Atomic Nerds

Hey, kids, it’s time for another round of Bullshit Evo-Psych! YAAAAAAY!

Title of article: Do Men Find Dumb-Looking Women More Attractive?
A new study says yes.

Oh, you know this one’s going to be fun. It’s also another entry in the classic genre of “equally dim views of men and women”.

In an article soon to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Texas–Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her colleagues explored what they called the sexual exploitability hypothesis. The hypothesis is based on the differences between male and female reproductive strategies as humans evolved. For ancestral women, casual intercourse with an emotionally unattached man who had no clear intention of sticking around to raise any resulting offspring constituted a massive genetic gamble. By contrast, for a man with somewhere around 85 million sperm cells churned out every day—per testicle—the frivolous expenditure of gametes was far less detrimental to his genetic interests.

An classic framework. Kind of a bit too classic, given that this basic assumption can suffer a lot when the life histories of species or entire groups are taken into account. As I will go into in further detail.

Goetz and her team began with the assumption that—because our brains evolved long before prophylactics entered the picture—female cognition is still sensitive to the pregnancy-related consequences of uncommitted sex and women remain more reluctant than men to engage in it

You don’t need… “female cognition” to understand that random sex can have more potential negative consequences for her than for him. Not all of them or even most of them have anything to do with pregnancy, either. What’s foremost in a woman’s (or, well, a female North American college student, but at least the two study demographics were the same) mind when considering accepting or rejecting casual offers from men actually seems to be the twin questions of whether he presents a physical threat to her safety, and whether he’s likely to be any good in bed.

I mean, you can and apparently these authors are making the argument that it’s actually our primitive ladybrains evaluating the chances of pregnancy completely outside our consciousness, but assuming we do things for secret hidden reasons rather than conscious reasons that are actually perfectly sound and utilitarian is questionable at best.

They set out to test the idea that any indication that a woman’s guard is lowered—that she’s “sexually exploitable”—is a turn-on for your average man. “[T]he assessment of a woman’s immediate vulnerability,” surmise the authors, “may be central to the activation of psychological mechanisms related to sexual exploitation.”

Fill in the appropriate square on your “misogyny and misandry are buddies” bingo card.

This is an inflammatory hypothesis, of course, and the language employed in the field doesn’t help matters. It’s worth noting that in the evolutionary psychology sense, the word exploitable simply means that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex—which takes her own desires, rather disturbingly, out of the equation. Even if she’s the aggressor, a prostitute, or a certifiable nymphomaniac, having casual sex with her would still constitute “exploiting” her (or at least her body), according to this model.

Thank you, author, though I’m not going to be very nice to you in this post, for at least acknowledging that if not continuing to think it through- specifically that it assumes the viewpoint that a sexual encounter that doesn’t result in marriage involves the man “winning” and the woman “losing”.

From a strictly biological viewpoint, this worldview is baffling. Translated into terms evolution actually operates on, the strategy makes one party more fit and another party less fit or no more fit. In order for the male to increase his fitness, the mating has to result in offspring and the offspring have to grow to become reproductively successful themselves, which is exactly what needs to happen for the female to increase her fitness. There is no scenario in which the male increases his fitness but the female does not. There are scenarios in which the male gains fitness at less cost or risk to himself than the female and vice versa, but none in which, biologically speaking, all sexual encounters that result in a fitness gain for the male are exploitation.

Underlying this entire model (not to mention article) is a conflation of mating events with reproduction. This is a frequent weakness in sexual selection research, but at least researchers studying wild animals have a somewhat plausible excuse in that the difficulty of observing their target population makes definitively tying matings with offspring by parent, event, and identity difficult, but no one studying humans has this excuse. We have geneaology, interviews, and DNA tests to answer nearly any possible question we may have about someone’s grandchildren, lack thereof, and what in their life path led to children, grandchildren, or none of the above. Which is one of many reasons why making your study demographic one that almost entirely consists of people who aren’t yet ready or willing to reproduce* for the purposes of this kind of study insane.

Using matings and offspring as interchangeable things with any hope of producing useful results depends on several things about your target species: you need the window in which its members are willing to mate and the window in which they are fertile to be identical or nearly so, and you need the cost of raising offspring to be relatively low, so that an individual who mates is pretty much the same as an individual who reproduces. If you are studying, say, snakes, this model is fine and dandy. If you are studying (most) birds, you have half of what you need; an obvious window of fertility and matings, but costly offspring that are by no means guaranteed to make it to reproductive age without a great deal of investment. If you are studying humans neither is true; humans are willing to mate regardless of fertility status, and the cost of raising offspring is extremely high.

So high, in fact, that it would have been impossible for a lone woman to raise an infant to adolescence on her own during our evolution. So high that some anthropologists estimate it couldn’t be done in the environment we evolved in with just the mother AND the father alone, either. “WOOP FOOLED YOU SURPRISE BABY OFF TO SPREAD MY SEED KTHX BAI” would have been a complete nonstarter as a reproductive strategy just because the only way the baby would actually survive would be if the child had substantial investment from other people besides the mother.

Chimpanzee mothers don’t need or want paternal investment from the males because the period of dependence is much shorter and the nutritional needs of the infant are less dramatic; they raise their babies entirely by themselves and are very protective, and possessive, of them. Human women, in all cultures around the globe, seek out helpers to help them with their children- and also unlike chimps and most other primates, are vastly more willing to abandon or kill a baby, especially under stress. (And even the devoted single moms of primatehood have their thresholds.) It’s not just us, either; in birds with very high investment requirements to raise offspring, abandoning eggs or chicks when confidence in the mate’s investment (or, more compassionately, confidence in the odds of raising them being possible) drops sufficiently is a common thing.

This is not to say that promiscuity cannot be a perfectly workable reproductive strategy, for a male OR a female; the mother simply needs to have sufficient investment from other sources, like relatives, a social network of friends (who like as not are mothers themselves), or those who will help with childcare in trade for something else. Under this model, however, what should make a woman attractive to a promiscuous male isn’t her exploitability, but rather her support network, especially if she’s successfully raised at least one other child to prove she can do it. A promiscuous male seeking out a female looking for strong paternal investment a isn’t win/lose fitness arrangement if he gets her pregnant, it’s lose/lose. Promiscuous men/promiscuous women in which all the men invest a little bit and family helps is win/win. Highly invested man/highly invested woman is win/win. Some blend of the two in invested polygyny or polyandry is also win/win. Humans are very flexible like that, and each arrangement as its advantages and disadvantages; but promiscuous/low or no investment plus individual seeking high investment is a combination that’s much less effective for anybody**.

Back to the article.

So how did this team put their sexual “exploitability” hypothesis to the test? Goetz and her colleagues planned to call a bunch of undergraduate males into the lab and ask them to rate a set of women in terms of attractiveness based on their photographs. But first they needed to pick the appropriate images. To figure out which sorts of women might be deemed most receptive to a sexual advance or most vulnerable to male pressure or coercion, they asked a large group of students (103 men and 91 women) to nominate some “specific actions, cues, body postures, attitudes, and personality characteristics” that might indicate receptivity or vulnerability

I see no possible way in which this line of approach could be compromised or confounded by cultural variables. How bout you guys?

These could be psychological in nature (e.g., signs of low self-esteem, low intelligence, or recklessness), or they might be more contextual (e.g., fatigue, intoxication, separation from family and friends). A third category includes signs that the woman is physically weak, and thus more easily overpowered by a male (e.g., she’s slow-footed or small in stature). According to the authors, rape constitutes one extreme end of the “exploitation” spectrum—cheesy pickup lines the other.

The sad part is this would function just fine as a study of how people seeking to actually sexually exploit someone select victims. It’s just a complete failure as a study of evolved reproductive strategy.

By asking students for the relevant cues, the experimenters reasoned, they’d keep their own ideas about what makes a woman “exploitable” from coloring their study. When all was said and done, the regular folks in the lab had come up with a list of 88 signs that—in their expert undergraduate opinions—a woman might be an especially good target for a man who wanted to score. Here’s a sampling of what they came up with: “lip lick/bite,” “over-shoulder look,” “sleepy,” “intoxicated,” “tight clothing,” “fat,” “short,” “unintelligent,” “punk,” “attention-seeking,” and “touching breast.”

Attempting to keep out confounding variables fail. The next paragraph is also pretty much just a quick and dirty anthropological review on straight male undergraduates’ ideas of which women are “easy”. Although the fact that they took their study images off the internet is possibly relevant, in a “their study was pulling people’s photos off Facebook and OKCupid” kinda way.

Now it was time for the test. A fresh group of 76 male participants was presented with these images in a randomized sequence and asked what they thought of each woman’s overall attractiveness, how easy it would be to “exploit” her using a variety of tactics (everything from seduction to physical force), and her appeal to them as either a short-term or a long-term partner. The results were mixed.

That should not be surprising.

Physical cues of vulnerability—the pictures of, say, short women and hefty ones—had no effect. These women were not necessarily seen as easy lays, nor were they judged as especially appealing partners for either a casual fling or a lifelong marriage.

I’m… glad we had a study to determine this.

On the other hand, the more psychological and contextual cues—pictures of dimwitted- or immature-seeming women, for example, or of women who looked sleepy or intoxicated, did seem to have an effect: Not surprisingly, men rated them as being easy to bed. But more importantly, they were also perceived as being more physically attractive than female peers who seemed more lucid or quick-witted. This perceived attractiveness effect flipped completely when the participants were asked to judge these women as potential long-term partners. In other words, the woozy ladies were seen as sexy and desirable—but only for fleeting venereal meetings. They lost their luster entirely when the men were asked to rate these same women’s attractiveness as prospective girlfriends or wives.

One might almost take this as a hint that sex is actually not the same thing as reproduction, psychologically speaking.

The possible evolutionary logic behind this interaction is fairly straightforward: In the latter case, the man would risk becoming the cuckoldee, not the cuckolder. (Of course you could also argue that men might rather marry a woman who looked like she could hold up her end of the conversation over French toast.)

Oh, obvious and non-hateful explanation, you so crazy. Alternatively, there’s an important and substantial difference between what people seek when they’re after the pleasure of sex itself and what they seek when they’re after a partner to relate and reproduce with- and this need not be complex evolutionarily produced psychology, but rather basic observation and reasoning skills.

In a follow-up study (that ended up being published first), the authors tried to add some nuance to their sexual exploitability hypothesis. Graduate student David Lewis led a project to narrow in on the specific type of man who would be most alert to the sort of “exploitability” cues outlined above. Not every man, it seems, is equally proficient at homing in on these weak spots in women. So he and his colleagues asked 72 straight men to evaluate the same photos as before, and in the same way. But this time, the researchers also measured some key personality traits in the male raters, as well as the extent to which they desired and pursued uncommitted sex. The students were asked, for instance: “With how many different partners have you had sexual intercourse without having interest in a long-term committed relationship with that person,” and, “How often do you experience sexual arousal when you are in contact with someone you are not in a committed romantic relationship with?”

Again, this would be an excellent sociology study of sexual exploitation.

The main finding to emerge from this follow-up study was that the more promiscuity-minded men who happened also to have deficiencies in personal empathy and warmth were the ones most vigilant and responsive to female “exploitability” cues. Men without this critical calculus—say, a disagreeable man who prefers monogamy, or a caring one who likes to play the field—are more likely to have these cues fly right past their heads and miss the opportunity to capitalize on an “easy lay.”

….Framed this way it almost seems like some sort of defect in these guys.

o rather than the sexual exploitability hypothesis summing up the male brain as one big ball of undifferentiated stereotype, the caveat here is that there are multiple subtypes of reproductive strategies in men. Not all men are pricks, in other words.

Happily I didn’t need either the author of the article or the architects of the study to tell me that. And the exploitative men are still much likelier to be the losers in the fitness game. Sadly they won’t disappear in a few generations as a result, because evolution almost certainly didn’t directly create them in the first place.

It’s easy to see the sexual exploitability hypothesis as misogynistic, but I don’t believe the authors are advancing a chauvinistic ideology

Nah, I just think they’re using a chauvinistic ideology to inform their ideas of what constitutes fitness instead of thinking through the reproductive math and taking into account what raising children requires for a savannah forager*** instead of a North American youth.

Take those kinds of complaints up with natural selection, not the theorists untangling its sometimes-wicked ways. The authors are trying—admirably, I think—to decipher an implicit social algorithm in the hopes of better understanding gender relations.

Why is it the people saying “IT’S JUST SCIENCE YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH IT” are almost always citing lazy, shoddy science?

I’m not going to bother fisking the rest of it; the upshot is the author takes some stabs in the dark at recognizing that there’s more to fitness than mating events, that their “easiness” variables are hopelessly muddled, and also that evolutionary psychology is cripplingly prone to just-so storytelling. Read the rest of it if you like (it may make you think better of the author), but as for salient points to make, I’m done right here.

*This is not the same as “young people”, see also, rates of teen pregnancy in which the parents willingly set out to have a child. But these people don’t usually go to college, at least not then.

**Bear in mind I’m talking about African hunter-gatherers and NOT modern North Americans. The environment in which we developed our reproductive behavior did not contain any form of social services, food banks or food stamps, orphanages, easy long-distance travel, charitable organizations, free clinics, or anything else that makes an unintentional child with minimal paternal/family investment possible to raise to adulthood. Infanticide of children whose needs were beyond low available resources was a sad, unfortunate norm until we developed civilizations- and our sexual psychology must have evolved millions of years before that happened.

***Another thing missing from this model is that humans don’t occur in lone, ranging patterns outside of civilization, they form small, tight communities. Exploitative behavior of all kinds tends to have a very high social cost unless it’s embedded in the structure of the culture itself. (Which sometimes happens, but generally only in cultures richer in resources that can afford to outbreed the loss of children due to neglect.) In other words, a serial deceiver generally isn’t fooling anyone after long at all.

Via commenter BH, an Atlantic article arguing that everyone has missed the point of Makode Linde’s “brilliant” golliwog cake.

The article does go into some detail missing from the original reporting on it, the important bits of which were a) The culture minister and her entourage had no clue what she’d be walking into other than that it was purportedly about female genital mutilation, and b) the minister had been under media fire previously for supposedly being pro-censorship of art, or at least heavily critical of “provocative” art. So yes, it was basically a setup meant to put a politician in a no-win scenario, which banked on her going along with it, which was a pretty good bet.

It also argues that it was actually a brilliant piece of art whose point was to demonstrate Sweden’s disconnect from the reality of Africa and Africans and illustrate the alienness of the experience of being black or African in Sweden. The article concludes:

There’s no doubt that Adelsohn-Liljeroth and the many Swedes involved in campaigning against FGM seem to be kind-hearted, noble-minded people who oppose racism and would like to help the victims of female genital mutilation. Linde, even if he has corralled them all into a disastrous photo op that could even cost Adelsohn-Liljeroth her job (it shouldn’t), probably doesn’t mean to embarrass them personally so much as draw attention to the subtle racial politics of Sweden’s popular conceptions of FGM and Africans generally. That’s not an easy thing to explain to people in words, but a screaming cake seems to have done it.

To which I would reply: no it didn’t. If it had, neither the Atlantic article nor the Africa Is A Country article explaining it would need to exist.

For one thing, that’s not what Linde said it was supposed to do at any point, and as the artist one presumes he would know. (His statements on the cake have been mostly semicoherent and range from LOL I TROLL U to “you’re just not sophisticated enough to understand”, and reinforce the “performance artist as unrepentant and undirected attention whore” impression.)

For another, if your art needs to come with a lengthy explanation of what exactly it’s supposed to express, it has essentially failed as art. Guernica doesn’t need to come with a “war is horrible” pamphlet in order to understand the painting, although if you’re unschooled in art history you’ll probably wonder what the point of having everyone’s features squashed on one half of their face is*. Even if you don’t know it was painted during the Spanish Civil War in the aftermath of a bombing, the idea that it’s about senseless suffering and chaos comes through just fine on its own. It’s not standard representational art, but it’s not enigmatic either.

Not all art is even meant to express something other than “pretty!”, or for that matter “ugly!”. It doesn’t necessarily need to. But when it IS meant to express a particular thing, it’s on the artist to make sure their point is even possible to take from the result, much as it’s on the writer to communicate their ideas efficiently and not on the reader to possess advanced detective skills to find it. Dumb audience members who aren’t going to get it and probably don’t want it exist, but when almost the entire world can’t find the expressed idea, that’s not on the audience as a failure, it’s on the artist.

It’s entirely possible that all that’s being expressed is that it’s possible to make really racist images and have people go along with them as long as you manipulate them in the correct ways, and then deduce that what makes this possible to accomplish is a meeting in Swedish culture of norms of avoiding conflict with the abstractedness of Africa and Africans to most Swedes. But I really do not think that makes the cake, or the artist, brilliant. Upsetting people by being blantly offensive not a high-order skill, and sadly neither is manipulating politicians who are feeling public opinion pressure.

At the end of the day it’s still just a really offensive cake.

*The point of cubism is to show all perspectives from one point of view. That’s pretty much the entirety of it.

Well this one just managed to sneak right up on me, but apparently it’s time for the annual NRA Convention again. And while I’m not going, those of you who are, might I make a request?

Drop by the HS Precision booth, and ask about their choice of “celebrity” endorsements. I mean for fuck’s sake, even if you’re a “Yay government they do no wrong!” jackboot cheerleader, and you don’t consider Lon Horiuchi a murderer excused by federal fiat when justice came looking for him, then at the very least he’s a spectacularly bad shot.

What sane company would use either of those options to endorse their product?

Oh wait. HS Precision isn’t sane.

So yeah, if you’re going to the NRA Convention, please drop by the HS Precision booth and find out if they’ve perchance seen the error of their ways. But I wouldn’t bet on a friendly response.

(more…)

The story thus far: In December of 2010, Qwest was doing line work on the main road behind our house, and cut our phone line. For whatever reason, the tech sent out to fix it couldn’t find the right “RECONNECT HERE” section in the time allotted before moving to the next ticket in the queue, and thus ran just a patch cord out to the main drop. Basically the equivalent of “Our power went out, can we run an extension cord to the neighbors?” We were assured someone would be along to fix it more properly within a week. Fine, if it’s stupid and it works, it isn’t stupid. And on that premise, the relative importance of me calling and nagging them to come fix it right as the months wore on was fairly minimal. If it goes down, it would’ve been damn near a mini-vacation for me given my work setup. Eventually, or more specifically the day before yesterday, the original tech came by to make good. Which apparently was still not possible without MASSIVE INTER-CORPORATE OPERATION which is starting to make storming Normandy look fairly straightforward.

But this isn’t about Qwest, although they do rather suck. This is about the huge, gaping, rancid maw of suck and fail that is Comcast.

Now just by typing that particular company name, I can already hear teeth gnashing in rage at them, but the Los Alamos branch of Comcast is special. Having already experienced their unique take on content delivery (don’t), pricing (hookers & blow), and customer service (answering machine that isn’t hooked up), when we bought this house we naturally dumped them and jumped straight to satelite. Never had them, any of their crap, or anything even remotely to do with them at this address.

A while after we finished building our fence, Kodos (an only-dog at the time) set up a way larger than normal racket while out sniffing around doing dog stuff. LabRat goes out to investigate, and discovers that two comcast workers (truck visible on the main road beyond the fence) have decided that there’s not really much need to ask property owners for access, and simply hopped the fence to access… something. There’s a box back there that’s supposedly phone-related rather than comcast, but the relevant details are out. LabRat, not knowing that our county has a specific law protecting dogs that bite tresspassers, hauls Kodos in and the cops are called, curses muttered. Relevant to today’s story only in establishing pattern.

Fast forward to the great pyramid building operation that is getting our phone line unfucked. Part of this requires locating existing lines for apparently everything from original phone to ley, and the last two days have been a fustercluck of parading workers coming to find these things. Until today, the county, the phone company, gas, electric, druid, and everybody else have been polite, courteous professionals. “Good afternoon, sir. My name is LineFinderGuy and I’m from WeGotLinesHere inc to find the type of line I find for your phone project.” Cool. No problem, let me haul the dogs in, let me know when you’re done, and I’ll stay out of your hair.

Guess who doesn’t follow this pattern! Lunch today rolls around, so all three dogs are busy drooling on LabRat’s feet, when Yet Another White Truck not just parks near the house, but parks in the driveway in such a way that I ain’t getting anything in or out till it leaves. I wander in to the kitchen to tell LR of the arrival so she can distract the dogs with meat while I answer the front door and do the aforementioned “Hi I’m From” dance. As I finish explaining, I turn, and out the window lo but who do I behold? Why it’s some fat fuck waddling around inside the fence! Curiously, the doorbell remains un-rung!

Brimming with inquisitiveness, and considering that anyone stupid enough to enter a yard pretty clearly obvious as containing some quantity of dog at most times he may have means to Deal with said dogs, I inquired as to his name and JUST WHAT THE SWEET BLISTERING SHITBLAST YOU’RE DOING IN MY FUCKING YARD why he is inside my fence. Surprise washed over me as a tsunami when he revealed his affiliation with Comcast, stated in their native surly patois of “I’m with comcast. Who are you?”

It did not go better from there.

After extensive explanation of the complete lack of comcast, or any welcome for them and theirs, said fuck was eventually ejected from the property, though at a much lower velocity than would have suited me.

Thus, in conclusion, fuck Comcast and their shitdick asshole unprofessional jizzbags that work for them. Feel free to contemplate interesting methods of deterring such behavior in comments. I’m leaning towards electrocution, or “You’re in my yard without permission, sit your ass down keep your hands where I can see them and we’ll let Johnny Law handle introductions since you’re so bad at it yourself.”

So I was more or less hoping that my local universe would move on from the subject after experiencing a deep realization of shame, but it never works like that, and thus one of the hottest topics on the right and even among the primary candidates is contraception! And specifically, Rush Limbaugh’s little incident regarding a feminist activist who testified about contraception!

Now, Sandra Fluke is in fact a feminist activist, and there is plenty to pick at in her testimony, like whether her friend with PCOS was denied oral hormone treatment because of some sort of religious objection to having anything that can be used as contraception available through insurance plans, or because insurance companies are often jerks about providing treatment they view as expensive. There’s also the issue that for those of us who pay for our contraception out of pocket and have a pretty good bead on how much the kind of contraception she’s talking about actually costs per year, her estimate was way high. There’s also a larger debate in there about Obamacare again and the issues of mandating that citizens buy particular services and then mandating what those services must offer.

Is that the conversation being had on the right?

Fucking of course not.

The conversation we’re having appears to have the following major points:

a) How much sex Sandra Fluke has is a critically important public issue we need to bravely discuss. If she’s a slut that’s something we need to TALK ABOUT RIGHT NOW because she has to TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for having sex. In this case responsibility for sex involves not using contraception, but being publicly shamed for having any.

b) Rush Limbaugh and anybody else should be able to be as big assholes as they like without experiencing any kind of social or market consequences, because otherwise it’s CENSORSHIP.

c) Men on the left have said equally nasty things about female conservatives, therefore men on the right should be allowed to too because otherwise NO FAIR.

d) Nothing Rush says is of consequence because he’s an entertainer, simultaneously with

e) YOU GUYS WE HAVE TO DEFEND RUSH RIGHT NOW OTHERWISE THE LIBERALS WIN.

Ken over at Popehat has already covered several of these points ably, so I’ll mostly leave them alone. (Especially the part about what a massive whiny tool it makes you look like to complain that an activist was that easily able to provoke you into making a major fool of yourself in the eyes of anyone not already mainlining your Kool-aid, or to complain that you aren’t allowed to be just as much of an ass as you’d like without being disapproved of.)

What I wish to talk about instead is the part that’s really making my head explode, which is that apparently Rush Limbaugh and hundreds of conservative men considered relevant enough to be given a megaphone for their soapbox have no clue whatsoever how birth control or sex or health insurance work.

I’m about to get a little personal here. It might even be titillating. Call me an exhibitionist if you will, but the primary subject at hand here is oral contraception, or if you will, oral hormone therapy. These are them, my True Slut Adventures.

I was first prescribed “birth control pills” when I was fifteen because my menstrual cycle was both very irregular and very painful, to the point where I was literally incapacitated for days or even more than a week once my period decided to show up, for however long it felt like staying. The local reason for this is that I was just unlucky; the meta-reason for this is that being a first-world girl, I’d had better and richer nutrition than women’s bodies usually had evolving, and did not pair off by the age of 17 as I would have if I’d been born a hunter-gatherer. The way a woman’s cycles are normally tamed into regularity “in the wild”, as it were, is pregnancy, and neither my parents nor I saw that as a particularly attractive option. My parents didn’t have a problem with the idea of CONTRACEPTION BEING GIVEN TO A TEENAGE GIRL either, since they figured they were hormone pills and not mind control. They were right, too, as I remained a virgin until I was well past 18*.

Then I got to college and somewhere in the second year of it my TRUE SLUT ADVENTURES began and I had sex. With a guy I was faithful to that lived in another state. I think I went through maybe two boxes of condoms’ worth of actual sex per year as a result. Then I really turned into a HYPERSLUT, amount of sexwise, when I graduated and moved in with him and eventually married him. He posts on this blog sometimes, you can say hi to him.

Cost of “contraception” over years of abstinence while being treated for a mild but problematic reproductive health issue, being involved with someone long-distance, and marriage: exactly the same per year. Incidentally also almost exactly the same as friends I had who had many more partners, minus the cost of condoms for non-tested-and-trusted partners, which is pretty trivial.

This is why people thought it was a problem when a Congressional panel on birth control was held without a single woman on the panel: because apparently there are a lot of guys out there who have no idea, on a basic and not even ideological level, how birth control pills work or that they or some basic variant on them are also useful and necessary treatment for a wide variety of women’s health problems (like PCOS, and endometriosis), and that if you use them they become a fixed cost that has nothing whatsoever to do with how much sex you have or with how many different partners. Goodness knows Bill O’Reilly apparently doesn’t either. Rush probably damn well SHOULD know how birth control works given he’s been married four times and has no children, but apparently it didn’t take. This isn’t just a oral hormone contraceptives vs. everything else argument either- most forms of birth control other than condoms are a fixed, regular cost independent of the frequency of sex, and the ones that aren’t (like spermidical jelly) aren’t healthy to use often. Even condoms with spermicidal lube, which is most of them, aren’t necessarily. And not even Sandra Fluke was arguing that condoms need to be covered by health insurance.

What’s blowing me away about the way the whole debate is playing out on those sections of the right that I regularly interact with is this bizarre, permeating worldview that birth control is something only some strange sub-cult of leftist Sex Women uses, and not, you know, the majority of American adults. What’s even more bizarre is the fact that apparently the Sex Women somehow aren’t involving men as they rack up their birth control bill; the strangest assertion I’ve seen yet is the idea that “women are getting paid to have sex but I don’t see anyone paying men to!”. (Paraphrased.) HOW IS BABBY FORMED, DO YOU KNOW? LESBIAN SEX AND MASTURBATION DO NOT REQUIRE CONTRACEPTION.

Oh yeah, “paying people to have sex”, that was a good one, which formed the basis of the “prostitute” allegation. Leaving aside that it wouldn’t be taxpayers paying, but rather insurance companies using the money paid in by people who have insurance with that carrier, it makes for all sorts of interesting other arguments. By that logic, anyone who shares Rush Limbaugh’s insurance carrier has paid him to destroy his hearing and his liver by abusing prescription drugs, and also for the enhanced size of his ass via whatever health care he’s receiving related to his weight, as well as paying him to have sex if that Viagra he was caught with in the Dominican Republic (a famous sex-tourism destination) was indeed his.

And you know what? I’m not Rush’s insurance plan, but I wouldn’t bloody well care if I was, because THAT IS HOW HEALTH INSURANCE WORKS. You pay in to a common pool and ideally it protects you from major catastrophe and smooths some of the edges off your more mundane health issues. You have a choice not to buy it if you really can’t stomach the idea of even distantly enabling your neighbor’s more self-inflicted health issues even to have your own treated, which is in fact a valid argument against mandates that everyone has to, but most of us don’t really mind because it’s not really our business anyway.

Even if you accept the idea that anything health insurance covers is something someone is “paying you to do”, what exactly is your alternative, Sparky? Would you rather pay me to have kids? That’s what lack of contraception tends to lead to, and both the OBGYN costs and the kid’s medical costs tend to be covered by health insurance. (That’s not even going into the various actually taxpayer funded government services for children whose parents cannot fully support them.) This isn’t a Sex Woman set of costs, it’s the cost every single fertile heterosexual couple out there faces- most of whom are married.

What’s that? Abstinence after marriage is the only responsible solution to the horrific burden way less than 3k a year would be for insurance to pay for hormonal contraception, in order to treat medical conditions and prevent having more children than couples want or can afford?

I don’t think it will catch on.

*Their idea of sex education wasn’t “shame her and scare her silly”, so much as “teach her everything that could happen and will happen, that her body belongs to her and not to anybody telling her what to do with it one way or another, and that all told, sex is a lot better with someone you love and trust and sometimes regrettable in various ways predictable and un”. Thanks, mom and dad, it was all good advice. I’m sure if I’d had a higher baseline drive and a lower threshold for intimacy of all kinds I would have had some of that teen sex you hear about, but the idea was “safely and without devastating consequences”, not “keep her legs locked until legal adulthood”.

So yesterday Jay brings us a story about two keystone cops who plugged each other, rather than the guy they were trying to catch. Supposedly the dude is a child pornographer, a phrase usually inserted into news stories in order to make sure everybody knows This Guy Is Skeevy And Bad. For some oddball reason most of us, myself included, are in the vein that would have a grand old time introducing people who sexually exploit and/or abuse children to Mr. Blowtorch and Mr. Sandpaper.

The part that made me do a doubletake, though, is that that wasn’t my first reaction to reading the quote from the article Jay put up. My very first take was more along the lines “I wonder what trumped up bullshit they’re throwing at this schlub. Probably some dipshit 17 year old sent a picture of her boobs to his phone,” and it doesn’t take more than a few seconds with google to turn up copious examples of such trivial things ruining lives.

Further along, it turns out the suspect was 45 years old and at a Harry Potter premier, which still isn’t damning by itself, but does tend to raise the eyebrows a skosh. Either way, evil sleazster or maligned dumbass, the fact that we have managed to fuck up our laws regarding sex so spectacularly that the previously visceral label “child pornographer” has not only lost all immediate impact, but swung all the way around to bring up an initial impression of sympathy (or perhaps more accurately severe doubt of the charges and sympathy for being on the receiving end of high-impact bullshit), probably means I need a much bigger and much stiffer drink. With breakfast. From now on.

Y’know how sometimes a chef or craftsman will focus exclusively on one aspect of the dish or subject at hand? Beermakers go for huge hits of hops. Laphroaig goes for insane levels of smokiness. Chocolatiers can strive for a richness that causes diabetes at 50 paces. Recoil junkies pack the .700 nitro express into a pistol. It doesn’t always work.

Sometimes, it’s perfect.

I fucking salute this profane fucking work of fuckart, and agree completely that the douchey fuckpilgrims of Harvard responsible for the aborted ganglia conducting the fuck-addled “study” can get fucked upside down with a ninety pound dictionary containing entries only for “fuck you” and “confirmation bias” and “worthless fucking fuckweasel” followed by a thorough plugging of the now bloodsoggy fuckhole with a copy of “Common Sense.”

(H/T Kevin)

I’ve only been home a day or so and am still catching up, so I don’t have much in the way of backlogged ideas for blogfodder. Mostly, I’ve been enjoying being in my own bed with my own pets with my own spouse in my own household. Phoenix is a nice city as cities go, but it’s not really “home” anymore.

That said, while surfing around at other people’s places, I ran across a question I’ve seen a lot, that seems to crop up on surveys and inane first-date interviews everywhere- “Do you believe in true love?”

What struck me as odd about the question on the eleventy-billionth reading is that I have no idea what it’s even supposed to mean. What the fuck IS “true love”, anyway?

If it’s “a deeply and sincerely felt emotional affectionate and romantic attachment”, then not only do I believe in true love, I think it’s pretty common. It can probably be differentiated somewhat from lust and infatuation, but millions of happily married and otherwise long-time couples across the face of the earth make the question somewhat trivial.

If it’s “a bond that can never be broken no matter what because love always comes through”, then that strikes me as not only a fictional thing, but still a silly question. Relationships require work, romances no exception, and if anything it’s much easier to hurt the other person and damage or destroy the relationship when you are so intimate that you know all the vulnerable points that can be hit. I’d chalk this up to the difference between fantasy and reality, but what makes the question really bizarre is that this is exactly what the fantasies are ABOUT- every single love story isn’t about two people forgiving each other for anything and effortlessly getting along with each other, they’re about conflict and misunderstanding and going to lengths to demonstrate one’s dedication.

The underlying question- and the one that gets our attention again and again- is always “will the bond survive the pressures on it”, and what the pressures are depends on the setting, culture, and the sophistication of the fantasy; immature and youthful fantasies tend to rely mostly on very dramatic outside pressures (RIVAL CLAN OF VAMPIRES!), but still tend to feature stupid misunderstandings and other user-generated errors. More mature ones tend to focus on pressures like a job that takes all of one person’s time, monomanias, and the sheer passage of time and lessening of newness, but even in fiction “and so they were incredibly attracted to each other and thus they stayed together forever” never makes the cut. Love stories often continue to qualify as such when external pressures keep a couple apart, and are certainly not an unfavored genre.

So if it’s not love as most of us experience it (note we rarely witter on about “true sadness”, or “true amusement”), and it’s not “romances that don’t require work”, nor is it “romances foreordained to end happily”, what the hell is it supposed to BE?

The world needs an answer to this. We have surveys to fill out.