I'm running out of exasperated terms to title blog posts with

Rebecca Traister moves on from that nice article she wrote about girlfriends back into fishing for ways to bash feminists in Salon today. The article is an interview with that ballerina who wrote and entire book on anal sex that is aimed squarely at an audience that thinks it's hip and with it but is prudish enough to be fascinated with one woman's long, arduous tale of getting to a point in her life where she can do what any two-bit 20 year old porn actress can.

Salon only seems to have this woman spewing her baloney about how she found spirtual fulfillment through anal sex for a little titillation and a lot of feminist-bashing. When the author didn't get there on her own, the interviewer just outright asks:

Do you think feminists are going to be ticked off by your book?

My book owes everything to the feminist movement. I am a product of that. I am a woman who had this experience that was very unconventional ... I am interested in my sex: in experiencing it and in the powers it holds for me. I am interested in our freedoms: You're a woman and I'm a woman having this conversation about this kind of book -- this is fantastic! But I think some women will protest the obvious things that I am talking about: submitting or surrender. I say feminism gave me the freedom to submit. Isn't this what we all want from feminism? The ability to choose conventional monogamy is a great option but not the only option.

Well, that was a non-answer, but to her credit she was trying not to take the bait, I guess. While they can't get her to outright claim that feminism is about hating sex, especially anal sex, they do manage to provoke her to say something they can badger feminists with:

In relationships it's about how people play off each other. A very feminine woman and a very feminine man -- maybe you should go off and be gay. I don't believe you are going to be able to have fantastic sex that way. You need polarized energies. Of course if a man is 100 percent masculine they're sort of Neanderthals and you can't talk to them. But in my relationship with A-man where I became my most feminine sexually, he was the most masculine of anyone I'd ever been with. I wanted him in control, which was an incredible relief to me.

Of course, earlier she extolls the virtues of finding a gentle man, but whatever. Regardless of the annoying blather about feminine and masculine and receptiveness and all these other weird justifications for liking to do something that she really doesn't need to justify to herself or anyone (please), I still find this passage beyond stupid. First of all, why the insult to gay men? And second of all, how is it that we've come a full circle from thinking that anal sex is something that only gay men do to thinking that if you're "too feminine" to do it you might as well be gay?