Sawatsky: Sexual pain in Christian Women | The Asexual Agenda – Okay, so this is for my journal club, and I wrote up the discussion notes.  But I have a few things more to say here.  The paper is exploring possible causes for the high prevalence of sexual pain among Christian women (primarily Evangelicals).  But the authors of the paper are evangelicals, and they frame it like religious belief is generally great for sexual outcomes.  To them, sexual pain is this one mysterious exception where religious women are doing worse.  Color me skeptical.

I recalled that a long time ago, there was a study that circulated among atheist blogs, seemingly claiming the opposite, that people who leave religion have better sex lives.  The study was called “Sex and Secularism” by Darrel Ray in 2011, and it was based on a survey that recruited a lot of participants through Pharyngula.  You can find news articles talking about it, but the article itself is totally gone. I’m skeptical of that study too, and the ephemeral circumstances of its publication certainly don’t help.

The thing is, “better sex life” is a normative judgment, and perhaps it’s not very surprising that any given value system results in better sex lives, as measured by researchers who share that value system.  Obviously my values would overlap more with Darrel Ray’s than with the evangelical authors.  But I’m also ace, which tends to come with its own sexual values.  Like whenever “better sexual outcomes” means higher frequency of sex, I’m just going to roll my eyes.  But sexual pain, that’s uncontroversially a bad thing, even when ace people have it.

Why was I invited to Beast Studios | Folding Ideas (video, 1:30 hours) – MrBeast is the most subscribed youtube channel of all time, valued at $5 billion dollars.  But they’re losing money, viewers, and their film production is at once lavishly expensive, yet made of paperclips and glue.  Dan makes few attacks on Mr. Beast’s character, yet exposes the organizational rot at the heart of his media empire.  They prioritize viewing metrics above all else, and seem uninterested in hiring any real expertise.

Prediction Markets are Ruining the Finance Industry | The Plain Bagel (video, 27 min) – Prediction markets have gotten really big because of a favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.  However, most people who participate in prediction markets lose money.  Insider trading is much more difficult to catch in prediction markets compared to traditional investment markets.  And some people will even manipulate outcomes to win a bet.  Think athletes betting against themselves and then throwing matches, except that now it’s for everything, including sports.  Don’t just say no with your wallet, say no with your vote.

The Rise and Fall of Misery Memoirs | Sarah Z (video, 2:05 hours) – Sarah talks about the genre of misery lit, supposedly true memoirs about harrowing experiences, such as growing up in Holocaust concentration camps, or dealing with drug addiction, or satanic cults.  Many of these stories were wholly fabricated, but the point isn’t just that they’re false.  It’s that even the true stories are censored, edited, and reshaped according to expectations and commercial demands.  The flipside of false misery memoirs are the true stories of sexual violence that are disbelieved because the victim didn’t react the way people expect perfect victims to react.