Best Sex Writing 2012: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (2 page)

I will quote Abby Tallmer again, because I don’t hear the words “sexual liberation” often enough these days. What moves me most about her piece is that you don’t have to be a New Yorker, queer, leather, or kinky to understand what she’s talking about. I’m 100 percent with her when she writes, “Back then, many of us believed that gay liberation was rooted in sexual liberation, and we believed that liberation was rooted in the right—no, the need—to claim ownership of our bodies, to experience and celebrate sexuality in as many forms as possible, limited only by our time and imagination.” I hope this applies in 2012 just as much as it did in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s.

The truth is, I could have filled a book twice this size. Every day, stories are breaking, and being told, about sex—some wondrous, some heartbreaking. This is not a one-handed read, but it is a book that will stimulate your largest sex organ: your brain. Whether you live and breathe sex, you are curious about sex, or somewhere in between, I hope
Best Sex Writing 2012
informs, incites, and inspires you. I hope it inspires you to write and tell your own sexual story, because I believe the more we talk about the many ways sex moves us, the more we work toward a world where sexual shame, ignorance, homophobia, and violence are diminished.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this book and what you think are the hot topics around sex. Feel free to email me at [email protected] with your comments and suggestions for next year’s anthology.

Rachel Kramer Bussel
New York
November 2011

Sluts, Walking

Amanda Marcotte

Toronto police officer Michael Sanguinetti probably thought of himself as a noble warrior against the arbiters of political correctness when he claimed, at a crime safety seminar at Osgoode Hall Law School, that the key to keeping men from raping you is to “avoid dressing like sluts.” But what he actually ended up doing was putting the final nail in the coffin of the narrative of the “humorless feminist” vs. the yuk-yuking sexists who have a monopoly on the funny. A group of men and women who were outraged at this supposed rape prevention advice responded by organizing a protest march to the front doors of the Toronto Police Service, and with a cheeky nod to Sanguinetti’s comment, called the whole thing “SlutWalk.” They also encouraged attendees to dress however they liked, including in all sorts of clothes that are commonly understood to be “slutty,” in order to drive home the point that clothes don’t cause rape—rapists do. The idea was to fight hate with humor, and fight violence with cheek and irony.

Organizers certainly wanted attention, but they probably didn’t have any idea what kind of attention the concept of sluts walking would get. In retrospect, the subsequent media blitz should have been predictable. The word
slut
probably generates more click-throughs than any other word on the Internet, after all, and the idea of sluts marching in protest, instead of simply sucking and fucking away in their relegated role as fantastical creatures of the pornographic imagination, was shocking enough that people simply couldn’t stop talking about it. Clearly there was a strong need to remind people that because a woman may want to have sex with some people doesn’t mean she has to take all comers—so international SlutWalk was born. SlutWalks were conducted in LA, Boston, Brisbane, Amsterdam, São Paulo, London, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Berlin, and Cape Town, just to name a few. Women all over the world wanted to say they had a right to wear what they want and go out if they want without giving carte blanche to rapists to assault them.

Making the movement international was helped in part because the message of SlutWalk is straightforward. It’s an update on the Take Back the Night rallies. Back when those were formed, feminists were saying, “Hey, we should be able to leave our houses after dark without getting raped.” Now we’re adding to that list a few other things we should be able to do without some dude raping us and having people excuse it as if rapists were a kind of vigilante police force assigned to the task of keeping bitches in line: wear what we want, go to parties, have as many sexual partners as we like, drink alcohol. Eventually we plan to reach a point where women enjoy the freedom of men to do what they like without the inference that you have it coming if someone rapes you.

SlutWalk drew the inevitable controversy that attends women saying they have a right to do what they want without being punished for it by the traditional methods of putting women in their place, such as forced childbirth or being mauled by rapists. Certainly, right wing responses to SlutWalk were predictable for this. The right-wing ethos is to demand that women’s sexuality and social lives be constrained with the threat of unwanted childbearing, STDs, and sexual abuse, and therefore they quite predictably defend abortion regulations, anticontraception propaganda in schools, men who catcall women on the streets, and defense attorneys who use the “she was asking for it” tactic to get their rapist clients off the hook. The predictability of these right-wing responses relegated them to background noise, no more worth debating than that grass remains green and the sky remains blue.

No, what distressed SlutWalk supporters was the noise from feminists denouncing the effort, primarily on the basis of a profound misunderstanding of the use of the word
slut
. For some reason, critics got it in their head that SlutWalk was about reclaiming the word
slut
, though their refusal to hear participants who denied that there was any kind of reclamation project going on inclines me to think they just wanted to get angry that young women were wearing miniskirts without apology.

Antipornography activists Gail Dines and Wendy Murphy were by far the most egregious offenders when it came to stubbornly refusing to get it. They argued against SlutWalk in the
Guardian,
writing, “Encouraging women to be even more ‘sluttish’ will not change this ugly reality. As teachers who travel around the country speaking about sexual violence, pornography and feminism, we hear stories from women students who feel intense pressure to be sexually available ‘on demand.’”

It was a mind-boggling exercise in arguing with a straw man. SlutWalk is not saying, “Everyone has to be exactly the same: dress in nothing and have sex with everyone who asks.” SlutWalk is saying, “Even if you think someone’s a slut, don’t rape her.” In fact, a protest against the consensus that it’s OK to rape a woman just because of what she’s wearing is a protest against the expectation that women be available on demand. Murphy and Dines might as well have argued that people protesting police brutality were supporting it by encouraging folks to believe they have a right to a life fuller than sitting quietly at home in fear of the police.

Dines reinforced the sense that she objected to SlutWalk precisely because she wants young women to feel shame for being sexy when she went on the BBC’s “World Have Your Say” and practically hyperventilated while describing young women who walk around wearing tight, low-cut jeans and skimpy shirts as if they had every right in the world to wear what they want. (Hint: They do, and men shouldn’t rape them for it.) Dines’s argument skews very close to the conservative argument that women’s sexuality and sexual freedom must be curtailed for the good of civilization. She argues that women need to rein it in so that other women don’t feel they have to be sexual to get men’s attention. This is scarcely different from the conservative argument that the “hookup culture” is making it so easy for men to get laid that they won’t give women what they really want, which is marriage. If for “marriage” you substitute “respect” or “not bugging you for sex” it’s functionally the same argument.

It was particularly strange for Dines to hook her hostility toward sexual playfulness in the public space to SlutWalk, since SlutWalk objectively did not pressure women to tart it up for dudely enjoyment. SlutWalk organizers encouraged women to wear whatever they wanted, anything from their sluttiest outfit to complete coverage in head-to-toe cloth. Katha Pollitt, writing for
The Nation
, captured the spirit perfectly when she said that Slut-Walkers were “attacking the very division of women into good girls and bad ones, Madonnas and whores.”

Why, then, did so many participants find it useful to walk dressed in the traditional garb of the slut, the miniskirt and the fishnet? Because they were challenging the retort to women who dress in revealing clothes, which is that they’re somehow sending A Message to men. The exact content of this Message is rarely spelled out by people who are concerned about it; it is instead expressed as “What do you expect men to think if you leave the house looking like that?”

Here’s what I expect:

If I’m out on the town wearing a cute minidress, I expect that I’ll get a lot of indifference, some men thinking I look good, some men thinking that I want to be attractive, some men thinking I enjoy feeling sexy, some men flirting—and some men thinking, “I wouldn’t wear those shoes with that dress.” I expect men to be happy they live in a world where people have fun and exude sexual energy, because I believe sex is pleasurable and good and that a little more sexual energy in the world tends to improve the fun we have at home.

What I don’t expect men to think is
Oh boy, I get to rape that one!
or
Clearly, she forfeited her right not to be harassed when she broke the nonexistent rule about skirt length written by me.
I feel that these are reasonable expectations, since the indifferent or favorable reactions I described above are what happens to me 99 percent of the time when I wear a minidress in public.

I expect that when a man thinks a woman being sexy means that she isn’t smart or deserving of basic respect, you know everything you need to know about him, and he is the one who has forfeited his right to be treated with respect, not the woman he claims provoked him. I think such a man doesn’t actually respect any women; he’s just making excuses because he likes harassing women. I expect other people not to make excuses or consider his opinion to matter in any way. I expect instead that such men be shunned by decent people.

I expect when I use the word
slut
in an arch, ironic way that men will find it both funny and insightful. I expect men to understand humor. I expect men to understand that even if I really do think I’m a “slut” this doesn’t mean I’m no longer a human. I expect men who believe I’ve had a lot of sex to know that no means no, no matter who says it. Again, these expectations have proven so far reasonable with the majority of men, and I expect that men who resist them have it in them to not be assholes.

I have one more expectation. I expect that when a man flouts the rules of morality and decency and harasses or assaults a woman, we treat him like the raving douchebag he is, and bring criminal charges where applicable.

Reading back over my list of expectations—demands—the part of me still socialized in traditional femininity flinches. A woman running down a list of expectations calls to mind unpleasant stereotypes: a bridezilla stomping her foot at a florist who used the word
can’t
, Meryl Streep in a power suit barking orders at a hapless assistant, a grim-faced church lady denouncing the evils of fornication. But really, this list of expectations isn’t so outrageous. The ability to live in the world, have fun, be flirtatious, make jokes, dress alluringly, have sex, and do all these things while still expecting the law to protect you from violent assault? These sorts of things should be expectations. Men—at least privileged white men who aren’t continually targeted by the police—experience lives where these expectations don’t even need to be articulated, but are simply part of the air they breathe. All SlutWalk is asking is that the same opportunities be offered to women.

Criminalizing Circumcision: Self-Hatred as Public Policy

Marty Klein

Full disclosure: I’m circumcised.

Too much information? Tell that to the people—well-meaning or otherwise—who have actually created a ballot measure to criminalize circumcision in San Francisco.
¹
Yes, in November 2011, San Franciscans vote on whether or not babies (and all minors) can be circumcised. In the wake of the ban’s (unlikely) passage, one can imagine the surgical equivalent of speakeasies or underground abortion clinics to which families bring little Joshua, Omar, or Justin.

The bill has been driven primarily by the psychological anguish of a small number of activists. The main source of information about their emotional torment is contained in the bill’s language:
It is unlawful to circumcise, excise, cut, or mutilate the whole or any part of the foreskin, testicles, or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years.

Equating the removal of an infant’s foreskin with the “mutilation” of the testicles or penis is ignorance, willful distortion, or delusion. No one in the city has been accused of touching any minor’s testicles or penis (Catholic priests notwithstanding). But lumping these together with the routine, nearly painless removal of foreskin—which has no impact on later physical function—shows just how theatrical the bill’s sponsors are. They are acting out their own odd sense of bereavement with a grand display of concern for future generations.

As a sex therapist for 31 years, I have talked with more men about their penises than an office full of urologists. We’ve discussed concerns about size, shape, color, and the angle of the dangle. We’ve talked about the ability to give and receive pleasure. We’ve talked about the amount, color, taste, smell, and consistency of semen. We’ve talked about what women (and other men) supposedly like about penises. And some men have talked about how they feel about being circumcised or not circumcised. If I ask, almost all men are fine as they are; if a man brings it up first, he’s almost always convinced he’d be better off different than he is—the cut guys want to be uncut, and the uncut guys want to be cut.