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Health / Politics / Sex / Religion / The Ladies Obama Diddles Bishops on Birth Control

Posted by Goldy on Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 9:11 AM

Seeking to calm a manufactured furor over a "new" rule requiring health insurers to provide free birth control to women—even insurance plans offered by church affiliated employers—the Obama administration will reportedly offer an "accommodation" this morning that drops this requirement of employers, and instead shifts the mandate to insurance companies to offer such coverage as a free side benefit to enrollees.

Clever, clever, Mr. Obama.

In the long run, there's no additional cost burden to insurance companies (giving away birth control is far cheaper than paying for pregnancies), yet it essentially achieves the same end as the original rule while removing church affiliated employers from the equation. No doubt the Catholic bishops and other conservative religious organizations will not be satisfied by the accommodation, but it totally shifts the parameters of the debate. What had been a conversation about whether religious organizations should be exempt from providing a service that violates their faith, now becomes a conversation about whether these employers should be allowed to deny their female employees access to affordable birth control. (Which, of course, is what this was always really about anyway.)

Recent polls show that despite the Bishops' objections, 98 percent of Catholics have used birth control, and a majority supported the "new" birth control rule. Which by the way, isn't all that "new." Insurers have long been required to offer birth control. All this new rule does is remove the deductible and co-pay.

UPDATE: US Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a champion of reproductive rights, just issued a statement supporting the proposed rule change: “My highest priority here is ensuring contraceptive access and coverage for all women, and I believe this accommodation meets that goal." Full statement after the jump:

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Sex / Visual Art / The Ladies The Art After Dinner Party: Mass Public Clitoral Action

Posted by Jen Graves on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 2:30 PM

Courtesy Lynn Schirmer
The clit of Lynn Schirmer.

Seattle artist Lynn Schirmer today announced a new project called After Dinner Party. The title is a reference to Judy Chicago's early feminist masterwork The Dinner Party, which is on long-term display at the heart of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Dinner Party is a vagina thing. After Dinner Party is clitoral, a body part that's inherently more politicized, more feared, more misunderstood, more ignored, more attacked, more everythinged. It's time to clitoralize.

At this point, After Dinner Party is just a web site—but one with drawings of the clitoris that already make you remember its shape when you close your eyes. (I did not already have a 3D projection of the clitoris in my brain; maybe you did.)

The project has two upcoming (ahem, upcoming) phases, set to begin during Pioneer Square's First Thursday Art Walk in May:

At present, After Dinner Party consists of two kinds of activities: a curated art exhibit and celebration; and a loosely coordinated series of individual and/or mass public actions. The form and scope of the second portion is entirely dependent upon the energy and creativity of participants. The goal is to represent the shape of the clitoris, in as many art forms and in as many venues or public spaces as possible, all over the city.

You've really gotta check this out.

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Sex It's a Kinky Comic Version of the "Pina Colada Song"

Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 12:07 PM

Awwwwww.

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??!! / Sex All Men Watch Porn*

Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 12:22 PM

But not all men murder their wives and children.

* Some men claim they don't watch porn. No one believes them.

UPDATE: Sorry, I just have to throw in a quote from this absolutely idiotic story out of Utah—the state with the highest per-capita porn consumption rates in the nation—that argues that WATCHING PORN WILL KILL YOUR BRAIN AND THEN YOU WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN:

In the wake of Josh Powell's actions that killed his sons and himself Sunday, KSL has heard from many viewers asking, "How does a person do this?" "Are there warning signs?" ... Julie Hanks, a licensed clinical social worker, said, "The fact that he murdered his own sons shows that he did not regard them as real people. I think he did see them as possessions." What causes a person to disconnect? Pornography allegedly played a role in the Powell family. Josh's father, Steven Powell, is in jail facing child pornography charges, and it has been alleged that Josh had images on his computer.

Susanne Gustin, a criminal defense attorney, said, "It seems to me that it was adult pornography, but it was probably pretty hard core. That raised some concerns in the investigators' minds and in the judge's mind." Pornography alone can be harmful, but coupled with severe personality disorders it can lead to destruction. Another licensed clinical social worker and therapist, John Murdock, said, "Pornography, in particular, is going to shut down your frontal lobes, and that's where you are going to do your reasoning, your emotional regulation and your judgment, things of that nature. It's like being in a car with no brakes."

This is completely insane—sexphobic, pornphobic hysteria of the latter-day order.

How many men have murdered their children in Utah this week? Utah, again, has the highest porn consumption rates per capita in the whole freaking nation. If viewing pornography "shut down [the] frontal lobes" and that lead men to kill their children—if porn consumption was one of the "warning signs" that you may be married to a Josh Powell—it's a miracle that children make it out of Utah alive.

Most men watch porn. Most men watch hardcore porn. Most men don't kill their children.

Fucking nutjobs.

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Sex / History President of the United States Had Sex with an Intern...

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 4:21 PM

...in 1962:

“The president came over to me and asked me if I’d like to take a tour of the second floor of the White House and see some of the rooms that had been redecorated. The last room that we went into was the bedroom and we walked into the bedroom and it was a beautiful room…I learned later that it was Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom,” Alford said.

Alford says that she lost her virginity to the president in the first lady’s bedroom. In her soon to be released memoir, Once Upon a Secret My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath, Alford described her first sexual encounter with the president writing that, “I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love, but I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual either.”

Man. Sex in the White House with an intern on the First Lady's bed, and nobody knew about it? Reporters sure were bad at their jobs, back in the day.

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Politics / Sex / The Ladies Komen: Has Pink Handguns, Inc., Reversed Course?

Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 9:06 AM

Great news... but watch out for weasel words:

We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants...

None of Komen's "existing grants" to Planned Parenthood—money Pink Handguns, Inc., had already promised to Planned Parenthood—had been pulled. And Pink Handguns, Inc., never said that Planned Parenthood couldn't apply for grants. Planned Parenthood could apply for all the Komen grants they wanted to. But so long as Planned Parenthood was being subjected to politically-motivated "investigations" by some rightwing douchebag with a congressional committee—investigations that would go on forever, of course, if keeping 'em going meant taking money from Planned Parenthood (and killing poor women)—Komen wouldn't award Planned Parenthood any grants.

Pink Handguns, Inc., now says that they won't deny any orgs funding unless an investigation is "criminal and conclusive in nature." What does that mean? Does it mean an investigation has to be over and it has to have found that crimes were committed? Or does it mean that some trumped-up, bullshit, politically-motivated charge of criminal behavior and the existence ongoing investigation—but one that is somehow "conclusive in nature" (what does "in nature" mean in this context?)—will be grounds to deny grants to Planned Parenthood?

It's unclear.

But, hey: I welcome this news. I love a good cave. But this could be an effort by Pink Handguns, Inc., to end the uproar for now, kick the can down the road, before they make a second attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. We won't know if Komen has truly reversed itself until 2012's grants are announced. And until then...

No one with any sense should give the rightwing douchehags at Pink Handguns, Inc., one red cent.

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Politics / Sex / The Ladies Virginia State Senator Janet Howell is an American Hero

Posted by Dan Savage on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 5:18 PM

I'm in love with this woman:

Irked by abortion bill, Va. senator adds rectal exams for men

The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as “ a little gender equity” to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra. “This is a matter of basic fairness,” Howell said.... “It’s requiring [women] to have unnecessary medical procedures, it’s adding to the cost and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail,” she said on the Senate floor today. “And I was upset because it’s disrespectful of doctors. It’s forcing them to perform procedures they don’t think is necessary.”

She said she was watching television in her hotel room that evening and saw an ad for an erectile dysfunction drug that included a recitation of “all the serious things that could happen to a man who was going to take this medication.... So, I said, it’s only fair, that if we’re going to subject women to unnecessary procedures, and we’re going to subject doctors to having to do things that they don’t think is medically advisory, well, Mr. President, I think we should just have a little gender equity here,” Howell said, explaining her amendment.

Send her an email, tell her she's awesome: SenHowell@gmail.com. (And, no, I haven't looked into her positions on other issues because, at least for right now, I don't want to know.)

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Sex The Masking of a Bond

Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:21 AM

The mask is designed by Didier Faustino and for kissing. The mask is not sexy because it limits the danger of a kiss, protects the sexual kissers. Something I wrote last year:

way to break that bond and bring a relationship to an end. True, there is always an element of pain and even aggression in most sexual tests—the playful bite on the lip (eating), the squeezing of a wrist (seizing), the pressing against the body (forcing). Indeed, [evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi] believes that a certain amount of aggression is found in every act of sexual love. "Among well-established bond members," writes Zahavi, beautifully, "activities which signal love, like... allogrooming and allopreening, kissing, etc., are often still mixed with genuine aggression as manifested by a reaction which often signals unpleasant feelings from the passive participant. A bout of allopreening among Babblers often terminates when the preened bird moves its head away as if it was hurt. Embraces and the leaning of one member of a couple on another are often terminated when one cannot stand anymore the physical stress involved. These stresses are very appropriate if such an activity is meant to test the bond."

Without danger, the danger of being bitten (a danger that tests the bond), sexual kissing is empty.

Testing a bond with a replicant.

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2012 / Sex Chaz v. Swingrich

Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 10:53 AM

The same Fox News douchebag who said that we shouldn't let our kids watch Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars for eight weeks because that would make our kids want to have "their breasts removed [and] penises amputated" doesn't see any problem with Newt Gingrich sitting in the White House for eight years—hell, all of Newt's cheating and fucking around is evidence that he'll be a great president:

When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.... [And] two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation. Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

I'm going to go throw up now.

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2012 / Politics / Sex Are You An Honest Swinger? Or Are You a Dishonest Swingrich?

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 3:57 PM

A readers asks...

Dear Dan,

Please, please, please, please PUH-LEEEEESSSSEEEE can you santorum Newt? Thanks,

Mary

Um... I'm not going to santorum Newt. That's almost too awful to contemplate. But commemorating Newt's request for an open marriage by redefining his name or part of it? A commenter beat me to it:

A "swingrich" is a CPOS masquerading as a swinger/polyamorous person. "I thought he was ethically nonmonogamous but he was just a swingrich."

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Sex Required Flowing

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:26 PM

Tom the Dancing Bug created a "Sex-Act Morality Flow Chart" to assist morality-impaired Republican presidential candidates.

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2012 / Sex Rick Santorum Won the Iowa Caucuses By...

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:09 AM

...69 votes. Santorum and 69... not a pleasant association somehow.

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2012 / Sex "Swingrich"

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:03 AM

Even though "Swingrich" unfairly equates the actions of decent, loving, honest swingers with those of that lying, cheating, dishonest piece of shit, it's still pretty funny. Swingrich!

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2012 / Sex So What Did Callista "Devout Catholic" Gingrich Know and When Did She Know It?

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 9:54 AM

Fnarf raises a valid question: Did Callista "Devout Catholic" Gingrich know about Newt's open marriage proposal? Did Newt bounce the idea off his mistress first? Maybe right after he finished bouncing himself off his mistress?

The Gingrich campaign has presented the holesome story of Newt and Callista's courtship as a redemption narrative: Newt is a better man today thanks to Callista, he's better suited to be president thanks to Callista, and he's better prepared to defend traditional marriage thanks to Callista. Callista even brought Newt to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church! So it's fair game to inquire if Callista knew in advance that Newt was going to ask his second wife for an open marriage and approved of the arrangement. (It might be more accurate to say that Newt informed his second wife that she was already in an open marriage and asked if she wanted to remain in it.) Would Callista still be Newt's mistress today if the second Mrs. Gingrich had agreed to remain in the marriage that Newt had already opened?

This news alters the redemption narrative that the Gingrich camp set before the voters. So questioning Callista about the open marriage proposal—what did the mistress know and when did she know it?—is entirely legit line of inquiry.

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2012 / Politics / Sex Newt Gingrich: Doing Monogamish All Wrong

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 7:59 AM

Newt Gingrich, defender of traditional marriage, was still married to his second wife—and still fucking the ~~living shit~~ consecrated host out of Callista, then his "devout Catholic" mistress, now his "devout Catholic" third wife —when he asked his second wife for an open marriage:

Marianne Gingrich, a self-described conservative Republican, said she is coming forward now so voters can know what she knows about Gingrich. In her most provocative comments, the ex-Mrs. Gingrich said Newt sought an "open marriage" arrangement so he could have a mistress and a wife. She said when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a Congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich.... "He wanted an open marriage and I refused." Marianne described her "shock" at Gingrich's behavior, including how she says she learned he conducted his affair with Callista "in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington."

Technically you're not asking your wife for an open marriage if you've already been fucking another woman for six years. You're presenting your wife with an ultimatum. That doesn't make you a proponent of open marriage, Newt, it makes you a CPOS.

But Newt's got a new campaign slogan: "Screw as I say, not as I screw."

And then there's this:

She said Newt moved for the divorce just months after she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, with her then-husband present. "He also was advised by the doctor when I was sitting there that I was not to be under stress. He knew," she said. Gingrich divorced his first wife, Jackie, as she was being treated for cancer. His relationship with Marianne began while he was still married to Jackie but in divorce proceedings, Marianne said.

So, Callista, how's your health?

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Crime / Sex He Has a Wide Glance

Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 2:16 PM

The airport toilet that Larry Craig made famous is back in the news:

A Florida man arrested at Minneapolis-St. Paul International has been charged after being accused of using a camera in an airport bathroom. Joshua Fletcher is facing charges in Hennepin County for peeping and recording other men in a bathroom in Terminal One. Airport spokesperson Patrick Hogan tells KARE 11 Fletcher had a hidden camera inside a book with a hole for the camera lens The incident occurred in the same bathroom US Senator Larry Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in June of 2007.

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Sex / Religion "Mormonism's Lethal Culture of Sexual Dysfunction"

Posted by David Schmader on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:53 PM

From Jared Spurbeck's shocking and illuminating piece posted on Yahoo!'s Contributor Network, about a little-known, very private, and totally effed-up practice within the Mormon Church:

I sat in my Mormon bishop's office, red-faced and silent. I was humiliated and scared; humiliated that I'd told this strange adult such personal things, and scared that he would follow through with his threat of church discipline. Scared that I wouldn't be able to go on a mission and that everyone would know what a failure I was. My crime? As an 18-year-old adult, I had just confessed that I masturbated. A few years later, after being publicly shamed for my sins, I was still unable to break my "addiction" and came very close to killing myself.

I wasn't alone

In 1982, Mormon Kip Eliason killed himself at the age of 16 because of "the immense feeling of self-hatred" he had, as a result of not being able to comply with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' teachings regarding masturbation. Mormon youth of both genders are taught that it is a sin, and told to confess their sexual sins to their adult male bishops, in one-on-one interviews behind closed doors. Church discipline is not usually prescribed for the sin of masturbation, but bishops are given wide latitude to act as they feel the Spirit dictates.

About those adult male bishops conducting the sexual interrogations behind closed doors: Bishop sounds fancy, but Mormon bishops are, for the most part, married male church members. (Any male church member is eligible to be a bishop—even black males, after 1978!—but typically only married men are selected, Jake tells me.) So, these interviews involve a private interview on sexual habits with, say, your friend's dad, or the old guy down the street.

Read Spurbeck's whole piece here. (And thanks to Slog tipper my father-in-law.)

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2012 / Sex But If You're Doing It Right...

Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:30 AM

A "Savage Love" readers writes...

I would like to propose a holiday: Santorum Day. On the day Rick Santorum pulls out of the presidental race—at some point all dicks pull out—you and all of your fine readers should rush home and create some santorum of their own in cellebration of a small win for secular freedom.—Anonymous

Santorum Day wouldn't work. As I've explained before: if you're doing anal intercourse right, there is no santorum. You don't have anal sex when your ass is full of shit for the same reason you don't have oral sex when your mouth is full of food: it's uncomfortable and it makes a mess. That's why santorum is only the byproduct of anal sex sometimes, Anonymous, per the standard definition. Santorum is an unwelcome accident, not a certainty and definitely not the desired outcome (or outflow), so it doesn't make sense to encourage people to intentionally "create some santorum." You're not a freedom-lovin', red-blooded, all-American buttfucker if santorum is your goal. You're a coprophiliac. Please make a note of it.

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Sex / Film Jacket Required

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:59 PM

The Los Angeles City Council just voted to require that condoms be used in all porn filmed in L.A.:

The measure, adopted 9-1, next goes to the mayor for his signature. Before it can take effect, however, the City Council has ordered police officials, the city attorney and others to hold meetings to figure out how it might be enforced.

Oponents of the ordinance say that even if it is enforceable, the porn industry will just move elsewhere. Is this what Republicans mean when they rail against evil government regulations getting in the way of business? I'll give five dollars to the first person who takes this issue to Rick Santorum and forces him to address it in public.

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News / Sex If Opposite-Sex Marriage is "Traditional Marriage"...

Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:48 AM

...then this would be traditional man-on-dog, right?

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Parenting Issues / Sex On American Teenage Pregnancy

Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 10:27 AM

Let's return to Sarah Hrdy's marvelous paper "The Past, Present, and Future
of the Human Family," and examine two passages. One:

Looked at comparatively, rates of teenage pregnancy (which happen to be higher in the United States than in any other developed nation) have less to do with moral decline than with changes in the nutritional status of human beings over the last tens of thousands and hundreds of years. Teenage pregnancy, then, is very much a human-made problem, a human-solvable public health issue, not a moral one.

What is this brilliant sociobiologist getting at?

As in all apes, human ovaries evolved to factor how much fat a woman’s body had stored. For a still partially dependent girl living among nomadic hunter-gatherers, this indicator of nutritional status would have been synonymous with how much social support she had. Among nomadic foragers, where youngsters depend on shared nutritional subsidies from other group members, a young girl’s fat reserves provided a fairly good indicator of how much social support she could expect from parents, grandparents, boyfriends, her mate perhaps, as well as other group members.

By and large, the plumper a girl is, the sooner she matures. Girls growing up in nomadic foraging society on the African savanna remained active, intermittently fed, and very lean, menstruating for the first time closer to sixteen than twelve, the average age of girls today in sedentary, hypernourished Western societies.

We should never forget, and Americans are always taught to forget, that we are highly social animals. And, most important of all, our sociality is not just cultural but profoundly biological. From the sclera, the white part of our eye, to the strange fact that our facial and head hair grow indefinitely (more about this in another post), our bodies reveal adaptations, selections for social life, life with others, group living. The body is not isolated; it is tuned to our social worlds. For the body, fat is a sign of social support, a sign that others are there for you. Agreed, in certain societies (rich post-industrial societies), this reading is a little screwy (adaptive lag can be a bitch), but it still reveals the core of our "species being" (I do not uses this term in the same way as Karl Marx—more about this in another post).

I will now leave you with another passage (this time by the primatologist Richard Wrangham—I highly recommend his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human) that I think connects well with Hrdy's insights:

I was impressed to learn that raw-foodists are thin compared to those eating cooked diets, given that in most cases they are eating domesticated foods with lots of nutrients, are processing them in machines like electric blenders, and of course, living as most do in the developed world, never suffering through seasonal food shortage. Yet despite all these advantages over anyone who might try eating wild foods raw, the average woman on a 100% raw diet did not have a functioning menstrual cycle. About 50% of women entirely stopped menstruating! When a raw-foodist’s reproductive system does not allow her to have a baby even when her diet is composed of processed, high-quality, agricultural foods, the obvious explanation is that she is not getting enough calories.

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Sex / Sports James 3:3

Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 10:15 AM

Tim Tebow... re-conceived... and roughly photoshopped... for the not-too-discerning centaur fetishist.

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Sex / Life / Film What I Learned from Edward Penishands

Posted by David Schmader on Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:48 PM

Watching someone lick, suck, and otherwise fellate a dildo is infinitely more upsetting than watching someone do it to an actual penis.

Thank you, Collide-O-Scope, for teaching me this valuable lesson.

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Sex / Theater Gay Actors, Straight Parts, and the "Flamboyance" Factor

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:28 PM

Over at Seattle Gay Scene, theater critic—and regular Slog commenter—Michael Strangeways is seven kinds of pissed off about Misha Berson's review of Balagan's Spring Awakening, and particularly her hit on Jerick Hoffer, also known as the ridiculously talented and beloved drag character Jinkx Monsoon.

As he quotes from Berson's review:

Bu a dissident note here is Hoffer’s overly flamboyant portrayal of Moritz, a luckless boy plagued by the shame and guilt of his erotic attraction to a female piano teacher. That longing isn’t evident in Hoffer’s diva showiness, which seems more suited to the drag rock musical “Hedwig and the Angry Itch” than the world of “Spring Awakening.”

That's real rage—when one journalists quotes another and leaves in the typos. Then Strangeways lets fly:

I’m not that overly sensitive to cries of media homophobia and god knows I’m not a fan of being overly politically correct, but this shitty review/trashing of Jerick Hoffer really pisses the hell out of me... basically, Misha Berson is saying: “Jerick Hoffer is too gay and faggy to play this part and he should stick to drag.”

Strangeways goes on to demand Berson apologize to Hoffer, gay actors, the whole LGBTQ community, and journalism itself. You can read his screed, her response, and his response to her response over here.

I didn't see this production (saw the touring version), but there's a fair amount of flamboyance in all the boys, no matter what their sexual orientation. None of those frustrated, confused, lustful 19th-century German boys are exactly paragons of butch reserve:

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Sex / Sports / Religion Deep Thought

Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 3:16 PM

Some are showered with praise for abstaining from acts that they have no desire to engage in.

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Sex Who Is This Guy?

Posted by Dan Savage on Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 8:20 AM

Whoa... he's hot:

I've always been attracted to slightly swishy guys with a little bit of muscle. Tebow is his name? Hope he goes into porn when he's done with whatever he's doing now.

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Sex Desiring Young Women

Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 8:32 AM

WaPo:

Here’s something to look forward to: New research finds that women’s sexual satisfaction may actually improve as they get older.

The study, published in the January issue of the American Journal of Medicine, looked at such sexual satisfaction-related factors as hormone use, frequency of arousal, lubrication, orgasm and pain during sexual intercourse along with sexual desire and satisfaction among 806 women ages 40 to 100 (median age 67; 63 percent post-menopausal).

The researchers found that, while sexual activity declined as women aged, about half of those age 80 or older reported being sexually satisfied most or all of the time.

This discovery is not surprising. What's really surprising is that human males desire younger women more than older women. True, this is not surprising if you compare humans with other humans, but it is surprising if you compare humans with other primates. And for a comparison to have any value or substance it must compare the human animal with other animals.

Anyone who has glanced at the literature concerning chimpanzees (the human animal's closest relative) realizes that male chimps prefer established females, powerful females, females who have had even several children. Indeed, with bonobos (our erotic relative), young females are practically ignored and have to force themselves onto males. (Read Our Inner Ape by the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal—however, much of his information on wild bonobos is drawn from the findings of Japanese researchers.)

So why do human males prefer younger women? Evolutionary psychology always has this dumb answer: Youth equals fertility. But if this is a natural law for us civilized humans, why is it not the law of the jungle? It seems we have completely mistaken a cultural phenomenon for a biological one. It is very likely that the desire for young women has no natural basis but is instead entirely a cultural construction. Indeed, the best sociobiologist in the business, Sarah Hrdy, goes as far as to see this strange kind of desire as emerging from the cultural institution of marriage. (In her brilliant paper "Female Sexuality and the Prehominid Origins of Patriarchy," Hrdy argues that youth has its value in the context of a long-term investment.)

And marriage only makes sense in the context of property relations. And cultures of property relations are mostly realized in agricultural or sedentary societies. And because these kinds of societies are new in the world, the desire for young women is not at all ancient, or profound, or in our blood. It's in our heads.

Another point Hrdy makes: "I am with my fellow feminist, evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty, who has argued that male preferences for neotenous traits might be due to juveniles being easier to dominate."

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Transportation / Sex / Life Heavy Petting on Light Rail

Posted by David Schmader on Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM

"Not sure if it is too late to report, but on Thursday, Dec 29, I had the joy of being the only other person on the light rail car when a couple got on at Benaroya," writes Hot Tipper Katy. "By the time we got to the ID, the lady had put her coat over her head and was going down on her male companion. This was in the middle of the day. Boy was that awkward. Had to share. I got off at the next stop. Happy new year!"

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2012 / Politics / Sex / Teh Internets "25 People Who Just Googled 'Santorum' For The First Time"

Posted by Anna Minard on Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:59 PM

Buzzfeed has collected some great Twitter/Facebook messages. My favorites are the people who think the whole thing's just an awkward coincidence. Check it out!

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