pirelli

selected quotes

The most expensive sex is free sex.

The master calmly said, that if he had to charge them, they would not be able to afford him.

Money as it turns out is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.

The more we have, the more we want.

oldest profession

The prostitutes had to make it their business to be students of men. They said that after most men passed their virile twenties, they went to bed mainly to satisfy their egos, and because most women do not understand sex this way, they damage and wreck a man’s ego. No matter how little virility a man has to offer, prostitutes make him feel for a time that he is the greatest man in the world. That’s why prostitutes never run out of business. More wives could keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men.

- Malcolm X

in short, art and sex

Art is for signaling status, intelligence, skill, VALUE (sexual selection theory); to get a better partner to reproduce, those who are able to signal more effectively, obtained superior partners and reproduced.

Art is like a tool then, a means to an end. Similar to how sex is a means for reproduction. Sex has to be pleasurable because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t reproduce and our species would have gone extinct.

To rephrase, the proximate reason to engage in sex now is pleasure. The ultimate reason is to reproduce and make babies. Most of time now, we engage in sex primarily to feel pleasure, not to reproduce. Similarly, now we engage in art primarily because intrinsically it is a pleasurable activity. The proximate reason is pleasure. The ultimate reason is to signal and to obtain a superior mate.

Another example is buying a book to increase your vocabulary:

...It’s a mistake to suggest that everyone today who walks out of a bookshop with a guide to a bigger vocabulary is somehow on the make with a potential sexual partner (or even trying to ascend a career ladder with a display of verbal sophistication). Forget about sex for a minute: knowing what words mean in ever larger numbers makes it possible to read with greater comprehension and hence more enjoyment; that’s a good in and of itself. Even if the origin of the propensity is sexual, it may well be that neither the motivation nor the function is sexual for the person who today tries to learn more words. Exercising this capacity presents itself as an intrinsic pleasure without the slightest present connection to sex, except in human prehistory.

- Denis Dutton

interplay between pain and safety in narrative

Safety help us solve a long-standing puzzle of fictional pleasure, one that was beautifully summarized by David Hume in 1757:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more they are delighted with the spectacle. . . . They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, cries, to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swollen with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.

Hume is marveling at the fact that viewers of a tragedy get pleasure from emotions that are normally not good ones to have, such as sorrow, terror, and anxiety—the more of these emotions they get, the happier they are.

Fictional narrative appeals to us because ultimately we are safe from the dangers that afflict the characters. But indeed it is pleasurable and exciting because though we are safe, we are not in total control of what we experience in the narrative. And the lack of control and suspense is exactly what makes it pleasurable.

However it is important that we do have control over the intensity of the pain. The lover of spicy foods needs to have power over what's going into her mouth; the horror-movie fan gets to choose the movie and is free to close his eyes or turn his head. And in sadomasochism (S/M) it's critical for the person experiencing the M to have some sort of signal that means Stop and for the person doing the S to immediately respond. The signal is sometimes called, appropriately enough, a "safe" word.

Thus masochism isn't really about pain and humiliation, it's about suspense and fantasy. Control is essential and this is what makes masochistic pleasure so different from ordinary pleasure. In a disturbing discussion, the writer Daniel Bergnci describes how a horse buyer named Elvis chose to be basted with honey and ginger, tied to a metal pole, and roasted on a spit for three and a half hours. This is a lot of pain. My bet, though, that if Elvis woke up one morning, stepped out of bed, and badly stubbed his toe, he wouldn't enjoy it at all, because it is not what he signed up for.

The ultimate test case here is going to the dentist. One article on sadomasochism describes a woman with a high need for pain in S/M sessions with her boyfriend, but who hated going to the dentist. The boyfriend tried to get her to construe a dental exam as an erotic masochistic adventure, but failed. There was no getting around the fact that the dentist was necessary pain, in something she chose.

- Paul Bloom

avant-garde art

At the time, Manet’s Olympia was extremely controversial and was rejected by the Salon establishment. Because the nude is wearing small items of clothing: the orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, these items accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture-also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

Olympia immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photos were controversial when they first came out. It can be argued that Mapplethrope’s photos had a similar effect on the art crowd that Manet's Le Deeuner sur l'herbe had with the Salon establishment. While rosy nudity was permissible in academic Salon paintings of Greek and Roman themes, the fiat, sallow flesh tones of Manet's nude female picnicker disturbed first viewers by a harsh contemporary realism and immediacy. There is no attempt to soften or idealize. This sexual flesh is frankly available and unromanticized. The casual air with which Manet juxtaposes brazen open-air nudity with the raffish workaday costume of the two young intellectuals, lost in discourse, is exactly the tone of many of Mapplethorpe's photos, where libertines pose in relaxed moods amid the bizarre discontinuities of their sexual underworld. The original shock of Manet's painting is surely reproduced, with the greater explicitness of our age, in Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photograph, Man in Polyester Suit, with its large black penis poking from an otherwise fully clothed torso. Finally, Manet goaded respectable sensibilities by the cool, appraising look on the face of his nude woman, who, like his self-possessed courtesan Olympia, meets our eyes without apology or embarrassment. She is practical, efficient, a bawdy woman of the world who knows her market value. She has, I submit, the same unsentimental sexual efficiency as Mapplethrope’s jaunty sadomasochists.

Mapplethrope’s distinction at the time was that he revived the idea of the avant-garde at a moment when it seemed buried forever. The avant-garde tradition was terminated in the Sixties by pop art, which closed the gap between high and low culture. The art world since then had, in my view, sunk into naked hucksterism and puerile mini-fads, a toy-train rat race of mediocrity and irrelevance. American creative energy was flowing instead into popular culture, which was sweeping the world.

- Camille Paglia

plastic surgery, bodybuilding, diamond rings, and gold-diggers

Sexual selection creates a psychological arms race in which the signaling capacity of one sex is pitted against the critical, discriminating powers of the other. That is why we have elevator shoes and push-up bras. That is what the cosmetic, body-building, and vocabulary-building industries are largely about: accentuating, highlighting, or faking desirable signals.

Sexual selection theory sees these urges to improve or enhance fitness signals by any available means as utterly natural strategies: they are straightforward Pleistocene adaptations. In this, sexual selection theory goes dead against many forms of cultural constructionism that have prevailed in intellectual discourse for the last half century. For instance, it has for years been widely argued that women dye their hair and apply wrinkle creams only through cultural pressure, and that wrinkles and gray hair are "natural." A Darwinian view maintains that, on the contrary, a woman's desire to look younger, like a man's desire to appear stronger, taller, or more wealthy, is adaptive and innate. Such strategies will take different forms in different cultures and epochs, but they are prehistoric in their origins. Contrary to gender theorists who have tried to argue that women's use of creams and dyes makes them dupes of the cosmetic industry, the converse is more the case: industries that produce lipsticks, mascara, and hair colors only exist because the values of youthfulness and "looking good" are products of evolution. Approve of them or not, these values persist because they represent our deeper, innate nature.

The essential requirement of Darwinain fitness indicators is that they function reliably and honestly: they must pose authentic tests. If they can be faked, they are useless as indicators. If unhealthy peacocks can grow massive symmetrical tails, the tail loses its value as an indicator.

Human obsessions with what is fake and what is genuine in skill, eloquence, beauty, and intelligence thus merge into another fitness indicator that is encountered high on the female list of mate-selection indicators and rather lower on the male list: wealth, along with its closely associated feature of social status. Women normally cannot help paying attention to how rich a man is—or how potentially rich, if he has not yet set out on a career—as well as his conscientiousness, social standing, and generosity. As a fitness indicator, wealth is open to dishonest signaling, and women are especially keen to distinguish honest wealth signals from faked or exaggerated ones. From the standpoint of sexual selection, whether that really is a Rolex watch or an authentic Princeton diploma is not trivial. Selective pressures in the Pleistocene seem to have combined with cultural expressions from the Holocene to put in place elaborate systems of resource-demonstration rules that are intuitively recognized by females—and ignored by males at their reproductive peril.

How does resource-demonstration work in courtship? Here is where the spontaneous, universal characteristics of an adaptation make themselves apparent. One of the best ways for the boy to prove he has resources is to give girl something is both expensive and useless. Hence flowers: they wilt, and except to look pretty have no use. They can communicate "I love you," but more important is what they signal: "I have the resources to buy thoughtful and beautiful but completely useless things for you, my dearest. And please also enjoy these fine, expensive Belgian chocolates." Consider the alternative: if natural selection governed courtship, the boy would show up at the girl's apartment clutching, instead of flowers and chocolates, a lovely potato, or perhaps a couple of thick steaks, or, being even more inventive, a new ratchet wrench set for her. After all, natural selection favors practicality and efficiency. (The young couple would then go out to a serve-yourself, all-you-can-eat restaurant, since natural selection also favors economy.)

That we smile at this indicates how counterintuitive it is. The real world, operating according to the imperatives of sexual selection, works very differently. If the male is serious, he will take the female to a lavish, overpriced restaurant serving mere smidgens of food. He will order champagne and make sure she notices his large tip. (The all-you-can-eat cafeteria comes later: after they've married and have to feed the children.) With respect to proving access to resources and commitment, nothing beats the gift of a diamond, particularly as an engagement ring. Diamonds, since they are both expensive and useless, are indeed a girl's best friend. They prove one of two conclusions: either he has the resources he claims—money to waste on useless minerals—or, if he does not, he is so committed that he has gone into debt. Any way a woman looks at it, the gift—not just the promise—of a diamond marks a significant step in a courtship situation. (The De Beers slogan, "A diamond is forever," is widely regarded as the most inspired single advertising statement of all time, and Darwinian theory explains why: it connects serious wealth display with the loving commitment women seek in establishing a household.)

- Denis Dutton

why women want diamond rings

The psychologist Geoffrey Miller has argued that many of the more interesting and ostentatious aspects of human nature have evolved through sexual selection, as a way for people to advertise their worthiness to one another. They are ways in which we reveal our fitness, and Miller would include dance here, and much of sports, art, charitable activities, and humor. For him, the brain is a "magnificent sexual ornament."

I am not going to discuss Miller's grand theory in detail here, but there is one insight that he has about sexual attraction that is worth exploring. The first is costly signaling. The idea is that displays of personal quality are only taken seriously if they involve some cost, some level of difficulty or sacrifice. If anyone can easily do the display, then it is worthless, because it is trivially easy to fake. Costly signaling shows up in the gifts we give to one another, particularly during courtship. Miller asks, rhetorically, "Why should a man give a woman a useless diamond engagement ring, when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?" His answer is that the expense and uselessness of the gift is its very point. A diamond is understood as a sign of love in a way that a potato isn't, because most people would only give one to someone they care about, and so the giving signals some combination of wealth and commitment.

Financial value is not the only signal of commitment. The economist Tyler Cowen points out that the best gifts for someone you live with are those that you, yourself, wouldn't want. He points out that even if his wife would enjoy the complete DVD set of Battlestar Galactica, it would be a lousy gift, because he would also get pleasure from it, and so the giving doesn't signal any particular love for her.

Other signals include changing your name, moving, and getting a large tattoo with your lover's name on it (and it can't be one of those stick-on tattoos that you rub off with hot water!). Marriage is obviously a commitment, and it becomes more costly (and more of a sign of love) if it is difficult to get divorced. Prenuptial agreements, however rational they might be, have the opposite effect, as you are explicitly signaling your worry that the relationship might end and shielding yourself from the costs. A man getting a vasectomy after his wife is no longer fertile is signaling that he won't leave her and have children with a younger woman (but, again, if the vasectomy is reversible, it's not as romantic.)

These are all signs of commitment, of love, though it should go without saying that this sort of costly signaling is not always welcome. Cutting off one's ear, for instance, is typically excessive, as is tattooing or self-mutilation after a first date. While these successfully signal interest and devotion, they also convey desperation and madness.

- Paul Bloom

god doesn't care whether you're virgin or not, man does

The central notion of virginity almost always applies to women, not men (the English word "virgin" is derived from the Latin, meaning "young woman"). Female virginity matters more than male virginity because females are virtually always certain of who their children are, while men are often in doubt. It is an evolutionary disaster for a man to raise a genetically unrelated child, and so it matters hugely to him whom his partner has had sex with in her immediate past, with the best answer being: nobody.

- Paul Bloom

level of parental investment --> level of sexual equality

A good way to predict the degree to which sexual equality exists or not in a given species is to look at the level of parental investment from each sex. If the investment is equal, either because the male and female work together to protect extremely fragile offspring (penguins) or because they just spray their sperm and eggs into the sea and offspring don't need more care after that (species of fish), you get physical and seductive equality of the sexes. If you have a species in which the males take care of the children, and the females are anonymous egg donors, you get choosy males and bigger, aggressive females with showy plumage. In this case, the males can’t screw around because they need to make sure their offspring are taken care of.

- Paul Bloom

why male and female sex drives differ

Sperm are tiny, multitudinous things, just barely genes and a motor to help them move toward the egg. Eggs are relatively enormous and contain all the machinery for growing a human. Further, in the standard mammalian plan, fertilization takes place inside the female and then, after birth, the baby is fed through the female's body. For a male mammal, then, the minimum investment required to create a baby, and thus pass on the genes, is a few moments of insertion and ejaculation. For a female it is months or years.

This makes a big difference, because while the female is growing and feeding a baby, she can't have another baby. As a result, one male can have children with many females at once, but not vice versa.

This discrepancy then entails a male-female difference in optimal reproductive strategy. Females should be prone to invest more in their offspring than males, because they can have fewer, and so each one matters more. This predicts that females should tend to be choosier when selecting mates, with an eye out for mates with the right genes and, in species in which this is an option, with the inclination to stick around and protect them and their offspring. Because males benefit from being chosen by females, there should be a corresponding trend for males to compete with one another for access to females, so they tend to be bigger and stronger, and often have evolved special weapons. They also advertise themselves to females, and so have evolved traits such as elaborate tails and markings. This is why the flamboyant tail belongs to the peacock, not the peahen.

- Paul Bloom

not a perfume, sex

why we seek sexual novelty

In a relationship, the first problem with novelty is that men and women express their needs for it differently.


On a crisp spring day in the 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were scheduled to tour an egg farm in the Midwest. Soon after their arrival, the president and Mrs. Coolidge were taken on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens, she paused to ask the farmer if the rooster copulated more than once a day. "Dozens of times" came the reply.

"Please tell that to the president," Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the president passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked, "Same hen every time?"

"Oh, no, Mr. President. A different one each time."

The president nodded slowly, then said, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

"What are the four needs of man?" a friend asked. Without waiting for a reply, he answered, "Food, water, pussy, and new pussy.' Like most men, I chuckled when I first heard the line. "But," I countered, "what are the four needs of woman?"

Without missing a beat, he replied, "Food, water, sex, and cuddling."

Men want sexual novelty outside a relationship/marriage. Women want sexual novelty within the bounds of a relationship/marriage.

Speculation: The former is probably due to man's evolved desire to propagate his seed in as many women as possible. The latter is probably due to a woman's desire to have a man stand by her and raise children together and also a signaling mechanism for a man to show his commitment to a woman (cuddling).   

everyone's a whore

In a bar, a guy asks a girl if she'd fuck him for a million dollars--and she thinks about it and finally replies, "Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah..." At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. "Fuck you!" she says, declining angrily. "You think I'd fuck you for a dollar? What do you think I am?" To which the guy says, "Well...we've already established you're a whore. Now we're just haggling over the price."


We all sell out at some point. It's never an issue of ethics or integrity. We're just negotiating over the price.

Man & Marriage

Man's genetic instinct focuses on availability and fertility so as to spread his genes more widely, while a woman's genetic interest is to find, and keep, the best-quality man she can whose fitness and resources will improve the survival chances of her children.

But for men "mate guarding" -- that is preventing other males from impregnating their mate -- may be a more efficient strategy than promiscuity in many circumstances, and might account for the invention of the institution of marriage. Remarking that human fertility is low, taking on average 120 occasions of regular intercourse to get pregnant, Angier suggests that a man has a choice of two equally effective strategies: he can sleep with a lot of women (the quantitative approach) or he can sleep with one woman for months at a time, and be madly in love with her (the qualitative approach).

Pornography

Men watch pornography. It's a fact. Men get horny and they need something to satisfy it. Often pornography is the easiest and most convenient way to do it, regardless of whether one is in a relationship or not. Women have a hard time understanding that men can often separate sex from love--for example, men can have sex with a woman they clearly don't love. Women have a harder time doing this because of biological and cultural reasons (hormones, risks of getting pregnant).

Is pornography a problem? I don't think so, because most if not all men watch pornography regularly. It's been around for a while and I don't see a social breakdown in society or men increasingly treating their women in a negative way. Pornography is to men what chocolate and sweets are to a woman. Biological desire. Nothing more, nothing less.

But, feminists argue that pornography is bad because it objectifies women and treats them as sexual commodities. It treats a relationship between a man and woman on purely sexual terms. If that were true, why would a man stick around if all he cared about was sex. What about love, marriage, raising kids? Yeah pornography often demeans women, encourages not-normal sexual practices, and show things that don't happen or should not happen in real life, but movies do the same thing. They are in the business of unreality. Do you think after I watch Terminator 2, I'm going to run around shooting at people? Do you think after I watch the Matrix, I'm going to jump off a building thinking I can fly? People like escapism sometimes.That's what pornography is. Fantasy on video.

The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it de­sensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obses­sions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is pro­claimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.

A recent issue of Sky, a magazine targeting young people, contained the fol­lowing letter in the advice column: "My problem is that I don't enjoy sex anymore. I'm a virile 22-year-old. I regularly have sex with my girlfriend, but I have no pleasure anymore.... Is there something that I'm doing wrong?" The advisor replied, "Shootin' air, eh, babe? You've caught the sex problem of the 90's: pelvic apathy...Actually all that's happening to you and your bald best mate of 22 years is that you've both managed to forget there's another human being slaving away at the far end of your plank. Remember that person with the high voice and the lipstick?" This exchange was an unwittingly ironic counterpart to all the "sexy" ads throughout the issue. And how dehumanizing to refer to a woman, someone's lover, as "that person with the high voice and the lipstick."

Meanwhile, Mademoiselle offered this advice to young women whose arms start to ache while pleasuring their partners: "Your best bet—short of looking meaningfully at the bedside clock or developing the forearms of Martina Navratilova—is to get him to give you a hand."

In 1997 NBC featured a story about some college students—men and women—who regularly make a practice of getting drunk together and then hav­ing sex with whomever happens to be nearest at hand. According to one student, it is a great way to get his sexual needs met quickly without the "time-consum­ing" hassle of actually dating and getting to know somebody.

In a world filled with fast-food chains and junk-food advertising, many peo­ple are deliberately starving themselves or gorging themselves into oblivion. Consuming food for which we have no real appetite, we are never satisfied and lose our ability to gauge our own hunger. In a similar way, the barrage of constant sexual images and perfect bodies being offered up to us like delectable pastries (or perhaps popsicles) leave us sexually numb and out of touch with our own de­sire. We can get almost any kind of ethnic food in our own hometowns these days, and we also have more sexual choices than ever before in terms of partners and techniques. But when eating is divorced from hunger and appetite and sex is divorced from desire and relationships, both experiences become onanistic, soli­tary, unfulfilling.

- Jean Kilbourne

Advertisement as Pornography

“If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.”

- Philip Slater

fast food and pornography

cheap. fast. convenient. but a proxy for the real thing.