"What Cornell Teaches Its Students About Sex/From feminist porn awards to guides on group sex, Cornell has promoted sexual liberation as a virtue."

An article by Jared Lederman, a senior at Cornell, in The Free Press.

Lots of links to the University's sex guides, such as "Yes, No, Maybe So: A Sexual Inventory Stocklist"."

Lederman opines: "Cornell’s philosophy on sex is so striking because it is much more measured when it comes to other facets of students’ lives. The school regularly instructs my classmates and me to limit our drinking, protect our sleep, and develop healthier habits. Cornell hasn’t adopted a libertarian philosophy on degenerate college behavior in general; it has simply chosen to champion sexual liberation...."

Hmm. I think he's underestimating how daunting that Sexual Inventory Stocklist is. It's a long series of lists and you're supposed to react to each one. Do you want this or not? Just to excerpt one section of one list: 

Just as I was complaining that I'm weary of the topics in the news, I run across "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him."

I thought Hormuz and Platner and the slush fund and Jill Biden were getting tedious, and then I see, in The New York Times, "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him/Mr. Epstein banked his sperm several years before his death and said that if he died, it should be left in the control of his estate."

Why is this news?

"Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis — but that doesn’t mean they grow better when there’s more carbon in the air, scientists say."

"A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. 'As a scientist, it’s really interesting,' said Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey, published in November. 'As a person … you don’t want to see such a shift, because it’s so negative.' For the past several years, ter Haar and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2.... Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels — and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million...."

From "Carbon pollution is making food less nutritious" (WaPo). That's a gift link, so you can figure out the science and whether this is a case of lying with statistics.

It occurs to me that percentages of nutrients would change if plants just contain more water, but a plant composed of more water might be more appetizing, so just eat a bit more of it. I'm always suspicious of articles that stir up climate-change anxiety.

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

"Landing a joke is difficult in a world where we have lost the shared context on which to build a punch line."

"A few months back, Cummings tried out some jokes about Kamala Harris looking drunk; no one had seen the videos to which she was referring. Onstage in this San Francisco suburb, she feels out the audience’s tolerance for mocking their own kind. A 'hot lesbian chick' in the front, she discovers, works at Tesla. 'You do?' says Cummings. 'Really? And he hasn’t asked you to have …' She gestures toward the hot lesbian, pauses for laughter. 'Is that hurtful? Are all the girls kind of like … "Did you get asked?"' The crowd is rolling. Oh, she thinks. They’re okay with this. 'What would you do if he was like, "Hey, you want this …?" He’d be like, "Here’s my sperm." Does he throw it this way?' she asks, throwing up a Nazi salute."

From "Whitney Cummings Finds Her People/The comedian’s politics has changed. So has her audience" (NY Magazine).

"A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium..."

"... on April 25. Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.

I'm reading "What to expect from ‘world’s first competitive sperm race’/A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium this month" (London Times).

With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"

"The male reproductive system, in particular, seems to be under plastic assault."

"Men with severe erectile dysfunction were found to have up to seven types of plastic in their penises. (That study, published in 2024 by researchers in Miami, was the first to detect microplastics in human penile tissue, which was extracted from six individuals who were undergoing surgery to get an inflatable prosthesis.) Microplastics have also been found in human semen samples. One experiment conducted in China, from October, found that all the semen and urine samples from 113 men contained microplastics. The samples that contained Teflon (the chemical PTFE), which coats cooking utensils, cutting boards, and nonstick pans, had reduced sperm quality, lower total sperm numbers, and reduced motility...."

From "There’s a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Our Brains. Now What? An investigation into what microplastics are doing to our bodies" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: Ironically, the inflatable prosthesis is plastic. 

AND:

We'll forget how to agonize about money in politics if it keeps getting spent with such ineffective and hilarious profligacy.

"The Harris campaign paid Oprah $1 million to do that interview, and she spent $100,000 building the set of the Call Her Daddy podcast so Kamala Harris wouldn’t have to fly out to LA to film it."

The Harris campaign paid Oprah $1 million to do that interview, and she spent $100,000 building the set of the Call Her Daddy podcast so Kamala Harris wouldn’t have to fly out to LA to film it. pic.twitter.com/rg0dthCR7c

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 9, 2024

ADDED: "How Kamala Harris plowed through $1 billion" (Washington Examiner).

"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"On set, Scorsese made one big stipulation. He ordered Dunne not to have sex for the duration of the shoot."

"I am gobsmacked by this, but the actor was unfazed. 'It made perfect sense to me,' he says. 'I knew what he meant. The character had to be boiling over with this unfulfilled anxiety. You had to see …' He pauses. 'Not to be crude, but you had to see the semen build up to where it’s practically coming out of his eyes.' One Saturday night, though, Dunne cracked and broke the rule. The next day of filming, Scorsese spotted the change and went berserk. 'You’ve fucked up the whole picture,' he shouted. 'I don’t think I can finish it now.' Dunne says that he was probably being directed here, too. 'Because now I’m afraid. I’m terrified. And it turns out that a certain level of fear is the same as not having sex. So [Scorsese’s] second piece of direction is telling me that I’ve ruined his movie. That’s excellent direction. It brought all the old anxiety back.'"

From "I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing/Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything" (The Guardian).

If a male director did that to a female....

Anyway... the Scorsese movie in question is "After Hours":

"The benefits of face-to-face interactions may be related to smell. When our noses pick..."

"... up the body odor of other people, for example, we tend to pick up their emotions, too: from anxiety and fear to happiness. In one experiment, researchers applied electrodes to the faces of volunteers and asked them to sniff samples of sweat of people who had previously watched either happy video ('The Jungle Book') or neutral videos (the weather forecast.) After inhaling the body odor of cheerful people, the volunteers’ facial muscles twitched in a way that suggested they felt happier, too.... This role of scents in feeling the emotions of others, he says, may help explain why people with more sensitive noses tend to have larger circles of friends and suffer less loneliness — both important predictors of health and longevity.... Smelling the body odor of a loved one can help reduce stress. When European researchers submitted a group of volunteers to weak electric shocks, those who could sniff T-shirts previously worn by their romantic partners stayed calmer...."

From "Why in-person friendships are better for health than virtual pals/Simply having good friends isn’t enough. Research suggests that to truly thrive, we need to physically meet with our friends on a regular basis" (WaPo).

1. I have almost complete anosmia so does that make other people less useful to me? I guess I would have more friends if the potential to smell them was part of the allure. 

2. Apparently, you have to go to Europe to find people who volunteer to take electric shocks and attempt to succor themselves with smelly T-shirts.

3. We're not hearing about experiments that made people smell the sweat of unhappy people, but wouldn't that change the inferences? If you can smell and you go out and about where you can smell people in person, then, presumably, the smell affects you, but the effect could be negative or positive, depending whether the smellees are happy or unhappy.

4. On the internet, nobody knows you're a smelly dog....

"I have seen claims on social media saying that semen retention can boost your testosterone levels, cure erectile dysfunction, make you more manly..."

"... make you stronger, cure depression, make you more successful, clear your skin.... And there is no medical evidence that it does any of those things."

Says Ashley Winter, "a urologist who has been publicly critical of nofap ideas," quoted in "Masturbation abstinence is popular online. Doctors and therapists are worried" (NPR).

The experts are worried — worried about respect for their authority. But whether there is "medical evidence" or not, individuals will experiment with their own body and mind and observe the results and make their own choices.

"[O]ne can be forgiven for an inelegant breakup when self-actualization — and an expanding transnational etiquette empire — is at stake."

"'You don’t get a second time to shoot a Netflix show, right?' she said. 'It’s all or nothing.' On 'Mind Your Manners,' [Sara Jane] Ho’s self-assigned mandate is ambitious: 'Come with me, and you’ll know what to do anywhere, with anyone, in any situation.'... Ms. Ho takes a practical, international and surprisingly adaptive approach to manners. During an interview, she delivered an unprompted primer on the places and circumstances in which she might personally spit phlegm on the street.... She emphasizes the logic behind certain norms and bluntly rejects others she finds distasteful. (On drinking tea: 'Some people keep their pinkies out to keep balanced, but it looks really pretentious. Definitely pinkies in.')"

From "The Etiquette Guru Who Broke Up With a Boyfriend Over Text" by Maureen O'Connor (NYT).

I clicked through to that article because the headline is susceptible to 2 meanings and the one that came to mind for me was not the one the article was about. I thought the boyfriend used texting to do something wrong and the "guru" broke up with him because of it. But it wasn't that she broke up with him "over" his texting. She used texting to break up with him. I don't think deliberately creating double meanings like that is a good click bait strategy, so I'm going to assume this was simply bad editing.

Is bad editing like bad etiquette? Sort of! It displays a lack of concern for the comfort and convenience of your guests. In that case, I could be accused of bad etiquette by subjecting you, my reader, to something bad. But I'm writing this before publishing, and I have the opportunity to trash this and move on. Yet despite my reason for clicking, I liked this article, and the author probably didn't write the defective headline.

What did I like? The crudely subtle way the author conveyed disapproval of this Netflix character's expertise. 

Now, I just need to add tags and I can publish. I'm not creating a new tag for "phlegm." I already have "saliva" and "bodily fluids" and I don't like thinking about why both seem not quite right. Why am I imposing this blog-writing problem on you, the reader, for whose comfort and convenience I purported to care?

Well, what's most convenient is not to read anything not absolutely necessary — warning labels, traffic signs, etc. — and comfort is complex in the realm of reading. There must be discomfort (of a crudely subtle kind).

"I was so angry and just irritated at seeing man after man — you know, typically, male politicians — grandstanding about abortion."

Said Gabrielle Blair, quoted in "Gabrielle Blair Would Like a Word With Men/After 16 years of making a name for herself as a blogger and home decor expert, Design Mom has written her manifesto — about reproductive health" by Kase Wickman (NYT).

The NYT article seems to be a reaction to the fact that a book Blair created out of a 64-post-long Twitter thread has debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’s paperback nonfiction best-seller list.

Here's the Twitter thread, and here's the book: “Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion.” 

Now, my readers may be saying tough luck for Althouse. She could have written a book called "Don't Be a Splooge Stooge," but Blair got to the best-seller list first. Of all my unwritten books, that's the one I'm least sad about not devoting a year of my life to.

"For about nine minutes, they watched a white, off-shoulder dress being sprayed onto Bella Hadid’s body."

"The substance — a patented spray-on fabric developed by a London-based company called Fabrican — looked like spider webs at first, until the fibrous layers thickened, instantly drying into a pebbled fabric and effectively mummifying the model.... The Parisian brand Coperni is named after the Renaissance mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Founded in 2013, the brand is interested in fusing science, craft and fashion.... The dress could be taken off like any other tight, slightly stretchy one: a process of peeling off and shimmying out. It can be hung and washed, or put back into the bottle of its original solution to regenerate...."

Jessica Testa explains in the NYT.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by New York Times Fashion & Style (@nytstyle)

The model was, reportedly, very cold, but when it was all over, she said, "I think that was the best moment of my life."

I've seen some commentary — I forget where — likening the spraying of the sticky white fibers to 2 men ejaculating. It made me wonder — is spider silk like semen? There is something called a sperm web. Britannica has this: 

"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"

Says Bret Stephens — in "I Was Wrong About Trump Voters" (NYT) — about the first thing he ever wrote about Trump. That was in August 2015, and he went on to write "dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself."

He now regrets attacking the Trump voters. Because it wasn't effective?

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?... What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....

He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?

"How to Build a Sex Room is technically a home-makeover reality show like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Flip or Flop, and Fixer Upper — complete with sledgehammering walls..."

"... ripping out unsightly wallpaper, and introducing spendy sofas.... But... it’s also sex-positive sex ed.... Very sexy sex isn’t aspirational enough anymore; people demand a dream home to have it in.... The show mixes it up, featuring queer couples, married couples with teenagers and toddlers, a recently engaged couple, a polycule, and a recent divorcee in her 50s....  [Designer Melanie Rose] asks about her clients’ favorite positions, their kinks, what they’re curious to explore. 'We’re clam chowder with a dab of Tabasco,' Wesley, a law-enforcement officer, says about his sex life with his wife, Hannah, a real-estate agent.... When it comes to conceiving of a pleasure-room design, Rose has a few rules: no carpet — not even a stainproof one. She recommends tile (and installing a drain 'if there’s going to be that much bodily fluid').... 'If you’re installing a sex swing, do it on a ceiling joist'.... 'I’m very much a touchy-feely person,” Rose says.... 'I like to smell the leathers, pick up the vibrators and the dildos.'"

From "So You Want to Build a Sex Room …" (Curbed).

Very sexy sex isn’t aspirational enough anymore.... Noted. I'm glad people are aiming high. And have drains to hose it all down in the end.

Polycules? you ask. What are polycules? Come on. It's a portmanteau. Don't you see it? Polyamory + molecule. 

ADDED: Clam chowder... and I was just doing the new New Yorker crossword where 43 Down is "______ Bucket (unappetizing-sounding rival of the Krusty Krab, on 'SpongeBob SquarePants')." I don't watch that show, and my first guess was "Clam." Spoiler alert: It's "Chum." Good thing Wesley the law-enforcement officer didn't liken his wife to that.

"I feel that if someone looking at Piss Christ is affected by it in a negative way, or upset by it, they should think about what the photograph symbolizes..."

"... and that the crucifixion is a really ugly way to die. And all your fluids come out, your piss, your blood, and even your excrement." 

Said Andres Serrano, recently, quoted in a New York Magazine article titled "Medieval in Manhattan Artist Andres Serrano’s ecclesiastical Greenwich Village home is not a museum." 

“I realized that the things that made the most sense here were religious in nature. They were Christian paintings, Christian statues, even furniture that looks ecclesiastical, that sometimes. actually came from a church, but it made sense because the Renaissance and the medieval period were all about Christian objects and paintings.” 

Serrano was raised Catholic in Williamsburg and became one of the most famous artists in the world during the ’80s “culture wars,” after his 1987 photograph Piss Christ enraged Senator Jesse Helms.

"Why does it matter if other people can see that we have panties on? Why does it matter if our panty line is visible?"

"It does not matter. You should be happy that I am wearing panties, and my kitty-cat juice is not all over the place. I don't understand why we need this contraption... This is not innovative. We are human. We all wear the panties...."

Pinky reacts — on TikTok — to a strapless stick-on thong.

"I'm not sure why the Times would print a recommendation of a practice that's strongly discouraged by doctors."

"Individuals discovering this for themselves, or inheriting this method from a parent, is one thing. Hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously receiving encouragement through the media for something that doctors consider dangerous is another thing entirely."

That's a comment on "The Best Way to Clean Your Ears: With a Spoon/Doctors strongly discourage people from scraping inside their ears. But knowing better and doing it anyway is part of what makes us human" (NYT).

I think the answer to the question why the NYT would print this can be seen in what I'm boldfacing: