One of the things I remember, most of 20 years later: mass nouns and count nouns.

Mass nouns: salve. water. willingness. mathematics. identity.

Count nouns: stone. leg. olive. book. person.

I haven’t thought much this week about men’s sexual desire, but women’s sexual desire has been right at the front of my mind, due to the NYT Magazine article, excerpted from Daniel Bergner’s forthcoming book.

Anyone who’s been reading the blog for a while knows that I’ve been looking and looking for effective ways to talk about WHY there won’t ever be a drug for women’s sexual desire (and PS – there isn’t a drug for men’s sexual desire either, just drugs for their AROUSAL, which is related but not identical).

Tonight I’m trying a new one:

Medications are good at interfacing with count nouns: bacteria. blood cells. neurotransmitters.

Medications are not so good at interfacing with mass nouns: trust. body image. trauma. stress. sleep deprivation. attachment.

And these are the some of the nouns that predict low sexual desire.

The drug companies have taken some really good whacks at the likely countable nouns that are probably involved in sexual desire – dopamine and testosterone, for example. (Technically these are also mass nouns – you can’t have 7 dopamines – but they are strictly MEASURABLE in a way that “trauma” and “body image” are not. Hm, I think my analogy is falling down.)

Women’s sexual desire is like water: trying to find a drug that will change it is like trying to change how a river flows by throwing different kinds of stones in it. It’s just the wrong approach. You have to move the banks.

Women’s sexual desire is like flocking (a gerund – slightly cheating on my “mass noun” analogy, but still within the rules!): trying to find a drug that will change it is like trying to stop a flock from flocking by convincing some of the birds to behave differently; the flock still emerges.

Women’s sexual desire is like choral music: trying to find a drug that will change it is like trying to change a tune by changing the singers.

Is this making sense?

Women’s sexual desire is an emergent property of the interaction between multiple systems, including the sexual excitation and inhibition systems, of course, but also the stress response mechanism, the attachment system, that predictive processing thing I mentioned in my last post, and many, many other components. And twiddling with one of the components is unlikely to have a big impact, in the way that change one bird in a flock or one singer in a choir is unlikely to change the outcome of those systems.

I want to say very clearly that the science has illuminated a number of things that really do seem to work: mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic experiencing, media literacy and cognitive dissonance exercise, building trust and communication, even simply reframing what it means “to want sex.” Research has shown these things to be effective. They work. Want to increase sexual desire? Try any of these. Warning: side effects may include improved mood, reduced anxiety, better relationships, better health, better sleep, reduced use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, and easier orgasms.

These strategies may not help you if you just want desire to COME, without any effort (“like it used to”). But desire is context dependent; sometimes life spontaneously offers erotic contexts (“it used to”), and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you can CREATE them. Move the banks of the river.

You can change the way your body responds to the world by changing the way you live inside your body. It’s an incredibly powerful thing to do – profoundly feminist, as well as being the evidence-based approach.

That intercourse which takes place between two sexually mature individuals of opposite sexes; which excludes cruelty and the use of artificial means for producing voluptuous sensations; which aims directly or indirectly at the consummation of sexual satisfaction, and which, having achieved a certain degree of stimulation, concludes with the ejaculation – or emission – of the semen into the vagina, at the nearly simultaneous culmination of sensation – or orgasm – of both partners (p. 145).

Then this, from The Hite Report (1976), from the chapter titled “Redefining Sex”:

Sex is intimate physical contact for pleasure, to share pleasure with another person (or just alone). You can have sex to orgasm, or not to orgasm, genital sex, or just physical intimacy – whatever seems right to you. There is never any reason to think the “goal” must be intercourse, and to try to make what you feel fit into that context. There is no standard of sexual performance “out there,” against which you must measure yourself; you aren’t ruled by “hormones” or “biology.” You are free to explore and discover our own sexuality, to learn and unlearn anything you want, and to make physical relations with other people, of either sex, anything you like (p. 365).

And I asked the students, “Which of these is more like the one you learned, growing up?”

No contest. Ideal Marriage.

And so I asked them why. “How come what you learned in the first two decades of your life is more like the 90 year old sex advice than like the 40 year old sex advice? How come this 40 year old sex advice isn’t what everybody believes now?”

“Because elephants are slow!” called one student.

“Yes. Well done.”

I said “Well done” because this was April, and I taught the thing about the elephants way back in January. I began the very first lecture of the semester with Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations research, and with his analogy of the elephant and the rider. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt writes that the rider is “conscious, controlled thought” and the elephant is, “everything else. The elephant includes gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions […]. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings. But they don’t always work together well” (p.17).

I describe the rider as a storyteller, constructing a meaningful narrative that allows her to explain how the elephant got where she is and, crucially, to predict where the elephant might go next. And when the rider changes the story, she clears a path for the elephant, tempting the animal to take the new, welcoming route – “What if we go this way?” (The technical term for this is “hierarchical predictive processing,” but if I told my students that, they’d dutifully write down the term and a definition and stop thinking. I want them thinking, so I talk about elephants and storytelling riders.)

But it takes time for the elephant to adapt to a new path, for the new story to become simply the truth. The old story follows a path worn by two decades’ steady traffic; it will take time to grow over, and the new path will take time, practice, and repetition before it feels as open and easy as the old one.

It’s a sturdy metaphor, but it gets a little harder when we lift our vision from the single elephant and rider, to consider the herd. Ready?

Each person in a culture – each storyteller – is a hologram of a larger, cultural storyteller, which guides us – a herd of elephants – along the old paths. If new trail is made, it is made gradually, sometimes accidentally, by the shifting traffic of our traveling elephants.

A couple of things become apparent: First every rider has a slightly different view of the path; every rider’s story is just a little bit different from her neighbor’s. And second, if the herd gets big enough, it may well happen that smaller groups form little sub-packs.

The particular subpack to which I belong involves a group of riders have asked, “What if we’re a group of riders on elephants? What if everything we know about sex is a story we’ve been told? How would we go about understanding sex as it really is, rather than as we’ve been told it is?” These are the sex researchers, educators, and therapists who trained me and whose work constitutes the bulk of my course content.

I stumbled accidentally on this little pack of riders and elephants back in college, and I instantly felt I’d found a home with them. I’ve been with them so long now that sometimes it’s a struggle to remember what it’s like on the old, main path.

So I lead my students along this alternative path, and sometimes their elephants freak the hell out to find themselves on a path so unfamiliar and comparatively unworn.

I teach them a skill for managing their elephant’s freak out:

Pause. Notice your elephant’s reaction and give her permission to be uncomfortable. But don’t let her run back to the old path just yet – let her know this is a hypothetical, just another “what if.”

“In the Washington Post on Sundays there’d be Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” […] and it would say from time to time – they would run this story, roughly “According to aerodynamic theory, bumblebees cannot fly!” And this made quite an impression on me. And I spent some time watching bumblebees, and it became clear to me that the bees are fine. The problem is with the theory.

I’ve spent a giant chunk of today workin’ on the book, trying to find clear ways to talk about how people THINK women’s sexuality works, contrasted with how science has increasingly over the last two decades shown how women’s sexuality actually DOES work.

All the ways in which the cultural theory of women’s sexuality has fallen short, man. What orgasm is like, how desire works, the appearance and behavior of genitals, how to tell “what a woman really wants,” all of these things endless speculated about, moralized over, rubbed raw with worry and fretting.

The women are fine. The problem is with the theory.

But women, unlike bees, can listen to all the theories that tell them they can’t fly, and what happens then? All of a sudden, it’s true. They can’t fly.

The problem is still with the theory.

The book, such as it is, is about the ways that women are fine.

Okay that’s all.

So we’re monkey’s right? (No, we’re not monkeys, we’re apes, but monkey is a better word, and it’s close enough for jazz – and this whole thing is simplified but close enough.) We’re monkeys who evolved to survive on the savanna of Africa, where we did things like get chased by lions and stuff. We have an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism called The Stress Response Cycle that helps us to cope with lions and other threats. This is how it works:

You brain notices a threat in the environment. It activates a massive flood of adrenaline and cortisol and things, and it does a quick assessment (which is continues, ongoing, until the threat is gone), and puts the threat into one of three general categories:

1. A threat you are most likely to survive if you run away.

2. A threat you are most likely to survive if you beat the shit out of it.

3. A threat you are too slow to run from and too weak to beat up.

And when your brain has made its decision, it uses all that adrenaline and cortisol and things, to make you DO something, and it also happens to cause you to FEEL something too.

For Threat #1, it causes you to try to escape. What emotion goes with trying to escape? Fear. Anything from mild worry to aject terror. This is called “FLIGHT.”

For Threat #2, it causes you to try to beat the shit out of the threat. What emotion goes with trying to beat the shit out of someone? Anger. Anything from mild irritation to blind, slavering rage. This is called “FIGHT.”

For Threat #3, it slams on the brakes and causes you to shut down, like a possum in the road. What emotion goes with this? Numbness. Nothing. Empty. This is called “FREEZE.”

Wwhat happens next is one of two things: EITHER the the lion eats you or whatever the threat is kills you… in which case none of this matters anymore… OR you survive.

Take the example of the lion. What if you get all that adrenaline, your brain goes, “RUN!” and you successfully make it back to your village, where everyone helps you kill the lion and you all eat it for dinner and the next day you reverently and gratefully bury the parts of the carcass you won’t be using for other things? How do you feel then?

Relieved! Joyful! Glad to be alive! You love your friends and family!

That, friends, is the complete stress response cycle.

Now, these days we hardly ever get chased by lions. Lions are an excellent stressor because they are ACUTE: the stressor has a clear beginning, middle, and end. These days our stressors tend to be CHRONIC, with no clear end.

And as a result, we get stuck in incomplete stress response cycles.

When we get stuck in FLIGHT, that can turn into anxiety or panic attacks.

When we get stuck in FIGHT, that can turn into anger management issues, rage.

When we get stuck in FREEZE, that can turn into depression.

Depression is what’s up with Allie, the author of Hyperbole and a Half.

So she’s stuck in freeze. She’s numb, right? Because she’s frozen like a bunny under a bush, waiting for a fox to stop stalking her.

And her friends are being emotion dismissing – which, well intentioned though it may be, is not helpful.

And can actually make things worse, because the depressed person may start to feel guilty or ashamed of not feeling better, even though their FREEZE state is a perfectly legitimate physiological reality.

When you’re in freeze, it seems like your feelings are a deep, dark hole. Bottomless. And you’re stuck forever.

In reality (though people in freeze often have no way of knowing this, and it’s difficult to find motivation to believe it), feelings are tunnels; they’re CYCLES, with a beginning, middle, and end. And you have to go all the way through the tunnel, through the cycle, to get to the other side of it.

But people get stuck in freeze.

And other people have no idea how to help, because there is no “thing you can do” to get out of freeze.

If you’re a bunny hiding under a bush, frozen because a fox is out there, what will get you out of freeze?

The fox going away.

In this case, the fox is in Allie’s own brain.

 So what does she need? What will help?

What Allie needed – what depressed folks often need – is just someone to sit on the floor with her and grieve for the dead fish.

Because that would help her to unlock, to move through the tunnel. Because grief is a feeling, not numbness. In fact, even her annoyance that no one could understand was a feeling, not numbness, so it’s a good start.

But instead, Allie got more and more stuck until eventually she didn’t know why to be alive anymore. And when you tell people you don’t know why to be alive anymore, they have feelings. And when you’re stuck in freeze, Other People’s Feelings are THE WORST. And you’ll do pretty much whatever to make it stop.

So she went to the doctor. Got some drugs. Got some therapy.

And started to unlock from FREEZE. Which is similar to thawing your hands when you come in from shoveling snow. It hurts.

A difficulty with major depression is that it’s rare to go from FREEZE to HAPPY without going through some FIGHT or FLIGHT first. Your body needs to COMPLETE interrupted stress response(s) that the FREEZE has kept frozen for all this time.

Allie’s body went to FIGHT. And she hated everything. And she LET HERSELF hate everything, which is the key! She didn’t try not to hate things.

And when she got to the end of the FIGHT, her body went to GRIEF, which I haven’t talked about here but it’s related to this. Basically your body has to let go of what it was holding onto for a long time, in order to create space for the new thing.

And your job is just let it happen. Which can be uncomfortable.

As Allie unlocked from FREEZE, as she completed some of the accumulated incomplete stress response cycles, her physiology changed. It cleared out space.

And when you clear out all the accumulated stress crap, you create space… for feelings!

Pleasure!

Fun!

Non-bullshit!

She followed/is following the process exactly. People oscillate around a recovery point for a long time, while their body/brain practices complete stress response cycles. And eventually it becomes second nature, and your central nervous system retunes itself to a more pleasure-attuned key.

I wish someone had explained all this to Allie sometime early on in the process.

Or maybe someone did, and that’s how she can tell the story, explain the process, with such exactness and precision. But I don’t think so, somehow. I think she had to find her own way through it without understanding it as she went.

Not that understanding make it easier, exactly – in the same way that knowing how and why and when your hands will thaw doesn’t make warming them after shoveling snow hurt less – but I’ve found that my students, anyway, benefit from knowing that the path they’re walking is a trail, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the more you practice walking all the way through, the better you get at it. It helps you to ALLOW the whole process, the way you allow your hands to thaw, without wondering if you’re doing it right.

But y’all can benefit from the combined storytelling chops of Ms Brosh and the Power of Science.

All four experts say, in short, “Start early, start often.”

Yes. Yes. Children should learn about sexuality the same way they learn about nutrition and hygiene and families and being kind.

But they don’t, and the reason they don’t is because the grownups are mired in a dangerous combination of lack of knowledge and abject fear.

How can we teach our children what we don’t understand ourselves?

The answer is that we ARE teaching our children, every day we are transferring to them our ignorance and fear – and the fear keeps us ignorant, and the ignorance keeps us afraid. I think Justin Richardson hits closest to the bone when he talks about how parents respond to seeing their son play with his penis, or whether or not they include “vagina” (VULVA!) in the bathtub song about body parts. In every moment, we communicate our uncertainty to others, and we teach them to be uncertain themselves.

The larger culture, both moralistic and capitalistic, has a vested interest in keeping us that way. And it’s working. The ancient morality-based social control mechanisms are the reason that otherwise evidence-informed practices such as medical education and mental health professional training include so very, very little sex education. The newer but powerful capitalism-based social control mechanisms (mostly the media) are the reason that young people think far more about what they’re supposed to be doing sexually than about how what they’re doing feels. It’ about performance, not experience.

So, how about 5 tips for being an awesome sex educator, no matter who you are, where you are, or what you do?

1. Love living inside your own body, including the sexual aspects of your body. The challenge here is in tuning your attention away from external voices about your body, from family of origin messages, from culture, from anything but the voice you had inside you the day you were born, the voice that is perfectly, deeply, serenely certain of your beauty, delight, and joy.

2. Allow the infinite in you to recognize the infinite in other people. Look people in the eye when you see them and think to yourself, “The infinite in my recognizes the infinite in you.” It’s okay if it’s not true; it’s okay if it is true. Just allow yourself to think it, allow yourself to look at their eyes and consider the possibility.

3. Pay attention to sensations – all the sensations. Pay attention to the texture of strawberries against your tongue and between your teeth. Pay attention to the way the fine hair on your lover’s forearm tickles the tip of your nose. Pay attention to the tension of your muscles as your body approaches orgasm, allow that tension, give it space. Pay attention to the way your feet feel in your shoes, the way your feet feel out of your shoes, the way your feel feet against the grass and the dirt.

4. Listen to things other people enjoy sexually. Notice when things they say make you feel uncomfortable. Reassure yourself that what they like in bed has nothing to do with what you like in bed, and that everyone gets to enjoy and do all the things they want to enjoy and do with whatever consenting peers choose to be involved. And having stuff you don’t want to do is just as okay as having stuff you do want to do. Having stuff you’ve done is just as okay as having stuff you’ve never done. This is autonomy. Your sexuality belongs TO YOU and you alone; their sexuality belongs TO THEM and them alone.

5. The strongest leaders lead not from their anger and frustration and fear, but from their vision of the world as it could be. Have hope. See a world you want to move toward, and take just one step forward today. Take one more step tomorrow. And one more after that. Justice and peace and a joyful, sex positive world are exactly like the ruby slippers – you had it with you all the time.

Go. Do.

Consent. Satisfaction. Confidence. Joy.

Go.

The students I work with, if they know who MacKinnon is well enough to have an opinion, have a critical opinion of both her as a well known anti-pornography feminist, widely believed to have asserted that “All sex is rape.” She didn’t, and neither did Andrea Dworkin. It turns out this belief was created by the creators of sexually explicit media, who clearly have a vested interest in lambasting and sidelining any argument against them.

All that contempt my students (and probably many of you, and for a long, long time I too) experience in response to these names is, it turns out, largely a product of an intentional effort by powerful corporate forces to discredit feminism as a voice in the mainstream discourse about the media. Reading their work, I can’t agree with them, but nor can I have contempt for them, in the face of their intellectual and moral integrity.

And yet. Despite this – and understanding the ACTUAL, deeper, more complex argument about rape culture and the eroticisation of female submission – I did not get so far as knowing that it was MacKinnon’s work that incorporated sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination.

And here’s the thing: MacKinnon is an alumna of this institution where I work, and she was a major force in creating the legal paradigm that informs a major portion of my job. And yet EVEN *I* was not aware of her role.

In 2011, the Office of Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter specifying that sexual assault is a form of sexual harassment, and sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination and therefore constitutes a violation of Title IX, which entitles girls and women access to all programs and resources available to boys and men in schools that receive federal funding. Here is her work, showing up in PDF form in my email, as a letter from the OCR. Basically it said, “Dear Emily, an alumna says hi, and PS don’t screw up too badly because there’s probably another student in your aegis who will go on to be just as much of a hellraiser who gets some shit done.”

I could feel ashamed of myself for not knowing about MacKinnon’s role already, but instead I think I’m more justified in feeling really pissed and frustrated with the world that has taught me. I’m a person who actively seeks out a wide range of information, so my ignorance is not for want of either understanding or curiosity.

That the myth of MacKinnon has made more of an impact that the truth, speaks, I think, to the nature of media: we attend to what holds our attention, remember that feel true, what matches the world as we already know it. The anti-sex termagant archetype is an easy fit with the world. The idea of sexual harassment as a civil rights violation is more challenging, because of the same cultural infrastructure that makes the termagant idea so comfortable.

So, basically, fuck the media. Fuck it all the hell.

…I think in real life, people want to have what Emily is describing, but it’s such a difficult performance particularly for guys, because it involves constant consensual pushing of boundaries, performing overwhelming desire while still being in control and ready to control oneself at every point. Since that’s so hard to do – and it is – it’s not something easy to imagine for most people, so they end up writing and imaging a scenario involving the overwhelming emotional force that they can imagine – alas, it’s non-consensual.

So, I think there’s a circular problem here: the fact that this is so hard to do makes people reluctant to write about it, and the fact that people aren’t writing about it makes is even more dificult to perform.

… I would still find it very hard to logically match feminist concern for explicit and if possible constantly reaffirmed consent with the kind of desire and performance described. I understand the trust part, but, just like a safeword, it turns the feminsit affirmative consent ideal into a classic no-means-no scenario. Which is perfectly fine. I just don’t think it’s compatible with a lot of feminist arguments in this respect.

To which I responded I would write one: a scene with ongoing consent with ongoing boundary pushing, that is as empowered as a heroine can be and as respectful as a hero can be, while still edging along the borderline of consent.

I made it as difficult for myself as possible. The worst things happen when the hero is certain that sex is going to happen and the heroine has no such thought in mind. So that’s what I wrote, the worst-case-scenario that works out just fine. It’s not great literature, but for one day’s work, it does the job.

Set-up: it’s London, 1926, and this is the son of a Viscount and an artist who’s been commissioned to paint him. I constructed more emotional context for myself, outlined a whole story around the scene, but I don’t think you need all that to see the dynamic.

First from her point of view:

Marigold tossed herself on the couch and put a hand over her eyes. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

“You had two pints, you’re barely squiffy.”

“Well.” No, it wasn’t the alcohol that made her feel this way. “I feel far too relaxed. I should go to bed.”

She felt his weight sink into the couch, near her feet, and then suddenly he was beside her, laying along her entire length, tangling his hands in her hair. Her eyes flew open in surprise, searched his face. His eyes were glassy in the white glare of the streetlamp through the window.

“I want to kiss you. May I?” His breath was on her mouth, sweet, a little alcoholic, a little like roses.

She squirmed a little. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Why not? You like me. You came and had a drink with me, you told me your life story; you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t like me. Don’t you like me?” Somehow in the process of saying all this, his mouth had traveled to the crest of her cheek, and then to her ear, and then her jaw. His clothes carried the smoke from the pub, but his skin smelled fresh, like bergamot.

“I do like you Mr. Marlow, I -”

James burst into laughter and pressed his face to her throat, “Christ, is that how you think of me?” He lifted head and grinned at her. “Call me Jamie. Think of me that way.”

“Jamie,” she said quietly, and her eyes went to his for a silent moment.

“I like the way your lips move when you say my name. Say it again,” he said with a smile. And as she set her mouth to the consonant, he kissed her.

This was all right, she thought. In fact, this was excellent. This was delicious. This was dizzying. She opened her mouth under his and let him in.

And then his hands were moving. Marigold felt the backs of his fingers brushing along her jaw, while the other hand stroked slowly over her hair. That was lovely. He was lovely. Her shoulder softened into the bolster beneath her and her hands began a tentative exploration of his arms and shoulders, his jaw and throat.

He made appreciative noises in his throat, as he kissed her mouth and then her throat.

“You’re glorious,” he breathed against her skin. “I’ve longed to touch you this way.”

His excitement mounted quickly, unmistakably; he ground his hip against hers – and Marigold remembered suddenly all the good reasons not to do exactly what she was now doing. The kissing was lovely, but his body was pushing for more and she was fairly certain that “more” was a bad idea. How would they work together after this? If she lost the commission because of this, how would she pay her rent? What if there were a baby? What if –

Then his hand moved lower – he was hitching her skirt above her knees.

And it was as if he had hit her, so stunned was she. She felt coldness flood inside her where she had so recently been warm.

“I -” she said. Her hands dropped away from him. He was still kissing her throat, and his hand moving up her thigh under her step-in, between her legs.

“No,” she thought, but her mouth was frozen. Her entire body was frozen. Her limbs seemed too heavy to lift. She was locked. No. This was happening and she didn’t want it and there was nothing she could do and it had all started so pleasantly, he had been so charming, and now he would -

His hand stopped abruptly, and Marigold felt him pull back, away from her.

“What is it?” Whatever he saw in her face made him blink. “Don’t you like it?” he said, his voice soft and serious. “Just say, darling, and I’ll stop.”

“Stop,” she said immediately, her voice faint though she wanted to yell and hit at him and push him away, so faint she feared he might not hear. But he heard. He took his hands away.

“All right.” And he kissed her again – or tried to. When Marigold turned her face from him, he said, “You like the kissing. It’s the other that made you panic, and I won’t do that unless you like it.”

“You want – ”

“I’m a man with eyes and you’re gorgeous woman. Yes, I’ve wanted inside you since the moment you walked into my library. But it’s no fun unless you want it as much as I do.”

She did like the kissing. So she let him kiss her, because she liked him close and warm and tender. Because she didn’t want to be alone.

Still, it took time for her muscles to unlock, to open again to the pleasure he offered, to trust that he would stop when she asked. He stroked her hair, petted her, murmured into her ear that she was beautiful, that he wanted to give her pleasure.

Gradually her tension ebbed in trembling discharges, and with it, in fragments, her body relinquished a layer of protection. To her mortification, she felt burning behind her eyes, and she tightened her jaw to fight the flood.

She returned his kisses, and she liked it, wanted it. She gripped him all the closer, and liked it.

She liked it when his fingers tangled in her hair and he used it to pull her head to one side, getting access to her throat and the delicate place behind her ear, liked it when he pulled her close to him, rolling her to her side so that her leg slung across his hip, with her arms wrapped around his neck. She pressed her hips against his, felt heat and weight in her pelvis, a persistent dissatisfaction, half familiar, half utterly, utterly new.

When her hips aligned with his so that her heat, beneath the layers of her dress, slid along the swollen shaft trapped in his trousers, he sighed, “Oh Goldie. Take what you want.”

From the moment she had said stop, his hands had stayed above her waist; he allowed her to come to him. Now, with her mouth locked over his, one arm taut around his neck and other hand fisted in his hair, she let herself want, let herself take. She pressed and rubbed and he held her close as her breath came in panting gusts within their kiss.

Unexpectedly, she breached some intangible threshold and her body crashed in a pounding current, pushed and pulled at once, and she cried out against Jamie’s mouth, bit his lips, her body rocking involuntarily against his. “Oh god I’m so sorry,” she breathed, confused, embarrassed, burning in ways she couldn’t name. Her body pulsed and sank and floated and throbbed.

“Christ Jesus, sorry?” He bit at her lips and rolled under her to his back pulling her over him. “More. Do it again. Oh god do it again.” He pressed his hands into her buttocks and ground her pelvis against his. She could feel his erection through her dress and his trousers, strainingly hard. His hands ran all over her, over her dress, softly across her eyebrows, gripping into her hair, and all at once she felt she might do it again, might do it over and over, as long as he never stopped touching her.

“Wait, hang on,” he said, and Marigold felt his hand move between their bodies. When she tensed he said, “It’s all right, I’m just going to ease some pressure, darling. I can’t concentrate on you when I’ve got a seam digging into my cock. There.”

She felt his hands tugging up her dress then, untucking it from under her knees. She began to protest, but he whispered, “Just see how it feels. It’ll feel good, sweetness. You know I’ll stop if you don’t want it. You know I will.”

With only her lawn step-in between her skin and his, she could feel much more of him – hot and damp and tender against her.

He inhaled and shuddered. “Oh god. Oh, you sweet woman.” And he made of noise of unholy, rabid pleasure while he scraped his teeth against her cheek and then bit into the meat of her jaw.

And she liked it too. She liked his body. She liked the way he liked her body, liked the way he enjoyed her.

Taking full advantage of her superior position, she rubbed herself along the length of his shaft, playing, experimenting with what felt good to her and what made him twitch and grunt and thrust and grip at her. When his hands reached between them to undo the snap, (“Just a little more, darling”), she only hesitated a moment, and when he fingers spread the folds of cotton apart and brushed almost incidentally against her body, she arched her spine and threw back her head.

She pressed and rubbed and played and explored, feeling him with every part of her body. In her exploration, the tip of him accidentally aligned itself against her entrance, and instantly he was ready to enter her – she felt him gather himself to thrust in, but she said, “No” and lifted her hips away.

He responded by clutching his hands to her hips and grinding her against him with a growl. “You mean to torture me,” he said. “And I’ll let you. Kill me this way and I’ll count it a life well lived.”

The second time she found him aligned with her, he made little “Ha… ah…” noises, like a man dipping his fingers into too hot water.

The third time was less of an accident. Their eyes meet, and he started to push in.

“Do you want me, Goldie?” When she didn’t answer, he pulled her face to his and kissed her, pulled her shoulders down against him and held her, running his hands over her. “Aren’t you sure? Doesn’t it feel good? Does it feel good Goldie?”

“Yes.”

“Let it,” he whispered into her ear, and then bit her earlobe. “You feel good to me. You’re hot and tight, and anyway it’s just a little, I’m not even all the way in. Just let me stay.”

Marigold let him stay. It did feel good. She pressed herself ever so slightly back against him, and when her muscles tensed around him involuntarily, he made a visceral sound and pushed against her, his arms clutching her whole body closed to him.

“Oh I want to move,” he sighed, “Let me move.” And when he moved, she let him, her breath held, all her muscles tense. Her mouth sought his, and he drank her in, a hand against her face as he thrust into her.

And then his other hand was there – there – touching where they joined, an unthinkable intimacy.

“Oh,” she said. Her breath came to her in struggling, panting gusts, battling against the tightness in her lungs and belly and pelvis.

“Come beloved,” he murmured through their kiss. “I love how you come. Come with me inside you.”

She couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d tried. She tucked her head against his throat but her held her face and said, “Look at me.”

She did. She met his eyes and her body pulsed around him, her attention coupling the heat of their joining with the heat in his eyes. In the white of the streetlight, his eyes were dark and massive and deep and as penetrating as his body, gripping her as tautly as his arms, as he pulled himself suddenly from her body and thrust against her, his shaft sandwiched between their two bodies, and Marigold felt the sudden rush of fluid heat against her belly, while his hips flexed sharply under her, and again, and again.

As the tension in his body softened, his arms held her to him so tight she could hardly breathe.

Then from his:

Marigold tossed herself on the couch and put a hand over her eyes. “I’ve had too much to drink.”

“You had two pints, you’re barely squiffy.”

“Well. I feel far too relaxed. I should go to bed.”

Oh, she should. She really should. James invited himself to the sofa and tucked himself along the back, to lay beside her. Her eyes flew open in surprise, searched his face.

“I want to kiss you. May I?”

She squirmed a little. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Why not? You like me.” He put is mouth on crest of her cheek, kissed a light train to her ear, and then to her jaw as he mumbled against her skin, “You came and had a drink with me, you told me your life story; you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t like me. Don’t you like me?”

“I do like you Mr. Marlow, I -”

James burst into laughter and pressed his face to her throat, “Christ, is that how you think of me?” He lifted head and grinned at her. “Call me Jamie. Think of me that way.”

“Jamie,” she said quietly, and her eyes went to his for a silent moment.

“I like the way your lips move when you say my name. Say it again,” he said with a smile. And as she set her mouth to the consonant, he kissed her.

She softened under him at last, and he touched her with his lips and tongue and fingers.

“You’re glorious,” he breathed against her skin. “I’ve longed to touch you this way.”

She was so responsive, so open, she enflamed him. He buried his hand under her skirts, searching out her core with his fingers, enraptured, blinded by a strange hunger that could only be satisfied with her pleasure. When his hand reached her apex, he tuned himself to her arousal – and suddenly everything was wrong.

“What is it?” He looked into her face and saw terror. Eyes wide. Still. She wasn’t breathing, though he could feel her pulse racing under him. What? “Don’t you like it? Just say, darling, and I’ll stop.”

“Stop,” she said. So he did.

“All right.” And he kissed her again – or tried to. When Marigold turned her face from him, he said, “You like the kissing. It’s the other that made you panic, and I won’t do that unless you like it.”

“You want – ”

“I’m a man with eyes and you’re gorgeous woman. Yes, I’ve wanted inside you since the moment you walked into my library. But it’s no fun unless you want it as much as I do.”

She had wanted it. But he’d gone too far, pushed her too hard. So he slowed down, stroked her hair, petted her, murmured into her ear that she was beautiful, that all he wanted was her pleasure.

Gradually her tension ebbed in trembling discharges. She returned his kisses, and touched him, and held him. Still he waited, not advancing against until she moved toward him. When at last, at last, at last, she was soft and pliant and her hips searching, he pulled her to her side and slung her leg over him.

When her hips aligned with his so that her heat, beneath the layers of her dress, slid along the swollen shaft trapped in his trousers, he sighed, “Oh Goldie. Take what you want.”

From the moment she had said stop, his hands had stayed above her waist; he allowed her to come to him. Now, with her mouth locked over his, one arm taut around his neck and other hand fisted in his hair, she pressed and rubbed and he held her close as her breath came in panting gusts within their kiss.

In a bountiful flood, she came, rocking against him restlessly, grunting, searching, wild, and he had never known anything as erotic as Marigold in her throes.

“Oh god I’m so sorry,” she breathed, even as the orgasm still echoed in her muscles.

“Christ Jesus, sorry?” He bit at her lips and rolled under her to his back pulling her over him. “More. Do it again. Oh god do it again.” He pressed his hands into her buttocks and ground her pelvis against his, he touched her all over. He wanted more, more.

“Wait, hang on,” he said, and reached between their bodies to unbutton his trouser. When she tensed he said, “It’s all right, I’m just going to ease some pressure, darling. I can’t concentrate on you when I’ve got a seam digging into my cock. There.”

She felt his hands tugging up her dress then, untucking it from under her knees. She began to protest, but he whispered, “Just see how it feels. It’ll feel good, sweetness. You know I’ll stop if you don’t want it. You know I will.”

With only her lawn step-in between her skin and his, he could feel much more of her – hot and damp and tender against him.

He inhaled and shuddered. “Oh god. Oh, you sweet woman.” And he made of noise of unholy, rabid pleasure while he scraped his teeth against her cheek and then bit into the meat of her jaw.

He let her explore, delighting in her curiosity, letting her know when she gave him pleasure. When his hands reached between them to undo the snap, (“Just a little more, darling”), she only hesitated a moment, and when he fingers spread the folds of cotton apart and brushed almost incidentally against her body, she arched her spine and threw back her head.

She pressed and rubbed and played and explored, feeling him with every part of her body. In her exploration, the tip of him accidentally aligned itself against her entrance, and instantly he was ready to enter, but she said, “No” and lifted her hips away.

He responded by clutching his hands to her hips and grinding her against him with a growl. “You mean to torture me,” he said. “And I’ll let you. Kill me this way and I’ll count it a life well lived.”

The second time she found him aligned with her, he made little “Ha… ah…” noises, like a man dipping his fingers into too hot water.

The third time was less of an accident. Their eyes meet, and he started to push in.

“Do you want me, Goldie?” When she didn’t answer, he pulled her face to his and kissed her, pulled her shoulders down against him and held her, running his hands over her. “Aren’t you sure? Doesn’t it feel good? Does it feel good Goldie?”

“Yes.”

“Let it,” he whispered into her ear, and then bit her earlobe. “You feel good to me. You’re hot and tight, and anyway it’s just a little, I’m not even all the way in. Just let me stay.” Oh god let me, he thought.

She pressed herself ever so slightly back against him, and when her muscles tensed around him involuntarily, his control cracked for a desperate instant; he made a visceral sound and pushed against her, his arms clutching her whole body closed to him.

“Oh I want to move,” he sighed, “Let me move.” And she let him, all her muscles tense, trembling with arousal. Her mouth sought his, and he drank her in, a hand against her face as he thrust into her.

He reached to feel where he entered her, damp heat emanating from their bodies.

“Oh,” she said. Her breath came to her in struggling, panting gusts. James could feel the mounting tension in her, her openness.

“Come beloved,” he murmured through their kiss. “I love how you come. Come with me inside you.”

She tucked her head against his throat but her held her face and said, “Look at me.”

She did. She met his eyes and her body pulsed around him, as he pulled himself suddenly from her body and thrust against her, his shaft sandwiched between their two bodies, and his hips flexed sharply against her soft belly, and again, and again.

He wrapped his arms around her and held on. This one he would have again. This one he would never let go.

So there you have it. Consistently reaffirmed consent, freezing and recovering, and radical pushing of boundaries. Again, not great literature, but it shows that it can be done.

I think romance novels should come with warning labels:

“HERO RAPES HEROINE.”

Except that apparently romance authors and readers don’t seem to be that good at recognizing rape. It shouldn’t be that difficult – if she doesn’t consent, it’s rape; if consent is coerced, it’s rape – and yet the romance community seems to struggle with it.

The Smart Bitches write in Beyond Heaving Bosoms that rape scenes, once a mainstay in the genre, have “largely disappeared from romance novels published from the 1990s onward,” but that’s not at all true.

For example, To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney (1995). The first sex scene, if we may call it that, between hero and heroine is unambiguously rape. Just, unambiguously. And yet. Here are comments on the book from Dear Author reviewers, which rates it as the #1 Best Romance:

Hands down my favorite romance ever. Blew my mind.

One of my all-time favorites.

Have never read it and doubt I ever will.

Adore this book. Amazing character arcs.

Part of my Romance conversion package. One of the few books with sexual force I adore. I was a late and reluctant reader of this book but it is powerful and moving.

Great book, but so uncomfortable I can’t read it again

Some mixed feelings from the various reviewers, but not one person saying, “Interesting story, but the way the hero rapes the heroine and then they fall in love is just too creepy for me.” Which is my review of the book.

How do I know it’s rape? The heroine never says yes. But even more than that, she never wants it – I mean, she’s SCARED the whole time. She doesn’t fight or scream because she’s frozen with dread. I mean JESUS PEOPLE. If I were teaching a class about how to identify lack of consent, I would ask my students to read that scene.

The idea that he’s, like… what? … HELPING her with this experience? is just gross.

What makes the scene particularly agonizing to read is that the heroine is a survivor of an abusive relationship AND THE HERO KNOWS THIS. Maybe the best/worst part is where the hero urges the heroine to give consent, saying, “Don’t make it rape.” Because it’s the heroine’s job to give consent in order to make it not rape. That’s how it works.

I threw the book against the wall.

I’ll give two more examples, though I think I started with the most egregious example.

Another: Laura Kinsale’s Shadowheart (2004), in which, again, the hero and heroine’s first sex is unambiguously coerced, unwanted by the heroine. Here is another scene I’d show students to illustrate what non-consent looks like.

This heroine does fight. She bites him. But she doesn’t want it, and he doesn’t stop.

The pair goes on to have one of the most original and interesting sex lives of any romance couple – the hero turns out to be a pretty committed submissive pain slut, which is not what you expect when your hero is also a professional assassin, right? – but in order to buy any of that, you have to let go of the fact that the hero raped the heroine.

Untie My Heart by Judith Ivory (2002). The consent in the first sex scene is more ambiguous than in the other two examples – there’s some ambiguous POV thoughts like, “Do I want this?” – but the heroine says no out loud, and she never says yes. Consent wasn’t there. I could make an argument here based on the fact that the hero turns out to be a service top and there’s some psychological things happening etc etc, but really. She wasn’t sure if she wanted it. “Not sure” is the same as “not,” when it comes to sex.

I think maybe we’re supposed to be able to tell she wanted it because she has an orgasm, but you and I know that orgasm can happen during sexual assault; physical response is not consent, it doesn’t mean she likes it and she doesn’t mean she wants it.

(There’s a lot of “My body responded, so I must have liked it” in romance novels. I need that to stop.)

Rapes notwithstanding, these are all three books that I liked, and it distresses and puzzles me that these three writers – gifted writers, all in my Top 5 Romance Authors – couldn’t or didn’t find their way to making the heroine want the sex, or, failing that, call what happens an act of violence.

Part of teaching is the stories we tell. We need – I need – stories that show consent at its best, that clarify the difference between “physical response” with “wanting,” that shows women how to recognize what they want and how to talk about it. And we need books that show how freeze works, so that we create a cultural narrative around it, grant it space and privilege in the story of survival.

That is all. Thank you for listening.

My brother said, “I don’t like to introduce anyone as ‘my girlfriend’ or ‘my partner’ because it’s like I’m saying that’s their whole identity, they exist only as part of my collection of stuff.”

And fair enough. He’s an Extremely Nice Guy. Feminist.

But I am also extremely nice and femininst, and I said, “No, I like it when a guy does that. I like that he’s publicly saying that he’s in this very specific kind of relationship with me.”

The idea of women as actual property – “belonging to me, mine to buy and sell” – is obviously offensive, misogynist, and utterly unacceptable, as indeed is the idea of any human at all as property (except, of course, under mutually consenting circumstances, which are by definition not ACTUALLY property-based).

But people who feel the way I do – that hearing the phrase, “This is my spouse/partner/euphemism/whatever” is a pleasant form of PDA – are not hearing, “THIS ONE BELONGS TO ME SHE IS MINE.” We’re hearing, “I have a strange feeling in regard to you, as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs tightly knotted to a similar string in you, and if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap and I have a notion I would take to bleeding inwardly.” Or anyway, those of us who have read Jane Eyre hear that.

In other words, we hear, “I am attached to this person.”

Children feel possessive of their adult caregivers; sometimes they even get jealous. They’re attached.

Biology does this, without capitalism or gender politics. It’s natural – which doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or bad, it just means that it’s more or less unavoidable and so there’s not much use insisting that someone “shouldn’t” feel that way. People just do feel that way. And very often they like it when others feel that way in return.

I’ve been working on the book a lot lately – I have a revision of the proposal due to my agent sometime in the next week, holy shit fuck I gotta get crackalackin’ – and one of the things that’s becoming clearer as I write is that a message people need to hear is that the erotic brain of a human is INTEGRATED into the rest of the brain, in particular into the other emotional systems: love/attachment, stress/rage/fear, seeking, etc. More for some people than others – and I’m quite ready to say more for women than for men – access to the erotic brain is heavily mediated by these other emotional systems.

For those with responsive desire styles (30% of women, 10% of men), the state of the other emotional systems may entirely control access to sexual arousal. I’ve written before about how stress (fight/flight/freeze) shuts down sexual response for many people (and turns it up for a few). But seeking for safety with others – one version of the oxyotcin-mediated attachment system – often takes the form of sexual connection.

Here is where I’m going with this:

This has been a hellish week. Whenever a person feels attacked, one natural response is too seek out their tribe, the people they care about, who care about them in return. So if you find yourself reaching out to hold on to someone, to hold on with your entire body, to say or to hear them say, “This one is mine,” that’s your attachment system doing what it does best. It’s increasing your successful survival in a densely social species by reinforcing your attachment to a specific other.

Folks without a specific other to claim can meet the need with an intensely connected social group, or through any version of prayer, guided visualization, or imagination that meets the need. What matters is generating a feeling of belonging to a loving presence (it’s not an accident that the modern god is a parent).

“This one is mine.” It’s something your monkey-body craves. Let us not police our needs and dismiss a desire as unfeminist. Dive into it, with mutual consent and satisfaction.

The eating analogy is particularly apposite.

Tristan Taoromino used a great analogy in terms of food: her feminist porn is organic, fair trade porn. Organic because it emerges from the performers doing precisely what they choose to do, and fair trade because she uses ethical business practices.

Princess Kali described the differences between her educational videos and her erotic videos as being about what’s included. The educational videos keep in the negotiation and other implementations of safer sex practices, while the erotic videos just straight for the ball crushing and whipping, without showing HOW to do these things safely.

I considered this distinction in the context of Tristan’s analogy, and decided that educational explicit videos are “farm to table porn” – you take the highest quality ingredients and do as little as possible to them from when they were growing to when they hit your tongue. Porn (as contrasted with educational videos) is more processed. I don’t think that’s quite right, but I think it’s an interesting place to start.

Some folks in the room expressed a definite preference for the more processed form, which takes full advantage of the nature of video media: that it can be edited down to the juciest bits. They wanted the sugar, and never mind the rest of the fruit. And fair enough: porn is entertainment. It’s dessert, not the main dish, it doesn’t have to be nourishing.

But it CAN be.

I wonder if porn could be broken down in this way: gourmet dessert porn, highly refined, processed, sweetened, calorie-dense and nutrient-poor, but deeply, deeply satisfying to the mammal in you; farm to table porn, organic, minimally processed, whole sex, less calorie-dense but more nourishing in its way; fast food porn – no feminist porn will ever be fast food sex, but most of the mainstream porn in the world definitely is, a chemistry project molded into the shape of food, with only a minimal quantity of actual food ingredients; cooking show porn, the explicit sex education videos that explicitly and intentionally stop in the middle to explain what they’re doing and how the viewer can do it too… and of course ALL feminist porn should be ethically produced “fair trade” porn.

What else? Gourmet dessert, farm to table, cooking show, fast food… what’s missing?