Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all…ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust. – Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade
One year ago today I published “Election Day”, which told of the prohibitionist persecution by power-mad perverts which eternally accompanies the approach of elections in the U.S. And while we do have one story of such a politically-motivated campaign of mass victimization today, the real unifying feature of this column is the frustrated male need for sex.
A Whore in the Bedroom (September 9th, 2010)
In this column I suggested that many a marriage would be happier if the wife were to be a bit more understanding of her husband’s sexual needs; I stated that “ignorant modern women not only feel that husbands should be satisfied with whatever sexual pickings their wives choose to dole out, however meager or restricted, but also refuse to understand that a starving man will seek food elsewhere if it isn’t available at home…If [accommodating his needs] seems too difficult, you can certainly just keep on the course you’ve set, but if your relationship hits the rocks solely because you couldn’t be bothered to tend the wheel there is nobody to blame but yourself.” I’m sure at least a few female readers felt I was overstating the importance of this;
…Kristina Dzara at Southern Illinois University…in her article, Assessing the Effect of Marital Sexuality on Marital Disruption…used the Marriage Matters Panel Survey of Newly Wed Couples that followed over 1000 couples in Louisiana from 1998 to 2004…The author used three measures of sexuality in the first three to six months of marriage — frequency of sexual intercourse, sexual satisfaction, and agreement between spouses about their sex life. Dzara used these measures to predict divorce by the 5th year of marriage. As we know, there are a lot of factors can contribute to divorce — marital quality, early marriage, cohabitation and many more. In order to get a better understanding of the effects of sexuality in marriage, the author controlled for many of these other factors.
…On average these young couples had intercourse between one and several times a week, but frequency didn’t seem to matter…For wives, satisfaction with physical intimacy decreased the likelihood of divorce, but overall marital quality and satisfaction with intimacy appeared to have the same effect. In other words, marital quality and satisfaction with sex could not be teased apart for wives…[However,] the probability of divorce is dramatically reduced when husbands report being sexually satisfied. Dzara writes, “a couple with a husband who has the highest self-rated satisfaction with physical intimacy, compared to a husband with the lowest self-rated satisfaction with physical intimacy, decreases their odds of experiencing a marital disruption by around 83.7%.” Overall, husbands’ satisfaction with physical intimacy is a stronger influence on divorce than any other measure in this study.
Somewhat surprisingly, agreement between husbands and wives about their sex life did not seem to have much influence on their likelihood of divorce. “Agreement about one’s sex life” may be bound up with many other factors of agreement. In short, sex seems to matter to healthy marriages — not too big of a surprise. For wives, satisfaction with physical intimacy and marital satisfaction seem to be rolled into one overall factor. Not so for men. When men report being satisfied with their marriage, this reduces their likelihood for divorce, and if they also report being sexually satisfied, then divorce is even more unlikely…
I didn’t really need a scientific study to tell me this, but validation is always welcome.
The Camel’s Nose (October 2nd, 2010)
The second part of this column discusses the case of “a man so sexually frustrated that all judgment and basic respect for others flies out the window, completely superseded by the need for sexual gratification through a perverse fantasy of sexually violating a woman unnoticed.” To be precise, he masturbated into a woman’s water bottle and was apparently surprised when she figured it out. Nor is he alone in either his filthiness or his stupidity, as reported in this October 6th AP article:
…Anthony Garcia admitted he tainted a sample of the yogurt he was handing out at Sunflower Market (in Albuquerque, New Mexico) in January. He also admitted putting some of his semen on a plastic spoon that he placed with the yogurt. Garcia then approached a female customer and offered her a sample…The woman told police that after tasting the sample, she spit on the floor several times and wiped her mouth on the garment she was wearing to get the taste out of her mouth. Investigators collected samples of the woman’s spit from the floor and took the garment she was wearing as evidence…Garcia was linked to the yogurt through DNA samples…[but] lied to investigators about the case…Garcia faces up to three years of imprisonment to be followed by three years of supervised release. He has been in federal custody since his arrest in July, and remained detained pending his sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.
Something Rotten in Sweden (November 13th, 2010)
Last November I predicted that “more and more prohibitionists would shift to the Swedish rhetoric in order to capitalize on “human trafficking” hysteria, deflect arguments based on women’s right to control our own bodies and win the support of fence-sitters and even some misguided whores.” Police departments have been especially enthusiastic about “end demand” rhetoric because it allows them to attack other men instead of women, thus pumping up their male egos by denying women agency and feeding their “pimps and hos” masturbatory fantasies while simultaneously avoiding criticism of their violence against sex workers and allowing them the pretense of “saving victims” when they’re actually persecuting adults for private behavior. Early last month, police departments across the U.S. staged a joint victimization campaign against clients; here’s an October 11th story from the Chicago Tribune:
Cook County sheriff’s officers…took part in a nationwide prostitution sting…that netted more than 200 arrests – most of which were of men soliciting sex acts…Dubbed “The National Day of Johns Arrest,” the crackdown involved police in eight different jurisdictions targeting commercial sex on streets, in brothels and over the internet, according to a statement from the sheriff’s department, which said the enforcement action was the first nationally coordinated operation of its kind. According to the statement, the pilot program is expected to be the first of several national sweeps to be aimed primarily at men who seek out prostitutes and who are increasingly seen by law enforcement as the true perpetrators of the sex trade, rather than the women who are often economically desperate or the victims of pimps. In addition to the three Chicago-area departments, police in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Cincinnati and Newport News, Va., participated. All told, the various departments arrested 233 people – 216 of them men seeking to patronize a prostitute – and levied $238,000 in fines…The action was conducted in conjunction with the Hunt Alternatives Fund, a Massachusetts-based social foundation that is attempting to combat demand for commercial sex and sex trafficking in the United States.
