FunctionalAmbivalent

Sex Day: Halloweenies

WARNING: The following blog posting contains information about, descriptions of, and jokes obviously related to sex. If you are offended by information about, descriptions of, and jokes obviously related to sex, one can only wonder why you even have an Internet connection. But here you are, reading headlong toward something you know you're not going to like even though you've been warned. One can only wonder what else it is you don't like or approve of that your force yourself to endure. Perhaps some of those things will appear in this posting. Perhaps that's why you're continuing to read. Maybe you're into that.

Oh well, since there's  really nothing else I can do, I guess I'll just welcome you to a special Halloween edition of Sex Day and say, "Whatever carves your pumkin." Come on in and make yourselves at home. Just keep your hands where I can see them and we'll get along fine.

If, like me, you're not much of a man, you probably spend most of your free time trying to figure out how to broach certain subjects with your wife or significant other. Or even, for that matter, with the MILF over in the marketing department or the cutie down at the end of the bar. You look across the room at her -- whoever she is -- and you think:

I should just tell her what I'm fantasizing about. She'll think it's hot.

But then the part of your brain that was installed by your mother shouts:

She will not!!! She'll think it's icky, and it is! Nice girls don't like icky things like that. It's like when you put the bug in Holly Heiden's hair. You thought it was nice but she had to go away to a convent school for two years and it just ruined her mother.

So you sit arguing with yourself and wishing that you could be like the guys in the movies who swagger over and say just the right thing and end up with the girl-of-the-moment bent over the nearest toilet tank with her panties stuffed in her mouth to keep her ecstatic screams from waking up the whole neighborhood.

But you never do it. You never get up and go down there -- even if the woman at the end of the bar is your wife who you've been married to for 43 years, who you've seen give birth to three children and whose breasts are no longer in the same time zone as they were when you signed the marriage papers -- and just blurt it out:

I want to fuck you in a taxicab while the Persian driver watches in the rear view mirror!

It's part of being a guy. Women tell us all the time how we don't communicate. What they don't realize is that we're not communicating because we're afraid that if we did, you'd make us live out in the garage.

Snicker if you want, ladies, but you're no better. You're nursing your dark secrets, too. You may not be the mass of jiggling goulash that the average guy is, but you're a psychological mess, too. Mom wasn't just screwing up your brothers; she did a job on you, too. You spent the first five years of your life focused almost entirely on wearing the right pair of clean cotton panties on the right day of the week. There was a big hunk of your girlhood when your brain could only think one thing, over and over in a seemingly endless loop:

Keep you legs together or someone will see your underpants keep your legs together or someone will see your underpants keep your legs together or someone will see your underpants keep your legs together...

And the thing is: It was true. You're mom wasn't wrong, even if she was nuts. In this one instance, she was right, because we boys were always out there, lurking and looking. And if your legs had parted for just one second, we would have seen your underpants and we would have run straight to our friends and told them what we saw, and every boy in school would have thought the exact same thing.

I gotta see that, too.

And then you wouldn't be the nice girl your mother wanted you to be. You'd suddenly be the kind of girl, at least in the eyes of all the boys on playground, who opened her legs once in a while so we could peek in.

That's why you're huddled down at the other end of the bar, just as fucked up in your own way as we are in ours. We want something but can't ask, and if we did and it happened to be something you wanted, too ("Does the Persian cabdriver have smoldering black eyes?"), you wouldn't be able to admit it to us. Because there's always that fear: He/She will think I'm a pervert.

So we sit, men and women metaphorically at opposite ends of the same bar, miserable, lonely and unfulfilled.

What all of us need, what every single one of us is crying out for, is some way we could ask and answer without risk of embarrassment. It could be a place, a safe zone. Or it could be a time, a moment of Jubilee when do-overs are limitless and people really do forgive and forget. We need a place or a time like that when we can admit to each other what we really are: Disgusting half-beasts barely constrained by thousands of years of Western Civilization and opportunistic infections. We're women who don't deserve the clean cotton panties we were awarded and men who can't touch the fuzz on a peach without thinking,"mmmm, shaved."

If there were a place and a time like that...man, oh, man, that would be something. I'm not asking for a lot here. Just one day a year.

Halloween began more than 2,000 years ago among the Celts who were, back then, not much more than animals. The Celts didn't need an excuse to act depraved. They were pagans, after all, howling at the moon and rutting in the mud.

Every fall, after the harvest, the Celts threw a festival of celebration and dread when they really, really blew out all the stops. The Celtic Halloween was a festival of the unknown, of death and planetary movement when the spirits were thought to return to Earth to make mischief.

During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Suitably dressed, the Celts gave way to their worst fears, that the end of the summer might mean a world frozen forever, a world without food or warmth or, eventually, life itself. It was a holiday of nightmare, and the only power the Celts had over that nightmare was to engage so robustly in life that it would chase death away. Over the centuries the Celtic Halloween rituals grew weirder and more ornate, until there were priests who specialized in the fall festival, who spent the entire year preparing for it and dreaming up new and stranger things to do to ward off death.

When the Celts were overrun by the Romans the harvest festival changed. The Romans injected their own Pantheon of gods into the Celtic culture, along with a concept -- Saturnalia -- of depraved sexual celebration. The Romans were like that, always looking for excuses to drink a bunch of wine and  deflower a virgin or two, and if the excuse was a festival that was part of the heritage of the land the conquered, no big deal. The festival might have become outwardly Roman, but for the conquered Celts the central theme of the rite stayed the same: Evil nearly triumphant, threatening their very survival, run-off by gluttony of all kinds.

In the 9th Century, Christianity conquered the Celts and immediately went to work sapping the Celtic culture of everything that was even vaguely fun. Since there was nothing more fun than the fall festival, the Christians took aim at it.

Christianity has spread most effectively when it absorbs -- and is absorbed into -- the cultures it is slowly conquering. So it was with the pagan cultures of northern Europe. As Christianity spread, it co-opted the traditions and events that defined each culture. For example, there is nothing in the historical record indicating that Christ was born in December; his birthday was assigned to December 25 so that it would conflict with pagan Winter Solstice celebrations, offering an approved-by-God recreational alternative for bored-out-of-their-minds Druids. Before you know it, everyone was celebrating the Christchild rather than the sun reaching the Tropic of Capricorn.

So it was with Halloween. The Conquering Christians moved into the Celtic lands and, instead of pissing everyone off by canceling the party, announced:

Look, we know you love dressing up in costumes and getting wild. But our festival is way, way better than that. Come to our party instead.

And so was born All Saints Day, the first of November or -- depending on whose calendar you use -- the first Sunday after Pentacost. All Saints Day is a remembrance of Christian martyrs, and the owner's manual says that all good Christians should observe the holiday by staying up all night to pray. One can only wonder what the pagans must have thought the first time attended the All Hallows Eve prayer service that preceded the first Christian Halloween.

FIRST PAGAN: They call this a party? Where are the fires?
SECOND PAGAN: Why isn't anyone dancing naked?
FIRST PAGAN: You want I should go back to the hut and bring my wolf head for the priest to wear?

For that reason, Halloween never really departed its pagan roots. The pagans may have converted to Christ, but they kept the wolf costumes in a trunk in the attic and brought them out once a year just for the hell of it. That's what Halloween remains to this day: One day of harmless pagan fun. You can't spend five minutes on the Internet or ten minutes at a magazine stand or even walk through a drug store without realizing we're still pagans. For all the trappings of civilization and all the hectoring of Christianity and all the depredations of communicable diseases, we still need our once a year naked dance around the fire.

Four years ago Linda surprised Travis...On Halloween, once the sun set, Travis was instructed to wait for his wife in the guest room with the lights turned off. When Linda arrived, she was dressed in a flimsy teddy and pretended she had just met Travis.

Because, of course, lots of women wear flimsy teddies when they're meeting complete strangers. It happens to me all the time at professional conferences.

She remained in character for the next several hours, seducing him and acting like it was the first time they were having sex.

Which is not to say, apparently, that he prematurely ejaculated and she hit him with both fists while sobbing that he had taken advantage of her.

The entire experience was highly erotic for Travis and he appreciated how much thought and effort Linda had put into the evening. At first Linda thought it was her husband who was receiving the erotic treat, but she ended up enjoying the experience as much as her husband.

There is absolutely no reason why Travis and Linda couldn't role play every single night of the year. The slippery-slope moralists remind us every day that that's what's going to happen. One peak at pornography and we're rapists; one puff of weed and we're heroin addicts; one night of frivolous, non-standard sex -- even with our legally sanctioned spouses -- and we're out the open door to find multiple partners, possibly of different races than our own. There's no going back, the prudes tell us. Except that there is.

Linda and Travis decided to make their erotic role-play an annual event. The following year it was Travis’s turn to seduce his wife and fulfill one of her fantasies. Both joked about how much freedom they experienced while playing the role of seducer. Becoming someone else in those moments allowed each of their imaginations to expand in new and exciting ways.

That's it; that's all Travis and Linda need. Once a year and they're back to real life. Oh, there will always be a few who want to make depravity a full-time job. They join swinger clubs and and hang out in dark bars looking for a hook-up, who die lonely and ravaged by disease. But most of us blow-out on Halloween and then are perfectly happy to put our sexual training wheels back on. Like the pagans of old, we've converted to the modern world with one caveat: Don't take away our fall festival. That night, leave us alone.

Except, or course, no one's going to leave us along for even a minute. There are too many people out there trying to screw up the fun.

The Christians are still out there, though not in force. My own church canceled its Wednesday night service this year so that people could stay home, hand out candy and make sure the dogwoods didn't end up hung with toilet paper. There's a Baptist church up the street that holds a huge Halloween Party for its neighborhood, and if Baptists are OK with something you know it's not a big deal anymore. But there are still those who take offense at costumes and revelry. I, personally, know people who will not allow their children to dress in costumes or to trick or treat. If you read the comments on this page, you will find that there are people who are horrified that society takes Halloween so lightly:

I was appalled at how many Christians think Halloween is harmless...I am grieved at how we are desensitizing our children to the things that are an abomination to our Holy God.

Whether Halloween is an abomination to God or not is a matter of opinion, and the only guy with an opinion that matters isn't talking. So we're on our own, left to our own self-indulgent decision-making processes. And all you have to do is walk up the aisle at the corner drugstore to discover what we've decided: It may be evil, but Halloween is a great marketing opportunity.

There is, of course, no kind of fun that marketing can't screw up. Consider for a moment the difference between Woodstock and Woodstock 2. Woodstock, held in 1969, was muddy and disorganized, a mob scene of naked dancing and sex barely concealed beneath sopping blankets. Woodstock 2 was well organized and sponsored by corporations with deep pockets and an apprently endless supply of porta-potties, and no one who went had much fun at all.

And so it is with modern Halloween. Mass produced and corporatized, it's become a festival of high-margin costume and decoration sales that seems almost designed to disappoint.

There are times when I'm frustrated by the psychological complexity of women and times when I'm grateful for it. In the case of Halloween, I'm grateful. While that complexity may make it harder to convince my own, personal wife that she should dress up as a female member of the board of directors who never wears panties to meetings and really needs to learn her place in the world, it is also the only thing that has saved Halloween from ruin.

Women's fantasies, you see, aren't as simple to fulfill through costumery as are men's.

It will not surprise you to know that there are trained, professional scientists who have studied this phenomenon. It will also not surprise you that their published results are almost impossible to understand, that being a requirement of most research grants:

The grantee promises to deliver a report that no normal person can possibly read and comprehend.

In this case, the research on differences between men's and women's fantasies is as extensive as it is indecipherable. See if you can make sense of this for example:

Whether gender differences in sexuality should be attributed to distal evolutionary factors or proximal sociocultural factors remains a controversial and contentious topic. However, as Oliver and Hyde (1993) noted in their meta-analytic review of gender differences in sexuality, evolutionary psychology and sociocultural theories actually agree on a number of predictions. For example, both theories generally predict that, on average, women will be more cautious than men in choosing sex partners and less interested in sex for its own sake outside of any romantic or relationship context.

What that means, I think, it that it's a lot easier to make a costume out of polyester and foam rubber that fulfills men's fantasies than it is to make one that fulfills women's. Men typically fantasize about women in roles easily depicted through wardrobe: Hookers, maids, dominatrixes, naughty secretaries in need of a good paddling, nuns. You can walk into stores across America and buy a costume for women that looks, based on the packaging art, as if it will turn any woman into a supermodel panting for various kinds of degrading sex. At the Walgreen's near where I live, I found witch outfits with miniskirts and fishnet stockings, a devil costume that consisted of a rip-away leotard and thigh-highs, three variations on a frilly-skirted French maid, and a one-size-fits-all harem get-up that fit in a package not much bigger than a greeting card envelope.

And I know, through experience, that when they are out of the packages and onto my hot, long-legged spouse, they will look like ugly pajamas from K-Mart. And it won't matter, because I am a man and I am a pig.

But look at the costumes for men, right there at the drug store. If women's costumes are all about fulfilling men's fantasies, men's costumes seem to be entirely about letting men complete the costume requirement without going to a lot of effort. At the self-same Walgreens, the available men's costumes were: Ghost, escaped convict, Grim Reaper, and football player. None of the costumes involved inordinate exposed flesh or particular emotional commitment. And, it's safe to say, none of them involved fulfilling women's fantasies.

The natural explanation for this disparity is Functional Ambivalent's First Rule of the Sexes, previously alluded to:

Men are self-centered pigs.

And we are, but in this case I think the reality is more subtle than that. Fact is, the reason we don't even try to put together good costumes is that women are psycho-sexually complicated. It's nearly impossible for a man to dress up as the fantasy object of most women, so we don't even try. Women fantasize about men in roles that are not defined by wardrobe: Protectors, responsible providers, loving fathers, guys with huge penises. It's a lot easier to manufacture, say, a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader outfit than it is to put together a convincing Denzel Washington costume.

CLERK: That'll be nine thousand dollars.
WOMAN: I'll take two.

The Halloween marketing machine hasn't figured that one out yet, but I have no doubt it's trying.

The part of the Halloween machine that is hardest to endure, however, is part that tries to take our pagan misbehavior and turn it into something good and healthy. Never in the history of mankind have there been more counselors, advice columnists, cable television hosts and other nitwit busybodies who want to advise us how to live our lives. And every single one of them ran out of original material years ago and are left recycling the same tired banalities. That means that every year they dig into the banality files and bring out the psychobabble advising us to turn our pagan fun into one more opportunity to talk about how much we need need to seek opportunities to talk.

Take, for example, Ask April. I don't know who April is and I'm probably not the kind of guy who'd ask her much of anything except directions off her website and on to someplace more interesting, but April is apparently an advice columnist. Who isn't, these days? And April, like every other advice columnist in the world, is dispensing wisdom about Halloween.

Putting on a costume gives people "psychological permission" to behave differently than they normally do. Wearing something sexy, silly, mysterious or scary evokes feelings in the costume wearer -- and the partner of the costume wearer -- and these evoked feelings can lead to new behaviors like silliness, sexiness, edginess, etc. * The downside of costume-wearing is if it's a crutch for not being yourself, and the behavior becomes addictive and "rut-like".

So: You should worry while you're having fun. You should worry that you're going to want to have more fun, and that fun could become a habit and the next thing you know you're happy and in no need of advice from April or anyone else. And we can't have that, now, can we?

Near where I live there is a big box store that has gone out of business, and every holiday season its 50,000 square feet are filled with whatever kind of crap that particular holiday markets. (Technically, from a marketing standpoint there are only three holidays a year: Christmas, the Fourth of July, and Halloween.) For the last month, the big box has been stuffed with disposable Halloween junk. There are decorations and tchotchkas and costumes of all types at all price points, from $12 Ninja Turtle holdovers to $300 Viking helmets.

If you go into the Halloween store, you will note that it takes almost no time for children to pick their costumes and forever for the adults. In ten minutes little Mary has become a fairy princess and Jimmy is a soldier with a toy gun, but it takes two hours for mom and dad to get through the complicated negotiation of who's going to be what for Halloween. That negotiation is not necessarily with each other. More than anything, each person negotiates with himself.

How far will I go this year?  What am I going to reveal of my true self?

The reason it takes so long is simple: Like the strangers looking across a barroom at each other and the pagans dancing around a bonfire, mom and dad are consumed with fear and excitement. They know that they have to hit just the right mark or their Halloween will be a failure.

Fear and sex have had a complex, intertwined evolutionary history, ever since our amphibious ancestors first mated ecstatically in the midst of fearsome predators, up to our modern desire to expose ourselves in risky places, from the Internet to the Oval Office. Hot sex and a touch of fear--risk, danger, taboo--seem to go together.

So we have the complicated and subtle dance.

I have a friend who is an accountant. He's a young father, rushing away from work to coach soccer and Little League. He drives a minivan and doesn't mind.

The other day, we were talking about Halloween. I brought it up, because I knew he had small children and I was curious what the kids are wearing these days. After telling me about his cute daughter and rambunctious son, he added almost in a whisper:

My wife bought a Halloween costume. It's kind of a police uniform, but sexy. She got handcuffs.

He's going to have a fun Halloween, because his children are young enough to go to bed early and his wife will still be wearing her sexy cop outfit and the living room couch or maybe even a straight=backed chair ("She got handcuffs!") will beckon.

Out there in the world, the marketers and busybodies are working as hard as they can. They've been out there in one form or another for thousands of years trying to ruin our Autumnal pagan celebration.

Don't let them.

So the Point Is, We're Supposed To Feel Guilty

The folk who inhabit the cultural right wing of the Republican Party were dealt a blow -- ahem --  with the publication of a study that indicates that 95% of people have pre-marital sex.  Even before the birth control pill and dirty words on television, people were having sex out of wedlock.

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

Apparently, things have not changed so much that western civilization is really threatened by what is clearly entirely human behavior, despite what the prigs say.  Just as clearly, concerns about rampant immorality and kids today and keep the hell offa my lawn have a lot more to do with the nature of the people doing the complaining than they do with what's really happening.

I, Personally, Would Look Under Tiny Skirts and In the Well Tailored Pants of Attractive Middle Aged Women

It's always something with the Japanese.  Whether it's restaurants where dateless momma's boys are treated like nerd-Gods by hired teenage girls or bars decorated like public transportation where customers are invited to grope the female help, Japanese perversion finds a refreshingly honest and usually commercial expression. 

So it's not surprising that the Japanese have turned a fetish for panties into an online game that anyone can play.  Called "Pantsu Getta" ("get panties"), it's a kind of treasure hunt for panties that allows women to turn men into drooling idiots, which isn't really that much of an accomplishment, if you think about it.  According to this report on MSN News:

A game starts when a woman posts a message announcing that she has hidden some undies in a certain area. Anybody interested in searching for the undergarments can post questions, which the woman can answer, and theoretically provide more specific clues about the location of the lingerie. When somebody finds a pair of panties, they're supposed to report all the details on the same bulletin board so that anybody still searching will know they can stop.

Men who play this game are called "panty getters," and there appears to be an evolving hierarchy among them based on their facility at tracking down hidden panties.  One day there may be famous panty getters, men who are respected all across Japan for their ability to find panties hidden in trash cans, under park benches, and in niches behind advertising in subway stations.  There will be TV coverage and product endorsements and...no, there probably won't be.

For now, it's a largely solitary endeavor, though men do apparently team up to help find the panties more quickly.  (I find this really perverse.  When they find them do they cheer and hug and pat each other on the ass?)  Competition is sometimes so fierce that there are threats of violence when more than one panty getter arrives at the same spot at the same time.

Pantsu Getta is not, according to its aficionados, about sex.  As one panty getter puts it:

"The more you do it, the less the whole thing becomes about the panties. You start enjoying the thrill of the treasure hunt, just like you did when you were a kid. If you want to meet a woman, there are plenty of places you can go. If it's just a sexual thing, there are plenty of places you can go for that, too. But, for the sheer pride and self-satisfaction you get at having found a pair of hidden panties can only be experienced through actually finding a pair of panties. Think about it. Is there anything on earth, apart from money, likely to inspire such frantic searches as these as women's panties?

Wouldn't it be better to find the panties while they were on an actual woman?

Sex Day: Answering the Question We All Need an Answer To

WARNING: The following blog entry contains information about, descriptions of, and possibly secretions from sexual activity.  If you are not interested in things like that, I'm very sorry.  Please go here where there is no danger of sex breaking out anytime soon, except perhaps among the custodial staff.  On the other hand, if you're human and not completely repressed, you might want to read on.  It's Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent.  That's right, after what seems like forever, we're back to the subject matter that causes blog traffic to skyrocket and my own self-esteem to plummet.  Is this really what it all comes to?  Writing about boobs and the women they're cavorting with?  Apparently.  A word to the wise: I haven't done this in a while. I might be a little rusty.

If you spend your life researching sex on the Internet like I do, you've no doubt run into the following question:

Am I normal? 

That question is everywhere.  Here's a website for women that describes how common the "am I normal" question is:

According to our expert sexologist, “Am I normal ?” is your most common question, right from teens through to maturity.

Sometimes it seems as if sex experts were created so that people could ask them if what people do is normal.  People reveal their deepest, darkest sexual insecurities so that a complete stranger can pat them on the shoulder and say, "Don't worry.  You're normal."  Put a sex expert on a street corner and within minutes some guy's gonna pull up -- probably in a leased convertible -- and ask something like this:

I can only maintain an erection if my wife dresses like Brent Musberger.  Am I normal?

Or:

I eat my wife's brassieres for breakfast with maple syrup.  Am I normal?

And that's pretty much what happens, because we live in a time when people tell their deepest secrets to strangers in grocery lines.  But if you actually search the Internet for people seeking validation that their all-consuming perversion -- whatever it may be -- is normal, you'll find an interesting thing.  Normal isn't what it used to be.

I consider myself to be a sex expert because I write about sex on the Internet.  And speaking as a sex expert, and if I may be so bold as to speak for other sex experts, I want to say this: Frankly, people aren't all that interesting. 

As unique as everyone may imagine he or she is, when you're on the receiving end of people's sexual issues they all pretty much start to sound the same.  It's tiresome listening to incredibly stupid questions, suffering through people's inability to discuss sex without  giggling, and -- most of all -- all this "are we normal" stuff.  Sex experts everywhere get the same crap all the time and -- sincerely, from the heart -- we don't care anymore if you're normal or not.  The culture has changed.  Everything is normal.  We're conditioned, no matter how perverse something may be, to nod our heads and say, "Yes, you're perfectly normal" so you'll feel good about yourself and recommend us to your friends.  We've got kids to feed.

In this Salon article -- titled, surprisingly, "Am I Normal?" -- a group of professional sexologists laments the tedium of your obsession with how normal you may or may not be:

Speaking of old standbys, everything Americans asked about 40 years ago, they're still asking about today: questions dealing with penis size, premature ejaculation, inability to reach orgasm, losing one's virginity, abortion, contraception, the G spot. Is it OK to masturbate? How can I meet someone? Why does he watch so much porn? How can I get my partner to try something new in bed? And any number of fantasies or experiences that end with "So, what do you think, am I normal?"

That's probably not how you think of your sexual issues, as "old standbys," but there you are. 

The distress that professional sex counselors feel at the sameness of the public's pubic concerns is severe, as Salon's professional sexers said:

The columnists estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the questions they receive are ones they've seen before.

As a result, sex experts have moments when what they really want to do is just be rid of everyone in the world who worries about whether they're normal or not.  Take, for example, Dr. Stuart Flanagan, who has a show on the British Broadcast Corporation's Radio 1.  Dr. Stu has the hardest job in the whole universe because he's in charge of answering sex question asked by British People.  If it were possible to put training wheels on sex, Brits would do it.  British people don't ask the kinds of questions that even other Brits are interested in, let alone a sex expert like Dr. Stu.  Here's a real question Dr. Stu recently confronted:

I had unprotected sex two weeks ago. Last week I had a period, but could I still be pregnant?

The answer to which is, "Of course you couldn't be pregnant, you stupid git.  Leave me alone."  Except that Dr. Stu, being a professional sex expert bound by all kinds of ethical regulations, isn't allowed to lash out at his phone-in patients.  But how he must long for an interesting question, like, for example:

When my wife is screwing our next door neighbor, my dick gets so hard it starts to emit a high-pitched noise.  Do you think there's a way that I could manipulate my level of sexual excitement in order to use my penis to make music?

For years Dr. Stu has given earnest, reasonable answers.  That is, he gave earnest, reasonable answers up until he got sick and tired of all the "am I normal" questions.  In a last, desperate effort to change the subject to something more interesting, Dr. Stu gathered all of his stupid "am I normal" questions in one place to answer them all at once, apparently in the hope that no one else would ever ask him a question again.  The combined, dripping-with-sarcasm meta-questions go like this:

Help me... my penis doesn't look normal! It's only three inches long when erect/looks too small/reminds me of a tinned carrot/bends to the right/bends to the left/is too thick/is not thick enough/won't look right for a partner...

And so on.

It didn't work.  People kept calling and writing and sending email to Dr. Stu, wanting him to tell them they're normal, even though he'd already told them they were normal.  And so, even now, he spends his days telling people they're normal.  But you can be sure: He isn't happy about it.

As you can imagine, a significant percentage of this has to do with penises.  Penises are Problem #1 when it comes to sex, and the normality of any given penis seems always in question.  If it weren't for penises, sex would be perfect because men would compensate for their lack of genitalia by orally gratifying women, which is the secret of good sex, at least according to the women I know.  Alas, men have penises.  And as any keen observer realized long ago, if there's a penis around -- whether its their own or, horrifyingly, someone else's -- men are preoccupied with it. 

Men worry about their penises more than anyone else in the world worries about anything.  They worry about their penises more than they worry about balancing their checking accounts, which is why so many men own powerful cars and boats but have mailboxes filled with overdraft notices from banks.

It's no accident that Dr. Stu's first question out of the box (metaphorically speaking) was a compendium of familiar penis issues.  And it's also no accident that Dr. Stu gave an answer that was, in its own way, frightfully blunt:

There's no such thing as a normal penis – one study in America classified 111 different types of penis shapes and sizes!

I want to take a moment here to discuss this "research" classifying 111 different penis types.  This is, just for the record, the first sex-related study I've ever run across that I want no part of.  I don't want to have my penis classified, and i don't want to classify anyone's penis.  I also don't want to overhear this conversation through the front porch window.

Kid 1: What does your dad do for a living?
Kid 2: He classifies penises.
Kid 1: I don't think it would be any fun to have a secret penis.

A quick bit of Google research shows that we are a society overrun by penis classifiers, and that there is great disagreement among those penis classifiers about how many classes of penis there really are.  The previously mentioned "111 different types" of penises statistic comes from a Pro Familia study that is in a foreign language and is thus indecipherable to real Americans, while this abstract in English ("The Language of the Bible") indicates there are far fewer basic penis types.

Four different penis types can be distinguished, which have parallels in numerous other laniatorean families. The possible evolution of these penis forms and the phylogenetic relationships between the taxa are discussed.

I, personally, did not know it was possible to make genitalia so uninteresting.  Leave it to science.

Anyway, Dr. Stu's statement -- "There's no such thing as a normal penis" -- is an important one.  What he's saying, really, is that abnormality is normal, because we're all different.

Still, despite Dr. Stu's efforts to normalize abnormality, men overwhelm Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards with questions about their penises.  All over the Internet, men are wondering if they and their little friend are normal.  You can read 5,000 sex columns -- and I have -- without coming across anyone wondering if anything really perverse is normal or not.  But everywhere you look, some guy has a minor cosmetic eccentricity to his dick and is nearing psychological collapse.

To be fair, occasionally one of the male-genitalia-obsessives does come up with something interesting.  Consider this intriguing  headline from Dr. Drew's website:

Is my testicle abnormal?

Now, most men -- and I'm assuming this corespondent is a man, rather than some kind of female trophy hunter -- have more than one testicle. Given that, one might expect Dr. Drew to come up with an interesting answer, like:

My God, man!  You're a freak!

But no, not Dr. Drew. Tool that he is, Dr. Drew goes for the responsible sex expert answer:

It is something that needs to be checked further by a health-care provider.

Do you think?

We're so concerned about whether we're normal or not that there's a website, IsItNormal.com, that exists entirely for people to anonymously ask if what they do is normal.  The topics wander far afield (" Is it normal to think that the Asian woman in Grey's anatomy is REALLY ugly?") but eventually come back -- as all things do -- to penises:

I'm James and I'm 14. I'm really concerned a 4 to 5 inch penis just isn't enough to satisfy my girlfriend. I'd really appreciate any helpful comments ASAP.

He got helpful comments, all right.  Like this, I'm guessing from a woman living in close proximity to and thoroughly sick of a penis or two:

If you strech your penis in five minute intervals for an hour, it will grow up to one inch. This is due to the elongating on the muscle.

And if you do it enough, James, you might just rip your penis right off, and then you won't have to worry about whether it's normal or not.

I hear you out there, women.  You think I can't but I do.  I hear you snickering.  You're so smug about men and their wieners, what with your genitalia safely hidden behind not only significant folds of skin and hair, but also panties, blue jeans, crossed legs, folded hands, and angry fathers and husbands.  But you're not off the hook here, either.  You've got plenty of your own questions about your own normality.  So many questions, in fact, that sex experts are tired of hearing from you, too.

All women that I know personally and those whom I have met and chatted with have at one time wondered if their genitalia are normal. Is my vagina too big?, are my lips too long? do I smell bad? — the list goes on.

Women ask variations on these questions all the time, building to a whiny crescendo: Am I normal?  Cosmo's professional sex expert spends about half her life comforting women who have apparently never met a man and are thus able to convince themselves that what they're hiding between their legs is somehow unattractive.  Being Cosmo readers, these women have highlighted the appearance of their visible parts by removing all traces of hair, leading to questions like this:

My vulva looks really weird because one lip is longer and more wrinkled-looking than the other. I have been putting off doing anything sexual with my boyfriend because I'm embarrassed about it.

I, personally, guarantee that no man has ever rejected a woman because her labia were asymmetrical. 

Women have questions not only about how their genitalia look, but how they behave at certain times of the lunar cycle.  Because I am a normal man, I'm afraid of women's menstrual cycles and will not deal with them here, ever.  I'll leave it to this woman to answer those kind of "am I normal" questions.  And I will not make jokes about periods, either, because that's a minefield with no safe path out. 

And even if we could all be reasonable adults about this monthly business, talking frankly and maturely about what is, after all, an entirely natural and beautiful bodily function, I wouldn't do it.  I know how that works.  We get to the point where we can discuss it maturely and without cringing or falling to the floor and whimpering, and the next thing you know we're expected to buy tampons at a public drug store.  So excuse me if, when the subject comes up, I act like I'm feeling a little dizzy.

With all of our doubts about the normality of our parts, the professional Internet sex expert answer never varies: You're normal already. Every warty, distended one of you is normal. Now go out and put your parts to work and don't come back until you come up with some more interesting questions.

What's remarkable about researching "Am I Normal" questions is that there are almost none that come from people who have serious normality issues.  I've stayed up the better part of two nights searching Internet sex sites for this post and I didn't find a single "am I normal" question from someone who seriously isn't normal.  You'd think, given the kind of stuff you see on Court TV every night, that the world would be crawling with creeps on the verge of abducting everyone they meet to be sex slaves, every damned one of them asking, "Am I normal?" and getting the same answer: Of course you are.

Over those two nights I've developed a theory: People who are sexually abnormal don't have any desire to be normal.  These people, in fact, take pride in their abnormality and don't want some smartypants sex expert -- Dr. Drew or Dr. Stu or anyone else -- to tell them they're normal.  Who wants to be normal?

Here's the interesting part: The people who have come under scrutiny, these days, are the people who would only a few years ago have been considered normal.  I'm talking about people who make love at night in the missionary position behind closed doors, who close the windows so the neighbors won't hear and worry that the kids might wake up.  Perfectly nice people, really, who pucker when they kiss and send Valentines to each other in the mail even though they're married and live together.  In our modern world, they're the ones who worry whether they're normal or not.

Take away all the neurotic questions about penises and vulvas (vulvae?) and what you're left with is Rob and Laura Petrie. (Admit it: You were wondering about the picture, weren't you?)  While the rest of us are out there having oral sex in cars behind gas stations, acting out chance meeting fantasies in hotel bars, or wrapping each other in black latex -- all perfectly normal, according to sex experts -- the "am I normal" questions that are starting to appear on websites are coming more and more from people who worry that they're abnormal because they're so normal.  Here's one site with a whole section titled "Am I Sexually Normal," that is packed with questions like these:

Sex every two weeks is enough for me.  Am I normal?
I need tenderness when we make love.  Am I normal?
I don't like acting out my fantasies.  Am I normal?
I don't have fantasies.  Am I normal?
I don't make much noise when I have sex.  Am I normal?

I bet it's hard for a lot of sex experts to answer those questions, straight up.  I bet our definition of sexual fulfillment has spanned so vast a landscape of variety that those who stay close to home are automatically suspect.  Normal?  Maybe, technically, but come on: You've got to get your kink on.  Normal people experiment with bondage.  They take it up the ass.  They throw their heads back and scream. 

All across America there are women wearing nighties to bed and men pecking them on the lips and rolling over for a good night's sleep, and in the backs of their minds they're asking themselves: Am I normal?  Shouldn't I at least occasionally grab her by the hair and tell her what she's going to do and how she's going to like it?  Shouldn't I every now and then drive a spike heel into my husband's chest and growl that he's a girlie man?  Should we invite the pastor over for a three way?

It is to those people that this particular Sex Day posting is dedicated.  And it is to them that I, as an Internet sex expert say, in all sincerity: Whatever floats your boat.  You're as normal as I am.

That's it for Sex Day!  We here at FunctionalAmbivalent hope you enjoyed it, and we hope it won't be six months until we enjoy it together again.  Maybe Sex Day would happen more often if you'd just put something a little slinky once in a while, just to let me know you're still interested.

Have a good weekend.

Adding Poignancy to the Time-Honored Phrase "I'd Rather Die Than Do That"

Oral sex causes cancer, at least according to a Swedish study.

The same virus that is behind uteral cancer is now thought to be linked to tonsillary cancer, and scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet say changed sexual habits and more oral sex are part of the problem.

During the last 30 years the rate of tonsil cancer has increased dramatically in Sweden despite a significant decrease in smoking.  During that same period, apparently, oral sex has increased in popularity.

If there's good news in this study it's this:

1. HPV-caused tonsil cancer is easier to treat than other tonsil cancers
2. You're not at as much risk of getting the cancer if you're monogamous
3. No women I know read Swedish medical journals

 

While 40% of Us Fantasize About Sex With a Celebrity, That Celebrity Is Almost Never Carrot Top

A British poll reveals who we're thinking about during the sexual fantasies we're having in those quiet moments when we're not fully engaged in emotionally meaningful conversation with our spouses or significant others:

Some 47 percent of women fantasize about firefighters, while almost 54 percent of men dream about women dressed in a nurse's uniform.

By contrast, only 1.7 percent of women confessed to having fantasies about politicians, while 6.5 percent of men fantasize about traffic wardens.

The big losers, according to the poll: Only 0.8% of women fantasize about milkmen.  Are there still milkmen, or is fantasizing about milkment like fantasizing about rosy-cheeked chambermaids in Victorian garb who need to be taken out to the barn and thrashed...oh, sorry.  I lost myself for a moment.

No figures were released on how many women fantasize about sex with middle aged fat guys who work in boring offices, a constituency I -- for some reason -- feel great empathy with.

Come As You Are

To raise money to promote safe sex, the Center for Sex & Culture is holding a Masturbate-A-Thon.  People of all inclinations -- though mostly those inclined to masturbate in public -- will gather at the Center's San Francisco headquarters to whack off for the benefit of all mankind. 

The pledges will be promised for the amount of time the pledgees spend masturbating. It's a group safer-sex event, a way to celebrate self-pleasure, and a fundraiser for the Center for Sex & Culture, the host organization.

Those who merely want to watch can, on a space-available basis, for $50 each.

If you'd prefer to masturbate in the privacy of your own home -- or perhaps in the comfort of a Starbucks with a wireless connection -- you can link via the Internet here.

Because the Masturbate-A-Thon is a competition -- there are both individual and team honors to be won -- there are rules.  Among the rules is:

NO FAKING ORGASM. Do not waste our time. If you have an orgasm we are happy for you but this is not our goal. The first detected faked orgasm shall be reason for a 15 minute penalty against accumulated time. The second detected fake orgasm shall be a thirty minute fine against accumulated time and the third will disqualify the offender from further competition at that event.

Somewhere in here I think there's a penalty box joke.  I'm just not sure where, and I don't really want to look around for it.

Here's more from the release (ahem) announcing the Masturbate-A-Thon:

The event is one of many National Masturbation Month events planned around the US and Canada, including many sponsored Masturbate-a-Thons. Unlike most of the others, the CSC's Masturbate-a-Thon is a live group event at which participants will raise funds by getting others to sponsor them for each minute they masturbate.

I can just imagine the conversation at the office:

Masturbator: Hi.  I'm taking part in a Masturbate-A-Thon this weekend and I was wondering if you'd sponsor me.
Co-Worker: Get out of my office you freak.  And for God's sake don't touch anything.

Doors open at 5:00 for "regular" participants and at 4:00 for those attempting to set time records.  I think that's kind of like the pro-am golf tournaments where they let the pros tee off first.

If you can't come, perhaps you can catch Betty Dodson, "The Mother of Masturbation," who's giving a how-to demonstration at the center on May 14.  The demonstration must be impressive, as it lasts for four hours.

It Was a Lot Like the First Time I Lost My Virginity, But We Were Drunk on Better Wine

Rodger Paine of Rodger Paine's Blog, who apparently doesn't have a marketing department to come up with a more inventive name for his (Rodger Paine's) blog, sent me this article about women having their virginity restored.  The article leads with this story:

When Jeanette Yarborough decided to give her husband a gift for their seventeenth wedding anniversary she wanted it to be special. Really special. She decided that conventional treats such as Mediterranean cruises, gold watches, cars, a murder-mystery weekend, or even a boob job just weren’t going to cut it. She gave him something much more personal — and painful. Her virginity.

Well, sort of. Mrs Yarborough paid $5,000 (£2,860) to a cosmetic surgeon to stitch her hymen back together so she could “lose her virginity” all over again and her husband would have that thrilling conquest at the grand age of 40.

There's something hot about Mrs. Yarborough's gift.  Not the virginity thing, exactly.  I don't buy the idea that virginity can be restored, since it's as much a mental as anatomical state.  What's hot about Mrs. Yarborough's gift is that she voluntarily uderwent painful surgery to give her husband a one-time sexual thrill.  While I don't advocate that, clearly Mrs' Yarborough is not the type who'd be difficult to talk into wearing thigh-highs without panties for a night on the town.  In fact, I'm guessing she'd figure out creative sexual adventures without any prompting at all.

Mr. Yarborough: Honey!  What are you doing here?  I've got a meeting in ten minutes.
Mrs. Yarborough: Then I'm going to have to hurry.  Off with your pants.

That's the kind of attitude that gets a woman into the Sex Hall of Fame.

The Yarborough's discribe the post-re-virginized sex as some of the hottest they've ever had.  It is, after all, the fulfillment of a guy fantasy: A highly motivated and sexually skilled virgin. (VIrginity is important because virgins lack perspective.  They don't what "good" or "big" really mean.) 

I wonder, however, whether the process might be more important than the actual surgery.  The recovery period, during which the woman can't have sex, is 12 weeks.  If you held off for 12 weeks and then simply pretended you were virgins -- the woman wears a Catholic girl plaid skirt and white cotton panties, the man is so completely absorbed with his own pleasure and manly fulfillment that he almost forgets about her -- wouldn't the sex still be incredibly hot, at least for the man?  I mean, 12 weeks is a long time.

Someone -- not me -- should conduct an experiment.  Let me know how it goes.

Who Says Not Everything Can Be Quantified?

A researcher at the increasingly entertaining University of Paisley has conducted a study comparing the relative merits of masturbation and sex with another person or people.  Stuart Brody, who earlier demonstrated that having sex before exercise actually improved athletic performance, studied blood levels of the pleasurable hormone prolactin in the blood of no-doubt-enthusiastic volunteers after they either masturbated or had sex with another person.

Surprisingly, after orgasm from sexual intercourse, the increase in blood prolactin levels is 400 per cent higher in both sexes compared with after orgasm from masturbation.

Which may explain why people masturbate four times as often as they have actual sex: They're just catching up.

Functional Ambivalent's Quick and Dirty Guide to Valentine's Day

If you're like most people, you have no idea how to behave on Valentine's Day.  Do you, for example, send your loved one flowers and candies?  Do you spontaneously hug people in the elevator?  Should you pass out cards at the office and chocolate kisses on the sidewalks of the busy street where you live?

Frankly, no one knows.  Valentine's day was designed to be confusing.  That's why desperate people like this woman, who goes by the alluring name "Dirty Mexican," turn to the Internet to seek advice.  In fact, our new friend Dirty Mexican turns, specifically, to the kind of people who hang out over at the All Sex Advice forums:

I've been dating my guy for... 6 months now... and i have no clue what to get him for valentines day. Ive never had a valentines day with a guy before, so i dont know what kinda things i should do, and i have no clue what to expect from him either.

Even as you admire that Dirty Mexican and her significant other have managed to maintain a relationship for six whole months, we can wonder why anyone with a lick of sense would turn to an Internet bulletin board for advice on issues as sensitive as love.  Better to turn, for example, to me, a blogger of no repute who would gladly sell your future down the river for the sake of a cheap joke.  Here is my sole qualification for giving love advice: My wife hasn't killed me yet.  Oh, she's tried, but I'm remarkably quick on my feet for a man of my girth. 

If Dirty Mexican had emailed me asking for advice, I would have told her this:

Valentine's Day is about love.  What you should expect from your boyfriend of six months, Dirty Mexican, is that he's going to try to get into your pants.  That's what guys do on Valentine's Day because guys equate sex and love.  Second, if you have no idea what to do for your guy, let me make a suggestion: Put-out without a lot of fuss.  Wear loose pants that are easy to get into and, if you want to say "I love you" in a language that even guys understand, wear those loose pants without any underwear.

And so we have the basic reason why Valentine's Day is confusing: It's about love.  When men think about love, we think about sex.  When women think about love, they think about romance.  Dirty Mexican is asking for romantic advice.  She's thinking flowers and Vermont Teddy Bears and thoughtful gestures.  I'd bet the house that her boyfriend is thinking about some thoughtful gesture like, for example, her notifying him in a public place that she's not wearing any panties.

Not wearing any panties goes a long way with guys.

The central fact of Valentine's Day for guys is that sex is easy.  Sex is all the stuff guys are good at even if the particular guy in question isn't particularly good at sex.  Sex is mechanical; it has moving parts and needs proper lubrication.  Sex is goal-oriented.  Sex is a communicative form based on grunts and snorts, which -- if you threw in a belch and a fart now and then for emphasis -- is basically guys' native language.  If Valentine's Day were entirely about sex, guys would be masters of the day.

But Valentine's Day isn't just about sex.  It's about what is, in the basic guy continuum, the opposite of sex: Romance. 

Women understand romance because it's all the things women are good at.  Romance is intricate, like lace or the making of fine chocolates.  Romance involves the careful balancing of reality and fantasy.  It involves being sensitive to the needs of others in surroundings that are often under purview of snooty gay men.  It involves wearing clothes that are designed to look good rather than to stretch. 

I, personally, find it hard to believe that more guys don't die of romance, as hard as it is to accomplish.  Romance is the emotional Mt. Everest, littered with the frozen bodies of men who couldn't take another step.  At the top of the mountain are women, wondering what's taking us so long.

So we are left with men and women, each in his or her own way perplexed about what the other is thinking.  We've allowed that cluelessness to, in some cased, harden into cynicism about love itself.  Here's a whole page of powerful venom about Valentine's Day, featuring these fun-loving quotes:

Saint Valentine worked for Hallmark. He decided the best way to succeed was to CREATE a holiday. Boom, Valentine's Day! It tortures the couple-less and fattens to pockets of flower peddlers and greeting card companies. Everywhere you look, there's disgusting mixtures of red and pink. God, I hate pink.
....
Just because there's chocolate doesn't mean it still doesn't suck.  Lots of us don't have dates and have to buy our own fucking chocolate anyhow. And then we just get fatter than we already are.  So it just sucks.
....
Get over it Cupid.  We hate you, too.

Here at Functional Ambivalent, we hate how love has come to confuse people.  So, in order to find a solution to the problme of Valnetine's Day, we've been conducting a study.  We worked really hard on it, which is why we weren't very funny during January.  Trying to discover what it is, exactly, that both men and women want out of Valentine's Day is grim work. 

We set for ourselves a goal of finding that one gift that can be given by men to women or women to men.  It had to be a gift that would convey exactly the right message to both sexes: Romance to women, sex to men.  And it had to be finacially accessible to all, because love should not be the exclusive domain of the  wealthy.

And, to the no-doubt great relief of all mankind, we found it.  Thanks to the contribution of one of Functional Ambivalent's volunteer researchers, a man who shall remain anonymous lest he be overrun by women seeking his romantic favors, team Functional Ambivalent will be able to save Valentine's Day.

I give you: The Chocolate Thong, For Him.

This unusual pair of pants is guaranteed to give both partners a treat, although of very different kinds. Just pop it on and let her have a nibble; at the risk of sounding sexist, chocolate can be the way to a woman's heart, not to mention yours if you've got this on.
...
As well as the obvious benefits of this thong to the wearer, there's something else special about it, and that's the taste of the chocolate. All too often novelty chocolate items taste cheap and nasty – probably because they are. The Chocolate Thong on the other hand is made from a pleasingly creamy Belgian milk chocolate, making sure you both get maximum pleasure.

Belgian chocolate for her; a blowjob for him.  It's everything to everyone.

Happy Valentine's Day.