One Night Stand: An Anecdote
There’s a very strange article about sex and porn in The Atlantic, which I cannot decide quite how to respond to. On the one hand it strikes me as wrongheaded and sad, especially in author Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s apparent opinion that male sexuality is essentially brutal and violent and, in her word, “extreme”. On the other hand, she has a clearer-than-usual view that men and women are different, and that the modern batch of anti-porn crusaders seem to want a “pygmy race of sexually neutered males” that is not achievable and wouldn’t be “all that enticing” even if it were. It would be easy to pull paragraphs and sentences out of this article and mock them, but on balance, I think I shan’t. Instead, it’s thoughtful enough — and such an intricate piece of interlocking arguments, each needing to be considered with the buttresses of its supporting paragraphs — that I shall simply point you there, with fair warning that it may piss you off if you don’t already have a somewhat negative view of male sexuality.
However, there was an amusing personal anecdote from the article that stands easily on its own while also, I think, serving quite handily to illustrate why I think Vargas-Cooper has somewhat bizarre ideas about male sexuality:
At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”–the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.
Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced–and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.
And as for our “honest” man, I think he’d have saved himself a deal of trouble and psychodrama by investing in a good pair of nipple clamps.
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Wow, what stellar journalism. To project one personal experience on the entire mail gender. Normally I don’t get off on subjecting women to pain and “discomfort”. But I would make an exception in her case. Yes bring on the clamps, that would make me smile.
That’s interesting. I’m not into causing discomfort through anal sex but I’m a huge enthusiast to the point of having more than one anal-only relationship, in the latter years of a rambunctious sex life.
I’ve always wondered whether my anal enthusiasm was due to the inconvenience and distress that my pursuit of vaginas has caused me over the years …
Anal sex: you’re doing it wrong. *rolls eyes*
I’m not very happy with this article, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why – other than the vast generalisations of course. The author thinks “I” and writes “a woman”, which sounds like “every woman” – insane!
The facts were all present and correct. Yes, there is a lot of amateur porn available, and sure, you can find something to suit every taste or fetish. What makes me roll my eyes are the interpretations the author draws from those facts. Particularly amusing/annoying is how she takes one experience from her own life and uses it to support her theory of what must be true for all men. Puh-leeze!
Is every poorly-lit video and pic done on a hand-cam or cellphone evidence that every man wants to debase and demean women? Or does most of it simply demonstrate a general clumsiness, lack of skill or knowledge, and an absence of artistic expression? Yes, digital technology and the internet have been the great democratizer in giving nearly everyone the opportunity to have a voice and broadcast it around the world. But that doesn’t mean all of it will be pretty or sexy. Furthermore, isn’t that really all in the eye of the beholder anyway?
My wife, who’s always right read the long paragraph. She says that the author was “not being herself” during that sexual encounter, trying various roles without any real meaning. The man’s request for anal was probably his attempt to knock her out of her comfort zone so that she would be genuine.
…In other words, that desired “discomfort” was emotional more than physical.
Kevin, I’m obviously working from a different theory.
I suspect the guy of being a closet kinkster; specifically, a bit of a sadist. But since he wasn’t open about it, he couldn’t say “I want to hurt you” and bring out his whip collection. Since anal often doesn’t go real well for people who are just learning each other’s rhythms and don’t have a lot of trust built up yet, I’m guessing this guy had learned that he could push an encounter to anal in order to create sufficient “discomfort” (his disingenuous code word) to keep his dick stiff, thus avoiding the need to be open and honest about his true kink with his one-night-stands.
No, I’m not impressed by that, and it’s just a wild theory; I’m reading an awful lot into a little anecdote. But if I’m right, it wasn’t a “moment of sexual honesty” at all — quite the opposite in fact.
A single instance is obviously not a statistically significant sample. But the nipple clamps response adds a little to that sample. Maybe she’s right.
Not really — because she assumes a phenomenon like sadism requires something like “hate of the object of one’s sexual affection.” That’s how she can prattle nonsense like “pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes” when in fact some of the happiest sadists in the world do their cruelest things to people who enjoy the hell out of it, in the context of happy relationships and fully-negotiated scenes that respect everybody’s boundaries and personhoods.
Combination theory: sensing, what with the switching personas, that she was not being honest and open about her own wants and needs, the fellow wasn’t comfortable being open about his own. Hence the posited anal discomfort duplicity?
Having skimmed the article, I’m torn between wanting to hug her and smack her–her writing gives the impression of someone who has never enjoyed sex (poor thing) and thinks that’s how it’s supposed to be (hence the smack).
[…] a risk this will reinforce some of the negative memes that were in that yucky Atlantic article, but I’m going to post it anyway, because it strikes me as honest and unfiltered, and because […]
I’m curious exactly what thoughtcrime Ms. Vargas-Cooper has committed here. Is it just that she failed to be unequivocally and enthusiastically approving of all porn, no matter its content? Is it the observation that the desire to debase women is an animating force of male sexuality? I find it very hard to believe that regular readers of a blog that links frequently to Kink.com sites would have a problem with this. One might think such readers would be proud to admit that the debasement of women is hot, but no, evidently to state this plainly is impermissible. “Yucky,” Bacchus says.
Or perhaps its this: “But equality in sex can’t be achieved.” I suppose if one held equality to be the utmost, highest good, it would indeed be yucky to learn that not everyone wants it or thinks it is possible.
Allow me to refer you to the second sentence of the post, in which your question has already been answered. Thanks!
Also, lest your comments encounter moderation difficulties in future, may I suggest you check out the ErosBlog FAQ? Orwellian references and sarcastic attempts to frame the discussion in terms of what ideas are “permissible” are stretching the bounds of civility, and future such rhetorical assaults are unlikely to survive the moderation process.
I agree with the commentator above that says, “The facts were all present and correct. Yes, there is a lot of amateur porn available, and sure, you can find something to suit every taste or fetish. What makes me roll my eyes are the interpretations the author draws from those facts.” And yet…
I remember there was a *pro-porn* writer that wrote a moving article a while back about how, when she was still working out her feelings about sexuality, porn scared her because of its emphasis on airbrushing and the “male gaze”. Porn is wonderful and freeing to many of us, but it can still partakes of many of the larger problems in our culture (anti-gay, sexist, racist, etc.)
What scares me is the idea that what looks like glaring holes in her research to most of the readers in this blog may still be a sexual reality to many people. In *my* personal experience, it was only through BDSM that I was properly taught concepts like consent, negotiation, and saying no. The author doesn’t seem to have even heard of female sadism, but then again, Bitchy Jones wouldn’t have had to write her (now sadly decimated) blog and Maymay wouldn’t have started Male Submission Art if the concept wasn’t counterintuitive for many people who were already involved in alternative sexuality.
Using this article to make generalizations about the state of sex in the US seems pretty dangerous, but it still makes me wonder how we can better get the message out to people who think “alternative” sexuality is too scary to seek out openly.
I agree with Bacchus that this article, while I disagree with much of what Ms. Vargas-Cooper writes, she is thorough and thoughtful enough in her writing to deserve measured criticism rather than mockery. (And Tom’s expressed desire, however lighthearted, in the first comment to hurt her for her views is a little chilling.)
The thing is, I don’t believe that pregnant gang-bangs and double-anal as everyday as she claims. And although fake incest is common, it’s if anything more common to be mother-son, which she doesn’t mention, since it doesn’t fit in with her theory. I think sex is just more complicated than she thinks.
Certainly, I suspect porn has affected sex and I remember reading an older gay man lamenting the way his young partners chose positions poor for pleasure, but good for a camera. And there is definitely some shitty, airbrushed, women-hating porn out there that I would be happier if it didn’t exist (but would fight for its right to be made). But even with a lot of the same prejudices as Ms. Vargas-Cooper, I still don’t buy her argument.
Interesting read, though.
eurgh… Writing in a hurry before bed, there appears to be an unnecessary ‘this article’ in the first paragraph and a missing ‘are’ in the second.