The Female Viagra

If the little pink pill ever comes into existence (the latest version is flibanserin), I know a lot of women who both desperately want and desperately do not want to take it. Low libido is a very common side effect from the Pill. You take the Pill so you can have lots of sex, and then the Pill, in a rather brilliant doubling-of-efficacy effect, makes you not want to have sex. So along comes the female Viagra to the rescue. Now you get to take TWO pills every day, or maybe wear a patch and a pill or whatever combination of tedium you prefer.

At Psychology Today, Paul Joannides brings up two problems that this pill needs to pass before getting FDA approval: placebo effect + situation (does the pill help more than a vacation or new lover?) and co-eds (frat guys spiking your drink with love drug). After making valid points, he meanders into some offensive, male-centric versions of how the drug works, but that’s mostly irrelevant to why I didn’t like his article.

Joannides skips over the real problem with the approval process: female arousal levels have to be normalized (range X is normal) and then pathologized (below range X is abnormal, treat with pink pill), for FDA approval and for insurance to cover it. And so once again we enter into the cycle of inventing problems so that the enhancement is justified as medicinal. I can’t wait to read Cosmo articles on flibanserin.

Did We Just Have Sex?

Apparently, that question is more debatable than one might think. A Kinsey Institute study on what a person thinks “had sex” means shows that, well, that phrasing isn’t very exact:

The study involved responses from 486 Indiana residents who took part in a telephone survey conducted by the Center for Survey Research at IU. Participants, mostly heterosexual, were asked, “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was …,” followed by 14 behaviorally specific items. Here are some of the results:

• Responses did not differ significantly overall for men and women. The study involved 204 men and 282 women.
• 95 percent of respondents would consider penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) having had sex, but this rate drops to 89 percent if there is no ejaculation.
• 81 percent considered penile-anal intercourse having had sex, with the rate dropping to 77 percent for men in the youngest age group (18-29), 50 percent for men in the oldest age group (65 and up) and 67 percent for women in the oldest age group.
• 71 percent and 73 percent considered oral contact with a partner’s genitals (OG), either performing or receiving, as having had sex.
• Men in the youngest and oldest age groups were less likely to answer “yes” compared with the middle two age groups for when they performed OG.
• Significantly fewer men in the oldest age group answered “yes” for PVI (77 percent).

I want to know what the missing percentages of PVI actually think sex is. Maybe it’s a bunch of Foucault wannabees with a “if everything is sex, than nothing is sex” attitude. I’ve had this debate with friends over what “hooking-up” actually is, but I thought “had sex” was explicit. Goodness.

How To Make Sex Better

Sex, on its own, in the wild, natural and unadorned, is still complicated. Don’t believe me? Look at a peacock or a bird of paradise. Salmon die after they procreate. Sea slugs penis joust. Now throw in evolved human biology, history, culture, technology, and science and you have a real disaster on your hands.

But sex isn’t alone in being affected by these things. But for everything that isn’t sex, we apply “lifehacks” to increase our productivity, organization, mood, and leisure time. We read monthly manuals on what to eat to lose weight, how to stay fashionable, what entertainment we might like, and news about our favorite hobbies. Yet we constantly mystify sex. Our culture treats it as this untouchable, morally ambiguous, thing-that-is-not-mentioned that EVERYONE talks and thinks about. We are at the beginnings of an era wherein sex and sexuality will become both more liberated and more complex than any previous era by orders of magnitude.

Transhumanism, as a philosophy and the technologies it embraces, may offer us a chance to finally take some of the stress and mystery, and hence create more enjoyment, over this taboo part of our lives. When Ben Goertzel and I had our little exchange on sex (he mostly ignorned my critique and tsk tsked me), I said “If sex is messy and imperfect, we need to improve it, not get rid of it.” here are my suggestions on how to do it.

1. Better matches: It is always impossible to guess what discoveries will occur in the future, but science has been confirming over the past century that both sexuality and gender are more of a spectrum than a binary. You know how politics is better plotted on a grid than a line? Well, sexuality is best plotted in a kind of hypercube. Sexuality is more like taste in music than it is an either/or situation, with thousands of combinations and often very eclectic interests. Now consider this: imagine a Facebook app that takes the voluminous knowledge of OK cupid, Match, or E-Harmony, combined with psychological research and an enormously powerful algorithm that is designed to help you understand your sexuality. In short: a Pandora or Netflix or Amazon “you might like this” of dating and relationships. It might even suggest a whole genre shift: “you like partners that bite, pinch, and slap, you should try: Bondage!” Instead of worrying about whether or not your profile picture is right, you can focus on being yourself.

2. Safer: There is already a vaccine available for HPV, it isn’t impossible that other strains of both viral and bacterial STIs could be vaccinated against. The stigma that protection oneself against STIs means one is sexually reckless (a paradox, given that a person taking preventative measures is likely to be a good decision maker in general) is going the way of the dodo. A combination of vaccinations, regular testing, antibiotics and barrier methods, if used in large enough numbers, could effectively create a herd immunity. We eliminated small pox, measles, mumps, and polio, we can get rid of STIs.

3. Reproductive Choice: To make something a choice, it has to reasonably something you control. Reproduction, as it stands, is hard to control, despite all the options.  The Today sponge, which went of the market temporarily, is available again in the US. Lots of different forms of long term hormonal birth control are available. IUDs are now far safer and better designed. Condoms are cheap and prolific. There is some truly great news on the horizon, however: the male pill. Despite the clamor of men’s magazines and the apparently hilarious joke that men are reckless morons, every guy I’ve talked to would love to be able to take a male pill. Why? Because most of my friends are smart and realize the awful consequences of accidentally getting someone pregnant. The male pill lets men take a much bigger role in pregnancy prevention and ads a huge aspect of redundancy to birth control. And better control means fewer accidental pregnancies, the central goal of both the pro-choice and pro-life movement.

4. Science Knowledge: A common complaint is that porn causes unrealistic attitudes about sex. A common joke is that young boys look at naked natives in National Geographic to get their jollies. Perhaps the undiscussed middle ground – TLC and Discovery Channel shows on human sexuality – could provide a fruitful place of learning. I know a lot of people (myself included) who learned how all the plumbing and hardware worked, while satisfying their curiosity and need for titilation, by watching science shows. Having the birds and the bees narrated to you by David Attenbourough is a glorious thing (it also makes Planet Earth even more erotic). Knowledge is sexy.

5. More Intentional: I posted about “tinkering with libido” some time ago, but it’s really an astonishing idea that bears repeating. Presuming well-made, low side-effect drugs, one could actively control one’s libido. Long day at work? Pop a libido suppressor and keep saucy thoughts from distracting you. Finally heading home? Take a libido enhancer and be very excited to see your significant other by the time you come in the front door. As Megan McArdle pointed out in a brave post on pedophilia, there are some sexual desires that are taboo, but still natural and uncontrollable. Schizophrenics, the mentally disabled, severe autistics, and a range of other conditions would be greatly eased by a reduced sex drive. Alternatively, those on anti-depressants or social anxiety drugs often lose sex drive, canceling out one of the major benefits of their medication. Libido control, and many of these drugs are in the works, would do wonders for many.

These are just a few ideas working with what we have and what we could accomplish in the near future. In the long term, ideas are absolutely mind bending. Synthetic skin could allow a person to amplify nerve endings all over the body, making every sexual experience otherworldly. Anti-aging might radically alter just how long our “hedonistic” youth is while simultaneously letting us have long term monogamous relationships that don’t have to suffer from the libido dampening effect of aging. Telepresence and virtual reality could help make long distance relationships easier and less taxing. Radical but safe and effective body modifications might allow for entirely new forms of sex and sexuality and gender to emerge.

As with everything transhuman, the goal is not to reduce the very things that make us human, like our sexual drive, but to open them to new and exciting possibilities. The goal isn’t to guide sex and sexuality towards some version of perfection, but instead to create orders of magnitude more options, to allow better control and safer conditions. Transhumanism is about diversity and choice, why not bring that to sex? Sex can be mystical and is perhaps ultimately ineffable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it better with technology, knowledge, and freedom.

Fight Like A Man

John DeVore’s “Why Men Fight” is both an excellent insight into the minds of men in general and into DeVore’s own gray matter. In spite of his eloquently wrought prose, DeVore seems to suffer from a sort of cognitive dissonance on the joys and glory of battle. On the one hand, fighting is epic, manly, invigorating, life-affirming and instinctual. On the other hand, it’s the realm of asshole hipsters, frat-boy broheims, and, ugh, Texans. These groups, as I’m sure DeVore is aware, are reviled by everyone except those who count themselves among their ranks. And hipsters are self-hating. So we’re caught in a bit of a conundrum: is fighting the Glorious Activity of Man DeVore describes or is it the last resort of man-children desperate to hold on to some pathetic vestige of self-respect – or at least have it beaten into them? Looking at DeVore’s examples – a hipster who doesn’t like The Dead and oversensitive fratboys – I would guess the latter.

Now don’t think I’m taking this all too seriously. DeVore is no troglodyte, and I know (I hope) his tongue was at least partially in his cheek throughout the essay, but I fear not enough. His rhetoric doesn’t match his examples. We get Homeric descriptions of battle, “Time slows down. Your muscles seem to swell, and your senses sharpen. Victory is an addictive drug” followed by the only truly manly act in the whole article: DeVore’s long-haired friend who took a beating for his principles. Notice DeVore offers no examples of his own fights. Notice he offers no examples of a fight that should have or needed to happen because a genuine affront to justice or personal safety occurred. Instead, what he offers are pictures of miserable, small men with miserable, small minds looking for some company at the bottom. DeVore’s “Why Men Fight” is no more an accurate picture than if he had written “Why Men Write” and then used Glenn Beck and Tucker Max as exemplars of the art.

In light of this, I wish to offer a counter-point to DeVore’s “Why Men Fight.”

I’ve only listened to fight stories from one man with respect, my former martial arts instructor, Cody Randall. The man was a monument to a body and mind honed to the art of fighting. Standing 6’3″, he had the countenance of a Hell’s Angel-cum-Buddhist monk, a barbarian who had made a conscious decision to control and channel his inherent brutality. His hands could at will shift from ball-pin hammers to precision blades to blocks of granite. The amount of violence and destruction this man could unleash upon a human body, with precision, with intention, with design, was staggering. Cody was trained in a form of martial arts similar to the kind developed by Bruce Lee, that is, a form of practical, street tested self-defense. The bulk of his students were people like my mom: petite women who didn’t want to be defenseless. Cody was uninterested in pride or glory, but he held honor and courage in high esteem. He had devoted most of his life and over a quarter of a century to practice and study. For him, hand-to-hand combat was an art.

Cody had three basic mottoes that were exemplified by both his teaching method and his stories.

1. Don’t fight if you don’t have to fight. Walk away, talk your way out of it, get lost in the crowd, run if you must. The first step to winning a fight is not wanting to fight.

2. If you must fight, fight to end the fight. Hurt the other person, badly and permanently if need be, but no more than is necessary for them to cease and desist.

3. There are no rules in a bar or in the street. There are no “sissy” moves when your life is on the line. Never start a fight, but use any and all means to end it.

These rules, mottoes, guidelines, whatever you want to call them, were taught to us everyday by Cody. He told us stories about his time as a bouncer where he would practice katas in the back alley and about potential bar fights where entire groups of black-belts would walk away from unforgivable insults. A great fighter, a real fighter, knows his or her power and will not deign to fight the likes of the people in DeVore’s stories. DeVore’s lofty descriptions of the emotional and visceral thrill of fighting deserve a worthy story, so I submit one of Cody’s favorites, so that you might have a better understanding of how a true fighter fights.

When still in his mid-twenties, Cody was training with a group of devoted fighters. One of these fighters, let’s call him David, had a situation similar to DeVore’s friend with long hair, with very different results. Unlike DeVore’s friend, David was trained in a panoply of self-defense techniques. After exchanging insults in a bar with a Hulked-out jock who didn’t like David’s hair, David simply walked out of the bar. The Hulk followed and tackled David in the alley with David landing on his back. The Hulk straddling him and started throwing drunk and sloppy punches, easily deflected by David. Exhausted and infuriated, the Hulk ceased his barrage to reach for a knife on his belt. At that instant, David’s hand shot up, his thumb and fingers encircling the Hulk’s windpipe. The giant drunk froze with terror. Treating the Hulk’s throat like a handle bar, David moved the Hulk so both were standing and pushed the Hulk against the wall, tightening his grip on the windpipe. In a low, steady voice, David said, “If you follow me, or I see you again in that bar, I will kill you.” He then unclipped the knife from the Hulk’s belt and slid it into his own pocket, let go, and walked away.

At the end of the fight, neither man was hurt, but one was completely disarmed and the clear loser, in every sense of the word.

Wanting to fight, needing to fight, instigating a fight has nothing to do with being a man. A man can walk away, a man can weather an insult, a man can defuse a situation; a man only fights when he knows he is already in one – starting a fight is the act of a man who has already knows he isn’t much of one. From his examples, and from his mother’s sage advice, DeVores knows that is the truth.