By Kate Winderman

It’s messy. My room is messy, my schedule is messy, my to-do lists are messy, and even my brain is messy. I can’t believe I can finally say, “I’m going to Rome in a week.”

Today it really hit me for the first time. I pulled out the biggest suitcase I could find and had a minor panic attack over the one-suitcase luggage limit. I packed the basics today: toiletries, my important travel documents, and Italian study materials. Study materials. That means I actually have to take classes while I am in Roma. La Città Eterna. It does not seem right that I have to post up in a library and memorize irregular verbs. I keep thinking that this semester will be a four-month long vacation where I can wear flowy dresses and gallivant across Europe (the release of Eat, Pray, Love certainly does not help). Dean Martin will croon, spaghetti will be consumed, and the language of love will be spoken effortlessly to gorgeous Italian men. I guess that’s somewhat part of the American dream. Accomplish your real life here in the land of the free and then sew your wild, liberated oats on a continent with deep, rich history. I keep telling myself to erase my expectations about what this coming semester will be. I need to tabula rasa-tize myself. Just let next semester be what it wants to be, and enjoy what happens.

Even still, a girl can’t help but have a few goals in mind:

1. Speak Italian as much as possible, without looking too much like a silly American tourist.
2. Eat carbs and learn to cook them, you hungry vegetarian, you.
3. Travel far and wide. Don’t let any little corner of Europe slip under the radar.
4. Meet lots of new people. It’s a tiny world! We should all connect!
5. Learn some stuff.

A presto!

My last American pizza. We'll see how it measures up!

by Karen Turner

You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.

There are many reasons that nobody out there should be fretting about finding love, relationships, or even the elusive “one” (rising world population and internet dating sites, just to name a few). Science has usually been another powerful ally on the side of single people, as study after study seems to suggest that matrimony is an unnatural state, love is purely chemical, and maybe we should just all be having sex like rabbits. I mean, it’s all about reproduction, right? Passing on your genes. Embracing your instincts. Selecting a mate that will help you create a genetically-superior-super-baby. Survival of the fittest! (As in the British slang “fit,” meaning sexy, as in, survival of attractive British men everywhere? Right? Maybe?)

There’s one study in particular that seems to break down sex, dating, and attraction into the hormonal, chemical process that it all could be. Claus Wedekind is a Swiss zoologist who decided to study the connection between smell and attraction. He created an experiment where he had a group of male volunteers wear the same t-shirt for 2 straight days. He then collected the t-shirts and presented them to a group of female volunteers, who were asked to smell the shirts and rate how sexually attractive they found each male based on odor alone. Claus found that the women overwhelmingly preferred the smell of males with differing major histocompatibility complexes than their own. This system, the MHC, refers to a massive genetic family responsible for an individual’s immune system. So, the females’ sexual preference seemed geared towards choosing a mate whose genes would strengthen her baby’s immune system, and thus, ability to survive.

The implications of this study, that who we are sexually attracted to is determined by our genes, makes me breathe a sigh of relief. It explains that weird crush you had/have on that person you thought you hated. It means that you should follow your sexual instincts and not your rationalizations. It means that everybody should stop showering, washing their clothes, and wearing deodorant. But above all, it suggests that finding “love” has less to do with looking or being perfect and more to do with just sitting back, being yourself, and deeply inhaling the armpits of each potential date.

Sweaty T-Shirt Study on PBS

Image Source: mashedmusings.files.wordpress.com

by Karen Turner

A hydra asexually reproducing.

Sitting down to write a blog this week proved more challenging than I expected. The reason, I began to realize as I twiddled my thumbs and waited for the keys to start typing themselves, was that I was suffering from a real lack of inspiration. How could I possibly write 200 words about sex when I haven’t had any myself in a quite a while? It seems that as the Laid & Paid section took me on as a sex blogger, my real sex life entered a dry spell.

Actually, this indefinite period of celibacy has proved interesting. What I’ve experienced is a newfound acceptance of the nonsexual state in which I seem to be floundering. While I expected to face, and have in the past, a sort of unbearable buildup of sexual frustration, I instead find myself in this zen place where sexual urges seem to take a back seat to other priorities. I feel, quite frankly, asexual. And it’s a strange place to be.

Given my strange new nonchalance to my sex life, I decided to do a little research into the actual community of asexuality. In 2001, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (conveniently abbreviated into AVEN, which offers wonderful lexical possibilities) was launched online, aiming to inform the general public of the existence of asexuality as a recognized sexual orientation as well as to foster an asexual community. The site claims a current following of over 6,000 members of all ages and nationalities, all united by a common disinterest in sexual activity. It isn’t any kind of problem with actual sexual functioning; asexual men and women could theoretically have sex. They just feel no need to.

Asexuality is different from celibacy, the website claims, in that asexuals can’t help it. They are born with no desire for sexual pleasure. They run into problems in that they too want to engage in romantic relationships, but to do so without sex is, to a lot of people, inconceivable and weird. Many asexual couples have found each other through the AVEN network and are now in comfortable, loving relationships.

There has been little research on the subject and asexuality remains, as of now, a self-defined group. Some psychologists claim that asexuality cannot exist and any lack of sexual interest must be the result of trauma or repressed homosexuality. However, the orientation is generally considered some kind of middle ground on the sexual bell curve where all humans must fall. A popular statistic estimates that some 1% of the population is asexual.

While I may feel strangely disconnected to my libido at the moment, I don’t think that this phase is long-lasting or significant and I can’t, quite frankly, imagine an asexual life. Indeed, one of my most enlightening thoughts provoked by an interview I watched with 26-year old AVEN founder David Jay was “I’d tap that ass in a second.” Despite this, I think it is worth examining asexuality as it seems to threaten a fundamental belief that sex is necessary to the life experience. If, to a group of people, it isn’t, than what is?

Image Source: scienceclarified.com