08 December 2014

All about the sex

I always hear about women having trouble having an orgasm.  About 10% of women have never had an orgasm, and I've heard plenty of male friends tell tales of girls who just "lie there".  As someone who feels sex is a very important part of life, this strikes me as extremely tragic!
First off, I want to say, I’m not anti-porn or pro-censorship and I freaking love sex – let’s just get that out of the way up front. I am definitely not one of these women, but I have talked to several of them and have always been puzzled by this issue.  (And because I'm a hetero cis female, I will speak from that point of view, so excuse me for leaving out all the lovely LBGT beauties, but that is not my experience, so I don't want to speak for anyone in that community.)
Porn gets blamed for the brokenness in male/female sexual relations a lot, but as adults. But I think the disconnect happens sooner, and it isn’t just in porn, but in the idea of what “sexy” is via the male gaze. Think about it: what we think of as “sexy” has been highly constructed. I believe the disconnect for women is that their first introduction to sexuality in our culture is entirely focused on the external than the internal — looking sexy as opposed to feeling one’s own sexuality. So in other words, women learn to act sexy according to pre-prescribed ideas of what sexy is visually…but they learn little to nothing about how to pleasure themselves. (Think about it — we don’t even really have much popular slang in this culture for women’s masturbation, but dozens of terms for the male — how do girls learn about masturbation for themselves?) So many women fall into a sort of “performative” sexuality that is disconnected from their own body and what it’s doing, instead focusing on “acting” sexy and not communicating with their partners.
Which is the key point: sex is a thing we do together, not a thing we do to one another. The best sex includes communication about what feels good and intense connection — if women are just “lying there” I’m guessing that they don’t feel good and they don’t know what will enough to communicate it to their partner, or they feel like they can’t communicate with their partner in the first place without being judged possibly. (I don’t know for sure, I’ve never been one to “just lie there”.) I’m guessing this is where the “feeling safe” idea comes into play — “feeling safe” could just mean feeling able to express themselves, however, if they don’t know what makes them feel good, then they’ll have trouble expressing that anyway.
This is compounded by the idea of “experience” — if a woman seeks to gain experience to become better at sex, she is slut-shamed…and if she talks about liking sex, forget about it. For a woman to be sex-positive is to be "dirty" or a "whore", and acknowledgement of female masturbation is almost non-existent — there are very few examples in the culture of women experiencing pleasure for themselves, it’s all performative.  If a woman is thinking about how she looks, it’s not going to be as easy to think about how she feels…or to lose herself in a sexual experience.
I believe we are all responsible for our own orgasms. It isn’t your partners job to “make” you come — sex happens in your head, and if you aren’t a full participant than having the expectation of an orgasm almost seems unreasonable to me. Conversely, under that model, a woman having an orgasm isn’t an “accomplishment” for the male, or an example of sexual prowess, which I think would take some of the performative pressure off of men (which can’t be easy).
I don’t know how we change this except to do a better job educating girls about their bodies and about pleasure!  I’m always shocked when I hear about women not communicating or just lying there…it makes me sad for both them and their partners.  They're missing out on one of the best parts of life!  

10 April 2014

So now George Bush is a painter.

(This was actually a facebook status update, but it bears repeating.  My apologies for being a lazy blogger, for the three people who might read this!)


Enough about George Bush's "paintings"! Or maybe I should say..."George Bush's" paintings?
Let's think about all this logically for just a minute, can we? Please?
We should well know by now the Republican publicity machine we're dealing with, yet once again, we're allowing them to lead us around by our noses while we squawk about mediocre paintings supposedly painted by someone the rest of the world knows as a war criminal. Let's break this all down.
1. We first learned of ol' 43's little hobby via a "hacked email". Instantly, the national conversation turned to a bizarre pair of "self portraits", echoed endlessly in the media everywhere. (The angle on the one with the mirror makes it just as logically likely, based on the pictorial space, that it's GWB looking at someone else's ass in a homoerotic encounter, but we'll leave that aside for a moment.) Umm...since when is an ex-President's email being "hacked" not the national conversation we SHOULD have at that moment? It's a major Secret Service FAIL. Where are the articles indemnifying the lax security? Why aren't the Republicans foaming at the mouth to find out who would allow their former leader to be in such danger? What's wrong with this picture?
2. Just curious: where are the articles about the prosecution of Guccifer, the hacker who was caught in Romania back in January? Now, don't get me wrong: I find Guccifer's antics fairly hysterical. Hacking Colin Powell's facebook page? Priceless. Releasing Hillary Clinton's Benghazi emails in comic sans? Epic. I'm generally fairly pro-hacker, in part, because hackers make our systems more secure and often reveal wrong-doings. However...shouldn't that be front page news? And not on Gawker, but everywhere? Shouldn't George Bush be more than "annoyed", as he expressed following the "accidental" unveiling of his hobby?
3. George Bush paints a bunch of world leaders because they're his "friends", and instead of using the vast trove of photos available in both his personal and official collections, since every move he ever made was documented by officially sanctioned photographers...he goes to google. He does the same thing a fifth grader writing a report would do, he picks the very. First. Image. On. Google. Now: aside from being the exact same crime that Shep Fairey just lost a lawsuit over, it's so extremely unimaginative that one wonders why. It just begs the question: did he choose the pictures? Did he think about them? Because...that's how painters roll. Even painters that pull images off of google.
4. We all know Jeb Bush is going to make a run for the presidency. And we ALL know who his biggest liability is. Yeah. That one.
So, here's one possible scenario: Karl Rove aka Turdblossom hired some Michaels crafts painting teacher to make those and then "leaked" them via email to start this whole ball rolling, so that we could all sit back and talk about what a silly doddering old man GWB is, and isn't it cute that he thinks he's an artist, and clear the way for JebBro's run by humanizing his evil sibling.
Now: I'm not trying to start a big conspiracy theory here. I have no proof that happened, and no reason to believe it could aside from extrapolating from past experience with the trail of lies, tricks and games this team has brought us for the past 20 years or so. Have we learned anything?
What I'm trying to do is get you to think. Of course it's fun to debate the merits of sub-par paintings, and complain that they don't deserve the attention and we should be talking about real art instead. But we're being part of the problem in that -- we could, for example, just go on talking about real art and ignore the hubbub, instead of lamenting that we aren't.
I just want everyone to think about whether or not they're being manipulated and played here. Because let's face it -- it wouldn't be the first time. We can always work on creating our own national conversation instead of following the talking points and P.R. mavens' goals for our interactions. What's in the news is rarely newsworthy these days, and I look to my fascinating collection of friends for a different, much richer, conversation. We're better than this. Stop.