So since this topic Will Never Die: What does hetero feminist sex look like? Is there any sexual act that is inherently ‘unfeminist’?
Possibly NSFW below fold. Read more »

Posted: June 11th, 2008 under Art, Bullshit, Feminism, Sex.
Comments: none

So I think I’ve been doing this for a week, though I think, like everything else, we’re not really respecting the boundaries of this week. We’ll define it as we want, damnit!

I will be trying to collect everything done for this ‘week’ soon, so stay tuned for super-amazing linkage.

Until then, I’m doing a bit of a wrap-up here for my own thoughts on what I want, on what desire means to me.

Sexual desire isn’t the only thing that women have been limited on. We’re expected to be restrained about food, about power, about love, about friendships, about everything. Even I worry constantly that I’ve crossed a line, that I’m bothering someone if I call too much or email too much, and I think that stems from the same place: feeling that I’ve made the fact that I want something too clear, too obvious.

Even criticisms of Hillary Clinton were often that she wanted it too badly, and while I agree with some of the critiques of the way she ran her campaign, I realized that criticizing her for “wanting it” was if not sexist, than certainly something more likely to be a negative when coming from a woman. She did want to be president. I’m sure she still does. And that’s a GOOD thing.

But what do I want?

I don’t want power, per se. I don’t like hierarchical systems and I don’t really believe in power over others. One of the reasons I had to get out of working in retail was that honestly, I hated being the boss. I hated that I couldn’t pay people more, that I had to get angry at people for missing work and that I had to yell at people (though a few of them made it easy for me!). What I do want, though, is autonomy. I want to work for myself and work for editors who work with me rather than against me. I do want to be well-known enough that I don’t have to chase people for work.

I want to have time and money for sports. I love that rush that Ren writes about here, though running never did it for me. Muay thai and krav maga and even ice skating did it for me (though I suck at the latter). I love that feeling when every muscle hurts but the endorphin rush is tremendous. There is great pleasure in physical exertion.

I want to not be ashamed of my government every single day, kthx?
Read more »

Posted: June 10th, 2008 under Feminism, Sex.
Comments: 1

Not that I really need an excuse to post man-pretty on my blog–it’s MY blog, and I don’t have a boyfriend to get jealous, so what the heck, right? But there are a few more that I wanted to get on here before this whole shebang ends. Plus a few more thoughts on desires.

See, I think the point to all this (other than gratuitous pretty men) should be thoughts about ‘the gaze,’ as it were, and what it really means. If it is about power, or just about appreciation, and if we can look at someone just purely in a sexual manner (tell me that if you’re attracted to men

at all, that bottom picture here doesn’t get you going) without necessarily taking away their humanity or acting as though we’re entitled to them.

I suppose in one way or another I am acting entitled to these pictures–they’re up on the web and I used them.

At the same time, I’m not treating them as less than human because I’m acknowledging that they are attractive–particularly because these pictures are put out there (particularly, again, the last one) to give a specific impression. I’d hope that if someone posted a picture on their blog of me in a pretty outfit and said I was sexy, I wouldn’t take offense. That doesn’t mean that ALL I am is sexy. (whereas if they said “it’s a good thing she’s hot because she’s so dumb” or suchlike, well, that’s a different ballgame, isn’t it?)

I suppose that at the end of the day, sexuality isn’t going anywhere, no matter how badly the religious right or the radical feminists want it to. And it’s not going to stop playing a large role in our lives unless we deliberately ignore any and all occurrences–and even then, someone’s probably finding you attractive whether you like it or not.

So enjoy, from top to bottom: Adam Foote and Joe Sakic, Robert Downey, Jr., the guys of Lucero, and Josh Hartnett without his shirt on.

Posted: June 9th, 2008 under Feminism, Movies, Rock'n'roll, Sex, Sports.
Comments: none

Can’t believe I haven’t watched this movie before this. Love it. Love America Ferrera. And it’s fairly appropriate for the topic at hand these days.

“Why don’t you value yourself?” her mother asks.

Oh, but she does value herself. She values herSELF. Which is why she had sex. Why she isn’t embarrassed by her size and her desire to go to college, why she complains about the lousy treatment at work, and why she wants her own life.

And why she whips her shirt off in the factory and is not ashamed.

“My weight says to everyone, ‘fuck you!’”

It may not be Superbad or anything else, but it sure is a movie about a girl getting what she wants. And part of what she wants is sex–and she doesn’t need to be married.

Posted: June 7th, 2008 under Feminism, Movies, Sex.
Comments: 4

In this post I wrote about the nastiness inherent in hating other women for their looks. Now I have to take on the flip side of that argument–a discussion of pure physical lust.

Cassandra Says (in between pictures of one amazingly beautiful man):

Funny how taboo that still is to admit for a lot of people, that women look, that men get looked at. Personally I’m profoundly uninterested in associating with either women who won’t admit that they look or men who’re uncomfortable with being looked at. This is me, folks – I’m a sensual creature. I’m visual. I like to look.

I have a friend who constantly defends her love for Roger Federer by swearing up and down that it’s all about the game. She’s the same friend who reminds me all the time that there’s more to a man than his looks, and that I should be choosing them for their brains–a reminder that I sorely need at times.

However, this discounts a whole part of attraction and desire. I like to remind her that it’s OK to look. It’s especially OK to look at a celebrity who you’re in all likelihood never going to meet.

She doesn’t know Federer. I don’t know Clive Owen. And those people are probably quite happy that we don’t know them. We know and like what’s put out there for us to see, and the rest is kept for them and the people who actually know them.

That doesn’t necessarily contribute to dehumanizing them, something that’s inherent in the usual discussions of “objectification.” Cassuto, in The Inhuman Race, writes of the tendency of people to try to turn other people into things, but I’d argue that simply appreciating the physical beauty of another person can be the furthest thing from treating them as a thing.

I wrote here about the different types of attraction I feel, and of course they shift as you get to know someone. But that doesn’t change the original physical attraction.

I wouldn’t want to be with someone who didn’t find me attractive, who didn’t think I was the prettiest girl in the room. Of course, I want them to like my mind too, but I want that physical attraction to be there.

I think part of the problem here that sees physical attraction as shallow or objectifying is that mind/body false dichotomy. Which was always equated with mind=male and body=female. So of course women are the only ones that can be looked at sexually, and men cannot be, right? Wrong.

Because we know that it’s crap, that we are all body AND mind. To recognize that someone is pretty, to take a sexy picture of them is not to deny that other parts of them exist. Sure, there are ways to objectify someone–to treat them as if they are not a person, to abuse them, insist they do things that they don’t want to do, deny their agency and ability to choose for themselves.

Just as when you see this picture of me, you know that there is a face and a front of my body, and if you read my blog, you know that there are a gazillion opinions inside me too, when we look at pictures of attractive people, we know that there is a person there. We appreciate how attractive they are because they are people, not because they are things.

So it’s OK to look. The problem comes from how you treat people, not how you see them.

Posted: June 7th, 2008 under Feminism, Love, Sex.
Comments: 4

Since we’re talking desire, I’m going to lay off both the feminism and the manpretty and talk about the different types of attraction I notice. (I’d love comments on this!) I’m writing this with male pronouns since that’s my usual frame of reference, but I’m pretty sure these swing all ways.

There is, of course, the knock-you-senseless physical attraction. That feeling that, damn, that is a lovely man and I want to touch him. It could be a body shape, a walk, eyes, a smile, whatever, but it’s that kind of desire that hits you squarely in the guts and moves down…yeah. And it’s purely physical. And of course, most of the celebrity pictures we’ve been posting fall into that category.

But so many of that type, as soon as you talk to them, don’t measure up.

Then there’s the one I dealt with recently–the ones that I uninterestedly think, “well, he’s kinda cute,” and then move on. But after talking to them for a little while I get drawn in, by a wicked sense of humor, a joint love for some or other crazy thing, and suddenly that “kinda cute” has grown into really wanting to know what their skin tastes like. Crush central, in other words. Where the crush is born of an actual spark between you, and it’s much harder to shake.

There’s the type that grows the longer you know someone, the kind that really comes out of love, not just lust. Those people you may know for years and then realize that you’ve been falling for them all along. This is so rare, but I think it can be the best kind. Except when it blows up in your face, but I ain’t tellin’ that story.

I tend to get these weird aesthetic crushes–my girlcrushes can fall into this category–where I think someone is beautiful and want to be around them and look at them but don’t really have any sexual desire involved at all.

Sometimes I don’t know where someone fits, when they’re in between crush and just appreciation and it seems the only thing missing then is chemistry, when I don’t really know what I want from it, sometimes I want to touch them and sometimes I recoil from it, unsure. Now that I think about those, none of them have turned out terribly well for me. Maybe I should stick with type 1, 2, or 3.

Though of course the type 1’s change, as soon as you actually get to know them, into 2’s or into that other kind, those people who are sexy but personally repugnant.

And of course you have the friends that you love to flirt with but don’t really want to date, or the friends that you’d love to date if the world were a different place and one or the other of you were single, or the friend you really, really wish you were attracted to but you just aren’t and it sucks because they’d be wonderful.

Posted: June 7th, 2008 under Lipgloss, Love, Sex.
Comments: 1

Wherein I expand on my definition of sexy men. Enjoy.

Nick Cave

Iggy Pop

Common

Clive Owen

Peter Dinklage

Kal Penn

Takeshi Kaneshiro

Posted: June 7th, 2008 under Feminism, Sex.
Comments: none

Caroline’s original post at Uncool and Amber Rhea’s excellent post today have me thinking about desire, sexuality, the body, and of course power dynamics. (read ‘em, because I’ll be referring to them a lot.)

Well, more so than I already do.

Because, as Amber noted, images of women who are scantily clad are almost always perceived as sexual. Women’s skin on display equals sex, or the offer of sex, as was discussed over at Uncool. It is never perceived as something that THEY want. Clothing that we choose to wear is assumed to be because of men, the decision to dance, to even walk down the street alone in less than completely covering garb is inviting the gaze. (Possibly NSFW below, just so’s you know.) Read more »

Posted: June 5th, 2008 under Feminism, Sex.
Comments: 1

So I never really watched the show, but I needed some seriously light diversion and lately I’m in that kind of a mood, a gab-with-the-girls-about-cute-clothes-and-men type of mood, so why not, right?

So last night instead of watching politics, I watched Sex and the City, the movie. With a bunch of girls, most of whom I didn’t know since they were my friend’s coworkers, but it was still fun.

I definitely agree with this lady’s review that the movie was tame. Problem comes when you’ve written yourself into a happy-ending for the show, and then you have to open everything up again for the movie. Sort of. Spoilers below! Read more »

Posted: June 4th, 2008 under Feminism, Love, Movies, Sex.
Comments: none

In answer to this, several of us have decided to make it Female Desire Week here on our blogs. So here’s round one.

“Good lovers don’t leave marks”

I like my lovers to leave marks. I like for everything to leave its mark on me. It’s probably why I tattoo things onto my skin.

I am trouble. I am a little too much for most people and I like that–when I think someone is shy I ratchet up the ammo–attitude, sass, flirt machine, talking about sex and my tits. And alternately, when someone is aggressive with me it either turns me off or makes me relish the competition.

I like the tension of a spark between equally wicked, strong, shameless people–the honesty of desire and the intimacy that comes not from shy declarations of feelings but from teeth and nails and push and pull and no need no make excuses, no not at all.

I think most of the men I know I would eat alive, just because I am who I am. Only one ever really disarmed me, laid me open and then he left anyway. Over and over. All the rest, really, fled or never got started or bored me.

Met one recently who might have been able to keep up, knocked me off my game a little but not so much, kept me walking that line instead of gleefully destroying it. Would’ve liked to try but things get in the way.

That line “good lovers don’t leave marks” came from an article in NYLON magazine about nerd chic, of all things, which may be oddly appropriate here but that’s a story you don’t get to hear. Gotta keep some things for myself.

I wrote before about unruly desires, and that’s true–it took me a while to come to terms with those desires but I think that because I did what I did on my schedule, even if it was late, it’s been worth it to have a better understanding of me.

I surrounded myself with people who weren’t heterosexual, but I stayed with men because that’s what I wanted.

I didn’t bother with “husband material” like some of my friends who were planning that shit in high school, because I didn’t want husband material. I wanted what I wanted–someone who turned me on by the way he moved, talked to me, touched me. Sometimes they got to my heart, other times just lust, but always what I wanted.

Allowing yourself to want things is a great freedom. Allowing ourselves to want things, as women, as people who’ve been not only not allowed to want things but treated as things ourselves…yeah. And allowing ourselves to want that connection, whether it’s a night of hotandsweaty sex on the kitchen counter and then goodbye, goodbye, goodbye or whether it’s a life that sometimes just comes down to snuggling on the couch watching 80s movies, it’s what we want.

Ms. Superstar Queen of All Things Awesome Angela Davis said in a talk at Penn this year that we have to understand why we want things–but we’re still going to want them. She was talking about capitalism, but lady had a point that resonated.

It’s easy to get caught up in rules and forget about what we want. Rules of the normative, patriarchal society. And conversely, rules of feminism, rules of progressivism, radicalism, etc. And of course our own fears and hang-ups. And yes, we have to think about things. When I get into a relationship with someone and he says to me “Well, I can’t be serious right now,” instead of accepting that shit because it’s the best thing offered to me, I have to ask–what the hell do I want?

Saw a preview yesterday (yeah, I went to see Sex and the City, and I’ll post about that later) for He’s Just Not That Into You, the movie. Seriously. Made a movie about that crappy book.

It pissed me off when it first hit shelves because it embodied what I think we do way too much of: wonder what “he” (or she, this isn’t contained to hetero relationships) wants rather than sitting down and figuring out just what the hell we really want. (course, someone responded with Be Honest-You’re Not That Into Him Either, which made me much happier if we’re going to be stuck with crap pop psychology relationship advice books.)

Everyone wants rules. Don’t have sex on the first date. Don’t give blowjobs. Don’t have sex, just give head. Sex with men is a tool of the patriarchy. All sex is power relations. Penetration=power. (Well, we’ll go tackle that one later.)

You can’t sanitize your desires to fit your political philosophy, let alone someone else’s. But instead of going rounds about whether we should be allowed to be turned on by things that occur between consenting adults (or between them and inanimate objects) the important question really is what do YOU want?

I want a man who makes me feel good in the way he looks at me. One who doesn’t want to protect me from things. One who sasses me back. I love muscled arms, big hands, knowing eyes. I like the way men move (some men). I like ‘em taller and bigger than me, though I’ve been known to give ‘em a shot if they aren’t but something they say piques my interest. I like talent–whether it’s art, writing, athletic, almost anything someone is really, really good at and puts their soul into is sexy.

And it doesn’t hurt if they look like this:

In honor of Game 6 (and hopefully Game 7).

Our lady over at the F word don’t know what she started, giving me an excuse to post gratuitous hot men on my blog in the name of feminism. Wasn’t like I didn’t already do it, but now….yeah.

Posted: June 4th, 2008 under Feminism, Love, Sex.
Comments: 5