What Is Sex Positive In A Dangerous Debasing Act of Humiliation That Can Kill You?

You should be warned that I'm going to quote a description of a disgusting, offensive and degrading sexual practice, a heterosexual practice in every description or definition I've seen of it.  Though there are practices promoted in gay porn that are at least as disgusting and degrading, it's probably been featured in gay porn though I've never seen it referred to in that.   And that is not to mention, and perhaps more important, it is also dangerously unhygienic.   And there's a pretty bad aspect of racial-ethnic stereotyping, just to add to the tantalizing transgression of it.

You may have heard or seen would-be humorous references made to "dirty Sanchez".  I had and until seeing some of those would be knee-slapping reference to it last week, I'd never bothered to look up what it meant. Here is the first description I read, I'll warn you again, it's pretty disgusting.

A Dirty Sanchez is a sexual situation where a man is laying some pipe doggy-style, and while in the midst of sex he inserts his finger in the womans starfish and then smears his finger across her upper lip, giving her a thin shit moustache. This is the Dirty Sanchez.
That bitch was so skanky, she didnt even mind that I gave her a dirty snachez!

That was the same thing that I read in several other places.  And remember, this is to be thought of as funny.

It is an act designed to be an expression of ultimate male supremacy, a demonstration of male supremacy by the use, degradation, humiliation and objectification of women.   Any woman who would want that done to her obviously has internalized her oppression or fear that overcomes any sense of her own dignity and rights.  If I knew someone did something like that to my nieces or even anyone I'd be tempted to kill them.  And I do mean that.

But it's supposed to be funny enough that references to it have left their mark on commercial movies and TV shows, here and in that bastion of non-liberating liberation, Britain.  There is supposed to be something wonderfully liberated in its mention, a sign of some kind of sophisticated transgression.   It is incredible to me that something so inherently puerile and irresponsible can be considered an emblem of sophistication but so much of sex based irresponsibility is to be taken as such.

If you don't monitor gay porn, as most gay men probably do to some extent, you might be shocked at how much in the past few years,  rimming, analingus, has gone from being a rare feature of a specialized category of porn - widely considered gross - to being pervasive, just another of the dangerous sex acts that are promoted by porn of all kinds.  Obviously, in the last several years, the porn industry has been trying to mainstream mouth to anus sex, extending what it did with anal sex in the late 60s and 70s.

A few seconds of thought should tell someone with more than vestigial intelligence that the ingestion of  even small amounts of feces IS DANGEROUS.  Especially directly from the body.   E-coli and a number of other highly dangerous microorganisms are found in abundance in feces.  And that's in the absence of specifically pathogenic organisms, HIV, hepatitis, cholera, cryptosporidium, salmonella etc. are just some of the known pathogens present in human feces.  And those are almost certainly not all known.  Before HIV was discovered and associated with anal sex, it was entirely unknown, dangerous as it was.    The same people who think there is something sophisticated and progressive about these sexual practices would blast and condemn anyone so backward and irresponsible so as to advocate decreasing public hygiene, risking disease outbreaks of disease caused by exactly some of those same pathogens,  to save money. And that is almost certainly less probable to make someone sick or kill them than direct ingestion of fecal matter.   But when it's presented as a part of sex, all of that is to be forgotten.

There is something really, really bizarre on display here.  When you introduce the word "sex" into it, when you call any practices "sex" people who consider themselves to be the embodiment of reason and rationality lose their faculty of reason, voluntarily.  There is nothing questionable about this, there is nothing that isn't obvious about it, ingesting fecal matter is dangerous and degrading.  A different and far stronger taboo takes over, forbidding the assertion that that fact should be mentioned or even can be finally dispositive in judging it.  It is forbidden to point out that these practices, even as sex, are, intolerably, a threat to health and life not to mention degrading and objectifying.

In observing this over a long period of time, since before the discovery of AIDS, in thinking about it, I've come to conclude that the desire to be cool is transcendent among large numbers of people.  And nothing defines cool more than the insouciant and public acceptance of sex acts that are supposed to shock the prudes.  The Cool Ones are a tribal group presented as being highly desirable, the membership of that highly hierarchical pecking order is the crown of modern life, it is presented as being a high aspiration to be as cool as you can be.  One of the things that will lessen your position in the tribe and which can expel you from it is expressing disapproval to acts presented as transgressive.  You can also gain status by boldly displaying your own transgression, or, in a case such as this one, by displaying your cool expression of the most appalling things without batting an eyelash.  That is a form of dare-ya to.   It is a challenge to dare you to reject the idea, to risk your status in the in-group.

If you think this is inconsequential, it is essentially the means used by the corporate media to discredit second wave feminism even as it was under attack from the religious fundamentalists.   As they were attacking feminists, they were also being attacked as anti-male prudes who were opposed to sex.  Susan Brownmiller's research into rape was attacked and distorted as well as the criticism of porn made by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.  On the other hand, it was held to be an offense to modernism to critisize the positive presentations of rape in Hollywood movies.   Clint Eastwood never suffered anything I'm aware of for presenting one of the most would be heroic, positive depictions of rape in a movie during the same period that saw the suppression of second wave feminism.  Clint was cool.  Officially.  At least until his senile performance at the last Republican Convention.   I didn't see much difference in the intellectual and ethical content of it from his previous career .

In the same period, beginning in venues of the cool such as the Village Voice other venues of the "alternative press" (those I know of featuring personals for kinky and commercial sex) and Penthouse Magazine what was billing itself as a new wave of feminism, "sex positive feminism"  was announced to overcome the second wave.  That those magazines and newspapers tended to be owned and controlled by men and were in the business of selling versions of the cool and making money off of commercial and transgressive sex was supposed to signify nothing, I guess.  The coersive effect on that in pressuring consent to acts that were dangerous and degrading is unmeasurable but it is certainly there. The effect on pushing expression of more extreme and more transgressive and degrading sex into mainstream culture could only be denied by someone willing to lie through their teeth that they see and hear what is right in front of them and that they have said what they have.

In the past, when pointing these things out, I've gotten a shocked reaction that a gay man, who will settle for nothing less than full equality under the law, could condemn what is held to have been a force in pushing that issue forward.  But it's because I'm gay and an observer of the history of the struggle for equality since before it is generally held to have "really" begun.  There are parallels between the forces that have lost ground in other movements, sometimes at the behest of commercial interests with goals at odds with promoting equality.  As I've pointed out here recently, the most extreme of anti-gay violence and oppression is indistingushable from what is regularly presented as gay sex in pornography.  When I first saw the images of the videotaped and posted attacks by Russian fascists on gay men, I thought it was porn-spam that had gotten through my filters.

I'm going to transgress and point out that in this issue, the cool ones are asking us to eat shit, literally.  Or asking someone to.  In order to maintain a cool attitude in this we are being required to pretend that it is anything less than degrading and dangerous, to suppress everything we should have learned about toilet training starting at about one year of age.  And, on the blogs, many of those who do that believe themselves to be champions of all that is modern and sciency.   Obviously that's not true.  There's nothing more backward than ignoring the most basic health issues in dealing with excrement.   And that is exactly what this boils down to.