intercourse

Intercourse
$16.95
The time was the early nineties. I was in a small liberal arts college that was heavily steeped radical feminist thought. We had a "Womyn's Alliance", eco-feminism was spoken there (which connected the rape of the Earth to rape of women), and we had a sexual offense policy that required verbal consent before any sexual advances. Oh, and we had nude co-ed swimming as well, as if to demonstrate just how highly evolved we were.

I was the cofounder of a pro-feminist men's group. A typical topic we'd disucss: is it wrong to fantasize about women while masturbating, and what to do about it? One of us had a girlfriend, the rest of us were too shy to approach women. As well we should have been - one female student invited me to her room and then pulled a knife on me and accused me of sexually intimidating her before I'd even stepped inside.

Dworkin's book helped set me free. It broke the spell.

First, Dworkin actually broke one of the foundational principles of feminism in her book, that gender is socially constructed. This was a silly belief to begin with, not based in fact and demonstrably false, but appealing to those of us who saw masculinity as inherently bad and wishing to change it. No, Dworkin said: women have slits between their legs, and men want to invade these slits, and this invasion of privacy is comparable to "atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag".

Dworkin may have never said that sex is rape. She actually seems to be saying something much stronger: sex is slavery. Sex is colonialism. Sex is genocide. But it's not a social construct.

Against this backdrop, I finally do get a girlfriend, and she wants me to tie her up. She WANTS me to have sex with her. Is she a damaged victim of the patriarchy's brainwashing? Actually, she seems to know what she wants much more clearly than I do, and she seems to be enjoying herself. And then later at this school, I meet a woman who I had always thought was a lesbian but turns out to be bisexual, and she's complaining that the sexual offense policy has made the male students timid and she wishes they were more aggressive.

Reality meets theory and theory loses. The female orgasm alone refutes Dworkin's book. And to look at it more broadly, sexual expression often involves the exchange of power in either direction, and the willing surrender of power in the bedroom is not violation.

Of course true subjugation of women occurs (genital mutilation, etc), and so does rape, and both are very bad things. However, the answer is NOT to pathologize our innate human drives, to try to feminize men in general so they don't rape as much. The answer is to confront the problem behavior.

[...]

2) Evolutionary biology teaches us that females also select males (which is why male birds tend to have pretty plumage), and so women are entirely complicit in our sexual make up. If women had selected for "softer men", that's likely what we would have. But clearly, women throughout the ages have selected for men who are stronger and more aggressive than they are, who are good hunters and can protect them while they are nursing babies. "This is nihilism, or this is truth"

The New InterCourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook
$29.95
I bought the first book for myself, but have since given this book for wedding shower gifts. The photographs are just as incredible as the recipes.

Verbal Intercourse
$0.99

Intercourse: Stories
$22.95
Butler, Robert Olen. "Intercourse: Stories", Chronicle Books, 2008.

Talking During Sex

Amos Lassen

Robert Butler has written a collection of stories about what fifty couples talk about while having sex. He further identifies each pair of loves not only by name but by age and occupation as well. He puts them in a place having to do with their lives, gives them an occasion and a date and then lets them talk. He uses couples from all periods of time--Adam and Eve, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Shakespeare and the third Earl of Southampton, Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, George and Laura Bush, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson, the Prince and Princess of Wales and a host of others.
The dialog is hysterical even though most speak rather poetically and there is wonderful parody here when Butler is not too serious. I think my favorite line is when Gertrude Stein says of Alice B. Toklas, "her mustache is her mustache is her mustache".
The women here come across as vain and full of contempt; the men seem to think they are what they are not. I have read a review that considers the dialog between the sexual partners as insipid and not erotic and the whole concept of the book as childish and "asinine". I found it delightful, irreverent and fun.