I saw “Tangled”, the 2010 Disney Princess flick, over my Christmas holiday. Where to start? I don’t know, so I’m gonna do one of my all-too-rare open threads. (Also, I have concluded that I should catch up on work and email and past comment threads and make sure to thoroughly enjoy New Year’s Eve before I write another of my famous long posts. Also also, happy New Year, folks.)

Feel free to post things that aren’t about “Tangled” too. But like … the movie is a freakin’ goldmine. Here are some discussion prompts:

1. I guarantee that “Tangled” has already birthed many, many BDSM fantasies. I mean, see above. But recalling my frequent injunction that BDSM can be “love sex” too, I like this picture much better:

Disney’s always been good at that sudden, sweet, swoon-inducing moment of intimacy.

2. Obligatory gender roles analysis! How do we feel about these in “Tangled”?

3. Did we learn any lessons about manliness (or even pickup artistry) from Flynn Rider?

Why, it’s almost like the guy is both cocky and funny! But you know what else he is? Vulnerable. Flynn’s character kinda made me think of the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché.

P.S. That “Blade Runner” reference towards the end. This isn’t even a question.

I am just saying. They can deny that they intended to reference “Blade Runner” all they want, and I’ll still be here, just saying.

(Images above show various characters from “Tangled” — including two in which Rapunzel has tied up the male hero, Flynn, using her hair. Please note that the image of the “unicorn moment” from “Tangled” is here via the fuckyeahtangled tumblr. Because there’s a fuckyeahtangled tumblr.)

Before I post my article about orgasms, happy Halloween:

I discovered this tiny sculpture (easily fits in my hand) at a friend’s party this weekend. Apparently it is known as a “Halloween labbit”; it was created by Frank Kozik and produced by the designer toy company Kidrobot. This discovery might just be the highlight of my entire life. Seriously. Study questions include, “What would you do if that were a real animal that ran into the room where you’re sitting right now?”

… Aaand on that note, let’s move on to “A Unified Theory of Orgasm”. This article was originally published at the girl-power site Off Our Chests.

I CAN’T COME.
and it’s poisoned
every romance
I’ve ever had.

masturbating doesn’t work. I don’t know why. I tried therapy too, but my smart, understanding, sex-positive, open-hearted doctor couldn’t help. drugs while fucking? check. I date attentive men who only want to make me happy, but no matter how fantastic they make me feel, I can’t get off. and believe me, I like sex. I love sex! how can it feel so good and not end in an orgasm? I tried experimenting, and I sure do love the kink. it feels great. but doesn’t get me off. I’ve tried everything. everything.

now I have the best boyfriend I’ve ever had. but just like every other one, he can’t get me off. big dick? oral sex? tons of foreplay? kink? it’s all there. nothing works. I used to lie to my boyfriends and say it was ok that I couldn’t get off. then at least they could enjoy sex without feeling guilty. but then they’d stop trying, of course. and this one is still trying … sometimes. I mean, it’s clearly never going to work. so I can’t blame him for not having the same passion for trying as he used to. and I keep thinking I should back off. after all, why put pressure on him to “perform”? he’ll just resent me if I keep asking for more, even if I’m gentle about it and compliment him and all that. since nothing he does works. it will never work.

and I try so hard not to get frustrated, but I can’t avoid the knowledge that I am fucked up, I must be broken. I mean, any normal woman would have come by now. so what do I do? I don’t know what I need. do I back off and focus on him? that’s what I end up doing, because I can’t face asking for a little more attention in bed anymore. what’s the point? he’ll just resent me when it doesn’t work again. so I back off. and I can’t help resenting him, just a little, for not noticing how much I’m hurting. and not trying, even if I am broken, and I will never ever come.

Contents:

I. Vaginal Pain
II. S&M
III. Frigid
IV. The Fight
V. Men’s Perspective
VI. S&M, Redux
VII. Figuring It Out
VIII. Study Questions

I. Vaginal Pain

When I wrote the above, I was actually pretty close to figuring out how to have an orgasm. But I didn’t know that. I’d dealt with the anxiety of being unable to come for so long — and I’d also recently begun to understand that my sexuality is oriented towards S&M — and so anguish just flooded out of me, into those words. I craved S&M, but acknowledging the craving made me feel like a “pervert”, a “freak”. It contributed to my already-overwhelming fear that I was “broken” because I couldn’t figure out how to come.

Thank you, all my readers, for your patience. To make up for the long wait, here’s an extra-long post.

It’s a long story and a short one, but I guess all of them are.

I’m 27. It’s about that age: A lot of my compatriots are getting married lately — most monogamously, some to a primary polyamorous partner. I myself have a stack of relationships in my past. Some were monogamous, some polyamorous. Some have been on-and-off, some short-term, some long-term (5 or 6 years was the longest). Lately I’ve been processing some tough questions about polyamory, but I’d like to stick with it.

And I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want in a primary polyamorous partner. The kind of guy I could marry. I wonder if I’ll ever get to that point. I wonder if I’d know him if I saw him.

I met Mr. Ambition at one of the aforementioned weddings. Several people recommended that I talk to him, and we liked each other right away. Mutual friends used words like “zealot” to describe him; let’s just say he’s got an intense history of dedicated activism. Charisma, integrity, and pure energy pour off him. His words are almost always articulate and challenging. He can socially dominate a room without thinking. He works a challenging job ten hours per day; exercises two hours; socializes several hours; sleeps and eats when he can. He gives hugs easily, laughs easily, hands out compliments like candy.

Mr. Ambition is most definitely not a neutral personality. Of course, neither am I.

At the time, I was just coming out of the worst stage of my research on pickup artists — a subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce women. Also, I’d just had one of those breakups where I was too busy feeling stupid to properly understand how hurt I was. (Don’t you hate those?) You can read all about those Dramatic Events in my upcoming eBook Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser. In the meantime, suffice to say that I felt … flattened.

Arguably, I should have had a sign taped to my forehead that read: “Emotionally Unavailable.”

I went to dinner with Mr. Ambition later that week. At the end of the meal, he sat back and looked at me. “You’re so authentic,” he said.

“I haven’t felt very authentic lately,” I said frankly, but his words felt good. Like a balm. Like I was healing.

We got along excellently, had a lot in common, etc. Typical this-relationship-starts-well stuff. One evening, after we’d been out to eat in a big philosophical group, Mr. Ambition noted the hotness of my intense theoretical bent. “When you were discussing social justice and ethics tonight,” he said, “I wanted to reach across the table and grab you.”

He mentioned marriage within weeks. “This has never happened before,” he told me. “I’ve never dated someone I thought I could actually marry.” Whoa, tiger, I thought, but I had to admit that he hit a lot of my Ideal Characteristics as well. Intelligence, drive, charisma, and morality: it’s hard to argue with that.

Our sexual chemistry was okay, but not climb-the-walls stellar. We’ll develop that, I told myself. He’s less sexually experienced than I am, and we’ll learn each other just fine. Fortunately he’s got some experience with polyamory, but in terms of S&M, he’s another of those vanilla-but-questioning guys (I never learn). When we did S&M, I had to monitor the situation extra carefully because it was so new to him.

And for all his intelligence, it was really hard to talk to him about emotions. It wasn’t that he was cold or distant; on the contrary, he’s one of the most fiery people I’ve ever met. But he had a lot of difficulty explaining what was going on in his head. Indeed, he told me that he had a lot of difficulty knowing what was going on in his head. He did things like laugh when a friend hurt his feelings, then deny that he was hurt, even though I could plainly see the stricken look behind his eyes.

I wasn’t surprised that he was more physical than verbal about S&M. Very straightforward: throwing me around, pulling my head back, digging his hands into my skin. He’s incredibly strong, and sometimes I called my safeword simply because his strength scared me.

There was one particular S&M encounter … early in the evening, I called my safeword because I wasn’t sure he was into it.

“Red,” I said, and he stopped. “Is this okay with you?” I asked, and he nodded.

This was originally published on May 12, 2011 over at the Good Men Project.

There’s this cultural image of what it means to be female, and good in bed. The image includes being young and thin and cisgendered of course, and that can be problematic. But it also includes a lot of behavioral stuff: the way you squirm, the way you moan, being Super Excited about everything the guy wants to do, and Always Being Up for It — whatever “It” is. When people think about “good in bed,” for a woman, that’s often what they think.

Here’s a short list of some things I think are totally awesome:

+ Squirming and moaning during sex in a genuine way, out of genuine pleasure!

+ Acting Super Excited when your partner wants to do something you’re actually Super Excited about!

+ Being up for sexual experimentation and trying new things, while keeping track of your boundaries and saying no (or calling your safeword) to sexual things you really don’t like!

Those things are great. They’re great when they happen in all kinds of sex, and I have no problem with how people experience or deal with with those things — whether people get them from vanilla or S&M sex, or porn, or sex with multiple people, or queer sex, or whatever. All consensual sex is fine with me. (In particular, in pieces like the one you’re about to read, I often have to make it really clear that I’m not anti-porn. OK? I’m not anti-porn. Got that? Say it with me now: Clarisse Thorn is not anti-porn. Yay, it rhymes!)

What scares me, however—what continuously gets my goat, what still occasionally makes me feel weird about sex — is how easy it is to perform those three things I listed above. Because I have always, since before I even started having sex, known exactly what I was supposed to look like while I had sex. I don’t even know how I internalized those images: some of them through porn, I suppose, or art or erotica or what have you; some of them by reading sex tips on the Internet or hearing the ones whispered to me by friends. But I can definitely assure you that before I had any actual sexual partners, I knew how to give a good blowjob. I also knew how to tilt my head back and moan, and I knew how to twist my body, and I knew what my reactions and expressions were supposed to look and sound like — I knew all those things much better than I knew what would make me react.

There was a while there, where my sexuality was mostly performance: an image, an act, a shell that I created because I knew it was hot for my partners. I’m not saying I was performing 100% of the time — but certainly, when I was just starting to have sex, that’s mostly what it was. And, scarily, I can put the shell back on at any time. Sometimes it’s hard to resist, because I know men will reward me for it, emotionally, with affection and praise. It’s much, much more difficult to get what I actually want out of a sexual interaction than it is for me to create that sexy dreamgirl shell: hard for me to communicate my desires, hard for me to know what I’m thinking, hard for me to set boundaries.

And hard to believe that a guy will like me as much, if I try to be honest about what I want. Honesty means that sometimes I’m confused, and sometimes we have to Talk About It; honesty means that sometimes I say no, it means that sometimes I’m not Up For It. Something in me is always asking: Surely he’d prefer the sexy, fake, plastic dreamgirl shell? It’s not true, I know it’s not true, I swear it’s not true — I don’t have such a low opinion of men as that. I know this is just a stereotype, the idea that men are emotionally stunted horndogs with no interest in how their partners feel.

So sometimes, I have to fight myself not to perform. But it’s worth it — because the hardest thing of all is feeling locked into an inauthentic sexuality. I tell myself, I try to force myself to believe it: even if a guy would like me more for faking and holding back and being so-called “low-maintenance” — I tell myself it’s a stereotype, but even if that stereotype is true of some men — no man is worth doing that to myself. No man is worth that trapped, false, sick feeling.

There’s an aphorism from the early 1900s literary critic André Maurois: “The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one’s opinion but to know it.” Even though I identify as an activist and genuinely want to make a real impact on the world based on my beliefs … I often think that much of my blogging has been more an attempt to figure out what I believe, than to tell people what I believe. And sometimes, I fall into the trap of wanting to be consistent more than I want to understand what I really believe — or more than I want to empathize with other people — or more than I want to be correct. We all gotta watch out for that.

But I’m getting too philosophical here. (Who, me?) The point is, I am hesitant to write something with a title like “Sex-Positive 101″, because not only does it seem arrogant (who says Clarisse Thorn gets to define Sex-Positive 101?) — it also implies that my thoughts on sex-positivity have come to a coherent, standardized end. Which they haven’t! I’m still figuring things out, just like everyone else.

However, lately I’ve been thinking that I really want to write about some basic ideas that inform my thoughts on sex-positive feminism. I acknowledge that I am incredibly privileged (white, upper-middle-class, heteroflexible, cisgendered etc) and coming mostly from a particular community, the BDSM community; both of these factors inform and limit the principles that underpin my sex-positivity. I welcome ideas for Sex-Positive Feminism 101, links to relevant 101 resources, etc.

This got really long, and I reserve the right to edit for clarity or sensitivity.

The following quotations are from the beginning of Phyllis Rose’s unusual and very interesting Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Rose, who knows an amazing amount about the personal lives of famous Victorians, starts the book with general insights about relationships — not just marriage, really — and then goes on to describe the marriages (Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens and George Eliot) in a charming and continuously insightful manner.

There are things here that I don’t quite agree with, or that I would frame differently. In particular, it seems to me that Rose probably doesn’t have much exposure to BDSM, and especially to explicitly-negotiated power play. She says a lot of things about power in relationships, how that power functions — and how it is disguised — that seem somewhat limited to me, as someone who plays with power on purpose very frequently. Nevertheless, I’ve drawn insight from those parts too, and generally think it’s all pretty brilliant.

Pickup artists may note similarities between Rose’s ideas and pickup frame theory.

In unhappy marriages … I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are acting, even if … their own idea of their relationship is totally at variance with the facts. I speak with great trepidation about “facts” in such matters, but, speaking loosely, the facts in the Mills’ case — that a woman of strong and uncomplicated will dominated a guilt-ridden man — were less important than their shared imaginative view of the facts, that their marriage fitted their shared ideal of a marriage of equals. I assume, then, as little objective truth as possible about these parallel lives, for every marriage seems to me a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent. (page 7)

… like Mill, I believe marriage to be the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults, and so I am interested in the management of power between men and women in that microcosmic relationship. Whatever the balance, every marriage is based on some understanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between the two partners. Marriages go bad not when love fades — love can modulate into affection without driving two people apart — but when this understanding about the balance of power breaks down, when the weaker member feels exploited or the stronger feels unrewarded for his or her strength.

People who find this a chilling way to talk about one of our most treasured human bonds will object that “power struggle” is a failed circumstance into which relationships fall when love fails. (For some people it is impossible to discern the word power without adding the word struggle.) I would counter by pointing out the human tendency to invoke love at moments when we want to disguise transactions involving power. … [W]hen we resign power, or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love. Perhaps that is what love is — a momentary or prolonged refusal to think about another person in terms of power. … [W]hat we call love may inhibit the process of power negotiation — from which inhibition comes the illusion of equality so characteristic of lovers. If the impulse to abjure measurement and negotiation comes from within, unbidden, it is one of life’s graces and blessings. But if it is culturally induced … then we may find it repugnant and call it a mask for exploitation. Surely, in regard to marriage, love has received its fair share of attention, power less than its share. … Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives? Only millions of romantics can resist it — and other millions who might see it as the bone thrown to men to distract them from the bondage of their lives. (pages 7-8)

This post was originally written years ago by a gentleman who has thoroughly investigated the pickup artist subculture (or “seduction community”). Chris’ main interest is writing about remedial social skills and shyness, but in the past he also offered some basic dating advice. Part of that involved trying to warn guys off the weirder aspects of the pickup artist world, which is where this post originated from. He’s since moved away from giving advice in that area and is concentrating just on social skills. His main site is available at SucceedSocially.com.

I first encountered this article when I started researching pickup artists, and I thought it was so interesting that I used it as part of a workshop. I was really disappointed when the author took down the site where it was posted, and I asked if I could repost it here. So, here is a guest post, originally titled Detrimental Attitudes You Can Pick Up Through The Seduction Community.

Please keep in mind that I, Clarisse, take no particular responsibility for this article. I think it’s fascinating for two reasons — because of what it says about the pickup artist community, and what the assumptions behind it are.

The Seduction Community is a strange subculture. Some of its odd ideas are just harmless quirks. I think some are plain counterproductive to your success though. Internalizing them will make you a less appealing person, and you may end up doing worse with women. The maladaptive ideas below can also appear in other subcultures which have members who are aiming to improve themselves along some dimension.

I can’t claim credit for coming up with many of the points below. I’m just throwing them together into one cautionary list. Some of these are fairly well known pitfalls in the scene, even if some of the guys who are aware of them can’t put them into words. Others you’ll recognize from The Game by Neil Strauss, which was good about drawing attention the the Community’s odder elements.

Feeling arrogant and superior just for being in the Community

In a general sense, many guys in the Community have that feeling of superiority that comes from believing you know better than most people. They think they’re in an elite class because they have this special knowledge about how to get girls, and about how things really work. They feel above all the guys who don’t possess the information they have.

This smugness has nothing to do with one’s actual ability to get girls. Guys in the Community can have swell heads whether they’re master pick up artists or complete virgins. It’s that they know certain things that supposedly puts them above other people.

Well actually Community guys can also feel superior because they really are doing well for themselves sexually, and look down on men who aren’t enjoying the same lifestyle. You’d think only successful guys could think this way, but inexperienced ones do as well sometimes. In their minds they honestly think that because they know how to get girls on paper, they really are players on some level. They’ll do things like scoff at a friend who’s having a dry spell, even though they haven’t had sex in even longer.

Seeing almost all mainstream guys as AFC’s

Community guys often see pretty much any guy that doesn’t know about the scene as an Average Frustrated Chump to be looked down on. Except for the odd mainstream guy who is naturally good with women, it’s a pretty Black & White distinction between enlightened Community guys who know the score, and the teeming AFC masses who make every dating mistake in the book.

Ironically many guys in the Community hardly get any girls, and many so-called AFCs do just fine with women, even if they are following traditional dating models that apparently don’t work. Many of the AFCs end with genuinely cool partners as well. They haven’t all settled for the first thing they could get because they don’t have the PUA skills to get truly quality women. Community guys end up with so-so women as well. They’re as likely to go home with a drunk, fugly girl from a bar as the next person. All types of men can do well, or not well, when it comes to dating.

The definition of what marks a guy as an AFC seems to depend on the situation as well. Even if a mainstream guy is doing well with girls on the whole, all he has to do is display one AFCish behavior to earn the label. However, when Community guys make these same mistakes (and everyone makes them, no one’s perfect) they don’t consider themselves as falling into this category.

The following meditation on anxiety about “sluthood” first appeared in December 2010 on the women’s site Off Our Chests. I’m reposting it here today because San Francisco loves me and I love it.

Since I was small, I’ve loved the Van Gogh painting “Starry Night”. I loved the cypresses in particular: winding spiral trees, hallucination trees. They were so unlike other trees I’d seen that I thought Van Gogh made them up, and so when I first saw cypresses years later, I was stunned: the hallucination trees had been imported into my world. I’d like to think that my world turned a little bit sideways forever, when I first saw cypresses, but I’m probably being melodramatic. (I’m good at that.)

San Francisco has cypresses, and a lot of other hallucinations, too. The city is full of angles, vantages, transitions, unceasing changing views: it feels, at times, like an unsolvable puzzle. A forested path leads darkly under a bridge, suddenly opens upon a manicured lawn with a white lace conservatory. A cement staircase rises through a narrow outlet, resolving itself step by step into a slice of brightly painted Victorian façade. I walked once with a friend alongside an ocean road, pacing through thick fog, and arrived at a dirt path that I insisted on following; thirty seconds later we stumbled upon extraordinary ruins.

San Francisco. Halcyon city, heartbreak city. Cypress city. The place I come to recover from being torn apart and, it seems, sometimes the place where I get torn apart again. This is okay with me, because nothing is more fun than overanalyzing strong emotions. I am not even kidding.

I returned from Africa recently; paused briefly in my adopted city of Chicago to collect my thoughts; and then went to the Burning Man Arts Festival, thence to San Francisco. This is my version of emotional decompression, and it worked! I feel much more centered now. But part of decompressing, for me, was specifically going out to a lot of dates and BDSM parties and pushing my own boundaries, which carries its own potential decompressable risks.

At the time of this story, it had been a couple of months in San Francisco, and I was leaving soon. I’d had an assortment of adventures, but there were two guys in particular who I was excited about. Not necessarily in a long-term way — I’m not in this for the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids (or at least, not yet) — but definitely in a wow-I-have-to-control-myself-or-I’ll-come-off-as-kind-of-puppyish way. New Relationship Energy: it is such a mind trick, such a delicious head-trip. You are the perfect drug.

UPDATE, March 2012: I have now released my book Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, and people seem to like it. You can read more, see some reviews, and learn how to buy it by clicking here. And now for the original article …

As some of my readers know, I’m fascinated by the pickup artist subculture (a community devoted to advising men on how to seduce women). It’s a very mixed bag. My feeling is that there’s good advice in the community for genuinely kind shy guys. But sometimes, it’s so mixed with misogyny and cold-heartedness that wading through it feels like panning for gold in a sewer.

By the end of this year, I plan to release a book called Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, all about my experiences in that subculture. In the meantime, here’s my attempt at a summary:

There are small communities of pickup artists all over the world, and there are message boards all over the Internet, and expensive pickup coaches are always popping up. Some of these folks are not so bad; some of them are really bad. Many have awful cynical and negative attitudes about people; many hold particularly awful stereotypes about women. And most of them care a lot more about what works (i.e. how to get their penis in someone) than about what’s ethical or how we can treat women like human beings.

A good friend of mine recently told me that he’s been reading the blog of a misogynist pickup artist who I absolutely loathe. I was appalled. I provided a detailed feminist critique of this guy’s blog. My friend listened and understood, but in the end he said, “I hear what you’re saying, and I agree with you. The guy is an asshole and his advice is permeated with terrible opinions of women. But a lot of it is really good advice, and I don’t know where else I can find such good advice about women.”

Here’s the thing: the current pickup artist subculture has a monopoly on effective advice for how to break down social interactions and talk to women. Not all of it works, but enough of it works that it draws guys in. As a pickup artist instructor once told me, “When I first found the community I was horrified by how sleazy and gross it is, but I had never had a girlfriend and I told myself: dude, if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna die alone.”

I’ve theorized that maybe feminists should provide good pickup advice, in an attempt to counterbalance some of the awfulness of the existing community. In the meantime, however, I figure the next best thing to do is to provide a list of less-misogynistic pickup artist instructors and sites, and a few very basic critiques.

First, the basic critiques. These are very, very basic; if you get me started then I’ll provide ten thousand more. But please, if you are going to investigate pickup artistry, at least keep these things in mind:

New open thread on manliness and feminism. What will we do when we run out of Terminator flicks?

As Cessen says,

The manliness followup thread was a bit over 450 thousand words long.
The second followup thread is a bit under 200 thousand.

So, counted together as a single thread (as it should be), we’re at about 650 thousand words.

For comparison, the bible is a bit over 770 thousand words long.

If we yoink out the intra-thread quotations then these threads are probably a couple hundred thousand words shorter than 650. But still. This is a seriously epic thread. It should be preserved for posterity. It’s amazing what joint authorship can accomplish.

Previous posts in the manliness series:
* Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares?
* Questions I Want to Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 2: Men’s Rights
* Questions I Want to Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 3: Space for Men
* Manliness and Feminism: The Followup
* Manliness and Feminism 2: Judgment Day

The above image is available in poster form from movieposter.com, or would be if they weren’t out of stock. Gotcha!