Tag Archives: junk and the touching thereof

Wingnut history: The anti-sex revolution

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Like a high schooler blathering about Nietzsche, right-wingers who attempt to appeal to feminism will invariably get it wrong:

The Obama campaign has repeatedly appealed to women as if the feminist movement never happened – that is, as a monolith who can’t get sex and reproduction off the brain.

Yes, remember how, before feminism, women were constantly flaunting their sexuality? And how the greatest achievement of feminism was to teach them to be more modest and ladylike?

The ultimate absurdity here, of course, is that if feminism had never happened, Obama wouldn’t bother appealing to women at all, what with their not being able to vote and all that. But now they can, and if they feel compelled to vote based, in part or whole, on policies that will affect their uteruses (uteri?), that makes them responsible, not retrograde.

I’d sure as hell vote against a party that wanted to impede my ability to get healthcare for my dong, but nobody’s threatening to do that because I’m a dude.

Rape culture: alive and well

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Via LGM, this disgusting tale:

Prosecutors contended that [Officer Evans] drank eight beers and then drove himself to the Green Room, where he flashed his badge in an attempt to get into a concert for free. While inside, he walked up behind the victim, who was a friend of a friend, put his hand up her skirt and then ran his fingers across her genitals.

When bouncers threw him out, Evans told them he was a cop and they would be arrested.

The 43-year-old former Arizona Department of Public Safety officer was facing between six months and 2 1/2 years in prison, but the crime was eligible for probation. He will not be required to register as a sex offender, according to the sentence.

The judge said she considered the defendant’s lack of a criminal record and strong community support in her sentencing.

She also advised the victim to be more vigilant.

…

The judge sentencing Evans, Coconino County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Hatch, said she hoped both the defendant and the victim would take lessons away from the case.

Bad things can happen in bars, Hatch told the victim, adding that other people might be more intoxicated than she was.

“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you,” Hatch said.

You, Judge Hatch, are an asshole.

What exactly is the idea in the minds of these patriarchal shits? That no woman should ever go to a bar? That a woman who wants to socialize and enjoy herself outside of a book club or some other approved-for-ladies activity deserves to be sexually assaulted?

And as usual, it’s only when a woman gets sexually assaulted or raped that people start lecturing about all the things she did wrong to put herself in that position. Nobody ever goes easy on murderers just because the murder victim should have known that bad things happen at places that Puritans feel queasy about.

Anyway, fuck you, Judge Hatch. You’re an asshole.

Old white guy doesn’t approve of your sex life, news at 11

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CNN has run yet another entry in the “people are having enjoyable sex, better sound the death knell of civilization” genre of op-ed. I was actually surprised that this one wasn’t written by a woman – don’t get me wrong, I don’t think women are any likelier than men to feel this way. But the media loves running op-eds by prudish women, often women who identify as feminist solely so they can concern troll about how maybe all this sexual freedom is just downright bad for women, who propagate the notion that women don’t actually enjoy sex.

William Bennett

Pictured: The lovechild of Andy Griffith and William Shatner

But no, this one is written by an old white man, namely William Bennett. Now, I thought we as a society had moved beyond caring about what old white men think about our sex lives, but then, I suppose that hope was quashed when the GOP and the media decided that the opinions of a bunch of old white male virgins should have any impact on legislation concerning women’s reproductive healthcare.

The op-ed as a whole is a dizzying and deeply confused mixture of sex-negative buzzwords, beginning with the well-worn condemnation of “hookup culture” (and the accompanying finger-wagging at college-age women for letting men take advantage of them like that, don’t you know you’re supposed to demand a suburban house and two kids and a life of housewifery in exchange for sex?) and quickly spiraling into a Kubrickian wormhole of flashing colors and rants about BDSM until suddenly you’re in a hotel room and you’re not entirely sure how you got from there to here.

The op-ed seems to have been sparked by something he read Maureen Dowd (of course) say about that really awful new book that everyone with a taste for tacky literature is reading, 50 Shades of Grey.

Dowd cites the remarkable success of the trilogy among Generation X women — the contemporaries, allies and beneficiaries of the modern feminist movement. And yet, the narrative flies in the face of women’s progress.

This is one of the red flags that tells you a person isn’t actually interested in ushering in a post-patriarchal era of liberation from gender oppression, but just using superficial feminist language to concern troll about what women are doing with all this freedom we’re so magnanimously giving them. There’s no distinction in such a person’s mind between “woman” and “feminist.” Suddenly all women, especially all young women, are held accountable for the goals and direction of feminism.

It’s akin to getting angry at a completely random black person that there’s a BET but no WET. Because obviously every single black person had a hand in the creation of BET and endorses it.

For example, a contract that the girl signs with the man stipulates that “the Dominant may flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason, which he is not obliged to provide.”

Oh, so it’s BDSM that he’s hyperventilating so much about. Funny, I thought we were talking about “hookup culture” as a whole. At any rate, while I don’t partake in BDSM myself, the kinky-ass agreement described in this paragraph appears to be entirely consensual, so I’m having trouble getting worked up over it.

If this is progress for women, what would regression look like?

I’m glad you asked! Regression, to answer your question, would look like the man being able to “flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason” without the woman’s prior consent. Are we clear now? Good.

Bruni goes on to grapple with Dunham’s loveless sex scenes and wonders whether today’s onslaught of pornography and easy sex has desensitized men to the point where they view women, to recall the words of an earlier day, only as objects.

Pornography? Maybe. Not a can of worms I intend to open right now. Easy sex? Hardly. Women have faced systematic objectification for the entirety of human civilization. They still face it today. The existence of casual sex neither contributes to nor reduces this problem.

But really all this is especially rich coming from someone who (as we’ll see later on in the column, though I assure you it won’t come as a surprise) cleaves to the patriarchal view of sex as something that women have to hold onto for their future husband. That is objectification. Believing that casual sex necessarily debases women is objectification. Believing that their sexual purity is so central to their value that to have sex with a woman outside of marriage is to sully her is objectification, and that is the position you are advancing, Mr. Bennett.

A person’s sexuality (if they have one) is part of their personhood. It’s only part, and it’s not an essential part – unless they choose to make it so – and certainly to value a woman’s sexual desirability or availability over anything else about her is objectification. But to merely acknowledge and address and interact with that sexuality, if she so desires that you do, without denying the rest of her personhood, is not objectification. And it’s very irritating to see the way conservative misogynists have latched onto the term to advance their incredibly objectifying, patriarchal vision of family values while pretending that they’re the real feminists.

Even the act of sex itself is boring to some men unless it is ratcheted up in some strange, deviant fashion — all at the expense of the thoroughly humiliated and debased woman.

Wait, what just happened? Are we now proceeding from the assumption that all of hookup culture consists of BDSM sex? BDSM is probably the best-known kink out there, but it’s still a niche. Bennett’s point seems to have gone off the rails.

As Bruni asked: Is this what feminism fought for? In the 1970s we were told to respect women, treat them as more than sexual objects and treat their humanity the same as ours. Is any of this still true today?

Yes, it is true, in that I can have casual sex with a woman without regarding her as a “slut” or in any way “damaged.” Which is more than you can say, Mr. Bennett.

Take note that this disheartening and dismal tableau of modern liberated sex comes not from pro-family conservatives, who have been condemning this turn in our culture for some time, but from two stars of the liberal commentariat.

Oh good lord, no. No. Just no. Maureen Dowd and Frank Bruni are not “stars of the liberal commentariat.” Sure, they’re on the New York Times‘s payroll, but so is Ross Douthat. Dowd is one of those faux-liberal, faux-feminist concern trolls I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. And Bruni is just… well, he’s just kind of an inoffensive guy who’s well below theTimes’s purported quality. But you can say that about 2/3 of their editorial board these days. Liberal stars? Neither of them qualify, sorry.

The end of Bennett’s column is the real howler, though:

Is there no alternative to the “Red Room of Pain” and Dunham’s demoralizing sexual encounters?

Absolutely! Consensual, mutually enjoyable sexual encounters with whomever you want, as frequently or rarely as you want, with as few or as many partners as you want!

Yes, there is.

Oh good, I’m glad we agree.

In an enfoldment of immeasurable cares in a real and true love, there is immeasurable intimacy too, including a richly satisfying sexual intimacy that finds no equal or parallel in a callous and casual hookup culture.

It is worth pointing out that this desideratum — deep sexual satisfaction — is found most often, as has been empirically verified over and over again, in what is often called, derisively, traditional marriage.

Or… not.

Well, there you have it, folks: Your two options are marital sex or kinky BDSM sex that’s only enjoyable for the man. There is no other way to have sex.

Rush Limbaugh should be asking ME for sex tapes!

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If I wanted a vasectomy right now, you know how much I would have to pay for it? $0. Seriously, I checked with my insurance provider and everything. My current healthcare package, which I receive as part of my compensation from my employer, covers 100% of the cost of a vasectomy. Why aren’t Republicans in Congress gravely concerned about this? Why should my employer be forced to pay for me to have the ability to rut like an animal without any concern for the consequences?

Could it be because I have a penis rather than a vagina?

1) Boobs 2) ??? 3) Death

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I get that it’s totally cliche and well-understood to point out that teen slasher movies, of the Friday the 13th and Halloween variety, seem to have a disturbing fascination with punishing young women for having sex. But there’s a side to this trend that I don’t think has been discussed quite as much, and is frankly even more disturbing to me.

While it’s annoying on a certain level that you can watch Nancy’s friend having sex in A Nightmare on Elm Street and literally just know that she’s about to die, there’s also a certain endearing quality to the way your old-school teen slasher movies tried to preach Sunday School morality even as they gleefully ripped people to pieces. It’s not forgivable or, needless to say, persuasive, but it’s amusing in much the same way that your cranky old grandfather is amusing.

But the dull predictability of sexy female deaths in B-movies up to the present day has long since worn out its welcome. And the side to this trend that I was referring to, the one that bothers me far more than it amuses me (because as to the latter, it doesn’t), is that modern B-movies seem determined to convince us that not only will psychopathic serial killers target young women who are ostensibly sluts, but that the very forces of nature themselves conspire to punish women for such crimes as necking, bathing, and not being entirely dressed. Observe:

boobs=death

 

So basically, even piranhas, crocodiles, and, uh, ghosts target women who commit the crime of not keeping their breasts under wraps at all times. I wouldn’t be inferring any kind of social commentary from this trend if it weren’t so depressingly predictable. And the fact that the women so often die while naked sure seems to suggest that the death and gore are an integral part of the porn. I think our culture gets off not only on seeing boobs, but on punishing women for letting them.

As an antidote, I recommend Teeth, a movie that punishes men for being rapists and douchebags rather than women for having bodies.

The TSA Nude Body Screening/Junk Touching Saga Continues: Obama remains a douche, wingnuts claim moral high ground

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The Obama Administration has got to be the dumbest group of people since whenever the last Geek Squad staff meeting was. They campaign on a platform of not being George W. Bush, and are now dismayed to find that, after almost two years of being strikingly similar to George W. Bush, albeit with a veneer of faux intellectualism rather than faux cowboy homeyness, people didn’t want to vote for Democrats in the midterms.

For example, Obama came into office promising to reverse Bush’s egregious rights violations and protect the American people from the power Bush’s executive branch seized in the midst of a wave of fear and paranoia. Instead, his administration now defends the use of nude body scans and enhanced pat-downs (colloquially known as “touching one’s junk”). At a time when Republicans are calling out the TSA for being overly invasive, Obama should not be taking the authoritarian stance on this.

Don’t get me wrong, the Republicans aren’t doing so out of genuine concern. They’re doing it because the oppose the Obama Administration, which at the moment means every single thing the government does at any level can be disingenuously blamed on Obama. For Obama to lend them credibility by defending the TSA’s actions is going to do serious, serious harm to the Democrats’ image.

Two years ago, I was laughing in the face of people who said that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same. It’s still not really true, but the Democrats have been so ineffective this whole decade, and so afraid of the Republicans that they’d rather defend an atrocious policy inherited from Bush than actually reverse it, that they might as well be. The Republicans’ policy platform was replaced by rhetoric and prejudice a long time ago, but the Democrats’ policy platform appears to have been replaced more recently by watered-down centrism that basically amounts to total inaction.

Let me throw in a quick reminder of a law I read once. You know, one of those really important laws that constitutes the very core of our government? Okay, I’ll stop being subtle; it’s from the Constitution.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In other words, you may, with probable cause, issue a warrant describing “my junk” as the place to be searched. Until then, you cannot touch it. (Side note: I happen to be in the business of authorizing people to touch my junk; any interested ladies should call me sometime and we’ll see if we can get you a warrant. Hint: probably.)

But the worst part of all this, besides the reminder that Obama is a toothless moderate, is the way conservative pundits are flocking to this issue and pretending to be its liberty-loving champions. To wit (yes, to wit):

The hoi polloi revolt against such outrages is beginning to resemble the TEA Party awakening in 2009. Watch not just for the Goverment pushback to such audacity but some pragmatic hand-wringing from the usual corners of the blogsphere. (source)

Krauthammer’s take, however, is even more hilarious.

Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don’t touch my junk, Obamacare – get out of my doctor’s examining room, I’m wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don’t touch my junk, Google – Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don’t touch my junk, you airport security goon – my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I’m a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come? (source)

Racism? From Krauthammer? Why I never! Every ounce of disingenuous bullshit in Krauthammer’s “champion of human rights” spiel is revealed when he basically says that he’d be A-OK with the junk-touching if they were just touching brown Muslim junk. He and the rest of the wingnuts are convinced that they’re the ones fighting nobly against government intrusion.

But as Amanda Marcotte points out, they’re really just championing white male privilege:

By the way, the choice between scanners and searches isn’t anything new.  I was pulled for a random search in El Paso in August, and I chose the full body scan, because I’ve been patted down with the old procedures before, and if you’re a woman you still feel pretty molested by that.  The shift that’s created all the anger is that the procedures have gotten invasive to the point where men might feel molested.  Don’t fuck with the privileged, man.  The procedures already had a heightened humiliation factor for women, which I’ve experienced myself, but it took making white men feel like women and people of color often do for this to be pushed into the next zone of full blown anger.

So conservatives feel like they have a right to bitch about, and even blame liberals for, security practices that are a logical extension of the policies that began – with those same conservatives’ hearty approval – under Bush. It’s only when their junk is under scrutiny (gross) that they suddenly remember that Benjamin Franklin quote about trading a little liberty for a little security. Before now, they were all for trading liberty for security, as long as minorities made the lion’s share of the sacrifice.

In essence, something that has always been the case is that conservatives will scream BIG GOVERNMENT about two things:
1. Policies that benefit minorities in any way.
2. Policies that chip away in the slightest at white Christian male privilege.

And they won’t even buy you dinner first

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The TSA wants to see you naked. As a strident opponent of modesty, I might be willing to get naked for them if they asked, but they don’t. And while I wish I lived in a world where nobody cared about being seen naked, that doesn’t mean I’m going to believe that the TSA or any other authority has the right to see a person naked without that person’s willing consent.

This  all seems fairly obvious, but we live in a post-9/11 world, which means that terrorists are hiding inside your vagina people are scared enough to give up basic freedoms if the government promises to protect them from brown people. The same government that shouldn’t be trusted to provide for your health care or regulate the economy is eminently sincere and trustworthy in its mandate to keep us safe from those outside the straight white male bubble. And if you disagree, you hate our troops and such. (See any of Amanda Marcotte’s many posts on what she calls “security theater” for some excellent reading about this attitude.)

This is the reason that my friend Mike segued immediately from naked TSA scanners to a great dissection of authoritarianism in America. It’s not just the people in authority who are authoritarians, after all – it’s the people underneath them who willingly let them maintain that authority. To use the ever-tasteful prison rape metaphor, they’re basically bending over and letting the government have its way with their buttholes.

There’s not much to say about it that Mike hasn’t already said, so I’m going to look at his point from a different angle: economic authority rather than political and social authority. Granted, the three are inseparably bound together, but that’s the very reason I felt that the economic angle was noticeably absent from Mike’s discussion of governmental authority.

Something I’ve observed in the past few years is the way people submit themselves to the authority of corporations, millionaires and billionaires, property owners in general. To their minds, they’re submitting to the power of the free market, by which reasoning the billionaires deserve their power because something something hard work mumble most productive cough cough invisible hand. Or to put it more legibly, they earned their money – and thus their power – through hard work.

But money is power, and that means that anyone who would tell you that money is a legitimate source of authority is pushing a philosophy of “might makes right.” This alone should be enough to make people shy away from the authority of the free market, except that America as a society actually does believe that might makes right. We have a right to stomp all over Middle Eastern countries precisely because we can, and no matter how many layers of justification we build about WMDs or freedom or security, when those all break down there are still conservative pundits arguing that we have a right to pick a third-world country willy-nilly and shove it against the wall just to show the world how tough and manly America is.

So pointing out the fact that the American people are basically being financially bullied into doing what the rich people want isn’t going to get very far. After all, we live in a country where John Boehner can stand in front of Congress and explicitly state that he’s favoring corporate interests over the good of the people and not get immediately impeached. Democracy can never function if the people want a king, whether that king has a crown or a gigantic net worth.

The rich use their power to influence the political process, as everyone knows, but they also use it to influence social attitudes. They want people to believe that what’s best for the richest is best for everyone; that an unregulated free market will favor people at every income level; that corporations can provide for people’s interests better than government can. And nowhere has this attitude gained more traction than in the US.

Gavin, in a rare bout of coherence, explains it thusly:

On this day in history, that first sentence could be the one that’s the most dense-packed with stupid of all sentences in an Erickson post, and therefore, until proven otherwise, in all of human discourse. “Continue to screw consumers with laws against business” is almost beautiful. It’s a stark, unadorned construction of ideas that required literally decades of work by the postwar right, first in the building of institutions and infrastructure, then in releasing payload after payload of bad-faith claims and contorted analyses into the atmosphere, until at last, a sufficient degree of besozzlement was realized that a sensible moderate-income American might expect to encounter such a phrase outside of the nearly plotless string of laugh-lines that make up a Sinclair Lewis novel.

[...]

The almost-beauty of Erickson’s word-sculpture, and I’ll repeat it: “continue to screw consumers with laws against business,” is that anybody with a lick of, and I quote again: “basic economic sense,” knows that consumers and business are inherently, tautologically, by the nature of what ‘consumers’ and ‘business’ are, opposed in their basic interests. For example, buyers want low prices, while sellers want high prices.

In a larger sense, the great project of the right in America since the reaction against Jacksonianism, or fundamentally since Hamilton, has been to advance the interests of the propertied and wealthy, the employers and sellers, in a system set up to respond to the will of the majority, who necessarily will mostly be employees and buyers.

This is not possible to achieve except by fooling the majority that their interests are different from what they are, manipulating them to exert their political power in various foibles and whoopsies: to shoot wealth away in a circus cannon; to be maneuvered into quarrels with the Blacksons next door and the Juanses around back; to put the car in gear and have the garage door pulled off by a sneaky chain, and that night to have the car driven off skidding and beeping from the wide-open garage; to find clowns switching your water and sewer lines, then run out to have other clowns switch the sewer and gas, then run in and someone flushes the john and blows out all the windows, then run out as clowns enter through the windows, then run back in, etc.

Conservatives were a nervous bunch back in the 40s – the Great Depression had shattered the country’s faith in the unregulated market, not to mention exposed millions of Americans to the realities of living poor; the New Deal had demonstrated that economic regulation actually does benefit most Americans; and World War II took an understandable toll on the popularity of fascism. FDR was more popular than a woman in the men’s locker room, and the Republicans were sweating.

And thus was born the seed of the modern Republican Party, which in recent years has reached the apotheosis of reality-denial, batshit rhetoric, and the replacement of policy with prejudice. It began with Yalta and the replacement of blacks with Communists as the scary group trying to take over America, and they never looked back.

It wasn’t merely a political coup – the wealthy benefit as well from this shift in political discourse, as was the intent. A scapegoat is created. The Pentagon is built to protect against that scapegoat, and to create more enemies to scapegoat later. And ultimately, those who question or attack the authority of the wealthy can be accused of sympathizing with or being a member of the scapegoated group. Basically, you want the Communists/hippies/Satanists/liberals/gays/terrorists to win. And the final result is that, in the middle of a recession so severe that it mirrors the Great Depression in many ways, John Boehner can stand in front of the nation and say, without subtlety or guile, “Don’t worry, rich people. We’ve got your back.”