Wed, 2006-05-31 19:53

From my “Folding Laundry” photoset on Flickr.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Wed, 2006-05-31 00:16

Interesting post by Hugo Schwyzer

I probably got called “gay” more than most of my peers. In my childhood and early adolescence, I wasn’t athletic. I was a “drama nerd”, and was active in a community theater company. At that age, most of my good friends were either girls or other boys who, like me, were seen as softer, more intellectual, less masculine, and, definitely, “queer.” Mind you, I had figured out early on that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men. Though many things in my life were complicated when I was young, I never went through a “crisis” of sexual identity. By the time I was thirteen, every fiber of my being was interested in girls. I may have been too shy at that age to do anything about it, but I was never personally in doubt of my own flagrant heterosexuality. (When I read Phillip Roth in college, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say I winced in recognition!)

Read his whole post here.

I remember being tormented by gay-baiting as a young man. In retrospect I think the mature reply would probably have been “he who smelt it dealt it.”

People who are confident about their own sexuality just don’t spend much time worrying about anyone else’s.

Sat, 2006-05-27 11:46

[I used to try to do a “Saturday non-salacious blogging post” every week, but I don’t think I’ve done one since at least the beginning of the year. Anyway, don’t let the dour intro fool you. This post begins with a bad old story and hints at progress. Slow progress, yes, but progress where its really needed. —fl]

Via The Feminarian

“... our own rector, Carol Anderson. Carol told us the story of her ordination. Which is an amazing story. She was actually in a history book I read. She was one of the first women ordained in our church, you see, and she doesn’t often talk about those times. But what a tale!

...

One time she was giving out the bread during Eucharist and a man walked up to her with intense hatred in his eyes and said, “Go to hell.” She said, “I can’t, I’m busy.”

Read her whole post here.

Can you imagine hating a class of people, women in this case, so much you’d prefer damnation to salvation? That you’d approach an alter to receive a sacrament and blaspheme?

It’s not that I don’t understand hating classes of people. I do. I grew up around it. I even recognize the various utilities of prejudice, of division, of seeing one’s self as exceptional and therefore resenting reminders that you’re no more exceptional than anyone else.

But if you have faith at all I can’t see loving your prejudices more than your deity, holding your pride above God, choosing to drag someone else with you to perdition rather than ascend with them into grace.

Question: Was his outrage based on theological principle or habit and taste?

—-

Aside: There’s a line in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 where an armed-forces general, speaking to the hapless Anabaptist chaplain, expresses first puzzlement and then outrage at the thought that enlisted men worshiped the same God officers did.

Question: Was his outrage based on theological principle or habit and taste?

—-

The issue here is that “innate conservatism” (also known as “that which we learned was true before age five”) is a natural but perilous barrier to thinking beyond stereotypes. At it’s most fundamental level it’s an extremely helpful reflex — before five we learn things like “don’t stick your fingers on the stove… again” that can really help you make it to age ten and beyond. The problem with low-level reflexive learning, especially the very early stuff, is it doesn’t discriminate against good vs. bad stuff, useful vs. obstructing, moral vs. immoral.

Question: What is the consequence of overhearing one’s older siblings saying “girls are yukky?” What do we learn from the uncontrollable/phallic message in the “snakes and snails and puppy-dog tails” nursery rhyme? Or it’s nondistinct/conformist “sugar and spice and everything nice?”

Question: When the “go to Hell” gentleman approached the sacrament where did his outrage lie? An intricate interpretative construction of the Bible or a misplaced, unremembered reflex; a stereotype fossilized into bigotry; an unconsciously laid brick of good intention paving the road to Hell?

—-

Ok, so I’d started this piece yesterday and… I wasn’t really sure where I was going with it. It’s old news — the incident described was recounted to the Feminarian — and for all its viscerial impact, and (for that matter) it’s resonance with current events (link also to the Feminarian, which was inspired in turn by a post on Alternet.org.) But complaints are just complaints unless you bring something more.

So I’m going to bring a little more, if I can. By coincidence, Kochanie sent me a link to another post, coincidentally also from Alternet.org, about a tech writer’s frustration with the über-tech site slashdot.org.

A few months ago, an article of mine was Slashdotted. But instead of resulting in a lively debate about technology and social justice, it instead produced a popular thread in the “comments” area about whether I was too fat to be considered attractive. At that point, I vowed to stop reading Slashdot. What the fuck? Why should I give a shit about those morons? I would read other geek culture blogs like BoingBoing, where the male editors are feminists and Xeni Jardin knows why it sucks that some creeps care more about her ass than the political op-ed she just wrote for the Los Angeles Times.

But, like I said, Slashdot is like the New York Times. No matter how infuriating and stupid its editorial policies, the site still breaks interesting news that everybody talks about. So I started peeking at my Slashdot feed again once in a while, then visiting the site, then actually poring over it daily as I used to do. Until my most recent Slashdotting, in which a guy linked to one of my more satirical columns and described me as a “gorgeous nerd” rather than a journalist or writer or columnist or even just plain “nerd.”

You can imagine the comment threads that followed. Was I really gorgeous, or was I ugly? Wasn’t it OK to evaluate my looks because my column wasn’t really “professional,” but rather “humorous”? (As if I haven’t been writing this column seriously and professionally for six and a half goddamned years.) And, my favorite, wasn’t it OK to talk about my looks because I write about sex? (This comment was followed by links to several articles I’d published about technology and sex, as if writing about vibrators somehow meant I was “asking for it.”)

Read Newitz’s whole post here.

Ok, so once again we’re seeing a double standard. It’s not so much that Newitz’s looks were discussed positively or negatively, it’s that they were discussed at all. (I remember when Microsoft’s then-VP Steve Ballmer gave a public programmer of the year award and added, sort of out of the blue, “...and I happen to know she looks darn good in a bathing suit too.” Had I been a Microsoft programmer, and had I somehow managed to be the best programmer in the systems division, I rather doubt he’d have mentioned how I looked in a bathing suit.)

I said I wanted to bring something to this discussion beyond merely cataloging complaints, and Newitz offers a rather sturdy straw:

...I went back and began rereading the comments on Slashdot about my article. At least half of them were written by outraged readers who asked why my looks were relevant. A woman had posted about how this kind of treatment was exactly why so few women are in the tech industry. It wasn’t a solid wall of sexism — there was a debate going on. And for every sexist dick, there was at least one feminist dick talking back to him. Even the guy who’d written the post sent me an e-mail apologizing for having used the word gorgeous, explaining that his English was really bad and he hadn’t intended to inspire the kinds of comments he had.

I wasn’t seeing biologically entrenched male domination at all. I was seeing a slow cultural evolution. The action on Slashdot is like a social version of that “missing link” fish with legs that some paleontologists just discovered. Maybe these guys don’t have their gender equality land legs yet, but they’ve got the beginnings of feet growing inside their flippers.

And there’s the crux of the issue. Reflexes aren’t destiny.

One more quote from Newitz that’s worth pointing out. From her introductory paragraphs:

Back in the 1990s, somebody told me that infamous antiporn feminist Catharine MacKinnon used to joke that she wished sexism were biological, because biology is easier to change than culture. I remember this unverified quote half a dozen years later because I thought it was such a great response to the claim that men are dicks to women as a result of neurological hardwiring — a claim you still hear all the time.

But is it dickish biology or dickish culture that creates a problem like Slashdot?

The answer, as Newitz notes, is that bad as things can get our biases are cultural, not biological. Boys as metaphorical squirmy, slimy garden creatures is a cultural truth, not a biological one, nor is the implication that they can’t be “everything nice” biological — it’s cultural. Similarly girls as saccharine bastions of pleasantness and the implication of intangible attributes or achievements is cultural, not biological. (Which, once realized, can come as a relief both to boys who discover they can be nice after all, and for girls who realize they may be nice without feeling obliged to model it for the benefit of others.)

In other words, McKinnon was right to point to culture rather than biology. And she was right that shifting culture is difficult. I think, though, that the shift away from startled “go to Hell” towards baffled “what the Hell was that all about, anyway” is underway.

If I may further wear out William Gibson’s wonderful phrase, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Our goal, then, is to further distribute it.

Fri, 2006-05-26 15:02

This post is about Ken and Ariel and Hillary and Bill. Really.

Ken, of Ken and Ariel:

Whenever guys “step out” on their girlfriends or wives, the reaction — whether we like it or not — is typically, “Hey, it’s guys being guys.” After all, we’re the ones being led around by out trouser snakes. We can’t help what the little guy gets us into; he’s clearly steering the ship.

When women cheat, however, it’s a different story. Here, we get the guys in labcoats and slide rules, with their Venn Diagrams and four-color pie charts, who toss off such conclusions as, “There must be something missing in their lives.” Or, “Clearly, she’s rebelling against the traditional role.” Or, “Her father probably never bought her a pony, so she’s acting on long-suppressed childhood rage.”

Read his post here.

Garance Franke-Ruta of TAPPED (The American Prospect’s blog):

I want to retract my instapunditry of Tuesday morning about the New York Times article on Hillary Clinton’s marriage. I momentarily forgot to put on my political journalist hat and reacted to it as a woman. As a woman, I find it impressive and admirable that she’s been able to preserve her marriage and turn it into something that, by all accounts, works for her. She has a friend, advisor, and peer in Bill Clinton, and the article’s unprecedentedly detailed accounting of their days showed that they somehow manage to find a way to spend a substantial amount of time together for a congressional couple, while still being mindful of not getting in each other’s way. It may not be perfect, but whose marriage is, marriage being the union of two imperfect beings after all? She has a real marriage, and if you consider only her role in it — which is the only thing that ought to matter at this point, since she is the political candidate, not her husband — it’s hard not to be impressed by her achievement in building something workable on top of a foundation we all watched cracking.

But that view is one that, I suspect, will be infrequently heard. The political media world will always look at her marriage from the perspective of him, forever placing her in the role of victim or deficient wife. The focal point of discussion will never be her happiness, but his, and whether or not she is living up to her responsibility to provide for it. And that is a disaster for her. The moment she once again becomes, in the public discussion, little more than the wife in his marriage, all her efforts to define herself on the public stage begin to crumble, too. Rather than being an actor, she is the subject of actions. Her capacity to make choices and decisions is negated, and her control over her life and fate and career rendered secondary to her capacity to control him. Instead of being the first female senator from New York, and the first serious female presidential candidate (requisite caveat here) in American history, the conversation becomes: Hillary Clinton, doormat or shrew?

...

... The moment people start discussing Sen. Clinton as a sexual being rather than an intellectual one, they take her down a notch. That’s how it’s always worked for women in public life.

Read Franke-Ruta’s entire post here.

Got that? For whatever reason the New York Times [Subscription required —fl] decided to run a front-page story about how much time Hillary and Bill Clinton spend together, given that she’s a U.S. Senator and he’s now a globe-trotting head of a billion-dollar foundation.

Franke-Ruta says her first reaction was “good for her” for finding so much time to spend with her husband. Her second reaction is also perfectly natural: WTF is up with that? Anybody know how any days, other public figures spend with their husbands or wives or significant others? Bill Frist? Jon Stewart? Tom DeLay? Rush Limbaugh? Alan Alda? Olympia Snow? Donald Rumsfield? Al Gore? Kay Bailey Hutchenson? Bill O’Reilly? How about in the blogosphere? Matt Drudge? Amanda Marcotte? Figleaf? Twisty? Ken or Ariel?

The answer, I suppose, depends on what you’re measured by. Also by what you choose to be measured by. If I say I’m a totally monogamous house-partner, or an every-night-a-different-bed sybarite, then it might matter. If I’m just a business person, though, (like Ken’s co-worker) or an author, or a blogger, or a generic Senator from New York, it’s not really necessary or appropriate to hire detectives to find out, nor necessary to put it on the front page as if it were “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Weird double standards we have here.

Men? Eh, they’re just led around by their cocks. Women? Ooh, we need to get to the bottom of something.

I’m just sayin.

(p.s. as long as I’m being cranky about stuff like this, why the tendency to refer to one New York senator as “Hillary” and the other as “Sen. Schumer?” Or the tendency among progressives here to speak of a local congressman as “McDermott” and our two Senators as “Patty and Maria.” And, letting the stops all the way out, what’s with the people who say things like “men do X while females do Y” or “women and males agree that…?”)

Fri, 2006-05-26 09:04

Thoughts:
I can’t stand another moment without her. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. Too late to call her I wrote letter after letter, never saying what I wanted to say, never managing to say anything that meant more than “I love the way sunlight catches the peachfuzz of your lower back. I adore your nose. I want to be closer. Sit next to me and let me feel your warmth against my skin, the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, the weight of your shoulder against mine, the rustle of your fingers in the pages of your book, let me watch the corners of your mouth (where I’d love to plant a kiss) quirk and smile and frown as your thoughts drift across your face, let us be lost together in sweet midnight couplings, dawn snuggles, morning teas and coffees, lunchtime domesticities…”

“Let me…” “Let me…”

An invocation not to her but to the universe to let me, to close the gap, to make the clock, the calendar… geography itself rend time and space to bring me there or her here. And how can I say it when I haven’t the words, the experience, the familiarity, the words, the words, the words.

Words:
“So, what are you doing Saturday after practice?”
“I don’t really know. There’s some stuff I need to do before but hadn’t made plans for after.”
“I was thinking of cooking something simple, Chinese or Italian… pasta and veggies anyway, and taking a walk downtown. Wanna come, I’ll make extra?”
“Yeah, that’d be cool. What time?”
“How about twenty till?”
“See you then.”

Deeds:
Dialing the phone
Opening our mouths
Being there

—-

It took me so long to learn that wishing, and words, and deeds works even better than wishing alone, no matter how fevered. :-)

Wed, 2006-05-24 23:00

I’m a big man — six feet and three inches and 195-200 pounds — but roughly four years ago I was really big.

(Ok, ok, the photos were taken in a children’s museum exhibit where everything was scaled down to 60% of full size.)

Update: The first photo doesn’t really capture what I meant by big. This new one does a better job — the ceiling was barely shoulder high so I had to bend over with less than flattering results.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Wed, 2006-05-24 10:01

Based on a Cameo I’d like to follow up on a semi-controversial post from last week, Steff’s sharp insight and memories of that personal finance class I’ve got to ask that question again: what isn’t available to you now that you could have if you finally lost that weight, or grew that cock, or shrank that nose, or broadened those shoulders, or tightened that butt, or lost that bald spot, or, or, or…

Would you be qualitatively different? Would you suddenly be satisfying in bed? Totally confident about your looks? Better able to enjoy sex? Romance? Conversation?

Anyway, Cameo said “Sexy is a state of mind, not a state of body.”

What I think you’re saying is that it’s not that things like size or status or finances don’t matter at all, it’s that we believe that sexiness is strictly dependent on those externalities.

Put it this way. I have an acquaintance who’s having serious problems with a partner not because he’s poor as a church mouse but because he tells here over and over he isn’t a good partner because he’s broke.

He makes every failing and every falling out about money. He’ll do things like pick flowers for her and say he had to because he couldn’t pay for “real” ones. That is driving her crazy!

See what I mean? We generally think of picked flowers as more considerate than store-bought ones but his self-absorption about money robs her ability to appreciate his gift. Imagine the conversation.

She: “Oh, you picked me flowers! You’re so wonderful!”
He: “No, I’m not, I only picked them because I couldn’t afford a real bouquet.”

Nice work, Romeo! Does it matter to her that he’s broke? Well, sure, a little, but she’s a student too and just as broke as he is. Does it matter that it matters so much to him? Oh yeah, that’s killing their relationship.

Now translate that to someone saying “You look great in that outfit!” “No I don’t, my boobs are too small” or “No I don’t my butt’s too big.”

The point being that yes, our flaws — real or imagined — matter. The really crucial question is “matter most to whom?”

Tue, 2006-05-23 21:14

I had some kind of bug last week and I’m mostly better but my energy levels are still pretty low. Which means lots of naps, mostly in the afternoon. (Thank goodness I get to work from home!) As I’ve mentioned before one of the great, quirky things I’ve been enjoying lately is waking up with afternoon morning erections.

Technically I don’t exactly wake up with them. It’s more like my cock starts to wake up when I do, and as I start to shift and stretch it grows to a point that pressure against my clothes or bedding (or, in this case couch cushions) starts to feel pretty darn good. That sets up a nice little self-reinforcing cycle. It’s pretty yummy!

So anyway, there I was this afternoon, lying alone in the house on the living room couch with an erection that just ached for a little sensual attention. (I must be feeling better since I haven’t been feeling very horny either.)

So anyway I just laid there with my hands behind my head, watching its curve gently tenting the fly of my jeans and watching it twitch and shift when I squeezed the muscles at the base. (Men can benefit from Kegels too, you know. I’m not sure the information about that gets out as much though.)

Anyway, as I gathered my wits about me it occurred to me that if I started moving my arms I could do more than watch. I reached down and traced over the lump in my jeans with the back of my thumbnail, from the base up to the crown, spending a little more time over the sensitive underside an inch or two from the tip.

Then after pulling my shirt tails out of my waist I slipped my hand down under my belt buckle and alongside my shaft, reaching down a bit further to cup my warm and therefore soft and loose balls before coming back up, palm down, to grasp my length and squeeze and press.

When that wasn’t enough I unzipped my fly, reached in, and pulled myself out (not something I’m inclined to do since someone coming up the steps to the door might have seen me) and just watched its arched form, its shiny-velvety head hovering over without quite touching my belly, pulsing minutely with my heartbeat.

I just petted it for a moment, stroked the sides with the side of my fingers, ran my fingertip around the spongy ridge of the head, and down over the vestiges of my lost foreskin, and generally enjoying the sensual feeling of cool air and enjoying the mild sense of naughtiness of “playing with myself” in the middle of the day, in the living room.

One part of the play involved something I’m sure you may have noticed (you can check next time you get the chance) where you can squeeze all the blood out of the head, temporarily shrinking it to something like its resting size before you wrap your hand tightly around the base and watch it grow full and tight again.

Sigh. It would have been so absolutely wonderful if someone had been there to play with me. To just explore me and experiment, to watch how I reacted to different touches. Fingertips? Check. Fingernails? Check. Leaning over and brushing it with your hair? Check. Licking a line down the side and blowing to chill the moisture, then blowing more gently to rewarm it? Check. Seeing if you could squeeze it hard enough to make me squeak? Probably not — they’re awfully good about handling pressure. Seeing if you could make it rise to meet the side of your face? You could probably make it do that. Slipping off the couch to kneel beside it, eyeing it closely, watching the soft outer skin glide and flow over the firmness underneath? Check. Hold it tightly at the base and feel my contracting muscles make it quiver in your hand? Check. Circle the tip with your fingers, watching the light and shadows shift over it? Check. Squeeze it again and watch it grow larger, tighter, darker red and shinier around the head? Check? Lift it away from my body, bring it microphone-like close to your open mouth, watching my expression as you lions-mouth it — inside but not touching, letting me feel your warm breath but nothing else? Check. Tickling the head with fluttery eyelashes? Check. Lifting it up again and planting prim closed-lip kisses from base to tip? Check. Following again with wet, wet upward licks, painting one side, then the other, then a soft broad-tongued slurp over the upturned underside? Oh check!

For all the good that would have done! Had you been there the phone still would have rung right about then. And if we’d been so occupied we’d have been content to let the machine get it. As I was alone I only sighed. Tucked myself away before zipping, rising, and reluctantly resuming my busy life.

Sun, 2006-05-21 23:14

Among tall trees
on an unseasonably warm day.

Just warm enough
just quiet enough
absolutely private enough
to go naked.

Which is a good thing
because naked it is.

Legs still wet
from dancing through a stream,
skin just moist
from climbing
halfway up the hill.

Tall trees.
Soft leaves underfoot.
Birds in the canopy overhead.
Leaf-filtered sunlight dapple our bodies.

And nothing else,
no one else,
but you and I.

A solemn silence,
broken by giggles.
First you.
Then me.

“Let’s play hide and seek,
I’ll count first…”
And you turn.
Lean over.
Cross your arms against warm, rough bark,
rest your forehead upon them,
shift your weight from foot to foot,
and pause…

Solemn silence,
broken by wind in the treetops far above,
broken by dancing circles of light on your back,
broken by sunlight caught in your hair,
broken by a tiny shadow shifting across your ass,
broken by a tiny whine of a single mosquito,
broken by a reflexive slap,
a murmured non-apology,
a gentle rub,
a makeup kiss,

Then the story becomes too jumbled to recount,
and too memorable to forget.

Solemn silence,
broken by our catching breath..

Sun, 2006-05-21 13:07

Shakes of Great Shakes has posted a snippet of dialog from Bat Boy, the Musical

SHELLEY: Can I call Rick again?
MEREDITH: That doesn't make sense, honey. You just left him a message an hour ago.
SHELLEY: I know. But I want to find out if he's coming.
MEREDITH: He'll think about you more if he talks to you less.
SHELLEY: Mom, Rick already knows that I like him.
MEREDITH: Don't talk like a slut, Shelley.
SHELLEY: Sorry.
MEREDITH: Courting is a slippery slope, dear, and it's a young lady's job to provide the friction. When I was your age a young lady didn't even call a boy, especially if she wanted to. [Emphasis mine --fl]

See Shake's post here.

This resonates with my thoughts in my earlier post about allegedly (I said allegedly!) promiscuously "predatory" college women and their bewildered male counterparts (as reported in the increasingly right-leaning Washington Post.)

It seems that for a sizable number of young men, the fact that they can get sex whenever they want may have created a situation where, in fact, they're unable to have sex. According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase.

"I know lots of girls for whom nothing is off limits," says Helen Czapary, a junior at the University of Maryland. "The pressure on the guys is a huge deal."

...

One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality. "That's a good thing," says Sawyer, father of four daughters. "But for some guys, it has come at a price. It's turned into ED [a marketing acronym for "erectile dysfunction" --fl] in men you normally wouldn't think would have ED.

Combine the two themes and you have one phenomenon: The worst thing that appears to happen is when "Young ladies" aren't supplying the expected friction we discover that young men have a supply of their own. The world does not dissolve into an unbridled orgy and a new, more natural equilibrium quickly asserts itself.

I think I've mentioned the old John Pryne lyric "half an inch of water / you think you're going to drown / that's the way that the world goes 'round." This seems like a marvelous case.

Actually, if you look back in the Shelly/Meredith dialog you see it's not even a new discovery!

SHELLEY: I know. But I want to find out if he's coming.
MEREDITH: He'll think about you more if he talks to you less.

(Note that I think Meredith's line is a bit euphemistic but the point's right there.)

So!

What are the social consequences of a tradition where women are expected to express less-than-natural desire and men are expected to express more-than-natural desire? What are the consequences when these expectations break down?

Actually I want to ask that last part in two chunks: What are the short-term and the long-term consequences of discarding our respective ice-maid/horn-dog conceits? In the short term I imagine there'd be a bit of turmoil with young men flustered when the women they've been conditioned to chase relentlessly either stop running or begin chasing them. And I imagine there'd be a bit more turmoil when young women discovered that they're often chased primarily because they've been running.

Before you say "eww, that would suck" consider the following "traditional-values" dynamics:

- Who is an alert woman going to respect more, someone who realizes she's saying no in order to keep him interested, or someone who doesn't? - Who is an alert man going to respect more, someone who realizes she's saying no in order to keep him interested, or someone who doesn't?

(Hint: The answer is "none of the above" but I digress.)

Anyway, back to the point, I can see that in the short term (to switch egregious metaphors) I can see that all the "farmers" might be unsure how to proceed when all the "milk" is free, just as I can see the "milk" becoming disconcerted when they discover all the "farmers" have become dear.

My hope would be that in the long run the whole fucking farmer/cow/milk thing would go the way of footbinding and (non-religious) circumcision and that a new dynamic might emerge where (gasp) men and women discovered there are better foundations for relationships than sex.

I'll even venture to guess that rather than skyrocketing promiscuity, as social conservatives fear, we might wind up having somewhat fewer partners overall (since there'd be far less emphasis on counting anyone's "scores") and there might even be a somewhat lower incidence of sex over all for the same reason. (It's worth remembering that overall average incidence of sex between long-term couples of all ages is once or twice a week. Why assume it would become substantially higher if everyone could have sex whenever they wanted, as opposed to how often they thought they ought to?)

Another possible consequence of gender-equalized incidence of initiation: If the possibility of sex is a given in rough proportion to the aggregate desires of the population as a while, then the prospect of sex would tend to cancel out and people would put more emphasis on other relationship factors such as, oh, I don't know, maybe compatibility?

Think the rates of separation would increase or decrease? (Hint: are divorce rates higher in "promiscuous" Blue states or "moralistic" Red ones? How about rates of adultery? How about rates of teen pregnancy? How about... Oh, that's enough hints.)

---

[Note to readers: I am so prepared to believe I'm just talking out of my hat here. (Ok, my ass.) And so I'm not proposing that this post contains solid truth. In fact I'm willing to believe that I'm just another member of the dominant paradigm trying to talk women into lowering their guards and/or standards. It doesn't matter that I don't think I am. Denial, like back hair or the presence of testosterone, is the first symptom of patriarchy. But... let's just say I know I've got to be missing something. I'm willing to defend this thesis in comments, but I promise I'll do it in good faith in order to derive a more durable synthesis. --fl]