70 Comments

1. Janet W:

   “servicemen make do by way of rape”

   Lots more foul and cloying language in this article, but that one pretty much sums up the underlying attitudes, the lack of compassion or even simple sensitivity of the author, never mind the US military.

   I couldn’t even finish reading it. Maybe later I will.

   My nephew is going to be a Marines Officer this December, unless he regains his sanity, and the thought of him being lost in all that… wow, it’s painful.

   30 August 2006, 7:20 pm

2. Yolanda Carrington:

   Janet, Stan…I did finish reading it, and I’ll just let these two passages from above speak for themselves.

   “It’s rank insanity to send young soldiers to battle and deny them sex, alcohol and drugs—the three things that can make the inhuman experience barely more bearable. But they’re not allowed. Alcohol and drugs are ostensibly banned from US bases. Sex isn’t exactly available, though servicemen make do by way of rape.”

   “Then we wonder why they unbuckle and rape: Diminish a soldiers’ purpose to that of a mercenary, and he’ll oblige.”

   Spoken like a true progressive, my friends.

   30 August 2006, 11:00 pm

3. Marilyn Farhat:

   Sex and violence used together have been the subjugators of many individuals, groups, and nations. One can appreciate the dialectic relationship if one has witnessed the ways that armed and civilian entities have related to each other during such times.

   What better reward to give young, strong, and healthy men to appease them in time of conflict? What better way for young women to flaunt their availability than around such desirable men? It is those raw emotions that become prevalent during war.

   One of the ironies of our existence is: what gives us life and what takes it away from us propagate each other. Men can become conditioned to the thrill of war through its spoils, symbolic and physical.

   We have not changed much in six thousand years. Our capacity for destruction has. We have deadlier arsenals and we have developed a complex set of moral jargon to justify their use.

   There is nothing good that can be said about war. It creates its own rules that are not compatible with our moral “peacetime” beliefs.

   As long as we remain obedient consumers and willing martyrs in the service of those in power, the orgies of war will continue, and I do not see that changing in the near or distant future. We are a species that thrives on symbols, but we also die because of them.

   31 August 2006, 2:35 am

4. Stan:

   Somehwere in the moldy, dark spaces of my memory I seem to remember an apocryphal story about a famous Greek (or Athenian?) who stopped to casually masturbate next a public fountain one day. He finished quickly, then remarked, “If only it were that easy to satisfy hunger.”

   The notion of sex as an overwhelming drive, like desperate hunger, is not only physiological nonsense, it is ideological as hell. Another sexual ideology metaphor is the boiler-room… if this steam isn’t let off, the boiler will build over-pressure until it explodes.

   Sorry folks, I have known entirely too many people who have passed through extended periods of celibacy, myself included, without either suffering the sexual equivalent of kwashiorkor or blowing up like a suicide bomber.

   Certainly sex moves the species along in some functionalist universe, but it is not required by individuals, and the WAYS we experience sexual desire are thoroughly determined by culture… a baseline aspect of which is patriarchy, that structures masculinity as violence and aggression (direct or subliminal), that encodes sexuality as male-over-female hierarchy, and reduces women to objects of that aggression and domination… or devalues them altogether.

   Male culture, magnified as it is in the military, is like a great locker room, where an I-dare-ya one-upmanship prevails that accelerates the socialization of males into violent misogyny. The penalty for failure to participate is a kind of shunning, and even feminizaton of oneself (fag-baiting, etc).

   I have to wonder about the women performers (I have daughters that age, and women friends), who are trivialized in this account, as they always are, after they internalize the norms, or more likely bow to economic pressure. They play the role that is demanded, and the response is to treat them accordingly… as objects for humiliation. If they depart from the script, as in the Duke rape case, the very obedience to the norms they have exercised is used against them; the revulsion that was once part of the thrilling transgressive boundary is distilled from constructed desire into a acid that is thrown in the woman’s face.

   But hey… it’s just a secondary contradiction, eh?

   31 August 2006, 9:59 am

5. Doyle Saylor:

   The picture illustrates a cultural stereotype of the ’stage’ and audience. The audience as a whole reacts to visual display, but in any meaningful sense can’t establish a real relationship with the woman.

   This epitomizes a one-to-many culture and how it argues for human knowledge. For example, all the guys can hoot and holler together thus establishing a vague but intense emotional ‘level’ shared by the audience, but the emotional system does not attach the men to each other, rather each individual ‘looks’ to the displayed female. And the emotion can only be to the display because the woman is in no way a potential emotional attachment.

   The immediate reaction shaped by any sense of justice is to question what every one feels as to why a woman is displayed like this, but that elides what a means of production produces here. The stage at the center of attention is a very old style of producing information. Christians enshrine the process in the pulpit at the front of the Church. Yet the same questions about how to use emotions pervades the Church as well. Morality being an outgrowth of those questions. Morality in terms of regulating how emotions are used in common social arenas.

   So long at the emotional question hangs in the air, I mean how do we really attach ourselves to each other, then abuse is going to happen. Abuse is of course hurtful interaction between people. No one, man or woman, likes to be raped for example, but one hopes the police will stop this from happening. And of course we know how far that goes.

   Were a society to guarantee to stop abuse that society must grapple with emotional interaction. With emotional attachment. That ‘knowledge’ is not one-to-many knowledge as the photo shows a woman on a stage in front of ‘men’, it is how people feel about ‘being’ in their society. Wherever they come into contact with society how they feel matters. Abuse is as it were, outlawed’, means that emotional attachment never abuses.

   A one-to-many culture can not ’show’ that because the question of emotional attachment is never answered. Can’t be answered by knowledge shaped by a one-to-many media.
   thanks,
   Doyle

   31 August 2006, 10:36 am

6. Julian Real:

   Thank, Stan, for noting the ridiculousness of the hegemonic “fact” of men’s “need for sex with others”. It’s nothing but CRAP. I’ve been celibate for years, and more recently some form of asexual.

   From stories adult whiteboys have told me about “blue balls” to how frustrating it is when a woman kisses him but won’t “put out”, to studies which show men would rape (more often) were it not for potential, if highly unlikely, legal/criminal consequences: hegemonic heterosexuality in men, in patriarchy, is male supremacist and misogynistic. Too many heterosexual men refuse to acknowledge this simple political “fact of life”, perhaps because it is in service to men’s sexual “needs” at the expense of women’s civil dignity and human rights.

   As a trans friend remarked to a lesbian friend of mine: “[Many] humans want sex; they don’t need it.”

   Try having that message institutionalized, religiously or secularly. This notion that “men need sex” is what allows us to shake our heads at male priest-rapes-nun (or child) cases and think “If only those Roman Catholic priests were allowed to marry [read: fuck their wives].” As if having sex, whatever that is, is an “outlet” which alleviates the will to rape. As if rape isn’t sex, for the rapist. As if any man can’t masturbate if he is feeling “horny”, and as if “horniness” in hegemonically heterosexual men is not politically bound up with the political entitlement to have visual or physical sexual access to women at will.

   CRAP, is what it all is. Nothing but CRAP.

   31 August 2006, 1:54 pm

7. DeAnander:

   Greed not need.

   31 August 2006, 3:06 pm

8. Stan:

   Yes, the “hydraulic theory.” (-:

   31 August 2006, 8:16 pm

9. kimberley:

   there is so much wrong here it’s wrong how wrong it is. jarhead? you’re quoting movies to make a point? have you absolutely no concept whatsoever of reality? and while you’re busily bashing the media for their oft times inaccurate and biased reporting, perhaps you should remove the mote from your own eye. “reigning redneck of the bunch” “Sex isn’t exactly available, though servicemen make do by way of rape” gross, blanket generalizations anyone? yes. they all rape. every single one of them. all the time. they hardly have time to torture and kill because they’re so busy raping all the time.

   please. you make me ill. perhaps you despise our armed forces, but you don’t speak for me. stick to what you’re best at, arm chair strategizing and black helicopter conspiracy theorizing from the safety of your cozy, safe little home, while they’re out there fighting every day and night for your right to spout asinine judgments about their service.

   1 September 2006, 3:27 am

10. Doyle Saylor:

    kimberly writes;
    please. you make me ill. perhaps you despise our armed forces, but you don’t speak for me. stick to what you’re best at, arm chair strategizing and black helicopter conspiracy theorizing from the safety of your cozy, safe little home, while they’re out there fighting every day and night for your right to spout asinine judgments about their service.

    Doyle;
    Making you ill is a metaphor for disgust. Disgust is anti-social ‘feeling’ which is a basis for brick wall social relations. If you have a problem with the generalizations why not think about how to make your point less rigidly?

    The power of a blog is the conversation. Engagement of people to each other. In doing that you ‘risk’ changing your mind. But over all it’s harmless.

    Over generalizations are a fault of course, but generalizations from local experience is a profound way to think about the ‘meaning’ of things. Give people room to be partly wrong and partly right and that will free you and them to rise above errors.
    thanks,
    Doyle Saylor

    1 September 2006, 9:04 am

11. Doyle Saylor:

    Stan writes;
    Yes, the “hydraulic theory.” (-:

    Doyle;
    In psychology there is a phrase I found rather strong in my own experience. ‘Attachment Hunger’. Sex in itself is sort of boring. More or less soon enough one gets tired of someone one doesn’t care about, and sex dies in a quiet bed. But Attachment Hunger motivates to glom on or leach like cling to another person via intimacy contact to ease the ‘Hunger’ for contact. Like Disgust, Attachment Hunger is implacable in denying the reality of human Attachments which must be flexible and ‘nurturing’ of human development in a complex environment.

    Overall human beings are more likely to be influenced by eating socially than sex. One needs in any case some sort of way to ‘understand’ the emotional ‘pain’ structure that underlies capitalist economic relationships. Being insecure, marginalized, unable to fullfill needs then ‘intensifies’ feelings, ‘hungers’ like Attachment Hunger are created by abuse structures which result in rigidities and brickwall defenses against pain. I have felt that Attachment Hunger, and because I take anti-depressants the ‘Attachment Hunger” subsides and does not affect how I feel about social contacts with other people though I recognize the ‘reasoning’ of strong attachments in relation to abuse I’ve lived through.

    Another form of Attachment Hunger is PTSD. That is in extremely stressful violent environments of war, people’s internal emotional landscape is re-shaped by the intense feelings of battle into a re-curring upsurge of feelings. That’s really describing ‘Attachment Hunger’ as a hunger to re-live the emotional landscape of battle to resolve the fear/pain being raised in other circumstances, an upsurge in intense feelings that ‘insecures’ social relationships.

    The left viewed material ‘well-being’ as sufficient to address ‘family’ depravation in terms of capitalist pain structures. The end result is that women have not been lifted to liberation by addressing material wants like living space and enough food and education.

    Most of women’s work is still the family system. Emotional attachment abused in the family by mom or dad, produces long lasting ‘pain’ structures like Attachment Hunger that always shape social connections afterward. Producing people who can’t be socialized in ways that yield ‘happiness’.

    To address that one must call into question things like ‘Attachment Hunger’, the intensification of emotions due to abusive family emotional structures into brickwall/disgust/shame pain structures that block social connection. Or in battle pro-longed terror of death, or in unemployment utter shut down of emotions in dire chronic depression.

    Men and women desire and long for ‘intimate’ social contact in which sharing the bathroom, the bed, the dinner table foster deep emotional attachments and to which children also can grow into ‘happy’ people. To me it’s fundamentally wrong for Julian to write;

    Julian;
    CRAP, is what it all is. Nothing but CRAP.

    Doyle;
    Because the emotion being described is brickwall disgust. Not a social view at all but a pull back and refusal to engage.
    thanks,
    Doyle Saylor

    1 September 2006, 9:36 am

12. Charles Brown:

    Let me say first , I don’t say any of the below to be confrontational. I have read at length people’s ideas here on heterosex, and I have posted enough for others to know how I differ.

    It is difficult for me to see how there is no instinctive component to the desire to have heterosex,in both women and men. True , it is not like the instinct to eat , drink, sleep , et al. as these all will result in death of the organism if denied for long. However, in the larger biological picture, failure to have heterosex will cause the extinction of the species. This is a fundamental principle of biology, and we as humans are still subject to this law of biology. Put another way, there are strong biological reasons that nature would “put” and sustain a heterosexual instinct in at least a major mass of any animal population. I can’t see why humans would be an exception to this principle. Even as much of human history is an effort to transcend the limits of nature - to become “supernatural” ,in sense - ,humans remain animals, with necesary natural requirements and limits.

    All non-human primates don’t have culture and tradition. Their reproductive practices can’t be socially constructed, because they don’t have social construction as humans have so much. So, their heterosex has to be instinctive. A group of primates without heterosexual instinct would go extinct.

    I don’t see how the human species and groups would have lost this primate instinct. Why would they ? Cultural or socially constructed desire for heterosex would not cause the trait of instinctive heterosexual desire to go away.

    Today’s humans are still animals, with instincts, even with all the cultural overlay. A fundamental animal instinct is for heterosex. There can be individuals whose internal composition does not include heterosexual instinct, due to genetic mutation or congenital processes, but I’d have to see a historical biological argument as to how human heterxexual instinct has been obliterated for most of the population, before I could accept the claims here that hetersexual desire is all socially constructed, cultural.

    I can see that culture allows humans to suppress or discipline their instinct, or direct it to other than the opposite sex. Of course, people can successfully discipline themselves to be celebate. And male supremacist practices might cause women to lose their desire to have heterosex, that is sex with men. But I don’t see the _obliteration_ of the _underlying_ instinct in great masses of the population. I don’t see babies being born in large numbers without the instinct or rather the “kernel” of the instinct which comes to fruition with maturity, as with other bodily maturations in adolescence.

    The instinctive aspect of the desire for hetersex does not in any way justify rape or any male demand for sex from an unwanting woman. That desire for hetersex has a significant instinctive component does challenge the notion that women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.

    1 September 2006, 3:28 pm

13. DeAnander:

    the type of heterosex needed for reproductive purposes doesn’t much resemble the socially constructed desire.

    for one thing, women in a state of nature would probably not engage in sexual intercourse until this year’s baby was weaned, i.e. 2 years post-parturition.

    nor would men have an appetite for prepubescent females who cannot reproduce. women would not be attracted to males old enough to have lowered sperm counts. and so on. men would be most attracted to fecund body types, not to excessive slenderness. and so on.

    there’s much about human sexual behaviour that can’t be explained by recourse to simple theories of sex-as-reproduction. but then there’s much about bonobo sexual behaviour that can’t be explained that way either… bonobos clearly use sex as a social function. not merely a biologically generative act.

    most sexual activity in mammals is triggered hormonally and pheromonally by oestrus in the female (being “in heat”, a cyclical hormonal state in which female mammals who are normally indifferent or hostile to sexual overtures from males suddenly “get interested”). but human beings don’t manifest oestrus. this led (male!) sociobiologists in the 70’s to theorise that human females were “permanently receptive,” i.e. always in heat (some wishful thinking there, methinks, and a great deal of misogyny). the absence of a marked pattern of oestrus in human women is one strong deviation from the prevailing pattern of mammalian sexuality…

    whatever ‘instinctive’ sexual feelings we have, I suspect they are buried as deeply as our instinctive mammalian fear of fire (we love campfires and fireplaces) and our instinctive mammalian fear of large fast-moving objects (we love airplanes and race tracks). we are near-infinitely trainable, more easily than one can train the average horse not to shy at unnatural objects; and if our “instinctive sex drive” were so secure and reliable, why would the culture expend so much brainwashing, force, coercion to make us straight?

    it may well be that there is an inner drive to reproduce in women as well as men — the “baby clock panic” and other self-reported maternal urges lend credence to it — but women acting on pure animal instinct might regard sex with men as merely a means to pregnancy, not a a desirable end in itself (particularly since the act of impregnation is no big physical thrill for the average female and often failes to provide an orgasm). for many women the mutually absorbing fascination of a new baby, and the physical pleasures of breastfeeding and cuddling, might be far more emotionally and physically satisfying than “the act” which impregnates.

    but we’ll never know, because we have no control group of humans raised w/o culture. even japanese macaques have cultural traditions such as inherited rank; how much more deeply and complexly socialised are we…

    1 September 2006, 8:55 pm

14. DeAnander:

    OK, I have been putting this off because it’s so irritating… but I’ll try to deconstruct a few bits of the cluelessness.

    Tristam, who is otherwise on many occasions insightful, loftily pronounces that the news that strippers habe arr8ved in Haditha should not be a feature article. He’s wrong and right. He’s right that in the smarmy-jokey way it was presented in the ST, it was not worth a feature. But he’s wrong in that the fact of the importation of US strippers to put on a show for troops in Haditha is worth a feature article because of what it says about militarism, gender, sexism, triumphalism, etc. Tristam seems to relegate the story to unimportance because it is about women and/or sex, as if this automatically puts it beyond the pale of interesting journalism.

    This trivialising and dismissing of the sex industry’s manifestations is a major factor in allowing its abuses to go unchecked, much as clownish caricatures of occupied people (Arabs, Indians, Japanese etc) render their existence automatically “funny” or “entertaining” rather than newsworthy and make any story about their experience automatically beneath the notice of Serious People. Call it the Hardeharhar Syndrome.

    Tristam is onto the borderline paedophilia of the stripper circuit but again fails to connect this sexualisation of the teenage female with, say, the rape/murder of Abeer and the US media’s ghastly insistence on calling her “an Iraqi woman” long after her age (14 or 15) was known.

    Tristam’s contempt for the strippers exceeds even his contempt for the ST feature. In one long supercilious paragraph he dwells on the favourite gripe of leftist males against prostitutes — that they are for rent. He implicitly chides the young women for being strippers, for selling their photos online, and accuses them in passing of having silicone-enhanced breasts. He does not enquire about the terms of their employment, whether they work for a male management (pimping) hierarchy, how much of the take from their activities they actually pocket, and whether any putative breast implants were voluntary or a precondition for employment. He castigates them for the pathetic fakery of their “sexiness”, with none of the compassion and understanding of their economic and social milieu that suddenly leaps into play in the next graf when he considers the consumers (soldiers).

    “You can’t begrudge soldiers being soldiers,” though apparently Tristam can begrudge, in a huge way, hookers being hookers. Boys will be boys, the oldest excuse in the book. And then comes the old Blue Balls excuse for rape — as if providing more strip shows for Our Boys would have saved Abeer. As if the rape of female cadets by their fellow students in the citadel, or the rape of female enlistees by recruiting officers, was all due to a huge shortfall of nookie throughout the US military. [cf my link upthread on Greed]

    “This was no USO tour,” says Tristam, but in point of fact, updated for the hy0ersexualised early 21st century, it is a USO tour — a reassuring exposure of the troops to the homeland culture, a quick refresher inoculation against “going native,” a quick dose of White Womanhood and corporate culture and white supremacy to make them feel special.

    Tristam then gets — correctly — angry about the situation of this strip show in Haditha, where US troops had recently committed a minor massacre of civilians. But he seems more angry about the Times reporting on it than the military for organising it, in a kind of Rumsfeldian moment of shooting the messenger. He comes close for a moment to seeing a connection between the sex industry and male sexual predation, but again misses the boat — it’s apparently only wrong for the military to expose its troops to “whorish shows” while in-country; the 20 to 40 years of exposure to misogynist pornography, ubiquitous prostitution, that these all-American boys experienced before they went to Iraq apparently don’t count: the fact that no “whorish sex show on a plywood stage” occurred 8mmediately prior to the rape/murder of Abeer doesn’t seem to count either.

    Tristam wants it both ways: soldiers rape because they are deprived of sex and who can blame them, so why do a feature article on sex shows for soldiers — but just a few grafs later, soldiers rape because they are barbarised by the military’s provision of sex shows. He comes back to reality with a bump for a moment, noting accurately that this is one projection of “a mission that rotted long ago.”

    Tristam winds up with an indictment of the cultural insensitivity of this event — i.e. that it insults Iraqis by violating their cultural norms. He doesn’t seem to have time to wonder whether it might insult female troops or women in general — presumably because feminists are not in the habit of planting IEDs along the roadside? He can easily see that one answer to “Why Do They Hate Us” might very well be this kind of boorishness, but I will bet you a eurodollar that -as a Good Librul — he would find the rage of, say, an Andrea Dworkin totally incomprehensible and irrational.

    Beautiful example of the doublethink and cog diss of liberals re the sex industry. Which is why it caught my eye.

    1 September 2006, 9:29 pm

15. DeAnander:

    oops I forgot to finish a thought… He comes back to reality with a bump for a moment, noting accurately that this is one projection of “a mission that rotted long ago.”

    here Tristam fails to connect another dot: that the mission of invading Afghanistan and Iraq is in part =- not in whole but in part — a component of the wingnut Kulturkampf one of whose agenda items is the resubjugation of women. from 9/11 onwards the revalorisation of dominant masculinity has been high on the media programme of the wingnut echo chamber. the “girly show” for US troops, and the message this sends to women in the forces, women in Iraq, and women back home, are part of the mission all right. part of the mission because the mission is against women and against feminism as well as against the poor, against nonwhites, against Muslims, against the Constitution and international law. etc.

    1 September 2006, 9:45 pm

16. DeAnander:

    or in other words, they can’t quite get away with a New Christy Minstrel Show, but they can get away with the gender equivalent… (well actually a drag show might be more the equiv of a minstrel show, but you get my drift) — left to themselves the troops at AG used their prisoners for both.

    1 September 2006, 9:49 pm

17. Stan:

    Most people cook food. It seems unlikely that there is a cooking instinct, however. I doubt anyone has suggested that there is not some hormonal-biological basis for that “itch” that humans feel. That it underlies, as some biological basis, reproductive sex does not in any more serve to privilege heterosexual coupling as one expression of that “itch”, combined IN EVERY CASE with powerful cultural conditioning, over any other erotic expression, any more than raw food is more an expression of “human nature” than cooked food.

    No one seems to live in fear that our species will disappear for lack of generative sex. That completely misses the point; and seems to suggest that heterosex is natural while other forms of sexual expression are not. This is not a biological point that gets made by privileging heterosex as “natural,” but an ideological one.

    If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.

    The use of the word “instinct” is also ideological, whether it is understood as such or not. Instinct is more akin to behavior that is involuntarily ritualized in its expression. As the mirror neuron post and others have suggested, human nature, as even neurophysiology is showng now, is such that we are biologically determined to NOT be biologically determined. We are wired for cultural determination. Our insincts have largely disappeared along the old evolutionary trail somewhere.

    No one has suggested that “women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.” What we are saying is that heterosex is so thoroughly and (for now) inextricably imbricated with our socialization into patriarchy (compulsory heterosexuality, gender as a hierarchical system) that no sexual encounter in this society happens without being inflected by that hierarchy. that is not a moral judgement, even though it has prfound ethical implication. It is a sociological observation based on the rejection of bourgeois, patriarchal science and society’s notion that actions can take place apart from their social context. They clearly cannot.

    Men are in power, so it is not surprising that we are attracted to the notion that women’s desire for us is purely a consequence of our attractive-ness (wait, that is constructed, too… drat!)… the reality is that if we are to take sexuality serously as a political issue, an issue of power, then we are duty-bound to abandon, by force of will initially, these self-aggrandizing rationalizations and the defensiveness that motivates them, and accept that political responsibility in this instance is no different than it is in other areas… like class privilege, or in my own case (not yours) white privilege. We cannot pretend the power dynamic is not there, even in the most respectful and loving heterosexual relationships. I can assure you every woman senses the existence of this power gradient, all the time. Solidarity requires that we do too.

    1 September 2006, 10:45 pm

18. Kevin:

    Stan,
    How is this any different from the USO visits you had in Nam?

    2 September 2006, 5:02 am

19. Stan:

    (1) I was in the infantry in northern Bin Dinh Province. The USO didn’t come there. I never saw a USO show.

    (2) It is no different. It’s the same.

    (3) The thread is about the article, and all the creepy assumptions and blind spots in it; but we could certainly talk about the whole notion of USO shows, including the sexually exploitative aspects of them.

    2 September 2006, 10:15 am

20. Kevin:

    The Perfect Angels went to our FOB. They were in good taste and did not seem sexually exploitive. Keep in mind that this is not the same show they do at trade events or bike ralleys.

    2 September 2006, 3:57 pm

21. Stan:

    Kevin,

    Friendly advice from an old retired sarge… get up to speed here, brother. They are called “perfect angels,” they are displayed as very typical sex objects, and they perform to the hoots of posturing males.

    Go back and read the much earlier posts on gender, and page through the comments and debates. You are coming to a firefight with a pocket knife. Nothing personal directed at you. You are who I want to have the conversation with. I’m just asking you to take this bit of initiative, familiarize yourself the level of discussion that is going on here with regard to gender, then come back. I don’t for one minute doubt that you have the native skill and ability, but you haven’t assimilated some of the basic concepts. You don’t need to agree with them; but you do need to at least understan d them.

    But what we do here is take those very assumptions that we thought were beyond question, and question them.

    I hope you are home and not still at the FOB.

    2 September 2006, 6:27 pm

22. Kevin:

    MSG Goff,
    I am well versed on gender. The topic is chicken shit; those were former NFL cheerleaders performing song and dance to a croud of warriors. Why not attack Kathy Griffin for her little USO stunt, asking the crowd for sex and rambling on about her vagina?

    2 September 2006, 7:24 pm

23. Stan:

    Bye Kevin.

    2 September 2006, 10:42 pm

24. lesliemai:

    i live in iran, and i do not want this kafr demrocacy here, when the white man come he bring all his immoral behavour, then white man wonders why we kill him on the battle field in fierce fights. our brothers in iraq will chase the amerikan satan from its ancient lands, and seeing artical like this make it even easier. i can take a measure of happiness in the knowledge that in the end we will stamp out this immoral behavior and the amerkian terrorists will be chased home as they were in vietnam.

    3 September 2006, 8:04 am

25. DeAnander:

    another thought has been nagging at me ever since reading this irritating oped, and that is the quote from Jarhead author Swofford: “I’d just turned seventeen. I’d had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs. I was sold.”

    time for some deconstruction. first off, as we’ve discussed before, Swofford evidently doesn’t believe that oral or manual sex is “sex”. he had sexual congress, presumably with women (?) 22 times by my count, but by his count only 3 times — we are left to assume that those three times involved screwing and nothing else really counts. it’s all phallocentric, but it gets even more patriarchal than mere phallocentricity: if he doesn’t penetrate another body with his own then it is not really sex, even if he experiences orgasm. now we are back to the defining memes of intromissive and receptive, dominance and submission, and why men involved in e.g. prison sexual relations think they are safely “straight” so long as they screw other men instead of being screwed themselves.

    next — and this is something that had been nagging at me for years but has finally come into focus with this article — consider the colloquial and rather brutal locutions “blow job” and “hand job.” these are count nouns, not verbs or even noncount nouns like “sex”. Swofford didn’t say, “five times I was lucky enough to receive fellatio to the point of climax,” or “I’ve been fellated five times,” or even, “I’ve been given oral sex five times,” let alone “five times someone pleasured me with her mouth,” or “five times I managed to talk a woman into sucking me off” which might at least have introduced some mention of a partner with some degree of agency in the matter.

    he says this as matter of factly as he might say that he’s eaten a cordon bleu steak 5 times, with no particular need to mention the chef or the waiter or the name of the restaurant. the servitors are erased, and the primary relationship is between the consumer and the thing consumed.

    I think there’s a reason — other than the conventional euphemistic tendencies of my middle class upbringing — why the terms “blow job” and “hand job” ring so unpleasantly in my ear: and that is because they are the language of prostitution, of commodified, Taylorised sex. a “job” is a unit of work, not a unit of play. [day job, steady job, second job, blow job, jobbing plumber, hand job, job offer, jobs wanted, get a job…]

    a “blow job” is a standard option on the menu of services available from a brothel for a standardised price. it is defined by the recipient’s experience, not the provider’s: translated into plodding literal-minded English for an alien anthropologist it means “fellatio patiently continued to the point of male orgasm”. “oral sex” might start and resume, intensify or lighten up, according to whim or flirtation or mood or playfulness — but a “blow job” is work: it has a specific goal, and the customer/recipient is the one who decides when the job is done, not the provider: it ain’t over until the phallus sings. it’s a reified, standardised product with a price tag, a recognised “unit of sex” provided by a servant or worker to a consumer, in a transactional context where sex is a unitised, measured and priced quantity rather than a free and spontaneous nonquantified flow of reciprocal touching and exploring (play rather than work) between equals.

    I note that there is no equivalent term — not one that I’ve ever heard, at any rate, and I have not spent the last 50 years in a nunnery — for sexual acts that provide female pleasure. “cunnilingus” is a noncount and scholarly term for an activity, a practise — not for a unit of commercial exchange or a standardised, commodified procedure. we do not say, “mouth job” or “tongue job” (not to my knowledge anyway) for oral sex received by a female. and I don’t think there is any necessary implication of success in the colloquial phrase “he went down on his girlfriend” — whether she experienced orgasm or not remains unspecified. we have no count noun either for stimulation of the nipples, whether by mouth or hand — the closest I’ve ever heard was the awkward locution “a first-rate nipple-tonguing” (improbably uttered by the lead actor in the Britcom ‘Chef’ and notably he was referring to a malerecipient, not a female — ain’t that interesting?).

    my conclusion is that the controlling metaphor of prostitution — the marketisation, taylorisation, scripting, prohibition of spontenaity, prohibition of intersubjectivity in sexual congress — is wired into the language at more levels than I had realised (even after almost 3 decades of thinking about gender and power). the dominant heterosexual paradigm is that sex — for women — is work… i.e. that all “normal” or socially conformant sex is, in essence, prostitution.

    capitalism and patriarchy dictate how we are allowed to conceptualise sex. to go back to the weary old Whorfian Hypothesis, we are very short of words for snow — and this helps to keep us incapable of perceiving, referring to, or imagining the different kinds of actually-existing snow right in front of us.

    5 September 2006, 9:46 pm

26. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    my conclusion is that the controlling metaphor of prostitution — the marketisation, taylorisation, scripting, prohibition of spontenaity, prohibition of intersubjectivity in sexual congress — is wired into the language at more levels than I had realised (even after almost 3 decades of thinking about gender and power). the dominant heterosexual paradigm is that sex — for women — is work… i.e. that all “normal” or socially conformant sex is, in essence, prostitution.

    Doyle;
    You can go to Wikipedia to get slang that represents female versions of what you found for men. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_slang

    That is beside the point. Your analysis comes close to a distinction about sex between impersonal and personal private sex. But your analysis fails to name what is different. It’s how partners’ ‘feel’, rather just sex. Sex is not gender specific as your comment really straightforwardly shows. The only gender specific part is childbirth. The penis and clitoris are the same organ in slightly different arrangements.

    The conundrum that Charles Brown brings up about instincts comes in here. Het sex is instinctive so Charles claims. That seems false to me. What is instinctual is to be hungry for sexual climax. Whatever creates that is immaterial. In that sense the fundamental abuse is emotional rather than what ever achieves the climax. In your words ‘agency’, but I think that rather indistinct. We ‘feel’ connected, and the connection can yield us pain mentally or it can be positive and healthful connection. Prostitutes cannot offer emotional connection. They just offer a rubbing post like a cat uses. Male or Female prostitutes.

    What is awry is the general poor or impoverished social connection for the working class. Sex is just one example, but in the case of women there is a difference that matters in terms of social justice.

    Women work more than men to make social connection. Making dinner, taking care of babies, etc., are all means to derive socially felt (emotional) connections to others. This connection work is so narrow in scale compared to public processes of state connection we tend to think it’s impossible to ‘control’ or administer. It’s left up to people how they screw.

    This narrowness of social connection best described this way, family connection, friendship connection, describes the ’sphere’ of emotional knowledge production. The reason women do not rise up is two fold, breaking social connections is extremely painful. That hinders the rational thought, and how do all women unite around how to feel that truly address the social injustice that women experience doing care work?

    Child care does not answer personal connection. A child may love their kinder teacher, but the attachment to a parent is the ‘true’ feeling. Or at least this society says that. It means we don’t have a equitable understanding of the distribution of emotional connection in society. This can not be addressed by a state revolution in so far as no state can guarantee emotionally equal distribution of such knowledge.
    thanks,
    Doyle

    6 September 2006, 12:53 pm

27. AradhanaDevindra:

    DeAnder - brilliant analysis of sex and prostitution…

    

    6 September 2006, 7:04 pm

28. Yolanda Carrington:

    Doyle, I just gotta say—your last post—c’mon now. You’re a bio-man for God’s sake.

    “Sex is not gender specific as your comment really straightforwardly shows. The only gender specific part is childbirth. The penis and clitoris are the same organ in slightly different arrangements.”

    Dude, that’s freakin’ bull and you know it. Every man and woman ALIVE knows it. Sheesh. Oh, and I went to the Wiki page too, and it don’t refute De’s point ONE BIT. You need to step up your game, man.

    6 September 2006, 10:34 pm

29. Doyle Saylor:

    Yolanda,
    Dude, that’s freakin’ bull and you know it. Every man and woman ALIVE knows it. Sheesh. Oh, and I went to the Wiki page too, and it don’t refute De’s point ONE BIT. You need to step up your game, man.

    Doyle;
    I hope I wasn’t being so critical sounding of the slang reference DeAnander brought up to seem I was refuting DeAnander. What I want to do is clarify and shift the discussion in directions I think work best.

    How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda? When you say it’s bull, my statement what is weak about it? Comparing clitoris and penis? What my reference to the Wiki meant?

    Over all my focus is to find the best sort of emotional understanding of what patriarchal structure does. Because I think that is the angle that offers realistic avenues of change. And the change needs to both done, and requires a radical shift in society.
    Doyle

    7 September 2006, 11:40 am

30. DeAnander:

    agree with Yolanda… despite an ingenious unlikelihood in the novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the clitoris is not a penetrative member. in terms of biomorphology or anatomy it is an “analogous” structure, not “the same organ in slightly [emphasis mine] different arrangements.”

    many of Doyle’s comments seem (to my ear) consciously or unconsciously to attempt to erase gender and sex differentiation, to defend or propose a kind of “gender blindness” which imho has the same advantages and defects as liberal attempts at “colour blindness” [sorry about the race analogy but I think it holds up here because the obfuscatory power is so similar — and I do mean obfuscatory, not clarifying]…

    it is a good thing to remember that we’re all human beings and most of our hierarchy is purely artificial; that we all shared a common small set of ancestors 4 or 5 millennia back, that all our genomes are damn near identical; that the commonality between male and female bodies is far greater than the differences. that “race” is an artificial construct and so is gender.

    BUT in the real present, in our embodied and socialised selves, in our houses, at our workplaces, on our streets, in our beds, those “slight” differences are the difference between the rapist and his socially sanctioned prey. not so slight, in practise.

    I also did not find any phrase in the wikipedia cite that was female-centric but otherwise semantically equivalent to BJ or HJ.

    7 September 2006, 3:21 pm

31. elaina:

    Doyle: How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda? When you say it’s bull, my statement what is weak about it? Comparing clitoris and penis? What my reference to the Wiki meant?

    What’s weak about your statement, Doyle, is that whether or not these body parts function similarly in a reflexive manner (that’s to say, to the person to whom they belong) I think it’s BLARINGLY obvious why we can’t say they’re “essentially the same thing,”
    even if you DO add the “in different arrangements” caviat.
    The sexual feelings/sensations felt by the person wearing the penis or the clitoris is NOT the only function that said body parts have. So the parts indeed are different, from a functional standpoint. But also from an emotional/symbolic/functional standpoint as regards OPPRESSION. Totally different thingies. For real.

    Men rape with penises. Women do not (and if there’s some random .000000000000000000000001% of women who have a big enough clitoris to commit a rape with the part, then I don’t want to hear it, because exceptions do not “disprove” rules, in reality as we know it).
    When recieving cunnilingus, it’s a bit difficult for a woman to choke her partner with her clitoris. The penis HAS BEEN a weapon of oppression. The clitoris has not. Men use their penises to hurt women, and men do terrible things to women’s clitori to hurt women.

    Men have systematically exploited the differences in physiology between themselves and women for a very long time. To say that that’s not so is, as Yola put it, “bull.”

    The ways that men have sex with us CAN HURT VERY MUCH. Some of us do train ourselves to enjoy that. I ain’t gonna lie. But that doesn’t make it right or non-existent. A lot of times the emotional coldness or dismissiveness that men have towards us when using us for sex is very clear in the man’s body language, and the ways that he uses his body to engage with us. Men are often rough or avoid body contact OTHER than his genitals to her *whatever*. And to add to that, we’re often objectified by men we love when we perform oral sex on them. How? “Turn that way.” “Let me hold your hair back.” “Suck it like this, or like that.” OR the hair-pulling. OR the hand-on-the-back-of-the-head. Or the lack of proper notice before… well. You get the point, I hope.

    That some women flip this scenario around in an attempt to objectify men, or whatever, is moot. This is how the patriarchy TRAINS women to do what it is that they are supposed to do to please men sexually. It’s part of the program, as it were. The program also serves to tell women what they are supposed to like as well. There are lots of women who think that liberation is tantamount to abstract equality (which doesn’t really exist, aside from it’s ideational form) and to obtain abstract equality, most women act like “one of the boys” and take on patriarchal mannerisms that invade, yup, their sex lives. Big fuckin’ surprise.

    The clitoris, for us, has historically and materially been NOTHING LIKE the penis, in terms of power-symbolism. It has been mutilated, it has been removed from us, it has been ignored. Church steeples and other phallic goodies that we see everyday are not modeled after clitori.

    The world has never revolved around the clitoris. While I guess there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying that in some aspects it’s functionality in regards to the sexual sensations it gives the person who has it is similar to those of the penis, this isn’t really productive, I don’t think, in this conversation. And yeah, you have to be that specific when you talk about it in order to be correct and not over-lumping. And I don’t really care what Wiki says about it, but I’ll go and read it anyways, when I have the time.

    Egad. Not meaning to sound harsh. But I gotta agree with Yolanda.

    7 September 2006, 4:33 pm

32. Audrey:

    Doyle, I’m with Yolanda here. Saying male and female organs are the same thing, just in different configurations, is a nice way to replace hard reality with abstract theory. It’s a bit like claiming chickens and eggs are the same thing, based on DNA and cells and whatnot. If you’ve ever tried jamming a live chicken in a fry pan and melting cheese on top of it, you’ll know it ain’t the same thing at all.

    Also, this question: “How can I clarify the confusion I have sewn in your mind Yolanda?” is some seriously patronizing BS. If you’re really interested in the “emotional understanding of what patriarchal structure does”, you might start right there, asking yourself why you characterize her disagreement with you as “confusion” on HER part.

    7 September 2006, 6:10 pm

33. DeAnander:

    oh yeah… imho Yolanda’s not the one who’s confused

    I meant to say that, thanks Audrey.

    7 September 2006, 6:59 pm

34. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    many of Doyle’s comments seem (to my ear) consciously or unconsciously to attempt to erase gender and sex differentiation, to defend or propose a kind of “gender blindness” which imho has the same advantages and defects as liberal attempts at “colour blindness” [sorry about the race analogy but I think it holds up here because the obfuscatory power is so similar — and I do mean obfuscatory, not clarifying]…

    Doyle;
    Sex differentiation is a fact. The point is not to confuse what society proscribes with what humans can do through ‘instinct’. Human beings can have sex with either sex at will. The fact that humans choose to reproduce is not as far as I can tell based upon an automatic male female act. People in general ‘learn’ to like/love someone else or they are forced by family to mate in cultures that still control the sex partnership choices of young people.

    While it may seem to you that color blindness is a liberal doctrine based upon U.S. history, I’m not advocating that, but I think your point about color blindness is also wrong. That any sort of political view of human beings has to take into account how people ‘recognize’ each other. That recognition functions as the primary way we know to feel something. I am saying that bj and hj are equivalent to scissoring, or rubbing (tribology), frot (frottage), and so on are all just ways of saying how female perform sex for their own pleasure specific and parallel to hj, bj. And that is what all human beings do with sex. And those are distinct from oppression based upon Patriarchy, in other words humans can still have sex and not be oppressive. That unequal relations can change.

    However you touch upon what I think is singularly strong about this parallel, racism and sexism have in common how people connect. To attack that as a Marxist I look at the work people do that is unequal, and oppressive, rather than I look for unthinking solutions. Unthinking solutions have to do with biological instinct.

    As to obfuscating, I’m glad to clarify to clear away obfuscating. Nor am I am interested in concealing oppression under a nice patois. My choice is to expose the ‘reality’ of a sexist and Patriarchal society.

    DeAnander writes;
    I think it’s BLARINGLY obvious why we can’t say they’re “essentially the same thing,”
    even if you DO add the “in different arrangements” caviat.

    Doyle;
    Social structure is what you are talking about, penis and clitoris perform the same function in sexual activity. They are homological features of the same body plan. For some reason you haven’t heard this before? In any case it ought not to threaten your basic views on Patriarchy. It is not biological differentiation, it is human consciousness that makes Patriarchy happen. The danger in saying so much depends upon sex differences these things DeAnander can add up as an average women is not as large as the average man. And that sort of biological determinism doesn’t raise why short small men can be world dictators like Stalin, or Napolean. Or that women are leaders on the national level like Thatcher, or Indira Ghandi.

    DeAnander writes;
    The penis HAS BEEN a weapon of oppression. The clitoris has not. Men use their penises to hurt women, and men do terrible things to women’s clitori to hurt women.

    Doyle;
    Rape is a social act, not an inherit biological fact. The penis can penetrate and most women’ clitorises can’t. But if a woman wants to she can use a steel pipe and penetrate to show power. But most women abhor the very idea. And that’s what we are talking about is power to hurt and oppress, not the comparative length of clitoris and penis. Female hyenas have bigger clitorises than male hyenas penises. The biological features of sex organs shift around a lot, and understanding that is to understand that humans do things beside what biology dictates.

    To repeat for clarity, sex itself is not gender specific. Male or Female can have sex with either sex at will. The next statement is not a repetition, oppression is not about penis length it is about the emotional prison that patriarchy creates for women. The bad thing in rape is the physical pain, and the emotional pain. The feeling is the key element. No more pain infliction and women are no longer oppressed. The problem is that tells us very little. As Lenin would say, What is to be done?

    Your point DeAnander is to focus upon intense feelings instead of having a holistic view of the process of a Patriarchal emotional mal distribution of power between men and women. How do intense feelings connect up with the whole of the social life? If people never got in a rage would that stop oppression? No. What would be necessary is to point intense oppression feelings elsewhere. Male rapist never rape any woman again, they might hj but they never rape again.
    Take care,
    Doyle

    7 September 2006, 7:51 pm

35. Stan:

    Doyle, please.

    I’m not moderating you out, becuse you haven’t broken any rules. But your disconnnected nonsense reminds me of the way I used to write when I was smoking pot morning, noon, and night. It felt profound when I wrote it, but none of it made any sense with the next morning’s coffee (until I lit up another doob).

    The fact that you puncutate this gibberish with occasonal outbursts of pedantic arrogance, like:

    “Social structure is what you are talking about, penis and clitoris perform the same function in sexual activity. They are homological features of the same body plan. For some reason you haven’t heard this before? In any case it ought not to threaten your basic views on Patriarchy.”…

    …is what no doubt compels many of us to reply to you. My recommendation, which I heretofore pledge to follow myself (to the best of my ability), is that the rest of us ignore it. The record shows, so far, that replying to this incoherent babble-text, with the expectation that said replies might stimulate more coherent babble-text, has proven to be a false assumption.

    7 September 2006, 9:49 pm

36. DeAnander:

    Ummm, whatever Doyle’s smoking, it’s got him confused enough to think that elaina is DeAnander Hints: different prose style, different signature. When attempting to refute a debating partner, first try to get their name right — just a helpful tip for more convincing presentations.

    8 September 2006, 1:47 am

37. Doyle Saylor:

    DeAnander writes;
    Ummm, whatever Doyle’s smoking, it’s got him confused enough to think that elaina is DeAnander Hints: different prose style, different signature.

    Doyle;
    Yes my error, this is correct.

    Stan writes;
    so far, that replying to this incoherent babble-text, with the expectation that said replies might stimulate more coherent babble-text, has proven to be a false assumption.

    Doyle;
    I don’t smoke dope. This is an unfair statement just to round up my thoughts and say it’s babble. Making broad generalizations like this is not what makes discussion work. In other words, you are the one who won’t make the effort. Not me. I’m not responsible for being closed off to you. How does being closed down make a broad functional liberation movement for women?

    For the left we need better ways to resolve such questions.
    Doyle

    8 September 2006, 10:14 am

38. elaina:

    Yeah.

    And I’ll just add for the sake of WHATEVER, I don’t really want to call it “argument,” but I think it needs to be added that BIOLOGICAL males have been PHYSICALLY RAPING BIOLOGICAL FEMALES with their PENISES (and other vaguely penis-ish objects) for a very, very long time. Yup, it’s a sociological mode of control. But sociology and biology are not separate or distinct from one another.

    Just for refreshment purposes: SOCIAL STRUCTURES CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT BIOLOGICAL HUMANS TO LIVE WITHIN THEM AND MAKE THEM. How fucking hard is that to understand?

    Rape is indeed a social act. No shit, sherlock. What I would like to know is how social acts play out, if they don’t play out through physical bodies?

    Is rape all in my head? I don’t think so.

    Gah. I think I’ll take your advice Stan, and ignore this weirdness from here on out. It’s making me loopy.

    8 September 2006, 11:56 am

39. Timothy R. Anderson:

    Dedicated to the choooosy among us.
    This is a reminder from October 2003 that the senior officials of the USA’s federal government take ” brief visits ” to Iraq ; they then have ” views ”
    different than the soldiers who serve on the ground in Iraq, hours and hours and hours and days and days and days and days and weeks and weeks and months and months and years and years ………..

    ( Guardian , Friday October 17, 2003 )

    ” A sizeable portion of US military forces serving in Iraq describe troop morale as low, and say they have no intention of re-enlisting, damaging the campaign by the US government to brighten up the image of the postwar occupation. ”

    ” The survey of 1,935 soldiers , published in a series of special reports on Iraq in the
    ‘ Stars and Stripes ‘ newspaper , also found that a significant number of soldiers were confused about the purpose of their presence,
    and had lost faith in their mission. ”

    ” Coinciding with the report, the US Army, yesterday ( Thursday October 16, 2003 ) admitted that at least thirteen US soldiers had committed suicide in Iraq , representing more than 10 % of American non-combat deaths there .
    The US Army said it had sent a suicide-prevention expert to Iraq. ”

    ” ‘ Stars And Stripes ‘ , which is funded by the Pentagon, says it embarked on the project
    after receiving scores of letters from disen-
    chanted US military servicemen and US military
    servicewomen. ”

    ” The mailbags belied the claims made by President Bush, last week, that increasingly negative public perceptions of his Iraq War were the product of media spin ; and that those who had been in Iraq held different views. Not so for those serving up to 12 months in Iraq , according to ‘Stars And Stripes’,
    which noted that the soldiers’ views stood in sharp contrast to those of senior officials
    on brief visits to Iraq. ”

    That’s the main bit right there. I mean, geeeeez Louise, this fiasco reeeeeks of hypocrisy . The regular G.I. Joe is truthful - enough to point out that the situation is totally f…ked up and what happens ? Some “senior official ” turns up for a 1 / 2
    day ” look around ” and says it ain’t a f…ked up situation at all.

    Well, well, well. The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk ) was courageous enough to say it back then, when Suzanne Goldenberg reported this. I would hope that the organizations such as I.A.V.A. ( http://www.iava.org )
    would be courageous enough to say it, loudly, right now,
    because………………..

    because, since October 2003 , some US soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq . Because since October 2003 , some US soldiers have returned to the US and then gone to Iraq AGAIN .

    Because since October 2003 , more than FOURTEeEN thousand US soldiers have been wounded in President Bush’s Iraq War.
    Because since October 2003 , more than ONE ThousaND NINE HunDRED FIFTY US soldiers have been killed in Iraq.

    Uh, Butler said it, ” War is a racket. ”
    please consider signing the petition at
    http://www.warisaracket.org

    Timothy R. Anderson 9 / 8

    8 September 2006, 1:35 pm

40. Charles Brown:

    Comment by DeAnander — 9/1/2006 @ 8:55 pm

    the type of heterosex needed for reproductive purposes doesn’t much resemble the socially constructed desire.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Sure. Can’t be around this blog without being made conscious of the vast amount and range of male supremacist, violent, vicious, criminal sex types. However, I don’t think that it has been demonstrated that these “desires” are universal. For “one” , I don’t have that type of sexual desire. I’m not ready to believe I’m the only man in the world whose doesn’t desire, consciously or unconsciously, to commit sexual crimes against women.

    So, SOME heterosexual desire ain’t like the type we want in this world.

    ^^^^^^

    for one thing, women in a state of nature would probably not engage in sexual intercourse until this year’s baby was weaned, i.e. 2 years post-parturition.

    ^^^^^
    CB: As you mention below, human women don’t have estrus, uniquely among primates. This cuts against what you say above. Don’t underestimate the ability of ancient women to develop contraceptives, etc. I’m not sure why you don think women wouldn’t want to have sex until after weaning.

    ^^^^^^^

    nor would men have an appetite for prepubescent females who cannot reproduce. women would not be attracted to males old enough to have lowered sperm counts. and so on. men would be most attracted to fecund body types, not to excessive slenderness. and so on.
    ^^^^^^
    CB: Agree. “Instintive” attraction would start at pubescence, by the general logic of what I am saying. Of course, again, this instinct is culturally modifiable.

    note: pubescents are minors today.

    ^^^^^^^

    there’s much about human sexual behaviour that can’t be explained by recourse to simple theories of sex-as-reproduction. but then there’s much about bonobo sexual behaviour that can’t be explained that way either… bonobos clearly use sex as a social function. not merely a biologically generative act.

    ^^^^^^^

    CB: Yes, there is much about human eating and food customs that can’t be explained by the need for nutrition to live. We have culture. However, underneath all that culture piled up, there remains in hunger a kernel physiological need. My hypothesis is that underneath all that culture piled up in sex, there remains the biological generated want.

    ^^^^^^^

    most sexual activity in mammals is triggered hormonally and pheromonally by oestrus in the female (being “in heat”, a cyclical hormonal state in which female mammals who are normally indifferent or hostile to sexual overtures from males suddenly “get interested”). but human beings don’t manifest oestrus. this led (male!) sociobiologists in the 70’s to theorise that human females were “permanently receptive,” i.e. always in heat (some wishful thinking there, methinks, and a great deal of misogyny). the absence of a marked pattern of oestrus in human women is one strong deviation from the prevailing pattern of mammalian sexuality…

    ^^^^^
    CB: See comment above on estrus. and lack of.

    ^^^^^^

    whatever ‘instinctive’ sexual feelings we have, I suspect they are buried as deeply as our instinctive mammalian fear of fire (we love campfires and fireplaces) and our instinctive mammalian fear of large fast-moving objects (we love airplanes and race tracks). we are near-infinitely trainable, more easily than one can train the average horse not to shy at unnatural objects; and if our “instinctive sex drive” were so secure and reliable, why would the culture expend so much brainwashing, force, coercion to make us straight?

    ^^^^^^
    CB: I’m not quite signed on to an instinct specifically fearing fire. I’d say we still have fight or flight instinct somewhere. But experience , training as you say, can teach that most airplanes don’t hit us. However, fear of fast moving cars may have an instinctual component. If you zoom a car past a baby , they might get afraid, run away.

    ^^^^^^^

    it may well be that there is an inner drive to reproduce in women as well as men — the “baby clock panic” and other self-reported maternal urges lend credence to it — but women acting on pure animal instinct might regard sex with men as merely a means to pregnancy, not a a desirable end in itself (particularly since the act of impregnation is no big physical thrill for the average female and often failes to provide an orgasm). for many women the mutually absorbing fascination of a new baby, and the physical pleasures of breastfeeding and cuddling, might be far more emotionally and physically satisfying than “the act” which impregnates.

    ^^^^^
    CB: On this, I am not proposing an instinct to directly reproduce. That might seem strange. I am proposing an instinct to have sex with the opposite sex without consciousness of trying to reproduce. Your argument or position here is a stronger heterosexual instinct than what I am proposing !

    I _would_ speculate that human females were the first beings (animals) to realize the connection between sex and pregnancy. Given the pains and labors of childbirth, it is significant that women still had heterosex all these thousands of years.

    ^^^^^^^
    but we’ll never know, because we have no control group of humans raised w/o culture. even japanese macaques have cultural traditions such as inherited rank; how much more deeply and complexly socialised are we…

    ^^^^^^^
    CB: Agree. We have to use abstraction to figure it out.

    I hear these reports of monkeys with “culture”. I’m still wondering about that. Did they get it from the humans who have been studying them so much for so long now ?

    13 September 2006, 11:11 am

41. Charles Brown:

    Comment by Stan — 9/1/2006 @ 10:45 pm

    * Most people cook food. It seems unlikely that there is a cooking instinct, however. I doubt anyone has suggested that there is not some hormonal-biological basis for that “itch” that humans feel. That it underlies, as some biological basis, reproductive sex does not in any more serve to privilege heterosexual coupling as one expression of that “itch”, combined IN EVERY CASE with powerful cultural conditioning, over any other erotic expression, any more than raw food is more an expression of “human nature” than cooked food.

    ^^^^^^

    CB: See my comment on food in response to DeAnander. The key thing on food is not the cooking but hunger. Different cultures have many different tastes, literally. However, underneath all this variety made by culture, there remains instinctive hunger _for nutritious food, food that meets physiological necessities_, for all humans. If your culture comes up with a cultural taste that denies food that meets physiological needs, you die, the species goes extinct. There is a biological limit on the range of tastes that human cultures may have.

    The analogy to sex is that there is a wide variety of sexual practices. But if these do not include heterosex, the species or group dies out.

    The Shakers are extinct because they derived a cultural ideology by which heterosex was no “kosher”, to extend the food analogy.

    ^^^^^^^

    No one seems to live in fear that our species will disappear for lack of generative sex. That completely misses the point; and seems to suggest that heterosex is natural while other forms of sexual expression are not. This is not a biological point that gets made by privileging heterosex as “natural,” but an ideological one.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Now, with 6 billion people, there is little danger of immediate species extinction from lack of heteorsex.

    We’re talking about 200,000 years ago and before when humans instincts evolved. That’s why we are considered the same species as the homo sapiens from then. Presumably,we have the same biology. At that time, if hetersex was a “take it or leave it” type a thing, there would have been a danger of the species dying out. So, when we were socalled hardwired, it seem likely that we were hardwired with a strong heterosexual instinct. In fact, that hardwiring comes from the primate and mammalian and _____ species ancestoral to homo sapiens.

    I didn’t use the word “natural”. I said “instinctive”. I know about the whole history of the law treating homosexuality as “unnatural” acts, and the resultant legitimate anger of the lesbian and gay liberation movement at the terms “natural” or “unnatural”. But that lesbian etc. sex should not be suppressed _is_ a political question, and doesn’t address the biological issue raised here. That prejudice against lesbians is wrong doesn’t mean that heterosex is not widely instinctive.

    And anyway, most of this 200,000 years plus of culture has been _overcoming_ _natural_limitations. Much of human endeavor seeks to be “supenatural” or “superorganic”, shall we say “anatural”.

    It’s unnatural for humans to fly. Yet airplanes are considered a great achievement,not a perversion. Saying that something is “supernatural”, beyond or above instinct , can be a compliment. In fact, there’s a whole other part of human judgment that considers natural, earthly, and earthy “things” to be dirty and uncivilized, animalistic, nasty ” He acts like an animal” is not a compliment. In fact, heterosex is widely reviled down through European history because it’s too “carnal”. So, the natural-unnatural thing cuts both ways in this culture.

    Nor is “natural as animalistic” always associated with female. There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”

    ^^^^^^^^

    If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: I explain above at length why 200,000 years ago a heterosexual instinct would likely be more fit than lack there of, i.e. why we needed way back then a heterosexual instinct. We needed it just like all the other species who have had it.

    To elaborate, take two groups of primates, one that has heterosexual instinct and one that does not ( somehow). The former would have a much greater adaptive fitness than the former. If you need me to elaborate on that , I will. But if you just look at a basic biology text on differential fertility, which is _the_ key thing in fitness for _all_ species ( this is an advance over Darwin himself who seems focussed more on “struggle” implying differential mortality) has an exponential component, that is a small difference can make big difference. That is, just a small advantage in differential fertility is what makes the qualitative , absolute difference as to what group survives and which one doesn’t. I’d say heterosexual instinct has a _big_ differential fertility advantage over lack of said instinct.

    We could discuss it, but I can see an argument why heterosexual instinct would have an adaptive advantage over “polymorphous” instinct because of the exponential effect of small differences in differential fertility. In other words, a group with heterosexual instinct would be more fit in a crisis, which is the points at which fitness is determined, where it “bites”.

    As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors. Assuming this was caused by giving an adaptive advantage ( and that is was not a Stephen Jay Gould “spandrel”), I’d guess it had to do with increasing pregnancies. In a crunch, crisis - the times when selection of one group over another occurs - the group with more pregnancies is more fit. You make the spandrel argument.

    ^^^^^^^

    The use of the word “instinct” is also ideological, whether it is understood as such or not. Instinct is more akin to behavior that is involuntarily ritualized in its expression. As the mirror neuron post and others have suggested, human nature, as even neurophysiology is showng now, is such that we are biologically determined to NOT be biologically determined. We are wired for cultural determination. Our insincts have largely disappeared along the old evolutionary trail somewhere.

    ^^^^^^
    CB: Well, now you’ve gotten to an interesting argument.

    My response is that we are hardwired not to be instinctive in much but heterosex, eating nutritious food, sleeping. Our instincts have laregely disappeared except for , especially, the instinct for heterosex. I’d rephrase it we are biologically determined to be less biologically determined than other species.

    ^^^^^

    No one has suggested that “women only want to have sex with men because they are forced to physically or economically.” What we are saying is that heterosex is so thoroughly and (for now) inextricably imbricated with our socialization into patriarchy (compulsory heterosexuality, gender as a hierarchical system) that no sexual encounter in this society happens without being inflected by that hierarchy. that is not a moral judgement, even though it has prfound ethical implication. It is a sociological observation based on the rejection of bourgeois, patriarchal science and society’s notion that actions can take place apart from their social context. They clearly cannot.

    ^^^^

    CB: Just to be clear, I’m not saying that any human action lacks important social context, cultural determination. However, I think that some culture, some social context, integrates biology and culture. Much of our culture is compatible with our biology. So, to say something has social context does not necessarily mean it doesn’t have a biological component.

    Secondly, and relatedly the social context of heterosex is not _just_ patriarchy and male supremacy. There is also the opposite. There are major aspects of our culture which promote , for lack of a better word :>) , love between women and men. I mean genuine love. I’m thinking it’s ok to say this since we have rather thoroughly acknowledged and covered at length here the cultural aspects which promote antagonism between women and men, the main one being male supremacy to be sure. General capitalist “dog-eat-dog” competition infects women/men relations too. Also, racism, et al. But the main one is male supremacy. At any rate, _some_ of the social and cultural context of heterosex promotes men treating women well. We don’t live in absolute male supremacy and misogyny. Some of the social and cultural context is in harmony with our heterosexual instinct.

    In fact your model of no remaining biological instinct implies that it would have to be replaced by a very strong pro-heterosexual culture (otherwise we’d have gone extinct). It doesn’t seem likely that all our culture that might have replaced instinct would be of the type where men coerce women into sex. Some of it would be “wooing” ; and genuine love,culturally generated ,genuine love of women by men. I don’t think men have been keeping the species going with just rape and coercive sex since the origin of the patriarchal family. There is also genuine, sincere ( both consciously and unconsciously) courting and making love, respect even.

    Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?

    ^^^^^^^^^

    Men are in power, so it is not surprising that we are attracted to the notion that women’s desire for us is purely a consequence of our attractive-ness (wait, that is constructed, too… drat!)… the reality is that if we are to take sexuality serously as a political issue, an issue of power, then we are duty-bound to abandon, by force of will initially, these self-aggrandizing rationalizations and the defensiveness that motivates them, and accept that political responsibility in this instance is no different than it is in other areas… like class privilege, or in my own case (not yours) white privilege. We cannot pretend the power dynamic is not there, even in the most respectful and loving heterosexual relationships. I can assure you every woman senses the existence of this power gradient, all the time. Solidarity requires that we do too.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I agree that overall, in general and in many specifics men are in power. But I do not agree that this power is absolute and utterly universal.

    I didn’t assert the opposite of what I gleaned from here. I didn’t say women are “purely” attracted to men by instinct. My position is that women’s “attraction”-compulsion toward men is a combination of culture and instinct. And that the culture part is not all male suprmacism, but includes some cultural tropes that are not misogynist, even if mysogyny dominates.

    Nor do I see what I said as self-aggrandizing. It works the other way too. Men are attracted to women by instinct ! It’s not like I’m saying “they like us , but we don’t like them.” It’s mutual,instinctively mutual. And when I say attracted to women , I don’t mean attracted to them to “conquer” them. I mean attracted to them to genuinely love them, care about and for them.

    As to “every woman,all the time”, I don’t know if I can quite grant you that. Sure overall, men as a group have more power, but if we examine every male-female heterosexual dyad,it is not true that every single one’s power balance is determined by the male suprmacist system that is general. It’s just a fact that there are relationships where the woman is dominant, runs the relationship, and this is not 1 in a million. I’m not saying this is bad, because, in general women are better “leaders of the relationship”.

    As to Solidarity, what I am saying is that there is an instinctive _affirmative_ basis for solidarity. We don’t have to build solidarity with women _only_ based on acknowledging and fighting male supremacy, but we can build it based on common instinct. But even more, there are affirmative bases in our culture. Our culture is contradictory in this regard, even if the male supremacy is bigger than the “genuine love”. We must suppress the bad culture, but may build up the good culture too. Women are great,inherently lovable. Lets try and promote that too, the opposite of misogyny, “love of women IN GENERAL”, There isn’t even a word for it. “Somethingphilia”

    Let me throw in another point here that is not exactly on point of this exchange, but one that I think must really be considered by we feminists who are basically trying to persuade men to end patriarchy. It’s a simple point. Because women do most childcare, most boys start out in life with the experience of being subordinate to a female, their mother. ( And since father is not there all the time doing parenting with orders and commands; day to day children are subordinated to mother more than father). I’m _not_ trying to raise this to counter the notion that male power is dominant overall in society. I am raising practically to point out that the average _man_ ,in order to become a feminist, has to overcome a part of his psyche by which he experiences an important and fundamental relationship in which he is subordinate to a woman. In other words, it’s inherently misleading, widespread “veil” or distortion of the larger social pattern of male supremacy. Should we take this into account in training male feminists ?

    13 September 2006, 3:01 pm

42. Stan:

    Charles, your attempts to salvage Marxism as the last work on feminism are heroic, I’ll give you that. You’ve taken the fight outside the perimeter now, into the realm of biology and desire to rescue Mssrs. Marx and Engels from their naturalization of women.

    But now your arguments have taken on more of the aspect of a personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships… except that no one has weighed in on any personal relationships except to say that patriarchy is ALWAYS present in sexual relations (not as you reworded, JUST present in sexual relations).

    When you say: “Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?”

    … that strikes me as extremely and personally defensive, as in, you are taking it personally.

    Did you read my comments about telling my (Black) children not to give white folks the benefit of the doubt, and that white people needn’t take that personally? Same thing. It is a recognition of social power, and those who inherit the (white) privilege of it don’t get to be liberal with me in order to say “I’m not racist, so you telling your kids that is making me the victim of their prejudice.” Born into power, born into responsibility, I say.

    Who in the world said that a particular man should automatically feel that his sexual relationship with a woman is “wronging” her? That has not even been suggested here.

    As for this: “There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.”"

    One critique notes “the old fable implies that women are responsible for controlling male anger and violence. If a woman is only pretty and sweet enough, she can transform an abusive man into a prince – forever. If only it were true. But this is a blame-the-victim scenario waiting to happen. In a realistic sequel, Belle would seek refuge at the village’s battered women’s shelter.”

    In other words, these tropes have NOTHING to do with women’s sovereignty and everything to do with the scripts of compulsory heterosexuality.

    And this one: “As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors.”…

    … is just a pure hetero-male fantasy. I mean, Holy Nonsequitur, Batman! In fact, in the real world, women quite frequently say they’d be happier with less of the heterosex they experience.

    On this one, “I’m not saying that any human action lacks important social context, cultural determination. However, I think that some culture, some social context, integrates biology and culture. Much of our culture is compatible with our biology. So, to say something has social context does not necessarily mean it doesn’t have a biological component.”… I’m going to go carefully, because I have made the same argument, which I admit is tricky (but I think important), that I have made in reply to pomo “anti-essentialism” (which I’ll admit I think is a crock):

    From Sex & War — I want to begin with biological determinism, and one of its alternatives, biological foundationism.

    The argument of biological foundationism is different from biological determinism. Biological foundationism, according to Linda Nicholson , is a “coat-rack” theory.

    “Here the body is viewed as a type of rack upon which differing cultural artifacts, specifically those of personality and behavior, are thrown or superimposed” (pg. 41).

    Biological foundationism attempts to reconcile the obvious fact that we exist as a biological body with the equally obvious fact that our behavior is overwhelmingly a consequence of socialization. The problem with this approach is that it is still highly reified. Concrete context is withdrawn and replaced by abstraction and generalization. Human behavior is yanked out of social history, and that history is replaced with a Dawkin-esque history of the genes… which is then qualified by an element of equally unspecific social constructionism.

    The implication is one of mutual autonomy – autonomy of the biological and autonomy of the social, with some simple and linear causal interactions, like billiard balls bouncing off one another and not changing the essential shape of each ball.

    It is the failure of this autonomy in real life that makes this analysis unconvincing. It also sets us up for other fallacies that begin with this unquestioned premise of autonomy.

    There is an argument that animals, even ‘higher’ mammals and primates exhibit certain sexual and-or apparently sexualized behaviors, implying an element of biological causation. Counterposed to this is the (social constructionist, but also Marxist) claim that human behavior is not determined by these kinds of predispositions. Counterposed to the constructionist argument is the claim that denial of the biological ‘element’ (like a billiard ball) is a reversion to biblical separatism between ‘human and beast.’ This is a non sequitur .

    The rejection of biological determinism, and of biological foundationism, is not based on assumptions of divine intervention and religion’s species discontinuity. It is based on both the empirical evidence provided by the social sciences that demonstrate, through diversity, the inextricably social character of conscious human behavior, and on the assumption that socialization is interfused with every conscious behavior past infancy.

    It is also based on the recognition that these behaviors are cognitive. Social construction and cognition are not mutually exclusive. They exist apart from one another only as an analytical category, not ontologically.

    Note, I do not say the ‘social content’ of behavior, because I believe this implies some quantity; our behavior is 80% social and 20% biological, for example. This is a decidedly non-dialectical understanding. So is the false dichotomy between the determinative influences of “social being” (from means of production through epistemology) and “consciousness.” These are interfused.
    < <>>

    You say: “As to Solidarity, what I am saying is that there is an instinctive _affirmative_ basis for solidarity. We don’t have to build solidarity with women _only_ based on acknowledging and fighting male supremacy, but we can build it based on common instinct. But even more, there are affirmative bases in our culture. Our culture is contradictory in this regard, even if the male supremacy is bigger than the “genuine love”. We must suppress the bad culture, but may build up the good culture too. Women are great,inherently lovable. Lets try and promote that too, the opposite of misogyny, “love of women IN GENERAL”, There isn’t even a word for it. “Somethingphilia”

    Why in the world would we talk about soidarity based on an “instinct”? How about based on common humanity? How about based on seeing our own liberation as men bound up with the sovereignty of women?

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    Now to the issue that provoked me to get back in this, even at this (for me) late hour. Love. Romantic love, constructed within patriarchy, has been one of the most uterly destructive, soul-killing, violent, and psychotic institutions in our emotional culture. The fact that we write songs, make movies, and scribble novels as paeans to it doesn’t change this fact. I hope that is not what you make reference to.

    http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MULR/1999/8.html

    13 September 2006, 6:25 pm

43. Yolanda Carrington:

    I cringe for you when I read “Women are great, inherently lovable.” I’m leaving that one be, because I suspect you will hear from more than one woman on that one.

    I don’t know about that Stan. So far CB has shown a marked inability to think critically about gender as it operates in the flesh-and-blood world. I doubt any cogent analysis or passionate argument from us “inherenty lovable” ladies here will change this fact.

    14 September 2006, 7:26 am

44. Charles Brown:

    Charles, your attempts to salvage Marxism as the last work on feminism are heroic, I’ll give you that. You’ve taken the fight outside the perimeter now, into the realm of biology and desire to rescue Mssrs. Marx and Engels from their naturalization of women.

    ^^^^^
    CB: Remember when I first got here and said it is not the _last_ work on feminism. I said that it should not be discarded but be the basis for further development on feminism. One of the first things I put on this list was a _critique_ of Marxism in that direction. So I’m not sure why you say the above.

    The discussion of biology stands on its own unrelated to Marx or Engels. I didn’t say a word about Marx or Engels in the post you now reply to that I remember. I’ll have to look. You want Marx and Engels out of the discussion, they are out. You are discussing it with Brown only.

    ^^^^^^

    But now your arguments have taken on more of the aspect of a personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships… except that no one has weighed in on any personal relationships except to say that patriarchy is ALWAYS present in sexual relations (not as you reworded, JUST present in sexual relations).

    ^^^^
    CB: I’m not clear what you mean by “personal defense of an unnamed set of relationships”, but by and large a rule of thumb in feminism is “the personal is political”, in some sense referring to “personal relationships”, so I’m not sure what the problem is with discussing “personal relationships. What is the problem you have with discussing personal relationships in this context ?

    I guess maybe you mean specific personal relationships ?

    I may have written something unclearly, but I don’t think you think or said that patriarchy is _just_ , not always , present in sexual relationships. I can go back and look. Anyway, addressing it now, I’d say in some heterosexual relationships patriarchy does not distort or ruin or pollute the relationship.

    Just as an analogy, there are some white people with whom I have relationships wherein racism really doesn’t distort it or pollute it. That may be more frequent in a place like Detroit where Black people are the overwhelming majority. Many white people who live and stay in Detroit substantially overcome racism in some of their individual relationships.

    ^^^^

    When you say: “Well let me ask: Do any women have any instinctive desire for heterosex ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in this society in which male dominance does not dominate and control, “pollute”, the content of that encounter ? Are there any heterosexual encounters in which the man should not feel he is wronging the woman in some sense ? That he is respectfully doing what the woman actual wants him to do with , by, of, for her ?”

    … that strikes me as extremely and personally defensive, as in, you are taking it personally.

    ^^^^^
    CB: My guess you are being “struck” wrong, because I’m asking it generally. I don’t have any reason to be defensive , and the things you are saying don’t bother me _personally_. They do seem somewhat onesidely inaccurate as to my observation of many women-men relationships “around” me, that is a bit of an unfair knock on a lot of men around me.

    I will discuss it personally if you want.

    To be frank, it is not so much being defensive , but that what you are saying seems to be something of a onesided caricature of reality (sorry :>)) There are certainly very serious conflicts caused by men wronging women, lording over women, but there are also women and men who seem to get along pretty well, not perfectly, but on balance very well. By my experience and observation, reality is a bit more contradictory than your discussion in general.

    ^^^^^^

    Did you read my comments about telling my (Black) children not to give white folks the benefit of the doubt, and that white people needn’t take that personally? Same thing.

    ^^^^^
    CB: However, I’m not taking it personally, so it’s not the same thing.:>).

    Actually, my son is Black too :>) ,and I don’t tell him that. We do tell him that racism can kinda sneak up on you and bite you, and there’s more racism than it might seem. But maybe we are wrong,and you’re right. Actually, he called his mother a racist for some of the things she said about white people ! :>) Also, I kinda think that it’s a new generation, and they should have their chance at trying to win idealistic integration, and Martin’s Dream, and not be deterred from it by our jadedness. But it’s contradictory. It’s tricky.

    ^^^^^^

    It is a recognition of social power, and those who inherit the (white) privilege of it don’t get to be liberal with me in order to say “I’m not racist, so you telling your kids that is making me the victim of their prejudice.” Born into power, born into responsibility, I say.

    ^^^^
    CB: I agree with this. I’m trying to think how to extend the analogy. It would have to be me telling a girl child of mine,and a male objecting they are not male suprmecist and being made a victim. Sure we should try to persuade that male of his social power.

    This whole analogy kinda doesn’t work, because I was not speaking personally, but generally, in what I said that you are commenting on.

    ^^^^^^

    Who in the world said that a particular man should automatically feel that his sexual relationship with a woman is “wronging” her? That has not even been suggested here.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I guess that is a bit “extreme” on my part, but that is the impression I get from the discussion I read here.

    There is an affirmative action aspect to your very correct feminist project here, that is, you are emphasizing criticism because it is so lacking in general.

    So, what are some of the types of situations where there is a politically correct hetero-sexual relationship ?

    ^^^^^^

    As for this: “There’s the whole “the beauty and the beast” trope in this culture. There are many “memes” in which the male is associated with savage and female with civilized. Girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice” . Boys are “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.””

    One critique notes “the old fable implies that women are responsible for controlling male anger and violence. If a woman is only pretty and sweet enough, she can transform an abusive man into a prince – forever. If only it were true. But this is a blame-the-victim scenario waiting to happen. In a realistic sequel, Belle would seek refuge at the village’s battered women’s shelter.”

    ^^^^^
    CB: By and large myths have multiple meanings, even contradictory meanings. If you want to contend that there are no myths in European culture by which men are associated as the “nature” part in the “nature/culture” opposition , ok. I’m pretty observant of this type of thing, doing anthropology on my own culture, and I’m a native informant (as we all are) in this case to boot.

    ^^^^^

    In other words, these tropes have NOTHING to do with women’s sovereignty and everything to do with the scripts of compulsory heterosexuality.

    ^^^^^
    CB: I dont’ know. The Beauty seems to tame the Beast. Belle seems a pretty independent woman for 1500 or whatever.

    How more specifically does compulsory heterosexuality impinge here ? I could see compulsory _beastiality_ ( Just kidding !)

    The particular trope of “Beauty and the Beast” shows that there are contradictory major tropes in our culture as to what you call “naturalization. ” I guess we could argue it but by my observation sometimes it is men who are “naturalized” relative to women. “Beast”. “Men are dogs.” Ever heard that ? And please don’t go off on something about me thinking in that “men are victims”. I am NOT saying that “naturalizatizing” is victimizing. I think that’s you who think that. Let me say straight out I don’t think The “Beast”is a victim of the woman in Beauty and the Beast. I’m merely _critiquing_ your theory at the abstract level of some universalized trope of woman = nature, or as we do in structuralism “woman is to man as nature is to culture”. In my experience, the cultural-SOCIAL facts don’t support you on that.

    In fact, sometimes male supremacist notions are rationalized by it being “men’s nature”, i.e. naturalizing men.

    And I am not saying that there are not women naturalizing tropes too. Pleeeeaaase don’t come back with “Charles says it’s only men who are ‘naturalized’”. I say there are contradictory tropes in this culture. Sometimes women are naturalized. Sometimes men.
    ^^^^^^^^

    And this one: “As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex than their primate ancestors.”…

    … is just a pure hetero-male fantasy. I mean, Holy Nonsequitur, Batman! In fact, in the real world, women quite frequently say they’d be happier with less of the heterosex they experience.

    ^^^^^^

    CB: You didn’t say what the non-sequitur is. I gotta go look at the larger context, because it is not clear how what you say above replies to what you quote from me.

    This was part of my replying to your saying:

    “If sexual desire can be polymorphous, to use the Freudian term, and generative sex happens within that realm of activity, then why in the world does the species require a “heterosex instinct”? Most heterosexual coupling does not result in pregnancy for humans, while short periods of sexual receptivity in other species almost invariably leads to generation.”

    Tell you what. I’ll just copy my whole response to what you said, and then maybe we can see how it “follows”. The part you quote above is at the end.

    CB: I explain above at length why 200,000 years ago a heterosexual instinct would likely be more fit than lack there of, i.e. why we needed way back then a heterosexual instinct. We needed it just like all the other species who have had it.

    To elaborate, take two groups of primates, one that has heterosexual instinct and one that does not ( somehow). The former would have a much greater adaptive fitness than the former. If you need me to elaborate on that , I will. But if you just look at a basic biology text on differential fertility, which is _the_ key thing in fitness for _all_ species ( this is an advance over Darwin himself who seems focussed more on “struggle” implying differential mortality) has an exponential component, that is a small difference can make big difference. That is, just a small advantage in differential fertility is what makes the qualitative , absolute difference as to what group survives and which one doesn’t. I’d say heterosexual instinct has a _big_ differential fertility advantage over lack of said instinct.

    We could discuss it, but I can see an argument why heterosexual instinct would have an adaptive advantage over “polymorphous” instinct because of the exponential effect of small differences in differential fertility. In other words, a group with heterosexual instinct would be more fit in a crisis, which is the points at which fitness is determined, where it “bites”.

    As to the short periods of receptivity, see discussion with DeAnander on the unique fact that human females lost estrus as part of their human biological makeup way back when. Well, what _does_ that imply in this discussion ? Loss of estrus indicates that human females became receptive to more sex