Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Sex as Collaborative Performance

The last time I paid any attention to the musings of Jaclyn Friedman she was explaining how she had learned to overcome the pain of a failed relationship by acting like a slut. I offered several posts on the topic, provoked by comments and by other blogs. Link here.

Friedman proclaimed that, for her, sluthood was a positive experience, one that felt therapeutic, even empowering. When I and others suggested that this would naturally encourage young women to try to overcome relationship heartbreak by slutting it up, she and her minions complained that she had not really advocated for it or told women to go out and get in touch with their inner sluts.

Which means that Friedman is not to be taken as a serious thinker.

If she believes that publicly proclaiming her pride in her own sluttiness, and publicly declaring its benefits is not going to encourage young women to try it for themselves, then she is either hopelessly naive or flat out ignorant.

She is banking on legalistic hair-splitting because she does not want to feel responsible for the consequences that might befall the young women who choose to emulate her example.

To me that makes sense. After all, if you read Friedman's latest foray into the topic, in an interview with one Amanda Marcotte and in a follow-up response to Susan Walsh, she is positively fulsome in her expression of how she feels about what she did, while not saying a word about how it might look to other people. Links here and here.

Since she proclaims that she still wants to have a meaningful and durable relationship, she should have said a few words about how other people might see her now. If she is implying that other people must see her only as she wants them to see her, she is simply acting like a petty tyrant.

As is true of all human conversation, you do not have the right to say that your words mean only what you think they mean or that the implications of your arguments are only what you want them to be.

If Jaclyn Friedman does not like the inferences that people can logically draw from her forays into the world of thought, then she needs simply to revise her theories.

In her more recent posts, Friedman has offered a new definition of sex, as a "collaborative performance."

In her words: "So, there is an entirely other way to look at sex that I think more and more people are turning on to and understanding, which is that it really is just a collaborative performance between two or more people. And it doesn't matter what your gender is. It doesn't matter how many people there are. It doesn't matter that it's anonymous. What matters is: are you both having a good time? Are you both getting something positive out of it? And is there good, healthy communication? Is everybody being safe? All those basic things. But outside of it: is everyone having a great time? Then there's nothing wrong with it. As long as everyone's on the same page; nobody's lying, everybody's playing safe about disease and pregnancy, that we can consider it more, like, you know, a collaborative jam session. Are we in the mood to make some music? Let's do it!"

Note very well that this is sex in the moment. It does not measure or evaluate consequences, except to the extent that it assumes that open communication will eliminate the possibility for any untoward consequences. Only someone with her head firmly ensconced in the clouds would ever believe such a thing.

Friedman does not seem to recognize the following possibility. What if you have freely chosen to have no-strings-attached sex with your collaborator, only to learn at the last minute that your collaborator cannot make it.

In some cases people have been know to compensate by having what Woody Allen called, "sex with someone you love," i.e. solo sex.

If Friedman believes that all sex concerns two or more people, is she saying that solo sex is not sex?

More saliently, how likely is it that you can have free and open communication between two or more people who are anonymous? How well can you really get to know all of the participants in your next orgy? Are gang bangs OK if everyone has consented freely and has produced proof of good health? And what if two people decide freely that they can best pursue sexual pleasure by beating and abusing each other, by mutual consent? Is that an acceptable way to find pleasure?

If you do not know the person, how can you trust his or her word? Do you interrogate? Do you require him or her to produce test results or papers?

But if he or she produces test results, these must contain proper names, and you  must know the person's proper name, lest your future collaborator be tricking you by showing someone else's results.

Friedman's response is that people in committed relationships also lie. Which simply begs the question, rather inelegantly. Someone you know well, as a human being with a name, is less likely to lie to  you than is someone you know only as a pleasure-seeking organism. If said pleasure-seeking organism is merely out for a good time, without there being any real risk of every seeing you again, why would he or she not tell you exactly what you want to hear?

There are myriad problems with Friedman's definition of collaborative performance.

One she addresses, in her reply to Susan Walsh, linked above. Namely, that performances are usually public. To which Friedman replies that she thinks of these sexual jam sessions as private performances.

But don't performances always imply spectators, real or imagined? At a time when more and more people are oversharing their intimate experiences on the internet, why imply that this is basic to sexual experience?

Considering the ease with which Friedman told the world of her own sluthood, it would not be too much of a stretch to consider that she does not quite understand that the value and the pleasure of sex lies for many people in the fact that it is a private and intimate experience, thus that the two participants are not performers.

Second, if there are two anonymous pleasure-seeking organisms involved, then it is fair to say that they are not really functioning as fully human beings. If their experience transcends their gender and name then they are fictional creations. Nothing more or less.

Third, if all sexual experiences are created equal, then how can anyone place greater value on sex within a relationship than sex with a handsome stranger. If people do place more value on sex with someone they love, are they deluded? If commitment makes sex feel better for certain individuals, are they abnormal?

And what are the potential consequences of making pleasure, having a good or great time, the gold standard? Many women have involved themselves in relationships that had no real future because the sex felt so good. How many relationships between pleasure-seeking organisms have come to grief once the demands of living as a couple intruded?

Fourth, the kinds of anonymous random sexual encounters that Friedman seems to be using as the model for sexual relations are most commonly practiced by gay men.

Why so? Perhaps because there are no women involved, thus, nothing resembling a pregnancy risk. Without a built-in link between pregnancy risk and emotion, gay men have better access to the kind of sex that Friedman wants to make into the norm.

Ought gay men be stigmatized because their sexual experience differs significantly from that of straight men or gay women? I think not.

Perhaps one kind of sex is right for some people but is not right for others. 

Saying that all forms of human sexual behavior should be defined in relation to the model of gay sex is to distort human sexuality in order to ensure that no one feels that they are any different.

As it looks, Friedman is telling women that they can have the kind of sex that gay men have mastered without having the feelings or the emotions that belong to them properly as women.

I will mention in passing that when gay women involve themselves in intimate relations they place far greater value on emotion, conversation, and knowing the other person. It seems intrinsic to the way women experience intimacy.

And, naturally, women have been clearest in expressing their objects to the sex positive feminism that Friedman has been offering to unsuspecting college girls. Susan Walsh has collected some feminist objections to people like Friedman in this post: Link here.

But if young women are being induced to have sex as though they were gay men, aren't they denying something about their being as women? If so, is Friedman mounting a feminist assault on women, because if women act like women, if they trust their own judgment, and follow their own impulses, then perhaps they will be less likely to be grist for the feminist recruitment mill.

People have said, correctly, that I am not a feminist. Well and good. But if sex positive feminism involves enticing women to have sex as though they were gay men, that feels just a wee bit like telling women that they should stop acting like women, lest they make gay men feel different.

To me that idea has a faint whiff of misogyny... unintended, I'm sure.

10 comments:

  1. Have you seen the latest comments in the sluts vs. the so-called "slut-shamers" battle? These chicks are BRUTAL:

    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/08/24/another-defense-of-hooking-up-this-time-with-science/

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think that most of us on Susan's website would admit that some women can indeed have lots of casual sex. Not a little, mind you, I'm talking LOTS. Hooking up at least once a month for several years, that sort of thing. Of course most such women aren't THEN looking for a LTR and if they later change their mind, they are often surprised how harshly they can be judged. Such women are like those who like mechanics or most sports -probably different than average in terms of genetics/brain chemistry. This is NOT to say they are "defective" mind you anymore than sexually submissive men or gay men are defective.

    But this is a minority (possibly as large as ten percent, almost certainly no higher) of women, most of whom tend to be young. The rest get hurt if a substantial number of their hookups fail to lead to anything better.

    And that is where teaching young females esp the value of some modesty comes in. At the minimum women interested in LTR should do two things:

    A. Don't give out sex unless at the least you are boyfriend/girlfriend and acknowledged as such by both partners.
    B. Look for men outside their immediate sexual hot zone. Young women esp tend to love dominant confident men and such men have much power to demand things as you probably know.

    Anyway, good post if you remember that not all males and famales fit the same mold and there is some overlap between the sexes at the margins.

    Clarence

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  3. Thanks, Anonymous, for the link to the feministe web site.

    The arguments are a bit too confused to take very seriously, but, perhaps in the interest of moving a bit away from the sex side, I was struck by some of Kay's grammar:

    For example, she writes: "A young woman are supposed to lose their virginity to someone she loves...."

    I do hope that she is better at sex than she is at grammar.

    I agree with Clarence that there are some women who are very involved in the hookup culture, perhaps because they do not want to commit or because they do not want the distraction of a boyfriend.

    And as he says, most girls who try this out do get hurt.

    As he suggests, most of the advice we offer about hooking up involves likelihoods and probabilities. There are emotional and physical risks in hooking up. They are generally higher than in sex with someone you know well.

    While it is possible, as the study cited by Feministe says, for a hookup to lead to a relationship, I think this is unlikely. And I believe that anyone who engages in sex with a stranger she has just met on the possibility that it will lead to a relationship is playing against very long odds.

    Long odds does not mean never. It is merely cautionary.

    When Kay mentioned on Feministe that the issue was sexual agency, I was somewhat taken aback. Surely, I, and Susan and even Hephzibah Anderson want women to own their sexuality, to engage it freely in relationships of their choosing.

    What concerns me, and perhaps this means that I am not very young, is that if you are giving it away to people you barely know, then how does that involve agency or ownership. If you give it away for free, then the other person really owns it. When you take the time to get to know the other person and then engage sexually you are making a free decision about whom you are giving it to.

    Again, some of these arguments are bizarre, indeed.

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  4. Hmm Stuart:

    I was struck by this that you said:

    "... is that if you are giving it away to people you barely know, then how does that involve agency or ownership. If you give it away for free, then the other person really owns it. When you take the time to get to know the other person and then engage sexually you are making a free decision about whom you are giving it to."

    It's an interesting argument, and one I admit I have never seen, but I think it is wrong - one can still choose to give anonymously to a stranger, look at many charities. :) That's not to say your and mine overall advice that its best to get to know someone first is wrong, but let's not confuse stupidity (or more charitably inexperience) with lack of agency. That way lies jailing men for consensual sex with young, unattached women.

    Clarence

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  5. Stuart, please do not judge my grammar, bear in mind that I am not of English mother tongue, have spent most of my life in German speaking Switzerland and am now retired in Spain. By the way, I very much enjoy your articles, but do not remember how I got to your website

    I would like to comment on Friedman’s hooking up theory. I think she is confusing two things: a (short) phase in life that one might go thru, may have to go thru and a way of life. Hooking up cannot be a way of life, for no one (except for gay men). She is fooling herself. Here my own experience: after having been left by my partner with whom I had lived together for a couple of years and who made me suffer a lot, I also went thru a hooking up period (after all this was the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies) and nothing and nobody at the time could have stopped me. Hooking up was easy for me, I was a headhunter and met lots of interesting alpha-men (expensive dinners followed by nights at expensive hotels). After about no. 8 I realized the following: although I had enjoyed most of my encounters did not feel guilt nor shame, I had experienced hardly any climax and the few I had were flat – not to be compared with what I had shared with my ex-partner. I realized that good sex (true sex, indeed) is much more than a mere physical experience, it has a spiritual dimension which renders sex/climax so overwhelming, penetrating body and soul and leaving one so deeply satisfied and happy – this cannot, never ever, be found in casual encounters with strangers, certainly not in sexual “collaborative performances”. Friedman and her like very probably have never experienced the kind of sex I mean. They simply do not know what they are talking about.

    My hooking up phase was followed by a long, very long time during which I had no sex. I met my husband two years later, we were married within a month, raised three children, and have been married for 35 years by now. Although married to the same man for so long, I feel I am at least in my fifth marriage with him: we mature, we develop, we change – and so does the marriage - life with the same person is certainly more of an adventure than with changing partners.

    To end my story, something strange: A few weeks after I stopped having casual encounters, a lady whom I had often seen (but never talked to) at the restaurant where I used to lunch, came up to me saying that she was glad seeing me back to my normal self. She said to have watched with horror how my aura (obviously she could read auras) had changed over the preceding months, from harmonious to torn and to being in tatters. “You young girls just do not know what you are doing to yourselves”, she said sadly. Obviously my aura had told her what I had been up to. When I challenged her about the auras of (sleeping around) men, her answer was that this was just not the same and that she did not know why this was so. One of the most impressive casual encounters I had in my life with a stranger.

    Laura

    ReplyDelete
  6. Stuart, please do not judge my grammar, bear in mind that I am not of English mother tongue, have spent most of my life in German speaking Switzerland and am now retired in Spain. By the way, I very much enjoy your articles, but do not remember how I got to your website

    I would like to comment on Friedman’s hooking up theory. I think she is confusing two things: a (short) phase in life that one might go thru, may have to go thru and a way of life. Hooking up cannot be a way of life, for no one (except for gay men). She is fooling herself. Here my own experience: after having been left by my partner with whom I had lived together for a couple of years and who made me suffer a lot, I also went thru a hooking up period (after all this was the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies) and nothing and nobody at the time could have stopped me. Hooking up was easy for me, I was a headhunter and met lots of interesting alpha-men (expensive dinners followed by nights at expensive hotels). After about no. 8 I realized the following: although I had enjoyed most of my encounters did not feel guilt nor shame, I had experienced hardly any climax and the few I had were flat – not to be compared with what I had shared with my ex-partner. I realized that good sex (true sex, indeed) is much more than a mere physical experience, it has a spiritual dimension which renders sex/climax so overwhelming, penetrating body and soul and leaving one so deeply satisfied and happy – this cannot, never ever, be found in casual encounters with strangers, certainly not in sexual “collaborative performances”. Friedman and her like very probably have never experienced the kind of sex I mean. They simply do not know what they are talking about.

    My hooking up phase was followed by a long, very long time during which I had no sex. I met my husband two years later, we were married within a month, raised three children, and have been married for 35 years by now. Although married to the same man for so long, I feel I am at least in my fifth marriage with him: we mature, we develop, we change – and so does the marriage - life with the same person is certainly more of an adventure than with changing partners.

    To end my story, something strange: A few weeks after I stopped having casual encounters, a lady whom I had often seen (but never talked to) at the restaurant where I used to lunch, came up to me saying that she was glad seeing me back to my normal self. She said to have watched with horror how my aura (obviously she could read auras) had changed over the preceding months, from harmonious to torn and to being in tatters. “You young girls just do not know what you are doing to yourselves”, she said sadly. Obviously my aura had told her what I had been up to. When I challenged her about the auras of (sleeping around) men, her answer was that this was just not the same and that she did not know why this was so. One of the most impressive casual encounters I had in my life with a stranger.

    Laura

    ReplyDelete
  7. Stuart, please do not judge my grammar, bear in mind that I am not of English mother tongue, have spent most of my life in German speaking Switzerland and am now retired in Spain. By the way, I very much enjoy your articles, but do not remember how I got to your website

    I would like to comment on Friedman’s hooking up theory. I think she is confusing two things: a (short) phase in life that one might go thru, may have to go thru and a way of life. Hooking up cannot be a way of life, for no one (except for gay men). She is fooling herself. Here my own experience: after having been left by my partner with whom I had lived together for a couple of years and who made me suffer a lot, I also went thru a hooking up period (after all this was the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies) and nothing and nobody at the time could have stopped me. Hooking up was easy for me, I was a headhunter and met lots of interesting alpha-men (expensive dinners followed by nights at expensive hotels). After about no. 8 I realized the following: although I had enjoyed most of my encounters did not feel guilt nor shame, I had experienced hardly any climax and the few I had were flat – not to be compared with what I had shared with my ex-partner. I realized that good sex (true sex, indeed) is much more than a mere physical experience, it has a spiritual dimension which renders sex/climax so overwhelming, penetrating body and soul and leaving one so deeply satisfied and happy – this cannot, never ever, be found in casual encounters with strangers, certainly not in sexual “collaborative performances”. Friedman and her like very probably have never experienced the kind of sex I mean. They simply do not know what they are talking about.

    My hooking up phase was followed by a long, very long time during which I had no sex. I met my husband two years later, we were married within a month, raised three children, and have been married for 35 years by now. Although married to the same man for so long, I feel I am at least in my fifth marriage with him: we mature, we develop, we change – and so does the marriage - life with the same person is certainly more of an adventure than with changing partners.

    To end my story, something strange: A few weeks after I stopped having casual encounters, a lady whom I had often seen (but never talked to) at the restaurant where I used to lunch, came up to me saying that she was glad seeing me back to my normal self. She said to have watched with horror how my aura (obviously she could read auras) had changed over the preceding months, from harmonious to torn and to being in tatters. “You young girls just do not know what you are doing to yourselves”, she said sadly. Obviously my aura had told her what I had been up to. When I challenged her about the auras of (sleeping around) men, her answer was that this was just not the same and that she did not know why this was so. One of the most impressive casual encounters I had in my life with a stranger.

    Laura

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you Laura for sharing your own experience. It's good for young women to know that occasional dalliances do not necessarily define one's character.

    Unless, of course, one is like Jaclyn Friedman and announces it all in public and insists that it define her character.

    I am intrigued by what Clarence wrote about charity.

    As you can tell, I've been mulling it over for a couple of days now.

    Of course, we offer charity to people we do not know, to strangers, and sometimes we offer it anonymously.

    Yet, the money or services we offer as charity are excess; they are more than we need to maintain our own way of life. We do not offer the rent or sell the house and give it to charity.

    But there is yet another interesting angle here, and here is where I think that Clarence is on to something very important, and something that I had missed.

    What if women who hook up, who choose to service the sexual needs of strangers, are thinking of themselves as offering charity, as doing a favor to someone who is in need?

    Offering charity to someone in need is quite different, as a moral mindset, from being used for sex.

    Thanks, again, to Clarence.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I actually looked up the word agency to get its exact meaning. In this context, it is "the state of being in action or exerting power." Certainly women who choose to have casual sex with a stranger, are agents of their sexuality. They may be selling themselves short, or even putting themselves in danger as JF, did, but they are ostensibly doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and opting in favor of the sexual exchange. I do find the word power quite interesting here, as feminists repeatedly claim that having casual sex is "empowering." It strikes me as a way of seeking validation - a short-term ego boost, really. Later, of course, women often "crash" with feelings of regret. Which leads them into a vicious cycle as they seek a new male source of sexual validation.
    As for sex as charity, I'll share a true story from my own life that I once put in the comments of my own blog back in February:
    The absolute worst is the pity f*ck. I remember one good platonic friend, and he had a gf, but he showed up at my apartment one night to say how tortured he was, that he couldn't stop thinking about me. He suggested that if he and I had sex, he would know whether he really loved her or not. I wasn't into him at all, so I assured him that he loved her, he didn't need sex with me to discover that. He was adamant and passionate about it, and pleaded his case for two hours. Finally, I said what the hell and took this guy into my bed. When it was over he said, “Wow, I thought you'd be sexy and passionate. I can't believe you just laid there. I guess I do love her.”

    womp womp womp


    That was my one and only act of charitable sex.

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  10. Thanks, Susan for your comments. Of course, agency implies selectivity. A woman who is too drunk to know what she is doing has clearly sacrificed her agency, and her free will. And a woman who hooks up with whoever asks her has also abandoned her discriminating judgment.

    The less well a woman knows the men, the less she has enough information to make a free choice.

    The more the person is a stranger the less the agency.

    ReplyDelete