pretty dumb things

a pair of middle-aged men needing some/same help

For whatever constellations of reasons, my readers often feel comfortable asking me for advice. Last week, I received questions in the comments to two different posts from two separate male readers. As if to prove that the universe has a strange predilection toward events in confluence, or as if to prove that strange human lemming instinct that causes everyone in a restaurant to suddenly order the fondue, or as if to prove some other mystical force, the questions of these two men overlap.

The first one wonders about the change in his post-marital sex-life:

Why, do you think, as a married man, I have lost interest in oral sex?

My wife sucks a good cock -- but we seem to get right down to fucking and skip foreplay.

And that goes for me, too. Living in a college town, I'll see a hot, young girl (I'm 45, so everyone looks young these days) and think, "Boy, her pussy probably tastes good." Meanwhile, I have a hot wife at home -- she's 36 -- and it's been too long since I've gone down on her. What's wrong with me?

We both work ungodly hours and we have a 9-year-old son, but still . . .

If I fantasize about eating a stranger's pussy, why not my wife?

The second man queries, not unrelatedly, about his inability to get rough with his girlfriend whilst fucking:

[On the Susie Bright podcast] you said something interesting about men, falling in love with a woman and not wanting to cause her any pain. guys are taught to treat women carefully. never to hurt them and always to help. open door, help old ladies across the street, fix "things" for them, always lend a helping hand. not a sexist thing but this is how "real men" treat a woman. At least this is what I've always been taught and what I teach my son.
the old saying; If women can't find you handsome at least they can find you handy.

So with this lifetime of respecting women, in grained in my head. I would find it hard to inflict pain, during sex. my current girl friend, whom I love very much. likes it when i hold her down, telling her what to do. I believe she would like the sex to be a bit rougher. I don't know how far to go and what if I don't like it.

whats a guy, who was 2 years old when JFK was shot, to do?

On the surface, these two queries might appear to have as much in common as, say, a kumquat and a tennis ball. Sure, both objects are round (just as both men are in relationships) and, sure, both objects boast citrusy colors (just as both men are having issues performing certain acts during sex), but beyond those superficial appearances, what do they have in common?

A lot, actually, and while I could wax poetic on the arcane intersections of kumquats and tennis balls (both are mystifying objects to the uninitiated, both float, both can be “smashed,” both were historically the provenance of the elite, both appeared in England around the Restoration of Charles II…need I continue?) I’ll try to restrain myself and focus on the sexual issue at hand.

Though to be hard-case analytic, the question ends up being less a question of sex than one of emotions.

Here’s the macro view: men often, not always, have a hard time doing the naughty-erotic things they have done/will do with a strange woman with a woman with whom they are in love. It is, in the words of my therapist, who is in fact Italian, the Madonna/Puttana dilemma. It goes like this: men in a relationship often have a hard time reconciling the sexual, which has been connoted as base and dirty, with the maternal, which is connoted quite oppositely. It’s kind of like in the eyes of dominant culture, women have a sweet spot of sexuality that is the brief interlude between virginity and motherhood, for being a mother is, unfortunately, often incompatible with being sexual (even if, ironically, being sexual is generally what makes a woman a mother).

This sticky emotional reaction gets even murkier when you consider that a woman doesn’t even have to become an actual mother to make this emotional dynamic churn. The first woman that little boys fall in love with is their mom (it’s the same for little girls, I might add). Therefore, the template for love has already been stamped with maternity. This stamp can—again, it doesn’t always—shape the way that men understand their relationship to all women whom they love intimately. In short, love = mother, but mother ≠ fucking.

Ok, I’m willing to put down my Li’l Sigmund Home Analysis Kit and say we throw out all the psychobabble I’ve so convincingly laid out. Let’s try this idea on for size: in current American society, marriage is overdertermined. Which means that it’s burdened with so many concepts, laden with so many signifiers, heavy with so much expectation, that it’s often difficult to make it all work.

I’ve never been married, so my giving advice on marriage might be like a passenger who has ridden in a car a lot telling the driver how to drive. On the other hand, I have lived with a lot of men, so maybe it’s more like the motorcyclist giving advice to that same driver. And what I can say from my view is this: that when you expect your spouse to be your best friend, business partner, co-parent, co-pilot, confessor, personal assistant, gardener, chef, masseuse, chauffeur, cleaning person, social organizer, and lover, something’s gonna give. I know I’ve had relationships where it felt like the man was already so far up my ass that sex was redundant. Good, steamy, naughty monkey sex, sadly, is often the victim in a committed relationship. It can just be intimacy overload.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to be the case. People—men or women—who find themselves in this stagnant missionary position can recognize their conflicted feelings, and rather than bludgeoning themselves with guilt, can effect change. Is change easy? Not unless it’s the kind from a coin-op laundromat, but you can make it.

You can push your limits, whatever they are right now. If you’re not rocking the foreplay, make yourself. If you’re not taking the time to play, slow down and make a game of it. If you find yourself imagining some co-ed’s genitals in loving Technicolor detail, don’t smack your imagination; tweak the fantasy and put your wife in it. You are the master of your inner domain, so make it work for you.

You can also compromise. If you’re not comfy getting seriously rough in bed, find something that doesn’t make you recoil on the inside. Don’t spank her if it doesn’t feel right to you. You don’t have to dive off the high dive just because your friends do. Start small with figurative baby steps. Put her over your lap, and pull her panties down. Caress, prod, pinch her ass. Talk to her about what you see. See how that works, and move from there.

Finally, don’t be afraid to continue to find help. Clearly being willing to ask me in my comments is a really, really good sign. Seek and ye shall find, you sexy muthahfucking grasshoppers, and there is a plethora of sexy hot fun-making writing, DVDs and objects out there on the Interwebs, in bookstores, and in adult toystores around this wet, blue planet. Find stuff that speaks to you, give yourself permission to make mistakes, and see what happens.

Sex can be the tender, rose-petal-strewn, Sarah McLaughlin meaning-laden meeting of two hearts beating as one. It can also just be a whole lot of dirty gutter-uttering fun. It’s totally fine to have both flavors with the same person. Free your mind, and your cock—or tongue—will follow.

I’m curious what my readers who are married (or not) have to say on the issue. What advice can you give these men? I feel confident they'll appreciate your kind words of wisdom. (My readers are so very erudite.)

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 3, subordination and coordination

Once more, I hold you, my audience, in the cross-hair grammar and kink. Nothing adds credence to your pervert's pedigree like seriously well-endowed self-expression.  If you're interested in further building your skill set, here's Part One, on comma use, and here's Part Two, on semi-colons and colons.

Sometimes grammar just sounds naughty. Dangling participle. Passivization. Periphrastic. They’re terms like “mukluk” or “mastication” in that they sound far more prurient than they really are (which is not to say that one couldn’t express a naughty thought about mastication in a passivized syntax: “Trussed in twine, Bob’s bulbous balls begged to be masticated, but I forbore,” for example.)

But of all the kinky-sounding grammatical terms, the ones that seems to announce their own smuttiness most boldly are “subordination” and “coordination.” It might be my own polymorphously perverse imagination, but it’s hard for me to hold those terms in my head without seeing a seething, roiling mass of promiscuously mixing bodies. But that just may be me.

question from a reader: foreplay, please?

Every once in a while, a reader emails me for help with some kind of relationship/sex/dating issue. Being a generally altruistic kind of chick, and loving to be perceived as an expert even more than an altruistic one, I do what I can to help out.

The most recent question comes from a woman who is having trouble getting her boyfriend not to directly pass Go and collect the fucking $200. She would like him to slow down and enjoy the fornicating journey a bit more, but he seems to wave off her requests like a road-worker with an orange flag. Here’s what she said:

for a variety of reasons, i waited for a loooong time before either having sex or dabbling in basic foreplay. the man im with now is the one i lost my virginity to, and generally speaking, our sexual communication is great.

until we had sex. once we began having sex several things happened:

thing 1 - he stopped paying attention to the rest of my body. sure he goes down, i get a few nipple pinches, kisses etc, but really? hes completely preoccupied with cunt. even when hes licking me, i feel like screaming, 'hey! sir! i have an entire body that is NOT my vagina!"

thing 2 - when i try to focus on him, he humors me for a second, maybe 3, before flipping me into position and... see thing 1.

thing 3 - our communication is ineffective. i asked for more time enjoying process (which before he also enjoyed), he agreed. things 1 and 2 continue to happen regardless. i asked if i could spend more time focusing process on HIM, he concurred, and things 1 and 2 spoiled the fun.

a part of me wonders if i am just THAT bad at the extracurriculars. since im not that experienced, i figured i needed direction to make it better for him. asked for that direction, got none. asked again, still got none. before we ever started a relationship he told me that he doesnt really go for oral. i happen to LOVE giving head, can perform a few decent tricks (very well controlled, nearly non existent gag reflex), take it slow to tease and build anticipation... and still. he lets me play for a few minutes and then stops me so we can start having sex.

what gives? what should i do? im tired of asking for direction on what needs to happen to make foreplay good for him and not getting answers. im also tired of being a vagina. i want to be legs, arms, back, knees, neck, face...

sigh.

suggestions?
Tired of Being a Vagina

Dear ToBaV,

This is a problem I myself have encountered in the past, when in the past I was having sex. It’s sad to lose the foreplay. Every once in a while the thunderfuck can strike like lightning and feel just as awesome, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

So the first thing you need to do is to sit down and talk like an adult with the boyfriend, if you’ve not already done so. People can be incredibly sensitive when you're trying to discuss sex with them, unto the point of hearing things you don't even say; therefore I urge you to begin the conversation with a bunch of compliments. Tell him what he does well and why you like it, and use that positive reinforcement as a segue to telling him that, gosh, you really miss foreplay.

In my mind, you need to have a clear end in mind when you bring up topics to discuss with your mate, whether it's more kissing, or more time with the girlfriends, or more parity in household tasks, or more bondage, please. However, not merely do you need a clear end in your mind, but you also need an idea of what you're willing to do if the partner doesn't follow through with what he or she says. Which means that you can't bring things up over and over, get an assent from the partner, find his or her ass is unwilling to cash the check the mouth has written, and then stay in the relationship. You need to be willing to walk if the partner doesn't hear you and at least take measures to meet you half way. Only you know what your limit is, and you'll know when you've had enough of not getting what you want.

That said, talking isn't always the answer in bed. You might want to make a game out of it. Tie him up. In short, take the upper hand here and put him in the position wherein he has to do what you want or he doesn't get what he wants. Feed him your nipples. Kiss his mouth. Blow him. Alternate all three. But take the upper hand and take control of the sex. He can't get his way all the time. It's boring for you. So fuck him, literally.

You might also take control short of tying him up. Get into bed fully dressed. Remove an article of clothing only when you get the attention you want. Or don't let him move below your throat, breasts, belly, whatever until a certain number of songs have played. Or tell him to kiss you in certain places and not to move on until you give him permission. Let him know that he'll get the cunt when you're good and ready and not a moment before. If he's not willing to play along, you kind of have your answer.

My theory about sex tends toward the psychological. I feel that men get flipped by what they perceive as too much intimacy, and so they have a tendency to take it out in sex. They often have a hard time seeing the woman they love as the chick they want to fuck, so they compartmentalize in one way or another. It's entirely possible your dude is going through a similar intimacy overload. That doesn't make it ok, but it does help you understand it.

To that end, you might also try talking with him about his relationship issues. This territory is much murkier than merely talking about sex, and that itself is a fraught swamp. However, if you really, really like this guy, and you really, really want to see where you two can go in your relationship, you might want to try to push him to discuss things he might feel uncomfortable about. Sometimes talking about fears can lead to a sense of freedom that gives both of you the emotional space to be more intimate and playful. It’s a risk, but “fortune favors the brave” and “the greater the risks, the greater the rewards” wouldn’t be clichés if they weren’t also true.

Best of luck. Maybe my readers can give better suggestions than I; they’re a pretty savvy group.

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 2, colons and semi-colons

Apparently there is quite the contingent of grammar sluts out there lurking in the digital gloam. I had no idea that so many of you would be so hungry for a little syntactical discipline. But then who doesn’t want to feel the stinging lash—as well as the mollifying lick—of the grammarian’s tongue? No one I want to share a turkey sandwich with.

Now that I’ve explained the wonder, the power, the flesh-cleaving glory of the comma, I’ll move on to  two of my favorite marks of punctuation: the noble colon and the oft-debased semi-colon. Several of you asked for it, so let me comply with your polite requests, as I am oft wont to do, both in the boudoir and out.

Colons and Semi-Colons: Putting the Kinky in Your Thinky with Punctuation

Colons and semi-colons function very similarly to commas in that all three punctuation marks indicate a close kinship between separate ideas contained within a single sentence. However, if commas often indicate that your ideas work together as a series—as when they separate items of adjectives in a list, or if they show what’s not entirely necessary but kind of fun in your sentence—as when they indicate non-restrictive clauses, or if they help to prevent misreading—as when they separate two independent clauses joined by one of those seven magic words known as coordinating conjunctions, then your colon and your semi-colon usually form a logical or analytic link between your ideas.

Think of it this way, if it helps: in the orgy that is writing, commas are kind of the lube. You can fuck without it, but why? Without commas, sex is going to be pretty straight-forward and possibly boring. However, in the great syntactical gang-bang, colons and semi-colons make for some truly interesting coupling. These punctuation marks slam, slide or otherwise seduce two or more often fully-formed concepts into close copulation. In brief, colons and semi-colons make sentences do some pretty kinky shit. Which you really kind of have to respect, if not cherish.

a pervert's guide to good grammar: part 1, commas

I am not in a minority about this matter: I find good grammar sexy. There’s something about a properly honed turn of phrase that can make me a bit damp around the lacy bits, sometimes even if the sentiment expressed is profoundly lacking in apparent sensuality. Grammar, you see, is nothing more than a set of rules that order discourse, and in that way, it’s just a slender shade away from other human endeavors bounded by agreed-upon rules. Like tango, say, or BDSM.

Because I do love rules as much as I love breaking them, and because I love knowing the difference between ignorance and style even more than I love breaking rules—and that does mean something, I present to you the first in a hott, hott grammar series.

A Pervert’s Guide to Commas:

All punctuation shows an explicit relationship between ideas. Sometimes, as with a period, the idea comes to a full declarative stop when the sentence ends. Other times, as with an exclamation point or a question mark, the punctuation indicates not merely that the idea has ended, but that it has done so with a specific emotional marker—quizzicality on the part of the question mark, and surprise on the side of the exclamation point.

Commas also show a relationship between ideas, but rather than being the definitive end that a period, exclamation point or question mark provides, commas are rather more subtle. You can, if you want, think of those ending marks as an orgasm. The deed is done. Another may be begun. Or it may not. A comma, however, is more like those little somatic susurrations that flicker and twitch, but don’t signify the end. Rather, they show a close and intimate relationship between single words, dependent phrases or whole independent clauses.

Commas are the most useful little things marks known to punctuation. Acting like “cleave,” they are the contranym of the world of punctuation, joining as much as they separate. If you ever were told to insert a comma where you would a breath, take your next vacation to hunt down and punish with furious might that person who instructed you thus. Here are seven simple rules for utilizing commas correctly.

i ask, you answer, and other ass-hanging meditations

Since I put up my post sending out a query to you, my gentle readers, about what you men would like to see more of in bed, and what you women are reluctant to do, I’ve found myself on quite the journey of edification.

Discounting the replies I received from women for the moment, I’ve compiled a quick breakdown of requests from men. This sample is far from scientific, being that I gathered it from about ten or so emails and fifteen or so comments, but I find it rather interesting. When looking at the list, be aware that for simplicity’s sake, I lumped activities as disparate as watching a partner flirt with other men, watching a girlfriend masturbate and watching a girlfriend with another lover under the broad heading “voyeurism.” Similarly, I classified a man’s wish that a partner play with his junk whilst driving, a dude’s desire for a partner to ride his face, and a guy’s hope that a girlfriend would just “surprise” him under the general subheading “Female more active,” so some of the terms may be a bit wide for strictly scientific purposes.

Without further ado, here’s the list:

• Sissification 1
• Bukkake 2
• Flogging and/or BDSM (of men) 2
• Flogging and/or BDSM (of women) 2
• Female more active 6
• Anal (women receiving) 4
• Anal (men receiving) 6
• Shaving (of women) 2
• Threesome (any variety) 5
• Dirty patter 3
• Piercing nipples (of women) 1
• Voyeurism (of women) 5
• Blow jobs/deep-throating/face-fucking 5
• All-nighter 1
• Public displays of affection 2
• Menstrual sex 2
• Watching/making porn 1
• Gentle instruction 1
• Toy use (for women) 2
• Having left nipple sucked (of male) 1

There are a few things about this list I find completely unsurprising, and a few I’m really rather shocked by. First, color me a robust and stalwart flesh shade for my complete lack of shock that more men want to enjoy more anal sex (woman receiving) and get more blow jobs. Anal is the final frontier, the last great taboo in monogamy that you can enjoy without stepping into polyamory or buying gear. Plus, anal gets a lot of good press from the male’s end, as it were. And everyone {hearts} blow jobs, so the fact that four men expressed a wish for anal from their girlfriend and five a desire for more, better head, leaves me breathing regularly.

What does cause me some small astonishment is that six men have expressed a wish to be anally stimulated themselves. And what causes me yet more shock is that the same number of men have stated a desire for their partners to be more proactive. To be honest, the latter causes me more surprise than the former. It’s not all that shocking that men want their p-spot stimulated, given all the press and other exposure that pegging has received lately. I only had to watch Road Trip once to make me wish I had a prostate. On the other hand, I’m frankly thunderstruck that men continue to complain about their partners’ unwillingness to seduce and amaze them. I truly thought we’d reached an age where women felt free to express themselves sexually with an impresario’s flair.

Apparently, not so much.

Less easily categorized under these broad headings is the general subtext present in many of the emails and comments that as relationships go on, the sex gets more lackluster. This phenomenon may be something I’m projecting because it seems to be my current experience—my boyfriend certainly seemed freer to enjoy himself in me when he didn’t love me so much—but committed-relationship malaise seemed to run like a slogging current through many of the emails.

This makes me sad. I wonder how much we limit our sexual passion when we find ourselves emotionally tied to others. Maybe it’s because, as I experienced with my X known here as Ernie, that we find ourselves so inextricably tied up with this other person that sex seems redundant. Or maybe, as is the case with my boyfriend, the risk of profound physical intimacy seems ameliorated when it’s not amplified by the keening need of love. Or maybe it’s that when we get so involved in the quotidian drudgery and tender debris that makes up every day life with another person, we find it hard to see him or her as the primal keening beast we want to see in a lover. Or perhaps it’s some combination thereof or something else altogether.

I kind of have to feel for that one dude who  just wants his wife to give him more head and suck his left nipple (concurrently, not simultaneously, I suppose, unless they have an exceptionally nimble family). I have to wonder what keeps him from asking, or if he’s asked , what keeps his wife from complying. I wonder if it’s just the fear of the risk—of stating obliquely your secret desire, of setting it out naked and bold in the bright light of mutual scrutiny, of feeling the visceral twist in the request—and the fear that if turned down, he’ll feel like his ass is out the window, bare and hairy and faintly disturbingly comic.

It would be an ideal world if we could ask for what we want without the ass-hanging fear, and if we could also say no, or maybe, or later, without feeling the unpleasant squelch of guilt. I’m too skeptical to put stock in a prelapsarian world, a utopian society where people act like our favorite swingin’ 70’s Swedish free-love parties, where everyone can happily do anyone and there’s always a crockpot bubbling with cheesy goo in the corner. For one thing, I think we humans are hardwired to enjoy some aspects of sex because they are outright taboo, or even mildly scandalous. For another, the idea of a prelapsarian culture of swingers swinging and goo bubbling gives me willies.

But if I could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, we’d at least be able to ask for what we want without the flesh-prickling fear of our asses being hung out in the breeze for all to point and laugh at, even if only metaphorically.

grabbing it by the short curlies: thoughts on the hair down there

There’s nothing that says “Happy New Year” like pubic hair. To that prickly end, I wish to address an email sent to me yesterday from a reader named David. He writes:

I've been reading your blog for quite a while.  Something I don't understand and hope you can provide some insight on:  why do so many women today shave their genitalia?  It's so commonplace, one can not find a working woman who isn't shaved.  I don't understand it.  Smooth skin down there suggests a child--eeeeew!  I'm not interested in sex with a child.  I want a woman.  A real one.  One with a bush.  Something you can feel through her panties (some of the time, anyways).  Any thoughts?

Putting aside for the moment what the writer means by “a working woman,” David raises an interesting question. Our current culture puts a tremendous amount of emphasis on the women’s bush—how it should be kept, ways to maintain its topiary forms, manners for dressing it up. It is such a commonplace that women should be trimmed at the very least that waxing or shaving bare is almost the default setting for female pubic hair, and those women who do like their hair “down there” wild as the outback seem either defiant or apologetic about it.

(I should note that this hirsute demand is not for women only. Men have been feeling an increasing pressure to manscape. Perhaps this trend was most hilariously captured by a recent web advert for the Phillips Bodygroom that features a smug, milquetoast man wearing a white terry-cloth robe, judiciously bleeped-out words, and well-timed images of fruit.)

There’s a lot to argue in favor of a more topiary bush. Being waxed or shaved has health benefits such as a lowered chance of urinary tract infections and other issues—in fact, epidemiologists have argued recent lower rates of pubic lice, aka crabs, stems from more people having less pubic hair; lice have nothing to nest in when you’re bare. Additionally, naked labia are more sensitive, and some people—myself included—just think it feels better to be licked or fucked when hairless. Finally, many people find it more pleasant to lick a hair-free or hair-reduced pussy.

But these benefits aren’t in and of themselves enough to argue for the trend of hairless genitals. Most women aren’t sitting down and making a checklist of pubic hair pros and cons before they make their appointment with their waxer or get into the shower with a new blade and copious shaving cream. Most women, we would argue facilely, choose to wax or shave their nethers because culturally we are pressured to do so, and that pressure has come from the media.

ripped off by a douche

I love the idea of Intellectual Property. I love the concept that what I think and create from the sheer power of my own mind has an innate value, a value I can appreciate not merely from a purely subjective stance but also from a purely objective and empirical, pecuniary standpoint.  Even more than the idea of my intellect owning property, I love the reality built into the legal system in the form of copyright law that what I think and write belongs to me and to me alone, until such time I should choose to sell it to someone else. Intellectual Property, and its attendant laws, makes me feel as if I can sit back and look at all the great heaving mass of my writing and feel like I have created something as real, as tangible, and as valuable as a shopping center or an automobile.

As I’ve become more and more comfortable in this new skin of a writer, as I’ve more and more often gotten remuneration for my writing, and as I begin to see my future as a bright and shiny horizon of publication, I have come to take my writing more seriously. It is, after all, not merely the musing of my scattered mind, the emo off-gassing of a burdened psyche, or the busy work of a person who really should be doing something else; it is increasingly my livelihood. More and more, my writing puts food on my table, keeps a roof over my head, and buys me all those DVDs, Frye boots and books I need and love.

Therefore, I take it very personally indeed when I am plagiarized. A person who steals my writing is not merely stealing my words and my ideas; he or she is potentially stealing money from my bank account. A person who plagiarizes—and in the specific case of the plagiarism brought to my attention by an unknown reader last night, she—is doing more than just appropriating something that is not hers; she is also diluting my voice, reducing my ideas with her unethical appropriation, and taking credit for a creation that is not hers.

I recognize the praise implicit to someone stealing my writing. One doesn’t steal stuff that one doesn’t value, not unless one is more into the act of stealing than one is into the actual stolen goods. I know that the woman who lifted my post “so a girl walks into a bar…” did so because she felt impressed by my writing. Nonetheless, it angers me that she stole it, stole it willingly, and stole it so that others would read the post on her blog—edited of some difficult syntax, embellished by ellipses and increased in length by a Sex in the City quote—and think that she wrote as well as me, though she clearly does not. I recognize this blogger’s inherent appreciation of my writing, but it provides only some small cold comfort.

In other cultures, plagiarism doesn’t exist in quite the same way. In some Eastern traditions, notably Japanese painting and print-making, aspiring artists are encouraged to copy, to copy studiously, to copy copiously, and to copy until such time that they have reproduced every nuanced brush stroke with reverence to the original. This, however, is not the tradition of the West.

The tradition in the West, beginning with Hogarth’s Law enacted in England in 1735, a law that sprang from artist William Hogarth’s anger and frustration at having his prints ripped off by every immoral man with a printing press, gives legal weight to the person who created the reproducible art the exclusive rights to reproduce the art. When we sell a piece of art, be it music, writing, or visual, we sell our rights to reproduce it. When a person copies the art without attribution and/or payment, depending on the venue, she does so illegally.

The Internet has complicated copyright law. The Internet is, of course, a hot-and-cold running stream of writing and images. They seem free for the taking, and some of them are. I have no problem if someone uses a paragraph or more from my writing and gives me proper attribution. This kind of borrowing and citation is equivalent to when print writers cite other articles in their own pieces; plus with the immediacy of hyperlinks, my writing gets exposure that it might not get otherwise. If there’s attribution, there’s no copyright violation. If there isn’t, there is. But the Internet is so big, and growing every day, that policing plagiarism is nigh unto impossible.

I can even forgive new bloggers, people who don’t understand how to do hyperlinks, or haven’t been blogging long enough to know that when one borrows, one should give proper attribution. I have taught college on and off for years; teaching Freshmen what is and what is not plagiarism comes with the territory. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn from mistakes.

It’s another thing entirely, however, to not merely make a mistake in attribution but to steal piecemeal and then, as the blogger who plagiarized my piece did, act as if the writing is her own. Responding to comments that praised the writing of the stolen piece, this blogger said that she had “two sides” to her writing,  averred that she could “pull out the high-falutin’ vocabulary” when needed, and offered that she “would do more of this kind of editorial writing” if she had more time. The blogger in question is also a thirty-something year-old college student. It’s impossible that she didn’t know that what she was doing was wrong; it is, however, possible that she didn’t think she would get caught.

Plagiarism really hurts me. It makes me red spitting angry. Plagiarism in this Western culture is wrong. It is stealing. It is lying. It is unethical. And it is illegal. It is also a problem that is growing with the bloated urgency of J-Lo’s belly. To that end, let me do a little good and provide three links to help people like me who have found their work stolen, as well as help those of you from having your work stolen.

This link helps you to protect your work from plagiarism: How To Protect Your Website's Copyright When Someone Steals Your Content

And this one, for a small fee, helps you detect if it has been: Copyscape

(The title to this post comes from a common misconstruing of a lyric to "Blinded by the Light" copyright Bruce Springsteen, ASCAP.)

now on newsstands near you, december edition

The December edition of Penthouse, along with my article on being a moral manwhore is now out and available at a newsstand near you.

It's all kinds of illustrated.

Go ahead, pick one up and let me know how you like it. Honestly, I hope you do.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

in further consideration of virginity

If my recent foray into virginal advice-giving has taught me nothing, it’s this: what is good advice for the gander is most definitely not for the goose. As I wrote in my piece of 22 June I have received several letters from young men of some limited sexual experience. These letters could be most neatly filed under “angst ridden.” When I answered the most recent angst-ridden virgin dude letter here on my pretty dumb things, I did so intending to respond this specific demographic: young, male, and panicky.

I composed my response with a mindfulness of being reassuring. I’m not a particularly nurturing kind of woman. I don’t come across as being very motherly, not in person and not on the page, but if these guys were writing to me, they clearly wanted to hear from me, and not a sugared-down, palliative version of me. So I wrote to reassure, but I wrote in my usual straight-forward voice.

This post proved to be unusually provoking. While the lion’s share of the male commentators gave my post a fairly unmitigated thumbs up, several women commented and took me to task for being “patronizing,” “condescending” and “missing some essential” points about virginity, primarily that sex is a biological imperative and that not having it is tied up with intense loneliness and fear of judgment. Implicit in these comments was a sense that virgin women experience their virginity in a keenly emotional sense and, even more, that the voice I used to write about the matter, while fine with the men, was deeply upsetting to the women.

I have spent the last week or so reconsidering the advice I gave this particular nineteen-year-old man and how it might or might not be appropriate for a woman, especially a woman in her thirties. I have spent some time imagining myself a virgin at thirty and how I would feel. I have spent some time as well thinking about how I wrote about what I wrote about with the specific audience I had in mind: young, male and panicky.

I stand by my choice of voice for that specific audience. I have a lot of experience with men of this age because I teach college. I spend several hours every week with panicky nineteen-year-old dudes. I get them. And, clearly, they seem to get me, or they wouldn’t feel comfy writing to me and asking me for their help. However, I realize from teaching writing that what one writes to one audience is not necessarily effective for another, and I can see how my voice would rankle an older female audience.

Because it’s not just the voice that’s problematic: it’s the virginity. Women, caught as we are between the rock of virginity and the hard place of whoredom, have an apparently slimmer range of appropriate sexual behaviors. There is a tightly wrapped imaginary number of acceptable sexual partners for women, whereas men have a much more elastic set, and that imaginary number depends greatly, like beauty, upon the beholder. This culturally imposed dangerous sexual territory, wending as it does inscrutably between virginal paucity and sexual excess, puts women, especially women who haven’t had sex, into a strange and ineluctable position, because women, much more than men, have an invisible time stamp.

It’s only been pretty recently that the idea of spinsterhood has begun to die a long overdue death. While male virgins have been a site of gentle ridicule (think Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones or Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin), spinsters have been a site of vituperative disdain (think Great Expectation’s Miss Havisham). There is anger, I would argue, because there is power in the single adult woman. She is a continually reckoned to be old, bitter and shriveled with unfulfilled promise because she alone has illustrated that a woman can live outside the heterosexual economy. We can all rejoice that this trope is in the process of gasping its last, replaced instead by the Cougar, or the Power Bitch, who while still negative at least glimmer with potency.

Women, too, have the ticking clock that men do not. Sure, sperm slows down as a dude ages, but a man who has working sperm has a lifetime of chance to procreate. Women do not. Sure, science is making it possible for us to give birth into our fifties, but we privilege the “natural” over the “artificial,” and conception is no exception. Moreover, we women get many more messages from our hormones than men do. In our late twenties to early thirties, we get told with a piquant urgency that Motherhood Is Now, and it’s a claxon whose snooze bar is difficult to press. All of these factors add up to women feeling a lot more pressure virginity-wise.

They also help to illustrate why my advice, as well as my wording of it, might feel incomplete and dismissive to these female virgins. I am, obviously, a woman who left her virginity well behind her, who has rarely gone more than a couple of months without sex, and whose partners have been various, sundry and many. I represent a kind of sexuality that seems pretty swell from the outside; it, of course, is not; my problems differ from those of thirty-year-old virgins, but I have many of them. I can see how my advice that boiled down to relax, educate yourself and get therapy written in my usual frank voice would cause umbrage,  because female virgins have—and I think I can say this with impunity—a lot more than male virgins to cope with.

And yet, even if I need to change the words to fit the audience, I think the meat of what I told the men remains the same for the women, whatever their age. In fact, perhaps even more so. Because the hymen matter is simply more complex and therefore more possibility for pain arises.

Let me try to say it again, without condescension, with compassion, and with a desire to help the women out there who took me to task for what I said earlier.

If you’re a virgin, and you’re unhappy about it, I urge you to make peace with your self, your sexuality, your heart and your mind. I urge you to learn what you can about pleasing yourself sexually and that means reading books and buying toys and figuring out what you like and what you don’t. I urge you to give yourself a big blank check where it comes to sex and to let yourself experience the new, to make mistakes and  to forgive yourself afterwards. I urge you to get into therapy and find someone to whom you can talk about your pain. I urge you to find things you love in the world and about yourself and enjoy them. I urge you to realize that your sex-life doesn’t end until the day you die, and that it, like everything else, will change and change again and change some more, and I urge you to be comforted by this thought. I urge you to find a way to live that doesn't measure yourself, your life, or your experience against an arbitrary and imaginary cultural marker.

Finally, I urge you to find a way to love who you are—whether you are a virgin or whether you are not—because whether win, lose or draw in love and in life, the person you’ll be spending the most time with is yourself.

to all the virgin dudes in the house

In the past year or so, I’ve received a bundle of emails from young men despairing over their continued virginity. They seem to feel like walking, talking, writing, fucking failures due to their lack of sex. I have responded to these letters a couple of times here on my blog and in emails, and I’ve done my best to help them.

As different as these guys may be, their letters share a commonality that my most recent interlocutor expressed when he lamented the following:

I came to realize that there really are things that I SHOULD absolutely have
done by now. They're basically a prerequisite to life after adolescence:1. I SHOULD have had a long term, serious relationship by now.
2. I SHOULD have more experience in talking to girls.
3. I SHOULD have lost my virginity by now.

What strikes me in this enumerated list is the sense that there is some invisible timetable/scorecard that this man—and the others who have written to me—is living with. As if he’s living in some kind of strange sexual Logan’s Run, and if he doesn’t have sex before he turns some arbitrary age, the jewel embedded in his palm will turn  red and he’ll have to go to Carousel. I’m not entirely sure exactly what it is about our current culture that makes dudes feel like they’re failures if they haven’t boinked by the age of ___, but they seem to.

The man who wrote me this excerpted letter hovers around the age of nineteen. I remember being nineteen. Everything felt apocalyptic, and I chalk it up to the raging perfect storm of hormones. There’s a reason why most fairly tales, myths and horror movies center on narratives of 15-22 year-old people. That time of late adolescence feels unceasingly hazarded with danger; when you’re that age, you are making the trek between childhood and adulthood, and it is a perilous journey indeed—the epic story is a logical metaphor for this time of maturity. Everything is so new and so scary and why shouldn’t it be—at least in equal proportions to its exhilarating pleasure—and people that age tend toward the hyperbolic. All I can say to the people of that age is this: your young adult thing will end, not soon enough, but it will, and you will be glad for it.

In the meantime, and I mean this sincerely, being a virgin is no big deal. The person who cares the most that you’re a virgin is you. So what that means is that you need to find a way to live with your virginity peaceably until that magic moment when you stick your dick in a chick’s pussy (if you’re heterosexual) or a guy’s ass (if you’re gay) or both (if you’re bi). I hope I can help.

I love sex. Sex is awesome: mystical, transcendent and pleasurable. But then, lots of things are. Watching a really good baseball game, climbing to the top of a mountain on a gorgeous day, eating a fantastic meal, going to a really great party—all of these experiences can be just as mystical, transcendent and pleasurable as sex (they also, in general, last longer). You might feel kind of bad if you've never done any of them, but you wouldn't let it ruin your self esteem.

It might help for you to think of sex in the same way—one of many glorious things that life offers, but not necessarily the end-all and be-all of being. And yet, the big difference between watching Jorge Posada hit a walk-off homer (he's my favorite Yankee) and a rousing session of sex is that while we humans don't have a biological imperative to watch baseball, we do have one to fuck. You might feel a hunger for a hike, a yen for some rack of lamb, an itch to surf, but no matter what, you don't have a bunch of hormones wandering around your body commanding you to do it, not like the ones you have stamping their tiny hormonal feet and decreeing you to go out and fucking fuck someone fucking already.

On the other hand, you're probably not going to come home from a lovely picnic with friends and Frisbees and feel like banging your head against a wall and berating yourself and agonizing oh, god, oh god, what the hell did you do that for. Which you very well might do after fucking. Sex is fantastically complicated because it really does epitomize what it means to be human: we are biological animals complete with biological needs, but we are also complex sentient, psychological, and emotional beings whose consciousness is only a showy fragment of the multitudes inside us. I'm not saying anything new here, but I am trying to explain why you feel like crap for not having had sex. Or why you might feel like crap after you have had sex.

If you really feel like crap for being a virgin, you need some help. Go to your school's counseling center or call your local mental health service and get some help. I promise you that finding some intelligent and trained stranger upon whom you can rest your baggage will be incredibly helpful. If you’re feeling this badly about being a virgin, you're giving a tremendous amount of psychic energy to your virginal state and you need to free that space up. You're going to be spending your whole life inside your head. It might as well be a nice place. See a therapist.

And while I'm at it, see what you can do about not keeping up with the fucking Joneses. Guys are notorious liars about their sexual exploits. Don't believe their hype. You are free to go at your own pace and  you don’t need to compare your life to anyone else's. And to help you, with all irony intended, I’m going to give you my boyfriend’s life as comparison. My boyfriend didn't lose his virginity until his Senior year in college. He never had a girlfriend before his Sophomore year summer, and he never did much more than make out with her. At 35, my boyfriend has had fewer lovers in his life than I had in 2004. You know what? It doesn't matter. All that matters is that we love each other and we enjoy one another, and quite frankly, as great as the sex is, we spend the vast majority of our time together doing other stuff—talking, eating, watching movies, walking around, shopping, and so forth. Sex is the blog-visible tip of the iceberg, but it's not the main point of our relationship.

Until such a time as you see fit to fuck, you might want to educate yourself. Read books on female sexuality (Betty Dodson, Violet Blue and Ducky Doolittle all have fabulous new ones) and read books on male sexuality too (I'm ashamed to admit I don't know any. Maybe my readers can suggest some). Find out what you can, so that you'll be armed with knowledge. The best lover I ever had decided at fourteen that he wanted to be good in bed, so he stole a copy of Joy of Sex and memorized it. It worked.

Don’t bludgeon yourself for feel like you don’t know how to talk to chicks. Girls may seem like this giant mystery, but they're just people. Treat them as such. Listen to them and respond honestly. Laugh out loud. Offer them gum if you’re having a piece. You know, like that. If you have ever had a female friend, you know how to talk to girls. Everything else is just gilding the lily. If you need practice talking to girls, give yourself some. Go to shops with female help. Ask for help from them. Talk. Go to restaurants with female servers. Order stuff from them. Talk to them. Pay and tip. Just find practice where you can. Borrow a dog and go for a walk and talk to females with dogs. Join a softball league. Go to a poetry reading. Find women and talk to them, and give yourself a blank check to chat them up and to make mistakes when you do. Start small and see where it takes you.

Finally on the cherry-popping front, if I could do it over again, I'd choose to lose my virginity to someone I like and trust, but not necessarily someone with whom I'm in love. But each to his or her own.  If you really, really want to lose your virginity and soon, then put an ad up in Craig's List “Casual Encounter” section stating what you're looking for. You'll find it. But I'd urge you to take your time, make peace with yourself and see what happens.

Sex isn’t the best thing in the world—it’s one of many. Learn to enjoy it all, and sex will come. I fucking promise you.

helping the hopeless/hoping the helpless

I've been a busy little writing beaver. Many of the pieces are just languishing in editor's inboxes like so many unlicked lollies. Others, though, are ready to rock and roll like ironic t-shirt-wearing teenagers with their uncles' guitars and an empty garage.

Here are four shiny pieces now up on the blog at Sexshop 365. Two of them are brand spanky new, complete with the new post smell, and the other two are previously owned, yet buffed and refurbished within an inch of their sweet lives.

If you want to go and read my whole Sexshop 365 ouvre, go here. If you want to just read the new stuff, here's the happy list:

• Where it is: "A Song in the Key of G: A Paean to the G-Spot"
• What do do with it: "How to Rock Her G-Spot Like a 21st Century Casanova"
• What will help you with it: "A Man's Guide to Buying Her Sex Toys"
• Hey, it can't hurt: "Why Bondage Tape is on a Roll: A Spellbinding Review"

And just because I like to keep you all in a state of suspended suspense, here are the web addies of the two sites I'll be writing for soon. Like fabulous apartments waiting for moving day, they're both empty now, but soon, oh, the parties that will be thrown. You want to keep an eye on them.

kissykiss,
chelsea g

here's to you (finding your) mrs. robinson

A few very busy weeks ago, I received the following letter from a reader:

I read tyler's question and i guess i have a bit of a similar one. I'm 18, my names [redacted] and i'm quite interested in finding a girl who would want to try deepthroat however I dont know any girls who are into that kind of thing, at least from what i've picked up. I would gladly explore new area's of sex with an older woman but am unsure how to approach that or where i would find an older women looking for a younger man. Also woud like to try anal sex but again am slightly unsure how to bring something like that up without coming off like an ass. If you have any advice for a me i'd love to hear it, thanks.

I always find it incredibly gratifying that readers reach out to me for advice. When someone aks me questions that are near and dear, I assume that this person must hold me in some positive regard, and that’s a nice feeling. I like knowing that strangers entrust me to be their own private Sexual Agony Aunt. It makes me feel almost…legitimate. I take the responsibility to answer these letters seriously, if not always in the most timely fashion, and so it is with this heady sense of trust—and the fact that I, a long-time cougar myself, believe in the power of older women/younger men relationships—that I respond to this young man’s letter.

First, my dear man, when you address a writer whose blog's tagline is “because life it too short for bad grammar or bad sex” and who has a predilection for posting the embarrassing emails she gets from her readers, you want to take the four minutes to proofread your note. I’m not saying that you have to compose your query in the Queen’s English, but you probably want to make sure it’s at least in the Viscount’s. Which means, at the very least, proper capitalization and spelling. Bad grammar causes me actual physical pain. At least it does when it’s unintentional.

Lest you think I’m spanking you for no reason, may I assure you that I’m not. Older women are generous, knowing, erudite mistresses; we are also hard mistresses, and one thing that we almost to a one loathe with an extra flamey white-hot burning passion is crap grammar. If you want to find yourself a smokin’ hott older woman lover, the very first thing you should do is learn how to write a grammatically pristine sentence.

There are a few grammar books I’d suggest for you. My personal favorite is Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire—it’s smart, sexy and illustrated. There’s also Patricia T. O’Connor’s Woe is I: the Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, which is quite easy to follow, though bereft of illustrations. Other suggestions are the preternaturally well-named books Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose, by Constance Hale, and Eats Shoots and Leaves: the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss. If you feel shaky about your syntax—and especially if you think “syntax” is something you pay in Las Vegas or Amsterdam—buy one. It really doesn’t matter which.

Why, you ask, do you need a grammar book? Because, my sweet tender shoot looking to grow into a strong sturdy oak, you will most likely find these women on the internet, and the internet means writing. Sure, it is possible to meet a real live older woman anywhere. We are, after all, everywhere. We go to the gym, we shop at the mall, we drink coffee at high-end coffee purveyors both independently owned and corporately connected. Wherever you go, there we are, in our Pilates bodies and generally high credit limits. We, like wildflowers in a field, like hipsters in Williamsburg, like dust-bunnies under my bed, are everywhere you look.

So why, you ask, must you go online to meet one? Why, to be direct, the deplorable need to learn grammar?

Because, my charming one who is simply tumescent with giddy willingness, in the real world, you can’t tell which one of us is looking for you. Sure, it can happen. You may be plucked from your pod of Van-wearing, creatively-facial-haired, Dinosaur-Jr.-listening friends by the older chick of your dreams (and I fully aware that to an eighteen year old “older” is a term flexible enough to drink a Cosmo in a backbend); it could happen. I, at the age of 31 and in the full flower of my stripper gorgeousness, picked a nineteen year-old surfer for my own fortnight of fun in Puerto Rico, and then I went on to have a two-and-a-half year relationship with C, then also nineteen, whom I met at the gym. It can happen. It’s just less likely.

See, the thing is, we’re both afraid of and attracted to you, as you yourself are afraid of and attracted to us. We assume that you’re not interested in us; you assume we’re not interested in you; it’s difficult. So while it is possible for you to hook up with an older woman in the wild, it’s difficult. If you really, really want to go the wild and natural route, be fearless. Chat us up. Smile. Go for it. The worst that’s going to happen is that we’ll pat you on the head in a patronizing manner. Trust me, it will be far less painful than the brutality suffered at the hands of girls your own age. We feel flattered by your attentions. They, however, have yet to learn that their excrement has odor.

My advice is to go virtual, my esculent turgid tidbit of manmeat, because we are online and we are looking for you. Head for the computer and sign yourself up for Craig’s List or Lava or Nerve or all three. Write yourself a grammatically clean profile that states simply and straightforwardly what you are looking for. If you can be witty, be witty. Cultural references are fine. Say you’re looking for your Mrs. Robinson, tell us you’re Ashton looking for Demi, put yourself in our Wisteria Lane and give us your best Josh Henderson. We like clever men who know what they want. Make yourself one. But only if you're really, truly, and legitimately over eighteen. We hate statutory rape.

When writing your profile, you want to tread the line between straightforward and crude. It’s fine to say that you’re looking for a “beautiful stranger” to teach you some “erotica” to give you “fever” and to “dress you up” in her love. You do not, however, want to say you’ll make her feel like a virgin touched for the very first time. Do not in your profile say that you are “into” any of the following: anal, rimming, ass-fucking, deep-throating, scat, water sports, sissy play, pony play, puppy play, fisting, or the thing with the hat. Any or all may be true, but we like a little bit of mystery. Save it for the third or fourth email. (Exception: perhaps if you sign up for Adult Friend Finders or a BDSM dating site, you might list the above. Look at other profiles for guidance.)

Next, my lovely and exuberant rod of molten metal, you will want a photo. You need some lovely shots of yourself clothed. Do not send any of the following: a picture of you with your friends, your ex-girlfriend, or strippers; a picture of you drinking anything alcoholic; a picture of you that isn’t flattering. We do like action shots, like you kayaking, catching Frisbees, or doing a handstand in the surf. You will also need, eventually, some lovely photos of yourself more naked (same rules as the clothed pictures apply). You do not, for the love of all things holy, need a cock shot until you get asked for one. Then, and only then, do you send one. Not before. (Exception: if you have a really fantastic penis, I mean a truly outstanding cock, you may want, after a decorous interlude of emailing, to send a shot unbidden. Use your judgment. I’m sure you’ll develop some.)

Once you have both your membership to the dating site(s) of choice and your picture, you’re ready to start looking for the older women of your fantasies. Approach them. Send them emails. Start short and sweet. Do not send form emails. Read the profiles in question carefully and construct your response in kind. Look at what she’s interested in and use that knowledge to tailor your letter to her. Remember: you are taking the first step in seduction. Make your email personal. Make it sweet. And above all, make it grammatically correct. Spellcheck.

You, my delightful pistil of masculinity, are young. And so you have much to learn about women. If you want to sidestep many, many future mistakes remember the following: be unequivocally complimentary. Do not say, “You look really good for 36”; instead, say, “You look really good.” Do not say, “You have a really hott voice, I mean the rest of you is pretty hott too”; rather, say, “You have a really hott voice, but then, you’re just hott.” Simple is better than complex; straightforward is better than comparative. Just learn how to craft a nice declarative compliment. It is a skill that will serve you well and long.

As you get into the actual dating portion of computer dating, do remember that the rules of common courtesy apply. If you change your mind and don’t want to continue the correspondence, just tell her so politely. If you want to meet, tell her. If you don’t, tell her that too. If someone is nice to you, say thanks. I can’t hold your hand through this because I have a life and I’m not prescient, but I can tell you to follow the golden rule of dating: treat others as you would have them treat you. Be aware of your actions and how they affect others.

Also, be careful out there. It’s a strange world. Don’t give your real name immediately; pick a pseudonym and stick with it. When you go to meet a new person, do it in public and tell someone—a friend, someone—where you’re going and make a plan to call. If someone sets your Spidey senses tingling, and not in a good way, back out gracefully. You need to take care of yourself.

Finally, always, always bring condoms, preferably of both latex and latex-free varieties, and bring lube. We like boy scouts. Don’t whine when your date requires you use the condoms, either. We hate whining. Comport yourself like the man you’re learning to be.

The sexually adventuresome, disarmingly polite, terrifically sexy and grammatically correct man that I know you are.

Thank you to Sutton who pointed out the errors of my own poor proof-reading ways. It happens to the best of us. Fortunately, I have an army of you to keep me honest.--cg

the magic bullet newsletter: or, how to remain an X file

Perhaps you’ve read my previous post on choosing to write a blog with and/or of sex. Perhaps, despite all my sensible warnings to the contrary, you’re considering doing so. Perhaps you’ve already joined the doughty masses who sits before the ethereal LCD glow of keyboard and tap-tap-taps their experiences/fantasies/anxieties/triumphs/failures into linguistic form, presses the “submit post” key and makes digitally eternal those carnal and/or mundane records.

Good for you.

Have you protected yourself? Are you sure?

The thing about writing a blog with and/or about sex is that unlike writing a blog about knitting, spelunking, or music, you open yourself to personal attacks. Which might be the only thing that writing a sex blog and a political blog has in common—and certainly one could argue that the choice to write a sex blog has inherent in it a commitment to politics that writing a cooking or fishing blog doesn’t.  While all blogs tend to have writers who choose nom de plumes for all varieties of reasons—alternate identities are fun, for one thing—most often the sex blog necessitates one because sex is information we generally keep private.

We do not necessarily want families and acquaintances to know the nifty nitty-gritties of our sexual proclivities. We call our genitals our “privates” because we understand that this area, more than any other, requires protection. I’m going to forbear a long disquisition on privates and privacy and sex and the Will To Tell About It, as interesting as that discussion might be, in interest of giving you some information that I wish I’d had as a fledgling blogger. Rather than giving you a thinky-kinky lucubration, I’m going to tell you how to protect yourself and how to keep the stuff you don’t want known from becoming known. I’m going to give you the sweet concentrated distillations of what I’ve learned in the past two years of writing these pretty dumb things. I’m going to help you learn from my mistakes.

Anonymity: Yay or Nay?: Several writers obviate the problem of being found out by writing under their own name. One way to avoid discovery is to uncover yourself. Certainly, writers like Rachel Kramer Bussel, Jessica Gold Haralson, Elizabeth Wood and Alana Noël sidestep the whole anonymity issue by writing out, loud and proud in their own names. If you absolutely know that the person you want to be is a sex writer, then this choice of openness may be for you. Understand, however, that this choice has its downsides. If you’re single, you may have a harder time dating, for others may feel afraid of having your relationship open to the public. If you want to switch careers, you may find your choice vexed by your erotically-writing identity. Sex writing is unfairly stigmatized. But go you and your public sex-writing self if that works for you.

Grey is not Black: Even if you choose to be anonymous, your anonymity will rest somewhere on a sliding scale. Someone like  the best-selling author and courtesan Belle du Jour has kept her anonymity with a fierce protectiveness. No one knows who she is. Someone like Figleaf, who just won the Dirtyspoke award for Best Male Sex Blog, has a looser concept of anonymity. He is pretty open about what he looks like from the neck down, what kind of dining room table he has, his general geographic locale, and his marriage status—but his writing is pretty tame. If you are writing about illegal activities, like any number of sex-work bloggers do, or if you’re writing about acts that require you protect identities, like many people who are both fetishists and parents, or people who are having affairs, you probably want darker shade of anonymity. If, however, your writing is less personal, or if you have fewer indiscretions you need to hide, you can pick a grayer anonymity. In any case, it’s important to consider how anonymous you really want to be. Don’t just fall into—or out of—anonymity. Choose it.

Where R U (and Do You Care if People Know?): If you surf from work, the chances are that you have a corporate IP address that shows bloggers where you work. This IP address shows up as a number in any comment you leave, on most blogger’s stat-counters, and in many e-mails. My suggestion is to never, ever comment on a blog from a work IP. Never, ever, ever. Your home IP most likely has a carrier attached to your number. It might read AOL, Roadrunner, Verizon, or whoever your Internet provider is and it will give the general geographic location, usually the nearest big city or town. This information isn’t very important if you live in a city like New York, where there are eight million naked stories. It matters more, however, if you live in Vermont, where there are 800,000. If you live in a remote area, and if you want your anonymity to be black, and not a smoke grey, you want one of two things: to pay for AOL, which routes through three major areas, making it impossible to tell where you live; or you want to pay for a proper proxifying service. It all goes back to how important your anonymity is.

You are Your E-Addy: One thing you need is a proper e-mail address that you use for your blog and for your blog only. Get a Gmail account. It assigns a new IP with every e-mail, so no one will be able to put your e-mail IP together with your surfing IP or comment IP and figure out who you are and where you live. Plus, Gmail has massive storage capabilities and filters you can put into place. It’s just a really good tool.

Count on It: Also get yourself a proper stat-counter. I like statcounter.com the best—it’s free, invisible if you want it to be, and able to provide a tremendous amount of information. In addition, it allows you to look up an IP address, so if someone leaves you an untoward comment or sends you a cruel email, you can search that IP address to find out under what bridge that troll lives.

Clean Up Your Room: If you must do any blog-related work on a computer that anyone other than yourself uses, clear the browser’s history, cache and cookies. It’s best to work only on your own computer that you can password protect if need be, but this decision arises in part from how gray your anonymity is and how permeable you computer life is. I don’t password protect my computer, but everyone I know knows about my blog. I do, however, always clear the cache when I check my blog e-mail address or approve comments or check my stats. I don’t need anyone I don’t know and trust stumbling across any piece of information and being able to put me with my blog.

People are Strange when They are Strangers (and Especially When They Aren’t): Pick your blogfriends very carefully. You will get comments on your shiny new blog, and  you will receive emails from people. You will feel shiny and new. You will want to extend to these people your naked and open palm. Don’t. You don’t know them. They may not be your friends. You need to be polite and cordial, but you need to take time to get to know them.

I have made some really great friends from my blog. I love them. I would choose to be friends with them over and over again in any lifetime. I have also made mistakes. I used to give people my first name readily. Now people have to work to get my first initial. Protect yourself and become friends slowly. You don’t know whom you can trust, and it’s better to err on the side of caution. Truly.

Be More Scully than Mulder: Read blogs very carefully. See if there is a lot of defensive posturing against an endless and recurrent horde of enemies. See if the comments hold a lot of hate speech and discord—words that go beyond simple if heated debate on an issue. See if the life portrayed feels too good to be true. See if posts and comments go up and get taken down frequently, and in doing so seemingly rewrite the past explanations for something. All of this information illuminates, in blazing neon, signs of bloggers  who may write enjoyable prose but with whom you probably don’t want to share a turkey sandwich. Or maybe even a link. (Always Aroused Girl has a thoughtful post on this issue here.)

Your Place, Your Rules: Your blog is your space. You don’t have to publish every comment—this choice to not publish comments isn’t censorship; it’s your right. The New York Times doesn’t have to publish every piece of writing that comes its way, and neither do you. You can publish what you want, you can link whom you want, you can do what you want as long as you are agreeing to your server’s terms of service (and it’s a good idea to read the fine print). No one has the right to invade your home or your blog. Feel free to shut the door.

Save the Uglies: However, should you get trollish comments or emails, save them. You want these offensive pieces of vitriol, even if you never look at them again, because should your dilettante trolls graduate to being full-on stalkers, you want that evidence ready at your hot fingertips. Keep it all in your e-mail account, but also save everything in a word file (including the IP information in the e-mails, if possible).

Host? What Host?: should you choose to buy your own domain and to host it independently, you can pay extra to register it anonymously. You want to do this. You do not want this information that usually includes your name, address and phone, hanging out there in cyberspace like a big red flag to the raging bulls.

A couple of other things to think about—you want to back up the files on your blog. My server, Typepad, both imports and exports files, so I can save everything I’ve ever written here in triplicate (everything is already in Word files first). Blogger and Google have joined forces to allow you to email posts to a predetermined e-mail address when you’re finished writing them. You can also use Google Docs to save your posts. You also want to be very cautious about writing posts that can place in you in time and space; for example, saying that you're a dancer and performed on a certain night could locate you in a specific and searchable venue. You need, unfortunately, to be paranoid. My stalkers found me from such a post that tied me to a Googleable time and space. You never know what’s going to happen, and you want to have your bases covered (Viviane of Viviane’s Carnival put up a very handy post on basic ways to remain anonymous; you can see it here.) And watch out for little things like Amazon Wish Lists that have your address, or sending Microsoft Word files because they show who registered the program when the document opens.

I have learned the very hard way that I should have been infinitely more careful with my identity here. Had I to do it all over again, I would do it very differently indeed. But I can’t, and so I offer you these words that might just err on the side of hyperbole: think of the Internet like Deadwood; it’s a wild and lawfree place; and you need to be very careful so that it’s not your body being fed to the pigs.

The greater the risk, the greater the reward, but also the greater the need to be cautious. Now you can make decisions with foreknowledge, a luxury I wish I’d had, and one that my hard-earned experience can give you.

same voice, other rooms

In the theme of continuing my slow and steady dominance of that world, that realm, that England, I have recently started writing for Sexshop 365, UK's largest online sex toy retailer, and I'm delighted about it. As many other adult toy stores are doing, Sexshop 365 wanted to start a blog, and they wrote me and asked to contribute. So far, I've posted six pieces on the site, most of which began in an incarnation here and one that is brand spanky new. If you want to go and check them out, here are links:

• Buzz Your Way to Pleasure: How to Use Vibrators During Sex
• Butt Sex for Beginners: Sodomy 101, part 1 and part 2
• Deep-Throat: A Step-by-Step Primer
• Blow Job Frills: Fun Things to Do with a Cock and Your Mouth
• Butt Plugs: Why You Want One (this one is new)

However as great as it is across the pond, I'm not limiting my world dominance to the country that kicked my ancestors out in 1620. I'm ready to stride like a big-ass fake titty colossus through this island that my other ancestors settled in 1648: Manhattan. This spring I'll be reading at Rachel Kramer Bussel's very popular In the Flesh Reading series on their night of "True Sex Confessions," about which I'm terribly excited. On the site, you can see the full line-up of authors (and you can see that they are all far better published than I), but you'll have to wait until April to see me read. I'm really grateful to Rachel for giving me this opportunity. She is sweeter than cupcakes with sprinkles on top, and that is not hyperbole.

so you wanna write a sex blog...really?

Almost two years I started writing my pretty dumb things, which I don’t call a “sex blog,” but a “blog with sex.” And yet this identification is a petit form of self-delusion. Looking at this writing in a cold, clear light of unobfuscated analytic light, this blog is a sex blog, or it has become one, anyway.

This post is my 444th. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of pages, of sentences, of words that comprise those hundreds of posts. I can’t imagine how many times I’ve used the word “cock,” employed the adjectival phrase “fat-bellied,” or summoned a metaphor of birds taking flight, balloons on the rise, tsunamis crashing or fjords dropping to describe my orgasms. I can’t fathom how many synonyms I’ve found for “pink,” or how many times I’ve said “spelunk,” while not referring to actual caves. I have, on these pages, yowled, yawped, ululated, screamed, gutter-uttered and howled like a banshee. (I have, however, never, ever used the term “cum,” unless I was employing Latin or being sarcastic.)

The point of my piling up the virtual metric tons of my things, pretty and/or dumb, is to point out this fact: I know a thing or two about writing a sex blog, however reluctantly I came about writing one. In the past two years, I have seen my readership go from a slender handful of people to a great burgeoning swell of thousands daily. I have the readership of a nice-sized small town daily. It’s a testament to my writing, I like to think, as well as a testament to how many people Google “how to deep throat” and come here for instructions.

I like to think I make it look pretty easy. Good artists do that, make difficult things look easy, and I like to consider myself pretty good at this thing I do, all hubris aside. Let me tell you, especially those of you who think you want to write a sex blog: it’s not.

sticking it to the man's censoring server

I recently received this comment from a reader named Brian:

Hi CG,

I'm sad that I can no longer read your blog at work. When I click your bookmark I get a blocked page error labeling you as Pornography.

I appreciate your good writing and your hottness. I thought you would want to be aware of this; I don't know if it could somehow be related to your Google problems (I'm thinking not; it's probably due to my surfing being monitored at work). They also recently blocked the Sun (UK) website in some other category.

I’m guessing that my spanky new porn label has more to do with webcrawlers finding my affiliate links to the very fine woman-owned, austral companies I Feel Myself et al than the recent Google snafu, but I could be wrong. I am not tech savvy. I don’t do my own code; mucking about in HTML frightens me. I do, however, know a few ways around be cock blog-blocked by The Man, and I’d like to share them with Brian, as well as any other readers who are having their daily reading fun impinged by cold and callous work computers. With a smidge of web-engine ingenuity, you'll  be sitting in your Dilbert cubicle speedreading about oral, anal or emo snug as houses in no time.

First, you can join an RSS-feed news aggregate like Bloglines, Rojo or Google Reader. I myself use Bloglines to read most of the blogs I read on a regular basis. Essentially, these servers allow you to subscribe to blogs whose posts are served up piping hott and fresh into your account. Most bloggers have RSS feeds, so you can get all of yours in one easy-to-read web-address that your work server won’t recognize as porn.

Upside: Well organized and clear, and everything all at once.

Downside: Not everyone publishes a full feed, so you may be out of luck when you want to read the full post and your favorite blogger publishes an excerpt. Also, your access to hyperlinks is denied: you can’t click on a link and get a page in a verboten blog. Finally, you’re less apt to comment or click on ad links, which is more of a downside to me than you, but, hey, it’s my blog that’s in question.

A proxy service will provide another way around the porn-blocked server; proxifiers are services that essentially gives you a false IP address. In my undoubtedly simplified and incomplete understanding it goes a little like this: your work server has some list of addresses that are blocked; however, if you change the address, your server won’t recognize the webpage. Proxified pages show the name of the proxy service before the web addresses. You can Google “free proxy server” and get any number of services that allow you to look as if you’re not looking from your own business IP, which will in turn make you look like what you’re not doing is looking at porn.

Upside: You can get any page through this method, and not just blogs, so you don’t have to have a page with an RSS feed, which you do with Bloglines and the like. Also, you can click on the hyperlinks and get other pages in the bad, bad, naughty, should be spanked, blog, which you can’t do from an RSS feed service. You can also comment and click on adverts.

Downside: Free proxy servers can be hella annoying. You can have very spotty access, and you can be denied when you most want to read. You can, however, pay for a proxy and get better service, but that’s kind of desperate.

An online translation page is one more way around The Man, The trick is to find one  that allows you to translate “English” to “English.” Type in the address you want to look at, and you’ve successfully confused both the translation page and the work server. This process works along the same lines as the proxy IP method—that the translation page changes the web-address and therefore your work server can’t recognize it for what it is. Just Google “free online translation” and pick one you like.

Upside: It’s free and fairly reliable. Plus, if you read more than one language, you can thrill to really awkward translations.

Downside: It’s time consuming. And it feels really geeky, for no explicable reason.

Finally, if your webpage publishes to feedburner, you can subscribe to it. Feedburner works like RSS aggregate pages and updates as soon as bloggers publish their new posts. However, not everyone publishes a feed to feedburner; I don’t, though I will be just as soon as my friend O links me, and then you can evade detection by reading my pretty dumb things through feedburner. I don’t really understand it, but maybe you will. I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Update: it's up. Go here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PrettyDumbThings, or click this little button to subscribe

Upside: Easy, undetectable and reliable.

Downside: Pretty much the same as an RSS feed--you can't look at hyperlinked pages, you can't add a comment, you can't see advertisements and you can't click on affiliate links and bring me the cold, hard American cash.

If any of you readers who are undoubtedly more tech-savvy than I have any suggestions for Brian, please chime in. Spread the undetectable love. Stick it to The Man.

In the end, he won’t know, though if he did, he might like it.

Update: My close personal friend and very favorite kilt-wearing dude Karl Elvis has kindly provided me with this Boing-Boing link that gives a highly comprehensive list to defeating corporate censorship.

a vibrating guide to concupiscent pleasure

Last week I received an email from fellow blogger, erotica writer, and ex-ecdysiast Alana Noel asking for advice on how to integrate her vibrator into her spanky new sex life with a spanky new Boy Toy partner.

Sometimes I get requests for help to which I feel the answers are self-evident, and initially I had that response to this query. Then I remembered how reticent I’d been for years to use toys while fucking with a partner. Upon reflection, I realized that it had only been pretty recently—the past couple years, really—that I’d begun to feel comfortable with the toys and the boy both together in my bed and between my juicy thighs.

I think part of my reticence stemmed from the fact that the first person I’d experienced toy play with was a bona fide asshat. I think that part of it also came from the feeling that using a toy was cheating—and the accompanying shame of feeling like a bad female for not being able to come reliably just from fucking, fingers or tongues.

When I became more sexually mature I realized the following: the first dude who guilted me while using a toy did a lot of damage and that I wasn’t not going to let his badness stand in the way of a good orgasmic time. It’s fun to use toys, and it adds variety to sex, but their use isn’t self-evident at all, I realized when I sat down and thought about it.  What follows is an expanded answer to my inquiring online friend.

Certain shapes of vibes are much easier to play with during sex, I find, though given the extreme particularity of my erotic organ, I could be in the minority in this particularity as I seem to be in so many other things. I have a bullet vibe, a rabbit, a Hitachi Magic wand and a vibrating butt plug. I have used them all during sex, as I have also used a traditional slender plastic vibe, a vibrating cockring, a remote-control vibe and a finger vibrator. I would say that each has its own goodness, depending on what you want the vibe to do. However, I would also say that using what you know and like best makes the most sense, at least initially.

The best starting place, I think, for integrating vibes into your sex life cum partner is to play with the vibe while said partner watches. Make him (or her) sit in a chair or at the foot of the bed and gaze on the pleasure-filled being that is you diddling yourself with the vibe. Tie him up if you have to. Or if you just want to. If you like being the exhibitionist, this vibe-show can be a lovely way to get accustomed to the vibe—its presence and its noise—as well as to use it as foreplay.

Moreover, giving your man (I’m just going to assume the politically incorrect and sexually limiting male partner here for the brevity of pronouns and for the fact that most women already know what to do with a vibe) the opportunity to watch will help him better able to use the vibe on you. If you want to learn or teach a sex act, you should watch or show it to the partner whenever it’s anatomically possible. Show your man how you like it.

The next clear step is to have the man use the vibe on you. If you enjoy the power exchange thing, you can be in charge here—he’s the slave doing your bidding—or you can be the sub being pleasured by the erotic largess of your Dom. In either case he'll like getting your patient instruction as well as watching you squirm under it. And once he’s learned, he will feel far more confident, secure in the knowledge that he has earned another erotic badge on his sash, prepared as a boy scout to whip that skill out at a moment’s notice.

However, here is where types of vibes come in. A rabbit vibe or a Hitachi Magic wand can be all encompassing and exclusive toys. However, if you have a bullet vibe, a type that I like a lot because they're cheap, easy to clean, small and versatile, you can not only have him use it on your clit (with you tied up or not), but you can also have him tuck it inside you while he licks or manipulates your pussy. Similarly, if your Hitachi has a g-spotter attachment, or if you have a g-spotting vibe, your man can use these in your pussy while he licks your clit. In any case, the vibe and cunnilingus duo solves the walk-and-chew-gum coordination issue that many men have with having to multitask the hand and the tongue simultaneously. And that, in the words of Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

The easiest way to use the vibe when fucking is to use it when fucking in doggy style. Your clit is just there, unencumbered and begging for attention, and the position facilitates actually reaching the clit, which other positions don't so much. I find it hard to wedge the vibe in between the man and me when we're fucking face to face, and I find the vibe totally pointless if I'm riding him because I'd much rather use my finger. If you do want to use a vibrator while facing your man or while on top of him, a vibe that slips over a finger or a Fukuoko vibrating glove can be really helpful. If you want to use your Hitachi while fucking, you can wedge it on a pillow, or you can buy a specially constructed pillow Hitachi holder, if you’re really into gear.

However, you know your body better than I, and you can figure it out. Essentially, once you cross the great toy Rubicon and no longer feel embarrassed by the presence of the vibe, the karma sutra world is your vibrating oyster.

I really enjoy using a vibe while I’m being butt-fucked. It’s nice to have something pressing directly against my g-spot, and each stroke of my man’s cock presses the vibe (usually the aforementioned bullet vibe) against my g-spot—and through my vaginal/anal wall against his cock, bringing us both pleasure. It’s a two-for. Plus, should I want to have the vibe against my clit, it’s right there. I suppose one could use a rabbit vibrator while buttfucking too, for that simulated double-penetration experience, though I’ve not done that. Yet.

Finally, don't be afraid to turn your guy into a human vibrator. There are vibrating cockrings, which I've had varying amounts of luck with, available that are pretty cheap. Also, should your man be amenable to ass play, you can get a buttplug with a tiny and powerful vibe in it that will bring pleasure to you both (though if he has stamina issues, I'd make this type of play about orgasm #4 in a series).

To be both brief and wit's soul: just play. In time, the toy ceases to be this Weird Other Thing and just becomes yet another choice in your vast panoply of erotic offerings.

bobbing for semen

The paper frills on the ends of the lamb chops aren’t necessary, but they’re nice. The umbrella in your adult beverage doesn’t make it taste any better, but it’s festive. The balconette push-up bra doesn’t really give you perkier breasts, but it’s alluring. None of these things—not the paper frills, the wee umbrella, the naughty lingerie—actually makes the decorated item any better, but they seem as if they do. The lamb chop seems more succulent; the frozen piña colada appears more decadent; the breasts look as if they’re ripe for the plucking.

In the spirit of sexy similitude, let me present you with a few things you can do that will put the icing on the cake, the gild on the lily, the pastie on the nipple, if you will, of your blow job.

A blow job in and of itself is, from what I hear, a very good thing. Not having a cock myself—except for a very large, perpetually tumescent, and ponderous metaphorical cock—I wouldn’t know first hand. But from all accounts, the blow job seems to really rather pleasant. Certainly, the sheer number of people who find my pretty dumb things by searching phrases like “deep