Though told from a perspective that’s highly male and (the author admits) fairly inexperienced For Guy Virgins: Basic Things No One Told Me About Sex” from http://www.succeedsocially.com has some highly useful information about the nuts and bolts of having sex for the first time with someone else. I’d be much harder on him for his general cluelessness about women’s perspective if not for a) the fact that for all the focus on women’s virginity there’s woefully little practical attention paid to men’s first times, and b) his clearly stated disclaimer:

I’m … a 26-year old guy writing this for other young guys so I’m going to be using slang terms. If that’s not your thing then feel free to hit the ‘Back’ button. Maybe you’re just here for the writing on conversation and making friends and don’t think a website on shyness and social skills should have this sexually oriented stuff in it. The thing is sex and young, dorky guys overcoming their issues are pretty connected.

As with maybe too many men (and increasingly women) these days, he learned a little too much about sex from Hollywood movies or while while masturbating to pornography.

What amuses me in movies now is what you could call the ‘instant penetration.’ You see it all the time if you look for it. A man and woman will be in their underwear, or even fully clothed, in some sexually charged situation. Maybe the woman is sitting on the man’s lap (both in their underwear remember), or the man is standing behind the woman. The camera is focused on their faces. Then the guy will make a little movement, the woman will gasp, and then they’ll close their eyes and start moaning, the implication being that the man achieved vaginal penetration off-camera. Yeah, not that quick and easy in real life. You’ve got to move your clothes out of the way, line things up, the guy has to be hard enough, the woman needs to be pretty wet, and often the man has to guide his penis in with his hand. Otherwise it’s a much more awkward procedure.

...

Also, when you watch porn you can mistakingly associate the visual act you’re witnessing with the sensations you’re giving yourself. For example, say you have a thing for titty fucking scenes in porn. And let’s say as you’re watching, you’re masturbating in a fast, intense manner. You know your body so of course it’s going to feel good. But actual titty fucking probably doesn’t feel like your fast, intense, just-right wanking. The true physical sensations may or may not be your cup of tea.

...

In porn the positions are all about making the sex visable to the camera and to give you a good look at the woman’s body. In real life concerns such as being close to each other often take precedence.

I love that last one, by the way. Evidently a lot of young men, knowing no better, pull out to ejaculate on their partners even though it’s a pretty significant step down in sensation from coming with and/or inside one’s partner. (Note: men’s partners opinions vary widely on this, from finding it totally hot to utterly degrading. Check first m’kay?)

There’s also some earnestly practical advice about positions, women’s natural lubrication, erections, penetration, orgasms and timing, minor injuries, condoms, and messiness.

With some variations her vagina will seem like a straight tunnel that you can easily go in-and-out, in-and-out of. With other variations you’re mostly inside her, can only thrust a little, and you’re more grinding pelvises together.

...

It runs out at some point and she’ll get dry, and eventually uncomfortable, during sex. Sometimes you have to pull out and apply some lube. At other times you can keep going for a bit and she’ll get wet again.

...

If it’s not hard enough you’ll have a hard time putting it in. It’ll tend to bend or slide out of the way instead of penetrating. However, if it’s slightly soft and you manage to get in it, you can often get it harder quickly once you start thrusting.

...

When the girl is on top the angle of her vaginal tunnel can give you problems and you can’t really see what you’re doing. It’s best if she guides it in herself.

...

In many cases you’re not just going to cum instantly as soon as you start pounding away, you have to find the speed, angle, depth, etc. that feels good for you. It’s not automatic, just like you can’t just masturbate in any random way. You have to do what’s effective for you.

...

If she’s riding you and you slip out she can come down on your dick. Usually it gets bent a little and hurts for a minute. At the worst you can rupture the tissue and take a trip to the hospital.

You may get scratches, bruises, pulled hair (purposely this time), and bite marks. That’s cool.

...

[Condoms] smell bad.

Sometimes when you’re inside the girl they’ll bunch up in weird ways and feel strange.

...

If you have a good session, when you’re done you’re going to be sweaty, red faced, tired, and a bit out of it. Your hair will be messed up, gross stray hairs will be stuck to your skin, the girl will have a bit of white lubricant running out of her cootch. You’ll have a bit of cum dribbling out of your dick. There will be at least one condom wrapper on the floor, the sheets and pillows will be all over the place, and the bed will have a wet spot on it. If you cuddle afterwards you’ll start to stick together and it’ll feel gross when you pull apart. It’s great.

Could we use an equally blunt exposition from a young woman’s perspective? You bet. Could we use a third entry on, like, things that do and don’t work for one’s partner? Um, yeah, that would be another major, and welcome, departure from a masturbation/porn orientation.[1] And so this piece functions better as the “don’t plug your waffle-maker into the wall while standing in the bathtub” section of the manual rather than the main “how to make really wonderful waffles” sections. But for a young man who’s about to have real-life, messy, sweaty, sticky, and generally wonderful sex for the first time, or for his partner whether she’s more experienced or not, it’s all pretty good to know.

[Footnote #1: I really am interested in similar first-timer’s perspectives for women and take-care-of-your-partner-too posts. Put them in comments if you’ve got them. Thanks in advance. —fl]

Hat tip to Bacchus of Erosblog.

Vanessa of Feministing has a quote from a speech by paleo-anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly at Bates college in (I think) Lewiston, Maine.

Last night at Bates College, Phyllis Schlafly gave a lecture titled, “Conservatism vs. Feminism: The Great Debate” where at one point she contended that a woman can’t get raped by her husband: “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”

Vanessa’s take here.

The original article appeared in the Sun Journal, central Maine’s regional newspaper. There server seems to be overloaded at the moment so I won’t provide a link. I Googled around, though, and found a bit more from reporter Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times:

Schlafly asserted women should not be permitted to do jobs traditionally held by men, such as firefighter, soldier or construction worker, because of their “inherent physical inferiority.”

“Women in combat are a hazard to other people around them,” she said. “They aren’t tall enough to see out of the trucks, they’re not strong enough to carry their buddy off the battlefield if he’s wounded, and they can’t bark out orders loudly enough for everyone to hear.”

But wait, it gets better.

At one point, Schlafly also contended that married women cannot be sexually assaulted by their husbands.

“By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape,” she said.

It’s in the vow don’t you know? To love, honor, cherish and roll over on command.

Brantley’s take here.

The good news? I think Schlafly’s newsworthy again because there are moves afoot in Congress to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment, which Schlafly made a career out of defeating the first time around. (Note: remarks on the irony of Schlafly abandoning her own children to nannies to fight for the right to stay home with them are so… 1977.)

The better news? The first time around most people, even many progressives, had a nagging suspicion she maybe, sorta, could be right. This time around? Pretty much everything Schlafly tried to scare us with has come to pass… with no noticeable effect. Unisex bathrooms? Ally McBeal wasn’t just 90’s cartoonishness. Men’s restrooms have those fold-down Koala changing tables even in pretty out-of-the-way places. Women in college and professional sports? Eh, we had it back then too but now it actually draws crowds. Equal pay for equal work or promotion discrimination? Not there yet but now, at least, when major retailers are accused of discrimination public opinion shames them into lying instead of claiming “natural weakness” as they did in the past. Women in politics? It’s worth noting that the major objection to the two most qualified prospective women Presidents (Hillary Clinton and Condileeza Rice) is not their gender but their association with a disgracefully initiated and managed war. (Had the war gone better, especially considering the quality of the Red men in the race, I’m extremely confident that Rice and Clinton would have been the two nominees in 2008.) Women’s reproductive rights? While certainly under siege the vast majority of Americans support choice. Education? There are more women than men in many colleges, graduate programs, and law and medical schools. Women in the military? Um, while not officially in combat roles they’re seeing plenty of combat. Firefighters and police? Women who want the work and meet the physical qualifications are finding jobs — if not in their backwards towns then in the more thriving municipalities.

Civilization has not ended.

In fact, pretty much anywhere you look Schlafly won the battle against the first ERA but lost the war. And pretty much everywhere you look she wasn’t just wrong about the consequences, she was laughably wrong.

So do we still need an ERA? Um. Duh! But not, as in the 1970’s, for querulous, reluctant “do the right thing” reasons. Instead we need it today to be used to hammer the last clawing fingers of the Shlaflys and Dobsons of the world who, though aging gracelessly, would drag us back out of the daylight world and back into the regressive sewers and ditches they call paradise before the last of them dies of old age. (For instance she was born in 1924, Dobson in 1936, Falwell in 1933.)

So do we still need an ERA? Um. Duh! But not just for women’s rights. Men, too, have benefitted tremendously from the advances towards women’s equality since the first ERA was introduced, and men, no less than women, would resent being thrust back into the misery of single-breadwinner, absent-father, bored or frantic dependent partner, and incredibly socially confined war-of-the-sexes world Schlafly would drag us back to. Ratifying a new ERA would lend structural backbone against backsliding both for men and women.

Do we still need an ERA? Um. Duh! Just because no one would marvel at Billie Jean King kicking Bobby Rigg’s ass today doesn’t mean there’s not a lot more we could do, nor way too much ground we could (temporarily) lose. Simply debating ratification in the 50 states (and ratifying it in 34) over the following 10 years would create a marvelous platform for clarifying both what’s been done and what can be done next.

We hear a lot of talk today about “post-feminism” and “4th-wave” and “opt-out” feminism. Whether people are willing to admit it or not, the luxury of “I’m not a feminist, but…” arises directly out of the rising equality that’s come to us in the last 30 years. I mean, just semantically speaking “opt-out” implies an option that Schlafly would erase as ruthlessly as she’d erase one of her nannies for requesting time off when one of their own children fell ill.

And, to get back to Vanessa’s point, how debased? How disgraced? How gutter-sniffing, raincoat-wearing, alcoholic-dazed, self-hatingly, irreligiously bestial? How… strong>unmanly! does Schlafly imagine real men to be that they would want a right to force their wives to have sex against their will anyway?

It might cheer her to imagine her daughters powerless at the hands of their husbands but I’d not have that for my daughter. It might concern her not that her sons could never be sure that their wives tears were from joy or bitterness and fear, but I would not wish it so for my son.

Think the ERA would protect only women from the proposed depredations of Phyllis Schlafly? Un-uh. With Schlafly and her ilk still at large moral, decent, self-respecting, family-loving men need protection every bit as much.

If the ERA passes this year Schlafly, Dobson, Falwell will be out of the picture if not out of commission before the 10-year ratification deadline passes. Children who will be voters by then will have even less interest in returning to the Ozzie (died 1975) and Harriet (died 1994) era of their grandparents and great-grandparents day than will those who are now under thirty, let alone their Gen-X and Boomer elders. 24% of state legislators are now women compared to 10% in the 1970s. Nine state governors are currently women compared to two during the entire period the first ERA was up for ratification. If the troglodytes can’t filibuster it’s passage I just don’t see them blocking it’s ratification. I just don’t see 33 states Red enough to vote it down ten years from now.

Melissa Gira of Sexerati has written a very cool manifesto for real adult sex. Four sterling paragraphs that begins with an assertion about the importance of communication about sex, a reminder that communicating unjustified shame for others or unjustified fears about our inadequacies limits all of us, a reminder that we don’t learn to enjoy sex by just reading, watching, or talking about it (any more than we learn to ride a bike by watching others), and a final “assignment” to

...ask someone that you want to kiss for a kiss. Be honest, straightforward, direct. Be seductive, shy, cute. Be whatever comes up naturally. The important thing to do is get over that fear of asking. The world will not end, and hey, you might even have a good time. If we all do it, we might all have a better time. Kiss someone for the sake of it, for the sake of sex, for the sake of your own well-being. Then tell us how it went, okay? We’re all in this sex smart thing together.

It’s short. It’s sharp. Read the whole thing here.

Best of all she’s not advocating that we all go out and hook up more, she’s not saying we should do anything better, or something right or that we’re doing anything wrong, she’s not expecting anyone to push their sexual boundaries, and especially she’s not saying go listen to a bunch of experts tell you how it is. Instead all she’s only asking that we ask for a kiss from someone we want to kiss. For a start.

High marks all around, Melissa. It’s all I can do to keep from quoting the whole thing here. So go read the whole thing there.

[Via Amber Rhea. Thanks, Amber. —fl]

Anastasia of Sexualité, discussing tropes in industrial porn, says

It dawned on me that in eight out of ten hetero porn scenes (especially amateur flicks, ‘ten dollar online porn’), a woman will usually be depicted bringing herself to orgasm while her vagina is occupied. She’ll be on her back, on top, or on her knees, with her hand between her legs, stroking her clitoris; watching this can sometimes exhaust me, and shine light on more questions, but more recently it has resurrected Terri Garr’s line in Tootsie, that feminist statement:

‘I am responsible for my own orgasm!’

I beg to differ, and if I put it all under my sexual microscope I can relate it to my own sexual hiatus. I also don’t subscribe to the overrated ‘Fuck, like you’re being filmed,’ quote that’s done the rounds. The thing is this: sure, I’m responsible for my own orgasm during my own solo time, but if I’m engaging with another person, it’s their responsibility as it is mine; I don’t shirk my sexual responsibilities, or efforts to press their buttons. So why the fuck am I expected to press my own button? Call it sexual chauvinism, I don’t particularly care, but it’s enough that I’m there, naked, and ready to go. Do I also have to sit in the driving seat and do all the work? If I’m going to sit there masturbating for a partner, then what’s the point? If they want voyeuristic thrills, they can dig out a porn film, whack it in the DVD player and go to town.

Read the quote in context here

The irony, of course, is that in porn anyway almost all sex ends with the men stopping whatever they’re doing and masturbating so that everyone can… see what a good time he was having before he stopped to masturbate? I dunno. I’ve never understood that bit, though I’ve got my little pet theories.

As for whether everyone should be responsible for their own orgasms, I think it’s important to know that the climate back when Tootsie was being filmed was that women’s enjoyment was considered exclusively the man’s responsibility. Not least because back then women were still expected to be embarrassed to admit they had any kind of sexual autonomy at all, let alone that they masturbated, let alone that they were active participants in sex.

Anyway, because of that historical bias I’m way more in favor of women taking charge of their own orgasms during sex. It doesn’t have to involve fingers or toys (though it’s totally fine if they do.) Instead it can be as direct as shifting herself or her partner during intercourse so that the stimulation works for her.

Also, it’s worth noting that turning the tables that way works both ways. There are a couple of positions for intercourse, mainly woman on top and pressing way down, that seem to be very effective for them while making it quite hard for me to get enough stimulation to have an orgasm myself. (The top of my cock right at the base, where most of the pressure happens in those positions, has almost no erotic nerve endings.) Consequently in those positions I also have to take responsibility for my own orgasms or I won’t have them.

Finally, because a minority of women seem to reliably have orgasms during straight intercourse, and because we’ve all got this idea that orgasms from straight intercourse are “normal,” and because believing that makes most women “abnormal.” Not my idea of a good definition. If you add that the notion that “his cock should be enough” is highly, highly male-centric, I’m just really wary about the whole idea.

I thoroughly, thoroughly agree, though, that the Tootsie-era declaration of responsibility runs the risk of letting men completely off the hook for their partner’s orgasms. And that’s the point I think Anastasia is making in her post.

Luckily the Tootsie era was almost 30 25 years ago. Nowadays I like to push for the possibility that when people are having sex they’re both responsible for making sure everybody is getting what they want out of it.

So I was stopping for a red light at an intersection and, for no good reason at all, I started wondering about masturbating standing up.

Shere Hite, who did a couple of big reports on men’s and women’s sexual behavior back in, I think, the late 1970’s, said a lot of men masturbate in the shower, which I assume means they’re standing up. And either she (or maybe it was a Nancy Friday book that came out around the same time) had an anecdote about a woman who preferred standing on tiptoe with her vibrator against her clitoris because she came very quickly that way.

I think I’ve tried it standing up a couple of times, and I’m sure if I applied myself I could learn to enjoy it, but it’s never really worked that well for me. (I much prefer lying or sitting.)

The tiptoe thing sounds interesting since it would intensify muscle tension in the legs — something that definitely seems to work for a lot of people.

So anyway, now I’d like to know what your take is. (If you haven’t tried it and you’ve got the time…)

Thanks.

A press release from Wellcome Trust begins on a highly accurate note:

The female orgasm is something of a mystery to scientists.

The rest of the presser, on orgasm research on identical twins presents some interesting information showing pretty high heritability correlations.

Twin studies are a popular way of teasing apart genetic and environmental influences on biological traits. The general idea is that the incidence of traits is compared in identical and non-identical twins. If a trait is shared more in identical than in non-identical twins, it is likely that genes are at work: the greater the discordance, the bigger the input from genes.

The two studies – from Tim Spector (who runs the UK’s twin registry) and colleagues, and from Khytam Dawood of Chicago University, working with the Australian Twin Registry – both probed female twins’ experiences of orgasm.1,2

Both studies discovered that the ability to achieve orgasm during sex showed a surprisingly high inheritance – 34 per cent of the effect in the UK and 31 per cent in the US/Australian study could be put down to genetic factors. (For orgasm achieved by masturbation, interestingly, it was even higher – 45 per cent in the UK and 51 per cent in Australia.)

Unfortunately the rest of the piece indulges in sophomoric idles (“Surveying 1500 pairs of twins about their sexual habits may sound like some people’s dream job”) then rehashes a couple of out-of-date evolutionary theories women’s orgasms. But!

But in a footnote it produces some genuinely interesting and potentially actually useful information:

Oddly, the scientists discovered that both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. In the study, 50 per cent of the 24 men and women analysed managed to achieve orgasm without their socks, but 80 per cent were successful with their socks on.

Bit of a bite out of the old fashion savoir faire, wearing socks in bed. Assuming we can trust their data.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

[Apologies for the older photo from my Socks and Shorts set on Flickr but they just went too well with this post. I’ll post the photo I’d planned to use next week instead. —fl]

Don’t get me wrong. We’re now a cool-dude’s computer household even though our kids keep asking if I can somehow make it run “Jurassic Park?” (Like most kid’s games it only runs on nerdy guy’s computers.) And my partner, who’s confronting her first-ever laptop, spent the better part of her first day hissing “I know this is supposed to be easier!”

So. Who do you think is better in bed anyway? The kind of nerdy cubicle denizen who’s smart, versatile, and telecommutes in his nightgown, or the kind of arrogant but stylish art roach who spends a lot of time telling you how privileged you ought to feel getting to be with him and all.

(If you think I have an easy answer I don’t. Neither seems like much of a catch.)

I had a wonderful time yesterday in Portland, Oregon, about 200 miles south of my home town. It’s a beautiful city, home to a bunch of cool bloggers, one of the wiggiest highway systems you’ve ever seen, the only theoretically active volcano in the lower 48, and the you-gotta-see-it-to-believe it Powell’s Bookstore.

It’s so big that the main store, which last I was there already took up much of two blocks, has several also-very-large satellite stores. Which is where I got to hear Rachel Kramer Bussel, Portland local Shanna Germain, and LA’s Stan Kent read from Rachel’s twin anthologies, He’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Male Dominance and Female Submission and She’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission..

/>

The reading was way better attended than the store had expected — there were maybe 30 chairs and about 50 people there, which, I gather, is a pretty good turnout. The audience was about two-thirds women, the average age was somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s.

Rachel started out reading sections from Donna George Storey’s “Yes,” about an impromptu two-and-a-half-way from He’s on Top, and ended with her own (pseudonymous) “Feeder” from She’s on Top about a dominant woman who shares a cooking and hand-feeding fetish with her partner. (Mmm, sex and food!)

Shanna Germain read from “The Sun is an Ordinary Star” from He’s on Top, a sweet and very erotic story about a top coming to terms with his partner’s just-concluded lumpectomy and chemotherapy.

Stan Kent, who as a boy went to an archetypical English boy’s school, complete with paddling, read a funny, barkingly pornographic, and highly convoluted story about a schoolmistress who turns the tables on the “head student” of a kinky, BDSM-intensive “executive training” school. (The convolutions involved Kent trying to fit his story inside the tropes of a boy’s school without going to jail for writing anything to do with, well, an ordinary schoolmistress disciplining an actual boy who’d previously gotten the drop on her.)

So, you might ask, was it worth driving the equivalent of Boston to New York and back in a day worth it? Definitely. The weather might have been worse but it’s a lovely drive even in the rain. I had a great time and it was good to see Rachel again anyway. It was also the first time I’ve really gotten off the main drag and taken in the town — it’s got some extremely cool neighborhoods, sort of like a cross between Greenwich Village, Vancouver, B.C., and Gray’s Harbor County (logging-port home of Kurt Cobain) all rolled into one.

Ever notice that ten minutes after really great (meaning not just “putting out” for your partner) sex you feel exactly the same whether or not you had an orgasm?

Sure, orgasms release some nice relaxation hormones, but sex releases quite a few more.

Is sex better with an orgasm? Sure! Maybe even of course! But lemme tell ya, if you think orgasms are all that feels good about sex…

So aside from the usual distractions of day to day life that… usually don’t distract me from posting… I’ve been wrestling with a notion about gender roles, patriarchy, and the trope of the lower-libido-in-women-relative-to-men. I’ve had this idea for about a week now. It first started emerging after my conversation with Joan Sewell. And it’s one of those cases where feeling like I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew is premature because my mouth might be too small to bite it in the first place.

So here’s the deal. There’s this great huge notion in the world out there that on the whole men are hornier than women, at least in the sense that a) tradition says women are more likely to have “a headache” — which we could pass off to domestic sexist workloads if not for b) self-help books seeking to boost the libido are purchased mainly by women. Oh yeah, and if you’re unconvinced it’s a huge notion: Dr. Phil says it’s epidemic. So it must be true!

I don’t happen to believe it’s true — not when, for instance, you take the fairly similar rates at which women and men tend to masturbate as a baseline.

But there are the books. There’s Dr. Phil. There are all the clichés about headaches. They just sit out there like unpopped kernels in a bowl. (Which doesn’t really suit my more-than-I-can-chew metaphor but there you go.)

Anyway, I got a little glimmer and rather than keep foundering around trying to write something big I’ll put out one little piece and ask what you think:

Ok. So if you scroll down in this Wikipedia page on average height between men and women you’ll notice that around the world women, on average, tend to be between four and five inches shorter than men, again on average.

But here’s the thing. By definition 50% men are shorter than average height. 50% of all women are taller than average height. And if you go hand out at a concert, in a train or subway station, or just watch crowds of people walking up and down the street you’ll notice there’s quite a bit of overlap in heights between men and women. In fact, especially in smaller groups, it’s not that unusual for the tallest person to be a woman or the shortest to be a man.

But here’s another thing! If you look at pairs of partners the woman is almost always shorter than the man. Going back to looking at crowds again, say, coming out of a church, a dance, or somewhere else where people tend to be paired up, you’ll see the overall effect I mentioned before — some men are shorter than some women, some women are taller than some men… but not the people standing or walking next to each other.

Know what I mean? There’s some sort of self-selection process going on. It’s two-way selection too. It’s not just that shorter men are often less interested in taller women — tall women are often also less interested in shorter men. Weird huh?

You’ll see the same things with age too — clich&eacu; says men are interested in women who are younger than they when they fill out on-line dating forms, but women are just as likely to request older men. Odd, isn’t it?

Income and social status? Same strong tendencies even in the face of narrowing economic and social gaps between men and women. (See Maureen Dowd, for instance.) What’s with that?

Is it true of all couples? Of course not. Could there be all kinds of qualifying factors in such gross characterizations? Oh yeah. Are the exceptions and qualifications enough to hand-wave away all the observable biases in couple selection. I don’t see it happening.

Question about libido differences then: Even if you bought the argument that, for whatever reason, the average man’s libido was higher than the average woman’s, the fact that libido within genders tends to vary way more widely than height. Which means that if one were to pair up randomly selected heterosexuals you’d expect to see a way higher incidence of men with low libidos relative to their partners, and women with high libidos relative to theirs.

Off the top of my head I can think of maybe four possible explanations for Dr. Phil’s “epidemic” which, if we really were to randomly pair couples up shouldn’t be nearly so divided between men/high and women/low.

- Distribution starts out more random but patriarchy-induced stress about domestic maintenance tends to wear women down faster than men.

- One of the other, more over factors people seem to select for — say status, height, or age — is somehow linked to libido.

- We have a tendency to prejudicially select partners for libido the same way we select for height, age, or socioeconomic criteria.

Yes of course there are other possibilities but it’s that last one’s what’s got me in a bit of a dither. Am I barking up an entirely wrong tree here? Before I delve deeper I’d like a second, third, even a 22nd opinion.