Someone’s been a bad girl

Pax Arcana

The foundation of a long and happy relationship is built from equal parts honesty and compassion.

Oh, and spanking.

Turns out those weirdos who lurk in chat rooms in dark corners of the Internet trading fantasies about Catholic school, Taiwanese prison, and the Mitt Romney presidential campaign may be on to something. According to the New Scientist, couples that flay together stay together:

SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.

Brad Sagarin at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and colleagues measured levels of the stress hormone cortisol in 13 men and women at an S&M party in Arizona, before, during and after participating in activities. During S&M scenes, cortisol rose significantly in those receiving stimulation, but dropped back to normal within 40 minutes if the scene went well. There was no change in those inflicting the activity.

Basically that means that as long as you’re not, like, actually beating on each other, spanking and bondage and stuff can actually boost the bond between couples.

Of course there are always the haters that try to take a good, sexy science news story and tie it up with saddle leather and whip it into submission:

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, adds that almost any shared activity is likely to promote interpersonal closeness. “It doesn’t have to be tying up your partner or placing clamps on their nipples, it could be something as simple as cooking a meal together or even doing the housework as a duo,” he says.

Frankly I don’t see why all of these activities can’t be combined into one. Oh yeah, you love the way I beat those eggs, don’t you girl? Yeah…. they’ve been naughty…. wait what are you doing with the vacuum cleaner? You’re gonna break it. No seriously, stop — you’re gonna…. Oh great. Nice job. Now how are we going to get all this parsley out of the carpet?

Spanking ‘brings couples together’ [New Scientist]

Pax Alma Mater: Subject of widespread (and justified) ridicule

This is kind of old news for those of us who get the college newsletter, but Middlebury College has recently earned a bit of notoriety of late on account of a bunch of students starting a Quidditch club.

Pax Arcana and the Harry Potter phenomenon have lived under an uneasy truce since about 2002, when we realized we had a better chance of living in a marshmallow castle with Liz Phair than convincing the world that there was something profoundly silly about investing so much of our cultural capital on books that are meant for children. Since then we have watched as millions of otherwise intelligent adults have practiced a distinctly creepy ritual of self-infantilization — fording through thousands of pages of goofy, juvenile fantasy scripts only to emerge on the other side with annoying justifications for the practice, like “the books are really good,” and “the characters are fun” and “why did you stab me?”

The ridiculousness of the Quidditch fetish (and if devoting hours of your time trying to mimic an imaginary game from a series of children’s books isn’t fetishistic, I don’t know what is), has finally hit the blogosphere, as literally dozens of blogs have commented on the below video clip, in which a Vassar College student describes his club’s intention of challenging at the — get this — Quidditch World Cup at Middlebury:

And, because Pax Arcana has vowed not to allow ourselves to get too worked up about this stupidity, we’ll just quote some other people:

“People say a lot of bad things about frat boys, but I, for one, would love to see some popped Abercrombie collars and feathered bangs beating the shit out of these people.” – With Leather

“God I’m angry.  I’m going to punch every inanimate object I see, beginning with homeless people and eventually moving my way up to white babies (not that white babies are higher up, just that I don’t see black or Mexican kids playing goddamned Quidditch).  This is what happens when people stop beating their kids.  I don’t want to live in that world and if I have to smack your kids myself until they learn that there is such a thing as a stupid idea, so be it.

And if you’re keeping score at home, people who play quidditch just shot to the top of my list of people I want to stab, just above guys that listen to techno in their car, club promoters, white guys with dreads, and the cast of Sunset Tan.” – FilmDrunk