Sexuality Happens

I like Amanda Palmer quite often. I’m still out on how I feel about her Evelyn Evelyn project, which deals with a faux discovered set of coinjoined twins (hence my issue with the project). However, usually, I think she’s pretty rad.

Recently, I discovered this video by AFP (Amanda Fucking Palmer) which is about pubic hair (watch out, it’s very catchy):

Now, the video is awesome, I love the fabulous merkins (vulva wigs), the beat is rocking…but I have some issues with the message. I totally 100% believe that we need to do away with the myths that a shaved vulva is sexier, that natural hair is gross, that shaving/waxing/etc is a cleaner option, and so on. Obviously, these are all bullshit, and just one more way to control women and their bodies.

HOWEVER, I’ve talked about this before and I’ll talk about it again. It is NOT sex positive or feminist in anyway to tell people that what they CHOOSE to do to their body is wrong, or as this song puts it “whack.” Vagina Monologues (which has its other issues as well) has a piece called Hair, in which it says “You cannot love the Vagina unless you love hair.” First of all, this is anatomically incorrect, as the vulva is where there is hair, not the vagina…and secondly, it tells those people that like the feel of having less/styled/different/no public hair that they clearly don’t love their vulva/vaginas or those of a partner.

I have done almost everything that there is to do with pubic hair (except dying it). I have cut it, styled it, shaved it, waxed it (never again — way too fucking expensive), etc. It is certainly NOT for any male gaze. And I identify as a sex positive woman and with parts of the femininist movement. Does this mean that I don’t love my vulva? That I’m wack? NO. I like the sensations of toys and tongues both with and without hair, and enjoy the differences that hair does and doesn’t provide. Some months I grow it out, other months I chop it off. My public hair and how I style it does not define me as a person, or whether or not a love female assigned genitala. The end.

I don’t know what the answer is. How do we reclaim the sexiness of having hair as an option without stepping on shavers/waxers/etc? It’s the same as how can we run the fat positive movement without saying horrible things about skinny people? (some people are naturally a size two, and yet often times the FP movement talks about them as if they are bulimic or anorexic when they are not, or calls them skinny bitches, etc). To be truly sex positive, or the type of feminist I identify as involves elevating global thinking WITHOUT HURTING others. When we step on people, say hurtful things, call them names, etc, solely in order to futher our own thoughts about things, we set all of us back.

So yes, I will probably continue to sing this song under my breathe, and I will DEFINITELY be using Map of Tasmania in the future. But Amanda Fucking Palmer, Eve Ensler, and the rest of you? Please stop judging people for choices that they make. Pubic hair is NOT gross…but not having it doesn’t make you a bad person, a failure as a woman, or even whack.

-Essin’ Em

And so it begins. I think it was Sophia St. James that started this blog/tumblr thing, but voila:

The Femmes Holding Animals Tumblr

Contribute! Make it awesome! We, as fierce and FABulous Femmes need to represent. All animals are welcome.

I’ve looked high and low and since I’m usually taking the pictures, there aren’t many of me actually WITH the kitties, but I’ve talked to Q, and we’re going to remedy that…because honestly, who doesn’t love hot femmes holding cute animals? Just saying…

-Essin’ Em

A cohort of mine from Widener University is behind this study, and I’m hoping to get lots of women and gender diverse people (who are/have been sexually intimate with women identified people) to participate. There is very little research done on queer sexuality, especially by people who recognize the difference between women, trans (men), gender queer and gender diverse. I’d love it if you’d support this great research by taking the survey if it applies to you, or at the very least (or if it doesn’t apply), passing it on, re-posting, etc. Thanks for doing your part in helping to create queer visibility and awareness.

-Shanna

This is a groundbreaking study about the lives of women and gender diverse people who are sexually intimate with women. Please participate and forward on to others who you think might be interested. Also, after you complete the survey, you can enter to win one of three $100 gift cards.

Are you a woman who is or has been sexually intimate with another woman?

—–OR—–

Are you gender diverse or trans and sexually intimate with women?

If you answered yes to either question, please take this survey

web.me.com/sexuality/

Who Can Participate?

You qualify if you identify as a woman who is sexually intimate with another woman OR a gender diverse person who is female-bodied, assigned female at birth and/or woman-identified and is sexually intimate with a woman. You must also be 18 years of age or older.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this research study is to better understand the sexuality of women who are sexually intimate with women, gender diverse people who are sexually intimate with women, and those who may not identify their sexual orientation and/or gender so narrowly. In this study, sexual behavior and sexual identity will be measured to better understand women, including gender diverse people who are female-bodied, assigned female at birth and/or woman-identified, who are sexually intimate with women and those with whom they partner.

Description of the Study

This study is about sexuality and identity of women and gender diverse people who sexually partner with women. The survey will take about 25 minutes to complete. The study is completely anonymous, meaning there will be no way to trace any questions or data back to you or your computer, and it is completely free to participate.

Win a $100 Gift Card

After you finish the survey, you will be invited to enter to win one of three $100 gift certificates to say thank you for participating.

Additional Important Information

The Widener University Internal Review Board (Protocol #38-11) has approved solicitation of participants. The Primary Investigator is Debbie Bazarsky, M.S., M.Ed. If you have any questions, you may email her at sexuality@me.com.

Today, November 20th, is National (and International) Transgender Day of Remembrance. In the last few years (and this video is from last year, so there are more names and faces to be sadly added), over 100 people have been murdered for their gender identity/presentation. This doesn’t even take into account the hundreds and possibly THOUSANDS of people who are assaulted based on their gender, and tens of thousands more who are harassed each and every day.

Please watch this video. Again, it’s a year old, so many people are missing, but if you cannot take nine minutes out of your life to remember those who we have lost due to violence against the transgender community, what does that say? After you watch it, please think for a moment, or two, or ten, what YOU can do to create change in your community, in our community. How can we make it stop? This is completely unacceptable and heartbreaking. No one should have to be scare to leave their home due to their gender, and they should certainly not be scared of being killed. This is flat out wrong, and regardless of your politics, or religion, or moral views, is is NEVER ok to hurt and/or murder someone because of who they are. Ever.

If we don’t stand up and create this change, no one will. Stand up for people who are being harmed and whose voices are being heard. Create change, NOW. And always, always remember those we have lost.

-Essin’ Em

Q and I will be participating, and if you’re engaged, I highly recommend you do as well. It’s important to participate in studies like this, to show the diversity of love and sexuality. It’s opened for engaged people of all genders and all orientations — you just have to not have kids, and be planning to have a wedding/ceremony/celebration of love in the next 12 months. Help a doctoral candidate out!

-Essin’ Em

Engaged volunteers needed!

I am looking for volunteers for a study of attitudes towards marriage and parenthood among engaged couples. The study consists of a 25-30 minute online survey. To qualify for the study, you must be 20-35 years old, live in the U.S., and plan to marry or have a commitment ceremony within the next 365 days. You and your romantic partner must not have children, and this must be the first marriage for both of you.

You can:

-Help a doctoral candidate;

-Increase the pool of scientific knowledge;

-Support research on marriage and families; and

-Spend some time thinking about your relationship!

I am working with Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. This study has been approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Review Board #2009025800.

If you and/or your romantic partner are interested in participating or want further information, please email me at survey.couples@gmail.com. I will send you a link that you can use to access the study.

Thanks!

Cristina Reitz-Krueger

Doctoral Student

University of Virginia

(434) 243-8558

survey.couples@gmail.com

I got an email, assumably from someone’s agent (I’m not quite sure), promoting an article about labiaplasty. For those of you who don’t know, this is plastic surgery on the labia. To make them look like some fictional, non-existant norm.

Let me reiterate what I say in every god damn class I teach. Vulvas are like snowflakes; each is unique, and beautiful just the way it is. I hold up Vivianne, my vulva puppet, and explain that sometimes the outer lips are biggers, but sometimes the inner lips are bigger. Sometimes the lips (either set, or even both) can be uneven.

There is NO reason, aside from a painful accident, to EVER, EVER EVER. Get labia plasty. Period. You are beautiful just the way YOU are(or your partner/friend/lover is beautiful just the way THEY are). Some of these surgeries require epic amounts of money, time, recovery, sometimes being put under…and sometimes, (often) the clients are still not happy with their vulvas.

Well, it turns out this article is PRO-Labiaplasty. Someone, somewhere, put me on a press list for fucking PRO genital mutilation articles…because that’s what non-emergency labiaplasty is. Genital mutiliation. The end. So I wrote back, asking if they had send me this because how atrocious and ridiculous this article was, supporting women cutting up their genitals to have some sort of “perfect” or “ideal” vulva that just doesn’t even exist.

Her answer?

This article was sent with the belief that women are allowed to do what they want with their vaginas and that there are far more atrocious things that can be done to them than labiaplasty.  That said, we find the article and subject matter interesting, and wanted to pass it along.

Thanks,
Amanda Z***********

Globalpost

THERE ARE FAR MORE ATROCIOUS THINGS THAT CAN BE DONE TO THEM OTHER THAN LABIAPLASTY. Um. What? I mean, if you’re going to count sexual assault, then yet. It doesn’t happen specifically to a vulva though — it happens to the whole person. I can honestly not think of anything worse happening to a vulva specifically than having it cut up. For not reason other than some non-existant ideal. Possibly losing most/all sensation in said lips.

I’m sorry, but while I support everyone’s right to make personal choices, I do not support our society telling vulva owners that they aren’t good enough, and so need to cut up their area of pleasure to appeal to some made up, bull shit standard.

The article itself, in the Global Post, did have one redeeming paragraph (out of two freaking pages talking about porn stars vulvas (NOT vaginas, btw) being the models for women who come in wanting vulva surgery because they want to look “perfect.’  The paragraph?

Virginia Braun, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, has also railed against the trend.

“We came to believe that, despite claims that they are about empowering women and improving women’s sexual pleasure, these surgeries were being recommended out of a misogynist disregard for women’s genital diversity and a willingness to exploit women’s lack of knowledge and confidence about their genitals,” she wrote in a study called “The ‘Designer Vagina’ and the pathologisation of female genital diversity: Interventions for change,” published in Radical Psychology earlier this year.

Otherwise, fuck this. Anyone who tells me that their are many worse things that can happen to ANYTHING is making excuses and creating a hierarchy of oppression.

Well, she sure did give me something to write about, although I’m sure it’s not the way she expected.

Love every vulva. Irregardless. The end.

-Essin’ Em

Excerpt from ShannaKatz.com…

When I was 10 or so, I discovered the wonders of the internet. It was back in the mid-90s, before most people had access, but my father was a computer scientist, and I was rocking out on Mosaic, way before IE or Eathlink or Netscape or AOL made their brands so popular. I didn’t use it for much, as there wasn’t that much info out there pertaining to me, but I did have an email, and learned how to search.

Around the late 90s, I was in my “oh em gee, want to learn everything possible about puberty and sex” and after my parents exhausted the info available at the local library, I was lucky enough to discover Scarleteen. It was still quite young back then, but it was knowledge, and that was something I was desperately hungry for. More importantly, it was more than just information; it was interactive. I could learn from older teens, from educators, from people my age. I became obsessive about checking the forums every day. It was a way for me to connect, to get information, to teach myself about sexuality, to have my questions answered, and to get to know my body.

I didn’t really get any sort of sex education from school until I was a Junior in High School (age 14), and accidentally ended up in a Parenting and Child Development class (amusing, since I definitely didn’t want and don’t want children). In that class, we spent a good week or two on birth control and contraception. I got 100% on every assignment, and impressed the teacher, as I already had learned most of this info from Scarleteen.

High school was hard for me. I graduated at 16, so I was always about 2-3 years younger than most of my peers, and that caused endless taunting and worse, being ignored. I had my inner circle of friends, of course, but more importantly, I had the knowledge that on Scarleteen, I was equal. My questions and answers were just as valid as a popular cheerleader, or another braniac. To me, sex education was my great equalizer. I might not be cool, or popular, or the social ideal of beautiful, but because I had information that no one else had, I was still interesting. I might get teased, but people still wanted what I had (knowledge) and so I wasn’t the brunt of as much hate as I might have been.

Click here to read the rest of How Sex Ed Saved My Life.

I did this last year, and think it’s worth re-doing…

-Essin’ Em

I got this idea from the brilliant site Feministing.com. Of course, now that I’m going back to try and find some of their examples of things they could do without, I can’t for the life of me find their posts. Bah, humbug.

Regardless, here is my snarky list o’ the week of things I can do without. They actually aren’t really in any particular order, just as I’ve thought of them.

10. The assumption that the average woman should be a 36-24-26, size 2, 36DD, blonde, etc, what have you. People are beautiful in so many different ways, different sizes, different colors. The average size in America is a 12-14. AVERAGE. Not a 2. 2 is a fine size. So it is 22. Let’s stop being so fucking ridiculous in our expectations and searches for perfection. People of ALL sizes, from 0 on up to 32+ are all beautiful people. The end.

9. The Tea Party movement, and I don’t mean Alice in Wonderland. Some of those people are really scary…like, they make George Bush look like a bedtime story.

8. Straight men who think that they can turn queer women straight. Straight women who thing they can turn queer men straight. Queer women who think they can turn straight women queer. Queer men who think they can turn straight men queer. Monogamous people who think that everyone should be the same. Non-monogamous people who think everyone should be the same. It’s just rude. Kinky people who want to kinkify non-kinky people. In every direction. Why are we so eager to change other people’s identities?

7. Hypocrites. Nuf’ said. They piss me off. A lot.

6. Those who do not recognize their privilege. I understand that you cannot change certain things (race, gender, age, ability, etc), and that you may not *want* to change certain things (class, appearance, etc). However, that does not excuse not recognizing that you HAVE that privilege. Do with it what you will, but at least own it.

5. Laundry. I really hate having to do it. And it takes forever, and I never have enough quarters, and our washer is broken, so I have to carry them to the laundry room, up stairs, and it’s just horrible. If I never had to do it again, I’d be estatic.

4. People who feel like they own the road/bad drivers. You *have* a turn signal. Please use it. Let people in occasionally, especially in heavy traffic, or when their lane is ending. Wave a little instead of flipping people off. Don’t go freaking 20 over, drive the wrong way down one ways, back up the street, drive over medians, etc. Really, it’s easy. Just don’t be a douchehat. Simple as that.

3. Violence as a solution. Violence NEVER has a reason to be the solution. Talk. Go punch a wall. Go have sex. Go eat a pint of ice cream. When I say violence, I mean everything from domestic violence to wars, road rage to genocide. It solves nothing. Period.

2. Spiders. Really. Ugh. I KNOW they eat mosquitos, so I can possibly amend this to “spiders that are inside” or “spiders that are where I are, and/or exist in my personal sphere of life.” But they are terrifying AND dangerous. Especially in Arizona, where we have TARANTULAS.

1. How society drives us to feel better by putting people down. We judge others on their bodies, what they where, what car they drive, where they shop, where they go to school, etc. This tears us apart. We call each other sluts, whores, fat, etc (in non-positive ways). How does taking other people down build us up? And why do we let society control us this way? I do not approve.

What are ten things YOU could do without?

I entered a writing contest back in August. The prompt was to write approximately 1000 word about my coming out story. Here it is:

My coming out story isn’t just one day, or a week or even year. In fact, my coming out story isn’t finished. It is happening every day of every week of every year.

In college, I discovered the concept of orientation being fluid, and realized that I liked some of the women on campus. I joined QSA and EQUAL, and began to identify as bisexual. I told my mother and sister, and they reacted as expected; they didn’t really care.

Then in graduate school, I decided that I didn’t really like men anymore; I became a proud, flag-flying lesbian. I’m actually not kidding about the flag. I was a lesbian, and I liked women, and was attracted to women, and I came out to my friends and family and work and then…suddenly, I hit a speed bump.

Why? Well, I was suddenly dating someone that didn’t identify as a woman. I was dating a gender queer identified person. She didn’t care what pronouns people used to refer to him. When we were out and about, sometimes people saw us and identified us as a lesbian or dyke couple…other times, I could swear that people thought I was a twenty-something woman robbing the cradle with a 15-year old guy.

I loved this person. And this person didn’t identify as a woman. So I did what most young people in the middle of an identity crisis would do; I went online. And as I searched blogs and forums, I came across the term “Pansexual.” Ok, I thought. I can be pansexual, and be attracted to many people across the sexual spectrum. I was now a card carrying (I’m joking about the card) pansexual woman. Great. I started coming out to people as such on a regular basis.

In the midst of all this, I discovered something else about myself. Despite my angry feminist moments in college where I distained all things feminine as a creation of our misogynist culture and the patriarchy, I realized that while I didn’t embrace all or even most feminine things, my gender identity was developing, and it happened to have a Femme bent to it. One person I was seeing told me one day that I was “such a Femme.” I froze. I had always thought that being feminine or even a Femme was a bad thing, capitulating to social norms. But here I was, having spent almost an hour getting ready, getting a tingle in my stomach as my date opened the door for me, and a smile on my face as they brought me a drink. I had embraced the power of femininity, and I realized that even though I rarely wore heels and was allergic to pink, I am a Femme. Femme is my gender.

So here I was, a Pansexual Femme, and trying to come out to people. Trying to explain how Femme differed from female or woman was hard enough, but when I got into the term pansexual, people shut down. It was too academic, too different, too much. As I continued to prowl around online, I found that pansexual was a privileged term; it was mostly people in academia using it (and often just open minded bisexual people). I didn’t identify as bisexual, and I didn’t want a term that wasn’t accessible to everyone.

That is when I discovered the term QUEER. I was at a house party I’d been invited to by a fellow fierce Femme from roller derby, and I started talking to people about identity. At this party were people of all different gender presentations, from high femme to stud, gender queer and andro to trans folks of various presentations. And let me tell you, almost everyone at this party was smoking hot. I was trying to figure out how one would identify if you were a fierce Femme (IE, me) who was attracted to pretty much everyone in the room, and then, magically, I heard the term QUEER. It fit. It was perfect. It was me. It was an identity that fit me regardless of what I was wearing, who I was attracted to, what my own gender identity was, and everything else.

Now, as Queer Femme, I had to re-come out to everyone I’d already come out to. My family was open to it, but needed some education on the term queer. My co-workers were already reading Judith Butler and Kate Bornstein, so they got it. Some of my friends asked me what took me so long to figure that out, while others still thought of the term queer as a hateful term, and that involved much discussion.

When I moved to Arizona, the coming out process started all over again. Explaining my gender as Femme is always a hoot; people assume that unless you’re trans or gender queer, your gender is just a given. Mine is not. Femme is an attitude, a belief system, a presentation, and it is my deliberate gender. And here in Arizona, very few people understand my queer identity, and so it’s been an opportunity for education. My coming out story never ends, because I have to come out to everyone I meet, and everyone I’ve met, and because my identities are so fluid, sometimes I have to come out to myself.

The other day, my partner’s softball coach referred to me as her “roommate.” I was hurt and angry and frustrated. I’d come out to him already; as queer, as her partner, as her fiancé, and yet here he was, invalidating our relationship. So we both came out to him again. And will do so again if needed.

THIS is why coming out is so important. It creates visibility, and dialogue, and understanding, and these three things create change in our community. It is only with change that we can be seen as full members of our society, instead of second class citizens. So please, keep on coming out.

Happy Coming Out Day!

-Essin’ Em