[Caught in the Net] Uncharted
I’m sure it’s just confirmation bias — now that I’m aware of them, I see them everywhere — but the internet seems full of graphs lately. (Or maybe it’s just because I’m looking at so many graphs during my obsessive checking of election poll tracker FiveThirtyEight.com — hard to believe that by the time you read this the election will be over! But, ahem, I digress.) The graph I noticed first was the amazing Fetish Road Map by Katharine Gates, which seeks to organize all sexual fetishes with links indicating their various levels of interrelatedness. It’s a work of taxonomic wonder. (There’s a better image of the roadmap here.)
Webcomic xkcd responded to the Gates roadmap with, characteristically, a good joke about mathematicians.
Franklin Veaux took the notion of a sexual preference map a bit more literally in his Map of the Lands of Human Sexuality, a colorful bit of cartography including the Island of the Imaginary (where vampire erotica and tentacle sex live), the Land of Mundania, and Terra Del Solo (which is not so much for lovers), among many others.
In further taxonomic adventures, there’s a funny flow chart of good and bad things to say during sex, with categories ranging from “Rhetorical Questions” to “Noises” to “Religious.” Full of useful tips and pitfalls to avoid!
The Hang Fire Books blog posted an image from old sex digest Sexology, The Obelisks of Erotic Gratification, contrasting the stages of “auto-erotic acts” vs. “normal marital acts”; while both begin with “anticipation,” one ends with “lust, shame, self reproach” while the other ends with “relaxation, spiritual fusion, satisfaction” — guess which is which!
Finally, the marvelous site CrappyGraphs.com, which invites user-submitted crappy graphs, has many hilarious entries (among the less hilarious ones, of course), but only a few are related to sex. My favorite is this graph depicting the amount of enjoyment one derives from porn versus the amount of time spent watching porn. As a porn reviewer, I can confirm there’s a certain amount of truth to it . . .
This entry was posted on Wednesday, 5 November 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Wednesday, 5 November 2008 at 8:41 pm cand86 wrote:
My favorite was totally the flow chart of good and bad things to say during sex! I can’t wait to say “Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?”, lol.