But if this report is to be believed, this usefulness argument is conclusively shown to be bogus—even on its own terms. At least when it comes to sex. (It’s probably bogus when it comes to the rest of our lives as well—or rather, it would be bogus if our society didn’t privilege religious belief and treat atheism with bigotry and contempt. Countries with higher rates of atheism actually have higher levels of happiness and social functioning than more religious countries. But I digress.)
Religion doesn’t make people happier. Not in the sack, anyway. Religion makes people less happy. Leaving religion makes people happier. There’s no reason to hang on to beliefs you don’t actually believe in and that don’t actually make sense to you, just because you can’t imagine a happy and fulfilling life without them. We know that leaving religion can be a scary and painful process—but once it’s behind you, life is good. And the sex is great. Come on in. The water’s fine.
And what does this report say to atheists?
This report, people, is our sales pitch.
Again, I will make this very clear: The fact that atheists fuck better has no bearing whatsoever on whether atheism is correct. And atheists should not pretend that it does.
But when believers make the argument from utility—when they argue that religion is important and necessary because it makes people happy—we don’t have to just tear our hair out and say, “Does not! Does not!” We can print out this report and hand it to them with a smile.
A satisfied smile.
To All the Butches I Loved between 1995 and 2005: An Open Letter about Selling Sex, Selling Out, and Soldiering On
Amber Dawn
You were a set of sturdy boys in well-worn Carhartt jeans and rock T-shirts. Rough scrubbed, each one of you, from your Brylcreemed hair to your polished black jump boots. You rode bellowing 1970s muscle bikes, drove cars with duct-tape interiors, walked with practiced swaggers. You could hold your own at the pool table and in the kitchen—cooking your mamas’ comfort-food recipes. You played “Ace of Spades” on electric guitar and hemmed your own pants. You spent your days painting six-bedroom houses in Shaughnessy, tending to show-jumping horses, keeping university grounds, or otherwise soiling your fingers. You were evolved renditions of the very boy a small-town slut like me was expected to wind up with. But unlike that probable boyfriend, you were a feminist, you rejected the status quo with much greater consideration than it rejected you, and you didn’t leave me a knocked-up single mother-to-be. I couldn’t possibly have told you enough how truly remarkable you were.
To all the butches I loved between 1995 and 2005, there is a consequential and heartfelt queue of things I never said to you. Blame booze or youth, frequently practiced self-flagellation, homophobia, or a brew of stinking societal influences for me holding my tongue. What matters now is that I put some honest words to our past and—if the graces allow—that you will hear me.
If the details are a blur (and I don’t blame you if they are), let me remind you that I was your girl, your mommy, your headache, or your heart song (depending on my mood). On a good day I wrote poetry, walked rescue dogs, or led survivors’ support groups at the women’s center. I’d all but quit rush drugs, but on a bad day I drank like a fancy fighting betta fish in a small bowl. I spent my nights gliding around softly lit massage parlors in a pair of flitter-pink stilettos. Personal economics informed my femme identity. My transition took place in prudent increments: I grew my neon-orange dyke hair into a mane of bleached blonde; I shaved my armpits and pussy; I dropped down to 100 pounds, and, in effect, I learned to indulge the tastes of men with money to spend. When the business was good, I made more in an hour than you did all week.
This is where my overdue disclosures begin. Whenever I picked up the dinner tab or put gas in your tank, we’d both swallow a quiet shame. I might have mumbled something aloof like, “Easy come, easy go,” handling the neatly folded bills with the same cool discretion as my male customers did when they paid me.
For a good long time, I positioned this shame entirely in a have-and-have-not credo. I believed that all my shame came from the very same grounds as my pride: my humble class background.
I’ve since realized that this summation is too easy.
You and I and just about everyone we knew were salt-of-the-earth folk. Salt of the earth meets pervert, that is, on account of our being the kind of kinky, tough-love queers that set us apart from our back-home birth families. Ours was an elbow-grease, adult-children-of-alcoholics, there-ain’t-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch butch-femme. That’s right, let’s say it again. Our was a damaged-goods, bitter-pill, better-luck-next-time butch-femme. We were cut from the same threadbare cloth, and we wore it well. Our world was filled with modest yet revered codes and traditions. When guests came over, they were offered mismatched kitchen chairs to sit on. If there was whiskey in the cupboard, it was either Jim or Jack. Clothing was swapped. Tools were shared. There were logging-road camping trips and back-alley bonfires. We danced like crazy in creaky-floored rental rec centers and declining dance halls; we’d make the air hot and muggy, the old wood floors stickier than flypaper. And in the dark safe corners of the night, we fucked with our fists, teeth, and hearts like we were indestructible. This was our behind-the-eight-ball butch-femme. I was never ashamed of it.
The shame I felt came from sex work. There it is, as barefaced as it can be. Don’t get me wrong, I still wear my feminist-slut badge. This isn’t some dubious argument over the merits of waiting tables for minimum wage versus the formidable moneymaking potential of prostitution. Morals are not being reexamined here. I’m not moving from “camp empowerment” to “camp victim”—such dichotomies are far too short-sighted to sum up sex workers. What I’m coming out about is that sex work changed my relationship with being a working-class femme and, in turn, my relationship with you, my butch lovers.
Sometimes you tried to talk about it. I want to thank you for being brave enough to speak up, even though you didn’t always say the right thing. I remember waking up one morning to your big green eyes. You had been watching me sleep since sunrise, adoringly at first, the way smitten lovers do, then your thoughts took a turn and you began to wonder, How the heck is this my girlfriend? Fake tan, synthetic hair weave, fake, long airbrushed fingernails; you said that lying beside me felt “surreal.” I suppose I looked like a poster child for the beauty myth we had been warned about in our early 90s feminist education. I looked like the kind of femme who is dubbed “high maintenance” or “a princess”—indeed these labels were used to describe me—though the reality was that sex work had only made me tougher and more fiercely independent. Still, there wasn’t anything punk rock or edgy, humble, or even queer about my exterior femme persona. I pretty much looked like I belonged in a commercial for a chat line or a diet pill. The familiar fit of you and me (your butch and my femme) had been disrupted. Had I sold out our butch-femme codes? Had I snuck the bourgeois “other” into our bed?
“I make more money when I look like this.” How frequently I used this disclaimer. It was the fractured thinking I employed as a sex worker: there was the persona and then there was the real me. But, as I’ve already mentioned, easy dichotomies fall short. As with my appearance, sex work began to shape my life. Prostitution money paid for my liberal arts degree, an MFA in creative writing. If I was going to be the college-student-by-day, working-girl-by-night cliché, I was determined to average at least a 4.0—even if it meant turning a date with a dental student during lunch break so I could pay for my biology tutor that same afternoon. I was raised with the principle of sacrifice; if I was going to obtain the things that my class background hadn’t afforded me, I figured I was bound to suffer at least a little.
While I’d grown somewhat accustomed to grappling with the personal sacrifices that came with sex work, witnessing your inner conflict was an entirely different challenge. Although we both agreed in theory that my job ought to be treated like any other line of work, if your boss called to offer you a
n extra shift, our biggest dilemma was whether the overtime would cut into our upcoming scheduled dates. “Baby, you don’t mind, do you?” was all you needed to say, conversation closed. In contrast, entire nights seemed to be ruined when my madam called to ask me to take a last-minute client. As I’d whisper into my cell phone, I witnessed your face stiffen. Eventually, the sound of my ringtone alone was cause for pause.
I never had to lie to my friends about what you did for a living. “She’s a carpenter” or a “welder-in-training,” I boasted. These were strong, rugged, and proudly butch professions. For you, telling people your girlfriend was a sex worker was a crapshoot, at best. Of course, I was out to our close mutual friends. Others were told a half-truth: that I was a stripper rather than a full-fledged, blow job–performing prostitute. This explanation spared you from uttering an outright lie and also from making your buddies uncomfortable or concerned. What kind of man dates a prostitute? A tyrant, a pimp, or a broken man who can’t take care of his woman. Our radical queer values didn’t protect us from these stigmas. “I wish I could protect you” was another brave thing that you frequently said to me. I took what comfort I could in this sentiment and let you wrap your arms around me a little tighter. This tender statement, however, affirmed how truly uncomfortable you were with sex work and, worse still, how uncomfortable you were that my work made you feel powerless. Butches aren’t supposed to feel powerless. I was inadvertently de-butching you. And, as a femme who believes (and celebrates) that her role as a femme is to make her butch feel like one hell of a butch, I was de-femming myself, too.
Confessions don’t come any harder than this one: sex work changed the way I fucked.
I remember the first time I refused to kneel for you. We were making out at one of our fuck spots, between a row of highschool portables a few blocks from your house. You took out your cock, ran your thumb along my bottom lip, and yanked my hair as you did when you wanted me on the ground. It was Friday night. The next day was my regular Saturday shift, when all the big-tipping clients visited the massage parlor, and I couldn’t risk having my knees scraped like a “cheap whore.” It might have messed with my money. Moreover, I refused to reveal the real me at work. My work persona didn’t have scraped knees (or welts or hickeys, etc.).
The simplest, sexiest diversion would have been to spit on your cock and lift my skirt. Instead, I stood there frozen in that inciting moment when I realized that keeping my real life and work neatly separated was impossible; it was failing at every opportunity. Sex work was not simply coating the surface of my body like a topcoat of glitter nail polish. It had sunk in.
We could playfully liken my appearance to a drag queen’s. My money financed more than a few good times together. But we met an impasse when the impact of sex work entered our bedroom. Setting boundaries around scraped knees was only a preview to long and recurring phases when I couldn’t be touched at all. Contrary to your fantasies and my own, I wasn’t an inexhaustible source of amorous coos and sighs. My pussy was not an eternal femme spring, always wet and ready. The image of the coquette was critical to our relationship. It was critical to who I was as a femme. I hadn’t chosen the saccharine country classic “Touch Your Woman” by Dolly Parton (my working-class femme role model) as a mantra for nothing! Who was I, as a femme, if I couldn’t offer my body to you, my butch lovers, as a touchstone, a safe haven of hotness, a soft-skinned, sweet-mouthed reminder that who we were was right and good?
A bigger question: what the heck did sex between us look like if I wasn’t going to spread my legs anymore? Most of you had your own set of complex raw spots—as our generation of butches with hard-knock pasts often do. I’d spent my younger femme years devotedly learning about and responding to the nuanced body language and boundaries of butches. Suddenly, it was all I could do to keep up with my own changing limits and body issues.
For a while I tried on “stone femme” as an identity. In many ways, this label protected me and made me feel powerful. It also became a regular topic for dissection in our small community. “A stone femme, meaning a femme who loves stone butches?” I was asked repeatedly.
“No, I mean I myself am stone.” I’d say. “I don’t let lovers touch me.”
“Hmm.” I got a lot of doubtful “hmms” in response, as if I were speaking in riddles.
Ultimately, changes to the way I fucked meant we both had to reinvent the codes and traditions of the butch-femme bedroom as we knew them, which under different circumstances might have been a fun task, but the possibilities weren’t as discernible as the losses. We didn’t ask “Could we…?” as often as we asked “Why can’t we…?”
Let’s just skip the berating part, where I say, “I admit I wasn’t always an easy woman to stand beside.” Let’s move right to the part where I simply thank you for doing so. If you’ve hung on and heard me this far, then please let me finish this letter by explaining exactly what it is I am thanking you for.
You were adaptable. You tried really darn hard to be adaptable. Most of the time this only made you about as flexible as a flagpole, but I noticed you bend and knew that you did it for me. I remember the time you let me strap it on and be the first femme to fuck you. It ranks quite high up in my list of all-time favorite memories. Later, you gloated to your butch buddies, “She’s more ‘butch’ than me between the sheets.” To my surprise, comradely arm punching and shared stupid grins followed this admission. It made me wonder if you needed that fuck (and those that followed) as desperately as I did. Maybe you needed a damaged-goods, stone femme like me to ask you to become something besides the ever-infallible butch top you were accustomed to being.
Likewise, maybe you needed to cry with me during those rare times when you resisted the urge to take up the emotional reins and say “Baby, don’t cry” or “It will be okay.” This was a delicate and extraordinary space, where we both unabashedly cried together. For me, it was the emotional antithesis of the wordless reactive shame I often felt but lacked the guts or words to talk about. Thank you for sharing this space with me.
There were many moments when I doubted myself during those years—hazardous moments, like brushes with bad clients, when yours were the strong arms in which I sought respite. There were also many instances when I lacked the confidence to walk with dignity into a university classroom or a square job interview, moments when I was tempted to blow my ho money by going on benders because climbing the class ladder was terrifying. Thank you for loving me the way you knew best. Your big calloused hands held me strong to this life. You still took me dancing until our clothes were soaked through with sweat. You popped Heart’s Greatest Hits in your car stereo, and we drove the back roads singing “Crazy on You” in comically awful disharmony. You called me “old lady” and “beautiful” and “your girl.” You taught me that butch-femme wasn’t about dress codes, the gendered skills we’d acquired, or jobs we held, or even about who bent over in the bedroom. At the crux of it all, our butch-femme traditions were about creating a place that was distinctly ours. Again and again you brought me to this home, this shelter from external pressures, this asylum from troubled pasts and uncertain futures. Thank you for assuring me that I always had a remarkable, shameless place.
I Want You to Want Me
Hugo Schwyzer
Like countless American children, I grew up hearing the nursery rhyme in which little boys are characterized as “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails” while girls are “sugar and spice and everything nice.” As a small boy very attached to our pet dachshund, I thought puppy-dog tails were a fine thing indeed, but the point of the rhyme wasn’t lost on me. Boys were dirty, girls were clean and pure.
We’re raised in a culture that both celebrates and pathologizes male “dirtiness.” On the one hand, boys were and are given license to be louder, rowdier, and more sexual. We’re expected to get our hands dirty, to rip our pants, and get covered in stains. We enjoy a freedom to be dirty that goes hand in hand with the expectation that we are in a state of
perpetual craving for women’s bodies. Even now, too many girls grow up shamed for wanting to be dirty. And if men’s bodies are dirty, then to lust after them is to be dirty as well.
For many guys, growing up with the right to be dirty is accompanied by the realization that many people find the male body repulsive. In sixth grade, the same year that puberty hit me with irrevocable force, I had an art teacher, Mr. Blake. (This dates me: few public middle schools have art teachers anymore.) I’ll never forget his solemn declaration that great artists all acknowledged that the female form was more beautiful than the male. He made a passing crack that “no one wants to see naked men, anyway”—and the whole class laughed. “Ewwww,” a girl sitting next to me said, evidently disgusted at the thought of a naked boy.
In time, I discovered that Mr. Blake was wrong about this so-called artistic consensus. But it took me a lot longer to unlearn the damage done by remarks like his and by the conventional wisdom of my childhood. I came into puberty convinced both that my male body was repulsive and that the girls for whom I longed were flawless. (I still remember how floored I was at 16, when the lovely classmate on whom I had a crush farted while I was sitting next to her in German class. I had sincerely believed until that moment that women didn’t pass gas.)
A year later, in my first sexual relationship, I was convinced that my girlfriend found my body physically repellent. I could accept that girls liked and wanted sex, but I figured that what my girlfriend liked was how I made her feel in spite of how my body must have appeared to her. Though I trusted that she cared for me, the idea that she—or any other woman—could want this sweaty, smelly, fumbling flesh was still unthinkable. What made her want to have sex with me, I assumed, was a combination of two things: her love for me (which trumped her “natural” disgust), and my own skill.
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