Noli Irritare Leones

First thing to know about sex and relationships: people lie. Second thing to know: people are different.

People lie: They claim more chastity, or fidelity, than is really true, or they claim a longer list of sexual exploits than they really have, or they pretend to be less emotionally invested in the people they sleep with than they really are. They lie in several different directions, not just one.

People are different: So, even though we know that people lie about sex, quite often, we can’t assume that people are lying when they describe an experience that we can’t imagine having. Even if a particular choice – let’s say, for the sake of discussion, open relationships – is so generally disastrous, and so often disastrous for people who thought they could handle it, as to be worth discouraging for anyone whatsoever (or for any heterosexual couples, or for any heterosexual relationships that include children), it doesn’t follow that absolutely everyone who describes having it work is lying.

Sex blogger figleaf, as a prudish libertine, is, I think, well aware of both of these rules of thumb, but occasionally, very occasionally, he’ll forget rule two in the process of tackling rule one. That is, in the process of pointing out a certain secrecy and hypocrisy about sex, he’ll make statements about how people don’t differ that I think unlikely to be true. For instance, he’s often said that sex bloggers are much like anyone else in their sex lives, only they talk about it more. That’s possible, but it seems to me unlikely; most Internet groups that I see wind up a little askew of where the same discussions wind up offline. Libertarianism is more heavily represented online. Visible online US Catholics trend more conservative in their attitudes both toward liturgy and toward sexuality than offline US Catholics. I won’t venture to guess how sex bloggers differ from people in general in their sexual attitudes and behavior, but they probably do, in one way or another.

More seriously, figleaf has just proposed that

I’m pretty sure of two things. First, that the rate of extra-relationship activity in “open” relationships isn’t significantly higher than in “closed” ones. (Or, to put emphasis where it belongs, the rate of extramaritality doesn’t appear to be any lower in closed relationships.)

and I’ve disagreed, saying in his comments that

I’ve seen lots of widely varying estimates of how much sex people are supposedly having outside “closed” marriages, everything from most such marriages involving cheating to most such marriages not involving cheating (with a huge gap between the high and low estimates, and no one using anything remotely like random samples). But even the very highest estimates for cheating on closed relationships involve large percentages, both of husbands and wives, not cheating – I’d be really surprised if you’d find such high percentages as that of people in open relationships never taking advantage of said openness.

I’d also be really surprised, given that people vary a lot in their desire for monogamy vs. variety, if people’s sorting of themselves into open vs. closed relationships didn’t track at all with their desires. Sure, some people may promise fidelity who have little desire to deliver, and some people may be in open relationships who got prodded by a partner into an arrangement that they really don’t want, but is it really likely that people who choose closed relationships have exactly the same desire for multiple partners as people who choose open ones?

There might be some ways in which open relationships differ less from closed ones than people might guess: some people are serially monogamous, and some have open relationships that involve sleeping with only a small number of people, ever, so I wouldn’t presume that even non-cheating monogamous people have always had fewer sexual partners total than non-monogamous people. But I’m not buying “everyone cheats,” or “there’s no real monogamy, just people who cheat and people who are open about being non-monogamous.” I doubt figleaf actually believes that, either. The real argument is more: realizing that some people find it easier than others to sleep only with one person, and that some people are more sexually jealous than others, what general norms work best? And not just about sex, but about social boundaries?

The article that inspired the whole discussion was about “emotional affairs,” an area where it’s possible to err in two directions. The first error is “it didn’t count because we didn’t actually have sex,” even if, say, you’ve reached a point where you’re heavily invested in a sexually charged relationship that you’re concealing from your spouse. At that point, yes, I’d say it’s some sort of affair (call it an “emotional affair,” perhaps, if the two of you didn’t actually go very far physically). But the second error is the “men and women can’t be friends” error, the one where you have to treat any relationship with the opposite sex that’s at all close as suspect (and you’re pretty much screwed if you’re bisexual, or a woman working in a male field who needs mentors).

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Switching gears entirely, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a thread on the Steve McNair story, where he posed the question

I have an open question for readers: the person who broke your hearts the hardest, whom it took you the longest to get over, were they higher on social and economic ladders than you? Or were they lower?

(Amber and Hugo both commented.)

I’ve been trying to figure out why that question doesn’t resonate with me. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a good question, or that I don’t think that being higher or lower on social and economic ladders matters in relationships or break ups. I’m actually curious to know whether there’s a general trend in other people’s answers. As for my own, though …

The thing is, all the relationships I had, before Joel, that were actually both reciprocated and physical, were people I met at Stanford (well, not counting one guy in high school that I went with for about two weeks, and where the physical part didn’t go as far as actual nakedness or orgasms). And this is how I remember social class working at Stanford. The tuition is high there, but lots and lots of people are on some kind of scholarship.

In 1996-97, 44 percent of Stanford’s 6,550 undergraduates received need-based scholarships totaling nearly $49 million. Almost 70 percent of students receive some form of financial assistance.

Among those of my friends who were on scholarship like me, which was, I think, most of my friends (and very possibly all of the people I dated), some came from families that were higher on social and economic ladders and some from families that were lower. And, usually I didn’t much know or care what people’s parents did. But every so often, something would come out, that would make it clear that some particular friend was very high indeed on that ladder. I’d be talking with some women about some political organizing or other, and a couple of them would suddenly announce that we could take out an ad in the New York Times, all they had to do was call a few family friends for the money. Or the friend who was at Stanford on a union scholarship, the first in her family to go to college, would start seeing a guy who already, in college, had his very own investment portfolio (on top of the fact that his parents were presumably paying that hefty Stanford tuition). Or there were people with parents who were actually famous and highly connected. Or it might be just a little thing like the fact that somebody had a car and had wracked up a large sum in parking tickets, and I’d think, you can afford both a car and to be indifferent enough about money not to worry about parking tickets, while someone’s covering your tuition at Stanford?

But, until something happened to come up to bring it out, I wouldn’t know that so-and-so was the first in his or her family to go to college, while so-and-so was rich. And I don’t, actually, for sure remember the social standing of all the people I dated. I think that most of them had families that were about at my own family’s level, but I think at least one of them came from a family that would be ranked higher in terms of social and economic status than mine, while at least one family would have been ranked lower. Anyway, given that we weren’t actually engaged or sharing checking accounts, it’s all pretty hazy. I could be remembering someone’s background wrong. In fact, I know I remembered some details of Dre’s background wrong, till Wikipedia set me right.

What I remember is what each person’s father was like, when I met him. Who had how many brothers and sisters. What part of the country people came from, sometimes what their religious background was. I remember odd differences in what was familiar to us: What, how can you not know what Yom Kippur is (for someone from somewhere in Kentucky, where I guess Yom Kippur was less acknowledged than in New York)? Occasions when I worried that something might be a clue to a mismatch, like the time (after I’d left college, for a flirtation that failed to go anywhere) that someone said something that suggested I, as a Greek-American, might not be considered white. Or the person who was way richer and better connected than me, but it didn’t make a difference in terms of heartbreak, because that was another case where things never panned out to begin with.

And I remember what broke my heart. Death. Deceit. Sudden and unexpected break ups, with no prior warning. Most of all death, because that time, there was no undoing any of the things I’d done wrong. And at this point, decades later, the ways I failed other people are more vivid in my memory than the ways they failed me. Even though I do remember both, and am not so self-accusing as to think I was the only one who failed, or always the one who fell more short. Still, what I remember most vividly are my own failures.

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Last sudden shift of topic: interracial porn. Wendi Muse at Racialicious raised the question, to those who watch mainstream porn, whether the films they watch that involve people of different races meet the following requirements:

1. The color, size, or shape of the characters’ body parts, particularly genitals, as they relate to his or her race or ethnicity is not mentioned

2. No racist epithets are uttered.

3. The race or ethnicity of the characters (including the white characters) is not mentioned.

4. The background music, setting, and general environment of the scene does not conform to a stereotype related to one or more of the characters’ racial or ethnic identity.

Of course, I don’t watch mainstream porn, so I have to rely on other people, who actually do, to answer the question. Some of the commenters at Racialicious say some porn actually does exist that meets these requirements.

“Interracial” porn is by name alone invoking a certain fetishistic idea. Someone searching for or advertising a porno as “interracial” is gearing towards the stereotypical depictions of those races. Which may not be pretty, but it’s a ridiculous sample bias to google search “interracial” porn and be surprised that race plays a key factor in the scenes. As others have mentioned, there’s tons of porn (both soft, hard, amateur and mainstream) with many multi-ethnic actors and actresses that just don’t ever bring the issue up, because the focus (a parody of Seinfeld perhaps) lies elsewhere.

What this brings up for me, though, is my porn spam. All, literally all, of the porn spam I’ve ever seen, in my email or on my blog, that references people of different races, includes the following features:

1. It involves black men and white women. To judge from my porn spam, no other racial combination exists; porn either involves white people alone or it involves black men with white women.
2. The black men all have great big humongous dicks. To be sure, men in general, in porn spam, have great big humongous dicks, but black men really have great big humongous dicks.
3. The black men are super big and strong, while the white women are super delicate and fragile.
4. The film is described in a way that emphasizes how degrading it is for the white woman to sleep with the black man. Either she is, in the way of women in porn spam everywhere, slutty, but in this case her willingness to sleep with a black man is the proof of her sluttiness. Or she is, unlike most porn spam women, pure and virginal. Either way, the black guy is a brute and an animal, and the description of their sex sounds like nothing so much as the “woman has sex with horse” that is, for reasons I don’t understand, another porn spam staple.

So, OK, this is spam, and it costs little to send, and you don’t need a high response rate for spam to work. But why is all my porn spam, that involves anyone of another race, of this form? Even if I just stuck with bm/ww, I could imagine lots of more appealing fantasies. How about Star Trek slash involving Tuvok paired with Captain Janeway, or Sisko paired with Dax? Or how about a scenario like where Othello seduces Desdemona with his stories of martial achievements (only, since we’re proposing sexual fantasy here and not tragedy, rename the pair, and end with them making the beast with two backs, rather than with him killing her in a jealous rage)? If you’re turned on by seeing a black man fulfill racial stereotypes, why not some other stereotype, like being a whiz on the dance floor (certainly more seductive to me than being an animalistic brute)? Or if you’re turned on by a super strong and muscular body in a black man, couldn’t he be some regular old strong and muscular guy -a fire fighter, say – rather than also an animalistic brute? And that’s not even getting into all the fantasies you could have that involve some other racial combination than black men with white women.

Obviously, someone out there actively likes that one particular stereotype. Finds it hotter than any other. And that fact creeps me out.

So, OK, most everyone I know dislikes this particular kind of interracial porn. Even people who love porn and identify as sex positive dislike it. Here, for example, is Anthony Kennerson, from the comments of the Racialicious post.

Yes, I do not argue the fact that a lot of IR porn does pander to some of the most ridiculous racist stereotypes….especially the “Mandingo” stereotype of Black men with super large penises penetrating young, virginal, White women.

To me, though, that is less the fault of the performers themselves than to the producers and distributors of sexual media who are too set on their “formulas” for making money through pandering to a specific White demographic..and to the fundamental lack of progressive vision that far too many distributors of adult media seem to have.

I do think that there is a hidden market out there for non-degrading, mutually pleasurable porn that celebrates true passion and diversity. Problem is, as long as it is only middle- to upper-middle-class Whites who are the majority market for IR, and as long as the producers and distributors aren’t willing to take some risks and offer themselves to different demographics, then not much will change regarding the more dehumaninizing content….

And yet. Even here, often, when I’ve been reading an Internet thread where this comes up, there’s a counter argument that gets made. The “you shouldn’t judge” counter argument. That this is just people’s fantasy, like any other porn, and you shouldn’t judge it, and so on and so forth.

No. Really, no. I draw a line at saying I can’t make any judgment on a film, or an ad, or whatever, as soon as you put sex in it. I draw a line at saying I don’t get to see something wrong when the entire content of my porn spam, that ever even mentions anyone of another race, is solely and exclusively about how very degrading and defiling and brutish it is to have sex with a black man. Porn spam may be good only for found poetry, but even spam says something about our culture, and in this particular case, what’s being said is not good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 8:09 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.