Until last night, I hadn’t heard of Karen Owen and her PowerPoint presentation. Ms Owen, an undergraduate at Duke University, decided to treat thirteen college athletes with whom she had sex as “subjects” of a faux-sociological report — which is to say that she rated them with astringent candor. Having read about the presentation in Caitlin Flanagan’s aghast article in The Atlantic, I can see that there’s no need to continue beyond the first couple of slides. 

But the 42 slides of Owen’s report on her “horizontal academics” are so dense with narrative detail, bits of dialogue, descriptions of people and places, and reproduced text-message conversations that they are a chore to read. It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.

A chore to read at best. A Calvary, I should think, for her family. If nothing else, it confirms my ancient convinction that, classrooms aside, male and female students ought not to share the same campus. 

Sex education needs a serous re-think: the sexes need to be taught about one anotheer. It would appear the learning the mechanics of the thing is the least of the problem that faces young people. Boys in addition need to learn that gratifying their own desires, whatever these might be, is always less important than respecting the human independence of their partner(s). This principle is right up there with the prohibition of murder and the rules against stealing things. Which brings me to the other Atlantic article that I read last night, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s pornography update, “Hard Core.” Vargas-Cooper grasps an aspect of sexuality that doesn’t, I think, get enough frank discussion; when it comes up, it’s tarted up as “role-playing.” I’m speaking of power, as in the exercise of — and the tremendous ambivalence that men feel in the face of a partner’s surrender. 

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.

Although Vargas-Cooper doesn’t seem terribly upset by her encounter with the “polite, educated fellow” — educated in what? — it made me sick that anyone would corrupt an intimate encounter by asking to inflict pain — to introduce an absolute distance. (I hope that you grasp the difference between wanting to make someone else uncomfortable — this fellow’s stated objective — and asking to “try something out” that, while causing some discomfort, might also afford the partner a kinky sexual satisfaction.) I’m not shocked by the desire, but the guy’s bad manners are astonishing. Not that there is anything about Vargas-Cooper’s report that likens him to a rapist. He seems to have remained “polite” in bed (his problem, perhaps?). It’s that hse seems to have believed that his partner could give him permission to make her uncomfortable. 

It is easy to hold up the stories told in the two Atlantic pieces against nostalgia for the good old days of respectability, which afforded a woman who chose to take advantage of it a great deal of protection from the predations of male sexuality. But that’s a mistake as well as a distraction. It’s a good thing that women can’t “fall” anymore — not even Karen Owen. The question isn’t who gets to have sex with whom. The question is what kind of sex is wrong for everybody. We seem to be on the same page about children and non-consensual sex — verboten. Perhaps those are the only workable general rules. But the idea that “sex is good full stop” is preposterously naive, and if the flower children of the Sixties may be forgiven for their ignorant excesses, no such innocence is available today. 

As an aside, I think that it’s worth thinking whether the uncorseting of the American libido had the side-effect of eliminating shame on the subject of income inequality.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 3:00 pm.