Strong woman.

It's a school night.  Quick one.  (Several people asked for a post on "self-de-escalation," so I'll try to put one together in the next couple days.)

I want to address a misconception that I had when I first started getting into feminism, and a misconception that's gotten thrown in my face a few times.  Most recently, it came up in Katie Roiphe's terrible New York Times editorial about how sexual harassment is no big deal and chicks should just suck it up and learn to run with the big dogs etcetera.  The misconception is: "Feminism is the idea that women are strong."

No.  Feminism is the idea that women are as strong as men, but no stronger.  Some men can cut off their own arm to survive; some women can lift a car to save their child.  But lots of men are delicate little crybabies and lots of women are delicate little crybabies.  Women, being people, run about the same range of personal strength as people. And this ought to be okay.  Feminism is the idea that a woman shouldn't have to be exceptionally strong to get by.  Feminism makes no predictions on whether a particular woman can survive slings and arrows, bullying and belittling, mistrust and self-doubt.  Feminism asks "hey, who the fuck said women had to run this bullshit gauntlet, anyway?"

Am I a Strong Woman?  I think I'm kinda strongish, both in the "arm-wrestling" sense and the "doing emotionally difficult things for a greater good" sense.  But that's not feminism; that's good luck.  Feminism is thinking "gosh, maybe going to work while female shouldn't be an emotionally difficult thing."



"I thought feminism meant women were strong" is rarely the full argument.  The full argument is: "I thought feminism meant women were strong, so why are you complaining if you're so strong?"  The implication here isn't just that women should have to be strong to survive, but that strength consists of shutting up and taking it.  That the strongest thing to do is to keep your head down and grind away at whatever task is set before you, silently stronging your way though every obstacle, for your entire life.

Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is complain.

Living every day with being the "girl" of the office and having your ass grabbed and everyone laughing about how funny it is that your ass gets grabbed--no, that's not easy.  But speaking up about it is even harder.  It's taking initiative.  It's taking a risk.  It's facing pushback, retaliation, skepticism, red-tape brush-offs, ostracism, the shit you get for being female compounded with the shit you get for being a troublemaker.  Complaining about how you're treated as a woman is anything but the coward's way out.  There have been times I should have done it but wasn't strong enough.

(Oh, and you also have to face people saying "guess you're not such a strong woman after all, huh?"  Forgot to put that one on the list.)

Doing what people want you to do can be hard.  Doing what they don't want you to do, and standing up for yourself instead--that's strong.

Economics vs. apples.

A day doesn't go by I don't see an article like this one.  I'm not going to try to deconstruct it point by point, because it's the same old shit.  I'm just going to pull some quotes and talk about my weekend.  I suspect you'll get my point.

Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the “price” of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.

Rowdy and I had agreed to a date, but neither of us was feeling in the mood for a "date" date on the night.  Instead, we just got snacks and juice at the drugstore and sat together on the cover of the subway tunnel, listening to street musicians in the square, laughing at little kids playing run-in-circles-really-fast games, laying back and cuddling on the concrete.  Because of the kids around, I whispered the dirty things into his ear, very quietly, so they wouldn't know why he was laughing.

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

We split up to head back to his home; he biked and I drove.  On the way I stopped at the liquor store to surprise him with a pack of beer from his hometown.  At home we drank the beer (he dressed his in a little lederhosen first), undressed, and cuddled naked while watching porn.  It didn't turn into sex.  The porn was too ridiculous for that.  It turned into giggling--helpless, naked, wiggly giggling.

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

At the end of the night, I stroked his cock, at first slowly and gently, almost comfortingly, then for real.  I kissed the tip of his cock and when he groaned appreciatively I took the whole thing in my mouth.  It was a long, sloppy blowjob, popping his cock out of my mouth and then swallowing it down again, both of us still a little giggly.

Men want sex more than women do. It’s a fact that sounds sexist and outdated. But it is a fact all the same -- one that women used for centuries to keep the price of sex high (if you liked it back in the day, you really had to put a ring on it). With gender equality, the Pill and the advent of Internet porn, women’s control of the meet market has been butchered. 

It was my turn next.  I slipped a condom on his vibrator and went to town while he held me, stroked my breasts, gently pulled my hair, and whispered fucking filthy sweet nothings in my ear.  I came and didn't want to stop.  So I didn't.  I just kept pleasuring myself over and over, Rowdy's hands on my ass and his lips on my cheek, until I was exhausted.

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future -- that is, committing to marry?”

We slept late into the morning, curled around each other.  It's been more than a year of nights like this and I'm still stupid in love--the kind of love where I think his snoring is cute, the kind where I'm charmed and a little turned on when he scratches his balls.  When he woke up he held me and kissed me and reminded me that with him I'm safe enough to be that stupid.

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable. “Sexual strategies for making men ‘fall in love’ typically backfire, because men don’t often work like that,” Regnerus says.

Later in the day, Sprite came over and we went apple picking.  It really makes no sense to pick your own apples, economically; I'm sure we paid three times what it would have cost at the store.  What we were really paying for was a day in the orchard, walking through rows of trees in light misty rain, eating impossibly sweet and crisp apples right off the trees.

So, what can women do to return the balance of sexual power in their favor? Stop putting out, experts say. If women collectively decided to cross their legs, the price of sex would soar and women would regain control of the market. Like a whoopie cartel.

After we gathered our apples, we sat together at a picnic bench under a tree, drinking hot mulled apple cider, talking about our childhoods and our schoolwork and tractors (that one was mostly Rowdy) and various forms of perverted sex we were planning to have.



The point here isn't that my relationship is super special, or that my relationship represents every relationship.  But my relationship exists in the real world--the messy, complicated, wonderful real world.  It's a place that has masturbation and apples, cuddles and really bad street musicians, group sex parties and muddy shoes.

I'm sure there are relationships in this big ol' world where women coldly trade sex to men for commitment and compete joylessly to see who can get the biggest diamond for the fewest fucks.  It's just that there's a universe of other relationships out there, and they're way more fun.  I mean, shit, if the woman's withholding sex strategically or having it pried out of her economically, when does she get to enjoy feeling a man's arms tighten around her as she comes?  And if the man's only giving as much love as he needs to get sex, when does he get to enjoy sneaking kisses behind an apple tree?

So I don't just want to brag here.  I want to tell stories to show that no one has to live that way.  And oh my God is life better when you don't.

Next time we're together, we're going to bake apple crisp.

The results are in!

Remember The Great Female Survey from a few posts back? Well, they've collected their data, such as it is, and the results are...

Pretty reasonable, actually.

In most cases the plurality of the answers went to the least evil option. (Which frequently was "none of the above," because who would have expected women to be not-evil?)

Although I was sad to hear that women become sluts at 20 partners (which, credit where credit's due, was at least the same as the point for a man becoming a "man-whore"). Because... well... I lost track somewhere in the teens. I had this list, and it went up to thirteen, and then the computer I had it on died, and I know I've had sex with a bunch of people since then... what I'm trying to say is I don't know if I'm officially a slut or not.

Also, it's hardly a fair survey of women in general--only 10% of respondents said they had children. So taking these data and saying things like "62% of women have 10 or more pairs of shoes!" is going to be every kind of wrong. It's more like 62% of a horrible hodgepodge of Cosmo readers, trolls, outraged feminists, and people who are "random" visitors but not in the scientific sense.

Now let's see how the men fared.

It's interesting just to look at the parallels between the questions asked.
Women's Version:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN MARRIAGE?
Yes, definitely!
Yes, but it is not for me.
No, I don't believe in marriage.

Men's Version:
DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE?
Yes, I believe it is a necessary institution and one in which I will participate to help preserve.
Yes, I believe in it as an institution, but it is not for me.
No, I do not believe in it.

That's right; the men got bigger words.

33% of the women report being single. 46% of the men do. Polyamory isn't that popular and the survey pretty effectively excludes gay people, so this is yet another reason to roll your eyes any time the results here are trotted out as "40% of men think a woman starts losing her looks at 40!" Not to mention the fact that only three percent of the men report having children. Really, I can't stress enough how things like this make the survey entirely meaningless. I'm not even going to talk about the results--only the questions--because the methods here are as sensible as me doing a headcount in my house and determining that Boston is 100% white, 100% employed, 66% male, and 33% people who replace the toilet paper roll when they finish it.

Although it's worth noting that as with the women, the plurality of men chose the most decent-human answers despite being transparently baited to do otherwise. In the face of "WOULD YOU DUMP A GIRLFRIEND IF SHE BECAME FAT?" and "HAVE YOU EVER READ YOUR PARTNER'S FACEBOOK MESSAGES, EMAIL OR OTHER ELECTRONIC CORRESPONDENCE?", most men in the survey answered "no."

The men are asked how many partners makes a woman a "slut," (10) but not how many makes a man a "man-whore."

Men's Version:
OF THE CHOICES LISTED BELOW, WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE MALE STATUS SYMBOL?
A family.
A high-profile career.
A beautiful wife or girlfriend.
A beautiful house.
A beautiful car.
A membership to an exclusive club (like a country club).

Women's Version:
FOR WOMEN, WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS THE ULTIMATE STATUS SYMBOL?
A beautiful house
A very successful husband or boyfriend
A beautiful wardrobe
A huge engagement ring
An expensive car

I'll spot them the engagement ring and country club as being gendered things, but what the fuck is up with women not getting the option to take pride in their family or their career? And of course the husband is "successful" but the wife is "beautiful." I... shit. I gotta write a whole post on this one.

The men get questions like "HOW SHOULD AMERICA REBOOT THE ECONOMY?" and "DO YOU FEEL YOUR COUNTRY IS PREPARED IN THE CASE OF A NATURAL DISASTER SIMILAR TO THE EARTHQUAKES / TSUNAMIS THAT RECENTLY HIT JAPAN?" The women do not.

Men's-only question:
WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN CUT SOME SLACK BY THE MEDIA FOR HIS SEXUAL TRANSGRESSIONS?
None of the above. They all got what they deserved.
Anthony Weiner.
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
John Edwards.

One of these things is not like the other things, one of these things is not the same... because one of these things is being accused of rape. I'm really frustrated by the way sexual assaults by famous people get positioned as "sex scandals" instead of "crime scandals." Violent felonies don't belong in the same "oh, boys" category as accidentally Tweeting your junk.

Last question on the men's survey:
HAS OBAMA CHANGED THE INTERNATIONAL PERCEPTION OF THE UNITED STATES?

Last question on the women's:
AT WHAT AGE DO YOU WANT TO START A FAMILY?

On not taking the bait.

On the anti-fun (er, I mean, pro-"meaningful relationships," but in a way that excludes most of the actually meaningful relationships in my life) blog Hooking Up Smart, Susan Walsh posted the following chart on the economic costs of promiscuity:


(Click to embiggify)

My reactions, in no particular order:
-"EVENTUAL ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!"
-"That's not even a real flowchart."
-"That's not even like a flowchart."
-"Rape is just another kind of casual sex?!?!?" (I could write a whole post about this. But Manboobz already did.)
-"Wait, so a declining birthrate is bad for the economy, but having babies is bad for the economy?"
-"Gosh, prosecuting rape sure is hard on the economy."
-"Having kids with a father present leads to substance abuse, violence, crime, and prison?"
-"Wait, you can't list 'promiscuity' as a drawback of promiscuity. That's a feature."
-"So having consensual sex with a condom and not getting an STD or getting pregnant leads you to 'whew'? Since that's actually not rare at all, that's kind of an endorsement, isn't it?"
-"Y'know, not everyone who has casual sex is on welfare. If I have a job, and I pay those $$$$$ out of my own pocket, am I still ruining the economy?"
-"EVENTUAL ECONOMIC STAGNATION!!!!!!!!!!"

And then I made a chart of my own. I made a chart of reasons why promiscuity is good for the economy!



I mean, I don't know. Maybe it is good. Maybe it's actually bad? I'm guessing it doesn't really make a difference, but I don't know that. Like Susan Walsh, I'm no economist. Unlike her, I'm not going to pretend I am. And exactly like Susan Walsh, I'm not in this for the economics anyway.

Is sex good or bad for the economy? I don't give a shit. It's a personal freedom.

You know what else is an extremely fucking important personal freedom to me? Not having sex. Saving it for marriage, or saving it for a meaningful relationship, or saving it for when you're "ready," or saving it for never if that's what you want to do.

Reading someone rip into sluttiness and promote prudishness (to put it crudely on both sides, but you get my gist), it's easy to be tempted to take that bait, to make yourself a mirror image of their assholery, to say "sluts rule, prudes drool!"

But that's what the assholes expect (and maybe what they want). And most of the time it kinda makes you an asshole too. The right answer is "sluts rule, prudes rule, and anyone who has a problem with either of them... drools."



This comes up a lot when facing misogyny. When reading someone saying "women commit all the abuse, women have all the advantages, women are trained to be unreasonable to men," there's a certain temptation, in the heat of the argument, to point out that men commit all the abuse, etc. And whether you're statistically/sociologically right or not, ultimately, it doesn't prove that much. What I really want to say is:

Abuse, unfair advantages, and unreasonableness suck. Let's get rid of them.

Because this feminism stuff isn't supposed to be about "sides." It's about envisioning a better world. And the people on the other side just never seem to understand that!

SurveyFail makes the WSJ.

[Three people sent this to me. I'm here to serve...]

In 2009, there was an event known in online fan circles as SurveyFail. Complete details are collected here, but the basics of it are that researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam conducted an online survey of fandom members that was incredibly shoddy in its construction and application. The complete survey can be found here and contains awesome questions like:

54. If you write m/m slash, how do you study male physiology in order to write more convincing stories? (Check as many as apply.)
I don't write m/m slash.
I use ideas from other slash stories.
I ask gay men for information.
I research details on the internet.
I watch gay porn for insight.
I'm a man, and can use my own experiences.
Other:

If you're thinking that's missing a few obvious possibilities, making a lot of assumptions, "steering" the survey responder toward certain stereotypes of the shallow young "gay men are so sparkly!" fangirl who's never had real sex, and generally a very unprofessional way to conduct psychology research, you're not alone.

Much of the concern stemmed from the fact that Ogas and Gaddam had explicitly stated that the purpose of their survey was to "prove" cognitive differences between men and women concerning romance and sexuality, and made delightfully quadruple-clueless comments like the following:

Well, slash is kind of the female equivalent of the straight male interest in transsexuals. That is, the opposite of what culture would predict. So it probably reflects a more direct subcortical effect.

Ogas and Gaddam claimed to be endorsed by Boston University, but BU actually had no affiliation with them and they had never cleared their research with BU's or any other university's institutional review board for human subjects. They also did not disclose to subjects that their answers would be published in a for-profit, non-peer-reviewed book (and now also a shit-ton of likewise non-peer-reviewed popular press articles), did not screen for underage subjects, and generally did not do anything to screen or randomize survey respondents. They were every bit as "scientific" in their conduction of the survey as a quiz on Facebook asking you which Ninja Turtle you are.

Less so, because at least the Facebook survey probably doesn't start with the assumption that all women are gonna be Rafael.

And worst of all, even after they were widely criticized for all this (and their survey can be assumed to have been fucked with eight ways to Sunday, although they discarded any critical answers as "sabotage"), they went ahead and published anyway!. Check the tags for, as the kids say these days, "lulz."

Now they're publicizing their "research" in the popular press as if everything was dandy and actual science had been accomplished. Which brings us to today's fisk:

The Online World of Female Desire
For women indulging their curiosity, Internet erotica is less about flesh than about finding Mr. Right.
Wow! Who knew that Science™ would confirm all the stereotypes we already had? Quick, now do expensive shoes or bad driving!

The female cortex contains a highly developed system for finding and scrutinizing a prospective partner—a system that might be dubbed the Miss Marple Detective Agency.
Science™! "And if you pull away the upper layers of the somatosensory cortex, you'll find the Miss Marple Detective Agency. Only in women, though. Men keep football scores there."

Also, I'm not convinced I use the same, um, brain structure when reading Internet porn as when seeking an actual partner. I know damn well that in real life Jack Sparrow wouldn't even smell good.

Using similar investigative skills, the female brain evaluates all available evidence regarding a potential mate's social, emotional and physical qualities to make an all-important decision: Is he Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong? Only if Miss Marple gives her stamp of approval do physical arousal and psychological arousal harmoniously unite in the female brain.
Dear God, how do I masturbate? I can't clear that shit with Miss Marple every night just to get my rocks off.

Female arousal is arousal. Sometimes it's based on all available social/blardy blah evidence. Sometimes it's based on a nice pair of forearms or a few nasty words whispered in my ear or the length of time since I last got laid. Sometimes it happens to me at random when I'm driving or in public and it's really inconvenient.

And for the love of God would these people please stop saying "the female brain" as if it was this exotic novelty and "females" were a recently discovered species? I have... er, I am a female brain and I don't appreciate this "intrepid explorers with pith helmets bring light to this unknown region" attitude toward my entire subjective existence.

This unconscious evaluation is the source of "feminine intuition." Though the female brain carefully processes many stimuli simultaneously, it is experienced only as a general feeling of favorability or suspicion toward a potential partner. This feminine intuition is designed to solve a woman's unique challenge of determining whether a man is committed, kind and capable of protecting a family.
Actually, I'm usually quite aware of some of the stimuli that lead to the "hottie, lets-be-friends, or creeper" determination. How could I not be? Is my brain supposed to erase things like "this one smiled at me in a friendly way, and that one gave me the bug-eye and 'accidentally' touched my butt"? It's really not that subtle. I may have been accidentally issued a male brain, because I seem to be sentient.

Female erotica demonstrates how the detective agency operates—and how it differs from the much simpler male brain.
Whoops, sorry, I forgot. Nobody is sentient.

Whereas two-minute video clips are the most popular form of contemporary erotica for men, the most popular form for women remains the romance novel, an artifact that takes many hours to digest.
I'm not much of a romance novel aficionado, but I'm fairly sure you don't masturbate the entire time. (Maybe a little on pages 213-215.) It's not a substitute for porn; it fulfills a different need.

There's also the issue of gaze. Very few two-minute video clips show the things a heterosexual woman might want to see, in terms of attractive men with their bodies emphasized giving respectful pleasure to women. And very few romance novels describe the heroine's heaving bosoms in the detail a heterosexual male reader might be interested in. You can argue about whether this is an effect of gendered preferences or not, but there's no doubt it's a cause.

I'm really sorry, non-heterosexual people, but you don't seem to exist. Do you ever?

All romance novels, whether written by the likes of Jane Austen, Nora Roberts or Stephenie Meyer, employ a narrative formula that follows the gradual elucidation of the hero's inner character, leading to an emotional epiphany between hero and heroine. On this journey, the heroine—and the reader—investigates the character of the hero.
Sure, sure (although frankly, you could read your Jane Austen a little more carefully), but you don't wank to it. It's entertaining because it's a novel, not because I'm imaginary-dating Mr. Darcy and need to know him inside and out before we may consummate our imaginary-love.

Fan fiction also reveals another fundamental difference between male and female sexuality. Men almost always consume pornography alone. But in the fan-fiction community, the online discussion of a story is as important as the story itself. This reflects one of the primary investigative techniques of Miss Marple: soliciting information from other detectives.
Oh, come on, ew. Fandom Wankers aren't literally masturbating together.

I'm not much of a fangirl these days, but I did my time in the Pit of Voles, and the point of discussing a story is... nngh, discussing the story! It's like developing any work of fiction, it's not a matter of collaboratively evaluating Harry Potter as a potential boyfriend. In any intelligent fan group, there's a lot more "this seems out of character" and "whoops, grammar fail" than there is "HARRY IS SO SENSITIVE AND CARING *hearts, stars, flowers*."

Do men and boys participate less in this kind of collaborative story-building? It seems that is the case, and that might be worth investigating. But that would mean investigating, not drawing a priori conclusions that this is all about sex and all about hardwiring.

Some female readers might be thinking, "This doesn't describe me at all!" And, in fact, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the visitors to the major pornography sites are women. Our data suggest that these women probably have a higher sex drive than other women and that they are more socially aggressive and more comfortable taking risks.
"Our research describes all women except the ones it doesn't describe! All women are alike, except the ones that are different!"

For most women, however, Miss Marple is the master sleuth. Her fact-finding mission must be completed before mind and body are united in sexual harmony.
Sure, sure, for harmony and stuff. But that doesn't mean I can't get off.




It's old news, every bit of it, wearing slightly new clothes and a shiny gloss of Science™. Men are from "I just stick my dick in a warm thing" Mars, women are from "I must feel nurtured in every cell of my complex fickle being" Venus, and none of this has any relation to anything that happens on Earth.



Edit: Whoa. I missed the forest for the trees here. The forest is: THEY SET OUT TO PROVE THAT WOMEN LIKE ROMANCE STORIES BY STUDYING WOMEN WHO LIKE ROMANCE STORIES. There was literally no way this "study" could have produced different results.

Using a self-reported shoddy online survey distributed only to left-handed women, I could prove that women are all left-handed.

Women's horniness and the worm-in-mouth paradigm.

I am horny. Oh my god am I horny. I was horny driving home from work this morning to the point where I could barely hold it until I got home. Of course, I was horny at work this morning. I was horny before work last night, come to think of it. Then again, maybe it's just the time of the month. I've got my period now and that always makes me horny. Although right before my period I get kinda randy. And right after my period I'm so ready for sex. And in between periods of course there's a surge in my sex drive.

I think you get the picture. Everyone I've ever dated has really gotten the picture. I think I've said "no, not tonight, honey" about a tenth as often as I've said "oh alright, not tonight, honey."

Why does this matter? Because it gives me visceral proof that women can be horny. I know I'm off to one side of the bell curve, but I also know I'm not alone, and my experience of being a woman is one of being physically and emotionally ravenous for sex. Not dates, not cuddlewuddles (those are awesome, but they're separate desires), fucking.

It seems like a fact of life to me, but it puts a big ol' hole in a creepily common worldview, paraphrased thusly:

Women don't have any innate sex drive. Sex for them is kind of undignified and gross, like holding a worm in your mouth. Now, unless you're particularly squeamish, you can be convinced to hold a worm in your mouth. You'll do it for money or gifts. You'll do it if someone special says "darling, it would mean the world to me if you'd put this worm in your mouth... for me." You'll do it if you're insecure and all the cool kids have worms in their mouths. You'll do it if you're convinced that no man will ever love a woman who doesn't mouth worms. Hell, sometimes you'll do it just because you're not sure what you want out of life and putting a worm in your mouth seems like it's worth a shot.

But you will never, ever, in any of these situations, like the taste of the worm.

The implications of the worm-in-mouth paradigm range from the annoying:

Porn is for men; romance novels are for women.

To the horrifying:

If a woman doesn't want to have sex, that's no big deal, because women never actually want to have sex and they're used to coping with that. She's just holding out for better compensation.

How lesbians have sex is a mystery for the ages. (Usually it's resolved by either declaring them honorary men, or by conjecturing that they all suffer "lesbian bed death" and just "lie around and hug.")

There's this entire mess of social phenomena, from my ninth-grade health teacher telling me to "respect yourself more than that," to PUAs trying not to arouse women but to appeal to their insecurities, to "women need a reason to have sex; men just need a place," to the freaking bazillion people buying into the "being a rich man is like being a beautiful women" thing, that can be punctured with one simple and ridiculous phrase.

"I love worms."



***



The inspiration for all this (besides certain third-grade incidents) was being forwarded this article, from "Time" magazine: He Wants Sex, She Doesn't. Are Beads the Answer? I'm not doing a full fisk because some days I just don't have the energy for an extended session of Logical Fallacy Whack-A-Mole, but I'll hit the highlights. Such as "what the hell? BEADS?"

A fortieth birthday is a big deal that calls for a big present. How about 40 straight days of sex? That's the gift that Carolyn Evans bestowed upon her husband, Ray, in January 2009. Immediately, she regretted it.
“I woke up the next morning and thought, I will not survive this,” says Evans, 40, who ostensibly did not receive an identical gift on her milestone birthday.
I'm not sure what the "ostensibly" is doing there, because if this is her attitude toward sex, her husband better not pull that shit. That's like getting himself a present for her birthday.

But the "I will not survive this" is really bugging me. And it's not explored in the article; it's treated like a normal thing, like having sex every day would naturally be a hardship on a woman (and not on a man). I'm curious what she means by it, though. Is the sex physically painful for her? Is she too tired at the end of the day? Does she not experience pleasure during sex? Does she feel embarrassed or uncomfortable having sex? Does she not like her husband, or not desire him sexually? Is she ashamed of her body or her performance? Is her husband just really, really, really bad at it?

Because "ugh, sex, am I right, ladies?" isn't a normal thing. It's a sign of a specific problem, and I wish they'd dig into what that is. Or at least acknowledge that it could be a problem, instead of the inevitable, semi-humorous way of the world.

(From the author's mostly unenlightening blog: I became painfully aware of the fact that I don’t have the emotional stamina or bodily constitution [to] survive that much sex. I saw myself laid up in a hospital bed accepting antibiotics intravenously.
Holy crap, just how bad is her husband?)

“I was at a friend's shop and I complained to him. He said maybe a token system will work better.”
Reaching under the counter, her pal pulled out a dusty Mason jar housing a collection of Venetian glass beads. Forty beads, to be precise.
That's the title of Evans' new book, due out Tuesday. Part memoir, part treatise on why men like sex more than women, part instructional manual in her proprietary method that she credits with transforming a marriage on the rocks into a happily-ever-after, Forty Beads is relayed in a straight-up, slightly raunchy tone reminiscent of a giddy gathering of too-tipsy girlfriends.
The premise behind “beading” is simple: The woman keeps a bowl, a.k.a. beadcatcher, by her bedside. When her husband (or lover) is in the mood, he drops a bead into the beadcatcher. The woman has to be ready to slide between the sheets within 24 hours.
This friend and his charmingly rustic, handily planted jar (with the exact right number of beads!!!) are fictional. Let's get that out of the way right now. I'd feel more respected as a reader if she said aliens gave her the method.

So, hey, why do men like sex more than women? I'm kind of intrigued if there's a substance to that, if it goes beyond "well, duh, they totally just do." (Perhaps it's evolution--like how I evolved to get a mate and get my eggs fertilized--or anatomy--like how I can have more orgasms in a half hour than most men can have all week.)

But the really disturbing part, of course, is "has to be ready [...] within 24 hours." Has to. Ouch. Apparently the way to address an imbalance in sexual desire is to just go with whatever the man wants, and soften the blow by at least providing some advance warning.

Hey... when I want to fuck the ever-loving shit out of him, where's my little bead bowl?

Looking out for the best interests of its female readers, Healthland asked Evans whether a woman has any recourse should her man act like a total jerk; thankfully, Evans has a clause for bad behavior. “If a bead has been dropped and the husband exhibits real a—hole behavior — not just run-of-the-mill irritating behavior — he can get turtled,” says Evans, referring to a maneuver in which the disgruntled wife turns the beadcatcher over so beads roll off. “My husband got turtled once in a year."
I didn't check Urban Dictionary on this one, but I think my boyfriend got turtled last Saturday.

But why is it a matter of being an asshole or not? What about a matter of "darling, you're my schmoopy-boo and you've done nothing wrong, but Little Holly just ain't feelin' it?"

Well, continuing to say "but I put my token in the vending machine, and you better give me a good reason why I don't deserve sex or I'll lean you forward and shake your Skittles off the coil you'll be breaking the ruuuuules" after I explained this would be real asshole behavior. So I guess that's a self-correcting issue.



To be honest, I don't have a great solution for couples with mismatched libidos. (Well, I do, but "hey, you don't have to fuck just me" isn't the solution for everybody.) But I'm absolutely positive that "women just need to work out a cute little system for doing their wifely duty" isn't it.

The [Unquestioned Assumptions] About Beauty.

God, "Psychology Today" is such a shitrag. Today, someone linked me to this article about beauty, and why it's only for women, and why women who think they have any value besides decoration are deluding themselves, and why any woman who isn't beautiful needs to get with the program already, and other novel and kind-hearted sentiments.

Also it's illustrated with (marginally NWS?) silhouettes of naked women, just to really class up the joint. Funny thing is, I can't really tell to whether the women are "beautiful" or not. They're just naked. If being pointlessly, even inappropriately sexual is beauty, then I can be beautiful too! Although I might get arrested.

There are certain practical realities of existence that most of us accept. If you want to catch a bear, you don't load the trap with a copy of Catch-22—not unless you rub it with a considerable quantity of raw hamburger. If you want to snag a fish, you can't just slap the water with your hand and yell, "Jump on my hook, already!"
The article kicks off with two of my favorite argumentative fallacies:

The Fallacy Of That's Just Life: "What do you mean, you have pneumonia and you want antibiotics? Listen up, sometimes you just have to cough and choke and wheeze, and that's just life. Suck it up, grow the hell up, and deal. Life's not fair, and sometimes life hands you infections. God, stop acting like problems can be solved."

This fallacy is excellent for dismissing any kind of social injustice whatsoever, or for that matter, any kind of statement whatsoever. There is absolutely no observation, no matter how banal or penetrating, that cannot be handwaved away with "whatever, that's just life." Thanks a lot for that insight, champ. Everything's life... and life can change.

The Fallacy Of The Completely Batshit Analogy: "If you want to change your clothes, you don't eat an entire bucket of red paint. So don't expect to start your car by turning the key!"

This fallacy is excellent for creating the outward appearance of a rhetorical point, but be aware that this appearance is only 0.013 microns deep, and even light fingernail scratches may completely rupture it. For example, it turns out that men are not bears or fish (well, some of them are bears, but bear with me here) and that beauty is not hamburger or nightcrawlers. Also, a dead man in a trap in my apartment would be both legally inconvenient and sexually useless.

Yet, if you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're "beautiful on the inside," that's all that should count.
Fun fact: Ernest Borgnine is married. It's almost like he has something interesting or appealing about him besides his decorative value! Oh, but wait, he has a penis, so all the rules are completely different for whatever reason.

Also, if you look like Ernest Borgnine--if you literally look like him, rather than just looking like an average woman who's a bit slovenly and a bit overweight, which I'm sure is what the writer means here and is expressing in the most schoolyard-bully terms possible--ain't no beauty regimen in the world gonna change that, so you're not "going around" that way, you're stuck with it, and for the writer to rub it in that you can't possibly deserve love is just a pointlessly assholish move.

Welcome to Uglytopia—the world reimagined as a place where it's the content of a woman's character, not her pushup bra, that puts her on the cover of Maxim.
Yeah, yeah, I get that, I'm a hilarious strawman for hallucinating that anyone cares about about the character of a person woman. But I'm still hoping for a world where it's the content of a woman's character that puts her on the cover of "Time" or "Newsweek."

While we wish things were different, we'd best accept the ugly reality: No man will turn his head to ogle a woman because she looks like the type to buy a turkey sandwich for a homeless man or read to the blind.
That's fine, because I don't actually get much out of being ogled except creeped the fuck out. Ogling so rarely leads to a healthy long-term partnership.

I used to give sandwiches to homeless people every day. I worked at McDonald's as a teenager and I'd bag up my employee meals and give them to the local street people. And you know, it didn't get me laid. It got homeless people fed. Forgive me if I'm going off topic here, but there are things in life that can be important and valuable regardless of whether they get a dick stuffed in you or not.

The features men evolved to go for in women—youth, clear skin, a symmetrical face and body, feminine facial features, an hourglass figure—are those indicating that a woman would be a healthy, fertile candidate to pass on a man's genes.
This again. I've never been convinced that these actually have anything to do with health and fertility beyond not having gross malformations, but what I'm noticing this time is how this doesn't even begin to cover the modern beauty standard. Try being a young hourglassy etc. woman who doesn't wear makeup, doesn't shave her legs, cuts her hair short, wears cargo pants and is overweight, and you'll... probably meet guys who are into that, actually, but that's not my point. You're not going to get a lot of credit from society at large for being "objectively beautiful" just because you look healthy.

And while Western women do struggle to be slim, the truth is, women in all cultures eat (or don't) to appeal to "the male gaze."
Well... yeah. Unfortunately. I guess the thesis of this article is "the concept of beauty exists, therefore it must be right."

Men's looks matter to heterosexual women only somewhat. Most women prefer men who are taller than they are, with symmetrical features (a sign that a potential partner is healthy and parasite-free). But, women across cultures are intent on finding male partners with high status, power, and access to resources—which means a really short guy can add maybe a foot to his height with a private jet.
No he can't. An unattractive guy can get more chicks with a private jet, but the chicks are thinking "if I marry him I can quit my job and I'll never be hungry again, and he's not that bad," not "my vagina is responding directly to his wealth and I am so wet." And should a single woman ever acquire a private jet (they're letting us own property these days), I have a sneaking suspicion she'll suddenly have quite a few guys willing to overlook minor asymmetries.

An unattractive guy without a private jet can also take the here-unmentioned option of being an interesting and likeable person. Appearance and "status" aren't the only two dimensions of a human being.

Yet, while feminist journalists deforest North America publishing articles urging women to bow out of the beauty arms race and "Learn to love that woman in the mirror!", nobody gets into the ridiculous position of advising men to "Learn to love that unemployed guy sprawled on the couch!"
That's because it's not the same thing. Beauty isn't the female money. Money is the female money.

But you don't help that woman by advising her, "No need to wax that lip fringe or work off that beer belly!" (Because the road to female empowerment is...looking just like a hairy old man?)
The road to female empowerment is looking just like a hairy old woman, if that's what you look like. And still having some damn power.

The more attractive the woman is, the wider her pool of romantic partners and range of opportunities in her work and day-to-day life. We all know this, and numerous studies confirm it—it's just heresy to say so.
It's not that we don't want to acknowledge reality. It's just that we don't want to settle for the current reality, not when it's balls-terrible. (Particularly the "work and day-to-day life" bit.) The fact that discrimination exists doesn't justify discrimination.

I'm particularly bothered that the author isn't bothered that this is almost entirely a problem for women. Apparently the immutable, undeniable, writ-in-our-genes-for-eternity "power of beauty" just goes away completely if you have a wiener.

We consider it admirable when people strive to better themselves intellectually; we don't say, "Hey, you weren't born a genius, so why ever bother reading a book?" Why should we treat physical appearance any differently?
Because knowledge is useful. Being someone who's read a ton of books actually isn't particularly desirable, but being someone who's read a ton of books and synthesized the knowledge into a new theory or invention is. Whereas you make yourself "beautiful" (by the standards of the editors of "Maxim" magazine circa early 2011, I'm guessing) and then... you stand around being all beautiful and stuff. Whoooo.

At one end of the spectrum are the "Love me as I am!" types, like the woman who asked me why she was having such a terrible time meeting men...while dressed in a way that advertised not "I want a boyfriend" but "I'm just the girl to clean out your sewer line!"
Is there a way to dress that advertises "I want a boyfriend"? Seriously now. I want diagrams.

Me, I kind of like dressing in the way that advertises "I want a boyfriend, but only if I can have one who will let me 'get away' with dressing in a comfortable and practical manner, the way he takes for granted when it comes to himself."

At the other extreme are women who go around resembling porn-ready painted dolls. Note to the menopausal painted doll: Troweled on makeup doesn't make you look younger; it makes you look like an aging drag queen.
Oh, ouch. The whole article up to this point was about "ladies, you only exist so you can conform to the beauty standard and you shouldn't expect anything out of life if you don't," and then there's this sudden swing to making fun of women who believed this and tried too hard. Apparently if I wasn't considerate enough to be born a supermodel and stay one my entire life, I should just... just... just fuck off, I guess, because the author's attitude here to people who don't look good even after doing the "beauty" stuff seems to be that we're so subhuman as to be unworthy of consideration.

French women, too, buy into the idea that there's some fountain of youth at the Clarins counter. But, perhaps because feminism never seeped into mainstream culture in France like it did here, they generally have a healthier and more realistic relationship with beauty, accepting it as the conduit to love, sex, relationships, and increased opportunities. They take pleasure in cultivating their appearance, and in accentuating their physical differences from men. They don't give up on looking after their looks as they age, nor do they tart themselves up like sexy schoolgirls at 50. They simply take pride in their appearance and try to look like sensual, older women.
I'm not French or a Franceologist here, so I'm just putting this up in case I have any French readers--madames et mademoiselles, is France in fact the land of universal beauty, where all women have found perfect happiness through perfect femininity?

And if so, what do you do with the women who were just born funny-lookin' and don't have anything to "cultivate"? Do you ship them all to Belgium?

To understand what it takes to be beautiful, we need to be very clear about what being beautiful means—being sexually appealing to men. And then, instead of snarling that male sexuality is evil, we need to accept that it's just different—far more visually-driven than female sexuality.
I don't think male sexuality is evil. (I think it's kind of awesome sometimes.) It's just not my problem.

Most of my life, I'm not trying to get laid. I'm going to work, shopping, walking around my neighborhood, hanging out with friends, whatever. If beauty is all about giving dudes wood, I don't see why I should be beautiful at those times.

And while wood has its place in dating and sexual attraction, if someone tells me that I can't be hired or taken seriously or treated decently because I don't give him wood, he's an asshole. Male sexuality isn't evil; but believing that male sexuality should be catered to in nonsexual situations or determines someone's human worth is evil.

There seems to be a huge conflation in this article (and, unfortunately, in a lot of other places) between "you should be be beautiful to get a man" and "you should be beautiful all the time and everywhere, just because." The first is sort of true, with the caveat that men's preferences differ considerably and their attraction isn't purely physical. The second is complete sexist bullshit.

So, ladies, read lots of books, develop your mind and your character, exercise the rights the heroes of the women's movement fought for us to have, and strive to become somebody who makes a difference in the world. And, pssst...while you're doing all of that, don't forget to wear lipgloss.
But if I do forget to wear lipgloss, pssst... don't forget about my mind and character and rights and striving to make a difference in the world.

Scott Adams Quick-Fisk.

Oh lord, he's like a kid who's just discovered that yelling "fuck" makes everyone look at him and make a big fuss. (Analogy stolen from LabRat's excellent post here.) Scott Adams is still at it.

No point-by-point, but a few things that were just so egregious.

Take the question of equal pay for equal work. If you see it as a gender issue, aren't you leaving out a few dimensions that are also important? I saw an interview the other day with the woman who is the lead plaintiff for the class action suit against WalMart. Her complaint is that WalMart discriminated against her for being a woman. The thing that fascinated me is that somehow she managed to discern that the discrimination she experienced was because of her gender and not the fact that she's also obese, unattractive, and African-American. Based on the interview, she also seems to have a sketchy command of grammar. I couldn't judge her height or personality, but those are two more factors that have a big impact on career advancement.
Classy motherfucker, ain't he? And then he goes on to acknowledge that he's a "a short, hair-challenged, nearsighted, unattractive, over-the-hill individual" so he's faced discrimination too ya know, plus even more discrimination for being a white male... while somehow missing the part where he's rich and famous.

I don't really get the point here, though. It's a huge class action lawsuit, so presumably there are some skinny pretty white women in the class too. And if Wal-Mart was "only" discriminating against her size/appearance/race, that would be... okay?

(In fact, here's a picture of some of the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart suit. Three are white, at least one is definitely not fat, and "attractive" is subjective but c'mon, they're definitely not "too ugly to promote," whatever the fuck that would even mean in what wasn't exactly a glamor industry to begin with.)

So I propose a simple test to determine if you, individually, are a victim of gender unfairness. If a genie gave you the chance to magically switch your gender, and become a member of the other sex, would you do it? And let's say the new you would be about the same as now on the scale of attractiveness, intelligence, ethnicity, circumstance, and health. The only real change would be gender. Do you take the offer?
If your answer is no, then maybe fairness isn't what you really want. Maybe what you want is all the advantages you have now plus the good stuff that other people have. I totally understand. I want the same thing.
Actually, yeah. I do want all the advantages I can possibly get. Um... how terrible? I want women to have all the good stuff available to men and vice versa. That actually sounds just dandy to me.

The whole point of feminism (at least my feminism, blardy blah) isn't that men have it so much better than women. The point is that gender roles screw everything up for everybody. I don't want to be a man. (Well, I'd like to try it, but this isn't about me.) I want to be a person.

I apologize to anyone who was offended by this post.
I repeat: classy motherfucker.

Scott Adams is being interrogated from the wrong perspective!

Oh, it's been too long since I had a good fisk. And this one's a doozy, coming from the author of "Dilbert" of all people. It's actually two posts--one about why women suck and are beneath him, and one about waaah, people who disagree with him just don't understand his brilliance. He posted the first, deleted it when people called him out on it, and then when people called him out on that, he reposted it prefaced by the "dear negative reader" justifications.

...Does that make any sense? You can see the end result here. I'm going to fisk in chronological order.

The topic my readers most want me to address is something called men’s rights. [...] According to my readers, examples of unfair treatment of men include many elements of the legal system, the military draft in some cases, the lower life expectancies of men, the higher suicide rates for men, circumcision, and the growing number of government agencies that are primarily for women.
I support men's rights. How could I not? But the thing currently called the "Men's Rights Movement" is a huge fucking mess. They have some legitimate grievances that are absolutely buried under a mountain of misogyny and anti-feminism. The movement as it currently stands is so focused on the idea that men's rights are obtained by fighting women's rights, and so crowded with members who haven't even gotten that far but just think of it as a new venue to talk about how bitches suck, that it's hard for me to take them seriously when they do have a point.

You may have noticed that when I talk about why feminism is necessary on this blog, I try very hard to blame "society" and "culture," and do not blame "men." This is because I realize that women are often participants in keeping women down, because I know that simply being born a man doesn't dictate who you'll be and how you'll treat women, and because the cooperation--not capitulation--of men is necessary to advance women's rights. Besides, a lot of the same forces that make life suck for women also make life suck for men, and we both stand to benefit from eliminating gender roles and discrimination. Also some of my best friends are men.

When the men's rights movement gets to this same place, to talking about how men can deal with society instead of how men can deal with women (and also when their commenters aren't 90% plain old-fashioned sexists who've found a home), then I can take them seriously.

Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.
I'm not sure what constitutes "male behavior," but if I turn off my brain and go with "you know, grunting and eating steak and punching things, c'mon you know what I mean," I think the list of exceptions is more like sports, humor, war, government, media, socialization, family, sex, and business.

Also fishing.

So actually kind of a lot.

Women will counter with their own list of wrongs, starting with the well-known statistic that women earn only 80 cents on the dollar, on average, compared to what men earn for the same jobs. My readers will argue that if any two groups of people act differently, on average, one group is likely to get better results. On average, men negotiate pay differently and approach risk differently than women.
This is sort of true. Now ask why this is true. It isn't because vaginas make you hate money. It's because women spend their entire lives being trained not to be a mean pushy bitch, and can't just turn that constantly reinforced meekness off at salary negotiation time, and if they do are frequently dismissed as mean pushy bitches. It doesn't help that these salary negotiations are frequently being done with men.

And it doesn't help that salary negotiation is a red herring anyway. The real thing women do that hurts their earnings is care for children. The jobs you can hold and the hours you can work with a one-year-old at home and a partner either absent or very busy with his Important Real Job are why women earn less. We don't need to "approach risk differently," we need to approach family differently.

Women will point out that few females are in top management jobs. Men will argue that if you ask a sample group of young men and young women if they would be willing to take the personal sacrifices needed to someday achieve such power, men are far more likely to say yes. In my personal non-scientific polling, men are about ten times more likely than women to trade family time for the highest level of career success.
That's because the personal sacrifice a man stereotypically makes is "I don't see my children enough, and my wife does almost all the raising." The personal sacrifice a woman's expected to make is "I can't have a family at all."

Also, even if a woman is willing to make the personal sacrifice, she'll have a hell of a time getting the top management headhunters to believe that. She'll also have a hell of a time dealing with the fact that she's less likely to have great business connections on account of how many of those are forged by Man Time Between Men, and the fact that inevitably she either presents as too feminine to get ahead or too manly for people to like.

Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights: Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
I know he chose the word "pussy" to mean "weak and pathetic," but the fact that it means "weak and pathetic, like a vagina is, haw haw" kinda jumps out at me here. One of the most common insults on Men's Rights websites for a man who's seen as giving in to feminism is "mangina." The worst thing a man can be is a woman.

No one ever insults me by calling me a cock, a tomboy, or telling me I've got my boxers in a twist. I mean, not that I exactly want them to, but I'm just noticing.

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
I don't need to carefully deconstruct this, do I? It's... it's kinda out there. God damn.

I will say that Scott Adams always likes to fancy himself a master manipulator, someone who totally knows people and always thinks in terms of how people will take what he's saying and how his words are engineered not to express himself but to produce results. In that case, you'd think he'd have picked up that just maybe this wasn't the right metaphor to use.

I don’t like the fact that the legal system treats men more harshly than women. But part of being male is the automatic feeling of team. If someone on the team screws up, we all take the hit. Don’t kid yourself that men haven’t earned some harsh treatment from the legal system. On the plus side, if I’m trapped in a burning car someday, a man will be the one pulling me out. It’s a package deal. I like being on my team.
That "team" stuff is just fluff and bullshit. Tell me about the great "teams" formed between rich white men and poor men of color sometime--because if you're in the former group, very often the legal system is suddenly magically able to overlook your maleness. If you're in the latter group you're a whole lot likelier to take one for the team, rah rah rah. Go team.

Also, he's right about the burning cars, because it's fucking impossible for women--and I'm talking here about women who pass the physical qualifications with no modifications, women who can run and crawl with a charged hose and drag a 150-pound dummy solo--to get hired as firefighters. She just doesn't fit into the station culture, or she looks like she might not be strong enough regardless of her physical results, or she's great but I'm old frat buddies with that other applicant. (It's also yet another job that only lets you have children if you have a very accommodating partner at home.)

I've dragged a whole lot of people out of non-burning but quite smashed cars, though. And when you go from your burning car to the ER and the burn unit it'll be largely female nurses and aides caring for you. I think that gets us a spot on the goddamn team.

I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.
I'm not saying they're similar, just that you should treat them with the same detachment, condescension, and complete disregard of their words and actions. And understand that all their grievances are really just emotional lady things and they really just need a "yes, dear" and a hug! So that's comforting.

Also if you're such an expert at considering emotional realities you might have found an analogy that was a bit less emotionally provoking, eh?

A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don’t care about 90% of what is happening around us. I just did a little test to see if I knew what pajama bottoms I was wearing without looking. I failed.
I started this fisk by talking about how men and women aren't opposed to each other, but are actually facing some of the same enemies, and what a wonderful example. Women can't be reasoned with so their rights don't matter, but men are oblivious lumps so their rights don't matter. As so often happens, misogyny and misandry aren't opposites, they're friends!


That was the original post. Now the part where he gets, as they say in slightly sexually-troubling Internet parlance, butthurt.


This weekend the top twitter meme in the solar system, at least for a few hours, involved Feminist blogs calling me an ignorant, misogynist asshole. Meanwhile, over on the Men's Rights blogs, I'm being called a wussy, asshole, douche bag.
So he said things dismissive and insulting to both men and women, and both men and women took offense, and poor snookums had to deal with some nasty mean words. No part of this post is an apology, just a "clearly you didn't understand my genius, also you hurt my feewings."

I thought it would be funny to embrace the Men's Rights viewpoint in the beginning of the piece and get those guys all lathered up before dismissing their entire membership as a "bunch of pussies." To be fair, they have some gripes worthy of discussion, especially on legal issues. But I'm been experiencing a wicked case of "whiner fatigue." It feels as if everyone in the world is whining about one damn thing or another. In normal times, I can tune it out. But lately the backdrop has been world class problems on the order of financial meltdowns, tsunamis, nuclear radiation, and bloody revolutions. THOSE are problems. Your thing: Not so much.
Ah, the old "there are children starving in Africa, so who cares if your boss pinches your ass, you're lucky to have a job" argument. Good for shutting down any discussion about anything. Hey Scott Adams, why are you wasting time defending yourself on your blog when there are CHILDREN STARVING IN AFRICA?

Regular readers of my blog know that the goal of my writing is to be interesting and nothing else. I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion, largely because I don't believe humans can be influenced by exposure to better arguments, even if I had some. But I do think people benefit by exposure to ideas that are different from whatever they are hearing, even when the ideas are worse. That's my niche: something different.
Actually, "men should just man up and ignore women's stupid little complaints about their periods or whatever they're complaining about" isn't different at all. It's depressingly similar to shit I hear every day.

And enough with the "no, I wasn't saying the things I was saying, and you're a fool for thinking that." If you're in the habit of just saying words to make word-juice, and aren't actually advocating the things you're openly advocating, you need to hold up a little sign or something.

A few people appreciated the meta-joke of removing the post. If you didn't get it, read the deleted post, consider the feminist backlash, then think about the fact that I took down my post and ran away.
It's not a meta-joke, though. It's a meta-insult. The message of "ugh, women and their woman problems aren't even worth dealing with" is not something that gets better when it gets meta-er.

I also didn't predict that critics would reprint the post one component at a time so they could dissect it, which has the fascinating effect of changing the humorous tone to something hideous. Humor requires flow and timing. A frog isn't much of a frog after you dissect it.
Oh, I see. His brilliance is simply too holistic, too crystalline to be understandable when broken into mere sentences. Fisking isn't a way of addressing individual points in a way that's comprehensible and amusing for readers, it's tampering with his comic art.

I linked to the whole post at the top, though, so you can read it in the perfect intact state its creator intended. Tell me if you think it's funny. Like, even if you turn off the critical-thinking part of your brain and don't analyze it ideologically at all, just as a piece of writing, is it even funny? It really doesn't read as someone being amusing. It could really fool ya for someone saying what he thinks.

Next came the labeling. Once the piece had been reprinted on feminist blogs, the "with us or against us" instinct took over. I clearly wasn't supporting every element of the Feminist movement, and therefore I was presumed an enemy and labeled a misogynist. I was also labeled an asshole, which I have come to understand is a synonym for male.
Oh for fuck's sake. He compared us to children and people with mental retardation, and he thinks our problem with him is "gosh, you just don't like men"?

But perhaps I can summarize my viewpoint so you can understand why I'm such a misogynist asshole douche bag. Here's my view in brief:
You can't expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge. Emotion pushes out reason. That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability. The path of least resistance is to walk away from that sort of fight. Men generally prefer the path of least resistance. The exception is when men irrationally debate with other men. That's a type of sport. No one expects opinions to be changed as a result.
Funny thing is, he's kind of got a point here. Changing people's minds on controversial topics is a hell of a thing. It does happen, but slowly, and generally not through direct argument. Debating, and particularly blog-debating, is the fine art of preaching to the choir.

Gosh, somehow I managed to say that without saying that women get less money because they deserve less and men should ignore their childish whining. Guess I'm just pithy.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who understood the original post and its context was offended by it. But to the women who were offended by their own or someone else's interpretation of what I wrote, I apologize.
"In conclusion, if you don't love me, you just don't understand me. But if you got angry because you didn't understand me, I'm very sorry that you got angry."

Scott Adams sure is a master manipulator of the human mind.

Good, giving, game.

I like Dan Savage, for the most part. He's funny, he's unflinchingly sex-positive, and he provides a voice for queer and kinky sexualities in some surprisingly mainstream venues. So this is not a "Dan Savage said a bad thing and now everything he ever wrote sucks retroactively." But Dan Savage did say a bad thing.

I'm a 24-year-old straight male. For the past six months, I've been dating an amazing GGG girl. We have amazing sex. The other night, after a week of no sex, I came on to her in bed. She turned me down and said that she was okay with me masturbating on the other side of the bed so she could sleep. After a very unsatisfying orgasm, I told her I understood her need to sleep, since we had an early engagement the next morning, but that this was difficult for me. She said we'd have great sex the next day, which we did. Which one of us needs to be GGG in this scenario, should it happen again?
Fucking Early Engagement Botches Lovely Evening

A week is a long time to go without at your age and at six months and prekids, I realize, but it sounds like the girlfriend more than made it up to you the next day. As for who needs to be GGG in this scenario, should it happen again (and it will)...
GGG demands a little something of both of you. GGG requires you to stop whining about having to wait 24 whole hours for awesome sex, FEEBLE, and GGG requires her—if she isn't completely exhausted (and it appears she wasn't, as she was still awake when your "very unsatisfying orgasm" was over)—to come through with a loving assist when you're desperate and she's not feeling it, i.e., lie with you, talk dirty to you, stick a finger up your butt—whatever—for the 5 or 10 minutes it takes you to drain your sack.

Okay, so the letter writer is patently ridiculous--oh no, we didn't have sex one whole night, how can I go on--and Savage does get that. He probably picked the letter specifically because it was so ridiculous. But then we get into the creepy area of "GGG." This is Savage's pet acronym for "good, giving, game," and was originally created to symbolize the idea that people should be willing to try things their partners are into, even if it's not their cup of tea, because giving is part of a relationship. Which, okay. Could use a little more "unless it's a limit for you," but I generally agree--"we'll do your fetish tonight" is on some level the same kind of good and necessary relationship giving as "I'll get the dishes tonight." Except this dishwashing involves doing things to intimate parts of your body that could be disgusting or painful for you, so, you know, not exactly the same.

But GGG seems to have undergone a disquieting metamorphosis into the sensitive new-age sex-positive way to say "partners are obligated to satisfy all sexual demands." And it seems to have been co-opted by assholes--"c'mon, baby, be GGG!" is the new "you can't leave me with blue balls!" It's just a cheap guilt trip used to override a "no." Maybe most dangerously, it seems to have been turned around, from something you decide to be to your partner, to something you demand that your partner be. "I'm GGG, so I'm putting on the diaper for you" is a very different thing from "you need to be GGG and put on this diaper."

I propose an alternate theory of dealing with unilateral desires or fetishes: LAHTW. Lead A Horse To Water. In other words, you communicate your desire, and... that's it. Once they know what you want, they go where they go with that knowledge.

So my advice for the letter writer:
"Hey, girlfriend, want to have sex tonight? I do!"
"No, but it's fine with me if you masturbate."
"Oh, okay."
fin

I think a lot of people are opposed to such blunt constructions of consent because it conjures up the fear "but then I'll never get laid!" But, as I say so often, women are horny. If your girlfriend is having sex with you so much that a whole week off seems like an eternity, then she's probably horny for you. She probably wants to make you happy sexually (most of the time and within her limits). And if she doesn't, if she really doesn't care about your pleasure or if she just can't get into the things you're into, then a cute acronym and a guilt trip aren't going to change that.

This is the same reason I can't get jealous in relationships. If someone I love wants to love me, awesome, and if they don't, well, fuck. It ends there. Once I've communicated that I want to be close (and acted all sweet and wuvable to them), there's nothing more I should--or ultimately, can--do to ensure that. Trying to make "no fair falling out of love with me!" rules is either unnecessary or hopeless.

I've been on both sides of the "nope, but your exciting consolation prize is a handjob!" negotiation. It's not an invalid compromise. But it's not an obligatory one. Sometimes no means not even a little bit. Or sometimes no means "eh, rather not" rather than being a giant "ABSOLUTELY NOT IT WOULD KILL ME" line in the sand, and if your partner feels comfortable doing this and if you respect it, that's a really good sign for the relationship.

Ultimately, I don't believe the old saw about "Relationships are about compromise!" Relationships are about doing what you want to do, and discovering to your delight that what you want to do is make your partner happy. If that want isn't there, no set of imposed rules--not GGG, not The Rules, not even the Standard Western Heterosexual Relationship Unwritten Rules--is going to make up for it.

Gentlemen Prefer Grinning Automatons.

Recently linked in the comments, another case of Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. Fisking stuff that's obviously wrong is strangely fulfilling to me not just because I get to swear at a more successful writer and make them look silly, but because it's a way to clarify my own views. In making the step from "this is wrong because it makes me angry and it's wrongity wrong wrong," to "this is wrong because X, Y, and also Z," I'm able to work out beliefs I might not otherwise have examined. It's also good practice in critical thinking, in identifying the overarching fallacies of sexism, and in providing just a bit of counter-evidence for the people who say "but sexism is dead now!"

It's also entertaining.

So. Why You're Not Married. (Because you have a personality. Men hate personalities.)

You want to get married. It's taken a while to admit it. Saying it out loud -- even in your mind -- feels kind of desperate, kind of unfeminist, kind of definitely not you, or at least not any you that you recognize.
I don't know if I want to get married. It seems to me that marriage doesn't necessarily make a huge difference--if you didn't have a close and committed relationship before, this isn't going to help, and if you had a close and committed relationship before, well, what are you hoping to accomplish? Tax and other legal benefits mostly. So maybe it's really up to H&R Block if I'm ever going to get married.

(Sidenote: I've always liked the idea of a wedding, however. I have a longstanding fantasy of going to one of those Vegas quickie-novelty-wedding places and hiring Reverend Presley to do the whole ceremony dealie even though we're not signing papers, just for giggles.)

There's also the issue that my current relationship can't get fully legally sanctioned even in Massachusetts.

But look at me here approaching the issue rationally. I ought to have figured this out while crying into a bridesmaid dress:
Then, something happened. Another birthday, maybe. A breakup. Your brother's wedding. [...] You started to hate the bride -- she was so effing happy -- and for the first time ever you began to have feelings about the fact that you're not married.
Something this article never gets too clear on: am I starting with a boyfriend? Is this a "can't get a man to look at me twice" problem or a "can't get my man to commit" problem? Those seem like two very different things. And trying to accomplish both steps at once, trying to get a date so you can marry him, doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Particularly if you're using marriage as shorthand for "happy and intimate marriage" rather than "I literally just want to be married to something."

Also, not to sound like Holly-Two-Shoes here, but I've never been to a wedding where I hated the bride! I mean, I don't go to weddings of people I don't like, and when I like a person, it's nice that they're happy! Maybe with age I'll learn the womanly art of bitterness.

It basically comes down to this: I've been married three times. Yes, three. To a very nice MBA at 19; a very nice minister's son at 32 (and pregnant); and at 40, to a very nice liar and cheater who was just like my dad, if my dad had gone to Harvard instead of doing multiple stints in federal prison. I was, for some reason, born knowing how to get married.
"I'm great at quitting smoking; I've done it ten times!"

I know how to get married too. If all I wanted out of life was a marriage certificate with my name on one line and someone who could fog a mirror on the other, I could've been married years ago. But this is so irrelevant to my goals that it's meaningless. It's like having the recipe for sewage lasagna; it doesn't matter if I know how, because I'm not dumb enough to actually execute such a pointless plan.

I don't know how to marry someone awesome who will stay in love with me and whom I will stay in love with. But it's pretty clear that neither does she.

But I won't lie. The problem is not men, it's you. Sure, there are lame men out there, but they're not really standing in your way. Because the fact is -- if whatever you're doing right now was going to get you married, you'd already have a ring on it. So without further ado, let's look at the top six reasons why you're not married.
There's a weird little grain of truth buried here: the problem is never an entire gender. If your problem is with "men" or "women" in general and as a group, then the problem is indeed on your end.

That said, we haven't exactly established that I'm trying to get a ring on it at all costs. So the fact that what I'm doing right now hasn't resulted in a ring is what we call "a feature, not a bug."

1. You're a Bitch.
[...]The deal is: most men just want to marry someone who is nice to them. I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband. Here's what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn't think so. You've seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men. I know it seems unfair that you have to work around a man's fear and insecurity in order to get married -- but actually, it's perfect, since working around a man's fear and insecurity is big part of what you'll be doing as a wife.
So now I know how to marry a 13-year-old. ...Ew.

Or really I just know how to get a 13-year-old to jerk off to me, since I doubt that loving partnership is really part of the kid's designs on Ms. Kardashian.

And holy fucking hell to "working around a man's fear and insecurity." I'm not going to marry someone I have to work around. Work with, certainly; everyone has some fear and insecurity. But that's something to comfort or confront, not avoid by never taking any risk of upsetting them. To "work around" someone implies that they themselves cannot be dealt with, that they're a child to be pampered or a tyrant to be tiptoed around. I have a little more respect for men than that.

Also: there's few things I hate worse than someone playing the "I know it's unpleasant and you don't want it to be true, but reality is cruel" card when saying something that isn't true. There are situations where "suck it up and deal, that's life" is true, but there are also a lot more where it's used as a smokescreen for things that really aren't right.

2. You're Shallow.
When it comes to choosing a husband, only one thing really, truly matters: character. So it stands to reason that a man's character should be at the top of the list of things you are looking for, right? But if you're not married, I already know it isn't. Because if you were looking for a man of character, you would have found one by now. Men of character are, by definition, willing to commit.
Apparently being "of character" is a static and binary thing. You're of character or you aren't, fellas, and it's stamped on the packaging. And if you are of character, you'll marry basically the first woman who talks to you.

3. You're a Slut.
[...]That's due in part to this thing called oxytocin -- a bonding hormone that is released when a woman a) nurses her baby and b) has an orgasm -- that will totally mess up your casual-sex game. It's why you can be f**k-buddying with some dude who isn't even all that great and the next thing you know, you're totally strung out on him. And you have no idea how it happened. Oxytocin, that's how it happened. And since nature can't discriminate between marriage material and Charlie Sheen, you're going to have to start being way more selective than you are right now.
Oh god, the oxytocin thing. Oxytocin is a magical hormone that makes a lady instantly fall in love with anyone who's around when she has an orgasm, which is why my true and deepest and first love is that pillow I had in sixth grade. (The creepiest permutation of oxytocin lore is the threat that you can "run out" if you have too many orgasms with people who aren't your true love. No, that doesn't make any sense.)

Facetiousness aside, you know what really gets me about this sort of thing? If it were true, you wouldn't have to be told about it. Falling in love after sex would be like getting thirsty on a hot day--blatant and predictable. "Welp, now I'm in love with you" would be as everyday as "welp, now I want a nap." When someone tells you something about your own nature and it comes as a surprise, skepticism is in order.

I dunno if "nature" can distinguish between marriage material and Charlie sheen, but I can. But wait... I'm made of nature!

4. You're a Liar.
It usually goes something like this: you meet a guy who is cute and likes you, but he's not really available for a relationship. He has some condition that absolutely precludes his availability, like he's married, or he gets around town on a skateboard. Or maybe he just comes right out and says something cryptic and open to interpretation like, "I'm not really available for a relationship right now."
You know if you tell him the truth -- that you're ready for marriage -- he will stop calling. Usually that day. And you don't want that. So you just tell him how perfect this is because you only want to have sex for fun! You love having fun sex! And you don't want to get in a relationship at all! You swear!

I don't exactly disagree with this section. It's pretty much an exercise in constructing an imaginary woman who is comically stupid, then telling her that she's stupid. It's not wrong, but it's so obvious that it's not exactly something I needed to hear from a MARRIAGE EXPERT, either.

"I know what you're like: you're eating your toes. 'They're delicious!' you say, gnawing on some distal phalanges. 'I'll grow more!' 'Toes are great to eat!' Well, thank God I'm here with my great wisdom to set you straight."

Either that, or this section is just her way to justify to herself the existence of women who claim they're only having sex for fun--clearly all liars, since there is only one Woman and we are but her appendages, and Woman is ever-hungry for enagement rings to stuff down her chthonic maw.

5. You're Selfish.
[...] A good wife, even a halfway decent one, does not spend most of her day thinking about herself. She has too much s**t to do, especially after having kids. This is why you see a lot of celebrity women getting husbands after they adopt. The kids put the woman on notice: Bitch, hello! It's not all about you anymore! After a year or two of thinking about someone other than herself, suddenly, Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford comes along and decides to significantly other her. Which is also to say -- if what you really want is a baby, go get you one. Your husband will be along shortly. Motherhood has a way of weeding out the lotharios.
Don't you call me a bitch, bitch, especially not by way of my hypothetical nonexistent children. Is this even an article or do you just want a fight? I'll take you down.

If marriage and kids require the complete ablation of the self, I'm more confused than ever why I would even want these. Wait... if it doesn't matter what I want, how can I want marriage or kids? This is like those Internet Submissives who claim they're so submissive they won't admit to deciding to be submissive.

6. You're Not Good Enough.
Oh, I don't think that. You do. [...]Here is what you need to know: You are enough right this minute. Period. Not understanding this is a major obstacle to getting married, since women who don't know their own worth make terrible wives. Why? You can fake it for a while, but ultimately you won't love your spouse any better than you love yourself. Smart men know this.

How fucking heartwarming. Articles like this always try to go heartwarming in the homestretch after being reprehensible the entire rest of the time. Except in this case, the contradiction with the rest of the article is a little more blunt than usual.

Wait... I'm good enough right now, but I don't believe that, and not believing that means that I'm not good enough!

The bottom line is that marriage is just a long-term opportunity to practice loving someone even when they don't deserve it. Because most of the time, your messy, farting, macaroni-and-cheese eating man will not be doing what you want him to.
No. I'm no marriage expert, but I think marriage is a long-term opportunity to practice loving someone when they deserve it. Just because someone farts or eats mac and cheese (huh?) doesn't mean they don't deserve love. But if they don't deserve it in other ways, that's not a marriage, that's volunteer social work. This whole article seems to be setting up marriage as something that has shit-all to offer women, but that they should want because... because... you better shut up, men don't like women who take things to their logical conclusions!

But as you give him love anyway -- because you have made up your mind to transform yourself into a person who is practicing being kind, deep, virtuous, truthful, giving, and most of all, accepting of your own dear self -- you will find that you will experience the very thing you wanted all along:
Love.
Yeah, well, if I wanted to pour all my love into a totally indifferent lump just to get the experience of loving something, I woulda gotten a Pet Rock.

The funny thing is, for all the disrespect this article shows to women--you're nothing without a man, but you're kinda nothing with him too--it's even harsher on men. Women are mostly stupid and their only hope in life is an upgrade from miserable spinster to martyr wife, but men are beyond hope. Men's lumpen, selfish, macaroni-smeared nature is taken for granted, then framed as something women have to accomodate, not hold them accountable for. It's an insult that lets them off the hook, but it's a pretty grave insult nonetheless.

This article also stands as an illustration of the nasty devolution that the "traditional marriage" paradigm seems to have suffered. It's supposed to be "she keeps house and raises children and is sweet and sexy, he supports and leads the family"--which is a lousy deal to be locked into, but at least it's a deal. But too often it seems to have mutated into "she keeps house and raises children and is sweet and sexy, he... keeps her around." I'm no fan of traditional masculinity, but traditional femininity in a vacuum, washing the dishes not of a patriarch but of a clueless macaroni-eater, is even sadder.

If I lived in that world, I'd say that the reason I'm not married is because men aren't worth my time. But I don't. I live in a world where men are people and some of them are pretty awesome. The reason I'm not married is simply that I'm happy unmarried, and while I guess I could be happy married too, ain't exactly any rush.

Sex is cheap? Dude, it's FREE.

Two people independently sent me this link, so I guess there's a demand for this.

Sex Is Cheap: Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life.
"Young men" are just one guy, right? Actually, I think I dated him. ...Twice.

We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary life.
We keep hearing it because it's a meme that has a grain of truth and a thick outer coating of things people want to be true for some horrible reason, from "kids these days, with their Xbox and their sexting and their Rainbow Parties" to "this feminism business has just gone too far."

And yet there is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.
By "in charge," this author means that they're having them. The fact that women are, duh, having the exact same premarital heterosexual relationships just proves what suckers those chicks are.

(Sidenote: Does anyone else feel like the word "premarital" is kind of a weird way to put it? It makes it sound like you're definitely going to get married later. "Nonmarital" seems like a more sensible term.)

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn't so bad.
"Attractive"? Most of the women sleeping with young men are presumably young, but I don't think anyone collected any statistics proving that they're all hotties. And if the author is trying to conjure up an image of a dude who lives on his mom's couch playing Xbox and has a parade of hotties showing up at the door anyway... yeah, that's not really how it works.

But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day.
Right, because young men never want to have a (ewwww) girlfriend. The funny thing is, in my experience, a lot of young men are actually giant saps. In my sexually free relations with young men, I have encountered offers not just of affection but of "schmoop" and "wugs." This article simply does not account for wugs.

If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on.
This is presented without supporting evidence, just because we all know that broads only want to snag them a ring.

But actually, these aren't things that (all; your mileage will vary on account of how "women" also is not one person) women just want for their own sake. These are things that women want in a system where they have very little power, so securing a generous and committed husband is the only way to get any status. When we don't need a man's help to get by, we can afford to relax and just have some fun.

The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it's all thanks to supply and demand.
I don't think the supply and demand have changed all that much, buddy. It's been very close to 1:1 for a while now.

Wait... exactly which one of us is the supply and which is the demand?

As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have repeatedly shown, on average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes.
I'm going to guess this says less about women's horniness than it does about our experience with creepers. A guy who proposes sex out of the blue is potentially dangerous, and in many women's experience, he doesn't even really want sex at all but is just playing some weird game to get a reaction. Blunt sexual advances are a form of street harassment that most of us have been through, and "you wanna fuck me, babe?" has nearly the same tone and intention as "mooooo what a cow." Most random sexual offers to women are neither compliments nor genuine offers.

As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.
Well... yeah. Consensual relationships require consent. That took two researchers?

But obviously the man has to decide too. And even within the model where he always makes the first move, making that move is a way of expressing his consent. Guys who initiate sex may always want sex (my tautology powers are tautological!), but guys don't always initiate sex.

And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren't asking for much in return these days—the market "price" of sex is currently very low.
Sexual purse strings? You mean the ability to not have sex when I don't want to? I'm like the fucking Scrooge McDuck of pussy here.

As for market price... hey, I'm not working for free here, it's just a different currency. Instead of rich husbands, I get paid in orgasms. And business is good.

Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual options—more supply for his elevated demand—it takes some measure of price control away from women.
I'm pretty sure even old-timey Victorian dudes knew how to jerk off just fine.

And seriously, price control, seriously. It's kind of hard to miss the "whoreswhoreswhores" undertone here when you talk about sex entirely in terms of the price the woman charges the man.

But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young men are faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It's not that the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it's that there's a growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings—women outnumber men by significant margins.
So even if we followed the conclusions the author is implying here with utterly literal "the pussy market works just any other bulk commodity" thinking, we wouldn't see unsuccessful young men getting laid a lot. We'd either see successful young men turning into pussy-gorged mansluts, or unsuccessful young men who have successful girlfriends. Or just a lot of single people who can't find anyone in their demographic who wants them. But there's no permutation of this scenario where Xbox couch dude is a pussy-gorged manslut.

Unless he's got something else going for him. But too much consideration of what "something else" consists of could derail this whole article. Surely the people in these strictly-business sex-for-commitment exchanges don't like each other?

Analysis of demographic data from 117 countries has shown that when men outnumber women, women have the upper hand: Marriage rates rise and fewer children are born outside marriage.
So since the human birth ratio is pretty consistently 1.05:1, think about why men would significantly outnumber women, not in a college or a particular social class, but in an entire country. Because the women are dying. They're getting aborted or killed as infants because girl children are a burden, they're dying in childbirth, they're victims of violence. Some upper hand.

We found that virginity is more common on those campuses where women comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the upper hand.
Virginity is a sign of having the upper hand? Boy you couldn't have convinced me of that when I was in college and still had mine.

By contrast, on campuses where women outnumber men, they are more negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex.
"Commitment in exchange for sex." Hey, I give them credit for spelling it out. Okay, it's not really credit. I think it's more like disdain. FUN FACT: The human female occasionally experiences sensations similar to "pleasure" during certain sexual acts!

36 percent of young men's relationships add sex by the end of the second week of exclusivity; an additional 13 percent do so by the end of the first month. A second indicator of cheap sex is the share of young men's sexual relationships—30 percent—that don't involve romance at all: no wooing, no dates, no nothing.
"Young men's relationships" is such a strange way to describe relationships that involve a man and a woman. You could use these statistics to prove the opposite point by changing that wording.

And hey, why would I want exclusivity if we're not having sex? What's the point of having a man all to myself if I'm not going to use him?

Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment.
When could it ever? Was there a time in history when I could have walked into the street and yelled "Hey! I have a vagina! But you can't have any!" and eager suitors would have swarmed me? There was a time when marriage was more common and longer-term, but based on everything I know about human nature, "love and lifelong commitment" weren't necessarily part of that deal.

Jill, a 20-year-old college student from Texas, is one of the many young women my colleagues and I interviewed who finds herself confronting the sexual market's realities. Startlingly attractive and an all-star in all ways, she patiently endures her boyfriend's hemming and hawing about their future. If she were operating within a collegiate sexual economy that wasn't oversupplied with women, men would compete for her and she would easily secure the long-term commitment she says she wants.
I know a bunch of couples who married at or before 21. Out of six that I'm thinking about now, one is still together. Turns out that when you get married you don't ride off into the sunset on matching ponies, but have to suddenly deal with being married. Which is tough when you're still young and forming your own identity. Most 20-year-olds are damn right they've got a lot of hemming and hawing left to do.

But you know, there's no moment as joyous as "Mom, he proposed! Because he can't get laid any other way!"

Michelle, a 20-year-old from Colorado, said she is in the same boat: "I had an ex-boyfriend of mine who said that, um, he didn't know if he was ever going to get married because, he said, there's always going to be someone better."
Alright, that guy's just a dick.

And yet while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex.
Don't forget the part where Freud's theories have been totally disproven and these days are only ever used for literary criticism, and that's only because literary criticism is, well, not so fussy what theories they'll accept!

And in this mindset, women are... prizes? Trophies? Acquisitions? Purchases? Certainly not people with their own damn drive to achieve in life.

Hey... regardless of whether there's satisfactory sex in the marriage or not, how do monogamously married men ever get anything done?

As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.
Has this ever actually happened? Has there actually ever been a society that crumbled because people were just too darn happy with their sex lives? (Okay, the hippies. Moving on.)

Not only are women people rather than pussy-dispensing man-motivators, men are people rather than single-minded crotch-hounds. Neil Armstrong did not go to the moon to get laid. I mean, fuck, cavemen could get laid. People achieve because the human race has as one of our traits, as immutable as the whiskers on a cat, the drive to always want more and better. Give a child blocks and they build a tower; give a person a job and they want to be the boss. Pussy's got nothing to do with it.

And if pussy did have something to do with it, fuck "society," because I'm sure as hell not giving up sex just to get some random schlub's ass off the couch.