June 20, 2011

Man Candy Mondays: Go doggies!

When I moved to Melbourne three and a half years ago, one of the first tasks I had to attend to was choosing an AFL team. Unfortunately, I was led badly astray by a very dear friend, and for a brief period followed Collingwood.

Soon after that mis-step, I settled on the Western Bulldogs. They were a bit of a funny looking bunch at the time, save the dreamy Daniel Giansiracusa.

via Gay Footy ‘s  Player Pix

But watching a game the other night (my first this season), I was struck by how beautiful my team was all of a sudden.

Now to Giansiracusa I will add 18-year old (!!) Luke Dahlhaus, he of the beautiful shoulder-length dreadlocks.

Via the Herald Sun

I am quite partial to Will Minson and his beautiful arms:

Via Zimbio

And this Justin Sherman chap is making me (and apparently a whole bunch of gay men) rather dizzy.

Via The Sports Fag

That is all!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Man Candy

Tagged as , , , ,

June 11, 2011

The news in numbers 1: Female gazing

Released, this week, from my usual 9 to 5 toil, I’ve had time to devote myself to something far less consequential: an investigation into the abundance or otherwise of hawt men in the Australian online media landscape! Today, I am excited to unveil the results of my miniature study.

I’m going to give my geek free reign on this one, so your three options are to:

  1. get your geek on too;
  2. forgive me and endure; or
  3. skip straight to ‘Results’

Here we go!

Aim

To assess the extent to which major Australian news websites show attractive men on their homepages.

Rationale

While images of hot women are hard to avoid modern Australia, images of hot men appear to be a scarcer commodity. This makes people who are attracted to hot men sad. By determining which online news site tends to feature the most hot men, my project will empower hot-men-attracted persons to navigate the media landscape in the most pleasurable way.

Research question

How many photographs of attractive men are displayed on the homepages of major Australian news sources?

(entirely skippable section on) Methodology

Daily, over the period 6 June to 11 June, I visited the homepages of four major Australian online news sources: The Age, The Australian, the Herald Sun and ABC News. Each visit took place in the early afternoon.

On each visit I classified each photograph on the main site as either:

  • attractive woman
  • not-so-attractive woman
  • attractive man
  • not-so-attractive man
  • other.

I counted totals for each and entered them into a spreadsheet. At the end of the week I calculated some daily averages and made some pretty stacked column graphs – my favourite!

So what is a physically attractive man and how is he different from a not-so-attractive man? How do we operationalise this concept? Obviously, hotness is subjective, and, recognising this, I didn’t go through measuring the moistness in my panties or anything. Instead, I made most classifications based on the way the person was presented, their occupation and their reason for being in the news. For example, a photograph of a politician, columnist or similar public figure was classified as not-so-attractive, unless the related article actually focused on their attractiveness, or if their attractiveness was really played up in the photo, or if they just happened to be undeniably super-hot. For example, Andrew Bolt = not-so-attractive, Fairfax blogger Katherine Feeney giving you a seductive sideways glance = attractive.

A photograph of a young celebrity or entertainer was classified as attractive by virtue of profession and presentation, rather than my own view of their hotttt level. The exception to this is was the celebrity is generally considered unattractive, but somehow still managed to get famous. For example, in a group photograph of tv show hosts Dannii Minogue, Kyle Sandilands and Brian McFadden, Dannii and Brian were counted as ‘attractive’ but Kyle was not. Come now, this is entirely fair.

Athletes and sporting figures with their tight, glistening bodies were classified as attractive unless they are most definitely not so. This was pretty generous of me, I thought, and really upped the count of attractive men, perhaps unfairly.

Where a photograph featured more than one person and each was clearly visible and an equal focus of the photo, I counted each of the people separately.

Photographs of groups of ordinary or hard-to-see people and of children, along with non-photographic images (cartoons, graphs, etc.) were classified as “other”. I counted large, medium and small photographs, including those in automatic slide rotators, but not teeny-tiny thumbnails or photographs in advertisements. Where the exact same photo appeared more than once on the homepage, I counted it only once.

Results!

On all of the websites, there were more photographs of men than women (Table 1). Perhaps this is a good sign for hetrosexual ladies eager for visual stimulation! Then again, perhaps not! We shall not jump to conclusions.

Table 1: Average photographs of men and women

The ABC led the pack in display of the male form, with a daily average of 13.75 photos of men on its homepage (74% of people-pictures). With 73% men, the Australian also did well on this measure, while delivering a higher total number of pictures of men (average of 17). The Age was disturbingly egalitarian, with nearly half of all people in photographs being of the female variety. Boo!

Now let’s dig a little deeper. Figure 1 below shows the average proportions of hot and not-so-hot men and women on each of the homepages.

Figure 1: Average proportion of hot and not-so-hot men and women

Figure 1 shows that The Australian got our hopes up only to dash them cruelly. Despite their admirable focus on men, a paltry 1.4 of them were hunky – a ratio of not-so-hot to hot of around 11 to 1! The ABC, on the other hand, put in a decent effort with hot men representing a respectable 19% of all people photographed.

The clear winner, though, is the Herald Sun. The Herald Sun averaged 7.6 hot men per day, which was, incredibly, exactly equal to the average number of hot women displayed. Even though The Age had more hot men in total (9.4), one is forced to wade through many, many pictures of unbearably cute women to find them. One caveat, however: many of the Herald Sun’s physically attractive men are footballers or similar, which might not be your thing.

Discussion

Like all the best studies, this one did not add to human knowledge but simply confirmed what everyone knew already. Pictures of pretty women are everywhere, and pictures of pretty men are not. For those of us who like to look at hot men, though, there is a surprising oasis in the media desert: the Herald Sun. The very worst thing you can do as a lover of male beauty is to peruse The Australian or the ABC.

As well as providing a basis for newsmedia decision-making, the study sheds some light which types of people are likely to become famous, in the news. If you are woman who is neither super hot nor Our Nation’s Leader, you are not very likely to get your face in the paper. Sorry! Best focus on baking or something like that, rather than fame. If you are a not-so-attractive man, but you can write above a fifth-grade level and enjoy kicking poor people in the teeth, you should probably get in touch with The Australian as they may have an opening for an opinion columnist.

Limitations

Like all research, this project had its limitations. Most importantly, alone, the results of this study may not provide sufficient information for media consumption decision-making. You might wish to take other factors into account when deciding what news source to rely on, such as journalistic quality, ease of navigation, and whether Andrew Bolt is likely to make you lose your breakfast.

While I tried to judge general attractiveness, I am human, and I’m sorry, I just don’t think Rafael Nadal is anywhere near so hot as Bear Grylls. You may disagree.

Also, I was not all that careful in my counting. Slide rotators, in particular, are really annoying to look at, so I probably fucked up a bit with those. Whoops.

2 Comments

Filed under In the news, Man Candy, Research

Tagged as , , , ,

June 9, 2011

TBSASS 2: Won’t somebody think of the children?

Hello! Welcome to the second instalment of The Best Studies are Sex Studies, wherein I read an entire journal article or report on sex stuff, and pass on the interesting bits to you…

Right at this  moment, I’m at a career crossroads. I know I want to quit my office job. What I’m trying to decide is whether to do a Dip Ed and become a bitter, misanthropic high school teacher, or do a PhD and become a poor nobody entirely disconnected from reality.

So anyhow, one of the things is, I really want to teach sex ed. I don’t know if you can even do this. I mean, I don’t quite know how the job gets allocated: perhaps wanting to be the sex ed teacher disqualifies you.  But so! Sexuality education. It is an interest of mine. Let’s do some learning on it!

The study

The good people at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society have just released a new study on this very topic: Sexuality Education in Australian Secondary Schools: Results of the 1st National Survey of Australian Secondary Teachers of Sexuality Education 2010.

As the title helpfully suggests, the report describes the findings of a national survey of high school sex ed teachers. Prior to this survey, nobody really knew very much about who taught sex ed, what they taught or how they did it. The idea behind the survey was to get a representative picture of Australian sex ed so as to provide a basis for improvement.

Not because I am dedicated, but because of being a nerd, I read the report’s ‘methodology’ section. Twice, actually! Despite a low response rate, it looks pretty good, and the findings are probably more or less representative of the actual situation. The survey included teachers from government, independent and Catholic schools in cities and in the regions. One anomaly I did notice is that 28 respondents were from single-sex girls’ schools, but only 6 were from boys’ schools. I will keep my wild conspiratorial speculations on the reasons for that to myself.

Sex ed teachers

Think back, if you will, five years, ten, fifteen, thirty, to your own schoolyard days. Call up, in your mind, the image of your PE teacher…

Apparently, fully 4 out of 5 Australian sex ed teachers are PE teachers. I don’t know about you, but I find this a bit disconcerting. Times have probably changed since I was in school, and ten years of public, humiliating physical defeat may be unfairly colouring my perception of PE teachers, but they never struck me as the most enlightened of the faculty.

The next biggest contributors were SOSE/humanities teachers (5.4%), science teachers (5.1%) and, eek!, religious education teachers (3.2%). Support staff like nurses, consellors and – eek! again – chaplains, together made up 4 per cent.

Most had some training in sex ed, either as post- or undergraduates, or in-service, but 16 per cent had no training whatsoever, and one third didn’t assess their teaching against any curriculum standards. This is kind of a big deal, when you compare it to teaching generally.

A small but scary group of sex ed teachers harbours some pretty fucked-up views. (Unavoidable double-negatives in this paragraph, read carefully!) For example, 1 in 5 didn’t ‘strongly disagree’ with the statement ‘homosexuality is always wrong’, and 27% weren’t sure whether sex before marriage was okay or not. Only 62% disagreed that sexual orientation/same sex attraction should be excluded from the sex ed curriculum.

What’s being put into impressionable young minds??

It seems reasonable to assume that the framework in which sex ed is taught will influence its content and messages, so it’s interesting that:

 … most sexuality education was taught as part of the health education program (91%)… When sexuality education was taught in another subject (12% of teachers), it was most likely to be in Religious Education, Personal Development or Biology/Science.

Hold this in your mind as we move onto the next point.

So, the survey listed a bunch of sexuality topics, asking the teachers to identify those that they covered in their teaching. Factual sexual health topics were most widely taught, including STIs, birth control, reproduction, etc. Social topics such as ‘managing peer influence, relationships and feelings, alcohol and decision-making, sexual activity and decision making and dealing with emotions when sexually active’ were also taught by the vast majority of teachers. Ninety-four per cent of teachers covered ‘abstinence from intercourse until being ready’. Surprisingly, to me, 68 per cent also covered the ridiculously unrealistic and thoroughly antiquated topic of “abstinence until marriage”.

When it comes to social topics detail seems to me to be all-important, and what a survey can tell us is pretty limited. It’s good for teenagers to hear that they can wait until they’re ready, and to know how to deal with pressure from peers or a partner. The thing is that these good-in-and-of-themselves messages can so easily be taught as part of an overall narrative in which everybody is hetrosexual, girls’ sexual desire is totally missing, sexual activity is equated with a lack of self-respect, and so on.

What gets left out?

Guess! Guess!

………………………………………………..

…………………………………………………..

Fascinatingly, the only listed topic covered by less than half of the teachers was ‘the pleasure of sexual behaviour/activity’. The report is pretty sanguine about this, but they do have a little jab, with some help from those kinky Scandinavians:

However, practical examples such as the Long Live Love Program in the Netherlands demonstrate that comprehensive programs that accept young peoples’ sexual desire as being normal and teaching about mutuality and pleasure in sexual relationships can be very effective. Within Europe the Netherlands has the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion and STIs among young people.

Long Live Love? Sounds cooler than Australia’s most-used program, Talking Sexual Health. Check out this video on the program (ten tips on good kissing at 3:10! Rude Dutch words at 4:30!).

Also, around 16 per cent of teachers said they do not cover ‘sexual orientation/same sex attraction’, which is a complete fucking travesty, in my opinion.  ‘Gender roles and stereotyping’ was covered by nearly 9 of 10 teachers, but it’s difficult to know what this means, and ‘gender identity’ wasn’t even an item on the list. Around a third didn’t cover ‘sex and ethics’.

How and when

The study also looked at how and when sex ed is taught. Unless you have an unusual interest in pedagogy the ‘how’ isn’t particularly interesting (live demonstrations don’t get a mention). In terms of timing, the basic reproductive facts are usually taught in years 7 and 8. Sex ed is most concentrated in year nine, followed by year ten, and only a small proportion of teaching time is in years 11 and 12. In a way this makes sense; there’s a lot of other stuff to focus on in years 11 and 12, and some kids have already left school. On the other  hand, this is around the time that a lot of teenagers start actually having sex, so it’s odd that education about it drops off.

My random view, in case anyone cares

Ultimately, sex ed, like anything that is taught in schools, is unlikely to stray far from prevailing community attitudes, or travel more quickly towards sexual utopia than society as a whole. Nearly half of the teachers in this survey said that they were careful about what they taught because of possible community reactions.

On top of that, schools are the focus of a million competing interests and agendas, each salivating at the thought of all those developing brains held captive, nearly every day, by law! Sixty-five per cent of sex ed teachers said that there was already not enough time to cover sexuality education adequately, so nobody’s going to be clamouring for more content.

Still, here’s my idea. In addition to the vital sexual health information, the social skills for negotiating sex, and the Pleasure Stuff, I think that sexuality should be taught in its cultural and political context. That is – and excuse me for this wanky academic terminology – it should be taught as a contested thing. So many controversial political and cultural debates centre on sexual matters: abortion, gay marriage, sexual assault & rape, porn, and so on. Because sex is also a part of our personal lives and relationships (whether we’re getting it, wanting it, avoiding it, loving it, watching it, fighting over it, or something else), these debates are extra-emotionally-charged.

So I reckon that a useful message for teenagers, maybe in those last couple of years of school, is that a lot of people have strong views about sex: what it means, how and when it should be done, and who it can be done with. The task for them is to work out, or decide, what sex means to them and the place it will have in their lives.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Research

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 6, 2011

Man Candy Mondays: Aural edition!

When I was 18 or so, I was really, really into Jeff Buckley. OK, I know that most everyone likes Jeff Buckley, but I was obsessed. I owned every album, even the illegally produced bootleg ones and the ones that just comprised 17 slightly different renditions of Dream Brother.

Anyhow, this is by no means the best Jeff Buckley song, not by a long shot. Plus, it’s a home-recorded work in progress so the sound quality is crap. But it is fucking horny, and perhaps even a little bit genderqueer:

Your Flesh is So Nice, from Sketches for my Sweetheart the Drunk

Enjoy!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Man Candy

Tagged as , , ,

June 3, 2011

Dilemmas 1: Coming out as sex positive

On the Monday after you’ve fucked four guys at a sex party, how do your answer a co-worker’s polite question about your weekend? I’m in an industry that’s not even remotely sexy, so I’ll tell him I went to a party. If I’m feeling cheeky I might add that I “met a bunch of new people” and “had a really great time”. Being discreet about gang bangs is one thing, but should we hide our sex-positivity, our alternative relationships or our interest in sexuality when we’re at work?

For me, my interest in sex, my being non-monogamous and my sex positivity form a big chunk of my identity. In some way I feel entitled to be open about this, just like my foodie colleague is open about her fascination with food and wine. On top of that, I think perhaps there’s a political and moral obligation to contribute to a more sex positive culture by being open about my interests and lifestyle, even with co-workers.

Generally, my approach in the workplace has been to be honest if asked and somewhat open with ‘work friends’. I don’t go around telling people I’m nonmonogamous, but if it comes up in conversation I do tell colleagues that I am in an open relationship, just like that, without elaborating or explaining, as though it’s normal.

With ‘work friends’, I’m more myself. I joke around with one of my colleagues, a guy my age, about various men in our sector/office block/most frequented cafes that I think are “hot” or on whom I  have “crushes”. We’ve chatted about sex education and AFL scandals in amongst all our other discussions of politics and current affairs, and I’ve told him that I have an intellectual interest in sexual issues.

Recently, though, there was an incident that made me wonder whether I’d perhaps been a bit too much myself. The aforementioned work friend noticed that I was leaving a comment on something online, and mentioned it loudly, and somehow drew the entire (very small) office into discussion of what I was reading and commenting on – an article about Filament magazine. Suddenly I was exposed.

What’s the article about?

Um, this magazine, um.

What magazine?

Um. It’s a magazine with pictures of men.

Are they naked?

Ah, yeah, mostly.

So you’ve read this magazine?

Yes, yeah.

One day I’m semi-comfortable with one colleague, and the next I’m admitting to a conservative Christian, my boss and a brand new colleague that I consume porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Normally I don’t care about being judged, but I don’t want to be judged by my co-workers. And I don’t want my interest in sex to damage my career. But I’m not sure that I could maintain a sexless work persona, even if I wanted to.

5 Comments

Filed under Introspection

Tagged as , , , , ,

May 30, 2011

Man Candy Mondays: Penis love

Ok, this isn’t really technically man candy but no matter – is it not one of the sweetest sex pictures you’ve ever seen?

It’s from somebody’s Tumblr, I’m afraid I can’t remember where. I do wish that everybody (who wants it) could have a partner who feels that way about their genitals…

 

2 Comments

Filed under Man Candy

Tagged as ,

May 29, 2011

Taking one for the team

Friday night, anti-porn campaigner Gail Dines rounded off her interminably long trip to Australia with a last hurrah at Melbourne’s Trades Hall. I was there, apparently alone, taking one for the team.

From the moment I stepped inside I felt jittery. Readers, there were radical feminists with severe fringes and chunky red necklaces everywhere. (Sorry. I know there is something wrong with that last sentence, but I’m keeping it.) No-one did or said anything to me, of course. But in my own mind, I felt like they could perceive, just by looking at me, that I had an immoderate interest in cock. The whole atmosphere made me too nervous to reapply my wearing-off lipstick in the open, so I scuttled off to the toilets to touch-up.

Lipstick fixed, I filed into the room and took a seat near the end of the fourth row, in between a young Asian woman with a pen and paper, and a middle aged white man. I took out a notepad, my ipod (for furtive voice recording), and my phone (for furtive tweeting). Adjacent middle aged man breathed heavily, which I interpreted as disapproval. Another middle-aged white man wearing glasses was in front of me, talking to a middle-aged white woman about what young women feel they have to … I couldn’t catch what he thought I felt but I was pretty sure he was wrong.

Monica Dux, who was stitting on stage with Dines, started things off with a quick overview of the arguments in Pornland. Then she addressed Dines: ‘Gail, are you tired?’. The audience chuckled politely, and Dines opened with the observation that because Australia is smaller than the US, it’s much easier to get into the media. Then she launched into her spiel.

It was replete with:

  • sexist jokes/insults (e.g. the other guests on Q&A were like “adolescent boys”, with Leslie Cannold “the biggest little boy of all of them”)
  • assumptions about who makes and uses porn (there have been images of sex “since the first time a man realised he could scratch a mark on the ground”)
  • ridiculous and insulting generalisations (“all men know what gonzo porn is”; “there will never be condoms in porn because men don’t want to see them”; “men don’t want to see love-making”; “working class women in minimum wage jobs were looking at Jenna Jameson and thinking ‘I could do this’” etc.)
  • Juvenile sex humour (“We have to get the industry where it hurts – with money. That’s worse than squeezing their balls, trust me!”)

The audience laughed along at all the jokes, gasped or shook their heads enthusiastically at the appropriate moments, and asked polite, complimentary questions at the end. I desperately wanted to ask Dines what she thought of my taste for rough/group/cock-gagging sex but I was, simply, too scared.

What is authentic sexuality?

Anyone who has paid any attention to Dines knows that a great deal of her argument about the harms of porn rests on the notion that there exists an ‘authentic’ sexuality.

Dines talks about authentic sexuality a lot but she seems reluctant to define it. At Trades Hall, she was careful to emphasise that it wasn’t up to her to dictate others’ authentic sexuality, and she wasn’t going to tell us what constituted authenticity for us. I can’t help but think that her coyness on this crucial point is not due to some heartfelt committment to freethought and self-determination. Rather, I suspect it comes from a reluctance to defend her definition of authenticity, which (perhaps she’s aware, on some level), is entirely arbitrary.

While she won’t set out criteria for authentic sexuality, she is clear in saying that authentic sexuality cannot come from, or be informed by, porn. Dines suggests that this is because the porn industry is capitalist and patriarchal, offering McDonald’s as a cute metaphor (porn is to authentic sexuality as McDonalds is to food) and relying on the supposed self-evident absurdity of expecting anything creative or real from a capitalist entity.

But Dines does leave clues as to her definition of authenticity scattered through her speeches and articles, whenever she identifies a given sexual act as good or bad (either with her tone, or with funny labels like ‘life-loving’ and ‘death-loving’). Good things include ‘making love‘, connection, and tenderness. Bad things include rough sex, hairless pussies, and having sex with real dolls. Gagging on cock is perhaps the baddest of all bad things, judging by the number of references it gets.

But really, what the hell kind of sense does this make? It really does not make any. Sure, most pornography is produced by profit-making enterprises. But so so too are the majority of books, magazines, films, songs and assorted cultural ephemera from which Dines et al have derived their ideas about the right kind of sex – the loving, monogamous, gag-free kind. Does Dines really believe, as she says, that nothing creative, useful, or meaningful can come out of a capitalist industry? Has she never seen a film, or read a book published and printed by a profit-making company, that added any enjoyment or meaning to her life?  Or is it only when you add sex that nothing can be salvaged?

As a sociologist, you would think Dines would recognise the cultural and social context surrounding her, and realise that perhaps her view of sex is also shaped by the culture that she sits within. You think she might understand that no-one’s sexuality is a pure, untouched, individually-determined thing. Instead, she clings tightly to a narrow view of acceptable sexuality which, ironically, fits very comfortably within the patriarchal, capitalist framework she critiques.

Slut-shaming under the surface

Dines and her organisation say that they are not critical of the ‘constrained’, option-lacking women who perform in porn, but of the industry that exploits them. Still, there seemed to be an undercurrent of slut-shaming in the room.

It was probably most obvious when discussion turned briefly to Sasha Grey. Sasha Grey, Dines explained, is a  pornstar who recently ‘gave up’ porn to ‘go mainstream’ in a horrifying first for the industry. (It’s not actually a first, of course, but was described as such).

This was, I suppose, an extension of Dines’ argument about the mainstreaming of pornography, but it was hard to miss the implication that women who’ve performed in porn are ‘other’, tainted beings coloured wholly by their sex work and properly confined to that space where they belong.

Of course, no-one mentioned that while she’s gone mainstream, Sasha Grey hasn’t disowned her past in porn, describes entering the industry deliberately and with purpose, and appears to be an impressively intelligent, articulate and self-possessed woman.

Moments when I LOLed and nobody else did

  • Bless her, but Monica Dux seemed particularly clueless w/r/t the modern era with its internet and international postage and so forth, saying, for example, that she didn’t think you could get real dolls in Australia.
  • Near the end, in response to a question, Dines suggested that the solution to the porn problem was to tell young women about radical feminism, specifically, having them read some Andrea Dworkin.

13 Comments

Filed under In the news, Introspection

Tagged as , , , ,

May 24, 2011

The best studies are sex studies 1: Lives and voices of highly sexual women

This post is the first in a series I’m going to do looking at some study or other that I’ve come across. I can’t promise timeliness – today’s study is close to a decade old – but I will actually read the darn thing. Like, the actual journal article, not the press release or the Daily Mail distillation.

So, let’s get to it, shall we?

———

When you’re a highly sexual woman, I think you generally don’t get to talk as freely with girlfriends about sex, men, and relationships as other women do. There are dozens of little things to worry about. Will they think you’re pathetic/slutty/boastful/deluded/going to come on to their partner? &c.

Oftentimes, you can talk to men about these things, but then there’s another set of  concerns. Or just one concern: that they will misinterpret your frequent desire to jump into bed as a desire to jump into bed with them, specifically. This can be awkward. Conversely, if you do want to jump into bed with someone, specifically, casually mentioning how much you love fucking is a clever seduction trick.

Anyhow, it was with this general wish to share and identify in mind that I googled, the other day, “highly sexual women” and “research”. I loooove research, so I’m not sure why looking for this had never occured to me before.

The study

What I found was a wonderful 2003 paper by Eric S. Blumenthal, “The Lives and Voices of Highly Sexual Women”. It’s an exploratory study, done in the USA, based on semi-structured interviews with 44 mostly white women who self-identified as ‘highly sexual’ against the criteria:

(1) You typically desire sexual stimulation, typically to the point of orgasm, with yourself or a partner, six to seven times per week or more and act upon that desire whenever possible.

And/or

(2) You think of yourself as a highly sexual woman, sex is often on your mind, and it is an aspect of yourself that strongly and frequently affects your behaviour, and quality of life satisfaction.

(As an aside, I definitely place myself in the second category, not the first. I think about sex a lot every day, but I don’t necessarily feel I need it ‘six to seven times per week’, every week.)

A central fact

Blumenthal found that the women reported their lives had been “enormously affected by, if not completely organised around, their sexuality,” and that the influence of sexuality on their lives could not be overstated. Almost all of the participants said that being highly sexual was a ‘central fact’ of their lives – one that affected their relationships, activities and life choices, and occupied a major part of their time and energy.

It’s hard to put in words just how and why it is that knowing other people have felt the same things that you is so gratifying. It’s powerful, though. No joke, I cried when I read the first issue of Filament magazine, and I felt close to it reading Blumenthal’s study.

What does it mean to have your sexuality permeating your activities and life choices so thoroughly? For me, the ways in which this happens are subtle and perhaps, from the outside, unexpected. It’s not just that I have an open relationship or go to sex parties. It’s also my hobbies and my daily routines. For example, I love sewing and fashion. I enjoy them just for themselves, but, very consciously, they serve an ultimate purpose of attracting men to me, and enhancing my feelings of sexual confidence. Another example. Every weekday lunchtime, I go out. To get lunch, yes, but also to look at men, and have them look at me, as I walk around the city.

Bad bits

Most of the women in the study had struggled with living in a society that defined them in pejorative ways, and that had “mores and belief systems” that didn’t match their own behaviours. Some struggled painfully with self-hatred, while others were just conflicted  about being different, afflicted, unfeminine. Most eventually overcame these conflicts, and a small, lucky group, generally with sex-positive or sex-neutral parents, experienced little internal conflict to begin with. One even reported feeling “blessed” by her highly sexual nature. Heartwarming!

With regard to societal attitudes, the participants reported being aware of being perceived negatively, or simply presumed not to exist. It’s this invisibility, not the negativity, which annoys and interests me most, so I loved this quote from one participant:

I think the stereotypes that bother me are that women generally don’t like to have sex or don’t want it. Even on like, “Mad About You” or some sitcom where they were talking about having sex, “See, I just make my grocery list in my head, while we’re having sex.” And I thought, “That’s terrible. What kind of message is that, you think about your grocery list, while your husband is making love to you?” [laughter]

Who among us hasn’t groaned watching some stupid sit-com joke about women not liking sex? I mean, I can even think of some series in which a good two-thirds of the humour turns on this.

In terms of social interactions, the women reported some negative effects. A fascinating finding, for me, was that every one of the women repeatedly mentioned the difficulty or impossibility of gaining sexual satisfaction from just one primary relationship. Some dealt with this by having short relationships, others by having multiple concurrent relationships (n.b. my preferred coping strategy!).

The paper gave some attention to friendships with other women, which could be difficult:

Many women reported experiencing a considerable amount of accusatory, rejecting, and judgemental behaviour because of the attitudes of other women toward them, particularly female friends and peer group members.

The participants generally attributed this to discomfort arising from other women’s lack of comfort with their own sexual feelings, or to the threat of competition that highly sexual women might create. Those who had found other highly sexual female friends that they could be open with were grateful, and those who hadn’t were sad or even bitter about it.

The good bits

A majority reported that their relationships with men were very comfortable. Some described a feeling of camaraderie that rings very true to me, others reported a more flirty, bantery type of relation, and a small group said that men were often frightened by their strong sexual energy (not a problem I’ve experienced).

Many women in the study reported that their strong sexual feelings had also positively influenced their personal growth and development:

They reported learning to make conscious choices about who they were and how they would live life. Many of them reported that the introspection and personal growth required to cope successfully with the intensity of their sexual desire had ultimately produced a self-confidence and sense of individuality that then generalized to other areas of their lives.

I mean, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Pretty much the opposite of the popular imagination’s sad slut.

And lastly, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Sexy pleasure!

The experience of life as a highly sexual woman was also reported to be filled with satisfactions and pleasure.

There aren’t really any good quotes on this, probably because it’s hard to describe, but the words ‘ecstasy’, ‘amazing’ and ‘rejuvenating’ featured.

———

It’s just a small, exploratory piece of research, so I was surprised by how much of it was familiar to me. And so! I give this study my highly-sexual-woman seal of approval.

If you’re a highly sexual woman and you want to feel like less of a freak for fifteen minutes, or if you want to sex a highly sexual woman and think you might seduce her by understanding her (hint – alternatively, just show her your abs!) check it out here.

3 Comments

Filed under Research

Tagged as , , ,

May 22, 2011

Man Candy Mondays: Here’s Johnny!

Things I adore include: Mexico, shoulder-length hair, shirtlessness and Johnny Depp. The 1995 film Don Juan de Marco combines these four of my favourite things.

Stills for your (actually my) pleasure…

Resplendent in black and white:

Sexing:

More sexing!:

More sexing!!:

*Faints*

In addition to all the Johnny Depp half-naked, this film has some pretty funny moments for the non-monogamous.

Watch the whole thing for the full effect or skip to 3:30.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Man Candy

Tagged as

May 21, 2011

What men want

So, Slutwalk, hey? You heard of this thing?

/jokes/

I don’t want to re-hash the Slutwalk fors and againsts that everyone has heard a couple dozen times, but I do want to comment briefly on one of the criticisms that hasn’t gotten much attention and that bugs the hell  out of me.

In a new Slutwalk article just up on Fairfax sites, Michelle Griffin quotes Carolyn Worth, manager of a Melbourne sexual assault and rape crisis centre, who has ‘mixed feelings’ about the event. Says she:

“I have some difficulties with the selling of the raunch culture. I don’t want to be a wowser, and I don’t want to say women aren’t sexual creatures, but I still have at the back of my mind this really uneasy feeling that this is what men would like,” Ms Worth says.

In a similar article last week, the same journalist  has anti-porn campaigner Gail Dines making the same kind of point:

“By having a slutwalk, you have turned the focus onto what women are wearing,” Professor Dines told The Age. “The men who are responding to this message are not getting the irony at all.” By dressing in fishnets and push-up bras and brandishing ‘slut” signs, she said, the organisers are playing into the hands of raunch culture. “Men want women to be sluts and now they’re buying in.”

Now, I don’t want to put Worth – whose opinion is somewhat measured (and who, after all, works all day with sexual assault victims, and so is probably allowed to be a bit jaded) – in the same box with Dines, but they both seem kind of overly concerned about women giving “men” what they want.

Two things. First, the references to “men” and what they want or like are, well, a tad man-hatey. Men, like women, are a diverse bunch, and don’t share the same responses and wants. I positively bristle thinking of the men in my life – my brother, father, friends, lovers, coworkers – being slurred in this way, when not one of them is incapable of grasping the fairly straightforward rationale behind slutwalk, and not one of them wants women to do anything sexually other than follow their own volition.

Second, what’s with the suggestion that women should avoid doing something they otherwise wish to do, simply because (some) men might want or like it? I’ve tried to work out what could be at the bottom of this sentiment and all I can come up with is a generalised dislike and distrust of men. Remarkably, Dines seems not to care what women want anywhere near so much as she cares how men feel about it. Women shouldn’t be sluts, she’s implying, because that’s what men want (supposedly).

Making it all about me

I’m a highly sexual woman. I have a lot of sexual partners. I also like dressing in quite a sexually charged way. These things bring me a great deal of pleasure and are precisely what I want to be doing. But yes, the men I sleep with benefit. The men who enjoy checking me out on the street benefit. I am, I suppose, doing what they want and like.

Sooo… mutual pleasure and gain? I’m not seeing the problem here.

Observations on feminism

I was raised by a radical feminist academic and so grew up:

  • going to Reclaim the Night rallies;
  • hanging in my mother’s office at uni reading her sociology books*; and
  • being told I Could Do Anything.

I am deeply grateful that I had this kind of upbringing, and I have real appreciation for the work of my mother’s generation of feminists (and those before).

Still, I think many of them are now behind the times, holding on to resentment and dislike of men, understandably perhaps, rather than focusing on creating a future where none of us are constrained by strict gender roles.

* Hilarious-in-hindsight tangential anecdote

I am fairly certain I remember, one school holidays at the university, getting all hot and bothered reading a book in which Shiela Jeffries or somesuch explained the horrors of penetrative sex with a man, and MAZZING RIGHT THERE IN MY MOTHER’S OFFICE. True stories.

3 Comments

Filed under In the news

Tagged as , , , ,