Another gem from DTG’s archives: In the eye of the beholder

Like a lot of women DTG once thought her vulva is ugly or freakish. That’s ok, I used to think my erect penis was deformed — enough so that the first time I let someone touch me I nearly wept with fright. It curved up instead of sticking straight out like… well, like I sort of figured it was supposed to. Enough so that I was sort of stunned that she didn’t recoil in horror. Enough so that it didn’t occur to me that a) she’d never seen one either or that b) I had no rational basis for believing I was anything other than normal.

So when I read:

I always thought my pussy was kind of ugly.

For years I even suspected I was a freak of nature because my inner lips protrude slightly between my outer lips, whereas the few other girls I saw when I was growing up had tight, tidy little slits. That bit of angst ended the day I saw a Penthouse centrefold with a pussy just like mine. But I still thought it was kind of ugly.

...

Cut to my lovers, pattering about naked with their cocks flopping in their bushes and their wrinkly sacks wagging. Out of context, the male package looks bizarre. But to a well-fucked woman like me, it’s a living pleasure machine, perfectly formed to bliss me out, and so of course endlessly desirable.

... I totally understood.

Turns out DTG was wrong. Turns out I was wrong. I haven’t seen hers, nor am I likely to. She hasn’t seen mine, nor is she likely to. Certinly not in real life. But chances are, sort of by definition, we’re pretty normal. Ugly to ourselves, maybe, at first, but not to our lovers.

We’re always hardest on ourselves. Sorry about that, self.

I’ve been digging around lately looking for descriptions of how people like to masturbate, based, in part on Wegg’s assertion that the way we masturbate ourselves says something about the kind of lover we are.

By this metric DirtyTalkingGirl is probably a very interesting lover! Here’s an excerpt of her rather stirring description!

Here’s one of my favourite ways, which I’ve been using since puberty…

I pull off my shirt and bra and kneel on the floor with my body across the bed. I make my nipples hard and tight by pinching and yanking them until my hips rock. Then I unzip my jeans and slip everything down past my knees—love that bare-arsed feeling! Grabbing my cheeks from behind, low, at the base, I spread them wide, then clench them, rhythmically. I can’t do this for too long because I want to come right away, but it really jumpstarts my engine.

Keeping my thighs spread, I place fingers of both hands at each side of my pussy mound just where it opens and begin to circle hard and slow. My clit is way too sensitive to touch directly with fingers (though not with tongue), so I apply pressure this way, massaging through the flesh…

The rest of her description is just as nice! Figleaf says check it out if you’re looking for new ideas.

I’m really enjoying reading the sexuality and relationships postings on Noli Irritare Leones. Here she’s assessing a paper called Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions — warning PDF by Baumeister & Vohs after receiving an RFC (oops, Request For Comments.)

It’s hard for me to believe that, in studies like the one in which college students are approached by attractive strangers offering sex, the fact that women turn the men down (while most of the men accept the proposition from the strange woman) has nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility that this random stranger might, after all, be someone who would beat you up or rape you. I mean, obviously it’s not the only consideration, but surely part of the reason you want to know your sex partner first is that you hope you have at least a little ability, on acquaintance, to weed out potential abusers. I doubt men worry as much about their physical safety, on receiving a sexual proposition from a stranger

link: Trading Sex for Something

This is such a lovely counter-explanation for the standard sociobiological explanations for women’s perceived selectivity regarding sex partners. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate sociobiology (which is generally perfectly able to invalidate itself) but it certainly suggests there’s more to be considered than simple comparisons of human sexual behavior to that of to bonobo chimps or blind, microscopic ostensibly-homosexual nematodes.

The Left-Handed Dictionary defines children as “innocent by-products.” Dour conservatives oppose birth control and abortion primarily because they believe children are the “wages of sin” (especially for single women, though seemingly not for single men.)

Now Dan Savage, making a fairly reasonable argument in favor of requiring medication-support payments from people who infect others with HIV, makes the same mistake:

A straight man knows that if he knocks a woman up, he’s on the hook for child-support payments for 18 years. He’s free to have as much sex as he likes and as many children as he cares to, but he knows in the back of his mind that his quality of life will suffer if he’s irresponsible.

link: Savage Love

I think his heart’s in the right place though he could have chosen his words more carefully. More to the point he likely would have chosen his words more carefully if he hadn’t been focused entirely on his main point.

That said, Amanda at Mouse Words summarizes the fallacy rather nicely:

Children are not a punishment for sex. Dan Savage, who has an adopted child, needs to think about this more thoroughly. Treating child support payments as the equivalent “punishment” for male sex to women’s “punishment” of having to bear raise children is the sort of thinking that has given birth to the men’s rights assholes and anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion thinking. HIV is a public health problem, but children are the responsibility, not the problem, of their family.

I had a vasectomy at age 21 because I was damn-sure not going to father an unwanted child, and in 1975 that was about the only reliable way to be sure one wouldn’t. Years later, after a reversal and two zilly-wonderful children later, I got another one because I’m just not that comfortable with unintended fertility.

Nevertheless, children are sort of a fact of life. Every one of us has a father and a mother. And bloody-near all of us are here because (whether we want to think about it or not) our mother and father had sex. Chances are very high that around 80% of any potential readers will have a child sooner or later, and that child too will have a mother and father.

The main question is whether they’ll grow up knowing exactly who.

I bring all this up because of a very peculiar series of court cases involving a pair of doctors, one who had been very meticulous about avoiding pregnancy by only having oral sex, and one of who insemnated herself with the other’s sperm she’d collected after oral sex and later sued the first doctor for child support. Link

It’s in the news this week because the father, who evidently really was clear in both word and deed that he didn’t want to be a father, recently won the right to counter-sue in an appeal.

The oddball thing for me is this ongoing notion that it’s “her baby.” Well, yes in the traditional sense he or she (it’s hard to say “it” since we’re talking about a walking and, by now, talking person) is, and even in a semi-pseudo-second-generation feminist sense it is too. But really, whether he agrees or not, whether in a different universe she never mentioned it or not, the child is his too.

It’s hard to imagine being so incurious about one’s own offspring. I’m not saying it’s not possible, or even easy! Just hard for me to imagine.

Anyway, if it were me and somebody’d pulled a trick like that — you gotta admit insemnating yourself with semen obtained from a scrupulously fertility-avoiding donor is immoral, dishonest, and wrong if not (evidently) illegal — I’d tend to sue for custody on the not-inconsiderable basis that the mother wasn’t entirely fit.

Yeah, sure, it might cramp the guy’s style having a child (or another child if he’s already married to someone else) but as I’ve discovered having children changes one in unexpected ways. More to the point it also doesn’t change you in ways you might have suspected: a parent can be as sexually active as a non-parent (most of the time, anyway.)

—-

Hmm. My next post had better be lascivious or I’m gonna start losing people. I know — I’ll call this a “Sanctity Sunday” post and try to do Pussy Blogging on Fridays. Stay tuned. :-)

Things you find when you Google the words “ceteris paribus” (meaning “all things being equal”) with “oral sex!”

For instance I found a lovely polymath blogger at a lovely theologically-inclined site called Noli Irritare Leones

At the moment her most recent post (containing neither the terms ceteris parabus or oral sex) is a riff on an Evelyn Waugh quote about sex and golf.

The article’s interesting to me because I’ve often wondered why we can’t be as casual about sex as we are about, well, my example is tennis or singing duets but the counterexample could as easily be golf.

She answers the question in ways I’ll have to think about. I still disagree but I can’t dismiss it. Here’s her second point on the morality of talking someone into sex when they’re really not interested. This is a point with which I can sympathize.

Second, bad sex is a whole lot worse than bad golf. Bad sex is really, really, really bad, intrusive, invasive, quite possibly physically painful, and worth passing up a lot of good sex to avoid. Bad golf, on the other hand? Bad golf is being really slow and having the people behind you yell at you for holding them up. I’ve done bad sex, and I’ve done bad golf, and I know that I’d do bad golf a hundred more times before I’d do bad sex even one more time.

The moral conclusion I draw from this difference is that it’s OK to talk someone into golf when they weren’t all that interested in playing, but sex is an area where people really need to respect each other’s reserve.

Read the whole thing here.

Food for thought via HerDesires, April 2000 (emphasis mine)

A text from 1883 called “Health For Women” recommended the new vibrators for treating pelvic hyperemia, or congestion of the genitalia. Vibrators were also marketed directly to women, as home appliances. In fact, the vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron — perhaps, Maines suggests, “reflecting consumer priorities.“

link: Yesterday’s doctor treated ‘hysteria’ with vibrator

Via Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run

... the debate over whether or not Viagra should be covered by it has revealed some interesting ideas that certain people have about older people and sex.

For example, in today’s New York Times, Iowa Democratic Representative Steve King (age 55), says handing out blue pills to oldsters is “unconscionable.” Virginia Democrat Jim Moran (age 60) denounces the plan as “scandalous.” Bioethicist Daniel Callahan (age 75) declares: “These are essentially lifestyle drugs…In many men, impotence is simply a function of age….”

Cancer and heart disease are functions of age, too. OK, erectile dysfunction may not be life-threatening, but most people will agree that sexual intimacy is a pretty important part of their lives.

We’ll leave aside, for now — and only for now — the disgraceful tendency for health-care providers to cover erection-dysfunction medication (for men) but not contraceptive pills or shots (for women.) It’s not that that’s important — it’s sort of crucial to people of child-bearing age — but we’re talking about medical benefits for people over age 65.

People seem to hate the idea of old people having sex. In the old film “Harold and Maude” (admittedly a slightly different context) the priest sums up the nation’s collective revulsion at the prospect: “[the idea of…] commingling with [Maude’s] withered flesh, sagging breasts, and flabby buttocks — makes me — want to vomit.”

All well and good I suppose, till you realize context is everything. I recall — at age eight or nine — sharing that exact revulsion when my friends and I realized we’d eventually start kissing other people on the mouth. (The meta-realization that after I got that puberty thing I wouldn’t even mind doing it only added to my revulsion.) The point being that, presumably, when you yourself are elderly sex with the elderly isn’t so bad. It’s certainly likely to beat the alternative.

I could go on in that vein for a while — a former roommate worked in a nursing home and talked about sometimes about policies that required them to tie people in their beds at night if they were caught having sex with one another — but I’ll leave it at that.

That last bit is telling though. You might have a case if you could somehow demonstrate that all elderly men had erectile dysfunction, but my roommate’s anecdotes suggests the case doesn’t hold up. Therefore, if erectile dysfunction is in fact a treatable one, then as long as it’s not put to non-consensual use (one’s partners presumably might prefer to be consulted) then in principle there’s no reason Viagra or similar medications for men — or, if the FDA ever gets off the dime, women — should be withheld.

Tip for the ages: Treat your elders the way you think you’ll want your children to treat you.

Via non-sex blog MarginalRevolution

What is the minimum number of condoms required for safe sex in each case:
(a) two men with two women
(b) one man with three women or three men with one woman
(c) three men with each other
(d) 2k+1 men with one woman
(e) m men and n women

Answers

Original Source: “Ilan Vardi, Computational Recreations in Mathematica, Addison Wesley,
1991, p. 205

DirtyTalkingGirl posted a link to Matthew Hunt’s exhaustive history of the word cunt.

In keeping with Pussy Talk’s aim to provide good reads “for horny people who think too much”, I’ve been digging out my favourite thought-provoking links on female bits. Today, it’s the essay by Matthew Hunt called Cunt: A Cultural History.

Much to chew on here about the most offensive word in the language, as it’s been described by many observers of the human comedy. Well, maybe. Like many other women who refuse to cringe, I reclaim “cunt” proudly in these pages, but Hunt makes some pointed observations on the process of re-appropriation, too.

I had a chance to read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary while downwith the flu this winter and I appreciate Hunt’s work all the more for it. If you’re not as interested in word origins parts may seem esoteric. Other sections are more interesting for those curious why one of the older known (and in their time perfectly ordinary) words should have become “the worst possible word you can use.” Those looking for affirmation will enjoy the observation that the word has overtones of both womanhood and knowledge — it’s no etymological coincidence that one can conceive a child and conceive an idea. Those like DTG who want to reclaim the word there are plenty of pointers. Finally, those looking for further reading will find an exhaustive bibliography.

The great thing about sex is the harder you study the harder it gets. Check it out. For future reference there’s a link in my sidebar too.

I learned via ErosBlog that Italian researchers are suggesting a link between chocolate consumption and libido in women.

Is chocolate better than sex? While some may argue yes, it turns out you may not have to make the call. Chocolate may just be good — both to eat and for sex, according to a recent study.

Italian researchers found that women who ate chocolate on a daily basis had higher libidos than those who didn’t. They also found that chocolate-fed women had better sexual arousal and more sexual satisfaction. Their scientific conclusion: The craving of choice for many women has some real benefits for our sex lives.

link: http://www.suntimes.com/output/berman/cst-ftr-berman21.html”>Chicago Sun-Times

The story’s actually a little more complicated according to Cayuga Medical Center at Ithica’s Health Resource Library

Chocolate seems to make the mood more fulfilling, says Dr. Andrea Salonia, an Italian researcher, who will report on the link he found between satisfying sex and chocolate at the annual meeting of the European Society for Sexual Medicine in December in London.

Dr. Salonia’s group at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan had 153 women fill out standard female sexual function questionnaires, among other lifestyle and psychological indices. The women ranged between 26 and 44 years old, with a median age of 35. It turned out that the 120 women, average age 35, reported they ate chocolate frequently, compared with 33 women whose average age was 40.4.

Both overall sexual function and sexual desire were significantly greater among the chocolate-eaters than among those in the older group who were more likely to spurn chocolate, said Dr. Salonia.

Calling it “an intriguing correlation,” Dr. Salonia indicated nevertheless that dalliance between chocolate and sex was far from a sure thing. “It seems alluring to hypothesize that chocolate can have a physiological positive impact over women’s sexuality.” But he added that the age difference, an important factor in sexuality, was also significant between the groups.

In other words, while Dr. Salonia’s study does hint that chocolate consumption may influence libido, it’s equally possible that libido influences chocolate consumption. It may suggest only women tend to have both higher libidos and chocolate consumption around age 35 than around age 40.

The good news is I don’t think it would be very hard to construct a study to specifically test the hypothesis. You’d want to select a two sets of statistically matched volunteers — preferably women who don’t already eat chocolate — and ask half to eat a certain amount every day and ask the other half not to. If the chocolate eaters reported increased libidos compared to the control group you’d be on much firmer ground.

This ought to be a pretty easy study to construct and administer. If any enterprising grad students want to put one together I’d be happy to publish the results.