Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

HNT founder Osbasso’s end-of-year assignment was to repost our favorite Thursday photos from the previous year.

I’ve got two.

This was the most fun, part of a series I did based on spam email titles. This one was a post called “HNT – Got Wood Disaster”

On the more serious/artsy/sexy side I liked this one, HNT – Painting Project, from when I was cleaning up a previously-finished garage conversion.

More like this here.

Of course those are only my favorites — feel free any time to pick your own favorites from my HNT archives.

Anyway, I’ve really, really enjoyed participating this year, and really appreciated visiting other participants and seeing the huge, huge variety of what it means to be “half-nekkid” anyway.

Happy New Year.

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

Via Bad Man’sTumbler post about a get-a-clue-NiceGuy™ rant I just (finally?) stumbled across Heartless Bitches International. I haven’t read enough of to endorse it out of hand but it looks pretty interesting.

From their intro page

Despite the statements of some of our more Bitter Heartless Bitches, Heartless Bitches International is NOT about Man-Hating. We don’t discriminate against stupidity, arrogance, irresponsibility, bloated egos, or immaturity on the basis of gender.

Has HBI got you all hot under the collar? Before you run off in a snit, ready to send email detailing the extent of your ire, look up the words “irony”, “satire” and “caricature” in the dictionary..

Which is a long way of getting around to a question that kept popping into my brain during my mostly-delightful, snow-induced hiatus:

You know that old “male bashing” line “If we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all?” It’s usually associated with feminism but… I dunno… the more I think about it the more it seems like the kind of “Sex in the City” style anti-feminism that masks passive-aggressive resignation behind “perkiness.”

Via Phil Plait of the (well, except for this I guess) entirely non-sex Bad Astronomy on the latest debunking study about “abstinence only” sex education.

“Taking a [virginity] pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”

See his remarks, and follow the links here.

Lots of people have remarked on this study — for the most part limiting themselves to predictable, progressive forehead thumping and “duh”-ing that there should ever be any question. And to be honest my own forehead’s a bit sore… though the keyboard marks are already starting to fade.

What I haven’t seen pointed out so far, an even more damning indictment of abstinence-only education, is that they can’t fall back on educational-incompetence dodge (a.k.a. “abstinence-only education can’t be wrong, it can only taught wrong.“) Because, not to put too fine a point on it, they’re hitting all their other objectives! However unhelpful or actively counterproductive it might be to their actual health or well-being students who go as far as taking the approved “abstinence pledges” are “correctly” skeptical of condoms. They’re about 10% less likely to use them than matched peers who didn’t drink the abstinence-only Kool Aid…

... but no less likely to not have sex period.

Conclusion? It ain’t how they’re teaching it that’s leading to failure of students to actually be abstinent: for better or worse they’re teaching everything else they teach just fine. It’s just that, evidently, even using the best methodology money ($175 million just last year!) can buy you just can’t teach people to abstain from sex.

Another great one from Holly of The Pervocracy, this time on the overlap between perverts and geeks.

Geeks didn’t get laid in high school—or even if they did, they were still mocked for being unsexy and they probably felt they weren’t getting nearly as many sexual privileges as the cool kids. Well, we’re grownups now, so in your face, cool kids!

And the most important, probably, is fantasy. Many perversions are really enactments of sex as high drama. Probably the one defining feature of geekery, more concrete than any other, is escapism. So naturally, we have to escape ordinary human sex. My bedroom is a dungeon, my lover a beautiful monster, violence making our sex so much more intense and passionate and dramatic than reality. Perversion creates a heightened world, sexier than mere sex, a world insulated from reality, (a world where you’re really awesome cool and sexy) a world you can be swept away in.

I used to run around with my friends and get bruised and dirty playing that we were grand mythical figures. Now I do… really, the same thing, but with less pants.

She said it here.

There’s so much cool stuff to unpack there. The big one about how geeks (i.e. the non-beautiful crowd) not being acknowledged even for the sex they were having, harks way, way back to one of my earliest posts, from a now long, long gone blogger named Cat Nastey, along the same lines. Nastey said

I was hanging out with a friend of mine last night and we got to talking about sex…big surprise with my friends!!

Both my friend and I consider “sex” to be more then just about the
penis-in-hole action and tend to get frustrated with partners (straight guys)
who seem to have this “penis-in-hole-or-nothing” attitude when it
comes to “sex” and the having of “it”. For us,
“sex” can involve many different activities from mutual masturbation to oral sex and doesn’t (nor should it) involve JUST the penis-in-hole definition.

We started joking that most straight guys complain that they aren’t getting
enough sex and that “non-straight” people seem to be having lots and
lots of sex…well, what if it’s all about the definition? Wouldn’t it make
more sense that one might be getting more “sex” if one included more
activities into the the definition of “sex”?

(Even in 2005 that was an archived post (Oct. 2003!) She had such a great perspective on sex. I learned a lot from her blog and I’m sorry she’s gone.)

Another big point I like in Holly’s post is her reference to the progressive double standard of approval for active women who get bruised and dirty everywhere but during sex… where participating in and enjoying getting dirty and bruised is supposed to be sick and wrong.

Holly of The Pervocracy, in another bout of what she calls Cosmocking, takes Cosmopolitan magazine to task for, as always, warning women to put us men first, foremost, and always lest our rock-solid faith in the “no-sex” class paradigm be shaken. For instance, from an article in the January issue called “Surprising Things that Turn Him Off”

Being Kinky in Bed (At First)

There’s nothing wrong with showing enthusiasm. But when it comes to off-the-wall sexcapades, setting the bar—or stripper pole—too high the first few times can make guys wonder what else you have in common with Jenna Jameson. “It feels weird to say it out loud, but I really don’t want a girl to be completely uninhibited in bed when I first start sleeping with her,” says Jon, 27. “I like to feel like we discover some stuff together and then work up to the really experimental stuff.”

I’m actually about halfway with Jon here—it’s awesome to discover new ways to have fun together—but only if you’re actually discovering them. If you’re just biding your time as you reel out the tricks you already knew, it’s not experimentation, it’s pretense.

Read the quote in context here.

Yup, nothing makes us men less comfortable than imagining what might consider “experimental stuff” she thinks is practically passé. (Note: consider that sex manuals from the 50s and early 60s considered both woman-on-top intercourse and any kind of oral sex “experimental” for both women and men.)

Remember that one of the peculiarities of men’s self-induced no-sex class indoctrination says men should expect (and, according to Cosmo anyway, even demand) a “no” from women… and thus to keep asking (no condom this time?), and asking (anal?), and asking (threesome?) till we get one. And since men, too, have comfort zones we’re kind of hoping to get to that “no” before we get out of ours (uh… threesome… with your *dad?!?!) The great thing about kicking that indoctrination, by the way, is there’s no advantage to “pushing” anybody’s boundaries just to see how far they’ll go before saying no. And here’s the deal with that: if you’re not “experimenting” to see where one’s partner’s “no” is you can actually experiment, together no less, to see what you both really enjoy doing together!

Way to be, Cosmo.

World-class cynic Scott Adams of Dilbert.com Blog turns science news into dating tips for the pointy-haired-boss “seduction community.”

I always need to eat something before I attempt writing or else nothing comes out. ... I always assumed this was just a combination of ordinary hunger plus a habit that borders on OCD. ...

Recently a reader sent me a link about a writer who has the same experience but better research to explain why. The bottom line is that writing requires will power to avoid distraction, and will power is correlated with your glucose levels. In other words, your free will is actually sugar.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/practicing_selfcontrol_consume.php

This makes me wonder if there is an optimal food strategy for seduction. Apparently bringing a woman chocolate will only increase her glucose levels and with that her ability to resist you. In fact, a guy should want his woman to be good and hungry, preferably on a diet. It turns out that resisting one sort of temptation makes it harder to resist a different sort at the same time.

If that is not enough, I just did a Google search to confirm that alcohol lowers your glucose levels. That fits the theory. Everyone knows they have less will power after a few drinks.

http://www.abbottdiabetescare.com/adc_dotcom/url/questionAnswerProfile/en_US/40.20:20/question_answer/question_answer/QuestionAnswer_00103.htm

He paints more of this non-rosy scenario here.

Of course the whole shebang is predicated on the “no-sex” class assumption that a woman who’s willing to go on a date with a man isn’t interested in sex… or at least sex with him… or at least sex with him right then. And it’s further predicated on the “no-sex” class assumption that because women just aren’t naturally interested in sex… or at least sex with you... and therefore it’s ok for you to use leverage to “break down” her will to say no. (Which belief makes you, um, a rapist?)

It’s also predicated on the destructive-to-men (not to mention dangerous to women) circular assumption that a man’s worth is equated with his “score” on the one hand, and that his ability to score equates with his worthiness on the other… and of course on the corresponding assumption that women’s worth is equated with the degree of her reluctance to have sex when she (being a human being and all) wants to… in favor of “holding out” till she can bestow sex (her “favors”) as an acknowledgment of male worthiness.

All of which makes possible knuckleheaded scenarios like… looking for women on diets, just before dinner, who’ve had a drink, and (if you read the rest of Adam’s post) have been led into further temptation by resisting going into a store the man steers her past on the way to dinner.

Instead of just, I don’t know, assuming that a woman is human, and therefor interested in sex, and looking for ways to make her comfortable with saying yes — or even initiating it herself! — instead of assuming she’d rather not have anything to do with it.

Small wonder Adams is drawn to stuff like this. The bitter, almost misanthropic jokes practically write themselves.

According to Wikipedia, the non-romantic, full-on nerd definition of a light cone is

In special relativity, a light cone (or null cone) is the surface describing the temporal evolution of a flash of light in Minkowski spacetime. This can be visualized in 3-space if the two horizontal axes are chosen to be spatial dimensions, while the vertical axis is time.

More about light cones here.

There are more romantic ways to put it, however. Paraphrasing to Matt Webb, the author of Mind Hacks and creator of the very cool Light Cone RSS feed says

From the moment of your birth lightwaves that have bounced off your body have been expanding around the Earth into space in a sphere who’s surface (not surprisingly) is growing at the speed of light. Meanwhile, light coming from objects inside that same growing sphere have been reaching you. Put the two together and you’ve got your light sphere.

He said it here.

Webb’s Light Cone page only goes back 50 years but the general principle is pretty cool. Lightwaves, even those reflecting sources far more feeble than a candle, may be about as small as stable particles of matter get but they’re exceedingly long-lived. Lightwaves from the moment of your birth or mine (or anyone else’s who might have been born, no matter how long ago, on on, say, December 25th) are still out there, moving away at 186,000-odd miles per second. Some may travel on till the end of time. Always something to think about.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it’s certainly convenient to get one’s weather forecast on national newscasts… well, not exactly convenient as much as distracting.

The weather outside, actually, is delightful. Snow in the Puget Sound lowlands is about as common as sandstorms in Ohio so this is actually kind of a treat.

I’m reminded of my first ski trip near Wolf Creek Pass in southern Colorado. We’d intended to do backcountry camping on cross-country skis but the avalanche danger was too high to risk it. So, having made the trip (and booked rooms for a week at the Pegosa Springs Motel (the hot springs kept the open pool comfy warm even at 14 below zero) we rented downhill skis instead.

The snow, so hazardous in the back country, was transcendentally heavenly on groomed courses, even for a complete downhill novice like me. Meeting some of my companions at the bottom of a lift one point one of the more experienced skiers said “that was better than sex” and another said “totally, I mean… how can you have an eleven minute orgasm?”

I wouldn’t have gone that far but it was nice.

Well, if the snowfall here isn’t quite better than sex? It’s better than writing about it. :-) And so I’ll be on a very light posting schedule until the weather returns to our regular Seattle Rain Festival — 40 degrees and raining from October to May… which is part of why I’m able to post so much the rest of the year. :-)

More later. Hope you’re all having as much fun as I’ve been — if not outside then in bed!

(p.s. one of my off-line duties during this extended and extremely-uncharacteristic cold snap — just about 13 degrees Fahrenheit the other morning — is keeping the feeder ice-free for our resident hummingbird. I took this photo last year, I think. I’ll post new ones if I can get the little rascal to hold still long enough.)

figleaf

In comments on this post about pop-evolutionary psychology’s fascination with “proving” gender differences Holly Page from Whoopie School said.

...it’s interesting that of all the institutions that science has historically been willing to challenge, the “men are from Mars” notion isn’t one of them. By focusing on the differences, it validates treating people differently by gender or sexual orientation.

She said it here.

Exactly! It’s like… what if scientists refused to reconsider Rousseau’s remark that it was inevitable that one in four children would die of disease before age five? And all they did was set out to prove how inevitable that was? And considering that all it took to change that hugely was elementary sanitation like, say, keeping fecal bacteria out of drinking water! Meanwhile all it takes is equally elementary changes to effect tremendous gender equalization. And they’re almost never interested.

Odd blind spot, eh?