Surely demanding one leave one’s feather boa at the door on Sleaze weekend is an egregious offence against some sort of human rights, or at least bitchy gay-boy rights!?

Viz casual sex, there’s ethical requirements for honesty and consideration and the rest. I do find it puzzling that anyone would go to a singles’ bar say to look for emotional commitment. But that said there’s a huge range of options for the conduct of sexual life between marriage for life and Disco Stu One-Night-Stand revue.

The Religious Right are, in the main, anti-sexual freedom. Sex for them in extremis is a necessary evil. To receive pleasure from it; to explore it a la Anais Nin say, is evil. I’m repulsed by this self-imposed poverty of imagination.

Still I regard the current sexual ethos vulgar and venal. There’s a complete lack of decorum, of manners, of style. There’s no tenderness. As Paglia has said where sexual freedom goes sado-masochism follows.

Still I believe there must be an ethical culture that a. is honest about human sexuality and b. seeks to do more with it than use it to create property-progeny structures.

Disco Stu doesn’t advertise.

I remember a few years back, a talented, intelligent gorgeous girl had an arranged marriage with a guy, but the guy’s parents pulled the plug at the last minute because her parents wouldn’t accede to their extortionate demands for more dowry. At one time it would have been shameful for her to admit this publicly, but she went on television to point out how ridiculous the whole thing was.

The gap only needs to be small, too - 100 men to every 99 women produces some very interesting distortions in the marriage ‘market’. My suspicion, however, is that for the numerically smaller group of women to get the economic benefit, there needs to be a ‘rule of law’ framework in place - relatively easy access to divorce, for example, and the ability to choose one’s marriage partner. If there was something you wanted to be imperialistic about - even if only with immigrant cultures - it would be working to undermine arranged marriages, as they prevent women in places with sex-specific abortion making use of their scarcity power.

As to when the positions are reversed, Charles and Luoh have done terrific research on what high rates of male incarceration have done to black women’s relationship options in the US (where there are - as a result of incarceration - slightly more black women than men).

I agree. To answer it, one would first have to ask oneself why it’s the female foetuses that get aborted. If the answer is the large dowries, one must then ask why that. As if one did not know the answer to both questions.

Personally I think a societal tendency to abort female foetuses contains the seeds of its own destruction and requires no intervention from other cultures, only the passage of time.