BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Relationship Stuff, and Career Aspirations
This was going to be a post with a few random notes, but as I started writing it became all about my recent and future dating activities. So it's kind of unified in theme, now. Funny how that worked. I even went back and changed the title.
It's the weekend. Late Friday night, at least. And I'm busy. Most of my weekends are busy, now that I have a new girlfriend. I'm either down at her place for a day and a half, or she's up here, and while the time is fun, it flies, and I'm certainly not online or even on the computer during that time. So when I get back on (the computer) late Sunday night, I'm going a million miles an hour to catch up on what I would usually have been doing all day Saturday and/or Sunday.
This weekend Elle's off to some family events all day Saturday, but she'd going to drive up here early Sunday morning, hopefully arriving in time to surprise me in bed. Later in the day we're doing a sorta double date with Malaya and her husband (they're approaching their first anniversary, so I suppose I should stop saying "new" husband?). Neither Malaya or her guy have met Elle, and since I've told each party a fair amount about the other, I think that curiosity is fairly high. (I knew Malaya's husband long before she ever met him, so there was never any such "first" meeting curiosity betwixt myself and he, when they were dating.) And I've not talked to the capricious young woman formerly known as the I.G. in weeks, so there's very little likelihood of Elle and she ever coming face to face.
One thing that's very odd (to me) with Elle is our mutual physical admiration. I don't just mean sex -- I mean that we are both fairly visual creatures, and we're both in better shape than any of each other's past boy/girl friends, so we tend to spend some amount of time in various states of undress, simply admiring each others physiques.
I'll spare you any overly eroticized descriptions, but she's a dancer and is fairly tall for a woman, so I'm forever getting lost tracing up and down the smooth lengths of her long, shapely legs. I'm also overly fond of her primary objects of human sexual dimorphism, as well as the curve of her upper thigh, where it tapers out at the hip and my hands naturally slide down over her smooth, flat stomach.
For her part, she is forever focusing on an unmentionable portion of my anatomy, but she also quite enamored of my shirtless upper body. And, as I said previously, she loves red hair and freckles, the later of which I have in abundance on my upper arms and shoulders.
It always amazes me that women like the male body, especially that they like body hair. It's become fairly trendy for men to shave themselves to look like overgrown altar boys, but I've yet to meet a woman who actually prefers a bare-chested man to one with body hair. And that includes the IG, who hated and waged constant war on her own body hair, and was 21 when we met; seemingly in the prime age range to believe the media hype about chest waxed metrosexuals.
Women even love hair on the legs; one of the funniest former sex stories Elle ever told me was about a guy she dated who had shaved his genitals. And not just the cock and balls, but several inches up his thighs and stomach. She said it was just a weird, deforested sight, and not at all erotic.
My experiences make me wonder who exactly is pushing the hairless man ideal? Homosexual fashion magazine photographers? (Except that gay men don't seem to dislike body hair either.) At any rate, I've not shaved my chest in years, since Malaya asked me to stop doing it since the stubble tickled her ear when she laid her head on my chest or stomach. And I'm certainly not going to start now, the way Elle loves to run her hands and finger tips over it.
Yes, that's me in a very recent photo, to the right. I thumbnailed it so anyone opposed to a topless man won't scar their beautiful eyes. Click it to see it larger. No, I don't know what's going on with my forehead there. It's an odd angle, and unforgiving bathroom lights overhead.
The picture stemmed from an amusing girlfriend interaction. I was giving my head a buzz, as I do every few weeks, and I texted Elle to tell her that she'd be seeing a bit less of me next time we met, she asked for a pic. That's what resulted, and since I may not continue to have pecs and abs forever, I figured I should immortalize the fitness moment on the blog. I'm not doing any special diet or physical training; just my usual 90 minutes 3 or 4x a week at the gym, with most of that spent on cardio. I imagine that if I concentrated more on lifting, and took some of those protein powders that are forever getting professional athletes suspended, I'd really see some upper body definition form. Perhaps someday...
I must be doing something right, since Elle is always raving about what a perfectly "manly" shape I have. The wider shoulders than waist, the muscular legs, the solid jaw and defined neck, etc. None of those are things I think of myself as a paragon of, but she certainly enjoys the visuals. Sometimes when we're lounging around she asks me to get up and walk around just so she can enjoy the view. I'm game, though it feels weird. I'm not self conscious, but I've always thought of myself as average to ugly in looks, and I was also the skinny kid. So why is this hot chick asking me to parade around for her eyes? She probably feels much the same strangeness when I ask her to parade around, bend over, pose with a saucy expression on her face, etc, for me, but she's done some modeling and has danced and sung on stage countless times, so it's less odd for her. Besides, men are usually the visual creatures in a relationship, so women are more used to being looked over and admired in private, not to mention their "every guy is looking at my boobs/ass" regular daily existence.
At any rate, her constant comments on my desirability influenced the above photo. Also, I sent it to Malaya's cell and asked her if I'd ever been in that sort of shape when I was with her. I wasn't trolling for compliments, and in fact I rather expected snark and sarcasm. But I was genuinely curious what she'd say, since she hasn't seen me without a shirt in years. (She said surprisingly nice things, and confirmed that I'd never been that muscular when in her acquaintance.)
It's hard to keep track of one's own bodily changes. I see myself every day, and muscles grow very slowly, so I can't really remember if I was bigger or smaller 4 or 5 years ago. I suppose most men around my age experience a similar transformation, though it's usually going the other way on the fitness meter. And that's probably where I'd be going, if I hadn't been single and childless and trying to date 22 y/o's over the past couple of years.
The muscles and six pack never quite got me through the door with the IG, but they certainly helped win Elle over. Or more accurately, they didn't really affect her "I like him a lot" judgment, but they did make her enjoy the "getting to know him in a physical way" process more than she might otherwise have. It's funny, since she's much more discerning in her partner selection than the (secretly slutty) IG was (that's one of the little details that came out when we argued as our friendship apparently came to an end earlier this summer). Elle has dated a lot of guys, especially in the month+ she was doing online dating before we met, but most of them were just one or two dates and not so much as a peck on the cheek. She's very often marveled at how attracted she was to me, and how the things we've been doing together are different than her usual behavior with a new boyfriend.
The irony is that the IG, while much younger and having dated far fewer guys than Elle, had sex with substantially more men, though most of them were very short term relationships she almost invariably regretted afterwards. It's ironic since she knew me much longer than most guys she went down on, and she liked me a great deal more, and often told me how much more attractive/built I was than most of her exes. (And non-exes she concealed during our time together. She just came to think of me as a friend and a big brother, rather than a boyfriend, and she liked me too much to ruin our relationship with sex. And she was right, since that would have ruined it, especially since she would have cheated on me, as she had (and will continue to do) with every other guy she's slept with. And I'm very monogamous, so we would have fought and it would have been ugly and then we'd not have been friends anymore.
Instead of that we didn't have sex, and ended up fighting about the non-sex, and it was ugly, and now we're not friends anymore. Great success!
I digress. Not that this post ever had a central theme to digress from.
Next weekend I'm going down to Elle's place on Saturday night and staying over through Sunday, and the weekend after that we're looking at some sort of getaway. Up to wine country for an overnight, down to Monterey, etc. She's got a real job doing scientific lab stuff, and she needs to tend ongoing experiments and projects almost every day (frequently including weekends) so she can't just take off a Friday and/or Monday and be gone for 4 days without a lot of advance planning, which slightly limits our ability to dash off for romantic weekends away.
I'm interested in enjoying some of those with her, though I've had to do some soul searching to feel accommodating about that sort of activity. Much less encouraging. Who doesn't like a vacation? Me, that's who. I came to this realization some months ago, and probably blogged about it then. Though I certainly can't expect anyone reading this to remember that, since I didn't, and I (theoretically) wrote it. At any rate, the realization was that most people enjoy travel and getaway activities on weekends or holidays since they work all week, and whether they love or hate their jobs, when they leave work on Friday evening, they want to not think about it until Monday morning.
That's a perfectly natural concept, it's just not one I've ever really experienced, since I've never had a M-F, 9-5 type job. I'm always working on some freelance editing project, or a website, or writing fiction, or at least I should be. So I don't have a regular schedule, which means I don't really have any regular vacations. When I'm not at home I'm always thinking about the work I should/could be doing, and since I enjoy my work and since it's got to be kept up on constantly, I usually do some hours of it every day.
In a larger sense, most people don't have anything personal tied up in their jobs or careers. They do them for the money and maybe the satisfaction, but it's not really anything personal. They're just a cog in a wheel, and if they weren't doing what they do, someone else would, with no real difference to the company or the world at large.
That's not meant as an insult; it's just the way of things. Sure, some teachers are really good and memorable to their students, and some doctors save lives, etc. But the vast majority of people are fairly faceless and highly fungible, in their careers. Usually by choice; it's certainly easier and safer to go to work and just do what you're assigned than it is to strike out on your own and take all the risks/rewards/initiative.
I'm rambling here, but my point is that I feel a more personal connection to my work than most people do. Not so much the website stuff; true, if I didn't do it much of it wouldn't get done, on my site or any other, but if a few tens of thousands of Diablo 3 fans had slightly less game info and news to read, it wouldn't really change their lives in any significant fashion. Not much more so than if their usual barrista were eaten by Shamu, and the new guy put too much/little cream in their mochachino.
On the fiction though, as terribly as I've (so far) underachieved my potential, I am the only one who can do it. True, the fantasy/horror/mystery readers of the world aren't exactly living lives of quite desperation, deprivation, and misery due to the fact that I've written about a dozen fewer books than I should have, to this point in my life. But the books/movies I have in my head aren't going to be written by anyone else, and if/when I write them, they'll be something permanent, a literary legacy, for better or for worse. And to that I feel some amount of responsibility (though not enough to do more than 1/10th as much writing as I fucking well should be doing), which makes me want/need to work on them. Even on weekends.
These thoughts came about chiefly from reading many of the online dating profiles (not Elle's, though) where the women (men too, but I seldom read those) were so gleefully up front about their desires to party and go crazy every minute of every weekend, and to get out of the city/state/country the minute their vacations arrived. I had subliminal annoyance/confusion about that for a while, until I finally realized why it bothered me. It was due to what I said above; that I feel a need/urge/responsibility to do some work every day, and it seems very weird to me that a person (most people) are the complete opposite. When they're not at work they're not working or thinking about working. In fact, they're working hard to not think about working. That's the whole point of weekend getaways and vacations and drunken nights out for most people!
Which is fine. Whatever gets them (you) through. If I had a job I didn't like and only did for the $, I'm sure I'd feel much the same way. (Though I'd probably spend those weekends and nights diving into my fiction writing as an escape. Which might actually result in more writing productivity, ironically.) But it took me a while to come to this realization, and for months I was mildly annoyed at all the dating personals written by people who wanted nothing but party/fun on weekends. "Sit down, stay home, and accomplish something with your life!" I found myself muttering. And while that reaction is perfectly rational for me, or when applied to my life, it's utterly irrelevant and misplaced when aimed at the lives of most people, who work at work, and try to have fun and forget about work when they're not at work. They're not going to write novels, or even maintain websites, and there's no benefit to them sitting home at their computers at nights. They might as well party, or travel. In fact, those are probably much more wholesome and enriching behaviors than the gaming, watching TV, reading-the-paper-and-yelling-at-their-kids alternatives.
Not that many of the women whose profiles I was viewing had papers to read or kids to yell at, but you get my drift.
Fortunately, Elle agrees and understands my psychology on this. She has a job she loves, but it's not one she can do much on when she's not in the lab. She can read scientific journals and work on grants and proposals and articles and such, but even those largely require her to be in the lab for tech work, computer access, etc. Plus she mostly does that stuff at work, to keep herself busy while she's running experiments on this and that. When away from work, shes' not a party animal (just a dancing machine), and she loves to read and engage in other quiet and solitary pursuits in her free time. So she's quite happy to set aside a couple/few hours during our planned weekends together, when she'll read, or take a walk, or window shop while I hunch over my laptop and attempt to further my literary aspirations.
That's the plan, anyway. Thus far it exists entirely in the theoretical, since we've not had any whole weekends to spend together, and when we are in each others company for a day, we can't help but interact for hours on end, often without the aid of verbal utterances. And it's not like we're eager to put a halt to that, but all things in good time, and since she's been spending virtually all of her free time in some sort of socialization, with her family, friends, or me, Elle's probably happy to plan some free time to herself, for reading or just thinking, while I'm tapping away.
Not that we'll be putting that to the test this weekend, with her early morning arrival, lunch with my friends, and then a few more precious evening hours together before she's got to drive back home to get some sleep before Monday morning work. Personally, I'm looking forward to it.
Also, I've not Twittered in weeks, but that's since I changed my phone upload over to the @Diii.net Twitter account, so I could tweet updates directly from Blizzcon. I did, about five times, during the Blizzard HQ tour on the Thursday before Blizzcon. I then completely forgot about the twitter distraction once BlizzCon began. I was on my laptop constantly at the show, usually in the press room, but I was writing content, posting news, jumping into the live chat, etc. Not burping up 140 character non sequiturs for an audience a fraction the size of that which was viewing the forums and the D3 main page. (I did text a fair amount over my phone, but those were mostly to Malaya, who was also at BlizzCon, or to Elle, who was as almost as horny and missing me as I was horny and missing her.)
After Blizzcon I remembered that any tweets sent from my phone would go to @Diii.net rahter than @BlackChampagne, but I only remembered that far enough to stop myself from sending any tweets, rather than as motivation to go into the account and change the settings back. Thus when I've thought occasionally about tweeting during the past 2.5 weeks I've just not done it, since said tweet would have gone up to the @Diii.net, where posts about my mercantile misadventures, cats, garden, and prophylactic purchases would have been out of place. At best.
I just switched my phone tweets back to BC though, so for both of you who sometimes thought about checking there, you can think about it again. It's almost sure not to entertain. If it had been working today, I'd have made two posts in the evening. Which I shall now recreate. With better grammar and punctuation than my thumbs would have provided, and likely character overflows as well.
# I'm enjoying the irony of browsing the birth control aisle in Target while women wheel screaming babies past.
# They say not to shop for food when you're hungry because you'll indulge cravings. By that metric when could I ever rationally buy these intimate items?
In one of the articles I read today about Illinois' crazy governor getting impeached (unanimously) I saw a mention of the last governor to be so summarily tossed out; Arizona's Evan Mecham. I remembered the name and something about canceling the MLK holiday, but it was back in the 80s when I was too young to really follow politics of current events. So I headed to the always-reliable wikipedia, found a substantial article, and was surprised how funny (in a horrible sort of way) it was. A few quotes from the gold mine of content on the guy. Corruption, incompetence, paranoia, casual racism, and much, much more.
As governor, Mecham was plagued by controversy and became the first U.S. governor to simultaneously face removal from office through impeachment, a scheduled recall election, and a felony indictment.
... [There were many accusations of cronyism as he appointed incompetent or unqualified friends to state offices.] Among these nominations was Alberto Rodriguez as superintendent of the Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control, while he was under investigation for murder. Other questionable nominations included the director of the Department of Revenue whose company was in arrears by US$25,000 on employment compensation payments, an appointee for head of prison construction who had served prison time for armed robbery, and as state investigator a former Marine who had been court-martialled twice. Other political appointees who caused Mecham embarrassment were an education adviser, James Cooper, who told a legislative committee "If a student wants to say the world is flat, the teacher doesn't have the right to prove otherwise," and Sam Steiger, the Governor's special assistant, who was charged with extortion.
...Besides the uproar caused by the MLK Day cancellation, Mecham committed other political faux pas. Claims of prejudice were made against Mecham after he defended the use of the word "pickaninny" to describe black children, claimed that high divorce rates were caused by working women, claimed America is a Christian nation to a Jewish audience, and said a group of visiting Japanese businessmen got "round eyes" after being told of the number of golf courses in Arizona. In response to claims that he was a racist, Mecham said, "I've got black friends. I employ black people. I don't employ them because they are black; I employ them because they are the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job.
...Throughout his administration, Mecham expressed concern about possible eavesdropping on his private communications. A senior member of Mecham's staff broke his leg after falling through a false ceiling he had been crawling over, looking for covert listening devices. A private investigator was hired to sweep the governor's offices looking for bugs. The Governor was quoted as saying, "Whenever I'm in my house or my office, I always have a radio on. It keeps the lasers out."
This guy was 20 years before his time. Imagine if he were around today, with cable news and the Jon Stewart show and blogs? God the amusement he'd provide, with this non-stop cavalcade of blunders and foots in mouth. He's like Sarah Palin without handlers or speech writers, albeit without a high school drop out daughter and her self described "fucking redneck" baby daddy.
The racist comments are the worst/funniest/most groan-inducing. I have to assume he was joking (in poor taste) with that "cotton-picking" remark, rather than saying it in inadvertently as a figure of speech. If it was unintentional, it might be the funniest thing anyone has ever accidentally said.
His racist comments remind me of Rush Limbaugh's a few years ago, when he was briefly on the ESPN pregame football show, until he "resigned" after making some comments about how the media always tries to inflate the value of black quarterbacks. Rush, like Evan Mecham, steadfastly denied that he was racist, going to the notorious "I have black friends" defense. And he probably does (as far as someone like Rush Limbaugh can actually have friends, as opposed to sycophants and boot-lickers). But that's not the point. There's a difference between being a racist and a bigot, though the terms are frequently used interchangeably. You can be a racist and not a bigot, though I don't think you can be a bigot and not a racist.
Rush Limbaugh and Evan Mecham are (were, Mecham's dead now) racists, by the classic, 1st definition in the dictionary sense. They see the world in black and white (and yellow and brown, etc) where race colors (taints) every issue. It's the mindset that MLK was directly attacking with his famous "I have a dream" speech. The whole "by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin" concept. They don't necessarily hate other races; they might even admire them in various ways. You can be white and think Asians are smarter/better at math, Jews are better with money, Blacks are better dancers, etc. All things you might wish to be yourself. That's not the point; the point is that if you attribute those talents to their race, it's the same concept as attributing stupidity or sloth or greed or other negative traits to race. It's racist, even if it's not bigoted.
From even those few quotes of Mecham it's pretty clear that he was bigoted as well, and there's plenty of past evidence to convict Rush of the same sin. But they're not unusual or exceptional; they're just public figures whose comments on race were broadcast widely. They don't think of themselves as racist either; after all, everyone knows that blacks are dangerous and criminal; what's wrong about saying so?
An anecdote. Last weekend I had a first date with another woman I met via online dating service. It was a disaster. Well, that's overstating. I was miserable and had a horrible time and will never see her again, but it's not like we got into a public altercation. I kind of wish we had; it would have been something interesting. I have never been that bored during two hours with another human being, and it came about because she was just inert. She had no opinions, no observations, no suggestions, no comments, she answered questions with short, declarative sentences, she never laughed or joked or smiled, etc. Halfway through, while waiting for the chocolate factory tour to begin, she took the first of her 3 10-minute bathroom visits and I texted a few friends, and my Twitter account, in desperation. And the quick text I got back from the IG was the most interesting remark I'd heard all afternoon.
That's not why I bring up the date, though. The funny part, in an Evan Mecham way, was earlier, when we were driving. We met in Berkeley and I drove us down to a chocolate factory near I-80, after we window shopped a bit and had a coffee. That was the plan, anyway. The window shopping turned out to be a disaster since she had nothing to say about anything, didn't seem to be interested in anything but some theater company fliers in a cafe window, and didn't want to go into any of the shops. She thought they looked weird, or so I interpreted from her wrinkled nose and nervous eyes.
I'm not exactly bohemian, but I've been in that area a few times, and it's far from dangerous of weird. It's mostly White and Asian, it was the middle of the afternoon on a sunny Sunday, there's no graffiti or barred windows in the area, etc. We weren't even in the heart of Berkeley, (like the place I got my ears pierced last week, while there to give the IG moral support for her latest piercing) near the Cal campus where you'll see later-day hippies galore, and most of the stores are sprawling used record places and head shops and there are pushy street vendors on the sidewalks, etc. We were on Shattuck near University, which is a little bit hippy, but is mostly just businesses, small restaurants, quirky jewelry and art stores, etc. It could be a nice semi-downtown neighborhood anywhere in the US. There were a few street people, but I didn't even notice them. It's Berkeley; of course you'll see a few bearded guys walking around with huge backpacks and bedrolls.
She however, very much did notice them. Even very early on, when we were sitting at a little outdoor cafe and drinking coffee (well, hot chocolate actually) she was doing this eye bugging thing whenever someone weird walked by. The funny part came later, when we were driving to the chocolate factory. We headed west on down Ashby, which is kind of a weird street, but it's not the hood by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly not on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Several blocks down Ashby crosses Martin Luther King, on a corner blighted by such dreadful inner city sights as a busy corner market, joggers, dog walkers, children playing, etc. I think there might even have been a woman or two pushing baby strollers. Most of them white people! Horrifying, I know.
As we got to that intersection and waited for the red light, my date peered through the window and saw the street sign. Breaking her near-silence, she said, "Ohhh... Martin Luther King street? I hear it's dangerous here."
I am seldom speechless, or even at a loss for words, but at that one I did take a pause. After taking a breath I said something about the old Chris Rock joke, about the irony of how MLK was a man of peace, but if you found yourself on a street named after him, you'd better run. Run! She didn't laugh, she just kept looking around nervously (there was not a sullen, saggy-pantsed black teenager in sight) and didn't seem all that calmed even when we were half a mile away and parking in a lot entirely full of nice cars and white people.
It was kind of a head-slapping moment; not that she thought it, but that she said it so casually. (Actually, it wasn't that casual. She was on edge right from the start of our date, since she'd obviously expected me to be different than I was, in some unknown way. So probably she blurted out something she'd never have said in racially-mixed company.) And I'm sure that she, like Rush and Evan, would vociferously deny that she was a racist. Nevertheless, I had to think about that afterwards. She worked in the HR department for a tech company and did a lot of their hiring and internal transfers, and I kept thinking about all those studies when researchers send out identical resumes, but one is from John Smith and the other is from Dikembe Shabungue. And Mr. Smith gets far more call backs.
The other interesting thing about this woman's character was that one of the very few things she showed any interest in all day were the fliers we saw for various plays and shows coming to the Berkeley area. One was by some Black performance company, and she said she was interested in seeing it. (Which she might yet... but not with me.) Afterwards, having seen her uneasiness at street people, MLK boulevard, her refusal to go to the Ashby BART station when I wanted to drop her off (since it was nearer MLK and therefore dangerous), etc, I thought back on her theater interest, and her stated interest in indy films, and all the pieces of the stereotype started to come together.
I've often heard about the white liberal type who are sympathetic and compassionate, but only from a safe distance. This woman had happily voted for Obama, and she would go to a play about black culture, and she's probably seen A Raisin in the Sun and The Color Purple, etc. But at the same time she's got this mostly-hidden reservoir of terror of the Other. Weird people, different people, black people, strange things, etc. For her, riding BART to Berkeley was way out of her comfort zone, driving past MLK was scary, etc. It doesn't make her a bad person, and in fact we got along well in email and txt before our date, so we had something in common. But she was only book smart; only interesting when she had time to think of a response. Her real life personality was timid and insecure and non-spontaneous, and that made her boring and hesitant. And that made our date a disaster.
Happily the date gets funnier in retrospect. Talking it over with the IG the next day we were alughing our asses off. Even immediately afterwards, while driving home I called Malaya to vent/rant, and she was laughing hysterically at my depiction of events. I didn't just call her to yell though, I was curious. She used to complain to me how boring her social events were at work. She was surrounded largely by over-educated, suburban, white women, and she always said the conversations were painfully dull. I never quite grasped why that was, but I think I know now. In recent weeks I've gotten to know/dated 2 fairly intelligent, gainfully-employed, well-educated, semi-worldly white women in their early 30s, and both were incredibly boring in person. I'll avoid a massive digression in this post, and just say that after those dates and some discussion of them with friends, I've concluded that there are many different types of "intelligence." People can know a lot of things, be able to write coherently and think, and even do fairly difficult jobs with competence. Yet at the same time they can be horrible at communicating, lack any sense of humor, kill any conversation they're invited into, etc. I'm sure it's not just white people who fall into this trap, but the more white women I date, the more those "white and uptight' stereotypes seem accurate.
And yes, I'm straying in an interesting direction for a post all about racist thinking. The difference, as I see it, is that I don't attribute a genetic, biological reason or predestination for this. It's entirely cultural, just like any superior black dancing ability, or Asian math prowess. Some white people are brought up and live in a way that sews the seeds of them being uptight and uneasy around strange or new or different things as adults. And unfortunately, I keep reaping those harvests via online dating.
Happily, this weekend's date is a lively and intelligent woman who pointed me to some YouTube videos of her doing on-the-street interviews as part of a media project in college, and she's able to talk and think and be sarcastic and wry, on her feet. Literally, in this instance. I'll report how that one goes at some point. Or not. I seem to blog on CPT these days... wait, what?
One aspect of Milk that caught my attention was the depiction of Harvey's love life. Throughout the movie, which covered about 9 years of his life, Harvey had sex with two guys, both of them relatively long term relationships. (The personal details as presented in the film don't mesh with Harvey's biography on wikipedia, but that's another issue.) Harvey met Scott, a younger white guy in NYC, and they moved to SF together and stayed together (without any signs of cheating or serious discord) for 6 or 7 years. They eventually broke up when Scott couldn't take Harvey's endless political campaigning and the fact that he was putting the gay movement first. Harvey was then alone for about a year (hard to precisely judge the time flow in the film) until he met Jack, a somewhat nutty but seductive and free spirited Latino guy. Harvey and Jack were together for a year of drama (from Jack) while Harvey's career finally took off, until Jack eventually killed himself because he was unbalanced and very needy. Harvey got over that in like, a day, and devoted himself to his work.
Leaving aside the issue of how true to life this is (not very), it's a remarkably non-sexual life for any single, powerful, prominent man to lead, especially an openly gay man living the pre-AIDS era in San Francisco.
Scott, the first boyfriend, remained a character in the movie, and he and Harvey stayed friends and looked to be heading towards a possible reconciliation at the end, just before Harvey's death. One thing Scott said during a meeting while Harvey's crazy second BF was still alive spurred this post. They'd brought their dates to the same party; Harvey with the crazy Latino guy, Scott with his new BF, and during a moment of private conversation Harvey said to Scott, "You can do better." Scott shrugged and said, "He keeps me away from the bars."
I noticed that at the time, and thinking it over later, it's an interesting way to view a relationship. Almost as a necessary evil; a way to stave off the cravings or opportunity to do worse things.
A slight digression: while researching video games and addiction and other issues for my senior project last year, I read a number of scholarly papers in which mental health practitioners and patients praised World of Warcraft and other such games for the good they did for people with addictive personalities. Yes, WoW will suck your life away, but better a computer game than truly dangerous, expensive, life-destroying addictions like booze or drugs. It's bizarre to think about, but a non-negligible number of those crazy people with multiple level 80 alts are actually using their 8+ hours a day of WoW as a form of self-medication.
Back on the topic at hand, I found myself thinking about Milk last night while procrastinating other projects and working up to writing my irrelevant review of the film. Specifically, the gay lifestyles as shown in the movie. They were largely desexualized; probably to give the film more appeal to straight mainstream audiences. Harvey has 2 long term boyfriends, only 2 other guys in the movie are ever shown engaging in sex (during a victory celebration), and there isn't any public nudity or sexual deviancy (other than some campy drag queens), no orgies, or anonymous hook ups, or cottaging, etc.
I'm not complaining about this; the film focused on Harvey's political efforts, with his personal life important only as it related to larger public events. The movie wasn't about life in the Castro, or the gay bathhouse scene, etc. It made me think about how so many gay men actually do behave though, and how wildly different it was from what we saw in the film, and from the lives of most heterosexual men. It's quite possible for your average (or below average) gay men to go out to a bar or a park or some other cruise spot, and get laid (well, at least a blow job) just about any night they wish. Consensually! I'm not talking about hiring a whore, though that's sometimes necessary. (Heterosexual guys can do that too.) Most of the time no money need change hands, and true, you might not get the hottest guy in the bar, but you'll likely meet interested in quick sex, happy to reciprocate whatever you do to them, and not interested in giving a thought to dating or even trading phone numbers or names. If you're a straight guy, try to imagine that? Three or four or six nights a week you could go to a bar, hang out for an hour or two, and be almost guaranteed to get laid, without needing to be all dressed up, to have a great convincing rap, having to lie, to make promises of love and commitment, etc. I think that, for most straight guys, is inconceivable. Pun intended.
Sure, there are straight men in that situation, but they're exceptional. Rock stars, tycoons, pro athletes, etc. Some .001% of the male population with enough "eligible" in their "bachelor" (or not; lots of them are married) to create a situation where attractive women will relax all of their usual rules and requirements and will indulge in sex without a relationship or any long term promises or agreements. The key difference is not that only that tiny 0.001% of straight men want easy, eager, anonymous sex. It's that they are the only type of straight men who can get it! Women just aren't interested in that, except in rare instances (some women like it, lots more women like it at one time in their lives with very special men).
Also, let's be clear that not all gay men are into cruising and anonymous sex of that type, and even those who are at some point aren't into it forever. That's what Scott's comment in Milk reminded me of. He liked his post-Harvey boyfriend since it kept him out of bars. As Chef said, "Meaningless sex is fun for 20 or 30 years, but after that it starts to get old."
I'm not going to debate the pros or cons of this practice; I'm more interested in contemplating it as a reality. I can't imagine it, personally. I've never had sex with a woman I didn't know fairly well, either as friends for at least weeks, or from dating a number of times. I have had (usually realizing it in retrospect) that I've had a few opportunities for hook ups with female strangers, but they weren't interesting to me at the time, for various reasons. Admittedly, I never go to bars or clubs or other places to hang out where slutty women might be found. But even if I did, the vast majority of men who try that go home alone, or require welder's thickness beer googles to get aroused by their catch.
A slight digression: Years ago, when I lived in San Diego, I was friends with most of the guys who worked at a video game arcade near SDSU. I would hang out there several nights a week, and through skillful application of social engineering skills and various minor favors and gifts, I eventually enticed most of them into hanging around after closing time and sucking my cock. Wait... what? No I mean we'd stay there after closing and put the games on free play for an hour or three. This was in the days before computer games or console games were up to the technological snuff of arcade games, especially in terms of multiplayer components, and it was great to get hours of head to head battles or even just solitary practice time on Street Fighter Alpha or some other game that usually had a crowd waiting to play. And since being the best at video games was important to me at that time, I valued the experience highly. But even then I often got bored and just hung out there out of habit, or because it was free and I was getting something other people wanted and couldn't have. I'd tell myself to stay home and write that night, but I'd been in all day, or I was tired after RL work and wanted to be out and unwind a bit, etc. And since it was free, and easy, I often did.
In that light, I can kind of understand the lingering attraction and addiction of cottaging or gay bar/bathhouse action. Even if you're growing sick of doing something, just the fact that you can do it, for free, makes it hard to stop doing. It becomes a habit, you get some ego boost out of it, you know other people would love to do it if they were allowed to, etc. And I was just playing arcade games for free; imagine how much more compelling it must be to get sex; the single strongest drive afflicting the male of our (and most other) species?
And that's why I can't imagine what it would be like to know I could just go to some bar a block from my apartment and get sex. Well, I mean with someone I want to have sex with. I live 20 miles from the setting of Milk and I'm not hideously disfigured; if I wanted to visit a gay bar and see what all that sex was like first hand (so to speak) there's nothing stopping me. But since I'm attracted to women, and since women are not wired to want sex the way men do, it seems almost like science fiction to contemplate it.
The funny thing is that I don't want that. Or at least I don't think I want that. Possibly I'm just telling myself I don't want it since I can't have it? It's easy for me (and most other "nice guys") to say I don't want "meaningless" sex of the type Chef talks about, but since I've never had it, and will likely never have easy access to it, how do I know? The straight guys who can nail groupies seem to enjoy them to the best of their ability, though eventually most straight men get tired of those sorts of games and settle down (while still indulging in some "strange" when the occasional presents itself).
Sure, sex is a drive for me, and as I've met various women in real life and through online dating, I see how sexual urges and attraction work. I feel far more interested in spending time with and getting to know the women I find sexually attractive than the ones I'm just so-so about. But I sublimate the interest in sex into a larger interest, since I don't just want them for their bodies. Having been in love with someone I got to sleep with, I know how much better sex is when there's a strong emotional aspect to it. Like virtually every other man (and quite a few women) alive, I'm horny enough that I'm not putting love as a prerequisite for sex, but I am holding to a standard that I have to at least really like her before I will have sex with her. However again, since that's the standard almost all women hold men to... am I really making that choice, or just finding a way to rationalize and agree with one that's been forced on me?
In a weird way, I think that the psychology of most gay men is closest to the psychology of straight men at a younger age. When a lot of straight guys are in their teens or maybe college years, quite a few of them see relationships and talking and interaction with women largely as a means to an end. They don't want to talk or romance or date; they just want pussy. They (at least the more successful of them, a fraternity that did not include me at that age) have just learned that those other things are required in order to get said pussy.
Between men and women who are starting to date, there is a usually unspoken but widely understood arrangement; the man wants sex, and the woman might be willing to give it to him, if he proves himself worthy to her. That proving takes a different form from man to man and for each woman, but most of the participants are well aware of the game going in. That dynamic is radically altered when gay men are involved, since they both want the same thing and they both know what the other one wants. That's one element of gay courtship that was fairly accurate in Harvey. Despite the fact that he was with an absurdly low number of partners; both of his boyfriends were total strangers when they met, and yet they were kissing within seconds, and fucking within minutes.
Straight men (homophobic ones especially) often rail against this sort of promiscuity, but I think a lot of their whining and condemning is born of jealousy. Not that they want gay sex themselves (though that's notuncommoneither), but they resent that other people get to have all the sex they want while they can't themselves. Speeches moralistically condemning homosexuality very often include comments about promiscuity, so it's not just that they're fags, it's that they're successful fags!
Ironically, when the subject turns to bastard babies on welfare, the condemnation usually falls on the mothers. They're sluts and whores for giving it up and getting pregnant, while the men who fuck 'em and leave 'em are not much blamed for their behavior. They might be blamed for not "taking care of they kids" but there's hardly ever any criticism of their sexual behavior. It's women our society holds responsible for moderating and controlling sex; men are supposed to fuck any woman who will let them. Unless they're gay men, in which case society says they're wrong in general, and doubly wrong for doing it so often.
Back in January, the IG and I had a conversation about her future plans, and where and how and if a boyfriend would fit into them. She was tempted and torn by the notion, and the man who was postulating it, but she'd only been single for a couple of months at that point, and hadn't been happy with how her last (and previous) relationships had gone. She felt she was too busy with full time school and two part time jobs, and that she couldn't fit a boyfriend into that, at least not with the quality of relationship she wanted. She'd felt like her previous boyfriend was almost a long distance relationship, even though he only lived 15 miles away and they often saw each other at school, and she didn't want that again.
She rescinded that rule for about a week around Valentine's Day, and we had a lovely date and a lovelier follow up date at my apt one day, but she came to her senses before March began, and held her ground through the rest of the spring. We saw each other all the time, and traded phone txts and emails and talked now and then, but it was purely as friends. (Obviously she knew I had ulterior desires, if not motives, and we'd joke about it from time to time, but it wasn't as if I was actively trying to seduce her or pressure her into anything.)
In early summer, before she went away for 2+ months on an internship, we had a conversation much like the one we'd had in January, with a similar outcome. I really couldn't argue with her logic; she was going to be out of the country from late May until early August, when she got back she was going to do some other traveling, she had to help her younger sister move down south and get set in college, and then her own fall semester started in late August. At that point (now) she'd be back where she was in the spring; full time student, working at least two part time jobs, with a lot of friends to find time for, and no realistic time for a boyfriend. (And that's how things have turned out.)
She wasn't leading me on or stringing me along; she never asked me to wait for her, or flirted and then shied away, etc. Quite the opposite; she kept encouraging me to find a woman who was looking for a boyfriend, and offered me advice on good ways and places to meet women. I didn't take her advice, but I did make some efforts to meet women over the summer. I even met some, but none that worked out. I think I mentioned it on the blog at some point, but mostly on a lark, while semi-drunk late night on my June 20th birthday, I posted a personal add on Craig's List. It didn't go well.
I didn't get a ton of weird spammers and scammers, as I'd expected. That would have been better. What I got were several replies from women who were around my age or "a few years older," and while two of the four were fairly interesting to talk with via email, when they got around to sending me pictures I was, frankly, horrified. Thrown for a loop, as they say. I never met any of them in person, or even talked to them over the phone, and I disliked myself for simply ending the conversations as abruptly as I did, but the pictures... *shudders at the memory*
I'm not going to post any of the photos here, and I never told them my real name or used my regular email or mentioned my blog, so I'm sure none of them are reading this now, which is why I can honestly say that the experience made me question my heterosexuality. Not that it almost turned me gay; more like, "If all women looked like that, I'd just be celibate."
I've never been unhappy alone, and I hate hanging out in clubs or bars, and I'm not into spending time with people I don't enjoy spending time with. As a result I haven't dated that much or had that many girlfriends, but by chance or design, I've been pretty fortunate in the quality of women I have ended up with. No Victoria's Secret models, but none who weren't at least "pretty" by any conventional scale, and none who were anywhere above "plump." Usually closer to "slender." More importantly, I realize in retrospect, they all were young, and looked it. I've dated women older than me, but I was in my early 20s then, and in more recent years they've been younger, if only by a few years. On the whole though, I've never dated a woman who didn't get carded any time she went near a bar. I still get carded, for that matter.
The women who replied to my CL personal were not ugly, and they might even have been pretty. But they were clearly nowhere near slender, and most crucially, as I discovered to my surprise, they looked old. Not elderly, probably not even past 40, but when I received emails with photos, I immediately thought, "I'd be dating my mother." Which isn't a plus, in my judgment.
My reaction was way off base, of course. My mom is over 60, and while she was a beauty pageant winner in her youth, and she looks good for her age, these women were clearly decades younger than she. But after spending half a year hugging, occasionally kissing, and regularly looking into the face and eyes of the beautiful, size zero, 22 y/o IG -- that after spending four years with the beautiful and typically youthful-Asian-looking Malaya, I couldn't make the jump to secretary-haired, soccer mom type white women in their late 30s. It was day to night. Or at least day to very late afternoon/early evening.
It was partially my fault; I'd neglected to include a desired age range on my post and hadn't lied about my own (very much), so women within hailing range of it felt within their rights to try their luck with a hunky younger man. *cough* They just happened to be women who looked their age (or perhaps they were well-preserved 45 y/os?), while I look well under my own, (I never felt out of place ferrying the coed IG around the Bay Area) and (apparently) look for even further under my own, when it comes to picking women.
That realization, I think, is part of what made the CL personal ad experience so traumatizing. I hadn't really thought about age when placing the ad, and hadn't considered that an issue of importance in picking a girlfriend. I just assumed that if I got any replies, they'd come from youthful, possibly-attractive women in their late 20s or early 30s, and that the deciding factors for us dating would be compatibility, conversational aptitude, hobbies/interests, appearance, etc. Instead I wound up talking to a couple of women who seemed fun and youthful and lively (and a couple who did not) and when I saw their pictures I reacted like the evil businessman who drank from the fake Holy Grail in Indiana Jones 3. Or, to be more accurate, I reacted like Elsa did in that scene, when faced with the evil businessman after he'd sipped from the fake Holy Grail.
I didn't just take it as "Oh well, bad luck on the personal ad replies. Better luck next time, and for good measure, use a more reputable, user-vetted service than CL." I took it as an existential dilemma. Was I supposed to be attracted to that? Is that what I had to look forward to? After all, even if I married one of the IG's classmates, in 10 or 15 years, they'd be that age. (And girth. And looks.) Was I doomed to a pathetic, Hefner-like existence, using my fame and fortune to trade up through a decades-long parade of interchangeable, 25 y/o dipsy blondes, while steadily transforming into a Crypt Keeper-esque homunculus?
Except that I don't have fame or fortune, or like blondes.
I don't know. Perhaps. I chose not to grapple with that dilemma in June or July, and quite likely it was what drove me to enjoy (so much) my summertime interaction with the IG. She was a thousand miles away, but she had cell phone service and plenty of free time to chat, and we traded numerous txts every day, talked for an hour at a time two or three times a week, and got to be quite close, even though we were far away. One thing we didn't do was flirt, or phone sex, or anything along those lines. It was very platonic; she'd tell me about the crazy people she was interviewing for her summer project and her annoying boss and the small town she was going stir crazy in, and I'd talk about things on my end, and we'd cheer each other up.
I had no reason to think things would change between "us" when she returned, and when she talked about hoping to keep her schedule lighter in the fall, and that she wanted to save more time for socializing and not be dashing to or from school or work every minute, I didn't believe it. I believed that was what she thought, and what she wanted, but I knew her well enough to feel certain that activities would rapidly fill her time, that she'd get another job, and that even if she found a roommate and moved out, as she kept daydreaming, that process would drag on and the end result would (somehow) have her even busier than before.
Nevertheless, when we got together for an evening last week, with dinner and much conversation on the agenda, I felt myself growing ever more enchanted, and eventually had to ask her the same question. Of course I got the same answer, but with even more nuance. She didn't have time for a boyfriend, and furthermore she'd given it a lot of thought and decided that her next relationship would be really special. Not just someone to spend romantic time with, but a sort of trial engagement. Someone she would rearrange her schedule around, focus her social life on, perhaps even live with.
All of which is fine and even admirable, but it's not going to happen for at least another year or two, and what she's looking for then isn't what I'm looking for now. I've never thought she was the woman I would marry (and I'm sure that impression, gender-flipped, is mutual), and even if she wanted that right now, I'm not sure I would be willing to provide it. I don't want to leap back into a full time, living together, pseudo-married situation. I want to have a serious, monogamous relationship, but I don't want to live together, or see each other every day, or not have other friends, etc. I want a fun, intelligent woman to do some cool activities with, talk to regularly and get to know, romance and date, and spend a night (or two) with each week. Basically what I have with the IG now, plus a little more time, and sex. And she wants that with me, minus the sex. In fact, that's basically what she has with me now, minus the sex and plus a ton of other friends pulling on her time.
As a result of that Sunday conversation, and its (inevitable) outcome, I was in a very glum mood Monday, angry and resentful Tuesday, and more or less back to normal Wednesday. I wish things were different, but the IG's answers and desires have been consistent all along, and now that I know where things stand and see that even if she had more free time it still wouldn't work... I can move on. Which brings me to the title of this post.
I was running some errands yesterday, and several times while touring Costco and Target, I saw things I knew the IG would like, and thought about sending her a photo, or a txt, and then realized there was no point in doing so. I still care about her, and want to see her as a friend, but the fact that I'm no longer trying to win her over for romance has entirely changed my attitude and outlook. Why would I make an extra effort to remotely include her in my activities? She's off doing her own thing. I'll text her if something interesting comes up, or I'm stuck in line at Costco, waiting to buy peaches that will turn out to be grainy and inedible; but the urge I felt all spring and summer to keep her apprised of my situation, to send her funny or encouraging txts, to keep track of what she was doing so I could remark appropriately at the end of the day... it's gone. And I find that very odd. How quickly, how switch-flickingly it ended.
It's genetically and biologically understandable; when the sex drive is engaged humans will do effortful things we'd never otherwise consider, but it's weird to see it in myself. Especially when I wasn't consciously thinking of the IG in that way. Sure, I wanted to fuck commence romantic activities with her, especially when she returned from her summer job 10 pounds lighter and even prettier, but it wasn't like I was sitting around txting her with a boner. (Not literally or figuratively. My phone buttons are way too small, for one thing.)
I knew it was very unlikely that she'd change her mind about having time for anyone to be her boyfriend, even/especially me. And I never consciously thought I was waiting for her, or trying to convince her to change her mind. And I didn't give up looking at and thinking about other women. And yet... my desire for romance with the IG was clearly a substantial motivating factor for most of my behavior over the past few months, given how differently I feel now that that dream is dead.
I still like her and want to spend time interacting with her; we might this weekend see the movie we were going to see last weekend, before we decided that we had too much to talk about and would rather spend our evening doing that. But I've not thought much about her the past couple of days, the idea of her spending her free time with her other friends doesn't give me the feeling of lost opportunities, I've felt no compunction to send her my usual string of chatty and engaging txts, and I'm just not viewing the world through the same prism. Yesterday I looked at the huge homecrafts warehouse store by Costco and my eyes slid right past it. It wasn't until later that I realized that I hadn't thought, as I had every time I saw that barn for the past near-year, "I should bring the IG here sometime -- she loves that girly decorating/sewing pattern stuff."
I'm not really thinking about finding someone else/new/different, at least not yet, but I think that thought will come. It did in mid-June, 4 weeks after the IG had departed for her summmer working vacation, but I don't think it'll take that long this time. Monday evening I spent my 2 hours in the gym sweating and scowling and cursing under my breath and thinking how happy I'd be to never be attracted to another woman ever again. Tuesday and Wednesday's gym sessions I was kind of in a fog and not thinking clearly about much of anything. Yesterday evening though, I was quite aware of two young women treadmilling their way towards fitness, and as I churned up the 20 minutes/120 flights on the stepmill that serves as my warm up exercise, I found myself thinking how much fun it would be to have a fit woman to workout with. Not to mention the enjoyment of sharing a shower and trading massages afterwards. Yes, hope, and erections, spring eternal. Even if chemical assistance is required.
Not much time for blogging lately, with other things going on. But since this'll serve as a blog entry, and let me think things over while I'm typing it, here I go.
1) My nice little part time (hours and pay) job updating the content on diabloii.net, and filling up the wiki, and establishing the screenshots section, and encouraging the forums, and planning for some future day when Diablo III comes... has blown up thsi week since it seems almost certain that Blizzard is going to announce Diablo III at the WWI convention this weekend in Paris. Other staff members on the site have, in fact, said for a fact that that will happen, and I both believe and hope they are correct in that prediction.
Perhaps needless to say, this has caused the gaming world to stand up and take notice, and site traffic and attention is vastly increased. Blizzard has been posting mysterious splash screens on their website all week; a new one each night at midnight, and as the images progress and the mystery deepens, the fan interest is spiraling ever higher. I posted the new images tonight at 12:15, went to the gym, got home at 2am, and there were upwards of 400 new comments in the forum, and more than 100 directly on my post.
This is starting to remind me somewhat of the pre-D2 days, when virtually anything we posted on the site would be viewed by 10,000 people in like, 3 hours. Hellgate:London never approached that level of activity/popularity pre-game, and certainly didn't once it was released, but Diablo III is doing it before it even (officially) exists.
This weekend is going to be interesting, when/if they do announce the game and release screenshots and information. I may need to make some new forums just to divide up the Diablo III comments and attention, since new posts are scrolling off the first page in just hours now, and that's with basically nothing to talk about but wild speculation over the enigmatic clues Blizzard is throwing forth.
2) I ordered a furminator last week from Amazon ($20 there, vs. the ridiculous $40 they want at PetCo), it arrived this afternoon, and tonight I can safely say that it works as well as advertised. I have used it on Jinx several times thus far, for no more than a couple of minutes each time, and I could literally stuff a pillow with the hair that's come off of her. This photo is from the first go, and all that fur came off in about 45 seconds, and just from one side of her lower back. I later got a clump that would have burned out a clothes dryer from 1 minute combing the base of her tail, and removed a cabbage-sized tumbleweed from her neck and the sides of her face.
The amazing thing is that she looks exactly the same. Same coloration, same thickness, and she even feels the same afterwards. Perhaps a bit softer, but I can't necessarily tell the difference between this and how she feels after normal brushing, when her fur is all orderly and smoothed down.
The product literature claims that it removes the undercoat, and that does seem to be true, since the fur that comes off of Jinx is all blonde/light gray and monochromatic, while her actual pelt has dark patches and variegations. As best I can tell, it works by shaving/cutting the fur, but only down by the skin. The tines are very pointy and angled, and not very deep. They're maybe 5mm deep, and all angle to a V shape, which is beveled somewhat on the top side. So the longer, outer hairs get pushed to the sides, while the softer, shedding underfur gets cut off near the root. The larger models, for big dogs, come with replacement blades, but the smaller cat ones are just one piece.
It's damn clever, and quite effective. I get more fur with 5-10 seconds of this than I would with several minutes of brushing with a normal pet comb. They say not to use it if the animal has skin lesions or a rash, and not to go over the same area too much, but if it hurts, Jinx has given no sign. She purrs relentlessly when I do it on her neck and chin and cheeks; she always enjoys being brushed there, but she definitely enjoys the furminator more than a normal comb, perhaps since it scratches her better?
I'm going to get her more thoroughly tomorrow, and see if she actually looks/feels/vomits any differently once I've taken another pound of fluff off her. She doesn't hork up hairballs that often, but she does do so from time to time, and there's perpetually cat fur flying around my apartment, so it would be lovely to minimize those effects. Plus it's fun to unpeel her with this strange device.
This is not her post-furminating, but is a photo I took last week when I found how nicely she blended with a new fleecy brown blanket I got. I didn't think it would pair well with her color, but I think the brown and gray go very well together.
3) I'm taking a couple of months off of kali. I've not been for a few weeks, and as of yet I'm not missing it. The class has gotten very rarefied of late; lots of talking, lots of theory, and very little of what I wanted from it, which was practical self defense techniques, sparring practice, and playing with weapons. I don't mind if we do odd things, but I want them to involve sticks, swords, staves, spears, etc. Odd forms of open hand, while no more practical, don't interest me as much, and yes, that's an entirely personal preference with no real defensible logic to it.
I've been thinking about trying some other forms of martial arts, or even just doing something more brutish and direct, like some MMA (non-competitively) or kick boxing or the like. However, I've not sought out any such activities yet, and I'm not really feeling motivated to do so tonight. I'm not hibernating; I've been working out 4 or 5x a week, but haven't felt any real desire to fight or train.
One unexpected benefit of not going to kali for 3 weeks is that my back and hip are feeling almost normal. I complained some weeks ago about how my right hip had been growing very stiff, and radiating up into my back, when I stood around for a while on a hard floor. And the chief culprit was kali class, since our current studio has a concrete floor, and with all the lecturing lately, we'd had a number of nights with almost nothing but standing still. I knew that was aggravating my sore back, since I was always sorest Tuesday nights after class, but now that I've not done it for a few weeks, that's become very clear. I miss the combat and fraternity of class, but I do not miss being unable to get out of bed Wednesday morning, and limping until Friday each week.
4) Freed from/deprived of my martial arts outlet, which (some weeks) provided a pretty good workout, and no longer so burdened by a sporadically sore back/hip, I've been hitting the gym more often, and enjoying it. I'm doing very long cardio sessions; usually 20 minutes at a pretty high speed on the stepmaster stepmill machine (about 120 stories climbed in that time), and then 35-55 minutes on the elliptical (800+ calories, according to the highly-inaccurate digital readout), before an hour of weights, situps, etc.
I can't say that I see any big differences in my body, but one thing I've been experimenting with lately is the situp machine. My gym, like every gym I've ever been in, has a bunch of these, and they allow you to do far more situps than you could just lying on the floor, or on an inclined bench. The upper back thingie rocks with you, so it provides neck and shoulder support, and part of the exertion is on your shoulders and arms. How you use it varies the load; if you really lift with your crunch muscles instead of using your arms and bracing your feet, it's far more exertion. The best is to stick your legs straight up in the air, or at least curl them up so they're not on the footrests, since you get much more strain on your stomach that way.
I've used that type of machine at the gym for years, and I used to do 50 or 75 situps on it when I went to the gym with Malaya a few years ago. I'd do that many straight, and then turn my legs so both knees were on the left or right, and do another 15 or 20 each way to get the sides of my stomach. I'd upped that to about 100 during the 5 months I've been going to my new gym, but was also doing a lot of reps on the "make it burn" crunch machine, and using some other ab/torso machines too.
Last week I started to realize that I wasn't really getting tired on the sit up machine anymore. I was doing my usual 100 or so situps, about half with my legs up in the air, but I was just doing that many out of habit, not because I was too tired to do any more, which is why I stop doing reps on all the other machines I use at the gym. So I tried to do more, and did 250 one day last week, and then did 300 the next time, and followed that by another 50 to the left and 50 more to the right.
I don't recall exactly which day, but over the weekend I did 500 without pause, and then more to the sides, and on Tuesday I did 750. That was getting to be silly, not in terms of how many, but just in the time it took. I haven't exactly timed myself, but I do them a little faster than one per second, so it took me something like 10 minutes to do 750. Ten minutes doesn't seem that long when upright on a cardio machine, but when you're just rocking up and down on a sit up machine, it's a long time. I'm not used to being on any single piece of exercise equipment for longer than it takes one song to play on my ipod. Much less two or three.
That aside, I decided to see how far I could go tonight, and set 1000 as my goal. That was an arbitrary number, I thought, since if I could do even 300 or 400, I could theoretically do them forever. It wasn't like they were getting gradually more difficult every 10 or 15; or that my muscles were steadily, but very slowly, tightening up. It was just a mental thing; could I do situps for that long?
As it turns out, I could. I didn't time them, though I probably should have since I doubt I'll do it again. But it took 4 full Eminem songs, one of which was Stan, and that's about his longest song. At least 15 minutes lying there, nonstop sit up'ing. And yeah, I could have done them forever. I felt my stomach get tight after 30 or 40 with my legs up, but then I'd put them down on the foot pegs and breath deeply to relax my stomach, and after 10 or 15 situps I'd be back to a neutral state; neither tired nor straining.
My conclusion is that doing situps on that sort of machine is equivalent to doing a bench press with no weight on the bar. Once you get to some level of fitness in the relevant muscles, it's not really exercise anymore, and you can more or less do it forever. The problem is that since it's not a strain, you won't really improve your muscles by doing it. It's like trying to build up your legs by walking. I'm now thinking it's pointless to do more than a couple of hundred reps on that machine, and maybe not even that many, since they're not straining me. Other ab machines do, and there's a simple padded plank with footrests that I can't do more than 30 or 40 situps on without cramping up. I see some guys on there holding medicine balls, or 20lbs weights to their chests, so I imagine they could go infinitely on the situp machine too.
I find it interesting though, and surprising, that it's possible to get to a point where such a machine is no longer work. I imagine guys with really strong upper bodies feel the same way about pushups; their arms and chests are powerful enough that they can lift their own upper body weight an infinite number of times, and it's neither tiring, nor enough of a strain to let them build more weight.
5) Last week, on my birthday, motivated by boredom, ennui, mild loneliness/horniness, and a glass of exquisite dessert wine gifted me by my dad, I popped my own cherry by placing a spur-of-the-moment personal ad at an online dating service. I didn't have any expectations for it, so when 3 actual human women replied, (along with about 10 really lame, boring, and obviously fake spammers/scammers) I was pleasantly surprised. A week into trying to get to know them, I'm less pleasantly.
In my spontaneous state, I didn't include some of the basic personal ad elements, such as a desired age range. I would have gone something like 24-34, since like most men, I want a woman who is potentially younger than me, since like most men, I find younger women more attractive. I wasn't looking for a hook up, and physical attraction isn't anywhere near my most important criteria for a date, but there has to be some attraction to make it worth the effort to get to know a person, when romance is the potential end game.
Given my lack of specifications, I shouldn't have been surprised that two of the women were, as Chris Rock said, "damn near forty!" Yeah, age is just a number, but both women were white, and not to be racist, but white women don't age well. The event horizon varies from woman to woman, but most white women go from MILF to cougar to granny in like, 3 years. Whether that happens from 28-34, or 32-36, or 35-40, you can almost see time taking its toll from day to day. White women in that range are almost better off accepting the inevitable, putting on 25 pounds, and aging gracefully, since the alternative is um... this.
None of the women who replied to my ad were Terri Hatcher'ed, but neither were they women that I, in great shape and still semi-able to pass for 30, found real desirable. While contemplating the chronological doom that is my fate, I reflected on the downside of having spent so much time with the IG over the past 6-8 months. It's been fun, and she's good company and we're very friendly, but we're not destined for romance or an LTR, and more relevantly for my current dilemma, she's in her early 20s, is very pretty, and wears size 2 petite. And it's hard (impossible, in my current case) to go from that, to women who are more than a decade and a half older, even if they look fairly good for their age.
All is not lost on the personal ad front though, since I'm still corresponding with one woman who is but 32, and even if that doesn't work out I got my feet wet with this free ad nonsense, and saw the possibilities. There are countless non-free dating/singles sites with more quality control, more serious singles, and many more opportunities to find someone with a more selective criteria than "click here." And I might one of them later this summer.
I'm not sure how suitable such an activity is for blogging about. Such activities are definitely "blog material," but I'm wouldn't be doing it entirely on a lark and I'm not looking just for hook ups, and I'd have to/want to reveal my blog to any woman I was sincerely interested in. And me blogging about her, or other women I'd seen before her, probably wouldn't be a huge selling point. Nor would/will the comments I made in this post about white women aging in dog years, for that matter.
Guess I'd better find more Asian girls women, eh? They're cuter when they're young, and better yet, they age more gracefully. Plus, by 30 most of them have escaped the controlling clutches of the "traditional" family they grew up in/rebelled against, and can start to live their own lives, rather than just doing what their parents want for them.
Was that five things? I think so, and it's too late to proofread or count now. I picked the number kind of at random, so it's nice if it worked out in the end.
A friend of the IG's has been rebuffing the advances of one of her exes, and through a complicated chain of events, she imposed upon the IG to create a largely-fictitious persona through an online dating service, expressly for the purpose of checking out the exes' own personal ad. There wasn't much to report from that, and it wouldn't be my place to talk about it if there had been. What was more noteworthy was that the IG hadn't had her profile up for a day before she started getting male attention.
The first one came in while she was on the phone with me, and I received a gasping-for-air, laughing-in-pain play by play of her investigation of her admirer's profile. I shan't link to the poor soul, but the salient details were as follows. He's a 42 y/o white male, who lives with his parents in Oakland, is unemployed, has some college, likes watching sports and playing video games, is of average build and height. He's seeking... an 18-27 y/o female who is pretty, slender, and adventurous. Seems like a likely match there, eh? Better yet, for his luck and the IG's amusement, he had posted some photos. Her narration of that discovery went something like this. "A picture!" *in a high, excited voice* "Oh my god Eric..." *peals of laughter* "He's so fat! His beady little eyes!" *much more semi-breathless laughter*
His profile had more info than that, and I'm writing this from memory of tonight's phone call, but I assure you, it only got worse. More hobbies women aren't interested in, more unrealistic expectations of his future soul mate, etc. He didn't actually talk about his Night Elf rogue, or list the names and classes of his lvl 70 Alts, but possessions of that nature were strongly hinted at.
Mercifully, the IG closed her browser at that point to get back to not studying for her finals, and after our conversation ended I found myself thinking about that guy's ad, and the whole scenario. I guess we've got to give him some credit for being honest about what he wants? Perhaps needless to say, every man wants an slim, beautiful, adventurous 18-27 y/o. It's just that most of us realize such a catch is out of our league, and that such women don't spend time on personal ads since they have negative trouble meeting men in real life. Even if we overlook those two realities, most men have enough sense not to advertise their delusions of glandular quite so openly. For those who do, the imagined worst case scenario is being ignored by women and annoyed by scammers and spammers. That a girl who actually qualifies for his wet dream-esque profile preferences might one day come along, read the ad, and laugh so hard she gets hiccups is not something many guys consider. Luckily for the shriveled, blackened, last-year's-orange of a husk that is their ego.
It takes some nerve to post an honest personal ad. It's putting yourself out there, where you can, and probably will, be rejected. Perhaps painfully. It reminds me of a junior high dance, where the girls cluster together along one side of the gym and the boys have to find the nerve to walk across the desert of the basketball court, the three point line unreeling beneath their shined shoes like road lines leading over a cliff. Boys tend to suspect that the pretty girls only go to dances to tease and laugh at us, and men might think the same thing about posting a personal ad.
Fortunately, we all know that's just paranoia and foolishness, and that women never look over the ads just to laugh at how lame the guys are... oh wait.
In vaguely-related news, I saw a link to this description of the legendary debacle that was Australia's Naughtiest Home Videos, and had to share.
After being informed by friends at a dinner, Kerry Packer, owner of the broadcaster Nine Network tuned in to watch the show on TCN-9 and was so offended by its content that he phoned the studio operators and ordered them to "Get that shit off the air!" The studio operators complied, and the show immediately pulled the plug and went to a black screen saying the network had "technical difficulties" In Melbourne, the show went to a commercial and never came back, with two reruns of Cheers filling the show's remaining air time. The same happened in Brisbane, with the exception that it was succeeded by three episodes of Cheers.
The show ran for just 34 minutes of a 90-minute premiere (minus the advertisements, an effective 24 minutes of the show was aired); Mulray was immediately fired and banned for life from the network.
Some clips from the show can be seen on YouTube, though they're terrible quality, very short, and show nothing but quick snippets of non-explicit interspecies animal porn. Dogs with cats, bunnies with chickens, monkeys with goats, etc. For example:
Finally, when I went to the gym after Kali on Tuesday night, I got there early enough that the place was still slightly crowded, and with women as well as men. (There are very seldom any ladies there after 11pm, when I'm usually working out.) I was forcibly informed of this fact when I entered, had my badge scanned, and walked around the front desk only to come face to face (so to speak) with a young, slim, tall, tights and jog bra-wearing Asian woman who was walking on one of the stepmill machines, placing her most delightful asset directly at my eye level.
For an instant I considered turning around and leaving. After all, there was no possible way any subsequent events at the gym could improve upon that opening. Sure enough, I walked from there into the locker room and was greeted by the usual rogue's gallery of all-too-naked 60 y/o while males, most of whom carried more weight, and fat, in a single thigh than that scrumptious stepmilling woman had in her entire body.
I didn't talk to her there... wonder if she's got a personal ad?
While looking for a link to place in the previous post, I saw this graphic and remembered that I'd wanted to post about it weeks ago, but hadn't gotten around to doing so.
I saw it posted here, and the original is here. Reading the comments on the Washington Monthly page, I found some insightful analysis into the trends this map illustrates.
First, some liabilities.
The map isn't calibrated by %, but by whole numbers, which means that only large populations can qualify, and that slight differences in very large populations will be magnified. NYC, for instance.
The age range is too wide; 20-64, which extends far beyond what most people think of as "singles," and runs into the problem of widowers (who are predominantly female, especially under the age of 65).
There's no racial breakdown, and since prisoners (disproportionately male) were evidently not counted, and most prisons aren't located in metropolitan areas anyway, this skews the numbers female in areas with large black populations, given the high rate of incarceration among young black males.
It's unclear how illegal immigrants are counted. If they are, that would probably account for many of the blue dots in California, with its heavy population of largely male migrant workers.
Sexual orientation isn't adjusted for, which really skews things in areas like the one I'm in. It's a cliche how much women in San Francisco bemoan the "Every guy is gay or taken." issue. (Guess I should move to the city?)
All that said, there's still plenty to explain and learn from. Many commenters pointed out that tech heavy industries are clustered in California, especially around LA and Silicon Valley, and those are heavily male. Others said that many industries in NYC skew female; fashion, publishing, media, etc. It's also likely that some of the blue dots would be surrounded by dart boards of tiny pink dots, thanks to young men moving to work in cities in greater numbers than do the women.
I'll buy most of those explanations, but as is usually the case in American society, they're largely devoted to explaining things from a male POV. What about the big pink dots, though? Why are there so many more women in almost every major city in the South, Midwest, and Northeast? It's not enough to say that men are moving to follow jobs in higher numbers than women, unless you're going to say that all those guys from New York and Alabama and Georgia moved to Phoenix and Dallas. Either the men all moved west of the Mississippi, or all the women from California moved to the East, and why this might be the case was not addressed by any explanations I've yet seen. This isn't 1849; men from New York aren't selling all they own to book passage on a clipper sailing around Cape Horn on the way to San Francisco and their fortune in the gold mines.
Yes, I'm a day late on that wish, but I was busy yesterday... having a happy Valentine's Day. I picked up the IG from her university over in The City in the late afternoon, and we headed to Union Square. She wanted to eat at the Cheesecake Factory, which is on the top level of the massive seven-story Macy's, and that was fine with me, so we headed right over there, expecting that there might be a wait and wanting to get our names on the list. There was no wait at all, since it was only 4:30, and since neither of us were especially hungry yet, we decided to kill time browsing through the mega-department store for an hour.
We weren't hungry yet in part because of these. Aren't they the cutest thing ever? I was making lunch Thursday afternoon and thinking about the V-day date coming up that evening, and what I might take the IG for a little snack. I had a red pepper before me on the cutting board, and its ineffable redness and succulence called to my muse. I was going to cut it into heart shapes, Xmas cookie cutter style, until I noticed that the top ridges of the vegetable made rather convenient heart shaped curves already. So I just adapted those in several places, and cut a couple of more hearts out from the flanks of the beast. Notice the broken-heart locket one, with matching halves? Yes, I amuse myself.
The IG thought they were adorable, but not so adorable that she didn't gobble them right down. While noshing on those, she cooed over the non-mushy card I'd brought, and a tulip-type plant with crimson red flowers. I was going to get her a rose, but those are so cliche, and besides, it's just a pretty weed that rots in a few days. I always do a plant if possible, rather than flowers, and happily the IG concurred and liked the present. My theory was to clip one flower and corsage her with it, but she was like, "You're out of your damn mind if you think you're cutting a bloom off of my new plant!" So the plant remained undamaged, and her breast unadorned. It was just as well, since I gave her dozens of hugs that evening, and if there'd been a safety-pinned bloom between us, that would have somewhat dampened my ardor. Or at least left red spots on our respective upper body garments.
As for the pre-supper fun, the Macy's in Union Square is ridiculous. It's seven floors, big floors, and every one of them is women's clothing. Well, there are a few kid's sections, and lots of shoes, and the 2nd story (street level on one side) is all makeup, and they've got suitcases, and one level of furniture/carpets, and a linens section, etc, but it's at least four floors of every type of women's clothing. No men's clothing; there's a smaller, dirtier Macy's across the square for that ignoble purpose.
This was fine with me, since I don't really need any clothing and I wouldn't pay Macy's prices if I did. Besides, it was a lot more fun watching the IG wiggle into various coats and jackets than it would have been trying them on myself. The IG also let herself be shanghaied in the makeup session, where a man as gay as he was commercially-aggressive furiously applied make up of the sort she'd never wear on her own. Dark, almost blood red lips, aggressive dark eye shadow with some gold tints, blush, etc. It was a bit much at first, making her look somewhat plastic, but it faded in over the course of the evening, and she kept blotting at her lips, so by the time dinner was finished it was quite a nice look. Amazing how much difference some eye shadow and mascara can make in making the eyes flash and catch the attention. We took some photos, but none for public display, for much as Malaya was, the IG is a private person and doesn't want her face, or anything else, splashed all across the Internet.
We eventually headed back up to the restaurant, and of course there was a wait by then, so we wandered back down to the 7th floor, where Macy's has considerately located their furniture section. It essentially serves as a lounge for the Cheesecake Factory, with dozens of groups staking out various overpriced leather couches to kill their 60-80 minute waits all through the dinner rush. There wasn't much of a rush yet at 6, so we wandered through the area, crashed on some ugly brown sofa, and hardly got talking before the pager buzzed.
Dinner was adequate; we got a great table, right against the glass wall with a view down over Union Square, but the service was horribly slow and our waitress was clearly in a pissy mood. In that light, perhaps it was good that she only came by every 10 minutes? The IG got a corn cake appetizer and I got an appetizer salad, and since Cheesecake Factory portions are obscenely large, that was plenty. We also split a strawberry martini and then a slice of strawberry cheesecake for desert, so apparently red fruit/vegetables were our running theme for the evening.
We browsed a bit more after dinner, getting as lost in our conversation as we always do, before heading home through the rat's warren of one way and partially-blocked streets that make navigating downtown SF a pleasure of the "avoid at any cost" nature. Thankfully, the IG traverses Union Square fairly often while commuting to school and/or work, so she was able to guide us to the Bay Bridge, and across the water to civilized freeways and automobile-designed suburban layouts. I dropped her off by her car, and after a lingering goodnight, she was off.
I was in a good mood and full of energy, so I stopped by my apt just long enough to pet Jinxers and change clothes, then headed straight to the gym. I'd never seen it so crowded, and I don't think there was any Valentine's Day connection -- no more sweating couples than usual -- but for whatever reason there were considerably more people there than I've come to expect at 10pm on a weeknight. It's such a large place that I still had my free choice of machines, at least.
So... fun night, good date, and oddly enough, it was the first real Valentine's Day date the IG or I had ever been on. I'd been with Malaya for nearly a year by the time our first Valentine's Day rolled around in 2004, and we went out that night and again on V-day in 2005 and 2006, but we were a couple, so the V-day events weren't really any different than our usual nights out. (Which was probably a failing you could tie around my neck; that I didn't make an effort to make the event more special.) The IG hadn't ever done anything notable on that night in her past relationships, so it was fun for us both to be in the still "getting to know each other" stage, on a festive evening of that nature.
Nothing momentous occurred, and you'll note that I'm still calling her the IG (Imaginary Girlfriend), but maybe after such a lovely evening she's a little less "I" and a little more "G?" I guess time will tell. I do know we need to think up a better nick for her, but, like everything else in our relationship... all in good time.
I got my grad school application package sent out today, approximately 22 minutes before the post office closed. It had to be postmarked today, and after nibbling at it for the past couple of weeks, I spent about 12 hours straight working on it yesterday, running straight through the night until 9:30am. At that point I sent the 5-page Statement of Purpose off to my mom, dad, and Malaya and asked for some comments/ideas for improvement. I then went to bfed for 3 hours, got up at 1, read some useful suggestions by my correspondents, and made a bunch of changes. I also finished up the required resume, did a last time over the 15 page writing sample, and then frantically filled out the various forms while the printer was working.
I very nearly forgot to put in the check for the application fee, but remembered that just as I was sealing the manila envelope. I'd set out my checkbook for that purpose yesterday, but had forgotten to write the check and have it ready. Just imagine if I'd sent everything off, and then returned home and seen the check book and realized my error, 5 minutes after the post office closed for the day? Oh, how I would have laughed. Laughed and laughed and laughed.
At any rate, it's been submitted and my fingers are crossed. I don't want to say where I've applied, but I will say it's a very good writing program, that it's expensive, that they accept fewer than 10% of applicants, that admission is based almost entirely on the writing sample and Statement of Purpose, and that I wont find out the good (or bad) news until at least April. Now let us never speak/think of it again.
While I'm not going to school this semester, my friend and very imaginary girlfriend is. I really need a nick for her, since we're friends and we hang out, but she's not "dating" me (or anyone else) in a romantic sense, so calling her the IG is misleading. Neither she, nor I, imagine that she is my GF. Anyway, she's started her semester at one of the many fine colleges over in The City, and as usual, tons of guys are hitting on her. She's very cute and personable, but is too nice for her own good, since when some guy comes on too strong and makes a fool of himself *cough*, she doesn't tell him to fuck off, but is polite and tolerant. As a result, she ends up with various mental patients, sad puppy dogs, "nice guys," and plenty of others trying to get up the nerve to ask her out, or asking her out and refusing to take a hint, or even a direct "No." for an answer. This causes her no end of exasperation, but does give her some funny stories to tell.
Last week some guy in one of her classes latched onto her like a remora, and followed her around for a couple of hours after class, while she was killing time before her next class began. As she said to me, "I stupidly told him I didn't have anything to do until 2 when he asked, so he stayed beside me the entire time. I've never been so eager for my theology class to begin." I of course made a joke about her thanking God that it was time for theology.
Anyway, here's the list of the expert dating techniques he displayed during 90 of the longest minutes of the IG's life. Keep in mind that this guy had just met her that day, and the extent of their experiences together were sitting all-too-near each other for a 2 hour college course.
Sitting way too close beside her.
Breathing on her with his stank breath.
Staring at her from about a foot away thanks to the circular chair arrangement in the class.
Waiting literally a foot from the bathroom door when she went to pee after class.
Taking a big uninvited sip of her fruit juice, through her straw, when she went to get a drink after class.
Repeatedly putting his arm over her shoulder, or around her waist, or over her back while walking next to her, despite her shoving him off each time.
Asking if her dad let her date.
Asking if she was a virgin.
Asking if she did one night stands or had boyfriends.
Inviting her over to his place for lunch, since he claimed to live very near campus.
Saying his girlfriend experiences involved a lot of one night stands. "You know, just the 'in and out.'"
Saying he sells a lot of pot, but that it's okay since God made plants for us to enjoy.
Asking repeatedly if she wanted to come over and get high.
Asking what religion she was, proclaiming how totally devoted to Christ he was, saying he was very tolerant of all religions, and then going on a vindictive rant about how Muslims are the root of all evil in the world.
There was even more, but you get the idea. I guess the moral of this story, and it's not one you need to be reminded of if you've been reading my coverage of The Evolution of Desire, is that the behaviors men think women will like are very seldom the behaviors women actually like. Also, guys... just because a woman doesn't come out and tell you that you're an asshole and she'd like to see you eaten by a tiger doesn't necessarily mean she's enjoying your company or you constant sexual comments and innuendos.
It's quite interesting to me to hear the IG's stories, since every guy she goes out with or gets to know, who is anywhere near 21, is just impossibly stupid, sexist, sex-obsessed, ignorant, rude, crude, uncouth, etc. And when I think back to myself at that age.. I wasn't much different. I can recall the burning need to put a sexual comment into virtually every sentence, when I was talking with a girl. After all, how else would she know that I was, you know, interested in sex?
To all the 21 y/o men out there... trust me, girls know. They're not nearly as stupid or oblivious to social clues and cues as you are, and you're not the first 21 y/o to come slobbering after them. You do not need to mention sex, blowjobs, how hot her ass is, how nice her tits look, pubic hair shaving vs. waxing techniques, etc, etc, etc. She's quite aware that the vast majority of your thoughts stem from about 2" of dangle between your thighs, and the more you bring it up, so to speak, the less interested she's going to be in engaging in the behavior you so desperately want her to engage in. There's this thing called "subtlety," and if you know a guy who isn't rich or a big jock stud, and still seems to get laid a lot, he's got it, and you don't.
This is kind of an awkward transition in subject, but is there any possible connection or correlation between date rape, and a cat sleeping on you when you're asleep? See, Jinxie and I have a bed-sharing arrangement. I sleep on the left side, by the window, and she gets on the right. She never sleeps on the left anymore, and when I go into the bedroom and find her already on the bed, she's invariably on the left side, up near the top of the comforter. About neck height, on the invisible person who might be sleeping there. She occasionally sleeps leaning against my side, but most often she's at chest height and arm's length from my right shoulder.
The date rape part has come lately.I've had some sudden nap urges in the evenings, since I'm not sleeping very long at night (which is usually in the day), since I keep waking up after 5 hours with financial worries and thoughts about all the work I want/need to do, and grad school ideas, and story ideas, and more, that I can't get back to sleep. Nor do I want to, when I can get up and start working.
Unfortunately, my inferior meat unit of a body can't go indefinitely on 5 hours of sleep, especially not when I'm working out 90-120 minutes every other day, plus martial arts. Hence... naps.
The weird part is that if I nap on the left side of the bed, jinx sleeps right beside me, whether I'm under the covers or on top or just rolled up in the comforter. But if I sleep in the center of the bed, or on the right, I invariably wake up with Jinx sleeping on top of me. My position doesn't matter either; she'll get on my back if I'm face down, or my stomach if I'm on my back, or perch awkwardly on my hip if I'm fetal'ed. And she's never there when I fall asleep; she only comes in once I'm out, and settles herself down on me.
The worst was a few days ago when I woke up from vaguely sexual dreams with a boner and a desperate need to pee, only to find Jinx hunched right on my groin, in a reverse cowgirl, with her back end right on my bladder. I had on pants, and was rolled up in the comforter, thankfully. I was lucky I didn't piss myself, she was so creating a simulation of male pregnancy kitty, and that's not the kind of wet dream I'm interested in experiencing. Not for another 40 or 50 years yet, anyway, until they're feeding me full of dog food and rolling me onto the rubber sheets.
So, I'll repeat my question. Is a cat taking advantage of your (or my) unconscious, helpless, yet apparently desirable and welcoming body, the equivalent of feline date rape? I did not grant consent for this activity, Mrs. Jinxles!
Finally, can someone pass a law allowing for the sport shooting of any really, really loud motorcycle? Especially when the same asshole rides it slowly around your block, like ten times in a row? All young men on motorcycles are just organ donors anyway, and anyone who makes that much noise in a residential area, without involving dynamite, deserves to die. My only concern is that stray bullets might strike innocent, deafened bystanders, or that people with poor aim would land a gut shot, and ruin the valuable chest meats that human pinata is riding around with. Still, I think it's a fair trade off, given the level of disturbance those Harley-riding assholes create. I'll be happy to co-sponsor any appropriate legislation in the upcoming congressional session.
More from the The Evolution of Desire. Coverage of the previous chapters can be seen here.
Chapter Six: Staying Together
Chapter Six opens with a few paragraphs about the benefits of couplehood. (Not that Buss calls it that, since "couplehood" isn't actually a word.) These include shared resources, complimentary skills, division of labor, stable home for rearing children, etc. Maintaining a successful marriage is tricky though, and breaking up comes with high costs. Family bonds can tear, children are damaged, finances can be ruined, and if there hasn't been any reproduction, the time off the dating market was wasted, from a genetic point of view. Men lose a potential reproductive partner and the resources they've expended on her over time. Women lose a resource provider, protectors, prime years of fertility, and will likely be less desirable (from the genetic, youth/beauty standpoint) when they leave the marriage than when they entered it. (In today's society which partner provides more resources can vary, but throughout the book Buss frames most situations in evolutionary terms, and historically it's been the males who were the providers, so that's the direction in which our genetics guide us.)
Buss points out the reality of high divorce rates, details some of the many perils that can doom a relationship, then goes into his usual animal examples, using them to illustrate situations analogous to those humans must navigate. Various types of male animals use techniques to keep their mates for themselves, including hiding them or disguising them, or using physical aggression to drive off interlopers. Reproductive access and exclusivity is of such paramount importance that many types of insects remain in the mating position until and even after death, and others have evolved ingenious (single use, tragically) techniques such as penises that break away and remain stuck in the female, blocking any other males from inseminating her.
Humans can't do all these things, for better or for worse, but humans are unusual, and nearly unique, in that both parties in a relationship gain substantial benefit from it. Males don't just use females to make babies, and women aren't alone in raising them (in theory, anyway). In terms of successful reproduction, humans function best in a pair bond, and thus we've evolved various tactics to help perpetuate such relationships.
One of the most important is continuing to fulfill the desires of one's mate--the desires that led to the mate selection to begin with. But merely fulfilling these desires may not be enough if rivals are attempting the same thing. Ancestral humans needed a psychological mechanism specifically designed to alert them to potential threats from the outside; a mechanism that would regulate when to swing into action in depoying mate-guarding strategies. That mechanism is sexual jealousy.
The Functions of Sexual Jealousy.
Compared to other animals, human males invest tremendously in their offspring. In the ideal case, years and years of resources are plowed into developing the young and sustaining the wife and the relationship. Raising another man's young is a complete waste from a genetic point of view. Worse than a waste, it's a loss, since resources that could go to providing for a man's own child are being spent on someone else's. Intellectually humans today can choose to do this, and many people do, but it goes against our evolutionary instincts. Since human males often can not tell if a child is theirs or not, human males are highly sensitive to possibilities of marital infidelity. You'll recall from earlier chapters that men rate sexual fidelity as the most important trait in a wife. As Buss describes the situation, "Cuckoldry is therefore a serious adaptive problem that men throughout human evolutionary history have had to solve."
Buss describes the emotions a human experiences when discovering sexual infidelity. "If you are a woman, you would be likely to experience sadness and feelings of abandonment. If you are a man, you would be likely to experience rage .If you are a human, you would most likely experience humiliation." Given the high stakes involved, suspicions of sexual infidelity trigger strong reactions, for logical reasons. "Sexual jealousy is activated when one is confronted either with signs that someone else has an interest in one's mate or with signs of defection by one's mate, such as flirting with someone else. The rage, sadness, and humiliation following these cues motivate action typically intended to either cut off a rival or to prevent the mates defection."
While most studies of jealousy behaviors have focused on men, and logically it would seem that men have more cause and likelihood to be jealous (given the obvious disparity in how certain a man or a woman can be that their child is genetically theirs), other studies, in the US and worldwide, have shown that the genders experience feelings of jealously equally. What is not equal is how men and women react to those situations, and the sort of situations that make them most jealous. Women are most jealous of situations in which their man spends time or resources with another woman. Men are most jealous of situations in which their woman is sexually unfaithful. This is only logical, from an evolutionary POV. "...although both men and women have the psychological mechanism of jealousy, it is triggered by different events, which correspond to the adaptive problems of ensuring paternity for men and ensuring resources and commitment for women."
Buss tested this in a lab, by hooking volunteers to machines that measured their heart rate and a muscle in the face that contracts when they frown. He then had them imagine sexual and emotional infidelity and sure enough men were far more bothered by sexual and women by emotional. Other surveys bear this out as well. In a study of 511 college-aged men and women on what type of behavior they would find most upsetting in their partner, the results were confirming:
Emotional infidelity: 83% of women found it the most upsetting. Only 40% of men did.
Sexual infidelity: 60% of men found this most upsetting, while only 17% of women did.
Various studies in central Europe, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, and elsewhere have all found the same results.
The Consequences of Jealousy. Buss cites documentary and anecdotal evidence of men becoming violently enraged by the discovery of sexual infidelity. Laws have long supported this, for better or worse. Until 1974 in Texas, it was legal for a husband to kill his wife and her lover if he caught them in the act. Old Roman law allowed husbands a similar right to homicide within his own house, and similar laws remain in effect in many parts of Europe. Buss doesn't mention it, but this sort of thing is of course epidemic under Sharia law in the Muslim world, where "honor killings" of wives, daughters, and other women are carried out routinely.
Male sexual jealousy is cited as the chief cause of violence directed at wives. Buss cites a study of 44 battered wives, 55% of whom said jealousy was the key motive behind their husband's abuse. Men aren't the only violent ones either; many murders committed by women have jealousy as a motivating factor. Women kill jealous husbands in self defense, and sometimes even seek out the woman who they feel is trying to steal their man, with lethal results. By any measure, sexual jealousy is leading cause of violence and death worldwide. It's estimated that around 20% of all male on male homicides in the US are predicated one or both men competing for the same woman.
In a sample of 47 homicide cases precipitated by a jealous man, 16 women were killed by men for real or suspected infidelity, 17 male rivals were killed by enraged men, and 9 men were killed, in self defense, by women whom the men had accused of infidelity.
Happily for the perpetuation of our species, sexual jealousy does not usually result in murder. The jealousy and the strong emotional reaction it causes are evolutionary useful, but it seems that violence, especially to the point of murder, is an overreaction, genetically speaking. After all, the vast majority of cheating wives are not murdered by their husbands.
The Value of Fulfilling A Mate's Desires. Besides motivating murder, jealousy can inspire greater watchfulness. Many men and women check up on their partner: calling them at unexpected times, having friends check up on them, snooping through their personal belongings, dropping by their work unannounced, etc. These activities can, and often do, double as romantic actions. A sudden late night phone call while out of town; just calling to say I love you, or making sure you're home and alone? Or both.
Ideally though, jealousy is a motivator by providing incentive to make the partner happy in the first place, so they don't consider straying. And this is best done by fulfilling their desires. "Because women desire love and kindness in their initial selection of a mate, continuing to provide love and kindness is a highly effective tactic for men who want to keep their mates." This works better for men than for women, and women judge such behaviors as the most effective men can perform. Unsurprisingly, how likely men are to do this corresponds directly to the length of the relationship. Women in new relationships report much higher satisfaction along these indices than women who have been married for more than 5 years.
Women vote with their pocketbooks as well, and because they are genetically and culturally conditioned to value economic and material resources, keeping the flowers, candy, and more expensive presents flowing is another highly effective tactic for men who wish to satisfy their wives. In this as with showing love and affection, women value it more highly than men.
So what can a woman do to keep her man happy? If you've read the chapters up to this point, you'll have no trouble guessing. Men desire physical attractiveness in a mate, and women report that making efforts to enhance their appearance and keep themselves looking their best is a very good way to maintain their man's interest. Buss cites no studies or surveys on this aspect of things, which is odd, as many as he had on the "men keeping women happy" side of things.
One interesting study is documented. In it men and women watched a short film and reported their reactions. Participants viewed a short scenario in which a couple were sitting on a couch. One of the partners got up and left the room, and a moment later another person entered, and was introduced as an ex of the partner who had remained on the couch. The newcomer sat down on the couch, and after a moment of conversation, they started touching and kissing each other. The partner who had left then returned and caught them in the act, concluding the video. Naturally, women saw a version of the tape in which an ex-girlfriend entered, while men saw a version in which it was an ex-boyfriend.
The researchers then asked the study participants what sort of strategy they would pursue in response to this sort of a threat. Men said that they would become angry and would pursue various, aggressive strategies of keeping a mate. Women were far more likely to say they would try to make themselves more attractive to keep their man from thinking about straying.
I suppose studies must be conducted to build up scientific evidence of human behavior, but really, they needed a survey to figure this one out?
The Uses of Emotional Manipulation. When tactics such as providing resources, love, and kindness fail, some people resort to baser approaches. Behaviors such as crying, talking about how jealous you feel, and telling the partner you depend on them are common techniques. Total submission and self-abasement is commonly used as well. "I'll do anything/whatever you say." for instance. Oddly, studies show that men, whether in new relationships or after years of marriage, are 25% more likely to use this approach than are women. Why isn't entirely clear, at least not to Buss, since it seems to go against the stereotype of women as the submissive sex.
Perhaps men who perceive themselves to be relatively lower in desirability than their wives or girlfriends use submission to try to prevent a woman from defecting to another relationship. Perhaps the tactic represents an attempt to satisfy or placate a woman who is on the verge of leaving. But these speculations are not satisfactory because they beg the question of why men need to resort to this tactic more than women. Only future research can reveal the answer to this mystery.
I'd suggest that it's because men are (at least) 25% more likely to be the one cheating, and when a woman is righteously furious at a man for his misbehavior, the men feel shame and fear of losing her. Besides, just in a tactical sense, screaming back aggressively when you're the one who at fault, is not likely to calm her down. Furthermore, I'll get Freudian and say that such situations trigger childhood memories in men, of mommy shouting at them when they were bad, and that some men behave as they did then, flopping the power dynamic entirely to the benefit of their aggrieved partner.
Another interesting behavior is that of men and women who intentionally provoke sexual jealousy to try and keep a mate. These tactics are judged to be much more effective when performed by women than by men. Women walk a fine line though; stirring just enough jealousy to make their man pay more attention to them, but not so much that he becomes violent or concludes that she's promiscuous and an unsuitable mate. Again, it's unclear to Buss why this works so much better for women than for men. And again, I'll suggest that it's because men are more likely to stray, and because men are more possessive of their mates. Male ego is tied up in it, and is easily activated by the thought of losing a prized possession. It's connected to the whole, "You don't know what you've got until it's gone." truism, and being reminded that their girlfriend or wife might not be there forever is a powerful incentive to most men.
Ways to Keep Competitors at Bay. Public displays of affection have an odd gender breakdown. Although studies show that men and women are about equally likely to show their affection in ways such as displaying photos, holding hands in public, exchanging jewelry, and so forth, these signals are judged to be far more effective at keeping a mate when used by men. Buss speculates these work well since they satisfy the woman's desire to feel wanted and needed and secure, rather than simply functioning as deterrents to ward off the approaches of other men.
I think that's reasonable, but I question the conclusion that the genders are equal in their desire for touching and hand holding and other forms of PDA. I've always enjoyed holding hands and walking close beside my dates, but most women have told me that's rare, and that they have to initiate that sort of thing, or poke their boyfriend to make him walk closer/slower. Women want to hold hands and hold the man's arm and feel escorted. Men often want to be more like moody teenagers and not walk too close to mom/the gf in public, so as not to look like they're whipped. That said, I might be skewed by a lack of time spent in single's bars and college mixers and rock concerts and other meat market type locations, where a man would feel a need to show his possession or attachment to his date.
Monopolizing a mate's time is another common tactic. Staying close to them at social events, wanting to keep them at home, not wanting them to go out alone, etc. Buss brings up the historical fact of rich and powerful men keeping harems, which were secured to keep men and out to keep the women in. Kings and maharajas have long kept dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of women locked up for their private use. "In Imperial China, emperors around 771 BCE kept one queen, three consorts or wives of the first rank, and 81 concubines." And you thought knowing the powers of three would never come in handy!
Destructive Mate-Keeping Measures. Most male animals use the physical threat of violence to dissuade rivals and/or to keep the mate from straying. Humans are no different, but with our higher brains we can use social and cultural tactics as well. Verbal threats and promises, as well as subtler techniques, such as belittling the competition, are frequently used by humans. Logically and ironically, these tactics are most often turned on the mate in more serious, committed relationships. After all, the more a man loves his wife and the more he is planning to remain with her, the more violently and angrily he will react to signs that she might be straying.
These tactics can be taken to horrible extremes. Buss discusses the cultural (and largely religious, since it is practiced mostly by Muslims) practices of clitoridectomy and infibulation. Both function to retard a woman's sexual desire or pleasure in the act, and infibulation makes covert sexual intercourse impossible.
While much of this chapter stresses the nastiness and violence that jealous humans can engage in, this just underlines how important our ancestors found the act of preserving a successful pair bond to be. If there were not substantial benefits from such a relationship, we would not have all of the encoded desires to fight to preserve it. Speaking of sexual jealous, Buss says, "It may seem ironic that this mechanism, which is designed to keep a mate, causes so much destruction. It does so because the reproductive stakes are so high..."
Up next: Chapter Seven: Sexual Conflict.
I'm going to cut way down on the detail of these, since this is just going on too long. Both on the blog, and in my life. I vacuumed up every detail from some of the early chapters, but these middle ones aren't as fascinating to me, yet I'm continuing to summarize nearly everything, since that's the tone I set from the start.
Book Review: The Evolution of Desire, Chapter Five
My discussion of The Evolution of Desire continues. Click here to see the review and discussion of earlier chapters in this fascinating book.
Chapter Five: Attracting a Partner
I've been reading the whole book with great interest, especially chapter two on what women want, but for this chapter I really perked up for. I've got a personal interest, now that I'm single and looking to potentially change that fact, but also because this is what I find most interesting about male/female interactions and relations. Not so much the getting along once they're together, but the mating dance and the way different priorities and hopes and dreams mesh in the initial interactions.
Buss starts off by describing the differences between human mating interest and simpler attraction paradigms. In most cases in nature, prey and predator evolve together. Catching a fish is simply a matter of finding a lure the fish like best. Catching a partner though, is far more complicated, in part because of the competition. You are not the only fisherwo/man in the stream, so just as humans have evolved strategies to snag a mate, and to appear more interesting to potential mates, men and women have evolved strategies to "counter the seductive lures of rivals."
Many other animals engage in this sort of behavior, but what makes humans unique is our intelligence, our culture, and our verbal skills. We speak to make ourselves seem more attractive, and to denigrate the charms of our competitors.
Derogatory tactics, like tactics of attraction, work because they exploit the psychological mechanisms that predispose persons of the opposite sex to be sensitive to certain valuable qualities in possible mates, such as their resources or appearance. A man's communication to a woman that his rival lacks ambition can be effective only if the woman is predisposed to reject men who have a low potential for acquiring resources. Similarly, a woman's remark to a man that her rival is sexually promiscuous can work only if men are predisposed to reject women who do not devote themselves sexually to one man.
Buss is clearly posing this as an answer, not a question, since he's demonstrated through the book that men and women are predisposed to those two things, at least when it comes to selecting a partner for a long term relationship. (As explained in chapter three, a man's preference for promiscuity in a woman is inversely proportional to his interest in establishing a LTR with her. Men hook up with sluts; they don't marry them.)
Deception is a more viable skill in casual relationships, too. A man can exaggerate his wealth and social status for a short time; married people can temporarily conceal their marital status to the person they're having an affair with, etc. Also, the rules are very different for the sexes. Since more men than women are seeking casual relationships (women look more for long term relationships, and men tend to cheat more), women have more power since they have more men to choose from. As Buss points out, "For every sexually willing woman there are usually dozens of men who would consent to have sex with her."
Displaying Resources. Buss begins by detailing some of the behaviors that male animals engage in to attract a mate. Male birds build nests for females to pick between, other male animals catch or accumulate food items they do not allow the female access to until she consents to mate, etc. These behaviors in animals work quite well, but are usually fairly simple and straight forward. Human resource displays are a bit more involved.
Researchers interviewed hundreds of college students and had them list tactics they'd used, or seen others use, in attempts to attract women. The list of more than 100 behaviors was then sorted into categories, and put to a different group of single college students, and married couples, who rated how successful they thought the various tactics would be in attracting a partner, and how often they or their spouses used those tactics. Techniques that displayed wealth, or convinced women of the man's social status or ambition, were by far the most successful. Denigrating those tactics in other men worked quite well to lower the women's opinions of them, as well. Wearing expensive clothing, buying a woman an expensive mixed drink (rather than cheaper beer or wine), and tipping generously were winning tactics, since they demonstrated that the man possessed resources, and more critically, that he was willing to part with them. These types of behaviors work best when trying to attract a casual sex partner, and are less effective on women who are seeking a LTR.
Expensive clothing worked very well too, of course. Another study showed women slides of men; the same men appeared dressed in a Burger King uniform, or in slacks with a blazer and a Rolex. Unsurprisingly, "Based on these photographs, women state that they are unwilling to date, have sex with, or marry the men in the low-status costumes, but are willing to consider all these relationships with men in high-status garb."
These behaviors are not limited to American women, either. Buss details studies of various primitive tribes and in every case, the men with the resources enjoy higher status and have a better choice of women. To test this, an interesting experiment was carried out by anthropologist A. R. Holmbrerg. He befriended one low status man of the Siriono tribe of eastern Bolivia, started hunting with him and by using a shotgun, vastly increased the man's take. He even taught the man to use the gun and in short order the loser was, "enjoying the highest status, had acquired several new sex partners, and was insulting others, instead of being insulted by them." Sound like every rich-daddy, frat boy you ever dated hated in college, or what?
Displaying Commitment. Showing signs of commitment and devotion are powerful attractions to a woman. They're difficult to fake since they must be repeated over a long period of time, and are good indicators, to the woman, that the man would make a good LTR partner. Such things as showing an interest in her problems, discussing marriage, integrating her into his social circle, and (especially) showing persistence in courtship were very winning tactics.
Buss talks about these as ways to demonstrate to a woman that a man is interested in a LTR, and throws in several anecdotes about men who persisted in pursing a woman and impressed her with their perseverance. In the examples given, the women were not especially interested in the men initially, and truly did have to be won over. This phenomena is pretty widespread in my experience, even amongst women who aren't considering getting married. Attractive young women who have their pick of men, such as my current Imaginary Girlfriend, are constantly being approached and solicited, and if they're not given to bed hopping, or being easily wooed by some flash and cash, they often use commitment and persistence as sorting factors. Men have to put in the time and effort to prove their worth and prove they are truly interested in such women, even to obtain "casual" relationships with them.
Women also appreciate kindness, and men have learned to act that way, or at least fake it. A study in Germany showed that college students engaged in all sorts of deception to woo women. Common tactics included acting "...more polite than they really are, appear to be more considerate than the really are, and seem more vulnerable than they really are." This sort of thing works in singles bars too. "Women stated that the most effective tactics for attracting them are displaying good manners, offering help and acting sympathetic and caring. Mimicking what women want in a husband by showing kindness and sincere interest, in short, is also an effective technique for luring women into brief sexual liaisons." The old "pose with a baby and/or a puppy" trick works too. Women evaluated photos of the same man standing alone, playing with a baby, or ignoring the crying baby. Unsurprisingly, the women were most attracted to the man playing with the baby. Women like caring and fidelity. "Of the 130 possible ways to attract a mate, women regard showing fidelity as the second most effective act, just a shade behind displaying an understanding of the woman's problems"
Honesty is another trait that women are strongly attracted to, so of course males of all species have evolved techniques to take advantage of this. Male birds and other animals appear to offer the female food, then snatch it back after copulating. Lying about one's relationship status was the most effective, and damaging, lie men could tell. A survey of men in a singles bar got a substantial percentage of them to admit they were married or in LTRs. By the same token, telling a woman that a rival for her affections is not available is the single most effective technique to cause her to lose interest in him.
Displaying Bravado and Self Confidence. On the other hand, women can be won over, especially for casual relationships, by attitude and charisma. As one woman is quoted in the book, "Some guys just seem to know what they are doing. They know how to approach you and just make you feel good. Then you get those nerds... who can't get anything right. They come on strong at first, but can't keep it together... they just hang around until you dump them by going to the restroom or over to a friend to talk."
Men with strong self esteem approach the most attractive women, regardless of their own attractiveness. Men with lower self esteem don't approach the most attractive women. Buss also points out the obvious, that men who get rejected experience lowered self esteem and tend to lose their nerve.
Buss also describes the "satellite technique." The nature analogy is the bullfrog. Male bullfrogs sit by the pond and croak to attract females, who home in on the loudest, deepest croaker. Males who can not compete in volume sometimes use stealth techniques, and sit by the loudest male, then dart out and quickly copulate with females as they approach. Buss analogizes that habit to sidekicks type guys who hang out with BMOC types, and then try to pick up their leavings. Another technique is to be a friend of a couple, and wait until there's a breakup, or the woman is feeling down and rejected, and trying to take advantage of her then.
Enhancing Appearance. Buss spends several paragraphs describing the value of the cosmetics industry and the fairly obvious fact that women don't use cosmetics to make themselves look normal, but to make themselves look like the image of womanhood that attracts men. Youthful, clear-skinned, flushed-cheeked, etc. There are a myriad of other deceptive techniques to employ; false fingernails, hair extensions, eyelashes, padded bras, girdles, spray on tanners, and so forth.
Women compete viciously, too. As much or more than men, women denigrate their rivals, both to the man they're competing over, and directly to the other woman, attempting to drive her from the field.
Buss concludes this section by taking on various cultural commenters, such as Naomi Wolf with her book, The Beauty Myth. Since Buss' whole point in The Evolution of Desire is that what men and women want is not imposed by culture or society, but is an evolved desire, he of course objects to authors, like Wolf, who say that we've been brainwashed by out culture into wanting what we think we want. "Women are not unsuspecting dupes buffeted about by the evil forces of Madison Avenue, but rather determine through their preferences the products that are offered." He admits that the cosmetic industry, and others, prey upon our genetic desires, but strongly objects to the theory that culture creates our urges.
Employing Sexual Signals. In another section of "no, really?" insight, Buss details numerous surveys that prove that men really like it when women do sexy stuff. Bending over to show their curves, licking their lips, touching the man, rubbing against him, etc. All those are sure winners, when women do them to men. The more overtly sexual the enticement is, the more men like it. Women are almost exactly the opposite. The more obvious and overt the man's enticement is, the less it interests a woman. (Unless she already likes the guy a lot, in which case it can be exciting to her. Good luck guys, in figuring out when that is.)
Clothing follows this pattern. Men find women in tight or revealing clothing extremely attractive as sexual partners, though somewhat less attractive as marriage partners. Happily, there's some overlap here, since women report wearing sexy outfits when looking for casual partners, but not as often when with men they consider as better potential LTR matches. As for female preferences, they are nearly the opposite of male preferences. Women shown slides of men in various outfits rate the more revealing outfits as less attractive in men they're considering for casual as well as LTRs.
Men also show their mental state by the fact that they interpret almost anything a woman does, such as making eye contact, smiling, any sort of physical contact, etc, in sexual terms. Buss mentions a study in which male and female actors interacted in a variety of scenarios. Men and women in the test audience then watched these movies and filled out surveys on their impressions of the events displayed. In every scenario, men were much more likely to see sexual connotations, and especially to judge the actress' behavior as flirtatious or attraction to the man; while female test subjects saw nothing more than politeness or friendship.
This sort of thing, I think, does a great deal to explain the difficulties men and women have in communicating and courting. I've talked to the IG quite a bit about how guys approach her and hit on her, successfully or otherwise, and she's got endless funny stories about men just failing and flailing in their every effort. (And yes, a few of my initial, overly-earnest efforts will no doubt end up on her permanent story list.) Nearly every guy she has known, on what she thought was a friend level, invariably made some clumsy, often downright embarrassing play for her at some point.
She brings it on herself, somewhat, since she's attractive, but also quite friendly and polite, and as such she puts up with guys who she really has no interest in, but who are so attracted to her that they keep persisting in pursing her despite numerous rejections. Because she's so nice she tries to let them down gently, or give them a hint, rather than just saying, "Fuck off!" and she's quite often driven to distraction, trying to be nice to someone who she really doesn't want to interact with anymore. Her main complaints about men are that they (we) can't take a hint, and act very inappropriately. I've told her that it's a difference in how men and women think, and much of what Buss covers in this section meshes nicely with my own conclusions.
Men don't know how to show casual, cool interest. We get all obsessed and het up, and think that if we could only show the woman how much we care, she'd understand, or be won over, or see our true value. So men ignore obvious "No." signals, make grand gestures that just annoy the disinterested woman, or use behaviors that would win them (the men) over, but that fall flat, or are actively repulsive, to the woman. It's not that men are trying to be crude when they say how hot a woman is, or how much they want to have sex with her, or how aroused they are when they think about her, etc. They're demonstrating behaviors that would be all but guaranteed to work on them if a woman displayed them, and they mistakenly think that women will respond to the same thing. They are very, very wrong.
Women do the same thing, of course. Women most strongly respond to emotional appeals and communication and emotional outpourings and vulnerability. Men do as well, sometimes, but quite often men feel overwhelmed and terrified by that sort of thing, which results in the stereotypical relationship fight in which the woman is crying and trying desperately to reach out, and the man is sitting silently, wishing she'd stop crying, or else feels so overwhelmed that he has to flee the scene.
Book Review: The Evolution of Desire: Chapter Three
My "review" of The Evolution of Desire continues. As you've no doubt noticed, this isn't really a review; it's more like a chronological term paper, analyzing and preserving and pretty much ripping out every bit of useful content from the book. Well, not every bit; my review is far shorter (believe it or not) than the book itself, and I'm only touching on maybe 10 or 15% of the points Buss covers. I just found so much of the book fascinating and elucidating that I wanted to go over it slowly and carefully enough to get most of the facts and concepts burned into my brain, and to do that I had to take notes and type it up as I went. And since I did that, I might as well post it here, for those of you thoughtful and psychologically-curious enough to read it.
It occurred to me a few days ago, while going through this book and several others on related subjects, that I could have made a career out of this. Since I grew old enough to appreciate the difference, nothing has ever interested me more in conversation that talking to women about their views on sex, relationships, what they like and don't like in men, etc. I find male psychology so boring and rudimentary, in comparison to women, that I never much care about the inner lives of men, at least not in regards to their sexual desires and hopes and dreams. You've probably all seen the famous illustration of this. That's obviously an exagerration, but it's not grossly untrue when evaluating the way the genders deal with each other when sex is part of the equation. (And when is it not?) I used to think of that diagram as being drawn from the male POV, but upon reflection, I think it goes both ways. The obvious joke is that women are impossibly complicated, but the converse is true as well. Women wonder why men only seem to have one reaction to stimuli, and curse the fact that the male control panel is so lacking in finer calibration.
Men aren't just stupid animals about everything; I think the psychology of my gender can be quite complicated and interesting in many areas of their psychology; how men seek or flee power and authority, how men relate to authority figures and especially their own fathers, and more, but those aren't really my areas of interest in study. Also, since I'm a man I have a natural insight into and knowledge of the male mind, so many things that would interest or confuse a woman seem common sense to me.
I enjoy the subject area in general though, and as I said, I've lately read a fair number of books on male vs. female psychology and relationships, and I've also read about famous sex researchers (Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, etc.) and psychologists and doctors who studied gender and made breakthrough discoveries. It never occurred to me until recently, but that field is one I could have enjoyed a career in. I can't see going into that at this point, though. I'd enjoy the grad school and doctoral thesis aspect of it, but that would take another 5 or 6 years, cost a fortune, and then what? No one's going to pay me to research and write books about it. I might sell books on it, but I'd have to go into practice to gather the information and learn the field inside and out, and frankly, I don't want to deal with crazy people.
I enjoy studying them, like bugs in a box, but I don't want to put up with their bullshit, and I don't care about helping the sick. I just want to read about their problems and try to figure out what caused them and why, and hear the juicy stories of their madness. Making them better is hard. Well, it's getting easier, but that's because abnormal psych and sexology has become almost entirely pharmacological, and just writing prescriptions isn't any fun. Worse yet, when the lithium or prozac or other mood stabilizers work, the client isn't interesting anymore.
So, no psych career for me, but I do enjoy dabbling in the field with a layman's knowledge, and I enjoy good books on the subject. Thus continues my discussion of this one.
Chapter Three: Men Want Something Else
This chapter starts off pondering why men are willing to marry. After all, casual sex is a far better solution, genetically. Implant sperm, move on to another woman, repeat. Buss speculates that some of the evolved male willingness to marry and invest many years in just one woman was created as a reciprocal desire by women requiring that of men.
Women's requirements for consenting to sex made it costly for most men to pursue short-term mating strategy exclusively. In the economics of reproductive effort, the costs of not pursuing a permanent mate may have been prohibitively high for most men... A further cost of failing to seek marriage was impairment of the survival and reproductive success of the man's children.
Children without a father must have had much lower survival rates, and biologically speaking, it's useless to get women pregnant if they die before giving birth, or their/your offspring die before reaching reproductive age. Buss also points out that by marriage, men were able to reproduce with much higher quality women, since the higher quality women were able to demand marriage as a prerequisite to sexual activity. This works both ways, though. Lower quality women (by whatever the criteria of the age/culture was, and Buss gets to what men find attractive soon enough) can obtain sex with very high quality men by lowering their relationship requirements. Marrying such a man was much more difficult than bearing his young, since highly-eligible men have marriage standards that exclude most women.
Since men, biologically speaking, want to have numerous children, and since men were largely forced into monogamous relationships, the trick, for the men, was/is to figure which women are more reproductively capable. This is difficult, Buss says, since there are few obvious signs of reproductive capability. It can't be seen in a woman's appearance, her family history, or her social status, and she doesn't even know herself. How can men judge it, then? "Two obvious cues; youth and health."
Youth. A woman's reproductive capacity declines rapidly with age. From puberty to about 20, it increases. After 20 it steadily decreases; it's very low at 40, and by 50 it's generally zero. "Thus, women's capacity for reproduction is compressed into a fraction of their lives."
In the US, men uniformly express a desire for mates who are younger than they are. In surveys on college campuses from 1939-1988, men wanted women who were about 2.5 years younger than them. Men who are 21 prefer, on average, women who are 18.5. This preference is not limited to the US. It's found in surveys of men all over the world, and in all sorts of cultures, from the most modern to the most primitive. Nigerian men at 23.5 prefer women who are 17. Yugoslavian men at 21.5 want 19 year old wives. Most of the surveys cited by Buss are of young men, but he includes some stats about older men, and as you might expect, the older a man gets, his ideal women gets more years younger. Hugh Hefner aside, most men at 40 and 50 don't still want twenty year olds, but men in their 30s want women who are about 5 years younger, and men in their 50s prefer women 10-20 years younger. (Or perhaps that's the youngest they can get, and if not limited by economic or cultural barriers, most 60 y/o men would shack up with teenagers, sultan-style?)
This stated preference is backed up by demographic studies; American men marry women progressively younger than them in second and third marriages. Men are around 3 years older than their first wives, 5 years older than the second, and 8 years older than the third, averaged across men/women of all ages. This isn't a new or American phenomena. Records from Sweden in the 1800s show that men married women an average of 10.6 years younger than them on their second marriages. The age difference is even wider in polygamous cultures, with men choosing (buying) wives two and three decades younger than themselves.
In short, contemporary men prefer young women because they have inherited from their male ancestors a preference that focused intently upon this cue to a woman's reproductive value. This psychologically based preference translates into everyday mating decisions.
Standards of Physical Beauty. Even more than youth, men seek beauty.
Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman's health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone -- and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute the ingredients of male standards of female beauty.
I'd never thought of some of those categories, but upon reading them I realized that I did in fact desire them. Malaya did a lot of those things, and the IG has a few habits that I find so charming, and several of them are darts into these bullseyes. She sometimes gives a little skipping hop to get moving towards a desired object, and she makes the most amazingly animated, dancing-eyed, excited faces when she's intrigued by something. I've always been enchanted by those maneuvers, but had never thought why. I just thought they were cute. Now I know that they're hitting me in my evolutionary psychology, as features of behavior that indicate her good health and high reproductive value. Helpful! (Not that there's any consideration, on either of our parts, of reproducing. But that's the whole point of this book; these things attract men and women without our realizing why, and they're just as attractive whether we're looking to have children, or doing all we can to avoid that eventuality.)
As with everything else in the book, there's no moral value attached to these human preferences, and their prevalence is judged population-wide. Individuals may have very different preferences, but as Buss points out, men who prefer gray-haired, wrinkled women might be very happy in their lives with a succession of elderly women, but they're likely to be a genetic dead end. Every man alive today is a descendant of thousands of generations of men who preferred young, healthy women, since the ones who didn't, didn't leave descendants.
Other researchers have surveyed populations across the world and found features that are almost universally considered repugnant. Most of these are cues to ill health, such as a poor complexion, ringworm, facial disfigurement, and filthiness. "Cleanliness and freedom from disease are universally attractive."
It's not just men who feel this way, either. Considering younger women prettier is universal among humans, both male and female.
When men and women rate a series of photographs of women differing in age, judgments of facial attractiveness decline with the increasing age of the woman. The decline in ratings of beauty occurs regardless of the age or sex of the judge. The value that men attach to women's faces, however, declines more rapidly than do women's ratings of other women's faces as the age of the women depicted in the photograph increases, highlight the importance to men of age as a cue to reproductive capacity.
These preferences seem to be inborn too; they are not all learned and conditioned. Various studies with infants have shown that babies from 12-24 months spend more time looking at photos of younger, more attractive (as judged by adults) women than they do of older women. Babies also play longer and more happily with people wearing youthful, attractive masks than those wearing ugly masks, and twelve-month old infants played longer with dolls that were attractive than they did with ugly ones. Preferences cross racial lines as well; whites and Asians agree strongly on which women, of either race, are the more attractive. (Asian girls. *cough*) Consensus has been found among many other racial and ethnic groups as well. (I thought the figures were a bit cherry-picked in this section of the book, since the people surveyed were adults, who might have genetic preferences, but who surely have been conditioned by culture as well.)
Body shape. Male preferences for female body shape differ widely, and seem to be culturally-conditioned. In cultures and times when food is scarce (such as among many modern day bush peoples and ancient Europe during periods of famine), plumper women are the most desired. In cultures where food is over-abundant (such as modern day America and Europe) slimmer women are more desired. From this Buss concludes that men do not have an evolved preference for a particular amount of body fat. Male preferences for breast size and shape vary widely as well, and many cultures have unique physical attributes such as tattoos, elongated necks, piercings, etc, are desired within those cultures, but not elsewhere.
One interesting finding about thinness preferences in modern Western culture is that women think men want a thinner figure than men actually do. Experiments with adult men and women in the US have repeatedly shown that when presented with images of women of varying thinness, women prefer one of the thinnest models, while men pick a slim model, but one with more meat on her than the women do. "American women erroneously believe that men desire thinner women than is the case. These findings refute the belief that men desire women who are emaciated."
This is definitely true for me. I like a woman to be slim and athletic, but I do not find skinny, bony women attractive. I've never though the Olsen twins, or Nicole Ritchie, or Paris Hilton, or other famous anorexics, were attractive. Admittedly, I thought the whole Jennifer Loves Nougat "I'm a size 2!" saga was quite amusing, but not because she was fat, but because she was delusional about her dress size. Was she just throwing out tiny numbers she might have fit into a decade earlier at the spur of the moment? Or better yet, was her stylist buying her clothing, ripping out the tags, and sewing in new ones with lower numbers just to feed her vanity?
A more universal preference is the waist-to-hip ratio. Buss explains this by detailing the changes in male and female bodies during puberty. Before puberty, boys and girls have similar body shapes. Afterwards, boys lose fat in their buttocks and thighs, while the release of estrogen causes women to deposit fat in their trunk, particularly the upper thighs and hips.
Healthy, reproductively capable women have a waist-to-hip ratio between 0.67 to 0.80, while healthy men have a ratio in the range of 0.85 to 0.95. Abundant evidence now shows that the waist-to-hip ratio is an accurate indicator of women's reproductive status...
Singh discovered that waist-to-hip ratio is a powerful cue to women's attractiveness. In a dozen studies conducted by Singh, men rated the attractiveness of female figures, which varied in both their waist-to-hip ratio and their total amount of fat. Men find the average figure to be more attractive than a thin or fat figure. Regardless of the total amount of fat, however, men find women with a low waist-to-hip ratio to be the most attractive... Studies with line drawings and with computer-generated photographic images produced the same results. Finally, Singh's analysis of Playboy centerfolds and the winners of beauty contests within the United States over the last thirty years confirmed the invariance of this cue. Although both centerfolds and beauty contest winners got thinner over that period, their waist-to-hip ratio remained exactly the same at 0.70.
Importance of Physical Appearance. Unsurprisingly, men want women to be beautiful. In a survey of 5000 male and female college students in the 1950s, men ranked physical attractiveness at or near the top of their desired characteristics to a far greater extent than did women. Other surveys, conducted at least every decade since the 1930s, have had men and women rank 18 traits in order of preference. Men have always placed beauty at or near the top, and have always put more importance on it than on women do. It's grown more important, too. All during the 1900s, the values assigned to attractiveness increased for both men and women, though men always ranked it much higher on their desired traits.
The values and increases (or not) vary around the world, but in every culture surveyed, men highly value beauty, and always value attractiveness higher than do women. As Mass concludes, "Men's preference for physically attractive mates is a species-wide psychological mechanism that transcends culture."
Men's Status and Women's Beauty. Humans advertise their status with possessions. Gold chains, expensive cars, designer clothing... and trophy wives. Men want a beautiful woman, they are willing to go through terrible trials to obtain one, and will put up with a great deal to keep one. Buss gives an example of a man who wants to divorce his beautiful wife since he's unhappy with her, but is swayed to put it off by friends telling him how good she looks on his arm when they enter a party.
Possessing a beautiful woman enhances a man's status in the eyes of other men, and women. We've all heard the joke, "He must be rich or have a big dick." when an ugly man is seen with a gorgeous woman, and this isn't just vernacular anecdote. When people are surveyed, they judge men, even unattractive men, much more favorably when they are accompanied by beautiful women. Furthermore, men gain more perceived status when judged with a beautiful woman, and lose more perceived status when judged with an ugly one, than women do. This gives men further motivation to find an attractive mate and avoid an unattractive one. In the eyes of others, women are much less boosted by a gorgeous boyfriend, and much less penalized for an ugly one. These trends hold true all over the world. Buss cites surveys his team carried out in China, Poland, Guam, and Germany, as well as the US.
Homosexual Mate Preferences. Buss holds these results as very important:
The issues are whether homosexual men show preferences more or less like those of other men, different in only the sex of the person they desire; whether they show preferences similar to those of women; or whether they have unique preferences unlike the typical preferences of either sex.
Buss points out what Kinsey was the first to demonstrate; there are few pure-homo or heterosexuals. Most people are primarily heterosexual, but substantial percentages of people, men more than women, engage in occasional homosexual acts, often without considering themselves other than heterosexual. (And no, not all of them are white male elected Republicans, though recent news headlines might lead you to think otherwise.)
Buss talks about the biological origin and continuation of homosexuality, which are still a mystery. Theories about kin selection (good to have a gay brother/sister since they'll help with your kids without consuming resources to support their own) and parental manipulation of lesser children to boost the importance of others are considered, and rejected for lack of evidence.
Homosexual mate preferences are less difficult to discern. Homosexual men and women are essentially identical to heterosexuals in their rankings of the attractiveness of men and women, and men of both persuasions place much more importance on the youthfulness of their desired gender than gay or straight women do. Homosexual men are quite similar to heterosexual men in desiring youthful, attractive partners. Lesbians, like straight women, place much less importance on age.
Studying this further, two psychologists sampled thousands of personal ads placed by gay/straight men/women all across the US. Some bullet points derived from the book.
Percent of personal ads stating a preference for an attractive partner:
By lesbians: 18%
By straight women: 19.5%
By gay men: 29%.
By straight men: 48%
Percent of personal ads in which people mention their own physical attractiveness:
By lesbians: 30%
By straight women: 69.5%
By gay men: 53.5%
By straight men: 42.5%
Ads in which a photograph is requested of respondents:
By lesbians: 16%
By straight women: 35%
By gay men: 34.5%
By straight men: 37%.
Ads that specify physical characteristics such as weight, height, eye color, height, or body build:
By lesbians: 7%
By straight women: 20%
By gay men: 38%
By straight men: 30%
From these and other figures, it seems clear that gay men and straight men are quite similar in their preferences, with only the gender differing. Buss doesn't analyze this further, but it seems to cry out for an attempted explanation. Obviously gay men do not desire young, healthy partners for their reproductive capability. So is the theory that genetics drive men to pick young, healthy baby making machines, and that these same genetic drives push gay men to want youthful, attractive partners even though reproduction is not a possibility?
It would be interesting to see survey results for what gay men want in cultures where mate preferences are different. Youth and beauty are desired worldwide, but do the body shape desires vary; would gay men want plumper men in countries where food is scarce, just as straight men want plumper women in those cultures? There's no data for this for obvious reasons (gays have never been tolerated enough to discern their preferences in any such cultures), but it's a thought exercise.
Men who achieve their desires. Looking at historical records informs us about male desires through time. They're as would be expected. Richer men have always married younger women than poorer men, and kings and sheiks who were able to maintain harems invariably stocked them with young, beautiful women. The Moroccan emperor Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty is credited with 888 children and a harem of up to 500 women, none of whom were over the age of 30. When they got that old (if not sooner) they were kicked out and replaced by a younger woman. The same preferences in women were seen in Roman, Babylonian, Egyptian, Incan, Indian, and Chinese emperors.
In a recent study of German computer dating services, men requested younger women as their incomes increased. Men earning over 10,000 deutsche marks advertised for women from 5-15 years younger. Men earning only 1000 deutsche marks only asked for women up to 5 years younger.
Media Effects on Standards. Buss discusses the popular perception that mass media and advertising are responsible for establishing standards of beauty, and tries to refute it. As he's pointed out throughout the book, humans have preferences that cross culture, age, gender, sexual preference, and more. The images sold in advertising are not arbitrarily selected.
Advertisers perch a clear-skinned, regular-featured, young woman on the hood of the latest model car because the image exploits men's evolved psychological mechanisms and therefore sells cars, not because they want to promulgate a single standard of beauty.
That being said, Buss does cite some studies that found pernicious effects from mass media beauty. People who viewed photographs of attractive members of the opposite sex reported feeling less satisfied with their current romantic partner. Also men lowered the score of their gf/wife after looking at models, compared to the score they gave before eyeballing superior goods. The same men even reported feeling less satisfied, serious about, and close to their partners after scoping out the eye candy. This is obviously not a good thing, and Buss points out how misleading those photos are; that we're seeing the best few shots out of hundreds of images, that they're perfectly lit and costumed and made up and then the photos are airbrushed and Photoshopped, etc.
We carry the same evaluative mechanisms that evolved in ancient times. Now, however, these mechanisms are artificially stimulated by dozens of attractive women we witness daily in our visually-saturated culture in magazines, billboards, televisions and movies. These images do not represent real women in our actual social environment. Rather, they exploit mechanisms designed for a different environment. But they may create sources of unhappiness by interfering with existing real-life relationships.
Besides screwing with men's heads, these media images affect women, making them feel that they must compete with impossible standards of beauty. However, as Buss points out several times, these images are not creating the vision of beauty; they are manipulating male evolutionary urges and forcing females to react by triggering their competitive mating mechanisms.
Chastity and Fidelity. This section addresses the human oddity of cryptic ovulation. Most female mammals only enter estrus occasionally, and when they do it's obvious to males and other females. There are visual cues, behavioral changes, strong odors, and so forth. Human females, in contrast, exhibit no such obvious cues, and women may consent to sexual relations at all times (theoretically), rather than only when they are ovulating. As a result, men don't know when a woman is fertile, and don't even know if she's capable of becoming pregnant if there sexual intercourse occurs. This has created a situation in which women are attractive to men at all times, not just during some periodic mating cycle, and in which a man must guard his woman, or take other steps to ensure her fidelity, if he wishes to be sure her offspring are his own children.
Marriage provided one solution. This greatly increased the odds that a man was the father of his partner's offspring, and the proximity of marriage enabled a man to get to know a woman better, thus giving him a good idea if she were deceiving him about her fidelity. Men had to become sensitive to their partner's needs to ensure that she was happy with him. Ensuring their partner's fidelity is of utmost importance to most men, and this desire often begins even before marriage. Virgin brides have been highly prized throughout human history, to the point that women known to have had children, or sexual relations, became unmarriageable in some societies. This was not simply a male vanity; chaste behavior was seen as a predictor of fidelity in marriage; if she couldn't even wait to be married, what are the odds she'll stay faithful in the future?
The importance placed on virginity in a bride has steadily declined in the US over the past 60 years, largely thanks to the advent of birth control and various cultural changes. In the 1930s, men ranked chastity 10th on a list of 18 requirements for a new bride. By 1988 it was down to 17th. Men value chastity more than women (more than women value it in men) in every country, but its importance varies widely by culture. In China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Taiwan, and Palestine, men attach a very high value to it. In Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France, it's largely irrelevant in potential mate selection.
Buss speculates that the importance of virginity is tied largely to the economic independence of women in a given culture. This is not a male choice, but a female decision. If a woman doesn't feel she must have a husband to survive, then she's got little incentive to "save herself." Hence women in Western nations with good social care networks, such as Sweden, feel free to experiment sexually, knowing the consequences of unwanted pregnancy will not be crippling. Swedish men place very little importance on virginity in a bride, but it's not clear if this is because they legitimately don't care if she's a virgin, or if they realize they'll never get one in Sweden, so there's no point in worrying about it.
While most men these days are less interested in virginity, men still view a lack of sexual experience as desirable in a spouse. I'd cynically suggest this is because guys don't want their wife to know 1) how small their penis is, or 2) how lousy they are in bed, but I'm sure Buss' evolutionary logic is more sound. He says this is also due to the utmost importance men place on fidelity. On many surveys, men regard unfaithfulness as the least desirable characteristic in a wife, and a lot of sexual experience before marriage is apparently seen as an indication that such behavior may continue.
Evolutionary Bases of Men's Desires. Men's desires for young, healthy, sexually faithful mates are in no way universal in the animal kingdom. Many primates prefer older, more experienced (at child-raising) females, and in many animals the females make the ultimate choice, and place far more importance on appearance (such as peahens picking peacocks by their plumage) or strength (does picking the elk with the largest rack of antlers). But, as Mass says:
...human males have faced a unique set of adaptive problems and so have evolved a unique sexual psychology. They prefer youth because of the centrality of marriage in human mating. Their desires are designed to gauge a woman's future reproductive potential, not just immediate impregnation. They place a premium on physical appearance because of the abundance of reliable cues it provides to the reproductive potential of a potential mate.
Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them until death. These preferences cannot be attributed to Western culture, to capitalism, to white Anglo-Saxon bigotry, to the media, or to incessant brainwashing by advertisers. They are universal across cultures and are absent in none. They are deeply ingrained, evolved psychological mechanisms that drive our mating decisions just as our evolved taste preferences drive our decisions on food consumption.
The chapter closes with some fact-based lecturing from Buss. He talks about how these findings are considered controversial by some, and how women have said he should repress his results since they're unfair to people born ugly, and especially to women, who naturally can't stop aging. Buss admits the truth of this, but holds strongly to our genetic legacy. He says men can't help being attracted to young, beautiful women, since their evolved preferences are driving them. "Telling men not to become aroused by signs of youth and health is like telling them not to experience sugar as sweet." In Buss' judgment, there's no changing nature. It can be fought, of course, and men do not have to give into their desires anymore than women have to fantasize about a tall, handsome doctor, while being courted by short, fat garbage collectors. But what really happens in life?
This is one of several books I checked out for my Abnormal Psych research paper (on Hypersexuality). Like the other books, it was of limited use for that topic, but I found the info good enough that I went back and read the whole book after I finished the paper. Here's the quick score, with much, much more discussion below.
The Evolution of Desire, by David M. Buss. Revised edition, 2003. Concept: 7 Presentation: 7 Writing Quality: 7 Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8 Entertainment Value: 7 Rereadability: 7 Overall: 9
This book is simply packed full of useful information. It's crammed with statistics, surveys, and polls illustrating what men and women want in a mate, with tons of analysis about the biological and sociological reasons why we want it. The title is appropriate, but misleading. It sounds like a book about how desire came about to exist in humans, but that's almost exactly wrong. The book is actually about how desire caused humans to evolve, and how our biological imperatives continue to influence our mate choices, on a conscious and subconscious level.
It's not a perfect book; the most helpful review on Amazon.com enumerates a long list of problems, chiefly with the methodology of the surveys Buss conducted, but also with his analysis of them. My objections were more to the constant generalizing in the book. Buss constantly says things like, "72% of women said X and Y..." which may be true, but their reasons for saying it could be very different, and just because people say something on a hypothetical survey doesn't mean they actually do it in real life. Much less do it in every situation, since every situation is different, depending on the people stuck in it.
Furthermore, Buss' his information is almost entirely targeted at heterosexuals of child-bearing age. He pays scant attention to people who are seeking a partner but not considering having children with that person; teenagers who don't want to settle down yet, adults who have kids already, older people past child-bearing age, homosexuals, etc. Presumably the same genetic drives motivate those people, though they're less predictable since what they consciously want differs from what their genetics are pushing them to obtain.
On the whole though, the book has a lot of very interesting and useful information. In the rest of this review I'm going to quote a bunch of stats and summarize a bunch of his chief conclusions, for your benefit but also as a way for me to record my notes and thoughts on a book that's well overdue at my ex-university's library.
I was going to post it all in one update, but I've been working on it on and off for several days, and my comments and notes thus far are up over 14 pages, and I'm only halfway through the book. I'm doing 2-4 pages of summarization and opinion on each chapter, depending on how much of each chapter is fascinating. Since it's running so long, I'm going to break this review up into several, perhaps many, parts. Here's the intro and chapters one and two. I'll post the rest in updates over the next week or so. The information all ties together, but you can theoretically read just the chapters on subjects you are most interested in.
Chapter One: Origins of Mating Behavior.
Darwin's discovery of natural selection can be seen clearly affecting human behavior in the way we've evolved characteristics and behaviors useful for obtaining a mate, rather than (simply) for survival. Many animals display this, most obviously in things like deer antlers and peacock tails. It's known as sexual selection, rather than natural/survival selection. This sort of feature exists in a feedback loop. Females, peahens for example, prefer a huge, colorful tail on a male. Therefore males with larger, more colorful tales breed more, thus having more offspring with the genetics for large colorful tales, thus perpetuating the trait. The peahens aren't crazy in their choice; they like males with large, colorful tails since to have such an ornamental appendage, a male must be healthy and strong; sickly males will have mangy tails, or will die to predators since they can't escape or fight with all those heavy feathers slowing them down. The birds don't realize any of this consciously, of course. It's simply the mechanism that's evolved over millions of years.
Humans have similar preferences and desires, and even though we are conscious creatures, possessed of at least semi-free will, our genetics and evolutionary drives still propel us. We can't control our desires. We can refuse to act on them, and can (sometimes) overcome them with logic and reason, but quite often we give into them without realizing it. We rationalize that we want to do, or we should do, what our genes drive us to do.
The most basic human desires for a mate of the opposite sex, boil down to simple, stereotypical factors. Men want a young, healthy, beautiful woman, who is at the peak of her breeding years and can give birth to and successfully raise numerous healthy offspring. Women want a strong, capable, economically-secure man who can provide for her and her/their offspring, and who will not abandon her to raise the young on her own. These desires exist across almost every human culture, primitive and modern. We desire this, our children will desire this, and our ancestors desired it, which is why we do, since our ancestors reproduced successfully, and passed on their preferences to us.
Keeping a mate is another problem humans must face. Unlike many animals, both partners participate in the raising of resource-intensive offspring. Women want a mate who can provide ample resources for the young. Men want a partner who will be faithful, and this is an almost uniquely human problem, since human females are capable of mating and getting pregnant all the time. Many female animals only go into heat at certain times of the year, or only for a few days at a time, and their males can guard them during that time. Human males can not (generally speaking) guard their females full time (only the super rich, such as maharajas with harems and eunuch guards), but do not wish (consciously and genetically) to raise another man's children. Both genders are therefore genetically motivated to select a mate who will not cheat on them, though men can get away with it if they are such good providers that they can keep more than one woman satisfied. (Again, this is on a biological level; cultural issues and human psychology greatly complicates the equations.)
Humans also have a biological predilection to keep possible options open for mate replacement. If a partner is infertile, or dies, it pays to have an alternative in mind. Humans thus tend to notice other potential mates even when they're in a relationship, and this noticing grows much more pronounced if the existing mate is proving unsatisfying. Not reproducing, not looking like a good subject to reproduce with, not providing as necessary to support a child, etc.
Men and women are destined to clash over mate selection. Men want a woman who can raise their young, and have a genetic predisposition to involving themselves in the process of raising the young. That being said, it's a very sound genetic strategy to impregnate as many women as possible, since while the resulting offspring won't be as successful without the man's direct assistance, odds are some of them will survive, and in any event, women who are impregnated by one man can't get pregnant by another. So this is a useful way for one man to propagate his genes, while blocking other men from propagating theirs. This causes men to be willing to engage in sexual intercourse far more readily than women, who bear the physical toll of pregnancy and raising the child and are therefore evolved to select their partners much more carefully.
There is a fundamental conflict between these different sexual strategies: men cannot fulfill their short-term wishes without simultaneously interfering with women's long-term goals. An insistence on immediate sex interferes with the requirement for a prolonged courtship. The interference I reciprocal, since prolonged courting also obstructs the goal of ready sex. Whenever the strategy adopted by one sex interferes with the strategy adopted by the other sex, conflict ensues.
It's fairly obvious that these genetic behaviors motivate humans even when, thanks to birth control or other factors, reproduction is not a factor in potential sexual intercourse. It's also obvious, though never directly addressed by Buss, that sexual pleasure goes naturally with the sex act. In the same way that fatty, high calorie food tastes good to us (since it's what we needed to eat to survive when food was scarce), and makes us want to eat it even when we know it's bad for us, sex feels good, and makes us want to do it even when we know we shouldn't, or even when there's no chance of it leading to reproduction (masturbation, for instance).
Sexual strategies are constantly shifting. When there are more women than men, women have to lower their standards and men become reluctant to settle into a monogamous relationship. When there are more men than women, women can be highly selective and monogamy becomes much more common. In cultures where polygamy is allowed, parents put intense pressure on their sons to achieve and succeed, since many men are locked out of reproducing entirely.
Chapter Two: What Women Want
What women want, and the fact that they want very different things than men want, derives directly from sexual and genetic differences. Men produce countless billions of sperm; around 12,000,000 per hour. Women produce ova, have only about 400 of them, release (usually) one per month if past puberty and until menopause, if they're not pregnant, and can not make any more than those original 400. One act of sexual intercourse, a negligible energy expenditure for a man, can result in a very resource-intensive nine month pregnancy for the woman, who risks her life in the birthing process, and if successful will then expend additional energy in the process of lactation.
Incidentally, Buss stresses that while this is true of humans, it is not a universal male/female issue. Many female animals produce eggs and drop them with minimal resource depletion, leaving the male to fertilize and guard the eggs, and sometimes even provide for the offspring.
Given the high cost of reproducing, human females must select their mates carefully. There are countless traits that a woman might factor into her decision, and cultural factors are major influences, as are individual preferences. Biological factors underlie the process though, and they developed over millions of years, and are highly focused, for good reason:
A strong preference for a particular navel shape would be unlikely to evolve unless male navel differences were somehow adaptively relevant to ancestral women. From among the thousands of ways in which men differ, selection over hundreds of thousands of years focused women's preferences laser-like on the most adaptively valuable characteristics.
Evolution has favored women who prefer men who possess attributes that confer benefits and who dislike men who possess attributes that impose costs. Each separate attribute constitutes one component of a man's value to a woman as a mate.
The way this works is similar to how random mutations drive evolution via natural selection. Mutations can be good or bad or indifferent. There's no logic or drive to them. Giraffes don't get longer necks to reach higher vegetation because they stretch for it, or because they want longer necks, or because they consciously know they'll enjoy greater reproductive success if they do. Some giraffes just have longer necks via random genetic chance, and those longer-necked giraffes are therefore able to eat more, and be healthier, and have more young; young who who inherit the genes for longer necks from their parents. Natural selection is a blind, stupid, random process in the individual, but over populations, and generations, it's brilliantly-focused and highly-effective.
Human sexual preferences work in similar fashion. Some women prefer longer eyelashes, or large chins, or in-turned navels. But if these traits aren't genetically repeating, or don't help the children succeed, then they will not be passed on, since there won't be anyone to pass them on. The logic isn't that women have spent a million years intentionally picking traits in men that will make their children survive and succeed. (Though this can sometimes happen in humans, since we can think and reason, at least when sports or celebrity gossip is not involved.) The logic is that women have based their partner selection on all sorts of traits, but the ones that have resulted in more, healthier children are the ones that have been passed on.
Economic Capacity. Bearing and raising children is a costly activity. Historically, women needed a man's help to survive this process. Women were therefore well-served to select a man who could provide for her, and who would be willing to do so. As Buss points out, "...if all men possessed the same resources and showed and equal willingness to commit them, there would be no need for women to develop the preferences for them." This sort of genetically-created preference turns into a feedback loop. Women want men who have resources to mate with. Men therefore seek resources in order to make women want to mate with them. It's a symbiotic, chicken/egg scenario.
Men who helped raise the child were much more useful than men who abandoned the woman, and culture reinforced this. Children had to be fed and kept safe, as well as taught to hunt, educated in a trade, and they could inherit social status and influence from their fathers as well. Women, and their children, were very unlikely to receive these benefits from a man chosen simply as a temporary sexual partner. "Not all potential husbands can convert all these benefits, but over thousands of generations, when some men were able to provide some of these benefits, women gained a powerful advantage by preferring them as mates."
Buss cites surveys in which American women were asked to rank numerous factors in selecting a mate, according to importance. In 1939, 1956, 1967, and 1982, the results were quite similar. In all cases, women rated their partner's financial prospects at or near the top of their preferences, and in all cases, women placed about twice as much weight on this factor as men did when they ranked their preferences in a female. A more recent survey of over 1000 personal ads bore this out, as women sought financial resources about 11x as often as men did. This preference in women is not limited to any particular age group, or country. Buss conducted surveys and found this was true in dozens of nations around the world, and even in polygamous cultures. The man's financial prospects are less important in countries where women have higher incomes or there are better social support networks; women in the Netherlands value financial prospects only 36% higher than men in the Netherlands, the lowest difference of any nation surveyed.
Women desire men with higher social status even when the women themselves are well off. In cultures where women have more economic power and wealth, they still rank their partner's status near the top of their list of preferences. There are exceptions; very rich older women may pick attractive younger men without consideration of their economic prospects, but these are very special circumstances, and reproduction is not a factor, given the age of the women.
The female desire for a man with good economic prospects exists even when the women have excellent prospects of their own. Surveys of well off women show that they want men who are even more well off.
These women were well educated, tended to have professional degrees, and had high self esteem. As the study showed, successful women place an even greater value than less successful women on mates who have professional degrees, high social status and greater intelligence, as well as desiring mates who are tall, independent and self confident. Perhaps most tellingly, these women express an even stronger preference for high-earning men than do women who are less financially successful.
Social status is very important as well, because it goes hand in hand with economic prospects, and presumably because a higher ranking man will have children who are treated better and more likely to succeed in life. (And obviously enough, women want to marry a chief so their own lives will be better, but Buss doesn't discuss that; just the reproductive benefits.) In a study of 5000 US college students, "...women list status, prestige, rank, position, power, standing, station, and high place as important considerably more frequently than men do."
Educational degrees are a factor as well. Buss relates an anecdote about women in a restaurant complaining that there weren't any eligible men, while surrounded by young, healthy, unmarried waiters. The waiters were not seen as men of acceptable social status or economic value, so were not considered as potential mates. The word "eligible" is a euphemism for a man with substantial assets, who has not already committed them to another woman and her children. In a polygamous culture, it would refer to a man who had enough surplus assets to support additional women and their children. As with economic resources, women all over the world value social status in their potential mates much more highly than men do in theirs.
Age. In all 37 countries in an international study, women preferred men older than they were. Not a great deal older, on average; just 3-5 years, but always older. The most obvious reason for this is that men accrue resources over time, and all other factors being equal, a man of 30 will be a better provider than a man of 25. Of course all other factors are never equal, and age must be factored in with the other determiners of "eligibility;" social status, appearance, etc. Age selections outside the usual range are often caused by related factors.
Other exceptions occur when women mate with substantially younger men. Many of these cases occur not because of strong preferences by women for younger men but rather because older women and younger men lack bargaining power on the mating market. Older women often cannot secure the attentions of high-status men and so much settle for younger men, who themselves have not acquired much status or value as mates.
Ambition and Industriousness factor in as well. Women view hard work and ambition as key indicators of future economic and social success. Men who are lazy or underachieving are less desirable. Men place far less importance on this attribute in their mate selection, in almost every culture studied.
Dependability and stability. These factors in a man are highly valued by women. Of the 37 cultures studied, 16 showed a substantial difference between men and women's preferences for these traits in a partner. In 15 of those cultures women placed a higher value on dependability and stability. Interestingly, dependability was rated higher than total production, in many cultures. Being able to count on the regular, usual resource production was valued very highly. Emotional stability was very important as well. Men who are not stable tend to be jealous, possessive, philandering, and prone to erratic behavior.
Size and strength. These factors are valued, but largely in terms of how they reinforce other status points. A strong partner can provide and protect, but in modern society, it's more about tangential factors; taller men enjoy greater status in almost every culture surveyed, for instance. Women prefer it in almost all cases; a study of personal ads found that more than 80% of women wanted a man who was 6 foot or taller. Ads placed by taller men produced more replies than those by shorter men.
Love and commitment. Women desire, and require, a man who will commit to them and stick with them. Men who are committed value their partner and protect her, funnel their resources to her and her offspring, and show their commitment (love) by behaving thoughtfully in word and deed. Love is a human concept and emotion, but it goes hand in hand with commitment and fidelity. Most people, over 82% of men and 89% of women, say they would require love to marry someone, even if that person matched all of their other requirements very well. This varies between cultures; only 59% of Russian women surveyed in the mid 1980s said they would require love, a low number that reflects the economic difficulties those women were living under at the time.
Coming soon... Chapter Three: What Men Want: Something Different.
My last final was Wednesday evening, and after breezing through it I wandered out to my car and drove home, wondering what now. I'm done, finished my degree, B.A. in Humanities, and yeah, I should probably be more emotional at this point. I had a semi-hysterical breakdown Monday night, but in a good way, after making it through 2 finals that day, after having been up all night finishing my senior project and getting it printed up and bound at a 24 hour Kinkos. The senior project was an insane rush to finish, thanks to my procrastinating on it, and my primary reader was too busy last week to look over it. He was supposed to get on it over the weekend and get comments to me over the weekend, and when Sunday night came and went without any word from him, I was a little panicked. I went ahead and finished a last edit/draft, and took the 34 pages to Kinkos to get it printed up in two copies on good paper and bounded (spiral folder type thing), and sent him a late night email with the final .doc attached, saying I'd drop off the hard copies at his office in the morning and that they were due that day, and I needed his signature on both copies.
I got to sleep around 5, set my alarm for 10, and at 7:45 when my alarm clock/cell phone singing, I picked it up with no idea who it was. It was helpful that I was too asleep to speak or think, since it was the man I'd been so eager to contact, and he had good news. He'd read (well, skimmed) my paper and thought it was very good, and would be happy to sign off on it, and would meet me in his office early that afternoon. So that was that, worries over with, but I was too relieved to get back to sleep. So I laid in bed for 3 hours, sort of dozing but mostly thinking about everything, then got up and took a long shower and spent an hour studying for my first final of the day, then headed out to get his damn thing so I could be rid of it.
That went smoothly, and I went from his office hither and yon, getting the other required signatures and turning the two copies in at last. From there I went right to my first final, making it through a ridiculously long and overdone exam (for a stupid GE requirement Speech/Rhetoric class that hadn't taught me a thing all term) writing with a pen that might as well have used liquid manure for ink, as much bullshit as I wrote on that test. From there it was over to the library for 2 hours studying for my second final of the day, and then another Pepsi with a bag of sour cream and onion baked potato chips, before the World Religions final.
I usually am very careful on exams. I always force myself to read all the multiple choices to be sure there aren't any tricks, on the test or in my mind, and I check over my answers, etc. Not this time. I'd done all the readings and paid attention in lectures and gone over the material so much that I knew the answers at once when I read the question, and my unblinking eyes were soon scanning the ABCDE options not to read them all and evaluate, but to find the one correct one as quickly as possible. Sometimes before I even finished reading the question. I'm sure I missed a few Qs because of that, but it won't matter, since I didn't miss much, and I knew all the 6 extra credit map questions. Besides, I'd gotten an A on the first paper in that class, and the midterm, and I never got less than an A on any full-length paper I did in my 3 semesters, and I knew my research paper was good too. I could have gotten a B on the final and still had an A in the class, what with the various extra credit options I'd fulfilled.
It's funny; I had a horrible GPA in high school, since I didn't care at all. I had several Fs in classes I just chose not to participate in or attend at all, and ended up with the minimum units required to graduate. No idea what my GPA was. Literally, no idea. I couldn't name 2 classes I had my senior year, and don't know my grade in any of them. Probably 2.2 or something like that, since I did get As in classes that were hard/interested me, and those averaged out the Fs and Ds in boring classes I did nothing in for 8 months.
In my first swing through college back when I was 19, 20, etc, I got something like a 3.6 GPA, without really trying. I didn't not try, but I didn't really care about my grades. I did the work in college since it was interesting and sometimes challenging, but mostly since I had about 12 hours of class a week, each class only met once or twice for a total of 3 hours, and I could take classes at times I wanted to take them at, instead of being trapped in the busywork hell of high school from 7-2:30 M-F.
This time I've not really worried about grades either, but the classes have been largely interesting to me, and since the work is all reading and writing and thinking, and I do that for fun, my GPA is enviable. I think I had a 3.96 over my first 2 semesters, (There are no A+s, honors classes are still just worth 4.0, which you get for an A, 3.7 for an A-, and so on down.) and I'll be surprised if I don't do a 4.0 this time, for my 20 units. I don't really feel any pride in this, since I just expect to get an A. I feel bad when I get less. And I should feel bad, since it's not a stretch to say that I'm smarter than most of fellow students, especially when I consider that few of them can write, plus they're like 20 and are still pretty much 13th-grading their way along on mommy and daddy's $32k a year.
Well that's invidious of me to mention, since the other students don't matter, since almost nothing is graded on a curve. So forget that. I should get As since the work I'm doing is all squarely in my skill set. I'm gifted/skilled at reading comprehension and especially at writing. Earning less than A means I didn't apply myself. I'm sure it would (will?) be different in a grad school level class, with higher standards and other students who are also very skilled at this pursuit, but at the undergrad level I've been able to breeze to an A in almost every class I've taken. Not that I'm uniquely talented; I'd have to work much harder for a C in biology or comp sci or calculus than I do to get As in English or History or Humanities. I'm not unable to do hard science or math; I actually scored higher on the Math than the English of my SAT lo those many years ago, but since I haven't spent most of my semi-adult life working with numbers or in the sciences, I'd have to do a lot of relearning and thinking in areas that are not second nature to me.
While I'm on the topic, I had an email asking me why I did Humanities rather than English or Writing. Logistics, mostly. I chose to major in Humanities rather than English since my transferred units went further towards the Humanities degree. Well, that's not entirely true; they were so old that they only counted as lower division/electives, so I had all my electives finished when I enrolled, but had to take all my core major courses, and needed to finish other GE reqs and needed everything upper division. An English degree required something like 42 units, while Humanities was a bit less at about 36, and there was a much wider array of possible classes in Humanities. Stuff like world religions, art history, musical theory, ethics, Anthropology, sexual morality, great books seminar, Asian culture, Italian Renaissance art/history, and so forth. I've taken all of those, and more.
I do not think I could have done the 64 units I needed to graduate in 3 semesters of English, and not just because of boredom and being forced to take all the elementary writing classes I knew enough not to need, but would have had to take anyway since you can only test out of so much stuff, when you need X number of UD units to graduate. Worse yet, as English majors frequently told me, the University had real problems offering enough English programs for the major, especially for those taking "English with an emphasis in writing," which is what I'd have wanted to take. Required classes were only being offered every other semester, or every third, and they were always filled up instantly, with others who had to take that class for their degree not able to enroll.
Naturally, the guidance/placement counselor didn't mention that, but fortunately I was steered to Humanities anyway, and now I'm done. It's kind of sad; as I look at how well I've done in the intellectually-challenging, non-time-wasting college classes, I can't help but remember the utter waste of 4 years that was my high school experience. I've blogged on it before, but how I wish I could somehow tell my 15 y/o self that if I really wanted to I could apply myself and take equivalence exams and graduate at 16, and move onto college with classes in subjects I was actually interested in, and not full of other disruptive idiot 16 y/o's forcing the teachers to spend more time controlling them than instructing us in the 6 weeks of material and 6 months of busy work that was stretched to fill an entire school year.
Anyway, lengthy, "I'm a good writer" disproving digression aside, let's return to Monday evening. I had my soda and chips and got ready for the World Religions final, and knew I was going to do well. I had it all in my head, I'd done the readings and read over the lecture notes, and as other students around me were spending time on their last minute cramming and asking each other about reading questions they hadn't gotten around to answering (since they hadn't done the reading in the first place) I knew them all. Five Pillars of Islam. Giblah is the direction one must face towards Mecca during the five daily prayers, dhikr is the endless "Allah" chanting the Islamic sufi mystics engage in, shirk is idolatry, the worst sin for a Muslim, etc.
And then test time came... and I went through it like Michael Vick's pet shop through a kindergarten class on rub-yourself-in-ham-day. Six pages of T/F and multiple choice with a few fill in the blanks, and I was done in about 12 minutes. Finished it just about as fast as I could turn the pages and write in the correct letters. I was the first one done, and as I got up I saw that the woman next to me was on page two. But almost halfway through page two! I laughed, more in glee at myself than at her, but a little of both, since I was giddy with relief and caffeine, and because I'm kind of an asshole who thinks he's better than other people, all real life evidence to the contrary.
The prof looked kind of shocked that anyone was done yet, but he took my exam and when I went back to my seat to get my jacket and bag, he got up and met me at the door, opening it and proceeding me outside. Where he stopped me in the hallway and said how much he'd enjoyed my final paper and how it was a really interesting topic and very well researched and presented. I enjoyed hearing it, since, unlike most of my research papers, I'd actually put in a fair amount of thought and analysis into that one. I thanked him and we talked for a moment and than we shook hands and I was off -- thinking once again that he'll be one of the profs I ask for a recommendation letter if I do continue to grad school, since he's a nice guy, speaks well, and is actually quite well known in the field, with several books that are often used to teach various comparative religion courses.
After that I began laughing. Walking to my car I was like Dr. Fucking Evil. Just manic cackling, mostly at how completely I'd been on top of that final, and how the senior project thing had turned from "ohshitI'mfucked" to "no problem," and how I was all done but for an Art History final on Wednesday that I knew I'd blow through since I knew the material very well. The whole drive home, mad cackling laughter, clapping hands, shouting like a football fan watching the home team rock one home, and shedding actual tears of joy; something I don't think I'd ever done since (or before) the time several years ago when I realized that I was actually in love with Malaya. That was a bigger deal than being all-but-done with my BA, but this was pretty good too, and I wasn't nearly done laughing by the time I finished the short drive to my apartment, so I rolled around the block a few times, with the windows rolled up so I could scream in relief and happiness without causing anyone to call the cops or throw a rotting pumpkin at me.
Compared to that, Wednesday night was nothing. I finished the art history final, which was about as easy as I'd expected it would be, walked to my car, drove home, threw off my jeans and jacket, and hopped into bed beside Jinxie where I could warm up under the covers and pet kitty and enjoy the 70 points of blue light coming from the two $2.25 strings of Xmas lights I'd bought the day before. Before I got lost in, "What now?" thoughts I traded texts with a few friends, read sixty pages of a book on male/female sexual psychology I checked out for a final paper but kept to read for personal interest (after it was useless for said paper), and eventually got up and made food, ate while surfing, and then wrote this.
One thought I had Monday, when I was bubbling with relief and happiness, was how this was but a dim reflection of what Malaya must have felt when she got her PhD last summer. I just finished 3 semesters of fairly easy university work, more than a decade after my first 3 years of desultory undergrad work. To get her PhD she did what most people do. Four years of undergrad, several more years of grad school, 2 years of research and field work to prep for her thesis, and then more years to write a nonfiction book on her research, while working full time. So yeah, as happy as I was on Monday, after 3 semesters of work, I can imagine why she was grinning like a well-battered pinata, about to disgorge its load of cheap candy, after a decade of far more intensive labor.
Wow, bad metaphor simile.
Speaking of (Malaya, not bad similies) it seems just months ago that I was scoffing at her suggestion that I return to college to finish my degree. She mentioned that several times to me during our first couple of years together, but I never gave it any serious thought until early 2006, when she was finishing her thesis and approaching her PhD graduation. Watching Malaya receive her PhD in the summer of 2006, seeing how happy she was, and seeing all of the others there to receive their masters and doctorates, and how many of them were in their sixties or seventies, I got motivated. I kept thinking how long they must have worked at it; how many late nights and long hours they'd put in after working and raising families, and it seemed an interesting pursuit. I was also interested in learning more; I felt my mind fully engaged sometimes during conversation, and also when writing fiction, but like most people, I was pretty much coasting through the rest of life, in terms of how often I had to work my hardest and think my best.
I have indeed gotten to read and think and work, though I have to admit that very little during the past 3 semesters has actually been a challenge. This semester was insane, but only because I was taking 20 units (usual full time student is 12), and thanks to procrastination during October and early November, I rolled into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with 5 research papers to finish, plus my senior thesis. From Wednesday the 21st through the day my last paper was due, Thursday the 29th, I worked at least 10 hours every day researching and writing papers. Then put in another 20 hours Thursday night and over the weekend to finish up my senior project/thesis.
The craziest one was a psych paper on hypersexuality that was due Thursday night. I'd done nothing on it as of Wednesday at midnight. I started then, after my Wednesday night class, and did nothing but search out and read psych journal articles for about 8 hours straight. Cutting and pasting the good bits and bibliography info into one word document, adding in notes from other online sources, general info from wikipedia, etc. I went to bed at 7, with no idea how I was going to get a 12 page, 10 source paper out of that, since I had shit for info. The 7 books I'd checked out were useless, and the vast majority of online papers were crap too. Lots of mentions of hypersexuality occurring after brain surgery to correct severe epileptic seizures, historical info about the old days of nymphomania diagnoses, etc, but almost nothing about the actual condition itself, why it isn't listed in the current DSM, treatment options other than drugs, etc. Worse, the paper was supposed to be about treatment, not just info. How I'd handle a patient with that if I were a shrink, insurance coverage for the disorder, etc. Not to worry though, it was only 40% of my class grade.
I woke up at 10 for a morning class, talked to a female friend for a while after class to chill out, drove home for lunch, and then set to work furiously condensing my endless quotes and notes into a paper. The psych class was at 6, and I was willing to get there at 7:55 and meet the prof in the hallway after class if I had to, to finish the paper. I purposely didn't look at the clock all afternoon, just worked as fast as I could, and when I finished quoting and writing bullshit to fill the gaps and boiled the whole thing down to 11.5 pages, with a bloated 27 cited sources in hate-you-so-much, no-one-fucking-cares-about-page-numbers APA style, I was astonished to see that the time was 5:40, and that I might only be a few minutes late if I hurried. So I did, since after all, proofreading is for the weak. I changed clothing while the document printed, grabbed it and an apple, and was out the door.
I laughed Thursday night while driving to class, even though I knew I had 8 hours of senior thesis ahead of me that night, just out of exhilaration at having finished that paper in 18 hours, including sleeping (about 4 hours) and attending a day class. It was inarguably the worst paper I'd done during my 3 semesters back to college, but it covered the topic, more of less, and it was probably deserving of an A just for the abundant, steaming masses of research I'd done for it, and made very evident by almost entirely constructing it from generous quotes from said research.
And no, that's not what I mean about paying attention in class and making the work easy. I'm sure everyone else in the class, even the 19 y/o's, did a far better job at managing their time and putting in coherent hours on their psych papers. It is what I mean about reading and analyzing and writing being my skill set, though. If I tried that on an assignment in a fact-based class, one in which I had to work out problems or memorize things, or conduct experiments, I'd have failed miserably. But since it's in a writing/reading type class, I can pull it off even when I'm writing on a topic I didn't (and still don't) know that much about. It's actually something I've been trying to get over, since I last minute flashed through a number of papers that way in my first two semesters, when I was procrastinating really badly. The fact that I can do it that way and get away with it doesn't mean that I want to keep doing it that way. Though, obviously, it's a nice luxury to have.
Not that I need to worry about that problem for a while, with no more papers, or classes, or finals in my immediate future. There might be come the fall, since I'm seriously thinking about grad school. No idea where yet, since from what I've been told, graduate school is mostly where they do your field of study, and to find that out you've got to conduct some research. I want to study literature and creative writing, but also analysis and criticism and research in nonfiction too. Not really journalism; I don't want to be a reporter or work in a newsroom, but I do want to write articles and maybe even books on subject that interest me enough to research them. And no, I don't really *need* graduate school to do that. I could do it now, but I've gotten a lot better at writing nonfiction and analyzing material and making coherent arguments (not that this blog post is evidence of that) during my 3 semesters at college, even though none of my classes have explicitly taught those skills, other than by forcing me to practice them to do term papers.
I would like a class that really drilled down into the science of organizing long works of fiction; with techniques to keep things organized and keep the plot moving while working in character info and interesting scenes and such. I don't know if anyone really teaches that, most lit programs I've read about are very artsy-fartsy and non-commercial, and while I'd like to write better fantasy and horror than most of what's on the market (which isn't saying much) I do want to produce work that's commercially successful and accessible to the masses. Ignorant and lacking in elite academic credentials though they are. *cough*
So maybe grad school come the fall, but lots of work on my novel(s) in the meantime, and if I have success pursuing publication... I'd probably still want grad school, for self improvement and knowledge. It would just be more fun if I weren't starving and living on loans and grants while attending. Plus it's fun to imagine the bitterness and jealousy the serious, emo, artsy college "literature" writer types would manifest towards me if I were a successful, published author of something so plebeian and common as horror or fantasy, while studying in the same classes as they were in their pursuit of higher values of literature, none of which would ever hope to sell more than 500 copies through some pseudo-vanity press.
What's that you say? Have I given this particular fantasy any thought? No, not so much.
Another thing about grad school; connections. Most of life, especially in regards to a career, if who you know. What you can do helps, but if you know someone to give you a chance to do it for $, or in a good place, that's a huge leg up, and that's why people major in fields related to their career. Or post-grad in those fields. In my case I'd meet agents and editors, my profs would know people in the industry to recommend me to, there are internships and other ways to get into the industry, etc. I hope I don't require that, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
As to where... no idea. As I said, it's all about the university and the program they offer for grad schools, and while there are any number of fine institutions in the Bay Area, including USF, Berkeley, and Stanford, I don't know if any of them have the sorts of profs/programs I'd be interested in. And even if they did, there's no guarantee I'd be accepted. I assume I'd be applying to a lot of programs all through the US and maybe even internationally (Oxford and Cambridge keep popping up in my life lately; meeting people who attended or meant to, who lived nearby, etc...) and seeing who was interested in me.
I like this part of the country, but if I have to move (for a few years, at least) to pursue higher life goals, I would be willing to do so. If I don't do it now, while I'm still relatively young and unhindered by a job I can't give up or a house I have to pay for, when will I? And if you're wondering about another long term attachment I've not mentioned... there isn't one. As I've hinted at and alluded to (on this blog), but never actually stated thus far, Malaya and I are no more. We broke up last December, and in January 2007 I moved to North Bay to be nearer my university.
I've lived alone in a small apartment a very short commute to school for the past 11 months, and while I was planning on moving down to East Bay or somewhere else in the Bay Area once I graduated and my 12 month lease ran out in December, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I'm paying a bit over $1000 now, but there's nothing too much cheaper in the Bay Area other than tiny studios, and I can't tolerate that. You can get down to $800 or so if you're willing to live in the projects in Oakland or parts of Emeryville, but in either case you'll probably spend more repairing your broken car windows and replacing your stolen property than you're saving by living there. Although, learning to sleep through the sounds of sirens and gunshots and drunken brawls at 3am might be a handy talent later in life. Anywhere else is as or more remote than the North Bay where I live now, and it's not worth the trouble to pack and move and unpack, along with all the associated fees, just to save $150 a month, when I'm probably going to move in 6 months for grad school.
I sort of skimmed over the real news there to get to pointless apartment rental talk, so let me double back. I am single now. Malaya and I split up last December, and I didn't post it on this blog since she didn't want all of our mutual acquaintances (in real life) to know and ask questions. I told various people I knew online, and our relatives found out, and our real life friends have long since been told, so I really have no idea why I didn't mention here. I guess I was just waiting to talk about that and college at the same time; when I graduated. And since that time is now (well, I'm done, but I won't actually graduate until paperwork and more is completed) I'm talking about it.
I do not want to get into why we split up, but it was a painful experience for us both, though we were committed to remaining friends. I've never lied about it on this blog, though I obviously didn't tell the whole truth. Malaya and I have been hanging out at times; we've gone to dinner semi-regularly, seen some movies together, and she drove up here several times to play HGL on my computer during the alpha and beta test. I mentioned many of those events, I just didn't say that was the first time I'd seen her in 2 weeks, or whatever. Not that anyone really cares anyway.
I'm not going to speak about Malaya's personal life, but I can say that I've not found anyone else, nor have a I really looked. I have made a few friends at college but even if I were actively looking for a GF, the age range isn't good for me there. I'm too old (or they're too young) for the 20 y/o undergrads who make up most of the students. In addition to those kids there are a fair number of adult students, who are almost all 45+. Which makes them too old for me. I'm the oldest student in most of my day classes, and the youngest in most of my night classes, and no, I can't really say why I'm not pursuing some cute little 20 y/o coeds for sex. I guess after 4 years in a LTR with love and cohabitation and all of that, casual sex doesn't really hold any appeal to me, and the 20 y/o who was mature and interesting enough to be worth considering something more LTR with would be quite a rare and lovely creature. And even more so if she were interested in that with me.
I have gotten to know a few girls in that age range, and the results were not real pleasing. They were flaky and superficial and flighty, and not worth the trouble to try and get to know or spend time with. I could probably have gotten one or two to hang out, or taken them out to drink beers or something, but I don't enjoy that sort of time-wasting bullshit with a person who isn't interesting to me. I love spending time talking with and hanging out with an interesting person, but for that TV and alcohol aren't required or desired. Dumb, boring people hang out endlessly with time killing crap, since they can't find anything better to do with their time, but I don't want to be one of those people, or be with them. I don't think anyone really does, but most guys are horny enough that they'll sit through hours of bullshit and cheap beer if it means they might get some pussy. I won't, so I don't, and I haven't.
I guess that's another potential benefit of grad school. Intelligent women older than 20?
So, that's a rambling catch up on what's been up. I'll probably blog on the issue some more in the days/weeks to come, especially as I spend December decompressing and figuring out what I want to do with the next six-eight months of my life, while preparing for what I do with the decades after that.
What sort of sexual experience do you want a prospective partner to have at the start of a new relationship? By that I mean, if you're constructing your hypothetical new girl/boyfriend, or evaluating the real thing, how much and what kind of sex do you want them to have had prior to you? I'll discuss it primarily from heterosexual POV since that's what I know, but gay mileage will vary, obviously.
The stereotype is that men want a woman to be a virgin. I have no idea how common that desire actually is, and how it breaks down by age range (I can't imagine too many 40 y/o men looking for a woman in their age range give the faintest thought to her being a virgin.) but it's the stereotype, thanks to old fashioned American males and fanatical male Islamic suicide bombers. Do real men want a virgin, though? The (stereotypical?) male desire for a virgin seems to me to stem largely from insecurity; if she's never had sex before she won't know if you're any good or not, if your dick is small, etc. You'll be the best she's ever had!
Personally, I can't imagine wanting a virgin. I wouldn't want to date a porn star, retired or otherwise, but I would want a woman to know what she was doing in bed, and to know what she wanted done to her. That being said, I'm self-serving enough to not want her to have been with so many guys that I'd would just be one more for the list, or so many that I'd inevitably fail to measure up, by tactics or equipment.
How "experienced" breaks down into actual numbers, or events, is another question. It would scale by age as well, but not necessarily on a steady parabolic line. I kind of expect a woman would have more sexual partners from 18-24 (or so) than from 25-30, when she'd more likely be settling into mature, monogamous relationship(s). That's not true for everyone, of course, but we're dealing with hypotheticals and generalizations. You could also consider what type of sex. How do you rate "got drunk and sucked off a guy at a party" vs. "two month dating/screwing?" The later is a lot more sex, both by activity and frequency, but I'd figure the random blowjob'er as more likely to do that sort of thing again (with someone other than me) and that she'd therefore not be someone I could trust.
I suppose it also depends on what you want to come of your "relationship;" assuming you even want one. Are you looking to marry her, do you demand monogamy, or do you just want a friend with benefits and don't give a damn what she does with her vagina when you're not in town? The more extreme case would be random casual sex, like picking someone up in a bar, and in that case I can't believe a guy would even give it a thought. I've never been interested in one-night stand type sex, but if a guy were, wouldn't he have to assume a woman willing to engage in that had done it before, and frequently?
Of course this is only half of the equation, and the rather sexist half at that. I'm reminded of the surveys on sexual experience, when the average man claims something lke 40 partners, and the average woman about 8. I'm just making those numbers up and not citing any particular survey, but the numbers are always skewed like that, with men having far more partners than women. It's fairly obvious that that's mathematically impossible, unless the survey is taking the medium instead of the mean, and even then you'd need a not insignificant percentage of women reporting porn star type numbers to average things out.
How do we explain the survey discrepancies? Easy answer: everyone's lying, and they're lying to correspond with (American/Western) societal expectations. Women are supposed to be "good girls" and not give it up (much), and men are supposed to be studs and plow many a field, and then brag about it to survey-takers.
That does not delve into the original issue though, which is ideal hypothetical partner experience, from the female POV. Is there a clear stereotype of what a woman wants? It's not a virgin; I've never heard that one, and to the contrary, most women want a man who knows what he's doing and who can sweep her off her feet. That most men are (from what women have told me) fairly awful at sex, is not the point. It's perhaps assumed that a virgin will be awful, and awfully quick, but she can at least hope for competence from a man with a reasonable amount of experience. Not too much experience, though. Women are clearly prone to giving it up to "players" (literally, professional athletes), or rock stars, or movie actors, or other celebrities, that's not the type of guy a woman is hypothesizing as her ideal for a relationship. Women want to sleep with Brad Pitt, or whoever the hot rock/rap star of the day is (I so do not know, and honestly, Brad's probably older than young women want now anyway.) but are they thinking about marrying him? Maybe an actor, but rock stars and jocks are notorious for having Wilt Chamberlain-sized appetites, and while a woman might indulge her groupie urges once or twice, few want to marry a man they know will cheat (constantly) on them.
So, the average woman, looking for a real, non-celebrity man, for a relationship. How much experience does she want him to have? Not a virgin, but not a pre-AIDS Magic Johnson either. Is there a number? I have no idea. I suppose a higher number could be romantic in some way, as a woman might like to think that she's tamed him or she's so good that he settled down for her, when he just fucked 'em and left 'em previously. I don't think too many women are delusional enough to believe that in real life, though, dogs that most men are.
Another issue is what type of relationship the past sex was part of. I was talking to a female friend about this, and she pointed out that, at least from her perspective, a man who'd had one or more LTRs was much more desirable than one who'd been single and/or bed hopping for years.
Finally, I realize that I'm simplifying the whole desired aspect, since I haven't allowed for types of sex (if you're into bondage, you'd obviously want a partner open to that), and more fundamentally, I haven't clarified what people want from a partner's sexual history. It's easy to answer the question in terms of "how good will they be at the physical mechanics of sex," but that's not really the issue, in many/most cases. For lots of people, men and (especially?) women, the new partner's sexual/relationship history is more about how and why, than what and when.
I suppose if I had to make a pick and there were two identical women who hadn't been whores/porn stars in their previous lives, I'd want the one who had a bit more sexual experience, and who I thought could therefore be more fun in the sack. That's an entirely artificial scenario though, since no two people are exactly the same, and even if they were, the one who'd had more sex would not be magically more promiscuous without changing anything else. Having more or less sex isn't like eating chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla; it's an outward manifestation of internal values and beliefs that would color many other things about this hypothetical woman, for good or ill.
So, now that I've grossly elaborated on this seemingly simple question, and perhaps rendered the whole point moot with my final paragraph, I'm curious what my (hypothetical) readers think? If you're creating your hypothetical partner (pretend your single if you're not, and this isn't a perfect dream individual, but someone at least a bit realistic) how much and what kind of sex have they had? Please state your gender and desired age range, for the record.
Earlier this week I stopped at a gas station in a pretty bougie part of town at around 10:30pm. Coming home from a thing, Malaya was not with me, and I had no cash so I used a credit card to pay at the pump. As I pull up and get out some random woman starts yelling at me from a bench near the gas station door. I couldn't really hear her with traffic going by, and I didn't really want to hear her, since she was sitting with some guy and I figured they were just weird homeless people. You know, the kind who hang around gas stations late at night and yell at motorists. I figured they were a couple and they were about to panhandle spare change, or say that their car was out of gas and they'd been robbed and that they needed a few bucks to get home, etc.
I was surprised when she got up and started walking over towards me, and the guy she was with detoured to the dumpster with a trash bag in his hand. He was the cashier, I could see, and she gave him a wave and said goodbye as he went back into the minimart and she closed in on me. The woman was relatively young, 20ish perhaps, very thin, white, long dark hair, wearing jeans and boots and some sort of white/gray sweater/wrap. Not unattractive, but she was smoking, which is a huge turn off for me, and she gave off a very dizzy, half-stoned vibe, which is another big turn off. Not that it matters, since I'm happy with Malaya, but just trying to give an honest appraisal of the woman. If I were single I'd have been interested in her in another situation, but never stumbling towards me at a gas station like that.
Once she was in ear range she said, "Do you know where any parties are? It's so boring here."
So you're a whore, I thought, as I replied. "I don't live around here, so I don't really know where anything is. The college that way must have something going on; there are dorms."
She had stopped a few feet away from me, blocked from further progress by my open car door, which was touching the gas pump. I was standing behind it, with my gas tank on the driver's side, so she was arm's reach from me, but my car door was between us.
"Oh yeah. I go to that college." she said, then kind of trailed off with a shrug. "It's boring though," she added after a moment, when I said nothing more and put the gas pump back once my tank was full, then tried again. "Do you know where any parties are?"
I said that I didn't and that I lived over in the East Bay, and wished her luck finding a party. As I put my gas cap back on and it became clear to her that I wasn't going to hit on her or ask her if she wanted a ride, she got a bit more animated and mumbled something along the lines of, "Well thanks. High five!"
She actually raised her right hand up over her head, Borat style. I gave her a high five as I got into my car, just on the principle that it's easier to humor crazy people than argue with them, and she met my hand with her surprisingly-warm palm, then gripped my fingers for a moment, until I pulled them away.
She tried one last time, with something along the lines of, "You're sure you don't know where any parties are?" and since my getaway seemed sure, I threw her a pity bone. "If I didn't have a girlfriend I might be able to show you." I mumbled as I slid into my seat, slammed the door, and zoomed away before she threw herself onto my hood or something. I saw her watching me go in my rear view mirror, and was glad when the first light was green and I was able to put a couple of blocks between me and the gas station, just in case.
When I got home I asked Malaya, "When a strange girl walks up to you at a gas station late at night and asks if you know where a party is, she want's to give you a blow job, right?" Malaya assured me that yes, it meant she did, and thusly reassured, I went about the remainder of my evening with a glad heart, and only a few fleeting thoughts of what sort of trucker/escaped con might currently be sodomizing that skinny girl's still-warm corpse.
On a more serious note, I wonder what was up with her. She wasn't dirty or homeless looking, and she said she went to college, and she wasn't ugly. So what was she doing roaming around the streets at that hour, trying to pick up gas station attendents, and then random guys in cars? And trying it in such a classless, yet non-slutty fashion? I got the impression she wanted someone, anyone, to keep her company and maybe buy her dinner, and that she was more than willing to pay for said company with vagina dollars. If so, why not just go all out and whip out her titties, or pantomime thumb-sucking, or straight out ask a guy if he wants to have sex? Not that "Do you want to party." is much of a euphenism.
She wasn't giving off a whore vibe, though. Maybe she was too stoned, or maybe she was a real woman who had recently decided on a career change and didn't quite now how to go about acting the part, or maybe she was just really unhappy and lonely and didn't know what else to do with herself, but her approach was a mess. At a bar she could have just thrown some smoldering looks and had plenty of guys working to pick her up, and at a truck stop she'd have been fine with her current approach. But at a gas station in a good part of town she was a fish out of water; so forward that non-sleazy guys would be suspicious. I certainly was, and even if I were single I wouldn't have tarried with her. I would have expected AIDS exposure at best and a bitten off penis or carjacking attempt at worst.
I am curious about how her evening ended, though. I almost wish I'd had time and money and interest enough to take her to a Denny's or something and put some pancakes in her emaciated frame while I asked her what the hell a cute, moneyed, white university student was doing all-but-turning tricks at a Arco at 10:30 on a Thursday night.
