oral sex, action, feminism

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200601/oral-sex
"Are You There, God? It's Me, Monica"
by Caitlin Flanagan
January / February 2006
The Atlantic

The article discusses the rise of young girls performing unreciprocated oral sex on young boys. Flanagan is not entirely happy about this. She remarks that it is bad that girls engage in sexual acts without any concern for their own pleasure; she is unhappy that they engage in them outside of the context of a romantic relationship.

Putting on my devil's advocate / philosopher's hat, I want to argue that the nature of acts is not written into the world. (I would make a more or less identical complaint about a lot of religious ethics, actually). The basic point is: are we even right to say that this is a sexual act? Flanagan writes,

"Instead we see a group of young girls who have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether and have made of their sexuality something that fulfills all sorts of goals, but not the one paramount to Katherine and her mother: that it be sexually gratifying to themselves."

Let's assume that this is right - that these young girls experience no sexual desire during these acts. (And let's assume that they're freely chosen, i.e. not rapes). Why say that their sexuality is in play at all? (Certainly the boy's sexuality is - one would expect - but that hardly indicates that, from the female perspective, what we have is a sexual act). Or recall Flanagan's earlier comment, regarding Patty Hearst, that she changed the nature of the act (a rape) by changing her attitude towards it (falling in love with her captor). In other words, Flanagan's objection to the practice is generated by combining her own conception of sex with the conception held by these teens - which probably is not the right way to go about things.

But this obviously isn't the whole story. Flanagan writes,

"I am old-fashioned enough to believe that men and boys are not as likely to be wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls. I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature of who we are."

In other words, maybe the nature of these actions isn't written into the world, but into our psychologies. We can't help but react to certain physical acts in certain ways. Whether this is true or not is a real question - an important question. But Flagan goes on to assert that this is "in the nature of who we are." Now, I don't mean to assert that we can change this merely by raising our children differently - merely through "nurture." But I will assert without hesitation that it can be changed; that if we don't know how to do it now, we'll know how to do it soon enough. So is this the way that we should deal with each other? Is this the sort of world we want to live in?

(One question which I have ignored is: if it's not because of their sexual desire, why are these girls engaging in these acts? This is another important question, and I doubt that it has a pleasant answer.)