For once I agree with Gonz.

Humans have free will strong enough to trump any programming.

This is sort of true, in the sense that sufficient effort and cultural pressure can change people’s behavior every which way. But that doesn’t mean that we’re blank slates, and that all those changes will be comfortable to live.

The reason it’s wrong for men to expect me to be constrained to modest dress and behavior to control their natural desire for variety isn’t that people are so darn malleable that men can always control their desire for promiscuity (heck, even women, angels in the house though we’ve been expected to be, don’t always manage to control that desire for variety). It’s that people aren’t completely malleable, that there is a natural desire for freedom that women, as well as men, have, that is violated if I’m obliged to wear constraining clothes and limit my movements to control men’s wandering eyes. It’s that my natural desires count every darn bit as much as those of men, and it’s that equally applying the “your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins” rule to men and women alike is more just than imposing extra constraints on women for men’s convenience.

I think reparative therapy can work

And I think that the vocal range analogy that someone used in an earlier thread works well here - some people’s attractions may shift, as some people’s vocal range does, but it’s no more possible to shift everyone between the far ends of the Kinsey scale than it’s possible to make every deep alto into a coloratura soprano.

But just because we can change our nature doesn’t mean we always should. I don’t happen to believe gayness is a problem to solve.

I’d put it more that it can be extremely hard work to change even just your sexual behavior (let alone your sexual desires) from what feels like your natural inclination. And that hard work is worth it, if “doing what comes naturally” has been leading to hurt all around. If a guy following his natural desire for promiscuity is leaving a trail of broken hearts, abandoned children, etc., because he just isn’t taking responsibility for the natural consequences of his choices, then at some point, the fact that he has a natural desire for variety becomes a weak excuse for the choices he’s made in acting on that desire.

Which puts you at odds with Paul. That said, a lot of the “flak” was less about your point of view and more about your taking cheap shots at anyone who might disagree with you.

As Treifalicious points out, one of the things Wolf does not note, in her obsession with her friend’s hair, is that Orthodox Jews follow family purity laws that disallow sex, or even affectionate contact, during the woman’s menstrual period and for a certain number of days thereafter. I’m not saying this guarantees great sex, but it probably has a lot more to do with Ilana’s marriage than the hair-covering.

The mesage is that women could raise their “stock price” and get the things they want from men by making sex less available. This does not mean covering up and being more traditional, just not dropping the panties so qiuickly.

And, again, the message is that for women, sex is a commodity with no inherent value of its own. The idea of girls dressing sexy but walking around ‘protected’ is especially creepy; woman as bling.

Of course, if it isn’t it doesn’t lend itself well to doctrinaire political dogma and demonizing those who disagree with you.

I am quite confident that if I wanted to, with God’s grace and a lot of effort, I could become attracted to men. I’m not, and see no reason to be. But is that potential within me — and, IMO, in every human being? You bet.

Nice quote. I don’t buy it.

If your statement is true, then the reparative therapy people are correct and all gays and lesbians can be converted to heterosexuality.

You sure you believe that?

I suspect that the strength and kind of hardwiring varies and different people might require different answers.

And yeah, I’m totally ignoring the theological and recovery problems brought up by my approach.

ick.

Exactly. Taken to an extreme, you get burqa wearing women being viewed as normal and reasonable, because the men are weak willed dogs who cannot be trusted to view an ankle or midriff without being driven into fits of lust. Nor should we in the West be too quick to shake our heads at the poor oppressed Muslim women - we had our own flirtation with such “modest” foolishness in the Victorian age.

We still have a cultural hangover of this - when a man rapes a woman, many are quick to ask “what was she wearing? where was she? was it late at night?” Because the rapist was a weak man who was driven into a lust-fueled temporary insanity by what that temptress was wearing, naturally.

Doesn’t compute for me, sorry.

I don’t think it should be either-or. Either burqification or pornification is too much - there has to be a reasonable middle ground.

I understand — I remember the flak. But my comment wasn’t aimed at just you, it is the overall assumption of the culture we live in. I’m just now coming to terms with my own approach to consensual non-monogamy and so, of course, I’m seeing the unquestioned assumption everywhere. Like seeing blue cars after you just bought a blue car.

An old mentor of mine told me “You can have lots of the same experience with different people, or lots of different experiences with the same person. But you gotta pick, and the latter is always better.”

I would respectfully disagree with your mentor. One doesn’t have to “pick” because the binary is a false dichotomy. People are all different. The same experience with two different people wouldn’t be experienced in the same way, each person would filter and live the experience differently, depending on her/his life experiences, and sharing that with those people would cause my own experience to differ.

That’s one reason why I’m very ambivalent towards porn. The LA porn industry is heinous: bad conditions, bad treatment of actors (women particularly, of course), bad depictions of life and love, and ultimately bad product. But humans learn by watching and in our sex-obsessed culture many try to find out how things work by watching the only sexual expressions they can find: mass market porn. People want to learn and yet what they are learning is skewed tremendously towards misogyny and false sense of what “real” sexuality is. And yet we all want to know how “it” is supposed to work. We certainly didn’t/don’t get it in school, especially with the lies the “abstinence only” folks dish out. So we seek that knowledge and we find lies. Sad, really.

I absolutely agree with you that it is not up to the woman to “help” her partner create focus or mystery or keep the fires burning, or what have you. Men don’t need to be catered to, they need to take responsibility for themselves. This man is learning how (it’s a lifelong course of study) to be the best partner I can, by seeing, actually experiencing and reveling in my partner(s) as she is, and not compare her to the lies of the porn industry or any other false idyll (pun intended).

An old mentor of mine told me “You can have lots of the same experience with different people, or lots of different experiences with the same person. But you gotta pick, and the latter is always better.”

I suppose — without evidence other than my own abundant experience — that that’s still my view.