Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.

The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.

You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.

But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:

• He cooked a really great dinner.
• He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
• There was nothing good on TV.
• The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
• Pilates just gets too repetitive.
• That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
• To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
• She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
• She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
• She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
• Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.

Some research study claims “love inspires creativity, but thoughts of sex stimulate analytical thinking.” The reasoning: “Love… is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”

…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)

While our country faces the folly of abstinence-only sex-anti-education, and the resulting ignorance/pregnancies/STDs, Britain’s National Health Service (you know, one of those efficient, money-saving, inclusive government health systems we’re supposed to hate) just published a leaflet recommending that teens have an “orgasm a day” to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

…got to pout n’ protest against California’s supreme court when it upheld that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.

As I wrote here last fall, it’s always fun to snipe about the state that thinks it’s so superior to the rest of us.

(Of course, longtime readers know that when I snipe at Calif., I also snipe at people here whose only idea how to improve Wash. is to blindly copy everything that’s been done there.

As if everything done there would always work here.

As if everything done there even worked there.)

But, as speakers at Tuesday’s Westlake Park rally asked, why don’t all these local protesters do more to get legal gay marriage in this state?

Well, some are.

We’ve now got the great compromise that is “civil unions.”

(And as one Daily Kos diarist put it, Tuesday’s Calif. ruling seems to pave the way for a similar compromise there.)

But plenty of activists insist that “the legal equivalent of marriage under another name” just ain’t the same thing as marriage.

And they’re right.

…one Sam Schulman argues what just might be “The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage,” as described in a New Republic snark post. Schulman goes beyond the normally accepted bounds of reactionarydom, to posit that marriage is necessary to keep straight men in proper society and to keep women from “concubinage.”

By the way, this is the Sam Schulman who used to own the short-lived magazine Wigwag—not the (now late) Sam Schulman who used to own the Sonics.

Item: Mary Kay Letourneau and her grownup boytoy Vili Fualaau will cohost a “Hot Teacher” night, this Saturday at the Fuel sports bar in Pioneer Square.

Comment: What, that guy’s old enough to be in bars now?

…“Erotic Services” ad categories: That’s OK. Those listings were full of scam artists anyway. Other sites have far more reliable referrals.

So, Playboy came out with a list purporting to rank “America’s sexiest CEOs.” The 10 women include one porn producer, two lingerie company bosses, and the head of an L.A. gym called “Flirty Fitness.”

All proper meaningless entertainment fluff so far. Then, Huffington Post puts up a link to it. The link item led to a comment thread that runs the gamut from “objectification” gripes to “homely” gripes.

Why do the dumbest bits of media draw the dumbest responses?

Look: There have been plenty of women in business. A few of them, too few, have reached positions of leadership. Of those, several have had, or acquired, faces and figures that conform to commonly held notions of physical attractiveness. Yawn.

I do concur with one HuffPo commenter, who noted the Playboy list didn’t include any women who ran really big companies (other than Victoria’s Secret). There haven’t been enough females atop Fortune 500 companies; those who have could use more recognition, even if it’s for their more peripheral achievements.

…to Marilyn Chambers, one of the very first people to become a celebrity for performing real sex in a movie. She continued on, despite typecasting and the advance of years. Her cable softcore comedies of the 1990s were minor entertainment trifles that proclaimed, without preaching, that the formerly young still have bodies and can still enjoy their use.

…for the know-nothing videophobes in our audience (ignorance of your culture is NOT considered cool):

• Bill Maher asked Newark mayor Cory Booker why America’s economy needed to keep growing all the time; doesn’t everybody already have more than enough? Booker quietly reminded him that not everybody does. Another guest, bio-ethicist Peter Singer, chided Paul Allen for devoting too much of his charity money to projects in the affluent Northwest; Booker chimed in with the observation that plenty of folks and organizations in the NW could really use that money.
• Angie Mentink on Fox Sports Net Northwest, during a postgame discussion of the UW men’s hoops team and its historic Pac-10 regular-season title, on why the team and its fans should save some celebration energy ’til after the Pac-10 tournament: “There’s a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling ‘satisfied.’ It’s something I’ve tried to teach my husband about.”
• A Today segment discussed frugal living with a tabletop tableau of “simple life” stuff—a Netflix envelope, a Scrabble board, a package of store-brand toilet paper, a drip coffee maker, etc. Excuse me, but you think we haven’t already familiarized ourselves with these?Unless the show’s producers are on the vanguard of a new media meme. Let’s call it “the upscale downsizing.” This schtick is to talk about economizing precisely for people who haven’t had to economize. It demographically separates the newly downscaled from those of us who’ve already been here a while.

Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

…a national girlie mag created a fictional pictorial essay about a Seattle coffee shop, the “Big Cups Coffee House,” with nude baristas. Now, someone in Maine has really opened one. The owner claims to have had 150 applicants for the 10 available jobs.

The legendary pinup model was the most reluctant of icons. She modeled for five years, mostly for small niche-market publishers (including the then-new Playboy).

She then utterly and completely retired from what faint spotlight she had.

Everything since, the whole Bettie phenom, was completely the work of avid fans (and a few ambitious publishers of her public-domain photos). It was several years into the revival that she even heard about it, and several more before she successfully gained legal control over her name and likeness rights.

(Rocketeer comic-book creator Dave Stevens was a key figure in both in promoting the Page revival and in getting her some financial renumeration from it. Stevens died this past March from leukemia at age 52.)

Teenagers have bodies. They have sexualities. They have occasional tendancies toward ill-advised behavior. Get used to it.