Tag Archives: Sexual ethics and transformation

Earning the epithet: men, deliberate cluelessness, and deserving the label “creep”

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In my Facebook newsfeed this morning, I saw this post by Lu Fong at the Good Men Project: The “Creepy Factor.” Fong, a staff writer at GMP, used the word “creepy” in one of her recent posts, and was called on it by Jeremy Paul Gordon. Gordon’s take on what he calls “the worst thing a woman can call a man” is here. And it’s, well, creepy. Gordon:

Without a doubt, creepy is the worst casual insult that can be tossed at a guy. A guy can publicly scoff at something you say and be a “douchebag;” sleep with your best friend, never call her back and become an “asshole;” cry while listening to Neutral Milk Hotel and forever be a “pussy.” But creepy is not that simple. It doesn’t relate to someone’s appearance, actions, or behavior. More accurately, creepy is a vibe. You can’t define it — you just know it. It’s when a guy looks at a girl for a little too long, when he friends her on Facebook a little too quickly, when he doesn’t understand that no actually means no, not “Try harder.” It’s a tag that isn’t easily dispelled — after all, what are you supposed to say? “I’m not creepy! I’m NORMAL! I say normal things and act like a human being!”

Well, Jeremy, when a guy “doesn’t understand no actually means no”, that is — at best — creepy. When you stare at someone longer than is polite, or refuse to take no for an answer (read Gordon’s post for an example of where he had that problem) then the epithet is well-earned. In a world where women have good reason to fear men’s potential for sexualized violence, a man whose behavior or words suggest that he doesn’t grasp boundaries well is rightly called a “creep.” Merriam-Webster defines creepy as “producing a nervous shivery apprehension”, and women are not overreacting when they’re apprehensive or nervous in the presence of a man who sends the unmistakable signal that he’s not good at taking no for an answer.

Guys like Gordon complain about being labeled as “creeps” (or more commonly these days, “creepers”) even when their own words make it evident that they’ve done more than enough to invite the tag. Convicted on that point, they tend to fall back on an appeal to male cluelessness. “Judge me by my intentions, not by my clumsy actions”, they beg. To put it another way, these lads are asking women to be mind-readers, to possess the magical ability to distinguish between genuine danger and mere social awkwardness. That’s a huge over-ask.

What isn’t an over-ask is to expect men to be capable of sufficient self-control so as to hear a “no” for what it is, a no. What isn’t an over-ask is to expect men to know the obvious difference between an appreciative smile and a hungry leer, and to refrain from offering the latter. And when we fail to do these basic acts of self-regulation, it is an over-ask to insist that women not call us “creepy” because it, well, hurts our feelings.

I’m not asking guys to man up. But jeepers, lads, clue in! Your capacity for empathy and intuition is there, it really is. Use it.

The right to pursue, not the right to have: a response to Miguel on sexual entitlement: UPDATED

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Miguel at EmporiaSexus has had a pair of posts up this week dealing with male heterosexual desire: Men Can’t Opt Out and Sexual Entitlement. He takes issue with me in both posts, particularly the former, and with my friend Clarisse Thorn in the latter. Clarisse wrote in a comment on one of her posts:

…no one is actually entitled to sex, and if we start acting like a given class of person is entitled to sex, then that becomes extremely dangerous extremely fast… No one has a right to a sexual partner. … [I]t’s really important that we don’t ever make claims about how a given person “should” have a partner or other people are hurting that person by not partnering them, because these are tacit efforts to guilt people into having relationships they don’t want.

I don’t always agree with Clarisse, but I stand with her on that.

Miguel argues that Clarisse and I are missing the point badly, she presumably because she’s a woman and I because my own sexual experiences render me incapable of understanding the frustrations of the involuntarily celibate male. Miguel doesn’t argue for the obligation of any individual woman to consent to sex with any particular man, but he does argue that men — especially those who battle low or non-existent sexual self-esteem — should feel entitled to sex at some point:

Put an ordinary, sane person in solitary confinement, and that person will rapidly decompensate and become severely disturbed. And yet nobody would argue I have a right to coerce another person into being my friend, or to pressure another person to touch me, even platonically. Yet at the same time, to say that friendship and human touch are “privileges” – and they are either privileges or entitlements, there is no third choice – is to say it is wrong to feel entitled to a basic human need. The fact is, to survive psychologically as social beings, we are all desperately dependent on – and entitled to – that which other people cannot be ethically compelled to give us.

Bold mine.

I appreciate that Miguel isn’t endorsing coercion. But as I read further in his piece, it’s clear that he thinks women — and sexually “successful” men — have failed to appreciate just how devastating the condition of involuntary male celibacy can be. And it’s clear too that he thinks that this is because of the choices women make. His finals words in the post: young women’s preference for the aggressive, dominant man is unmistakable, obvious, and brutal. It’s fairly clear that he thinks the victims of that preference are the beta (or omega) males who are rejected and ignored — and in some sense, robbed of what is rightfully theirs.

I’m reminded, reading his piece, of a conversation I had with my mother when I was in fourth grade. I was in fourth grade in 1976, the bicentennial year when every elementary school in the country did something to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I’d memorized some of the more famous phrases, and on one occasion, when my mama wouldn’t give me something I wanted, I shouted at her “Jefferson said I had the right to life, liberty, and happiness. But you’re taking away my happiness!” My dear mother, with her doctorate in political philosophy, kept a straight face. “No, Hugo, you don’t have a right to happiness. You have a right to pursue happiness. But Jefferson never promised that the government would give you happiness. To pursue means to earn, and you need to do more around here to earn.”

I actually knew the correct quotation, but had left out the key words in order to attempt to convince a woman (my mother) that I was entitled to have my desires fulfilled. Miguel (a grown man) is doing what I was doing when I was nine: conflating the right to pursue fulfillment with the right to have it. But my mama — and Mr. Jefferson — were right: we are not entitled to happiness, and we are not entitled to sex. We are entitled to pursue both, and in a society that guarantees equality of opportunity but not equality of outcome, none of us are entitled to have our basic needs for friendship, or orgasm, or a romantic partner met. Continue reading →

Not a dichotomy, a spectrum: on rape, consent, and desire

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In yesterday’s post, I made reference to a “rape spectrum” (also sometimes called a “consent spectrum”). In the comments, SamSeaborn and CornWalker asked me to clarify the concept.

I’ve written and spoken quite a bit about consent. There’s an ongoing discussion about consent, enthusiasm, and agency at the splendid Yes Means Yes blog. The book with the same title, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, also explores the intersections of desire and culture and agency. One topic that has always come up in my talks about consent — and which came up in the book as well — was the difficulty of defining those sexual encounters that do not meet the prevailing legal standard for rape, but are still non-consensual to one degree or another. (This problematic concept is explored in a very fine piece by Latoya Peterson, a “Yes Means Yes” contributor: The Not Rape Epidemic.)

A recent survey in the Journal of Sex Research has led to the adoption of a new term to describe one aspect of the problem: sexual compliance. The authors define compliance as “consent without desire”. That’s an exasperating way of couching it — after all, as I usually point out in my workshops and lectures, consent comes from the Latin consentire, which means literally “with feeling” or “with desire.” Consent, I argue, both etymologically and ethically shouldn’t be understood as the mere absence of a “no” or even the mere willingness to comply with another’s wishes. Authentic consent is always charged with desire; “enthusiastic consent” is, in a very real sense, a redundant term!

But I recognize that the common understanding of consent refers to the granting of permission rather than the presence of desire, and I suppose that a lesson in Latin isn’t going to change that interpretation.

One way to think about sexual ethics and the problem of what Latoya Peterson calls “Not Rape” as well as what the Journal of Sex Research calls “sexual compliance” or “consent without desire” is to imagine a spectrum. Think of a long flat line, but without any numbers on it. (This isn’t quite the Kinsey scale of sexual identity.) Imagine that the left end point of the scale is marked “Absolute Enthusiastic Consent” or, better yet, “Hell, Yes!” The right end point of the spectrum is marked “Neither Consented to Nor Desired” or “Hell, No!” or “Everyone in Their Right Mind Would Agree that This is Rape!” It’s pretty clear that a lot of what happens sexually in our lives or in the lives of the people we love happens somewhere in between these two poles. Listening to the stories of how real people live — and in many cases, reflecting on our own pasts — most of us realize fast that it’s a false dichotomy to insisist that every act of sex is “either rape, or it isn’t.” There’s a lot of space in between our two poles. Continue reading →

For pleasure, for justice, and against shame: on acceptance as a prerequisite for growth

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The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.

– Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

While listening to Clarisse Thorn lecture in my women’s studies class last Thursday, this quote popped into my head. Though I didn’t mention it in my most recent post, it was already on my mind when I wrote about rethinking my dismissiveness towards the plight of men eager for “feminist dating tips.” One could substitute the word “feminist” for “spiritual” in the AA quote, I think, and get to the heart of what I’m wrestling with this week.

Theory has consequences. Ideas have an impact. That’s not a new insight for me or anyone else. But when it comes to writing about men, women, and feminist sexual ethics, I’m ever more keenly aware that those of us who seek to encourage the transformation of both the individual and society at large often end up inadvertently shaming the very people whom we are trying to inspire.

I wrote a three-part series a couple of years ago, praising Robert Jensen’s wonderful Getting Off. But when I actually assigned the book in my “Men and Masculinity” course, I found that Jensen’s radical anti-porn stance not only aroused disagreement (which is healthy) but shame (which isn’t). This past July, I wrote about rethinking my own anti-porn stance, and about my decision not to reassign Jensen’s book (which I still think is very useful) as mandatory reading for my masculinity course:

I loved Jensen’s thesis… Many of my students did too. But some of my students of both sexes who told me they viewed porn felt overwhelmed, shamed, guilt-ridden as a result. One young woman told me she had stopped looking at porn but felt guilty about the arousing images that still popped into her head. Another young guy, one of my best students, told me that he felt as if he’d been set up for failure, as if Jensen and I were positing abstinence from pornography as the sine qua non of being a decent male. “If I masturbate to porn can I still be a good man was the question I got from more than one anguished participant in the class. And if several of the students were willing to divulge such private pain to me, I can only assume that still others felt the same way but kept silent.

Clarisse is a well-known advocate for what is usually called “sex-positive” feminism, as well as an activist for BDSM acceptance. She takes the position that some folks may have an innate orientation towards BDSM, a stance of which I am deeply suspicious but not immediately dismissive. But watching my students’ reactions to her — and reading the emails and Facebook messages I got from several of them afterwards — I realized how important it is to have feminist voices that celebrate pleasure and desire. Theory matters to Clarisse as it does to me; justice matters to her as well. (In her real life, where she goes by her birth name, she is a committed activist for a variety of causes.) But though she recognizes that our culture is deeply corrupted by what is increasingly often called “kyriarchal” influences, she understands that all of us have to live and love and fuck and create and nurture within that culture. Just as ringing Sunday sermons in church aren’t of much use if they aren’t applied in the weekday lives of the congregation, so too a feminism that is heavy on inspiring classroom rhetoric needs to offer folks reassurance and encouragement in every other aspect of their lives.

One of the critiques that feminists of color had of mainstream white feminism a generation ago was that middle-class white feminists tended to prioritize “sisterhood” over all other values. Women of color who lived in what white feminists considered “patriarchal” and “oppressive” ethnic groups were encouraged to extricate themselves from their families and their cultures for the sake of individual happiness. Black, Latina, and Asian feminists insisted — quite rightly — on a different kind of feminism, one that could be synthesized with traditions and values that they held dear. What seemed hopelessly oppressive to well-to-do WASPy feminists was experienced very differently by many non-white women.

The same problem happens around sex. Continue reading →

The pro-feminist pick-up artist: rethinking a blind spot

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Clarisse Thorn, the noted sex-positive writer and blogger, came to speak to my women’s history class today. Clarisse was in Los Angeles on another engagement, and was kind enough to come and talk to my students about sex-positive feminist masculinity. We had a short and very amiable debate, as I challenged some of her positions. (More on that in a future post.) I look forward to getting some good feedback from more of my students, but have already had a few enthusiastic emails and Facebook messages.

UPDATE: Clarisse notes her visit here. Her post lists some links from each of our archives that cover some of the areas where we disagree.

Clarisse’s article on the pathologizing of male desire got a great deal of attention in the blogosphere last month, and there were over 100 comments in the debate about it here on this blog. A follow-up post has a still-active comment thread. Those two posts received more comments than any others I wrote in October. Clarisse is clearly an instigator of good discussion.

I took Clarisse to lunch to thank her, and in our discussion over various vegetarian goodnesses, we returned to this challenging theme of constructive sex-positive feminist masculinity. I talked about how frustrated I’ve been in my exchanges on the topic with many men, who — as my comment threads indicate — find my writing on the topic to be shaming, or unhelpful, or privileged. I’ve been asked before for “pick-up tips for feminist men”, a request I’ve resisted for both ideological and experiential reasons. I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist” (PUA) and “seduction” communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men). Clarisse has a more nuanced view, as one of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap” between the PUA and feminist worlds. I’m leery that that gap can be bridged at all, but I’m open to discussion.

But in talking with Clarisse, I realized how often I’ve been unnecessarily contemptuous of those men who have sought out techniques and strategies for approaching women. I’m married, of course, and devotedly so. I’m obviously not looking for sexual or romantic partners. But even when I was single, I never had trouble “meeting” women, finding sexual partners, or getting into relationships. (I had tremendous problems making relationships work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Writing those words makes me uncomfortable; they seem filled with macho swagger. I’m not boasting of my sexual prowess, or at least, I’m trying not to. But though I have had myriad challenges in my life (particularly around drug and alcohol addiction), one problem I haven’t had since I hit college was finding sexual partners. Learning to be celibate was hard; learning how to be monogamous in thought and word as well as in body was hard. Unlearning flirting was hard. Getting laid — and every few years, getting married — was easy. Continue reading →

Of the validation of desire and the graceful acceptance of rejection: on male wanting

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A young man whom I’ve mentored was in my office this week, and asked me a question based on what had come up in one of my old Men and Masculinity lectures. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s more or less what he said:

I appreciate what you often say about the importance of being a “safe older man.” You are, and that’s great. But one reason you’re safe is that you’re married. You aren’t single and looking. It seems like that makes it easier for you to be a full-fledged feminist male, because you can afford to have all of your relationships with women other than your wife be completely asexual. So don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not always that helpful as a feminist male role model because you can’t demonstrate how someone can be single, straight, looking for a girlfriend and be feminist. I don’t want to be seen as a creep, but I certainly don’t want to be seen as asexual either.

This goes back to some of the recent discussion around Clarisse Thorn’s piece at Alternet about demonizing men who are honest about their sexual desires.

It’s something I touched on in my write-up of my meeting with young men at Brown University last year. As I wrote then: “for men who long to be feminist allies, finding a way to affirm their own wanting (without an assumption that they are entitled to have those wants satisfied by women) is vital.”

So my student (who had read Clarisse’s controversial article as well as my post about the lads at Brown) was essentially asking me to explain the how of affirming male heterosexual desire while reconciling it with a commitment to gender justice and feminism. He wanted to move past the rhetoric that intimates that from a feminist standpoint, “the only good penis is a soft one.” But how can a man show sexual and romantic interest in a woman without being potentially creepy? That’s where my student — and many other well-intentioned young men – need help.

First off, being a straight male feminist ally is not code for “walking on eggshells” all the time. It does not demand that young men run about taking the emotional temperature of their female peers. There’s no better example of a false dichotomy than the suggestion that all men must be either painfully earnest nice guys or predatory, swaggering bad-boy assholes. The alternative to those unhappy models is one of compassionate confidence (or, if you prefer, confident compassion.)

What does compassionate confidence look like in interpersonal relationships? It starts with the recognition of the difference between one’s own right to want and one’s right to expect others to respond to those wants. In a culture where we raise women to be people-pleasers, generations of men have grown up assuming that their desires are women’s responsibility to solve. Whether it’s a husband who expects dinner to appear magically as soon as he’s hungry, or a boy who insists that his girlfriend owes him a blowjob because “she got him horny”, far too many of us are conditioned to believe that men’s desires are women’s problems to solve. So many men confuse wanting with the entitlement to have their wants met that it’s little wonder that a great many women are mistrustful of expressions of male desire.

A good guy knows that he has the right to want. His horniness and his fantasies are not sinful or wicked. But he’s very clear that his attraction to a woman (say a classmate with whom he strikes up a conversation) isn’t a compliment to her for which she is required to be grateful. He has the right to have a crush, he has the right to lust. He doesn’t have the right to have his wants reciprocated. He needs to do two things at once: affirm the essential goodness of his own desire, and affirm that the woman he’s attracted to has every right not to share his interest.

As I’ve written before, one of the greatest benefits of feminism to men is a greater authenticity and honesty in heterosexual relationships. Women who don’t feel pressured or coerced or “guilted” into a “yes” are going to be much more comfortable saying “no.” And a woman who feels safe to say “no” to the men to whom she is closest will also be someone who will be better equipped to speak an enthusiastic, honest “yes!” when she’s presented with someone she actually wants.

We live in a culture where women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men. Making it clear that one doesn’t expect one’s wants to be met by others is a key part of putting other folks at ease. Dealing with rejection without sulking or shaming the one who has rejected you sends a signal about your safety and your essential decency. (For a marvelous example of why women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men, see the opening scene of the hit movie “The Social Network”, in which it seems as if the very inspiration for the creation of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s toxic rage at being rejected by a woman he’s already treated very shabbily.)

Because many women have little experience with men who take rejection easily and with equanimity, it’s little wonder that some women’s fear of male rage turns into a fear of male desire itself. “If he wants me, then I have to face the problem of rejecting him — and if I reject him, he may do something really dangerous or humiliating. Therefore, it would be better if he didn’t want me at all.” But the problem isn’t the wanting: it’s both the vulgar and crude ways in which some men make that wanting known, and more importantly, the outraged indignation so many men express when they are in fact rejected.

Learning to articulate one’s wants needs to go hand in hand with the graceful acceptance of the rejection that occasionally follows; that is the stuff of which “confident compassion” is made. And in the end, women’s acceptance of the reality (and goodness) of men’s desires is contingent on men’s acceptance of women’s (absolute and never forfeited) right to reject them.

Homosocial anxiety, the virginity obsession, and the sexual double standard

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In my “Beauty and the Body” class yesterday, I revisited the topic of homosociality and male anxiety. Homosociality is the notion that winning validation from other males is the primary concern for young American men. Contrary to popular wisdom, “getting laid” matters less than the social cachet of being seen by other guys as someone who “gets laid” regularly and easily. (Michael Kimmel introduced the concept of homosociality in his magisterial Manhood in America; A Cultural History). I wrote this in an earlier post on the subject:

To use one cheap and easy example, homosociality explains the function of catcalls and wolfwhistles. I’ve often been asked by female students why men whistle and hoot at them from construction sites and passing cars. “Why do they do it? Do they think this actually ‘works’ to pick up women?” I usually inquire whether the whistling was done by a single man or a group; the answer is almost invariably that it was the latter. The answer, seen through the lens of homosociality, is obvious — men whistle and yell to connect with other men. Women are, alas, mere devices for creating non-sexual, same-gender bonds. This doesn’t explain all catcalling behavior, but it goes a hell of a long way towards doing so.

In yesterday’s class, we connected homosociality to male “performance” anxiety. We were talking about Susan Bordo’s wonderful, albeit dated, The Male Body, and her discussion of men’s anxieties about penises and performance. (I’ve written about this topic before as well, here and in this archive. I offered the not very original suggestion that the longing for homosocial approval is inevitably wrapped up in competition. Men gain status in other men’s eyes by competing with and bettering other men; the whole culture of sport, of course, is rooted in this. This relentless pursuit of dominance and validation is exhausting, painful, and anxiety-producing for everyone involved, not least the women who are turned into mere yardsticks with which male competitors can measure their success. Continue reading →

The season of “no”: revisiting and expanding an old post on celibacy

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This post, a different version of which first appeared in 2006, was initially inspired by this poem by Lady Ki No Washika:

No

It’s not because I’m now too old,
More wizened than you guess..

If I say no, it’s only
Because I fear that yes
Would bring me nothing, in the end,
But a fiercer loneliness.

I found it in the Los Angeles Times Book Review back in the late summer of 1998. This was a time in my life where, after a very turbulent couple of years, I had taken a temporary vow of celibacy. Keeping the commitment to that vow was proving difficult. This poem comforted me instantly, because those last four lines ran so unbelievably true — they summed up in 22 words what had been up to then my entire sexual history.

When writing about my past, I choose my words carefully.  So many people I know and love read this blog, as do folks from my spiritual community, my youth group, and my college classes.  Much of my private life is thus obscured, and rightly so.  Yet I think I can share a little bit that may prove useful, or if nothing else, may explain why this poem means so much to me.

As I’ve talked about before, in late June of 1998, I had hit a kind of emotional, physical, and spiritual bottom. I attempted suicide after a prolonged struggle with drugs, alcohol, and compulsive sexual behavior. My family was frantically worried about me, my friends had largely pulled away from me, I had spent time in handcuffs — and extended time in hospitals.  While in the last of these hospitals, someone asked me "Hugo, do you have any idea how to be alone?  I don’t mean single — can you really be alone with yourself?"  I admitted that no, I really didn’t know how to do that.  I had already burned through a couple of marriages, and was, for lack of a better time, compulsively dating.  I was a walking, talking, incarnation of toxic neediness!   In the year or two leading up to that watershed summer, I had been going out several nights a week with lots of different people, addictively hungry for connection.  The whole process had left me alienated, lonely, and miserable; it had also made me a bit of a pariah. 

In that long hot summer of 1998 — the summer of Bill and Monica, the summer of the World Cup in France — I came home to God.  It’s an easy phrase to write, and it doesn’t come close to capturing the extraordinary turbulence and excitement of that time of conversion and transformation.   I can only say that I prayed as I had never prayed before, to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in, and I was given peace beyond any expectation.  It was an amazing time, one I hope I will never forget.  "Born again" is such a trite, overused expression — and yet truly, that’s what it felt like.

One of my earliest spiritual directors/Twelve Step sponsors told me that in addition to a variety of spiritual activities, I needed to be celibate.  He defined celibacy as not only no sexual activity, but also no dating, flirting, masturbating, or what he liked to call "intriguing" (I love that verb) with women.  I asked how long this period was supposed to last, and he gave me the typical spiritual director answer: "You’ll know.  For now, just do this a day at a time."

Continue reading →

Radicals in the bedroom: a response to Julian

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Julian, who blogs at Radical Profeminist, commenting beneath this post that concluded a series of responses to Factcheckme (FCM), asked this:

I’d prefer to know from the male-men contributors here what you do that is sex and oppressive: and what values get expressed when you do what you do that you call “sex”, because in my experience, men talk a good line about everything, and then when I speak with the women in their lives, I find out a whole other reality–one that becomes entirely apparent, yet is unowned by the men who proclaim themselves sensitive to this or that matter. So the oppressive behaviors hide behind the platitudes and proclamations.

We’d been discussing heterosexual intercourse, you’ll recall, and its feminist implications. The split between those of us who are classic liberal feminists (convinced that individual agency can be exercised even in the face of huge social pressures) and those who are radical feminists (who are far more suspicious of such claims) was on display for all to see. There was the usual name-calling, which went both ways and was uniformly unhelpful. There was the usual misunderstanding of what the name-calling meant, which compounded the unhelpfulness. And despite that, there were some very good comments. Perhaps it’s male privilege, perhaps it’s the nearly indissoluble bond of tenure, or perhaps it’s just that I’ve been having these discussions for 25 years, but I appreciated all the heat, even if it shed only a little light.

As the name of his blog implies, Julian embraces a line of inquiry and an intellectual tradition several steps to the left of my own. I don’t need to agree with his radical analysis to find much that is useful and provocative in his writing. I am not a radical, but as a liberal am made better and more thoughtful by engaging with interlocutors whose views are sharply opposed to mine. Radicals like Julian, Factcheckme, Andrea Dworkin, Robert Jensen, and Andrea Smith are great “cover-pullers”, rousing from slumber those of us who sometimes like to hide from the reality of the oppression all around us. That doesn’t mean that their criticisms are always right, or that their solutions are wise. It does mean that their perspective is useful and deserves to be taken seriously.

I’ve said it many times: part of living out a commitment to justice is consistency between one’s private behavior and one’s public pronouncements. That doesn’t mean that we share every intimate detail of our lives in order to prove that we aren’t hypocrites (we’re all hypocrites to one extent or another). It does mean that we work towards wholeness, where what we say and do and think matches up more often than not.

For feminist men in sexual relationships with women, this commitment to integrating justice and egalitarianism into one’s private life is especially important. We’ve got to make sure we’re not hiding behind “platitudes and proclamations”; Julian is quite right that “talking a good line” and living it out are, sadly, often two very different things. I’ve been candid about my own massive failings in this regard in the past, most obviously about my pattern of sleeping with students enrolled in my classes early on in my teaching career. Of course, at the time I was engaged in this unethical and decidedly un-feminist behavior, I wasn’t also opining that teachers shouldn’t sleep with their students. I wasn’t an out-and-out liar, but I was still abusing my position.

I also have been open about my use of pornography in my younger years, a use that probably met the standard for “addiction.” (I am beyond grateful that the worst of that addiction was prior to the coming of the Internet, which I’m confident would have made recovery harder.) Staying away from pornography and not sleeping (or flirting with) anyone other than my wife are obviously important commitments to me and to those who place their trust in me.

But virtue, including feminist virtue, is as much about what one does as one doesn’t. And Julian is right to suggest that heterosexual feminist men in particular integrate their principles into their sexual lives with their partners. Regarding heterosexual intercourse (PIV), that means more than assuming a degree of responsibility for contraception. Willingness to wear a condom is certainly commendable, but that’s not quite enough. Given that penis-in-vagina intercourse poses a host of risks to women that it doesn’t to men (ranging from pregnancy to a greater chance of contracting STIs to the genuine physical trauma of childbirth), feminist men need to be particularly careful that they aren’t prioritizing intercourse over all other possible sexual activities. Continue reading →

Relationships, hook-ups, and GPAs: getting past the headlines

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The headlines out of the American Sociological Association’s Atlanta meeting this past week have been catchy: Love makes teen sex less academically harmful, study says; Teen sex not always bad for school performance; Sex in romantic relationships is harmless. There’s a nice summary of the conflict between social scientists and journalists in this Oliver Wang piece in the Atlantic.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before reading this very important discussion from Heather Corinna at Scarleteen. I might have written a very different piece had I read it first! Please do read Heather’s excellent analysis, based on having read the actual study quite carefully.

What the study showed, of course, is that encouraging teens to delay sexual activity in order to boost academic performance isn’t necessarily the most helpful strategy adults can take. The study did indeed find that sex within relationships did not have a deleterious effect on adolescent grades, but casual sex sometimes did. From the AP summary:

Teens in serious relationships did not differ from their abstinent counterparts in terms of their grade-point average, how attached they are to school or college expectations. They were also not more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent. (But) compared with virgins, teens who have casual sex had lower GPAs, cared less about school and experienced more problems in school. For example, female teens who have flings had GPAs that were 0.16 points lower than abstinent teens. Male teens who have casual sex had GPAs that were 0.30 points lower than those who do not have sex. Teens who “hook up” also were at greater risk of being suspended or expelled and had lower odds of expecting to go to college.

First off, in my experience (a couple of decades worth of work with high school and college students), students who are high-achieving tend to be the ones most likely to be dishonest (or at least, less than entirely forthcoming) about their sexual behavior. Teens are notoriously sensitive to reputation and image. One negative stigma that I’ve often seen teens associate with casual sex is that kids who do engage in sexual activity outside committed relationships lack ambition or seriousness. Remember the tremendous power of the “one mistake can ruin your life” narrative, particularly in the lives of adolescent girls. As a result, teens tend to associate casual sex with recklessness and the absence of motivation. Teens, especially young women, who are sexually active outside of committed relationships and are also intellectually serious and highly motivated tend to feel tremendous pressure (often self-imposed) to be quiet about that aspect of their lives. In the hyper-competitive world in which many bright adolescents live these days, someone who has casual sex isn’t necessarily immoral, but foolish. And for a certain kind of highly ambitious young woman who has been raised to be risk-averse, being called “reckless” or “frivolous” or “unthinking” has almost the same power to wound as “slut.” In other words, who is willing to admit to casual sex may well be tied not only to class and cultural background, but to important perceptions about one’s seriousness. I suspect some hefty underreporting. Continue reading →