Huh

Will Wilkinson, one of my favorite libertarian bloggers, on masculinity in America.

To my mind, too little attention has been paid to reconsidering ideals of manhood in the age of equality. Since I was a teenager, I’ve found old-school machismo pathetic and somehow irrelevant to the problem of becoming a man. Without even knowing what or why it was, I was heavily influenced by gay culture, which provided me, and many other straight young men, a wide variety of templates for manhood that are at once unmistakably masculine, playfully ironic, aesthetic, emotionally open, and happily sexual. You can be manly and care about shoes!!! I’ll confess that I used to periodically regret my heterosexuality because there seemed to be greater scope for constructing a distinctive and satisfying male identity within gay culture. I think that’s telling. And the virulent homophobia that remains in most American dude subcultures has cut most young men off from the possibility of modeling their manhood after any of the delightful variety of types available to the homophile. And that really doesn’t leave them with much to work with.

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/08/28/the-menaissance-and-its-dickscontents/

Intriguing. I've certainly found the process of constructing an identity greatly aided by not buying into heterosexist culture (when reading the article linked in Wilkinson's post, I thought more than once- "I'm so glad I'm not normal), but I've never heard it expressed in quite this way. Fascinating stuff.

Intellectual Ammunition

Try bringing up this study to anyone who buys into the hackeneyed pop psychology explanations of BDSM: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24238131-2,00.html

AN unusual sex survey has found that Australians who enjoy bondage and discipline are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise "normal" sex.

The research showed 2 per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role play.

And contrary to commonly-held stereotypes, they are not doing so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are "sexually deficient" in some way, according the study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales.

"Our findings support the idea that bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a minority," Associate Professor Juliet Richters and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The findings showed that it was more common among gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and that participants were more likely to have been more sexually adventurous in other ways.

"However, they were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious," said Prof Richters, author of the book Doing It Down Under.

In fact, men who take part may be happier, with results showing they score significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men.

The researchers did not study why this was, but suspect it might simply be that they're more in harmony with themselves because they're into something unusual and are comfortable with that.

Prof Richters says the findings go against professional views of BDSM.

"People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation," she said.

There was also an assumption, mostly among the general public, that people involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, "and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused".

She said she hoped the results would help change these stereotypes.

Apparently Tim Tebow is a virgin

There are many possible angles to attack this story from, but I'm not interested here in the hero worship of athletes, the appropriateness of asking such a prying question, or our fascination with the sex lives of athletes. I do want to talk about how this fits into the mythic Tebow: thanking Jesus for winning the Heisman trophy, his ministry in prisons, his overseas proselyting, helping with circumcision, and generally his status as percieved upstanding guy, the sort of guy who is faithful and immune to the pleasures of the flesh, the sort of guy that chose to stay in his room playing a party game isntead of hitting the town when he had a night in Atlantic City.

I will be honest: when I heard the news, I felt a little threatened and defensive in a completely irrational way. Here's me, a philosopher instead of an athlete, a heathen, queer, perverted, a dire existential threat to traditional values- and someone whose prowess on the field I admired greatly, who seems to have the respect of everyone but opposing SEC teams- showing yet again that he is not me, or anywhere close to me in conceptual space. I could not help but hear, in the effusive praise of the media (when they weren't excoriating the reporter who asked the question), that he is a virgin and I should be too.

But why should I feel that way? Tebow never condemned people who make different choices than he does, and he doesn't seem the sort to judge. I have to own that the response consistent with my values would be admiration, not because chastity is inherently valuable, but because undergoing such privations for the sake of your values is admirable; much like vegetarians, I can respect his dedication even as I disagree with his values.

I hate to leave it on a hackeneyed note, but I suppose we've all got to learn, myself included, that everyone has different forms of flourishing, and we ought not interpret respect for someone else's lifestyle as derision for our own. Certainly there are those who wish to remain celibate before marriage, or whose natural instincts incline them toward intimacy only in certain contexts; if Tebow gives these people a better way to live up to their values, or makes them feel more comfortably acting in the way that feels most in tune with their selves, he's doing good for the world.

Dear BDSM organizers who make their events aged 21+

Fuck you with a rusty shovel.

Sincerely,
A hot 20-year old

BDSM and Christianity

Found this picture of a tattoo of St. Teresa of Avila from Trinity the other day, and it reminded me that medieval Christianity produced a whole lot of writers and thinkers that, looking at it from my perspective, articulated and understood the masochistic experience in ways far more eloquent than anywhere else I've seen it. St. Theresa. John Donne. It's no accident that the BDSM community has glommed on to a lot of the symbolism and implements of the period, most notably from the flagellants.

And while the masochistic and submissive experiences may be different, I don't think Christianity's kinship to kink is accidental. There's a lot of places you can take Far from it: I don't believe that I would be submissive if I had not been raised Catholic. Fundamentally, Christ made submission noble, and made the submissive a hero.

My supreme role model bore his love in tribulation and his purity in agony, his suffering was virtue and the ultimate expression of his all encompassing love was to die on the cross. If the height of my romantic ideal became one who was willing to suffer for the good of their beloved, it has much to do with this narrative. If we English speakers correctly group together so many different concepts under "love," it should not surprise us that caritas can morph into philia can morph into eros.

My savior preached the nobility of service and the excellence of humility. Despite being the stainless man, who embodied all the virtues and having the essence of the divine within him, despite being the perfect human being, Christ was not too proud to get on his knees and wash his disciples' feet.

More importantly than that, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The world is turned upside down by the divine revelation; the wisdom of the mighty is the folly of God. The downtrodden can take the mantle of righteousness.

ἔχεις μοι εἰπεῖν, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἆρα διδακτὸν ἡ ἀρετή

Can unchosen character traits be considered unvirtuous or blameworthy?

The inimitable Bitchy Jones on forced fem once again:

"The best of these is probably ‘Women wear trousers!’ Because when you’re trying to deconstruct and evaluate what the position in femdom of forced feminisation as a way of diminishing men and what kind of ideas about men and women it reflects and endorses there really is nothing like an irrelevant non-sequitur to stop you in your misguided tracks."

It's got Nine Deuce's acrid tang. The "there's some sort of thing wrong with you. It's not your fault (ND'd blame it on patriarchy, god knows what Bitchy would blame it on, but in any case, it's clearly not an aspect of the will), and it may not even be immoral because it's not hurting anyone. But it's not noble. It demonstrates a character flaw, something corrupted within you. Maybe for souls such as yourself, giving in to such desires is the best decision in a bad situation, but don't pretend like it's a good thing."

I've always felt that such an attitude was decidedly unhelpful. Beating yourself up over desires never seemed to do anyone any good. Much better to accept yourself for who you are, right? Much better to find something liberating in being different from the norm, rather than be paralyzed by it.

Yet I have to own that all of those are utilitarian defenses. If one were to consciously adopt beliefs based on expected return, they might work. Perhaps the subconscious does so, but now that they're arrayed in this fashion, it seems an insult to the truth to leave it at where I'd rather the truth be.

Yet it also seems horridly unfair to condemn a fundamentally unchosen trait. The only coherent morality has always seemed to me to only be concerned with acts of the will. Morality consists of correct action, not correct thought.

The difficulty here may be professing a morality based only on the harm principle while still harboring attachments to other commonly accepted principles of morality (the framework I've been exposed to divides traditional morality into the categories of Harm, Purity, Loyalty, Fairness, and Respect for Authority). Such an attachment to the will makes sense in a heavily consequentialist, utilitarian morality based only on the harm principle, but if you're going to accept purity as any basis of morality, purity of thought seems just as important as purity of actions. In that sense, the difficulty may only be an insufficiently rigorous application of my moral principles to my moral intuitions. I, for example, am repulsed by eating dogs, but I'm also able to overcome my revulsion long enough to realize that my moral intuition in this case is invalid. Perhaps then I need only return to my first principles: clearly no one is being directly harmed by people doing what Bitchy describes, so there's no problem. Describing something as bad but not immoral seems like a cop out: you're trying to have your cake and eat it too by indulging a bad moral intuition while trying to soothe your intellect that knows such condemnation is not justified.

Maybe the force of such a case indicates that I ought to examine my principles. If that's the case, well, it's not something I'll get done in the scope of one post!

Rape culture and the anti-gay movement

From the ever awesome Dw3t-Hthr over at safe spaces:

"The primary contributor to "rape culture" is the idea that people -- particularly women -- are not competent definers of their own sexuality. That they 'really want it' even when they don't, or that they only need to be instructed to become fully sexual in the manner their instructor desires, or that their decisions about sexuality in one set of circumstances mandate that they make the same decision in different circumstances."

Amen.

But I'd like to use this as a springboard for another conversation that's likely to piss a few people off.

The truth of the matter is, I see a lot of this same mentality in the excoriation of the ex-gay movement. I stand by my position that reparative therapy for homosexuality is in all cases unnecessary, and in most cases traumatic and a poor idea for all involved. But whenever I hear people claiming that the ex-gays can't truly have become heterosexual, I see the same old colonization of other people's sexualities. We queers have a theory, and damnit if we're not going to make every person fit into it in some way or another. I may disagree with their decision, but claiming that deep down they're actually homosexual, that they can't have become heterosexual- well, it strikes me as saying that they're not competent enough to define their own sexuality.

I understand the concerns many people have. Obviously there's considerable pressure to become an ex-gay. Obviously the proponents of the ex-gay movement are doing the same colonization of other's experiences that I'm decrying here. But I think that neither coercion nor oppression invalidates free will. And that neither of those things compromises the individual's perogative to name their own experiences.