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.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

A reddit contributor made this:

Woo A Geeky Girl

I’m lucky enough to already have a geeky gf, but these are just good tips in general. My favorite one:

Be able to have interesting conversations on any topic. This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in everything, but be willing to discuss unusual topics. Know nothing about fossils? Be willing to have her teach you what she knows, and ask relevant questions. If you try to learn something new each day, you’ll always have something new to talk about.

See what she can teach you.

12 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal

Brilliant:

1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer life-spans.
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

[TDW via Reddit]

Diesel’s Girls Have The Balls

Diesel’s new ad campaign, “Be Stupid,” is plastered all over the West 4th street stop in NYC. I really like this campaign. I’m analyzing this campaign in two parts. The first is its perspective on gender, the second its perspective on human nature.

The first reason I love Diesel’s “Be Stupid” campaign is that it treats both genders surprisingly equally, especially for a trendy, sexed-up company like Diesel. Sociological Images, a site normally quite good at picking out the really offensive stuff from the mundane, somehow reversed this message to make the campaign out to be sexist. Before getting into what’s so great about the campaign, I wanted to defend it from charges of being “Men: Be Stupid.” The message I got was, in fact, the reverse. My rebuttal:

Above is the first image that shows up on Diesel’s website when you click “view the campaign.” On the site, the only reference to the campaign that is gendered before this image is the like “Smart has brain, stupid has balls” that occurs in the opening (all text) flash video. In the video, that line is written in pink, as it is in on the poster ad in the West 4th street station. Not exactly a stereotypically manly color. In the picture ad campaign, the line “stupid has balls” almost only occurs with women (there is one exception). In fact, the two most dangerous (thereby brave/manly) adds feature a lone woman and a big cat. In the picture above, a panther. Below, well, a picture that one-ups The Hangover.

This picture is actually in the West 4th street ad campaign. Notice, the girl isn’t scantily clad, she isn’t scared, and she doesn’t have a boy egging her on. In the narrative of both ads, these girls got to be just as stupid as the men and, in fact, in the narrative of the whole campaign, women have “the balls.” Through out the campaign, men and women are depicted being stupid together with other women, with men, independently, sexually, non-sexually, and in no way are the women seen as drags or ancillary to the fun. In fact, in several cases, the guys seem almost along for the ride, with the girl initiating and dominating the action. And finally, the ads are far from heteronormative, with two dudes goofing around? On a date?

And a few girls coming home? Taking each other home?

The guys are being silly and cozy, the girls coming back from a rager in the wee hours of the morning. Are they gay/lesbian? The story is mostly in your head, the pictures let you make it up. Straight and queer narratives work in both images and a ton of the pictures are actually desexualized, save the fact that everyone in the campaign is really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.

The result is a campaign that is shockingly not sexist. About the only argument one could make is that there are perhaps a few (and I mean a few, like three) more pictures of women in just swim suits/underwear than men. In several of the more sexually charged images the woman is either in charge or equal to the man: in one the woman is pulling a man half out of a bus, in another, she is pulling off his shorts while he goes for her top in the pool, and another she is leaping onto the bed while he half-cowers beneath her. Furthermore, the fact that the campaign centers on recklessness, danger, stories, adventure, humor, and breaking the mold, makes the generally equal involvement of women and men all the more important. The message is that both men and women get to be “stupid” as Diesel defines it and that stupidity isn’t shameful for men or women. And in Diesel’s world, being stupid, funny, and brave, even having the balls, doesn’t mean you don’t get to look like a fierce, hot, chick.

Misunderstanding Sex

Ben Goertzel talks about overcoming sex and sexuality at IEET:

As is now common knowledge, the power sex has over us is rooted in the power our DNA has over us. We are evolved to obsess over reproducing, over extending our DNA to future generations. Even though most humans in First World countries now use birth control for nearly all their sexual encounters, and many humans choose not to reproduce at all, we are still strikingly controlled by the mind-patterns ensuing from our DNA’s urge to persist itself.

But evolution has tangled sex up with all manner of other aspects of our psyches. As Freud, Reich and others pointed out so thoroughly, human motivation is deeply tied with our inner sexual energy. Eunuchs seem to generally lack aggressive, enthusiastic motivation even for things outside the realm of sex. But when my anti-sex futurist friend speaks of blotting out sexuality from his mind, he doesn’t want to blot out his passion and energy generically—he wants to focus it on things other than simulations or enactions of the reproductive act.

This mode of thinking remains one of the most infuriating and frustrating aspects of transhumanist thought: the atomization and compartmentalization of human behavior. Goertzel fallaciously uses eunuchs to equivocate biological sexual drive with general passion. Worse, he uses the sociobiological cliche, “all human innovation is a form of courtship display.” Paraphrasing his friend uncritically, Goertzel says:

When you really think about it, how much of modern human society is structured around sexuality. Marriage, kids, dating … buying nice clothes and making oneself up to impress the opposite sex … buying cars or houses or the latest cellphone to impress the opposite sex with one’s success … etc.

Ah yes. Thanks for that old trope. Goertzel’s portrayal of sex and sexuality is something along the lines of, “sex is fun, but it’s a distraction, and sexuality is necessary for passion, so we need to separate the passion from the distraction.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

My frustration here is not the categorization of sexuality as messy and imperfect (it is), but the reduction of it to mere biology. I have no doubt that Goertzel’s friend and his wife would take offense to my assumption that they got married because they viewed each other as the best reproductive option. Human bonds are complicated and sexuality is a small but important part of those bonds. Sex isn’t a distraction, it’s a form of human enjoyment and bonding. Goertzel describes sex, at its best, as equivalent to “self-melting and reality-changing as meditation or psychedelics or any other extreme of human experience.” But somehow psychedelics aren’t a distraction we need to eliminate to seek the Singularity? What about all the other distractions? Should we eliminate them too?

If sex is messy and imperfect, we need to improve it, not get rid of it. If sexual drive is a distraction, we need to be able to (better) control it, not nullify it. Technology can make sexuality even better while minimizing the problems associated, many of which are the result of social conventions, cultural taboos, and the biological variety among humans.

Furthermore, how dare Goertzel or his friend somehow assert that the goal of transhumanism or the Singularity are so worth while that we give up things that are fundamentally valuable. I don’t care what decision calculus one uses, that sort of assertion borders on religious zealotry. The hypocrisy of Goertzel’s friend (advocating asceticism while not practicing it) smacks of the worst priests and prophets of the past. Goertzel’s “asexual alien” experiment is just an externalization of his value system in a fictitious proxy, used to justify his view point, not a legitimate thought experiment.

Sex is a biological behavior that, through the hugely complex process of evolution (both biological and cultural) has become a way for humans to bond, experience pleasure, and to alter their consciousness independent of the need to procreate. To elaborate on Emma Goldman: If I can’t have sex, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Polyamory According to DeVore

I have a weird/frustrated/intriguing relationship with John DeVore’s “Mind of Man” column at The Frisky. Usually I just smack my forehead in annoyance and don’t finish the article. But his polyamory piece was unusually, well, honest. And his respect for polyamorists takes a lot of guts to write:

Here’s the truth: I actually have a lot of respect for polyamorists. They’re like sexual astronauts exploring the outer reaches of human intimacy. Polyamory directly confronts the great scourges of committed, contemporary relationships. The 800-pound gorilla being jealousy, which, I’ll remind you, is a vice for a reason. Jealousy inspires nothing positive; it’s a rot divorced from reason. A rapacious parasite. Jealousy is Othello worked into a murderous rage because of rumors and hearsay. Love is not possession. It does not seek to strangle or suffocate. Love lets it be. And then it’s up to he or she who has chosen to love to decide whether his or her heart can take it or not. Polyamory also addresses The Itch, that craving for fresh flesh, the thrill of the fox hunt. The solution offered is deceptively simple: out of sight, out of mind. If you’re happy, I’m happy, maybe don’t brag about it. This seems to fly in the face of human nature, but maybe human nature is overrated. After all, it’s responsible for warfare.

The rest of the piece is fun, but this little chunk was my favorite.

We Men Are To Dumb For The Pill

Or so says Ravi Somayia at Gawker, with a frighteningly stupid post about how the male pill is a bad idea because, uh, men are too dumb and libido driven to use it properly. Thankfully, Kate Harding, my hero, eviscerates Somayia’s crap:

Not having his partner’s consent, obviously, is a most excellent reason for a man to boldly disobey his own penis. But so is not wanting to cause a pregnancy or pick up a sexually transmitted infection — in fact, I’m no sexpert, but I’m pretty sure that already, even without a male pill on the market, some man, somewhere, at least once, has decided not to have sex because he had no contraception handy and was so concerned for his own health and/or future, let alone his potential partner’s, that he chose neither to lie nor ignore the dilemma, thereby proving that such conscious action is not a biological impossibility

A feminist defending MEN? My God, it’s like they aren’t all insane gender terrorists but may, in fact, be rational human beings trying to make things better for everybody. After completing her demolition of Somayia, Harding does something that is rare even for someone of her caliber: she points out the lunacy of presuming a new technology has to necessarily supplant the previous one. The male pill is not a replacement for any form of birth control, but in addition to those that already exist:

That’s the other bizarre thing about Somaiya’s argument, however tongue-in-cheek it may be: It’s like he thinks that a male pill hitting the market will render all other forms of contraception obsolete. It’s my understanding that the new pill would be an addition to, not a replacement for, the existing smorgasbord of options (of which I count 20 at Planned Parenthood’s website right now). So people concerned about STIs or suspicious that their male partners are lying could still opt to use condoms. Women worried that their male partners won’t remember to take a pill every day could still take the original version. Anyone looking to avoid pregnancy would still have at least 18 other options of varying effectiveness to choose from. But for people who want it — from players who want an extra bit of insurance against unwanted fatherhood to men whose girlfriends or wives can’t tolerate hormonal birth control to anyone who just thinks it’s about time — it would be one more.

I couldn’t agree more. The Pill isn’t 100% reliable, no method of birth control is, but when contraceptives are used in combination, the risk of unwanted pregnancy falls to essentially zero. In the case of a monogamous straight couple,  each person being on the Pill would allow barrier free sex with a vanishingly low possibility of accidental pregnancy. In the case of a one-night stand or casual straight relationship, condoms plus both people on the Pill offers protection against STIs and triple-protection against accidental pregnancy.

Even if the male pill is completely redundant, it is still a very good thing because 1) redundancy is important and 2) it has the psychological affect of forcing the male partner to be aware of a risk of pregnancy. It’s now as much in his power to prevent one as it is hers.

Oh, and if you haven’t been reading Kate Harding already, I recommend you start.

Avatar Sex

Meredith Woerner at io9 brings up the prickly situation of sex in Avatar. As most of us guessed, Na’vi sex happens, at least in part, with their mind-link cords:

If [no genitalia are involved], then we’d have to assume that Na’vi mating only includes the hair tail syncing system. Which puts us in a bit of a dirty little conundrum. If syncing up basically means “the most amazing orgasm” ever, um, what does it mean when the Na’vi are syncing up to the rest of the Pandorian wildlife? Can the animals really consent, or even understand what’s going on here?

Now that is a weird question. As I mentioned earlier, Cameron’s biosphere on Pandora is far more interesting than anything in the film’s plot. I must admit, when I initially read the headline about “Avatar” and “bestiality,” I thought Woerner was implying that having sex with the Na’vi was akin to having sex with an animal. That, thankfully, is not her point. Instead, what she is asking is: if Na’vi-Na’vi link equals sex, then Na’vi-Pandorean critter link would also, weirdly, equal sex, which, in turn, would equal bestiality. By Woerner’s logic, the movie should have been NC-17 because just watching Jake Sully learn to ride the horse would be way beyond MPAA standards of decency.

Of course, Woerner is just exploring the possibilities, so let’s take her lead and run with the idea of Na’vi sex. The question of consent is the most important one here, as that’s what makes a behavior unethical. Let’s assume that Na’vi sex is genital free and only involves the mind-link, so every animal-Na’vi interaction is potentially a sex act. A worrying set-up, since we see a lot of linkage throughout the film.

In a worst case scenario, the more mentally powerful (intelligent, advanced, evolved, etc.) creature controls the situation and every mental-link would be somehow sexual. Thus, every interaction that isn’t between two fully matured Na’vi adults, say, between a Na’vi adult and a Pandoran banshee, is rape. It is rape because consent is impossible, due to the imbalance of both power and intelligence. In this worst-case scenario, Jake Sully effectively raped most of the flora and fauna he encountered on Pandora via his avatar. Re-read that sentence, ladies and gentlemen, and remember this is what happens to your brain if you read too much Foucault.

That scenario, however, doesn’t quite make sense.Through Jake’s trials and tribulations, we see that learning to deal with the mind-link is not easy and, even with the plants of Pandora, requires significant effort to make effective. Furthermore, the link is shown to work in both directions, effectively uniting the two creatures. Jake can “feel” the emotions and sensations of the creature. It brings into question the whole idea of sex for the Na’vi. With a pure mental link, one that flows in both directions, the fundamental barrier between two entities is broken. By linking together, the two entities must, in a sense, decide to give the other pleasure. A bond can be made, but it need not be pleasurable, or pleasurable in the way sex is. When I pet my border collie, that isn’t sexual, but she seems to take pleasure in it. The mind-link, like physical contact, probably requires a lot more than just the basic connection for it to be a) pleasurable and b) sexual.

Based on my arbitrary, totally unverifiable speculation, it would seem that the way the Na’vi link to each other and to the wildlife of Pandora makes it possible for two different species that cannot communicate via language to have consensual sex.

The weirdest point is that, because the pleasure isn’t physical, one can presume that the intensity of the experience comes from a mutual desire to interact in a pleasurable  way (is it even sex?). By extension, the quality of the mind linked would determine the quality of the sex. Therefore, not only would rape be a technical impossibility due to the nature of the bond, there would be no point in having sex-like mind-linking with a non-humanoid entity.

So, I think, if I’m getting this right, Meredith Woerner does not have to worry about the alien bestiality that is ostensibly implicit in Avatar. Probably.