Do me a favor. Unless you’ve been the same height as all your partners, get out your camera, set it not at your eye level but at that of your average partner, and begin photographing yourself. It’s probably best if you’ve got a tripod, but most people don’t so you can use a dresser or shelf and maybe some books. Set the lens to as wide an angle as you can. Use a remote control if you’ve got one (lots of digitals come with them) or figure out how to set the timer. Then walk, move, get dressed or undressed, recline and touch yourself sexually, get up and brush your hair or your teeth. In other words be you, but be yourself for the camera.

Next? Prop the camera on the back of a chair around your partner’s eye level when he or she is sitting. Repeat the exercise. Finally, put the camera on the pillow next to where you sleep and repeat the exercise yet again.

Now look at the photos and compare them to the view we have of ourselves in the mirror, or looking down at ourselves.

We usually see ourselves in the mirror which, believe it or not, gives us a distorted view of what we look like to everybody else.

I could probably expound on this for paragraphs more. Instead I’m just going to say…

Try it and see.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Going back to my recent exposition on the word “kink” for a moment, several commenters hinted that part of the appeal of kinkiness (whatever one chooses to call it) is that you get to distinguish yourself from the crowd of “normal” or “vanilla” people who stick to very plain, ostensibly non-kinky sex.

And that reminded me of a debate I read about lingerie in a members-only discussion group I used to contribute to.

Back in July, 2001, a poster said

I have found a certain brand of clothes that I like very much. It’s not expensive, but it’s sold in boutiques. I was talking to other folks who are devotees and said “I’ll love it with this stuff is at Target!.”

They were horrified. There was something clubbish about wearing the clothes to them.

I want the clothes sold and target, and I want everyone to have the opportunity to taste kink, if they want.

No link because the forum is closed to non-subscribers

It’s a pretty interesting point and counterpoint and one that addresses my strong preference for defining what is or ought to be general practice as normal. For instance not everyone rides a bicycle or plays the piano but they’re still considered perfectly normal things to do.

So here’s a question: How would you react if Target began selling good quality, low-cost sex accessories like the ones you can now find only at Babes in Toyland or Good Vibrations? How about The Gap? What if even Walmart started selling floggers, lube, butt-plugs, Xana & Dax or Damon & Hunter DVDs from Comstock Films in flyover places like Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Halls Crossroads, Tennessee?*

Me? I think it would be all for the good because more of the 125,000,000 adults in the U.S. (for a start) could discover and afford richer, more varied sex lives with their partners if and when they wanted to. At the cost, however, of the distinction of kinkiness (if pretty much everybody was doing it, even in Decora, Iowa, would it still be kinky?)

Discuss.

* Yes, yes, these days state legislatures are more inclined to ban “marital aids” than buy them for their sweeties, but then again those are currently boutique items only so large retailers don’t have a dog in the fight. If they did then legislators would be rolling over and wagging their tails to accomodate them.

Back in the early 1970s, when condoms were considered a miserable, highly-fallable WWII-era excuse for birth control, you had roughly two options for buying them if you were underage: Pharmacies which, back then, were almost always owned and operated by respectable middle-class citizens who usually lived in the neighborhoods their pharmacies served and often knew your parents, or truck-stop bathrooms on the edge of town.

Both sold the same kind of condoms — usually Trojan or Ramses — although the truck stops often had a separate machine that sold novelty condoms called “French ticklers” that, as far as I know, nobody in their right mind bought.

And back then, still not so long after the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision that finally legalized contraception, all condom dispensers, and many condoms, had a sticker or badge that said, in all capital letters, “FOR PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY.”

Fast forward to the 1980s and the advent of the first really incurable sexually transmitted diseases — herpes and HIV — and condoms got a new lease on life. The failure rate wasn’t any better (it’s still not much better) but as a barrier method condoms prevent disease transmission far better than no condom at all. (And since many STDs like syphilis, herpes, and — in some cases — HIV are transmitted via tissue-to-tissue contact as well as fluid exchange, even a broken condom offers more of a barrier than no condom at all.)

I bring this up because, fast forwarding again to the 2000’s…

The Vatican is considering whether to condone condoms as AIDS prevention. The church opposes condoms as contraception and thinks promoting them to stop AIDS is counterproductive because it encourages promiscuity. But a leading moderate cardinal says the church should allow condoms within marriage when one spouse has HIV, and the pope has asked his health department to consider whether this might be acceptable as a lesser evil.

Read it here, though since I’m not sure how long the link will last I’ve reproduced the entry in its entirety.

This is actually very good news. Contrary to our local experience, in much of the world HIV infection is very effectively transmitted through heterosexual vaginal intercourse — it’s the main way women contract it (and, by proxy, the way their children contract it.) If the cardinals decide to permit condom use that will directly remove a major obstacle to accessability for millions of people world-wide and may also indirectly benefit millions more by undercutting opposition to condom distribution by protestant and non-sectarian advocates of abstinence.

I’m pretty confident that any decision will have absolutely no bearing on the church’s opposition to contraception but with many, many millions of lives at stake I’ll take it.

It’s also worth pointing out that to the extent that condoms can be made available, and to the extent that there can be an official “for prevention of disease only” cover story, even if it’s supposedly only for married heterosexuals, then they will be more readily available for other users and for other purposes.

—-

More good news is on the horizon on the HIV-prevention front by the way

... if we could spur the pharmaceutical companies or the NIH to put a bit of money into the anti-HIV microbicides currently nearing breakthrough status, we’d save a lot of lives. As Kate Steadman points out, the primary driver of HIV infection in the third-world are patriarchal sexual arrangements where a lone male, with his many wives, mistresses, and prostitutes, can contract HIV from one source and spread it far and wide.

Sadly, condom use is taboo under the best of circumstances and, thanks to funding and support from the Christian Right, officially discouraged in many countries (like Uganda). An anti-HIV microbicide would give women a discreet way to protect themselves, one whose application and use they could largely control.

From Ezra Klein at TAPPED

In his post Ezra expresses pessimism about U.S. support for further development of distribution of this class of microbicide but it sounds like the FDA has fast-tracked review of at least one such product.

When I upgraded to the new MovableType template the “remember personl info” feature on the comments page broke somehow. After quite a lot of time imagining I ought to be able to fix it myself (I am supposed to be a perfessional computerer after all) I asked for help. Now, thanks to the wonderful support team at SixApart, if you check the “remember personal info” button you should no longer have to type your personal info each time you want to leave a comment.

Sorry about the delay. Glad it’s finally fixed.

Oh yeah, and for those of you who haven’t left comments yet the shower series continues…

Yesterday I spoke briefly about mistaken understandings of the word “kink”.

Generally, when most of us here “kink” we typically think “any kind of sex beyond bedtime penis-in-vagina missionary-position intercourse that’s preceded by kissing with maybe a little fellatio or cunnilinugus thrown in, and that’s followed by resuming everyday activities such as brushing your teeth and going to sleep.

That’s not a very useful definition of “kink.” For one thing it’s a “negating definition,” an “anything-but-this” one. Actually that right there should be a bit of a flag — if we can only define something by what it’s not then, well, by definition we don’t have a very good idea of what it is! Ok, so what is it?

Well, it’s a metaphor derived from plumbing (though it’s also used in wiring and fence-building.) A kink is a constricting flaw in a pipe or hose. Since it’s an awfully nice day out today I decided to illustrate the point with a garden hose.

Illustration #1 is an un-kinked garden hose. The hose is laid out in a straight line with the faucet wide open. Water gushes out unimpeded.

Not kinked, see the full-size image here.

Illustration #2 shows the same garden hose with a kink in it. Notice little water is coming out of the hose even though the faucet is still wide open. A kinked hose is blocked, effectively damaged, and unable to function properly.

Literally, non-metaphorically kinked, see the full-size image here.

Illustration #3 shows the same garden hose, unkinked, but laid out into sinuous, sensuous loops and turns. This time the hose is not laid out straight, but since there are no kinks in the hose water still gushes out of it unimpeded.

Not straight, not kinked, and still fully-functional, see the full-size image here.

And here’s the deal. In photo #3 the hose isn’t laid out in a utilitarian straight and narrow line, but that doesn’t make it kinked, not at all, at all. It’s working just fine, thank you. In fact, unlike its previous straight-line configuration you could say it’s working beautifully!

A “kinked” hose is the only kind of hose that can’t fully fill whatever it is you’re trying to put water into. The curved, rolled hose with its relaxed twists and loops, though not straight and missionary-style utilitarian, is just as capable of full filling whatever is needed.

So, now that we understand the metaphor let’s reapply it to sex. Now we can understand that just as a kinked hose is un-full-filling, “kinky” sex is nothing more than unfulfilling sex. And we can confirm Madame X’s suspicion about kink. The curved and rolled sex she enjoys, with their relaxed twists and loops are not kinks, as she correctly notes, because she finds them fulfilling.

All this, I think, supports my contention that

...kinky [is] any behavior you feel compelled to engage in even though you don’t enjoy it. This much more limited definition would apply both to, for instance, the pedophile who’s deeply ashamed of his behavior, or someone with a same-sex orientation who feels obliged to form sexual partnerships with members of the opposite sex, or someone with no sexual desire at all who feels they have to have some kind of sex with somebody. And since Madame (and most other people) appear to enjoy their “kinks” very much, those things aren’t actually kinks at all.

Two more genuine kinks: If you’re giving in to your partner’s demand for sex then that’s kinky even if it’s missionary/man-on-top/lights-out sex. (If you’re only acquiescing then it’s still kinky, by the way, even if you wind up having an orgasm. Especially if you resume feeling bad, or worse, about it after.) Another sign of kinkiness, by the way, would be when you do the “walk of shame” the next morning and you really feel ashamed! The point is it’s a kink if it’s something that makes you feel out of integrity before or afterwards whether you’re experiencing arousal at the time or not.

In fact, I’d like to argue that if you really feel constrained to have sex only as described up at the top — “bedtime penis-in-vagina missionary-position intercourse that’s preceded by kissing with maybe a little fellatio or cunnilinugus thrown in, and that’s followed by resuming everyday activities such as brushing your teeth and going to sleep” — then you may be dealing with a few kinks of your own!

The best of the sex blogs by the bloggers who blog them. Categories shift around and change between editions depending on what people send in, and you can get in on the next one by visiting Sugasm.com and completing the form.

Erotic Writing

Back to the Beach (luvsicpup.blogspot.com)
Bliss (sexblogthis.blogspot.com)
Closings and Openings (sadiedark69.blogspot.com)
The Delight Of Sexual Tension (thetastetester.com)
The Driver (pleasinglydebauched.blogspot.com)
First Time – Steaming the Windows in the Backseat of a Car (thestoryofrose.blogspot.com)
Five Minutes (barbiebaby09.livejournal.com)
How Would It Be? (easilyaroused.co.uk)
Illicit Liason (gentlygently.blogspot.com)
Low-Carb Foreplay (realadultsex.com)
masculine/Feminine (damnjezebel.com)
Stairs (alwaysarousedgirl.blogspot.com)
Tara’s Private Diary: Sucking Him Dry (taratainton.com)
Taxi Cab Confessions (bikersballsandteacherstits.blogspot.com)

Thoughts on Sex: Sex Advice, Sex Commentary, Sex News, Interviews, Sexual Politics

Burning Rubber Interview (sin.typepad.com/shauna_by_night)
Cat-Girls and the Sexuality of Cats (shayssexcolumn.blogspot.com)
The Future’s So AdBrite, I Gotta Get Paid (sugarbank.com)
Hand-Jobs: Things You Need To Know, Part One (cuntinglinguist.blogspot.com)
High-Frequency Masturbation (onaniajournal.blogspot.com)
Maenads’ Mantra (sexeteria.blogspot.com)

BDSM and Fetish

All Tied Up (theholidaylife.blogspot.com)
C is for Cookie (redvelvetropeburn.blogspot.com)
Dire Caning Technique (adelehaze.com)
Identity Crisis for a slave (masterenigma.blogspot.com)
Tease and Denial with pastorpaul (goddessjaguar.com)

NSFW Pics

Allie Sin, Naughty Nati Dichotomy Exposed. Plus nekkid pics. (internetisforporn.com)
Crystal Klein (pspporn.com)
Cute Spring Babe Cody Milo in Full Bloom (thesexblog.com)
Exclusive – Justine Joli, Ball (tgp.com)
Front Seat Sexy (eroticandy.blogspot.com)
Hair Goof (seska4lovers.com)
Marathon Progressive House Party… revisited in pictoral (danni654.blogspot.com)
A Saucer of Cream Please (shaysotherspot.blogspot.com)

Experiences (and a Funny)

Cock & Dumplings (nyc-urban-gypsy.blogspot.com)
Dick’s Sauce (janeluvsdick.com)
My first wank (wanklog.blogspot.com)
Sean luvs goths: Part 2 (seanandmel.blogspot.com)