Well, more or less about sex, anyhow. Sex, gender, and so on.

First off we have this article about how polyandry might be more common than previously thought.

Polyandry is, of course, the fraternal twin to polygamy. It is the practice of women being able to marry more than one man, and in the survey of world cultures, it is considered to be extremely rare.

It is certainly rare compared its twin polygamy, where men can have multiple wives. But it should be stressed that both of those are relatively rare compared with single marriage as we recognize it in most of the world today.

Regardless, according to the article, there seems to be some evidence that polyandry exists in a larger number of societies than previously thought, and this merits attention.

Conventional wisdom has held that polyandry was rare because men are inherently jealous and aggressive and domineering, and would never consent to share a wife except under the strangest of situations.

But that would suggest that men are more jealous than women, and I think one would have trouble establishing this as true in any non-anecdotal sense.

Myself, I have always considered the tendency of human societies to enter a polygamous phase to be an evolutionary throwback to our more primitive arboreal primate ancestry. We are still, weakly, a “hareming” species. Our pair-bonding mode is very strong (that’s why we fall in love, after all) but it is a fairly recent evolutionary addition, and our previous mode, where dominant males collect harems of females and guard them zealously, is always there, waiting in the wings.

And the evolutionary argument is simple. One male impregnates many females, his genes are spread further than with a single pair-bond.

So where does that leave polyandry? My guess would be that it evolves in societies where death during childbirth causes the number of males to outstrip the number of females by enough of a margin that young men are willing to share a wife because half a wife is better than none.

We also must keep in mind that in a lot of less advanced societies, the link between sex and paternity is not as well understood as it is in the modern world. The idea of one father per baby is one that is relatively recent, and a lot of these societies barely grasp that sex and babies have anything to do with one another, let alone grasp that each baby has a single father.

And speaking of babies, here is a hilarious story of religious excess from the world of Islam.

Seems that last year, some ambitious imam decided to suggest in a television interview that baby girls should have to wear the burka.

And predictably enough, the world went apeshit over the very suggestion, which I find quite interesting. It shows the power of our taboo against putting sexuality and children in the same context at all that the reaction to this notion, which to my mind does not seem any loonier than a lot of other religious practices, was so universal and vehement.

The guy sited worry about the molestation of babies, which is a curious thing to worry about. I hardly imagine there has been an epidemic of baby groping in the Islamic cultural world to justify such a move.

Although I have to wonder… if the only recognizable, unbagged female forms that are around for males in these societies to imprint upon are preteens, that could plausibly be linked to a rise in interest in preteen females. Sexuality tends to seek the “closest thing available”, after all.

So maybe this foolhardy fellow had a point. Maybe all this sticking girls in a bag the minute they show any sexually stimulating characteristics is leading to a rise in child molestation.

Of course, from a Western standpoint, the obvious solution would be to let the girls out of the damn bags and let the primacy of appropriate sexual response sort things out.

But that would be letting common sense into the room.

And speaking of common sense as it fails to be applied to human sexuality, let’s talk about the tragedy of the media freaking out about little kids touching each other’s bathing suit areas.

Apparently, at some preschool in Carson, California, some little girl was caught with her mouth on the penis of a little boy, and people are, predictably, freaking out over it.

Pedophilia is the moral panic of our age, and as is always the case with moral panics of the past, the main motive force is the public’s appetite for occasions to enjoy the thrill of being shocked and titillated while also engaging in the fun ritual of everyone assuring everyone else that they are “normal” and “not at all like that” and that “those people” are nothing like us good, normal, wholesome people.

As such, the pathology of a moral panic always follows the same route as any thrill-seeking and addictive decadence. It seeks larger and larger doses of the stimulus. But unlike traditional decadence, moral panic also contains a pressure to lower the threshold for offense which works in the opposite direction.

This is how you end up with the Edwardian sex panic and women wearing a dozen layers of clothing in order to conceal any trace of femininity, or for that matter, the burka.

This all said, I do not quite agree with the Jezebel commentator’s stand that this is just children innocently exploring one another’s bodies. It might be that, but it might be… worse.

See, investigators into child abuse know that one of the signs of sexual abuse of children is that the child is sexually precocious, in other words, that the child seems to know a lot more about sex than would be normal for someone their age.

So I would have to ask, who taught this girl about oral sex? Usually, with the little ones, you get touching and rubbing and that is about it.

So there might be something there for people to be angry about after all.

And with that happy thought, I sign off for today.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write about this topic, as interesting as it is, but then, completely by chance, I decided to watch an episode of Family Guy with today’s lunch, and lo and behold, which episode should come up but this rather on-topic one.

Well I can take a hint when the universe is sufficiently blunt and obvious about it. Time to talk about parallel universes and, more specifically, this article about the real people who claim to be from them.

The star of the story is Lenina Garcia, a Spanish woman, a well-educated professional, 41 years old, who woke up one morning in a world subtly different from the one she knew.

For example, she went to work to find that she was in a different department than the one she had been in when she went to bed, and had no memory of ever having switched.

Other things were different too. She found out she was still in a relationship with someone that she thought of as her ex-boyfriend. (Man, that’s got to be a kick in the cunt.) Nobody remembered her going in for surgery on her shoulder. There were clothes in her closet that she did not remember buying.

All in all, a very strange and disturbing to happen to the poor woman, regardless of the origin. Nothing in her story absolutely rules out some form of fairly specific retrograde amnesia, possibly brought on by a mild stroke. She says herself that it as if she lost five months of her life, months that she does not remember but everyone else remembers her living.

That is pretty much what would happen if she had a stroke that disconnected five months of her memory from conscious access. Again, that would be a suspiciously specific amount of time to result from a random stroke, especially considering that it did not, according to the story, result in any other symptoms, like loss of motor control or an atypical epilepsy.

And of course, the idea that she came from a parallel universe is a much more interesting theory.
The idea that this is all some big hallucination due to stress is something I reject out hand as simply absurd. People have far less complicated and subtle stress reaction disorders.

But as a big time science fiction nerd, I would remiss if I did not at least take a poke at the idea that this poor woman actually did, somehow, switch alternate realities and end up in the wrong one.

Being an absentminded dreamer who often wonders what reality he is in myself, this seems all too plausible. I have had very vivid dreams where it seemed like I was living someone else’s life, and when I wake up, it takes me some time to remember who I really am, and what is truly real.

Truly, being me is one freaky ass trip sometime, and I suppose it would be at least somewhat cool to find out I have been exploring alternate universes in my sleep.

But somehow, I think the drugs have more to do with it.

Anyhow, back to Lenina Garcia (aren’t Spanish names gorgeous?). Suppose this poor woman did genuinely hop universes somehow. Why would it happen in her sleep? Perhaps in sleep, we all wander.

We don’t notice because, well, we always come back.

So that would imply that Lenina’s fate is some sort of cosmic accident. But if so, who (or what) screwed up? If this sort of thing is possible, one must ask what force it is that makes it so that a trillion times out of a trillion and one, we all get back into our right bodies in the morning?

Is there some sort of super rare cosmic weather system that makes the membrane between parallel universes permeable enough to allow for such mistakes?

Perhaps it is more common than people realize, but most of the people to whom it happens never say anything and just adjust the best they can to their new lives.

Maybe most of the time, the differences are so small and subtle that we just assume the problem is our faulty memories and gloss over it and get on with our lives.

Or maybe there truly is a super rare form of mental illness that results in this sort of delusion. That is also pretty unlikely and interesting in its own right. The closest thing I can think of to it would be the phenomenon known as fugue state, where a person loses all memory of their lives, wanders off in a daze, and creates a new life for themselves, only to suddenly remember who they really are months or even years later.

That one I can see as a result of unprocessed stress. Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like if they just left everything they knew behind and went someplace where nobody knew them and just starter their whole lives over with a new identity?

Just hit the reset button on life, and see if you can do better the second time around!

So I can imagine how, as a result of deep psychological pressures locked away in someone’s subconscious mind that they simply cannot, for whatever reason, let surface consciously, the person’s mind might become overloaded and use the unusual route of a fugue state to resolve the tension.

But just forgetting five months of your life? I would have to know what happened five months before the onset of the amnesia that marked it as somehow special in Lenina’s life.

Maybe she wanted to go back to a time before some certain even happened and was willing to forget everything that happened since then to accomplish it?

That does not strike me as very likely. Again, there are much simpler stress reaction disorders, like for instance total fatigue, that are far more common.

Oh well, time to transport myself into the alternate universe where I am done writing for today.

Seeya later folks!

Time to share some of the stuff that is clogging up my browser and has yet to find a home in one blog post or another, but which I can’t bear to just throw away.

In other words, this is the sort of post I do to prevent myself from becoming a link hoarder. I am pretty sure I could never be a hoarder not because I am any good at being neat and organized and minimalist or anything. I totally am not.

It’s just that I do not get very emotionally attached to objects, and so I have no problem throwing stuff away or giving it away if it becomes a hassle.

Anyhow, on with the links!

First off, there is this interesting piece about the simultaneous rise and fall of Wikipedia.

On the one hand, Wikipedia has never been bigger, better, more comprehensive, more trusted, more used, or more ubiquitous in our lives. It is the reference desk of the Internet, the go-to repository for all human knowledge for the entire human race. I cannot over-stress how amazing, important, and powerful that is. Wikipedia is beyond the dreams of scholars past and truly represents a new frontier in human thought and human understanding.

But, as the article points out, the original concept of Wikipedia as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” has mostly been eclipsed by the realities of human nature and Internet life.

Theoretically, anyone can still edit and contribute, but when you combine the stringent rules that they have had to implement to keep quality up and more important to keep the random defacers out, and then add the very real possibility of having your contributions rejected by the community for not meeting its standards or covered in other people’s edits, it is no wonder that actual number of contributors has declined sharply over the years.

And that is not even getting into the fact that human knowledge is, in fact, finite, and therefore over the years fewer contributions are actually needed. Eventually, it is all in there, more or less, and it is harder for a potential contributor to find an area that is not already covered.

So all that is needed is people to update the entries that are open to updating, and that will always take far fewer people than the initial rush of documentation did.

But that does not make Wikipedia worse. It is still the most amazing knowledge tool ever. I Wiki thinks all the time.

It just does not require millions of participants any longer.

On a completely different note, a man walking his dog on the beach discovered something which might be worth nearly 100,000 pounds, or about $155K in Canadian bucks.

But it was not a golden treasure chest or a casque of ancient brandy.

It was a big lump of ambergris, otherwise known as whale puke. And it’s worth a fortune.

That is because, hard to believe as it might be, it is highly sought after by perfume makers, who use it as the base for (I assume) very expensive perfumes.

See, here’s the thing. I knew about ambergris. I knew what it was and where it came from and what it was used for. It did not even surprise me that it was worth money.

But the picture in the article seems to imply that this find is around the size of a standard turtle, and that implies that the stuff is worth more than truffles or gold.

So even if it took only a tiny bit to make perfume more wonderful, I am guessing you will not find any of it in your cheap bottles of Lady Brut.

Surely, we have an artificial substitute by now.

Sticking with the animal kingdom, we have this, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad for this year.

Awwwwwwwww! That just about melted my heart and made me cry. Budweiser did something amazing and made a one minute horse movie for men and it totally, totally works.

And yes, as the Jezebel article where I got the link says, it is obvious and cheaply manipulative and designed entirely to pull at your heartstrings in order to make your beer money come out.

But I do not care. Sure, it is obvious. So are horse movies for chicks. And it’s predictable, but they cleverly counter that by having it all happen so quickly and smoothly that your cynicism and jadedness can’t quite keep up.

Sure, you know what is going to happen, but it doesn’t matter, because you are looking forward to it and the ad does not give you a chance to get bored.

Of course, I am gay, and an animal lover, so I might be easier to engage on this subject than your average manly heterosexual type.

But I don’t think so. Men have their sentimental side too, and I bet this ad will go over like gangbusters with the beer crowd.

And hey, chicks watch the Super Bowl too. And they will fall for this ad like the Berlin Wall.

I am not sure it will make people want beer, but what the hell, you can’t have everything. Some ads are more about the brand than the product.

And this certainly will give people a warm happy feeling about the Budweiser brand and their iconic Clydesdale horses in general.

And often people buy the product that makes them feel good. See : politics.

Lastly, I think I might have linked this before, but it bears repeating : this is totally my favorite Bad Lip Read that they have done recently.

Something about it just works better than their usual stuff. Maybe because the quick cuts let them do more with context than their usual “so random LOL” type humour, which gets old pretty fast.

I think my favorite moment is “I encompass, and I eclipse. ” It’s just so magnificently unexpected after all the goofy random crap. It really takes the comedy to the next level.

And that level is where genius lives.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!