The other day Charlie was sitting and watching TV while I was at the computer reading blogs (the computer is in the dining room, and the TV is in the living room, six feet away). He was being a typical guy and watching some crazy crap on the Discovery channel (and not Discovery Health which has cool shows I like to watch, but some other channel), and they were doing a show about sewage.
Fascinated, Charlie wouldn't allow me to interrupt him when I had a question, and said he was hoping that the show would answer a burning question he had. A few minutes later he said, "I was sitting on the toilet the other day and I realized that around the world, 300 million people are all taking a crap right now." Then he turned to me expectantly.
I looked at him blankly for a moment, wondering what possible response he could be hoping I'd offer. After a moment I said, "I have to say, love, that I cannot see a time, ever, when that thought would organically occur to me." Nor, I must say, would I ever have such a pressing question about sewage that I would watch a TV show about it and refuse to be interrupted.
In many ways, Charlie and I are not "typical" in our gender roles; I'm more likely to pick up a screwdriver than he is, and he's into a bare minimum of sports (hockey and, more recently, boxing). Charlie also does not view the parenting he does as being anything other than his job (as do I)--in other words, he doesn't expect to be rewarded for changing a diaper or going to Tori when she wakes up at night.
But in other ways, we are typical. I, for instance, do not care about sewage, and he finds it fascinating ("It's treated with bacteria!" he gushed at me after the show is over). But all the talk about sewage got me thinking about where it comes from.
Ass has been on my mind lately ever since I read this article (link via Feministing). I'm not sure (and either was Feministing) what was worse--the article itself or the fucking heinous picture that goes with it. Take a good, long look. Feel subjugated? I sure as hell do.
As a woman who has been sexually active for 25 years (holy crap), with many of those years spent "exploring" (a nice way of saying "being a slut"), I have been asked to have anal sex exactly once in my life, and that was so unusual at the time (about 17 years ago, I think) that I dumped the guy immediately (full disclosure--he also had a foot fetish; I might have been able to handle one or the other, but not both).
But that has changed, according to the article. I'm not surprised; if you've watched porn over the last twenty years (what?), you've seen the rise of anal sex from a fringe fetish to a required standard act. If it's in pornography, you can bet your ass (heh) that men are going to start asking for it.
What surprised me about the article, however, is the idea that some men view anal sex as LESS INTIMATE than vaginal sex. Seriously? I don't know any women--not a single fucking one--that would not completely disagree. NO FUCKING WAY is any woman I know having anal sex with any man she doesn't fully and totally love and trust already.
The other appalling thing about this article is that men view having anal sex with a woman as an important thing to brag about. Gah. I'm am very, very proud to say that none--NONE--of the men I know ever brag about the sex acts they have--other than one of Charlie's college buddies (but he's reformed now that he's married). Ironically, every single woman I know does indeed share sex details, but I wouldn't call it bragging particularly. No, we women don't brag, we share information. Heh.
On a side note, it does seem like more people are also eating ass. After all, a common phrase you hear these days is that something "tastes like ass." How do people know? Again, in pornography, there are a lot more tongues touching assholes in the last few years than ever before (again, what?). I remember years ago in the movie Working Girls (no, not Working Girl with Melanie Griffith--one of my fav movies of all time--but a different movie) about a high-class brothel, one of the characters wanted a woman to lick his asshole, and that was considered highly freakish--by prostitutes (she faked it in the movie, by the way--it was considered that vile).
In the Details article a few men at least were willing to admit the truth about anal sex--it's really about domination and submission. I'm not a feminist scholar, or a woman studies major, or even a very good feminist (see: my common use of the words "bitch" and "cunt") but it seems pretty fucking obvious to me that the higher women rise in society, the more likely they are to be humiliated and degraded sexually. First, in pornography (easy to do, eh?). After all, back in the 70's, women didn't have men ever ejaculate on their faces (they were just degraded in the standard ways). That came in the late 80's and 90's--and now it's all about anal sex. Eventually everything crosses from pornography into "real" life, and men begin to expect degrading sex acts from women as a matter of routine. At least that's how it seems to me (my personal experience is only with the face ejaculation thing--not long before I exited the "dating" scene, that became a common request. That was denied.).
Course, I may be talking out of my ass here--after all, I've been in a monogamous relationship for nearly 15 years. I have no idea what men are really demanding out there these days (other than what the women I know tell me). All I know is that if men like those in that magazine article really exist, I am very fucking glad I'm not single. Very, very glad.
