more genius feminist analysis from DeAnander

[sam]

Language, sexual politics, prostitution...this post touches my hottest buttons. Italics original, bolds mine. -sam

http://stangoff.com/?p=362#comments

another thought has been nagging at me ever since reading this irritating oped, and that is the quote from Jarhead author Swofford: “I’d just turned seventeen. I’d had sex three times and been the recipient of five blow jobs and fourteen hand jobs. I was sold.”

time for some deconstruction. first off, as we’ve discussed before, Swofford evidently doesn’t believe that oral or manual sex is “sex”. he had sexual congress, presumably with women (?) 22 times by my count, but by his count only 3 times — we are left to assume that those three times involved screwing and nothing else really counts. it’s all phallocentric, but it gets even more patriarchal than mere phallocentricity: if he doesn’t penetrate another body with his own then it is not really sex, even if he experiences orgasm. now we are back to the defining memes of intromissive and receptive, dominance and submission, and why men involved in e.g. prison sexual relations think they are safely “straight” so long as they screw other men instead of being screwed themselves.

next — and this is something that had been nagging at me for years but has finally come into focus with this article — consider the colloquial and rather brutal locutions “blow job” and “hand job.” these are count nouns, not verbs or even noncount nouns like “sex”. Swofford didn’t say, “five times I was lucky enough to receive fellatio to the point of climax,” or “I’ve been fellated five times,” or even, “I’ve been given oral sex five times,” let alone “five times someone pleasured me with her mouth,” or “five times I managed to talk a woman into sucking me off” which might at least have introduced some mention of a partner with some degree of agency in the matter.

he says this as matter of factly as he might say that he’s eaten a cordon bleu steak 5 times, with no particular need to mention the chef or the waiter or the name of the restaurant. the servitors are erased, and the primary relationship is between the consumer and the thing consumed.

I think there’s a reason — other than the conventional euphemistic tendencies of my middle class upbringing — why the terms “blow job” and “hand job” ring so unpleasantly in my ear: and that is because they are the language of prostitution, of commodified, Taylorised sex. a “job” is a unit of work, not a unit of play. [day job, steady job, second job, blow job, jobbing plumber, hand job, job offer, jobs wanted, get a job…]

a “blow job” is a standard option on the menu of services available from a brothel for a standardised price. it is defined by the recipient’s experience, not the provider’s: translated into plodding literal-minded English for an alien anthropologist it means “fellatio patiently continued to the point of male orgasm”. “oral sex” might start and resume, intensify or lighten up, according to whim or flirtation or mood or playfulness — but a “blow job” is work: it has a specific goal, and the customer/recipient is the one who decides when the job is done, not the provider: it ain’t over until the phallus sings. it’s a reified, standardised product with a price tag, a recognised “unit of sex” provided by a servant or worker to a consumer, in a transactional context where sex is a unitised, measured and priced quantity rather than a free and spontaneous nonquantified flow of reciprocal touching and exploring (play rather than work) between equals.

I note that there is no equivalent term — not one that I’ve ever heard, at any rate, and I have not spent the last 50 years in a nunnery — for sexual acts that provide female pleasure. “cunnilingus” is a noncount and scholarly term for an activity, a practise — not for a unit of commercial exchange or a standardised, commodified procedure. we do not say, “mouth job” or “tongue job” (not to my knowledge anyway) for oral sex received by a female. and I don’t think there is any necessary implication of success in the colloquial phrase “he went down on his girlfriend” — whether she experienced orgasm or not remains unspecified. we have no count noun either for stimulation of the nipples, whether by mouth or hand — the closest I’ve ever heard was the awkward locution “a first-rate nipple-tonguing” (improbably uttered by the lead actor in the Britcom ‘Chef’ and notably he was referring to a malerecipient, not a female — ain’t that interesting?).

my conclusion is that the controlling metaphor of prostitution — the marketisation, taylorisation, scripting, prohibition of spontenaity, prohibition of intersubjectivity in sexual congress — is wired into the language at more levels than I had realised (even after almost 3 decades of thinking about gender and power). the dominant heterosexual paradigm is that sex — for women — is work… i.e. that all “normal” or socially conformant sex is, in essence, prostitution.

capitalism and patriarchy dictate how we are allowed to conceptualise sex. to go back to the weary old Whorfian Hypothesis, we are very short of words for snow — and this helps to keep us incapable of perceiving, referring to, or imagining the different kinds of actually-existing snow right in front of us.

[sunnysmiles]

brilliant, pure brilliance