Influence is more than statcounter results.

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.

Assorted thoughts on sexuality and sex education.

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.

An anecdote about breasts and friendship.

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.

The Open Source Boob Project was totally unsurprising.

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 chickdudeis 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 hir post/comments kinda sorta 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.

ETA NOV 2008: edited very slightly to correct some gender confusion, also slightly.

I don’t have a lot to say about that Shvarts chick.

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.

Erotonomics 101: Macroeconomic Principles

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.

Erotonomics 101: Microeconomic Principles

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.

An Introduction to Erotonomics

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.

Fascinated by the Infertilisphere.

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.