Am I missing something or is the following a suggestion that people should have sex when they don’t want to in order to please their partners and keep them around?

It’s not an obligation, to start with. It’s not necessarily about physical pleasure, per se. It doesn’t have to be a “release” or even a distraction. It doesn’t have to be AWESOME. It’s a thing you do with your partner because your partner likes it and you like your partner and it won’t do you any kind of harm to have some naked time. You do it because you see how it’s good for your long term happiness: your partner feels welcomed into your heart and mind, feels connected and accepted, may even feel all the pleasure, release, etc that sex is hyped to be. You do it because it’s Good For You. . .

Look, if you only exercised or ate vegetables or showered when you really WANTED to… well, I know I’d only do each one about once a week, most weeks.

Obviously, we all know that the people encouraged to force themselves to have sex as an investment in long-term happiness can only be women. It is much easier for an uncaring, nasty partner to pretend not to notice lack of female arousal than of a male erection.

The idea that female sexuality only exists to service the needs of others (men, the family, society) has been Within a patriarchal model, each woman needs to be claimed by some man as her own and proclaimed as valuable in society’s eyes by this act of ownership. A woman who is “not in a relationship” becomes a useless creature who hasn’t fulfilled her role of servicing the needs of others.

The especially passionate proponents of this sexual self-violation are women who have sacrificed their sexuality for the sake of this Holy Grail of a relationship. They know how much they lost when they chose to betray their sexuality. This is why the idea that there are women who don’t self-violate in the same manner drives them to distraction. Hence, the efforts to talk all women into following in their footsteps.

So here is an alternative piece of advice from a non-patriarchal woman:

Dear women! Do not violate your bodies and force yourselves to have sex when you don’t want to and with a partner you don’t desire. Rather than an investment in long-term happiness, you are investing in  a host of physiological ailments and psychological problems. This self-violation will cost you very dearly. Every time you fake interest in sex, you remove the possibility of ever having happy, orgasmic, fulfilling sex even farther away from yourselves. If you need to have sex to “feel accepted” by your partner, that means you have a really crappy partner who doesn’t care two straws about you. Dump him today, he is a jerk. A normal man – I don’t even say a loving man, just a man who is reasonably healthy in his head – would be horrified at the suggestion of having sex with an unwilling partner. (And a woman, too, of course.) You don’t need to be “in a relationship” at all costs. Nobody does.

If you are past the age of 30 and you need to think of long-term happiness, investments, relationships or posts you read online to talk yourself into having sex, please know: you are with the wrong partner. He might be the best guy in the universe, but you do  not desire him physically. You are exchanging your sexuality for societal validation. Just think about it.

I was asked to say something about the following comment:

I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard there are pretty big cultural differences between the United States and Russia when it comes to acceptance of certain non-scientific modalities, and that they are taken much more seriously in the former USSR.

I find it pretty hilarious that people from a country:

– where huge chunks of population do not “believe” in evolution,

– where many people seriously suggest that creationism should be taught in schools,

– where police officers employ psychics and there are hugely popular shows about that process,

– where there are people who speak in tongues and touch snakes because they are incapable of understanding a metaphor from a book that is thousands of years old,

– where a presidential candidate has to fake that he is religious in order even to be considered,

– where a political figure with a huge following says in public (and keeps insisting!) that the number of contraceptive pills you take depends on the number of sex acts you engage in,

– where there are Departments of Happiness founded at universities,

– where The Secret becomes an instant mega-bestseller;

– where a president bankrupts the country and drags it into two ruinous wars because God told him to,

– where millions of people can’t get the difference between an abortion pill and a morning after pill because the science behind how the pill works is too complex for them

would proclaim with a straight face that people in the FSU they know absolutely nothing about are more anti-scientific.

They keep writing strange and disturbing things like these:

Megachurches give their members an instant and all-encompassing community, complete with youth ministries, classes for adults, service opportunities, and support groups. They offer one-stop shopping for all your community needs. And today, I miss that. It’s a lot harder to build your own community from scratch than it is to plug in to one that already exists. And then there are the things I didn’t even mention here: the feeling of a higher purpose, the feeling of solidarity with other church members, the sense of mission.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like and admire the blogger I quoted here. It is not my intention to criticize her in the least. I just want to point out that it would probably be easier for me to decipher a text in Chinese than this series of statements.

When I read the words “an instant and all-encompassing community” I feel an onset of a panic attack. Then, when I realize that the author sees this horrible, terrifying prospect as something positive, I’m completely baffled. The idea that somebody would want to build something as useless, restrictive, castrating and invasive as a community is extremely strange. Also, the idea that one would be able to combine a feeling of higher purpose while being dragged out by the leveling, grinding down machine of a community just leaves me speechless.

Once again, I’m not criticizing anybody. I’m just sharing something that makes me different from many people.

I sometimes despair of ever finding any mutual understanding with a non-autistic. Of course, there are always non-autistics like my husband who has been bribing me for years into not inviting anybody to visit us at home.

I know I promised a semi-open thread on Obama a while ago, so here it is, people.

The subject is the recent string of revelations about the kill list of terrorist suspects supposedly personally vetted by President Obama. Do you approve of the list? How did finding out about it make you feel about Obama? Did it make you more or less likely to vote for him in the elections?

And what about the revelations of the cyberwar Obama has been waging against Iran?

Feel free to share anything else that comes to mind about Obama.