Fri, 2007-08-31 11:09

Holly of The Pervocracy wrote a great post about the unsung art of relaxing sex.

There’s parts of sex that don’t get a lot of publicity. Publicity seems to be mostly for either mushy loving sex or, more often, wild monkey sex. But when in book or movie or pornography do they talk about the joy of relaxing friendly sex?

Wednesday night, I gave Brandon a thirty-minute blowjob. It wasn’t furiously passionate (I’ve only got about ten minutes of continuous furypassion in me, I need to work out more or something), it was more like an intense kind of cuddling. We were talking the whole time.

...

It’s unambiguously sexual to have a man’s hard penis in your mouth, I guess. But there was no moaning, no thrusting or headgrabbing, no dirty talk, barely any acknowledgment that we were doing anything but lying in bed together. No pressure to do it faster, better, harder, finish it up already. Just keep doing that as long as you like.

Read the rest of her post here.

I’d like to say she beat me to the punch but to be honest while I keep meaning to post something along these lines it’s been months since I first thought about it, and it might have been many more before I ever got around to posting about it myself. I’m glad she did though, because relaxing, friendly sex really is underrepresented in song and story but it’s just… so… cool!

My version of her story might have be something like lying together end to end on crumpled sheets on a just-too-warm, sunny afternoon, each partner’s head cradled on the inside of their partner’s out-turned thigh, maybe talking or listening to acoustic music on the local college station, maybe even reading to each other, each partner’s spare hand slowly, desultorily tracing, stroking the other’s body or just rolling your head to the side to gaze at, smell, nuzzle, or mouth your partner… just enough to keep her lips full and wet or to keep him full and fat… but not so much to lose their train of thought. For long anyway.

Or my version of the story might have been leaning back in an old-fashioned armless rocker, a partner lazily straddling me, her arms around my neck, her head on her arms, my one hand on the small of her back and another at the small of her neck, feeling each other’s chests rising and falling as we breathe, our telling each other awful puns or stories about things we did during childhood summers, with breaks for slow, lazy, but extremely pleasant stirring of interlocked parts, the joints of the rocker (and maybe the old hardwood subfloor) supplying the sighs and groans we ourselves were too lazily enraptured to produce.

Sigh! It’s so much harder to find time for that now in the summertime than it used to be. So worth it when you can.

Thu, 2007-08-30 23:46

Another one of those quirky things I’m learning from watching porn clips over at YouTube knockoff YouPorn.com: most women seem to need absolutely no clitoral stimulation to have moaning, sometimes even screaming orgasms. For many it seems to make no difference whether there’s any below-the-waist contact at all. Heck, for quite a few it seems to be enough to just kneel there mouth open, tongue out, eyes closed to experience paroxysms.

So…

I’m not even bragging when I say I’m very good at the kind of things that have made my partners have orgasms. Near OCD attention levels combined with a severe indoctrination in the “no-sex” class paradigm, while actually not that healthy sexually nevertheless helped me develop some pretty good techniques with my hands, my mouth, my thighs, my erect cock, and even (through jeans) my toes that have generally worked extravagantly well in combination with hot kisses, strong arms, very warm skin, gentle mummers, [ok, ok, also gentle murmurs! —fl] naughty stories, and genuine feelings. I’ve been with partners who’ve come in just seconds (her on top “dry humping” fully clothed is very effective for lots of people) to several hours (tied to the corners of a bed with soft leather straps in a candle-lit room and tormented mercilessly with a small brush kept wet with her juices.) And yet…

And yet…

For all that I’ve never learned the secret of giving partners near-spontaneous orgasms with no visible contact with any of her erogenous zones (better known or little known) and so…

Have I been missing something all these years?

—-

For the record this afternoon I spotted one clip where a couple was engaged in side-lying rear-entry intercourse and the man, clearly no better experienced at the mystery technique than I, reached around his partner’s body and stimulated her vulva. Seriously, it was the first time I’d seen that. In porn, I mean.

—-

No doubt I’ve just been making poor choices but as yet none of the men have had similarly spontaneous orgasms without… well… quite a lot of friction first. Which is strange when you think about it — men allegedly being so much easier to “bring” to orgasm than women and all.

—-

I’m sure none of this is giving young men and young women with no other sources of good sexual instruction nothing but the best impressions of what to expect from their partners.

Thu, 2007-08-30 23:43

Sheesh. This Larry Craig men’s room arrest thing just goes on and on. I was at the gym tonight and CNN was wall-to-wall panel discussions. Much of the discussion was inside baseball (how much will this hurt/help Republicans/Democrats) but every now and then a panelist, grasping for anything else to say, would pipe up about the hypocrisy issue of a gay anti-gay lawmaker.

If the story won’t go away, and if people are going to persist in talking about the hypocrisy angle, I guess it’s ok for me to post a reminder that the scandal isn’t the hypocrisy, it’s the policy! Hypocrites are a dime a dozen. So, unfortunately, are crappy, unworkable, often punitive or vindictive laws. There’s probably not a whole lot we can do about the former but there’s no excuse for the latter.

Consider: Larry Craig voted for a constitutional ban of same-sex marriage, against adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes, against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, for prohibiting same-sex marriage, in favor of job discrimination for sexual orientation, and as a state legislator against anything resembling civil unions. Craig also belonged to numerous “family values” groups, spoke vociferously on those issues, campaigned hard as a standard bearer of those values.

And yet…

And yet…

Despite all that, despite all his good will, all his exhaustive campaigning, all his research, all the testimony he heard, all the bills he voted for, all the money he raised for anti-gay groups…

Despite all that he continued to engage in homosexual behavior.

Worse, he engaged in the stereotypically creepy men’s-room cruising that he and most of his supporters find most alarming about homosexual behavior.

So…

Is his personal hypocrisy the scandal or is it the didn’t-even-work-for-him-even-though-he-wrote-them policies he’s spent his career advocating? (Clue: if you think it’s his hypocrisy you haven’t been paying attention.)

—-

I might add that there’s another Craig-related scandal at the policy level that I alluded to in previous post: if he, like so many of his conservative colleagues, is a covert, closet homosexual then the “family values” policies he’s been advocating are utter fiction.

Think about turning the tables — imagine even a well-meaning heterosexual trying to create policies that promoted homosexuality. With no experience, and perhaps compounded by good-will-driven efforts to “pass” for homosexual himself, you wouldn’t expect him to make proposals that actually accorded with issues that are most important to, let alone most beneficial to, real homosexuals. Such a clueless cheerleader might propose making purses available for gay men because, he might assume, all gay men are transvestites. Such a wannabe do-gooder might propose earmarks for grants to recognize “lisp-bonics” as a “legitimate” dialect!

In other words, he might merely attempt to legislate to the most extreme stereotypes without ever recognizing that…

well…

most homosexual men don’t cross dress, don’t mince and dish, aren’t fussy hairdressers or interior decorators, and don’t otherwise conform to heterosexually-generated stereotypes about them…

any more than most heterosexual men sit around in locker-rooms adjusting their balls nor stand around golf courses wearing mixed-plaid golf caps nor pissing in their Depends at the prospect that someone they know might be “a little light in the loafers.” Update: Or worrying that if their daughters got the same pay as their sons they’d never see grandchildren, etc., etc., etc.

Turning the world back upright again that’s exactly the sort of thing Craig, and Haggard, Allen, and Jim West or (from the chastity/fidelity/probity side) Vitter and Giuliani and McCain and Laura Schlessinger have tried to foist on real straight people. Update: Joe Conanson of Salon.com has a more extensive list dating back to the McCarthy era’s Roy Cohn. Mike Rogers of BlogActive is keeping the list more than current. (He’s the gay activist who broke the story of Craig’s arrest, among other outings of closeted gay Republicans who vote anti-gay.)

Again, it’s not their personal hypocrisy that’s a problem. It’s the clueless, whole-cloth-fiction-based policies they try to foist off on the rest of us — normal heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, trans- inter- and asexuals — in hopes we’ll mistake them for “one of us.”

Thanks but no thanks.

@#$!@!~@%

Thu, 2007-08-30 14:01

Ok, another question after randomly browsing recently uploaded clips on YouTube knockoff YouPorn.com.

So there you are enjoying anal sex and then just before you (according to the script anyway) and your partner have orgasms he abruptly pulls out, scurries around, and sticks his cock in your mouth and (with some degree of effort or other) proceeds to ejaculate. So… hot or not?

Call me a libertine prude here (why not, I do) but… I just don’t see that many people heading out to a club in the evening saying “gee, I hope I meet some nice guy who’s into ass-to-mouth!”

If I’m just being totally old-fashioned here let me know in comments, m’kay?

—-

Part two of this, by the way, is that based on personal experience men just have to be doing this sort of stuff because they think their partners want them to. Because, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, when you’re a man concentrating on his own enjoyment the least satisfying thing you can possibly do is withdraw from your warm, wet partner just before ejaculation.

Seriously, as Wikipedia dryly puts it in it’s entry on coitus interruptus as method of contraception

The method may be difficult for some couples to use. The interruption of intercourse may leave some couples sexually frustrated or unsatisfied.

So… again, hot or not?

—-

Yeah, yeah, they do it in porn so if porn is all that passes for sex education for millions of impressionable young women and men then maybe that’s how they expect it to go. But as I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, I’m pretty sure the “money shot” in porn arises as much out of expediency and the relative status of male vs. female performers in the porn industry.

In terms of expediency, semen is surprisingly sticky and therefore way easier to wipe off of the body than to lave out. And since virtually all industrial porn is a) highly bodily-fluid averse and b) tightly scheduled because producers are ridiculously parsimonious, the quicker the cleanup the better as far as commercial guys are concerned.

Don’t get me wrong here, I totally understand that industrial pornographers are under no obligation to be even remotely realistic, let alone educational. And since they exist mainly to facilitate (mostly) male masturbation it even makes sense that every single fucking sex scene in industrial porn seems to end with the actors stopping all the action so the man of the moment can masturbate to ejaculation.

But in terms of actual male orgasmic enjoyment it’s an absolute buzz kill.

So, final time, in your personal experience and not just as an abstract viewer: ass to mouth ejaculation — hot or not?

‘Cause if it’s not hot for you then we men would probably enjoy ourselves far more if we didn’t do that.

Thu, 2007-08-30 11:43

One of too many consequences of the contemporary dominant male paradigm is the frame of reference that men “just naturally” want more sex than women, who (we falsely believe) constitute the “just naturally” disinterested “no-sex” class.

(Ever notice how often “just naturally” really means “taken for granted and consequently never examined?”)

So check out this startling question and response I found at WebMD’s Health and Sex column

She Wants More
Question: My husband and I are newlyweds and I can’t keep my hands off him. I initiate sex 85 percent of the time. He usually says “no” because he is tired. Am I being selfish because I want sex more often? Is it normal for the woman to be the initiator most of the time?

Answer: Psychotherapist Rachel Morris says the first question to ask yourself is whether there are any other times — apart from when you’re having sex — where he gives you his “entire, full, unadulterated attention.” “If the answer is no,” Morris says, “it may be that you’re confusing the desire to have sex with the desire to have him all to yourself — the reassurance that you’re still loved. Intimacy and sex aren’t necessarily the same things. So pushing him to have sex, when really what you want is intimacy, probably means that you’re getting neither.

Source: WebMD.com

Mmm, boy if I were a knee-jerk gender activist I’d just automatically chew the authors another butthole for implying that if a woman says she wants more sex than her partner does she really just wants intimacy.

Because the entire point of the “no-sex” class paradigm is that women have to want something else because they never really want to have sex. Instead, quoth the dominant paradigm, women must be manipulated, levered, seduced, enticed, compensated, or coerced into sex. Instead, quoth the dominant paradigm, women who don’t need to be coerced and instead are initiating sex are somehow cheating, consciously using their booty to extract some other advantage from their male partners… or (shades of the reply at WebMD!) they’re using sex unconsciously in an effort to be “popular” with the boy or boys.

So yeah, not exactly the worlds most progressive foundation for rendering advice, Docs.

But…

But…

But…

Reflexes notwithstanding I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. And here’s the deal.

Had the question been asked by a man the answer would have almost certainly fallen along the lines of

Mismatched sex drive is one of the most common problems with couples, says general practitioner Sarah Humphery. “It’s interesting you say that you don’t understand how getting more involved in the housework is going to help,” Humphery says. “She’s going to be less tired, she’s going to be preoccupied, she’s going to feel less like a sort of housewife — you’ve got to make her feel sexy.”

From a previous question in the same article.

In other words it would have been a variation on the same old inside-the-paradigm “just naturally” thing with the same old conflation of sex and housework. (Men should pull their weight. However advisors should not tie it to women’s sexual availability!)

Instead, though, it was a woman asking and so…

Instead of totally jerking their knees they actually put a little thought into the answer.

And to be honest while you could read their advice as a complete affirmation of the “no-sex” class paradigm I’m going to turn it the other way and suggest…

It’s good advice. Good for women, sure, but from a social-indoctrination standpoint even better advice for men!

I realized back when I was 19 that while I seriously enjoyed sex I was really getting something out of the fact that, back then anyway, if you had sex together you slept snuggled together afterwards as well.

Actual sexual urges, you may have noticed, can be handled handily with, um, our own hands. Snuggling, however, requires two people. Using sex, as I did, as a way to get that close physical contact with another human being, however, alienated me from sex.

And lemme tell ya, if Freud, if not 100% right, was still on to something when he said there are problems when we seek nonsexual outlets for our sexual urges, he neglected to mention it’s no better to seek sexual outlets for our non-sexual urges!

We’re all easily starved for intimacy, and while I’ll be the last person to knock the very distinct pleasures of sex, I want to always be the first to knock efforts to ask more of sex than it can deliver.

Anyway, given the author’s answer to the previous question I think they probably need to be given the benefit of the doubt, I’m still giving it. “Am I needing sex or some other form of physical intimacy” is always a good question to ask. Even if we never think to ask it of men.

Update: Since the above is a bit convoluted here’s a quick recap.

- The advice “if you think you’re not getting enough sex, check to make sure you’re really not using sex as a substitute for other needed forms of intimacy” is good advice. – The advice was offered to, figuratively, the first woman to express interest in more sex than her partner wants, whereas – Since it’s assumed that men are “just that way” they are almost never offered the aforementioned very good advice. (For instance that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone else suggest it.) – Yet the complaint is so common among men it’s beyond cliche.

Even bottom-ier line: the advice, while sound, nevertheless insults women’s sexual autonomy and men’s sensitivity since it’s offered only to a woman and not to myriad men in the exact same boat.

Thu, 2007-08-30 09:34

So Senator Larry Craig has insisted for years, and continues to say “I am not gay!”. This despite evidence that he’s up on what seems to be well established and fairly sophisticated “cruising” behavior.

As a thought experiment let’s give Craig, and millions of other in-denial men, the benefit of the doubt. Back in the late 1980s, when HIV/AIDS research was really beginning to hit its stride, I remember reading about a minor outbreak among married Latina women in, I think, southern California. Research showed that population slice had the lowest opportunity for outside sexual contact, due in part to a very high “macho” culture among their husbands. So the question was where were they getting it. And the answer, according to the study, was that their husbands picking up the infection from one-the-way-home sex with anal-receptive-only transvestite men, who their macho-culture partners referred to with contempt as maricóns.

Now I happen to think there were some problems with assumptions in that study but I was really taken with a point the researchers brought up: that in macho culture you’re not considered “gay” unless you engage in receptive sex from another penis.

In other words for a lot of men putting your penis inside another guy doesn’t make you gay!

I think the logic (such as it is) is that since penis insertion is a traditional heterosexual male role, as long as you’re the one doing the inserting you’re home free. And by extension since penis reception is the traditional heterosexual female role then allowing penile penetration is what makes men gay.

Anyway, I’m guessing that Senator Craig has been telling himself that since he (generally?) only sticks his penis in other men’s mouths or anuses he’s really not “gay” because he’s not engaging the “homosexual” a.k.a. receptive a.k.a. feminine role.

Now. Can we just take a moment to digest how heteronormatively insane that is?

I actually don’t see how (or why!!!) you’d want to weasel-word your way into a claim that “sex with other men” isn’t “homosexual sex.” And therefore I don’t see how, or why, you’d want to claim that only one side of the equation was homosexual while the other wasn’t.

But I especially don’t see how, let alone why, you could pretend you’re not homosexual if you’re the one who wants to stick your penis and ejaculate somewhere inside another man’s body!

Call me a clueless heterosexual here but who wants to “get off” with you isn’t nearly as significant as who you want to “get off” with.

Anyway, I think this is a pretty important distinction to get across to folks here because I think it comes up a lot in the whole anxious “does [this that or the other] make me gay” business men subject themselves and others to.

• “Bending over” for your girlfriend? Um, since she’s your girlfriend that’s not gay.
• Soliciting a blowjob from a man in a Minnesota restroom on a trip to visit your wife? Um, since he’s a man that’s gay.
• Being solicited in a Georgetown men’s room? Doesn’t make you gay. (And therefore really doesn’t justify going back with a friend to assault the solicitor.)
• Molesting custodial minor boys even though you’re married? semantics not withstanding, whatever the heteronormative-roles justification, you should stop lying to yourself and have sex with men your own age instead.
• Carrying your wife’s purse when her hands are full? Um, dude, she’s your wife!
• Sexually attracted to both men and women, or maybe attracted only to men but still married, as Senator Craig is? That would be either bisexual or homosexual, but not heterosexual.

Finally here’s why I think this whole thing is such a joke. What the fuck would be wrong with being any of those things — lesbian, gay, straight, bi-, trans-, inter-, or asexual anyway? [Eek! Any of the above except, of course, molestation since “consenting adults” really is categorically binding! Sheesh! Teach me to post everything without proofreading! —fl]

—-

Hmm. Actually this might also be a strict generational thing. I remember someone asking his elderly mom about an uncle who was supposed to be gay and the mom said, rather heatedly, “No he was not gay! Your uncle was bisexual!”

Wed, 2007-08-29 23:12

Ok, so while randomly comment surfing (a great way to find new blogs is to follow links back to commenters on your blog, and then links back to commenters on their blogs, and so on) I ran across a link to an X-rated YouTube knockoff called YouPorn.com.

Unnecessary note: YouPorn.com is a porn site. If you’re offended by video porn you’re just going to be offended by YouPorn, ok? If you’re aroused by video porn you’ll probably find something you like.

And if you, like me, just aren’t as familiar with video porn as, say, text and still images, then you, like me, might learn something.

For instance I’ve learned that unlike any of my direct experience with real-life sex, a lot of people in porn, particularly men in porn, pump like they’re having a panic attack in a broom closet. If I had a metronome handy I’d be more sure but I’m guessing it’s somewhere between allegro and presto. Since I don’t let’s just say it’s faster than the average football half-time marching band marches.

So… Is it just me that’s never gotten into sex as an anaerobic activity?

Seriously?

Actually it can’t just me that’s into variations in pace and tempo. I haven’t watched that many other couples in real life but I’ve seen and/or heard enough to know otherwise. And I’ve had enough partners and enough who’ve set their own paces when, for instance, they’ve ridden on top of me, who’ve somehow managed to get off without pulverizing me or others.

Anyway, if I seem to be missing something please feel free to clue me in. I’m not adverse to it, just surprised and perhaps not sufficiently impressed.

Wed, 2007-08-29 23:00

Where the sun sometimes does shine.*

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

• Meaning the Pacific Northwest, of course. :-)

Wed, 2007-08-29 08:26

Someone posting with the alias “test” at Pandagon passes along the consensus list of social conservatives who in just the last six weeks(!) have been discovered practicing in private what they both ardently decry and, more disturbingly, actively legislating against!

First the list, then an explanation for why it’s not just gossip to repeat it.

• Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), cruising for potty sex, somehow “mistakenly” pleads guilty.
• Diaper David Vitter (R-LA) admits he’s a “bad”, “naughty” and “nasty boy” with hookers.
• former White house spiritual advisor and fallen megachurch pastor Tweaker Ted “I’m completely heterosexual” Haggard asking whatever fans he has left for money.
• former NC Republican lawmaker and Christian Action League president, Coy C. Privette — caught at the no-tell motel with a sex worker — also guilty.
• Mark Foley is back in the news, he won’t turn over his former congressional computer to investigators.

• Rep. Bob Allen, another Republican, caught asking to blow an undercover officer and willing to pay $20 for the pleasure; currently coming up with an excuse for the day (scary black men, thunderstorms) for his same-sex appetite.

Whoever it was said it here.

On one level it all really is just gossip because nothing is changed by adding these names to the list of social-conservatives who deal from the bottom of the propriety deck maintained by Armchair Subversive. Sure, the list is long, and yes, it’s updated continuously.

But if such revelations were ever going to reverberate social conservatives out of their literally grievous double standards they would have done so long since. If they were going to shame the perpetrators they would have. If revelations were going to prompt followers and adherents to question their leaders they would have.

They haven’t.

So why bother?

I say we bother not because Larry Craig or Ted Haggard or David Vitter or Laura Schlessinger are nasty fucking, cash-in-on-the-misery-of-others examples of the banality of evil. In policy terms that’s the devil talking — leading us away from real purpose in pursuit of mere character flaws.

But from a conservative policy standpoint character flaws aren’t the problem here. The scandal is that nearly the canon conservative sexual policy is largely invented by self-defined deviants who have no fucking idea what “normal” behavior might be!!!

They pull things right straight out of their asses and try to slap those of us with actual experience of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual or asexual normalcy in the face. And when we complain of the out-of-their-asses smell and otherwise complain of their un- or surreality they double down on proposed penalties rather than backing off. And why? Because to back off would be to admit they have no fucking clue.

Got that? The problem with Senator Craig isn’t that now and then he enjoys getting anonymous assfuckings in men’s restrooms.[*] Nor is it that he enjoys it even though he’s in a long-term marriage to a woman. The problem is that, leading such a life, he imagines he knows enough about either normal homosexuality or normal heterosexuality to competently support, let alone author, legislation regulating either.

Bottom line: public policy should not be in the hands of men and women who are trying to pass.

Tue, 2007-08-28 15:19

Feminism is not a joke because this story is not a joke.

Video of former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami apparently shaking a woman’s hand—horrors—is roiling politics there. Khatami claims the video is a fake.

Source: TalkingPointsMemo.com

I think the direction we’re headed in our part of the world, towards social and economic indifference to gender, is pretty wonderful. But whatever benefits may accrue locally, they are clearly not yet well distributed. See also: I’ve got nothing against equal rights for women, but we’ve got that, so isn’t feminism nowadays just going too far? at FinallyFeminism101.