Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Links People Sent Me.

Woman's life made 'unbearable' by insatiable libido

To be honest this isn't a sex story so much as a medical story, and if her symptoms keep up long-term I wonder if surgery or some kind of nerve block might be justified. It also sounds like her problem isn't "libido" per se but genital hypersensitivity--closer to priapism than nymphomania.

I've noticed that there are (at least) two different kinds of horny I experience. One is a desire for the full package of sex, for human connection and kinkiness and lots of experimentation and enjoyment. The other is more akin to needing to pee--it's just a physiological desire for orgasm. It's the difference between "let's make love all night, baby" and "oh man, I wanna come so bad right now."

The second kind is not only less noble, it's less fun, and I don't think someone cursed with that kind of horny all day long is in a good situation at all.


Vintage Sex Ed

Thoroughly entertaining, although sadly I haven't had the chance to watch it all yet. I think it would be more instructive to make a gallery of current sex-ed materials; I'm guessing they don't lack for howlers. My sex-ed classes seemed to focus mainly on the idea that if girls had "self-esteem" they wouldn't want to have sex. Which is the complete opposite of my real-life experience, in which sex bolsters my confidence and confidence gets me laid.

But I guess the message of "as a teenage girl, you may feel pressured to have sex by the sexiness of your boyfriend and how good he is with his fingers and the fact that sex feels fucking fantastic and you can come over and over and it's so good oh God" didn't pass the curriculum review board.


Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants

A well-known blogger "comes out" as female, and tells a heartbreaking and scary story of how taking on a male identity changed her life.

Instantly, jobs became easier to get.
There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.
Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.
And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.



It's true: all the taken men are best

Silly "scientific" horseshit. It's (at least as written here) a great example of a study finding results that could mean many things, and then shoehorning them into a form that confirms stereotypes as comfortably as possible. The actual results: women are more attracted to the same man when they hear that he has a partner.

That's sort of interesting, but then the interpretations go all kinds of wacky unsupported places: women are "poachers," women are competitive, women want a man to be "socially desirable." Maybe, but nothing in your actual research tells me any of that. (Here's a thought, I know it's ickily qualitative, but maybe she should've asked her subjects why they found these hypothetical partners attractive or not. Or for all I know she did, but it sure didn't make it into the article.)

My own hypothesis is that a man who's very good-looking but not in a relationship leads to the question "so why not?" and suggests he either doesn't want to be or he comes with some baggage; and a man who's not very good-looking, well, he's not very good-looking. Obviously there are plenty of cute single guys who'd be good boyfriends, but I can see that reasoning. Still, my hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis, and I wouldn't publish it in a big national magazine before I actually tested it.

Finally, I'm always amused that people can get grants and press for "studies" that amount to little more than playing "would you rather" with a bunch of undergrads. I can play this game too! Hey roomie, would you rather fuck Kurt Russell or Shia LaBeouf? Kurt? Awesome, me too.

BREAKING NEWS: WOMEN PREFER OLDER, HARIER MEN:
Possibly a subconscious desire for their own fathers, or for rich men to support them, or to steal the husbands of older women. Women are filthy creatures.

8 comments:

  1. I've noticed that when I'm in a relationship, I get flirted with more often; when I'm not, & really want to get laid, it's more difficult.
    I think it's confidence. When a man knows he's loved, his self-esteem goes up, & that attracts women. YMMV.

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  2. When a guy's in a relationship, he notices it more. The desired number of women flirting with him then is zero -- not that he doesn't want women to find him appealing, but it takes on rather less importance -- so the ones that do stand out.

    In other words, if you're scanning every woman you encounter for signs of interest, only finding a handful who show such signs is a disappointment; you focus on the thousands who didn't. If you're not looking for signs of interest, the ones who show interest stand out.

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  3. I always thought the thing my ex's sex-ed teacher told them as amusing. You can have as much fun with this doorknob as you do with a guy.

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  4. I went & took a look at the mate poaching article, since my university affiliation gives me access to all things. Basically the researchers showed the participants (male & female, attached & unattached) photos of "moderately attractive" opposite-sex people on a computer, & told them they had been matched with those people based on interest. Single women (& only single women) gave higher scores to the supposedly "attached" men on the questions like "how compatible do you think you are w/ this person, how likely would you be to initiate conversation w/ this person, how direct would you be in initiating a romantic relationship w/ this person." The single women didn't rate the attached men as more attractive, but they DID rate them higher in terms of how likely they would be to hit on the dudes.

    So that's the basis they used for saying single women are more likely to "mate poach." I tend to agree that it's bullshit. #1, the study claims to be about "mate poaching," when really it is about young women's subjective reports about how they MIGHT behave if they met a particular guy. No one in the study actually poached any mates. I would think it highly likely that the women were giving responses based on how they would act if they hypothetically met the guy in the picture, AND he was available, AND he showed interest in them, etc. etc. Since the whole study was pretty hypothetical anyway -- it all took place on a computer screen -- there's no reason the participants would imagine themselves literally hitting on a guy with a girlfriend. If I got asked those questions I'd be more likely to imagine myself "meeting" the target in an imaginary ideal circumstance.

    Thirdly, there's a lot of reasons these women might see a guy who's presented as "attached" as better relationship material, beyond the fact that they want to steal him away from somebody else. A college guy who's been in at least one LTR is likely to be more mature and sexually experienced, which a lot of women would find appealing. Women might also be more likely to "initiate conversation" and "be direct in initiating a relationship" with a guy if they know he's been successful with women in the past, since that would tend to indicate that he won't act shy or intimidated (and that once he's single, he might not be on the market for long).

    Again, it would be different if the researchers had studied incidents of women hitting on "taken" men, but they didn't. I also think it's bullshit how they use the faux-objective term "mate poaching" throughout the study. Human beings have boyfriends and girlfriends, not "mates."

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  5. That first story is a real thing. Usually when I see other bloggers & mainstream media talking about it (it's got a name - check RGS/PSAS/PGAD) they sensationalize it or say it's fake... I'm glad you didn't do that here.
    And yeah, libido... Doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it. It's a physiological thing, is my best understanding.

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  6. about 10 years ago 1940's big band frontman and musician Billy Tipton died. Wouldn't have mattered to anyone beside a small group of friends and fans.

    Except the responding paramedics found boobs, not man boobs either.

    Seems Dorothy Tipton got tired of being treated like a groupie and a slut, so she took her deceased brother's name, and carved a small slice of fame for himself.....

    She lived as a man for 50 years....

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  7. Dan - That's one hell of a doorknob. (And really, even if it was a really exceptionally phallic doorknob, I've yet to meet a doorknob that will cuddle afterwards.)

    Lastnightsclothes - Good point about studies that merely ask people "would you" instead of observing their actual behavior--it's a terrible way to study psychology. Self-reporting is sketchy to begin with when you're talking about something as touchy as sex and relationships--but self hypothetical reporting is seriously double sketchy.

    John B - I believe Billy Tipton was really transgendered, not just averting sexism the way James Chartrand did. Even his partners often didn't know his biological sex--that's more than just working the system, I'm pretty sure that was his real identity.

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  8. Holly - Yea, that was my thought as well. (It wasn't my sex-ed teacher). And no, doorknobs don't cuddle well.

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