sexuality

Why do some people refer to sex as dirty?

~ Roger JG Albert

By sex in the title here, I mean sexual intercourse and sexually related activities. I never could understand the reference. It seemed (and still seems) ridiculous to me. I understand it now, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept because it’s a metaphor that is deeply demeaning to women of course, but frankly, to all of us. The reference could make sense if it aimed at describing sex in a mud bath, but that’s never the intention, of course.

You all know this. It’s no secret. Men are never referred to as ‘dirty sluts.’ It just doesn’t happen. However, women are  routinely called dirty sluts, particularly by the porn industry, but also by some segments of the population with very categorical views of when, where, and with whom it’s okay to express one’s sexuality.

More basically, I heard with my very own ears parents chastising their children for having their hands ‘down there.’ “That’s dirty, don’t do that!” I’m hoping that it doesn’t happen with younger parents these days but I somehow doubt it. There are people on this planet who are pathetically if not pathologically ignorant, so nothing should surprise us. Moreover, cultural references are pretty pervasive and consistent in linking our ‘private parts’ with dirt. The word pudenda, the plural of pudendum, refers to “a person’s external genitals, especially a woman’s,” that according to the very reliable Google dictionary. Pudendum literally means: “thing to be ashamed of,” according to the same reliable dictionary. So, not only are genitalia dirty, they’re also something to be ashamed of. Now, even as a long time social researcher and somewhat cynical sociologist, I still find this reference to genitalia and sex, especially with reference to women as entirely perverse.

On another tangent, but still on the language train, if I want to refer to someone as not being entirely nice, I may call that person an ‘asshole.’ There we go again. It’s no surprise too that our swear words are pretty much entirely focussed on our genitalia and on sex. In French, swearing also involves the genitalia and such, but in Québec, you’re also liable to hear swear words referencing the Catholic Church and items used during the mass.

Since who knows for how long we’ve been alienated from ourselves. We refer to ‘my’ body. What is the ‘my’ that owns a body? We should’t be surprised, though, because that’s language and our language reflects our morality and our preoccupations and we are silently, unconsciously, subconsciously, and daily reminded of death. Language is entirely metaphorical so we express our fear of death not in direct terms, but obliquely, using metaphor. [By the way, if you want a good read: Talking Power: The Politics of Language, by Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Basic Books, 1990). It’s all about metaphor and politics. She’s got a great chapter in there on women and language.]

Alright, I’ll grant you that excrement is not far from being dirt and if mommy doesn’t want you playing ‘down there’ it could be partly because she doesn’t want you spreading shit all over the place. But that’s not the whole story, nowhere near. Excrement has much more meaning for us than that. Norman O. Brown notes in Life Against Death (p.295):

Excrement is the dead life of the body, and as long as humanity prefers a dead life to living, so long is humanity committed to treating as excrement not only its own body but the surrounding world of objects, reducing all to dead matter and inorganic magnitudes. Our much prized “objectivity” toward our own bodies, other persons, and the universe, all our calculating “rationality,” is, from the psychoanalytical point of view, an ambivalent mixture of love and hate, an attitude appropriate only toward excrement, and appropriate to excrement only in an animal that has lost his own body and life.

What does Brown mean when he writes that we are “an animal that has lost his own body and life.” ‘His’ in this sentence refers to humankind, all of us. In some ways I find it strange that Brown uses ‘man’ to include women and ‘his’ whenever a general possessive pronoun is on his mind. However, Brown is right. Taking a shit is a daily, unconscious, subconscious, reminder of our death and that’s distinctly unpleasant. If we thought about it consciously, we would be traumatized. So we use all kinds of metaphors to try to forget all about death or we joke about it. Few are the people who have come to grips with death and live a full life in their bodies, as their bodies, taking pleasure in them and accepting their aging and their annoying aches and pains. These are people who don’t yearn for a life beyond this life, because for them, that just doesn’t exist.

Just one more thing: What the fuck does ‘taking a shit’ mean? Of course we know what it means, but what can we make of it literally? I really don’t know. However, I’d rather leave a shit than take one, thanks. Enough silliness for one day. More later.

 

 

Is Equality Between the Sexes Possible?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Is it possible to have equality between the sexes?

Given the history of sexual relations on this planet, a logical answer would seem to be a resounding NO. But I don’t think that’s so.

Yes, absolutely, I do think that equality is possible. However, it can only be possible when humankind, especially the male fraction of the species, agrees to give up its apotheotic quest for the god-like status of an immortal being. There are hints that there is movement in this direction (more on this later), but we have a long way to go before the bulk of humankind can reconcile itself to the idea that our bodies are all we are and souls do not exist except in our collective conscience.

I sincerely have sympathy for people who want to live forever. Our quest for immortality is the basis for a lot of our sociality. We share a belief in eternal life with others like us. We build institutions and organizations to perpetuate and nurture this belief. It’s an appealing prospect until one begins to read the fine print or we begin to kill each other to defend ‘our’ god against the gods of ‘others’ who dare to try to usurp our vision of the way to eternal life. The way gods work, there can really be only one that is the true god. All others must be pretenders. (This isn’t strictly true. Even one god, the one proclaimed by Moses and Abraham, can be the source of real division, death and mayhem). That said, let’s get to the nitty gritty.

It’s evident that males and females of many species of animal are dimorphic, meaning that the sexes vary in body size, shape and weight, hairiness, and in other easily ascertainable ways. Us humans are significantly dimorphic with males being on average stronger, bigger, etc.[1] So, men and women are not equal in many respects. This has lead a whole lot of conservative thinkers and philosophers going back as far into history as the eye can see to make the logical leap to conclude that these physical inequalities are the natural basis for the social, economic, and political inequality of the sexes. This is patently absurd but it doesn’t stop those who claim a logical basis for their arguments in natural human variation from making their claims on clearly ideological grounds.

It’s certainly true that there is huge variability in male human size, strength and shape. Some theorists might dare to suggest that the Nilotic peoples, especially the Dinka and Nuer, being very tall and thin on average, must be superior to the BaMbuti people of the Ituri Forest in central Africa, who are what we used to call pygmies, and who are very short and compact. The same is true for intra-female variability. The variability of human form is quite evident still, of course, but there is evidence that with international travel and population mixing that the variability that we have seen historically is very slowly attenuating.

Of course, we’ve seen evidence in history that skin colour, eye shape, etc have been significant bases for the imposition of social inequality. We ‘other’ people for all kinds of convenient reasons especially social and economic power. We deny people equality for whatever reason we can dream up or make up as long as it’s in our interests. So, what about the inequality that exists between men and women? Well, I think I’ve repeated it often enough, but it may be worth repeating again. Men have longed for immortality for as far back as we can ascertain. Their literate representatives who have gotten into the history books and have written a huge range of proclamations on the topic going back further than ancient Babylon have been pretty well in agreement that women are a huge stumbling block to achieving the objective of immortality. Women just can’t help but get most of us poor men all lathered up sexually and by that process, take our limited attention away from our focus on our spiritual salvation and eternal life.

It’s pretty common to read in historical documents, including the Bible, of course, that any form of pleasure of the flesh is sinful and leads to eternal damnation. In her book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and The Catholic Church[2] Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s focus is on Church writers, theologians, popes and the like. She also, however, goes beyond her analysis of women and the Catholic Church, to consider relations between men and women taken more broadly. She notes that although it seems that proscriptions and interdictions regarding sex are pretty straightforward in historical texts, we cannot assume that everyone was on board with those specialists, philosophers, theologians, etc., who were often celibates and who lorded it over the masses. It seems the masses weren’t always in agreement with the high and mighty and often ignored interdictions even to the point of suffering persecution and social exile.

Of course, it’s really quite ridiculous to expect people to not enjoy sex. Plainly, there are many circumstances where sex is not at all pleasurable, especially for women and even ejaculation can be painful at times for a small minority of men. Still, essentially, sex and pleasure go hand in hand. I (and I daresay most men) would find it very difficult not to feel some pleasure upon ejaculation. Ironically, according to many writers historically men are not supposed to even experience ejaculation (during masturbation or coitus) unless it’s sanctioned by the authorities and only under very socially proscribed situations. In fact, Ranke-Heinemann notes that church authorities even discouraged sex between spouses, some going so far as to dictate time of day, day of the week, months of the year. Needless to say, the Church fathers were only concerned with male sexual pleasure and regulating it, not female pleasure, which they often assumed never existed.

Let’s not fool ourselves either to think that regulation of sexuality is a thing of the past. Female (and male) genital mutilation is still commonly practiced as well as segregation of the sexes. It’s also still common for states to try to regulate what you can do in the privacy of your bedroom.

One last thing before I move on. It’s clear that not all men are misogynists and women victims. Humans will always find ways of sharing intimacy and revelling in sensual, sexual pleasure no matter what the ayatollah, the pope, imam, rabbi, or whoever goes on about how bad it is and how it detracts from our main goal of immortal life in the presence of our preferred deity. It’s also true that women can have just as much of a stake in immortality as men do. The only difference between men and women in this regard is that men have made up all the rules and women must obey or live eternally in hell.

It’s also clear to me that men and women can equally be jerks, self-serving, mean, nasty, and violent. They may choose different paths to meanness, nastiness and jerkiness on occasion, but elimination of the search for immortality will not necessarily do away with the human condition although I really am optimistic that there will come a time when there will be less basis for stupid, vapid, ignorant human behaviour. The elimination of competition for favour in the eyes of God or just for individual specialness, even on the football field, will take us a long way to equality of the sexes. Just don’t expect dramatic results too soon.

It’s also true, I’m pleased to say, that we can love profoundly and unconditionally. Problem is that we do that in spite of all the social forces that work to divide us when they should be working to bring us together romantically, whether it’s woman with man, woman with woman, man with man or a combination of the above. I’m not saying we should abandon all restraint and engage in all out debauchery, but we should all be engaged in figuring out as we go along what we want rather than have the high and mighty do that for us in the name of a false hope of immortality.

Next: how little innocuous things like words, sayings, and practices can reinforce and even exacerbate sexual inequality.

 

 

[1] See de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for a detailed exploration of this topic. Germaine Greer takes a slightly different look at sexual dimorphism in humans in her book, The Female Eunuch.

[2] New York, Doubleday, 1988.

This is not about sex.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

I think that the reality is that most of the judgments we make of other people and how we may ‘gaze’ at them  are not specifically about sex or their fitness for procreative success. They may be unconscious moral judgments about their fitness to be part of the in-group. 

 

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/schedule-for-monday-march-14-2016-1.3490076/photographer-captures-the-dirty-looks-strangers-give-her-1.3490082

So, I listened to the CBC’s Q this morning while waiting in the car for Carolyn to come out of appointment with her optometrist. The interviewee Haley Morris-Cafiero is a fine arts professor at an American University and she’s just recently published a book called Watchers. Obviously, listening to the radio, I couldn’t see what she looked like, but the host, Piya Chattopadhyay’s questioning made it obvious she was trying to get Morris-Cafiero to admit that she was fat and that’s the reason people were glaring at her askance.

The book and the interview are revealing for a number of reasons. I’ll deal with a couple here. For one, people judge each other constantly. It’s a part of being a human being. If a person stands out in any particular way, is a statistical outlier by being super tall, super small, super thin or super fat, tattooed all over the place, a different colour or ethnic group than everybody else in a group, then there will be stares or at least oblique glances or gazes. This we cannot avoid. Morris-Cafiero’s documenting of the oblique glances at her because she’s fat, is what’s interesting here. She is unapologetic for being fat and why should she apologize? Well, some of us see obesity as a moral failure for which we need to apologize. Others see it as just a problem of overeating: we should just stop eating so much. We make fun of fat people. The internet is full of blogs and commentary objecting to obesity. Morris-Cafiero actually reports that there are blogs set up just to make fun of her size. She’s now chasing them down to mock how they look if she can find photos of the bloggers and commentators. Morris-Cafiero claims to be perfectly happy with herself and the way she looks. I have no reason to doubt her.

Her book is not about the issue some women have of being stared at because they are ‘attractive’ to someone or other. They may not be beautiful in any normative sense, but they can and do attract the carnal attention of some men or women. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Of course the fashion industry has no qualms about deciding for all of us who is attractive and who isn’t.

On another CBC item this morning I heard a comment about women’s bodies being a battle ground. Men stare. Men comment. Men catcall. Men, men, men. Of course we do. Some of us are stupid and have no moral or social brakes, so we catcall and make rude remarks. Some of us admire from a distance and would be mortified if a women called us out for staring at her. Some of us get caught on the odd occasion stretching out a glance at a particularly attractive woman and we’re soon reminded of our misdemeanour. Some of us are not attracted to women at all so we only admire feminine beauty from an aesthetic place. But most of us look and assess. We check out people. We watch. We undress people we find attractive with our eyes only. Sex is sex is sex. We may be offended by people looking at us with a carnal look in their eye, but we may be just as upset if they didn’t look. Of course men get looked at too. This is a two way street.

Dress often makes things interesting too. It’s easy to dismiss a focus on dress as just a side issue to the real issue which is physical attraction. Women and men in their dating years often dress provocatively if they can. When they do, it’s hard to feel sorry for them if people look a little too long or too closely. That said, I’m not making any apologies for sexism and discrimination based on sex. It’s just that us humans are geared for sex and that’s a two way thing. Sexism and sexual discrimination mean treating people unequally because of their genitals, not their brains.

Thankfully, us older people are less subject to the overheated, pheromone soaked dating world younger people are subject to. In fact, I think that us older types are more easily capable of thinking of people of the opposite sex in terms of their qualities and characteristics other than their sexuality and sensuality. That said, even as an old man, I can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a younger member of the female sex. Those inclinations don’t just disappear overnight. I’m sure the same goes for women.

I think that the reality is that most of the judgments we make of other people and how we may ‘gaze’ at them  are not specifically about sex or their fitness for procreative success. They may be unconscious moral judgments about their fitness to be part of the in-group. I think that goes for most people, young and old. We even look at children in strollers and unconsciously assess them for their future potential. We just do.

Being human is pretty funny if you can figure out how to get under our common prejudices and ‘see’ other people for what they are. It’s not easy because we have sexuality, procreation and morality all vying for attention and complicating things no end.

 

Frosh silliness and all that…a sociological take.

~ Roger JG Albert

In Canada.com, Laura Strapagiel writes on September 18, 2013,

Although there is no evidence that student leaders were directed to lead first-year students in a chant endorsing rape, it was part of the oral traditions of UBC’s Commerce Undergraduate Society (CUS), according to a report released today.

The University of British Colombia tasked a fact-finding panel with investigating an offensive frosh-week chant recited during bus trips by first-year Sauder School of Business students and activity leaders.

The chant, which also caused controversy at Halifax’s Saint Mary’s University, went like this: “UBC boys we like them young. Y is for your sister. O is for oh-so-tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass.” In some variations, “G” stands for “go to jail.”

In addition to releasing the panel’s report, UBC announced Wednesday that CUS will be making a voluntary contribution of $250,000 over three years to help fund a “professional position to provide student counseling and education on sexual abuse and violence.”

“After serious consideration, we believe it is essential that the C.U.S. and all FROSH leaders make tangible amends,” said UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope in a statement. “At the same time, the whole UBC community needs to embark upon deeper, transformative and lasting change that would make such chants entirely and obviously unacceptable in our community.”

So, can we come to some (sociological) understanding of what this is all about?  Yes, we can, but it’s not simple.  First thing, there is the chant itself and it’s two variants.  The first variant must be considered as an outright invitation to first year male students to go find an even younger female student to rape.  The second variant is more complex and can be read as a cautionary tale as in ‘if you rape my underage sister you will go to jail.’  Second thing, there is the issue of the UBC administration’s reaction to the events.  Punish the students and embark on a “deeper, transformative and lasting change that would make such chants entirely and obviously unacceptable in our society.”  I’d like the reporter who wrote the piece in Canada.com to follow up in a few months to see just what UBC’s president has come up with to undertake this “deeper, transformative and lasting change.”  I’ll bet nothing comes of it.  I’m sure the UBC administration is hoping the whole thing blows over and soon.  Well, there may be a token attempt at something, maybe a forum or some workshops, but nothing more.   Frankly, I expect most people will forget about this within a very short period of time.

So now what?  Well, the social dynamics that underpin this whole scenario are really quite fascinating.  There are a number of avenues of investigation here.  For instance, the chant itself and its implied assumptions about the nature of sex between young men and women, that is, that men must overcome, forcibly if necessary, a young woman’s need to protect her virginity.  Then there’s the fact that these are young people and young people have always done things that piss off their elders as a way of ‘carving their own path’ in life.  Any talk of rape, especially in a tight-assed university setting is bound to piss off a lot of older people, especially ones with young daughters (I’m still one of those).  Mission accomplished here as evidenced by UBC’s response, which is another issue all in itself. Using the chant to ‘do something naughty’ and create solidarity among students is a related issue and an important one.  I’ll address these issues in blog posts over the next few days.  I’m not offering any solutions here, like Toope is, but rather observations on the nature of morality, ours and others, as it relates to sexuality, in particular, but also to business in a limited sense.  However, this is not a rant about the evils of capitalism, of business or about the evils of anything else.  What I want to do here is comment on the moral context in which such events can occur and how they are treated by the ‘morally upstanding’ among us.  It’s just a bonus for me that the students in question at UBC are business students because today business and the market occupy the moral high ground in our world.  We judge so much of what we do by its effects on the ‘bottom line.’  So, I’ll start with the nature of sexual relations in our world and then move on to other issues like the need for students to stand out yet fit in, and the need for those who occupy positions of moral ‘leadership’ in our world to make sure our world is morally clean and upstanding allowing no breaches of the moral wall that surrounds us all.

Sex.  Much has been written about it.  Confusion abounds.  Procreation by the process of coitus is fairly straightforward to understand.  We ‘have’ sex, we may very well make babies, that’s if we’re a male and a female.  Sex between gays and variations thereof is not procreative sex.  That’s pretty clear, I think.  Procreative sex is about biology, penises, vaginas, sperm and eggs.  That said, procreative sex is regulated in very complex ways and has been ever since we’ve been writing things down and probably way before too.  We’re not the only sexually reproducing species that regulates sexual behaviour, that is who can have sex with who, when and how.  Many species have mechanisms for regulating sex.  We speak of ‘instinct’ when we refer to sex among non-human species, but nonetheless, sex is regulated.  Often, the physically and socially dominant individuals of a species are the only ones to procreate as in wolves and African wild dogs.  Among primates, sex generally goes to the dominant members of the troop, but there is a lot of sex on the side type behaviour.  Among Bonobo chimps, sex seems to be recreational but it also serves a purpose of keeping peace in the troop.  It also serves a procreational function, of course, but paternity is not an issue among bonobos.

There are many problems that arise with human sexuality. One is that we have a long gestation period and it takes a very long time to raise an infant to self-determination and adulthood.  Procreative sex has its consequences and can be very expensive in time, effort and resources.  That problem is compounded by the fact that men and women can be attracted sexually to a number of other men and women.  There’s no evidence to suggest that human beings are naturally monogamous and a lot to suggest otherwise.  Another thing is that closeness, physical contact, nasty experiences with members of the other sex, neurological wiring and many other factors mean that humans, like bonobos, are often quite happy to have sexual relations with members of the same sex or with whatever comes along, animal, vegetable or synthetic.  Some of the most popular porn sites on the internet are bestiality sites.  A popular practice among some men is to have life size sex dolls.  Is sex with a sex toy still sex?  Well, we sure talk in those terms.  So, humans are, let’s say, open to possibility when it comes to using their sexual organs.  I coined the term ‘monosex’ when I taught a course on love and sex a few years ago, to describe masturbation and the fact that many people prefer it to anything else.  Apparently we don’t even need partners.

Of course it’s very important here to separate love and sex.  Love is a sentiment of emotional attachment that can, but needn’t have anything to do with sex.  Romantic sex is not always loving sex, although we generally think of romance and love as intertwined.  Love can exist in many social situations and describe relationships between mothers and children, men and women, men and men, women and women, men, women and flags, football, sausages, cars, sunsets, pets, forests and a pretty close to infinite number of other things.  We ‘love’ all kinds of things.  Sex describes one way of expressing love, but it also goes way beyond that and often has nothing to do with love.

So, sex is all over the place and procreative sex is a particular variant that ends up producing offspring and those little guys are essentially considered property.  Randall Collins in his book Sociological Insight refers to offspring as generational property.  Other forms of property he identifies that are regulated by marriage contracts are domestic property and erotic property.  Erotic property is exclusive rights over another’s body for sexual purposes.  Domestic property refers to pots and pans, houses and cars.  The point here is that sex is regulated in our world or rather what derives from sex is regulated.  For as long as we know, sex has been regulated to achieve certain social ends.  Who one can have sex with, when, where and how are all regulated by mores and laws in our society and in one way or another in all societies now and historically.   Morality is the context in which sex is regulated.  Although it’s clear that sexual mores are broken all over the place all the time, we still feel the pressure of sexual ‘propriety.’  Although things are changing we know that extramarital or extra-relational [my new term, I think] sex (cheating) is bad.  We know that pre-marital sex is bad.  We know that children are not supposed to be sexual, neither are old people (yuck!).  Most important, we know that children and adults are never to engage in sexual relations under any circumstances.  We know that sex in public is bad.  We also know that people do it for the ‘thrill’ of it.[1]  We know that both parents have a responsibility to raise their offspring.  We all know these things but we also know that these things don’t count as much in real life as they do in ideological terms.

So, I’ve put this off long enough.  Young men and women are sexual by nature.  Biology gives them the tools to have sex pretty early in life.  In our world, however, it’s not morally acceptable for them to engage in sex until they’re told it’s OK.  We have rules around how young people are to behave sexually and celibacy is it!  We don’t know when exactly it’s ok to have sex as a young person.  Waiting until marriage doesn’t cut it anymore.  It’s now a matter of ‘let’s discuss it when it happens.’  We’ll make the best of it.

However, the crux of the situation for me is the moral responsibility that is placed on young women to protect their virginity at all costs or at least to avoid the label of ‘promiscuous’ or ‘slut.’  Young women are supposed to suppress their sexual drives and be ‘responsible.’  This automatically sets up an adversarial relationship between young men and women.  Women must protect their virginity.  Young men must respect that and suppress their own sexuality.  But, for many young men, the challenge is that of a safe-cracker. Conquest is big on their minds!  They’re supposed to be real men, after all, aren’t they?   Can I get into her pants?  Young male bodies are telling them to carry on, get it going.  Damn the torpedoes!

I can’t imagine how rape and other variant of sexual assault are not more common under these circumstances and why young people in the prime of their youth at university would not want to challenge the moral prescriptions that define their sexuality.  Young men and women chanted the Y.O.U.N.G. chant at St-Mary’s university and at UBC (and on many other campuses, no doubt).  This is, in my mind, a protest against contradictory social mores.  The reaction of the university administration as protectors of the dominant moral code in our society underlies the seriousness of the proscriptions we impose on young people and their inherent sense that there are serious issues with them.

Obviously not all young men and women are conflicted about sexual mores.  Some of them are staunch defenders of social proscriptions against extra-moral sexual relations.  There is a lot of diversity in the population.  That said, all youth are pressured to conform to social mores under the threat of rejection, opprobrium and shunning.  Young people have a strong need to ‘fit in.’ That may mean going along with the Y.O.U.N.G. chant or opposing it depending on what group is strongest in its pull to conformity.  But I’ll leave that to another time.

[1] There are porn sites dedicated to public sex.