FunctionalAmbivalent

Sex Day: Spanking New

WARNING: The following entry contains descriptions of sexual practices that a lot of people consider perverse.  For those of you who would prefer not to be confronted by perversion, please go here, where nothing perverse goes on, at least that anyone will admit.  For the rest of you, you bunch of sick-o perverts, you've come to the right place. 

Welcome to Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent, an irregularly scheduled, impromptu celebration of...well, human perversion, to be perfectly honest.

Whaddaya say we get down to business?

Spanking.  There, I've said it.  Spanking spanking spanking.  Spanking.  Spank spank spank.

I think I'm speaking for most men when I say: Spanking.

No, wait.  I think I'm speaking for most men when I say: Spanking is interesting.

Yes, it is.  All the same, it's not something we'd ever bring up to our wives or significant others.  Because there's no telling how our wives or significant others would react.

Wife or Significant Other: Ohhhh, I love kissing you.
Man: Spanking.
Wife or Significant Other: What?
Man: I want...I want...
Wife or Significant Other: Tell me what you want, dear.  I love you and want what you want.
Man: I want to spank you.  With tiny panties on.
Wife or Significant Other: We're never going to have sex again, you sick-o pervert. 

Every time a man suggests anything new, it is the above conversation that is running through his mind.  Trust me.  Men approach even highly familiar women with the same dread really old people have of computers: Touch one wrong button and life will never be the same.

So, as a public service, Functional Ambivalent now presents The Neurotic Gentleman's Guide to Bringing Up Spanking with Your Wife or Significant Other; or C'mon, Honey, You Know I Was Only Kidding!  The title's a little long, I know, but anything that delays the inevitable is OK by me.

First, you have to remember that some women like to be spanked.  Second, you have to remember that some women are deeply offended by the idea of being spanked.  Third, you really, really have to remember that there's no way to know which women are which. 

Do not delude yourself into believing that you can joke about spanking and draw meaning from the way a given woman reacts to your joking.  Spanking has become a standard topic of sexy joking and flirtation, even among people who have no interest whatsoever in spanking as an actual activity.

I have always been a big proponant of introducing new sexual diversion while everyone involved is shit-faced drunk.  There are three reasons for this:

1. It improves your chances for success, however marginally
2. Later, you have something to blame other than your own twisted psychology and weak moral fiber
3. It doesn't hurt as much to get slapped when you're drunk

Even to me, spanking doesn't seem like something you should first try while drunk, since it's an activity that is easily misconstrued as abuse.  If there's one thing you don't want to have to explain at the office it's an appearance on Cops, obviously drunk and only half dressed, under arrest after giving your wife or significant other a playful-but-misunderstood slap on her delightful ass.

Oh, and speaking of Number 3, above: I am not the only man who fears physical reprisals for suggestions that are all in good fun.  Even among accomplished spankers, anti-spanking backlash is a fear widely felt. 

At an Internet bulletin board named SpankingClassics.com, a wannabe spanker asks the experienced spankers how to introduce the notion of spanking to a woman.  An experienced spanker who seems to have misspelled his own name, The Professorr, suggest to the tyro spanker that he ask politely from a safe distance.  Like, for example, the other side of the world.

The Internet is the best way. Ask women who post there. Don't risk asking in real life before you ask online. It's not possible to predict who is into spanking and who not. People are, first, secretive, and second, very often totally confused about their secret fetishes.

And third: Some of them are capable of expressing great outrage.  Here's an observation from the friendly-sounding blog Gwen's Petty, Judgemental, Evil Thoughts:

I can't imagine what I would do if a man tried to "spank" me...I mean, I think violence is wrong and all, but I like to imagine that I'd slap the shit out of him.

Gwen stopped blogging soon after that posting.  Perhaps she is in jail after having killed the man she was dating for suggesting that it would be a lot more tolerable to go out dancing if she weren't wearing panties.  Or maybe she ground him up in a meat grinder when he innocently and supportively suggested that if she wanted to try lesbian sex, he'd be glad to keep her company. 

I can't say I'm going to miss Gwen.

Let's say you're in a commited relationship and popping the spanking question is not something you can reasonably do over the Internet.  After all, you can never tell when your wife or significant other is going to pick up her email.  It might be days from now, which would mean that you'd have to keep on guard for a long time just in case she came away from the computer with a hankerin' to go all Lorena Bobbitt on you.

Wife or Significant Other: Honey, I got your email...
Husband: You did?  What did you think?
Wife or Significant Other: I think I'm going to chop off your penis with this dull, rusty knife, you sick-o pervert.

No, in dealing with an established wife or significant other relationship, you're going to have to bring it right up, face-to-face.  Or, if it seems more appropriate, face-to-catchers-mask.  You need to be open and honest in that mentally healthy way that led to so many divorces in the 1970s.

Here's some friendly advice from a website that makes me nervous because, like a lot of other "How To Introduce Spanking to Your Wife or Significant Other" websites, it seems to be no longer in operation.  That makes me wonder what's happening to all these spanking experts.  Have they all been thrown into meat grinders by Gwen?  Will we ever know?

Anyway, here's what this apparently missing-in-action spanking guru suggests:

• Introduce spanking as friendly new sex game called "Hankey Spankey", let her spank you first, of course.
• If your lady likes it doggie style then there's no better time than when you're cumming from behind to surprise her with a light slap, increase the intensity only when she says "harder!"
• Wear a G-String, no one can resist slapping a G-Stringed Ass!
• Next time you fight with her just point your butt at her and say, "Show me how mad you are!!"
• After spanking don't forget to gently rub the spanked area.

To which I have several reactions.  First of all, I don't think any man who is so worldly as to be able to offer other men advice on how to spank their wives or significnt others should use the phrase "doggie style."  It's unseemly, like asking a woman to suck your "weiner." 

Secondly, in the real world most women would find it exremely easy to resist spanking their man, should he appear suddenly in a g-string.  Most men look ridiculous in a g-string.  Most women do not find ridiculous men irresistable in any way.

That said, the Unknown Spanking Guru has a point: A quick slap from behind during the act of sex can be a winning strategy, just so long as you're properly prepared.  Here's what I suggest:

Before initiating sex, use a black Sharpie to draw a tiny, irregularly-shaped speck on the palm of your spanking hand.  Then, when your wife or significant other is really getting into it, give her a resounding slap on the ass.  Don't be ambiguous; spank her once sharply and keep humping.

If she lowers her head and moans, or asks for it again, harder this time, or pushes back toward your thrusting hips and grinds...you've survived to spank again.  If she turns and glares back over her shoulder, or shows any other sign of anger or impending violence, hold up your spanking hand and show her the irregularly-shaped speck.

"Mosquito," you explain.  "Sorry."

Then back to it before she sees that it's not a dead mosquito on your palm at all.  Don't forget to wash your hands immeditely after you're done. 

Look: I've got to admit I have no idea how to introduce spanking into your sexual repertoir.  It took me about two years to get up the nerve to even kiss my wife, who was not my wife at the time but was just some hot young girl who made my insides go all spinny every time she lifted her upturned breasts to take a breath.

I've searched all of the Internets and the only advice that makes even a little sense is so shameful and unnatural that I can barely write it out for others to read.  The advice is: It's all about communication and trust.

I know; that's the nightmare scenario.  Communications and Trust.  How can anyone reasonably expect guys, of all people, to meet that kind of standard?

It all depends, of course, on how much you want what you want.  If you want very badly to spank her perfectly rounded ass, clad only in the sheerest of silk, communications and trust might be tolerable.  If you spend long hours imagining her over your knees, you can talk yourself into putting up with just about anything.  In fact, when it comes down to it, it might not be that bad.  The Lover's Guide makes it sound almost...well, tolerable.

If a man really wants his dream to come true, the golden rule is to ask nicely. Start with a toned-down version of your fantasy and, if your partner seems amendable, carry on telling her all the lurid details.

We can handle that, right guys?  Be brave!  Remember: We're evolved, sensitive men of the New Millenneum.  We can ask politely, sweetly, lovingly, over dinner at a restaurant that doesn't even have sports on TV, if we have to.  We can do that.

Don't be too demanding. While most women will like the idea of being the ultimate lover and making your dreams come true, it's no fun if the goalposts keep moving.

OK, so far so good.  What they're talking about here is sticking to the old game plan.  No quick shifts from spanking to, say, the flogging her breasts with leather straps.  Nothing like that.  Just some innocent spanking is all.  Playful, really.  Slap and tickle.  It's about the symbolic power relationship, really, not the pain.

Most importantly, bear in mind that she's more likely to live out your fantasies if she's happy with you.

Happy.  Right.  Got it.

Whether that means you doing the washing up, giving her a sensual massage or living out one of her fantasies, treating a woman with respect is by far the most effective way to make sure your dreams come true.

Aw, now wait just a second.  Let's be reasonable here.  We need to do the washing up?  Massage?  Respect?  Who are we trying to kid?

I don't know about you, but I'm sticking with the mosquito thing.  A man can only go so far.

And, it's worth remembering, so fast.  You're going to want to get a good head start, just in case she notices that that's not a mosquito on your hand.

That's it for Sex Day this time around.  I'll be back in a week or so with more useful sex information and wacky hijinks. 

For the next few days, I'll be figuring out ways to keep my wife from reading this.  If she does, boy, I'm in for a sound thrashing.

Hey, wait a minute...

Sex Day: Getting a Little Something Under the Tree

I wrote this a few weeks ago but hated it and never posted it.  Since then, actual readers have asked "Where's the Christmas Sex Day you promised us, you bastard?"   To which I had only a single reply: I have readers?  With that in mind, I've re-worked it and am posting it now. 

WARNING: The following blog entry does not consider sex between consenting adults to be horrible.  In fact, the following blog entry considers sex between consenting adults to be just wonderful, particularly when those people love and trust and look out for each other.  More to the point, the following blog entry considers long-term monogamous relationships to be the most erotic thing imaginable, and it pities people who go from empty, regret-filled one-night-stand to empty, regret-filled one-night-stand.  Though, to be completely honest, the following blog entry is not entirely unfamiliar with that, from back before the following blog entry met, married, reproduced with and made a full life with a woman who is incredibly beautiful and understanding, and who will, later tonight, be dressed-up in all kinds of shiny, clingy things for the first of several Christmas parties. 

The following blog entry will, in fact, follow her around all night like a slobbering dog.

But I digress.

For those of you who don't approve of blog entries that talk about sex as if it weren't something to avoid at all costs, go here, where you will find images and text that confirm your perverted worldview.  For the rest of us -- the people I like to refer to as "normal and healthy adults with a good appreciation of the full range of possibilities that the Good Lord certainly did not create by accident" -- you've come to the right place.  It's Friday, of course, and Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent, so let's get all dressed-up in our holiday finery so that we can hurry up and take it off.

So what is it about Christmas that makes people horny? I don't mean everyone, really.  There are certainly harried moms out there who, between the shopping and the wrapping and the cooking and putting the nice sheets on the bed for company would rather not, thank you.  And there are people who think of Christmas in purely religious terms who think sex might not be the best way to commommorate the virgin birth.

But the rest of us, I mean: The people who want desperately to unwrap more than presents.  What is it about Christmas that makes us wanna more than, say, Columbus Day makes us wanna. 

If you doubt that Christmas has this effect, I refer you to reputable scientific statistics, which show that more babies are born in September -- nine months after Christmas -- than in any other month.  It doesn't take a great leap of logic to conclude that, back in December, there was a lot of sex going on.

The question is, "Why?"  If you listen to people around the holidays, all they do is bitch.  They're too busy, they've got no time, they're stressed, liberals hate Jesus...you know the litany of complaints. 

But have any of you, even once, heard someone say, "Man, I'm having a lot of sex this holiday season.  I've barely got time to shop!"  No, of course not.  No one would say that, because the whole status hierarchy of the holiday season is based on how busy you are. 

The coolest people are the people who have too many parties to attend, too many gifts to buy, too much traveling to do.  Sex is something people do, at least at my age, lying down.  Busy holiday people don't have time to lie down.

Except that, clearly, they do.  Which brings us back to "Why?" 

My regular reader will not be surprised to learn that I have a theory about why people have so much sex during the businest time of the year.  My theory is: People dress nicely, drink a lot, and can make a lot jokes about "the spirit of giving" that aren't really jokes at all.  Also, it is the only time of year when spouses ask each other what they want, instead of just assuming they know.  And a lot of spouses are apparently not asnswering, "A new Dremel home handyman tool."  No.  In fact, a lot of people are apparently answering the "What do you want?" question by narrowing their eyes and saying, in a growly voice, "You."

As a result, Christmas has become an orgy of the kind of sex that men wish would be celebrated year-round, but that women seem to lose interest in once either the spirit of the season or the possibility of jewelry-related gifts fades.  But for a couple of weeks there, the possibilities are so numerous and the alcohol so available that men and women both are coming up with new and inventive ideas about how to do the Same Old Thing.

Take, for example, this advice offered by a female LovingYou.com member:

Get a sexy Santa or Mrs. Santa lingerie suit/outfit. Get naughty presents like edible undies, edible finger-paints etc. Wrap them up and sit down on the couch or biggest chair in a very seductive pose. Lay the presents around you then call your partner out to you and have fun opening and using the gifts.

Now technically there's no reason a wife couldn't surprise her husband with a seasonally-themed Gift of Sex any other time of the year.  Lay naked across the Thanksgiving table, perhaps, or don grass skirt and lei to celebrate Hawaii Statehood Day on August 21. 

But no; that never happens.  Every year, Hawaii Statehood Day passes, at least around the Functional Ambivallent household, without anyone getting leied at all.  (Sorry.  I couldn't resist.)  What happens is, instead, a lot of going-to-bed-early and I've-got-a-headache excuse-making that women learn from men when we're trying to avoid mowing the lawn. 

Instead of spreading it out (unfortunate metaphor) over the course of the whole year, we let it build up into a flurry of prop-intensive sexual activity right around Chrismas.

Each day we hung an ornament with a romantic love note inside for each other until Christmas eve. On Christmas morning we opened each ornament "love note" and shared them with each other, and then we made love underneath our Christmas tree.

I assume they don't mean literally "under" the Christmas tree.  Unless their Christmas tree is a 30-foot Douglass Fir, there's barely enough room under the tree to fill the treestand with water, let alone execute a memorable sexual act.  I think they mean something more like, "on the couch in front of the tree" or "right there on the floor where I'm pointing and I mean now, slut."

There is, apparently, something liberating about Christmas, something that allows people to do for each other what they're not likely to do at other times of the year:

When Christmas comes, we have family to buy for, which leaves us no money to get each other anything. So, we started having a romantic night together cooking dinner together, dance to our favorite songs, and enjoy a "Fantasy Idea." We would pretend to be a teacher/student, librarian/student ... etc you get the idea. The night turns from nice to naughty. Use your imagination and have fun, just be safe!

No, actually, I don't think safety has anything to do with what some people have planned for Christmas. 

I have not, in relentless searching, found Hot Hanukkah sex advice.  It appears that Holiday Horniness is strictly a Christian phenomenon.  Judging from my own experience, around Christmas even Lutherans a numerical increase in urges.  We get urges other times of the year as well, but we channel them into wholesome activities until the weekend, at which point high school-aged children are left wondering why bedtime falls at 6 PM on Saturdays. 

But now, in the Holiday Season, we're overwhlemed by urges we don't really understand, sometimes mid-week.  Which is why we are fortunate that there are people who can help us. 

I'm not talking just about the people at the previously-mentioned LovingYou.com bulletin boards.  No no no.  I'm talking about all kinds of people who are concerned, for some reason, that people overcome with horniness 'neath the tree won't be able to figure out what to do on their own.

Like, for example, me. 

Being a generous and caring man, as I am, and purely as a public service having nothing to do with my own barely-disguised desire to read about other people's sex lives, I have assembled Hot Holiday advice from people expert enough to get published on the Internet.  And we all know how hard that is.

From Redbook magazine:

While my husband's out, I make dough for his favorite cookie and hide it in the freezer. On a night when he's least expecting it, I treat him to a batch of warm cookies and a tall glass of milk.

OK, this may not seem, on the surface, like sex advice.  On the surface it seems like that horror of the women's publishing world, "relationship advice."  It would seem that way, since Redbook seems like a grocery-stand pick-up for those who haven't advanced past training-wheel sex.  But read between the lines and think: This whole "scenario" is kinky with a capital "kink." 

Him, sitting at the kitchen table, probably wearing slippers and a robe, child-like as he eats cookies and milk warmed to the same temperature it would be if it were coming directly from a genuine human female breast.  Her, standing nearby in a housecoat and, perhaps, curlers, like June Cleaver a mother and sex object at the same time, a protector in a puh-up bra.  All that's left is for her to powder his bottom and we're deep, deep into the kind of activities even this consenting adult doesn't like to ponder.

"Call me mommy."
"Mommy."
"Ohhhhhh, mommy wants to feed you.  Does baby need to eat?"
"Mommy smells good."

I question whether I should even put this kind of thing here in Functional Ambivalent.  I have standards, after all, though right this minute I can't recall what they are.  And you have delicate sensibilities. 

So forgive me, but jouranlism marches on.  I had to do it, even if it means mommy is going to punish me for being such a bad...

Oh, sorry.  I'll edit that out later, when I get the feeling back in my other hand.  For now, it's the sound of one hand typing as we get back to more "normal" sexual deviation.  Like this Christmas sex advice from Dr. Susan Block, a self-styled sex therepist and scary person, who has her very own holiday sex website.

There are no doubt those of you who see Dr. Block's rankly amateurish and openly pornographic website and who, as a result, doubt the good doctor's medical credentials.  Oh, you people are so cynical. 

When it comes to medical credentials, let me tell you this: Dr. Block has been interviewed on television, and that's good enough for me. 

Really, is there any more genuine affirmation of someone's credibility than being interviewed on television, particularly if the interviewer is an actual journalist working for a non-network-affiliated newscast in Los Angeles, a city where television news is famed for its high journalistic standards?

Of course there isn't, and so it was that Dr. Block came to be interviewed by genuine TV Reporter and handsome man David Jackson, who asked her what her holiday love advice might be for the viewers out there in TV land.   

Then I looked deep into David's holiday blue eyes and said that if you're all alone and you don't mind being alone, you may wish to give yourself the pure personal pleasure of a nice holiday evening all by yourself doing nice things for yourself, like relaxing, listening to some great music, taking a nice hot bath, indulging in your favorite drinks, sweets or other treats, slipping between satin sheets... and... masturbating.

Wouldn't you have liked to here the inter-anchor banter that followed that story?

Anchorman: "Satin sheets, huh?"
Anchorwoman: "That sounds nice."
Anchorman: "Like the weather here in the southland.  Right Mac?"
Weatherguy: "No doubt about it, John, it's going to be a beautiful night for masturbating, especially along the coast."

If you follow all this advice, you will have a Christmas Orgasm.  What, you ask, is the difference between a Christmas Orgasm and a regular orgasm?  Well, of course, it's Meyers Rum. 

A Christmas Orgasm is a drink, silly.  Here's how you make it, and here's why: Because if you don't, some guy at Meyers Rum won't make his sales quota.  So dump the old-fashioned eggnog and get on the brand-name wagon while there's still time.

See, that's what Christmas is all about.  That's why the marketers are out there shouting at you from Halloween until the Year-End Clearance Sale.  Christmas isn't about anything but making quota these days, and the quotas keep going up because we need to grow the economy to downsize the deficit and...and...wait a minute!

That's why sex is so popular at Christmas!  It's because in the relentless commercial deluge, two people -- or just one, if you're the kind of guy who has satin sheets -- having sex is the only refuge left.  It's the only time the marketers wouldn't dare break-in to interrupt us.  Sleeping, going to the bathroom, dinnertime...none of that's sacred anymore.  But in the bedroom...

Everywhere we go we're bombarded with messages to buy, consume, and conform to the marketing department's definition of what The Perfect Christmas is.  We measure ourselves against the pre-indictment Martha Stewart and her staff of thousands and we inevitably come up short. 

We're left without a quiet moment to ourselves except when we're...well, maybe quiet isn't exactly the word.  But you get what I mean.  And because of that...because it's all we've got...come Christmas we're about ready to, well, come Christmas.  And if we come Christmas in particularly ornate and time-consuming ways, we avoid even more marketers.

I think that's it.  I think I finally figured it out.

Merry Christmas, all of you, and I hope you give as well as you get.  'Tis the spirit of the season, after all.

My Theory is That the Stuff Doesn't Work. He Just Filed the Patent Application to Justify the R&D Process

From a patent application filed by a husband and wife inventor team working in Arizona, this description:

This invention regards a novel and unobvious dietary supplement formulation of relatively specific ratios of fruits, vegetables, and spices that when ingested by the male results in a significant improvement to the taste of the male ejaculate by reducing its generally salty and/or bitter taste while also adding a pleasant flavor that is considered by 98.5% of all customers as very enjoyable.

This landed on the desk of some unsuspecting patent clerk.  I bet that was an interesting morning.

While generally I have an aversion to focus groups, in this case I'll make an exception.  I'd also like to know something abut their methodology.

Oh, wait: I should have read a little farther in the application:

...marketing testing began with 27 local couples of different ages, races, and health regimens (e.g. smokers/non-smokers, drinkers/non-drinkers, healthy/not-so-healthy lifestyles and diets). Questionnaires were created and used for data collection by said couples and, after several months, the data was examined. The results were highly positive, clearly indicating that regardless of the lifestyles of the couples, significant semen-taste improvement was experienced by all in the market-test group.

Well, there you go.  Science marches on.

Sex Day:Coming Soon

Who would have imagined the popular uprising caused by my lack of Sex Day postings the last few weeks.  I know: I promised a series of Christmas Sex Days.  I'm working on the one I wrote a few weeks ago but hated.  Before I sleep tonight, I'll have both of my loyal readers satsified.

Unless, you know, I drink too much or get stressed.  It happens to all men, so just promise me you won't tell anyone..

Defining the Bottom

It occurs to me that the above is an unfortunate title for a Sex Day entry, and perhaps even "entry" itself is an unfortunate choice of words. 

I didn't post Sex Day last Friday because the piece I wrote was terrible.  The joke reply here, of course, is "How could you tell?"  Trust me, I could tell.  I started with a premise that fell apart as I researched and I didn't have the sense to change the premise so I wrote a whole bunch of words that made no sense and then when I got to the end I wrote an ending that didn't make any sense, either.  Not that that's ever mattered before, but this time, somehow, I just couldn't push the button to post the thing. 

I'm going to start over and post it...probably tomorrow.  Sorry.

'Twas the Night Before the Twelve Sex Days of Christmas

WARNING: The following blog entry contains information about sex.  This information is, to be perfectly honest, utterly predictable.  To coin a phrase: Banal sex.  Yeah, well, how much did it cost you to get in here, anyway?  That's right.  So keep your mouths closed -- which, come to think of it, is probably not a bad idea given that this is Sex Day and you never know who's roaming around looking to make an unexpected friend. 

For those of you who don't like reading about sex, go here, where you will find charming material posted by a guy who doesn't really like reading about sex, either, but does it anyway just so he can send me emails claiming he's giving up blogging.  Which I, regretably, believed, because as soon as I took him off my blogroll he starts right up blogging again just to make me look like a complete idiot.  And then, as if it's going to make me feel better, he says that Sex Day is an "acquired taste."

Yeah, well, taste this, buddy. 

For the rest of you, well, you've come to the right place.  Because every Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent.  And this Friday is special because it kicks off our Super-Special Holiday Sex Day Super Special, a series of Sex Day postings on a Holiday Theme that may or may not contain actual comedy.  We'll see.

So tell your friends, tell your family, tell random people you see in the street: On Friday, Functional Ambivalent is the place to be for holiday sex.  Unless, you know, you're somewhere else.  Which most of you are, at least if you believe my traffic data.

Not that I'm bitter.

I have a friend who writes every Christmas letter as a parody of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."  He started this reprehensible tradition long before he was married and had children, so he has no excuse.  He is a computer engineer with all the creative gifts that career choice implies, and I swear to you one of his Christmas letters started out like this:

'Twas the night before Christmas/and all through the condo/not a beer was unopened/and I was quite blotto...

He must have missed the day in first grade when they explained rhyming.

Anyway, the "'Twas the night before..." conceit has become commonplace in American folk literature, a field of endeavor that includes everything from photocopied Christmas letters to local advertiser newspapers to -- come to think of it -- blogs.  And as bad as my friend's letters are, they are not nearly as bad as the stuff produced by self-styled wits who seek to bring us Christmas cheer by describing their sexual exploits in verse:

'Twas the night before Christmas, and God it was neat.
The kids were both gone, and my wife was in heat.

And so the stage is set for a seemingly ifinite number of verses of smutty Christmas tomfoolery.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the shack
Not a creature was stirring, not even Pam's Rack.

Because, apparently, Pam's breasts occaisionally get up and roam the house on their own, so it's worthy of note this particular Christmas Eve that they're staying right there in bed with Pam.  Anyway:

Set vertical in the chimney was a decorative spear,
In hopes that St. Nicholas would take it in the rear.

My dog was nestled all snug in his bed,
While visions of hot poodles danced in his head;
And Jane in her 'Sweater, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's... nap

First of all, I thought he was sleeping with Pam, not Jane.  And second, I was completely taken in by the clever use of elipses..."nap"...to imply that what he was settling down for was anything but restful.  The careful reader will note immediately that this isn't your regular Christmas poem. 

One of the standard things that happens in these parodies is the sudden switch from sex to violence.  The above version continues:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window and without a pause,
I whipped out my rifle and pegged Santa Clause.

What a delightful story!  Now, off to bed little ones!

The thing is, it looks so easy, this game of parody.  It looks like anyone could do it because almost anyone can, so people with no more sense than a teen-aged ATV show-off assume they can parody the world's most famous Christmas poem even when it's not Christmas, like this:

`Twas the night before Halloween, when all through the Strip
All the creatures were stirring, just to be hip.
The stockings were worn by the hoes and their pimps,
In hopes of finding anything that would make the rest of the world sick.

The rhythm and rhyme scheme break up a tad bit in that last line, but what the hell.  When you're as far out of bounds as these guys, you can even try things like this:

'Twas the night of Thanksgiving, but I just couldn't sleep
I tried counting backwards, I tried counting sheep.
The leftovers beckoned - The dark meat and white
but I fought the temptation with all of my might

There are people far down the evolutionary ladder, dolts and fifth-raters barely able to brush their own tooth, who are attracted to Christmas poetry parody like NBA players to legal trouble.  They massage the old poetry gland on the assumption that they, too, can ejaculate wordsmithery.  But writing an acceptable parody poem is hard compared to, for example, watching TV, so some don't quite make it all the way to the end.  This one, for example, which only goes a few lines before giving up.  I present it in its entirety, spelling intact:

Twas the night before christmas and all threw the land
Santas fore skin was wrinkled and so has his hand.
The stockings were hung on his balls by a dare
in hope the elves and K J soon would be there.
I in my laytex and ma with her gag,
had dressed up the dog in summer time drag.
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter
I emptied my Mac into his fat sack!
Good nite

It scares me to think that this person is probably allowed to drive.

The Twelve Days of Christmas is the other great literary convention, and there is no shortage of sexy fun and games that can be had substituting, say, "six girls a-laying" for the more traditional lyrics.  People who do this will, of course, burn in hell because the origins of the song are religiously symbolic.  The whole thing was crafted in code to help English children remember the Catholic catechism during a period of horrible religious oppression.

But you don't care about that because all you care about is sex.  I know you people.  Hell, I am you people.  So read this list of the 12 days from a  website that reveals its comedic sensibility right there in its title: "Minnesota, Pants Off to Thee:"

12 Twats a twitchin'
11 Lesbies lickin'
10 Testes throbbin'
9 Nipples drippin'
8 Assholes gapin'
7 Scrotums swingin'
6 Sacks O' shit
5 Mother fuckers
4 Call girls
3 French ticklers
2 Brass balls
1 And a handjob in a fir (or fuckin') tree!

Sing that in the car on the way to grandma's.

I feel so dirty.  This isn't right.  This poetry I've been quoting is the kind of rude stuff that the far right uses to justify censorship.  It isn't wit or humor; it's the verbal equivalent of going into a freshly remodeled kitchen and crapping in the sink, an easily insulting thing to do that takes no skill.  This is just punks and boneheads taking something innocent and wonderful and replacing it with something profane.

So I'm going to try something right now, right here.  I'm going to try for Twelve Days of Christmas that are sexy but not horrible.  I'm going to use all of my regionally-published, writerly skills to craft a Christmas poem/song parody that will seem, somehow, fresh and orginal rather than just awful. And you're going to witness my whole creative process, so you might want to wear safety goggles.  Okay, here we go:

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me...a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

I like that line, but to make this work we're going to have to imagine that I'm an attractive woman, and that's going to take some work because I'm not really either one of those things: Attractive, or a woman.  I'm a middle-aged guy with hair in places where I didn't used to have hair and, come to think of it, no hair in places where I used to have lots of hair.  Which works well with "Brazilian wax," right?  You know about Brazilian waxes, I assume.  I think that's a good place to start.  Get rid of all that mess down there.

On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me...two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

I think this can work.  I'm thinking from a woman's point of view and I'm going to see if I can develop this as a kind of story.  Maybe build up to...what's the word I'm looking for?

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me...three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

A climax.  That's it.  I'm going to build to a climax.  I mean, not literally.  In the story.

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

Notice the clever use of "fore" rather than the number "four."  I just thought of that right now.  That's a handy precedent to set.  I think it's going to be valuable when I start running out of ideas.  You want to do that kind of thing as your write: Leave yourself some escape hatches in case the format becomes restrictive.  That's money in the bank.

On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...five inch spiked heels!

And I looked good.

Foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

You guys get the drops-of-wax thing, right?  It doesn't have anything to do with getting a Brazilian wax.  Is it getting hot in here?

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

I ask because I'm getting kind of warm.

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...chocolate on my nipples, seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

I'm running out of numbered things.  Remember I left myself some leeway back at number "fore"?  Of course you do.  Also, to tell you the truth, I'm uncomfortable role-playing hot sex from a submissive woman's point of view for this long.  Or, to be more precise, I'm uncomfortable feeling the way I do about role-playing hot sex from a sumissive woman's point of view.  Which is to say: I like the idea of chocolate on my nipples, and that worries me.  I wonder if we have any chocolate in the pantry.  My wife makes cookies sometimes...

On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...nine lashes lashing, chocolate on my nipples, seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

Ouch!  I deserved that.  I was concentrating on my own feelings, not on Master's.  I was bad and I deserved that.

On the tenth day of Chritsmas my true love gave to me...ten soothing seconds, nine lashes lashing, chocolate on my nipples, seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

Master is so good to me.  Those ten soothing seconds seemed like forever in my Master's strong arms.  And then, when I really knew I was loved, he...oh, I'll let the song tell the story.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me...eleven painful bites, ten soothing seconds, nine lashes lashing, chocolate on my nipples, seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

Oh, we're getting close...so close...oh, God, we're getting close...just one more...one more...one...

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...multiple orgasms, eleven painful bites, ten soothing seconds, nine lashes lashing, chocolate on my nipples, seven sips of Champagne, six drops of wax, five inch spiked heels, foreplay to burn, three solid spanks, two thigh highs, and a really, really smooth Brazilian wax.

A holiday to remember, that's for sure.

Just give me a minute here.  What was my subject again?  Oh, that's right: My scorn for how easy and common it is to put smutty words to Christmas poetry and song.  And how much I disapprove of that.

The only thing worse: Doing it under the guise of criticism.  You know: Pretending you're writing disapprovingly about something, but really you're just doing that as an excuse to do exactly what you pretend to scorn.  I hate that more than anything.

That's it for Sex Day this week.  Remember: Sex Day is all about Christmas from here until...well, until I run out material, or Christmas, whichever comes first.  My bet is that I'll run out of material.

Next week: Romance 'Neath the Tree.

Have a great weekend.  I'll be wracked with guilt after enjoying being a woman for a while.  I deserve whatever punishment I get, so maybe I'll go to a mall.  Nothing worse than that, this time of year.

See you there! I'll be the guy in five inch spikes.

Sex Day: Girls Gone Mild

WARNING: The following posting contains information about sex, including information about attractive young girls who should be virgins but aren't.  If you're the kind of person who thinks that girls who should be virgins but aren't shouldn't be the subject of long, poorly-structured blog entries, please go here, where you will learn how to make animals out of foam.  On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who doesn't mind if a writer loses track once in a while and reaches an expedient and inconclusive ending, just so long as the subject matter is attractive women acting all slutty in public, then you've come to the right place.  Because it's Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent, and on Sex Day, slutty is pretty much what we shoot for.

A couple of weeks ago, I came upon a bachelorette party.  That is not as interesting as it sounds, you dirty-minded pigs, because it isn't to say that I came upon the bachelorette party, so much as it is to say that I saw the bachelorette party across a crowded bar.

I wanted more than anything just for one short moment to be...well, Jimmy Smits would have done nicely.  Because if I'd have been Jimmy Smits, just then, I'd have swaggered over to those loud, condom-waving young girls and I'd have said, "Hi, I'm Jimmy Smits."

But I am not, alas, Jimmy Smits, and while that doesn't necessarily preclude my introducing myself to young girls as Jimmy Smits, I'm not sure my fragile ego could take their response, which would be:

"Wow.  You've really let yourself go."

Or:

"Bullshit.  Go away before I scream."

So I sat in the bar, my beer in front of me, and I watched.  I watched the women wave inflatable penises around.  I watched them erode penis-shaped suckers.  I watched them knock back jello shots and hug each other in what has become a familiar ritual, described here:

In  modern times bachelorette parties have evolved into a celebration of female sexuality.  Women are seen as hungering for good sex, much in the way men desire good sex. Thus, bachelorette parties are most successful when they  are structured in such a way to pass on the sexual secrets and emotional wisdom of all the women in group to the bachelorette. 

Trust me: Those women weren't hungering for good sex in anything like the way I was hungering for good sex, at that particular moment, because if they had been they'd have been over at my table doing about 0.3 seconds of totally unnecessary begging before I, to the best of my ability, accomodated their wishes. 

No, these girls were doing what guys have been doing at bachelor parties for ages: They were acting like idiots. The only difference was, they had tits.  That, combined with the fact that there were men in the bar, meant that they didn't have to pay for their own drinks.

Like so much having to do with sex the origins of the bachelorette party are shrouded in mystery and, in all likelihood, lacy underthings.  (I'm way in favor of lacy underthings.)  Back in the 1950s, before the discovery of female orgasm, brides and their bridesmaids would get together the night before the wedding for a bridemaids' tea.  These were extraordinarily tedious affairs beloved by all because they didn't realize how boring the teas really were, since female orgasm had not been discovered yet and they had nothing, really, to compare the teas to.

No one knows for sure who discovered the female orgasm, but it's a fair bet that she was pretty damned surprised.  (If a man discovered female orgasm, it's a fair bet that it was accidental.)  If she'd have had the foresight to take out a patent on the particular method of scrubbing that led to female orgasm, she'd own at least half of the world today.  But she didn't.  Instead, she just called up her friends:

Melissa, listen.  This is going to sound icky but you have to try it...

Within two weeks, word had spread across the world and the nature of the bridesmaids' tea had forever changed.  No longer was the event a quiet meeting welcoming one more woman into the security of marriage.  No longer were there whispered acknowledgements that it was the bride's job to endure the joys of womanhood and "take one for the team" if that's what it took to get the lawn mowed and the barn painted.  No.  Once female orgasm had been discovered the bride-to-be's emotions changed, becoming growlier and more emphatic:

I can't wait any more, goddammit.  Give it to me, give me the dick.  And another fucking drink.  And if there's nothing but pindicks around this place, find me a man with the tongue of a cow.  A man with a face I can make a home on.  Or there, the arm of the couch.  That'll do.  I'll just climb up...

Thus did the bachelorette party become something much like the traditional male bachelor party, except that the women could actually get laid, if they wanted to, without paying for it.

And that was fine, for a while, until bachelorette parties became a statement:

Bachelorette parties are like the Title IX of weddings: they're supposed to make the girls equal to the boys. If the groomsmen can take their boy out for a night of debauchery, so can we, right? As a bridesmaid, one of your jobs is to coordinate a "last hurrah" for your soon-to-be married friend. After all, now that she has a matching set of Pyrex casserole dishes, she'll probably never go to a bar ever again. She'll be too busy darning the holes in her man's socks.

Yeah, sure.  That's exactly what she'll be doing, all right, darning socks.  That's why she gets to have one night of total release before her enslavement, and why she should spend it playing The Penis Game:

Purchase some clothes pins and fuzzy balls. Draw a penis on the clothes pins and hot glue 2 fuzzy balls onto the end. As the guests arive pin the clothes pin on them and tell them they can not do something (such as touch their hair). When someone does this tell the guests they may take the persons "penis". The one with the most "penis'" at the end of the party wins.

Not surprisingly, bachelorette parties have become an industry, with factories around the world churning out products and services to make the parties even sexier and more regretable.  Many of these factories are in China where, in many cases, slave laborers who have never been more than a few miles from their home village spend their lives making things like these ejaculating keychains.  What impression do you think those Chinese slave laborers have of America?

I don't know, but I do know this: A lot of them want to move here.

But getting back to the point, which is that bachelorette parties are now a commercial endeavor.  Take, for example, this package of Spermies Candies:

These are the candies that you will "Love To Swallow!" Each large box contains a "100 gram load" of soft chew candy (like gummy bears with sugar but spermie shaped). The candy is "bursting with flavor" and there is definitely "no salt added". You will enjoy the candy as well as the box it comes in (extra large size box). A must for any Bachelorette and her Divas! This candy is a huge hit and is a great gag to offer the guys that walk by.

Now, had I been editing the ad copy for Spermies, I'd have ordered up one more rewrite to take advantage of the not-fully-realized use of the words "box it came in" and "great gag," but that's just me. 

The larger point is this: For the equivalent of approximately 4 ounces of gummy bears, Spermies Candies cost $5.99.  Talk about your value added. 

Also, ladies, next time you feel like calling men "stupid" for, say, spending $100 on a game of golf that accomplishes nothing but making them angry, remember that your sisters are out there buying artificial sperm candy for $24 a pound.

For the really bitter bridal party, there's a special pinata, a variation on standard Mexican birthday party prop that has never, ever been fun -- unless someone gets accidentally hit with the stick.  Shaped something like a penis and something like a Civil War cannon, at 15-inches this penis pinata is nearly life size.  The hilarity ensues when the bride and her party whack at the penis until it pops it's load, presumably of Spermies Candy.  Or, if you prefer, suckers.

So the empowered women hack and slash and club to destroy the mighty penis, at which point they all scramble around on their knees, trying to grab more penis-shaped candy than the others.

After that, they can sit down to a healthful dinner of MacAweenie and Cheese, a penis-shaped pasta that'll have 'em layin' in the aisles.

The topic of conversation at bachelorette parties is, as you may have noticed, penises.  If I may digress for a moment, I'd like to point out that I have looked far and wide and have found no novelty bachlorette party product on a vagina motif.  I have found no novelty vagina bachelor party product, either. For some reasons, vaginas aren't significant when it comes to comically ritualizing the newness of sex.

You would think someone would have come up with at least one funny vagina novelty.  A fur-lined party hat, for example.  But no.  We are left, instead, with all manner of penis paraphernalia, including stupid things like pin-the-penis-on-the-groom games. 

So stop, for minute, and consider: The bachelorette party, the great celebration of female sexuality, is all about dicks.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

Fortunately, there is drinking.  Drinking is a big part of bachelorette parties, the reason being, apparently, that most women have to get themselves drunk in order to let themselves enjoy doing bad prop comedy about sex. This strikes me as fair since, as a man, my primary sex-acquisition strategy is: Get her drunk.

It's been a long time since I've gone drinking, in any serious kind of way, with a bunch of twentysomething women, but as I watched the bachelorette party a fundamental truth of dealing with twentysomething women came back to me.  Unlike the grown-up women I deal with in my every day life, when twentysomethings get good and sloshed the mess they make is more likely to be physical than emotional.  Bottles will break, tables will fall over, and things will be spilled that no one wants to clean up.  Take, for example, this bachelorette party horror story from the aptly named website "Ettiquette Hell":

The rest of us make sure that the bride stops drinking after awhile so she won't be hung over for the bridesmaid's luncheon the next day. But of course no one pays attention to the Maid of Honor. Then we all decide to head back to the house. Not once, but twice on the way back the MOH vomits in the back of the car and then once more on the host's front lawn. The next day at the bridesmaids' luncheon she has to excuse herself three times to head for the bathroom.

Nonetheless, women attending bachelorette parties continue to drink ridiculous amounts, perhaps because that is the only way they know to act more like they think men act at bachelor parties.  And everyone knows that men drink a lot at bachlor parties because that's a big part of the fun, right?

Yeah, well, pull up a chair, campers, and I'll tell you about bachlor parties.  See, I'm a man who has attended several bachelor parties spanning an era of American history stretching from roughly way-back-when to not-that-long-ago, and I know one thing for sure: Don't lick the strippers.

No!  Wait!  That's not it.  I was going to say...I should have said: Men do not drink at bachelor parties to have fun.  That's what I was going to say.  Really.

We drink at bachlor parties because we're embarrassed, because the whole bachelor party thing is humiliating, and not simply because the best man ends up puking in the back of the car.  (Drinking advice for women: Put the person about to throw up next to the window.  Drinking advice for men: Open the window, no matter how funny you think it will be to see your best friend puke onto a closed window.)  Bachelor parties are embarrassing because guys simply do not not do sex together well.

Women can get away with it.  They can shimmy around in tight hip-hugger pants and wear giant-sized novelty condoms on their heads and pretend to be making out in...what was the phrase?  Oh, yeah: "In celebration of female sexuality."  But a bunch of guys watching a stripper and trying not to pop a hard-on in front of everyone...that's just pathetic.

So we drink.

The female reaction to all of this degradation is not to go back to having bridesmaids' teas.  It is, instead, to drain the spontaneity out of the event and turn it over to professionals.  They turn a nice, friendly orgy of self-destruction into a learning experience.

For example, there are women who, during their bachelorette party, want to learn how to have sex.  Now, I've heard of bachelor parties where men call in an expert on sex, but I suspect that has little to do with learning.  These bachelorette party consultants, however, actually teach.

Take Alex Robboy, a certified sexual technician of some sort, who will, for $500 or so, come over to your bachelorette party and teach you gratifying sexual techniques.  She even has a number of different skill levels, begining with things like kissing and, for the more advanced bachelorettes, anal sex.  You could never in a million years get a bunch of guys into a room to talk about anal sex, but apparently women are different from men.  Or, maybe, the anal sex lesson as delivered by Ms. Robboy bears a similarity to self-defense classes.

The first time he mentions it, you grab him by the side of the head like you were going to kiss him, and then you push your thumbs deep into his eyes...Don't worry, his vision will come back in a few days.

Ms. Robboy's website has an impressive list of customer endorsements, including:

"On the night of my wedding, my husband told me that that was the best blow job he had ever had. I can't wait till my friend has her bachelorrette party. I learned a ton." Jill, age 27

Yes, well, perhaps your bachelorette-party-acquired oral sex skills resulted in the best blowjob ever.  But let me, as a guy, suggest an alternative explanation.  As you walked up the aisle, your husband's nervousness may have been fear that, now that the deal was signed and sealed, the blowjob part of your relationship was over.  That night, when you went down on him, it may or may not have been the best blowjob ever, but it was certainly one of the blowjobs for which he was most grateful, because it meant his fears were baseless.  There would be blowjobs in his future!  His thanks were certainly sincere, though perhaps more related to future quantity than present quality.

There are other bachelorette party seminars available, too, including this one, during which Catherine, a former exotic dancer, comes over to teach the girls how to take their clothes off in disturbingly evocative ways.

With over eight years experience as a professional Exotic Dancer, Catherine believes that erotic dance is an empowering form of self-expression and physical fitness to be enjoyed by all women, regardless of age or body type. Known for her warm and intuitive approach, Catherine creates an environment of ease and accessibility in this groundbreaking new form of dance and fitness.

So, let's Recap: The penis-is-the-center-of-the-universe, blowjob lessons, training in how to pole dance...why does what bachelorette parties have become sound like something men designed to please themselves?  Put in a half-hour on how to light a charcoal grill and these empowering events for women are getting pretty close to the kind of training that, if men were really in charge, would be mandatory before a marriage license could be issued.

So you go ahead girls.  You have your empowering fun.  We'll just stay over here by the bar, watching.

And that giant condom on your head?  It looks fabulous.

That's it for Sex Day!  I hope you have a good weekend.  I'm going to get my wife a box of candy and see what happens.

Sex Day: The Private Ryan Effect

There will not be a Sex Day today because Radical Conservatives are outside my house threatening to send letters of compaint to the FCC if I write anyhting they don't like.  Specifically, their spokesman has informed me that I can't use any of the following words: Moist, grunting, and restraint.

So, instead, I'll muster every ounce of moist, grunting restraint I can, and hold off until tomorrow morning when they've all fallen asleep.

Also, I'm really busy with what my wife likes to call "paying work" and haven't had the time to surf dirty web sites in search of material.  But tonight I'll be all over the web, operating under the name "Mistress Sylvia."  Maybe we'll run into each other.

Sex Day: Goofs, Gaffs, and Goofy Gaffs

WARNING: The following posting contains information about sex. If you're surprised by this, please not the first two words of the headline: Sex Day. What, you thought I was talking about something else? Anyway, if you're not interested in reading about sex stuff right now, go here, where sex stuff you will not find. No way, Jose. For the rest of you -- for the loyal and perverse few who seem to enjoy reading long, confusing things about short, confusing sex, you've come to the right place. Why, you ask conveniently? Because every Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent.  Especially today, a Friday on which I actually got the damned thing written on time.

Sex, as we all know, is complicated. It's not complicated in the "insert Tab A into Slot B" sense. That part's easy, unless Slot B is not in the mood or Tab A has had a little too much to drink, honest, or has been under a lot of stress at work. It's all the other stuff that's complicated. Like, for example, paying attention to where you are when you have sex. And remembering the law of gravity. And remaining aware of who just walked into the room. Doing all of that at the same is complicated, and complicated stuff goes wrong, especially when you're really concentrating on having sex.

Which is why the Worldwide Web is stuffed to the gills with stories about things going wrong during sex. Sometimes, horribly wrong:

He had his shirt off and I was kissing his chest when I got this urge to gently bite a nipple. He'd just gotten both of them pierced, and I forgot they were still very sensitive. I ended up misjudging and biting down on it harder than I intended. The next thing I know, he's hunched over, holding his nipple in pain and I'm running to the wastebasket with a mouthful of pus that squirted out of his two month-old piercing.

Clearly, this was not the intended result. But it is typical of what seems to happen to the well-intentioned people who post sexual embarrassment in Bust Magazine.

my ex and i were at it like rabbits on my sisters bed one afternoon. he was on his back and i had removed my upper layers and was straddling him. we were in raptures and as far as we were concerned, the house was ours.

we were so wrong. the front door slammed, the bedroom door opened and my little sister stood in the doorway watching her older sister ease herself down onto ex's um um really big cock. i made the really big cock noise. anyway, my sister saw me all half nakey, shouted 'good evening shaggers!' and turned away hysterical. we all laughed a lot. my sister and i have never spoken of it again. thank christ.

Now, first of all, the fact that you and your sister haven't spoken of this ever again probably has very little to do with Christ, so I wouldn't bother thanking him. And, secondly, what, exactly, is the "really big cock noise"? I've never heard such a noise.

If one surfs the Internets, one finds many stories of sexual embarrassment. Read enough of those storie and you notice something: The people involved are all young.  At some point, sexual stuff stops being embarrassing. 

I, myself, no longer experience sexual embarrassment, though I'm a little pink-in-the-cheeks about admitting that I haven't heard the "really big cock noise" in the course of my own life.  But out there in the world here are people having sex, and not all of them are as graceful as Cary Grant. For example:

Well we get to my house and we're getting a little hot and heavy on the bed. So he lifts up my skirt, pulls down my thong and starts eating me out. Well i have a few piercings down there, one of them having a chain, usually i take it out but it was going so great i didnt think about it. That is until his tongue ring got caught in the chain!

So we both tried to untangle it, but it was stuck pretty good, and we had no luck. So i had no choice but to call one of my friends.

I think we've all been called late at night by drunk friends needing some sort of help, even if it's just emotional affirmation. But this...this is a phone call I'm having a hard time imagining.

Hello, Becky? This is Anonymous. (Not her real name.) Listen, I need you to come over. Bruno's tongue stud is caught in my clit ring and we can't get separated. (Pause.) Yeah, rubber gloves would probably be a good idea.

Many sexually embarrassing moments revolve around getting caught having sex in public places. I've been writing Sex Day for six months now, and I've come across some odd things. ("For some strange reason, my boyfriend's dog likes to eat underwear if it's on the floor") But if there's one thing I've learned about people and sex it's this: Normal people, just like you and me, or maybe even more normal than that, have a lot of sex in public places. It seems to be something we're really interested in.

From an architectural standpoint, the consuming obsession of Americans is privacy. We don't want to share anything with anyone else. But once we're done completely sealing off our lives from others, the first thing we seem to want to do is to go out in public and have sex.  And then we act surprised when other people see us doing it.

The results of being caught having sex in public are sometimes quite unexpected. Certainly, there is an element of society that thinks you should not be embarrassed if you're caught, because that element of society likes seeing other people have sex in public. So, on occaision, those being caught are rewarded rather than penalized. Here's an example culled from the always entertaining Women.com message boards:

Once my guy and I were in the mall and we had an urgent need for sex. We decided to do it in a dressing room. No one was looking, or so we thought. Apparently, there was a security camera at the register. When we left the store, the salesmen were clapping for us and one asked for an encore. They even gave us a 25 percent discount on our purchases that day

Which, depending on how long they were willing to shop in a store where all the clerks were pointing at them and snickering, could be a lot of money saved.

Sex is not, the moralists out there like to remind us, without consequence, and a good many sexually embarrassing moments take place long after the sex is over -- when the chickens, having been choked, come home to roost. I'll let you imagine the set-up to this workplace boo-boo. It's helpful to remember that the person telling the story is a heterosexual male:

Now I don’t have my own office, or even my own cubicle walls. I'm the last one there, the room is full. I sit down at my desk and reach up to scratch my head. I feel something gooey - a big glob of cum is stuck in my hair! It's like Something About Mary meets Office Space. Before I can help myself, I groan, loudly. Everyone turns around and looks. The girls giggle and the guys are disgusted, actually, everyone is disgusted. I go to the bathroom and try to wash it out.

And when he was done with that he got a new job thousands of miles away.

As we age, I think, we get less embarrassed about sex.  Once you hit mid-twenties, no one you know is a virgin any more; by mid-thirties, pretty much everyone has had one night where they drank too much and ended up tied to a radiator or something.  Hey, it happens.  By mid-forties, pretty much nothing sexual embarrasses you anymore because you've all done those things you first read about long, long ago when Joy of Sex was new.

Here's an example.  Please note the man involved is almost 40.

A man caught having sex with a blow-up doll in a busy public shopping arcade had to be physically parted from his rubber lover and escorted away, said police in Stuttgart on Wednesday.

The 38-year-old man was caught with his trousers down early on Monday evening after alarmed witnesses alerted the police.

The police, the article goes on to say, had "considerable" trouble separating the man from his inflatable partner. He wasn't embarrassed; he was belligerent, shocked and dismayed that the authorities would interrupt his revelry. After all, what goes on between a consenting adult and an inanimate object in public is really no one's business but...well, actually, it is someone's business.

But for the young, sex is still new and embarrassing.  Phrases like, "I'm not putting that thing anywhere near my mouth," have titanic meaning.  Things that are not headline-worthy later in life seem shocking when they're new. That's why this story is such a nightmare:

This happened quite a few years ago when i was thirteen and my sister was nine.

(I was) about to get dressed after a shower and just as i dropped my towel my little sister walks in and sees me naked. Her eyes got big and round, she goes running out the door and down the stairs yelling at the top of her lungs, MOM, MOM, CINDY'S GOT A BUSH, CINDY'S GOT A BUSH!

And just my luck my former crush who i wanted to get back with was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, and when i went downstairs and saw him sitting there with a weird look on his face i ran back upstairs crying and i couldn't face him for a month or so.

The little sister's body was never found, and the teenagers say if you're down near the big swamp on a moonlit night, you can hear her in the wind, shouting, "Cindy's got a bush! Cindy's got a bush!"

Of course, it's not really big news when women have bushes. Sometimes, in fact, it's big news when they don't.

Yesterday, I was short on time so I decided to shower at the YMCA. I forgot until I was basically undressed that I was shaved bald. I still would have forgot except a little girl who was with her Mommy kept staring at me. I felt so stupid.

The moral of both of these stories is, to me: Don't let little girls see you naked. This is particularly good advice to people like me, who are middle-aged men with no daughters and no excuses and not enough money in the bank to hire really good lawyers. Don't let little girls see you naked. Say it to yourself over and over: Don't let little girls see you naked.  Never forget it.

I'm a long way from being a kid and I've been married for 21 years to the same woman and neither one of us is capable of being sexually embarassed anymore.  We leave that kind of thing to you youngsters, experimenting with new lovers and trying things that might sound yucky most of the time, but right now -- if you could just figure out a way to bring it up for discussion -- might be kind of fun.

We've been there; we've done that.  If we want to do it again we'll just do it.

I realized I was no longer sexually embarrassable a couple of years ago, when my wife and I were old enough to know better but still young enough to want to do something wild.  We snuck over to the swimming pool at a nearby apartment complex.  It was late at night, our bloodstreams were aglow with metabolizing alcohol, and we thought skinny dipping would be a fun little act of nostalgia.

We were swimming around like teenagers when a member of the apartment building maintenance crew walked out on the pool deck and saw us.  He straightened up like he was going to yell at us and then realized that we were not crazy teenagers but grown-up people maybe as old as his mom and dad.  And we were naked and romping in the chrystal clear water. 

My wife, naturally, looked fabulous.  But that's beside the point, which is: For a moment, we reacted like teenagers, covering up and acting like the maintenance guy might call our parents.  But then, after about two seconds, both my wife and realized this kid couldn't do a damned thing to us.  He could call the cops, maybe, and have us arrested or trespassing, and one day we'd have to appear in court where the middle-aged judge and middle-aged attorneys would look at us not with scorn but with amused envy.  We might have to pay a fine, but it surely wouldn't make a visible dent in our checking account.  When it was all over, we'd walk out of court more heroes than criminals.

Plus, this young maintenance guy was more afraid of us than we were of him.

Some 20 year old maintenance guy seeing me naked?  A whole lot more his problem than mine.  The twenty-year-old maintenance guy ogling my startlingly attractive naked wife?  To be honest, that was kind of complimentary to her and kind of hot for me.

So we stood there looking at him, and he stood there looking at us, for a long moment.

"You have to leave," he said.  "I"ll get in trouble if you don't.  It's the rules."

We didn't want the kid to get in trouble, so we left under his watchful eye.  And neither one of us blushed even a little.

That's it for Sex Day this week.  I hope you all have fun this weekend.  Maybe I'll see you down by the pool.

Sex Day: Bare Hunting

WARNING: The following blog posting contains information about sex. Lots of people aren't interested in sex. Lots of other people aren't interested in hearing a middle aged fat guy like me talk about sex. Still others don't like hearing their relatives talk about sex. (Hi, Mom!) For all of you, God created websites like this. For everyone else, God created websites like this. Because it's Friday, and every Friday is Sex Day here at Functional Ambivalent. So let's get it on!

I want to say, first of all, that I'm perfectly normal. I'm not a pervert, even a little.

Now that we've established that, let me also say that I like watching naked women. I once spotted a naked breast at 135 yards. I know it was 135 yards because I paced it off. I was sitting on a beach with a margarita in my hand. My wife, who is really quite lovely, was sitting next to me. I was pretending to read but I was really checking out the women on the beach, including my wife, who looks wonderful in a bathing suit. Or not in a bathing suit, but I've not had a lot of success convincing her that she should sunbathe naked.

Anway, the beach was pretty sparsely occupied. I turned my head to the left and, far off in the distance, saw a woman untie the top of her bathing suit, put it into a beach bag, and lay down on her back. That meant here breast were pointed up, where they could be seen.

"I think I need to stretch my legs," I said to my wife, who knows me pretty well.

"Spot someone good?" she asked.

"No," I said, trying to act innocent, "no, really. I just need to stretch. I'll be back in a minute."

I walked down toward the water and made a show of gazing out to sea as if deciding which way to walk. I looked to my right, to my left. Then I made a bee-line to the woman who had removed her bikini top. I counted every step: 135. Then I made another show of stopping and gazing and thinking deep, non-sexual thoughts before turning and walking away from the water. Coincidentally, I walked right past the woman sunbathing topless.

Yep, they were breasts all right. Fashionable, southern California breasts topped with perfect pink nipples. There were faint tan lines that would not last the afternoon. For about ten seconds as I was walking by her, I knew without question that God exists and that he loves me.

I made a long loop back up the beach, walking on the hot cement of hte strand back to my wife, my beach chair, and my margarita.

"Did you have a nice walk?" my wife asked.

"You know," I answered, "I really love you."

My wife laughed.

"She must have been really hot."

"No, really," I said, picking up my book. "I was just stretching my legs."

The reason I am not a pervert is because pretty much everyone likes to look, particularly men. More than that: We like to see. Not just breasts, and not just nudity, either, though nudity is nice. We -- "we" meaning people, but mostly men -- like to see sexy things we're not supposed to see. We like to see other people in moments when other people don't know they're being seen. As Chance, the simple-minded gardener in Being There famously said, "I like to watch."

I, myself, would rather get a good 5-second sneak-peek of a nipple down the blouse of an attractive woman than spend a whole night watching strippers. The woman whose nipple I'm risking serious neck injury to see doesn't even need to be that attractive; she just needs to be oblivious. If I see and she doesn't know it, life is good.

I know for a fact that I am not alone in this. How do I know that? Because I'm not stupid.

I have a friend who, over drinks, confessed to me his deepest, darkest secret. You women out there who don't believe that men share feelings, listen-up. My friend came clean with me, almost in tears. He poured out his soul, confessing that, while driving through a nearby neighborhood, he had seen an old lady sitting on a porch, housedress askew. He wasn't looking for trouble. He just stopped at a four-way stop, looked around, and discovered that he could see right up to where her underwear should have been, but wasn't. For what seemed, to him, a good long time, he sat there with his foot on the brake and he stared.

He told me this story the way someone might tell a story about killing an annoying-but-beloved family dog. It was as if he had done it and told his children the dog had died of natural causes. He was in pain, unable to bear his burden of guilt. I tried to comfort him, comparing looking up the old lady's dress to staring at a gruesome accident on the highway. He shook his head as if I didn't understand.

"You don't get it," he said, his head down, his voice heavy with shame. "It gets worse. I drove around the block to see it again."

My guilt-ridden friend understood something about voyeurism: The absolute best voyeuristic experiences are accidental. They're magical, all-to-short moments that happen and are then gone forever, and there's no way to tell when the next magical moment will come along.

The fine line between normal voyeurism and perversion is this: Normal people (e.g., me) accept that fate will only occaisionally bless us with a naughty view. Perverts, on the other hand, do not accept that. They go out and seek naughty views. They want to see naughty things on their own schedule, not on a schedule dictated by fate. Perverts linger at the bottoms of open stairwells, awaiting women in dresses they know will come; normal people (e.g., me) just take a passing upward look to see if today's the day fate offers its gifts, and if it isn't we go on with our lives. Our glance is quick, deniable, and every now and then there's a payoff. But no one is going to wonder why we're out there hanging around the bottom of the stairs; no one is going to think us perverse.

That's why my friend was so disturbed about circling the block. It's not that the lady was old; it's that he took an undeniably active step to look up her dress. He went out of his way to see what no stranger should see, and in the back of his mind he was wondering: How far is that from just pulling a lawn chair up to her window and waiting for the Big Show?

Innocent voyeurism just happens. It loses its innocence if, when it's happening, we let it happen some more. For example, here's a teenaged girl who claims to have "accidentally" walked-in on her her masturbating twin brother. Except that, as the story unfolds, she "accidentally" saw several minutes of activity until he had finished.

He collected his cum in a piece of paper and tossed it in a basket, but when I went back to the living room, and he came out, he never washed his hands. I don't know how to bring this up to him. I don't want to tell him I was peeking, or tell our parents, but I'll wish he'd wash his hands. I don't envy those people who shake his hand!

Thus we see vividly illustrated the Voyeur's Dilemma: What do you do when you're looking at something you're not supposed to be looking at, but in the process you see something really important that you need to tell someone about, but you can't tell anyone because to do it you'd have to admit that you were doing something you weren't supposed to be doing?

You do nothing, because you've crossed that line. You've got something to hide. You're one of them. You're a pervert.

I have never gone out of my way to peek into a window. Well, that's not true. In college, there was a 10 story women's dorm across from the 4 story dorm where I lived, and one night a bunch of us guys sat on a balcony with binoculars and looked in windows. It was good, clean fun, because we were in college and there was beer involved. We saw college girls reading. We saw one college girl pick her nose. Then, after hours of perfectly innocent college fun with binoculars, we saw two girls come home from a double date. After closing the door on their ardent suitors, they got into their jammies. For about three solid seconds, we saw college-girl breasts.

But, aside from that, I've never...well, sometimes while I'm walking the dog I look in windows from the street. And, for the record, I've never seen anything even remotely good, so it's hardly perverse. But, as the dog deposits his scent on lawn after lawn, bush after bush, I look through living room windows in the hope that I'm going to see something really exciting. I imagine couples coming home from work, throwing off their clothes and getting down to it right there on the couch. I fantasize women casting away their restrictive business suits, sitting in whispy lace underthings while sifting through the day's mail or dusting the Hummel figurines.

In the real world, here's what I see: Bad art. Where do these people buy the junk they put up on their walls, for heaven's sake? Did I miss the day Gypsies went door-to-door?

OK, so I've looked in a few windows. From a distance! But I'm not a pervert because I've never done anything like crawling around in the ceiling of a health club to look down into the women's locker room. I've never done that even a little.

Police say it was around 6am when the woman witnessed someone's leg crash through the ceiling.

Karen Peterson of the Friendswood Police Department said, "She described the leg as dark-colored pants and boots like hiking boots."

By the time police arrived, whoever was hiding in the ceiling was gone. How the getaway was made is a question they haven't been able to answer.

"When the officer got up into the attic/ceiling area – it was apparently narrow, dusty, dark. He had to use his flashlight. He said it was hard to maneuver up there," Peterson explained. "He couldn't find any evidence of anybody being up there other than the hole in the ceiling tile."

No, I've never done anything like that...except once, in junior high school, when we discovered that the weight room had a heating grate that provided a straight shot into the girls' locker room.

But that was just happenstance, and when a couple of guys got caught the gym teachers put cardboard over the grate and that was that. The guy who fell through the ceiling...he's a pervert because he worked so hard to get a peek at some naked women. Here's a guy -- I assume it was a guy, since a woman wouldn't have to crawl around up in the ceiling to get into a women's locker room to see naked women. Anyway, here's a guy who found a way into the "narrow, dusty, dark" ceiling, crawled however far he had to crawl, and waited -- at six in the morning, when normal people (e.g., me) are reading the paper and blogging -- for women to come into the locker room and undress.

That's a whole different scale of involvement than walking up the beach or driving around the block or taking the dog on another walk or peeking through a heating grate. Or walking in every morning like clockwowrk when my wife is getting dressed, for that matter, or just taking a quick glance back into the dressing rooms while shopping at Victoria's Secret. ("No, I don't need anything. I'm just keeping abreast of your new product lines.") That's all normal, because it's nothing more than giving fate a chance to intervene. Like they say about Lotto: You can't win if you don't play.

But it's not perverse. This is perverse: In Malaysia, another enterprising voyeur gave himself away when a woman in the shower noticed something askance at the window.

The mother of three said she noticed a pair of hands at the window holding a pocket-sized camera and clicking away at her while she had no clothes on.

“I don’t know why the man wanted to take pictures of an old woman like me naked,” she said.

This is perverse because taking pictures of neaked strangers in their bathrooms perverse. Other than that, he was probably just walking his dog.

It will probably not surprise you that you can find peeping tom instructions on one-or-the-other of the Internets. Here's a site apparently written by a troubled teenager who never really learned how to spell, and who is -- without question -- a pervert. The troubled teenager goes by the name "The Monkey," which I assume is not his real name. Though you can never be sure. He lives in California and you know how they are with names out there. They may have run out of seasons, celestial bodies, and geological features to name their children after. They ma have moved on to endangered species.

The Monkey takes voyeurism really seriously.

If I'm doing anything that night I'll check out the house during the day. I'll usually jog very slowly past their house. See if they've got a new dog or any new places to hide and stuff like that.

It's important, if you're serious about this peeping tom stuff, that you dress properly. The Monkey has a few wardrobe suggestions, though for me they're of limited utility, since I don't have any of the things he suggests a peeping tom wear. And, if you lead a reasonably civilized life, neither do you.

I'll wear my paintball clothes, which are: Tiger Stripe BDUs, Bonie hat, german sniper veil, boots, gloves. Other stuff is like.... uh... a crook-neck flashlight, and a swiss army knife.

Which leads me to imagine the following conversation with my wife:

Me: "Honey, have you seen my German sniper veil?"

Wife: "Aunt Mae borrowed it. She's assassinating Vernelle from the bridge club this afternoon and hers is at the cleaners."

Anyway, being the kind of terrifyingly obsessive criminal who plans everything in advance, The Monkey suggests you pre-plan your cover story:

If a police officer drives up to you and ask's what your doing out so late, you'd better have a good excuse ready. Say something like, " I was just coming back from a costume party and I'm on my way home," or, " Me and my friends like to play war games at night." But whatever you do don't say stuff like, "Oh, I was on the way to your wife's house." There's nothing worse than a pissed off officer. So kiss up a little if he lets you go then it's worth it.

The Monkey then advocates that you do something prosecutors like to call "laying in wait." Since nudity takes time, The Monkey passes his hours outside his chosen window working what Albert Einstein called "thought experiments." While he waits, he tries to decide "if the prom queen wears panties or not. Or what a certain girl wears under that tight black mini-skirt she wears to school."

Since I'm now shuddering with gratitude that I live thousands of miles from Alameda County, California, where The Monkey makes his home, I'll leave you with his last bit of Monkey wisdom: What to do if you do everything right and still don't see anything good.

The night is young and the town is yours for the taking. Get the drift?

A nice thing to do is set off car alarms. All you have to do is start moving the back of the car up and down until the senser goes off. See how many alarms you can set off in one night.

I think we starers and gawkers and peekers can all feel better about ourselves now. It's like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who says the torture of prisoners in Iraq is acceptable because it's not as bad as chopping their heads off. As long as you can find something worse, what you're doing is just fine. When it comes to voyeurism, normal people (e.g., you and me) can do pretty much whatever we want, because we're not as bad as The Monkey.

Keep that in mind this weekend, when you're out and about.

That's it for this Sex Day. I'm spending this weekend out in the neighbor's bushes, waiting patiently, not setting off car alarms. Setting off car alarms would be perverse. As long as I don't do that, I'm normal as can be.

Have a nice weekend. I'll keep an eye out for you.