Wow, thank you guys so much for expanding on this, it helps a great deal. And makes for incredibly interesting conversations, too!
When stuff like this freaks me out, I don't like to just get offended and draw conlusions, I like to pick it apart and figure out what different people think, see the angles and learn something, and often that makes me feel a great deal better. So sincerely to you guys, thank you for that.
Gord's Bro, your comment reminded me of something that happened yesterday. I was sitting at school, eating ice-cream in the lounge, when Ron Jeremy comes strolling by, pausing at the elevator a few feet away(I'd love to say "I bumped into Ron Jeremy" because it would sound more exciting, but wouldn't quite be accurate). My friend's jaw dropped, his eyes widened, and so I pat him on the back encouragingly and said "Go on, shake the man's hand, you know you want to" which he did.
So we got to talking afterward, what the hell was Ron Jeremy doing at our school? Giving a Q & A apparently. But, I said, wouldn't it be infinitely more amusing if it had been a debate between Ron Jeremy and Andrea Dworkin? If you don't know who Dworkin is, she's a well-known feminist/philosopher/and-maybe-social-scientist-to-some-extent who tensd towards the extreme radical, to put it mildly. She has argues extensively that any form of intercourse between a man and a woman is rape, a violation no matter where you stick it because the woman (who is politically disadvantaged to the man) personal space is being encroached upon and penetrated.
Now, I know that if you read a lot of her stuff, she's not completely "wrong", and she has a lot of interesting arguments (though I haven't read enough to be any kind of authoritative expert on her, be warned). I see what she's saying in a really abstract kinda way, but for practical reality it's obviously a pretty useless philosophy to try and live. I call this kind of feminism "Doom Feminism" because it makes everything seem so permanently horrible.
And me? I'm more like "Can't you just choose a different paradigm? If enough people don't want to be the victim, can't we just start to will things to be different?" I know it's not like some magical, instant cure of society's problems, but if people start to think and believe differently, they will act differently. Reality will change. You can have a society (and maybe I'm jsut being naive here) where forcing someone into a sexual act would seem as rediculous as forcing someone to dance, something virtually non-existent in regular daily reality because the idea is foreign. And like you were saying, about the power dynamics of sex between men and women, a common response to the view of female submission/male dominating is "Why don't we see it as the female actively consuming the male?" Western conceptions of how intercourse works, with the male as the actor and the female as the passive receptacle, is a construct of medical language pieced together by male practitioners over the past, oh, few hundred to a few thousand years (whole other debate there), and so of course the language of sexual intercourse and anatomy is going to be with the male body as the standard model, with the female merely being a "variation" on the standard, and sexual acts coming from a male perspective. They didn't do it to be jerks, that's just the way it was. Male physicians seeing it from their world, without female input (though perhaps ingoring female input was a little jerky, but they thought we were mentally feeble and occasionally given to be possessed by the devil, so I'll give 'em a break
) So that's probably why we have the popular language of "penetrate, thrust, enter, violate / submit, surrender, resign, permit" rather than female active participants who "consume, embark, absorb, devour, .....help me out here, even I'm not used to thinking about alternative discourses for sex.....uh, engage, assimilate, tap, extract, milk, sap (ooh, this is getting sexy, I'll stop there).
So don't let Dworkin make you feel bad about having sex!
Again, thank you guys for talking with me about this, I appreciate it so much, and totally see you're point of view.
*a kiss for each of you on the cheek*
-F
