Loving Introverts

July 1, 2011 § 4 Comments

After reading Susan Cain’s article from the New Yorker on introversion, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the topic.  I was wondering if it would fit in on this blog despite the change of pace.

I’m personally extremely introverted, but also very good at passing as highly extraverted.  There is a funny gap between the perceptions people have of me who know me intimately versus those who know me in social or work situations – for the former, my introversion is a given, the latter are shocked when I mention it.  Most of my love bonds are with other introverts, including Emily and Valerie and other friends who will likely begin to appear in this blog.  As a group whose strengths are stigmatized, I think knowing how to love one’s self as an introvert and how to love other introverts is a skill we lack.  I decided it definitely does fit in to my journey and thoughts on love.

It’s funny how simply being introverted did not teach me how to engage other introverts.  I had to grow out of estrangement from my own natural temperament and learn skills of how to care for myself and my close introverted loved ones.  These are some things I thought of after visiting Susan Cain’s blog that I’ve learned cultivated my bonds with other introverts that you might try in learning to care for your introverted loved ones.  Not only do people who naturally tend towards extraversion often spook their introverted loved ones, but many of us introverts who are more skilled at passing will try to apply our same extravert-side with other introverts.

Tips for Being in Love Bonds with Introverts (Including Yourself):

1.) Allow for the gradual approach ~ I think of introverts like foxes.  Three steps forward and two back is still progressing forward.  The dance towards and away from something is part of the introvert decision-making process.  It is our form of taking action.  Try not to rush an introvert.

2.) Provide processing time ~ Especially after social or new experiences, introverts need time to process.  I can feel my need to process intensify, and if I don’t make time to be alone and away from external stimulation so I can think back over what I’ve taken in, I feel “oversaturated”, like my thoughts are muddled and I’m edgier and more skittish than usual.  I actually feel like I forget things if I don’t have adequate processing time, like they don’t sink in or become integrated fully into my awareness.  Time in between, even if it’s short, is important to sort and store information and reorient towards taking in the external world again.

3.) Signal shifts before affecting them ~ Give a warning or notice of an anticipated or desired shift and a little downtime for your introvert to manage their own inner state.  How many extraverts have been driven crazy by introverts who said yes to a suggestion then showed no sign of stopping what they were already doing?  And how extraverts have then been even more upset when they grew disappointed and withdrew, then had their introvert turn suddenly engaged and ready?  Give notice, such as, “We need to go soon,” or a subtle signal like letting the conversations die down, or hints like kissing your introvert lover on the neck and expressing desire, then moving away and giving them a minute to shift from what they were focusing on internally and reciprocate before either pouncing or assuming they’re disinterested.

4.) Gentle transitions ~ Introverts need special care surrounding transitions. They are likely to feel vulnerable and jarred by sudden shifts, when a gradual change would have made both activities enjoyable. Create rituals surrounding transitions when possible, especially when heightened emotions are involved.  A pattern that marks and facilitates incoming change can ease the process.

5.) Exhibit patience and reduce pressure, directly or indirectly ~ First, you have to genuinely be patient to exhibit it.  But if you do feel patient waiting for your introvert to go through their decision-making process, don’t assume they will know you are accommodating.  Give some verbal or nonverbal signals that they can take their time.  I often say, “No rush,” or, “Take your time,” or, “If you want to talk about it later, that’s fine,” or, “If you need a while to think about it, that’s okay,” or, “We can talk about it another time.”  I say, “No pressure,” and use a casual, gentle tone a lot with my introverted friends.  If an introvert freezes up, it’s best to de-escalate the situation rather than increasing pressure.  This is tough in conflicts, but very important to keep introverts from becoming overwhelmed.

6.) Leave silences ~ Silent moments may feel awkward due to our social conditioning, but generating comfortable spaces and silences is necessary to get introverts to move past their inhibition.  Most introverts won’t “butt in,” so leave some space that is not loaded with pressure or anxious vibes.   This can be especially difficult during conflict or potential conflict and other emotionally loaded situations when introverts will try to act with extreme caution and care.  Try to be patient and don’t hurry them or they may panic and become reactionary by fleeing or fighting impulsively.

7.) Manage interruptions ~ Try not to interrupt when an introvert is talking.  If you do, pick up the thread for them by prompting what they began before you interrupted and asking them to continue what they were saying.

8.) Don’t “play rough” ~ Most introverts will respond to teasing, heckling or other rough wordplay as if it were genuine.  This type of aggressive play won’t sit well with most sensitive types, so check the tendency and look for other ways to break the ice or display intimacy when you feel uncertain.

9.) Ask questions ~ Many introverts will give their opinion when prompted, as long as they feel safe.  This includes big questions about values and beliefs.  My own journaling and writing improved drastically when I began to ask myself questions first, then wrote towards an answer.   It was hard for me to pour my opinion out at random, and easy once I was asked, even if I was asking myself.

10.) Try not to suddenly single them out in a group and if you do ally yourself with them quickly ~ Being prompted by a friend to tell a story or give an opinion work for me, but it won’t for all introverts.  If you accidentally say something that draws group attention to your introvert unexpectedly, say something quickly to ally yourself with them and bring the attention back to you or spread it to both of you.

 11.) Focus alongside one another ~ Introverts often like focusing intently on tasks.  Cooking, dancing, watching films, and other activities that can be shared and yet individuated are a good way to spend time with an introvert.  You can be connected while allowing them to put their focus on their own inner world, which will be less exhausting for them.

12.) Stay up late ~ Many introverts are less inhibited at night.  Staying up late to continue a conversation or hangout can be an excellent way to get to know an introvert intimately.  My best conversations with other introverts have mostly taken place between 10pm and 4am.  You lose some sleep, but you gain true knowledge of a friend you might not get any other time, which I’ve definitely found worth it.

Polyamory and Love, Some of My Views

June 22, 2011 § Leave a Comment

I recently decided to begin openly describing myself as polyamorous.

I’m not a big fan of the attitude of “your sexuality labels are public property and should come from a fixed set, so stand and deliver!” that seems to be the status quo.  I’ll often resist self-defining except with people who seem to be really listening.  How someone labels their sexuality just doesn’t seem to me to be that strong of an indicator of who they are or how they are in their relationships.  And, well, people are liars – consider the abundance of “monogamous” cheaters.  And there is an assumed norm that doesn’t have to do the work of self-defining.

However, I do see value in the willingness to claim a countercultural identity publically as an act of defiance.  And even more so, I believe that talking about countercultural views and practices regarding gender, sex, and relationships with people who are generally respectful and open can make huge strides in forming allies and can be freeing since witnessing someone else think or live in a new way can give you permission.  So I’ve been trying to be more open with engaged people in talking about my personal beliefs and ethics, especially around sex and relationships, which are taboo starting out.

In thinking about posting on this subject, I didn’t want it to be polyvangelism.  I recently heard the term polyvangelist used to describe those of us who are poly who think it’s a good idea for everyone.  I laughed and blanched, since I recognize the impulse.  But I have to remember that when I’m inclined to throw the poly card, I don’t just mean that someone should have sex with multiple people.  Sleeping with more people is certainly not a fix for all relational issues.  As Valerie said once, “When I hear about someone whose a chronic cheater, I always think ‘polyamory,’  but then… the skill set required for cheating and the skill set require for polyamory are really not compatible.”  If I think a bit harder, I usually realize that it is actually some element of the relational dynamic that seems to be causing issues and making people unhappy.  It’s not the monogamy, but the romantic myth at fault.

People think of polyamory in contrast to monogamy.  By plain definitions, monogamy would mean having a sexual relationship with only one person in a span of time, and polyamory would mean having sex with any number of partners.   I’m all for monogamy, plain and simple.  I don’t think it hurts anyone.  I’ve known a lot of people who are monogamous whom I believe really know themselves and are making conscious, self-derived choices.  But usually monogamy is assumed to mean not only sex with one partner, but to include vast elements of behavior and a worldview mandated by the romantic myth.  The romantic myth I think destroys a lot of beautiful bonds and causes a lot of suffering in the world.

One leg of the romantic myth that chills me is the concept of “emotional monogamy.”  You’re supposed to dethrone all your meaningful bonds from the past and avoid making new ones or else stand accused. Communicating, “You are doing something wrong.  You are immoral,” when what we really mean is, “I am scared,” or, “I am jealous,” or, “I am realizing that I do not trust you to tell the truth,” or, “I want greater connection with you and this contrast just made me realize it,” won’t help anyone create a stronger relationship. I think it’s a way projecting feelings of possessiveness onto another person rather than taking responsibility for them and sorting them out into some deeper meaning.

If we expand polyamory to simply mean having a life of many loves, not strictly sexual, then I think it is undoubtedly a good idea for everyone.  People who only have sex with one person (or one person at a time) will more likely find their relationships taxed and strained by trying to get all their needs met from that one person.  If you always drink from the same well, you’ll dry it up eventually.  I think these kinds of relationships are often lost simply because when conflicts arise, the only person to go to in order to process those conflicts is the person involved.  I think you need a friend who feels more objective and advocates for your bond to process things with in order to bring a more enlightened and balanced mentality back to the conversation and not just have incendiary rounds of fighting every time an issue is brought up, or worse, avoid talking about it until it blows up.

I talk a lot about sexual consent on this blog, so I end up talking a lot about friends I’ve had sexual relationships with, but those are not my only or deepest bonds.  I just don’t see any truth in my bonds existing in a hierarchy where “romantic” bonds are above “platonic” bonds.  Nor do I see that as a particularly relevant distinction, honestly.  Sex does not an entirely new beast of a relationship make, at least, not in my experience.  Yet no one finds a relationship self-help books that says, “Have lots of close and lasting friendships, and you will learn a ton.”  The support and skills I have needed to maintain a bond with my best friend, Emily, I imagine are exactly the same as those needed to support a loving monogamous sexual relationship, since it is a long-term bond I prioritize.  Even if I only slept with one person, I would still be polyamorous, since I already have a primary partner I’m not willing to give up in Emily.  I’m just willing to have more than one.

Does that mean I just don’t love people I sleep with as much?  No.  Looking at love bonds as a hierarchy where participants rival for affection, or simply at yourself as a limited vessel holding a finite amount of love you must pour out judiciously is a mindset simply too small for love.  In “The Ethical Slut”, they call this mentality starvation economy thinking.  I don’t love my best friend less because I begin to love my new lover or my other best friends more.  In my experience, the opposite is actually true, that both the capacity to love and the skills involved expand as you use them.

I’m polyamorous because my priority and I believe my rightful purpose in life is to seek as much genuine love as possible, and I assume it is the right of everyone else to do the same.  C.S. Lewis, who really shaped my thinking as a young person, says that God does not find our desires too big, but too small.  A love ethic does not require that we want less, that we tie ourselves to a small set of people and beliefs and restrict our desires and growth outside those boundaries.  It requires that we grow, that we enlarge our hearts to carry more empathy and find greater connection, that we suffer the depression of letting go of the old to replace it with the new, always seeking greater truth and connection with the divine.  I find it most in other people, so I’m not willing to whittle myself down to one.

Consent in Everyday Life: Parents

June 10, 2011 § 3 Comments

A while back I read this blog post called “Schrödinger’s Rapist” about the ways in which men communicate respect or lack of respect for consent in everyday, nonsexual interactions.  Straying from the original intent of the post, it was an important experience for me to find a discussion of consent ethics outside of just sex and to begin to apply radical feminist moral ethics to everyday life.  Consent, and in contrast coercion, I found could form a strong basis for a moral ethic and clarify many moral questions and make the process easy to articulate.  And, like in the case of sex, it can be seen that coercion goes far beyond the individual or even small group interaction into a broader scale.  I found myself asking more and more, What’s going on with consent in this situation?  This will be a series of posts on consent in everyday life (so not just sex).

For this first post, I want to focus on an area that has been very prominent in my life lately, how parents relate to their children.  I first heard someone state plainly that children are seen as the property of parents and denied basic human rights in our culture reading bell hooks.  I learned later how much second wave feminism had focused on the rights of children, the most powerless and subjugated group in our culture, and increased consciousness and law regarding child abuse.  Children are at the very bottom of the totem pole when it comes to hierarchies of power.

And we all begin here, at the bottom.  I think this is where we learn a lot of our lessons about cruelty and despair and abuse of power.  I believe abusers learn to abuse from suffering injustices.  This is not tantamount to excusing abusive behavior, but a lens for perceiving models of restorative rather than retributive justice, for creating actual change and not just perpetual cycles of abuse.

Harriet Taylor Mill once stated that women were the only group in the world subjugated and told that this is their privilege and blessing.  I think there is one other group – children.  Children are supposed to be grateful to their parents.  It seems the prevalent ideology is that in being born, children owe a debt owe a debt to their parents they will spend the rest of their lives repaying.

I have a friend who is fifty.  He’s been everywhere in life, from Howard Zinn lectures to real estate fortunes to crack addiction, violent crime, and prison.  He has been forced by circumstances and also led by his own search to deal with a lot of confused parts of his psyche.  He told me a story about his childhood once.  His father had beaten him with a belt so severely, he bled through his shirt the next day at school. He went to the bathroom to look.  When he pulled up his shirt, he saw a friend’s reaction in the mirror and realized for the first time there was something abnormal in his experience at home. Today, he talks about his parents with no anger in his voice.  He still visits them on holidays and supports them when he can.  He feels sympathy for them, much more than he ever does for himself.  If he shows any strong feeling in telling stories of his abuse, it is shame.

Many people will take it as a sign of his character that he still “loves” his parents after all he suffered.  If I described this same behavior in a woman who related to an abusive husband in this way, I think the critical lens we’d use would be quite different.  Yet a child in possession of abusive parents is even more helpless than a adult caught up in an abusive relationship.  We still think, however, that everything parents do is excusable, that children should and must still “love” and “honor” their parents, who in many cases never loved or honored them.  It’s a bizarre to me really.  As bizarre as the mental gymnastics and compartmentalized paradoxes of systemic sexism and very similar, in fact.

My close friend and lover, Valerie, introduced me to the work of Alice Miller, an essential part of her way of interpreting the world.  Miller does work on how child suppress trauma and carry on patterns of abuse and the roots of violence on an individual and societal scale.  I think we need to face the facts that a lot of parents are abusive and begin to untangle the threads of how this has become commonplace and how we can no longer even see it in our current frame.  The entitlement that parents exhibit towards their adult children has become quite shocking to me as I look around my life now and a sign of something very wrong with the way parents relate to their children.

Last year, I had the flu and was talking to my father on the phone.  He was ranting about a news broadcast, which he often does, and I said, “Listen, I’m trying to keep up with you, but I’m not feeling up to speed like usual.  Can you just slow down a little and take it easy and keep talking about what you’re telling me?”  He said yes and continued in exactly the same vain.  I repeated the rest two more times in different ways, always getting a sympathetic agreement before he continued in exactly the same behavior.  I finally just got off the phone and the distinct thought, “That is more overriding of my consent I’d tolerate from anyone else in the world.”

I finally realized how intense this pattern was when, after two years of not visiting home, I had told my father a number things about both my and my brother’s experiences of our mother.  My parents are separated and have no contact with each other now.  I told him stories he had never heard that shocked and angered him. I told him I wasn’t having contact with my mother and finally gained his support in the decision, despite his religious trepidations about honoring parents and forgiveness, and convinced him to stop encouraging my brother to have contact with our mother, as well.  I was coming back to visit, and I asked if the rest of the family knew my brother and I weren’t going to see our mother or if they would be shocked.  He said they knew and wouldn’t question or judge us.  And before I even got there, he had invited my mother over to his house to spend time with me against my explicit, repeated, consistent, and even impassioned expression of non-consent.

Valerie recently spoke to her mother after three years of ceasing all contact.  She was confused by the experience of having a lot of experiences her mother had denied in the past confirmed.  It seemed like things had changed.  The conversation began after her mother called her 13 times in half and hour, leaving her six messages, and sending her several texts.  And during the conversation, Valerie had said she didn’t want to discuss certain topics, which her mother would agree to and then continue to bring up until they were discussed.  I said to her, “If you think of it in the terms of feminist sexual ethics, it seems like you had an experience of someone verbally showing support for your emotional well-being and consent and blatantly disregarding them both with actions.  Seems like that’s not different, just advancement to Nice Guy ™ tactics.”

I am sure early feminists went through the mental struggles with terror that asserting their rights against abusive behavior would break down the way society functioned, eradicate their bonds with men, make them less “loving” and bad people, drive them mad, and leave them dangerously alone.  Yet they were brave enough to shape a new world where they struggles to keep the things they valued without the compromise of submitting to a system of dominance and abuse.  I feel like today we’re on the cusp of a similar upheaval surrounding parents’ abusive relationships to children, at least in communities of people similar to my own.  And I think that, even when I can’t fully envision it and feel terrified, the end result will be a world that still functions just fine without relying on the commonality of abuse.

Feminism 201: Consent Skills, Generating Options

June 3, 2011 § Leave a Comment

Deciding what’s going to happen in a sexual situation can be tricky.  In my experience, deciding what’s going to happen during an evening hangout with a friend can be tricky, since making decisions can just be hard.  How many of us sit staring at menus for ten minutes?  Imagine you go to a restaurant and there is no menu, the server just asks, “What do you want?”  Too many options and not enough information to decide.  That’s kind of what partner sex is like.

One excellent trick I’ve learned with my friend and lover Valerie in dividing up the decision-making process is that whoever does not want to make the decision helps the other person by generating options.  This way it’s not just one person being passive and one person being active, but both people engaging in different roles in the decision making.

In an everyday situation, it would go something like this:

Person A:  “What should we do?”

Person B:  “I don’t know.  What do you think?’

Person A:  “I don’t know. 

From here you are at risk of the cyclical “What do YOU want to do” routine.

Person B:  “You don’t have preferences?”

Person A:  “Not really.  Can you generate options?”

Person B:  “Well, we could go outside.  We could go for a walk downtown or along the pond.  We can get food while we’re out, either pick something up or get groceries.  Or we can stay in.  I can come there and we can order food. Or you can come here.  Or we can cook if you have stuff.”

So now Person A doesn’t feel like they’re totally in charge and deciding for someone else, and they don’t have the pressure of choosing along with the pressure of being creative.  Often, everyone knows one of probably six usual options will be what they choose, they just don’t want to seem boring.  Once you’ve got the usual suspects or some new ideas on the table, it’s easier to decide.

Person A:  “Going outside would be good.  I think cooking, too.”

Person B:  “Do you have anything already?  I have some potatoes, bread, and some avocadoes.” 

Person A:  “I have carrots, that’s basically it.”

Person B:  “We could make chili.  Or curry.  Or soup.  Or try burritos like we said that one time.” 

Person A:  “Ooh, burritos!” 

Person B”  ”Ok, cool.”

My belief is that all people really want when they spend time together is to create a pleasant and/or constructive and tolerable experience for each other and feel connected with one another.  Everything is an excuse to make a connection.  Getting to the experience, however, can be a more or less painless process.

Most of us are shy to some degree in bed, and some of us are worried about treading on our partner’s consent.  So having one person decide and another person generate options can be a way you can ask for something you want from a place of comfort that you aren’t leading your partner into something they aren’t consenting to and excited about.  Sometimes the sex “just happens” and sometimes, it doesn’t.  Sometimes people both try to read each other, and everything stalls.  Or you just aren’t sure which direction to take things in.  So having a bit of a framework of how to go about in a mutual way is helpful.

In bed, it might go something like *this*:

Person A:  “What do you want to happen?”

Sometimes it’s as easy as Person B saying, “I want ____,” and Person A being into it, too.  Sometimes not.

Person B:  “I don’t know… I like what’s happening so far.”

Person A:  “Well, we can keep doing this for a while, and then move to something else.”

Person B:  “That sounds good.”

Person A:  “What should it be?”  If Person B seems to stall or get spooked by being put on the spot…  “Do you want me to give you some options?” 

In my experience, this is less of an awkward and more of an exciting experience in bed.

Person B:  “Yeah, sure.”

Person A:  “I could touch you.  Or I could go down on you.  Or we could fuck.  Or some combination of the three in whichever order you want.  Or we could switch to you being on top.”

Person B  chooses whichever option, and when there is some indication that both people are ready…

Person A:  “How should we be?  Is there a position you want to try first?”  If Person B doesn’t have an immediate answer, Person A can give options again…  “We could stay like this.  Or you could move over me.  Or I could be behind you…”

And so on and so on.

*I was trying to keep this applicable to different combinations of genders.  What’s obviously missing is a discussion of safer sex practices including barriers and birth control and the use of toys.  I think it’s always wise to talk about sex with someone before having sex with them, and to try and get a feel for their safer sex practices and expectations and how they match up with your own before you’re on the verge of the act.  If someone is really uncomfortable talking about safer sex, that’s probably not a great sign.*

This might seem like a lot of talking, since talking during sex can be really spooking.  The BDSM community has a lot to teach us all about the need for becoming comfortable with verbal negotiations of sex.  My indicator to myself is that if I can’t talk to someone about it, then I probably am not ready to do it yet.  Practice helps;  reading a lot about sex in different types of language, talking with both lovers and friends explicitly about sex when you aren’t having it, writing out some sex scenes, learning to say things out loud during solo sex, and learning to talk to your partners comfortably during sex can all be remarkably challenging given the cultural stigma against talking about sex ever and saying anything during sex that’s not “hot,” or more precisely I think, commonly said in mainstream pornography.

Feminism 201: Consent Paranoia

May 31, 2011 § 2 Comments

This may be an issue that crops up only between women.  But I doubt it.  It is certainly an issue that crops up only among people who have a well established desire to have only consensual sex.  So if you’re still working on that, you need Feminism 101 type discussions, and not this entry. This discussion is for those people engaging in their personal lives from a strong stance of feminist ethics and working out the complex dynamics of a countercultural value system meeting with the real, quite muddled world.  So if you’re starting from there, feel free to read on.

The way I see it, once you are committed to consent, there are two lines of work still to do.  The first is developing the skills to negotiate consent in real life situations, where formulaic, performative lessons society has taught us about initiating sex just don’t apply and often work against us.  The second is managing the all the stuff that crops up for you and your partners regarding sex, when triggers from past trauma and mixed up shaming messages and simple lack of helpful skills all get in the way of everyone actually having the experiences they want.  This post is about a place where those two things seem to really connect.

I’m in a steady sexual relationship with another radical feminist, Valerie.  She identifies as a kinkster, and I don’t (although radical feminism and polyamory with people of diverse genders obscures the definition of “vanilla” to some extent.)  One of our most important conversations about sex took place after I joked around about rope play.  She hit the breaks suddenly and had what could only be described as a crisis of consent.  She was about to do the freak-and-run, but luckily she decided to stay and talk it out.  We hit upon a major internal experience we were both having but not able to articulate, which we started calling “consent paranoia”.

Basically, we were both second-guessing each other’s expressions of consent, but were not able to constructively address it.  As a result, one of us would stop something from happening (express non-consent) not out of a lack of personal desires but out of a sense that the other person was not or could not be genuinely consenting.  Since then, there have been times when both of us have starting backing off and realized the motivation was not lack of consent or desire personally, but worry about the presence of consent from the other person, even against all evidence.  I don’t think this experience is totally uncommon, but without a name for it, there is rarely a dialogue about how to address and manage it in a healthy way.

In essence, without recognizing it, we sometimes start making choices for each other, that is the choice to stop, not out of a will to dominate, but out of a desire not to cause harm.  Is that so bad?  No, it’s not so bad.  The risk factors are quite low here, compared with deciding to go on with something someone does not consent to; nobody is going to get sexually traumatized.  But some consensual sex and the corresponding connection was not going to be had and anything that estranges two people seems like an issue to me.  I think the more good sex is had the better the world will be and the easier it will be to name and be outraged by abuse masquerading as sex.

A lot of us recognize that we have ourselves failed to express non-consent or expressed consent when we were not consenting for some reason or another.  A lot of times, that reason is external, i.e. we’re with an abusive partner.  But sometimes, it’s internal, like when we’re too afraid of hurting someone’s feelings to say no, or this and not that, or just not right now.  Or it’s because we simply do not know what we want and don’t know how to exist without anxiety in a state of “maybe” or how to go about searching out what we want so we can express our consent.  It’s definitely good to know this is a reality and that false expressions of consent can happen and to incorporate knowledge of that dynamic into how we engage with one another, especially when we don’t know our partner too well.  In the past, I had what I now believe was a nonconsensual sexual experience with someone who was not only expressing consent but initiating the interaction.  I was relieved when Jaclyn Friedman addressed this in a Q&A she crafted from an attack on her work.  I had one of those “Thank God, it’s not just me!” moments.

I think what we need is not to ignore or suppress consent paranoia, especially since it feels very similar to actually noticing when someone is giving mixed messages or feigning consent, but to develop the further skills to negotiate consent when our risk tolerance not for ourselves but for our partners gets too high for our comfort.  It can certainly feel awkward to say, “Are you sure?” or “I’m getting some mixed signals from you, and I need us to slow down,” and then address worries cropping up for us internally.  Being able to just say, “I’m having some consent paranoia,” has done a lot for me.  This kind of honesty requires a lot of vulnerability and trust in a partner.

Negotiating not just yes and no but the maybe aspect of sex in a way that is tolerable for all parties is an important skill that our society generally does not acknowledge as even being a part of sex. Soliciting an affirmation from your partner that non-consent will be addressed, that you won’t be allowed to venture accidentally into leading experiences of non-consent, that they will be accountable to themselves and to you is necessary for a feminist’s peace of mind and should be considered a part of maintaining your own consent.  It seems sad to say it, but a lot of people do not assume that their partners only want to engage in acts they are fully consenting to, but that they want to engage in anything they can get away with.  Consent is not understood to be the bottom line for enacting desires, the battery without which the fantasy cannot and does not run in real life.  I think we need to communicate this to our partners in a myriad of ways consistently over time.  And I hope this creates new awareness and new standards of what people expect from sex partners once they’ve had a partner who is mindful and skilled in managing consent.

As I said, I don’t think this issue is exclusive to relationships among women.  I’ve known men who second guess or simply feel guilty about expressions of consent from their female partners because of an internalized sense that their sexuality is inherently violating and damaging and degrading to whomever they have sex with.  The “I got her to do this” creepy showboat side of performative sexist masculinity also can add a flavor of creepiness to the genuine desires of men with willing partners.  Men get a share of sexual trauma instilled in them from our society, as well.  How many men grow up being taught that their penis is an instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of pain, a means for creating connection rather than forcing submission?  How many men grow up being taught that their bodies are designed to nurture and create and take please and joy in the world rather than to dominate and kill, or, at best, protect and work?  A lot of men find it hard to believe they can be mutually desired and censor their sexual behaviors rather than addressing worries and negative feeling that come up when they seek them out.  I’m sure a lot of men experience consent paranoia as regularly as women do.

What are the causes of consent paranoia?  Seems to me like it can be a lot of things –  differing communication styles, internalized shame, politicization of particular sex acts, changes in a partners signals over time, obsession with consent, low lighting.  Whatever it is, knowing how to distinguish concern about a partner’s consent within a spectrum of one’s own is something everyone operating from an ethic of consent has to manage that seems to generally go unnamed.

Societal Disembodiment and Healing, My Thoughts On Reading “Healing Sex” by Staci Haines

April 23, 2011 § Leave a Comment

I found a book called Healing Sex by Staci Haines when I was working on healing my own sexuality.  I wish a wider audience could be drawn to this book.  It is written specifically for women who were victims of childhood sexual abuse.  I had to keep from getting bogged down with the fact that it wasn’t “for me” and that I didn’t identify as a victim of childhood sex abuse.  But I think the same experiences of dissociation and the same healing process are applicable to anyone who has experienced more psychological culturally inflicted sexual trauma, and I think that’s all of us to more or less of an extent.

A lot of people would like to be more present during sex.  A lot of people would like their partners to be more present and for greater connection to be possible.  There is a lot of body negativity and sex negativity being ingrained into children in our society, and you get a double dose if you are raised in a conservative religious environment.  As a result, many of us wind up alienated from our sexual selves, worried we may be wrong, we may be harmful, we may be sinful, we may be perverse.  These worries are usually not conscious; they exist in the body as sensations of pain in experiencing desire where there should be pleasure.  The dynamics of healing laid out in this book are relevant to anyone’s experience of getting back in their body, back in their consent, back in their sexuality after past experiences that left them fearful of or alienated from their sexual selves.  I think most people will relate to some elements of what is described.

The book begins with an explanation of the experience of dissociation, or the experience of checking out and shutting down mentally as a safety mechanism to avoid experiencing trauma in the moment.  It’s a sort of cognitive flight response when fighting isn’t an option and physical flight isn’t either.  While this protects the victim in the moment, the trauma remains unprocessed in the body to be addressed in a safe place.  Unfortunately, this often does not occur and the trauma remains, occupying a space in the body and psyche.  The mind and body need to be reintegrated and the trauma released and experienced for healing to take place.

Disconnect between the mind and body is more pervasive than in just the lives of survivors.  It’s a widespread Western cultural phenomenon.  We live in a culture of rampant body hatred and abuse, whether it veers towards neglect manifested in a sedentary life of overconsumption or in brutal diet and fitness culture rooted in dominating the body into submission and perfection.  We rarely find our bodies a comfortable place to be and fail to even begin to know how to make it so.

I believe sexist gender oppression is also one of the primary forces at fault in creating widespread dissociation.  I had a unique experience as a child in that all of my genuine love bonds were with males in my family, while the females in my family were mostly shut off and consistently abusive.  As such, I took on a lot of male social conditioning and got to understand it better than I would have.  My experience is that men are collectively taught and required to dissociate.  Part of sexist masculinity is to be shut off from emotions, shut off from the body, able to commit violence, which requires a disconnect from empathy and therefore from one’s own body to be tolerable.  I learned to dissociate to avoid being targeted for abuse and in order to fit in with the people I was bonded with, all males, who were generally well practiced at dissociation and at times would literally become frightened and paralyzed by strong expressions of emotions, excepting anger, which of course was what all negative emotions were translated into since it is one of the few emotions “appropriate” to men.  Anger or numbness – that was the choice.  I think that’s the choice we put before males in this society.

Women are taught to dissociate in equally distressing and covert ways.  Self-sacrifice and longsuffering are still seen as Christian feminine virtues in our culture.  Physically, women are not supposed to even take up space or take risks or be strong and active, though this has improved a great deal after Second Wave feminism.  When one of my best friends almost died because she had been living with a burst appendix, and by living with I mean walking to school and going to class, her male doctor saw her CAT scan and went on an impassioned feminist rant about how only women die from ruptured appendixes because they are taught to ignore pain and not complain or take up too much attention.

My strongest response to this book came in the preface, when Staci Haines names collective dissociation as the root of the eradication of empathy in the modern world.  I see empathy as a form of genius at the heart of all great artistic creation and every great movement for change and love.  The social immune system of a species that thrives only in groups is empathy, the capacity to feel what another animal experiences in your own body.  If  you dissociate, you don’t feel even your own experiences in your body.  This leaves no room for empathy.  You shut off this species survival mechanism.  From this place, it is easy to oppress and abuse, to neglect and ignore without an experience of empathic suffering to check you.  And you get what we have now, a species killing itself and being conscious of this without any significant response or feeling.

The process of somatic (meaning mind-body reintegration) healing Staci Haines outlines involves working with triggers, the action or event that sets off an experience of dissociation.  Tracking what causes you to check out, where you feel the experience in your body, what causes you to get fully into your body, where it is in your body you feel strong and safe is the heart of the work in this book.  From here, you can begin to make choices and enact change in your dissociative response.  This is the process of somatic healing, tracking and embracing triggers to heal dissociation rather than navigating them and losing a part of yourself and your experience.  I can’t do it justice in this short space, since specific exercises and very well described methods of increasing self-awareness and emotional awareness are the heart of how this book not only diagnoses but offers solutions to the experience of dissociating during sex.

It occurred to me how focused solely on the mind the spiritual practices I learned in Christian culture were.  Somatic spiritual practices were completely foreign to me.  With an emphasis on right belief over right action, dogma over a lived love ethic, and a strong assumption of the goodness of the mind over the baseness of the body, my Christian spiritual practices got me in my head, which wasn’t entirely a bad thing.  I learned a lot about my own beliefs and gained self-awareness and wisdom.  But it was imbalanced.  I never got in my body and found the wisdom there.  The idea that I could access the divine in my body, not just my mind, was completely foreign to me.  The idea of the body as simply good was completely foreign to me.  It was a difficult shift to make.

Then I thought about dogs – how much we love our dogs as physical beings, noticing the features of their bodies with love and giving them care and affection through touch and physical sensation and how each dog can seem beautiful despite the incredible spectrum of their appearances.  If I could believe a canine body was inherently good and worthy of all good things, how did it correlate that I had trouble thinking a human body was inherently good and worthy of all good things?  In short, I found that I carried a lot of my despair and fear of the human race in my body, repressed there in an attempt to gain “hope” and through it access to loving practice.  It didn’t work, of course, but left me disconnected.  Somatic healing took place as I began incorporating my body into my spiritual disciplines, newfangled ideas to supplement Bible study, reading, introspection and prayer like meditation focusing on sensations in the body, mindfulness and practicing being present, and somatic exercise, and, I’ll say it, somatic sex.  I’m still working to find strong physical spiritual disciplines in my life now.

One thing I loved about this book is that it encourages you to go into your trigger while equipping you to make the experience tolerable and productive to your healing.  I think a lot of us avoid having any kind of difficult or unpleasant emotions during sex.  We think that anything that isn’t totally pleasant and predictable isn’t an appropriate part of sex.  We’re too freaked out and think our partners will be freaked out.  We try to hide any negative or confused emotions from ourselves and anyone we’re with.  But most of us have more shaming, damaging, harmful formative sexual experiences in our pasts than positive, happy, healthy ones.  Complex feelings will come up, and not addressing them will not send them away, but keep them operating in our sex lives and blocking us from creating the sexual connections we want.  Lack of recognition of this fact and lack of knowledge about what to do with negative emotions leaves us hiding and disconnected from ourselves and our partners.

Understanding the dynamic of the healing process and being equipped with the skills to make choices and to help our partners make choices for themselves enables us to experience and facilitate sexual healing.  My sex life got way better after I read this book.  I did a lot of work on my own to simply become capable of experiencing desire and pleasure while staying present, sorting through more fear and grief than I would have guessed I had stored in my body from my past experiences.  I was able to witness complex dynamics partners were experiencing and hear about experiences of friends without panicking or ignoring or simply being confused about what was going on and to help them feel less threatened by their experiences by sharing my own.

I think we’d be a lot better off if we started from the assumption that we have all histories of sexual trauma.  Not only does refusing to believe this create a silent culture of extreme and taboo shame for the many people who experienced physical sexual abuse as children (estimated 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men when last I heard a statistic) and mark them as unduly damaged and beyond our skill to heal, it belittles experiences of trauma sustained by people who have experienced psychological abuse by a coercive culture and often our own experiences of suffering.  This leads us to apathy out of repressed awareness or a sense of helplessness.

I think one of the most important foundations of a love ethic is that of taking responsibility.  Trauma does not just go away.  Even if we don’t think about it.  Even if we throw money at it without thought, effort, care and personal transformation.  We are not helpless to heal trauma, even on a grand scale.  But to do so we have to first face and name it, to take responsibility for it despite the discomfort and despite our doubt that we might simply see it, find that we are helpless to heal it, or fail.

People like Staci Haines and work like Healing Sex and generationFIVE show how much power we do have when we choose to address suffering in the world and commit ourselves to healing it.  And I think hope and loving action are best served by a foundation of personal transformation, the experiential knowledge that if we can heal and grow and change, then those things must be possible on a larger scale.


No Such Thing as a Gay Hating Christian, More Like

April 21, 2011 § Leave a Comment

I just came across a rant online entitled, “there is no such thing as a gay Christian.”  I’ve heard this plenty of times, and this time, I got to thinking on how I might respond if I spoke from my deepest, truest self.  It goes something like this…

I agree that you have the letter of the law right.  You can quote Biblical text to back your opinion.  But I would have the letter of the law right if I said slaves should submit to their oppressors or that you should stone your parents to death for cooking on a Sunday.  Whenever you quote the Bible, you are appealing to some other authority outside of the simple letter of the Biblical text.  Whether or not you like to be confronted by this point is beside the point.

What we always have to appeal to in order to know how to live our lives as Christians is the spirit of the law, not the letter.  This is what Jesus did, and this is what we have to do, either mindfully or by simply following the mandates set out for us by authority figures.

I say your argument has got the spirit of the law all wrong.  So perhaps, in essence, we’re following a different spirit under the same name.  If you are drawn to Christianity for a sense of moral superiority or shelter from the judgment and torture of an angry, violent God, then your spirituality is completely different from mine.  What draws me to Christianity and the God Jesus represents is the ethic of love – radically simple and full of hope and life and vision for a world where connection and compassion and joy are found in abundance.  I believe that is the spirit of the law, the spirit of teachings of Jesus, the spirit of God is the spirit of love.  Not a spirit of threat and harm and restriction and fear.

If Jesus was showing us a better way, doesn’t it seem suspect that the same marginalized hated group in our culture is translated into the taboo sinner and moral scapegoat in our dominant religious culture?  That doesn’t seem like a better way to me.  Broader culture would suppress and kill and otherwise terrorize people out of same sex relationships; Christian culture would convert and consign to hell and terrorize people out of same sex relationships.  I don’t even see that as a different way, much less better.

I would agree with the definitive statement that there is no such thing as a Christian hate crime or a Christian war.  To be “Christian” derives from following in the teachings and example of Christ, and Jesus definitely didn’t do either of those things, but opposed them with his words and exemplified a better way, one of nonviolent resistance fueled by a divine love.

But to say there is no such thing as someone who loves and follows the Way of Jesus and has relationships and sex with people of the same sex…   No one has yet articulated for me how same sex relationships contrast with the love ethic taught by Jesus.  Arguments to that nature are shallow and cyclical and generally infused with an atmosphere of belligerence, threat, fear, and hate.

Anything that makes me feel like closing off a part of my soul or cowering or shutting out someone or something, I name to be the influence of a spirit of anti-love, or Satan if you will (though conjuring an image of horns and hooves seem like a distraction to me).  Anything that makes me feel like my heart has enlarged to incorporate something or someone that was previously outside its bounds, that my soul has woken up and been united into one, clear, bright flame, I take to be the influence of the spirit of love, or the Holy Spirit of God.

That is how I discern what is the true spirit of the law, of the teachings of Jesus reflected in the Biblical scriptures.  God is Love.  And love is simple.  As simple for me as that.

Shy Sex

April 20, 2011 § 1 Comment

This is going to be a short post and a bit of a rant and an unsolicited, impassioned morale speech.  But I just need to get it out there, somewhere, and I’m choosing here.

I’m sick of the cultural assumption that the most and the best sex is always had by outgoing, brazen social butterflies – that sex is not for the shy.  While I’m sure there are some highly extraverted and social people having a lot of very good sex, the idea that the same skills required to “win friends and influence people” are those required to get with lots of people in happy ways annoys me and just isn’t true.  What you need to have good partner sex is some good information, some grounding in your own self and sexuality, genuine consideration for the other person, and confidence in your own capacity to know and uphold your own boundaries within reasonable circumstances.  You can be shy and have all those skills in abundance.

You just don’t need to be able to convince people to buy anything in order to get with them.  All you need is enough boldness to be communicate your desires and intentions in a way they can catch.  Even if you stammer or have to look down while you’re saying it or run away right after (though you probably want to hand off your contact info first if you’re going to bolt), people like to be liked, and you should trust that if they have any corresponding interest, they’ll act on it if they can.  If not, don’t take it too hard.  Maybe they’re not available or still too spooked or just didn’t happen to share your interest.  If they’re mean, be glad they just self-exiled themselves from your bed without your having to bother, since that takes lots of energy and can be quite awkward.  You are no worse off than when you started.

One thing that keeps people from positive sex is shyness, or rather the perception that shyness is a barrier to having lots of good sex.  Shyness itself can be a place of connection and overcome if it can simply be named.  It is not a shameful or terrible thing to feel shy.  It doesn’t ruin your chances.  And it won’t ruin your sex.  If you’re shy, you’re probably going to get with mostly other shy people, which is good.  Shy people know about being shy and can probably take gentler hints and cues than other people.

It just drives me crazy that this culture is so anti-shy.  It’s just illogical to me.  I mean, we put the people who exude impeccable confidence and forwardness in charge and just look where it’s gotten us.  I think it’s important that we start giving timid and meek people a say, for example by pausing long enough for them to get a word in edgewise.  One way this anti-shy bias is manifested is in the pervasive impression that only the charming egotists can initiate sexual relationships and get what they want in this life.  I am staunchly and adamantly pro-shy, and I think that is hogwash.

If I could convince all the kind, timid people of the world to increase practicing one policy in their sex lives, I think it would be not to decide for your crush.  Don’t assume they aren’t, won’t, can’t be interested in you and skip over the part where you give them the chance to decide for themselves.  If you are just willing to put yourself out there just a bit, not in overconfident, grandiose, fake ways, but just in tiny, noticeable, genuine ways, you give a person enough of a heads up to at least get them to consider the idea of getting with you.  Sometimes it will happen, sometimes it won’t.  But it will happen a lot more than if you default to expressing no interest, as if the person has already expressed that they aren’t interested when you haven’t given them a chance to decide for themselves.

Needing to convince someone you’re the coolest and have no insecurities or quirks just isn’t necessary for asking someone to have tea or have a fling.  Especially since, you know, you’re not the best and coolest or whatever.  You’re just you.  All any of us has to have sex with is our own self, and, like, maybe a few sex toys and a candle or something.  But it’s your genuine self and not your social façade that you’re going be stuck with in bed and need for having good sex, the kind where you and your partner are vulnerable enough to express real wants and real responses and create the sort of connection that alleviates psychic aloneness and is blissful before and after and not just during any orgasms that may be had – the kind of sex that makes life and the world better and drives the often misdirected tireless search for sex our species seems given to.  I believe every true self is inherently shy.  So look at it this way, you’re already ahead if you can’t fake confidence and mask the nature of your true self.  If you are shy, you are already ahead of the game when it comes to be capable of good sex, not behind.

If you’re shy, you’re probably not going to seek people out the way the smooth cruisers do.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t be an initiator and actively get more connections and sex in your life.  You just have to find your own style based in your own values and temperament.  My consistent sexual partner and good friend, Valerie, has taught me a lot about sex with the shy.  She taught me shyness skills and ingenious tactics like pulling a blanket over us when one of us got too spooked to be out in the open – it’s a lot less exposed and scary under there, just be sure you choose a blanket that’s light enough to let some light in.  Invest in some Calming tea.  Do some meditating.  Take some time.  And then take some more time.  Instead of going at a person you’re interested in with one, grand scheme for making an impression, just talk to them a little bit every time you see them.  My experience is that people are pretty slow in becoming aware, especially at processing the uncanny reality that someone is interested them and having someone come over to you and pay attention to you consistently over time is actually a good way to get recognition to sink in.  Figure out what you need to do to keep within a healthy realm in your risk tolerance and still put yourself out there a little bit.

Just don’t think that because you are shy, great sex is not something appropriate to you.  The world needs the kind of skills shy people will bring to their sex lives, because we’re all shy in bed, and most of us simply don’t have the knowledge base of how to manage it you shy people do from living your everyday lives.

Coerced to Say No

April 20, 2011 § Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of necessary and important conversation going on surrounding the ways our society coerces people into sex they don’t want.  Dismantling dominance culture and realizing the ways that rape culture solicits us to participate in a system of oppression and abuse is one of the most important works facing new wave feminism.  I want to flip the coin a bit and talk about the side of coercion not usually focused on, societal pressure to not have sex even when consent is present for everyone involved.  Just as people will express consent when the consequences of not doing so create too much risk, we will also refrain from expressing or acting on consent to sex when the environment and consequences are too high risk. It short, just as much as you can be forced into sex you don’t want, you can be forced to deny sex you do want.  I see both as sexual coercion and as traumatic experiences.

My youth was shaped much more by this experience and my relationship to my own consent more damaged and suppressed by it than sex I was forced to have.  I know many of my friends, especially in high school, and sexual partners since then have had similar experiences, especially those raised in environments shaped by conservative religion.  I think a lot of people have.

I grew up in a small, rural town in the Midwest, where there was a church and a liquor store adjacent on every corner.  There was an atmosphere of poverty and despair, an enormous amount of meth production that went unaddressed.  It fit the bill for everything that is wrong with the commonplace hypocrisy of the system often attempted to describe by the inadequate phrase “conservative Christianity.”

The first place I went to as a young person looking for ways to ground my sexuality in a love ethic was the Christian church and Christian writing available to me.  No one else was talking about ethics, and no one else was talking about sex, at least not outside of jokes and secret discussion with other teenagers I knew.  The shortage of information and resources available would shock most New Englanders, indeed I have shocked many a friend with my description of “sex ed” in my school, which was showing us horrid pictures of STI’s and one graphic birth video.  No one talked about the relationship elements, except Christians.

I went to youth group.  I studied the Bible.  I read books like those by Eric and Leslie Ludy and Elisabeth Elliot.  And I got more and more confused.

The compromise I struck with my conscience resulted in an almost complete suppression of my sexuality.  I was uneasy and disturbed by the marriage-focused dating lit I found.  I stopped thinking “sexual” thoughts and stopped masturbating.  I focused on my energies on other things, mostly good ones that served me well, mainly on genuine love bonds in friendships and on the education that got me out of my town and my family of origin once I graduated high school.

When I fell in love with one of my close friends my junior year, I felt a new round of turmoil.  All of a sudden, my sexuality, which I’d mostly buried rather than evolving, was all I had to work with in negotiating my first really passionate romantic bond.  I had a great relationship with Tom.  He was an artistic, high status, attractive boy who played in a metal band and had long hair was new to the area.  He moved between clichés and was one of those rare high school students of high status who is socially generous and disrupts bullying.  He was the sort of guy that parents and teachers dub a bad boy and other teenagers consider really nice and a good guy.  Tom had been moved around all his life and had negligent parents who were largely hands off.  He’d had lots of sex and had lots of guilt mixed in with it.  By the time we broke up, a year and a half later, we’d done a lot of making out and both done a lot of freaking out about ourselves and our bond, which was mostly unconstructive.  The main theme of those freak outs was whether or not our bond was ethical, whether or not we were treating each other with genuine love and respect.

I think now, we weren’t, but not because we didn’t want to, but because we were unresourced, unsupported, unskilled, and not yet free to go and find those things for ourselves.  I can see now how many factors were at play in frustrating our connection to each other, which was inclined to involve a deeply passionate sexual bond:  lack of safer sex information to allow us to talk out our risks and evolve sexual practices we were both comfortable with, lack of parental support and instead threats and shaming, a complete lack of privacy in both our homes, sex negativity in our culture and school, intense teen negativity, unconscious assumptions about what having sex meant about us and about our bond, unprocessed family trauma, and ingrained sexist beliefs about gender, and the intensely sex negative, body negative, fear-based conservative sexual ethics our Christian (he was raised Catholic) religious backgrounds imprinted into us.  It is very hard to make any sex, much less beautiful, consensual, fulfilling sex happen in the midst of an environment that hostile.

There was a general impression I took, particularly from the youth group culture I experienced, that the goal of adults was to keep teenagers from engaging in wild, reckless, foolish, catastrophically damaging sex they thought they wanted to have.  Yet all around me, I saw young people confusedly trying to sort how to make real connections with each other and treat each other well and survive the utter misery of being teenagers.  Namely, I saw a lot of young people willing to love and desperate to find out how to be loving in their romantic relationships and sex lives meeting not with support and education but instead being met with the sort of vague, hostile disapproval that crushes self-esteem and creativity of soul and a general imposition of fear about their sexuality and their sexual choices.  The assumptions seemed to be that teens were bad, sex was bad, and that control was necessary, and that fear was an instrument of love.

From the way we treated each other in our bond as it did exist, I think Tom I could have experienced a lot of good with each other if we’d had sex.  A partner who respects your rights and consent is bare minimum.   A partner who resonates with the deepest core of you and wants to know as much of your real self as possible and to participate in and witness the journey as you coax that true self further and further out into the world – that’s where the best sex is had, and what I experienced in my relationships later in life.  The inability to create that sexual bond and loss of one of those rare, intense soulmate sexual partners was an experience I was not able to name, but that mingled grief and despair into my sexuality that took me years to process and move past.

Why is sex not being had a problem?  Because it is also a part of system of oppression, dominance, and control.  And it alienates us from our own desires and consent and rights.  It blurs the line between consent and coercion, between sex and abuse.  Without clear definitions and practices along those simple lines, we will never see a world free from abuse and full of great sex.

In this culture, there is a complex web of consent confusion.  Women don’t have sex for fear of pregnancy, slut-shaming, family abuse and rejection, and other punishments.  Men don’t have sex because they’ve imbibed a belief that they have to be “masculine” to get sexual partners or because they’ve internalized a belief that their sexuality is inherently dominant and violating and a harm to their female partners.  People of all kinds don’t have sex with people of the same gender because of internalized homophobia and fear of harm.  People in relationships don’t have sex with anyone but their single partners for fear of societal punishments, loss of the relationship, and an inability to imagine or create healthy, safe, loving bonds free of the romantic myth, which most often translates in practice into a life of jarring serial monogamy.  Christians don’t have sex because they believe it is wrong.  People who don’t fit the image of physical beauty imposed on us all by an exploitative culture and media don’t have sex because they believe they are of less worth and less deserving of loving, passionate sex partners than others.

Enabling people to say no to sex they do not want and yes to sex they do want, and even maybe to sex they haven’t decided on yet is my vision for the world.  Many seem to think chaos and more abuse would ensue.  I think sorting sex from abuse, choice from coercion, free will from submission to dominant culture, love from fear will only create of more truth and more love.   And yes, more sex.  

Feminism 201: Basic Consent Skills, Beginning to Ask Questions

April 20, 2011 § 1 Comment

Any decent discussion of sexual ethics will stress the importance of consent.  One of the major reasons I find fault with the conservative, legalistic approach to sexual ethics offered to me as a young adult by Christian religious teaching was that it never talked about consent and so never had a strong foundation to work from.  Feminism 101, it seems to me, is the work we need to do to get people to think about and care about and generally shape their sexual behaviors on an ethic of consent and to shape legality around it.

This post is part of a series that will go a little beyond that to relate my experiences of already wanting a life, and particularly a sex life, built on a foundation of consent, but needing some skills to bridge the gap between what I wanted and what I’d been taught.  It is sort of my experiences working out Feminism 201… what to do after you already care about consent and begin to get with people in this new value system.

This post is about my experiences of learning how to have a dialogue of consent during sex.  Consensual sex isn’t just a yes or no, we do or we don’t.  It involves a constant dialogue (not always verbal but consistently communicated).  Initiating and negotiating that dialogue takes practiced skill to go smoothly.  I learned much of this through the progression of my own sexual experiences with other feminist, loving people.

My first sexual encounter after I became a radical feminist was actually a bit of a shambles.  I was still evolving rapidly in my new feminist consciousness, and I had just really begun to heal my own relationship to sex and alienation from my desire and consent.  I got in bed with a close friend, Laurel, who I’d bee having intense conversations about sex and Christianity and ethics with for years.  I cared deeply about her and her consent, and I certainly didn’t want any kind of sex to happen we weren’t both on board with.  As things progressed, we switched back and forth as initiators, but would both sort of slow to a halt.  I was reading a lot of mixed signals from her and knew I was giving them, as well.  One minute it seemed like we were going to rip each other’s clothes off and have sex immediately, the next minute it seemed like we were going to slow to a stop and go to sleep.

I was tuned in to consent and had a strong rapport with my partner in this experience.  Despite having the lights off (which I now think was and is always a poor choice for encounters with partners you haven’t developed a strong sexual rapport with), I could still read a lot of her energy and communication because of our familiarity.  But I didn’t really know what to do with the mixed signals I was getting or giving.  I slowed down and eventually stopped, which was the only way I could find to address it.  I just said, “I don’t know what you want right now,” and she seemed wildly relieved and said, “I don’t know what you want either.”  So we decided to make out a little more and go to sleep.

My next sexual encounter after my feminist journey was well developed was with a feminist man, Jack, about ten years older than myself who I met at a friend’s wedding.  It was a fairly low-risk one night encounter, but some time later I found myself in bed with someone else, a shy feminist lady I was very interested in this time (Valerie, who appears in many other posts on this blog), and what do you know, I realized I had learned something very important from my encounter with him – some basic skills of negotiating consent in the real world.

Simply through they way he was as a partner, Jack showed me a lot about how to initiate a dialogue of consent with your partner.  At the time we got together, I was still sorting through a lot of alienation from my own desires and consent.  I was also very tired and had had a few drinks, and as a result, I wasn’t doing much initiating.  I was giving mixed signals and having mixed feelings, and because of this I to experience a lot of Jack’s different ways of maintaining consent in our interaction.  He was very closely reading my body signals as he went along, and when I would stall or have a response he couldn’t read, he would just ask me, “How are you feeling?”  Or, “Is this good?”  Not rocket science, I know.  Yet in a tiny way, that asking is a radical act.  I was surprised by his ease in asking questions, and it made it easy for me to respond.  A lot of what was communicated was that any answer would be okay, that I wasn’t with someone who was going to freak out or pout about what we decided to do, and a lot of that was expressed through tone.

I left that encounter sure I’d been with someone with more consent skills than me.  If I had been more of an initiator in the interaction, I would not have been as skilled or practiced as he had been.  It was, for lack of a better term, inspiring, a motivation to figure out more.  I recognized that I would not have been willing to ask him questions the way he asked me.  I could already think of twenty new ways to have handled the experience of getting mixed signals from Laurel that would’ve made the experience better for both of us.

I needed to find ways to work on the skill of asking questions, which you do have to practice to be able to do without feeling awkward and to elicit the actual information you need.  Soon after that, I read the anthology Yes Means Yes.  The book was transformative for me in many, and perhaps the one where I met with the most internal resistance was in reading about an author taking on a practice of always seeking explicit verbal consent for physical touch.  The idea freaked me out and made me feel a bit angry and panicked as I was reading about it.  I tried to track my fears and realized I felt like a lot of touch in my life wouldn’t happen in this model, which led me to wonder if I was concerned that it was not really consensual.  And I knew for sure that I did not want to touch anyone who didn’t really want to be touched.  In short what I realized was that when it came to physical touch in my bonds, I was not sure it was always consensual because minor social trepidation led me to guess instead of ask.  I decided if I wasn’t willing to ask, then I shouldn’t be willing to touch someone – the risks were not comparable.  So I tried it.  I actually ended up with a lot more touch in my life, since it led me to stop assuming what people didn’t want, as well.  And it helped me get rid of some of my anxiety about asking questions regarding physical intimacy and touch.  I don’t practice EVC all the anymore, but it does inform my everyday practices in that is has become the instinctual go-to in new or tentative bonds and in any situations of doubt or mixed signals.  Consent exists far beyond sex, and negation of consent can exist in myriad of interactions, so it was good for me to recognize how I could facilitate more consent in my bonds.  And it let me practice a skill necessary for sexual consent outside of the bedroom, which is always a good idea.

Asking questions during sex isn’t rocket science, I know.  But the simple act of Jack asking me for clarification when he felt trepidation or unclear about my consent was a radical act.  Mainstream sexual convention creates an image of the perfect encounter as being one where everyone is smooth and impeccably confident, no one is awkward, no one changes their mind, no one says they want something then finds they don’t really, no one says they don’t want something then decides maybe they do, no one wants to have sex but is just too tired, drunk, shy, whatever to go for it just then and decides to go to sleep and hook up later or show future interest or spoon and talk.  No, initiation of the sex has to be so well managed (generally by the guy, women only get to manage making male notice and then jump to making marriage happen) as to go as smooth and formulaic and fake as a job interview.  And once you get to it, the sex should be one flawless, hot ride to simultaneous orgasm with no questions being asked in between.

There is a lot of inhibition and fear surrounding asking questions or just plain talking about the sex you are having with someone.  Initiating communication during sex, especially with a new person or stranger can be daunting and may meet with mixed responses.  You think you might freak them out, you think you might kill the mood, they might get spooked, you might get spooked, they might not know how to answer you, you might not know how to answer them, and how do you even begin to know precisely what to ask?  You’ll be shocked at how much sex language sounds clinical or vulgar and generally alienating when you go to talk about it with someone you’re trying to navigate a positive sexual encounter with.  Just figuring out what to say is difficult.

When I next got into bed with someone, less tired and less drunk and more of an initiator this time, I found myself reading a lot of body consent, but having moments where I just didn’t know what my partner, Valerie, was experiencing.  And, lo and behold, when I hit that confused hesitance again, I just asked.  “How are you feeling?”  And, “How are you doing?” And “Is this good?” And, “Is this okay?”  And, “Does this feel good?”  I didn’t feel awkward about asking, so she didn’t get psyched out.  And my guesses often would have been inaccurate to what she said when asked.

Later it evolved to less tentative and inhibited questions, basically matching the less tentative and inhibited sex we were having: “What do you want me to do to you?”  “Is this going to fast, or too slow, or good?” “How does that feel?” “Do you want me to seduce you?”  “Is that too rough?”  “Is this a good speed?”  “Do you want something different?”  “Do you want to stop for a minute?” And later just, “Do you want me to keep asking you questions, or just go?”  “Tell me if you want something different.”  And, “Tell me if I get too rough.”

I was fortunate in that I was with a partner who wanted consent and was willing to do the work to get it.  Questions can confront you with your own experience during sex.  They can bring you into the present in ways that are uncomfortable and show you whether you are checking out or following a formula or deferring to your partner or simply just unsure.  If someone is going to hold you accountable (to yourself and to them) for your consent and mindfully ask you what you want and how you’re feeling and be open to adapting to your answer, you’re going to have to know things.  Things about your body, about your values and desires and inhibitions. You’re going to have to face the fact that sometimes you don’t know; that all of us are, at least at times and to some extent, alienated from our consent.  You’re going to have to sort through the categories of what you want to fantasize about, talk about, do in real life, or try to find out if you want in real life.  But the sex is well worth it.  You can be more connected with your self, your experience, and your partner.

Response to Thomas’s post on gender orientation labels (on Yes Means Yes blog)

June 19, 2010 § Leave a Comment

I just read Thomas’s blog post on Yes Means Yes regarding the terms we use to describe gender orientation: http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/would-that-make-me-queer/#more-1647.

Most of the people I know with any level of intimacy have some qualm with labeling their gender / gender orientation.  They can almost always point to some aspect of what is implied that does not accurately reflect the way they relate to their sexuality and/or sexual partners.   Cisgendered, heterosexual men may be as uncomfortable as gender queers wary of labeling when called upon to self-define, and it isn’t hard to see why.

I think the issue relates more to body sovereignty than language.  When you are called upon to define yourself, the stakes can seem raised, as if you are being threatened somehow.  I think it’s because you are.  You may trip the label signifier that defines you in a manner other than what you feel/know yourself to be.  In literary theory terms via Lacan:  you may be aware that your social I and your ideal I are about to hit a patch of dissonance.  Often, you know your listener(s) will not extend their attention past about three words, so which three will you choose???

I have found that with some people I can talk about my sexuality openly, and with others I want to grasp any fragment of information in a clutch of animal-like ferocity.  Describing the difference is similar to describing why one person can approach you on the street or give you a comment and you feel threatened while from another you feel flattered.  I think it has to do with your internalized sense of whether or not this person is trying to better understand and relate to you on your own terms or maneuver some type of ownership over you.

I would say defining someone is in some manner taking ownership of them.  Hence, you find Thomas exploring this topic as an issue of feminism, applying the same awareness of prejudice and lack of consent and body sovereignty as one would in an analysis of a sexual encounter.

Thomas points out what I think he considers an inconsistency in his feminist MO of letting others define their own gender and gender orientation:

“But when Larry Craig or Ted Haggard tell me they’re straight, I don’t accept their self-definition. I think they’re full of shit. And I’m not the only one. Asher used the term “closet case,” a term the very existence of which presumes that there is a fact of the matter that can be different from what people say about themselves.

But, if we try to go whole hog with that, and come up with “objective” criteria for pigeonholing people by orientation, the enterprise is doomed from the start.”

This is not, I think, a matter of rigid defining, but a response to an awareness of someone who is manipulating their identity to claim a social/political status or statures.

In the case of “closet cases” that are not infuriating, the manipulation may seem more spurred by fear rather than power mongering, and a desire to self-protect from a societal prejudice.

When you push back against someone else’s self-definition, you take a huge risk of being wrong and, since I can’t think of another way to say it, emulating the behavior of the oppressor.  But there are times when you will be inclined to take the risk either because you are invested in a person’s further self-discovery or, in a very different circumstance, because you think they are a conniving hypocrite who lacks integrity and should be held accountable.

Much as the writer points out in “Schrödinger’s Rapist,” there can be a sense of entitlement to someone’s space, attention, and trust, and I would say there can also be a sense of entitlement to knowledge of another person’s identity, especially when it comes to gender and gender orientation.  It has taken a remarkable effort of self-chosen reconditioning for most of us (myself included) to become comfortable not knowing someone’s binary gender label, much less branching out from there.

I once had a group of very progressive folk turn suddenly to me during a planning retreat late at night expecting an explanation of my sexuality after someone offhandedly referred to me a lesbian, and I said, honestly surprised, “Who said I was a lesbian?”  The questions continued until I was asked why I am private about my sexuality unless it’s relevant and “how that works.” Finally one person said, “This is getting inquisitory,” and everyone sort of backed off, feeling a bit ashamed it seemed.

In a far less jarring instance, one of my roommates suddenly asked me how I “as lesbian” liked living in JP (which, as a side note, I will say was even more interesting considering I had only had sexual relationships with men since moving into the house).

Oddly, my severe discomfort and annoyance in both situations made me feel like I was out of line.  Maybe I’m ashamed or homophobic or sexist or sex-negative?  When I brought this up with my very-most-feminist friend, she said, “Making assumptions about someone else’s sex life – NEVER a good idea!”  My friend continued to point out that while she is careful to guard against presumption when someone has not revealed a self-defined sexuality, she also doesn’t feel like she can bring it up out of sheer curiosity.  It takes some other more relevant incentive to get her to breech the subject.

In short, to her, a person’s sexuality (including their gender and gender orientation labels) are not public property, but belong to the individual who chooses when, how, and if to define state them. In both instances, I felt uncomfortable because in our society, even among very considerate and progressive people, it is not acceptable to be private about your gender or gender-orientation.  It is the possession of the public, of others.  It does not inherently and exclusively belong to you.

The most awkward and often threatening moments in life are those when someone approaches you from a standpoint that you owe them something.  At least, they have been for me.  In the same way that feminism challenges us to dismantle our entitlement to another person’s body, it challenges us to dismantle or entitlement to defining ourselves or even being privy to their self-definition regarding gender and sexuality. As the author of Schrödinger’s rapist breaks it down with physical space in public, for some people the boundaries of handing out identity labels you may or not define the same as they do may be lax and for others, no risk is acceptable.

“But how does that work?” people will ask.  It’s pretty simple:  you respect consent, so when both of you want to talk about it, you do; when one of you doesn’t, you don’t, and there are no punishments (physical, psychological, or social) levied as a result.

See “Schrödinger’s Rapist” here: http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger’s-rapist-or-a-guy’s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

On Jennifer Knapp and Loving Sexual Ethics

May 1, 2010 § 1 Comment

The release of Jennifer Knapp’s new album and the recent news that she decided to be open prior to its release that she has a female partner and is still a Christian has completely consumed my inner (and much of my outer) world lately.

I love this woman.  Her art has changed my life, no sentimentality included.  Many, many people feel this way.

I am deeply upset by the news.  Let me explain.  Her same-sex romance and continuing ownership of the Christian faith does not constitute a moral conflict for me.  This would not have been the case some years ago.  I am upset, because it causes me great pain to relate to the spiritual turmoil she clearly went through in reconciling her faith with same-sex love and attraction.  I went through a process of grieving when I read the reasons for her long break from making music.  All I kept thinking was, “That’s it!? That’s why?”  A great artist was broken to the point of being unable to create for eight years.  To me, that is nothing short of severe injustice and of tragedy.  The “Christian music industry” (VOMIT) was largely to blame.  But that is not what I want to focus on just now.  That was only part of what happened.  She felt herself torn between her partner and her faith – between two parts of herself.  That is some of the worst pain and the worst cognitive dissonance to reconcile and recovery from.

I decided to post this in an attempt to succinctly convey the total shift I experienced in moral comprehension surrounding same-sex attraction, sex, and love.  If you love Jennifer Knapp or are otherwise at all conflicted about how the combination of homosexuality and Christianity interact, I think you will want to read this post.

On we go.

When you ask any Christian why they believe homosexuality is wrong, they will invariably answer, “The Bible says.”

This response is not ubiquitous or necessary in discussion of any other supposed sin.  Everything else has moral ramifications that can be elaborated upon and even separated from church-speak all together.  I can explain to a friend of any and all or no religious backgrounds why it is a sin/immoral choice/bad idea to:  kill, rape, exploit, drink too much, eat too much, use too many resources, ignore others, and so on and so on.  I do not need to appeal to anything outside of my own intuitive moral sense, the Spirit of Love in me, and trust that it will resonate with the same in their moral conscience and leave them with a personal moral decision.

But with homosexuality you get the same old, “God wills it.  Look, the Bible says…” argument every time.  This was the case for me initially.  I could not come up with anything besides, “The Bible says…” and this seemed anomalous to me.  So I kept coming back to those passages regarding homosexuality over and over again, trying to gain some moral grasp of what they were saying and why.

Amidst the complex and shockingly specific Law of the Old Testament, in the list of people who get stoned to death, with abrupt vehemence, homosexuality (specifically male, but we all agree that the culture did not fully perceive women as moral agents and they should be included) is listed.  No Christian can quote the Law without appealing to some authority beyond the text as to which parts of the Law are still relevant to us under the New Covenant, with the Holy Spirit replacing the Temple and so on, and in what way.  For example, I do not leave the corner of my fields for widows and orphans, but I give a portion of all of my resources to the under-resourced.   I wear multi-colored clothes made of blended fabrics, but I try to wear excessively expensive clothes that flaunt wealth.   I hold my father’s hand when his skin is discolored and cracked instead of sending him to a tent and bricking him in the head if he treads back without being “purified.”  All Christians understand that Jesus eradicated the Law, stating that the Jewish clergy belied God in the way they kept the letter of the Law and not the spirit of the Law.

Then there is that bit in the story of Sodom and Gommorah – the men turning to lust after one another.  A close reading of this eradicates its relevance pretty fast.  This was not a culture where men were so “evil” they wanted to kiss other men and marry them and adopt babies, oh my!, but a vicious, overt rape culture.  When the angels show up, the townsmen literally pound on the door and demand that they be handed over.  Not for consensual sex of any kind – the town was primed for gang rape, slavering over fresh victims.  That is so far gone, it isn’t difficult to read the story and think, “I don’t know if I could have thought of anything but fiery destruction to solve the problem either…”  I would say this is tantamount to the moral confusion of trying to deal with legitimately evil people, which is a separate, long, and terribly difficult discussion in and of itself.  Frankly, I don’t fully understand the story’s ramifications, but what I take away from it is that even Abraham, who was super righteous by all accounts, was LESS merciful than God, even though he perceived the opposite during his moral negotiations with God on the subject.

So, we’re on to the more actually challenging question of mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament.

Jesus said not a word about it.  This is a very significant indicator of a very relevant fact – the sin that should be taboo in the Christian church is not homosexuality, or any sexual sin.

What is it?  Hypocrisy.  Willfull distortion of the truth, projecting an image of righteousness and piety, for the sake of gaining leverage and power that you use to exploit people and get away with abuse.  There were PLENTY of people having same-sex romps all around Jesus as he lived and taught and healed.  It was Rome.  But the people he railed at, shamed, and blamed for the impending demise of the Jewish people’s world as they knew it were the hypocritical religious leaders who had learned to implore the authority of God without exhibiting the love of God.  Jesus talks to these people in a manner radically different from his norm.  It’s a huge part of what gets him killed.

Then we are left with Paul, and a less quoted bit of Revelations (written by John).  Paul’s words are the crux of anti-gay sentiment in the Christian church.  This is where my very real moral dilemma got stuck for a long time.  I could not figure out what to do with Paul.  I kept thinking, if I can just understand why this is listed as a sin, then I will be at peace with it.

I noted first off that homosexuality is NEVER singled out as a particularly “bad” sin.  It is mentioned only in lists of the kinds of people who won’t enter the Kingdom, and if you notice the context, these lists are sent by Paul to communities in the midst of radically altering their moral views to the very new and largely undefined Christianity and scared that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t doing something.  It can’t be as easy as loving, can it?  And what does that mean?  He was trying to answer so many questions, because people were so willingly to follow the Way of Jesus, but struggling to comprehend what it was.  Married couples were confused as to whether they should become celibate to “be saved,” and Paul tried to direct the to understand that having sex or mutually choosing to abstain were both ok.  The lists are there to comfort them, not terrorize them!  He is trying to say, you are not missing some magical thing that is required to get you into heaven.  He named the people who were to be left of the Kingdom, naming liars, cheaters, murderers, etc, etc.  Basically, those people who make a lifestyle of exploitation – they relate to others as predators, by going for whatever they can get from them.  They choose dominance over love.   They seek to destroy life rather than nurture it.

So why are homosexuals in this list?  The answer I found from Biblical scholars is one I had a hard time with for a while, but now think is true.  In short, the word homosexuality did not exist in Roman culture the way it does in ours.  There was no such thing as same-sex marriage; there was not even separate caste marriage.  Early Christians habitually broke marriage laws by marrying people of differing cultural and social standings.  It was assumed at the time that men (those who were dominant) had the right to the bodies of women AND children, both male and female who were perceived as lesser and therefore property (inherently and rightfully submissive), and that they would have sex with them, that is get pleasure from bodily exploiting them.  A man was not considered homosexual if he had sex with males – there was instead a lot of highly disturbing politics regarding tops and bottoms that I won’t go into now.

What did exist, rampantly, was temple prostitution.  Boys and girls were sold or given to temples (and remember this was the most multi-cultural society before ours, there were a freaking ton of religions) and visitors would have sex with them without a fleeting moral qualm.  This still exists today, if you ask me, in many guises.  I would say Las Vegas is one of them – we go there to worship money.  Paul wanted early Christians to know that they were to have absolutely no part in this.  The people Paul was talking about when we say “homosexuals” would be more aptly described as “sex traffickers.”   That is so in line with Jesus’s teachings, there is no contention.  Anyone who is predatory with their sexuality, who does not honor the human rights of those they have sex with, IS A SINNER, until they repent and stop.

But how many Christians are mobilized to stop sex trafficking, sexual abuse, or rape apology in the current world?  You hear statistics like in THIS country, someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes, and by the age of eighteen one in three women and one in six men have been sexually assaulted…. And you turn around and see Christians fighting “sexual immorality” by telling kids they must abstain even from being turned on by each other until marriage and that if gays are allowed to marry the world will end.

But I don’t know anything about Greek or Biblical scholarship on my own.  I had to allow that perhaps Paul did mean just all same-sex desire and sex.  And this is where it really got tricky.

Then I noticed something.  The Christian church relates to Paul’s letters in much the same way that we do the Old Testament.  There are passages we literally ignore and passages we tout.  Women don’t cover their heads all the time, and men grow long hair without being metaphysically shamed and lessened.  Women speak in church, and no one is suddenly stripped of their moral insight.

The best parallel I can find to the way the Christian church relates to homosexuality is slavery.  Paul ALLOWED for slavery, as did the Old Testament.  He sent a slave back to his owner.  He said, “Slaves, obey your masters.”

Abolition was an issue that drew sides both within and without the Christian church.  There were those who argued that the Bible allowed it and told slaves to be subservient. People believed being black was having “the mark of Caine” and being destined for suffering, which they gladly exploited for their own gain.  And there were those who argued that all human beings were equal in God’s eyes, and that no one who served the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Love could or would rob another person of their right to freedom and body sovereignty.

No one could erase those lines from the Bible.  Paul did say, “Slaves obey your masters,” although maybe he meant bondservants and maybe slavery was different in that culture, but who knows.  We learned to believe that the Way of Jesus leaves no room to own slaves.  We gloss over those verses.  We know they are wrong.

I believe that Paul also allowed for sexism.  And that the Way of Jesus does not.

The anti-gay factions of the Christian church claim to uphold the sanctity of the Bible.  They quote it as if they are not appealing to any other authority besides the letter, but, undeniably, they are.  The letter of the law is nothing without the Spirit – this is one of the greatest tenants of Jesus’s teachings.  And the letter does not animate itself regardless – there is always some “interpretation” being made.  The Bible says, “Fear God,” “Love is God,” and “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”  We’re all making decisions in how we understand it.  How could we not?

What they are actually upholding and arguing is the sanctity of gender – specifically binary gender in which males and females are delegated into very specific, appropriate, and “God-given” roles.

I find no reason to believe, either in the Bible, in my own moral conscience, or in Jesus’s teachings as I have been able to discern them, that any trait found righteous in a man should be sin in a woman or vice versa.  Men are called to be tender, to be non-violent, to uphold the rights of the weak, to divest of the “privilege” of exploitation.  Women are called to be defiant and adhere only to the authority of God and the inclinations of their own moral conscience, to resist tyranny and defend themselves and others from oppression, to be their own moral thinkers and judges.

There is lots more to be said of the gender politics of Jesus.  The fact that the tomb was discovered by two women, a direct parody of Jewish law where the testimony of two men was enough to confirm or condemn and women’s testimony counted for nothing, the inclusion of women in Jesus’s set of intimates, his insight into how people won’t marry in Heaven but be like the angels (which signifies to me that we are to be without gender/sex), and then the female leaders Paul himself commends in other letters than the “wives be submissive” and “women be silent” ones and his statement that “in Christ there is neither male nor female.”  In summary – Jesus demands the divine, human rights of women be upheld the same as men’s, and children are naturally thrown in.  Love, not ownership and not oppression, are the Way of Jesus.  You cannot reconcile the two.

If we as a culture take ownership of people by defining their gender and their appropriate roles, their appropriate behaviors and temperaments, and their appropriate lovers we strip them of moral autonomy and body sovereignty, and we replace a love ethic with legalism.  I believe, in short, that Paul was transitioning from Jewish law to the Way of Jesus, and that the place where he was most caught up in the old was in regards to patriarchy (the inherent right of the strong to rule over the weak and to take possession of their bodies, in a myriad of ways, through psychological terrorism or force) and so you get justification of slavery, sexism, and homophobia.  If this is not Paul’s error, then it is ours in how we have understood him and just as relevant.

How can a loving action be made sin by the mere coincidence of gender?   Gender has to be sacred – more sacred than love.  I don’t mean love as affection or simple bodily desire or even extreme feeling or obsession.  I mean love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.  Sexual desire calls us to closer communion with others (even when we’re teenagers and in our time of deepest introversion and resistance to intimacy), and we either learn to allow it to guide us wisely, crush it out of ourselves to our own loss, or turn what was meant to be sacred into a means of exploitation, of ourselves and/or others.

I think Christianity does demand a love-centered sexual ethic.  And I do believe that our society does not have one.  Rape apology, child abuse, and sexual trauma in the form of body-negativity, sex-negativity, gender-normative social conditioning, and homophobia abound.

Let me ask you this – doesn’t anybody think it’s odd that non-Christians are just as disgusted and abhorred by homosexuality as Christians?   Doesn’t the coating of a severe preexisting prejudice in religious language seem slightly convenient to anyone?

We are using the name of Jesus to excuse our sexism, rape apology, homophobia, and the dominance of a huge number of people’s sexualities through physical or psychological violence, especially through shaming.

And that to me smacks of the taboo sin.  Hypocrisy.

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