A Modest Proposal

A few months passed. Sarah and Angela worked hard on their project, filming some women in the glory hole, conducting extensive interviews and evaluations of the male volunteers, and analyzing the results.

Sarah wrote a couple more award-winning papers on the basis of her research and achieved her first goal -- tenure. Angela started her thesis based on a spin-off of the research she helped with.

At the end of the project, Sarah was ready to give a presentation to the tenured faculty committee of the Women's Studies department.

"Settle down, everyone!" yelled Natalie. The faculty had been chatting away in the conference room before the start of the meeting. As the women quieted, Natalie began. "As you know, this is Sarah's first meeting as a tenured faculty member. Let's all give her a round of applause!"

The ladies clapped as Sarah stood next to Natalie at the head of the table. She wore a big, genuine smile -- she had achieved one of her major goals and felt at home. Natalie continued, "Sarah has been doing stellar work studying glory holes, their relationship to feminism, and to gender relationships. She's just completed a multi-month study with her graduate student, and I've asked her to give a summary and present her recommendations." There was another brief round of applause.

Natalie dimmed the lights and sat down, while Sarah started her slides.

"First, we looked into male sexual response in the glory hole booths. We have two major findings from this. First, men are pervs..." -- here everybody laughed -- "Hahaha, but what I mean is, there was just an enormous range of sexual activity that would provoke a positive response in men. I'll discuss the ramifications of this a bit later. But meanwhile, although this is pretty obvious, it's good to have research confirming that men like a lot of different sex acts."

"Second, we found that the anonymity for men, combined with easy access to sexual relief, has a strong positive impact on their pro-sociality. Our research shows that this enables important feminist advances. My grad student, Angela, can email you our preprints if you want to see the details."

"Based on these two findings, we want to make some changes to the glory hole. That's the main point of this talk -- to walk you through the proposal. The basic principle that we followed was to find the simplest changes that yield the biggest benefit, the sweet spot if you will. Here we examined the long-term benefits to feminism and gender relationships as laid out in our papers; though in practice this usually manifests as changes that give the male participants more sexual satisfaction."

"There was a very strong signal in the data showing something else we all knew -- that men are very visually oriented. And, our research shows that while anonymity for the men is very important to their own ego defense, a lack of anonymity for the women involved provides them with a very strong boost to their sexual response. Combining these two observations, we recommend that the wall in the booth be replaced with a one-way window, so that the women are easily visible to the men. And, women in the booth should remove all their clothing before their session starts."

There was a cough and and a raised hand. "Yes, Carol?" asked Sarah.

"What about those of us who are... not classically, umm, hot?" she asked. Carol was a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman with greying hair.

"That's an excellent question. Our research shows that this isn't important in this scenario. It's more the willingness to be nude that has an impact. In fact, this is a general theme in our research, explored in one of the papers -- and it will come up again later. Any other questions?"

There were none, so she continued. "Men are also auditory. We already encourage the men to express themselves verbally, but now we'll recommend that we also do a bit of role-play and use crude sexual language ourselves. This is a high-impact, low-effort change. We'll provide a list of suggested phrases and scenarios to make this simpler."

"Because men are dogs" -- another laugh -- "we realized early on that we couldn't provide any sort of comprehensive sexual service. There are just too many variations of too many acts. So part of our proposal concerns what not to do. We think we should lean into the oral sex aspect already offered at the glory hole, and not expand into other kinds of sexual activity. You'll be relived to know we aren't recommending any sort of intercourse, even though we're aware that this does happen at some other glory holes."

"Following this, we want to propose a renewed emphasis on swallowing. Swallowing is already the departmental rule, of course, but we propose going a bit further. If any semen misses the mouth, or spills in any way, we recommend requiring that it be eaten -- and, importantly, that we post a sign in the men's side laying out this policy. This change is an easy win, because very little is spilled in practice, and because the sign itself provides the majority of the benefit. In keeping with the visual aspect, we also recommend the showing of a mouthful of semen to the man, through the one-way glass, before swallowing."

From the shuffling noises and stillness in the room, Sarah could tell that some of the faculty were uncomfortable with this idea. 'Have to just soldier on,' she thought to herself.

"I'm afraid that the next two recommendations may come as a shock. They may sound **** to you, but I'd like you to hold off on any judgement until you've heard the rationale."

Here Sarah took a breath. "Ok then. The first major change is that we recommend recording all sessions in the women's booth, and posting these to the departmental web site. Men often want to revisit their conquests, and we think this will provide some therapeutic coverage for the times when the booth is inactive."

"Our last recommendation is that we extend our swallowing offer to urination."

At this there was an outcry of "No!" and "Gross!"

"Please bear with me," continued Sarah. "I know it sounds gross. However, it's perfectly safe. I've tried it, and I can say personally that while the taste is somewhat unpleasant, the experience is mild and over quickly. Also, in our research, very few men are actually interested in doing this act -- fewer than 2% -- and once again, nearly all of the benefit comes from simply advertising that it is available."

"No fucking way!" exclaimed Kate.

"Kate, I don't think that's a helpful response," replied Sarah. "Again, I ask that you consider the evidence, the roll-out plan, and our papers before expressing any opinion. I think you'll find that the case for including this is solid. Are there any other questions?"

Luisa, a beautiful Latina professor with long, flowing hair, raised her hand.

"Yes, Luisa?" asked Sarah.

"For the web site, have you considered having an interview section? We could talk about our goals and research, and maybe offer some suggestions for visitors to the booth."

"That's an excellent idea, Luisa," said Sarah. "I'll add it to the plan."

Natalie stood up and the lights came back on. "Thank you Sarah. We agreed not to immediately roll out the changes, but instead wait until the next meeting for a vote. I expect everyone to educate themselves on this topic -- if you plan to vote 'no', you'd better have a strong reason. Meeting adjourned."