Recently I was talking to my significant other about the music we liked to listen to back in college while having sex (not with each other — we didn’t know each other back then — but with the people we were having sex with). That got me thinking: if, as Shakespeare wrote, music be the food of love, then it seems reasonable that music and love’s kissing cousin sex must have interesting intersections. (Let’s leave food out of it for now. It’s just a metaphor. Though I reserve the right to do a food-plus-sex column in the future.) So here’s some sexy musical links to prove my theory.
Addressing the specific issue of music and shagging, Playboy.com provides M*sic To F*ck To, a “mixtape series” featuring “bedroom beats.” It’s an ingenious idea, and might provide a change from that tired old playlist you’ve got with all those Isaac Hayes and Al Green songs (or, alternately, that Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails stuff — however you roll).
My adoration for the Magnetic Fields’s musical opus 69 Love Songs is unsurpassed, so I was delighted to discover 69 Love Songs, Illustrated, with adorable and cool and weird drawings by assorted artists; they’re not all entirely porn-y, but I wouldn’t call them safe for work, either, especially the one for “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits”. It’ll be cool to see how the project progresses; they’ve got a lot of songs left to do!
Music videos are a fantastic delivery mechanism for risque cheesecake sexiness, filled, as they are, with women of the gyrating, scantily clad, and often soaking wet variety. Trust lad rag Maxim to provide just what I was looking for: a list of the hottest music videos. I cannot vouch for the quality of the music involved, but such bouncing bosoms and sashaying asses are the reason dance beats were invented!
I was a bit appalled that the list above left out the video for “Crazy” by Aerosmith featuring Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler, a vision that haunted my teenage nights . . . or does admitting such a thing merely serve to show my age?
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Wednesday, 29 April 2009
| 8:39 am
| Industry
Every year, as part of a training I co-teach at San Francisco Sex Information, we ask students to evaluate their attitudes toward erotic media. One of the questions we want to pose is how it feels to look at images of people doing things very different than what you do in your own life? I have spent so much of my time doing so much of that that it’s sometimes easy to forget what it feels like. One of the things that students recurrently report is that the actual experience of watching porn is very different than what they think it’s going to be. That concept makes me remember vividly the first time I watched a video with men getting it on.
It happened in the late ’80s, when I was living with a group of friends and we were all pretty laid-back about sexuality. I did not own a VCR but since everyone in the house worked or went to school, I figured I’d be safe watching porn in the living room during the day.
I had already been writing gay porn for magazines professionally for a while, and there’s a long, sordid story about; it might or might not be relevant, but in any event it is long. In those days I was prone to think divergently about sexuality. I thought to myself, “If I like watching porn of guys with big dicks fucking women, and I don’t object on philosophical or aesthetic grounds to guys fucking other guys, oh, and I write gay porn for money, then watching videos of guys watching other guys should be hot, right?”
Perhaps more important, watching gay porn seemed fantastically taboo. I was totally into the idea of watching gay porn, as a straight man, or whatever the fuck I was or was not. Just the fact of gay porn seemed so filthy — immensely filthier, I was given to imagine, than any straight porn. Plus, on political grounds it just seemed like I ought to spend time watching homosexuals fuck each other — right? Wouldn’t that make my being a pornographer more philosophically defensible? It was the ’80s. It was the Lesbian Sex Wars. I somehow felt I needed an arsenal of rationalizations to make it okay to write porn.
So, one day, I went well out of my way to obtain a couple of gay porn VHS tapes. It’s worth mentioning, in case anyone has somehow forgotten, that in those days porn wasn’t as easy to come by as it is now. You couldn’t just punch in a Google search and get oodles of porn; you couldn’t enter a credit card number and get even more porn. If you desperately wanted porn featuring guys with toupees fucking girls with glasses, your “research” was not about sitting in front of your computer figuring out just the right search string.
No, in those days you broke out the phone book. You picked through the listings because you could never tell in any particular city where they were going to list the adult video establishments. Then you put on your boots and you went crawling through the sleaze shops and dens of iniquity, clawing through clouds of cigarette smoke, huffing bleach fumes and stepping in fluids surely left there by a gentleman who, you had to assume, found just the right porno, hallelujah.
Just obtaining porn in those days was a sexual act, and not always in a good way. Towns like Baltimore, which made it terrifyingly easy by putting everything on one street, were few and far between. In most towns the porn shops seemed to be out by the freeway, or down in the “wrong” part of town. But sometimes you’d spot the signs just sitting there on some suburban street, doing nothing but looking weird.
Anyway, this particular afternoon I brought home a VHS compilation tape that featured Jeff Stryker plowing men varied and numerous. Stryker, I am given to understand now, is well-known to be Margaret Cho’s favorite porn star, and John Waters called him “The Cary Grant” of porno. At the time, all I knew was he had a big dick, and that seemed to be a requirement. Gay porn — big dick, right? Man, this was gonna be hot.
I was turned on to the filth of watching gay porn; I was excited by how transgressive it seemed. I was going to watch gay porn! I was not “supposed” to be watching gay porn. While I guess I wasn’t “supposed” to be watching straight porn either, there were many more taboos being broken with gay than with straight. I swear, I think I already had a hard-on as I popped the thing into the living-room VCR. I settled back to have my mind blown.
My mind wasn’t blown, at least not in the way I expected. I kicked back and expected to get fantastically turned on. As I recall, in the first scene he walked into a gym where some dude was working out, whipped off his gym shorts, dangled his balls in the guy’s face and said “suck it,” like some redneck nightmare. The guy did. I stared, puzzled. I watched Mr. Stryker playing the butch, slapping the guy with his dick and saying “Suck it! Suck that cock! Yee-aw. Suck it!” I stared blankly, my eyes glazing over.
I don’t know if I’m just a big geek, or I’ve got one of those problems the hippies speak of where I’m not “in my body,” I’m “in my mind,” but all I could do as I stared at the screen was rationalize why this ought to be turning me on. I wanted to think divergently about sexuality . . . but Jeff Stryker getting his cock sucked by some beefy dude was . . . dull. The idea of watching Jeff Stryker get his dick sucked had been some sort of sexual totem, shining bright in the distance as I groped after it, sporting a hard-on. The reality of it was just . . . not much of anything.
I watched the whole thing feeling the hard fist of existential despair clenched on my balls — this was supposed to be hot! It was distressing me. You may think me lame for finding it distressing, but at the time I felt the acute need to embrace every experience. Shouldn’t this experience be, at least, moderately interesting? It upset me that it wasn’t — it was like watching paint dry.
The moral of the story? There isn’t one, there’s just a truly bizarre postscript. If there is a moral to the story itself, it’s that not everything turns everybody on, which seems so fucking obvious that I’m a bit of a blockhead for needing to have learned it so viscerally. But it bears remembering, and repeating, that porn that does not turn you on is just porn that does not turn you on — in watching it, you’re trying something new, in a safe environment — maybe. But for me, it rarely feels safe. It’s a terrifying thing to sit there staring at porn, even now after years of watching it professionally as well as writing about it. I look at it this way: Porn is so charged that every viewing seems able rewrite our sexual experience. When it doesn’t, that’s disappointing; when it does, it’s both terrifying and exhilarating. I don’t know if anyone but me has this highly excitable sense of what porn is and isn’t. But I know that plenty of people get pretty worked up about porn one way or another — as if it were a virus that could enter through our eyeballs and change our world.
I think it’s as common for people to have this experience in couples as alone. How many times have I watched porn with a girlfriend who got hot as hell picking out the title, then sat there with arms crossed critiquing the actress’s hairstyles? This has happened to me a half-dozen times, at least. Those girls usually didn’t get asked back to watch more porn, and frankly, I wouldn’t have invited myself back to watch more porn, either. I would have said “Why don’t we go to a nice poetry reading?”
Also since then, I’ve encountered women who watch a lot of porn — a lot — but whose tastes are so fantastically esoteric that whatever they’re into bores me to tears. Quite often that has caused intense tension — which is totally counter-productive. Watching porn is a charged, but letting it become more charged because of its individual nature can totally derail the pleasurable experience of discovering new things together — or, for that matter, alone. You learn as much about yourself, and your partner, by experiencing porn that doesn’t turn you on as by the porn that does. But for me, as for everyone, I think, the porn that does turn me on is vastly more exciting, and therefore the other kind practically hurts to watch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not productive to check it out.
So here’s the truly bizarre post-script to my story about watching Jeff Stryker plow some hapless innocent gym bunny just trying to do his lats. The next time I sat down to write porn on assignment for the sleazy gay leather mag I was working with, the dude in my mind’s eye as I wrote the story? Jeff Stryker. Weird.
Thomas Roche blogs about death and Turkey City at Thomasroche.com.
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Friday, 24 April 2009
| 2:26 pm
| Culture
So why is the myth of sexual spontaneity so damaging?
I know. I’ve written about this before. Buy why else?
I’ve written before about the myth of sexual spontaneity: the myth that, for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately. I’ve written about how unrealistic the myth is, how poorly it fits into the reality of many people’s sex lives; I’ve written about the narrow and limiting definition of sexual desire it creates.
But I’ve been thinking lately about another — and in many ways more serious — problem with the myth of sexual spontaneity.
And that’s that it contributes to the idea that sex is dirty and bad… and thus makes people feel like sex is only okay if they don’t take responsibility for it.
A lot of other feminists have talked about this: the myth of being “swept away.” It’s the myth that sexual desire should overpower you with blinding passion — and that if it doesn’t, if you plan for it, that’s somehow cold and calculating and missing the point. And it’s a myth that fucks up sex lives from beginning to end. It keeps teenagers from using birth control. It keeps people from talking with their partners about what they like and don’t like in bed. It keeps people from educating themselves about sex, on the grounds that it should be “natural.” It keeps long-term couples from making dates for sex.
And I would argue — as many feminists have argued before me — that the “swept away” myth essentially comes from the idea that sex is bad.
Let’s look at another primal animal desire, one that we don’t have as much negative baggage about. Let’s take the desire to eat. We don’t think that eating a meal is somehow diminished by planning for it; that eating is only true and beautiful if the desire strikes us out of the blue and we act on it at once. Sure, we’ll stop and buy funnel cake if we smell it at a street fair… but we also buy groceries a week in advance, and make reservations for busy restaurants, and think in the morning or afternoon about what we might want for dinner, and make careful plans for special, festive meals.
Why?
Because we basically think that eating is okay. We have some complicated and messed-up feelings about food in our culture, sure; but most of us accept that food is a necessary and valuable part of life. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with planning a meal… because we don’t think there’s anything wrong with eating one.
But that’s patently not the case with sex. Our culture tends to see sex, either as a sin that we must resist, or as a selfish luxury we can do without. We don’t see it as a necessity, and we definitely don’t see it as a central and valuable part of the human experience.
And yet — obviously — we still want it.
Which is where the “swept away” myth comes in. The “swept away” myth lets us have sex, while pretending to ourselves and everybody else that we didn’t really want it, and didn’t consciously choose it, and can’t be blamed for it.
It’s essentially a way of abdicating responsibility for sex. It’s a way of convincing yourself that you didn’t really choose this. You were overwhelmed by passion, by an animal urge or emotional flood that couldn’t be controlled. You couldn’t help it. It wasn’t your fault.
It’s like fantasies about bondage or rape: fantasies that, for many folks, let them enjoy sex, or enjoy thinking about sex, while still feeling like it’s against their will and they’re not responsible for it. Now, there’s not a damn thing wrong with these fantasies. There’s not even anything wrong with acting these fantasies out. But it’s no way to live your entire sex life. (Unless you’re into the 24/7 dom/sub thing… and even that takes a lot of thought and conscious choice, more even than most sex lives.) It’s not grownup. It’s not responsible.
And ultimately, it’s not even that much fun. The “swept away” myth of spontaneity seriously limits your opportunities to learn about sex; to learn more about your partners desires and your own; to expand your sexual repertoire. It limits the kinds of sex you can have: if planning for sex ruins it, that pretty much rules out the acquisition of sex toys. Not to mention sex education materials, or smut, or birth control. And — especially if your life is stressful and overbooked, or you’re getting older and the spontaneous urge to boff is diminishing — it limits your sex life in the most blunt and obvious way… namely, how often you have it.
And maybe more importantly, the “swept away” myth feeds the monster of sex-negativity. It feeds the monster in our culture and in all of us that says that sex is a sin, and that while letting yourself be overcome with lust might be forgivable, consciously choosing to make room for it in your life makes you guilty of first- degree sex. With premeditation and passion aforethought.
I actually have nothing against spontaneous sex. I love spontaneous sex. Being overwhelmed with lust, blowing off your dinner reservations because your lover’s ass has suddenly become way more important… that’s lovely. It’s like an adventure, like riding a rollercoaster. It lets you feel like your entire life isn’t being measured out in coffee spoons; like you still have the capacity to surprise yourself, and to be surprised.
My problem isn’t with spontaneous sex. It’s with the myth of spontaneous sex. It’s with the idea that spontaneous sex is the best sex, the sex we should all be having all the time, the only sex that counts. As one kind of sex among many, spontaneous sex is great. But as The One True Sex, it severely limits your sexual options. And it feeds into the monstrous idea that making sex a priority makes you a bad person.
So buy a vibrator. Make a sex date. Have a conversation with your partner about sexual things you might like to do. Call San Francisco Sex Information, and ask them a question you have about sex. Read a book about a kind of sex you’re curious about. Do something that says, “Sex is a priority for me, and I am making a conscious choice that will shape what my sex life looks like.”
And let’s starve the monster together.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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Thursday, 23 April 2009
| 9:42 am
| Videos
The French do not mess around when it comes to their porn. In Command: The Governess features double penetration within the first 25 seconds, and it only gets hotter from there. The film, originally in French, has dubbing in various languages and subtitles in various others, and the English audio is quite good, generally — I’m usually not a fan of dubbing, but it works well here, and the plot’s worth following.
The main plot involves Regina Ice, a pretty blonde hired as a nurse for the wheelchair-bound Horst Baron, a man whose paralysis does not in any way diminish his sex drive. His household is ruled by the Governess of the title, the iron-willed Melissa Lauren, who sleeps with menial employees, Horst’s doctor, and anyone else who catches her eye — but won’t even allow Horst to read porn. The cold-hearted bitch must inevitably go down. (And does, in more ways than one.)
Things opens in media penetrus, with sultry brunette Melissa wearing stockings, a choker, heels, and nothing else, being fucked hard by a couple of dirty workmen. The scene is, admittedly, rather strangely cut — after the double-team-fucking we get a shot with her sucking cock while still wearing her bra, apparently traveling back in time. But I’m not going to complain overmuch about continuity issues when the sex is this hot, nasty, and right up front! Melissa’s charisma is palpable, and she’s beautiful to watch, whether she’s fucking or acting.
Regina gradually comes to love her patient Horst, and rebels against Melissa’s control, ingratiating herself with the boss by wearing slutty costumes, doing stripteases, and arranging live sex shows for his amusement. (Don’t worry, Horst does stand up and get some action, in a couple of fantasy/dream sequences.)
This is a wonderfully dirty movie. Lots of anal and DP, assorted three-ways, sloppy blowjobs — all filmed with great care and accomplishment. There’s nothing like watching a quality depiction of depravity. Things come full-circle plot-wise, and the film closes in a very amusing and satisfying way, too.
It’s a smart film, with lots of nice touches — the topiary hedges are cut, probably inadvertently, into the shape of butt-plugs, but the camera lingers on them long enough for us to get the joke. Even though the descriptive text on the back of the box is objectively bad — it seems to be the result of some kind of machine translation, much worse than the dialogue translation in the movie — I also find it kind of charming: “Melissa multiplies the sexual adventures with the males of her circle, without disregarding the lesbian caresses.” Oh, well. When something looks this good, who cares how well it speaks our language? Highly recommended.
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I consider it my secular sacred duty to shine a light on the weirdest, most thought-provoking, most interesting sex-related bits of the cyberinterwebverse that I can find — but sometimes it’s nice to remember that the internet is, fundamentally, the greatest porn-delivery system imaginable. Never in history has it been easier to find pictures of beautiful people doing naughty things in little or no clothing. So this week, a simple celebration of hotness.
There’s an infinity of free porn picture sites out there, but I do enjoy the approach of Kinky Delight, which posts a single high-res kinky image every day. Nice place to visit for a concentrated hit of kink, and you can browse around in the archives by following the keywords and drifting in the tag cloud . . .
In terms of celebrity hotness, AskMen.com has released its annual list: The Top 99 Women of 2009. It’s one of those lists you can argue about endlessly, but there’s no dispute that there’s a lot of beauty in those 99 positions. (If you don’t have the patience to click through 99 separate pages, Fleshbot has kindly excerpted the Top 10, and as a fanboy it’s nice to see the lovely Kristen Bell in there, even if she was hotter in the old days as Veronica Mars than as a disembodied voice on Gossip Girl or a sociopathic electro-girl on Heroes.
Cutting-edge technology can be good at giving us a look into the past. Consider the Pocket Pin-Ups iPhone app, which brings hundreds of never-before-published vintage pin-up shots to those newfangled space phones all the kids are using these days. •”Go back to a time when a ‘babe’ was an infant, ‘hot’ referred to the weather and a ‘chick’ was a young chicken . . . You’ll have access to authentic mid-century bikini, swimsuit, lingerie and calendar girl images from the largest privately owned archive of fully restored and retouched retro cheesecake prints and negatives.”
Sexy literature doesn’t come much older than the Kama Sutra, but Playboy’s new spin on that old material is worth a modern look. This is one of those girl-girl Kama Sutra variants, with positions like “hug it out,” “Thai me up,” and “all you can eat.” They don’t have the ring of “the wanton wheelbarrow,” maybe, but Playmates in lingerie making out can do wonders for my level of linguistic forgiveness.
Speaking of Vintage and of Playboy, the venerable magazine has put 53 issues from 1954-2007 online in their entirety! The drawbacks are that you have to install Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Flash, and the interface is clunky to use for anything more directed than casual browsing, but still — that’s a lot of old-school softcore porn and articles about cocktails and hi-fi stereos!
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Tuesday, 21 April 2009
| 10:59 am
| Industry
Why, in a column about porn, would one address the recent death of science fiction writer J.G. Ballard? Because Ballard was the producer of material that this present author has found, to his intense distress, eminently jackable. Oh, and he’s my sick, twisted spiritual Daddy, which would maybe bewilder him, but who cares?
I’m referring, as will be obvious to those of you familiar with Ballard’s work, to those works that showcase the author’s proclivity for describing with blatant and bizarre language the confluence of sexuality and violence in such things as car crashes and murder.
Ballard himself would probably like that sentence, because in such works as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, he spent much of his time writing in the cold, detached tones of a scientific observer, even while naming the protagonist after himself and matching his own identifying details. He seemed to get off on the convoluted language, satirizing science and technology at the same time he lampooned politics. and he sprayed them all with his potent seed, in a way that in his day left most readers wiping their eyes and cursing.
Such elements of his bizarrely explicit psychosexual work The Atrocity Exhibition as “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” are rendered as technical papers, producing such quotes as “Slow-motion film of Reagan’s speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children” and “Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer)” and “In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection.”
When “Ronald Reagan” was distributed as a prank at the 1980 Republican National Convention by members of the Marxist-Leninist Situationist International, Ballard claimed, it was regarded by the RNC delegates as exactly what it appeared to be: a technical journal article describing a behavioral study of Reagan’s sex appeal — circumcised Kruschev and all.
Other elements of The Atrocity Exhibition include “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” both of which rendered political assassination as psychosexual pursuits.
In particular, Ballard was obsessed with media, and this seemed to inform his deviant ideas of sexuality in a way that would have been marginally abstract in the hands of a theorist or philosopher — but became dangerously visceral in the hands of a writer of science fiction who got going just as the genre began its savage turn from pulpy formulaic entertainment to weird fucked-up decimation of all society’s values. Ballard, for his part, hated the term science fiction, and the science fiction community took something like 10 to 20 years to stop desperately trying to ignore The Atrocity Exhibition. It was the cyberpunks who finally inserted this work into the science fiction lexicon. Ballard preferred the term “apocalyptic” to describe his work. He seems to have seen his more audacious work, for all intents and purposes, as a social-political assault on celebrity culture, media, and consumerism.
Which is all well and good, but his blatant treatment of deviant sexuality, when he went there, was a huge influence on more literary pornographers than I can count. The blatant assault on reason that is “Ronald Reagan” was a revelation to me when I read it in college. I had already been writing porn novels professionally; shortly after I read “Ronald Reagan,” I wrote my first piece of seriously fucked-up psychosexual death-obsessed porn. Does that make me a satirist? No, I’m a pornographer. And Ballard, at least in that work, was my godfather.
But for the record, The Atrocity Exhibition is probably too weird for most people to jack off to. Calling Ballard’s subsequent psychosexual work Crash “less weird” than anything is of questionable provenance, and probably calls my sanity into question. But the casual reader will find Crash, ultimately, a relatively straightforward novel with plot and characters, a narrative thread, and the kind of emotional arc that draws one into a story. Is it made any less traditional by the fact that it’s about a guy, coincidentally (I’m sure) named James Ballard, who gets off on car crashes, particularly celebrity car crashes, and becomes involved with a group of people who feel the same way? Maybe so.
In Crash, Ballard (the character) encounters a doctor whose main fantasy is to die in a head-on car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. This is not typical stuff either for porn or science fiction; it might be slightly more at home in the world of avant-garde literary fiction or the Decadent movement of the late 19th Century, but even there it’s beyond anything Alfred Jarry or the Paris Grand Guignol ever came up with. I think Baudelaire would have read Crash with his jaw on the floor. Oscar Wilde would have howled.
So consider that Violet tells me it’s the first book she ever jacked off to, and that while a young man I became physically aroused while reading it — to my great dismay. I know several other literary pornographers for whom Crash’s “satire,” or “psychosexual deconstruction” or “critical analysis of the 20th-Century Zeitgeist,” or whatever the fuck you wish to call it, translated directly into hard-ons and girljuice.
Is that weird? Um, yeah, kinda. But hey, you start taking things apart, and sometimes you find some surprising stuff once you look under the hood.
David Cronenberg made a supremely sexy film version of Crash, and as a (somewhat reluctant) fan of the novel I found his movie surprisingly successful. If you’re not a big reader, you can get the basic gist of Ballard’s Crash by watching that film. The subtleties of the book are legion and those of the film are relatively few, but it’s still hard to grok it without some mental gymnastics.
It’s a challenging concept, as Ballard was always challenging to his readers. In bringing the literary avant-garde to science fiction, and science fiction to the avant-garde, and in smearing them both with his pungent jizz and other less savory body fluids, J.G. Ballard remade modern sexuality in a way that proved an enduring influence on the people who would build the punk culture of the late ’70s and ’80s, and by extension the renaissance in erotic literature and media that marked the ’90s and continues, in somewhat varied form, in to this day. Blame the internet if you wish, but Ballard was there before any of us.
Thomas Roche blogs about sex, death and science fiction at Thomasroche.com.
Image: Cover scan of a 1977 Panther Books UK reprint of Crash.
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Saturday, 18 April 2009
| 9:35 am
| Culture
What does it mean to “want” sex?
There was a letter to the Perv Panel advice columnists at Carnal Nation that’s shoved this question into my mind. In the Lesbian Bed Death letter, the author says that, after four years in a committed relationship, neither she nor her partner has any real interest in sex anymore. In one sentence, she says they’re content; in the next sentence, she says she feels like they should do something about it.
The advice from the Perv Panel was fine, as far as it went. But I think there’s a very important core concept here that none of the advisors really got into.
It’s this:
There is more than one way to “want” sex.
When we talk about “wanting” sex, we tend to mean the immediate animal urge. The hard cock or clit. The overpowering physical desire to get busy, now.
But there are other ways of “wanting” sex. You can want the effect sex has on your life, and on your relationship. You can want the closeness and intimacy it gives you with your partner. You can want the affirmation it gives, the feeling of being desired and valued. You can want the confidence and poise that being an actively sexual person can give. You can want the transcendence that sex can create, the experience of epiphany and transformative joy.
And for that matter, you can want the pure animal pleasure of sex . . . without having the immediate physical desire for it. You can know in your head how great sex can feel, and want to re-create that feeling — without your dick or clit being hard right that second. (Sick people often don’t feel much appetite for food — but if they’re smart, they know that food will make them feel better, and they know that once they start eating, their appetite is likely to return.)
This is a bit of a tricky distinction. So let me draw a couple of analogies before I move on.
I very rarely “want” to go to the gym. When I have a rare free moment, and I stop and think, “What do I most want to do right now?”, the answer is very rarely, “What I most want is to lift weights and walk on a treadmill.” And yet, once I’m at the gym, I enjoy it. I actually do have fun working out once I’m doing it. Of course it gives me medium- and long-term payoffs in stamina and mental health and such . . . but I’m not even talking about that. Walking on a treadmill and lifting weights is a positive sensual pleasure. Sometimes even an erotic pleasure. I just have a hard time remembering that until I’m actually doing it.
That may not be the best example. I realize I’m a bit of a freak, and not everyone is tickled to be at the gym once they’re there. So I’ll give another example before I get back to the point: Dancing. If I’m tired at the end of a long day, I often don’t “want” to get in the car and drive across town to go dancing. What I “want” is to sleep. Or watch SpankingTube and jerk off. Or collapse on the sofa, order takeout, and watch The Simpsons.
And yet, I love to dance. At its best, dancing makes me feel transcendently connected with humanity and the universe. At its worst, it’s a heckuva good time. It is one of the great pleasures of my life: a creative pleasure, an intellectual pleasure, a source of expansive shared joy with a community, a source of intimate shared joy with my wife. And on a purely physical, sensual level, it just feels good. Once I’m dancing, I am never, ever sorry that I went.
And in the same way, I am never, ever sorry that I had sex . . . even if I wasn’t in the mood when we started.
It can be hard to overcome inertia and find the energy to do the things that we love. It’s easy to focus on the necessities of survival and getting through the day, and then just blob out once those necessities are handled . . . at the expense of the things that give our lives meaning and joy. Especially if we’re overscheduled and overworked. And for many of us, this gets harder as we get older. The automatically exuberant energy of youth often gives way as we age, and it takes more work and conscious effort to fan the flames into life. Especially when it comes to sex. And double especially when it comes to sex in long- term relationships.
And yet, one of the main things that defines being a mentally healthy grownup is that you can distinguish between the things you want right this second, and the things you want in the long run. Or even in the medium run. One of the things that defines being a mentally healthy grownup — and this isn’t a buzz-kill, this is one of adulthood’s greatest joys — is that you have the knowledge and self-discipline to defer the gratification of immediate desires, in order to fulfill larger, more deeply satisfying desires. This can mean passing on sex that you know is a bad idea even though you have a strong, urgent desire for it . . . but it can also mean pursuing sex that you know is a good idea, even though you have a strong, urgent desire to just order a pizza and then go to sleep.
And one of the things about getting older — and about being in a long-term relationship — is that sex tends to shift away from being a relentless, urgently demanding physical desire, and toward something familiar that’s easy to put on the back burner . . . but that’s richly and complexly satisfying when you set aside time and energy for it. It shifts away from, “I am totally starving right now, if I don’t get a burger in the next ten minutes I am going to pass out and die,” and moves toward, “We have some free time this Saturday — why don’t we cook something special? Let’s make that roast chicken you like so much, or try that recipe for polenta with red pepper sauce we keep looking at.”
These are two very different ways of “wanting” food. And don’t get me wrong, both have their charms, I am a big fan of the starving hamburger lust. But it would be a huge mistake to say that only starving hamburger lust counts as “wanting” to eat. Setting aside time to plan and cook a meal also counts as “wanting” to eat, “wanting” the sensual pleasure and rich satisfaction that food can give you . . . even if you aren’t hungry right that second.
I’ve written something like this before: how, in order for sex to be satisfying, you don’t have to be in the mood when it starts. You just have to be willing to get in the mood. But I hadn’t thought of it quite this way before now. Being willing to get in the mood — being willing to seduce and be seduced, to be drawn in by the pleasures of sex even though you’re not feeling it when you start — is really just a different way of wanting it. It’s an acknowledgement that, even though you may not “want” sex in the more immediate and narrow sense of the word, you still “want” it in the larger and broader sense . . . and that therefore, you’re willing to prioritize it and make room for it in your life.
If you really, truly don’t want or care about sex on any level . . . okay. I personally have a hard time getting my mind around that — heck, I have a hard time understanding people who say they don’t like to dance — but I trust that, for a handful of people, it’s probably true.
But I did not get that from this letter at all. Maybe I’m misreading it: but I did not get the sense that the author of this letter was genuinely happy with the status quo. (For one thing, if she were, she wouldn’t be writing to sex advice columnists.) The author of this letter seemed dissatisfied and sad. It seemed like sex was important to her, or used to be important to her, and that even though the overpowering physical urge for it had dissipated, she still missed it.
So if what you mean by “I don’t seem to want sex anymore” is “I no longer feel the immediate physical urge for sex that I used to, but it’s still important to me and I want it in my life” . . . then I think it might behoove you to rethink what you mean by “wanting sex.” I think it might behoove you to stop thinking of “an immediate and overpowering physical lust” as the only meaningful definition of “wanting sex” . . . and to give the “it’s important to me and I want it in my life” meaning every bit as much weight.
Greta Christina, copyright © 2009. Be sure to check out Greta’s blog.
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I’m a fan of monster movies and things that go bump in the night, generally speaking, so I got to thinking about things that go bump in the night actually bumping nasties in the night, and, lo, discovered much fantasy and monster-licious porn.
I’ll spare you the vampire stuff, mostly — there’s so much vampire porn out there that it deserves its own column, and I’ll get to that sometime — but I can’t help but point you toward Twilight of Virginity, the porn movie spoof of Twilight, the movie about sparkly vampires and the abstinence-loving girls who love them, based on Stephenie Meyer’s insanely bestselling book. According to USA Today, Meyer’s books accounted for 16% of all book sales in 2008, and her fans are so devoted they’ve been known to physically assault people who insult the woman’s work, so it’s a cultural force to be reckoned with. The transformation into porn was inevitable, but given the themes of the series, it’s also very funny
You can get “Vampire Gloves,” leather gloves with tiny prickly metal points on the fingers, for sensation play, though vampires aren’t known for their spiky hands, particularly . . . still, I guess “porcupine gloves” lacked sex appeal.
Vampires are well known for their sexiness (for some reason — I prefer my vampires of the old-school Nosferatu variety, stinking corpses who eat blood and kill people, not suave seducers, but that’s just me), but what about other monsters? Like, say, zombies? Don’t they deserve some love too? Sure, there’s the comedy-horror movie Zombie Strippers, but what if you need hardcore zombie porn? Look no further than Porn of the Dead by director Rob Rotten. Now, I haven’t seen the film, but there’s a collection of still images here, and it appears to deliver on its promise — blood-smeared corpses eating intestines and having sex! Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Vamps, zombies, and — of course — werewolves; the monster trifecta. Consider this collection of Queer Werewolf stories, including werewolf rape torture porn, werewolf porn with bestiality (well, duh), and other such variations. The page does lament that “No classic werewolf stories” of the queer persuasion “have been found as of yet,” and you know, even as a devoted longtime reader of fantastic fiction, I’m having a hard time thinking of canonical gay werewolf fiction. Methinks a niche needs to be filled . . .
Oh, I almost forgot mummies. Actual porn about dead guys in pyramids having sex is in short supply, though in my travels I did find this awesome blog post featuring Pony Girls of Ancient Egypt, which shows those pharaohs knew how to have fun. More to the point, there’s of course a lot of modern mummy porn out there — here’s an extensive page on mummification bondage, so if you do have a thing for screwing dead guys wrapped in bandages, you can at least simulate the experience at home!
I was very disappointed that I couldn’t find any King Kong/Godzilla slash-fic or fan art — surely there must be something, somewhere depicting the giant radioactive lizard and the savage ape god making sweet love on monster island? Has Rule 34 (”If it exists, there is porn of it”) actually let me down, or is my google-fu simply not up to the task
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Wednesday, 15 April 2009
| 10:54 am
| Industry
Search “Amazon Fail” on that other Corporate Satan, Google, and you’ll get a flurry of entries deriving from that clever catchphrase. WTF is going on, you might ask? The short version is that social networking, Twitter included, is doing what it’s supposed to do: Keeping corporate pigfuckers honest, or at least humiliating them. We hope.
The story, in short form, is related by women’s blog Jezebel, the LA Times, Violet Blue, and dozens of other sources. A few days ago Amazon started “de-ranking” some high-profile gay romances. Jezebel quotes Mark R. Probst, author of gay young-adult romance The Filly, who searched for his own book and found it de-ranked.
Look, let’s get one thing straight. I don’t approve of this kind of material. Romance of any orientation should be kept in back alleys, porn theaters and the men’s room at Penn Station, where it can’t hurt the children. But that’s hardly the point.
What does de-ranking mean? Well, on Amazon, sales rankings are used to generate the appearance of books in the Amazon search engine. A book that has no sales ranking, essentially, won’t show up in most searches. Probably more importantly, it also won’t show up on best-seller lists. Best-seller lists are probably the single most important factor for authors and publishing generating book sales on Amazon. Anecdotally, I’d say appearing on best-seller lists is more important than appearing in a search, since anybody searching for your book might find it through other means. Without searches and best-seller lists, a book’s momentum is virtually impossible to generate; each book has to be essentially “hand-sold,” a term in the writing and publishing industry for when a bookstore clerk grabs a book and shoves it in a customer’s face in response to a query like “I’d like to explore my homosexual urges, do you know any good books to help me do so?” or “Got any porno?” To be banned from best-seller lists guarantees, frankly, that your book won’t become a best-seller. Funny, huh?
According to Probst, Amazon’s response was typically helpful — I’m reminded of similar customer-service responses by Google and Flickr over the years:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.
Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage
Objectionable, but not exactly gibberish at first glance — except that this answer is gibberish, and appears to have been pulled out of somebody’s ass. Probst’s book is a young-adult romance, not in any way an adult book. Does a gay-themed book automatically equal an adult book? Read on.
Apparently the day after Probst noticed his book’s exclusion, hundreds of other queer-themed and sex-themed books disappeared, while books featuring extreme violence and, somewhat randomly, explicit sex, remained ranked. People began to notice that explicit erotica got the same treatment as gay material, whereas, say, Naked Lunch or American Psycho did not. Probst cheerfully points out that while his book was languishing in Limbo, The Complete Playboy Centerfolds from Chronicle Books still had a sales rank. While we’re at it, Craig Seymour, an Associate Professor of Journalism at Northern Illinois University, observed that his memoir All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. was de-ranked, while Juno author Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper was still on best-seller lists.
Oh, and the Jezzies at Jezebel also point out that while gay books were busy being disappeared, Amazon still had sales rankings for anal plugs. Writer of steamy future fantasies Lilith Saintcrow noted that while queer-and-adult books were de-ranked, A Parent’s Guide To Preventing Homosexuality still had a sales ranking and was showing up in searches.
But it gets even better! Apparently Amazon is operating with Byzantine efficiency, here. Jezebel, in an update to their post, tells us that Amazon left Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer on the lists, but removed Delta of Venus — by Anais Nin, a female author. Is this some sort of conspiracy against queers and female authors? Who knows — certainly not Amazon, who doesn’t seem to know what the fuck is going on. Do you believe their explanation, reported in Publishers Weekly, that a “glitch” is responsible? I don’t think they believe it themselves.
Is there something conspiratorial about Amazon’s de-ranking of gay books and adult books, and their nuking of Nin but not Miller? I tend to take the classic anti-conspiracy-theory view that any bureaucracy as big as the government — and Amazon is as big as some governments — can’t keep a conspiracy secret for long. I believe that’s what happened, and I’m going to speculate here: Under pressure from somebody — internal or external — Amazon’s resident rocket surgeons decided to censor adult books, and some brain scientist figured that gay equals adult. So some mid-level manager yelped “Jones! You take care of it!” and Jones, a minor functionary, started shooting. This speculative censor disappeared books on adult topics — including books on gays and lesbians serving in the military, guides on coming out, sexual health books, etc. etc. Sound plausible? Dude, whatever.
The short version is that within a matter of days — hours, really — the “controversy” had hit social-networking site Twitter, and hilarity ensued. This led to the Amazon statement about a “glitch.” Did Amazon really screw up their technology that royally — or is it possible, just possible — I’m speculating here — that they kowtowed to some weird idea of public perception, and got bitch-slapped by the real public perception, among people who are really buying and reading the books, rather than those who spend their time threatening not to?
As of press time, most books seem to be re-ranked; the whole thing appears to have blown over. As they say in politics, now it’s all over but the screaming. And the screaming, my friend, will be loud.
Whatever angle you choose for it, this thing looks completely inexplicable. It seems like incompetence, sure, but weird, random incompetence that takes on an unmistakable political tone. Does Amazon really want to play this game? To censor books based on their content is not illegal. The First Amendment protects us only against government censorship. The only tool in the toolbox here, for consumers who love books, is business-related. Let’s not let Amazon off the hook here. Amazon hopes you will. Amazon hopes you’ll believe in their “glitch.” But ultimately they don’t give a damn; they just want you to STFU.
Whether you plan to defend to the death my right to say “pigfucker” in a blog post, it is de facto political censorship for Amazon to decide that gay equals adult, and that books, whether supposedly adult in theme, or gay-themed, or written by women, should not show up in “certain” searches based on anything other than an end-user’s specific request.
Author blogs and just about every book-related site in the universe spends most of its time performing analingus on Amazon.com. In my opinion it’s time for that marriage of convenience to end, or at least for us smart kids to start withholding the one thing Amazon needs most of all for its book business: readers. If you run an author blog, I’m sure you don’t feel like opening every post and removing your Amazon links. It’d be much easier to just humiliate the bastards as cheerfully as possible — and oh, so much more fun.
That’s why Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is my new favorite blog; they have started a movement to “Google Bomb” the term Amazon Rank as the following:
1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.
As in, say the Smart Bitches:
“My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay.”
And as of press time . . . it’s working. Try it yourself — search Google, and click on the result, please. That’ll help establish the permanence of “Amazon Rank” in the lexicon . . . with what it really means, apparently.
There’s more further reading available on this issue than I could even begin to list, let alone summarize. There’s a garden of links on the Meta Writer Live Journal Community, to start with. But like I said . . . it’s all over but the screaming. And the screaming, my friend, she is loud.
Thomas Roche blogs about zombies and black powder firearms at Thomasroche.com
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