...is the author of a method of political philosophy rather than the author of bodice ripping fiction.

For Rand worshipers consent is compromise. For Rand worshipers compromise is only for the weak.  For Rand worshipers the strong don't compromise they take.  Therefore in Rand's impoverished little moral universe "legitimate" rape, which 'wingers are always so careful to distinguish, is the only legitimate "method of conception."

And, of course, Paul Ryan is a Rand worshiper.

In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)

But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.

Source: Huffington Post

Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?

And even if they are is it really because of biology?  Or is it maybe more about 

Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies?  Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men?  Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up."  (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)

I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy.  But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.  

I mean...

Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces.  Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces."  That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.

And speaking of normal circumstances...

Really?

Really?

Men aren't particularly choosy?

Are you kidding me?  First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it?  If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there?  If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all.  Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick."  Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter.  Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.

More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!

Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.

Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:"  reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it.  And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.

But...

But...

Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check.  (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)

Basic Instructions comic by Scott Meyer.

"You keep hitting on Athena."
"You can't blame me for trying!" 
"Sure I can, it's your fault.  She certainly hasn't encouraged it." 

Nicely said.

Update: For those unfamiliar with the reference, a rodeo clown's job is to run in front of a bull, distracting it while someone else gets out of the way.

Image from Someecard.com. Used without permission though I doubt they care.

I'd like to tell you that Rush Limbaugh is alone in his theory that his dick is small because of feminism. But alas, no.

Read it in context here.

What's funny of course, beside the blunt truth that, no, feminism doesn't make your penis smaller (though maybe your conservative neighbor's industrial effluents might be) there's the even more fundamental man-hating anti-feminist idea that penis size is the only element of sexual attractiveness in men.

Quick aside: The author Mary Roach excels at highlighting tragic/comedic aspects of the human condition. In her excellent, readable book Bonk, the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, she mentions that, evidently, men with larger-than-average penises are at least as likely to seek out "enhancement" treatments as average or smaller-sized men! This suggests, at the very least, that male anxiety about "size" is about waaay more than size. (Further aside: I'm... pretty certain this anxiety is what drives so many men to email or post penis photos to dating sites, Tumblr "ask" boxes, etc.)

Anyway, as Kaili Joy Gray points out in her DailyKos post, Rush Limbaugh, Rep. Alan West, and other winger-est of the wingers evidently sincerely believe that feminism isn't just "emasculating" men, it's actually making our pee-pees smaller.

Just stumbled across this awesome refutation of the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the entire array of social expectations that drives them.  It's by ThePeacockAngel on Tumblr. Have to repost the whole thing because it's... awesome. Sometimes you'll hear men's rights activists grouse about the way society hates men. Often they'll blame feminists of all people for somehow being part of it. Here's exactly why that's a mistake. Actually, she gives a whole bunch of reasons why it's a mistake.

The Patriarchy Even Denies Women The Right To Fully Love A Man

You know what pisses me off, even though women are supposed to be these passive creatures utterly devoted to their men, the patriarchy denies us the right to even fully and properly LOVE a man. It denies us even enough agency to be allowed to care for and about a man the way men are women.

• We’re supposed to wait to be protected by our knight in shining armor, we’re never allowed to stand up and fight alongside our partner. Like if there’s a noise downstairs, and you actually CARE about someone, you don’t let them go down there alone to check it out, you grab a heavy object and you go downstairs with them, because two people are more capable of overpowering a wild animal or intruder than one.
• We’re not supposed to care how men look, so we can’t think our boyfriend/husband/partner is the most fucking beautiful thing on earth, and we’re shallow if that was ANY part of the reason we chose to be with him. Because we live in a heteronormative patriarchal society men aren’t ever supposed to be “attractive” or “sexy”
• We’re supposed to passively receive expensive gifts and not give the same in return (semi-understandable with the wage gap, but still)
• We’re supposed to let our men protect us, sacrifice themselves for us, and are somehow castrating harpies if we lift a finger to stand up for them in return. It’s supposedly emasculating to be a man who has a woman who loves you enough to fight for you, and that’s REALLY fucked up, because if you really truly and completely love someone, you WILL stand up to help them when they need you.
• We’re apparently “emasculating” our partners if we try to earn more money to help support them, or buy them nice things because we care about them.
• We’re so fully objectified that we’re objects capable of receiving love and lust, but never giving them in return.

Instead we’re supposed to sacrifice our identities, our dreams in exchange for a white knight who will protect us from the scary world, and honestly, that’s not fucking romantic, that’s… if it were actually necessary the most purely mercenary thing I can think of doing. We’re told women don’t like “nice guys” if we don’t date a white knight (and punished) because womanly love is actually supposed to be coldly pragmatic according to society, and we’re breaking the script if we don’t choose an option society sees as “The best host for our benevolent parasitism” All we’re allowed to do (and therefore what we are ALWAYS supposed to do) is stroke wounded feelings and look pretty.

And fuck that, i don’t want to be forced to be a parasite, I don’t want to be the fragile pixie who’s character is defined be her romantic entanglement, I actually want to be allowed to be a person who loves another person, and is that actually too much to ask?

She said it here.

I mean, read through that post and see if you can see, anywhere, anything less than an enthusiastic, passionate, uncompromisingly feminist embrace of heterosexual partnership. In opposition to coruscating anti-feminist insistence that both women and men live inside the strangling gendered rules that capital-P patriarchy demands.

Seriously, I could write ten posts about each of her points and sub-points.  Actually, over the years I've written <em>about</em> many of them... but neither as succinctly or as passionately or as well.

(Via Lipstick and Ligature.)

Answer? Nobody.

In a great post titled "The Myth of the Boner Werewolf," Cliff of The Pervocracy points out that excuses about "blue balls" and other (mythical!) forms of male uncontrollability make women less enthusiastic about being sexual around men.

There's a pernicious myth out there that the male sex drive is unstoppable and irresistible--that once a man is aroused, he literally cannot control his actions. We tell jokes about "thinking with the other head" and "all the blood went out of his brain" that aren't entirely jokes. We have a cultural narrative in which sexual arousal makes a man into a goddamn werewolf.

And we expect women to tiptoe around this uncontrollable male sexuality. We tell them to watch how they dress, lest they wake the beast. We tell them "some guys can't control themselves"--not won't, but can't. We tell them to be careful what they start, because they'll be expected to finish it. Hell, way too often we outright tell them that they have no right to withdraw consent once sex has started.

My response to myths like this, more and more, is "shit, if I believed that, I'd never have sex with a man again." I wonder if the story would change if more guys realized that saying "if a woman gets me turned on, she'd better be ready to go all the way" is the same as saying "getting me turned on is dangerous, better not take the risk."

Source: The Pervocracy

Anyone here wish women felt sex with men was more risky rather than less? Show of hands here? If not then is it really worth perpetuating the dominant paradigm of men as the obligatory, reflex-driven, and therefore high-risk "sex" class." In exchange for what? A marginally higher chance of receiving grudging pity sex of some sort? Whee!

Screen shot of Google Analytics for Realadultsex.com, Oct-2008-Sept-2012

Maybe I need to start taking this site a little more seriously again!

That doesn't even include now-lost stats from the years before 2008 when this blog was really popular. (When I blogged more about sex than politics and gender.)

The breathless headline (probably not written by Wired UK science writerLiat Clark) says "Sexual Arousal May Help Women Ignore the Yuck Factor."

Really! Wow, yeah, I mean we all know women are so sensitive and easily squicked and... and...

Oh wait, the very last paragraph of the article says...

A 2009 paper did come to similar conclusions when investigating the affects of sexual arousal on the disgust mechanism in male undergraduate students.

Source: Wired Science

In other words men and women, both, are made of snakes, sugar, snails, spice, puppy-dog tails, and everything nice. In about equal measure.

It's kind of a cool research topic, incidentally, in keeping with the SIS/SES hypothesis of arousal Emily Nagoski evangelizes. And the intention is evidently to explore certain (possibly common) sexual dysfunctions. And it's cool that one set of researchers decided to do coverage of women after others did coverage of men.

But wow, watch those gender-reflex headlines, gang.

Quick followup on my previous post, An Illustrated Guide to the NiceGuy™ Loses to Bad Boy Myth

The problem is that even many of the worst "bad boys" think of themselves as "nice guys."

Thus the experience of "nice guys" being left by someone is almost universal.

Meanwhile, surprisingly few men consider themselves to be actually bad guys.

And contrary to myth but conforming to actual common sense, most women aren't particularly attracted to men who are actually are and know they're bad!

With the result that nearly every guy who gets broken up with believes women always leave nice guys.

The law of averages, plus maybe a little selective memory, is all we need in order to "know" the story that "women leave nice guys for bad boys" is "true."

Image from George Takei's Facebook page."

In his accompanying text, George Takei asked "Who's been there or done that?*"

Short answer, of course, would be me! And about eleventy-million other guys who mistakenly believe that smothering a partner in devotion and near-servitude will buy love any better than money or threats.

The problem is that relationships, real relationships, last only between equals. Yeah, you might worship the ground she walks on, and be prepared instantly to set anything and everything aside to do her the slightest favor. But...

But...

To a first approximation, whereas nearly everyone enjoys visiting a spa pretty much nobody wants to live in one. Similarly nobody wants to marry their doorman, waiter, shoe salesman, or even masseuse with the expectation that they'll continue to be treated like a customer or patron.

Don't get me wrong. Loyalty's great. Backrubs are great. Being willing to listen is great. Making time for someone you're interested in is great too. Nothing wrong with any of that, m'kay? People do it all the time even.

But never making demands in return? Never expecting favors in return? (Except for "validation," a relationship, or, um, sex?) Always "being there?"

See. Here's the thing. It all presupposes that women are only interested in parsons or monks. (You know, like men are only interested in schoolmarms, right? Oh wait!) Or, of course, that women are secretly interested only in "bad boys." (You know, like men are only interested in strippers, right? Oh wait!)

The fact of the matter is that "bad boys" aren't any better off that "nice guys." It's just that social expectations (particularly the expectations us men are indoctrinated with) make it very easy to notice, and remember, when the next boyfriend is a "bad boy." Those same expectations make it almost invisible each time a woman dates a "good boy" after breaking up with a "bad" one. I think that's called selection bias.

Note: The comic is curiously devoid of authorship or even provenance. I tried tracking it to its origin with Google Images search. If Google's to be believed the thing has been posted and reposted more than 19,000 times! By every imaginable kind of website from individual lawyers to MotorTrend Magazine's website to, well, George Takei's Facebook funnies page. If you recognize the style I'd be interested to know whether the original artist identifies as a man or a woman.

I'm guessing man. Because while I really actually have known women who've left their perfectly nice but stiflingly sweet partners for "bad boys" I've never, ever known a woman to say, in advance, "yeah, he's so nice. I think I'm gonna break his heart and dump him for a greaser."

Extra bonus clue: The vast majority of women I know who've left stiflingly "nice guy" ideal partners have left them for...

... nobody at all!

Because, sometimes, after feeling boxed in by someone who at least outwardly behaves as if he's willing to wait on you hand and foot? Sometimes you just want to be on your own for a while.

In practice I've noticed that, stereotypes and anonymous cartoons notwithstanding, it's almost completely random who someone dates after a breakup. Ones again, yeah, we notice when someone breaks up with someone "ideal" and later takes up with someone "less than ideal." But when they instead later take up with someone who's just as ideal or (gasp!) is otherwise a more equal, suitable, compatible match? Maybe it's because it's more of a "dog bites man" story not a lot of people brood loudly about that. Or draw comics about it.

* Yes, it's happened to me.