quotable

Daring to step into oneself is the bravest, strangest, most natural, most terrifying thing a person can do, because when you cease to wrap yourself in artifice you are naked, and when you are naked you are vulnerable.

But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one. - Charles Blow, in his beautiful and gut-wrenching personal essay, Up From Pain

modern love: eating the ham sandwich

My mother moved to the U.S. as a thirty-something military wife in the mid 1970s. Her upbringing in a staunchly conservative Catholic family in South America burdened her with many neuroses, many of which she inflicted upon me. Her negative messages about sex, power, and men took me a long time to unlearn. I've concluded that fear seems to drive most of her decisions (including all of the unhealthy things she ever said to me about men and sex). The irrational world she's constructed for herself (and for me, expected to be the perfect only child of a narcissist) were suffocating even when I was child.

I distinctly remember the fight that my parents had about me going to prom. I wanted to go with my high school sweetheart. My mother was dead set against it, because she thought that prom was essentially an abbreviation for 'promiscuity' -- that it was really an excuse to have sex (perhaps it was for some, but that wasn't my M.O. for the evening) and with so many unsupervised (I'm assuming she meant predatory) high school boys, one was likely to prey on her daughter. What she didn't realize is that her (and my father's) discomfort with the subject of sex meant that I filled in the blanks on my own.

In the fifth grade, that meant the racy bits in Judy Blume's "Deenie," lots of poring over the entries about vagina, penis, intercourse, etc. in the family encyclopedia that defined things in a decidedly unsatisfying way because there was no mention of how things felt, and obligatory misinformation from friends with older siblings. By junior high, I had a basic idea of the mechanics and consequences, but still hadn't had a sex talk from my parents and (because I skipped the seventh grade) also never had the benefit of a sex ed class.

In high school, I was outraged by the way my mother criticized my classmate for being at a high school basketball game when she was visibly pregnant. And I told my parents as much because they had never said a practical word to me about how not to be in her situation. By that point, I had my first serious boyfriend. We stumbled our way through first base and the rest, but it wasn't until I got older that I started to explore and enjoy sex in the way I do today. Even by the time the high school boyfriend and I got divorced when I turned 30, I was completely naive in the language of seduction, because I was dating for the first time in my adult life.

I enthusiastically dove in and got a crash course on the topic. I got comfortable with expressing my desires and needs and with having really candid (and fun and serious) conversations about what it means to be good, giving, and game. A few partners later, my would-be sexual renaissance came to a screeching halt when I tested positive for a few high-risk strains of HPV. I called a girlfriend and blubbered to her about my fate and she told me that she was HPV positive, too and that it was pretty common. I lamented my luck, given that I hadn't engaged in what are typically considered high-risk sexual practices, had only had a few sexual partners my entire life, and that (with the exception of my ex-husband), I'd never had unprotected sex. But it was helpful in putting the brakes on physicality and focusing on really getting to know someone before getting in bed with him. Slowing down also meant that I met the love of my life -- my partner Leo, with whom I now have a 9-month-old baby boy. The added bonus: my body finally killed off the HPV a few months before I got pregnant.

Leo and I have had our share of conversations about how we plan to parent our children. We've put a lot of thought into the messages we want them to get from us about sex, sexuality, body image, healthy eating, self esteem, and several other subjects. I know that I'll never punish them (as my mother punished me) by not attending their high school graduations if they choose to go to prom. I hope that I won't make sex a taboo and make them or their boy/girlfriends feel dirty if I think they're having sex. And I hope that I'll be able to have an open relationship with them about sex, so that questions are asked and answered, information is shared, and emotions are discussed. More than anything, I want them to understand that sex is a very big deal, that there are big consequences attached to it (I'm talking emotional ones just as much as STDs), that it is a wonderful thing, and that over time they'll probably get a good deal better at understanding and communicating about their sexual needs.

This Modern Love essay was written by someone who also got really negative messages about sex from his mother. In this case, he's a guy who figured out how to move beyond his upbringing.

Modern Love: Eating the Forbidden Ham Sandwich
By ANDREW LIMBONG
May 5, 2011

AT 8 in the morning, I expected some old woman to be working behind the counter of the pharmacy — the kind of person who usually gets up at 6 a.m. anyway. Instead, there was a young guy in tight jeans and one of those faux-ethnic kaffiyeh scarves. I thought about how cold it wasn’t inside the pharmacy. When he asked me if I needed anything, I stepped aside to let my girlfriend, Sam, walk up to the counter.

“Yeah, a morning-after pill?” she said.

“We have Plan B and a generic,” he said. “Which one do you want?”

Sam looked at me as if I would know.

I made a face Sam knows all too well that said, “Uh?”

“How much is the generic?” Sam asked.

“Ten dollars cheaper.”

She looked at me again, then said, “I’ll take the generic.”

“O.K., that’ll be $35.”

I held out my debit card and he took it, looking as if he had done this a hundred times before.

I paid, we went home, Sam took the pill and I’m not a father: all good. But something felt off.

Had that proverbial old woman been behind the counter that morning, I think I would have been more comfortable.

Well, actually I would have been a lot less comfortable at the pharmacy, but I think that would have made me feel more comfortable about the situation as a whole, because we would have fulfilled the archetype that I thought our story was supposed to fulfill: young couple has sex, condom breaks, they feel ashamed buying a morning-after pill and no one speaks about it after.

But as it happened there was absolutely no shame in it at all. Everything was fine, and I was joking about it later that day.

Yes, this was a good thing. But it still bothered me.

On my first day of college, my mother took me aside while my father carried my stuff from the car to my dorm room. She held my shoulders tightly and told me not to hug any girls because they’ll lie, say I raped them and then I’ll go to jail. Either that, or I’ll get them pregnant.

It wasn’t the first time I was hearing this. I nodded along, pretty certain that the chances of a girl accusing me of rape because I hugged her weren’t very high.

I knew a lot of my mother’s attitudes toward women and sex were wrong, but that didn’t keep me from absorbing some of it. Persistence does count for something.

I met Sam when I was 20. She’s my first girlfriend, my first sexual partner and the first girl I’ve ever kissed twice. Luckily for me, she was very patient throughout this whole process.

And it really was a process.

Both of my parents are Indonesian immigrants. They grew up in a strict Christian household, and they did their best to impart all aspects of their home culture to me.

My father never spoke to me about sex. We never sat down and had the “talk” that seems to happen only on television. But I always knew we were a different kind of family from the ones I watched on a nightly basis, because nobody on “Full House” ever got in trouble for kissing a boy, as my sister once did.

I never got that far when I was younger. There was something about girls that scared me. This isn’t uncommon, but most people seem to get over it somewhere around high school. By the time I was 20, I still had this irrational fear of rape, jail, pregnancy, God and my mother. It led to feeling lonely a lot, but at least I knew I wasn’t alone.

My friend Haroon calls this fear the “ham sandwich” effect. Like me, he’s a first-generation American, born to a religious family. He’s Muslim. His parents would tell him not to eat pork because it’s evil and God will send you to hell. They had a similar attitude about sex.

But he was 16 and curious, so why not? He sat down one day, bought a ham sandwich, ate it and then threw up.

He tried again, though, and was eventually able to eat ham sandwiches like any other American.

It was the same way with sex.

A lot of people suffer from the ham sandwich effect, especially first-generation Americans. You can reject the parent culture all you want, but the more serious the situation, the harder it is to get over. And sex is very serious.

Over the course of one semester, Sam and I went from being friends of friends to making out in my bed on a nightly basis. There was nakedness and there was touching, but it never went any further than that because I always felt my mother was there in my room, too.

Sometimes, she would be sitting in the chair across the room, holding a Bible. Sometimes she would just be casually standing by the wall next to my bed. Once I even saw a vision of her in my room with my imaginary teenage son, who started using heroin because I gave him up for adoption.

These characters, these figures, put pressure on my blood vessels, not allowing the blood to go where I oh so desperately wanted it to.

It was like this for a month. Sam was patient, but I didn’t want to wait for her patience to run out.

So I called Haroon. At this point, he had already had sex, or “eaten the ham sandwich,” as we like to say.

He laughed when I called, but not condescendingly. He was expecting this call from me. He had become something of an expert in overcoming the ham sandwich effect. He ran off a list of people we both knew in similar situations whom he had coached through this sort of thing.

His advice? Breathe a lot, do some push-ups and don’t really think about it. “Stop thinking about her as a person,” he told me. “People are animals, and having sex is a natural thing that animals do all the time.”

He probably could have worded it differently, but I was comforted by the simple fact that he got over it and was now eating ham sandwiches on a regular basis.

That kind of achievement wasn’t really my goal, but I did need to stop thinking about it so much. For my blood to go where I needed it to go, I needed to distance myself from my fears, my religion, my mother, Sam and even myself.

So I did, and it happened.

I don’t blame my mother for how difficult it was for me to have sex, to have any sort of physical relationship with women at all. That’s how she was taught, and she was just trying to do her best with me.

Actually, unlike Haroon, I appreciated my mother’s old-school leanings for making sex so difficult. Getting over the mental block seemed like an achievement, an accomplishment, something worth doing.

I tried explaining all of this to her once. The semester before I met Sam, I was studying in London. My parents visited me, and my mother and I took a walk around my campus. She asked me a lot about women. Apparently she thought I went to London to go on a wild sex romp. She seemed almost disappointed when I told her no.

There was a glassy, wet look in her eye, and she asked me if I was gay. And I said no, I was just messed up. She nodded.

A lot of times traditional families can display a certain degree of homophobia. My mother certainly wasn’t friendly with the idea of homosexuality, but on that walk, for the first time, I knew that if I were gay, she might actually be all right with it. It was nice to know.

“Haroon calls it the ‘ham sandwich,’ ” I told her. And I told her about the religious pressure, and the constant clashing of Eastern and Western ideals when it came to sex. She stopped walking, so I put my arm around her. Then she apologized to me. She had never done that before, and she’s never done it since, but that bit of progress was nice.

SO when the kaffiyeh scarf guy in the pharmacy sold Sam that morning-after pill, I think what was missing for me was the ritual of seriousness, the sense of progress that I was doing something big. If the old woman had been behind that counter that morning, I’d like to think I would have asked quietly for the pill. I would have paid the extra $10 for the brand name. I probably would have also picked up some toothpaste and deodorant to act as if I was doing this casual thing that didn’t mean much to me.

But I would have known that she thought it was serious, and that would have been enough.

Andrew Limbong, a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest, is a senior at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

quotable

"Being who you are is one of the bravest and most rewarding experiences. So start immediately - as you can't imagine how much fun you'll have, until you do." -- , Eamonn, on the Born this Way blog

gendering halloween costumes

I'm not a fan of the ho-riffic Halloween costume for women. There's no need for any female to dress like a trick, especially when she's a kid.

This cartoon from Sociological Images sums up my point quite nicely.

beyond gay and straight: mexico's muxe

I thought this article (and the accompanying slideshow) were fascinating.

A Lifestyle Distinct: The Muxe of Mexico
By MARC LACEY
Published: December 6, 2008

Mexico City — Mexico can be intolerant of homosexuality; it can also be quite liberal. Gay-bashing incidents are not uncommon in the countryside, where many Mexicans consider homosexuality a sin. In Mexico City, meanwhile, same-sex domestic partnerships are legally recognized — and often celebrated lavishly in government offices as if they were marriages.

But nowhere are attitudes toward sex and gender quite as elastic as in the far reaches of the southern state of Oaxaca. There, in the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into gay and straight. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” (pronounced MOO-shays) — men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned netherworld between the two genders.

“Muxe” is a Zapotec word derived from the Spanish “mujer,” or woman; it is reserved for males who, from boyhood, have felt themselves drawn to living as a woman, anticipating roles set out for them by the community.

Anthropologists trace the acceptance of people of mixed gender to pre-Colombian Mexico, pointing to accounts of cross-dressing Aztec priests and Mayan gods who were male and female at the same time. Spanish colonizers wiped out most of those attitudes in the 1500s by forcing conversion to Catholicism. But mixed-gender identities managed to survive in the area around Juchitán, a place so traditional that many people speak ancient Zapotec instead of Spanish.

Not all muxes express their identities the same way. Some dress as women and take hormones to change their bodies. Others favor male clothes. What they share is that the community accepts them; many in it believe that muxes have special intellectual and artistic gifts.

Every November, muxes inundate the town for a grand ball that attracts local men, women and children as well as outsiders. A queen is selected; the mayor crowns her. “I don’t care what people say,” said Sebastian Sarmienta, the boyfriend of a muxe, Ninel Castillejo García. “There are some people who get uncomfortable. I don’t see a problem. What is so bad about it?”

Muxes are found in all walks of life in Juchitán, but most take on traditional female roles — selling in the market, embroidering traditional garments, cooking at home. Some also become sex workers, selling their services to men. .

Acceptance of a child who feels he is a muxe is not unanimous; some parents force such children to fend for themselves. But the far more common sentiment appears to be that of a woman who takes care of her grandson, Carmelo, 13.

“It is how God sent him,” she said.

Katie Orlinsky contributed reporting from Juchitán, Mexico.

that's amore

It all began when we visited San Francisco. Zack, the adorable boyfriend of one of Leo's Boston buddies, turned on trash TV and left the "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" marathon on.

Yes, it was trashy. Yes, it was MTV. Yes, it was "reality" tv. But we got sucked in anyway.

We've watched the episodes (online) since then and even sent Zack a thank-you note last month where we waxed on about our love of Domenico and Dani.

We know they both have no chance in hell of winning, but he's a good comic foil to all the testosterone freak boys and Dani's a boyish breath of fresh air compared to the surgically enhanced, vacuous bitches "in love" with Tila.

... and Domenico is just fabulous. They should do a reality show focused on him.

Several weeks later, it's down to two contestants and a finale next Tuesday. Also, rumors are surfacing that Tila's not really bi (or single, for that matter). And, yes, we still want Domenico and Dani to have their own tv show, with Dani's grandma, of course. (I just found out that Domenico is getting his own show, called "That's Amore.")

But if Tila breaks Dani's heart, I may just hate her forever. Meanwhile, I thought this piece, on Tila being a bi tv pioneer, was interesting:

AlterNet: Tila Tequila’s Bisexual Dating Show Is More Than Just Trashy Fun
By Nicole Kristal, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted December 13, 2007.
MTV's reality dating show A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila takes on some of society's worst stereotypes about gender and sexuality.

For those of you who haven't noticed, we bisexuals finally scored our own show -- A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. Unfortunately, it's a reality program made by a former producer of The Bachelor that places Tequila, an exotic Asian American femme with plenty of tattoos, cleavage, and low-cut halter tops, at the center of a battle between sixteen straight men (who have the maturity of frat boys on Jägermeister) and sixteen trashy lesbians (many of whom resemble strippers much like the woman they're pursuing). Despite the contestants, the show proves to be trashy fun that grows less superficial -- mostly due to the maturity of its star -- with each episode. A surprising feat considering that most of us, that is most of us over the age of twenty-one, didn't even have a clue who Tequila was until MTV aired this show.

Known for having two million MySpace friends, writing provocative songs like "Fuck Ya Man" and "Stripper Friends," and being a Maxim cover girl, Tequila (for obvious reasons) isn't the ideal bisexual poster child. During the first episode Tequila's slutty behavior and ignorant commentary made me want to hurl things at my television. Aside from her penchant for approaching the contestants in the house and randomly making out with them then walking away, Tequila also reinforces another major bisexual stereotype -- she keeps her sexuality a secret from her potential suitors. When they arrive at the house, Tequila hasn't told any of the men or women that she's bisexual, let alone that they will be competing with members of the opposite sex for her affections. Even worse, when she tells them her sexuality in a dramatic ending to the first episode, she says, "I'm a bisexual," not "I'm bisexual." That's like Ellen DeGeneres saying, "I'm a gay." Not exactly confidence inspiring. Neither is her admission that she's a complete horndog. Tequila confides to a male Italian contestant that she has to masturbate nine times a day in order to be satisfied. Not exactly helping our image there, either, lady!

Despite claiming that both men and women have broken her heart, Tequila's clearly a new bisexual, which makes her comments and influence somewhat dangerous to seasoned members of the bi community like me. In earlier episodes she has a proclivity for turning to the camera and saying unintentionally damaging things like, "This show's the perfect experience because it's really going to help me figure out -- do I really like a guy or do I really like a girl?" Umm, the point isn't to determine whether you're straight or gay. You're allegedly bisexual, you idiot!

The point of a bisexual dating show shouldn't be to prove that we all eventually develop a preference, abandon our fence-sitting ways, and settle into a heterosexual or homosexual lifestyle. And it definitely shouldn't be to center an entire show around a bi-curious straight girl who'd make out with a woman at a nightclub after a few cocktails for the pleasure of her boyfriend. And after watching the first few episodes of the show, I wasn't entirely sure Tequila wasn't that girl. When she screams things like, "I don't know about you guys but I love strip clubs. Are you ready to party?" I can't help but miss Ani DiFranco.

The competitions on the show are designed to highlight gender roles and thus help Tequila better decide whom to eliminate. In many cases she behaves like a straight man. In the first episode she makes the female contestants play dress up and walk a runway in maid, Catholic school girl, and dominatrix-style outfits so she can objectify them like a dude, then eliminate the least sexy ones. She eliminates the male virgin for inexperience in the first few episodes, but keeps the female virgin around, excited about exploiting her innocence. She doesn't hesitate to scream, "Look at that ass!" as both men and women slither around in a tub full of bath bubbles looking for chips that will grant them alone time with her. But as the season progresses Tequila also proves to be genuine and multi-faceted despite her superficial packaging and dirty talk.

After the first few episodes Tequila stops consoling the lesbians with comments like, "I'm just trying to figure it out right now," and starts saying intelligent things like, "It just depends on the person, it's not 'a guy' or 'a girl.'" She puts looks aside, opting to eliminate pretty boys in order to keep goofy guys with senses of humor around and drops most of the trashy, self-centered lesbians, one of whom physically attacks another contestant when she isn't chosen to stay in the house. But Tequila's openness and lack of superficiality truly shines when despite her claim that she only likes "lipstick lesbians," she falls for a warm-hearted soft butch who puts on no airs and refuses to dress in the skimpy outfits chosen by the producers. As the number of contestants is narrowed and Tequila truly begins to get to know the men and women, even traveling to meet their families, she encounters a very bisexual dilemma -- the former Playboy model starts to connect emotionally and fall in love with both the men and the women.

Getting to observe this on television is a first. I, too, have fallen simultaneously for a man and a woman, and if you're not bi, you'll never understand the unique challenge it poses. I've never had the opportunity before to watch a fellow bisexual woman struggle on national television with the disadvantages and advantages of dating both sexes, and for this reason alone, the show is truly groundbreaking. It also exposes the common prejudices and assumptions straight men and lesbians have about bisexual women.

Some of the guys on the show predictably say they want to be Tequila's primary relationship but admit they are open to threesomes. Other men express anxiety and insecurities about competing for a woman with other women. One lesbian is so repulsed after she learns Tequila is bi, she quits the show, while other lesbians try to undermine each other by telling Tequila they believe other female contestants are "confused" and not sure they're only into women. These are all realistic scenarios most bisexuals encounter while dating monosexuals, and I truly feel Tequila's frustrations as she tries to sort through the drama. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for her given the venue where she's chosen to come out. Perhaps the most frustrating element of the show is why a bisexual woman would close herself off from the possibility of dating another bisexual. It would seemingly solve a lot of problems but not Tequila's own insecurities. Early in the show she expresses her concern that the contestants will lose their focus on her and start hooking up with each other. The concern proves valid when a "lesbian" contestant fools around with a man and another woman, showing viewers much to my delight that even static sexuality can be fluid in the monosexual community, let alone when the cameras are rolling.

But after Tequila ultimately gets real and eliminates the contestants who cheat on her or who don't seem capable of a genuine connection, she impresses me again by realizing her original assumptions about bisexuality were wrong. She admits, "You know when I first started out it was more 'do I want to be with a girl' or 'do I want to be with a guy?' and that was it. But now that I'm involved, I have two girls left and one guy. They're people that I really love and in this case, love has no gender." Pretty evolved commentary for someone who hasn't even come out to her own parents.

Who will Tequila ultimately pick? Who cares? I, along with bisexuals everywhere who bothered to watch this far, are just breathing a collective sigh of relief that she actually goes both ways -- not just in her loins, but in her heart.

Nicole Kristal is the co-author of The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe: Quips, Tips, And Lists for Those Who Go Both Ways.

the whys of mating: 237 reasons and counting

Only a handful of the statements really resonated with me. (I'm thinking that tells me a great deal about what motivates me not just re: sex, but in life generally.)

The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: July 31, 2007

Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren’t so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies — to find better genes, to gain status and resources — but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.

Perhaps you didn’t lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people’s minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they’d had sex “to get rid of a headache.” It’s No. 173 on the list.

Others said they did it to “help me fall asleep,” “make my partner feel powerful,” “burn calories,” “return a favor,” “keep warm,” “hurt an enemy” or “change the topic of conversation.” The lamest may have been, “It seemed like good exercise,” although there is also this: “Someone dared me.”

Dr. Buss has studied mating strategies around the world — he’s the oft-cited author of “The Evolution of Desire” and other books — but even he did not expect to find such varied and Machiavellian reasons for sex. “I was truly astonished,” he said, “by this richness of sexual psychology.”

The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex.

The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: “I was attracted to the person.”

The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including “I wanted to express my love for the person,” “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “It’s fun.”

No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, “I wanted to express my love for the person” and “I realized I was in love.” This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents’ reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”

Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”

But then, men were also more likely than women to say they’d had sex because “I was slumming.” Or simply because “the opportunity presented itself,” or “the person demanded that I have sex.”

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

To make sense of the 237 reasons, Dr. Buss and Dr. Meston created a taxonomy with four general categories:

• Physical: “The person had beautiful eyes” or “a desirable body,” or “was good kisser” or “too physically attractive to resist.” Or “I wanted to achieve an orgasm.”
• Goal Attainment: “I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner” or “break up a rival’s relationship” or “make money” or “be popular.” Or “because of a bet.”
• Emotional: “I wanted to communicate at a deeper level” or “lift my partner’s spirits” or “say ‘Thank you.’ ” Or just because “the person was intelligent.”
• Insecurity: “I felt like it was my duty” or “I wanted to boost my self-esteem” or “It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.”

Having sex out of a sense of duty, Dr. Buss said, showed up in a separate study as being especially frequent among older women. But both sexes seem to practice a strategy that he calls mate-guarding, as illustrated in one of the reasons given by survey respondents: “I was afraid my partner would have an affair if I didn’t.”

That fear seems especially reasonable after you finish reading Dr. Buss’s paper and realize just how many reasons there are for infidelity. Some critics might complain that the list has some repetitions — it includes “I was curious about sex” as well as “I wanted to see what all the fuss was about” — but I’m more concerned about the reasons yet to be enumerated.

For instance, nowhere among the 237 reasons will you find the one attributed to the actress Joan Crawford: “I need sex for a clear complexion.” (The closest is “I thought it would make me feel healthy.”)Nor will you find anything about gathering rosebuds while ye may (the 17th-century exhortation to young virgins from Robert Herrick). Nor the similar hurry-before-we-die rationale (“The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace”) from Andrew Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.”

From even a cursory survey of literature or the modern mass market in sex fantasies, it seems clear that this new taxonomy may not be any more complete than the original periodic table of the elements.

When I mentioned Ms. Crawford’s complexion and the poets’ rationales to Dr. Buss, he promised to consider them and all other candidates for Reason 238.

You can nominate your own reasons at TierneyLab. You can also submit nominations for a brand new taxonomy: reasons for just saying “No way!” Somehow, though, I don’t think this list will be as long.

sex (and sexuality) on the brain

Interesting. Very, very interesting.

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes
April 10, 2007
By NICHOLAS WADE

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

In the womb, the body of a developing fetus is female by default and becomes male if the male-determining gene known as SRY is present. This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession, sidetracks the reproductive tissue from its ovarian fate and switches it into becoming testes. Hormones from the testes, chiefly testosterone, mold the body into male form.

In puberty, the reproductive systems are primed for action by the brain. Amazing electrical machine that it may be, the brain can also behave like a humble gland. In the hypothalamus, at the central base of the brain, lie a cluster of about 2,000 neurons that ignite puberty when they start to secrete pulses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which sets off a cascade of other hormones.

The trigger that stirs these neurons is still unknown, but probably the brain monitors internal signals as to whether the body is ready to reproduce and external cues as to whether circumstances are propitious for yielding to desire.

Several advances in the last decade have underlined the bizarre fact that the brain is a full-fledged sexual organ, in that the two sexes have profoundly different versions of it. This is the handiwork of testosterone, which masculinizes the brain as thoroughly as it does the rest of the body.

It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right.

It is no surprise that the male and female versions of the human brain operate in distinct patterns, despite the heavy influence of culture. The male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire. The most direct evidence comes from a handful of cases, some of them circumcision accidents, in which boy babies have lost their penises and been reared as female. Despite every social inducement to the opposite, they grow up desiring women as partners, not men.

“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

Dr. Bailey believes that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Similar differences between the sexes are seen by Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University. “Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible,” he said.

Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth. “I think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life, probably before birth,” Dr. Breedlove said, “whereas for females, some are probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life.”

Sexual behavior includes a lot more than sex. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage “can last 12-18 months,” is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain. Brain imaging studies show that a particular area of the brain, one associated with the reward system, is activated when subjects contemplate a photo of their lover.

The best evidence for a long-term attachment process in mammals comes from studies of voles, a small mouselike rodent. A hormone called vasopressin, which is active in the brain, leads some voles to stay pair-bonded for life. People possess the same hormone, suggesting a similar mechanism could be at work in humans, though this has yet to be proved.

Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire. Studies of twins show that homosexuality, especially among men, is quite heritable, meaning there is a genetic component to it. But since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side.

But Dr. Bailey believes the effect, if real, would be more clear-cut. “Male homosexuality is evolutionarily maladaptive,” he said, noting that the phrase means only that genes favoring homosexuality cannot be favored by evolution if fewer such genes reach the next generation.

A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antimale antibodies could perhaps interfere with the usual masculinization of the brain that occurs before birth, though no such antibodies have yet been detected.

The fraternal birth order effect is quite substantial. Some 15 percent of gay men can attribute their homosexuality to it, based on the assumption that 1 percent to 4 percent of men are gay, and each additional older brother increases the odds of same-sex attraction by 33 percent.

The effect supports the idea that the levels of circulating testosterone before birth are critical in determining sexual orientation. But testosterone in the fetus cannot be measured, and as adults, gay and straight men have the same levels of the hormone, giving no clue to prenatal exposure. So the hypothesis, though plausible, has not been proved.

A significant recent advance in understanding the basis of sexuality and desire has been the discovery that genes may have a direct effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain. Researchers had long assumed that steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen did all the heavy lifting of shaping the male and female brains. But Arthur Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that male and female neurons behave somewhat differently when kept in laboratory glassware. And last year Eric Vilain, also of U.C.L.A., made the surprising finding that the SRY gene is active in certain cells of the brain, at least in mice. Its brain role is quite different from its testosterone-related activities, and women’s neurons presumably perform that role by other means.

It so happens that an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other.

Greater male variance means that although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes. Women’s care in selecting mates, combined with the fast selection made possible by men’s lack of backup copies of X-related genes, may have driven the divergence between male and female brains. The same factors could explain, some researchers believe, why the human brain has tripled in volume over just the last 2.5 million years.

Who can doubt it? It is indeed desire that makes the world go round.

they're just birds

"March of the Penguins" is the second-highest grossing documentary ever in the US.

It's now being touted by some conservative groups as supporting their values, namely monogamy, intelligent design, and a pro-life agenda.

I saw the documentary and learned a lot. But I didn't think it had any of those messages. Frankly, I'm amused by the anthropomorphism. And I loved these responses from the film's distributors:

... the movie is simply a tale about penguins and any attempt to divine a deeper meaning is misguided.

"We did not have discussions of what should be in from a social, cultural or political perspective at all," said Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films. "We just wanted to make sure that it was accurate."

Or as Laura Kim, a vice president of Warner Independent, put it: "You know what? They're just birds."

gay gene in fruit flies

This new study on genetics determining sexuality is very interesting. If the same is true for humans, then it will make it harder for homophobic laws to stay on the books. It may also mean that certain folks want to screen out any fetuses that are gay, but as miriku puts it, "in this case most people who are anti-gay happen to be anti-abortion and [anti-]research as well" so maybe that won't happen. Of course, it's only a matter of time before Fred Phelps and his nutjob minions condemn the Drosophila, too.

I'm wondering if fruit fly sexuality is an either/ or proposition, i.e., you're a Kinsey 0 or a Kinsey 6. It will be interesting to see if they can correlate behavior (kinda hard to know what makes a fruit fly bi) back to a Kinsey 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

The long-running scientific debate about whether homosexuality is determined by nature or nurture is dramatically closer to resolution after new scientific evidence was published yesterday.

Biotechnologists have found evidence that sexuality is, after all, determined by genes and not environment. Researchers discovered a single "switch gene" that swaps the sexual orientation of males and females.

In the research, published yesterday, genetically altered male fruit flies spurned females and became attracted to other males. Genetically altered females engaged in complex male mating rituals, vibrating their wings, licking other female flies' genitalia and curling their backs ready for copulation. They rebuffed males that tried to mate with them.

The heated debate about the nature of gay sexual orientation has divided opinion for decades, with many gay men and women saying that they were born homosexual. Anti-homosexual activists say that gay sexual orientation is learnt and can be "cured" with psychological help.

The paper's lead author, Barry Dickson, senior scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, said: "We have shown that a single gene in the fruit fly is sufficient to determine all aspects of the flies' sexual orientation and behaviour," he said. "It's very surprising."

Dr Michael Weiss, chairman of biochemistry at Ohio University, was as surprised at the findings. "It seems that none of us chooses our sexuality. It just happens. The results are so clean and compelling, the whole field of the genetic roots of behaviour is moved forward tremendously by this work," he said.

"Hopefully this will take the discussion about sexual preferences out of the realm of morality and put it in the realm of science."
Via miriku