On libertines, lap dances, and really creepy pop song lyrics

Posted by Sappho on October 24th, 2009 filed in Blogwatch, Movies, Music, Sexuality

The Libertine: The one thing this movie surprised me by lacking was a sexy Johnny Depp. You’d think that Johnny Depp as a famous rake in the court of Charles II would be, oh, sensual, enticing. But in fact, by the time the movie got to the actual sex scenes, all I could think was how glad I was not to be in bed with John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. This isn’t, mind you, a slur on either Depp’s acting or his general sex appeal, and I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. It’s more that the movie drives home the negative side of Wilmot’s libertine life so, that his most appealing moments are his least overtly sexual ones, and, when the character’s sympathetic, it’s more a sympathy that appeals to pity than to desire. This is a libertine with whom I might enjoy a night at the theater, a game of cards, or a chance to listen to his witty verses, but not one I’d want anywhere near my bed.

And now for the scattered links and comments, some of stuff that I didn’t find time to comment on before my Hawaii trip, and some about stuff that came up while I was gone:

I’ve still never read Twilight or seen the movie, but it’s great fun reading the various feminist posts about how awful they were. For variety, here’s Nate’s post on why Twilight is more feminist than you might think.

My approach to sexual fantasy has long been the mantra, “this is fantasy, not reality.” Hugo, though, has a stronger remedy, that I hadn’t heard of before, for dealing with unwanted thoughts and fantasies.

My sponsor gave me a tool that is the point of this post, one that I share with those whom I mentor. When it comes to intrusive thoughts or seemingly irresistible fantasies about doing something that is almost certainly a bad idea, there’s no point in fighting the thought. Saying to oneself “don’t think about that” doesn’t work well. If one is told in a firm voice, “Don’t think about elephants!”, the first thing that pops into one’s mind is probably a pachyderm. Rather than fighting a futile, shame-filled battle against one’s fantasies, it makes more sense, my sponsor said, to give oneself permission to have the fantasy. But — and here’s the key — one doesn’t have permission not to think the fantasy all the way through. I was told that if I wanted to drink again, I could imagine the heat of the liquor in my throat, the soothing warmth in my belly, the delicious sense of calm suffusing my whole body. But, I wasn’t allowed to stop there. I had to continue the fantasy. I had to envision the nausea, the stumbling, the peeing on my self once I passed out. (Yes, I was a wet-the-bed drunk. I know, TMI.) I needed to continue the fantasy into the next day — the hangover, the guilt, the fear of seeing people again, the worry about the harm I had done, that awful sourness in my stomach and soul.

With thoughts about acting out sexually, I was told to do the same thing. I couldn’t just do the pleasant parts of imagining taking someone new in my arms for the first time, the taste of her mouth and the thrill of slipping the clothes from our bodies as we tumbled into beds, backseats, or bushes. I needed to think through the awkwardness to come, the fear of being discovered, the shame of knowing I had crossed a line (for the umpteenth time) I had sworn not to cross. I had to imagine not just the erotic aspects of a desired encounter, but all of the possible harsh, inescapable consequences. I couldn’t stop the fantasies half-way through, in other words; I was allowed to daydream all I liked, but only if I carried the reveries to their inevitable conclusions….

Also via Hugo, here’s a post by Phaedra Starling, romance novelist and licensed private investigator, on Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced.

Disputed Mutability is back, and now no longer considers herself ex-gay. This is a less dramatic shift than it sounds, though.

Now, before anyone starts either panicking or dancing in the streets, let me say that nothing has really changed. My lifestyle, my loves, my convictions, my feelings, my views, are all pretty much where they were when I left off. I just finally realized that I haven’t been much of an ex-gay for a while now. (Which, yes, some of you have been trying to tell me for years.)

For those who are wondering why I ever snuggled up to the word in the first place, well, it did some things I needed it to do back in the day. After my religious conversion, I felt exiled from gaydom, very dyke-without-a-country, afflicted with a ridiculous traitor-guilt complex. (What a crippling loss for the gays! How will they ever get by?) I craved a new tribe to latch onto, and the ex-gays were there for me! …

We all live in public now department: Blogging about dating a celebrity can, at times, be a private, blog backwater sort of thing. You’re way down on the blog food chain, there perhaps hundreds of sites that will show up ahead of you in Google rankings, so no one except your few particular blog friends will know or care what you have to say. Or, then again, perhaps enough people will pick up and quote your now deleted blog post that it gets reproduced on Gawker, where everyone can get in on the act of debating whether you’re for real, and whether the problem is more that your ex is a douche bag or that you’re a doormat (via belledame, who’s definitely on the “ex is a douche bag” side of the argument). Given that the ex in question is Tucker Max, though, I suppose his reputation really can’t be damaged by accusations that he’s a jerk to women.

Meanwhile, non-worksafe figleaf had an active, and entirely worksafe, thread on creepiest in retrospect pop song lyrics. Creepy pop song lyrics are of several varieties.

Some are quite conscious that they’re addressing the creepy side of sexual relationships. It’s said that “Every Breath You Take” was consciously written about stalking, and that “He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss” was meant to be about the problem of abuse. I personally think (though figleaf seems to think otherwise) that “As Long As He Needs Me” is in this category. In context, in the musical, where Bill’s the villain of the piece and Nancy winds up dead, I think it’s meant to evoke some sympathy for Nancy’s mistaken decision to stand by her man, but not to leave you feeling it’s the heroic or right decision.

In contrast, “What’s the Use of Wondering,” in Carousel, is written and played as a sweet love song (which by itself, it is), ultimately framing the choice of a husband who beats his wife and dies in the course of a robbery as a romantic one. Songs that don’t seem aware of their own creepy side include “Cherish” (which on first hearing can come across as a simple love song, but which does have a stalker side to it that was put to nice use in one movie I saw), and “Tonight’s the Night” (where the “virgin child” line really does have a creepy feel to it). At least one that figleaf lists doesn’t feel creepy to me; I hear “Just My Imagination” simply as someone who knows he’s fantasizing about someone unattainable, rather than someone with stalking on his mind. One that sounded harmlessly bouncy when I was young and not listening to the lyrics, but sounds creepier once I’ve actually looked the lyrics over, is “Brown Sugar,” a kind of “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” meets “Black Boys Are Delicious” song in which the first verse seems to be describing the rape of slaves, but the chorus jumps in about how terribly sexy black people are, as if, you know, it’s all good.

Then there are the songs that creep people out less because of implications of violence or stalking or abuse than because of the roles they portray for men and women. For a lot of people, including figleaf, “Having My Baby” is high on this list. I have to admit, I’ve never been one of them, at a visceral level, not because I like “Having My Baby,” but because, whatever I should think, pro or con, if I look at the lyrics, what I actually feel is just that it’s kind of sappy, but with an earworm tune that’s all too memorable, and I wish I could turn the brain cells that remember it over to a more interesting song. On the other hand, “I’ve Never Been to Me” drives me nuts, with its dichotomy between a meaningless life as a sex object and settling down and accepting your life as a “discontented mother and a regimented wife” (can I pick from column C? pretty please?). And then, back around the time I graduated from college, one that was popular on the country stations was “Coward of the County,” in which a woman gets raped just so the protagonist of the song can learn that “Sometimes you have to fight when you’re a man.” (She was his woman, you see, and got raped by people who wanted to get at him.)

Then there’s the way a potentially creepy song can shift, depending on how it’s performed. Kittywampus, arguing that “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” isn’t a “straightforward date-rape story,” analyzes several different performances of the song, including one in which a woman takes the “male” role and plays it more aggressively than would likely be tolerable from a man.

Echidne of the Snakes is among those taking on a Freakonomics article on prostitution. At issue is the authors’ claim that

Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?

I’m struck, in discussions of prostitution, by the meaning that gets attached to “liking sex.” And I mean this on more than one “side” of these discussions. There is, to start with, a potential reading of Leavitt and Dubner’s claim that “men have wanted more sex than they could get for free” and that’s the reason prostitution flourishes; namely, men just like and want sex more than women. Often, this argument gets made explicit, and people will even point to the existence of prostitution as proof, in itself, that men just like sex more than women do. In this particular case, by arguing (whether correctly or not), that wages of prostitutes have fallen post-Sexual Revolution, Leavitt and Dubner provide fodder for the usual counterargument: women like sex just as much as men do, but pay a higher price for it, and as the price women pay falls (due to more available birth control and reduced social sanctions), you get more happy and enthusiastic sex all around. Echidne naturally makes that argument, and adds another.

Let’s go back to that first excerpt, about men always having wanted more sex than they could get free. There’s no actual evidence for that, but never mind. Let’s set up something similar but in reverse:

Since time immemorial and all over the world, women have wanted more romance than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of men who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?

But such a market has never existed, to my knowledge. Why would that be? Worth thinking about, this one. It also links to the whole attitude of Levitt and Dubner.

And an argument ensues in the comments over whether gigolos count as evidence that this demand is being met. But what I want to point out is that liking “romance” is, in fact, a form of liking sex. That “liking sex,” in these kinds of discussions, often gets defined, both by the people who say women don’t like sex as much as men do and by the people who say, yes they do, as liking the kind of sex that men are stereotypically supposed to like (so that you get women making “I do too like casual sex” arguments, in ways that suggest that all those people who don’t like their sex all that casual maybe really don’t like sex unless they can trade it for something else). So, if you like sex with a lot of different people, you like sex. If you like “casual sex” on short notice, you like sex. If you don’t need a lot of “foreplay” to warm up to the “main act” of sexual intercourse, you like sex. I’d say this is the wrong way of looking at it. If you find yourself picturing what you’d like to do naked with practically everyone you meet of the appropriate sex (or at least with practically everyone you meet that’s sufficiently close to your age and of your preferred sex), then, well, you probably like sex. But also, if you think day and night of all the fabulous naked things you’d like to do with one particular person, and, for now at least, no one else will do for you, then, well, you, too, probably like sex. If you like it fast and furious, you probably like sex. If you like a guy with a slow hand, you probably like sex. If you like a lot of kink with your sex, you like sex. If you like your sex vanilla, you still like sex. The kinds of “sex” that women are said to like more than men (whether the difference between the sexes is in fact just as large as advertised here, or much smaller) aren’t some special non-sex thing; they’re sex, and desired just as passionately as any other variety of sex. And, maybe, just maybe, there really are more women than men who are truly asexual. But most of us, you know, aren’t all that asexual at all, and whatever the nature of the sex we want, we want those particular kinds of sex that we like pretty darn strongly.

While I was away, another set of women raised their voices about a professional issue, which also, as it turns out, relates to sex, namely, the fact that a Yahoo Hack Day event in Taiwan provided lap dances to participants. As you can imagine, this is not the way to make women feel welcome in technical professions. I think of myself as a woman with a relatively high tolerance for the occasional sexual joke from men in my field, and, yeah, having to watch women lap dance all over my colleagues at an event where I’d expected professional talks or networking would exceed my own comfort level. It’s said that Yahoo has apologized, and, since I’m coming into the discussion late and having missed much of it, I’ll avoid joining any argument that may be going on now about whether they’ve apologized enough. What I do want to say, though, is that, though I’ve been lucky enough not to encounter the problem much personally, this kind of thing has been a matter of ongoing discussion among women in IT. More than one conference has been dinged for sexualized presentations that leave many of the women participants uncomfortable. More than one professional article by a woman on a technical web site has turned into a comment thread evaluating her sexual attributes. For more examples, see this Geek Feminism page complaining about the “He’s Just Like That” defense.

“Being an ass does not recursively excuse you from being an ass, as some seem to suggest.” Adam Conrad, here

But I don’t want to end on a sour note, so I’ll close with one of my favorite songs (since Joel always insists I’m playing with sexual innuendo when I sing to him the bit about the roller skate and the key).