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 Friend of mine told me this on IM before she had to go. I had been mentioning I was turning down the only person offering me sex these days because I thought the emotional fallout a bad idea. She responded that it was good, because I needed that.

 "I need to not have sex?" 

 She said she didn’t want to phrase it that way…

"But yes. You shouldn’t have sex.  *gulp"

  She had to go, and has promised she will write more to explain. I don’t think she means just with this person.

How very curious.

 I have noticed that no matter where we start, at some point she ends up with her head hitting the wall next to my bed.

 Perhaps I should attach her to something to prevent that.

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’."

She of the couch conversation had me over last night and we did do some talking. I do think I am prone to see someone who is very up front about desires and limits in a favorable light given my history of terrible communicators.

 That’s not to say I don’t carry my general paranoia about whether people are being honest about things, or reading too much into things too quickly with me still; I do. This trip, issues in other people’s relationships have probably accentuated that general worry of mine. But even when I am somewhat unsure, someone trying very hard to be clear about what she wants and what I can expect is particularly good at convincing me I should at least be open to the possibilities.

 Deliciously hot begging isn’t entirely ineffective, either. (Not that it always gets you what you want, either.)

  Even if I might not act on it, it is nice to visit a town where I feel physically desirable. Sex may not be the be-all and end-all of what I find important in relationships, but it is nice to actually have it again. It would be nicer to have a girlfriend, but a lover or two I visit every few months isn’t terrible.

 

Pixies are tricky creatures, prone to mischief in their pursuit of entertainment. One underestimates them at one’s peril. For instance, I have found that even when feeling somewhat disconnected from my inner sexy beast, it is difficult to resist a Pixie expressing glee at coaxing an orgasm from me.

 As I find that fighting a Pixie in such a mood is only asking for more trouble, it is best to submit to an enthusiastic cocksucking.

 Sadly, my hopes for some Dionysian abandon on this trip are unlikely to be fulfilled. I think the lovely nymph in question sadly underestimated her boy’s comfort with this plan. Or rather, she didn’t think to schedule things so as to allow for him to meet me and be more ok with things before continuing.

 I am not sure what I think of her new boy. He seems very hovering, but that could have been any number of factors. He seems a little less antisocial than her last, but still seems to set me a bit on edge. I might just be too worried about him being rebound and her moving too fast with him.

 In general, though, I have not felt super sexy on this trip. The reminder that I am the one who gets bumped when Demon’s schedule makes trouble for the people she has committed days to was unwelcome. I was already over-stressed and that was just a touch of lemon juice to the earlier paper cuts. I really had hoped to be wished off to the bus. The Elfling’s schedule problems above didn’t help, and I don’t know if I will be acting on the Pixie’s invitation. This may end up being a far more chaste trip than I had originally hoped, but I am not feeling the fire. More to the point, I am feeling a need for the fire to be stoked, and I don’t know if any one here is willing or wanting to do that.

is that they do wacky things to your body.  For instance, when faced with a sniffly, feverish cold, one might find that the unexpected hand job from a lovely companion who has been not particularly up for sexual activity of late results in you getting a splitting headache.

Still, I do so like clear demonstration of desire, even when it can’t be acted upon.

 So it seems fairly likely I’ll get to scratch that particular itch on my visit up north at the end of the month.

 This pleases me, especially as it will be with someone who I’ve had a two-year or so dance of attraction with strict policing of boundaries.

I really want someone to ravish with Dionysian abandon. It feels like a very long time since I’ve had that opportunity.

(this will be rambly as it is 2 in the morning and I just can’t seem to wrangle my thoughts) 

People might have guessed it would be a consent post that brought me back.

I am, in the words of one of my lovers, a "consent fetishist". By this she means that my interest/obsession with consent goes to such lengths that she will point out people wearing t-shirts that say "consensual sex is hot", find me consent quotes, and I get to check off "consent" as part of my Fetish Bingo card if someone we’re in bed with goes out of their way to be clear about gaining consent.

 It’s a big deal to me.

 So, unsurprisingly, I was pointed to Calico’s post "Grey is a Kinder Color" - inspired by Debauchette’s post about how hot the time she was raped in Italy still makes her- about the ambivalence Calico feels concerning certain types of sex/fantasies that make her hot.

I couldn’t parse that. In the world I knew, pleasure and violation were mutually exclusive. To go from hot sex to abuse, you needed to shift the carpet, declaim your experience with a revisionist history. Abuse wasn’t sexy. If you thought you’d liked it, you were deluded.

Maybe, just maybe, a belief system that holds me (us?) to be stupid and blind is not an accurate one.

 The post by Debauchette is an excellent read, and she describes what she labels a "faux-rape". It seems people are very conflicted about being able to find rape hot. Of course, this is only one kind of rape. This wasn’t rape being used as a terror weapon or anything.

 I could discuss the consent issues in play in Debauchette’s tale (she specifically mentions "there was a moment when I knew I could’ve made myself clear, in any language, but I chose not to. I wanted to see what would happen.") and the very interesting comment section it has generated, but mostly I want to discuss people thinking you aren’t allowed to find something that is wrong hot.

 Why on earth not? We’re fucked up, complex creatures, we humans. We find all kinds of things hot. Finding something hot does not make it a good. It is perfectly possible to find the thought of being ravished/forced hot and find the reality of it ethically horrible. Many, many people’s bodies respond erotically to rape - this often ends up as a mind fuck for people because how could they have had such an intense orgasm from something wrong? (People, we have orgasms in our sleep sometimes - the body does what the body does, it doesn’t change the ethics of a thing.) Marcelle Manhattan touches wondefully on how ambiguity makes us uncomfortable in her response to Debauchette here. (However, she does bring up the "Second Wave Feminists say all sex is rape" myth which just drives me nuts. No, that’s not what Dworkin was saying.)

  The sex can be clearly hot and still be abuse. Orgasms aren’t a magic wand that makes things better. Dear lord, people have been having hot sex throughout recorded history, were all those people and sex acts in contexts of perfect spiritual equality? Of course not. We humans are capable of eroticizing just about anything, so what? Erotic != good by definition. (Erotic is a slippery enough slope as it is; would that rape have been hot to her had it been anyone else at any other time? Or even if it was him at another time?)

 Now, defining and judging abuse is a tricky thing and one shouldn’t ignore the subjective interpretations of people in this matter, but you can’t believe in inalienable human rights and not think it is possible to find some objective way of judging these things.

It’s three in the morning, there are too many good comments on just those three or four posts, and I don’t have enough brain to deal with them now. Hell, I don’t even have an ending for this post.