A while back we promised to respond to the sexperts featured in a story on Slate.com on things about sex that confuse even bona-fide sex experts. We hope you (and they) will find our take on these issues provocative and possibly even illuminating. As we wrote in Part I, if our model holds any water, we should be able to answer some of their doubt and questions in terms of what we've learned about prehistoric sexuality. Here's the second and final installment.
You can find the original article from Slate here and Part I of our response here.
Ian Kerner is the author of She Comes First, He Comes Next, and other sex advice books: "Why do most men still know more about what's under the hood of a car than the hood of a clitoris, and why, in our post-Sex and the City culture, are women faking it more than ever?"
Doesn't the premise of his first question answer the second? Also, we'd be careful about assuming most men know how their cars work. And how does he know that "women are faking it more than ever?" Still, reasonable questions.
Briefly, we strongly believe that modern societies generally teach and insist upon sexual ignorance. Clearly, the situation isn't as bad as it was when people were being severely punished for masturbating a century ago (doctors used acid to burn away the clitoris) or imagining evil spirits fornicating with them at night two or three centuries ago -- but it's still pretty bad. Even Bill Clinton (hardly anti-sex) fired his Surgeon General for suggesting that masturbation should be openly discussed in schools. And our federal government is still in the business of insisting on abstinence-only education -- despite the voluminous evidence that it is substantially worse than ineffective. Even supposedly clear-thinking scientists are still arguing that human nature tends toward sexual monogamy! No wonder a lot of guys prefer to work on their cars -- it's a lot easier to get reliable information on auto mechanics than on the mechanics of love.
Em & Lo are sex and relationship writers and authors of Buh Bye: The Ultimate Guide To Dumping and Getting Dumped: "We've never been able to understand why virginity is still defined strictly in terms of penile penetration. Does that mean all lesbians are lifelong virgins?...."
Yeah, it does, at least as far as most religious authorities are concerned. This one's pretty easy. Virginity is an important concept only in societies that are concerned with property rights. But the fact that just about any society around at the moment fits this category doesn't mean this concern is a universal human preoccupation, as many evolutionary psychologist argue.
Societies that aren't founded upon a sense of the importance of personal property don't even have a word for "virginity." Despite their tragically low numbers today, such pre-agricultural societies were ubiquitous for most of our existence as a species. This illuminates the point that virginity really isn't about sex; it's about paternity certainty. So any sex act that cannot result in pregnancy isn't really at issue.
Here in Spain, where there's a large North African population, more than a few of our male friends have had encounters with Moroccan or Tunisian women who were game for anything but vaginal sex -- so they could keep their "virginity" intact for marriage.
