One Year Monk

Robots can also be unlucky in love

In case you are a human being who feels like love is really hard, it may make you feel better to know that some robots have trouble finding girlfriends, too. Yes, even Transformerz.

You are not alone.

KINSEY and the universality of fucked-up-ed-ness

So last night I watched the movie Kinsey. If you don't remember, it stars Liam Neeson as the famous sex researcher. One of the things the movie captures well (or, at least, the story it tells) is how his work on insects revealed something he'd spell out better for people when he researched their sex lives: the one universal of life is diversity - even within a species, every individual is different.

This is an important lesson for me to keep in mind for this project. This project is the opposite of scientific. It's as subjective as you can get. It's the smallest possible sample size. And the control group? It's my fist in your face.

As I fight with Laura Kipnis and subsequent authors, it's important to remember what Neeson articulates, as Kinsey, in his first college class on human sexuality: as different as humans are when it comes to all things mating related, we each want to believe that we're "normal." This desire leads us to generalize when we think we've learned something about ourselves or found something in common with people we know.

If everyone is different, then there will be outliers. In sex and love, for most people, anyway, it takes two. With as much divresity as there is out there, the world will include some frustrated outliers. In some ways, those folks are the ones for whome I am writing.

So, if I fail to keep this lesson in mind and start generalizing based on my own accounts or that of a few others, please remind me. Thank you Mr. Neeson and Mr. Condon and your version Kinsey. Before I heap too much praise on the real Kinsey, here's one alternative take on Kinsey and another, both of which appear to be based on a real familiarity with his work and methods (though I will welcome correction).

Like many geniuses and groundbreakers, it seems like Kinsey may have gone a bit too far. That doesn't mean he didn't have anything to teach us, though.