A schadenfreudal orgasm.
Delightful.
Author's Note: This lengthy diatribe was inspired by a sf-drama post -- a forum I do not attend, nor do I desire becoming invested in -- which elicited a severe twitch of irritation within me. I, very reluctantly, said nothing. After all, why would I, somebody who devotes massive amounts of their time into Dare-I-Say-PC research, ever want to ( Read more... )
Author's Note: This lengthy diatribe was inspired by a sf-drama post -- a forum I do not attend, nor do I desire becoming invested in -- which elicited a severe twitch of irritation within me. I, very reluctantly, said nothing. After all, why would I, somebody who devotes massive amounts of their time into Dare-I-Say-PC research, ever want to ( Read more... )
Then, as I discussed with you, I did sit back and think of the psychiatric and medical obsession with low libido, and the need to 'fix' many people who don't feel like anything is really that wrong with them until others make them feel alienated and broken. The way people strongly try to correlate this ~deviant~ (lack of ) sexuality to abuse, hormone imbalances, or what have you is very much the same attitude toward homosexuality. In the end, whether it's seen as biological or psychological, it is seen as a deviation from the norm, the norm which is heterosexuality, and a healthy need to engage in heterosexual sex.
We also talked about the stupid notion that we are somehow repressed as a society, and I wish that people would understand that sexuality has no 'natural' state. It's directed and shaped and packaged and sold for everyone in all kinds of ways. Who knows what sexuality would look like without any societal influence, if it were to just ~exist naturally~.
Asexual men are seen as less of men, while asexual women (or just people with low libidos) are seen as damaged, someone that just needs peen, as ALWAYS (that's a cure to every woman's problems), to 'fix' her.
If who you are is unanimously considered a disease, I'm loathe to deny any systematic component is involved.
I love this. And my next comment will be purely anecdotal because I am tired and incoherent and cannot sound very intelligent yet, but I can at least talk about myself.
In the end tl;dr, upon further reflection, I do understand what these asexuals were trying to say.
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"We also talked about the stupid notion that we are somehow repressed as a society, and I wish that people would understand that sexuality has no 'natural' state. It's directed and shaped and packaged and sold for everyone in all kinds of ways. Who knows what sexuality would look like without any societal influence, if it were to just ~exist naturally~."
What's interesting is that I can interpret this both ways. Upon watching a documentary about The History of Sex (which was, essentially: "Here's a List of All the Impossibly Destructive Abuses We've Inflicted Upon The Female Species and Masqueraded it as the Natural Evolution of Lust; How Marquis de Sade Was Sinisterly Awesome to Sexologists"), I noticed that beneath the pile of bizarre devices, contraptions, mandates, and clinical phrasing of the carnal actions, that we've, presently, really just given historical practices a different name. We've also only minutely tweaked the motions. What seems evident is that it's unanimously accepted that the most appalling levels of power exchanges were rooted in shame and repulsion for sexuality -- and, within contemporary society, even sex-positivity thrives on the notion of making dirtyness good. What's implicit here, however, is that "revolutionary" types into, let's say, kink, still embrace the notion of "consensual debasement", which requires a deeply embedded attitude that you believe that your particular sexuality is, in fact, a debasing thing. The only difference is that you unabashedly adore this self-described depravity and trangression -- in fact, the taboo is often the core of it's appeal. Ergo, in that regard, I can definitely understand how people believe we are a sexually repressive society -- but I agree with them for the "wrong" reasons.
On the other (more obvious) hand, as we discussed before, it's entirely laughable to believe Western society is a de-sexed police state, unfairly trampled by the oppressive regimes of the "Aw shucks" conservatives. Beneath the pile of attempted impositions of prostitution censorship, restrictions towards the LGBT community, and other debacles that are interpreted to be conjoined with deviant sex ... Well, suffice to say, I don't believe these dilemmas within the heteronormative collective are rooted in hatred of sex, but rather rooted in associated contempt with the female body, which has become the centerpiece of expression of What Is Sex. After all, it is often channeled with her as the visual or abstract medium -- and she is the passive receiver of anonymous lust while paradoxically being the cause of other's activeness.
But alas, I suppose discussing heteronormativity is irrelevant to my own topic. Then again, maybe it isn't.
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...I don't believe these dilemmas within the heteronormative collective are rooted in hatred of sex, but rather rooted in associated contempt with the female body"
Agreed, 100%. The sex men have (unless it is homosexual sex, which is threatening to the order of trying to control women through sex, and shows the innate entwining of power and sex that seems to come with masculinity) had throughout history has gone through completely different 'regulations' than women.
I do not know if I've discussed this with you, but people as a society, especially Western society, seem to view the human experience as One Big Brain. They basically think that what has happened in the past is in the past, it is unevolved and we have learned from it naturally. What, exactly, is 'we'? Has every person really just learned, through collective human experience, that it's unfavorable to do these things to women, or to another 'race', or to those of deviant sexuality, etc.? It's as if they think that humanity shares this giant brain, and it learns from every experience it has had in the past. Yet, we somehow have the same issues consistently popping up ubiquitously all over the world, with slightly different names to the issues and slightly different definitions, and perhaps some tweaking here or there.
This is practically the counterpart to the phenomena of people looking at history with a rosy, natural, essentialist view and any bad outlook on it is 'revisionist and PC', and talking about 'upholding traditions' for some bullshit reason or another, as if Humanity is to be Parented and it's constantly going through a rebellious adolescent phase and must return to its pure, childhood roots.
When looking at the history of sex, and looking at how the sexual revolution evolved within the frameworks of a patriarchal and unequal society and within the goal of making the Female Body more 'free', more sexual, is the way to achieve real liberation ... it's just obvious that the same things seem to occur constantly ( despite what people decry in our 'femininized society' ), and they may take different shapes or forms but are never truly knocked down, never truly defeated. Legalities are switched, which is good and all. It's good that it's illegal to kill a woman for this and that, it's good that you can't toss someone in jail for being gay in some parts of the world, it's good that integration exists. A lot of change doesn't come from it because people are afraid of radicals, and there is a great tool [the media] that can be used to silence them or make people afraid to be associated with them.
Most people deemed 'radicals' really don't have that many crazy beliefs, and should not be pitted with people who condemn those of different lifestyle to death, or even crueler, eternal suffering after you've died.
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Sex has been dangerous to women for most of our history. Not only because of what it does to our status and how people redefine and speculate about us from it, but childrearing has been dangerous for a long time. Are women designed to maximize their sexual encounters like men are? What does biology play in this? Do we define women's sexuality separate from men's sexuality, BY men's sexuality (which is what we currently do), or within it and as the same?
When it comes to 'revolutionary types' and kinksters, well, as I told you, nothing is reflexively off-limits for me to debate. Some people don't like that I use strong words of condemnation or anger towards men or racial/class privilege or heterosexism (I'm seeing more and more feminists that have this; yet again, feeling disillusioned). It's not something I ever want to change or intend on changing. I don't mind that some of my opinions alienate people. I don't care about alienating some people. Fact of the matter is, I'm not concerned with looking for allies, I'm just concerned with listening to people that may have much brighter insight than my own to offer me.
I suppose that I'm an Incompatibilist in some ways. While I understand there are certain freedoms that no doubt exist (the freedom to act how you want, the freedom to CHOOSE what you want, despite how much I doubt your autonomy in those choices), and while it is my unbending principle to uphold those freedoms legally (these things are not for debate; their nature may be, and I will engage in discourse and theory about 'choice' feminism, but whether or not some freedoms should even exist isn't even up to question for me), I still feel that our freedoms are shallow. I try to think about how people came to be how they are, what circumstances they have grown into, the water these fish live in, and I see that people have not controlled how they came to be, and just 'go with the flow' and 'do what they feel like', which is usually directed from outside forces anyhow. So I end up thinking, how much of their ~special own person~ are they?
This all ties in to the asexuality and romance thing, to me, because I just don't feel the current romantic-sexual construct of love makes sense. I don't feel it's natural in any way, and I guess I personally don't feel I'll ever find happiness with the model that's been set up and the variations of it I've been presented by many ~alternative~ people.
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Our culture equates the female body with sex itself. The female body is positioned as an object of desire, and being desired is the height of female achievement (god, look at how 'ugly' women are treated especially when they want to get recognition for something). Women will see sex as a process primarily centered on men wanting women, and will probably get off more on being wanted and desired than wanting and desiring. Women experience the world secondarily, at least when it comes to sexuality.
I heard once that sex itself is constructed with women on the receptive end: Men penetrate, we’re penetrated. That isn’t just biology, it’s culture. And it's true. The words we use, the concepts that arise and are constructed from these words.
The female body is understood to be largely sexually passive and receptive to sexually active and aggressive actions. So it is no surprise to me that many women eroticize sexual submission, and it's why I don't find it reflexively off-limits to roll my eyes at the insistence that rape fantasies and submission/degrading fantasies are natural and off=limits and just a ~ kink ~. No, I won't go into your bedrooms and try to stop you gals from masturbating to this stuff, and I don't think lesser of any woman with that (I have shameful domination fantasies that involve women submitting to me -- how can I judge?). But your clitboner is, yet again, not a sacred cow for me. Women are told men want to marry a virgin but fuck a whore, that men will pay more attention to you when you're younger and teetering over the edge of 'hot' and 'wanting to fuck' but not going OVER the line or else you'll be TOO hot and TOO slutty/whoreish ! And then of course we get into the 'asking for it' scenarios.
With the way sexuality just happens and is cultivated and shaped and formed, it's no wonder that asexual women must feel incredibly alienated. People are already obsessed with how ~damage~ affects women. We have the 'daddy issues' girl, we have a society that loves to talk about fucking 'whores' and 'strippers' but will gleefully admit to how 'screwed up' these women must be. Women that are non-heterosexual must be confused or lying, unless they are ugly, in which case they are truthful but it is just because no men will have them. And then we get to 'frigid' women, women who don't want that much sex or don't care for it, especially when they are older and tired from housework and mothering.
What exactly is the line between asexual and someone with a very low sex drive? In a sense, I believe it's similar to how I don't really feel there's the 'natural' homosexual and the 'natural' heterosexual. I don't think that many asexuals are pure 100% bona fide asexuals that have no desire whatsoever, but many probably have little sexual desire or are more autosexual. They probably get sexual arousal, but don't want other people to really take care of it, and don't see it as a means to engage in something they're not interested in, and deal with people's attitudes on the subject that they are not interested in. The entire culture of sex must be so off-putting to asexuals.
I admit, I'd know more what it's like for a woman to be asexual and the resulting stigma and obsession with 'fixing' her (or turning everything she says into something she doesn't mean) and 'finding' things with their confirmation biases, but I don't know much about the stigma a man would face. I'm trying to think.
Probably just being seen as less of a man. As you stated up there, the gay jokes. While women with low libidos seem to be a 'weird' thing, men with low libidos or who 'can't get it up' seem to be emasculated walking punchlines to many.
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Within heteronormative society, people -- even within the queer community -- are frequently attempting to conceptualize everything in terms of the gender binary. In other words, everyone often tries to make homosexuality as heterosexual as possible; proponents of this essentialist ideology, in addition, also have the vast majority of their straightness centered around these constructions. (This, for the record, ties into your explanation of how socially-constructed gayness is just as plausible as socially-constructed straightness.) Gay men are quite obviously "feminized": because in which other way could their desire to be fucked by men -- the homophobe's way of refining what their orientation must be rooted in -- be rationalized? Lesbian women, alternatively, are "masculinized" -- after all, what explains their desire to fuck women the way men should be fucking them?
Collective society encodes these attitudes within their lexicon, which always betrays them: How passive and active, dominant and submissive, penetrative and receptive, are often used to describe what is defined as inherent to basic, heterosexual relations. This, of course, transcends in how they approach non-sexual behaviors -- women are not only passive sexually, but psychologically. Men not only exert physical strength in the public labor sphere, and jackhammer the ground -- if I must be glib -- but within her.
This, by proxy, afflicts how attitudes are represented in the homosexual domestic sphere, including within childrearing -- division of household labor should, apparently, be determined by who subscribes to their respective complementary role of gender. Of course, observational data demonstrates the opposite of this transpiring within same-sex relationships, but that certainly doesn't stop the Ambiguous Heteronormative Collective (this is wry, of course) from believing otherwise. Similarly to everything else.
Which leads us back into how this cannot be divorced from sexuality. Bisexuals hardly merit a second glance -- after all, they're just confused, mired in ambiguity, and will eventually "settle down" into their respective norm: the normative heterosexual role, or the normative homosexual role. Gay men are Like The Women: fucking eachother the way only women should be fucked. Lesbian women, on the other hand, are fucking eachother when none of them should be doing the fucking in the first place! But if you may, allow us to manufacture you some dildos, "flesh"-colored and stippled with veins along the phallus.
(Another off-topic thing: Ever notice how in scientific descriptions of female animals with enlarged clitorises -- such as the spotted hyena -- it's described as a "pseudo-phallus"? I wonder, then, why penises aren't described as "pseudo-clitorises", given what they're constructed from. And also, on the male-normative skeleton, you can feminize it by adding some lipstick and a pink ribbon, Ms. Pacman style. Interesting paradoxes everpresent.)
Transpeople dismantle this category even further, throwing even secretly-essentialist feminists into a frenzy: far more emphasis is placed on Gender Identity Disorder rather than Body Dysphoria. And when you pepper asexuality into the concoction, it ties together nicely: Men should want to be fucking, and women should want to be fucked -- better still, they should at least desire fucking eachother within normative parameters, with gendered caveats applied. If they don't, the reasoning must also be rooted in sex; inadequate sex, abusive sex, stubborn puritanical sex-hating abstinence.
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You've got it covered perfectly here."I admit, I'd know more what it's like for a woman to be asexual and the resulting stigma and obsession with 'fixing' her (or turning everything she says into something she doesn't mean) and 'finding' things with their confirmation biases, but I don't know much about the stigma a man would face. I'm trying to think."
I've known more male asexuals than female ones, oddly. I wouldn't suggest their discrimination is lesser or worse, but it's certainly a unique genre of loathing. They face similar pathologising as women do, but face less permissibility -- after all, within patriarchal parameters, women are natural receptacles, are notoriously "harder to please", and more prone to frigidity. Men, on the other hand, are expected to be abundant in !TESTOSTERONE!, which is automatically affiliated with aggression and lust (and interestingly, this invokes to our past discussion about how violence and sex are entwined, to the point where the violence is invisible). So, men are more likely to be defaulted into "obviously homosexual" status, whereas women are more likely to be categorized in terms of abuse or dysfunction. But this is only anecdotal.
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