In progress...

So, my regular readers (I found out recently that I actually have regular readers!) may have noticed I have repeatedly promised an indepth essay on capitalism, I have said at least once that it would be my next post, and I keep posting other stuff.

Well, it really is in progress.  I've written a lot of it.  But there is a lot more to go, and I decided not to start posting the finished ones until the entire thing is finished.

In the meantime - since I am saving each section in my drafts folder - I discovered a whole bunch of stuff I wrote, sometimes years ago, and for reasons I can't even guess at, I never posted. 

I'm going to start posting those, while I work on my biggest writing project to date.


Oh, and by the way - if you read 5 Years Later and Not A Great Start to the New Year, and you were wondering if I was still in a bad place... noooo.  I am not.  Not even a little.  A very very good place right now. 
I don't want to get into it too much here - its very exciting, its very mutual, but its also very new and we all know my patterns.  I can't be objective. 
As far as I can tell thus far, there is real potential, and regardless of how it turns out I am having a hell of a fun time in the moment.  If you remember, way way back, New Year's (2009); I honestly did not think it would be possible - I mean, literally, physically possible - to top that experience.  Well, it turns out it is.

Wearing the Skirt

Been thinking a bit recently about gender.

Thanks, primarily, of all things, to being more active on Facebook than I've ever been.

Which exposed me to:

http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm

(A ruler can only lead with the consent of at least most of the people. Women make up slightly more than half of the population. Sure, today institutions are set up that hold the status quo, but how did it get this way in the first place? This is a pretty plausible theory of how and it puts a lot of other stuff into a different perspective too.)

and this

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tabathaleggett/lego-just-got-told-off-by-a-7-year-old-girl

(I'm afraid the larger issue is that we all assume the standard lego person is male. The standard lego person looks like this:

which has no features which indicate gender.
Kind of like when cartoons give a female animal character long hair or eye lashes, lipstick, or (human type) breasts - even if she isn't a mammal - because if a cartoon animal just looks like an animal "obviously" it must be male(??)
It goes way deeper than corporations and marketing. We have all internalized it. Even the girl who wrote the letter.)

and then this



www.buzzfeed.com/marietelling/this-powerful-video-shows-men-what-it-feels-like-to-be-subje

(Overall, this was great. I love that it was made, and I hope some of the guys who treat women so disrespectfully see it, and it gets through... There is one problem I have with this video though - the last scene perpetuates a belief, shared by almost everyone, which is based more on misogyny than fact.
The guy really was "asking for it" when he yelled back at the gang members. Not because of how he was dressed or any signals he gave off, but because he YELLED BACK AT GANG MEMBERS!...
every male above about the age of 13 who lives in an area with street crime knows that doing that will get the shit beat out of you.  Because the reality is that men are the victims of violent crime by strangers over 1/3 more often (down from twice as often a couple decades ago). What any male with even an ounce of street smarts does when a group of 4 dangerous looking teens starts harassing him verbally is ignore it, let it go, and continue with his life. Sometimes women yell or insult them back - and the reason they think this is ok is because most of the time they can get away with it - almost all men, even the low life scum who look for excuses to attack strangers, have internalized the (sexist) rule of "never hit a woman".
But then, in the few instances where it does escalate to violence - and despite the fact that it escalates to violence more often with men - we take those examples and pretend it proves that women are disproportionately victims. It isn't because the statistics actually support it. Its because our misogynist society starts out with the premise that women are victims as a given, and then looks for the evidence to support it.)

followed by this

http://imgur.com/a/RmAjE

(It may be true, as far as it goes - but I can think of more than a couple examples where the FriendZoner does choose to go out with the guy who WOULD take advantage of her when she's drunk, or who WON'T listen to her when she is upset. As though she is only attracted to people she wouldn't actually be friends with. Not saying it is universal, but it seems to be pretty common. She might even be even be attracted to The Nice Guy - if only he acted like more of a jerk. That doesn't make her an evil bitch. But it does maybe make her judgement a little suspect.)

and then, finally this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html

(I can say, for me personally, I feel no pressure to fit a masculine role, but I have experienced what it talks about first hand - it could easily have been about my marriage. And it was mostly her; she wanted equality and friendship in principal, but was attracted to the jerk who didn't respect women. It looks a lot to me like what I was talking about earlier about the Nice Guy not being sexually attractive by virtue of being a nice guy - that makes him seem like a brother, which is anti-sexy... If it is because of societal expectations and gender roles, then why do lesbian couples experience the exact same patterns?)

all of which, of course, I had comments on, usually lengthy (compared to a typical online comment) and most of which drew responses from others, which in turn got me thinking even more.

I feel like there is a bit of a common theme running beneath the surface, one which is touched on, or at least alluded to, by things I've written before

 (like  Sexual Dimorphism, and Caveman Love,  
FemDom vs. Feminism: Power doesn't come from penetration,
The Oldest Profession,   and 
What does our gut reaction to the word "rape" say about our subconscious beliefs about women's agency?  )

but is never really spelled out explicitly, mainly because even I take the world as it is for granted, and even though I actually have thought about this in the same terms before, I didn't actually remember in the moments I was writing any of those.

Its nothing particularly revolutionary - in fact, it seems it should be obvious, and I'm sure many others have thought of, and have written about the same thing, but it still seems to escape our daily consciousness, even people whose primary focus in life it these sort of issues.

I had been trying to pin down what exactly it is that I don't like about the word feminism, why I prefer "egalitarianism", for several months now.  It isn't just that all people should be treated fairly and with respect - I think it's totally valid that any group which has disproportionate challenges in society get more focus in order to change that.  And its not just that using the root "fem" to apply to females implies that all women are (or should be) "feminine", which is a social construct to which not all females conform (so does feminism not aim to help them?).

The last of the essays I read finally helped solidify what it actually is...

Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, the focus was on allowing women to participate in democracy.  Around the time of world war II (due to necessity) women entered the work force in large numbers and after, due partly to that, partly to politics, and partly to technology, women were more and more free to be something other than a house wife, even if they got married.  In the 50s and 60s there was a struggle to change American culture to allow women to wear pants - and while that success has become so common place that its a complete non-issue today, the phrase taken from that transition still has the same meaning today - if a woman "wears the pants" in the relationship, it means she is the head of the household.

We've come a really really long way in allowing a woman complete freedom to choosing any role in life that she is capable of and interested in, even though we aren't quite all there yet - there are still some roles in the military that are closed off by gender, regardless of ability, and we still have yet to have a single female president - but those last few are within sight of changing.

But what was neglected all along, because of the focus on women specifically, was, well...    men, and their roles. 

I don't mean that in a "it's so unfair" kind of way. 
The vast majority of women are heterosexual, and the vast majority have at least one serious intimate relationship at some point in life.  So the social roles expected of men are directly relevant to women.  For one thing, the things that women traditionally did still need to get done.  Allowing women to enter what was once men's sphere, while not allowing men to enter women's, leads directly to the modern challenges of women who want to have both a career and a family.

See, while it has become acceptable for women to - both literally and figuratively - wear pants, it never became acceptable for men to wear the skirt. 

Again, both literally and figuratively.

A woman wearing pants is not a transvestite, no one assumes she is gay on that basis alone (never mind that the majority of male cross dressers are straight anyway, I'm just talking about public perception), and it doesn't even make her not "feminine".  A average man wearing a skirt (not a kilt, an actual skirt), who isn't dressing up as a female as a sex fetish, joke, or political statement, simply isn't done.  Anywhere.  Ever.

In the figurative sense it is slowly changing to at least a small degree.  There are male school teachers, flight attendants, receptionists, and nurses, and none of those are seen as particularly shocking.  There is even such a thing as a stay-at-home dad, though its extremely rare (~3% of married couples - and this includes involuntarily unemployed fathers), and depending on the specific American sub-culture, still frequently (usually?) stigmatized.

I can imagine attempted explanations for this going along the lines of male machismo, or that patriarchy controlled the terms of change as women were allowed political and economic power, but those explanations wouldn't really explain why men would want to deprive themselves of choice, and besides, they are a bit circular.  They tend to assume that half the population of the world has no influence on culture - even after political and economic power were won / granted.

I would expect some people's responses to point to the theoretical "matriarchal" societies prehistoric societies - unfortunately, as nice as that myth is, there isn't any actual evidence to support it having ever been true, anywhere: https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html  and  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy )

I remember reading an article about the difficulties of modern educated Russian women in finding husbands. 
Manufacturing and other traditionally-male semi-skilled labor jobs - jobs which once provided a comfortable and respectable life - were in decline, leaving a lot of men struggling to adapt.  Meanwhile, more women graduated universities than men, and began taking higher level professional jobs.

The trouble finding husbands wasn't due to a deficit of smart, kind, hard-working men.  It was that the women, even though they had enough income to support themselves and a family, were unwilling to partner with someone who earned less than them.
Surveys found that the average single man was willing to marry a woman with more education or more income (as well as one with less) than himself, but this was not reciprocal.

It was women's choices, preferences, biases, that was controlling the situation.

My friend who shared that last link above (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html)

suggested that the reason women insist on their partner's being traditionally "masculine" and dominant (in sexual relations, if nowhere else) is because of their internalized sexism.

I could see that.  It certainly fits with the conclusions I came to in my "perceptions of rape and feminism" blog post. 

That explanation definately would make sense: men have had about about half a century to get used to the idea of strong independent women, several generations have grown up taking female police officers and business leaders and politicians for granted - men my age or younger don't actually remember the time when women were barred from traditionally male roles.  However the stay-at-home-dad, the sensitive nurturing husband, the sexually submissive boyfriend, these things are relatively new.  Perhaps it will just take more transition time for women to adapt to egalitarianism, to start seeing "feminine" men as being sexy, the way men have accepted "masculine" women can be sexy.

That explanation is appealing, but it begs the question of why similar patterns seem to emerge in the generally egalitarian gay female relationships, but not in the generally not egalitarian gay male relationships. It also doesn't explain satisfactorily why so many straight women accept, or prefer, egalitarianism in every aspect of a relationship, except for sexually, where she enjoys it more if the male takes charge.

The alternative is that this may be rooted in biology.  That could make sense too: the creep who sees every attractive female primarily as a potential sex partner, who doesn't want to take "no" for an answer, is likely to get more lifetime sex partners than the respectful guy who sees women as people first and foremost, and prefers his partner to be his friend and equal - if only because of the numbers; the bad boy is constantly trying to get some, while the nice guy is waiting for someone to give him a sign that she's interested.  Pre-birth control it means jerks are going to have more children.  Assuming that some degree of personality traits are genetic, from the stand point of a female who (subconsciously) wants to maximize not just the number of offspring, but of grand- and great-grand-children, then it makes sense to have sons who will have lots of kids with lots of different partners, and so it makes sense to find a partner who will pass on some disrespectful womanizing genes.  She would still want a relationship with a guy who actually cares about her, who will take good care of the family, but the jerk would be sexy - after all, humanity also evolved hundreds of thousands of years before paternity tests.

This explanation is much less encouraging - it implies that this phenomenon will be a hell of a lot harder to change overtime, maybe even that there may be relatively little we can do about it.  It could mean we may never expect to eliminate sexual harassment or date rape, since the dynamic set up by women being turned on by "alpha males" actively encourages both.  It would mean nice guys would always continue to finish last, sleazy pick-up-artists would always be successful, stay-at-home-dads will never become common. 

But not necessarily.  The human brain is pretty complex, and culture has managed to have us go against instinct before (most notably in the suppression of violence).

Either way, in order to address it, we have to understand it.  And before we can understand it, we have to become aware (and/or admit) that it even exists in the first place.

So. 
Tell me, my heterosexual female readership:

Am I totally off-base on this? 
I could be totally wrong. 
Correct me if I am. 
I am very open to being proved wrong. 
I would love it if I was wrong. 

All of my personal experience, not to mention the statistics, tell me I'm not, but I'm still open to new information.

Are there actually lots and lots of exceptions, and I just don't know about it?

Do you, personally, find it sexier when your partner takes charge in the bedroom?

Have you ever turned down a male friend who was interested in you, even though you liked him and he was attractive because you "see him like a brother" or you "know him too well" or "you just don't see him that way? 
If so, why are trusting and being comfortable with a person anti-sexy traits? 
If you would want your partner to be your friend, why would you not consider a close friend as a candidate for partner?

Have you ever not said what you wanted, or not made the first move, because you wanted the guy to be the one to initiate?

Have you ever had a guy be uncomfortably sexually aggressive, perhaps even to a point that made you dislike him as a person, but still found yourself turned on by the situation?

Regardless of if you would actually want it in the real world, have you ever had a fantasy of being forced, or does the idea seem at all sexy, or if you ever actually have been, was it, on any level, sexy or enjoyable?

Do you prefer to be submissive, (even if only in terms of sex)?

Do you tend to think of intercourse as him fucking you, (as opposed to you fucking him)?

Do you sympathize with the women from the article?

How about the examples in my blog post on the topic? 

It certainly resonated with my own personal experience (of course, a couple of the anecdotes were drawn from my personal experience), but I have a fairly small sample size.

Do you prefer that your partner be physically taller than you?

Has the guy been the one to first express romantic interest in more than half of your relationships and/or dates?

You don't have to tell me, or answer out loud, I'm just asking you to question yourself, to be aware of the answers. 

If the answer to, not necessarily all, but even just any one of them is yes, why do you think that is? 
Is it something you've learned, something you've internalized from cultural expectations, or do you suspect its something deeper, more primal than that?

If the answer to any of them is yes, how do you reconcile that with your values and principals around feminism and equality and power?

I could see if it was just any one individual, a person can have any particular preference - "that is what I believe in principal, this just happens to be what I personally like, and my personal tastes have no political meaning". That seems to be the most common self-justification, the most common way to reconcile principal and practice, politics and desire.  On the surface it seems like a perfectly reasonable answer, and it allows a person to not have to think about uncomfortable questions.
But if its universal, or an overwhelming trend, if even just more than 50% of straight women answer "yes" to any of the above questions, then there are obviously sociopolitical implications. 
Or, at least, it seems obvious to me - yet it seems like nobody notices.
 

I come across sexually assertive women, anti-sexism activists, queer women who challenge traditional concepts of gender, all wanting to be dominated sexually.
In a different context these same women will object to, for example, sexual harassment, but somehow see no connection between the two.  Men who harass are like spam or telemarketers or junk mail - all it takes is one positive response in 10,000 to make the strategy successful, but if the positive response rate was absolute zero, they wouldn't waste their time.  And it shouldn't be surprising that some women respond positively to what others call harassment, if in other contexts a power differential is seen as desirable.

As I pointed out in the rape and feminism blog post, if we want to reduce date rape, it is absolutely vital that women not ever say "no" when they really mean "yes" - and surveys find that the majority of young, sexually active women, by their own admission, have done exactly that at some point in their lives (61%).  When I first read the statistic, I assumed it was due to cultural expectations, a way to avoid 'slut shaming' - "There's bound to be talk tomorrow" ... "At least I'm gonna say that I tried" - but after reading the NY Times article that inspired what I'm writing now, I wonder if there's more to it after all.

"Ninety percent of these women said that fear of appearing promiscuous was an important reason for their behavior.  Many said that they wanted their dates to wait, or “talk me into it.”  And some said that they told their dates no because they “wanted him to be more physically aggressive." [emphasis mine]

So far the push for equality has been focused on the tangible for women - legal status, employment, dress; and the mental/emotional for men - how they are supposed to think about women.

We've pretty much ignored the physical world of men - there is no law protecting men who choose to wear a skirt to work - while the mental/emotional for women has been pretty much ignored too.

There are no college or corporate educational videos, no pamphlets or handouts, no protest rallies or petitions, that address how women view men or sexuality.  We tell men not to look at women as sexual objects, and leave it at that, as though it were a given that we don't need to tell women not to want to be looked at as sexual objects - even though there is a lot of evidence that says they many (most?) do.  The former will never succeed without the latter, because the message men get from women in their personal lives will always outweigh the message they get from activists or the human resources department.

So.

Whoever reads this:

speak up! comment.  I want to hear different ideas and viewpoints and opinions and theories and personal experiences and thoughts and feelings.

I know people stumble across this blog somehow or other - I can see the internal statistics.  Some of you even stay on the page long enough to read.

You can even comment anonymously if you want.

Could you have a passionate and fulfilling sex life with a man who, figuratively speaking, wears the skirt in the relationship?

Why or why not?

Is it possible that the current dynamic will ever change, and, if so, how might that happen?

5 years later

Four months since I have written anything at all here.

I am really letting my two or three readers down! I'm sorry. Well, not sorry enough to necessarily do better, but enough to write this, right now, even though I'm not really feeling inspired.

My next real post will be on the difference between capitalism and the free market, how they are actually opposed, how government favors the former, and how it could (and why it should) be doing the opposite. Actually, it might even be a series of separate posts.
I already have basically everything I want down in my head, but it still may be a few months or a year before I get around to it. But I have always eventually written all the things I said I would so far, haven't I? So, unless I randomly die before then, it will really happen.


A part of why I stopped writing was the time and thought and energy that went into a major life transition.



I finally came to terms with the fact that the relationship I was in wasn't making me happy, and we broke up.
I was trying to help her find a place to live, when I happened to come across an ad for a building maintenance manager, doing the exact same sort of work I've been doing in my own business for the past 8 years, in exchange for subsidized rent.

First time in my adult life I haven't lived in an RV.
What with the economy, everyone who had an RV for vacations is trying to sell, and the market is much lower than when I bought. Looks like I'll be lucky to get half what I paid, even though Aileen negotiated to well below market rate when we bought, and I have upgraded appliances and added solar since then.

My new place is back in Oakland, closer to where the people are. Also, I have exclusive access to the finished basement, which I turned into my own personal gym.

This building was, less than a year ago, the neighborhood hangout for homeless and drug addicts, but new owners took over, hired a security company, did some much over due maintenance, and effectively changed the culture before I ever found the place. But it's still East Oakland, which is obvious the moment you step outside the front door.

5 minutes by bike from the BikeStation, so no more 15 mile commute by bike or skates once a week. I miss that.

Winter time is always slow for my business, but this year the slow down started sooner than usual. No longer saving, focused on breaking even.



I started dating again.

The title of this post refers to this: biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-year-later.html

Re-reading it - no, I didn't not follow through with that. Not even close. Looking back, its funny to me that I really believed that was realistic.
I still feel the same way, but I've given in to experiencing whatever life has to offer along the way.

I found several people who looked interesting on the interwebs, and sent messages.
And got no response.
And was discouraged, because I wasn't just sending mass emails to lots of women, I was sending detailed personal messages to specific people because I thought we had stuff in common and would get along. If I like them, chances are they might like me too.
Maybe they are just overwhelmed with spam. Maybe they are out of the country, and not checking messages. Or maybe I am just uglier and stupider than I am aware, and nobody wants to date me because I suck.
Actually, thats not entirely true - I had ongoing conversations with two women, and even made plans to meet. One told me the day before that she decided she wasn't ready to date after all, and canceled. Then the other told me she got back together with her boyfriend.
Maybe those were both true, and not just excuses, but it sure didn't make me feel any less discouraged.
Was this so hard 5 years ago?

Well, all of a sudden, weeks, sometimes months, after I first contact, someone finally gets back to me. Not just once or twice, but 5 separate people. "I'm sorry for the long delay, I've just been busy, but you seem really interesting, and I'd love to meet up in real life"
And I end up on 4 dates on 4 consecutive nights, all with different people.

This was scary. Especially since more than one went well, and left me wanting to know her better. I can barely handle dating one person. How can I date several?

It was moot, because one had more free time than the rest, and we went out several times before I had a chance to schedule a follow up with anyone else. She is smart and shy and she challenged me, which I love, and something seemed to connect. In the middle of a discussion on politics, there would be a sudden romantic moment, a pause, a look, a feeling. 
There was the usual pattern of physical intimacy on the third date (for some reason, it has always been first date, 3rd date, or never. Never 2nd or 4th. I don't know why. I don't plan it that way.)
I was telling her I never initiate that stuff with someone new, because of patriarchy and gender roles and all that, that I always wait for the woman to make the first move, and then she kissed me ;)
I fell hard. Like I did with Valerie. Not counting my ex-wife (which was in a different way, it was more gradual, we were friends first), it was only the 2nd time in my adult life that I really completely fell.

It was interesting to watch from the inside - normally I have love-blindness, and I can't see any flaws or compatibility problems with my interest.  This time I could very clearly see red flags, I was totally aware of the obvious issues, and I almost willfully ignored them. Seeing it clearly made literally no difference. All the reading on love, on cognitive bias, on psychology, literally no difference. It was just as strong. I believed my own excuses, my own rationalizations, even though I knew I was doing it as it was happening.
And I know - and am ok with - that I will do the same next time.

I'm not fully over it. I am still depressed, have no motivation to leave the house or talk to anyone or do anything or even eat. I spent much of yesterday napping.  Fortunately, recognizing this part, knowing it's temporary, that does help. Its like being on a bad drug trip when you have been enough times before. You don't want to feel that way anymore, but you know that a) there is nothing you can do about it, and b) it will go away on its own, all you have to do is wait it out.
So I'm waiting.

She really did have some great things about her though. And we shared a decent amount of fun in a short time. Maybe, with some buffer time in between, we can become friends.

I'm still in contact with the other interesting women I had first dates with, both of them are open to more dates with me, and I will try not to get overly excited too quickly when that happens.  And I'll fail. But that will be ok. Sooner or later I'll get it right, the pieces will fall into place, it will be mutual, and it will have been a great way to begin something special and lasting.

I started out saying I didn't have anything in particular to say, and here we are, 20 paragraphs later.

Some Thoughts on Partnership and Extra-Marital Sex; Monogamy VS Sexual Exclusivity

First of all, I need to clarify a very important point, that many people seem to get wrong more often than not.

The suffix "-gamy" means "marriage".
It does NOT refer to sex.  It refers to romantic commitment - and more specifically, a religious and/or government sanctioned commitment (because two people can be entirely committed to each other without ever getting married).
The alternatives to monogamy are being single, or being polygamous, which means being married to more than one person.

The term for not having sex with anyone other than your spouse (or other committed romantic partner) is sexual exclusivity.


This is not just semantics.  It is in fact a crucial distinction, and without proper and consistent terminology, it is completely impossible to talk about the topic in any meaningful way.
So, for example, in a culture where polygamy is legal and culturally accepted, a man could have two or three wives.  If he never has sex with anyone other than those several wives, he is maintaining sexual exclusivity, even though he is not monogamous.  On the other hand, a married couple who are into swinging are monogamous, even though they are not practicing sexual exclusivity.
And both of them are practicing sexual fidelity - the word fidelity means "faithful" or "loyal", and none of the people in these examples are cheating.  It is only cheating if it is against the rules, and everyone involved in both the polygamous relationship and the swinger's relationship is agreeing to the same set of rules.
When people talk about "open" relationships, or polyamory, they can mean either having multiple committed romantic relationships (which might not, but probably will, involve sex), or they can be talking about having only one committed romantic relationship, but one or more other non-romantic sexual partners.


I am only going to be talking about the second option.




Human beings are complicated creatures.  We don't really have emotions and thoughts of our own, they are intrinsically entangled with the people and culture around us.  There may be many other social animals, but none else has communication detailed and complex enough to have a culture that modifies individual preference, opinion, and experience.  So, if we want to try to separate out which parts of those things we take for granted are fundamental to who we are, and which are handed to us externally, its often helpful to look at other species besides ourselves.  In some ways studying chimpanzee politics can tell us things about ourselves that studying human politics doesn't.
Lets try it!
Of course the vast majority of all animal life is not monogamous to begin with.  In mating season its either a free-for-all, or its winner-take-all for the strongest male around.  But 90% of all birds and a small but significant number of rodents and primates are monogamous.  And it turns out that with extremely few exceptions, all of these monogamous species are using the term literally  - once they have picked a mate, they tend to stay with that one partner for years, if not for a lifetime.    Yet among all of those creatures sharing a life with one partner, 90% of those species do not maintain strict sexual exclusivity.  DNA testing of bird families find anywhere from 20 to 70% of the chicks are not technically sired by the father that raises them.  But ultimately, DNA makes less of a difference than family, and the mother's partner is the baby bird's father by default, and invests parental resources in the chick.
Both sexes are observed to have extra-marital affairs, and this generally has little to no effect on the permanence of the primary partnership.  To say these animals are "cheating" is to anthropomorphize them. The idea of monogamy implying sexual exclusivity appears to be almost entirely a human cultural invention. 

Which, if you step back from the assumptions most of us have always taken for granted, sort of begs the question of why we do that.
There may be some part of it that is rooted in biological based jealousy - on some level a person fears that if their partner has children with another person, they may divert resources they would have spent on your shared off-spring on the affair partner's instead.  In an age of cheap, effective and readily available birth control this concern is far less valid, but of course our emotions evolved millions of years before modern technology, and evolution progresses far slower than science.  But the cultural demands of fidelity are much stronger and more consistent than any individual feeling of relationship insecurity.  Many cultures designate adultery to be an offense - in some even a capital offense - even if it is consensual by all parties involved.  When something is considered unethical even if no one is hurt in anyway, chances are there is a more insidious root to it.  Religious and political leaders have used controlling sexuality as a means to control the populous in general for as long as there has been such a thing as religion and politics.  Centralized power is the original reason for almost all sexual morays, from outlawing prostitution, banning non-reproductive sexual activity, to the concept of sanctioned marriage.  The moray against adultery is no exception.  Having someone else decide how, when, and with whom you may have sex train you to cede independence and be obedient in general.  It also allows much more certainty of paternity, which ensures that males can be forced to help raise their biological offspring, which is good for women and helps make society more stable.  At the same time, it allows keeping track of paternal lines, which is essential for patriarchy to function.  In particular, it facilitates the concept of inheritance, particularly of land, so it is a vital component of any caste, serfdom or capitalist system whose aim is to keep the genetic line of those who are already wealthy, wealthy in to the future.
As with many other concepts of "morality" which began as a means of top down control (like loyalty to country being a basic virtue), or "traditions" which were invented by marketers (like a diamond ring representing marriage) it was almost completely successful. It has been entirely internalized by the vast majority of people, in almost every culture, so that very few even question whether it is actually an automatic and natural feeling, and not something imposed externally. 

The Oldest Profession

First of all, let’s make one thing clear.  A prostitute does not sell their body.  The only circumstance in which any person actually sells a body part is when someone sells a kidney.  When you sell something, the buyer takes permanent possession of it, and the seller can not get it back.  The new owner can do anything they want with their purchase, because it is now their property.  This does not describe the prostitute / client transaction at all.  Even when people accepted indentured servitude arrangements they were only offering themselves on a long-term lease, not actually selling themselves.  A prostitute normally only allows her (or his) clients limited use of a portion of their body for a short, usually designated time period, an hour perhaps, maybe a few. 

This is not just semantics.  It’s a very important distinction.   

Really, what the transaction consists of is a person agreeing to engage in a specific activity for a specified time period which they otherwise might not do, to the benefit of another person who offers compensation for the time and labor involved.

Which, if you think about it, kind of describes every job.

Why is sex a special case? 

Post- effective contraception, women’s liberation, and sexual liberation, (and beyond that to a modern world heading towards equality for homosexuals and acceptance of transsexuals), most people (at least people whose opinion is worth considering) have normalized sexuality, accepted it as a natural part of life and, frankly, not really such a big deal as people used to make of it (and some still do). 
It’s how we – and all multicellular life – reproduce, and it also happens to be enjoyable (except, not “happens to” – it is enjoyable specifically in order to get us to do it, because otherwise we wouldn’t). 

Non-reproductive sex is basically like chocolate cake with ice cream, or roller-coasters, or movies.
They are all examples of ways we have learned how to deliberately activate our own pleasure sensors - originally designed with some evolutionary function or other - but we can skip past all that survival of the specie nonsense and use our intellect to make life more pleasant for ourselves.  Sometimes there end up being negative side-effects, but plenty of times there aren’t.  When there aren’t any negative side-effects, there is no good reason why we shouldn’t.

EDIT:
My first two comments on this were both very similar.  They both addressed some commonly held ideas about the real world working conditions of prostitutes - specifically "street walkers" - currently, in the United States.  This is not an essay about what "is".  It is about what "could be" - perhaps even should be.  I believe that the REASON conditions are so bad for those women, and the reason many of them have backgrounds of addiction and/or childhood abuse is BECAUSE of both the illegality and the social stigma.  The same degree of correlation does not exist, for example, in the porn industry, which is a legal version where a person has sex in exchange for money. Some correlation still exists, but then again, the social stigma is there even if the criminality isn't.

However, given that this is what probably many people will be thinking about upon seeing the topic, I should address it early on.

Many people simply accept it as a given that the majority of prostitutes are being exploited by pimps, that they were abused as children, or that they began working as prostitutes as children. 
As is often the case, common knowledge does not fully match up to even current reality in the first place:

"a Miami study found that only 7 percent had pimps"
"studies that compare matched samples of street prostitutes and non-prostitutes [regarding childhood abuse] show mixed results; some find a statistically significant difference in experience of family
abuse, while others find no difference."
"victimization is apparently not nearly as prevalent, even among street prostitutes, as the oppression model asserts."
"An estimated 20 percent of all prostitutes work on the streets in the United States."
"indoor sex workers are less likely to experience violence from customers than those who work on the streets. For example, Church found that few call girls and sauna workers had experienced violence (only 1 percent had ever been beaten, 2 percent raped"
"compared to streetwalkers, indoor workers have lower rates of childhood abuse, enter prostitution at an older age, and have more education. They are less drug dependent...Sexually transmitted diseases are fairly rare among call girls, escorts, and women who work in brothels"
"Research finds that many indoor workers made conscious decisions to enter the trade; they do not see themselves as oppressed victims and do not feel that their work is degrading. Consequently, they
express greater job satisfaction than their street level counterparts. And they may differ little from nonprostitutes: A study by psychologist Sarah Romans and colleagues comparing indoor workers
and an age-matched sample of nonprostitute women found no differences between the two groups in physical health, self-esteem, mental health, or the quality of their social networks."
 
http://www.umsl.edu/~marinap/DOCUMENTS/problemsurbancomm/mail/Prostitution-%20Facts%20and%20Fictions.pdf

Street walking is the most visible form to most people, and the form that critics always point to, but there is absolutely zero reason to assume that it represents anything inherent about prostitution.  Understand that all through-out this essay, I am referring to prostitution philosophically, removed from the social elements in day to day practice in the United States which are largely a result of both it being illegal, and the social stigmas which are a direct result of the sort of collective beliefs we hold about sexuality that I am addressing in this essay.

Back to the question at hand.  Why is sex a special case, when really all employment involves renting yourself out?  What does it say about our assumptions about sexuality, our own lingering hang-ups and inappropriate moralizing if using ones hands to stimulate another’s back for money is ok, but using ones hands to stimulate another in certain other places is not?  Are we still going to claim that a woman’s sex parts are what make her valuable?  If not, why is it any more or less demeaning for her to use those parts to stimulate her client than it would be to use her hands?  What does it say about our own beliefs about female sexuality if any act of sex is somehow inherently degrading?

Man provides money, woman provides sex.  This describes a large part of the traditional model of home life.  If a live-in prostitute also cooks and cleans, does that somehow make it less scandalous?  How about if a man has sex with his live-in maid? What separates her from a housewife? What if the two feel a genuine affection for each other? At this point the lines get very blurry between a sugar daddy / sugar baby relationship – which is technically legal – and straight prostitution.  (link to playboy article, if available).  What separates this  arrangement from any other childless couple consisting of a breadwinner and a housewife?  One could answer that a wife need not submit on demand, but remember that for most of history, she generally was expected to.

A masseuse makes their client’s body feel good, using their own body.  The only thing differentiating massage from prostitution is sex part contact (though, of course, that is not always a difference.  It seems the two go together quite naturally.  Yet neither always implies the other). But masseuse is just most obvious analogy, how about a chiropractor?  Or any doctor for that matter. How about a model? They are renting out their body as well. Or a construction worker, who is paid to do particular things with their hands all day, which they wouldn’t be doing on their own?  Moreover, any one who does any work with their hands, is renting their body to whoever employs them.  Professional thinkers are not off the hook.  They are being paid to think about some particular topic, no matter what they might prefer to have on their minds.  They are renting out their brains to their employers or clients.  And the brain is an organ of the body, just like every other.  The temporary use of your body is what you get paid for.  If you weren’t using your body in some way that someone else wanted, no one would give you any money.  Unless you are unemployed, you rent out your body.  Most people spend the majority of their waking hours renting out their bodies to someone else.  And while there are a few fringe anarchists who think that is always immoral, most people see no problem with it, so long as it is a voluntary arrangement.

The one exception we have is for children (and perhaps people with the mental capacity of a child).
But in the case of sex, an awful lot of people don’t feel its ok even if the professional prostitute is an adult, and choose that line of work voluntarily.  What does this say about our hidden beliefs about female agency?  Can we assume that no one would ever voluntarily make that choice, therefore they must be a victim?  No other profession carries with it an assumption that the worker must be being forced or manipulated into taking the job.  I would never voluntarily work in a sewage plant, a landfill, a slaughterhouse, a coal mine, or wearing a giant advertising character suit.  Yet I don’t assume that anyone who does those jobs was traumatized in their past, is on drugs, or is being manipulated or threatened by their manager.  I just see that for the right price, different people choose to rent themselves out in different types of employment.  For unskilled or semi-skilled labor, the most unpleasant jobs tend to pay pretty well. 

As was established earlier, due to obvious evolutionary reasons, sex feels pleasurable.  It does for both genders, for the same reason.  On average males tend to have a stronger sex drive than women, but it is none-the-less pleasurable for females – if it wasn’t, they would never agree to it, and the specie would have died out millions of years ago.  Contrary to what much of society has claimed for centuries at least, women even have sexual desire of their own, independent of their partners, and most of them have orgasms at least occasionally.  So, unlike being a sanitation worker or a coal miner, the day to day (or night to night) business of being a prostitute is at least potentially pleasurable, and at the same time, the pay can be competitive with the crappiest of jobs. 

I propose that the real reason for the cultural stigma of prostitution may have actually originated from somewhere quite different – nearly opposite – than the purported reasons of today (protecting women), and it ties in with the housewife analogy I made earlier.

Our species is slightly sexually dimorphic – that is, males and females have slightly different characteristics aside from those which directly affect reproduction.  For example, males have furry faces, females do not. Males also tend to be slightly larger in stature and stronger physically than females.  Whatever the reasons this dimorphism originally evolved, as humans formed ever larger and more complex social groups, we tended to set up arrangements where males used their strength for hunting and protection.  This gave them a social advantage, since they had something to offer that females need - protein - while males were capable of gathering plant food as well if need be (and frequently did, during the long periods of waiting that hunting involves). 

Meanwhile, the long human gestation period and even longer time to parental independence means a female has reason to be much more selective in mates than other species, while for a non-monogamous prehistoric male there is still the same biological incentive towards promiscuity that there is for any creature (of either sex) which doesn’t have to take the time and resources to care for offspring.  This tends to leads to a situation in which the male human’s sex drive is much stronger than the human females – not just in terms of frequency, but, more importantly, in terms of the sensation of urgency.

And there lies the equalizer to the power dynamic caused by our sexual dimorphism.  For females sex is pleasurable, but for males sex is (or at least feels like) a necessity. 

As obsessed as our particular society is with rape, in practical terms, barring the use of weapons, bondage, or drugs (none of which had been invented yet) to force submission, it’s simply challenging to do successfully.  Imagine trying to get a key into a doorknob while someone on the inside keeps turning the handle.  Now imagine instead of just turning the knob, the other person has the knob out of the door, and they are spinning it and waving it all around, and also punching you in the face and kicking you in the crotch at the same time you try to get the key in the keyhole.  The difficulty in practical terms is reflected in how rarely rape is successful by total strangers who don’t use any sort of weapons, drugs, or other means to force submission.

This is reflected by real life statistics.  Depending which study you look at, 70-90% of rape victims knew the attacker personally, and the vast majority of these happen inside the home of one of them.  In these cases there are a myriad of social and psychological factors that affect power dynamics, so in order to determine any inherent gender based power imbalance, we have to focus on only those rapes committed by strangers.
Among all rapes, in 54% the victim was intoxicated, and while many of these coincide with the cases of known assailants, at least one study suggests that women raped by strangers are more likely to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of attack.  Of rapes committed by strangers, 20% brandish or use weapons, and 20% have more than one assailant.  These 3 factors will no doubt have some overlap, but it means somewhere between 60% and 90% of the time there is something other than just physical strength differences involved.  Of what remains, a very significant number of victims do not resist.  This is likely from a mistaken belief (one which has been actively promoted by well meaning but misinformed professionals) that resistance will increase the violence used against them, when in fact "resisting victims are less frequently and less seriously injured after taking some kind of protective action than non-resisting victims"
When a potential victim offers physical resistance before rape has occurred, it is effective 85% of the time.
Another study found violent physical resistance prevents rape up to 86% of the time it is attempted and simply running away is effective up to 85% of the time.
Apply that 85% of the time an attacker is unable to overcome resistance to the up to 90% of the time when physical strength is the only advantage the attacker has, and the reality matches up with the thought experiment - outside of modern social and technological factors, the physical power imbalance between the genders is much smaller than we commonly assume.

So that leaves female choice as the deciding factor in when, or if, a male gets to have the sex which he (feels he) needs.  This balances out the power dynamic, as females have almost total control over something males need; something that they are not realistically able to do without.

Once agriculture is invented, though, women are less dependent on men for sustenance, and the power balance shifts in their favor.  To try to compensate, men formed strict social roles that attempted to keep women dependent, all the way to the fairly recent era of housewives and breadwinners – a female may be just as capable physically and mentally as doing whatever job her husband does, but if she is capable of supporting herself, what incentive does she have to stay with him and continue providing him sex?  (Incidentally, this is perhaps reflected in that, since female employment has become normal and wide-spread, the majority of divorces are initiated by women).

Then, perhaps largely to that end, at some point in our history, cultures all over the world invented marriage. 

This is good in a way for females, as it mandates males to stay put and provide half of the time and/or resources necessary to sustain the helpless human offspring they helped to create. 
But it also takes away the one source of power that they had, as (up until about 19??), the deal also mandated that a wife satisfy her husband sexually anytime he wanted.  It allowed females themselves to be commoditized, a possession originally owned by her father, later transferred to her husband in a match the father arranged. 
Most important of all, it was good for social cohesion and society as a whole, and allowed a mechanism by which one group could form alliances with others nearby.

Prostitution bypasses that mechanism.  Societies’ leaders don’t like it, because having authority over sexual acts gives them power over individuals, and because illegitimate children are hard to fit into organized social structures. Illegitimate children confuse issues of inheritance, dowries, and kinship. 

Males don’t like it because it gives females power.  Sex is again commoditized, which means the female can demand a fair market price for it, rather than being forced to provide an unlimited amount.  She can also turn down a client she isn’t interested in. 

Non-prostitute females don’t like it because their promise of sexual availability to their male partner was supposed to be the trade off for sexual exclusivity from their partners, guarantying the male isn’t tempted to spend resources on offspring produced with some other female (like the prostitute).

Yet, despite all of the various social arrangements prostitution circumvents, it remains a worthwhile transaction for the parties involved.  What can the leaders of society – those creating the fundamental beginnings of culture, that which would continue to affect our collective consciousness for the rest of foreseeable time – do to prevent two consenting individuals from engaging in what they determine to be a mutually beneficial transaction?
Before there was any such thing as law, there was only one thing societies leaders could do.  Invoke a religious based morality, one which needs no justification or explanation, because it is claimed to come directly from the mouth of “god(s)”.  Prostitution, along with all non-procreative sex, gets condemned universally.  In a world with no technology and no law enforcement, where individuals may live any distance from anyone else, and where the majority of families are responsible for their own sustenance, there isn’t much leverage a society’s leader has over the people.  If individuals can be convinced that there is something fundamentally bad about the pleasure of sex, that it is permissible only in the context of an officially sanctioned marriage, then those who control marriage control an important aspect of individuals lives – and of course marriage is universally controlled by religious or government officials, those same entities which have attempted to maintain control over people for as long as people have lived in groups.  Every expression of sexuality outside of it then becomes expressly forbidden – per-marital, adultery (even if its consensual, including the consent and/or participation of the spouses), incest, prostitution, and even masturbation – by way of the false “morality” of religious decree. 

Of course any sane person, told that, for example, enjoying the sunshine on your face on a sunny day, or enjoying a delicious orange, or enjoying music, or laughing with friends was actually immoral and angered “god(s)”, not for any particular reason, but just because (S)He says so, would immediately disregard such utter non-sense, and probably disregard pretty much everything else the priest who made that claim said as well.  It has to go beyond just a decree.  It has to be a universal condemnation of any pleasurable aspect of sexuality which is drilled into every single individual from the moment they learn to speak, if not sooner.  Herein lies the birth of the concept of nudity and its inseparable concepts of indecent exposure, modesty, and shame.  Never allowing any person to see one’s sex parts outside of the family unit creates a subtle anti-sex message to a new human trying to make sense of the world even before they are old enough to speak. 

In a society where women are property, a young girl’s value is inherently tied up with her virginity.  No family wants to arrange a marriage for their son with a girl who is already pregnant with someone else’s child, nor does a man want to spend his resources raising a child that doesn’t have his genes.  But hundreds of thousands of years before modern technology, the only way to be absolutely sure a woman or girl isn’t already pregnant is if she is a virgin.  Therefore, from the point of view of her parents, who have her to trade, her virginity is valuable.  However, from her own point of view, any child she may get pregnant with has her genes, and more immediately relevant, any sex she has is potentially enjoyable to her.  So there is a conflict between her acting in her own interests, and what her parents want her to do.  Much like with the leaders of societies desire to control all of society by limiting who has sex with who, individual parents have incentive to prevent their daughters from having sex with anyone other than who they designate, and they have the same problem of how to actually enforce that.  The solution is the same: make sure that she feels guilty about her own sexuality from as young an age as possible, and constantly reinforce the idea that her value as a person is intrinsically tied up with who she has sex with.  Make her feel that refraining from sex makes her a virtuous person, and slander the words “slut” and “whore” as the two worst possible insult that can be given to a female.  Tie up her self-esteem with her sexuality (or rather lack-thereof), and reinforce that so persistently that she completely and fully internalizes it.  Eventually everyone is so affected and it gets reinforced by social pressure so thoroughly that many thousands of years later people still assume that if a female chooses to have sex with several different people, she must have a low sense of self-worth, and similarly sex-workers of any kind – not just prostitutes, but also escorts, porn actresses, strippers, and even nude models, are all often assumed to be victims of abuse, drugs, or desperation.

Even though, in the years between then and now, quite a few totally game-changing events have happened.  Women have regained recognition by males as people.  Women have ceased to be legally property.  Rape is no longer a crime against a woman’s father or husband, as it was in the Bible, but instead a crime against her.  Women have been included in democracy, allowed to vote and hold office. 
Another sea-change in human culture is region lost its strangle-hold on society.  It still has plenty of adamant followers, and even among non-believers its influence on world-view can be rather dramatic, but it is no longer a serious rival to secular government in making Laws which must be obeyed by all.  That leaves open for questioning all of the “moral” rules handed down by it which have no actual basis in the fundamental ethics of harming or helping sentient beings which real morality is based on, and nearly all of them have indeed been questioned by secular liberals, and occasionally even secular conservatives and religious liberals.  In dramatic contrast to the religious past, homosexuality is widely tolerated, if not accepted outright, gambling is a problem only if it leads to addiction or crime, blasphemy is just a figure of speech, and Family Guy is aired nightly on broadcast television with nothing more than a brief message of parental advisory.
The third gigantic change – one which may actually have had significant affect in helping the other two occur – was the invention of forms of contraception which actually worked.  People have been using methods to try to enjoy the pleasure of sex without the inconvenience of reproduction since before anyone thought up the wheel, but “actually worked” are the key words.  That invention completely dissolved most of the original reasons for centralized authoritarian control over individual sexuality – managing fertility and kinship in order to manipulate social relationships.  The main reason left for anyone to want to control an individual female’s sexuality is the power imbalance caused by sex being a necessity for men but a nicety for women.  Now that she can have sex without the risk of having to raise a child without paternal support, she has substantially more power.  Couple that with women’s substantially increased rights, and women, by gaining control over their own sexuality from both men and from biology, and in doing so gained a huge amount of power over men.  As religion lost strength and contraception became cheaper, easier to access, and more effective, many of the sexual morays which pretended to be morality but were really about controlling fertility and maintaining power structures began to melt away.  While it’s not exactly dinner conversation, it’s pretty much understood that most normal healthy people masturbate at least at some point in their lives.  Swinging or open relationships are seen as choices a couple makes.  Premarital sex has become the norm – who in modern society would marry someone they had never had sex with?  Homosexuality, once seen as the gravest of sins, is no longer a capital offense, no longer a mental illness, and in many places, nothing to be ashamed of at all.  All of these things which we take for granted were once considered capital offenses.  Regardless of the consent of all parties involved, the punishment for any sex outside of marriage was death.

But with all these changes, certain things – particularly those with significantly less universal appeal – have kept their status as inherently “immoral” even if they don’t actually hurt anyone.  Incest between two consenting adults is still seen as inherently immoral even by otherwise secular progressives.  There is likely a biological component to this aversion, as there are a lot of regressive genes which lead to various genetic illnesses which are only expressed if a person has the same version from both parents, and statistically speaking the more closely related the parents, the higher the chance of them both having the same problematic recessive gene. However, even siblings only have about 50% of their variable DNA in common (that which can vary and still leave a being human) and all the members of a given population (especially prior to the advent of mechanized long-distance travel) are likely to have very similar genomes.  In other words, incest is not at all a guarantee of offspring with problems, nor is avoiding it a guarantee against them.  By the logic of the recessive gene argument, people should seek partners as foreign to themselves as possible, yet people (especially females) tend to seek partners of their own race (that, or seek out white partners, regardless of their own race).  In any event, the invention of effective contraception renders the entire deformed offspring argument entirely moot.  There is no objective reason for any objection for sex between two consenting adults, who are using contraception, who happen to be siblings.  And yet this persists even in the most progressive of societies as being seen as despicable, and that speaks to just how strongly the affects of past religious based “morality” continues to have indirect influence over current culture, no matter how far removed from it any particular non-believer is.

You can still hear post-sexual-liberation women use the term “slut” and “whore” as an insult against other women.  A “slut” is just a female who chooses to have sex with multiple partners without forming relationships with them first.  A “whore” is a derogatory word for prostitute, or, anyone who receives compensation from a partner for engaging in sex.  Why should these things continue to offend women?  Certainly a part of it is the same lingering religious morays that condemn incest, but there may be another factor as well.  As previously noted, much of the reason for the original subjugation of women may have been men’s attempt at undoing the power unbalance, and with women’s liberation, the power imbalance returned, and with the advent of contraception and abortion, that influence over males could be exercised with no risk of unintended offspring.  But the power shift to the entire gender is only available to any individual to the extent that she controls the only access to sex for a given partner.  Although any given couple is unlikely to make every sexual contact a squid row quo, generally both partners are expected to contribute to the relationship, and sex is frequently seen as a negotiating point in the females favor since, as since ancient times, no matter how much she may desire and enjoy it, she can do without it, while a male can no more go without then he can without food (which is why there are so many cases of celibate priests in sexual scandals, but it is essentially unheard of among nuns). 
However, if a prostitute comes along, it diminishes that negotiating power, as her partner now has another avenue for that resource, one that comes without the explicit long-term contract of marriage or even the implicit long-term contract of a relationship.  And of course a promiscuous female is even worse, since they don’t require any form of compensation.  Obviously few if any women actually consciously think all this through when looking down on another women for their sexual choices, but I propose it may be a subconscious mechanism that explains why some people who take per-marital sex for granted and are totally ok with homosexuality still have a distaste for prostitutes and promiscuous women.

All of this history and politics, to try to look into why sex is considered a special case, any different from any other temporary renting out of ones body, why it should have any more or less to do with self-respect than any other form of labor.  The primary reasons are obsolete.  Many of our sexual morays are relics from before birth control existed, and gradually – very gradually – societies in many parts of the world are finally changing to catch up to modern technology.  Things which have been ingrained into our collective psyche for thousands of generations often have a tendency to take on an existence of their own, independent of the original reasons they developed.  But as logical intelligent individuals, we can each think about our own true core values and separate that which we believe from that which everyone around us has always told us to believe.  If we accept that there is absolutely nothing dirty or sinful about enjoying sex in any form so long as it is by the consent of everyone involved, then all of the old “goes-without-saying” type of morays should be questioned.  Not just the ones we personally would like to violate, but also the ones we have no interest in.  There is no such thing as a perversion.  There is just differing tastes. 
And once you have removed the “non-reproductive-sex is evil” non-sense from the equation, all that is left is prostitution is a job.  A job in which you temporarily rent your body to someone, and do something you wouldn’t otherwise be doing in that particular moment.  Just like every other job that exists or could possibly exist.  If you are employed, in any fashion, if you get compensated by anyone for doing or thinking anything, that makes you, essentially, a whore.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

A year later

• May 26, 2009

A year later

I am so sick of dating.

I can't say it hasn't been fun.
Its been really fun.  Many first experiences.

I have been asked out.  I have gathered the courage to ask out. 
Some time later I replaced courage with confidence.

I have learned an awful lot of things (and confirmed a few I suspected all along).
I learned just how different I am compared to so many of my peers in this area.
I learned that finding what I am looking for is really hard.
I learned that all the common stereotypes about gender and dating are totally false.
I learned that people really do have sex on first dates (and not just desperate people, drunks, or players, but ordinary healthy well-adjusted people)
I learned that women are just as superficial as men (just with height instead of weight)
I learned that (at least for those whose standards start at 5'6" or less) I am much more attractive than I had thought I was.
I learned that there is very little correlation between stated views on sex and actual comfort and enthusiasm in practice; and little correlation between visual sexiness and actual quality of performance.
I learned that the single most important variable is that she is truly comfortable with her own sexuality.
I was shocked to learn how many people think that the actions of the female partner have little bearing on the overall quality of sex, or that being "good" can consist solely of how much she is willing to have done to her.  I learned that not everyone can match my stamina.
I learned that people are much more forgiving of me for my infidelity than I am of myself (I decided against ever making that story a blog, but I have nothing to hide, so if you ask me I'll tell you about it)
I learned that I can easily fall in love with someone I am totally incompatible with - in fact, I'm starting to suspect that I have a tendency to do just that.
I have learned a lot about emotional responses and how rare it is to just be told, directly, when something I do is upsetting or annoying or offensive.
I learned just how guarded and polite people are, and how it breeds a sort of inadvertent falseness which I honestly never noticed before.

I have had sex with a number of beautiful intelligent compassionate women of various shapes and sizes and colors. People involved in social justice and environmental protection and education, younger than me, older, people who want to get married someday and others who think monogamy is an artificial social construct. More women in just this past year than I expected to be with in my entire life.
(I've also had my first ever STD test, and got the equivalent of an 'A' on it.) 
I've shared both physical and emotional intimacy with women who I could have conversations with and find myself questioning beliefs I've refined over a lifetime of thought and debate and felt totally confident about. 
I've even fallen in love.  It may have been with someone totally incompatible with me, but it was still nice to know for sure I still can.



It turns out that sex with someone who isn't my best-friend-and-long-term-partner is just as unfulfilling as I always assumed it would be.  They were everyone of them someone I could consider a friend, a whole world of difference from one-night-stand or purely-physical affairs (the thought of which makes me feel a little sick inside).  That just isn't enough. 

I have not had a history of following through on this sort of thing in the past; perhaps a public pronouncement will aid my meager willpower - or at least discourage the women in my life from taking advantage of it:
No more sex on first dates, no matter how good that date is.  Or second.  Or third.  No sex unless I've known you at least a couple months and had some combination of plenty of dates, long conversations, and exchanged emails.  And not unless you are looking, and feel ready, for a serious long term partner.  That isn't to say I want to be celibate until after my next wedding, but I would like that level of intimacy be reserved for when working towards something serious is at least the intention.
My old rule was I didn't want to have sex with anyone I wouldn't want to be friends with.
The new one is not with anyone I wouldn't want to have a child with.

I found my old list which I had written on the suggestion of one of my first dates, one of the people I had been most excited about at one time.  I wrote down a list of exactly what I am hoping to find in someone.
I figured after a year of dating, meeting many new people, romance and relationships and sex and new friends that I might be able to refine the list with new found perspective about what is most important to me.
Turns out I had it the first time.  There is nothing I can remove, and only one small addition.
(Its just that I haven't been actually following it.  I keep giving people chances, even though its a list of "non-negotiables".)

Really, it doesn't seem like so much to ask for.
Just three basic things.

Someone who shares my outlook on life.
Someone who challenges me intellectually.
Someone who wants the same type of life-partnership that I do.

That's it.
Its easy enough to find all of those things.
Just not all three in the same person.

One of my new friends pointed out there is a conflict in what I want:  I want a relationship that builds over at least a year, but I also want to be in that relationship already. 
She made a good point.
So its on me to keep meeting new people, but avoiding all the romantic and intimacy which sucks me in but leaves me discouraged and unfulfilled when I return to reality a few days or weeks or months later.

Perhaps my readers can help me out.
Here is the list:   EXTRA BONUS SUPER FUN PACK

If you know anyone like that, direct her my way.