But why privilege the reproductive capacities of our genitals as their primary function? (4,000 years of Judeo-Greco-Christo-Roman-Celto-Muslim teachings, that’s why!) Sex, it’s true, is involved in the reproductive process (except when it’s not — see below), but function does not necessarily show intent. My car makes a good deer-killing tool, but that’s not what it was intended for. And it’s the assumption of intent that dominates the debate — that sex is somehow “intended for” procreation, by God or by nature or by both — as if either had intentions (ok, God, if she existed, might have intentions, but most of the faiths I’m familiar with that posit such a being place those intentions well beyond the ken of meagre human minds and thus hardly applicable to human understanding).

Frankly, reproduction isn’t something sex is even particularly good at achieving. In the best of circumstances, the odds of viable sperm actually reaching and fertilizing a viable egg, and of an egg thus fertilized actually implanting in the uterus, and of a zygote thus implanted developing properly and reaching term, and of a fetus thus developed being delivered, and of an infant thus delivered surviving a reasonable amount of time, are pretty slim. And that’s under ideal circumstances — a thin sheet of latex drops the chances to virtually nil, a simple pill drops them even further.

What’s more, as every right-winger railing about lesbian-raised “baster babies” (I’m talking abou you, Hannity) tacitly admits, there’s lots of ways to achieve reproduction without having sex at all — ovum can be fertilized in vitro and implanted in the uterus with nary an orgasmic groan. What’s more, our genitals seem perfectly content to do their thing regardless of the reproductive potential of the encounter (with the odd exception of the neurotic sperm played by Woody Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask).

No, sex is hardly necessary for reproduction — and getting less so — and not much good at it. On the other hand, sex is really good at creating orgasms, and, defined widely enough, some sort of sex is essential to the process. Sexual excitement is crucial to orgasm, whether through touch, language, or really vivid fantasization. Considered something like obectively (that is, in the absence of literary traditions like that of Christians condemining sexual pleasure) we would probably have to admit that the primary function of sex — the one it’s best at, and the one it’s most necessary for — is to produce pleasure. Reproduction is merely a side-effect of some ways of achieving pleasure — sometimes a pleasant and even desirable side-effect, but by no means a predictable outcome of pleasure nor necessary to the attainment of pleasure.

Of course, I’m not saying that sex is “intended for” pleasure — it just is what it is. We assume, impose, invent, construct the intentions, sex doesn’t. In the end, sex is much better at creating orgasms than at creating babies — that’s just the way sex is. It functions to create babies, just not well — that, too, is just the way sex is.

Discuss.

Money quote: “Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood. It embraced home video in the late 1970s, allowing people to bypass seedy theaters and watch the movies in their living rooms. Mainstream studios, by contrast, fought home video all the way to the Supreme Court before making it one of the most profitable pieces of their business.”

Among the lessons settlement house workers aimed to teach was how to be suitably poor. While immigrants bought lavish furniture and decorations, often on credit, in part as an attempt to accumulate and master the symbols of American affluence, settlement house workers created “model homes” furnished in Shaker simplicity and devoid of clutter — and, for many immigrants, devoid of any semblance of human occupation.

I’ve posted the whole essay — it’s long (about 30-odd pages as written, probably about half that without the double-spacing) and covers a lot more than just standards of cleanliness, but I think all of it is fairly relevant to Bitch|Lab’s point.

Uptown/Downtown: The Settlement Movement and Jewish Immigrants, 1880 – 1920

People in our culture wonder about people who don’t have sex: Are they strung out? Anorexic? Fanatically religious? Or are they in some way neuter, cut off from their urges because of some childhood trauma or deep personal failing? As Abbott writes, sexuality is equated with normalcy in this post-sexual-revolution age, and abstinence is “tantamount to being branded as an emotional deviant, an errant soul in a world where adult sexuality is a mark of mental health and a measure of social adjustment.” Therapists, she notes, even try to restore the fearful or asexual to a state of sexual interest, rather than affirm celibacy as an acceptable way of living. In any case, to be celibate is to be called into question; it is not, in this day and age, normal.

Given the tremendous pressure our society puts on us to be full-time consumers of sex — the commercials, the magazines, the billboards, the “girl-talk”, the locker-room bonding, the sit-coms, the Viagra and Cialis and birth control and condoms, the spam — it’s no surprise that, for many, sex has become less a pleasure and more a duty. In the face of this pressure, more and more folks are turning away from sex altogether (or, rather, going public with their indifference to it), and even wearing their asexuality proudly as a slap in the face to our consumerist culture.

Every time I teach the section on marriage in my Intro to Anthro class, I inevitably face the same question. The book lists four types of marriage: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and group marriage. and someone always asks “What about swingers?” (Of course, I live and teach in Vegas…) The question points to a limitation of the concept of marriage not just for anthropological understanding but even within our own everyday usage.

Writers Em and Lo confront these limitations in their current New York Magazine piece The New Monogamy, addressing the kinds of open relationships that some married couples are evolving in order to both maintain their commitment to each other and manage their attractions to other people. Em and Lo’s “new monogamists” represent a new twist on the more well-established swinger scene, combining professional lifestyles, post-feminism, and a modern psychotherapeutic understanding of sex, relationships, and the self in an attempt to navigate the pitfalls of tradtional marriage in a society increasingly ill-equipped for long-term exclusive bonding.

There are a couple of irritating quibbles in the article that I’d like to get out of the way before moving onto the meat of the topic. First, the framing of the New Monogamy as not just a move away from cultural norms but from human universals is not only gratuitous but wrong. “For much of human history,” the authors write, “monogamy (or, at least, presumed monogamy) has been the default setting for long-term love.” We do not know what sexual/emotional relationships were like “for much of human history”, but judging from the ethnographic evidence gathered over the last century or so among today’s populations, the norm has likely been serial monogamy (as we find in many foraging societies today; see e.g. Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa), likely with numerous temporary relationships “on the side”, and polygyny, which is today accepted and often preferred in 80% of contemporary cultures, with no reason to assume it was any less common in “much of human history”. Monogamy as practiced in the United States is a function of our particular history, especially the inheritance of British agricultural traditions and the impact of the 19th century Industrial Revolution.

The other issue I have is the constant reiteration of stereotypes of open relationships as the province of either “earnest, hairy polyamorists” or “doughy, middle-aged swingers”. While there are obviously precendents for today’s New Monogamists in the Haight-Ashbury hippie culture of the Free Love generation and in the key parties and wife-swapping of ’70s suburbia, various kinds of open relationships have been practiced from the dawn of American history (to their credit, Em and Lo mention the 19th century utopian Oneida Colony) and have cut across a wide range of American social strata. The point that their subjects come from neither a bohemian subculture nor a suburban middle-class but rather a professional, urban, and upwardly mobile mainstream can be made without the repeated images of purple muumuus and Tupperware.

With those objections out of the way, I can move onto the more substantial topics at the heart of the article. Em and Lo speak with a selection of couples — straight and gay, as well as mixed straight/bi relationships (on which more later) — who are struggling to accomodate their decidedly non-monogamous sexual desires while continuing to nurture the marriage commitments that they still find meaningful. Ranging from shared fanstasization about Friends–style fantasy lists of famous people and collaborative surfing of online personals to fully open sexual relations, each of the couples has attempted to divorce their sexual desires from the romantic committment of their marriage without divorcing their spouses. For instance, Diane and her boyfriend have agreed to allow flirting, dirty phone talk, and cybersex over IM, “as long as no one ends up actually making out with anyone else”; Mike and Jessica indulge in three–ways, four–ways, and even a full-blown orgy; William and Dan have a closed relationship — unless one or the other is out of town; and Siege and Katie follow a code of “body-fluid monogamy”, indulging in safe sex with whomever they like, even in their home while the other is busy in the other room.

The key to these relationships — as Ann Landers could have told you, if the word menage-à-trois had been in her vocabulary — seems to be communication. Many of the partners had seen previous relationships dissolve when their partner cheated on them, and in retrospect many felt that it was not the cheating so much as the erosion of trust and honesty which had created the problem. So they share fantasies, experiences, and even partners, all under the aegis of pre-negotiated rules, in order to preserve the trust relationship and (hopefully) forestall jealousy, suspicion, and betrayal.

Trust, sharing, communication, honesty, commitment — the language is straight out of Oprah and reflects an intersection of ’70s self-realization, 80s self-help and relationship manuals, and ’90s post-feminism. The women in these relationships are active professionals, empowered both by their social status and by their own sexualities, unwilling to limit their sexual urges for the sake of a husband like their mothers and grandmothers were typically expected to do — and like their fathers and grandfathers were not expected or obligated to do. The arrangements featured in this article have been designed as much out of the women’s need to assert and satisfy their sexual needs and desires as for the men’s, and explicitly with equality in mind.

One of the pull-quotes in the article notes that, with all the concern for communication and equality between partners, “perhaps this time around, seventies-style swinging and slutting will actually be feasible — and fair.” And yet it bears asking whether this assumption of equality has been realized in actuality. The easy response is that given the label “slutty” and the lack of an equivalent label for men engaged in the same behavior, there is still an obvious inequality — but I think the issue runs much deeper than that.

How much deeper begins to be clear when Em and Lo breach the subject of bisexuality. In many of these set-ups, the men are straight and the women bi, and rules have been adopted limiting both husband and wife to female extramarital partners. For the men, the thought of another man involving himself in their relationship is threatening in a way that another women’s involvement is not; consider Siege’s statement that “I just don’t want her messing around with other guys. Because I don’t find men attractive, my only instinct would be to punch them.” All of the mixed-sex couples seem much more willing to experiment with her sexuality than with his.

While the article suggests a couple of explanations for this double-standard, only one of them really seems to get at the reality of sexuality in the 21st century. It’s unlikely that women are, by nature, simply “more fluid” sexually, especially given the incredible restraints around any expression of male homosexuality; it’s also unlikely that women have more sexual freedom than men in our society, given the way so many other aspects of their lives are socially programmed. At the same time, none of the women seemed to express the feeling that she was being made to perform for the benefit of her partner — and given their economic and personal independence, I find this a doubtful proposition in any case. But I think the authors are moving in the right direction when they guess that “It could be that sexually speaking, women are just not taken seriously: Hot, yes, but as sex toys, not real romantic threats.”

The idea of women as “sex toys”, as objects to be acquired, used, and either discarded or grown out of jibes well with the commodification of sex in general in our increasingly consumeristic society. Sex has come to stand alongside other entertainments as a way of expressing our individual identities, like the choice of a double grande mocha latte, the latest art house film, or an indie CD. One person likes Fellini, another likes fellatio — to each his own. (Or her own, but that would ruin the rhtyhm of the cliche now, wouldn’t it?)

The marketing of sex as product, though, is much more easily achieved in the case of women’s sexuality than men’s. As John Berger noted (Ways of Seeing, 1972), gender roles in Western societies can be summed up by the simple maxim: “men act and women appear” (47). To commodify a woman’s sexuality, to objectify it and make it available for consumption, is easy because we are already predisposed to do so; men’s sexuality, however, is wrapped up with notions of virility, strength, and power — aspects of character as much as or even more than of appearance. I had a graphic illustration of this in a recent classroom discussion on gender, when I asked why so many women find John Goodman sexy. “He has character,” one of my female students responded. When I noted that Roseanne Barr has lots of character and asked if she was also sexy, I received a chorus of “no’s” — and the same student replied that “Character doesn’t count for women.”

Many of the women Em and Lo spoke with summed up this attitude quite nicely, saying they were “sexually, but not romantically, attracted to other women”. That is, they were interested in other women because they found them physically attractive, but were unwilling or unable to imagine other women as potentially meaningful partners in life. For their male partners, then, there was little risk in seeing their wives getting it on with other women — no more risk than seeing their wives pick out a brand of coffee or a DVD. You don’t lose your wife to a product.

You lose your wife to other men, though. Men are agents, not products, and neither the men interviewed nor most of the women could as easily divorce their sexual attraction to men from the potential for romantic involvement the way they could with women. This resonates well with the way many men fetishize lesbianism, even as they deeply fear anything that even faintly smacks of male homoeroticism. When a woman makes out with other women, she’s “bi”; any contact with another man though, especially a gay man, is tinged with panic that the encounter might reveal a man to be — or even worse, turn him — “gay”. Because male sexuality is premised on character and not superficial appearance, a man’s attraction to another man — or a women’s attraction to another man — implies a deeper level of commitment than the consumerism satisfied by the consumption of other women as “living, breathing sex objects”.

The danger of shifting commitment obviously poses a threat to the marriages that the men and women in Em and Lo’s piece are struggling to negotiate. In a society like ours, with personalities both shaped by enculturation practices to be independent and self-serving and to be focused strongly around sexuality as the core of the self, marriage as traditionally understood seems artificially limiting — and we have been trained to see such limits as challenges. The commodification of sexuality is not just a temptation threatening to destabilize the institution of marriage, but can be seen also as an accomodation to that institution, a way of allowing expression of our consumeristic, sexualized selves without further destabilizing the relationship. The stress on “cheating” is important in this regard — in their former relationships, without the possibility for acceptible extramarital sex, the partners were forced to resort to secrecy and dishonesty, which eventually undermined their emotional bonds with their partners, making it all the more likely that they would seek romantic, as well as sexual, release with their new partners. By limiting extramarital encounters to the purely sexual, these couples are trying to prevent the erosion of their romantic relationships — thus making the extramarital relationships into a supplement, rather than a replacement, for their relationships with their spouses.

Of course, we might ask why such a supplement is necessary in the first place, but I think it’s fairly clear. If we did not seek something new, different, and exciting, we would not be very good consumers — and we are very good consumers! And if we did not do everything in our power to attain the objects of our desires, if we did not view social restrictions as obstacles to be overcome, we would not be very good individualists — and we are not only good individualists, but we have to be to function in our highly mobile, highly specialized society. As women have become more and more expected to function as workers and participants in the public sphere, the role of monogamous wife has become as untenable as the role of monogamous husband has been for centuries.

It may be that the institution of marriage itself is becoming untenable, and the couples in this article are not the vanguard of a New Monogamy but are rather leading a fighting retreat. More and more people find marriage simply unnecessary to their lifestyles — what with professional obligations requiring more and more frequent travel, the difficulty of finding satisfying work in the same place as your partner, the risk of boredom in the face of lifelong commitment, and the failure of more than half of the marriages in oursociety, marriage seems particularly ill-suited to modern living. Increasing numbers of people are turning to short-term relationships, casual encounters, and alternatives to long-term monogamous relationships that better fit the demands of their lives. The rise of polyamory — semi-closed networks of friends and lovers often spread out over several cities — represents one adaptation to these demands. It may well be that the only thing supporting traditional marriage in Western society is the fear of disease; as new treatments for STDs become available, we may well see the end of marriage altogether, or at least its diminishment as a primary organizer of social relations.

The connection between eating and having sex is a fairly obvious one. Many of the words we use to describe sexual desire (hunger, voracious appetite) and sex acts themselves (eating out, munching), and even various body parts (my favorite: “the split knish”) refer to food — an obvious parallel given the importance of the mouth to both eating and sex. The connection is deeper than just slang, though — Edmund Leach noted in 1964 that the way we categorize the animals we eat and the way we categorize potential sex partners are parallel as well (at least in mid-century Britain): women and animals that live in the home (sisters, dogs) are off-limits for eating and/or sex; animals and women that live outside the domestic sphere (cattle and other animals that roam more or less freely, neighbors) are potential sex and marriage partners; and the truly exotic, those living entirely outside of the familiar world altogether (emu, Africans — from a British perspective) are neither food nor sex partners. Among the Arapesh and Adelam peoples studied by Margaret Mead (1935), a man could eat neither one’s own yams and pigs nor one’s own mother and sister, while:

Other people’s mothers
Other people’s sisters
Other people’s pigs
Other people’s yams which they have piled up
You may eat (Mead: 78).

With such a thin line between eating and “eating”, it seems unsurprising that some people would seek to combine the two more explicitly. Enter the cann-fetish (some explicit langauge, probably not worksafe) — cannibal fetishism (or cannibalism fetish). While many of us are familiar with the case of Armin Meiwes, the German man convicted recently of killing and eating a partner he met and coordinated the killing with over the Internet, Meiwes represents an extreme distortion of what is becoming a significant, if small, fetish community. For the most part, cann-fetishists stop short of actually eating or hurting anyone, rather endulging in a rather elaborate pretend-feast involving trussing the “meal” (generally a willing female, who is bound and whose various orifices will be poked, prodded, and filled with various trimmings and cooking implements), coating her (or, apparently far more rarely, him) with oil, butter, honey, and other basting substances, and “cooking” her in a make-believe oven.

Given the elaborate bindings and the rich fantasy elements, it would not be too far off the mark to describe cann-fetishism as a sub-genre of BDSM (bondage/domination/sado-masochism), replacing the leather-and-chains aesthetic with a playful June Cleaver look. Central to both “mainstream” BDSM and cann-fetishism is the (voluntary) passivity and objectivization of the subject — as one enthusiast puts it, “I like to think I’m inanimate, without a conscience. There’s a feeling of transcendence when I’m being transformed.” For the subject, there’s also an element of exhibitionism, of being the center of attention. The same woman says, “It’s the same attention you give the turkey on Thanksgiving. Everybody is just obsessed with that turkey. Ooooooh, the turkey the turkey the turkey. When is the turkey going to be done? It’s so exciting!”

While to outsiders (like myself, I must admit), BDSM, including cann-fetishism, seems centered around degradation and humiliation, for its practitioners there’s something rather more complex at work. BDSM participants, both “tops” (dominant partners, “doms”) and “bottoms” (submissive partners, “subs”), get off on playing with power roles, in a way that is often strikingly subversive. The power that a “dom” enjoys over their “sub” comes with great responsibility for the emotional and erotic satisfaction of the “sub”, as well as for their physical and psychological health. Consider this piece of advice from The Beginners Guide to Dominance and Submission (the first website I cam across googling domination+submission+rules):

The Dom should not arbitrarily punish the sub on a whim. There must be a reason. To do otherwise will break down the trust and security of the sub. The Dom has to be respected by the sub. Respect is a quality that is earned by the Dom being right, and issuing swift, correct justice and reward to the sub. The Dom is not there to inflict pain and degradation on the sub, but to give the sub a goal and a direction on how to love and please him.

Participants in this kind of play are binding themselves to their partner with promises and gifts of trust, making very explicit the “rights and obligations” that anthropologists see at the root of all social relationships. The question of “who is in control” can become muddied rather quickly.

What sets cann-fetishists apart in this regard is not so much the ritual consumption of the “sub” as the rich semiotic and aesthetic stew in which their particlar brand of BDSM is marinated. Unlike the pseudo-fascistic trappings of “mainstream” BDSM, cann-fetishism (or at least the kind described in the article) draws on — and, I believe, subverts — images of domestic bliss straight out of “Leave It to Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show”, images laden with power relations between dominant husbands and submissive wives only a short step away from climbing onto the table and offering their own bodies up for the sustenence of their families. Which is to say, only a short step away from devolving from the height of “civilized” living to the worst stereotypes of “primitive” cannibalism. One of the cann-fetishists in the article even collects old-fashioned gag images of cannibals boiling their victim in giant stew-pots, à la this image. Although tinged with a kind of nostalgia, the parodic “Ozzie and Harriet” aesthetic represents a conscious break with and rejection of these roles, reserving them for “playtime” and transforming them into scenes of orgiastic perversion. I doubt very much June Cleaver ever used the word “assplay”.

[Thanks to Jill at Feministe for the link.]

Work Cited

Leach, Edmund. 1964. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” In New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric Lenneberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 23 – 64.

Mead, Margaret. 1935 [2001]. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Harper Perennial.

So step right up, ladies. Your labia may not be up to snuff – they may extrude too much or lack youthful plumpness – but a quick nip/tuck or strategic injection of fat from Dr. 90210 and his colleagues will take care of that. And thanks to the wonders of hymenoplasty, you can get to be a virgin – or at least like a virgin – all over again. From where I sit, life looks to be one long Madonna-esque self-invention tour, and there’s nothing to be done but to grin, tighten your Kegel muscles and bear it.

PS Sorry about the double plural in the title — it makes the rhyme work…