Our revisionist history on sex and sexuality doesn’t match up to reality (shocking):

Men have stronger sexual desires than do women…Women are the more monogamous gender…Homosexuality is an unnatural sexual behavior.

Sexual beliefs, like these, are so widespread that we have collectively come to view them as being embedded in our biology. Cross-cultural data collected from pre-industrial societies, however, tells a different story. That data suggests that culture – including religion – has played an important role in ingraining these “truths” about human sexuality into our collective psyche.

Just to give you an example of our modern perspective, a few weeks ago, when we were talking about the origin of marriage, one of the commenters asked the question: “Why the obsession with pre-marital virginity (and extra-marital children) that we see emerge across cultures from a very early point in time?”

I find these types of questions revealing. They illustrate our belief that conservative sexual values today are representative of historical sexual values (across societies) and, as a result, tell us something important about who we are as sexual beings.

Thanks to the exhaustive efforts of anthropologists like George Murdock, Douglas White, and dozens of others who contributed to the Standard Cross-Cultural Survey, I can tell you quite emphatically that there is no uniformity of human beliefs about sexual behaviors across cultures and from an early point in time.

In fact, cross-cultural evidence collected on 1167 pre-European contact societies suggests that much of what we believe to be true about human sexuality is socially constructed rather than biologically pre-determined.*

Read the entire article, it isn’t particularly long and makes the point that our attitudes about sexuality have never been ‘fixed’ but constantly fluid and evolving (or devolving) depending on the time period and cultural shifts.

By analyzing 2 billion anonymous telephone calls and 500,000 text messages, researchers have reached a better understanding of who men and women choose as their best and second-best friends. “Between the ages of 20 and 40 men and women behaved similarly. Both tended to have best friends of the opposite sex.” Second-best friends, however, tended to be of the same sex. But as people enter middle age, patterns change dramatically. Women gradually prefer best friends of the same sex while both men and women show greater preferences for second-best friends of the opposite sex.

I still have to actually go through this month’s issue of Esquire to read the original article but I heard plenty about it from female friends of mine. I fuck with Rachel Kramer Bussel’s (one of my favorite sex writers by the way) on this:

In the latest issue of Esquire, writer Goeff Dwyer frets that “[t]he blowjob has fallen on hard times.” What he really means is that the female-delivered not-so-enthusiastic average quality male-received blowjob is on the wane, but even sticking to heterosexuality, Dwyer simply doesn’t know where to look. Firstly, he pits fellatio against cunnilingius in some kind of oral sex bracket game, as if the two cannot coexist peacefully and be enjoyed mutually. Secondly, he ignores the spaces where men and women are celebrating women who love to open their mouths.

Blowjobs are, in fact, popular enough that Violet Blue’s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio was revamped for a second edition, while sex educator Jamye Waxman is teaching a bjowljob bootcamp at Toronto sex toy store Come As You Are in May where you can “Learn about the frenulum, the taint and how to go down deeper. Find out why gagging can be sexy, and why enthusiasm gets you farther.” Other books on the market: Fellatio 101, Going Down: An Illustrated Guide to Giving Him the Best Blow Job of His Life, Blow Him Away and Oral Sex He’ll Never Forget: 52 Positions and Techniques Guaranteed to Blow Your Man Away. Camille Crimson and her partner Mike Flirt have a whole series of videos dedicated to The Art of the Blowjob and she writes, “From an industry standpoint, although blowjobs are really popular, they’re either treated as a boring prelude to sex or they’re really rough and there’s very little skill involved. We wanted to show that a blowjob can be beautiful and something exciting for both men and women, so it felt like a calling.”

Like I said, I won’t personally speak on it too much because I haven’t read the original article but I will say this: that writer is probably meeting the wrong girls anyway and if a girl doesn’t like giving head, I prefer she skips that step. Because to me, a shitty blowjob is worse than no blowjob at all, not to mention it achieves absolutely nothing for either party involved.

Very well written piece, I encourage you to read the entire thing:

The sweaty underbelly of the human psyche often mimics the anxieties of the age. We don’t need Freud to tell us that proscription eroticizes the social desires that are deemed unacceptable in polite society, whatever that polite society is. Politicians roll out of bed with nubile individuals to whom they are not married and still preach family values. Husbands and boyfriends who would never raise a hand to their partners masturbate to online videos of anonymous women being throttled and raped with champagne bottles. Peace activists dress up as soldiers and police officers to beat willing participants with fake rubber truncheons. What does it say about the world we live in when desperation itself has become a fetish?

Desperation is the great unspoken truth of modern life. It does not do to admit to poverty, to panic, to being needy enough to submit to being exploited by another human being — particularly in America, where everyone is supposed to be go-getting and independent, whatever the economic realities of our lives. Our darkest social secrets often crop up in collective sexual fantasy before they ooze into public consciousness. “Casting Couch,” for example, is a long-running pornographic meme whereby young women who need money pretend to be other young women who need the money, role-playing poor college grads and modeling hopefuls who will “do anything” for the cash, including have dirty sex on camera. In these clips, watched by hundreds of millions of sticky-fingered cyberspace surfers, the story is always the same: The woman sits on the “casting couch,” and the “casting director” persuades her to perform successively exhausting sexual gymnastics in exchange for money or a job — which at the end, is never forthcoming.

The same story seemed to be working for the ‘”sugar daddy” wannabes that I spoke to online: The idea of having a financial hold over another creature has become a fantasy on its own merit. The key to that fantasy is the idea that the young people willing to offer their physical and personal affections in exchange for hard cash are not “pros” or professional sex workers — they are “ordinary.” Students and single mothers were particularly in demand, as women who were assumed by definition to be financially abject.

The fantasy of the hard-up student or struggling single mom, of course, is hard reality for many people. There is no shortage of desperate students and lone parents out there, and the trend of students in particular turning to sex work to fund their college and university fees has been well-publicized over the past few years.

Something worth considering:

It soon became obvious to me that what I was experiencing with such intensity had more to do with my own romantic and sexual compulsion, fueled my own youthful imagination, and less to do with the objects of my affection, as genuinely attractive as they may have been. What was making me laugh was how utterly convinced I had been of the truth of what I had been experiencing only a few moments before. I really had been convinced … until I wasn’t anymore.  

Sound familiar? I call this drama “the promise of perfection.” This is the powerful and at-times-overwhelming illusion that perfect happiness, perfect contentment, perfect fulfillment, and perfect completion lie somewhere beyond the boundaries of our own selves—more often than not, in the arms of the perfect other. It’s a promise that is perpetuated constantly by the culture all around us. And evolutionary biologists tell us that we have been chemically wired to have these kinds of experiences in order to ensure the propagation of our species. I know that the ecstasy of romantic love is an important and positive life experience for many, as it was for me. But I wonder, is it possible for any of us to know what love truly is, unless we are finally able to see through this powerful illusion? 

I feel like one of the luckiest people in the world, because I did eventually find what I was looking for: a glimpse of true spiritual happiness, contentment, fulfillment, and completion beyond the small world of the psychological and biological self. This has helped me enormously (though it’s not always easy!) to see through some of the compelling illusions that repeatedly and often painfully ensnare our hearts and minds, for years, decades, and even lifetimes. To be honest, I think that many thoughtful, sensitive people are mature enough to have pierced the romantic illusion and seen through its promise of perfection for themselves. The question is, are we spiritually mature enough yet to accept the implications of what we have already seen?

Andrew Cohen is the author of EVOLUTIONARY ENLIGHTENMENT: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening

Thrilled to come across several excellent articles recently. Hugo Schwyzer argues that the increase in single mothers isn’t about men becoming hapless (a predominant cultural narrative in recent years) but simply a matter of women having more of a choice in choosing when they want to marry… if they decide to marry at all:

For the first time in American history, more than half of new mothers under the age of 30 are unmarried. The news has led to stark warnings from social conservatives about the supposedly disastrous consequences of illegitimacy –- and to renewed discussion about whether marriage remains relevant today. In the rush to pass judgment on these unwed mothers, one question is almost never asked: how many of these young single moms would actually like to be married?

Like many of the articles that touch on contemporary American manhood, the Times piece can’t decide where the blame for male fecklessness lies. DeParle and Tavernise trot out the usual culprits: the much-oversold “mancession” (“men are worth less than they used to be”, the article laments) and the tendency, familiar to fans of Judd Apatow movies, for American men of all social classes to turn puberty into a quarter-century project. The Times interviews Amber Strader, a 27 year-old single mom, whose “boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. ‘It was like living with another kid,’ she said.”

So how much of this growing phenomenon of single motherhood is about male unreliability, and how much is about changing social mores that make marriage less relevant? I spoke with the noted sociologist of masculinity, Michael Kimmel, who said that the rising percentage of unwed moms was “over-interpreted.” Kimmel notes that in Scandinavia (where there is no equivalent to the American narrative of male haplessness) the majority of mothers in all social classes are unmarried. “They don’t need to get married because they have adequate health coverage, education, and retirement benefits.” The answer to the manufactured problem of “illegitimacy” is, says Kimmel, “better access to birth control and abortion.” Michael Kaufman, (who co-authored The Guy’s Guide to Feminism with Kimmel) concurs that this isn’t about masculinity at all, but about “the moral panic that is the conservative heart of the anti-sex agenda.”

Kimmel makes the important distinction between single mothers needing to get married and wanting to be wed “someday.” That qualification is often missing from these discussions, but it’s at the heart of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Poverty isn’t the primary problem, authors Kathyrn Edin and Maria Kefalas say, noting that “now there are few differences between the poor and the affluent in attitudes and values towards marriage.” However inadequate the American social safety net is compared to the Scandinavian model, it’s sufficient (barely) to ensure that very few women feel compelled to get married for economic reasons.

As usual, I encourage you to read the article in its entirety. Very solid.

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The fact of the matter is that health insurance covers all manner of “things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be,” when it comes to men, and no one has any real complaints about insurance coverage that allows men to continue having sex for non-procreative reasons and despite medical conditions that would otherwise prevent it. Most of them are actually far more expensive than hormonal birth control or intrauterine devices, the two methods of contraception that House and Senate Republicans now want all employers to be able to prevent their insurance companies from covering in employee health insurance packages. Five things that health insurers — including, in some cases, the federal government — currently cover for men’s reproductive tracts.

1. Erectile dysfunction drugs
From Viagra to Cialis, if a man has trouble getting or maintaining an erection (a common occurrence with age or with certain diseases), a pharmaceutical company has a $15 pill for that. And, in many cases, the man’s insurance company picks up the tab.

2. Vacuum erection devices
Famously covered by Medicare (as well as some private insurance companies), men with erectile dysfunction that won’t or can’t go the pill route do have a another option. Though it first raised eyebrows in Austin Powers and is better known as a masturbatory aide, vacuum erection devices do work as advertised by will cost insurance companies $300-$500 a pop.

3. Penile implants
If a man’s erectile dysfunction can’t be mitigated with pharmaceuticals or vacuum devices, there’s yet another method insurance companies will pay for afflicted men to try: penile implants. Though most urologists tend to use more modern inflatable models, which require users to manually inflate their own erections, some urologists hew to the older semi-rigid models despite their potential complications. Either way, the $10,000-$20,000 cost of the implants is often covered by insurance, particularly if the erectile dysfunction is the result of a disease or a side effect of surgery.

I need a fucking drink…