The way we talk about sex is based on some very dubious assumptions, starting with the idea that “normal” is a thing.
So I was reading this lovely Charlie Glickman piece about listening to Robert Jensen give a talk about how porn is a guy thing that’s bad for men, and how his own reaction to much of it was utter WTF. The money quote, for me, is this: “It isn’t clear to me … why he left pleasure out of his list of things that we might want from sexuality.”
The respectful bafflement there is very telling, to my eyes, and it mirrors a similar bafflement I’ve seen in a lot of other places. I think there is an enormous, rarely-bridged communication gap between people of varying libidos, and I think it tends to result in conversations where both parties are talking completely past each other without realizing it.
Let me start by clarifying what I mean by varying libidos. Different people have different levels of horniness, and different ways of expressing that. For some people, sex is a relatively low priority; not getting off in their preferred manner is like giving up smoking or eating pork–maybe less fun, but not that big a deal. For others, sex is a very high priority indeed; not getting off is like giving up breathing or eating food–a seriously unacceptable plan. In between, you’ve got a whole spectrum of complex interactions of desire, which is, from a humanist perspective, totally awesome. Where this scale comes from is interesting, but not relevant to the subject at hand. A weird mix of biology, socialization, formative experience, and a visit from the Libido Fairy, perhaps.
Now, some will point out that I’m leaving out compulsive sex addicts from the high end of this scale, and leaving out asexuals from the low end. (Note: I am not trying to equate asexuals with people suffering from an addiction. It does not work the same, as far as I’m aware.) I’m leaving them off for a reason: those groups of people are aware that they’re outliers. They know that most folks don’t share their particular drives, and they deal with that in their own ways.
What’s key to this understanding is that everyone on that libido spectrum assumes they’re normal.
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What’s key to this understanding is that everyone on that libido spectrum assumes they’re normal. It’s the Typical Mind Fallacy cranked up until the knobs snap off. It’s that blasted quote from Annie Hall about a guy and a girl who are having the same amount of sex and he thinks it’s too little and she thinks it’s too much. (I say “blasted” because that quote reinforces the idea that women aren’t that into sex and men are constantly horny, which is horseshit.) Therefore, if I’m normal, everyone who’s more or less horny than I am must be abnormal. It’s the old joke: A prude is someone who gets laid less than you, and a slut is someone who gets laid more than you.
Because of the weird blind spots in the ways our culture talks about sex, most people never really grasp that there’s a lot of variance in libido out there. That, combined with the Typical Mind Fallacy, means that most of us are working from some very wrong assumptions. I myself, when I hear about someone who’s happily monogamous with a single person, have to restrain myself from going “Yeah, but… really? I mean, you’re not really happy, are you?” I would not be comfortable in such an arrangement, therefore obviously no one else is either, right? And again, that’s from someone who knows that’s wrong.
Now, let’s look at feminism for a second. One of the deepest and longest-running schisms within the feminist movement has been, to oversimplify just a notch, the sex-positive vs. sex-negative fight. In the form of a brief dialogue, it’d look a bit like this:
Neg: …and we will be liberated from the bonds of economic oppression!
Pos: Yeah!
Neg: We will be liberated from having our own identities defined by others!
Pos: Hell yeah!
Neg: We will be liberated from having to pretend we like sex!
Pos: Y… wait, what?
Neg: You know, all that stuff about having to have sex to please men. We can stop doing it.
Pos: I don’t want to stop doing it. I actually kinda want to be free to do more of it. Also with women. And with myself. And combinations of the above.
Neg: It is completely alien to me that you would make sex such a high priority. I have no model to explain this, other than to assume you are brainwashed by the patriarchy.
Pos: …I brainwashed your mom’s patriarchy.
Obviously, from there the conversation does not go anywhere productive.
The flaw here is partly the flaw in so much gender thinking, the conceptualization of Men and Women as two monolithic, homogeneous groups. Thus, if any given woman thinks a thing, such as “I am tired of being pressured for sex when I’m just not that into it” then obviously All Women must think the same thing. Nobody quite sets out to model things that way, but damn, it keeps on happening, doesn’t it? There is something profoundly Manichaean in human cognition, and it tends to lead us into error.
The key issue about this dichotomy is that both sides have a hard time understanding the other’s premises, just as Glickman struggled to understand what the heck Jensen was basing his assumptions on. Thus, we have Pat Califia in 1981, with her seminal article “Feminism and Sadomasochism”, in which she answered the question “Why would any liberated woman want to be tied up and whipped?” with, basically, “Honey, if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know.”
Today we have the exact same conversation going on, with Naomi Wolf (who I do respect) and Gail Dines (who can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut) still saying “Yeah, but Women aren’t really into that kinky stuff, that’s just something Men like.” Thirty years, zero progress in this conversation. Hell, even feminists of my particular stripe have been dismissed by some radical feminist commenters as “sexpozzies”, a derisive slur I had never previously heard, and in which I probably take too much delight.
That said, I don’t want to dismiss the sex-negative crew’s viewpoint out of hand. If sex is just not that high a priority for you, the constant barrage of sexual imagery in culture, the constant messages that sex is what defines you, that’s got to feel incredibly alienating. If you only masturbate occasionally and aren’t really into the freaky stuff, the rise of the Infinite Porn Machine, or the internet as some people call it, has got to look very weird indeed. Why the hell would people put this much time and energy and money into something that’s just not a big deal? The answer, of course, is that it is a big deal to them, but there we walk straight into the same old fallacy: I’m normal, you’re weird, let’s construct models to explain why you’re weird.
What we need to let ourselves do is acknowledge that sex is a big deal for some people, and really not a big deal for others. We need to get better at saying “Eh, that’s not really my thing, but if you like it, rock on with your cock on” and meaning it.
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This lack of comprehension is very much a men’s issue, of course. Just that we tend to gender the same conflict in societally-taught male terms. Speaking personally, I’m a horny bastard, no denying it. I prioritize sex very highly, and I’m very much okay with that. So when I hear male friends talk about how they’re not really looking to date anyone right now, that’s gibberish to me. I cannot understand it. It’s very, very tempting for me to start thinking “Well, he’s a loser. He couldn’t hack it in the dating world, so he’s just punking out and giving up.” Not because I actually believe that, but because growing up male, I was taught to think of things in terms of winners and losers, and that it was bad, reprehensible, unmasculine to be a loser. I have to actively fight that programming, as do a lot of guys, I think.
At the same time, my friend is probably fighting the impulse to look at me as a dumb horny bastard, a two-bit Lothario who spends all his time chasing girls instead of doing something useful or productive. (A vicious lie: I can’t afford two bits.) That, too, is another male stereotype, another model of dysfunction created to explain why someone is different from ourselves. Again, I’m normal, you’re weird, let’s construct models to explain why you’re weird.
And boy howdy, do we internalize these models. Horny guys like me often feel like we’re sex-crazed beasts, inflicting our unwelcome penises on a world that barely tolerates us. Less-horny guys often feel like failures of masculinity, like they’re supposed to have lush Frazetta women clinging to their legs, or at least to want that more than they do. Both these things are bullshit, but we don’t have a good societal vocabulary to talk about them.
What we need to let ourselves do is acknowledge that sex is a big deal for some people, and really not a big deal for others. We need to get better at saying “Eh, that’s not really my thing, but if you like it, rock on with your cock on” and meaning it. Otherwise, we will only continue to be opaque to each other. We will miss the enormous pain in someone who would really like to get some, but isn’t. We will miss the pain in someone who doesn’t want to have sex but feels obligated to. We will miss all the people who can’t reconcile the contradiction between their utterly filthy fantasies and the social role they find themselves in. Understanding can only arise from acknowledging our mutual incomprehension.
This is an edited version of a previously published Noah Brand piece.
Photo—Mats Lindh/Flickr
Noah, you made an absolutely awful stereotype in your piece. Sex is a very high priority for me, I think it is a key component to a healthy fulfilling life AND I think the constant barrage of sexual imagery in our culture is absolutely ridiculous. I masturbate alot AND and I think that the Porn Machine is so messed up and completely alienating people’s highest form of authentic sexuality. I love sex but I hate porn and I think that makes me EXTREMELY pro-sex. As you encourage everyone to be more accepting of each others sexuality your entire piece has… Read more »
Amy – Way to create a false dichotomy here, but I suppose it’s unfortunately part and parcel of some of the revisionist attacks on sex-positivity these days, even from within the movement. It seems that sex-positives are guilty in some vague way of demeaning asexuals and self-described prudes, and that those of us who are openly interested in sex are “pressuring” the less sexually interested by the mere fact that we’re opening our mouth. And people like you are *so* put-upon because you can’t “censor” us. It sounds to me like just a bit of creative table-turning by those who… Read more »
hey man, thanks for putting in a more than distantly accepting word for people (hello) who just don’t want to fuck much, if at all. i’m all for sex positivity, but in most of the articles and general material i read although people who just-aren’t-that-into-it are mentioned in the “and that’s absolutely a-okay too!!!!” bracket, we’re not really sympathised with. it’s like, we’re included for a sake of being inclusive, but people don’t often attempt to talk about what it’s like from our perspective. i guess that comes down to heart of what you’re saying here. although sex-posi is supposed… Read more »
Oh yes, disparate libidos can cause such a gap in understanding. I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot recently because my roommate and I, who are the best of friends, absolutely cannot see eye to eye on matters of sex. For instance, I recently started a friends with benefits relationship with my ex, because despite no longer being in love we’re still all kinds of attracted to each other and extremely sexually compatible, and both of us had gotten seriously sexually frustrated. My roommate has told me at length how she thinks I’m being entirely irresponsible and making a… Read more »
The paragraph about people with low libidos feeling alienated rang so true to me. I’d only recently heard of ‘asexuality’, but found it didn’t fully describe my views on sex. Sex is nice and everything, but it has never been very important to me. Often I found myself wishing it was just a one time deal, like checking a block. Meanwhile, it seems as if the entire world revolves around it at times, and I just don’t get it. I go years between boyfriends, and am always getting criticized by my male and female friends alike. One friend just simply… Read more »
You can rank 16 people and I am boggling my mind about 5 as if it were one of those 3 level chess games.
Other people’s sexuality: even the details are so foreign!
if I lined up all of my past sexual partners, I could pretty quickly rank them by quality of sex.
Wow, from my personal perspective that is actually one of the most bizarre statements about sex!
I sometimes do miss sex with a few of my exes, but not because it was better, just different in some ways.
Since I put it out there, I will say:
The number is 16, I know their first and last names and only one of them was a one-night stand. And I am on good terms with all but the ONS and my rapist.
Edit to add: I understand my preferences aren’t universal and maybe not even “normal” – as Noah spent so much time trying to explain in his post. I suppose that for some people, the best, most soul-affirming sex could be 30 seconds of getting humped by a drunken stranger in the bathroom of a dance club. I just want to say that sex with another person you are attracted to is fulfilling in a way (an important way, dammit) that masturbating is not. Attempting to put that into words here would do both sex, and Ozy’s servers a major disservice.… Read more »
Angry monkey in the back of the brain, that is a good metaphor. 🙂
Well then you might be able to relate more than you think you can. An orgasm brought on by a person whom one cares for, and whom you find to be highly sexually appealing is one of the most spiritual experiences this atheist has ever had the pleasure to enjoy. Masturbating is something I do to keep the angry little monkey in the back of my brain from flinging its poo at me. Fulfilling sex with a person you are in love with and attracted to is something I do that makes me feel closer to God. One is a… Read more »
Unless I misunderstood that post, Schala wrote that as a reply to a post of mine, and if I came across as complaining about not having sex, then I expressed myself very poorly. (I am fine with not having sex. I am annoyed about sometimes thinking about it involuntarily, since there are things I would rather be thinking of. When I was in a relationship and did have sex, this did not change, so it seems to me that at least for me it is not comparable to a thirst that needs quenching, just some kind of hormonal hiccup of… Read more »
I never orgasmed EE. Ever. As far as I know, I just can’t.
So I never masturbated to orgasm either. And I don’t masturbate period. I did “to see what it felt like”, figured it was too overwhelming sensation-wise, and just didn’t do it again. I felt I was not missing a thing not having sex and not masturbating.
I felt I was missing on stuff not being in a relationship, but that’s different. I need touch, I need comforting. I don’t need sex. So my libido is pretty much entirely reactive.
@Schala:
Telling people who complain about not having sex in a long time ‘you can always masturbate’ is like telling a person dying of thirst to swallow their own spit.
@AB: Thanks for pointing me in the right direction about what felt “off” about this article and the discussion that followed. The model of sexuality presented here, one focused on intensity and frequency, doesn’t really fit the many nuances involved in any individual’s sexual desires and choices. It doesn’t quite acknowledge that someone may not be able to get enough of one sort of sexual relationship, could take or leave another sort of sexual relationship, and can be flat-out disgusted by yet another sort of sexual relationship. I’m not talking about specific sexual acts, but ways that people relate sexually… Read more »
Coming in late here, but thank you for this article Noah. It helped me realise one of the things that most alienates me from sex-positive feminists, despite generally agreeing with them more. I think it’s related to how LGBT activists often present their sexuality or gender identities as inborn. It’s a useful attitude, because it counters the idea that they can be held responsible for their orientation as a choice, or that marginalising them will make them go away. And as a bonus, it’s definitely not without scientific merit. I see a lot of the same attitude in sex-positives in… Read more »
What about the notion that “A woman with low to non-existent libidos just hasn’t met the right man yet”? It’s a question I’ve struggled alot with, since several of my partners have had low libidos. None of them have expressed any dislike in it, or ever said that I did a bad job on my part of it. Yet none of them rarely, if ever, expressed an interest of their own in it. And I think it plays straight into the myth about Real Men, and The Myth About Men Not Being Hot (as well as the “Well, he’s a… Read more »
f. writes:
“Those things are worth interrogating from a personal perspective, but I strongly feel that nobody else has the right to interrogate them for me, unless I specifically ask them to do that.”
Exactly. The whole discourse of “examine your desires until you come to our conclusions” just strikes me as bad faith on the very face of it. And the assumption that because we don’t come to the same conclusion that “sex controlling” people come to somehow means we haven’t actually thought these questions through is actually quite presumptuous.
On further investigation, I think that the “sex negative” writing Glitterary linked to might violate one of the most basic tennets of more “mainstream” feminism. Most feminism takes what I like to call the “postmodern problem” to heart. Put in other words, it is axiomatic that a person cannot know another’s ideas, feelings, etc. as thoroughly as the other person knows them, much less better. The way I was taught it, this is why standard feminist discourse places so much value on the stories of others as ways to express ideas and concepts. Feminist tools and models were functions of… Read more »
@ glitterary, Iamcuriousblue, I just wanted to say I enjoyed both of your posts & the things you brought up. In one way, yeah I like the critical perspective that sex-negative thinkers tend to bring to sexualization, pressure to be sexy, sexiness as capitalist token, etc. But in another way, to bring all that to bear on individuals is super-ridiculous. I too have some sexual and even clothing tastes that long made me wonder AM I REALLY CHOOSING THIS FOR SERIOUS? and in fact in a heteronormative society, I’ve often questioned whether I’m actually even straight or not. Those things… Read more »
sometimes I start to think about sex as well, but it is not a “powerful drive”. Obviously it is a hormonal reaction triggering those thoughts, but I do not feel compelled to have sex, neither do I feel stressed or unfulfilled over not having sex. I have not had sex for years, and this does not bother me. (it *does* sometimes bother me that I feel lonely, but that is not usually due to sexual concerns). When my brain starts thinking about sex, I just get a bit annoyed with it. In other words, you can’t help thinking about sex.… Read more »
“I think there is an important debate to be had on where we draw the line–at what point “sex-negativity” should step back from protecting us from the pressures of kyriarchal expectation, and “sex-positivity” should step in to help us define our individual sex lives–but both arguments can be taken to extremes which are unhelpful and damaging.” I guess I take a stronger, more classically liberal view of sex-positivity, because I don’t see “sex-negativity” as having any worthwhile role in “protecting” us from anything. The claim that sex-positivity is only about honoring “authentic” sex expression is a major difference I have… Read more »
Hugh Ristik, I love what you’ve said here: Some “sex-negative” feminists frame the issue as “women’s political interests vs. individual women’s pleasure.” If your individual pleasures are “constructed” by society and counter to women’s “class interests,” then you must abandon or restrict them in favor of a more politically-correct preference. This framing is ridiculous, because it assumes that the sexual pleasure of individual women in the present is a not an important political goal, but rather a frivolous pastime that should be abandoned in favor of what is really politically important. The sort of person who might feel this way… Read more »
One side-effect of sex-pos people seem to be overlooking: Sex pos doesn’t just mean your freedom to do whatever you like with whoever you like*. It also means hearing things you may not want to hear from other people. Including but not limited to receiving advances from people you may not be interested in**. There are times when an outsider’s sexuality can feel like an imposition, and it’s interesting to see people’s stance on sex politics when that happens. *Obligatory disclaimer about consent, and abuses of trust/power muddying things to hell and back. **Harassment is harassment. Inappropriate contact certainly applies,… Read more »
Sorry to come late to the discussion, I’m afraid I skimmed through some of the comments (most of them are fascinating and I should probably read in more detail later). This post reminded me of some conversations I had with a friend of mine with whom I have many, many differences. In one, she was telling me about a speaker who had come to her college (no idea who) who had spoken about how pornography is anti-feminist, pornography encourages rape, pornography IS rape, pornography must be stopped at all cost. And my friend had swallowed this philosophy hook line and… Read more »
Thanks for the name, using it I was able to find some stuff (not much, searching “Christopher Kendall” gets a lot of unrelated results and “Christopher Kendall porn” turns up more porn than Christopher Kendall). It was bizarre. No attention paid to the issue of abuse of performers, it was all about how “gay for pay” was an assault against homosexuality and how gay male porn is white supremacist and male supremacist. There are certainly legitimate criticisms of gay male porn as racist, but these weren’t explored. It was just “gay porn is white supremacist, next topic please.” Ugh.