Best Sex Writing 2010 (26 page)

The abstinence proponents are quite explicit about this also. They have a model for sluthood: a woman whose commodity is used up and worn out, whose commodity nobody would want except as a cheap alternative at a low price. This model is often taught with an eye toward making the metaphor as disgusting as possible. One program uses a piece of tape covered with arm hair after being stuck to and torn off of several students’ forearms, and which is
then thrown in the trash.
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Another has students pass an unwrapped Peppermint Patty around the entire class. A Nevada program actually aired a public service announcement that said girls would feel “dirty and cheap” after breaking up with a sex partner.
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The people who encourage young women to treat their virginity as precious property do not see themselves as anti-woman, though feminists generally do. They are so invested in the commodity framework that, from their perspective, trading the commodity for the best possible gain is the best outcome a woman could hope for. To that way of thinking, sex can only ever be transacted, and the transaction that is the most advantageous is the one that uses the highly valuable early product to maximum advantage, to secure the best possible marriage: a lifetime commitment to financial support, and hopefully even an attractive and chivalrous sex partner. If sex really were a commodity that degraded with repeated harvesting, that would be all that was possible. The abstinence proponents, at least those of them who genuinely buy their line, think they are telling women what is in their best interest, because a better world is beyond their grasp.

On the spectrum of patriarchy, the religious conservatives of the abstinence movement stand at one end. At the other end are Joe Francis and his
Girls Gone Wild
empire, and all of the other cultural forces that see sex as property, but simply want women to permit men to exploit it more freely.
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This is clear from the internal dialogue among self-styled
“pickup artists,” who attempt to procure sex partners using “game” techniques.
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One moderator at an online pickup artist forum wrote, “Really improved my game and what girls will do for me. If I can get them folding all my laundry a day after they met me, think what I’ll have them doing when they’ve been having a continuous orgasm for the past 15 minutes.”
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The writer makes it his goal to “get” the most out of women, in the form of either sex or labor.
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(That commenter made the transition from household labor to sexual services without apparent irony. If service and commodity are not exactly congruent, they are certainly close cousins.)

Further, buying into the commodity model also means buying into its internal valuation method: that value derives from scarcity, so that any woman who expresses her sexuality by actually having sex partners is devalued. One poster wrote:

A forum moderator responded, “Too bad she’s still a depreciating and often damaged asset.”
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These men openly adopt the commodity model as conducive to male privilege, because a better world is not in their perceived self-interest.

The term “Nice Guys™” has evolved in the feminist blogosphere to refer to passive-aggressive hetero men who complain that they are refused sex in favor of other men when, apparently, they deem themselves deserving. Usually, their belief system involves the idea that other men, who treat women badly, are much more appealing to women, and that they themselves are disadvantaged in a sexual marketplace by their refusal to abuse or trick women in certain ways. Their entire worldview depends on the commodity model, and on a corollary view of their own entitlement: that there must be some “proper” way for them to act and “get” sex; that if they do all the “right” things, they will unlock the lock and get laid. By contrast, do musicians really think that if they just do the right things, someone must form a band with them?

The combination of passive-aggressiveness, entitlement, and the certainty that sex is a commodity leads the Nice Guy™ to argue, in all seriousness, that rape is caused because Nice Guys™ seek sex but are rejected, and rape is their reaction to unfair rejection. A paradigmatic example of this argument appeared in a mammoth discussion of rape in a thread entitled “Some Guys Are Assholes But It’s Still Your Fault If You Get Raped” at Alas! A Blog on June 15, 2005. Commenter Aegis posted this argument, which neatly encapsulates Nice Guy™ thinking:

Aegis thus conceives of rape as the result of a man’s frustration when he is refused something (the commodity) that he would be granted if he submitted a proper application for it. There is a term for something that is meant to be granted upon proper request: entitlement. To the Nice Guy™ way of thinking, the commodity is an entitlement: women are gatekeepers to the Pussy Oversoul, and should grant access upon proper application; or, more crudely, women are pussy vending machines.
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If only the Nice Guy™ were unique in this sense of entitlement! Rather, the Nice Guy™ expresses clearly the undercurrent of entitlement that runs through the culture. Men generally are constructed as the pursuers of sex, and taught that their proper pursuit will be rewarded. What straight men really need to learn is that women are humans, too, who get to make their own decisions about whether and with whom to have sex; and that nobody owes anyone sex.

Aegis lays out an argument that this entitlement leads to rape, but the path from rejection and disappointment to rape does not depend on misunderstanding, as Aegis believed. Instead, entitled men who believe that sex is a commodity and that they have been denied it wrongfully see rape as repossession. It belongs to them, and they resentfully use any tactic necessary to get it. These men see themselves as being in the same position as a man who
finds that his stolen car is in the custody of a garage: he may not know whether the garage stole it or found it, but it is his, and he is entitled to get it back. If they refuse to give it up after he asks the right way, he will lie to them, trick them, or threaten them if necessary to get it. He can write a check and stop payment; he can just get in and drive off. Because it is his car, it is his right. When these men apply that thinking to sex, it’s as if the woman standing between them and the pussy is an irrelevance, a hindrance.

The commodity model has a number of problems. Principally, it reinforces patriarchal sex roles and constructs, and it allows for the construction of the concept of sluthood, which is key to at least one family of rape-supportive ideas.

The commodity model is inherently heteronormative and phallocentric. If two men have sex, who is the supplier and who is the demander? The commodity model requires one person to “give it up” and the other to want to “get some,” the “it” and

“some” being the paradigmatic commodity: crudely, pussy. When nobody in the equation has an actual vagina, the model either imposes a notion of one or presupposes unlimited consumption. So, for example, thinking mired in this model may assume a “who’s the girl” conception that penetrative sex always occurs and that femininity should be imputed to the enveloping partner. Separately but not unrelated is the long-standing slur that gay men are inherently and compulsively promiscuous, there being no gatekeeper to restrict the supply of the commodity. The commodity model doesn’t deal any better with sex between two women—it simply imagines the economic problem in reverse, so that two gatekeepers reluctantly, if ever, “give it up.”

The commodity model also functions as all-purpose rape
apology. The logical conclusion of this model is that rape is narrowly understood and consent is presumed. Under the commodity model, consent is not necessarily enthusiastic participation, or even necessarily an affirmative act. If someone tries to take something and the owner raises no objection, then that something is free for the taking. To this way of thinking, consent is the absence of “no.” It is therefore economically rational to someone with this commodity concept of sex that it can be taken; rape is a property crime in that view. In the past, the crime was against the male owner of women (let’s not sugarcoat it; until very recently, women were in a legal way very much male property, and still are in many places and ways). Even among more enlightened folks, if one takes a commodity view of sex, rape is still basically a property crime against the victim.

Some of the most common rape-apologist arguments follow from the commodity model. For example, rape apologists often echo Katie Roiphe’s argument from her 1994 book,
The Morning After,
that women who have “bad” sex and later regret it interpret the experience as rape. In fact, the terminology of a transaction is often applied: “buyer’s remorse.” To that way of thinking, women have made a transaction that cannot be undone, and seek a form of refund by calling it nonconsensual after the fact. But it is fanciful to imagine a circumstance in which enthusiastic participation quickly turns not to regret, but to denial that consent existed at the time. This argument works only if consent is simply acquiescence, even grudging acquiescence. Because they cast sex as commodity, rape apologists can easily make the same caveat emptor arguments about sex that one makes in used-car sales: that a deal is a deal, however reluctantly, grudgingly, or desperately one side accepts it.

In fact, the commodity model is, at its core, an adversary model (though one might stop short of calling it a zero-sum game, except
perhaps in the minds of the most open misogynists). The negotiation is not a creative process but a bargaining process, where each side seeks and makes concessions. Each side wants to get something that the other does not want to give.

What naturally arises from the commodity model is a tendency of property transactions: they are often not equally advantageous, and depend on bargaining power. Since some duress and coercion are common, in order for commerce to flourish it is necessary to have rules about when someone is stuck with the bargain they made, even if they regret it or never really liked it in the first place. This is what rape apologists do every time: defend the transaction by holding the unhappy participant responsible, emphasizing her agency, minimizing coercion, and insisting on the finality of bargains.

When applied to sex, every feminist knows what this looks like. Rape apologists argue that once consent is given it cannot be withdrawn; that acquiescence under the influence is consent; that women who do not clearly say no assume the risk.
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Returning to Sally the musician, we do not believe some things to be true of her that the commodity model presumes about sex. The better model for sex is the one that fits the musician: a performance model, where sex is a performance, and partnered sex is a collaboration. Music is an obvious metaphor. (There are others: dance, which is also frequently a two-partner but sometimes a multipartner activity; or sports, which imports a problematic competitive aspect.)

The commodity model assumes that when a woman has sex, she loses something of value. If she engages in too much sex, she will be left with nothing of value. It further assumes that sex earlier in her history is more valuable than sex later. If she has a lot of sex early on, what she has left will not be something people will esteem highly. But a musician’s first halting notes at age thirteen in the basement are not something of particular value. Only an obsessive completist would want a recording of a young musician’s practice before she knew what she was doing; and then only after that musician has made her mark by playing publicly, well, and often. She gets better by learning, by playing a lot, by playing with different people who are better than she is. She reaches the height of her powers in the prime of her life, as an experienced musician, confident in her style and conversant in her material. Her experience and proven talent are precisely why she is valued.

Because it centers on collaboration, a performance model better fits the conventional feminist wisdom that consent is not the absence of “no,” but affirmative participation. Who picks up a guitar and jams with a bassist who just stands there? Who dances with a partner who is just standing and staring? In the absence of affirmative participation, there is no collaboration.

Like the commodity model, the performance model implies a negotiation, but not an unequal or adversarial one. The negotiation is the creative process of building something from a set of available elements. Musicians have to choose, explicitly or implicitly, what they are going to play: genre, song, key and interpretation. The palette available to them is their entire skill set—all the instruments they have and know how to play, their entire repertoire, their imagination and their skills—and the product will depend on the pieces each individual brings to the performance.
Two musicians steeped in Delta blues will produce very different music from one musician with a love for soul and funk and another with roots in hip-hop or 1980s hardcore. This process involves communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meet with acceptance or rejection.