Image by XKCD's Randal Munroe. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Canadian economics professor Marina Adshade brings a slightly tongue-in-cheek assessment of an evidently not tongue-in-cheek academic paper, Yeoman, Ian and Michelle Mars (May 2012). “Robots, Men, and Sex Tourism.” Futures Vol. 44: p.p. 365-371. Naturally you have to pay out the wazoo ($41.95, possibly Canadian) to read it.

As one might expect of people who write about the economics of sex with androids, the authors are wedged so far up the "no-sex" class paradigm only the bottoms of their toes can be seen. Here's their take on the impact of android sex on marriage dynamics. Emphasis mine.

Another implication is that android sex would change the dynamics within marriage. I personally don’t see wives happily waving their husbands good-bye as they head out to spend $10,000 on android sex (which is the 2050 price suggested in this paper) any more than I see husbands cheerfully sending their wives off to do the same thing.

But if they did, and sex with an android was acceptable within marriage, how might that change the way that couples negotiate? The authors of this paper argue that wives only have sex with their husbands in order to encourage them to help out around the house. Does access to android sex then mean that women have to go back to doing all the chores?

Source: Big Think Proxy

Righto then! "Wives," obeying Rule #1 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire, have no innate, independent libidos and so, claim the authors, being free of wanting sex because they're human beings and humans enjoy sex, "wives" are able to barter sex for things women "naturally" enjoy instead. Like help with chores!

Welcome to the malevolent, dehumanizing dominant paradigm of transactional (heterosexual) sex.

Note: In her review Adshade recites a list of things the authors say men and women would do with androids. There's no evidence the authors imagine married couples sharing androids with their partners. My guess is if you were to bring up the idea of group sex with androids the authors would blush and sputter that that would be perverted.

Note: If you've got access to an academic library you may be interested in reading the actual article. If so I'd be very interested in your impressions.

Image by Benjamin Dewey of Things Could Be Worse. Order a print here.

Benjamin Dewey says draws

Do You know a ravishing scientist who deserves more attention for her mathematical derivations than for her aesthetic wonders? Show her you understand how vexing the veil of comeliness can be when it masks an equally exquisite brain for which no one shows a primary concern! This illustration is available as a keepsake from my emporium.

Tagged: For Lisa Randall. Steph Levi. Saskia de Vries and Hedy Lamarr Beauty Great Thinker Lady Scientist Cupid Brilliant often overshadows work Deriving Maxwell's Equations for the Potentials chalk top hat love

Source: Things Could Be Worse

It's kind of a big deal. There was a sort of lowlife blogger years ago who'd preface many of the images he'd repost with comments like "With a body like that she should never have to work a day."

Leaving aside the insane idea that supporting one's self with sex or "beauty" isn't work, where does anyone get the idea that it would be fun to have a brain and never fucking use it?

In my socially checkered past I've managed to live in a number of situations where one occasionally encounters "kept" women: higher-end rock music culture, cocaine-dealer culture (closely related to the preceding), middle-upper-class and upper-upper-class neighborhoods (where I was a paperboy), and country-club culture (related to the preceding.) And near as I can tell, a almost-synonymous word for people (mostly women) who not only aren't expected not to work but are outright expected not to work is "alcoholic."

Human beings don't make very good pets.

Years and years ago a friend my age, a nursing student who had grown up in country-club culture, said she had to get out because what other girls from her neighborhood were going through was either making them insane or driving them to drink. She said, yeah, it might sound like fun to "do nothing but lie on your back eating bonbons and drinking Cutty Sark," while your husband worked, the gardner and maid took care of the house and the nanny took care of the kids, but, "Frankly I'd be happier changing bedpans for a living." (I lost touch with her decades ago, before she finished nursing school, but she was on track to become a Nurse Practitioner rather than a bedpan changer.)

I dunno. I've been catching up on my reading this morning and running into a lot of commentary by women scientists, women skeptics, women in medicine, and even little girls trying to go to school. The theme is just...

You know what, it's just dumb! Not to mention just an unbelievable assault on human potential. Not to mention an even bigger insult to half of all of humanity! But mostly just really fucking dumb. Richard Fineman was attractive enough but no one ever suggested he couldn't be attractive and also win a Nobel Prize in physics. Anderson Cooper is attractive enough but no one ever suggest he's "too pretty to do real reporting." And even though the first President George Bush selected the sorry-assed J. Danforth Quayle for his good looks ("women will be throwing their underwear at him at campaign stops"), and even though he was never smarter than a bag full of golf balls, there was still never any question that he was also going to work. Heck, even Mitt (Mittens) Romney, who was born with both a silver foot in his mouth and a full head of hair continues to work even after making further piles of money putting other people out of work. And while a lot of people believe he shouldn't do the job he's looking for, nobody deplores his basic interest or desire in working, period. So where's the fucking contradiction in women being attractive and working? Brilliantly or otherwise?

Just how weird is it that nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, those boys had to have done something to get themselves raped." Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, after so much teasing you can't really expect a horny man to control himself. Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, they only 'cried rape' the day after because they regretted what they'd agreed to do the night before." And you sure don't seem to be hearing anyone brassing on about the need for awareness classes or self-defense classes or what-not-to-wear classes or 'don't walk alone' classes for boys. Not where the expectation is on boys to be on the defensive, to be perpetually vigilant, to be sure not to go around "asking for it."

You don't hear anyone opining that "sure, they're a little young, but since they'd have been 'giving it away' for nothing before too long anyway there's no real harm done."

Seems kind of funny to me, you know?

Kind of a paradox, really.

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that in the Penn State case.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable expectation to impose on victims of sexual predation.

This evidently doesn't become clear when victims are women or girls. 

So however horrifying the Penn State case might be, or the Boy Scouts cases, or the Catholic Church cases, or the Republican congressman cases, it seems like there's some kind of teachable moment there.

Know what I mean?

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I gotta back up here and repeat something I mentioned only in passing above.

Nobody seems to be giving this guy Jerry Sandusky a pass for "doing what comes naturally."  Nobody's tisk-tisking about how he was just "thinking with his 'little head.'"  Nobody's going "well what can you expect, a man can only handle so much temptation!"

Not the way they'd typically give him a shrug if it had been the more typical "coach treat:" cheerleaders.

Another kind of paradox, eh?

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that about this guy Jerry Sandusky.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable pass to grant perpetrators of sexual predation.

This evidently doens't become clear when a perpetrator's victims are women or girls.

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And I gotta touch on one more thing I almost completely glossed over above.

Nobody seems to be saying "those boys have had their precious jewel flowers taken from them."  They're not saying "nobody will want them now."

Which is kind of odd because, you know, when <em>people</em> are sexually assaulted and raped it generally has kind of a negative impact.

Another one of those paradoxes, only this one lands harder on boys and men in the sense that we have approximately zero social scripting for helping them work through that kind of violence.

Photo by Flickr user Jon Bragg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here's Lynn Gazis-Sax on the recent dealbreaker meme. Pointing out, correctly, that there's probably no controversy about what she calls "red flag" dealbreakers, and there shouldn't be much of an issue with "we don't share the same values" dealbreakers (say, a collector and a declutterer) there are also "shallow" dealbreakers. About which she has some great points (emphasis hers):

Finally, there are the “shallow” dealbreakers, the ones that involve looks, hobbies, tastes, etc. Now, the thing about shallow dealbreakers is that several things are true:

• You have the right to have any dealbreaker you darn well please.
• That “right” doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers (and it especially doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers if you announce them in a particularly rude way). It does mean that, once the deal is broken, the person you’re not going to date needs to accept no for an answer, and it does mean that at a certain point you get to tell people to butt out of your business.
• You should, in fact, not date anyone you don’t want. That applies even if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to other people’s values. It also applies if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to your own values. If, for instance, you really, really wish you could be sexually attracted to men (because your faith won’t allow you to sleep with other women), but you’re actually only attracted to women, it’s not fair to pick a guy you’re not attracted to and date him anyway. For as long as your attractions and your faith are in conflict, suck up and be abstinent; at least that way, you don’t wind up imposing on some unhappy man who would have liked a woman who actually found him attractive.
• At the same time, some “dealbreakers” may turn out to be more malleable than you thought they were. Sometimes people’s attractions even change (though the one about which sex you’re actually attracted to seems to be, if at least partly mutable for some people, pretty darn resistant to deliberate change). If you’re not happy with the men you’re actually choosing, you may want to rethink your choices. That might mean caring less about how a man dresses, or deciding that values are dealbreakers but tastes are fungible. The point here, though, isn’t to “settle” (and it isn’t that no one gets to have any “shallow” dealbreaker – see above about how you’re doing no one any favors if you date people you can’t find attractive); it’s to pick useful standards, ones that actually bring you a happy relationship, rather than being more exacting about things that matter less than about things that matter more.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

I think the second point nicely handles, say, Jill Filipovic's defense of "shallow" dealbreakers while making sense out of Rebecca Watson's reservations about mocking those you've declined to date for "shallow" dealbreaker reasons.  While also nicely handling the case where when it's a woman who balks over a "shallow" dealbreaker it instantly stops being about the shallowness and turns into zomg there'sfeminernazifemalebichesusingwordsonmyinternetsmakeitstopppsss!!!!

But I digress.  One peculiarity in the discourse is an assumption that it's generally women who wield the dealbreakers.  Actually that's not all that peculiar in and of itself.  Inside the dominant paradigm where men are supposed to initiate and women are only supposed to accept or decline it makes sense that women's dealbreakers are visible (it's easy and almost inevitable to wonder "why did you say no") whereas men's are invisible (it's almost impossible to imagine anyone saying "why did you just not ask me out just then?")  And therefore inside the dominant paradigm it follows that there would be talk of shallow "gatekeeping" but none about the often equally shallow... I dunno... call it "gate passing."

What I don't get so much is how much of the conversation hasn't mentioned, or mocked, shallow gate passing.  (Note: if I was feeling more strident I'd mention how this is yet further another still instance where we men have the wind at our backs.)

Because it seems like the Lynn's points about dealbreaking apply equally to both responding to and initiating relationship overtures.