Steelmanning PIV-Critical Feminism

For those of you don’t know: steelmanning is coming up with better versions of your opponents’ arguments, and PIV-critical feminism is the kind of feminism that comes up with graphics like this: 


[Assuming the following are all true: PIV = sex, oral + PIV = sex, digital + oral + PIV = sex. What is the value of oral? What is the value of digital? They are both zero. If sex = PIV and PIV = female risk and sex = pleasure, them female risk = pleasure.]

PIV is thought of in our society as “real sex.” To pick an example: it regularly happens that I will be naked with a dude, my hands down his pants, when he asks “do you want to have sex?” (which rather makes me wonder what he thought we were doing before). The question “do you want to have sex or just get a blowjob?” makes sense, rather than being an inquiry along the lines of “would you like food or just a pizza?” You lose your virginity the first time you have PIV sex, rather than the first time you share orgasms with someone or have oral sex. Vaginal orgasms are treated by a lot of sex advice as the end-all be-all rather than one more enjoyable activity partners can share. Premature ejaculation is an Enormous Problem rather than an opportunity to explore other sex acts. Et cetera. 

Because of this, PIV is to a degree mandatory. Imagine the general public’s reaction to a woman who chooses not to give blowjobs versus a woman who chooses not to have PIV. Don’t get me wrong, ladies who don’t want to give blowjobs would still be characterized as prudish and unreasonable. But women who don’t want to have PIV? Are their relationships even real? Are they secretly asexual? What’s wrong with her?

(Note: I wrote the rest of this blog post with “uterus-owner” and “penis-owner,” and then with “cis woman” and “cis man,” and it was so clunky I cried on the inside, so now I’m going with the cissexist version. This is all your fault, rest of the trans community, for not giving me a good set of nouns for the different sexes.)

Mandatory PIV is misogynistic because PIV is kind of a shit deal for women. Women are more likely than men to contract STIs from PIV and less likely to have or notice symptoms so they can be treated promptly. Women get pregnant, which even in the modern US leads to a death rate of 11 in 100,000 pregnant women, and historically led to a death rate as high as 1 in 100. Most forms of birth control are solely the woman’s responsibility: they can be expensive and often have physical and mental side effects. (Yes, women’s control of birth control does mean that dudes are at a higher risk of reproductive coercion, but that doesn’t change that side effects are shit. I had vaginal bleeding for three months straight when I was on the pill. Mrer.)

And for what benefit? About three-quarters of women don’t orgasm from intercourse alone. (While I was Googling this, I found this article. Headline: Female Orgasm Eludes Majority Of Women. Study: 70% of women don’t orgasm during intercourse, but 85-90% do orgasm. While 10-15% of women being nonorgasmic is deplorable, it’s only the majority if you think “female orgasm” means “female orgasm during PIV.” Talk about mandatory PIV.) While of course you can enjoy PIV without orgasming, a significant part of that 70% are not particularly enjoying themselves– and besides it’s a bit shitty to have Real Sex be something that reliably results in orgasms for men but not for women.

PIV is more likely to be painful for women than for men. There is no male equivalent of having your cervix bumped, or a too-large cock stretching your pussy out too far, or sex without lube, or being painfully jackhammered, or post-PIV vaginal soreness. Psychologically, being receptive often feels more vulnerable for people than being penetrative does, which can be unpleasant, particularly if you don’t trust your partner (although as with every generalization about How Brains Work During Sex there are a lot a lot a lot of exceptions).

The way PIV itself is constructed is centered around male pleasure rather than female pleasure. A woman is ready for PIV when her vagina is wet, which is at best an unreliable indicator of how turned on she is; clit boners are typically not considered in mainstream sex advice. Many people talk about how hot a tight vagina is, even though vaginal tightness happens when a woman is insufficiently aroused by the sex to relax her vaginal muscles. (Or when she uses her Kegel muscles. Yay Kegels.) PIV typically ends when the man ejaculates; I know I’m not the only person who feels guilty about ending PIV before my partner ejaculates, even when my pussy’s sore and I’m not enjoying the sex anymore. On the other hand, if the guy comes before the woman’s finished, it is generally considered highly emasculating to pull out a dildo and finish up.

The flaw with a lot of PIV-critical feminism, I think, is that they ignore that the problems with PIV are not inherent to PIV itself but to the way we construct PIV. PIV is legitimately enjoyable to a lot of women– whether because they orgasm from it, they don’t orgasm from it but it still feels good, or they enjoy their partner’s pleasure. (Boyfriends, if you read this and decide not to have PIV with me I will be Very Sad.) It is incredibly shitty to those women to say “no, you don’t get to have PIV because these women over here don’t enjoy it but feel like they have to have it anyway.” I mean, the obvious solution here is that people who don’t like PIV shouldn’t have to have it, and people who do should.

So. Here is my list of solutions:

1) If you don’t want PIV, you shouldn’t have PIV. (Although it is wise to communicate this to people you might have sex with early on, in case they prioritize PIV highly in their sex lives.) Anyone who gives you shit about it is a rapey asshole and I hope they fall in love with a Joss Whedon character.
2) If you’re staring at the ceiling going “when will this be over?”, you can stop the PIV, even if your partner hasn’t come yet. While it is usually a good idea to make sure your partner orgasms too, you can give him a blowjob or a handjob or kiss and pet him while he masturbates. (And of course it is not mandatory that you make sure your partner comes if you don’t want to. Consent!)   
3) Orgasms from non-PIV sources are just as valid as PIV orgasms. Orgasms from PIV assisted with a vibrator or a finger are just as valid as unassisted PIV orgasms. STOP CREATING ORGASM HIERARCHIES. ALL ORGASMS ARE EQUAL IN THE EYES OF GOD.
4) If you aren’t enjoying yourself during PIV, you should feel free to talk to your partner about this and figure out ways you can make it more enjoyable.
5) Male birth control! Please!
6) Sex without PIV is still “real” sex. Oral sex is real sex. Manual sex is real sex. Dry-humping is real sex. Kink is real sex. As long as your relationship or sex life is making you happy, you should feel free to select any of those you want and refuse any of those you don’t want, because ultimately it is up to you and your partner to do what makes you happy. 

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The People You Meet While Camming

So Scott (who is my boyfriend) pointed people to my blog and was all “Ozy writes about zir experiences as a camperson!” and I was like “shit, I have never actually written about my experiences as a camperson!” so now I have to do that thing.

So. Here are, as far as I can tell, all the types of people that come visit me in my chatroom:

1) The Guy Who Doesn’t Get That This Is A Job.

This is a conversation I have about ten times a shift:

Dude: Take your top off!
Me: You gotta give me a little bit of encouragement first, sugar.
Dude: I’m totally sexy, I have a big cock, I can show you a good time in private, just take your top off!
Me: Well, darling, take me into private and I’d be happy to take my top off for you.
Dude: TAKE YOUR TOP OFF I’M SO HARD FOR YOU RIGHT NOW
Me: (ignores him)
Dude: BITCH WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME

I am not sure why those guys are here. I mean… okay, it’s called My Free Cams, but it’s not actually free. This is my job. Everyone else seems to understand that. Do they seriously think there’s a large population of attractive young women who are so desperate for sexual attention that they are going to take their clothes off, for free, for guys about whom they know nothing other than that he wants them to? Are these the same guys who holler “sexxxxy!” from cars? That would explain a lot.

Also, seriously, I don’t care how sexy you are. I am not doing this job for my sexual gratification; I’m doing it because fiftysomething divorcees have a lot of spare cash to spend on camgirls.

2) The Guy Who Is Hopelessly In Love With You.

So much so that he wants to hang around in your chatroom for two hours just sort of… watching. And occasionally asking you what your favorite book is, or telling you how pretty you are, or talking about how he’s going to take you out on a date to a country music hall.

Some of these guys are pretty good tippers, which makes me feel really guilty because I’m taking money from someone who is Hopelessly In Love With Me. Even the ones who aren’t good tippers can often make you seem charming and sexy, which means that other people will like you and take you into private. I always end up feeling outright contempt for them, which makes me feel like a terrible person, because it’s not like they did anything wrong other than have a giant crush on me. But pretending to have a crush on someone when I don’t makes me feel really icky, and so I end up dealing with it by disliking the guy so I don’t have to hate myself for taking advantage of him. Bleh.

3) The Guy Who Wants To Watch Girls Masturbate. 

I really really like this guy. He takes you into private, asks you to strip for him, and then wants you to come three or four times while talking about how much you want him to eat you out and fuck you. Usually he doesn’t even talk that much. I love this guy, because a show with him is basically being paid four dollars a minute to masturbate. Best. Job. EVER.

However, I always wonder if I should point him to the existence of porn. Like. There is a lot of porn where you can silently watch a girl masturbate, you do not have to pay me sixty dollars to do so. I mean, he must get something out of it, right? It’s not just that he doesn’t know that I Feel Myself exists? I mean, I can’t believe that someone’s been on the Internet for long enough to find a camsite but not for long enough to figure out that you can get porn for free.

…Maybe they just all believe in supporting our sex workers. I approve of that!

4) The Guy With The Really Specific Fetish. 

“I want you to stand there in your panties for twenty minutes and repeat the word ‘pussy.’” “I want you to spend half an hour talking about how big my cock is and begging for my come on your face.” “I want you to put the camera near your feet and just stand there. No, you don’t have to do anything, just stand there and occasionally command me to lick them.” “Slap your face for ten minutes straight.” “Put clothespins on your nipples. No, don’t masturbate, just put clothespins on your nipples and twist them sometimes.” “I want you to describe seducing me in a coffeeshop, except that I’m a girl.” (I actually suspect that that last one was a closeted trans woman, and I wish them the best of luck.)

I totally understand why those people don’t just use porn. I imagine even Rule 34 has difficulty with “thin small-breasted girl in glasses with unshaven pussy, in panties, repeating the word ‘pussy’ in a low yet sweet voice.”

5) The Cuckold Fetishist.

You would think, given that I’m always filed under the “barely legal” equivalent category, I would get a lot of ageplayers and people who want to fuck the babysitter and stuff. Nope. It is JUST CUCKOLD FETISHISTS.

Specifically, cuckold fetishists who want me to tell them about all the unprotected sex I’m having with men, preferably black or with big cocks or both, because their cock is too small to satisfy me. And then they lick out the come from my pussy and I make them have anal sex with or give a blowjob to the guy with a big black cock. Also, sometimes I get pregnant and become, quote, a “pregnant ghetto whore for big black cocks.”

That is a weirdly specific fetish and I do not understand why everyone in the world seems to have it. I am also worried because I seem to be absurdly attractive to cuckold fetishists, and yet in my private life I have never done any sort of cuckolding roleplay. Have all my partners been into cuckolding and not told me? Have I left them sexually unsatisfied? THIS IS A SERIOUS CONCERN!

The Government Does Not Spend Enough Money Researching Snail Sex

One of the recurring subgenres of the “people complaining about lack of fiscal responsibility” article are the people complaining that the government has spent money on some kind of ludicrous-sounding scientific research. For instance, here we have someone upset that scientists received eight hundred thousand dollars to research snail sex.

First! I would like to point out that previous research about animal sex taught us that ducks have anti-rape vaginas. If you don’t think that’s the coolest thing in the world, I do not know what to do with you. ANTI-RAPE VAGINAS, PEOPLE. Even if this research were totally useless, finding out interesting facts about animal fucking is pretty much the best thing the government could spend money on and I highly approve of it.

Second! The government is not loads in debt because they have spent a lot of money on research about animal fucking. The government spends most of its money on Social Security, the Department of Defense, and “Unemployment/Welfare/Other Mandatory Spending.” The Department of Animal Fucking Research was, unfortunately, too small to show up on the pie chart. 

Third! Research into animal fucking is actually really important. In general, to pass your genes on to the next generation, you need to survive long enough to have babies and then have babies. Sex often plays a key role in the baby-having process, although sometimes it doesn’t. Understanding how animal sex works helps us understand how evolution works, which means a greater understanding of why literally everything alive is the way it is. If you’re too immature to respond to the topic of sex with anything other than a fifth-grader’s “hurr sex,” that’s a valid life choice, but you should probably refrain from talking about biology.

Fourth! Research into biology in general is really important! Norman Borlaug saved a billion people worldwide from starvation via government-funded biological research. (The government in question was Mexico, but still.) Even if the rest of biology spent its grants on pot and beer, biological research would still be one of the most beneficial things any government has ever done. Of course, biologists didn’t spend all their grants on pot and beer: they went about finding cures for diseases and improving agricultural yields and figuring out how life on earth came about and discovering that ducks have anti-rape vaginas. THANK YOU BIOLOGISTS. YOU GUYS ROCK.

Evidence-Based Rape/Abuse Avoidance

I’m going to have to put Disclaimers on this post, because people are terrible. Absolutely nothing you do ever makes being raped your fault; rape and abuse are 100% the fault of rapists, not of survivors. If someone is using this, or anything else I write, to victim-blame survivors, they are doing it wrong. Got it? Okay.

If you were socialized female, you probably got a lot of advice about how not to be raped. Don’t wear slutty clothes. Don’t get drunk. Keep an eye on your drink. Don’t walk around late at night, especially not alone or in a “bad neighborhood.” Keep a rape whistle with you. Hold your keys between your fingers so you can stab a rapist in the eye. Don’t wear a ponytail (apparently rapists will use it to hold your hair back while they rape you). Yell “fire” instead of “rape” if you’re raped (???). Et cetera.

This advice is terrible for a lot of reasons. A lot of it is based less on empirical evidence and more on patriarchal theories about what sort of women get raped (drunk sluts) and why they get raped (dude was so horny he couldn’t help himself). It limits women’s ability to participate in routine activities like going to a bar, walking home from the bus stop at night, or wandering around shirtless after Rocky Horror. (Maybe that last one’s just me.) It concentrates on preventing stranger rape, which is only a third of all rapes. Much of the advice requires women to be constantly afraid. A lot of the advice involves making yourself less vulnerable to rape, which is less “rape prevention” and more “how to make sure they rape the other girl.” And, once again, there is no evidence that most of it actually works.

(This is all much better than the advice I got about how to prevent abusive relationships, which was mostly “don’t date a guy who hits you.” In other news, you can cure obesity by losing weight and poverty by earning more money.)

The standard feminist advice is what I’d call the Schrodinger’s Rapist/creepiness advice: “if you get a weird vibe from a dude, you don’t have to talk to him. Dudes, this is how you can prevent women getting a weird vibe from you.” This is actually much better advice than the standard advice, since it at least acknowledges that the key variable in whether a rape happens is the presence of a rapist. Also, people do not have to spend time with people they don’t want to spend time with, and “I get a weird vibe from you” is a perfectly legitimate reason not to want to talk to someone (although don’t be an asshole about it). However, I think it still suffers from some fatal flaws.

—”Schrodinger’s Rapist” is really poorly named, because the initial blogpost focuses on interactions between men and women in public. I mean, sure, in a dark alley “fuck dude’s gonna rape me” is a worry, but if a strange dude approaches me while I’m presenting female and on a bus, my concern is not that he’s Schrodinger’s Rapist, it’s that he’s Schrodinger’s Dude Who Lectures Me For Thirty Minutes About How Reading Instead Of Talking To Him Means I’m An Elitist Bitch.

Anyway, fatal flaws with the “creepiness” model. It assumes that rape and abuse are things women have to fear from men, as opposed to things that people have to fear from people; this is unfair to men, as well as giving abusive and rapey women a free pass. It assumes that people have a gut feeling about who’s creepy or a threat (hi, anxiety issues, I’m scared of everyone, your model does not work for me). It assumes that people’s gut feelings are fair and accurate, instead of influenced by classist, racist, ableist, and transmisogynistic social forces.

Fortunately, we can solve this problem, because as it happens people have been doing empirical research about the traits of abusers and rapists for like two decades! (Of course, not all rapists or abusers show all or, indeed, any of those traits, and some people show these traits and are not rapists or abusers. Nothing can zero out your risk of being raped or abused; it can only reduce it. And what level of risk you accept is ultimately your decision: whatever level of risk you’re comfortable with is right for you. I’m just providing information here.)

  • Disrespect of boundaries. If you say “no” to something and they don’t listen that is a GIANT RED FLAG OF REDNESS AND FLAGGINESS. Same for pushing boundaries. 
  • Misogyny (for women assessing men), particularly anger at and desire to control/dominate women. Even something like appreciating sexist humor is correlated with likelihood to rape and is a (minor) red flag.
  • Hypermasculinity (again, for women assessing men).  
  • Antisociality and lack of empathy.
  • Impulsiveness.   
  • Rape- or abuse-justifying beliefs.
  • Gaslighting, even if relatively minor.
  • Excessive jealousy or anger.
  • Constantly criticizing you or putting you down.
  • Tries to get you to quit your hobbies or stop talking to your friends or family.
  • Conversely, seems way too good to be true.
  • Blames their previous relationships’ failure on their partners.
  • History of committing abuse or rape. (I mean, duh?)

I feel like listing them out most of the red flags are… really really obvious? Stay away from absurdly horrible people, they are more likely to abuse or rape you! It is totally valid to be like “that person criticizes me a lot and doesn’t quite grasp the concept of ‘no,’ I am not going to spend time with them anymore.”

[ETA: a lot of people in the comments are like "where are the citations?" I was totally hoping I could get away without citations, but I cannot pull anything on you people. The answer is: I know this because I spent like a month reading hundreds of articles about rapist and abuser psychology and I am way too lazy to dig up all the articles I read. :P David Lisak, My Favorite Researcher In The Entire World, is a good place to start if you want to do your own research though.]

Intro To Rape Culture, Or, Ozy Fangirls David Lisak

My boyfriend is confused about the concept of rape culture, which means I need to explain what rape culture is. Again.

For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s necessarily good to use the word “rape culture,” because people who aren’t feminists tend to respond to the word by saying “…but rape is illegal in our culture, everyone hates rape!” and then wander off assuming that feminists are rape-obsessed and probably hate sex.

The Problem

According to very respectable national research done by the American government, about 18% of women and 6% of men are raped over the course of their lifetimes. According to peer-reviewed psychological research, between 6% and 13% of men have committed rape. (As far as I’m aware no one has done similar research on female rapists.) That is a lot of rape.

Rape is also a really big problem. For instance, let’s take PTSD rate as a proxy for severity of trauma. Rape survivors have a higher PTSD rate than combat veterans, which suggests that being raped is actually more traumatizing than fucking combat.

Rape culture is the term for “the cultural forces that make the rape rate so fucking high.”

Why Rapists Rape

Nearly all the evidence about why (male) rapists rape is correlational– “huh, rapists seem to have Trait Y more than the general population, let’s try to reduce that.” (This blog post is a pretty good summary of the research. Yes, I could really replace this entire blog post with “go read the Yes Means Yes archives.”)

Rapists are more misogynistic than non-rapists (angrier at women, more likely to want to control them); therefore we stigmatize the hell out of misogyny, particularly those forms (like the treatment of women as machines that you get sexual gratification from) that seem likely to lead to rape. Rapists tend to have “toxic masculinity” traits such as lack of empathy, impulsiveness, and antisociality; therefore we advocate for a wider definition of masculinity. (I am not aware of research on how these apply to female or queer rapists because people tend to totally ignore female and queer rapists.)

Rapists are more likely to have rape-supportive beliefs, like “if a girl is raped when she’s drunk it’s at least a little her fault for letting things get out of hand” and “guys don’t intend to force sex on a girl, but sometimes they get a little carried away” and (presumably, there has not been research on this one) “if a man gets hard he’s consenting.” That is why we’re against victim-blaming: not just because it’s horrible to survivors (which, Jesus, isn’t that enough of a reason?), but because rapists believe victim-blaming ideas and it is reasonable to believe this is a causative factor in rape.

Rapists tend to test boundaries to see what people will assert them and what people will give in. There’s this whole idea that women need to be polite and kind and not make a fuss when their boundaries are violated, until they’re raped, at which point it’s “why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you say no loud enough?” (The linked Fugitivus post, btw, was my click moment about rape culture.) A lot of people also seem to have difficulty with the concept that men get boundaries at all. Therefore, feminists need to assert that boundaries matter and they matter everywhere– not just during sex, but during kissing and hugs and cuddling and tickling and conversation and what food you fucking eat. And that if someone does not respect your boundaries, they are not a good person and it is perfectly reasonable to be pissed.

Rapists tend to believe that their behavior is normal: that most men commit rape, or want to. That’s why we’re against things that normalize rape, including most rape jokes. Because Pat Not-A-Rapist thinks the joke is funny because haha it’s so absurd that anyone would think they and their friends are rapists, and Robin Rapist thinks it’s funny because that’s how they think the world actually works.

After a Rape

I have a friend who was raped fairly recently at our nice liberal-arts college full of hairy-legged feminists and dirty hippies. (I have her permission to tell this story.) She reflected that the worst part wasn’t the rape– it was that she can’t be friends with anyone who’s friends with her rapist anymore. They might invite him over to hang out and, well, if she told anyone that she was raped– even just to say “so please don’t invite my rapist over while we’re hanging out”– it would instantly spread everywhere and turn into a referendum about whether she was a lying whore.

See, everyone believes that rapists are evil! Rapists are horrible monsters. They probably have fangs or something. It’s just that people don’t like considering their friends horrible evil monsters. So a lot of people are going to hear “your friend raped me” and respond with “it was probably a misunderstanding” or “you just regretted it the next day” or “you’re a lying whore.”

This means that a lot of rapists experience no negative consequences for their rape whatsoever. It means that repeat rapists– who commit most rapes– continue to have access to a social group where they can rape people. It means that rape survivors don’t get the support they need.

This is why feminists are dicks about affirmative consent (other than the boundary stuff above). Because if the norm is “you don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t obviously want to have sex,” people cannot be like “well my friend probably just misunderstood the situation” and justify the commission of rape. Because we are the 95%, we are capable of telling when our partner does and does not want sex, we are not rapists, and we should not be giving social cover to rapists.

–A related but distinct kind of social cover for rapists, which I would be remiss to end the post without mentioning, is that of prison rape. A lot of people seem to accept that rape is a reasonable punishment for crime, which makes it harder to get political will to end prison rape. Some people even seem to believe that rape is a reasonable punishment for rape, which you would think would lead to this weird recursive thing where rapists are raped by people who are now rapists and have to be raped, and so on and so forth ad infinitem.

(I’m kind of dodging the justice system issue here, because I’m not a legal expert, and because while our justice system often treats rape survivors horribly it’s hard to imagine a justice system that simultaneously protects the mental health of the survivor and the rights of the accused. Anyway, we are not going to lock up ten percent or so of the male population. The solution to rape culture has to be a cultural change, not a legal change.)

Because it is apparently necessary that I link to every post on Yes Means Yes, I want to signal-boost this as a really good case study of rape culture in a particular community– namely, the BDSM community. The BDSM community is a really interesting group to look at because it’s about sex, so a lot of the dynamics that are hidden in other communities are out in the open.

So What Do I Do?

  • Don’t rape people. Okay, this shit is obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway.
  • Respect people’s “no.” All the time. For everything. Without fussing about it.
  • Don’t say “no” when you don’t mean “no.” Again, I can’t believe I have to say this, but apparently some people are going about saying “no” when they don’t mean it and then everyone else is like “women! Sometimes they say no, but they don’t mean no, therefore I am totally justified in having sex with people who have said no!” So seriously, if you pull that shit, stop ruining it for everyone else. (You can do rape play if you want, but use a safeword.)
  • “Ask before touching people” is a really really good social norm. So is “ask before sex.” (I know this is stigmatized in some social groups– which is horrible and rape-culturey itself. But it’s still a good thing to do.)
  • Make it clear that you are part of the vast majority of people who are not rapists and that violating people’s consent, victim-blaming, misogyny, and so on are Not Okay. You do not have to lecture people about rape culture– I mean, I do, but that’s less anti-rape activism and more being a boring one-trick pony. But you can be like “dude not cool” when someone talks about how funny prison rape is or about getting women drunk to have sex with them.
  • Check in and, if necessary, rescue people if it looks like something skeezy or abusive is happening. (Examples of “skeezy or abusive”: person looks creeped out; one person is getting another person very drunk; someone has said “no” and the other person is trying to get them to do a thing anyway)
  • Believe survivors. I know, I know, some unknown (but small!) percentage of accusations of rape are false rape accusations. But like. It is not that hard to not invite a survivor and the person they accused to the same party, or to keep an eye on people accused of rape to see if they seem to be repeating it, or to provide support to a survivor, or to bluntly talk to someone about their behavior. And if someone has been accused of rape multiple times or has a history of being a gigantic boundary-violating creeper… seriously, you don’t have to be “innocent until proven guilty” on being friends with someone. Not being invited to parties is not a goddamned death sentence.

I mean. Nearly everything on this list is stuff that people I know– even people who aren’t super-aware of rape culture– do anyway, because they’re not douchebags and they’re not rapists. Because… really if there’s one takeaway point here, it’s that we are not rapists, we don’t approve of rape, and we need to stop fucking acting like we do.

An Angry Rant Prompted By Someone Calling Me “Male-Identified”

I am not male. I am not female. I am genderqueer. 

You would think that wouldn’t be so difficult for so-called trans-positive people to understand.

Oh, sure, they don’t look at my tits and my vulva and assume I’m a woman. Instead, they look at them and assume I’m a dude! Yaaaaay! Do you want a cookie for being a Super Awesome Trans Ally? Shall I throw you a parade?

Not male! Not female! Neither! None! None of the above! Why is this so difficult for some people to understand?

Calling me male (oh, sorry, male-identified) is misgendering me. It’s not somehow not misgendering me because it’s a different kind of misgendering me than most people do. 

(…Also wtf “male-identified.” First, that’s fucking redundant, if you’re in a trans-positive space everyone knows “male” means “identifies as male,” you don’t need the extra word. Second, fuck you, I don’t identify as male. I have never identified as male. The word “identified” is a paper-thin figleaf over your binarist bullshit.) 

Now, you might say, my social position is male. After all, no one is read as genderqueer; we have to go through a rather long and annoying process of explaining what we are, and even then half the people will slot you in as “basically a lady” or “basically a dude.” So maybe I’m treated like a man most of the time!

Except you’re still wrong there.

Like a lot of (most?) genderqueer people, my gendered social position is complicated. I am usually initially read as a teenage boy, possibly queer, except inexplicably in geek-heavy spaces where I’m always read as female. When I open my mouth, I’m read as a gender-non-conforming woman. For school, work, and family purposes, I present as a cis woman. All my current romantic/sexual relationships are with straight cis men. Online, “genderqueer” seems to round to “male,” which means no one calls me ugly anymore. (Sadface.) My friends consider me genderqueer (thanks, guys, you’re awesome).

You might notice a couple words getting repeated there like “woman” and “female.” Juuuuust saying.

I don’t want to say that I have never received male privilege– of course I have. The freedom from sexual harassment is particularly nice. And I cannot overestimate how much easier my life is because I’m not a recipient of transmisogyny. But I don’t see how any of that justifies calling me male-identified! Because, you know, I don’t identify as male. So fuck off.  

Don’t Call Circumcised Penises “Mutilated”

[By request of Zuiyo Maru.]

I am, like most right-thinking people, anti-circumcision. The health benefits are fairly small (as are the risks, to be fair), which means it’s primarily an aesthetic procedure. And, no, you do not get to do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitalia. If they like the way circumcision looks they can get the procedure done when they are of age. (As regards the religion issue: I am uncomfortable forbidding circumcision to devout Jews and Muslims, but I also see the merits of the “kids shouldn’t have to get surgery because of their parents’ religion” argument. Regardless, in the US, most circumcision is not of Jews or Muslims.)

At the same time, I am very against people calling male circumcision “male genital mutilation.”

The number one rule of writing things is to remember that the people you’re talking about are reading your article. If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t put it in print. Autistic people will read your article calling autistic people empathyless monsters. Geeks will read your article talking about how weird and freaky cons are (“sometimes people dress up in costume!”). And circumcised men are reading when you call their genitals mutilated.

You’d think this would be easy to remember, because four-fifths of American men and a third of worldwide men are circumcised. It’s not like circumcised men are a tiny minority one could conceivably forget about.

And, you know, I feel like “don’t do aesthetic surgery on babies’ genitals” is a strong enough argument without having to add in “…because they’re horrible and ugly and a perversion of the way genitals are supposed to be!” Like. It doesn’t matter. Circumcised penises are fine. Uncircumcised penises are fine. It’s just that what one wants one’s genitals to look like is a decision that should be made by adults who have assessed the benefits and consequences of the procedure, not by parents when the child is too small to speak, much less consent.

And that’s an argument you can make without having to call people’s perfectly attractive, perfectly functional, perfectly okay genitals mutilated.

Against Kink-Critical Feminism

Cliff Pervocracy wrote a thing about kink-critical feminism (she disagrees with it!) and I felt like adding in my own two cents.

The primary claims of kink-critical feminism, as far as I can tell, are that kink is primarily caused by societal structures of domination and that because of this it reinforces those structures. Both of those ideas are, in fact, totally wrong!

Obviously, sometimes kink is caused by an eroticization of societal structures of domination. I think that sexuality is primarily a result of environmental influences, and those include, you know, being in a racist and sexist society. I think that in a hypothetical non-racist non-sexist society we probably wouldn’t have people who are into race play or sissification. If you find the radical feminist argument that society eroticizes sexual violence to be persuasive, as I do, then of course some people are going to be into consensually enacted portrayals of sexual violence. Furthermore, you could argue that societal structures of domination sometimes indirectly cause kinkiness: for instance, I know some survivors attribute their kinkiness to eroticization of their rape, and in a hypothetical less-fucked-up society we would have fewer rapes.

But just as I find it difficult to understand how sissification would be unrelated to patriarchy, I find it equally difficult to understand how patriarchy leads to people pretending to be show ponies.

I’m a masochist because some weird part of my brain is messed up such that I enjoy pain; there’s no power-exchange aspect to it. I don’t know, maybe my brain releases more endorphins than most people’s. I would be very interested in an explanation of how the patriarchy caused that. (Note to kink-critical feminists: before you say that my masochism is immoral because people cannot consent to assault, I will point out that yes they can. It’s called boxing.)

Similarly, if you happen to know people who enjoy pain (or be such a person yourself), it makes sense that you’d get off on giving them pain, in much the same way as you’d get off on giving them oral sex. People generally like giving their partners sexual pleasure.

Psychological studies have shown that people tend to be more attracted to someone after they’ve gone through a scary experience, presumably because their brain attributes the increased heart rate and fast breathing to “that person is hot!” rather than “that was scary.” A lot of kink plays around with fear and other heightened emotions, i.e., the ones that actual peer-reviewed studies have shown to be sexually arousing. Just saying.

Or hell maybe there are personal psychological reasons. There’s the famous cliche of the sub with the high-powered job who just wants a chance to relax and have someone tell them what to do. (I presume a stereotype of doms who have no control over their own lives may or may not be accurate but didn’t gain ground because it’s terribly insulting to doms.) Not everything is caused by the patriarchy, you know.

At the same time, even kink that is obviously related to patriarchy is not necessarily anti-feminist, because there is a difference between “caused by patriarchy” and “perpetuating patriarchy.” Kink causes patriarchy in much the same way as my muddy shoes cause rainstorms.

And, look, just being caused by the patriarchy doesn’t make something immoral, otherwise the list of immoral things would include girls liking pink, stay-at-home parenthood, Hull House, and the feminist movement itself. You have to show that a thing actually hurts actual people in order for it to count as unethical. Which is a task that kink-critical feminists have yet to do.

Ozy’s Current Theory of Gender

[As promised. I would like to acknowledge my debt here to West and Zimmerman's Doing Gender, to Natalie Reed, and to the valiant people who have attempted to explain to me what the fuck Judith Butler is going on about. Also, I'm not saying any of this is how it should work; I'm simply describing how, as far as I can tell, it does work.]

Our culture transmits to us a certain idea of How Gender Is Supposed to Work. Or, well, ideas. People of different races and classes and abilities and sexualities and religions and body types and personalities get different messages about how gender is supposed to work. You get different messages based on where you grew up, what your family’s like, where you went to school, what media you watched, who your friends were, whom you date, where you work. In fact, you can say that no two people get exactly the same gender socialization.

People use the cultural ideas of how gender works as a toolkit to express their own identities and to communicate them to other people. (For some people, gender is not a relevant axis on which they construct their identities. Thus you get cis by default people.) Ways that people express their gender can include clothing, grooming, hygiene, mannerisms, word choice and syntax, the way they pitch their voice, their lifestyle, sexual choices, how they interact with or treat other people, and probably half a dozen other things I can’t think of.

Because gender is a means of communicating facts about one’s identity, people “read” each other’s genders. People slot each other into “male” or “female,” and then into a multitude of gendered subcategories– butch, femme, good girl, slut, dandy, bro, geek, fag, et cetera I’m sure you can think of more. Of course, just because you’re trying to communicate something does not mean other people are able to understand what you’re trying to communicate (the jargon I hear is “illegible gender”); other people bring their own biases and interpretations and Mounds of Gendered Shit to the table.

People end up treating other people differently based on what gender they read the person as having. For instance, I mysteriously get much more respect in intellectual conversations when people read me as male or at least masculine. All this gets Really Important in relationship to sexuality, because for a lot of people what sex or gender they read their partner as is a fundamentally important aspect of attraction. And in turn what gendered subcategories they read their partner as fitting into affects whether they want a sexual relationship and what kind of sexual relationship they want.

People feel more comfortable expressing their genders in some ways than in other ways. In some ways, this is shaped by how people treat them: after all, there are plenty of women who look feminine to get guys without having much connection to femininity at all. But for a lot of people the act of expressing yourself in a certain gendered way feels right: putting on a skirt just feels ineffably better than sweatpants; it just feels right to swish; when you slick back your hair you look in the mirror and see you. I think that’s a lot of what people are getting at with “makeup is empowering!”– it’s not that makeup is empowering, it’s that expressing your gender is empowering, and for some people that involves makeup. (I predict about half my readers are nodding along going “yep” at this point and the other half are like “what the fuck is zie even talking about?” Sorry, other half. Please take it on faith that this Is A Thing I Promise.)

—As for the “hey, if that’s true, why can’t trans women just be men in makeup?” Because they feel comfortable as women, not men. Duh?

Why do people have feelings of gender comfort? Some kind of biopsychosocial nonsense, probably. I’d argue that there’s Probably Some Kind Of Neurobiological Thing Or Things That Affect One’s Gender Somehow, because both gender roles and trans people tend to pop up a lot cross-culturally, and because certainly from the inside it doesn’t feel like my bodily gender dysphoria is a product of the culture I grew up in. But I’m not going to say “it’s the prenatal hormones!” or “we have the brains of the opposite gender!” or anything specific. Wait for neuroscience to become more advanced.

As to the psychological and social factors… I only have one navel to gaze at, my own, so I’m not going to generalize about other people’s experiences. But I use gender-neutral pronouns and call myself “genderqueer” or “nonbinary” and wear a binder because I happened to encounter the trans community and fit my experiences into their framework of what genderqueer people do. I paint my nails and wear makeup because, shit, man, so did David Bowie and Billie Joe Armstrong. I cut my hair to look like Joan Jett and grew it out to look like every gamer guy who can’t be bothered to get a haircut. I’m perfectly fine fucking boys because of my formative experiences reading slash fic and lesbian feminist theory. (Which is kind of the opposite of what lesbian feminism was supposed to do, but c’est la vie.) I choose my outfits based on whether strangers “sir” me or sexually harass me. I joke that my gender identity is bishonen! Either “nature” or “nurture” is an inadequate explanation of how I got my gender: the answer is both.

(Also I really like this list from Natalie Reed’s Twitter of assorted factors that have to do with gender somehow. Gender is coooooomplicated.)

On Marriage

[This is a post for Forward Thinking. The question is "What do you believe should be the purpose of marriage in our society today? What do you personally see as the purpose of marriage for your own life? And finally, what responsibilities, duties, and/or obligations do you believe marriage should entail?"]

The first question is really easy for me to answer. I think marriage is a collection of rights and responsibilities which we as a society have agreed to give to people who are in some kind of Important Non-Familial Relationship with each other. I don’t think it’s any of my business to police what sort of Important Non-Familial Relationship that is– romantic or non-romantic, sexual or non-sexual, monogamous or nonmonogamous, for life or until they get bored of each other– any more than I would non-marital relationships. (Which is to say that there are moral obligations, like not to abuse each other, and Best Practices, like communicating regularly. I have a lot of Opinions about other people’s relationships actually.)

Like, honestly I’m trying to think of a situation where I’d treat marriage different than non-marriage. Children maybe? Given that children generally do better with more than one parent who is stably and reliably involved in the child’s life,* marriage is often a useful tool for people who want to be parents.

On the other hand, I have very specific ideas of what marriage would mean for me personally.

I have wanted to be married as far back as I can remember, possibly because my parents are the single most functional relationship I have ever witnessed. They’re not Hollywood in love, with the passionate tearful declarations and soaring music and Big Misunderstandings. They’re just… quietly each other’s best friends. They have each other’s backs. They’re in this– whatever it is– together.

When I was very young, I decided that I would get divorced in cases of abuse, infidelity (later, when I discovered that I was poly, changed to “severe betrayal of trust”), my partner and I both being utterly miserable in the relationship even after we’ve tried everything we can to fix it, or my partner’s decision to divorce me. The idea is that I choose to have a relationship with you– even when I don’t want to, even when I’m pissed off at you, even when the only thing I want is to walk out that door and never come back.

Part of it is that, if I selected my life partner well, it is more likely that Future Mes will be happy in the relationship than that Future Mes will be unhappy, even if that seems implausible in the moment. For one thing, I did get married to the person. For another, age and depth of relationships do in fact make relationships richer and more enjoyable, at least in my limited experience. (It turns out, if you have borderline personality disorder and don’t realize it, and if you can only be happy in poly relationships and you’re trying for monogamy, you’re really bad at relationship stability.) I mean, technically all I have evidence for is “Ozy prefers relationships of a year and six months to relationships of two weeks and passionately hates New Relationship Energy.”

Part of it is that I find the decision to be unhappy for the sake of some higher passion to be… aesthetically pleasing; it’s the same sort of aesthetic pleasure I get from people sacrificing for their art or science. I don’t know why; I assume this is one of my Arbitrary Preferences. Of course, I’d expect that my marriage would be happy more than it’s unhappy– but you don’t exactly need much commitment to stay in a relationship that’s good.

Other than commitment, what would I be looking for in my Hypothetical Marriage? Domesticity: I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of my romantic daydreams revolve around cleaning and cooking and budgeting. Yes, really. Do you want to see the Word documents with hypothetical budgets, or will you take my word for it? Fortunately, domesticity seems to be in high supply in life partnerships.

And I want someone who’s my best friend. I want to read books or sit on the computer late at night in companionable silence. I want to play around with ideas with them. I want that sort of creepy hivemind you get where you can say “the thing” and they’re like “but what about” and you’re like “yeah, right, but still.” (Seriously, my parents do that and I can’t even understand what they’re talking about half the time.) I want someone who understands that I’m always going to be in a triad with my partner and writing and, ideally, is going to make it a quad. I want someone who complements my weaknesses and enhances my strengths, and to be a better person because I’m with them.

Things I don’t care about: sex. Really don’t care. I mean, I’m poly, I can get sex elsewhere, and sex really isn’t that important to me in a relationship regardless. I like holding hands and snuggling and kissing and having my head petted, but if we do all that and never interlock genitals I don’t care. It’s very odd to me to see people talk as if all marriages must be sexual relationships: why is a relationship of friendship and commitment and mutual support somehow less valid because you aren’t participating in one admittedly very enjoyable recreational activity?

Still odd, although slightly less stupid, is the insistence that marriages must be romantic. Romantic love is a storm of emotion that often makes you want to be with someone forever, so of course people assume that if you’re in romantic love you must be together forever. But I think a lot of people think two friends marrying is Less Real Somehow, which is just bizarre. And while it is perfectly valid to get divorced because you’ve fallen out of love with your partner, because anyone is allowed to end relationships for any reason, I find the assumption that falling out of romantic love automatically ought to lead to divorce to be silly. You can still be partners even if you are no longer lovers. It’s totally valid!

*Although many times this is not possible. I in no way intend to shame single parents, who are usually good people struggling with a very difficult job.