The Crotchal Tyranny!
Fear me, for I am the High Queen Crotchula, Withholder of the Sacred Vaginamancy!
So I have had this article sitting open in a tab in Firefox for a while now, waiting for my brain to be ready to be coherent about it. I am, honestly, failing hard. It just blows my mind.
It is an article entitled “Reasons Women Withhold Sex.”
First, let’s talk title: withholding sounds evil. You withhold rent if your landlord turns off your heat. You withhold food if you’re a prison overlord from a horror pulp in the 40s. You withhold services.
I am going to say this, and I’m only going to say it once:
My vagina is not a service.
Astounding, right? Anyways, moving on.
Reason 1: She’s pissed.
A HURR HURR DURR. I see someone has been working hard on this one! Yep, sometimes, when angry at a significant other, we do not get turned on. It’s true! Just like sometimes because there are other things in our mind we do not want to cook, or balance our checkbooks, or solve multivariate calculus equations. Sometimes, the things that are urgently on our mind ARE URGENTLY THERE. So it’s hard to think about other things–including sex.
Reason 2: She’s asserting herself.
…because you are such a jackass that you have shown her the only way she can possibly hold ANY power is through her vagina. Good work. You dug this hole for yourself, so I’m just gonna stand back and laugh, okiedokie?
“If there’s one area of a relationship women think they have control over, it’s sex.”
Truly, it is positively INSANE for us to think that we have the right to decide whether or not something is put inside of our bodies. Consent–it’s totally just a figment of a crazy little woman’s imagination!
Reason 3: She’s manipulating you.
“When no other methods of getting what she wants are working, she might resort to revoking your sex privileges until you agree to what she’s after.”
Now remember, boyfriend, you can only play with the toys if you behave yourself and eat all your vegetables! …Seriously? Seriously? Can we please grow up here?
I think what bothers me the most about this statement is that sometimes it is actually TRUE. Bastions of rationality such as Cosmo encourage women to go on sex embargoes to get things from men, or to get their boyfriends to prove how they “really feel.” People, that is NOT the foundation of a healthy relationship! And in this article, the advice is to just give in and give her what she wants. How about instead of feeding a passive-aggressive cycle, you elect to be the mature one and see what’s going on and try to, y’know, communicate?
No, of course not. Why would we do that when we can continue to use our detachable genitals as bargaining chips? Just stick the ol’ vagina in a tupperware in the freezer till you need it.
Reason 4: She’s bored.
“She could be avoiding sex with you because she’s not enjoying it.”
Okay, article, good work. You have made a valid point. It turns out, dudes, that us ladies do occasionally become involved with you folk for reasons other than sex (it’s been years since I’ve done that, so don’t look at me). And word on the street is that when y0u care about someone, you put up with a lot of shit. Including your boyfriend’s unattractive beer gut, his lack of interest in foreplay, and the fact that he’s just not a good lay, if he even lasts very long. Truly, it is astounding the sort of sexual desserts women will exile them to because the guy is so great in other ways. So yeah, she might actually even actively dislike sleeping with you! But she doesn’t want to hurt your fragile penile ego, because we know how important the majesty of your dick is to you.
Scathing bitchiness aside, it’s true–sometimes couples don’t have sex often because the sex is unsatisfying. It’s the job of BOTH members of the couple to fix this. But dudes, as much as it might be painful to think, when your girlfriend is avoiding sex, instead of assuming that she’s manipulating you or trying to make a point about her power, pause to think when the last time you gave her orgasm was (and remember When Harry Met Sally. Faking: it happens). Think about to what extent you’ve really worried about her satisfaction, and think about whether or not she has been responsive. This is actually probably the BEST problem to have when it comes to lack of sex, because it means you’re not dating a bitch. This can be fixed without someone needing to be kicked to the curb. And fixing it can be FUUUNNN!
Reason 5: She’s tired.
Again, how astute. Yes, sometimes we just want some sleep. No, really. It happens. It happens to dudes, too! I’ve been turned down for sex by partners because they’re tired. It’s kind of part of the modern world–we work hard, we’re busy, we don’t get enough rest, so we’re tired. If you’ve never been too tired for sex, then either your sex requires very minimal energy, which is kind of depressing, or you have an easy life, and I would like to borrow it.
Although, a note from this section: “Or, you could be truly unselfish and devote your time entirely to her pleasure for one night, making her more likely to want to return the favor another time.”
Yeeeeeep. That about says it all. You don’t devote your time to pleasing your significant other because you like to make that person happy–you do it in hopes that it will be reciprocated in the future.
Fun trivia: when I’m with a guy, I like sucking his dick because I like making him happy. I’m not getting turned on by it because I’m gleefully thinking “Oh boy, oh boy, now he pretty much HAS to eat me out!” No, I’m thinking about how much I like satisfying my partner and how hot it is to hear him breathing hard and moaning. I really have a hard time believing that I’m the only one like that.
Reason 6: She’s cheating.
I can’t really argue that. I find cheating abhorrent from either sex, so I won’t even begin to make an argument for the woman in this case.
Reason 7: Playing games.
It’s a good thing I don’t actually own an xbox or Playstation, because I’d probably pass up sex pretty often so that I could try to beat that level. “Sorry sweetie, I can’t come to bed yet, I’ve decided to turn to the Dark Side so I’m using my Force powers to toss Jawas at stormtroopers. UTINNI!”
Oh. Oh wait, they don’t mean those kinds of games.
“Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it.”
Yeah, gotta keep those bitches in line. Don’t they know that vaginas belong to the MENS and that they can’t be ALLOWED to keep them away? Jeez. Next time your woman tries to deny you access to the vagina that is rightfully yours, squirt her with a bottle of water or smack her on the nose with a newspaper. When pets misbehave, they can’t be allowed to get away with it!
“It’s pretty clear it’s the one thing that most guys can’t live without and that they’ll do pretty much anything to keep it coming on a regular basis.”
Ah yes, the “men are slaves to their penises and have zero cognitive capacity beyond what their penis is kind enough to allow them” argument.
DUDE-FOLK. YOU HAVE BRAINS. I SWEAR. I KNOW IT. You aren’t just penis-transport-mechanisms. You have free will and the ability to think rationally and make decisions for yourself and all kinds of neat things! As much as I love the word “vaginamancy,” it isn’t actually possible for a woman to control you with her vagina unless you let her.
Please. Please stop this bullshit. I am so sick of hearing about how men are powerless in the face of sex and vaginas because they just WANT IT SO BADLY, and women are sex-hating man-manipulating lumps of frigidity.
I seriously do not understand why people continue to bother with trying to have relationships when this is the sort of bullshit that we are being programmed with. Everything about that article made me not want to be a woman, and not want to date a man.
Congratulations, Fox. I think you have turned me gay.
I Would Like to Play Videogames With You
Really, I would. I love playing videogames (though I only first picked up a controller about four years ago) and, despite the newness of my gaming geekery, have been some form of geek for basically all my life.
Here’s the thing about being a girl geek–you’re kind of a hot commodity. This is becoming less and less true as girls flock to geek culture in greater numbers (fuck yeah, ladies!) but nonetheless, the fact that in eighth grade my best friend and I wrote a song entitled “Take Back Your Tribble” while writing character sheets on the floor of a hallway at a convention seems to make me a target. Specifically, usually a target of lust.
There is a stereotype that geeky men are all socially awkward and incompetent. As a target of geekboy adulation, I’ve seen this many times, whether it’s being groped while in costume, awkwardly stared at or followed around the game shop (look buddy, if you want to ask me what I’m buying a set of gaming dice for, just do it! I’ll be happy to tell you about my level 12 half-elf rogue, but if you keep standing one row away from wherever I am and breathing heavily, I am going to roll a saving throw to leave), or simply listening to the chortling and exclamations of “huh huh huh, GIIIIRRRRLLL show us yr tits” on xbox Live. But here’s the thing–honest to god, it isn’t all that NORMAL. Geeks can be racist, misogynist, socially awkward, narcissistic, anti-social, jackasses just the same as any other demographic. Just the same as any other demographic, they can be sweet, funny, smart, multi-faceted, generous, caring, and respectful. I’ve seen plenty of each.
The concept of GameCrush just blows my mind.
I think playing videogames together is an AWESOME date (order a pizza and let’s go fragging together; fuck that fancy restaurant and a movie bullshit. I think our ability to succeed in a co-op mission demonstrates our compatibility much better than our ability to sit next to each other in a dark movie theater) but I’m a little weirded out by this concept of paying to play videogames with a girl.
After my remarks the other day about how I don’t actually stand against the sex trade, I know that it seems out of place for me to be creeped out by something that is far tamer and less invasive to a female than the sex trade. But I am a geek just as much as I am a feminist, and the GameCrush concept offends my inner geek.
C’mon people. Must we typecast geeks forever as bumbling basement-dwelling pasty pudgy losers who can’t interact with females on their own? Can we stop just assuming that A) geeks are all boys who are desperate to interface with a real, honest-to-god vagina-owner and B) said geeks are incapable of doing so? Also, why is this a one-way service? Why must guys pay while ladies get paid? Believe me, geek girls can be incredibly shy as well. Some are pasty and pudgy and awkward and live in a basement and can’t talk to boys. It’s true! It’s all true! OH THE HORROR.
Soylent geeks are people!
Seriously. Let’s stop acting like geeks are some fringe part of society, some creepy serial killers, and that they’re just men. Girls don’t need the inducement of money to play videogames, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like GameCrush actually drive a large number of the shy, self-conscious geek girls away from gaming, or at least away from online gaming. Most geek guys don’t need an online service connected to their xbox to help them talk to girls.
Instead of turning girls into commodities in the gaming and geeking world, let’s make them welcome participants. Gaming isn’t about what you look like or what gender you are or how popular you are. Gaming brings people together and forms communities (whether it’s something as small as friendships formed over the D&D table up to something as huge as the PAX and new PAX East conventions (btw, Tycho and Gabe, thanks for PAX East! :D)). Let’s stop segregating those communities. Cutting the group into men-who-pay and girls-who-get-paid automatically forms a division. It reinforces the stereotype that girls can get a free ride from sucker boys just because we have boobs, that guys deserve a girl’s time and attention because they have money, and that geeks are socially incompetent losers who can only get with the opposite sex when there’s money involved.
Geeks, rise up! We are bigger and better than this!
Happy birthday, Nessie!
Well, I’m a little early, but I’d like to wish Nessie a happy birthday. Her official birthday is actually March 17th, 2006, but in light of this amazing article about contraception on The Sexist, I just have to make her birthday post a little early.
Nessie is my birth control, so named because like the Loch Ness monster, she lurks in the deep dark places. I have a Mirena IUD (intra-uterine device), which remains in my uterus for 5 years while steadily releasing eensy weensy amounts of the hormone levonorgestrel (it’s okay–I can’t pronounce it either!). It works on multiple levels to help prevent pregnancy and is incredibly effective.
I’ve been on and off of some form of hormonal birth control since I was 15. When I first stopped taking the pill at 18, largely because I could not afford to keep paying for it each month, I discovered exactly how much the hormones had been gravely fucking with me. I was an emotional, neurotic mess with bad skin and some extra pounds that I couldn’t shake no matter how unhealthy I let my eating habits get. I had no sex drive and I was uncomfortable with and disgusted by my own body, despite my burgeoning feminist tendencies.
I am convinced that the birth control pill is one of the biggest shackles we as women are burdened with. There is a huge lack of education surrounding birth control that leads to a lot of misinformation or simple ignorance. People refer to “the pill” as if it is something monolithic when it’s not. There’s dozens of different kinds of pills, from tri-cyclens (that give a different dose of hormones each week) to monophasic (a steady dose over the entire active pill cycle) to low-dose pills to a variety of hormone blends, and of course there’s an army of generics of all of those. Plus there’s an arsenal of non-pill options, such as the patch, the shot, the ring, and my personal choice, the IUD (which comes in two flavors–the Mirena, with a low dose of hormones, and the ParaGard, which is hormone-free).
Putting hormones into our bodies fucks us up. We’re people, not science experiments. Every version of every one of those contraception options that I listed will muck up your body chemistry in some way, and very rarely is it for the better (some women get slightly bigger boobs and/or clearer skin while on HBC, but I don’t think the trade off is worth it. Your mileage may vary, though). Fucking with our bodies leads to all kinds of unpleasantness. It’s a way of giving up our independence (and I will admit that my IUD does include a very low dose of hormones, so I’m guilty as well; the ParaGard would not have been a healthy choice for me, however) and letting someone else–drug companies, among others–control us. Think about it–that PMS? That’s not your PMS. That PMS is brought to you by Pfizer. Kinda creepy, when you think about it (especially considering how much shit you’ll then take for having PMS in the first place when it’s all “DUDE, I am riding a fucking hormone tsunami because of this bitty little pill that I take because you don’t like to wear a condom cause it like cramps your baller style or whatever the fuck it is!” Man, not cool).
I hear from women all the time about all these issues they’re having–their bodies are behaving weirdly, their emotions are out of control, they’ve lost their sex drive, they’re depressed, etc. The majority of the time, we can trace the problem back to their HBC. I’ll give them a quick little tutorial on all the different kinds of birth control and suggest which option might be better (even just switching off the generic of your pill can have a huge impact, believe it or not). Everyone’s body responds to hormones differently, but here’s the hitch–no one tells us about this shit. No one warns us that just because our BFF is on Yaz and it is fucking the shit for her and she’s having orgasms that make the Fourth of July look boring, we might get on Yaz and discover ourselves 20 lbs heavier and without any sex drive to speak of. On principle, I hate treating my body like a hormone cocktail shaker (unless, of course, I’m about to be lapped up by James Bond. Then we can talk). However, I understand the draw of traditional HBC for many women. I just wish we had more education on the veritable cornucopia of anti-baby drugs out there. This is America, land of plenty. You are not married to your birth control, and even if you are, shit girl, get a divorce if that crap isn’t loving you!
When I get the opportunity, I encourage women to experiment with not being on birth control at all. I got my IUD, which admittedly has a low dose of hormones, after a year and a half of being completely off hormonal birth control. I spent a month or two doing thorough research of my options and looking at the decision from all angles before deciding on the Mirena (depending on how sharing I’m feeling, on Nessie’s birthday I may post in depth about the research I did and my motivations for my choice, as well as more about my experience as an IUD user). Most women get big round eyes and go, “But then we’d have to use condoms!”
Awwww HELL NO I do not ever want to hear that kind of horrified response to condoms!
I love dudes who wear condoms. The quickest way to dry my out like the Sahara is try to avoid using a rubber when things are getting hot and heavy. In order to make sure that any excuse a dude can possibly try to pull is utterly null and void, I actually keep a condom in my purse, a practice that I wish more ladies would get into. There’s no real reason for a guy not having a condom, but sometimes they just don’t. And we’re the ones who are stuck with the babybakin’ ovens snug inside our pelvises, so really, it couldn’t hurt to carry a condom just in case. That doesn’t make you a slut–that makes you responsible. And responsible is sexy.
However, on the topic of condoms, it’s really astounding to me how rarely they are used. One of the comments on the above linked article remarks, “You can turn on the tv, and find a Trojan condom ad usually everyday of the week. I’m sure if you took a poll of men, about 100 percent of the male respondents would know what a condom is.” This is true. You can see a lot of ads for Trojans. They feature things like CGI pigs in clubwear.
That doesn’t tell viewers jack shit about how to use a condom. And that’s what’s important–the basic concept of the condom is self explanatory, and yet I can assure you, as someone who spent a summer as a peer health educator for Planned Parenthood (complete with wooden penis and day-glo magenta demo condoms) that in reality, very few people know how to use a condom. There’s the whole issue of putting it on right side out, for starters. There’s the matter of remembering to pinch the tip. There’s that whole rolling thing. Seriously guys, it’s boggling. I’ve saddled up a wooden faux-peen over and over for demos and this summer I had my first experience of applying a condom to a real live dude–holy shit! It’s way different and super scary! No joke, I was afraid I was gonna break him. Not the condom. Him. Talk about performance anxiety!
So I have a lot of sympathy for people who don’t even have a passing familiarity with the theory of condom use, let alone any sort of in-depth knowledge. Dudes and gals, it’s okay–there is not a goddamn thing instinctive about using a condom, and they are that weird color, you’re making a dude’s otherwise pretty sexy instrument look like it’s about to go SCUBA diving to boot. I understand. It’s uncomfortable stuff, especially with a new partner.
But in all the world, there ain’t nothin’ like a condom when it comes to being safe. My IUD is, granted, a more reliable form of birth control, but babies, believe it or not, are not necessarily the biggest, baddest things in the world. There’s STDs and that shit is SCARY. That can fuck you up. That can kill you.
And that’s what I advocate that ladies experiment with taking some time off from hormonal birth control–because no matter what, you should be using condoms basically all the time anyways. Of course, when we get into committed relationships with set sexual understandings, it can be fun and romantic (and, let’s face it, sexy) to throw condoms to the wind. After, of course, both partners getting tested for STDs. However, being on birth control is NOT ENOUGH to keep you safe for one night stands, casual dating, etc.
Unless you know for absolute certain (and, for the record, just because someone is a virgin doesn’t mean they are disease-free!), always use a condom. If nothing else, that just makes it that much better when you finally hit the point in your relationship that you aren’t using them anymore. And it makes your life that much better, because you don’t have any nasty surprises.
The article on The Sexist is great–funny, far less wordy than I am, and interesting. However, a lighthearted enjoyable read can lead to some heavy stuff. Birth control is heavy stuff, and it isn’t given nearly the attention it deserves in our world.
Educate yourself. Educate your friends, no matter their gender. This is really important.
Circumcision as genital mutilation?
I don’t have much of an opinion on circumcision. I don’t subscribe to any religious beliefs that mandate circumcision, and I’ve been with men of both varieties and it didn’t really make a difference to me. I’ve never become particularly interested in the topic, so I haven’t bothered to learn much of anything about it.
However, Massachusetts will be voting on a bill on March 2 that would make illegal any “genital mutilation” of children under the age of 18. It would outlaw circumcision, without any exceptions granted for religious purposes.
My first instinct is simply that this can’t be legal–freedom of religion is one of the major rights, which this bill would be flagrantly contradicting. On the other hand, there’s also the right to bodily integrity.
The thing is, I firmly stand against female genital mutilation, and as soon as you start making laws that apply to only one gender, you stand on shaky ground. It becomes easier and easier to undermine something the more stipulations you put on it.
Admittedly, I don’t suppose we have a very high rate of FGM in Massachusetts. (Then again, now that I’ve said that, I will probably regret it, as I will discover depressing statistics or something.)
I don’t know. I can’t really come to a decision on where I stand about this issue, but it’s certainly an interesting one to turn over in my head. Again and again and again. There’s a lot of ways to look at it, and a lot of issues interconnected with it. I’ll keep thinking on it.
Bitches Get Stuff Done 