Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Donald Trump and Pegging, Both Together and Separately

Oompa loompa doompa de doo
Bonjour! Here's what happening right now.

Contest Winner: The winner of the Best Worst Erotica contest is the Anonymous commenter who chose the unintentional BDSM erotica of the Good Housekeeping article I Tried to Wax My Own Bikini Line--And It Was a Disaster.  The reason I chose this--if you're looking to rig the game next time--is because this guy expressed a clear interest in the prize. (A Cadet dildo, courtesy of Good Vibrations!) Although other entries were super fine and completely amazing, I wanted to avoid creating an Unwanted Surprise Dildo in the Mailbox situation.

The contest also possessed a bunch of people to write me lengthy, super personal emails. Some of them were beautiful and touching, some were just fucking weird and creepy. Try to figure out which category you fall into and adjust your behavior accordingly.

Super Gay:  Speaking of dildos, as I often am, I was assigned a Cosmo piece on 5 Positions for Pegging Your Man. Which, whatever. But what completely shocked me was how many Cosmo readers were totally freaked out about pegging. On Cosmo's Facebook page, there were thousands of comments, with about 70% saying that any butt stuff was "super gay." Which, a. who cares? and b. what???  Over at the IBWMW FB page, where it's way more sensible, Rusty wisely noted, "A man and a woman having sex is the very DEFINITION of gay!"

Super Gay, Donald Trump Version: Some guy on Twitter threatened to get drunk and compose Donald Trump gay erotica. Using the single-minded vision of a drunken man, he did just that in a 4 hour "wine and weed fevered dream" creating Trump Temptation: The Billionaire and the Bellboy.  Pretty much anything associated with this is great, including the Amazon reviews, author Elijah Daniel's Twitter feed, this interview with Daniel, and of course, the book itself i.e. “His gorgeous ass flapped behind him like a mouthwatering stack of pancakes in his pants. My hunger for pancakes had never been stronger."

"I Saw This and Thought of You":  Among the things that greeted me in my inbox recently because...well, it's my own damn fault, were:
--The Dicture Gallery, featuring photographs of penises dressed up in little costumes. Thanks to Christina G. who has a knack for finding such things.
--This insanely fascinating video of hetero missionary sex filmed with a camera inside the woman. Thanks to Lily R. for scienceyness!
--A New York Times video on the New York Public Library's collection of vintage erotica featuring seedy Times Square ephemera, early transgender magazines and copies of Playboy. This was sent in by my Mom, which perhaps explains a few things. 

Viva Bowie!
xoxox
jill

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

"Our Genes Can Be Heartless Puppeteers"

Note the grim, bored faces.
Too many orgasms for the Coolidges?
"Pete and I haven't had sex for awhile," said a friend. "I'm not particularly in the mood, but I feel like we should. You know, for the good of the marriage."

I murmured in an affirmative manner, conveying something along the lines of "Yeah, go hit that dutiful marital sex." After all, sex--even possibly tepid sex--has all kinds of benefits--the immune system boost, happy endorphins, lower incidence of incontinence and all that.

But, at it turns out, not only am I a sucky friend for putting her personal business all up in my blog, but I also might have given her exactly the wrong advice. At least according to the limbic system, a primitive part of our brain that doesn't care a whit that we've based our entire societal structure on the responsible-sounding, seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time ideal of monogamy.

By having sex with good old Pete, my friend would be inadvertently setting off a chain of neurochemicals that would actually increase marital ennui (it means boredom/lack of interest, if you happen to be afflicted with dictionary ennui). Surprisingly, sexual satisfaction kicks in a biological impulse full of monogamy-unfriendly side effects like making a couple more irritated with, and less attracted to, each other.

Marnia Robinson in Psychology Today reports that sexual satisfaction, specifically orgasms, actually compels us to want to move on to a new partner. 
[A] mating frenzy (hot sex, lots of orgasms) resulting in sexual satiation (that "I'm done!" feeling) plays right into Cupid's plan. Decreasing dopamine (after the delicious neurochemical blast of orgasm) tells your limbic system, "Fertilization duty is done here; time to find this mate less alluring-and respond to any potential novel mate with gusto."
The same cruel, cruel swirl of chemicals that make you swoon over another's perfection and general dreaminess, then:
 --makes you think it's a swell idea to bear children with this lovely person, 
-- fills you with a fiery rage toward this person who can't seem to fucking realize that wadding up a wet towel makes it moldy,
--makes you think a new partner would be a much more suitable mate. (I'm keeping a shortlist, just in case.)

Our bodies are, annoyingly, designed to make us stop desiring a mate once we've had our way with them. It's all about creating genetic diversity in our young, maximizing our fertility and all sort of other biological constructs that don't go over too well with a certain monogamous mate.

It's called the Coolidge Effect, and refers to the tendency in mammals to develop deadened sexual responses to their familiar mate while miraculously having no such problems with a novel mate. The name comes from a story about Calvin Coolidge and his wife touring a government farm. After hearing that a particular rooster spent a good part of each day mating, Mrs. Coolidge, in a moment of First Lady TMI, supposedly remarked, "Tell that to Mr. Coolidge when he comes by." When told, the president asked the farmer, "Same hen every time?" "No, sir," answered the farmer. "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge," retorted the President, thus ensuring that no one in the Coolidge house would be doing any mating that evening.

In the Coolidge Effect, a male rat will mate with a receptive female (so made that way through chemical injections) until his libido dies out and he gives up and ignores her, doing whatever the male rat equivalent is of grabbing the remote. However, if a new receptive female enters, he jumps out of his stupor and begins banging her with a fresh vigor. The effect repeats--Mr. Rat rising to the occasion with each fresh female and giving them sweet, sweet rat love--until the dude is overwhelmed with exhaustion.   

I know this is science and all, but part of me wants to take the Creationist Approach to Science and just declare that, hey, I don't believe and/or like this idea, ergo, it's untrue. Despite all the testing, data, chemical analysis, carbon dating, friggin' dinosaur and early human bones littering the whole fucking globe...er, sorry, off topic.  

I mean, I get the whole fresh-excitement-with-new-mate part. Anyone who takes a look at the latest celeb pairing on US Magazine's cover can see that clearly enough, but the rest of it is so counter-intuitive. Having sex with your mate is...bad? And orgasms are especially bad because they make you want to leave your mate and move on? 

So where does this leave us? We live in a society that at least nominally supports families and lifetime pair-bonding. But our uncouth biological impulses are fighting us with every one of our well-intentioned, sanctioned-by-marriage thrusts.

It is a bit of a pickle and I don't have any great solutions for you yet. In the meantime, should you have sex with your mate? Hell, I don't fucking know. Play it by ear and we'll figure it out next time.

xoxo
jill

"Our senses crave novelty.  Any change alerts them, and they send a signal to the brain.  If there’s no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing.  A constant state--even of excitement--in time becomes tedious, fades into the background because our senses have evolved to report changes, what’s new, something startling that needs to be appraised, a morsel to eat, a sudden danger.”  Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Bad Erotica All Over The Damn Place, Plus a Contest!

Still love him.
Today's story on weird-ass erotica was killed by an editor's editor who found it "too weird." Which to me is not a thing. Sort of like the sentence, "That's ok--I've had enough."  I'm running my reject here for you, even though it actually doesn't seem quite weird enough by the rather high standards of weirdness we've developed over the years. 

So to sweeten the deal, I'm adding a contest. Send in a link to the very worst erotica you can find. You can comment below or use ye olde email (jillhamilton001@gmail.com). Deadline is January 22, so you have plenty of time to look around, then set fire to your search history.  Winner will be the entry I deem the best worst erotica, as determined by a ridiculously unfair and unfathomable system based on funniness, personal taste and the ancient Mayan calendar. 

The lucky winner will, one day in the very near future, walk out to their mailbox and be shocked to find a discreetly packaged Cadet Dildo courtesy of Good Vibrations lurking within. It might be a vibrating version of the Cadet or not. We still haven't worked out the details on that part, but it will for sure look like a dick (in one of three colors!) and I think that is an important feature of a pretend penis. That's $42-80 of penis-shaped silicone that's pretty damn perfect for all your pegging needs!

Yes, we ARE happy to see you
In the meantime, I'm also pleased to inform you that dear sullen Morrissey was the recipient (winner, perhaps is too strong a word here) of this year's Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. The judges were particularly swayed by this passage from Morrissey's List of the Lost which certainly lends credence to his assertion that he's asexual. 

"At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone"

Anyway, here's the too weird/not weird enough article. And don't forget to enter the contest. That dildo could soon inside you or inside an orifice of someone you love! Or at least someone you like well enough to feel comfortable sticking a fake penis (in one of three colors) in one of their holes.

Fuck, I've missed you.

 xoxoxxo
 jill 

******

 7 Least Appealing Objects of Desire in Erotica

We are truly in a golden age of erotica. Maybe not quality-wise, necessarily, but in quantity—we've got it covered. Anyone or anything that is even vaguely fuckable has fanfic or a cheapo Amazon book featuring their heaving bosom and/or throbbing manhood and/or whatever spiky thing they have in their loins. Within seconds you can access smut featuring Santa Claus, Dobby the House Elf or a pterodactyl “who might have carnal pleasures in mind.” (Sure, some of it's meant to be funny/parody stuff, but, well....there's sure a lot of it. There's clearly something else going on here*--like how vehemently anti-gay politicians seem to spend a whole lot of time talking about gay dudes.)

Here then are erotica's 7 Least Appealing Objects of Desire.

--Not Obviously Sexy Celebrities!
Celebrities who rarely make anyone's freebie list finally get to throb with desire in stories like The Audition in which a hopeful contestant walks into Pat Sajak's (!) office and “is shocked to see Pat Sajak with his pants on the ground and one hell of a hard-on.” As one would be. Other erotic fodder includes the “Happy Days” cast, Ray Romano, Beavis and Butthead, and Mowgli and the Village Girl from “Jungle Book” (who, apparently, also have balloon fetishes. Because Mowgli/Village Girl erotica wasn't quite specific enough.)

Best/worst sentence (from The Audition): “Pat uses each hole well, like the proverbial gopher popping in and out of Vanna and Lila’s boxes.”