Tag Archives: gender and sexuality

booknotes: not under my roof

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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9780226736198Ever since I heard about Amy Schalet’s research and her forthcoming book, Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2011), I’ve been eagerly waiting to get my hands on a copy. Thus, when Not Under My Roof came out earlier this winter, I had ordered it from Amazon and read it before the month of February was out.

And I’ve been waiting ever since then for inspiration to strike vis a vis how to review the book. I’m not exactly sure why. It’s got a whole host of things that usually cause an explosion of thoughts and words in my head: human sexuality, cross-cultural analysis, discussion of cross-generational family relationships, overall encouragement to re-examine our historical-cultural assumptions that a particular set of events or circumstances (in this case coming of age and emerging adult sexuality) just is a certain way. If you want me to experience the scholarly equivalent of an orgasm, throw an articulate article or book in my direction that suggests some naturalized assumptions about sex or gender are actually historically contingent. Not Under My Roof has all the above covered, in spades.

But mostly, it made me incredibly sad. Sad because the mainstream culture of the United States — as well as the institutions and state apparatus that support/are supported by that culture — is failing us abysmally when it comes to parent-child relationships and the incorporation of sexuality into family life and society. This isn’t news, but it’s still kinda hard to have a book-length reminder of how badly we fail at this. Schalet’s research looks at the negotiations between parents and teenage children over sexual activity and relationships in the United States and the Netherlands. My marginalia, particularly in the U.S. sections, consisted of a lot of “so sad!” and “key disconnect” and sad faced emoticons.

Schalet, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, conducted her research in the U.S. and the Netherlands (where she had spent part of her childhood) during the mid-to-late 1990s. She conducted qualitative interviews parents and their adolescent children in a number of different suburban and urban locations in both countries, focusing on white, middle-class families as her research sample. While she acknowledges the limitations of her research population, she argues that these middle-class families are also a key demographic in the development and maintenance of cultural norms.

What she discovered is that, in the Netherlands, adolescent sexuality — particularly in serious relationships — is normalized by both parents and the wider society (culturally and institutionally). As a result, even when conflicts or anxieties around teenage sexual behavior emerge, families negotiate solutions that tend to integrate the children’s sexual relationships and emerging adult life into the fabric of the family and society as a whole. In the United States, by contrast, adolescent sexuality is dramatized as a dangerously out-of-control physical and emotional experience that will signify a break from the family of origin. It is simultaneously a facet of independent adulthood and an activity which threatens a teenager’s ability to reach successful middle-class adult independence.

Schalet broadens her examination of adolescent sexuality to look at how these differing concepts of teenage sexual desires and behaviors both reflect and inform our divergent understandings of adolescent development and adulthood cross-culturally. In the Netherlands, Schalet argues, adulthood — particularly young adulthood — is not understood to constitute economic self-sufficiency or emotional distance from one’s family of origin. Dutch teenagers are expected to develop a self-determination within emotionally close family and social circles, rather than in opposition to them. While American teenagers are expected to be rebellious, incommunicative, out of control, hormone-driven beings, Dutch teenagers are assumed to be self-regulating individuals who will gradually assume responsibility over their social and sexual lives as they are able.

The Dutch framework is not without its troubling aspects, as Schalet points out, specifically the lack of language with which to articulate and grapple with unequal power within relationships (parent-child, a couple of differing ages or class standing, sexism within dating relationships). However, overall health indicators suggest that the Netherlands is modeling a much more successful way of supporting teenagers’ development than is the United States. One of the most fascinating aspects of Schalet’s interviews, I thought, was the widespread helplessness expressed by American parents and children when it came to cultural views of adolescent sexuality and parent-child relationships. Parents and children alike often expressed unhappiness with the status quo, yet were equally at a loss when it came to effecting meaningful change in their own family lives or in society at large. By conceptualizing American teenagers as hormone-crazed beings incapable of rational thought, parents either threw up their hands or resorted to an authoritarian rules-based approach which they acknowledged their child would likely evade or otherwise thwart. Children, in turn, expressed a desperate desire for adult support, but could not picture integrating their sexual selves into family life either through conversation about sexuality or by bringing a partner to their parents’ house.

The title, Not Under My Roof, refers to the scenario Schalet presented to each of her interviewees: “Would you (or your parents) allow your child’s significant other to sleep over?” Across the board, Dutch parents answered in the affirmative, though with some qualifications concerning age and nature of the relationship — older teenagers and “steady” boyfriends/girlfriends were much more acceptable than were sleepovers requested by younger adolescents and relationships deemed more casual. Dutch boys were also more likely to report being comfortable with bringing a significant other to stay overnight than were Dutch girls (who generally preferred going to the house of their partner).* However, every single American parent rejected the idea of “the sleepover,” conceptualizing the economic dependency of adolescence as mutually exclusive of (acknowledged) sexual activity — even as they articulated a certain fatalism that their children were likely engaging in sexual activity elsewhere. Teenagers in the States were, likewise, unable to imagine being openly sexually active or to communicate with parents about their lives as sexual beings.

I feel like I should put some of my personal cards on the table here and acknowledge that my upbringing was much more like that of the Dutch teenagers than the American ones. I never brought a partner home to stay overnight as a teenager quite simply because I wasn’t sexually active at that point in my life. My siblings romantic and sexual relationships were integrated into our family life in various ways, and my parents were always vocal about the fact that if any of us were to need a private space for sexual exploration, our bedrooms were available — and preferable — to more public, clandestine locales. Unlike many of the American parents Schalet interviewed, my siblings and I are welcome to bring our partners home and to share a bedroom with them. In contrast, Schalet’s interviewees often persisted in rejecting their children’s sexual selfhood up to the point of marriage and/or simply believing that a child’s sexual relationships, even as adults, belonged outside of the family home. This seems to mirror the reflexive disgust many adolescent and adult children express when asked to contemplate the sexual lives of their parents — something I find at best puzzling and at worst disturbing (surely we should be invested in supporting our parents’ sexual well-being just as we ask them to support ours?).

Which is where the sadness of this book comes in for me: The entrenched helplessness of Americans across the generations when it comes to communicating more effectively and positively about our sexual hopes and fears, about the quality of our relationships, about what we need to foster health and well-being in our sexual lives. The Dutch families don’t have it all worked out, certainly, but through Schalet’s eyes they certainly seem to be light-years ahead of our dysfunction. I really wish Americans would start to take the lessons of other Western nations to heart and do better by our youth. Instead, as a society, we seem determined to move by inches into ever-increasing moral panic, non-communication, and policing.

I very much hope that Schalet’s book will make its way into the hands of policymakers, parents, and sexual health professionals and that it will encourage us collectively to re-examine our assumptions about adolescence, sexual well-being, family relationships, and our conception of successful adult development. I can’t say I’m very hopeful about large-scale change, but perhaps Not Under My Roof will — if nothing else — encourage individual parents and their children to assert their independence from normative cultural pressures and create more functional, integrative, patterns of family communication and togetherness.

*As a side-note, this book was frustratingly heterocentric, though that seems to have been the “fault” of the families interviewed rather than Schalet’s process. She deliberately asked all questions in a way that left the sex/gender of the child’s partner undetermined — and virtually all parents, with the exception of a couple of Dutch parents, presumed straightness in their children. Virtually all of the youths Schalet interviewed, likewise, were either paired with an other-sex partner or identified future partners in other-sex language.

I’d love to see a follow-up study that deliberately sought out families with youth of wide-ranging sex and gender identities and experiences. I’d be really interested to see how or if parent-child interactions change when queer sexuality enters the picture. How do parents conceptualize their queer childrens’ sexual lives? How do parental fears about youth sexuality shift when pregnancy prevention is no longer a concern? Are young people more or less likely to bring same-sex partners home? We may think we know the answers to these questions … but I’d be really interested in the results of a deliberate cross-cultural study.

thought for the day: why are we still framing the conversation this way?

15 Sunday Apr 2012

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So I was going through my Google Reader feeds just now, from the last couple of days, and a lot of people seem to be talking about the possibility of male-female friendship like it’s suddenly 1989 again and we’ve decided that When Harry Met Sally is once more culturally relevant.

The question being, as always, “Can men and women be friends or does sex/sexuality inevitably get in the way?”

Here’s my thing about that question. Two things, actually. The question “Can men and women be friends?” assumes a) hetero-universality and b) that the possibility of sexual desire precludes a relationship that doesn’t involve sexual activity.

Speaking as someone who experiences the possibility of sexual attraction across genders, if I ruled out friendship sans sex with anyone who I could envision sexual intimacy with, then wow I’d be shit out of luck when it came to friendship. Because, surprise! The type of people I tend to get along with as friends are also the type of people I’d be most likely to be open to sexual intimacy with.

Obviously, it’s a moot point since I’m in a committed, monogamous relationship with Hanna. So sex with anyone else simply isn’t on the table any longer. But the same could be said of any person in a committed relationship — are you supposed to cut yourself off from friendship with any person you’d theoretically be willing to have sex with, simply because the possibility of sex and friendship don’t mix? That isn’t practical and doesn’t even make sense?

And think about what it’s saying about peoples’ ability to keep it in their pants and, you know, practice fidelity to the ground-rules of their primary relationships! That somehow the very presence of sexual attraction makes rational thought and decision-making evaporate? That you experience the possibility of sexual attraction and whist! — all prior commitments and promises out the window! Erm … really?

I get why, in our aggressively gendered, heteronormative culture it feels like “common sense” to assume homosociality and heterosexuality naturally go hand in hand. That your friendships will be primarily with people of your own gender (to whom you’re not sexually attracted in any way) and that your sexual intimacy will happen with a person or persons of another gender (the gender toward which you experience sexual attraction). But that formulae simply doesn’t work for people who are gay or swing both ways. As someone who experiences desire toward people with female bodies, I nevertheless have friends with female bodies with whom I manage not to have sex.

I’ve also managed to be naked in a locker room, in communal showers, skinny dipping, and co-sleeping with female-bodied people without engaging in sexual intimacy. Given cultural taboos, I haven’t done the same with male-bodied persons, but I’d wager the experience would be similar. That is, it’s not about the shape of the body in question or the gender identity of the person embodied, but about the context of our relationship and what we’ve mutually decided it contains. If sex isn’t part of our intimacy, we somehow (!) manage to not go there.

Granted, I’m not one of those people who experiences sex-exclusive attractions. Maybe if I only found women or men attractive, it would be easier for me to form platonic friendships with people of the gender which I wasn’t sexually interested in, and save the gender I was for flirting and sexytimes? But I can’t help feeling like the assumption that it’s an either/or (friendship OR sex) proposition hurts even the people who experience those more exclusive desires.

Thus ends my thought for the day.

"have a moment for gay rights?"

12 Thursday Apr 2012

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via ACLU

Last week outside Trader Joe’s I was accosted by charity muggers from the ACLU. 

This happens regularly in Coolidge Corner and I generally ignore them across the board. I make it a rule not to support any organization via street harassment, even if they’re a group with a mission I support. (And yes, I have, in fact, been a card-carrying member of the ACLU when personal finances allow).

But anyway. Last Wednesday was the day the federal appeals court in Boston heard oral arguments against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). And the chipper young woman in the ACLU vest was asking passers-by if they had “a moment for gay rights?” so I thought perhaps they had some sort of petition to sign vis a vis the whole DOMA-is-stupid-not-to-mention-unconstitutional thing. So after the internal debate while grocery shopping (“you should just suck it up, self, and be a good citizen and a social person for once”) I actually stopped on my way out of the store and volunteered to hear what she was about.

“So do you have a petition you want me to sign or something?” I asked.

She seemed surprised I was even stopping, but gathered herself together and launched into what the ACLU was about, as an organization, and specifically some of the things they were doing to support queer folks who’d been discriminated against because of their sexuality. It turned out she didn’t have any sort of petition to sign, but was just trawling for donations.

“I’m asking people to make a donation of $29 dollars today for each of the twenty-nine states where it’s legal to discriminate against someone due to their sexual orientation!” she wrapped up with a note of breathless relief in her voice that I’d actually let her finish a thought.

“Well, I don’t give out my financial information on the street,” I tried to break it to her gently, “But I’ll definitely keep you guys in mind.”

“But you’re behind what we stand for, right?” She asked, anxiously.

“Um –sure!” I said, shook her hand politely, and headed off down the street.

It took me most of the walk home to realize what was the most frustrating and surreal part of the interaction. It was that the young woman in question was pitching her persuasive skills at someone she presumed to be straight. Did I stand for “gay rights”? Well, yeah, actually, I’m pretty into having equal civil rights. The whole reason I’d stopped to speak with her in the first place was that I’d been thinking about DOMA that day. Because the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act has a direct effect on my life. Because Hanna and I are talking about getting married and even though we can do that perfectly legally here in the state of Massachusetts, as far as the federal government is concerned (taxes, social security benefits, etc.) we won’t be a family unit.

So I’m not behind the idea of “gay rights” as this abstract great-good-thing that all card-carrying members of the ACLU should, you know, be in support of because it’s the right thing to do. (Though I’m behind it for that reason too). I’m actually in support of it because it’s about my equality of personhood before the law.


I’m not pissed at the young woman I spoke with (well, not much). She’s getting paid probably minimum wage (if she’s getting paid at all) to stand on the pavement and harass people at rush hour for what is probably an incredibly, incredibly low rate of return. And I’m sure whatever job training she received was cursory at best.

But I do find it note-worthy that the ACLU spiel is constructed in such a way that assumes the person to whom the spiel is pitched is outside the group of interest. I think I would have been less irritated by the encounter if I’d been told, “Here’s what we’re doing to support your right to equal protection under the law, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.” If you’re standing on a street corner flagging people down, you can’t actually tell whether they’re gay or lesbian, bi or poly, trans, genderqueer, or otherwise. Whether their sexual practices put them at risk of arrest, whether they’re afraid to us public restrooms, or whether they’ve got two partners waiting at home, only one of whom they could legally marry — even in the state of Massachusetts.

So a tip to all you charity muggers out there? Keep in mind when you ask the question, “Are you for gay rights?” The chances are at least one in ten (more of you count family members of queer folks who identify as straight) that the person you’re talking to isn’t a supporter of gay rights ’cause it’s a trendy liberal cause, but because it actually has an effect on their quality of life.

I’d say, just assume everyone’s queer until proven otherwise. It might actually up your success rate.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

booknotes: not in this family

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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So I’ve got a backlog of books to review here, which I’m going to try and get to over the next month or so. But I thought I’d begin tackling them this week with the most recently-read: a history of the relationships between queer children and their parents in North America, 1945-1990. In Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America (University of Pennsylvania, 2010), historian Heather Murray explores the way in which parents and children navigated — personally, politically, culturally — the subject of homosexuality in the children’s lives between the end of World War II and the latter days of the twentieth century.

Murray begins in the 1950s by examining the relationships between homosexual adults and their ageing parents, as seen through existing correspondence and children’s memories. She suggests that queer individuals who had come of age during the 1920s and 30s shared with their parents an assumption that familial relationships would not include candid discussion of sexuality, be it straight or non-straight. When one daughter profiled attempts to broach the subject with her mother, her mother’s response expresses discomfort with discussing sexuality at all, and appears genuinely confused by her daughter’s insistence that her mother acknowledge that the younger woman’s close female friendships include sexual intimacy.

From that point forward, Murray traces the expectations and real-life experiences of parents and children navigating various levels of openness regarding the child’s sexuality. For readers familiar with the history of gay liberation, lesbian-feminism, and AIDS activism, this book will provide a fascinating perspective on familiar events, seen through the lens of parent-child interactions. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on lesbian-feminism, which explored the ways in which mothers and daughters struggled to communicate across a chasm of politics and understandings of identity and performance. One mother-daughter pair Murray examines corresponded back and forth about the daughter’s newly-proclaimed lesbian identity, with the mother focusing on what she feels is her daughter’s rejection of her female self. Wrapped up in discussions of lesbian sexuality was the (to many mothers apparently more urgent) question of gender presentation. One exchange between lesbian journalist Penny House and her mother highlights this mis-communication between the generations:

For [Mrs. House], appearance was certainly not a simple matter of vanity or an instance of the oppression of women; rather it was an obligation, or as Alice Munro put it, a kind of housekeeping. This interpretation was at odds with her daughter’s view of beautifying as social brainwashing. Her daughter even chastised her mother for “self-devaluatory notions” by wearing makeup to cover up her wrinkles (94).

Both mother and daughter read each other’s actions as self-rejecting: the daughter valuing her mother’s wrinkles as authentic markers of beauty and age, while the mother understood bodily “housekeeping” as a signifier of personal respect and valuation. In such exchanges, explicitly sexual attraction, desires, and behaviors are a secondary concern, playing only a supporting role as further evidence of a child’s gender-nonconformity.

The primary sources Murray employs in Not in This Family are an impressive range of personal papers (diaries, correspondence), gay and lesbian newspapers, queer-authored fiction and poetry, published memoirs, literature from organizations like PFLAG, editorial cartoons, television shows, and other artifacts of popular culture. As an archivist, it’s particularly exciting for me to see twentieth-century materials not only made accessible but actually utilized by historians of the period to contribute to our understanding of not only the public face of gay liberation and activism, but also the quality of relationship and personal meaning-making that happened in more private, inter-personal settings. Among people who weren’t necessarily a central part of “the Movement.”

While Murray’s narrative ends in the early 1990s, the question of parent-child relationships and how they intersect with the lived (and particularly sexual) lives of the children has not gone away. Reading Not in This Family I couldn’t help thinking about my own familial relationships and how they do or do not reflect the trends Murray outlines. There was never really a “coming out” moment for me, with my family, since I’d been open about my thoughts on sexual identity and desire throughout adolescence. Thus my parents were up to speed, so to speak, when I connected with Hanna. My siblings (both in other-sex relationships) and I have a similar quality of relationship with our parents regarding relationships and sexuality — that is, my queerness doesn’t trigger particular anxieties or reticence in my family of origin. We’re all six of us understood and honored as couples. But I’d suggest that my experience is an outlier. Queer kids still fear their parents’ reactions, and gender non-conformity continues to incite panic among parents and the wider society.

What we have ended up with, in the early twenty-first century is a culture that places a premium on “coming out” to one’s parents (and society more broadly), as a central marker of queer adulthood. Whether or not that current emphasis is warranted, Heather Murray shows that it is historical contextual — that what queer children and their parents expect from each other in relation to sexuality and identity varies over time. All in all Not in This Family is highly recommended both for historians of sexuality and for those with a more casual interest in the politics of queerness as it related to kinship cultures.

quick hit: queer community archives in california since 1950

29 Thursday Mar 2012

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more about Diana

On March 19th our good friend (and Hanna’s former roomie) Diana Kiyo Wakimoto became the first PhD candidate in the Queensland University of Technology and San Jose State University’s joint  Gateway PhD Program to reach the point of making a final seminar presentation before revisions and submission of dissertation research. Congratulations Diana!

Her topic, queer community archives in California since 1950, makes her research a valuable contribution to the fields of library science/archives, queer history, and queer activism. And of obvious interest to the folks who read a blog titled “the feminist librarian.” Happily, she’s made her final presentation slides and the text of her talk available over at her blog, The Waki Librarian. In her own words:

For many decades, the records that have been forgotten are those of the queer communities, which were not collected by institutional archives. In response to this neglect, community groups created their own archives to collect and preserve their records (Barriault, 2009a; Flinn & Stevens, 2009; Fullwood, 2009). Without the activism shown by the pioneers who created these personal collections and community archives, much of the record of the queer community organizations, movements, and individuals would have been lost. Multiple queer community archives have been created in California to combat the historical neglect and silencing of queer voices in institutional archives. My thesis focuses on the little studied area of the histories of these queer community archives in California and their relationships to institutional archives. 

… As archivists continue to debate the role of the archivist as a professional, this study lends support to the scholars and practitioners who see the archivist as an activist and a non-neutral player in the construction of history and community identities. It bears repeating that without the activists and archivists within the queer communities who saved records and completed oral history projects, much of the record of the communities’ histories would have been lost. Therefore activism is important to saving records of the past and the archives profession must act to ensure a diversity of voices are found in the archives. We could learn much from the community archivists and volunteers about connecting with community members and creating archives and spaces that reflect community needs and interests.

Congratulations, Diana, and I can’t wait to read the final dissertation in full! 

booknotes: straight

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Until I fell in love with my partner, Hanna, I generally conceptualized myself as “mostly straight.” This was because, despite the passionate friendships I formed with female friends and the way lesbian sexual fantasies made me go all squishy with excitement, I didn’t feel I was queer enough to be considered authentically out of bounds of straightness. And I passively imagined that, given the statistical odds, chances were I’d fall in love with a person who was a cisgendered man (although I wouldn’t have used the term “cisgendered” back then).

Then Hanna came along, and I realized I was falling for her, and then we were together, a couple in the world, and I had to develop a whole new vocabulary for talking about myself: “mostly straight” no longer felt accurate. But was I lesbian? bisexual? fluid? queer? Should I articulate my sexuality in terms of my kinky fantasies? The gender identity and sexual orientation of my partner? The aggregate attractions I’ve felt but never acted upon for people across the gender and sexuality spectrum? If I’m a person who’s felt squishy feelings for people who identify as male, female, trans, gay, bi, straight, and numerous combinations of the above … how meaningful is it to try and identify something inherently personal (one’s subjective sense of self) in terms of the objects of my affection (which are multivarient, ever-changing). In a strange way, the language I choose to speak of myself has an effect on the identities of anyone I’ve ever felt the thrill of sexual excitement over.

It’s a social dilemma that, three years later, I’ve yet to resolve. These days, when filling out forms I go for the string-of-words approach. The form asks Sexual Orientation? I respond: “lesbian/bisexual/fluid” or the like. Check boxes be damned. In a pinch, “bisexual” is probably the best catch-all (I register attraction to people of multiple gender expressions and sex identities). In biomedical terms, “lesbian” is probably the most accurate in that I’m in a monogamous relationship with a cisgendered woman — so our medical needs will be those of women who have sex exclusively with women. But that isn’t all of who I am — or who my partner is, for that matter, since she identifies as bisexual. “Fluid” helps capture some of the contextual nature of my sexual desires, and my sense of personal change over time. But will provide little information to my primary care provider that “lesbian” doesn’t already communicate — with much less room for confusion.

When blogging or speaking informally, I’ll use lesbian, dyke, bi, gay, queer, fluid, or sometimes opt for phrasing that’s less about who I am and more about what I do: “As someone in a lesbian relationship…,” “As someone who’s partnered with another woman …”

Hanne Blank, in her recently-published (long anticipated!) Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon Press, 2012) recounts similar dilemmas of self-identification as the partner of a male-identified person whose markers of sex and gender are, nonetheless, all over the biological map due to having been born with XXY chromosomes. The author of Virgin: An Untouched History returns to historical and cultural notions of human sexuality in an effort to illuminate what we mean when we talk about “heterosexual” or “straight” identity. As with “virgin,” the answer turns out to be murky at best. The concept of an individual whose identity or nature was built, at least in part, around an exclusive attraction to “opposite”-sexed partners and activities, only came into being in relation to the study of non-normative or “deviant” sexual behavior during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even after the term came into common usage, virtually no research has been done — scientific or otherwise — on heterosexual sexuality. We don’t know how the bodies of heterosexuals differ from those of non-heterosexuals, for example. Research on homosexuality suggests there is no marker of sexual orientation on the body, but no one has ever asked the question “How are heterosexual bodies composed?” Scientists studying non-heterosexuality always assume they know the normal against which they are measuring the non-normal. Yet this assumption is never spelled out, and its markers are never articulated. As Blank writes:

Scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this is precisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists (42-43).

The reason why we’ve never inquired into the existence of heterosexuality is that, culturally speaking, it is a category of being that has become commonsensical, so self-evident in our minds that we measure every other sexuality in relation to it. There is power in a category so constructed as simultaneously normative and empty of actual definition. Blank compares heterosexuality to the concept of being not a person of color or not a slut. “Nameless and characterless, the space we can loosely categorize as ‘normal’ is almost completely undefined,” she writes (32):

This is why ‘slut’ and ‘prude, ‘pervert’ and ‘deviant’ all work so well as insults and as ways to police the boundaries of sex doxa [an anthropological term meaning “what everyone knows to be true”]. The labels are effortless to deploy, and hard, even impossible, to defend against … The opposite of ‘slut’ is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa (32).

If there is a weakness in Straight it is the emphasis on marriage and reproduction as signs of heterosexual identity. I understand why Blank draws upon these cultural examples of heterosexual life — both marriage and parenting are more social activities than, typically, sexual behavior. People are far more likely to record instances of the former rather than the latter. So from an historical perspective, research on heterosexuality will end up documenting those outward signs with much more confidence than it will what people actually did with their bits (and how they felt about doing it). Unless people talk about their sexual self-identities, it’s hard to do more than catalog instances in which sexual acts were recorded — and those acts were usually the ones considered deviant, exceptional, worthy or note or censure.

Still, other books have been written in recent years on the history of marriage, and I felt myself starting to skim in hopes of more discussion of sexological research and taxonomy, a more inventive backward reading from those instances of “deviance” toward what people considered not-deviant. Some of that does appear in the pages of Straight, but I found myself wishing Blank’s editor had pushed her to include less of the well-trodden history of marital practice and more of the specifically sexual practices that fell within the bounds of the acceptable. She does argue, at one point, that “penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure that has never, so far as we can tell from the historical record, has never been challenged … the fortunes of all other sex acts and all other sources of sexual pleasure, have varied widely” (124). I would have liked to see that assertion expanded on, to have these boundaries of sexual activity discussed in relation to the notion of sexual identity in historical understanding. In the 1890s, for example, would a husband and wife who practiced cunnilingus and fellatio with one another been categorized as “normal-sexual” in the eyes of the early sexologists? Blank leaves much of that open to further discussion — which may, I admit, have been her intent.

In the end, Blank has written yet another accessible survey of a sexual concept we think we all know and instead, it turns out, we know little about. I hope the liveliness of her prose and the concrete examples she provides of individuals who defy our binary sex, gender, and sexual categories (man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans) will encourage people who may not have thought human sexuality in such complex terms to revisit their assumptions and look at their own identities and behaviors with new, and perhaps more forgiving and expansive, eyes.

booknotes: theorizing twilight

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Theorizing Twilight: Critical Essays on What’s at Stake in a Post-Vampire World, edited by Maggie Parke and Natalie Wilson (McFarland, 2011), is the latest addition to the growing body of work analyzing Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight franchise from a broad range of literary, cultural, psychological, sociological, and political perspectives. To put my own cards on the table up-front, I have read the first three books of the series, as well as skimming Breaking Dawn (once the vampire pregnancy thing entered the picture, I lost patience). In the beginning, I wanted to like these books. At least a little. I’m not totally opposed to the paranormal romance genre, however cliche it can so often be — think Laurel K. Hamilton for reference; more about that series in a minute — and I, like many readers, found the front-and-center treatment of Bella’s sexual desire a initially compelling alternative to the preponderance of sexually passive/dormant female characters in YA fiction. But stepping back and looking at the series as a whole, many disturbing patterns appear in terms of gender roles, sexuality, romance, family relationships, and more. If you’re interested in my previous reflections, see here, here, here, and here. Below I’m going to talk specifically about the newer questions and concerns that came up for me as I was reading Theorizing.

As with any anthology (me: broken record) there are highlights and lowlights depending on your own personal interest in the Twilight phenomenon. I found myself skimming over the several essays that used psychoanalytic and literary critical frameworks, for example, in favor of pieces that chose to consider the interaction of fans with the books and films, or the political messages embedded in the book concerning gender and sexuality. Pieces that hit a particularly high note in my own estimation were Tanya Erzen’s “The Vampire Capital of the World,” Ananya Mukherjea’s “Team Bella,” Ashley Benning’s “How Old Are You?” and Hila Shachar’s “A Post-Feminist Romance.”  Erzen travels to the real-world town of Forks, Washington, to explore the way in which Twilight tourism has affected the town’s economy, identity, and created internal social tension as the residents react in differing ways to the influx of fans. Mukherjea considers “the interpretive work that Twilight fans do with the text,” with particular attention to those fans whom we might think would feel alienated from the texts: self-identified feminists, queer, and non-white readers. Benning’s “How Old Are You?” de-naturalizes the assumptions the series makes regarding age (for example, that ageing and death are something to be feared and combated). She also considers the cultural and political import of classifying the books as “children’s literature” for adolescents, despite the fact the series has a large following among those over twenty-one. And Schachar suggests that Twilight could be fruitfully considered as part of the backlash against feminist interrogations of feminist analysis of gender relationships, and political challenges to male dominance.

I particularly appreciated, throughout this book, the recognition and engagement with the agency of Twilight‘s fans. For the most part, the authors in Theorizing recognize that readers are not passive receptacles for the conscious and unconscious messages of the books, but rather actively engaged in the project of interpreting, analyzing, and appropriating the narratives for their own ends. Those ends are, of course, constrained and influenced, in part, by the culture through which we all move. Our affinities and desires are hardly established in a vacuum. But much of the coverage of Twilight among its detractors has, troublingly, figured its fans as frivolous, foolish, and dangerously susceptible to the troubling messages about gender, sexuality, race, mortality, religion, and more which we see embedded in narrative. Given that the fan base is overwhelmingly made up of women and girls, I worry about how the construction of Twilight‘s fans feeds into our “common sense” assumption that anything coded feminine is inherently inferior. Add to this our similar assumption that anything coded as juvenile/childish is inherently inferior and it’s all too easy to dismiss Twilight fans in some truly unfortunate ways (I’ve been guilty of this myself in the past, and likely will again). I was glad to see relatively little of that in the pages of Theorizing.

The one aspect of Twilight enthusiasm that I was disappointed to see completely missing from Theorizing‘s pages was any serious treatment of the depictions of violent sex that looked deeper than the obvious problem of consent. As my friend Minerva pointed out, when we were talking about this recently, the Twilight saga reads like a “four book ‘dub-con’ fan fic,” since the series is saturated with sexual narratives which depend on dubious consent, if not out-right non-consensual sex and relationships. As a number of Theorizing‘s authors point out, despite the fact that Bella is scripted as a heroine who, through her own strength of will, creates the life she desires, what the language and symbolism of the series makes clear is that Bella’s “choices” are supernaturally pre-determined. She never could have “chosen” any other path, and therefore the choices she makes are not true choices at all, or a Vampire-esque version of Calvinist predestination.

The problem I see in a lot of critical analysis of this dubious consent problem is that it slips into equating the consent issues with the depiction of sexual intimacy as violent, particularly in the context of Bella and Edward’s infamous wedding-night initiation into an active sexual relationship, which leaves the bed destroyed and Bella’s body bruised. Bella insists the rough sex was desired; Edward is appalled by his behavior and backs away from the implications of his aggression. Such a scene would be a perfect opportunity to introduce readers of the series to enthusiastic negotiation and consent in the context of rough sex and BDSM scenarios. Instead, criticism of the scene usually takes an appalled stance on sex that would leave bruises and broken furniture. I can’t help worrying that girls and women who find fantasizing about such scenarios a turn-on will feel shamed for their “wrong” desires, when instead critics could offer them ways of incorporating those fantasizes into non-abusive, consensual sexual intimacy.

It could be fruitful, for example, to contrast Meyer’s depiction of violent sex with other supernatural romance authors who explicitly incorporate notions of negotiation and consent into their narratives. Laurel K. Hamilton, for example, whose Anita Blake series contains many similar elements to Meyer’s Twilight — including a vamp-human-were love triangle — yet offers much more radical solutions to the heroine’s potentially dangerous desires. This isn’t to say Hamilton’s series offers to completely positive alternative to Twilight — there’s a lot one could critique in terms of its depictions of gender, sexuality, relationships, etc., and even simple construction of a plot. But in contrast to Twilight the Anita Blake series does suggest that non-normative sexual desires and relationship constellations can be healthy and nourishing.

I would also have been interested in more sustained analysis of Bella’s monstrous vampire pregnancy, and how one might place it within the gothic/horror tradition, rather than the romance genre (which most critics draw on most heavily in analyzing the narrative elements of the franchise). I’m intrigued by the fact that the novels figure marriage and motherhood as the source of Bella’s ultimate fulfillment and the key to her immortality (*coughcough*Mormon theology*coughcough*), yet present pregnancy and parenthood as a monstrous, body-destroying enterprise. Put together with the horror of ageing and mortality in the series, I think Bella’s experience of pregnancy could be a potentially fruitful gateway into an examination of our culture’s fears of the process of child-bearing, and our fears of women’s reproductive capacity — particularly the changes it wreaks upon women’s bodies.

Theorizing Twilight will be a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the Twilight phenomenon, in fan culture, and in current iterations of gothic, horror, romance literature.

"how women’s studies mattered in my life": a panel discussion

15 Thursday Mar 2012

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On 6 March I participated in a panel presentation/discussion at my alma mater Hope College in celebration of twenty-plus years of women’s studies at the institution (the interdisciplinary minor was formally established in 1992; students had been forming “contract” majors and minors since the early 1980s).

I’m really hoping the college will make the panel discussion available via web video so I can share it with all of you, since the other panelists all had fascinating stories about their coming to feminism and its integration into their personal and professional lives. The questions from the audience were engaged and the panelists answers were diverse and thoughtful. I was honored to be a part of the evening.

At the beginning of the session, each panelist was asked to speak for about ten minutes on the topic “how women’s studies mattered in my life.” Here’s what I had to say.

Tonight, I’d like to share some thoughts about three aspects of my life as a feminist, and how feminism and women’s studies have affected my life. The first is how feminist ideas and politics have brought to my personal relationships, the second is how I incorporate feminist thought and practice in my intellectual and professional life, and third, some thoughts about how I’ve grown as a feminist since graduation.

I’m sure most of the people in this room have a story to tell about their coming to feminist ideas and a sense of how those ideas could help them make sense of their own lives and the world around them. In my family growing up, feminist understandings of gender equality and individual self-determination were more or less taken for granted, and I felt an affinity with feminist activists in history for as long as I can remember. My sense of contemporary, feminist political awareness — the realization that there is still feminist work to be done — came gradually as I struggled during my childhood and adolescence against prejudiced notions of what children and young people are capable of. As I grew from being understood primarily as a child to being understood as a young woman, rigid conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender came to the fore — particularly in peer relationships and in church. I had support in my immediate family to push back against restrictive notions of gender and sexuality — but it was feminism as a philosophical framework and as a community of practice that gave me the support outside my family to articulate and honor my own experiences and desires.

Since my teens, feminism (conceptually) and feminist spaces (materially) have been a space for me to break open ‘common sense’ definitions of love, relationships, human sexuality, and community. Feminism has connected me to global, trans-historical network of people who work not to pass judgment on relationship diversity. We’re all imperfect at this, it’s true, but at least within feminist spaces there is usually a common ground to talk about how monogamy and non-monogamy, parenting and not-parenting, queer and straight relationships, long-term and more casual sexual relationships, can all be ethical, meaningful, and healthy.

Feminist spaces encouraged me to ask “does it have to be this way?” over and over and over again. Even when I didn’t think I had the right to identify as queer (more on that in a minute),  my ties to feminist and queer thinkers and activists became a way for me to explore the possibility of sexual intimacy and family formation in ways that didn’t make me feel claustrophobic or filled with rage. That instead filled me with hope and desire, with expansive generosity, with the sense that there was enough creativity in the world to ensure that everyone’s relational needs could be met — and exceeded.

Feminism encourages me to take ownership of my sexuality and learn how to take pleasure in my body in a culture that is hostile to our embodiment. Being a self-identified feminist is obviously not an instant cure for body insecurity, for fear of being the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong kind of beautiful. But in my experience, a feminist analysis of our culture’s narrow expectations of beauty, sexuality, and health give me an edge in asserting my right to be at home in my physical self. My knowledge and confidence about my body, and the pleasure I can experience as an embodied person, has been hard-won in a lot of ways. And wouldn’t have been as possible, or as rich a journey, without feminism in my life.

My feminism, at Hope College, wove back and forth across the boundaries of personal and academic life. On the one hand, feminist analysis was a way for me to understand the political upheaval around religion and sexuality I experienced here at Hope (in the late 90s). I was politically queer long before I was sexually active, in a same-sex relationship, or had to grapple with how to label myself in a world that demands sexual identification. By the time I entered into my first relationship — with a lover who happened to be a woman — I had a rich history of engagement with feminist and queer literature, political activism, and support networks to draw upon. That history made transition from thinking of myself as “mostly straight” to thinking of myself as someone who was in a lesbian relationship remarkably easy. And I owe the Women’s Studies program at Hope for at least some of that.

In an academic and professional sense, the exploration of gender and sexuality in historical context is at the heart of what I do as an historian. The Women’s Studies program here at Hope was my entre into thinking about women’s human rights as they are connected to broader socio-political struggles against racism, homophobia, economic inequality. Academic feminism is often criticized for being abstract, privileged, and out of touch with the urgent political engagement needed in “real” peoples lives. And I think that’s a critique worth listening to (if you haven’t already, check out the anthology Feminism For Real edited by Jessica Yee). But in my life, college classrooms became one of the places where I wrestled with notions of privilege and with the complicated histories of oppression. And in part because of that, my scholarship will never be entirely divorced from my political or personal selves.

It was through the Women’s Studies program that I became involved in my first full-scale oral history research project, published and presented original research, and began my research on the history of mid-twentieth-century countercultures — an interest I carried with me into graduate school an pursued for my Master’s thesis. While my work as a reference librarian isn’t explicitly related to feminism, gender and sexuality, or social justice issues, I went into library science because I see facilitating equitable access to information as a feminist activity. I get asked a lot whether my “dream job” would be to work at a library with collections more in my field of interest — but I actually prefer (perhaps because of my experience as a liberal growing up in West Michigan?) to work in spaces where feminist-oriented research remains, to some extent, counter-cultural, an exercise in reading against the grain of our collection strengths and thinking about how to come at things slant-wise. To find evidence of gender and the erotic in unexpected places. My years at Hope College taught me that radical ideas and non-normative experiences can be found virtually everywhere.

Political activism in the classic sense isn’t my day job — and that’s okay with me. Post college, the space for feminist thought, discussion, and networking that’s worked best for me has been the virtual world of Internet. Blogging provides me a way to interact with others over issues of gender, sexuality, and social justice in a way that help me avoid burn-out. If I’m having a shitty week, or I’m busy at work, or I can feel myself getting wound up over a really emotionally-fraught issue, I can walk away and engage in self-care — calm down, re-group, and re-engage. On my own blog, I write as much as I want about the issues I’m passionate about, and no one can dismiss me in conversation or bully me into silence by saying “oh, don’t take it so seriously!” or “you think too much.” I’m sure there are people out there who believe I do take things “too seriously” or think “too much.” But I don’t have to allow them to comment on my blog, and regardless of how loud they shout online, they don’t control my online space — I do.

Blogging has also put me in the way of opportunities to participate in feminist scholarship and activism — I’ve done author interviews, attended conferences, been a research participant for a number of studies on human sexuality — one on religion and use of sexually-explicit materials among women,  one on the personal experiences of queer individuals interacting with straight folks and mainstream culture. In 2009 I had the awesome experience of participating in the revision of the relationships chapter of the latest edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Women’s Studies and feminism was a generally positive, inclusive space for me while I was at Hope. Since graduating, I’ve met a lot of folks for whom feminism and Women’s or Gender Studies programs were not welcoming. People who experienced feminist spaces as exclusionary because of their gender identity, their sexuality, their family lives, their concerns about race or class inequalities, their physical or mental health concerns … I’m sure some of you could add to this litany. My partner was told she couldn’t be a feminist because she liked the Terminator movies, and that she was a bad lesbian ‘cause her best friend was a guy.  I believe those people were wrong, but that doesn’t erase the fact that the language of feminism was used, in those instances, as the language of exclusion.

This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped identifying myself as a feminist. In fact, it’s made me more vocal about what I believe feminism is and can be. It’s made me more likely to speak up when I hear people using feminism as a tool to create and enforce us/them, insider/outsider hierarchies. At the same time, over the last ten years, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that feminism, for some people, will never signify intellectual and emotional support for their being in the world the way it does for me. And that that’s okay. I believe feminism is — at its best — for everybody. But I also believe there are many pathways to a more loving, equitable world. As long as I see folks living out the values I name as “feminist” then I’m happy to count them as allies and co-conspirators.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

booknotes: delirium

28 Tuesday Feb 2012

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After hearing Nancy L. Cohen interviewed by Amanda Marcotte recently on the RhRealityCheck podcast, I requested her most recent book, Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America (Counterpoint, 2012), from our local library and spent a day reading through it. Cohen is an historian and journalist whose previous research also took as its topic political history in the twentieth century. Delirium looks at what are popularly termed “the culture wars,” beginning with the advent of the birth control pill and rolling up to the current election cycle — with a particular focus on the politicization of sexuality — both behavior and identity — and gender roles. You can read an excerpt of the opening chapter over at AlterNet.

Cohen’s narrative of sexual politics from 1960 to the present seeks, in some measure, to revise our understanding of the conservative revolution of the late 1970s as one led by white male reactionaries like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Instead, she argues, some of the first — and most successful — sexual counterrevolutionaries were women like Phyllis Schlafly, Lottie Beth Hobbs, and Anita Bryant. These women, like their male counterparts, were opposed to the advancements in gender equality, the changes in (hetero)sexual mores, and the growing visibility of human sexual variety that the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 60s and 70s fought for. In sometimes overwhelming detail, Cohen recounts how political activists and career politicians successfully stopped the Equal Rights Amendment, pushed back advancements made in civil rights for queer citizens, generated moral panics around sexual variation, and stymied the post-Roe landscape of women’s access to sexual health services, especially abortion.

Overall, I felt like Delirium bogged in a blow-by-blow recounting and analysis of presidential campaigns and administrations, from the fall of President Nixon to Barack Obama’s first term. Cohen draws much of her evidence from quantitative polling data and political commentary, which left me wondering how much the understanding of individual Americans support her thesis about who sexual conservatives are and why they support the policies they do. To her credit, Cohen does acknowledge that sexual conservatism, as sociologist Kristin Luker has shown, appears on both sides of the aisle. Moral panic over teenage sexuality and concern-trolling about women’s ability to meaningfully consent to an abortion are equal-opportunity topics for Democrats and Republicans alike. Her narrative, however, mostly charts the sexual conservatism and politicking of Republicans. I waited in vain, for example, for her to talk about feminist anti-porn activism, which often paralleled and intersected with — at least on a policy level — with the work of people with otherwise diametrically opposing political views.

Cohen’s work will be particularly interesting to those who enjoy thinking about strategy of electoral politics and policy negotiations, as well as those who may want a better grip on the broad sweep of sexual politics since the 1960s. However, for scholars and activists well-versed in much of this history, Cohen’s narrative fails to add much of significance to what we already know about our sexual selves in relation to formal politics. That is, that our sex, sexuality, and gender identities and experiences are presently over-determined, or constrained, by the decisions of our elected representatives at the local, state, and federal level.

why I think porn can be positive

25 Saturday Feb 2012

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So I realized, after writing three mammoth posts about how wrong I think Gail Dines is regarding the inherently alienating nature of pornography, that I hadn’t actually spent a lot of time talking about why I find her analysis troubling. I talked in general terms about the sexual subcultures and sexually-explicit materials she was choosing to ignore. But I didn’t talk about why I think sexually-explicit fiction and images can be enriching rather than soul- and society-destroying (as Dines understands them to be).

So this is the post where I talk about why I read and write porn.

Back in the fall, I wrote about the pleasure of porn over at The Pursuit of Harpyness in a book review of the anthology Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica. And to open this post, I want to quote from a couple of passages in that review. Because they pretty much get at the heart of why I think it’s important — vital even! — to represent sexuality and sexual activities in our material culture.

There’s no simple answer to the question: “What am I looking for in porn?” At least, no simple answer for me. Sometimes, I’m looking for erotica that tells me stories about pleasure wholly unlike anything I would ever want in real life: dom/sub relationships, bondage, sensory deprivation, pain. In real life nothing turns me off faster than feeling trapped and out of control of my bodily experience; in erotica few things turn me on more quickly or reliably. Yet catch me on the wrong day and a story about BDSM is going to make me feel claustrophobic — and what I want more than anything is an established relationship, early morning kissing fic in which (as Hanna and I like to put it) “everything is gay and nothing hurts.”

… The joy of knowing and being known. This is my current answer to the question of “why erotica?” I’ve realized that my favorite stories — trappings aside — hinge on that moment of radical acceptance when two (or more) people become, metaphorically and actually, naked before one another — and all of the terror of rejection or fetishization, of being judged and found wanting, washes away in tenderness. Whether it’s an anonymous fuck or a thirty-year relationship, whether being known means being suspended in mid-air and spanked or demands languorous love-making at dawn (or both!), relational sex involves stripping ourselves bare, making ourselves vulnerable, being brave enough to expose our humanity in the presence of someone(s)-not-us.

You can read the whole thing over at Harpyness.

Our culture has an impoverished vocabulary for pleasure and joy. It’s true that we also struggle to put unspeakable pain and grief into words — and people have argued, in fact, that certain types of trauma are literally beyond the act of speech, that is beyond the ability to communicate, to connect, to understand. Due to some personal experiences in my teen years, I did a lot of thinking about the language of trauma and grief and how creative acts, how the creation of art, can help translate the unspeakable into (forever imperfect) speech.

And all of that was incredibly important, and needful. But eventually I noticed something equally troubling — and that was our similar struggle to put unspeakable pleasure and joy into words. What I find almost more troubling, in fact, is the way in which our inability to articulate love, connection, and ecstasy, doesn’t get the same attention as our struggle to articulate the pain, rage, loss, and cruelty. We privilege suffering in artistic expression, while trivializing joy. Yeah, I know this is an over-generalization, and I’m not out to play oppression olympics: both pleasure and pain are fundamental experiences of being human, and both deserve our attention. But since I first started noticing our discomfort with speaking of pleasure and love, I’ve been wondering about the discomfort and its cause. Why are positive experiences somehow less captivating to our cultural imagination than trauma? Is it simply a collective desire to process the fact we’re all walking wounded? Is it that joy and pleasure seem self-evident while grief and pain demand explanation? Do we resent the evidence of other peoples’ pleasure, while seeking solace in other peoples’ pain? Or is there something more self-punishing going on — guilt and shame over experiencing functional relationships, embodiment, contentment, grace?

I realize at this point you probably think I’ve strayed from the topic of porn. But bear with me. Because, see, I’ve been thinking these past two weeks about this moment in the porn debate where Gail Dines, attempting to locate the blame for sexual violence in sexually-explicit material culture, said, “When men become murderers and rapists and bachelors you are compelled to look to the culture for understanding unless you want to go down the hopeless route of believing that men are born wrong” (emphasis mine).

“And bachelors.” In the same breath as “murderers and rapists.”

Keep in mind that I’m coming at the notion of porn as a genre expressing the full range of human potential when it comes to sex. So obviously, yes. There’s going to be pornographic material out there I find troubling. There’s a lot of crap in the culture at large I find troubling. But I think that one passage tells me what a yawning chasm exists between how I think about the possibilities pornography represents and what Dines imagines when she hears the word “porn.” Basically, she thinks that the people who engage with erotica are people who have failed. She understands them as alienated beings, perhaps reaching for human connection but in ways that are fundamentally destructive to creating and maintaining that connection.

She thinks the language we have for sex is the language of violence and alienation. She thinks the only language for sex we have is the language of trauma.

And on that slim spit of land where Gail Dines and I actually agree? If that actually is the vocabulary of sex that Dines has at her disposal? I also think that’s a pretty shit state of affairs.

So I read (and write) porn because I don’t want our vocabulary of intimacy to be limited to loneliness and destruction. 

I read (and write) porn because in my experience, erotica is where people are willing to get naked.  They get naked about what makes them feel connected. They get naked about what it feels like to be a body, grounded in the sensations of touch, taste, hearing, and smell. They get naked about pain and pleasure, and the delicate line that wavers between the two. They get naked about desire, love, want, about what makes us brave enough to open ourselves others, emotionally, physically, what allows us to trust. They get naked about the small details of another person’s being-in-the-world that break your heart.

Sure, there’s shit porn out there. Just like there’s shit detective fiction, and shit made-for-television SyFy original movies. But the best porn? The stuff I’ve discovered and go back to again and again? Yeah, it totally makes me wet in the knickers. Yeah, it makes me hot and cold and so turned on I can’t breathe. Sometimes it also makes me weep for what it struggles to say about connection and disconnection, about feeling lost and coming home. It’s a whole universe of visual and verbal solutions to the struggle we have, in our collective culture, talking about intimacy, vulnerability, nakedness, humanity, and love.

We laugh, as writers of fan fiction, about the tropes and the memes and the win-every-time formulas for getting each pairing together. But at the end of the day, I’m always bowled over by the specificity of another person’s vocabulary for lust and love. Even if it’s not my own, even if it’s the last thing I’m ever going to think is hot, it’s a pleasure to know what other people find pleasurable. Read fan fiction long enough and — far from the commercialized, plasticized, one-size-fits-all Gail Dines imagines to be our only shared vocabulary for sex these days — you discover even in the bad stuff there’s details that will expand your world.

The erotica I read actually works in direct opposition to the messages of sameness Dines believes porn, as a genre, propagates.* The porn I read and view tells me over and over again: Someone out there finds that sexy. Far from making me judge everyone I see by some corporate definition of “sexy,” pornographic materials have opened me up to a world in which virtually everything is sexy to someone. A world in which, as I walk down the street, I can feel myself being less judgmental of peoples’ bodies, less worried for them that they’ll experience rejection — because I know, somewhere out there, there’s someone who sees them as beautiful.

My engagement with erotica is deeply, deeply informed by my feminism and my spiritual practice. I realize that I bring myself to pornographic materials and their potential just as much as Gail Dines does. What I hope, though, is that this sort of feminist, lovingkindness-informed approach to pornography and sexual discourse can begin to offer the anti-pornography folks a new vision for an ideal world. One that isn’t predicated on the eradication of porn but on the creation of awesome porn. One that’s predicated on generating a rich vocabulary of love and lust, of sex and intimacy, of fucking and bondage, of a little pain with your pleasure (if that’s the way you like it), and sexual, sensual variety. As a writer and reader of smutty stories, I’m proud to be involved in co-creating that future.

As a writer and reader of smutty stories, I think that future is a helluva lot closer to now than Gail Dines seems to think.

*Mainstream porn does, often, reify these notions of sexy sameness. As researcher Anne Sabo recently pointed out at her New Porn By Women blog, pornography conveys cultural messages both positive and negative, as does all media. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there is much about the mainstream conception of human sexuality, on the political left as well as on the political right, that I find shamefully lacking. But porn as a medium can assist us in insisting on the truth of human sexual variety. We can use it, are using it, to set the record straight (er … queer?).