Here’s why I don’t usually participate in the Friday Random 10 iTunes meme. It’s not the songs part, it’s the “justify your choices” part that’s hard.

• Road Movie To Berlin – They Might Be Giants: “We were once so close to heaven / St. Peter came out and gave us medals / declaring us the finest of the damned”
• Fly-by-Night Benny Goodman – All The Cats Join In (Vol 3): What can I say, I can’t think when I’m listening to music with lyrics so I tend to go for instrumentals
• Ballad Of Ronald Reagan – Austin Lounge Lizards: Ominous that I feel nostalgic for the pragmatic politics of Ronald Reagan
• Sometimes I Don’t Wanna Go Home – Joan Armatrading: Awesome song about the uncertainty of emotionally-abusive relationships
• On The Couch – Ry Cooder: Instrumental from Paris, Texas, another epic relationship movie.
• Blues [A Jam Session] – Fats Waller: awesome instrumental ensemble
• Punahele Excerpt – Masters Of Hawaiian Slack Key: awesome slack-key guitar
• Mercenary Territory – Little Feat: “Now some kind of man, he can’t do anything wrong / If I see him I’ll tell him you’re waiting” More lyrics about self-doubt in unhappy relationships, this time from an uncertain man’s perspective.
• Just Joshin’ – Josh Graves (The Great Dobro Sessions): What can I say, Graves invented a lot of what we think of as modern bluegrass Dobro.

• Sousa’s “The Washington Post March” – Leonard Bernstein: New York Philharmonic Orchestra: In a few years this might be the most memorable cultural feature titled “The Washington Post.”

(What can I say? I’ve made a point of buying no new music since the RIAA went all Gestapo. I’ve got thousands of songs but most of them are very old. Then again, most were old when I bought them.)

So how about a link round-up instead? These are all posts I recommend highly but probably won’t be able to say what I want to say about them in posts:

• Pek Van Andel has made a video of the still-image MRIs he took of volunteers having intercourse back in 1999. I’m still shocked that no one else seems to be imaging the anatomy of dynamic sexuality. Or at least publishing them. 1999 was a very long time ago now. (Via Em & Lo and Ms Naughty)
• Ann Bartow: Dan Kahan, “Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in ‘Acquaintance Rape’ Cases”. Looks like an extremely interesting investigation with kind of creepy conclusions about victim blaming in men and, especially, women with hierarchical worldviews.
• Joe Sonka: “Are you a treasure or a target?”: More sex ed FAIL from Ohio. What is wrong with those people and their persistent belief that perpetrators are less relevant to sexual assault than their victims?
• Vanessa at Feministing: STIs are so manly. Dismal reflection on the way we “treasure” of women (as pristine objects, anyway) and disregard “uncleanliness” in men. Which is significant because since it’s not the case that sex with men makes women “unclean” men’s “cleanliness” actually matters!
• Hortense at Jezebel: “Godmothers” Begin Taking Control Of Crime Syndicates. An unnecessary demonstration that women are just as capable as men. See also Tyler Cowen on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. “Women are significantly less violent than men in the outside world and less lethal when they are violent. This holds in all times and places for which relevant data exist. And yet in prison this universal fact is overturned: women become at least as violent and often more prone to violence than men are.”
• Over-Educated Nympho: Seeking Short-Term Boyfriend (to paint her house.) Tongue in cheek but see also Cheri at Secret Lover’s Lane mentions some kind of Ashley Madison offshoot called Barter Clubs where the idea is evidently taken seriously.
• Geek Feminism Blog: The Thank-You Meme. “I have a theory: Most people in open source support what we are trying to do, it just doesn’t feel that way. On the Internet, no one can see you nod. ... If you get a really positive, well-written thank-you for your work in women in open source, we’d love it if you shared it with the rest of us.”

• Lisa Campo-Engelstein: Autonomous Contraception – Science, Sociology, and the Potential of a Male Pill. Another reason why foot-dragging in male-contraceptive development is dumb: “while mass media articles in the English speaking-world assert women will not trust men (including their partners) with contraception,[16] an international study reveals that only 2 percent of women would not trust their partner to contracept.” (Via Samhita.)

If I get a chance I’ll blog about these topics, but even if I don’t the following posts are good food for though.

Ann Bartow: Hillary Clinton’s Gender Agenda. “Democracy means nothing if half the people can’t vote, or if their vote doesn’t count, or if their literacy rate is so low that the exercise of their vote is in question.”

Laura Agustin: Stripper class-action suit challenges independent-contractor status [in] Boston. Having been one of the earliest “independent contractors” in high-tech, and thus having missed the dot-com stock bonanza, I’m particularly sensitive to this issue. Bottom line: Strip clubs set rules, hours, performance standards, pay scales — labor law says, fairly unambiguously, that’s not independent contracting, that’s direct employment. Case law dating from the 1980s and 1990s leaves even less wiggle room. But the bigger “scandal” of the sex part of sex-work (“ooh, boobies!”) has obscured the more egregious scandal of the illegal work part of sex-work.

Debby Herbenick: Will Lay There Angry For Food? “A new law has been passed in Afghanistan that would allow Shia men to deny their wives food if they are ‘disobedient’, which includes denying them sex.” Bonus in the law: “In addition, it apparently allows men to evade prosecution for rape if they pay ‘blood money’ to the woman they raped.” Double bonus: Herbenick has a new book, — Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction. Based on the radical-sounding title don’t hold your breath waiting for Cosmopolitan to review it.

Katherine Anne Forsythe: Straight, Single, and Sixty: The Truth About Dating After 55. “Better sex? Remember, this is the generation who brought us The Rolling Stones, Betty Friedan, Hair, free love, and The Joy of Sex. This generation is not going to take dating while aging lying down. It’s no surprise that this group is redefining dating and sex to fit their needs.” Note: there are a couple of good posts about sexuality over 40 this week. See, for instance, Debbie at Shapely Prose “Used to be, “aging” started somewhere around the 40s. Now, especially for women, ‘aging’ starts before you’re 30. Since the only definition of ‘hot’ is 25-or-under (and often younger than that), you’re out of the race” And Sungold’s Erotic Pictures for Women: Still Leaving Me Cold notes with exasperation that the male models in the first issue of Filament all seem to be under 30… and maybe under 20.

Michelle Cottle: XXX vs. ZZZ. A decade ago 31% of respondents said they’d prefer sleep to sex. This year it’s up to 51%. “Counterintuitive finding: More men than women went for sleep over sex.”

Violet Blue: Well Stop the Fucking Presses. Proliferation of free, amateur porn is gutting industrial porn sales. “Imagine a world where you can’t go to Joe’s Jack Shack and buy a product for $50 that you know you’ll like some of, or an overly expensive rental that you know you’ll like one scene from because it’s packed with the same old shit to wank to — and that’s your only choice? I can’t imagine this world. With… what? Different standards of beauty and sexual expression? It’s like, a pornpocalypse. Praise the lube and pass the ammunition.”

Courtney Martin of Feministing says

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (of Manifesta, Grassroots etc.) are chipping away at a new book, this one focused on sex after kids. If you’ve got some—kids—and are or aren’t getting some, then go fill out their survey here.

Read the quote in context here.

They survey’s short and anonymous. And it’s for a good cause. Help out if you feel the request applies to your life.

So I realize I’ve done a couple of posts in the last week that were all related to a stealth brain-changing post from Britni Danielle of Oh My God, That Britni’s Shameless who said

I absolutely love when a man comes on my tits or stomach. I adore being covered in come. I also love when a man comes in my mouth. I think it’s totally hot. I don’t necessarily love having someone come on my face, but if it’s someone I’m dating and he really wants to, I’ll let him. So where do I HATE when a guy comes? Inside me (without a condom).

Read the quote in context here.

My post about Shere Hite and her view that depictions of men in porn are impoverished compared even to, for instance, their sexual expression while they’re masturbating, the one linking to Guttmacher’s Rachel K Jones assessing withdrawal as contraception, one about heteronormative assumptions embodied in proposed revisions to the DSM, and even the one from Em & Lo questioning why stains from women’s menstrual blood are more problematic than “wet spot” semen stains after intercourse were each influenced by Britni’s post questioning the utility and/or desirability not of PIV intercourse but PIV intercourse culminating in male ejaculation as the default/desirable/fallback/ultimate sex act.

Many of the above posts have sparked cool conversations in comments. Other comments have (not-unreasonably, considering) questioned my judgment for being, for instance, so sanguine about “withdrawal.” There’s a longer answer, which would be the possibly radical idea that intercourse itself should be employed as “foreplay,” but the shorter answers lead back to Britni’s post.