I am not going to regurgitate the article here. You can read it for yourself on MSNBC.com. What I am going to ask is, would you, could you, if you were a scientist, study booty calls? And not in a prurient sense, but as an actual event worthy of documentation and scientific discussion?

The reason I ask is because when I got to the bottom of the article, the first comment I saw basically said, “Who the hell thought THIS would be a good idea? I hope they didn’t get a government funded grant for this!” Because god knows, it would be absolutely horrible if the government paid anybody good money to study how human beings negotiate their sexual relationships. Why, if we did that, we might learn all sorts of horrible things, like how often are condoms and other birth control measures used in booty calls? And do the participants discuss their sexual history before getting involved, to insure no one passes on an STD to their partner? Well, we wouldn’t want to understand something like that!

Honestly, I think it’s assinine to assume that because the subject is sex, it’s not worthy of serious scrutiny. Personally, I would like to know how these relationships form and how they end. How do the participants feel about preventing the spread of disease? Are booty calls a wide-spread phenomenon in college-age people? Does participating in a booty-call relationship have any impact on the ability of participants to develop longer lasting romantic and sexual relationshpis later on?

Further reading of the comments did get into some interesting discussion as people talked about romance vs. quick sex, why women who have sex on the first night with someone are cheap but men who do the same aren’t, why booty-call relationships are better than one-night stands, etc. So it was good to see an active and usually thoughtful discussion going on in the first page of comments.

Think about it. Is the booty-call worth scientific study? Is any relationship worth scientific study? Let me know your thoughts.

I read through a few articles on the impact of oral contraceptives on society and was struck by one particular theme. The Pill did not have the effects on society that people thought it would. Apparently, people believed 50 years ago that the pill would: end unwanted pregnancies; cure the population boom; and cause a drop in the divorce rate as spouses engaged in increased sexual activity without risk of pregnancy. It did none of these things, as it turns out. The population still ended up increasing, people still had unwanted pregnancies, and spouses who took the pill might have been just as likely to enjoy their new-found sexual freedom by engaging in extra-marital affairs as they were by having sex with the person they married.

Instead, what The Pill did was offer women more of a choice about when to get pregnant. Granted, a woman could still get pregnant while on The Pill, but it worked well enough that most women suddenly found they didn’t have to become mothers before they were ready. It gave women the choice to go to school and have a career first, then have children. Or perhaps never have children at all.

But there’s one thing not mentioned in the articles I read on the Pill’s 50th anniversary, and I find it interesting that the subject was overlooked. I took The Pill for 10 years. When I went off it, I knew I was ready to get pregnant. Then I went through four years of infertility. I was finally able to get pregnant thanks to two medical proceedures called ovulation induction and artificial insemination. But that is the only way I was ever able to get pregnant. Both my daughters are miracles of modern science. In light of what I went through to get pregnant, I have often wondered if I wasted a lot of money on prescriptions for The Pill. Would I have had an easier time getting pregnant back in my 20s, when I was so desperate to not get pregnant. Or was I going to need fertility treatments no matter what age I was when I decided to venture into motherhood?

I don’t know. What I do know is that now people are starting to realize that a woman’s most fertile years are in her late teens and early twenties, those same years when women are taking oral contraceptives to ensure they don’t get pregnant before they’ve completed college and started their careers. Then later on down the line, when these same women are in their thirties or even their forties and they finally decide the time is right for them to have children… Well, the spirit may be willing, but the body ain’t.

It seems that while The Pill has given women the option of choosing when not to get pregnant, it has not given them the choice of when to get pregnant. In other words, there’s only so long you can keep hitting the snooze button on the biological clock. I know this from personal experience. Last year the Hubster and I decided to try fertility treatments for a third time, but at the grand old age of 40, my body just could not perform that same trick a third time.

This are so many issues tied together in this: the science behind controlling fertility; the societal aspects women deal with when making choices about family and career; the economics over having a child now or ten years later; and so on. The fact is, 50 years later The Pill has not necesarily liberated women from the burdens imposed upon them by sex and pregnancy. It’s just given us a different set of problems to deal with.

Here are some articles on the 50th anniversary of the Pill and on women having to choose between children and careers:

Birth Control Pill Turns 50

What ‘The Pill’ Did

The Pill at 50: Sex, Freedom & Paradox

Periods — Who Needs Them Anyway?

Making Time for a Baby

We’ve had absolutely lovely weather where I’m at this week, but even so, looking at the cartoon above still gives me a chill. Blacksburg in late Fall through early Spring can be pretty miserable, especially if you have to wear a uniform. I recall the everyday or “gray-bag” uniforms as being on the rather light weight side. Sure the pants were a wool blend, but they had also been worn by a couple hundred other cadets over the previous several decades! Everything was hand-me down or previously worn(out), and none of it up to the frigid chill of a Blacksburg winter.

The rain coats were probably the worst. They were designed to cover a cadet from neck to mid-calf. They were this god-awful heavy rubber, with a caplet at the top that tended to flap in a good wind so that on a really stormy day all the cadets looked like giant bats haunting the campus. It was a pain to wear, and an even bigger pain to figure out what to do with once you made it to class. I mean really, the thing was big, cumbersome and sopping wet. Was I supposed to put it in my chair and sit on it? Not. Hang it from some non-existent coat hook? You jest, right? Or maybe I was supposed to leave it in the hall and pray no one walked off with it?

Anyway, one thing I do not miss about being a cadet is wearing those uniforms on a cold, windy, rainy day.

I’m going to curl up with my heating pad now. BRRRRRRRRRRR!

Over on LiveScience, there’s an interesting ariticle on a man who predicts that by 2050, people will be legally allowed to marry robots, which just takes the video game idea one giant step further. Again, I can see some sort of logic to this. People are prone to assigning imaginary personalities to all sorts of inanimate objects. Children have their favorite stuffed animals, some people are simply in love with their cars, and some of us (including me) are prone to swearing at our computers when they give us the middle finger the blue screen of death. People have very active imaginations and are quite capable of creating very detailed characters out of just about anything they interact with. And we’ve been doing this for centuries, I might point out. Think of the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his own creation and then was overjoyed to have it come to life. That give you some idea of how good we are at making the inanimate so lively?

But what are the potential problems of marrying your video game or having wild sex with your own personal robot? How could this possibly go wrong? The problem I see is that people who choose to do this will most likely be the ones who have trouble making friends or dating anyway. With robot lovers available for the right price, these folks will now have an excuse not to seek out human companionship instead. And the scenario may not limit itself to the socially awkward or shy. A lot of people might decide it’s just too much hassle to maintain a real relationship with a real person, and prefer instead to deal with a programmed partner, someone they know will always be there for them no matter what. But what do those people lose out on by no longer have the need to form relationships with flesh and blood creatures?

For starters, how about the ability to handle conflict? If your robot lover never argues with you, if you always get to have your way, how would you learn to handle disagreements in the real world? Dealing with real people teaches important social skills, in my opinion. It may not always be fun to learn those skills, but they are still important for survival.

Then there’s the issue that people who get married and stay married live longer, though researchers debate over whether the marriage offers certain health benefits or whether healthy people are simply more likely to get married. But would those same health benefits arise if a person married a robot?

My question is, how anthropomorphic would a robot or video game have to be to offer the same benefits as a relationship with an actual person? Could a simple android suffice as a mate, or would the programming and construction have to be an exact match to a real human? If it’s the latter, that means these robots would have to do everything a human could do, including make decisions, have arguments, exert free will… These robots would no longer be programmable and thus might lose their appeal as partners for those looking for the sure thing.

In fact, that’s one thing that has struck me as key to this entire discussion of marrying a video game or robot. Is it really a marriage if only one partner is capable of saying “I do” and actually mean it? If the video game/robot can’t make a choice to say ‘no’ because they’ve been programmed not to say no, is the relationship really a relationship? I find it ironic that the LiveScience article makes the following statement:

“There has been this trend in marriage where each partner gets to make their own choice of who they want to be with.”

But the video game/robot won’t get that choice unless they somehow develop artificial intelligence. And when that happens, be prepared for a whole new can of worms opening up in romantic relations between man and machine.

Again, hysterically funny if you’re a B5 geek. If not, I have no idea what you’ll think of it.

Maybe I’ll dig out more old cartoons and start posting them here…