Elf Sternberg

Peter Beinart writing in the Atlantic about why Conservatives defend Kavanaugh more the more the accusations against him grow credible, says this:

If you’re already inclined to believe that America increasingly victimizes men simply for acting like men...

To me, this is the ugliest piece of this whole story, this definition of "acting like men." Which men? The 10.8% of men who commit some kind of sexual assault before they graduate college, or the 89.2% of men who don't? Why do we have to make room for the 10.8%? [CITE: "Trajectory Analysis of the Campus Serial Rapist Assumption," Journal of the American Medical Association: Pediatrics, July 2017]

The JAMA article goes into detail: For that 10.8%, three-quarters "committed only one rape, or engaged in multiple rapes only during a single academic year and never again before or after." The article also goes on to emphasize that in many of the cases the whole point of the rapist is to bond with his male buddies, to be "one of the guys."

Who knows? Maybe Kavanaugh is in this category; maybe he had a wild year and in one of his drunken stupors engaged in some pretty ugly ways. Hey, it was the 80s! Remember Revenge of the Nerds? Remember Sixteen Candles? Porkys? Women were always the victims: if they could be deceived, drugged, or coerced into having sex with someone they didn't want, that was funny back then!

But no, you see, men don't have to act like that. That's not "acting like a man." That's acting like the one-in-ten men who can't control themselves, who through upbringing, media exposure, and their own innate ugliness, fail to stop themselves when they find themselves with a vulnerable woman.

If Peter Beinart believes this is "men acting like men," I'm not sure I can trust Peter Beinart's opinions.

On MSNBC this morning Joe Scarborough shuddered in horror at the idea that Stormy Daniels might have one or more "dick pics" sent to her by Donald Trump. I know, I know, you really don't want to think about Donald Trump's penis. But bear with me for a moment, because there are two competing impulses here, and one of them is fair and one of them is wrong.

The fair one is the idea of Donald Trump humping away at anyone. From what we know of his habits— his germophobia, his discomfort with his own body, his self-centered inability to care about other people— sex with Trump basically reduces you to an onahole.

But the other one is reacting with distaste to the idea of an elderly man having sex. And that one's not fair at all.

If you're not familiar with LemonParty, it was a shock site and the game was to trick people into visiting it and watching their reaction when they did. It was a short looping gif of three elderly men having sex. It was prominent about a decade ago, when I was in my early 40s, and I did not have the reaction most people did; my reaction was "Yeah, go for it dudes, life is short and I hope I'm still going at it like that when I'm in my 70s too!"

Which was not the reaction people expected. (Then again, I have more or less the same reaction to Goatse as Marten Reed's mom, so my calibration is way, way off.) Nobody wants to talk about elderly sex; they'd rather go to Carousel than think about what sex will be like when they're 70. But many of us are going to get to 70, and it's damned unfair to say "Oh, old people, they shouldn't have the pleasures the rest of us enjoy." Sure they should, to the best of their ability.

Even Donald Trump.

A couple of final points to drive home (perhaps belabor) the point about how maddening I found Adam Rogers's Sex With Robots.

Rogers makes the observation that millions of women¹ have discovered that a robot doesn't have to look human to be sexually satisfying, and then goes on to cite vibrators as the pre-eminent example. But we're not talking about a motor with a programmable rhythm chip and a bluetooth interface.

If you've ever played a first person shooter in campaign mode, the experience of a gun battle does not entail high-minded thinking along the lines of "Oh, that avatar was programmed by the developer to want to reduce my health score to zero, and I will do the same to it." It's more along the lines of "Aieee, that zombie is about to eat my head! Die, die, m10r²!" We don't think about the player at all; instead, we ascribe some degree of agency to the zombie and react accordingly.

The more subtle and capable the robot, the broader the range of possible reactions it can take, the more we attribute real agency to a robot. The shape doesn't matter.

There are two axes on which Rogers is playing this game. The first is the uncanny valley; a range at one end of which we say "is human," and at the other "is avatar," be it puppet, stuffed animal, or cartoon, and in the middle is the valley, a gap where it's "almost human" but in an off-putting or uncomfortable way that suggests illness or anathema³. The second is from human to animal, with some animals being cats and dogs who get cuddled to sleep in our beds with us, others being food animals raised for slaughter, and at the far end mosquitoes and E. coli and things with which we'd rather not have to share the Earth. Even there, pets have their own uncanny valleys: glass-eyed, palsied and jerking movements, gurgling speech all suggest illness and uncanniness rather than a household friend.

But in robots, to suggest that there's a range of moral worth because of body shape, even when all those body shapes are occupied by the same mind, is to argue that bodies, and not souls, are what we care about as a civilization.

Rogers doesn't even begin to account for those local maxima in the uncanny valley where fetishists hang out. There are a surprising lot of them and they already exist as a market for "not human" robots. Above and beyond mere Furries and Ferals, there's Bad Dragon which sells dildos for a market that wants to fuck, you know, dragons. There are fetishists for glossy, metallic, sexy robots, every kind of beast you can find in World of Warcraft, body-morphing "humantaurs", tentacle monsters, even attack helicopters. The robots for this market wouldn't qualify as human-looking, but if they had all the compassion, the wisdom, if they were "absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all the offices of lover as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her," Adam Rogers isn't concerned with their moral fate at all.

As a final thought experiment, imagine a smart house with a server in the basement that supplies the persona for the house. It talks, it listens, it tries hard to meet your needs. It has an extension avatar, a woman-shaped robot that makes sure your lunch is packed, your bed is made, your carpet is vaccuumed. It doesn't really have a mind of its own; just a radio connection to the server in the basement. In Rogers's argument, it would be wrong to slap the robot around, but you'd be completely within the bounds of social acceptability to take an axe to the server because, after all, it doesn't look human.

That's incoherent. And if the house is indistinguishable from a spiritually animated person in speech and word, immoral.

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¹ Millions of men, too. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that on a dollar basis, men spend more on sex toys every year than women, and not for toys that they intend to use with women. The most expensive and boutique sex toy manufacturers, such as Squarepeg or Oxballs, actually market to gay men, and even on the determinedly non-gender retailer Bad Dragon, a large portion of their consumer base is self-described straight men who just enjoy the challenge of shoving large things up their backsides.

²A common convention among nerds is to shorten long words to their first and last letters and a count of the letters in between. "Internationalization" becomes "i18n;" "Localization" becomes "l10n." You can probably figure out what "m10r" stands for.

³Modern filmmakers and choreographers exploit this. Crystal Pike's modern ballet, Emergence, uses dozens of highly trained dancers at the height of their physical capabilities and human beauty, and teaches them jerking, mime-like motions to suggest an insect hive, and the effect is definitely uncanny.

Adam Rogers has a new article in Wired entitled Sex With Robots, and I just cannot get over how fundamentally misguided and immoral the article really is. The entire article is predicated on a pernicious and ill-considered anthropmorphization of devices that are purposefully designed, by humans, then constructed and deployed from a factory.

Rogers starts with this thought:

On the one hand, technology isn’t sophisticated enough to build a sentient, autonomous agent that can choose to not only have sex but even love, which means that by definition it cannot consent. So it’ll necessarily present a skewed, possibly toxic version.

I'll be coming back to this paragraph repeatedly, because it, and a final sentence I did not include, are at the heart of Rogers's incoherence and amoral thinking.

Let's start with what we talk about when we talk about sex robots. There are three completely different technologies at the heart of this issue, they are all in their infancy, and they are all improving rapidly.

First, there is up-close, small-scale sensory realism. Does the thing we're talking about look like a human being? Does it feel like one, even at the very smallest scale? If you squeeze it's upper arm, does it feel like a bicep? Is the belly squishy and soft, or muscular and hard, and in either case is it convincingly human? Does it move like a human, smell like a human, and even taste like a human? ¹

Second, there is large-scale mobility: can the thing we're talking about move inside a human space? Can it walk, climb stairs, dress and undress itself, climb under the covers, manipulate the light switches, and shower on its own without a human being lifting and turning it?

Third, there's the capability for emotional realism. Can the thing we're talking about sound like a real human being? Can it hold a conversation, react to stimuli in satisfying ways, read your verbal and physical responses, and react to them in an appropriate, safe, expected, and pleasurable manner?

All of these technologies are being pursued independently. Small-scale sensory realism is a combination of RealDolls to surgical quality synthetic skin, along with whatever improvements come along to make taste and smell work just as well. (I have this disturbing notion that future sex robots will have groins and armpits doped with a combination of pheremones and vape-style flavorings so the upper brain is going "strawberries!" while the back brain is screaming fuck now!). Large-scale mobility is the sort of robotics technology pursued by outlets like Boston Dynamics and Toyota.

The third technology, emotional authenticity, is being pursued by Google and Microsoft and just about everyone: it's called Human Interface AI Design, and it's an emerging discipline of matching our speech and the device's responses.

The first two are just technologies. The last is where the rationalizing rubber meets the risky road, and Rogers initially seems to be addressing that danger, but he isn't. His conclusions are philosophically incoherent and morally offensive.

I believe there are deep and inherent risks in the third technology on two fronts, neither of which Rogers addresses. One is rooted in the terrifying reality of our modern day culture, the other in the horrifying thought experiments of science fiction writers for the past century.

We'll discuss both of those later.

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¹ The fact that, right now, forums discussing silicone sex dolls like RealDolls recommend putting talcum powder on the surface to make it feel "more lifelike" is a huge tell: no one kisses a relief machine.

Matt Purple, writing at The American Conservative, wrote an article entitled #MeToo Becomes a Revolution, which starts out alarmingly enough with a stock photo of a man and a woman, their backs turned, their stances tense with anger, the sun setting behind them. He then asks

Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks? To initiate a workplace romance? To behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just “playing the field”?

Purple wants to portray the #MeToo movement as one in which the "inherent contradictions of leftism" are now tearing The Leftist Sexual Agenda™ apart. He gleefully quotes Christine Emba's Washington Post article, Let's Rethink Sex, in which Emba writes,

We need to reintroduce virtues such as prudence, temperance, respect and even love. We might pursue the theory that sex possibly has a deeper significance than just recreation and that ‘consent’—that thin and gameable[sic] boundary—might not be the only moral sensibility we need respect

To which I respond:

Welcome to the Queering of America.

In a conversation with Andrew Sullivan at the New York Public Library five years ago, Dan Savage correctly hit on what's happening:

Everything that straight people do now in their twenties and their early thirties is what was condemned thirty years ago by right-wing religious conservatives as the gay lifestyle. You renamed everything. Gay people had tricks, you people have hookups, gay people had fuck buddies, you people have friends with benefits, but the whole moving to the city, living in an urban area, having an apartment, fucking a lot of people, dating around, and then settling down in your thirties, that period of straight life, post-college, pre-marriage, the way we do it in the blue states, where it works, is the gay lifestyle.

But there's more to in than just this. There's the other side of the issue.

Sex between two people of the same sex lacks the gender dynamic of sex between two people of the opposite sex. There's no culturally embedded expectation of a power differential between two men, or between two women. It's hard to be a misogynist when you're a woman. It's hard to be a misandrist when you're a man. Men expect other men to bring the same feelings, the same power, the same desires to bed; the same is true of women. There have been a handful of reports of gay men in positions of power harassing other men, but there have been no reports of gay men harassing other men when they're peers, but plenty of reports of men harassing women peers because men expect to get away with it and women have been socialized to accept it.

(I don't want to paint the gay sex scene as idyllic; it's just as full of jerks and monsters as the straight scene. Differentials of race and, especially, class play a huge role, since wealthier gay men can afford PReP while the poorer ones, as everywhere else, are struggling to eat and keep the lights on. The interactions between those who have been reconciled to coming out and those who haven't can be fraught with unstated agenda. But the single largest conflict in our culture, that between men and women, simply doesn't exist.)

The conflict here is between those who want that power between men and women to be equal, and those who don't. And conversations about power lead us not to the queering of America, but something else:

Welcome to the Kinking of America.

If you've been to a professional conference in the past ten years, you may have been asked to read a Code of Conduct, which specifies the expectations of people at professional events to, well, be professional, and describes the social and professional, if not legal, consequences of exceeding the terms specified. I've read over twenty of these things and I've come away with one distinct feeling every time: whoever writes a Code of Conduct should send a thank-you note to Pat Califia.

Thirty-five years ago, Pat Califia wrote one of the most important books in the history of human sexuality: The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. A slim volume, little more than a chapbook, was the first to lay out in explicit, concrete terms the notions of power differential and consent that we're grappling with today. She took the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and made it intimate: how we as intimate individuals have a right to feel safe in our own skins and in the presence of others, even when the power differential between them is vast, even when what the two people want out of an intimate encounter is a violent, physically demanding role-playing of the existing power struggle or its inversion.

Every modern Code of Conduct descends from The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. The earliest ones are almost verbatim copies of the guidelines for kinky events; later ones refine the CoC with more professional language. It's almost as if, when the time came to write it, a volunteer stepped forward with "I have significant experience on this," without going into detail what experience she had.

Consent is necessary but not sufficient.

When Emba writes that consent is "that thin and gameable boundary," she's making a category error that kinky people don't make— and our world is the one that's been thinking about consent longer than anyone else. When a friend visits and you offer them a drink, if they don't consent, you know not to shove it down their throat, not matter how much you may like alcohol. In every other category of life, we understand consent implicitly. It's only in sex that we artificially thin out and game the boundary, mostly because the cads in power want it that way. All we're asking is that the rest of the world adopt our ideas on the inviolability of the other person's body, humanity and dignity as we expect it of our own, and to do so without assumption as to how the other person defines those terms.

We ask that you ask.

The school district where I live has an excellent three-week sex-ed course for middle school students that includes a brilliant section on consent. It, too, reads a lot like the Safety Manual, only it adds years of sociological research into conversational interaction and provides a pretty good formula for asking for consent: set ground, then ask. "I like when you do X. Could you do it more?"; "I don't like when you do X. Would you be willing to do something else?"

Because consent is necessary to an ethical sexual encounter, but it is not sufficient. The two participants must talk about it. They must explicitly raise the issue of existing power differentials, and they should agree that even in the presence of those differentials, the forms of intimacy they're considering would most likely work out for the best. In short, when Emba says, and Purple endorses, that sex must include "temperance, prudence, and respect," she's claiming that the consent movement needs to start talking about, well, the stuff we've been talking about for thirty-five years!

The consent movement assumes that people have temperance, prudence and respect for each other, and has for all that time that we've been talking about it, and has always said that if you don't have those things you shouldn't be out there.

Answering the questions.

So, to answer Purple's snarky introduction:

"Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks?" The answer is: it depends on the context. Are you co-workers? Then no, it is not okay. There are power relationships going on around you that can skew your relationship badly: you cannot guarantee that your sense of duty will not be compromised by a request from your partner or your employer. Are you at a professional conference or event? Maybe, if neither of you is a presenter; otherwise, one of you has power the other does not. Are you friends? Again, maybe.

"Is it okay to initiate a workplace romance?" Under almost all circumstances: no. Maybe, if you were in wildly different divisions, with different chains of command, that had no working relationship. But you could never ethically date within the company if you or the other person was an executive, or a member of human resources, as again the power differential is a great risk.

"Is it okay to behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just 'playing the field?'" Yes, as long as every one of your partners understands that's what's going on, and that you both still go through the essential conversation about whether or not it'll be good for you both.

There exist, and have existed for decades, contexts which men and women visit for the explicit purpose of meeting, pairing up, and having sex. There are bars, there are "singles events" at square dances, small theatres, garden clubs, and kite-flying at the park. There have always been gay bars and kinky dungeons, too. These days there are websites and Tindr and Grindr and a host of others. In another context, all we ask is that you have respect, decency, and an awareness that that context may not be one suitable to a come-on.

Women are, in general, physically smaller and less strong than men. Men have created a world in which women learn from a very young age that this makes them vulnerable, and men have crafted a social and legal system that gives them every advantage over women; the society we live in teaches that women aren't to be trusted, believed, or even understood. A recent and utterly brilliant take on this is Kristen Roupenian's Cat Person, a short story from a woman's point of view about meeting and dating a man, and how her picture of him is constantly changing, because she's constantly on guard against the threat men represent to her from the simple, constant, leering attacks on her dignity all the way to threats of violence; from her point of view, and from the point of view of most women, men have a lot of work to do until they're understood, believed, and trusted.

Which is a bit of a shame. As I learned long ago, women actually like sex more than men do, but can rarely let loose the way they'd like because they're too busy burning mental cycles trying to figure out if the guy they're with is a threat and, having determined that he's not a threat, if he's any damn good at all in bed. Most men can name more parts of a gun, an automobile engine, or a computer mainboard than they can a vulva.

To claim that, twenty years ago, Purple's list of caddish activities would be met with a "resounding Yes!" is to miss the point of the #metoo revolution. Lots of men have been jerks. Women are tired of doing all the work while "great men" get the credit, and women are tired of constantly having to fend off the unwanted advances of men, the constant distraction of low-level sexual harassment while they're just trying to get their jobs done. The Internet has given them a tool with which to rally, and we should all be thankful for it.

It's hard to take Purple seriously. When he says that twenty years ago being a cad was, well, maybe not the best thing in the world but Christians had learned to live in a world full of cads, the funny thing is that the kinky community was saying that a world full of cads is a terrible thing and we can, and should, do better.

The queer and kinky communities have always been a bit utopian: after all, they both started as reviled communities, and both wished for a better world not just for themselves but for everyone. They first started to surface in the 1960s, the same time as Stewart Brand's New Games movement, and the motto of that last is still the best one we've ever had. We wish, and we teach, people to bring it into the bedroom:

Play hard. Play fair. Nobody hurt.

Brad Delong recently wrote

The original American populists were reality-based small farmers and others, who accurately saw railroad monopolies, agricultural price deflation, and high interest rates as crippling their ability to lead the good life. They sought policies—sensible, rational policies in the main—to neutralize these three historical forces. They were not Volkisch nativists distracted from a politics that would have made their lives better by the shiny gewgaws of ethnic hatred and nativism.

Rod Dreher, in a recent article challenging the "Why are Christians so hung up on sex," also recently wrote:

To the contrary, it is you who have elevated sex and sexuality to the most important issue in the Church. This is no surprise. You have been formed by a popular culture that has elevated sex and sexuality to the center of our existence. The Church is the only institution left that tries to order sex rightly, to put it in its proper place

Dreher is at least honest in that he's given up trying to change the world, and instead advocates a retreat from for Christians, or at least the Christians who believe as he does. The magazine for which he writes, however, maintains an unceasing drumbeat against the legitimization of GLBT issues, of Trans issues, and of the lives of the laity as they live it. The American Conservatives is a full-on participant in the highly schizophrenic far-right with its bizarre fusion of Christian Nationalism and the weirdly homoerotic masculinist doctrines of the "red pill" Reddit dudes.

What gets me is Delong's formulation of "The Good Life." I'm rather fond of that term, ever since reading William Irvine's "Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy," since it's a lovely, if controversial, introduction to Stoicism¹. Delong correctly identifies the true threats to most of us living the good life: collusion between large economic forces to create unproductive and even destructive entrepreneurial enterprises: those enterprises that ultimately end up taking wealth out of the system, hoarding it to the few at the expense of the many, lifting almost no boats at all.

Which has nothing to do with sex. Or race². It's about the unfeeling forces of the sociopathic entities known as "corporations" living among us, collecting vast amounts of capital to deploy against the barriers to its objectives (you know, things like you and me). Conservatives have railed against biology ever since Antoine van Leeuwenhoek described bacteria and spermatoza in the first microscope powerful enough to see them³.

The invention of the birth control pill and antibiotics released an entire sexual revolution, and the conservatives are still complaining about how it gave women the freedom to do other things with their bodies and minds, rather than enslave them to biology's strings. Nobody complains that we're free from polio or smallpox, that our lives are longer, our bodies stronger, our minds clearer, for much longer than our ancestors (well, almost nobody). We've upset the natural order of things by eliminating the 1 in 3 childhood death rate, by controlling plague outbreaks, and by instituting a public health and hygiene regimen that makes us more effective and productive than our drunk ancestors. It's only in sex that this really seems to upset the conservatives, who really wish the whole genies and bottles thing.

Trans people, gays, lesbians— everyone should be allowed to pursue The Good Life. Progressive agreed a long time ago that minorities are just as deserving of a Good Life, one freed from interference by both the state and by singular corporate forces, while also supported by effective and ethical institutions. We've come to agree that LGBT people are just as deserving. The battle over sexuality is way to keep two groups that would normally ally to fight the oligarchial monopolization of our food, our water, even our attention spans, instead fight each other into the ground.

While the fascists laugh.

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¹ Irvine's book reaches a conclusion that no ancient Stoic would recognize: that the point of Stoicism is to reach a state of "tranquility." The ancient Stoics recognized that tranquility was an excellent state, but it was not the point of Stocisim. The point of Stocism is to train oneself to experience real joy rather than hedonistic pleasures, and to be completely prepared to respond effectively to the shocks and tragedies of existence.

²Although the 19th century populists were undoubtly racists. When the populists became the Populist Party, they explicity excluded Black and Chinese people from their ranks by the party's founding charter. We shouldn't sugar-coat the issue here.

³ Ever notice that it's always biology? Even creationist geology has no villains, but creationist biology is full of hatred for Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel. There's no creationist equivalent of chemistry or physics (not for lack of trying). It's always about biology, and it's always about sixth grade biology. Everything learned afterward, about the messiness of sex and gender, the way actual biology doesn't care about human categories and absolutes, is thrown away by conservatives and the anti-trans "radical feminists" alike. While the fascists laugh within their vaults of cash.

Re-reading Sam Brinson's Are We Destined To Fall In Love With Androids?, and my response to it, I noticed a pattern between the stories to which I linked, the ones in which I showed how much the "literature of the future" (which is, in fact, really about the present, and ways to address the present) has addressed the question of "human / cyborg relations" (to use fussy C-3PO's term). One of the overriding questions asked in these stories, one which was elided in 2001 and addressed directly if awkwardly in 2010, was this:

What is our moral obligation to the robots we create?

In a lot of ways, science fiction writers use this as a metaphor for the question of our moral obligation to our children and our progeny, but as experience with actual AI starts to get real we (science fiction writers) are already starting to ask questions about our moral obligations to our creation. This isn't a new problem. The very first "artificial life" story, Frankenstein, addresses the issue head-on in the last dialogues between Victor and the Monster, and later between Walton and the Monster.

If you, like me, believe that consciousness is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, a way of maintaining a continuity of self in a world of endless stimuli and the epiphenomenal means by which we turn our actions into grist for the decisions we make in the future, then maybe there will never be conscious robots, only p-zombie machines indistinguishable from the real thing, William James' automatic sweetheart.

But if we want our robots to have the full range of human experiences, to be lovable on the inside as much as we are, then we're going to have to give them an analogous capacity to reason, to tell themselves stories that model what might happen, and what might result, and therefore we have to ask ourselves what moral obligations we have toward people who are not entirely like us, or whose desires are marshalled in a way that suits us entirely.

My own takes has been rather blunt: we are obligated to actually existing conscious beings as if they are moral creatures, and they have the rights and responsibilities of all moral creatures. At the same time, the ability to alleviate them of the anxieties and neuroses of human beings, our own vague impulses shaped by evolutionary contingency that make us miserable (and they do: happy people lack ambition; they do not build empires) may make them more moral than we are. (Asimov addressed this a lot; in many ways he was far ahead of his time.)

Emma Lindsay has a long post entitled Porn Makes Men Terrible in Bed, in which she talks about how porn is a terrible teacher of the things women like, that much porn shows women not in physical pleasure but in either a workaday mode or actually disliking what's being filmed. She talks about how the messaging for women is terribly fucked up, and she talks about how the message "Women don't care about looks" is fiercely anti-woman because it basically messages that women don't care about pleasure.

Maybe that's the point.

I left a comment on this quote:

When I think about wanting to have sex like a man, I think about wanting to enjoy sex with reckless abandon the way men enjoy sex.

The phrase "reckless abandon" there is really the money quote of the whole article: It's "reckless" because the men she's describing don't care about their partners; it's "abandon" because the men she's describing aren't actually enjoying it; they're seeking something other than pleasure. I go with the Marquis de Sade on this: the men she's describing are not interested in pleasure, they're interested in relief. Relief from their sex drive. Relief from this bizarre urge that hit them during puberty, the most confusing time of their lives, that drives them to associate with "gurlz."

Lindsay finishes with this gem:

If you are not actually receiving pleasure in sex, you are the one in power; your partner will always crave you more than you crave him. This gives you some degree of control.

Exactly. And in this patriarchal society, I have yet to be convinced that it's physical, sexual pleasure that most men are after. It's power. It's the power to get the relief they want and need. The frustration she talks about, when marriages go celibate because the woman isn't getting her needs met, the anger she hears from men, is the anger that their power isn't working, their relief isn't coming anymore.

That's why the "women don't care about looks" meme evolved. Lindsay begs men to at least try to care about their looks, to communicate "I care about your pleasure, even your visual pleasure." But let's face it: most men don't.

If you want to know why porn evolved into this marketable resource primarily depicting women doing uncomfortable acts, your answer is simple: that's what the market wanted. Not women in pleasure. Not women expressing their own pleasure. It wants to sell the viewer on the idea of women who'll grant him the relief he wants, regardless of the cost to their own bodies.

Now that I've talked about the non-social causes of sexual orientation in children and teens, and how the right wing is using a well-funded think-tank paper with no peer review and no vetting by third-party social scientists to beat up on queer youth, I actually want to talk about the other issue in Todd Herman's rant. Herman makes a huge deal out of the fluidity of sexual orientation. Without saying so, he wants his audience to believe that queer kids can be made to grow up to be straight adults.

He wants his audience to believe it's "leftists" who fund Gay Straight Alliances and teach school counsellors and sue for Title IX acceptance of trans kids on schools, and all of that is making more and more kids reconsider their heterosexuality.

I'm here to tell him that he's correct.

For many people, sexual orientation is highly fluid and remains so. Here's the secret: we've known this for a long, long time. I reached my majority in the mid-80s and collected all the queer and kinky samizdat I could get my hands on. And the open secret is that we all knew. We knew then, we know now: There are lots more people who would openly explore homoerotic experiences and non-traditional sexual expression if the shackles of traditional gender roles were removed.

At which point, of course, the right wing quotes Chesterson:

There is the modern type of reformer who goes gaily up a gate and says, "I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

The problem with this quote is that we do know why the gate is there.

Unplanned pregnancy and the threat of disease are technological barriers; we have found our way to manage both of these most of the time. Prior to the 20th century, they were managed by controlling the whole human being, often violently. Fear of this violence coincided nicely (at least for those in power) with ensuring the integrity of one's family.

Fear sucks. Fear of disease, fear of unplanned pregancy, fear of violent reprisal for not being heteronormative, these are not moral values. Morals are only worthwhile when they are held positively, and the queer moral state is one of commitment and responsibility: life without commitment, life without responsibility, life without honoring the work the world has brought us, is empty of meaning, insignificant and debased.

We knew. We knew this would happen. The conservatives were right all along: there was indeed a worldwide queer conspiracy to normalize romantic attraction without prostrating ourselves to the twin poles of absolute masculinity and absolute femininity. Masculine and feminine are simply descriptions; they hold little moral value in and of themselves. Commitment and love have moral value.

Where Herman sees a chance to drive home a wedge, I see a promise where one sex is not empowered over the other, and where, for those so inclined, features other than the hardware between one's legs dictates the conscience to decide who is worthy to share in our physical affection.