You know what really, really gets to me?
If I were to share with you, my readers, something like, “I have this persistent cough that just wouldn’t go away. I feel like my chest is constricted and I wake up at night drenched in cold sweat.” What would your advice be?
I’m guessing that any person in their right mind would say, “Go see a doctor!” I’m also guessing that nobody would start diagnosing me over the Internet and telling me how to cure this ailment sight unseen.
If I told you about a dysfunction in any system of organs in my body, the advice would be the same: talk to a specialist. Several years ago, for instance, I complained of a chest pain on the blog, and a reader who happened to be a nurse told me in no uncertain terms that I had to go to the ER. And this turned out to be amazing advice: I had pericarditis and needed to be treated. But even that reader – an actual medical professional – was not presuming to prescribe treatment for me online. I think we can all agree this is the right approach.
There is, however, one area in our bodies where every Tom, Dick and Henrietta thinks it’s OK to diagnose and prescribe treatment left and right. Here is an example for you. A person asks:
Other than a recent, brief and dissatisfying encounter, my SO and I haven’t had sex in a very long time. At the beginning of our relationship, we were very sexually active but my desire over the course of the last few years has completely tanked. I still very much love and am attracted to my SO, but I worry about our future. How do I regain my mojo and how do I know if this is a sign that our relationship is reaching the end?
Obviously, nobody but a specialist can even decipher what “I’m attracted but don’t feel desire” means. All anybody can do is gently suggest that this person take this query to a sexologist. Sadly, there are many other people who would benefit from seeing such a specialist, too. And it is those people precisely who are interested in projecting their own deeply Victorian views on others. Here is an example:
Many of us have these romantic visions of what our sex lives are supposed to be like: spontaneous, plentiful, void of drama or misunderstandings, and perfectly matched in libido to our partner(s). That just ain’t reality, especially for the long haul.
Translation: “My sex is infrequent, routine, filled with misunderstandings, and always leaves either me or my partner unsatisfied. That’s my reality and the price I pay for the all-important privilege of being in a long-term relationship, and don’t anybody dare suggest life can be different.”
From the viewpoint informed by her own dysfunction, this dispenser of advice exhorts the poor reader to “keep trying” in a way that reminded me of “close your eyes and think of England.”
What really gets me is that people who identify as feminists keep offering this extremely outdated kind of advice. Years ago, I wrote about another feminist who blithely dispensed sex advice of the most offensively patriarchal and anti-woman kind anybody can imagine. It seems like there is now a re-incarnation of that woman-hating sex specialist. (Or is it the same person? I don’t want to believe there could be two of them prowling the world, dispensing their sexual wisdom.)
Thank you, dear Cliff Arroyo, for this great link. And just out of curiosity, how is it possible for a blog that has exactly 2 posts to have 296 followers? If somebody tells me this blogger is a bot, that will be a relief.
Clarissa's Blog 
“how is it possible for a blog that has exactly 2 posts to have 296 followers?”
It’s a side project of someone from the dreaded Snakespill (that’s where I saw it).
What I find odd is how it totally fails as an advice column, the purpose of which is not so much to advise the original letter writer (for all sorts of reasons) but to amuse the other readers so they can match their interpretation/advice with the person doing the column.
Whatever you think of Dan Savage (who the blog in question is a reaction against), he does know what’s expected of an advice columnist. He always does tell the obviously disturbed ‘see a professional, SOON!’ but he also keeps his audience amused with funny and often inciteful smartassery. I’m sure he would tell that person to get to a professional (probably solo and couple work is in order) and he also might guess that the writer really wants out of the relationship and is shutting down the sex to expidite the process.
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Ah, so these people followed out of solidarity! Got it.
I just looked at this Dan Savage column, and it seems like quite a good one. I’m always suspicious of blogs that define themselves in terms of a dislike for a blogger / journalist who isn’t even aware of their existence. This is fandom of the worst kind.
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Dan Savage has it in him to say some very biphobic and transphobic stuff, but compared to Shakesville, he’s a master of insight and tact.
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I only read these two recent posts by him, and they were fine. But even if they were horrible, it’s weird to start a blog whose entire presentation starts with the name of another blogger. I mean, I hate Ross Douthat, but I’m not dedicating my life to proving to the world how wrong he is.
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I like Dan Savage, despite faults; he actually *is* irreverant and transgressive.
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And has a sense of humor about these things, which is helpful.
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Dan Savage is repugnant and I loathe that he’s become The queer advice columnist, when you consider that Dear Abby actually does a better job treating her bisexual and trans readers/letter writers with respect and tact (but then again, treating bisexuals and trans people better than Dan Savage is kind of a low bar to set).
There used to be a sex column in my old school’s newspaper (It generated a lot of press because a very prudish law professor decided to sue the newspaper to stop it from being printed, and failed) and it was just as bland and uninspiring.
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As I said, I only discovered his existence today and read all of 2 of his articles. so I don’t have an opinion about the guy.
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I haven’t read him on a consistent basis that much lately, what does he say that’s especially transphobic?
What i remember of his attitude towards bi-people (which was pretty hostile) was that they should pair up with each other since the bi-gay relationships he’d witnessed usually ended up with people being badly hurt (usually the gay partner).
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If you google “Dan Savage Transphobia” you’ll get more than your fair share of examples, the most egregious being:
– Calling a trans parent “selfish tr*nny/stupid tr*nny” for transitioning during their child’s teen years
– Repeatedly using the slurs “tr*nny” and “sh*male” on his show/in his column even when asked to stop by trans activists
– Mocking trans activists and calling them a fringe movement
– Making a joke about a politician in Washington State being a trans man
I’ll also add that I’m bisexual, and I can tell you that the idea of monosexual partners being “hurt” by bisexual partners is borne out of a cultural myth of bisexuals being more promiscuous and more flippant towards the feelings of their partners in the name of satisfying their sex drive, which has no basis in reality. As is Dan Savage’s assertion that bisexual people just “have one foot still in the closet”.
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All of your recent posts, or perhaps most, reflect the Christian ideology that once a certain level of innocence is lost, all hell lets loose and one disaster follows another. That is not hard to decipher. One must keep one’s innocence by not eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Otherwise really innocence people, like poor innocent husbands, have to pay.
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This is probably why I don’t get these appeals to innocence at all: I’m alien to this religious tradition and the word doesn’t have that meaning for me.
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I had to work it out for myself indirectly, in relation to people’s reactions to things I had myself said done or thought. But piecing it together even now, that explanation makes the most sense. We are forbidden to know certain things, as that dirties life and then the impurity can never be removed. Politically, too, one gets ahead best by adopting the creed of the three wise monkeys, to neither see, know, nor speak (of) any evil.
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Did you know if you take advantage of the WordPress “publicize” option on your dashboard, and connect your blog to your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts, WordPress aggregates your followers from all sources, creating an inflated (but very encouraging) number of followers. Example, I have 101 friends on Facebook and 95 followers on Twitter. WordPress adds those numbers to the 800 or so people who follow my actual blog, inflating the total to over 1,000.
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Ah, interesting! I didn’t know this.
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And, of course, how do I even know how many of those followers are human beings and not bots.
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I read the site this blog post links to and apparently the writer has the idea that women need intimacy more than sex. Intimacy is cuddling and closeness and I don’t know what else. Also the writer has the idea that women may not know why they may not feel like having sex. They can’t figure out that it’s because they’ve just had children or another aspect of their existence has escaped their minds.
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No one, and I mean _no one_ infantalizes women more than modern American feminists.
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So true! Not even Victorians went quite as far.
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There used to be this superpopular blog Bitch PhD back in 2008. Once it published a post by a woman who discovered she was a rape victim because she used to have sex with her boyfriend on occasions when she didn’t really feel like it but didn’t feel like refusing.
I was so incensed that this was the most popular blog by feminist academics that I started my own blog.
Bitch PhD closed down a few years ago. But there are many more blogs that adopt the “my husband, the evildoer, refuses to parent me, a 40-year-old woman” stance.
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You might find these two bloggers interesting.
http://www.maggiemcneill.wordpress.com
http://www.lauraagustin.com
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