What Causes Sexual Attraction?

"So, if neither your weight nor your looks have anything to do with whether people find you sexually attractive, then what is it that makes one person have a crowd of admirers while another individual sits there forlorn and abandoned?" people might ask after reading my recent posts. 

I know that this will come as a shock to people who have been brought up in a Puritanical tradition that expects human sexuality to be easily subjected to ideology and reason. Still, the truth is that sexual attraction has nothing whatsoever to do with easily quantifiable things like weight, height, size, number of college diplomas, IQ, figures in the bank statement, or anything of the kind.

It happens very often that a tall, beautiful, ripped guy with fantastic hair and a sunny disposition can't find a date in a decade. And in the meanwhile, a short, skinny, balding dude with a nasty personality gets crowds of women flock to him as if by magic. (I know both these guys, so please don't argue with me about it.) How often do you look at a female friend who is not only nice and kind but also stunningly beautiful with a modelesque body and wonder how the hell it is possible that somebody like her is single and can't get to the second date for love or money? While the short-legged, plump woman with bad skin and an extremely bitchy personality is juggling four men at the same time and trying to carve out space for numbers five and six.

If you forget about what you see on television and look at people who surround you, you will, without a doubt, realize that appearance and weight in no way correlate with whether one has any personal life whatsoever or can get anybody give them a second look. When I was much younger, I would go out with four of my girlfriends with an express purpose of meeting guys. One of my friends was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in real life. She had Victoria Secret body and John Frieda hair that were completely natural. She is also a highly intelligent person with a fascinating personality and many interesting hobbies. As we'd hit yet another bar on one of our outings, each of us (and most of the other women and men there) would get interested people come up to us and try to meet us. Our beautiful friend, however, was consistently treated like she was invisible. She really wanted to meet somebody, she tried hard, but people didn't pay attention to her. For the five years that I knew her, she was completely celibate. And not because she wanted to.

What really attracts people sexually is an exuberant, happy and healthy sexuality. Sexually healthy* people give off little tells that we observe and process often without even realizing it. A healthy sexuality entails, among other things, a different relationship with one's body than the one that less sexually healthy people have and a different attitude to sensual experiences. A sexually healthy person moves in a less constricted, freer way, holds him or herself different. You can say a lot about people's sexual health if you observe them select and ingest food and drink, buy clothes, touch different fabrics, choose scent. Whenever we meet a person, we immediately pick up on such things. Those who show many signs of a happy sexuality, attract a lot of people. Those who give off none, attract nobody.

It is a symptom of a sexually unhappy culture that one actually needs to explain that sexual attraction is caused not by how many inches your waist measures but by how sexually healthy you are.

* I don't know if I need to clarify this, but just to be on the safe side I will. Sexual health is a capacity to enjoy sex for its own sake without needing to justify it or feeling guilty about it. It's very similar to a healthy relationship with food. When we eat (or deprive ourselves of food) to relieve stress, exorcise emotions, punish ourselves, out of a sense of obligation, because of social expectations, etc. it is obvious that this is not a healthy relationship with food. It's exactly the same with sex. 

Does the Defense of Women Always Have to be Prissy?

Everybody is being super enthusiastic about Anna Holmes's article "The Disposable Woman" in The New York Times. Everybody, except me, that is. I only discovered who Charlie Sheen is last week, so I'm a very poor judge of whether Holmes's criticisms of this trashy TV actor are correct. The following passage, however, has made me doubt whether this article has any value at all:

On reality television, gratuitous violence and explicit sexuality are not only entertainment but a means to an end. These enthusiastically documented humiliations are positioned as necessities in the service of some final prize or larger benefit — a marriage proposal, a modeling contract, $1 million. But they also make assault and abasement seem commonplace, acceptable behavior, tolerated by women and encouraged in men.

American feminism can always be recognized through an excessive amount of priggishness in its defense of the rights of women. Violence against women is horrible and needs to be condemned publicly and vocally. I am quite shocked, however, to see that Holmes places violence and sexuality together, as if there were anything in common between them. If the moment you write the word "violence" you feel like putting the word "sexuality" right after it, then there is something very wrong with the way you view both. Later on in the quoted paragraph, Holmes talks about assault and abasement, which seem to mirror her reference to "gratuitous violence and explicit sexuality." I have no idea where she sees all that "explicit sexuality" on the prissy and super sanitized American television but Holmes is not alone in her pseudo-feminist concern over the excessive presence of sex on TV.

I have written before about the American feminists' unhealthy dread of sexuality (see, for example, Part I, Part II and Part III of my review of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs.) Instead of recognizing that there is no true freedom that does not include the freedom to be sexual in a way one wants and as much as one wants, these pseudo-feminists insist that sex is debasing and humiliating for women. They cannot accept that it is possible for women to be sexual (and explicitly so) not for the purpose of placating or pleasuring men but simply because these women enjoy sex for its own sake. In her article, Holmes seems to be wondering where the unhealthy attitudes to women as objects come from. She fails to notice how her own positioning of a woman as a perennially debased object of any sexual act is contributing to this state of affairs.

Mark Regnerus Beseeches Women Not to Have Sex

Mark Regnerus has been making a laughing stock out of himself for a while now. He keeps publishing articles and books beseeching women not to have sex until they manage to wheedle, manipulate and cajole men into marrying them. Regnerus is one of those sad, extremely unattractive individuals who compensate for their lack of appeal for the opposite sex by appointing themselves as experts on what that opposite sex "really wants." 

In Regnerus's upside-down universe, all men want casual sex while all women want courtship, marriage and a lesser number of sex partners:

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even those who are floundering, just isn't so bad. This isn't to say that all men direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don't. But what many young men wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. 

The extremely complex idea that all men and all women are different and that they might even want different things during different stages of their lives never occurs to Regnerus. His attempts to explain human sexuality in purely economic terms tell us nothing about men, women or sex. They do, however, tell us a lot about the author's extremely unhappy personal life. When I read Regnerus's sad verbal monstrosities such as "women are holding the sexual purse strings" and "the market "price" of sex is currently very low", I feel embarrassed for the author who exhibits his psychological, emotional and sexual deficiencies so openly. It is as if he were screaming to the world: "Why, oh why do women keep having sex with certain men for free while paying no attention to folks who are willing to pay them and even marry them in return???"

Regnerus is a sad throwback to the times where men had the power to choose women unilaterally. For women in certain social classes, getting married was the only way to provide for themselves. As a result, they were forced to value offers of marriage a lot higher than any financially independent woman can today. Nowadays, things are more complicated. Women have realized that sex is fun and are now choosing men based on whether they feel attracted to them. And this is something that is driving Regnerus insane. 

Penetrating a Woman in the Classroom

Is the universe conspiring to make me want to vomit today? This is what is being taught to students at Northwestern:

Students in the popular and provocative human sexuality course at Northwestern University were invited for an optional demonstration after class on Feb. 21 in which a naked woman was penetrated by a sex toy until she reached sexual climax, The Daily Northwestern reported. About 120 students voluntarily stayed for the extracurricular activity organized by professor John Michael Bailey. Guest speaker Ken Melvoin-Berg, co-owner of Weird Chicago Tours, led the "Network for Kinky People" panel, which included several women. Before a woman onstage disrobed, students were repeatedly advised that they would see explicit content. The woman then used a machine with a graphic name to stimulate herself to the point of ejaculation, a topic that had been recently covered in class, Bailey said.

I just have a couple of questions here. It says that the woman stimulated herself to the point of ejaculation. Whose ejaculation are we talking about? If the so-called professor teaching this course is a man, what prevented him from limiting the discussion to what he really understands, namely, male sexuality? The good professor could have gotten up on the stage and penetrated himself with a toy to the point of ejaculation. Is there a reason why that wasn't done? Is there a reason why a woman was asked to make a spectacle of herself but no man was requested to do the same? Aren't students equally interested in the workings of male sexuality? Or do we still imagine female sexuality as mysterious and incomprehensible? Why are the feminist organizations at Northwestern not asking these questions?

And my last question. I heard that Northwestern was considered a good school. Does anybody still believe that? I know I don't. 

Infantilizing Vaginas

Reader Marina just sent me a link to the following article and asked me to blog about it:

You’ve tried everything to spruce up your lady parts. First, you made sure your garden was neat and tidy. Then, you trimmed up the hedges. (Read Does Bikini Razor Commercial Go Too Far?) Finally, you decided to go for the gold and deforested all of “virginia.” Where does a girl go from here?One sparkly, special word: Vajazzle.
Vajazzling is a burgeoning beauty treatment, popular with celebs and kinky Martha Stewart-ites alike, that involves ladies bedazzling their freshly waxed lady parts just as they would their neato neckerchiefs or fancy fannypacks – with tiny, magical crystals.
So women aren’t just obsessively coiffing their “areas” to look like pre-teen Barbies – they’re now glue-sticking Barbie’s earrings down below, too?
Jennifer Love Hewitt sparked this sparkly trend a few weeks ago when she announced her labia luster on Lopez Tonight. “After a breakup, a friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady," J.Love said, while discussing her new dating book. "It shined like a disco ball, so I have a whole chapter in there on how women should vajazzle their vajayjays."

There is more in the same vein but I realized that I was about to throw up and stopped reading. Lady parts? Precious lady? Vajayjays? Before you follow the link to read the article in full, I have to warn you: there are photos of very very weird people vajazzling or whatever it's called. Don't say I didn't warn you.

For centuries women denounced the patriarchal society for infantilizing them, for trivializing their experiences, for reducing them to perennially childlike toys whose only role was to be consumed by men. Today, nobody forces women in our society to refer to their vaginas as "precious ladies" or to stick Swarovski crystals into them. I know for a fact that a woman can have a very fulfilling personal life without vajazzles, Brazilian waxes, vaginal plastic surgery, or any other atrocity of the same ilk. I even happen to believe that a fulfilling personal life is a direct result of liking one's sexual organs and accepting them the way they are. 

The need to self-infantilize remains so strong because it liberates one from adult responsibilities. A grown woman pretends that she doesn't have a grown vagina but, rather, a little girl's vajayjay. By sticking flashy crystals onto it, she convinces herself that she has managed to escape adulthood for good.

P.S. I just forced myself to look at the pictures of this atrocity and realized that this procedure must make having sex quite uncomfortable, if not painful. In this sense, this must also be some sort of a self-castration practice that helps one avoid confronting one's adult sexuality. 

"Gratification Disorder"

Reader Marina wrote the following comment to one of my posts:

There is little worse than these crazy mothers who have little else to do in their lives than to creep all over their children's lives, post countless pictures of them all over the net and inform the whole planet of every time the babies poop, have a fever or do something menial. I sometimes almost feel it should be illegal. Here is something else that blows your mind. As you know, some children start to masturbate as early as their toddler years. Well, guess what? Turns out it is a disorder with an actual 'scientific' name attached to it - Gratification Disorder! Get it? Gratification is a disorder! So, as I was trying to find some info about it online, I came across a psycho stay at home (of course) mother's blog, whose daughter has such disorder. Well, the crazy observes her daughter like a hawk and documents it all in the blog (http://gratification-disorder.org/)!!!!

At first, I  didn't believe that this was possible. But then I checked out the link, and it's all true. There are psycho quack "doctors" who diagnose what is a completely normal behavior in a child as a "disorder." Being gratified is a disease for them, so you can imagine the quality of these "medical professionals." There are also insane parents with no life of their own who - instead of trying to achieve an orgasm of their own for a change - engage in creepy voyeurism of their masturbating children. And then post detailed accounts of it online.

I'm rarely rendered speechless but in this instance I was. Are there any social services in this country at all? If this is not an occasion when they feel they need to interfere and prevent such an egregious instance of abuse, then I don't know what their mission is. This mother is literally trampling the poor child's sexuality into the ground. Imagine the host of medical and psychological problems the kid will experience when she grows up. 


Is anybody still wondering why there are so many adults who are incapable of experiencing sexual gratification? 

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.