sexuality

With Tiger Woods in the news for this latest round of Very-Public-Infidelity, guest blogger Ebony A. Utley weighs in with her expertise on the issue. A research expert on marital infidelity, Utley confronts common stereotypes and raises questions about cheating, talking, silence, and power.

The proverbial cats are out of the bag as the tabloid media collect stories from Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses. The mistresses are increasingly chatty — talking about “I was with Tiger here” and “he left me a voicemail there.” Woods is busy denying what he can and apologizing for what he can’t while Mrs. Woods remains silent.

None of this is unusual. With a slew of high-profile unfaithful men in the news lately, it’s hard not to notice a pattern. These men haven’t come out in public to say, “I had inappropriate sexual relations outside my relationship” without first facing an impeachment trial, sexual-assault accusations, blackmail threats, texts, sexts, voicemails … you get the picture.  Rarely have these men come clean without some sort of provocation.  Often, famous unfaithful men confess to their infidelity because the other woman beat him to it.

Mistresses are notorious for telling their side of the story because the world wants to hear it. The sex secrets of sexy women are titillating. Be honest with yourself. You wanted to know whether Tiger’s mistresses were prettier than his wife. Some of you readers out there also wanted to know whether she looked like she was better at sex than the wife. Admit it. Those are our society’s infidelity stereotypes. The other woman had to be offering something that the wife did not.

The wife wasn’t giving it up. Or if she was, her sex was boring.
The wife let herself go.
The wife was too invested in the kids.
The wife didn’t (emotionally) support her man.
The wife was emasculating.
The wife was never around.

Mistresses are quick to perpetuate these stereotypes, but the husbands are quick to offer their wives $4 million diamond rings and $80 million prenup revisions.  If the wives were such horrible people, why dish out all the cash to keep them? Since the husband can no longer keep the mistress quiet, is he buying his wife’s silence? I don’t think so. Men who cheat on their wives rarely want to leave them; usually they’re genuinely sorry. The silence on the wives part is not about his money. It’s about power.

A mistress has power because she is the secret. She is the one tasked with being discreet. Once the secret is out, the mistress loses her power. She scrambles to get it back with revealing details, but the more she talks, the more her power diminishes. People know who she is, where she was, what she did, how she did it, and who else she did it with. Once the prurient details are all out there, people are free to pass judgment on the mistress and she rapidly moves from sexy story to object of public scrutiny to obscurity.

But the wife who refuses to talk gains power. Now she is the one deciding to be discreet.  No one knows what she’s thinking and everyone wants to. Did she know?  Did she have a revenge affair? Why didn’t she leave him? Does she love him that much? How is she going to spend those millions? The quieter she remains, the more dignity that wife regains.  Long after we’ve forgotten the mistress’ name and the seedy motels and the racy voicemails, the silent wife is still standing in the spotlight with an air of mystery about her. We might not understand her, but her secrets are the ones that garner respect. The most understated gift a chatty mistress gives to the wife is power.

Ebony A. Utley, Ph.D. is an expert in infidelity. She is currently writing about her interviews with wives who have experienced infidelity during their marriages. See more of her research at http://www.theutleyexperience.com/

There’s lots of cross-dressing buzz in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere.  Here’s a semi-biased sample for your consideration:

Oct. 17: CNN covers Morehouse College’s dress code which “cracks down on cross-dressing.”

Nov. 6: NYT article asks “Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?” and describes U.S. high schools whose dress codes range from enforcing ‘traditional’ norms to allowing for students to more freely express their sex, gender and sexuality through their appearance. Is this a case of those with social/political power being ‘out of touch’ with changing times?

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

Nov. 7: Sociologist Shari Dworkin’s post on the Sexuality & Society blog adds a more nuanced analysis of Morehouse’s policy and encourages a complex approach to understanding gender-based dress codes.

Nov. 18: My guest-post on the Sexuality & Society blog takes on some of the questions left unasked and unanswered in that Nov. 6 NYT article about high school dress codes and considers Dworkin’s arguments.

What are the overt and covert goals of school dress codes? Are these dress codes developed to ensure that students meet norms of professionalism, or do these serve as tools for schools to enforce heteronormativity and stigmatize transgenderism? Are schools citing safety concerns, warning parents about how to protect youth from harm, or do these intend to distract us from the ways in which dress codes serve to reinforce heterosexist norms? How well can we predict the unintended consequences of dress codes – both the more ‘traditional’ and more ‘progressive’ policies?

Today: I read a new NYT article online — in the Fashion & Style section — that asserts, “It’s All a Blur to Them” and goes on to describe today’s “urban” 20-somethings who,

are revising standard notions of gender-appropriate dressing, tweaking codes, upending conventions and making hash of ancient norms.

So, what are we to think? In early November, we read about a female high-school senior who was forbidden to wear a tux in her yearbook photo. A couple of weeks later, we read about the growing trend of unisex lines in the fashion world. Does this mix of media coverage reflect that the U.S. remains an ideologically conflicted patchwork of ‘blue’ and ‘red’ Americans? Or, if the generational-change argument holds true, then are we on our way to becoming a society that truly embraces ‘gender fluidity’?

It’s always a treat to get quoted in a mainstream newspaper article that takes a critical look at U.S. norms and values. Fellow GWP editor, Shira Tarrant, and I were recently interviewed about trends in female Halloween costumes:

Talking with this reporter reminded me of a campaign launched on my university’s campus a few years ago by the student club Feminism Is. They created posters with the slogan “We’re not a trick or a treat!” to raise awareness at California Lutheran University about the importance of the messages being sent by the hyper-sexual costumes that had become popular among U.S. female college students. With too many Americans still unclear about the relevance of sexism in our daily lives, it’s vital that we mentor and teens/young adults who create feminist events and collaborate with reporters who are willing to ask questions like — Is dressing up “like a slut” for Halloween “harmless fun” or “demeaning”?  Kudos to writer Rhiannon Potkey and other journalists who are fighting the good fight!

Some would say this has been true since 2006, when the FDA approved Gardasil for exclusive use in girls/women, and finally the FDA agrees. Last week Merck received FDA approval for Gardasil to be used as a genital warts vaccine in boys/men (ages 9 to 26 years old). However, yesterday, the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted for only “permisive” use in boys, rather than voting for the stronger recommendation of “routine use,” as they had for Gardasil’s use in girls/women.

As reported in Bloomberg.com, this decision had been predicted by some experts:

William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said the panel will be asking itself “if we vaccinate all the girls, how much additional benefit will we get by vaccinating the boys?”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution cited a similar argument from a different expert:

Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecologic cancer at the American Cancer Society, agreed with the findings. “If we can vaccinate a high enough proportion of young girls, then vaccinating boys is not cost-effective,” she said.

This line of reasoning and the ACIP’s conclusion are problematic on two levels. First, there seems to be a privileging of female health over male health. There are compelling reasons “ other than the prevention of cervical cancer” for the ACIP to recommend “routine use” of a safe and effective male HPV vaccine. Second, there seems to be a heterosexist assumption in the ACIP’s decisions — that all boys/men are sexually attracted to (and sexually active with) girls/women and vice versa.

Maggie Fox of Reuters offered a more complete assessment in her article published yesterday:

The main reason the vaccine was approved was to prevent cervical cancer, which kills 4,000 women a year in the United States alone. But various strains of HPV also cause disfiguring genital warts, anal and penile cancers and head and neck cancers. “We know that the later the cancer is discovered, the lower the chance of survival is,” David Hastings of the Oral Cancer Foundation told the committee, asking for a recommendation to add the vaccine to the standard schedule for boys. However, ACIP decided only to consider its use based on its ability to prevent genital warts.

Did the ACIP adequately factor in the clinically proven causal links between certain strains of HPV and potentially life-threatening oral cancers — which do not discriminate on the basis of sex? This seems important, particularly if, “The death rate for oral cancer is higher than that of cancers which we hear about routinely such as cervical cancer” (Oral Cancer Facts)?

A recent New York Times article reports that the committee will “take up the issue of the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing HPV-related male cancers at its next session in February, when more data should be available.”  But data has been available since 2007, when results of clinical studies were reported and the Oral Cancer Foundation issued a press release urging male HPV vaccination?

If the FDA believes Gardasil is safe and effective, then we deserve a more thorough explanation of why the vaccine’s potential to protect against oral cancers — in both men and women — is not reason enough for the federal advisory group to issue as strong a recommendation for male vaccination as for female vaccination.

Welcome to the first official post for Bedside Manners. As a sexual health researcher and book author, I receive a lot of emails from women and men who are dealing with sexually transmitted diseases. Yesterday, I replied to Liza, a 25 year-old married, monogamous woman who had just been diagnosed with a serious cervical HPV infection and treated via LEEP. She could not understand how this had happened, since she had been getting pap smears during her annual gynecological exams for the past 10 years, and her husband had never been diagnosed with genital warts. Her doctor told her it was “bad luck,” and now she is worried about the possibility of having an oral HPV infection, wondering whether her cervical infection is cured, and trying to figure out how to this will affect her marriage.

By getting annual pap smear exams, Liza has been doing the right thing. Unfortunately, most medical practitioners don’t explain that pap smears only sample a small area of a woman’s cervix. So, it is possible to receive a “normal” pap smear result when there are HPV-infected/abnormal cell changes in other portions of the cervix.

With Liza’s husband as her only sexual partner, it’s key for him to get thoroughly examined for HPV/genital warts. If HPV-infected cells are found, then he should have them removed via one of several treatment options. Once both of their bodies have healed from treatments, the couple should strongly consider using condoms during sex (note: condoms reduce but do not eliminate the risk of HPV transmission).

Given Liza’s concern about oral HPV, a ‘HPV test’ can determine the specific strain of the virus. HPV 16 has been linked to cervical cancer and to oral/head/neck cancers. So, an important follow-up exam after receiving a genital HPV diagnosis is to see a dentist: I encouraged her to share that she’s been exposed to HPV orally and request a thorough exam.

As I concluded my reply to Liza, I realized that I needed to address the stress that she was clearly experiencing. Medical sociologists have often written about how disease can cause dis-ease, an illness often causes a patient to lose her sense of wellbeing. In the case of socially stigmatizing and medically incurable infections, like HPV, stress is almost unavoidable for newly diagnosed patients. In my book, Damaged Goods?, I detail specific strategies for handling the variety of stressors that come with a genital HPV or herpes infection, but I’ve decided to wrap up today’s post with a general note about stress.

I was fortunate to attend a talk last night by the authors of a new book, The Inner Game of Stress. Tim Gallwey has teamed up with two physicians, who practice a patient-centered approach to integrative medicine, to combine medical research with his executive coaching techniques. The result is a thoughtful self-help approach to stress management that encourages readers to be assertive patients. As a medical sociologist, I have written about the health impacts of practitioner-patient interactions and was familiar with the body of research showing how stress can weaken a person’s immune system.

For people, like Liza, who are battling a virus, it is important to not only empower yourself with knowledge about your particular illness but also to strategize how to strengthen your immune system. In addition to the obvious recommendations of decreasing unhealthy behaviors and increasing healthy ones, I encouraged her to find sources of emotional and social support. Some who are facing a stigmatizing illness may find comfort by talking with trusted friends, while others may prefer the neutrality of a therapist, and many may find empowerment in a book. 

This month, The Man Files brings you Jessica Pauline — a writer and feminist with experience working in some of the dicey-er Los Angeles strip clubs. Lots of ink has been spilled on the sex worker debates. Are women oppressed by sex work? Liberated? Both? How is trafficking distinct from, say, dancing one’s way through law school? In this entry, Jessica leaves those debates for another day and instead turns a keen eye to her observations of the men who make it rain. (—verb: to throw wads of cash in the air for dancers to retrieve as tips.)

Like Jane Goodall and her chimps, I spent a good deal of time during my tenure as a stripper in some of L.A.’s seediest nightclubs observing the behavior of the primates. Not the dancers, mind you — the men who came to watch them.

Based on my humble observations, I came to discover that certain behaviors are both predictable and categorical, and that most hetero men, when confronted with a pair of boobs in a semi-public setting, fall into a few choice archetypes.

Let’s start with what I imagine to be the most common breed of American strip club patron: white, middle-aged men who golf and vote Republican. They swagger in to the club with an air of ownership, their masculinity stuffed into their wallets and tucked neatly into their pressed khaki pants. Observing the dancers with the same level of detached interest that one might imagine they’d use in selecting a prime rib-eye, they pick a girl, begin to talk to her in their most sensual voice while rubbing her back and her leg, and shortly thereafter are ushered back to the VIP room with very little to-do. This is the kind of easy sell around which strip clubs were designed, and for that reason, we’ll call this breed Strip Club Men (SCM).

Now, strip clubs have been around long enough for a type of strip club rebellion to brew amongst men. So imagine, if you will, if the SCM had a son. This son desires nothing more than to be the antithesis to his stuffy, conservative father, and so he becomes sensitive, wears ironic t-shirts to demonstrate the fact that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and quite possibly sports artistic, sentimental facial hair. Let’s call this breed Feminist Men (FM).

When forced into a strip club, maybe because of a bachelor party, or maybe in search of a place to talk quietly on a Tuesday night, the FM immediately seeks to set himself apart. Rather than sexualize the dancers, he opens with a nice conversation, carefully keeping his eyes above the neck. But as the FM gets less and less guarded, a strange thing begins to happen. He becomes more willing to let his eyes wander down. His friendly conversation becomes more imbued with sexual innuendo. And finally, often after spending copious amounts of money on what he has come to believe is a “real connection,” he tries to get the dancer to go on a date with him. (This, as an aside, is both insulting and never going to happen.)

The final subcategory of men falls deeper into FM territory, and warrants mention simply because of the unique validation that they seek. They’re easy to recognize, because no sooner does some indie chick start swaying her hips to Tom Waits, the King of Melancholy himself, then the Tom Waits Man (TWM) begins nodding in recognition. Before long, he’s dug a crumpled dollar bill out of his pocket and walked up to the stage where he will deposit it, but not until he’s made sure that the dancer sees him so he can compliment her taste to her face and thereby secure his place as profound, mysterious and, of course, different.

Maybe you’ll read this and think that I oversimplify. But since the most honest interaction in sex work is based on a respectful, fun partaking of the service provided, it can’t hurt for men to examine their own behavior with at least as much gusto as I examined it (don’t worry, I took some long, hard looks at myself, too). Without that, gentlemen, you are really just entertainment.

Jessica Pauline is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. An NYU graduate with a degree in music, her writing appears regularly on LAist.com, and has appeared in $pread Magazine, The Printed Blog, the Ventura County Star, and a number of other websites and local papers. She is currently working on a book about her experiences as a feminist stripper, and lives in Silver Lake with her fiance and their dog, Molly.

There’s so much Father’s Day goodness out there today I don’t know where to start.

Former NYTimes blogger Marci Alboher asks “Are Dads the New Moms?” over at her new Yahoo blog, Working the New Economy.

Lisa Belkin conducts a two part interview with The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared ParentingAreTransforming the American Family author and Daddy Dialectic blogger Jeremy Adam Smith

Michelle Goldberg of ABCNews.com tells us What Laid-Off Dads Want

And I offer “Findings from from the Layoff Lab”— a Father’s Day assessment of recession-era dads — over at The Big Money! 

You can bet we’ll touch on many of these themes — and more, and from a fresh and feminist perspective — at the Brooklyn Museum tomorrow when the WomenGirlsLadies talk about “Dads, Dudes, and Doing It.” Event is free!  We’ll be giving books away!  I’ll be wearing straight-up maternity wear!  This is one you won’t want to miss 🙂

PS. Time Out New York just listed us as one of the “Ten Best Father’s Day events” in town!

I’ve been busy working up my comments for this Saturday’s 2pm panel at the Brooklyn Museum, billed as “a fresh conversation among feminists in honor of Father’s Day.” We’re an editor’s pick over at the Daily News and Time Out is supposed to be featuring us too!

We’ve been launching a multimedia publicity attack, so if you receive email from me and another from Facebook, please bear with us.  As always, it’s one great experiment in getting the word out in the age of social media.  (Learning lots along the way!)

For a taste of WomenGirlsLadies, you can check out this YouTube video from one of our past events:

My fellow WGLs Courtney Martin, Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent Zook, and I REALLY like to make these talks interactive, so it’d be so great to have YOUR voices there! And if anyone’s game for liveblogging it here on GWP, the door is open!  Just email me and let me know.  K?

We’ll be at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, June 20 at 2pm for what promises to be one of our liveliest versions ever. There’s more over at the WomenGirlsLadies blog, and on a YouTube channel coming soon. Please spread the word!

DADSDUDES_F

Much as I want to think of myself as a feminist parent, sometimes I doubt my credentials.  After all, I don’t forbid Hannah Montana for my daughter or swordplay for my son even though both of these activities certainly do reinforce gender stereotypes (although I should probably add that my daughter took jui-jitsu for a time and my son happily watches Hannah Montana).

But I know that when it comes to discussions of loving relationships, this is one area where my feminism comes through loud and clear.  With the current setbacks—like yesterday’s California High Court ruling in support of the gay marriage ban and victories over gay marriage, I see this as an important social justice issue.  After all, I want my daughter and my son to grow up in a culture that will recognize and equally value their loving relationships whoever their partner may be.

Katy Perry as “Compulsory Heterosexuality 101”
My 8-year-old daughter loves Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” She’s especially familiar with the chorus, which goes like this:

I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right

Recently after the song played my daughter asked, “Why is she worried about what her boyfriend will think?”  I explained that the song was about two girls kissing.  Perhaps not surprisingly, she had been listening to the song and singing the words without really understanding it.  When I explained the idea of two girls kissing, some predictable “ew’s” and “yuck’s” ensued (the standard grade school reaction to all romantic kissing).  I also explained that some people think two girls or two boys kissing is a bad thing.

I went on to tell her what I thought—that two people who love each other can kiss, whether they are two girls, two boys, or a boy and a girl.  I talked about the way that “gay” can be used as an epithet, and how in my view such a usage was inappropriate.

My daughter wanted to try the idea on for size.  What would be the difference between using gay in a “mean” way and in a “nice” way, she wanted to know?  She thought out loud, “I could say, ‘You’re gay, hooray!”

I loved this response.  Tolerance is one thing: plenty of research suggests that young people are more supportive of gay marriage than their older counterparts.  But celebration is another, and my daughter is right there already.  Dismantling heterosexism and homophobia are important parts of this mix as well: my daughter may not be there yet, but that’s where my feminist parenting comes in, and we’ll take it day by day.

While I don’t think Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” lyrics are especially feminist—heterosexual male enjoyment of “lesbian” sexuality has been around for a long time, it opened a great window of conversation and analysis for our family.  Now that’s feminist, so thanks, Katy Perry.

GWP, readers how does feminism influence your parenting?  I’d love to hear your stories.