Category: Sex

No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage (2015)

by philg

An expert analysis from 2015… “No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage” (Politico):

I am a gay marriage advocate. So why do I spend so much of my time arguing about polygamy? Opposing the legalization of plural marriage should not be my burden, because gay marriage and polygamy are opposites, not equivalents. By allowing high-status men to hoard wives at the expense of lower-status men, polygamy withdraws the opportunity to marry from people who now have it; same-sex marriage, by contrast, extends the opportunity to marry to people who now lack it. One of these things, as they say on Sesame Street, is not like the other.

Yet this non sequitur just won’t go away: “Once we stop limiting marriage to male-plus-female, we’ll have to stop limiting it at all! Why only two? Why not three or four? Why not marriage to your brother? Or your dog? Or a toaster?” If there’s a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate, this is it.

The shortest answer is in some ways the best: Please stop changing the subject! … If I sound exasperated, it’s because the polygamy argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Certainly it was absurd in 2015 for anyone to suggest that normalizing 2SLGBTQQIA+ couples would somehow lead to the normalization of larger groups of sex partners. Let’s check in with the nominally conservative Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2023… “How Instagram’s Favorite Therapist Makes Her Throuple Relationship Work”:

Dr. LePera, 40, a psychologist and bestselling self-help author who explores trauma and recovery issues with her 6 million Instagram followers, announced in 2021 that she and her wife had entered a romantic relationship with a third woman. … The therapist, who lives with her partners in Scottsdale, Ariz. …

Part of the gift of having two partners is allowing each partner to be themselves, not feeling like I need to force them into a box to fit this idea of a partner. I can express different parts of myself in each relationship. If we all allow each person to be as they are, to self-express in their unique ways, we can really expand ourselves.

We have a humongous bed. There are one or two companies that manufacture large-type beds. It’s almost like a double king. It’s very obnoxious.

Related:

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Abortion care as a wedding gift?

by philg

I just RSVP’d for a family wedding. Here’s what I found in the wedding registry:

In other words, to mark an event traditionally associated with reproduction guests can give the gift of abortion care (for pregnant people).

Since I absolutely have to be there and might have to zip to Los Angeles the day after (helicopter ferry trip), it was time to give some money to our commercial airline oligopoly. United tried to sell me trip cancellation insurance, noting explicitly that COVID-19 is “foreseen”:

Readers: If you are are giving abortion care as a wedding gift, what is the correct amount to give?

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ChatGPT explains why humans cannot be optimized via breeding the way that dogs are

by philg

Happy Valentine’s Day, devoted to activities that sometimes lead to procreation.

Here’s an exchange that a Deplorable friend had with ChatGPT:

Related:

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An Opera Superstar and a Progressive go into a Bar…

by philg

Checking a couple of recent news stories…

“Placido Domingo’s name comes up in Argentina sex sect probe” (state-sponsored PBS)

Opera star Placido Domingo’s name has appeared in an investigation of a sect-like organization in Argentina that also had U.S. offices and whose leaders have been charged with crimes, including sexual exploitation.

Domingo, the Spanish opera singer who has faced accusations of sexual harassment from numerous women over the past three years, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Argentina case.

“Placido didn’t commit a crime, nor is he part of the organization, but rather he was a consumer of prostitution,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. Prostitution is not illegal in Argentina.

The article says that “children or teenagers … were sexually exploited”. Placido Domingo is, thus, a child molester? The specific person who visited the opera star in his hotel room is named: Susana Mendelievich. How old is this teenager? In 1990, she was old enough to play the piano (source). Operawire reports that she is today 75 years old.

The great opera star, in other words, is accused of paying for sex with a 75-year-old.

“Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women” (New York Times):

Kacie Margis [27 years old], a model and artist, first learned about Dan Price in 2020 the way many people do: through social media posts that celebrated his progressive politics.

Five years earlier, Mr. Price had propelled himself to an unlikely position for the head of a 110-person payment processing company when he told his employees that he was raising their minimum pay to $70,000. His announcement was covered by The New York Times and NBC News. Esquire did a photo shoot. He made appearances on “The Daily Show” and at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

On Monday, the police in Palm Springs, Calif., said they had referred Ms. Margis’s case to local prosecutors, recommending a charge of rape of a drugged victim.

What harmful drugs did the Progressive icon employ in his nefarious scheme? For those who had the patience to read another 7 screens of text:

Ms. Margis returned to Room 423, where she took a cannabis edible to counter insomnia, something she’s regularly done since being at the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Price returned and tried to initiate sex.

I’m wondering if this is at odds with Science. Marijuana is such an important booster of overall health that marijuana stores were “essential” and, at least in California, Illinois, and Maskachusetts, remained open on every day that public schools were closed. This is a Scientific fact and it is reflected in Science-guided policies designed and imposed by politicians and officials who Follow the Science. But, simultaneously, a different branch of the same Science-following government considers healing cannabis to be drug that leaves a person mentally and physically incapacitated, unable to resist a sexual assault.

Moving on to one of the other victims… Serena Jowers, also mentioned in the article as having provided sex to the Progressive CEO without an explicit fee being charged:

Unless we want to say that, just as being elderly makes a person better suited to being President of the United States being elderly makes a person better at having sex, it seems that sending out a handful of Progressive tweets yields a superior return in the sexual marketplace than a lifetime spent honing one’s craft as an opera singer.

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New York Times hires a grandmother-age writer to expound on casual sex

by philg

“I Still Believe in the Power of Sexual Freedom” (New York Times, August 16):

At the tail end of 2016, I ended an eight-year relationship about six years too late. Our marriage was modern and progressive by most standards: We experimented with nonmonogamy; my partner did more laundry than I did. And yet I found myself unable to admit a simple fact: Our sex, it turned out, was bad.

Women’s right to sexual satisfaction is taken as much more of a given

How did I find myself in a marriage filled with bad sex? I was as equipped as anyone could be to seek out real erotic freedom, and yet I still spent my high school and college years feeling uncertain about how to do so. I idolized Samantha from “Sex and the City,” and I also wished my sex was more meaningful. I wanted sex to be meaningful, but I was also turned off by the whole heterosexual dance in which women demand commitment in exchange for sex and men acquiesce. I was turned off by the dance, and yet I clung to the cultural validation offered to married heterosexual couples, staying way too long at the expense of my own happiness.

When I left my marriage … to pursue my true desires, …

I do believe that reaching for more sexual freedom, not less — the freedom to have whatever kind of sex we want, including, yes, casual sex and choking sex and porny sex — is still the only way we can hope to solve the problems of our current sexual landscape.

(NYT: To be “modern and progressive”, a marriage requires that any man involved do most of the laundry while the woman is out having sex with her friends and this arrangement continues until the woman files her divorce lawsuit.)

Wikipedia says that the author, Nona Willis Aronowitz, is 38 years old. In other words, a grandmother for all but a handful of the 300,000 years of human history. And the NYT has enlisted this grandmother-age individual to write about casual sex.

This is not to say that I think there should be an age limit for Tinder and Grindr users. I’m merely surprised that there is a mass market of people who want to read about the sexual exploits of humans who are best suited, biologically, to be grandparents.

Very loosely related… the local Walmart and Hershey’s invite us to celebrate anyone who shows up using “she” as a pronoun. This would, presumably, include elderly Tinder users.

Related:

  • Christmas Cake, a Japanese term for “A woman 26 years+ who is considered to be past her prime, undesirable, used goods and/or no good.”
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Why aren’t emails to an at-work lover copyrighted?

by philg

Academia is always great for showing those with inferior credentials (i.e., “inferiors”) how to think and behave appropriately. University of Michigan recently fired its president for having sex with someone else who works at the University of Michigan. The press release:

After an investigation, we learned that Dr. Schlissel, over a period of years, used his University email account to communicate with that subordinate in a manner inconsistent with the dignity and reputation of the University. In the interest of full public disclosure, we have released dozens of Dr. Schlissel’s communications that illustrate this inappropriate conduct …

(He’s actually a real doctor, not merely someone lacking the creativity to quit grad school before getting a Ph.D.: “Mark Schlissel, MD, PhD”)

A 118-page PDF is available as a link. Note that the sex/knish partner is “Individual 1”, implying that this guy had a Cuomo-style stable of females, but no “Individual 2” appears.

Suppose that Mark Schlissel had identified as a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community and used his official email account to make reservations at some of the places featured in “San Francisco tells gay bathhouses, ‘Welcome back!'” (Bay Area Reporter, January 25, 2021, just in time to catch a few more COVID-19 waves!):

The city’s public health department has rescinded the restrictions that have kept such businesses from operating in the city since the mid-1980s. A legacy from the height of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses in San Francisco until now could not have private rooms with locked doors and were required to monitor the sex of their patrons.

Those regulations, when put into effect, resulted in a de facto ban on gay bathhouses in San Francisco, leaving residents to have to travel to such businesses in Berkeley and in San Jose. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lone gay bathhouse left in the Bay Area is Steamworks in the East Bay and it remains closed because of the health crisis.

While gay sex clubs without private, locked rooms continued to operate in the city, most eventually closed their doors. There is just one in operation today: Eros on upper Market Street in the city’s LGBTQ Castro district.

The venues must provide safe sex materials free of charge, such as lubricants and condoms. Those establishments with locked rooms must have such materials stocked in each room.

And all such businesses need to provide wash-up facilities for their patrons where they have access to hot and cold running water, liquid soap, hand sanitizer and paper towels.

Presumably the Board of Regents would have celebrated their president’s decision to live the university’s values. Instead of getting to know 50 new male friends at a bathhouse, however, the implication is that President Schlissel was having sex with 1 female friend from work and that they were organizing the sex around athletic events, Saudi filmmaker Safa Al Ahmad events, and articles from Harvard Business Review about how to breathe (a skill that folks who’ve paid $500,000+ in Ivy League tuition may not have mastered, apparently; one tip for easier breathing… move to Florida and then you don’t have to try to do it through a mask). Rather than enhancing campus Pride, as the bathhouse visits might have, the (cisgender?) heterosexual office romance was “inconsistent with the dignity and reputation of the University.” (But if the Board hadn’t fired Dr. Schlissel and released the emails, thus telling everyone about this exciting situation, how would the reputation of the university been affected?)

This post is not about whether the Board made the right decision, but how it is possible for them to publish 118 pages of the president’s emails from a copyright perspective. The university IT folks had the technical means to dig into the president’s account, of course, but can they publish these documents without permission? I guess they can because they did, but how?

Tougher question: What does Mark Schlissel, MD, PhD do now if he wants to continue working? Emigrate to China or France? No American university can hire him, right?

The Michigan commerce mural above is from the Guardian Building, in Detroit (Returning from EAA AirVenture (‘Oshkosh”), August 2021), and contains some job ideas if Dr. Schlissel wants to stay local.

Related:

  • “Why did University of Michigan fire Mark Schlissel? He broke a rule he introduced this summer” (MLive): At the July Board of Regents meeting, he announced an overhaul of sexual misconduct policy changes, particularly the prohibition of relationships between subordinates and supervisors. There would be zero tolerance for someone in a leadership position to “solicit a personal or romantic relationship with someone they have a supervisory authority or career influence over,” he said at the time.
  • The Wikipedia page for this guy mentions that he was criticized for not following the science in maxxing out the university’s level of coronapanic. In other words, a group of elite Americans rejected as unscientific the leadership of an MD, PhD (professor of microbiology and immunology as well as a professor of internal medicine). Paging Dr. Tegnell!
  • Real World Divorce chapter on Michigan (in case the doctor’s wife decides it is time to cash out)
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Romantic first date conversation advice

by philg

Today is the day that Tinder users will have to provide proof of vaccination in order to meet in a Boston restaurant (NPR). From there, they can decide whether it is time to go to the marijuana store (“essential” and, therefore, never shut down, unlike the Boston schools, which were closed for more than one year) and then to have sex (also perfectly legal at all times since March 2020, unlike indoor tennis, which was banned by Covidcrats at various points due to the filthy germ exchange that is inevitable during backhand strokes (consider the swearing/shouting!)).

What should our young lovers talk about after they’ve exchanged health records? Following a traditional family Christmas dinner at Singing Bamboo Chinese Restaurant, I received the following: “A beautiful person is with you, confide your problems.”

I’m not in a position to try this out in a dating situation, but I tried it within our household. The results were not promising except with Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever.

  • Boston is the Cradle of Liberty (TM) and we fought to escape high taxes and tyranny imposed by what is today the U.K. How are things over there in tyranny-land? Taxes for entrepreneurs in the UK are at a total rate of 10 percent (compare to about 29 percent for federal, Obamacare, and Massachusetts state tax on long-term capital gains!). Boston forces 12-year-olds to take a non-FDA-approved (experimental use authorized only) medicine, against a 2.25-year-old version of a virus that kills old people, to get a meal (5-year-olds will be forced starting in March and they’ll get an experimental drug against a 2.5-year-old version of SARS-CoV-2). The UK is not the Florida Free State, but anyone can eat in a restaurant and there are no vaccine requirements for those under 18 (over 18 need vaccine papers to get into nightclubs and music venues with over 10,000 seats (BBC, 12/16)).
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Waiting for marriage to have sex

by philg

On a group chat, a young friend talked about dating a 24-year-old “Nazi”. On what basis did she merit being lumped in with Donald Trump? “She said that she’d moved to [Mountain West state] because ‘it isn’t very diverse and I like that.'”

The young “Nazi” was a traditionalist, who wanted the man to pay for everything when on a date and also wanted the man to choose the restaurants and activities. She also said that she wouldn’t have sex prior to marriage.

An older participant in the chat noted “Sex is a statistically rare event after marriage, so what she’s really saying is that she doesn’t want to have sex ever.”

Another member of the younger subgroup within the chat mentioned his engagement. This prompted a reminder that “Jeff Bezos would be the richest person in the world right now if he hadn’t married the secretary.”

Speaking of dating, those wanting to make a strong first impression might consider this interior color choice:

The Aston Martin above, the epitome of British understatement, was parked at the “International Polo Club Palm Beach” (which is, of course, not in Palm Beach). One of the songs played for Rolls-Royce-driving spectators was Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman”, in which she sings about preferring beer to Champagne. At halftime, nonetheless, spectators who ventured out onto the field to stomp divots were served free Champagne and no beer was available.

After expressing sympathy to the father above that his babe-in-arms was too young to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, I gave the guys below a lecture on the risks that they were taking by participating in this game. Even after I pointed out the increased transmissibility of Omicron, however, they rejected my offer of a stack of surgical masks from the minivan. I was, fortunately, able to deliver pamphlets on the dangers of second-hand ivermectin that are inherent in equestrian sports.

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Carousel of Social Progress for Disney World?

by philg

We hid from the afternoon rain at Magic Kingdom’s Carousel of Progress, which covers technological progress fairly well:

Follow an American family over 4 generations of progress and watch technology transform their lives.

During each era, learn how the technological marvels of the day made life more comfortable—and paved the way for unimaginable innovations.

Discover how gas lamps, the hand-cranked washing machine and gramophone made the pre-electric era a breeze.

Watch the advent of electricity give rise to modern conveniences like the electric iron, the radio—and the simple, revolutionary light bulb.

See how the automatic dishwasher and television set transformed the American household.

Today’s high-tech marvels include virtual-reality games, high-definition televisions and voice-activated household appliances. Imagine the wonders the next hundred years may bring!

The period covered by the carousel seems to be roughly 1900 (gas lamps, Wright Brothers experimenting but not yet succeeding) through 2013 (Amazon Alexa plus consumer-priced VR goggles).

The attraction doesn’t cover the changes in American society over this period, however. The narrator is a white cisgender married heterosexual male in every scene, for example. None of the children in the nuclear family identify as LGBTQIA+ in any year. No migrants arrive. Nobody has sex with a politician’s son in order to pocket $2.5 million in child support. What about a companion Carousel of Social Progress ride?

Readers: What would you include to show the changes in American society that aren’t technological?

Here are some ideas for a progression…

Start with a family of Native Americans: dad, one wife (not a “squaw“), and two kids. They talk about how they have so much land and so many resources they are hunting and gathering only a couple of hours per day. Once every 6 months, dad smokes some tobacco as part of a religious or diplomatic ceremony. Illustrate with this stained glass from downtown Key West, in which a non-binary “Calusa Indian” parent tells his/her/zir/their non-binary child about the rainbow of LGBTQIA+ possibilities that the white invasion and occupation will bring:

The above family is shoved aside by some white “settlers”, who guzzle corn liquor from a barrel and chain smoke. They talk about setting up a casino.

Californians in 1969 smoke marijuana and talk about how the new no-fault divorce law (“unilateral divorce”) means they can “do their own thing”.

Lunden Roberts talks about how she made good money at a fully legal strip club, but that having sex with Hunter Biden yielded $2.5 million in tax-free child support (pats animatronic Navy Joan on head and $100 bills come out from under the child’s cap).

In the last scene, we find an Afghan migrant family eating goat head soup around the breakfast table in a luxurious apartment building. The father says how happy he is that the town forced the developer to give up 12 percent of the units for public housing so that unemployed migrants like himself could live there. The wife announces that she is suing him for divorce so that she can live in the beautiful apartment with her girlfriend and that he has 48 hours to vacate. The teenage daughter says that seems like a good time to inform the parents about zir transgender identity and says that ze’s going out to pick up some medical marijuana to help treat side-effects of hormone therapy. The younger child says that he hopes to one day open a recreational marijuana dispensary that also sells state lottery tickets.

Exit through the gift shop exclusively stocked with Pride products from the Rainbow Disney Collection, e.g., this Mickey Mouse Intersectional Flag pin:

(not to be confused with the Mickey Transgender Flag pin, the Mickey Lesbian Flag pin, or the Mickey Bisexual Flag pin)

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The haters who said that polygamy would follow same-sex marriage

by philg

Back when same-sex marriage was the subject of referenda (eventually rendered irrelevant by the Supreme Court), the haters said that same-sex marriage was the camel nose under the tent for polygamy. This was an outrageous calumny. See “Polygamy Is Not Next” (TIME, 2015), for example and “No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage” (Politico, 2015): “Opposing the legalization of plural marriage should not be my burden, because gay marriage and polygamy are opposites, not equivalents.”

From CNN, six years later: “Three dads, a baby and the legal battle to get their names added to a birth certificate”:

This isn’t news, actually, but we’re just hearing about it now…

The judge ruled in their favor before their daughter Piper was born in 2017. Jenkins believes they are the first polyamorous family in California, and possibly the country, to be named as the legal parents of a child.

The journalists want us to know how much better this is than when there are two squabbling opposite-sex parents:

The dads and their children share a bustling house with two Goldendoodles named Otis and Hazel.

“We’ve had zero negative feedback from coworkers and friends. Everyone seems to just be delighted about the arrangement and that’s because they know us,” Jenkins says. “I think some people will look at this and say like, ‘Oh, this is exotic. It’s going to harm the child.’ But people who know us know that we have been taking care of these kids as best as we possibly can.”

That however hopeless things may seem as a young gay man struggling to fit in, the world is changing. And that he’ll someday find more love under one roof than he ever imagined.

(If two dads are good, maybe three are better! See The happiest children in Spain live with two daddies,)

From my inbox, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms” (New Yorker): “Campaigns for legal recognition may soon make multiple-partner marriages as unremarkable as same-sex marriages.“

Some excerpts:

The next year, in an online forum, they saw a post from a woman in her early thirties named Julie Halcomb that said, “I’m a single mom, I’ve got a two-year-old daughter, and I’d like to learn more.” Rich wrote, “If you want to know more, ask my wives.” Angela had opposed adding a third wife, but when she got off her first call with Julie she said, “O.K., when is she moving in?” Julie visited, mostly to make sure that the kids would get along, and joined the household permanently a week later.

Their living arrangements attracted other unwelcome attention. Neighbors called the police, and Child Protective Services interviewed the children. Since there was only one marriage certificate, the police couldn’t file bigamy charges. “They said, ‘We don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do,’ ” Julie recalled. “But we had them at our door constantly. One of the kids would have an accident at school—we’d have them there again. They were constantly trying to find signs of abuse.”

At the family’s largest, Rich had four wives, but when I met him, a couple of years ago, he and Angela were divorcing, and another woman, April, had come and gone. Rich, Brandy, and Julie were living with their kids—six, including Rich’s and Julie’s from earlier relationships—and saw Angela’s two every other weekend.

The Austins would like one day to enjoy the legal benefits that married couples take for granted. Brandy and Julie take heart from the success of the gay-marriage movement. “I’ve got a wedding invitation on the way from a friend who’s transitioning from female to male,” Julie said. “I’ve got classmates that came out almost twenty years ago. They’ve been lucky enough to get married. I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”

We already have functional polygamy in the U.S. An American doesn’t need to settle for the highest-earning partner whom he/she/ze/they can find for a long-term marriage. He/she/ze/they can have sex once with an already-married high-income defendant and earn more via child support (see Hunter Biden’s plaintiff) than by getting married to a mediocre earner and enduring his/her/zer/their presence in the apartment 24/7. Soon we can have de jure polygamy?

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