During a visit to Salt Lake City, just blocks from Temple Square at the Gateway Mall, I was aghast to see in the Victoria Secret’s display window a sexually positioned mannequin dressed in skimpy black underwear with garters and black stockings. I credit them for not including whips and chains, but the implication was surely there for the world to see – including small children and teenagers. A nice little Mormon family outing turned into a lesson on immorality with an explanation to my kids why they should wear their temple garments after they are endowed in the temple.
Why should I be exposed to that lewdness unless I choose to walk into the store? At least then I can walk out if I am offended, but please, don’t throw it in my face. It is sad to see that Babylon prospers so well in Zion, and that apparently no one cares enough to protest the perils of pornography. Well, I’m standing up to protect children from exposure to it.
In my childhood, the public was sheltered from inadvertent exposure to pornography by the use of brown protective wrappers on magazines. What a concept! I live in the country and I don’t get out much. Thank goodness.
I have a question. How is it that a moral woman in a nice little Mormon family who grew up protected from pornography by brown paper wrappers and lives in the country and doesn’t get out much knows about including whips and chains with skimpy black underwear, garters and black stockings?
It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.
Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.
Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen. I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s is absolutely right about this in general…
And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.
Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny. Amazon describes it thusly…
Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.
If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it. More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals. Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease… You’re damn right we’re anti-sex! It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian". I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something. But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence. If anything, it wants the silence to continue.
Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature. It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates. It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon. Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably. Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately. Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig. Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge. You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.
Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:
There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.
You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash. There’s a couple reasons for that. First..because it mostly Is trash. In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does. But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose. It’s job is to happily push our buttons. But everyone’s buttons are different. And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another.
When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them. Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex. Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on. I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion. That is me. My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one. But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit. Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else. I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact. They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection. It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was… Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem. It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality. I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women. Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females.
This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality. But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality. That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women. The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice. That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced. But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.
Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator. But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away. And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming. Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.
But that’s exactly what some people want. Better we feel ashamed then proud. Proud people don’t passively take orders.
There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.
If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within. It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover. If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature. There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane. We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt. That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women. So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.
From our Now Just Imagine How Much Bellyaching You’d Hear From The Kook Pews If Gay People Were Doing This department…
Color me unimpressed by Mark Penn’s "microtrends" based on Marc Ambinder’s writeup. Penn mostly seems to be playing his favorite sport of defining groups arbitrarily and then finding that if you slice up the population in random ways, you can get interesting-but-meaningless results. That said, this is funny:
Within the past ten years, the number of women who sought younger male boyfriends has quintupled. These are the "cougars," Penn writes.
I’m not sure I understand why they’re cougars? Because it’s an alternative to being a cat lady?
That’s from Matthew Yglesias, who gets himself an education on "Cougars" in the comments to his post. And so did I actually…
Los Angeles is a land where conventional time no longer exists. “There are no seasons, it’s always the same sunny blue sky day after day, so you never feel you’re getting any older,” said a friend, tranquilly. Here you can pause the passing of the years, or even rewind a little — breasts can be pert again, skin taut, forehead uncreased.
Age is no bar to anything in LA, least of all relationships — look at 44-year-old Demi Moore, all glowing and toned on the arm of 29-year-old husband Ashton Kutcher.
So perhaps the rise of the cougars should be no surprise. They’re a new Angeleno phenomenon: rich, powerful and — unlike Demi — predatory older women, whose natural habitat is the high-end shops, bars and spas of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and whose chosen prey is younger men.
Chris Breed, the Brit maestro of the Hollywood club scene — he looks about 28, but isn’t — has seen them in action. “It’s a complete role reversal,” he said over dinner at Maestro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills, a frenzy of mirrors and laughter. “But if you want to get on in this town, you go where the power is, and often the older women have power: power to cast an actor in the right role, power to get a man into the right club.”
“These girls don’t want steady relationships,” said Chris’s friend. “They’ve had that. Some of them have been married four times. They want to keep their money. Their attitude is, I’m rich, I’m in great shape, I don’t give a shit. They shred young men alive.”
“Do the men mind?” I asked. He grinned. “Hell, no.” At that moment, a woman swept in wearing a floor-length leopardskin coat, her hair bleached blonde, her lips cartoon-character colossal and exaggerated with so much lip liner and lipstick, she seemed to be more mouth than face. One hundred per cent cougar. Behind her hovered a slight young black guy, with white trousers slung low, and black beanie hat pulled down in an attempt to keep some street cred.
I later saw her haughtily leave the restaurant, and the doors nearly swung back on the poor guy as he bleakly followed.
“These girls,” the friend continued, “they carry Viagra in their handbags. Viagra and Cialis, the 36-hour drug. They are vicious. They call the shots.”
That’s from an LA Times article, posted up on the website UrbanCougar.Com…a website for older women who like younger men, and lots of them. Take a wee stroll over there, and ask yourself how loudly they’d be screaming about it on Fox News if that was a web site for older gay men who like younger guys. For one thing, no matter how much the operators and users of that site made it clear they weren’t about going after teenagers, let along children, the word all over the corporate news media, never mind Fox, would be that the site was somehow linked to NAMBLA, and was facilitating pedophiles. Middle aged heterosexuals can pursue younger lovers and maybe get an occasional sniff of disapproval, when they’re not getting knowing winks. Homosexuals are presumed to be child molesters.
But…never mind. There’s this foundational myth in western culture about female sexuality being more chaste and demure then male sexuality, and I’ve always been skeptical of it. I went through adolescence in the free love 60s and early 70s, and I’m here to tell you the girls weren’t any less sexually aggressive then the boys. But one of the slogans anti-gay crackpots like to throw out there is how male-female couples naturally complement each other in terms of their sexuality. The female’s less lustful, more maternal sexuality attenuates the male’s predatory sexual nature, while males, provide structure and a firm hand of guidance to the emotionally weak females. This, they claim, is why male homosexuality is so inherently reckless and promiscuous. Men need a female to tame them. Never mind it’s male superiority dressed up in a veneer of junk psychology. With regard to female libidos, it simply isn’t true.
Historically, it wasn’t all that long ago in western culture that the notion that women might actually experience orgasm when they weren’t ovulating, let alone enjoy sex for its own sake, was considered implausible. And even these days, the most rigidly male dominated cultures are without exception also the ones in the deepest denial about female sexuality. The more male dominated and fundamentalist a culture is, the more likely it is to nail female sexuality into a coffin. In Saudi Arabia they put women in burkas. Here in the U.S. we put them into the kitchen and tell them that only boys are allowed to have sex for its own sake, and that’s only because they can’t help themselves…they’re guys. But women like to dance in the arms of eros too.
Early work, both empirical research and theorizing, took a decidedly male-centered perspective on multiple mating, emphasizing how males maximize their paternity by being sexually available to more than one female whenever possible, also competing with each other directly (by bluffing, displaying, and fighting) and indirectly by guarding their mates, as well as by using an array of anatomical, physiological and behavioral techniques – such as frequent copulations – to give them an advantage over other males.
More recently, biologists have begun to identify how females partake of their own strategies: mating with more than one male, controlling (or at least, influencing) the outcome of sperm competition, sometimes obtaining direct, personal benefits such as food or protection in return for these extra-pair copulations, as well as gaining indirect, genetic benefits that eventually accrue to their offspring. A penchant for non-monogamy among males is no great surprise, but as we shall see, the most dramatic new findings and revised science brought about by recent demolitions of the myth of monogamy concern the role of females. Freud spoke more truth than he knew when he observed that female psychology was essentially a "dark continent." A well integrated theory of female sexuality in particular still remains to be articulated…
But that’s half the human race. If men don’t really know all that much about female sexuality, then how can they say they really know their own? The dark continent is sex. Still.
Why are we still so ignorant about this vital part of our lives? Because the status-quo doesn’t like being upset…and nothing upsets the status-quo like sex. Female sexuality has been kept in the closet all this time for the same reason that homosexuals were. Control. The prerogative of power is that you get first dibs on the hotties. Otherwise what good is money and status? In a world without fences, where everyone owns their own love lives, and manages their own sexual affairs for themselves, and are not only free to say Yes, but also No Thanks…then even the powerful have to ask.
That’s why, for so very, very long, so many of us have been taught not to trust our own feelings when it comes to sex. There are others who know what’s best for us. We must always listen to them…never to our own hearts…
Actually, the real object of my affections back then wore BVDs. Most days I could tell anyway. But I thought Jockeys were sexier back then (though I wouldn’t admit it) and so I used a little artistic license there.
Back when I was still trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay, oddly enough I could tell exactly what kind of underwear a guy was wearing just by getting the slightest glimpse of the waistband…usually in gym class. If I could see enough of the stitching through a guy’s gym shorts, or if he was wearing his pants tight enough, I could tell that way too.
"T.K." used to drive me absolutely nuts whenever he was out on that tennis court. Not only did he wear his gym shorts very tight…tight enough that I could clearly see the lines of his underwear…he’d wear a loose t-shirt that didn’t quite go all the way down his waist. So every time he took a swing at the ball I’d get a glimpse of his stomach…and that little bit of elastic waistband. At 17, it was electrifying. For the life of me I couldn’t turn my eyes away. But I knew I wasn’t sexually attracted to guys.
If you’d asked me anything back then about women’s lingerie I wouldn’t have had clue one. Matter of fact, I still don’t. For a bit of fun…hang out at the Victoria’s Secret at your local shopping mall and watch guys as they walk by. Most of them just can’t not look…even if their wives or girl friends are with them. And some are completely oblivious. That would be me, usually. Too bad there isn’t a men’s equivalent store chain. I’d make it a point to stroll past its window every time I walked in a mall with one.
At the end of episode ten, my libido warns my teenage self that things get more complicated after they invent designer underwear. But it’s a happy complexity…
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