Popsicles can make the cranky go away.

So I was having this really shit day. I ran errands all afternoon in my car without A/C, and it is hotter than fuck outside, and I remember now why I HATE SUMMER, and I came back and find out my email account was hacked into. They spammed a random part of my address book and then ERASED a shitload of my emails. Why did they erase my emails? What possible good could that have done them? So now I'm cranky and hot and depressed about my email and hoping that nothing important got erased. And I still have to do laundry, which is requiring me to carry heavy loads of clothes outside in the goddamn heat, and just...ugh.

But now I'm eating the last of the popsicles that were in my freezer, and I feel better. I would kiss whoever made this recipe, seriously. So I figured I'd share it with you fine folks, so that if you have one of those days this summer, you can feel better, too.

Berry Yogurt Ice Pops

Ingredients:
2 cups plain (sweetened or unsweetened) yogurt
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup frozen raspberries, blueberries, or strawberries (or combination thereof) (N.B. I tend to use a lot more than this, but no more than 1 cup.)

Also need:
Ice pop molds and popsicle sticks

In medium bowl, whisk yogurt and sugar to combine. In a blender, place 1 c. yogurt mixture w/frozen berries; purée until well-blended. (The recipe tells you to press this mixture through a fine mesh sieve into another medium bowl, discarding the solids. I don't have a fine mesh sieve, and I am lazier than all get-out, so I have literally never done this step, even though I make these popsicles 5-10 times every summer. If you're going to be lazy, be sure and blend like crazy. Also, it will mean you have seeds in your popsicles. I find this really only matters if you're really worried about the texture of your popsicles, in which case, stay away from raspberries. Those fuckers have a lot of seeds.) Dividing evenly, layer plain and berry yogurt mixtures in the ice pop molds. Insert popsicle sticks (or the sticks that come with your molds, if they have them) and freeze until solid, 4-5 hours or overnight. To unmold, run warm water briefly over molds to loosen.

Yummy! Now I'm going to finish my popsicle and watch Bones.

This is what happens when I don't write a post for a while.

I have too much to talk about! So, more linkspam. Sorry 'bout that. But this time with more crunchy commentary!

From FWD, one of the ableist words of the day: Crazy.

Crazy is often used – even, still, by me and other feminists – to negatively describe ideas, writing, or other nouns that the speaker finds disagreeable. Conservatives are “crazy”, acts of oppression are “crazy making” , this winter’s snow is “craziness”. This usage makes a direct connection between mental disability and bad qualities of all stripes, turning disability itself into a negative descriptor. Whether it means “bad” or “evil” or “outlandish” or “illogical” or “unthinkable”, it’s turning the condition of having a disability into an all-purpose negative descriptor. When using crazy as a synonym for violent, disturbing, or wrong, it’s saying that PWMD are violent, disturbing, wrong. It’s using disability as a rhetorical weapon.

[Trigger warning for descriptions of violence against women and rape.]

Via Feministing, men who batter women overestimate how much other men abuse women.

The work is the first to document overestimation of intimate partner violence by batterers and is consistent with findings about a variety of other harmful behaviors such as substance use, gambling, and eating disorders. This line of research looks at social norms, or what is considered to be appropriate and inappropriate behavior in society.

“Social norms theory suggests that people act in a way that they believe is consistent with what the average person does,” adds Denise Walker, research professor of social work and co-director of the Innovative Programs Research Group.

The research looked at 124 men who were enrolled in a larger treatment intervention study for domestic violence. The men, all of whom had participated in violence against a partner in the previous 90 days, were asked to estimate the percentage of men who had ever engaged in seven forms of abuse.

These included throwing something at a partner that could hurt; pushing, grabbing, or shoving a partner; slapping or hitting; choking; beating up a partner; threatening a partner with a gun; and forcing a partner have sex when they did not want to.

[...]

In every case the men vastly overestimated the actual instances of abuse. For example, the participants on average thought 27.6 percent of men had thrown something with the intent of hurting a partner while the actual number is 11.9 percent. Similarly, they believed 23.6 percent of men had forced their partner to have sex involuntary compared to 7.9 percent in reality.

This is unsurprising, and not just because of social norms theory. Feminists have been saying for a long time (like, longer than I've been alive) that we live in a rape culture, a culture that condones and encourages violence against women. Is it really so unbelievable that men who abuse women translate misogynistic jokes as signs that other men hate women, too? Is it really so unbelievable that these men, who abuse or rape their partners, think they're normal? Why wouldn't they? Everything from offhand remarks or jokes made by other (even feminist!) men, to television shows making a joke out of stalking, to advertising campaigns (to PETA), to attempts by police, regular people, judges, campus officials, and the Catholic Church to ignore or apologize for actual rape and abuse supports their belief: rape and abuse are normal; normal men hate women. That's what rape culture does. It gives these men room to commit their crimes (knowing always that their victims, not them, will face blame, disbelief, and a lack of support) by allowing them to believe that they are normal. I was once told by some men (on the internet!) that making misogynistic jokes doesn't harm anyone because mature men know the difference between a joke and an insult, a rapist and a non-rapist. (They seemed unconcerned with the fact that they very likely know a woman who is has been sexually assaulted and might be triggered by their jokes.) And while I think it's important to leave room for humor, I don't (shockingly) think it's helpful for men to assume that they don't know any secret misogynists (say, one who phrases all their misogyny in joke-form and also private violence?) and give the impression to other men that they sort of hate women. If violence against women was, you know, RARE, this would be slightly different. But making jokes about rape or slapping women around or how women are whiny bitches who are really only good for fucking (amiright fellas?) when 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime and 1 million women are stalked annually and most women who experience violence do so at the hand of a partner or family member? Not okay. (Believe or not, the men on the internet did not buy my logic! Because I am a crazy overemotional bitch. But they are decent, non-misogynist men, they tell me! That means their opinion about my mental state is VALID.) "But but but!" they said, "We are decent men! Men who can joke and laugh at sexist commercials without it affecting our treatment of women [doubtful, but let's grant that this could be true of some feminist men]! It is not fair to limit our fun-having just because some men hate women! [Actually, it is. Your right to make or laugh at douchey jokes should be trumped by the right of women to exist in your vicinity without feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.] Men who perpetuate violence against women are fucked up in the head. It's not fair to compare us to them!" I agree that men who assault women are fucked up in the head. But here's the deal: I can not tell you apart. Which I know you probably find infinitely annoying. But, you tell the same jokes. You're both likely to ignore it if I'm experiencing sexism in front of your face. You're both likely to tell me to just shut up and stop being so political if I point out that the Superbowl commercials are so offensive I can't even enjoy them or that Scott Neustadter is a total douche for writing (500) Days of Summer. You act the same! That is a problem! And it is your problem! I can't tell the Nice Guys^TM from the nice guys, or the rapists from the non-rapists, and it is not because my poor lady brain is not equipped with the appropriate observation skills! Do you know why the men in this study think they're normal? It's not because they are, but because you allow them to occupy the same social circles that you do! You, men on the internet who desperately cling to your right to tell offensive jokes without being labelled an asshole, don't tell them they're being assholes! And why not? Because then you would have to reevaluate your own behavior. And god no, not THAT. That is a fate worse than death.

Vintage sexism: Kissing is for whores! This video is hilariously disturbing. Creepiest dad ever.



More vintage sexism: Ads I will show my stepdad next time he's nostalgic about the 1950s.

From The Sexist, why chivalry is decidedly Not a Good Thing.

Chivalry encourages a form of preemptive internalized misogyny that results in the policing of women, how they dress, where they go, how much hair they show, and whether they stand up for themselves when harassed or assaulted. In the future, the woman harassed by the firemen may dress more conservatively, or avoid standing on the street corner alone, in order to prevent her husband from ever being associated with someone who is confused for “a hooker”. A woman may choose to wear a headscarf in order to preempt any shame being brought to her husband. And a woman who is victimized by a man may not speak out, in order to avoid the chivalrous man-next-door from starting a fist-fight—or criticizing her for somehow encouraging the harassment.

Chivalry works to unfairly displace misogyny onto men. But focusing solely on that particular failure of chivalry ignores the obvious truth—that misogyny is unfair for everyone. Women, too!

From Shitty First Drafts, Why I’m Not Proud of You for Correcting Other People’s Grammar:

But when people find out I’m an English teacher, they often say, “I have a grammar question for you.” Asking someone to give you free professional advice when they are not at work and just looking to enjoy casual conversation with their dry martini is, of course, total etiquette fail. But it gets even douchier when people want to tell me all about how they go ahead and correct other people’s grammar every chance they get. This happened with my new dentist, who, while digging around in my mouth with metal objects, regaled me with stories about how he calls people out–family members, friends, patients, probably also panhandlers with poorly copyedited signs–for using adverbs incorrectly. Adverb usage: apparently one of the Big Problems Today, along with oil rigs asploding in the Gulf and poverty and such. It’s like these people are part of a Douchebag Club and think they have recognized me as one of their own. To which I have this to say: I am not. I am not, in fact, proud of you for being a dick to the people around you. Now don’t get me wrong, I am sort of a dick sometimes, but this is one area of dickery I just don’t touch. I equate it to going around at a party criticizing everyone’s food and drink selection. No one likes that guy. We edge away from him and talk about him behind his back. Like food selections at parties, speech patterns are both a function of personal taste and what’s available to us. Not only is grammar correcting just plain rude, it’s soaked in classism, regional chauvinism, and privilege.

It bothers me that some people think that this is what I do all day: copyedit my student’s documents and then take my work home with me by copyediting conversations with family and friends. That sounds joyless. And stupid. What I really do is research American literature and religion because I find it fascinating. Then I teach my students about literature and religion and try to find ways to make it fascinating for them. I also attempt to teach them to do fabulous things with words, things that are full of joy, as well as insight, nuance, and gravitas. In short, I love my job, but grammar has precious little to do with it (“it” being both my job and why I like it).

Ladysquires doesn't argue that clarity is not important, but that people who harp on grammar and spelling in everyday conversation are assholes whose concerns aren't communication so much as using their privilege to dismiss you without engaging with what you're saying. A great example of this is Arizona's newest choad move: firing teachers with foreign accents. From Amanda at Pandagon:

According to Think Progress, the man behind this project is Tom Horne, a superintendent who is running for attorney general. His reasoning in this video is specious and laughable to anyone who isn’t a full-blown racist looking for a rationalization. He claims that it’s confusing to students if a teacher pronounces “comma” like “coh-ma”. The underlying assumption is that there’s only one right way to pronounce any word in English, something that isn’t true even within the United States, much less across different accents in the English-speaking world. For instance, am I more or less American because I pronounce the pronoun “I” like “Ah” instead “Eye”? Those are actually pretty different, and yet we expect people to learn that both are acceptable. People like Horne may be able to fool some people that live far away from the Southwest with this act, but for those of us who grew up there, it’s obvious he’s full of shit. A fluent English speaker with a Spanish accent isn’t hard to understand, and they’re the ones being targeted. Whining that some people drop the ending sounds in words is particularly stupid, since that’s how pretty much everyone in the South speaks, and no one is claiming you can’t understand them.

The method used here is essentially accusing teachers with foreign accents of poor grammar. If someone's grammar, pronunciation, spelling, etc. aren't absolutely perfect, the grammar police claim, then no one can understand them! Which is, as Amanda points out, usually total bullshit. It's not about communication, but about dismissing people without having to listen to or engage with what they say.

Next post: Doctor Who! Again!

Interview on Information Underground

I had an interview on the local radio station 89.1 KEOS in College Station on Sunday, with Teddy at Information Underground. As I am when no one is editing me, I am chatty and not particularly articulate. You can listen here.

Sorry I haven't posted a real post in a while. I finished the semester a week ago, but I've been decompressing. It just really sunk in a couple days ago that I've finished my first year of grad school! Awesome. Now I have a to do list a mile long, but I'll get back to writing non-linkspam posts soon!

[Corrected: KEOS is not an NPR affiliate.]

Recommended Reading for 5/13

I turned in my last seminar paper today! Let the fun times begin! My brain is a little empty, so I just have some links for you today. I'll get back to writing soon.

Attention feminist geeks! The Sexist lets us know that Portal, dubbed "the most subversive game ever," is available for free until May 24th. So hurry and get it!

Also from The Sexist, the follow up post to the xkcd color survey, concerning the sex/gender question from the survey:

We debated for a long time to find a wording of the question that would be answerable unambiguously by everyone, regardless of gender identification or any other issues. In response to a friend who was suggesting we were overcomplicating things, she said, “I *refuse* to word the question in a way that doesn’t have a good, clear answer available for transsexuals, intersex people, and people who already know they have chromosomal anomalies.” I felt the same way, and at the same time I didn’t want to assume everyone remembers what the hell chromosomes are. After hours of debate, everyone was happy with this:

Do you have a Y chromosome?
Don’t Know
Yes
No

If unsure, select “Yes” if you are physically male and “No” if you are physically female. If you have had SRS, please respond for your sex at birth. This question is relevant to the genetics of colorblindness. 

We didn’t add a question about gender identification, in part because I wasn’t really planning to do anything with the survey data beyond basic calibration and didn’t want to hassle people with more questions, and in part because gender is really complicated. We recently programmed Bucket, the IRC chat bot in #xkcd, to allow people set their gender so he can use pronouns for them. This ended up taking hundreds of lines of code, three pages of documentation, and six different sets of pronouns and variables, just to cover all the basic ways people in the channel with different gender identifications wanted to be referred to (even without invented pronouns like “xe”, which we vetoed). And that’s just to cover the pronouns. The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

Okay, so I just realized that 3/4 of these links came from The Sexist. Anyway, Amanda outlines why Christopher Hitchens's defense of the French veil ban is, unsurprisingly, really fucking misogynistic:

In an essay condemning a cultural institution that prevents men from looking at the faces of women, Hitchens instead argues that men have an inalienable right to stare. Of course, Hitchens phrases this in gender-neutral terms—”My right to see your face is the beginning of it, as is your right to see mine”—that assumes social equivalence between the gazes of women and men. In fact, the gender-neutral approach fails to acknowledge the sexist cultural institutions that allow men to exert ownership over women’s bodies through their gaze—like street harassment and sexual objectification. When a guy passes a woman on the street and tells her to “smile, baby,” he’s asserting authority over her face, her feelings, and how she chooses to express them—or not. Those who would declare their “right” to look at women should first note the social context in which women’s faces are often examined.

Having just written an essay about the role of science and technology in our understandings about our bodies in the Victorian era, I found this article from The Guardian really interesting:

In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even see their new body and clothes.

The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.

Men who took part in the experiment reported feeling as though they occupied the woman's body and even gasped and flinched when she was slapped by another character in the virtual world.

 
[...]
 
The study, which appears in the online science journal PLoS One, suggests that our minds have a very fluid picture of our bodies. The research is expected to shed light on the thorny neuroscientific puzzle of how our brain tells the difference between a part of our own body, and something else in the wider world.

Enjoy! I'll be back soon!

Recommended Reading

I promise I will go back to real posts soon. My last seminar essay is due Thursday, so hopefully I will get back to not dying of stress this weekend. Until then, read these fine folks!

Sqbr on Disability in Speculative Fiction: Monsters, Mutants and Muggles:

Fiction reflects social attitudes, and the social attitudes to disabled people tend to suck. Disabled people are presented as scary, pathetic, exotic, demanding, laughable, etc.


But some tropes are popular/unique to SF.

It's not all bad: speculative fiction allows for powerful allegory, and can also make very interesting explorations/extrapolations of future attitudes/experiences of disability.

National Journal Magazine asks, Do "Family Values" Weaken Families? (Hint: Yes.)

Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics may at last be resolved.

The paradox is this: Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of "San Francisco liberals." But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

Rebecca Traister over at Salon says, Screw Happiness:

When it comes to social science and economics, women lately seem especially prone to having the contentment thermometer thrust at them, and their temperature always seems to register at "dissatisfied." A study by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, as well as one by Princeton economist Alan Krueger, have shown a decline in female happiness in the years since the second wave, a trend that has been cheerily used as proof of exactly how unhappy increased social, sexual, professional and economic liberation has made American women. Even those who dare make claim to general life satisfaction are told not to get too comfortable; as Marcus Buckingham, the author of "Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently" gloomily warned any aberrantly chipper chicks in a piece last year, "as women get older they get sadder."


But really, how could they not, given the aggressive messages about happiness and how they must achieve it, and unhappiness and how they must avoid it that are foisted on them from every direction, making them feel like failures if they are not warbling and grinning their way through life?

[...]

You know what I think? It's all bullshit. Not just the trend stories and the self-help stuff, but the laser focus on happiness itself. I say this as someone who has grown steadily happier as I've aged, but I think I would have said it even more emphatically earlier in my life: I'm just not sure that "happiness" is supposed to be the stable human condition, and I think it's punishing that we're constantly being pushed to achieve it.

And filed under both hilarious and interesting, xkcd published the results of a color survey, broken down by gender:

Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

1.Dusty Teal
2.Blush Pink
3.Dusty Lavender
4.Butter Yellow
5.Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

1.Penis
2.Gay
3.WTF
4.Dunno
5.Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.

I weep for my gender.

Quick hits in lieu of me procrastinating via blogging

After the Rethinking Virginity conference over at Harvard, Lori put together 10 myths about sex and virginity and debunked them. My favorite is Myth #6: There's one universal definition of sex.

Amanda at The Sexist reminds us to check our privilege when facing slurs that compare us to other, more marginalized people. 

Listen: I’m a heterosexual cisgender thin able-bodied atheist white lady. If someone attempts to insult me by using a slur that’s offensive to gays, or trans people, or a racial group, or the disabled, or fat people, or a religious group, it’s unhelpful for me to respond by saying, for example, “That’s offensive to gays, and also, I’m personally offended that you would ever compare me to a gay person.”

That means you, US Airways.

Via Shakesville, John McCain is now officially against constitutional rights. But only if you did something illegal. And you're brown.

"Obviously [Mirandizing attempted Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad] would be a serious mistake...at least until we find out as much information we have. … Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about."—Senator John McCain, arguing that an American citizen should not be read his Miranda rights, lest, I guess, he be accidentally afforded those rights. Or something.

 Melissa just isn't American enough to know that withholding rights from U.S. citizens is totally patriotic now.

And now, work to do! Seminar papers to write!

Oh, last issue of Maroon Weekly! You make me so angry.

You know what is the best of all procrastination methods? Blogging! So, if you regular readers are like, "Holy shit, Courtney, are you on crack? Four posts in one weekend?" the answer is no, I am not on crack. I am avoiding paper-writing. Well, not avoiding. Just break-taking. A lot. But I am still writing things! So, neutral?

Anyway! Maroon Weekly! It is often horrifying! Let's talk about it. Last Thursday was the last of the issues this semester, and it was a doozy. Shorter Autumn Dawson: "Obama is teh worstest of all presidents! Liberals are sheeple for voting for him! Obama is un-American! Obama has done more damage than Bush! Also, Christians are totally persecuted in the U.S.!" I wish I was exaggerating. The best part is the claim that liberals are sheeple who voted for Obama without thinking. (Yes, the people who voted for McCain/Palin were thinking really hard about what that would mean for our country. Whereas liberals were just, "Oh! Black guy! I has vote?") The suggestion seems to be that Autumn doesn't understand how Obama was voted. I can tell her: by a majority. All presidents, barring electoral nonsense, are voted in by the majority of people. Does that mean all presidents (except Bush) were voted in by brainless sheeple? Is this yet another conservative claim that we should limit the vote to people who matter? (We all know what that's code for.) Autumn suggests that Obama is failing even at being liberal, and that liberals have unthinkingly gotten us into a mess that even they don't like. (You know what my liberal friends who voted for Obama and I don't like about Obama? That he isn't being liberal enough. He still hasn't made DADT a priority. He still keeps throwing women under the bus. He didn't push for single-payer hard enough. And etc.) This article was so fucking ridiculous I had a hard time reading it all the way through. I handed it to a friend, whose reaction was similar. About two paragraphs in, he handed it back to me.

And then, the "Love Connection!" Written by our favorite resident misogynist! In this edition of "Cody Lillich gives judgmental and generally terrible advice," Teri asks the "Love Doctor" how to move from an open relationship to a closed one.

Dear LC,

I’ve been in an open relationship with Tim for about 4 months. We both have really busy schedules, and we decided early on that commitment–for either of us–was impossible. So we decided we would spend time together when we could (once or twice a week), and that’s worked out fine.

I’ve never asked him if he’d been on other dates or if he’d fooled around. Although I’ve been curious. He never asked me, either. Honestly, I haven’t seen anyone else since we started the relationship. I’ve left the door open for anything, just in case something came along. But I’m so busy and focused on other things, so the time I spend with Tim is enough for me.

Last week I was joking with him about all of the other guys I’d been seeing. Just for fun, just to get a reaction, in a flirty way. Tim said, “That’s good to know. Now I don’t feel bad.” But he didn’t say it in a flirty, joking way. He was serious.

It turns out Tim has been seeing two other girls the whole time. And I don’t know why, but I feel jealous. I knew the rules when I jumped into this, but still, my heart sank when he told me. When we agreed in the beginning to not have anything serious, I was fine with the idea. But now…I actually have feelings for him and I do feel like I want him in a closed relationship. How do I go about asking him to date just me? Is it possible?

Second-Thoughts Teri

There are a lot of sensitive, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful responses that one could give to Teri's dilemma. Cody's is not one of them:

Open relationships are for porn stars, hookers and gigolos. In fact, the words “open” and “relationship” don’t make sense next to each other. It’s a paradox. It’s like saying the door is open closed. So call it what it is: promiscuous dating. You guys are just friends with benefits (and apparently he’s had more benefits than you).

Is this guy allergic to sensitivity? Could he be any more fucking judgmental? Also, is he living in a box? Tons of people have open relationships. Successful open relationships. It is not a paradox. And it is not necessarily "promiscuous dating" or "friends with benefits." There are even books written to help people navigate the different kinds of open relationships they can have. (The Ethical Slut is a good starting place.) Open relationships (or poly relationships) are not for everyone; but then, neither are monogamous ones. In short, Cody is being an ignorant asshat.

Of course you like him now and want commitment. He made you jealous, told you that you’re one of the two other hot chicks he’s been doing. But ask yourself if the feelings would be the same if you had also been fooling around with other guys?

Listen, these dating games only work when there’s no contractual terminology. The word “relationship” implies a contract, even if it’s tenuous next to the word “open.” Next time, get your terms straight from the beginning. Steer clear from labels that might bind you. Just say “Let’s date,” or “Let’s just have fun,” or “I’m not looking for anything serious right now.” But you’ll only be able to say these things if you really mean them. Make sure your skin is thick enough to deal with the possibility of a guy with multiple women. And make sure your heart is out of it.

 And, sure. You can ask him if he’d like a closed relationship with you. But good luck getting him to kick two other girls out of bed.

Actually, open relationships work best if there is "contractual terminology." The reason that Teri and Tim are having issues is because she is not talking to him honestly, and he is not talking to her honestly. The only real solution to this problem is an honest and open conversation between the two of them about what they want. And Teri needs to consider whether she would be open to a poly relationship, albeit one that is more committed than they currently have. You can care for someone (keeping "your heart" definitively in it) and still have an open relationship (which can mean a number of things).

Cody's advice is non-advice. He tells Teri to forget it, basically, because he assumes that every man is as big of an asshole as he is. Cody acts like all men care about is sex (Obviously, no self-respecting man would want to have a relationship with icky women. Gross.) and that if women don't trick men into having relationships with them, and use sex as a bargaining chip, they'll never have satisfying (as if that kind of relationship could be satisfying) relationships with men. Which is, of course, bullshit, as any person who is in a healthy, happy relationship (or who knows other people in healthy, happy relationships) knows. Some men actually like being around their female partners. Craziness, I know! But it happens! And when it happens, they might actually be willing to be in a monogamous relationship with them. Or might be willing to compromise. If Tim and Teri have something, they'll be able to have an honest conversation about what they want from their relationship, and come to an agreement about what that relationship will look like. And they'll continue to have those conversations. It's a novel idea, I know, and not quite as much fun as telling Teri that she's an idiot and kind of slut.