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.

Speaking of sex and statistics, while digging around for evidence that any MRA/Tea-Bagger anywhere was in favor of women faking orgasms (evidently not) I did run across a nice non-tea-baggery quote from a 2004 post at Slate.com by economist Steven E. Landsburg post about (naturally) the economics of faking orgasms. The post isn’t quite as goofy as it sounds… but close. The quotable part comes from a brief aside at the end.

My old friend Steve Zucker (now a math professor at Johns Hopkins) used to say that sex and academic research complement each other nicely, since you can do either one while thinking about the other.

He said it here

Ba-da-da-bump! There are dozens of ways to take that horribly. Particularly the notorious (and not all that successful) advice men get to think about math problems to avoid “premature” ejaculation*. I prefer to think of it as the mark of a genuinely well-integrated, stress-free approach to life.

First of all the idea that ejaculation can be premature depends on quite a few phallocentric, intercourse-centric, passive-partner-centric, and sex-begins-and-ends-with-men’s-arousal assumptions. Also, and this is potentially a total hijack of my own thread, doesn’t an early orgasm just mean there are opportunities for real, relaxed two-way “foreplay?”

And second of all, the whole idea of “all night” sex is a misnomer responsible for a lot of unnecessary… well… stress. Real all-night sex is almost never where you literally hump and bump all night. Speaking only for myself, some of the best all-night sex I’ve ever had included both lovely sex that digressed into conversation about mutual interests and… lovely conversation that digressed into mutually-interested sex.

Abby Spector, guest-posting at Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. has the one really critical takeaway about sex and alcohol.

I’m being honest, I’m not planning on swapping my flask for a carton of soy milk anytime soon — I’m still in college, for chrissake.

But what I am trying to teach myself is that every positive experience I’ve had while intoxicated, I am capable of achieving sober. Alcohol is a permission slip, but nobody is stopping me from signing those permission slips myself, in the clear light of day. My bisexuality was not hiding in a keg — it was there all along. Alcohol simply provided the burst of confidence I needed for self-acceptance.

Here’s a toast to the joy of uninhibited sobriety. Because the only thing better than awesome, toe-curling, uninhibited sex is awesome, toe-curling, uninhibited sex that you can remember in exquisite detail the next morning.

She said it here.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I pretty much quit drinking when I turned 21. So its been a while (turns out I have a defective gene for the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol) but Spector really brings home what’s important about drinking and sex.

It’s not so much that one shouldn’t (that would just be my sour grapes since I can’t) as that for an awful lot of us alcohol gives us an excuse to do stuff we’d… at least be willing to try anyway.

With the added advantage you mention of having more memorable experiences to remember… and fewer we wish we could forget. :-)

A little earlier today I mentioned a post by Britni Danielle expressing how she’s keen on most things about hetero sex, except…

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).

I think it’s absolutely repulsive. I think it’s messy. I hate that it drips out for the next hour, whether it’s onto the bed or into your underwear and you have to sit in it all day.

Read the quote in context here.

She continues…

But honestly? I think that it may be partially related to my complete aversion to having children. I think that I associate someone coming inside with procreation or babies or pregnancy or something. ... Now of course I know that there are sperm in precum and blah blah blah, and I’m on the pill which is 99.9% effective and blah blah blah, but I still hate the thought of someone coming inside me. Even if it’s someone that I’m really emotionally connected to and intimate with.

When you add it all up it does seem like — however nice PIV/ejaculation might be — that there’s an almost… disorderly emphasis put on that one particular activity.

I can think of a couple of obvious reasons why. The most circular being that it’s the most “natural” form of sex. Or, its sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology form, it’s the most “genetically wired.” But I can also think of a couple of other ones: a thousands-of-years-old, intense legal and doctrinal fascination with restricting sex “except for procreation.” The equally ancient tradition of male “semen conservation“ for health, vitality, and old-age would be another. (I’ve mentioned elsewhere that in the peak of Victorian-era hysteria it was believed in Europe, England and the United States that “as much as ten ejaculations a year” could be fatal to a healthy adult male!) The old Monty Python song “Every Sperm is Sacred,” in other words, had (and in many cultures still has) an entirely secular side as well.

One nice side effect of the Protestant Reformation in the West was an overturn of the idea of sex only for procreation. And men have demonstrated, um, repeatedly that semen “conservation” has few if any benefits at all. Add the substantial risks of unwanted, unplanned pregnancy, the increased risk of transmission of some STIs, the inconvenience and mess born mostly by the recipient and the point that there are actually more pleasurable ways for both men and women to have orgasms together and… it’s worth, well, reconsidering our obsession with the practice.

Except for procreation, of course. :-)

Update: For the record, since my enthusiasm might be mistaken for stridency, after complaining about the notion that we should always limit “normal” sex to PIV intercourse to ejaculation I’m not turning around and saying we should never do so. I am, however, questioning its centrality and the assumption — especially in the face of quite a bit of contrary evidence — that it’s the easiest, most natural or (according to DSM proposals) least “abnormal,” or best thing people can decide to do together.

I’m also aware that a lot of the alternatives sound a whole lot like the dismal, almost universally self-induced “money shots” of pornography. To that I’ll just say that the “money shot” of porn is to male orgasm what the rest of porn is to real adult sex: highly stylized activities designed almost exactly to be more exciting to watch than to do in real life.