From the Trenches

Work's been a bit slow today—I'm mostly just waiting to hear back from researchers—so I thought I'd take a moment to write to you, darlings of my readership. It's Yom Kippur, so I'm fasting, and bloody hell am I hungry. I don't know why I do this...really I don't. I'm so generally unobservant, it's absurd. I know, it's a fairly simple way for me to give a nod to my ancestry without formally disrupting my life. I do the same thing by eating crap for a week during passover. At least that doesn't make me feel half-dead (although it does leave me craving pasta). Ooh, did I say pasta? I could totally use some Pollo e Pasta Veneziana right about now. Or some Chinese food. Anything saucy and spicey.

Alexandria laughed at me a couple of years ago when she saw me fasting. I was doing exactly what I'm doing now: whining my hungry little head off. Apparently in Catholicism (gee, what a surprise) you're not supposed to kvetch when you fast. You just hold it in and don't let anyone see your suffering. Well, good for you, Catholics. I don't think you're SUPPOSED to bitch and moan in Judaism either, but apparently the motivation for fasting is so you can concentrate on your prayers and studies. What kind of silly method is that? If you want me to concentrate, you put a tube of Ritz or Pringles and a bottle of Coke in front of me. That way, my needs are constantly satisfied and I can move onto the next level of the pyramid. This way, I'm totally unproductive and grumpy. I feel like I'm about to fall asleep (woooo, seeing auras) and I've been totally incoherent on the phone with scientists and taken crappy notes. Well, less than two hours until break fast at the Roths. Then all will be well.

The study I started researching today is pretty cool, though. Researchers took a group of 18 straight men and 18 straight women. They sat each person alone in a room with a comfortable chair, and showed them 7 two-minute segments of porn. There was an oral and penetrative scene of heterosexual sex, gay male sex and lesbian sex. That makes six. The seventh scene was two minutes of bonobo sex. Hot, hetero, monkey-on-monkey action. The researchers measured physical arousal with the usual methods (penis circumfrence, vaginal pulses), and allowed the subjects to report subjective arousal as they watched the porn. So, the men behaved as men do: they said they only got off on women, and their bodies concurred. Men had no arousal in response to the monkeys, insignificant arousal in response to the gay male scenes and substantial arousal in response to the straight and lesbian scenes. The women reported the opposite: they said they were aroused only by the straight scenes. Their bodies told of a slightly different picture. In fact the women were equally aroused by all the human scenes and, most bizarrely, were aroused less so but still significantly by the bonobo scenes. Yup. They totally got off on the monkeys. I mean, it's also pretty interesting to note that straight women were equally aroused by both sexes engaging in sexual activity. In previous studies, the author noted, she found that lesbians were equally aroused by lesbian porn and gay male porn. So it's not just that straight women are too scared to verbalize their lesbian tendencies. The researcher thinks that women are just turned on by any activity they recognize as sex. You know, from my ever-valuable "field-observations," I'd have to agree.