Clueless Sex

In a speech Monday, British M.P. Michael Gove spoke out against "narrow conception(s) of beauty and a shallow approach towards women." Bravo! It's great to see a politician publicly speak out against sexist attitudes and rigid ideas of female beauty. That said, he's lambasting U.K lad magazines -- Zoo and Nuts, in particular -- for promoting these things. As you might expect from those illuminating titles, both offer up photos of topless ladies with a side order of dudely reportage on sports, technology and, of course, breasts. I'm afraid Gove is banging his head against a wall -- of dirty mags -- when he questions the way these magazines celebrate "instant-hit hedonism," "thrill-seeking and instant gratification." After all, how much sexual maturity can one really expect from a men's weekly called Nuts?

From there, his speech speeds downhill. Gove, a member of the Conservative Party, argues that it's important to help "adults commit and stay committed" because it "opens the door to a depth of emotional enrichment which a series of shallow and hedonistic encounters can never generate" and "provides the best possible start in life for children." I won't bother defending young adults' uncommitted "encounters" --been there, done that -- but I will say: Politicians truly interested in seeing more children receive a fair start in life should focus on, say, improving sex education and increasing the support available to parents, and spend less time in the magazine aisle.

The next week we would switch roles and the whiner would offer warm words of advice and hand-holding to the comforter. I heartily participated in all of these discussions, more often than not as the one plunged in despair when I first arrived in New York, and later, hardened and somewhat resigned, as the one extending succor.

After months of these cocktail-drenched evenings, two fleeting thoughts slipped across my mind, which later would take on shape and bulk and eventually morph into full-blown arguments. The first of these took hold when a friend was complaining how a man she'd met at a party two weeks ago had seemed very interested and had taken her number but had not called since. And today she'd discovered that a colleague she had a crush on had a girlfriend. Two leads that had seemed promising just last week had fallen through, which in New York is enough to induce a midmonth slump.

I bit my lower lip and, ever helpful, said, "What about that guy you were talking about last month, the one you made out with at that bar in Soho?"

"Oh yeah, him. He's too young. I can tell he's not interested in something serious," my friend said.

"Okay, well what about that guy Jason who's really into you and asking you out all the time? I think he's kind of cute," I offered hopefully.

"Eew," she said.

"Okay, what about going online? I know you're not really that into it, but ... I don't know. It just seems like there's no other way to meet somebody," I said, the first tendrils of my seedling thought stretching their tiny arms.

"I tried it. I only met freaks. I was just wasting my time," she moaned. "I just don't know where I'll meet someone."

Then the petals of my thought opened to reveal its essence. Yes indeed. Where are we in the West supposed to meet someone we'd like to marry, or at least be committed to? If we graduate from university without having found someone, we assume we'll meet someone over the next few years. But where exactly?

In many workplaces, romantic relationships are frowned upon, and people are often averse to dating someone in the office for fear it will end badly and they will still have to see their ex-lover on a daily basis. We are told that it's best to meet friends of friends. We all think this is a brilliant idea, until we realize that we've already met all of our friends' friends ... two years ago.

Then of course, there's the online route. Although the popularity of online dating in the last few years has somewhat reduced the stigma of having had to resort to the Internet to find a date, it's hardly a preferred method. Having found a girlfriend or boyfriend from an Internet site still seems the refuge of the desperate and socially isolated. And then there's the nagging little fact that many of us have tried online dating to no avail.

So then what?

This is when I found myself saying to my friend, "You're right. I don't know where you'll find someone, short of bumping into him on the street."

From that point on, I became mildly obsessed with the inadequacies of the Western dating system, or rather lack of it. Where exactly are we supposed to meet someone to marry?

For years, I never questioned the Western dating system. The tenets on which it rests seemed perfectly sound: after meeting a man or woman through work or friends, one gets to know him or her, and if one likes what one sees, one continues to deepen the commitment, which sometimes leads to marriage. What surprises me now is how much this system leaves to chance encounter, to a kind of fate or fortune. For a decidedly unmystical society that seems to have the answer for everything else -- the best medical care, cutting-edge technology, superhighways, and space shuttles -- it seems odd that people are left to their own resources, casting around for another lonely soul, for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives.

If the institution of marriage is present in every society that we know of, from Lapps in northern Sweden to aborigines, and nearly all cultures promote marriage as the foundation of society, isn't it odd, then, that there is very little provision for how it is supposed to occur in the West?

It was so obvious no organized system for marriage existed in the West that people simply failed to blame the obvious for why they couldn't find someone to marry. They were told by their therapists and their friends that it was because they were too neurotic, too unhappy, had to work on themselves before they could be happy with someone else, or that they wanted it too badly. People are told to blame themselves, and they do: they try to lose weight, they develop new interests, they get a nose job. We wonder what's wrong with us when really we should wonder whether there isn't a better way of doing things. It is a curious misplacement for a self-congratulatory culture in which people are constantly trying to shift blame away from themselves.

Once I began questioning the efficacy of the Western dating system in resulting in marriage, I started wondering why it is that wanting to be committed to someone else is too often associated with weakness in the West. I noticed that when people were happily self-sufficient, they liked to preach how they weren't looking for a serious commitment and didn't have time for one. It was only when they were dissatisfied that they began to think of marriage or commitment as a solution. But how many people are happily self-sufficient?

Does marriage have to be a salve to loneliness to have value? Isn't it valuable to begin with? In the West, the modern ideal is to be independent, on one's own, and to be able to make the choice to live with another human being, to welcome someone else as a bonus to one's existence -- if and when one is ready.

By Anita Jain

happened to find this article at salon.com

From the prostitutes of "Grand Theft Auto" to cutting-edge teledildonics, sex has fueled the gaming industry, as the author of "Porn & Pong" explains.

In 1972, our sexual landscape was forever changed by the release of two pop-culture legends: the skin flick "Deep Throat" and, months later, the arcade game "Pong." Since then, pornography has greatly influenced how sex and sexuality are explored in gaming, which in just three decades has ballooned into a $18.85 billion industry. From early '80s sleaze fests like "Leisure Suit Larry" to the porny moans of pneumatic "Tomb Raider" heroine Lara Croft to the teledildonics that are changing the way we have -- and think of -- sex, video games have evolved with an understanding that humans crave sexual interaction, whether with a virtual character or a fellow human with high-speed Internet.

It's this sexual history of video games that Damon Brown, who covers technology for Playboy, obsessively details in"Porn & Pong: How 'Grand Theft Auto', 'Tomb Raider and other Sexy Games Change Our Culture". Approaching such topics as arm-length pixelated penises and breasts that deserve their own planetary orbit with a sense of humor, Brown explores how virtual sex has gone from the crude, joystick-controlled adult games on the Atari 2600 and text-only cybering in early-'90s AOL chat rooms to bumping uglies (fully customizable, by the way) in the virtual world "Second Life" and banging prostitutes in "Grand Theft Auto." He also examines how video vixens went from having bodies practically built out of Lego blocks to becoming ever more realistic -- at least, as much as porn-industry bodies can be called "realistic."

I recently spoke with Brown about these topics and more

How did the first pornographic video game come about?

The first mainstream pornographic game would be "Custer's Revenge," which came out in 1982 and was manufactured by a pornographic company that wanted to get a piece of the large Atari 2600 market. The game is based on General Custer who, of course, failed at Little Bighorn back in the 1800s. Part of the traditional history is that not only did General Custer fight against the Native Americans, but he also slept with quite a few of them, as did his soldiers. That was Custer's revenge for losing so badly

In the game you move a naked General Custer across the screen, avoiding Native American arrows, toward a voluptuous Native American woman, who has her hands and legs tied to a cactus. Your job is to get to her, have sex and once you have enough orgasms or she has enough orgasms it starts over and you're back on the other side of the screen. You get to do it again, only there are more arrows coming. That was the whole game and it sold 80,000 copies at $50 a piece.

There was another one called "Strip Poker" that was for the Apple II. It was a poker game where you had this digital image of a fully clothed man or woman lying down and, as you beat them in rounds of poker, the screen would flash and they would take off another piece of clothing. There were six stages, so you went from fully clothed to bra and panties -- and in later editions completely nude.

"Leisure Suit Larry" was the first fully accepted sex-related game. It had a lovable character wearing a leisure suit. He came straight from the '70s. He was like the 40-year-old virgin, except much sleazier. He just wandered around a parody of Las Vegas trying to pick up women, and it sold about a million copies in the '80s.

By Tracy Clark-Flory

salon.com

But while we ladies may still have a few more laps to go before we can declare victory on, say, equal wages for equal work, an article in today's New York Times reveals that when it comes to the wages of marital sin, we may be making some progress: "Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men." Let's hear it for equal-opportunity lying, cheating and whoring around!

Lying is pretty much included in the definition of adultery -- otherwise it's a relationship better known as "open marriage" or "polyamory" -- so it can be tough to figure out if the same people who are lying to their spouses about their behavior are lying to researchers as well. But several new studies seem to show significant demographic shifts: "Researchers have found that the lifetime rate of infidelity for men over 60 increased to 28 percent in 2006, up from 20 percent in 1991. For women over 60, the increase is more striking: to 15 percent, up from 5 percent in 1991." Also: "About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful, up from about 15 and 12 percent respectively."

Seniors may be having more illicit sex just because, thanks to medical advances -- including Viagra, estrogen therapy and "better hip replacements" -- they can have more sex, period. But researchers are most interested in what's up with the women -- and here at Broadsheet we are, too.

Upon closer examination, the thing that may take most explaining is why there was such a huge fidelity gap between American men and women in the first place. In those infamous "hunting and gathering societies" -- the ones that come up each and every time we talk about cultural vs. hard-wired differences in gender -- women are no more likely than men to be faithful, anthropologist Helen E. Fisher told the Times. Thus, any differences are likely to be cultural. Do we even have to say it? OK, fine: "Men with multiple partners typically are viewed as virile, while women are considered promiscuous."

But does the stud vs. slut conundrum mean that women were actually less likely to commit adultery, or just less likely to admit it? Asks Fisher: "Is it that men are bragging about it and women are lying to everybody including themselves?" Or did women of yore just not have enough time and dependable child care to work a little extracurricular action into the daily schedule? "Historically," Fisher points out, "women have been isolated on farms or at home with children, giving them fewer opportunities to be unfaithful." But these days, wives, too, can have a little "late night at the office" or last-minute "business trip."

Whether lifelong monogamy is an ideal worth achieving is something way too personal to get into here. But I dare say it's the kind of contract that works best with equal expectations -- of virtue and villainy, love and lust. I'm pretty sure that "Mad Men's" Don Draper might have been more likely to skip his round of gimlets had he suspected his wife might have been around the corner enjoying one of her own.

By salon.com