Have any questions or comments? If so, fire away.
Sexed to death.
From National Geographic:
Why A Little Mammal Has So Much Sex That It Disintegrates
by Ed Yong
It’s August in Australia, and a small, mouse-like creature called antechinus is busy killing himself through sex. He was a virgin until now, but for two to three weeks, this little lothario goes at it non-stop. He mates with as many females as he can, in violent, frenetic encounters that can each last up to 14 hours. He does little else.
A month ago, he irreversibly stopped making sperm, so he’s got all that he will ever have. This burst of speed-mating is his one chance to pass his genes on to the next generation, and he will die trying. He exhausts himself so thoroughly that his body starts to fall apart. His blood courses with testosterone and stress hormones. His fur falls off. He bleeds internally. His immune system fails to fight off incoming infections, and he becomes riddled with gangrene.
He’s a complete mess, but he’s still after sex. “By the end of the mating season, physically disintegrating males may run around frantically searching for last mating opportunities,” says Diana Fisher from the University of Queensland. “By that time, females are, not surprisingly, avoiding them.”
Soon, it’s all over. A few weeks shy of his first birthday, he is dead, along with every other male antechinus in the area.
[...]
It’s their diet that matters. These animals feed on insects, and some experience a glut of food once a year but very little at other times. This seasonality increases the further you get from the equator. The species with the most seasonal menus also had shorter breeding seasons, and their males were more likely to die after mating.
Fisher thinks that as the ancestors of antechinuses spread south through Australia and New Guinea, they encountered strong yearly fluctuations in their food supply. The females were better at raising their young if they gave birth just before the annual bonanza, and were well-fed enough to wean their joeys. Their mating seasons shortened and synchronised, collapsing into a tight window of time.
That probably wouldn’t have happened if they were placental mammals like shrews or mice, which could have produced several litters during the peak of food. But they were marsupials: their babies are born at an incredible early stage and rely on their mothers’ milk for a long time. A baby shrew suckles for days or weeks; a baby antechinus does so for four months. The females could only fit in one litter during the annual peak.
This had a huge impact on the males, which were forced to compete intensely with each other in a matter of weeks. They didn’t fight. Rather than using claws or teeth, they competed with sperm. The more they had, the more females they impregnated, and the more likely they were to displace the sperm of earlier suitors. Indeed, Fisher found a clear relationship between suicidal reproduction and testes size. The biggest testes of all, relative to body size, belong to species whose males die en masse, followed by those where a minority survive to mate again, and then by those with several breeding seasons.
The males that put the greatest efforts into sperm competition fathered the most young. It didn’t matter if they burned themselves out in the process, if they metabolised their own muscles to fuel their marathon bouts. These animals are short-lived anyway, so putting all their energy into one frenzied, fatal mating season was the best strategy for them. Living fast and dying young was adaptive.
Read the rest here.
Sarah Silverman on vaginas.
Slam: Rape culture.
A powerful clip:
Condom use PSA: GI Jonny.
More Damn You, Auto Corrects!
in Humour Etc.
Many more here.
Creative test response.
Meow.
More on the meaning of slut.
From the Huffington Post:
The Truth About Being a Slutty Slut
by Stefanie Williams
I am a slut. A slutty slut slut. So say a lot of people. People who read my blog and disagree with its premise. People who don't like me. Women who think sex is gross. Guys who want the girl you bring home to mom and think because I talk openly about sex, I don't like family dinners or moms.
There are loads of reasons they think that. I've slept with a couple guys. More than 10. More than 20. Want to keep guessing? I wrote about a lot of my sex life. Shared personal stories because I did and still do believe not only do I write well, but that it's a good story. One that I still believe has a happy ending somewhere in all the messed up tragedy between all the hate e-mail I can count and having a note left on my mother's car at a train station parking lot that said "I hope you're proud of the slut you raised."
[...]
Because the slutty slut never wins, you see. The girls who have pictures leaked, never win. They lose their jobs, they lose their reputations. They are humiliated, shamed. Of their bodies. Apologizing, for being sexual privately. For the things we do in the privacy of our bedrooms that we all aren't and shouldn't be doing but apparently are because hey, there are nine billion people on this planet and they got here somehow. Sabbith sits in a dark room and says, "I want to die." Because she let her boyfriend take pictures, and he released them. Pictures not of her murdering puppies, or punching toddlers, or raping old people. Pictures of herself. Her body. The stuff that exists under her clothes. The body parts that are somehow more offensive than her toes.
Then came Maggie. Maggie said everything I've been saying for years. "What's wrong with being a slut?"
We all fear this label. And the ironic part is, most of us (and maybe I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure I'm not) do the slutty slut stuff. We take pics. We sext. We sleep with our boyfriends. Husbands. We give blowjobs. We get naked. We have vaginas. We use them. Some of us, sometimes, even enjoy using them. We have boobs and nipples and butts. Which clearly we should all be ashamed of. Because we're the only ones doing it. You hear me, every woman on the planet? You are the only one doing what you're doing with that guy (or girl, or worse, BOTH). And it is so, so, incredibly hurtful and wrong and shameful. What? You wanna know why? Oh. Because... slutty slut?
Read the rest here.
Thursday mail - October 10th.
Have any questions or comments related to sex and sexuality? If so, fire away.
Film: Love is All You Need.
Slut shaming.
From Buzzfeed:
Pictures Of Teenage Girl Engaging In Oral Sex At Eminem Concert Spark Intense Online Slut-Shaming Many are furious that the teenage girl involved is being called a slut, but the boy is being celebrated as a hero. WARNING: This post contains graphic content.
A sample of the commentary:
And a sample of people pointing out the double standard:
See the entire article, including all the photos and commentary, here.
More PostSecrets.
in Humour Etc.
Many more here.
Circumcision debate redux.
If you're at all interested in the debate about circumcision, the following two pieces are must-reads. The article from Slate by a freelance writer lays out all the points made by those who support circumcision, referencing the relevant research, and sharply criticizes those who speak out against it. The piece from the Good Men Project, written by an Oxford academic whose work includes psychology, philosophy, and ethics, is a response to the Slate article. It counters many of the points made and addresses the research cited.
So first, the article from Slate:
How Circumcision Broke the Internet
A fringe group is drowning out any discussion of facts.
By Mark Joseph Stern
There are facts about circumcision—but you won’t find them easily on the Internet. Parents looking for straightforward evidence about benefits and risks are less likely to stumble across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than Intact America, which confronts viewers with a screaming, bloodied infant and demands that hospitals “stop experimenting on baby boys.” Just a quick Google search away lies the Circumcision Complex, a website that speculates that circumcision leads to Oedipus and castration complexes, to say nothing of the practice’s alleged brutal physiological harms. If you do locate the rare rational and informed circumcision article, you’ll be assaulted by a vitriolic mob of commenters accusing the author of encouraging “genital mutilation.”
How did it come to this? For years, circumcision was a private decision, encouraged by many doctors, practiced by most families (in America, at least), but little discussed in the public sphere. Yet in the past two decades, a fringe group of self-proclaimed “intactivists” has hijacked the conversation, dismissing science, slamming reason, and tossing splenetic accusations at anyone who dares question their conspiracy theory. For doctors, circumcision remains a complex, delicate issue; for researchers, it’s an effective tool in the fight for global public health. But to intactivists, none of that matters. The Internet is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, where human reason leads the best ideas to triumph. There are plenty of other loud fringe groups that flood the Internet with false information, but none of them has been as successful as the intactivists at drowning out reasoned discourse. In the case of circumcision, the marketplace of ideas has been manipulated—and thanks to intactivists, the worst ideas have won out.
Like most fringe groups, the anti-circumcision faction is almost comically bizarre, peddling fabricated facts, self-pity, and paranoia. The intactivists also obsess about sex to an alarming degree. Still, some of their tactics are shrewd. The first rule of anti-circumcision activism, for instance, is to never, ever say circumcision: The movement prefers propaganda-style terms like male genital cutting and genital mutilation, the latter meant to invoke the odious practice of female genital mutilation. (Intactivistslike to claim the two are equivalent, an utter falsity that is demeaning to victims of FGM.)
Read the rest here.
And the response from the Good Men Project:
An Open Letter to the Author of ‘How Circumcision Broke the Internet’
By Brian D. Earp
Dear Mr. Stern,
I recently read your article, “How Circumcision Broke the Internet” for Slate magazine [republished as "'Intactivists' Against Circumcision" in Canada's National Post]. I understand your concern about overheated rhetoric in public debates as well as the misuse of science to support untenable positions. As a scientist and ethicist who studies circumcision professionally, I will admit that I have seen this happen on both sides of this particular controversy. I think, however, that in your hurry to admonish “the intactivists” for pushing their anti-circumcision arguments too far, you may have fallen prey to some of that very same rhetorical excess (as well as misuse of science) in your own piece.
First, when you said that circumcision used to be “practiced by most families” I’m glad that you added the qualifier, “in America at least.” This is an important point. Circumcision is extremely uncommon in most parts of the world, and about 70-80% of men globally are left intact. Over 70% of those who are circumcised come from the Muslim world where it is done as a rite of passage; it is also a rite of passage in countries like South Africa, where at least 39 young men recently died from complications related to circumcision, such as excessive bleeding from their penises. Europeans, by contrast, (including the British; as well Latin Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, the Japanese, the Chinese, Russians, and Indians–that is, most of the developed world) very rarely circumcise outside of religious communities (if at all). A majority of doctors from these countries insist that any “health benefits” conferred by circumcision–even when the procedure is performed correctly–are dubious at best. In fact, 37 of Europe’s most pre-eminent medical authorities (along with the distinguished Canadian pediatrician, Dr. Noni MacDonald) have recently expounded on this point in the flagship journal Pediatrics:
Only one of the arguments put forward by the American Academy of Pediatrics [concerning potential health benefits for circumcision] has some theoretical relevance in relation to infant male circumcision; namely, the possible protection against urinary tract infections in infant boys, which can easily be treated with antibiotics without tissue loss. The other claimed health benefits, including protection against HIV/AIDS, genital herpes, genital warts, and penile cancer, are questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context, and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves.
Read the rest here.
Sexercise.
Some light and funny reading to cure the Monday-morning blues. From The Cut at NYMag:
How I Turned My Sex Life Into an Exercise Routine
B C. Maria McMillan
In the back of any fitness enthusiast’s mind is a series of attainable and unattainable goals. Run 26.2 miles? Attainable. Squatting my way to Coco Austin’s ass? Utterly unattainable. But my personal Everest has always been sexercise, that elusive yet seemingly attainable goal of burning calories with exertions designed by nature to feel good. Over the years, while on the treadmill or holding a plank, the ultimate form of multitasking would call to me: “Why are you doing (insert current activity) when you could be having sex?” It seemed so simple. Deceptively simple. Following in the footsteps of exercise pioneers like Suzanne Somers and Jane Fonda — and sexual pioneers like Sappho and Kim Cattrall — I was ready to condition and climax.
First, I needed a plan. I was shocked by the lack of information on sexercise. Most of the books were distasteful self-published works from nostalgic swingers. As a modern sexerciser, I would need to construct my own approach.
My grand experiment would last fourteen days. I would perform aerobic sexercises for 30 minutes a day, six days a week, using twelve approaches culled from contemporary fitness trends. Needing zero persuasion, my husband was onboard. (He would regret this decision in coming days.) Experiencing the mix of dread and anticipation every athlete feels before an intense training period, we set a date and commenced sexercising.
Day 1: Interval Sex
We start with interval training, a workout basic that can be applied to any cardiovascular routine. I will alternate between periods of heart-pumping high-intensity humping and sensual, slow-paced recovery periods.
I decide to keep the tone sporty instead of sexy, so I pull off my clothes, smack my hands in a single clap, and yell “Let’s do this!” in my coachiest voice. I immediately regret missing the chance to scream “Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose!” while slapping my husband’s bare butt. Luckily, it’s just the first night.
I position the clock so I can time my (nonsexual) splits. Jumping into bed, we assume my first position, my husband lying on his back while I pump vigorously for one minute, slow down for 30 seconds, then pick up the pace again. Like Kristen Stewart in Breaking Dawn, I am a female jackhammer. I break a sweat and my first mistake becomes painfully clear: I forgot to warm up. Like a distance runner cramping after the second mile, jumping into hard intervals leaves me with a sore, dry vagina.
After a pit stop for lube, I practice targeting different muscle groups by switching whether I use my arms and legs to propel movement. Though some sexercise books outline specific positions, I find that using positions I already know and enjoy makes it easier to endure my interval burns.
Though I work out daily, twenty minutes of interval sex exhausts me. I face two unpleasant truths: First, I have terrible sexercise endurance. Second, when it comes to sexual workouts, men have been duping women for years. When I became the predominant thruster I burned calories, toned muscles, and worked my heart. The first rule of sexercise is to take back the thrusting. Whether on top, bottom, or sideways: thrust, ladies, thrust.
Read the other 13 days here.
Perverts.
A great read from Aeon:
Perversions
Atheists and homosexuals were called perverts once. Why do we still see perversion where no harm is done?
by Jesse Bering
Perverts weren’t always the libidinous bogeymen we imagine when we think of the term today. Sexual mores have certainly shifted dramatically over the course of history and across societies, but the very word ‘pervert’ once literally meant something else entirely to what it does now. For example, the peculiar discovery that some peasant during the reign of Charles II used conch shells for anal gratification or inhaled a stolen batch of ladies’ corsets while touching himself in the town square would have been merely coincidental to any accusations of his being perverted (though it wouldn’t have helped his case). Seventeenth-century terms such as ‘skellum’ (scoundrel) or reference to his ‘mundungus’ (smelly entrails) might have applied, but calling this man a ‘pervert’ for his peccadilloes would have made little sense at the time.
Linguistically, the sexual connotation feels natural. The ring of it — purrrvert — is at once melodious and cloying, producing a noticeable snarl on the speaker’s face, while the image of a lecherous child molester, a trench-coated flasher in a park, a drooling pornographer, or perhaps a serial rapist pops into one’s head. Yet as Shakespeare might remind us, a pervert by any other name would smell as foul. For the longest time, in fact, to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sexual deviant; it was to be an atheist.
[...]
One key reason for this shift can be found in the work of the British scholar Havelock Ellis, who back in 1897 popularised the term ‘pervert’ in his descriptions of patients with atypical sexual desires. Earlier scholars, among them Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German psychiatrist regarded by many as the father of studies in deviant sexuality, had already sexualised the term, but Ellis’s accessible writing found a wider general audience and ultimately led to this meaning of ‘pervert’ becoming solidified in the common vernacular.
[...]
Today, the word pervert just sounds silly, or at least provincial, when used to refer to gays and lesbians. In a growing number of societies, homosexuals are slowly, begrudgingly, being allowed entry into the ranks of the culturally tolerated. But plenty of other sexual minorities remain firmly entrenched in the orientation blacklist. Although, happily, we’re increasingly using science to defend gays and lesbians, deep down most of us (religious or not) still appear to be suffering from the illusion of a creator who set moral limits on the acceptable sexual orientations. Our knee-jerk perception of individuals who similarly have no choice whatsoever over what arouses them sexually (be they paedophiles, exhibitionists, transvestites, or fetishists, to name but a few) is that they’ve wilfully, deliberately, and arrogantly strayed from the right course. In other words, we see them as ‘true perverts’. Whereas gays and lesbians are perceived by more and more people as ‘like normal heterosexuals’ because they didn’t choose to be the way they are, we assume that these others somehow did.
Read the rest here.
Thursday mail - October 3rd.
Have any questions or comments related to sex or sexuality? If so, fire away.
Letter from grandpa.
Orgasms in animals.
in Orgasm
From Popular Science:
FYI: Do Animals Have Orgasms?
Well, probably, but how can you tell?
Ah, the age-old question. When animals are going at it like, uh, animals, how does it end? Is there an animal version of the Big O?
It's a bit hard to say, actually. "The short answer is that we don't know much about orgasms in other species -- in fact, scientists are still studying the significance/evolution of female orgasms in humans," Marlene Zuk, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota, wrote me in an email.
Unlike humans, animals can't tell us they're having orgasms, so we can't truly know what their experience is like. For the most part, we assume that male animals orgasm because there's an ejaculation--though one can happen without the other, they usually go hand-in-hand. (Or something in hand.) The question of female orgasm is, as usual, more hotly contested, though all female mammals have clitorises.
Scientists can infer that animals--mostly primates--orgasm through recording physiological or behavioral aspects, like muscle contractions or changes in vocalization. Studies of primate orgasm have often focused on macaques, a subset of monkeys which are used often in research because they're genetically similar to humans and have similar reproductive systems. According to Alfonso Troisi, a clinical psychiatrist in Rome who has studied female orgasm in Japanese macaques, they're easier to study in the lab than gorillas or chimps. Macaques species tend to have longer copulations than other primate species like gorillas, which is a bonus if you're trying to observe their mating behavior.
"In the lab, by artificial stimulation, it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species."In a 1998 study, he and his co-author wrote that "Under specific circumstances, nonhuman primate females may experience orgasm." But, the rate at which the females orgasmed was variable, and they weren't exactly sure what caused them. Their study found that the level of dominance of the male macaque might play a role, for instance. But, as Troisi wrote me via email, "In the lab, by artificial stimulation, it is possible to trigger female orgasm in virtually any primate species."
Read the rest here.
Dinosaur erotica.
From Jezebel:
Dinosaur Erotica Exists and It's Just as Amazing as You'd Imagine
I found something to haunt your dreams and fuel your nightmares: DINOSAUR EROTICA.
I purchased one AS RESEARCH OKAY and, my oh my, it is delightfully disturbing. Here's a taste of In the Velociraptor's Nest:
Azog stood, back to the wall, clad only in damp buckskins, waiting for the beast to slash at her torso until she lay helpless and bleeding on the damp cave floor. She wondered if it would kill her first, or if her limbs would be sliced from her body as the beast gorged on her.
Instead, it reached out with a classed hand to snatch at her damp animal hide as it clung to one shoulder. Azog felt the kiss of sharp claws against her skin as the hide slid from her shoulder and exposed on naked, heaving breast. The raptor paused, curious, sniffing at her as she pressed desperately against the wall.
A reptilian tongue, stiff and hot, dashed out to lick at the tender, naked flesh so suddenly exposed. Azog gasped at the touch, then gradually relaxed as her body warmed to the intoxicating sensation of the beast's flesh against her own.
She wasn't sure if her sudden arousal was because of her earlier thwarted climax in the cool stream, or if she was just desperate for one last pleasant sensation before being torn limb from limb by the great, scaly beast. Either way, Azog relished the rasp of its tongue, hot and rough, on her sensitive skin.
I just want to point out that it took two people to write this 18-page book. That is all.
Happy reading!
Asking 100 girls/guys for sex.
There are several important sex differences in sexuality, some related to biology and some related to the social environment, learning, etc. Often, biology and environment interact. Recent research is showing that some of the sex differences that were thought to be quite large actually aren't - men and women are far more similar than they are different, as discussed in class.
These clips depict an interesting pseudo-experiment examining sex differences in responses to propositions to have sex. From a scientific perspective, the experiment isn't particularly rigorous, but it's still of interest. The results aren't at all surprising, both in terms of biology, and social rules and environment. Heterosexual sex is more risky for women, as they are the ones who can become pregnant. Socially, women are judged more negatively for a huge variety of sexual behaviour, including causal sex. Also, a stranger approaching someone for sex must be considered in the context of male-perpetrated sexual assault.
Here's the description of the experiment:
Social Experiment: Asking 100 Girls For Sex
There is a saying that goes that if you ask enough girls (in this case 100) to have sex with you, at least one will say yes. I'm not sure who to attribute that assertion to, but it's clearly wrong. I had a pretty strong feeling going in that I wasn't going to be very successful. What I didn't expect though, was that the vast majority of girls found it amusing and actually cracked up.
I wanted to do a social experiment comparing and contrasting how males and females respond differently to being outright asked if they want to have sex. I had a pretty good idea of how it was all going to go down beforehand, but I thought it would make for an interesting and entertaining video nevertheless.
And some extras and bloopers: