Sexual ethics and institutions



⚠️ Content warning ⚠️

Sexual acts, sex work, controversial sexual institutions

Placeholder for an article which mentions modern western experiments in relationships, introduces terminology such as polycules, metamours and so on, as well as analyses of sexual ethics and politics. These terms to be used in analyzing recent and historical experiments in sexual mores.

Dating

The Odds are Good & the Goods are Great is a fun think piece about het dating

My suspicion is that the majority of my women friends who had bad relationships had partners who chose them, rather than the other way around. If you are 100% passive in the dating market, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of people who wants to date you’. If you are 100% active, your partners will be drawn from the set of ‘the kind of person you want to date’.

Iwan Bloch’s Sex life in England:

A STUDY of the British Don Juan affords us some highly interesting psychological insights into the character and distinctiveness of the English man of the world who became the prototype for the French and German novels of the nineteenth century. One primary characteristic of the British Don Juan, which thoroughly distinguished him from the worldlings of Latin and German lands, is the cold, brassy repose with which he indulges his lusts. This to him is much less a matter of passion than of p&de and satisfaction of his sense of power. The French or Italian Don Juan is driven by a fiery sensuality from conquest to conquest; that is the chief motive for his deeds and mode of life. The English Don Juan, however, seduces for the sale of experiment; he pursues love as a sport. Sensuality plays a secondary role and in the midst of ecstasy the coldness of the heart peers through terrifyingly.

Pornography

See pornography.

Sex work

I am curious about the incentive mechanisms of sexual political economy.

The Rhode island experiment (Cunningham and Shah 2014) is an intriguing case study.

The reduction in disease from decriminalization of prostitution is not surprising. The reduction in violence is uncomfortable for my assumptions for a variety of reasons.

Alternatively, a treatise arguing that sex work must always be sex-slavery, Prostitution, Liberalism, and Slavery.

Ideology

I enjoyed Ozy Brennan’s advice, Kink. Hi.:

All human sexuality is weird and embarrassing and vulnerable and politically incorrect. It’s not something we kinky people have a monopoly on. I guarantee you if you could read the minds of people having the sweetest and most loving vanilla sex, it would turn out their sexual interests are related to their insecurities and their body image issues and their yearning for intimacy and all kinds of other stuff you’d be uncomfortable telling the Starbucks barista about. Sexualities are sort of like dreams: they take all the strange awkward uncomfortable bits of you that aren’t fit for public consumption, mix them together with that TV show you watched and your favorite shoes and your third-grade teacher, and produce some unrecognizable and nonsensical yet mortifyingly revealing slop.

That’s one of the reasons that talking about sex is hard. You’re like “here are all my weird uncomfortable bits, fellow human! Please don’t judge me.”

And it’s also one of the reasons that a lot of political ideologies don’t like sex. Sex is stubbornly politically inconvenient. You can get a woman to wear combat boots and no makeup, to split the chores fifty-fifty and practice Health at Every Size, to have a flawless political analysis and to organize at her local domestic violence shelter — and her sexuality will still go “you know what would be hot? If I got a boob job. Just. Giant fucking tits bouncing all over the place. That would be hot.”

Living apart together

I just found out my lifestyle is called living apart together. I wonder if there are any useful tips from other people who do that?

My favourite example from history is Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä

Poly people

Ozymandias’s sex positivity articles are intersting, e.g. Your Partner Dating Lots Of People Is Less Scary Than You Think It Is.

Marriage

To read: Schacht and Kramer (2019),Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2012),Schacht and Bell (2016).

References

Cunningham, Scott, and Manisha Shah. 2014. Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health.” Working Paper 20281. National Bureau of Economic Research.
Deida, David. 2005. Wild Nights: Conversations with Mykonos about Passionate Love, Extraordinary Sex, and How to Open to God. Trade paper, later printing edition. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Fletcher, Garth JO, and Patrick SG Kerr. 2010. Through the Eyes of Love: Reality and Illusion in Intimate Relationships.” Psychological Bulletin 136 (4): 627–58.
Henrich, Joseph, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson. 2012. The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367 (1589): 657–69.
Lambert, Tracy A., Arnold S. Kahn, and Kevin J. Apple. 2003. Pluralistic Ignorance and Hooking up.” The Journal of Sex Research 40 (2): 129–33.
Leuner, Benedetta, Erica R. Glasper, and Elizabeth Gould. 2010. Sexual Experience Promotes Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus Despite an Initial Elevation in Stress Hormones.” PLOS ONE 5 (7): e11597.
Moreno-Domínguez, Silvia, Tania Raposo, and Paz Elipe. 2019. Body Image and Sexual Dissatisfaction: Differences Among Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Lesbian Women.” Frontiers in Psychology 10.
Schacht, Ryan, and Adrian V. Bell. 2016. The Evolution of Monogamy in Response to Partner Scarcity.” Scientific Reports 6 (1): 32472.
Schacht, Ryan, and Karen L. Kramer. 2019. Are We Monogamous? A Review of the Evolution of Pair-Bonding in Humans and Its Contemporary Variation Cross-Culturally.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7.

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