fandomnumbergenerator | Entries tagged with unlimited intimacy

"But does it make sense to continue to speak in terms of the unconscious when men consciously experiment with deliberate HIV-transmission? Although the problem of “slipping up” doubtless still exists, increasingly gay sex without condoms is figured as a “lifestyle choice,” an option on the sexual menu that can be actively pursued in contexts that validate the choice […] Barebacker has become a new sexual identity because the practice of unprotected sex contravenes gay community norms that were established and held sway throughout the first decade of the epidemic. Somewhat akin to the category of queer, barebacking is defined by its resistance not merely to heterosexual norms but to gay norms as well.

"During the second decade of the epidemic, as homosexuality inched its way from the margins into the social mainstream, becoming what Andrew Sullivan called “virtually normal,” the discourse of barebacking was invented by some gay men to keep their sex outside the pale of respectability. These are men who don’t want to be considered “normal,” and who thus are making clear that something other than normal can be not merely defensible but positively desirable. If part of the appeal of gay sex consists in its transgressiveness (whether perceived or actual), then barebacking could be considered a strategy for reinscribing eroticism within the sphere of transgression"

—Breeding Culture:Barebacking, Bugchasing, Giftgiving

Tim Dean actually goes into a lot more detail in Unlimited Intimacy, which I think was based on that article.

And if I remember right, he finds that it is actually very hard to find documented cases of bug-chasing and gift-giving, and that a lot of people involved in these scenes were already HIV+ (though a lot of people apparently don’t get tested, because it comes with a lot of legal consequences). In terms of forming a bond of personal responsibility, it doesn’t really seem to work that way, particularly since it is very difficult to attribute seroconversion to one specific partner if you are having a ton of risky anonymous sex.

I would also say, though, that I think some of the fetishization of barebacking comes out of the reality that there is already a lot of risky M/M sex going on, and at least the barebackers are claiming it. A pretty depressing recent study found that condoms don’t protect as well against HIV in the context of anal sex (even if used perfectly) and that using condoms some of the time was no more effective than never using condoms and that only a small minority of gay men were using condoms perfectly.

"Theoretical blind spots not withstanding, these psychoanalytic accounts [of Freud and Lacan] offer a description of human sexuality as ineluctably fetishistic, in the sense not of referring ultimately to the penis (or the phallus) but of drawing attention to the fantasmatic transformation of objects that have no preordained psychic value. The dense weight of cultural convention persuades us to distinguish some forms of sex as fetishistic, while others (such as heterosexual genital penetration) are understood as “normal” sex by virtue of their fetishistic histories having been naturalized. From a psychoanalytic perspective, even vanilla sex counts as sex by virtue of its having undergone a mostly invisible process of fetishization – a process that is largely invisible because it coincides with heteronormative culture"

—Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy

I’m rereading Incognito by David Eagleman, and it’s a book that I for the most part like. I’m very interested in consciousness and the illusion that there’s a little person who is “me” who is driving the rest of my brain and body around.

But Eagleman’s acceptance of a teleological, reproduction-driven idea of sexual desire is just baffling to me. Public scientists really need to think through how creepy the reductionist explanations of male sexuality in evolutionary psychology are; they are basically saying that it is “natural” for men to only be attracted to fertile, physically perfect, teenage girls. And part of their justification is that sexual attraction is not under conscious control. A trained athlete hitting a fastball is also largely unconscious, but no one’s claiming that that is an intrinsic part of human nature.

"I do not see how one can talk about fetishism of sadomasochism, without thinking about the production of rubber, the techniques and gear used for controlling and riding horses, the high polished gleam of military footwear, the history of silk stockings, the cold authoritative qualities of medical equipment, or the allure of motorcycles and the elusive liberties of leaving teh city for the open road. For that matter, how can we think of fetishism without the impact of cities, of certain streets and parks, of red-light districts and “cheap amusements,” or the seductions of department store counters, piled high with desirable and glamorous goods … ? To me, fetishism raises all sorts of issues concerning shifts in the manufacture of objects, the historical and social specificities of control and skin and social etiquette, or ambiguously experienced body invasions and minutely graduated hierarchies. If all of this complex social information is reduced to castration or the Oedipus complex or knowing or not knowing what one is not supposed to know, I think something important has been lost."

— Gayle Rubin, “Sexual Traffic” quoted in Unlimited Intimacy by Tim Dean

"At the heart of every culture is a set of experiences which members hold not onto to be worth practicing, but also necessary to maintain and transmit to those who follow. In the case of a sexual subculture, one often has only one way to do this: by embodying the traditions. …The subculture and the virus require the same processes for transmission"

—

Paul Morris “No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn” (1998) quoted in Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy (2009)

There is a very similar question of intergenerational transmission of disease and knowledge among IDUs. I remember a harm reduction seminar about 15 years ago recommending that young people be discouraged from getting high with older people to protect themselves from HIV. The argument seemed to be that the older IDUs were only acting as a reservoir of HIV and HCV, and were not also a reservoir of practical and historical knowledge and culture (because that role should belong to harm reduction organizations).

But I’ve been thinking specifically about how the knowledge and culture of sexual identity is transmitted from one generation to the next, and the role that sex plays. “Unlike other cultures, nobody is born into or inherits queer culture: it becomes one’s "own” culture only through modes of invention and appropriation" (Dean, Unlimited Intimacy). So there is always a question of transmission of or induction into queer culture.

I think the experience may be different for girls than it is for boys. When I was a teenager, I did a lot research, read a lot of books. Combing through used books stores for whatever I could find – Audre Lorde and Joan D Vinge, Weetzie Bat and City of Night. A battered copy of the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse. A Maximum Rock and Roll piece on the history of the word punk.

And I think a lot of boys scoured films for coded references (as described in the Celluloid Closet). But a lot of boys in my cohort also had a more hands on introduction. I heard a lot of stories that ranged from objectification (think Queer as Folk UK) to frank abuse. And I got the impression that that was a lot less common between women. When I was a teenager, the women I had sex with were in my age group – friends from high school, women I met at the Mix (an all-ages gay club in Berkeley), fellow college students. And that seemed to be pretty strictly enforced. Older women were not interested in me. Which was an important way to protect young women, but also left me invisible to the larger lesbian community. Older women were pretty openly dismissive, making it clear that they didn’t considered me old enough to be taken seriously. And while the spaces that catered to gay men were inappropriately lax about checking IDs, lesbian bars and clubs seemed to go too far in the opposite direction, and I several times had to talk my way into places that I had legitimate ID showing I was old enough for.

In a very frustrating episode my first week at college, a 20-year-old I met at an MIT dance took me back to her dorm room, and then recoiled in horror when she found out I was 17. We spent the rest of the night respectfully cuddling in her too-small bed.

(Though part of my problem might have been Boston/ San Francisco 2nd wave/ 3rd wave culture shock – I was young, bisexual and the wrong kind of androgynous. Often mistaken for a scruffy, long-haired guy. I was later told that no real lesbian would believe that Djuna and I were a couple, since we didn’t look like [Boston-style] lesbians.)

The issue of how important sex (and specifically the pick-up scene) is to queer community is something I’m still chewing on, as a bisexual woman in a monogamous straight relationship. And honestly, most of the sex and relationships I’ve had with women (aside from that brief period of picking up girls at the Pacific Center and the Mix when I was 17) have been related to Rocky Horror, Goth clubs, or the drug scene of the Lower Haight – outside of any kind of official queer space.

The men who climb into the sling to be fist-fucked are enduring the act, and they have an audience to prove that they passed the test. While many participants report great pleasure in accomplishing taking a fist up their ass, it’s impressive to note that many men report that they have to have the act witnessed for it to really have any meaning for them.

This is even more apparent when dealing with whippings. Obviously, the person being flagellated is enduring a punishment.

—John Preston, My Life as a Pornographer and Other Indecent Acts (1993) (in an essay on the history of the Mineshaft sex club in New York) quoted in Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on The Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean (2009) (Emphasis in the original)

So, I have never been fisted anally, but somehow this description of endurance and public witnessing is closer to my experience of performing with Brigit at Bondage-a-Go-Go than most of the descriptions I have read of sub-space in BDSM. Our performances involved me stripping naked and being flogged and caned and didn’t involve dirty talk or humiliation or obedience (I actually really hated it when she called me a slut, even in private). Having an audience meant that I could push myself to take more and that Brigit (who had a bad habit of getting stoned and sloppy) would be on best behavior. It’s interesting to realize that this kind of endurance instead of submission was coded as more of a gay male thing.

And may explain why, even though I was naked (and had narrow shoulders and wide hips), people seemed confused about my gender. Also, most of the trans women who performed at Bondage a Go Go (who were older and who, unlike Brigit, often had some experience in the gay community in the 80s) were also doing performances (like being hit with 2x4s) that were based on endurance.

Still thinking way too much about Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy. Apparently there is a whole impregnation-based argot in the barebacking subculture, with words like “breeding” and “knocked up” and “seed” used in online ads and documentary-style porn (with an implicit parallel between pregnancy and HIV infection). And I think I’ve been on Tumblr too long, because the first thing that hit me was the disturbing parallel to Omegaverse fanfic. Though fascinating in the way the same fantasy – unprotected sex as procreative, even when it’s between two men – is found in such different subcultures (hypermasculine barebackers and mostly female fanfic writers). The language and the prominence of large quantities of semen and the requirement for internal ejaculation.

Also making me uncomfortable all over again with the lack of condoms in so many fanfics (or almost as bad, some throw away “I’m clean, you’re clean” dialogue). I mean, I get that it’s fantasy. And unlike filmed porn, there are no participants who are risking viral transmission. And, at least in slash, there’s no possibility that a female reader could become a literal participant, because the characters are fictional, male, and, in some cases, sci-fi mutants with non-human genitals. But the fantasy seems really naive when you think about what it would actually mean to act it out. Though apparently some writers are particularly concerned with portraying safer sex because of anecdotal evidence that fanfic has become a vector for transmitting information about sex and pleasure intergenerationally, from older women to teenage girls.

"These days virtually everyone imagines that the safe-sex maxim “use a condom every time” does not apply to him or her but to those whose pleasure seems less significant or legitimate than his or her own."

— Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on The Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean

"Similarly, the risk-reduction strategy of negotiated safety substitutes the limit of monogamy for that of latex. Given that this strategy rationalized the abandonment of condoms in strictly controlled circumstances, it is not surprising that the doctrine of negotiated safety originated outside the United States. A central element of Australian and European safe-sex education, negotiated safety involved gay men in a committed couple going bareback only when both repeatedly test negative for HIV. As Shernoff correctly observes, “negotiated safety makes AIDS prevention professionals in the Unites States nervous,” because they do not wish to be seen as condoning the abandonment of condoms. Although the doctrine of negotiated safety preceded the emergence of bareback subculture by several years, it should be regarded as a fully rationalized, supremely safe version of barebacking – and therefore, some would say, it hardly qualifies as barebacking at all. Negotiated safety enables unlimited intimacy with a single partner, while simultaneously imposing stringent limits of extramarital liaisons. With this approach – in which condom use remains the norm relative to which a single exception may be carefully elaborated – the investment lies in safety rather than risk.
By contrast, the technique of strategic positioning is employed during bareback sex between discordant partners. Here a high-risk situation may be ameliorated by the HIV-positive man’s taking the role of “bottom,” while his HIV-negative partner takes that of “top.” this configuration reduces (although it certainly does not eliminate) the risk of infection, since viral transmission occurs most readily when a positive man ejaculates inside a negative man’s rectum. As a term, strategic positioning, like negotiated safety, is derived from Australian research’ as a practice, it does not qualify as safer sex (the only sanctioned goal of HIV prevention in the United States) but as a harm-reduction technique."

—

Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on The Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean (2009)

What is the US problem with harm reduction? Trust the US to apply the logic of abstinence-only to safer sex. No wonder it’s not working very well.

Also straight couples use negotiated safety all the time (albeit usually in a watered down form where these is no contingency plan for what happens if one partner strays). How can you have an official policy that expects married gay men to never stop using condoms even within the marriage?

"Like the disappearance of gay institutions of interclass contact that coincides with [San Francisco Mayor Gavin] Newsom’s promotion of the institution of gay marriage, the survival of San Francisco’s racial diversity camouflages the loss of its class diversity. Before his decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses, Newsom had generated controversy with his inhumane proposals for reducing the city’s homeless population. The festival of gay weddings early in 2004 made getting married feel like an act of civil disobedience, as if privatized intimacy via government-sanctioned nuptials heralded the birth of a new civil rights movements. Media images of all those joyful newlyweds bamboozled liberals everywhere into seeing nothing but sexual progress in Newsom’s San Francisco. However, the price of these weddings will not be Newsom’s political career but erotic diversity, relational possibilities, and a whole social fabric of interclass contact that, as I have tried to suggest, makes urban life worth living."

—

Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on The Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean (2009)

So, yeah, after a lot of ambivalence about the push for gay marriage, I had to admit that I wanted to have kids and it seemed foolhardy to give up all the protections that government-sanctioned nuptials offered. And it seemed incredibly hypocritical to hold my nose and take advantage of all the things that marriage offers without fully supporting other people’s right to do the same thing.

But, I think it’s absolutely true that Newsom’s media circus of gay marriage (which apparently ended up causing a lot of headaches for the very limited number of people who managed to get married) really overshadowed his very conservative vision of San Francisco.

When I’m single, I don’t bareback on purpose usually. I practice safe sex often enough to consider myself “always safe,” even though that’s not quite true. While the overwhelming majority of times that I’ve had casual anal sex, I’ve had the wherewithal and self control to stop and put on the condom I’ve already made sure is within my reach, there have been times when pre-sex teasing has led to penetration. I’ve slipped. There are times when a few condom-free strokes don’t seem like they’d hurt anyone and we were both down so… I’ve given in to requests of full-on bare sex to orgasm on occasion, depending how hot and convincing the invitation was and how turned on I already was. It’s always the exception, though. “That’s not me,” I tell myself during and especially after.

It’s easy enough to sweep this all under the rug if nothing comes of it. If you don’t contract HIV from bareback sex, was it unsafe? What does it even matter? Just do better next time and take solace in the personal rules—somewhat informed, somewhat arbitrary—that you suspect are keeping you protected: I’ve never gotten fucked raw by anyone who wasn’t my monogamous boyfriend—I never need to bottom so badly that I’d ever let a casual acquaintance enter me without a condom.

—

Jim Pickett, the director of advocacy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, quoted in “What Is Safe Sex? The Raw and Uncomfortable Truth About Truvada” by Rich Juzwiak, Gawker, March 4, 2014

Just read Unlimited Intimacy, which I found fascinating but also terrifying. I am much more in the category of Jim Pickett (the “That’s not me” problem), with a set of strict rules that sometimes get broken (both in terms of sex and when I used to inject drugs) than the “No limits” men Tim Dean describes. It set off such a deep irrational terror, that I found myself thinking, maybe I should start using condoms again with my husband

"If barebacking is defined not as intentional unprotected anal intercourse between men who remain unaware of each other’s hiv status but, more broadly, as fucking without condoms, then few adults remain wholly unimplicated in it."

—
Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean