Skull-F**k
The New Republic’s recently fired editor, Spencer Ackerman claims that his drift to the left is what caused his firing, and no one here is likely to find that surprising. But that is not the topic here. The topic is how Aker-MAN said it.
From Michael Calderone’s New York Observer column:
Mr. Ackerman said he had clashed with Mr. Foer over various editorial matters. But he said that he had fallen from favor after growing disenchanted with the invasion of Iraq, which he and the magazine had both supported in the beginning.
“I definitely, for lack of a better term, drifted leftward,†Mr. Ackerman said. “The Iraq war will do that to you. The Bush administration will do that to you.â€
Mr. Ackerman had been acting out, by his own account: telling a colleague it “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world†to get fired “for being too left-wingâ€; declaring in an editorial meeting that he would “skullfuck†the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides.
Skull fuck.
Now, allow me to turn to a highly eupehemized scandal in Germany right now. Nine German soldiers assigned to the NATO occupation of Afghanistan have been busted for posing with the skulls of dead Afghans. “Posing.” Other accounts say “desecrating.” In fact, in at least one of the pictures, a German soldier has his dick out of his pants in the suggestion that he is about to… “skull fuck” it.
For those not in the know, I am about to break the code of omerta with the fraternity of men. This term is common military parlance, and more and more among American (and German, too, it seems) males. When you really want to prove you male “bona fides,” you talk about humiliating the enemy, by removing the eye from a corpse and “skull fucking” it.
For those newcomers and lurkers and men who don’t get it yet, how much more perfect an example could I give of the association of male sexuality with violence, aggression, and the humiliation of the (real or symbolic) female victim. And what better example of many liberal and leftist men’s cluelessness than this masculinity-donning remark by Spencer Ackerman in the context of complaining about being red-baited off of a magazine staff.
Men, language like this is not one whit more excusable or acceptable or defensible than racial epithets or ethnic slurs. But had Ackerman discussed “jewing people down” or “nigger-rigging” or any of the other shit we’ve managed to at least run off the public stage in the interest of some facade of decency, lefty blogs would be lit up like an NSA communications board, in an attempt to see who could level the harshest condemnation. Yet the implication that reception of a penis — which most men desire from women — is synonymous with the desecration of the enemy dead, seems to drift along with hardly a rustle of the leaves.
astras:
’skull fucking’. that’s what occured to me first when i heard about these pictures. there is one good thing about this, though. the german army has spend years and years to create a good image in germany. but recently more and more of this kind of stuff has come out.
29 October 2006, 8:47 amthey appearently did the same shit in kosovo. and of course there have been other scandals, like officers sticking turnips up each others backsides (really!), and serveral cases of rape of female soldiers. the ugly truth: the german army is just an army like all other armies. the soldiers tend to be a bunsh of immature macho freaks playing rambo.
let’s hope support for the army will go down like an elevator.
the connection between army, war and macho behavior, though fairly obvious, is not heard in public discussion, though.
Required:
I think using the word “immature” conceals the problem here. I implies that when they’ve matured they’ll act like adults. But this patriachal mysoginistic culture is adult. It certainly wasn’t invented by children!
29 October 2006, 9:36 amJonas:
Stan
do you know Klaus Theweleit’s classic study on fascist masculinity?
http://www.amazon.com/Male-Fantasies-Bodies-History-Literature/dp/0816614490/sr=8-5/qid=1162130027/ref=sr_1_5/002-3340814-1093618?ie=UTF8&s=books
See the reader reviews. It’s an enlightening book.
29 October 2006, 9:56 amastras:
well, of course. the purpose of an army is, as the late mr. hackworth put it, ‘to break things and kill people’.
29 October 2006, 4:04 pmit is an insane system and most likely soldiers have to be this way in order to do their job.
Albert:
Which is it?
courtship -> acceptance, receptiveness -> penetration
or
dehumanization -> prevarication -> penetration?
Is sex a metaphor for war or is war a metaphor for sex?
I get it! Pre-emptive war is rape!
A confused non-military guy.
29 October 2006, 4:27 pmStan:
Klaus Theweleit and a bunch of other stuff is discussed in detail at this link, and I am hereby linking David Neiwert’s blog, Ornicus in our website-blogroll list.
Albert, to get our heads around how pervasive and all-emcompassing are the links between domination/violence and sexuality as it is constructed by patriarchy, one almost has to suspend one’s own experience of and desire for sex, which is intimately felt in the very terms dictated by the system.
“Penetration” is a hugely loaded social meaning. Women, in our sexual universe here on Planet Patriarchy, do not penetrate. Perhaps they envelope, if we are to focus solely on genital-genital coitus (another issue). Penetraton makes the male the actor, and the female (or feminized sexual object, the bottom) the acted upon. This is what we means when we say that language is phallocentric, centered around what the penis does, what men do. Dividing the world into doers and done-tos.
Our point, when it comes to the questions surrounding the what-is-to-be-done phase of politics, including sexual politics, is that men must have NO entitlement to penetrate, at all… operative term, entitlement.
So if we pose the questionin terms of which is the acceptable route to penetration, then we have posed the wrong question. We are still inside the patriarchal world-view, the universe of male entitlement.
29 October 2006, 4:47 pmAlbert:
Thank you Stan for helping me understand the context of this. I agree with the points you make.
29 October 2006, 10:33 pmIf we’re in a universe of male entitlement, then skull-f**king is a scary black hole in this universe.
One landmark on the way to a better place is maintaining an attitude that we love and respect whom we f**k, right? Fulfillment doesn’t require us to debase others. Ethics prohibit us from doing so.
conq:
On October 19, a vieled Muslim woman was shot to death in Fremont, CA. She left behind six children and a husband. The killer still hasn’t been found.
What does the media focus on? The fact that days later someone paints “Alia Ansari, RIP†on a Church wall. “Disgruntled Aghani youth,†they’re called, are suspected of “vandalizing†the property.
29 October 2006, 11:59 pmRequired:
This is paraphrasing, but Derrick Jensen one said something along the lines of “”FUCK”, that’s all of patriachy in that one for letter word. Isn’t it telling that the same word that means “make love to” also means “do great harm to”?”
There was more about not being able to phrase sentences about sex in a way which both made sense in our current cultural context and also did not make the woman the object of the sentence, in the Subject, verb, object, sense. But it was a while ago I heard it so I’ve forgotten exactly what he said.
30 October 2006, 2:03 amMew:
Clueless ‘leftist’ man here. I’ve heard this expression so many times around the web, its a favourite parting shot from reactionary men in ‘debates’, but didn’t make the obvious (now its spelled out) leap to explain its ubiquity. I’d guessed it was something from a video-nasty, but then why would it have been so attractive a fantasy to them? Doh.
I’m becoming a little bit less clueless at least, certainly about my own use of language, though I’d never use this particular expression. Thanks Stan.
30 October 2006, 1:45 pmPaul:
In Full Metal Jacket, R. Lee Ermey, as Drill Instructor Hartman, has this line:
“Private Pyle, I’m gonna give you three seconds, exactly three-f**ing-seconds to wipe that stupid looking grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-f**k you!”
Ermey apparently improvised most of his dialogue, and I originally thought he was just riffing, making it up as he went along. Now I realize he must have heard the term during his actual experience as a Marine in Vietnam twenty years earlier.
30 October 2006, 5:30 pmCharles:
Stan, agreeing with you, and perhaps expanding on your point, we don’t have to go to a military situation obscure from a lot of people. It’s very common in everyday , civilian life to say “fuck you” , “this is fucked up”, etc., etc., many variations as a swear word/phrase. Sadly “fuck” is used very widely to express negative, aggressive hostility or dysfunction as we all know. Perhaps you have discussed this more general usage before. I guess this is Required’s point above.
I have often lamented that this word for making love is synonymous with its opposite “making hate”.
30 October 2006, 6:49 pmRequired:
Just a technicality, but maybe not, the Fuck is not synonymous with “making hate.” If something is “fucked,” it’s either very wrong (”that’s fucked!”) or severely damaged (it’s completely fucked.)
30 October 2006, 8:28 pmDeAnander:
a fundamental “inconvenient truth” that men of all political stripes want to avoid at all costs is the problem of mammalian sexuality and gender. anatomy may not be destiny, but it sure shapes politics. it’s the elephant in, appropriately, the bedroom.
for example, liberal Useful Idiots continue to promote patriarchy by making nonsensical claims that “women can rape men.” patent rubbish. as if female sexuality and male sexuality were some kind of generic “human sexuality” with no functional differences.
men — unlike women — can experience physical pleasure and orgasm by fucking any suitably-sized orifice — “natural” or “unnatural”, adult or juvenile, female or male, biotic or artificial, human or animal or vegetable, willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious, living or dead. the experience of the fuckee is irrelevant to the “success” of the experience of friction and orgasm (plus dominance which for most men enhances the orgasm).
men, unlike women, can “steal” sex, use another person’s body as a masturbatory aid with or against their will, and — physically at least — it makes no difference if the lubricant is natural bodily secretion, KY, blood, or vitreous humour. or none (as in the ‘dry sex’ trend in Africa which puts women at elevated risk of AIDS and other STDs).
what on earth could a woman do to a man — or any other human being — that is equivalent? sure, a woman could get a man incapably drunk and tie him up and rape him anally with an object of some kind. that would be a case of a woman raping a man. but what would she get out of it? there’s no intimate endorphin/hormonal rush there, no direct limbic feedback loop. it would be a very rare female sadist who would get any satisfaction out of so artificial an act.
a woman trying to “steal” an orgasm from another person is somewhat short of strategies. what’s she gonna do? vigorous tribadism against some bony body part? distasteful to an unwilling participant, certainly — describable as “molestation” or “harassment” or “indecent behaviour” — but not the same, really, as the perfect convergence of assault and orgasm that men achieve via penile rape.
the accident of dimorphism that makes men able to “take sex” from other creatures is so obviously the root of so much evil. and so hotly denied, erased, homogenised by both liberal and conservative men.
imho “to fuck” is not a synonym for “to make love”. “to make love” embraces a wide range of mutually pleasing activities, a implicit reciprocity and attentiveness and intersubjectivity, which the verb “to fuck”, in its literal meaning and in common usage, clearly excludes.
there is no ambiguity. if we want a word for the willing or joyous reception (engulfment was Dworkin’s suggestion, iirc) of a phallus by a lover’s body, we’re gonna have to come up with a new one. ‘cos “A fucks B” is Subject Verb Object, and there’s no getting around that. and the vernacular clearly reflects what we all know, no matter how vigorously wishful thinking or nervous obfuscation denies it.
women cannot skullfuck. men can. and that tells us a lot about patriarchy.
30 October 2006, 8:28 pmDeAnander:
Useful Idiots continue to promote patriarchy
well of course they do that, but I really meant “protect patriarchy”… (oops)
30 October 2006, 8:29 pmspook:
this is probably nitpicking, but i have never equated “fuck” with “making love.”
if i equate “fuck” with anything in a sexual context, it is the act of having sex. if “making love” is merely having sex, then i suppose “fuck” and “make love” could be considered equivalent.
to me, even without any romantic connotation, “making love” has to be more than merely having sex, or there is no “love” about it. calling it “making love” is a serious misrepresentation and an unjustified assumption.
i don’t see any irony about fuck meaning both “make love to” and “do harm to” because i don’t accept the premise. in fact, mere “fucking” in the sexual context obviously has some serious negative consequences.
the irony may be that some analysts equate “fucking” in the sexual context with “making love,” and not “doing great harm.”
30 October 2006, 8:44 pmspook:
“fuckee” hit my funny bone for some reason.
i didn’t mean to be redundant in light of some of DeAnander’s comments. i was wondering why nobody had said anything about “fuck” and by the time i finished, somebody had.
30 October 2006, 9:03 pmspook:
forgive me.
by saying:
“if i equate “fuck†with anything in a sexual context, it is the act of having sex.”
in a previous post, i was trying to be generous–as in the best possible interpretation–to the word “fuck.”
to me, as DeAnander said much better, essential to fucking is that the experience of the fuckee is irrelevant.
i don’t think i equate all sex that is not making love to be fucking. i’ll have to think about that.
is it me or has stan’s blog failed to “fall back” yet?
30 October 2006, 9:18 pmDeAnander:
the Fuck is not synonymous with “making hate.†If something is “fucked,†it’s either very wrong (â€that’s fucked!â€) or severely damaged (it’s completely fucked.)
ummmm…. and… women are what the majority of men habitually fuck (or wish to), right? and that which is “fucked” is wrong (morally wrong, defective, bad, negative), or damaged (incomplete, destroyed, second rate). so what do these usages of the verb say about women? women are wrong, women are damaged, women are bad. women are a damaged version of men, damaged by being “fucked up.”
what does the sarcastic male utterance, “Oh, I am so fucked,” or “Well fuck me!” mean? “oh alas alack, I am as stupid or luckless or hopeless or secondrate as a woman”? certainly “Well fuck me” — said in surprise, astonishment, aghastness etc — maps onto less graphic tropes like “damme / blow me to hell / stap my wig / wax my ass and use me for a surfboard” and other invitations to condemn the speaker to an unpleasant fate [often if some other unlikely event turns out to be true, as in “Damme if I believe you, sir.” — a kind of rhetorical gambling with Fate.]
and don’t these attitudes to women [fuck = what-women-are-for = damage, bad, wrong] as revealed in all the four-letter vernacular, add up to ‘making hate’ — hatred of women, the inferior Other, That Which is Fucked?
the hidden cognitive dissonance in patriarchal thought about sexuality is an Ouroborean knot: men know that fucking can be and is often unpleasant, painful and humiliating to the fuckee; every way that the verb is used in casual conversation confirms it. yet at the same time they insist that “she wants it, they all do;” that women enjoy being fucked (in every sense of the word, both literal and all the affective overtones).
women who openly say that they do not enjoy “the act” are DSM’d as “frigid” and colloquially abused as “cold fish” or “dyke” or “puritanical little tightass;” while women who do find it enjoyable, under the right circumstances, are assumed to be enjoying not only the physical sensation but also all the affective burden — being dominated, being used, being “fucked” in the sense of “now that’s fucked up.” enjoying, in short, their secondrate, second-class position as fuckables. which makes them “dumb” and/or masochistic. which confirms that women really are inferior ‘cos they have no self respect — they “roll over” for men. and around and around and around and around it goes, the self-referential carousel of masculinist metaphor and ranking.
if i equate “fuck†with anything in a sexual context, it is the act of having sex.
and ummm, that’s the only kind of “sex” that counts as “having sex”? so ummm, if a couple (of any genders) goes to bed and has passionate — even orgasmic — sex that didn’t involve fucking, then they didn’t actually “have sex”?
why would we say that fucking — the only sexual act by which men can steal an orgasm *and* dominate and invade another person’s body — is the only “real” sexual act?
round and round we go…
30 October 2006, 9:38 pmDeAnander:
sorry spook, you didn’t retract quite fast enough
we have been here before…
working out some new anticommodifying language might be helpful. as far back as EM Forster’s Maurice, one gay man speaks to another of “sharing” as a verb for lovemaking, and that has a positive sense for me at least: that lovers “share” their pleasure and their bodies with each other, rather than stealing or taking. doubtless many “sex positive activists” would scorn such terminology as euphemistic; but if euphemism is the obfuscation of underlying realities, then all our language about sex is both euphemistic and embarrassingly self-revelatory; it mystifies and fetishises at the same time as it openly tells us what we really think about men, women, sex, power.
and now we are back to Veblen and the social cachet of predatory or bandit behaviour, the higher status of force and fraud vs sharing and decency, and the association of “bold, brave manliness” with theft, deceit, and intimidation. theft, deceit, and intimidation in the sexual realm come down to harassment, rape, heartless seduction, battery, etc. — and whether we like to admit it or not, these behaviours are more highly valued and admired in men than gentleness, reciprocity, respect, caution etc.
we say in either fear or admiration, “he’s a real mean fucker” [and isn’t that ambiguous: he’s a “fucker” — generic term for an aggro male — who is mean? or he fucks meanly? or both?] but if we say “he’s a cocksucker” it’s not ambiguous: it’s never a compliment. it might, just barely, pass muster as nonpejorative incrowd jesting among gay men, but only with a conscious awareness of being countercultural, satirising or defying the dominant meme.
I have recently heard a useful librul idiot refer to “sexing with someone” — the ultimate homogenisation of sex and gender, as if all sexual activities were blandly e
30 October 2006, 9:52 pmDeAnander:
dammit! blandly equivalent and genderless, I was about to say when I hit a control sequence (why oh why does wordpress have no Preview?)
Militarism and Sexual Violence in Israeli Society
a relevant snippet, that ties together gender, militarism, neoliberal immiseration, race…
another random snip: I caught up at last with the modern noir film “Body Heat” — a very stylish effort — and was struck by the meme-cloud around one particular scene… a very young girl comes downstairs to find her aunt (with whom she is staying) about to perform, or performing, fellatio on her illicit lover. the adulterous pair are terrified of the aunt’s husband who has mafia-type connections; later, the little girl is interviewed by police to see if she can describe the man she saw with her aunt. the suspense is considerable. but a lawyer who was present at the interview later chortles with amusement as he recounts that the child cannot describe the man at all, except as “6 to 8 inches tall and very bald.” (har har har). she was so shocked by his nakedness and his erection that she never noticed his face. the suspense is momentarily resolved. but it is what the lawyer says next that struck me: “I bet she’d never seen one when it was angry.”
when it was angry
well how about that. not “when it was excited” or “when it was happy” or “when it was dancing”. when it was angry. erection = anger.
this is how the culture constructs male sexuality — over and over again, in casual speech and meticulously orchestrated pornography, in metaphor and obscenity (which itself is mostly metaphor). the physiology is one thing: the affective construction placed on it is the culture.
30 October 2006, 10:10 pmspook:
i like “sharing.”
i wasn’t trying to retract so much as clarify. that’s what i get for multitasking. what happens in my head isn’t always what ends up in space.
this is definitely not what i intended or thought:
“why would we say that fucking–the only sexual act by which men can steal an orgasm *and* dominate and invade another person’s body” — is the only “real†sexual act?”
in my framework, the term “fucking” includes any array of sexual activity in addition to the specific sexual act to which you refer, including the example you gave:
“so ummm, if a couple (of any genders) goes to bed and has passionate — even orgasmic — sex that didn’t involve fucking, then they didn’t actually “have sexâ€?”
it seems to me that they could be making love, sharing, or they could be “fucking”, in the sense that they’re just using each other for personal satisfaction whether or not there is literal “fucking.”
i don’t equate “fucking” with “making love.” i don’t know necessarily know how to define what happens in the space between those two concepts between two consenting adults.
it seems that within a certain sphere, the same act could be two completely different things depending on the mental and emotional states of the participants, both consenting in both cases.
after rereading my post, it was apparent that i didn’t clearly communicate what i intended, and having read your responses, my “retraction” was not adequate either.
but i do like the idea of “sharing.”
30 October 2006, 10:50 pmRequired:
DeAnander,
Just want to clarify; as I said early, I believe that the word “fuck” is a great illustration of patriarchal language. I agree with the way in which you expanded upon what I had written earlier.
What I meant when I said fuck is not “making hate,” I didn’t mean to imply that you don’t hate what you “fuck”, or that the “fucked” thing is inferior in some way, but I don’t think that it’s a correct translation.
I think it’s interesting your analysis of “mean fucker” is correct. One interesting thing which I think is an Australian saying is “sick cunt.” Sick as in cool. It’s a complement. I’ve never been able to satisfactorily analyse its implications.
I think it’s interesting your analysis of “mean fucker” is correct. One interesting thing which I think is an Australian saying is “sick cunt.” Sick as in cool. It’s a complament. Sometimes “tough cunt” might be used. I’ve never been able to satifactorily analyse it’s implications
30 October 2006, 10:59 pmjimi 45:
I think the concept–if not the term–originated with Georges Batille’s 1928 anti-clerical surrealist short story, Histoire de l’oeil(Story of the Eye). I’d be interested in the etymology of “skull fuck.”
Although I reject Col. Dave Grossman’s characterization of male ejaculation onto the females’ faces (such as in bukkake) as clearly and universally a sadomasochistic displacment of a point-blank shooting fantasy (assuming I have not mischaracterized his statements), I have no problem accepting it as a mild, fairly universal expression of (male) domination, and the idea of the “skull fuck” as its extreme cousin.
30 October 2006, 11:02 pmDeAnander:
a mild, fairly universal expression of (male) domination
mild?
well, as compared to murdering someone, cutting off their head, and fucking the skull’s eye sockets, yeah, I guess. but then I guess watarboarding is “mild” compared to drawing and quartering.
criminy. comparing more and less ghastly depths of masculinist body-hatred and the impulse to degrade — what a depressing taxonomic effort.
30 October 2006, 11:58 pmMarilyn Farhat:
What the NATO soldiers did to the skulls of the Afghans is part of the humiliation of the enemy. The penis has been used in war to humiliate men and women alike, the living and the dead, and in traumatizing whole cultures.
Desecrating the dead or their graves can be more traumatic to a culture than targeting the living. In a sense, it is a double insult aimed at reminding those conquered that weapons and the male organ of procreation are interchangeable in the game of power and control and that control over the group extends beyond the realm of this world.
After all, what better way to ensure “culturocide” than by killing all the males and stealing the women and children and incorporating them into the conqueror’s group, the ultimate stab at the heart of the “other” and the way to ensure our own control.
The sexual humiliation that has been the consistent theme of this conquest in the Middle East is, in my opinion, deliberate despite claims to the contrary. It is aimed at the heart of the Islamic world and is a form of cultural terrorism designed to eradicate the dignity of a whole group of people, for people who possess no dignity cannot resist and will cease to exist as a cohesive group. That is how cultures have died out in the past.
I do not see the the act as feminization of the dead. The males of many species, including our own, do “hump” animate and inanimate objects as a sign of power and domination over different groups, including women (women are physcially weaker than men, so they can be easily controlled). Testosterone levels and brain conditioning are what determine degree of aggression. The values and rationales we attribute to the aggerssion are determined by culture, morality, and personality.
The actions of the NATO soldiers are also a form of ritualist “bonding” to cement the relationships of the males in the conquering group. They are carried out in a group setting (rarely in private) precisely to boost morale and ensure compliance and continuation of the “brotherly” bond, and is a symbolic reminder of who is IN CHARGE. It is also notice to the whole world about who rules that particular mud hole. Why else would soldiers pose for such pictures, whether at Abu Ghraib or the multitude of other prisons around Iraq and Afghanistan, or in some deserted village at the perimeter of a territory most of us have never even heard of?
Sadly, such acts are more common than many may think because our instinctual emotions have not evolved at the same pace as our capacity for destruction.
31 October 2006, 4:08 amAlbert:
If I may offer an oblique critique:
31 October 2006, 4:52 amLanguage is more often used to describe what has occurred or is occuring, rather than an injunction for better (or worse) behavour.
Good behavour is more likely to engender better language than the other way around.
Latin was a language of imperialists (success through war and organization).
How would a good man behave?
Elliott:
DeAnder:
“working out some new anticommodifying language might be helpful. as far back as EM Forster’s Maurice, one gay man speaks to another of “sharing†as a verb for lovemaking”
“I have recently heard a useful librul idiot refer to “sexing with someone†— the ultimate homogenisation of sex and gender”
I guess I’m just confused about your objection to the phrase “sexing with” as a homogenisation of sexual terms, since it seems like you’re advocating the use of new terms as a memetic tool to change how people think about sex. The balance between changing our language to reflect our ideals but not too much that we obscure past and present injustice is tricky and I think it’s a tension that is hard to address.
31 October 2006, 5:55 amDeAnander:
beg pardon Elliott, the “sexing with” usage to which I objected was in the context of women being vulnerable to rape when incapably drunk. the guy whose remark I considered clueless was saying something like “sexing with anyone when they are too drunk to know what they are doing is wrong,” as if a guy (or guys) fucking a semi-conscious or incapable woman were exactly equivalent to a woman getting a judgment-impaired, drunken man into bed — the same degree of wrongness. w/which I course I disagree entirely, for all the reasons discussed above.
on further rumination sparked by your challenge (for which, my thanks) I think in fact he may unconsciously have been using it — as spook suggests above that “fuck” may be used more generally than specifically to describe penile penetration and friction — to indicate instrumentalist or uncaring sex, selfish sex, sex *without* sharing. if we used the word “sharing” to talk about a healthy or loving sexuality, it would be pretty clear that you can’t “share” much of anything with an incapably drunk person, an unconscious or sleeping person, a developmentally disabled person, a person being coerced, etc.
it is perhaps worth considering that we have very strong taxonomies of sex by gender and power — “homosexual” vs “heterosexual” (and even those terms in male subculture ascribe gender to power and vice versa more than being tied to literal phenotype) and by various types of fetish, as in necrophilia, ephebophilia, bestialism, paedophilia, “top”, “bottom” — but we have almost no language to distinguish qualities of sexual encounter by affective or connective or intersubjective intensity. all we have is a fairly weak distinction between “lovemaking” (a term used by many people to describe caring, sharing sex) vs “having sex” or “fucking”. since many people also use “lovemaking” as a polite euphemism for fucking, as in the old joke “How do porcupines make love?”, it’s not a strong taxonomy.
this is a topic that preoccupied me much in my late 20’s and early 30’s — there seems to be no —–sexual descriptive term for a person whose sexual preference is to be caring, sharing, loving and nonviolent in bed. philosexual? egalisexual? charitosexual? namastephilia? altermondialistosexual? help me out here
thanks for pressing me to clarify…
31 October 2006, 2:53 pmAlbert:
I find the act of skull-f**king deeply disturbing, and I may be finally ready to articulate why.
31 October 2006, 4:27 pmIt is an act of desecration of the enemy dead which implies that no end to war is possible until all of them are dead.
But it is also an act of desecration of whatever good or flawed concept of masculinity one may have. That soldiers are put in a position to choose between the good will and protection of his comrades, and a necrophiliac denial of his sexuality, is mind boggling.
Mr. Ackerman is describing a similar dilemma: to keep his job he was required to deny himself. He offered that a ritualistic submission to his “controllers”, might enable him to continue to report the way he sees fit. That’s not how it works and he knows it.
That “club” doesn’t work for you Mr. Ackerman, despite all the sick propaganda, there is a market out there for what you have offer.
DeAnander:
Jesus H Christ as a friend of mine used to say — I never knew what the H stood for.
here’s a legal ruling that illustrates neoliberal contract theory taken to its extreme…
notice that in this ruling “the start of sex” means the start of fucking (see above). the start of what is sex for men.
I suggest that this ruling, with its contractual overtones (the woman has “agreed to” a discrete contractual unit of sex — “the fuck”, and cannot renege on that agreement w/o being in breach of contract) reflects the ubiquity of prostitution in the legal understanding of heterosexual relations. in other words, the law regards all sex as a business proposition, and once a woman has “signed the contract” she is no more allowed to change her mind than she would be if she signed a deed of trust, a traveller’s cheque, or an affidavit. the man is seen as *entitled* to the sex act agreed upon, and consent cannot be withdrawn.
it would be interesting to clarify this ruling with questions about what “intercourse” means in this context. if, for example, intromission has not yet occurred, does the law permit the female partner to change her mind? what if the penetration is not “natural”, i.e. is oral or anal? what if she agreed only to vaginal penetration but the man forcibly inflicted a different mode (”round the world”) — would the court then admit her right to refuse, since then the man would be in breach of contract?
and does anyone — *puh-leeeze* — imagine that a man who had voluntarily offered sexual pleasuring to a female partner could ever be found in breach of any legal convention if, say, he became bored or tired or had a coughing fit in the midst of cunnilingus and wanted to stop? would a woman who somehow *forced* him to continue — and how on earth could she do that, but anyway, let us imagine that somehow she could — be considered a reasonable person exercising a legitimate right?
31 October 2006, 5:38 pmpeggy:
Really getting off-topic here, and maybe walking onto hot water as well, but maybe we ought to concede that a penis sometimes has a will of its own. That is, a man or boy can sometimes get a hard-on even if he doesn’t want this to happen. I am NOT excusing rape here, or anything like it, as a man can control the rest of his body enough not to stick his thing into a given orifice. But some men can be forced against their wills to get a stiffy, and if they are tied up or something, then that stiffy can be stuck into a place where the man does not want it to be stuck. A man can end up hating his penis for this reason, to the extent that he contemplates self-castration.
I wonder if this hatred-of-own-penis may result in owner’s abuse of same: sticking the hated thing into a hated place. Or, by extension, hating the place into which the thing is stuck. Do any men here have any comments on this hypothesis?
On the positive side, a woman can definitely use a man’s body as a “masturbatory aid” (by means of frottage, for instance) and some men enjoy it. It is a form of lovemaking. It is not, to the best of my knowledge, considered a form of fucking.
31 October 2006, 7:15 pmpeggy:
“How do two porcupines make love?”
“Very, very carefully.”
At the risk of ridicule, may I suggest that the term “make love” was deliberately chosen for this joke? The concept of fucking is incompatible with the concept of care, or of being careful.
I think some animals and birds can and do make love as opposed to merely fucking. Like emperor penguins for instance (anybody seen that movie)? I am happy to imagine that porcupines also make love.
Go ahead, laugh.
31 October 2006, 7:44 pmSpencer:
You’re kidding, right? At the risk of starting a flame war, in what possible sense is using the term ’skullfuck’ remotely synonymous with using the N-word?
31 October 2006, 9:02 pmStan:
Hi Spencer. Sorry about your job. And you ask a question, so no one is going to count it a flame. (Flame wars are outlawed here.)
Not kidding at all. Only what I said was that it is NOT synonymous, but should be… with regard to how calling n****r has been widely recognized as the explicit devaluation of Black folk, referring to sexual aggression and sexualized revenge, with the penis as the instrument of humiliation implies a devaluation of women.
It’s a set of corresponding binaries:
Male = aggressor = masculinity = fucker
Female = receptor = feminity = fuckee
Roam around the Gender section of this blog. There is plenty here to clarify this. It’s tricky at first, because we are immersed in masculinity-as-violence and sex-as-revenge to a point where it is invisible. That makes the position nof women in all this invisible, too.
31 October 2006, 10:47 pmStan:
Peggy, I had to look up “frottage.”
New Zealand and the United States… two peoples separated by a common language.
31 October 2006, 10:53 pmpeggy:
Stan, “frottage” is not a New Zealand word. From the looks of it, it’s French. I found it on the internet once. Previously, I didn’t imagine there was a word for it. Guys do it with each other, but girls can do it with guys as well.
1 November 2006, 12:16 amRequired:
Speaking as sex as revenge thing, has anyone seen Terminator 3? Man, did it suck (must confess I liked the first 2 as a kid). Anyway, I promise this nerdish rambling has a point.
The whole film is the male Arnie Terminator fighting a woman terminator. He is an old model (read traditional values), she is a new model (feminist woman.) He defeats her by taking out one of his power cells which conveniently look pretty phallic, grabs her by the face, which looks terrified, and jams his “power†into her mouth! I am not making this up. It is hard core misogyny.
There were so many horrible moments in that film, but the end was the most ground breakingly demented.
1 November 2006, 8:47 amjimi 45:
Yes, mild
At least in consentual* setting.
the other activities cited (both by you and by me) are, by their nature, both non-consentual and also highly hazardous if not entirely fatal. (I’m willing to accept that there’s some superfreak out there who digs consentual waterboarding, but this is about as far from normative as it gets, whereas this is not the case with ostensibly consentual ejaculation on partners’ faces.)
It is not at all lost on me that these acts are often referred to as “facial humiliation” and so on but, again, this designation of a pure Foucalutian binary relationship to such activities in all cases rings false to me. It is clearly a common attitude. But universal? I doubt it.
*I am quite willing to recognize that all sorts of acts, especially in a binary power-related exchange are only questionably consentual, but I use the term here in its ordinary/common sense.
1 November 2006, 8:03 pmCharles:
there is no ambiguity. if we want a word for the willing or joyous reception (engulfment was Dworkin’s suggestion, iirc) of a phallus by a lover’s body, we’re gonna have to come up with a new one. ‘cos “A fucks B†is Subject Verb Object, and there’s no getting around that. and the vernacular clearly reflects what we all know, no matter how vigorously wishful thinking or nervous obfuscation denies it.
^^^^^
CB: However, there are in fact a lot of women who use the verb “to fuck” with themselves or another woman as the subject, or in the form “they were fucking”, with one of the “they” as a woman. Or “we was gettin’ it on” ( woman speaking); it’s a social thing with two subjects, subject/subject sex. I just heard three women say it in that grammatical form of woman as subject or co-subject in the last two days ( not about me). I’m not going to say if there was some kind of study that it wouldn’t be majority male-fucker/female-fuckee in usage. But it’s not some rare occurrence that women use it with the woman as the fucker/subject.
The other thing is in terms of “objectification”, although feminism emphasizes woman as sex object, the actual basic physical situation is that the male has more of an object than the woman, and so the male or the male’s organ is more sort of “objectified” in one sense than the woman’s. The woman brings a “space”, not an “object”.
I think it more has to do with what the social relationship is between . If the woman has controlor power in the overall relationship, then the the shape of the physical act is not what determines the subject/object reference.
3 November 2006, 3:59 pmCharles:
Comment by spook — 10/30/2006 @ 8:44
this is probably nitpicking, but i have never equated “fuck†with “making love.â€
if i equate “fuck†with anything in a sexual context, it is the act of having sex. if “making love†is merely having sex, then i suppose “fuck†and “make love†could be considered equivalent.
to me, even without any romantic connotation, “making love†has to be more than merely having sex, or there is no “love†about it. calling it “making love†is a serious misrepresentation and an unjustified assumption.
i don’t see any irony about fuck meaning both “make love to†and “do harm to†because i don’t accept the premise. in fact, mere “fucking†in the sexual context obviously has some serious negative consequences.
the irony may be that some analysts equate “fucking†in the sexual context with “making love,†and not “doing great harm.â€
^^^^
CB: Your points are well taken. When I said “this word for making love” , I didn’t mean its only meaning is making love, obviously, since I was pointing out that the word is also used for making hate or as someone pointed out the product of hate or something like that. But any native speaker can tell that your other definitions for “fuck ” are also valid. I would say that “making love” _is_ one of the meanings of fuck, though. “Love” here need not be taken as deep, romantic, Christain love or anything. Just co-pleasuriing seems like love to me. Or at least I use “love” in that less heavy sense. Love-lite. The simple pleasures and “loves” of life are ok by me.
Sorry to hear that by your experience fucking has more to do with “doing serious harm” than with “making love(lite)”. I guess I’d say that’s a result of one of the ways in which our society is fucked up.
3 November 2006, 4:23 pmspook:
charles-
i didn’t say anything about my personal experience. i didn’t say there was anything wrong with “having sex” or “fucking” or “sharing” or “making love.” that is not my choice to make for anybody else.
i don’t need to have a negative experience personally to have known many people who have suffered a wide array of negative consequences as a result of mere “fucking.”
i just find it interesting who calls “making love” “fucking” and who doesn’t.
4 November 2006, 1:59 amCharles:
Glad to hear you haven’t had any negative personal experiences.
6 November 2006, 5:57 pmspook:
charles,
again, i didn’t say anything about my personal sexual experiences. i said I don’t NEED to have negative personal experiences to know others do. i think that is a fairly common phenomenon.
you’ve twice made remarks about my personal sexual experiences in the context of a general discussion about language and reality. i don’t see why that is necessary or appropriate.
i’m sure we can move on now.
6 November 2006, 6:31 pmCharles:
I was trying to express solidarity in both my statements.
When you say, “if i equate “fuck†with anything in a sexual context, it is the act of having sex.” and
“to me, even without any romantic connotation, “making love†has to be more than merely having sex, or there is no “love†about it”
It’s a bit ambiguous whether or not you are referring to “a general discussion about language and reality”.
7 November 2006, 12:20 pmspook:
charles,
fair enough. i think if you read the thread and my posts it’s not that ambiguous. even the examples you offered are clarified repeatedly.
this isn’t something i’d say to express solidarity with someone whom i concluded had suffered harm as a result of “fucking”:
**Sorry to hear that by your experience fucking has more to do with “doing serious harm†than with “making love(lite)â€.**
my mistake.
7 November 2006, 3:53 pmElaina:
Making love “lite.” Jesus christ. This conversation has unravelled.
How is it that a post intended to highlight the phenomenon of skullfucking as illustrative of male supremacy turned into a forum for men to talk about their own sexual philosophies and strategies?
Fuck that. There’s plenty of other places to go and talk about that on the web. Seems to me like it’s a waste of space here.
8 November 2006, 4:35 amspook:
elaina,
yes, the conversation has unraveled.
but men talking about their own sexual “philosophies and strategies”? that seems a bit unfair.
someone equated the word “fuck” with “making love.” i disagreed, in part because i think the vast majority of people who use that language with that meaning are male. i think that is relevant to the discussion of skull-fucking as illustrative of male supremacy.
someone made a comment about my personal life–the comment you just referred to. i didn’t appreciate it.
i probably didn’t need to respond to the personal comment but, for similar reasons to those you are expressing now, i didn’t see it as relevant or necessary.
i wonder how people would feel if the same comment was made to a woman who had suffered adverse consequences as a result of “fucking” and what they would expect as an appropriate response.
i think i’ll go back to soaking up stan’s work and leave the forum to those with valid opinions.
8 November 2006, 11:39 amStan:
Hay spook,
I think Elaina’s remarks were, like yours, directed to Charles. She can correct me if I’m wrong. I’m very tired, but that doesn’t seem clear here.
This forum — and VERY VALID voices like yours — is what this blog is for, and the collective work there is far more important than any of my lone ramblings… tho I am flattered by the vote of confidence.
8 November 2006, 12:16 pmspook:
okay, stan. i’m on day 7 of a fast and a bit fatigued.
i’m a newbie poster (not a newbie reader) and didn’t want to make myself an unwelcome participant on what i consider to be an oasis of intelligent thought.
and when i referred to your work, i didn’t mean just your “lone ramblings,” which i find to be intensely passionate, compassionate and intellectual, something i consider rare.
this website and everything in it is part of your work. you have created a vortex of intense thought–yours and others’–and for that i am grateful.
8 November 2006, 12:52 pmAudrey:
I had a long talk yesterday with an onlooker at an antiwar event. I saw him staring at us with one of those I’m-not-sure-I-like-this faces, and I wandered over to say hi. On a hunch I asked if he was a vet; turned out he was in Desert Storm. He talked a little about how he doesn’t like these extremist anti-war events. I nodded and talked a little about the organizing group, which does counter-recruitment, and explained that mainly we go into high schools and just correct misinformation the recruiters give out, and talk about the fine print in those enlistment contracts. He started in on how you can never trust recruiters.
It was one of those surreal conversations where we were on opposing sides but it was hard to see why. He brought up statistics on PTSD and spousal abuse by veterans; he talked about rampant sexual misconduct in his unit during bivouacs. He believed nobody under 25 should be in a combat zone because at that age they don’t have the maturity or wisdom to follow any of the Geneva Conventions at all, from what he saw – except then he clarified that there were a few rules they held sacred, like not shooting red cross vehicles. He thought we were in Iraq for the wrong reasons.
At the end, he restated his position that he just didn’t like the extremist anti-war protests … and he looked at our area for a few seconds. People writing names in chalk on a sidewalk. Silhouettes of bodies painted with cornstarch and water that will wash off in the first rain. No chanting, no yelling. One person was reading names of US and Iraqi dead. Then he said he guessed ours wasn’t really extreme. We shook hands before he headed off to class.
The thing that reminded me of this blog entry was that he’d originally thought about enlisting in the reserves. His recruiter talked him out of it, saying he’d regret taking a reserve position because it was a sissy move (phrased with a little more vulgarity), and that he should sign up for an active duty/combat position because it was “like an aphrodisiac.â€
An aphrodisiac. That’s an odd word choice, I said. He nodded in agreement.
It was one of those moments when there’s nothing to do but stare face to face with a total stranger, each understanding the impact of a seemingly minor thing that’s been said.
10 November 2006, 12:01 am