Secular Apostasy

I have been blogging in a very intermittent and unsteady fashion for the last yearish now. Additionally, I have a few other spots on the internets where I post comments and such more than a bit. However, for the time of official blogging, I have pretty much stopped writing fiction. Every couple of months I look at my archives and see how long it’s been since I even edited a story or a poem, and it has been a very long while for me.

I used to write a lot of fiction. Even when I thought I wasn’t writing terribly much, I was still knocking out a bit of fiction here and there. But since I have become attached to writing nonfiction, I’ve found I cannot get back to the place that spawned my fiction.

When I wrote fiction, it was much the same. I struggled with nonfiction, rarely getting further than note-taking, much less actual intros or drafts. I should love to find a balance, and write fiction– there are so many tales I haven’t finished the telling of, people and worlds and places I long to return to and stand on the soil of, tasting the texture of another reality than the one I dwell in.

But I feel overwhelmed by nonfiction. There’s so many research studies to analyse and critique, so many laws to deconstruct and list the flaws of, so many opinions and views to put out where others can see and think on them as they will. So much religious analysis and apologetics to write. There’s a lifetime of nonfiction, dozens of books worth of material. I have gotten so grounded in the wonders of this world I can’t get back to the ones inside my head to write about fictional people and things.

Certainly, I hope I can return to other worlds than this one, but in the meantime I will stay here and get back to posting nonfiction on various topics of interest.

Since this is my 100th post, I will post a meme. I got tagged by the evocative Natalia, and so here that goes.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

REM- Losing My Religion
Front242- Headhunter
Elvis Costello- I Dreamed of My Old Lover Last Night
Cabaret Voltaire- 24-24
Sade- Hang On To Your Love
Bush- Mouth
Elvis Costello- Distorted Angel (Tricky remix)

This is current to the fortnight, which is about all I can attest to when it comes to songs I like.

I will tag Shannon, the Field, Joan Kelly, WOC Phd, Sudy, Problem Chylde, and Aaminah.

Any sufficiently lengthy science fiction series will degenerate into sexual wish fulfillment for the book’s author.

The canonical examples of Shoeboy’s Law are the Dune series, which includes such things as Amazons from space enslaving the human race with Tantric sex and the Ringworld series, which pretty much degenerates into the hero having sex with bearded alien women (aka “rishathra“). Other examples include the Foundation series (in which the Asimov stand-in upsets one of the other main characters by having Too Much Sex with the sexually insatiable telepath character) and the Rama series, where the anal beads come out around the third book and one is left wondering how exactly they got into space with the rest of the cast.

Here are some links to wiki entries for the first book or so of each series.

Dune
Ringworld
Foundation
Rama

I will update this with other sci-fi series that suit if it comes up.

Title says it all. There are plenty of other authenticity cults, such as the one that says you have to have been a drug addict or regular user to write about it. Or the one that says you have to have given birth to write about it. And so on.

It’s particularly frustrating with sexwork because all those authenticity police spend a lot of time invalidating the experiences of anyone who doesn’t share their opinions. This is true on both the pro and anti sides of the matter. Journalists interview their subjects, and that’s good enough to call news. Why can’t that be good enough when talking about the vagaries of sexwork? Why are the only ones allowed to speak ones with experience WHO ALSO AGREE WITH YOU?

It’s such a bizarrely modern notion that ‘ya gotta live it to talk about it’. These same authenticity cops are happy enough to pontificate on many other things they haven’t directly experienced. And that’s the whole problem with authenticity policing, or with first-person-only (who agrees enough with mememe) as the sole arbiter of validity.

I thought I was going to say more about this, but that covers it.

Sometimes I question the right to abortion. I don’t question it out of jealousy or resentment or a desire to keep women ‘in their place’. I question it because I question a societal circumstance that leads women to believe that an instance of pregnancy is a disaster that must be dealt with by obliteration. It bothers me that in a supposedly “civilised” cultural environment, women can still feel that something is wrong with giving birth in itself, that there’s a problem if they happen to be fertile enough to provide some continuation for the human race.

I can’t chalk it all up to the nihilism of middle class+ white women. This is something deeper and more constricting in American and Western European society. This isn’t a thing that can be blamed on women alone, the feeling that their fertility is a fault to be papered over with abortion.

This strange and latently nihilistic undercurrent in those social fabrics makes the question of reproductive freedom a particularly complicated one, because so often in the MSM it is defined as the right to obliterate life and not much else. But there is more to reproduction than restricting one’s reproductive abilities and calling that freedom. There’s also the freedom to bring life into being regardless of circumstance, to not be told you should have been sterilised. There’s the freedom to learn how to prevent conception, and contemplate an approach to sex that isn’t based around male-specific fertility (that is, the idea of continuous fertility).

Most especially, there’s reconfiguring the social structures so that it isn’t a ‘disaster’ when a woman does get pregnant (or when she gets pregnant with certain kinds of fetuses). To me, the idea of reproductive freedom involves eradicating this fear of pregnancy, of embracing the true nature of female fertility (which is yeah, different than male fertility), and mostly of creating a situation where women can start with avoiding conception first so that surgical, hospital-based abortion is the last resort.

Abortion isn’t comfortable or fun, and I believe it can be reduced while still allowing women to choose how they’ll plan their families (or plan not to have them, in those instances). This brings us back to fertility awareness and the desperate need for it to be a primary element of reproductive freedom, not an unspoken, misinformed rumor.

Reproductive freedom to me should be about informing women so totally about their bodies that they don’t have to have abortions most of the time but can instead simply not conceive. I don’t care if some doctors lose money over that. I just hope I and others can find a way to get more accurate information out to the vast array of women who just have almost no information about their bodies. I guess I feel knowledge is freedom, then access.

It has been a mystery to the American medical establishment why black American women got fibroids at rates far higher than white American women– some estimates run as high as 70%. It’s also been a mystery why black American men get higher rates of prostate cancer.

It’s the Vitamin D (or lack thereof). Unsurprisingly, the amount of Vitamin D one gets in a multivitamin is formulated for white people, who have far more ability to generate vitamin D in parts of America outside the South, where there’s less sunlight per day. And while many black Americans live in the South, there are plenty not living in the South, some so far north that they can’t make their own vitamin D (and the multivitamins don’t contain enough). Additionally, black Americans are concentrated in urban areas where pollution also affects how much sunlight can get to them to absorb and make vitamin D from.

Vitamin D is the precursor to hormones women and men need to avoid fibroids and some cancers.

There’s a mythos among fibroid sufferers (esp. black American fibroid sufferers) that the reason African women and men don’t get fibroids and prostate cancer at the crazy rates of American blackfolk is because of ‘traditional diets’. No, it’s primarily that African immigrants come from countries where they lived at a latitude to generate enough Vitamin D. Secondarily, it may be that their preferred ethnic diet is heavy in Vitamin D– but there are a lot of African ethnicities that immigrate over, and there is a fair variety in all the different diets.

There is finally starting to be a bit of research done (will update this post with the link as soon as I can find it) grudgingly suggesting that yeah, getting little black American girls vitamin D might help them not have fibroids, which is one way to avoid the disproportionate hysterectomies the medical establishment loves to inflict on black women. Plus, black men might not be dying at 55 from ’stress’, but from not having enough vitamin D as little boys, putting them at higher risk for various cancers and even high blood pressure– possibly more so than ‘bad diet’ or ’stress’.

I do think black Americans have more stress exposure in their lives and that it affects the health negatively, but it is quite appalling how ’stress’ is used as a catchall to avoid investigating root causes (like this vitamin D issue, which involves some very cheap solutions to help people be healthier) when it comes to blackfolk.

Just an increase from 500 IUs of vitamin D per day to 2500-5000 IUs per day could be the key to saving a lot of black American women from unnecessary surgery and outright saving a lot of black American men. It would be bitterly excellent if millions could be helped by something so cheap as a bottle of vitamin D tablets.

Prostitution (and for that matter, all the rest of sexwork) isn’t the world’s oldest profession. In fact, the winknudge aspect of that whole association is remarkably non-respectful of womens’ ability to get along in the world using something other than sexual service. In the history of the world, women have been valued for far more than how much sex they can provide for cash in hand. The idea that in tiny twenty family villages there was a village hooker is just appalling. In such a tiny economy it doesn’t even make sense to have what is generally considered prostitution.

Prostitution fundamentally requires an at least minimally urban, specialised culture to sustain the idea of a woman having to support herself by having sex with the town’s men. In a foraging group, it’s not worth the trouble. The woman will get fed or get thrown out without having to have sex for the food. The fact that a society has to get pretty advanced to even have a village large enough to support a ‘town whore’ means prostitution is not the oldest profession, not even in jest.

I just get tired of hearing that transactional sexuality is the ‘real’ norm for sexuality– which is the primary underlying subtext in this ever-favored narrative. Women were engaged in plenty of other professions aside from prostitution historically. Which isn’t to say women’s lot has been perfect in the past or anything, just that it’s incredibly misleading to pretend that prostitution is what all women *would* do even if they all do not.

That’s another little implication. Of course, I still hold the oldest profession is murder for hire, and there’s less to dispute there comparatively. Anyway, it’s one of my little triggers, one might say.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%2011:5;&version=47

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”

This is the kind of Bible verse cherrypicked by science-worshipping atheists to demonstrate that Christians are inherently opposed to science. Because in that worldview, humanity has magically come to a complete understanding of all bodily processes. Actual science reporting shows otherwise, but that is generally not the thrust of such discussions.

I look at a verse like that and I realise that science is a perfectly fine complement to Christian faith– it illuminates aspects of God’s glory and creation, without usurping His role as Creator. While we as humans can know the processes of fertilisation and pregnancy, we don’t know why some eggs get fertilised and why some don’t. We don’t know why some women can easily get with child, while others cannot even in their late teens and early twenties. We don’t know why most zygotes and embryos never make it to fetal stage.

We can describe what happens when things go well, but science is no help as to why things do not. And I appreciate this little note that we can never truly know, understand, comprehend all that God has made of us and for us and around us. It reminds me that pride is foolish, especially pride in science, which only tells you how little you know the more you study it in any specialised aspect.

In agreeing to participate in any form of sexwork, one is agreeing to rules and roles that are demarcated by society. They are rules that can be bent a little here and there, but it’s deceptive to claim sexworking is a transgression or flouting of social conventions. Sexwork is part of the social fabric in most post-agricultural societies, and as part of the fabric has rules and mores one is supposed to follow.

I won’t say they are comfortable or pleasant rules, but they are there. The work is many things, but it’s not subversion.

I’ll come back to this detail intermittently. It’s important to remember that true transgression generally doesn’t involve slotting oneself into predefined roles hundreds and thousands of years old.

In the (white) femblogosphere, the latest whitegirl idiocy is the Pandagon writer Amanda Marcotte not noticing racist cartoons being published in her book. I was fool enough to post a bit in the comments. The primary thing I got into commenting about was, well, stats and how they are a measure of influence. A hapless poster was insisting that no-one could critique Miss Mandy unless they had a top 1000 (by technorati standards) blog, or something along those lines. And I was floored, really, because one of the founding assumptions of the Internet (once it hit the public eye in the early and mid 90s) was that a person with ten readers could come to have as much influence as a corpo-website with 100,000.

So it’s kinda funny to me that there’s someone on Pandagon tooting the megacorp horn when speaking of feminism. Because influence goes far beyond how many hits you get. If you have a dozen devoted readers who take it offline, go out into the world and do something about your preferred topic, you have more political and social power than the person with a mainstream blog that gets a million hits a month (but everyone’s just trading the link and not actually propagating the information anywhere).

What’s interesting w/r/t feminism is that the very WOC who are constantly denigrated for not being ‘big bloggers’ have more INFLUENCE because their audiences are devoted and TAKE IT OFFLINE, regardless of size.

Shaquanda Cotton was released due to the efforts of numerous ‘tiny, insignificant’ blogs with readership in the dozens and hundreds (repeat readers), along with a few blogs with larger readership. But the core was those tiny little pulpits with small, devoted audiences– real-world, REAL influence that can’t be gained through traffic, but only through quality and shared goals.

Pandagon, Feministe, Shakesville, etc, of the femblogs may have the hits, but they’ve got no influence because their audiences read and stop there. The ‘blogs that don’t count’– their readers are so glad to find others sharing the goals and travails that they get out there and make changes happen. They make the world over, in positive disproportion to their stat counts.

And maybe that’s why the white fembloggers (and many of their commenters) hate the WOC fembloggers so much. The WOC’s audiences get out there and actually alter the world around them in positive and real ways, while their audiences just smile and pass the link on and congratulate themselves a bit over an ‘uplifting’ post they read.

It’s interesting that a subculture like feminism, which is supposedly about giving voice to the oppressed, is increasingly falling back on the rhetoric of corporations, who were proven wrong as soon as blogging started happening en masse and to some extent (albeit smaller) back in the days of plain old webpages.

There were innumerable small websites I recall from my early internet days that came to have huge influence because of small but devoted audiences. So I don’t put any stock in hits– I know they don’t mean so much online. Yahoo.com has more hits than Pandagon, but it’s hardly got more influence on the people level.

One person makes differences. As do five or ten or thirty. Critical masses are so much smaller than people invested in the establishment like to admit, because it would break the narrative that popularity is influence, when it doesn’t work that way on the internet. Just being there at all is influence, and as long as we’re there, working to connect with others, taking it offline and making it work, then we’re doing better than any corpo-site or blogger who thinks hits are all that matters.

A heavily edited assemblage of comments I made about sexuality a while back, edited to include the new information I have about fertility awareness and also a bit for cogence. I apologise in advance for any lack of focus, since many of these ‘grafs were responses to others’. But I want the general record of the thought process here, so, uh, enjoy.

I don’t agree with the stereotyped religious right notion of sexuality, not least because it tends to be held up as the only possible Christian interpretation of sexuality. Except the Bible is more egalitarian than any of that stuff.

However, that said, I do wonder in discussions of sexuality and sexual education why the discussion is always framed in terms of how people can have sex in ’safer’ fashion rather than in terms of how people can just…not have sex. I mean, to me, the extreme Christian-culture view that sex is dirty and wrong is misleading and not ultimately helpful or useful. Concurrently, the progressive liberal view that everyone ought to be having sex if they feel the urges (so to speak) so long as it’s consensual and involves barrier methods is problematic for completely different reasons.

The progressivist view makes no allowance for restraint or demureness on the part of men or women, nor honestly for patience in relationships. Though one can SAY abstinence is ok, or waiting until marriage to have sex is ok, etc, focusing so much on how to implicitly and explicitly encourage teens and young adults to ‘just do it’ really shows that such advocates don’t have, er, faith that anyone would ever exercise restraint or discipline when it comes to sex.

Part of the problem with a harm-reduction philosophy towards sex is that assuming folk’ll do it anyway leads folk to think they ought to do it and that NOT doing it is ‘weird’ or ‘freaky’ or ‘abnormal’. It takes fortitude and discipline to not have sex, much as it does to not max out one’s credit. The doctrine of self-indulgence is a root from which springs both kinds of behaviors.

Of course, the flipside, demonising sex and saying ‘omg you will BURN if you evar touch another’s genitals and btw, you can’t even enjoy sex when married!!!!’ doesn’t really cover the discipline and restraint side of things. It just makes people feel bad for having felt good when they explored sexual feelings instead of offering ways to direct sexual energy away from indulgence for its own sake. Also, there is a subtext of extreme focus on sexual sin or misconduct to the exclusion of other sins in right wing Christian culture.

It’s inaccurate to say ‘abstinence education FAILS’ when it’s done in a way almost calculated to not work in the real world. i mean, poor teaching methodologies for non-sex things are critiqued but not dismissed. And abstinence education could be done in a viable way, particularly if it brought fertility awareness methods into the teaching.

Another issue with sectarian Christian culture among right-wing people is that pro-life and pro-choice views within the rest of the Christian community get zero play. Lots of Christians support in word and deed caring for single mothers, making adoption easier, supplying women with good prenatal care and even birth control. But they aren’t sectarians, or right wing, or part of the machine that now has become associated with Christianity despite openly advocating non-Christian beliefs and practices. They’re mostly small local groups or individuals doing what they can to help those in need in a way that is useful to those in need.

But a greater problem is the surrounding culture. You cannot have a culture of endless indulgence and then be shocked that some people turn sectarian. You also can’t be surprised that kids are having sex younger and younger.

Nabokov wrote of upper-middle class preteens having sex at 12 or so. Now it’s not just the richies being decadent, but everyone else too, and unlike Paris Hilton, the consequences are a lot worse for the indulger when one isn’t well-off.

Also, in a world where people are encouraged to just do what makes them “happy” (indulgence of every whim at that instant one has the whim), one cannot be shocked that boys and girls are growing up having trouble respecting each other. Girls see guys as objects that exist to give them attention and validation and possibly material goods. Guys see girls as objects offering unlimited consequence- free sex. If one girl won’t put out, it’s not so hard to find another who will. And if a girl or girls won’t do the acts you want done, there’s always a bunch of women doing them on the easily accessible porn that permeates the culture.

And interestingly, the increasing social approval of being sexual without restraint has actually led to women just commoditizing other women. Strip clubs are full of lesbians behaving as piggishly as male customers, and also bisexual and straight women both behaving piggishly and also trying to appeal to the male gaze through simulating interest in the dancers. And yet, because women still expect to not pay for sex even if they expect to act like men about it, they cost the girls who will explicitly sell their sexuality more and more money each shift.

It is fairly obvious to me that the sectarians who hate sex so much nobody’s supposed to like it ever are not so far removed from the people who advocate overt sexuality so much that other options become socially unacceptable. In this culture you have to pick either an extreme sectarian sex-negative viewpoint or pick a hyper-sexualised, ultra-indulgent sex-positive viewpoint (as the MSM will have us believe). That’s a difficult place for kids to be in, for women to be in, for men to be in.

I don’t think teen and young adults should NEVER have sex, ever. But they could NOT have sex until, you know, long-term relationship time rolled around. I mean, the idea of emphasizing celibacy for a period of time until one enters into a long-term relationship is honestly never a part of any sex education i’ve seen advocated by either right-wing people or left-wing people.

Altogether too many liberals find it being problematic that sectarians focus on sexual sin to the exclusion of other sins. But it’s problematic to err in the other direction and think that always choosing the option to have sex is ‘better’, which is the subtext you get from the other side. Plenty of people who are given to natural celibacy or asexuality, or even people who do want to wait and only have one partner for their own reasons often, often, often are considered strange and weird for not choosing the option to have sex.

Also, and this is key, we now live in a society that does not understand why the aggressively anti-gay whatnot is just as much a symptom of endless indulgence as aggessively pro-gay. People feel free in this culture to indulge it all, be it tolerant support or intolerant dislike or outright hatred. It is an unintended consequence, but there it is.

Ultimately, the extreme camps themselves aren’t so much the core problem as the fact that they are the operant ‘faces’ of each view to others. There are women who think they aren’t supposed to orgasm even in marriage (waaaay unChristian); there are women who think that they have to be extra freaky sexually and do a wide range of sexual acts with lots of different guys to be properly liberated. These women aren’t deriving this stuff from out of thin air. And there are women and men who are affected to lesser extents by the extreme and binary breakdown. Something as tiny as watching a porno you don’t like with your husband or boyfriend, or having sex with your girlfriend when you’d rather wait a few months on it but you are worried she will think you’re ‘weird’ or don’t find her sexually attractive.

Or conversely, trying to isolate yourself so totally from sexual expression that you really do end up unable to enjoy it. Or getting so caught up in the presumed ‘dirtyness’ of sex that you express sexual desire only through extreme fetishes.

The Puritans were so much more rational about it all. Wives and husbands were to please each other in bed and premarital sex was strongly discouraged, but you weren’t reviled if you had sinned that way because everyone sins and sexual sin wasn’t broken out and considered ‘worse’ than other sins and specific sexual sins weren’t judged as uniquely awful (like the current sectarian gay-hate– Puritans would have recognised that behavior as distinctly unChristian and rebuked it accordingly). But history is written by those who overthrew them, so the word has come to mean almost the opposite of what Puritans actually thought and believed, especially (though not limited to) sex.

Many moons ago I knew a guy. He had a variety of friends, a mix of girls and guys. He was from France, so all his friends were French.

Anyhow, they all had a common friend who was well-liked. She had a particular nickname, though I don’t know who first gave it to her.

It was ‘Belle Loloches’. This is French for ‘Nice Rack’ ‘Sweet Tits’ or ‘Beautiful Breasts’, etc.

She used to put it on party invitations.

BoobGate reminded me of this.

It was unsurprising because men have this habit of framing sexual liberation as ‘I wants more sexual availability from the women around me’. So in that regard it was not the least bit shocking that some dude would bring boob-grabbing under the banner of open source software and ideaology.

The merry-go-round of people being shocked that women’s bodies were considered open spaces for grazing groping was also entirely expected.

Needless to say, the guy magically discovered after that original post that chicks started the whole thing, and that more than boobs got groped, and that therefore these two things made it all ok and please would you stop judging him loudly like dirty sex-prudes or something.

When bisexual porn actresses who make themselves sexually available to many feel you’re being rude and invasive, you are pretty definitely advocating something risky at best and downright cruel at worst.

I will actually not dissect the objections themselves, though in some respects the same ideology that has people being bisexual porn actors is responsible for BoobGate, but I will make some space for my concerns about the women.

White people, and very especially white geek people like to have this notion that social pressure doesn’t exist or is not exerted in their environments. So the idea that women might suggest the idea, or agree to it at all is never questioned. Motivations are never inquired after. And when you’re dealing with geek-girls, motivation is everything.

If you are not conventionally attractive, but have still been told that a woman’s worth is in how many men (and to a lesser, very specifically policed extent, women) validate her as hot/sexy/pretty, then this whole situation is pretty different than Dude was presenting. You are pretty likely to have women making themselves physically and sexually accessible because the non-geek world won’t validate those women, but the geek world sure will. That desperation is sometimes so horribly subtle, and you aren’t going to have socially awkward men complaining about Women With Issues dressing skimpily and nervously saying ‘OMG PLEEZ TUCH MAH BOOBZ’, with that giggle that is not a sign she thought it was all funny. But of course, geek-men hide behind their inability to read body language and quite easily dismiss all the discomfort of the women assenting to acquire the precious validation that both geek and non-geek society claim is all we can have as women.

That whole involved paragraph up there was my main beef with the whole deal. Dude wanting to justify getting his perv on at a con, and women enacting the subtle coercions of, uh, the patriarchy, and very few people wondering why guys never seem to wonder aloud ‘why can’t sex be more sacred? i wish more people would be celibate until marriage. where’s the “celibate until marriage” buttons?’

Bad example, but you get the gist. I wasn’t surprised at the perving, but I was saddened at the tens or dozens of women who probably felt they had to wear the ‘yes you can ask to touch me’ button, when the whole button system was absurd and nobody should be asking that of any woman other than their SO. And saddened at the white geeks who are so sure they don’t pressure anyone to do anything, since they’re all socially inept or whatever. Sigh.

ETA: This chick is at least consistent regarding some of the logical outcomes of sex-positive idealogy. Although one wonders how it’s empowering to let guys have unfettered access to female bodies, to the point of women having to accept men regularly asking to touch them intimately (when that was not regular, at least for the subset of white women being spoken of here). But the tone of her post/comments kinda illustrates my point up there about geek-girls being desperate to prove their worth through male validation in a venue where they can be considered appealing enough to be lust objects.

And while this whole post is pretty much about McWhitey and problematic aspects of the whole thing for McWhiteyChicks, I could fill this blog with like eighty posts on how completely different this would all be if it had involved MOC touching white chicks (especially black guys) or WOC being touched by white guys (especially Asian women). I can assure you the internets would not have blown up in anywhere near the same ways or quantities.

Just look at BlackAmazon. White women scrabbling over her mind as invasively as anything, and no firestorms from Feministe/Feministing/Pandagon about how disrespectful and rude that is. Since re:BoobGate, some are making the argument that it’s no different than wanting to know more about someone’s mind. Well, not any different in creepy factor.

And tangentially, nobody’s mentioned how it played out if a woman let Guy A touch her boobs but not Guys B or C (or only let women touch but not dudes, etc, all the permutations of refusal). In fact, there’s been an implication through all the defensiveness that women who allowed groping allowed ANYONE to grope and did not exercise any selective refusal. That’s a VERY interesting implication, if so, and further bolsters my original points about social pressure and coercion. Because the creepy dude was whining that it was wrong, WRONG, WROOONNNNGGG for women to be choicy about who touched thar bewbz, so I am pretty curious about how selective refusal was handled, and if it even happened. But not enough to read 1300 comments.

The one who pulled the hoax suggesting she was impregnating herself and then inducing abortions over several months. A commenter on some blog suggested that the point was to play up the ambiguity between menstruation and miscarriage/abortion.

Well, unsurprisingly, in actual reality, there is no ambiguity with naturally occuring miscarriages (at a minimum). With the information gleaned from fertility awareness methods, one learns that during menstruation, temperatures might RISE, but during a miscarriage, temperatures DROP. It is a telltale sign for detecting miscarriages as early as two weeks. TWO WEEKS.

This is the kind of thing I have concern about when I rant to all and sundry about fertility awareness. You have people not even knowing that random, average women can be taught very easily to tell the difference between a miscarriage and a period. That the difference is stark and easy to immediately recognise.

I am aware there are reasons to encourage women to be ignorant of their body’s functionings. I just don’t think it’s very progressive or open-minded or feminist.

And at the end of the day, what this person was proposing was monstrous, whether she was physically able to enact it or not.

In my last post, I covered the micro side of Mankiw’s ten principles of economics. Now we’ll explore the macro ones, as they would apply in erotonomics. Which is, tangentially, a great word.

So, these three remain:

1. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services. When dealing in sexwork, one can extrapolate some pretty interesting things about this principle from countries where the sex trade is a tourist resource or a means by which sexual labor is factored into the GDP as immigrant sexworkers earn grey and blackmarket money working in other countries and ship it home to be spent. One might do an entire blog on that specific aspect of erotonomics, tying it into trafficking, as well.

2. Inflation is the government printing too much money. While I disagree that this is inflation, inflation itself does some very perverse things to the supply side of sexwork in terms of dangerous and profit-slicing incentives.

And lastly,
3. Societies face a short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. What this means specific to sexual labor and the sexual economy is, in fact, the inverse. Sexual labor bears some relation to household production (presently unfactored into national GDPs) in that during times of unemployment, there is a larger supply of labor and a higher (albeit pretty elastic) demand for the services. Inflation (presuming it improves national employment, which I don’t actually agree with but will let slide for now) is not a net benefit to this industry.

I am clumsy in my extrapolations of this stuff, but when I’m speaking in terms of the most general economic principles, these are the directions I am coming from.

And that concludes intro material.

Now I am directly relating/slightly translating Dr. Mankiw’s ten principles of economics to erotonomics.

The Microeconomics Stuff:

1. Tradeoffs (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.) Whether you do extras, whether you do contact, whether you provide sex, what kind of sex you provide, etc, etc. On the customer side, how your purchasing is influenced and why.

2. Which brings us to the joy of opportunity cost. I am not always certain sexworkers and sexwork-buyers understand this fundamental of economics completely. There tends to be a disconnect between tradeoffs made and their resultant opportunity costs.

3. “Rational people think at the margins.” Another way of looking at this is satisficing, or having a minimal level of ‘decent enough’ and modifying your economic decisions until you’re at that point. A perhaps canonical example within sexwork is strippers and contact lapdances. Another might be prostitutes and choosing which of oral, anal and vaginal sex you are comfortable providing. Satisficing is determining the lowest marginal cost you will accept relative to your marginal gain.

4. “People respond to incentives.” Where this gets tricky regarding sexwork is that the incentives can in fact be more complex than discounts or added services.

5. “Trade (competition) can make everyone better off.” Note the use of the word ‘can’. But we must define ‘everyone’. Individual labor– not generally better off, particularly within the realm of sexwork. In fact, this principle is functionally not even true for clubowners or porn producers, etc. In sexwork, the monopoly or oligopoly is essential to optimal gain for suppliers.

6. “Markets usually are a good way to organise economic activity.” Not with labor as private as sexual labor. It operates in a grey market at best and an outright black market at worst.

Which leads us to the principle that:

7. “Sometimes government intervention can improve market outcomes.” When the government gives some sexual service providers a greymarket monopoly, they win. Canonical example here is the Nevada brothels in America.

This is the briefest of overviews, but a start. Next up is the last few Mankiw principles, covering the macroeconomic side of things.

The sex industry, sex trade, or sexwork (I will probably go back and forth using the three terms mostly interchangeably) can be examined via regular economic principles. Curiously, no-one’s really done so.

But here I am, armed only with a copy of Mankiw and a mix of personal and acquired knowledge of sexwork. I’ll be starting with the ten basic principles of economics and how they apply to sexwork and then going from there.

In the rare instances where I can scrape up some economic analyses/studies of sexwork, I will deconstruct them at length. It should be interesting times decanting the economics of the erotic.

The blogosphere of infertile or potentially infertile bloggers posting about their attempts to get pregnant is a very fascinating place to wander through.  I have one such lady listed on my blogroll because she’s just– well, she is very eloquent in her pain and occasional moments of hope.  I empathise with her journey even if its particulars are strange to me. 

It is absolutely remarkable how advanced medical technology is when it comes to giving women opportunities to have pregnancies they simply could never have achieved even twenty years ago.  Science has its amazements. 

But as ever, I mention all this to say that the infertilisphere fascinates me less because of the eloquence and artful writing of many its bloggers, or because of the advances in medical technology, but because of the class and race dynamics that bubble along as undercurrents. 

I’ll get into some of those undercurrents as months go by.  At the moment, I’m not too far from my own 2ww (2 week wait), and have some other things I’d like to get muh blog on about. 

This is just a note to say I keep infertile women in my thoughts because their struggles are worth looking at and understanding more of. 

This guy writes a lot about what he terms Forbidden Lore, or powerful knowledge not readily accessible. The thing about forbidden lore is that once you discover it, it can so radically alter your worldview that you can’t un-see it.

Discovering the truth about inflation was some forbidden lore for me. Understanding precisely how awful inflation is leaves me even more appalled at the housing bubble’s popping.

The thing about inflation is that people generally process half of how it works, but not all of it. When it comes to housing prices, they notice that historically the prices go up. So then it seems like a great idea to buy a house that’s a bit over their income, since ‘housing prices always go up’.

But the other half of inflation is that spending power goes down as prices rise. Historically, you need more and more money to buy the same things you might have bought 20 years earlier. This is where people just…they can’t seem to process it. They basically believe housing prices can go up AND they can somehow retain the CURRENT year’s spending power. That is, they think they can buy a house in 2005 for 500k, have it be worth 1.5 million in 30 years (2035), and that this means they’ll have 2005 spending power with that 1.5 million as home equity. Everyone thinks that housing prices can rise forever, but they can still keep current spending power.

Once you understand what it really means that one dollar now buys far less than it did in 1940, you can’t look at inflation the same way. You can’t look at housing as an investment at all. It’s a depreciating asset. The treating of debt as wealth as a result of this half-knowledge of inflation fills one with a sense of complete horror.

I just can’t un-see the devastation and the problems that come from a situation where rampant inflation is considered ok. Nobody in America seems to be taking seriously the lessons of all the countries where people burnt the money instead of buying wood because it was cheaper. Or have to use calculators for the most simple purchases because the smallest notes are thousands or millions.

I really think inflation is forbidden lore, because if people really followed through the implications, they wouldn’t have made such astronomically crazy decisions in purchasing housing. At least, I have to hope so.

The idea of chastity in modern life has become inextricably entangled with celibacy. This is a shame, because chaste sexuality is not so simple (or simply dismissed) as abstaning from sex. By binding the idea of chastity to a sort of arid, sex-averse conception of celibacy, the full range of sacred sexuality is denied expression and acknowledgement.

Chastity is a difficult concept to incorporate into sacred sexuality if one isn’t Christian. Sacred sexuality is all too often associated with a certain kind of neo-pagan sexuality, generally including something like sacred whores. There is also the idea that sacred sexuality is about sexual indulgence equalling innocence. That you can’t be sexually innocent without group sex, for example. Because somehow a sexual innocent would just naturally go for that (or other sexual acts/expressions the person in question prefers personally). And more to the point, this type of sacred sexuality presumes that sexuality must be expressed through specific sexual acts. There isn’t room for sacred virginity in such a worldview (which is quite fascinating in its divergence from the pagan traditions that effectively do make room for sacred celibacy/virginity AND sacred whoredom).

Christianity, however, presumes that sexuality is part of all that you are in a different manner. Sexuality is intrinsic, and as an intrinsic quality, does not need to be expressed to be present. It can be latent or dormant, in a sense, without that dormancy being a flaw or fault.

Chastity, from a Christian-sexuality perspective, is the state of living in holy sexuality. Because this includes latent or dormant sexuality, a virgin or celibate is as ’sexual’ as, say, a married person and all three can thus have holy or sinful sexuality– that is, be chaste or unchaste. This is a much more nuanced approach to the idea of sexuality, to me. Likewise, a person who shifts from unchaste sexuality to chaste sexuality (such as someone who is a non-virgin due to fornication, but lays off the fornicating after being saved) is as sexually sacred as someone who was a Christian virgin or is a Christian celibate. There’s not a scale of chastity in that sense.

For Christians, sacred sexuality is more about honoring God than expressing themselves sexually. The second thing is one method of doing the first (ideally). Because the focus is on God, having sex can itself be perfectly chaste. But so can NOT having sex. And sometimes NOT having sex is unchaste (as when a husband denies his wife sex out of spiteful intent, or vice versa). So the specifics revolve around chastity being defined by how your heart approaches sexual matters. Come in with a heart for God, it is a chaste sexuality. Come in seeking to sin, it is unchaste. Whether sexual acts happen or not is often quite orthogonal to whether one’s sexuality is chaste or unchaste.

ETA: Essentially, for Christians chastity is about whether one’s sex life in thought and deed focuses on God. If it does not (even if no deed is committed), then it is not chaste.

I’m just going to randomly post this from time to time, because it’s true and I am sick of ‘Puritanical’ being used to mean ‘anti-sex’.

They were in many ways quite feminist and radical and sex-positive. They did eventually degenerate into legalism and hyper-Calvinism, but that was by no means the starting point. People need to read more history.

This whole Spitzer deal is spawning some just seriously DUMB posts about sexwork from feminist blogs. This deal from Feministe is a case in point, though much of the dum is in the comments.

I don’t even know where to start, as the whole mess is so covered in semi-truth and straight out misinformation that I feel too exasperated to take it all apart.

I suppose part of the problem is that I cannot identify as a feminist because the more radical strains of it that I was influenced by (and still have residual effects from) really are pretty much religious beliefs. A lot of it must be taken on faith, since it requires that humans behave in ways they often refuse to when given the chance.

A prime example is with (unpaid) sex. The current culture is aggressively pro-casual sex and anti-marriage. It is of course more complex than that, but that simplification serves well enough for this point. By undermining the value of any long term romantic relationship (by increasing the ease of divorce and redefining ‘long-term relationship’ in terms of months rather than decades, to name two means), a nastily combative situation has developed between men and women.

Men and women are increasingly not culturally bound to treat each other well. Since both male and female virtues were denigrated, what is now culturally rewarded is male and female vice.

Which brings us back to the whole ‘is sexwork anti-feminist?’ query of that Feministe post. Sexwork is (mainly for the privileged women referenced in the post) quite literally a way to buy respect in a cultural market that tells women their value is how many people affirm their hotness.

You can get groped for looking cute in that miniskirt at a bar or you can wear an even shorter one at a strip bar and get paid twenty bucks a song. And possibly avoid the groping entirely. You can have one nighters with guys who expect you to be a 2am booty call the next week or you can book appointments with some of those same guys for 150-300 bucks an hour.

By third-wave, sex-positive definitions of feminism, sexwork is clearly feminist because women are leveraging money to generate power where they would otherwise have none if they did the same stuff for free. Using a slightly different means of analysis, it can also work with some radical first and second wave definitions of feminism. When you make a guy respect you by paying you, then it’s feminist if feminism is about how much respect you can coerce from an interaction.

Ok, now that I have declared sexwork intrinsically feminist in modern society, back to the comments which contained privilege and partial truths about sexwork itself.

There was a fair amount of ‘it’s better money than other jobs’ floating around. I will save the econ breakdown for a later series (yes, sexwork economics could be its own series of textbooks), but simply put, the money never changes and there’s a lower ceiling than most people (including many sexworkers) will concede.

While you can make guys pay you twenty a song, you can’t make them all pay you 100 a song. Likewise with escorting, phone sex, webcam work, porn, softcore/hardcore modelling, or paid BDSM. This is where the privilege comes in. While women who look like the right kinds of conventional attractive can command a premium above the norm, there is a fairly hard limit on how much respect even they can earn (so to speak). And because sexwork requires a whore/madonna dichotomy of its own to even exist, women who are not so conventionally attractive suffer a penalty against the norm.

Also, there are two money-levellers: how sexual you will get potentially, and how physical you CAN get potentially. You are not getting hundreds per hour to be a webcam girl or talk dirty on the phone. Likewise, strippers top out at hundreds per hour versus escorts/prostitutes.

Then there’s the flat wages. In stripping, dances have been 10-20 overwhelmingly for decades. Standard stage tips are still a dollar. Three hundred bucks is still a tolerable to decent night, with five hundred being pretty sweet for the great midrange of strippers.

The difference is the combative stuff carries over into sexwork. Now that women have to hustle respect in cash, men are responding by demanding more and more for that cash. It quickly becomes a very tangled give and take. Add to that the ever-increasing numbers of women attempting some form of sexwork, and we see that while the work is feminist, it’s being done in a heavily buyer-friendly market.

Women now have to get their boobs grabbed and grind on dudes to get 500 in a night, versus even ten years ago, when it might have been stage-only money or maybe a mix of stage and airdance money. Five hundred bucks buys a lot less now. And a girl may only get it once in a month of shifts. Not really ‘more money than other jobs’ as a default anymore.

Anyway, I could spin out another couple thousand words detailing the privilege intersections, but they kind of deserve their own discrete spaces. I’ll just finish out with a grumble about the gender dynamics.

The comments to that Feministe post had a fair helping of ‘omg it’s not just women who do sexwork’. That is true. However, I would hazard but can only prove anecdotally that buying sex is essentially masculine, and selling it is essentially feminine. That is, I tend to use man/woman as abstractions when talking about sexwork. I do this because I don’t really know of any markets where a feminine purchasing style exists, as such. I don’t know what it would look like. Even women who buy take a masculine purchasing style as their starting point and go from there.

Maybe that’s the final partial truth. There’s many kinds of masculine, and that’s what a buyer works from culturally. Some of them aren’t macho-masculine.

As for sellers, even among men and transgender, again anecdotally, they felt feminised in the process of selling. They didn’t necessarily think the customer thought them feminine, they just felt very chick-like (of those presenting as male).

Anyway, I have written over a thousand bipping and bopping words about this post and its comments without even touching on all the assumptions implicit to the discussion.

But then, that’s why I gots a blog. I have an unending supply of material for many (more orderly) posts along such lines…

At any rate, I rather like the sound of that. In this post, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon takes Melissa Farley and Some Dude seriously regarding What To Do about legalising prostitution.

The assumptions that all men purchase sex to punish women are appalling in their bizarre self-righteousness. It is one reason, but not the only one. It’s required that some women be degraded for the edifice to exist, yes, but it is not a requirement or truth that all men buy sex to treat women like trash. Some pay to treat women well, or be kind to them as they understand kindness. Selling sex gets very complicated even though it is meant to offer uncomplicated alternatives to romantic and marital relationships.

As far as the legalisation argument goes, the problem with legalisation is– how do we define what’s legal? Whatever answer is determined almost certainly will penalise ’small operators’ such as the escort who works off craigslist, or the street girl without a pimp, or the four girls who pool money for their time-shared incall location.

It’s private labor, like childcare and housecleaning. And like those, too intimate to regulate at the level most people prefer to keep them at (small). You have to instead create a situation where only brothels are legal, and only large childcare facilities are legal, and only large companies funded and run by men are legal.

And everything else is on the edge.

It’s beyond legalisation, and I’m not sure I think that part’s a problem. This is why simply failing to prosecute (decriminalisation) can be a start, if it’s done with an eye to protecting the ability of small operators to operate safely. That doesn’t usually happen. Canada is a rare exception, with brothels being illegal and small-scale operating being legal (going to the guy’s hotel, or having him come to your location). And even there law enforcement has trouble accepting the law. But that’s a more valid way to go if you want the girls to be harmed less, if you care a damn bit about them being able to GET customers who aren’t there to treat them like trash.

Invoking Melissa Farley=lose. It’s not that she hasn’t done the work (she hasn’t), it’s that she has no care for the women. In this world, in the larger societies of this world, some women will offer. And they must be protected if people won’t find them other ways to earn livings. I think of the Ghanaian women, devout Christians, pleading with relatives in bordering countries for money to buy food with and being told ‘no’. But those same relatives shame and berate them for working in the new strip clubs in Accra. That’s unChristian, but it’s also the world we live in. The sin of not starving is an understandable one to commit, there. More so than the sin of self-righteous refusal to take care of relatives in need.

The work is tempting, compelling, alluring precisely because it isn’t always degradation and harm to the woman doing it. And Marcotte simply doesn’t acknowledge why women are drawn to make the offers in the first place. There is power in selling sex, though one can certainly dispute what kind it is and its limits.

Marcotte doesn’t understand that even Ms. 10$ blowjobs in the rain has the right of refusal. Yes, even her. It is a serious and difficult and nuanced topic, prostitution, because it involves women, who are also nuanced in their reactions and attitudes towards the work. I can’t even agree with her that HappyHookerdom is the problem in this case. She’s committing the FarleyError of thinking that even if there are women outside the HappyHooker and CrackWhoreInTheRain categories of prostitute, they don’t count because by using that binary distinction, they technically don’t even exist!

You aren’t real to Farley if you aren’t a traitorous HappyHooker (for claiming it can ever be enjoyable work) or bitter OppressedHooker wanting out. You break the binary, distort the clean little narrative. And that Marcotte swallows her poison bait so completely is just, again, appalling in its very bizarre self-righteousness.

In the Bible, there are two ladies named Tamar that come up in regular discussion. The first of these is an ancestress of King David, while the second is one of David’s many children. What is interesting about both women is that they are both sexually victimised.

Ancestress-Tamar is used by her brother in law Onan for sex (Onan denies her the right to bear children by him, as was their mutual duty under Jewish law, by pulling out every time) and then screwed over figuratively and literally by her father in law Judah. When God strikes Onan down for being a greedy jerk (he didn’t want to lose his inheritance), Judah refuses to marry Tamar to his remaining son when that son hits marrying age. That’s the figurative. The literal is where it gets interesting. Tamar takes continuation of the line matters into her own hands. She dresses up as a prostitute and gets solicited. By Judah. He was pretty eager to break further commandments with her, so he does, but cannot pay immediately.

So Ancestress-Tamar gets some IOU tokens from him and sends him off. She gets pregnant, and is accused of immorality and threatened with death– by Judah. At that point she busts out with the tokens and Judah is like “I totally suck.”

She ended up with twin boys.

Daughter-Tamar is a different kind of sexual victimisation. She was ill-used without her consent. She was raped by her half-brother Amnon, after being bullied into going to see him by her father David. Her situation is interesting because she even offered to be wife to her half-brother, and that was rejected, because there was no love underlying his ‘affection’ for her.

Unlike Ancestress-Tamar, she does not take matters into her own hands. Her brother Absalom revenges her rape.

David’s wives are similarly passive (exemplified by Bathsheba) or even passive-aggressive (exemplified by Michal), while his other ancestresses such as Ruth and Rahab are pretty take-charge and assertive. That said, I don’t think Daughter-Tamar’s response was bad, but it is very different than Ancestress-Tamar’s response to sexual mistreatment (albeit more consensual in her case).

When dealing with actual prostitutes, the Bible mentions them in ways that belie the stereotype of the Bible as anti-woman or denigrative of female power. And that’s very interesting. Rahab the prostitute, after all, was an ancestress of Christ Himself, along with Tamar, who played one to get done what none of the men around her were willing to (continue the bloodline).

In a way this is an extension of my thoughts about the possible class ceiling within sexwork. But thinking of sexwork from this angle explains a lot of the seemingly contradictory (to those outside the work) aspects of sexwork that crop up.

I’ll just list some similarities:

• Cunning is rewarded over abstract intelligence.
• Being plastically adaptable to many situations and circumstances.
• The constant focus on money (always defined as CASH) rather than assets.
• Related to that and also to cunning, both sexwork and grifting think of one’s body as the only real asset, with larger-scale assets rarely acquired and even more rarely kept over the long term. Also, that one asset is thought to be inexhaustibly profitable.
• Attracts binge personality types.
• Rewards and encourages sociopathic and narcissistic personality traits. This also relates back to adaptability.

I really think you hit a class ceiling where only up to x class level will you find people in either or both lines of work (there is some crossover, though not very much). At least for me, noting the similarities explains certain things better than any other explanation.

I suspect but cannot prove that there’s a class ceiling within the realm of sexwork, that it’s not a means of class migration and that really only middle class and below women enter into it at all.

But that does involve using a definition of middle class that isn’t quite tied to earning x amount of dollars per year.

However, I’m just not sure. I’ve never known anyone above middle class to be in sexwork, or even heard of such a thing. But there could be alternative anecdotal evidence to the contrary, possibly.

It would make for interesting research, anyhow.