Despite Ogi Ogas, Why Feminism and Submission Are Great Bedfellows

So there’s been a lot of shit going down in the feminist blogosphere about an blog post I just got a chance to read on the Psychology Today website, authored by Ogi Ogas (of fandom survey fail fame) and Sai Gaddam.  The post is called Why Feminism Is the Anti-Viagra, and despite requisite ass-covering, the premise is basically that gender equality is making sex suck for heterosexual women because women are wired to have submission fantasies.

I’m not going to try to respond directly to the article, though if you’d like to read a good response, you should try Jill’s Feminism makes boners sad or Thomas’s Inherent Female Submission Follies: Why Ogi Ogas Is Full of Shit.  Instead, I want to share a perspective that is entirely anecdotal, and doesn’t prove anything about this hypothesis because I’m a queer person that does not live on the gender binary.  I want to share it because it’s important to me as a submissive, as a feminist, and as someone who believes in the importance of sexual communication.

Momentum Con Recap

I’m happy to say that I had an amazing weekend at Momentum, thanks to our fabulous organizers Tess & Diva, a truly excellent group of presenters, and a great crowd of attendees overall.  It felt so good to be in a sex-positive, mostly safe space for a weekend, and I feel about a hundred times more connected to the online sexuality community than I did before the convention.  It’s great to read the blogs and listen to the podcasts, but making new personal connections gives my writing and activism so much more energy.  I did a pretty good job of making time for self-care this weekend, in a number of ways, and for the most part managed to keep my mental health balanced.  There are tons of project ideas spinning through my head, and I know I need to tone it down, but I do think I’ll be ready to go ahead with the planned sexuality e-zine project soon.

Some of the highlights for me included:

Let’s Talk About Sex

So far, Momentum has been very encouraging. The keynote panel really energized me to get out there as a sex educator and not be afraid of being young or the new kid on the block on this community. I also was pleased to hear some discussion of queerness and gender. Talk about anonymity was very relevant to me as I think about allowing my public identities to move a little closer to each other. I also got some ideas about where my niche might be as a writer and sex educator, and how that blends with overall queer feminist activism.

I’ve felt isolated before in the sex blogger community, but I felt very welcomed last night and was able to come out of my shell a bit. It’s still interesting how in a sexuality-focused group, it’s hard to just say hey, I find you attractive, but I imagine that gets easier with time.

Don’t forget to follow me @sexpositiveblog for livetweeting, and follow the whole con #mcon!

Coming Out Kinky

Recently on Fearless Press, Viola wrote a post called Pissing on the Oyster about the idea that kinky people should come out as kinky to increase acceptance of kinky sexualities.  Viola does a great job in that post of covering the legal and lifestyle ramifications of coming out as kinky, and I wanted to add a voice to the chorus and talk a little bit about why I have a problem with the idea of “coming out” in the first place.

Coming out can be an empowering experience.  I know many queer people for whom coming out was a blessing, a way to find community, and a way to feel more comfortable in their own skin.  Throughout my own teenage years and early twenties, I found coming out (as bisexual, then as lesbian, as feminist, as queer) to be important because my gender and sexuality were huge parts of how I identified as well as huge parts of my activism.

Rethinking Vaginal Penetration

Note: This post contains very explicit language below the cut.

I read a couple of sexuality books recently, and they got me thinking.  One, the Hite Report, stirred up a lot of negative emotions in me, ranging from frustration at the heteronormativity of the whole thing to uncertainty about my own body and responses.  The other, an anthology called Sexual Revolution, was on the most part really good, and had some stellar norm-challenging essays.  A lot of different things came up while I was reading these books, but what I want to talk about today is vaginal penetration.

Oh, penetration.  How confusing it can be.  Penetration can be fun, of course.  It can be psychologically stimulating, and physically arousing.  But it isn’t for everyone.  Or maybe it is, some of the time.  Most of the time?  A little of the time.

Gender and Sexual Scripts

I’ve recently been thinking about my history of sex with male-identified individuals with penises and trying to pin down my limits and hesitance when it comes to sex with such individuals in the future.  It may be irrelevant–after all, I don’t even have many cis-gendered male friends–but I am curious because for me it’s sort of a sexual black hole that’s scary to poke at.

The place that everything is coalescing around is related to sexual scripts.  This is true, in fact, both for sex with men and male-bodied individuals and for sex with women and female bodied individuals (and any combination).  My big thing is that I don’t want to have sex with someone who views our sex or our relationship as “straight” or “lesbian.”

As a genderqueer person, I can’t have “straight” or “lesbian” sex anymore.  And in my experience, the places where sex gets labeled in that way, and where I start to feel uncomfortable and viewed as “woman,” are the places where a sexual script starts rolling.

The straight sexual script is fairly well-known–foreplay, insert penis, sex, orgasm with variations including some oral sex in there somewhere, female orgasm, what have you.  The lesbian script is similar, if more egalitarian–mess around, get aroused, stimulation (often mutual), orgasms (sometimes multiple), sleep.

For me, sexual healing is a lot about removing these assumptions.  It’s about figuring out what kinds of stimulation I like and what kinds I don’t like.  It’s about being with partners that will ask what I like, and tell me what they like, without the sort of quiet assumption-filled sex I have experience with.  It’s not so much about gender, which I used to think it was.   As long as a partner <i>respects</I> the above and doesn’t make any assumptions–whether that’s about PIV sex, or the order of acts, or what constitutes a “sex act”–then I’m happy.

The Internet Is For Porn: Sex Negativity and Sexualization

I don’t need to tell you that there’s a lot of hypocrisy surrounding the Internet and sex.  Websites like Amazon, Google, and Paypal are constantly patrolling sexuality by limiting access to goods, services, and content that those websites consider “pornographic,” while at the same time content that could be extremely damaging due to its misogynistic and in some cases triggering nature gets through scot-free.  It’s hilarious, in a very sad way, that frank and informative content about sexuality, queer identity, sex work, etc. is constantly being policed while no one complains about vaguely pornographic images of children on shopping websites, threats of sexual assault in web forums, or erotica that focuses on non-consensual “ravishment.”

I most recently came across this kind of hypocrisy in a certain wiki’s approach to sex-related content.  The policy clearly states that articles cannot be about sex, giving two examples (one about planning a threesome) of articles that aren’t allowed and two examples (both about kissing) of articles that are.  Yet, the site allows articles on how to get a girl to take her panties off, how to address an addiction to masturbation, and how to lose your “virginity.”  It comes as no surprise that the articles that are available about sex focus on penetration, assume heterosexuality, and have an implicitly male point of view.  But don’t plan threesomes, anyone!  Heaven forbid.

A Question about Polyamory, Romance, and Sex

I’ve been wondering something, when I read accounts of polyamory and polyamorous relationships.  I understand that people come to polyamory for a variety of different reasons–it might be about sex, it might be about relationship style, it might just be about relating to the world or about beliefs.  I tend to see a lot of accounts, though, that focus specifically on sexual openness and having sex with multiple people, which I find interesting.

I wonder how many people do come to polyamory because they are interested in having multiple sexual partners, specifically, or because they find sexual exclusivity untenable.

Polyamory can be about sexual relations, but it can also be about the freedom to let each interpersonal relationship in your life be exactly what it is.  It can simply be about the freedom to be romantic or affectionate towards a friend, a drive that many people naturally experience.

In a recent Poly Weekly podcast, Minx and Graydancer were talking about female sex drive.  I hadn’t thought much about low sex drive, but I realize that the impression in the poly community is often that your sex drive is low if you’re not having regular sex with multiple people.  I wonder if maybe poly people as a group tend to have a higher sex drive, and how that affects those in the poly community who have a lower sex drive or simply have less sex.  Is it harder to get involved in the community if this is the case?

Any thoughts on the issue would be more than welcome in comments.

Meta Thoughts on Sex Education

One of the things I would absolutely love to happen in my life is to become a sex educator in a full-time, professional capacity.

I mentioned this to a coworker the other day and she responded “oh!  me too.”  Another coworker agreed.  When I asked what they were interested in, specifically, Coworker A mentioned AIDS prevention, and Coworker B talked about reproductive rights in the developing world.  Both valid career paths, both related to sex education, but once they said that I felt a little nervous, since of course my interest in sex education has to do with de-stigmatizing sexuality and talking, point-blank and down and dirty, about sex.

When we talk about “sex education,” a lot of the time we are talking about things like disease prevention.  This is a valid goal, but I have to wholeheartedly agree with Cara Kulwicki’s conception of real sex education. In that formulation, any discussion of sex education is incomplete without acknowledging sexual pleasure.

Thinking about sex education, and what I’d like to achieve as a sex educator, and what I get out of the sex education provided by others, I came up with three rough categories of sex education.  These are based more on the demands of the audience than what’s being supplied, and so one form of education can easily meet multiple demands, but it’s one way of thinking about what’s out there.

Are Some Sexual Positions Inherently Demeaning?

There was a mention in the book I’m reading about Greek vase paintings, and a particular image of a woman performing fellatio on a man while another man penetrates her from behind, possibly anally, with a hand on her hair.  In the book, this is used as an illustration of how particular demeaning sexual positions were available only with particular classes of women in Ancient Greece.  I don’t doubt that this was the case in Greece, as everything I’ve come across in my studies of Greek and Roman sexuality (admittedly, that was a while ago) suggested that sexual relationships were heavily regimented based on the positions of the partners.  However, it got me thinking about that particular position in modern parlance, and the meanings ascribed to it.

I’ve seen a moderate amount of pornography in my lifetime, so I’m no expert, but what I have seen of this configuration (one partner fucking from the rear, another receiving fellatio) in porn tends to fall under a particular formula that does suggest at least some level of shame inherent to the position.  In heterosexual porn, I’ve seen it used with two men and a woman where either the men are using explicitly humiliating language to demean the woman during the act, or alternatively the men seem to be using the woman as a vessel for their desire for each other (basically ignoring her).  In gay male porn, I’ve seen it mostly in a gang-bang situation, where the bottom is portrayed as particularly eager but there’s still an implication that he’s a slut and there’s some inherent meaning to the position.