A recent analysis of 20 studies over the last 30 years indicates that between 31% and 57% of women have rape fantasies, and these fantasies are frequent or preferred in 9% to 17% of women. Considering that many people are ashamed to report rape fantasies, these stats are most likely lowball figures.
In the current issue of Psychology Today, I wrote a little piece about personality and body modification
(titled "The Body Mod Squad" in the paper version.) I already have a
pierced tongue and some scarification, but for the servicey sidebar
(titled "Rebel Without a Commitment") I reviewed some more softcore
ways to stand out. (And actually tried them; yes we are better than Maxim.)
Did you realize this stuff was on the market? Newman's Own raunch ranch flavored personal lubricant, "for tossing salads when your first course is intercourse."
Last week I received a press advisory from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that began:
"A hamster-size dose of sildenafil, known as Viagra, helps the rodent recover more quickly from a six-hour advance in its daily cycle, researchers report."
A hamster-size dose of Viagra? Yikes, that better not be a suppository.
Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association, was more careful with their representation of appropriate dosage when they captioned the following image last year (volume 5, number 2, page 41):
Actual size
The academic periodical played a bit more fast and loose in captioning the image of Bob Dole on the following page:
But who can blame them? That's totally my favorite kind of joke: one that combines Viagra, invalids, and bestiality.
Part of my job is skimming tons of science journals and separating the Easter eggs from the chaff. And some of those eggs smell kinda funny. Here are the top 10 paper titles I've encountered in the last six months.
10. "Reinforcing effects of smoked methamphetamine in rhesus monkeys" (Psychopharmacology)
Where the hell does one find monkeys who know how to smoke meth? Oh, from the abstract: "Materials and methods Four rhesus monkeys were trained to smoke cocaine (COC)... Upon observing stable levels of self-administration, METH was substituted for COC". Not. Cool.
9. "Is an Entertainment Robot Useful in the Care of Elderly People With Severe Dementia?" (The Journals of Gerontology Series A)
Useful? I'm not a doctor. Entertaining? Obvs. From the abstract: "The patients recognized that AIBO was a robot. However, once we dressed AIBO, the patients perceived AIBO as either a dog or a baby."
8. "A general method for computing hierarchical component structures by Goldberg’s Bass-Ackwards method" (Journal of Research in Personality)
Something about the phrase "hierarchical component structures" just makes me giggle.
7. "Wise, winsome, or weird? Mechanisms of sperm storage in female animals." (Current Topics in Developmental Biology)
Wise: Lquid nitrogen or genital area.
Winsome: Cheeks.
Weird: A special friend from college, an artist, used to save used condoms after sleeping with men so that she could encase them in amber and use them as paper weights. She once noted that my phenotype complemented hers, leading me to carefully dispose of my bagged baby batter myself. True story.
6. "Bumsters, big black organs and old white gold: Embodied racial myths in sexual relationships of Gambian beach boys" (Culture, Health & Sexuality)
If this were a memoir I would buy it.
5. "Acute renal failure is not a "cute" renal failure!" (Intensive Care Medicine)
LOL! But seriously, I beg to differ. I had a mad crush on this girl once. It took me forever to admit to myself that she was a total idiot and I was merely attracted to her elevated blood urea nitrogen (BUN) level. Also, I totally dug the catheter play.
4. "Singular case of shooting a football fan with a signal rocket" (Forensic Science International)
Don't read the abstract. It's not as funny. Actually, pretend I didn't link to it.
3. "Autoerotic Fatalities with Power Hydraulics" (Journal of Forensic Sciences)
It's like a crazy, tragic mashup of Maxim cover stories. The abstract is twice as deadly as the football fan one, but negative two times as funny. Sample: "One man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a name and writing poetry in its honor. ...The other man... died when accidentally pinned to the ground under a shovel". This is what happens when you ban vibrators in Alabama.
2. "Stroke and cognition: What’s hot" (Brain and Cognition)
I vote cognition! But I'm always a season behind, so who knows. Ask Paris.
(UPDATE: Paris says stroke. Hot!)
1. "The Lurcher mouse: Fresh insights from an old mutant" (Brain Research)
From the abstract: "The Lurcher mouse was first discovered in 1954 as a spontaneously occurring autosomal dominant mutation that caused the degeneration of virtually all cerebellar Purkinje cells and most olivary neurons and granule cells. He staggers from doorstep to doorstep with his rickety cane and cracked spectacles, begging for pieces of cheese with one of his five outstretched paws, frothing at the mouth with saliva and a cretinous Cockney accent. Yet on occasion we have found him to offer incisive advice on love and loyalty from a place of worldly weariness."
Usually my coworkers and I are too busy at the office to use IM for anything non-work-related, but occasionally it serves as a virtual water cooler, like yesterday.
matt: how was your date
matt: is that why you were late
jay: no, i had a doctor's appointment this morning.
matt: was the doc appt related to the date?
jay: i wish.
carlin: there's a male morning after pill now?
matt: it seeks out and destroys your sperm wherever it happens to be
carlin: it's a homing and killing device.
jay: yeah. the guy takes the pill, the woman's pregnancy terminates.
jay: does your sperm have to be pre-installed with self-destruct devices?
matt: no the spewed sperm are quantum-entangled with your remaining sperm. it reads those.
carlin: bingo
jay: "quantum entangled" - i'm not familiar with that term.
matt: simple physics.
jay: yeah, sounds real simple
matt: collapse of the wave function, etc.
carlin: it's a sperm, it's a particle...
matt: it's a spermicle
matt: we should do a charticle on spermicles
jay: and how does it work? the man swallows a pill?
carlin: it's a spermcicle
carlin: yum
jay: or he goes to the window and releases it?
matt: he jacks off into a black box
matt: with a cat in it
EPILOGUE
Jay laughs so loudly at this that another coworker asks Jay to share with the group.
jay: what should i say?
matt: MAKE SOMETHING UP
jay: give me something!
Carlin distracts the coworker with a question about the flowers on her desk.
carlin: drop it
matt: um, tell her you found picture of a monkey that looks like a dog
jay: should i seriously forward that to her?
carlin: no drop it!!!!
matt: looks like she's over it
jay: ok. thanks. nice work, carlin.
I'm tempted to let that just sit there, without comment.
But all you furries out there might waste countless hours searching the nets for the missing frames that would show this "gorping" action more explicitly.
Cool your jets (and put your dry cleaner on hold.) It's merely a depiction of a video shown to a set of two-year-old test subjects: Fig. 1 from a paper titled "Learning Words and Rules: Abstract Knowledge of Word Order in Early Sentence Comprehension" in the August issue of Psychological Science. Who knew grammar could be so kinky?
But seriously, if you want to find gorping, just ask Moby.
Update: My dear advice-giving friend Liz has now opined on the origin of the furry friend trend. More generally, she advocates:
I Would Vote for a president who runs on anti-meme. How does it work? It works on the same principle as a hybrid -- it stores up potential energy. Every time you stop yourself from creating a delightful and idiotic social trend, the energy gets stored in a battery. That battery is around eight pounds, and the presidential hopeful runs around with it, hitting people.
So I was at a party recently with a couple coworkers: Jay and a woman who prefers to remain unidentified (let's call her Betty.) There was drinking, there was dancing, there were bloggers, and there was a weird dude I'll call Munch. Munch was harmless but a little too friendly, and at a crucial moment a little too liberal and libidinous in his interpretation of the Yellow Pages slogan. Having met Betty only minutes before, dude pinches her ass. Um, what?
Eagle-eye Jay spotted the maneuver and later got to the bottom of the situation. Here's Jay's recollection of the intervention:
ME [Jay]: do women ever react badly when you pinch their asses!
HIM: oh my GOD, yeah! like last month, i was talking to this woman at a party, and we were flirting for hours--like *hours*--and then I pinched her ass. and she like, recoiled, and was like, "I can't believe you just did that!" and i was like, what the hell?
ME: why do you think she reacted that way?
HIM: i don't know, i guess she just took it the wrong way.
ME: and why did you do it?
HIM: to communicate to her, i'd love to dominate your luscious body.
ME: to dominate it?
HIM: yeah.
ME: so we're talking, like, not just like normal, mutual sex, but more like, you're dominant and she's submitting. to communicate to her that that's the type of sex you want.
HIM: no, i mean... i'm exaggerating to be funny.
ME: so just regular sex?
HIM: sure.
ME: so basically to communicate to her that you're attracted to her.
HIM: yeah.
ME: so then, why pinch her, when there's a chance that will be misinterpreted?
HIM: what do you mean?
ME: well, you just said she took it the wrong way. maybe some women think it's degrading.
HIM: degrading?
ME: well... if she didn't like it... so why not just do something that communicates to her that you're attracted to her but that's less likely to be misinterpreted?
HIM: like what?
ME: well, like you could kiss her.
HIM: well, pinching comes before kissing.
ME: necessarily?
HIM: yeah, to me, kissing is more intimate. pinching is less intimate.
ME: so you would always pinch a woman before you kissed her.
HIM: pretty much.
ME: why? i mean, do you get pleasure out of pinching? i mean, ok, you're trying to communicate something to the woman. but do you get anything out of it?
HIM: what do you mean?
ME: i mean, if you feel her ass, you might get something out of it. but does it feel good to you to pinch an ass?
HIM: well, if she giggles, then i feel good.
ME: and if she doesn't?
HIM: then she'll be like, "i can't believe you just did that."
Our 'munchy friend later went on to explain why handjobs come before handshakes.
Last week my friend Liz wrote in her advice column: "Questions, questions, questions. Men and women alike love to be drawn out from their selves with QUESTIONS. I keep a file of questions ready for occasions like this." They range from the timely ("Do you identify more with Generation X or Generation Explains-Your-Wearing-Stupid-Clothes?") to the timeless ("Who's your hottest underage relative?") I have not yet tried any of them as pickup lines, but if you do, please let her or me know how they work out.
Recently a bunch of pickup approaches actually were put to the test. In February, researchers at Edinburgh published their results on which "opening gambits" work best. Surprise surprise--situations where men organically display generosity or a cultured background work better than preformed pickup lines. (Summary here, full list of gambits here.) But then, the lines included schlock like this:
M: What has 148 teeth and can hold back the incredible hulk?
W: I give up.
M: My fly.
In Hulk's place, I would have liked to see one from Nick Sylvester's infamous Village Voice story about Neil Strauss's The Game, in which Sylvester refers to someone's "new signature move, a pickup line that takes over 15 minutes to tell and wraps up like this:
"Anyway, my friend has had this mustache for as long as I've known him but he just shaved it and now he's freaking out because he has a really bad tan line on his upper lip. He has a date in two days so we were discussing what he can do. My question for you is: Should he wear a fake mustache on the date?"
(Reconstructing the first 15 minutes of that line would make a great exercise for a creative writing class, but "reporting" on its existence was a riff that lost Sylvester his job.)
Or the Edinburgh team could have relied on the old fave The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines, which already has a smattering of data on the utility of many lines. Skim through and you will find that "I wanna put my thingy into your thingy" is surprisingly effective, working 100 out of 120 times. Unsurprisingly, "Chick do now" has worked 0 out of "804,147 (or so one guy claims)" times.
You'd think "Chick do now" would have amused one of those thousands of women and led to a hookup. Two scientists (Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine) published a study last year in which people rated potential partners on desirability. Subjects viewed head shots with funny and not-so-funny quips attached. Women liked funny men, but apparently men didn't give a shit whether women were funny. These data didn't mesh with claims from both men and women that they like partners with a good sense of humor. So B&B did a follow-up study and found that men and women mean different things when they say "good sense of humor." Women like men who say funny things; men like women who think the things they (men) say are funny. (Good summaries of the research here and here. Full PDFs available here.)
French maximizer La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "We often pardon those people who bore us, but we cannot pardon those who find us boring." Modern-day research has now demonstrated the utter male-centricity of this particular maxim. (Whereas the male-centricity of this Maxim was never in question.)
The flirting research came to bear in an IM chat with Liz last month:
liz: what do you think about the notion:
men: use conversation to establish dominance
women: use conversation as gift to establish togetherness/equality
me: ya
me: like that humor study
me: girls like funny guys, guys like girls who think they're funny
liz: humor is the ultimate trick - it tricks guys into thinking they've become dominant by making girls laugh. it tricks girls into thinking they've been offered a gift by the man to induce togetherness
liz: what happens though when i tell a humor-joke?
me: no effect
me: guys don't care
liz: is gilda radner funny?
me: ya
liz: is that good?
me: ya
me: i need funny. i am not most guys
liz: oh so you're saying certain guys, it's a plus
liz: but guys guys don't care
liz: how can i know the difference
me: you cant
me: ok you can
me: do they attempt to elicit humor from you
liz: seems so simple, and yet i'd never have come up with it
me: i have lots of experience attempting to elicit humor from chicks
me: its my litmus test
me: if they fall flat, too basic, i lose interest
liz: how do you do it
me: leading, snarky questions can work
liz: example?
me: last night i replied to [redacted]'s friendster message. her profile says she wants to meet someone who can procure a butterfly knife. i said:
me: "Why do you wish so badly to procure a butterfly knife? What do you have against butterflies? (Or is it merely a person who can easily obtain one that you wish to find? You're into bad boys/girls.)"
me: not brilliant, but it should work
liz: but isn't that just showing off your creativity/humor, more than eliciting hers?
me: its both. thats the key.
liz: yeh
