Researchers Shocked to Discover that Casual Pestorkers Enjoy Casual Pestorking

I for one welcome the return of Stinque After Dark, even if we can never recapture the glory days of “my (I forget) you (I forget) dire.”

I think it comes down to sex, whether casual or committed (and why can’t you be committed to the sex during a casual encounter?), either causes emotional damage or does not. Depending on your attitude toward sex.

That said, why do I only get the inconvenient come-ons from supermarket behavioral researchers and people who want to know which commercials I responded to most favorably during last year’s Superbowl?

Why can’t a hunky “researcher” knock on my door right now to massage my underlying data? I suspect those researchers are casting pearls before swine. But men are pigs, aren’t we?

Oh! I hear the doorbell ringing…

It’s great to see the ancient and honorable euphemism for fucking bannered high on the Stinque.com!

Whats funny to me is that there was nothing “casual” about the supposedly “casual” sex I had between 18 and 24. Hell, I was almost 19 before I had any of this supposedly “casual” sex.

Between 18 and 24, hell, for a long time after, sex was not “casual,” it was the single most important thing in the world. Life revolved around it, trying to get it, planning every moment with a mind towards whether there might be an opportunity for it, during those years, its the only reason I bathed and groomed and tried to dress, it was not casual, it was life or death.

No, thats not casual sex. Casual sex is what you have after you have been married 20 years and are doing it for the 2,000th time with your partner. No more pressure, no more worry, no more shyness, no more fear of “no,” thats casual sex.

And its great, by the way.

@Pedonator: “there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare. If you are raised to believe casual sex makes you evil and awful, you are gonna feal evil and awful when you do it. If you have a healthier attitude, and its shared with your partners, thats critical, mutuality in the understanding of whats happening, then its completely harmless.

That mutuality, it might be an unattainable ideal (at least in my heterosexual circles). I am trying to remember if I can, if I have ever had a truly innocent, casual, one night stand.

I am tough on myself in this regard, I have no blinders, no illusions, I am thinking through those years, when I was young, and all the casual hookups, to see if I can remember one, where my ideal was the reality, two people, just enjoying a moment, intimacy, affection, without deeper hopes, just fun, like playing a game of tennis.

I can’t recall one. First off, as my shrink has been working gently to get me to see, I had a distant, unaffectionate mother, and this is a recipe for a womanizing man, seeking affection and validation from every woman. As a result, I tended to be in in love with any woman who paid attention to me, and thus, I was often the one who was used, because, when seeking sex, because of my neurosis, I was always, always, seeking love.

And then there were the rarer times, when I was just blindly horny, and there was a woman seeking love, and most often, she would be playing a false face, and professing that its a no strings, cool thing, no pressure, but you know, you can always tell, you can, if you are honest with yourself, you can always tell when someone is giving you sex in the hope for love. But you do it anyway, at least I did.

So, I have pretended I was not into it for love, just sex, but I was lying to them, and there were times when they were pretending they were just into it for sex, and not love, and I took advantage of that, knowing they were lying.

I hold all this stuff to tough standards, I am very very good at criticizing myself. None of these situations involved any egregious using of the other person’s emotions, but still, I often knew, what was really going on.

But thats life, there is always some inequality, some difference, all you can do is try your best to be a decent person, despite the amazing genetic, animal, urges.

@Promnight: What a wonderful world it would be if we could all drop our pants and fuck like bunnies just because it makes us feel good. And if we could really engage with others on an emotional level, open ourselves up, get to know one another without that perpetual tension of sizing each other up and down, wondering, how would this fit in there and what sounds would be made in the fitting?

I guess it does sometimes happen, and that’s a reason for optimism if there ever was one.

@Pedonator: But if we could just be free of received value judgments, free from what is all just guilt over fear of transgressing social values, wouldn’t that be reality?

Oh, we progressives have rejected victorian religious moral strictures about sex, but have replaced them with value judgments based on analysis of assumed power disparities, assumptions about who is using who, who is taking advantage of weakness, who is using who, and whats astounding is that we have replaced victorian religious-based prudishness with a new, politically correct prudishness, that, it seems to me, is more repressive.

@Promnight: It may be that humans have an innate need for duplicity.

Perhaps the Victorians did have better sex, after an evening of extreme social conformity, after excruciatingly polite, conscripted conversation at the dinner table and painstakingly choreographed movements upon the dance floor.

They would retire, sneaking surreptitiously up the servants’ stair, to rendezvous in the fire-lit bedrooms of their host’s country manor, to rip each others’ corsets and waistcoats apart with savage abandon and throw themselves upon each other atop the down comforters of the four-poster bed. One sneaking back before light of dawn to his or her own guest room, before the servant appeared with the breakfast tray.

@Pedonator: You are fascinating.

I can understand casual sex like one night stands.

Friends with Benefits? Not so much. Having gotten myself out of such a situation, I can only say that regular casual sex either means you have an uncanny ability to detach emotion from sex. I just can’t. I’ll admit it. I get attached to who I bang. To me, sex is as just as much emotional as it is the physical act. I don’t really like sex without emotion. Makes me feel empty.

@Promnight: Thank you. But please. Just trying to spice things up for After Dark.

Also, that shtick was an easy reference to the ongoing controversy among some of The Ghey about whether the sex was better when we had to hide our desire. But there don’t seem to be many of The Ghey on this thread tonight, so go figure.

@ManchuCandidate: I agree that sex is all about emotion, and almost completely in the head. The head above your shoulders I mean. But particular nuances of emotion can be savored once or many times.

There are probably so many flavors of sex, like food, there are meals you want to consume passionately but just once or once in a while, and then there are comfort foods, that will sustain you throughout your life.

@Promnight: Oh — did you mean like a train wreck?

@Pedonator: No, not at all, only that you have thought deeply about it too.

@Promnight: By “it” do you mean my peen and what makes it tick? What other subject is worthy of deep thoughts?

@Promnight: After Dark is just an Occasional Feature now, for those weeks when I stumble across something appropriate. It’s too onerous to look for a needle in a haystack of thirty pages of “sex -offender” in Google News every Friday.

@nojo: It’s an onerous onus for you to provide us all with a place to vent spleen daily anyway. No worries. Though I noticed (?) that Occasional Feature After Dark erupted an hour earlier, to accommodate the lately incomprehensible daylight savings time-shifting?

Anyway, I was wondering where you were. So, do you have any Deep Thoughts about my peen and what makes it tick?

@Pedonator: Since After Dark is now Irregular, I’ve released it from its 11 p.m. perch. It was originally set for 9 tonight, but Tiger bumped it. (It was set for 9 last week as well, but someone else scored a late post and I delayed it.)

In regard to Ticking Peens, usually that depends on whether they’re wound up.

@nojo: Don’t let Benedick see that last comment. Might give him more ammunition ideas.

I was just wondering if you could contribute to the philosophical treatise I’m preparing about my peen. I’ve been working on it for years. Still looking for the faculty to judge my oral dissertation.

@Pedonator: I’d suggest following Aristotle’s lead in De Anima, Book II, Chapter 1:

Suppose that the eye were an animal — sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula [i.e., which states what it is to be an eye], the eye being merely the matter of seeing; when seeing is removed the eye is no longer an eye, except in name — it is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or painted figure.

To my knowledge, no scholar has applied this passage to the peen and contemplated the consequences. You might even get a research grant from Pfizer.

@nojo: Now I must contemplate, what is the substance or essence of the peen?

Good homework assignment, but I’ll have to get back to you on that. Rest assured, I’ll be studying the question right away. I just hope that when the essence is is removed, it will still be a peen.

@Pedonator: Now you understand the title of Wittgenstein’s major work, Philosophical Investigations.

@nojo: Language bewitches the thinking of our peens?

Can we get a cage match between zombie Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky (in his linguist-Ninja format)?

Of Wittgenstein, I just vaguely remember reading Of Color, after a blitzkrieg of reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more, way before I had any business reading philosophy.

Which means, I don’t remember any of the specifics, but it somehow informed my worldview.

@Pedonator: way before I had any business reading philosophy

So now I just stick to reading porn.

@Pedonator: I see a cage match among a dozen Zombie Wittgensteins, each representing an irreconcilable group of his followers. It’s worse than splintering teabaggers out there.

And please note, Wittgenstein is thoroughly unreadable. If you try to approach him directly, you’ll turn to stone. And if you try to approach him via an acolyte, you’ll be fundamentally misguided.

Which, of course, is part of the fun.

@Pedonator: Language bewitches the thinking of our peens?

Wittgenstein would call it thinking with the wrong head.

Wow, I missed a lot watching my favorite dark and cynical movie last night for the 500th time. (It’s a Wonderful Life)

@SanFranLefty: Why do we have to have all these kids? My fave line in any Xmas movie.

@nojo: Peens think? I think El Tigre would say no.

@Mistress Cynica: Yes, that’s the favorite line of mine and Mr. SFL in that entire movie. But you have to say it with that Jimmy Stewart inflection.

Since it’s been a year since I pulled out the DVD, I was struck by how Dick Cheney did such a great job playing Mr. Potter back in 1947. And Homofascist may recall that when we were watching the inauguration from a bar after being screwed by the Purple Line, I screamed out “Mr Potter” when they showed Cheney rolling around in the wheelchair. The people within earshot of our table laughed.

@Pedonator: You’re being mean, it was sincere, and not referring to peens. I know, you are a deep thinker, and I understand it sounded like condescension, or else, and I know this feeling, sometimes a compliment from some dullard who graduated from a land grant school and has no idea of your depth, can be, well, insulting, if taken wrong.

But thats not what I was doing, I was just happy and somewhat honored that you engaged with me, despite my autodidact’s habit of thinking that what I picked up accidentally is somehow rare knowledge. Trust me, I know, and deeply appreciate, that the people here at this place are the smartest, most educated people I have ever had contact with in my life, I wish you were one of my professors, you and others here show them as the dullards they were.

I am sorry for the offense, I do understand it, it was not intended.

@Promnight: @Pedonator:

i like to call myself “boy crazy” sounds less slutty.

i never dated in any conventional sense. i just went about my business and invariably bumped into someone who would become The Love Of My Life for 4.3 years.

i never had a one night stand. except once sorta. (sorta only because we spent a few boring weekends together after it)

i was sitting next to my girlfriend at a busy bar in philly. sitting directly across from me was a GORgeous guy. i told my friend, it’s time i had a one night stand, and see that guy over there? he’s coming home with me tonight. she said, you know who that is? he was the new weatherman on the station i didn’t watch. big deal. he came home with me, all right.
and it will make me chuckle when i’m rocking in my nursing home chair.

fun fact: he’s on the air in nyc, still talking about weather.

@nojo:

wittgenstein. very weird. i finished the last of unpacking the books last night and came across wittgenstein. haven’t given him a thought in decades. and now he comes up here.
is this like when women hang out together they all get their periods at the same time?

Wittengenstein has been mentioned here, Dear baked, probably more then anywhere else except philosophy blogs over the last, what is it now, 2 years, and I regard “here” as wherever we all are. The cool thing, though, is that when Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, are mentioned here, its not intellectual muscle-flexing, or sophomoric name-dropping (except maybe when I do it), its because we have an amazing number of people, led by Nojo, who really know their philosophy.