Non-salacious Saturday blogging

Something like 96% of the roughly 300 million people living in the United States profess some sort of belief in a higher being. Less than 10% identify as having right-wing/conservative fundamentalists religious beliefs. That leaves a heck of a lot of more or less “straight but not narrow” people of faith somewhere in the middle.

We often look back on the original New England Puritans as a, well, puritan bunch. Blue nosed, “banned in Boston,” boring. Thus it’s startling to recall that (compared to their contemporaries) they were libertine in the extreme. Rather than rejecting pleasures of the flesh outright, as tradition had dictated since at least St. Augustine’s day, they believed that within marriage the pleasures of the flesh were a gift to be celebrated.

That’s where websites like Paul & Lori’s The Marriage Bed comes in. No, the site doesn’t support extramarital or same-sex activities, and at least to the uninitiated some of the distinctions they make probably seem odd

Sex toys: We see no scriptural prohibition on toys, nor any way in which toys violate any scriptural guidelines. In general this is going to be something each couple has to decide for themselves, but below are a few things to consider

...

Some items designed to resemble parts of the male or female body are actually “modeled” after a real person, usually an actor or actress from pornographic movies. While it’s not clear that this is a sin to use such a product, most Christians are opposed to it for obvious reasons. If an item is not advertised as being modeled after someone, it’s just a generic sculpture.

While these prohibitions and/or equivocations are arguably a show-stopper for a lot of us, for the people who are used to hearing nothing but “no, no, no” it’s a positive step.

It’s also worth nothing that many of the prohibitions on the site are oriented towards reinforcing primary relationships, towards focusing sex on sex instead of sublimation, and on avoiding real pain, abuse, and especially humiliation or deprecation. Thus B&D is fine, D&S is questionable, and S&M is out according to these guidelines:

BDSM is bondage, discipline (or domination), sadomasochism (or slave-master). This is a wide category with unclear boundaries; at “low levels” playing at these things is fine provided both husband and wife enjoy them. But all these things can be, or can become, fetishes, and then are wrong for that reason (see above). BDSM is openly sexual, and is different than so-called “Domestic Discipline”.

• Bondage: Tying a partner up can be very arousing for both of the one tied and the one who is not tied. It can show a sense of trust, and can allow the bound person to feel free to do nothing and just receive. If bondage is mutually enjoyed and not extreme, we see no reason not to make it a part of a couple’s sex life. Some people practice bondage in a way that causes pain, making it a form of S&M.
• Spanking: There are valid biological reasons why mild pain can be arousing. Spanking, scratching and biting all fit into this category. We can find no scriptural or scientific reason to avoid this so long as both partners agree to it. However, if the pain is more than mild, this moves into S&M.
• S&M: A sadist is sexually aroused by causing pain, a masochist is sexually aroused by receiving pain. Aside from the fact that this is virtually always a fetish, we do not see either behavior to be compatible with who God has called us to be. Desires for S&M may be a result of sexual or physical abuse in the past, or may reveal problems with self-image or self-confidence.
• Dominance and Discipline: Sexual arousal from dominating or punishing another, or from being dominated or punished. This involves humiliation and degradation, and again we do not see it as compatible with who God calls us to be.

Again, we might disagree over where these lines should be drawn but you can see their lines are drawn with a degree of nuance we’re not accustomed to seeing.

As they say (perhaps a bit tartly) if you’re not a practitioner of their philosophy-based alternative lifestyle (i.e. evangelical Christianity) “none of this matters.” For those who are (and maybe only for those who are) it’s kind of cool. For the rest of us it’s at least an interesting window into another way of looking at sex.

Update: Ironically, as a prudish libertine the discomfort I feel regarding sexual do’s and don’t‘s like these comes from my prudish side. Mapping one’s boundaries that way pushes my “ew, kinky” buttons. I can respect it in its context, even admire it for its internal consistency and the benefits to its practitioners, but I’d rather not do it that way. To each one’s own though, of course.

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I’ve been going through the archives on Dacia’s newly migrated and renovated Waking Vixen. Back in August, 2004, she spent a day on a porn movie set minding the lubes and condoms and, particularly, “towels (for wiping off the gleaming sex sweat).”

So I was stretching out this afternoon, and for some reason thought about the old Gary Larson Far Side cartoon with the caption that goes, roughly, “The vikings understood the importance of stretching out before sacking a village.” That made me think of Bob and Jean Anderson’s now-classic book Stretching, which has page after page of stretching routines for various sports and activities.

No, the book doesn’t have a specific stretching routine for sacking villages, but neither does it have pre-sex stretches either. I’m perhaps sorry to say I haven’t seen a porn movie for years because whatever the premise and whatever the preliminaries, the sex scenes quickly devolved into what looked less like fun and a lot like aerobics and even more like work.

Pumpety-pumpety-pumpety-pump for two minutes. Turn. Pumpety-pumpety-pumpety-pump for two more minutes. Switch. Pumpety-pumpety-pumpety-pump for three minutes. Oral. Slurpety-slurpety-slurpety-slurp, two minutes. Turn. Pumpety-pumpety-pumpety-pump some more. Guy pulls out, masturbates onto his co-worker’s back, face, or breasts with a look that might be either feigned enthusiasm or real disappointment. It all seemed to be by the clock (pumpety-pump, I guess, costs less to script.) No wonder everyone needed towels.

Note: from what I can tell about Dacia it’s hard to imagine sex in the porn she’s been involved in would be nearly as mechanical. But it sounds like you still need towels. And (lights and bodily fluids notwithstanding) if your sexual activity enough to need towels you probably also ought to stretch either before or after or both. :-)

If so, then which stretches are best?

Yes, this isn’t meant to be a serious post. On the other hand, if you’re aware of any sex manuals, kinesiology texts, workout books or videos, or websites that deal with sex as a fitness activity please post a pointer in comments.

I feel like an idiot for not just posting my email address. On the other hand some of my other mailboxes have a 98% noise to signal spam rate. I’m always happy to receive person-to-person email from real adults but not at all interested in unsolicited commercial, fraudulent, or machine-generated email. So here’s a simple puzzle:

First part of the puzzle: The name to construct my address from is figleaf

Second puzzle part: The domain to construct my address from is realadultsex.com

In the middle of an extended Q&A post the Fish from This Fish Needs a Bicycle has an interesting insight:

[Q] Are you a jealous person? – Kristine
[A] No. I’m an insecure person. It’s different.

It’s an important distinction. I realize that while I feel pangs of jealousy from time to time — the couple who made (and kept) just a whopping pile from the whole dot-com thing, the guy who plays great guitar while sight reading piano music — I’m not really that jealous. Insecure, though? Yes! I’m going to have to think about it more.

In the overt case it certainly seems like objections to infidelity have a lot more to do with insecurity than jealousy. (Or perhaps more accurately, people who confident in their relationships seem less concerned about their partners’ infidelities.) In less obvious cases I’ve noticed that people who don’t to want their partners to have any friends are at least as likely to be driven by insecurity as by jealousy or possessiveness.

Hmmmm.

I’m sorry to hear that VS at Dilemmas of a Virgin Slut has been in a lot of ibuprophin-doesn’t-help-it pain lately. I expect most of us in the blogosphere wish her a speedy recovery. I certainly do!

The funny thing about sex-blogging about people I don’t know in real life is that (paradoxically since we’re all thinking and talking about sex, preferably with other people) I tend to develop disproportionate respect for their minds and personalities. VS sounds like a babe, and I have to admit it would be lovely to have terminal foreplay with someone who’s never felt like having vaginal sex, but I read her because she says intelligent things like this:

To be completely honest, the pain had put a damper on my mood. Sex was the last thing on my mind…

I guess it is at times like these when I understand why some people do not like/want/need sex in their lives. So here is some virginal wisdom to all those people with no sex drives: your lack of interest in sex has probably nothing to do with sex itself, so look above and beyond it. Most importantly, do not continue to do things the way you do and expect the lack of enthusiasm to be miraculously extracted from your life; things can’t change and stay the same! In other words, if your routine is not working out, it is time for you to adopt a new act.

Get well soon, VS.

I mentioned earlier that it’s hard to photograph yourself. Actually it’s easy to photography yourself, it’s just hard to enjoy the results.

Looking at photos you take of yourself is just as hard to get used to as, for instance, hearing your own tape recorded voice.

Extra credit applies for

• the extra complications of working the camera
• framing the image (blind of course),
• composing the image,
• composing and posing yourself
• overcoming your surprise that you don’t look like you imagined
• getting over how almost everything looks bigger than you thought, including your tummy, neck, and that mole/scar/pimple/wrinkle/chipped fingernail
• getting over how everything that doesn’t look too big looks too small
• getting over the shock of seeing various naughty bits from all the “wrong” angles
• getting over worrying what other people would think
• getting over the shock of what your parents/children/co-workers would think

but most importantly

• getting over the impulse never, ever to do it again

The keys are to remember that

• the only thing that gets you past the “shock” factors is practice
• the only thing that gets you past the clumsiness factors is practice
• the only thing that gets you past the posing difficulties is practice
• the only thing that gets you past concentrating so much on the camera parts your arousal vanishes is practice

In other words, practice, practice, practice.

By the way, it’s totally fine to erase each photo the second you preview it until you get used to them. Once you get past that you’ll do fine, and a bit after that there’s a good chance you’ll discover it’s actually kind of fun and even arousing. The very fact that you’re looking at yourself as if it were through someone else’s eyes changes your self-perceptions in a positive way.

That’s the whole point of the exercise, by the way. Not as a way to turn on friends or strangers by showing yourself, but to learn to see yourself as others do in real life or would if you ever let them see a photo. No, you don’t have to show, or mail, post anything, obviously, and it’s perfectly fine to delete everything you ever take right after you look at them, but the exercise itself is a good experience.

One final note: Sometimes you can make lemons out of lemonade. What starts out as a very low-quality photo overall can still be cropped to good effect. I’m not sure how long I’ll leave these up, and they’re definitely not safe to browse at work and appropriate only for real of-age adults, but I rescued this and this from some very mediocre original shots. Eventually I got to a point where I could do something like this by propping the camera on a chair in low light and using the little timer dealie on the camera.

Update: If you do wind up with photos on your computer and you don’t ever want anyone else to know, then be sure you delete them when you’re done. Girl with a One Track Mind just posted an excellent case in point.

Update: TheGirl’s elderly father(!!!) discovered her incriminating photo while playing around with Google’s new Picassa PC photo indexing and editing tool. Two points:

• If you are going to fiddle around with your own photos it’s a nice editor and it will evidently find and index every photo on your computer.
• If you’re paranoid think of Picassa as a nice way to track down any wayward shots before someone else does.

Update: Self-portrait tips for (and from) the beginner: If you use the on-camera flash it’ll bleach and flatten parts you’d just as soon not see bleached and flattened. Instead try natural or indirect light. If you use natural or indirect light move slowly — the lower light lowers the shutter speed. Avoid direct sunlight as it too will tend to bleach you out — choose filtered light or wait for a cloudy day. For full-body photos figure out how the little timer dealie works on your camera (this helps reduce camera jiggle in low-light situations as well.) Finally, if you lean against a wall, lit only by light from another room, the light may ridiculously flatter your rather ordinary body.

I mean, who wants to hear that some man you’ve never met, who lives too far away, who’s happily married to a wonderful woman, who’s a loving father of two great children, who studied something as arcane as the history and philosophy of science, who’s from the south, who loves to cook, who loves to flirt, who’s tall, dark haired, healthy, lusty and happy would wake up in the middle of the night in his own warm bed thinking about you — your fantasies, your brains, your work, your joys and sorrows, your coughs and sniffles — and then drifting off again to dream futile dreams of watching your beautiful neck and chest and breasts flush pink from his fingertips and kisses?

Roused from sleep it all seems so simple. In the light of the day, though, I know better and speak not a word of it.

Interesting exploration of the Madonna/Whore syndrome on Kayten’s Divorce Chronicles. Interesting responses in comments to her post as well. She wrote to answer why she sees herself fitting more on the whore side of the Madonna/whore division which she first talked about in her preceding post (see that here.

First of all I’d have gone along with the men who commented and said “no way” to most of what she said. A lot of us either dismiss the division as a myth as out of hand or else dispute it as archaic and irrelevant.

However, the warnings GoodGirlBadPlace related in her comment reminded me of an email from a friend who’s very long-term partner (after years of wheedling) angrily called her a whore (not in a good way) when she (finally) agreed that his fantasy of a three-way with another man excited her as much as it did him. His fantasy, mind you, and then he called her a whore for liking his fantasy!

So yes, there are definitely still guys with Madonna-whore problems, no doubt about it. The good news, as one can see from the rest of us guy’s comments, is that not everyone feels that way. (I wouldn’t feel that way either.)

I’ve had previous long-term partners who had very rich sex lives both in fantasy and reality. I want to be loved very much, no doubt about it, and I’d become very defensive if I began feeling displaced altogether. Otherwise if she sometimes wished to do what I sometimes wish I could do then more power to her.

—-

Speaking of Madonna/whore syndromes, and why I don’t feel that way, I ought to
mention how my very first relationship ended. My first partner was ardently,
passionately, even fanatically pro-monogamy. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were topping the charts back then and she got apoplectic every time she heard the line If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with on the radio, which back then was about every 15 minutes.

Several years into our relationship she went on a retreat. She called me right after she returned, crying her eyes out, saying she was sorry, saying she’d screwed up everything. Turns out there’d been this guy at the retreat. (Ok) And slept with him. (Yikes, ouch, but ok) And regretted it. (Better than ok.) And she loved me so much. (Even better, plus very reassuring.) And even though she didn’t want to and she was very unhappy about it she was leaving me for him anyway because she believed if she didn’t it meant she wasn’t monogamous and she couldn’t tolerate the idea.

That’s when I started crying too, and to be perfectly honest I didn’t really stop crying for more than a year. I didn’t care then, and I wouldn’t care now, if my partner slept with someone else as long as she still loved me and didn’t leave me for them.

In this case the monogamy/Madonna thing was her decision. It was her idea that meeting expectations about some kind of false idealized virtue was better than being fallible, maybe, but also lusty and alive and entirely human. If she’d come back she’s the one who would have thought herself a whore (hate that word by the way) not me.

With decades of perspective I can see we probably wouldn’t have been able to stay together much longer anyway, but the world is brimminig with better reasons, and better ways, to break up than the one she picked.

When we were teenagers, a lot of us made over-dramatic promises like “I’d rather die than drive a mini-van.” Many of us grew up and broke that promise because we realized pragmatism often outweighs looking cool. What else did you promise yourself you would never do as an adult? Which promises did you keep? Which did you break?

I’ve heard the claim that SUVs are so popular because they serve the same functions as minivans without carrying that minivan stigma. Maybe so. Could be.

Maybe its a generational thing but I love minivans. I didn’t loose my virginity in my 1965 Volkswagen bus (came close though) but more than made up for the oversight for the next couple of years. I suppose you can have sex in the back of a Chevy Suburban or one of those other stupid-looking land-yachts, but the back of a minivan with the back and middle seats folded into the floor gives you as much space to lay out as a queen-size bed!

Plus, what cop’s going to bother shining her flashlight into the back of a minivan anyway? Security through obscurity. (More thinking inside the box.)

Anyway, bottom line is I have great sexual associations with minivans. Just so you know.

I was 35 before my first blowjob to ejaculation. There were a couple of memorable moments like the first time my first partner tried it, I think, out of curiosity. And the time a dear partner squatted, knees wide apart, in a dark brown leotard pulled off her shoulders and down to her waist and saying “I just love doing this” with this big enthusiastic grin. The sensation wasn’t that great, and I soon had her out of the leotard and on to the main event. But the visual impact remains vivid.

I think I was always too uptight to let go, too panicked about appearing selfish, or to self-righteous about making sure the woman got off (double reverse hold-the-door-mam chauvinism?), or too arrogantly or mechanically operational about finding the right buttons to make her lose control. Or something. Anyway, any time anyone tried just to turn me on I’d try and get a tongue, finger, elbow, or toe in there in return. It distracted them, it distracted me, and for most people if someone’s working overtime to get you over the top you’re eventually going to give in and let them.

Anyway I met this woman who just wouldn’t let me pull that. When she’d massage my shoulders I’d reach up and try and massage hers too. When she tried to kiss me somewhere I’d try and find something of hers to kiss too.

She finally basically cornered me, called me on it, and told me she wanted her turn with me sometimes too. Even after that it took about a month to figure it out and let go. And of course then I learned about a whole other level of fun.

Slow learner. She never liked to swallow, and we didn’t do it that often. But I learned to lie back and enjoy it when it was her turn. (This has to sound stupid but sometimes I wish I could go back to all my old girlfriends, apologize, and — a different sort of selfish now — ask if they’d like to try fellatio without the interruptions. :-)

I read a while ago that if you don’t like to swallow you can just hold it in your mouth for a second and then drip it back over his penis and your fingers as he’s winding down. I wish I’d known about that — I was still too new to it but I would have been perfectly happy if she’d done that.

One night was transcendental. She had a job out of town for the summer. I went to visit her. She was staying in what amounted to an attic loft with room just for mattresses but no bed frames. There was just this skylight and it was too dark to see anything. After some wonderful but conventional slurping and bobbing she lured me to a point where, I think, she’d just slide her thumb, or maybe it was her tongue, over my cockhead and it was like just a string to my brain or something — and she kept me balanced there with the lightest of touches for what seemed like forever. I don’t remember if she finished me with her mouth or what, but neither she nor anyone else has been able to float me down that particular stream since.

For once I just let it go after that without trying to immediately return the favor. (What kind of neurotic friend tries to immediately repay every favor anyway?) But it gave me an idea and I think the next time we were feeling oral I got her to the same sort of place where she’d just make these quivery “ahhhs” at the lightest touch of my tongue above her hood. I never figured how to do that every time either but it’s more fun when it’s not a race anyway.