Week 16 (31)
We were making the bed this morning, the Spouse and I, and I was fumblingly trying to explain what had gone wrong last night, as in what had not gone off. Wine with dinner, and some Maker’s Mark after—two glasses, really, and if you saw the next-to-last episode of Farscape for this harrowing third season, you know why—and then tumbling into bed (you know how your ears get when you’re drunk, full of blood, red and a little tender and hot to the touch? You know how delicious it feels to lay one of those down on a chilly pillow?) and disturbing the cats and having her reach around and pull me over and chuckle, and, well. Off with my shirt, off with her pants, off with mine, what the hell, here we go with little preliminaries because, heck, neither of us needs ’em. Not last night.
But—for the men, in the audience, at least—you know how it can get to be too much? It’s a tricky thing, sometimes, more delicate than it first appears, and even if most of it’s hardwired into the backbrain it can still be rigorously meticulous. Savor the warmth, first, the envelopment, the heat and the slick creamy length of it, not at all like easing into a hot bath, but there you are. Test the waters and lay the groundwork with some slow, solid, long strokes (the Spouse will sometimes buck a little, here, trying to drive you faster; be firm. Setting off too soon will spoil the finish for both of you) and when you’re ready, well. You’ll know. The pace almost picks up by itself, and you’re off, hunting for the onramp into the inevitable—that moment when you know nothing you do will stave it off, not now. You won’t be able to stop.
—But I was talking about when it’s too much. Something haywires, a nerve spangs when it should have spung, I dunno. The sensation is painful suddenly, or not exactly; merely too much—as if some nerves have to be deadened through activity before others fire, and if those nerves aren’t deadened, you’ll feel it. And I did. Halting a moment, gasping, hitched above her on tired arms (we are talking meat-and-potatoes, here; forgive the unoriginality of our drunken imaginations). And it’s over, the spasm’s past, let’s pick it up again—but what’s this? We’re losing pressure, we’re losing sensation. The give and take ain’t giving any more. Crap. It’s goin’ down. Fuck. Or not, as the case may be. Out and over on your back and a bit of a cuddle after Kleenex all around and off to sleep.
Anyway. Trying to explain the sensation this morning, over shaken-out blankets. “It was like—like crucial bits of my brain were too drunk to figure out what was going on, and when the spasm of sensation hit, they figured, oh, hey, orgasm, let’s get the blood cells back out of that spongy tissue and call it a night, eh?”
“Oh,” she says.
“Reminded me of faking it in a weird sort of way.”
“Faking it?” she says, eyebrow cocked.
“Yeah,” I say, scooping up pillows and tossing them at the head of the bed.
“Guys can’t fake it,” she says.
“Sure they can,” I say. “With a condom? In the dark? Who’s gonna know? You get tired, or something, or you just don’t want to deal, and you don’t want to have the whole oh-I’m-sorry-you-didn’t conversation, so you just, you know, fake it.”
“You faked it,” she says, folding blankets at the foot of the bed.
“Oh, geeze. Not that often. A couple of times.”
“A couple of times.”
“Well, never with you.”
“Uh huh.”
“Honest.”
Every
now and then—
Thursday, 23:22
Salon reminds you of how they used to rock the house on a somewhat more regular basis.
Amy Benfer, for instance, did a good, solid interview with Judith Levine, about whose book you’ve heard me spout all too often lately. But that’s not what has me grinning and slapping my thigh and chortling with unadulterated glee.
No: it’s the fact they titled it “What’s
so bad about good sex?” and illustrated it with a post-coital shot
from Zeffirelli’s
Romeo
& Juliet
Oh,
right, almost forgot to mention this—
Tuesday, 23:23
Thanks to anyone who voted; “Giggling” shares the March Silver Clitoris with Jamie Joy Gatto’s “A Garden Called You.” Thanks especially to Gary, natch, for running the whole shebang in his inimitable fashion, and congrats to everyone, everyone in the whole wide world.
And yes. I already did the “kissing your sister” joke. —Even that one.
Free
speech, 1; Ashcroft, 0.
Tuesday, 14:32
Oh, it wasn’t John “Teats” Ashcroft’s fault. He didn’t pass an unbelievably stupid and patently unconstitutional law for election-year brownie points with the hoes at home who don’t care what you do so long as “the children” are safe from whatever monster is lurking under their imaginations this week. But Ashcroft’s name is on the case, so I’ll celebrate by flinging a middle finger in his face anyway: the Supremes shot down the CPPA. —At least, part of it. (If you’ve got Acrobat, here’s the PDF of the decision—)
But between this and the uproar over Levine’s book, I’m starting to lose faith in Massively Multiplayer Online Punditry. Everywhere you look, from MeFi to Plastic to Kuro5hin, you see the same ignorant, hysterical responses to basic fundamental bedrock truths about life: teens have sex. It’s okay—important, vital even—to talk about teens having sex. To ourselves, each other, to teens. It’s perfectly okay to make art—visual, narrative, interpretive, explicit, shocking, grotesque, didactic, disapproving, celebratory, bad, good—about teens having sex. Passing laws against this idea citing the utterly arbitrary and relatively recent cut-off age of 18 in the name of halting the phantom pedophile is at best absurd. Fiercely vociferous supporters of free speech—as one likes to imagine the fiercely vociferous participants of free-wheeling online discussion groups to be—ought to get this.
And yet, time and again, we see that ignorance and hysteria: UncleFes, say, over at MeFi:
If the Supreme Court won’t defend American children from sexual predators—despite the overwhelming evidence that pedophilia is commonplace, that active pedophiles are the primary consumers of child pronography, that pedophiles are sophisticated at hiding their crimes, and that sexual abuse as children in a leading contributory factor to adult violent criminal activity—it is then the responsibility of the citizenry to do so.
Roll that around for awhile while you consider what the realistic end-results of this decision will be.
One is at a loss, here. Is this a call for vigilantism? How on earth does making it illegal to film Romeo & Juliet (as the CPPA would explicitly have done; she’s 13, after all, says so in the script) “defend children from sexual predators”? In what way does this decision reinforce the sexual abuse of children? And where, oh where, are these so terribly commonplace pedophiles (aside from the ones on TV), and what does child porn—a very specific term, mind—have to do with teen sexuality?
boltman, in the same discussion, thinks it’s a shame that the justices didn’t agree with Rhenquist and assume the famous Miller test was merely “written” into the statute—which ignores the fact that the CPPA sidesteps Miller by banning any such depiction, and begs the rather fundamental question of if we’re going to assume Miller’s in force, then why the fuck do we need a new law at all?
Over at Plastic, the news is reported thusly: “Sickos Rejoice: SCOTUS Says ‘Virtual’ Kiddie Porn.” (One presumes they meant to finish, “Okay.”) While Plastic ordinarily goes for the ironic jugular, the discussion that follows is unusually banal, even for them, focussing wholly on the “virtual” child pornography that is a vanishingly small percentage of what the CPPA would have affected, and sparing very little thought as to the futile o’erreaching of this law and the havoc it would have wrought.
And I’m still reeling over the response to Kuro5hin’s intelligent and articulate defense and endorsement of Harmful to Minors, which focussed rather oddly on the idea that though the author had the right to say what she believes, she does not have the right to have it published. Which astonishingly, even breathtakingly sidesteps the point here: a respected academic publisher agreed to publish her book, and it’s the publisher being roundly condemned by the American Taliban for it. To the point of agreeing to institute an unprecedented review of their process of selecting manuscripts. This isn’t a fringe author crying foul when the marketplace rejects her work; this is a publisher being condemned for a book no one who’s condemning it has read. This shouldn’t be happening. Period.
—And all of it cloaked in the nauseating piety of “think of the children.” The ones whose voices are silenced by these laws. The ones whose valid questions about themselves and their bodies go unanswered. The ones whose sexual experimentation is being criminalized. The ones far more likely to be preyed on by a family member than a pedophile in an act that has everything to do with power and control and little to do with classic pedophilia—whether the phantom monster on the television set, or as it actually exists in the real world.
Fuck. Given all that; given the blows the First Amendment is taking in other arenas—well. Maybe my headline is overly optimistic.
Dear God—save me from Your followers. Oh Founding Fathers—save us from ourselves.
(—On the other hand, maybe I’m just tired. There’s people out there fighting the good fight on all these boards, and maybe it’s my natual pessimism making me think they’re more outnumbered than they are. One could take all this as a sign that speech is still free and vibrant and alive and kicking, were it not for the fact that one broad generalized side of the debate is trying to quash the very nature of free speech. Close with the usual Franklin quote, Nicholas, and get back to figuring out CSS.)
Father and son visit a porn set; father and son write about it. (The son at rather more length—it’s his gig, after all.) A fun piece. I liked it. —I’m wondering if some of the soullessness to be found in mainstream video porn whether just because you’re expecting it or actually because it’s really there isn’t perhaps due to the machinations and jerry-rigging necessary to get around the laws that are in place (supposedly) to keep the truly obscene from our delicate, tender eyes, but I’d be way the fuck out on a limb I know nothing about on that one, so I’ll just leave it as an airy perhaps and move on.
Rejiggering the site hereabouts to match transitional XHTML 1.0 standards and properly utilize CSS. At least, as I understand it, pathetic mortal that I am (thank God for the New York Public Library). Let me know if something looks weird, but it’ll probably (knock wood) be your browser: if you’re using Netscape 4.x or IE 5 on a Windows box (or anything earlier, natch), for the love of God update. Opera and (yes) Mozilla are excellent alternatives, and we presume you know where to find Explorer—5 for Mac is cool, and the most recent 6 for Windows doesn’t suck too hard.
And there’s that dam’ Amber essay. I swear to God, I’m working on it. Honest. Spare a warm though for Michael Dalton while you’re at it, folks.
Daze Reader turned up this link to Kuro5hin’s op-ed on Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors. I agree with Daze: the op-ed is excellent, and about the best you can say of the discussion that follows is it’s lengthy. —Just to add my own two cents: go help Scarleteen. Now. Whatever you can do. It’s a chance however vanishing to help some small segment of the next generation be less screwed up than the rest of us are about this most basic humanstuff.
—And keep those cards and letters comin’ to support the University of Minnesota Press.
So much of the wattage of the erotic realm is expended upon establishing a relentlessly enlightened, tasteful, educational and morally pioneering ethos that there is sometimes little energy left for eroticism.
Ha! I said as I read that. Indeed. It’s the first of many savvy remarks in this eminently savvy article on the current state of erotica, with some attempts at sketching out how we got where we are. (Even if he does use “image” as a transitive verb a tad too often—which is to say, at all.) From the insightful comparison of the current state of erotica marketing hype (redemptive, enlightening, uplifting) with the marketing hype of Playboy in its heady Golden Age (redemptive, enlightening, uplifting) to the stab he takes at explaining the rather impressive gender gap you find in the world of respectable upscale intellectual popularizers of sex and the sexual, it’s just a good, solid article—nothing blindingly brilliant, but all of it in one place and neatly summed up with a snark or two.
Theft? Oh. See, I stole this link shamelessly from Debra, and I’m going to go it one better and steal this one, too: a decent and (ye Gods!) even-handed account of the brouhaha over Judith Levine’s evil, evil, evil and unbelievably necessary, unutterably vital book from the Paper of Record, the Grey Lady her own dam’ self. Once more, I’ll urge y’all to take a look at what it’s about and see if you think this is too evil to be thought, too radioactive to be published, and grounds to have the staff of the University of Minnesota Press shitcanned for criminal irresponsibility; if not, drop them a line and tell them how cool they are for sticking up for such little things as the First Amendment and academic freedom and common sense and the right to call foul when you see it. They need to hear a positive word or three right now, methinks.
And while you’re at it, go thank Debra for giving me these great links to give to you...
Anything
can be sexualized.
Sunday, 13:36
The principal of a Catholic high school in Canada wants the girls to stop dressing like, well, Catholic school girls.
There’s really nothing more to say, is there.
nicholas urfé
indigo • the
james sisters • fripperies
links • about
• ftp
archives
•
