I had constantly lousy dealings with my slacker downstairs neighbors for the first year after they moved in. Then I happened to bring home a new lover who howled/shrieked/moaned/cussed/yodelled like a banshee on DMT when we had sex. After a few weeks of this I never had problems with the neighbors again. When I met them in the hallway they looked at me with what I imagined was a mixture of fear, respect and abject bafflement.

Then again (as I suspect of my aforementioned girlfriend) your dolphin lover could be faking it. There will always be a certain percentage of women who resort to intra-coital high dramatics as a way of masking the fact that they don't know how to enjoy sex and/or don't feel comfortable asking for what they really want -- and we, foolish-ass men that we are, we fall for it most of the time, because we want to believe we are infallibly the best, most masterful lovers of our lovers' love-lives.

C'est la vie!

As in: "FINALLY an article so poorly organized, not to mention so supremely mired in abject pseudoscience, that I can drop my last shred of respect for Salon"

How Helen Fisher can call herself an "anthropologist" and yet feel free to reduce human identity, as manifest in mating/reproductive strategies, as something which can be reduced to a mere 4 archetypes, is beyond me.

If you want to begin to understand the whole mating/gender/Darwinism-via-game-theory issue, I recommend starting with Matt Ridley's excellent study "The Red Queen" -- like any honest attempt to tackle enormously complex dynamics, it'll fill your head with new questions, not easy stock answers.

Salon editors, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Yarmulke, schmarmulke -- seriously, to remain vital, religions and cultures require an about-ness, a with-it-ness, a connection with the rest of world, a connection with life/death/birth/morals/etc. as they happen on the planet, on a daily basis, to EVERYONE. While once a deep, rich source of egalitarianism, Judaism has so become about itself. It's become more about Jewishness than real life. Get over yourself -- we're all small, finite, and we're all going to die.

...if TV is pushing women toward assuming the traditionally male "breadwinning" roles here in the Western World, it's fine by me. I'm perfectly happy to stay at home all day, surf the web, watch porn, get myself off, catch up on my reading, go to the gym in the middle of the day when you don't have to fight anyone for the best machines, etc.

Go to it, girls! Turn late-period post-capitalism on its proverbial head. Make contemporary office politics less of a middle-school throwback than it already is. Make ASSLOADS of money, please. I'll gladly drive the kids to Little League practices and Young Fascist Alliance meetings. I'll admonish the maid about separating the whites. And I promise to reward you with a nutritious meal in the evening when you get home from work...

YOU just try pulling the "slowing down population" argument on a woman who feels entitled to have a(nother) child, and tell me how well you do. Oy.

I don't think they can actually survive at sea-level -- their bodies are designed to withstand the immense atmospheric pressure of the deep sea, and being brought up to the surface means certain death for them.

Yes, he's a man, but he's also written a much, much, much better book on the subject.

Q. How do you get a bunch of Salon readers to fly into a tizzy?

A. Write something remotely un-PC.

I grew up in Boston in the 1970s -- among the most racially bigoted points on the space-time continuum I've had the pleasure of inhabiting (MUCH worse than the Deep South). After college, I spent a few years working for a less-than-glamourous division of the city government. My co-workers were as racially diverse a bunch as one could hope for, and from my first day on the job I was referred to as "white boy". Words like "nigger", "honky", "chink" and "jewboy" were tossed around as frequently as proper names, and after the initial shock wore off, I was in heaven. Point being, differences were ACKNOWLEDGED. With humor. Constantly. Until they ultimately ceased to mean very much. And it was incredibly liberating to be able to interact with so many amazing people from so many different ethnocultural backgrounds without feeling obliged to slip into any of the paranoid oversensitive politicalcorrectthink I'd been raised with. We should all be making jokes about each other's cultures and lifestyles. Constantly. Because we are pretty damn funny. And ridiculous. And forever in need of reminders NOT to take ourselves too seriously. Gay culture is ultimately as much of a solipsistic dead-end as WASP culture, black culture, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, leftism, conservatism, pop culture, and every other -ism fighting for our hearts and minds. An open mind and a sense of humor will get you so much further.

I am utterly sick of the popularity of Gladwell and his ilk, and their smug, oversimplified analyses of human nature, generally static analyses which completely overlook the dynamic plasticity of human respons. It's like letting a bunch of actuaries take over the mouthpiece of sociocultural psychology.

These silly articles tend to get phrased in cultural or political terms while ignoring the science: all pubic hair is not created equal(ly soft). Some pubic hair is much more Brillo-esque and tends to cause what my buddy Mark refers to as "the lusty abrasians" -- I've had my cock literally shredded any number of times by stray pubes getting in on the action. I've also had lovers whose bushes were soft as nap, but -- best bet, ladies, is to keep the vestibule trimmed. And men, trim the base of your cock. Ultimately, it's not a fashion issue but a courtesy along the lines of brushing your teeth.