Link Banana

Your daily “Whoa! Really?” is an excerpt (from a fascinating excerpt) from Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready!:

“Ladies,” announced Dillow, “sensuality in marriage is godly. Just as a husband and wife experience deep joy as they lose themselves and merge into oneness at the moment of sexual climax, we experience ultimate joy as we become one with Jesus Christ in a union that leads to incomprehensible joy. Sexual intercourse mirrors our relationship to God and causes us to worship him for giving us this good gift.” Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence, she added with a wink, that there is no better time than a long Sunday morning in church to practice your Kegel exercises.

It’s best not to call them all facts, because a lot are just playful space wasters. Still it’s interesting:

6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes.

7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is “quite weird, but it’s science.”

8 Here in the US of A, that kind of stuff ends up on YouTube.

(via clusterflock)

As that rather straight-forward title indicates, the piece from More Intelligent Life is by turns profane and risque. That said it’s also fascinating.

This list, where he names names but gives no details, Keynes organized year-by-year. He was scrupulously honest, too, even in times of sexual famine. For three years running—1903 to 1905—he records no sexual partners; ‘nil,’ he admitted. As he became older, though, the number of his partners increased dramatically, so that for 1911 he lists eight partners (although half of these are probably one-time pick-ups), for 1915 he lists seven, and for 1913 (his highest score) he lists nine different partners. One or two men are repeaters: DG (Duncan Grant), for example, runs throughout.

The other sex diary is more puzzling and, in a way, more informative. An economist to the core, Keynes organized the second sex diary also year-by-year, but this time in quarterly increments.

Unfortunately for us, however, this second sex diary is in code. And as far as I know, no one yet has been prurient enough to crack it.

(via kottke)

Anyone interested “the world’s oldest profession” could have learned something at the recent meeting of the American Economic Association, where Steven Levy and others brought the excitement of the dismal science to the topic.

Almost half of the city’s [Chicago’s] arrests for prostitution take place in just 0.3% of its street corners. The industry is concentrated in so few locations because prostitutes and their clients need to be able to find each other. Earnings are high compared with other jobs. Sex workers receive $25-30 per hour, roughly four times what they could expect outside prostitution. Yet this wage premium seems paltry considering the stigma and inherent risks. Sex without a condom is the norm, so the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) is high. Mr Levitt reckons that sex workers can expect to be violently assaulted once a month. The risk of legal action is low. Prostitutes are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.

Slate’s William Saletan’s got some useful ideas about America’s most controversial legal case.

Today [yesterday actually, because I’m slow], Roe v. Wade is 35 years old. If you’re tired of rehashing the same debate every Jan. 22, here are two ideas that would advance the debate to a better place by this time next year. To pro-choicers: Talk about abortion the way you’ve been talking about teen sex, embracing an ideal number of zero. To pro-lifers: Accept that the best way to advance toward zero is through voluntary prevention.