pubes, politics, pop and words, words, words

The crickets chirping on this blog wouldn’t make you suspect it, but I actually have been kind of busy the last few months. For one thing, I’ve been enjoying a simply crushing melancholy, one that has come complete with a charming shame spiral and the consumption many big blocks of cheese. It has been simply fabulous trying to get out of bed in the morning (and usually succeeding). Fortunately for those who love me, or even those who love to loathe me, it remains as difficult now as it ever has been to find a guillotine on EBay, and thus I suspect I'll be with you for a while longer.

Beyond going fetal early and often combined with cheese-eating, I’ve done some writing for pay on the website 4-Letter E-Books. The site is also publishing one of my fave erotica writers—and by “fave” I mean one whose writing I admire enough to have stolen whole clauses—a woman who goes by the name Remittance Girl. You should check her out.

“The Honeypot,” my column for 4-L E-B, takes an analytic look at sexytime stuff happening in media, on the news, or in popular culture here in the States. It’s sort of “Love, American-Style” for curmudgeons, misanthropes and anhedoniacs, which is to say my people. I might start writing about actual sex should I start to have actual sex again, but in the meantime, I’m feeling like the Dorothy Parker of sexuality, so I’m just going to stick my tart tongue out and go with it.

The first piece I wrote is about pubic hair. More specifically, it’s about the clucking liberal-in-the-corner Atlantic magazine take on pubic hair written by Ashley Fetters. Here’s a choice follicle plucked for your reading pleasure:

Porn is the cause for all this missing pubic hair, according to not only Fetters’ piece but also conventional wisdom—both the LA Times and The Guardian responded to The Atlantic article with scathing opinion pieces condemning in one huffing breath cosmetic surgery and porn, as if the two industries are holding hands, if not swapping fluids. Commonplace says that the sight of bare, glistening, wet, split, open and, above all, shaved beavers has driven women on both sides of the pond to extreme acts of depilation. Shaving’s passé; waxing is, like, so totally late ‘90s; everyone who’s barely anyone, Fetters suggests at the end of her article, gets lasered. It’s a whole big, bare thing, really, and Fetters’ piece caused, as Fashionista reported, women to get their muffs in a huff—so much so that Londoners took to the streets last Saturday for the Muff March, a protest in favor of natural genitals.

The easy way out of this hairy situation is to state obliquely that it’s a woman’s choice. You can shave it, you can save it. You can let it grow, you can make it go. It’s your pubic hair, and as in other things vagina-related, it’s your choice. The problem is that while we would like to pretend that it’s simple, it’s not. You can hum along to Amanda Palmer’s “Map of Tasmania,” the woolly-happy-spirited pubic anthem while twirling your armpit hair around your fingers as much as you like, but hair is never just hair.

You can go here to read the whole ball of wax.

I wrote my next piece on Newt Gingrich. It’s kind of awesome to see a Republican presidential nominee with Gingrich's mind-bending hypocrisy become the accidental posterboy for open marriage, at least it is if you’re a Progressive Democrat with serious perverse leanings, as I am. So I wrote about Maryanne Gingrich and how her announcing that Newt wanted an open marriage made for some very, very strange bedfellows in the polyamorous community. Below is an excerpt, but go here to read the full Gingrichian orgy. (If you want to see something really fun, compare these two Google Trend graphs of Newt Gingrich and Open Marriage. They're like Castor and Pollux.)

Gingrich has a famously problematic marital history. Currently, he is wed to wife #3, Callista Bisek, for whom Gingrich both converted to Catholicism and left wife #2, Marianne Ginther, who had just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when Gingrich left her. Gingrich has a pattern; he began sleeping with Ginther before he’d divorced wife #1, Jackie Battley, who was just beginning her battle with cancer when he announced to her that he wanted a divorce. It’s a whole big thing, really, and all this Newt and Callista and Marianne and Jackie history only serves to complicate any connection between Newt and polyamory, 

Not that this complication doesn’t mean that advocates of open relationships haven’t tried.

And then last week, I wrote the piece that I feel proudest of. It all started when I tweeted, “Oh, I get it, Lana Del Rey is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction. Dirgetastic!” And then I wrote a whole piece about death and sex and repression and white skin and eyelet tops. It’s a whole big thing, and here’s a snippet:

Here’s my simple explanation for the LDR phenomenon: LDR is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction.

Stay with me here, setting aside your feelings for either entity, or both, if need be.

LDR and Twilight share a deep, abiding love of all things dead or dying. Life is just the thing in the way standing between you and your eternal white-toothed youthful glory. Life is that dead part, that portion where you’re standing around, beer in hand, rivulets of dew running down your teenage wrist, waiting for your boyfriend to put down the joystick and notice you in your blue-jeans. Life is roaming the halls and the hills in your godforsaken small town dreaming of a better death. Life is that inconvenient bit where you’re clothed, however attractively.

You can go here to read the full chewy thanatos and eros black-and-white cookie.

Look for my 4-L E-B column the last week of every month, or just follow me on Twitter. I’m delighted to know what you think or if you’ve any suggestions. You’re the meerkat’s monocle just for reading.

 

Comments

[Pete]

CG,
It is nice to see you writing here again and as usual, you create a fun read. The pieces mentioned here were fun to read as well. The hair piece was spot on, it is a choice, whether it was porn or a new norm that inspires the depilation. Newt is an asshole who is also a hypocrite. Callista can not be a a good Catholic if she was sleeping with Newt for all those years while he was still married to Marianne. LDR is just horrible.
Pete