Posts by Max Rose
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Lilith __,
I did a lot of Latin Dance for a couple of years and while a lot of people thought it was an ideal way to sex it up with strangers, I actually just really enjoyed the dancing.
I do know what you mean: the sheer joy of movement can add to the frisson of attraction, or be an end in itself. I love the spark of physical communication through dance, when barely perceptible shifts of balance, touch and attitude can guide the flow of the night. Even in traditional Latin and ballroom, where the man "leads", the influence actually flows both ways, and at its best it's as good an example of non-verbal communication as you could get outside of the bedroom.
And no-one at Ceroc ever took it from there to sexing it up with strangers. No, never.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
Dammit, that was actually how far I could get into that whole “happy spiritual loving” thing before I was laughing so hard I couldn’t type.
But ... didn't you know that sex is degrading unless the couple are looking lovingly into each other's eyes? Although that can be difficult if someone is blindfolded, or if there are more than two pairs of eyes involved.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Emma Hart,
Does the image in your head include any same-sex material? If not, why not? Any laughter or playfulness? Brightly-lit stuff? Tattoos? Affection?
I see that you've already covered some aspects of this, but I'll add my piece anyway. A lot of good sex involves laughter, playfulness and affection, and when those qualities come through in porn it can be glorious. But even outside of BDSM, a lot of good sex is not giggly and playful: it can be intense, urgent, fierce and yes, rough. And in my sex-positive utopia, a fair amount of porn would still be like that, because in porn as in life, it can be goddamn hot.
So I wouldn't want to see a change in the overall gamut of the content, but I would perhaps like to see a change in the balance and presentation of it. It's relatively easy now to choose one's own corner of the porniverse, and perhaps avoid the bits with which one is less comfortable, but at least on the most accessible sites it's hard to avoid some aspects of mainstream porn that I don't like. For instance, in an explicitly kinky context slapping, choking and certain forms of humiliation might be clearly conceptualised as a fantasy, and this sort of porn seems at least as popular among women as it is with men. But similar acts in mainstream porn are often presented as male revenge fantasies, and it's hard to avoid the nasty taste of misogyny, even if the performers themselves are not being coerced or exploited.
Overall, though, I think that a world in which all porn was cheerful and spiritually fulfilling and lovey-dovey would get dull very quick. It's good to remove the stigma and shame from sex, but I wouldn't like to totally eliminate the idea that sex is dirty. Because it is. Very, very dirty and very, very good.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Sacha,
different worlds, is all I can say to that assumption
Certainly! It's very much a hypothetical situation, though based upon a not-uncommon type of person.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Sacha,
Does not compute. Either the gap is long or it isn't.
Let's assume that opportunities* are independent of current relationship status, which is the hypothesis in question. To make things easier, let's assume that they're reasonably equally distributed in time* *, at a rate of x passes per year: let x=4 for the purposes of argument. Since I mentioned serial monogamists, let's assume that when you do get an opportunity, it results in a reasonably long-term relationship, say 2 years.
Thus, during every two-year relationship, you'd encounter roughly 8 opportunities. But when you're single and looking for a relationship, the only opportunities you get are the ones you take, so you'd remember the three months or so of unhappy singledom with no passes, followed by the start of a relationship. The answer to “Where were they all when I was single?” would be that they're always there, but as soon as you find one, you cease to be single.
It's a fairly artificial model, and doesn't apply to people who like being single or who aren't monogamous, but it's a possible explanation for how some people could think they attract more attention when they're taken even if there were no difference in the (ahem) pass rate.
(* For the sake of this argument I'll define "opportunities" as "occasions where someone you might potentially be interested in expresses some degree of interest in you". I'll omit passes from people you have no interest, since they're not likely to trigger the “Where were they all when I was single?” response.)(* * someone more statistically literate than I might want to comment on the relationship between Poisson distributions and the "it never rains but it pours" effect.)
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
"But I think that older, more experienced men value sexual confidence and forthrightness in a woman."
And I'd go ahead and amend that to "some" more experienced
Sure, I know I'm generalising again. But beyond empirical extrapolation from my own experience and those of some of my friends, I think there is an argument to be made for it, based on certain assumptions and observations.
First, I'm assuming that such a man is looking for an honest and mutually satisfying experience. I hadn't thought about the sort of men who might pursue a coy woman with declarations of eternal love just so he can get a notch on his bedpost: I'm talking about rakes, not cads.
Given that, I'll make the assertion that women who are strong, open-minded, sexually experienced and confident in their own desires make the best lovers. That's partly based on my own experience, which may not be a statistically significant sample (except within certain geographical and demographic domains), and on reading that is admittedly more literary than quantitative, but I wouldn't have thought it to be a monstrously controversial statement.
Finally, I'm not talking about what a man might be looking for in a life partner, since my definition of the word "experienced" kind of presupposes a certain degree of promiscuity.
So, to qualify my original assertion, I'd say that for men looking for an honest, mutually satisfying, but not particularly long-term sexual experience, the more experienced he is the more likely he is to value sexual confidence and forthrightness in a woman.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Emma Hart,
So, while I still attract interest from men even though I’m in a relationship, I don’t really have much to compare it with – especially a fair comparison, because the last time I was single for more than six days I was nineteen.
That would make for difficult comparisons. I guess a lot of the anecdata to support the hypothesis comes from serial monogamists who would generally prefer to be in a relationship. When in a relationship, they note the number of "interested" people that they might have an interest in, and there might be several throughout the duration of the relationship. When single, the passes might come at the same rate, but they might hook up with the first suitable suitor. The first data point ends the experiment, and all they remember is a long lonely gap.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to BenWilson,
I only tell this story to show that even horny straight men can be put off by the wrong approach, even by an attractive woman.
Well yes, YMMV and all that. I think the value of a thread such as this is sharing the range of personal experience and responses, rather than trying to draw conclusions or state universal laws.
Having said that, I'm going to go straight ahead and propose a generalisation. When you say that "even horny straight men can be put off by the wrong approach", I'd amend that to "horny straight inexperienced men can be put off by the wrong approach", if by "wrong" you mean "crudely direct and sexual". You said you were a 19-year-old virgin at the time, and in the same situation I would no doubt have been scared witless too. A combination of performance pressure, a slut-shaming upbringing, the suspicion that it can't be real and an expectation that your first should be special (more generalisations) would naturally make young inexperienced men afraid of such an advance. But I think that older, more experienced men value sexual confidence and forthrightness in a woman.
I remember in my early twenties, after only two or three sexual partners, having a brief fling with a strange but fascinating woman a few years older than me. After our first time in bed, as she was leaving I asked her when we'd see each other again and she said "Maybe not. I only did that because I fancied you, you know." I was shocked: I thought men were supposed to be the shallow ones only interested in one-night stands and physical attractiveness! Women want love and intimacy and kittens and rainbows! Well, I guess you could call that a learning experience, but it still took me a while to understand and relish the reality of some women's raw sexual desire.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to Ross Mason,
Some of them have tattoos. Or so I'm told.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guides:…, in reply to B Jones,
the volume of popular culture that argues that women's availability/desperation is a massive turnoff for men* can't be ignored
Availability and interest can be different things. A woman could be available (i.e. heterosexual, single and not a nun) yet not show any signs of interest or desperation; or could be "taken" and yet show signs of attraction. There are two different questions: is showing signs of explicit interest a turn-off? And: is being in a relationship a turn-off?
I think the first depends a lot on what each party is looking for, how the interest is signalled, and extent of any pre-existing attraction. Signs of desperation are not usually attractive, though that would depend upon what they're after. For me as a card-carrying commitmentphobic slut, a woman who seems in a hurry to settle down would make me run a mile ... and only partly because anyone who thought of me as "potential husband material" would clearly be unhinged. But if someone explicitly said to me "God, I really need someone to [redacted] my [censored] tonight", and I was at least moderately attracted to her, such forthrightness would be a massive turn-on. Confident sexuality is sexy; desperation is not.
As for whether a woman's availability is a turn-off, that becomes more complicated in a polyamorous context, but I tend to feel the opposite way. I usually assume that anyone in a committed relationship would not even look twice at me, so even if I found such a woman highly attractive, the appropriate circuits would just not get switched on. Maybe I've bought into the old cliche that while men will look at anything in a skirt, women are paragons of virtue who only have eyes for their husbands. But if it seems genuinely to be an open relationship, my reaction is usually a raised eyebrow and "tell me more".
To sum up, for those situations where I might be at least moderately attracted to someone in the first place:
Available and interested: A turn-on if they're not after a serious relationship; scary otherwise.
Available and not interested: Sometimes a challenge; sometimes too intimidating. The combination of flirtation and coyness would either exasparate me or drive me mad with desire.
Not available and not interested: Usually straight to the friend zone.
Not available, but interested: Here comes trouble.