milli-Helen, milliHelen, as a unit of beauty (1958 March 11)

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:27 PM -0400 6/5/11, Wilson Gray wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Garson O'Toole
><adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  Wikipedia contains an article titles "List of Humorous Units of
>>  Measurement" that includes a discussion of the miliHelen and connects
>>  the term to Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton and Isaac Asimov:
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement
>>
>
>W:pedia, loc.cit.:
>
>Pleasure: Hedon
>Philosophers talking about Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism sometimes
>use the conceptual unit of the Hedon to describe the amount of
>pleasure, equivalent to the amount of pleasure a person receives from
>gaining one util of utility.
>
>
>A friend of mine, Judy, independently developed the concept of the
>_hedon_ ['hi,dan] in 1973, defining the _megahedon_ as equivalent to
>one by-some-considered-mythological female orgasm.
>
>--
Historical note, tangentially related to the, um, Garden of
Hedon--I'm not sure anyone (other than frustrated
boyfriends/husbands) ever officially considered female orgasms to be
mythical.  It's the so-called *vaginal* orgasm, posited by Freudian
theory (the "clitoral orgasm" being immature or unfeminine or
whatever) that is suspect. Masters & Johnson effectively threw cold
water on that thesis.

LH

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