Mon, 2010-07-12 10:11

Yet another complete but unposted draft.

You can find out all about the deeply anti-feminist National Organization for Marriage’s “Ruth Institute” project from DailyKos’s Dante Atkins starting here and continuing here. The short version is that the Ruth Institute’s founder, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse disagrees with Atkins’ evidence that the intent is not just to encourage women (that would be white American women) to make a choice to stay home, be supported by men (that would be white American men), and have babies (those would be white American babies) in order to stave off the brown menace but to force them to do so through social, political, religious, and legal legislation.

Morse evidently apoplectically disagrees with Atkins’ assertions… not so much by refuting the considerable evidence Atkins presented but instead by claiming that’s what some women want.

You can follow the links above to assess the evidence yourself, and assess for yourself some of the excellent points Atkins raises that I really agree with and think you might too, but I want to talk about one particular point about willingness vs. coercion that really gets to the heart of the question of choice.

[I]n Dr. Morse’s opinion, it’s not sexist of her to advocate that women’s economic and social advances be rolled back. Why? Because many women actively want take on what one could call a traditional domestic role. That is definitely true: many women do actively seek that role, just as there are many men who actively desire the corresponding role of economic provider. What Dr. Morse seems to want, by contrast, is to force all women to reject the technological, medical and social advances that guaranteed their freedom to choose something else.

Read the quote in context here.

There are certain points in adolescence, during the formation of adult identity, where it really can feel like a threat to one’s own validity when other people make choices different from your own.

On the other hand in adulthood healthy individuals have completed the work of finding their identities with the result that they may be annoyed by, or attracted to, or otherwise influenced by other people’s choices but they no longer feel threatened by them. Indeed I’d argue that this is the definition of adulthood — the thing that distinguishes full-sized post-pubescent humans from full-sized mature humans. (It also, incidentally, distinguishes when I think people ought to wait till they — and even more importantly their partners! — begin having, well, real adult sex.)

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Also, not to put too fine a point on it but how, exactly, is Roback Morse’s assertion that society should be bent to satisfy her 24/7 M/f master/slave sex fetish than for it to be bent in favor of, say, NAMBLA’s fetish for pedophilia? I mean, it wasn’t all that long ago that sexual subjugation of boys was as institutionally acceptable as subjugation of women. Why privilege either?

Thu, 2009-09-03 19:23

Em & Lo, on the Sundance group blog Sunfilgered link to a, well, ok, it’s self-evident from the URL...

AwkwardBoners.com is one of those genius sites that appeals equally to 13-year-old boys and, well, us. While awkward boners in public can be kind of creepy … the image gallery on this site mostly just makes us glad we’re not dudes. Sure, there are your standard creepy pervs who get a thrill out of showing off their “accidental” erection (something tells us this guy knows exactly what he’s doing — he’s sunbathing in spandex, ferchrissakes!). But most of the boners captured for posterity here underline the fact that penises do the darnedest things.

Read the quote in context here.

Awkward boners just aren’t a laughing matter — they’re awkward!

Which is funny when you think about it — men are supposed to be so sexually aggressive and all but I’m guessing all of us except the random sociopath (doesn’t care if he’s seen) or exhibitionist (cares a lot) wants anyone to know they’ve got a boner outside of a sexual situation. They make you feel extraordinarily vulnerable.

Note: the guy in the photo they mention (it’s at the top of their post) does look like he knows what he’s doing, but it looks like he’s wearing standard cotton/poly trunks, not spandex. I won’t say how I know — though any men reading this probably know it too — but spandex, or even classic nerdly y-front whitey-tighties, pull your erection up against your belly where we all hope it’ll appear less awkwardly visible. (Not unawkward, just not as awkward. And yes, one of the big reasons anyone over about age 16 wears y-fronts is to minimize the bump.)

And yes, they can happen at any time, at any age, for a variety of reasons. Sleeping’s a killer — the average man has multiple erections every night. Memory’s another. Then fantasy. Then visual stimulation. Then, for better or worse, actual sexual interplay.

Even during sexual interplay it can be awkward as we tend to live in mortal dread of appearing pushy (or maybe for some men appearing pushier than we actually are.) Thanks to the Two Rules of Desire we’re dead sure it neither interests nor arouses you to know we’re hard.

And since this post is all over the map anyway, I might as well add that in arousal terms having a boner doesn’t mean we’re already ravening with lust. Erections begin in men at roughly the same stage lubrication begins in women — early on, at the point of interest and anticipation, not the point of inevitability. Oh, and another thing that a lot of people who aren’t in touch don’t seem that clear on: absent further stimulation they go away again all by themselves.

One last thing: I’m actually kind of heartened by this site — for a lot of men it’s the worst that can happen to you. Also for a lot of men, for better or worse, we imagine we’re the only ones who get awkward boners. That’s mostly because they’re usually nowhere near as noticeable to others as they are to us. (Depending on age we can have dozens of them a day, most entirely unwanted. Most people clearly don’t notice.) The site neatly… ok, not exactly neatly, dispels that idea that we’re the only one it ever happens to.

Sat, 2009-05-02 20:14

Another post I’ve been meaning to get to. Back in April Margaret Jezebel let us know about a new dating website.

Do you hate wasting your time dating guys and learning all about their thoughts and feelings only to find out later that they have an average-sized penis? Then 7orbetter.com is the dating site for you.

7orbetter.com is a new site for people interested in meeting men with penises that are seven inches or longer. According to the website, the mission of 7orbetter.com is to let women know “upfront if a man has what it takes to satisfy you sexually.”

She said it here.

Margaret quotes Washington City Paper writer Amanda Hess’s wry reaction

Isn’t society just terrible? A “properly behaved woman” who is only interested in men with huge penises may have to wait months-months!-before figuring out that the man that she has spent months falling in love with has been hiding a dick that’s slightly too small to deserve that love. Now, with Seven or Better, that woman can know from the first date the exact dimensions of that penis she doesn’t want to see yet.

Hess said it here.

Margaret adds that the site welcomes people of all persuasions including men seeking men and, perhaps less intuitively, women seeking women. She also says the editors want some sort of 3rd-party verification and they take a dim view of “any photograph [they deem] to be of such superior quality (i.e. modeling shots, magazine pages, etc,) that it raises the question of that photograph not being a reasonable representation of said member.” It’s not clear what exactly they mean by “said member.”

I know men are raised to believe that length of erection is better but, at least on the heterosexual side most people I know who’ve expressed a preference seem to prefer girth over length.

It’s all moot to me, of course. I may be tall, and I may have big hands, but I’m otherwise perfectly average.

NSFW Caveat: If you’re an adult you can click here to see a disappointingly (according to 7orbetter.com) average cock. In a disappointingly cluttered environment.

Thu, 2009-04-30 13:05

Via economics blogger Tyler Cowen and sex-blogger Violet Blue we’ve got not one but two works of epic fiction, one sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that, together, explain perfectly why so many women can have orgasms the regular way (with fingers, toys, tongues) but no so much from intercourse.

Exhibit #1 would be sociobiologist David Barash (in his first book, incidentally, he claimed the behavior of microscopic, parasitic acanthocephalan worms somehow explains or justifies homosexual rape in humans) who’s new book, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas co-written with long-time collaborator Judith Eve Lipton, M.D., spends an entire chapter on the “Enigmatic Orgasm” (Note: sociobiologists think only women’s orgasms are enigmatic while men’s are thoroughly self-evident… and therefore absolutely unnecessary to explore)

Anthropologist-primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males. “Based on both clinical observations and interviews with women,” writes Hrdy, “there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per copulatory bout.” A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential. As for why this potential exists at all, Hrdy suggests that it is ultimately driven by the fitness benefit of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, as proposed earlier for the evolution of concealed ovulation. Thus, female orgasm and its requirement of sustained stimulation may have provided the proximate mechanism underpinning the ultimate payoff deriving from having sex with multiple partners. Here are Hrdy’s own words: “It is possible that as in baboons and chimps the pleasurable sensations of sexual climax once functioned to condition females to seek sustained clitoral stimulation by mating with successive partners, one right after the other, and that orgasms have since become secondarily enlisted by humans to serve other ends (such as enhancing pair-bonds).”

Read the quote in context here.

So. Got that? Them gang-bangin’ hoor women somehow evolved multiple orgasms… or maybe evolved… um… difficulty having orgasms with just one partner… in order to encourage them to have lots of group sex. Got that?

But wait, there’s more!

This month’s Scientific American Jesse Bering summarizes the latest word on Ev Psych thinking about the evolution of penis shape in “Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?“

It too takes the line that women are just a bunch of train-pulling cum dumpsters, and therefore, mens penises have evolved our evidently atypical bulbous glans and flared coronas in order to…

...effectively displace the semen of competitors from their partner’s vagina, a well-synchronized effect facilitated by the “upsuck” of thrusting during intercourse. Specifically, the coronal ridge offers a special removal service by expunging foreign sperm. According to this analysis, the effect of thrusting would be to draw other men’s sperm away from the cervix and back around the glans, thus “scooping out” the semen deposited by a sexual rival.

See page #2, here.

So. Got that? Men evolved the kind of penises we have becausea them gang-bangin’ hoor womin pulllin alla them trains. Got that?

So we’ve got a little concordance here between “creationist” sociobiology and it’s more sophisticated “intelligent design” ev-psych descendant: them gangbangin’ hoor women forced men to evolve plunger-shaped penises out of reproductive self-defense. We didn’t want to, women made us!

Now this is where things start to get tricky. See, the researchers Bering mentions tested their semen-extraction hypothesis with sex toys. Specifically with “anatomical” vs. smooth-sided dildos inserted into masturbation sleeves. And sure enough, dildos with coronas extract more artificial semen (they boiled precisely measured quantities of flour and water for precisely measured quantities of time so it has to be science) than did dildos without coronas.

All well and good. Except, of course, unlike dime store “pocket pussies,” actual vaginas, rather like actual live human beings with vaginas, are complex, dynamic, muscular, and responsive. Worse, from the ev-psych/sociobiology point of view real women’s vaginas do that darned tenting thing as they get close to orgasm, meaning this carefully selected-for “semen extraction” business isn’t going to do much good at all if the woman’s even slightly aroused. From, say, the cooperative intercourse with preceding partners during these allegedly evolved serial couplings.

Which is where the ev-psych/sociobiology unified field theory rides to the rescue! If penises don’t efficiently displace (other men’s) semen in pre-orgasmically aroused women then men must not be accidentally incompetent about helping their partners have orgasms during PIV intercourse compared to other methods, our incompetence is evolved!

At last! Not just a biological basis but an evolutionarily determined basis for the proscriptions and prescriptions of the no-sex class paradigm! :-)

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Now truth be told there are more than a few teeth missing from the ev-psych/sociobiology combs here. Which is fine, of course. There are a few muffins short of a baker’s dozen in my arguments as well. The difference being, however, that I don’t pretend to be a scientist.

Gap #1: Other closely-related species are also promiscuous (hello chimps? bonobos? Orangutans? Though not gorillas) but Bering says they’re not semen pumper-shaped.

Gap #2: Which means we would have had to evolve ours in the ~6,000,000 years, or call it 2-300,000 generations since separate speciation from common ancestors. Which, sorry, isn’t a lot of time for multiple-partner competitive semen-extraction to be a significant selective factor at the margin.

Gap #3: Just because it’s not selected for doesn’t mean that human penis shape doesn’t facilitate semen extraction. The authors Bering cites aren’t the first to notice the effect. Bering cleverly proposes that the male post-orgasmic refractory is evolved to prevent men from pumping their own semen back out of their partners by resuming intercourse too soon after ejaculation. The down side of this, though, would be that if Barash’s interpretation of Hrdy is correct and women “evolved” to favor lots of group sex (um…) then a refractory period would tend to be maladaptive for all men who weren’t a women’s final partner.

Gap #4: So based on #3 the refractory period suggests men and women both evolved having more single-partner sex than Barash, Hrdy, and Bering suggest, or else there’s some other reason for the refractory period. I can see having one, or the other, but both doesn’t make much sense. (And, at least as Barash is willing to admit in his title, these are all “just so” stories so there could be plenty of other reasons instead of the ones proposed.)

Gap #5: All of the above leaves out… um… y’know… women, even “primitive” proto-human women, making decisions in the matter. A counter experiment I might propose would be instead of using phthalate-laden plastic sleeves to ask real, actual women to try not two types of dildos but three: the original smooth-sided and “anatomical” ones, sure, but also one of the new glass dildos which tend to have lots of extra bulbs and ridges. Oh wait! We don’t have to conduct that experiment, women who can afford them speak highly of glass dildos. (For instance.)

Gap #6: See gap #5.

Gap #7: See gap #6.

Gap #8: For something called “Evolutionary Psychology” these guys (and it’s still mostly guys) don’t spend much time on the psychology part. In fact they’re highly resistant to it. The problem being that humans almost certainly started being able to do mind hacks around the time we learned to make tools — which would have been at least 1.36 million years ago. And the problem with mind-hacks is that they by definition derail predestination.

That doesn’t mean humans haven’t evolved. Or even that human penises haven’t evolved. Or even that human behavior isn’t adaptive or selected for (see human facial expressions, for instance.) It just means you can’t base every flipping hypothesis for human sexual selection on the behavior displayed in reruns of The Flintstones and Mad Max.

%$$!@$!^&*!!!

NSFW Caveat: If and only if you’re an adult you can click here for an extravagantly not-work-safe image possibly related to penis evolution… in a primitive habitat no less. :-)