Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Despite the dolorous tones of my previous post I’m now fine. I’m not sure where root canals got their painful reputation — what actually hurts is the #%$!@* abscessed tooth that have to be treated with a root canal.

In fact, just an hour after I better than I have for more than a week.

A few hours after that the last $%)$@*! Vicodin wore off and now I really feel great.

But that’s not what you come to this site expecting, nor is it what I came here to talk about.

Instead, you want to know something else opiates like Vicodin cure? Libidos. Or at least it always cures me of anything like one. Admittedly I’m often in, um, pain when taking prescription painkillers, but on other occasions when I’ve been in comparable pain but using non-opiate analgesics like Toradol a.k.a. ketorolac I was otherwise, well, unimpaired.

Now that I’m back to just a couple of ibuprofen (plus completing a course of antibiotics) I’m… interested again.

And actually, technically, that’s not even what I came here to talk about.

Because before things got to the 3:00AM “hmm, Vicodin or the pliers in the kitchen drawer? Decisions, decisions?” point I’d noticed that in kind of a dog-leg jog away from BDSM, whenever I was erotically distracted my awareness of pain was equally distracted.

I’m not exactly sure how one would write a human-subjects grant application for something like this, let alone get a review board to certify it, but I’m very curious now whether there’s been any research done into erotic and/or sexual stimulation as palliative care.

And, incidentally, no I’m not imagining variations on porn cliché #31, involving the sexy dental-hygienist costume.

Quick aside: despite quite a bit of Googling it turns out that while most “sexy XYZ” costumes are for women there aren’t any readily-findable “sexy dentist” costumes for women. And of course nurses. Sexy tooth-fairy costumes, yes. And at least two dentist costumes meant for men. There are, in the imaginations of “sexy” costume designers… or just as likely their customers… no women dentists and thus no call for special costumes for them. There are “sexy” women doctor’s costumes, which I guess is a nod in the “right” direction considering more than half of all med-school students are now women. But dentists are right out. Not that everyone’s fantasy “sexy” dentist or hygienist would be only female or only male. I just think the omission is odd. Oh, and to conclude this digression, one of the “sexy” male dentist costumes has a giant blue plastic tie that has “open wide” printed on it. So, um, yeah.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so no, I’m actually not thinking about the caregiver-straddling-the-patient schtick for distraction. (In the exceedingly unlikely chance one of my own caregivers is reading this I’m not thinking about you. In this context anyway.) Not least because over time that could get a annoying for the caregiver. In fact I’m not sure how one would go about it. (Audio or visual stimulation through headsets? Participation from a partner? Discreetly placed TENS units? I dunno.

I’m guessing if I participated in such research I’d end up, as usual, in the control group.

By the way, even the forgoing discussion — stimulating though it might be — is not what I came here to talk about. I mostly wanted to mention that now that I’ve recovered from my little experiment in dental agony I’m going to take up to a couple of days to unwind, and maybe convert this site to a whole new blogging platform (as the delightfully not-work-safe AlwaysArousedGirl has been urging me to do for several years now.)

I’ve been so awful to my friend, Laura Agustín. Months ago she suggested I find a place where we could have conversations. No problem I said. And it’s been a terrific problem.

Before I’m through I’ll have moved my blog to an entirely new platform

As I’ve discovered last week and this, an abscessed tooth is remarkably, extraordinarily painful. I’m off to see a highly-paid professional who will use exotic costumes, expensive instruments, and an expectation that I will remain self-disciplined while he or she creates, at least temporarily, a great deal of suffering. All with the expectatin that afterwards I will feel gratitude and a great deal of relief.

Meanwhile, mmm, ibuprofin/hydrocodone “cocktails.”

And yes, I’m aware this really has nothing at all to do with the experience of actual kink/BDSM at all.

Amanda Hess of The Sexist jointly posted with Sady Doyle, who blogs at TigerBeatdown on the Levitt and Dubner’s dumb Superfreakonomics chapter on prostitution, wherein they ask, among other things, why all women aren’t prostitutes given that some of them can earn a lot. Particularly this one they dwell on a lot (“Allie”) who makes $350-$500/hour.

Even accounting for actual hours worked per year $350-$500/hour is still more than even a very highly-paid economics professor is likely to earn per year. Which leads to the second-most obvious question (I’ll get to the first in a minute):

AMANDA: haha right. now, i dont’ know if Levitt and Dubner are heterosexual males, but let’s assume they are.

SADY: assumed!

AMANDA: the only appropriate response to the ridiculous question posed in the article would be, “I don’t know, why don’t you suck cock for a living?” Why don’t you suck cock, out of your fancy house, instead of being a famous economist? I’m sure that will be the pertinent question in “SuperDuperFreakonomics: The Freakiestonomics Yet”

SADY: yes, at some point. WHY AREN’T LEVITT AND DUBNER JOINTLY FELLATING YOU RIGHT NOW: A FREAKONOMIC ANALYSIS.

AMANDA: probably because they don’t like sex?

They said it here and also here.

That last little bit is significant. Because the one other prostitute they mention in their story, a subsistence/street prostitute they name “LaSheena,” says she doesn’t like her job and doesn’t even much like men. So in “pure” economic terms it not liking prostitution or men shouldn’t be an obstacle.

Hess and Doyle speculate that Levitt and Dubner don’t like men either, and so that might make them “failed” prostitutes they call “LaSheena.” But hey, at $28/hr even as a failure her average hourly earnings are still better than a lot of associate professors, which only shifts the question to why it wasn’t rational for the Steves to suck dicks for a living when they first left grad school.

This is not, incidentally, a completely out of line question to post to economists, by the way. A “philosophical” question that comes up in beginning economics seminars is why you wouldn’t mow a neighbor’s lawn for $25 if you won’t agree to pay a neighbor’s kid $25 to mow yours.

#%

Oh wait, remember I was going to mention the first-most obvious question? Maybe it’s because I’m not a super economist but it seems to me that even if I lived in the purest Total Asperger Blinders economist framing of prostitution I’d still want to hear how economics professors imagine the hourly rate would remain $350-500/hr, or even the $28/hr that “LaSheena” earns, if all women (let alone men) “enthusiastically” embraced prostitution.

Quick note: I keep returning to these almost-absurd cases because there’s already been so much excellent, thoughtful, and well-reasoned refutation of the author’s seriously bone-headedly convention-bound set of assumptions.

Sadie of Jezebel says

We got a number of distressed emails about a recent piece in Details. Possibly because the description read, “Getting tricked into fatherhood by a woman hell-bent on getting pregnant is much more common than you think.” Good to know!

Deceptive, baby-hungry women have always been a staple of male-mythology; punching a hole in a condom is the sort of thing we like to do between maxing out guys’ credit cards on shoes and sleeping with their best friends. So it’s not shocking that this particular urban horror story should make the lad-mag rounds just in time for Halloween.

Read the quote in context here.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are as many women who perforate condoms in order to get pregnant with their unwilling partners as there are men who do so to get their unwilling partner’s pregnant, i.e. some but not very many and certainly not enough to warrant a “words of warning” article in Details. (I mean… seriously, in the average Details readers dreams do women want to have their babies!) Sadie puts it in perspective:

For every Cosmo-wielding nutter this guy dredged up (and I’d really like to see the email he sent out requesting quotes from “friends”) he could have found ten thousand who found the idea not merely abhorrent, but insulting and frankly incomprehensible.

Of course, to the author it makes total sense

For the record, one needn’t be “pro-life” to recoil in horror at the implications of one adult using actual pregnancy as a ploy or, worse, punishment against another. It is absolutely and unequivocally a woman’s right to choose whether she will keep a pregnancy to term. It is not, however, the right of any party to chose parenthood for another without his or her competent decision to do so. And while some religious denominations might be sanguine about it, the idea of one person potentially creating a third human being for use as an instrument against another strikes me as brutal, thoughtless, and deeply alienated from the condition of being human. And can I just say it’s also a lousy, lousy reason to have sex. I don’t mention it as often anymore but this is the sort of thing I mean when I say I’m a prudish libertine: mutually agreed-upon sex is great. Mutually agreed-upon procreation is also great (as can be mutually agreed-upon sex for procreation.) Sex to make someone an unsuspecting parent, though, is just ewww!

But the above paragraph is a digression: Details- and perhaps Cosmo-reader fantasies notwithstanding, the likelihood of one adult partner attempting to make an involuntary parent of the other is vanishingly small when compared with, oh, say, the chances of both parties being confronted with the possibility of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy do to failure to use contraception either correctly or, for that matter, at all. It would be lovely if Details, and its sister (in spirit if not in fact) publication, encouraged deeper introspection in that direction.

Deepali Gaur Singh of RHRealityCheck.org talks about another… peculiarity of patriarchal culture, this time in India, particularly in the state of Bahir. Since it’s about men being forced into marriage it could easily be brushed off as another “man bites dog” story but there are a lot of interesting implications for men and feminism. Here’s the gist:

From what once sounded more legend, less fact, it is a menace that has assumed alarming proportions in recent years and spread to the neighboring districts too. The massive pressure of increasing dowry demands and the inability of most parents to fulfill them has resulted in families seeking the services of criminal gangs that kidnap unmarried men and force them into wedlock. Even as cases might appear rampant in certain areas many go unreported out of fear of these local criminals.

According to the police, over the years it has turned into a high-profit, low-risk business that many gangs thrive on as they earn a sizeable commission from these marriage-related kidnappings. And by stretching the saying of “honor among thieves” a little further, their responsibility does not end with the abduction alone. They ensure that the marriage is solemnized and the girl sent to the boy’s home.

Read the quote in context here.

Just to be absolutely clear the primary motivation for kidnapping men for marriage comes from “traditional values” in the area that, combined with poverty, turn already-undesirable daughters into financial and social catastrophes for families. The families of sons demand extortionate dowries of the families of daughters. The families of unmarried daughters are scorned and scandalized. Enough so that it’s pretty common to slaughter infant daughters at birth. Enough so that despite infanticide-induced shortages of girls (average age of marriage: 13!) families of sons still demand dowries the average local family can’t afford. Also, it’s made clear in the post that even when the groom is forced into marriage he and the bride are sent back to his parents/family, which can’t exactly be a bed of roses for her. The post also makes clear that the area is made even muddier by the fact that very, very often it’s families, not individuals, who arrange marriages even though it’s usually the individuals, not the families that bear the brunt of any and all unhappiness with these arrangements. And finally, it’s important to remember that bride’s families coercing men into marriage isn’t terrifically common even in India, let alone the rest of the world. That said…

It’s a wonderful illustration of the principle that the goals of feminism aren’t just for the benefit of women.

—-

Quick note: They’re not as familiar to English speakers with Western European heritage but for thousands of years arranged and/or forced marriages are and have been a feature of patriarchy for both women and men. There’s I have a tendency to equate “patriarchy” with “male dominance” and in recent centuries that’s been a lot more true. But in the past, and in much of the world today, it’s more accurate to call it an extended-family hierarchy system where, yes, the senior-most male is the titular patriarch but subordinate children, and not just subordinate female children, are regarded as instruments of their seniors. Just one more way the objectives of feminism worldwide go beyond benefits to women.

Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise asks

I wonder if Hollywood luminaries will sign manifestos in defense of James Phillip Edwards, a 60-year-old Kansas City man who admits to drugging little girls and molesting them

Read the quote in context here.

I wonder further if they'd consider 42 days adequate should Edwards be found guilty, since that's all Polanski served for drugging and assaulting a 13-year-old before skipping the country and they think that's all the time he should ever serve.

Yesterday I mentioned a post by Fran Langum at Blue Gal about some of the absurdities that can arise when economists try their hand at pop-referencing prostitution. Fran mentioned that Echidne of the Snakes had taken a more serious look at the issue, and since Echidne’s a giant walking brain cell I took a more light-hearted approach.

Later I read Echidne’s post and confirmed that, yup, she tidily unmasts some of the pillars of the pop-reference approach. The whole thing’s a good read but I’d like to highlight one particular point. After quoting the authors of Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Times Online column (from the Times entertainment section!) she digs in:

“Why has the prostitute’s wage fallen so far [in the last 100 years, with demand falling 80% as well]? Because demand has fallen dramatically. Not the demand for sex. That is still robust. But prostitution, like any industry, is vulnerable to competition.”

That competition, dear ladies, is you giving it out for free! So let’s return to the beginning of that quote: “ Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?”

So why would the supply of “free” sex have risen? What is so different from the new generation of women,eh? Are they rather stupid, not to realize that you’d make more by charging for fucking? Or let’s put it in reverse: Why was the supply of “free” sex so much less in the past?

Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to answer these questions for us (at least in the above excerpt I found). But they are very important questions, after all, and their answers have something to do with the way societies punished women who “supplied” “free” sex. You can still get stoned for it in a few places on earth.

By not answering these questions Levitt and Dubner make it sound as if men would always want more sex than they can get “freely”, whatever the societal setup. Yet the amount they appear to get has risen over time, and in theory, at least, it’s possible to imagine a society where the “supply” of “free” sex would be enough to cause the prostitution markets to die out.

She said it here.

Cool huh? If men’s “hard-wired” drive for sex really was insatiable then it wouldn’t matter how many women wrested their own sexual autonomy from social and familial control in order to have it when they wished because it would never be enough: there would still be as many prostitutes and they’d still be as busy as ever. And yet…

Y’know, given that so much of society is organized around the principle that men are biologically sexually insatiable and that women are sexually inadequate it’s kind of shocking to see the whole notion undermined in just a few paragraphs of a research paper.

What’s more shocking, however, is the durability of the ideas about insatiability and inadequacy even in the face of considerable evidence.

What’s even more shocking is the fucking authors themselves are so invested in the idea they don’t see its refutation in their own work!

That’s some powerful paradigm! Um, “no-sex” class much?

Geneticist and paleoanthropologist John Hawks tackles arguments from a new book claiming that modern men are wimps. (It’s called Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male so there you go.) Anyway, Hawks says there’s a couple of yes-buts in there.

it is entirely true that our bone cross-sectional areas have greatly reduced, with consequent reductions in compressive and torsional strength. We don’t suffer the stresses of the past, and our bones are weaker than ancient peoples’ — at least in comparison to our mass.

That’s the complicated part of any comparison — men in Westernized nations today tend to be bigger than many ancient groups of people. If you’re going to compare “wimpiness” between Neandertals and living men, you have to understand the relative masses.

Read the quote in context here.

Americans aren’t just taller, we’re bigger than we were 200 years ago.

Did Neandertal women really have 10 percent more muscle bulk than modern European men? At 60-80 kg in mass, Neandertal women were between the 5th and 50th percentiles for American white men (link).

Hawks also puts an assertion about the running speeds of Australian aboriginal from 20,000 years ago: estimates based on preserved footprints of six men running down prey suggest the fastest was able to sprint… about as fast as a good high-school track star: a little bit faster than a modern high-school girl, slower than a modern high-school boy.

Now I’m not saying that 37 kph isn’t an impressive speed — there’s no way I could run that fast, even if I were being chased by a Sasquatch. My point is just that there isn’t very much time separating a good high school athlete from the World Record. Sprinters spend an intense effort training to shave a miniscule fraction off their times.

...

But it’s hardly a knock against “modern males” to say that ancient footprints would have crossed the finish line a second slower than the fastest Wisconsin boys.

I don’t really have a lot of patience with “it’s been all downhill ever since.” Humans are very, very good at adapting to niches. We were great at it 20,000 years ago in Australia. We were really great at it in the wilds of Borneo. We were really good at it in the slums in London and New York. We were really good at it in deserts. We were really great at it in Tierra del Fuego even when we’d lost the technology for both fire and clothing (but not, significantly and not surprisingly, body decoration.) We’re also really great in suburbia, in war zones, in agrarian societies, in riparian ones, in hunter-gatherer ones, in nomadic ones, in monument-building ones, and even in darkened-surrounded-by-empty-cheetoz-bag ones.

And the funny thing is that more or less, if you dropped 100 modern human children into pretty much any human society (that would tolerate them) over the last maybe 1,000-100,000 years anywhere on the planet they’d almost certainly survive at… roughly the same survival and acculturation rates as the local children would. But also grow to roughly the same height, live only about as long, and accomplish about as much as their “ancient” peers. Same if you were to drop 100 “ancient” children from back there and then into any society today (that would tolerate them.) And, for that matter, run the 100-meter dash in roughly average time. On the other hand, drop 100 adults from either situation into either situation and either way they’d almost certainly have a rougher time of it.

It’s not that we’re not evolving, at all. (Hawks is a strong proponent of the still-evolving school of thought.) It’s that in evolutionary terms millennia are still pretty short intervals. And though culture has changed considerably from place to place and time to time, the culture in general has been a huge factor in whether and how we survive to reproduce for a very long time.

Uggh. Too-early morning shower. I usually have coffee first but there’s that terrible situation where you’re out and don’t want to go out for some with Hair By Mr. Pillow.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.