“Who the fuck would want to learn how to give a blowjob in five minutes?” in the context of your discussing a book about marriage…

That is identical to assholes that say, “Oh, gays have anal sex! Oooh!”

Or people that would say, “Go down you? That’s disgusting!”

Or “Two guys kissing? Yuck!”

Or “God, two girls kissing makes me so hot!, I love Lesbians!”

No difference between you and Dobson. Very little difference between you, a so called sex-positive feminist, and Twisty a radical feminist. Which is why you have plagiarized her schtick for youself at Unsprung. I am appalled that Neal Pollack would have a bigot on board as well as a bigotted plagiarist.

How can anyone that calls herself sex-positive be against orgasms between consenting adults?

When you say “who the fuck would want to” (learn that technique)

STAY THE FUCK OFF OF MY BODY AND OUT OF MY BEDROOM.

Who the fuck are you to judge what anyone’s consensual sexual practices are. In the context of a consenting adult relationship, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

You should be promoting more orgasms in this world, not less, and not condemning others for having them or giving them.

Stop with your sexist, judgmental, privileged bullshit.

What is wrong with a little bit more knowledge and another technique? What is wrong with consenting adults pleasing each other?

Who the fuck would want to learn that? Who the fuck wouldn’t want to?

And don’t even try to deny your real upset is that this takes place within the context of marriage. Because if this were two woman having a contest with each other, or two gay men, you would be telling us how cool it all is.

You are basically an authoritarian prude at heart. There is literally no difference between you and James Dobson except who you call your home team. Get over yourself.

And do explain to us how a rightwing fucktard bigoted troll like Ilyka Damen came to think that Pandagon was the place for her? Because my understanding of it was that one fucktard saw another fucktard and said, they use my techniques, we must be friends. And after you’ve done that, you can explain to us Chris, who is another of the same ilk.

also, I think it’s more that [Ilyka] used to be liberal and was briefly one of the “after 9/11 everything changed” people than she’s a totally recent convert.

No, that’s not the case at all. Ilyka voted for Perot in ’92, Dole in ’96, and Bush in 2000/2004. I don’t know if she voted in ’88 — she was just barely old enough then — but if she did, she voted for Poppy Bush. She’s never voted for a Democratic President.

She was kind of a Randroid in the late 1990s. 9/11 had fucking nothing to do with it. But fucking nothing.

Rare and appreciated.

Most of you are exceptionally smart. LOL.

The politics of tribalism are just recently being explored. And to someone like me, a middling smart person who cares about their country, it is an enlightening experience indeed. In the end, Gleen G.’s evisceration of R. Cohen’s OOIDP (Elite Fucktard Edition) was about the same thing.

And what a dank, dark, moist, tight..wait.

What a weird place tribalism is.

Trust me: I like Chris a lot, but he’s the only blogger that ever banned me from a site. And I deserved it; the misogynist ad hominem attacks became so relentless I went into full “fuck you” mode. At Pandagon, one of the first sites I linked on my own never-read blog because I dug Amanda’s writing and perspective so much, while still e-mailing her from time to time and telling her she was full of shit. E.g., “Hey, Amanda, so you don’t like giving head! That’s fine! But there are plenty of strong smart ‘feministy’ women out there who dig the power and the pleasure one gets from giving another pleasure! Let it go!”

And I still love her writing, her perspective, and her courage. She is to me to this day a fabulous woman to whom my respect is virtually (pun intended) limitless.

Anyway. OIIDP is a problem on both left and right, middle and disenfranchised. Tribalism runs very, very deep.

Beautifully said. Thanks again.

Of course, this is exactly what Chris et. al., demand of any male commenting at Pandagon before that male raises any objection to anything that Chris, et. al., post at Pandagon. If you don’t innoculate you are a rapist wife beating pedophile stalker misogynist. And even if you do innoculate, if you comment too many times in defense of your point, you are still a rapist wife beating pedophile stalker misogynist.

Blogs and OOIDP is just Calvin Ball. It’s fun to watch, but you won’t be able to get the interest of many adults that way. And so ultimately it’s self-defeating for liberal progressives to play OOIDP.

On the other hand, if what you are interested in is not progress but self-proclaimed victimization and a circle of eternal fights with the rest of the world then OOIDP is the way to go.

My problems with Queer Theory are more epistemological than practical, I suppose – but I also don’t think you’ll ever get to a good real-world outcome if you start with shitty theoretical assumptions about the way something works. And I *do* see QT as part of a larger, overarching series of epistemological mistakes that people are making nowadays – and I believe these mistakes make them less effective in the real world at figuring out what are the real world problems we face, how do we derive solutions to them, and how do we implement those solutions. It’s interesting to me how the New Left synthesis started rising to prominence right around the time “the Left” in this country started losing their ability to effect any real, substantive changes at all…naturally, I see the two phenomena as related.

It’s a complicated thing to explain, and I probably don’t do it really well, because I find myself assuming that other people see the same sorts of connections I do between things like Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and, say, the creationist backlash against evolution in public schools. I’m still trying to work out the best way to make those connections more clear. One of the things that makes it difficult for me to do is the difficulty there seems to be in having this conversation without it deteriorating into accusations of “Who’s a Worse Traitor to the Cause?”, and I get tired of that real fast. After watching what got done to Alan Sokal and Stephen Jay Gould, I’m just not enough of a martyr to put myself out there like that.

This, I suppose, is how what is nominally “The Left” eats its own.

Look, sexuality’s complicated. It’s not as clean as straight OR gay OR bi for everyone. It’s not even a direct continuum, I don’t think, it’s…complicated. And yeah, maybe for the purposes of getting people to understand the very basic, “no, it is NOT just a whim i adopted for the purposes of shocking you, -I really do feel this way and yes it bloody well matters-, then to a point, I think so be it;

but in another way, I think, “I can’t help it” is a sucky rationale for civil rights. Hey, there’s freedom of religion too; people aren’t BORN believing xyz; that doesn’t mean it isn’t deeply felt or an essential part of their being. It also doesn’t mean it won’t change over their lifetime; or that it will. Or, in either case, that it’s -anyone else’s business but their own.- THAT is the point. Life liberty pursuit o’ happiness, yeah yeah? If people are getting in the way of that, it isn’t because they’ve been influenced by postmodernism; it’s because they’re bigots. And because they really -don’t- understand, I submit, those “self-evident” truths.

And secondly – did you just make a crack about age, Mister Punko? Because I’d be willing to be my birthday candles would completely pwn yours. ;-)

Although, when you talk about influencing how people act vs. how they think, you start to sound like a materialist, which warms the cockles of my little Marxist heart!

(Just a side story……I once knew a guy who was the local Communist party rep – back in the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union – that I think was probably a government operative. If he weren’t one, he should have been. He was so completely doctrinaire and humorless that he once told me his favorite thing about sex was that he felt really excited and energized afterward, so he could devote more energy to writing and distributing pamphlets. True story! Howevermuch of a Marxist I might be, I am NOT dogmatic or doctrinaire about it, and am very open to criticisms of Marx and socialism – I make a fair number myself. Just wanted to add that because I know there is a perception of socialists as Borg – and I really don’t think I am that.)

I don’t believe that gay people who feel that their identities are socially constructed–or who make a conscious choice to be gay–should feel compelled to keep quiet about that for fear the religious right will cram it into a pathological framework.

I don’t believe it’s possible to make a “conscious choice to be gay”, any more than it’s possible to make a “conscious choice to be straight” – and if you read through the accounts of the ex-ex-gay people, you’ll see what I mean. Plenty of gay people have tried – tried very, very hard – to choose to be straight, with the strongest motivation and the most complete support in the world. It can’t be done.

I think it’s entirely possible that people who are bisexual can choose to only express one side of their sexual identity, and I think there are a lot more bi people around than most people realize – but that doesn’t make them straight or gay: it makes them bisexual people who have chosen to only express part of their sexual identity. Which is fine, btw – I don’t really care, and I have no interest in being the sex police, telling other people how to live their sex lives.

My hackles instantly go up when non-biolgists start talking biology – which is what the whole “nature/nurture” stuff is. No one’s even been able to ever explain to me in a way I understand what that distinction is even supposed to mean – it embodies this assumption that the way we parent (the “nurture” aspect) is somehow totally free of biological predispositions, which is patently silly to anyone who’s ever watched, say, mother alligators with their babies on Wild Kingdom or something. (First off, I think I just set some kind of record for the number of commas in a single sentence (sorry about that), and secondly – where’s Marlon Perkins when you need him?)

Frankly, I think most of the stuff written on the topic at this point in time is just decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio, and I wish people would honestly just stop and chill on it for a while. Make the legal arguments, the Fourteenth Amdendment arguments, prosecute vigorously for a while, let the blood run in the streets if it has to (not that I like the idea, but the history of America generally implies that blood does have to run in the streets for minorities to get something approximating equal protection under the law), and give the biologists a couple more generations to figure out in better detail what makes the human brain tick. Until then, chances are that we are ALL talking out our asses – me included.

And any time I see the phrase “socially constructed” used seriously, I have to fight off the temptation to track down Ian Hacking and Paul Boghossian and turn the conversation into a drinking game. I’m just not sure, unlike Hacking, that it’s possible to peel off all the excresence attached to the term and find anything useful at its heart anymore.

Yes, you are. It’s not a purity test, and it’s not an all-or-nothing demand for someone’s personal conduct. I said that you are either a lightweight, or a take-no-prisoners activist, not both. I didn’t say that those were the only two options. I said they were mutually exclusive personae. They are.

Jillian, I don’t agree with these objections, and I don’t believe that gay people who feel that their identities are socially constructed–or who make a conscious choice to be gay–should feel compelled to keep quiet about that for fear the religious right will cram it into a pathological framework. Social construction might well be an incorrect framework, but it shouldn’t face any sort of political litmus test–and people like Riki Wilchins shouldn’t be called quislings. I don’t think that the religious right’s conception of the gay is dangerous because it sees homosexuality as socially constructed. These days, lots of people are edging towads a combination of social and innate factors; it’s the explanation that makes the most sense in my life. I also don’t think that socially constructed is the same as socially created. I should get around to writing the post…eh, within a couple days, so I’ll just take it off this gargantuan thread and onto my blog. (I mean, not to discontinue the conversation here; just that I’m going to write in more detail over there.)

And okay then, Pinko, but then why is it such a problem to say that someone’s not particularly interesting or pleasant to be around, but rather overrated and kind of a jerk?

The other thing that blows my mind is that even though there are a lot of issues I’d like some consensus on, somethings will not get figured out anytime soon, so why act like religion, needing everyone to believe the same stuff? You work on how people act first and then try to modify how they think, but you can’t demand people think differently.
I need to get off my soapbox. There’s lolcat bibel to has tranlate for cheesburger.

Identity politics personalizes everything, to the degree where an attack on an *idea* becomes an attack on a *person*. It’s like religion that way.

I have a problem with some peoples’ *ideas* about feminism. Doesn’t mean I have a problem with those people, or with feminism. But when people confuse their ideas with their identities, and use them interchangeably, it becomes hard to express disagreement as anything other than a personal attack – and then the other party, feeling attacked, responds in kind.

So that which you have come to embrace as important to you, nobody else can ever understand the sense of importance, the incredible richness of understanding that you have, and they will ALWAYS get it wrong.

I hope I said that kind of right. It’s really just human nature. And now that we all, for the most part, live outside the tribe, no one can understand what it is in our experience that drives us to a position of passion. So we rip them as poseurs, or half-assed activists, rich dabblers or liberal dudes. But if we can’t find a way to relate to the experience of others, there will never be an end to the conflict. And that’s sad…

mikey

That’s a sucky reason. All or nothing activism? This is the purity test right here. I don’t have anything to say about Twisty in particular, but I hope there are better reasons for supporting her or denigrating her than this. Maybe I’m misreading, but jeez.

Just to clarify….it has nothing at all to do with not liking nonstraight people. I’m bisexual, the person I’m closest to in the whole world is a gay man, I think trans people should be entitled to a full suite of legal protections and rights (as well as having their basic existence recognized, which too often it isn’t), and anyone who doesn’t think nonstraights are utterly equivalent to straight people should kindly piss off and die, please.

But the idea that sexual orientation is socially constructed is not just wrong; it’s harmful. It’s exactly what the ex-gay contingent says: “Society makes them that way”. It also means that nonstraights can be changed, simply by changing society.

I also see Queer Theory – well, to be specific, my reading of Foucault here – as just as essentialist as the “essentialists” his fans deride.

I think Queer Theory hurts the ability of gays to get legal recognition of their rights, and therefore it’s not something I can just quietly disagree with – I have to voice my opposition to it, just as I voice my opposition to Focus on the Family and that crew. I am perfectly willing, as always, to be shown I am wrong on this (or any) topic – but it’s not a topic I’m ignorant on, and nothing I’ve seen so far has changed my mind.

I really don’t like being in the position of feeling like I’m *always* standing outside the groups of people whom I should be working with, pointing my finger at them and saying “you’re wrong”. But being dishonest to myself helps no one. I really want to be an ally, but I won’t ally myself with tactics that I think are ultimately detrimental.

To be fair to the sushi people–which tack I don’t care much about one way or the other–those people weren’t ragging on her for eating artisan hamachi. They were using that to get at her “examine everything” ethos; if there are political problems with purchasing makeup, there are political problems with eating in restaurants.

Jillian/CASL–were you the one who said that you have issues with Queer Theory? I’d rather not scroll up. I’m working on a post on it, because I think that you (or whoever) misunderstood a couple things, and I wanted to try to clarify.

No doubt. One of the wonderful tenets of life is that no matter how bad somebody has it, that won’t stop them from turning right around and shitting on someone else with glee. Again, this is the problem with assuming that someone has the moral highground based on their identity.

I don’t. I do think, however, that there’s a high correlation between firsthand experience and insight–and, conversely, between never having experienced something and not knowing very much about it. I think that this tendency is exacerbated when the experience in question isn’t very common or granted very much respect.