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Very intereresting article about Elon Musk and his baby mommas in today's Wall Street Journal. High hubba-hubba factor! I present it to you unlocked:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c?st=Ebczgb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
It comes on the heels of a equally fascinating piece excerpted in The Atlantic called The World Porn Made, which, while lengthy, is also well worth reading:
https://archive.is/WymsI
I can't help thinking that the two articles are connected. In gist. In terms of Important Things both left out.
There is a science to inferring Important Things from gaps in the record...
###
Elon Musk would appear to be a Robert Heinlein fan. 😀
His Austin baby momma compound is straight out of the pages of Stranger In a Strange Land. Heinlein lived long before medical fertilization procedures, but if he hadn't, I'd have expected him to be a fan of cherry-picking IVF embryos, too.
The "Ick" factor is strong in the Musk piece because most of us are not living in a libertarian science fiction novel. But it is kind of an interesting scenario if you use the omniscient third-person point of view and pretend you're reading a history of the opening years of the 21st century written in the 23rd century.
###
What the Musk article hints at—but does not explicitly say (because how could it?) is that Musk does not enjoy traditional baby-making.
Which, you know, involves penises and vaginas and secretions and involuntary twitches and general loss of control.
There is one allusion to Musk having actual sex with one of the baby mommas, but as a one-time writer of "investigative journalism," the allusion rang false to me, felt planted, seemed to me like the baby momma's attempt to whitewash behavior that unless you are living in a Brave New World alternate universe is very outside the conventional norms.
The new Meet Cute!
Hi! I liked your X-Twitter posting. Can I send you a check for $12 million and a vial of viable sperm?
###
The Atlantic piece about porn is an excerpt from a book that I have pinned to the top of my Stuff I Gotta Read list.
The excerpt actully drills down into porn's effects on feminism—which while not uninteresting is not one of my main interests when it comes to analyzing porn as a sociological phenomenon.
No, my main interest in porn is the effect it has on libido.
Porn actually seems to extinguish libido, in a very convoluted, circuitous way.
The studies all seem to have been done on men, and, of course, they're correlative, not causal. But in the last few years, there's been an unprecedented rise in erectile dysfunction among young men. It seems related to dopamine response mechanisms in the brain.
Personally? I think this unbattening of libido is not just a consequence of porn consumption alone but also a logical response to the use of sexy as a marketing weapon. I mean, Bigger! Hotter! Better! It's classic conditioning, right? The natural response to a sexual stimulus is excitement. And if a sexual stimulus is repeatedly associated with a product (which doesn't inherently in and of itself produce excitement), in time, that product will become associated with excitement—
Until it doesn't.
Is that because some saturation threshhold has been reached? I really don't know.
But I suspect that lack of excitment transfers backwards to the original stimulus—which was sex.
###
Full disclosure here: I watch porn—though increasingly, it is difficult for me to find porn that is at all arousing. Part of that is because I dabble my feet in the shallow end of the pool on account of my age & the societal mores with which I was raised. Part of that is because of my participation in the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective back in the Jurassic, I actually know what feminine arousal looks like and 99.9% of the porn I see ain't it.
But I do have to wonder whether sex on a societal level is on its way out.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c?st=Ebczgb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
It comes on the heels of a equally fascinating piece excerpted in The Atlantic called The World Porn Made, which, while lengthy, is also well worth reading:
https://archive.is/WymsI
I can't help thinking that the two articles are connected. In gist. In terms of Important Things both left out.
There is a science to inferring Important Things from gaps in the record...
###
Elon Musk would appear to be a Robert Heinlein fan. 😀
His Austin baby momma compound is straight out of the pages of Stranger In a Strange Land. Heinlein lived long before medical fertilization procedures, but if he hadn't, I'd have expected him to be a fan of cherry-picking IVF embryos, too.
The "Ick" factor is strong in the Musk piece because most of us are not living in a libertarian science fiction novel. But it is kind of an interesting scenario if you use the omniscient third-person point of view and pretend you're reading a history of the opening years of the 21st century written in the 23rd century.
###
What the Musk article hints at—but does not explicitly say (because how could it?) is that Musk does not enjoy traditional baby-making.
Which, you know, involves penises and vaginas and secretions and involuntary twitches and general loss of control.
There is one allusion to Musk having actual sex with one of the baby mommas, but as a one-time writer of "investigative journalism," the allusion rang false to me, felt planted, seemed to me like the baby momma's attempt to whitewash behavior that unless you are living in a Brave New World alternate universe is very outside the conventional norms.
The new Meet Cute!
Hi! I liked your X-Twitter posting. Can I send you a check for $12 million and a vial of viable sperm?
###
The Atlantic piece about porn is an excerpt from a book that I have pinned to the top of my Stuff I Gotta Read list.
The excerpt actully drills down into porn's effects on feminism—which while not uninteresting is not one of my main interests when it comes to analyzing porn as a sociological phenomenon.
No, my main interest in porn is the effect it has on libido.
Porn actually seems to extinguish libido, in a very convoluted, circuitous way.
The studies all seem to have been done on men, and, of course, they're correlative, not causal. But in the last few years, there's been an unprecedented rise in erectile dysfunction among young men. It seems related to dopamine response mechanisms in the brain.
Personally? I think this unbattening of libido is not just a consequence of porn consumption alone but also a logical response to the use of sexy as a marketing weapon. I mean, Bigger! Hotter! Better! It's classic conditioning, right? The natural response to a sexual stimulus is excitement. And if a sexual stimulus is repeatedly associated with a product (which doesn't inherently in and of itself produce excitement), in time, that product will become associated with excitement—
Until it doesn't.
Is that because some saturation threshhold has been reached? I really don't know.
But I suspect that lack of excitment transfers backwards to the original stimulus—which was sex.
###
Full disclosure here: I watch porn—though increasingly, it is difficult for me to find porn that is at all arousing. Part of that is because I dabble my feet in the shallow end of the pool on account of my age & the societal mores with which I was raised. Part of that is because of my participation in the Berkeley Feminist Health Collective back in the Jurassic, I actually know what feminine arousal looks like and 99.9% of the porn I see ain't it.
But I do have to wonder whether sex on a societal level is on its way out.
