Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Head’s up for Seattle-area readers: Rachel Kramer Bussel will be appearing with friends at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight, Tue, 02/23/2010, at 7:00pm. They’ll be reading from Rachel’s new anthology Best Sex Writing 2010

February being a month when eros is on the calendar, if not in the air (Valentine’s Day, Carnival, and more), editor Rachel Kramer Bussel being here to read from and discuss the anthology, Best Sex Writing 2010 (Cleis) is particularly apt. She is senior editor at Penthouse Variations, is the former “Lusty Lady” columnist for The Village Voice, and runs a New York City erotica reading series, “In the Flesh.” She also did the hard work of putting together an anthology that embraces many different takes on sex and sensuality—which adds to the pleasures of this book. Reading with Rachel Kramer Bussel tonight are two local contributors to the anthology, Michelle Perrot and Janet Hardy.

The Elliott Bay Book Company
101 S. Main St.
Seattle, Washington 98104

I like Rachel’s “Best Sex Writing” series. There’s nothing wrong with erotica either, of course, and Rachel’s no slouch when it comes to editing those. This series covers more of the nuts and bolts of sex, of coping with, say, complications of sex while pregnant or nursing, the contradictions of sex education in purity ball culture, the commonalities of political sex scandals, or the factors condom manufacturers must juggle to make their products safe, effective, and marketable.

Janet Hardy, who will be reading with Rachel, is co-author of the classic (and recently-revised) The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures.

Michelle Perrot is a pen name for Kerry Cohen, a therapist, writer, mother of an autism-spectrum child, and author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity.

If I can possibly make it I will. I hope you can make it too.

Update: I’ll be there. I’m looking forward to it.

Figleaf and family members skiing near the Canadian border while his blog was broken.

Update Ok, I’m back and I’m hopeful the changes I’ve made have a) improved performance without b) breaking anything else. :-) The good news is you should now be able to let me know in comments.

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I’m back from vacation where I had a genuinely lovely time with my family. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere so close to civilization while nevertheless being so far from online communication! No cell-phone service, no wifi, not even TV reception! Gas,yes. Roads, yes. Even espresso stands. Very nice skiing (if also very short of new snow.) Just no connectivity. I assume the Olympics are going well. Funny how we were so close to Vancouver (just an hour or so as the crow flies) but so deeply between mountains we might as well have been on the moon.

Anyway, I’m back but my blog is still somewhat broken. I can post, obviously, but comments are off the menu. I may not be able to get to that till Monday.

I almost never get it together to participate in really important “meme” days of remembrance, or even days of celebration, on the actual designated day.

If I hadn’t stumbled across it at Scarleteen I’d have missed remembering today is Blog for Choice Day. And by the time I’d figured it out (sometime over the weekend) I’d feel dumb for having missed it and not say anything at all.

Most years I’d just say “every day ought to be blog for choice day anyway” and be done with it. This year, though, the new Republican-activist majority on the Supreme Court has handed down it’s… fascinating decision that, say, the entire Walmart Corporation has the same just-folks right to pay as much as it wants immediately before an election as any supporter of a small-town zoning-board candidate. Which suggests they might as easily next use identical logic rule that abortion restrictions are just as they infringe on pregnant men’s rights no less than pregnant women’s.

In these days of disappointment it’s so tempting to think of just staying home next time there’s an election… as, for instance, millions chose to stay home in 2000, 2004 when it might have made a difference who replaced Justices Reinquest and O’Connor.

It’s your choice to do so again in 2010.

Enjoy it while you can.

Happy Blog for Choice day.

As you might have noticed if you’ve visited my site I’ve been inundated by spam from a Chinese company offering knockoff copies of the winter equivalent of Crocs rubber shoes. Their trick, evidently, is to just getting human readers to type the Captcha codes.

So I’ve turned on an Akismet-based spam filter instead to see if a) it works any better to block the bootie spammers but also to see if b) it doesn’t filter anyone else. I’m doing this reluctantly since, for instance, Akismet blocks me when I type “realadultsex.com” in other people’s comment boxes! But other methods haven’t worked and I’m guessing the bootie spammers aren’t going to stop so…

I’ve got a couple of other options if this method proves to be more hassle to you than it’s worth. If you get completely stuck trying to comment please email my Gmail account, where my username is TalkingFigleaf. Extra credit if you put the words “I got filtered” in the title.

My apologies for any inconvenience.

figleaf

Update: Ok, so Akismet blocks me as spam when I comment on this site! That plus it seemed really, really slow. So I set the tool to use TypePad AntiSpam instead. That not only let my own comments through despite the “provocative” URL but did so in about 1/10th the time. Again, let me know if you have problems commenting. But I feel more confident about that.

Update: I’m going to (vaguely) miss the eerily prescient reCaptcha keywords from the old anti-spam feature. But I know it was a hassle for a lot of would-be commenters. The new system doesn’t make you jump through that hoop any longer.