Kameron Hurley

Condoms Beat AIDS

I mean, it’s no worse than that whole guys-dressed-up-as-blobs trying to get through the gate video they showed us in third grade.

Certainly more entertaining.

Posted in fun, sex | No Comments »

The 237 Reasons to Have Sex

And, here’s the list of the 237 reasons to have sex thus far recorded and tabulated for SCIENCE. Do be sure to nominate your own….

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Men & Women: Not So Different

I mean, it’s like, we come from the same planet and similiar cultures and everything.

After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations.

I mean, who would have guessed that the number one reason people have sex is “Because I was attracted to the person.”

Baffling, really.

What attractiveness means to different people (no matter the gender) varies quite a bit, which is why some people would argue that the title is a misnomer. I’d argue, in fact, that the title’s right on. A lot of women, growing up, hear that it makes us better people to be attracted to people primarily based on how “good” they are, and men are told it’s better to be attracted to people based on how “hot” the person is (socially determined standards of “attractive” of course). I think both genders factor in personality and looks, and those things influence each other to a huge degree, so sure, you’re going to bed with someone cause you’re attracted to them: what attraction is, what is means, varies wildly from person to person (which is why even those of us who are socially deemed “unattractive” by the media at large are still having lots of hot sex).

There were social things that were pretty unsurprising, too, like the fact that women were more likely to have sex to “please a partner” (or to say they wanted to have sex to please a partner: absolutely, there’s patriarchy and coersion and etc. to deal with, but I think men are more likely to omit this or pretend it’s something else, or even just more likely to refuse to have sex if they don’t feel like it because of privilige, I think).

The aggrevating thing about this “study” was that they left out all the good parts. Like, women rank “wanted to give sexual partner a sexually trasmitted disease” at the bottom of their list of reasons why they have sex, but they don’t say where men ranked this one (!). Why the omisson? Because it ranked #2 or because it ranked second to last? And then there’s this tantalizing quote at the end:

“Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some added,” Meston said.

Like what? What was missing? What were the top things people wrote in? And where’s a copy of the comprehensive list of 237?

Why does the AP always leave out the most interesting parts and make the huge “news” story about the “well duh” part?

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Oh, the Joys of Female Fighting

In addition to having class knock the crap out of every muscle in my body on Tuesday, I also had a sparring partner knee me just below my bellybutton on my left hand side. This also happens to be the side where my IUD, when it does pinch, pinches.

If she’d kneed me full force, I’d probably have punctured something. As it was, there was no blood, and when I checked the string it was still in place, but the bump to my uterus got the thing all worked up again, and I’ve been having those occasional jittery sorts of cramps that I was still getting a couple months after it got put in. Once again, starts pinching at me when I sit for long periods (again, a common symptom during the first three months), and it’s annoying enough that I’m considering going out and buying some Motrin.

I love my IUD cause there’s no weight gain, no diminished sex drive, and no depression (all symptoms I experienced while on various Pills). But once a month there’s seven days of blood and pain that used to just be five days of non-painful inconvienence.

What pisses me off is that when it comes to contraception, women get it coming and going. I’ve found that my contraceptive choices tend to be based on “which does me the least amount of pain, damage, and discomfort?” The IUD won.

One of the first things I looked into was, “What happens if I get hit during class?”
The answer really depends on how you get hit, best I’ve figured. Most women who end up with perforated uteruses have it happen on insertion, so if you can get through that OK, you’ll be all right.

Still, as I continue with class, it’s something I’ll have to keep an eye on. As a woman who hasn’t had a kid (and therefore has a smaller uterus), I’m not the ideal candidate for an IUD, and the problem of the tight fit has been an issue from the start.

But oh man does it beat depression and non-interest in sex.

Posted in fitness, sex | No Comments »

Take Me Out

I was looking at an ad for a play showing in Dayton tonight and saw this warning message attached to the ad in the local City Guide:

“WARNING: Contains strong lanauage and male nudity – not recommended for audiences under 17.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rating system that specificed the sex that was baring all. I’m assuming that the assumption here is that audiences will find a flacid male member far more intimidating than a pair of breasts (the play is also about race and homosexuality – maybe the whole “male nudity” thing is code for that in case insecure het men decide to go and see a “play about baseball” and get freaked out that it’s *also* about baseball…).

There’s no reason why a naked woman couldn’t be seen as powerful and sexually threatening and a naked man viewed as a docile object to be dominated. There are certainly *instances* of this, and much of the control of women and their bodies – what they show, to who, and when – is of course done because women *are* secretly seen as powerful. But it *is* a secret super power – the rest of the world doesn’t want to code it that way.

It does make me wonder if the whole bluster about male nudity is just a big sham to cover up the fact that the naked man is just as vulnerable – if not more so – than the naked female.

Ever so fascinating.

Posted in sex | No Comments »

When the Jokes Don’t Even Make Sense Anymore

I was idly plugging away at my stumbleupon toolbar and happened across a tired old joke that plays on expected gendered behaviors. It’s something like this: a guy’s in bed with his girlfriend and really wants to have sex with her, but once he’s all buttered up, she says she’s really not in the mood and why can’t we just cuddle? and doesn’t he want her for more than the fulfillment of his sexual desires? So the next day he goes out shopping with her, tells her to buy anything she wants, and watches her work herself into an “orgasmic fit” at the idea of purchasing all of these items. Then they get to the register and he says he no longer feels like buying her anything, and doesn’t she want him for more than his ability to buy her things?

The tone was from the first person male POV, with the shopping scene deliberately set up as a cool “ploy” to get his “point” across. It was mean-spirited.

But what struck me about this particularly gendered joke of the sort I see all the time was not just that it was stupidly sexist, but that this joke’s “punchline” relies on gendered norms that are completely foreign to my experience. It was a joke based on a shared assumption of behaviors. But it was an assumption I didn’t share, cause it wasn’t true in my life, so it wasn’t funny.

When you tell a joke, you’re playing on people’s actual experiences. You’re ribbing at everyday behaviors, everyday truths, and for the first time I realized that these jokes weren’t funny just because they were sexist or crass, but merely because, well they didn’t make fun of true experiences. It didn’t take behaviors out of context and make me look at them in new ways because this isn’t the way my relationships with people have ever worked.

I don’t find orgasmic fulfillment in shopping. It makes me feel *worse* about myself. And I’m generally the one who conflates sex with emotional fulfillment in a relationship (yes, I’m working on that). The men in my life don’t really buy me things. I struggle to be as fair and equal as possible in the purchasing of shared meals and trips, even when unemployed.

This joke didn’t make fun of my life.

It made me think about the shelf-life of sexism, workplace harrassment, etc. The more we live lives that *don’t* fit stereotypes and these rigid and absolute gender norms, the more people who speak in these terms look dated, old-fashioned. When an unmarried woman announces she’s pregnant these days, the first question out of people’s mouths isn’t immediately, “When’s the wedding?”

I suppose it’s too much to hope that sexism will just “go out of style,” but certain forms of it have, and I’m watching the rest follow suit. It’s why I can understand the fear and terror and violence of the people watching it go; the desperate cry of people watching an entire system of oppression, a system that’s kept them in power, headed for the door.

There are days when I worry that it really will take some kind of bloody, radical revolution to get to an egalitarian society. The problem with starting a society based on bloody revolution is that then you have to figure out how to police the bloody-handed revolutionaries. That world isn’t any better. I don’t really want a Joanna Russ world. What starts with fire and blood often ends with fire and blood.

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Blogging Will Save the World!

Blogging will not save the world.

I’m going to say that again: screaming on the internet will not save the world.

But it can be a good place to start.

Blogs are great places, but I see them more as testing grounds – as initial steps, as consciousness-raising – more than I see them as real, solid activism. They’re a form of, maybe, virtual activism. It’s where you go to find your voice and speak to others who’ve shared some of your experiences in the world and want to converse about a common cause or interest.

The trick is to then use this voice you’ve found online and speak out in the real world. If something is fucked up, you need to be able to say it’s fucked up just as easily in real life as you can online.

Because you’ll find that it’s a fuck of a lot easier to rip into the latest asshattery published by the Washington Post than it is to point out your coworker’s blatent sexism during a morning meeting. It’s a lot scarier to actually do than to talk about (like most things).

I remember standing around with some coworkers waiting for a meeting to start and having one of the guys make a “joke” about how one of our coworkers must be “shooting blanks” because they found out his wife was having “another” girl. For the first time in a long time, the not-coolness of it struck me deeply enough that I spoke up and said, “Wow, you’ve just offended every woman here.”

And I spoke up in part because of the voice I’d found on this blog. How could I be the writer of a blog called “Brutal Women” and be too terrified to call out a simple example of blatent sexism?

He laughed about it of course, and there were efforts made to move on to another subject, but I remember how difficult and terrifying it was to say that in the workplace to people I had to work with every day. Nobody wants to lose their job or get shunned by everybody else and have their job made horrible because you’re that fucking Nazi who “can’t take a joke.”

But nobody wants to live in the fucked up beat-you-down-somebody’s-gotta-be-top heirarchy either.

I got tired of people saying they “just didn’t know” something was not cool, offensive, abusive, etc. If you *tell* them they’re being sexist, at least you can take away that particular excuse, and maybe your courage can give other people courage. When enough people say no, you have a movement. Behavior changes.

While at Wiscon this weekend, I had somebody introduce me to somebody else as another writer’s girlfriend.

One sentence. Full stop.

I laughed out loud and said, “Wow, I can’t believe you just introduced me that way at a feminist SF con when I have a story coming out in a Year’s Best SF on Tuesday.”

I tried to be very good-natured about it, and she was actually a little embarassed about it I think, because it was something she did without even thinking about it. It was a funny thing, too, to be at a professional con and have the entirety of my writing career erased and my identity boiled down to “that chick who’s sleeping with so-and-so.”

These are all little things, of course, personal things. But if we let these sorts of things go, what else will we let go? The first step to altering behavior isn’t to ignore it or smile at it or make excuses for it. The first step is to change your own behavior and call out those normalized behavior in others.

I love to babble online, becuase it is, largely, safe. I can delete comments all I want. I can choose to share or not share things with certain people. I can control whether or not there are comments at all. I have yet to be fired from a job for something I said online (knock on wood). There isn’t a lot of danger in it.

What’s dangerous is speaking out at the office and confronting harrassers on the street.

It takes courage. It’s fucking hard. And terrifying.

But it’s the only way we’ll ever change anything.

The alternative to speaking out is not speaking out, and that’s worse. Silence in this culture implies consent (however fucked up that fucking fucked up idea is). By not speaking out, I am consenting. That’s how it’s read, no matter that I’m not speaking up because I’m afraid to be beaten, raped, harrassed, fired, etc.

It’s going to be read as consentual, because the means of oppression in this society are just so damned normalized.

And you know what? I want to live in a world that’s really different. And in that world, the sorts of sexist, oppressive people-like-me-are-better-than-you-and-we’ll-force-you-to-fuck-us-to-prove-it stuff that people say everyday is *not* normal, and it’s *not* OK, and if I can wrap my head around this idea – that the language of equality, of valuing individuals based on their humanity and not on their race, or class, or gender, is the *norm,* then when I hear these things spoken, they’re all the more shocking. They’re missives from another world where somebody’s got to be on top. Where a woman’s value is based on the man (always a man!) who she’s attached to, and if you can’t beat somebody else into submission then you’ll be the one who’s beaten.

That is not the world I want to live in. I have to speak from somewhere else.

Sure is a good thing I’m a fantasy writer.

Makes it easier to believe it can be different.

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Parthenogenesis Among.. Sharks

“Only a species under threat would reproduce this way.”

Well, then. That does give me some ideas for a few SF novels…

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Well, if REAL People are Going to Die…

“Here’s the headline from my morning paper: “HPV Factors in Throat Cancer: Study Could Shift Debate About Vaccine.” You bet it will. Up to now the HPV vaccine—which, again, has proven 100 percent effective against the cancer-causing strains of the virus—could merely prevent 10,000 cases of cervical cancer in American women every year, along with 4,000 deaths. But now the debate could shift—it will shift, it already has shifted—because it’s no longer “just” the lives of 4,000 American women that are on the line, but the sex lives of 150 million American men”.

I should be happy about whatever it takes to get a vaccine that PREVENTS CANCER covered by every insurance program out there, but fuck, this observation makes me angry. Cause it’s fucking true.

Who cares about 4,000 dead women? I mean, now we’re talking about something that could… that could… hurt men!!!

Well then, sign everybody up.

It would also make it more likely that the vaccine would be given to women AND men (and yes, I believe it should be mandatory for men – who do you think most women get HPV from, the Easter Bunny?), and that’s a huge omission that’s been pissing me off from the start.

God DAMN, this makes me angry.

I must be feeling better.

Posted in sex | No Comments »

Barring the Removal of a Certain Piece of Hardware, I Can’t Really Become Pregnant, So….

According to the definitions sections of Senate Bill 51:

The term woman means a female human being who is capable of becoming pregnant, whether or not she has reached the age of majority.

I do wonder what this mysterious Third Gender is, tho: what do we call all of those barren, menopausal, and sugically sterile women?

Do we get a special bathroom?

Posted in sex | No Comments »