Feministing blogger Maya summarizes Terri Conley's debunking of six common gender-essentialist myths. Follow the links to read the rest. The last two myths really stood out for me.

5) Men like casual sex more than women do

This is one of the most persistent myths out there. But the researchers say that women’s reluctance to accept an offer of casual sex is mostly because they’re not convinced the guy will be good in bed (see #4) and are afraid of being slut-shamed. If you account for these two barriers, the gender difference disappears.

6) Women are pickier than men

Everyone tends to be choosier when they’re approached by a potential partner, and less choosy when they’re doing the approaching. So it’s our lingering expectation that men do the asking and women the accepting–not some evolutionary bullshit about spreading seeds–that keeps this myth alive.

Source: Feministing

The factors affecting #5 seem to be the crux of the matter for a lot of the other discrepancies. The higher the likelihood that sex will be personally disappointing (not just non-orgasmic but downright bad) the more “reasons” you’re probably going to need to do it anyway regardless of gender.

Meanwhile, to the extent “slut shaming” imposes external costs above and beyond personal enjoyment (or, conversely, to the extent that “stud-congratulating” imposes external benefits beyond actual enjoyment) you’d expect to see those being shamed limiting their activities.

If you include in “slut shaming” awkward little historical tendencies like “honor killings” and “stone her if she’s not a virgin on her wedding night,” plus psychiatric treatment for “nymphomania” if she wants sex more than her long-term partner, and approximately 0% interest from authorities if you’re sexually assaulted then we’re not just talking about a little name calling being an inhibiting factor. You don’t need special “genes” to explain that — just the plain old ordinary genes for self-preservation.

I'm perfectly comfortable with the notion of behavior-linked genes shaped by self-preservation in social situations. I just generally have a tough time with selected-for behavior that has to have evolved to handle a wide variety of fairly subtle and often ephemeral gendered situations.

Lindsay Beyerstein, guest posting at Pandagon makes a great point about dodgy definitions of paraphilia and perversion while dissecting a troubled essay about aging, dementia, deviancy, and sexual assault by science writer Jesse Bering. Beyerstein says

Bering fusses over the precise definition of “gerontophilia” but he doesn’t address the central conceptual problem with the entire psychiatric framework for “diagnosing” paraphilias and fetishes. In a world where we can date whoever we like, the difference between a paraphilia and a “type” becomes meaningless. If I’m only attracted to skinny brown haired guys between the ages of 25 and 45, I just don’t date anyone else. Nobody questions this relatively rigid preference because it fits with society’s definition of normal. If I only wanted to date 80-something dudes, Bering would say I was a deviant. Actually, he’d say I was a golddigger because later in the essay asserts that female gerontophiles don’t exist.

Source: Pandagon

There are two good points in there. The first being that if someone of your "type" is a) able to make a competent decision to join you in bed but b) not a "type" Jesse Bering approves of then... you're not actually a deviant, you're just interested in someone who's not Jesse Bering's type.

But for the sake of argument, consider an exclusive heterosexual likeGeneral J.C. Christian. The General, a Manly 11 on the Scale of Absolute Gender, is absolutely dependent upon women, or thoughts of women, to become aroused. Every single time. Nothing else has ever aroused him in his life. Does that mean the General has heterophilia? No.

Bering insists he is incapable of erotic thoughts about elders. Does that mean Bering some kind of paraphilia for adults roughly his own age? No. He just has his preferences, like everyone else.

Incidentally, the DSM, the bible of mainstream American psychiatry, classified homosexuality as a paraphilia until 1973. Gerontophilia isn’tlisted in the DSM--which says a lot about why it isn’t studied more. To psychiatry’s credit, a thing for grey beards is no more remarkable than a thing for redheads, as long as it’s all between consenting adults.

Secondly, there's that echo again that women aren't supposed to have sexual fixations, and so any deviation from just wanting babies ...er... keeping your man interested long enough to raise those babies fairly staid vanilla sex amounts to calculation of some sort rather than genuine erotic interest.

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By the way, don't even get me started on the heart of Bering's actual post.

The point of his exercise in geriatrics and erotics appears to have been whether raping a very old woman with dementia should be taken as seriously as raping someone younger. After all, sez Bering, she wouldn't remember and she couldn't get pregnant so, hey, the ref says no harm, no foul, play on!

As, oh, maybe 99% of everyone reading the piece points out, that doesn't just start down the slippery slope towards condoning universal use of alcohol and roofies, it drives it right over the cliff.

Because in addition to slipping roofies to young men and raping them (remember, no recollection plus no pregnancy = no harm, no foul) then slipping roofies to a just-past-menopause 50-year-old woman, slipping roofies to a 35-year-old woman who's had a partial or complete hysterectomy, slipping roofies to a woman with an IUD or other birth control, slipping roofies to any woman of any age if you've had a vasectomy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, also looms large.

In none of those circumstances they would't know and they won't get pregnant so if we were to follow Bering's lead it would all just be exploring, as he puts it, "questions about issues related to consent, trauma, and the impact of sex crimes on victims with different psychological and physical stakes."

Actually I'm pretty sure Bering believes nothing of the sort but was was just looking for a phone-it-in way to close his article. He's been phoning them in a lot lately and I'm guessing his regular editors at Scientific American took a pass on this one. But not Slate!

Tony Comstock, guest blogging for James Fallows about U.S. obscenity court cases, quotes from the Supreme Court's 1956 ROTH vs US decision affirming the difference between sex in art, literature and scientific works vs sex for "prurient interest."  A key sentence from the I think needs even further scruitiny

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages; it is one of the vital problems of human interest and public concern.

Source: Atlantic Monthly

Want to know a really dirty secret?  Once you take a good, close, eyes-open look at it isn't really all that mysterious.  Auto mechanics is way more mysterious.  Baking with yeast is more mysterious.  And certainly the practice of law is far more inscrutable.

The main difference between sex and all the other objectively more mysterious practices is that social norms permit and even encourage spending one's life elucidating the latter "mysteries" while those same norms have tended to insist that sex remain, well, mysterious.

Mark Seddon of Big Think calls attention to Stephen Fry’s over-the-top perfect submission to the bogus Two Rules of Desire. Seddon says Fry manages to fall for both rules in one sentence!

Stephen Fry raised the curtain when he said that men secretly felt ‘they disgust women’ as they ‘find it difficult to believe that females are as interested in sex as they are’.

Yup. In heterosexuality Rule #1 is about the inconceivable impossibility of women having desire, Rule #2 about the similar impossibility of men being desirable.

Fry being gay, is strongly aware of the other side of Rule #2 — intolerability of men being desirable. As a gay-rights activist Fry is obviously aware of this part of Rule #2. And it’s patent absurdity. Which makes it a shame that he falls for the rest.

Seddon continues

He continued: ‘If women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas.’

Fry said that the only women who accepted being promiscuous were prostitutes and that was because they receive payment.

‘Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: ‘‘God, I’ve got to get my f*****g rocks off’‘, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to s**g behind a bush,’ he told the November issue of gay magazine Attitude.

‘It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it.’

Source: Big Think

Right! And the only reason men ever “turn” gay is because they had strong mothers and weak fathers. Oh, oh, or maybe because other gay men “convert” them from straight to gay. Yeah, that’s gotta be it, right? One imagines Fry would call that part somewhere between offensive and insane. Well… yeah. So why participate in that breed of stereotyping in the first place?

No remember, the Rules of Desire insult both men and women — men for being sexually unlovable, undesirable, and unattractive; women for being calculating golddiggers. Fry seals the… um… misperception thusly

I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that the sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want.

Fry has evidently retired from Twitter, at least (where much of the uproar occurred) and possibly other online venues. If so it’s a shame since he’s a thoughtful, insightful, progressive, and not particularly more indoctrinated to the dominant paradigm as anyone else. Because, seriously, almost everybody believes those things. And not being directly hetero himself Fry is particularly unlikely to have directly experienced anything to the contrary?

The nice thing about Fry, I think, is he’s thoughtful enough to get that the rest of the stereotypes about straight men and women are as perniciously bogus as the stereotypes about gay men and women. Assuming he gets it he’ll almost certainly become a marvelous ally instead of a bewildered obstacle.

(Hat tip to reader Eve.)