I remember, in my middle-school youth, considering some cache of mildewed Playboys discovered in the crawlspace of an abandoned house (yes, I played in the crawlspaces of abandoned houses; I couldn’t play Nintendo all the time) and having the sudden realization that most of the women in said nudie magazine were in reality much older, in real time, than the frozen images of themselves that appeared in those smelly pages. I spent some time struggling with the psychological ramifications of that fact. I wonder, did the businessman who reputedly purchased a hardcore Marilyn Monroe blowjob film for $1.5 million have any similar moments of cognitive dissonance as he watched it for the first time? Did he think, “Dude, this woman I’m currently spanking it to is this very moment dead?”
Perhaps not. Sadly, those of us lacking the right combination of Marilyn Monroe obsession and deep pockets may never see the sex film (unless it gets digitized and put up on YouTube at some point). We can, however, see another sex movie that may or may not star Marilyn Monroe, the infamous “blue movie” of uncertain provenance. I remember seeing stills from that in some ancient issue of Playboy during my misspent youth, too, now that you mention it. No double anal piledriver reverse cowgirl there though. Ah, porn from a simpler time.
If you want vintage rock star celebrity fucking, you might consider the Jimi Hendrix Sex Tape, obtained and released on DVD by Vivid. You gotta shell out some cash if you want to see grainy footage of the man’s famous wang, which I have not bothered to do, but I’m sure it’s quite an experience. (Get it? Jimi Hendrix? Experience? No?)
Less explicit, but no less fabulous, is this Flickr set dubbed Hammer’s House of Hotness, featuring the gorgeous ladies of the old Hammer horror films. So many women who were fictionally murdered by fictional monsters!
And, continuing the slide from iconic to anonymous (though equally vintage), another Flickr set — this one of strippers posing for Polaroids. Some are explicit, some are not, some are cute, some are sad, all are a slice of forgotten and seedy Americana.
And kids today think they invented sex . . .
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, that means if I could find just the right two-fifths of a picture, I could finish my whole column in record time! But, because I believe in going above and beyond in terms of providing value, I’ll point you to several complete and uncut pictures instead. Funny pictures, even!
The kerfluffle over the recent ill-conceived (if arguably well-intentioned) Open Source Boob Project could prompt a long discourse here about sexual spaces, personal boundaries, the strange assumptions many men make, and so on, and you can follow the link above if you want to read some things in that vein (plus a full overview of the whole strange affair). Me, I’ll just do as a few others I saw online did when faced with such a messed-up situation, and point to this classic Bob the Angry Flower comic about the male obsession with mammaries. Pretty much sums it up, yeah.
Publishing industry blog Galleycat recently hosted a contest to caption a naughty New Yorker-style cartoon of a nude couple skydiving in, um, let’s say “intimate tandem.” The caption “Do you think we have time for one more?” won, and it’s not bad, though the science geek in me likes “Well, sorry, but it takes me longer than 32 feet per second squared to come!”
This instructional chart of “Sexual Positions (for the lonely and the loveless)” covers a whole range from the practical to the sublime to the disturbing, illustrating such masturbatory methods as “The Microwaved Melon,” the “Mary Lou Retton,” and “The Ball Pit at the Chuck-E-Cheese” (the last is rather advanced, of course).
Something Positive is one of my favorite webcomics, and it tends toward character-driven arcs, but every once in a while writer/artist Randy Milholland busts does a great single-panel comic. Most famous, perhaps, is his D&D-style stat sheet for Redneck Trees, which feature a unique combat method known as “Improved Anal Plundering.” More recently, he had a comic about research suggesting a link between frequent masturbation and a reduced incidence of prostate cancer which covers the subject far more amusingly than any news article I could link.
Finally, an installment of xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” about fun with mistranslations of the Kama Sutra, always a favored topic around these parts.
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I worked ever so briefly as an advertising copywriter, and my boss always said that good, effective advertising wasn’t about telling lies or tricking customers — it was just “the truth told well.” Kind of a nice thought, huh? But if you can tell the truth well with the addition of cocks and boobies, then I say that’s the truth told even better.
Consider this ad campaign created by French college students protesting the lack of student housing, which forces them to keep living at home, featuring a couple of healthy young people screwing in bed between a set of sleeping parents. The text, translated based on my two semesters of college French, reads “Some pretend that students don’t have housing problems . . .” Who knows, in France, this might even be an effective argument!
Here’s another ad with a social conscience, this time encouraging people to eat more fruits and veggies. Yes, that is a woman made of broccoli — and, what, squash? — shagging a dude made of carrots. I feel healthier just looking at it!
Not all advertisements are aimed at making the world a better place, of course — most just want to sell you a product. And it’s not exactly strange for a condom ad to be sexually explicit, but this poster for Manix Endurance condoms is just too damn weird not to link. The painting, titled “Marathon,” depicts a surreal world of disembodied cocks that participate in sporting events, a land of boob trees and stocking bushes and cock-hungry birds . . . it’s like something out of Bosch, only with more smiling bow-tie wearing bunnies.
And here we have some good old-fashioned masturbation humor, with a mom horrified to discover her son, who happens to be an anthropomorphic M&M, licking himself. Well, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?
I always thought Aston Martins were classy cars — I mean, James Bond drives one! — but they’re the first car company I’ve seen suggest that buying their vehicles can transform a woman from a mere mom into a MILF. And here I thought expensive cars were only for male midlife crises!
And, finally, a bit of old-school advertising from a simpler time, as seen at Eros Blog: Now! It Can Have Fur Around It! Well, yes. Yes, it can.
Until next time, shop wisely!
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I know I write a lot here about the sexy, sexy collisions of sex and science, but I can’t help it — this is a column about sex stuff on the internet, and the internet is obsessed with technology for the same reason Hollywood keeps making movies about life in Hollywood: the joy of obsessive self-regard. Now that my elaborate justifications are out of the way, let’s talk tech:
First, news about the fleshlight, that humble male masturbation sleeve. No, it hasn’t been fully automated or converted into a hands-free device — not to disappoint those of you who keep asking — but it has been modified to act as a mouse for your computer. Yes, that’s right, with the correct equipment, you too can move your pointer by . . . well . . . moving your pointer. The repurposed fleshlight is specifically designed for playing kind of a lame-looking video game where your CGI avatar tries to seduce a nurse. (”If you thought the controls for the Nintendo Wii were intuitive, wait until you try the Nintendo Wee-Wee!”) There are hints the fleshlight-as-mouse controls might go open-source, which means all kinds of hacks could be coming in the future. Imagine being able to pay your bills online . . . with your cock! Or being able to play World of Warcraft . . . with your cock! Or being able to read Caught in the Net . . . etc.! (I could keep going, but you get the gist.)
The Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN in Switzerland will be the world’s largest particle accelerator, and the device itself is practically porn for a particular kind of science nut. But the name of the machine lends itself to a particularly hilarious typo, dubbed “the world’s funniest malapropism” by the creators of Large Hard-on Collider.com. Yes, many a reporter has accidentally mistyped and created a headline that seems to imply there are oversized atom-smashing penises in our future. The site above collects incidents of this hilarious misuse, which is fine, but the genius comes in the crude hand-drawn sketch of the hard-on, the unknown particles it produces, and the “black hole” it’s plunging toward . . .
But, lest you think our glorious future is all cock-based technology, here’s a little something featuring the softer side of metal: hot models cuddling with, and even making out with, robots, from the March ‘08 issue of Marie Claire Italy. Though perhaps better as an idea than in the actual execution, there are still some lovely images here.
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It’s no secret that I’m first and foremost a lover of the literary — books are my passion and my obsession and so forth. So it is with great pleasure that I explore some of the interstices of the literate and the erotic.
Literary site Bookslut.com (which certainly has a name Caught in the Net readers can appreciate) has a blog, and one of the blog’s regular contributors, Melissa Lion, runs an occasional series called “Sticky Pages,” an “an exploration of sex in literary fiction,” where she discusses the sex scenes in various books. The blog doesn’t have category tags, or even a search function (that I could find), so I’ll just have to link directly to a few of the offerings. First, the introductory entry, where she promises to “tell you the page numbers so we can all flip ahead and enjoy our sex on the literary side.” (In that one, she covers Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House, which is pretty damn literary, and also has a great cover.) Most recently she read Getting Off by Jayme Waxman, subtitled “A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation,” and what begins as a discussion becomes a celebration of the book’s subject matter (it also introduced me to a term for female masturbation I hadn’t heard before: Jocelyn Eldering). If you like those, check out this one about the sexy side of Stuart Dybek, and this one about sodomizing Dick Cheney (in a literary way).
Mary Roach, one of my favorite non-fiction authors, has written about cadavers (in Stiff) and life after death (in Spook), and having taken on death and spirituality she now, naturally, turns to sex. Her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex looks just as fascinating, full of her usual weird factual tidbits and dry humor. I haven’t read it yet, but I have read this interview with Roach, where she talks about her research, the quest for a female Viagra, the dubious correlation between female orgasm and the distance between the clitoris and the vagina, and other interesting things. (The aforementioned Bookslut site also did a feature on the book). I can’t wait to read it.
Finally, a little Sex Advice from Booksellers, from Nerve.com. When asked “Can working at a bookstore get me laid?” bookseller Lori Rozycki sagely replies: “Who doesn’t want to date a bookseller? We climb ladders in skirts, and remain slightly aloof.” It’s difficult to argue with that.
Until next week, keep reading, and I hope you find something wonderful between the covers.
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The title of this entry is, of course, a reference to the viciously funny song “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying”, by the Bloodhound Gang. I always thought it would be hilarious to see a stripper do a routine to that song, so I was delighted to see the webcomic Something Positive make the same joke in a recent storyline about visiting a strip club. But I digress. (Except I suppose you can’t digress before you’ve actually gotten started.) What I meant to say is: Hey, there’s a vegan strip club in Portland OR! Casa Diablo replaced the meat dishes with soy and the leather garments with pleather. Is it a reflection of the owner’s deep commitment to vegetarian values, or just a publicity stunt? (If it’s the latter, it worked — I had several news stories about the club bookmarked, and only picked the NY Times story because they had the dopiest headline, “The Carrot Some Vegans Deplore”.)
Those stories got me thinking, naturally, about strip clubs, and how to find the good ones. I grew up in the rural south, where occasionally from the interstate you’d see an old barn transformed into a “gentleman’s club,” often with a giant XXX painted on an old silo. I never frequented such establishments — or even infrequented them, as they looked scary — but if only I’d had the internet back then . . . Why, I could have consulted Nudar.com, described as “GPS for Strip Clubs & Nudity,” and found the full extent of my options. It’s an interactive map with reviews and ratings for the US and Canada, covering strip clubs, bikini bars, nude beaches, and etc. Road trip!
If you’re in the Los Angeles area, you might try Gridskipper’s list of classy clubs in downtown LA. Or, if you’re feeling international, take a wad of American money down to Chile, where the owner of strip bar Passaponga has turned back the clock to 2004 . . . at least in terms of the exchange rate. As you’ve probably heard, the dollar is tanking in value worldwide, and in Chile a buck is only worth 430 pesos . . . except at Passaponga, where they’ll give you 600 pesos for a dollar, just like they did in 2004. Sounds like a good deal, but wouldn’t shoving 1200 pesos into a stripper’s g-string get a little bit unwieldy?
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Last week I discussed some recent intersections of science and sexuality, and this week I revisit the same topic, with a bit more . . . eclecticism. First up, some scientific proof to back up all that anecdotal evidence that intense sexual attraction only lasts a couple of years. Researchers at the University of Pisa in Italy studied hormone levels in couples in the fresh bloom of new love, and in couples who’ve been together for a long time . . . and discovered very different hormones at work. After a year or two, the “love molecules” that make the early stages of the relationship so sexually intense begin to wane, and are replaced by our old friend oxytocin — the “cuddle hormone” — which makes you want to snuggle more than you want to, say, screw against the wall of a freight elevator on your lunch break. The scientists in the article are afraid that some chemist might attempt to create an artificial form of the lust hormone, a real-life cupid’s arrow, to which I can only reply, “Well, duh, of course someone will!” Working love potions (or, at least, lust potions), here we come!
But don’t despair, men, if you feel the old sparkle starting to fade. The solution is to drink more! Turns out that daily alcohol consumption can increase your sex drive and decrease your sexual inhibitions. (Er, though, the scientists have actually only proven this with fruit flies. And most men of drinking-and-shagging age know that too much of the former can sometimes make the latter physiologically difficult . . .)
Enough about humans. Let’s move on to animals . . . behaving like humans! Like this astonishing photograph of gorillas having sex in the missionary position. It’s the first time this position has been observed in this particular kind of gorilla, and the first time it’s ever been photographed in the wild. (The female of the couple is also the first gorilla ever seen using tools in the wild, which makes me suspect she’s come kind of awesome sexually-adventurous gorilla genius — will it be long before she figures out how to improvise a vibrator using a beehive and a stick?)
Humans having sex is good, and animals having sex is good, but humans having sex with animals is . . .. less than good. In so many ways. One way it’s bad: letting a boar have anal sex with you can tear you up inside, so if you were contemplating such a thing, reconsider. Turns out a pig’s tail isn’t the only part of its anatomy shaped like a corkscrew — they’ve got decidedly strange penises, too. You don’t want to be like the poor Bulgarian farmer in that article, making sweet love to bacon-on-the-hoof and suffering rectal tears as a result. You can read a PDF of the original paper, which is titled, “Zoophilia: a rare case of traumatic injury to the rectum” . . . though I’d totally understand if you don’t want to.
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