In Over 50 Sex Tips, My Vagina is Not Mentioned Once

September 30, 2014 6:17 PM

Desireé Dallagiacomo & Kaycee Filson - "Real Sex Tips" SLYT (NSFW) Two women give their take on magazine sex tips in a tandem button poetry piece.
posted by Michele in California (38 comments total)

DAMN. I love this.
posted by bunderful at 6:49 PM on September 30, 2014 [2 favorites]

Do we do anything besides touch him on the penis?
posted by BungaDunga at 6:54 PM on September 30, 2014 [4 favorites]

Obviously this is really about the pain and suffering endured by women because of our society's bullshit double-standards about sex, but I feel these women made a great choice in presenting "sex tips" that are downright horrifying to me as a man. Nothing about those "tips" was appealing.

Patriarchy does indeed hurt us all. Ow.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 7:26 PM on September 30, 2014 [10 favorites]

I feel these women made a great choice in presenting "sex tips" that are downright horrifying to me as a man. Nothing about those "tips" was appealing.

You should read a list of them sometime! I guarantee you they didn't have to look very hard.

Related: 8 Sex Positions That Will Blow His Mind and Destroy His Penis
posted by phunniemee at 7:34 PM on September 30, 2014 [13 favorites]

Master Your Genitals With Fraction & Zdarsky's 'Just The Tips'
posted by Artw at 7:44 PM on September 30, 2014 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: My vagina is not mentioned once.
posted by Danf at 7:49 PM on September 30, 2014

I loved this. "Clit-o-ris!"
posted by sockermom at 7:51 PM on September 30, 2014

This is nnnice.
posted by boo_radley at 7:55 PM on September 30, 2014

Well, that was depressing.

Also DEAR HUMANITY: STOP BUYING THESE MAGAZINES. THEY MAKE EVERYONE FEEL LIKE SHIT.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:56 PM on September 30, 2014 [6 favorites]

After listening to those "sex tips" I wish they hadn't mentioned a penis once either.
posted by bswinburn at 9:55 PM on September 30, 2014 [5 favorites]

I am happy to focus on vagina if it stops sometime grabbing mr winky with one hand and slapping him with the other.
posted by biffa at 11:52 PM on September 30, 2014 [1 favorite]

I...don't...get it.

I mean, I'm a man, so I get that I'm supposed to feel bad about that or something.

That might be your problem right there. This performance didn't really do it for me, but most poetry doesn't, so that's not a reflection on poetry, it's a reflection on me. But at no point did I think "As a man, I'm supposed to feel personally bad about this". So if you start with that assumption, and then try to work from there...well, it's like "I don't get the Simpsons. I mean, I know it's supposed to be a gritty Swedish art film series, but..."
posted by Bugbread at 12:45 AM on October 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

I...don't...get it.

I mean, I'm a man, so I get that I'm supposed to feel bad about that or something.

Or maybe it's possible that when a woman talks about her experiences with men, it's not about you, it's about her, and her experiences. Maybe it's even possible to be interested in someone else's experiences even if they aren't about you.
posted by straight at 12:59 AM on October 1, 2014 [34 favorites]

I realize that since basically every piece of media caters to men it can be hard for dudes to get that maybe some shit isn't about them but JESUS, SinisterPurpose, that was dense. Maybe it was a pair of human beings sharing their experiences and you were supposed to, I don't know, LISTEN? And maybe get a scrap of empathy for that experience?
posted by NoraReed at 1:50 AM on October 1, 2014 [14 favorites]

I...don't...get it.

I mean, I'm a...
I'm supposed to feel…
I don't
I certainly don't...
I understand…
I also know…
It takes little time for me to…
I generally try not to bother people with my penis...
Should I be…
What if I don't care…
What if it just isn't that important to me

This poem isn't about you. The performers are expressing something about their own experiences as women learning to take control of their own sexualities. Experiences which have absolutely zero, zilch, nada to do with you and your penis. Does a poem written and performed by women need to be directly applicable to you and/or your penis in order for you to consider it worth hearing?

You are, of course, welcome to critique the rhythm and delivery of the poem if you wish. (Although that is not a particularly brave or interesting way of engaging with a text. It's a bit like starting a book review with a stinging critique of the font it's printed in). But to dislike a poem simply because it describes feelings and experiences which are very different from your own is to miss one of the great pleasures of poetry - that it is a window into the lived experiences of other human beings.
posted by embrangled at 2:20 AM on October 1, 2014 [14 favorites]

I'm a woman, I have my own vagina and everything, and still like 95% of this didn't apply to me because their personal experience has not been my personal experience. But that doesn't mean that their experience is any less valid, you know? Or that their experience won't strike a chord with some of the many many people in the world who are not me.

Just because I personally have managed to avoid a lot of the shitty things that happen to women's sexuality in our society doesn't mean that other women have had that luxury. If you don't get it and don't want to get it then the message maybe wasn't meant for you. Seems pretty easy to grasp.
posted by phunniemee at 4:45 AM on October 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

I loved this very much. I like spoken word as an art form, and the message this poem delivers resonates with my experience. I am glad I watched it, and will deliberately seek out more work from Desireé Dallagiacomo & Kaycee Filson.

Although, ya know, to be fair...I don't have a penis, so what do I know about women's experiences with the way media portrays a woman's sexual role in culture?
posted by dejah420 at 6:37 AM on October 1, 2014

Although, ya know, to be fair...I don't have a penis, so what do I know about women's experiences with the way media portrays a woman's sexual role in culture?

Totally not being flippant here, but: isn't it generally accepted at MeFi that having a penis isn't synonymous with being a man? Wouldn't a pre-op trans woman have a penis?
posted by Bugbread at 6:53 AM on October 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Righteous. People, regardless of sex, gender, or any other factor, ought to be able to claim their bodies for themselves. In fact, they ought not have to. But since the pervasive cultural messages in most of the world send pretty unsubtle signals that bodies, and in particular the female body, is a thing to be displayed for others, I'm damn glad people are standing up and claiming.
posted by that's candlepin at 7:36 AM on October 1, 2014

I...don't...get it. I mean, I'm a man, so I get that I'm supposed to feel bad about that or something.

You should have stopped with your first sentence because that isn't what this is about.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:29 AM on October 1, 2014

Um, isn't it okay to have feelings about stuff here? Maybe everyone doesn't agree with sinister purpose and his take on the poetry, but does that mean a bunch of us need to pile on him? I think not. YMMV. And yeah, stupid sex tips and stupid women's "service" magazines that train women to feel inadequate no matter what.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:52 AM on October 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I assumed his comment was magnificently satirical performance art and am disappointed to discover that I was apparently incorrect.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:32 AM on October 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Hey, I said "two women give their take" and that is all it is. But, also, there are going to be other women out there for whom this resonates.

I was sexually abused as a kid and the single hardest psychological moment of my entire life was the realization in my mid-twenties that I needed to find a way to embrace my sexuality and be nice to it, because hating my sexuality and rejecting it and wanting to basically be psychologically neutered was just perpetuating the problem (not quite the right language, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment). I was in therapy for the second time and my thought upon going back to therapy was that "I have a nice life and I like everything about it except my sexuality." One of the things I liked was being a mom. Well, you know, I didn't mail order the baby. I got that baby from having sex. So, there was something very broken about my internal logic there.

I had that epiphany and drove by myself to some park and sat in my car and probably cried. I think I sat there an hour. I was horrified. It was like I had been told "In order to get to heaven, you have to first love the devil."

I am not unique in having such negative past experiences and struggling to find a way to something more positive. And, yeah, magazines and movies and whatever tend to be bad about perpetuating certain stereotypes that actively make it harder to escape that mindset if you have the misfortune of finding yourself in a mental space of knowing your own sexuality to be something that exists solely for the pleasure of men and not for your own -- in fact, for the pleasure of men at your expense, often involving pain and suffering.

To be fair though, I have read articles about, for example, female erotica and how the publisher struggled with "what on earth do we put on the cover?" Because most male erotica just has a sexy woman on the cover, but merely objectifying the male body tends to not appeal to women the same way that it appeals to men. So this problem -- of media portraying sex a certain way -- is something I think is at least partly routed in genuine differences between the sexes and not just cultural bs.

I discussed this with my oldest son recently. He read some book about someone who had come up with a formula for predicting certain things based on Internet searches. One of the examples in the book was that when men are interested in a female celebrity, they basically want to find naked pics. But women don't typically go looking for naked pics of men. When they think some male celebrity is hot and want to fantasize about him, the first thing they google is his relationship status. So, in other words (generally speaking), women are looking for a relationship, men are looking for sex. And my son talked about how looking at search results was fairly objective evidence of this because it didn't contain the biases you so often see in how studies get designed.

I know this to be true of me -- that I am looking for emotional attachment. And I have struggled with how that gets represented, what do you focus on (like in your own fantasies, even) if you are not terribly interested in just his looks per se? I have wrestled with such questions for a long time. It took me a long time to find answers that work for me. I suspect this is why we have tropes like "the perfect wedding" -- I think things like that symbolically speak to the female urge to bond emotionally, which is something that is hard to represent in some kind of visual shorthand. Emotional bonding is something that happens over time and it's hard to capture that in a visual.

Anyway, I don't want this tangent to get too long. I just thought the video was something neat on the web that some folks might like, and I wanted to share.
posted by Michele in California at 9:44 AM on October 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Maybe everyone doesn't agree with sinister purpose and his take on the poetry, but does that mean a bunch of us need to pile on him? I think not.

I'd have a lot more sympathy for not piling on if EVERY post that discussed women's issues didn't get automatically derailed out of the gate by guys saying "I don't get it" or "but this happens to men too" or "not all men do this" or blah blah blah.

It's perfectly okay for someone to not say anything at all if they don't get it. In fact, maybe sitting on your hands and reading what other people have to say first could HELP you get it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:49 AM on October 1, 2014 [10 favorites]

I think if you want to find "sex tips" that are focused on "what gives a woman pleasure" you'd want to look in men's magazines and not women's magazines. That is, both sets of magazines are assuming that their audience already knows, pretty much, what they like, but needs help figuring out what the other body in the bed likes.

One assumes, of course, that most of the advice in the men's magazines is just as bad as the advice sampled at the beginning of this video (blow pepper in his face as he climaxes? Really?).
posted by yoink at 9:55 AM on October 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

FWIW, I think the problem with the pile on is that it does make it about some guy. So I would be all in favor of mostly ignoring shit like that and not acting like the universe revolves around one guy who had an opinion.

I have been on plenty of email lists where the majority of the population was female and you have a short list of guys and, inevitably, one of them becomes the alpha male of the group and then every fucking time he opens his damn mouth, no one can disagree with him or his gaggle of cocksucking bitches that adore him will hand you your head. So even in environments that are like 95% women, you can't escape this shit.

So, whether you want to look at this as a politeness/respect thing or just women exercising power, seriously, the answer to this is to NOT make one man's derail-y comment the entire focus of the damn discussion.
posted by Michele in California at 9:55 AM on October 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

automatically derailed out of the gate

A) A single comment is not a derail. The pile-on is the derail.
B) A comment posted 6 hours after the FPP was made is not "out of the gate".
posted by 0 at 9:57 AM on October 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

Mod note: Folks, this is getting awfully metatalky, probably just drop it in here and consider going there if it actually needs discussion.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:02 AM on October 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

"I think if you want to find "sex tips" that are focused on "what gives a woman pleasure" you'd want to look in men's magazines and not women's magazines. That is, both sets of magazines are assuming that their audience already knows, pretty much, what they like, but needs help figuring out what the other body in the bed likes."

I was wondering about this. I know some men's magazines publish positions. Do any of them have "10 ways to drive her wild"-type articles?
posted by bunderful at 6:54 PM on October 1, 2014

Yup.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 6:59 PM on October 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

ThatFuzzyBastard: "Yup."

Whoa, from those results, consider my mind blown: Cosmopolitan: 10 Sex Moves She Craves.

Sure, it's a three year old article, while the last Cosmo article about what a man craves is probably one or two months old at most, but I'm just kinda amazed that Cosmo ever ran an article about pleasuring women.
posted by Bugbread at 7:12 PM on October 1, 2014

ah, the irony! I clicked the first link from ThatFuzzyBastard's google search, and the ideas on "how to drive her crazy in bed" mostly dealt with teaching her how to work his cock.

"Place your hand on top of hers, finger against finger, to guide her when she's giving you a hand-job"

"If she's going down on you, take her hand and show her how to use it as she gives you a blow-job"

"Add a bit of lubrication and you'll be slipping through her fingers with ease"

"While blow-jobs are depicted with women kneeling in front- unless you're short or she's skilled at controlling her gag reflex-it's a tricky position. Instead, have her sit at your side as you lie down. This angle allows much easier access."

"If her tunnel of love doesn't feel as snug as you'd like, convince her to take up Pilates."

These were the first five. I couldn't finish.
posted by kanewai at 7:32 PM on October 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Thanks, TFB. I did notice that the first article in the results is actually more along the lines of "how to get her to give better blow jobs" etc. but some of the others seem to be actually focused on female pleasure.
posted by bunderful at 7:33 PM on October 1, 2014

Didn't see kanewai's post before I posted ... But yeah.
posted by bunderful at 7:34 PM on October 1, 2014

I'm not surprised these sex tips didn't mention their vaginas. These are sex tips for Over 50's, and I think both women are considerably younger.
posted by um at 10:12 PM on October 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

The "How to drive her crazy in bed" seems so odd for Cosmo. It's a magazine for women, but this article seems to be "What women want guys to do". If it were aimed at women who have sex with women, it would make sense, but as it is, it seems to be addressing readers of a different magazine. Makes more sense to see them in places like Men's Health or AskMen.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:02 AM on October 2, 2014

And they too are chock-full of terrible advice!
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:05 AM on October 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

So, we are getting equal time it seems. There is, in fact, gender parity here: Men's and women's magazines suck about equally bad at this kind of advice.

Go equality.
posted by Michele in California at 9:45 AM on October 2, 2014 [1 favorite]