The Disappointments of Cinema Sex: Take Two, Consent and Coercion Really Aren’t That Different, Eh?

June 6, 2012 § 3 Comments

There is lots of pseudo-feminism in mainstream media.  There is nothing quite like watching a female lead kick someone in the face and seem “awesome” to trigger the scrunch my eyebrows make when I feel I am being condescended to by someone who is selling me a gimmicky version of women’s liberation.

Perhaps my very least favorite all of tropes, by which I mean the pseudo-feminism that gets a visceral, intense response from me, is the story of a woman being coerced by a man and then falling in love with him and having hot, consensual sex.  Witness, The Piano.  Or how about Game of Thrones.  There are more examples, I am sure, but these are perhaps the ones that made the strongest impression on me because people love them so much.

It’s like a slight of hand.  The calculation is:  rape is sex lacking female desire… so solve the issue by adding female desire!  It makes me shiver.  There is such a fine line between coercion and consent in the tangled up minds of those steeped in a rape culture a storyteller can suddenly have a woman’s feelings and experience “change” to become self-derived, positive, and hot.  And we’re supposed to believe that 1) this exists or is believable 2) the storyteller actually knows the difference between rape and sex 3) this character’s problem has been solved 4) it’s okay we were into the sexual tension being built by coercion and it is natural that we “knew” the female character would change her mind 5) the difference between men who have sex and ones who commit rape is the coincidental presence or absence of female desire, i.e. luck.

Three words for you:  Scary.  As.  Hell.

The idea that sex is hotter for men when women consent and get off too and therefore it is desirable as a general rule is quite simply not okay.  And it is something that exists in the real world.  How many women think they can solve “their issues with sex”, which really means the complex realities of oppression, by just wanting the sex they feel pressured to have?

Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse for the cause of women’s equality than the coercion-turned-consent magical thinking of media representations of women “transcending” abusive relationships by conjuring desire for their abusers.

Feminist Ladies Don’t/Do Shave

May 21, 2012 § 1 Comment

I just posted last week about the politicization of women’s bodies.  As a natural progression, I thought I’d tell a story about politicizing my own body.  Here follows a brief account of my history with the age old feminist question – to shave or not to shave?

Before I discovered feminism, when I probably nineteen, I was with some friends at a book signing.  We were standing next to a women our age who did not shave, had brilliantly asymmetrical hair, and was wearing all leather.  I got into an exciting conversation with her.  The whole time I was tracking this weird experience as if two lenses were being put in front of my eyes and switched back and forth like at the eye doctor.  One cast a stereotypical, judgmental attitude over this person, and the other felt clearer and positive based on what I was actually experiencing.  Afterwards, I felt uncomfortable with my own biases, particularly towards women who do not shave.  It made me angry to realize, mostly because it was so strong and felt entirely inauthentic.

After discovering feminism, I started questioning whether or not I should shave.  I went back and forth on it, with a surprising amount of angst.  I was scared to do something that aligned me with a stereotype.  It felt strangely like it could disempower my feminist stance by giving people an excuse to compartmentalize and discredit me.  But I felt like a coward and a tool for being unable to stop shaving and being so preoccupied with other people’s perceptions.

I was amazed to find how deeply both choices were riddled with harsh self-judgments and how little resilience I felt in the face of them.  Thinking about my body and about my body being perceived by others stirred up a lot of internal violence.  Finally, I remembered the girl I had met.  I decided to stop shaving, because I wanted to deal with my internal judgments in the context of my own body.  And they came up, exactly the same as I remembered.

Some months later, finally comfortable with my unshaved body, I found myself noticing women who did shave.  And I noticed a tone of inner judgment towards them, as if they weren’t feminist enough or autonomous in some way.  It felt like the same mean-spirited, little invasive part of my brain, the same dual lens now weirdly reversed.  So I went through a reverse ordeal and got myself to shave again.  I had a lot of emotions again this time about my body.  It felt strangely vulnerable and reminded me of my old self.  It felt once again like something people could see and judge.

I had this ideal for a while that I should be able to figure out what my personally preferences were and shave or not shave “for my own reasons.”  The issue was so politically loaded, I could never quite achieve that.  I realized the real struggle would be to not judge myself about it.  Women should be able to shave or not, but far more importantly, women should be able to look at their bodies without hate and judgment, without the sense of being perceived and at risk of being valued or devalued based on how they fit an ideal, and be free from rejection, criticism, and commentary on what they decide to do with their own bodies.

Eventually, I took up a habit of shaving half the year, when it’s cold, and not shaving the other half, when it’s hot.  That’s been going on for probably three or four years, and I just now have gotten to where I don’t freak out when I transition from one to the other.  I feel like I enjoy my body in both states, and I look forward to seeing it again when the seasons change and I’m going to switch.  And I do not even notice whether or not other people shave.  And I notice my inner voices are much better company these days as I’m in the shower adjusting to my routine of seasonal shaving, sorting through all its corresponding philosophical musings, so it seems all the work was worth it.

It shocks me still how much work I had to do to get away from a harsh critique and knee-jerk politicization of my own body and the bodies of other women on what ought to have been such a small issue.  I had such a hard time taking off my shirt with first-time lovers during the time after I first stopped shaving.  I finally started getting with people who seemed literally not to notice or care, which I personally feel to be a good sign about the advancement of my choices.

Feminist Chat and the Politicization of Women’s Bodies

May 14, 2012 § 1 Comment

A sensitive and progressive acquaintance of mine recently brought up a feminist issue with me, hoping to bond a bit at work.  He said he was recently noticing women wearing power suits, and expressed how he felt uncomfortable with it.  I got caught between two minds, and had to express first one, then the other.

On the one hand, I think “power feminism” or whatever you want to call the prioritization of the interests of the small demographic of women who have economic and race privilege, particularly in the work force where they want to be equal with similarly privileged men, distorts the true meaning and cause of feminism, burying the vast majority of women under a blanket of invisibility and highlighting one small, relatively comfortable strata of gender oppression.  There seem to be two major strains of feminist thought, one that does not see capitalist consumerism as inherently at odds with feminism and one that does.  I am strongly on the side that says the commodification of human rights and of people is not feminist, even if it does not discriminate in regards to gender.  Equal opportunity exploitation is not equality in my book. I found a quote online once I lost the reference to that said, “True feminism seeks not to make women the equals of men within an exploitative system, but to liberate both sexes from oppression.”

However, the more immediate issue for me was less apparent on the surface of the dialogue, and had more to do with us launching into the conversation.  I could not help but notice how people simply feel more comfortable politicizing women’s bodies and choices than they do with men.  Anybody can talk about women, collectively, and argue about and pick apart their choices.  Women’s bodies are still seen to some extend as public property.  Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, and often that opinion is loaded judgment.  If you don’t believe that, just talk to someone who breast feeds.

Let’s face it, society has shittier boundaries towards women than it does with men.  We ALL do it.  Sometimes it manifests physically, sometimes emotionally, sometimes psychologically, and often so subtly and casually we don’t even notice it.

 

In Which The Young Feminist Learns to Ride a Bicycle

April 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I never learned to ride a bicycle as a kid.  I used act like it was no big deal.  But I was in denial.

I had tried only once as an adult to teach myself to ride.  Several people in my house had bikes and encouraged me to ride.  The friend with the most ideal bike to learn on said I could ride it anytime.  So I waited until one day when I was feeling especially bold.  I took the blue bike from the garage to the driveway and got on.  It was ludicrous.  My pedaling the short distance of the driveway was belabored and felt impossible.  I literally imagined myself as a bear on a bicycle.  As things progressed, I concluded that I lacked an essential inner gyroscope of some sort and was almost making peace with it.  When the friend whose bike I was supposed to be riding came up the driveway on her bike.  “Whose bike is that?” she asked nicely, and I have to admit it, I panicked and lied and said, uh, our other housemate’s boyfriend’s.  “Oh,” she said and went away.  I asked another housemate later whose the other blue bike was, and she said it was in fact our roommate’s boyfriends’.  And it had two flat tires and needed a tune up.  When I admitted what had happened to both roommates, they laughed until they cried.  And biking dropped off my radar for a while.

A few winters ago, I got some variant of the H1N1 and was the sickest I have ever been in my life.  It was the kind of sick where I wanted to get up and make toast, but I couldn’t and had to wait for a good spell. While I was weak and lonely at my house, I watched a remarkable documentary called The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.  One detail they describe in Cuba’s transition from an import/oil dependent culture to a self-sufficient one after the embargo is that people learned practically overnight to ride bikes.  One Cuban commenter states that they had no previous culture of bike riding, that it was sheer political will.

I realized I really wanted to learn to ride a bike and tried to tap my political will.  I began to unload all this baggage I had about bike riding.  My brother had learned early, and I was supposed to learn to ride.  But no one ever bothered teaching me, even though they went through all the motions to act like it was going to happen.  Once when my parents were separated and I had a lot more room to be unnoticed, I tried teaching myself on a bike that was too big.  I crashed, and I was shamed by my mom when I admitted what had happened.

The next year, I read Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd.  In it she tells a brief story about watching a family by a river bank.  The son is taken down to touch the water, and the slightly older daughter desperately wants to go.  But she is told no, that it is too dangerous and has to sit and watch.  That story set off a personal will of resistance towards messages I had imbibed as a child.  I had this sense that my body was not my own, that it was not appropriate for me to apply my own judgments in determining when and how I was to take risks.  It was a deeply entrenched message, and I am forcing it out still, but I try to keep the frontline moving.

I looked up adult bike riding classes, and I also looked up information on bicycling and feminism.  I discovered what a strong role bicycling played in the history of women’s liberation and empowerment.  I felt like I was getting my own tiny dose of what must have been their personal experiences of transformation, reaching out and taking self-sufficiency and what they knew was appropriate to them despite ridicule and threat from external culture.  I tried to channel some of that fiery spirit.

I found a bike riding course in Somerville, Mass., near where I live.  My teacher had a garage full of bikes and helmets and knee pads and pieces of war protest art.  She was wearing an orange jumpsuit protesting Guantanamo at the time.  All the other students in my class happened to be women ranging in age.  We were all self-conscious and awkward as we pushed our bikes and followed our teacher, a row like over-padded ducklings on the sidewalks, as she led us with her own bike to the empty parking lot where we would start .  Little by little, we were taught to balance, then to pedal, then to turn, then to do tricks like standing on one foot and looking back.  Some of us picked up the pivotal balance the first day.  Another woman did not find it until the end of the third class.  When it finally happened for her, all the students stopped and watched.  When she stopped her bike, she was winded with excitement and cried.

I’m still a relatively new rider, and this year I will probably advance to riding in traffic and thinking about distance riding.  Every time I get on a bike, it still changes my mood.  I feel like my old image of myself is challenged and a new one takes its place, one where I can make changes and have the life I want for myself.  Something as simple as learning to ride a bike, but I can’t tell you how complicated it was in my inner world.

The journey of becoming feminist, as I experienced it, pits you against forces of coercion in your life.  For myself and everyone I’ve been close with during this process, it includes confronting internalized voices of coercion that dominate your life and cause you to restrict your own freedom.  They are often echoes of the messages of coercive parents and authority figures from the past, which often mirror messages from broader society those people never learned to rebel against for themselves.  Figuring out what you want that you believe is not suitable to you, where your creative blocks are, is part of the journey to me.

A lot of my work began with dismantling and rebuilding my views on sex and my own sexuality.  Another was working to overcome my creative blocks.  And among and surrounding both journeys was the challenge of reclaiming my body.  I imagine the same themes come up in many people’s lives as they try to defy whatever forces coerce and inhibit them.

A Few Thoughts On Privileges

April 14, 2012 § 1 Comment

I just posted about my encounter with a Nice Guy ™, and it has me thinking about privileges.  The term privilege is often used to indicate anything that is given to one group and not another, usually in talking about what a privileged or underprivileged status or position in society is.  I usually use it a bit differently to draw clear lines in my mind, because I find it hard to use when it’s so contextual and keep a grasp on the connotation.  To me, a privilege is something you get that is outside of your basic human rights, what rightfully belongs to you.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having privileges, they’re really nice and they can help you do good things.  I have lots of privileges, including relational ones, like the privilege of touching my lovers body on a regular basis and getting lots of time and attention from my best friend and having my housemate pick me up things from the store he works in when I text him.  However, I know that those are privileges.  Those things lie within their boundaries, not within mine.   I am given those things ethically only by someone else’s consent, and they are always negotiable.  When I say there is nothing wrong with “having privileges,” I mean there is nothing wrong with being given privileges consensually by the people involved.

At this stage in life, a lot of my ethical focus is on the individual and interpersonal, and I am working to get a clear vision there in order to zoom out into a larger focus.  When I catch myself feeling emo because I’m not getting what I’m used to from someone, I try to check myself.  I feel like at times it’s hard for me to understand the difference between being open and honest about my emotions and being emotionally punishing or coercive.  So many of my close people are very sensitive, especially to me, they care very much about what I am feeling and experiencing.  I feel like one consent skill I’ve learned is to reinforce the other person’s decision when they have guilt because I am sad or disappointed by it.

This has been a key skill in my relationships with my best friend Emily.  When we were younger, we could help each other deal with negative emotions, so long as we weren’t the cause of them.  In that case, we’d have an emo crisis.  Now we can support each other even when we are the catalyst for one another’s negative feelings. We’re both more able to remember not to try and cater to the other person’s feelings or try to suppress them.  We both know that’s what the other person wants, which is a key element here.  Learning to prioritize your own rights over another person’s feelings, especially if you’ve had abusive parents and/or partners in the past, can be a trying and prolonged ordeal.  And it helps very much if you get into relationships where people help you maintain your boundaries when they start breaking down, rather than merely testing them.

I hope I can develop a clearer vision of the difference between rights and privileges as I mature, and figure out where my boundaries are and where other people’s are.  And I am hoping to zoom out.  Systemic privileges offered to me in this culture encroach incredibly far into the rights of other people, often folks I will never see or know about, which is an added privilege being sold to me by corrupt corporations and governments.  The main reason I am upset with this society is that it coerces and dominates rampantly, and by being here it often feels impossible to figure out how not to be a part of it.  I don’t want privileges that violate other people’s basic rights.  And I don’t want privileges that compromise mine, like the privilege of having someone else think for me and do my coercing for me.

Nice Guy ™ Style Coercion in Everyday Life

April 7, 2012 § 1 Comment

I think I’ve had enough distance from this subject to write about it, but it’s taken a while.  When I first came across the phrase Nice Guy ™ in the feminist blogosphere, it really cracked me up.  However, I really had only encountered this type of person in the comments threads of feminist blogs, which probably says a lot more about who I hang out with than the consistency of the world.  Well, last year I got a dose of pure Nice Guy ™ tactics in action with a housemate.  I feel like I have a whole new understanding of the term and what it encapsulates.

This housemate “accidentally” coerced us into living with a friend of his, which only with very strategic and uncomfortable resistance did we stop.  He wanted to get out of his lease mid-year, which is fairly common and usually no bit deal, kind of routine for a big house.  We just needed to meet and approve someone, and they would take over his signature on the lease.  After we met and declined his friend as a potential housemate, he then proved mysteriously unable to set up meetings with other potentials despite weeks of posting the room.  Then he mistakenly had his friend submit the rental application to our landlord.  He called us passing it off as a big whoopsi daisy that his friend was all ready and excited to move in even though we had said no.  One detail of note might be that he had just sublet his room for three months with no confusion or difficulty just a couple months before.  So apparently he “forgot” how it worked in the meantime.

Some harsh words were exchanged between the two of us after a craigslist post I put up produced over 20 responses in 24-hours, our landlord and I had a difficult conversation in which I was told the information he’d gotten was that “the house” had been slow in finding someone despite repeated resistance from our roommate when we offered to help search, and I somehow magically managed to find us a new housemate in exactly 8 days.  Included in his passionate defense of his actions was the phrase “the reason I am trying to convince you all to live with my friend is…” after he asserted multiple times in person that he was not trying to control our decision, but about his friend…

Having moved out into his girlfriend’s old room literally two minutes away, he failed to return his key, and to this day his things are still being kept in our house.  I cleared off his bathroom and food shelves for the new roommate, eventually giving his things to donation boxes.  He still comes by to get his mail, which he never had forwarded, making an appointment with a current roommate then showing up randomly on another day.  He’s been asked to come get his stuff and said he would be over that weekend, then not come and not said anything about it.

But here is the part that really gets to me.  During this whole debacle and even to this day, most of my other housemates say he was just a nice guy who had good intentions.  That he thought he was doing the right thing trying to make us live with his friend or explain his behavior by saying that he is just “really laid back.”  You know that feeling you get when after you’ve become feminist someone goes into apology mode about sexism – the one where you feel you might burst a blood vessel in your eye or go into a self-defense blackout?  Yeah, I got that every time my house attempted to talk about it for a long while.

My understanding of a Nice Guy ™ type is someone who wants the relational privileges of appearing nice, but does not actually divest of their sense of entitlement.  As such, they will be nice and sweet, until they don’t get what they want.  Then they’ll coerce you nicely, then blow up.  They’re those people still think their boundaries are somehow set within your space and can’t seem to figure it out when you indicate otherwise.  A good example would be when my friend’s abusive mother, upon discovering the concept of boundaries, tried to set a boundary that she had to call her once a week.  Something key missing there.

Nice Guy ™ types want the ego gratification and extra benefits that come from being considered nice by others, rather than being considered pushy jerks, which to my sensibilities sets their coercion in a new realm of creepy.  It’s bad enough being coerced, let alone having someone try to control what you think and how you feel about them during the process.

When you set a proper boundary with a Nice Guy ™ and claim your rightful space, they don’t adapt or even negotiate.  They typically go on a rampage and try to convince you that you are abusive for not giving them what they want and being “nice,” and if you then call them out, for saying “bad things” about them and “making them feel bad.”  Whatever it takes to get the world back to its right state of being, where they can walk into other people’s space and have what they want without their entitlement being questioned.  You know, where they get their proper reward for being so nice.

Feminism Made Me A Better Christian

March 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I used to feel confused often about what loving behavior was.  I knew I wanted to follow the teachings of Jesus, to hear and honor the voice of the Spirit of Love.  I listened hard for that still, small voice within me.  And I think that has been the best decision I have ever made in my life.  But I used to get bowled over by arguments that used the rhetoric of Christianity, applying the words of Jesus and the name love to things that did not feel right, that did not sound like that little voice I knew, but I could not find the words to argue against.  For a long time, I obeyed what I felt as a voice of authority I could not win an argument against, assuming that meant it was the Spirit of God.

Discovering radical feminism helped me.  It brought with it a new rhetoric, a new ethical lens to apply to things.  A consent ethic can be applied to many situations to clarify matters when strong rhetoric and my intuitive sense of what is right are at odds.  I became much more aware of how much authority can be wielded by forces far from divine, and I learned to see how oppressive systems persuade people to deaden the voice of their own conscience.

Love and coercion cannot coexist, as bell hooks says in All About Love.  If we are coercing, we are not acting in line with the Divine. Yet everywhere, we find this bizarre image of God cast as this punishing, invasive parent set to police our actions and frighten us into doing good and people emulating this God.  I believe that God is a garish shadow of oppressive humans cast into the sky to use fear as a mechanism of control.

Once I got straight in my head that the God of Love was not the god of coercion, love made more sense to me.  It seemed more consistent and more worth believing in and more applicable to everyday life.  I had a language all my own, away from Christian rhetoric, that would not confuse me into believing that God told me something the Spirit in my conscience did not.

A consent ethic runs parallel for me with the nature of the Divine.  I consider it obvious that if God meant us to be coerced into doing good, we would be.  So our purpose cannot be to coerce one another into being “good.”  The reality of free will indicates that it is the right state of human beings to have autonomy, and I think this is because we are meant to love and love cannot exist outside of free will choice.

The real Divine feels very different from any other voice of authority to me.  It feels like radical love, an exciting and creative force that makes a life of fear and hate seem an unenticing, sad, and strange choice.  It feels like the message of Jesus feels, telling of how an Empire so strong its ruler named himself the Son of God, King of Kings and Lord of All, could not stop the love pouring out of one poor, humble, radical person’s soul.  It feels like something that can quietly and gently overcome that internalized voice of fear that presents as an all-powerful authority who will destroy us if we do not bow to it and make us resistant to coercion and oppression.

What Sex Feels Like

March 14, 2012 § Leave a Comment

I believe consent resides in the body alongside the mind.  To be skilled with consent, we need to learn to listen to our bodies, and to have some ability to understand, with their help, what another person’s body is telling us.

A culture of coercion has made consent hard.  Confusion about our own consent comes from society, an abuser, or some other voice of authority saying you’ve experienced one thing and your body telling you another. This kind of undermining of personal experience estranges us from embodiment and consent.  What did we experience?  What are we experiencing now?  Sex or rape?  Love or abuse?  The answers lie in our bodies when our minds have been confused.

I wish I could put into a bottle and share what it feels like to have embodied, consensual sex, free from both present coercion and interference of past trauma.  It took me a long time to experience it and now I have a baseline that makes it much, much harder be coerced or confused.

As well as I can describe it, this is some of what embodied, consensual sex feels like for me:

It feels like excitement and pleasure, an energizing and motivating force, even before we touch. 

It feels like energy, roiling up in and around me and my partner, drawing things together and pushing me to experiences larger than myself, greater than my body can hold, bigger than either of us but including us.  

It feels like trembling, like being vulnerable, and the peace of knowing that it will be okay, of being safe and healing. 

It feels like taking in a beautiful scene, like witnessing truth and knowing some new quality of  my partner’s humanity, witnessing some new facet of their soul. 

It feels like being seen, like showing myself to another person, who is opening out to take the experience in and holding it in reverence and being transformed. 

It feels like my heart breaking open and getting larger, letting the new in, rather than the feel of it breaking and shrinking, crumbling in, keeping things out. 

So much abuse gets called sex in this culture, so much pain gets undermined and painted over as something else.  People learn to believe the feeling of pain, sickness, shame, fear they have in their bodies are what sex feels like, what sex is.  They learn not to look to their bodies for an account of their experience.

A friend of mine was once in so much pain talking about a sexual experience she’d had, her whole body was tensed, her shoulders pulling in to try and hide her chest, her jaw tight, and she was crying.  She was trying to convince me that she had expressed consent and didn’t have the right to consider her experience abusive or traumatic.  When I tried to get her to check in with her body and asked her if that’s what sex usually felt like, she said, no, it was what abuse usually felt like.

Past abuse can leave us distanced from our bodies, frozen with past trauma we buried to survive.  Coming back can mean experiencing those feelings now, which is difficult to choose.  I believe we have to be embodied in order to have the transformative experience of sex we are meant and have a right to have.  We are mean to be our own rescuers, our own administers of justice, restoring what was lost to ourselves, moving past experiences of pain that hold us away from pleasure now.  And for many of us, I think that means allowing ourselves to feel the feelings of past abuse now while remaining safe and making choices in our current lives.

This is what embodied, consensual sex does not feel like for me, but what abuse or the memory of past abuse often feel like:

It doesn’t feel like seeking quiet, being small and still, waiting for things to go away, hiding away in to be safe.  That’s what being triggered feels like.  

It doesn’t feel like a pain in my stomach, like fear, like animal panic upon being cornered, like an urge to escape and weight holding me down.   That’s what being coerced feels like. 

It doesn’t feel like nothing, like not being there, like being gone.  That’s what being disembodied feels like.  

It doesn’t feel like being numb, being cold, turning everything down to become invulnerable, impenetrable, experience anything and survive.  That’s what believing I have to tolerate something I don’t want, what being caught intimate abuse feels like. 

It doesn’t feel like shame, like a rent of agony in my chest, like wanting to shut my eyes and duck my head, hide away and not be seen.  That’s what the coercion of sexual shaming feels like. 

The Disappointments of Cinema Sex: Take One, Lack of Male Expression

March 7, 2012 § 1 Comment

Is anyone else deeply disappointed by the sexual content in art?  Sarah Waters, aside, I wonder if I would still think myself potentially asexual based on how excited I get about sex in film, and even books.  There’s a lot to complain about, but today I am going to focus on one, tiny point of contention that’s driving me crazy.

I am deeply bored of men in movies who have sex while looking like they’re modeling for a bowflex ad.  It doesn’t have to be this boring to watch the scenario male-top-facilitates-short-round-of-passionate-kissing-then-unprotected-PIV-with-female-bottom over and over again.  Not this boring.

Seriously, why can I rent any of a choice of films where a man kills dozens of other people in new and “exciting” ways but can’t rent a film where a man makes noise or an affected face while having sex?  Every since Jonathan Rhys-Meyers went HBO, I can’t get excited about representations of male sexuality in mainstream media.  I just don’t believe them.  The only representation of male sexuality I’ve seen in ages that felt real is the character Tommy in Never Let Me Go, and if there is any flaw in that film (which there isn’t) it would be low sexual content.

You know why the sex in BBC’s adaptation of Fingersmith is so hot?  Not because it involves two women.  Because both people look like they’re having an experience of equal passion, equal pleasure, equal response to one another.  Even though one is on top and one is on bottom, they are both responding to what is happening. I’m going to send Hollywood a letter that says, “Dear Hollywood, Topping is having sex too.  Love, Claire.”

Haven’t any filmmakers had sex with expressive men, including themselves?  Am I so lucky and unique?  Come on, folks, entertain me, at least.  Or better yet, move me with your depictions of sex.  Please!

PDA vs. EVC: An Idea for Consent-Minded Sex Ed

February 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment

In my middle-American high school, students could get in trouble up to being expelled for “public displays of affection.”  By the time I graduated, the administrators had become so strict, they were expelling students for hugging or high-fiving at school.

Stewing in a retrospective rage about PDA’s recently, I thought anew about how this system estranges young people from their own consent.  Shaming and punishment for completely consensual acts of physical affection, whether sexual or not, probably grew from administrators trying to prevent students from making out in the hallways, cracking down in an overzealous attempt to maintain control.  The rule is, in short, an incredibly bad rule.  It is counterintuitive to just about everything I can think of that is good:  consent, touch, solidarity, body autonomy, friendship, happiness, and, yes, sex.

I wish I could replace a legalistic, authoritarian PDA rule with a consent-based rule system. I was thinking about how little I knew about consent when I was in middle and high school.  I think a lot of people have their first real, deep friendships as teenagers. And a lot of us have our first sexual relationships then.  All in all, it’s a pretty important time to advance in our comprehension of consent and ability to engage an exchange of negotiating our own boundaries and wellness with someone else’s.

I started to think out a model of what new rules might look like.  Students could be collectively introduced to consent and engage in a week of EVC where they were not allowed to touch without getting explicit verbal consent.  Any touch that was not explicitly allowed would become taboo, as it should be.  The language of consent and skills to ask for desired touch, respond authentically, and manage one’s own feelings when disappointed could be taught as rudimentary skills required when touching other people.  And after that week, consent could be expanded to a standard of more simple expressed consent.  There could be discourse teaching students to bring in nonverbal signals and cues, to look for and give consent, and use basic consent skills like the 90-10 approach.

The rule then would be that no touch was allowed that was not consensual.  I think just about everyone would break the rule at some point, and particularly at first.  Adults would need to be capable of leading students through negotiating hurt feelings and miscommunications.  And in the end each student would need to have their right to account for their own experience of having consented or not upheld and never overridden.  Teachers and administrators would then have to apply their own judgment as to an offending student’s intent and the proper response.  Rampant offenders would be singled out pretty fast.  Types of bullying and coercion that go on without breaking any “rules” would come to the surface.  And in general, everyone would get some model of consent in their mind and start learning skills early.

I didn’t have a language for consent until after college, but was figuring it out in slower, foggier ways from my experience years before then.  During my sophomore year of high school, a trend kicked up where we would suddenly pat each other on the rear and say “good game.”  I thought it was hilarious, and I was really bold about it and got some fantastic responses from people.  One guy I did not know well was in mid-conversation when I got him. He turned and winked and said, “I play hard,” then picked up what he was saying without losing stride.  We actually became better friends after that.

But I patted one of my friends, standing in the midst of a bunch of our mutual close friends, on the rear who was really, really upset.  She had already had her butt touched several times that day and didn’t like the joke.  She didn’t have any solid footing to make an argument, since she was considered a “prude” and had been essentially judged all day for her “weird” response.  Those of us who were her close friends I think were all surprised and abashed for a moment by her response, but then staunchly defended her right not to be into “good-gaming.”  I apologized and felt genuinely sorry, putting onus on me and not her for being out of line.  And I only got people I knew liked the game afterwards.  It was a weird moment of recognizing consent, and realizing that it was a real risk to invade someone’s boundaries even with good intent, not knowing how they would feel.

My group of friends didn’t have any language to talk about consent.  We just had to feel our way about it.  It’s a confusing business to sort things out in the midst of a rape culture.  I think I would have been really into EVC and an applied consent ethic as a teenager.  It would have helped me to think and relate to other people better, and I think it is worth teaching.  To be honest, I think it is imperative, and I find it really twisted that we don’t consider consent a standard topic of education for all people.

Consent Frustration – What to do when you’re consenting?

February 14, 2012 § 1 Comment

 How do you communicate consent?

I recently read and loved the article “Submissive Skills” by Clarisse Thorn.  I often find her writing about negotiating consent in BDSM relationships excellent and illuminating.  They feel relevant to dynamics I’ve experienced negotiating consent not being a BDSMer.  I love that she breaks up the usual assumption of the top as the initiator and adds a more complicated portrait of initiating sex as a bottom and in dialogue with a partner.  I especially loved the specific examples of her past lover initiating as a bottom.  She points to often overlooked consent skills that include knowing what you want, interpreting well your body’s response in a given experience, indicating accurately how you want to change a dynamic, and externalizing what is happening internally for your partner to read.

Consent is a dialogue, and usually someone is the initiator.  In discussions of consent, onus is usually placed on the initiator to actively get consent from partners.  And encouragement is usually given to non-initiating partners to communicate non-consent.  These two steps reestablish an egregiously absent bottom line in sexual ethics and go a long way in stopping rape culture.  It reminds initiators that absence of consent is non-consent.  It acknowledges how hard it can be to communicate non-consent.  To me, consent skills begin with learning to protect yourself and your partner from having nonconsensual sex.  Taking no for an answer and expecting, rather, demanding partners who accept no for an answer at any and all points in a relationship without threat or punishment.

Consent is a dialogue and usually someone is the initiator.  In a scenario where both partners have a solid consent ethic, the initiator will be looking to their partner for active communication of consent.  This is where consent confusion and consent paranoia can come in and make life, or rather sex, difficult.  This is why I imagine some people are beginning to replace “enthusiastic consent” with “good consent.”  In a context of consent, (i.e. We have established that we want to have sex with each other), there is still the need for a lot of decision-making an ongoing dialogue of consent (i.e. What sex are we having and how is it going?).  Consent skills might begin with stopping nonconsensual sex from happening, but I think they go on to getting consensual sex to happen.  Perhaps this is one reason why BDSMers like Clarisse Thorn have a lot to teach the rest of us about consent, they’re used to having to create what they want without a status quo in mind.

It is difficult to know and communicate your desires, and it is difficult to accurately and confidently interpret and negotiate with what your partner is telling you.  Consent frustration is what I would call that sense those of us looking for consent sometimes get when we want to say to our partner, “Please tell me when you’re consenting!”  Or, “Tell me louder.”  Or, “Keep telling me.  Tell me again.”  And that desperate sense we sometimes get when we feel, “I just don’t know what I want,” or, “I just can’t say what I want.”  And perhaps also the sense we sometimes get when we feel we just aren’t sure what our partner is telling us.

Before reading Clarisse’s article, I had recently thought to ask my close friend and frequent sex partner Valerie, “How do you communicate consent?”  Even though all the sex we have is consensual and not traumatic, it is sometimes fraught with consent paranoia, confusion, and frustration. Valerie found it hard to answer, and what she did say surprised me, pointing out several ways I was misreading her response, like her going very quiet and relaxed as a positive sign whereas for me that would be a terrible sign meaning I was freaked and checking out.

After reading Clarisse’s article I realized I have some consent skills I hadn’t recognized and so does Valerie.  I have actually worked to externalize my response (in my experience, INTJ’s have to learn to communicate emotion anyways), and I feel comfortable enough when I give a nonverbal signal and I can tell she doesn’t catch to give a stronger signal or just verbalize what I’m saying.  I think I learned some of those skills from my first lover, Tom, whose response was so vivid I could practically feel it in my own body.  He was almost impossible to misread.  Valerie is less comfortable adapting her communication, but she is one of those people amazing at interpreting nonverbal communication she receives.  When we were first together and I was more shy and working myself up to asking for something specific, she would often read cues off my body I thought were subtle and do it before I said anything.  So lack of response to small cues probably seemed to her like expressions of non-consent from me early on.

I imagine most people come to sex and communication of consent with strengths and weaknesses, same as any other context of communication.  We live in a culture that actively alienates us from our own consent, which makes it difficult to prioritize and look for consent in others.  After we learn to care, we probably all need to work on one dimension or another of our consent skills, whether it is seeking out what we want, learning to say no to what we don’t want, learning to negotiate consent when we’re unsure, externalizing signals, feeling comfortable enough to get a little louder and a little clearer when our signals are not read, reading other people better with a broader understanding of how different people might respond, asking the right questions, or making those questions sexy enough to keep the energy going in our interactions.

From my experience, I would say the number one skill needed to overcome consent frustration is patience.  Both with ourselves and our partners.  And I think that if we are even working on it, there’s a lot to be grateful and give ourselves credit for.

The “Wearing-Down Approach” to Consent

February 7, 2012 § 3 Comments

My friend Veronica likes to use the phrase “the wearing-down approach” to consent.  She sometimes adds, “a.k.a. coercion.”

This describes when someone keeps asking, or keeps calling, or otherwise continues to push a boundary you’ve set until you either escalate your “no” or give in.  They don’t escalate the aggression of the approach, instead they stay neutral or more often add a level of helplessness or neediness to the situation.  They keep testing the boundary, changing the emotional pitch, over and over, to see if it will stand.

Let me just state…

BEGGING IS COERCION

I have so rarely heard anyone discuss begging and posturing low status and neediness as a means of coercion.  Yet it comes up time and again in accounts of friends processing past experiences of rape and other coercion.

Of course, there is such a thing as more accurately portraying the intensity of our feelings about something, there is such a thing as checking in again as time passes, there is such a thing as making sure someone is sure.  But there is also such a thing as tiring someone out by getting them to set the same boundary over and over again.  And there is also such a thing as learning to over-express emotion to control someone else’s behavior by exploiting their empathy, and often their learned sense of responsibility for someone else’s feelings.

Coercion can be overtly violent, but it can also be less overt and manipulative.  We’ve all met one of those people who can’t take no for an answer but doesn’t blow up, who plays angles and manipulates more “nicely”.   A lot of us have done it and at point or another, and some of us are trying to break the habit.

But I hope we can start calling a spade a spade and clarifying in our own minds and hearts that repeatedly pushing  against someone’s boundary or posturing multiple emotional pitches to try and get a different response is disrespectful and unethical.  It teaches people away from consent.  It is the opposite of love and counterintuitive to it.  It is coercion.  And it is abuse.

Converting to Sex Positivity

January 31, 2012 § 4 Comments

It takes a lot of time and intense work to actually become sex positive, not just in theory as a political stance but practically in our own minds and bodies.  Healing from even the everyday sort of sex trauma our society dishes out is a process. Souls are slow growth crops.  But miraculously resilient.

I want to encourage folks to keep the faith.  At thirteen I believed even thinking about sex was wrong.  At nineteen, I could not feel any sexual energy or sensations without becoming almost unbearably sad.  At twenty-six, I experience a ton of joy in sex and feel that sexual energy is an healing and sacred force in my life.  I still have a very long way to grow, but I’m far enough along now that I only rarely crash into total despair.  And I see a lot of people I’m close with progressing in their own journey, each of their lives adding to my hope for broader societal and global change.

I thought I would list a few things that have helped heal and grow for readers to consider trying.  If anyone has something that has helped them they’d be willing to post, please do!

1) Re-parent and re-educate.  Most of us learn about sex in vague, patchy, loaded awkward ways by people trying to control our choices.  As adults, we are our own guardians and teachers, and we can choose to re-teach ourselves, to unlearn sex-negativity and shame by seeking out sex-positive environments.  Put in some new messages from books, conversations, websites to defy the sex-negative messages of the past.  I feel more is better, just tipping the scales of what’s in my brain on the topic of sex.

2) Talk about sex with safe people.  Most of us only talk about sex, often in limited and uncomfortable ways, with partners whose feelings we’re preoccupied with. Most of us haven’t learned to talk about sex before we attempt to do so in high stakes situations that make it difficult.  Talking about desire and consent, experiences and thoughts with close people we aren’t in sexual relationships can help in pushing past the taboo and shame and awkwardness of the learning process and give us the skill when we need it.  It can also teach us about letting down boundaries, what is safe for us and what is not.  And it can be a good context for working on consent skills as we navigate our own comfort levels and those of our friends.

3) Learn from solo sex.  Most of us learn first to have sex with ourselves.  And what we often learn is how to make as little noise as possible as we rush to relieve the stress of pent-up sexual tension before shame – external or internal – catches us.  Naturally, when we get with a partner, we have sex the way we have learned how.  We can begin to move away from shame and towards remaining embodied and to externalize our response in the safety of solitude in order to be better prepared to be with partners.

4) Learn to manage triggers.  A lot of the same feelings come up in solo sex that come up in partner sex, and sometimes it can help to learn to manage them alone.  Just identifying when we are triggered – when our response has to do with experiences in the past that are interfering with us responding in line with the present – is important.  And there are lots of skills to manage our response.  I always point to Staci Haines book Healing Sex as a masterpiece of creative and radical values put to work, and I wish there was an equivalent written those of us who do not identify as survivors of child sex abuse.

5) Write about it.  Obviously, at some point I even decided to write this blog, but long before that, I started writing about sex in my journals.  I wrote about past experiences many of which were still loaded with extreme and difficult feelings, wrote out questions of what I believe and what I wanted and wrote towards answers, wrote about numerous books and articles and new sexual experiences as I processed them.  I got to know myself a lot better.  Putting something into words can get it out of your head, away from haunting you, and out where you can really see it objectively and start to work with it.  Even if you have to burn it immediately after, I suggest writing about sex in every form that occurs to you.

Lastly, what I did not list was to learn about rape culture and learn about consent.  This blog is written for people post feminist awakening to the reality of sexism and rape culture and in the midst of a personal process of change.  If you’re on here, you’re probably doing this work and know how great it is, but I thought I’d write it out.

Working with Consent Paranoia and Consent Confusion

January 17, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Before becoming mindful of consent most (and more likely all) of us participate in rape culture.  There are a million different parts to play.  From actively coercing others imagining ourselves entitled to what we take, to betraying own consent by communicating consent that is not authentic or following a prescriptive pattern in sex or relationships rather than negotiating for who and what we want, to good old slut shaming, to advising our friends to compromise boundaries for the sake of protecting attachments to partners, parents, traditions – it seems nearly every situation calls upon us to either reinforce or defy a status quo of coercion.

I doubt if anyone comes to feminism, to consciousness of consent, without some regret over the past, some grief to tolerate, some healing to do.  Awakening to feminist consciousness is a crisis.  We see with a new lens, not only our society but also ourselves.  We have to learn to stop coercing, as we pick up the habit long before we are conscious adults.  Consent doesn’t just happen.  It is not habitual, not the status quo.

I’ve talked before about the other side of the coin of coercion – about all the sex that does not happen because people are coerced not to have it.  I care a lot about this sex, because only a world where consensual sex becomes the norm  — where it is understood and talked about, represented in art and media and the backbone of law regarding sex, and so on – will clear lines be drawn between sex and rape, coercion and consent, justice and injustice, abuse and love.

In this post, I’d like to talk about even more sex that doesn’t happen, specifically the sex that does not happen because we have become mindful of consent but do not know how go about ensuring it while initiating sex.

Sex doesn’t just happen, we learn how to make it happen, just as we learn how to make anything happen.  I’d say there are essentially three ways we can learn to make sex happen a) blatant coercion, like bullying and physical violence b) cryptic coercion, like manipulation, flattery, and begging and c) consensually.  There’s a lot more skills taught for a and b than there are for c.  We learn from our society how to make sex happen predominantly by using coercion.  Even if we’re lucky enough to have decent technical sex education, we don’t learn the necessary skills to negotiate consent.

For the consent-minded, sex is spooking. Consent requires upholding boundaries between ourselves and others and knowing how to negotiate situations in which the choice is made by all parties to let some of those boundaries down.  Consent paranoia – that panicked, decidedly turned-off feeling we get when suspect our partners are not consenting or consenting falsely – is a decidedly healthy, enlightened neurosis.  But I should like to think we move forward and learn the skills necessary to represent our own consent and interpret that of our partners accurately and consistently.

Maybe you’re a brash egotist who learned how to check your privilege and will have smooth sailing from here.  But the rest of us shy freaks need to get into some dialogues and work out how to gain some confidence and grounding with sex and consent.  The first sexual experience I had after becoming a feminist with another recently feminist friend got more and more anxious and stilted until I said, “I’m not sure what you want,” which brought out a relieved response of, “I’m not sure what you want either.”  That experience petered out because neither of us really knew how to get a grasp on what we wanted or trust the other person to express consent and not be persuaded by a desire to please.

One thing I’ve learned is to translate my consent paranoia into expressed consent confusion, not just to feel anxious about consent but to recognize and name how I’m feeling and ask the other person for more information if I can.  It finally occurred to me to ask Valerie, “How do you express consent?”  From her answer, I realized there were times I was reading her response all wrong, assuming her responses would read like mine.

In films, consensual sex “just happens.”  In life, people have to make it happen, write the script, direct, provide technical support and dramaturgy – the whole thing.  It’s essentially a creative process, and I think most of us are at least partially if not desperately blocked.  There is often a lot of consent confusion to clarify before we can decide how to act.  Personally, I am happy to be in a place where while the sex might not always be happening, there is no risk of the rape happening instead.  But I’d like to move on from here.

While I may not be coercing people (including myself) into sex, I do sometimes find that sex is not happening because I and my partner don’t know how to initiate it.  There are lots of questions to answer after consciousness of consent hits you.  How do you ask questions without killing the mood?  How to you redirect what’s happening if your response to what you initially asked for is not what you expected without worrying too much about our partner’s feelings or confidence?  How do you know what you want?  How do you consensually ask your partner to choose for you?  How do you learn to read someone’s response to interpret nonverbal consent?  How much responsibility can and should you take for another person’s consent?

Coercion for a Good Cause? Consent in Everyday Life, Canvassing

September 27, 2011 § 1 Comment

Coercion for a good cause?  Somehow that does’t compute for me.  I imagine everyone has their unique negative feelings regarding interactions with canvassers.  Guilt, shame, irritation, sympathy — perhaps some of those with really excellent boundaries or a sturdy non-engagement habits brush off what my friend calls “live spam” same as us city-dwellers do close encounters with pigeons.  But for myself and a lot of my friends, it can be a small, unsolicited moral dilemma, a sort of special breed of street harassment that is supposed to be in line with our values.  Probably being twenty-something, working with not-for-profits, and generally attempting to be open and engaged sets us up for high intensity canvasser interactions.  Canvassers tend to be our peers and likely find us most approachable and sympathetic.  And since most of us are broke or giving money elsewhere, we often have to stick to saying no rather than breaking free with a small donation.

I am amazed by how much canvasser tactics are simply coercive tactics and how often being accosted by a canvasser feels uncannily like being approached by someone in a bar or on the street trying to pick you up (in a very non-feminist way).  They often literally use the same lines, jumping in front of you and saying things like,  ”Hey, what’s your name?”  And my favorite, which I have only gotten from male canvassers, in response to a, “No, thank you,” which is my current status quo, the ego-bruised counter-rejection.  Things like, “You don’t have a name — okay, fine.”  Or how about, “You don’t like polar bears?  Pssh, man.”  Or, “You don’t care about women’s rights?”  I had one of those freakishly personable attractive and charming people you instantly like hop in front of me and say, “Where have you been all my life?”  I blushed, I admit.  But I didn’t stop, since I knew I was being asked for $25 rather than a date, and instead was like, “Geeze!  Use your superpowers only for good!” and thought about the moral complexities of the interaction all day.   I once told a Red Cross door-to-door guy I was unemployed.  He was training someone and hadn’t been able to get any answers that day, so I asked if he wanted to go through his material with me anyways.  He said that would be helpful and seemed relieved to have some sort of training scenario.  I could not believe the number of times I had to say “no” and the degree to which I had to escalate my no to get through his scenario, even though he was just showing a new person what a typical interaction was supposed to look like.  It left me with a similar feeling to having to get rough in rejecting someone’s advances, kind of strangely rattled with an edge of feeling bad and guilty but more so angry and a bit disturbed.

Much like being approached unexpectedly with street flirtation, I have had a few really good encounters with canvassers.  It’s a pretty terrible job.  I had a roommate who had worked for the Obama campaign who told me about her own moral dilemmas regarding canvassing and how incredibly grueling the work was.  She was almost never home and had been moved from city to city so many times it was ridiculous.  I gave hot chocolate to a guy about my age having a meltdown in a snowstorm, because no one was even looking at him.  I got some good information about how Oxfam’s donation system works and why it is helpful to them to do a scheduled donation rather that frequent one time donations, even if they add up to the same sum.  I gave a girl some blueberries from the farmer’s market on my way back and thanked her for being a non-coercive canvasser, and she seemed really moved by the acknowlegement.

I am not a marketing genius, and I can see how hard and frustrating it can be to incite people to contribute to a cause in world deadened by excessive marketing.  But somehow, I can’t shake the feeling that street canvassing is not our best option.  I feel like with the degree of passion and talent available to not-for-profits even just with young, entry-level employees, creative alternatives could be found.  Do some crazy stunts.  Learn some guerilla advertising.  Or at the very least, take the coercive edge off of canvassing rather than training people how to be better at it.  I don’t see how a better world is supposed to be born that way when it mirrors so much the ethics of the status quo.

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.

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.

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.

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