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Bad Evo-Psych always drives me a little nuts.

 The latest little news report to get under my skin is a piece that starts with this tidbit of radical "scientific truth":

 Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance.

Ah yes, the delightful reminder that you can get almost anything reported if you simply confirm sexist tropes. Where the actual paper is published is never mentioned, so that raises red flags. As far as what they actually found, the article reports it thusly:

 The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partners whose data was the basis for the study.

They found that 121 of these women always had orgasms during sex, while 408 more had them “often”. Another 762 “sometimes” orgasmed while 243 had them rarely or never. Such figures are similar to those for western countries.

There were of course, several factors involved in such differences but, said Pollet, money was one of the main ones.

He said: “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm.

 So, to summarize - women in China reported more orgasms as their male partner’s income increased. Of course, we have no actual data given, but let’s assume there was an actual correlation.  If so, would you leap to the conclusion that it is the size of the income that is producing the orgasms, because richer men are more desirable lovers? What other possible explanations could there be? (I leave that question as an exercise to the readers, since I am pretty sure my readers aren’t stupid.)

 This kind of thing drives me batty, but things that reassure the "common wisdom" are far easier to get press for. Evo Psych might have been an interesting field, but is used primarily to provide "scientific" cover for some heavy gender-essentialism.

 Of course, when the "great minds" of the Evo Psych field such as David Buss produce this explanation of why the female orgasm exists,  you see why.

"They could promote emotional bonding with a high-quality male or they could serve as a signal that women are highly sexually satisfied, and hence unlikely to seek sex with other men,” he said. “What those orgasms are saying is ‘I’m extremely loyal, so you should invest in me and my children’."

I was introduced to The Secret Diary of a Call Girl the other day by the Pixie.  (I suppose I should put a spoiler warning on this for people thinking of watching the show in the future.)

I suspected immediately that it was based on a book or blog series and it turns out that it is, indeed, just that - based on the book based the blog of Belle de Jour (and since it seems all sex bloggers know each other, I will assume most of my few readers already know who that is).

It has much the confessional style of a blogger, with series lead Billie Piper often addressing the camera directly to comment.

I caught the fourth episode (the link to the show site offers to let you play episodes but I can’t seem to link to it) where Belle becomes a pro-domme (well, learns and tries it out). I suppose  I should ask Calico her opinion of it.

I don’t really have context, so I don’t know if the subplot with her best friend is some kind of important romantic or personal arc that is the "real story" of the series or not. In the episode, Belle ends up getting pissed at her best friend and takes it out on her sub. He safewords out, which she ignores at first.

I was only partly paying attention, so I am not sure, but it sounds like he apologizes for it - they both do - but he says something like she ‘really got it’ at the end there. I want to double check that last part, but I can’t get the clip to play on the laptop.

Belle then comes out to her friend and there is some voice over about her learning sometimes you have to abandon control. So it seemed to use the pro-domme thing more as metaphor for the character development. I don’t know if the show always does that with her sex work or not, though.

Mind you, the pro-domme who she trained under was presented not as a crazy out of control person at all. She’s matter of fact, professional, out to her husband, and very reasonable and polite. She is played a bit for laughs in how she teaches Belle, but the humour was more based in her matter-of-factness.

In fact, it is the "out to the husband" bit that rattles Belle, who is closeted to her best friend, which is why they are having stress.

I can’t quite make up my mind about the show and don’t really know if it was good enough for me to bother watching the rest. However, given the diversity of how BDSM is actually lived  it is always interesting to see how it is presented in media. i’m not sure if this was a positive or a negative over all.