Your Partner Dating Lots Of People Is Less Scary Than You Think It Is

Tags

polyamory, sex positivity

When I see people talk about polyamory, one concern they often have is that the partner who’s more attractive (or female) will be out every night sleeping with a new person, while the partner who’s less attractive (or male) will spend all their nights alone crying into their bowl of ice cream while watching Netflix.

There is a grain of truth to this. In my experience, it’s very rare for everyone in a primary relationship to be dating exactly the same number of people. Lots of primary poly relationships include one partner who is dating four or five people or having a lot of casual sex, and another one who isn’t. And certainly it’s much easier to have casual sex if you’re more attractive or if you’re a woman.

A lot of people assume that this situation is naturally the sort of thing that makes the left-out partner miserable. They might feel insecure, like their partner is more attractive than they are; they might be envious of their partner’s relative level of sexual success; they might be jealous; they might feel humiliated. And I don’t want to say that those dynamics never happen.

But I think the level of distress caused by one’s partner dating lots of other people is often pretty low, assuming that the rest of the relationship is healthy. Obviously, people are often sad if their partners are neglecting them for other people, or won’t stick to their agreements, or want a less committed relationship than they want, or similar. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about sadness caused solely by your partner dating lots of people when you aren’t dating very many at all. And I do think that’s less common than a lot of monogamous people think. 

One reason this is true is that the number of people you date isn’t just related to how attractive you are: it’s also related to your extroversion and your pickiness.

Some people thrive on having lots of relationships: there’s nothing they love more than having a brunch date with Sally Saturday morning, grocery shopping followed by a long walk with Alex Saturday afternoon, and going out dancing with Josh Saturday evening– and then repeating it all on Sunday. For other people, this sounds like a newly discovered tenth circle of Hell.

Obviously, that second group of people are going to have way fewer partners.

I called this “extroversion”, but it’s not just about extroversion. It’s about how you choose to spend your time. Some people prioritize having lots of romantic partners and sex. Other people prioritize writing their novel, or having deep and rich platonic friendships, or maintaining open-source projects, or climbing the corporate ladder, or binge-watching Netflix. If you’re into writing novels, and your partner is into going out on lots of dates, you’re probably not going to be sad that you have fewer boyfriends than your partner does. You’re going to be like “great! He’s busy and not bugging me, so I can really dig into the edits on Chapter Three.”

And of course this is particularly an issue for casual sex. Lots of people don’t have much casual sex because they find casual sex unappealing. And many people are not at all jealous about not participating in their partner’s unappetizing and incomprehensible hobby.

Another factor that affects how many people you date is pickiness. I have a friend who, at any given time, has a crush on about half of the women he interacts with. Inevitably, whenever he meets someone new, two days later he’s PMing me to go “so-and-so is pretty.” Naturally, he is dating a rather absurd number of people.

Now, I don’t mean to insult my friend’s girlfriends, all of whom are lovely people the appeal of whom I entirely understand. I’m not saying “some of the people your slutty partner dates will be ugly as fuck” (although this is sometimes true). But if you are only interested in shy, petite, multilingual girls who enjoy tabletop roleplaying, love children, and never raise their voices, then you will be totally uninterested in your metamours who are tall, loud, outgoing, monolingual, and aggressively childfree and who think dice only come in six-sided. In my experience, it does not hurt nearly as much for your partner to date lots of people if all the people they’re dating are unappealing.

Moreover, there’s a certain fairness to it. You are aware that if you liked as many people as your partner does, you would be able to date as many people as they do. Your partner dates lots of people because they like lots of people; you don’t because you don’t.

In general, extroversion and pickiness matter more than attractiveness when explaining why one person is dating more people than their primary partner is. In general, with some exceptions for people with unusual tastes, people tend to date people who are about as attractive as they are. (And quite often if your primary is more conventionally attractive than you are but is super into you due to your unusual traits, you will be pleased to have scored such an attractive person and accepting of their increased romantic success.) So most of the difference within relationships is about extroversion and pickiness. 

I am not saying that there’s no such thing as jealousy in poly relationships– there is– nor am I saying that no poly person is ever insecure, neglected, or envious. But quite often when one person dates many more people than their partner does, it is because that person wants to date more people than their other partner does. The person with fewer partners might need more alone time, be putting energy into something other than dating, or simply have a hard time meeting people they’re interested in– and that means they’re dating exactly the number of people they actually want to date. 

Basic Sex Education: A Review

Tags

not feminism go away, sex positivity

[My friend nextworldover wrote this as a Reddit comment in response to a person who grew up conservative Christian and did not know anything about sex. I thought it was an excellent explanation of how sex works and asked to post it as a guest post.]

—

People have sex for many reasons, the most common of which are pleasure, bonding, and reproduction. Stimulating erogenous zones (including genitals but also other sensitive areas on the body) feels pleasurable to most people, and can relieve sexual arousal. Sex is often an intimate and vulnerable experience, which many people find deepens their emotional bond with their romantic partner. Sex is also the way that we conceive children.

Pleasure: When aroused, the genitals generally become engorged. For a penis, this is visible as an erection. For a vulva, this is visible as the labia and clitoris swelling and appearing flushed. Arousal also frequently comes with secretion of lubricating fluids. For a vulva, this fluid will originate near the entrance of the vaginal canal, within the labia minora. For a penis, it will secrete from the urethra. Here‘s a diagram of how the penis and vulva develop from the same structures. This might help you get some idea of how the anatomy fits together.

People have differing amounts of desire for sex and differing patterns of arousal. Some people have high libidos, and frequently find themselves desiring sex. Some have low libidos, and only want sex occasionally. Some people have none, and never desire sex. Some people have spontaneous arousal, and find themselves easily aroused to sexual desire regardless of context. Some people have responsive arousal, and only become aroused once they are in a conducive context. Libido can be affected by age, sex, health, life stress, medication, mental health, and more.

There are many things people can do together to cause each other sexual pleasure. Some popular ones include: masturbation, fondling, making out, manual sex (handjobs, fingering), oral sex (blowjobs, eating out), penis-in-vagina sex, and anal sex. Many people find that there are scenarios, activities, body parts, or objects that assist in their sexual arousal or pleasure. Most of these can be explored one one’s own or with a willing partner. A common sexual aid is pornography, which can provide mental stimulation. It can come in many forms, including writing, drawings, games, photos, audio, and videos. Many people enjoy consuming pornography by themselves or with partners as part of their sex lives. Another common sexual aid is vibrators, which can provide physical stimulation. Vibrators can be applied to any erogenous zone, including but not limited to the nipples, clitoris, vagina, penis, anus, and prostate, and often they are designed to be more effective for use with a particular one. Many people enjoy using vibrators on themselves or each other as part of their sex lives. There are many, many, many forms of sexual aids, catering to a wide array of tastes.

Here is a diagram of common human erogenous zones. Many people like to touch these areas on their body, or stimulate them with objects, or have other people touch them. Due to differing physiology and psychology, every person has a different set of preferences about how they prefer to be touched. Some places that feel good to some people will feel uninteresting or unpleasant to others. Likewise, some sorts of touch that feel good to some people will feel uninteresting or unpleasant to others. The best way to discover what you prefer is to experiment with different things. The best way to discover what someone else prefers is to ask them. However, communicating this sort of thing can be difficult, people may not know what they want, and executing a particular action in the desired way may require practice. For this reason, the experience of sex usually improves as you gain more familiarity with your own preferences and those of your partner.

Bonding: Many people find that when they have sex with someone, they feel more emotionally connected to that person. Having sex is a very intimate experience during which people often feel very vulnerable. Having sex in a way they feel comfortable with in a safe environment with a person they trust is considered by many one of the most relationship-affirming activities they do. Many people have insecurities about their appearance, performance, or general desirability as a sexual partner. During sex is a time when acceptance or rejection is likely to hit someone especially hard. Some people require being in an intimate relationship in order to enjoy sex at all. Some people enjoy having sex outside of intimate relationships. Sex does not always engender feelings of closeness with the other person. Some people find that sex outside of a relationship does not provoke much emotional response in them, or that no sex does. Sex can also be frustrating, upsetting, or traumatic. Feeling unable to communicate what you want, or feeling that it cannot be achieved, can be frustrating. Feeling rejected by the other person, or like they don’t care about what you want, can be upsetting. Sex with someone you don’t trust or feel safe with, or with someone you trust but who abuses that trust, can be traumatic. Sexual trauma often arises when people have nonconsensual sexual experiences – this often involves feeling violated and ashamed. The best way to avoid causing sexual trauma to yourself or your partner is to progress slowly and check in often about what you’re each comfortable with, and to care for each other’s needs, wants, and boundaries.

Someone’s sexual orientation refers to which people they are attracted to. Someone who is heterosexual finds people of the other gender attractive, someone who is homosexual finds people of their own gender attractive, someone who is bisexual is attracted to people of more than one gender, and someone who is asexual is not sexually attracted to anyone. These are terms people use to try to describe their experiences, and many people find that these descriptors might not perfectly describe their sexuality. For example, someone might be mostly attracted to men, but also much less frequently attracted to women. Someone might be attracted only to people with breasts, regardless of their gender. Someone might like engaging in some sex acts with women, and others with men. Someone might find that they are capable of physically enjoying sex with any gender, but that it only gives them an emotionally satisfying experience with one. Sexuality is rarely completely clear cut, and the words someone uses as a shorthand for themself are just that.

Reproduction: Sex is the most common way that people conceive children. Sperm are produced in the testicles and are ejaculated from the urethra of the penis along with seminal fluid. When introduced to the vaginal canal, sperm can join with an egg and fertilize it. This can also be performed via artificial insemination. Eggs are released from the ovaries at a rate of approximately one per month according to a hormonal cycle. This hormonal cycle also regulates the buildup of endometrium in the uterus. The egg travels from the fallopian tube to the uterus, and if not fertilized, will pass out of the uterus with the endometrium as part of menstruation. Menstrual fluid usually passes out of the body over the course of around 5 days, during which time people generally use one of a variety of hygiene products to absorb or collect and discard it. Some of the more popular options include pads, tampons, and menstrual cups. Menstruation can involve the uterus cramping as it expels the fluid, as well as a variety of other symptoms such as headache, diarrhea, bloating, irritability, sensitivity, increased or decreased libido, breast tenderness, fatigue, and more.

In vitro fertilization involves fertilizing the egg outside of the body, and then placing it into the uterus to implant. If the egg is fertilized, it will implant into the endometrium as an embryo and develop into a fetus. Pregnancy in humans lasts around 40 weeks and is generally divided into three trimesters. Here is a chart of fetal development over the course of pregnancy. With current medical technology, after about 32 weeks of development, babies are generally capable of surviving outside the womb, though they may have some health complications. Babies can be born vaginally, in which case the opening of the cervix must dilate large enough for the baby to pass through the vaginal canal. This is generally considered to be an extremely painful experience for the person giving birth. They can also be born via C-section, which involves performing abdominal surgery to cut open the uterus and extract the baby directly. Because it is a fairly major surgery, it can also be extremely painful, and require time for the incision to heal. After birth, the cervix and vaginal canal may undergo some changes – these may be minor changes in shape, or may involve more major injuries, such as tearing. For most people, the vaginal muscles regain their tone within weeks of birth.

For those who wish to avoid pregnancy, there are many options of varying ease of use, efficacy, and side effects. Here is a chart that covers many of the more common methods.

Condoms are one of the most popular and effective forms of birth control. A condom is a very thin latex sheath which covers the penis, catching semen and preventing sperm from entering the vagina. Condoms also protect against a variety of sexually transmissible infections. Condoms are convenient because they are widely available, inexpensive, quick to apply, and highly effective when used properly. The drawbacks of condoms include reduced sensitivity and variance in people’s ability to reliably use them correctly. A more reliable and permanent form of birth control is the vasectomy, which is a minimally invasive procedure that involves severing the vas deferens, the tube through which sperm travel from the testicles to the penis. Benefits include that once the procedure has been performed, it will remain effective until reversed. It is frequently although not always reversible. Drawbacks include pain or discomfort during the procedure and potential permanency.

For those with ovaries, a highly popular form of birth control is birth control pills. These pills, when taken correctly, alter the hormonal cycle to make hormone levels more consistent, which prevents ovulation from occurring. They also frequently help with the various symptoms of menstruation, making them popular even among people who are not sexually active. Different formulations of the pill exist, and have somewhat different side effect profiles. The pill can generally be obtained by prescription after discussing it with your doctor. Depending on various factors, such as whether it is covered by insurance, it can either be very inexpensive or quite expensive. The pill is convenient because it does not require use during sexual activity and is highly effective. Drawbacks include that it must be taken daily to be effective, and that it can cause a variety of hormone related symptoms, such as those listed above for menstruation, and others, such as increased risk of blood clots and stroke. A third highly popular form of birth control is the intrauterine device, which is a small piece of plastic which a doctor can insert into the uterus. There are both hormonal and nonhormonal versions, with different side effect profiles. It is convenient because it is long-lasting, reversible, extremely difficult to use incorrectly, highly effective, and, in the case of the hormonal IUD, it can alleviate menstrual symptoms or prevent menstruation entirely. Drawbacks include the same ones as hormonal birth control, if it is the hormonal IUD, as well as pain during insertion, heavier menstrual flow, and more painful menstrual cramps. There are many other forms of birth control available, including the shot, the ring, the implant, and more. Each comes with its own benefits and drawbacks.

Although this is a long post, it is only a cursory introduction to the topic of sex. If you are curious to learn more, there are many online resources:
Scarleteen is a popular, well-maintained, and informative sex ed website.
Oh Joy Sex Toy is an online comic that reviews sex toys and produces sex ed materials.
Archive of Our Own is an online repository of amateur fiction. A lot of it is erotic in nature.
PornHub is a popular site for video porn.
The Guttmacher Institute publishes research on topics of sex and sexuality.

Book Post for June

Tags

becky chambers, cat valente, effective altruism, mary robinette kowal, ozy blog post, rebecca roanhorse, sex positivity, ursula k le guin

Non-Fiction

The Origins of Happiness: A book about the various things that are correlated with life satisfaction scales. In and of itself, this is an interesting topic. However, the author fancies themself a person who is Reforming Public Policy in order to Bring About A New Focus On Happiness, which makes the entire book epistemically dubious. Here are some criticisms not addressed by the author at any point:

1. A life satisfaction scale involves rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. While this metric has some advantages (it lets people decide for themselves what factors they want to incorporate into their life satisfaction assessment), at no point does the author provide evidence that this metric is correlated with a common-sense definition of happiness. They also provide no reason to choose life satisfaction over other metrics, such as experiential happiness or “how happy are you?” questions, which often have correlations of different strength or even direction.
2. Correlation does not equal causation. People tend to report higher life satisfaction if they are married, but that doesn’t mean marriage increases life satisfaction. Perhaps happier people stay married for longer and miserable people are more likely to divorce, or perhaps both marriage and happiness are caused by some other factor, such as religiosity.
3. Life satisfaction may be compared against a reference class. If you mostly know people with very very good lives, you might consider your life mediocre, while if you mostly know people with terrible lives, you might consider your life very good– even if your life is the same in every way.
4. In particular, the author’s data suggests that being around richer people lowers life satisfaction, holding income constant. In fact, all the life satisfaction you gain from increasing your income a certain amount is exactly balanced by the amount of life satisfaction lost by the people around you. But this is a strange result: it implies that no one gains any life satisfaction at all from any of the things you can purchase with money, such as education, vacations, nice food, entertainment, health care, or financial security. Life satisfaction is only gained by having more than other people. All goods are zero-sum positional games. The author suggests deprioritizing increasing GDP, but does not suggest any of the more radical policies that are implied by this point of view. If life satisfaction is an accurate measure of wellbeing and nothing you can purchase with money affects wellbeing, why not ban vacations? They cost a lot of resources (e.g. flying planes spews a lot of carbon) and don’t actually make anyone any happier.
5. Depression is highly correlated with low life satisfaction ratings. But standard depression inventories ask many questions that are, essentially, life satisfaction questions, like whether you’re unhappy all the time and whether you think you’re a failure. Does this mean that the mental health condition of depression causes low life satisfaction (and thus that the best way to improve life satisfaction is to treat depression), or does it mean that if you define a mental health condition as “people who have low life satisfaction” it will turn out they all have low life satisfaction?

Addicted to Lust: A fascinating ethnography of porn use in the conservative Protestant subculture.

Conservative Protestants are less likely to use porn than the general population, although (like the general population) their use of porn is rising because the Internet is improving porn access. However, conservative Protestants who use porn face much more severe mental health consequences than people of other denominations or religions who use porn.

They face overwhelming shame, guilt, and stigma. Some are socially isolated because they can’t admit their porn use; this particularly affects women, who are believed not to be visual and not to be tempted by porn, and therefore have a hard time finding support and are often stigmatized as ‘unfeminine’ for needing it. Others find their entire moral life reduced to porn use: male ‘accountability groups’ often discuss only porn, masturbation, and lust without ever thinking about any of the other sins that men commit; some people even have difficulty thinking about anything they might do wrong that isn’t porn use. Porn users avoid volunteering, service, missionary work, or helping out at church because they think they’re too broken to be allowed to participate in Christian life. Many even avoid praying, reading the Bible, or participating in church services. One interviewee says:

[D]uring that time I become a burden to god, too. It’s like ‘yeah, I love you. And you know, I died for you. But really I’m just tolerating you right now because I made a commitment to myself and I have to.'”

Because porn use is conceived of within conservative Protestant culture as a form of cheating, spouses experience tremendous jealousy and betrayal when they find out. People can’t talk to their spouses about their porn use and get support in quitting, because it is perceived as such a betrayal; the deception can poison a relationship. The discovery of a spouse’s porn use often leads to threats or even the reality of divorce, even when the marriage is otherwise happy.

My takeaways from this ethnography are twofold.

First, the corrosive effects of purity culture are hard to overstate. When you make a single common sin a litmus test of how a person is doing morally, it is really bad for people. People experience feelings of guilt, shame, and worthlessness. They are isolated from friends and loved ones. It doesn’t even serve to make the person more ethical. Purity culture takes away your ability to see the moral life holistically. While you’re struggling with the fact that you jerk off to porn for fifteen minutes once a week, you might ignore the fact that you shout at your wife, or that you’re lazy at work, or that you go on luxurious vacations instead of helping the poor– all of which may very well be more serious sins. You can feel like you “don’t deserve” to do the things that give you strength to be a better person: the Christian avoids praying and reading the Bible, but a secular person might avoid therapy, journaling, meditation, reading inspiring books, going to meetups of people who share their values, etc.

Effective altruism has (so far) put a lot of thought into avoiding creating a purity culture, although often not in those terms. However, I think this is something well worth thinking about more.

Second, I have often had a hard time harmonizing my positive personal experience of porn with the research that suggests negative effects of porn use. Addicted to Love’s model, I think, explains this very well. The thing that causes negative effects of porn is not the porn itself; it’s the context and the use to which you put porn. Addicted to Love finds that porn use is correlated with depression if and only if you believe that pornography use is morally wrong. Doing things that go against your values makes you feel guilt and shame. If your partner feels betrayed by your pornography use or worries that it means you don’t find them attractive anymore, it is likely to make your relationship worse; watching porn together and using it as a springboard to discuss your sexual fantasies is likely to make it better.

You can expand this model further. A culture around porn which clearly discusses which aspects of porn are reality and which fantasy leads to accurate beliefs about sex; in the absence of such a culture, people might try unlubed anal sex. (Ouch.) In a sex-positive culture of experimentation and open communication, being interested in more sexual acts means you have more sexual variety; in a more sex-negative culture, it can lead to frustration and even sexual coercion. Isolating yourself in your bedroom to jerk off for four hours is different from writing a porny giftfic for a friend. Saying what effects porn has in the abstract is like saying what effects Marvel movies have in the abstract; you have to consider the individual, the culture, and their relationship to porn.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing: At some point Ursula K. Le Guin is going to really truly publish her last book, but apparently not yet. Conversations on Writing is an interview with Le Guin about writing; like all Le Guin’s writing, her compassion and wisdom is palpable, even when I disagree with her. By far the most delightful part of the book is a short story Le Guin wrote about Zombie Michael Chabon infecting literary writers with genre, but the rest is well worth your time.

An Informal History of the Hugos: This book is baffling. I have no idea what the target audience is. Jo Walton briefly talks about her opinions of the Hugo nominees for each year, lists off the titles of various books that might otherwise be nominated, and says whether she thinks the right one won. Since I have usually heard of half of the nominees and very few of the non-nominated books each year, this is incredibly boring.

Fiction 

Space Opera: This is… an incredibly weird book. It’s a Douglas Adams pastiche where aliens decide which newly contacted species are sapient by having them compete in galactic Eurovision; if they come in last place, they’ll get destroyed. Unfortunately, the list of musicians who might have a chance of not coming in last was generated by a time traveling alien who got confused, so only one of them is alive: a washed-up, drunken David Bowie/Freddie Mercury expy who hasn’t had a hit in a decade and has to get the band back together to save humanity.

Cat Valente is one of the best prose stylists in modern science fiction, and she uses all her talent to make Space Opera’s twee whimsy, with a core of jaded cynicism. This is the sort of book that drives me to metaphor. Reading the book is like eating twenty pounds of cupcake frosting: you enjoy the individual bites, but you eventually want something more substantial, and the whole experience makes you kind of sick. The book itself is like building the Statue of Liberty out of cheese: you set a goal and you accomplished it and it’s hard to come up with criticisms that aren’t ‘instead of doing this you should have done a different thing,’ but… maybe instead of this you should have done a different thing.

That said, I’m probably going to vote it #1 for the Hugos this year. I didn’t particularly like Space Opera, I don’t recommend it, but there’s something about “I thought the surprise mpreg reveal in the climax was superfluous” that captures the anarchic spirit of science fiction, and I think that’s what we should honor with our awards. And if it’s the sort of book you like you’ll really like it.

Trail of Lightning: Meh. I don’t like action heroes who are brooding and violent and angry and never talk about their feelings and you have to be SYMPATHETIC to them because they are TRAUMATIZED. Manpain bores me. It does not actually bore me any less if the person experiencing manpain is a Native American woman.

The Calculating Stars: I gave up in disgust after the first part, so take this review with a grain of salt, but: UGH. The author wants to write an alternate history where a giant meteorite landed on Washington D. C. in the 1950s, which kicked off catastrophic global warming, and the only way to save humanity is to go to a moon colony. Fine. Okay. I am willing to suspend disbelief about ‘moon colony’ being a better option than ‘geoengineering’ if only because of the Rule of Cool.

But the author clearly fails to think about the internal life of her villains for even a second. The president’s advisers respond to the protagonist’s report that catastrophic global warming is going to happen with spontaneous climate-change denialist tropes literally five minutes after she delivers it, even though this makes zero sense. No one would think it’s absurd and laughable that a meteorite that destroyed DC would have other catastrophic effects, and climate change denialism is a thing because fossil fuel companies have spent tons of money spreading doubt, a thing which they would have no reason to do in setting and which they could not possibly have pulled off in five minutes.

The protagonist, a former member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in WWII, is forbidden to fly a plane to rescue refugees because “nursing is more feminine,” despite the fact that this is literally the sort of thing the WASPs did in WWII and a meteorite just destroyed Washington DC. Women are forbidden from becoming astronauts because they will become hysterical in space; a female character points out that you can’t have a self-sustaining moon colony without women, but it is never discussed what the fuck the villains think about this obvious objection.

Look, I’m not saying that the villains’ behavior is completely unreasonable. (Okay, the climate change denialism is unreasonable and clearly just put in to make a political point.) Maybe the protagonist is forbidden from rescuing refugees by one guy, who’s not very competent at running a military and is only doing it because the entire hierarchy fell apart because DC got a meteor dropped on it, and who’s clinging desperately to normality in the wake of an abnormal situation. Maybe they’re planning to include women in later flights but don’t want to include them right away because they’re concerned about not having developed the safety equipment to deal with their hysteria. But you have to justify this! You can’t just be like “sexists are sexist because they are sexist, this is completely causeless behavior totally unaffected by circumstances or incentives.” That’s not how people work.

Record of A Spaceborn Few: Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on a former generation ship, a few generations after first contact, which currently orbits around a star. The sociological worldbuilding is rich and complex. A great deal of care and thought has been put into the sort of society a generation ship would have: the religious beliefs, the tensions, the economics, the leisure activities, the social arrangements.

It would be misleading to say nothing happens. Many things happen. But there is not very much in the way of plot. It is essentially the events that happen over the course of a particularly interesting few months in the lives of a dozen ordinary people on the generation ship. It is a slice-of-life story; it is as interested in parenting struggles and teenagers fighting with their best friends as it is in starship accidents or the alien ethnographer studying the human colony.

I have literally been craving this book for the past fifteen years. (I really really want it in post-apocalyptic, but you can’t have everything.) If slice-of-life SF with rich sociological worldbuilding is your thing, you’ll really love it.

Traditional Sexual Ethics Are Impossible In The Modern Day

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

The recent and thought-provoking Slate Star Codex sequence on cultural evolution has led me to think about traditional sexual ethics, and the fact that it is literally impossible to do them in the modern day.

There are three large changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years, which affect sexual ethics. The first and most obvious is the invention of birth control, which permits people to separate (penis-in-vagina) sex and babies.

It is easy to overstate the importance of birth control. Many effective methods of birth control, such as homosexuality and outercourse, were known since the Paleolithic. The Oneida Community reportedly had a typical use pregnancy rate of 0.5%, more effective than modern birth control pills, with male continence; this is a method known since Biblical times. (Of course, the Oneida Community may have had particularly motivated users, and widespread use may have been less effective.)

Nevertheless, giving people more birth control methods with fewer side effects and no chance of not using them in the heat of the moment likely changes many things about sexual ethics.

Second, children are now a net financial drain on their families. In the developed world, children are always a financial cost for 18 years, and often for longer than twenty; they rarely pay their parents back. However, historically and in the developing world, children often began making a financial contribution as young as seven. It is difficult to estimate how many children are/were involved in child labor and how large their contributions to the household were. However, even today, in large families, teenagers who are not sent to school can often pay for themselves through chores and taking care of younger siblings; there is no reason to believe this was not true in the past. (I am interested in more detailed data and am happy to edit this section with more.)

Finally, and most importantly, child mortality.

Our World In Data provides some interesting graphics about child mortality in the past two hundred years. In summary: in 1800, while there is little data, the best estimates suggest that about 40% of children died before age five. In 2019, in rich countries, less than one percent of children die before age five.

Forty percent is a lot of children. Consider a fairly ordinary traditional Catholic family of five children: in 1800, they would only have had three. A family of ten would, in 1800, only have six children. Even the Duggars’ nineteen children would only have been eleven.

But high child mortality rates affect more than family size. That forty percent isn’t evenly distributed among families; some may bury seventy percent of their children, perhaps because of a series of epidemics or a bad crop year. If all you care about is one of your children surviving to take care of you in your old age, and the mortality rate is less than one percent, you have one child. However, if the mortality rate is forty percent and unevenly distributed, you may have to have many more than two kids to have a chance one of them survives to adulthood.

(The evidence is suggestive that decreasing child mortality tends to decrease fertility, in part for this reason.)

What this means is that practicing truly traditional sexual ethics is literally impossible.

You could stop using birth control, and people do. (Catholics use natural family planning, but natural family planning is itself a fairly recent invention. You could, fortunately, do extended breastfeeding for a break in between pregnancies.) In theory, it is required that you educate your children. In practice, you can homestead in a state that doesn’t check up on homeschoolers much and put your children to work farming or watching their younger siblings as soon as they’re able. It wouldn’t be doing right by your kids– it turns out some knowledge of writing and math and history and science is useful for being alive in the 21st century– but you could do it.

But child mortality is a bitch. “Not using birth control” is unpopular, and “educationally neglect your children in order to live on a homestead” is unpopular, but “forty percent of your children die” is more unpopular than either of those. There exist some religions that don’t use modern medicine, but you’re never going to get particularly widespread uptake.

But even if you are a Christian Scientist homeschooler who doesn’t use birth control, you’re still not going to get to the environment that traditional sexual ethics evolved for. Many of that forty percent died in epidemics, and most of the diseases they died of have been eradicated in the United States due to vaccines. You are never, ever going to have three of your children die of smallpox in a single month.

These changes are generally agreed upon to be good things among both sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. No one wants forty percent of their children to die. Child labor is generally unpopular. While some social conservatives disapprove of birth control, most social conservatives do not.

But it means that you can’t make the argument “the sexual ethics of 1800 are good because they are traditional and worked for hundreds of years.” Our situation is very very different from the situation in 1800. Children are financial drains instead of investments; children are almost certainly not going to die; it is possible to separate PIV from reproduction with a good deal of reliability.

This is not, of course, to say that the traditional sexual ethics of 1800 are incorrect for modern humans. It may well be that we would all be happiest if divorce and sodomy were illegal, no one used birth control, having sex before marriage if you’re a woman made you a fallen woman, and men are technically not supposed to have sex outside marriage but in practice seeing a prostitute is a common vice among urbanites. But this proposition– in the current situation– has at best a few decades of track record. It cannot take advantage of the argument from tradition, any more than can the proposition that we would all be happiest if gay marriage were legal, divorce were unstigmatized, many people were poly, and birth control is the default.

We knocked over the Chesterton’s Fence, because Chesterton’s Fence was driven through the heart of millions of children and subjected them to a horrible painful death. Now we have to figure out sexual ethics in a fencefree world. Chesterton’s Fence does not apply.

The DSM-IV Believed Women Didn’t Have Paraphilias

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

An interesting fact literally no one believes me about is that until relatively recently it was sexological consensus that women don’t have paraphilias.

When I say this, people are like “okay, Ozy means some weird, fringe sexologist who believes bizarre things that no one else agrees with, obviously they can’t actually mean that within our lifetimes sexologists believed women don’t have kinks.” But, no, really. Here is a quote from page 524 of the DSM-IV, published in 1994 and updated in 2000:

Except for Sexual Masochism, where the sex ratio is estimated to be 20 males for each female, the other Paraphilias are almost never diagnosed in females, although some cases have been reported.

To be clear, “paraphilia” is a term which includes most of what we’d consider to be kinks; there is no requirement that a paraphilia be obligatory for sexual arousal, and in fact it is explicitly mentioned that some paraphiliacs are aroused by sex where their paraphilia is not included. Paraphilias defined in the DSM-IV include:

• Sexual Masochism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the act (real, not simulated) of being humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer”
• Sexual Sadism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.”
• Fetishism: “recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving the use of nonliving objects (e.g., female undergarments).”

Special shoutout to transvestic fetishism which literally could not be diagnosed in a woman or a queer man.

The DSM-IV defined ‘paraphilia’ as a diagnosis by inclusion: paraphilias were a set of specific sexual interests, examples given above. The DSM-5 defines ‘paraphilia’ as follows (pg. 685):

The term paraphilia denotes any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners.

(“Phenotypically normal” is intended to exclude visibly physically disabled and transgender people, as well as perhaps members of some other groups. Please note that “paraphilia” and “paraphiliac disorder” are distinguished; a paraphiliac disorder causes mental distress or is a threat to the psychological or physical wellbeing of others. It is possible that what the DSM-5 intends is that, for example, female crossdressers are all unusually well-adjusted.)

This is what the DSM-5 has to say about the prevalence of paraphilias:

• “The highest possible lifetime prevalence for voyeuristic disorder is approximately 12% in males and 4% in females.”
• “The prevalence of exhibitionistic disorder in females is even more uncertain but is generally believed to be much lower than in males.”
• “It has been estimated that 2.2% of males and 1.3% of females had been involved in bondage and discipline, sadomasochism, or dominance and submission in the past 12 months” [about masochistic disorder]
• “Fetishistic disorder has not been systematically reported to occur in females. In clinical samples, fetishistic disorder is nearly exclusively reported in males.”
• “Transvestic disorder is rare in males and extremely rare in females.”
• Silence about the prevalence of sexual sadism in women.

This is definitely an improvement on the insistence that women essentially never have paraphilias other than masochism, which has twenty men for every woman (!); still, there is an insistence that the paraphilias are extraordinarily rare in women.

—

Why was this a sexological consensus? I present a few hypotheses.

First, most research on paraphilias is conducted on a sex-offender population. For various reasons, women are less likely to be sex offenders. Sexual crimes by women may be underreported and underprosecuted; women may also be legitimately less likely to engage in many sex offenses.

Second, the definition of ‘paraphilia’ is androcentric. Consider omegaverse. “I get off on a man going into heat and then getting knocked up by another man with a dog dick” is certainly a sexual interest in something other than genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners. However, it does not fit in any of the current paraphilias. Conversely, there are paraphilias for sexual interests that are more typically male, such as an interest in jerking off into a shoe. This is likely to be a self-perpetuating problem; since paraphilias are defined androcentrically, paraphilias are underdiagnosed in women, and there is no way for psychiatrists to discover that they should correct the definitions.

Third, there is a lot of stigma on women admitting their sexuality, and many women would feel reluctant admitting their sexual interests to a psychiatrist or even on an anonymous survey. (As a very obvious example, studies consistently report heterosexual men having a higher mean number of sexual partners than heterosexual women.)

Fourth and most importantly, women are less likely than men to be aware of what their kinks are, especially before the present day. There are both biological and cultural reasons for this. Biologically, if one has a penis, arousal is more obvious and the mechanics of masturbation are more intuitive. Having a male-typical level of testosterone also usually gives you more interest in sex than having a female-typical level of testosterone does. Culturally, women’s sexuality tends to be shamed and stigmatized as “slutty.” Female sexual exploration and curiosity tends not to be encouraged as much as male sexual exploration and curiosity, particularly historically.

Among all age groups, women are both less likely to have ever masturbated and less likely to have masturbated in the past year. It is likely that many women who have never masturbated or who masturbate rarely also don’t sexually fantasize or fantasize rarely. They may have completely failed to notice what their kinks are.

The self-hating man with a paraphilia might go to a psychiatrist for help fixing himself. The self-hating female woman with a paraphilia might very well never realize she has a paraphilia and instead conclude that she just doesn’t like sex that much.

How did this change? Why, in the past thirty years, have we gone from “women don’t have paraphilias” to “don’t be ridiculous, Ozy, of course it wasn’t sexological consensus that women don’t have paraphilias”?

I believe the answer is our friend the Internet.

Perhaps due to sexual stigma, women seem particularly averse to buying porn. In 1970, if a woman wished to purchase erotic literature, she would have to go to a literal physical store and buy it from an actual shop clerk and then maybe display it on her actual shelves where people could see it and judge her. Today, all she has to do is search on Amazon and download The Devil: Devil’s Playground Duet #1 to her Kindle and literally no one will have any idea.

We’ve seen an explosion in the past twenty years of art, erotica and porn aimed at women. I talk about fandom a lot, but I think it’s equally obvious in the romance novel world: since the development of the Kindle, there have been a lot more erotic romance novels with more and filthier sex that caters more directly to common female interests. This is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you have porn that’s catering to you– porn with sexy men in it rather than sexy women, for example– you’re more likely to notice the sorts of things you get off on.

Cards on the table: I suspect that, while men might be more likely to have certain paraphilias and women might be more likely to have certain other paraphilias, women and men are equally likely to have intense, persistent interests in sexual activities other than genital stimulation or preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners. I believe, in the next few decades as the number of people who had access to porn as teenagers increases, we will see more and more women with paraphilias, and this fact will become obvious.

Book Post for May

Tags

drugs cw, martha wells, naomi novik, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, seanan mcguire, sex positivity

Rising Out Of Hatred: This book– about former white nationalist Derek Black and how he stopped being a white nationalist– takes place at the college I attended as a undergraduate, while I attended. For that reason, I’m not sure I should give much of an opinion on the book; gossip about my college acquaintances is not of public interest, and my book on the story is going to be fundamentally affected by the fact that I took classes with Derek Black, in a way that makes it less useful for other people. I can, however, state that as far as I’m aware its description of events is accurate. There were a couple of places where I’d quibble with the description of New College, but nothing I’d consider generally unreasonable.

The Sober Truth: “There isn’t great evidence that AA works. Despite its pretensions of secularism, AA is a clearly Christian-influenced organization, which makes it problematic for both devout members of non-Christian religions and atheists. AA is prescribed over and over again for people for whom it clearly isn’t working. THEREFORE, we should use the true evidence-based treatment for alcoholism, which is psychodynamic psychotherapy.”

Inside Rehab: I started internally screaming in the first chapter, when someone described how one of their rehabs only gave you Suboxone as a reward for good behavior. I did not finish internally screaming until I finished the book.

Interesting facts: Your chance of receiving evidence-based treatment is generally higher if you’re poor or homeless and lower if you pay for rehab out of pocket, because NGOs and governments have leverage to demand that rehabs implement evidence-based treatment, while private rehabs can just do whatever sounds good (equine therapy, Reiki) even if there is no evidence behind it. Rehabs (particularly for people with mild substance abuse problems and teenagers) can make drug addictions worse by introducing the client to more severely addicted friends and teaching them about new drugs and ways of hiding them. AA specifically leads to binges in some people by teaching them that if they have one drink they might as well go on a binge. Thirty percent of people have had an alcohol use disorder at some point in their lives; this is because alcohol use disorder is defined very broadly and essentially includes anyone whose use of alcohol has ever caused a problem in their lives. As you might guess, most people with mild alcohol use disorders are capable of drinking moderately.

One thing I’m confused about is that the author complained that rehabs are very expensive, and then complained that addiction counselors are untrained people whose only qualification is being former addicts, and then complained that rehabs almost never offer much individual therapy (often less than once a week). Presumably the last two things would make rehabs less expensive? Are rehabs directing money in a useless way (towards equine therapy or administrator salaries or nice bedrooms)? Or are rehabs inherently very expensive for some reason? If it is the second thing, maybe we should transition to outpatient therapy, which is less expensive.

Highly recommended both for people who want to gain a better understanding of the rehab system in the United States and for people considering rehab for themselves or their loved ones. The lists of questions to ask rehabs seem very helpful.

Sex Addiction: A Critical History: I was really excited when I bought this book, because I think sex addiction is a problematic concept and I was really looking forward to an in-depth history of how it came to be, along the lines of (say) David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in the social construction of transness, Imagining Transgender is an absolutely invaluable book and I highly recommend it.)

Unfortunately, the authors have Szaszian sympathies, so instead of enjoying the book I spent the entire time raging about their terrible, terrible politics. “‘Sex addiction’ is bad because it’s another example of the psychiatric industry medicalizing normal human behavior, the way that depression medicalizes normal sadness! You can tell, because there’s a continuum between sex addiction and normal behavior and you can’t draw a non-arbitrary line between ‘sex addiction’ and ‘normalcy.’ How negatively sex addiction affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts sex addiction can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing.”

But the problem is that all those things are true of literally every psychiatric condition. Psychosis is on a continuum with normal hallucinations that ordinary people experience, and it’s hard to draw a non-arbitrary line between psychosis and normal voice-hearing. How negatively psychosis affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts psychosis can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing. Either you bite the bullet and go “psychosis is fake, the homeless schizophrenic guy is exactly like everyone else”– which, to his credit, Szasz does– or you realize that we have to have a way to think about psychiatric conditions that features the social model of disability and the fact that psychiatric conditions are all on a continuum with normal human behavior.

Unfortunately, the authors are so busy having stupid opinions about psychiatric diagnosis that they didn’t do anything more than touch on the genuine incoherency and thorny ethical issues associated with the ‘sex addiction’ concept.

The behavior highlighted by the PATHOS screening for sex addiction– preoccupation with sexual thoughts, hiding some sexual behavior from others, seeking treatment for sexual behavior, sexual behavior that hurts others emotionally, feeling controlled by your sexual desire, feeling depression after sex– just doesn’t have one simple set of causes. Some people might have hypersexuality symptoms associated with mania or a personality disorder. Some people might be closeted gay people in a homophobic environment, or kinky people in an environment where kink is stigmatized. Some people might use sex as a quick source of pleasure when they’re depressed. Some people might have a history of sexual trauma. These are all different problems with different solutions and I don’t think it makes sense to treat them all as one thing.

(And what’s with that “hiding sexual behavior from others” thing. I hide sexual behavior from others because I have boundaries.)

The concept of ‘sex addiction’, I think, highlights a particularly thorny ethical problem. If a system of sexual ethics is particularly demanding– in particular, if it demands that a person not masturbate, or not masturbate when in a relationship, or not masturbate using porn or erotica or sexual fantasies of people other than their partner, or only have sex with people they aren’t oriented towards– a certain percentage of the population will find themselves engaging in sexual behavior they don’t endorse. But those people are not going to have sexually compulsive behavior in general. If they stop believing that gay sex, pornography use, or masturbation is wrong, they’ll probably use porn, have gay sex, or masturbate a perfectly reasonable amount that is in balance with the rest of their lives. They certainly won’t escalate to nonconsensual behavior, adultery, or pedophilia (as is sometimes implied by sex/porn addiction discourse).

I’m not sure what we should do about that. On one hand, some part of me says that the problem here is clearly not the masturbation or porn use or gay sex, the problem is the stigma, and the therapist should destigmatize the sexual behavior in question. On the other hand, it seems to me that therapists should not impose their ethical beliefs on their patients. I certainly wouldn’t like it if a therapist tried to do CBT to my demanding ethical beliefs! The therapist should let the patient set their own goals according to their own values instead of imposing the therapist’s values. I think this is a legitimately complicated ethical issue, and saying “if you masturbate when you don’t endorse masturbating then you are a sex addict which is exactly the same sort of thing as an alcoholic” elides it. This is exactly the sort of issue I hope would be addressed by a critical history of sex addiction, and exactly the sort of issue that was not addressed.

Artificial Condition: Murderbot is back! Murderbot is on a quest to figure out whether, last time he’d hacked his governor module, he’s committed mass murder instead of his current occupation of binging TV shows. He stumbles across some humans he feels like he has the duty to protect, and much to his grave irritation has to stop watching TV in order to protect them from their own suicidal tendencies. Murderbot is one of the most likeable and engaging protagonists in recent SF, and every novella he is in is a delight. ART, a television-obsessed spaceship, is equally likeable and a delightful foil. Pick up the series next time you have a bad day and need something fun and not too deep.

Spinning Silver: A fast-paced and page-turning fantasy novel. A moneylender boasts that she can turn silver into gold catches the attention of a gold-loving fairy, who threatens to kill her if she doesn’t turn his silver to gold and marry her if she does; a noblewoman uses the fairy silver, which makes others see her as beautiful to marry the tsar, but there is more to him than it seems. Lots of fascinating plot twists; it manages to be very gripping without having any fight scenes, which is always something I like in a novel. The secondary world is Russian-influenced, which is an interesting variation on the stock European fantasy novel. Highly recommended.

Beneath the Sugar Sky: Down Among The Sticks And Bones was so good! And this was so not good! WHY.

The protagonist’s sole personality trait is being fat. She is insecure and feels bad about her body because she is fat. She is bullied because she is fat. She is an endurance athlete because fat athletes exist. She is magically transported to an alternate world and turns into a mermaid, and suddenly becomes an athlete because being fat is actually helpful in ultraendurance swimming. (This is legitimately pretty cool and I would have hella appreciated it if the character had had at least three non-weight-related personality traits.) She expects to be bullied for being fat, but everyone is tolerant. She has to go to a magical world made out of candy, where the villainess surrounds herself with candy and never eats any of it in order to stay thin, and talks to her about how if she diets she will be thin. Every five pages we get some “and Cora was tired but she couldn’t ask for a rest because people would assume it was because  she was overweight.”

I get it! I’m on board! We should be nice to fat people! PLEASE GIVE YOUR FAT CHARACTER ANOTHER PERSONALITY TRAIT.

At one point Cora is like “the only thing people see in me is fat fat fat” and I was like “yes! that’s so true it’s even affecting your author!”

There were some really interesting ideas. The “nonsense world” made out of candy felt like a real world from a genuine children’s portal fantasy novel. Kade, a transgender male side character, had some really lovely and interesting characterization (which is unfortunately a spoiler). But overall this is a very weak entry in the series.

Five Kinds of Relationship Problems

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

In my opinion, there are approximately five kinds of persistent relationship problems. I’m going to be using the word “partner”, but none of this is limited to romantic relationships.

First, there are stupid problems. A stupid problem is a problem with some sort of no-shit obvious fix that, for some reason, neither you nor your partner seem to have come up with. Every relationship can be expected to have some quantity of stupid problems in it, because no one is perfect at relationships and everyone is missing some relationship skills.

Here are some examples of fixes to stupid problems:

• When you and your partner are having a fight over nothing for no reason, notice this and stop doing that.
• When you are angry, go someplace else to calm down until you can talk about it like adults.
• Talk about what you want instead of trying to send your needs to your partner telepathically.
• Think about what’s really important to you and what you can compromise on.
• Ask whether your partner wants support or problem-solving.
• Ask your partner questions about how their day went.
• Schedule regular time together.
• Try out things your partner likes instead of dismissing them out of hand.
• Say ‘thank you’ when your partner does something you like.
• Do things that make your partner feel loved instead of things that make you feel loved.

Second, there are basic incompatibilities. A basic incompatibility is when one person has a need, desire, preference, or want, and the other person is for whatever reason basically incapable of fulfilling it. One of you is monogamous, the other one is polyamorous. One of you wants sex all the time, the other one never wants sex. One of you needs a tidy house, the other one has ADHD and can never put things back in the same place. One of you has expensive tastes, the other one wants to save money. One of you wants kids, the other one doesn’t. One of you wants to live in a big city, the other one wants to live in a small town. One of you loves movies, the other one doesn’t. One of you craves adventure, the other one is a homebody.

There are basically three approaches for dealing with basic incompatibilities. First, one of you sucks it up. You accept that you’re just going to live in a messy house forever or do an unfair share of the chores. Second, you manage the problem. For example, you might hire a house cleaner. Third, you break up. Next time, you know that this is important to you and you will find someone who will keep the house in the state that you prefer.

Every relationship has certain basic incompatibilities, because no two people ever mesh perfectly together. You’re never going to find anyone who satisfies every single desire you have in a relationship. So you have to figure out what’s most important to you and what you’re willing to compromise on.

Third, there are problems that are actually a different kind of problem. Your cat died. You’re stressed at work. You’re sleep-deprived. You have a newborn baby. You have depression. You have cancer. Any of these things is instead true of your partner. In any of these situations, you can wind up persistently unhappy in your relationship. This has nothing to do with your relationship, it has to do with the rest of your life circumstances.

To fix this sort of problem, you can fix the underlying issue– such as by getting enough sleep. You can also try to both be aware and understanding of the situation and approach it as a team. A reframe from “I’m sleep-deprived and also my relationship is a mess” to “I’m sleep-deprived and that’s stressful, but my partner and I are approaching it together” can help.

Fourth, there are horrifying soul-sucking messes. A problem of one of the previous three types was badly managed, perhaps for years. Now, every time you have a minor argument, you bring in everything wrong that happened for your entire relationship. You don’t feel like you can trust your partner. All the quirks you used to find charming drive you up the wall. You hate even your partner’s most innocuous actions. You avoid every topic that leads to a fight, and rapidly find that you can’t discuss anything except Marvel movies and the weather. You’re defensive whenever your partner says anything that sounds like even a minor criticism. You’re sarcastic and you call them names. Somehow, when you remember good things about the past– the time you saw Hamilton together or your birthday present or being the best man at their wedding– all you can remember is the long lines at intermission, the poor wrapping job, and their incredibly rude drunk aunt. If asked to name a good trait of theirs, you draw a blank, but you can go on for hours about their flaws.

I guess it might be in theory possible to fix a horrifying soul-sucking mess with a lot of hard work, but to be honest every time I’ve seen a person in one of those relationships they were a lot better and happier and stronger as people as soon as they ended it.

Fifth, there are terrible people. One or both of you just sucks. This category includes abuse, but it certainly isn’t limited to it. This is the category from which advice columnists get all their pageviews: we love viewing a train wreck. Your partner has had a suicidal crisis every night at 3am for the last month, and you’re up all night comforting them, and they refuse to find anyone else to talk to or ride out their suicidal crisis on their own. Your partner cheats on you constantly. Your baby is eighteen months old and your partner has never changed a single diaper. Your partner has demanded that you keep your relationship secret from everyone. You asked your partner to clean up dog poo from the floor, and it is three days later, and the dog poo is still there.

If you have found yourself in a committed relationship with a terrible person, you should DUMP THEM. If you regularly are in committed relationships with terrible people, you should think about why you do that, and do appropriate countermeasures (such as talking to a wise friend). If your relationship is one where you can scale back the relationship until the terribleness stops affecting you, you can decide whether to do that or to dump them, depending on your values. (Setting boundaries will be an important skill, if you try this.)

If you are concerned that you yourself might be a terrible person, the solution is probably a long and difficult and painful process of personal growth.

PSA: HIV PrEP

Tags

ozy blog post, sex positivity

Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is a way of preventing HIV. If you’re HIV-negative, you can take certain HIV medications before coming into contact with HIV, and it reduces the likelihood that you will contract HIV.

PrEP is very very effective. If you take 7 pills a week, your risk of contracting HIV goes down by 99%. That is, if you receive unprotected anal sex from an HIV-positive partner, you have a 1 in 100 chance of getting HIV. If you are on PrEP, you instead have a 1 in 10000 chance of getting HIV. If you use condoms, you have a 1 in 50000 chance of getting HIV. [ETA: numbers fixed; thank you Keller.]

Even if you miss a pill sometimes, PrEP can be very effective. If you take four pills a week, your risk goes down by 96%, and if you take only two pills a week, your risk goes down by 76%.

You have to take PrEP for a week for it to start working for anal sex, and three weeks for it to start working for vaginal sex. When you stop taking PrEP, you should continue taking it for at least four weeks after your last possible exposure to HIV.

PrEP has very few side effects and is considerably safer than, for example, the birth control pill. Some people report gastrointestinal issues in the first month of taking it (I personally experienced nausea for one day), but these side effects will go away after the first month. If you take PrEP, you may experience a small increase in serum creatinine, which is filtered by the kidneys. While PrEP has not been linked to loss of kidney function, your doctor will monitor your kidney function, and it might not be a good idea to take it if you have kidney issues. If you’re on PrEP, you will have to go to the doctor more often for blood tests. People have taken PrEP for up to five years without long-term health consequences.

PrEP is usually covered by insurance, and there are medication assistance programs to help high-risk people pay for it.

PrEP only protects against HIV, not other STIs or pregnancy.

You should consider being on PrEP if you have sex that puts you at a high risk of contracting HIV. Here are some people who should consider being on PrEP:

• People who have sex for money, drugs, housing, etc. and their partners.
• People who inject drugs and share needles.
• People who have unprotected sex with people who are HIV-positive or whose status they are not sure of. (“I met him that night and he said he was clean” does not count as “sure of.”)
• People who drink heavily or use drugs in a context where they might wind up having unprotected sex.
• People who have recently contracted an STI.
• People who have anonymous sex with men or trans people who have sex with men or trans people.

It can be easy to overestimate your risk of HIV. For example, if you are polyamorous, have sex within your extended polycule, use condoms reliably, have a gossipy enough polycule that you know the HIV status and condom use habits of random acquaintances*, and know that everyone you’re sleeping with uses condoms reliably and gets tested regularly and doesn’t have HIV, you’re pretty safe from HIV. I don’t think people should rush out and get PrEP without considering how likely it is that they will get HIV.

However, even if you aren’t at high risk of HIV, you may want to consider taking PrEP for peace of mind. If you regularly feel anxious about contracting HIV or are avoiding casual sex that would make you happy and fulfilled because of fear of HIV, PrEP might be a good decision for you even if you’re objectively at fairly low risk.

*This may be redundant with ‘is a polycule.’

Incentives Matter

Tags

advice tag, ozy blog post, sex positivity

This is a rule I’ve generally found useful for interpersonal interactions:

Consider the incentives you’re giving people. Behave in a way that rewards people for giving you things you want and punishes people for harming you, instead of the other way around.

For example, let’s say you want people to email you with your requests, so you can process them all at once and they don’t interrupt you. But when someone calls you on the phone, you handle the request immediately so you can get back to what you were doing. In this case, people who call you on the phone get their request handled faster than people who email you. A better policy would be to firmly inform people who call you that the appropriate way to contact you is through email, and that you will be happy to assist them as soon as they email you.

Or maybe you want a person you love to tell you when your behavior is hurting them, so you can stop. But every time they tell you that, you start crying and apologize a dozen times and beat yourself up for being such a terrible person and they have to spend two or three hours comforting you about the fact that you hurt them. Often, you get mad at them, because if they’re saying you hurt them they must be saying you’re bad, and you’re not bad, and it is very unfair of them to accuse you of being bad. They’re only going to bring up ways that you’re hurting them if it’s worth the cost of spending hours comforting you, and you might end up hurting them in lots of ways you don’t know about. A better approach would be to thank them for telling you and say that you’ll think about it, then do your processing with someone else where they can’t see it.

Or maybe you want your romantic partner to spend lots of time with you. But when they’re with you, you spend all of your time talking about how much you miss them when they’re gone, how jealous you are of all the time they spend with other people, how they have a moral obligation to spend more time with you than they’re currently spending, how miserable you are, and how much them not spending more time with you is ruining your entire life. A better approach would be to talk with them about their day.

Or maybe you would prefer that your child not have tantrums. But when they ask nicely for a cookie, you never give them a cookie. When they throw a tantrum, you give them a cookie every time in order to get them to shut up. A better approach would be to give them a cookie sometimes when they ask nicely for it and never give a cookie to a tantruming child.

In general, you should put yourself into other people’s shoes and figure out what’s the best way for them to get what they want, whether it’s a cookie, a pleasant afternoon, or a speedily fulfilled request. Some people are going to do the thing you want them to do, out of altruism or a desire to follow the rules or because they care about you. But lots of people are going to do the thing that helps them reach their own goals the best. So you’re more likely to get the things you want if getting you the things you want helps other people get the things they want.

This seems like a really simple rule but I think a lot of relationships would be improved by putting it into practice.

Critique of Just Love, Part One

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[Content note: this post discusses, without explicit detail, many forms of unethical sex, including rape, sexual harassment, and child molestation.]

A reader commissioned me to write a blog post about the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret Farley, a Catholic nun and former professor at Yale University Divinity School. (It’s “Just Love” as in “love that follows principles of justice,” not as in “only love.”) Just Love was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for endorsing masturbation, gay marriage, gay sex, divorce in some situations, and remarriage after divorce.

I will begin by discussing why we should have sexual ethics other than “don’t rape people” at all, then explain Farley’s view of sexual ethics, then I will critique each of her proposed norms in turn. I have a lot to say about this book, so I’m splitting the post up over several days in order to save everyone from having to read a ten-thousand-word monstrosity.

A Justification of Sexual Ethics Beyond Rape

Many people adopt what I consider to be an extraordinarily deontologist view of sex. They consider sexual ethics to consist solely of not having sex with people without their consent. Everything else is strictly supererogatory. You might decide to care about your partner’s sexual pleasure, or indulge your partners’ fetishes, or avoid sex that makes you feel sick and empty and degraded inside, but these are all personal choices with no moral valence. The actual ethics is in the consent.

I admit this is a model I am continuously tempted to use. It is so simple and so elegant. A free agent in the sphere of sexuality and romance can set their boundaries and express their needs to other people. They search until they find a partner who has a compatible set of needs and boundaries. Throughout the relationship, they renegotiate as their boundaries and needs change; when their boundaries and needs no longer mesh, the relationship ends. No set of needs and boundaries is “wrong”, although with certain sets of needs and boundaries it may be hard to find a compatible partner. The only unethical action is violating someone else’s boundaries.

But it is unsatisfying in many ways. It is all very well for deontologists to have a model where as long as you follow the rules you’re okay. But utilitarians ought to object that there are many instances of consensual sex which do not produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Egoists should remark that there is no reason to assume that all consensual sex is pursuing the individual’s enlightened self-interest. Virtue ethicists might point out that it would be very odd if sex were the only sphere of human interaction in which we cannot cultivate wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Even many formulations of deontology object: sex can be consensual and still involve treating a person as a thing or following a rule that you would not will everyone else abide by.

The “only nonconsensual sex is unethical” is equally odd from the perspective of intuitive morality. Sometimes consensual sex is disloyal, harmful, or unfair. Certainly it would be very strange if sex were the only area of human life in which the sum and total of ethical human behavior is “don’t commit literal felonies.”

I think how unsatisfying the only-nonconsensual-sex-is-bad ethic is can be shown through how many other aspects of sexual morality people insist on attempting to smuggle into it. For instance, some people argue that cheating is wrong because it violates your spouse’s consent. It seems extraordinarily puzzling to me that people get to consent to sex that they are not involved in and may not even be aware of, and very unprincipled that only spouses have this capacity. (Why can’t parents revoke consent for their teenagers to have sex? Why can’t governments revoke consent for sodomy to happen between its borders?) You might argue that the difference is that you have sex with your spouse and you do not generally have sex with your government. But in that case a spouse would have no room to object if their partner had sex with someone else and then conscientiously never had sex with them again. Most people, I believe, would consider the latter decision to compound the harm, not to erase it.

I think the only logical conclusion is that the harm from cheating has nothing to do with consent; instead, the harm from cheating comes from breaking a promise. It is possible for sex to be completely and 100% consensual and also be wrong.

A lot of people have a flinch reaction to that conclusion, which makes sense. As completely reasonable sentences that are usually followed by horrible bullshit go, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is right up there with “I’m not racist” and “think of the children.” Traditionally, of course, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is followed with some thoughts on the evils of premarital sex, pornography, homosexuality, polyamory, birth control, feminism, sex toys, oral sex, sex outside of the missionary position, and literally everything else that’s fun. In our more modern era, it is also used by various Tumblr users who want you to know that BDSM is violence and violence is still wrong when everyone is consenting, which is presumably why they make a habit of protesting boxing matches and karate dojos.

That is what you might call act-based sexual morality. In addition to sex without consent being wrong, people put certain sexual acts on the “no” list, because those acts are considered to be inherently violent or misogynistic, objectifying or going against God’s will, disrespectful or a violation of the proper end of the human body, regardless of context or how the participants feel about it.

I think that consent-only sexual morality is right but doesn’t go far enough. However, act-based sexual morality is totally and completely wrong. After a great deal of thought, I have not been able to identify a single sex act qua act that I would consider conclusively wrong in all circumstances. (As opposed to, say, choice of sexual partner, where there are a number of choices that are wrong in all circumstances– children, your students, people who are in a monogamous relationship with someone else, etc.) Unprotected PIV is wrong if you picked up a stranger at a bar, but beautiful if you’re conceiving a loved and desperately wanted child. Calling your partner a disgusting whore is cruel if you mean it, but extremely hot for some people in a negotiated D/s dynamic. Certain forms of dangerous edgeplay are far too risky for most people, but can be valuable for certain people who are aware of and have accepted the risks.

(Sex in public where people might see is the closest I can get to an “always wrong in all circumstances” thing, but even then if there were enough sex-in-public enthusiasts that they convinced the city to allow them to cordon off a few streets every so often for the purpose, and there were bouncers checking IDs and making sure everyone knew what they were in for, I think that sex in public would be absolutely wonderful.)

The fallacy of act-based sexual morality makes sense once you try to apply it to any other subject. Is it inherently wrong to punch someone? Depends on whether they’re assaulting someone else at the time. Is it inherently wrong to play at a rock concert? Depends on whether you’re doing it in my backyard without my consent. Is it inherently wrong to give away a million dollars? Depends on whether you’re giving it away to the Nazi party. You can’t judge any action outside of its context, so why do people think this is a reasonable way to judge sexual ethics?

Three final notes: First, while I do think sexual ethics should consider issues other than consent, I do not think any form of consensual sex should be illegal. It is wrong to cheat on your partner, but that does not mean that you should go to prison for cheating on your partner.

Second, no person is perfectly ethical. This is true for every area of ethics. It is wrong to yell at your children, but nearly all parents yell sometimes. It is wrong to go on expensive vacations instead of giving that money to the poor, but most people who can afford to go on expensive vacations have gone on at least one. It is wrong to eat products that come from chickens, but I still eat the occasional cookie without inquiring too closely about whether there are eggs in it. Similarly, we would expect all people to have unethical sex sometimes. The question is whether you are doing the best you can, not whether you have reached some unattainable standard of goodness.

In particular, it is very very common for people to do wrong things because they have no other choice: for example, people eat eggs because they’re depressed and if they didn’t eat eggs they wouldn’t eat at all. It is not ever wrong to take care of yourself first. Ethical actions should be healthy, happy, and sustainable.

Third, when I say that sexual ethics must go beyond consent, I don’t mean to imply that consent is not important. In fact, consent is the bedrock of all sexual morality. Unfortunately, our society has caused many people to internalize the idea that you shouldn’t say no to sex if you have a certain relationship with someone, or if they really really want it, or if you don’t have a good reason. All sexual ethics has to come from the fundamental, baseline position that you can always refuse sex with someone for any reason or no reason at all. Even if your reason is really really stupid, you have a right to say no to sex for stupid reasons. Even if they paid for dinner, or you’re married, or it’s the third date, or you’re a man and you think men always want it you have a right to say no to sex. You should absolutely say no to any sex that makes you feel sick or gross or sad or violated.

Farley’s Framework

Farley argues that justice involves treating other humans with respect for who they are as humans: a unique person with a body and a soul, needs for food and clothing and shelter, the capacity for free choice and thoughts and feelings, a history, a social and political and cultural and economic context, a relationship to various systems and institutions, a potential for growth and flourishing, a vulnerability to diminishment and despair, interpersonal needs and capacities, and emotions. Of particular relevance to sexual ethics are a person’s ability to make free choices (autonomy) and their ability to have relationships with other people (relationality).

Farley presents a seven-item framework for sexual ethics. The first two are grounded in human autonomy, while the second five are grounded in relationality.

1. Do no unjust harm

While this is a general principle of ethics, avoidance of harm is particularly important for sexual ethics. Violations of this principle include rape, domestic violence, enslavement, sexual exploitation, unsafe sex, deceit, betrayal, sexual unfulfillment, emotional manipulation, and so on and so forth.

2. Free consent

Free consent is the right of each individual person to determine their own sexual actions and relationships. Violations of this principle include rape, violence, coercion, sex with people who do not have the capacity to give informed consent, sexual harassment, and child molestation. Norms derivative from this norm of free consent include privacy (the right of an individual to keep information about their sex life confidential), telling the truth, and keeping promises.

3. Mutuality

Mutuality is mutual participation in the sexual act. Sex is not a thing that one person does to another person; instead, it is a relationship in which everyone involved is both active and receptive and both gives and receives pleasure. This does not necessarily imply that it is morally wrong to be, for example, a pillow princess or an exclusive top: as just one example, a pillow princess may actively participate through their obvious enjoyment of the sex.

4. Equality

While no two individuals are perfectly equal in power, Farley argues that individuals participating in ethical sex must be sufficiently equal. Severe inequalities, such as when one person is very emotionally immature or those produced by certain patriarchal cultures, may result in one person being vulnerable and dependent and having limited options. Violations of the norm of equality include sexual harassment, emotional and physical abuse, some forms of sex work for some people, and giving up your entire sense of self for the person you love.

5. Commitment

In general, Farley argues, ethical sex requires some form of commitment to your partner, although not necessarily a lifelong marriage.

6. Fruitfulness

The most obvious kind of fruitfulness is procreation. Procreative sex must be conducted in a context that ensures the responsible care of offspring, the creation of a family, and participation in the great project of building the human community. However, for many people, sex is not procreative: they might be gay, infertile, childfree, or simply not ready to have children. However, they can still have fruitful sex. Ethical sex opens you to the wider community. It is not self-involved. Good sex can strengthen you, which lets you move beyond yourself in many ways: you can nourish your other relationships, make art, help people, provide goods and services to others through work, or raise your own or help raise other people’s children.

7. Social justice

Please note that this is “social justice” in the Catholic sense of the term, not in the modern-day sense of the term.

Social justice is an umbrella term covering many different kinds of sexual ethics. It is not sexual ethics construed narrowly, as in whether or not you should have particular kinds of sex; it is sexual ethics construed broadly, as in all the ethical problems which are affected by our sexualities. All people have a right to “freedom from unjust harm, equal protection under the law, an equitable share in the goods and services available to others, and freedom of choice in their sexual lives– within the limits of not harming or infringing on the just claims of… others” (Farley pg. 228); unfortunately, some people are denied these rights due to their sexualities or in the sphere of sexuality.

In a narrow sense, social justice requires that we take responsibility for the effects our actions may have on others, such as public health concerns, procreation, broken promises, and so on. In a broader sense, social justice implies a concern for the many ways in which people are harmed based on sexuality: a brief and incomplete list would include sexism, sexual and domestic violence, racism, global poverty, oppressive religious and cultural traditions, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, lack of contraceptive access, and the harmful use of new reproductive technologies.

Unjust Harm

In general, I endorse Farley’s reasoning. If you are the sort of person who reads a long post about sexual ethics, you probably already know that you should not rape people or sexually harass them or enslave them. It is in general wrong to have sex with people if you know it will cause them more distress than pleasure.

Many utilitarians may object that “no unjust harm” pretty much covers all of sexual ethics and we don’t need any additional sexual ethics. Be that as it may, I think it’s useful to have guidelines about how you can avoid harming people, particularly for those of us who have already mastered “slavery: probably a bad idea.” These sexual ethics I will discuss in the next post.