Category Archives: Sex

This tends toward the academic rather than the erotic. But not entirely.

Interesting Analogy From Someone With Very Different View

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10

Quote of the Day

thinking seems like two things – a powerful engine (good memory, fast computation, abstractions) and a steering wheel (avoiding cognitive biases, noticing when beliefs are incentivized). But it’s way easier to tell if you’ve got a weak engine than if you’re missing steering

Our brains are super bad at noticing steering problems. We just steer straight into whatever validates us, and the faster your car goes there, the smarter we think we are. This is how u get people like my dad, who’s IQ tested 140+, but thinks evolution is a lie.

It also seems like it’s pretty hard to improve your engine, but it’s a lot easier to improve steering, given deliberate practice. I’d rather have a weak engine in a car that’s pointed in the right direction, than a powerful one in a car that’s pointed in the wrong direction.

Aella @Aella_Girl
Post on X here, here, and here on April 22, 2024

Interesting analogy. It seems pretty solid to me. I like her stuff. She has a different way of looking at things. More different than even I look at things. She has some very twisted Twitter surveys. Example:

Quick, don’t think, just vibe- are snakes more good or bad? || In general, you’re more sympathetic to Israel or Palestine?

Snake good || israel
Snake good || palestine
Snake bad || israel
Snake bad || palestine

And she made a blog post with a flow charts, statistics, and pictures from her birthday gang-bang.

Confirming Evidence of My Hypothesis

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I have interviewed a number of women on the topic of monogamy and/or the lack of it in their relationships. Numerous women told me things which indicate to me it was virtually impossible for them to be happy in a monogamous relationship.

Here are some sample quotes (paraphrased for conciseness):

  • After that threesome with two men I realized I could never be in a monogamous relationship again.
  • My husband is a great guy and a wonderful father. He is good looking and good shape. I just don’t want to have sex with him. I want to have sex with a half dozen different strange men at the same time.
  • After being married for two years I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to have something more so I divorced him. I married a second time and the same thing happened again. They were both good men and they did nothing wrong. It was me. I just feel comfortable at the sex club. It feels right to me.
  • My husband and I estimate I have has sex with about 600 different men since we have been married. I can’t imagine it any other way.
  • All people want to do this sort of thing (sex with multiple people). The ones that say they don’t are lying to themselves and/or others.
  • I was monogamous in my first marriage. We had lots of great sex but there were other things wrong in the marriage. After getting divorced I discovered there was a sex club nearby. In the first year after joining I had sex with 600 different men. Not 600 times in that year, 600 different men. Multiple times with many of them. Now I create my own parties for people in private homes and nothing gives me greater joy than seeing women discover their true sexual nature like I did.

Numerous other women tell me they simply don’t have an urge to have sexual relationships outside of their committed relationship. I believed them because they were in a safe place to be completely honest about their feelings.

There were others which described a middle ground of some sort. Yes, they had been unfaithful for a while but that was when their primary relationship was bad and in their current multi-year/decade relationship it wasn’t a problem.

I didn’t see any environmental factors which could explain the difference so I concluded there was likely a genetic factor.

Now there is evidence confirming my hypothesis:

The Surprisingly Strong Link Between Genetics and Infidelity | Psychology Today

  • Monozygotic twins are more similar to one another in the likelihood of being unfaithful than dizygotic twins.
  • It is estimated that between 40-60 percent of the variation in infidelity can be explained by genetic factors.
  • Research attempting to link infidelity to specific genes has been largely unsuccessful.

…

In Cherkas et al.’s research, concordance rates were significantly higher for MZ (46%) than DZ (32%) twins, suggesting that “MZ co-twins are approximately one-and-a-half times more likely to be unfaithful if their co-twin has been unfaithful as compared with DZ co-twins.” When adjusting for factors such as number of sexual partners and age, the authors estimated that 41% of the variation in infidelity in this sample was due to genetic factors, a “heritability estimate.” By contrast, the shared environment in which twins were raised did not contribute to twins’ concordance rates.

…

Zietsch et al. calculated heritability estimates of 63% for men and 40% for women, suggesting that for men as much as 63% of the variation in infidelity was due to genetic factors. While the estimate for women was very close to the earlier estimate calculated by Cherkas et al., the estimate for men was much stronger than the heritability estimate for women, potentially suggesting a stronger genetic basis for infidelity in men vs. women.

I find this fascinating. How can such complex behavior/urges be influenced by differences in brain chemistry or some such thing? How is this behavior controlled at the genetic level rather than via rational thought?

I am, again, left with the conclusion that rational thought is a very thin veneer over the mind of most people.

Dr. Joe’s Cure For Everything Improves Cognitive Function

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Another study in support of Dr. Joe’s Cure for Everything (see also these posts):

Numerous studies have noticed that loneliness and social isolation are associated with cognitive decline in later life; however, these analyses do not often consider one of the most intimate types of social activity: sex.

What’s more, some experts think that a lack of social activity is a repercussion of cognitive decline and not a cause of it.

Nevertheless, the models that Shena and Liub ran in their study suggest that the link between sex and cognitive health does not go both ways.

In other words, they found better cognition was not predictive of sexual activity five years on.

…

Shena and Liub have put forward several explanations for their results.

First, sex often involves physical exercise, which means improved cognitive performance may be due to improved cardiovascular health, which, in turn, can increase blood flow to the brain and reduce inflammation.

Sex is also known to reduce stress, and stress is thought to prevent the neuronal growth in some parts of the brain associated with memory.

Lastly, sex may improve cognitive function through the release of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter linked to improved memory.

There have been lots of studies showing correlation between sexual activity and various aspects of better health. This is the first one I have seen that supports sexual activity being a causation of better cognitive health.

This post was motivated by Archer who suggests Dr. Joe’s Cure For Everything could fix the entire country. The country could sure use some improved cognitive function.

Do your patriotic duty.

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An Alternate Point of View

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Quote of the Day

We have horrific double standards when talking about polyamory vs. monogamy. relationship issues in polyamory get blamed on the poly; relationship issues in monogamy dont even get processed as being caused by monog

Aella @Aella_Girl
Tweeted on August 29, 2023

This was sort of mind blowing to me. What a difference an alternate point of view makes!

The majority of people in this country probably see many problems with all the variations of consensual non-monogamy even if they do see the potential benefits. But can those same people see the exact opposite of that. That is, can they see many problems with monogamy even if they do see the potential benefits?

Now apply that logic to gun control and the advocates on the alternates sides of that debate.

Rationality is a just a very thin veneer over our emotional brains.

Don’t make impractical sex rules

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Quote of the Day

A new study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy sought to investigate the relationship between sexual values and sexual incongruence as well as the effects of religiousness on this relationship. The findings indicate that religiousness predicts sexual incongruence, but not more than conservative sexual values, which demonstrated the most substantial relationship.

…

The research demonstrates that specific sexual values are predictive of sexual incongruence, over and above the effects of religiousness. Conservative sexual values surrounding abstinence may be particularly difficult for individuals to uphold, leading to greater sexual incongruence.

These findings have important implications for sexual education and therapy, highlighting the need to consider individual values and beliefs in promoting sexual health and well-being.

Laura Staloch
February 21, 2023
New study finds the more conservative your sexual values, the more challenging it is to stick to them

On one hand this is a, “Well, duh!” moment. Adhering to strict rules is obviously going to be more difficult and less likely to happen than having lax or no rules. But there are some implication not mentioned in the article.

If the rules are so such that compliance is too difficult, then guilt, depression, and perhaps even self harm could result after failure or having extreme difficulty in abiding by the rules..

They are doing it wrong

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Really?

The fear of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine looms over the current crisis, but some Ukrainians have found a… creative solution.

A large group of Ukrainians has decided to organize a mass orgy to take place on a hill outside of Kyiv in case Putin does launch a nuclear bomb.

More than 15,000 have already registered on Telegram for the sex party. The mass orgy will take place on a hill outside the city where the participants would be asked to decorate their hands with colored stripes, symbolizing their sexual interests. If you are considering participating – three stripes are for anal sex lovers and four stripes are for oral sex lovers.

That’s pretty messed up as far as I’m concerned. You should stay in your bunkers.

The orgy is after you know you have survived all the firestorms and fallout.

Quote of the day—Annalee Armstrong

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HIV integrates its genetic material into the genome of a host cell, meaning available therapies just can’t remove it. A team of scientists at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center managed to remove the virus completely from mice during preclinical testing using a combination of CRISPR and antiretroviral therapy. They also found no adverse events that could be linked to the therapy in the study, published back in 2019.

…

The company is also working on similar treatments for other viruses, including herpes and hepatitis B.

Annalee Armstrong
September 27, 2021
Excision’s CRISPR gene editing therapy for HIV is heading into human testing after FDA clearance
[A few months ago a male friend (who I suspect is bi-sexual) pointed out that COVID-19 is not the first pandemic our generation has lived through. My thinking about this enabled a quick response to different friend just a few days later who was pontificating on how COVID-19, “Hit the sweet spot of infectiveness and lethality.” I disagreed, “It could be a lot more lethal.” “Not really”, he replied, “It would be hard to be more lethal and still infect a lot of people because it would kill people before they could infect as many people as it does.” I had a three letter acronym response, “HIV”.

He immediately conceded. A disease as infectious as chickenpox with the silent latency and deadliness of HIV would have the potential to exterminate humanity.

I fear that as long as we have global trade if we don’t develop the ability to respond to new diseases in timeframes of weeks, or perhaps days, some disease will, “Find the sweet spot” (or be engineered) to close the curtain on humans.

HIV was first recognized as a new disease in 1981. At the time I figured scientists would have it figured out and curable in “five or ten years”. Forty years later a promising cure is going into human trials.

Herpes too was a pretty big deal in the mid 1980s. Like HIV, herpes is now treatable but incurable. That may be changing in the next few years.

Think of all these diseases as practice for the future.—Joe]

Self-esteem correlated with number of sex partners

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Interesting:

An analysis of data collected across 10 world regions suggests that men’s self-esteem is more strongly tied to their sexual success than women’s. The findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

…

The study authors accordingly proposed that having a greater number of past sexual partners should increase self-esteem. They further reasoned that this positive link between self-esteem and number of past sexual partners should be stronger among men since greater sexual acceptance is more adaptive for men. That is, men’s ability to pass on their genes relies strongly on having a high number of sexual partners, while women’s success in passing on their genes rests on having higher quality sexual partners who will invest in offspring.

The first thing that came to mind when reading this was, “Correlation doesn’t mean causation. Perhaps having a high self-esteem, as a consequence of such things as job success, physical attractiveness, etc. contributed to the higher number of sexual partners.”

The authors are concerned about that as well:

The authors note that past experimental studies have found that manipulating self-esteem seems to impact sexual desire differently among men and women, suggesting that self-esteem might be “both a cause and a consequence of short-term mating success in men.”

“Future work should seek to disentangle the many functions of self-esteem within men’s short-term mating psychology,” the researchers write, “including work to identify how self-esteem may serve specially-designed functions as both a consequence, and a cause, of short-term mating success.”

Many years ago I would hear things to the effect that women with high number of sexual partners by women was frequently a result of low self-esteem. At the time I knew two young women (in their mid 20s) who that seemed to apply to but it did not appear to be a consistent pattern. More recently with women in their 50s and 60s I have talked to about numbers of sex partners don’t seem to show any correlation one way or the other. But this did not involve any accurate self-esteem measurements.

More study is required before, if ever, the head shrinks start prescribing lots of sexual partners to increase self-esteem.

Quote of the day—Terri Conley

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If you inch towards suggesting that people who do something other than monogamy might not be miserable or that they might have some advantages, they were just so hostile to that. I found that really fascinating.

Terri Conley
August 4, 2020
How One Psychologist Upended Everything We Know About Women, Sex, & Monogamy
[As well as being fascinating I think making people uncomfortable with clear factual data is great fun! I love doing it with the stupidity of gun laws as well as human psychology.—Joe]

Looks indicate which men have cheated

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This is almost unbelievable:

People can predict with modest accuracy whether a man (but not a woman) has cheated before based solely on the appearance of his face, according to a recent study published in Royal Society Open Science. In other words, we seem to have a limited ability to pick out men who have committed infidelity just by looking at them.

I’m having trouble coming up with plausible reasons for this to be true. Perhaps a particular physical appearance gives them more opportunities/temptation.

Posted in Sex

It’s in the genes

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Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes

We have long known that men have a genetic, evolutionary impulse to cheat, because that increases the odds of having more of their offspring in the world.

But now there is intriguing new research showing that some women, too, are biologically inclined to wander, although not for clear evolutionary benefits. Women who carry certain variants of the vasopressin receptor gene are much more likely to engage in “extra pair bonding,” the scientific euphemism for sexual infidelity.

I’m not surprised. My informal interviews with women indicates a bimodal distribution. Either women 50 years and older have had a relatively small number of sexual partners, less than 10 or else dozens or, sometimes, many hundreds.

See also my post here.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day—Wednesday Martin

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Most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.

Wednesday Martin
February 14, 2019
The Bored Sex
[I’d like to see the research on this. I’m a bit skeptical that women are more likely than men to have these feelings. However, I have talked to a number of women who identify with this.

One women asked me to take some sexy pictures of her. It turned out it was for one of her boyfriends. Not her husband. The husband wasn’t supposed to know about them. “How many boyfriends do you have?”, I asked. Her answer was a bit of a surprise to me, “Enough for my own basketball team.”

Another woman was married a couple years to a really nice guy when she started getting “restless”. She felt she just had to have sex with someone other than her husband. She decided there was something wrong with her mate selection and divorced him. She found someone else, thought things were great, then after a couple years the same thing happened. She ended up finding a local sex club that she started attending regularly.

Another woman had been married something like five to seven years and found she could barely stand to have sex with her husband. He was a really nice guy and she liked him a lot, he was good looking, but sex just wasn’t something she wanted to do with him. What about sex in general? Did she have an interest in sex with some other men? Ahh…. yes, she would like to have sex “with like seven guys at the same time”. The last time I talked to her she was meeting a married man several times a week but still had no interest in her husband.

Another woman “stopped counting” after she had 200+ sex partners (both male and female) before she finally “settled down” and got married. After a couple years she was “climbing the walls”. She got her husband to regularly go to a sex club with her and her cravings were brought under control. But her husband didn’t really care for that solution and the last I heard from her there were a lot of compromises on both sides but without either being very happy about the situation.

Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I could go dig through my notes and find many more examples. The point is,I am quite sure what Martin is saying has some truth to it. “Conventional wisdom” on this topic is at least not universally applicable. I’m willing to consider the hypothesis that a significant portion of the female population is content being monogamous but there is a lot of data that says it is not universal and that women who have very ordinary childhoods with no discernible “damage” are not comfortable with monogamy.

See also Sex at Dawn (Sex at Dusk is a counter argument) and Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.—Joe]

You knew it was coming

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Technology is advancing extremely rapidly. More and more jobs can be done by automation. This should come as no surprise:

Male sex robots with unstoppable bionic penises are coming this year

David Levy, author of Love and Sex With Robots, says, ‘I’m sure women will find robots equally appealing as men. ‘If women are that interested in getting satisfaction from a vibrator, imagine how the same women will feel having a robot they can put their arms round them and having the robot squeeze them.’

The date of that article was a year ago. The male sex robots are now available.

Of course, this same company has been making female sex robots for quite some time now.

I wonder how realistic it will be when one of the male robots is with one of the female robots. Will it be against the law if someone put them in a public park and let them do their thing?

We live in interesting times.

Democrats, sex, and violence

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Justin Lehmiller wrote a book, Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. I participated in his research survey but haven’t read the book the book yet. He has been writing a few articles about his research and I found this one particularly interesting:

Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies.

…

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 1970s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

By contrast, self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain.

The BDSM thing is consistent with the Democrat goals of acquiring complete power. And, as we fear, inflicting pain, suffering, and submission. This claim is further exemplified by Karin Jones on Twitter who, after reading Lehmiller’s article said:

A fun read by @JustinLehmiller. He’s right! As a Democrat I often fantasize about BDSM activity – like crushing Donald Trump’s balls in my bare hands until he falls to his knees and begs me to impeach him.

In contrast, my most far out political fantasies involve the government obeying the constraints imposed upon it by the constitution and politicians who violate the law being prosecuted.

Never give up your guns. If you do what follows will be the wildest fantasies of the Democrats and it will be extremely unpleasant.

The sexual playground

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Interesting article in Psychology today.

Most Americans Have Tried Unconventional Sex
The popularity of unconventional sex raises questions about what’s “deviant.”

…

Imagine a playground filled with happy children. Some can’t get enough of one activity: the swings, slide, sandbox, carousel, climbing structures, whatever. Others sample two or three. Some circle among everything. And others avoid the various stations, preferring to make their own fun alone or with others. What can we say about children who love swings, but never use the slide? What does it mean if all kids do is play in the sandbox? It means nothing. It’s play, and kids play in the ways that appeal to them individually.

Sex is adult play. Like a playground, it includes myriad possibilities, none better or worse than any other. Absent harm to self and others, it doesn’t matter how adults twist the sheets. It’s play. It’s pleasure. And erotic pleasure is uniquely individual.

So we must think long and hard before labeling any legal sexual possibilities weird or deviant. There is no normal, so we must be careful calling anything abnormal.

Posted in Sex

Quote of the day—Jodie

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I think everyone should get as much sex as they can.

Jodie
October 23, 2018
[Jodie is my boss.

She has also been known to announce, “This is now a HR free zone.” and say something less that politically correct.

I have an awesome boss in a number of ways (never mind that she once tried to drown me). I’ve never had a boss tell their staff this sort of thing before.—Joe]

Progressives don’t want you to read this

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I haven’t read this yet. It sounds interesting:

An elementary mathematical theory based on “selectivity” is proposed to address a question raised
by Charles Darwin, namely, how one gender of a sexually dimorphic species might tend to evolve with
greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective
then from one generation to the next, more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to
prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if a sex is relatively non-selective, then less
variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This
theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that
one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a discrete-time
one-step statistical model using normally distributed fitness values; and a continuous-time deterministic
model using exponentially distributed fitness levels.

If I had seen this without much other context I probably would have read the abstract and moved on. Interesting, but not worth much more time. However…

The context in which I ran across this was Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole, an peer reviewed paper, approved and published, was removed from online archives:

Colleagues I spoke to were appalled. None of them had ever heard of a paper in any field being disappeared after formal publication. Rejected prior to publication? Of course. Retracted? Yes, but only after an investigation, the results of which would then be made public by way of explanation. But simply disappeared? Never. If a formally refereed and published paper can later be erased from the scientific record and replaced by a completely different article, without any discussion with the author or any announcement in the journal, what will this mean for the future of electronic journals?

I save banned CAD files for 3D printing. I buy banned books. And I publish banned academic papers.