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Regina Lynn, writing at Sexier Sex, says here’s how to pick the best kind of lover:

This one’s easy. Find a geek.

Here are 5 reasons geeks make the best lovers…

She said it here.

I’m just going to list her five bullet points. You can follow the link to see if you agree with the reasons she gives.

• Geeks build it so you will come
• Geeks interact
• Geeks don’t shock easily
• Geeks know kinky people

• Geeks understand multidimensional relationships

I actually don’t think geeks are automatically the best type of lover, anymore than plumbers, poets, actuaries, stay-at-home parents, gardeners, or nuns** are. But her points about the way life online can enhance rather than detract from someone’s real-life interpersonal skills is actually pretty interesting.

[** Just testing: if you’re a geek that last item wouldn’t easily shock you. :-) —fl]

Photo by Flickr user Martin_Heigan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Zwicky Arnold of Language Log,in the course of raising a grammatical point about the use of the word “shall,” says

On ADS-L, Fred Shapiro (following up on a lead from Barry Popik) has posted the following antedating of Father’s Day, which the OED currently has from 1943:

1908 Boston Globe 19 May 10 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers)  Why doesn’t somebody suggest the idea of having a “Father’s day,” when everybody in the country shall wear a modest violet in honor of poor Father?

I don’t know why the writer suggested a “modest violet”, but the idea seems never to have caught on. Instead, as the holiday was commercialized, the celebration came to center on giving “poor Father” characteristically “masculine” gifts: tools, gadgets, golf equipment, grilling equipment, supplies for hunting, fishing, and camping, items associated with sports (especially football), stock car racing, and beer drinking, and so on.

He said it here.

Comments on that post are closed, for reasons unclear to me. But I can answer his question. I have no idea how I know this, but some time between the late Victorian era and the late Edwardian there was a sort of pre-internet meme among romantics where symbolic messages were “composed” using the meanings of different flowers arranged in bouquets. And so a moment of Googling revealed that, according to New-Age.co.uk

Violet Violet – faithfulness and modesty – during mediaeval times violets were believed to provide protection from evil spirits, and the leaves were used on wounds as healing plasters. When Napolean Bonaparte married Josephine she was said to have worn violets, and he sent her a bouquet every anniversary. He apparently wore a locket containing violets he had gathered from Josephine’s grave. In medieval times the violet flower was strewn on the floor as an air freshener due to it’s sweet perfume, and a substance called ionine which dulls the sense of smell. This fragrant flower was used as a remedy for insomnia, as an antiseptic and in poultices.

Source: New Age: “Flower language – meanings of flowers – secret messages – history and folklore of flowers”

So 101 years ago a “modest violet in honor of poor father” would probably have made a lot more sense.

Interestingly this would have been towards the end of the “semen conservation” era in Anglo-American tradition where, throughout most of the Victorian era at least, it had been believed that a single male ejaculation was as damaging to male health as the loss of a pint of blood, with the result that all health-conscious men knew — because their doctors told them with full, scientifically backed, peer-review-journalled authority — that “as many as” ten ejaculations a year would lead to inevitable ill health, insanity, and premature death.

That was, of course, impossibly silly: left to one’s own devices a healthy adolescent may be able to ejaculate ten times in a day without much more than perhaps a little soreness and maybe, depending on his recovery rate, a bit of sleep loss. The flip side, of course — that ejaculations are so easily and effortlessly obtained as to render the father’s contribution to reproduction essentially meaningless — is also silly. And not without its consequences.

The faithful and simple “modest violet” father of the 1900s was replaced in mid-century by the “industrious clover” of Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman, who’s role was to make up for the deficit of his seminal “spending” by absenting himself as much as possible and working himself to death in order to “provide for his family.”

What. Ever.

Having only been a father for twelve years since the birth of my first child I can’t say I’m up on all the details. But I do know there’s more to it than either the fanciful loss of “precious bodily fluids” or the equal folly of backbreaking absence.

Instead, off the top of my head it’s all about Acorn, Allspice, Ambrosia, Anemone, Angelica, Aniseed, Azalea, Basil, Bay Leaf, Bird of Paradise, Bittersweet, Bluebell, Borage, Burnet, Buttercup, Cactus, Calendula, Carnellia, Carnations (pink, red, white), Cattail, Chamomile, Chrysanthemum, Crosus, Daffodil, Dandelion, Eucalyptus, Fern, Feverfew, Fir, Flax, Forget-me-not, Forsythia, Garland of roses, Garlic, Gladiolus, Grass, Heather, Holly, Honeysuckle, Hyacinth blue and white, Iris, Ivy, Jonquil, Juniper, Lavender, Lemon, Lemon Balm, Calia lily, Lily of the valley, Magnolia, Marigold, Mint, Marjoram, Mistletoe, Myrtle, Orange, Cattleya orchid, Pansy, Pine, Poppies red and white, Primrose, many but not all Roses, Rose leaf, Rosemary, Sage, Salvia, Strawberry, Sunflower, Sweetpea, Thyme, Tulips, Woodruf, Yarrow, and at least so far, Zinnias magenta, scarlet, white, and yellow. All that and violets and clover and you’re starting to get what an astonishing, only-a-child-would-gather-such-chaos-and-recognize-its-beauty bouquet it is to be a dad. If you let it.

Matthew Yglesias says of a study that tries to claim that macaque monkeys conduct prostitution transactions. In the sense that sex is more than twice as frequent (3.5 times vs 1.5 times) when males that “pay” sex by first grooming females than when they don’t.

If you think about human society, “paying for sex” denotes a pretty specific kind of social practice—prostitution—and isn’t a catchall phrase to cover every mutually beneficial relationship that involves sex. You could probably do a study of married human couples that would show that sex is more likely after a husband is nice to his wife than after he’s been a jerk; I don’t think you’d call that a study about “paying for sex” among married couples.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. It happens to be the case that a lot of people imagine that “proper” men “pay” for sex through marriage. Which makes sense in those relationships where women have no interest in sex, whatsoever. Or who, because of artificial limits on social and economic opportunities imposed by the dictates of gendered culture they have no, zero, none interest in sex with the men they’re obliged to marry.

Oddly the article, and the study it describes, claims no parallels should be drawn between human and macaque behavior. Which is laudable I’m sure. Or would be if, rather than conclusions drawn the researchers and reporters hadn’t instead drawn premises.

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P.S. if I’m not mistaken I’m more likely to want sex 3.5 times an hour instead of 1.5 if, instead of just bending over the first “female” I’m on intimate terms with and “copulating” with her I instead spend time “grooming” her by putting my arms around her, stroking her cheek, murmuring things out loud that remind me why I appreciate her, burying my face in her hair, kissing, nuzzling, or biting her neck and shoulders, and otherwise engaging in the kind of “payment” we more often think of as, oh, I don’t know, foreplay!

Because, you know, foreplay increases men’s interest in and desire for more frequent sex. Something the subset of anthropologists and science reporters most drawn to moronic anthropomorphization of macaque (not to mention macaque-ization of humans) might discover if they ever bothered to try it.

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Seriously! The idea that only women “need” or otherwise benefit from foreplay is just… um… yeah, just try it some time. I mean, not to drag in the food issue or anything but don’t studies also show that people who eat food cold, out of the can, over the sink to “save time” also tend to eat less overall than people who take the time to actually enjoy their food as a cultural activity and not just a biological necessity? Well, same for sex, m’kay?

Comic by XKCD. Used under a Creative Commons license. Click to see full-size at xkcd’s site.

Em & Lo of Sex. Love. And Everything in Between say

Researchers at Villanova and Rutgers charted personality traits against bedpost notches. They weren’t surprised to discover that dominant people have more notches than wall flowers, on average. But what did shock them was the finding that people who have very warm personalities are just as likely to sleep around as people with very cold personalities — while people who are somewhere in between warm and cold get around a lot less. This held true for both men and women, and for all manner of sex acts, from making out to making lurve.

They said it here.

As usual, without seeing the original study (Psychology Today, Em & Lo’s source, offers no links… or researcher names) you have to take it with a grain of salt. But as E&L make clear it’s also kind of obvious.

It’s been my experience as well. It’s not that warm people can’t be as heartbreaking as cold ones either, it’s just that they (we? I don’t know if I’m so much “warm” as kind of a cheerfully clueless galoot… you could call me lukewarm though “m’friends call me Luke”) are more likely to stumble rather than connive themselves into relationships that might better be either very light, or maybe not be relationships at all.

Last night I went with friends to see Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in Duplicity. It’s a surprisingly unconventional use of dark irony, screwball comedy, and spy procedural. I mention this in part because it nicely illustrates the point that “cold personality” players can make suitable matches in non-lifetime/exclusive relationships. And I think “warm personality” goofs and nerds can work pretty well in those situations too.

The mistake, I think, is to try and generalize that to, well, the general population.

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It’s not that relationship drama, sexual or romantic, can’t be radically unwound from the misdirections, stereotypes, and semantic overloading our highly gendered paradigms have wrought. If I didn’t think they could I’d be blogging about food or childcare or knitting or something. But then if I believed dropping old social rules would be all it took to eliminate “drama” I probably wouldn’t be blogging then either. :-)

Sort of by definition the exits out of a dominant paradigm aren’t illuminated by saying “let’s just not be in this paradigm anymore.” Because, to paraphrase xkcd, the opposite of paradigm n = “more paradigm n + drama.”