lately, i've been delving into things that were once outside my comfort zone... largely that seed was planted a while back, and this blog was it's first budding blossom. sexuality is a very, very funny thing... in my past 15 years of any sort of sexuality i've seen various stages of revolution. in the 90s lesbians started coming out more in the open... now we barely bat an eye seeing two women together. now we have a bigger movement where gay men are out in the open and are no longer secondary characters on shows, but are the stars... and they aren't even always sitcoms! there are more and more people embracing the idea of love being something more then a matter simply of mechanics but of a metaphysical/spiritual journey. to me - it's refreshing and sometimes scary... because it should force a person to step back and question what they "know" when they see change happening. there is a quote that i have always liked "tradition hinders progress" - which is tough for me, because i appreciate tradition: family, national, societal, etc. progress is revolution!
with these revolutions we've seen militant groups rise up - both for and against these movements. ...that's expected and in ways, needed... but something truly enlightening has come from these, and it inspires me. feminists who were introduced to me in the late 80s / early 90s were in the vain of riot grrls. punk inspired, penis hating, pro-femme girls who typically lived and died by what kathleen hanna had to say. bikini kill, babes in toyland, huggybear, L7, bratmobile, sleater-kinney... the list goes on and on. before the late 80s when i was coming into my own as a young adult was really before my time, but we've all seen images of the bra burning and picket signs at protests with large women symbols on them... usually not being too supportive of men. ...however, this past week, i found something that floored me in ways:
"Feminists talk a lot about the privileging of penile-vaginal intercourse. We talk a lot about how the word foreplay is misleading at best and sexist at worst. We talk a lot about how most women can’t come from penetration alone, and how treating non-intercourse forms of sex as simply a preamble — not even sex at all, really — trivializes female pleasure.
What we don’t talk about as much is how this assumption trivializes male pleasure. We don’t talk about the pressure it puts on men to “perform” — pressure that, ironically, can make said “performance” more problematic. And we don’t talk as much about the ridiculous limitations it puts on male sexuality. We don’t talk as much about how enjoying full-body sensuality, nipples and ears and toes and hair and the huge range of sexual pleasures available to all human beings, is typically seen as girly. We don’t talk as much about how men who like receiving anal sex are widely assumed to be gay… even if the people they like receiving anal sex from are consistently women. And we don’t talk as much about how this assumption reduces men’s pleasure, their possibilities, their entire sexual beings, to a few inches of erectile tissue between their legs."
What we don’t talk about as much is how this assumption trivializes male pleasure. We don’t talk about the pressure it puts on men to “perform” — pressure that, ironically, can make said “performance” more problematic. And we don’t talk as much about the ridiculous limitations it puts on male sexuality. We don’t talk as much about how enjoying full-body sensuality, nipples and ears and toes and hair and the huge range of sexual pleasures available to all human beings, is typically seen as girly. We don’t talk as much about how men who like receiving anal sex are widely assumed to be gay… even if the people they like receiving anal sex from are consistently women. And we don’t talk as much about how this assumption reduces men’s pleasure, their possibilities, their entire sexual beings, to a few inches of erectile tissue between their legs."
i have been raised to believe sex was intercourse. everything else, simply was foreplay... just like this piece explains... this mindset is of fractured logic and what the piece says makes sense. brilliant! ...and even more impressive to me is that this was written from the perspective of what seems to be a feminist... an open minded, liberal feminist - that truthfully up until i read this, was something i'd file away with the likes of santa, the loch ness monster, and republican/conservative punk* (another thing that exists: see michale graves* of the misfits!) all the feminists i knew were in ways as bad as ultra conservatives "porn is bad, this gender is dominant, we will fight to prove that you and your beliefs are wrong". i fully understand and embrace the idea that my beliefs were (and i'm sure there are some that still are) ignorant, but i'm delighted to find something that made me step back and go "hmmm... you make a terrific point" and allowed me to climb a rung on the ladder of growth...
this article made me stop and think about how i've been taught to look at the sexes and how i perceive sexuality. it's definitely not black and white (this is probably why the gay community flies the rainbow flag?). maybe there are a lot of people who understood this, but it just "clicked" for me... (as i ascend another rung). between this blurbage i quote above, and the one from last week - they have made the following blurb about women and porn resonate with much more appreciation...
"We like watching naked men, we enjoy watching pornography and we love reading steamy fiction that makes our ears glow red. We want wild, lustful sex, and would skip the romantic candle light dinner without thinking twice if we know that mindblowing, orgasmic craziness is what awaits us afterwards… We want erotic fiction that is hot, direct and stimulates our lustful fantasies. We want images of natural, authentic looking men, men who make us curious, men we want to touch, men we can meet in real life…"
i have always felt guilty when looking at porn or reading erotica... mainly after its consumption, as the action of looking at naked (and sometimes, perverse) beauty, provides an excellent distraction from what may ail you in life and whisks you away to some other place where you are with someone other then yourself and your troubles. ...but i feel a revolution within myself too... one of pansexual proportions. one that doesn't look at a gender and say "love this person because your pieces fit, love them for who they are, not what they are" (or what they aren't in the case of my riotgrrl exposure).
it just goes to show... that after years of thinking i know something, that i can relearn... and that truly there can be wisdom from the mouth of babes (in toyland). :)
