Couldn’t Give It Away

Some time ago, I wrote about virginity (which is a meaningless concept with no value) and about the premium placed on it, something I discussed in Towards A Performance Model of Sex, in Yes Means Yes. Jessica Valenti also discusses it in detail in Purity Myth. However, neither of us spent much time with the reverse dynamic: how the culture treats women as abnormal if they don’t fall in line with the compulsory sexuality as expected. Some folks have raised that issue in response to things I’ve written in the past, though I can’t find the references now, and then recently Salome wrote eloquently about it in comments here.

Meet The Predators

A huge proportion of the women I know enough to talk with about it have survived an attempted or completed rape. None of them was raped by a stranger who attacked them from behind a bush, hid in the back of her car or any of the other scenarios that fit the social script of stranger rape. Anyone reading this post, in fact, is likely to know that six out of seven rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. It has been clear for a long time, at least since Robin Warshaw’s groundbreaking “I Never Called It Rape,” which used Mary Koss’s reseach, that the stranger rape script did not describe rape as most women experienced it. It’s easy to picture the stranger rapist: a violent criminal, not much different from the violent criminals who commit other violent crimes. This guy was in prison before, and he’ll be back there again, though not for rape because reporting and conviction rates are so low. (See, generally, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.)

But who commits the vast majority of rapes, the nonstranger rapes? The acquaintance rapes?

TMI

I’m about to overshare personal information:

I have a deep affection for the furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Also, Harry Chapin. My father loved his music, and I can probably still sing every track on Greatest Stories Live.

But that’s not what we mean when we say “TMI,” is it?

I Don’t Talk About Topping Much

Partly, that’s because while in practice I switch, I identify more as a bottom. Partly, it’s because, even writing pseudonymously, my spouse prefers that I not talk about what I do with her as a top. What I do as a bottom is personal to me, and I can talk about it as I see fit; what she does as a bottom is personal to her, and she doesn’t want to see the details in the blogosphere.

People who top in various aspects of BDSM play do so for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to attempt a typology of topping. Since our experiences are highly individualized, it’s tough to say much more than, “this is what I do, this is how I feel about it.” And my freedom to do that is limited, so I tend instead to talk about my experiences bottoming.

I did, however, run across someone saying a lot of things about topping that resonated with me, and that I will share for that reason.

Reductio

Lauren reviewed this survey and said:

Because mothers are more than their children or grocery shopping habits, I’d imagine they tend to check their email, conduct business, and make phone calls too. Was that on the survey?

The answer is that it isn’t. That’s what this culture does to women. It reduces them to component parts, pidgeon-holes them and refuses to recognize or respect the whole woman.

Boundaries

I said in the Shroedinger’s Rapist post that it was part of a larger idea and might be Part I of two. Here’s Part II.

It’s all about boundaries. The Shapely Prose post started with a discussion of women’s fear of rape, and moved from there to public spaces, interruption, intrusion and boundaries. My post focused on public transit as a particular case of public spaces, and staked out the position that bothering a woman whose activities and body language are not inviting interaction is a violation of her boundaries. I’m saddened to see pushback on that.

Shroedinger’s Rapist And The Imagined Right To Intrude

This may be Part I, because there’s more to this than I have time to flesh out right now.

[Added: Part II is Boundaries.]

First of all, this is full of win. Phaedra Starling guest-posted it over at Shapely Prose, and I just can’t say enough about it.

For the cis- het- men out there, I want to talk about what she says about approaching strange women:

Too Drunk To Fuck*

There’s a running joke between my spouse and me: “one is not enough, and three is too many.” It’s a joke about threesomes, but not about the number of people. It’s a joke about one that got away.

Before I get to the story, I’ll say this: I feel like I can’t tell other adults much about reasonable alcohol use. I have a skewed perception of what that is. Both my parents had alcohol problems, and in my early teens I decided I didn’t drink, and that remains true. For lots of reasons, I don’t think I can drink in moderation, and the consequences of being correct are too high to test the hypothesis. My wife can and does drink socially, knowing that she always has a designated driver, and is well acquainted with, for her, the difference between alcohol as social lubricant and drinking to suppress judgment. It’s a distinction other folks draw for themselves, and one I only see from a distance.

So. We were out of town with a group of my wife’s school friend from all over the country. This was a long time ago, before the demands of renovating a fixer-upper and raising a brood of small children.

Everyone’s Fault

The Polanski arrest has everyone talking, and Lauren has again revisited her personal story, which can’t be easy.

Lauren’s a friend, and I’ll say publicly what I’ve said privately before.

Rihanna’s Choice

Rihanna, choosing how we see her.

 
There is an image of Rihanna seared into the public mind — not the one above. That image is of a young woman swollen and bruised by Chris Brown’s fists, and she has become synonymous with domestic violence. We’ve discussed this.

We don’t know, really, what she lost that day.