It doesn't die until midnight. That leaves a good 45 minutes or so.
If we knew the duration of a quantum of masturbation, we could estimate exactly how many masturbations until no more masturbating to TimesSelect.
Oh, right. For masturbating. I'm an idiot.
Estimate exactly approximately precisely how many masturbations etc.
What's even more amusing is that the featured item from the NYT Store is the iconic Powerhouse Mechanic photo. Guess they really are focusing their advertising efforts.
"He also points out that International Male serves a valuable function in the [pathetic sex lives of closeted gay teenagers]."
It was certainly the best thing I could get my hands on in the '80's. (besides, y'know) Everything old is new again.
I can't put my finger on it, but I'm getting a kind of "house the Jack built" vibe from 3.
w-lfs-n has masturbated to the point of idiocy.
Wait, is it midnight tonight or midnight tomorrow? The article isn't clear.
w-lfs-n has masturbated to the point of idiocy.
Here's a hint to gentoo users: don't upgrade to v2 of expat. It will break things, and you will be sorry.
Here's a hint to gentoo users: don't
there, fixed that for you.
Unfortunately, the death of the paywall means that columns by Friedman and Brooks will start appearing again on my favorite blogs. I really enjoyed having their stuff safely segregated behind high walls and kept away from my internets.
don't upgrade
Obviously you don't listen.
So the big question here, Becks, is:
Where did you pre-sexually ogle boy bodies?
I don't know. I remember looking at the pictures in my parents' copy of The Joy Of Sex and reading some steamy passages in Clan of the Cave Bear but I don't remember ever ogling guys like that. Even today -- not much of an ogler.
Actually, when I was in middle school and earlier, I think I was more likely to ogle women's bodies in lingerie catalogs and such. Perhaps less ogling in a sexual sense than a fascination with the women in them and the idea that I would eventually have boobs and be able to wear bras and stuff someday.
Oh, yeah, I read all the Auel books in junior high. They get a lot steamier after CotCB.
In high school, I learned how to take inseam measurements and hem pants for the drama productions. And I made friends on the swim team. I am no crotch-ogler, and never have been, but I liked to know they were around in case I changed my mind.
I am no crotch-ogler
Well, sure, if you put it like that.
I'VE GOT A MAN-SIZED HUNGER FOR MAN-MEAT!
My best girlfriend is a terrible crotch-watcher. No one seems to notice, I guess. She will call my attention to a particularly arresting specimen on the subway, and I just can't bring myself to look. It's like there's an image scrambler over it or something.
Oh my god -- the other thing that I read when I was in junior high or my freshman year in high school was The Diary of Laura Palmer. I was a huge Twin Peaks fan. And guess what? The book is online. I remember that book being very...eye-opening...at a certain age. Especially the entries for October 20, 1985 and the one right after October 3, 1986.
I killed the blog. Everyone's off reading Twin Peaks porn now. Oh well. Time for bed.
Yeah, I think I found that sort of vague (LPD) or "writerly" (CothCB) description especially exciting as a pre-teen because the only other language I had for sex was the gross way a couple of nympho 5th-grade classmates talked about what they did with high school boys. It really put me off actually wanting to do anything with anyone else.
And thus, I was only really interested in sex in literature until I was 18. Sad, but true.
No, Becks, I think I killed it. Whenever someone posts something sexy, the rule is that no one is allowed to talk about sex. Whenever someone posts about something dorky or antisocial, it's all about cock. I keep forgetting this rule.
Maybe the blog is quiet because it's 1:30 AM on a Monday night.
I think over here whole generations had their first sexual responses to the tiny pictures of "sex education" books in the backpages of book club catalogs.
I clicked through to International Male underwear section, and *I* was quite scared too. I'm sure Ogged has that Push-Up Thong. And then I nearly cried at the Problem Solvers category.
OT, but while I like Keith Olbermann's news show quite a bit (except for the Britney shit), the ads on the program are skewed toward Cialis and laxatives (two competing brands).
Also, almost all of the laxative ads feature nice-looking women. Is it so that homely fat guys can buy laxatives without believing that they're contributing to a stereotype?
Anti-diarrhoea adverts feature nice-looking women too.
I remember looking at the pictures in my parents' copy of The Joy Of Sex
I remember looking at my parents' copy of The Joy of Sex and thinking "Gross. Hippies."
Sorry for thread spamming, but I just want to repeat a comment I posted in another thread. If anyone sees JL around here, please ask him to e-mail me. It's semi urgent.
37 - Totally. Least sexy sex book ever.
A friend of mine looked at several editions and said that bondage became more and more prominent as the book progressed.
A 40-year-old tech friend of mine left her tyrannical husband and took up with a 25-year-old guy (a Mormon!). Shortly after that I met her coming out of Powell's with a brand-new JofS. I told her she should make sure that the new 5.0 manual also covered the older 2.0 and 1.0 models. She finally got the joke a few hours later, she told me.
Least sexy sex book ever
Hm. Clearly the signifiers are very time-specific, and just the right style to be redolent of parents, for someone your age. And you Becks are about the most age-aware person I regularly encounter.
In the day, it was sexy to us, although the hippy quality was striking, and probably deliberate on several levels. The hairyness, and to No. American eyes uncut quality was about "naturalness." My favorite illustrations in memory are the color ones from the front of the book, where the woman in the peasant dress doesn't actually take it off. The woman, particularly in the uncolored line drawings, always looked very English to me.
Yes, a bromide, pathetic in retrospect, yada yada. It seems to have helped a lot of people in the half-generation older than mine, and may be out there doing good still. Maybe current or future teenagers will find that hair sexy again.
Becks and Cerebrocrat are uptight Puritans who hate the body.
Correct, John. The early JoS books was illustrated with all these wonderfully lithe and natural bodies. So natural compared to the chunky, muscular, six-packed, shaven ones that came later.
Anyone else find their parent's copy of Anais Nin early on?
41: In the day, it was sexy to us, although the hippy quality was striking, and probably deliberate on several levels... about "naturalness."
No doubt, and in retrospect this makes it kind of charming. But the age at which we were most likely to be nosing around in our parents' sex book s is exactly the age at which we'd be most sensitive to generational signifiers (god, I just said "signifiers") and least interested in naturalness as opposed to idealized sexuality. Now that I'm older and wiser, I'd have to agree that pube shaving is weird.
44: I never ran across a copy of the Joy of Sex at a formative age (I'm actually trying to figure out what I did run across. Not much -- I had pretty complete biological knowledge, but that was about it until I started actually doing stuff.) But I'd think there'd actually be some informational usefulness in having a non-hot sex manual - a sort of 'this is stuff ordinary unappealing people do' rather than 'Oooo, look at the pretty pictures.' You'd want it to stay short of revolting, but unerotic sounds like it might make it more personally approachable as reference.
I'd have to agree that pube shaving is weird.
Cerebrocrat hates progress.
@47: I think that balance was what the publishers were aiming for. It did function as porn, in spite of or perhaps because of the ordinariness of the figures, but approachable and non-intimidating for sure.
Now that I'm older and wiser, I'd have to agree that pube shaving is weird.
It's not inherently weird. Doing it because it feels good and makes sex more fun makes perfect sense. Doing it out of a sense of social expectation is weird (but when you get down to it, so is shaving of legs and armpits)
My mother was (and remains) a book-packrat nonpareil. She regularly brought home cartons full of castoffs and surplus books from the library at the prison where she worked, which was overflowing from all the publisher's remainders (cover half cut off, remainder stamp on the sides of the pages) they received.
All together, this constituted a cornucopia of near-porn, at least if you were willing to skim through hundreds of promising-looking paperbacks, which I most assuredly was.
46: Now that's just the last straw.
re: 50
Or the face, for that matter.
Or the face, for that matter.
True, although that one has some limited argument from utility (can't catch food in a beard that isn't there). But I agree it's mostly aesthetics.
Whenever I feel slightly self-conscious about not shaving my armpits, I remember that my parents' Joy of Sex was very adamantly against it. I have like five armpit hairs, so the cost-benefit equation comes out against shaving, but I do get embarrassed every couple months or so.
What in 55 requires presidential pseudonymity?
My parents always seemed horrified by regular-old-sex books like JoS. Instead, they both seemed to buy a lot of softcorish thriller novels, which they'd then lend to me. Always, the sex in these books was not well-enough described to get what was going on, but it was always mildly nonstandard. I remember reading Pet Sematary when I was 11 and it was full of loofah-handjob-in-the-bath type stuff. Others only had lesbian scenes in them.
I guess no one ever really puts a carefully-described missionary intercourse scene in a novel.
Clearly you've forgotten the M of receptivity.
Gawd, I hate Updike.
That was Updike, right?
But I agree it's mostly aesthetics.
That last optical inch could make all the difference. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression.
I think the first explicit sex scene I ever read was in the New Yorker, in a story by John Updike that eventually became part of "Sabbath's Theater". It was extremely weird.
Sabbath's Theater is a P. Roth novel.
I think vanilla het sex tends to get described very elliptically in non-literary, non-porn fiction, because the assumption is that the reader has a strong enough concept of what's going on to supply the details themselves. I read an awful lot of novels with sex scenes aimed at adults as a kid, and managed to gather very little actual information from them. Once you get a little off the beaten track, the writer has to be slightly more straightforwardly informative to make it clear what exactly they're talking about.
But it was definitely an excerpt from Sabbath's Theater. I read it over and over wondering what the point was.
Except Roth can choose not to suck for pages at a time. Also: sense of irony.
It's not impossible that a story by John Updike was plagiarized by Roth and inserted into Sabbath's Theater.
Not everyone is as comfortable as apostropher in describing their intimate hygeine to the whole wide world, ogged.
The only two women I have known not to shave their pits were hotter for it.
64: In elementary school, I bought a lot of adult fantasy novels, like Anne McCaffrey, and found that fantasy tends to be more helpfully descriptive about the mechanics for beginners.
They probably lived in a cool climate.
70: That's because in fantasy you have to make it clear that the people having sex are humanoids and not griffins or wraiths or talking cats.
They probably lived in a cool climate.
Or washed.
I guess one of them I didn't really know. We were in the same class one quarter, and I referred to her as "hot Durkheim girl". She was really beautiful. I don't think I exchanged word one with her.
fantasy tends to be more helpfully descriptive about the mechanics for beginners
Because the author can't assume that the reader is familiar with what turns on imaginary species from other planets.
Or, of course, that they are griffins having sex with talking cats.
I dunno, isn't Anne McCaffrey a lot of "she lay back and let him come to her" "they joined passionately, coming together more and more intensely, until she felt herself explode in an endless cascade of starlight" and so on? Not so much with the body parts.
Or maybe I was just slow. But I was, in fact, reading a whole bunch of Anne McCaffrey and similar, and still felt somewhat underinformed.
I've changed my mind—again!—about presidential pseudonymity: whatever people feel vaguely ashamed about, for whatever reason, seems an appropriate use to me.
What leads me to this conclusion is the fact that we do have established personae here, and what seems to go with that is a desire to not reveal things that would shame not merely our real life selves, but our personae too, before the others.
It's not my way here: I only use it when the story violates the privacy of someone else, but I think that's what's going on.
In principle, I wish we were franker than that, and I try to be "warts and all," but I wouldn't want to deflect any conversation that would otherwise come up here by insisting others do the same.
70: Same for me with the McCaffrey, although I rather quickly moved on to Heinlein's non-juvenile stuff. I think I read Time Enough for Love when I was 12 or 13. That was... educational.
I think that's a really underexamined source of Heinlein's popularity among the teen nerd set. Number of the Beast, here.
Now that I'm older and wiser, I'd have to agree that pube shaving is weird.
Absolutely. If there's one place you don't want irritating stubble, that be it. Waxing is clearly the way to go.
I think Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, do you read?" was the first story I read that dealt with explicit sex. Also, around the same time I read Portnoy's Complaint and The Professor of Desire. So much of the latter two flew straight over my head, but I was only there for the hot parts, anyway. I recall Tanith Lee being good, too, as well as Andre Norton.
I remember reading a sex scene in one of the later Foundation novels and being really disappointed with how ineptly it was written.
There was a copy of The Harrad Experiment at my family's summer cabin that I recall finding quite startling.
I read lots of books that had sex scenes as a kid, but like others, I didn't really get what was going on until I was older. So they sort of passed me by. Ditto explicit films and/or porn. I don't think I saw any genuinely explicit films until after I'd already started having sex.
Number of the Beast, here.
I'm reasonably sure that I read about sex in fiction when I was 8 or 9ish and workin' the adult fiction section of the library (with permission). The memory of whatever that was is totally blotted out by the fact that I laid hands on the semi-infamous "Last All Meat Issue" of Hustler when I was 11.
That was shortly followed by acquiring an issue of Gallery which was a sorta 2nd rate psuedo-sophisticated euro skin mag. Since it had pretenses to sophistication, it actually had articles, which I eventually got around to reading. One article was a quite serious one about the massive unpreparedness/ineptitude of the American army (this being 1979). Roughly six months after I had read the article, I was reading the new edition of Expanded Universe and discovered that Heinlein made an explicit reference to that exact article. I was totally thrilled; the Grand Master and I were perusing the same skin mags! Woo hoo! (I had long since read Time Enough for Love and the other "adult" bloviating books.)
So there's yer teen nerd moment from me.
max
['I suppose you had to be me.']
81 - That and the hardminded, no-nonsense political philosophy suitable for twelve-year-olds.
So they sort of passed me by. Ditto explicit films and/or porn
"Lord, you can imagine where it goes from here!"
"He fixes the cable?"
"Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey."
I think I worked out that Heinlein was socio-politically offensive before I realised that he was riske'. (Can't be arsed with fancy characters.) I was a bit strange like that.
Can't be arsed with fancy characters.
Like "q"?
Over lunch I remembered Herzog's IQ 83. This terrifying tale of a world lapsing into imbecility is filled with characters who--as they became dumber and dumber--can't control their savage desires!!! Even at thirteen or so, I think I suspected that Herzog wasn't a very good writer--not that I cared--but I didn't realize how bad until now.
The only two women I have known not to shave their pits were hotter for it.
Aye. And legs.
Shere Hite, "The Hite Report", was also formative and I think having impressed on it so early made me a better lover when I finally worked my way around to the real thing (much, much, much later...the book was only helpful on what to do once you were in bed).
I think Heinlein gave me a skewed picture of how impressed women were by endless sophomoric lectures on politics. He was like the first warblogger.
93 - How hairy were these hot non-shaving girls you and Ben are going on about? I mean, I'm Sicilian. If I didn't shave my legs (& etc.) I'd probably be as hairy as Ogged after a couple of weeks. Are you talking the type of girl with downy blonde hair or with serious hair?
I was thinking. I'm not Sicilian, but I'm dark-haired, and in non-shaving periods of my life you could have told that my legs were unshaven as far away as you could see me. Blondes are talking about an entirely different level of committment to unshavenness.
95: Becks: you could not shave at all and then go on dates nude; then, you could pen a Modern Love column titled "When Hirsute Becamse Her Suit."
I had an illuminating early experience of literary porn with a book I more recently identified as Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure. I recall opening it because of the title, and being hit full-force with an explicit oral sex scene.
We all must decide where our limits are. I'm downy and blonde, but girls at the spa where I worked were always on me to get full-body waxes. They wanted me to do my forearms and everything, couldn't believe I'd go in public with visible blond forearm hair. Around that time I went out with a guy who told me it was, like, unbelievably kinky that I didn't get Brazilians. And a coworker explained to me that "a lady gets a pedicure and wears sandals in the summer."
Apparently, everywhere I went, I was broadcasting that I was a low-rent midwesterner with 70's-housewife-level grooming habits. I've made a couple of minor concessions since then, like paying more for haircuts, keeping my brows plucked, and trying to make my nails look decent. I Brazilianed a few times on compulsion, but it's just too much fucking effort. Trimming is sufficient.
I understand shaving the public areas—sounds like co-op bylaws, I know—but hair whenever and wherever encountered has never been a turnoff, as we used to say in the seventies heyday of that sort of thing.
I guess it just feels weird to be told that one's hygiene is, like, fetishy, even if it's appreciated.
I reject America's depilatory frenzy. Let a million ass hairs wave!
Eh, shoulda been born with a dick, then.
I usually get away with claiming that it's a Continental thing. Or something. Maybe I'm driving away a thousand prissy potential dates everyday!
I usually get rid of my leg hair, though.
Shaved legs rule. It's not, obv., bad to have hairy legs, but it's not genuinely awesome, the way the smooth, nearly slick skin of just shaved legs are. w-lfs-n and KR are deviants.
95, 96: I hate to admit it, but Becks and LB have a point: those of us who don't shave would have an even rougher time of it if we were hairier than we are. I'm not sure what I would do in that case.
I'm not downy blond; my leg hair is pretty noticeable, but no, not at Sicilian levels. Almost all of the other women I've known who don't shave are, in fact, downy blond.
The only ones who weren't were either lesbians or hippies. In other words, participating in communities with divergent sensibilities. And many hippie women do shave, usually legs more than arms; it's often for, hm, aesthetic, sexuality-related reasons.
I was talking about armpits, Timmy.
I think the world is ready for a thread on this topic. I'll put one up.
If I could snap my fingers and be entirely hairless except for my eyebrows, I'd do it. I don't know why I'm telling you this.
Or why you aren't telling us this on the thread ogged put up, I'm guessing.
"a lady gets a pedicure and wears sandals in the summer."
A truly artful euphemism for talking about ass hair.