Showing posts with label Sex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sex. Show all posts

Monday, January 26, 2009

Not THAT e-card.

One e-card you don't ever want to get. Nooo, it's not happy birthday. Nooo, it's not get well soon. Nooo, it's not congratulations. It's hey, sorry, but I may have given you syphilis, and I don't see you often enough in my real life to tell you in person. Have a nice day. The newest thing in e-greeting cards appears to be a nifty little one that notifies all your 'friends' that they might have been exposed to an infection.


From the NYT:
The e-card, which allows the sender to select the disease involved and includes links to public health sites and services, is part of that strategy.

“Notifying the person exposed to a sexually transmitted infection is the critical piece in preventing further spread.”
Ummmm, I don't even know where to start with the problems with this sort of service from In Spot. Not that I'm not against the spread of disease, but sometimes I have to wonder if I am the only one concerned that our society needs oops-I-gave-you-an-STD e-cards?

Friday, July 18, 2008

Regret: The Nature of Women and Men

I was browsing Neuroanthropology: Yes, as nerdy as it sounds. But interesting. Very interesting.

Most current article: Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 A recent journal publication argued:
that women are ‘ill adapted’ for promiscuity, that the ’sexual and feminist revolutions’ didn’t work because women couldn’t shake their inherent nature, which is to long for committed relationships and loathe themselves if they act like cheap floozies.
To which, gregdowney, whose paraphrase is above, repudiates:
That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation — like, ‘too many guys in one-night stands don’t know how to satisfy women’ or ‘women are better at sex than men’ — you could construct another story around this data that was equally plausible — no, more plausible — than women are programmed to want long-term relationships.

I think I disagree with large portions of both viewpoints.

1. The feminist movement was not merely an attempt to allow women to have casual sex with ease. This seemed to be some sort of motive that got super-imposed upon the feminist revolution to make it seem more sinister and well, ridicule-able. I do believe it had more to do with equality and fairness.

2. I think that both men and women are programmed, as we shall call it, to desire stable long-term relationships.

3. However, the additional "programming" that influences women more so than men is the social conditioning of society rather than one's nature. Society tells women that they ought to be married and popping out babies (among other messages) in order to be successful. Also, a woman who is sexually promiscuous may be labelled a whore, whereas a man with similar habits is a stud.

My conclusion: Neither men nor women are naturally inclined to embrace the phenomenon of a one-night-stand as a self-fulfilling, emotionally satisfying way of life. Temporary physical relationships lead to loneliness and emptiness regardless whether there is bragging or hiding occurring the morning after.

Good or bad moral decisions, if you will, are always either punished with *eventual* remorse or rewarded with *underlying* self-affirmation. Depending on which path was taken, the notion of right or wrong always lingers and always catches up. Man or woman.