Ok, so while I’ve been a knitter for maybe 20 years I’ve only just picked up crocheting in the last few days. Clue: crochet is kinky. And quick. I’ve already fashioned three items I’d love to model for HNT but while they’re I just haven’t had time to take a photo. Maybe next week? Anyway, I hope this will do in the mean time.

It seems to me there are two ways to go around stopping abortion. One’s controversial and, often, morally suspect, all too often murderous, and… astonishingly ineffective. The other is surprisingly uncontroversial, ethically sustainable, possibly very effective… and largely underutilized by abortion opponents. Curious? Here’s a hint.

Doctors at a Glasgow hospital analyzed the birth control attempted by nearly 1,000 women requesting abortions.

They found the proportion of older women who had used no contraception at all was roughly similar to the percentage of teenagers.

...

Some had experienced a contraceptive failure, such as a burst condom, or had fallen pregnant despite taking oral contraceptives.

However, a large proportion had become pregnant following sex without any attempt at contraception.

In all, 57% of the teenagers had not used contraception, and 51% of the older women – and this small difference was not statistically significant.

Source: BBC News

57% of adolescents, 51% of older women seeking abortions used no contraception. Got that? If you’re opposed to abortion it’s got to be disturbing you that more than half of the women seeking abortions couldn’t use or wouldn’t use contraception in order to avoid needing one. I mean, look at me, I’m not morally opposed to abortion but I’m bothered by those numbers so I know it’s got to be causing you a lot of anguish.

Fortunately there’s something you can do about it.

If you’re an abortion opponent chances are very good you or someone you know also supports Abstience-Only education, and you’re probably aware that those education programs are carefully designed to leave students as ignorant of contraception as humanly possible. Which, you gotta admit, doesn’t appear to be working.

So. Next time you feel like doing something about abortion, how about sharing your concerns with colleagues, parents, educators, and sex-ed curriculum developers who oppose serious, responsible, and effective instruction in contraception. Let them know that more than half of all abortions stem from their educational strategies and that that they too should start acting responsibly.

—-

Note: Of course some abortions were needed despite efforts to employ contraception. Here too abortion opponents could really help. First, contraceptives are often difficult to understand and use correctly. That’s another excellent argument in favor of forcefully supporting meaningful technical sex instruction. Second, since some number of abortions result from correctly used but insufficiently reliable contraception. If you’re an abortion opponent you should find that particularly disturbing. It would really help if you could help lobby for better research and development into contraception that’s not only easy to use correctly but is also more reliable.

The bottom line, though, is that if you’re seriously concerned about abortion you can have a real impact on the number of abortions performed by throwing your support, with all the very real passion you’re able to bring to the issue, behind promoting safe, effective, affordable, easy to administer, and readily available contraception, and by supporting meaningful education and outreach to promote its use.

When it comes to how to deal with unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, pro-choice and anti-abortion people have been adversaries. But before the fact we can find a great deal of common ground. There’s no reason we can’t work together to prevent the unplanned, unwanted pregnancies that lie at the heart of our major disagreements.

I’m just sayin’

Rachel Kramer Bussel of LUSTY LADY has a great post about blogs like hers, or mine, that you can’t read at work.

I’ll never forget how proud yet also weirded out I was when my best friend told me her law firm wouldn’t let her access my blog. I also remember well when Tripod just wiped out my old site, raquelita8.tripod.com, because I had some inappropriate photos on there. That made me determined to stick photos of my naked body all over my new site. Okay, maybe not all over, but on there somehow. I’m still amused when people tell me they can’t access my blog or site from work and now, thanks to Lux Nightmare, that has a term that’s especially apropos for this blog: The Pink Ghetto.

Read the rest here. Also see an adorable no-breasts, but still NSFW photo of RCB.

Yeah, I get that too. It could be something about the title. It could be the photos (see “continue reading,” below.) And I knew when I bought it that the URL “www.RealAdultSex.com wasn’t exactly going to make me any friends at NetNanny or SurfControl. (I mean that literally, by the way. I was tinkering with political and first-amendment-issues blogging back then and it seemed like the perfect vehicle for tweaking those and automated net filter vendors ever time they blocked what would otherwise be a perfectly ordinary political blog based on its URL. But I digress…)

Anyway, if you’re trying to read this from work you probably can’t, for which I apologize since they already got me at the URL.

And if you’re trying to read this from work , then you probably can’t because if the URL didn’t block it the photos just above probably did. Which means you’re not going to find out that I think it would be cool to be sitting together, naked, you on my lap with your back to me, so you could look down where my cock was standing proudly between your legs and against your belly so it seemed as if it were your cock, and so you could reach down and feel its length rising from your own groin, and when you reached lower you’d find languid testicles lolling in loose skin instead of your own familiar folds. And when you grew impatient with it outside you, as I kissed and bit your neck and shoulders, as I supported and rolled your breasts against my palm, you could palm my length, rise and slip forward just a bit, and guide me into you, rocking your hips back or forth against me to press me against your mons from the inside before leaning back against my chest, your toes and mine just touching the floor, rocking and gimballing the chair like there was no tomorrow.

Oh well.

Luckily one can find chairs like that in home offices too, and at home there might be a nicely made backless rocking chair somewhere that’s not in an office. Those work wonderfully well too.

One other thing. If you’re trying to read this from work then some combination of the URL, the images, and the text — not to mention the responsible-adult metadata I put in my HTML headers to properly keep this site blocked out of schools and parentally-controlled computers — has already gotten me.

Which means you may not no to go to the Dirtyspoke Best of Sex-Blogs page and vote for me in the “Best Male Sex Blog” category, or to vote for all the other great bloggers in the other categories.

Voting ends at midnight, January 31st, so I hope you’re reading this from home.

Professor Fate of The world was made for people who aren’t cursed with self-awareness asks

4. When you have a “toe-curling” orgasm, do your does curl up, or down?

He asked the question here.

I’m not sure why but the question shocked me.

You know about that phenomenon where people tend to unconsciously assume everything else in the world is like the way their corner is? It simply never occurred to me that “toe curling” could mean anything but “curl down.”

No reason for me to believe that.

What other thinks do we just know to be true about sex that just ain’t so?

With advertisements for both the Superbowl and Valentine’s Day cluttering the media this time of year it was only natural that a survey (sponsored by a beer company) would come out saying…

...a large percentage (44 percent) of men put more time and energy into making Super Bowl plans than making Valentine’s Day plans.

Randomly selected source: Reno Gazette-Journal

It’s a charming little terminal moraine of gender stereotype and commercial holidays — a perfect cultural set piece arriving just in time for us to cuddle up to our favorite clichés, deliver a few “tut tuts,” or “aw honeys” or “hey-ell yeahs” and… then go buy a little more beer this week and a nicer card, or box of chocolates two weeks later.

I dunno. If you choose to look at the thing with suspicion about stereotypes questions start coming up.

- How does that 6656/44% breakout compare to women, or the aggregate of men and women, who spend time and energy making both Superbowl and Valentine’s Day plans?

- How much time and energy is required to plan for either the Superbowl or Valentine’s Day anyway?

- How much time and energy is required to plan any sort of group gathering (say, a dinner party for six) vs. any sort of individual outing (say, a date with one’s significant other?)

- Is there much variation between men and women in the amount of time they spend planning a dinner party vs. a date with their significant other?

Anyway, the point being that surveys like this is all part of the libretto of a stylized, overplayed opera, one we’re supposed to know so well we just hum along without really listening, and certainly without questioning who to clap for and who to hiss.

And is anybody really happy if an old curmudgeon comes along, scowls at the playbill, and asks…

Hallmark rather than Coors had sponsored the same survey would the headline have been “6656% of men put more time and energy into making Valentine’s Day plans than making Superbowl plans?”

I’ve foolishly agreed to play pedal-steel guitar in an improvised country-western band accompanying a very amateur theatrical production in a couple of weeks. I say foolishly because it’s been a very, very long time since I’ve played music for a live audience, and it’s been even longer since I played pedal-steel in front of anybody. (Oh wait! I’ve never done it at all! Yikes!)

Anyway, one of the songs we’ll be playing is Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.”

When I heard the original as a kid I never paid much attention to it. Hearing it as a teenager in the 1960s was like having my teeth pulled. Hearing it during the 1970’s we’d just change the station so we didn’t have to listen to that kind of archaic sexist tripe. Same thing in the ’80s except we called it sexist enabling drivel. I don’t think I heard it once in the 1990s.

And if you’d asked me about it last week I’d have said it was just a bunch of repressed, plain-vanilla, knee-jerk, and ultimately and obviously insincere propaganda for monogamy.

Which, after all, it is. Almost. But.

Listening to it this afternoon as I was trying to work out fills I actually listened to the lyrics.

Sometimes its hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man

[emphasis mine —fl]

That’s not coming out of brainwashed unconsciousness. More radically, it’s not coming out of some genetically predetermined “monogamous-by-nature“ inclination to fidelity women are supposed to have. (Loretta Lynn offered one far more pragmatic, and situational, critique of women’s fidelity in (Now I’ve Got) The Pill.)

Monogamy for people, not just women, doesn’t seem to be natural at all. It’s rather the opposite, and if you recall that we rarely require anthems, sermons, laws, or other exhortation to follow actual natural inclinations, that kind of makes sense. (It also explains the hint of resentment in lines like “And if you love him, aww, be proud of him / Cuz after all he’s just a man.”)

Anyway, while I still don’t like the (surface-level) sentiments expressed in the song, or the clamped-teeth Sunday-morning-vs.-Saturday-Night hypocrisy of the culture it emerged from, but as a reluctant-but-sincere monogamist I recognize and appreciate the way the song expresses not unconscious ease but considerable conscious effort.

Ok, so when I was growing up (admittedly quite a while back) I remember reading in earnest sex manuals that it was common for boys to get together in groups and have “circle jerks,” where they’d masturbate.

The text sounded eerily similar to something I just Googled up from Answers.com.

Sometimes this may be in the form of a game. Participants may masturbate themselves in a challenge to see who can ejaculate first and be declared the winner. Other times, one is to masturbate his opponent and the one who ejaculates first is instead declared the loser and may have to eat the other’s semen. Other competitive games include who can ejaculate the most semen, who can ejaculate the farthest, or simply who has the largest penis.

A circle jerk sometimes involves a contest to see who can ejaculate first on a piece of bread or biscuit. The last to ejaculate may be forced to eat the semen soaked biscuit, commonly called “cummy biscuit”, a “limp biscuit”, a “ookie cookie” or, more commonly, a “soggy biscuit”. In Australia, the term “soggy sao” is also used, referring to the popular biscuit produced by Arnott’s. This is often an urban legend associated with fraternity initiation of pledges. Among adolescents, or men with adolescent sensibilities, there may also be a cash prize for the victor, from a collected “kitty”.

Read more of their “Mutual Masturbation” article here.

Anyway while I read about or heard the story often enough in my junior-high and high-school years I neither saw, was invited to join, or even heard about such an event. And if the goal really is supposed to be racing to finish first I’m not sure I missed much since a) while men can generally come pretty quickly when they apply themselves you generally get out of masturbation only what you’re willing to put into it, and b) typically one’s (heterosexual) partner is rarely impressed by demonstrations of rapidity.

Still, times change. Bukkake social clubs , slash-fic fans, and Betty Dodson... not to mention centrifugal sex-education curricula (Abstience-only on the one hand, anything with actual information about sex on the other) tend to make the original, secretive, all-boys idea sort of quaint.

Anybody know anyone who’s actually been there and done that?

Note: Wikipedia’s entry on mutual masturbation mentions something called a “dog pile” which, in mixed company, sounds more interesting.

A “dog pile” is similar to an orgy, except the mass of people on the floor (single sex or both sexes) engage only in manual stimulation, rather than penetration. This should not be confused with a “puppy pile” a non-sexual cluster of people that may occur at a non-sexual “cuddle party.”

Source: Wikipedia

. . .

Hmm. You know how I ramble off topic sometimes? I’m about to really do that here.

That Wikipedia paragraph begins with “a ‘dog pile’ is similar to an orgy…” and then says it’s not an orgy because there’s no penetration. So now I’m really confused. Is that like that “eating each other isn’t sex” things? If there are a bunch of people in a room masturbating together and then someone agrees to penetrate someone else does that suddenly mean everybody’s at an orgy after all? No? How about if two others engage in penetration while everyone else just masturbates? Still no? Then is it still somehow not an orgy if one or two holding out for masturbation even though everyone else is penetrating each other? Yeah, yeah, silly questions. Unless you define orgies or any kind of sex in terms of penetration because if that’s your distinction then you’re going to need those questions.

According to Steve Ramos, reviewing “Teeth,” a new dark-comedy/horror film, in Indiewire

...in countless psychiatrist offices everywhere, there are people describing their fear of vaginal dentata, the belief that women have sharp teeth lining their vagina.

Find the rest of the article here.

Can this possibly still be a phobia, let alone a plausible fear? It seems a bit of a stretch that it ever might have been, but Ramos says

I can’t say with certainty if anyone with that fear was sitting in the audience watching actor-turned-filmmaker Mitchell Lichtenstein’s “Teeth,” a silly, splatter movie about a teen girl with G Spot canines. But there were enough screams, as well as nervous laughs, to conclude that everyone has some queasiness when it comes to bodily fluids and orifices. If [filmmaker and famous-artist’s son Michael] Lichtenstein’s aim with his mixed-bag horror comedy was to bring the fear of vaginal dentate to life, he succeeded fantastically.

I guess what confuses me about the phobia (which Wikipedia says relates to various symbolic concerns about patriarchy and its related castration anxieties) is that as far as I know it never crops up in relationship with fellatio. Where you’d think actual teeth would be a bigger cause for concern.

I’m just sayin’

Via Vivianne’s Sex Carnival.

So usually when I post risqué photos I put them behind the “Continue reading…” link to increase your page-load speed and to make the homepage slightly less awkward to browse at work. That’s all well and good (if you’re at work, anyway) but several people have groused that the images show up anyway in RSS feeds which, again, makes things awkward when browsed from work.

Ok, so I’ve been tinkering with templates so I think I’ve implemented the same Continue-reading link in RSS feeds. The only way to test it, though, is to test it. So here you go. (Note: so far, anyway, I’ve only updated the standard atom.xml-style feed. If your feed reader uses one of the alternatives — index.xml or index.rdr — I don’t think you’ll see a difference. Let me know.)

Oh yeah, I’ve added Technorati tags to the RSS feeds as well.

Note: I took the photo behind the fold last summer to celebrate putting new lithium-ion batteries in my camera.

That “Integrity Balls,” the male counterpart to daddy/daughter “Purity Balls,” are intended to extract vows from boys to preserve women’s chastity instead of their own is just… I dunno, it goes against all but maybe the first 100 and the last 100 years of Christianity’s tradition with chastity. From St. Anthony and the early Church Fathers of Scetis, Egypt to the American Harvey Kellogg and Muscular Christianity, men’s chastity has been at least as important as women’s and often far, far, far more so.

Yes, the older world order was no more respectful of women — until maybe the 1700’s they were considered utterly immoral and therefore willing to copulate, at the drop of the hat, with any man too weak-willed to resist their wiles (if their families somehow left them unchaperoned.) And yes, the latter-day fantasies of Dr. Graham (of Graham crackers) and Dr. Kellogg (of Kellogg’s corn flakes) that a single ejaculation was equivalent of losing a pint of blood were beyond mentally ill.

But the fact remains that until very recently indeed chastity (as opposed to pre-marital virginity) was primarily the domain of men.

And therefore the fact that modern-day chastity movements has so completely detached itself from male chastity is just depraved.

Humorous side note #1: ‘Member in the movie Dr. Strangelove where the suicidal Gen. Jack D. Ripper goes off on a screed about the need to protect men’s “precious bodily fluids?” While it seemed bizarre by the 1960s, when the movie was made, and sounds utterly daft today, it was routine medical advice in the 1890s when it was believed, for instance, that excessive “conjugal endeavors with one’s spouse” — say a “depraved” 12 times a year — meant certain insanity and death.

Humorous side note #2: Westerners aren’t the only ones to believe in “semen conservation.” For instance it’s one of the foundations of Hinduism. (It’s also pretty central to Taoism, Buddhism, and a number of South American shamanistic principles. Withholding ejaculation was a huge motivation behind the development of Tantric sex.) Anyway, in the Ayurvedic medical tradition of India loss of semen through ejaculation is also a big health risk for men. And now that women are allegedly ejaculating it seems they too are now at risk. According to the Llewellyn Journal, in an article about women and tantra, “...we are aware of one contemporary neo-Tantric teacher who claims that female ejaculation causes cervical cancer…”