Where do Pornographic Stories Come From?

Sooner or later, every author, even an author of pornography on the web, is asked, “Where do your stories come from?” The person asking that question of a pornography author often seems to be hoping that the answer will be, “Personal experience. I’ve done everything that I write about and I’d like to do it all again with you.”

Though I dislike disappointing my readers, I’ve always admitted that I’ve never done any of the wild things that I write about and never will. I’m content to let my masochistic fantasies remain as fantasies.

The question, though – Where do I get my ideas from? – deserves an answer nevertheless.

My stories grow from seeds. A story consists of a plot – a sequence of actions. It needs characters to perform those actions. The characters perform in some situation and the actions should lead to an interesting conclusion. The action, especially in sado-masochistic fiction, may require an unusual physical device. And it should give the reader some information. It may even make an argument.

Any one of these – plot, characters, situation, conclusion, device, or argument – can come first and be the seed for the story. My story, “Riding the Devil’s Horse” began when I found a description of the Spanish Horse torture device on the web. “INR” began when I thought about what would happen if a woman wanted to experience rape without unnecessary risk. “A Necessary Beating” began when I read about boxing gloves being invented to make fighting safer.

The seed is the smallest and easiest part of the writing process. I keep lists of interesting seeds for stories that I’ll never get around to writing. “Woman who is in the process of committing suicide is rescued by a sadist.” (a situation) “A woman’s evening gown can have the sleeves sown to the seam at the hips so that it looks normal but prohibits her from raising her arms.” (a device) “Making people afraid is dangerous.” (a principle)

After the seed is chosen, the real work starts. The remaining elements must be created because the seed won’t be a story until it has at least plot, situation, characters, and conclusion. And probably won’t be worth reading unless it also has a moral, principle, or argument.

Adding these other elements to the seed is a problem-solving processes. An author must be a person who likes solving puzzles.

Even choosing a character to tell the story and picking a point of view is a problem that I consider for a while before the writing begins.

I solve most of the other problems as I’m writing, particularly creating difficult situations for the characters and finding interesting ways for them to get out of them. I never have a complete story in my head before I begin. Instead, I let the story unfold as I write. My main guiding principle as I’m writing is to avoid the obvious and try to constantly surprise the reader by having something unexpected happen to the characters or have the characters do something unexpected.

So, the simple answer to the question, “Where do your ideas come from?” is that they can come from almost anything. But they’ll only be worth reading if a lot more work is added to that idea.

Making People Afraid is Dangerous

American popular culture and terrorism hold one belief in common: that it is useful to make people afraid.

It is obvious that terrorists believe in the power of fear. This is in their name. But, to see how deeply the idea runs in American popular culture, we have to examine it more closely. First, we notice that in most American television and movie dramas, the hero strives to instill fear in the villains. Movie heroes never succeed by negotiating reasonable terms with the villains.

Tee shirts say, “Be afraid. Be very afraid,” and bumper stickers, “Fear me, right wing conspirator.”

High school football coaches tell their players to make the other team afraid of them under the theory that an fearful opponent will be an ineffective opponent.

This idea carries over into American’s perceptions of international relations. In conversations with other Americans, it is common to hear Rambo wannabes refer to themselves as “the world’s only superpower”; having “the most powerful military in the world”; and able to “destroy anyone we want, anytime, anywhere”. They are likely to say explicitly that other countries better do what they are told or America will wipe them off the face of the Earth.

Few Americans ever talk about having the most effective diplomatic corps in the world or being happy to negotiate peaceful and mutually beneficial agreements with other countries. The American government engages in diplomacy constantly, but the average American doesn’t want to hear about it. He wants to see news stories about America’s enemies running away from American troops in terror.

The idea that “it is better to be feared than loved” was made explicit by Machiavelli in The Prince. His logic was that love is fickle and cannot be trusted but a man who fears you will remain fearful in all circumstances.

Unfortunately, Machiavelli’s simplistic logic was not based on an understanding of how people actually behave.

When you are afraid of someone, your first response is not obedience. Your first response is to destroy the object of your fear. Obeying a monster will most often damage you because monsters do not have your best interests at heart. On the other hand, destroying the monster will permanently and completely free you and those around you from danger. Because of that, you will go to considerable lengths to destroy a monster, even taking the risk of being destroyed yourself.

If you are unable to destroy the monster, then your best alternative is not obedience, but flight. If you can get away from the monster, then you will have an opportunity to marshal your forces and destroy it if you encounter it again.

Only if the first two options are impossible, only if you are cornered and face overwhelming force, will you obey the monster. And, even then, you will only obey for as long as necessary. No matter what you promise or what you do, as soon as you have an opportunity to fight back, you will revert to your primary impulse and try to destroy the monster.

Trying to govern through fear is a dangerous strategy. Even if you can do it in the short term, it never creates loyalty and always fails in the end. Kingdoms were replaced by democracies as soon as people acquired adequate weapons. Dictators are usually overthrown sooner rather than later. Fascist states that bragged they would last for a thousand years were defeated after a decade or two.

Terrorism has been even less successful. Never in history has a terrorist campaign achieved its stated goals. A century of terrorism has done nothing but harden England’s hold on Northern Ireland at the same time that nonviolent action freed India and South Africa. In the face of wave after wave of Palestinian suicide bombing campaigns, Israel becomes stronger all the time. After 9/11 Bin Laden said explicitly that he did it in order to drive the American military out of the Middle East. Look how well that worked.

The same is true of military campaigns which attempt to demoralize the enemy through fear. In World War II, the blitz was intended to break England’s will to fight. Pearl Harbor was intended to drive America away from a Pacific front. A massive American military presence was intended to show the North Vietnamese that resistance was futile. Every time, the action had the opposite effect. Superior military power can physically crush an opponent but, as long as the enemy thinks that he has a chance to win, however slim, he will keep fighting against you.

We brag that Americans don’t capitulate to our enemies when faced with danger. “These colors – the red white and blue – don’t run.” We stand and fight. Why do we think that other people will bow down to us if we threaten them? In our propaganda, we always depict the enemy as craven, but propaganda is not reality. When we make our enemies fearful, even enemies who are much smaller than us like North Vietnam and the Taliban, we make them stronger and more determined to resist us.

Sometimes we make them so strong that they defeat us.

In our fantasies, diplomats might not be as exciting as soldiers, but in the real world, we win more concessions when we make people our friends than when we make them our enemies.

Yours, Ashley

What’s Wrong with Television?

Television offers us some great programs. The Good Wife, Being Erica, and Breaking Bad are just a few examples from a long list. In the golden age of television in the ’50s and ’60s, there were few if any shows that could compete with the best of today’s programs.

Yet, the number of people watching television has been decreasing every year for more than two decades. Worse, for more than a decade, teenagers have been spending more time on the Internet than watching television. Television is failing to attract and hold the interest of the next generation of viewers.

What is wrong with television?

The problem starts with greed, pure and simple. Long ago, in the primal media swamp, an hour-long television program took about fifty-five minutes. A minute of advertisement was broadcast before the show began. Fifteen minutes later, the show was interrupted by another minute of advertising. At the half hour there was another minute plus a station break, and at the forty-five minute mark, another minute. Watching television was tolerable.

But what was tolerable for the audience was intolerable for network executives. They wanted more revenue and they could earn it simply by inserting more ads and sacrificing show time.

Now, an hour-long television program is only about forty-two minutes long. Viewers are expected to spend a third of their time watching ads.

Network executives noticed that they lost viewers every time they interrupted the show so they thought that they could be clever by distributing the ads at strategic intervals. Their brilliant idea was to begin shows with a long period without ads to hook the viewer and then pile the ads on at the end when they hope that the viewer is too involved to turn off the set. And they take ads out of programs with low viewership and insert them into the more popular programs. Government regulation allows this.

Worse, research showed that ads are more memorable if they are repeated while still in the viewer’s short-term memory. So the networks began the truly obnoxious practice of repeating ads within the same three-minute break.

These tricks drove many viewers to stop watching altogether. Ratings dropped for all but the most popular shows. You would think that the executives would have learned that they need to respect the audience at least a bit.

Nope. Instead of learning their lesson, the network executives found new ways to jerk the viewer around. In a desperate bid to grab a diminishing audience share, they began trying to hook viewers with multi-episode plot lines, inserting a little soap opera or a season-long mystery into every drama series. Now, the forty-minute show is effectively a half hour for the casual viewer: thirty minutes for the story that the viewer tuned in to watch and ten minutes for a bit of plot that’s meaningless unless they have been watching every episode in sequence.

They lost more viewers.

Okay, so if the remaining viewers have to watch every episode in sequence to make sense of all the story arcs then the networks will make that easy. Right? Or at least make it possible. Right?

Wrong. Convinced that they had their remaining viewers tightly trapped into watching their series, they began trashing the program schedules.

First, they tried moving series around in mid-season. For year after year in the fifties and sixties, on Sunday night, everyone watched Disney, followed by Ed Sullivan, followed by Bonanza. Nobody had to check the TV Guide. And every other night had its own lineup. Those days are no more. Now, if a program on Tuesday has a bigger audience than a competing network’s program on Wednesday, the network will suddenly move it, expecting that the more popular program will take audience share away from the other guy’s less popular show.

For this to work, they assume that viewers are watching television all the time and, at the beginning of every time slot, will tune into the program that grabs their interest.

Did it work? No. That’s not the way modern audiences watch TV and there were some spectacular failures. The critically-acclaimed Murder One consistently lost audience share when they shifted time slots and made their viewers miss episodes in the serialized plot line. The top-rated reality show, The Mole, lost almost its entire audience when it shifted time slots. Excellent shows could not survive the stress of constant schedule shuffling. On the other hand shows like Law & Order, which occupied the same ten o’clock Wednesday time slot for years survived just fine.

Did the network executives learn anything? Not a thing. They began playing more drastic games with scheduling. Traditionally a television season was twenty-six episodes: half the year was new episodes and the other half re-runs. Then they cut the standard season to a mere thirteen episodes: a quarter year of new episodes, a quarter year of re-runs, and the other half year with a replacement program. Except that wasn’t good enough. They began intermixing new episodes with re-runs hoping that people would watch episodes that they’d already seen only a couple of months ago. And then they began playing re-runs to try to get viewers back up to speed on the on-going plot lines before the new episodes begin.

Now, nobody knows what’s going to play or when, even with on-screen program guides to help.

So what do people do? They watch less television, of course. But, thanks to technology, they are watching as many programs as ever. They record them, not only to skip commercials, but to avoid re-runs and out-of-order episodes. They buy DVDs so they can see a whole season at a time. They download them off the Internet, either from legitimate sites or as pirated files.

Have the studio executives learned their lesson yet? Hell, no. Now they strut around saying that new technologies are killing television. Nonsense. The new technologies are not that good. It’s too expensive to buy everything on DVD. The Internet doesn’t have enough bandwidth so it takes too long to download enough programming. PVRs take too much planning.

The only reason that people cobble together enough programs with combinations of these technologies is because network executive already killed television. They jerked the viewers around so much that they jerked them away from the screen.

If they want their audience back, they can get it easily enough. Reduce the commercial interruptions down to one minute breaks every fifteen minutes. Keep the shows on at the same time on the same nights. Save the multi-episode plot lines for programs that need them, like soap operas, and make most shows self-contained episodes.

Viewers will come back if the network executives can get themselves under control and stop driving them away.

But time, and technology, marches on. If the executives don’t make television watching tolerable again, the alternative technologies will soon be good enough to kill television permanently.

No audience, no advertisers, no television. It’s simple economics.

Yours, Ashley

What’s Wrong with the Movies?

It’s been a bad summer for the movie industry. It’s been a bad decade, for that matter. And it’s going to get worse unless Hollywood executives change their ways.

There has been endless speculation among Hollywood executives about the reason for the decline in theater attendance, accompanied by endless pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth.

They blame technology. New technologies, like HD flat-screens with Blu-ray players and digital cable, have had an impact. Movie theaters are scrambling to install Omni-max 3D projectors so that they can offer something not available at home. That’s nice, but it’s just a band-aid.

Then they blame the bad economy. That’s always a convenient whipping boy. Even without overpriced pop and popcorn, fifty bucks is a lot of money to pay to take the wife and 2.5 kids to see a flick. You don’t do that every week when the bank is foreclosing on your house.

Hollywood can’t stop technological progress or fix the economy. But, if they want to fill their theaters, one thing that they can do is make better movies.

Long ago, Hollywood lost sight of a simple fact: A movie is a story told on the screen. Got that, Hollywood? A story! Making better movies means telling better stories.

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, from the thirties to the mid-sixties, studios ruled and studio executives treated everyone like chattel: stars, directors, and screenwriters alike. That changed in the New Hollywood era during the late sixties and seventies. Brash young directors who knew how to appeal to the baby boomers were given a free hand.

The New Hollywood directors won a power struggle against writers. They wrote their own scripts or mercilessly re-wrote other people’s scripts. Famously, Ring Lardner, Jr. was so appalled at the changes that Altman made to his M*A*S*H script that he pulled his name from the credits. He was far from the only writer who was appalled to see the release of a movie that hardly resembled his original script.

This is completely different than live theater. A playwright can get a court injunction to close a play that varies from his script by even a single word. In stark contrast, a screenwriter has no legal recourse against a director who mangles his words beyond recognition.

Sometimes screenplays are improved dramatically by the director’s revision. Compare the original screenplay of American Beauty to the final movie, for example. But the long-term effect of routinely trashing screenwriters’ work has been devastating.

Instead of screenwriting being a creative art, it has become assembly-line drudge-work. Screenplays are nothing but grist for Hollywood mills to grind into tasteless pap. This summer, the typical Hollywood movie has been a sequel or an adaption of a comic book or video game. Screenplays are written to conform to the specifications of studio executives and market researchers and then turned over to directors and editors who serve the same masters.

Hollywood believes that people don’t mind seeing weak stories based on simple-minded premises and driven by witless, utilitarian dialog to a predictable conclusion as long as it is tarted up with a celebrity star, breathless, bloody action, or oodles of gorgeous computer-generated visual effects.

They are half right. And they get half the audience that they should. People will go see Avatar for the CGI. But they’d rather have seen it with a decent story, not with a childish plot that serves only as a crude hanger for hours of splendid visual effects.

In the New Hollywood era in the late sixties, cinema was edgy and television was crammed with mindless pap. Today, television has Glee, Dexter, and Mad Men, and the movies offer us Vampires Suck.

The New Hollywood is long gone and it looks like Corporate Hollywood will remain in control until it’s forced into bankruptcy. Pity. I used to like going out to see a movie.

Yours, Ashley

To Write Porn or Not to Write Porn?

I aspire to write pornography. I don’t write it just because it’s fun (it is!) or because it’s easy (it’s not). I write it because I want to write it.

Why?

To have an audience.

When I write “mainstream” fiction, nobody wants to read it. Not even my family. When I write “porn” and put it on a site like BDSMLibrary.com, it is downloaded 5,000 times in the first week, 10,000 times in the first month, 25,000 times in a year.

I bundled four related stories into an ebook (A Lady Pays her Penalties) and self-published it on Smashwords.com. Within three weeks, it climbed into the top 200 most downloaded long (more than 25,000 words) publications. That’s out of a field of almost 8,000 works. Currently it has been available on Smashwords for about six weeks and is in 120th place with well over 1000 downloads. It’s an epub bullet!

I could never get those numbers with self-published mainstream fiction.

So why do I want an audience – even to the extent that I’m happy to distribute my work for free and forgo a potential few thousand dollars a year in royalties?

Fame is nice. It’s comforting to know that a few thousand people somewhere in the world have read your work and may remember your name.

Feedback is more important. I want to write better. There’s no ceiling on good writing. No matter how well I write, I know that I could do better somehow. I have to have a large audience to get feedback because only one out of a thousand of my readers writes a comment or sends fan mail. When people write and tell me what they liked, what they didn’t like, how my words affected them or failed to affect them, then I get clues about how to do better next time. When one reader sends me an email saying that my story made her cry in a good way or another talks about walking out of the cybercafe trying to conceal the tent in his pants, I know that I’ve done something right. When a number of other readers agree that my male characters are two-dimensional and too wimpy, I know that I need to devote more effort there.

I also put “payloads” into some of my stories. Messages can be embedded in the porn, from prescriptions for saving failing marriages to urging Microsoft to develop virus-resistant computers to promoting a skeptical view of religion. I don’t have to be a Ghandi or a Mandela. Even if only a few people find their lives improved by just a barely noticeable amount, then I can be happy that my time on earth has not been totally wasted.

But, most important of all, the audience keeps me writing. I’ve written well over a million words of fiction in the last ten years. Only a third of that is porn. Two thirds is mainstream fiction. But not a single person has read my mainstream writing. If I didn’t have my porn readers encouraging me to write more, I would have given up writing years ago.

Given that I want to write porn, it’s surprising how difficult that can be. The problem is not to write something – I can always write something – but to write something that is both new and erotic. It is surprising how often an interesting idea does not have a sufficient erotic flavor.

A case in point is my latest submission to BDSMLibrary.com. The Baby Machine is a story about a young woman who decides to devote her life to having as many babies as possible, each by a different man. It’s got sex. I describe in some detail how she tries to seduce three virgin high school students in one night. It’s got kink. She has her gay husband supply her with large numbers of anonymous men to have sex with her while she’s blindfolded. It’s got bondage. When she fears that she will not be able to force herself to continue to have sex, she chains herself to her bed. But is it erotic enough? I don’t know, but I fear not. It’s a full novella, almost 40,000 words, but only a few thousand of those words describe sexual activities. The rest describe her self-created situation, how it evolves to become more practical, and how it leads to surprising success in both business and academia. I attempt to provide an in-depth study of a strong character because character development has consistently been one of the weak points in my previous writing. But there’s not a lot of whack-off material in this one.

So here I am, waiting for the story to appear, fearing that my readers will tell me that, once again, despite all my best efforts, I have failed to write pornography.

Do other pornographers face the same dilemma?

Yours, Ashley

Breaking my Willing Suspension of Disbelief

What do Dan Brown’s Deception Point and Glenn Cooper’s Library of the Dead have in common? Both strain my ability to suspend disbelief beyond the breaking point. And, both for the same reason.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1817, noted that stories, or in his case Gothic poetry, had to have a sufficient semblance of mundane truth to allow people to believe in the supernatural elements in his ballads.

For exactly that reason, Brown and his possible literary heir, Cooper, have to make the mundane elements of their stories sound correct in order for their readers to accept the extraterrestrial fossils and supernatural library that are the keystones of their respective books.

In their books, it’s not the fantastic that fails to engage me, it’s their foolish handling of mundane details.

In Deception Point, Brown has a major American government operation taking place in Canadian territorial waters without the Canadian government noticing or objecting. Worse, in The Library of the Dead, Cooper has the British government, in the person of Winston Churchill no less, giving the most important archeological discovery of all time away to the American government because they couldn’t handle it in the aftermath of World War Two.

Say what? The Canadian government doesn’t know or care what happens in the Canadian Arctic? The British government of Bletchley Park code breakers and MI6 believe themselves less able to handle sensitive material than Americans? We are to believe that neither of these governments is either competent or patriotic? We Americans might sometimes be seen as ignorant about international affairs and arrogant about our own place on the world stage but surely we aren’t that ignorant or arrogant. Are we?

The sad part is that both of these canards could have been avoided with a few keystrokes. Deception Point could have been located in American waters off the coast of Alaska. The Library of the Dead could have been located in a country such as Italy that was occupied by Americans after World War Two. There was no need to fuck up my willing suspension of disbelief by disrespecting the competence of other industrialized countries.

In my own writing, I give my readers descriptions of women who are not only willing to suffer pain and humiliation, but seek it out. Such women exist, but are outside most people’s experience. I need my readers to suspend their disbelief just as surely as Dan Brown or Glenn Cooper. Unlike them, I try to be as accurate as possible about the mundane details of my settings, even to the extent of researching restaurant menus on their web sites before my characters sit down to a meal.

In more ways that one, I’m no Dan Brown.

I hope my readers are happy about that.

Yours, Ashley

How to Make a Virus-Proof Computer

That anyone sells personal computers that can be infected by viruses is unconscionable. I would not buy a car if any stranger who wished could drive it away; or a house if any stranger could come in and live with me. Why should I be forced to buy a computer that any stranger can hijack?

To make a computer virus-proof, one need only enforce a simple principle: The computer must execute only programs that that the owner knows about and approves.

Enforcing this principle is not difficult. Computers need to have three characteristics.

First, the operating system must be installed on a write-restricted disk. Dangerous viruses hide by modifying the operating system. If a physical switch must be closed before anything can be written to the disk where the operating system resides, then no virus can surreptitiously modify it. Some people already run Linux from a CD or DVD. This works, but is slow. It is more efficient to use a high-speed magnetic disk that has been write-disabled. When the operating system needs to be upgraded, then the owner can be instructed to throw the switch to temporarily enable writing to the disk. As long as they are careful to enable writing only when making authorized changes, the operating system will be inviolate.

Second, the inviolate operating system must monitor applications to ensure that they have not been modified. To do this, it must have access to an authoritative information about each application, possibly from a remote server or from a second write-restricted disk. Before executing an application, the operating system will validate the program’s memory image by ensuring it is the right length, has the right checksum, and satisfies other requirements. If it is found to have been modified, then the operating system can re-install a clean version of the application before executing it.

Third, no application should allow data to be executed. Macros or interpreted code can be made safe because they only trigger the execution of known functions. But to allow the execution of arbitrary binary code as machine language is to give whoever created the data unrestricted access to the computer.

If it is easy to protect computers from viruses, then why is it not already standard practice?

Offhand, I can think of two reasons.

First, the companies that develop operating systems want access to your computer. Knowing that their code will never be free of bugs, they want to be able to reach into your computer and patch their programs at will.

Second, they believe, often correctly, that many, if not most, computer owners do not know or want to know everything that is running on their machines. In the pursuit of “ease-of-use”, they want to be able to “do things for the user” without bothering to inform the user what they are doing.

In fact, people mostly want to do simple things with their computers: surf the web, send and receive email, create documents, play games. It is atrocious that people cannot do these things without putting their computers at risk and, by extension, all the information that they store on them.

We do not have to harden all computers against viruses, only the majority of them. This will greatly reduce the incentive to write viruses. As well, it will reduce spam because spammers will not be able to use networks of zombie computers to send unwanted emails. For the same reason, it will make it far more difficult to mount denial-of-service attacks.

These benefits not only protect us as individuals, they increase our national security. If Microsoft and Apple are unwilling to design virus-resistance computers, then the NSA and Department of Defense should do it for them.

How to Make a Happy Marriage

The most common sexual “dysfunction” experienced by married couples is unequal libidos. One partner wants to make love more often than the other. Though this is a mild dysfunction compared to impotence, complete lack of sexual desire, or an inability to experience orgasm, it causes difficulties in more marriages than any other sexual problem. Over the long term it can lead to increasing dissatisfaction that spills over into other areas of the relationship and eventually to divorce.

It’s not surprising that the most common question about sex is “How often do other people do it?” Low libido partners are hoping to hear, “not often,” and high libido partners, “all the time.” The therapists’ standard answer to the question is an uninformative: “It depends on the couple. You have to decide for yourselves how often you want to do it and not measure yourself against other couples.”

Forget about counseling. There is a surprisingly simple fix for the problem that you can do all on your own. For free.

Assuming that you both have some prurient interest in each other, sit down and negotiate a schedule of sexual activity. Compromise. One of you will have to agree to slightly more frequent sex than you want and the other to slightly less frequent sex, but you will be able to find a middle ground.

Be specific. Say exactly which evenings, mornings or afternoons will be on the schedule. It doesn’t matter if you decide once every second Saturday night or every single morning and evening. It only matters that you both agree.

Then stick to it. Don’t worry about being “in the mood.” Have sex regardless. Keep KY Jelly beside the bed and use it liberally. Help your partner with manual stimulation. It’s surprisingly easy for both men and women to get themselves in the mood if they help each other. Only omit sessions in case of illness or physical impossibility.

At first blush, this sounds unromantic. Mechanical. Isn’t spontaneity the heart of good sex?

Nah. Spontaneity is way overrated. It’s fine for new lovers but couples who have been married for years don’t have much truly spontaneous sex. Someone is usually inconvenienced.

Scheduling your sexual activity has a lot of advantages.

First, it takes the power struggle out of sex. Nothing is as harmful to a relationship as one partner withholding sex from the other in order to exert control over them. “You didn’t put your dishes in the dishwasher so I don’t feel like making love to you,” is a vicious tactic that is going to lead to the divorce lawyer’s office sooner or later. And, when you’re holding the divorce decree in your hand, you’re going to be wailing, “I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this.” You know; you just don’t want to admit it. Take sex off the power-stuggle table. If you want to punish your partner for something, you’ve got lots of other ways to make life miserable than by witholding sex.

Second, it makes fighting difficult. If you are committed to making love in the next four hours, you’re going to think twice about flying off the handle over some trivial matter. At the least, it will give you an incentive to put off that big fight until tomorrow. And it’s surprising how many fights never take place if they have to be delayed by twelve hours.

Third, it makes affection easier. Without a schedule, every kiss, every hug, every shoulder rub might be an attempt to initiate sex. Even if the high-libido partner does not intend it from the beginning, if the low-libido partner responds, the high-libido partner will be tempted to try to push further in the hope of getting lucky this time. It’s no surprise that low-libido partners get into the habit of discouraging even minor gestures of affection. If both partners have agreed to a schedule, then acts of affection need never be rejected. If they happen at a time when sex is not scheduled, that hug will be understood to be simple affection, not the first step in seduction. And if sex is scheduled, then both partners know that they are engaged in foreplay and will respond appropriately.

Fourth, it makes waiting for sex easier. If the high libido partner is horny and sex is not scheduled yet, then he or she knows exactly how long he or she will have to wait for satisfaction. If it’s soon, then waiting won’t be an insurmountable problem. And if it’s a long time, then masturbation is a safe option. Not knowing if sex is coming in four hours or four weeks is what makes waiting problematic.

Fifth, it makes sex easier. If you know that you have to perform in the next twenty-four hours, you can avoid masturbation; in the next hour, you can prime yourself by fantasizing or reading arousing stories; in the next two minutes, you can lubricate yourself or your partner or stimulate yourself or your partner. Because the sex is scheduled, and it’s something that  you are doing for your partner’s benefit, it is understood that you might need a little extra stimulation. It’s not a slight on you or your partner.

If you establish a schedule, then you can review it every once in a while, objectively and without recrimination. Do you need to add a day? Can your partner tolerate removing a day? As time passes and circumstances change, you will want to fine tune your schedule. Unlike being turned down halfway through an attempted seduction, sitting down and negotiating revisions to a schedule is not so emotional or personal.

Given all these advantages, it is not surprising that couples who have used a schedule for a time find themselves more happily married than they expected. Thoughts of divorce fade into the background.

The only surprise is that more couples haven’t discovered the advantages of scheduling their love life for themselves.

The Evolutionary Advantage of Getting Raped

You are the result of twenty-five thousand rapes during the last two thousand years.

This assumes that, over forty generations of your ancestors, one of every thousand sexual acts that resulted in conception was a rape. In fact, this is a conservative estimate. Considering that a women is more likely to be raped during her most fertile years, that there was no birth control for most of history, and that spousal rape has only been considered a reportable crime in the last couple of decades, probably more than one pregnancy in every thousand was the result of a rape.

This also assumes that you have more than ten million ancestors in the last two thousand years. The exact number is smaller than a simple geometric expansion would indicate because there were only about a hundred million people alive two thousand years ago, not the trillion assumed by a complete independence between ancestors. Assuming that your ancestors came from a some specific geographical region, you probably have around a million ancestors who were alive at 1 AD (1 CE). You would be the product of a thousand rapes in that generation alone. Add in another thousand for each of the next twenty generations, then small numbers as your number of ancestors shrank and you quickly arrive at a twenty-five thousand rape minimum. Modify these conservative assumptions even slightly and the number of rapes soars.

If we extrapolate this logic through ten thousand generations to the dawn of homo sapiens as a species, each of us must be the product of millions of rapes.

If your male ancestors had not been able to rape your female ancestors, you would not exist today. The logic of natural selection predicts that women should have evolved to be rapeable.

What makes a woman rapeable? Several things. First, women only have one-third the upper body strength of men. A man can overpower a woman relatively easily. Second, a woman can be penetrated passively. There is no specific action that a woman has to take to make her genitals work. Third, women have no biological defenses around their vulvas. No teeth or stingers or bony plates. Nothing that they can employ to keep a rapist out.

Does this mean that women want to be raped or that they should be raped?

No. Not at all.

Natural selection also predicts that a woman would prefer to be impregnated by a man who has a commitment to her and her child. Single mothers are less able than married mothers to care for themselves and their children. And a mother will have more difficulty attracting a suitable male than a childless woman.

Thus, the logic of natural selection also says that women should have evolved ways to discourage rape and to reduce their chances of getting pregnant following a rape. Furthermore, it says that they should employ their anti-rape mechanisms more readily against strangers than spouses.

These conflicting forces should result in women evolving a balance between their rapeabilty and their ability to resist rape. A woman should be neither easily raped by anyone nor able to resist rape completely.

During the past decade there has been a growing body of scientific literature on this topic (e.g., Thornhill, R. and Palmer, C. (2000), A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Cambridge: MIT Press). But, as an author of fiction, I am more interested in the implications of the rapeability of women for my writing. Exploring the circumstances in which a woman might be raped, the ways that she might resist her rapist, and her reaction after the event has been the grist for literature since the Ancient Greeks told stories about Zeus raping any woman who struck his fancy. This theme continues throughout literature today, though, in the wake of the feminist ideology, it must be accompanied by considerable “tut-tutting”.

Yours, Ashley

Don Juan and the Guys

What does a man have to do to seduce a woman? Much has been said about what the man should do with (or to) the woman. What to wear. Where to go. What pickup lines to pitch. How to fake sincerity. Whether to give candy and flowers or not. How to get to first base, second base, around third, and come in for the homer. Call the next day. And hope to get lucky again.

Little has been said about the importance of other men in this process. Not as competition but as male companions.

Here’s a secret magic tip, guys. Memorize it. Ready? Women like men who have good relationships with other men.

They like men who are confident around other men. They like men who have steadfast male friends. They like men who understand other men and are respected by them.

Don’t believe me? What is attractive about sports stars? Sure they are young, healthy, and handsome. That helps attract the ladies. But they are also team players. They get in there and mix it up with the other guys.

Ever seen The Sopranos? What is attractive about Tony Soprano? Not his flabby physique. Not his ninth grade education. Not his unenlightened view of women. The most notable feature of Tony and other mobsters on the screen is that they spend most of their time in close contact with other men.

The same is true of other “bad boys” from Hollywood cowboys to motorcycle gang members to prison inmates. And equally true of the “good guys” from police officers to soldiers. They’re all “men’s men”.

Look at any book on the romance shelves in your local bookstore. Invariably, the desirable man who wins the woman in the end has close male friends.

There are good biological reason for this. Women take comfort from the shield of protection that a respected man automatically provides. Even at the most civilized cocktail party, most women are not keen on being hit on by every man in the room. If she has a man who is respected by other men, she’s less likely to be pestered by a horde of horny losers.

As well, a man who knows how to cooperate with other men is likely to be a good provider. From participating in a successful mammoth hunt to ruling the boardroom, men who work well in groups will bring home more bacon than men who can’t.

As well, a man who is well-socialized will be a better father. He will provide a better role model for his sons and a better example of a good mate for his daughters.

S0, guys, if you want to woo the ladies, start by paying attention to the guys around you. Don’t start practicing your pickup lines in front of the mirror until you have your male relationships under control.

Then, after you tell a woman that “I must be Long John Silver because I want your booty” and she doesn’t even smile before she turns her back on you, you’ll still be able to go back to your table and share a pitcher with the guys.