Image reposted from Geekyvamp.tumblr.com.

Ever notice how almost all mainstream/medical/social discussions of women with multiple male partners the women are always assumed to be objects, passive participants, or even unwilling or duped victims?

And hey, sometimes they are! But the reflex assumption that they must be? That no woman in her right mind would choose to be with, let alone enjoy being with, let alone desire to be with two men at once? That’s the bogus Two Rules of Desire talking.

See also the persistent narrative that all two-women-one-man three-ways are also for the benefit of the man.  Yes, again, sometimes it is.  But heaven forfend that a woman ever was interested in, let alone desired, let alone might invite, orchestrate, or otherwise initiate such a thing for her own benefit.

That might not be intolerable, for once, but... only because it's so socially inconceivable that a woman would ever want such a thing that 99 out of 100 observers would say either "woo-hoo, dudes love girl-on-girl 'action'" or else "eww-boo, straight girls playing it up to keep the man interested." 

Note: For the longest time I focused this blog on the women's side of feminism -- posting in defense of women's sexuality and autonomy and alternating between anger and mockery of men (but it's not all men!) who denied such a thing.  Lately I'm trying to turn that around and actually, you know, take it to men instead.  Because it's as much a gender trap for men to assume any kind of hetro-leaning sex is always about the man.  The social scripts and narratives are overwhelmingly strong... but 50 years ago the narrative was still strong that any man who wanted a blowjob was a "latent homosexual" (look that one up in your granparent's psychology books sometime!) and 100 years ago the equally strong narrative was that any man having "as many as" ten ejaculations a year would be insane or dead by age 40.  If you're a man alive today you're better off than men from 100 years ago.  And of 50 years ago. And, trust me, if you can help get it out of your heads that all of hetero sex is, one way or another, "in service" to men you'll be even better off.  But I digress...

Anyway, in porn?  Yeah, it's still almost exclusively about the men, even though an amazing amount of porn is consumed by women.  But from talking to a wide array of candid, sexually active people over the last seven years, in real life it's not as sure a thing that a woman in a threesome sees herself only as "servicing" her two partners.

Colour photographs of a Square Dance, Oklahoma, 1940 by Russel Lee, found on Retronaut.com.

A lot of people seem to misunderstand that sex education isn't the same as sex instruction.

Based on the awful memories most people have of getting ballroom or square dancing instructions in school I suspect the threat of getting sex instruction in school would put more people off sex forever than would 10,000 moron "abstinence only" classes involving tape, gum, sweater lint, or rose petals.

Daniel of Casual Kitchen knocks it out of the park on another hidden-in-plain-sight issue that eventually affects almost all long-term relationships, especially in-college, fresh out of college, or instead of college relationships: domestic budgets.

Below is a recipe list, menu list and itemized grocery list you can use to feed two people a wide range of simple, healthy dinners for fifteen days. It can easily be scaled up for larger families, or used as a template for your own collection of favorite, low-cost recipes. And this is no hypothetical menu that looks good on paper but fails miserably in practice. I actually used this exact menu, made these exact food purchases and cooked these exact recipes during an actual fifteen day period a couple of months ago. This was a real 15-day trial carried out in real life.

It's deceivingly easy to assume that eating involves unavoidable tradeoffs: Healthy food has to be expensive. Cooking at home means spending hours slaving away in the kitchen. There's not enough time or money to eat well at home.

...

Recipe List:

• Garden Gumbo- 1.5 batches
• Black Beans and Rice - double batch
• Viennese Potato Soup - double batch
• Fresh Carrot and Cabbage Curry - double batch
• Chicken Mole
• Easy Lentil Soup with Chicken

Source: Casual Kitchen

I've made quickly made and my family has thoroughly enjoyed all of those dishes, all taken from Daniel's list of Best Laughably Cheap Recipes. Most could become comfort foods. As well as being laughably cheap and remarkably good they're all ridiculously easy to make too. The best part of Daniel's post is the title: "Two People, Fifteen Days, Thirty Meals. Thirty-Five Bucks!" The best part because he was being cautiously conservative about the price -- he says hypothetically, if you exclude the ingredients left over from his shopping list, it could have cost as much as nine dollars cheaper!

When we think of the politics of sex, gender, and relationships we usually think about things like trust, attraction, maturity, commitment and/or the lack thereof, opportunity, and maybe whether or not to risk contact with each other's bodily fluids. All of which is fine, of course, and perfectly true. But especially when we're young, and possibly, in today's political and economic climate, even when we're older, we overlook the ability to provide our partners, and to impress them, with a variety of healthy, home-cooked, low-cost meals at our peril.

Like Daniel I don't particularly have to feed my family dollar-a-serving meals. But I've put many of his recipes in heavy rotation for my family anyway because... they're delicious! His Pasta Puttanesca, Pasta with Tuna, Olives and Roasted Red Peppers, Collards with Rice and Kielbasa, and Groundnut Stew are serious comfort-food-quality crowd pleasers. Some of them, like his Chicken Mole recipe, are suitable for semi-fancy potlucks if served with rice. Just don't admit how little they cost to make because no one will believe you.

Update: I can't believe I forgot to mention that none of these dishes are much more difficult to master than the a) mac and cheese, b) fried potatoes, and c) rice boiled in bullion cubes that were all I knew how to cook when I first left home. And without focusing too much on traditional gender disparities and social expectations, young men could easily master them today. And while I don't know if you could win friends and influence people with them you'd definitely impress friends and have a little left over each week to entertain them. Just sayin'

Photo by Flickr user fabulousfabs. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jeffrey Israel reminds us yet again of the covert body-hair fashion imperative hiding in plain sight.

Every morning I wake up with resentment about the fact that I have to shave my damn face. The ideas that grew gnarled and twisted in my mind by the end of the previous day have loosened over night. My mind is fresh and agile and I’m already working on new material silently in the shower. I’m ready to burst through the plastic shower curtain. I’ll do a couple of quick swipes with a towel to dry off, throw on a random pick of clothes, grab my coffee, which was prepared with a timer to be ready and waiting the night before, some cereal, and run over to my computer to pound out a few pages of my book proposal, or conference paper, or whatever. 

But noooooooooo. Stop everything. I have to spend the next 8 to 10 minutes lathering up, artfully dodging moles, carving into under-nose crevices, turning the water on and off to rinse the razor. It’s torture. And I resent it. 

What if we could spare future generations this grievous time suck? Surely facial hair is no longer necessary for human survival (if it ever was). No future person would be worse off for not being able to grow facial hair, right? Wouldn’t we be doing future people a favor? Wouldn’t we take a huge leap forward in human evolution if we genetically engineered all forthcoming infants to grow no facial hair and to produce descendents who would forevermore likewise be incapable of such growth? 

Source: Big Think

Rather than spend more time mentioning how weird it is that we all distinguish "body" hair removal from "facial" hair removal, I'm just going to go ahead and restate, and in doing so re-frame, Israel's question:

If we could genetically eradicate facial body ancillary hair, should we?

Would we?

Would you?

It's a trickier question than you think. At some point in the past our ancestors had considerably more body hair. Were they better off? Were they more attractive? Was it a boon, a bust, or no difference? If they could have gotten their hands on five-blade razors and hot water would they have shaved their foreheads, eyelids, and noses? Would those who did have been admired as looking tidy? Decried for looking "prepubescent?" Sought out for being daring and sexy? Turned to for seeming self-disciplined and clean cut?

On balance I think I probably would change my facial hair. Maybe not to eliminate it altogether. But maybe to change it enough to make it possible to wax it the way we can wax all the rest of our body hair.

But really? I think if we were to spend any time genetically modifying ourselves for fashionable rather than medical reasons I think I'd rather we modified ourselves to not really care one way or the other.

Laura Clawson says

A Human Rights Watch report based on interviews with dozens of farmworkers as well as many attorneys, service providers, law enforcement officials and others involved in the agriculture industry details the problems these women face. The problem is widespread:

A 2010 survey of 150 farmworker women in California’s Central Valley found that 80 percent had experienced some form of sexual harassment, while a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that a majority of their 150 interviewees had also experienced sexual harassment.

Because assailants are often supervisors, women who resist sexual harassment or assault are often fired in retaliation, sometimes along with their entire families or with coworkers who try to stand up for them

Source: Daily Kos

It's just so... conceited to claim that people trafficking into commercial sex is the only conceivable thing we should be worrying our pretty little heads about. My only quibble would be that the report makes it sound as though only women in precarious, smuggled, or trafficked agricultural work are subject to sexual harassment and sexual coercion, but that's just a quibble: it matters more that anyone at all is acknowledging that "non-sex" smuggled, trafficked, and otherwise poorly-documented workers are at risk. Especially since credible reports suggest that they (along with trafficked manufacturing, domestic, and hospitality workers) make up close to 90% of humans trafficked worldwide.

Frequently Freakonomics-addled economics professor Alex Tabarrok relays the following from Louis Theroux in The Guardian

...it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.

Source: The Guardian

To which I can only say I'm winning. That's a link to what I think was my first assertion that as both the stigma for acknowledging one's sexual activities and the economic barriers to entry drop, the number of people who find it exciting to upload "porn" made with partners who similarly enjoy exhibitionism is going to increase. And as it increases it's going to eclipse industrial porn.

Or, as I'd put it today, I would add that, especially now that both stigma and capital barriers to entry are so low, to many other people when it comes to porn not charging for the content they and their sex partners produce and upload also seems like the more moral thing to do.

Because the best thing about zero-marginal-cost porn is there’s also approximately zero marginal incentive for the coercion, exploitation, and unsafe working conditions which have traditionally been the biggest objections to porn, at least on the progressive side of anti-porn debates.

Photo by Flickr user Twiggles. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Atheism evangelist Adam Lee says it's about time people started addressing the sometimes outright predatory sexism that afflicts his community. Good for him.  And great job snarking the guys (and it's mostly guys) who think if they're being oppressed if they can't drunkenly corner women skeptics in elevators. (Emphasis mine.)

The atheist community is abuzz over a discussion at last month's Women in Secularism conference, in which it inadvertently emerged that there are prominent speakers who have a reputation for predatory behavior and whom atheist women informally warn each other to avoid. This revelation (as well as a few recent high-profile examples of unacceptable behavior) is leading to the institution of anti-harassment policies at many of the major annual conventions, something I'm very happy about.

Still, from the usual quarters, we're hearing the absurd fear that these policies are "Talibanesque" (because the Taliban are well-known for their strong anti-sexual-harassment stance) and will suppress well-intentioned and harmless social interaction. Some people are even threatening not to go to conventions that have them, saying that they create too much "drama", or that they're "dividing the movement" (and harassment doesn't?).

I want to stress that if I thought for even a moment that anti-harassment policies would have this effect, I'd be strongly against them. I'm all in favor of everyone having a good time at atheist conventions. I'm all in favor of people getting to meet and greet famous atheists, to network, and to make friends. And I'm all in favor of flirting, dating and sex being options for people at conventions, if that's what they're there for. These policies aren't intended to stifle these activities, nor will they. The whole point is that they make these events more enjoyable for everyone, by ruling out only those behaviors that make others feel demeaned or afraid for their safety.

Source: Big Think Proxy

I'm personally not a big fan of organized atheism for the same reason I'm skeptical of organized religion.  And so maybe I'm not the best person to go to for advice for recruitment and retention.  But if I was I'd probably point out that if you really want the whole population to become unbelievers you could start by not alienating half the population.