season of the bitch

It’s Blog for Choice Day. And this year, a year many of us thought might actually be a good one for sexual and reproductive rights, has turned out to be a very lousy one indeed. We saw Democrats force the Stupak amendment into an otherwise fairly decent House health care reform bill, and do nearly the same thing in the Senate onto an already-pretty-crappy health care reform bill.

We saw the murder of Dr. George Tiller, abortion provider, in cold blood.

We like to talk about choice. We fight over terminology. But what have we really done, in the years since Roe v. Wade, other than hold the line and nervously try not to lose what we’ve won?

We criticize Democrats for not supporting us, we who put them in office. But what are we pushing for? When my Democrat Congresswoman from my quite Democratic district (BROOKLYN, people) sends me a form letter in response to my calls and emails about Stupak, reassuring ME that there won’t be any federal money spent on abortion, what does that mean for us? Even the Democrats are more worried about antichoice arguments than they are about people like me bailing on them. Where are we going to go, after all, right?

Well, I’m tired of it. It’s 2010. We need to be fighting for more gains, not hiding in a defensive crouch and praying we get to hold on to what we’ve got. Rights are not granted, they are taken.

Right after Stupak, I wrote:

Not enough. I want positives. I want to use this moment to affirm our right to a healthy, joyful sexuality and to talk about how we can achieve that. A messy, unruly sexuality—hell, part of the beauty of it is that it’s not clean and neat. It is like eating a peach, in the last lines of Prufrock, juices running down your chin, sweet and tangy. Those decisions that happen in a minute are sometimes wrong, and sometimes unplanned things come out of them, but we don’t need to be saved from it, we need to have resources and support to deal with it, from a relationship gone sour to unfortunate STIs or Plan B for a birth control failure—or, whether Congress likes it or not, safe, legal, insurance-covered abortion.

I want to come out of the closet and say yes, we like sex, and we have the right to have it. To say that if the government spends millions of dollars every year on technologies that are only good for killing people, it can include abortion in a health care plan.

We didn’t get to the point of Roe v. Wade by having nice polite arguments. We got there by being angry, and demanding, and pushing. We got there by staking out a firm position: that our bodies are our own and we have the right to do what we want with them. We got there by calling for free abortion on demand.

So this year I don’t want to hear any sugarcoating. I don’t want any dancing around the words. Abortion. Sex. Pregnancy. There it is. “Choice” means a lot of things, it’s true. But this year we should all remember at bottom what it is we fought for.

The Summer Of Death continues. Patrick Swayze has apparently died. In his honor, I’m reposting my somewhat famous feminist defense of Dirty Dancing, complete with video. You know you love this, so don’t even pretend.

1. Dirty Dancing.

I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

There’s some good discussion over at Ren’s about the term “Sex positive.”

I am with her (and many of her commenters) that the term sucks. It’s limited, it’s vague, it doesn’t describe what it’s meant to. And yes, it implies that those who don’t identify as such are “sex negative.”

Me being the kind of person I am, that’s the least of my concerns. But I don’t know if I’ve ever really called myself “sex positive,” inside my head. If forced to identify my feminism, I’ve done so. My tag cloud testifies to it. But it doesn’t always feel that way, or make a lot of sense.

Ren said:

The One Thing I truly do care about is helping or encouraging other people, especially women, to say what they do and do not want or like, doing what they do like and not doing what they do not like, and being okay with doing that.

Ginmar commented:

Whatever a woman does, I want her to be safe, respected, protected by the law, and happy. How do you sum that up in one economical little phrase?

And Iamcuriousblue said:

That said, I do think “sexual liberal” or “sexual libertarian” is actually a more accurate term for this school of thought. (”Sex radical” often gets used, though I personally don’t like the one-upsmanship implied by “radical”.) Of course, for people want something to get their back up over something, I’m sure the implication of calling the other side “sexually conservative” or “sexually authoritarian” will be brought up. But then again, that’s precisely the critique that many of us are making of restrictive forms of sexual moralism, both from the religious right and secular left.

So: sexual libertarian? Kristin also said it, and I like it. I already consider myself a pretty hardcore civil libertarian, and so this fits right in. It defines a little more practically what we actually believe, without really defining ourselves as against anyone, or defining anyone else as “negative.”

Some of us just want to be left alone, and for others to be left alone. Others find the whole subject fascinating, and like to talk about it–more than we should, maybe. But I think what we all want is for people to be able to explore and enjoy their sexuality in a world where they’re supported and not ostracized for their choices.

It’s a mouthful, but it’s also important.

Millions of women around the world make their living through sex work. Some do it by choice, some do it because they have no choice, and some are forced into it.

In any case, supporting laws that allow more harm to come to women whether they be trafficked or willing participants, does no good. A policy of harm reduction, outlined by Renegade Evolution at Feministe a while back, is a far better way to make sure that women are safe and supported.

I want for sex workers what I want for every woman and man on the planet–safe working conditions, fair wages, and the ability to choose what kind of work they will do to support themselves and their family. I don’t believe that sex work is fundamentally dirty, wrong, or exploitative, but that just like working at Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant or waiting tables, it damn well can be.

Whatever your stance, though, on sex work, I hope we can all agree that allowing violence against sex workers to continue, that a sentence of one day for murdering a “hooker” (yes, that’s from an actual headline) and allowing the rape of sex workers to be written off as “theft of services” has to end.

Check Bound, Not Gagged for much more today. And thanks to Amber Rhea for reminding me to write about this.

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.