fil-ter

With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China.

Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

(thx paul!)

Notice that the relationship between financial stability and one’s sex life is markedly different based on the respondents’ age. Dissatisfaction with one’s financial situation doesn’t appear to have any effect on libido, because the younger, financially strapped respondents are having A LOT of sex.

The situation changes rather sharply after age 35, though. Perhaps by that age, financial difficulties make one a less desirable sexual partner. The moral is clear though - If you want to keep the fires burning into your golden years, get your financial affairs together early. (Not too early, though. Right around age 35 would be perfect.)

Age 35 is the transition point for the general population. Segmenting by gender, however, reveals another interesting pattern. For men, the burden of financial responsibility doesn’t become a prerequisite for great sex until the early 40’s. It happens a decade earlier for women – around age 30. Interestingly, this is just after average childbearing age for both groups. (The second inversion for men, at age 80, has a very small sample size so we’ll refrain from reading anything into it.)

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Yeah, I’m way behind …