Recently in Who Knew? Category
Rori of Between My Sheets polled around for a list of the top 100 sex bloggers of 2008. Given what a non-sexy curmudgeon I've been lately I'm grateful to have made the cut but that's not why I think it's worth checking out.
Instead what's great is, first of all, the other 98 entries -- the many I knew about and the many others I didn't. Second of all? She purposely left the 100th entry blank
Why is #100 blank? Because I know there are dozens…hundreds…of other amazing sex bloggers out there, and I want everyone to be a part of this list. If you weren’t already include, please promote yourself and your blog with a comment below. You can also feel free to link to other people’s blogs in a comment. Anything goes! I hope you’ll copy/paste this list on your own blog, if you have one. You don’t have to link back here - just get the word out about these amazing bloggers. Or, create your own list!
Here's the list
1. Sinclair Sexsmith http://sugarbutch.net
2. Radical Vixen http://www.radicalvixen.com
3. Curvaceous Dee http://curvaceousdee.blogspot.com
4. Always Aroused Girl http://aagblog.com
5. Ellie Lumpesse www.lumpesse.com
6. Catalina http://catalinaloves.com
7. Selena Kitt http://selenakittyn.com
8-9. Wifey and Hubby http://wifeytalk.com
10. Roger http://wwww.dirtyboy2.blogspot.com
11. Essin¿ Em http://essin-em.com
12. Amber Rhea http://www.beingamberrhea.com
13-14. Richard and Amy http://247richardandamy.com
15-16. MJ and MJ¿s Slave http://www.aslavestruenature.blogspot.com
17. Thursday¿s Child http://thursdayschildhasfartogo.blogspot.com
18. Narration by D http://narrationbyd.blogspot.com
19. Andrea Zanin http://www.sexgeek.wordpress.com
20. The Provocateur http://theprovocateur.wordpress.com
21. Violet Blue http://tinynibbles.com
22. Autumn http://dreamsofaneroticaqueen.sensualwriter.com
23. SSS http://sweatshopsissy.wordpress.com
24. Storm http://ambientstorm.blogspot.com
25. Sub lyn http://longdistancesub.blogspot.com
26. Tara Tainton http://www.taratainton.com/tarastrysts/index.html
27. Jake http://factsandfriction.blogspot.com
28. Cherry Bomb http://cherrybombnyc.blogspot.com
29. Lakey http://fairelaffaire.blogspot.com
30. Scarlet Lotus Sexgeek http://femmeinistfucktoy.com
31. Glenpreece http://lastbreath.wordpress.com
32. Lolita Wolf http://www.leatheryenta.com
33. Vixen http://blue-eyedvixen.com
34. Tom Paine http://perverselypoly.blogspot.com
35. Tongue Tied Blue http://tonguetiedblue.blogspot.com
36. Maymay http://www.maybemaimed.com
37. Miss Bliss http://blog.blisswarrior.com
38. Mistress Maeve http://7d.blogs.com/mistress
39. Nadia http://www.kinkylibrarian.net
40. Luka http://barbedwireboudoir.blogspot.com
41-42. Odysseus and Penelope http://marriedexploits.blogspot.com
43. Eileen http://bloodylaughter.com
44. Calico http://dominatrixnextdoor.com/blog
45. Caroline Shepherd http://feministsexcarnival.blogspot.com
46. Kathleen http://polyspace.wordpress.com
47. Packing Vocals http://packingvocals.blogspot.com
48. Audacia Ray http://www.wakingvixen.com
49. Axe http://unspeakableaxe.com
50. Baccus http://www.erosblog.com
51. Chelsea Summers http://prettydumbthings.typepad.com/chelseagirl
52. Debauchette http://debauchette.wordpress.com
53. The Butterfly Temptress http://thebutterflytemptress.com
54. Dirty Little Girl http://dirtylittlemind.blogspot.com
55. Sexy Whispers http://sexywhispers.wordpress.com
56. Wendy Blackheart http://www.heartfullofblack.com
57-58. Padme and Anakin http://darkside-journey.blogspot.com
59-60. Him and Her http://sexcakes.blogspot.com
61. Slip of a Girl http://aslipofagirl.blogspot.com
62. Blowjob Babe http://strokesuckswallow.blogspot.com
63-64. Dirty Debbie and CJ http://dirtydebbie.blogspot.com
65. Scorpio http://adventuresofascorpio.blogspot.com
66. Charlotte http://charlottethorpe73.wordpress.com
67. Bitchy Jones http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com
68. Anastasisa http://www.chaosnoir.com/anastasia
69. Alice http://anonymous-alice.blogspot.com
70. Anita Wagner http://practicalpolyamory.blogspot.com
71. Jack http://writingdirty.com
72. Mistress Matisse http://mistressmatisse.blogspot.com
73. Mariella http://wannaplaymariella.blogspot.com
74. O http://eros-logos.blogspot.com
75. Shasta Gibson http://shastagibson.com
76. Gwen http://www.pop-shot.blogspot.com
77. fivestar http://www.iamfivestar.com
78. Lilly http://dangerouslilly.com
79. Penny http://birdsaresmart.blogspot.com
80. Figleaf http://www.realadultsex.com
81. Tony http://www.comstockfilms.com/blog/tony
82. Viviane http://www.thesexcarnival.com
83. Six http://sixelaborates.wordpress.com
84. Bob http://bobsbestboobs.com
85-99. Fiammetta, Jill, Robyn, Scarlot, Melissa, Kitten, Karly, Holly, Surgeon, Stacey, Tara, Jessica, Gina, Wendy, and Tori http://deepthroated.wordpress.com
100.
If you wanted to start a blogroll that was more organized than mine that would be a great place to start.
[Oh, and lest more recent readers wonder what's the big deal about sex bloggers anyway or why I'd call myself one, here's why I blog about sex. --fl]
Governor Palin is clearly the best qualified, least corrupt, most pro-woman, least hypocritical, most experienced, least conceited, most concerned for the life and health of the unborn including her own, most filled with integrity, most committed to busting pork, most emblematic of traditional family values, most America-loving, biggest proponent of America first, best informed, most fiscally responsible, least executive-power-abusing person
...in the Republican Party.
Ok, so this is cool. Or, I mean, hot. Sarah Porricelli and Sarah Morgan had enough fun 
selecting the hottest male blogger (non-sex blogger Peter Shankman) that they going a step further and soliciting nominations for not one, not two, but an entire calendar's worth of hot bloggers!
When I first started blogging there were some pretty wonderful male sex bloggers, but probably not enough to fill a calendar. Now there are quite a few more and I think it's great. If you want to nominate someone (it obviously doesn't have to be me**, especially after being such a dull boy all summer) you can nominate your hottest male blogger here, and, since Porricelli and Morgan didn't want to follow Playboy's lead and select only from one gender, they're running a second contest so you can nominate your hottest female blogger here.
Key point, though: your nominees don't have to be hot *sex* bloggers. For instance while Peter Shankman was selected as the hottest he's just a great, eclectic, all-around sociable blogger and seemingly a darn good choice. The point is don't feel like you have to limit yourself to any category. (And since "hot" doesn't have to mean "hawtt" my choices, for instance, might be political blogger Ezra Klein for hot male blogger. And at least for today I might choose Rachel Maddow for hottest woman blogger.)
Further details here:
You nominate your Hot Blogger, male or female. Nominations will be accepted for just one week, from August 18-25. You can vote for yourself (we won’t tell!) or for any other blogger who makes you muy caliente!
But you must spread the word, because obviously, the more people who vote for
youyour nominee, the better chance thatyouyour nominee will be a finalist. Finalists will be announced August 25, and voting from August 25-September 1 will determine the Hot Bloggers who will grace your calendar pages throughout 2009.
Anyway if you're into these sorts of things tell *all* your friends.
[** The one fly in the ointment would be that being only 98.6 degrees (Fahrenheit) I'm not exactly *hot,* and that I'd bring that up says I'm not exactly cool either. Which, I guess, makes me only lukewarm... "But m'friends call me Luke." --fl]
Image: Courtesy of CuteOverload.com
While it may not be the best place to meet with your elected representative, the men's restroom provided a safe haven for this flock of flamingos at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Bronzeville, Texas during the recent hurricane-force winds.
See. There is a reason why women go to the restroom in groups.
Festival-audience hula-hoop dancers photo by figleaf
Just a quick note: My partner and I spent the weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada this weekend. Had a lovely time. I brought my laptop but never really got it out. Sorry for dropping off the map like that but... did I mention we had a lovely time? The Vancouver Folk Music Festival is just such a great reason to go, and once you're there there are maybe eight million other great reasons to hang out from delightful parks to elegant hotels to astonishingly varied international cuisine to shockingly (for a Yankee) tolerant and diverse and yet... gorgeously healthy, open, welcoming, and generally prosperous. With enough clear downsides (homelessness, a currently hot Mob war, Mob interference with sex work that includes trafficking and coerced workers) that you don't mistake what's good about the place for magic.
Photo by figleaf
Back from vacation in northern Idaho and southeast British Columbia. I had a wonderful time. Even without very reliable connectivity! :-) Thanks for everybody's patience. I'll read and respond to comments as quickly as I'm able.
I have at least one suitable-for-HNT photo from the trip... that I suppose will have to wait till Thursday. Preview after "continue reading."
I'm off on vacation for nearly two weeks in northern Idaho and southeast British Columbia. The former has lots of clothing-optional lakes, rivers, and streams. Idaho? Not so much. And as usual for places I seem to vacation connectivity promises to be unpromising. I've left a few posts for publication later on just in case but I *should* be able to connect at least once a day. Possibly by dial-up only.
I may not have much opportunity to reply to comments but you're comments are still very welcome. I'll reply as soon as I can. You're some of the best commenters in the blogsphere so you're always welcome to respond spiritedly but respectfully to each other's comments while I'm away.
While I'm out I'll be reading Umberto Eco's On Ugliness
See you sooner or see you later but one way or another I'll look forward to seeing all of you.
Z of The Naked Truth says
The other day, someone said to me that this is not a sex blog, it’s an emotion blog. Is it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a sex-through-a-veil-of-emotion blog, or an emotion-through-a-veil-of-sex-blog, or it’s more of a relationship blog than a sex one, mainly detailing the close and generally fulfilling one between my body and my head.
Funny how you never hear people say "well, he's not a real a *food* blogger" or "You couldn't really call her a *transportation policy* blogger."
Something similar popped up in comments when The Ethical Slut discussed vulvodynia, a decidedly sex-related topic for her because it was *getting in the way of* (ok, effectively wrecking) her ability to enjoy intercourse. The commenter said "Wow, the writing here has gotten to be a bit of a downer. Meh. Buh bye."
Anyway, I got a little lightbulb reading Z's post though and I think maybe the distinction isn't sex vs. non-sex blogs but sex vs. reliable-wank-material blogs. (And by the way I think TES's retort to her commenter supports my contention.)
Anyway this is all kind of a nuisance. On the one hand you're not a "sex blogger" if you don't reel off your nightly encounters. Meanwhile for everyone else if you use any of the Carlin words it's off to the pink ghetto, never to be seen by Google or Ad-Sense again.
Quick follow-up to the previous post. So... Nipples aren't little penises, contrary to 10,000 cheesie porn stories (written, one could sometimes imagine, by people who actually haven't had a lot of actual sex.) And so nipple erections aren't nearly the reliable an indicators of arousal that penis erections are. Instead if they consistently mean anything it seems to be "something just changed." A chill, a breeze, a touch, a surprise, a shift in emotion, even recognition of someone or something that's arousing. (I think it's less noticiable but they seem to behave the same way for men as women.)
To be honest between all manner of erotic interactions with quite a few partners and experience with multiple friends and a partner while they're nursing their children I've always wondered what, exactly, the point of the stereotypical pinup-style crinkly-areola nipple erections might be. (During arousal and during nursing the nipples engorge sure -- in fact during pregnancy they undergo some amazing, and amazingly reversible changes. But not so much crinkling at all.)
I got one possible clue from a bodyworker (can't remember if he was a physical therapist or a chiropractor) who was talking about the surprisingly redundant number of muscles in people's necks. He said that while they don't do very much (except give us literal pains in the neck, or at least *my* neck!!!) they contain thousands of special nerves for detecting body position (a.k.a. proprioception) which would be pretty critical if you were a featherless biped trying to balance our heavy-as-a-bowling-ball heads on the ends of our spines.
So I'm just *sooo* guessing here but maybe the point of the extra muscles in our nipples isn't the nerves themselves but the proprioceptors that come with them. How, or whether, that would actually make a difference in women or men might be beyond me but they *are* there so... anyone else care to take a guess?
By the way I'd like to say I was just curious but I can't. :-)
[Note: I wrote this on Father's Day last year but never had time to post it. I probably won't have time to post anything else today so... :-) --fl]
Today is father's day. I'm a father. My partner is a mother. We have two wonderful children.
Despite conventional imagery Father's Day and Mother's Day are society's gigantic admission that normal human beings actually have sex. You'd never know it based on the conventional imagery of
...poolside relaxation (for fathers) or
...flowers (for mothers.)
Yes, there are ways to get around the sex part these days, thanks to needles, petri dishes, and turkey basters, but the point remains generally overlooked. Here's why I don't mind.
Being a father is surprisingly easy. Way easier than I imagined. Sure, there are hard parts but none any harder than many other college courses or professional jobs I've had with their all-nighters, their sometimes tedious days, their repetitive tasks, their anxieties or stresses, their petty bickerings, their mid-day office parties, their... everything. But... but... I dunno, maybe like owning your own business or something you don't mind when it means something to *you!* A bad day being a father is still better than a good day at work.
Take today for instance. I got to sleep in a little this morning, but as soon as we'd placed our order at the special little local cafe we sometimes go to my daughter, who'd been complaining that her stomach hurt, said she wanted to go home... because she thought she might need to throw up! After a bit of "are you sure" type negotiations I left my partner and our son with instructions to bring home my order to go I scooped up Her Majesty and whisked her home. She never did throw up but we spent the next hour just lying together on the couch because she really did feel awful. She's been running a fever since and she's pretty under the weather but... we've had a lot of time to talk and just *be* together. It's not how we planned to spend Father's Day but it was actually a pretty great way to go.
I also spent a bunch of the afternoon with my 4th-grade son today, helping him pull together material for his end-of-year presentation on global warming. Yeah, since I sort of live online and I seem to be a natural writer I could have done the whole thing myself in, oh, five minutes but... it was very, very cool hanging out with him while he tried to master Google with a purpose instead of for random entertainment, helped him pick categories, helped him find diagrams and then draw them out his way, helping him say things in his own words, and helping him write down his sources.
In biological terms my partner and I didn't just find them in the cabbage patch...
...but (sorry "why buy the cow" traditionalists, and shared-genes-calculating sociobiologists) it wouldn't matter if we had.
Photo by Flickr user brocktopia. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I've brought this up before elsewhere but has anyone checked out just how *exotic* vanilla plants are? They're epiphite orchids! The flowers can resemble male or female genitalia (depending on how you look.) The flavor's incredibly sophisticated. There are thousands of variations of what you can do with it. By comparison stinging nettles, used in BDSM, seems almost boring. :-)
That's *not* to say BDSM itself is boring -- far from it! It's just that vanilla actually isn't very boring either.
[Note: Image behind the "Continue reading..." fold is slightly unsafe for work. --fl]
I want to take a moment here to own my shit about my post last week about Melissa Bruen's U-Conn DailyCampus.com article "My spring Weekend Nightmare."
Bitterly concerned about what *could* have happened to her I discounted what did. I might have all sorts of considerations and excuses. Meanwhile, though, whatever I thought I was doing, what I did was hurt, anger, and discount others.
And so from the bottom of my heart I'm sorry for making you and anyone else feel that way. I'm sorry for then behaving as if I hadn't done anything wrong, or that people shouldn't have have felt the way they felt about it. I could have chosen other ways to respond but I didn't and I apologize for that as well.
Finally, owning my shit also means acknowledging that apologies, no matter how deeply felt, don't oblige anyone to accept them.
Dang it all. I'm travelling this weekend and left my power supply at home (something I think I did once before a few years ago.) Which sort of bites, especially after cracking my head on this kind of horrified realization, which I'd really like to discuss a little further.
Oh well, if I can find a substitute I might post more. Otherwise I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
Photo by Flickr user richtpt. Used under a Creative Commons license.
So it's taken me a while to work my way through all of your comments (life's quite a bit busier these days) but I finally got 'round to Kochanie's reply to this post about that sort of broken division-of-labor study. One of the problems, for instance, is in their decision to equate "domestic tasks" with "women's work," which meant, among other things, that they disregarded all outdoor chores. (Which therefore stints on the workload of, say, single mothers who move out of apartments to houses or farms.) Another big problem is the 60's-era way they chose to designate the "Head" of the "Family Unit."
The Head of the FU must be at least 16 years old...If this person is female and she has a husband in the FU, then he is designated as Head. If she has a boyfriend with whom she has been living for at least one year, then he is Head. However, if the husband or boyfriend is incapacitated and unable to fulfill the functions of Head, then the FU will have a female Head.
To which Kochanie replied
Morale of the story:
Never trust a governmental body to give Head. It will invariably FU.
Ouch! Just Ouch! Very nice Shaggy Dog ending to an otherwise pretty irksome story.
"Know thy enemy."
When I was in my first year of college, taking a year-long integrated studies course with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking, we endured a cavalcade of some of the most gruesome, egregious, sometimes even murderous character studies in sociopathy and self interest raised by this one particularly grinchy (and brilliant) professor.
Week after week we endured Pol Pot, Mein Kamph, George Wallace, Ayn Rand, and every other kind of self-justifying asshat and asshole you could imagine, with lectures that scrupulously addressed technical details but didn't really address the, um, confrontative underlying horrors. (For instance we learned about former Alabama Governor George Wallace's thoughts on the principles of States Rights but nothing about "in order to preserve Jim Crow laws.")
Eventually people started snapping under the regimen, and then, at a certain point, someone (not me I'm retrospectively ashamed to say) asked WTF. The professor smiled over his reading glasses and delivered a pretty amazing lecture on pseudo-innocence and the importance of the phrase "know thy enemy."
I mention this because infra of Skin::filter() has noticed that the Amazon Ad algorithm in my sidebar, which *generally* has sex, gender, relationship books that tend to lean feminist also... occasionally... cough up links for "seduction community" books like The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like or How Much You Make or The Professional Bachelor Dating Guide - How to Exploit Her Inner Psycho
They’re books like this one, and this. Kinda strange seeing them come up in the same list as bell hooks and Naomi Wolf. Surreal, more like.
“Know your enemy,” maybe?
I’m sure he already knows about that, but… the world never ceases to amuse me, what with the small, bizarre things that surface from time to time. Just more proof that the universe has a truly twisted sense of humor, I guess.
I mean, seriously. Those don’t even show up in my recommendations.
Actually I hadn't noticed. It's funny though, and a little frustrating. Every time I try to re-fiddle the keywords for that Amazon ad I get something that's *mostly* what I want with some... interesting stuff thrown in for... I dunno, roughage or something. One set of near-identical keywords and the outliers are books by wingers like Caitlin Flanagan or Ann Coulter. Another near-identical set and it's a bunch of outright misandry like "The Rules" and Mary Daly. So I don't know quite what to do. I actually think it's good to have ads of some sort, but I'd really rather find a source that better reflects my values. (And by the way, I may not be the only one.)
Suggestions are always welcome, but meanwhile, since some (mostly older) sources in my blogroll are of the "know thy enemy" variety I guess it's ok that some of the "recommended" books fall in the know thy enemies category as well.
So last night I wrote a "Who Knew?" post about using Apple's Text to Voice feature for proofreading. Since I'm a relative newcomer to the Mac I followed the technology blogger's advice and installed "Alex," the newest, most natural-sounding voice and just started using it without fanfare.
In comments though, Zeborah checked out all the available voices and...
I've had my text-to-speech set to Vicki for a long time. Normally it's little use to me -- I read *way* faster than I listen so it drives me batty to have to wait -- but it comes in handy when eg I've got the flu and my eyes are hurting.
So, I go to listen to Alex and get side-tracked into listening to the sample sentences spoken by the various characters. For the novelty ones, the sentence generally has something to do with the kind of voice:
Bad News: "The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast approaching train."
Bahh: "Do not pull the wool over my eyes."
Trinoids: "We cannot communicate with these carbon units."The male voices also have sentences expressing their personality or something about them:
Albert: "I have a frog in my throat. No, I mean a real frog!"
Alex: "Hi. I'm a new voice for Leopard."
Bruce: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Fred: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Junior: "My favourite food is pizza."
Ralph: "The sum of the [...] square of the hypotenuse."And then there's the female ones, which, with the exception of Princess, have no personality and no care for anything except their owner:
Agnes: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Kathy: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Princess: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a scientist."
Vicki: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Victoria: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"Fascinating.
Being the literalist I sometimes am around technology probably woudn't have tried that experiment, so I can't take credit. And a little quick Googling suggests no one else has noticed either though I'll obviously update the post if it's been mentioned elsewhere. Anyway, till then Zeborah ought to get the nod.
In a follow-up comment to the same post she generously added that
It's probably fair to point out that these voices have been created one or a few at a time over... oh, I can remember some going back ten years at least, I'm sure. Possibly the relevant software engineers have never sat down and played the test files one after another. Even so, someone(s) made some choice(s) at some point(s).
At some point when I have energy back, I might write a polite "did you notice?" email along with a suggested fix (that all voices have the same text - to facilitate comparing intonation etc) and see what happens.
A quick note to Apple is probably a good suggestion. And since problem ins in their *text to speech" feature an update to the relevant text file or files would have an *extremely* small footprint for their test suites and bandwidth.
Photo by Flickr user The Rocketeer. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Just so you know, if you've got a Macintosh you can use the Text to Speech feature to either read someone else's posts or, even better, *proofread* your own!
Not that I'm positive it'll do *me* any good. I tend to write in the same cadences I speak, which is part of why, I think, I'm *so* inclined to terminally interminable run-on sentences. And since I write like I speak, hearing my posts spoken back to me may not help. But it *will* help with some of my less comprehensible sentences (which I also, unfortunately, tend to write the way I'd say them... minus the "um's," and "I mean's.")
Anyway, if you have OSX Leopard there's a new voice called Alex that's a *lot* better at pausing and taking breaths (if not *heavy* breaths) for punctuation. It's a big improvement over the earlier voices.
Windows machines have had the same basic behavior for years as well, I just didn't think to try it for proofreading before I made the switch.
(Tip of the hat to David Alison's Blog, an entirely work-safe and excellent source of Windows-to-Mac conversion tips.)
Update: See Zeborah's comment about the sample sentences Apple gives each voice to play with!!! Yikes! Good eye,Zeborah. I only tried that one voice and didn't even test that before I applied it.
Photo on Flickr by... hey, *me!* Used under a Creative Commons license.
So last week I mentioned a tomato sauce I often make and people asked for the recipe. Here you go.
Seriously, while I never make sauce exactly the same way I like to take a little tip from Indian cooking and cook the spices right into the olive oil before I toss in chopped onions and garlic into a big skillet. If I'm cooking with meat I'll toss in either ground beef or Italian sausage and let it brown a bit. When I'm not using meat and I'm planning to cook everything down, I'll use chopped up eggplant which substitutes nicely.
Once the onions and garlic are in I'll usually them that go till they just starts to get translucent before throwing in all the other chopped veggies. Veggies vary but I always a red or green bell pepper, almost always some carrot, celery if my kids and partner will let me get away with it, and then either the regular white or brown mushrooms. Every now and then I remember to soak dry porchini mushrooms but I almost never plan to put it in pasta sauce.
Lately once the veggies are all piled in and cooked just a bit I've started doing this trick I heard from some Italians where you "sweat" the vegetables, covered, on low for up to half an hour. That works as a nice alternative to deglazing the pan with wine... though I usually do that anyway.
I'm not a big wine snob... or drinker (about once a year I give away all the bottles well-intentioned people bring over.) I keep a couple bottles of high-quality vermouth -- one sweet and one dry usually -- plus some really expensive port and (a staple for Asian cooking) Chinese rice wine. For pasta sauce, unless I'm using something really beefy as the (optional) meat I'll deglaze with the dry vermouth with has a nice, fruity sweetness that to my ignorant palate nicely complements tomatoes.
Then into the pan I toss however many cans of mixed (almost always that great organic brand) tomato stuff -- diced, whole, crushed -- to mostly fill the skillet. Then I'll usually top off with herbs, black pepper, and salt, a little tomato paste, sometimes a little anchovy paste, and a pinch of sugar.
Then depending on what's what I'll either cook it just above a simmer for 15-20 minutes, or else I'll move it into a big pot and simmer it on low till it gets this really thick, glossy, almost syrupy quality that's really cool.
After that I usually boil pasta, grate parmesean, throw together a salad (I use olive, flaxseed, or sometimes a nut oil plus unseasoned rice vinegar as the dressing base with salt and pepper always, but then a little brown mustard or mayo or maybe a little crumbly bleu cheese to help emulsify it and fresh or dried herbs.) Whack up slices of crusty bread and yell for someone to set the table. Cleanup the big stuff while they're doing that, then serve up, say whatever feels appropriate to you, and dig in.
Update: SugarMag observed that I'd neglected, um, times and measurements. Which, as she said, is fine if you've already made it hundreds of time (in the last five years I'd guess 250 for me?) but not so hot if you've never done it before. So while I still think it's hard to go too wrong as long as there are tomatos in it and nothing burns I'll add some starter details.
For an 11 inch wide, 2.5 inch deep skillet:
- One medium onion, chopped
- One green pepper, chopped
- A medium carrot and a medium stalk of celery, chopped
- Half pound of ground beef or italian sausage (bulk is cheaper but sliced up links are fine too.)
- If not ground beef then a medium-small eggplant peeled or unpeels and cut into cubes.
- As much garlic as you and yours enjoy
- One to two tablespoons of your choice or combo of dried oregano, basil, marjoram, or "italian seasoning" herb blend.
- A quarter teaspoon of black pepper or to taste
- A teaspoon of salt or to taste
- Maybe a teaspoon of sugar
- Maybe a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar or a teaspoon of (stronger, more acidic) wine vinegar
- As little as a tablespoon of olive oil and as much as a quarter cup (it's healthy, flavorful, and filling, so if you're worried it's beter to skimp on the meat instead.)
- Up to a quarter cup of wine, water, or some kind of broth for deglazing.
- The equivalent of three 14.5 oz (411g) cans of tomato "stuff," (stewed, diced, crushed, sauce, whole, etc.)
- A tablespoon or more (to desired consistency) tomato paste
- A teaspoon or less of anchovy paste
- A quarter teaspoon red chile flakes or to taste.
1) Sear ground meat on high heat till it gets a little brown around the edges and a little browning starts sticking to the pan too (disregard the sticking part if you use teflon.) It's ok if the inside of the crumbles isn't quite done because it'll finish cooking in the sauce. Transfer meat to a bowl. Pour off any accumulated fat. *Don't* clean up the browned stuff on the bottom of the pan.
2) Add olive oil to pan over medium high or high heat, let warm till fragrant, then sprinkle seasonings over the oil without stirring, wait another few moments and throw in garlic and onion. Turn down the heat if necessary to prevent scorching, and stir occasionally, one to three minutes, till the onions are translucent.
3) Turn the heat back up and start tossing or stirring in all the other veggies. Once the heat's stabilized again turn down heat enough to prevent scorching and let it carmelize a bit. Maybe five to fifteen minutes. Note: depending on moisture in the veggies you may wind up with too much juice for it to brown properly. Life in the big city, it'll still be good.
4) If you've got good browning, turn the heat back up to high, throw in your quarter cup of liquid and stir, making sure you get all the carmelized juices and scrape-y bits loose and into the liquid. If you don't have good browning, again, life in the big city -- add the wine anyway if you like, or, I guess, drink it if you're ok with that. If you do then let it simmer for three to five minutes (till the steam stops smelling like there's raw alcohol in it.)
5) Add the tomato stuff and stir. Add tomato paste, anchovy paste, and anything else still out on the counter. :-) Stir to mix.
6) Simmer very low, stirring occasionally, for up to 20 minutes *or*
6a) Transfer to a large pot or (my choice) crock pot and let cook for the rest of the day.
One of the nice things about being a stay-at-home dad is you get days like (now) yesterday. I'm going to tell you a couple of possibly boring things and then a potentially salacious bit.
Yesterday, inspired a little by recently-stumbled-upon 30DayGourmet.com ("The Leader in Freezer Cooking" and also, unfortunately, some kind of pay site) I plopped down and made a couple of gallons of homemade chicken stock (2 pressure cookers, about ten pounds of free-range chicken backs and other *cheeep* parts) and then skimmed, clarified, and boiled down to four pints that, once frozen, I'll divide further, pack into vacuum-sealed cubes, and deep freeze.
I also made three full recipes of scratch eggplant parmesan (my favorite-in-the-world dish, vegetarian or no) with a gallon and a half of scratch, simmered-for-hours tomato sauce with sweet red peppers, onions, celery, carrots, "wild" mushrooms, garlic, Mexican oregano and Italian herbs, with a bit of anchovy paste and balsamic vinegar for complexity. As an experiment I sliced the eggplants lengthwise into little planks instead of crosswise into circles. Then I breaded them in egg, fresh breadcrumbs and fresh-grated parmesan cheese, and then fried them before layering them up with a ton of mozzarella and my sauce and baking them up. Once those are frozen I'll break them into individual vacuum packs as well.
I also took the car in to the shop, called around looking for someone who can do some "handy-person" work around the house, cleaned the kitchen, managed a couple of play-dates with other children, made breakfast, school lunches, and supper (surprise, the children don't like eggplant parmesan so I made them quick macaroni and cheese.**) I also cleared some space in the converted garage that used to be my data center and is on its way to becoming a library, music room, detached guest bedroom. I read a ton of blog pages, read about the election, read about some of the divisiveness over whether gender loyalty ought to trump strong policy differences, and wrote a couple of posts in response to all that.
Now for the salacious bit. I think there's a drinking game where you type random words into Google, add "porn" and then see whether there's a porn site dedicated to that particular combination. If there's a match everyone takes a drink. (If you played it the other way, where you drink if there's no match, then teetotalers could play without anyone ever being the wiser.)
Anyway, as I was skimming chicken broth, and dividing it into containers for freezing, and as I was spreading tomato sauce over layer after layer of crusted eggplant and cheese, I became fascinated with the rhythm and sensuality of the ladles I was using to dip, pour, swirl, and pat everything into place. I became enamored with the polymorphous qualities -- the phallically rounded wood and metal handle of my (Chinese) ladle, the breast-like/buttock-like curves of the cup. I reflected on the gorgeous flow of luxuriously thickened broth pouring forth as I divided it into containers (mmm, it would be lovely to be ladled like that with massage oil or warmed-just-right fresh water after a salt scrub. And as I spread sauce in widening circles with the rounded, polished underside of the ladle I fantasized about spinning similar circles over slippery naked flesh.
If I hadn't been so busy I'd have taken photos.
When I Googled "ladle porn" I found no associated websites. I felt so proud! (Everyone gets a drink, though it it was up to me I'd suggest juice, tea, or coffee rather than booze. Use good judgment in any event.)
[** I use spaghetti noodles for my mac n cheese, boiling it for eight minutes in lightly salted water, then draining and immediately tossing it with a cup or so of freshly grated cheddar cheese, a tablespoon or so of butter, and a tablespoon or two of milk. You just keep tossing and the heat of the noodles takes care of the rest in a minute -- it's faster, much tastier, and even cheaper than Annie's or other boxed versions. Oh, there's nothing special about spaghetti noodles by the way -- elbows or shells work just as well. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user Anita Gould. Used under a Creative Commons license.
So more than 20 years ago I was a volunteer ranger in a very remote area of the North Cascades National Park. One evening I was strolling past a row of vacant cabins on the way to the park firehouse for dinner or to hang out and yak or something. Anyway, I heard a bit of rustling between two of the cabins and when I looked over there, maybe eight or ten feet away, was the largest non-grizzly-bear bear I've ever seen. I remember thinking to myself woah, *that's* a big fellow and continuing my stroll.
At the firehouse I told some of the other guys I'd just seen a really big bear a couple of doors down and they all kind of freaked out and ran outside to catch it, tranquilize it, or at least chase it away. It wasn't there when they got there but there were tracks and they *were* large. I didn't panic or anything but I did get a nice case of the jimmies that it had remained as calm at being surprised as I had.
I mentioned this at dinner when one of the children said they wondered if bears know what you're thinking. I mentioned that, at least after that, I really didn't care much for bears at all any more, or camping where there are bears.
My daughter said she thought it would be *very* cute to be walking through the woods and see a baby bear. That idea gave me even more jimmies and I mentioned to her that most bear attacks in the lower 48 states happen when someone walks between a baby bear and its mother.
I said you can imagine how the mother would feel if someone got between her and her baby. I said "well, after all you know what would happen if a bear walked between me and one of my children, right?"
And my eight-year-old daughter completely unselfconsciously jumps in aggressively with "I'd say 'You stay away from my daddy, *bear!*'"
I just love that girl! Sure, she can be sweet but boy is she tough! I wouldn't get in her way either if i was a bear! :-)
Photo by Flickr user mecredis. Used under a Creative Commons license.
You know, almost every day I take a look at my little stat-counter thingie and give or take a standard deviation it says roughly the same thing. Every now and then it bumps up when someone links to me but between the long timeline I've got a stat counter and the constant sleet of random Google Images hits my photos generate it's almost impossible to tell where an uptick comes from. (Especially since my fallback plan, Technorati, seems to go for days sometimes before coughing up new links.)
So anyway sometime between yesterday and today I got another uptick today (thanks, whoever you are) and just on a whim I went and downloaded my raw server logs and tried slicing and dicing them to see what I could see.
The short answer is I can't tell who, if anyone, might be responsible for my surge in hits but one thing I *did* discover since the last time I checked (some time last year) is that at least another 1,200 of you have me in your RSS/Newsreader queues in addition to the people who read me the regular way. Last time I checked (again some time last year) it was in the low hundreds so that's quite a jump!
So anyway, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone -- those of you I knew about and those of you I just discovered. And don't forget you don't have to be a stranger. Your comments are always welcome, and if you've got a blog or other kind of website and you feel like quoting from or linking to any of my posts please do -- I'm not the kind to bite (or not without being asked politely.)
One way or another, though, no matter how, and no matter how often you do, thanks so much for taking time to visit.
figleaf
Photo by Flickr user peterpunk777. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY answers whether the world needs more sex writers.
The issue here, as far as I’m concerned, is not so much how many sex writers there are, but what kind of discourse we’re conducting about sex. The truth is, there’s only room for so many Carrie Bradshaws (ideally, none, or close to it): but Carrie Bradshaw is not the be-all, end-all, of sex writing.
To assume that writing about sex means writing about our own relationships, or writing solely about relationships, period, is to see sex as a limited, boring, sad little topic. That’s not the case, as far as I’m concerned: far from it. Sex is a vast, diverse, fascinating topic; an expansive area that’s ripe for exploration, discussion, and commentary (insightful and otherwise). The problem isn’t that we have too many sex writers; it’s that we have too limited an idea of what sex writing is.
Sex is everywhere, sex permeates everything. Sex shapes our movies, our music, our sports, our literature; sex drives our science and frames our political agendas. Sex is a huge part of our lives — and if we could just own up to that, and respect that, well, we could start having discussions about sex that are anything but tired, boring, or played out.
Agreed. The real question isn't why write or blog about sex. I always say the real question is why aren't more people doing it?
You see this a lot with people who fret that they'd be a bad sex blogger because their own sex lives aren't that exciting, or because they don't want to blog about their own sex lives, or because they haven't had sex often enough (or, even, haven't had it at all, or, even, don't intend to have it till graduation or a certain age or marriage, or, *even* have no intention of ever having it at all.) Because there's... look, there's just *more to sex* than *having sex!*
Having a great time. I'd have to connect via dial-up at long-distance rates unless, as now, I'm able to drop into an internet cafe in town. Having a great time. Weather's cool but it's marvelously sunny, especially for the far north California coast. Great beaches, the occasional whale in the distance, redwoods you'd need to pack a lunch to walk around the trunk, and my (evidently chill-proof and wind-resistant) children are transported with all the sand, water, shells, gravel, and the enormous rocks dotting the coastline here.
Meanwhile it finally soaked in after however long it's been that what I'm really interested in dealing with if I can find a good graduate program that'll let me do it is understanding, discussing, and mitigating the impact of anti-feminism on men.
Because for all the plaintive refrain of NiceGuys™ everywhere that "patriarchy hurtz menz twoo," for the most part nobody does very much about it except, possibly, concern-troll about how nobody does anything about it on feminist-focused websites. Which is sort of a shame because for all the incontestible crap it heaps on women the benefits to men are, um, kind of meager.
Oh rats, almost out of batteries.
More tomorrow, maybe.
Photo by Flickr user superterrific. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I'll be off on a bit of a busman's holiday beginning Saturday morning: a drive from the rainy, chilly snow-on-cedars forests of Washington State to the... evidently equally rainy, almost-as-chilly redwood forests of northernmost California.
Seemed like a good idea when we booked the trip last November but the weather map says it's even more 40-degrees (F) and raining there than it is here. (And my father swears that here we just paint our thermometers at 40 degrees to save ourselves the trouble of buying real ones. :-)
Actually while it will be rainy it's actually a beautiful time of year to visit and my whole family is looking forward to it.
Even me, despite slight qualms about just how much internet connectivity there might be -- it may be dial-up from the little cabins we're staying in, assuming there's even a local access number!
Anyway, all this by way of letting you know that if I seem to vanish, or at least fade somewhat, it'll be a planned outage and if so then while I'll still be reading appropriate materials off line (at the very least I'll be thoroughly enjoying myself reading Amanda Marcotte's new book "It's a Jungle Out There") and otherwise recharging my batteries.
If I do find my way to a connection (who knows, it's 21st Century California and not 18th Century Borneo after all) you can probably expect posts on prostate cancer and the no-sex class paradigm, further reflections (with a distinct figleaf twist!) on what might constitute "feminist porn," and reflections on a startling realization about what I've actually been interested in blogging about for at least the last half year (if not my whole adult life.)
Sooner or later, preferably sooner.
figleaf
Green Shirt 004 from my Green Shirt set on Flickr.
The word of the day is vellus, the "short, fine, 'peach fuzz' body hair" that's just one of the most underrated of bodily delights.
Often nearly invisible except when highlighted from behind or when we're very, very close, vellus hair on cheeks, foreheads near the hairline, the small of the back, the belly and breasts, catch our eye, tickles our partner's faces, and respond to feather-light, not-quite-tickly kisses with tiny goosebumps that quickly melt again when we warmly, gently breathe over them.
Mmmm, vellus. The word of the day is vellus.
[I'm just a bit under the (spring-like) weather, decompressing from a dynamic winter quarter, and catching up with my family. And under those circumstances I thought I'd indulge one of my non-sexual interests: inventing witless, substance-free, but internally consistent conspiracy theories. Warning: This post is almost exclusively about current American Politics and couched in the formal language of American-style conspiracy theorizing. That said... --fl]
The completely sensible, level-headed Kevin Drum of the wonderful The Washington Monthly creates a great opportunity by complaining about a curmudgenly post by Matthew Yglesias...
Hillary's chances are slim and maybe it's time to withdraw. But how do we hop from there to an out-of-the-blue factual assertion that Hillary would just as soon see Obama lose in November? That's crazy. There's just no evidence that anyone in the Clinton campaign actually thinks this way. It's like the 90s all over again and it's driving me nuts.
Amateurs I tell ya! *If* someone really just wanted to enjoy a nice fat conspiracy theory they'd knit together a nice scenario where Senator Clinton, seeing the writing on the wall, continues to undercut Senator Obama on issues, especially, of foreign policy inexperience, skin color, class, and religion right up till... Senator McCain nominates her to be his running mate in a "maverick" twist on last cycle's Kerry -> McCain "unity" story. [**]
Such a move would thrill: journalists, disappointed Bloomberg "centerist party" backers, embarrassed-to-admit-it racists, neo-conservatives of the Joe Lieberman stripe, paleo-feminists, immigration-reform folks, the Clintons, and, of course, the Clinton's pollster Mark Penn.
- Currently marginalized “Centerists” would get their dream ticket.
- Uncomfortable “Bradley-effect” Democratics would be relieved to have a reason not to vote for a person of color.
- Joe Leiberman / Jamie Kirchick types would obviously prefer someone who lacks foreign-policy self-confidence and therefore acts excessively hawkish in a position of influence instead of someone confident enough to... eww!... consider diplomacy.
- Ferarro-style paleo-feminists (though not younger, politically progressive feminists) would prefer another chance at a-woman-any-woman in the #2 spot over no chance at all.
- A number of immigration reform folks evidently hope (as Mickey Kaus and other opponents fear) that a combination of McCain and Democrats in the House and Senate probably offers the best policy outcome.
- The Clintons would be thrilled, of course since not only could they have almost free, Cheney-style reign in the power vacuum left by McCain’s clueless indifference to domestic policy, but in actuarial terms chances would be very good that she’d ascend to the Oval Office sometime *before* 2012.
- Oh yeah, and finally Mark Penn would be thrilled because his billing and employee oversight would be streamlined. So see? Plenty of ammunition for conspiracists!
That's not to say Clinton is up to any such thing but it is to say that *if* Yglesias is just spinning conspiracies for the fun of it he's not putting very much effort into it.
[** Nevermind that votes gained from the proposed new coalition probably wouldn’t offset those lost by the hard-core Reds. Why hold this conspiracy to any higher standards than any other? --fl]
The 9 1/2 Weeks final project went swimmingly, although since it was a group effort I don't feel comfortable sharing the results here. (Suffice to say both parties would have gotten more of what they enjoyed, and less of what made them miserable, if they'd first been willing to discuss what they were doing period, and second if they'd been willing to negotiate boundaries and limits for their fantasy role-playing rather than imagining they were discovering some new, more "authentic" gender dynamics. Because, after all, "authentic" and "gender" are as oxymoronic as a "selfish lover." Eww!)
And speaking of oxymorons there's only one paper left to write by Thursday, a three page assignment to (paraphrasing) "Describe the history of human sexuality from its origin to the present day, concentrating especially, but not exclusively, on interpersonal communication, gender, technique, power dynamics, and and reproduction as it has impacted heterosexuals, gay, lesbian and bisexuals, asexuals, and the transsexual, transgendered, cisgendered, and intersexed at each stage of life. Be brief, concise and specific." :-)
Normal blogging and, especially, comment responses should resume after that. Thanks for your patience!
I gotta figure out where I can do more of this work, especially in groups, either in graduate programs or for (gasp!) work. Because it's not just good it's been *good* for me! It might stun you to learn that when I'm not blogging I can evidently write extremely well-structured, coherent, and relatively copy-edited work without seriously compromising either creativity, specificity, or warmth. It's certainly stunned me. Not that I'd want to do it all the time, mind you. But wow. Please sir, after 20 odd years out of college I want more. :-)
The tough part isn't just going to be finding a local graduate-degree program that'll fit what I want to do, it'll be finding enough others to seminar and collaborate on research with.
Evidently because I'm
- Tall (6'0"-6'3")
- Have an athletic body type
- Am older than 30
- Am (sexually-transmitted?) disease free
- Am heterosexually oriented
- Have had more than 20 partners
- Have one small tattoo
- Will do things you never have even heard of sexually **
- Have no piercings ***
- Have a four-year degree
- Have an average-sized penis
- Describe my style as "eclectic"
- Am usually honest and open in conversation
- Suffer from disorders listed in the question
- Would rather stay in to have sex on a Friday night
- Enjoy international travel****
- See some sort of sexual imagery in an ink-blot*****
- Prefer spicy foods
- Usually snuggle or spoon after sex
- Prefer sexual attraction most from a sexual partner
...
I'm evidently worth $1,025.00/hr in bed, based on calculated averages taken from advertised male and female private escort sites.
This compared to the average person who takes this test who, allegedly, is worth only$214.26 an hour in bed.
This all according to the no-doubt highly accurate Hellarity.com "How Much Are You Worth In Bed?" quiz.
Now the irksome thing, of course, is that as far as I know there's no way to legally confirm or refute this in practice. Or, for that matter, since it's pretty hard to prove a negative ("No problem, officer, here's proof I didn't have sex for money yesterday, or the day before, or the day before, or the day before, or...") I probably couldn't confirm it theoretically either. But still, since I've been speculating a lot recently about it in the abstract a single data point makes it more tangible than none.
** By which I mean not what my average extraordinarily well-informed and diversely experienced readers has heard of but what the average person has.
*** Ok, I have a couple of left-over holes in one of my ears from back in the 1970s and 1980s.
**** No trans-oceanic travel yet but I go to Canada a lot and I've trekked around Belize and eastern Guatemala.
***** It looked like embryological genital tissue -- hope that counts :-)
Photo by Flickr user cuorhome. Used under a Creative Commons license.
There's an old aphorism that I remember my brother the budding graphic artist making into a middle-school poster. It says
He peels potatoes best who peels them one at a time.
Source: My little brother.
That's probably too gender-specific for general distribution but it's remarkably appropriate in *my* specific case. Although even then, come to think of it, I could change it to
*Figleaf* peels potatoes best when he peels them one at a time.
Between influenza, musical rehearsals, family members with influenza, full-time courseload, the controlled chaos of hundreds of cases of Girl Scout cookies all over the living room which I haven't had to manage directly but even so..., a largely unreduced domestic workload doing much of the shopping, most of the cooking, much of the cleaning, laundry, bedtimes, and all the million other great/awful burden/pleasures of stay-mostly-at-home parenthood, and planning for a long-format videotaped presentation today (that went about 12% over time this morning but was otherwise actually well-received thank goodness) I seem to have thrown my blogging off balance. Outright cranky rather than merely curmudgeonly posts, peculiar formatting (all strike-through? not so hot) decisions, jumbled comment replies, unfortunate photo highlights, and now a notice from YouTube that an HNT video I posted last summer violated community standards after all... well, what's a blogger to do?
Well, sometimes it's just good to sit down in our lovely myth-of-rational-self-interested and remind one's self "I am not a human being, I am an animal!"
It's often said we wouldn't treat a friend as harshly as we treat ourselves. It's probably not necessary to add that very few people would treat an animal as harshly as they treat themselves either. (The irony was not lost on anyone at the time, or since, that the first child-protection suit was brought under animal cruelty prevention laws as, theretofore, animals had more protection than did children.)
There's much to be said about sex, power, politics, gender, prostitution, agency, ability, and self-photography. But there's also something to be said about taking a nap, sitting down and reading a book alone or with children, watching TV shows on DVD, and spending hours simply holding hands... and peeling potatoes one at a time. In real life as well as in metaphor.
Aahh, the kettle's whistling. I have more to say, and I'll say it soon but... One thing at a time! :-)
So the other day we had dinner with friends at their house and at one point while standing by in the family room to help the kids settle back down after a mid-game frackass I started thumbing through a book about working out with those big pump-up Pilates exercise balls.
This afternoon, sort of on a whim, I decided to try one of the recommended "subtle core-building" exercises on the biggest of several balls my partner used to use as a chair when she had a sore back. And the exercise really is a simple, subtle one. You sit square on the ball, your knees at roughly 90 degrees, and then bounce with a sort of elbows-bent, marching-band arm movement. The instructions had been to do the exercise for a while, five minutes or more, and to pay attention to what core muscles were engaged or flexed.
And it really is a subtle exercise. At first it was all about finding balance, and then rhythm, but once I found my center of gravity and a good pace I started noticing, sure enough, all sorts of muscles I generally don't pay any attention to gently engaging and taking on more of a central role. The first big sensations were in my core muscles near my solar plexus -- not my usual abdominals or obliques but something a little deeper.
So that was cool, but the other thing I really started to notice after my mid-torso muscles was my pelvic-floor muscles. After just a few minutes the slow, steady pulsing and flexing -- too gentle by far to be anything like clenching... really no effort at all -- just started reaching deeper, engaging not just my PC muscles but lots of other ones as well, leg muscles, girdle muscles, muscles around my perineum, and even muscles I think maybe I notice only when I'm ejaculating.
Anyway, it was just a slow, sensual not-quite-erotic feeling, and -- me being me after all -- I began to wonder how it would work with more direct stimulation like a smaller bump or ball near my prostate. And then, me being me with my little lint-trap memory, I remembered someone mentioning a gag/novelty sex toy that was basically just a Pilates ball with an attached dildo.
A little bit of Googling turned up a couple of products along those lines (or at least a couple of repackagings of the same product -- as if that never happens.) You can see one from the first randomly Googled vendor that included a photo of the actual product here.
I obviously couldn't say if the product would work for anyone else, male or female -- especially since I haven't even tried one yet -- but I can say that I think it might not be the big joke it was often presented when it was first introduced. I happen to think you could probably get the same benefit from a regular ball and a regular insertable of your choice. Anyway, if anyone else has tried one of those things, or if you've noticed the sort of inner/erotic sensations I was trying to describe (with or without insertables) I'd love to hear about it.
[Note: Today's photo is a bit less work safe than usual. But, again, only a bit. --fl]
I'm reposting my response to a multitude of heated comments to my previous post which mostly inadvertently, has ticked off a lot of people I like quite a lot and almost always whole-heartedly support. So rather than rephrase things for each individual I'm going to try to either dig myself out or, very likely, dig myself deeper. Here goes.
First of all, since at least last summer I've been trying to reconcile what I felt was a big disconnect between the very real attitude advances women are going through in terms of agency, interest, and expression on the one hand, and the majority of men who, stuck wherever we largely are conceptually, see all that and say only "yeah, yeah, show me your tits?" Well, this post is, in part, an expression of frustration with all that.
And now, not just for Amber but for everybody: Today a friend of mine in class, who's working at a copy center to help pay for school, said it was slow so she was doing homework the other evening, and a customer came in and asked her, evidently dead seriously, why she was bothering to study when someone with her looks and body should just forget all that and find a sugar daddy. But here's the thing, it's not like she's fucking stupid, right? She's passing her college courses, right? And she's got a mirror and knows what she looks like. And she's even in a communications/gender-studies/sex-ed class where this week everyone's busy putting together their own, and answering other's, audience survey forms for presentations next all next week about cool, cool stuff like the benefits of anilingus, the history of the condom, intro's to Seattle's Center for Sex-Positive Culture a.k.a. The Wet Spot, and where the instructor's been using sex toys as the subject of all her examples of speech presentations, right? So it's not like my friend's either dumb or disinterested in sex. And yet. And yet... somehow this lard-assed grandpa's supposed to be clueing her in to a possibility she might not have already chosen to pursue if she were so inclined? Sorry, that's not cool, that's not disabled-in-a-world-with-no-acceptance, and that's not edgy-something-one's-partner-won't-do. That's just lame.
I mean, fucking hell, it's not even like the guy just asked her if she'd like to stop doing her homework for a few minutes, put up the "back in two minutes" sign on the door, and have sex with him. For pay or not for pay. Nor did he make inquiries into her attitudes about sex, her interests, her potential partners, or how often she was already having sex with friends, acquaintances, and compatible friends-of-friends, alone or in combination, without anyone having to pay her anything. Hell, he didn't even ask her if she wasn't already a prostitute! No, instead he opined that, with a body and face like hers an education was a waste of effort... as if she couldn't have both! Which, she says, she didn't appreciate.
So before responding everybody hold that thought for a second as well. Next item: Lately there's been yet another round of calls amongst international feminist legal scholars to once again pull out the tired old, boring old, and wrong old idea that it's simply inconceivable that any person, anywhere, at any time, could possibly be a prostitute on purpose; that each and every prostitute on the whole planet earth has no, zero, none agency and is therefore automatically and irrefutably "trafficked" and "prostituted."
Now, since I happen to know a number of women who are or have been sex workers who were *neither* "trafficked" or "prostituted" I happen to think the idea that *all* sex workers are captive thralls is bullshit. And yet there incontestably *are* trafficked and enslaved sex workers -- every couple of months out here on the west coast, anyway, another underground, illegal, unlicensed, and unregulated brothel with pretty unambiguously trafficked and uncompensated sex workers gets busted. Which means some subset of customers of prostitutes are knowingly purchasing the services of coerced sex workers and *don't care.*
So hold *that* thought too. And yet... and yet... there's still that perpetually percolating notion out there that nobody in his or her right mind would willingly become a prostitute because prostitution is somehow the worst possible job on the planet, something so odious, so vile, so instinctively demeaning, that it could *only* be coerced. Thus, for instance, the agitation to have it all defined as, well, coerced. But that's obviously bullshit.
First it's bullshit because, in fact, as we know, plenty of people don't agree it's the worst job at all, right? People we know. People I and other commenters in this thread so far know personally, have met, have had long conversations with, and have no reason at all to believe they're any happier or more unhappy than any other self-employed professional.
And second it's bullshit because there are in fact jobs that, if the standards sought by prostitution opponents were applied, would appear even further down the list. If I offended any colonics workers I apologize but I was getting a little bored with my other preferred comparisons: boiler-room phone sales and agricultural stoop labor -- one of which is clearly emotionally draining the other is physically draining. And yet one almost never hears opponents of prostitution agitating for the dignity of agriculture workers, and never for the dignity of boiler-room operators. Or, I might add, the dignity of those who's job it is to sluce and vacuum other people's colons.
And so I'm saying (but evidently not too well) is that *if* sex work is really that bad then other jobs, colonics workers in this case, must be *even worse.* Of course if prostitution *isn't* really that bad -- an argument you've probably noticed I make rather frequently -- then everything I said about colonics changes as well.
And the final point I'm going to ask you to hold on to for a moment, is that I think the notion that ugly people, fat people, old people, disfigured people, or disabled people can't find partners is kind of out of line. The first time I ever went to the Center for Sex Positive Culture, for a group discussion of body image, I met an extremely pleasant group of people of literally all shapes, sizes, ages, physical conditions, gender orientations, preferred-partner counts, and kinks, who spoke both about the difficulties they faced in the outside world and the great sex with varied and non-judgmental partners they were finding *for free* in the community the Wet Spot has created. And for that matter, it being 11:22 PM on a Thursday Night, the regular Thursday night Grind ought to be in full swing right this second. Which means that any of the differently-abled people some commenters have expressed concern for had previously joined the center and attended its brief but comprehensive orientation that includes express language about policies regarding tolerance and diversity, then they could go in (most areas are wheelchair accessible) and feel pretty welcome. And, more to the point, get together with each other or other CSPC members and dance, converse, make out, or fuck each other silly either in public in one of the main rooms or else in one of the smaller, more private enclosed spaces about the premises. All for about $65 a year and, I think, a $15 cover charge. (Quick aside: CSPC is *definitely* not for everyone -- a fair number of younger people characterize it as a place where old people have sex, and a fair number of other people have a hard time with their extremely earnest approach to things, and others have difficulty with their strong BDSM emphasis. But what can I say, it's a chartered 503(c) non-profit community center that just happens to have an extraordinary number of well-used hardpoints in the ceiling and walls so you're going to get a little bit of that. But at least in Seattle there are a number of smaller venues that cater to more specific, less diverse preferences and those are great too.)
So. I've asked you to hold a ton of things and I appreciate your patience. I'll take them off your hands though not necessarily in the order I handed them out in, and, I hope, in the process you'll at least better understand where I was coming from when I wrote this seemingly galvanizing and divisive post.
1) Whereas the customers of some sex workers may be perfect, adventurous gentlemen many of them aren't. They don't particularly value the service sex-workers provide, they don't particularly respect sex workers, and they have opinions about sex workers that, ahem, may have more in common with the bitterest prostitution opponents than with the often progressive practitioners who may feel I was singling out them, their friends, or their select customers.
2) There's an assumption that, somehow, non-Barbie/non-Ken types must seek out prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them. There's a similar assumption that there are just some things that... what... no "good" woman (at least) wants to do and... what?... no woman period would do except for money. Please! As I'm writing some of them are doing it right now. Without having to pay anyone but the great volunteers at the check-in/ticket counter.
2b) Maybe instead there's some kind of assumption that non-Kens aren't so much unable to find willing sex partners as unable to hook up with Barbies without paying them. Well, that's entirely possible but *extremely* different from the previous assertion that they need prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them *at all.*
2c) Oh yeah, and leaving aside "teh disabled" for a minute, if there are actually plenty of people in the world who are capable
3) Possibly due to more focus on male customers than female sex workers, there's another move underway to demonize prostitution in a way that denigrates, alienates, and denies the agency of numerous autonomous prostitutes. These opponents seem so motivated by panic about patriarchy and misogyny that they may be attributing more power and authority to sex-worker's customers than reality supports. And while I think authors of those initiatives really do mischaracterize the situation it's *still* the case that an extraordinary number of (mostly) men purchase the sexual services of (mostly) women they know to be coerced. And don't care.
3a) *If* one is going to argue that sex work is demeaning (as I do not) then out of a sense of both consistency and decency one ought to acknowledge that other jobs are even more demeaning (which I don't think they are.)
3b) Rather than mischaracterize what's still (in my past experience) the bulk of customers as arrogant exercisers of macho, masters-of-their-destiny, patriarchal privileged types I thought it might be more productive to mock, socially castigate, and just generally recognize their marginality rather than centrality.
4) And finally, whereas I've acknowledged there are men and women who are perfectly content to do with a transfer of money from men to women exactly the same things they already enjoy doing for free can I just say cool, good for you, sounds like fun, odd how the fund transfers always seem to go one way when we know desire goes both ways but, still, what the heck? Nothing I've said in the original post and this even longer reply except maybe my little quip from two seconds ago about how money seems to flow only one way applies to you. Really. I don't mean you.
So there. I'm with a lot more caveats than I started with I'm still sticking to my guns: a society organized such that some people feel obliged to pay other people for sex -- and, to consider paying someone else a discount in order to knowingly have sex with a coerced individual -- is, well, sorry, *weird* considering how other existing social organizations allow people to do much the same things for free.
So I've just confirmed with another blogger that comments I leave on their blog are being automatically spam-filtered. And as she said
I did search for a recent comment from you ...and found it amidst my spam. And not just comments awaiting moderation, but the 'bad' spam. LOL
Craziness. Every time I catch a comment of yours, I mark it as 'not spam'. Which *should* mean it doesn't keep snagging your comments.
I already knew blogging systems that use the popular (and otherwise generally excellent) Akismet kick me to the curb- and some other systems drag me down too. Now it looks like [Blogger's correction: Wordpress! --fl] is doing it as well. That's ok, sort of... something about a URL with text "real adult sex" in it maybe? And, after all, my *original* idea when I saw the URL for sale years ago was to start a straight-ahead progressive political blog with a minor in 1st Amendment issues precisely because I *knew* it would get filtered and nanny-netted.
What's bugging me a bit more, though, is that I might be getting filtered when I comment using my alt-URL on Blogger, figleaf.blogspot.com and alt-email address ("talkingfigleaf" on the gmail system.)
Anyway, two questions:
- Anyone else with sexually oriented but non-spam content think their comments are getting filtered?
- Has anyone else checked their moderation lists for incorrectly marked comments? (This might not be worth your while and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't bother.)
I promise I might be irked but I'm not offended if my main URL is being spam-filtered, although I'd like to politely ask policy administrators on the big filtering teams to add me to their white-lists. Unless their algorithms just don't work that way or, of course, if they honestly believe I really am some kind of spammer or my content is really that inappropriate.
(Note: As chance would have it I've been so busy for the last three months that I've barely had time to keep up with the comments on my blog, let alone comment heavily on other people's. Yet sometime in those three months I seem to have been plunged into black-list oblivion.)
I go on and on so much about interconnected webs of dominant paradigms, agency, worthiness, beauty and paleo-marxian "classes" that it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume I don't show my face because I'm always wearing the classic tinfoil hat of the conspiracy theorist. Not unreasonable but also, theoretically anyway, not true.
I also ought to mention that while I think feminism is the cutting edge of humanism, and while I passionately agree with classical radical feminists that domestic gender relations are the model for all other forms of oppression, I'm not trying more to establish my NiceGuy™ credentials, I'm trying to talk other men out of this millennium-long hostage crisis called patriarchy where the tragedy is that the alleged "feminazi" enemies of the guy way out on the ledge *really would,* *really do* wish him only the best while his anti-feminist nominal allies are yelling "Jump, jump, jump like a man!!!"
So if you've read much feminist theory, or you've taken women's studies classes, or already have egalitarian heterosexual relationships, or if, say, you're an actual woman and therefore not at all mystified, awed, baffled, or willfully in denial of your own sexuality then an awful lot of what I've got to say here is probably somewhere between boring, patronizing, distorted, off point, and sometimes wrong. None of which I particularly mind unless I appear to be a) actively mischaracterizing other living people's words b) missing an opportunity to state the case in a way that resonates with men who aren't yet on board.
Even my photos, which I know a lot of people really enjoy, are about getting the point across that *humans* are "visual," and not just men, that *men* can be the objects of heterosexual erotic desire and not just consumers. (A point your wonderful and wonderfully confidence-building comments reinforce over and over.) Even the increasingly rare erotic posts I write are efforts to break through the traps of the beauty myth for women and the worthiness traps for men, the traps of passivity in women and aggression in men, the traps of scarcity and disinterest and androcentrism.
So anyway, everybody's got a windmill to tilt at and I feel remarkably fulfilled tilting at mine. And if I seem a particular and myopic old man and you think you could do better? Woah, that would be deluxe! I may b