Tag Archives: Sexuality

Humiliation and affirmation at Jezebel

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My weekly Genderal Interest column at Jezebel looks at “facials” (the sex act, not the beauty treatment). He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think features interviews with my friends Charlie Glickman and Megan Andelloux, two wonderful sex educators on opposite sides of the country. Excerpt:

A few years ago, in a humanities course on the body, my class was discussing one of the most famous selections from the now-iconic Vagina Monologues, “Because He Liked to Look at It”. The monologue tells the story of a woman who thought her vagina was “incredibly ugly” until she meets a man named Bob, who loves to stare at —and taste — her vulva with delight and wonder. Bob’s embrace of her body is the key to her self-acceptance. During our discussion of the monologue, a male student noted bravely that he thought many men felt the same way about their penises. Perhaps, he suggested, the intense appeal of facials in porn (and real life) was about men’s desire for that same experience of being validated as desirable, as good, as “not dirty.” For a young man raised with the sense that his body – and especially his penis – is “disgusting”, a woman’s willingness to accept a facial is an intensely powerful source of affirmation.

In my conversations with Glickman and Andelloux, I shared this anecdote. Both agreed that rather than seeing the facial as rooted in the impulse to denigrate, it might indeed be better to view it as longing for approval. Andelloux pointed out that in her experience, many women (often with good reason) have a difficult time believing that degradation isn’t at the root of straight men’s fascination with facials. In any case, humiliation and affirmation aren’t incompatible reactions to the same act; a feeling of indignity when your partner ejaculates on your face isn’t contingent on his intending to demean you. No one should be obligated to endure humiliation for the sake of someone else’s longing for validation.

What’s Your Number? Who Cares, and Why?

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A new film, What’s Your Number? revisits old questions about sexual pasts, honesty, and slut-shaming. Samhita (whose new book Outdated is a treasure) writes about the film and the obsession with “the number” today at Feministing.

I recently did a still-unpublished interview with a reporter for a college paper, and in the middle of a conversation on this topic, she asked me my “number”. I blurted it out, much to my own amazement, and had to send her a message after we were off the phone to ask her not to use it. (She agreed.) For a host of reasons, I don’t disclose the number of sexual partners I’ve had, but in a relaxed moment, out it popped…

In any case, a good time to link to this piece from February at the Good Men Project: Why Does It Matter How Many Partners She’s Had? Excerpt:

I lost my virginity at 17 to my high-school girlfriend. She was a year younger but much more sexually experienced. She was my first for anything that went below the waist; I was the fifth guy she’d had sex with. I’d asked her number, of course, and then fought hard not to obsess about the four boys who had “been there” before me. But I saw the pain my questions caused her. And I came to realize that it didn’t matter.

I don’t know my wife’s number. I’ve never asked her. She’s never asked for mine. I know enough from the stories she’s told to know that there was more than one guy before me; she knows enough about my past to figure out that she can’t count my lovers on her fingers. Beyond that, we—who have shared so much sexually and emotionally in our nine years as a couple, six years as spouses, and two years as parents together—don’t need to know more specifics.

When we’re in a monogamous relationship, what we have a right to insist on is that no names get added to the list after our own. It doesn’t matter if I’m number five or 55. I’ll be crushed if my wife adds a number six or a 56 behind my back.

But the right to ask to be last is not the same as the right to know how far we are from the first. And for me, part of being a good man is knowing what I don’t need to know.

Why We Can’t Celebrate Male Sexuality… Yet

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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.

Love is never about wanting to be first

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One of the perennial subjects in sex and relationship writing is jealousy of a partner’s past. At the Good Men Project this week, we had 10 Ways to Deal With Your Partner’s Sexual Past (Because You Have To). It’s not the most detailed discussion of the subject you’ll see, and I have some quibbles with bits of it, but it’s a healthy and helpful reminder of the utter bootlessness of longing to be the “first.”

I’ve written a bit on this topic before. In early 2009, I wrote to challenge the obsession so many have with a partner’s past. That piece is reprinted below.

Below this January 14 post on experience and numbers, bmmg39 writes:

…my view is that, often, people with little or no experience in a certain thing (it CAN be sex but it could also mean romantic love, or kissing, or slow-dancing, or whatever) often seek others with the same low level or non-level of experience. Someone who’s never soul-kissed someone else might not feel comfortable with someone who’s done that with a hundred people already. That doesn’t mean the first person thinks that there’s something wrong with the second; it means that the first person would like to be remembered fondly as someone else’s first experience in that department with all the wonderful awkwardness and nervousness that is said to come with it.

The bold emphasis is mine. What bmmg writes sounds innocent and sweet enough. But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is “to be remembered fondly”, to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body or heart, hoping — as humans tend to hope — that we won’t be forgotten. There’s no question that most of us would like to leave an impression on other people; perhaps it’s the historian in me, but there are few worse fears I have, to be honest, than that I will be completely forgotten! But bmmg makes the mistake of assuming that “first” equals “most memorable.” Ask around. Legions of people, particularly women, would rather forget their first experience of heterosexual intercourse. There’s not infrequently a world of difference between, say, the first partner with whom you had intercourse and the first partner with whom you truly felt close and safe.

When my wife and I were planning our wedding, she was hardly unaware that this was to be my fourth marriage — and her first. (Indeed, I have been the first husband to four different women.) A friend of ours did ask her, on one occasion, if it bothered her that she was doing something for the first time that I had done several times before. My fiancee, sensible as ever, said, “No, because this is the first time he’s doing it with me.” She was focused, bless her, on the marriage we were building together. She didn’t deny the reality of what had come before, but she rightly saw no reason to believe that prior experience on my part would diminish the unique intensity of what we were creating as a team. She knew better than to see me as a three-time loser and a has-been. So when we talked about rings and dresses and bands and caterers, she was aware — on some level — that I had had all those conversations before. But she was also clear that passion is not automatically killed by repetition; she knew enough to know that past behavior isn’t always the best indicator of future action. Above all, she believed that most of the time, the axiom of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” holds true: my ability to be a great husband in my fourth marriage was in no small degree a consequence of all the mistakes I had made in the previous three. Some folks hit a home run on their first at bat. Others… need to be sent down to the minors a time or three. Continue reading →

When Harry Was Wrong: Desire and Non-Sexual Friendship

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We’re home from a brief trip up to Northern California for the Fourth of July festivities with family. A happy time for all, including for Heloise, who has decided she loves the family’s “safe and sane” fireworks.

My Tuesday column at Good Men Project went up this morning. It riffs on the famed exchange in When Harry Met Sally about the possibilities of male-female nonsexual friendship: Harry Was Wrong: Lust Doesn’t Have to Ruin a Platonic Friendship. Excerpt:

We assume that male sexual desire is so powerful that it overrides everything else, including friendship. One of our great myths about men is that lust invariably cancels out empathy. Call it the sexual equivalent of being unable to walk and chew gum at the same time: Harry, Sally, and too many of the rest of us were raised to believe that men can’t experience lust and practice non-sexual friendship simultaneously.

The truth is that men and women alike are capable of being platonic friends with someone to whom they are powerfully attracted. That’s true regardless of the reasons why someone can’t act on his or her desires. Perhaps it’s because the attraction is one-sided, or perhaps it’s because one or both of the friends are in monogamous relationships with other people. Sometimes the attraction is openly acknowledged, more often it’s something of which both are aware but about which there isn’t necessarily much need to speak.

There are a couple of keys to making a platonic friendship work despite the presence of sexual attraction. First off, it helps to demythologize sexual desire. Too many of us speak about attraction as if it were an irresistible and destructive force, like a tornado or a tsunami. If you’ve genuinely fallen in love with a buddy who considers you “just” a friend, that’s one thing. But if all that’s happened is that you find yourself sexually attracted to someone who isn’t attracted to you (or isn’t your significant other), it’s worth saying so what? We’re hardwired to be sexual creatures. But we’re also equipped with the ability to “override” those desires for a host of other reasons—including preserving friendship.

Read the whole thing.

If you like you can also read it at The Frisky.

Elsewhere, I’m interviewed — along with my old friend and foil Glenn Sacks — in this piece for Good Magazine on the marketing of a male contraceptive.

“Let Me Show You What I Like”: Sex, Perfection, Reassurance

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My latest is up at Sir Richard’s Condom Company. Revisiting some of what I wrote about in my old “bowflex boy” posts, the piece talks about body image, making love with the lights on, and how to reassure an insecure lover that you think his (or her) body’s hot.

Mama, you’ll want to give this one a miss.

Excerpt:

I got an email from a woman named Clara*, who has a great new guy in her life. Things are awesome, including in the bedroom – except for one thing. Reggie, Clara’s boyfriend, only wants to get naked when the lights are off. Clara writes:

“It took me until I was 25 or so to get over my own anxieties so that I could be comfortable having sex in daylight. When I was a teen, even in my first serious relationship, I always wanted to keep some clothes on or do it in the darkness. I was so embarrassed about my body, thinking I was too fat and too pale. I thought a guy wouldn’t want me if he could actually see all of me.So I finally get to the place where I can accept my body. And I end up falling for a dude who feels the same way I used to feel. Do other straight men have this problem? How can I help him see that I want to see him?”

The first part of Clara’s question is easy to answer. Statistics show that poor body image is on the rise among young heterosexual men. Our stereotype is that young women and gay men are the ones most likely to be concerned with appearance. While that’s still true, the pressure on all guys to be toned and hard (with, of course, a six-pack) is growing rapidly, thanks to a media that increasingly features images of male perfection.

The insecurity that these images foster does often manifest in the bedroom. A student in my interdisciplinary “Beauty and the Body” course told me last year that he has a hard time believing a woman can be attracted to any body type other than the slender, lightly muscled ideal he sees on the cover of men’s fitness magazines. As a result, he’s scared to be naked with a girlfriend – just like Clara’s Reggie. As with any body image issue, there’s no magic quick fix. Talking about it openly and offering a partner reassurance is important. But as they say, talk is cheap. Putting actions to your words can help, I told Clara. And I shared with her something a friend of mine did to help me with a very similar issue.

Read the whole thing.

Weinergate, penis pics, and the longing to be hot

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In response to Anthony Weiner’s press conference yesterday in which he admitted using the internet to send semi-nude pictures of himself to young women, Irin Carmon suggests at Jezebel that this latest scandal is — like many others before it — rooted in male narcissism.

All over the Internet, men are photographing their own bodies and sending the shots to women who are maybe not their wives and girlfriends. It’s a risk for most any non-professional, but it’s one that predictably costs male politicians like Anthony Weiner — and the men before him — so much more. So why do they do it?

“Hottttt.” That’s the Facebook comment on a video of Weiner speech that launched Meagan Broussard’s Internet flirtation with the Congressman, complete with cockshots clothed and maybe less so. “You’re so hot,” was Rielle Hunter’s opening line to John Edwards; eventually, he thought it was a good idea to make a sex tape with her.

In the Venn diagram of narcissism, the overlap of men in political office and men whose sexual narcissism verges on self destruction is increasingly visible. If you want to blame the Internet for anything, blame it for manifesting — and giving an outlet to — what surely must have always been present: Men (and they are still overwhelmingly men) who not only want your votes but for you to adore their waxed pecs. And they think they can get away with it.

Carmon isn’t entirely off base. But she misses the key point, though it’s one she hints at. “Hot” has such extraordinary power in these men’s lives not because they are all narcissists (though some may meet the clinical definition of that term) but because they so rarely hear the word. Powerful men who risk everything to send pictures of their penises or pecs to strange women aren’t filled with cocky self-regard. They’re filled with a desperate hunger for a very specific kind of validation.

In a piece I wrote for the Good Men Project in March, I suggested:

So many straight men have no experience of being wanted. So many straight men have no experience of sensing a gaze of outright longing. Even many men who are wise in the world and in relationships, who know that their wives or girlfriends love them, do not know what it is to be admired for their bodies and their looks. They may know what it is to be relied upon, they may know what it is to bring another to ecstasy with their touch, but they don’t know what it is to be found not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but worthy of longing.

I’ll bet Anthony Weiner doesn’t doubt his own intellectual or political abilities. Like many men who are good at what they do (and Weiner has been one of the most able members of the Democratic caucus for years), he exudes a confidence that borders on arrogance. I don’t think that’s feigned. But like so many men sliding towards middle age, there’s an unmet hunger for sexual validation. Men like Weiner know women may be attracted to their power or their status, but they want more — they long for validation that their bodies aren’t gross and disgusting. They want to be “hot.” Continue reading →

Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness

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In the past two weeks, I’ve heard from three friends of mine all struggling with the same issue. Each is a woman in a monogamous relationship with a guy who uses internet pornography. None of these women are reflexively anti-porn. But each has noticed how her partner’s porn use impacts their sex life. Cassie wrote:

There are SO many more things I’ve noticed that he does during sex that are straight out of a porn. He’s asked me about threesomes before, saying he “thought it was just a normal thing that everyone does.” Hello?! Only in the porn world does everyone have a threesome everyday! In trying to explain why I was opposed to it, I asked him how he’d feel if I asked him if we could bring another man into our sex. He said I was being mean and that it was gross. =) He’s also asked me if he can pull my hair. I let him, because I knew he liked it, but it’s so . . . porn-like. Also, he thinks body hair is gross. Even on him. I personally think that body hair is normal and it should be kept nice and trimmed, but I am a woman and he is a man. We are not little kids that are supposed to have hairless genitals. I know this is a HUGE trend right now, but I just hate it and I think it’s directly linked to porn.

Part of the problem in discussing porn is that most people reflexively fall into one of two camps. Either all porn is unhealthy, invariably addictive, and exploitative of women or its harmless, healthy, and almost invariably liberating. There’s an almost deliberate refusal to make distinctions. My anti-porn friends often cannot envision a “healthy place” for visual masturbation aids; my pro-porn friends are often too dismissive of the damage that compulsive porn use can (but will not inevitably) bring.

The reality is that different kinds of porn exist, and that the conditions under which porn is produced differ. These distinctions matter. And of course, another key distinction is that not everyone will “use” porn in the same way. As with beer or chocolate, what one person can delight in without harm can become an obsession for another. Whether or not “sex addiction” exists in the same biochemical fashion that alcoholism does is beside the point — the evidence is clear that some people do use porn compulsively in a way that damages their relationships.

Both sides need to recognize two truths about how porn impacts people’s lives. One, some people genuinely find healthy pleasure in porn. Their experiences are real and valid. Two, some people develop an unhealthy relationship with porn that can wreak havoc in their sexual and romantic lives. If all of us concede these realities, we’d be a lot better off.

Cassie’s concern was echoed in Amanda Marcotte’s excellent piece at Good Men Project yesterday: What Women Don’t Tell You. Amanda is hardly in the “sex-negative” camp. But she offers this timely admonition:

Most sex in porn is about what’s good for the camera, not what’s good for the participants in it, especially the women. In fact, many things that look good in porn can keep us from having fun in real-life sex. For instance, in porn the only parts of their bodies the actors often touch are their genitals, so that the camera can get a full view of the action. But in real life, sex is more of a whole-body experience, and the genital-only thing can feel cold and masturbatory.

Of course, we know that men know this, and most would deny that they’re doing stuff because it looked good in a porn and not because it felt good in the moment. So we’d rather not bring it up when you do stuff that looks better in porn than it feels in life. We don’t want to argue over whether or not that’s what you’re doing. But when you do something you picked up in a porn that doesn’t add to the real-life pleasure, we take notice and we’re often hoping you get it out of your system so we can move on to activities that are actually fun.

Bold emphasis mine. . Continue reading →

“I can’t see you with a fat chick”: shame, homosociality, and desire

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The title is godawful, but this Village Voice article is both interesting and important: Guys Who Like Fat Chicks.

Men who are sexually attracted to heavy women are more numerous than we’re led to believe, Camile Dodero writes, and that has important implications both for our understanding of male sexuality and for our ongoing conversation about weight and desire. The title of the piece, however, frames the attraction to fat women as an unusual fetish, an odd quirk that only a few men share. That’s unfortunate, because the article is more nuanced than that, exploring the ways in which fat has been stigmatized and heavier women have been both exploited and desexualized. The familiar myths (such as fat women’s much-hyped desperation for a relationship) are debunked. And though the article still centers men’s attraction to heavier women rather than women themselves, it’s a useful conversation starter.

In 2006, I wrote a post called Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. So much of men’s focus on thin women, I pointed out, is wrapped up in the desire to gain status in the eyes of other men. One of the most basic tasks for heterosexual men is a simple one: learning to separate what it is that they personally find desirable from their desire to impress others. Our ruthlessly fat-phobic culture doesn’t give fat people “trophy” status, even if (as the article suggests) many men are sexually drawn to heavier women. I wrote five years ago:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

When I linked to the Village Voice piece on my Facebook yesterday, a friend asked if I had ever dated a “fat chick.” It reminded me that when my 2006 post appeared, one of my colleagues, a very heavy woman with whom I am very close, remarked “I could never see you with a fat girlfriend.”

I wasn’t surprised by the comment. When it comes to relationships, we expect a disconnect between what people say and what they do. Many heavy women do have painful stories of men who were quite happy to fuck them in private but refuse to date them in public. Continue reading →

“If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model

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This topic came up in my Men and Masculinity course yesterday, and an earlier version of this post appeared at Healthy is the New Skinny this morning:

It’s not news that girls are feeling more pressure than ever to be perfect. As I’ve written before in my posts on the Martha Complex, this generation of teen girls is more stressed about, well, everything, than any generation of women before them.* The pressure to do well in school, the pressure to please parents and peers, and the pressure to live up to an impossible ideal of physical perfection is crushing.

Tweens and teens grow up comparing themselves to models and tv stars. Few girls feel as pretty, as sexy, as skinny as the women they see in the media. As a result, many young women conclude that happiness is something that you only get when you get to your goal weight. And even more troublingly, when it comes to relationships, lots of straight girls think that if their own bodies aren’t perfect, they have no right to expect too much from guys.

Working with high school and college-aged young women, I’ve heard the same thing more and more often in recent years. These smart and amazing young women have somehow gotten the idea that in order to be treated with respect and love, they have to be damn near perfect. One student said to me last year, “If I were fifteen pounds thinner, I think my boyfriend would stop looking at other girls.” She didn’t feel like she had the right to ask her guy to stop checking out other women in public. “You have to be gorgeous for a man to want to be with you and only you. I’m not, so I can’t expect that.”

A mentee of mine has a boyfriend who uses porn regularly and plays video games for hours. “Sometimes he’ll just forget to call or text because he’s gaming”, she says. “I’m lucky to get a few minutes alone with him a week when we’re not doing something sexual. But this is the way boys are — unless you’re like freakin’ Megan Fox, you can’t expect a guy’s complete attention.”

Another girl told me that she doesn’t feel like she can have a boyfriend – because she’s not pretty enough. She has a lot of hook-ups instead. “I’m the girl you get with for a blowjob”, she said; “I’m not the hot girl you hold hands with in public.” (For more on the connection between perfectionism and promiscuity, see Kerry Cohen’s forthcoming Dirty Little Secrets, to be published later this year.)

Words like these break my heart, because these bright and beautiful girls are blinded to their own worth. They don’t see that they have the right to demand respect; that they have the right to set good boundaries; that they have the right to pursue a real relationship (if they want one). Believing that only women who meet an unattainable standard of perfection “deserve” to be happy sets girls up to settle for second-best in one area where they should never compromise.

This perfectionism dovetails dangerously with another theme in young women’s lives: the “good guys are hard to find” narrative. This belief that reliable and loving young men are rare reinforces the pursuit of skinny, sexy, beauty: the fewer decent lads out there, the more “choice” those guys have. And even the decent ones, so the culture tells us, will make relationship decisions based on women’s appearance. For some, that means all the more reason to compete — and for others, all the more reason to opt out and “settle” for what they’ve been told is the best they can reasonably hope for.

We need to see how the pressure to be perfect — a pressure that is nearly omnipresent in young women’s lives, even the lives of those who don’t seem to be pursuing an ideal — is rooted in a false scarcity model. There won’t be enough for you, the culture says, unless you try harder. And if in your own eyes, you’re well short of that ideal, then you need to be realistic and settle gratefully for the crumbs.

Young women often tell stories about their girlfriends, whom they often describe as amazing and wonderful. “It’s so sad”, Jessica will say, “Amy doesn’t see what we all see. She’s so pretty and smart, but she keeps dating these losers. She doesn’t know her value.” Of course, half the time, Amy is saying the same thing about Jessica. Teen girls are almost invariably fonts of great wisdom for their peers — but lousy at taking their own advice to heart. The truth is, of course, even the young women who most closely match the rigid beauty standards are bitterly aware of how they “fall short of the mark”, at least in their own minds.

It’s not a stretch to point out that the “scarcity model” combines with perfectionism to let men off the hook time and again. The less girls believe they deserve, the less they’ll ask for — and the less young men need to provide. Until we ask who benefits from this cruel system, we’re not getting close to solving the problem.

*For more, check out the work of Claire Mysko on Supergirls, as well as the solid books by the aforementioned Kerry Cohen, Stephen Hinshaw, Rachel Simmons, and of course, Courtney Martin’s seminal Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.