Last week I posted a comment I added to Em & Lo's regular "Wise Guys" feature. This week I'm in the rotation as Em & Lo's "straight married" Wise Guy, answering the question...

“What would you tell a guy who was intimidated by the idea of his partner bringing sex toys into the bedroom?”

Source: Em & Lo

Here's how I answered (slightly reformatted since, hey, now it gets to be a second draft):

The dead cliché answer would be to remind him that they’re only called “toys” and “novelties” to get around puritanical blue laws.In reality, you could tell him, sex “toys” are tools for sex. Guys like tools.

But here’s a more original approach: Tell him, if someone brings a Monopoly board into the den it would be a pretty good sign she’d like to play [Monopoly] with you, right? So if your partner brings a sex toy into the bedroom that’s an even better sign she wants to play with you.

Yeah, we men are under a lot of social pressure to feel inadequate or even jealous about... well... all kinds of things. But, seriously, once you give up on the idea that sex is a test it can be a heck of a lot of fun. Whatever you want to call them, sex toys are pretty much always going to make sex even more fun. For both of you.

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?

I'd like to suggest one small edit to Reuters health and science reporter Julie Steenhuysen's otherwise commendable article on young people's misunderstanding of HPV vaccine protection, based on one of her own previous, equally commendable article on HPV vaccine recommendations for boys.

Some adolescent girls adolescents who get the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer wrongly think they no longer need to practice safe sex, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, shows the need for better education about the vaccines and their limitations.

Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines protect against strains of the humanpapilloma virus or HPV that cause cervical cancer. Gardasil also protects against some strains of the virus that cause genital warts.

But neither vaccine can prevent other forms of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea or human immunodeficiency virus or HIV that causes AIDS.

And HPV vaccines can only prevent HPV infections; they do not treat active infections.

Most girls young people who get the vaccine know its limitations, the researchers said, but the vaccines are recommended for all girls young people aged 11 to 12, and overestimating their effect could increase a young woman's person's risk of contracting other sexually transmitted diseases.

Source: Reuters

Given all the hype, and given how recently the vaccine has been recommended for boys it's understandable that people are still thinking mostly in terms of HPV vaccines and girls. But the fact remains that boys as well as girls are at risk of HPV-related cancers (it's linked to penile, throat, and rectal cancer, for instance.) And it further remains the fact that (statistically speaking) by definition boys are as likely to receive HPV and other STIs from girls as girls are likely to receive them from boys. That's sort of how heterosexual disease transmission works.

Finally, call me a rebel here but while I understand the researchers surveyed only adolescent girls and so it would have been inappropriate for them to extrapolate... it's a safe bet that a comparable survey of adolescent boys would find they're at least as likely to make the same mistake.

So if it was me, while composing educational outreach materials on the matter I'd drop the adolescent boys or adolescent girls language and just make sure I was trying to reach adolescents, period.

Lisa Wade says

Her Dad corrects her, saying “Boys, well, boys want both…”

But her Dad is wrong.  Boys in the U.S. are taught from a very early age to avoid everything associated with girls.  Being called a “girl” is, in itself, an insult to boys.  And the slurs “sissy” and “fag” are reserved for men who act feminine.  So, no, boys (who have learned the rules of how to be a boy) generally reject anything girly.  (Indeed, this was one of the themes of Jimmy Kimmel “bad present” prank played by parents on their kids.)

The girl’s Dad, however, articulates a symmetrical analysis. The idea is that there are gender stereotypes — ones that apply to boys and ones that apply to girls — and that both are inaccurate, unfair, and constraining.  His mistake is in missing the asymmetrical value placed on masculinity and femininity.  Boys and girls are simply not positioned equally in relationship to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

Source: Sociological Images

 

What I sort of want to know is... given how totally full of awesome this kid is at, what, age three or maybe early four, why on this big blue marble would anyone mind being associated with girls, being a girl, being mistaken for a girl, admiring the dickens out of girls, and so on. And why would anyone waste an average of .5 liters of tidal volume wishing they had more sons instead of daughters, or selectively fucking aborting daughters, etc.?

You know what's really great about that video? She could have been my daughter at that age, who certainly made observations that astute. And you know what's great about that? Neither the girl in the video nor my daughter are curve-bending prodigies -- they're perfectly normal, perfectly sensible human beings who are special as possible to their loved ones but nothing like unique. Which is good because if they were prodigies there might be some excuse for excepting them but still grubbing every other human with XX pairing at the 23rd chromosome.*

Instead girls rock because people rock. Sure, some rock more than others... because some people rock more than others. Still no cause for culturally drowning girls... and only girls, naturally... in a deep pink sea.

* For starters. There are plenty of other ways of designating "girls" for the purpose of discriminating. But XX chromosomes are pretty representative so let's start there.