Becoming an authentic adult means going against the whole drift of the culture. It specifically means, among other things, soothing your own bad feelings without the help of another, pursuing your own goals, and standing on your own two feet. Most people associate such skills with singlehood. But Schnarch finds that marriage can’t succeed unless we claim our sense of self in the presence of another. The resulting growth turns right around and fuels the marriage, enabling passionate sex. And it pays wide-ranging dividends in domains from friendship to creativity to work.

Before I get started, though, let me say this: I am a white, cisgendered heterosexual man. That puts me in a uniquely privileged position; since I will never be pregnant, the assault on women’s right to choose doesn’t affect me directly. Since I am straight, the assault on the rights of gays and lesbians doesn’t affect me directly. Since I am a man, I am almost never the target of slut-shaming. I am, in other words, not the target of the campaign against women and gays that’s playing out on the airwaves and in the ballot boxes all over the United States right now.

But in a way, that’s kind of the point, because even though I am not the target of the attacks on women and gays, they still very much affect me. The thing is, these are not assaults on women’s rights or gay and lesbian rights; they are assaults on human rights. I am not gay and I am not a woman, but I am a human being. It would be a mistake for me to think that these things don’t affect me directly.

Let’s look at contraception. The debate over whether or not women should have easy access to contraception has turned into one of the defining issues in the current political discussion. Last October, presidential candidate Rick Santorum said “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s OK; contraception is OK. It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” More recently, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh referred to Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “whore” and said that she should be made to post sex tapes of herself online for his viewing pleasure when she said that the insurance policy covering fellow students were wrong to deny coverage for drugs to treat ovarian cysts on the grounds that they could also be used for contraception.

Now, a lot of folks are rightly horrified that a presidential candidate who supposedly favors “small government” would advocate government control over contraception in order to make sure that citizens only do what he thinks they should do in the bedroom, and were rightly appalled at Limbaugh’s slut-shaming tirade against Ms. Fluke. But a lot of folks have cast these as being women’s issues, and described them as attacks on women’s rights, and I think that misses the point.

If a woman wants access to contraception as contraception, presumably it’s because somewhere along the line there’s a man involved. Parthenogenesis is rare in the extreme in human beings. When a woman chooses to use contraception, she’s not the only one affected; her partner is affected to. Restricting access to contraception is not a woman’s issue; it’s a human issue. It affects all of us.

I was married for eighteen years. For twelve of them, my wife used hormonal birth control. This wasn’t just about her; it was about both of us. Neither of us wanted children. Had Santorum been in the White House, and had he been successful in his crusade to prevent her from obtaining birth control because he wanted the government to have the final say in how our lives were “supposed to be,” it would not have affected her; it would have affected both of us. Attacks on contraception are not attacks on women, they are attacks on people.

The issue of gay rights is similar. The language being used today against gay marriage–that it violates the “sanctity” of marriage, that it goes against the “natural order”–are the same arguments, almost word for word, that were used against interracial marriage in the 60s. Many of the opponents of gay marriage, like the National Organization for Marriage, actively seek to use racial division to achieve their goals. Other opponents of equal rights for the LGBT community also oppose divorce even in cases of abuse; Republican state legislator Don Pridemore told a news station that abused women should not get a divorce, but should “get back to why they got married in the first place.”

Again, these are not LGBT issues or women’s issues, but human issues. The moment a person says that it’s acceptable to use manipulative, divisive strategies to achieve a political end, or that victims should not be permitted to leave abusive situations in order to satisfy some kind of abstract idea about the way people “should” be, that affects all of us. Domestic violence doesn’t just affect women; it affects everyone.

Even if these things did only affect women or gays and lesbians, I would still support them against the systematic attacks of the political right, because it’s simply the right thing to do. But by casting these things as women’s issues” or “gay and lesbian issues,” those who seek to control our sexual choices hope to divide us. This strategy only works until we see past the artificial divisions and realize that an attack on women or on gays and lesbians is an attack on all of us.

I abandoned Cafepress years ago. However, this sentiment seems far more relevant and necessary today than it did back then, so I’ve set up the store again.

So, here it is again. If you’d like to show Rush’s fans how you feel about sex, click here!

I’ve also created icons in two different sizes suitable for blogs, Twitter, and forums from the same design. These icons are free to download and use however you’d like:

Limbaugh referred to Ms. Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute,” and ridiculed her for trying to get free contraception from the American taxpayer to fund her “recreational sex life.” In a particularly odious statement, he proposed that any woman who receives taxpayer-funded contraception be forced to have sex on camera for his entertainment.

His tirades provoked an enormous backlash, as a result of which many sponsors have ceased advertising on his show.

There are a lot of things that can be said about this entire embarrassing debacle. Mr. Limbaugh has had four wives and has been known to have multiple affairs and also to frequent sex workers, so the notion that he should resort to slut-shaming when he is promiscuous himself is a bit baffling, and points to an appalling double standard held by many social conservatives.

Additionally, the fact that female health care is still, even now, so fraught with controversy in an age where male health care is routinely covered by insurance, and insurance companies pay for Mr. Limbaugh’s Viagra, indicates that in many ways, women still aren’t quite considered equal members of society, equally deserving of the same medical treatment.

But rather than talk about either of those things, I’d rather talk about something else: the power of framing.

This is Ms. Fluke’s testimony. If you watch it (you can also read a transcript here, if you’d prefer), you will probably notice something interesting: At no point does she ask for free contraception.

Instead, her testimony is centered around other issues, such as insurance companies which refuse to cover medically necessary treatment for women if the treatment can also be used as a form of birth control. Here’s an excerpt:

A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy. Under many religious institutions’ insurance plans, it wouldn’t be, and under Senator Blunt’s amendment, Senator Rubio’s bill, or Representative Fortenberry’s bill, there’s no requirement that an exception be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription, despite verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. [...] Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary.

I have written in my personal blog about the power of framing. By taking testimony about discrepancies in health care coverage between men and women in the guise of religious morality, and re-framing it as “women want free birth control so they can have recreational sex with someone else’s money,” Rush attempted to manipulate people’s opinions toward those he preferred.

And, sadly, to a large extent he succeeded. The ensuing discourse about this issue has tended to center around subsidized contraception–which is definitely a worthwhile topic for discussion in its own right–in spite of the fact that that isn’t what Ms. Fluke’s testimony was about. He spent three days referring to her as a “slut” and a “prostitute” despite the fact that she was not talking about her own sex life at all, nor even about insurance coverage for her own contraceptives!

One of the more insidious problems with slut-shaming is that it is such an entrenched part of many societies, including US society, that public debate about important topics can be stifled by careful framing of the debate in terms of female promiscuity.

In this particular case, Mr. Limbaugh’s attempts at using slut-shaming to derail conversation about health insurance have backfired, but it remains a powerful tool for manipulating public discourse, even on topics not directly related to sexuality.

I will teach my daughter to accept nothing less than respect. Anyone who hurts her physically or emotionally doesn’t deserve her respect, friendship or love. I will teach my boys the same thing as well as the fact that hitting on girls doesn’t involve hitting girls. I can’t teach my daughter to respect herself if I am teaching her that no one else has to respect her. I can’t raise sons that respect women, if I teach them that bullying is a valid expression of affection.

There is definitely an important lesson here. Harassment is not acceptable as a way to express affection.

I think the lesson goes deeper, though. We as a society often fail to teach children (or adults) good interpersonal and relationship skills, period. It’s not just about boys using harassment as a way to express the interest or affection they feel, though that’s an especially odious manifestation of it. It’s also in the fact that we don’t seem to place a high priority on teaching people the tools for expressing any kind of emotions–especially intimacy and vulnerability–in healthy, constructive ways.

I personally would like to see a society that values open, constructive expression. Ceasing to excuse bullying behavior with “Oh, he’s only doing that because he likes you” would make a great place to start.

If you had a daughter and she was going to go out to a party with guys drinking would you let her go out looking like a slut?

There is a brilliant response here by Tumblr blogger marxisforbros.

I suppose one take-away lesson from that is “don’t read the comments.” And I’m not saying that’s a bad lesson; any time I read the comments on just about any Internet story or news article or (God help me) YouTube video, I weep for humanity.

But it’s got me to wondering, why do the bad stories outweigh the good? Is it because having a threesome really is that dangerous, that fraught with emotional turmoil?

Maybe, but I think there’s another possible explanation as well. I think that it’s easier to talk without consequence about the threesome that went wrong than the threesome that went well, because the story fo the threesome that went wrong reaffirms cultural norms. We’re steeped in a society that sees monogamous sex as the only sanctioned sort of sexual activity. Tales of threesomes that were happy, wildly successful, uplifting experiences fly in the face of that cultural trope, while stories of threesomes that led to disaster and heartache affirm it. The person who explores group sex, has a bad experience, and returns chastened to the monogamous fold is validating the cultural expectations about sex and relationships.

It is rare indeed for folks who have monogamous sex that ends in disaster to say “See? Don’t have monogamous sex! It only leads to tears!” Instead, the blame the particulars of that relationship–the people involved weren’t right for each other, it was a bad match, other things happened. When threesome sex goes wrong, though, it’s always the threesome itself, not the particular mix of people or the specific choices they made, that’s at fault.

So it seems to me that in many cases, the “threesomes are a disaster!” voices outweigh the “Threesomes can be awesome!” voices simply because it is more socially acceptable to talk about the threesome that went bad than to talk about the threesome that didn’t.

I personally have had many successful, enjoyable threesomes (and foursomes, and occasionally moresomes). I lost my virginity in a threesome; my best friend was dating a woman I had a crush on, and rather than that being a source of tension or animosity between us, we all three worked out a relationship that was mutually beneficial. To this day, I remain quite a fan of the erotic possibilities of more than two.

What do you think? I’d like to hear your stores of successful group sex, that didn’t go the way that society says these things must go. What made it successful to you? How did it benefit you? Would you do it again? What positive things did you take away from it? You can register here for an anonymous account to reply with, if you like; there’s no need to use your real name.

I saw this video today posted on Facebook and I really liked it, so I wanted to share it. But I also had something to say about it and my comment ended up being longer and more rambly than a FB comment should be (IMO), so I decided to make my own post about it.

In the video, Alyssa posits that the reason why people shame others for sex is because they’re afraid that, if we give those people permission to do those things they like, then those people will try to do those things with us, and if we don’t like those things that’s a scary thought.

I don’t disagree with her. I just think she was … incomplete.

I think that at least one reason, if not a main reason, why people shame others for sex is less about fear of those others, and more about fear of ourselves.

I think that a lot of people believe that the way to control scary things is by boxing them up and putting them away in the attic, never to see the light of day (I know a lot of rationalists who think this is the way to deal with emotions). I think that a lot of people believe that, by exploring something scary, they may find the scariest thing of all, and that is that there is no end; that once you start down that road, not only can you never go back, but you can’t ever stop either; that you necessarily must keep exploring and exploring and exploring until you HAVE TO explore previously-thought hard limits like bestiality and child molestation and rape and murder because, once you throw out the rules preventing you from doing things, what’s to stop you from doing anything?

Except that people in general don’t typically refrain from doing things because they are told not to. They typically refrain from doing things because they have an internal sense that they shouldn’t do them. This is a very complex sense, though, which can be (and is) influenced by the culture around us, and not everyone has the exact same sense of right and wrong. In a lot of ways, we really do need some kind of external set of guidelines telling us how to get along with each other.

But in a lot of ways, that set of guidelines is born out of our collective internal sense in the first place.

Although sex does create and encourage a lot of the same chemical reactions in our brains as drugs do, contrary to pop-psych, sex is not the same as addictive drugs. People can, and do, stop wherever they want to. But the ones who are the most successful at stopping where they choose to stop are the ones who allow themselves to explore and who live by Francis Bacon’s statement (whether they know of it or not) that “your true self can be known only by systematic experimentation, and controlled only by being known.”

The more we know of ourselves, the better control we have over ourselves, and we can only know ourselves by experimentation and self-exploration. Ironically, those of us who explore the most fearlessly are the ones who tend to exhibit better control, while the ones who are most desperate for control are the ones who lack it because they don’t tend to explore themselves.

People who know themselves, and therefore have control of themselves, don’t get caught with “luggage boys” after enacting legislation against gay rights. People who know themselves, and therefore have control of themselves, don’t get put under arrest for the very law they created against gay sex with strangers in public restrooms. People who know themselves, and therefore have control of themselves, don’t tend to get caught using tax dollars to pay for prostitutes out of the same funds that put them in office on an anti-prostitution ticket.  People who know themselves, and therefore have control of themselves, can consciously and deliberately arrange their lives to enjoy those desires they have in a manner that includes “safe, sane, and consensual”.

So I think Alyssa here didn’t address all, or even the most prominent reasons for shaming others. I think one of those reasons is that people fear themselves. She makes the distinction between shame (something that people to do you by telling you that you’re a bad person) and guilt (something that you do to yourself by feeling bad for a harmful act). I think that a lot of people feel the need to shame others because they feel guilty themselves – they feel afraid of the unknown and/or guilty for things they’ve done or want to do because other people have shamed them.

I think shame is a self-perpetuating cycle. We shame others because we have internalized the shame that other people have made us and others to feel. If we grow up in a society that says gay sex is bad, then we jump on that bandwagon and shame people for gay sex to avoid being shamed, thereby promoting that message to the next person who has to also jump on the bandwagon and shame people for gay sex, because to not do so would be to draw shame upon them.

And I think the reason why a lot of people shame others is because they are afraid of themselves, and of what they do not know about themselves. When someone tells me that they wouldn’t explore some avenue of kink because “how would you ever stop?”, that frightens me. That tells me that they don’t have any internal sense that lets them see the difference between spanking a lover because he likes it and murdering someone. That tells me that they don’t have any internal sense to show them the line between enjoying a sensation and self-harm. And since many of these people are the ones most vocal and most adamant about instilling external rules to help us all behave, this frightens me to no end because these people with no control are in charge.

I am not afraid of myself or my desires. I know what I am capable of, I know what I like, and I know how to stop. I am afraid of other people – afraid they will want to do those things to me, and by those things, I mean lock me up and prevent me from being myself because they are afraid of themselves. If anyone should be ashamed, it’s them.

But I like the overall message of this video & I think you should watch it.

Rick Santorum, who has compared gay sex to bestiality, outdid himself in an interview that resurfaced this week in which he suggested that states should have a right to outlaw birth control since contraceptives are “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” The other Rick, former Texas Gov. Perry, has been an outspoken opponent of gays in the military and the “sin” of homosexuality. Recent dropout Michele Bachmann seemed a messenger from a previous era, what with her belief that homosexuality is “personal enslavement” and her pledge to ban pornography.

[...]

All of this raises the question: Why are the GOP’s leading candidates becoming more sexually conservative as the rest of America heads in the opposite direction? How are the remaining prudes so good at filibustering the rest of us?

In a lot of ways, this is probably the natural result of the fact that the Republican Party has actively and aggressively courted the Evangelical Christian vote for the past several decades. Evangelical Christians may hold a number of different ideas about religion and governance, but one thing they generally tend to agree on is that sex is something which is acceptable only if it is tightly regulated, and only a very narrow range of behaviors is morally acceptable.

That puts the party at odds with the majority of citizens, though, who don’t subscribe to the same narrow views about sex and sexuality. The end result, incongruously, is a political party which has long claimed to stand for smaller government and less regulation calling for increased, massively invasive regulation of the most private of all activities.

One of the points that the article touches on is something I think deserves to be expanded on a bit more.

Klein argues that “the normal pushing and shoving, pluralistic conflict-driven politics doesn’t work when it comes to sexuality” because few people are willing to speak up in defense of their private sexual practices. “If the government says, ‘We’re gonna ban hot dogs,’ everybody stands up and says, ‘Hey, I eat hot dogs, don’t do that!’”

With sex, however – whether it’s reproductive rights, censorship of porn or prohibitive zoning laws for adult businesses – things are different.

It’s true that people who have sex lives outside the narrow range approved of by the Republican candidates, or who support the right of individuals to make sexual choices free of government intrusion, are rarely willing to stand up and counter the rhetoric of government regulation of sex.

I can see a couple of reasons why that might be. The first is that many people who favor the right of the individual to make sexual choices free from government involvement also see sex as a private affair, not really suitable for public discourse.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it becomes self-defeating when the enemies of sexual freedom see sex as a matter of regulatory policy, and have no trouble expressing their views in public. If people who see sex as private are unwilling to have a public discourse about it, that leaves only the voices of the people who want to regulate it.

The second is shame. Even folks who see sex as a positive, healthy thing that can be expressed in many ways between consenting adults still may experience lingering shame when talking about it. The culture of shame that surrounds sex in the US is something that a lot of folks from other pluralistic countries might find hard to understand. We are a nation that is deeply schizophrenic about sex; on the one hand, we treat it as a subject of loathing and shame, and we’re unwilling to talk openly and honestly about it or teach even basic sexual anatomy to our children, yet on the other hand our media is awash in sexual imagery. The result is a push-you-pull-me attitude toward sex; we’re fascinated by it but also ashamed to talk honestly about it, even in the face of political candidates calling for extreme government regulation of it.

One of the purposes of this site is to help address that culture of shame. I personally believe very strongly that it is absolutely imperative for those of us who support individual choice about sexuality to stand up and say so wherever it is possible, and I call on others to do likewise when they can. If there is to be any voice in the national debate opposing the call for government intrusion into our sex lives, it has to come from us.

[T]here’s no standard definition of sex addiction. It hasn’t been recognised as a bona fide disease by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the medical profession’s bible when it comes to mental health, so, instead, there are a dozen or so competing definitions and no two psychotherapists who apply the concept in the same way. A diagnosis is based on a therapist’s own idea of what constitutes an excessive amount of sex. But the mistake all these “experts” make is to try to apply the characteristics of drug and alcohol addiction to sex, claiming too much sex works like a drug, causing cravings, withdrawals, tolerance (the need for increasingly powerful “hits”) and a downward spiral in which sex “takes over their life”.

There are many embedded moral concepts in these definitions, all of which suggest that sex is dangerous, shouldn’t be “enjoyed too much” and that something that creates imbalance in a person’s life is inherently unhealthy.

When I first started hearing about the notion of “sex addiction,” it struck me very strongly as a way of pathologizing any kind of sex that was not perceived as “normal.” The term was invented by a guy named Patrick Carnes, who wrote a book () and then went on to make a very lucrative career from “treating” sexual “addiction”. He has developed a sexual addiction screening test which consists of 52 yes or no questions, with even a single “yes” answer sufficient for a possible diagnosis of addiction. Among the questions:

11. Do you feel that your sexual behavior is not normal?
16. Are any of your sexual activities against the law?
18. Do you hide some of your sexual behaviors from others?
44. Have you maintained multiple romantic or sexual relationships at the same time?
46. Have you regularly engaged in sadomasochistic behavior?

The problems with these questions, and others like them, is that they really have nothing to do with whether or not sexual behavior is an “addiction;” instead, they start with the assumption that there is a “normal” set of sexual behaviors, that set of “normal” behaviors aligns with conservative social norms, and that anything outside this range of “normal” behaviors must be destructive.

Nearly all people can answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, at least in the United States. Many states outlaw oral sex, anal sex, and/or use of sex toys. Few of us talk about all of our sexual activities with everyone we meet. Polyamory and BDSM are both sexual activities which are quite popular and which have never been shown, when practiced between consenting adults, to be indicative of any sexual dysfunction.

These problems highlight one of the biggest issues around the notion of sex “addiction”–the pathologizing of any sexual activity that is not perceived as normal. When one reads Carnes’ questionnaire, it soon becomes obvious that it is a reworking of conservative religious morality with a veneer of psychological legitimacy tacked on.

Now, to be fair, Patrick Carnes may have invented the term “sexual addiction,” but that doesn’t mean that others who subscribe to his ideas agree with his definition. It’s by no means my assertion that everyone in the sex addiction industry assumes that having oral sex in Florida (where it is illegal) or tying up your partner with silk scarves automatically makes you a sex addict.

But that’s another of the many problems with the notion of sex addiction; there’s no rigorous diagnostic criteria. Ultimately, sex addiction is diagnosed by therapists who seem to apply a principle of “I know it when I see it.”

Part of that comes from sloppiness in language. In the popular vernacular, the word “addiction” is generally believed to mean “something you can’t stop yourself from doing.” But “addiction” actually has a very specific medical definition, and it’s difficult to argue that sex rises to that definition. More properly, something one can’t stop from doing is termed a “compulsion.”

I’m not trying to argue that there are no people who have destructive sexual habits or practices. Nor am I saying that there’s no such thing as people who sexual dysfunctions are both uncontrollable and harmful to others. What I am saying is that calling such things “addictions” is misleading and harmful.

The word “addiction” carries an emotional charge. We all have associations with it; alcoholics who beat their families in a drunken rage, heroin addicts dying in inner-city streets. And these emotional associations, flawed as they are, help shape our emotional response to the idea of “sex addiction.” Calling destructive, uncontrollable sexual behaviors “sex compulsions” simply doesn’t carry that emotional charge.

It’s not just a semantic quibble, though. The word “addiction” also carries assumptions about how to deal with it. If you have a drug or alcohol addiction, you can go into a rehab treatment program where you go through a process of detoxification and then receive counseling and support such as a 12-step program, right? And since sex can be an addiction just like drugs can be an addiction,it makes sense that the same treatment process for drug addiction must also work for sex addiction, right?

This assumption has fueled a multimillion-dollar industry in treating presumed sex addiction, and in the process given a number of celebrities who like having sex behind their partners’ backs a socially accepted excuse for their behavior, but it has never been shown to my knowledge that the same approaches that deal with drug dependency actually work on behavioral compulsions. Nor is there any real reason to believe that they would; factors such as physiological dependence simply don’t exist with behavioral compulsions.

The range of human sexual expression is wide. People make conventional and unconventional choices about sex, just as they do about money, work, hobbies, and everything else. Some of those choices are destructive or ill-conceived, just as they are with money and so on.

What concerns me is the notion that destructive choices about sex being assumed to be the result of some sort of nebulously-defined “addiction” (rather than, say, poor communication, or faulty assumptions about sex, or a conflict between a person’s sexual identity and his or her religious values or upbringing, or a simple unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of sexual decisions, or any of a thousand other things), and the eagerness on the part of some therapists and “experts” to say that any sexual practice that’s not in keeping with conservative religious ideals must be a sign of a pathology.

Are there people who genuinely struggle with sexual compulsions that cause them harm and that they can not control? You bet there are. I do not see, however, how pathologizing large swaths of the American public, or treating supposed sexual addiction the same way one might treat a heroin addiction, or offering the notion of sex addiction as a get-out-of-responsibility-free card whenever a star celebrity is caught in an embarrassing sexual situation, helps these people or anyone else.

Except perhaps the folks who sell books and offer expensive treatment programs for an addiction that’s never even been defined and has no accepted diagnostic criteria in the first place.