What are we really talking about when we
talk about making a city more vibrant?
In a word, sex. Creating the right conditions
for people to hook-up. Think about it: Sex is
the very essence of a city. People meeting,
mixing, mingling, making out, making stuff happen.
Sharing space, exchanging ideas,
getting entangled, getting busy.
Duke Dumont – Street Walker from Turbo Recordings on Vimeo.
Sexual Energy [Can You Feel It?]
It’s basic biology — the survival of the species. People are drawn to other people, and when we come together in close proximity, sparks fly — some might even ignite.
Sometimes this leads to a long-lasting love affair; other times it’s a white-hot one-night stand that rocks your world, and then you move on.
Either way, great cities are designed to encourage the flirting and foreplay that lead to great sex, because they offer:
1) Customer satisfaction
If people find human connection and happiness, they’re more apt to hang around, right?
2) Economic opportunity
If people get busy — in the business sense, I mean — the money will flow.
Sex is good for commerce, it’s good for culture. The highest achievements of humanity — the stuff that propels our civilization forward — come from human friction and collision.
Our best music and architecture, our greatest inventions and masterpieces — these aren’t born in a vacuum, like some immaculate conception. They come from people and places. They emerge in environments where exchange happens freely.
This kind of sex appeal — or magnetism, as she calls it — is important for cities. Places flourish when they attract people, resources, opportunities, and ideas, and match them to one another.
Cities are much more than the built environment of roads and real estate. Cities are about relationships, and whether people have access to opportunities. Cities are one big dating game.”
Some cities really get this — and they set the stage to turn you on and hook you up. You can feel it in their urban design, you can smell it in the air.
Markets, parks, sidewalks, streets, museums, galleries, clubs, bars, cafes. These are great places for sparks to fly.
This is why investing in quality spaces is smart civic policy. An enticing public realm invites human interaction, which in turn produces collaboration and innovation. It’s kind of like lighting candles and playing Marvin Gaye. It helps set the mood for more.
Can you feel it? We come out of our homes and cars, we brush up against strangers in parks and bars. The core temperature is rising, powered by sexual energy.
Do You Want Sex
Here or the Bedroom?
Essential Desire
Young Women
Scratch the Sexual Itch
Female desire is a relatively new field of research. Until the late 1970s, the male-dominated field of sexology focused on documenting male behaviour and performance.
The more complex, discrete mechanisms of female lust were inconsequential. Anatomical drawings of female rats didn’t bother to include the clitoris. Even today, a peep-show stigma remains attached to sexology in academe, particularly in the US.
Psychologists wonder whether low female desire isn’t so much about libido as it is about boredom. The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women is inaccurate.
Monogamy Means Sexual
Boredom for Most Women
Female desire is a relatively new field of research. Until the late 1970s, the male-dominated field of sexology focused on documenting male behaviour and performance.
The more complex, discrete mechanisms of female lust were inconsequential. Anatomical drawings of female rats didn’t bother to include the clitoris. Even today, a peep-show stigma remains attached to sexology in academe, particularly in the US.
Psychologists wonder whether low female desire isn’t so much about libido as it is about boredom. The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women is inaccurate.
If we correlate low female desire to the length of time a woman had been with her partner, not hormonal changes, libido returns when she’s with a new partner.
Psychologists routinely see women whose white-hot lust for their partner has turned to ash. Within monogamy, women’s narcissistic need to feel desired is not being met.
They feel their partners are trapped and that a choice—the lust-propelled selection of her—was no longer being made.
Many women reveal how they compensate to summon lust for their husband by fantasizing about being ravaged by some celebrity hunk.
The “you complete me,” best-friends model held as the marital ideal and routinely joked about as a turn-off for men may actually be even more so for women. There has to be an ‘other’ for there to be sexiness.
The idea that women might be ill-suited for monogamy flies in the face of entrenched thinking that women use sex to bond while men use intimacy for sex, as enshrined in the “intimacy-based sex-response cycle”.
It also upends the “parental investment theory,” the notion that men’s seemingly limitless reproductive capacity is why they fling seed far and wide, while women maximize limited reproductive resources by being choosy.
Societies have long used the low-libido explanation to maintain order: it discourages female infidelity and has freed women’s energy to focus on home and children.
But that doesn’t jibe with the new thinking that a big part of what triggers female desire is to be desired.
Some of this is conditioned: the idea that women—or “good” women—must be pursued and coaxed into sex. But women also expend a lot of energy on the hunt but that also focuses on being desired.
The stakes are even higher for women in the current hypersexualized culture. Their desire to appear desirable exceeds desire itself.
There’s a double standard surrounding female sexuality rooted in fear. Men are afraid that if they open the box, open her control, they’re opening ourselves to being cuckolded. They’re afraid of what’s inside.
A glimpse of the box’s contents was provided by Natalie Angier’s 1999 book Woman: An Intimate Geography, which describes the clitoris as the only organ designed purely for pleasure; it has 8,000 nerve fibres—twice the number in the penis. “Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”
Women’s desire is as omnivorous as men’s. They’re equally aroused by a range of porn and are far more responsive to stories involving strangers than long-time lovers. Yet when asked to rate their arousal, women downplay it, particularly when the stimuli aren’t socially acceptable.