Today's op-ed in the New York Times , Postpartum Impression, discussed the little-talked about practice of vaginal strengthening after childbirth. It helps tighten the muscles for all sorts of reasons: pelvic health, preventing incontinence and, of course, pleasure! The author, Pamela Druckerman, used the practice as an example to point out that in France this type of thing is subsidized, while it is not in the United States.
Insurance and health-care debates aside, I am left wondering why such a simple and cheap procedure is not even discussed much here by health care practitioners? Our Puritanism astounds me again and again, especially when it is ostensibly a procedure from which men have much to gain.
From what I can tell the procedure can be done at home. It involves a whole lot of squeezing down on a wand (which most women probably already own, albeit with a different name.) One French web site sells oeufs de jade (jade eggs) for home-practice; an American site sells a medical-looking wand with a digital meter and then there is the Kegelmaster, a slightly pre-historic dildo type thing. (CN)
12.13.2007
12.09.2007
MIND: Estrus makes bank
This is one of the items in the New York Times magazine's end of year Annual Year of Ideas. I think it's quite fascinating. The short form: Women in "heat" make more money than those who don't in a strip club. (CN)
December 9, 2007
Lap-Dance Science
By REBECCA SKLOOT
Despite media reports to the contrary, the University of New Mexico did not pay for Geoffrey Miller and Brent Jordan to get 5,300 lap dances in two months. In fact, Miller has never even been in a strip club. And frankly, they’re getting tired of everyone’s asking.
Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, and Jordan, his recent undergraduate research assistant, did conduct a study examining the impact ovulation has on lap dancers’ tip earnings. But they gathered data via a Web site, where strippers logged in anonymously to provide information about their earnings, productivity and menstrual cycles during 296 work shifts (about 5,300 lap dances). The results: While ovulating — and therefore the most fertile — strippers made an average of $30 per hour more than menstruating women and $15 per hour more than women elsewhere in their cycles. Women on the pill — who typically don’t ovulate — made significantly less than naturally cycling women overall and had no “estrus earning peak.”
Jordan first became aware of this phenomenon while working his way through college managing a strip club, where his duties included “physical protection,” collecting nightly reports on women’s tips and providing dancers with tampons when necessary. Jordan noticed that the women getting tampons reported lower tips than those who didn’t. So he started collecting “preliminary data” to analyze for his evolutionary biology coursework.
“Studies like this,” Miller says, “can tell us about the nature of human sexuality and attraction and answer important questions scientists have been debating for decades.” For example: Conventional scientific wisdom says that almost all mammals except humans go into estrus (a k a “heat”). Cats yowl and raise their hind ends in the air; female primates get visibly engorged in relevant areas. But humans, scientists have long believed, do no such things. Miller and Jordan’s research indicates otherwise. “It’s highly controversial because it’s science blurring the line between humans and other primates,” Miller says, “but our results give clear economic evidence that human estrus actually does exist.”
The findings that estrus impacts earnings could have implications for women selling cars or giving big presentations as C.E.O.’s,” Miller says. “Should women schedule big job interviews during certain weeks of the month? We don’t know. But maybe.
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