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Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

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Lillian Faderman

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“One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?”

ScienceSexSocietyBehaviorFood For ThoughtBiology
Book:The Selfish Gene
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“Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in.”

SexCosmic Oversight
Book:Catch-22
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“His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in.”

SexCosmic Oversight
Book:Catch-22
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“Trust was the sexual clincher for Dolores Alexander, the once-married early NOW member from chapter 3. "Once I had had sex with a woman," says Alexander "it was mind-blowing, it was so much better than with men. [My sexuality] just never became a question, I just stayed there. The issue was trust. I felt I could trust women so much more than I could ever trust a man. You are dealing on a truly peer level with women and you are not with men - or at least I wasn't.”

LoveSexGayLesbianBisexual
Book:Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics
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“Sex and love with robots. A bit amazing, fantastic, inconceivable, nevertheless, imaginable and scientifically explainable. Nowadays you can disclaim this idea because of a scientific fiction, but you cannot argue that it is completely incredible and contradicts human sexuality and romantic experience. As it is known, whatever you experience, you experience due to what is going on in the brain. Your physical contact with the partner’s body is nothing more than merely a physiological act, sending signals to the brain. Without the signals that cause neurochemical activity in the brain, your sexual contact cannot give you any sexual experience on its own. Your brain has been automatically programmed before this contact concerning which kind of natural design of the partner’s body can send more intense signals to your brain, which, in turn, enable it to experience stronger sexual pleasure. The direct cause of your sexual experience is your brain program, your sexual partner’s body, from which you derive sexual pleasure, is just indirect cause of it. Orgasm occurs in the brain, but not in any part of the body. Now imagine higher technological progress than ours. High bioengineering allows us to construct artificial robots similar to us — which have artificial ‘flesh and blood’ that is indistinguishable by your sense organs. When you get in physical contact with her ‘body’, your brain program could discern nothing artificial there. The same input signals, as if there is nothing artificial, and the brain would automatically begin to satisfy its sexual desires. However, there would be a fundamental difference — an artificial partner would exist absolutely adequate to your will. Visually, ‘she’ would be the living embodiment of your dreams. Neuroengineering would allow us to construct ‘her’ brain and through it also her conscious mind and personality, as you would like them to be. An ideal personality for you. It would be like that you say to do something and she would do, or you say don’t, and she wouldn’t. However, there wouldn’t be any direct control. You would control only her brain program, her unconscious and conscious mind, delete unwished episodes from her brain. She wouldn’t know that she is a robot, as you couldn’t know, if you were a robot. She would think that she is the same as you, having free will, being capable of thinking, feeling, expressing herself, controlling her behavior, and so on, and so forth. It would be possible to program her brain against leaving or killing you, so in that context you future would be guaranteed. The ideal personality, the ideal physical appearance — welcome to heaven, but only for those who have a lot of money. Unfortunately, even in the cyber-future, those who would be short of money would have to content themselves with biosocial robots in hell, as most of us do now.”

LoveSexBrainPersonalityScience FictionRobot
Author:Elmar Hussein
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