quizzical pussy

Porn rockstar Drew Deveaux recently linked this disturbing, uh, thing, on twitter. It presents an email conversation between a lesbian activist and a trans activist. In summary, the lesbian activist asked the trans activist what the “cotton ceiling” was. The term, which was entirely new to me, deals with the concept that trans women are welcomed into feminist/lesbian spaces, but they are largely ignored as potential sexual partners in these spaces. Think the feminist concept of a workplace “glass ceiling”, but with panties. I’ll admit that I’m biased against any glimmer of transphobia, but to my eye, the conversation quickly descended to the lesbian activist more or less asking the trans activist “Why are you trying to force me to acknowledge you as a woman and touch your penis!? Eeeeww!” Of course, this is just my interpretation, but here’s a direct quote:

Lesbians are sexually attracted to females. This does not include trans women with penises.

Hold the fuck up there.

First off, hasn’t feminism– especially queer feminism– been dealing for over a century with how fucked up it is that other people try to define “correct” womanhood for us? Distinguishing between “female” and “woman” here may seem deceptively okay because “female” refers to sex and “woman” refers to gender. But sex is so much more than genitals, and I cannot imagine feeling comfortable telling anyone else what their sex or gender is. If you feel comfortable doing that, please spend the next month speaking as little as possible and concentrating hard on listening to the people around you. You are not the boss of the planet: you can certainly say that women with penises aren’t female, but your simplistic view of bodies and selfhood and reality is not fooling the rest of us.

Second of all, and I can’t believe there’s even a remote possibility that this is going to blow anyone’s mind: Some lesbians want to have sex with women who have penises. Yes, really. Accept it now. I’m a queer woman. I love women. I am absolutely open to dating and fucking trans* people, including trans women. You don’t get to dictate to me whom I am attracted to. You don’t get to tell me what girl love means. I realize that my bisexuality might cloud this issue, but let me assure you that there exist full-blooded lesbians who feel the same way. Let’s put it this way: I can also have completely male-free lady sex involving a penis at any time with a cis woman. It’s called a strap-on. A penis doesn’t make someone male; I speak from a place of experience here.

I don’t think the trans activist or anyone else was saying that all lesbians are transphobic meanies unless they go out immediately and find trans women to have sex with. Obviously, each of us has the inalienable right to be attracted to the people we end up being attracted to. At the same time, there’s a big difference between saying “You’re not the type of woman I’m into” and saying “I’m into women and you don’t count.” I suspect that the plea here is to fully acknowledge trans women in the queer community as women, as lesbians (if applicable), to acknowledge their partners as female-loving people, and to open up to the idea that female-on-female sexuality is more diverse than all vaginas all the time.

In short, stop trying to make goddamn rules about other people’s sex lives. Maybe even consider reevaluating some of the assumptions that led you to create rules for your own.

Feminism doesn’t get to be an exclusive club. Feminism is the anti-exclusive club. We will joyfully include everyone in our goal of equality– including men with penises, women with penises, marginalized groups of all kinds, and even people we don’t particularly agree with, or we’ve already failed. We’re either dismantling hierarchy or we’re just rearranging it.

(image source)

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Whenever someone tells me that sexism is basically over and feminism is a relic (and trust me, it happens) my brain tries to do a spit take inside my skull. This is one of the stranger head sensations to experience, so the look I give these people isn’t so much anger or irritation as utter discomfort. Because my brain is doing really weird things in that moment.

Because they’re so infuriatingly wrong, see.

I get it. When you start examining sexism you often end up confronting not-so-fun subjects like abuse, sexual assault, workplace politics, pesky healthcare dilemmas, or that old “body image” chestnut that feminists trot out to try to get us to stop looking at women in bikinis. And if you really think hard you’ll find it hard to avoid looking at other unsettling things too: racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. and then your whole day will be taken up having to think about how and why you’re privileged. Laaaaaaame.*

And very few people have all the possible privileges at once, so it’s easy to get caught up in the “Well things aren’t easy for any of us, little camper. But I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got, and you should too!” fallacy and start arguing that, for instance, sexism doesn’t exist because you are a short man, and height discrimination is very real.

It all gets complicated and messy, you know?

But you know what’s not messy? Popular music! And you know what’s not complicated? Numbers! And you know what perfectly parries any claims that sexism is dead in Western culture? NME’s Greatest Singers of All Time poll! Observe.

On NME’s website, readers are asked to rate various singers of the 20th and 21st Centuries, mostly in the pop, rock, and R&B genres, from one to ten. The selection ranges from Art Garfunkle to Beyonce to Mike Skinner (the garage hip hop phenomenon The Streets) to Patti Smith to Al Green. There are more male nominees, but not overwhelmingly.

So far (as of Tuesday afternoon in my time zone) two women have made it into the top twenty. Monday it was just Aretha Franklin, but Tuesday morning I noticed Janice Joplin had made it to the #20 spot (so maybe by the time this entry posts we’ll have three women on the list). And I think that’s fucked up, not because I think Joni Mitchell should necessarily appear above Kurt Cobain (although one could certainly make an argument for that), but because 18-2 cannot be an accidental, random, “just the way things worked out” ratio. It has to mean something.

(as of Tuesday 6/7/11 1:00PM EST)

If a great preponderance of people agree that men are better at something that’s totally subjective and impossible to quantify outside of pure taste, it means we’ve basically just decided we like women less. We might not really even know why, exactly, but they’re just not as good. Does this seem freshly tapped from the very essence of sexism to anyone else?

There is a problem. Sexism is not over. It is not mass hysteria. It is not liberal brainwashing. And feminism is me, as a woman, wanting to not have to deal with that vague, visceral dismissal of my work, or body, or voice, or abilities. There is a problem. And which singers we all like best is really the least of it, yes, but it’s an easy thing to point out and say: “Now tell me more about this post-sexist world we’re living in, please?”

That said, I still can’t really think of a better singer than Freddie Mercury.

* You thought I forgot ableism, didn’t you?

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Tonight is the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3. Who cares, you ask? I do. My latest brush with acute illness has left me with a lot of time on my hands. Did you know you can watch every single scintillating episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race ever produced right on logo’s website, tiny and pixelated beyond your wildest dreams? Well, you can.

To say that I lay in bed watching every episode would be a gross understatement. I also watched the extra catty web exclusives where you get to see the drag queen contestants bitch about each other backstage.

All in all, I’m excited to see who wins. I actually, really, almost and maybe even truly unashamedly am.

Part of this, of course, is research. Or maybe reverse research, because I’m actually a drag king. That’s right: I have exactly one performance to my masculine alter ego’s name (which I can’t share because I just know he’s destined to become a famous playboy and I still have a secret identity to play fast and loose with here). And I’m just a handful of days from another, if I can decide what song we’re lip-synching to.

It was once explained to me that to do your makeup as a king, you just reverse everything that queens are supposed to do. So while a man will put a white stripe down the center of his nose to make it appear narrower and create the illusion of feminine features, a woman has to draw a dark stripe instead to make the nose appear wider. I have no idea whatsoever if this is valid or not. I know exactly enough about makeup to have never bothered to learn anything and I own a book by Kevyn Aucoin that I don’t entirely understand. That’s pretty much all I can say for myself when it comes to makeup.

Really, the assumption in drag is that the genders are opposites, and have minimal overlap. If I walk like a woman I obviously can’t be walking like a man. In a recent episode of Drag Race, a queen advised a straight jock on his first flight dressed as a woman that “girls don’t point”. Like, at things, with our fingers. Which, I have to admit as a girl, I do. But what we’re dealing with in drag isn’t gender; it’s fantasy gender.

Which is why it’s so powerful and challenging and fun, really.

But this is also why there probably won’t be a reality show all about drag kings. It’s the same reason handsomeness pageants aren’t neck-and-neck with beauty pageants for popularity and scholarship opportunities. Same reason both men’s and women’s magazines have hot chicks on their covers. This is gender 101 shit. We more or less all fetishize the image and the fantasy of femininity, regardless of which gender/s we’re actually attracted to. In performing the opposite gender, women lose that double-sided edge we come to expect. We’re no longer universal visual shorthand for “sex object”.

It took drag to make me stop and wonder if guys don’t sometimes feel bad that they’re largely excluded from pretty.

Of course, I kind of also love this about being a drag king. Performing maleness I don’t feel any pressure to look sexy in the ways I’m used to failing at (big boobs, long hair, perfect figure et al.), and I think that’s why I suddenly almost feel sexy. Or something.

Or maybe I’m drunk with power because I have a big fucking packing penis.

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Above: The Best Facebook Ad

I found the winner of the best ad on Facebook. You can all stop looking now.

See, the reasons this ad works so well are manifold (or possibly closer to twofold): First, Pell Grant eligibility is absolutely based on the sex of the applicant* rather than economic need, so saying “Pell Grants for Women!” isn’t at all embarrassing.* Second, a mudflap girl in a margarita glass is the perfect image to complement the concept of online education.*

It’s also important to point out that Academies of Burlesque do accept student loans.* I plan to minor in titty tassels.

*Lies. All lies.

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The day I had committed to shave my head for charity I was so nervous I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t figure out where the nausea was coming from, because deep down I believe that I’m fearless. Deeper down– like in my stomach, I guess I know I’m not.

Outwardly, I was blasé about losing all my hair. It would grow back, I told people, myself. It didn’t matter. But really I was quite attached to my hair. For years I’d been bleaching it out and dying it outrageous colors: orange, pink, purple, blue. It was the first thing people noticed, and most people loved it. Little kids thought I was a muppet; old women thought I was brave. For me, crazy hair took no courage. I can honestly say, even looking back and in the searing light of day, that I was never rebelling against anything, and I wasn’t after attention. I just wanted to dye my hair crayola colors: it felt comfortable, oddly natural. It was me.

There were several reasons I decided to shave it off, but the main one was that I knew the only reason not to do it was fear. Fear wrapped up in vanity, which is perhaps the most repulsive kind. My philosophy supports doing anything that you’re afraid to do when there are no good, logical reasons to back up that fear. A dread of being unattractive just doesn’t count, especially up against raising money for charity. But I couldn’t help being scared that losing my hair meant losing a huge part of my identity. Maybe without awesome hair I wouldn’t be me anymore. Even worse, I might be really fucking ugly.

So my stomach was a mess underneath my cool “What is hair anyway, in the grand scheme of things?” exterior. But I didn’t back out. I sat through the dull-clipper-tearing-my-hair-out-instead-of-cutting-it stage, the these-replacement-clippers-hurt-much-less stage, the oh-dear-I-have-a-mohawk stage, each of these taking roughly five minutes. And then, after all that, I had a really short crew cut, more a faint suggestion of hair than an actual hairstyle.

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This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.

I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.

I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.

One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.

My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.

I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.

One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”

I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.

In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.

It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.

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I dated Edwin Pomble for several years, but I never understood his odd prejudices. One in particular that galled me, upsets me to think about even now, was his awful double standard about toys.

Excepting necessary concessions to propriety, if I’m acquainted with (nevermind boning) someone for any length of time, I’ll probably start talking sex toys eventually. People like to talk about their hobbies. I talk about the ones I love, the ones I lust after, the hilarious ones, and the ones I want invented yesterday. And I’m never shy about the fact that if I were a dude I would gleefully and unashamedly use masturbation aids, because I think they’re a lovely idea for all sexes, genders, races, and creeds. Edwin was tolerant of this only to a point.

“It’s fine for girls to use vibrators or whatever, but it just seems weird for guys to use anything… it’s so pathetic,” he insisted one day.
“Why is using a Fleshlight or something any different from me using my jackrabbit to get off? They’re both just simulated versions of genitals.” I pounced. I don’t like this weird idea that a guy fucking plastic is any different from a girl fucking plastic. It grates against my sense of fair play.
“Well…” Edwin was a slow talker. With a hint of conflict my conversational rhythm lapses into a staccato gallop, so this harmless idiosyncrasy always piqued me. “…it’s just not the same…” Another pause.
“Why not?”
“It just… isn’t. It’s sad when a guy does it. It’s like he can’t get a girlfriend so he has to use a pretend vagina.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why should you or anyone else care what someone does all alone and in private? If it feels better than your hand it’s a great idea: simple as that. And maybe it feels twenty times better. Have you tried it?” I challenged, setting myself up for a very easy “don’t knock it ’til” rejoinder.
“Well… my ex once…bought me… something.” Huh. Really? Now this was getting interesting.
“Cool! What was it?” I leaned into the question.
“It was like, a masturbation… thing. A sleeve or something.”
“And did you try it?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t like it?”
“It felt really good, but…then I felt bad about it. So I threw it away.”

He threw it away! He fucking threw away a perfectly good sex toy. That’s sad! In my world, it’s practically a capital offense. A lovely sex toy whose only purpose in life is to help you get off, that exists only to enhance your pleasure, deserves better than that.

It bothers me no end that most people seem to think that when a girl uses a sex toy she’s adventurous, empowered, and sexually aware, but when a guy uses a sex toy it’s depressing unless he has a female chaperone, and even then the toy must mostly be for her benefit. Even those who get behind the idea of a man using dildos and buttplugs on himself often still revolt against the idea of him using a male masturbator. In short:

Toy penetrates flesh = HAWT
Flesh penetrates toy = UR A LOSER LOL

…Why? I honestly don’t get it. I can’t even argue against this prejudice in any systematic way because I have no idea where it’s coming from. If anyone out there can give me a logical reason people arrive at this conclusion I’ll give you a jelly bean.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some horrifying male toys out there, which is exactly what Part 2 of Quizzical Pussy’s “The wank that dare not speak its name” series will be about. But really, anyone who doesn’t (and no one should) have a problem with my dildo collection needs to stop worrying about guys using sleeves or other sex toys. It doesn’t mean we’re beneath all standards for human contact; it just means that we’re occasionally eschewing our hands for a fancier option.

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I’m no one’s sterotypist laureate or anything, but it seems to me conventional wisdom holds that men and women fap very differently. Some sources actually contend that women can’t fap at all, and that they only “schlick”, but that’s misogyny for you. Schlick isn’t even a word, and it sounds off-putting.

So let’s just all agree that girls can fap. And do. Some more frequently and enthusiastically than others. And perhaps it really is true that men and women tend to gratify themselves differently. Maybe men and women are from different planets, and those planets have very different masturbation rituals. Like…

“How men masturbate”

Let’s look at a fap in the life of your average bloke. He’s going to want a healthy clutch of porn, his hand, and ideally a bottle of lotion. A quick click animates the pretty naked things on the screen and his dick snaps to attention. He’ll graze on different porn scenes, flitting over whatever catches his eye and discarding it when it loses his interest, moving on to the next stimulus, and then the next. Alternately, if he’s in the shower or another place where porn isn’t readily available, he’ll use his imagination and fantasize about fucking his friends’ girlfriends or his wife’s sister or his squash partner. He focuses on the most sensitive spots on his cock with a fast and heavy, practiced touch. His orgasm is quick and workmanlike. He’s done this thousands of times and faps with efficiency, for results.

“How women masturbate”

Women don’t masturbate so much as make love to themselves. Women don’t like regular porn. They like “erotica”. There are special porn companies that make smut with story lines and character development and poignant portrayals of intimacy, but everyone knows that most women prefer their erotica in text, be it slash featuring anime characters or bodice-ripping plucked from the grocery store.

When a woman decides to masturbate, it is an event. She pours herself a glass of wine, lights some scented candles, and luxuriates in a bubble bath or lays back in bed with a favorite toy. And there she escapes into an erotic fantasy, becomes other people, slips into breathless moments and exotic roles. Her hands wander all over her body, teasing her neck, thigh, nipple– like a lover might, tracing circles that spiral ever closer to her sacred center. Finally, when she’s ready and she’s at an especially hot paragraph, she stimulates her clitoris or impales herself tenderly with a dildo. It’s spiritual, vital, powerful. It’s part of the process of falling desperately in love with herself. Hell, she might even have an orgasm!

…Yep. That’s definitely how men and women masturbate, respectively. But I’m such a special snowflake that none of it applies to me.

How I masturbate:

I’m actually much closer to the male stereotype when it comes to fapping, but I suspect that many women are. I can’t relate to its female analog. It seems too damn elaborate, like a lie that tries to cripple your skepticism with irrelevant details. I may need to put in a lot of work to seduce someone else, but myself? If I can’t be my own sure thing, we have a problem.

I think lots of women actually do like porn, and not just “girl porn”. Plenty of us like the really hot, exploitative kind. When I’m in the mood for video, I’ll watch mainstream, gay, or lesbian porn: hot people fuckin’, preferably saying derogatory things here and there.

But usually, I don’t just masturbate like a guy; I masturbate like a fourteen-year-old boy. I browse through pictures of hot naked chicks, my vibrator poised on my clit (or I’m actually jacking off, but we’ll cover that another time), eager eyes darting to the next picture, and the next, and the next. I’m not thinking about aught but the scandalous things I want to do to these women: there’s no grand backstory, no character development, just me-on-them action. In my mind’s eye.

Sometimes I do this for literally hours. Because although I normally pride myself on my will of adamantium, once I start getting off it is really, really tough for me to make myself get back on.

It’s a relief to be able to admit this aberrant behavior now. I spent a long time lying to boyfriends and telling them I thought of nothing, absolutely nothing, or just them when I fapped. We’re all mature enough here to realize that our partners are lying through their teeth if they tell us that, right?

Of course, sometimes I will think about fucking guys, usually things I did with partners in the past, things I wish I’d done with them, or things I intend to do with them.

…Or I fantasize about fucking my friends’ girlfriends. Just kidding. Kinda.

One thing that may be more stereotypically feminine about my system is that I actually do prefer “tasteful(ish) nudes” when it comes to pics. I don’t really need the spread-eagle pussy shot; in fact, occasionally it just looks tacky to me and I move on to something with a little more mystery: a wall to scale, a thicket to penetrate.

Sure, I’ll fap to hot text sometimes: a well-crafted erotic story or a field report from a fellow blogger. Not often, but it certainly happens. I’ll also masturbate casually while watching TV or reading a completely neutral book: it’s like fidgeting, but much better. I honestly do masturbate too much, the more I think about it. But really, every single other guy from my planet seems to have the exact same problem, right?

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