Sex with sleeping people

The Assange scandal has generated a lot of talk about explicit and implied consent, and sex with sleeping people. I understand that these issues are complicated, but am I really the only one to whom the idea of trying to have sex with a sleeping person is extremely strange even when one does have standing consent?

I was raised with the idea that sleeping people want to sleep, unless they have explicitly asked to wake them up at a specific hour. Also, that we do not wake up sleeping people unless they have asked for it or unless there really is an emergency. Being horny does not constitute an emergency.

Seriously - it had never occurred to me that trying to have sex with a sleeping person - even one who has told me that that he would like to have sex with me in the morning - could result in anything else besides being lectured on bad manners and expelled out of the bed.

"...ribbed and dotted condoms to stimulate you both"

The text above was on a pack of condoms at the grocery store checkout, and it made me wonder: are there really any women who can derive some pleasure (I mean vaginally) from those ribs and dots, or indeed notice them?

Russians and the sexual market theory

Despite having lived in Russia for 16 years, I don't really know that much about the sexual dynamics there. I belonged to a minority with somewhat different sexual dynamics and was raised to believe that having sex with representatives of the majority would result of too much of a culture clash. (I think I did it just once; it resulted in being caught by the camp staff, so we didn't quite even get to the cultural differences, or to the orgasms for that matter. I've done it with some Russians after leaving Russia, but they were raised abroad and therefore quite different.)

Anyway, the sex life of Russian Russians has always been a mystery to me. Lately I have been reading Russian forums, and the mystery did not solve itself, but rather deepened.

There seems to be a belief there, both among the men and the women, that there are much fewer men than women and that the sex market there is a man's market. This is of course not really the case demographically, at least not until 40, but that's what they seem to believe.

How exactly do they reconcile the idea that you must get a man right now or else you'll run out of them real soon with the idea that of course the man has to pay for the privilege?

On a somewhat-related note: I have met many Russians (ethnic and otherwise) who have told me that they would really like to be me (in the sense of living alone in the city). The Finns and the Americans who express the preference for lone city living tend to - surprise - actually live alone and in the city. Russians express this preference more often than Finns or Americans, but for some reason don't do it that much.

Open relationships and celebrities

The whole Tiger Woods scandal made me wonder:

Why do so few celebrities negotiate themselves an open relationship? OK, some of them might be in love with someone special who doesn't agree to it, but what's up with the rest?

I know that open relationships are not for everyone, of course. I also know that monogamy is so much of an assumption in our culture that even most of the people who'd prefer an open relationship probably do not raise the subject with their partners.

Somebody like Tiger Woods, however, has more than enough sexual market value to negotiate himself an open relationship should he want one. He didn't, however.

For a while I wondered whether an open relationship would be a scandal as such, and whether this is the reason it is so uncommon among the celebrities. Guess not. I had to turn to Wikipedia to see if there are any celebrity couples in open marriages (more recent than Sartre and de Beauvoir). Yes, there are. Very few. I don't remember any of them being any kind of public scandal.

So, what prevents the guys who want to have sex with a lot of women and have the means to do so from finding wives who'd let them do so without any scandal?

On sex and/or relationships with friends

Most of the people I know find sex and relationship partners among their friends and acquaintances. As far as I can see with is the case for my friends in Helsinki, my childhood friends in Boston, my parents' childhood friends in St. Petersburg, and my grandparents. (Although I do know some people who have found their partners as strangers in the bars or on some Net dating service, and they seem happy enough.)

However, the people claiming that once a man is friends with a woman he has no chance are so numerous, that probably somewhere out there there must be a place (geographical or social) where this is in fact the case. I am just curious: where is it?

The Game

Lots of people seem to be writing about "the game" nowadays, meaning the techniques allowing the men to pick up more women. The idea is probably useful; the actual advice ranges from useful to ridiculous; the writers range from people who sound like they more or less know what they are talking about to people who are pick-up experts in the same sense as a guy who is always in trouble with his residence permit is an immigration expert (I know one of those, too).

The purpose of this post is not to bash the male sex as such for inventing silly rules for picking up women. Embarrassingly enough women were there first, at least in modern times, with The Rules and similar books, and I can't say that the quality of advice was any better when written by women and for women.

One of the main points that the male pickup advisers make is to never take any advice from a woman, because they are all lying or don't really know what they want anyway. If you want to heed this advice, stop reading this post now.

If you are still reading: take this with a grain of salt, anyway, because this is obviously seen through the lens of my life experience, and people in other places might behave very differently from the educated classes of Helsinki, Finland.

Also: I don't actively pick up women, so these are just the thoughts that came to me from watching men pick me up, or pick my friends up in my presence.

First of all, about "women don't know what they want: they want X, but not too much of X". Well, duh! Many qualities are distributed on a bell curve, and many people don't like the extremes of the curve in many cases.

Second, even though this sounds like an instruction on picking me up, it's not really meant as such, and just written on the reasonable assumption that I am definitely not unique.

Basically, there are only two really useful things in picking me up: a) be somebody whom I already know and b) be very attractive physically. A and B and interchangeable to an extent; a well-liked friend can well end up in my bed just by being reasonably cute, and a very beautiful stranger can have the familiarity requirement waived, but if you are neither attractive not previously known to me, just forget it.

There have been exceptions to this, when I was in the mood for experimenting and very young and very bored at the same time. The experimental mood is hard to detect, but you might want to find somebody young and really bored.

Familiarity has its degrees, as does attractiveness. My taste is farther out than most, but they all differ a bit. Remember that if women rate you on a 1-10 attractiveness scale some of them will give you a couple more points than you would receive on average. I don't know how one would go around finding them, though.

Being nice and decent doesn't help much, although failing to do so will hurt. The reason it doesn't help much is that everyone else is nice and decent, too. You are competing against the pool of my single friends and acquaintances, every one of whom is nice and decent. They are intelligent, too.

Sense of humor? Not a big plus, because I suspect all humans have it.

If I am up for casual sex, especially for casual sex with a man I don't know very well, the single thing I hate the most is drama. The worst thing you can show is drama potential. (Oh well, you can turn out to be the new Pol Pot, but I guess this also counts as drama potential.) Any man who makes me suspect that having sex with him once and failing to do so the second time will result in screaming, major depression or broken kitchenware is immediately off the list.

Here is where confidence enters the play. If you are planning on casual sex with me, especially if you don't know me well, you should sound like my "yes" or "no" is not a big deal to you, and if it is "yes", then a subsequent "no" the next time is not a big deal either. Any hint of worshiping is not good.

Negativity is not good either, if you don't know me well. Negativity in general only works with people who know you don't really mean it. Very light negativity might work with strangers, but most people, myself included, don't know how to apply it.

Too much confidence is a bad thing too. This is kind of difficult to notice, because it becomes a bad thing very easily and I am not likely to express it, I just withdraw. (My failure, not yours.) My manner with the people I don't know well is rather gentle; it is a kind of a so-called "shit test": if a guy interprets gently expressed movie/bar/restaurant preference as something he does not have to listen to and compromise with, he is out. (With people whom I know well it's different, we can play tug-of-war with those things.)

As for "being an asshole", which is a misnomer, since said behaviors don't always understand assholicity: ignoring me every once in a while is quite healthy, although this can be and has been overdone. Flirting (and having sex) with other women has practically no effect on me (and I know it's quite unusual). Trying to order me around... well, so far nobody dared.

Basically, be somebody I know, or somebody attractive, otherwise your chances are low. And don't overdo things.

One more thing, but I am not sure how common it is, even in my own circle: early hours of the morning is a really bad time to pick me up. That's the time when I don't usually want anyone, even familiar and attractive. Evening is much better.

Only live performances, please

Just as you think that there is some limit to human stupidity, the government of Ahvenanmaa surprises you. They banned all the officials from staying in the hotels that offer porn channels on their TVs.

Yes, they do realize that this leaves very few hotels outside Sweden (Sweden has a list of porn-free hotels). But do they realize how expensive a live performance is in comparison with those TV channels?

I feel sorry for the officials having to reserve their hotel rooms. "Hi, I am Mårån Idiotsson from Ahvenanmaa Self-Righteous Prick Office. I would like to reserve a single room from May 5th till May 8th. But first of all: do you have porn channels in your rooms?"

Somehow I have a feeling that whoever wrote this policy is having a good laugh thinking about exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, this might be a conspiracy by the porn video manufacturers. Or prostitutes. Or tent and camping equipment manufacturers.

Just don't tell them that there is some porn somewhere on the Internet. They'll ban laptops for sure.

Now that's what I call a real gay capital!

Tel Aviv has long been known as the gay capital of the Middle East, but I did not know that they fuck so hard that they cause earthquakes.

That fills me with so much ethnic pride... Go Israelis!

They don't write about sexual market value like they used to

Some years ago a lot of people used to write about the sexual market value theory. They were, for the most part, rather entertaining about it. A lot of other people used to disapprove.

The basic idea of the sexual market value theory is that some people are more sexually desirable than others (to the members of their preferred sex on average), that some features are more desirable than others, on average, and that the more desirable people tend to be able to find more desirable partners.

The idea is simple, and intuitively understandable to most people. There is a fair amount of fun in discussing the details, if one is so inclined.

A lot of people seem to object to the idea, for fairly obvious emotional reasons. First of all, it's nice to think that one is loved for one's true self, whatever that means, rather than pay attention to the fact that before your current, former or prospective partners really start paying attention to your true self for sexual or romantic purposes they have already preselected you on a number of rather more mundane features: height, weight, age, social class, where you live, whether or not you smoke, etc., etc. Second, even a person who does not mind the idea of sexual market value as such usually prefers to overestimate his or her own sexual market value, and does not particularly enjoy hearing exactly which of his or her own features are not deemed desirable by prospective partners.

It's quite understandable for some people to write about sexual market value theory, and for some other people to answer "you evil, evil shallow person! how can you be so cynical!".

This really should not, however, be the same person in the same blog post. Or even in the same blog, if the whole blog is dedicated to the sexual market value theory. And this is what I keep seeing lately. Don't these people understand how pathetic they sound?

It's often fun to pronounce ugly truths, and fun to read people who do so, but people who do so should at least exhibit a bit of self-ironic detachment when they notice that the same ugly truths apply to themselves (or, failing that, pretend that they did not notice). As opposed to puzzlement and/or moral outrage.

For a couple examples (links not given to protect the guilty):

1. A man in his forties (IIRC) finds out that various sexual market commodities can be exchanged one for another, more particularly that a fortyish man who is a lot richer than average can find 20-year-old women a lot easier than average. He moves to a relatively poor Asian country on a first-world income and proceeds to do so, much to the understandable (but IMO unjustified) disapproval of the young guys in the new country and the middle-aged women in the old one.

So far, so good. But then the man in question, who keeps extolling the various virtues of young women is totally, completely baffled when he sees middle-aged women who prefer younger men. "Why?" - he asks. "What do they find in them?"

2. Another man keeps going on about younger women, too. Again, understandable. But then he writes a whole post full of moral outrage about older women who try to pick up younger men. "What are they trying to prove?" The post contains a picture of woman who is otherwise reasonably good looking according to the author, but whose upper arm definitely shows her age (or lack of workout). In the same post he accuses those women of shallowness.

3. A guy does not like fat women. Fine, no surprise here, most people prefer thinner partners.

Then he finds a statistic saying that newly-married women in their teens and early twenties gain 24 pounds during their first 5 years of marriage, whereas men gain 30. Dismissing the men's weight gain as unimportant (because he thinks women don't or shouldn't really care), he proceeds to exhibit moral outrage with the wives for being inconsiderate to the desires of their husbands and therefore ugly inside as well as outside.

This is funny enough in and of itself, but the same guy has also previously expressed the opinion that women who lose weight to please men are shallow.

Oy vey. "Myötähäpeä" is a really good Finnish word that English unfortunately lacks.

Why does an elephant have four feet?

...because he would look stupid with six inches.

In fact an elephant has a lot more that four feet. His dick is longer than his legs, which must be rather inconvenient.

I was on vacation in Amsterdam last week - more about it later, with pictures - and visited a zoo there. I was considering visiting a sex show in the red light district, but they turned out to have one in the zoo, too.

Here are the pictures. I have some videos, too. Foreplay, more foreplay, sex and more sex.

The poor guy had so much trouble finding his way in that it's no wonder that they are endangered. Although this particular couple had a little elephant running around them, so I guess they must have managed to do it properly at least once.

But hey, what a huge dick...