An alternate perspective: Tigger answers the Dr. Efficient questions, #4

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

The first home post after my long trip comes courtesy of Tigger, who is coming up fast on Dr. Efficient with her fourth installment.

Enjoy!

All opinions are those of Tigger.


Being a Tantra master, you are aware that according to theory, sex can be sustained for many hours at a time. To be honest, I think my honey pot would turn into sandpaper. Tell me how this is attained without a man's veined beast being shredded into pulp?

I'm actually not a Tantra master (and I seriously suspect that Dr. Efficient isn't, either).

Tantra has always sounded to me too much like putting a lot of effort into taking something gloriously fun (sex) and making it into a lot of boring work.

This doesn't mean I haven't spent hours at a time having sex with a man, just that Tantra wasn't involved. (A man can get hard again pretty quickly after orgasm if given appropriate encouragement.)

So long as lubrication is involved (natural or otherwise), you can pretty much have sex indefinitely without having problems. Well, maybe not indefinitely; eventually, you're bound to get hungry.

Why in God's name would someone want to fuck animals? And is it true the same [sic] men of a Mediterranean culture have special boots made for fucking sheep?

Well, you know, sometimes you're just horny.

Or feeling experimental, I guess.

Men seem willing to insert a penis in almost anything, presumably with hopes that it might feel good and they'll get off.

And, as to the other, I really, really hope not.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Tigger and Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

An alternate perspective: Tigger answers the Dr. Efficient questions, #3

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

Tigger is still working hard to catch up to Dr. Efficient and is now on her third installment.

Enjoy!

All opinions are those of Tigger.


Why is porn such a rush??

I'm not entirely convinced it is "such a rush," but this is likely because I wasn't raised right or something.

I suspect that porn is more exciting to you if you were raised to view it as illicit, forbidden, shameful.

Especially, if you were also raised to view sex as illicit, forbidden, shameful, since then porn triggers those same feelings you associate with sex and orgasm.

In addition to it just being a rush to be getting away with something you think you shouldn't be doing.

For the rest of us, it's just a visual cue to inspire thoughts about sex.

Or, for some, maybe instruction on new and interesting ways to perform sex.

On the whole, though, for those of us who do it, having sex is way more fun than porn.

Why do most men have the ultimate dream of having sex with more than one woman at a time? Preferably twins. Preferably twin cheerleaders. Preferably twin cheerleaders that are built like Pamela Anderson?

and

When asked about their favorite sexual fantasy, why do most men suggest a menage a trois (with two women and one man, not two men and one woman)?

Generally, because men are gluttons: if one is good, surely two are better!

Also, because they haven't thought things through properly. In the minds of most men, this is two women working to satisfy him, rather than two women he has to figure out how to simultaneously please.

I have a friend who is perfectly horrified by the idea of the traditional two-women, one-man menage a trois arrangement. He has explained to me how it sounds like a grueling amount of work, and he would much rather have a woman suck him off while she took it in the ass from some other dude, because then, it's no work for him and all pleasure, right?

Possibly, he was just trying to impress me with how thoughtful and conscientious he is about wanting everyone else involved in his sexual escapades to be satisfied, too.

Possibly, he hasn't really thought it through, either, and other men just plan to outfit the second woman with a strap-on.

I would like Dr. Efficient to explain to me how this beautiful girl doesn’t have a boyfriend.

Oh good, I think he did. :)

As long as you keep sending in questions, Tigger and Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

An alternate perspective: Tigger answers the Dr. Efficient questions, #2

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

Tigger is working hard to catch up to Dr. Efficient and, even though a hurricane may soon hit her, has already supplied me with these answers.

Enjoy!

All opinions are those of Tigger.


How does one entice a partner who has apparently given up sex into wanting to fuck again?

Does anyone really have this problem?

Kneel between his legs and blow him. Possibly consider stripping naked and/or playing porn in the background when you do this.

If this somehow fails, probably he needs to change any medications he is taking and/or his choices re: recreational drug use.

Why is love so important to a woman and not so much for a man? And, no, saying "I love you" just to have sex doesn't count.

Love is important to everyone. Differences in expression and the way we understand "love" are mostly a result of cultural conditioning.

Mark's home page includes a sentence that starts out, "stories help us understand the universe and our place in it." I totally believe this. I also think it is largely why women get caught in fantasies about romance and men want to run out and fight things, in both cases as expressions of love.

It's possible this works in reverse, that stories are modeled on reality rather than reality being modeled on stories. I think the "emo" kids disprove this, though. That population seems to demonstrate that given the right sort of cultural influences, boys and girls may model themselves in such a way as to be almost completely indistinguishable from each other.

What is it about big breasts that makes men go catatonic?

It's the possibilities inherent in cleavage and the idea of something else they could slide their cock between.

Maybe.

Alternatively, it might be the same reason that men are so impressed by trucks with really, really BIG tires. Whatever that reason might be.

If I recall correctly, according to some of those evolutionary psychology types that Dr. Efficient is so enamoured of, liking big boobs has something to do with how much easier it is to accurately guess age and, therefore, likelihood of fertility. Because unsupported big boobs typically go all obviously floppy as you age, whereas it's harder to tell with tiny boobs. I'm surprised he didn't mention this, actually.

I'd still bet on the cleavage thing, though.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Tigger and Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

An illuminating correspondence about Dr. Efficient's posts

David Drake (Dave) and Dr. Efficient (Kyle) recently exchanged a set of email messages on the topic of the Dr. E columns. They CC'd me, in part because I'm involved and in part because the original goal was to have this happen through the Comments section of the blog. I found the correspondence interesting, so I asked their permission to reprint it here. They agreed.

Dave

I am intellectually and emotionally in tune with sociobiology, and there's lots of empirical support for it. That said, I have a feeling in reading your answers that we're missing something. I think we're Newtonians in an Einsteinian universe. Everything we can see reacts in the fashion we think it should, but there's more out there.

Obviously if I could see what I was missing, I wouldn't be missing it. Intuitively, though, I believe we may be understating--ignoring--the role of our higher processing faculties in viewing our behavior as only that of beasts. I think that throws enough of a variable into your (our; let me emphasize, I'm very much in your camp) calculations to seriously bias the result in a direction we have difficulty in seeing, let alone accepting.

Kyle

Humans are somewhere between apes and angels. Anybody who's seen a dog playing with a toddler realizes that other animals are straightforward predictable creatures and that humans, even little ones, aren't. If I spend a lot more time focused on our apish than angelic natures, there are three reasons for that:

1. Most people seem to think that we are angels--that is, that we're creatures of godlike intellect and airy emotion who act out of love or reason rather than animal need. If that's what humans were, our species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Maybe that's what we'll become after the Singularity. In the meantime, I emphasize our apish past as a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom.

2. Most of the things people care about most deeply are rooted in our evolutionary past. Love, war, fidelity, family, mortality... I can't think of any of Shakespeare's plays that wouldn't have made as much sense to a paleolithic hunter-gatherer as they do to us.

3. As you say, we're Newtonians in an Einsteinian universe. Or maybe Einsteinians in a Heisenbergian universe, since Einstein at least thought that truth was knowable. Every year at the beach there comes some point when I wander upstairs to find the women deep in conversation with each other about families I didn't know they had or concerns that I didn't know existed, and I'm reminded that I'm surrounded by this web of human connections that I simply lack the sense organs to perceive. It's like being blind, but feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, and knowing that there does exist such a thing as light even though you'll never be able to see it.

Tigger's now answering the same questions that I answered. I don't disagree with her answers, and I don't think that she'd disagree with mine. They just come from different places. My answers come from painstaking research.

Her answers come from blowing lots of dudes. I mean, life experience.

Dave

Apes/Angels implies a good/bad dichotomy, where I really think it's just different--or rather, much more complex.

Yes, the blind man in the sun is a very good analogy. I wish I understood better, since apparently about half my species does understand better; but hell, that's life.

Kyle

I don't intend for apes/angels to imply a good/bad dichotomy. Because we are apes. Genetically we have more in common with chimps and bonobos than gorillas and orangutans do. Certainly, I wouldn't be too surprised if I ran into this fellow at WalMart one day.

As for angels, I've never assumed that they have our best interests at heart. Lucifer was, of course, an angel. The rest of them didn't seem like a particularly trustworthy lot, either. I'm not trying to connote goodness, merely transcendence.

Whatever else you may think about the Dr. Efficient columns, I encourage you to consider also this: though entertaining and frequently outrageous by design, they also represent more serious consideration and examination than may be initially apparent. As I hope this dialog makes clear.

An alternate perspective: answers to the Dr. Efficient questionsfrom a woman who once rented his basement

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

In an earlier blog post, I issued an open invitation to anyone who would like to provide alternative responses to the questions Dr. Efficient has seen and answered so far. Anyone who wanted to do so would have to start with the questions he answered in his first column and then work her/his way to the present.

One woman stepped up to the challenge: JennieR, hereafter Tigger, debuts in this guest column.

To answer a few questions I've already received since mentioning this debut: Yes, she's real. Yes, she really does have a Tigger tattoo. Yes, she does claim the tattoo isn't actually supposed to be Tigger fucking Pooh. And, yes, she is a friend of Dr. Efficient's and mine.

I must also note that all opinions are those of Tigger.


Why do men obsess so much about the size of their penises? Do they truly get penis envy? And, do they think we really care about the size?

Really, as far as I can tell, they don't. Well, or, only to the extent that it's something else to be competitive about. Which is to say they obsess about the size of their penises to roughly the same extent they obsess over how far they can pee or how much beer they can drink before passing out. Mostly, they just want something to brag about and if they lack both useful skills and completely useless accomplishments but happen to have a big dick, you'll hear more about the size of their penis. Otherwise, you may just hear about how fast they can field strip a rifle.

Likewise, they don't get penis envy. Arguably, it's a girl thing. (Probably it's not even that; Freud was just cracked, and most likely no one gets penis envy.)

Finally, I expect that they do know we care about size. (What they apparently don't realize is that while women do care about size, we don't care to hear about size & bragging reduces rather than increases odds they will be offered the opportunity to do anything with their huge cock.) If you've had some variety in sexual partners, you know you care. If not, you might not be aware. Granted skill matters more, and manual stimulation, oral stimulation, and toys are all good and may be acceptable substitutions. But size, shape, and angle of objects inserted make a difference, so while you may not care much or you may not realize it, to some extent you care. Hopefully, more than you care about how far a man can pee.

Why are men so clueless about what a woman needs in a relationship?

For roughly the same reasons I have no idea how to fix your car, starting with never having seen your car, and ending with having never received instruction on how to fix a car. At all.

Likewise, if I sat down with a mechanic and a manual and finally did learn how to fix your car, it might not enable me to fix anything and everything with an engine.

That said, most men are trainable.

And some men are surprisingly not clueless.

Sadly, most of them have other problems like being gay or being married or being stationed in Afghanistan.

What foods should a man eat/or not eat to make his cum tasty?

It never occurred to me to be concerned about this.

The last man I played with had tasty cum. His diet seemed to consist primarily of coffee, beer, water, lean meats, some vegetables, bread, and the occasional scone (too, whenever I had dessert, some of my dessert). This may have made his cum tasty, or it might have been genetic. Who knows?

I suspect that asking a man to change his diet is a bad idea anyway; it's probably easier to change men. Or, maybe you should just use Listerine or something else that's going to kill your ability to taste anything before blowing a guy if you're really concerned about potential flavor.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Tigger and Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #9

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Dr. Efficient clarifies a point from his last column

The mention of rape in the last Dr. Efficient column drew enough attention and raised enough ire that when he asked if I thought he should comment on it, I said, yes. He did, and his comment is available in the Comments section of that entry. Because many readers have told me they often miss the comments, I am also making the text available here, as its own entry.

Now, I turn you over to Dr. Efficient.

The subject of rape could probably fill several columns on its own. I can't really do it justice here, but nothing I've written should be interpreted as excusing rape or Sudanese atrocities in the Nuba mountains.

David Buss writes in The Evolution of Desire, "it is a matter of controversy within evolutionary psychology today whether rape represents an evolved sexual strategy of men or is better understood as a horrifying side effect of men's general sexual strategy of seeking low-cost casual sex." However, "the age distribution of rape victims corresponds almost perfectly to the age distribution of women's reproductive value, in marked contrast to the age distribution of victims of other violent crimes. This evidence strongly suggests that rape is not independent of men's evolved sexual psychology."

Rape is also most often perpetrated by socially outcast young men who've lost the game of marital musical chairs because there aren't enough available women to go around. (A fact that bodes poorly for Asia and its 160 million missing girls. But that's another column.)

An open invitation to those who feel Dr. Efficient is wrong

As you might imagine, more than a few people, most of them women, have told me in no uncertain terms how very wrong most of Dr. Efficient's answers are. Some of these folks have been rather vehement in stating those feelings.

I've been pondering this situation, and I've decided to offer to all those who feel Dr. Efficient is wrong an opportunity: write your own guest column here. You would have to go back to the first Dr. Efficient column and respond to those questions, and then when you had caught up to the current columns, I would run the doctor's and yours either intermixed or one after the other.

Before I made this offer, I asked Dr. Efficient if he would mind if I did this. His response:

It certainly wouldn't bother me to have somebody else go back and give incorrect answers to all the questions that I've already answered correctly.

The rules are simple and the same ones under which Doc E. operates:

* You have to answer all the same questions he already has.

* Your viewpoint has to be rather different from his (which presumably it already is, or you wouldn't be interested in rebutting him).

* I will edit you for conformance to my personal style guide but otherwise will leave your work alone.

* You may use a pseudonym, but I must know your real name, and you must be willing for me to show it to the world in the tags, as I do with Dr. Efficient/Kyle.

* There's no money here; I don't pay Dr. E, and I wouldn't be paying you.

* I will run only one alternative viewpoint column (well, unless two people just blow me away with their writing).

That's it. Anyone think Dr. Efficient is wrong and want to play?

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #8

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

In Dr. Efficient's eighth guest column, he clarifies some of his positions while also helping his questioners.

As usual, the questions he answers originated with U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

Why do men like to watch women masturbate? It has nothing to do with procreation, which is your general theme for sex. Explain that to me, Dr. Efficient.

Okay, two things: First, I'm not a biological determinist. And second, men don't care about procreation, they just want to fuck.

If I tend to give answers rooted in evolutionary biology, it's because I tend to get cross-cultural questions like "Why do men do like to watch women masturbate?" rather than "What is it with Germans and Scheisse porn?" or "Why is female genital mutilation common in Northeast Africa but not in Northern Europe?"

Evolution has left humans with a broad palette of mating behaviors to choose from. Which of those strategies they evince depend largely on culture and individual personality. When a young man in middle America hires a limousine, rents a tuxedo, and gives a girl flowers in the hope of getting laid, that's one mating strategy. When a young man in Sudan joins a dozen of his Arab militia buddies in gang-raping a Nuban tribeswoman, that's another.

And those are just evolutionary strategies that make some kind of evident sense. (Demonstrating resources to a prospective mate in one case, forcibly increasing genetic diversity in the other.) Beyond that, there are numerous sexual behaviors that appear, at least on the surface, to be maladaptive. Homosexuality, celibacy, and polyamory all seem like behaviors less likely to result in successful propagation of one's genes than the traditional serial monogamy, polygyny, or monogamy+cheating. Yet homosexuality, celibacy, and polyamory persist, and continue to be practiced by single-digit percentages of the population. Do they convey some evolutionary benefit that is at first non-obvious? Or are they merely side-effects of some other adaptive behavior?

And then there's the truly freaky shit. Vorarephiliacs who get off on watching people being eaten. The aforementioned Germans and their love of shitmunchery. Amputation fetishists. Human furniture. Kitten crushing. If it exists, there is porn of it. It's all but unimaginable that these behaviors are adaptive. Yet there are whole sub-communities devoted to all of them. Psychologists call such fetishes paraphilias--but can't agree on their origin, or even whether they're disorders that should be treated or healthy behaviors.

So where were we? Oh, yes. People do all kinds of whack shit to get off that has nothing to do with procreation. That said, the answer to your question seems pretty obvious. As I mentioned, men aren't turned on by procreation; they're turned on by fucking, and biology takes care of the rest. Foreplay, to a man, is the sight of a sexually available woman. A naked woman who's done the two-finger taco tango until she's dripping wet is about as available as it gets.

On the other hand, if Studly Do-Right would rather watch you buff the beaver than actually walk over and stick his dick in, he probably has a paraphilia. Depending on how satisfied you are with this arrangement, he may require treatment.

How can you tell if a man is potentially interested in you as a long term mate vs. just thinks you're a fun fuck? To what extent do men really differentiate?

When surveyed, men express different preferences for casual encounters than for a long-term mate. As David Buss explains in The Evolution of Desire, for men seeking short-term sex partners, promiscuity is a plus. A woman seeking commitment is undesirable. A woman's marital status is less important in short-term than long-term relationships. In fact, a lot of standards are lowered for short-term mates: Men are willing to accept a wider age range, lower intelligence, lower education, less athleticism, and more emotional instability in short-term sex partners. That last point should work in your favor.

Men gain greater evolutionary benefit from casual sex than women do, which has left men much more willing to fuck around. Women know this, and so women who are interested in longer-term relationships typically require demonstrations of a man's commitment. They require ongoing effort in courtship: lots of dates, lots of phone calls, time spent listening to the woman's problems, time spent discussing the improbable future of their relationship. When a man buys a woman an engagement ring, that's not a custom that evolved by happenstance. It's a signal that a man is sufficiently committed to the relationship that he's willing to spend several months salary on a useless bauble for the woman.

On the other hand, men know all of this. Both sexes practice deception in securing the attentions of the other. Men looking for a quick fuck will pretend to be interested in long-term relationships. They'll pretend to be polite. They'll pretend to be considerate. Men who want to get laid will ape human feelings and will pretend to care about small animals and children. If cornered, a man will even tell a woman, "I love you." None of these things should be believed. Women think men are nicer than they are, when really women just have something men want.

The battle of the sexes is a war that's hundreds of thousands of years old. Male and female mating strategies operate at cross purposes. When one sex has evolved a new behavior to maximize success, the other sex has evolved countermeasures, in a never-ending arms race. Where men seek signs of youth and fertility, women deceive them with make-up, high heels, and wonderbras. Where women seek success and fidelity, men deceive them with feigned bravado and pretended sincerity. And the war goes on.

Have fun on your next date.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #7

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

For Dr. Efficient's seventh guest column, we had to interrupt him in the lab, where he was conducting sexual stimulation studies on willing volunteers. He graciously took a break from that grueling work to answer a few questions for us.

As usual, the questions he answers originated with U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

What positions are most effective to achieve the greatest orgasms for both partners? (No chandeliers should be involved.)

and

What do you consider the most effective sexual positions for attaining an orgasm for either a man or woman?

Well, for starters you're going to need about fifty feet of hemp rope, a block and tackle, and a master of Shibari, the Japanese art of bondage. You should be able to find all those things at Home Depot.

Or you could just ignore all that, because position doesn't matter.

Let's assume, for the moment, that any necessary foreplay has been dispensed with; both partners are in a relaxed and receptive state; and they've got the basic rhythm to do what needs to be done. They're down to the short strokes. It's business time. And when it's business time, it doesn't matter where their elbows are. It doesn't matter which way their feet are sticking. No, boys and girls, when a man gets his junk all up in that special someone's honeybox, what matters is: angle of entry.

Let's start by considering things from the woman's point of view, because getting a man to orgasm is trivial while operating a set of ladyparts is as complicated as the cockpit of the fucking space shuttle. Reduced to its barest basics, taking a woman to orgasm requires stimulation of at least one, and preferably both, of the G-spot and the clitoris. The key to hitting these spots isn't any particular position, it's fine-tuning whatever position you prefer to hit the angle you need and applying supplemental stimulation as necessary. Basic missionary position isn't great, but if a woman puts her hips up on a pillow that should provide the angle her man needs to get his shaft up into her G-spot. This is basic high school trigonometry, people. Add a little thumb-rub on the clit, and we have liftoff.

Doggy-style also generally offers good stimulation of the G-spot and is convenient for reach-around clitoral stimulation. Side-saddle can be good for G-spot contact if the gentleman's poon pounder hooks left or right. (Be sure to choose the appropriate side to match his political persuasion.) Cowgirl, Reverse Cowgirl, or Lap Dance (seated in a chair facing one another, as I'm sure my readers are well aware) all provide some contact with the G-spot and give the female partner an opportunity to, in a ladylike fashion, grind her clitoris into the nearby available manflesh. If all else fails, girls, just grab stud-boy's hand, put it on your clit, and in a clear, firm voice instruct him to "rub here."

Men, on the other hand, are easy. And by easy, I mean total sluts. If you want a man to orgasm, you can do pretty much anything you want with his purple piledriver and he'll skeet all over you. For that matter, you can do nothing at all with his manly pleasure pickle and eventually he'll spooge. Men are like that. But men are also fundamentally lazy creatures. So the "greatest orgasm" for a man is just one in which he doesn't have to put forth any effort. To give your man the best possible orgasm, gentle readerlady, mount up into cowgirl or give him a blowjob. Don't worry, he'll let you do all the work, just like in the rest of your life. He'll be happy to lie back, close his eyes, and ride the orgasm train all the way to Spunksylvania. And remember, nice girls swallow.

So, is there a line between attentive and clingy that's somewhere discernible? Should I err on the side of ignoring boys if I'm uncertain where that line is?

Here's a simple two-step test for determining if you're being too clingy with your man:

1. Are you in his company?
2. Are you blowing him?

If you answered those questions "yes" and "no" respectively, then you're doing a good impression of Saran Wrap.

Men and women want different things from relationships, and in general women want a lot more commitment than men are willing to offer. Psychologist David Buss writes in The Evolution of Desire, "Roughly 41 percent of newlywed women and 45 percent of women married for four years complain that their partners do not spend enough time with them. The analogous figures for men are only 4 percent during the newlywed year and 12 percent during the fourth year of marriage.... [On the other hand, a] common complaint of married men, far more than of married women, is that their spouses absorb too much of their time and energy. Thirty-six percent of married men, in contrast with only 7 percent of married women, complain that their spouses demand too much of their time." Emphasis mine.

During our caveman days, women benefited greatly from having their men around to share food and provide protection. Male companionship meant that their children didn't starve and that they didn't get raped to death by neanderthals. For the men, the benefits of paleolithic date night were somewhat more limited. Hence the difference in biological imperatives. Even your question about the "line between attentive and clingy" betrays a lack of understanding of the male psyche: Why would a man care if you're being attentive? Is that going to help him get food, shelter, or sex? No. Your man wants to hunt, kill, roast his meat over an open fire, gorge himself, fuck you, and go to sleep.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that you have to ignore boys, either. You just have to ignore the one you actually want. You see, luckily for you there's an evolved behavior that runs counter to the male desire not to be tied down, and that's sexual jealousy. As biologist Robin Baker explains in Sperm Wars, "World wide, it has been calculated from studies of blood groups that about 10 per cent of children are in fact not sired by the man who thinks he is their father." In evolutionary terms, this is an Epic Fail. Prehistoric men who failed to be vigilant and deter other men from their women suffered a double whammy: they failed to pass on their own genes and wasted their food and protection raising the children of other men. So find some other guy to flirt with. You'll find that your regular squeeze is suddenly much more...what's the word? Attentive.

On the other hand, there's always some small chance he'll choose to murder you and Mr. Flirtypants with an axe. That's a chance you take when you try to manipulate men by making them jealous. Good luck!

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

To reiterate about Dr. Efficient

Folks are still asking me three key questions about the Dr. Efficient columns, so even though I've answered them humorously before, I thought I would take a moment to answer them directly here.

Q: Is Dr. Efficient just a pseudonym of yours?

A. No. Dr. Efficient is the name under which my friend, Kyle, writes the columns.

Q. Does Kyle really write the columns?

A. Yes. I make a very light editing pass to bring his prose into conformance with my personal style guide (e.g., I like the serial comma), but that's it.

Q. Are women really sending in those questions, or are you just making them up?

A. Women really are sending me the questions. I have not made up a single one.


On a different note, because he performed it the other night and I loved it, here's Josh Ritter doing "Lillian, Egypt."

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #6

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Dr. Efficient's sixth guest column finds him back in the gym, eating healthy, meditating, rescuing stray pets, and giving pro-self-love talks to middle schoolers around the country.

As usual, both questions he answers originated with U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

Is it okay that my dog watches me having sex, or could that cause lasting mental damage?

It's not clear whose mental health you're concerned about, so this question requires a four-part answer to cover all the parties involved:

1. Me. I don't give a shit. Unless you're ugly. If you're ugly, then I don't want to think about you having sex, and I feel sorry for your dog.

2. Your dog. For the sake of convenience, I'll henceforth refer to your dog as Olivia. As far as Olivia's concerned, watching your lover's pimply butt pumping up and down between your thighs is the most natural thing in the world. Like most of God's creatures, dogs hump in public. In Why Is Sex Fun?, UCLA physiologist Jared Diamond describes a dog's opinion of human sexual practices: "Here's the weirdest thing of all: [they] close the bedroom door and have sex in private, instead of doing it in front of their friends like any self-respecting dog!" You're part of Olivia's pack, and she wants to be there for all of your bodily functions.

3. You. Your mental health is already questionable. As a species, humans prefer privacy during sex. This preference spans cultures and so is presumably evolutionary in origin--though no one is quite sure why this preference evolved. The desire for sexual privacy may relate to the fact that human females show no visible signs of ovulation (a trait that is quite rare among primates), a quirk that leads humans to screw constantly whether it's the right time of the month to make babies or not. The desire for privacy may also relate to the amount of care required by human children, which caused human parents to evolve to be more-or-less monogamous, and turned sex into a tool to cement the pair bond between mates. Diamond writes in The Third Chimpanzee, "Not only have all signs of female ovulation vanished, but the act of sex itself takes place privately, to emphasize the distinction between sexual and nonsexual partners within the same close group." So in rejecting the human preference for privacy during sex you are, like a monk or a vegetarian, defying your evolutionary programming. No good is likely to come of this.

4. Your lover. For the sake of convenience, I'll henceforth refer to your lover as Dirk Studly. Unless you're of long acquaintance and you're confident that Dirk shares your peculiar predilections, you're being rude. Since sexual privacy is the norm, you should assume that Mr. Studly would prefer not to fuck with your dog watching his hairy man-ass jackhammering away. You could ask, "Do you mind if my dog watches us fuck?", but (a) Dirk will assume you're a total perv and (b) he'll probably say he doesn't mind even if he does because he doesn't want to jeopardize his chances of getting laid. So just stick Olivia in the bathroom and tell Dirk, "I'm going to lock the dog up so you don't have to worry about whether your pasty asscrack is winking at her while you thrust." If Dirk's really your soul mate, he'll tell you not to bother.

If a man's only sexual thought is to implant as many seedlings as possible, why are they so picky about their partners? Wouldn't any female do?

Picky relative to what? Compared to women, the only yardstick available, men are stunningly unpicky.

In 1978, Florida State University psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield recruited male and female students as accomplices. The students were instructed to approach members of the opposite sex on campus and proposition them with the winning pick-up line, "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?"

When young male researchers thus propositioned female students, not a single woman said yes. When young female researchers thus propositioned male students, 75% accepted! The authors write, "The men that said 'No' even gave apologies, i.e., 'I'm married' or 'I'm going with someone.' In contrast, the women's response to the intimate requests from males was 'You've got to be kidding,' or 'What is wrong with you? Leave me alone.'"

The researchers repeated the experiment four years later with similar results.

On the other hand, men aren't entirely unselective. When offered sex, one man in four said no. To understand why, we must turn from the cold science of evolutionary biology to the rather colder science of economics. Economics, you'll recall from your college days, is the study of how people reconcile infinite wants with finite resources. Men want a great many things--sex, but also food, shelter, violence, more sex in the future, etc. But men have limited time, money, and attention. Any man will turn down sex if the expected costs exceed the expected benefits. A man may be sufficiently tired or hungry that he'd rather spend his time eating or sleeping. He may consider the woman who's offering him sex to be so unattractive that fucking her would lower his social status and hurt his chances of fucking more attractive women in the future.

A man may also mistrust a woman's offer of casual sex on the grounds that sex is less casual for women than for men. For example, when surveyed about their preferences in long-term and temporary sex partners, men rate promiscuity and sexual experience as negatives in a long-term sex partner but positive in a temporary sex partner. Women, on the other hand, find promiscuity equally distasteful in candidates for short-term and long-term relationships. David Buss writes in The Evolution of Desire, "Women's desires in a short-term sex partner strongly resemble their desires in a husband.... Men's preferences, in marked contrast, shift abruptly with the mating context. The constancy of women's preferences in both scenarios is consistent with the theory that women see casual mates as potential husbands."

Men know this and understand that relationships initially advertised as being all sexual reward with no cost ("Would you go to bed with me tonight?") may in the end require non-trivial effort to extricate themselves from. It's important to understand up front the terms of the transaction. Hence the old joke that men don't really pay hookers for sex; they pay them to go away afterward.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #5

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Dr. Efficient's fifth guest column comes to us from a land of gentle waves and scorched sand.

As usual, both questions he answers originated with U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

Why do you think that women are inherently bisexual? Are men inherently bisexual?

Don't be ridiculous. Men are either straight, gay, or lying.

To be fair, women aren't strictly bisexual either. It would be more accurate to describe them as omnisexual, since they're also turned on by watching apes have hot monkey sex. Now that is some sick shit, and something to think about the next time you're getting up on your "Ew, fucking sheep is gross" high horse.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. All of these results come from experiments in which sex researchers attach monitoring devices to record blood flow to the genitals while subjects are shown a variety of visual stimuli.

In 2005, a team of Northwestern University researchers lead by Dr. J Michael Bailey recruited 101 young male research subjects. Thirty of the men self-identified as straight, thirty-three as bisexual, and thirty-eight as gay. All were shown sexual videos, some featuring only men, others only women. Self-professed straight and gay men behaved as expected: straight men were aroused by looking at women, while gay men were aroused by looking at men.

Self-identified bisexual men, on the other hand, were not aroused by both men and women. They were aroused by only one sex or the other, and usually they were aroused by men. In the laboratory, most bisexual men are indistinguishable from gay men.

Women, on the other hand, are different. Whether they self-identify as straight, gay, or bisexual, women show similar indiscriminate patterns of physiological arousal: They go moist looking at either men and women. They go moist looking at either straight sex or gay sex. Dr. Bailey says, "I'm not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men."

Enter Queens University researcher Dr. Meredith "The Queen of Bonobo Porn" Chivers. Chivers showed a wider variety of images to her female subjects. She found that women were physiologically aroused not just by watching videos of humans having sex, but also great apes. This would suggest that all women are, to some extent, inherently into yiffing. On the other hand, when surveyed, women reported subjective levels of arousal that bore no relation to their physiological responses. Straight women claimed they were aroused by images of men, gay women claimed they were aroused by images of women, and nobody admitted to being turned on by hardcore apefucking.

So does this mean that all women are bisexual? Or that all women are into bestiality? Chivers herself says that "To conclude that women are bisexual on the basis of their sexual responding overlooks the complexity and multidimensionality of female sexuality.” Or to put it another way, as David M. Buss writes in The Evolution of Desire, "women's preferences in a partner are more complex and enigmatic than the mate preferences of either sex of any other species."

To sum up: Men are simple. Women are complicated. Male sexual wiring appears to be a matter of hardware, while female sexual preferences are a matter of software. And it's hard to be certain of anything about women, except that any of them would go gay with enough alcohol and the right partner.

At least that's my hypothesis; I'm still looking for grant money to test it.

Further reading:

"Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited"
"Pas de deux of sexuality is written in the genes"
"What Women Want (Maybe)"
"What do women want?"

all from The New York Times.

I know they say men think about sex all the time, but what about women? I am female and literally think about sex so much it is a constant "background noise" in my head. Is that normal?

Normal? Maybe. Hot? Totally.

But seriously, who gives a shit? Will you be happier if I tell you that you're in the middle of the human bell curve than out there on the extreme?

You know that profound sense of alienation that you feel from time to time? You come by it honestly. You are as much a stranger to this world as if you were a visitor from Mars. You were not born for this. You were born to walk across the pre-Saharan veldt with a spear in hand (if you're male) or an infant (if you're female). You were born to feel the dry grass beneath your feet, and to know the hot sun on your back.You were born to hunt and to forage. You were born to watch a third of your children die in infancy. You were born to leave another third of your children to die of exposure in times of scarcity--or to smother them to death if you are merciful. You were born to be a nomad, constantly moving to follow the herds. You were born to never be alone, to live your life in the bosom of thirty to fifty close relations who've known you your entire life and who impart to you the wisdom that you will pass on to your surviving children.

That is the world we were shaped for by a million years of evolution. But we've made a different world. Instead of scarcity, we have abundance. Instead of the comfort of the band, we have the loneliness of the crowd. Instead of timeless rhythm, we have constant flux. Instead of wisdom, we have statistics.

The statistics are these: 54% of men report thinking about sex every day. 19% of women report thinking about sex every day. Presumably those percentages are higher for men and women in their twenties and are lower for children and the elderly, as with other reported sexual activity. These, and a variety of other fascinating stats are available at the Kinsey Institute FAQ.

The Kinsey statistics don't report how many times a man or woman thinks about sex in a day, but with 81% of women thinking about sex less than once a day, presumably it's pretty low. On the other hand, ABC News did an admittedly anecdotal study (one man, one woman) in which the man reported thinking about sex thirty times in a day, the woman twice. There are going to be problems with any self-reported statistics: people are unlikely to remember everything they think about in the course of a day, different people will have different thresholds for what they consider to be worth reporting, and cultural inhibitions will keep some--especially women--from reporting sexual thoughts.

So you're probably out there toward the end of the bell curve, but it's only something to worry about if that bothers you. The American Psychiatric Association doesn't consider "thinking about sex a lot" to be a disorder. If it's a major inconvenience for you, antidepressants and therapy might help. Your level of sexual interest will probably lessen as you get older in any case.

And in the meantime, you can make a lot of men pretty happy. Or one man very happy.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #4

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Dr. Efficient's fourth guest column finds him in fine form. Though he answers only two questions this time, this entry illustrates the breadth and depth of his prodigious experience.

As usual, all the questions came from U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

Being a Tantra master, you are aware that according to theory, sex can be sustained for many hours at a time. To be honest, I think my honey pot would turn into sandpaper. Tell me how this is attained without a man's veined beast being shredded into pulp?

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, lube would be it. The long-term benefits of lube have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

To be fair, we should be clear about terms. While in America "Tantra" has come to be synonymous with "New Age granola sex," true Indian Tantra is a spiritual tradition similar to yoga. Tantra teaches spiritual awakening through postures, meditation, chant, and visualization. Some Tantric sects practiced Tantric sex, but even that was freakier than anything you'll find in, say, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Tantric Sex. To cite Wikipedia:

Sexual rites may have also evolved from clan initiation ceremonies involving transactions of sexual fluids. Here the male initiate is inseminated or ensanguined with the sexual emissions of the female consort, sometimes admixed with the semen of the guru.

Whoa! Emphasis mine. Be sure to bring that up the next time your over-sharing hippie friends tell you they're into Tantra!

American Tantra reverses the ends and means of Indian Tantra: Instead of sex being a mechanism through which heightened spiritual awareness is attained, we use traditional spirituality as a technique to attain better (or at least prolonged) sex. Indian Tantra is to American Tantric sex as traditional Christianity is to Catholic sex (in which you delay orgasm by imagining a disappointed Jesus discussing with your mother your spiritual and physical inadequacies).

In Tantric sex, a man delays orgasm by pausing in his thrusting when he feels himself getting close or by applying manual pressure to prevent ejaculation. As you mention, in theory this allows him to continue to rut for hours. In practice, a typical man will get bored and turn on the telly unless new partners are rotating in to keep him interested.

In the unlikely event that your man is able to sustain an erection with a single partner for hours, there's no reason why this should be uncomfortable for either of you assuming that you produce sufficient vaginal lubrication. Inadequate lubrication may be the result of sexual inexperience or a variety of psychological or physiological conditions. Try building up to multi-hour sex slowly, but if you're worried about turning your man's pork sword into pork sausage, try supplementing your special sauce with a little lube.

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the lube.…

Why in God's name would someone want to fuck animals? And is it true the same [sic] men of a Mediterranean culture have special boots made for fucking sheep?

What freaky shit lurks in the hearts of men? Dr. Efficient knows. And by the time you've finished reading this answer, dear reader, you will too.

Let's start with the easy part. This may be difficult for women to understand, but men are Energizer bunnies of fucking. They're full of sperm as countless as the stars in the sky, and every second they're not sharing that sperm is a second that they're losing the genetic arms race. Men are cruise missiles programmed by evolution to deliver their payload of spooge as directly and as frequently as possible.

This is not to say that men are unselective. Men have strict preferences when it comes to sexual partners. For a heterosexual man those preferences are, in order from greatest to least:

* women
* everything else

Given freely available women, men will fuck women. If women are in scarce supply, men will share women or pay for sex. But if there are no women to be had at all, men will make do with what's available. They will fuck their hands. They will fuck pillows. They will fuck Fleshlights. In exclusively male environments--the army, prison, game development--men will fuck other men. And in rural areas where livestock is readily available, men will fuck sheep.

So to answer your first question, almost nobody wants to fuck animals. That would be sick. But sometimes there aren't any women around, and that skin flute isn't going to play itself.

The second question is a vile and racist canard. No, Mediterranean men do not have special boots for fucking sheep.

First, Mediterranean men have no exclusive affection for the sheep under their care. Hence the old jokes:

Q: Why do Scotsmen wear kilts?
A: Because sheep can hear zippers.

and

Australia: Where men are real men, and sheep are scared shitless.

In Central Asia, authoritative sources report seeing Afghans laying pipe with a variety of ungulates. Esquire writer Brian Mockenhaupt reports hearing tales of "men having sex with sheep and goats in the deep of night. I first heard this from infantry soldiers and took it as rumor, but at Bagram I met a civilian contractor who works in UAV operations. 'All the time,' he said. 'They just don't think we can see them.'"

Wherever there are men and sheep, some of the former will be giving a hot beef injection to some of the latter.

Second, sheep fucking boots (or sheeping boots) aren't really "special". Any pair of tall boots will do. Their usage varies: Some sheeplovers prefer to wear the boots and tuck the sheep's hind legs into the boots along with their own. This requires a roomier boot. Other sheepfuckers just put a pair of boots on the sheep's rear legs, restricting its movement enough to prevent it from escaping the randy shepherd. The latter approach, using combat boots, is described in this harrowing (but non-Mediterranean) true-life account of sheepfuckery. I advise against reading it, but I know my advice falls on deaf ears with a hardcore perv like you.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #3

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

All opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Welcome to the third installment of Dr. Efficient's guest column. When last we saw him, he was headed to a Couples in Crisis seminar where he was the guest lecturer and lead counselor. Fortunately, we managed to catch him long enough to download these answers to reader questions.

As usual, all the questions came from U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

Why is porn such a rush??

Why don't you tell me, since you're clearly the porndog here?

This question is really three questions with different answers: First, why do people like sex? Second, why is a visual representation of sex (sometimes) an acceptable substitute for the real thing? And third, why are you taking so long in the bathroom? What are you doing in there?

The answer to the first question is recursive: You like sex because your parents did. That is the nature of natural selection, which has been ruthlessly selecting for creatures that are born to bone for about half a billion years now. Make no mistake: the gene pool is a shark tank. There have been lots of creatures born over the last 500 million years that didn't like to have sex. They died. They didn't have offspring. They didn't pass on their genes. And so, in Darwinian terms, their lives were irrelevant. Those creatures did not contribute in any way to your genetic make-up. You, dear writer, are the inheritor of five million centuries of genes that loved to fuck.

Is it any wonder that you think of sex more than anything else, all day, every day? Is it any wonder that you're thinking about it right now!?

Humans are willing to substitute porn for sex when sex isn't available because humans are visual animals. More of your brain is dedicated to processing visual input than any other sense. Other species would probably prefer the smell of sex, but humans, voyeurs that we are, like to watch.

Note that the visual substitution of porn for sex is similar to the even more common visual substitution of violence for the real thing. Humans have spent most of the last 200,000 years hunting daily for food and engaging in constant tribal warfare over scarce resources. Today, most people don't hunt or fight, but on some level we still crave danger and killing. We scratch that itch by watching horror movies and action movies or by playing video games. To satisfy our desire for love, we have romances. To satisfy our compulsion for sex, we have porn.

Take away all popular entertainment designed to stimulate those evolved biological urges, and all you're left with is C-SPAN. And you're not watching C-SPAN in the bathroom, are you?

Why do most men have the ultimate dream of having sex with more than one woman at a time? Preferably twins. Preferably twin cheerleaders. Preferably twin cheerleaders that are built like Pamela Anderson?

and

When asked about their favorite sexual fantasy, why do most men suggest a menage a trois (with two women and one man, not two men and one woman)?

Why wouldn't they? This is basic math. One slice of cake: Good. Two slices of cake: Better!

Men will prefer to have sex with two women at once because a man can do so and get both women pregnant. A woman having sex with two men will only get pregnant once, and neither man is likely to expend a lot of effort on child care since neither can be confident that the infant is his. Men don't think about getting women pregnant, they just think about fucking. They think about fucking because, as I mentioned earlier, their forefathers did a bang-up job of getting women pregnant.

Here's how the evolutionary impact of all this works:

My father is a devoted husband. He married one woman and has lived with her all his life. He's had two children. My sister, also married once, has had three children of her own.

Mohammed Bin Laden had ten or eleven wives, and somewhere around fifty-four children. His seventeenth son, Osama, had six wives. He fathered between twenty and twenty-six children before the Navy SEALS ensured he wouldn't be having any more.

And so, within a couple of generations, there's at least seven times as much of Mohammed Bin Laden's DNA out there as of my dad's. If Osama's siblings have all fucked as freely as he has, there's a hundred times as much of Mohammed Bin Laden's DNA out there. Now imagine what a million years of that kind of natural selection does to the human race. Is it any wonder that men like to spread the joy--or at least the joy juice?

I would like Dr. Efficient to explain to me how this beautiful girl doesn’t have a boyfriend.

She doesn't have a boyfriend for the same reasons that Wonder Woman and Buffy the Vampire Slayer don't have boyfriends: Partly because men are intimidated by strong women, but mostly because fictional characters don't get dates.

"Debbie" is a creation of wannabe Internet funnywoman Cara Hartmann, who's also created this video, in which she discovers that the effects filters on her shitty webcam let her make fun of conjoined twins, and this lame fake news story in which she discovers that Internet stock photography lets her make fun of Stephen Hawking. At least in her "eHarmony Video Bio" she's moved on from making fun of the physically disabled to merely making fun of the mentally retarded.

I think we can all agree that retards are fair game.

As long as you keep sending in questions, Dr. Efficient will return soon! Email your queries to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All, #2

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

I must also note that all opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

Welcome to the second installment of Dr. Efficient's guest column on my blog. This time, we managed to snag a few minutes of his time at three different airports as he flew around the world in search of new secrets of the Tantra to share with you. In those precious moments, he answered three more of our reader questions for him. All came from U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

As long as you keep sending in questions, more answers will follow in later installments.

How does one entice a partner who has apparently given up sex into wanting to fuck again?

You're really not giving me a lot to go on, here. Did it occur to you that my advice might differ depending on whether you're an obese odoriferous octogenarian burn victim married to a woman who just can't stomach the nightly horror show anymore or you're a shapely twenty-five-year-old bit of skirt dating a man who's suddenly realized that he was born to be a sausage jockey?

Still, some universal rules do apply, the foremost of which is: You can't change other people; you can only change yourself. The lover of your reality is not going to become the lover of your dreams. The best you can hope for is some accommodation that leaves you marginally more content than you are now. You have three options:

1. Get over it. Find some other outlet for your sexual energies. Consider some alternatives: Exercise. Dance. Porn. Painting. Dressage. Porn. Writing. Suicide. Porn. Maybe if you can find more fulfillment elsewhere, getting your itch scratched will seem less indispensable to you.

2. Mix-and-match. Clearly your partner satisfies some of your needs, since you're still together. He--for simplicity's sake I'm going to assume that you're a straight woman because (a) it makes no difference and (b) no man would ever ask me this question. If you're a woman dating another woman, refer back to reason (a). Anyway, as I was saying, your partner merely doesn't satisfy you sexually. So find someone who does. If your partner is sufficiently open-minded or sufficiently oblivious, there's no reason why you can't have your cake and eat it too.

3. Manipulation. If you're too inhibited to tend to your own needs or find someone who can, your only hope is to try to manipulate your current lover into providing some trouser action in spite of himself. Good luck with that. The key here is to find activities that your partner likes and try to gradually redirect them so that they end with your getting shagged. Would he like a back rub? Start with that and try to turn it into a front-rub. Does he like dessert? Invite him to lick chocolate off your nipples. Does he want to bone someone else? Invite that person to join in! Etc.

Why is love so important to a woman and not so much for a man? And, no, saying "I love you" just to have sex doesn't count.

Like most differences between men and women, this one has its root in basic biology. An act of sexual intercourse requires only the slightest investment of time and attention on the part of the man. But it may leave a woman pregnant with a child that she has to bear for nine months and (unless she abandons it) until it's old enough to fend for itself. Male reproductive effort is an abundant resource. Female reproductive effort is a scarce resource. Hence women are likely to be more selective than men.

As with our cravings for salty and fatty foods, the desires shaped by hundreds of millennia of evolution are hard to overcome. The neolithic men who survived to pass along their genes had lots of children by lots of different women. The neolithic women who survived to pass along their genes secured the commitment of men to provide for themselves and their children. These instincts, obviously, make little sense in the modern world. Conditions have been altered by the advent of birth control and the availability of abortion as a more palatable alternative to the traditional infanticide. It's no longer expected that children will be raised exclusively by their mothers or that women need men to provide for them.

In sum, love is obsolete. It's a vestigial sentiment that hangs on past its time like an emotional appendix. But you still want it because you're basically a Neanderthal at heart.

What is it about big breasts that makes men go catatonic?

The American male's fascination with breasts is about ten percent intrinsic behavior and ninety percent cultural.

Men are naturally going to pay a certain amount of attention to distinctive sex characteristics. In an eye-tracking study, men looked at the breasts, face and crotch of a bikini-clad woman, but men also looked at the crotch of a bathing-suit-clad man. Presumably men quickly focus on distinctive sex characteristics because it was important for our caveman ancestors to rapidly classify strangers as threats (male) or reproductive opportunities (female). (Women in the same study didn't pay much attention to breasts or genitals. Presumably identifying a stranger's sex is less important to women because all women are to some extent inherently bisexual.)

So men are going to pay a certain amount of attention to breasts and crotches. But the amount of attention paid covers a pretty broad range. The pages of National Geographic are filled with pictures of bare-chested aboriginal women surrounded by aboriginal men who are neither staring nor fapping furiously. Yet those same pictures are all the inspiration teenage boys in America need to stroke one out. And walking down a street in Riyadh wearing a halter top is likely to get you more unwelcome attention than walking down a street in San Francisco without one. This wide range of male reactions to what women do or don't expose suggests that what's interesting to men isn't so much breasts per se as a chance to see bits of female anatomy that, in their particular culture, are usually kept hidden.

So if you want men to stop going dumb at the sight of your breasts, start going topless. I promise we'll get used to it and stop treating it like such a big deal.

Eventually.

There might be a certain amount of wanking before we get there.

Dr. Efficient will return soon! To get him to answer your questions, email them to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.

Ask Dr. Efficient, the Love Guru: Dr. Efficient Answers All

Warning: The following is an adult entry. If you are underage or simply do not want to read about sex-related topics, stop now.

I must also note that all opinions are those of Dr. Efficient.

On May 23, I announced this new feature of my blog. Today, we inaugurate both June and this column. We were lucky enough to catch Dr. Efficient between visits to India and his speaking engagements at the U.N. and the Kinsey Institute, so we now have his answers to three of our first questions. All came from U.S. women who chose to remain anonymous.

More answers will follow in later installments.

Why do men obsess so much about the size of their penises? Do they truly get penis envy? And, do they think we really care about the size?

While men clearly don't understand how women think, apparently women don't understand how men or women think. Allow me to enlighten:

1. No gentleman of my acquaintance has ever expressed the slightest concern over the size of his penis. I haven't checked, but I have no particular reason to believe that I've self-selected for a fellowship of monster-dicked alpha-male supermen. Yes, the volume of e-mail spam relating to penile enhancement suggests that there's a target demographic for such products out there somewhere. But I'd guess that demographic is the bottom percentile for self-esteem, if not penis size.

2. Freud believed that "penis envy" was the reaction of a young girl at the age when she became aware that boys had a penis and she did not. Remember how I said that men don't understand women? On the other hand, the movie Annie Hall contains this exchange:

Annie Hall: And then she mentioned penis envy. Do you know about that?
Alvy Singer: Me? I'm, I'm one of the few males who suffers from that.

So apparently the answer to your question is, yes, men truly get penis envy, at least in Woody Allen movies.

3. I've been told by several women that they do care about penis size. If you don't, I'm sure that somewhere out there is a man with a micropenis that's right for you. Try contacting Woody Allen! Do not Google the word "micropenis"!

What foods should a man eat/or not eat to make his cum tasty?

I spend years reading the ancient philosophers. I master the Tantric arts. I study psychology, evolutionary biology, and the behavioral economics of mating behavior. But do I get called upon to shine a light into the dark corners of the human heart? Am I asked to explicate the complexities of mating behavior? No. Instead, it's all, "How can I make my boyfriend's spooge taste like he loves me?" Well, you can't, because he doesn't.

There are, however, some things he can do to alleviate the bitter taste of contempt in his baby-batter. Dairy products and beer are contraindicated. By the time they've passed through the human body and turned to boysauce, they've changed much the way they would if left out on a warm day. Conversely, fruits like pineapple or watermelon reportedly give your man's mangravy a sweeter tang.

But for a heavier, creamier jism, I'd suggest trying maple-glazed bacon. Everything's better with bacon. When life hands you bacon, make Baconnaise!

Why are men so clueless about what a woman needs in a relationship?

Men are simple, direct creatures. As such, they're at a complete loss in most dealings with women. If your man isn't giving you what you need, one of two reasons obtains:

1. You haven't been sufficiently explicit in telling him what you need. Men need clear instructions. Very, very clear instructions. If you tell your man, "I'm going to tell you about my lousy day at work. I want you to make supportive and encouraging noises. I don't want you to try to tell me how I could solve any of my problems. Yes, that's irrational, but that's how it's going to be," then you're probably going to get what you want. Otherwise, you're probably going to end up somewhat dissatisfied.

2. If your man seems to forget some of the algorithm along the way, you may not be making it worth his while. A man can follow almost any set of instructions that ends with him getting laid. "I'm going to tell you about my lousy day at work... and then I'm going to give you a blow job." Sounds more compelling, doesn't it? You certainly have my complete attention.

Dr. Efficient will return soon! To get him to answer your questions, email them to me or send them via the Contact page on my site.