Does penetration = presumption of power/control?

[skrumle]

Was chatting with my H last night and mentioned the Romeo and Juliet law in Ireland that's been discussed on here a few times. Anyway, when I asked if he thought it was reasonable his immediate answer was "no". I then asked him: if our son was gay, and started a conversation about a sexual experience that he was unhappy/uncomfortable about would he be more likely to feel that our son had been forced/co-erced if he was the one penetrated rather than penetrating and got a in reply...

I have to be honest, when I read the original thread on here my automatic view was that to protect girls over boys like this was to deny the fact that girls enjoy sex too, almost like taking a step back. When I read the thread fully though and thought about the implications for girls I probably did start to think that girls should have more protection than boys.

So, should there be a presumption that penetration equals a greater degree of control? So two heterosexual 15yos - greater responsibility lies with the boy to ensure that this is what both of them want?

Yes, definitely felt like that StartaFire. Also there was a certain "ick" factor with the giving bit as well.

LRD "Trust me on this, I am a lot brighter and better-informed than you are." I think that says it all really. Sorry, who was the arrogant one again? For someone who doesn't wish to be caught up in it, can I just remind you that you've spent about four hours throwing insults in my direction?

It was me who wanted to challenge and discuss the idea that PIV should be avoided by women in developing countries and that the men of wives and GFs of women who dies in childbirth should be considered murderers. It was you who wanted to drag it to a personal level.

GothAnneGeddes - you are right, I have reviewed that thread and there is indeed plenty of robust 'challenging'.

SAF - if you read it again you'll see that that can be interpreted in two ways. Either I wish to drag it down, or I believe that the extreme posts drag it down. Which do you think I mean? I think you just proved my point about people being inclined to misread something.

This is an incredibly boring post, but I thought I'd better answer LRD's question.
LRD, there are different disciplines that look at it from different perspectives.

The original point that someone else made about PIV urges was an evolutionary psychology type of point (although I've not read of an evo psych making it, but it is still that kind of point):

Women want X now because women in the past had to do X for our species to evolve (although they probably said nature/design).

I've argued from an ecological perspective that women did not do X in the past. I would also argue from that perspective that whatever X women did in the past does not mean they will have an urge to do X now, in a totally different environment and culture. So I fundamentally disagree with the whole premise of evo psych anyway (and AFAIK evolutionary biologists aren't interested in evo psych either).

And there are lots of people who aren't interested in evolution or biology at all, and will study Palaeolithic people from an entirely social perspective, looking at things like burial rituals, art, tools and other stuff as expressions of culture.

Just to let everyone know, I've had an email from HQ saying that prolesworth and sakura are definitely NOT the same poster!

HTH.

Are you quite sure you're not just into point-scoring LRD? One tongue-in-cheek question and all this faux-outrage. Really!

jenny No, I'm not into point-scoring. Check my posting history and you will see that. I spent a lot of time being very patient with you and actually defended you on one thread when I thought you were putting your foot in it by accident, so I am annoyed at this.

I'm interested to see you now admit it was 'tongue-in-cheek' when you pretended great outrage at the idea you might be posting as a deliberate 'lunatic fringe', mind.

milly - thanks for replying, it isn't boring at all!

Now you say it I remember the thread where you talked more about evo psych - I must go dig it out and remind myself. Thanks!

This might be a TMI post (excuse me if so), but can anyone help me with this one?

I went for my smear the other day and the nurse pointed out how, because it's basically a ring of muscles, things like your cervix can actually move around a whole lot depending on what you do with your muscles. And I was thinking about lots of posters - mal and me in particular, I guess - saying PIV really works for us. But then, if it's all muscles being trained, is it possible PIV works well for people who have a lot of PIV? If you see what I mean? So maybe one of the reasons this thread keeps digressing into 'what I like about sex' (not that I mind too much ) is because we all train our bodies differently according to what we start off doing and liking?

UMS - as far as I know, that punishment is rare in England. You're quite liable to be forced to marry someone if you've slept with them, and people get jailed for rape or made to do public penance, but usually people get put to death for fornication only if it's also treason (as with Anne Boleyn/katherine howard later on). If that helps?

I do wonder a lot about medieval sex, I must admit.

LRD Your 'posting history' most recently includes several hours of giving me a complete battering in which you state you are brighter, better informed, your misreading of my posts is based on my poor vocabulary, I am just here to take the piss and a variety of other things. What you haven't done is talk about the link between PIV and manslaughter which is the post I made.

My posting history reveals that I think some extreme feminism is a 'lunatic fringe', Prolesworth only seems to appear to defend Sakura and will split hairs to the nth degree to do so and that you have often taken the worst possible transaltion of what I have written - no matter if it is nonsensical- and used it against me.

It is certainly true to say that it is easy to phrase something badly and easy to misread something - how busy we all are with what we are concurrently doing in RL has a huge bearing I am sure. I can't see where you have made any allowance for this, but I do see how you believe yourself to occupy the moral high ground and be the one displaying patience despite being just as guilty - if not more so - of imagining personal slights where there are none.

If you are as keen as you say you are to discuss the issue of the OP and avoid personal attacks, then I do not see, firstly, why you have not engaged with the issue of PIV and just attacked me. Secondly, I do not see why you are still here continuing the point-scoring when you said you were going.

LRD, I did read somewhere (can't remember where - I was just googling a while ago) about the anatomy of the clitoris. It way saying that the leg parts of the clitoris are different in different people. So some people may have leg parts that are kind of more curved around the base of the vagina and some have leg parts that extend further back under the perineum. So the sensations are going to be different based on that. No doubt there is some technical term that is not leg part.

This is TMI, but I have a lot more g spot sensation since I was stitched up following child birth. I am assuming that it has somehow moved everything around a bit. So I would think that part of it is differences between bodies and how everything is laid out.

UMS - oh, yes, the Church does say those things.

I think there are two issues. Firstly - does the law get enforced? I think (I could be wrong, this isn't my area really) that actually getting put to death for fornication is relatively rare. Despite it being technically illegal. It's maybe a bit like underage sex these days - technically there's a law, but often no-one bothers to prosecute. Secondly - if you look at what laws are made and what the authorities are keen to talk about people not doing, that is often a fair guide to what people are doing! No-one bothers to legislate against a crime that isn't occurring.

FWIW, I was talking to someone working on disability/mental illness, and she points out that in medieval England, disabled or mentally ill people were entitled to marry, and their marriages were valid - even if they were so disabled sex/PIV was out of the question. One writer says you can tell it is right for disabled people to marry because they've grown up knowing about sex from their relatives, and - basically - 'the swelling of flesh' tells you they want to have sex. That's pretty penis-centric and frank, so I would guess there's still an emphasis on PIV.

I don't think we'll ever know for certain what happened in the past. What I think is most important is not to assume PIV was always the definitive ideal of sex. I hate it when people use incorrect or incomplete 'evidence' from the past to insist 'it's always been like this' - that is rubbish!

thanks for the sharing SaF, another reason to pester DH for a baby!

Last post in a row ... promise ... but isn't it fascinating about bodies?!

This is how I know I'm not at heart an intellectual person - I just love to know about the physical stuff because it is so interesting that we're all a bit different. And women's bodies are a pretty amazing bit of design, aren't they?!