Recently in Who Knew? Category

I've been way more out of contact that I thought I'd be. I'll be home and (finally) back online this afternoon.

Ell of Wilful Damage says there's something Blogspot bloggers can do about the annoying "Objectionable Content" warning that shows up every single time anybody visits your blog.

In the big blog blockout of 2008 you may recall I somehow ended up with the infamous "Objectionable Content" warning page. That stung a little.

Flitting around the internet last week I noticed that some blogs have a different warning page - one that alerts to "Adult Content" rather than "Objectionable Content"

I am, dear readers slow on the uptake it would appear, for on further investigation I've found that now if you go into your Settings page you can set for "Adult Content" and this removes the "Objectionable Content" warning and replaces it with the all together more reasonable text below. It's only a small thing, but "Adult" I can live with happily - "Objectionable" just made me sad.

She said it here.

No, you can't turn it all the way off but I agree with Ell that "Adult Content" is typically way more accurate than "Objectionable Content." For instance "objectionable content" might refer to commercial spam, racist, homophobic, factually inaccurate, egregiously personal-characterizing, random, unattributed reposting of other people's work, and so on. "Adult Content" is more likely to be just about sex.

The pro-same-sex-marriage video by Garfunkle and Oates has already made the rounds at Huffington Post and Alternet and the like, but Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors introduces it using an irresistable pun.

Will Gay Marriage Lead To Sex With Ducks?

Pat Robertson thinks so.

And these two “chicks” are pretty stoked about the idea:

Read the quote in context here.

Note #1: The Robertson video takes you to MediaMatters.com which unfortunately presents an annoying "want to register" popup.

Note #2: If you squint your eyes, ignore the lyrics, ignore the background scenes in the video, and just concentrated on how they criticize Pat Robertson and don't smile you'll realize that Garfunkle and Oates, like all their radical lesbian separatist female lesbian extremist radical radical socialist feminist ilk, have no sense of humor and probably don't even pluck their legs.

Note #3: Comforting thought for right-wing straw-clutchers. "Garfunkle and Oates" are actually named Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci. Which raises an important Pat-Robertson-comforting, institutional-women-erasing point. When gay marriage happens to lesbians they both have to give up their maiden names, right?

Note #4: And of course point #3 explains why homophobes seem to be so much less tolerant of gay men than gay women. Because when gay men get married they're both men so there's no way to resolve who's last name to use which, like time travel anywhere except the Star Trek mulitverse, would cause irreconcilable paradoxes in the time-space continuum. Which is the real reason misunderstood advanced particle physicists like Pat Robertson differentially oppose gay marriage over lesbian marriage and not, despite that one unfortunate video clip where he'd obviously been into the cooking sherry and a stray mike was left on, because "girl-girl scenes in wedding dresses are HAWT."

As James Fallows, writing about the designer of the soaring I-10 / I-405 interchange in west Los Angeles, says, you learn something new everyday.

Here, from the linked CalTrans website, is Marilyn Reese as she looked during construction; below, a clearer sense of the design she had in mind.

The designer:

Her work:

He said it here.

Say what you will about car culture (and I've got a few choice words) the architects and engineers of that era had an incredible, consistent aesthetic in California. Including, evidently, Marylin Reese, first female civil engineer licensed in California. The interchange is now named after her.

Image from the excellent lawyer-humor page BrainDen.com.

Via newly minted lawyer Jill Filipovic of Feministe turns up yet another one of those wretched, seemingly-beloved-to-lawyers anti-lawyer jokes -- this one with a no-sex class twist.

"What rare thing do you get when you cross a feminist and an attorney?"

Answer: A lawyer who won’t screw you.

Read the quote in context here.

I believe congratulations are in order for passing the bar. Nice work, Jill.

My net service is down today. I've got a call in but for now? Am iPhone is nice, but not for blogging.

Too bad! There are some wonderful
comments, some that deserve to be promoted to their own posts.

Ill be bad online soon as I can.

Thanks to a chain of links beginning on Twitter, traversing the Washington Post and ending up at a post by MG Siegler at Tech Crunch I discovered first that Amazon now lets blog authors publish to the Kindle and, second, how to do it.

1. Go to kindlepublishing.amazon.com and sign up for an account.
2. You have to create a completely new account -- your existing customer or associate accounts won't work.
3. Submit an online form identifying and describing your blog
4. Amazon does... something... not sure what
5. Your blog is available for subscription on the Kindle.
6. Update Your blog's Amazon page will look something like this!

The program's in beta -- just a day or two old at this point -- and the original links were about a now-fixed bug that let anyone register anyone else's blog (e.g. you could have registered DailyKos or BoingBoing) and then get any subscription money that might accrue.

As I say that bug's now fixed -- you have to actually be the author of the blog. And since I'm not sure how they're going to validate I thought it would be a good idea to post this in case they check visually.

So check out this page out of the current issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, posted by Alessia of Relationship Underarm Stick. Specifically, compare and contrast the feature title, "Fun Fearless Female" with the photo of feature profilee Anna Paquin.

Cosmo is the magazine of choice for critics of gender construction sites because it's just an OSHA inspector's enforcement nightmare. Everywhere you look there's a serious health or safety violation. In her post Alessia ably dismantles the text of Cosmo's perpetual gender enforcement, click here to see her take on that. I see a much simpler problem though.

In a standard magazine photo shoot hundreds of photos are typically taken using dozens of poses and, often, multiple settings, outfits, and lighting designs. From that photographic bounty a single image is selected that in the eyes of the editor best represents not only the individual being photographed but also the message of the accompanying article and, of course, the editorial stance of the entire publication.

So compare Paqun's wary, tentative body language and facial expression to the title "Fun Fearless Female." I'm not sure what the image communicates to Cosmo readers but if it showed up in, say, Details magazine I don't think the caption would be about her having fun.

---

I dunno. I probably would have passed it by if Paquin wasn't the lead character, Sookie Stackhouse, in the HBO series True Blood, which is based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire series of novels I've been reading lately. I like the books because the character is so much the opposite of protagonists in other, outwardly similar books such as Twilight: capable, respected, sexual, and most importantly integratedly adult.

But as Punkass blogger Lisa KS said in comments on my earlier post

Yep, Twilight sucks butt and Charlaine Harris's series is tons of fun. Whatever you do, don't watch TrueBlood on HBO -- all the things you listed that are great about the books, plus a few more, get completely annihilated in the series, to be replaced with a mixture of high-school romanticism and pointless titillation.

One of the nicest things about the Stackhouse character in the books is that while she's female, and fearless considering her circumstances, and even occasionally fun (again considering her circumstances) she probably wouldn't read Cosmo.

Oh yeah, and for the record I'm just starting book four, Dead to the World. The rest of the series so far, (#2 - Living Dead in Dallas, #3 - Club Dead) hasn't been as consistent or thought-provoking as the original Dead Until Dark. But hey, they're not that bad and besides I've got a cold. Plus a habit of compulsively reading book series to their bitter ends... which is just one more reason I tend to stick with non-fiction. :-)

Goose of Living In Outlaw Territory occasionally does the Recipe Tuesday meme. I happened to be on the market for something quick, easy, tasty, and kid-friendly so darned if I didn't print her post (I don't think I've ever printed anyone's post before) and headed to the grocery store.

Here's what I printed. I'm reposting it so that either makes it a Tuesday Recipe by proxy post, a bigger-than-140-character Twitter Retweet, or else just a darn good Tuesday night meal.

So sometimes I want enchiladas mole but I don't want to spend forever wrapping the filling inside each tortilla and I certainly don't want to haul out the spice grinder to hand make my mole. Perhaps that makes me lazy occasionally, so be it.

Here is what I do.

One jar mole paste, diluted with at least two cups water and blended over heat till simmering. This paste tends to want to stay thick so keep adding water if you need to.
15 corn tortillas (cut the sides off so they are rectangular)
Filling, such as-black beans and corn with minced peppers, zucchini, mushrooms and garlic or shredded chicken or pork or whatever you want.
Three cups grated cheese-chedder, monterey jack, queso fresco what have you

Saute up your filling
Spray a glass pan with cooking spray and lay down a layer of tortillas (about 5).
Add a layer of filling, cheese and mole sauce.
Repeat the top the layers with the last batch of tortillas and mole.

Bake at about 350 for 30 minutes.

She said it here.

For once my corner grocery let me down -- no mole sauce of any kind -- so I improvised my own impromptu enchilada sauce with a tub of fresh salsa and a can of tomato sauce.

Otherwise? Wowzie! Quick, easy, and very tasty. I grabbed an ear of fresh corn and some canned black beans, a little pork sausage, some onion and red bell pepper. A little sour cream on top after serving it up and... Mmmm-mmm!

The kids liked it too. Plus there's enough left over for lunches tomorrow.

Or, as Goose put it "It's dang good."

Here are my rough, non-verbatim notes from Cunningminx's excellent ice-breaking presentation "Internet Famous / Conference Shy." The notes are necessarily incomplete during audience-participation sections. Finally, because I arrived a few moments late I missed part of the introduction.

Language note: Minx uses the ominous-sounding term "stalking" in the OKCupid sense of being interested in or curious enough about to want to know more about or to meet someone you know only online. (In real stalking there's obviously no such thing as "stalking politely.")

First, here's the session description from the 2009 Sessions page.

Are you great on a keyboard, but overwhelmed by the time you get to the registration desk? Are you charming on Twitter but glued to the wall at the opening night party? Sometimes internet abundance doesn’t translate well to having a great time at that conference. From wildly famous sexperts to curious wallflowers, from keynoters to first-time guests, conference experiences might not easily translate from the keyboard. Find out how, with just a little preparation, you can have the best possible experience at your next con.

Session leader: Cunning Minx

How do you stalk politely?

• Check blogs and their other sites
• Leave comments
• Follow twitter
• Google for other social-media connections

Be organized

• make a list of who you want to see
• and what you want to talk about with them
  • name/alias
  • organization
  • blog/twitter topics
  • recent events attended

What can I do to be stalkable/open?

• Write best work before the event (most interesting to/about you)
• Be yourself, be interesting
• Reach out via blog, podcast, Twitter
• Use the event #hashtag for Everything
• Blog/Twitter about folks you do know
• Find out/ask who's going
• What you're excited about

Join the conversation

• Mailing list
• Listen first -- take a week to listen to what others are talking about, so you know what is and isn't... topical.
• Answer questions (if you really know)
• Ask questions
• Post a pic to Facebook group
• Post to Facebook wall
• Continue interesting conversations with individuals off list
• Be a real person

Mailing list don't

• Don't use as a dating service

As you pack

• Make sure you've got all your equipment with you
• Including chargers and cables
• And extra batteries
• On the other hand, asking to borrow a power cord is a great ice-breaker
• Bring fresh business cards w/ name/pseudonym, TwitterID, blog, cell-phone or texting
• Backup your laptop
• Give current partner some loving

During the conference

• turn twitter notices on mobile device
• be stalkable
• be your "party self"
• Post about all the fun you're having
• If you show faces do a pod/vidcast
  • seesmic.com
  • audioboom.com [Couldn't find working link. --fl]

Starting a conversation

• Statement
  • I just went to...
  • This is my first...
• Disclosure about yourself ("I" statement)
  • I think...
• Invitation (opportunity for them to say)
  • What do you think about...?

Conversation Starters

• Which session are you going to?
• Oh, I missed that, how was it
• Going anywhere for dinner (be specific
• What do you do at XXX
• How did you find out about YYY
• Did you see the season finale of ZZZ? (Battlestar Galactica, good example -- kind of random, good break-out-of-conference-mode question.)

Say what you want

• I'd like to present/scene with you tonight (Can't get what you don't ask for -- they're not telepathic)
• I'd like to get to know you better
• I'd love to hear you scream
• Point being -- get it out there out loud so they can respond

Practice believing in yourself

• If you get emo get yourself out of it by... asking/outreach to pull yourself back into "party" space
• Say fears out loud
• "Egging on" exercise -- you vent, they agree instead of saying "oh no." Point is you can end up laughing about it instead of resisting their resistance.

Take care of yourself

• Adopt a policy of
  • Trying new things
  • meeting new people
  • having new experiences
  • no regrets (you won't enjoy everything you try, e.g. the 9-star tofu faux chicken-liver appetizer everyone else at dinner said they liked.)
• Decide you will kick ass

On a whim, while looking for some uncharacteristic-for-me very light reading for the plane, I picked up a copy of Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark, the first book in a non-gothic, non-Twilight vampire novel that's the basis for the TV show True Blood. (I haven't seen the show but two people in the airport bookstore said it's not as good as the books.)

I haven't read the Twilight series but I've read more than enough reviews to have a good idea what it's about. And to suspect I wouldn't care much for it. Harris's book, on the other hand, while following almost the same template reads almost the opposite of what Twilight sounds like.

I don't know if the author intends any of this but...

• The vampire doesn't help the protagonist remain celibate. Quite the opposite.
• Rather than be physically harmed by sex with her vampire partner (it invigorates her and helps her heal faster) she's socially harmed (and sometimes put at physical risk) for her association with him.
• Even though there are male and female vampires their power, social conventions, and ruthlessness towards humans -- who till the recent development of synthetic blood were straight-up prey -- things are even more patriarchal rather than less
• The exaggerated patriarchalism and paternalism of vampire society makes it easier for the reader to notice the "ordinary" patriarchy of contemporary human society.
• The protagonist uses many of the same skills to cope with vampire culture that she developed as an intelligent but lower-working class woman to negotiate conventional society

All that said she remains a part of her culture instead of particularly questioning it, being "too good" for it, or otherwise being angsty or alienated.

All that plus southern (north Louisiana) culture, murder mystery, family drama, and of course romance, danger and lust made it pretty delightful light summer or long-flight reading.

I've already read the second book (I stayed home with my son who's come down what I rather pointedly hope is just a cold) and while I wasn't as enamored of it I'll read the next to see if I want to read the rest. But the first one was pretty good.

Everybody says the Pacific Northwest is rainy. And sure, it is. But it's almost always a drizzle so fine office workers will sometimes sit out in it and housepainters will (only half-jokingly) say "that's not rain that's coastal fog... keep working."

Meanwhile in northern Virginia, almost in sight of Washington, D.C, it was raining so hard a few minutes ago I got more thoroughly drenched just running across the street to catch a shuttle than I have in all the years I've lived in the northwest. Combined!

Point being that even though it rains "all the time" hardly anyone in the urban Northwest except little kids and tourists actually owns an umbrella because you don't really need them. But here? I don't think I'm going to bother here either -- it was raining so hard an umbrella wouldn't have helped!

It was raining so hard I got soaked to what would be my underwear. Assuming I wore underwear. Which usually isn't a problem. Unless you get so wet people can... almost tell. Even through heavy jeans!

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Weekend editor Hortense of Jezebel says

Oh, internet. Without you, how would we ever learn about Boytaurs and those who love them? According to Urlesque, there's an entire (NSFW) Boytaur site devoted to those who prefer "pony boys with octopus arms."

Boytaurs fall into several categories, apparently: either half-man, half-horse, or just men with multiple arms and legs. "Of course, many boytaurs don't stop with four legs," notes the site, "Some add more legs, going six-legged or more. Some add extra arms. And many, enjoying all their boytaur feet, decide to go wristfooted as well."

She said it here.

She found the link via URLesque.com

To be honest I'm not terribly impressed. I'm not sure the site's intention is even erotic so much as more of the same old iconic/stereotypic/lookee-thar. And pretty much by definition photoshopping men's torsos on to horse bodies (let alone photoshopping more muscles onto already musclebound men) doesn't representing the erotic possibilities inherent in the figure of the ordinary heterosexual male. Still, if manamal mashups are your thing boytaur.com seems to be your go-to destination.

If you're an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

I'm really looking forward to attending the second Sex 2.0 conference in the Washington, D.C. area early next month. Here's the press release.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - April 27, 2009. Now in our second year, Sex 2.0, a one-day unconference, will take place on May 9, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? Sex 2.0 is an unconference, which means that sessions will be informal conversations organized by people attending the event. Session leaders with some knowledge in a subject area facilitate conversations among the participants.

Sessions will include: “Internet Advocacy for Sexual Freedom” with Ricci Joy Levy of the Woodhull Foundation; “Polyamory in Media’s Spotlight” with Anita Wagner; “Craigslist Red, Craigslist Blue: Why we should dismantle the “internet red light district” with Melissa Gira Grant and Joanne McNeill; “Kick Ass Twitter Apps” with Cunning Minx; “Revenge Porn” with Maria Diaz; and “Sex Writing Beyond Erotica, Beyond Porn” with Jack Murnighan, Nerve.com editor-at-large. The keynote speaker will be Nikol Hasler, creator of the Midwest Teen Sex Show (http://midwestteensexshow.com). A complete list of sessions may be viewed at: http://sex20con.com/2009-schedule/sessions/

Sex 2.0 will be held in a Washington, D.C. hotel. (To ensure everyone’s privacy, location information will be email once you are registered). It will offer five conference rooms, a lounge (with free WiFi), vendor area as well as space for various sex-positive outreach groups to set up informational displays and tables.

The event is managed by volunteers and funded by sponsors. We are pleased to have SEXTOY.com as our presenting sponsor this year. SEXTOY.com has been focusing on building a relationship within the blogger community with the recent start-up of its sex toy reviewer program. SEXTOY.com is honored to be the official sponsor for Sex 2.0 and looks forward to a mutually rewarding relationship with the blogger Community. Two SEXTOY.com associates will be attending Sex 2.0 this year: Erik Van Riper and Domina Doll; who both look forward to meeting everyone, attending the talks and participating in discussions. Sex 2.0 is also pleased to have community sponsor Bound Not Gagged (www.boundnotgagged.com), hospitality sponsor Kimberleecline.com and technology sponsor PosAlt.com supporting this years conference.

While the event itself is on Saturday, May 9, there are participant-organized meetups, outings, and parties being planned for Friday night and Saturday evening, as well as a Sunday brunch. For more information, visit the Sex 2.0 website at www.sex20con.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/sex20con.

Source: Press Release

The workshops all look interesting. Some of the ones I'm particularly looking forward to include "The Evolution and Democratization of Sex Writing," "Gender & Technology: How technology influences hegemonic sexual awareness and vice versa," "Sex Writing Beyond Erotica, Beyond Porn." And obviously, and especially, "Internet Famous but Conference Shy?"

If you're going to be there I look forward to either meeting you or seeing you again.

So the other day in a book store, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again by Heidi Raykeil and Ian Kerner. I didn't have time to look at it closely, but I'm familiar with Raykeil's work so I looked it up when I got home.

And since I'm interested in sex, relationships, and parenting I'm perpetually meaning to write more about the nuts and bolts of, well, love in the time of colic. And diapers. And sibling rivalry, And conflicting soccer-league schedules. And so on. And since the reviews were generally positive I added the book to my shopping cart.

Here's a screen dump of the page I got back.

Screen capture by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) -- Click for larger image.

Line #1: "Customers Who Bought Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again Also Bought:" Raykeil's earlier book, Confessions of a Naughty Mommy: How I Found My Lost Libido, Stacie Cockrell's Babyproofing Your Marriage: How to Laugh More and Argue Less As Your Family Grows, and another Kerner book, Passionista: The Empowered Woman's Guide to Pleasuring a Man

Well that's cool. I don't know much about the Cockrell or Kerner's books but they sound like nice suggestions considering my new choice. So that's fine, good suggestions.

Line #2: "Customers Who Shopped for Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again Also Shopped For:" Sex Recharge: A RejuvenationPlan for Couples and Singles by Kerner again (hmmm, one begins to notice a trend), Eve Kingsley's Just Fuck Me! - What Women Want Men to Know About Taking Control in the Bedroom (A Guide for Couples), and Valerie Davis Raskin's Great Sex for Moms: Ten Steps to Nurturing Passion While Raising Kids

Hmmm... again I don't know the books so even if I might not buy them they do sound even racier! Good, good, I'm a sex blogger, right, not to mention a healthy, lusty parent so those titles at least sound libidinous and libertine-ious.

But then there's line #3: "Customers Who Bought Items in Your Shopping Cart Also Bought:" Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) from the American Psychiatric Association, James Morrison's DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis, and I guess for some actual light reading, Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success

Looking through my actual shopping cart I'm not exactly sure what would have prompted not one but two DSM-IV-related suggestions. And it's not that I'm specifically opposed to diagnostic and statistical manuals that might be somehow related to relationships, sexuality, or parenting. But...

This is the sort of thing that could cement one's reputation as a prudish libertine. :-)

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hey, this is fun! I think I've mentioned that years and years ago I went through a formal apprenticeship and became a journeyman leatherworker. Just a year or two later, though, punk and the new wave hit popular culture and fashion took a huge turn away from natural materials towards and in fashion, basically, black first became the new black. Say what you will about Elvis Costello or the Talking Heads (I say I think they rock) but they didn't carry a lot of hand-tooled leather accessories. :-) So after flirting very briefly with the next next-new-thing, tattooing, which though a logical next step didn't appeal to me, I put away my tools and went to college after all.

Then last week a fellow northwesterner, Red of (slow to load?) Red Sneaker Diaries, reviewed a handmade paddle from a southeastern craftsperson and I finally decided it was time to, literally, dust off my old tools and see if I still remembered anything I used to know.

The short answer would be it's like riding a bicycle for the first time in 30 years: I still know how but boy am I wobbly. And I'm really short on materials (just a couple of colors of dyes, finishes, and dressings.) And my fingers are so sore from braiding it hurts to type. Oh yeah, and since I don't have any designs, and I actually didn't do much braiding at all way back when there's a lot I'm going to have to learn or relearn. But wow is it fun!

So far, in addition to a lot of puttering, putzing, and refamiliarizing with tools and techniques I've braided six feet of rope, a short whip with a wound leather core, and an alpha-code version of a belt that closes with a kind of Celtic knot instead of a buckle that we used to make a lot of for, mostly, acoustic guitarists who didn't want the backs of their expensive instruments scratched up. There's still a lot to learn -- how to finish the ends of braids for one thing, and the right size and shape for the head of the belt. And wow do I have a ton more work to do to recover my staining and dying chops. But, again, wow is it fun!

Apropos my 4/20 pot/booze day post.

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk"
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."

This is an excellent example, by the way, of a set-substitution incongruity joke as outlined in John Allen Paluos' Mathematics and Humor: The Study of the Logic of Humor.

Found at the bottom of the page (not in a post) at Christie Lynn's Observations of a Nerd.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

So I've been thinking about (finally) writing a book. Weird to think that if I wrote it about how to make money off of date-raping drunk young women my Amazon.com sales rank might shoot up to 1,404, but if I wrote about date rape in the context of the Two Rules of Desire in the no-sex class paradigm my Amazon sales rank might be... well, you might expect it to be a lot lower. Turns out, though, that evidently as of some time today it would more likely be... non-existent! Wiped out. Erased. Expunged.

From Twitter (Links with "twurl.nl" are URLs that are automatically shortened to fit Twitter's 145-character post limit.)

Audacia Ray: http://twitpic.com/37ur0 - #amazon has dumped sales ranking for "adult" books. and all the info/reviews about Naked on the Internet are GONE

Audacia Ray: It's not just "adult" themes but also LGBT books. I hope there's a good explanation, but I fear there isn't http://twurl.nl/w2y2dz

Audacia Ray: I'm trying to believe that the #amazon erasure of Naked on the Internet has to do with biz of remainders (its almost 2 years old)

Audacia Ray: But books older than mine have listings w/covers/reviews on #amazon even if out of print, like Carol Queen's 1995 Exhibitionism for the Shy

Audacia Ray: So fucking bizarre. my book's page is back, its in stock. sales rank is indeed missing. http://twurl.nl/7yd2vz

There's actually quite a lot of buzz about this (at least a little while ago @AmazonFail was the #2 search item on Twitter.) I've singled out Dacia because a) her book is about sex, not a sex book, b) because her posts capture the general sense of surprise so well, c) because she's pretty cool, and because I've been meaning to link to her last not one but two wonderfully reflective posts for a day or two.

(Update Speaking of cool people, see also Heather Corinna's take on this.)

Other books recently gone missing from Amazon's Sales Rank and other metrics (gee, wonder why the following links all go to Barnes & Noble pages? Gee, wonder why there are no links to Amazon pages in this post?)

Miriam Kaufman, Fran Odette, and Cory Silverberg's The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability : For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness unranked on Amazon.com

Heather Corinna's S.E.X. : The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College unranked on Amazon.com

Audacia Ray's Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration unranked on Amazon.com

The Joy of Sex: The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking unranked on Amazon.com

Meanwhile, over at Amazon.com you can still find sales ranks for Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls (2008) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,404 and other charming works.

About that last one? The "one of these things that's not like the other ones?" The one that Amazon hasn't suddenly stopped sales-ranking? Here's a nice "customer review" of this instructional video

66 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The New Girl-on-Girl - Barely Legal, February 18, 2008
By Jenifer M (Orange County, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
What started out as girls flashing their tits (for a free Girls Gone Wild T-shirt) - has more recently evolved into a bellwether of female sexuality (in the new century) - that captures some of the freshest and most spontaneous girl/girl action you'll find in any video series today.

These aren't actresses performing on film - but real girls, being sexy - and doing what just comes naturally. Sure, you'll still see young women flashing, hiking their skirts, or completely baring their souls (or the physical equivalent) - just for the fun of it! But you'll also find babes who (instinctively) know their way (exploring) around their friend's feminine form - and who feel just as comfortable doing so - as they would around their own.

You'll also find lots of girls kissing (another GGW trademark)

[Quick note about GGW: if you think that last bit was about me being "down on porn" then stop it. Porn's not the point. This is about consistency, fairness, exercise of sound judgment, commercial competence, and abiding contempt for knee-squeezing twittery. --fl]

Yeah, so if you want to see "documentary" footage of legalized, commercial date rape of drunken "real girls" no problem. If you're a sexual human being with, say, disabilities... or just in need of honest ideas... and want advice or inspiration? Amazon appears to be snubbing the kind of authors and works you probably care most to read.

I'm sort of hoping the overreactions aren't called for. But... at the very least it seems pretty awkward. If it turns out to be true I'll remove all references to Amazon.com from my website (including the book ads in my right-hand column) and swap in links to Powells Books or Barnes & Noble.

Which, if it was just me wouldn't be a very big deal for Amazon at all. But then if it turns out to be true I'd probably recommend everyone else I know remove their references as well. (Even that might not be such a big deal for Amazon because... while I'm going to wait a little bit a heck of a lot of other people online aren't waiting to de-link them at all.)

I found some interesting referring pages in my server log this evening that link to not just one but two posts. I'm not sure how significant it is but it looks like the editors of the New York Times online edition have added Real Adult Sex to their Blogrunner news aggregator which in turn generates related links to news items on their main site.

Screen dump by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Posted under a Creative Commons license.

I'm not sure what it means but it was a heck of a shock to see a referrer that said just "www.nytimes.com!" Anyway, for approximately the same reason I rubberneck at the big buildings in New York and say "golleeey, lookie thar" I've stuck a screen dump of the NYT topics page below "continue reading..." (If it happens again I'll send a copy of the screen dump to my mom.)

Wow, two cool new developments for my blog.

First, I got to be a guest Wise Guy (this week's "straight married guy") at Em & Lo's Sex. Love. And Everything in Between (emphasis theirs)

Advice from three of our guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Does sleeping with a guy on a first date really ruin my chances for a future relationship with him? What if it’s obvious we really like each other, the chemistry’s great, we have a lot in common, and we’re both horny?”

...

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): I don’t think first-date sex together ruins your chances but it does change them.  You know the critical little “voice in your ear” that says “Hold off: good girls shouldn’t ruin their ‘reputations,’” even when you’d rather not wait?  Men get that too.  Only ours says “Go for it now: losers never get another chance.” Neither “voice” is telling the truth but they can have an effect anyway.  Sometimes when we have sex right away the social pressure those “voices” represent get in the way of everything else we might feel about each other. So for both men and women I think it’s worth it to wait at least for the rest of your feelings catch up. And since when did horny have a shelf-life anyway?  Even waiting a few days (three days, not three dates) gives you both time to talk, a chance to take showers and sleep on it in your own beds, a time to decide what you really want instead of what you think you should do, and… time to get your respective bedrooms tidy and kitchens stocked for intimate guests.

*I* said it here.

I'll be in their wise-guy rotation every month or two.

Oh, and by the way, I was at the original Babeland store the other week killing time while one of my children was taking a carpentry class at a nearby school. After looking at all their hardware I sat down and started thumbing through books on their shelves. As you probably know Babeland sells a lot of sex toys so at random I pulled down a book that said Sex Toy. It was cool, informative, and matter-of-fact. I hadn't registered the authors when I picked up the book but turns out it was by... Em & Lo! If I feel awkwardly self-conscious plugging a bit of my writing on their site I don't at all mind plugging their site, or books.

It's funny. Today's HNT photos all look like my head's been deliberately cropped. But actually I usually just put the camera down on a chair and run into position before the shutter clicks, and when I went back to check? No heads, and sometimes no upper body. This week's photos were like that.

---

You may have wondered why I never show my face in photographs. It has nothing to do with being afraid of getting caught, of course, nor even because the "headless horseman" look is just de rigeur for men posting photos with sexual content.

It's not because even that I'm shy.

It's because of my parents.

Yes, my parents. They were both of noble birth. And, as too often with nobility, their family tree... overlapped.

Perhaps too much...

Because I was born... different from the kings and queens who didn't know jacks about recessive genes.

So as the clock winds ever closer to midnight I can't go another day without revealing the shocking truth. I may wear ragged clothes, I may be judged a social climber, but blood will tell!

Click "continue reading..." to learn the truth about my ancestry... and my face.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

You know that fortune-cookie running joke where you read your fortune cookie and add "in bed?"

This afternoon I briefly wondered if a similar running joke could be perpetuated by adding "with a magnifying glass" to the subject lines of penis-related prowess spam.

The joke worked for roughly the next five spams to slip through my filters... but none since. Oh well.

Photo not withstanding "with a measuring tape" wouldn't work either.

Still, there's got to be *something* useful to do with spam titles besides curse your filters and/or spammer's non-socially-productive innovations in spam-filter thwarting.

Suggestions?

Political blogger Ezra Klein has a *great* post coaching bloggers about how to think about comments on their posts. It's probably *way* more interesting to bloggers than blog readers, but since it's not too long I'm going to quote the whole thing.

Without getting too far into the particulars of Amanda's argument about Ross Douthat, I'd suggest that Brad DeLong's lament that his post on Ross Douthat and sex got more comments than his post on the Treasury Plan is fundamentally misguided: The number of comments a post gets is not, in any way, analogous to the importance attached to the post by commenters. As example, a post I wrote yesterday on the DMV -- in which I unwisely made a glib joke about Kafka -- amassed 50 comments. A post I wrote summarizing an interview with the Swedish Finance Minister who ran his country's nationalization effort got exactly zero comments. Comments are not a reflection of how much your audience cares about a topic. They are a reflection of how much they have to say on it.

As a blogger, I think that actually exerts a subtly pernicious influence on my writing. The posts I write that get the least comments are those with actual reporting in them: Congress did this, or an administration official explained that. The second worst are wonky posts. It's easy enough to understand why those pieces end with single digit comment sections: There's less to say about a fact than about an argument. But since I, like many bloggers, use the vibrancy of my comment sections as a way to not feel like a crazy person ranting in cyberspace, too many low comment posts in a row and I itch to write some pieces that generate a bit of discussion and prove that my cyberfriends are still out there. I'm not sure that's always the best impulse.

He said it here.

That's not just about right, that's *really* right. Some public bloggers have entire communities and long-standing conversations in their comments. Other bloggers hear only crickets. Some people don't mind the silence. It drives others crazy.

On the other hand, as Klein says, you have to be made of *very* stern stuff not to care at all whether people comment or not. And as bloggers it can affect what we choose to write about.

I appreciate your comments when you leave them (more than I've been able to show lately -- I no longer have enough time to reply to comments the way I used to.) But just as much I appreciate those of you who just come by, day after day, to read. Similarly I don't have time to leave comments on every post I enjoy (let alone post about them here -- I already have hundreds of posts in my queue that I'll never have time to finish.) But I appreciate their posts, and yours, every bit as much as the ones I do manage to comment on or link to.

Anyway, whether you're a reader or writer, a commenter or a skimmer, thanks all around.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!)

So *if* it's a virtue to be able to tie a knot in a cherry stem with your tongue, how do you interpret being able to tie knots in only three out of four cherry stems?

(To be honest I'm not sure there's any *practical* significance at all to being able to tongue tie cherry stems, even though people have been eyebrow-wiggling about it for generations.)

[Caveat: "Continue Reading..." image not exactly safe for public spaces. --fl]

I mentioned to a friend a while ago that Amanda Marcotte had interviewed me for her regular podcast series at RH Reality Check. Today the friend reminded me I'd totally spaced out mentioning it.

I'll refrain from mentioning how flustered I felt trying to answer and instead say how flattered I felt to have been asked to explain a little about the no-sex class theory.

You can hear the whole podcast, including my interview, here.

I'm traveling again, this time it's work-related, this time to Washington, D.C., for a conference. I'm staying in a neighborhood I'm guessing is "in transition" in the sense that I heard a hotel person telling a guest that there's street parking but not to leave anything in their cars overnight, including pocket change. On the other hand there's what looks like a fairly new Whole Foods a couple of blocks away. Oh yeah, and the White House appears to be a couple of blocks in the other direction. Update: It's near Logan Circle.

On the other hand, since I probably won't be eating suppers at either the White House or Whole Foods, I'd be grateful if any D.C. area foodies let me know their favorite good, non-obvious, non-pretentious places to eat.

Oh, and since this in nominally a sex blog and this post isn't even somewhat sexy there's a somewhat-sexy photo behind "Continue reading..."

I'm not dead sure about the world of texting and tweets but I do need a place to mention cool posts I ought to blog about. So, prompted in part by this post by Calico, I'm going to try doing that on my spanking new Twitter account. I'll try self-referencing this post first. If that doesn't work then I'll probably just tweet about what I'm cooking.

So yesterday I was reading a website more closely than I usually do and saw their copyright notice was out of date. Which was great, actually, because it reminded me to check the copyright notice here. Sure enough, it's no longer 2008.

That's fine, of course. It usually takes me till February to stop reflexively writing "08" on my checks, for instance. And copyright law is pretty flexible so not having the most up-to-date date, or even having a copyright notice at all, doesn't automatically give someone else a copy right. Still, it's better to be current than not so...

Anyway, a quick cruise around the interblogs suggests this other site and mine weren't outliers. I didn't find any copyright dates earlier than 2005 but I only looked at ten blogs.

My guess is that most of us put the copyright date in the template footer the day we setup our blogs... and then don't think about it again unless or until we update the templates again.

Anyway, while I think it's usually more polite to keep your eyes on a blogger's header, title and latest post, at least once a year feel free to let your eyes stray... drift... downward... and if something's a miss? Whisper discretely "Ssst! Check your zipper copyright date!" :-)

[Following up on last December's Flagged By Technorati Terms of Service, here's the text of a message I submitted to their review link this afternoon. --fl]

When my blog started showing up as "flagged" I figured what the heck did I expect with a domain name like "real adult sex" anyway? I wrote a post saying it looked like I was dropped and decided to move on.

But since then other bloggers have approached me to say they don't consider it appropriate that you would have pulled my blog which, despite the title is far more about the politics of gender, relationships, and sexuality than about sex itself. In other words the emphasis in virtually all of my posts is on the "real adult" part and not the "sex" part. My editorial position is best put in "Why I blog about sex instead of politics, the environment, health, money, or food."

This is not just my opinion. Since you have the technology a quick review of other sites that while I am linked by a number of blogs with sexual content I'm also blogrolled by quite a few academic, political, feminist, gender-activist, reproductive-health and reproductive rights, sex-education, and first-amendment sites as well as at least one prominent news organization (the Huffington Post.)

At any rate, if you can't do anything about it I guess that's just life in the big city. But considering how many other non-flagged blogs have far more prurient information than mine, and far less political speech, I'd appreciate it if you'd reconsider my designation and reinstate my blog.

Thank you,

[real name and email redacted]
a.k.a. figleaf@realadultsex.com

AlwaysArousedGirl says it's not enough to just have an RSS/Newsread on your blog so that your readers can use blog subscriber/aggregator like Google Reader or NewGator to keep up with you. It's also important to use the "whole post" setting in your feeds and not just teasers, snippets, or headlines-only.
Photo by Flickr user orangejack.
Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here's how she puts it.

After ages of reading blogs through my blog roll only and adding blogs by hand (and very reluctantly), I finally switched over to Google Reader.  This makes writing the Tuesday Fleshbot Sex Blog Roundup ever so much easier for me.

At least, it’s easier for me if you do one very small, very simple thing.  May I beg you to publish a full feed?  Please don’t tease me with an abbreviated feed or worse, just the title of your post.

“But I want people to click over and read on the blog itself,” you might be thinking, and I thought the same too for a long time.   But the fact of the matter is that many people won’t click over.  Blame it on time constraints, blame it on laziness, blame it on the momentum one acquires when paging through the dozens if not hundreds of items that land in one’s feed reader daily.

It doesn’t really matter why people won’t leave the comfort of their reader.  A sizable portion won’t, and that leaves you with a decision to make in regard to potential readers who like you well enough to add you to their feeds:  If they’ve already made the decision not to click over, would you prefer that they read your whole post or just a fraction of it?  If your only concern is how many hits your blog gets, then by all means continue to publish only a partial feed.  But if your concern is having people read your words, for fuck’s sake publish the whole thing.

She said it here.

She's right. It's pretty important to publish that whole feed and not just teasers. If I can read your whole post in my newsreader then... well... I *do!* I almost never just breeze past a non-teaser post.

It's not a trivial point either -- if you rely only on tools like StatCounter or AWStats or Google Analytics to track visits to your site you're almost certainly missing a lot of traffic. When Google Reader scans your site it shows up as just a single visit whether there are two subscribers to your feed or two million! (Note: I don't think many blogs have either one or one million subscribers but you know what I mean.) All I know is that one day when I was spending a little time hand-washing my server logs I discovered I had more than *twice the number of readers I thought!*

Chances are pretty good that if you've got a teaser-only feed you don't have as many subscribers... but you may not have as many *readers* either. Just sayin'

---

Now, that said, if you're viewing this post on a newsreader you'll see a little link saying "Continue reading..." That might seem a little hypocritical considering I'm asking everyone to do just the opposite. On the other hand, since I only use the "Continue reading..." for the photos I sometimes post, and because those photos are usually only incidental to the content of the posts, *and* because that created problems for some people who read this blog via newsreader in public places, I feel that's an ok exception. It's fine if you do likewise. But please leave your generally wonderful prose out where *everybody* can find it.

---

Quick tip: since about 85% of the blogs in the world seem to be hosted on Blogger/Blogspot, and since about 80% of the teaser-only feeds I read are on Blogger/Blogspot, here's a quick how-to to change your feeds to full text. (If you're on a different blogging system that defaults to teaser feeds, and you're not sure how to switch to full-text feeds, *and you actually want to* then drop me a line in email or comments telling me what blogging software you use I'll do what I can to track down a how-to for your system.)

Oh, a quick pre-postscript: If you make the switch and let me know I'll post your URL in a thank-you.

For Blogger/Blogspot blogs

1) Go to your Blogger.com dashboard (blogger.com/home)
2) Click "Settings" in your "Manage Blogs" area
3) Click "Site Feed" in the row of links under the "Settings" tab
4) Select "Full" from the "Allow Blog Feeds" list
5) Click "Save Settings"

Thanks!

Hortense of Jezebel says

So it turns out that alcohol consumption, once thought to be a leading cause of poor performance in the bedroom, actually improves a man's sexual abilities, according to a recent study of 1580 Australian men.

"We found that, compared to those who have never touched alcohol, many people do benefit from some alcohol, including some people who drink outside the guidelines,'' says Dr. Kew-Kim Chew, who led the study at Western Australia's Keogh Institute for Medical Research. After studying the habits of 1580 Australian men, it was found that men who drank within recommended guidelines had 30% fewer problems during sex than teetotalers, and, according to Clair Weaver of The Sunday Telegraph, "Even binge drinkers had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who never drank, although this type of drinking can cause other health problems." And if that isn't wacky enough, ex-drinkers were the ones with the highest rates of erectile dysfunction. (That sound you just heard was a million guys, giving up their New Year's resolution to drink less. Or perhaps a "WTF" sigh from your straight-edge boyfriend.)

She wrote about it here.

Even though I'm a near teetotaler (hey, I drank an entire mixed drink just the other day... ok, ok, for the first time in maybe a year) and even though some of the reporting is of the breathless-as-usual type, I think it's an entirely plausible conclusion.

One thing though. Hortense says

There's no real reason given for the increase in performance that alcohol provides, though one would suspect a sense of relaxation and a lessened sense of anxiety helps a bit.

I actually agree that being easygoing and less stressed makes a difference and alcohol could make a difference there... although it's just as likely that those who drink in moderation are just more easygoing anyway. But I'm pretty sure the answer's actually a lot more straightforward.

It's not that alcohol *boosts* performance (assuming "erection" is really a synonym of "performance") it's that alcohol *reduces* inability to perform. Here's how.

There's roughly one ounce in: a standard shot of whiskey, a standard bottle of beer, or a standard glass of wine. And numerous studies show that people who drink between one and (no more than) three ounces of alcohol a day have much lower rates of heart and arterial disease and death. (Actually *much* lower although, unfortunately for enthusiastic drinkers, the benefits plummet into deficit after three a day.)

Anyway, given that an awful lot of non-psychological difficulty with erection is all about cardiovascular health (Viagra is basically heart medication with a pronounced and profitable side effect) it's not surprising that if small amounts of alcohol benefits the blood vessels of the heart it benefits the blood vessels of the penis as well.

So short-term relaxation notwithstanding certainly long-term you'd expect moderate drinkers to have more reliable erections than either non-drinkers or heavy ones.

And hey, that's not to knock short-term benefits either. One of the first effects of alcohol** is vasodilation, and if constricted blood vessels make erections more difficult then (up to a point) less dilated blood vessels will make them less difficult.

One last thing, again, in addition to any possible psychopharmacological effects of alcohol: alcohol in general and beer in particular suppress production of something called antidiuretic hormone, with the result that you need to pee more. And I don't know about anybody else but I've always found that erections are a lot easier, and a lot longer lasting, if my bladder is comfortably (but not uncomfortably) full. So unless that's just me (and since I don't have any erotic associations with urination or urination denial I'm pretty sure it's *not* just me) then that could be yet another short-term, erection-related benefit of moderate alcohol consumption.

In my entire life I've only had one pregnancy scare.**

In my entire life I've only once had sex with a partner with the result that she and I were afraid she was pregnant.**

But then in my entire life I've only (knowingly) had unprotected, fertile PIV intercourse to ejaculation twice when pregnancy wasn't a desired outcome.

The two times were before I was 20.

The first time was before the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down, the other was after. One was when my partner and I were still teenagers, still jobless, still living at home, still in high-school. The second time we were both of age, both living on our own, both with good support networks.

Murphy's Law would demand that the scare happened the first time. And so it did.

There were no morning after pills back then. No pee-on-a-stick pregnancy tests. One *could* get a pregnancy check but it cost hundreds of early-1970s dollars, had to be conducted in a clinic, involved (literally) killing a rabbit, and took up to a couple of weeks to get the results back... and time back then was a critical factor because...

Abortion was legal in only two places in the United States: Washington, D.C., where it was legal up to 12 weeks, and New York State where it was legal up to 24 weeks.

We lived in the southern Appalachian mountains.

A little more than half a year later Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, and since the anti-abortion movement took years to take hold my partner could have gotten a vacuum extraction, or even a D&C, in a matter of weeks at the local public health department. But when we needed it most... it wasn't yet there.

Plans were discussed. Tears were shed. Friends were quietly contacted and hit up for favors and loans. Arrangements were made... a cover story about an "overnight camping trip" with friends for her, covert transportation to Washington... if we could make it inside the 12-week limit... backup plans, excuses, more tears -- not about the pregnancy so much but what would happen if our parents found out.

Six or seven weeks after her period was due it came. "Late" we called it back then. "Early miscarriage" is what it almost certainly was. A quiet celebration ensued. And we agreed she should probably retire her previous preferred term for her period: "the curse."

Today is Blog for Choice Day. Thirty-six years ago today the Supreme Court changed all that. And while I never intentionally risked pregnancy with someone again while sober (and only once when not... with someone who *was* sober and who I could trust when she assured me she was nowhere near ovulating) that has not been the case for millions of couples young and old, prepared and unprepared, careful and heedless, bonded for life or little more than strangers in the night. And for all of those Roe has been there.

It might not always have been.

It's tempting to say that a twice-taken inauguration oath was the turning of a once-rising tide Roe. Tempting because it might even be true. But...

Funny thing about temptation is... that's why, that first time, a partner and I nearly needed Roe to be there. And remembering *that* temptation, and remembering so vividly what heterosexuality was like before Roe... I'm going to say why leave anything to chance?

No woman, young or old, should have to go through what my partner went through thirty six and a half years ago. No man, young or old, should have to go through what I went through.

And while I share, passionately, President Obama's reaffirmed commitment to *avoiding the need* for abortion through

"...prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion and support women and families in the choices they make," Obama said. "To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information and preventative services.

Source: Associated Press

I'm also grateful for the President's affirmative declaration that

"On this anniversary, we must also recommit ourselves more broadly to ensuring that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons: the chance to attain a world-class education; to have fulfilling careers in any industry; to be treated fairly and paid equally for their work and to have no limits on their dreams."

Good for him. And good for us for pushing him. And good for us for pushing Congress. And good for us for pushing each other to reach this point.

But if the tide of anti-abortion activism has turned it's still high. Very high. The Justice who bobbled administering the Presidental oath is young. He controls a close majority of similarly young, anti-choice colleagues. And he still has the power to cause further mischief even if he can't sustain an outright overthrow of Roe.

And if the tide has of anti-abortion activism has turned it's still high. Too high in whole time zones in America, whole states, whole regions where a trip to the nearest, still-heavily-guarded clinic may be more hours away than Washington D.C. was from southern Appalachia. Whole counties where peer pressure prohibits pharmacists from exercising authentic conscience and *offering* emergency contraception... or even non-emergency contraception such as hormonal birth control pills or even condoms. And there are still clinics where disgracefully disingenuous healthcare "professionals" claim they're only "accidentally" removing women's IUDs.

So yeah, good to all of us for pushing, sure, and good for the President for committing his administration to that push. But the work's not done, it's barely begun. And might still be undone. The more pressure we bring to bear the greater the odds the work will be done well.

Happy anniversary, Roe.

[** A little less than 37 years ago my partner became pregnant when we had intercourse or at least we believed her to be. It was her pregnancy. I was scared for my partner and for myself. This post is not about her pregnancy but a reflection on my experience of it, of it's consequences, of how the political landscape has changed since then, and about how I feel about those changes. My apologies if I created any other impressions. --fl]

Reminder from (mostly) political Blue Gal

Image from original B.A.D. instigator Skippy the Bush KangarooTuesday, February 3 is Blogroll Amnesty Day. Old timers know that this holiday has a rather sullen history, but now it is a happy occasion: On February 3, bloggers are invited to post links to five blogs you like, that have smaller traffic than your own. It's a great celebration and a time to discover new blogs and link them and stuff. As I said last year, "not to get all mushy here, but do you know how fucking great it is to be here in the blogosphere? Take a moment. Take it in." Spread some linky love.

She said it here.

I think it's another one of those great ideas where it *doesn't matter* how large or small you are. Four years ago my blog had maybe ten visits a day... even *Google* didn't know about me... but I still managed to find a few then-isolated but still cool that were less visited. If I'd known about Blog Amnesty Day back then I could still have made five new friends. This blog is a little busier now, and I follow, and I'm followed by, a lot more bloggers now but the principle still applies. Barring those with huge Rolodexes or the kind of pre-existing cache that comes when celebrities launch their blogs with the help of with pre-existing publicity agents, we all built our traffic link by link. So again, large, small, or in between, Blogroll Amnesty Day is a great way to pay it forward or pay it back.

Start looking for five smaller blogs (this is a sex and politics blog but B.A.D. isn't limited to a single genre) that you wish more people knew about and mark your calendars for this year's Blogroll Amnesty Day: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2009.

(Thanks for the head's up, Bluegal.)

I spent the day enjoying a much more momentous and anticipated event. As a politics, social theory, and American history nerd I enjoyed it, every minute, very much. I hope you did too. And so it's taken a while to get around to saying it, but four years and almost exactly two hours ago I wrote my first post on this blog:

Regarding Cock-suckers

Cock-sucker: The term has many unfortunate uses and connotations, which is a shame since very very few of the connotations have anything to do with actually sucking cock. Let's go one step further. Just as boys in the lockeroom stop bragging about sex as soon as they actually begin having it, it's hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you've met someone who knows how to do it.

I said it here.

Now I'm four posts shy of 2,600 posts (!)

I've had the pleasure to enjoy (and, well, *mostly* answer) eight comments over 11,400 of your comments (!!!)

I've moved also moved servers at least four times, including one emergency move due to increased bandwidth consumption, and changed server-stat programs at least that many times. So I'm no longer able to track total users over the years, but two years ago you had all visited this blog from more than half a million unique IP addresses. I can't track by machine address on my new site but using different metrics nearly 400,000 unique visitors dropped by since last year at this time and more than 80,000 of your came back more than once.

When I started this blog I was a bored house-husband grown weary of trying to keep up with my old posts on a closed-membership community sex forum. Four years later? I'm still mostly a house-husband but I'm a lot happier with my family, my friends, my view of life, and... now of course... my readers. You! In fact I'm happier in large part *because* of you -- your feedback, your willingness to be a sounding board, your support, and of course your occasional much-needed kicks to the seat of my trousers... when I'm wearing any... which, being a sex blogger is *actually part of the job description!* :-)

Thanks again, and again, and again, and again, from the bottom of my heart, for being there these last four years. I look forward to the next four as well.

figleaf/David

Em of Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. passes along a great vocabulary word

Oprah loves Kate Winslet’s real boobs. Winslet jokes that they race for sanctuary under her armpits when she lies on her back, but Oprah has a nicer way of putting it: they just part. As opposed to pointing toward the ceiling like the silicone variety. High-five for Kate’s golden globes!

She said it here.

I don't know if it's because so many people, men *and* women, learn about anatomy from Barbie dolls but I'm always surprised when people say they think breasts should continue to point up when you lie down.

They don't.

In fact, as I recall from my own teenage years, even teenager's breasts of any size at all rarely continue to point straight up when they lie down.

But here's the thing. When they do that thing where they "race for sanctuary" under the armpits? That's not "sagging" it's by design. Which is why parting isn't just a nicer way of putting it, it's more apt.

Score one for Oprah.

The word of the day is "part."

It's been occurring to me lately that my desire to remain anonymous now has far less to do with my subject matter than my astonishing incapacity to consistently write sequences of coherent sentences.

My first letter the editors of my conservative hometown paper was about their editorial position that contraception interfered with God's plan. My letter, drafted in paper, checked carefully for spelling errors, typed, then retyped, and re-retyped on an actual *typewriter* nevertheless contained an obvious grammatical error that made it appear that I *supported* their stance rather than abhorred it.

I don't think there were more than three sentences in that letter.

I don't think anything I've written since has been *that* bad. But oof, sometimes when I read my old posts, or comments on other people's posts I... I... I...

This isn't an assertion that I'm lazy, ignorant, useless, or dumb. I'd know I was none of those things even if all of you didn't keep coming back, and even if your comments didn't make it clear my meaning does come across. It's just that... well...

...Let's just say if I ever post a photo of myself with a bag over my head it won't be because I'm ashamed of my body, it'll be because my body's ashamed of me! :-)

Looks like voting has begun on the biggie of weblog awards, the, well, Weblog Awards. And once again there's no category for sex blogs. Not even blogs like this one that are a lot more about the politics and sociology of sex than about things one does, has done, or can do with his, hers, or ter's moistey frictiony bits.

Oddly they've got an LGBT category, which is actually pretty nice of them: It'll be hard to choose between Pam's House Blend since Pam (who also blogs at Pandagon) rocks on politics at the intersection of orientation, gender, and race, and Susie Bright's Journal since while Susie certainly blogs about LGBT issues she actually blogs about Teh Sex in *all* its dimensions including L, B, G, T, A(sexual), and S(traight.)

But alas I'm not so much an LGBT blogger -- the (functional and dysfunctional) conniptions of heterosexuality being both interesting enough and, more to the point, *dire* enough to keep me busy nearly almost full time. Since I blog a fair amount about feminism (or perhaps more accurately about anti-feminism and anti-anti-feminism) there might have been room for Real Adult Sex in a feminism category. But alas while there are thousands of feminist blogs, and hundreds of excellent ones, there's no category for those either.

There's also a Best Culture Blog category, but that seems more appropriate to The Cool Hunter or Art of Manliness's articles like How to Shave Like Your Grandpa than this blog or, say, Andrea Zanin's Sexgeek.

True, in 2006 sex-blogger par excellence Zoe Margolis's Girl With a One Track Mind won an award in the Best UK or Irish Blog category but, alas again, this isn't a UK blog nor was hers a WeblogAwards award (hers was from The Bloggies. So that's out.

And since I'm coming up on my fourth (or is it fifth?) anniversary it's way, way too late to land a Best New Blog award but there are... well... too many great new sex-and-sexuality blogs this year to even imagine picking what my first choice would be.

So...

Kind of a bummer there's nothing for us. It's not like sex is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And even out of date as it usually is my sidebar is still full of excellent sites, many of which I think would be great candidates in a sex-blog category. If only someone wanted to host a category for them.

Oh well, we know who we are. For that matter *they* know who we are! And if they're uncomfortable unrecognizing us we'll have to recognize each other. Hats off (at the very least) to everyone willing to do good work here in the "pink ghetto."

According to Wikipedia, the non-romantic, full-on nerd definition of a light cone is

In special relativity, a light cone (or null cone) is the surface describing the temporal evolution of a flash of light in Minkowski spacetime. This can be visualized in 3-space if the two horizontal axes are chosen to be spatial dimensions, while the vertical axis is time.

More about light cones here.

There are more romantic ways to put it, however. Paraphrasing to Matt Webb, the author of Mind Hacks and creator of the very cool Light Cone RSS feed says

From the moment of your birth lightwaves that have bounced off your body have been expanding around the Earth into space in a sphere who's surface (not surprisingly) is growing at the speed of light. Meanwhile, light coming from objects inside that same growing sphere have been reaching you. Put the two together and you've got your light sphere.

He said it here.

Webb's Light Cone page only goes back 50 years but the general principle is pretty cool. Lightwaves, even those reflecting sources far more feeble than a candle, may be about as small as stable particles of matter get but they're exceedingly long-lived. Lightwaves from the moment of your birth or mine (or anyone else's who might have been born, no matter how long ago, on on, say, December 25th) are still out there, moving away at 186,000-odd miles per second. Some may travel on till the end of time. Always something to think about.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it's certainly *convenient* to get one's weather forecast on national newscasts... well, not exactly convenient as much as *distracting.*

The weather outside, actually, is delightful. Snow in the Puget Sound lowlands is about as common as sandstorms in Ohio so this is actually kind of a treat.

I'm reminded of my first ski trip near Wolf Creek Pass in southern Colorado. We'd intended to do backcountry camping on cross-country skis but the avalanche danger was too high to risk it. So, having made the trip (and booked rooms for a week at the Pegosa Springs Motel (the hot springs kept the open pool comfy warm even at 14 below zero) we rented downhill skis instead.

The snow, so hazardous in the back country, was transcendentally heavenly on groomed courses, even for a complete downhill novice like me. Meeting some of my companions at the bottom of a lift one point one of the more experienced skiers said "that was better than sex" and another said "totally, I mean... how can you have an eleven minute orgasm?"

I wouldn't have gone that far but it *was* nice.

Well, if the snowfall here isn't *quite* better than sex? It's better than *writing* about it. :-) And so I'll be on a very light posting schedule until the weather returns to our regular Seattle Rain Festival -- 40 degrees and raining from October to May... which is part of why I'm able to post so much the rest of the year. :-)

More later. Hope you're all having as much fun as I've been -- if not outside then in bed!

(p.s. one of my off-line duties during this extended and extremely-uncharacteristic cold snap -- just about 13 degrees Fahrenheit the other morning -- is keeping the feeder ice-free for our resident hummingbird. I took this photo last year, I think. I'll post new ones if I can get the little rascal to hold still long enough.)

figleaf

Yet another non-cliché mention of breasts I've noticed this week. Jessica of Feministing says

I was sick in bed yesterday (actually, still am) so I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up on some movies I've been meaning to watch: Itty Bitty Titty Committee was one of them.

It was awesome, super fun and interesting. And I have to say, I was really pleased to see it not too far down iTunes "top rented" lists. Nice. C(I)A rules.

Read the quote in context here.

I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying the movie is about Anna, a young, still-sort-of-coming-out lesbian who meets a group of activist lesbians. The activists work to reclaim space for acceptance and self-acceptance of women by, among other things, spraying graffiti on the walls of... the plastic-surgery clinic in which Anna works where... breast implants are a fairly important part of the business.

I mentioned earlier that I've noticed more posts about breasts than usual this week. Here's another good one. F.F. of Feminist Finance, in a continuing series called "How to Care For Your Clothes" says

I will break the ice by telling you a somewhat embarrassing story about myself. Hi, my name is feminist finance, and I wore the wrong size bra for about 15 years. I bought bras based on the size I thought I probably ought to be. My breasts weren't small, but I didn't think they were especially big, either. I am not quite sure who or what I was comparing myself to, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was, oh, boob-fetishizing culture at large. So, not so big and not so small: a B-cup sounded about right based on that description. So that's what I wore from the start of high school until the very recent past.

Ding, ding, ding, guesswork and habit is the wrong way to buy a bra. My idea of what I looked like, and consequently what size bra I should be wearing, didn't match reality. ... But dysmorphic thinking can take a lot of different, less extreme forms, and the form it took for me was thinking that because I didn't look like a Hooter's poster girl that I could not possibly be larger than a B-cup. That is also the form it apparently takes for a lot of the women who appear on Tim Gunn's Guide to Style (I'm such a sucker for Tim Gunn ), who says that in all the episodes of filming that show, he has never worked with a woman who was wearing a correctly sized bra. It's not necessarily about body hate or even mild body dislike, but it is always about unreality.

... It wasn't enough of a prompt that I always had to wear a sweater over my button-down shirts because they would gap and pucker across my chest. I thought that was just an occupational hazard of buying cheaply made stuff. It wasn't enough that I could sometimes see the outline of my bra through my sweaters where my breasts were spilling out over the top of the cup. I thought maybe my sweaters had shrunk. ...I decided that just for shits and giggles I would swing by my friendly neighborhood department store lingerie department. It was there that I learned that I have probably not been a B-cup since early in puberty. Me and my properly supported 34-D's can now quite happily wear the exact same button-down shirts that used to make me swear and foam at the mouth.

She said it here.

I strongly endorse f.f.'s recommendation that women get fitted by someone who's trained to do it, even though I don't have breasts, because just before I moved to the northwest young I worked briefly with a young woman from a fairly rural area who's starchily conservative, religious mom happened to sell foundation garments out of her home. And while she very strictly managed her daughter's relationships ("so... exactly what *are* your intentions with my daughter?" "Um, I'm mostly giving her rides to work since she doesn't drive") she was absolutely relaxed and almost, well, evangelical about breast care. And so on the few times I had to wait for my coworker to get ready I got a living earful of not-immediately-applicable information about the importance of breast examinations, the merits and demerits of underwires, the proper adjustments of straps, changes in breast size over the course of menstrual cycles, and quite a bit about the arcane system whereby bra size is determined. And, as f.f. discovered, just how much a correctly or incorrectly sized bra affects the fit of one's clothes.

The main upshot though being, yeah, especially considering how expensive they are and how much they affect comfort, fit, and even health, it's *really* a good idea to get properly fitted before you buy bras.

Update: Doh! I should have added "...if you intend to buy or wear them." Which not everybody does or should or needs to or wants to, and which some people say one ought not to.

I'm tickled pink to have been nominated in the Hottest Daddy Blogger category in the 2009 Blogger's Choice Awards. If you'd be willing to follow the link and put in a vote for me I'd be very grateful.

Some of the competition is very good as well. If you'd like to check them out, or if you'd just like a chance to browse a list of sites with a high concentration of potentially hot daddy-bloggers you'll find a bunch of them here.

Also, while I think the Hottest Daddy Blogger nomination is really appropriate (I'm not just a dad I'm a *stay-at-home* dad) I've also been nominated for a Best Political Blogger award. I think there are other, better political bloggers out there but given why I blog about sex in the first place I'd like to thank whoever was kind enough to nominate me in that category as well.

Thanks!

Photo by Flickr user robotson. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Well that's nettlesome! Technorati has evidently flagged this blog as in violation of its Blog Quality Guidelines, which read, in part

Engaging in the following types of behavior increases the likelihood that your blog will be Suspended or Removed.

• Do not republish content from other sites without adding your original commentary or reaction.
• Do not publish with excessive Commercial Intent. We understand that many blog to make money. However, sites that include a high proportion of content and links solely intended to promote ad networks, affiliate system bounties, or other transactions are not considered blogs.
• Do not tag exessively. Make sure the tags you use to describe your posts really do describe your posts. If we see high occurrences of unrelated, variants and synonyms, or over-use of tags in your posts, we may conclude that your site is trying to game the system.
• Do not promote or participate in viral linking schemes.
• Do not ask us to index objectionable, obscene, offensive content or content that promotes or displays pornography. Use of Technorati is subject to our Terms of Service.
• Do not publish posts with nonsense text intended to boost keyword matches in search engines.
• Do not be overly repetitive. If we find that your posts all contain the same content and/or links, your site may be considered gaming the system or link spam.
• Do not be misleading with inappropriate redirects. Do not use links that take the reader to completely different content than what is expected.
• Do not promote malware or objectionable content. Do not promote downloads to view objectionable content, promote malware or spyware of any form.

...

We try our best to filter out spam and inappropriate content. However, some content may slip through. If you find such content, please submit the URL to our support staff in our Troubleshooting Section.

When I log into my account I get

Sorry, we can’t find that blog

We’re sorry…we don't have a blog by that name. If this is your blog, look over our Blog Quality Guidelines and submit your blog for review by pinging us. Or better yet, claim your blog to get into the high priority queue!

When I go back and try to "claim my blog" I get

This URL has been flagged by our systems. Please read our Blog Quality Guidelines for more information.

I know I'm a bit repetitive but not, I hope, *excessively.* And I have to assume I haven't been flagged for excessive commercial intent. So... anyone else in the "pink ghetto" been unable to directly track their blog through Technorati? (I can still *indirectly* track it, for now anyway, via their standard search .) Or do you suppose it's some other problem?

If it's just me it's just me, and I'll just switch the rest of the way over to Google Analytics, which has some *very* nice tracking features. If other sex bloggers have been getting the boot, though, that's annoying.

Photo by Flickr user ideath. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I mentioned in the last post that I'd had such a relaxing day I'd forgotten to post anything. Well, part of the relaxation of having nothing to say means it's fun to plop down on the couch to read a book I always meant to read to my children back when they were too young to read for themselves. (A copy having mysteriously shown up on a shelf in the intervening years.)

The book being T. H. White's 1939 classic The Once and Future King. Which I vaguely remembered from my own childhood...

...but may have somehow confused with the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone... but I digress.

Anyway, right there on page one, barely halfway down the page, was something eminently post-worthy.

The governess had red hair and some mysterious wound from which she derived a lot of prestige by showing it to all the women of the castle, behind closed doors. It was believed to be where she sat down, and to have been caused by sitting on some armour at a picnic by mistake. Eventually she offered to show it to Sir Ector, who was Kay's father, had hysterics and was sent away. They found out afterwards that she had been in a lunatic hopital for three years.

Hmm. Some sort of wound. From sitting on something. That she wanted to show to Sir Ector. And was sent away for being hysterical. Hmmm...

See also The Job Nobody Wanted for more about "hysteria." See also "no-sex" class.
See also that in 1940 when the book was written an English (or, for that matter, American, Canadian, Australian...) husband could still have his wife committed to an asylum on his say-so. So it's not just about deepening and enriching an ancient myth with day-to-day narrative.

Could be an interesting read. Who knew?

I don't think I posted anything at all today. Kochanie did, and it was pretty great. But... aah, it's been a wonderful day to chill out with the family, clean up and put away the last of the Thanksgiving decorations, munch on chunks of leftover turkey from the fridge (my nine-year-old, clearly thrilled, kept saying "it's just like string cheese!"), hang out with a few friends and a couple of suddenly-exotic-tasting *pizzas!*

All in all a *great* "holiday."

So via Kevin Drum, who got it in turn from Andrew Sullivan it turns out if you're a blogger you can paste your URL into the Typealyzer and get back what seems to be a pretty solid Myers-Briggs personality score. For folks who've played along at home it looks like I'm an INTP, which stands for Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Perceiving)

Hoo-boy, I'm not sure it's any better-grounded than, say, astrology but it sure felt like the description got me dead to rights. (INTP rundown from Personality Page, Wikipedia.) It's even more accurate in terms of my writing -- introspectively theory based, intuitively extroverted, good at explaining big ideas but a tendency also to overkill the obvious, lousy attention to spelling and grammar. Yup, that's me.

Interestingly (maybe only to me and/or possibly other INTPs?) I nerdily cross-checked the score by running links to my top-level topic categories. All sat pretty firmly either in INTP (mostly) or closely adjacent. Perhaps interestingly the one exception was the now-seldom-updated History and Fantasy category which light up way over on ESFP (Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling, Perceiving.) Which might explain why it's now so rarely updated. :-) Oh, that and maybe because so many more people I know in real life know about my blog I'm a lot more shy.

Anyway, that link again if you want to try it on your own work (or any other website -- all wikipedia entries register INTP, for instance, Obama for President is or was ISTP - The Mechanics) is Typealyzer.

Laura Augustin's essays on migration and sex work, like this one on her blog Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex resonate for me because of my own experiences with counter-culture homelessness back when I was a very young man. We weren't exactly "undocumented" and the people I traveled with were almost entirely citizens, but our cultural status (draft-avoiding, long haired, "hippie" clothes before such clothes had retro chic) meant we had to be very wary of police, citizen vigilantes, and often of conventional employers.

Photo "Homeless, November 1974" uploaded by
Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Distributed
under a Creative Commons license.Her descriptions of the experience of arriving somewhere new, with just a name or address, often no money, and having to take what work was available, often at the convenience of our local "hosts" or people who were willing to work with "you people" sounds very familiar to -- including the paradox of unlicensed employers often being the least safe and most exploitative.

Same with one of her points, the vast majority preferred to do anything other than sex work (and, ironically, take a "straight" job... assuming in the depths of the Nixon-era oil embargoes such work could be found.) Most of us preferred to do something else, including day labor, informal agricultural labor, and even being drug "mules," but others, ranging from very reluctant to almost enthusiastic, would agree to sex work. And, as Augustin says, in those circumstances you wouldn't be able to say any of us were outright *trafficked* either for labor or sex. If any of us were by contemporary standards then at the time, at least, we probably wouldn't have seen it that way.

But living as we did, as on or close to the street as we did, we were also aware that there were others almost like us, sometimes in factories or on farms but mostly in sex or maybe drug work, who *didn't* have a choice. And often even they weren't really *that* different from the rest of us, not mindless, not thralls, and sometimes very nearly as locally independent... and sometimes even with warmer clothes or more spending money... as we were. But they were the ones who had to "get back" to someone, "had arrangements" with a guy they couldn't "cross" or mess with. It was all really vague but sometimes they'd be pretty stressed or, when they were on the move, even desperate not to be found.

Anyway, when I hear people say "all 'X' are trafficked" I think that's wrong, and wrong the way Augustin documents in her work. Instead when I hear the word "trafficked" I think about that small subset who really didn't have the same choices we did, who had more than law enforcement to worry about, and who sometimes suffered much more dire consequences.

It wasn't all of us, as maybe an outsider might have concluded, and it wasn't even one percent of us, but they were there. More complicated, sure, and *way* less common, but there. I know my experiences were only somewhat analogous to the undocumented/migrant communities you work in, but I can't imagine it's so different that there isn't the same kind of small subset of people who need... maybe not so much "rescue" the way "anti-trafficking" people mean it but... still in their circumstances need a lot more than relaxed document requirements or more open borders or more local tolerance to regain their autonomy.

Anyway, I left a comment at her site asking if she had any insights into that particular kind of condition and if she knew what might best help them out of *their* circumstances.

I actually wasn't sure she'd have an answer -- she tends to study trans-border, migratory populations and, at least in my former subculture, the people most likely to be "trafficked" or "pimped" were, perhaps ironically, the least likely to be transients -- often there when we arrived, almost never able to "head west" or "head back east" when invited to move on and check out rumors of new possibilities. And so to that extent I wonder if they really even show up in genuinely migrant communities.

Turns out she's traveling (not surprising given the nature of her work) but she sent a link to an opinion piece that, by coincidence, showed up in todays Guardian Online. It's not exactly an answer, but it clarifies nicely why, at least when they're on the move, it's so hard to identify, let alone rescue, actually trafficked people.

Heck, speaking for myself, even though I was sometimes sleeping under overpasses, in cars, or "crashing" at other people's apartments, and even though my diet was so meager I developed nutritional deficiency diseases, it wasn't until the 1980s that I realized I'd been homeless. And it wasn't till very recently that I realized the people we thought of at the time as "in some kind of hot water" probably qualified as trafficked or pimped. So I'm guessing the same is true for a lot of people still in those situations. And not because they're not there but because there's there's so much overlap between the aspirations and difficulties of migration/transience, smuggling, and trafficking that sometimes it's hard to tell even when you're in it, let alone from the outside.

As times get tougher and as ad revenue dries up I've started noticing increasing numbers of tip jars appearing in the sidebars of bloggers of all genres. I'm not sure how well they work but if you like someone's work and you've got even a couple of bucks to spare I heartily recommend chipping in.

Anyway, while I've never had much ad revenue to begin with (I've experimented a bit with ads but since I'm *in* the "pink ghetto" of sex bloggers but not enough *of* it to feel comfortable hosting ads for porn or adult-equipment sites that's never really been much of a revenue generator) my expenses are low enough that I'm not going to put up a tip jar either. (I'd far, far rather you donate whatever you can to the independent, and excellent sex-education site Scarleteen.)

Instead I'm going to take a tip from Casual Kitchen, a food blog that nicely combines quality food with cost consciousness. The author, Daniel Koontz, invites readers to

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by subscribing to my RSS feed, or submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.

He puts this note at the end of each post, here.

I'd like to make the same request. Wheni read posts that inspire me I quote and link to them. If I consistently read them I add them to my blogroll. If you enjoy reading Figleaf's Real Adult Sex, tell somebody. Quote or reference a post, add a link to your blogroll, subscribe to my RSS feed, leave a comment.

If this blog isn't your cup of tea you can still support other bloggers the same way.

Thanks!

Mathematician, and developer of the BitTorrent algorithms, and diagnosed genius Bram Cohen of Bram Cohen's Journal asked one of those so-simple-only-a-genius-asks-them question about the current financial meltdown/bailout business.

the credit default swap market is many times the size of the actual mortgage market. How'd that happen? Well, overzealous investors ran out of actual mortgages to invest in, so they simply started placing side bets on how the mortgage market would do, totally many times how big the actual market underneath is. AIG is in a position of being the biggest insurer of the garbage. These two facts put together make for an interesting possible scenario. Since the amount of money on the line is greater than the actual size of the underlying market, AIG could potentially agree to cover every mortgage company's loss in any short sale (a short sale is where the mortgage company agrees to forgive part of a loan to make a sale happen, as a way of avoiding forecloser). That would immediately result in the number of foreclosures being near zero, and AIG would magically have made it so it didn't have to pay out on any of its side bets.

Read the context leading to his question here.

Given the division of ideas between whether bailouts should benefit a) financial markets or b) end users of mortgage credit, and given that the meltdown really does have more to do with the side bets described in Cohen's introduction to the question, Michael Lewis's analysis in Portfolio last week, and Matt Yglesias's similar explanation today it *does* seem like an interesting way to kill at least two birds with one (um?) fire-extinguisher.

Yeah, this post isn't even remotely related to sex, relationships, or gender**... except *maybe* in the sense that if the meltdown continues we're all screwed. But Cohen's question has been nagging at me enough that I figured I might as well get it out of my system. And it's not like *he* blogs about financial markets all that much either.

[** Of course money problems are actually a *huge* stressor in most relationships. --fl]

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.*Don't* ask why (I might explain at the end) but I happened to start re-reading an old college textbook -- social theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's 1994 Dialectic of Enlightenment.

I think the rest my college education must have paid off because it's much easier reading 25 years later than it was when I was a feverish 2nd-year student.

I hadn't remembered that one of the chapters ("Excursus II," no less) contemplates how De Sade's Juliette foreshadows the Enlightenment's tendency towards systematization and Nietzsche's rationale for ruthless exploitation rather than compassion by strong against weak.

Anyway, in a passage that, I think, nicely skewers the attitudes, especially, of members of the current Vice President's inner circle and an unfortunate plurality of the Supreme Court (As expressed by Sade's character Francavilla: "What does the idea of a curb which they never experience themselves mean to the rich, if with this empty semblance they are able to preserve a justice that allows them to crush all those who live under their yoke? You will find no one in that class who would not submit to the worst tyranny so long as all others must suffer it?") Horkheimer and Adorno incidentally criticize an impulse in De Sade that... I think applies to a lot of contemporary pornography.**

What Kant grounded transcendentally, the affinity of knowledge and planning, which impressed the stamp of inescapable expediency on every aspect of a bourgeois existence that was wholly rationalized, even in every breathing space, Sade realized empirically more than a century before sport was conceived.

The teams of modern sport, whose interaction is so precisely regulated that no member has any doubt about his role, and which provide a reserve for every player, have their exact counterpart in the sexual teams of Juliette, which employ every moment usefully neglect no human orifice, and carry out every function.

Intensive, purposeful activity prevails in spirit as in all branches of mass culture, while the uninitiated spectator cannot divine the difference in the combinations, or the meaning of variations, by the arbitrarily determined rules.

The architectonic structure of the Kantian system, like the gymnastic pyramids of Sade's orgies and the schematized principles of the early bourgeois freemasonry -- which as its cynical mirror-image in the strict regimentation of the libertine society of the 120 Journées -- reveals an organization of life as a whole which is deprived of any substantial goal.

These arrangements amount not so much to pleasure as to its regimented pursuit -- organization -- just as in other demythologized epochs ... the schema of an activity was more important than its content.

Source: Horkheimer and Adorno "Dialectic of Enlightenment", Continuum Press (paperback 1982): pg 88

Case in point, the "pterodactyl porn" clip I referenced last month (you don't need to see the link to get the, um, picture... or if you *do* need to see it again it you can Google for it.) Someone decided that it wasn't interesting enough to film a hetero couple having sex with one of them*** was naked and the other one**** wore a pterodactyl costume. No, instead they chose to show hetero sex between one naked woman and *three* men in pterodactyl suits.

One can make the case that the extravagant variety of fetishes represented in internet porn as a whole simply mirrors both the diversity of individual interests, on the one hand, and relatively low financial barriers to entry. One would have a harder time making that case with individual authors of pornographic books. Especially book series. Like Sade pornographers from the Anonymous Victorian Pornographers to Ann Rice's pseudonymous "Claiming Beauty" series to various psudonymous and/or anonymous internet novelists find themselves digging further and further to retain, um, novelty.

Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with that... at least as long as, unlike Sade, any activities involving actual live human beings are confined to non-coerced, non-conscripted adults. Nor, for that matter, is there really *that* much wrong with the Enlightenment and its reductionist tendencies... as long as one recalls that it's an unnecessary conceit to try to build rational systems without any first-principle/axioms like, oh, say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But still, one wonders if there are any pornographers who've excelled at portraying, in their chosen medium, the erotic appeal of the small subset of sexuality typically expressed over the lifetime of a single couple... ok, or the same couple of singles. And if so then why they're not more widely recognized.

Or, since this really isn't meant to be a solemn bit of prudish libertinism, maybe it's just that our appreciations of representations of sex simply invert Tolstoy's dictum that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That "boring sex stories are all alike; every erotic story is erotic in its own way." :-)

Update: Doh! I originally said why I started looking through the book to begin with. I remember hearing in a lecture that one or the other of the authors had quipped that in order to escape the confining logic of Enlightenment thinking it would first be necessary to "repeal Beethoven's Ninths Symphony." The phrase comes up every now and then when I'm writing about paradigms and traps and, since I'd like to get quotes right... or at least correctly sourced... I finally broke down and started looking. So far no luck, but it's still pretty interesting. Among other things I realize my penchant for grievously long parentheticals comes from learning how to write while reading dead German philosophers in college. Oh, and speaking of dry humor, the title of the book itself is an bit of a joke given their thesis that the Enlightenment only runs one way. So there you go -- even more that you probably didn't want to know about obscure mid-20th-Century neo-Marxist social theorists. :-)

[** No, I'm not engaging in porn bashing per se with this post, just a recurring problem in it. --fl]

[*** Guess which one? There's not *that* much variety after all. --fl]

[*** Though surely *someone* would be interested if, occasionally, the man was naked and the woman got to dress creatively. --fl]

TMI Tuesday, this week via Osbasso of Views From the Back Row.

1. Have you ever felt guilty or ashamed after a sexual experience?

Sure. Well, yes and no. I've never woken up the next morning saying "what was I thinking" and skulking out "walk of shame" style. It's usually in long retrospect that I really kick my self. For instance having sex with someone I wasn't comfortable with because I thought there was something wrong with a man declining sex. For instance agreeing to "make up" sex after a big fight.

And, again in retrospect, having sex with people who were drunk after I had stopped drinking alcohol. At the time I just thought it wasn't enough a "challenge" because what seems like subtle or sophisticated rapport building when you're *both* drunk is often pretty predictable when one of you isn't. And because I thought that while it's kind of funny and bonding and intimate to rub each other's backs, or hold someone's hair out of the way while you heave it all up it's really not very cute at all when one of you is sober. In retrospect that was... um... patronizing? Arrogant? Alienated?

But also in retrospect I think we tend to be harder on ourselves *after* we've learned from our mistakes than we probably ought to be. If we want to be embarrassed or ashamed about anything (in all of life and not just sex) it should be for repeating our mistakes *after* we've learned from them.

As for feeling *guilty* I feel a lot more guilty about the times I mistook love or loneliness for horniness rather than the other way around. A *huge* step was recognizing that often the most important part about hookups and pickups and one-night stands was the intimacy of holding someone and being held while sleeping afterwards. It's not that one's better than the other, or more right or wrong, it's that using one to get the other is either way doesn't get you what you want.

Once I figured that out I've still had plenty of opportunity to learn from mistakes, but not so much to be guilty or ashamed of.

2. Did you ever own a fake ID?

No. On the few occasions I would have needed it the circumstances were generally lax enough that I was never asked.

The one time I ever wished I had one I was already in my late 20s and long past drinking. One time though had a chance to hang out in a bar with Alan Ginsberg and some other poets after a guest lecture at my college. Everyone else ordered beer. I asked for a soda. The bartender carded me (and as I recall *only* me) and since I didn't have my wallet I had to leave.

(Note: While I used to drink a lot I never had a drinking problem per se, I just never seemed to enjoy it the way all my friends did. Many years later I learned I have a defective enzyme for metabolizing alcohol. Which means it's closer to toxic than intoxicating for me. Which explained a lot. Including, in retrospect, the power of peer pressure and self-expectation since it would have made sense to stop a lot sooner.)

3. How often do you tell white lies?

A little prevaricating here is in order. :-) I love playing practical jokes and planning surprises so, for instance, I'll pretend I forgot someone's birthday after hiding their present under their pillow. I'll often be tactful or diplomatic (however clumsily) rather than overt, as in "you might have phrased that differently" when maybe I'm thinking "I don't see how the two of you can remain friends after that." If those count as white lies then guilty as charged.

As for the more standard sorts of white lies. I try not to do it at all. I usually try to clear it up when I do. I've told a few big dark lies and even years later feel awful about it. (Speaking, again, of shame, guilt, and the failure to forgive one's self even after learning from one's mistakes.) The reason I'm not so up on white lies is they're usually told to deflect criticism, about which see #4, below...

4. On a scale of 1-10, how well do you receive constructive criticism?

I'm a little too good about seeking and responding to constructive criticism. Years ago I worked for a company that did semi-annual evaluations with a large self-analysis component. Part of the process involved getting feedback from managers, colleagues, and contacts in other departments. After a couple of years a couple of managers approached me asking why I only asked for and wrote up criticisms. They said they thought I was actually pretty good at my job but people in HR and slightly higher management kept asking why, given all my reported performance problems, they kept recommending raises and bonuses.

I immediately apologized... and made it a "room for improvement" goal on my next self-evaluation.

Turning to my personal life I've also tended to assume every problem I've had in every relationship has been mine.

A few years ago a former colleague, one who'd noticed we both shared that tendency, said she'd realized you have to be pretty egotistical to assume *everything* is all your fault.

If I had still been doing self-evaluations I'm sure I'd have have... apologized and made that a "room for improvement" goal as well. :-)

Instead after that while I'm still, always, open and interested in constructive criticism, and really do take it very seriously, I've been able to put it a lot more in perspective.

One probably very nice thing about assuming everything was all my fault is I worked *very* hard to be good in bed. Although even that had diminishing returns until I (finally!) figured out that... hey, maybe my partner would enjoy giving as much as they enjoyed getting. (Apologies... "room for improvement goals..." :-) )

Another good thing for blogging purposes, I hope, is I take your comments to heart. And (another good thing for bloggers) I assume that if there's a misunderstanding it's my miscommunication (and sometimes egregious grammar, parentheticals, run-on sentences, and editing errors) and not that someone else just doesn't get it.

5. Have you ever shaved your pubic hair?

Yeah. My first vasectomy, my reversal, and my second, post-planned-pregnancy vasectomy for starters. And a few years ago when people were really debating the whole waxing/shaving question I tried it to see what it was all about. (Conclusion: about the same as shaving my face; it was actually more easier to keep shaving than put up with prickly regrowth; stopped shaving anyway after maybe a month.)

Technically the first time I didn't shave I used a depilatory like Nair. It was the late 1970s where "natural" hair was still really big (and "big hair" even bigger) and as far as the general, hetero public was concerned *nobody* removed pubic hair, or even trimmed it for sexual reasons. Consequently it was a matter of great curiosity that I did so.

Bonus: What percentage of women do you think are capable of handling being in a "friends with benefits" relationship? How about men?

I've felt pretty positive about a lot of other blogger's answers, and I'm inclined to agree with most that as long as everyone's really straight-forward about being actual *friends* about it, and not just using it to be a) controlling or b) arms-length then men and women are capable in roughly equal numbers. Call it maybe 30% for both with the biggest factors not being so much gender as maturity, experience, and circumstance.

Interesting sex-related question at Manic Monday today

Which would you prefer and why? To have every stoplight turn green upon your arrival for the rest of your life or to have one week of the best sex any person ever had?

Read other, mostly non-sex-related questions here.

I read the question at Biscuit, who raises a perfectly sensible (and possibly ominous) concern

A week of mind-blowing sex. Very tempting, but what about the rest of your sex life afterward? Would it pale in comparison and leave you wanting?

She said it here.

Assuming all else would be equal I'd take the green lights.

Regular sex is already pretty nice, and in my experience "mind blowing" sex, while also nice, is sort of overrated. I mean who in his or her right mind says "oh darn it, that last orgasm sucked because it wasn't the best ever" and/or "my partner's last orgasm sucked because it wasn't her/his best ever?"

Anyway, I'd settle for the same old perfectly enjoyable sex for the rest of my life... using some of the time I saved not waiting in traffic! :-)

Note: I'm very much *not* a subscriber to bumper-sticker slogans along the lines of "the worst day X is better than the best day Y." In particular I don't believe "there's no such thing as a bad blowjob/cunnilingus" or *especially* the daft idea that "bad sex is still better than no sex." Since todays' meme isn't about *bad* sex I just don't see any of those slogans applying here.

Photo by Flickr user otbayley. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Having just repeated myself with a serious post from my pile of drafts here's a non-serious one from the draft pile I'm... pretty sure I've never brought up before. It's based on observations while hanging with my children in a mid-western municipal swimming pool this summer.

So on a sweltering mid-west day the relatives we were visiting suggested we go visit the nearby swimming pool to cool off. We agreed instantly, especially since our children and theirs were going stir crazy in the too-small-for-two-families house, effectively trapped inside by the heat.

Once I'd finally cooled off in the water long enough to be able to think clearly again I started watching the local youth playing their half-flirt/half-showoff games by the diving boards. They were all pretty accomplished divers (to my relatively untrained eye anyway) but at one point one of the young men upped the ante by yelling at another to do a belly flop. The man on the board took the challenge and landed a whopper, let out a huge groan when he surfaced, and then challenged the rest to follow suit as he swam to the side.

Maybe eight or ten, mostly men but a few hardy young women as well, followed suit. Some people went more than once. My observation? Even through a summer-long tan a belly-flop leaves red marks on the down-side of the body. If you've ever landed a belly flop yourself you gotta know it just plain hurts, and some of these people were really trying to get some air before their landings. But between the adrenaline, cheering and being cheered on, and just the general camaraderie they... Ok, I can't say they didn't *mind* that it hurt, it just didn't *bother* them that it did.

Not the way, say, they would have seriously minded getting a similar all-body whopping as corporal punishment in a different setting -- say, instead of school detention.

That's sort of the difference I've noticed between BDSM and ordinary physical abuse as well -- attitude, and maybe arousal and adrenaline make a *huge* difference.

Not a huge insight, I'm sure, and probably an eyeball roller for people more in to spanking than I've ever gotten. But something to remember while processing one's reactions, and possible triggers, while contemplating consensual BDSM.

One question, though. While I'm sure I could Google up a porn site somewhere that's got nothing but naked people doing belly flops (so confident, actually, that I'm not even going to bother looking) I wondered then, and I'm finally asking now...

Ever heard of a lazy top telling their sub to do belly and/or back flops? Any subs out there who'd think that would be hot? (Because, seriously, anything inside anything dungeon-y in the midwest in the summer has got to be some kind of miserable-hot, not hot-hot.)

Thanks in advance.

Image by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

I've never particularly cared for the penis euphemism "junk." As in "junk in the trunk." I'm not even sure where it comes from.

But then...

This afternoon I think I got a clue while deleting the usual rivers of spam!

Ah-ha!

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!

She said it here.

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 you your nominee, the better chance that you your 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.

Source: Hot Blogger Contest

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 and History of Beauty, and Jessica Valenti's He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, plus, as usual, anything else I can get my hands on.

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.

Read the quote in context here.

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

2007 Father's Day Google logo

...poolside relaxation (for fathers) or

2006 Mother's Day Google logo

...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.

He said it here.

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.

Quoted with permission from here.

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.

She said it here.

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.

Drum said it here.

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 be the only one doing it at the moment but I promise I'm not the best.

And actually? Turns out while I might be the only one trying to get the word out to other heterosexual men, I'm just so not the only one examining these questions. Just one for instance that I want to blog quite a bit more about is Michelle Fine's concept of the Missing Discourse of Desire. So far at least her actual paper appears to be behind for-pay firewalls but an excellent summary can be found in Jennifer Logue's tongue-twistingly titled but easily read A Contrapuntal Analysis of Discourses of Desire in Education (PDF) which can be read as HTML from Google's cache

In a nutshell:

Dominant Discourses of Desire: “Have Sex and Die”

When asked to reflect on how their experiences in sex education classes in high school informed their understanding of gender and sexuality, undergraduate students in my Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies class responded with similar scenarios of scare tactics used to reinforce notions of individual responsibility that depicted sexual desire as dangerous and needing to be repressed. The first student to comment raised her hand and said “my school did not do abstinence-only sex education, but our teacher told us ‘have sex and die’ and meant it. She told us that sex leads to HIV, STIs, unwanted pregnancy, and social stigma, and repeated, ‘have sex and die.’”

Another student reported that she was also from a school that did not have an abstinence only policy but her introduction to sex education consisted of a teacher passing around a cauliflower and imploring female students to take a good look at what their genitals could look like if they engaged in sexual
activity.

Source: Philosophical Studies In Education – 2006/Volume 37

In other words, as Fine and others have pointed out, our discourse of sexuality fails to address ideas related to the possibilities of heterosexual women's sexual desire and the possibility that heterosexual men have either the interest or capability of participating in the satisfaction of those desires. Instead it's all, as Logue's female student put it, "have sex and die." With its unspoken corollaries about the relative worth of men. That the bulk of the discourse of male undesirability comes from anti-feminists, and only a tiny fraction from generally-shell-shocked, abuse-surviving separatists should not be lost on anyone. But usually is.

In other words I'm tilting at windmills, yes, but they're *real* windmills.

As i was turning on the coffee maker this morning I had the odd realization that

Horniness is one of those things we value so highly that we start thinking about ways to get rid of it as soon as we start to feel it.

Photo by Flickr user santheo. Used under a Creative Commons license.

While one of my older, innocuous email addresses has been the target of spammers for years, for the last couple of weeks I've been getting this... peculiar thread of spammage that (I have to assume since I never actually open such messages) is trying to sell some kind of penis pills.

Usually I spam-heap them without a second though. Sometimes they're good for a chuckle or two. And a couple I had to resist posting about because the assumptions alone, let alone the pragmatics, are just wild.

For instance: "Your New Schlong Will Win More Prizes"

That one, like the old motto of the grandfathered-in strip joint on the way to school that said "top class show girls," seems like a collision in class distinction. Does anyone in the upper class describe anything as "top class?" Does anyone who might award prizes call them "schlongs?"

And how about "Now it is possible to have sex more than 10 times a day"

Y'know, most people don't go through life saying "ah crap, I barely made it to nine today, I gotta do something about that."

All funny in the lame way spam tends to be, but not worth posting about on their own.

Today though... well, first I ought to mention that I obviously get all sorts of other spam. With that in mind, today I got an email that I'm almost tempted to open because, you see, I can't figure out whether

"University degree is not that hard"

...is just way-more-subtle-than-usual penis-pill spam or something else?

What do you think? (If you've gotten it and actually opened it don't spoil it for me. It's far more entertaining to guess than it'll ever be to know.)

All things considered the reason today has been designated Blogroll Amnesty Day isn't as important as that there *is* such a day.

And if you're not sure what it might be, here's the idea, as articulated by non-sex blogger Mike of Mike the Mad Biologist

[T]he start of 2008 seems like a good time to have another Blogroll Amnesty Day. If you're not on my blogroll, and I'm on yours, leave me a link below and I'll add you (note: racists, creationists, and flat-out weirdos won't be accepted).

Please put your blog name on one line, and the url on the second line, like so:
Mike the Mad Biologist
http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/

or give me a line of html code, like so:
Mike the Mad Biologist

Thanks!

Source: Probably pretty obvious at this point

Ok, technically, I first heard about it from Blue Gal who in turn got it from another non-sex blogger, Stephen Herron of Drinking Liberally in New Milford, who in turn got it from Mike. And me? I was reminded today was the day from a post by M.Yu of the distinctly power-exchange-oriented The Jade Gate.

So! Same deal: If I am on your Blogroll and you notice that you are not on mine, tell me! I will add you. Heck... Add me to yours and I will add you to mine. Just drop a note in comments here.

Couple of things: Unlike Blue Gal, Stephen Herron, and Mike the B who aren't part of the pink ghetto, as Melissa Gira calls sex bloggers, linking to me can be a bit stigmatizing. I totally get that even though I actually blog mostly about sexuality as it pertains to politics and gender there are quite a few sites that can't comfortably link to me without rumbling their advertisers and/or colleagues and/or employers and/or partners, children, neighbors, and friends.

That's ok. My original scheme when I stumbled across this domain name and saw it was available and thought it was too good a name to pass up was to start a totally non-sex oriented media-and-the-first-amendment site and make hay out of how often what would have been entirely innocuous content got firewalled or NannyNetted based on the name alone. But I didn't do that, choosing instead to tackle sex head on (for what I believe are obvious reasons).

So, all this is preamble to saying how much I appreciate those of you of every blogging "denomination" who do link, quote, and blogroll me. Thank you. I'll be honored to return the favor.

Note: Speaking of returning the favor, I've just added M.Yu's The Jade Gate since, it turns out, he has me in his blog roll. Who's next?

• M.Yu's The Jade Gate
• Marianne's Indescretion
• Prom Queen Subdued
• Elizaveta Mora's Vespertine Erotica
• Tara Tainton
• Sungold's Kittywampus
• Bunny's Rabbit Gone Wrong
• Connecticut Man1 (why not?)
• R. Hayes' Fors Clavigera
• Duke Orsineo's Illyrical Despatches
• Cyrao Q's Aiming to Arouse
• SnowdropExplodes
• Sugar Mag's Random Thoughts

There's still plenty of time...

So I've got a question about cocks and sexual sensitivity.

One of the limitations of heterosexuality or, of course, homosexuality, is that however experienced one might be with the responsiveness of different individuals of one's preferred gender one is necessarily going to have more limited experience with whichever gender *isn't* the one you prefer. That means an opposite-side data point of one if you're straight, or none if not.

In my case I've got pretty much a data point of me and for the question I've got that's not enough so I'm going to ask those of you with more sexual experience with cocks other than mine.

So!

Pretty much every sex education book introduces the penis as functionally blah-blah this, and la-la that (usually without mentioning that whatever else it's good for one of its functions is caressing one's partner.) After the functional formalities there's mention that the "head, or 'glans'" has the most nerve endings and is most sensitive to touch.

So...

I gotta admit that the head, "or glans," of my cock has the most nerve endings and is most sensitive to the touch. I also, however, gotta admit that all those sensitive nerve endings aren't really very *erotically* sensitive. They're extraordinarily good at, say, helping me locate just the right part of a partners vulva without me having to look, of being able to tell... quite a lot really... about how she's feeling about penetration: how wet she is, how warm she is, how engorged and open her lips are, where the verge of her vagina is, and whether I should try to enter her at all or if I should first dip shallowly and slowly for lubrication or whether she'd be into me deepening my strokes. It's even good (and, it seems to me, almost exactly the right shape) for telling when it's touching her cervix so that, if I know she's enjoying it (which some partners do) I can continue or if she doesn't care for it at all (which some partners really don't) then I can steer clear.

What all those sensitive nerve endings are *not* good for, however, is...

...pretty much anything to do with arousal or orgasm!

Anybody else have experience with that, either as a cock owner or as partners with cock owners?

Now that doesn't mean my glans never feels erotic sensation, but if it does at all it only does so way, way, way far into extended arousal and even then it feels good only with the lightest sensations and tons of lubrication.

Instead what's most sensitive to erotic touch for me is the skin an inch or two below the glans, the wrinkly, oak-y, tattered remnants of my foreskin, especially along the sides and underside (underside when if I'm standing up, anyway.) The surface there is instantly and erogenously sensitive to warmth, moisture, and touch. The lightest contact from tongue, or labia, or a slickened finger feels marvelous there, and somewhere below the surface, close to the slippery-hard core, especially near the spongy ridge along the bottom, there are deeper nerve endings that respond *very* nicely to firmer pressure from tongue or the roof of the mouth, from thumb or fingers, and from the slippery/hard corrugations right over the G-spot just inside and under the pubic bone.

Oh, where was I?

Oh yeah, textbooks and sex manuals. They tend to go on about nerve endings in the glans (as they do about the glans of the clitoris, by the way) as if raw numbers told the whole story. At least if you asked *me* but I could be mistaken so I'm instead asking you.

So in comments the other day, Kochanie said of my comparison of skiing and BDSM

Your very thoughtful post prompts me to pose this question:
What do a fourteenth century Christian self-flagellant, a mountain climber and a BDSM practitioner have in common?

Answer: Each one uses his/her body to get to a "higher place."

Continuing my inquiry into BDSM-ish themes is it an oxymoron to say "a subspace high?"

So back on January 20, 2005, I wrote

Cock-sucker: The term has many unfortunate uses and connotations, which is a shame since very very few of the connotations have anything to do with actually sucking cock. Let's go one step further. Just as boys in the lockerroom stop bragging about sex as soon as they actually begin having it, it's hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you've met someone who knows how to do it.

I said it her.

Three years, and about 1700 posts later, I feel pretty much ready to say it again... but if I were to say it now it wouldn't be with the bewildered half-marveling, half-wistful suspicion that the word "cocksucker" needed a little more unpacking than it generally seemed to get. Little did I know!

May I offer incredible, heartfelt, happy and goofy appreciation to every one of you, my cock-sucking, pussy-licking, gay, straight, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual, monosexual, pansexual, wildly experienced, fabulously inexperienced, sure, unsure, readers for all your help.

Thanks!

Ok, so here's a joke. It's about the women's studies class I'm taking. It's quite an old joke considering how relatively new the field of Women's Studies is. Here goes.

So there was this old hillbilly lived way back in the woods and made his living chopping firewood and selling it to the flatlanders who drove up on the weekends. His real name was Howard Jackson Oliver but everyone called him Uncle H'aird for short. Well one day Uncle H'aird rode his mule wagon into town to get a new axe since his old one had been sharpened so many times it had gone out of balance.

Well, there Uncle H'aird was looking at axes in the hardware store and a new salesman came over and said "Uncle H'aird, you still cutting firewood with an axe? Why don't you buy one of these new chainsaws?"

Well, Uncle H'aird said he thought he did pretty good with his axe, like he'd always done, and so he didn't think he needed any new chain saw. The salesman asked "Well how many cords of wood are you able to cut a day with one of your axes?" Uncle H'aird allowed as to how if his axe was sharp and balanced he could cut twelve to fourteen cords a day.

"Twelve cords a day?" Said the salesman, "Why if you bought a chain saw you could easily cut twenty a day!"

Well, it didn't take long after that for Uncle H'aird to buy a chain saw, load it onto his mule wagon, and head back home up in the woods.

Two days later, though, he showed back up in town with the chainsaw on his mule wagon and he told the salesman he wanted his money back. The salesman asked why and Uncle H'aird said "Yew said I could cut twenty cords a day and I barely cut eight! I want my money back."

"Now calm down, H'aird" says the salesman. You got to give it a little time to get used to it. You might get eight cords the first day but you just need practice. Give it a week and then we'll talk."

Uncle H'aird figured that sounded like there must must be some sense in it so he got back on his mule wagon and headed back up to his home in the woods.

A week later there sat the salesman and wouldn't you know it, here comes Uncle H'aird on his mule wagon looking *awful!* His hair all stringy and his hand blistered and raw, his clothes in tatters and his hat stained all the way to the brim with salt from sweat. And he gets down off his mule wagon and he picks up his chain saw and he limps over to the salesman and drops it at his feet and says "Ah gave it time like you said, and I practiced, like you said, but try as I might I never was able to cut more than fourteen cords in one day and that's just about kilt me. I want my money back and I want my old axe back."

Well the salesman felt pretty bad but he also felt like maybe something was wrong with the chain saw so he bent over, picked it up, set the switch, checked the spark, primed the fuel, grabbed the starter cord, tightened the fuel trigger with his index finger and did a perfect drop pull.

Well the chainsaw started right up with a roar and Uncle H'aird stepped back, scared to death, and said "what's that noise?"

Now that might not *sound* like a women's studies joke... and truth be told as far as I know no one else ever has, and maybe ever will claim it is. Except me. Because every day when I come home there's something else I've learned -- a new concept, new vocabulary, word about research, or new-to-me ideas that keep making me want to say "what's that noise?!?!" Because I feel like I've been sitting at home reading and blogging about stuff for years, and, like Uncle H'aird, I do ok -- I can recognize right from wrong, I can see directions society could go in that would defuse tension, increase truth, justice, liberty, and equality, and I can think of maybe fun ways to think about it. But it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that human factors researchers and instructional designers long ago demonstrated that individuals gathering information mostly on their own tend not to choose the, um, most direct path through the material. And that's fine, really. Seriously! But then when you *do* get someone to point out prominent landmarks and answer questions it really helps pull a lot of stuff together.

Update: Anyway, I happen to think I'm not alone in this -- sure, it's possible for people to figure out *a lot* of stuff on their own, and when you look at some of the work that, say, Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer produced with very little formal infrastructure to support them it's not like you can't do *anything.* But check out this post and conversation in comments about why the allegation that men won't ever take hormonal contraceptives for themselves because, in effect, it would be so easy to just lie instead. Again, chances are you could separate wheat from chaff in their on your own, but a solid foundation in, oh, say, women's studies, would give you not only critical skills (which you might get elsewhere) but also an informational infrastructure and a rich theoretical framework in which to question whether the effect of predominantly anti-feminist narratives about men and women merely enable men to behave irresponsibly or whether they actively coerce men to select dishonesty over integrity.

In other words I'm not the only man, let alone the only person, who might react with the same startled "what's that noise" when someone actually fires up women's studies instead of just wearing you out with how you heard you're supposed to use any other kind of saw.

I'm starting to love that joke about Uncle H'aird.

I'm going back to college for a quarter, taking among other things, a women's studies course and intro to human sexuality. It's 15 hours in all and, since its my first trip back to college in 22 years, it may take a day or two to adjust. :-) (Thank goodness I decided not to add calculus as well!)

Anyway, while I don't think my overall posting rate will decline much there is going to be a bit of a dip. Ok, ok, so mostly I did the *wrong* 30 pages of reading last night and had to read the *right* 30 pages this morning. That technically puts me ahead of the curve for this afternoon but I'm grumpy about it.

Ok, ok, I'm *also* grumpy because even though I mostly worked on (cough) the internet for 20 of the last 22 years since graduation I, um, had a hard time figuring out the on-line interface to the class assignment areas. Why can't kids these days just feel lucky being able to type their papers a line at a time on teletype terminals and print them on industrial-sized paper-feed printers? And not have to be able to read a yew-are-ell correctly. :-)

I'm totally psyched about my professors, though, and so far the other students seem perfect. I'm really looking forward to formalizing the stuff I've been picking up haphazardly all these years. I'm not going to blog specifically about school, and obviously not at all about real people in my classes. But just getting my brain stirred like this is bound to shake new stuff loose. (Example: noticing oddly off-base gender assumptions in reading that, a decade or so ago, was consciously very progressive. The content makes hitting bumps worth it but it really shows how fast things are moving.)

[Note: I'm also a week behind in responding to comments. And that's now *only* a week. I'll feel better about posting new stuff when I'm caught up with comments. I appreciate them all. Especially the nice distillation Sugar Mag, Holly, and P. Burke have been coming up with in comments on the last couple of posts. --fl]

[I was just about to publish this post when I ran into server problems. Turns out it wasn't a coincidence. Doh! --fl]

As I probably mention every time it comes up, I always get a little anxious when my "continue reading..." photos get a little more explicit than usual. On the one hand it feels a little disengenuous to add a warning (or, a warning beyond "...if you're an adult" anyway) in the text. But on the other hand if it's not your cup of tea it does seem polite to let you know.

So anyway, this latest version of Movable Type lets me more easily assign multiple categories and so I'm going to try to remember to add a "Not Work-Safe" category tag to the posts who's photos are, well, not work safe.

Oh, and by the way, feel free to let me know -- in comments or otherwise -- when you feel an image ought to get the designation. More than a "should I / shouldn't I" decision that could really help me decide how to proceed with the photographs. Thanks! (This includes archived posts as well.)

Update:
Oh forget *this* idea! Ok, so while it's probably still a good idea for me to mark posts with the category it's evidently *not* ok to modify the templates so that every time one or more indexes get published the database gets hit with hundreds or even thousands of extra queries everytime, say, I add a new post or you add a new comment.

The idea was to mark each post with the selected categories so you could actually *see* if something was marked "Not Work-Safe" before clicking into it. I made template modifications in preparation for this post and... the possibly-exponential extra processing time is probably what got me kicked off the old host. (The way traffic was growing I was going to have to move sooner or later -- I could have just done it in a more orderly fashion.)

Oh, and I guess those of you who *like* more explicit photos of heterosexual men could find more of what you like here.

Hope this helps. When I find a more processor-efficient method I'll try again.

Closer to Up and Running.

January 4, 2008 08:50 PM: Even closer. Now I think new posts and comments are being registered, and sort of maybe even published. There are still a couple of if's, and's and but's, but we're close to showtime. Which, I have to say, would be a big relief. (Secret: I love little attacks of technotwittery like this -- I just wish I had a little more advance notice and maybe a chance to practice on something read by people so important to me... like you!)

January 4, 2008 06:30 PM: Almost there... One can now do everything but... um... post, receive comments, etc. Which is about where we were two days ago. But! The good news is we're now on a new system, mostly configured pretty almost right, and going downhill fast. (I mean downhill in the skiing sense, not the emergency-room sense. I think.) Hey, at least you can search. Thanks for being so patient.

January 4, 2008 02:10 PM: If you're reading this it means I've got static pages and all my archives moved over to my new server. If so then it's on to database and script-permission configurations and then? Who knows, I might even be able to stop directing you to my emergency back-up Blogspot blog.

New Posts Up On Blogspot.

January 3, 2008 06:30 PM: So I've had to pick up a virtual server which means I've got to dust off even more of what I remember about microprocessor Unix clones. Sigh. It may take a day or two to get things operational over there so, for now, I'll just keep a running tab here of new posts over there.

• Hat Hair vs. Bare vs. Underwear and New Year
• If Your Hymen Is Duct Tape Then Who's the Garbage Can? (01/03/2008 03:15 PM)
• HNT - Poor Substitute (01/03/2008 12:01 AM)

Temporary Blog Headquarters.

[January 2, 2008 10:30 PM: Oh well, while I'm waiting for various new-server entities to rouse themselves I've decided to start blogging on my emergency backup Blogspot blog. There's even an HNT post over there! --fl]

More Broken Comments, etc.

[January 2, 2008 6:00 PM: Another quick note to say that, after consultation with my hosting company, it looks like I have to upgrade my service. Which is at least theoretically ok but won't happen instantly. Though with luck it *will* happen overnight. :-)
Meanwhile please feel free to check out my archives or, even better, check out some of the other great bloggers and websites in my blogroll. I'll keep you posted updated.

[January 2, 2008 9:26 AM: Just a quick (hand-coded!) note to let you know that back-end parts of my server seem to be broken. This means that at least for now you can't comment (bad) and I can't post (possibly not so bad. :-)) Often the problem is that the server's choking on masses of attempted comment spam. If so then service will resume by itself. If not then I'll keep you posted. (Clue: If the problem gets fixed this message will disappear by itself when a new comment or post prompts a page rebuild.) -- figleaf ]

Photo by Flickr user The Infamous Gdub. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In comments to last year's post, SnowDropExplodes expands on my hasty conclusion with a reminder

Rather than having it taken away, it is rigorously enforced by social expectation, and the boy becomes identified only with his sex drive and little else. On the face of it, that looks like fun, and is experienced that way by some, but the competition with other boys to prove oneself to be identified with sex in particular, is endless and impossible to satisfy.

I've been brooding for a day or two about another new book by Evolutionary Behavior grandpa Desmond Morris that Abby O'Reilly mentions (Big theme in the book? Surprise! Men behave the way we do because we're "expendable," who knew? And guess what? It's *genetic!* So, I guess, that means it's ok plus we can't change it! Also, presumably, get used to those genetic high-heels girls, God, or at least Darwin says you want 'em. %E!#$&@%!!) But searches to make the memes more inescapable, unavoidable, and animalistically unalterable notwithstanding, moving into the next year I'm going to try to spend more time examining, and inviting others to examine, ideas about expendability of male *sexuality.* (Note: Victorian men referred to orgasms as "spending!" Not *quite* for the same reasons but... hmmm.) I'm also going to note pretty much the *only* thing I ever learned *and liked* from Newt Gingrich and that's that humans tend to waste, expend, and otherwise misuse that which they perceive to be free or cheap. And whereas the "no-sex" class paradigm both prescribes, describes, and perhaps proscribes women's sexuality as difficult, even dangerous to obtain (in every dimension from frequency to orgasmic difficulty) for men as the sex class orgasms are cheap, disposable, and -- even when pregnancy is a wanted, planned outcome -- at best a minor contribution.

Bottom lines for exploration in 2008:
- Continue unpacking the lie that women must be incredibly high-cost sexual and social female eunuchs as defined by Germaine Greer
- Continue unpacking the lie that men, for all that conservative, anti-feminist happy talk, are sexually and social cheap and interchangeable.
- Find ways to better encourage men to begin noticing and responding to feminist overtures with the result that, eventually, even the seemingly intractably bitter who comment at Men's News Daily and the seemingly no-less bitter women who comment at Women's Space discover that even if they never become bestest friends they at least recognize they're Scott-Adams'-style natural allies. (Despite drawing Dilbert, and writing, um, *generously* chain-pulling posts, Adams also comes up with shockingly sensible observations and proposals. Occasionally. Like this time.)
- Oh yeah, and *especially* for those of us who are heterosexual, as long as we're exploring, let's explore some new ways to be healthy, happy, and horny-together human beings without dragging quite so many misery-inducing stereotypes into bed with us.

So the biggest thing that happened to me this year, the biggest that might ever happen, was figuring out (for myself at least) exactly *what* the "dominant paradigm" we used to talk about subverting might really be. I had little glimmerings about it, and then it just sort of poured out this summer, and ever since then my posts have been far more purposeful and, sorry to say, quite a bit less erotic.

So it's kind of fitting that today, on the last day of this memorable-for-me year, that I'd read just a marvelous, affirming chapter in a 37 year old book.

I mentioned back in September that it looked like Germaine Greer might have anticipated my idea back in 1970 in The Female Eunuch.

How about her chapter called Puberty then? She fiercely lays out *her* side, women's side, of the conundrum...

...all that we are constantly aware of is that puberty is hell. It is hell for boys as well as girls, but for boys it is a matter of adjusting to physical changes which signify the presence of sex and genitality... For the girl it is a different matter: she has to arrive at the feminine posture of passivity and sexlessness. No sooner does her public hair appear than she has to learn how to obliterate it. Menstruation must be born and belied. She has been so protected from accepting her body as sexual that her menstruation strikes her as a hideous violation of her physical integrity.

...

The growing girl is encouraged to use her feminine charm, to be coy and alluring, while ignoring the real theatre [i.e. sexuality] in which such blandishments operate.

...

In this critical period a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men, dealings based upon her attractiveness as a sexual object, dealings which can only be hampered by any consideration of her own sexual urge.

One more quick quote that I needed to read a couple of times before I recognized that she isn't simply regurgitating a common put-down of women who "put out" to be popular (it's in the final clause.)

It is not uncommon for a girl seeking 'popularity' or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself.

In other words, says Greer, puberty is a particular kind of hell for girls because that is the time that, first, they become present to "sex and genitality," and second, that, unlike boys, this is taken away from them so that, to be "normal" and "well adjusted" they must become female eunuchs.

So that's Greer's side -- the *consequences* of what I'm calling *men's* dominant paradigm of women as the "no-sex" class. Unlike Greer, however, who focused so much on the aftermath, what I've been trying to plumb is the *origins* of the thing. And it's consequences for men. Which, as I occasionally hint is of a deeper and more souls-conquering nature than the routine carping about "getting drafted" or "having more heart attacks" or just generally being "more expendable than women."

So last night I almost didn't go to a local Seattle meetup put together by Holly and Jill from Feministe because I was sure being a man, and twice (almost) everybody's age, and not having a graduate degree in anything, and not really being connected with a lot of people, and, and, and... and I was talking with my partner about it and mentioned that it always seemed like my story is that I don't quite belong here, or that I won't quite fit in there... and she said "well, all the more reason to go then."

And anyway, so I went, right? And the first thing someone else said was "I was so nervous I almost didn't come," and then a bunch of other people nodded, and I said hey me too, and then suddenly we all had something in common after all.

And at least two things came to mind over that. First of all I don't know if we ourselves are always the best judges of where we do and don't fit in. Second, I sort of hate to think of all the other people who, for whatever reason, went the *other* way and didn't show up because *they* made the decision they wouldn't fit in.

The point being that for all of us there are probably some dimensions that we really *really* don't fit into, but the chances that *nobody* will take us are so slim that, past a certain point, we have to start asking who's *really* keeping us out.

---

It felt really good to meet Jill and Holly. Feministe was maybe the second or third feminist blog I ran across when I first started reading blogs nearly three years ago now, and between that and Pandagon and Feministing (the other feminist blogs I found first), especially, I finally kicked myself out of the rut I'd been in since maybe the mid-1980s. So that was great, and it was great to be able to put faces to at least some of the names of their commenters too.

To bleg: "A blog entry consisting of a request to the readers, such as for information or contributions. A portmanteau of 'blog' and 'beg'. Also called 'Lazyweb.'" This post includes a request for information from readers, preceded by an explanation of why I'm interested. --fl]

So, based on a comment fragment from Eurosabra...

Oddly enough, there is little to no overlap between the BDSM and the PUA community here, and from what I can tell, they exist in totally separate discursive spheres.

So... I know hardly anything at all about Los Angeles (where Eurosabra lives) but it occurs to me that whereas the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, Seattle, and even Portland are well-known for their active BDSM/kink communities I never hear anything about kink in L.A.

This could just be due to its proximity to the San Fernando Valley, the center of industrial pornography production and therefore also world capital of conservative, routine, bj/gg/three-positions/jack-off-facial and it's a wrap non-kinky sex. Or I could just be missing the obvious -- there are, after all 17,000,000 people in the greater L.A. area so it stands to reason *some* of them have to be linked.

So if you're familiar with the area (as, admittedly, I am absolutely zero not unless you call one of the big conference centers near Disneyland part of L.A.) then would you mind filling me in?

So this morning I noticed Ell of Wilful Damage, one of my oldest blogger friends, said

A hiccuping octopus - I wonder if anyone will ever find this blog searching for that term?

She said it here.

First of all I'd like to say that's a *great* idea for a variation on buzzword bingo! Slip the best non-sequitur you can into a blog post and then see if anyone Googles it.

But also, since on the internet there really is nothing new under the sun, I ran across the following image on Flickr just a minute or two after reading Ell's post.

From Flickr user Penguin_Queen.

Who knew?

Merry Christmas, Ell.

Also, "snuggly banjo"

Ladies and gentlemen, kindly direct your gaze to the sidebar on your right. Thank you. You may have noticed that the addition of a new statistical measure, Author Archives, which proudly announces this score:

Just to clarify.
This is not a running tab of our respective sexual partners.
Or our respective orgasms.
Just our respective posts.

And no, the reason I write so infrequently is not because I'm too busy having sex. Maybe it is because I am too busy thinking about sex. Hmmm. [epiphany ensues].

That was all.
Carry on.

[I need to think about this some more.]

Ok, so I've added a "Captcha" style comment verification to my posts.

The good news? My hosting service has re-enabled comments.
The bad news? You have to guess what the smudgy text says and type it in.
The good news? When you retype the smudgy text you're re-typing, and confirming, text that's been scanned from old books using the reCaptcha collaborative web service.

Here's how that works, according to their website:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

eCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

The process is actually pretty cool. Get the whole non-technical rundown here.

At any rate, while I regret having to subject you to comment confirmation at least I was able to find something that actually does something *besides* strain your eyes.

Update: If you missed a chance to comment on one of my posts from earlier this week those should work now too. Even the egregious Lonesome Folksinger HNT post that, for poetic reasons if nothing else, I should have left closed. :-)

Update #2: Also, in the interest of getting more books scanned, I've added a "reply to this comment" feature so that you can reply directly to each other's comments as well as to my posts. (Just be polite to each other -- I'm way nicer to people who are mean to me than to my important guests... and I feel strongly that every one who visits, let alone comments, is a very important guest!)

So another weird thing about morning erections -- 'know, the erections most men almost always wake up with? They really won't go away until you get up. You can start reading, or listen to sports reports or to dry reports about how the sub-prime lending bubble is affecting corporate short-term paper derivatives (go NPR b-station programming!) or just daydreaming about mortality, or pondering the integrity of those who generate comment spam vs. those who use lead paint in children's toys... in fact you can do pretty much anything you want. But until you get up your erection isn't going anywhere.

Anyway, there's a hall mirror between my bedroom door and the bathroom and since I'm (almost) always the first person awake by more than an hour I hop out of bed, throw my bathrobe over my shoulders and head for the bathroom. Anyway, every morning I'm treated to the perversely Victorian/Gothic mirror image of a half-naked, full-grown man striding purposefully down a very dimly-lit hall, the tails of his robe flowing behind him, a crowing-rooster erection bobbing ahead while he fumbles for the sash of the robe so he can properly tie it all back together.

The Victorians and Goths had the right idea about dimly lit corridors, by the way. Same with Pauline Réage's description of the corridors at Château Roissy where the men all walked around the same way *on purpose* -- which must have looked sillier in practice than it sounded in print. Because in brighter, less romanticized light I'd also be able to see that I had a puffy face, sleep-muzzy eyes, yet another stylish coiffure from Hair By Mister Pillow, and chenile-bedspread-patterned skin. :-)

Oh botheration! Looks like my comments are fouled up again -- possibly because I'm now getting thousands of spam hits a day and that consumes resources that my ISP doesn't like.

If so I may need to either upgrade my service, move to a new host, or otherwise reconfigure my blog to make it harder for spammers to access it. (Movable-type back-end consultants are welcome to drop me a line!)

Update: The good news (such as it is) is that I'm getting to learn even more (than I wanted to :-)) about my blogging tools. Plus java-script (which back when I *was* a web professional I went to a lot of trouble never to learn.)

Meanwhile...

Photo by Flickr user plynoi. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So I'd been thinking about trying out this Facebook thing. Recently I'd noticed several sex, politics, and relationship-oriented bloggers and site operators have been setting up Facebook groups, and since a lot of people go there I thought maybe I'd get an account so, at least, I could hook up with those other groups and... do whatever the heck Facebook would to be useful for.

Now comes word from the venerable and highly-respected-in-tech-circles InfoWorld.com that Facebook's owners are *adamant* that they'll never back down on their new Beacon software's information collecting *and sharing* feature.

Facebook's CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg has profusely apologized for missteps in the design and deployment of the Beacon ad system, but he remains unrepentant about what privacy advocates consider a particularly egregious feature.
InfoWorld Podcast

Absent from Zuckerberg's mea culpa Wednesday is any indication that Facebook plans to modify the system's ability to indiscriminately track actions of all users on external sites that have implemented Beacon.

...

Even critics of Beacon had generally assumed that the ad system limited its non-Facebook tracking and data reporting to Facebook members who were logged on to the site.

However, in the past week, CA security researcher Stefan Berteau stunned many when he reported that Beacon tracks all users in these external sites, including logged-off and former Facebook members and even non-Facebook members, and sends data back to Facebook. He also found that logged-in Facebook users who declined having their actions broadcast to their friends still had their data sent to Facebook.

Beacon, already blasted for weeks by privacy advocates like MoveOn.org and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as by concerned Facebook users, has come under renewed attacks as a result of the findings from Berteau's independent research.

Facebook confirmed that this broad user tracking function remains untouched in Beacon, despite the changes announced Wednesday, a spokesperson said in an e-mail.

Inforworld article here.

It allegedly tracks you even if you opt out with their little "Don't append stories about what you've purchased, browsed, or accidentally stumbled upon on arbitrary external websites to your profile" feature in their "Privacy" settings section. That only prevents the sites from *telling your friends* about what you did while you were there.

Under the agreement with external sites Beacon allegedly continues to track you even if you're not actively logged in to Facebook at the time. In fact Facebook will continue to track you via Beacon *even if you quit the service!*

They'll even received purchase and other information from cooperating websites of people who've never, ever *been* facebook members, but, of course, they won't (yet) have all the personal profile information (a.k.a. *your identity*) such as family, social, and professional affiliations plus all the intensely personal questions about, say, your first kiss or your mother's maiden name...

...and, assuming you don't have an account, they won't be able to tie *you* to *all your friends* and *all their "friends"* to these arbitrary websites.

So anyway, the point I'd like to make about Facebook accounts for bloggers is that *even if* you're not concerned for your own privacy -- and for you it might be perfectly reasonable not to be concerned about that for yourself -- it's still the courteous... responsible... even *decent* thing to consider whether any of your on-line friends have reason to be concerned about *their* privacy, have reason to fear being traced as friends of anyone who browses sites and makes the purchases you make or leaves the comments you make... people who might be worried about stalkers (stalking being a form of OCD, stalkers can be stunningly persistent, creative and resourceful) or involved in lawsuits or custody disputes... then do your friends a favor and think twice before establishing or tying your Facebook account even peripherally to anything where privacy might be an active concern.

---

Techno-twit note: On the face of it this Beacon thing looks a lot like a real version of the 90's-era controversy over website "cookies." The difference being that cookies were scandalous because websites could store your personal information on *your* computer. (Don't worry though, thanks to lots of activism and legislation, website operators were obliged to stop storing your personal information on *your* PC... where it was inaccessible to other websites and, if you turned off your machine and/or deleted your cookies, was inaccessible to the original website as well. So now, almost universally, website operators store your personal information on *their* databases... where no amount of cookie-deleting will erase it.) And if cookies were a complete and utter false alarm, this Facebook business seems a lot more ominous. Yes, yes, they say the won't share or sell your information *outside* the system, but given the ping/ping-back nature of its communication with outside vendors there's no reason (beyond your personal faith in their respect for your privacy and faith that they'll always resist temptation to earn a great deal of money) to believe they wouldn't share your advertisement "personalization" information (i.e. your identity) to anyone willing to pay for it.

With any luck I'll get to look back and say "sheesh, I was such an alarmist to go off like that." And who knows, maybe Beacon is the sort of revenue-generating feature that'll help Facebook grow large enough that, like Google or Amazon, they're not really in reach of "interested party" organizations like Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney's activist religions or Rupert Murdoch's conservative-government-suck-up enterprise. If any or all of that comes to pass, and if it turns out that my concern is unfounded, then I'll very cheerfully issue mea-culpas and otherwise admit I'm descended from Chicken Little.

Until then, however, I'd recommend using virtual condoms and other common forms of online sex safety when using a Facebook-related account to hook up with other sex-related friends.

This post is partly in response to an email message from a reader who asked why I post an erotic or semi-erotic (and occasionally approaching-pornographic) photo a day, especially since most of my posts, while about sex, aren't so much about the erotics of sex but gender issues and social theory of relationships. I'm not sure I can explain *everything* but I can explain how those photos started.

It's funny about these photos. I started them with a *huge* amount of trepidation soon after I started my blog when it finally soaked in that a) contrary to everything I was taught women are as aroused by images they find erotic as men are and b) they were mostly drawn to gay porn and part of that was because so much of straight porn *isn't* particularly erotic for women. So anyway, after chewing on that for a while it occurred to me that while there's gay porn (for men) and straight porn (also for men) there wasn't anyone actually trying to create erotic images of straight men *for straight women.* After chewing on it further I summoned up *a lot* of courage, got out a camera with a remote control, and took a handful that, I hoped, *didn't* focus on what most male, or male-interest-serving photographers focus on.

I took photos of myself because I really didn't have any other models, and, taking them, I was dead afraid my skinny, ugly, un-conventional body type would distract and/or turn off people so much they wouldn't recognize what I was trying to say. And the results were both overwhelming and, the big surprise for me, overwhelmingly positive!

I *still* think a lot of the appeal has to do with me just trying to be interesting and not so much me as all that attractive (where that means even if I *wasn't* attractive since people insist I am.)

So anyway, after I posted that first series I thought I was done and so I stopped. And received a lot of queries and complaints. And so every now and then I take another series, usually of me doing ordinary things around my home but always mostly just about the small erotics of everyday life and not the exotic worthiness/achievement-linked stuff that's nearly always a part of porn for men. And then I just post one photo a day from the set.

It gets a little problematic for me sometimes because often I'll be in a randy mood... or at least rowdy one... when I take the photos, and then thirty, or ninety, or one-hundred-and-ten days later I'll be distracted or aggravated or wrapped up in ideas instead of erotics... and the next photo in the series will be more, um, naked than usual.

I try to keep going but sometimes I chicken out. For those of you who are into seeing those you can let me know either in comments or email and I'll send you an invitation to go behind the "friends-category" firewall where I'm more comfortable because nobody's seeing anything they didn't expect or ask to see.

And *that's* how the photos come to be there. It's part political, part illustrative, part accomodation, part personal, part arrogance, part payback, part self-education, part self-expression, part force of habit, part self-image verification, part tweaking the "women aren't 'visual'" part of the paradigm... the list goes on and on, and so, till I run out again anyway, will the photos. I'm totally

Exhibit A: Knitting by Christina of Vovare.

Exhibit B: Crocheting by me.

And so you know I'm not immune to typical male vulnerability, I'm totally intimidated that hers looks bigger than mine. :-) Totally semi-serious. It's a complete reflex! Yeah, I get over it pretty quickly but it always surprises me when I get caught me off guard like that. Kind of like flinching even decades later when you spill your coffee or tea in case your kindergarten teacher somehow was still right on your case. :-)

Hey! But speaking of size, hers is 25 stitches cast on, I'm pretty sure mine was 27, but she used #7 needles (U.S.) and my hook was, I think, a five. Which is *exactly* the sort of irrelevant justifications we make up when we're indoctrinated to worry about size whether it's penis size, bust size, waist size, height, weight, you name it. We're all so different, and so cool, and it's so foolish to compare blunt numbers anyway but if you *do* put a number on something then we just reflexively gotta compare. As if everything was a race. And there was only one way to win it. And only one person on the entire planet could be the winner.

Wild huh?

---

All joking aside, one of the very nice things about a crocheted cock-cozy vs. a knitted one: crocheting is way easier to pull out while you're still wearing it, and the little nubbly vibrations circling round and round and round as you pull might not ever get someone off but they feel very, very nice!

This is just a test post... but why be boring about it?

Just a quick note. For some reason my host server is returning errors whenever you try to comment. I may not do anything about it before Friday. In the meantime please accept my apologies.

figleaf

Update: Well, this is turning into a slightly bigger issue. I'll still be back soon but I've upgraded my blog-server software as well and... well... ask me how *that's* going! No idea how long it'll take but I'll keep you posted as much as possible.

Update #2: More work, but also more interesting. MovableType version 4 is a radical, *radical* departure with some way, way cool features... that I haven't really bothered to explore yet because, really, I'm just trying to get comments working. The problem being that the comment-spam filter I installed a few months ago (the one that has resulted in none, zero, nada spam instead of 1000+ a day) is evidently *very* processor intensive. So my hosting ISP, in the way of most hosts and not just them, turned off my commenting script. Hoops are being jumped through (sadly mostly clothed hoops) and many hoops involve this upgrade which either will or won't solve everything. :-) More later. And as it's a busy post-holiday weekend with everyone home, beautiful fall weather, and lots of food to continue cooking and eating, "more later" may be a bit later than I might otherwise prefer.

Update #3: Ok, and obviously there's a new look to the site as well, which is nice, but my blogroll and the paths to all my archives are broken. Which isn't as nice at all but does give me something to do for the rest of the weekend. And, of course, comments still aren't working so much but I'm still going to get to that last anyway.

Update #4: Getting closer. I think some of the permalinks are starting to work and so are the archive paths. The good news? It looks like the new version has by-author archives as well which means those of us who prefer Kochanie's posts will be able to track them down more easily.

Update #5: Even closer! I think everything works except the comments now. On the other hand... still no comments. And without comments you can't tell me if you notice anything else is or isn't working.

Update #6: Final update: It looks like even comments are working now. Let me know if you notice anything behaving weirder than it was. Once everything stabilizes I'll be able to add back useful stuff like tags, blogrolls, and other useful information.

About comments I'm back to the older problem of unthrottled comment spam. That shouldn't be *too* much of a problem since the current system chucks most of the really bad stuff into moderation where I can delete it quickly. But even though it evidently kept the server red-lined I really appreciated how the old system pretty much stopped everything. Sigh.

Back to work. :-)

Photo by Flickr user minnemynx. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Yes, I'm a bit crabby at the moment and thus exceptionally intolerant of oxymorons but why, exactly, is it that the same people who go around saying "pussy" now generally don't think they should have fur?

Oh yeah, and same goes for "beaver" if anyone besides retired truckers and even older ex-pornographers even say that anymore.

I know, I know, perfectly logical linguistic migration, blah blah blah. And I'm definitely not saying one should or shouldn't have all the latitude in the world to fashion one's own hair as one sees fit at any given moment.

What. Ever!

And say, did I accidentally bring home decaf or something? :-)

So one of the little-appreciated benefits of anonymous blogging is that at least you don't have to show people your face. And at the moment mine looks a little funny.

I went to bed last night with a horrifically sore neck and woke up with a prickly feeling in one side of my face and a little difficulty moving one side of my face. Turns out I've got this non-threatening but cosmetically noticeable thing called Bell's palsy.

The upshot is one side of my face looks like I had too much Botox or something and it feels a little like when the novocaine starts wearing off after you've been to the dentist.

Now, not knowing that's what it was when she talked to me over the phone my doctor suggested I go to the emergency room. Which made me pretty nervous. Then I got in and someone said "what's happening?" I said my face was getting limp on one side and she cheerily chirps "oh, that could be a stroke, I'll get you into a room right away."

Well, fortunately it wasn't as bad as that (nor was it a brain tumor, the other unpleasant possibility.) Instead it is, as I said, Bell's Palsy. All in all I'm feeling pretty happy and, even better, chances are *extremely* good that my face will be back to normal within 90 days. As it is if you look at one side it looks normal, and if you look at the other side it looks normal (if a bit relaxed) but if you look at my face straight on it looks lopsided. Weird, eh? Not bad, just weird.

According to the Wikipedia entry other sufferers of Bell's Palsy include actors Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney, radio personality Amy Goodman, erstwhile progressive politician Ralph Nader, and Def Leppard bassist Rick Savage. So unless I wind up as rashly testosterone-poisoned as Ralph Nader did it could be a lot worse. Again, not bad, just weird.

(Via Viviane's Sex Carnival)

Cory Silverberg of About.com:Sexuality has a heartfelt lament about the current state of sex blogging.

I have a deeply neurotic and fundamentally unhealthy relationship to blogs. I belong to a transitional technological demographic and while I read blogs voraciously for work, every click holds the possibility of sending me reeling into a fit of informational inadequacy. To top it all off, reading, writing and thinking about sex is work so virtually the only fun thing left for me about sex is actually having it. So in the end, I’m not really sure that I want more sex blogs as much as I might like more blogging about sex. But Susannah’s post made me realize that I haven’t thought much about what I’d actually want from a better sex blog.

• A better sex blog would incite action.
• A better sex blog would be less cool.
• A better sex blog would reveal something about the reader and the blogger.
• A better sex blog would be about everything, just like sex.
• A better sex blog would be critical about sex.
• A better sex blog would be subversive.

In his original post each bullet point is expanded into full detail. See the whole thing here.

On the one hand I could gently reassure Silverberg it's not as bad as he fears, although on the other hand I could give him a cup of coffee and say perk up!

I think one issue with his lament is that -- just as some people seem to think "sex" is limited to only PIV intercourse till male ejaculation -- a lot of people think "sex blog" is limited to first-person accounts of their Saturday night down at the Stop 'n Fight. Or something not far enough from that. But just as there's way more to sex than *having it* there's way more to sex blogging than blogging about having it.

Instead there are plenty of excellent, thoughtful blogs that hit each of the points you mention -- calls to action; revelations about the writer and forced reflection by the reader; about not just the ins and outs of sex but also the politics, the sociology, the history, and the variety of sex; of critical commentary on the manias and conceits and blind spots of sex. Susie Bright, of course, manages rather nicely. And while I'm not crazy about his innovative but too-much-like-a-thumbnail-site design, Sam Sugar can too. Chelsea Girl and AlwaysArousedGirl each compellingly thread their sex lives through the greater fabric of the rest of their lives. CollegeCallgirl can knock your socks off. Same, though for different reasons, with The Beautiful Kind or Cassandra Says. And I don't even think Bright, or Bank, or Collegegirl or TBK or the others are even necessarily the best non-Bridget-Jones blog out there. (I know I left a lot of good people out and besides... what's wrong with Bridget-Jones-blogging anyway?) Anyway I did miss good sex bloggers but follow the links and you'll find someone you like in one or more of the blogrolls you find.

If I can just beat my own drum for a moment, just since Friday I think I've posted about finding common ground between pro- and anti-porn feminists (over the role of agency) which is an invitation to action; I've posted about using instant mac-n-cheese powder as a (surprisingly harmless and flavor-appropriate) sexual flavor dust, which is just about as not cool as you can get; I've posted about cognitively-sound contrarian sex education tactics and parodies of evolutionary psychology, which -- while not about everything just like sex -- helps remind people that there's more to sex than the old in-and-out; riffing off a Susie Bright review of a lame porn video I criticized the Johnny-Knoxville-ization of "gonzo" porn which is pretty critical of a direction away from actual sex people seem to be going with porn (and, sadly, viewers seem to be following); and finally I posted about what I believe is the deeply subversive indictment represented by the actual text (as opposed to the funny pictures) in Rachel P. Maine's The Technology of Orgasm. And if I haven't revealed something about myself in the last week I'm working on a post -- one in a series -- that's about my own personal quest for "worthiness" which, I contend, is for men comparable to the "beauty myth" phenomenon that affects women.

Heck, not to put too fine a point on it but *Cory's blog* is a very good sex blog and his post was a wonderful example of the genre! You just gotta look a little.

So! Sex bloggers. We're there, we're sexy-but-square, get used to it! :-)

Now opisthenar is a word you don't really hear everyday. It means "back of the hand" which, I suppose explains why you don't hear it that often since "o-pis-the-nar" is no shorter and also harder for native English speakers to pronounce.

Still, it's a pretty nice word when you think about it. When I want to lightly caress a loved-one's cheek I almost always use the softer, dryer backs of my hands than my rougher, more textured palms. Same when, during long wet kisses, I first slip my hands under blouse or bottoms. When stroking someone's leg through pants or stockings I'll use my palm but for bare skin, at least the first time, it's the back of my hand again. And finally, for some reason if I slip my hand under the band of your bra it's my warm palm that will capture your breast, but from above it's the cool backs that will side next to your skin.

Mmm. The word of the day is opisthenar.

Miss Wolfe of Love in the Capitol on overhearing two guys discussing her blog and, since she hasn't posted a photo, speculating about her looks.

it was at this point i felt the need to let them know i was there, not me as miss wolfe but as me a woman. i gave a little cough and they looked over and noticed me. they both got a little flushed because i overheard them.

me: did you ever think she doesn't post her picture on there because she doesn't want some weird stalker guy? (i get a blank stare)
me: i am sorry for butting in but i couldn't help overhearing your conversation.
guy1: i never really thought about it.
guy2: i still think she's a freak.
me: you shouldn't say things like that because she could be sitting next to you. you don't know i could be her.
guy1 and 2: both laugh (they think i am joking)
me: besides you said that her advice helped you a little so maybe shes doing a little good. maybe she wants to help men please women better. isn't that good for you and your girlfriend?
(again i get blank looks, like i'm crazy)
me: sorry for interrupting, i needed to say something.

i packed up my work and moved to a different spot. i didn't hear anything specific after i left. i don't think they were happy with me interjecting. the second guy didn't like me at all. i do remember hearing the word cunt as i walked away. i deserved it for interjecting but i couldn't really keep my mouth shut. to the guy that reads the blog, i do exist and now you had the distinct experience of the only reader to ever see me and now know who i am. my only advice to all you me, watch what you say because you never know who is listening.

Read the quote in context here.

Talk about a rare treat. Not so much the other guy's unkind remarks, and not so much the chance to get in the last word *on your blog* (although that would be sort of a treat.) But just to hear what an anonymous *reader* has to say when they don't know it's you. There just aren't that many of us who get the opportunity.

Here's a consolidated mass of random TMI Tuesday answers. I nicked the questions from Vixen at Secrets of a Blue-eyed Vixen.

2. Which super power (ability to turn invisible, ability to read people's thoughts, or invulnerability) would you take and why?
The virtuous superpower of my dreams would be to make people understand perfectly their opponent's point of view. Not so we could get all lovey-dovey (although that might be one possible outcome) but instead so that we'd have fewer stupid arguments about inessential details. (Smarter ones would be ok.)

The salacious superpower? Plastic Man / Reed Richards / Elastagirl thing where you can radically change the way your body's shaped. And no, not just so I could do the cliché things with cock or tongue. I'm thinking always being able to have my head in the right spot for full-on kisses regardless of position... which, I guess *could* have some bearing on the usual cock/tongue cliché. :-) But that and being able to just endlessly surge and pour against a partner's body till her body fluttered against mine.

3. Would you rather be tied up or tie someone else up? Why?
Yeah, I keep saying I'd be willing to let someone tie me up and/or spank me, and/or otherwise top me. And I *would* be willing -- I can be extraordinarily aroused by what floats a partner's boat. And I *know* people who can switch easily tend to be a lot better balanced overall than those who stick firmly to one side or another (if, for no other reason, than -- where's that superpower again? -- understanding how the other half lives can improve technique, not to mention creativity.) But... I have issues with being tied up that, come to think of it, have to do with being tied up by playmates as a kid, and... hmm... actually, as I mentioned a moment ago, while I strongly prefer tying to being tied that previous experience really did increase both my compassionate sensitivity *and* my wicked creativity so....

I gotta say, though, that there's something really lovely about just crossing a partner's hands over her head, pressing them down, and growling "keep them right there..." Not all bondage requires binding.

5. If they were naming new Dwarves beyond the seven what would your name be and why?

Blabby I'm afraid. I like to read non-fiction, ok, and I like to talk about what I read. At dinner many years ago a roommate, told my partner (only half-jokingly) "damn, you could just replace him with an encyclopedia and a vibrator, couldn't you?")

Bonus: What's the most embarrassing thing you ever bought?
This might sound funny but the most embarrassing thing I've bought would probably be my first Macintosh. I was really, really into the Mac when it first came out, but way too broke to do much more than look at them in magazines... on the magazine racks, since, for that matter, I was too broke to afford magazines either! Then I wound up in technology, documentation, and IT, which was all PC-based. And so when I finally had the means, motive, and opportunity to actually buy an Apple I'm constantly pleased by how superficially pretty it is but also less patient with it's underlying blind spots. That plus they (we now own three) crash way more often than the Windows boxes we replaced them with. Not sexy, I know, but hey, I'm a rebel. :-)

1. Where was the first place you ever had sex?
You gotta define sex, of course. First ever was probably when I was in kindergarten and a girl my age, who lived on the corner asked if I wanted to play something like doctor behind a building in our neighborhood. We just pulled off our pants but in that context it was powerfully erotic. First ever anything leading to an orgasm I was alone in bed sometime in maybe 7th grade, maybe 8th? I'm going to assume they mean first intercourse, and that would have been on a Valentine's Day in the carpeted hallway of my first partner's exuburban/suburban split level home (we did it there so we'd hear the garage door if her parents came home unexpectedly.)

2. Does size matter? (open to interpretation boys and girls)
Yes. Not so much for sexual sensation but woozie, would the economy ever collapse if we quit worrying about size and started worrying about health, happiness, and general well being. Not to mention that if people didn't worry about size then everyone in both the spam-filtering and spam-generating industries would be out of work.

3. Have you ever had sex in your office or your place of employment?
Yes. Even when I *didn't* work at home. :-)

4. Ever been skinny dipping?
Yes, but not until surprisingly late in life -- about 26 or 27. I went, of all things, with a couple of teenage girls (it was a moonless night and none of us saw any of each other.) Anyway, I was one of the volunteer guides in a sort of outward bound program for "at-risk" youth. A couple of the girls wanted to go in and I wound up going in with them to make sure nothing untoward happened. Turns out all the boys, many of them theoretically tough as nails, were just totally shy and freaked out and wouldn't go anywhere near undressing if there were girls nearby, naked or dressed.

5. Top or bottom?
As Vixen puts it in her answer to this question

Fuck. There is NO way to choose. Top means a guaranteed O. But bottom means *optimum* penetration…. And then there is everything in between… Lord!

See her other answers to last week's TMI Tuesday entry here.

I've mentioned elsewhere that whoever (metaphorically) gets to be on top seems more likely to guaranteed an orgasm, but then when I'm on the bottom it seems like I'm almost always guaranteed I get to enjoy *someone else's* orgasm. Or orgasms. But when it's my turn for an orgasm I prefer being on top.

That's enough for now I think. Off to bed with me.

Just a note to say I seem to be recovered from my foolish oral surgery. Thanks for all your kind comments wishing me well, remarking on my photos, and critiquing and adding intelligent insights to my posts. I appreciate you all so much. I've finally responded to each of you. Sorry about the delay.

Thanks!

figleaf

I'm away from home yet again and too many other friends and family members saying "you on that laptop again? It's *nice* outside!" So posting will be sparce, again, till Monday. (And besides, it really *is* nice outside here! And my only access is dial-up to a *long distance* access point!)

Ever notice how some of the nicest "church-lady" dresses, the ones with the tasteful but sometimes loud floral prints, the scooped collars, the fabric just heavy enough not to really require a slip, the contours not really tight enough to be too shockingly form-fitting, the hem well below the knees... y'know the kind you wear with the big broad-brimmed hat and the big clasp-handle purse?

Y'know, the kind a partner can pull up to your collarbone to reveal nothing underneath but self-garter stockings, the fabric heavy enough that should he drop it at the sound of a passerby approaching you're again church-lady modest, the kind where the neckline falls open enough for a man's large hands to cup your breasts and thumb your nipples stingy-hard, the kind where the broad brim can be lowered to shadow away your flushed cheeks and cock-plumped lips, and the purse large enough to hold... whatever suits your fancy, sure, but also large enough that you or he can rest a foot on it. The floral prints nicely camouflage any wayward drips or stains. And speaking of camouflage... no passerby would ever suspect someone in a proper, long church-lady dress. Certainly not!

Mmm, long dresses! The phrase of the day is long dresses.

So there's an old Seinfield skit about how nobody ever plans about moving back in with their parents. "Yeah, I'm going to graduate from college, get a good job, meet a nice girl, and then, y'know what? I think I'm gonna move back in with my folks."

Yada yada.

Anyway, nobody brags about getting pereodontal surgery either, and in just a few minutes I suspect I'm going to find out why.

I'll probably be out of it for the rest of the day. I may not feel like writing but just in case, if posts or comment replies seem a bit loopy you'll know why.

(See, for instance, discussion on Shay's blog.)

I've always come down on the "come" side of the debate. I've never been impressed with it because I remember it first showed up in the same hippie-dippie era as words like "luv" and re-spelling names that end in "y" to end in "i," and that little thing where people dotted their i's and j's with circles. And so for me it's always smacked of a kind of adolescent deprecation of something that people were sort of embarrassed to talk about.

There's also the problem of tenses: Sure, "Whatever you do don't stop licking just... exactly... like that... I'm ...about to ...'cum'" works, at least in the sense that that's how you might spell the word your partner actually says. But that leaves the writer in a bind when expressing how one tells one's partner afterwards that "I got so excited when you said you were about to 'cum' that I ____ too." A survey of modern American and English usage says that about 99.8% of actual English speakers would use the word "came." But if the present tense is to be spelled "cum" then how is one to spell the past tense? (Note: diehards evidently depart from English and write "cummed" although I've yet to meet a live human who's used that word out loud.)

So!

After all that preamble you might expect me to dismiss the word "cum" like a lame, low-rent, suburban porn shop, phthalates-contaminated jelly dildo. And indeed I wish I could.

...if not for this entry from TheFreeDictionary.com

cum 1
prep.
Together with; plus. Often used in combination: our attic-cum-studio.
[Latin; see kom in Indo-European roots.]

Hmm. "Together with?" Nice. "Plus?" Great!

And when you do go looking for the Indo-European root kom you get the American Heritage Dictionary's definition found at, for instance, Bartleby.com we learn

ENTRY: kom
DEFINITION: Beside, near, by, with.
Derivatives include enough, handiwork, and country.
1. enough, gemot, handiwork, witanagemot, yclept, yean, from Old English ge-, with, also participial, collective, and intensive prefix, from Germanic *ga-, together, with (collective and intensive prefix and marker of the past participle). 2. cum1; cooncan, from Latin cum, co-, with. 3. co-, com-, from Archaic Latin com, with (collective and intensive prefix). 4. British Celtic *kom-, collective prefix, in compound *kombrogos (see merg-). 5. Suffixed form *kom-tr-. con1, contra-, contrary, counter1, counter-, country; encounter, from Latin contr, against, opposite. 6. Suffixed form *kom-yo-. coeno-; cenobite, epicene, Koine, from Greek koinos, common, shared. 7. Reduced form *ko- in compounds (see gher-1, mei-1, smei-). (Pokorny kom 612.)

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

and then if that's a bit far afield the Collens Dictionary brings it back home very nicely.

cum prep. used between two objects to designate an object of a combined nature

In other words, whereas it's unlikely that the 60's-era teenie-boppers who wrote "Bobbi luvs Terri" on their Nifty brand binders with electric-blue ballpoint pens, or the underground comic artists who wrote "Doobie cums in Red" the word "cum" isn't the worst possible word!

In it's Latin, and earlier Indo-European forms "cum" puts people together, as in "companion" or (for the polyamorists among us) "community." "Come," on the other hand merely indicates that one has arrived. But arrived from... where exactly?

At any rate, 99.8% of the time I'm still going to prefer the English rather than the Latin spelling but (channelling goofy 'winger language guy James Kilpatrick) the word cum, properly italicized of course, is an appropriate designation for orgasms one has *with* one's partner.

So the word of the day, much to my surprise and possibly even to my chagrin, is cum. Mmm, cum. Not bad! Let's all come together on that.

So when I was little, and later, when I was bigger, I always -- I mean *always* -- felt self-conscious about my soft, skinny, tall, big-hipped, narrow-chested, chronically asthmatic body. Even when I worked out it didn't make much difference. My legs got stronger, sure, and my upper-arm strength increased quite a bit too, but I stayed pretty "scrawny up-top" as one partner used to put it.

So the other day I started a photo series sort of by accident. The lighting seemed just perfect and I already had the camera on a tripod with the remote handy for something else I had unsuccessfully tried to make work a couple of times. Anyway, I had been towelling off after my shower with a plain white towel, and I just grabbed the camera and started snapping away to see what I could see.

One thing that completely, *completely* surprised me was two classic Popeye-style muscle-man poses that, very uncharacteristcally, makes it look as though I have actual muscle-man muscles. (Did I say it was great light?) Anyway, I'm putting these photos up in order and while I'm really feeling self-conscious about the look the first one's there below the jump.

I'll get to the steamy, very-mildly kinky erotic technique I started this post to talk about in a minute. First, thought, I want to that minute (ok maybe a couple minutes) to explain where it came from.

So I have this huge soft spot in my head heart for Hong Kong sword and sorcery movies dating back to the days before video tape when the only way you could watch them was to luck into pocket specialty theaters that were running real film through real projectors. The prints were generally horrific. The plot, characters, and action were just amazing... and the subtitles (if there were any) were just amazingly bad.

So last night I was prowling the aisles of my local non-chain video store and I spotted one I hadn't seen. Even better it had an allegedly soft-porn element to it -- something that occasionally cropped up in that genre of film. I'd have been interested in anyway but since I'd already seen all the others it was a particularly interesting choice.

Which is how I wound up watching Michael Mak's 1991 film Sex and Zen last night.

It was, um, surreal. Allegedly based on a Decameron-like Ming-Dynasty-era Chinese novel called "The Prayer-Mat of Flesh" there's no real sorcery, very little arial martial arts, or, outside the opening and closing scenes, very much Zen either. (Not surprisingly there's plenty of misogyny, however, both historical within the narrative of the film and contemporary within the context of direction of the people appearing in it. Although no more or less than in any other guilty-pleasure action/adventure movie regardless of rating.)

Sex, on the other hand, there is. In abundance. And astonishing, judgment-free (though not at all *at all* sexism or coercion free!) polymorphous, and highly kinky variety ranging literally from

• zoophilia
• water sex
• voyeurism
• sadism
• reluctance
• pubic hair (though no actual visible genitalia since it's all soft porn)
• trafficked prostitution (wherein, surreally, prostitutes are also forced to become physicians of Chinese medicine...)
• masturbation (expedient, to get erections)
• masturbation (erotic, with calligraphy brushes and other insertables)
• masochism (she lashes him with her red bullwhip till he agrees to lash her back)
• kissing (romantic, vanilla, and highly, highly erotic)
• infidelity
• hot baths (see also masturbation with large calligraphy brushes!)
• fellatio (hetero and bisexual unfortunately always forced)
• erections (never seen in bare flesh but seen in shadows and wrapped with scarves)
• defloration (with a he-bleeds-instead twist)
• calligraphy with genitals
• bondage (with suspensions, male)
• amputation (ok, elective surgical castration prior to -- going full cycle here -- zoophilic transplantation)
• asses (naked male and female)

If I left anything out of the list it's almost certainly because I don't remember, not because it wasn't in there. The only things I've left out are full-frontal nudity, penile penetration, or "X" for x-rated.

It's only rated "R," presumably because it lacks directly visible penetration... which makes me seriously wonder what the Sam Hill the MPAA was smoking that week when they gave this show an "R" rating only a year after giving Philip Kaufman's Henry & June an "NC-17."

In his 1995 review (he reviewed it?) Roger Ebert said

"Sex and Zen" is a nostalgic reminder of the soft-core sex films of the 1960s, before "I am Curious (Yellow)" and "Deep Throat" began the hard-core revolution and turned adult films forever away from sex and towards plumbing. It is interested in how the characters look. It has a plot. It wants to be beautifully photographed (although it was too saturated in reds for my taste). It has a sense of humor, teaches a simple moral, and in Amy Yip it has a heroine who I would not have to be dragged kicking and screaming to see again.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

Ebert neglects to mention that the movie gives a remarkable look at a culture with superficially similar but sometimes fundamentally unfamiliar sexual attitudes, particularly in the areas of homophobia (or lack thereof) and BDSM's alphabet soup of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism.

But what I really wanted to talk about, after all this introductory yak, was how just totally, totally visually cool some of the individual sex scenes were. A nervous but insistent bride, her virginity theretofore enforced by an incredibly pious (Confucian?) father, fashions exam-style stirrups for herself from ceiling-high red silk curtains... and still involuntarily kicks her husband across the room... and then, moments later, puts him in the stirrups so she can examine the bloody wound she gave *him* with her heel at the moment of penetration.

Some time later -- days or months maybe? -- the husband and wife have a sex scene that's vanilla as Baskin-Robbins and yet sensuous beyond words as (ok, trying to use words anyway I guess) they lie end-to-end but head to head (if that makes sense) passionately kissing and then fondling, licking, and kissing their way down each other's bodies.

Which brings me to another point: compared to a lot of porn, even "soft porn" there's so much lingering-rather-than-transitory attention paid to breasts and nipples -- men's and women's. They're handled gently and roughly, kissed and licked and nuzzled, hinted at, revealed through silk and gauze garments, and bared to the touch, they're slid and stroked against people and objects... without any hint of that squirrely adolescent, boobs-are-either-second-base-or-church self-consciousness seen in, say, Anglo-American pornage.

And finally there are astonishing acrobatics. The soft-porn no-actual-penetration convention actually comes in handy here since otherwise penile fractures would be the least of anyone's concerns. Two scenes come to mind here

- One of the two hasn't-learned-Zen anti-heros, during violent sex with is wife the peasant/silk-weaver/gardner dude who appears to represent uncontrolled animal impulses, hurls a huge chain over the rafters in his silk works and then hauls his partner and himself halfway to the ceiling, coupling with her madly the while, their otherwise completely naked, muscular bodies screened from an x-rating only by their "tastefully" arranged limbs and the links of the chain itself.

- The silk-weaver, disgraced for abusing his wife and force to become a gardner for a woman who's sexually neglected by her elite servant-to-the-emperor husband for months on end. The gardner sees his mistress floating naked in a huge bath tub, masturbating with a gigantic calligraphy brush (what's with the brushes in this movie anyway -- sensuous yes but also symbolic of... what?) and, still unable to control himself, throws himself bodily into the tub beside her whereupon they have some seriously wild underwater sex. There's a point where they're having front to back intercourse standing up and he just hurls himself backwards and the camera captures him horizontal, under the water, arms spread, his movement no less vigorous but in some way or another far more elemental.

Oh boy. This post went elsewhere as far as my original intention goes. If you're still reading thanks for the indulgence. You can find the movie online at Netflix or Amazon but here's what I sat down planning to say.

The spouse-abusing peasant anti-hero, at this point still a silk-weaver, goes on a trip leaving his wife at home. The refined, dissolute scholarly anti-hero (all the adult men appear to be stock morality-play anti-heros ) attempts to seduce her and she reveals that her brutish husband has locked her into a chastity belt. The scholar enlists the help of a kind of priest/thief to unlock her belt at least part way.

The lovers languidly undress and caress each other in another substantially vanilla but high humidity love scene. At one point they take one of the many, many fine silk fabrics hanging from the ceiling (the husband is a silk weaver after all), lace it through a flap of the chastity belt she still seems to be wearing, and he pulls yard after yard after yard under the metal right over her clitoris. It's just a quick vignette, on screen for seconds, but it just looked so wonderfully, sensually, erotically, and unexpectedly hot that long after I've forgotten the rest of the movie I'll remember that scene. And I'll wish that I could do that with someone and that someone could also do it with me.

Used to be that my hit count went down whenever posted self-photography series. Lately it goes down whenever I stop! Either I'm becoming a better photographer or a more boring writer.

Actually I suspect it's both. When I first started this blog I'd try to post something serious and non-salacious at least once a week, usually on Saturday. Now it feels like I struggle to post anything salacious at all.

It's not that I'm not still feeling any less, um, profoundly sexy/horny/interested/erotic/mischevious than when I wrote my recipe for low-carb foreplay or manufacturing tips for chocolate cocks or (continuing the recipe theme) especially peaches and cream. Let's just say it's been more on my mind lately than at my fingertips.

As for photography? Getting out of the shower this afternoon I got inspired, and with the help of a tripod, camera, towel, mirror, and an uncharacteristic-for-this-time-of-year overcast sky that created wonderful shadows and tones I wound up taking a really nice, long, and I think generally successful series of photos... to lighten up my dolorous, overlong and wordy posts.

Here's a sample. (More to come.)

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

I gotta say I just loved, loved, loved Jim Carney's Once. Loved it. Cried through half of it, felt like a doofus for it, didn't give a shit.

It's just a perfect reconceptualization of the whole idea of what a movie musical ought to be -- just barely enough plot to hold the songs together... except that instead of bursting into song for no good reason at all, stopping everything, and hoofing it around in antic costumery... the characters are working and/or aspiring musicians who just show each other what music they're working with in their respective lives.

And what's just so cool is that while they're attracted to each other, and on top of that they *mean* something to each other, other parts of their respective lives have their own pull and so more than everything else they have the music the put together first over lunch breaks in music store pianos, or late night drinking and singing sessions with friends (my partner says this is more common in Ireland, where the movies' set, than in the states), and then finally in an all-night recording studio session with other Dublin street musicians recruited for the occasion. And then...

Not to change the subject (or give anything away) but the actors playing the lead man and woman (their characters are never named) wrote and performed nearly all the songs.

Sigh.

Something else that's so cool is that while they lyrics of the songs don't carry the plot -- they're just songs two very, very good aspiring musicians might write -- the way they're played, filmed, *acted* in character carry the show.

Sigh.

I just loved that movie. If more musicals were like that I'd really like musicals a lot more. See it if you get the chance.

Fighting for turns at the new J.K. Rowling book with your ten year old. And mostly letting him win. At the moment he's on page 421-something, I'm stuck back at page 347. We're both enjoying it immensely.

On a whim, on Thursday evening, I quit tobacco. I've done it a number of times in the last few years. This time was different though, in a lot of ways. Not least is I've quit cold turkey -- no tapering off, no patches, no hypnotherapy. Nuthin'. Just a conviction that I'd like to be free of certain things in my life and addictions to random partially-composted and oxidized plant matter being one of them.

Oddly, the symptoms I've most dreaded -- acute withdrawal symptoms -- have been almost entirely absent. So has, unfortunately, almost all other sensation besides a mild increase in appetite and almost no desire to do anything except sleep, speak in mild understanding tones with my children, partner, and friends. Oh, and eat dried red chilies like they were 60's-era Clint-Eastwood cigarillos. Yeah, they're hot. *Extremely* so. Surprisingly I can handle it. Except sometimes when I bite through too many seeds at once. Woozie, that's, a but sharp. Still, it keeps me from thinking about withdrawal. :-)

More photos from this series here

One good thing, though. I've been reading Barbara Eherenreich and Dierdre English's revised and re-released 1978 classic For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. O.M.G. The book really should have been required reading in one of my classes in college -- history of science, social theory, controversies of medical practices, political science, general women's studies, or American history. Oh well. It would have been right down my alley. Glad I found it now.

I've also been totally getting into this post by Amanda Marcotte, which really lays out the bones of contention between masculinist/basketball and feminist/musical approaches to heterosexuality. I still just can't say enough nice things about Marcotte, which kind of bums me out -- it all just comes out sounding like bland platitudes when I really just want to glowingly cite her chapter and verse. Oh well. (Thanks to Hedonistic Pleasure Seeker for sending me the link. I think I might have missed it otherwise.)

What else? Oh yeah, no libido. Which is kind of a drag. If I already don't smoke dope, drink, or do drugs. If I already don't stay up late and screw around on my partner. If I already don't drive fast, or gamble, or eat or exercise either too much or too little... If I don't do tobacco then...

What would be a nice, new, non-destructive, consenting-adult vice I should consider? At this point I'm all ears.

Oh botheration! I just spent *way* too much time writing up the results of the Blog Reader Project survey I asked you to participate in last month...

...and then lost the post!

Sigh. The bottom line, though, was that I couldn't ask for a more wonderful group of readers. Thanks to the surprising number of you who responded. I'm totally impressed with all of you. Thanks to the 83% of you who are women and the 17% of you who are men. Thanks to the 32% of you who read only one blog a day (he said blushing furiously.) Thanks to those of you from all over Asia, India, north and south Africa, and all around the Pacific who had only only "white," "non-Latino black" and "Latino" to choose from. And especially thanks to the 80% of you who at least occasionally leave comments on other people's blogs. You can read all the (individual-privacy-respecting) results here.

It's worth mentioning that the survey, which was put together to help advertisers decide how to advertise on blogs, doesn't particularly cover a lot of the subjects near and dear to the hearts of sex and relationship bloggers or their readers.

For instance today I received my first BlogAd ad, from a vendor of intriguing jewelry-like cock rings. As a not entirely reconstructed former hippie I don't really have a lot of experience with cock rings (or other sex toys) though I've been told by people I know and trust that they really enjoy slipping them on their partners and that their partners appreciate it when they do. The survey, however, is silent on the question.

So! If you've got cock-ring experiences you'd like to share you'll have to leave your words of wisdom in comments.

Non-sex blogger Ezra Klein of Tomorrow's media conspiracy today found a hot dating tip in Seventeen magazine:

In a finely conceived piece on "Dating Dares," the wise and forward-thinking Elisa Benson of Seventeen explains that she's "uncovered a few new guys for you to try! Among them are those old mainstays The Emo Guy ("Find him at: A dive-y dinner with his buddies, discussing the merits of My Chemical Romance."), The Club Promoter, and The Store Clerk ("Your first move: Write your name and phone number on the receipt he hands you, then slyly push it back across the counter."). But watch out, girls, because we've now got, The Blogger:

You don't agree with all his posts, but they make you think about new issues -- and whether he's as cute as his pics!

Find him at: A friend of a friend's Top 8 Your first move: Bloggers love having an audience almost as much as they like a battle of wits, so stir up some controversy by telling him when you disagree with a post.

Hidden payoff: An outspoken guy can stir up passions you never knew what you had -- and help you figure out what you really stand for.

Like universal health care!?

Read all about it here.

Not too sure about loving an audience but I certainly appreciate you. Also not sure about making other people think but I really appreciate the way others make me think. and finally? Not sure at all what a "Top 8" might be.

Some news about comments, kudos to a software developer, and a special request for human commenters.

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So I used to get so much machine-generated comment spam (up to 2000 a day last week!) that I had to start using comment moderation. Which makes it hard on comment spammers but even harder on actual commenters.

The other day it got so out of control I broke down and, sort of against my better judgment, I installed a new layer of filter designed specifically to block machine-generated spam. Of course the new software promptly broke *all* comments.

Actually that's technically incorrect. Because technically *I* broke comments by not installing it correctly. I did manage to fix it though. And boy is it now fixed! I haven't gotten a single bogus comment since!

In fact, it's worked so well I've turned off comment moderation. Now if you've got something to say you can just... say it! And not have to wait till I come along to verify and unblock it before you or anyone else can see it.

What I especially like about that is that you can talk amongst yourselves without me getting in the way. I was really missing that.

You've always been welcome to walk around the cabin here. Now you're actually *free* to.

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Hats off to Alogblog, the developers of the MovableType "CCode" plugin. If you're a MovableType blogger, and if you administer your own domain I think it's a great blog engine, I recommend checking it out.

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Since this has been an otherwise highly non-sex-related post, and I really try to avoid those, *and* since I'd really like to test whether comments are really de-moderated, I'd like to invite you to write about an erotic memory or fantasy that maybe breaks the conventional gender-role mold for you.

[Despite the initial glitches comments are fixed. And I mean *really* fixed. I haven't gotten a single machine-generated spam comment since I installed the pluging (for MovableType bloggers that would be the CCode plugin from Alogblog.) In fact it's working so well, so far, that I think I can turn comment moderation back off! Too cool! --fl]

When I hit the 2,000+ comment spams per day mark I finally decided to get off my keister and do something about it.

Of course what I *did* was break comments all together...
... right before going out to an appointment.

The behavior of the new spam countermeasures is to return a deceptive-by-design standard error: "too many submissions in too short a time." What's broken at the moment is the system thinks *all* comments including your legitimate and highly-welcome ones are spam.

My sincerest apologies. With any luck it'll take less time to fix this than it does to delete 500 spam comments.

When I signed up for BlogAds the other day I posted a link to an affiliated Blog Reader Project survey.

What appealed to me about the survey is it would give me an idea about who *you* are -- not individually (the survey results are meticulously aggregated so no personal info can be gleaned) but as a group. And based on the first report they generated (after enough of you responded to cover any individual's tracks) has helped confirm a lot of what I knew and surprise me with others.

So I really, really want to thank those of you who've participated and, if you haven't, to invite you to give it a whirl.

The idea behind the survey is to help advertisers decide whether they want to advertise on blogs in general, and as a result some of the categories and questions are a hoot. For instance there's no category for "sex and relationship" so you get to decide whether RealAdultSex is more about "parenting?" "alt culture?" "politics?" "general aviation?" And why oh why is there a "women" category but no "men?" (I'm pretty curious how you'd describe this blog with the choices they offer.)

Anyway, the survey group has asked that bloggers not reveal results until June to avoid biasing ongoing surveys and I'll honor that. I'll post results after June 1.

Once again thank you.

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In last Thursday's post I also offered complementary ads for fellow bloggers who wanted to create their own ads and give them a try (details here.)

And I'd like to point out that A in France of A changing life sent in an ad promoting her translations of Papillon's blog about life as a Senegalese woman working to recover from FGM that was arranged for her in childhood by her grandmother against her father's will.

If you want to try one too feel free. A in France's ad is public-service oriented but yours doesn't have to be.

Part One: Advertising

So I've been thinking about hosting ads on this site in order to help pay hosting and bandwidth expenses. AAG of AlwaysArousedGirl was kind enough to send me a BlogAds invitation. (I've tucked a little ad strip in the sidebar on the right.)

So! Now I can accept ads on the site, which is cool.

Even better? Although I'm not at all a heavy-handed moderator I get to approve the ads before they run. I probably won't actively support all the vendors who advertise here (I don't actively support all the sites in my blogroll -- I choose sites that make me think, without necessarily making me happy) but I won't accept ads that amount to spam.

But best of all? I can bypass the billing process and let friends advertise for free. Since one of the things I like to do with this blog anyway is promote other people's blogs I'd like to make a special offer to other bloggers:

• Generate a standard 150x200-pixel ad-like .jpg, .gif, or .png promoting your non-commercial blog and let me know in email.
• I'll send you the friends-n-family access code so you can run it for free for a week.
• Condition #1: Your ad will run for one week and then the next person will get his or her turn.
• Condition #2: Good for the first five requests only (at least for now since I'm not positive BlogAds will like the idea.)
• Condition #3: In the unlikely even BlogAds tells me to quit giving away ads I'll have to cancel the offer.

On the other hand, if you have a business selling healthy, non-discriminatory products or services or if you work for a progressive company or non-profit organization and you'd like to reach an extraordinarily thoughtful, intelligent, and well-educated group of readers while helping to support this site I'd like to encourage you to advertise here.

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Part Two: A reader survey

When I logged in to BlogAds with my new account one of the first things I saw in their little mini-blog section at the top of the page was a reminder/recommendation to longer-term users to put up a user survey. I think the idea is that it helps advertisers decide the most appropriate places to place their ads. But! Since I've always wanted to know more about who reads here I'd like to give you an opportunity to answer questions both predictable (do you watch TV and if so what shows) to the unpredictable (do you floss regularly) to the relevant (how many blogs to you read) to the, um, less relevant (do you use your cell phone to play games) to the personal (do you drink alcohol) to the just-for-fun (do you believe in UFOs.) There are some puzzle games too (which of only four choices best describes your sexual orientation.)

The surveying organization sounds pretty respectable (muckraking news blogs like Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo trust it) and responsible about your privacy (they'll only show aggregate and not individual results.)

Look on the bright side: how often do I ask you to answer polls, survey, and meme questions here? :-)

Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you'd complete my Blog Reader Project survey here.

Thank you.

Ok, ok, so I'm obsessing about one particular topic lately (even though I think it's a great topic.) But all cerebral and no play makes figleaf a dull boy. And so, to lighten up a little I'm going to cheat and play along with a TMI Tuesday meme I found on Bunny's blog, Down the rabbit hole.

1. Have you ever used foods in your sexual activities (ie; whipped cream, syrup, popsicles) and how did you use them?

Haven't actually spent much time with partners actually putting food on and licking it off each other, and to the extent I would probably wouldn't use whipped cream. (Quick question: to you think salt would count as a food?) :-)

What I *have* done, and enjoyed immensely because it's erotic as it gets, is feed each other tantalizingly small slivers of a shared dessert. Where? Doesn't matter -- in a can't-afford-heat walkup huddled in sleeping bags and blankets on the couch watching silent movies on PBS? Great. Sitting across a linen table-for-two tablecloth after a fancy meal? Great. Propped up naked on tons of pillows between cool sheets on midsummer's eve lit only by the 10:00 twilight at the 47th parallel drifting in wide-open gauze-hung windows? Great. Nor does what matter -- slivers of Häagen-Dazs? great. Catastrophically juicy hand-picked raspberries? Great! Nibbles of creamy cheesecake topped with stingy-tart liliquoi syrup? Great. Heck, guilty-pleasure chocolate malted-milk balls? Great! And how? Mmm, now how matters but that too is great! Reaching across a bistro table with tiny bites on those great, heavy spoons, eyes locked and full of mischief and understanding? Great. Nuzzling cheek to cheek in heavy wool or pile sweaters, chill late-autumn breath visible in the still air, chilly fingertips heated briefly as they slip morsels into each other's mouths? Great.

Tip: Long, slow, deep kisses with lips glued to lips and tongue locked to tongue make great napkins.

2. If your SO asked you to get them off using only your toes - would you do it and how?

Oh sure, that can be a great trick. I remember a way-too-long trip in a way-too-crowded converted mail-delivery truck on the way back from a youth-group weekend where a partner and I, legs interlocked as we sat in the noisy din on the dinged up sheet-metal floor of the darkened truck across from each other. I'm not really sure I'd be comfortable using a bare foot on a partner's bare vulva, but in that van, each-other's sock-covered toes against the other's denim-clad bodies, boosted by the rhythmic vibrations as the truck bounced along the dilapidated Jersey Turnpike, was languid torture broken by occasional pauses to "stretch" and sigh.

3. Would you ever participate in an orgy? Have you?

I've never participated in an orgy and to be honest I'm not sure I would. I'd be enormously flattered to be invited, of course, but I tend to be happiest when I can concentrate on one person. Of course nothing about an orgy rules that out. And I think it would be a world of fun to work together with other people to rock somebody's world. But then I'm guessing that a threesome would work just as nicely for that. As for me getting attention from more than one other person...? Y'know, I keep forgetting that if anyone can be said to deserve that, and if I can say I'd like to work with others on someone else, then I should be willing to let myself enjoy others doing the same to me. In other words, while I'm still not sure I would, if I did I'd certainly learn something and might have a lovely time.

4. What can a lover do to turn you on instantly?

Instantly? I think there's usually at least a little context before the "instant" part but what really gets me going is a sort of little unconscious almost-a-gulp swallow I've notice people (including me) make when they make the mental decision that signals the shift from "is this going to happen" to "this is going to happen." Whatever "it" is.

There are lots of other little triggers and cues that make me go "sproing," but that little swallow has been a big one for me ever since I first noticed it years ago.

5. Describe your favorite piece of lingerie or undergarments on yourself or your mate. (PICS PLEASE!!!)

On a partner? Mmm. Lingerie. Or, rather, the lack thereof! I really, really like soft button-down-the-front sweaters with nothing underneath, loosely tied robes, and button-front, not-too-thick patterned flannel pajamas. Warm partners make for, well, warm partners, loose clothes are lovely for slipping hands into or under, buttons undone one by one make for lovely pacing, drama, and if it's someone else undoing the buttons, suspense. Hmm, and what else? Soft cotton undies and spaghetti-strap T's are deluxe. The tiniest hint of lacy undies peeking past the edge of knockaround clothes. Anything that drapes the body but hints at curves underneath. And finally, nothing synthetic or with appliquéd lace. (Too scratchy.)

On me? I hate the word commando because, for one thing, I think most commandos don't actually go "commando." (I wouldn't.) Except maybe for Scottish commandos and, as we know, even then Scots don't go commando, they go "bagpipes".

My grandfather was from Scottland. I have a Scottish last name.

As for "pics, please?" I've already done one today but what the heck? (Check after the fold.)

Ok, ok, it's been a while since I've posted. My sincere apologies but I've been brewing some posts that are a little, or maybe way past, my ability to get down onto paper. Call it productive constipation (not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Anyway, the big thing is if I can pull this off I think I can reconcile a lot of things, including possibly the foundations of the RenegadeEvolution/Stormy "pornstitution"/"rad-fem"-epithet-ridden standoff.

The short answer devolves to men's response.

It's hard to write but very productive.

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By the way, I went to see Heather Corinna do a reading from her brand-new S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College. I'll have more to say about this as well but for now all I can say is if you've got kids you really want a copy. It's incredibly well-written to say exactly what young people need to know.

More later.

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I've also been thinking about the limits of anonymity. For the moment, then, D my (first) name is David.

Ok, so I just placed an order on Amazon for three sex-blog related items:

- Heather Corinna's S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College

- Pamela Druckerman's Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee"

- And Tony Comstock's DVD Matt and Khym: Better Than Ever (Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series) (I pretty much never watch even great, progressive video porn but it was about time I got around to watching more than snippets of Tony and Peggy's work.)

Anyway, when my order was complete Amazon cheerfully pointed out to me that people who purchased the same things I'd just ordered also bought...

- Comstock's Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract (Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series), which was fine, and

- Comstock's Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story (Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series), which also might be expected

- , but then there was Tracey Rihll's Catapult: A History (Weapons in History)!?!?

I dunno. Other bloggers like to post the oddball search queries they find in their server logs. Me? I think Amazon's giving server logs a run for their money. I mean, how exactly to you connect a sex-ed book, the sociology of infidelity, and a DVD of older sex partners with trebuchets?

Update: I spoke too soon! (Link to Wired article "Futuristic Sexual Fetishes for Web-Savvy Weirdos" about high-g fetishes via Vivian's always essential Sex Carnival)

Back in March bad influence girl wrote a simply brilliant post about the way many sex blogs evolve.

there is something about writing a sex blog that seems almost inevitable. this long, slow slide from hot smut into sexual introspection.

at first you are filled with erotic tales of wonder and sex. this applies especially (i suspect) to people who aren’t getting any but probably applies to everyone to some extent or another.

you tell your stories and you get out your fantasies, not all of them but a few favourites and then the thinking starts. the thinking because someone says that you write about something a lot or because you notice that you attract a lot of a certain kind of reader.

you post a little about your life and you tell stories and you start a ton of stories and then you look up and it’s six months later and your blog is changing.

not everyone’s of course, dirty little girl (of dirty little mind) and dirty boy still write fantastic smut and not much about their real lives at all.

others like anastasia (of sexualite) have fantastic and horny archives and are evolving into people who talk about sex in a more anthropological way… and i can feel that happening to me.

Read the rest of her excellent post here.

Golly, I've been meaning to write this up for so long. It's been stashed away, flagged for future reference in my RSS reader for nearly two months and between family vacations, leaving my old job, relocating this blog to a new server, troglodyte-friendly national news, and my recent relentless parade of dour grumblings it had become buried under nearly 1600 unread posts. Until today.

I couldn't have uncovered it at a better time! Compared to my early days I've wandered far afield of my original mix of tips, techniques, fantasies, flirtations, memoirs, and moralizing. Mostly it seems I've just been moralizing. (As a member of the first generation since the 1800s not to produce at least one minister or lay preacher in the family I'm sort of inclined that way.) Moralizing and punditry is all well and good but to a reader it's also got to get a little boring.

If you've been bored, my apologies. If you've *not* been bored don't worry -- one can hardly think about sex for long without the intrusion of society and politics. Either way, though, it's time I wrenched myself out of my rut and...

...slip into something a little more comfortable.

Hats off to Bad Influence Girl for providing me with, um, well, some positive influence. :-)

Figleaf's Construction Alert

This weekend I'm moving Figleaf's Real Adult Sex to a new server.

Progress report:

• Comments are now turned off so that nothing will be lost during the transition.
• Account transfer to new server is complete.
• Basic blog setup is complete
• Repopulate new database with old posts
• Test basic links
• Turn on comments
• Restore blogroll and other bits to the sidebar.

Remaining tasks:

• Tidy up various templates, including the goofy-looking 'my $keywords = ""' thing in my Technorati tags
• Do other behind-the-scenes tweaks

I'm actually pretty excited about the move since I've been pretty consistently scraping the lid of my current provider in terms of server space and bandwidth, with the result that my site occasionally goes down and/or your very-important-to-me comments get lost instead of recorded. In the process I'm also going to be upgrading to a newer version of MovableType and I'm pretty excited about that too since it supports better spam filtering and has a lot of nifty plug-ins. Put the two changes together and I can eventually give you more interesting features like non-Flickr image galleries and threaded comments so you can better reply to each other as well as to me.

It'll all be back to normal by Monday morning, but during the switch, however, you can look forward to seemingly-alarming little items like, oh, missing posts and comments, missing sidebars, broken links, and pictures of half-dressed men.

...oh wait, that's supposed to happen!

[Refresh page to see new sample images --fl]

Over the last two years I've received wonderfully insightful comments from people that I thought should have been blog posts in their own right. Occasionally I've just broken down and reprinted them with attribution as separate entries. After promoting a couple of Kochanie's last summer I asked her if she'd like to post here since she doesn't have a blog of her own. She politely declined, citing lack of time and other external issues. Times change and I'm delighted to say she's accepted my most recent invitation.

At least so far I haven't figured out how to enable for her the little administrator's cheat I use to reply directly to your comments so at least for now when she chooses to respond she'll need to use the regular commenting system. And, since her posts are going to be... well... *her posts* my comments to her will be regular comments as well.

A few moments ago I heard on the radio that Thomas Jefferson had a motto for his guests: "Eat as you please, and converse with ease." Though we've never met or spoken Kochanie is such a guest. The first here but not, I hope, the last. My invitation to her, as it would be for any guest I'd invite to dinner, is to post as she pleases and converse with ease.

Sincerely,

figleaf

[Quick note: I'm traveling with family and friends in a pretty rural, beautiful, and very remote part of the country this week so posts and comment moderation are going to be a little intermittent. I'd turn moderation off if I could, but I routinely get more than a thousand spam comments a day now and nobody wants to see those.

figleaf]