Are you a controlling shrew if you don’t want your partner using porn?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

The now-infamous Newsweek report on men who buy sex has drawn the predictably tremendous response throughout the blogosphere. The best take-down of the report’s methodology and conclusions came from the always excellent Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon. I recommend reading the original Newsweek piece and Clark-Flory’s response together.

But the conversation soon switched to the great evergreen of pornography use. I wrote a short response for Good Men Project (which got picked up at Jezebel). In the comments section below the GMP version, I got into a friendly argument with the magazine’s managing editor, Aaron Gouveia — which begat a post of its own here: A Vehement Disagreement about Porn.

Leaving aside the issue of whether pornography is degrading or empowering, putting on a shelf the question of whether its use is compatible with feminism, pressing the pause button on the debate about whether it casual use will invariably turn compulsive, there’s a basic query that has come up again and again: what right, if any, does someone have to ask for a “porn-free” sexual relationship?

We all come into sexual relationships with our “stuff” — our physical libidos, our private histories, our most enduring fantasies, our painful memories. Our sexuality is shaped by a constellation of factors: biology, faith, experience, will, fantasy, and more. Our sexuality belongs to us; as the authors of The Ethical Slutso famously put it, “the fundamental sexual unit is one person.” That makes good sense.

But when we come into any kind of sexual relationship, as so many of us will do or would like to do , we have to balance our own desires with those of another. We don’t get to do whatever we want. To pick a stereotypical heterosexual dynamic, the fact that a dude wants to come on his girlfriend’s face doesn’t mean she has to let him do so. We’re responsible for naming our wants, and responsible for self-soothing when those wants aren’t reciprocated by a partner. And the basic rule is simple: my right not to have something done to me that I don’t want done trumps your right to do to me what you’d like to do. To say otherwise is to give tacit approval to rape. Continue reading →

“Because it feels good”: the starting point for talking to kids about sex

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

My friend Alison told me a story the other day about her husband and her eight year-old daughter. While on a family camping trip over the long Fourth of July weekend, little Jade asked her parents, “Why do people have sex?”

Alison and Cooper were shocked. Like so many parents, they weren’t ready for the question; even those moms and dads who prepare themselves well to talk about the subject get thrown off by the timing or wording of these first queries about sex. And as Alison told me, she and Cooper expected to have the “sex talk” with Jade when she was ten or eleven at the earliest. Not eight.

Before Alison could say anything, her husband blurted out. “People have sex because it feels good.”

“Oh”, Jade said, and went back to eating dinner, uninterested in continuing the conversation.

Cooper was beside himself, telling Alison that he felt like an idiot for giving their daughter that answer. “I don’t know what I was thinking; it was the first thing that came into my head”, he said. His wife reassured him that they could have a more detailed conversation with Jade when she was a little bit older, but for now the answer was honest and fine. Cooper wasn’t convinced, and second-guessed himself for the rest of the family camping trip.

As I told Allie yesterday, her husband didn’t get it wrong at all. In fact, from a developmental standpoint, he gave the best one-sentence answer he could possibly have given. “Give him a high-five from me”, I said, “Coop nailed it.”

So many adults are fearful that telling kids that sex is pleasurable will simply encourage young people to have it before they are physically and emotionally ready for the consequences. Better, they imagine, to emphasize that it’s important to wait and to stress the risks. But as it turns out, centering pleasure is a great way to minimize the chances that a teen will be pressured into doing something that they don’t want to do.

When we tell girls that sex is something people do when they love each other, it sets them up to believe that sex is sacrificial. So when Jassie falls in love with Bobby, and Bobby pushes for intercourse, she’s conditioned to focus on “giving it up” for him rather than on thinking about what feels good for her. The more she’s taught that her pleasure matters, the less likely she’ll be coerced into going farther than her body is ready to go. “It’s supposed to feel good”, she may remember, “and right now, being rushed and pawed doesn’t feel good. So I want to stop.” Centering pleasure gives young women a power that centering love doesn’t.

The same is true with boys. When we teach them that sex is about feeling good, we remind them that it isn’t about “losing it.” We think of adolescent boys as hormone-addled horndogs, and many of them are. (There are some pretty damn horny teenage girls too, though we’re less comfortable acknowledging that.) But what drives so many boys to focus on having heterosexual intercourse isn’t the pursuit of pleasure for either themselves or their partners. It’s the longing to “become a man” or to “score” in a competition that’s really about winning praise and validation from other men. Pleasure becomes less important than being a “stud” in other boys’ eyes. That’s not a lot of fun.

So Cooper got it exactly right. While there are other reasons why people have sex, the desire to give and share pleasure is perhaps the most basic. And the more we center pleasure in our discussions with children, the more we equip them to say no to what hurts, what’s coerced, and what’s unwanted. And the more we empower them to say “yes” only to what feels good.

That’s the best foundation for good sex education I know.

Older Men, Younger Women with Meghan Murphy: podcast up

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Is age every really just a number? I tend to say no, and have written quite a bit about the problematic nature of older men/younger women relationships. (See my archive here, this interview with Tracy Clark-Flory here, and this post at the Good Men Project: What Young Women are Really Looking for From Older Men.)

Meghan Murphy of the F Word interviewed me last week for her radio program, and the show — all about older men and younger women — aired today. Here’s the podcast for download and streaming.

Why We Can’t Celebrate Male Sexuality… Yet

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

In response to this generally excellent Ally Fogg op-ed in the Guardian today, I’ve got a short piece at GMP: Why We Can’t Celebrate Male Sexuality… Yet. Excerpt:

Fogg thinks we need to celebrate positive male sexuality in order to make men into better people. Great idea, but it’s a bit back to front. First we need to show a rightly suspicious world that men are capable of being safe. Once men stop blaming women for enticing or inviting infidelity and rape – once we stop believing the myth of uncontrollable male desire – then and only then can we ask to have our sexuality celebrated in all its hot and powerful wonder.

Read the whole (brief) thing.

Porn and the fiction of a more virtuous past

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

I have a short piece today at GMP taking on Naomi Wolf’s theory that porn is driving men to madness. Excerpt:

JFK had sex with an untold number of women in the White House, including a threesome in the presidential swimming pool, and he was hardly the first American male politician to be sexually voracious outside of marriage. The difference, of course, was that JFK lived in an era when men could outsource their self-control to the media. By every count, powerful men in the past were no more discreet than our leaders today. Journalists, not politicians, were the ones who exercised self-control. And it was that restraint that created the fiction of a more virtuous past.

And don’t forget to listen to my chat with Meghan Murphy of the F Word Collective today at noon PDT on Vancouver’s Co-Op Radio. Streaming live around the globe.

Talking Older Men/Younger Women with Meghan Murphy

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

Meghan Murphy and I had a spirited series of exchanges here on the blog and at her site. But though we disagree about pornography and the decriminalizing of prostitution, we agree on some other issues — including the general inadvisability of older men/younger women relationships. (Particularly when the “younger woman” is 25 or less and the older man is 10 or more years her senior.)

We taped a lengthy interview last week and it airs tomorrow, Monday, July 18th, at 12 noon Pacific Time. You can listen to it live here. It will be set up to stream on the site not long after air time, and will also appear as a podcast (eventually) here.

Football frenzy

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

An incredible weekend of soccer, with three extraordinary matches all ending with the underdogs winning on penalty kicks. Uruguay knocked out Argentina yesterday, and Paraguay shocked Brazil today in the Copa America — and for the first time in history, South America’s most prestigious football tournament has neither of its traditional powers in the semis.

Say what you will about destiny, it’s a tangible psychological concept. We saw it today on the faces of the Japanese players from the first whistle to the last penalty kick in their remarkable win over a splendid US women’s national team in the World Cup final.

Ninotchka the chinchilla, 2000-2011

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

As some long-time readers know, my wife and I are long-time supporters of chinchilla rescue. We’ve had many chinnies over the years, and currently have six who have been saved from bad homes or pelting ranches. We had had seven; one of our rescues from Michigan, a sweet and elegant white chinchilla named Ninotchka, died at the vet’s yesterday after a brief illness.

Here’s a photo of her with her cagemate, Gabriella. Taken in 2006, the pair are in a salad bowl dust bath. Ninotchka (who was about 11 when she died) is on the right.

If you want to know more about our chinchilla rescue work, check out the website run by our project manager, Mya: Matilde’s Mission. (The site is named for our first chinchilla, Matilde.)

Wrapping up Spermgate

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Hugo Schwyzer

It’s been an interesting week, as the original story I wrote about a boy who might or might not be my biological child caused a minor kerfuffle in the blogosphere. My friend Katie sent me a text Monday night, saying “it’s spermgate!!!” I liked the term, and so I started using it, even though I risk ridicule for naming my own little scandal rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

Spermgate has been popular at Good Men Project and Jezebel; at this blog, I’ve had my best week of traffic since last fall. (When this became my most popular post ever.)

I’ve done two follow-ups to the original column, including one that was reprinted at Good Men Project. The best summary of the story comes from one of the few bloggers to write approvingly of how “Jill” and I handled the original situation. Zach at 8BitDad writes

Long story short (and apologies to Schwyzer for summarizing everything in a couple sentences), he met a gal, and the gal met someone else as well. She got pregnant somewhere along the way, and Schwyzer never really resolved whether the baby was his, or the other dude’s. The gal ended up getting engaged and married to the other guy – possibly because he was more stable and wanted to be a father, while Schwyzer partied and lived his single life. The gal had more kids with her husband, and they live a presumably happy life.

That’s about the size of it.

The reaction has been both gendered and generally hostile. Google my name and you’ll find the blogposts and stories out there; the one discussion I found that was worthwhile and balanced took place here. The rest have been nearly all godawful.

Nothing I’ve read this week has changed my feelings about what happened with Jill, Ted, and Alastair. This was a complicated ethical situation of the sort that eludes easy answers. I was absolutely in the wrong to have been as sexually reckless as I was. And given my recklessness, I don’t have any position from which to criticize my old friend Jill. I might have chosen differently had I been in her shoes, but that is a moot point. I was in no position to do much of anything constructive back in the mid-1990s when this story began; all these years later, the most destructive thing I could do would be to reinsert myself into the lives of this family I have every reason to believe is happy. In other words, while there might be some ambiguity about what the right thing to do was back in the day, there is no such uncertainty now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it 10,000 times again: in every imaginable way that matters, Ted is Alastair’s father. There is no doubt of that whatsoever, even if (and it’s a huge if) Alastair was conceived with my sperm.

I wrote this snippet of autobiography to illustrate a complex moral and emotional dilemma, and I wrote it to make a point about fatherhood. I’m pleased that it’s fostered a lot of discussion, even if a lot of that discussion has been unconstructive and tinged with violent invective. I’m grateful to the friends who have been so supportive in person and in writing — and grateful to the friends who’ve trusted our relationship enough that they can feel comfortable publicly or privately criticizing my stance. I’ve been around along enough to know the distinction between a thoughtful challenge and mean-spirited invective. I’ve had lots of opportunity to be reminded this week of that distinction.

My friend Harmony sent me a quote last night, from the artist Madelon Vriesendorp: “If you’re hated by the right people, it’s a compliment.” When someone says something hateful to me, I often ask myself, “Who else — or what else — do they despise?” While it’s not always true that the enemy of one’s enemy is automatically a friend, there is something to be said for being lucky in one’s opponents. I am indeed fortunate in my enemies!

I stand by the position that confessional writing matters. It’s certainly not the only kind of writing I do, and it’s not the only kind of writing I enjoy reading. But it has its place in fostering discussion about how it is we can construct happier lives for ourselves. Reading the intensely personal stories of other writers has helped me understand my world and myself. Of course, too much of a focus on individual experience is unhelpful; endless navel-gazing isn’t constructive. But it is a serious mistake to refuse to place personal experience alongside reason as a vital tool for understanding how to live.

I’ll leave the comment sections open on the older spermgate posts, at least for a few more days. But I’m ready to move on to other discussions, and with a few exceptions, I’d imagine most of my readers are as well.