Meghan McCain is Kinda Cool

Okay, so I got sucked into the internet vortex of Jezebel and their fortunately often feminist commentary on the gross celebrity stuff that's a constant subtext to life in American. And I somehow ended up at Meghan McCain's column at Daily Beast.

She's a Republican and very clearly supports fiscal policies that favor individualism and capitalism. She's also pro-life (I would say anti-choice). Those aren't things I agree with. I've decided I'm more or less a socialist, which I'll write about soon, and I'm passionately pro-choice. In case you never guessed. But that's fine. What struck me, despite some important opinion differences, was how much easier it would be to feel safe with Republicans and not kinda hate them if more of them were like her.

She talks honestly about some of the things I think are important. She notices issues with body image for women and writes about her own struggles with double standards in a way that's accessible and makes sense. She admires Hillary Clinton. She wants the Republican party to be more inclusive, and she's clearly at least socially moderate (if not liberal, although the pro-life thing is a wrench in that). She supports gay marriage. She thinks young people are important.

It's a departure from the rampantly privileged older white male syndrome. Yes, her economic policies still favor privilege. But at least she's got some awareness that life is unfair sometimes and actually cares. And she's respectful of people who disagree with her.

I don't know if she'll have any success with her message that Republicans need to join the 21st century. If anything, it seems like they're only getting more conservative and poisonous since they lost the White House. I'd love it, though, if she did. It's so much more fun to have an opponent when it's a respectful, ethical one than when it's a mean, exclusive, scary one. Maybe then we'd actually be able to have a few reasonable compromises and actually get some shit done in politics.

The History of Removing Women's Body Hair

In case you couldn't have guessed, the practice of removing female body hair in Western culture and especially North America started with advertising.



When sleeveless dresses became popular shortly after the invention of the razor with disposable blades (planned obsolescence anyone?), it was an obvious step for advertisers to try to sell the razors to women. What better way than making them think their armpit hair was unsanitary and needed to be removed?

The above image from 1915 was the first in a widespread campaign which increasingly suggested to women that their hair was dirty and distasteful. Now, this particular advertising trend had to do specifically with underarm hair. The disgust for leg hair and need for razors to shave it off was encouraged later, after hemlines began to rise. Women had to be self-conscious about their newly visible body parts in order to convince them to pay to alter them.

It's a little harder to pinpoint exactly when women started shaving their legs. There seems to be a consensus that it happened in the 1940s when skirts got shorter and sheer pantyhose became available. Some speculate that it had something to do with pinup model Betty Grable showing off her hairless legs and inspiring others to do the same.

Complete removal of pubic hair is a different story, actually. This was less driven by the advertising industry than by the porn industry. If you're a pornie, you've probably seen some of those old 1970s pornos where the women still sported the full bush. Pubic hair got shorter and shorter as porn became more and more accessible via VHS, DVD, and then finally the internet. As it became viable for more people to get into porn, it also became useful to remove their hair, the only visual obstacle to intense closeups of pink vulvas.

So, ladies, the fact that you're socially pressured in a huge way to remove all the hair on your body (except the long locks on your head) comes almost exclusively from industry and advertising. It has nothing really to do with hygiene or femininity, it's just about profits and products. I mean, that's no different than other staples of beauty standards like makeup and anti-aging products, etc. It's just equally depressing.

Quitting (Longish post)

Well, I quit sex work.

It's a little more complicated than that. I took myself off the schedule at the dungeon a few weeks ago. As an (apparently very) submissive woman I was having trouble effectively meeting the needs of my clients, and I didn't like the work that much. It was a fun learning experience and it gave me a lot of time and some experiences through which to mull over BDSM and my feelings towards it, but I was done with it.

My intention was to go back to stripping, and I found a small-ish club in Queens where I felt reasonably comfortable and the house fees weren't too high. I even auditioned there and worked for a night. (They have 8-hour shifts, 8pm-4am. Ouch!) I bought a gown to fit the dress code there, and packed all my g-strings into my rolling stripper bag.

But when I went in for my second shift, I just didn't want to do it anymore. I knew what I had to be doing to make money. I needed to go around the room and find the men who glanced at my ass, look deeply into their eyes, flirt mercilessly, all the usual. I needed to play the game. And I just had no interest in it.

I normally have an overabundance of sexual energy. I think about sex all the time and talk about it and have it and I've got this great store of positive juice in my batteries when it comes to physical love. As a stripper, I was able to use and play with that energy to keep things interesting and engage with men and even have fun.

These days, I'm a little low on that energy. I think a big part of that is having a full time canvassing job that's not in line with what I want to be doing. We're not even canvassing for Planned Parenthood anymore; now I spend all day having conversations with people who don't give a shit about human rights but will cry and throw thousands of dollars at "homeless" (ie feral ie wild) household animals. It's draining, on a soul level.

I also think I've probably learned everything I'm going to learn from stripping. I understand the dynamics of it and I have a feel for the industry. Sure, I could always learn to be a better stripper, but that's not really who I want to be. I was never a lifer.

Most importantly, though, I always promised myself that the second I really didn't want to be a sex worker anymore, the second it started to hurt me, I would stop. I've seen the consequences of staying in it past that point, and they're not pretty. I don't want to damage myself that way. I want to have more respect for myself and my feelings than that. I'm lucky enough to have a day job so I can, kind of, afford to leave.

Things are admittedly going to be financially difficult for me for a while until I figure out what to do instead. I'm going to try to go back to babysitting. Instead of another physically and emotionally draining job on top of my first one, I'll get to be around kids. That's like a battery charger; I love them.

I'm also looking for a different full time job. I came here meaning to canvass for only a little while as I looked for something else, but I was overwhelmed with moving and being on my own so I didn't have the extra initiative that took. Now I'm settled, and I'm going to dedicate myself to that for real.

I'm not really sure where I'll end up with all of this or how it'll go, but I've got some money saved and I've got a new determination to find work that's fulfilling, at least on a basic level. Wish me luck everyone, and I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Rapists are Nearly Always Predators

I've had two blog posts by Thomas over at Yes Means Yes up in my Firefox browser for a while, meaning to write about them here. They are both fairly lengthy but very, very worth reading.

In the first, he talks about who the people are who rape repeatedly without getting caught. He discusses a couple of surveys where researchers managed to identify and question un-incarcerated rapists. A few key points from the post:

Of the 865 total attempted or completed rapes these men admitted to, a staggering 95% were committed by 96 men, or just 8.4% of the sample...Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes...

The sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again...

We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.

The second post is sort of an expansion on the first. In it, Thomas explains how it is that serial rapists manage to commit their crimes without detection. Namely, by raping people they know and by using intoxicants much more than force to make the rape possible.

In the course of 20 years of interviewing these undetected rapists, in both research and forensic settings, it has been possible for [the researcher] to distill some of the common characteristics of the modus operandi of these sex offenders. These undetected rapists:
• are extremely adept at identifying “likely” victims, and testing prospective victims’ boundaries;
• plan and premeditate their attacks, using sophisticated strategies to groom their victims for attack, and to isolate them physically;
• use “instrumental” not gratuitous violence; they exhibit strong impulse
control and use only as much violence as is needed to terrify and coerce their victims into submission;
• use psychological weapons – power, control, manipulation, and threats – backed up by physical force, and almost never resort to weapons such as knives or guns;
• use alcohol deliberately to render victims more vulnerable to attack, or completely unconscious.

Now, I am not able to do these posts justice with brief blockquotes. I really do suggest that everyone go and read the full posts, as long as they are. They're both very informative and I finished reading them with the sense that, yes, dear God, rape is awful and these are horrible men, but also with the sense that maybe there's something we can actually do about it that would work.

That's what blew my mind. I've heard the rhetoric about acquaintance rape, that it's committed by guys who did it by accident, who were just confused and fucked up about consent because of our weird sexual culture. I bought into that.

The studies in these posts explain that this is clearly not true, that rapes are committed by predators, plain and simple. This actually made me feel better. Yes, I still will never know upon meeting a man whether or not he's a rapist, but at least the ones that are rapists aren't accident-prone nice guys who I should feel bad for. I need no conflict in my feelings. They're evil. And we can identify them, if we watch for the signs he points out.

That's pretty damn cool.

Why Isn't Rape Ever Funny?

Because chances are, you're telling your hi-larious rape joke to somebody who has been raped. And that re-victimizes them. It actively causes harm. And that's not okay.

Also, when you joke about rape, you create a culture in which rapists - who live and walk among us - know that their actions most likely won't see any kind of consequence. They have their desires affirmed. They get to actually talk about what they do, so long as they put it as a joke. And then people laugh. And they feel safe. And then they go rape people. And that's not okay, either.

This is not about being Politically Correct. Triggering someone's traumatic response to what is generally agreed is the most traumatic experience you can have has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with being a decent person who doesn't want to hurt people.

So just don't. And don't laugh along when someone else does. It's like a tiny, tiny thing you can do to fight rape. So let's all do it.

Shy?

So, while I've gotten better at this over the years, I've always been kind of bad about expressing my desires - be they sexual or for objects or especially emotional. I've gotten to a point where I can talk about them, but only in a detached, logical sort of way. Like I'm reporting on something external to myself.

It's easy enough for me to say "In general, I need regular physical contact and cuddling to be comfortable in my life," but much harder for me to say "Please hold me, I'm feeling sad."

This is something I've been struggling to overcome for years. It's kind of stereotypically feminine of me, and it's one of those ways I fit my gender role that drives me crazy. I'd like to be the first one to lean in for a kiss. I'd like to be able to simultaneously want and admit to wanting for something. As opposed to waiting until I don't feel it as strongly to admit to it.

I think I feel like my desires are so strong that I can't let them out while remaining at all in control of myself. I'm also afraid that if I admit or show the strength of any desire, the person I'm interacting with will be overpowered by it and bow to it regardless of their own needs. This may be irrational, but I also really don't want to impose on anyone else.

There are lots of reasons for this involving my upbringing and probably, yes, my gender role. But that's not as important for this post.

What I've started to think is that maybe I can approach this in a different way. Reframe it, if you will. Instead of thinking "I'm repressed about my desires" or "I'm incapable of expressing myself clearly," I could just think "I'm shy when it comes to desire."

It sort of changes things, doesn't it? Shy is not necessarily a positive or negative thing. It just is. And there are things you can do to deal with it, to live with it. It can even be cute or endearing.

If I can give myself permission to be shy with my desires, then I might even be able to, tentatively, physically express them in a way that doesn't make me uncomfortable. The gentleness of a shy expression of desire takes away, in my head, some of what I fear about it. It makes it manageable. It's a small step.

I haven't really tried this yet (I'm being celibate, remember?), but I'm hoping it will help.

What/Who I Want

So, the result of my last two posts has some pretty specific implications for what/who I am looking for in a partner.

Male. Feminist. Dominant. Polyamorous. Queer.

Do I even need to say that these people are hard to find? Especially the ones who I'm, incidentally, also attracted to? Yeesh.

A friend of mine suggested I find poly events to go to, as poly people are often also kinky. Sometimes they're queer, too, although lord knows how I'm going to find or negotiate that overlap.

Maybe now that I've figured out so much more clearly what I want, I'll feel more comfortable in the sex positive community. It always felt a little overwhelming and I never felt like I had enough of a handle on my own sexuality to communicate about it freely with the well-informed participants in that culture.

I always felt very young, inexperienced, and out of place there. Yes, it was very welcoming and they're kind people, but I'm a person who likes to have a handle on things before I jump in to participate, so I still felt like an outsider. Perhaps all this soul searching will mitigate that issue.

Does anyone else have this problem, of too narrow a field of prospective datees? What do you do to meet people? Any suggestions for me to find my kinky, queer, male, poly feminist? I'd very much welcome them.

P.S. I'm not letting go of the whole "bisexual" thing entirely. I still like women and having sex with them. I think there are just more men out there to whom I'll be attracted than there are women. Like, I'm a Kinsey 1.6: predominantly hetero but a bit more than incidentally homo. So I'm going to acknowledge that and just let it be.