Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: eppur esistono

In science, people are always trying to form models of the world, or a theory of how it works. We can’t prove theories to be true, but we can test them and find new information, and see if that information agrees with them or not. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way because people are too attached to the old theory. This is especially a problem when you get your theory not just from observation but also or instead from faith, by which I mean, a decision to believe something without testing it or that is untestable. For instance, Galileo found information that didn’t fit with the previously accepted geocentric model of the universe. His fit a heliocentric model, with the earth rotating around the sun instead of vice versa. Our observations of seeing the sun move in the sky can fit either model. But people had also decided to accept the geocentric model on faith, because they interpreted the Bible as supporting it. The Inquisition made Galileo recant his theory and put him under house arrest, and people were actually forbidden from advocating his theory. Eventually people realized he was right and now, as far as I know, everyone accepts the heliocentric model. Kinda difficult not to when you have all kinds of other information based on it, like we do about the solar system.

Whose side would you have been on, Galileo’s or the Inquisition’s?
We have an old theory of the types of humans that exist in the world. It divides humans into two types, men and women. There are no people in between, people can’t change category, you’re all one or all the other, and the two are diametrically opposed. Yin and yang (literally).

This theory says that men are like this/have these things: XY chromosomes, penis and testicles, testosterone, facial hair and increased muscle mass and height, aggressive, better at math/science than verbal skills, athletic, like cars with big engines, like beer, attracted to women, love sex but don’t like to cuddle, completely unattracted to men.

Women, on the other hand: XX, vagina and ovaries, estrogen, breasts and widened hips, emotional but not angry, graceful, better at verbal skills than math/science, like gossip and shopping, drink wine coolers, attracted to men, don’t have a huge sex drive but love to cuddle, completely unattracted to women.

But we’re starting to pay attention to some new evidence (some of which is not new at all).

-There are people who have the chromosomes of men but the secondary sex characteristics of women.

-There are people who have primary sex characteristics of both or in between men and women.

-There are people who have the sexuality of men but all the other characteristics of women, and vice versa.

-There are people who have the personality of men but all the other characteristics of women, and vice versa.

-There are people who aren’t attracted to anyone and don’t want to have sex.

-There are people with two or more of these conditions (that’s not meant to sound like a medical condition, just a state).

These people don’t fit out model. How do we react to this information?

We could ignore them, but that will only get harder and harder as they become more visible and we learn more about them, and it will create cognitive dissonance, which will give people an incentive to choose another option. It’s also bad science - you don’t ignore new data just because you don’t like it; that’s no way to improve your understanding of the world.

We could stand by our old model, but that would force us to define these people as not humans. If all humans fit the traditional model, anyone who doesn’t fit it must not be human. This would most likely lead to severe maltreatment of the people in question, which is one reason I don’t like it. But I’m arguing here that we don’t do science based on what we like, but on what we see. So the reason I reject this proposal is that it doesn’t fit with other observations that suggest that these humans are humans, having all the characteristics of humans except the ones in the model at hand, and being descended from other humans, and being capable of mating successfully with other humans (except in the case of sterility, which we generally do not see as reason to exclude an individual from their species). The theory that they are not human is less plausible than the idea that the prevailing theory was based on inaccurate and biased observations.

We could try to change these people - giving homosexuals therapy to try to make them heterosexual, forbidding trans people to have surgery or cross-dress, doing surgery on intersex people to make them look like one sex or the other. There are several problems with this approach - I don’t know of any way we could make people with androgen insensitivity syndrome conform, and anti-gay therapy doesn’t seem to work very well, and forbidding trans people to be who they feel to be is going to make them miserable, which is unnecessarily mean. But besides all of that, this approach is just backwards. Scientists don’t change the world to fit their theories, they change their theories to better approximate the real world. We didn’t try to make the sun revolve around the earth when we realized Galileo was right. We just changed our theory. We need a new theory of the types of people that exist. Because it’s clear that they do; if you don’t believe me, do some research.

What should our new theory be like? It would have to break apart the notions of sex and sexuality - having a penis doesn’t mean being attracted to vaginas, and vice versa. The two are independent, although they may be correlated in some way, since certain combinations are more common than others.

It would have to break apart the notions of sex and gender - having a vagina doesn’t mean feeling female, and the same for penises and feeling male. Again, independent, but correlated in a probabilistic way. This means acting feminine won’t turn a guy gay.

It would have to break apart the notions of gender and sexuality - being homosexual doesn’t mean being a girly man or a butch woman, although both are possible.

It would have to separate chromosomes from secondary sex characteristics - having XY chromosomes doesn’t necessarily mean growing facial hair and not having breasts.

It would mean regarding primary sex characteristics as lying on a spectrum rather than in one of two boxes. Same with secondary sex characteristics. Same with gender. Same with sexuality. That means it could no longer regard men and women as opposites. They are, rather, neighboring sexes.

It’s a much less black and white kind of theory, isn’t it? There are all kinds of permutations, and each one includes parameters that can be set at all different degrees rather than just one way or the other. It would be hard to adjust to, but that’s not really an excuse to ignore it. If you think this is weird, just look at quantum theory, and that’s one of the best-supported theories out there. In fact, we already know some and accept some of this. That’s why, although people may ridicule bearded ladies, flat-chested women, boys who cry, tomboys, etc, we don’t try to deny that they exist or claim that a sensitive boy is a girl in disguise or something.

So let’s imagine that we adopt this new model, in which you can’t tell just by looking at someone what’s in their pants, what they do for fun, and who they’d like to date, if anyone. Some people are going to say, yeah, the people who mess up our old theory exist…but they’re wrong. Just like they ridicule the people who they already acknowledge but don’t fit into one box or the other as well as they “should” to make the old theory work. This comes naturally. But why do we think it makes sense to attach a moral judgment to something like sex, gender, or sexuality?

Why are they wrong? Because they don’t fit the binary system. Why is the binary system the judge of right and wrong? Because most people fit it? Does that mean everything rare is wrong? After all, these people get called “freaks,” but “freak” is just a mean way of saying “unusual.” Why is rarity equated with badness? There are plenty of rare things that are wonderful, and conformity isn’t a value I hold too dearly.

Because God says so? Did God say to judge people, too? Do you think that if all people are sinners, it’s ok to discriminate against some people for their particular type of sin? Do you think something can be a sin if it’s not a choice, but just the way they are? And where exactly is the link between goodness and your gender, or your sexuality, or your sex? Really, think about it; I don’t know why I never thought to question that when I was Christian, but it’s not as obvious as people make it out to be.

Because they make you uncomfortable? Sounds like you’re the one with the problem, not them. It’s important not to project your feelings on everyone else in the world; you can speak for one person and say it makes you personally uncomfortable, but there are people out there who are not uncomfortable with it.

Because it’s evolutionarily inefficient? So are sterile people, and people who just don’t want kids, but we’re generally not mean to them (well, if they’re women who don’t want kids, sometimes we are). But evolution, first of all, is not the bearer of morality, it’s the mechanism by which those organisms that were good at surviving survived. You don’t get a prize for surviving, you just survive if you’re made to do so. It just is. And anyway, evolution equipped humans with a tremendous amount of flexibility, so you can’t use it as a reason why humans were supposed to be a certain way; we’re not transgressing the laws of nature (which would be physically impossible outside of a miracle), but rather, the laws of nature made us able to do a wide variety of things. And sometimes gay people have kids (and at this point, not having kids is better for the survival of the overpopulated species anyway). And people who can’t or won’t have kids or who aren’t attractive to you personally are no less worthy of human rights and respect.

Because people are happier when they conform to our old model? The thing is, they’re not; that’s why they’re fighting for the right to differ from the old model. If they’re unhappy about anything, it’s about being hated by narrow-minded people.

Next in this line of thought (though who knows when I’ll write it…) will be on gender roles.

One more thing to think about, in terms of whether different is bad and in terms of how much variation naturally exists among humans.

liberal book

I’m shocked. I just took a little online quiz on what type of liberal I am - it didn’t even get me right, it had me as the snarky kind (ok, sometimes) instead of as the rights activist kind (that I wanna be…I guess right now I’m more of a rights whiner/arguer than activist), but anyway, it turned out to be a promotion for a book, and I figured it would be crappy, but the table of contents actually got me interested. there’s one for conservatives too, it looks like it’s just on how to argue.  debate skills are always a good thing. and the author must know what he’s doing because he’s marketing two books, one to each party.  that was kinda brilliant, I have to say.

this blog is turning into a log of ways I find to procrastinate. I really do have a draft on sexuality and gender and stuff, I’m just forbidden to work on it until i finish my work (so I find other ways of wasting time instead).

Note to self: read this when I get married/move in with someone

Bitch PhD’s radical married feminist manifesto

I don’t want to have to be supermom, you know?  But if all goes according to plan, I’ll be a bitch PhD too.  I’ve been wondering for a long time how to get a partner to do his share of the housework, because other things can be fixed, but that’s a day to day kind of thing, and they might say they’ll help at first, but you hear way too many stories from married feminists saying they do all the housework no matter what they try.  But I do kind of like the idea of just doing it, but narrating it so that he knows how much more you’re doing than he is.  If that doesn’t make him want to pitch in, he’s probably not somebody I want to be with.

I’m not really explaining the background on this very well (at all?) but that’s because I know I need to be doing something else and I just want to save the link for myself.  Maybe someday I’ll go into it.

Other people’s BASV posts

I highly recommend Cara’s post at The Curvature, and I’ll add any other great ones I see.

Feminist Avatar’s at An Open Letter by a Feminist: “In fact, there are societies where rape and the concept of rape are unknown, such as highlighted by the research of the anthropologist Christine Helliwell. If rape was biology, we would expect to find rape everywhere.“

Marcella Chester at abyss2hope: “We need to get to a place where those who attack or dismiss any survivors of sexual violence need to know that their actions are more than unacceptable, they need to know that their attacks are ineffective because their lies have been exposed so well that only those who are intentionally pro-rape will continue to support them in any way.“

My Blog Against Sexual Violence post

FYI, I just wrote about consent and managed to get four posts out of the topic of victim-blaming, starting here. I have a feeling those are of higher quality than this is going to be, but I’m gonna give it a shot.

This isn’t about the suggested topic; it’s not even about something I know much about. It’s about prison rape. Specifically, prison rape in the US, because I’m talking about US politics and I don’t know how widespread the problem is in which other countries.

Prison rape is the butt of a lot of jokes. Even that Date Rape song, remember? The song was notably against date rape, but the guy couldn’t seem to muster up any pity for the date rapist, “even though he now takes it in the behind.”

Look, it’s fun to try to sing the end of that song as fast as you can and everything, but rape is rape, and it’s always wrong. Since I’m not very well informed on this issue myself, I’m just going to list a few links that give information on the problem, and then bring up some points that I think are important when approaching the issue.

Stop Prisoner Rape

Human Rights Watch report

Government statistics

1. Can a person lose human rights?

I think a lot of our political debates in the US currently revolve around this question. When a person commits a crime, or does something irresponsible or stupid or something you consider immoral, do they deserve punishment? Is it ok to violate some of their human rights in that punishment? Does punishing them really accomplish anything - make them less likely to commit crime in the future, make other people less likely to commit crime? Punishing people assuages our anger, and it looks like a determined attempt to lower crime rates. But if it doesn’t lower crime rates, do we want to do it anyway? “They deserve it” people say. …So? If it doesn’t help society, why do I have to care what you think they “deserve”?

In any case, no one deserves for their human rights to be violated. For a country that prides itself on being so “civilized”, we allow a lot of torture, in our regular prisons as well as Guantanamo. There’s no excuse for that. None.

2. What are the problems facing men who are raped and where do these problems come from?

Rape can be hard to prove, no matter what. Then, it can be hard to get sympathy for the victim. If it’s hard to get sympathy for a girl whose “crime” was drinking at a party, imagine how hard it is to get sympathy for a grown man who committed a felony. (Of course, this should be beside the point - human rights are human rights and they include the right not to be raped.) On top of that, it can be very difficult for men to admit that they were raped. If their rapist was a woman (rare, but possible), it’s embarrassing because men are supposed to be stronger than women. If their rapist was a man, it’s embarrassing because some people will say that makes them gay (remember, erections and ejaculation don’t always mean a guy was aroused) and gay still has bad connotations in many people’s eyes. In other words, being raped compromises a man’s masculinity, as defined by the patriarchy. You get what I’m saying - the rape of men is a feminist issue. This isn’t news to feminists, although I think some of them should spend a little more time on it, but I’m highlighting it as a way of explaining feminism to non-feminists.

Myths on Male Rape - everything here looks good except I’m not sure if more male prison rapes than female rapes in general occur. Stats of both are hard to get anyway, though, and both happen a lot, which is all that we really need to know. Also, remember that male rape doesn’t just happen in prison, but anywhere, like with female rape. A really important fact is that many men who rape men identify as heterosexual, which highlights the fact that rape, of men or women, is not about just really wanting sex, it’s about domination.

Female on female rape occurs in prisons, too. I just thought this was an appropriate time to bring up the poorly understood issue of male on male rape.

3. What about trans people who get raped?

Trans people are at an elevated risk of rape, probably everywhere, but especially in prison, as they may be put in a prison that corresponds to their sex and not to their gender. Putting a female-identified person in a cell with angry men in a situation where we already know rape happens is a bad idea, no? Seems pretty obvious to me, but in this case the court assumed that the guards were stupid and didn’t hold them accountable. Not terribly surprising, given how much our country seems to care about any kind of prison rape.

I was told by someone who works with rape survivors that the rape of a trans person is suspected to be an attempted homicide. Some people seriously hate trans people (tells you we’re a little too attached to our concept of male and female, no?) and trans people need adequate protection. But when even the courts don’t like you…

Here’s the Survivor Project, which is anti-oppression in general and specifically for intersex and trans survivors of domestic violence and sexual violence.

4. Why do our prisons suck so much?

I don’t know what it is about our prisons that makes it so easy for people to get away with rape. That would be worth figuring out, because we need to do something as quickly as possible to protect people. But the problem of our prisons is much bigger than that. We have several times more prisoners per capita than Western European countries. Our prisons are bad at rehabilitating criminals - in fact, they tend to make criminals more violent (an understandable reaction to being raped with impunity and deprived of a healthy social life).

Here’s Ezra Klein saying basically everything I was going to say. Check the op-ed he links to, where he says “Occasionally, we even admit that prison rape is a quietly honored part of the punishment structure for criminals.” I’m afraid that might be exactly why it’s allowed to continue.

Samhita highlights how unfair our prison system is to people of color.

A lot of crime happens due to poverty. We can either lock up poor people, or spend the same money making their lives better and have more productive citizens and less prisoners. A lot of crime happens because of drug addictions. We can either lock up drug addicts, or help them break the addiction. Why don’t we do this in the first place? (The answer, of course, can be found under number 1: because some people are so attached to the idea of being tough on criminals and punishing them, without ever questioning whether punishment is the appropriate response to certain kinds of crime.)

Ok, I just realized that Criminon, the organization I just linked to, is inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, the guy who made up founded Scientology, and it may use principles of Scientology. So, I’m not sure I support that particular organization. But still, education, prevention, help out of the cycle, that’s what we need to be doing. And for the love of Xenu, we need to make prisons safer whenever they are used.

Blog Against Sexual Violence Day is tomorrow!

And I just found out…but I’ll try to get something together.  Anyone who has a blog, regardless of the topic of the blog, is encouraged to write something against sexual violence.  The topic is about sexual violence in the workplace, but you don’t have to write about that.  Check it out here.

Practicing what I preach

In response to Victim Blaming, Part 1, mestiza asked “So what is a way to effectively educate men on what constitutes sexual assault and what consent really means? Should we start on the college campuses maybe?”

College campuses seem like an ideal place for this, and yet the attempts I’ve seen to educate people on consent at my college campus haven’t seemed to be terribly helpful. I think the best was the session we were all required to attend at the beginning of freshman year, because it was funny, and you remembered it because they gave out t-shirts at the end (one of them had a picture of a rooster on the front and said Cock-Block Sketchy Guys on the back, haha), and college kids wear their free t-shirts a lot (in the US, anyway). There was also one that all sorority and fraternity members were required to go to, but apparently the speaker was bad, they were given short notice, and they acted like jerks because they were mad about those things. I doubt that helped at all. Then there are clubs like Take Back the Night, we had an all-male group from another college come and talk about it, they’re called One in Four. That was cool but hardly anyone came and most of those who did were female. I think women should be at these things too, as they point fingers at rape victims as well and doubt their own rights when they’re victims, plus they need to get consent as much as guys do, even if they seem not to have so much of a problem with that - but we really need the men to hear it. If it’s optional, pretty much only men who already get it will come.

I also think this should be a part of sex ed, which I think should be comprehensive, and which I think should start young. I know, that freaks out Mike Huckabee, but Mike Huckabee freaks me out, so we’re even.

One thing I read about that looked really promising was, basically, an attempt at redefining masculinity (just a tad, since that’s a big job) to include the concept of caring about consent. Giving out facts at school talks is important, but it can only go so far. This is a tactic used on college campuses to publicize that your male peers care about consent. It’s almost counter-intuitive, because we normally want to tell people “Look how bad this problem is!” to motivate them to improve it, but since most males are not rapists (although most rapists are male, don’t get confused), it’s not actually contradictory. It’s just advertising to a guy: your friends wouldn’t rape. And that’s usually true - the study linked shows that a lot of guys think that they care more about consent than their friends do (but a lot of their friends probably think the same thing - they just don’t tell each other because it’s not good chest-bumping conversation). And since people tend towards the standards of those around them, telling guys that their male friends care about consent may make them care about consent a little more. So I think we should work on campaigns based on this concept. It just has to be handled by people who know their feminism, because otherwise it could come off privilege-y, like, guys are doing just fine, so don’t worry about the rape problem (or, so blame it on the girls, which I think we’re all pretty darn well aware that I’m against). When in fact, the message should be, you don’t have to violate women to be a man, and if your friends act like they would or joke about it or start to, you should call them out because your opinion makes a difference, one way or the other. It doesn’t even require any talk about what makes a “REAL man”, which I think is one of those insidious ways of getting really close to helping and then completely failing, since it relies on a binary gender construct which is causing the problem in the first place*.

Any ideas on how to put the above concept to work? I was thinking about having a sort of petition for people (just guys, maybe, not because it’s not important for girls but because if it was open to everyone guys would probably assume mostly only girls had signed it) to sign saying I believe in this kind of consent or something, and have it in a public place. Maybe video interviews with guys from around campus would work for the journalisty people out there. Once people are out of school, I guess it’s up to advertising campaigns, which could follow a similar path.

Does anyone else have other suggestions for how to educate people and change the way they see consent?

*coming soon: an attempt at explaining what some anti-feminists so loving call “gender-bending” and what the point of it is

if you don’t like the way I write

Read about True Love Revolution, which I critiqued in my last post, here.

Here’s one of my new favorite lines, from one of the comments: “Oh wait, now I’m preaching to the choir… of godless sodomites.”

Do you have to be a virgin to be loved?

“Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?”

The first time I heard that little gem was in 6th grade Sunday school, watching a video on the Ten Commandments that had high school kids applying the commandments to their lives. Some girl, I guess talking about the adultery commandment, mentioned that her mom told her that or something. I’ve always had a feminist instinct, even though I wasn’t one until not quite a year ago, but I don’t have any recollection of this quote raising a red flag for me, although it obviously did something in my head because I still remember hearing it.

I bought the abstinence stuff completely. Well, not completely; I bought what they told me, but since they only said sex was wrong before marriage, I really thought everything else was ok. (That’s whatcha get for privileging penile-vaginal, Church.) Then I decided everything except kissing was wrong, and then I became a feminist and completely changed my mind. I thought about that proverb, and all the sudden I realized how incredibly offensive it was.

First of all, I’m not a cow. I know that it’s supposed to be metaphorical, they’re not saying I look like a cow or anything, but it does compare me to something that people own (should people own animals? …something to think about), something less than human, rather than an equal partner in a relationship.

But moreover, it says that marriage is an exchange of goods that works thusly: woman has sex, man has money. Woman gives man sex in exchange for financial support.

(Can we please accept that sex is not something women have and men don’t have? It’s an action between people. Treating sex as something that women actually own and men don’t is sooooo dangerous. Not to mention, it opens you up to jokes like “I lost my virginity. I swear I left it right here but now I just can’t find it anywhere!”)

This proverb is not describing a relationship. It’s describing prostitution. Ironic, ain’t it, since the Church is not too fond of prostitution (although if you check my Bible page, you’ll find what the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures are not fond of is prostitutes; johns are ok and pimps are unacknowledged, I don’t know if they were part of the system then or what). If you want to tell a sex worker that johns won’t pay her for sex if she gives them sex for free, still referring to johns and not to men she sees romantically, I see nothing wrong with that except for the fact that you’ll probably insult her intelligence, as that is painfully obvious (unless she gives free samples?). But if you want to tell me that all I have to offer a guy is sex, that he would consider marriage a burden, and that I need to bribe him to marry me by withholding sex until he does, call me crazy, but I’m gonna have a problem with that. It’s offensive to me, the cow in the situation, and it’s offensive to guys, by stereotyping them all as incapable of loving a woman and generally assholey.

I know someone out there will get a really pained look on their face and tell me just for my own good that I’m fooling myself if I think any man would ever really care about me for more than sex, any man would ever really want to be monogamous, any man would ever find marriage to be something other than a burden that he would only put up with for the sake of sex.

And don’t I know that if people live together first and then try to get married, their marriage is totally doomed, which just proves you have to make him wait for marriage to have sex? (via Ezra Klein)

And don’t I know that women want marriage and kids more than men do and men want sex more than women do, so it’s inevitable that I’ll have to trade sex for marriage instead of us both wanting both (or both wanting sex and both not wanting marriage)? (I don’t have a link for this, but a lot of women do happen to be big fans of sex.)

Back to me: why is marriage considered the goal, the right way? Aside from religion, I mean. If you don’t have to get married in order to have sex, and if people can actually love each other and want to be monogamous without being coerced or bribed and therefore don’t have to get married in order to be committed, then…what’s the problem? Of course, there are a lot of legal and social benefits, so we still have to allow everyone to get married without being blatantly prejudiced for no good reason except our religion which isn’t supposed to dictate our laws…

Some people don’t believe women are cows, they believe men are like dogs. According to them, it’s not that marriage is a transaction, just that men have a short attention span and like the chase more than they like women and we have to 1) let them be the pursuer and 2) never let on too much that we like them and 3) not have sex too soon (better yet, only as a reward for doing something we want them to do, like a doggy treat, to train them), or else they’ll get bored with us. These people need to look around. Even anecdotal evidence will show you that sometimes women pursue and it works, that playing hard to get is often not healthy for a relationship, and that having sex is not death to a relationship (can’t believe I just had to say that). Yeah, there are guys out there who are purely dating for their ego and just want a challenge, the challenge being getting sex, and who will leave after they get it, but you don’t have to play their game because not all guys are such assholes. (Why would you want to keep one of those guys around anyway?) And I would like to remind you that making the man The Initiator and the woman The Gatekeeper is a bad idea, as are any rigid gender roles; no matter how nice they seem at first (chivalry, for example), they’ll always be used to oppress women (and to hurt men in some way) because oppressors use whatever they can to oppress.

But some women buy into these arguments, probably out of desperation to find the magical answer to how to catch a man, probably because they’re convinced that their value as a person or possibility of happiness depends on it. Others, like the leader of True Love Revolution, just see the ridiculous double standards around (I do too) and instead of saying, like Jessica at Feministing, that the double-standard itself is the problem, they decide to safely place themselves in the virgin category of the virgin/whore dichotomy. I have to echo Kate in calling that “decidedly not revolutionary.” These people think they’re being bold and strong by going against the hookup culture, and I hear ‘em, I felt the same way. It can be hard to abstain from sex when people who do that get called prudes or teases or are assumed to just not be able to get laid or are just seen as weird and uncool and no fun. (Am I saying there’s no pressure on women to be virgins? No, I’m saying there’s pressure both ways. It’s actually not uncommon for women to be told to do two mutually exclusive things.) Stand up for yourself and your decision, I’ll support that. But trying to pitch the idea that because the double standard means women who have sex are treated badly, women should accept that their options are limited and safely choose to be a virgin, as feminism or anything revolutionary is delusional. That’s ok, you don’t have to choose the feminist route all the time, sometimes you just want to protect yourself, but for the love of vibrators, don’t pretend it’s feminist and DON’T tell other people they’re wrong for behaving otherwise. Now, a feminist could say another thing I see in this article - that she demands men respect her and finds premarital sex disrespectful of her. But that’s a feminist I would want to distance myself from. We’re still trying to get over the het sex = rape thing. It’s not fair to men to say that they will without a doubt disrespect you if you have premarital sex with them. Please, avoid the douchebags that make all of the arguments here true. I know they exist, but you don’t have to date them. Edit: But if you do date them, it’s still totally their fault that they’re douchebags.

Also, being ashamed of your body and your sexuality and being freaked out by others’ sexuality is NOT FEMINIST. You’re not a bad person if you feel that way, but for crying out loud, don’t try to win over converts to that mindset. There’s nothing virtuous about rejecting a natural part of you. And anyway, this woman’s reactions to oral sex and especially to masturbation (where her abstinence arguments don’t apply, and yet even the guy said he had to quit masturbating) imply that the reasoning behind this movement goes deeper than the arguments they gave.

Oh, then there’s the oxytocin argument. I totally used this, in a less scientific way. You bond when you have sex, why set yourself up for hurt by making a bond you’ll probably break? Imagine how hard I slapped my forehead when someone pointed out that virgins get broken hearts too (and obviously, not all sexually active people do). In fact, I was one of them. The guy I was with while I thought everything except intercourse was ok? Healthy breakup. The guy I was with while I thought only kissing was ok? 6 month nightmare post-breakup. Physical intimacy was NOT the deciding factor.

There is such a thing as feminist abstinence - you could say “I don’t want to have sex because I’m not ready/I don’t want to have pregnancy scares/I just don’t feel like it, dammit and you better respect that and not pressure me to have sex!” And I would support you 100%. You could even have a feminist abstinence club, if it was made up of only people who had decided on their own to abstain and just wanted a social network of similar-thinking people, for support and possibly a dating pool that would be understanding. But I wouldn’t support you trying to convince non-abstaining people to join you, because then your reason wouldn’t be just how you feel, it would be that you think there’s some moral (they call it philosophical) reason not to have sex and that you don’t think everyone should get to make their own (safe, consensual) decisions about sex without being judged, and if you don’t think that about other people, why should other people think it about you? (Not that I’m saying it’s ok to pick on judgmental virgins; I’m just telling them to stop being judgmental because it makes them hypocrites. For the record, I’ve been one.)

So far we’ve seen these reasons why you have to be a virgin to be loved: because giving away sex means giving away your ability to bribe a man to marry you; because giving away sex means making a man lose interest in you; because having sex means letting men treat you like crap; because premarital sex is inherently degrading to women; because if you have sex and then break up you’ll get hurt too much. But there’s another one that’s really sad. It’s quite simply, because your virginity is your worth. That doesn’t sound very Christian to me (shouldn’t your worth come from God?), but some people think it is. (Look at the pictures in the links.)

But at least if they recruit for virginity they’ll keep people from getting STDs, right? Right? And at least we can rest assured knowing that their decision not to have sex is based on accurate information on the risks if they were given abstinence only education. Phew. That’s a relief.

In sum (and I’m saying this to everyone): don’t believe that you are worthless except for either your virginity or your ability to have sex with someone. Don’t believe that all men are assholes. Make your own decisions about sex. But don’t forget that the assholes that fit these descriptions do exist, and that’s yet another reason why we need feminism, to teach them that women have worth as full human beings.

PS - Sorry for making this purely heterosexual, but it was so long already…I’ll have to tie in the LGBTQ issue soon.

PPS - I know, I’m a liar and my pants are on fire and my paper isn’t written yet, but this humongo post is. Whoops.