The Perils of Lesbianity

Via Andrew Sullivan:

The Boyfriend

Ed and I started dating in late May. It's been about five months now, and we are still together, with no signs of that changing any time soon.

He makes me really happy. He's in love with me (which is mutual, as should be obvious), and he's wonderfully emotionally supportive, a drama whore like me, and just great. I can't believe how great he is in these emotional ways. Also, the sex is the best I've had.

He's still working on his master's thesis. It's hard for him to stay productive with hardly any external constraints, but that's sort of the nature of theses. I have no doubt he'll get it done.

Lately, we spend about two evenings and one weekend day together each week. We also play an online game together (EVE Online), which gives us a light way to spend time together (online, of course, not in person) without it being too intense. (We have a habit of getting intense over IMs, and it doesn't always turn out well.)

His birthday is Monday, but we're celebrating it Friday. He'll be 24.

Trojan "Evolve" Ad

Trojan has a new ad campaign, an example of which can be watched here on their website. The commercial depicts a bar full of pigs and women, and shows the women rejecting the pigs over and over. Then one of the pigs goes into the restroom and gets a Trojan condom from a dispenser, at which point he is transformed into a man. He returns to the woman who previously rejected him, and she definitely likes him this time. The end of the ad says "Evolve" and "Use a condom every time." Here is their print ad.

I have kind of a love/hate relationship with this ad. I hate the depiction of men as pigs and women as objects of sexual desire. But I really love the message of the ads ("use a condom every time" or "choose the one who uses a condom every time") and I think the angle of selling condoms to straight men using the motivation that women like men who use condoms is a good one. I really do like men who are happy to use a condom every time. I think it's a smart way to have sex.

Weekend with Ed; "The Talk"; Condoms

I basically spent the entire weekend with Ed, which was great. He brought his computer over on Saturday night so we could continue to hang out and he could still do his stuff.

We had a short but fun hike on Saturday. (He told me he must love me if he was willing to exercise for me. Not to mention be exposed to all that icky life outside.) We did the trading post loop trail mentioned on this page about hiking at Red Rocks. The first time I did this - a couple of years ago, I guess - I thought it was a pretty challenging trail, but now it's just a short romp, really. We spent a lot of the walk arguing about physics. (For instance, I argued that we had to walk uphill as much as we did downhill because we needed our up and down vectors to sum to zero, and Ed argued that it was because "gravity is a conservative force." The passers-by at a particular point probably wondered why Ed was shouting at me, "You're living in a flat earth!" All in good fun, of course.)

Late Saturday night we had the "what happens if Tam gets pregnant" talk, which is a very difficult conversation that is nonetheless a really good idea to have at some point. I of course told Ed that I want to marry him and have a million of his babies am not completely sure what I would do, but that we would discuss it in detail if it occurred. His position was compatible, but I won't expose it here. I think we are both realistic, reasonable adults who took approximately the positions you'd expect.

Meanwhile, I have BC pills on hand, and am ready to start taking them at the start of my next cycle. We are using condoms right now, and plan to keep using them even once I am on the pill, so the odds of fertilization are pretty low.

I haven't had many partners who were happy with wearing condoms indefinitely. I find them slightly inconvenient and a tetch uncomfortable, but I'm figuring out how to mitigate that, and I really appreciate having a partner who sees no drawback to them and is willing to take responsibility for his own half of the equation. And of course they make sex safer and I guess the bottom line is, I'm getting to be a big fan of the stupid things.

Blog Against Sexism Day

According to Amanda Marcotte on Pandagon, today is Blog Against Sexism Day. (It is also International Women's Day.) This is something I feel pretty strongly about, so I'll try to put together a semi-coherent post. Marcotte's is better and I highly recommend it.

One question she asks is

When did you become a feminist? Either when you embraced the word or when you realized that sexism is still a problem and that feminism is still necessary?

This is a tricky one for me. As a very young child, I already had some feminist instincts, which I can only assume came from my mom. I remember my grandmother telling me, "Act like a little lady," and how much it rankled me. Being anti-feminine, as I have been as long as I can remember, is not identical to being feminist, but the two are related insofar as one agrees that femininity is a social construct to keep women down, or, alternately, a coping mechanism that allows women to survive under patriarchy.

At the same time, there were always giant gaps in my feminist understanding. I remember one time at church (First Unitarian in Houston), I visited the women's group because Houston's mayor (Kathy Whitmire) was giving a speech there. After the speech, a woman from the group cornered me (as I perceived it) and demanded to know whether I was a feminist. I think I probably stammered that I was a humanist. My view of this incident is different now, but I remember complaining to Mosch about it later. I had a resistance - one I think is typical to people my age - to describing myself as a feminist. Didn't it imply valuing women above men? Wouldn't it be wrong to consider oneself a masculinist? etc.

A more important area in which I was wrong was that my sexuality had too strong an emphasis on pleasing men. I believed that being "good in bed" (by which I meant "able to please a man") was important - far more important than getting pleasure myself. (I would have described this differently at the time, probably explaining that giving pleasure to another was how I got off.) Because of this and because I am slightly tricky to bring to orgasm, it took many years for me to learn as much as I now know about my own body.

In general, I had the view that men will not stick around, or will suffer unduly, if they don't have orgasms whenever they want them. I had an early boyfriend who definitely encouraged this view. There were many other ways in which I failed to be adequately selfish in that early relationship, especially sexually.

I remember learning that a friend of mine would, if she got tired of having intercourse (during the act, I mean), actually just stop (say "I'm done" or whatever). That kind of blew my mind at the time - wasn't it your obligation as a decent human being to continue until the guy came? Wasn't the decision to fuck basically a contract?

Well, no. I don't mean to portray myself as a totally selfish jerk - I am actually a pretty generous lover, all things considered - but I have gotten over my early ideas that (a) a man will die or be harmed by not having an orgasm, and, more importantly, that (b) a woman's duty is to be a receptacle for male pleasure. (Of course, I would never have said otherwise, but I think that was the basic idea underlying my attitudes.)

There is lots of stuff at the Pandagon post I linked earlier that is more germane to global feminist aims, so I won't address that here, but just leave this as a report of (some of) my personal experiences. Of course sexuality is not the only area in which I think feminism is important, even on a personal level - but it's one thing.