Recently in HNT Category
This set started out as a demonstration of the idea that you can tell pants sizes by folding them and then wrapping them around your waist to see if they go half way. No, turns out it doesn't work for me either, so I took it from there.
I had fun taking these photos. I'll probably add a bunch more to the set in the next few weeks.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Photo by Flickr user hbruinsma. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[This seemed relevant to HNT folks so I'm posting it today. --fl]
Lauren of Feministe takes an issue raised by Jessica at Jezebel...
One day, you’re exchanging promise rings, and the next thing you know, you’re prosecuting your ex-fiancé for putting photos of your boobs on MySpace. The perils of modern love! Richard Morgan delves deep into what he terms “Revenge Porn,” i.e., when men distribute pornographic images of their exes without consent, on Details.com, and it ain’t pretty. The most insidious form of revenge porn includes the woman’s name, phone number, and address along with the naughty video for ultimate public humiliation. The worst part of the whole thing? Revenge porn is notoriously hard to prosecute.
... details her own experience of "revenge porn" and then makes a couple of excellent and obvious points
I don’t want to get into another feminist porn war on the blog, yet I think it’s pretty safe to say that most will agree that this is Not Okay. That being said, there is a market for this, so much so that there are several free and for-pay sites that capitalize on the “revenge porn” market, wherein dudes can post pictures and movies of their ex-bitches along with “that’ll show her!” messages meant to punish the little amateur sluts. The article linked in the blockquote details some of the issues victims run into when they try to get the movies and pictures removed, and moreover, the inability to prosecute their exes.
I'm... pretty sure that anyone who thinks it's ok to upload intimate images without the subject's permission, with or without identifying text, needs to have their corneas flared. As a highly visual person myself that's about as harsh a fate as I'm likely to wish on anyone but... seriously!
I mean...
You know how I talk sometimes about how *both* sides of the feminist porn vs feminist anti-porn sides are *mostly* right? About how on the one hand "pro-sex" feminists are right that exercising agency and challenging centuries of pressure to appear, or even better to *be,* chaste and sexless empower women? And about how on the other that "anti-porn" feminist are right to point out that the *reception* of that exercise is often perceived by men not as power for women but privilege for men? Yeah, well revenge porn? That kind of puts the shoe squarely on the anti-porn foot.
It's *obviously* a pain (although in kind of an "I told you so" sort of way) for anti-porn activists. It's also pretty obviously a pain -- real, heartfelt *pain* pain -- for the victims. And it's a serious jab in the eye for pro-porn activists as well. (And perhaps paradoxically it's also a black eye and a setback for the dickwad choads who upload the stuff. I mean because, seriously, *people have sex!* And, with digital cameras being nearly universal they take pictures of each other too. The mere existence of such photos reveal nothing at all about the actual victims beyond their contemporary humanity. That their erstwhile partners upload such photos, meanwhile, demonstrate only the victims *incredibly bad taste* in partners. Also, whereas nobody really "deserves" to be humiliated, that someone's ex uploads such photos is reason enough to recognize they made a rational choice in dumping them. Therefore the uploader betrays and humiliates only himself. Something to consider next time one contemplates pressing "send," m'kay? But I digress....)
Anyway, because I'm very much in favor of voluntary sexual photography but bitterly opposed to coercion, exploitation, and denial of choice, and because there are plenty of people doing it willingly I'd like to point to an article by Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors that outlines how a) current copywrite law makes it very difficult for victims to limit such "revenge" uploads but b) how the law could easily be changed. I may be perpetually banned from commenting on Bartow's site because we don't always, um, agree, but this seems like a reasonable undertaking, especially since the goal is to put the decision to post photos in the hands of the actual subjects. (Such requirements already being routine and well-established in commercial porn.)
See also Whatsername the Jaded Hippy.
Sure it's tame, shush! I'd never done anything like that at 30,000 feet before. It's not a very romantic setting so I might not do it again either, with or without someone else. :-)
And I'm publishing early because I'll be airborne when I'd ordinarily be publishing it. On the other hand? I *will* be airborne with a camera and I *could* try again. :-)
Update Now with a few more from last night's return flight. Click for larger versions.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Photo by Flickr user 30003019. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[Yeah, it's not Thursday but I didn't feel like waiting or post-dating this. --fl]
Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors raises an issue that every decent, right-thinking independent sex blogger and HNT participant ought to take personally. It's about the circulating video footage of wingnut Vice-Presidential candidate in a bathing suit when she was around 20 years old.
Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women points how here that blogs linking to Sarah Palin’s 1984 beauty pageant swimsuit competition are attempting to trivialize her for doing something traditionally feminine when she was young, using this HuffPo piece as an example. Of course the odious Daily Kos is all over this as well. Actually one of the bloggers at Kos manages to ramp up the sexism an additional notch by comparing Palin to this then teenaged South Carolinian, who certainly gave an oddly rambling and incoherent answer to an interview question during a beauty pageant, but who, last I checked, was not running for political office. And, it should be noted, who turned out to be fairly poised and mature in the face of aggressive widespread mockery.
Seriously!
The first blogger I "outed" myself to was Blogher co-founder Susan Mernit. She was giving a presentation on anonymous sex-blogging at Gnomedex 2006, an über-tech conference. one of her points was, first, that while they were all gathered to talk about developments in, primarily, Web 2.0 infrastructure what she was finding most remarkable were the resulting *social* developments (often almost dismissively shorthanded in nerd speak as "content.") In particular she said people... men but especially women...
As I said in my old post, the audience responses from men were pretty uniformly alarmed, and knowledgeable enough about details of on-line sex-related security to have practiced some of it themselves. They were also nearly as uniformly certain that "if you're not careful" then writing about sex, or posting your photos, or even looking at them when you're young could come back to bite you later when employers or admissions offices Google your background.
On the other hand, in a way that surprised me at the time, the relative handful of tech women in the audience, ages ranging from twenties at the low end to maybe fifty at the high end, were perfectly sanguine about it. Which, in retrospect, strongly reinforced Mernit's thesis. Their reaction was "no big deal, more and more people are doing it and when 'in the future' happens it'll be no bigger a deal than having a tattoo is today.
Well, two things come to mind immediately after contemplating the Palin pagent video. #1: To paraphrase William Gibson, "in the future" has already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet #2: Whoever initially posted that video was probably a man who still imagined it's a "gotcha."
But here's the deal: chances are *very* good that if you're a blogger reading this post you've written about your own sex life. And chances are pretty good you've participated in popular and consequently non-scandalous Osbasso's Half-Nekkid Thursday meme. Which, incidentally, started... roughly around the time Mernit made her presentation! And therefore chances are the immature troll who posted that Palin video is the kind of asshole who whacks off to your photos in private but would discriminate against you in public. And whoever snickers along with them saying "yeah, she was a *beauty contestant,* what a bimbo" is also insulting *you!* Oh yeah, and they're also threatening you. So yeah, they're not just sexist, they're immature, knee-squeezing, not-caught-up-on-the-21st-Century assholes who'd do the same to you given half a chance.
So! Governor Palin is a corrupt, imprudent, professional-line-crossing wingnut. Fine. Governor Palin is scary-unprepared to uphold the Constitution and administer the executive functions of the United States of America (or even, it would seem, execute the far more limited functions of President of the Senate -- the VP's day job till the President's unanticipated departure.) Got that too. But unlike every one of her many, many "fail stamp" flaws, that she ever paraded in a bathing suit... or for that matter birthday suit... or had Teh kinky Sex... or had Teh Sex at all... either in her youth or last week is *not* a blot on her character. It's *not* a disqualification for office. It's *not even a big surprise* since people have been doing those things since long before Edward Land introduced the first Polaroid camera. Instead it's what ordinary people do, and have done. If certain asshats got a problem with *that* it's *their* problem, not hers. If they think it's a point against her, surprise! It's a point against them.
Action item: when you see the future isn't distributed properly like that leave a comment saying get over it. Even better? Get *used* to it. Sod off works too.
I mean, yeah, most of us still post under internet aliases, and most other people don't post anything at all, because the future still really isn't well-distributed at all. Yet. Challenging mouth breathers who think that video, or who's in it, or how they got there is significant is one way to help break up the lumps.
---
Also see: "The Price of Profanity" (not.)
While clearing out the very back-est, furnace-room-iest part of the basement I found this pair of really old, rusty dumbells. I vaguely remember picking them up from a pile of junk left by a previous tenant at an apartment I lived in, and I vaguely remember taking them with me each time I moved. But I distinctly remember not ever using them. Actually I got a number of pieces to begin with but each time I moved I wound up with less and less. Evidently by the time I moved here these were all that remained of the original collection.
Amazingly, even though they're still rusty, dusty, and cobwebby they still work! :-)
Also, cool what kind of lighting you get in a basement from really overcast, rainy northwest skys in the Fall, eh?
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Well, I'm going to be out and about this evening, and I haven't had time to take photos for days, and barely time to post! So I guess I'll have to cheat. And if you're going to cheat and hit the archives you might as well go way back to when almost nobody read this blog. So here you go, an almost exactly half-nekkid photo from July 2005.
Update: To be honest I was reluctant to post such a bluntly sexual photo, especially for HNT. But y'know what? I got into the habit of posting fairly mild images on Thursdays because several years ago I was trying to post series of erotic posts with an update every day. Lately, though, I haven't been so erotic -- sexual, yes, given that talking about reproductive freedom, or about the peculiar mismatches between what we seem to believe is true about sex and what actually *is* true. But just slipping my hand into my pants for the sheer joy of being able to? While thinking what a shame it is that each of us *can* do the same thing but, for numerous, often perfectly sensible reasons, most of us rarely *do?* Not so much.
So... What the heck. Yeah, I still think an awful lot about the politics of sex and gender, but... thing is that while Peter Pan and Wendy might imagine that real adults are a stodgy lot... they were both *little kids!* What did they know? And how on earth did *they* become the (metaphorical) templates for life after puberty, let alone life after adolescence?
So feh with all that solemnity! Do me a favor. Slip your hand in your pants for me. Give yourself a nice fond caress, and remember how for *at least* half the population the specific way *you* experience it is utterly unfamiliar. And remember that a smaller proportion but still an absolutely huge numbers of the population would give anything to know what you know nearly... as well as you know the palm of your hand. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So I haven't been useful at all today. Instead I bought an iPhone.
Except for the rather glaring absence of, um, *cut, copy, and paste!!!* which even the original 32K, floppy-only Mac had, they're pretty cool.
Anyway, I did manage to take and actually download, then upload, two obligatory, cliché, predictable photos. The first, an accidentally salacious-looking one I took in the car just moments after taking the phone out of the box. The second, with forearms in flagrante delicto, I tried to take on purpose.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So... this afternoon I got some spam today that hinted I enlarge my penis by 3". As it happens I was unpacking decades old boxes and found strong evidence it's not always true that bigger is better.
Funny fact: While it's the size and shape of actual cell phones in the late 1980s, that's actually a water bottle some business promoter was handing out at a health club one day.
Update: I've corrected the typo in the title. I think it's all the spam I get -- the title for one I got as I was composing this post said "Ram ladies with your enlarged pinis." Whatever that is.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Ugg! It seemed like a good idea at the time to finally get a single place where I could put all my books, including all the ones I've had in storage. Now imagine actually hauling all those books! Ok, worse things could happen, and I could use the exercise. One cool thing? I've been finding all these great old books I'd forgotten about.
Anyway, so there I am, struggling up the stairs with all these boxes and my pants fell down. Seriously! Ok, not when I had the camera, these photos were part of a "reenactment." But seriously, I was wrangling all these boxes from the basement out to my new office and scootch... scootch... some seriously unwelcome (to me, not sure about you) migration. Luckily no one else saw and I somewhere to safely put the boxes down and my pants back up!
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So this week's theme is supposed to be about the Olympics. I started out thinking I'd do something athletic but the best I could do was find some light workout clothes. The problem is it seems to have started raining a bit early (ordinarily the "Seattle Rain Festival" lasts from October to May.)
Anyway, since I wasn't going to get a workout a nice lateral-move solution would involve pointing out that the rain comes from turbulence from the nearby Olympic Mountain range. (And that said mountains will even be prominently visible from the 2010 Winter Olympics venues in Vancouver, B.C.)
And then since it was raining that means it's time to put away the hoses for the season. And I toyed with the idea of first arranging loops of hose into five overlapping Olympics-style rings. But instead since I was already getting wet I turned on the hose and gave myself a good soaking instead. Brrrrzieee!
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
About two weeks ago this space was a very decrepit former data center with hard conduit and bare cabling, bad furniture, worse carpet, plywood, trash, dirt, and mouse hair. Now after I cleared it out, cleaned it up, painted it and figured out how to install laminate flooring it's kind of nice and, even mostly unfurnished, pretty cozy. If I say so myself. Even wearing nothing but a strategically placed bucket of paint. :-)
(Oh, and there's one more that's not quite half-nekkid enough for the home page behind the "continue reading..." link below.)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Traveling once again this summer, this time making my way from parts north to south through the Central Time Zone corridor has been great -- missed the big tornados in Chicago, and the stay-inside-warning thunderstorms in St. Louis. But there've been some glitches too. Cell phone batteries too low to take photos in the Land of Lincoln (and, more recently, Obama), at the car rental I discovered my driver's license had expired, magnetic stripe on my main debit card has gone kaput, and then as I was about to go out even low-tech technology struck out: I popped a button!
The cool thing is that all the stuff that really matters at the moment, good family, good friends, good weather, great inspiration on matters of slavery, endurance, and tolerance (thank you Mr. Lincoln), and unseasonably cool, clear, low-humidity mid-west weather. In fact, thanks to the wonderful weather I don't even have to sweat the small stuff. Although I suppose I will have to deal with that button.
And speaking of which that if you'd seen me walking around earlier this evening you coul dhave had my shorts off in next to no time... although it might have been more fun if you'd tried to take them off slowly...
Late but very happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Well, one of my summer projects is painting my old office. The light through my otherwise too-small windows seemed very nice, especially with the new, darker wall colors so...
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
It's been mercifully cooler (meaning, for me, in the 60's or lower 70's Fahrenheit.) Nice enough for me to bring a camera along when I biked to and from the gym.
Click here for more images from the set.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Update: People kept asking how I got the photos. I just had a little camera with me and reached out over the handlebars. The camera also has video functionality so this might give a better impression of the process.
I've been so busy since, basically, school let out. And for some reason -- possibly the warm weather -- I've been sleeping a lot more. And napping. Which may explain my slow blogging pace. (I swear when it gets hot -- where hot for me is over maybe 75 degrees Fahrenheit -- the lecithin in my brain starts to melt or something.) Anyway, when life serves you lemons, make lemonade! Or, in this case, make the bed! :-)
Click for more photos like these.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
I spent my recent vacation with friends and family in rural British Columbia, Canada. As it turns out an awful lot of them are alternative-health professionals and so whenever we go up there I wind up exposed to all sorts of cool new exercises, exotically healthy foods, not to mention massage, acupuncture, yoga, and other kinds of body work.
This time we were all hanging around on a sort-of-chilly sunny afternoon and someone proposed trying out their big tub of blue spa-style clay.
As you can see I was a bit late to the party (everyone else's had dried) and so I wasn't to the whisk it off before rinsing point the way the deliberately-anonymized Canadian individual nearby was. At any rate once you got it on you were supposed to stand still till it dried to keep it from cracking prematurely.
It turns out that cold, wet, blue class is, well, cold. Shrinkingly cold. Which, when you're standing naked on someone's lawn with a bunch of people you're not physically intimate with actually comes in kind of handy. And so under the blue clay I was also... well... blue.
More photos if you click.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So I'm sitting here, outdoors, with a really sketchy internet connection, between two sets of summer-rental ski condo buildings, barbecuing supper on an unfamiliar "community" grill, and wondering how I could possibly pull of a convincing Half-Nekkid Thursday photo with (now) just a few minutes to go before we go altogether out of range. Heck, I don't even have my regular camera out. There are dozens of people walking and (woah) golf-carting around (I'm not used to this kind of environment) and while I have to agree with the family members who booked this trip that it's a great "base camp" for checking out the upper Idaho panhandle area (if you ever get a chance Priest Lake, where we excursed on our excursions today, is an amazing, and amazingly remote area) it's still not exactly the kind of time or place that you'd think would support out-in-the-open, hours-before-sundown even semi-pseudo-kinky photography.
But then I remembered something I read a while back... I thought it was from Sinclair of Sugarbutch but maybe not since I can't find it now... about how a partner's hands are often the first, and also often the most long-term reliably pleasurable part of their anatomy and I thought...
Y'know, it's really true. I can't remember exactly which "bases" are which in the classic first-base, second-base scenario (clarification's welcome in comments, of course) but it does seem like almost every sexual encounter that's led to intercourse, and many, many others that didn't, involved someone's hands -- mine or a partners -- sliding under each other's shorts legs, hands slipping beneath waistbands, hands slowly sliding down zippers, or unbuttoning buttons, fingers patting and tapping and seeking, gripping perhaps or dipping depending on who finds what, and then stroking or circling, palming, pressing, faster and more rhythmically... growing slowly slippery early on, or pulsingly slick near the end, and then gentling, stroking, soothing, as breathing slows and often-shy smiles bloom.
And that's when I realized I could photograph one of the most lascivious parts of my body in broad daylight with impunity. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So, does only one sock still count as "half-nekkid?" I mean, at what point do you stop being half dressed and start being mostly naked?
HNT: 
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Isn't it silly how you can spend time setting up a shot and then forget you hadn't set the little timer on your camera? And so instead of pressing the button and scampering back into position the camera just goes click, catching you off guard and possibly off balance too?
I kind of like that look anyway so I just said heck with it.
Surprisingly, even though I *planned* for it to go that way, and therefore it *shouldn't* have gone that way, it actually *did!* :-)
Click image to see more photos from the same set.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Having fallen down on the job this week the bathroom's a mess. (For instance who, exactly, thought glass shower doors were easy to keep clean?) Usually I tidy up before I take photos but since I have to run out again for another end-of-the-school-year even (end-of-elementary-school project presentations) I just put the camera on the floor and crossed my fingers.
The photo was taken in natural daylight here in the *officially colder than Siberia* middle of June in Seattle! (40 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy non-stop since June 1!)
Click for more photos from the set.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
HNT Supplement: Desire Week
So based on Flickr's simple "views" metric it looks like I should have instead picked the photo below from yesterday's innocent ideas series for today's HNT post.
If so then apologies all around.
I mention this because, several people having declared this Female Desire Week based on Laura Woodhouse's point that men are proportionately really underrepresented on pro(gressive)-sex sites. And so I thought I'd arrogantly/nervously post some of my more frequently visited photos from Flickr. This wasn't the most visited overall, but it's at least twice as popular as any of the others including the one I selected.
Anyway, happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Coincidentally I was thinking today about how back in college I used to have very long hair that, good hippie that I was, I'd brush twice a day with a natural-bristle brush. I was thinking about it because recently my daughter, heading towards 4th grade, had decided/agreed to cut her shoulder-lenght hair into a very nice but practical bob rather than... put up with us asking her to brush her hair all the time. And I was thinking about it because now here I have this really lovely hairbrush and, with no one in the family with long hair anymore, there's really no other use for it. And I was thinking about how, without anything else to do with it I'll probably have to put it into long-term storage somewhere.
Oh yeah, and I was thinking about how the old blues musician Mississippi John Hurt aways said people just had a dirty mind for thinking there was anything suggestive about the lyrics to Candy Man Blues. Not sure why. :-)
Oh yeah, more images from my Innocent Idea set here.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Photo on Photobucket via Melissa McEwan's Shakespeare's Sister.
Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY asks a question that, combined with a Clive Owen/ Photoshop un-mashup that's been going around seems like a perfect excuse for an HNT editorial
A recent post from College Candy posits that women who aren’t getting laid just aren’t trying hard enough — or maybe just aren’t willing to lower their standards enough
...
Is it true? Is it that easy for ladies to find some action — or that hard for guys?
As a lady with a few dry spells under her belt, I’d like to think it’s a little more complicated than all that: but what do you think?
Read the quote, plus Alptraum's quote of College Candy, in context here.
My experience, personally and in conversation with male and female friends who've range from still-waiting 40-year-old traditional Christians to "why waste time learning to masturbate" classmates in high-school is yeah, it's a lot more complicated. And yeah, "standards" have a heck of a lot to do with the complications.
I first got my eyes opened to the standards thing right after I started blogging, with a, well, eye-opening post from the great but now-long-gone Cat Nastey who wondered if maybe straight vanilla people, straight men especially, complain about how hard it is to find partners because they're just way more fussy about who they're willing to count as potential partners when it came to age, social and marital status, class, looks, reputation, current or previous partner "number", and, of course, preferred gender.
Anyway, my first, second, and third-hand experience is that it's a bit of a myth that men have a hard time and that women "could always" find a partner. The key, I think, is Alptraum's point about standards and what, exactly, constitutes "reasonably attractive and intelligent." (And the blocks aren't necessarily the sterotypical ones: classic eye-hurting beautiful men often feel too self-conscious about something else to ask anyone out, and often eye-hurtingly beautiful women never get asked out because -- unless they're jerks, which would be Problem B -- guys assume they just have to have giant neck-breaking boyfriends in the background.)
On the other hand, of course, the reasons often *are* sterotypical where women are supposed to conform to height/weight/Prada-shoe beauty-trap standards, men are supposed to conform to the job/car/devil-may-car standards of the worthiness trap. And everyone's supposed to agree that sex should be a bit scarce that men can gain status by getting and women can gain it by holding back.
Actually I think a year or so ago there was an article about a down-state New York college where, the story went, women outnumbered men just enough that men discovered that in fact they *wouldn't* say yes to just anyone and women discovered they couldn't assume men would say yes if they asked. The point being that *a lot* of what we're raised to believe about who can and can't "get laid" if they "really wanted to" and were "willing to lower their standards enough" are more gender-constructed than real.
And... ok, actually, you know what I think is the trick with "standards" in the phrase "lower your standards enough?" I think the problem is that when we say it we're talking about not *our* standards but *off-the-shelf* standards that we haven't necessarily done much to customize. *Except,* of course, in terms of "lowering" them to meet... ok, reality, sure, but even *that's* a construction. Check out, for instance, those side-by-side photos of Clive Owen, one made up, lit, and photoshopped baby smooth and the other still craggy-handsome but far less idealized with wrinkles, pores, and other normal characteristics of an actual human face. The point being that if all we knew (and that's all a *lot* of, especially, younger people know) is the idealized Owen face then one would have to be "lowering one's standards" to hook up *with the actual Clive Owen!* Let alone the other mere mortals we meet after work.
Anyway, this is getting long and jumbled because I'm trying to make two points at the same time, but *if* everyone tried to test the "women could get laid if they tried hard enough" theory almost *everybody* would discover it was more complicated than they thought. Especially if they all tried it without questioning their assumptions about standards and, especially, making the mistake that adjusting ones standards to meet reality equals "settling."
One last thing, by the way, I'm not saying I think we should have no standards at all. We do. We're people. Goodness knows I have... focal points that revolve around media influences, the way older athletic/farmer-trending family members tended to look, and... for some reason, an inexplicable, roughly 75% attraction to former-Catholics with birthdays between mid-September and mid-October (!?!?!?) No idea what that's about, especially since I've never really been one to ask about birthdays in the first place. The point being that until I *noticed* I had those standards I didn't really think much about how important outdoorsiness was to me in a long-term partner, or how irrelevant birthdays were. And once I got that then they were *my* standards and that let me relax about everyone else's... and, for that matter, everyone else.
Nor did I recognize how much they constrained my partnership opportunities. Which is sort of the point I think I've been trying to get to. We usually understand "standards" to mean "an ideal to hold out for." Instead they're often "limits on opportunities for partnership." The problem isn't the one or the other, it's, as Cat Nastey saw it, failing to recognize that you can't have one without the other, and therefore you can't *logically* brag about the upside while complaining about the downside.
And, by the way, this all gets back to what's so subversive about Osbasso's HNT meme: when almost everyone posts their first photo they're posting with those off-the-shelf standards in mind and, consequently, the accompanying text almost always includes some overt or covert variation on "please be kind." And you know what? All but the *very* occasional troll *is* kind. And not because we're *settling* but because... hey, real people are pretty cool even *without* $6,000 worth of agency Photoshopping. Even Clive Owen. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Last week Osbasso posted a really cool photo from his laundry room. This week I should be so lucky. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Not sure what happened here but this photo doesn't look like any of the others I took. All I can say is I wish they all could out with this kind of lighting.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So Osbasso's Half-nekkid Thursday project is three years old. That's actually pretty cool for more reasons than I can count. Anyway, he proposed that participants this week incorporate the number three in their contribution. I'd already decided I wanted to submit a video of me walking down a nice sidewalk in my neighborhood and then back again. I didn't really know how to turn *that* into someting with a three in it, but then watching the video I'd recorded with all the street and airplane noise competing with bird calls it occurred to me I could do a voice over. And if I could do a voiceover I could do it in waltz or three-quarter time.
Since the microphones on laptops already make everything sound like those old wax recordings they used to do for the Smithsonian Folk Life and Cultural Heritage projects decided to make lemonade out of lemons... or maybe that should be other way around.
"Can you sing 'Under a Texas Moon?'... or further?"
"Can you sing tenor... twelve miles away?"
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
In the last chapter of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Roach points out that the study was somewhat deprecated because half M&J devoted the second half of the book to, um, misguided strategies for helping gay and lesbian people "turn straight." The first half of the book, however, Roach says, is pretty interesting.
One tidbit that I'd think would have been worth the price of the book (Masters and Johnson's I mean, Roach's book is priceless) relates very nicely to the tradition of Osbasso's Half-nekkid Thursday and issues of body consciousness in general. I highlighted the key pieces in the third paragraph.
For five years, Masters and Johnson observed and compared the laboratory sexual encounters of straight, gay and lesbian, and "ambisexual" couples. (The team coined the term to refer to nonmonogamous sexual opportunists who show no preference between men and women throughout their very busy sex lives.)
...
While some of the subjects were having sex with their spouses or long-term partners, others were doing it with a stranger -- not a stranger of their choosing, but one assigned to them by masters and johnson. These latter men and women would show up at the lab, chat with the researchers, and, following a short orientation session, get down to business with a man or woman they had never laid eyes upon. While Masters and Johnson observed.
...
The team did mention that many of the men and women who had been assigned a partner worried that this person wouldn't find them attractive. Oddly, the reverse anxiety never surfaced -- no one seemed concerned about whether they themselves would feel any attraction to the strangers whose genitals they were about to experience in almost every way imaginable: manually, orally, coitionally.
Source: Bonk, pg. 298-299
Pretty wild when you think about it, right? Everyone worries more about how *they* look than how their prospective partners -- even drawn out of a hat partners! -- will look. It's certainly borne out when you look at all the thousands of Thursday photos folks have posted over the last three years -- how the harshest criticism, and the biggest trepidation, has almost invariably been from the poster him or herself... and from the occasional, random, and pretty-obviously-flame-seeking troll.
While it's not actually related, I'm a bit embarrassed by my wrinkly/baggy clothes. Turns out, though, I'd have been even more embarrassed if they were tighter and neatly pressed. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
It's another experimental Half-Nekkid Thursday video presentation. I posted a recipe for tomato sauce that I mentioned making last week. In the recipe I forgot to mention that if you let the sauce simmer all day in a crock pot you can smooth it out with a hand blender. And I realized it reminded me a bit of how I like to be touched, at least at first, with that gentle, slow sensual stirring motion.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Yeah, so yesterday I mentioned I was (to my surprise) unable to Google up a fetish site with the keywords "ladle porn." (A surprise since somewhere, somehow, someone in the world has a fetish for just about anything you can imagine.)
Anyway, while fooling around in the kitchen again today (made hominy, pork, and chile stew from James Peterson's Vegetables cookbook) I took a couple of next-to-G-rated porn with my favorite ladle. Who knows, it might even make someone's day out there. :-)
[Update: Doh! Reset the permissions on Flickr so everyone can see the extra images and slideshow. Sorry about that! --fl]
Click this photo and see the whole set on Flickr.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So I found this photo set that... unless I'm just completely losing my memory I'm almost positive I never posted. (Except possibly one for HNT? We'll see.) Anyway, it's more interesting in a lot of ways because on the one hand it's more, well, half-nekkid than a lot of my other series, but on the other hand the photos tend to range more from PG-13 to R.
First couple of shots are "behind the scenes" photos. You can see the tripod and mirror I sometimes use. Usually once I get everything setup you don't get to see all that.
One nice thing about seeing *other* people's "behind the scenes" photos, though, is the way they make you realize it's *real people* making and sharing these things. Hope you feel the same about this.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So for some reason most of the spam I get is about trying to make, um, something or other bigger. I dunno if any of them work. On the other hand I don't know about anyone promising ways to make that can make the same thing smaller. Much smaller! So I decided to do a little research.
The research required ice.
To paraphrase Neo from The Matrix "...lots and lots of ice."
Works pretty well though.
The cool thing? No matter how small you make it with ice it still gets big again all by itself. Or, well, with a little encouragement. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Never should have clicked on that spam with the title "Persistent Will Not Falter Your Giant Wood!" :-)
(All kidding aside the redwood trees here are flipping big! There's only 2% of the original trees left. Glad they stopped when they did!)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
It's funny how we get about jeans. Compared to almost any other clothes we tend to value them more the older and more worn they get. I mean, how many other clothes do people buy that actually *come from the store* already faded, softened by tumbling with rocks, even *partially digested* with acids!?!?
I dunno. I adore my jeans -- they're versatile, comfortable, attractive, heavy duty, and unlike almost any other clothing except maybe painter's pants, you're not expected to immediately change out of them when they get a little dirty from gardening, housecleaning, hiking, or doing art.
Have I mentioned I think that jeans combined with a plain white t-shirt can be severely sexy whether you're wearing racey lacies, whitey-tighties, or nothing at all under them?
All good things come to an end though. It took all day for me to realize the impossibly worn fabric just below my back pocket had finally worn through. Which means if you'd stood behind me at the supermarket checkout, or the coffee shop, or as I browsed the shelves at the local library, or stood in the kitchen fixing coffee, breakfast, school lunches, my lunch, and afternoon coffee you'd have seen... well...
Not enough to get me in trouble, but enough to maybe spark your imagination. Maybe enough that you'd flirt with the idea of finding out if I was ticklish.
Sigh. All good things come to an end. I'm going to miss these jeans.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Since I often post half-nekkid photos during the rest of the week, I tend to reserve half-nekkid Thursday photos to illustrate other parts of my life. And sometimes I use videos instead of photos. I hope this works for you.
Almost the only time I record myself playing music has been for these HNT videos. So I don't really have much of an idea of how I sound. The music in this piece seems a little choppy, and I know freeform Appalachian flatpicking-style isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the thing is that sort of on a whim I did almost all the fretting with one finger. Not all, but most. And I really kind of liked it.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So it's just great relaxing this week. I hope you're all doing well.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
This ever happen to you where some cliché pops into your head and then some really silly variation pops up right next to it? For no good reason I was thinking "He'd give you the shirt off his back..." and right next to it popped up "Why never the shirt off his chest?"
I dunno, but it was a fun photo to take, except I had to be more careful about the buttons than I thought I would.
HNT: 
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So another enterprising entry in esoteric-but-suggestive spam email titles this week was...
"Do you know the difference between small instrument and huge one?"
As a matter of fact I *do* know the difference. Just last week I rocked an entire auditorium with my screamin' funky half-scale, low-E-tuned bass. Which has enough of whatever a bass needs that after the performances (ok, part of the "orchestra" in an elementary school play) some of the *real* rock musicians who are more familiar with "real" low-heavy-hanger bass guitars came over and asked where I got it.
Me? I say it ain't the size of the instrument it's the size of the amplifier.
Although to be perfectly honest, the amplifier in these photos (not the one I used in performance) is *also* extremely small. But still surprisingly suitable for pumping it out.
Either that or I have *very* big hands. (Ok, they *are* big but not big enough to engulf a full-size bass.)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So last summer I gave up tobacco for red-hot chili peppers on the theory of "why breathe smoke when you can breathe fire?" More than half a year later it's so far so good, which is actually pretty darn good!
Turns out that in at least one dimension (actually there are plenty of others) I'm on the same page with Senator Clinton who, it turns out, also eats hot peppers for stamina and health.
I won't disclose who I'd prefer to win the nomination, or the general election (hint: I'd cheerfully vote for any solid, strong, unshakably progressive candidates and I think there are some excellent ones in the race) but I will say I'd like to see all the candidates of any party sending a anti-tobacco message to children: why breathe smoke when you can breathe fire? :-)
Update: Also, while for most people this is a Happy Valentine's Day HNT I just want to point out that *next Monday* is President's Day. And since it would be beyond clich&eacut; for a sex-and-relationships blogger to blog about actual *valentine's day* (shouldn't *every* day be a be-mine-valentine day?) I thought I'd just get a jump on that. Thus I've updated today's photo with a stronger, more presidential-looking photo of my own. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So last night the rest of my family discovered American Idol, a TV talent show that's been around for years.
So they all went into the basement where we keep the TV and I thought I'd get a little peace and quiet to do my homework and maybe a little posting or something. Except the sound warbling up the stairs was distracting so I retreated to an upstairs playroom. And since the WiFi connection wasn't so hot I took a picture instead.
I think I mentioned that I was distracted but that's not why I didn't wear pants for the photo. I did that because it's time for...
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
[Hmm. I haven't gotten much work done, or all my homework, let alone my correspondence, let alone replies to comments. But for whatever reason (maybe that two-page paper I started writing around two in the morning) posts are flying out. Including a very rare second HNT post. Oh well, sometimes it's sunshine, other times you need an umbrella. --fl]
Quick question: I'm not sure if you've thought about it much, but have you ever considered how most activities that require a lot of body strength don't usually involve standing or working in the poses and postures we most often associate with bodybuilding?
Well, it being Half-nekkid Thursday and all I was struck this morning about the difference in some of the poses we associate with manly or womanly sexiness and... it occurred to me... that an *awful* lot of the cliché poses we associate with sex would actually be *terrible* positions to be in *during actual* sex.
At this point I ought to make clear that I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't noticed that most HNT participants -- the ones who are clearly feeling sexual in their photos -- are in positions that *do* make sexual sense. So while I'm pointing fingers I'm generally pointing them at the light/cheesecake/advertising and heavy industrial porn industry and at the subset of "amateurs" who emulate them. In other words, if you're an HNT participant, not you. :-)
You probably know what positions I'm talking about, right? The classic porn pose, one that drives a lot of people crazy, moralists and immoralists alike, is the woman naked in high heels who's squatting so low her knees are around her ears and she has to lean back to support herself with her hands behind her back. Cliché as the dickens, and certainly sexualized beyond mere gynecology (gynecologists are almost never need *that* much space to work) but... not at all practical for any kind of sex at all.
Not even for a nice, unreconstructed patriarchal man! She's too low and leaned back for a blowjob, to well-braced to push over and violate, way, way too low to easily caress, and more strenuously acrobatic than classically vulnerable. Yet over and over we see that and countless other poses in men and women that again are unquestionably sexualized but not sexy in any practical sense of "hey, let's have sex like this!"
Now I happen to think this is probably another one of those things like "O-face" where, mostly through unfamiliarity and insufficient time to develop affection for it, people decide *real* orgasmic faces are just too goofy and so they make all those weird-assed romanto/porno grimaces of agony and ecstasy and outrage that, in turn, make us feel even more self-conscious about our authentically orgasmic faces. Well, same with real sexual poses and positions.
Well, for the most part I think we probably look a little awkward, bracing our legs, pressing our pelvises up or out or down or in effectively but not very gracefully, to give ourselves and our partners the best contact with our (hidden from view if we're doing it right) genitals, and often-asymmetrically leaning here or there in ways that feel *wonderful* but look (if we weren't too self-conscious to let others look) awkward as pre-teen cousins forced to dance together at a relative's wedding. But (rather pointedly *unlike* being forced to dance at someone else's wedding) oh my does what we really actually do feel nice. Even if it doesn't *look* as nice as the made-up stuff people do for photographs.
Anyway, without dismissing or decrying porn (or advertising, or Hollywood, or romance-novel covers) I suddenly feel very comfortable pointing out that the create a *very* unfortunate impression of what we generally *experience* as very fortunate experiences, and likewise our attempts to create fortunate *impressions* we, like porn stars, Hollywood talent, and cover models, may end up with unfortunate experiences. Just something to notice next time you're thumbing, or browsing through photos.
Anyway....
Let's just say that were we ever to do more together than drink coffee and shake hands you might find me taking you by the hand, or shoulders, or by the hips, or thighs, or even hair and moving you to our mutual best advantage I can guarantee that *even if* for some reason there was a camera or audience in attendance we'd still be arranging ourselves for feeling, rather than necessarily looking, our best.
Once again, Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So my current daily photo series has had a snow-related motif. Today's HNT is far more prosaiac. Last Monday we had a snow-day here in town. The kids were already off for a one-day "change of semester" break but I missed a day of classes. I made up for lost time doing homework. (Notice my posts and comment replies are slow to non-existent? Homework for my classes, while wonderful and perfectly appropriate to this blog, are part of the reason.) Anyway, at one point my children and other kids from the neighborhood called me out to see their various handiworks in the snow so I grabbed my camera and headed out.
It's been a while since I delivered newspapers in snow like this (I did it only because I knew someday I'd want to brag about it) I seem to be hardy enough that in a pinch (at this point it would have to be a big pinch) I could still do it. Anyway, on my way back into the house I thought I might document my half-nekkid toes for posterity. And this week's HNT photo.
I seem also to have documented the raggled fringes of the old gardening pants I wear on snowy days, and to also have documented that it's not easy to assume a dashingly half-nekkid stance while bent over upside down with a camera. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So earlier in the week I compared and contrasted skiing and BDSM. Here's a photo of me unwinding after foot-bondage-ing, thigh-muscle-burning, and frost-nipping myself (it was brr-loody cold at the summit!) Notice that my corset-y boots are... in the *closet?* *Coincidence?* I don't think so! :-)
One difference I might have mentioned is that while aftercare is pretty important whether you're skiing or BDSM-ing, skiers have a cooler word for it. Après-ski has such an... I don't really have the right word for it... umm... maybe je ne sais qua? :-)
Anyway, right after I took this in-the-mirror photo, and a few others, it was off to a nearby hot tub which fortunately/unfortunately was a bit of a walk through 19-degree F temperatures, in just a pair of shorts and a towel. Hurt soooo good!
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So I missed HNT last week for the first time in ages because late Wednesday night, when I usually compose the post, I went night-ski-lesson skiing with my family. (I know, I know, busy man these days between a 15 credits of classes, and trying getting a handle on funk bass for the Motown musical at a local elementary school. But it's only winter for a couple of months.)
Anyway, I decided to get a jump on things earlier in the day. Possibly too early! The nice thing about anonymous bloggers is you never have to see their hair. :-)
But anyway, it occurred to me that this photo might reinforce the stereotype that bloggers work in their bathrobes. It's a chance I'm willing to take.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Well, botheration. Here's a late HNT entry on my emergency-backup blogspot blog. I'm going to have to move servers, and maybe even change hosting vendors, and this isn't really how I'd planned to manage my post-holiday slump.
Mostly I'd rather not push around all this drama (Bell's palsy, broken comments, hosting shenanigans) and instead just be blogging. But! You play with the straws you draw.
And all in all the straw I *wish* I'd drawn right would have been the one where I get my hands tied high so that I couldn't even pretend to resist when you started to loosen the knot... :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Update: Ok, so a little earlier I was searching high and low for ornaments since we were doing a lot of decorating tonight and our children were helping. I mean "helping."
Oh, and speaking of children and ornaments, quite a few years ago now we bought a couple of glass vegetable-shaped ornaments at, I think, a garden-supply store. One was a chili pepper, another a pear, and another was a pickle. No big deal, right? And so somehow or other, for nearly as long as they've been allowed near the tree without intense supervision our children have played this hide-and-seek game where they'd hang the pickle somewhere in the as-yet un-trimmed tree and then the other would try to find it. Other than the occasional exchange of raised-eyebrow, but-of-a-smirk smiles my partner and I didn't think much more of it.
Until this year when, Googling around for something *completely* unrelated I ran across a little mention of the old German tradition of hiding a pickle ornament in the Christmas tree. Weird but I was busy and didn't think about it again till my partner came home. And when I said something she was a lot more skeptical than I and accused me of pulling her leg.
So. I go online and Google again, this time expressly for pickle ornament. And low and behold, yes, there are hundreds, no thousands of pages advertising pickle ornaments. Many with a story about old German traditions.
But there are some other stories, mostly from Germans, mostly sort of irked, saying um, nope, no one they know in Germany has heard of it!
So anyway, it's evidently both a hoax *and* a rather elderly if not exactly ancient American or possibly German-American tradition. I might add that it's also a barrel of laughs for children -- earlier and earlier each year ours begin asking when we're going to get the tree. Go figure.
Anyway, they're big enough now that they're fiendishly good at hiding the dang thing. And so it took me quite a while to find it myself after everyone went to bed. And so now I'm thinking there's *another* holiday tradition that I'd like to start...
... sigh. :-)
Happy HNT.
---
Original post follows
And yet the story goes back, at least here in the U.S. for pushing a century, where grandparent-aged American aunts and uncles tell of their own elderly relatives telling them how they'd played it as children.
Not a creature knew how this ornament got into the kitchen... Or at least not a creature over age eleven. Several such creatures live in our house. :-)
Stay tuned, by the way. There's another missing ornament, one that I'd hoped to model today. Ironically I have to *find* the pickle before I can play hide the pickle.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
[Note: my comments were broken when I wrote this post. They're now fixed. (At least theoretically.) --fl]
Well darn it all! With a domain name like "realadultsex.com" about half the comments I leave on other people's blogs get spam-filtered out of existence (and who checks their spam filters to see if I'm in there anyway?) And now thanks to too much *incoming* spam on my blog my own comment scripts keep shutting down my server so...
I can't comment on your blogs, you can't comment on mine, so what's a lonely blogger to do? Become an even lonelier folksinger.
Actually I suppose if I'd taken time to, um, write something, or practice first, or setup a real video camera, or real microphone, or try multiple takes, or learn how to mix sound or video I might not *deserve* to be this lonely, but as it is... :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
You've probably noticed the recent template changes. If you've spent any time trying to cruise my archives you've noticed the new template does this fussy thing where instead of showing any actual archives it shows a gigantic dark green rectangle on all but the most forgiving (i.e. ancient) browsers. It seems to be related to minor and previously-ignored formatting errors (e.g. unclosed italics tags and/or unclosed quotes in tag attributes.)
Oh well. Since I actually *want* people to be able to look at my archives this means all the tag typos I've blithely ignored in the past need to be tracked down and fixed. Which means, yes, I've acted in haste and now I must repent at leisure.
Which brings me to my current photo. I've actually been too busy to take a new photo tonight so I'm using one from further along in my long-running Towel Off photo series. As you will notice it seems particularly appropriate for someone who needs a bit of a spanking for careless mistakes.
Update: Well, I've at least temporarily disabled the giant green rectangles. The sidebar columns are all still ahoo but at least you can read them. More later.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
So through a Technorati link I discovered Rachel Kramer Bussel's got a cross-dressing erotica blog. Although I tried cross-dressing once for a HNT photo I didn't get enough of a rise either for myself or from readers to bother trying it again. (Note: just because it doesn't get my motor running doesn't mean I don't totally get that it really revs other people up.)
But anyway, I noticed that Vixen of Secrets of a Blue-Eyed Vixen showed up in her partner's button-down shirt for today's HNT, and between that and finding Rachel's blog immediately afterwards I got the cross-dressing epiphany that a woman in a man's shirt is, like, the hottest kind of lingerie you can get. Mmm. Forget untying bows and laces, how about unbuttoning buttons one by one!?!?
Men's shirts on women. Manly, yes, but I like it too! :-)
So there I was minding my own business, walking back to the car from the big-box bookstore this afternoon. We trek across the parking lot... it's crowded with lots of holiday shoppers... find the car... hop in to the driver's seat and...
riiiiippppppp!
Doesn't get any more Half-nekkid Thursday than this, lemmie tell ya!
My loss is your gain. :-) Click the image below for a slideshow.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
If you're one of those rare University of Texas students who just. aren't. sure of the difference between men and women you don't have to force them to wear dresses or pants. Just wait 24-48 hours and look at their chins. The test isn't 100% effective since, like everthing else about gender the edges can be a little, well, fuzzy. But as I said in the referenced post, you could always just... ask.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
[p.s. And my Bell's palsy is almost completely gone. Still can't whistle but I can blink, wink, and kiss. Thank goodness! And thanks for all your kind words and wishes over the last two weeks. --fl]