How Can They?

Somebody on Reddit quotes my post on the GOP campaigning for oral and anal sex to be outlawed in Texas and somebody else asks, "How could any man want oral sex to be illegal?!" 

I'm not registered on Reddit, so I'll answer here: he can if he's not getting any. That's the problem of all hysteria-driven conservatives who want to police other people's genitals: they are simply jealous because they aren't getting any and it drives them nuts.

Who Robs Women of Sexual Desire?

Ancient cultures knew that female sexual desire was a lot more potent than that of men and that female bodies were a lot more adapted to experience sexual pleasure. Greek mythology, the great Eastern tradition of story-telling, One Thousand and One Nights, and a wealth of Medieval sources agree unanimously that female sexuality is a lot richer than male. We all know the myth of Tiresias, the blind sage of the Ancient Greek mythology who experienced being both male and female:

When Zeus and Hera had a disagreement on which sex enjoys the most pleasure during intercourse they decided to let Tiresias judge, since he had experienced both. Hera insisted men enjoy sex more, while Zeus claimed the opposite. Tiresias then said, that if sexual pleasure could be put on a scale from one to ten, then men were at one, and women at three times three.  

In Eastern stories, male and female genies often hold debates and conduct experiments to determine who needs and enjoys sex more. The answer, in every single case, is women.

As someone who comes from a different culture, I was quite shocked to discover that in the US the discourse that poses female lack of interest in sex as normal has won the day. Americans keep coming up with convoluted explanations as to why women in this country are less interested in sex than men. This is the most recent attempt I have found:

It's an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don't seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it's merely the symptom of a larger problem--that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies.

There is a very good, progressive sentiment behind the above-quoted post. It doesn't take into account, however, that cultures which were a lot more male-dominated than this one never had a problem of diminishing female libidos. Ancient Greeks can hardly be considered beacons of female liberation. Neither can the pre-Xth century Indian and Persian storytellers who contributed to the creation of 1001 Nights (and, consequently, the entire Western tradition of story-telling in the Middle Ages.)

This is an extremely Puritanical society that is very prissy about sexuality. I know that Americans have managed to talk themselves into believing that their culture is "permissive" and even "raunchy." However, any outsider immediately notices just how sexually deprived, constricted, and uncomfortable about anything that has to do with sex this society is. 

P.S. As I was finishing this post, I was watching a TV show that diagnosed a young man with something called "a severe addiction to sex" which, according to the show, is "a mental illness." People who watch porn, masturbate, and have sexual fantasies "should be monitored at all times" because "they are sick and need help." I rest my case, people.

Poor Ross Douthat Still Ain't Getting Any

Would some charitable individual just fuck Ross Douthat of the NY Times already and spare us the boredom of his weekly "I-hate-everybody-who-has-sex-because-I-haven't-been-getting-any-for-the-past-decade" opinion column? As spring is approaching, Douthat is getting into his public fits of hysteria over other people's sex lives more and more often. Not surprising, since he so obviously has none of his own.

Today's column is dedicated to Douthat gushing with admiration (the only thing he's been gushing with for oh, so long) over the tabloids' prurient interest in the sex lives of famous people. Oh, how much the sex-deprived Douthat would love to dedicate his life to going through the dirty underwear of politicians, actors, and athletes. Revealing who slept with whom when and in what position has an important social purpose. Besides giving Douthat an outlet for his unrequited sexuality, that is. According to Douthat,

there’s a case for erring on the side of prurience. Some private acts should be publicly disqualifying, and the media need to be willing to go digging for them.

You can just imagine Douthat foaming at the mouth with his enthusiasm for digging for the information on the sex acts of others.

As usual, the "why-are-the-Democrats-incapable of-bipartisanship" Douthat cannot refrain from showing us his blatant use of double standards. (Of course, he would gladly show us something else, but nobody is willing to look.) Where McCain has a

complicated relationship with a female lobbyist

Bill Clinton engages in "philandering". Douthat's attempts to attract attention to the sex scandals within the Democratic Party (which even by the most modest calculations never come close to the staggering numbers of sex scandals among the sex-starved Republicans) lead him to pronouncements that are nothing short of shameless:

If the supermarket tabloid’s reporters hadn’t gone digging where other journalists declined to even tread, we might never have learned how close the Democratic Party came to nominating a truly disgraceful character for the presidency.

Imagine that, a disgraceful character as a presidential nominee, or possibly even as the President. But wait, that's nothing new. We'd had a really disgraceful character as our president for 8 endless years. And his crimes were kind of a little more serious than having a child out of wedlock. Like lying to the American people in order to start an illegitimate unnecessary war that would bring death to thousands. Or authorizing torture. Or taking away our constitutional freedoms. or destroying the middle class.

But why would a NY Times journalist care about all those things when he can gasp over the real horror of an extramarital affair.