Non-Monogamy Seduction Fail

So I was talking to a single friend today about fuck-buddies, swingers, awkward situations, and what we did over the weekend. Coffee talk.

For the record, she knows nothing of Girl's and my open relationship. She knows some of my co-workers socially and there are somethings I refuse to be forced to discuss around the water cooler.

She talked the previous night's get together at her house with several couples she'd known for a while. As the night wore on, the the alcohol ran low, all but one of the couples left. The last couple proved to be the hardest one to deal with.

As she knew, or quickly learned, they had an open relationship. She also became aware that the wife had another guy on the side and that the husband was only allowed to play while the wife was present. With that on the table, the husband started making not so subtle come-ons. He had done this before without the wife around, and always been rebuffed by the friend, but this time, emboldened by wine and the presence of his wife, he kept pressing the issue, going so far as to repeatedly suggest they go off to the bedroom together.

It's not clear from the way it was relayed to me exactly what the wife was to do in the meantime. Sit on the sofa and channel surf? Put an ear to the door? Slip in and join them in some scenario from a third-rate porn video?

She declined, again and again, but it being her house, she had no retreat and even desperate looks to the wife weren't getting any response. No, she had to wait until the pursuer was too tired of the chase and finally retreated to the car with his wife.

The point of this story is that as there are good ways to make advances, so too are there awful ways that will definitely get you 86'ed from future guest lists. Not taking no for an answer was definitely the start, but putting the other person in an incredibly awkward situation in which they are cornered and have no idea how to proceed was the nail in the coffin. For anyone who wants to avoid being talked about the next day as "that creepy couple", it's something to consider.

Weiners and Consent

So the feminist blogsophere (still using it ironically) is still talking about Anthony Weiner, so I might as well, too.

The issue is that many feminists are taking issue with the idea, poised usually by liberals, that Weiner's conduct (having sexually-charged internet exchanges with various women) should not be relevant to his political career because it's a private sexual matter that doesn't violate any laws.  The feminist response is that it appears that he sent a sexually explicit picture to a follower of his without having established a consensual, sexual online friendship with her.  In other words: sexual harassment.

And I agree.  It's not cool to send dick pics to random women, period.  Weiner claimed it was "a joke."  The recipient doesn't understand the joke and claims to have never had any salacious interaction with Weiner.  But the other relationships, so far, appear to be explicitly consensual.

If it can be shown that Weiner was sending sexual images to women non-consentually, he is guilty of sexual harassment and should be forced to step down.   Although I find it funny that a man we pretty know is guilty of sexual harassment is regarded as an elder statesman and the same congressmen who were supporting Clinton during his shit are now calling upon Weiner to resign.  But that's just politics, gross, yucky poltics.

What bothers me about this feminist critique is how often it's tied into other moralistic, sex-negative critiques that I find troubling.  For example, in this excellent Shakesville post about the consent issue, a lot of the commenters diverge wildly from the topic of consent to shake their fists at Weiner for being a philandering asshole, for lying to his constituents, and in general for engaging in the consensual online sexual behavior as opposed to calling him out specifically for the behavior that wasn't consensual. This rankles me.

My husband  and I are not out about a great many things in relation to his work life, for good reason.  We're not out about having an open relationship, or our queerness.  Were he or I a public figure, I suspect we'd be even more closeted.  So if we were and some scandal came out about him having sex with dudes on the side, everyone would be up in arms about what a terrible husband he is.  I'm not saying that Weiner and his wife have an open relationship, but what I am saying is we don't know what their private boundaries are for this kind of behavior.  We know he told her about these online relationships before they were married.  That's it.

I find the hang-wringing about "poor Huma" to be shallow and kind of insulting to her.  By all accounts she's a pretty bad-ass lady.  What she does with this unfortunately public information is up to her, but it's not "feminist" to freak out about infidelity and act as if one woman's supposed private pain is somehow a political point.  Infidelity is not a feminist issue, no matter how you want to spin it.

Furthermore, there's a lot of "he's just a gross pervert," sentiment in the feminist blogosphere which I also find weird.  The consent issue is huge, and at the heart of the matter, but based on what I'm reading I can't help but feel that even if everything Weiner did was explicitly consensual, some progressives would have a problem with it, because "it's perverted" and "congressmen shouldn't act this way."  Weiner is a married dude who had some really boring, bland netsex.  This is exceedingly common behavior.  Dare I say it, it's pretty much normal behavior for a huge chunk of dudes with Internet access, if my experience on the Internet is any indication.  Does being a congressman mean a person has to give up all their sexual freedoms?  That seems ridiculous to me.  I don't think there's any job that should preclude a person a right to have consensual online flirtations and netsex.

I also find it strange that both in the media and on blogs, this is being spun as an infidelity, full stop.  I feel like it was pretty recently that the mainstream media was asking "Does this sort of behavior count as cheating?"  Apparently it's been decided now.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that netsex can't be cheating.  I'm just befuddled by the assumption that must be.  Some people think that viewing porn in a relationship is cheating.  I think it's a grey area that can be, depending on what the couple in question has agreed on.

At the end of the day, all that really matters about this situation was whether or not Weiner was sexually harrassing women who had no desire for sexual contact with him. I really wish that the moralizing about the other stickier, trickier issues around monogamy and private sexuality wasn't being lumped in with all that.

Consent: is it OK to go from No to Yes in one evening?

(X-posted from School for Scandal)

So, I am really lucky to have good health insurance and a great gynecologist. (I was seeing a GP before who was fucking useless.)My current gyno got me on continuous birth control on a low estrogen pill, as a person whose life used to be ruled by PMDD, this is one of the best things to ever happen to me.

So anyway, I visited her a few days ago for my checkup, and I told her about my plans to become a sex therapist. She told me about how she treats a lot of patients with sexual dysfunction and advises them to use vibrators (and referred me to her favorite vibrator shop). I love having a sex positive gyno (the first one I ever saw when I was a teen told me I shouldn't shave my pubic hair and that I needed to lose weight- I guess she was working at my high school's free clinic for a reason.)

I also told my Doctor about SlutWalk. She told me she treats a lot of women who have been dateraped and the advice she gives about consent is this:

"If you say no one evening, you need to stick to that no. You can say yes the next evening, but you need to be consistent with your consent, otherwise men think that if they push hard enough, they can turn a no into a yes."

I see her point (a similar technique is used to keep dogs from begging for scraps at a table) but if it's generally agreed that if you initially give consent and change your mind, you have a right to stop things without being judged. (I'm not talking about wishing you hadn't slept with someone the next day or retroactively changing your consent, I'm talking about actively communicating a change in consent at the actual moment.) So is it legit to say at the beginning of any evening, "I don't want to have sex tonight," and then after some heavy making out say, "I changed my mind, I do want to have sex tonight?" I think a mature dude should be able to handle this without assuming that he can turn every no into a yes. But is it, as my gyno claims, breeding messy boundaries? It certainly enforces the idea that women are responsible for preventing rape, rather than teaching men to roll with clearly communicated changes in consent without making assumptions.

I can think of one specific incident where I did this. It was on a second date with my previous boyfriend. We started making out and I told him I didn't want to go below the waist. The truth was, I did want to have sex with him but I set this boundary because I was looking for a relationship, not a hookup, and I wanted to take things slow. However, things got late, my train stopped running, and it was clear that I was going to sleep over, and I wanted to. So, I said "fuck it," and changed my consent (and clearly communicated this.) The next morning we talked about it over breakfast. "I did want to have sex with you, but I was afraid you would treat me weird the morning after if we did it so soon," I explained.

"Am I treating you weird now?" He asked, giving me a hug. And we did start a relationship, even though we had sex on the second date instead of the third, or fifth, or six months, or whatever society dictates as the appropriate time to have sex in the context of a relationship.

(An aside- anyone who casts you aside for having sex with them "too soon" is not worth being in a relationship with. Anyone you have to "manipulate" into a relationship, rules style, is probably not going to be a good partner. But it's probably a good idea to keep your expectations low in the beginning.)

So it was a weird situation because I initially said "No" out of fear of rejection, even though I wanted to say "Yes," and did change my consent over the course of an evening. I don't think this incident has made my ex into a date rapist, but I can see how with some less evolved dudes it might be problematic.

Very curious to hear what others think about this.