Saturday, January 20, 2007

Not an Object

A woman's sexual activity level as consumer good: Will this comparison ever die? No. No, it won't.

Faced with two oh-the-horror examples of similes of this kind (one oldie-but-goodie involving a used car; the other involving a [gulp] piece of tape), commenter Nik at Feministe is forced to break it to the ladies: These analogies persist because they're right!

I suspect you lot essentially just don’t like the fact that they are right. The fact is people who slept around a lot in the past are more likely to sleep around a lot in the future than people who haven’t. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re after a long term monogamous relationship, then you are better off going for someone who’s walked the walk and is not just talking the talk. (I know Hugo’s pimping the Xtian redemptive stuff, but the real world doesn’t work like that).

Many, many people rebut, but I'm fond of Lesley's response to a followup remark by D.J. Jazzy Nik:

You cannot take one action and assume that its statistically significant predictive values apply to completely unrelated actions. You have to study each action separately, because there are different factors that go into each. No reputable social scientist would make the leap you have. They would look at what influences people to do each of those actions and construct a model that accounts for those factors. Then they’d run the regression. You’re completely lacking any consideration of separate influences.

Let me take an example. Adults who watch a lot of Barney videos. The majority of adults who watch a lot of Barney videos do so because they have young children. Let’s even assume that they have a pattern of watching Barney videos, because they had three children in a 6 year span. In 10 years, assuming they don’t have any more children, their rate of Barney video viewing would decrease tremendously (probably to zero). We expect that, because we know what factors go into adult viewership of Barney videos. We don’t look at it and conclude that it’s like every other activity one might perform. You just can’t do that.

. . . although I'm also partial to this from Michelle:

Why does no on ever ask how you’d feel if you bought a sausage and found out that someone already took a bite out of it, ha? I’ve never heard that analogy.

THANK YOU AND AMEN.

Look, I'm very tired of this, because this should be so basic by now, but apparently it isn't, so once more with feeling:

A vagina is not a toilet or a bathtub, where you're willing to overlook a little grime and germs provided they're only YOUR grime and germs, and not some other guy's.

A vagina is not an object; oh, technically I suppose it is, in a sense, or at least you can use it as one in a sentence, but unfortunately for the Niks and for way too many other fellas in the world, a vagina is not much use isolated from the rest of the body; you know, from the person who's sporting it? Hello? Up here! Look in the eyes: This is what a human being looks like.

I will take your concerns about the purity or integrity of women's genitalia seriously--well, never, really, because it's not your concern, because women are not your property. But could you at least humor me by pretending occasionally to care where your dicks have been? Could you fake a little concern for me there, just for consistency's sake? Could you wonder whether that bad boy may have accrued a few too many miles on it? Say, how's the chassis looking? Do you think it might be time to rotate the tires? Or perhaps you prefer the tape metaphor: Do you ever find your balls feeling, you know, not so sticky?

Enough! A woman is going to fuck who she's going to fuck; if you want it to be you, and not some other guy, then dump these idiotic new/used, adhesive/nonadhesive analogies over a cliff and never recycle them again. And for fuck's sake do not invent NEW ones. I do not want to hear about how a woman's hooha is just like a battery or a refrigerator or a plasma television or whatever the hell else you come up with.

Cease and desist. You are being stupid, and we are losing patience.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

It's so tied to that pesky virginity business; the idea that the best vagina is the one you got to "use" FIRST. Like,if I looked, there'd be a little flag planted in the bush, proclaiming my muffin as territory. After that, future explorers would arrive at the outpost and sadly shake their heads when they saw that someone else had been there before them, and all that's left now is a flag and some litter. Sure, they'd still unzip, but with so much less enthusiasm. It brings a tear to the eye, it does.

ilyka said...

Like,if I looked, there'd be a little flag planted in the bush, proclaiming my muffin as territory.

If I could draw, I would steal this concept and use it in a comic strip somehow . . . a little teensy flag waving above some gal's racing stripe . . .

. . . yes, it is a very good thing I can't draw.

Sage said...

If you can't draw, you still might be able photoshop!

Lesley Plum said...

Thank you. I was trying to come up with an example that even a moron like nik could get.