Transplanting a Seattleite

This is just _wild_.

Under the heading, “Three Very Special Reasons That Straight Men Have Sex with Men”, Ward “takes a close look at the three broad explanatory theories” that “circulate through popular culture… becoming rhetorical resources … used to recuperate heterosexuality when it has been rendered suspect by homosexual contact.”

Did ya get get some gay on ya? Here’s some ideas on how to straighten it up. I’m laughing so hard I’m snorting.

Ward is hilarious and awesome and I’m loving this book, even tho the whole thing feels, at times, overly convoluted, I can’t really blame _her_ because the convolution is not of her making.

Increasingly, tho, I feel like a deal got made. Bi-erasure isn’t a bug ; it’s The Feature. Not Ward’s fault. This book goes a long way to shaping a path out, in fact, by depicting the gyrations and gymnastics of reifying the binaries.

ETA:

I am laughing _so hard_ now. NOT at Ward — at the craziness of what she is describing.

“The scripting of necessity is particularly salient for straight men who are unhindered by institutional isolation or heterosexual deprivation and who, nonetheless, seek male sexual partners.”

I mean, that is one of the _funniest_ sentences ever. And _yes_, the next part _is_ about slash, and starts with Kirk/Spock pon farr stories. After that, “cuckold” films, which are described. I have to say, reading the core elements there, I am forcibly reminded of the weird shit “Walter” described getting into (in _My Secret Life_) during his middle-aged years (minus the racial aspects).

Anyway. Next up: 2007 Bob Allen’s conviction. I don’t know how I didn’t notice this one go by, because I _definitely_ noticed Larry Craig and that was the same year.

ETAYA:

Lots more interesting stuff, but here’s another Golden Sentence on the topic of weird justifications for men touching each other inappropriately because they have to for Reasons.

“And yet a third approach, and the one I emphasize in this book, is to consider their erotic underpinnings, or to pay attention to the creative ways straight [sic] men find to touch each other’s bodies while working within the constraints of heteromasculinity, itself a construction arguably inseparable from dominance, violence and grossness.” Too true!

Shortly thereafter, this absolute _gem_!

“The long history of straight [sic] men’s sex with men, and the varied places where it occurs and the varied forms it takes, requires an expansive view, one that illuminates the all-too-often ignored probability that straight men, as a rule, want to have sex with men. And they want to live heterosexual lives.”

R. and I have been tossing back and forth where we think the numbers are on this. It is super clear from a variety of sources that there are way, way more men having sex with men while identifying as straight than there are identify-as-gay-or-bi men. Operating from a 10% are gay or bi perspective (I know, there’s no certainty surrounding that) rule of thumb, that would seem to imply a minimum of 20% of men are in this larger category. I’m thinking Kinsey would put it over 30%. I don’t know if that supports Ward’s “as a rule”, but it’s a long way in that direction for sure.

Lest you think I’m picking on men here, Ward goes on to note that if you said the same thing about women, it wouldn’t have a lot of impact, and I entirely agree.

ETA screaming with laughter:

Under the heading “The Bonds of Men: The Performance of Homosocial Homosexuality”

“…one organized around the belief that hand jobs are sometimes a “less gay” way to be close to men than the more intimate and feminized realm of friendship.”

!!!

You know, if, when people were trying to convince me that Men and Women Really Think Differently, they used _this_ as an example, I might actually be willing to entertain the idea of actual gender difference. Not for very long mind you — I’ve met some screwy women and girls over the last 50 years — but I would at least pause, for a while, and ask some questions about this belief.

Joe Kort is mentioned in this context, with a quote attributed to him: “deep longing to experience the physical intimacy with other men that they are denied in a sexist and homphobic world.” Then, in Ward’s summation, “In Kort’s view, if straight men can feel secure in the knowledge that they are innately heterosexual, and if they can understand that the craving for sexual contact with men is not only natural but “manly,” they can embrace their sexual fluidity without a sense of discordance.”

Next bit is about men seeking men ads on craigslist: “Some ads ask explicitly and longingly, “what ever happend to the circle jerk?””

Indeed.

Ward apparently interviewed Kort, and she summarizes from that: “Straight men have a need for access to quick and emotionless sex and a longing for physical intimacy with other men. Such desires do not make men gay, Kort explains, but simply struggling to get off and achieve closeness with men in a world that makes both difficult.”

I might as well start with the worst of it. My default position on identity is that gender is stupid and we should get rid of it as a category. Everyone should be “they”, and the only time anyone ought to get into what kind of chromosomes someone might or might not have is if there is active planning to biologically reproduce going on. My default position on orientation is that there’s a broad range of who is appealing to any given person, and it’s terrible to misrepresent your level of sexual attraction to someone. I mean, that is just a horrifying lie, and people need to never do that. It’s fine to not bring up sexual attraction — definitely preferable in a work context, for example! — but presenting as attracted when one is not is just wrong wrong wronger than wrong. Bad lie. Presenting at not at all attracted when one is has all kinds of problems, but I’m inclined to treat it as a less severe infraction (may yet change my mind on this one).

Obviously, this was not how I was raised (see numerous earlier posts on the topic of my evil parents, praying for a genocidal deity to kill everyone but their tiny group of fellow worshippers). However, even when I was fairly young, and well before leaving the cult I was raised in, I had a nascent version of this default position, which — yes, I’m sorry — I sometimes made the mistake of saying in some flavor of out loud voice. “Everyone is bi, right?” No, no they really are not. I get that. It’s a part of reality I continue to argue with, however.

Unpacking same-sex sibling incest is a whole other discussion, but probably has some degree of relevance when the perpetrator grows up to be fully commit to the cult, and to present to the whole world as straight. I definitely do not suffer from any delusions that straight-identified people actually behave in any way that resembles their advertising. Also an early, painful example of how the lying that goes in support of a drastic mismatch between what one is doing and feeling sexually and how one is presenting in terms of sexual identity is usually just one component of the absolute shitstorm of lying the person is engaging in more generally.

All that said, in general, my experience of people who are not currently participating in a cult of some sort is that most people are doing their best to accurately present themselves to their loved ones. Whenever I run into an egregious example to the contrary, I am legit startled, and very appalled. Florida Man basically _never_ tells the truth, and yet _even knowing that_, I was startled to learn that he falls fully within the MSM category. There are all kinds of problems with people who tell important lies to the people who love them, many of which can be summarized as, people believe them and then make terrible decisions based on that fundamental misunderstanding of reality.

There are a range of people out there identifying as bi. It’s a complex category, used for many purposes by many people. Plenty of pretty rigid people went from straight to gay to, much more quietly, bi. Other people went from straight to bi as a Let Them Down Slowly strategy of getting to gay. I _thought_ that this was something that as a society we were largely done with. I mean, it is 2021. I’ve been married since 2004, and when I got married, it was already Partner A and Partner B. Sure, I live down the street from a Missouri Synod Lutheran church — they don’t approve of gay marriage, but they also don’t approve of divorce and have a zero-exception anti-choice stance. It’s a whole grab bag of bonkers down there. I figured they were just weirdos.

However, after spending a day and a half rambling around the google and trying to understand why the heck the son of a gay man would be closeted to his entire family, I have come to some tentative conclusions.

First, it’s apparently really, really, really hard to get over being Catholic. I’m married to someone who got quite completely over it, in much the same way that I am quite completely not JW any more (altho I _am_ still prepared to throw down over really bad interpretation of of the Bible, which is a related character flaw, so maybe I’m not as over it as I think I am). We each hit a point in our development — and at a very similar age — where we considered what we had been raised to believe and dismantled it utterly. We each discovered under that early programming a nascent set of ideas about How the World Actually Works, and have been happily adjusting it to new learnings about reality as we go through life, first separately, and eventually together. Just because we found each other doesn’t mean that anyone else out there is like us. Small sample. Not representative. A pity, really.

Second, within liberal society, it’s really Not OK to present as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations. (See my recognition that being extremely pro-bi is actually pretty offensive!) That’ll attract accusations of homophobia and similar. But just because someone doesn’t _present_ as being pro-one orientation or anti-other orientations does not mean really anything about what is going on internally. So, I’m increasingly suspicious that there is a lot more internal family pressure to Not Be Gay than I had fully appreciated. My kids both have autism diagnoses, and they got it from their father and me. I’m very unevenly aware of subtext, and prone to complete obliviousness to pressure to do or be something I don’t want to do or be.

Third, a family with a lot of alcoholism in it (in recovery, in denial or other) has Mad Skillz with Denial, and when Denial starts to creak under the strain, Minimizing is right there to back it up.

I’ll be adding more to this later, just in case you are not already offended enough.

Back!

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the particulars of this situation, and the timeline is pretty good for the way things turned out. A boy born in the mid 70s and came of age in the late 80s / early 90s is someone who was learning about sexual attraction at a time when society was being really openly awful to gay men, and there was a pandemic connected to being a gay man and there were hate crimes aimed at gay men. That’s hard, and maybe it seemed easier to Just Not Be Gay. Certainly, that approach to things aligns well with how this family group tends to approach difficult problems, and it would also go a long way to explaining the mental health crises and personality disorder issues. Thinking about it this way reinforced my urge to reach out and shake everyone and say, hey, this is why therapy isn’t helping Florida Man! I bet he isn’t telling the therapists about this, either!

But then I got to wondering. When I quit being a JW, I did a lot of reading about other people who quit being JWs, and I realized that there really was a pretty big struggle involved. The disfellowshipping / disassociation process (shunning or excommunicating for people who are not part of the cult) is pretty psychologically traumatic, even if you know exactly what you are going to experience. I underestimated initially how hard it is to stop being Catholic, because it is not such an overtly hostile process. But I could see, over time, how people struggled with it. I knew from other reading I was also doing about sexuality and identity and so forth that lots of people have been doing lots of things for a really long time and often having to keep quite a lot of it secret to avoid getting killed, tortured, what have you. Stonewall happened the year I was born; I grew up watching eventually … oh, so eventually … activists convince people to quit it with the secrets so that allies could be found among the mainstream to help create a better world for everyone.

It was and is so wonderful to have effective treatment for AIDS, and for that treatment to be available as PReP, and for it to now be possible to use PReP intermittently and thoughtfully. Condoms were a lifesaver, but have so many issues. The Public Health community, and activists of a variety of types continue to try to bring more MSM into the community of people who identify openly to themselves, their partners, their family and friends, etc., as gay or bi or whatever. However, the size of the population of MSM who identify as “straight” does not appear to be small. And while a lot of efforts to figure out who is in this group come at it from a racial angle, there are a lot of reasons to believe this group contains far more white men than POC.

Sure, I can figure out an angle to explain why this particular gay son of a gay man in a family that includes other out gay and bi people might continue to be closeted. But increasingly, I feel like the satisfying answer to my question lies more in social trends than it does in diagnoses.

I think the real reason that MSM present themselves to women as intimate partners without being fully honest about the existence, nature or degree of their sexual relationship(s) with men has far more to do with the content of their character, and their degree of small c conservatism than anything else. People who find it easy to lie in general, are gonna fall back on that in specific. And people who see benefits in the status quo, are not going to give it up easily.

Obviously, our society is currently engaged in the larger project — long overdue — of dismantling forms of privilege such as that enjoyed by straight cis white men. While we are busy with this project, perhaps we could spare a moment to consider how we feel, and what we should do about the many, many, many people out there who are dishonestly enjoying that privilege. I’m envisioning something along the lines of a procedural cop show in which the various perpetrators are offered one last chance to cut a deal . . .

Recently, I was looking for something or other on Amazon (basically: I was awake and breathing and not out on a walk) and stumbled across Kyrja's _Rupert's Tales_. How cool are these! The bunny is adorable. The art is simple but appealing and not overly sentimental. The rhymes could become a bit much, but these aren't exactly the sort of book that one sits down looking for sophisticated verse.

I think what I like best about these books is how tactile the language is. Trees have "long, knobby knees". Rupert's bunny-eye view of ritual is really appealing, because the explanation always comes _after_ watching without knowledge. Never mind children: isn't this how it is with anyone, of any age, when first encountering an unfamiliar sacred act?

Rupert's heart speeds up and slows down, a realistic and tangible way of communicating his intense reactions to events like the arrival of an owl. "the twitching in his long legs began to relax". While the owl's explanation contrasts animal perceptions with human, it doesn't actually come down solidly on any particular conception of divinity, which I really appreciate. I was particularly pleased that Kyrja devoted some lines to acknowledging love of all kinds.

I read the Beltane section to T., and he liked the pictures and the story. We've been reading Wendy Pfeffer's books on the Solstices (most consistently in winter): _The Shortest Day_ and _A New Beginning_, and also her harvest book, _We Gather Together_. But I really like Rupert's Tales for being solidly grounded in a particular tradition that it isn't all that easy to find kids books about.

Happy Beltane! Give someone a hug and a kiss today, and remember that it doesn't just feel good. It is Good.

Subtitled: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality

There are some word-os (intimated when intimidated was meant, inappropriate duplication of words such as "that that" when it is not called for, missing words, etc.). It is a little irritating.

The reviews over on Amazon are a little startling as I type this: 44 reviews, 2 stars overall. Virtually all of the negative reviews are in-movement objections along the lines of, hey, HRC isn't really all that and Chad shouldn't get all the credit and Windsor is the case that is actually being used as precedent etc.

Jo Becker has written one of the most amazing sourcing essays at the end of this book that I have ever read. I didn't read it first and I'm not sure whether I should have or not. She presents an incredible amount of dialogue and self-described feelings throughout the years that the book covers, but did it in a way that just sort of slid right into my brain as part of the story (often, this kind of stuff makes me go, are you inventing this based on recollection? Did everyone keep really good journals? Was there video? WTF?). Turns out she was actually there for a huge fraction of what she describes: she embedded early on with the plaintiffs and other parties (Judge Walker, defending counsel Cooper) were very generous with their time in interviews at the end of the process.

Becker starts with Prop 8 passing, and an effort started by Chad Griffin and Kristina Schake to legally challenge it in court that succeeded in arriving, eventually, at the Supreme Court along with Edie Windsor's estate tax/DOMA challenge. Griffin and Schake get the Reiners to help fund raise, and they bring in Ted Olson who, in turn, brought in David Boies, guaranteeing an enormous amount of media coverage throughout the various legal maneuvering (since these guys had faced off against each other in Bush v Gore in addition to being high profile as individuals). If you're old enough to be reading this, you more or less had some awareness of this case as it inched along: the mystery of who is Cooper? California declining to defend Prop 8 and the question of standing on the part of the people who filed Prop 8 to defend it in turn. The trial itself with the disappearing defense witnesses and the question of whether it could be taped and put up on YouTube. The various delays that led to the DOMA cases catching up to it. Obama's "evolving" position on marriage equality. Biden "getting in front of his skis". The 2012 election cycle. Whether the case would be certified and then the decision to hear it and Windsor together. The marriages at the end.

Marriage equality existed as a movement long before this case got started, and Becker's presentation guarantees that you won't be _that_ surprised at the nature of the negative reviews on Amazon. Every significant social/civil rights movement has many stages that it passes through before succeeding in changing the world in a way that makes our own past that much more incomprehensible. Becker was there for when marriage equality passed from being an issue deprecated from many sides (on the one hand, because marriage itself is regarded by some as a very problematic institution; on another hand, because it was too important to risk dangerous precedent against marriage equality; on a third hand, because procreation/ew gross <-- full disclosure, I fell firmly into the first group, altho I'm not a sufficiently principled creature to object to actually being Partner A in a Massachusetts marriage in August 2004) to being a cause that ordinary people who had once voted for same-sex marriage bans were prepared to support because they now knew and felt strong connections of friendship, kinship and love for people who were suffering from being cut off from this basic institutional building block of our society. That pivot -- from a marginal, unpopular, but passionate group of people who are at the vanguard to a mainstream, popular, oh, wait, if they're in favor of it it probably isn't cool any more -- is a difficult one for those who are early adopters of important changes.

Becker praises her cast of characters highly, and presents many of the people who struggled against and/or with them less positively. If you're hoping for journalism of the don't-take-sides variety, this is not it. But it is a rollicking good tale, and while a lot of people are taking shots at the book, they do not appear to have any beef with the details, so much as they do with the framing -- and the trouble they have with the framing is sufficiently self-serving that I think we can all just agree to disagree.

Go read it. This was _fun_, even more so than Warren's _A Fighting Chance_.

ETA: I know some of the objections to marriage equality involve identity politics concerns on the part of people who don't fit into the dyadic, permanent relationship model of "marriage". There are some real trigger-y moments reading this (anyone who identifies as bi- or poly- or anywhere near there on some spectrum is going to find a lot of the rhetoric irritating if not infuriating). For me, it is also bittersweet to read so many stories of people who finally came around as accepting/loving parents/family members in the course of the case (especially in the wake of Biden/Obama/etc. coming out in favor of marriage equality as a right). I am _so very happy_ for all those families. And they provide such a contrast to my relationships with my own parents, older sisters and other JW family members.

Warning!

(1) I BELIEVE (shouty capitals) in spoilers. I will spoil this book for you if you haven't read it already.

(2) 50SOG is a book with a lot of sex in it. If you don't know what book I'm talking about, well, you should probably leave now. If you are the kind of person who is uncomfortable reading about sex or in a place where doing so is Not Appropriate, you should probably leave now.

(3) If you are an elderly relation of mine mostly reading my blog for family stuff, this is not only about sex, but kinky sex of the hitting kind. I'm sorry you learned this about me, but if you're not, well, yay.

Everyone read this thing before I did, because I stupidly believed people within the BDSM community who critiqued it saying it depicted a Bad BDSM relationship. They are wrong. I changed my mind and read a sample chapter and then the whole first book after learning that at least one person at CSPC had positive things to say about the book and the people who were finding the center after reading the book(s) -- and that they required a lot less reprogramming to Behave Appropriately (<-- my summation) than, say, the Gor or Marketplace fans.

I've read BDSM novels before (mostly when I'm reading triad books or paranormal fiction and the BDSM sort of comes as part of a package). I'm sort of a tourist or chipper when it comes to kink: I've done some, I know about more, and I can take it or leave it. I would characterize the BDSM in 50SOG as Lite. Christian makes a joking reference to TPE 24/7, but it is never explained. The restraints used are nothing fancy (starting with adaptive clothing use -- a tie -- working through cable ties and up to leather cuffs, IIRC). There is absolutely No Edge Play. The hard limits list was worth relaying to someone with considerably more experience than I have: "Wait, I think I've done all of those," which was, of course, my point -- cutting, permanent marking, fire, electricity, all out, and Christian never gets anywhere near CBT in volume one.

If someone is prepared to honestly tell me there is CBT in a later entry in this trilogy, I swear I will stay up all night reading it (<-- I'm not worried about losing any sleep here). (If you are trying to figure out what that acronym is using google and getting confused by cognitive behavior therapy, add BDSM to your search box and you'll be a-o-good. But don't blame me -- you shouldn't search on things like that in google!)

50SOG is supposedly Twilight fan fiction, but it is pretty loosely inspired, if that. EL James is pulling from a lot of sources, including a ton of romance novel subgenres (the billionaire who is bizarrely taken with the mousey admin, the sexual sophisticate who is ensnared by the virgin who presents herself as more experienced than she is, the rake who wants to have a Girlfriend Experience but can't convince the woman he loves that he is capable of love, the Tortured Soul with the extensive sexual repertoire and weird hangups, the judgy mcjudgerson woman is becomes open minded after a Whole Lot of Great Orgasms, etc.). There's a huge cinderella thing going on with Anastasia and the presents, with the usual pseudo-feminist petulant complaining layered on top (oh, no, I really cannot accept first edition Tess/Macbook/Audi/clothing/use of your private jet/etc. from you). I've never had much love for this structure: either say no and make it stick, or say thank you and come up with something as thoughtful but within a price range you can manage when you reciprocate. There is very little in life as irritating as being prevented from enjoying the things you can afford in order to have a relationship with someone you love. I feel sorry for the rich guy when people are asses about the presents he (or she) is giving -- unless he's a jerk about it, which I didn't really think Christian was.

One of the scenes in 50SOG struck me as imaginative and wonderful: when Grey spread-eagles Ana and blindfolds her after putting earbuds in her ears. Timing strokes to medieval church music is ... kinda pretentious and silly, but the sensory limitation/stimulation strategy is an excellent one.

For the most part, however, the scenes are fairly typical for erotic romance novels (they go down on each other, they do it facing, not facing, horizontal, vertical, in a tub, etc.). There is no anal, the digital penetration is minor (a couple fingers -- fisting is on a list of possible activities but they never get anywhere near it).

The order of events is fairly typical for a romance novel: they are thrown into each other's company by accident, he pursues her, she is flustered but attracted, they have a few more clothed meetings, they have sex, they have more sex, she has second thoughts and goes on a trip by herself, he joins her but then has to leave suddenly, they get together upon her return and then there's a Big Miss. At that point, volume one ends (and yes, I did notice that this is a three volume novel, not a trilogy per se).

The problems that Christian and Ana have involve BDSM but are universal: they are two people inexperienced at intimate relationships (he's had sex but not relationships; she hasn't had either but has probably had more interdependent friendships than he has) and young enough to lack perspective. While they both enjoy being with each other, they have taken pains to tell the other up front what they want/expect from a relationship and they have sort of concluded that there isn't much overlap. They persist anyway and their Big Miss arises when Ana in a fit of pique decides she wants to know How Bad This Can Get. Christian should have called a halt (it's 5 a.m. in the morning!), especially since Ana drew an analogy between how he felt about having his chest touched and how she felt about being hit, but that was a hell of an apple to be offered. I think a 27 year old in his first serious relationship can be forgiven for taking a bite out of it.

Christian's more serious error was in not sitting Ana down and saying, okay, here's why I like to hit women and why the women I hit are totally into it. I think there's a good chance you'll be into it, too, if you can get past this whole I Don't Want to Be Hit That's Wrong hangup you have, but let's at least go over the emotional roller coaster that "a good hiding" is before we actually do it. Because then they could have put together an Aftercare plan that would have included What To Do if Ana Can't Stand Looking at/Being Near Christian afterwards.

BDSM commentators who get hung up on consent issues because Christian came charging over to the apartment after the email Ana sent post Spanking #1 are Idiots. He did _exactly_ what Ana was asking him to do, even tho Ana used a bunch of words with a different literal/surface meaning. If Christian hadn't returned, Ana really would have had to stop seeing him; it would have been an untenable relationship unless she matured enough herself to be able to say literally and in the moment exactly what she needed. But the whole freaking book is about how she has trouble doing that when he is there (trouble even eating), and is much better with honesty in email -- and boy, if that isn't a perfect description of what its like to be 20 something, well, my memory has clearly taken some damage.

There _ought_ to be a crowd of people out there going, whoa, Christian, you don't have an Aftercare plan for what to do post-belt and you didn't negotiate the number of strokes and blah blah bleeping blah, but I can't find them through all the speculation about who is going to be in the movie.

On a technical level, the editorial staff erred in leaving the word "pinafore" in the description of the dress Ana wore to the second interview. I _was_ convinced that they should have fixed all the "He's not called me yet" and similar to "He hasn't called me yet", however, I got email from my brother-in-law today with that style of contraction. *shrug* It sounds too British, or at least not Seattle to me. Christian's use of the verb "rumbled" (to mean, you've found me out) also sounds not American usage to me.

I feel bad that I said negative things about this book based on commentators who presented themselves as part of the BDSM community and as disapproving of this book. It's a good book. If all you knew about BDSM was what you learned reading this book, you'd be in pretty good shape (right down to Christian emphasizing to an oblivious Ana that certain toys were new). What are being called consent errors are NOT consent errors. They are relationship errors and they are both universal and strikingly typical of people in their 20s.

Really, if you want to snivel at something, snivel at Ana getting a job at a publisher in Seattle with an undergraduate English degree from WSUV. Or at someone like Kate going to WSUV. Or at a 27 year old billionaire whose line of business seems to involve, well, hard to say. Or ...

ETA: Oh, if hair pulling bothers you, stay away from these books. Christian likes to pull Ana's hair. Ana seems to be very, very okay with that -- it's not abusive and she doesn't seem to perceive it as bad pain. I freaking loathe hair pulling, and it was, for me, probably the most difficult to deal with aspect of the book.

Subtitled: Women Write About Leaving Men for Women

A collection of essays as described by the title and subtitled, edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre with an introduction by Lisa "Sexual Fluidity" Diamond.

I'm never quite sure what I should say about myself when reviewing a book like this. I am a woman married to a man, so the assumption is going to tend to be that I identify as heterosexual and the assumption is wrong. Just 'cause I'm monogamous doesn't mean I'm not still bi- and poly. You don't need to speculate about whether I'm reading this book because I'm Figuring Something Out because I figured all that out a long while ago.

The editors picked a diverse group of contributors: women of color, women in interracial relationships, women born in a variety of decades, in a variety of regions. Women who ultimately identify as lesbian. Women who insist on not being labeled. Women who identify as something they would probably call bisexual, only bisexual has such a bad rep in so many communities and such a lot of silly expectations associated with it that it was rejected out of hand. If I have a complaint about this book, it's that latter: all the women who reject the word bisexual, because they have ideas about what that word means that strike me as every bit as prejudiced and wrong-headed as the prejudices about being lesbian or whatever that they had to get over in order to have any personal integrity, find love, have hot sex, etc.

Good collection, good stories, kind of annoying to slog through all the anti-bi propaganda. _Profoundly_ annoying little epilog at the end by Baumgardner about how "Falling in love with a woman, as a woman, is deeply linked to feminist endeavors". I _hate_ ideas like that. They do a massive disservice to feminism and warp politics and personal connection in ways that damage both.

To be utterly clear, however, I don't think that Lisa Diamond or her idea of "sexual fluidity" should be blamed for the anti-bi propaganda. I was wondering about that, and will probably get her book to find out for sure, but my sense is that she's desperately trying to help women who are getting railroaded from the "you must be straight" camp to the "oh, okay, you must be lesbian" camp when in fact their identity either is genuinely changing at one or more points in their lives (not due to choice!) or their identity is a poor match for either (ditto). That does shine through, ultimately, making this a very worthwhile read. More nuance in coming out stories is a good thing.

A number of the stories involving younger women (born after 1970ish, say) with relatively straightforward lesbian sexual identity sound like classics from a bygone era: they didn't even let themselves know how they felt about women because they were part of a community (Mormon, Evangelical, etc.) which was going to toss them if they didn't put up a very convincing heterosexual front. Poly- is touched upon briefly in one of the younger women's stories, but is part of a community she participates in rather than something she adopts.

For all Baumgardner speculates that "I imagine you may have gotten it in order to support or understand a loved one who has a story similar ... Or, more likely, you are living a story similar to", there's a lot of enjoyment to be found in these stories by anyone who enjoys a good story. Try not to get too bogged down in the politics of it all. (On sale as an ebook for the kindle for .99.)

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/07/why-masturbation-helps-procreation.html?obref=obnetwork


A friend e-mailed this, along with another link about this particularly odd candidates unusually [insert adjective here] views.

I'm mildly surprised Newsweek covered this, in this particular way. I'm _happy_ -- just surprised. Is this the result of the change in ownership and the general move away from paper to online for the magazine? Maybe I'll start reading it again.