I finally got a response. At first it was “Oh for heavens’ sake” but then it turned a bit hostile. She informed me that if women weren’t so “panzy assed” they would tell the men in their lives what makes them happy sexually. Then she admited the “fear factor” for women.

I took it from there. I told her that this is the way men are being raised. This has been passed down from generation to generation and it is where a lot of the sexual aggression, rape, assault, etc… has evolved from. Maggie agreed with that and added that “today” it’s all about being “tough, rough, and manly”. Sad thing to say about our “up and coming”.

She is a strong young lady and informed me that if todays women were confident enough with their own bodies and comfortable enough with who “they are” they will have no problems letting their men know what they need from them sexually. But she also acknowledged that a lot of times men just “don’t have a clue” – because of what society has given them to draw from.

In the long run she said to tell you that you “are right” and that “Freud was a lunatic” – she has studied his works.

wow. I somehow had never envisioned myself as a writer of prenuptial advice I would be interested to know what a 20-y.o. woman thinks about these things, whether she says e.g. “Oh for heavens’ sakes Mom, everyone knows all that, how dumb do you think we are?” or whether she is surprised by (or even annoyed by or hostile to) the information/argument. thanks for the kind words…

Thank you for this. I am going to set my 20 yr. old daughter down tonight and make her read this – before she marries her intended (in a few weeks).

It also gives me A LOT to consider as I raise my 8 yr. old son.

Linda

apologies for a poorly written transition.

before the Short-Ears can even find out if they enjoy sculpture or gardening, the Long Ears have to stop pushing them around.

>A belated observation, but maybe relevant: when porn and other kinds of hate speech are identified as causing harm, ther defenders often answer that, after all, they’re (to quote the title of a terrific book by Catherine MacKinnon) “only words.” This Nebraska judge and his defenders, on the other hand, seem to have no problem acknowledging that words — mere words, only words — can have powerful consequences, so powerful that they need to be banned lest they undermine the workings of justice.

I expand on this: legitimate legal opinion is that for prosecuting counsel repeatedly to refer to the defendant(s) as “rapist(s)” or “murderer(s)”, repeatedly to refer to an exhibit as “the murder weapon” or “his rape kit”, is prejudicial and can lead to an unjust decision in a case where — as we are so often reminded — a man’s life/future is at stake!

and yet we are repeatedly told — often by legitimate legal opinionators — that there is no measurable harm in the ubiquitisation of a pornographic culture that repeatedly refers to all women as “bitches,” “hos,” and other fuck-object labels, repeatedly opines that the only purpose for women’s bodies is men’s sexual satisfaction, that women enjoy being dominated, etc.  … and women who challenge this prejudicial atmosphere are routinely described as “feminist anti-porn harridans,” “prudes,” “censors,” and so forth.
somehow, outside the courtroom, this doesn’t lead to an atmosphere of prejudice in situations where — as amply documented — women’s lives and happiness are at stake. or so we are told.

like I say, “double your standards, double your fun.”

“enjoying heterosexual sex” is one of those obfuscatory phrases again. does “heterosexual sex” mean making love with a person of the other biological sex? or does it mean penis/vagina copulation only, and all other sexual activities between two persons are somehow “not heterosexual” even if heterosexuals do — and enjoy — them?

whether penetrative sex is a violent act or not depends on the feelings of the receptive partner (or victim, if it is indeed a violent act). on the positive scale: for the receptive partner it might be “so-so” as physical stimulation goes, but still very pleasant and intimate and endearing because of the joyfulness of pleasing a beloved Other; it might be pleasant and stimulating physically, but not quite sufficient for orgasm (if that’s the point, and we could question whether that is or should be the whole point), hence a perceived need for what is dismissively called “foreplay”; or in some cases (probably a minority based on empirical, anecdotal, and clinical evidence) it might be sufficiently stimulating for orgasm.

now for the negative scale: it might be merely boring and tedious, something one puts up with to humour the other person (I’d say the relationship is in trouble right there, if one person is meekly accepting a service role of this kind); it might be boring and tedious but endured for material gain or other advantage, like a kind of boring job; it might be painful or uncomfortable but endured to humour the other person or to gain material or social advantage (take for example the popularity in Africa of “dry sex” in which men want women to induce vaginal dryness in order to increase male sensation, and many women go along with this in order to get, or keep, a male partner — which in turn ties into patriarchy and the many motivations for getting and keeping a male partner other than love and affection, like protection, assistance in earning a living, etc); it might be painful or uncomfortable or humiliating, but endured because of physical threat or financial desperation (which is just a form of physical threat mediated by money); it might be painful, uncomfortable, humiliating, and endured under direct physical duress, as in a gun to the head, a knife to the throat, being restrained by one or more predators, being tied up, being drugged or Tazed, being weaker or smaller than a violent attacker, being disabled, etc. … and in the worst case it might be painful and traumatic, leading to lasting physical damage, disability, or even death. [I'm not even talking about psychological effects, PTSD, nightmares, flashbacks, the power of even a "non-brutal" (ha!) rape to destroy a woman's pleasure in her own body, disrupt her sleeping habits for years, make her unable to trust anyone intimately for years or possibly forever, destroy her partnership or marriage, etc]
the point is not that women “can’t enjoy” heterosexual copulation; the point is that heterosexual copulation can be — and commonly is — stolen or forced, and yet still result in a high-quality orgasm for the male doing the penetrating. in all the cases I’ve listed above, the male partner (or predator in the more negative cases) can walk away having experienced orgasm, a big neurochemical reward hit in the brain, and whatever other physiological and psychological benefits accrue from ‘successful’ intromission and ejaculation. the experience is inherently asymmetrical. women’s clitorides are not located in their vaginas, but men’s primary orgasm-producing nerve clusters are located in the penis… and not all the wishful thinking in the world changes the ontology or neurology. the clitoris is the homologous structure to the penis, developing differently in the fetus as it becomes gender-differentiated. the nerve clusters that would end up in an oversized, erectile penis in an adult male end up in a smaller (but still erectile, though not so showy) structure in the adult female. this is freshman physiology, and I don’t really understand why there seems to be such resistance to accepting the morphological reality. (though I have some theories, as we shall see )

many sexual experiences are asymmetrical, and that’s not necessarily evil: no one pretends that, for example, a male or female lover offering cunnilingus to a female partner is likely to have an orgasm as a result. it is a “gift” activity (when it isn’t perverted by porn culture into some kind of “gross-out” game, voyeurism, or a control fantasy); it’s quite clear that A is giving pleasure to B. and it can be quite a vicarious thrill — and/or very sweet, intimate, and bonding — to participate in such an intimate act of pleasure. fellatio likewise… but here we should really pause and note again the cultural/political significance of the very popular porn flick “Deep Throat,” which offered porn consumers the bizarre contrabiological fantasy of a woman whose clitoris is located in her throat: this film (it has been claimed) inspired a wave of more-than-usually brutal oral rapes, and a wave of coercion of female by male partners to perform an extreme sexual act. Linda “Lovelace” who starred in the film, later reported that her then-husband (and pimp) was an habitual abuser:

Boreman claimed her first husband forced her into pornography at gunpoint. They divorced in 1973.

Their relationship disintegrated into a life of violence, rape, prostitution and pornography, according to her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, and her testimony before congressional committees investigating pornography.

Boreman said she was never paid a penny for “Deep Throat” and her husband only was paid $1,250, though the film grossed a reported $600 million.footnote

but if you google for “Deep Throat” today, you are likely to find only starry-eyed sentimentality for the “good old days” of the porn industry and what a liberating event the film was for everyone. there is a somewhat interesting discussion over at Snopes in which the participants argue about the ethics of distributing (and watching, and getting off on) a movie that documents the coercion and rape of an abused wife. you’ll find all the stock liberal tropes somewhere in this thread
at any rate, my point here is that Deep Throat sold a Sci-Fi Z-movie fantasy (The Man With Two Heads!) of a woman who was, gee whillikers, somehow miraculously mutated morphologically to get her deepest satisfaction from being fucked in the throat by a well-endowed male; a practise that in real life would inflict enormous physical stress and the risk of permanent damage or suffocation. the idea was — just like liberal contract law — to obfuscate a power relationship by pretending that the colonised or exploited party is so constructed, by God or Nature, as to enjoy and welcome their exploitation. sound familiar? the Iraqis will greet us throwing rice and flowers.

while the insistence on the primacy of the vaginal orgasm — as promoted by Freud and greeted eagerly by patriarchy-fans of all flavours — is not quite so extreme as this bizarre fantasy, it is still fantasy;  and it still serves an obfuscatory purpose. (notice that the Freudian fantasy had its own bizarre and extreme political/social results, like the genital mutilation of women to “make them normal”). it constructs a fantasy in the mind of the person receiving a sexual gift or service that no gift is being given, because the provider or giver is (allegedly) getting off on it just as much as the receiver. thus all “true accounting” of reciprocity, gift exchange, gratitude, etc. is erased. if men believe that all women find copulation just as orgasmic as men do, then they feel no obligation to offer any reciprocal lovemaking, to learn anything about the reality of the female anatomy and neurology, or even to feel a moment’s gratitude for a woman’s assistance in getting them off.   and if a woman fakes a climax, they easily believe it and look no further, nor bother to learn any of the physiological indicators that might suggest a fake.  nor — and this is crucial — need they feel any guilt or shame for rape, if they believe that penetration is inherently just as pleasant and erotic for the “catcher” as for the pitcher. more than one rapist has claimed — to his friends, in court, to the press, and even to his victim’s face — that he knows she just loved it, it’s what women want, they’d all be better off for a good f*ck, blah blah.

awareness of the troublesome sexual asymmetry in us hairless chimps is not recent. throughout human cultural history — not just ours — there’s an implicit acknowledgement that copulation is not as physically satisfying for women as for men; at the very least, men need to learn how to “last longer” in order to give a woman even a running chance at an orgasm. even in “innocent” low-tech cultures such as the Bushmen — with a very high Gini coefficient and very little patriarchal structure — acknowledgement is made that men should bring gifts to women in exchange for sex (could the roots of prostitution lie this deep?) and that a good man should “do extra” to make a woman physically satisfied and happy. in the more enlightened cultures of the Mediterranean, experts (often religiously affiliated) offered lessons for both men and women in how best to please a partner, in preparation for marriage.  sophisticated persons in e.g. Crete’s golden era would have laughed Freud out of the temple.
so the idea that women are ideally sexually satisfied by “model-A” missionary (or any other) position copulation is by no means universal. it may have even started with Freud (as noted above) who seems to have invented the vaginal orgasm in accordance with his overall patriarchal theories about women’s nature and place; recall that he also refused to believe in the incestuous abuse of women by their fathers, attributing any testimony to a delusional “syndrome”, the Elektra Complex (corresponds to the Oedipus Complex in men). when his female analysands reported being raped by their fathers, he told them they were imagining the whole thing due to a complex. nice guy, eh?

It is now universally acknowledged that Freud’s ideas about women’s sexuality—in summary, that they were incomplete men—were so far wrong that, as his sympathetic biographer Peter Gay jokes, “If he were president of Harvard, he’d have to resign.” The low point of Freud’s reputation was probably the early 1990s, when women were filling the talk shows with accounts of childhood sexual abuse dredged from their unconscious. This was a no-win situation for Freud—who, admittedly, had staked out positions on both sides of this question, as he often did in his long career. Those who took the side of the accused parents and siblings blamed him for having planted the idea, in his early work, that the repressed memory of actual sexual abuse was a common cause of adult neurosis. Those who believed the accusers charged him with cravenly surrendering to community pressure when he ultimately decided that many of these recovered memories were actually childhood fantasies. “Sending a woman to a Freudian therapist,” Gloria Steinem said at the time, “is not so far distant from sending a Jew to a Nazi.”

His reputation has only barely begun to recover. In the wake of the repressed-memory wars, the vast Freud archive at the Library of Congress, much of which had been embargoed for decades into the future, has been opened to scholars. And Freud’s debunkers are finding much to confirm what they’ve said all along, that his canonical “cures” were the product of wishful thinking and conscious fudging, and his theories founded on a sinkhole of circular logic. Efforts to validate Freudian psychology through rigorous testing or brain-imaging technology is still in its infancy. “I’m afraid he doesn’t hold up very well at all,” says Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist and author of “Listening to Prozac,” who is working on a biography of Freud due to appear next year. “It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality.”

footnote

we should also note Freud’s (and patriarchy’s) legacy:  the still-existing cultural kapu against men learning to please women properly, or bothering to do so; it was noted recently that a male character on the notorious ‘Sopranos’ show was (in the script) derided and mocked by male friends when it was revealed that he was very good at cunnilingus (and was making one or more women very happy); this was considered — guess what — unmanly, sissy, not quite “heterosexual”.  it almost made him [gasp] a “fag”.  and here we have the nub of patriarchal belief about sexuality:  egalitarian or gift-exchange sex is unmanly, where Man is defined by patriarchy as ‘one who dominates/takes and does not give.’  the fact of taking, of enforcing an asymmetrical exchange (whether it be in bed or in neoliberal “free trade” contracts) equals dominance which equals Manliness.  notions of equal exchange or limits on kleptocracy are for “economic girly-men” [hat tip to Arnold Schwarzenegger, God's gift to political satirists and anyone else wanting to hear the neolib message without its pretty intellectual gift wrap].  the theory of the vaginal orgasm corresponds roughly to the neolib interpretation of Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage:  the Third World is really benefitting equally from “development” (the extraction of its resources in a “trade” system that is by definition and of necessity asymmetrical and unequally advantageous).  patriarchal sexuality, which has been called phallocentric (or “dickheaded” by those with a more Anglo-Saxon bent), might as well be called kleptosexuality — a word I made up just last week, but I see that the Urban Dictionary is ahead of me with a much less useful definition — a sexuality based on the valorisation and eroticisation of unequal exchange.  when a man under patriarchy tries to be a “fair trade partner” and give as much pleasure to a (female) lover as he receives himself, he’s automatically demoted to “less than a man,” sliding towards patriarchy’s outcast community of “deviants and homos”.  porn reveals that it isn’t the specific act that’s at issue:  it’s the egalitarian attitude.  any sexual act — including acts between women — can be and are shown in porn for men, so long as they are set in a kleptosexual frame (coercion, voyeurism, insult, blending at the gonzo end into overt rape and violence).
I couldn’t agree more that women totally deserve — as much as anyone “deserves” or is entitled to more than survival and justice — a healthy and happy sex life. but part of a healthy and happy sex life is not being compelled (by tradition, by the fear of hurting a male partner’s feelings, by force, by violence) to settle for a less-than-satisfactory sexual praxis, or to fake an orgasm when not actually feeling one. this act of fakery is what men require most often from prostitutes: to compel the subordinated person to pretend to be happy, to force the slave to dance and smile, is the ultimate refinement of domination.

the haunting question for men under patriarchy, as for any privileged class, is an uncertainty about the honesty and genuineness — the authenticity — of their sexual experiences with women. the price of power is the loss of authenticity, much as the price of microcontrol is the loss of robustness and diversity; the traditional power of men to compel women to submit, or to “fake it,” persists enough that unless the connection with a partner is very strong, very genuine, very honest, deeply trusting, the paranoia of aristocracy (does my butler really respect me, or just pretend to because I am his livelihood?) must endure.   racism has the same corrosive effect on relations between dominant ethnicities (Anglos in our culture) and deprecated ethnicities;  whitefolks with Black, Chican@, FirstNations friends have to wonder, “do my friends really like me or are they just nice to me because of my skin priv?”…. only an end to the rape culture can remove that taint of inauthenticity for the general population. only a very high-quality and special relationship (a “separate peace”, a private or collective TAZ), one where honesty and intersubjectivity are valued more highly than gender roles and “safe” conformity with cultural norms, can remove it for those of us living in Patriarchy Version 2007.0

but of course industrial capitalist culture specialises in substituting the cheap/easy inauthentic experience for the genuine article. profits are higher, less time must be invested, it’s more “efficient” than artisanal or commensalist or convivial (or sustainable!) production. two generations of men have grown up on totally inauthentic packaged porn — patriarchal cartoon sex, the junkfood of sexuality, a sexuality modelled on Taylorist industrialism for the production of maximal male orgasms with minimal investment — and now I sometimes fear that, like kids fed McDonalds’ cr*p from infancy, they are no longer capable of understanding what real food tastes like, or enjoying it if they happen to come across some. and women are, like it or not, being dragged along with the cultural drift; the pressure is now on bigtime to renounce a feminist analysis, embrace porn, dress like a hooker, and fake it with a determination and enthusiasm never before required; not just asked to fake an orgasm by ordinary copulation, it appears that young women today are under pressure to provide fellatio on demand, to submit to anal penetration, etc — and to like it, or pretend to like it, or risk being “totally uncool” and ostracised by their peer groups. I’m not aware of any similar pressure on young men to provide sexual pleasures for their girlfriends or risk social ostracism, but perhaps younger readers can correct me on this or expand our view of contemporary youth culture?

But wait, you guys really believe that as a biological fact, women just enjoy hetereosexual sex less than men? And you’re saying that to suggest otherwise is a symptom of ‘liberal feminism’?

I dunno. Let’s accept (because it is true)
* Many, many women in our society, much of the time, are pressured into having sex they would rather not be having.
* Many women in our society who have hetereosexual sex have unsatisfying hetereosexual sex.
* The contemporary idea that all women should be enjoying sex all the time–and should be having sex with any man who wants it and _should be enjoying it_–it surely just as much, or perhaps more, repressive and abusive than the previous pressure that instead said good women should never enjoy sex.
* And of course, that men need to learn how to relate to women as equals in a _non sexual_ way, and most men now are not able to do this.

Okay.

So, but despite all this, don’t women _still_ deserve a healthy and happy sex life? I guess a valid argument is the lesbian seperatist one that it’s not possible for a woman to have such hetereosexually. That’s pretty much the only place I see your argument leading. It’s an argument that can be made. Not being a woman myself, I certainly respect any woman that decides that.

I’m still not going to believe it’s some kind of general fact of biology though, that women just can’t enjoy hetereosexual sex. I mean, we just described all the ways in which our culture makes sex and sexuality into a violent act against women—does it really seem likely that women’s attitudes toward sex is unaffected by this? Or are you suggesting, that it’s not society, but that _biologically_, hetereosexual sex is _neccesarily_ a violent act against women?

I doubt you would make such a claim; the danger there is in somehow excusing men for _their behavior_ which is in fact what makes sex a violent against against women, not their genes.

First I’d like to state that fear of sexual abuse and rape isn’t somthing that belongs only to women.

My own personal history;

When i was in 2nd or 3rd grade a 4th or 5th grade boy from my school disapeared. Five days or so later his body was found naked. He had been strangled. While I did not know, intelectualy, about sex, sexual abuse or rape at that point but I was well aware that there was somthing sinister about the fact that his body was found naked.

When I was in middle school I was walking home from the bus stop near my house. A car full of teenage boys pulled up a said somthing to the effect of ‘we’re going to kidnap you and rape you.’

In Air Force Basic training one of my fellow enlistees accused one of our TIs of raping him. We were assured that the situation would be ‘taken care of’ and at the same time admonished to keep quite about the whole thing.

Going into the D.C. jail in 2000 during the IMF/WB demonstrations we were told by one of our jailers that ‘there are a thousand angry (n-word)s up there just waiting just waiting to rape you.

When a women hears these stories they may be amazed or disgusted that I might compare my fear to what they expierience every day but I will submit to you that in the context of my own mind (the only context i willever really know) they were very real and did have, and probably continue to have on a sub to semi conscious level, a very real impact on me.

I understand that the possibility of a man being raped is statistically insignificant compared to that of a woman but I would submit that statistical insignificance is not the same as non existance. If one discounts the expierience because it is statistically insignificant one is also discounting real people with real expieriences. I would also contend that if one discards men who have been raped and men who have feared rape (and are willing to acknowledge that fear) one also discards potentially valuable allies in trying to communicate the nature of rape and the fear of it to men who have not expierienced those things, or have chosen to surpress those fears or memories.

Regarding the fear of rejection, one of my major fears and in this I would like to establish that i’m expressing my own feelings, not trying to explain or defend Dicks statements.

Yes part of the fear is ‘not having a palce to put my dick’ but I would express it in terms of a fear of failing in the primary biological imparitive of reproduction.

The greater part of the fear of rejection comes froma different place. I was socialized to believe that heterosexual pair bonding was the norm of society and that every normal, well adjusted, healthy and worthy person would form such a pair bond and in so doing take their proper place in society. If I fail to form this pair bond then I fail in all of these areas, I fail to be a worthy member of my tribe. If I fail to be a worthy member of my tribe I may be excluded from that tribe. To the extent that humans are social beings this is a threat to ones very existance.

I can compare this fear to a womans fear of rape and I must compare it because how can I hope to understand anything if I can’t compare it to somthing that is in my field of expierience. I understand that others might be offended by this but it is how I feel.

If I might be permited an annalogy;

I spent my teenage years in mid Michigan. People who wanted to ski downhill and did not have the money or time to leave the area had to content themself with a place called Mount Brighton was/is a covered landfill that was let us say 800 feet tall.

I now live in Seattle. Mouint Raineer tower over everything in the area. Let us say it is 14,000 feet tall.

If one were able to take ‘Mt.’ Brighton and set it next to Mt. Raineer one would be able to judge how insignificant the one is compared to the other. While this is true in the context of Mid Michigan Mt. Brighnton still seems very large.

If a man could take his fear of rejection (Mt. Brighton) out of the context of his own expierience and and place it next to a womans fear of Rape (Mt. Raineer) he might be able to understand how insignificant it is. It is, however, the nature of our minds that we only have the territory we have. Disney movies and science fictions novels aside we cannot switch places.

I beleive that it might even be useful to allow and even encourage such comparisons if we wish to change the rape culture.

I have more I wish to write but have run out of time. I hope no one is hurt or offeneded by what I had to say. If so please let me know.

Yours in peace, Michael

STAN comments: I’ll leave it to others to deconstruct some of the more painfully drawn rationalizations here; and I’ll validate that some men – under certain circumstances – definitely do have occasion to fear rape. We have talked here at some length about prison rape (of males, women are raped frequently in prison, too) and what that means in the context of patriarchy. The rape of men is almost always conceived of by the perpetrator as a means of humiliating a male by making him like a female. But fear-of-rape for the vast vast majority of men (and this in no way invalidates or minimizes the experience of individual men and boys who have been subjected to the threat or act of rape) is a decidedly abnormal situation for men. The fear-of-rape is a nearly constant feature of almost all women’s existence in patriarchal society… in other words, the norm. What I find peculiar here – again not as a way of invalidating the experience of any victim of sexual predation and assault – is that when the egregious ininital incident (the judge prohibiting the use of the word “rape” in a courtroom) which served to reinforce the system of patriarchy in which all women are imbricated and disadvantaged from birth, has been pulled back (as it always seems to be, by men into a discussion of ‘competing victimhood’ by men… one that tacitly puts an equal sign not only between contingent circumstances, but between the structural conditions between men and women in a decidedly unequal society.

The fear of rejection (a risk taken voluntarily) and the fear of broken bones, bodily violation, etc being inflicted on you willy nilly, are not imho to be compared, any more than a nasty skin lesion from a brush with poison ivy can be compared to finding — say — a Karposi’s Sarcoma on one’s arm.