Divestment

I keep stumbling over these articles about modern-day cults of virginity. I posted about this one a while back. And this one was in last weekend's NYT Magazine. I find them fascinating. The prizing of virginity is a concept so foreign to me that I read these articles and the stories of the kids who maintain that there is value in abstinence with a great deal of wonderment. It's not that I deride them and think they're wrong; I know my brand of sex-positivism isn't for everyone. But I just plain don't understand why some people would ever choose to deny themselves a rather significant portion of the human experience. And so, I seek out these articles and read them attentively-- trying to understand, trying not to judge.

However, I once heard Hal Sparks (who I heart despite the uber-corny rock-throb photos on his homepage) say something to the effect that sex is good for us and we only get better at it with practice-- lots and lots of practice. And I must have actively nodded my assent at the TV. I *might* have paused to consider what practicing WITH Hal Sparks might be like. But I'm digressing. Regardless, his is a perspective I have in mind as I approach this topic.

I come to this subject, also, with only my own frame of reference with regard to loss of virginity. When I was about 15, I remember having a conversation with my dad. We were sitting in the car, in the garage. He said something like, in a day and age when there is a minimal stigma against practitioners of premarital sex, one really has no business NOT exploring this arena of experience. The stereotypical overprotective father, my dad is not. And yes, men really capable of saying such things to their 15-year-old daughters. God, I am so freakin' lucky to have open and rational parents who never did make arbitrary rules (with the possible exception of the wholly arbitrary body-piercing prohibition, which I promptly bucked when I came of legal age). I could NEVER have weathered an adolescence with more conservative parents-- I really don't think I could have! But anyway, I listened and understood what he meant, but it wasn't like, having been granted some sort of permission to experience my own sexuality, I nailed the next guy who cut his eyes in my direction. I was a zitty, four-eyed, underweight, frizzy-haired, brace-faced weirdo with a wad of Kleenex perpetually stuck to my face so as to staunch my chronic nosebleeds. Trust me, running out and having sex far and nigh was not an option for 15-year-old me. I was a far cry from the high-heeled, smart-assed, yoga-bellied...uh... weirdo that I am now.

Nevertheless, my libido kicked in well before my body caught up to it and by the time I was of legal age, I felt my virginity to be burdensome. I could have climbed the walls, so sticky and taut was I, with all my pent-up, breathless desires. I waited (due, mostly, to lack of opportunity) for another 3 years after that conversation with my dad. By that point, my academic interest in all things sexual had burgeoned into something akin to my current obsession. And I felt encumbered by my inexperience. Virginity was a mucky sinkhole out of which I was clamoring-- in a manner that can only be described as Sisyphean. I needed to know what sex felt like in order to properly conceptualize it. For some things, the imagination-- even an imagination that runs on a turbo-drive hamster wheel-- is simply inadequate.

So. There was a guy. He was 23 and I was 18. I'd had a crush on him for about a year... and he knew it but he told me he hadn't wanted to do anything about it because I was all jailbait-y and whatnot. I thought that was hysterical because... what was I going to do? Rat 'im out for ravaging me? For alleviating my handicap? Yeah, no. But there was a party one night. I followed him home to his apartment. He asked if I was a virgin and, though the lie tempted me, I told him the truth. It gave him enough pause to put me off until the morning. I slept beside him, naked and restless. My staying the night, I suppose, was some tacit insistence that the deed WOULD be done, maidenhood be damned, and besmirchment be heartily received! In the morning, he woke me, he rolled me over and into him. He entered me. It hurt-- it did-- and I felt a little invaded. He came on my stomach. But there was none of the blood about which I'd been warned. Nor was there any emotional transcendence-- or fallout, for that matter. I've since compared the experience to oral surgery-- I felt stretched out and used, but only temporarily. In the intervening years, I've come to relish that used feeling-- that sensation that comes after your body has been taken over by some Other-- that point at which you return to yourself after having lent yourself out, allowed someone to take you over, however briefly. But that first time I allowed it, I was calm and detached and curious. It was not an act into which I'd entered out of desire, unless you count desire for expansion of knowledge. And I'd spent most of it up in my brain, trying to decide if I was "feeling" anything. Mostly, I was feeling relieved. No longer could I be limited by that particular ignorance.

I've seen that guy a grand total of three times since. The first was about 4 days later, right before I moved away for college, to say goodbye. The second was a couple of years later at a Shakespeare in the Park performance-- he didn't remember my last name (and my last name's pretty easy to remember). I thought that was hysterically funny-- and I loved that, for both of us, the experience hadn't acquired any feathery pink patina of sentimentality. And the third time was about two years ago. I saw him across the lobby of The Belcourt, outside a screening of Blue Velvet. We made eye contact... and I'm sure I looked familiar but I don't think he could place me. I brushed past him and I don't think it registered. He'd grown his hair out long. He was wearing a white shirt. We were strangers.

So, that's MY divestment story.

We've all got little narratives that are more or less analogous, don't we? Sure, they're all a little different. But momentous, joyous, miserable, ambivalent or otherwise, they shape our existences and color our perspectives about sex in general. So, plain and simple, I just do not understand people who choose to delay-- or altogether forgo-- the experience. The NYT Magazine article interests me because it posits religion as mere subtext for motivating young people into celibacy. The people interviewed for this article might have initially arrived at their decision for religious reasons, but these college groups seem hell-bent on finding secular justifications for standing by their decisions. They turn to philosophers and feminist scholars and psychologists and evolutionary biologists. As do we all when we are hungry to declare our choices valid, I guess. But the attempts toward legitimizing celibacy in a secular age through academic rigor intrigue me to no end.

Some of it, I flat-out do not buy. Towards the end of the article, this Janie Fredell person begins to talk about the woes of inopportunely released oxytocin. Oxytocin is, of course, the hormone released during sex, among other pleasurable activities. Here's the paragraph about that:

“'Finding true love for me is the point of life,' she said, and she went on to explain that sex would only complicate the pursuit. She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone’s 'powerful bonding' effect can be 'a cause of joy and marital harmony' but that outside of marriage it can create 'serious problems.' Released arbitrarily, it can blur 'the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,' the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, and 'you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.'"

And then a few paragraphs later:

"The Web site warned what happens then to the sexually active; that oxytocin, in such cases, can cause 'a palpable sense of loss, betrayed trust and unwelcome memories. This is information that you will rarely hear from sexual-health groups,' because, the Web site says, 'there is no condom for the heart.'"

Now, seriously. I've experienced both love without sex and sex without love. I've sloughed off the latter without any " palpable sense of loss" whatsoever. Experiences of the former variety, however, have been tinted with regrets and miseries that were most certainly palpable. I know I argue all the time that sex and emotionality are just so many synaptic firings and chemical reactions within our bodies, and I'm certainly familiar with the role oxytocin plays in the pair-bonding process. But the idea that an arbitrary release of oxytocin can make interpersonal relationships more painful and break-ups feel lousier is pretty nutty. Sexless relationships can break your heart as easily as sexual ones can -- and a denial of that fact is one only a person who's never had a sexual relationship can make. No, OK, maybe that's not fair. But it is a denial that only a person who's kept themselves invulnerable from (to? what's the right preposition here?) actually falling in love could make. It's hard for me not to wonder a little bit if some of these kids are just a little crippled by their anxieties about opening up their bodies to another human. Of course, that's idle speculation and is also probably quite unfair, when these kids certainly seem self-aware and capable of analyzing their own motivations for being celibate. But that "there is no condom for the heart" line, as used in this context, is so ironic I just don't know how they can take it seriously. I mean, yes, it's true! There IS no condom for the heart. But hearts are also subject to whims not remotely related to the genitalia. And hence, they tend to open their little ventricular legs whether or not they've conferred with said genitalia. So, because hearts can bump up against each other with or without the involvement of other body parts, that argument's totally moot.

I do, however, like Fredell's argument that the choice for abstinence is actually pro-feminist. Yes, I'm scared that any line of thinking that might restrict a woman's choice to be sexual could be incredibly retrogressive, especially if one such line of thinking ever becomes institutionalized in any way. But the key word here is "choice." I've made a decision-- and several subsequent ones along the way-- that I want sex to be a part of my life. I feel empowered by those decisions. If Janie Fredell feels empowered by her decision to not be sexual, well, more power to her! She owns her body in a way that I think is analogous to the way I own mine. And while my path and hers are divergent, I still believe that they are both, essentially, inroads toward authentic feminism.

That said, the relentless drumbeat behind the argument for female assumption of control via celibacy is still the one that insists men are always pressuring women into sex. That it's always men doing the initiating and that, in order to receive love, women feel obligated to capitulate. And that misguided notion is one I'm sure I've railed against elsewhere on my blog. Not all men are predators-- very few, in fact, are. And not all women are love-staved, needy victims. This antiquated division of gendered behaviors bears so little relation to real-life sexually intimate relationships that I'm not sure why people continue to perpetuate it. I've said that before, too.

Now, I personally have never once-- not once!-- yielded to pressure for sex when I wasn't inclined in that direction in the first place. As I said, my decisions about how I choose to express my sexuality have allowed me to claim ownership over my body, such that that sense of ownership is never questioned. For one thing, I have spot-on asshole radar. I'm sometimes attracted to difficult and troubled people, but I can spot a real user/manipulator from miles away-- and those people hold very little sexual draw for me. As a result, every time in my adult life that a person has attempted to initiate sexual activity with me and I have not reciprocated the desire, that person has politely backed off on my cue. I may have had a couple learning experiences when I was a kid, but I quickly picked up all the forcefulness one needs when one needs to effectively communicate a "no." Or even a "no chance in hell, dude!"

I realize that I wield a pretty great deal of power in the early negotiations of a sexual encounter. Actually, I resent the hell out of the fact that women so often bear most of the responsibilities for being sexual gatekeepers. You, sir, can look at the gate but not touch it-- for propriety's sake. You, sir, can touch the gate but not look at it-- also for propriety's sake. And you, my lucky friend, you can enter the gate and stay a while, but eventually I'll kick you out, too-- lest anyone think my hinges too risque! It's a shit job, folks. Especially when your gate has a ravenous appetite. So part of the joy of sex is abdicating that responsibility-- saying, take over! YOU rule the gate for a little while. It's a tremendous release. But one can only enjoy the luxury of such an abdication when one has total and utter confidence that her yay or nay will be respected and accepted at face value. And that confidence is something one can only achieve when one is minimally needy or love-starved (hey, we all feel a little needy and love-starved at least some of the time, right?). I mean, if you don't doubt your own convictions, neither do other people-- even in the most intimate of scenarios. Say yes. Or say no. But either way, you've got to mean it when you say it. I don't think this is the secret to date-rape prevention, by the way, but it might give us a leg up. Just a theory.

Ultimately, I don't really know how to feel about these organized eschewers of sex. I appreciate their rights of free choice, so long as they don't attempt to impose their choices on me, of course. I worry that these types of ideas tend to infect public policy, though. I haven't even touched on all the havoc Bush's ostrich-headed abstinence-only education programs have exacted upon the sexual health of America's school children, but I think it's clear that I worry, too, on a more individual and personal level, whether self-denial is really all that viable an avenue for most of us-- even for these kids who profess to believe in it. Look at the Leo Keliher kid from the article! He tortures himself with this stuff. Is that really all that healthy for his soul? But I'm constantly reminding myself: it would piss the hell of me for them to judge me; what business is it of mine to judge them? That's right: none.

I should note that this post is taking a step in self-revelation that I've been reticent to make up to this point. Sure, I allude to my sex life now and again, but I've never once relayed much of a narrative from it. Until now, that is. I think I've been building up to it for some time, though-- like in my "a little faith in me" post. But I'm being inspired and influenced by the writers of sex blogs and the like, I think. I admire their writing and I admire the authority they claim when they speak about their experiences. These readings of mine may well change the mission of this blog for a little while. Here's where I currently stand on my own sexual self-exposition in a public forum: if I'm going to discuss the way my culture-- the one in which I participate-- perceives sexuality, I can only do it through my lens of selfhood. And I owe it to the ideas to be honest about that. I'm still going to talk about movies and feminism. But it's always my own story. I don't have any other tools.

So, please forgive me for invoking your spirit without permission, dear boy to whom I gratefully relinquished my virginity. I do it with neither ill intent nor your name... as you are, no doubt, quite So, please forgive me for invoking your spirit without permission, dear boy to whom I gratefully relinquished my virginity. I do it with neither ill intent nor your name... as you are, no doubt, quite Google-able.

Horse. I meant, whores.

It's entirely possible that She Hate Me (a Spike Lee Joint) is the worst movie ever made. Now, I do not take that proposition lightly. I've seen Showgirls and that's a bad movie. I've seen a few Hilary Duff movies and her oeuvre, by and large, contains an extravagance of badness. I even saw the Tom Cruise version of The War of the Worlds and was so offended by the exploitative badness of that movie that I can't really think about it without rolling my eyes like the snob I am. But She Hate Me is a movie that probably did not set out to be bad (as one might argue is the case with Showgirls or, say The Perfect Man (Heather Locklear is not aging well...)), but certainly succeeded in being one of the most egregious misuses of Hollywood money in cinematic history.


And I marvel at the manner in which it manages to be bad on So. Many. Levels. of possible badness. It's not just that the script and dialogue have all the grace of a belligerently drunk rhinoceros. It's not just that un-tough actors (uh, Ellen Barkin) attempt to seem tougher by inserting a needless and gratuitous quantity of f-word-usages into their speech. It's not just that the film's sick octopus of a narrative arc overshoots its own trajectory to the point that's it's basically unintelligible. It's not just that John Turturro plays a mob boss with a flat Long Island accent while Italian-accented Monica Belucci plays his daughter (so, he's American and she, uh, studied at Italian boarding school?). It's not just that the film entertains every possible permutation of the Racist White Asswipe stereotype that it can think up (and every other stereotype about pretty much every ethnic group other than American blacks (Asian women practice Tai Chi during sex? Really?)). It's not just that it attempts to fetishize lesbians while simultaneously blaming them for all the ills of the world. It's not because it indulges in some pukily cheesy anthropomorphizing-of-sperm animation sequences. And it's certainly not just because it portrays hordes of lesbians (most of them are porn-star gorgeous, and a few are the obligatory ugly dykes put forth to, what? "engender realism?") having gasping, sweating, multiform and enthusiastic hetero humpfests with one dude over the course of 4 nights


(Note to Mr. Lee: Lesbians like innies, not outies. No matter what our culture's collective fantasy would have us believe, real lesbians don't actually like cock. Sad news, I know. I am but the messenger.)


It's that it accomplished its badness through ALL of these avenues AND that it takes an interminable 2 hours and 18 minutes to do it!


Honestly. I would have satisfied my lousy movie viewing quota for this lifetime if all that offensive political grandstanding and and clumsy dialogue could have been captured in a much more weildy 86 minutes. But no. Clearly ol' Spike must've thought he was onto something big.


He was not.


Unless by "big" you mean "hugely bad."

I've already alluded to the fact that this film attempts to take on too many topics. It wants to talk about corporate corruption (and does so in a simplistic and grandiosely moralizing way). It wants to talk about gender identity and male anxieties about being abandoned by women as women become more and more self-reliant (in my opinion, lesbianism is too loaded a concept to bear the weight of this discussion, but the film certainly tries to broach it via that route). It wants to talk about institutionalized racism in corporate culture. It wants to talk about organized crime. And it wants to talk about gender role reversal and the objectification of the male body. Much like my post about Spitzer a couple posts back, the film's scope of concerns is simply too vast and it's clear that Lee lost control of it. And that can happen. There's a lot of stuff in our culture about which we can all worry ad nauseum. Trying to cram all that into one film (or one blog post) makes for poor story-telling (and poor post writing... alas).

So in an effort to not overshoot my own scope, I'm going to talk a little about the prospect of male whoredom as it pertains to this movie and then segue into some other thoughts about prostitution. And I'll leave the rest of the mess of that movie for another day. Sound good?

A basic summary: A big-deal business dude discovers some corruption within his company. He goes public with it and subsequently gets fired. To make fantastically affluent end meet fantastically affluent end, he allows his ex-girlfriend-turned-homo to pimp him out to a passel of lesbians who all want babies. And then he fathers 19 children. And then he mends his ways by "doing the responsible thing" and forming a family with a lesbian couple and the two kids he fathered with each of the two women. Nevermind that he signed his parental rights away prior to the conception of each baby (and as such, actually being responsible would entail his leaving the women alone). Nevermind that lesbian couples in real life tend to be rather guarded against male intrusion. Nevermind that... well, you get it... obviously, I think the story is far-fetched to the point of hilarity.

My question then becomes, is his selling his semen actually prostitution? He charges the women $10G to get them pregnant thru the tried-and-true method, yes, but they're not actually after sex. Wikipedia defines prostitution as "sexual activity in exchange for remuneration." And yes, the simplest way to make a baby is to have sex. But is selling a single act of intercourse for the strict purposes of procreation the same thing as exchanging sex for money? I don't know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

My point in asking this question, though, is that I'm wondering if prostitution is an equally viable enterprise for both men and women. By and large, I expect that it's not. And here, I'm limiting my discussion to hetero prostitution for the sake of convenience. It's not that I think women with a lot of power and money are above seeking dick-for-hire. And in theory, men are every bit as plausible targets for predation as women are, within the context of sex work. But in real life, we all know it doesn't work that way. It's rare that women hire men simply because they are in need of getting their rocks off. I don't really know why that is-- I don't think it's because women have an easier time getting laid or because men are all little more than sex-starved zombies-- but that IS how it is. So be it.

There is a scene in this film where all the lesbians sit in a circle and demand that Jack, our hero, disrobe so that they might "check out the goods." They begin to catcall him and whistle and make him spin around. It's a scene obviously designed to describe the character's humiliation and degradation. Then one of the women says, "So now you know what it feels like to be objectified." The whole scene rings so false! I mean, here are a bunch of women with, ostensibly, no real sexual interest in this man. They're ogling his DNA, sure, but they don't actually want him. HE isn't their object-- his semen, well, maybe-- but not HIM. And this is not the same thing as me, at 16, getting chased down a street in LA just because I got off the bus a stop to late and had to walk by a dive strip club late a night. Yep, I felt pretty object-like just then. Sure did.

So, I question his plausibility, as a healthy, attractive, strong hetero man, as a whore. As much as I might want to deny it in the name of gender equality, the dynamic is just not the same. And it's not that I think women aren't capable of viewing men as little more than sexual playthings. Trust me. We are. I just don't think that's what's going on in that scene described above.

And also? I kinda don't think objectifying each other is the worse thing in the world. In fact, I don't think it's avoidable. Part of what attracts us to each other is our outward visage and pretty much all of us, if we're being honest, put at least a little effort into our presentations. The nature of sexual desire is one that necessitates that we see each other as nothing more than an amalgam of body parts sometimes. Now some of us pointedly objectify ourselves more than others-- there's power to be had there, isn't there? In being the thing that grabs attention, rather than gives it?

For kicks, I just took a clever little online quiz about my relative value, were I do pursue sex professionally. Here are my results:

Interesting, eh? The site tells me that the average is $217 per hour, based on market price averages tabulated from several private escort websites. Is it wrong that this analysis does lovely things to my ego? Actually, I thought my results seemed a little inflated, given that I'm totally over the hill by sex work standards. But, I gather advanced degrees carry some cache... which is heartening in that it's nice to know johns like a little conversation with their cocksucking. Still, I'm perfectly content exchanging my own orgasms for those of my partner. As I'm sure I've said a million times, sex is enough of an end unto itself. Getting money to have sex just seems like too gross an imbalance, yeah?

And now I'd like to return to the Spitzer fiasco one more time. My voyeuristic meanderings through the online sex-worker community have informed me that anxieties are running high amongst the high-class hussies. Many are arguing that prostitution should become legalized... as it's the women themselves who are hurt by the current laws, not the rich and powerful men who employ them and partake of their services. And many are waving their "It's a freakin' victimless crime! What's the big deal?" banners. And some say, if the free-market economy supports the cottage industry (also known as the putting-out system), why shouldn't it be legally sanctioned?

Of course there are those, both in the industry and out, who argue that most prostitutes could never earn $1117 an hour, that most of them are utterly destitute, that they are subject to the abuses, and sometimes homicidal tendencies, of their pimps and johns. And faced with this statistically factual argument, the victimless-crime banner droops substantially. Ultimately, I'm not sure where I personally weigh in in this debate-- I probably tend to lean towards the former, but I can certainly see the validity in the latter.

But what kills me is the ways in which these women are selling each other out with regard to the Spitzer case in specific. A few mornings ago, I had on The Today Show while I was getting dressed for work. They paraded out a few of these women from some escort service. And what did they do on national television but demure to the Puritanicalism of mainstream American media. That's right folks. They bemoaned how Spitzer was a "poor role model" for the public. They waxed all righteous about sexual morality. They decried the reprehensibility of selling sex, particularly to married men. Of course, I would speculate that a far higher percentage of their clientele is composed of married men than single ones. But that's only speculation. My point, though, is that not only are they acting all self-righteous about each others' activities, but they're selling out their clients, too! Who are these women to have opinions about the marriages of these men? Who are any of us to have opinions about ANYBODY'S marriage? Um, yeah, that's a digression...

So, I listened to these women being interviewed by Meredith Vieira and I wondered, if they really believe what they're doing is wrong, why are they doing it? These high-end girls are beautiful and well-educated and clearly capable finding other means of gainful employment. And if, as would seem the case, they're in the industry by choice, how SPINELESS are they that they can't stand up for their choices? My heroine, debauchette sure stands up for hers. Unfortunately, she's felt it necessary to take down her post wherein she more explicitly defended her line of work. But it was a nice, tough, toothed little post-- although she seemed stressed out, for sure.

In the end, I think the thing that makes prostitution morally questionable for me is not the idea of selling one's body. One's body is one's own and one can do what one likes with one's own body, yes? Ultimately, it's that whoring is a line of work available to women and gay men (boys, mostly) and it's men with power and money enough to afford it who avail themselves of said service. It reinforces a gender dynamic that doesn't do any favors for my presupposition of equality between genders. This is the thing that differentiates Ashley Dupre from Jack, the character in She Hate Me. As much as I'm disinclined to support any line of thinking that would have us (and our government) limit the rights a person has to his or her own body, I can't quite reason away my niggling reservations about whether prostitution really is victimless, as it posits everyone on both sides of the equation on nonegalitarian footing.

In the meantime, I guess I'll still be giving my milk away for free. If I were to embrace my proverbial cow nature, that is.