I feel tempted to defend my profession. I see how we as a group are being painted with an extremely broad brush. Good people who spend their lives helping others are being unfairly lumped in with quacks and opportunists and sadists. I know this is happening because people are (very rightfully) angry. However, I wonder why those who are holding all psychologists responsible for the actions of our governing body do not similarly hold all Americans responsible for Guantanamo, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and all the rest.

Regardless of my desire to come out swinging, I'm going to accept this scorn, because like it or not, and ethical as I may be in my personal practice, I belong to an organization that has done and is continuing to do wrong. This shame is collective, and it is earned. I'll add it to the pile of shame collected over the years since 9/11 from membership in a political party that turns a blind eye to outrageous injustice and citizenship in a country that is wantonly destroying hundreds of thousands of lives.

This controversy is a microcosm of the moral decay of our country and our culture as a whole. While it is extremely important in and of itself, it can also be be a wake up call for us, pointing us to the ways in which all ordinary Americans are tacitly cooperating and compromising with evil in order to protect our precious "way of life." If the lesson from this sad chapter in APA history is "psychologists are baaaad," there's not much more to say. But if instead this incident brings to light, dramatically and unavoidably, the complicity we all share in this horrible situation, then perhaps we have moved one step closer to real change.

Others have beaten me to the punch pointing out that (as we used to say similarly of squares and rhombi), all SSRIs are antidepressants but not all antidepressants are SSRIs. There are antidepressants out there (technically referred to, I believe, as "the fun ones") that actually tend to increase sexual desire rather than suppressing libido, for example. Different people can also have opposite reactions to the same drug.

And if Ms. Fisher thinks that an SSRI is bad for the love life, she should really give depression a try.

I do very much want to take seriously that she is a well respected anthropologist, so I assume that her more gimicky concepts are dolled up for public consumption. The four personality types is actually not that far off from theories I've learned in Psych Assessment classes that personality can be usefully analyzed in terms of (though never reduced to) 4-7 categories (e.g. openness, emotional reactivity, capacity for positive affect). But that doesn't mean 4-7 types, that means limitless combinations of various degrees of each type. Common assessment tools like the NEO P-IR operate (to greater and lesser accuracy and usefulness depending on the tool) on this basic premise. But Ms. Fisher does make it sound a bit like we are just infinite copies of the same four basic people, which, in addition to being rather a depressing and notion and also an interesting concept for a Star Trek episode, makes me wonder what the point of matchmaking would then be. She runs the risk, in making it sound so very simple, of reminding us that we might not need complicated anthropological and neurochemical theorems to figure out who turns us on. Or rulers to measure our fingers, either.

Oh, and "the plow." Oh my. Feminists, let us unite against the plowtriarchy! Because everyone knows that, when translating your academic theories to common speech, it is best to simultaneously titillate and condescend to your readers by reducing the complex forces of social and cultural change to a single technological advancement. It's catchy, anyway.

Sex can be funny sometimes. Funny and awkward. This in no way detracts from it's more sublime elements. It's just that, hey, there are noises and fluids and unusual smells and strange angles and odd sensations all over the place.

And, at least in my experience, if you're in a secure enough and compatible enough relationship (which clearly is not the case yet for the LW and partner), you can usually laugh with each other about such things as dolphin squeals and laughgasms. They become the best kind of inside joke. They become turn-ons, things about your lover that you never thought you'd like but eventually wonder how you ever went without. It's exhilarating to let go together and be ridiculous, excessive, and odd in your pleasures.

That type of freedom is harder to achieve when you are just engaging in casual hook-ups with friends, unless they are very good friends. But if the LW wants anything more with this partner, s/he ought to consider that it is far more enjoyable and fulfilling in the long run to grow into your lover than to demand after the first time that your lover adjust to you. If you start conforming to one another's expectations and preferences too quickly, you'll lose all your weirdness and never have a chance to laugh at and exult in it together.

So perhaps, if a relationship develops, the noises will grow on the LW. Perhaps if the LW felt more free to be authentic in bed him/herself, s/he would not feel as hung up on the way the partner sounds. Perhaps, were it not for the unfortunate laughgasm-censoring incidents of the LW's past, the LW would not be feeling the urge so soon to censor his/her partner. But how unfun to be told not to express yourself because your noises are irritating and embarrassing to the person you have so intimately shared them with! That is a great way to develop self-consciousness where (at least for the partner) there seems now to be a glorious lack of it. That type of self-consciousness will ruin a sex life quicker than you can say "so long and thanks for all the fish."