July 2008 – Page 13

Men: Still Trying. Oh How They Try!

You know who I’ve decided that I absolutely can’t stand? Brian Alexander, the sex advice columnist over at MSNBC. I’m not actively seeking out the guy’s writing, but it seems to keep finding me. Recently, I called him out on being a rape apologist asshole. By comparison, his latest offense is rather minor, but it’s still sexist and obnoxious as hell. This is a question and answer from a column last week:

Q: Do men really care if the woman has an orgasm or not?

A: There is something almost existential about this question, like, “Is there really a merciful God?” or “Will Mick Jagger ever retire?”

I am here to ease your angst, and not just because I’m a man, but because I think it’s true. Not true for all men, of course, but I’d bet most of us do care and, like Boy Scouts, we strive to do our best.

Data from the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s sex life, “The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States,” showed that roughly one-third of women surveyed said they ALWAYS had an orgasm with their male partner. Not sometimes, or most of the time, but always. These numbers are even more impressive when you consider that many women report that due to some physiological or psychological barrier they rarely or never orgasm even if the guy is working like a Spartan. Then realize that the survey’s data was collected nearly a generation ago — before the explosion of porn in every possible form of media made fiery female orgasms the (completely unrealistic) standard, and before giving great oral sex became a datability requirement akin to having a job.

Even if you don’t trust our altruism, consider our egos. Many, many reader letters to this column come from women asking how they can soothe their men’s wounded pride over the women’s trouble reaching orgasm.

We care.

Oh Jesus Christ, where to start?

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Ooops, I Dropped My Feminism…

As the newest guest here at Feministe, I’d like to begin by thanking my hosts – I’m enormously excited and honored to be included in this summer’s series of guest-bloggers. For those who are curious about me, you can find an introduction here. The short version is that I’m a regular contributor to a blog called The Feminist Underground, I have completed the first sixty pages of the novel I’m writing, and (like most people) I dream of someday taking-over This American Life when Ira Glass retires.

The Feminist Underground recently ran a series of posts by guest bloggers that focused on the diverse ways that those of us who consider ourselves to be feminists define the term, how we put our beliefs into practice, and what led us to embrace feminism. I was particularly struck by a comment made by Sally from Jump off the Bridge, who asserts that ‘click moments’ with feminism are rare, writing “usually people either accept that they’re a feminist through time or completely reject it.”

In thinking about this insight, I realized that while I can’t point to one definitive moment when I ‘turned feminist,’ I did have a series of ‘click moments.’ Oddly enough, the most powerful of these have not been the times I’ve realized that others were treating me in a sexist way, but moments when I recognized that I was internalizing the sexism around me, and that it was causing me to treat other women – or myself – unfairly.

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Shameless Self-Promotion Monday

I was away from the computer all day yesterday so I didn’t get around to putting this post up. It’s a day late, but hopefully you’ll all self-promote anyway.

The Dismal Guest Blogger

Hello everyone – this is your newest guest blogger, reporting for duty! My name is Allison Martell, and I write about feminism and economics at Economic Woman. I also contribute to the group blog over at Shameless Magazine. Like Shameless, I’m based in Toronto, where I supplement my stats homework with cycling, vegetarian cooking, and productivity geekery.

I started Economic Woman in reckless moment shortly after WAM! 2008. I say reckless because I’m only marginally qualified to write about this stuff – most econ bloggers are professors, or at least graduate students, and my only relevant experience is as a freelance journalist and undergraduate economics student. But economics can be a lonely discipline for a woman, a feminist, really any sort of leftist. I wanted a place to chronicle my own intellectual development, and I also wanted to try to bridge the gap between the feminist and economic blogospheres.

Thanks for all the great input – you folks have made planning my posts much easier. Over the next couple weeks I’ll do my best to address your questions and suggestions. I’ll also point you towards some further reading and online resources about economics and feminist economics, and introduce you to some other fabulous bloggers.

Crappy Birthday

Americans’ unhappy birthday: ‘Too much wrong right now’, by Pauline Arrillaga, AP via Yahoo! News.

. . . talk turns to the state of the Union, and the [Gilbert, Ariz., chapter of the Optimist Club] become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Happy birthday, America? This year, we’re not so sure.

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Hugs, Kisses, Poetry, and Verka

Thanks for having me, Feministe, and thanks for reading and responding, guys.

I hope you stop by my magazine every once in a while. If you’d like to submit, keep in mind that we looking for more humor writers, as well as new coverage of election 08. If you’re a poet, consider contributing to our poetry section. On the other magazine, we cover a wide variety of topics, and are searching for contributors to our Muslim women section in particular. But honestly, many different pieces are welcome, as long as they’re well-written and do not include hate-speech.

OK, now that the shameless plug is over and done with, I’d like to leave you guys with two things for dessert:

This is my (loose) translation of a Mikhail Lermontov poem. I often find it useful when contemplating the universe and its less savoury elements:

We drink from the chalice of being/ With eyes blindfolded,/ Wetting the golden rim/ With our own tears./ When, before death,/ The blindfold falls,/ And everything seducing us/ With the blindfold disappears;/ We see the golden chalice/ Was empty all along/ The drink inside it was a dream/ And it was not our own.”

And this song by Verka Serdyuchka (alter-ego of Andriy Danilko), which has gotten me through many a desolate evening – “Vse Budet Horosho” means “Everything Will Be OK” (or “Everything Will Be Good,” or so the pedant in me says):

When one looks at Verka, one indeed believes that things will be OK, sooner or later.

Thanks, Guest-Bloggers!

Thanks to the lovely guest-bloggers who have written with us this week. This summer, we’re staggering the guest-blogging slots, which means that some of the current guests will be leaving and some will be staying on for another week. We’ll have two new writers joining us this week as well. All of the guest bloggers will each be staying on for two weeks.

Please show the guest bloggers the same courtesy and respect that you all show the regular Feministe bloggers. Obviously feel free to push back and debate, but keep in mind that they’ve been invited to be here, and we expect a level of respect that would be appropriate to offer any “real-life” guest. Please also keep in mind that we picked guest-bloggers who write about a diversity of topics, and who often take different positions and come from different feminist points of view than we do. That means that we do not automatically endorse every single thing a guest-blogger writes, any more than I automatically endorse every single thing Piny or Holly or Cara or Kactus or Jack write (or that they endorse what I write). We all write here as individuals — individuals who are ideologically tied to feminism and social justice, but who get there through a variety of means, viewpoints and life experiences. We aren’t always going to end up on the same page, which to me is sort of the point — feminism and social justice should not be monolithic movements. Our guest-bloggers will reflect that.

And finally, I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m in the middle of studying for the New York bar exam. That means that my own blogging is light, and my blog-reading is even lighter. There are going to be weeks when I’m not going to get around to reading posts until days after they’ve been put up; and there are definitely going to be times when I don’t get to reading through entire comment threads at all. So if something is going horribly wrong in a thread — an abusive troll, for example, and everyone is wondering why no one is doing anything about it — please email feministe -at- gmail -dot- com and one of the regular Feministe bloggers will come in and take care of it.

Enjoy your new guest-bloggers! This project will extend through mid-September, so there is a lot of great guest-bloggy goodness to be had. As usual, I will let them introduce themselves, but I’m excited to be blogging with them.

Thanks

It’s been great guesting here! Thanks so much to the Feministe crew for the invite.

I’ll leave you with two things. First, this is a recent, absolutely fantastic series of five articles and brief videos about some of the most common claims about “innate” behavioral differences between the sexes. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a quick reference when you get into another tiresome conversation about how “biology” has proven this or that antifeminist claim.

As you could probably tell from my posts, it’s always a pet peeve of mine when people fall back on “biology” as a justification for patriarchal norms and practices. It’s just such a shady rhetorical trick—attempting to claim that social change is impossible by implying that the current social order has been proven unchangable by a completely unquestionable authority, when in fact no such thing has occurred. Ack. Drives me up the walls just thinking about it. Must be my wandering womb.

Second, a rather shameless plug for the new database created by Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER), the organization I work with. SAFER works to empower college students to hold their colleges accountable for sexual violence on campus, and we help students organize to create better sexual assault prevention and response procedures on their campuses. The policies database lists various colleges and gives a rundown of their sexual assault policies, so if you’re a college student, you can use the database to look up your school’s policies, find ideas for reform by looking at the positive aspects of other college policies, and add information about your school policy to help prospective students evaluate how your college stacks up against others when it comes to dealing with sexual violence. Please take the time to check it out, and add info about any schools we don’t have listed!

Thanks again for having me here on Feministe. I had a blast.

Oh, one last thing:

Future Feministe Guest-Blogger is Looking for Suggestions

Help her out:

I’m currently preparing for a guest posting stint over at Feministe, which will start in about a week. I’m planning to make a series of posts about why women, and feminists, should care about economics. I’ve got lots of ideas of my own, but since this blog’s audience is often pretty skewed towards the econ side, I thought I’d ask for suggestions.

Economists, feminist economists, feminists who care about economics – what do you wish your fellow feminists knew about economics? Is there a particular concept that is often misunderstood? A branch of research they should pay more attention to?

If you make a suggestion that I haven’t thought up myself already, and I use it, I’ll be happy to credit you for the idea by name, link, or both. Of course, you’ll just have to trust me on that one.

This is probably a good moment to point out that I have finally secured myself a blog email address. It is: economicwoman AT gmail DOT com. Please send along your comments and criticism, unless you’re going to tell me to post more often. It’s on my list, right below “register for GREs” and “make sure you pass statistics”.

Obama and the Acceptable Abortion

Aw, Barry, say it ain’t so…

Strang: Based on emails we received, another issue of deep importance to our readers is a candidate’s stance on abortion. We largely know your platform, but there seems to be some real confusion about your position on third-trimester and partial-birth abortions. Can you clarify your stance for us?

Obama: I absolutely can, so please don’t believe the emails. I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.

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