In most cases, a confession of past sexual assault would elicit both sympathy and outrage from readers. A few of Collins' readers did express such sympathy—for her boyfriend. "The way you manipulated your boyfriend into your own self destructive behavior and then victimized yourself by his actions says a lot about your character," wrote one commenter. "I can't believe you posted that article under your real name."

Why wasn't Collins afforded the respect deserving of a victim of sexual assault?

Because Collins has rape fantasies. Weeks before the assault occurred, she began exploring them with her boyfriend. "Jacob and I had only been dating about a month and a half when I intimated that I had a rape fantasy," she writes. "I was relieved and excited when he told me he would be into trying it out. From there, the content of our emails, texts and video chats became decidedly faux-rapey, as I told him how I wanted him to hold me down, force my legs apart and screw me even as I begged him to stop. It was foreplay, and it got me incredibly hot."

But Collins' rape fantasy was just that—fantasy. "In my mind, it was still very much in the realm of fantasy, and I was secure in knowing that if and when I decided to take things to the next level—i.e., act out the fantasy—the inevitable and, for me, dreaded conversation involving safe words and boundaries."

Collins and her boyfriend were at the very beginning of exploring her kink, and as the word suggests, kinks can be fucking complicated. They take time. Exploring rape fantasies with her boyfriend got Collins hot. But taking those fantasies one step further—discussing, planning, and scheduling a rape fantasy—totally freaked her out. Actually fulfilling the fantasy—laying powerless on the bed as her boyfriend forced himself on her—absolutely horrified her.

Collins' mixed feelings about her fantasies are perfectly normal. Sometimes fantasy is just fantasy: People watch pornography featuring men and women they'd never actually want to fuck, think about sexual experiments they'd never want to bring into their own relationship, and talk to their partners about sex acts they may never decide to live out.

But the real problem with Collins' boyfriend's presumptuous "fantasy" rape wasn't that it came too soon—it was that it was planned and carried out by him alone, with no collaboration, discussion, or consultation with his "fantasy" rape victim. That ain't a fantasy—that's rape. A typical rape fetishist isn't into rape fantasies because she likes being raped (by definition, that's impossible). She isn't even into rape fantasies because she simply likes being dominated, abused, silenced, and blamed. She's into rape fantasies because they offer a chance to flip the script of domination, abuse, and silencing. Rape fantasies turn a normally horrific encounter into a sexual experience that the fantasy "victim" can control and orchestrate herself. She's into rape fantasies because they allow her to convert her fears and weaknesses into sexual power.

Collins' boyfriend robbed her of that power. She writes: "The problem, of course, was that since we’d never discussed it, his decision to enact it without any prior dialogue, without my consent, robbed me of the control that would’ve made it a rape fantasy rather than an out-and-out rape." Expressing a desire to have sex sometime in the future doesn't mean you have to give it up whenever and however your partner wants it. And expressing a rape fantasy does not give anyone the right to rape you.

The incident between Collins and her boyfriend was, in part, a result of an "unfortunate miscommunication." It was, in part, a result of the couple's failure to discuss boundaries and expectations at an earlier stage. But it was also a result of Collins' boyfriend laying claim to her body without bothering to ascertain her consent. Isn't that what rape is?

Obviously, this sexual assault is complicated. Most acquaintance rapes are. At this point, we all know how to knock down all the common excuses for non-consensual sex: It is still rape if you are married. It is still rape if he's your boyfriend. It is still rape if you've consented to sex with him before. It is still rape if you've expressed interest in having sex with him in the past. It is still rape if you're not a virgin. It's time to add another: It is still rape if you've had rape fantasies.

The Centers for Disease Control is currently weighing whether to recommend the circumcision of boys and men in the United States. If the CDC finds that a circumcision recommendation would reduce the risk of HIV among American men, I think that's swell. Providing people with information to help protect themselves from disease is a wonderful thing. But a CDC recommendation would likely come with one major adverse side-effect. For women who already find uncircumcised penises disgusting, wrong, or unfuckable, the recommendation will also provide more fuel for their ignorance.

Women who shun uncircumcised penises has always struck me as short-sighted. These are the women who will glibly deem their sex partner's genitalia unacceptable if, several decades ago, his parents did not predict her sexual preferences and subject him to newborn penis surgery accordingly. Sound familiar? We're women. We know what it's like to be unfairly judged on impossible physical standards! And yet, even women who are well-informed about sex—women who like it, talk openly about it, and even get paid to write about it—are keeping the genital snubbing alive.

Yesterday, the Frisky's Annika Harris wrote: "Uncircumcised penises repulse and scare me, so my sons are getting cut whether it’s PC or not." And she writes for a sex blog.

On the Simple Life, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie laughed over catching sight of some uncircumcised dick at a nudist beach, with Richie calling uncircumcised penises "fucking disgusting." And they're Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

In circumcision documentary Partly Private, a woman on a Sex and the City bus tour announced that "Ninety-nine percent of women in America would be shocked if they got in bed with someone and they were like: Oh! Huh!" (Watch her genital superiority, above, at the 1:33 mark). And she was standing outside of a sex toy shop while paying homage to a television show almost exclusively devoted to having sex with men. Note that this woman doesn't just express her extreme dislike of uncircumcised penises—she attempts to justify her position by extending the disgust to her entire gender. In the Sex and the City's circumcision episode, incidentally, the girls' penis preferences were split about 50-50.

Whenever I've encountered women like this—women who find uncircumcised penises inherently gross—various medical statistics will doubtlessly be raised in defense of their penis discrimination. Uncircumcised penises, they'll say, have a higher risk of contracting HPV—plus, they look weird. Uncircumcised penises have a higher risk of contracting penile cancer—also, what the fuck do you do with it? Uncircumcised penises have a higher risk of spreading HIV—and none of my girlfriends would ever fuck an uncut guy. These women are interested in sexual health, but they're more interested in protecting their own prejudice against unmodified genitalia. When it comes down to it, it doesn't matter if the guy's clean of STDs—to these women, he will always be unclean.

Again, facts are great. And when the CDC gets around to making a recommendation, we'll all be better informed about just what the risks of circumcision are. But no matter what the HIV link to uncircumcised penises turns out to be, you will never be able to determine a man's status by examining his genitals. (And in some cases, you wouldn't notice the difference anyway). So if you're one of those women who dislikes uncircumcised penises because you consider them to be "unclean," you would be better served to reserve that reaction for penises that don't have condoms on them, or any sexual conduct initiated before you and your partner undergo fresh STD tests. No matter what style of penis you prefer, those two little accessories are a lot more likely to keep you safe than an irrational repulsion to unmodified dick.

But Wakeman errs in her either/or assumption about the sex act: that facials are either grounded in mutual respect, and elicit pleasure, or are grounded in degradation, and elicit humiliation. In fact, facials can imply all of these things, though we rarely analyze it all in the moment. Plenty of sex acts made popular in mainstream pornography, like facials, are based on achieving male pleasure. Under this model, the female's pleasure is derived by successfully pleasing the male—and in the process, allowing herself to be degraded. As Amanda Marcotte writes, "our culture constructs sex as something women do for men, and men do for fun." That model of sexuality is undoubtedly objectifying for women. But it nevertheless—voilà!—conjures up an idea of "pleasure" for both sex partners.

Interestingly, Wakeman concedes that the facial is an act loaded with objectification and subjugation—in porn. When this act is removed from the context of pornography and placed into the bedroom of a Man and Woman Who Love Each Other Very Much, however, those demeaning undertones disappear for Wakeman. I can understand that: actually thinking about the implications of why we like jizz on our face tends to put a damper on the whole mutual-attraction-to-degradation thing. So what do we do? We compartmentalize. When porn stars do it, it's degrading; when we do it, it's respectful:

I think leaving facials up to the porn stars—actors who are making the facial appear to humiliate the woman—is what keeps it looking demeaning. Certainly some facials are depicted in porn as humiliating or degrading, but not every man who wants to give a facial wants it to degrade and humiliate just like it looks onscreen. Many do love and respect their partners, and know, to varying degrees, that porn isn’t real. Likewise, some of those female partners enjoy the act as well.

When Wakeman liberates the facial from the demeaning clutches of the porn industry, she performs a useful little trick for us feminists—she separates her sex life from her personal philosophy. We all perform this function in our daily lives—detesting cruelty to animals while eating meat, denouncing philanderers while cheating on our wives, denouncing corporate America while smoking cigarettes. But it's a particularly common move when it comes to sex. Why? Because getting off is very necessary, very much informed by a tradition of male dominance over women, and can be very, very hard to accomplish if you only allow yourself to get off progressively. Of course, that doesn't mean that enjoying performing or receiving facials means that you hate women, or that you have no self-respect, or that you're a bad feminist. It just means that the patriarchy affects a lot of the things that we perform and enjoy on a daily basis, and it's good to remember that our attempts to recast these acts as "empowering" isn't so much transgressive as it is convenient.

See, facials are like weddings. We all know that the institution of marriage is one of the patriarchy's all-time greatest hits, in which women are sold into sexual slavery from father to husband in exchange for livestock. And yet, who derives the greatest joy from weddings? Women! It's the craziest thing. But even though we all know that weddings were clearly institutionalized to facilitate the willing subjugation of women, feminists figure out a way to do it anyway. Why? Probably because even though we all know it's sexist as fuck, weddings—like facial ejaculation—still make some people happy.  And feminists deserve to be happy, too. But that doesn't mean we should forget about the sexist tropes that sometimes inform our happiness (and our sex lives).

* Great, women claim even more power over Children. The New York Times reports on scientists who have discovered "a surprising new mechanism by which women train their fetuses’ budding immune systems: the mother’s cells slip across the placenta, enter the fetus’s body and teach it to treat these cells as its own."

* Strapped for cash? Birth 14 babies through science [via The Frisky].

* When you open up your Reproductive Health Reality Check essay on body image with this:

I was saddened to read Hannah Whittaker’s article on The F Word about her eating disorder a while back. I did, however, want to share the experiences of someone from the other side of the fence. I have what, for many women, is an extremely enviable figure. If I open a copy of FHM, the models don’t look like unattainable visions of tiny-waisted pneumatic perfection. They look like me . . .

I may not read the remainder of your Reproductive Health Reality Check essay on body image.

* Tiger Beatdown does not defend the Guardian's defense of "political lesbianism."

Because "political lesbianism" reinforces the stereotype that women are not sexual; because it encourages straight women to appropriate lesbian experience; because it reinforces the stereotype that lesbians are all "going through a phase" that they can be fucked out of by men; because it encourages straight women to deny themselves a necessary, liberating, and life-affirming form of pleasure; because it inevitably leads to one-sided and sexually catastrophic lesbian relationships . . .

etc.

Photo by bugeaters.

* Lately, at times, I've felt like Jezebel has dipped ever so slightly into safer ladyblog territory, the one largely claimed by magazines featuring Amanda Bynes on the cover. Then came Tracie Egan's post on how to allay pregnancy symptoms when you're just going to abort the thing anyway, so fuck-all to fetus-safe medical care (i.e., "Saltines"). And it was amazing and not previously published in Cosmopolitan!

* Hey, weird, someone has collected some of 2008's top moments in feminism that are actually relevant to the women's movement. Thanks, "The Frisky"!

* Gawker's last lady standing signs off after one year of "Internet news-aggregating and the snark-blogging fishbowl," i.e. the great "Dadaist experiment."

* Wonkette has unearthed olde-tyme would-be "Junior" Senator from Illinois Roland Burris' GRAVE, which he has ALREADY CONSTRUCTED WITH A LIST OF HIS LIFE'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS, plus some space at the end for "unbought Senate appointment" or whatever.

* Ladyblog's Phoebe Maltz compares abstinence pledges to her own fifth grade school-sponsored anti-smoking pledge. Both are lame!

If we stayed true to our promise (an honor code our witness) we could attend an end-of-the-year school-sponsored pizza party in the spring. . . . The end of the year came, and, although I’d managed against all odds to make it all the way to June inhaling nothing more interesting than polluted NYC air, I refused to go to the pizza party. This was in part because what could be dorkier, and also in part due to an already-present libertarian impulse, albeit one in which the teachers were stand-ins for the State.

Photo via trialsanderrors.