Tag Archives: sex

October 25, 2016 · 6:47 am

The Moments I Feel Sexy As A Man

People make a big fucking deal about it when a woman decides to be sexy. For reasons that our prudish, uneducated, superstitious ancestors have cursed us with, we’re immediately aghast when a woman dares show a significant amount of cleavage, mid-drift, or ass outlines. We’re still at an immature stage of our development as a civilization where the sight of a pair of tits is enough to stop traffic.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love and appreciate any and all women who decide to be sexy. I encourage every woman who reads this blog or my books to be as sexy as you damn well please. The world will be a better place because of it.

However, I’m also of the opinion that men can be sexy too. I’m also of the opinion that both genders have an equal right to be sexy. Whether you’re gay, straight, bi, or something else altogether, you should take some time to act, feel, or be sexy. You may not always have a lover to do it with, but sometimes just being sexy on your own is good enough.

For me, it kind of comes with the territory. When you’re constantly conjuring new plots for erotica/romance novels, you can’t help but get into a certain mindset. Since our caveman brains are so crude, it tends to be a side-effect of sorts. You contemplate sexy stories so you feel inclined to act sexy. It’s too damn logical.

For a man, I think it’s a bit harder to be sexy. We don’t have boobs and that immediately puts us at a disadvantage. However, we men do have assets. We do have quirks that make us feel like we’re James Bond in a speedo. They’re different for every man, but I’d like to share a few moments where I’m at my sexiest. If you don’t have a spare pair of panties handy, you may want to skip this.

One: When I Lay In Bed Naked After A Long Hard Day

This one should come as no surprise to anyone who follows this blog. I sleep naked. I enjoy sleeping naked. I encourage everyone, male or female, to sleep naked if it’s an option to them.

It’s not just good for the body and the soul. Laying naked under the sheets, you feel like you’ve returned to a more primal state. You’ve completed the hunt. You’ve done your tribe proud for the day. Now, you celebrate by enjoying a well-deserved rest.

Two: When I Put On A Suit And Tie

As a kid, I didn’t like wearing fancy clothes. They were itchy, cumbersome, and my parents always got upset when I spilled hot sauce on it. That’s to be expected. When you’re a kid, you don’t think about being sexy. You just think about candy, cartoons, and avoiding homework.

As an adult, I’ve grown quite fond of men’s fashion. I’ve found that when I put on a suit, even if it’s a cheap suit I bought from Walmart, I feel pretty damn sexy. I stand in front of the mirror, look at myself, and think, “Damn! Now that’s a guy who will get shit done.”

It helps that I look damn good in a suit as well. I know this because others who aren’t relatives have told me as such. Women definitely appreciate it more. They treat you very differently when you walk into a restaurant wearing a suit compared to jeans and a T-shirt I haven’t washed in three weeks. It doesn’t just show you take care of yourself. It shows you want the world to know how goddamn sexy you are.

Three: When I Finish A Novel

cropped-passionrelapse_9781786511645_bookmark.jpg

This one is specific to me, an aspiring erotica/romance writer. It has nothing to do with my physical appearance. It doesn’t even have anything to do with what I’m wearing or not wearing. It’s just one of those powerful moments that is unique to me.

When I finished my first major book, “Skin Deep,” I felt like I could get a date with Jennifer Lawrence. I felt like I really accomplished something. I completed a piece of art that I put a lot of heart and soul into. I contributed to the world of sexiness by telling a damn sexy story. To say I had a little swagger in my step would’ve been a gross understatement.

 

Four: When I’m Exercising Or Finish Exercising

I don’t think this needs much explanation. It actually wasn’t until my late 20s that I began exercising regularly. Before that, I had a pretty unhealthy, pretty unsexy lifestyle. I avoided exercise whenever I could. I ate like I was still in college.

I eventually realized that this was not a healthy way to live my life. As such, I began eating a little better and working out. At first, it was a chore. I did it only because I had to or because I basically pushed myself to do it. Well, it turns out there was another reward that I didn’t expect.

Getting all hot and sweat, pushing my body and muscles to their limit, makes me feel sexy as hell. It makes my muscles bulge. It makes my skin glow. It makes me feel energized, like I could wrestle a bear and sing Metallica songs every step of the way. I may be dirty, disheveled, and smelly, but I feel like I maximize my manliness.

Five: When I Win An Argument Against An Asshole

In general, I try to avoid meaningless arguments. I’ve learned over the years that some things just aren’t worth arguing about because some people have their heads too far up their asses to see they’re wrong. I’ve been among those people. I admit, I’ve been laughably wrong at times and that’s not a good feeling.

However, on those rare occasions when I know I’m right and there’s an asshole on the other end, I make it a point to expose the bullshit. When I do, I can’t help but feel a little extra swagger. We live in a world where truth and honesty are at a premium. That makes them precious to both men and women alike. Possessing something that is precious can be damn sexy. Just ask any man who has a Lamborghini.

These are just some of the moments where I’m at my most sexy. These are the moments in which women have the best chance at seeing just how great Jack Fisher can be as a man, a lover, an erotica/romance writer, and everything in between. These moments can be fleeting, but they’re worth pursuing and cherishing at every turn.

1 Comment

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 23, 2016 · 8:41 am

Sexy Sunday Shower Thoughts

It’s Sunday. It’s a crisp fall morning. It’s chilly outside, but that doesn’t stop me from sleeping naked, as I’m so fond of doing. It’s been a long week. I’ve spent a good chunk of that week writing about and contemplating the future.

I imagine a world where technology makes us super-strong, super-healthy, and super-sexy. I imagine a world where our bodies and our sexuality are so malleable that we can share intimate, erotic experiences with each other in the real world, the virtual world, or some other world that no aspiring erotica/romance writer can imagine. These are all powerful, sexy thoughts. They’re also exhausting.

So for crisp Sunday morning like this, I’d like to take a step back. I’d like to take a deep breath. I’d also like to limit the amount of time I have to wear clothes today. Yes, I know it’s Fall. Yes, I know it’s getting cold out. No, I won’t let that stop me from spending as much time as I can naked. Read some of my books. A good chunk of them have been written while I’m naked.

I find that I have some of my best creative moments while naked, sexy or otherwise. I think everybody’s brain contemplates something unique when they’re naked or feeling sexier than usual. These thoughts are special and are definitely worth sharing.

Some call them “shower thoughts.” This is somewhat appropriate. We all shower and bathe ourselves naked. It’s one of the few times in modern life where we disconnect, step away from our hectic lives, and are just alone with our thoughts and our bodies. It’s one of the most underrated moments of everyone’s day. Even if they don’t bathe every day, just being naked and alone with your thoughts can be quite enlightening, among other things.

There are many on the internet that agree with this sentiment. I’m thankful to live in a time in human history where we have something that allows us to connect with others who are equally fond of lounging around in the nude on a crisp Sunday morning. Whether you’re a man or a woman, it’s a special feeling that’s worth sharing.

Thankfully, there are sites like TheChive, which act as hubs the for funny, sexy, entertaining bits of media you aren’t going to see on PBS. They have entire pages dedicated to such “shower thoughts.” In the interest of inspiring those who may benefit from spending more time naked, I’d like to share a few.

I’d say this depends entirely on the shoes in question, but I can’t say I disagree.

It’s logic like this that makes me think that human intelligence doesn’t get enough credit because only idiots make the news.

I’m not sure I can ever get the same enjoyment out of WWE that I do with porn, but that’s just me.

This almost makes me feel sorry for my male ancestors. I shudder to think about the lengths they went to in order to see a naked woman. What a wonderful time to be alive.

This is one of those things I wish people were more honest about. It would make our love lives much more efficient.

I’d watch that show. Hell, I’d DVR every episode and binge watch it multiple times, if only to thoroughly destroy all the bullshit I learned in sex ed classes in high school.

I’m not sure if this is injustice, hypocrisy, stupidity or a combination of all three. If it’s a combination, it’s a damn potent combination.

I’m not sure Elon Musk has thought this far ahead, but I’d be shocked if he didn’t contemplate this issue at some point.

Again, perfect logic can be both intriguing and disturbing. Although for this one, couldn’t you just take a picture of your flacid penis and be okay?

This isn’t a thought so much as it is a valid strategy. For those of us that enjoy loud, raucous sex, you can never have too many strategies like this.

Something to think about the next time you and your lover have sex on your birthday. It may or may not kill the mood, depending on what your relationship with your parents is like. Personally, I’m thankful my parents enjoyed sex enough to make me.

Those are some fun, sexy thoughts to warm you up on this crisp Sunday morning. Hope helps complete your weekend. Got any other sexy Sunday thoughts to share? Share them! Let’s make this our way of making cold, Sunday mornings more fun.

Leave a comment

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

October 21, 2016 · 6:38 am

Fulfilling ALL Our Needs/Fantasies Through Human Enhancement

Everyone has their own list of crazy, erotic fantasies that they don’t have the time, energy, or resources to pursue. Unless you’re super rich, super famous, or able to handle super-potent drugs, you’ll only ever fulfill a fraction of your fantasies at most. Hell, many people go through their whole lives fulfilling exactly zero.

This is good to some extent for an erotica/romance writer like me. It means that there’s still a market for those whose ability to explore their erotic fantasies is limited to a book. I’m more than happy to fill that market with however many seamy stories I can conjure.

At the same time, however, it’s kind of tragic when you think about it. Countless people will go their whole lives having all these needs and desires, but they never get a chance to explore them. Sure, it won’t stop them from living happy, content lives, but how much richer would those lives be if they could explore those fantasies?

Well, just as we’ve seen with the creation of fire, electricity, and internet porn, technology may one day make that possible. It’s already starting to happen. Virtual reality headsets are finally becoming mainstream.

You can probably assume someone is already planning to use it for porn. Pretty much every new technology that emerged is applied to sex in some ways. It’s a basic rule of technological progress. If it can be applied to sex, then it will be applied to sex. No exceptions.

This is just the beginning though. Just watching pretty pictures in a VR headset isn’t enough. We’re human beings. We actually want to do all this crazy sexy shit we come up with. There’s only so much we can do on our own. No amount of towels and lube can fulfill the breadth of our desires.

The advent of something like smart blood will help. I already discussed the extremely sexy possibilities in a previous post. The advent of biotechnology will usher in a new era of enhancement.

We’ll be stronger, smarter, and sexier. We’ll be able to live longer lives and stay strong, smart, and sexy along the way. We may get to a point where nobody looks older than 35. Every man will be as strong and endowed as Hugh Jackman. Every woman will be as beautiful and shapely as Kate Hudson. It’ll be a crazy sexy world and I hope I live long enough to see it for reasons that should be obvious.

As appealing and sexy as that future is, it’s still not the ultimate endgame for human enhancement. Sure, it’ll be a lot easier once everyone has smart blood in their system and can hump like Wilt Chamberlin on meth, but there are other forms of enhancement that go even farther if you can believe that. With those enhancements, our ability to explore our needs and desires literally takes on a whole new shape.

What sort of enhancements am I talking about? Well, to answer that, I need to preface this by saying a good chunk of this discussion, as well as those in previous blog posts, were inspired by a book I’ve been reading. It’s called “The Singularity Is Near” by a brilliant futurist, who also happens to be an engineer at Google, named Ray Kurzweil.

It’s a dense, technical book full of information, history, and speculation. If you really want to stretch your mind, and even strain it in some areas, I highly recommend this book. It’ll get you excited/horny about the future in ways you never imagined.

The primary message in this book is fairly straightforward. Kurzweil argues that the current pace of technology is accelerating at a rate that will eventually reach a point where we begin to transcend our own biology. The caveman logic that I’m so fond of referring to on this blog will become a moot point.

There’s a lot to unpack in this book and since I don’t like giving spoilers, I’ll focus on the sexy parts. That’s why people come to this blog. Discussions about human enhancement and futurism isn’t fun unless it’s sexy as well. Well don’t worry. This is going to get sexy real fast.

One of my favorite chapters in this book involves something Kurzweil called “The Human Body 2.0.” In it, he basically describes how we’ll use advances in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics to give the human body a much-needed overhaul. Forget just slapping on makeup, baby oil, and silicone tits. Kurzweil doesn’t just want to enhance our bodies. He wants to rebuild them from the ground up.

It’s not as creepy as it sounds. Recently, I ate this new flavor of cake mix ice cream and it turned my stomach into tire fire on a toxic waste dump. That experience alone, a body that can’t handle a certain flavor of ice cream, convinced me that the human body is due for an overhaul.

Kurzweil goes into great detail about how this 2.0 version of our bodies work. He even explores it on his website. Granted, he gets a little technical at times, but even he acknowledges there are some sexy implications.

This new body doesn’t just have better organs, stronger muscles, and less odor. It basically requires a whole new set of instruction manuals. It has so many upgrades and improvements that I can’t list them all in a single post, but here are just a few that should get you excited/horny:

  • A system of nanobots in place of traditional blood and body fluids, which are programmable and have a measure of intelligence
  • Biotech and cybernetic implants that improve/expand senses
  • Bioengineered skin that is stronger, more durable, and able to process more tactile information
  • Organs that are part biological, part mechanical, and completely interchangable
  • Enhanced brain and nervous system that integrates biotechnical and cybernetic systems to improve, enhance, expand function
  • Connectivity between brain and nervous system to external systems, including computers, AIs, and other brains

Again, this is just a fraction of the functions that these augmented bodies will have. They’ll go way beyond just keeping us free of disease and ensuring we’re all as fit as Olympian athletes. Hell, these bodies will ensure we can beat up every Olympian athlete over the past 100 years without breaking a sweat.

That’s besides the point though. I know what everyone really wants to know about. How will this impact our sex lives? Smart blood will already give us the ability to hump freely without much concern for any nasty side-effects or visits from Maury Povich. What more do we need?

Well, remember the VR shit I mentioned earlier? That’s where these enhanced bodies will be at their sexiest. How will they do this? Two words: The Matrix.

No, I’m not talking about the mind-bending 90s movie or the shitty sequels that came after it. I’m talking about the concept it explored, creating a virtual world so real that it’s completely indistinguishable, as far as our brains are concerned.

Kurzweil discusses this idea extensively in his book, noting the rate at which graphics and simulations are becoming more lifelike. Has anyone here seen the graphics of the PlayStation 4? I don’t think anyone would doubt that at this point.

As this trend continues, it’s going to get to a point where the graphics are so real that our caveman brains really can’t tell the difference. However, our enhanced 2.0 brains will be able to do us one better. It won’t just be able to process these virtual worlds. It’ll allow us to control them.

Kurzweil called it a form of “experience beaming.” I prefer to call it the ultimate fantasy, sexual or otherwise. Once computing power gets to this point, and we’re getting closer every year, we’ll be able to conjure any virtual world we want.

I don’t think it takes a dirty imagination to see the sexual implications of this technology. Now, we don’t even need a partner. We don’t even need to leave our couch. We can just plug in, load up a simulation that involves a three-way between Marilyn Munroe and Cleopatra, and it’ll feel so real that we can’t tell the difference.

This isn’t just the ultimate wet dream for some though. Kurzweil also says that these virtual worlds could be shared. There could be an entire virtual nightclub where people just project their conscious minds into it, hook up with digital versions of other people, and get busy with them in a controlled, malleable world that feels as real as this one.

For couples, it means they could conjure their ultimate fantasies together. Would that make their love stronger? Would that make their sex better? I certainly think so. We all have awesome experiences as individuals. It’s natural that we’d seek to share them with others. That’s something “the human body 2.0” makes easier. If it’s as easy as becoming Facebook friends, people will do it. It’s practically inevitable.

This all sounds wonderfully utopian, but make no mistake. There will be issues with our new bodies and these virtual worlds. There will be serious issues that’ll probably make us unenhanced folks in 2016 cringe.

Who’s to say these virtual worlds are as sexy or wholesome as low-budget softcore porno movie on Cinemax? Why couldn’t they also involve torture, mutilation, and exploitation so horrific that I can’t put it into words, nor do I want to? In a digital world, the laws of physics don’t apply. There’s literally nothing keeping people from doing this crazy shit. Will that be good for society? Will we be able to handle it?

Kurzweil doesn’t shy away from these issues. He acknowledges them, but says the benefits outweigh the costs. I think he’s right. Opposing these advancements is like nuking the internet to keep the libraries in business. It’s throwing away too much good because of a little bad.

When this day comes and we have the bodies that can enter these worlds, it’ll change a lot of things. Chances our, erotica/romance writers like me will be out of business or obsolete. That time hasn’t come yet though. That means I’ll just have to make the most of my desire to tell sexy, romantic stories. Then, when the time comes to enter a virtual world where we can go skinny dipping with Starfire and Wonder Woman, I’ll be first in line.

15 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 20, 2016 · 6:56 am

A Day In The Life Of An Enhanced Human

When I was 12-years-old, I was playing baseball with my friends, as any ordinary kid with limited athletic ability would. Then, on a total fluke play, I tried to pick up a ground ball with my bare hand so I could make the play at first. In the process, I jammed my middle finger badly.

This is a fairly normal injury that everybody gets at some point in their lives. It doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t even make you wish you were dead. It just hurts like a bitch and takes forever to heal. That simple, fluke injury ruined my week.

For six days, I couldn’t bend that finger so it looked like I was flipping everybody off. Something as simple as brushing my teeth became a test in pain tolerance and dexterity. I can’t help but think if I found this little injury so annoying, then I wouldn’t have lasted five seconds in the hunter/gatherer days of my ancestors. I’d have been the first to get eaten by a bear because I couldn’t stop complaining about a jammed finger.

Why do I bring this story up? Well, it highlights an important, not to mention inescapable, detail about the human condition. Our bodies, as wonderful and sexy they may be, are woefully inefficient. A good chunk of our lives and a major chunk of our civilization is built around mitigating these inefficacies. Why else would the pharmaceutical industry be a $1.06 trillion (that’s not a misprint) market?

There’s no doubt that the human body has its limits and we’re trying damn hard to manage them. However, there may come a day, and it may come sooner than you think, where we’ll do more than just manage those limits. We’ll subvert them.

That’s right. We’ll become the enhanced humans I often read about in my comic books. Men can become as fit as Captain America. Women can become as fit as Wonder Woman. Actually, scratch that. I’d rather the women become as fit as Starfire, for reasons I’ve already laid out on this blog. If you need a reminder, this should help.

It’s an appealing thought, in more ways than one. It’s a damn sexy thought as well, in far too many ways to list. It may seem so distant when the Centers for Disease Control shows that 591,699 people died from cancer and 55,227 died from influenza in 2015 alone. However, there is reason to believe that such a fanciful, sexy thought may become a reality.

I already revealed one possibility, courtesy of the 2015 James Bond movie, Spectre. In the movie, it’s called smart blood. In our world, it’s the alpha and omega of biotechnology. It’s Ryan Reynold’s abs, Jennifer Lopez’s butt, Pamela Anderson’s tits, and Ron Jeremey’s dick all rolled into one. Is that too sexy for you? Well change your panties because it gets better than Ryan Reynod’s abs if you can believe that.

Smart blood is basically programmable flesh. In theory, it’ll allow us to control our biology the same way we control apps on our smartphones. At first, it’ll be used for basic monitoring and diagnostics, but that’s not very sexy. The real appeal is how it will enhance us.

Let’s face it, human beings are really OCD about how we use our technology. It’s not enough to just fix a problem. We have to enhance it, even if it creates a whole new set of problems. So long as those problems don’t make our lives too inconvenient, we’ll gladly take them. It beats dying of small pox or not being able to get an erection after the age of 65.

Smart blood will enhance us in ways that we can’t predict. It’ll do this in ways I discussed in a previous post and explored in my book, “Skin Deep.” However, the events of “Skin Deep” only explored the effects on one particular character. What happens when a large number of people are enhanced with smart blood? What happens when there’s an entire society of people with smart blood in their system?

That’s something I’d like to discuss because it has many possibilities, many of which have sexy implications. It requires another thought experiment, one that means peering decades into the future after smart blood technology has been perfected. This is difficult because we can’t even predict the weather beyond a couple weeks. How can we predict something like this?

Well, history does offer an important guide. As we saw with the advent of birth control, technology does affect society in profound ways. If we’re going to speculate, let’s reasonably assume that humans are just as OCD when it comes to following the trends of history.

Picture this scenario. The year is 2055. Smart blood is not only perfected. It’s as widely available and universally accepted as aspirin. There is now an entire generation of children who grew up with smart blood in their system. In fact, smart blood is such a big part of them that it was with them in the womb because their mothers used it to ensure a healthy pregnancy.

This means that this generation sees having smart blood and all their benefits is normal. What do those benefits do for them? Well, the most obvious benefit is that far fewer members of this generation die in childhood or infancy. Smart blood doesn’t just fight off disease. It detects, suppresses, and treats genetic and autoimmune diseases. If it can’t cure the condition, it at least suppresses it in a way that allows people to live a healthy life.

So an entire generation never knows disease. They never know what it feels like to jam a finger, get the flu, or endure a hangover. Take a moment to envy those lucky shits, but then take it several steps further because the implications go beyond hangovers.

If smart blood enhances every part of the body, including the sexy parts, then that means it’ll enhance the sexiest body part of all, the brain. No, I’m not being factitious. It’s true. The brain is the center of all things sexy because it is the center of how we process all things. Those things include the sexy stuff.

As amazing as the brain is, it still has room for improvement. It’s good at recognizing patterns and warning us when a hungry grizzly is near. It’s not so good at helping us endure the biological torture that is puberty, peer pressure, and high school. I’m pretty sure my brain shut down for significant parts of my sophomore and junior year. I imagine many more feel like their brains fail them in similar situations.

With smart blood, however, the brain is enhanced like every other organ. That means for this generation, they basically have cheat codes for learning and comprehending the world. That means they can read, listen, and learn with much greater efficiency than those of us who don’t have smart blood.

In terms of education, that’s a big fucking deal. A good chunk of our bloated, inefficient education system is a product of outdated methods that fail to educate kids. With smart blood and the growth of online learning programs like Khan Academy, everyone will be able to get a world class education, hopefully without having to endure mid-terms, acne, and lazy teachers who just teach for the health benefits.

As a result, this means that an entire generation could have the same educational aptitude as a high school valedictorian by the fourth grade, if not sooner. Sure, that means we’ll have a generation of smart-asses, but they’ll be smart-asses for the right reasons.

That education goes beyond simply knowing the name of every Russian Tsar or being able to factor 10-digit numbers in their head. In addition to memorizing facts, smart blood will also improve the parts of the brain that process our emotions and social cues.

Children’s brains are basically like a computer getting a long list of updates. It takes a long time and there are bound to be many glitches along the way, as anyone who ever attended a pre-school birthday party can attest. Smart blood can deal with those glitches and speed up the download. Imagine a 7-year-old having the maturity of a 27-year-old. Then again, given the recent trends in reality TV, that bar may be too low.

On top of being highly educated and emotionally healthy, keep in mind that smart blood would also basically eliminate unplanned pregnancies, teenage or otherwise. As I speculated before, smart blood will allow women to have total control over their fertility.

From the moment their born, it may even be their default setting. They cannot and will not ovulate until they inform the smart blood in their body to do so. It’s perfect contraception, no pills or uncomfortable implants needed.

Why is this a big deal? Why is being educated and not having unplanned pregnancies a big deal? Well, come back to the present time for a moment and you’ll see something pretty telling. According to Pew, couples who are college educated are among the least likely to get divorced and the most likely to marry for the right reasons. Apparently when people are smart, they make smart decisions in their love life. Go figure.

Now imagine an entire generation that’s even smarter and not burdened by unplanned pregnancies. That means that they’re less prone to loving someone for the wrong reasons or having sex with someone for the wrong reasons. How many of our problems in society have come from such stupid decisions? How many episodes of Jerry Springer did these stupid decisions create?

We can never know, but the generation that uses smart blood won’t have to deal with that burden. Sure, they’ll still make mistakes, but smart people know how to deal with mistakes and overcome them. Thanks to smart blood, these simple mistakes will be less likely to ruin their lives and harden their hearts.

What will this mean for the love they find? What will this mean for the relationships they create? What will this mean for their sex lives, their children, or their communities as a whole?

In terms of their sex lives, I think our imaginations are dirty enough to have some ideas. If this generation is intelligent in both facts and emotions, then they’ll be able to relate to one another with much greater efficiency. That means they’ll be able to form more meaningful bonds and have the emotional capacity to express those bonds in a mutually loving way.

That may very well make for the kind of hot, steamy sex life that every bad romance novel ever written has ever described. Even some of the overly heated, overly steamy romances I conjure in my books would be considered basic by these standards.

Think about it, provided you have clean underwear. A young couple, a highly educated man and highly educated woman with the kind of enhanced bodies that are usually reserved for bad Photoshop covers, wants to make love. They know each other’s wants, needs, and proclivities to the letter.

Thanks to the influence of smart blood, they have the fortitude, stamina, and desire to do anything and everything they want in their sex life. They can hump like lions in heat for hours on end. Or if they want to slow things down, they can play every Barry White song ever made and make love slowly and passionately like every Twilight movie ever made.

What kind world would we live in if people had sex lives like that? Would it be more peaceful? I imagine it would. I’ve never met anyone, male or female, who has a great sex life and is regularly in a bad mood. How can you have great sex an hate anybody? It’s not physically or emotionally possible.

A generation fueled by smart blood may very well consider this normal. Thanks to smart blood, this generation won’t suffer and decline with age. If anything, age will just give them time to come up with more creative ways of expressing their love and exploring their sexuality.

What this generation of super-smart, super-sexy, super-emotionally competent men and women come up with is beyond my imagination, but that won’t stop the romance/erotica writer in me from trying.

Beyond this point, it’s impossible to speculate. However, this is a future that may very well manifest within our lifetimes. What will we tell this generation? How will we explain to them that we lived in a time where we had to worry about diseases, unplanned pregnancies, divorce, sham marriages, and Tinder? I don’t imagine that’ll be a pleasant conversation. I just hope smart blood enhances their sense of humor as well.

11 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 19, 2016 · 6:58 am

Biotechnology, Symbiotes, Smart Blood, And Becoming James Bond

When I came up with the concept for my book, “Skin Deep,” I didn’t just want to conjure some overly magical force to explore the themes of beauty, sex, and decadence. I wanted it to have some basis in reality. I intend to leave all the magical stuff to Disney and those who do porn parodies of Disney.

I’ve always been interested in futuristic technology. Having grown up on a steady diet of Star Wars and superhero comics like X-men, I’m often intrigued by the sci-fi, futuristic elements of these worlds and yes, that intrigue extends to sex and romance. I don’t intend to be coy about that, especially for the subject of this post.

Some of that comic book influence found its way into “Skin Deep.” In that story, the mechanism that the main character, Ben Prescott, uses to become attractive is called Project Venus. Without getting to technical, which tends to kill the mood to anyone who doesn’t have a very specific Star Trek fetish, this project basically consisted of this high-tech biotech goop. It’s not as crude as it sound. It was also inspired by these things.

For those of you who don’t follow comic books, monster movies, or tentacle porn, those are what Marvel calls symbiotes. They’re conscious alien organisms that consist primarily of blackish red goop. Their primary function is similar to that of a parasite. They find a host, be it Spider-Man or someone who hates him, and bond with it.

What makes them so intriguing (and dangerous) is that don’t stop at bonding with a host. They actually re-shape, heal, and (most importantly for the topic of this conversion) improve it. Sure, it tends to make the host crazy, homicidal, and inclined to murder Spider-Man, but is that really as bad as the side-effects from some modern drugs? Look up anal seepage and tell me you wouldn’t risk it.

The stories in the comics tend to focus on the murderous side of symbiotes, but they do sometimes touch on the benefits. One Spider-Man character in particular, Flash Thompson, got the most of those benefits.

At one point, he was badly wounded while in the military, losing two limbs in the process. Then, a symbiote came along and healed him. When there are veterans in the real world facing problems like that, who wouldn’t risk a treatment involving an alien organism?

In “Skin Deep,” Ben Prescott was in a similar situation. He endured a terrible accident that left him badly scarred and in chronic pain. Both he and his parents were desperate and Warren Irvine, the main “antagonist” (I use quotation marks because I don’t like ascribing that role to him) of the story, takes advantage of that desperation.

The treatment in “Skin Deep” is not at all like the alien symbiotes in Marvel comics. In some respects, it’s a bit more realistic. It doesn’t have consciousness. It doesn’t function as a parasite. It doesn’t make those who use it want to murder masked vigilantes. Project Venus was a lot more pragmatic. It focused entirely on healing and improving the host.

This is, in essence, the primary goal of biotechnology as it applies to the human body. We know all too well just how flawed the human body is. A great deal of those flaws do more than just make us sore at the end of the day. They make us hate each other for petty reasons, hinder our ability to understand one another, and (as I like to explore as an erotica/romance writer) hinder our ability to love and be intimate with one another.

Biotechnology and the promise it offers may very well be the key to fixing those flaws. In fact, it’ll do more than just fix them. It’ll enhance what’s already there. I’m not just talking about the “super penis” that Deadpool joked about in his movie. I’m talking enhancements that go much further.

I intend to talk about the extent of those enhancements in other posts. For this one, however, I want to focus specifically on the mechanisms. I want to explore the nuts and bolts of how a real life symbiote/Project Venus would work, how it would affect us, and how it would impact society.

Make no mistake. There will be an impact. Once we achieve the technology to enhance, tweak, or repair the flaws in human biology, then the possibilities get pretty damn big. They’ll be much bigger than anything an aspiring erotica/romance writer can conjure. I can only explore and appreciate the sexy parts so that’s what I’ll focus on.

First, let’s focus on the mundane. How will technology like this work? As is often the case, movies and comics do try to get a leg up on these breakthroughs. We saw it in Star Trek with cell phones. The same applies to biotechnology. In the case, the latest James Bond movie, Spectre, gave us some insight.

In that movie, James Bond is injected with an advanced biotech fluid called “smart blood.” It’s not as sexy as it sounds, but it’s somewhat similar to Project Venus in “Skin Deep.” In that movie, the smart blood was designed only to track and monitor James Bond’s vitals. That’s a simple, but pragmatic use for such advanced technology.

Imagine a more advanced form of smart blood that goes even further. Imagine that it can do more than just monitor and track. Imagine it healing diseases (let’s face it, James Bond probably has more than a few), improving stamina (he runs from explosions all the times so that’s vital), and enhancing organ function (although he may not need it).

Now imagine this kind of smart blood being available to all men. Imagine all men with this blood in their system having the same physical abilities as James Bond. I’ll give the women reading this blog a moment to fantasize about that world. Take all the time you need.

This “smart blood” isn’t entirely science fiction. It doesn’t exist yet, but there’s nothing in the laws of physics that says it’s impossible. More importantly, there’s a huge economic incentive to creating something that’ll turn men into James Bond. The men’s grooming industry alone is an estimated $21 billion in 2016. Whoever perfects smart blood is bound to become rich enough to fund its own Spectre organization if they want.

The same incentives are there for women. In fact, they’re even more lucrative. Hair care sales alone for the United States topped $11.6 billion in 2014. Imagine a form of smart blood that could change the color of a woman’s hair as easily as she changes the desktop art on her computer. Just as every man could look like James Bond, every woman can look like Jennifer Lawrence. I’ll give men a moment to fantasize about that world. Again, take all the time you need.

This is the world that “Skin Deep” explored. Are we even ready for that world? It’s hard to say. Were we ready for the internet? Were we ready for vaccines? Were we ready for penicillin? These are questions that don’t have answers because they didn’t have to be answered. The same applies to smart blood.

Setting those questions aside for a moment, let’s ask a more relevant question. What exactly will perfected smart blood do? Well, it could definitely start off as a means of tracking and monitoring people, just as we saw with James Bond in Spectre. However, new functions would emerge, just as they did with smartphones so let’s follow that model.

In the same smartphones took on many more functions, smart blood could do the same. It could consist of trillions of programmable artificial cells. Since these cells have a measure of intelligence, we could communicate with these cells the same way Bluetooth devices communicate with each other.

This communication means we can equip these cells to fight off every form of infectious diseases, including the very unsexy kind that James Bond probably gets from humping too many bond girls. Viruses and bacteria thrive because they can adapt to whatever biology we throw at them, but in the same way trees can’t adapt to chainsaws, these diseases will not be able to adapt to smart blood.

That means no more infectious diseases. That means no more STIs. That alone will have a huge impact on society, both in terms of public health and how we approach sex. I already posed this question on my blog before. It’s not an unreasonable question to ask because smart blood may very well make this possible.

Using this same communication, we could instruct our smart blood to fix damaged tissues, repair organs, and improve their function. This means kidneys are more efficient, livers are more efficient, and muscles are more efficient. We become stronger, healthier, and can drink a crate of whiskey without puking. Those are all amazing benefits in and of themselves.

Yes, by the way, those enhancements extent to our sex organs. Smart blood could improve the function of a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina to a level that even porn stars would envy. Smart blood could ensure a man never needs Viagra again. Smart blood could ensure a woman always has multiple orgasms. It can even ensure it’s not over after two minutes. What kind of sex lives would we have if that were the case?

You done contemplating all those fantasies about being able to fuck like Ron Jeremy or Jenna Jameson? Well, it gets even better! Improving the inner workings of the body is just one side of the coin. The outer workings benefit just as much, as “Skin Deep” explored.

With smart blood in your body, you can program it to attack wrinkles, moles, and blemishes without the need for botox or surgery. Our skin can look as youthful at 91 as it did at 21. A woman’s breasts will never sag. A man’s scrotum will never sag. If smart blood is truly perfected, we’ll basically stop aging in our mid-30s. Sure, that may really undermine the MILF porn industry, but I’d say that’s a sacrifice worth taking.

For women, specifically, the benefits go even further than better boobs, if you can believe that. With smart blood, issues over birth control and contraception are basically over. If smart blood can improve the function of your sex organs, then it can also manage them just as well. That means every woman will have perfect control over her fertility.

That kind of control is unprecedented. Current birth control methods are effective, but flawed. With smart blood, a woman can literally decide the exact moment to get pregnant. Before she has a romp with her future baby daddy, she just programs her smart blood to prime her ovaries. This way, she knows who the daddy is. Maury Povich will be out of business.

This is what smart blood can do. This is what we may be facing as a society at some point in our future. Personally, I hope I live long enough to see it because it’ll be a very different society compared to the one we have now. However, even that society is not the ultimate endgame for fixing the human body. What do I mean by that? Well, that’s a topic for another post.

Until then, I’ll leave readers to contemplate this society. It’s important to think about because it will likely be the topic of another book I write down the line. Think about the society we’ll have with smart blood at our disposal. What kind of conflicts will there be in that society? How sexy will this society be? I can’t answer those questions, but I sure as hell hope to explore them.

37 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 18, 2016 · 6:51 am

How Do We Fix The Human Body (Namely The Sexy Parts)?

I’ve done a lot of complaining these past few weeks. I admit it. I’ve covered some pretty depressing shit recently. There’s just no way to put a positive spin on the gross injustices of gender inequality or how double standards make men and women hate each other way more than we should. I’m not making anyone’s panties moist by talking about this stuff. I know that. That’s why I’m hoping this gets everyone back in the mood.

I feel I’ve already gotten my point across. The human race is an amazing, but imperfect species. Sure, we do have some pretty awesome hardware, as the health benefits to orgasms so wonderfully demonstrate. Anyone who watched the Olympics this year knows we can do some pretty awesome things with that hardware.

That said, it’s still full of bugs, flaws, and imperfections. The human body, as it is right now, is like the first version of Windows. For those of you too young to remember the days when we couldn’t download a billion pictures of tits on our phones, this is what that version looked like.

It’s old. It’s dated. It’s not very sexy anymore. There’s a damn good reason why it gets upgraded and updated all the time. Sure, those upgrades aren’t always the best, as anyone who used Windows Vista for more than five minutes knows all too well. At least future upgrades can fix the crap that the last upgrade created.

We take those upgrades for granted because the human body doesn’t get upgraded. We’re born into one body. We’re stuck with that body. The chemistry within that body is prone to all sorts of flaws. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, there are approximately 6,800 rare genetic diseases that we know about. There’s a real possibility there are a few that we don’t know about and won’t know about until someone suffers horribly from it.

Those are a lot of flaws and for most of human history, we couldn’t do squat about them. Our best bet was to just hope we weren’t born with any of these flaws and those are some pretty long odds. As someone who regularly loses at poker, I know all too well how long odds tend to screw people over and not just with money.

We’re lucky to live in an age where some conditions can be managed, but even if we’re lucky enough to be born with these flaws, there’s still the matter of upkeep. I’m not just talking about staying in shape, avoiding hungry bears, and not eating things that’ll make you violently throw up your internal organs. Even when we give the human body everything it needs, it’s still woefully inefficient at making use of those needs. Hell, it’s downright lazy at times.

The human body, like the bodies of all animals, is designed for two things: survival and reproduction. That body evolved on the African savanna and while it has proven adaptable to many environments and conditions, it’s still a crude piece of hardware that’s easily broken, easily wounded, and breaks down over time.

The human body is not like a car. Sure, we can spray on a tan, even if it makes us look like an old baseball glove. Sure, we can get plastic surgery and expensive skin treatments, even if they make us look like glorified crash test dummies with wigs. The human body still breaks down. It still ages and dies.

In fact, the rule of thumb in biology is that once your body stops growing, it starts dying. From an evolutionary perspective, it has to. Individuals of a species have to die in order to free up resources from the young and the growing who aren’t as close to dying. Is it harsh and crude? Yes, it most certainly is. However, it’s a process that has kept life going for a couple billion years on this planet so it must be doing something right.

Beyond its limited survival abilities, even the good parts are limited. The average male orgasm lasts only seven seconds. The average female orgasms lasts around twenty. Granted, those brief moments are a lot of fun, but who among us hasn’t longed for a longer stay in O-Town?

By that same token, who among us hasn’t longed for a body that doesn’t bloat up after eating a tub of ice cream? Who hasn’t longed for a body that doesn’t need parts of it shaved every other day? Who hasn’t longed for a body that isn’t hung over after drunk karaoke night at the bar? Who, I ask?

Clearly, there are many aspects about our bodies that we would like to improve. Fixing these flaws in the body is a critical step in fixing the flaws that emerge between people in general. Think about it. If you had the body of an Olympian and could eat chocolate-covered bacon every day without getting sick, would you be able to hate anyone? I think not.

It all seems like a fantasy, but it’s one I’ve explored before. In my book, “Skin Deep,” I explored the concept of changing your body, becoming as beautiful as you wanted to be and indulging in all the decadent pleasures you wanted. That’s every supermodel, actor, and professional athlete’s dream. You think Brett Favre would’ve retired if he had that option? I think not.

While the mechanisms I used in this book were fantasy, complete with technobabble refined from years of comic book and Star Wars jargon, the concept is not entirely fantasy. There actually is some science behind the inspiration to this story that was full of sex, romance, and teen melodrama.

How is this possible? Well, keep in mind that there is one powerful trait that sets humsn apart from the chimps, spiders, and pond scum of this planet. We build things. We build very elaborate things. I’m not talking about sticks and spears. I’m talking about big ass buildings in the middle of the desert.

The ability to build shit that helps us survive is a big reason why the human race is the dominant species on this planet. Beyond the big buildings, we also build amazing medical devices like CRISPR, which is to genetic engineering what a wrench is to a mechanic.

We are rapidly advancing to a time when we’ll have to tools to finally give our bodies the upgrade it needs. That raises all sorts of fundamental ethical and moral questions, but those questions aren’t very sexy so I won’t be touching on them too much.

Instead, I’m going to ask a simple question that I hope to answer in multiple posts. How would you upgrade the human body? Specifically, how would you upgrade it in a way that would allow us to be more intimate, more loving, and more understanding of one another?

There are all sorts of crazy enhancements that some would pursue just for the hell of it. I’m sure there are some people out there who would enhance their bodies in ways that would help them get the hell away from people in general. Sheldon Cooper of “The Big Bang Theory” comes to mind, but he’s an unapologetic asshole so this little thought experiment doesn’t apply to him.

For most of the non-Sheldon Cooper population of this planet, we’re an affectionate people who seeks intimacy with others. Our bodies provide some mechanisms for that, but those mechanisms are woefully limited by the forces of biology, evolution, and all the petty, unjust bullshit we tack onto it. There has to be a better way, right?

So before I start talking about specifics, think about this question. Think about how you seek love, intimacy, and understanding right now. How would you make that better? How will future tools make that better? Would you want orgasms to last longer? Would you want to share your thoughts with someone? Would you want to improve your senses so you can hear, touch, smell, and see your lover more clearly? What would you do?

Think about it and don’t shy away from the sexy implications. Hell, embrace them! These are implications that I want to explore as an erotica/romance writer and I think they’re worth exploring. At some point, the future will catch up to us and it will affect us. If we’re not ready, we’ll miss out on the sexiness and who wants to miss out on that?

11 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 17, 2016 · 6:58 am

Injustice, Male Privilege, And Why It’s So Unsexy

There are a lot of unsexy things out there that really kill the mood. Dead kittens, an overflowing toilet, and Rush Limbaugh’s voice all come to mind. We all have certain tastes and proclivities that either make our pants feel 10 degrees hotter or make us want throw up in the nearest trash can.

These tastes vary from person to person. Some are more typical of certain cultures. Some are more typical of genders. Men tend to get more aroused by big boobs and women tend to get more aroused by big biceps. It’s basic biology. In terms of what turns us off, that’s a bit less obvious. Aside from the things that involve heavy vomiting and excessive back hair, it’s hard to pin down things we deem universally unsexy.

I contend there is something that does turn us off faster than a picture of Pat Robertson taking a shit. It’s something that’s also ingrained in our biology, beyond the extent of the caveman logic I so often love to cite. Pull your pants up, skip your next meal, and brace yourself because I’m about to tell you the least sexy force in the world:

Injustice

I’ll give everyone a moment to stop gagging. For those of you who are confused, stay with me and skip your next meal as a precaution. It’ll make sense soon enough.

I spent a good deal of time talking about gender double standards and just how much they suck. I know it’s not as sexy a topic as sleeping naked or the different types of orgasms we can have, but I’m exploring these issues for a reason and I promise those reasons are sexy in nature.

In order to convey the extent of that sexiness, however, I need to touch on one more inescapable detail that stems from these double standards. I originally wasn’t going to dig any deeper on this admittedly unsexy topic, but then I came across a powerful video on YouTube that changed my plan.

There’s one feature of gender double standards I’ve tried to avoid, if only because it’s a loaded term. I can’t avoid it anymore so I might as well come clean. It’s the concept of “Male Privilege.”

Now I’m not going to lie. As a man, I do feel like I have my share of privileges. For one, I can walk around without a shirt on and not get arrested. I don’t feel compelled to shave my legs every other day. I don’t feel pressured to put on a certain amount of makeup before I go out. People even assume I’m tougher than I really am, never knowing that I grew up in a family with two older sisters who could kick my ass with their eyes closed.

However, there has been a growing trend in recent years, some from feminists and others from bullshit media controversies, to shame men (particularly white men) for having so many privileges. We’re getting to a point where “male privilege” has become a blanket term to undermine every benefit that any man has ever achieved.

Now I’m all for gender equality. I hope I’ve made that abundantly clear on this blog. Men and women can’t be biologically equal, but we can be socially and legally equal in the eyes of justice and fairness. The problem is we are a woefully imperfect species. That means there’s a long list of instances where men have created horrendous injustices for petty, sexist, bullshit reasons.

However, there’s a problem with this approach and it comes back to that horrendously unsexy force that we call injustice. As someone who grew up on a steady diet of superhero comics and superhero cartoons, I like to think I’m well-versed in what constitutes injustice.

In pretty much every episode of Superfriends and every other issue of Superman, there’s a common message about injustice. You can’t fight it with more injustice. Injustice is like an ant infestation. Fighting injustice with injustice is like trying to fight ants by throwing surge cubes at them. It’s only going to make the problem worse.

The popular perception is that “male privileged” ensures that men get more justice than they deserve. Ignoring for a moment how we measure the quantity of justice each person deserves, let’s not cross our eyes so that we can’t see the forest from the trees. Injustice, like spam email or annoying pop-up ads, finds a way to hit everyone. That includes men.

So what kind of injustices do men face? Are they at all comparable to the injustices that women face? Well, that’s hard to gauge because some of these comparisons are subjective. I’m sure there are women out there who see injustices against men and laugh their ass off at it. It may even make them horny.

These people are despicable excuses for human beings and are beyond reaching. If you are at all okay with injustice against men, please do me a favor and don’t come to my blog, buy my books, or interact with me in any way. I can do without that kind of douche-baggery in my life.

For those with a sense of compassion, decency, and justice, here’s the video that I found so powerful. Whether you’re a man or a woman, I hope it has the same impact on you that it did for me.

I hope this makes those who complain about “male privilege stop and think for a moment. It’s true. There are injustices in the world that are fueled by direct and indirect sexism, but it’s not just women who endure those injustices.

Our society is imperfect. Our species is imperfect. I’ve pointed it out many times before. Our biology is crude, clunky, and prone to errors, overkill, and oversight. Despite this, there’s still some glimmer of hope within those flaws that keeps us honest as a species.

Remember, children as young as two already possess an innate sense of fairness and justice. When we see something that’s unfair, it bothers us. It makes us anxious and uncomfortable. In essence, the feelings we get when we see injustice are the complete antithesis of the feelings we get when we see something sexy. That alone sends a powerful message about the innate sense of justice we all share.

Within that justice, it shouldn’t matter whether they adversely affect men or women. The abuse, harassment, and subjugation of women is a gross injustice. The denigration, dehumanization, and disparity that men endure is just as great an injustice. Writing it off as “male privilege” is just a pitiful excuse to ignore injustice and whenever injustice is ignored, more injustice will follow.

I’ll give everyone another moment for the non-sociopaths out there to swallow their disgust. These injustices should make everyone, male or female, sick to their stomach. That still leaves one burning question. What do we do about it?

I’ve made clear before that I’m not a fan of whining. Just talking about an issue is akin to throwing dirt on a festering wound and calling it medicine. Our society has made progress since the caveman days, but there’s still plenty more to make. With that in mind, how do we go about fixing this? Can it be fixed?

Being an optimist with a dirty imagination, I think it is fixable. I believe we will see more progress than we think. What form will that progress take? Why is a romance/erotica writer even talking about it in the first place? I’ll reveal that in future posts, but there is a reason for it and that reason will become clear very soon.

3 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 14, 2016 · 6:53 am

Thought Experiments On Double Standards

I’ve done a lot of whining on gender and double standards this week. For that, I apologize. I know that’s a real mood-killer. I’m an aspiring erotica/romance writer. Talking about these issues isn’t making anyone horny. That’s not good for my creative energy or my prospective customers.

That said, I’m not a fan of whining just for the sake of whining. That’s what children, internet trolls, and annoying reality TV stars do when they want to distract themselves from how little they actually contribute to society. I’m not a whiner. My parents had a low tolerance for whiners. Whining isn’t sexy and even the best erotica/romance writer in the world can’t make it sexy.

I bring issues like double standards up because it’s not just relevant in terms of where our society is at the moment. It also affects my work. When I’m working on a novel, I find myself hesitating at times to take the story in certain directions because of the gender of the characters involved.

One particular issue that came up recently involved my book, “The Final Communion.” That book has a sizable glut of erotica elements, to say the very least, but I did find myself struggling with certain scenes. I always intended to tell the story from the perspective of a female character. However, when I brought some male characters into the mix, I struggled at times to give them the depth I wanted.

This is largely because within those erotica elements, it’s hard to develop male characters outside the expectations we have towards society as a whole. Compared to women, those expectations are horribly skewed and unbalanced. We expect men to be aggressive. We expect men to be callous. We expect men to jump through any number of hoops just to get a chance at having sex. Do you see the running theme here?

I admit I played into some of those expectations in “The Final Communion.” I tried to add depth where I could, but it’s unavoidable in some respects. Our culture and our expectations shape our collective tastes. It affects how we relate to one another, how we seek love with one another, and how aspiring erotica/romance writers craft their novels.

So far, I feel like I’ve painted a bleak picture of sorts. I’m giving the impression that it’s hopeless. Men and women will never get along. They’ll never be equal. There will always be conflict between the horny men who just want to have sex without all the red tape and the horny women who want to just want to have sex without the stigma.

Does this mean double standards will never go away? Well, I don’t like to think in terms of such absolutes. At the moment, the research is not all that promising. According to an article in Psychology Today from 2014, which cited multiple studies, this is our current situation:

  1. Unlike premarital sex in committed relationships, which was once a hot-button topic but now viewed as OK by most Americans, the battle over the acceptability of casual sex has not (yet) been won by either side.

  2. A multitude of attitudes exist simultaneously among young people: Some consider casual sex wrong for everyone; others consider it OK for everyone; and others still consider it wrong for some but not for others.

  3. Women continue to be more conservative than men in their attitudes toward casual sex in general.

  4. There is still a double standard in the population as a whole, but only a minority of young men and women endorses it.

  5. Among those who endorse a traditional double standard, most are men.

The data is mixed, as it often is with all the insane complexities of the human condition. It’s also not final. No study ever is and those claiming to be are probably funded by tobacco companies, the Koch brothers, and the Vatican.

At the very least, it does highlight some trends that offer at least some glimmers of hope. Most notably, it reveals that Rick Santorum’s efforts have failed miserably. Acceptance of pre-marital sex is becoming so common that we’ve stopped punching each other in the genitals over the issue. When there are so many health benefits to orgasms and promiscuity, I call this a win.

However, even as acceptance of pre-marital sex grows, our inclination to shame others and whine about it still lingers. This is to be expected. Human beings are amazing creatures, but we’re still at the mercy of clunky, inefficient biological processes that often manifest in our societies.

Hell, we still have countries in this world where women don’t even have the right to drive a car. We can’t expect some of these outdated attitudes to disappear just because enough people whine about it.

For me, the most promising revelations of this study is that, while the sexual double standards for men and women are still there, the participants don’t exactly approve of it. This, to me, is the glimmer of hope that’s worth highlighting.

A lot of these double standards aren’t overt. They don’t walk up to you, slap you in the face, and scream into your ear for five hours every day. We tend to fall into them for the same reason we thought wearing bell-bottom pants was fashionable. It’s just the collective tastes of our peers that we don’t notice or scrutinize.

However, if you point it out to people and make them aware of it, they see the inherent unfairness of these double standards. That’s important because fairness is one of those powerful concepts that’s very important to the survival of a highly social species like ours. We don’t have the teeth of a shark or the muscles of King Kong. We need to work together to survive. That means fairness is a big fucking deal.

Current research also supports this. According to a study published in 2012 in Psychology Science, infants in the second year of life already possess context-sensitive expectations relevant to fairness. That means even when some of us are still in diapers, we have bullshit detectors that reveal the inherent unfairness of these double standards.

I still concede that some of these double standards have some basis in caveman logic, but only to a limited extent. It’s culture, injustice, and unequal power structures that skew these standards to an excessive degree.

For this reason, I believe that the double standards we apply to genders with respect to sex will one day fade, just as our attitudes towards casual sex did. It won’t happen overnight. We probably won’t even notice it. Angry old people complaining about today’s youth will still probably whine about it, but some people will always find a reason to whine. It’s better for society as a whole if we don’t make it easier for them.

With that in mind, let’s try a little thought experiment, which I hope to explore in future books. Let’s imagine a time several decades into the future where these egregious double standards between men and women simply fall out of favor. By all accounts, society is equal with respect to gender, or at least as equal as any sexually dimorphic species will allow.

This means that men and women are punished equitably for the same crimes. Nobody shames each other for having too much sex or wanting more sex than they have. Radical feminists and men’s rights activists aren’t influential or are all dead from whining themselves to death. What kind of society would that be? How would it operate?

Picture the following scenario. It’s one I’ve used before, but let’s apply the thought experiment to it.

Man: Hello ma’am. You look very beautiful today.

Woman: Thank you. You look quite handsome yourself.

Man: Thank you. I appreciate that. Listen, I’m single at the moment. I’m not looking for any long-term relationships at this point of my life, but I find you very sexually appealing and if you want, I’d like to have sex with you tonight.

Woman: I appreciate your honesty. I’m single at the moment too. I’m certainly open to long-term relationships, but I respect your current desire. And since I find you sexually appealing too, I’d be happy to have sex with you tonight.

Man: Great! Would you like to do it at my place or yours?

Woman: Let’s do mine. I live closer. It’s just easier.

I admit this is a laughably simplistic scenario. It’s so simplistic that it wouldn’t even qualify as a script in a low-budget porn movie. Even so, it highlights the necessary elements.

Two consenting adults walk up to one another. They don’t bother with elaborate flirtations or games. They just honestly tell one another what they want and respect each other’s desires. That’s as simple and basic as it needs to be.

This same scenario could’ve even played out another way. Consider this.

Man: Hello ma’am. You look very beautiful today.

Woman: Thank you.

Man: Listen, I’m single at the moment. I’m not looking for any long-term relationships at this point of my life, but I find you very sexually appealing and if you want, I’d like to have sex with you tonight.

Woman: I appreciate your honesty. I’m single at the moment too, but I’m afraid I don’t find you sexually appealing. I’m also not really in the mood for sex right now. I appreciate the offer though. I’m sorry.

Man: That’s okay. I’m disappointed, but I understand.

Woman: Thank you.

Again, it’s laughably simplistic, but it reflects the same underlying theme. Both individuals are up front and honest with their desires. Men don’t have to act like James Bond and women don’t have to act like every female character in “Seinfeld.” They can just be fair and honest with each other in matters of sex, love, and desire. What a concept, right?

I offer this thought experiment because some of my ideas for novels take place in the future. I enjoy looking to the future and imagining how our world and our society will change, both in terms of technology and in terms of how we’ll relate to one another.

It’s a concept I don’t see explored often in romance or erotica. I’d like to explore it in whatever unique way my perverse mind can conjure. I don’t have any clear plans at the moment, but when I do, rest assured I’ll do what I can to make those plans sexy as hell.

5 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 12, 2016 · 6:53 am

Monogamy May Be Going Extinct (Too Soon)

A big part of being a romance/erotica writer is finding new ways to explore romantic and sexual love in novel ways. Let’s face it. There are only stories you can tell about love at first sight. Those themes are as old as Shakespeare and it’s hard to make those stories interesting these days.

There’s still a place for these kinds of bland, basic love stories and there always will be. I’ve certainly used those elements in my own books. We’re an affectionate species. We love to love every bit as much as we love to hump. However, the ways in which loving and humping manifest will change with time, culture, biology, economics, and whatever happens to be a popular internet meme at the time.

There are already some ongoing trends that are making religious zealots, registered republicans, and anyone overly fond of the 1950s very nervous. According to the Centers for Disease Control, marriage rates are declining. Divorce is declining as well, but that’s to be expected when people aren’t getting married in the first place.

If that weren’t horrifying enough to the “Father Knows Best” crowd, the average number of sexual partners isn’t one. According to the CDC, men average approximately 6.7 sexual partners over the course of their lifetime while women average around 4.3. Seeing as how men tend to exaggerate the amount of panties they’ve moistened and women underestimate how often their panties get moist, let’s just call it an even 5.0 for both genders.

For some people, these numbers are truly terrifying. It means people are daring to love more than one person over the course of their lifetime. It means they’re daring to have sex for reasons that don’t involve consummating a marriage, making a baby, or showing homosexuals on how it should be done. The horror.

I hope everyone can appreciate the sarcasm in that last paragraph because this really shouldn’t be terrifying. People have sex. People love more than one person. It happens because people are complicated creatures. We can’t even agree over pizza toppings and ice cream flavors. How can we possibly agree on the right way to love and make love to one another?

I say this as someone who comes from a family that has a fair number of divorces and a fair number of marriages that’ll probably last until the sun explodes. I know how erratic and fickle our passions can be. It makes sense that our eyes, as well as other parts of our bodies, would wander.

I’ve talked about it before on this blog. Our bodies and our biology don’t know that we live in an era of Tinder, internet porn, and no fault divorce. As far as our brains are concerned, we’re still hunting and gathering in close-knit tribes on the plains of the African savanna.

Within those tribes, monogamy can happen, but it’s not the only way our passions manifest. In some cases, like when women die in childbirth or men die hunting sabretooth tigers, we need to be able to share our passions with others.

Loving more than one person doesn’t just make sense from a biological perspective. It makes sense in that it ties us together closer as a tribe. If we love each other and want to have sex with each other, we’ll be that much more dedicated to protecting and supporting each other. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s also a sexy thing. Even the most ardent clergyman or nun can’t deny that.

So when I hear stories about how monogamy is in decline or that family institutions are decaying, I want to roll my eyes and bash my head into a brick wall. This sentiment gives the false impression that monogamy has always been the end all/be all of sex, love, and relationships. That’s just not how the world works. It’s not how we’re wired as humans. It’s not even the theme of most sitcoms anymore, as “Modern Family” can attest.

So who is claiming that monogamy is in decline? It isn’t just the usual cast of clowns from the overly religious types who think their particular deity wants them to micromanage every aspect of our personal lives. Even more liberal types, like the Young Turks, are proclaiming loudly that monogamy and family life is going the way of disco, bell-bottom pants, and the Macarana.

Now I can understand the doom-saying from both sides. They’re looking at the same data and noticing the same trends. People just aren’t getting married, having children, and living around a white picket fence for the rest of their lives anymore. For some strange reason, this life doesn’t appeal to every member of the human species. Go figure.

That’s more sarcasm by the way. Sarcasm is necessary when addressing any form of doom-saying, be it from wide-eyed hippie liberals or fire and brimstone loving religious nuts. However, this sentiment that monogamy is in serious decline is worth taking seriously, if only because it means I may have to tweak the themes of my books.

As I’ve noted before, the current economics for marriage and monogamy are shit. The legal framework in which love and marriage operate are woefully unequal. In some ways, men get screwed over. In some ways, women get screwed over. It is a horribly unequal, inefficient institution that may as well have been crafted by divorce lawyers getting paid by the hour.

Since I’ve beat that dead horse more than it needs to be beaten, I won’t go off on another rant about why divorce sucks and why expectations of monogamy are unrealistic. I don’t think I need to belabor those points than I already have. However, there is one element to this sentiment that I think is worth pointing out and it’s something the Young Turks even discussed to a certain extent.

While it may be true that marriage and monogamy are in decline, it’s not necessarily declining in an equitable manner. What do I mean by that? Well, in the same way that divorce and marriage laws are woefully unbalanced, our cultural concepts of sex, romance, and gender relations are just as out of whack.

It isn’t because of the rise of feminism or radical feminism. It isn’t because of men losing their edge or fearfully protecting their male privilege either. In many respects, the problem has to do with the lingering impact that our uptight, puritanical, monogamy-loving culture still has.

Keep in mind, we still live in a culture where women can’t agree on whether Kim Kardashian showing her naked body on the internet counts as empowering or shameful. We live in a culture where a man can’t just walk up to a woman, say she has nice breasts, and not dread being sued for sexual harassment. We live in an environment where false accusations of sexual assault can ruin lives.

In other words, our current culture isn’t ready to let go of monogamy. We’re still kind of stuck on it. We still have these strange, skewed expectations about how men and women relate to one another, both romantically and sexually.

We expect women to be reserved and prudish, never freely engaging in sex with as many men as she wants. If she does, we as a society just assume there’s something wrong with her and go out of our way to shame her. It can’t possibly be that she just enjoys having sex and all the toe-curling pleasure it gives her.

We also expect men to be aggressive, pig-headed brutes who would gladly hump a dead cow if it looked enough like Jennifer Lawrence’s ass. If a man goes out and humps every woman within his area code, then he’s just being a man. If he actually goes out of his way to love and be faithful to one woman, then he must be a total pussy.

You see the problem with these expectations? Now try to imagine a society functioning without monogamy. It just can’t work. Our collective heads will explode from all the double standards, hypocrisy, and conflicting biological imperatives.

The fact remains that gender relations in our current society are just too fucked up right now. They’re too unequal. They’re too imbalanced for monogamy to decline to the extent that doomsayers fear. I’ll let the immortal Eric Duckman sum it up in the most crude, offensive way possible.

It’s unavoidable. Men and women today aren’t ready for a post-monogamous society. Too many of us still cling to the “Father Knows Best” principles of how love, relationships, and sex should manifest. Almost as many cling to the politically correct sentiment that one gender must be guilted and shamed to no end for past injustices. It seems like there’s no way for society to achieve a healthy balance.

I try to be more optimistic than that. Our society always has room for improvement. Trends change. Cultural attitudes change. We, as a species, are great at adapting to new conditions. It’s part of what makes us the dominant species on this planet.

We tend to be slow, clumsy, and inept as hell when adapting our culture to new conditions, but we do get around to it. I believe that at some point, the incentives for a truly balanced understanding of love, relationships, and sex will be greater than the forces driving us apart.

It may take a long time, but it’s one of those goals that is worth the wait and the effort. It’s a goal I hope to explore in my books in various ways. I might not be able to speed up the process, but I can at least make the wait entertaining and sexy as hell.

4 Comments

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

October 5, 2016 · 6:54 am

I Wish Ads Were THIS Honest

I saw this ad on a message board today and just had to share it. It’s a wonderfully relevant summation of the issues I discussed last week on radical feminism and sexual objectification. I know I said I didn’t want to keep talking about those issues. Believe me, I’d rather get a prostate exam from a lobster than talk more about these issues. Sometimes though, you just have to make an exception when it’s warranted.

When I saw this ad, I knew it was warranted and I’ll gladly make an exception because it reflects a point I didn’t get a chance to make in my previous posts. In our overly politically correct culture, we tend to get so emotionally worked up about overly specific shit that we can’t see the forest from the trees. If we’re not careful, we end up burning the whole goddamn forest down.

This particular tree already has wilting branches and dead leaves. It’s the tree of sex in advertising. Like peanut butter and jelly, Jack and Coke, or ketchup and damn near everything, it’s the go-to target for the politically correct crowd that loves to complain about objectification of women. To be fair, it’s hard to blame them when the target it this big.

However, this whining (like pretty much all forms of whining) doesn’t fix anything, nor does it acknowledge the actual context of the situation. It’s the other C-word that offends so many people without realizing it. That word, context, is the key to making sense of so many politically correct absurdities.

In the case of this ad, it basically says what shouldn’t need to be said to a reasonable mind, male or female. The fact we have to actually remind ourselves these days is deeply troubling for both genders. I guess some things just need to be belabored.

With that in mind, I’ll belabor the same point that this ad belabors so retreat to your safe space if you have to:

It’s okay for a heterosexual man to find a beautiful woman attractive.

I’ll give everybody a moment to stop gasping. I know. Shocking, isn’t it? Are we really at the point in our culture where we have to remind ourselves of shit like this? Do we really have to explain slowly and carefully to people that there is a context to all this sexy advertising? I’m usually pretty good at resisting the urge to punch my computer screen, but some days are harder than others.

There’s this disturbing trend in our culture where we’re shaming heterosexual men for finding women beautiful. We may as well shame them for breathing, farting, and coughing as well because this isn’t some elaborate patriarchal conspiracy. This is human biology 101. Heterosexual men find beautiful women attractive. Why does that have to be controversial?

Beyond the controversy, there’s another important point in the ad that’s worth belaboring. Again, retreat to your safe spaces because this may get heavy.

You’re not obligated to look at this ad and it’s perfectly okay to ignore it

This is where I feel like people give way too much credit to the human attention span. We live in a world where everyone cares about a dentist killing a lion one day and Kim Kardashian’s ass the next. We, as a species, are not good at paying attention for long periods of time. Anyone who fell asleep at an economics lecture understands this.

This is where my old friend, caveman logic, comes into play again. We have to have a finite attention span. Pay attention to one thing for too long and either a lion eats us or we forget to procreate. Our brains are wired in a way to help us forget trivial shit and what’s more trivial than an ad?

That’s not to say an ad can’t be offensive. An add that uses the Nazi holocaust to cell an oven is a bit harder to ignore because it exploits an egregious tragedy that actually killed people. A beautiful woman is not on that same level. It’s not even in that same time zone.

I get that some people find things more offensive than others. I get that some people are offended by next to nothing while others are offended by damn near everything. That makes ignoring trivial shit like ads all the more important. It serves everybody better.

Now, there’s one more point in the ad I’d like to make and this is probably something else that requires certain people to hide in their safe space.

Ads that involve beautiful women are targeted towards heterosexual men

I know it’s obvious. I know it’s downright inane, but it still needs to be said because it’s a context that some politically correct types just refuse to see. These ads aren’t just thrown out into the world to piss people off. There is another reason for it and, shockingly enough, it involves selling shit to a specific market.

Like it or not (and some do hate it), heterosexual men make up a good chunk of the market. They are a sizable chunk of the human population and, as I’ve pointed out before, tend to be much more visual compared to women.

They also make a lot of money. Heterosexual men don’t have babies and, historically speaking, have made up a larger chunk of the workforce. It wasn’t really until the 20th century that women, thanks to the development of birth control, were able to join the workforce in larger numbers.

Heterosexual men have money. Advertisers want them to buy their products so they can get some of that money. They make money by getting the attention of customers and what’s the easiest way to get the attention of a heterosexual man? Use a beautiful woman. It’s not just pragmatic. It’s basic biology. I’ll even argue there’s beauty in that biology.

Are you back from your safe space? Have you avoided any possible trigger warnings? Good. I’m glad I could share this ad and this insight.

As an aspiring romance/erotica writer, I want to appeal to everybody, be they heterosexual male, transsexual female, or something in between that I’m not equipped to define. As such, it doesn’t make sense and is kind of a dick move to single out one chunk of that population for shaming.

It’s okay for men to find beautiful women attractive. It’s okay for women to find handsome men attractive. It’s okay for gay men and women to find their own gender attractive. It’s also okay for ads to use this imagery. It’s not going to change our biological wiring. No amount of shame is going to change that. It’s better for everyone if we just accept it, hug each other, and move on with our lives.

1 Comment

Filed under Jack Fisher's Insights

Tagged as , , , , , , ,