person (but I'm skeptical, since shy people tend not to be so belligerent in their defensiveness), but it cannot come from a well-meaning person.  

There's no small amount of irony in the fact that I published this article about how the atheist movement dovetails with other social justice movements this particular week.  I was actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing, because I was writing it while traveling to CONvergence to speak at the invitation of Skepchick about the feminist depths of this issue, on a panel called "Women vs. God", where we discussed fighting the religious right.  Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind---religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history.  Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it's naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there's a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa.  I'm thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists. 

In fact, what makes all this ironic is I did get an eyeful this weekend of how serious the problem of sexism in the atheist/skeptical movement really is, and how much hard work needs to be done to get a male-dominated movement to take the problem of sexual harassment and female alienation seriously.  (Though by and large claims for reproductive rights go unchallenged; there are a few loud-mouths whose virulent sexism will cause them to take anti-choice nonsense seriously, but it's so steeped in religious woo that most atheists can't be bothered.)  Because right as I was traveling, conferencing, and writing about atheism, there was a blow-up that started because a guy exploited his position as a fellow atheist/skeptic to act like a creep towards a movement leader who happens to be female.  The controversy---and this is truly pathetic---is because she decided instead of just rolling over and taking it, she would say something about it. I know!  The bitch.

I don't want to recount everything that happened in depth, because it's really done better elsewhere, but what happened was this: Rebecca Watson, who travels extensively speaking about skepticism and atheism, was at a conference in Ireland and a guy followed her onto an elevator at 4AM and cold propositioned her for sex in this enclosed space without ever speaking to her before.  She mentioned it in a vlog that was mostly about other stuff, mainly to illustrate why this behavior is unacceptable and can turn women off from participating in events such as the conference.

The usual excuse-making for the guy immediately proceeded.  I'm sure you guys could generate all the excuses on your own: Claiming that men don't really know what's appropriate and what's not because women make it so complicated.  (This has been demonstrated untrue with research, though common sense should also apply.)  Denying the difference between flirting and cornering women in hopes that the implication of fear will grease the wheels for you getting your dick wet.  Claiming that introducing a whiff of coercion and fear into a situation is okay as long as you're willing to take no for an answer at the end of the day.  All of which reminds me of one of the great scenes from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia".  

In sum, men who corner women know what they're doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid.  Rebecca may not have  put it that way, but being a mean ol' feminist bitch, I'm happy to say it.  Also: duh.  It also strikes me, in my dealing with geek culture, that there's a taboo against rejecting someone, and creepy dudes also are happy to exploit that, knowing that women who reject them will be condemned for violating the "don't be judgmental" rule. 

And I also know, being a feminist for many years now, that whenever a bunch of dudes start freaking out on a woman who called out some egregious sexism, there are a bunch of women willing to back those dudes up in order to get that coveted male approval and attention.  I call this move Pulling An Althouse.  Or Dr. Helen, if you prefer.  Or maybe just call them Sister Punishers.  And they were thick on the ground in this case, and Rebecca used a quote from one of her female attackers in a speech where she was talking about there's sexism in the atheist movement (as a prelude to the more obvious fact that there's sexism in religion).  You can read the whole story here. Rebecca sounds like she was much nicer about it than I was; I'm prone to making jokes such as, "The guys you attract with this crap don't go down, so I don't know why you bother."  It does make you look desperate, ladies.  I'm just saying.  

Anyway, this launched Round Two of Silence the Feminist.  This time, the theme was, "Sure, you may be right that this dude was a creep but shut up, since you're making people uncomfortable and can't we get back to talking about how religious people are sexists?"  This was greased by a political strategy known as Calvinball---one that the right is really good at, by the way---where you make up brand new rules of discourse that were previously unknown and then chastise the target for breaking the rule that didn't exist before because you just made it up.  In this particular case, Rebecca broke the previously unknown rule wherein you can't actually quote someone's public words and the name they publish under when disagreeing with them, at least if your blog has more traffic than theirs does.  It may also be true that there are exceptions on every other Sunday, but I'm not sure. 

Here is a classic example, from the usually rational Hemant Mehta, of this Calvinball argument:

This was bad form for two reasons. One, it was a distraction from an otherwise important talk. Instead of us discussing the incredibly important issue of how the Religious Right harms women (the subject of the talk), we’re all discussing whether it’s right for someone with a big megaphone to pick on someone with a smaller one, whether someone was being a “bad feminist,” and all sorts of shit that doesn’t need to be aired in public.

Two, whether it was the intention or not, you’ve convinced a young female in our movement that if she says something you don’t like, she better be ready for an all-out barrage of criticism from every “big name” in the atheist blogosphere.

It has it all: 1) Countering criticism that makes you uncomfortable by saying there's something more important to worry about 2) Shaming a woman for having success  3) Sexist paternalism in the form of arguing that a woman has to be shielded from open discourse lest she be too frightened to return and 4) Implying that said paternalism is feminism.  Sarah Palin's P.R. team would be proud. 

Personally, I think that convincing an audience of atheists that the religious right sucks is probably much less of a challenge than convincing them to look at themselves and find imperfections, and I applaud Rebecca for being willing to take the hard road. 

That's the bad news.  The good news is that people in the movement are fighting back against this tedious and predictable sexism,  and they're fighting hard.  PZ Myers, as usual, is on the side of the angels.  So is Jennifer McCreight. Sadly, Richard Dawkins was a dick about all this. 

To sum up a long story, what is fascinating to me about all this is that it's something that tends to happen over and over again, and while it sucks at the time, it tends to pay off over the long run.  Many of the attackers, especially the ones pulling the "you're right but shut up" card, may resist now, but they absorb and learn and often adjust their attitudes, a little at a time.  Now that the issue has been raised, it's hard to ignore it in the future.  More attempts to make things female-friendly usually come out of this.  But it is fascinating how these things have a predictable rhythm to them. 

Okay, I'm so incredibly sick of this stupid Anthony Weiner thing, but feminism has been sucked into it, and bigger issues are being attached to it, so what are you going to do?  I can't pray for this country to grow up, since there is no god and prayer doesn't work.  But this morning I wrote about women, feminists even, taking on the schoolmarm role, and I forgot to load it down with caveats about how sex needs to be consensual, and so concerns about consent naturally came up.  I honestly hoped that my long track record of being all for consent would spare me the need to write a few hundred more words, but alas.  

Dana Goldstein and I are on Bloggingheads today rehashing our debate about Weiner and whether or not politicians should be held to a sexual standard.

In it, she raises the same concerns about consent, as did Ta-Nehisi.  It appears that one of the women involved has been clear that she did not engage with Weiner in any sexy talk prior to the penis picture.  And while she's not accusing him of harassment, I think that likely rises to the level of it.  I hope it's obvious that this is a much different kettle of fish.

But I still think most of my concerns are firmly in place.  This isn't a consent scandal.  To be fair, we do have consent scandals in our media.  Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a consent scandal, for instance.  But can anyone look deep into their heart and say that this would be going down any differently if every single woman involved was saying, "I was completely into it.  Cock pictures, yum!" No, we cannot.  Hell, if anything, that would probably just make it worse.  

I think what I'm getting at here is that this isn't about defending Anthony Weiner. This is about how much power we give to right wing fucktards like Andrew Breitbart who are completely unconcerned with consent, and whose sole purpose is to start up sexual witch hunts.  One of the reasons that I wasn't completely aware of the compromised consent issues is that it's been treated like an irrelevant aspect in the media.  Weiner's completely consensual chat logs are being given even more attention than the single picture we know was non-consensual, and the reason is there's more there to feed the prurient interest.  I think it's important to tease out these various issues, as complicated as it is.  The next target for a witch hunt is probably going to be 100% consensual stuff that simply is humiliating if put in the public square, because consent has no impact on why this particular scandal is a scandal. 

For instance, in my post this morning, I was addressing two separate situations that had zero to do with the consent concerns.  The Jezebel piece was about cheating and lying, and the Democratic women are playing up the female-judges-of-philanderers angle.  I've seen more ink spilled on the question of whether or not there's an angle with the fact that he did this in his office and at the gym than the consent question.  (As I noted in the video, I don't really see a gaping difference between using your down time at work to send sexy messages to people and using it to play Angry Birds, so long as you're careful not to involve coworkers.)  Since the media is making this about sex, I'm addressing my media critiques to the sex angle.  If we're having a conversation about consent, that's a much different conversation.

My concern that I've been on about is bigger than a single politician who is probably going to be redistricted away anyway.  It's about the future of politics and placing such prudish standards on private behavior that no one will actually be able to meet them. And it's women, I believe, who will pay more.  At Double X, I wrote about this piece in the NY Times, and one thing that was noted was that women are easily discouraged from running for office because they're afraid of being picked to death by an often-misogynist media and their political opposition. This is a legitimate fear!  And in our new post-Weiner era, when your bedroom doors are being flung open and your truly personal behavior is being considered part of your job qualifications, women will get it way worse. There are many people who will feign outrage if a woman simply sleeps with a man she's not married to, and who wants to deal with that? If we want more gender equality in politics, this is not going to help in the slightest.  

Excellent piece in Salon on why Anthony Weiner is getting denounced by the same congress critters who backed Charlie Rangel, who was actually accused of real ethics violations, and not just being a sad dude who bolsters his ego by getting ladies on the internet to tell him he's sexy.  Basically, Weiner didn't make a lot of friends, and that's apparently what matters the most.  I want to pull something from it, however, that's marginal to the point of the piece:

Several of his House colleagues, including the woman tasked with recruiting candidates for the 2012 elections, said it in the days following Weiner’s admission last week that he’d sent lewd photos to several young women. And now Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, have joined the chorus.

So the finger-wagging work has been relegated to the women.  Great.  But it's not just in Congress.  Erin Gloria Ryan of Jezebel wrote a piece about how Weiner's situation is causing her to question the trustworthiness of all the men in her life.

When men whom I admire let their families down- Anthony Weiner, to use a timely example, or Bill Clinton, to use an example that Jay Leno still likes to use as joke fodder- I can't help but apply it to my own life. If men like that are capable of lying to their families and to the public, then who's to say that the men in my life aren't doing the same to me? When men in public mess up, they're making it a little worse for other men, as the more I learn about the level of deceit that seemingly good men are capable of, the more gun-shy I feel about what men tell me, the less inclined I am to believe everything a man tells me. I become a side-eye machine, cross examining, and disbelieving mundane things.

Yes, let's make this about men vs. women. Erin is being a bit tongue-in-cheek (I think), and admits that it's unfair to judge all men by the actions of a few.  But still, this entire piece bothered me because once again it upholds an extremely conservative view of gender, where men are naughty little boys with overactive libidos and women are scolding schoolmarms whose trustworthiness is assured because we're practically asexual.  

Women should resist this crap with all our might.  In this moment, it feels pretty good, I'm sure, because it casts women as morally superior and all that.  Though that alone should give anyone with feminist sympathies pause, since we should be striving to unite men and women as equals, and avoid this pitting them against each other shit that sexists do.  But not only is that a problem in terms of truth (women cheat nearly as much as men, and most research points to the gap as being most likely a matter of opportunity and not desire), but also because this is just the patriarchy selling the same old double standard, but dressing it up and making it seem like it's a good thing so we're happier to embrace this church lady shit.   And while this double standard occasionally chews up a  man like Weiner, the main victims are women.  It's a short leap from insinuating that women are the more chaste sex to saying women should be chaste at all times, and if they aren't, then they deserve to be abused. I wrote a piece at RH Reality Check showing how thoroughly this is about using sex as a weapon against women that I'll hope you read.  When prudery expands, it's women whose rights get legally constrained, women whose clothing choices get monitored, women who are raped and then told they brought it on themselves by being unchaste.  

All this finger-wagging about Weiner distracts from that, but it's worth remembering that even in this case, the driving force behind it was the conservative desire to punish and abuse women for failing to live up to arbitrary and often impossible modesty standards.  Don't forget that conservatives were combing through Weiner's online contacts, finding the women, and closely examining---for the good of the nation, no doubt---their online pictures for short skirts and cleavage-showing shirts, anything that could used as evidence of sluttery.  It's distressing to see other women mindlessly rewarding this sexual witch hunt because the ostensible target is a man.  Not only is that inexcusable on its surface, but it's self-defeating.  

Matt picks up a drum I've been beating for a long time, which is "everything is culture war". There's a tendency in the mainstream media, which is encouraged by numerically small but well-funded and frankly deceitul "libertarians" to think there's some giant gap between "fiscal" and "social" conservatism.  In theory, maybe (and mostly in the elite classes), but for the right wing base, that's largely absent.  Matt cites a van he saw driving around that had slogans about the evils of abortion and slogans about the evils of government spending.  He responds:

Abortion is, obviously, a very emotional and very ideological issue. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s a problem for the country when strong emotional and ideological views about abortion get intimately linked in people’s ideas with views about much more technical questions about the merits of raising the debt ceiling or whether we have too much inflation or too little.

Naturally, I do think there's something wrong with abortion---which is, as I've said a million times before, a stand in for a host of beliefs about sex and women's role in life---being so emotional.  I think we'd be a far greater country if people could step off and butt out of other people's consensual sexual behavior and their often incredibly personal choices about love, marriage, and child-bearing.  But all that aside, I think this is a good place to point out that while most of us think of "economic" and "social" issues as divergent, they really aren't.  

I'm going to point out that the truck in question here specifically singles out black women who have abortions as bad people. 

The reason I'm going to do so is to point out that in the right wing mind, these are all intertwined things.  The right wing story is basically that this country is going to hell because people have abandoned traditional values, and now they're fucking in the streets and that the hard-working white man has to pay for all this bad behavior with his tax dollars.  Women's sexual choices are blamed for a lot---I'd guess that your average right wing nut thinks that spending on welfare is about half the federal budget.  This is blamed predominantly on women's inability to control their sexual urges.  Black women are especially held out as living lacivious lifestyles that the taxpayer is on the hook for.  I think Dana Loesch's rant at CPAC really boils down the argument:

But you’re not empowered when you’re expecting Uncle Sam to act like your sugar daddy, and take care of your abortions and take care of your birth control, and pay your bills and everything else?

Preventing a pregnancy, having an abortion, and bearing children out of wedlock are all blurred together in the right wing mind as evidence of women's bad behavior that they're subsidizing with their tax dollars, and the debt ceiling gets all caught up in that.  So these aren't separate issues in their minds at all. The assumption is, from what I can tell, that the government needs to "crack down" and stop borrowing money, and throw all those sluts on the street.  And then what will happen is said sluts will stop fucking, get married, and have a husband to support them and this country will return to the 1950s....and the prosperity of it.  

I know that doesn't make a lot of sense if you see social policy and economic policy as different things---and god knows that a sensible approach does call for such a distinction---but for a lot of average voters, the most obvious change from the prosperous 50s to now isn't hard-to-understand economic policies.  Most people have no idea what the tax rate was in 1953, for instance.  But they definitely know how much sexual and gender mores changed, and the most obvious change becomes the scapegoat for all other problems.

I don't want to keep hammering at this, but here's a link to my Alternet piece on why I'm so concerned about this whole Anthony Weiner scandal.  I won't revisit it at length here; please read the article.  My biggest problem is that the pretense of public interest was completely abandoned, and this was just a matter of the "ick factor". Now that this door is open, and simply making people uncomfortable is considered reason enough to condemn someone and demand their resignation, I'm really worried.  My gut feeling on this is that Weinergate really is confirmation of a suspicion I've had for awhile that America has quietly become more prudish in the past few years, and this is a very bad thing.

Now, I get that some people are sexually unadventurous, and god knows that's their right.  I find it silly when sexually unadventurous people get belligerently defensive that they're not as interesting in this way as adventurous people, which is like having picky people get angry that their stories of eating the same three things garner less attention than the stories of the gastronomically curious.  Or having people who stubbornly stay at home get defensive when people who travel a lot get more attention.  Or people who haven't bought a new album in 20 years lash out at "hipsters" for being so bold as to think they're cool. I could go on, but you get the picture.  All of us have areas of our lives where we're not that interesting.  Sex can be one of them.  The whole "prude pride" thing just seems silly to me.  

Silly, and unfortunately dangerous, as recent events demonstrate.  Because it's one thing not to be sexually adventurous, but quite another to sit in judgment of people whose sexual curiosities ick you out, whether done out of meanness or defensiveness.  And lately, I've just generally noticed a trend towards more openly bashing people for seeking pleasure, even and often especially if they harm no one else in doing so.  Hipster-bashing is actually a good example!  Between prudes and libertines, there's a major imbalance, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that libertines just aren't nearly as interested in getting into the business of prudes as vice versa.  And in a way, it's a lot easier to be prudish, to stick your nose in the air and claim that you're too good for base interests in humping and sucking and just giving yourself over to pleasure.  The fact that we are conducting sex scandals that don't actually have any public importance is only part of it.  I compiled a mental list of examples over the course of the day, and hope I can even remember them all:

*Trend stories about women who are just so tired of sex. 

*The surprisingly little amount of pushback that the Republicans have gotten for suddenly, as a party, moving towards an anti-contraception stance.  They're still hedging their bets---they're only against it if you're too poor to afford it on your own---but the fact of the matter is this is a radical anti-sex position that they would have been afraid to have a few years ago.  Even a few years ago, most conservatives wouldn't have been so eager to close down Planned Parenthood and screeching that you need to just shut your legs if you don't want to have babies, but now that's becoming a mainstream sentiment that is getting very little pushback from inside the Republican party.  From the outside, there has been resistance, but the vast majority of it has been rooted in the "necessary evil" argument---i.e., that we have to have these services because of public health problems if we don't---and very little has been geared towards saying, "Sex if fucking awesome, and anyone who's against it can suck my left one."  And part of the reason is that even liberals are afraid to defend sex. 

*To an extent, the ongoing hysteria over pop stars being sexy.  I just don't completely grasp why the fact that Miley Cyrus wears booty shorts is such a national scandal, honestly. When I was 8, 9, 10 years old, I loved Michael Jackson and Madonna, and both of them blew any kind of naughty crap Cyrus does out of the water.  Pop stars are supposed to be sexy. 

*The Twilight books.  Sex-and-woman-hating propaganda like that should be provoking a national outrage, not a spate of high-grossing movies.  If I had a child reading this crap, we would be having a series of talks about the importance of test driving cars before you buy. 

*That the reaction to SlutWalk involved, on any level, discussion about why women who are wearing short skirts are asking for it.  I feel more people are saying this in 2011 than they were in 2001. Just a hunch; obvs, no stats. 

*A study is released that shows that 1/3 of young people 15-24 have never had sex, and this was published uncritically in the vast majority of media outlets as if it was an unobjectionably good thing, on the grounds that less sex is somehow automatically better. The questions that came to mind for me were fast and furious, with the first one being, "Why on earth aren't we distinguising because 15-year-olds and 23-year-olds?" It's certainly not a problem if many 15-year-olds are virgins!  But if we're seeing a rise in 22-year-old virgins, that's not a good thing.  I would argue that's a bad thing, at bare minimum a symptom of major problems, either in their social lives or their sexual development. (There's even evidence that people, at least men, who wait until their mid-20s to start having sex suffer from greater levels of sexual dysfunction.) I did look into it deeper and found that the stats are misleading, and the percentage of 23-year-old virgins is really low, but the fact that people weren't even asking the question concerned me.  

*The word "vajayjay". 

*Gail Dines. 'nuff said.

*Talking about grown men who cheat in the same exact terms you discuss children caught snatching cookies from the cookie jar. 

*Calling Dominique Strauss-Kahn's problem a "sex case".  Or that of any other accused rapist.  The implication here is that it's the sex instead of the grotesque violence that's the problem.  Prudery is generally causing a collapse in the distinctions between "accusing" someone of having illicit but consensual sex and accusing someone of rape. 

*That Mike Huckabee, who I recall was treated when he was first governor of Arkansas like the fundamentalist freak show that he is, now gets a major pass in the mainstream media.  

*The explosion of wedding porn, and the accompanying obsession with "baby bumps" in the tabloid media. Especially in conjunction with the prurient obsession with bad girls who are drinking and sleeping around.  Our tabloids are a daily propaganda mill of shame for "bad girls" and adulation for "good girls", and of course all the accompanying redemption tales of "bad girls" who are baptized with a wedding gown and a baby emerging from the vagina.  

*Bristol Palin's inexplicable fame.  

*This is like the third article I've seen recently about Molly Jong-Fast, whose claim to fame is she's a judgmental prude who seems to have it out for her famous mother, Erica Jong, for not being a judgmental prude. In a saner world, this would be like reading an article about Jakob Dylan where he sneers at his dad for being one of the most important rock musicians of all time, and then turns around and prides himself on producing mediocre crap that is only appreciated by douchebags who have a deepset fear of being challenged by art.  But in New Prude America, the fact that Jong-Fast is a judgmental prude who picks on her much more interesting mother is considered not only newsworthy but arguably admirable.  Barf.

I could probably go on, but it's getting tedious.  I remember, about a decade ago, the first time I was confronted by a queer activist who was adamantly against marriage as a gay rights priority.  His argument was that marriage is a toxic institution that was invented to stifle human freedom, especially women's freedom.  And that by making it the focus of gay rights, you were reinforcing the notion that human rights are contingent on one's compliance with prudish, patriarchal norms.  I pooh-poohed this in my mind, and kind of have since.  I felt that most arguments I heard for gay rights were based not on compliance with stifling sexual norms, but were more about a combination of practical concerns and love.  Major gay marriage advocates like Dan Savage were basically the definition of anti-prudes, you know?  My hope, and I still hold it, is that by redefining marriage to include gay people we can in fact open the door to a real understanding that human beings are too damn diverse to all be shoved in the same box and held to the same standards. 

Now I fear this argument may have some validity, because it seems that support for gay marriage is rising as prudery is, and part of the reason is that many people have determined that gays want to be as square as everyone else.  Which is great for square gay people, but doesn't do much for the rest of us who also want full inclusion of the slutty and the kinky and men who like to wear dresses.  Not only do I think the queers and weirdos and sluts and whores of the world are still being left out, I fear they're being squeezed out even more, and it bothers me.  The effects of this aren't small.  I was struck by how bad it can get just this morning, as I was reading this really wonderful article about the families of the victims of the Long Island serial killer. The families feel, and I think they have a reason to feel, that because their loved ones were considered sexual deviants that this case isn't getting the attention it deserves.  Certainly, there were some up front irregularities, and if you take a step back, the truth of the matter is that murderers target prostitutes precisely because society shuns women whose sole crime is letting men pay them to have sex with them.  (Even as we often are gentler towards johns, who are far more likely than prostitutes to be abusive, evil, cruel, or even just morally indifferent people.) I teared up reading this one quote:

When I ask Cann about Maureen’s life as an escort, she says her sister was desperate. “I found out after she was missing that she had eviction court the next day. It was her last resort.” Cann knows people judge her sister. “I don’t like how they’re talking about her,” she says. But to Cann, it doesn’t matter what Maureen did. “She was still a mother. She still meant the world to her daughter, and me. She was in her mid-twenties. Who’s to say that she was going to be doing this her whole life?” 

During the heyday of fighting over abstinence-only, I really came around to the idea that we shouldn't argue, "Hey, kids are going to have sex whether we like it or not, so let's at least minimize the damage."  I was  more in in the camp of arguing, "Kids should be taught to honor their sexualities, to demand the right to feel pleasure (with the enthusiastic consent caveat!), and to value sexual diversity, because sex is a good thing.  It's part of being human. Pleasure is how we know we're alive."  A more radical, pro-liberty, pro-pleasure approach is the only way to win this argument.  Once we start to put the burden of proof on the arguments for pleasure and privacy, instead of on the arguments against it, then we've lost the battle.  I know many of us are the types to err on the side of the libertines.  What I ask is for us to get bolder in doing so.  

The debates are going to continue for days about how wrong Weiner was during this, of which I'm going to maintain my concerns that it's much easier to sit in judgment of someone else's choices when you're not the one having to make them while a howling mob is outside calling for your head.  And there will be debates about whether or not what he did is adultery; my feeling on this is that it's alarming how many people feel secure in making declarations about other people's marriages based on what they prefer for their own.  Adultery should be strictly defined by the people in a relationship, full stop.  But this post isn't about any of that.

This post is about another concern I have, and had with the Chris Lee situation, and has been growing generally as the distinction between "men sending pictures of themselves to women who are welcoming of such pictures" and "men who send such pictures unbidden".  I'm seeing a lot of people bunching them altogether and saying, "Ewwww....who wants to see that?  Why would any man think a picture of his cock/chest/etc. be something a woman wants to see?!"  Now, I'm not talking about men who take a picture of their cocks and send it to someone who really hasn't sent any kind of signal that she's interested in that.  I'm talking about pictures that exist in the context of a flirtation or an outright ask for pictures.  I'm seeing the same judgment laid across the board, on Twitter and forums and blogs.  And I'm going to have to push back and point out that this is sexist.

Why? Well, you know what never happens when a naked picture that a woman sent to a paramour gets out?  The "ewwww" reaction.  No one ever says, "Why would any man want to see that?!" or suggest that the distinction between wanted and unwanted pictures is unimportant because there's no such thing as a man who would find it arousing to have that kind of picture sent to him.  To use some radfem terminology on you, that's because we think of women as the sex class, and the viewing of their bodies as sexual things as normal and natural, but to do that to men is considered feminizing and therefore "gross".  

Again, since this is the internet and people want to distort your arguments beyond all recognition, I'm not talking about unwanted cock pics.  Those are often threatening in nature, because men are positioned as aggressive and violent in our culture, and so unsolicited nudity is not only harassing but scary.  But the blanket assumption that it's always foolish, unsexy, and stupid for men to take cameraphone pics and send them to women they're flirting with bothers me.  It carries with it the assumption that women are sex objects and men are sex actors.  And that women aren't sexual beings, but that we simply tolerate sex from men in order to get romance.  I would argue instead that women are very much sexual beings who can find the male body quite arousing, and therefore a picture of a man in the context of a flirtation is not only normal but should be immediately understandable, just as the picture of a woman in a flirtation is.  

Honestly, the fact that gay men exist and can look at each other with lust should have put to bed this ridiculous notion that men's bodies have no sexual allure.  But no.  The myth that women are for romance and men for raw sex and relationships are about a tense exchange of these conflicting desires has such a hold it overrules common sense understanding of the facts at hand.

This bothered me with the Chris Lee situation.  From what I understand, the woman ratted him out not because she was delicately offended that a man would think she'd want to see something like that, but because she recognized him and was upset that he was a cheater. In fact,  he sent the picture in response to communications they'd had, if I'm not mistaken.  The idea was to show off that he had the good despite his age, and let's face it, he made his point.  Personally, I'm glad that we're entering an era where men are toying with the idea that their bodies might have some aeshetic value that women may appreciate.  It opens the door to other ideas that we need to embrace as a society, the first being that because you can look at someone with lust doesn't mean that you should stop looking at them as a full human being with full human rights. And if straight men are seen as people who can incite lust, then we're halfway there---no one is going to take away their right to be full human beings with rights, such as the right to say no.  

Which goes back to Slutwalk, as many things do lately.  In her pathetic attempts to debate strategy instead of stand by her suggestion that anti-rape activism shouldn't be a feminist priority, Melissa Clouthier tweeted something about how women who go on Slutwalks don't understand how men think.  (i'm paraphrasing, because I don't want to wade through her ridiculous Twitter feed.)  The implication is that men, when they see women in short skirts, cannot be expected to see the person in the skirt as a full human being with full human rights, including the right to determine who penetrates her body.  I disagree, of course---not only do I see men accomplish this amazing feat all the time, I also have point out that how much skin is "too much" is so culturally constrained that making essentialist arguments falls apart after a minute's thought.  The argument "you know how men are" is an illusion, and part of what upholds it as an illlusion is the strict policing of men to make sure they don't present themselves in sexualized ways reserved for women, thereby collapsing the wall that's been built between being sexy and being a full human being with full human rights.  

So, by all means, denounce men who harass women with cock shots.  But let's be clear on distinctions.  The problem is not that a cock shot is always unwelcome and that women can be considered as a class not into that.  A lot of women (and gay men and yes, even straight men) find penises and male bodies in general arousing.  And there's nothing wrong with a straight man who wants to be seen as sexy by women, any more than there's something wrong with a woman who wants to be seen as sexy or a gay man who wants men to find him sexy.  In fact, we should be welcoming of a world flexible enough where all people have the right to try to feel desireable, and all people have full human rights, regardless of their sexual status. 

Andrew Klavan has investigated Anthony Weiner, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and come to the inevitable conclusion: it's all women's fault.

I blame women.  No, really.  Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion.   We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive…  on and on.  But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!

[...]

So, then, ladies — what do you expect?  All we guys want is for you to love us.  If this is the sort of guy you follow after in droves, this is the sort of guy we’re encouraged to be. 

Everyone I know has dated assholes.  It's because assholes know how to manipulate people.  Now, I'm pretty sure that DSK raping women doesn't exactly count as women "falling for" something, unless it's the seemingly reasonable belief that they won't be raped.  

When you look at Klavan's other exhibits, though, it's obvious what must happen: the more than three billion women on Earth should start some sort of network wherein unapproved men are shunned, and only middle-aged writers for Pajamas Media are allowed to come into the womanly fold.

Ha, I said "womanly fold".  I'm awesome.

But you all need to understand the eminently reasonable threshold here: all women (like all minorities everywhere) are responsible for the actions of every other woman on the face of the planet, so that if anyone reciprocally flirts with world-famous movie actors or prominent politicians, you're basically boning them as you speak.  Sorry for the late notice, but I figured you'd want to know that you're responsible for adultery and rape by people you've never met and whom you might actually find revolting.  So, uh, stop it.

There's something to be said for the predicted "normal" response to events.  It provides a comfortable frame of reference for people who were in no way affected by events to process what's happening to you; it also provides a template for shitty actors to mimic in movies rather than actually having to do work.

Oh, and it also allows Andrew Breitbart to endlessly discuss penises. 

Short version of what I'm talking about: on Friday night, a tweet appeared on Representative Anthony Weiner's Twitter account.  It involved a link to an associated yfrog account (a picture-sharing service) to a man's underwear-laden erection.  It was addressed to a female Twitter user.

One of two things happened here: either Representative Weiner mistakenly sent what was supposed to be a private message as a regular tweet, which means he's cheating on his wife and is generally an asshole, or someone else posted the tweet and the picture, and everyone involved is suffering from the act of some anonymous asshole who thinks weiner jokes are de rigueur.

Weiner and the woman involved are both contending that the tweet and picture were a result of someone breaking in to Weiner's account.  The woman suspects that it was a user who had been harassing her for weeks based on the fact that Weiner was following her account.  

Unfortunately for the woman involved, she operates under what is legally known as "the presumption of dick suckingness".  You see, she's a "21 year old coed", which pretty much means she would fuck the fail whale if those birds would just drop it on her luxuriously appointed extra long twin bed.  Having denied that there was any inappropriate relationship or exchange between her and the Representative, Tom Maguire responds:

As to whether any exchanges were "inappropriate", let's take a step back - were she and the Congressman cyber-buddies engaging in idle chit-chat and having appropriate exchanges from time to time on the Twitter private service?  Is it possible that a third party might consider some of those private exchanges to be a bit flirty?  I am not sure a twenty-one year old who wants this whole thing to go away is the most reliable judge of what might have been appropriate.

This makes a great deal of sense - the proper people to determine whether exchanges that didn't take place were appropriate are a group of slavering middle-aged conservative men who should be allowed to go through every e-mail and Facebook photo the woman's ever been a part of and comment on how much cleavage she's showing.  Roy has more on the Boobie Brigade, who will not rest until they have constructed every possible interaction between a faceless penis on the internet and this woman's pictures.  And if they have to use their own penises as stand-ins, I'm sure they will.  Repeatedly.

Of course, weeks of harassment followed by her name and sexual proclivities being blasted all over the internet this weekend led her to try to shut off her online profiles and information (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the New York Post using this picture of her, either).  She shouldn't have done that, though. Only guilty, sexy coeds do that.  Probably in lingerie.  Jim Hoft has, in a completely detached and non-creepy fashion, gathered up all of Weiner's "luscious" Twitter followers, because that's apparently okay to do now.  

Just keep in mind, ladies: if you don't want to be seen as an insatiable whore by people trying to smear someone with whom you're vaguely associated on the internet, then you should give the smearers as much information as possible so that they can properly determine your level of whorishness.   Preferably on Twitter.  That's the normal thing to do, and any deviation from it probably means you're a whore.

No real post for tonight; busy day!.  But I did want to share what are some of the best sentences ever to happen in a single letter to an advice columnist:

I have an incredibly poor history with women. I am almost 22 and have not had intercourse (there was some oral about 4 years ago).

And then, a little later:

The girls I get involved with either end up friend zoning me, I find them completely disinteresting, or something incredibly weird and awkward happens (the last girl undressed herself for me after knowing me for five days. I didn't sleep with her because I was turned off by this sluttish behavior).

I'm sure y'all be shocked to discover this guy wrote in to Savage Love because he's grown obsessed with a woman whose main selling point seems to be that she has a boyfriend that makes our hero feel irritated and competitive. 

Thanks to Maaya on Twitter for the link.

This is why we can't have nice things (via Atrios):

Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been.

This is the set-up for a "Suburgatory", an ABC sitcom that is not fooling me with language in its description like "bitingly ironic" or "single camera".  This is what I'm seeing:

Ostensible, pandering message: The horrors of female sexuality can be beat back with wholesome middle American goodness!

Actual message: Try your luck with pulling out, because parents are unreasonable assholes.

Isn't it so adorable and touching when men act like they have a god-given right to have daughters who don't grow into women? Isn't it wonderful when men believe because they spawned female offspring, they should treat them like permanent children? Don't you just want to coo your head off when a man puts his daughter in a position to take risks with her sexual health to avoid alerting him to the fact that she's not in pigtails anymore?

I don't have a problem with sweet sitcoms about middle American life.  That's why I like "Parks and Recreation".  Of course, that show doesn't act like there's something wrong with you if you both have a vagina and choose to use it.  So that helps.  But that ABC thinks psychotic parental freakouts are something to sell a sitcom on disturbs me. If Daddy was the villain, okay, but this description emphasizes how "close" they get because he decides that his control over her body matters more than her health or wellbeing.

Some times nothing, some times everything.  I'm sure someone can do a syllogism of this, but my feeling is that a man who is harassing and violent towards women probably isn't the sort of guy who is likely to suddenly grow a conscience when it comes to cheating on his wife.  But I don't think the flip is true---that a cheater is necessarily a violent man.  So, I'd say that there's no reason to think Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich harasses women because they're cheaters.  But a man who harasses women is probably a cheater. 

I guess the way I'd put it is that X means Y, but that doesn't mean Y means X.  Such as, if it's raining, there are clouds in the sky, but that doesn't mean that because clouds are in the sky, it's raining.  Just substitute cheating for "clouds in the sky" and sexual harassment for "raining".

Which leads me to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the least surprising revelation of all time, that he had a child with a servant ten years ago, and concealed it from his wife, who has taken a lot of shit on his behalf in the time they've been together.  (Not that she's off the hook, which I'll get to.)  This is an excellent time to remind everyone that Schwarzenegger was accused by a lot of women of sexual harassment during the 2003 campaign.  These accusations carried a lot of weight, for a number of reasons:

1) The accusations were numerous, extended over 25 years, and were from women who had nothing to gain personally from accusing him, but were only coming out because they were concerned that he could get elected governor.

2) He admitted guilt: ""Those people that I have offended, I want to say to them that I am deeply sorry about that and I apologise because that's not what I'm trying to do."  Yes, he made excuses for himself, but basically he admitted it.

3) This interview he did for Oui magazine in 1977, where he said this:

"Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's--the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train--there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together." Asked by Manso if he was talking about a "gang bang," Schwarzenegger answered, "Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough cock, so they can't get a hard-on. Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training. It gives you relief, and then afterward you go back to the serious stuff."

The disclaimer is that there's always a slender chance that the woman in question was fully consenting, but if so, the way he describes the incident is strange.  Was the force implied part of a game?  It's hard to tell if he's leaving out the part where the woman said, "Yes please, 'take' me upstairs and 'jump' on me.  Pretending to be raped by a bunch of bodybuilders gets me off." His complete indifference to her experience of the situation is what's remarkable from this passage.  The presence or absence of consent is his recollection leads the reader to conclude he didn't care either way.

Needless to say, for those of us who never forgot all this crap, the fact that the woman in question was a servant of Schwarzenegger's was the least surprising aspect of this story.  I am curious to hear her story and hope that if she's signed some non-disclosure agreement, the exposure of this story will make that null and void.

*****************

Here is a concern that was hashed out on Twitter, with Anthea Butler setting me straight. I noted that I feel bad---and often feel bad---for Maria Shriver, who has been publicly humilated by her douchebag husband repeatedly.  Has any woman in politics had to suffer so many people wondering what she sees in him?  But as Anthea pointed out to me, Shriver has her own responsibility for this mess.  Not the cheating, but the fact that such a horrible man ended up the governor of California.  Because when all these accusations came out about Schwarzenegger, and when he basically admitted to them, it was the presence of the well-respected Maria Shriver that allowed him to basically dodge the accusations.

Twenty-six years later it has become clear that whether she's working to land the man of her dreams—or to propel him all the way to California's governorship—Maria Owings Shriver fights for what she wants. On Oct. 7, wearing a $1,000 Dolce & Gabbana dress and her grandmother Rose's diamond engagement ring, Shriver, 47, beamed as Schwarzenegger declared victory in Los Angeles. "I know how many votes I got today because of you," he told the world. Indeed, at the end of the race Shriver was constantly by his side, helping to blunt charges of sexual harassment that threatened Schwarzenegger's candidacy. "When it comes to her husband, kids and friends, Maria is like a lioness with her cubs," says her good friend Wanda McDaniel Ruddy, who notes that Shriver shed 15 lbs. during the effort. "She didn't eat because she was too busy. She was running on adrenaline."

Here's the problem: Shriver is a prominent feminist activist. She worked with the Center for American Progress to put together a report on American women, their gains and their challenges.  It was a pretty good report!  She does good work, and that's what makes it all the more frustrating that she used all the good will she's garnered in order to propel a groping, lying shitbag into the governor's seat of the largest state in the country.

I'm not eager to judge anyone for who they fall in love with or marry.  Love is remarkably good at blinding people to who they're in love with, and anyone who claims this hasn't happened to them is either lucky or lying. 

But your moral responsibilities kick in when the man you love starts doing things that are wrong and you help him do it.  Shriver could have declined to help him run for governor, and I doubt that anyone would have thought less of her for doing it.  If she wanted to dodge the issue, she could have pointed out that she differs with her husband politically, and she can't bring herself to campaign for someone she wouldn't vote for.  So while I do feel bad that she's getting humiliated so publicly, she played a role in this.  And I hope other women that are caught up in sick relationships with hopeless cads are paying attention.  Even if your emotional and sexual feelings are such that you haven't got it in you to leave yet, that doesn't mean you have to enable.

Disclaimer: I'm not interested in turning this into a tedious thread about how Dan Savage is the worst person who ever lived because he occasionally says something you disagree with.  I'm genuinely surprised he gets shit on so much, since his occasional error is inevitable when you're producing a voluminous amount of work on the often-tricky and complex questions of sexual and relationship ethics and choices.  Most of the time, people who get shit on as much as he does, it's because the shit-ers believe the shit-ee is sensitive and responsive, and they enjoy shitting on them because they know it gets to them.  But Savage strikes me as thick-skinned, so I don't know why the Internet Denunciation Committee even bothers.  I don't really think he gives a flying fuck what you think.

This isn't really part of the news cycle and probably isn't the most important thing to be tackling on a Monday morning, but I have to unload my irritation.  Last episode of the Savage Love podcast, Dan had on Heike Rodriguez, who claims to be a sex educator who teaches women how to do female ejaculation, should they feel that they aren't spending enough time doing laundry.  I'm all for women learning the technique that could get you there, if that's something you're in to, and applaud all sorts of erotic experimentation done for the holy reason called "for the hell of it".  I'm guessing that kind of goal was why Rodriguez was invited on the show.  Unfortunately, she wasn't interested in educating people on techniques that might work for them so much as pushing her ridiculous and frankly sexist agenda on unwitting women like myself who tune in to the show for purely innocent reasons.  (Read: we like to listen to other people's sex problems while running errands or working out.)  See, Rodriguez is a first class pusher of woo, but more than that, she's a big fucking bully. And Dan should have cut the interview and told her to suck it.

Basically, what happened was that Dan was trying to get her to talk about the basics of female ejaculation, to dispel a couple of myths (that it's pee being the big one), and go on her merry way.  She, on the other hand, wanted to talk about how the G-spot is the emotional center of a woman's being and the if you're not ejaculating on a regular basis, the sole and only reason had to be that you are suffering from emotional blockage. Thus, when asked for techniques on how to do it, she was focused like a laser beam on characterizing those who don't ejaculate as emotionally broken women who need to go into therapy or just generally work on their brokenness until they start ejaculating, at what point they can feel like they're whole human beings without all those terrible neuroses non-ejaculators have.

I was surprised she didn't start to claim that female ejaculation is the process by which your body purges thetans and renders you clean so you can move on to the next level, at least after writing a check to her for thousands of dollars. 

To be clear, it was obvious from the interview that Dan was not happy about the way things had turned, and was trying to politely steer his guest in a less judgmental, less wackadoodle direction.  As far as I know, he's never been big on the hippy-dippy crap that links sexual health, acts, or performance to some kind of cosmic wholeness or the amount of patchouli in the room.  If anything, he's often pointed out that people's neuroses can be the root of some of their hottest fantasies, and I think he generally has a wide tolerance for neuroses, on the grounds that most people have them and it's not a big thing as long as it doesn't interfere with your overall wellbeing.  The interview was shorter than usual, and he did eventually get her to the point before shuffling her off.  I wouldn't be surprised if he talks about it for the next podcast and clarifies his point of view.  Which I suspect is very different from hers, especially since he did try a couple of times to correct her gently.  Overall, the interview sounded like a conversation you might have when you get caught in a conversation with someone who has weird, false beliefs but is very insistent about them.  Most of us try to politely disagree, give up, and then try as politely as possible to get out of it.  That's what he sounds like he was doing. 

That said, there was more that had to be done.  He should not have run the interview.  This is something that people in media have to deal with all the fucking time, and it's a tough one and I get that.  I have a podcast (listen to the latest here!), and I've definitely struggled with what to do when I interview someone and they wander off the farm into La La Land.  I've cut interviews before because someone just started riding a hobby horse that I thought was counter-factual. Not often---maybe once or twice---but still.  A couple more times, I've cut the part of the interview where the guest said factually incorrect things or promoted woo.  It's really a matter of how the interview is framed.  If I bring someone on to offer an opinion and I disagree, I run it.  I'm not endorsing the views of anyone I interview so much as letting them have a chance to express themselves and let the listener decide what they think.

But when an interview is explicitly about educating the audience, I think the standards have to be a little tighter.  When I bring someone on because I think they have information to impart and not just because I think they have opinions that are interesting, I raise the standards of what they're allowed to say on my show. I just cannot support setting up an education framework and then injecting untruths into it.  It runs against the very purpose of education. 

I realize that the line between fact and opinion is blurry, especially when it comes to sexual techniques and whatnot, but this woman crossed it big time.  Blag Hag has more information on why Rodriguez was unquestionably in the wrong here.  It sucks and feels rude to cut someone's interview, but your responsibility to the people you claim to be educating should take priority  in these situations.

One last thought: I have no doubt that Rodriguez considers herself a feminist.  Women who push this particular brand of woo invariably do.  But I really have to question a "feminism" that centers a woman's life around her vagina and is bullying and essentialist in this way.  If you suddenly declared that the amount of ejaculate a man produced was indicative of the state of his soul, because the penis is the emotional center of the man, we'd probably have no problem seeing you as a sexist who blows the differences between men and women way out of proportion.  The reality is that men and women have way more in common than not, and that's especially true when it comes to the physiological manifestations of our emotions, which, as far as I understand, are basically the same.