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Alt.sex.column

alt.sex: Don’t be a dick

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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alt.sex: Don’t be a dick

Dear Andrea:

I’m not your average 20-something male. I love sex, but not unless its part of a relationship. I guess I think too highly of myself to tag random chicks meaninglessly. I do have a high sex drive and a great deal of experience, but the women I go for are usually highly-educated, professional, librarian types.

From a female’s point of view, what is the best way to ask about a girl’s libido and kinkiness during the dating process without seeming like a creep or actually trying her out? Remember, I don’t date your average slut with a tongue ring and a Playboy Bunny tattooed on her ass, and I’m sick of playing T-ball when I’m a pro.

Love,

Classy Pro

Dear Pro:

From this female’s point of view, the best way to avoid coming off like a creep is not to be a creep in the first place, which unfortunately leaves you out. I mean what, exactly, do you hope to accomplish by dividing women into “librarians” and “tongue-ring-wearing sluts”? Moreover, have you ever actually seen a “tongue ring?” In this female’s experience, one pierces the tongue with a barbell, not a ring, and some of the finest sluts I know are librarians. I fear that you are not the sophisticate with discriminating taste in women you imagine you’re seeing when you gaze (too long, no doubt) in the mirror every morning, but really a sort of combo prig, prat, and snob, and I will be sure to tell my librarian friends not to go out with you.

If you are interested in a particular woman (and have, presumably, already examined both her tongue and her tattoo, if any, to be sure they meet with your approval before you waste your precious time or bodily fluids on someone who turns out to be just another average slut), it is permissible to bring up areas of interest, which can include vaguely sexual events or racy reading material.

The kind of woman you claim to seek, however, will not be impressed by your presenting her with a questionnaire (“How kinky are you?” “Would you rate your libido high, average, or low?”) before you’re willing to spring for a frappuccino. Neither, come to think of it, is such an approach likely to work on Tongue-Ring (sic) girl. Unless you meet your librarian love through the personals (not a bad idea) or at an S-M club or similar prescreened venue (which can certainly be done), there is no shortcut to intimate knowledge.

However much classier you may be than the average schmo, you’re going to have to put up with the inconvenience of actually getting to know someone. Take care to assure her upfront that you are a “pro,” have tons of experience, and only date “classy” women. That should take care of some of the screening for you right there. If she looks appalled, scoots her chair back, and leaves without a backward glance, she was probably just some slut anyway.

Love,

Andrea

Got a question? Write to Andrea at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com. See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

 

Ars longa

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Ars longa

andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m 43, good-looking, and reputedly sexy, funny, and easy to hang out with. I got laid almost daily in my 20s. But my last steady relationship was in 2007. My confidence is at an all-time low. I masturbate way too much to movies with Asian women and men who are hung to the floor, which makes me feel very small. I’m in a bad place right now and I don’t see the point of approaching women since I won’t be able to satisfy them like in the movies.

I’m a little under five inches. I’ve never felt comfortable with my size, although I did become very imaginative, creative, and kinky to give women pleasure. But I have never made a woman shake or moan with my penis. I miss female companionship, but I don’t feel man enough to try anymore. I just don’t have the confidence. Now I just fantasize about the kind of women I used to get.

Love,

Feeling Small

Dear Small:

Back when I used to answer questions at San Francisco Sex Information, we used to hear from a lot of guys who assumed that intercourse ought to go on for 90 minutes, penises ought to be at least 8 inches long, and all women achieve dramatic and very noisy orgasms from straight-ahead pounding and enjoy nothing more than a nice refreshing facial. What these guys had in common, was over-exposure to (mainstream) porn and little or no real-life experience from which to develop the kind of bullshit-o-meter one needs to protect one’s fragile sense of self-worth from most artifacts of popular culture, including Hollywood movies and all those songs about doing it all night till the morning light.

Those guys were virgins or recently devirginated, though, and were dismayed when real life failed, as it so often does, to match its own hype. You have no such excuse. You have actually done it with a real girl. Lots and lots of real girls, to hear you tell it. So buck up and back away from the giant-dick porn. Maybe try some amateur stuff, which, while still porn and still rife with porny conventions, may at least be more realistically scaled.

You do know that porn, like advertising, is aspirational and relies on a viewer’s ability to project himself into the imagined scenario, right? And it probably doesn’t work so well on people who already feel as rich, thin, powerful, well-dressed, and sexually satisfied as the people portrayed. Messages designed to make you feel unsatisfied with your own lot can be especially persuasive when you’re feeling vulnerable. So I assume that you also know that porn, however powerful, does not possess secret witch-doctor superpowers and cannot reach through the screen and SHRINK YOUR PENIS. So what the hell, dude? You were the same (admittedly smallish but hardly pathologically so) size back when you were in like Flynn. And all those women were not complaining then. Something has changed but it’s not the equipment.

I stopped making art when I stopped having the time and space (I hear these two are related somehow) to really spread out and do stuff, and I lost some confidence in my skills along the way, but a few weeks ago, sick of being a person who doesn’t do art, I dragged all my supplies out of storage and made something. If I can make art, you can … screw (despite the set-up I just could not, in the end, bring myself to say "make love").

I usually tell the unhung that they’ll have to develop mad skillz instead of relying on brute size to do the work for them. And then I add that everybody else would do well to do the same, since brute size is never a replacement for the skill that you, reportedly, already possess. And I usually throw in the fact that, speaking of not much penis, the people who report the most satisfying sex lives in all those surveys tend to be … lesbians.

To shake bad habits of thought and bad habits, period, find a cognitive-behavioral therapist. And to combat the blues from not getting laid, take a deep breath and find a date. Just don’t get the two things confused, and don’t put "has small penis" in the personals ad. Many women don’t care (and some prefer what you’ve got to offer) but it just doesn’t sound nice. You don’t have to marry this date. You don’t have to do her. Just prove to yourself that you can go.

And yes, I do know it’s not that easy. Neither is getting imaginative and kinky and giving women pleasure, and you used to do all that just fine. I would caution you, though, that thinking of women as something you (used to) "get" may have flown in 2007, but it won’t work now, bub. It’s a new decade.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

We are family

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We are family

Dear Andrea:

Is it OK to ask out my ex sister-in-law? I always thought she was hot. Now we are both divorced and I keep thinking, why not? Is there some reason I’m not thinking of why I shouldn’t?

Love,

Free and 50

Dear Free:

What is an ex sister-in-law, exactly? An ex wife of your ex wife’s brother? Entirely doable, assuming that none of these people are still in close touch with any of your people, and I’d imagine they’re not. If, rather, you mean your ex-wife’s sister, proceed only if childless or post-emigration (both of you) to someplace suitably distant, like New Zealand or the International Space Station. In other words, you are adults and can do what you like, but nobody else is going to like you for it.

While I am a big believer in living an authentic life (come out if you’re gay, don’t promise monogamy if you’re poly, etc.) I’m equally dedicated to what Michael Jackson’s rabbi Shmuley Boteach flogs, catchily, as “shalom in the home.” (Boteach calls himself “America’s rabbi” but having been MJ’s best grown-up little buddy all over the media for years makes him no rabbi of mine, yuck.) Peace to you! Peace to your ex-in-laws! (“Peace to you and all your mailmen,” sings our own rabbi, who is a bit of a goof.) Do not go sowing discord and discomfort. Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Don’t date your ex wife’s sister.

Exes who were never blood relatives of former spouses are a big whatev, go for it. We must keep in mind, though, that there is no reason to believe that the ex wife of an ex wife’s sibling or whatever she has been thinking you were hot all the years you were thinking she was. She may never have noticed you because you are not the sort of person she notices. She may find you repulsive. It’s no different from any other “should I ask her out?” situation — nothing ventured nothing gained and all that. But in the case of an ex’s ex-ex, if she rejects you, word may get back to the people you are still in touch with, and they may laugh at you. But if you ask her out, she may have sex with you. Decisions, decisions.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

Can you marry your cousin? Is it legal, and is it a good idea?

I am just wondering because we used to flirt a lot when we were teenagers and I still find her attractive (and will see her on the holidays) but of course I would never do anything about it.

Love.

No Harm in Asking

Dear No:

You could have just looked it up! This is not obscure information, although it does manage to be continually surprising information. The answer to your first question, as to so many others, is “it depends.” Fifteen or so states (and not just weird little forgotten out-of-the way states, either, count California and New York) allow first cousins to marry without any restriction. A handful more have various hoops to jump through. The rest still have anti-cousin laws on the books but you know, it is not unheard-of to go to another state to marry if your own is still too bigoted to allow it. It’s also legal in Mexico and Canada.

What do you mean, “bigoted,” you ask? Isn’t marrying your cousin a good way to get a kid with flippers and three eyes? No, actually, it’s not. There’s a slightly — very slightly — higher incidence of birth defects, like 1 percent or 2 percent. If your (mutual) family suffers from a heritable genetic condition, you’re both going to want to get tested for that before having kids. But for most people, it’s just not going to be an issue.

What is an issue is: your families would hate you. Or hate one of you and consider the other a victim. Or not hate but be so horribly uncomfortable in your presence that it would come down to the same thing, as far as happy holidays and shalom in the home go.

I am not horrified or even bothered by cousins marrying. It seems kind of lazy to me — what, you couldn’t be bothered to meet someone else? — but it isn’t bad or wrong or gross or even dangerous. It is, however, Not Done. It used to be done (every article you read on this is illustrated with a picture of the Darwins, I think), but it is currently Not Done. And you are not the Jukes and the Kallikakses (look it up) and you are not pharoahs or European royalty. You do not, presumably, possess dynastic wealth that requires cautious and xenophobic husbanding. So you probably want to not do it.

And now I can’t get Dorothy Parker’s poemlet out of my head, so here, Merry Christmas:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.

Love,

Andrea

My heart belongs to daddy

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My heart belongs to daddy

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

OK, I get it about the hot moms, but what about dads? Does anyone ever talk about them? I remember when our son was younger and my husband would be out with him in the Baby Bjorn or stroller, he would tell me he got a lot more attention from women than he did otherwise. Some of that was really about the cute baby, but really, he was pretty sure those women were flirting with him. What was that about? He had a wedding ring and a kid!

Is there a thing about DILFs like there is about MILFs? It kind of seems like there would be, but it’s not something you ever hear.

Love,

Wondering Mom

Dear Mom:

Kinda. Did you try Googling "DILF?’ There’s a ton more out there than I would have expected, but since you’re not the first one to bring this up, I have been looking. A lot of it is just online porny zeitgeistiness — "people are talking about MILFs, so people will be wondering about DILFs, so I, sex-site owner or promoter or whatever, will make sure there’s something for them to see." The perhaps unexpected (although not to me!) detail is that almost every hit brings you to gay porn. This should not be a big surprise when you remember that there just isn’t a lot of "hot guy!" stuff marketed to women. There is some, but most porn made for women is very couple-y. So "DILF" for porn purposes seems to refer to somewhat older men-for-men, and fits neatly alongside already-existing categories like "daddies." And "daddy" for porn purposes never had the first thing to do with taking the kids to the park. There are also bears, of course, but they are likewise not associated with babies. Not even Baby Bjorns. Ahem.

I did run across "Am I A DILF?" and "How To Be A DILF"-type posts on various dad blogs, but I find something unconvincing about the entire question, not to mention the suggestions. Use hair product? Work out a lot? Really? There is no question that attractive dads get a lot of attention (including a great deal of media attention, if they’re Jude Law or Brad Pitt), but I am not sold on the idea that they are getting it for their abs, let alone their well-gelled hair. Rather, I think a nice-looking guy pushing his daughter on the swings or toting an adorable toddler in a backpack attracts extra attention because (unfairly to today’s crop of fully involved fathers) a father who knows how to be a dad, not just a contributor of genetic material and material support, is still seen as an exception. And he is attractive to women who hope to find such a partner themselves, or who wish that the partner they did have would be more like that. He is not being fetishized for his fecundity (or for keeping his trim figure), nor are most admirers hoping to bed him. The women who are staring are well aware that he is married. Few are seriously plotting or even fantasizing a seduction. Now, for the attractive single dad at the playground …

While I do believe that the good father’s good-fatherliness is a large part of his appeal, it’s worth mentioning here that recent theories in sociobiology have poked giant holes in our previous, somewhat cartoonish view of protohuman, early human, and modern hunter-gatherer sexual politics and economics. It’s no longer safe to assume that women are hardwired to look for one reliable provider to raise our expensive, fragile, slow-maturing offspring with. Newer theories hold that human kids are so expensive and slow-growing that the preindustrial nuclear family could never have supported them. You need relatives, older children, and friends, as well as a husband, to keep a baby safe and well-fed.

This does open up a little room for us to view men, including men with children, as sex objects and not merely provider-objects. But I am just not buying the idea of women (most women, that is) seeing a handsome dad out daddying and thinking, "Now there’s a dad I’d like to fuck." I think most women who find, say, Brad Pitt sexy just find him sexy. There’s no special category for "has kids but is still hot." Rather, I think the sight of a man ministering to or goofing around with his young kids inspires an "aaww!" reaction that is, while not specifically antisexual, certainly not sexy-sexual. It may make you want to marry him or wish you had married him, or hope that when it is time to marry you find someone as handsome-plus-good-with-kids. It adds to a man’s attractiveness as a theoretical life partner, not as a potential fuck buddy. And I do not believe the same goes for MILFs. Having the hots for a dad is never going to carry the enormous cultural madonna-versus-whore weight that the "hot mom" does. And he can be happy about that.

Love,

Andrea

Winter wonderland

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Winter wonderland

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Every year I dread this season, not because I particularly hate the holidays, but because the short, dark days depress me. I talked to a therapist friend and she doesn’t think I have SAD, and says lots of people feel a little gloomy when the days get short. I also notice that I have almost no libido this time of year. I’m single and I usually date, but when it gets dark so early, I find that I just can’t be bothered. I don’t want to meet anyone because I don’t feel like having sex or any sort of intimacy, really. I just want to sit on my couch in my pajamas. Do I have "seasonal libido disorder"? Is this kind of seasonal swing a common thing? I also find I get the stereotypical "spring fever" and can’t wait to go out and meet guys (I’m a girl) when the days get longer. Any ideas?

Love,

Poorly Seasoned

Dear Poorly:

You’re not the only one! Even people who need look no further than the other end of the couch often experience a libido-slump in the winter. For the single, who may have to actually leave the house to find a prospective mate, the hurdles are higher. There are all sorts of possible factors, including less exercise and its possibly associated weight gain and/or lack of energy, as well as the bigger push it takes to get up and bundle yourself into cold-weather gear and slog through sleet or slush, as opposed to merely flitting out the door in a darling little sundress whenever you feel like it. There is holiday stress and all those happy couple and happy family images forced down your throat all season, set to the anti-erotic soundtrack of "Winter Wonderland." Feh.

It may turn out that there is something far more elemental going on, though. It appears that you don’t have to be human or trying to avoid Perry Como songs in order to experience a very precipitous drop in libido during the winter. Siberian hamsters, for instance, never have to listen to Perry Como (actually, I looked it up and was entranced by this list of people [besides Como] who famously recorded that nasty thing: Bob Dylan, Tom Astor, George Strait, Tony Bennett, Karen Carpenter, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Eurythmics, Elvis, Goldfrapp, Cyndi Lauper, Darlene Love, Johnny Mathis, Ozzy Osbourne, Dolly Parton, Frank Sinatra, Stryper, the Cocteau Twins, and Enrico Ruggeri) and their libidos completely shut off in the winter.

It turns out that a neuropeptide called, adorably but only coincidentally, "kisspeptin" regulates the release of the reproductive hormones — gonadatropin-releasing hormone and luteinizing hormone — and allows animals (that includes us) to reach puberty, ovulate, and (at least in the hamsters) experience the urge to go out and meet other hamsters. I doubt it will turn out to be this simple in humans, but for the hamsters, kisspeptin is libido. And it turns right off in the winter. They just stop making it. It’s cheering to hear, though, and not just for the hamsters, that hamsters given kisspeptin during the winter still respond to it. It appears that it’s the kisspeptin that keeps the hamsters from reproducing during the Siberian winters, which is very good news for the baby hamsters. And it suggests the possibility for all sorts of future kisspeptin-based treatments, not just for libido and maybe late (or too-early) puberty but for infertility. Yay! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. None of this works yet, unless you’re a Siberian hamster.

I know I’m weird this way but I always enjoy a sudden sharp reminder that we are, despite our opposable-thumb-wielding, Wikipedia-consulting ways, really just very large hamsters. We are living in real bodies that exist on a real planet (with seasons) and that have barely changed since our tree-swinging days. Our bodies know this, even if our monkey minds often get too distracted by the bright shininess of modern technological existence to pay attention. Of course the seasons affect us.

So what can you do? Your therapist friend may be right, maybe you don’t have the sort of seriously sad SAD that requires serious intervention, but maybe you have subsyndromal seasonal affective disorder, the milder kind (I’m willing to bet that I do, and we have plenty of company). Maybe you have low kisspeptin. Maybe you just don’t like the dark. You could do the light-box therapy anyway, no matter what your friend says, and just see if it works. You could take a lovely "get your groove back" beach vacation. You could make sure you get out of the office every day at lunch. Or you could just figure that having a low libido for three months a year is not the most horrible thing that could possibly happen, and hibernate until it’s over. You wouldn’t be the first mammal to just pull the covers over her head and wait for the solstice. Your next mate can wait.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Attack of the 50-foot MILF

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Attack of the 50-foot MILF

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I initially missed the hot-for-friend’s-mother definition of MILF, and was introduced to the phrase, sweetly, by a former lover. He wasn’t trying to separate the fuckable mothers from the nonfuckable, or fetishizing fecundity. Since we were both middle-aged, he wasn’t designating me a MILF based on the understanding of it that you and the writer of “Still Hot” hold [“Milfbone,” 11/18/09]. He simply meant that my being a mother was one of the things he found attractive about me — he is a devoted father — and that he wanted to fuck me. When you are covered with spit-up or finger paint, when most of your social events involve the PTA, it’s nice to know you’re still hot — maybe even hot because, rather than in spite of, your momitude.
His use of MILF made me feel attractive and desirable. It told me I was still sexy. Indeed, it implied that part of my appeal was my maturity: not the maternal qualities in an icky, “I want to suckle your milk-filled breasts” way, but that he preferred me to young ’uns and to the big-boobed brainless bimbos. “I think Stacy’s mom is way hotter than her teenage daughter; I’d rather F her, because, while society says I should de facto be more attracted to the young girl, I’m more into the woman my own age.” I doubt very much that I’m hot to a 14-year-old. But I might want to be to his dad.
So although I understand your discomfort with the acronym and the letter- writer’s outrage, I have a fondness for the term. When you are a mother, you’re different from when you weren’t a mother — not better or worse, but changed. If someone wants to F you, for whatever reason, you are by definition, a M he-or-she would L to F.
Finally, I don’t dismiss the power of words or names. I instruct young people not to use terms like “wife-beater.” I find it incredibly offensive to equate a still-libidinous woman over 40 with a predator, especially since she is simultaneously the object of contempt and ridicule. I get how insulting it is to be objectified and demeaned through language. And I am aware of the implicit sexism and cultural disregard for — -if not downright fear of — women’s sexuality. But.
Does everything have to be so complicated? Can we stop looking for reasons to be outraged?
Love,
Glad 2B
Dear B:
Certainly! But I don’t think “Still Hot” was outraged as much as she was puzzled and maybe made a little irritable by trying to figure out if she still rated as an attractive woman or only, now that she had a kid, as one of the scarce-enough-to-be-worth-a-special-coinage exceptions to a perceived rule (moms are not sexy). For myself, I at least hope I don’t go around wasting my outrage on silly examples of what I’m going to term “folk demographics,” terms spawned by popular culture to describe human phenomena of current cultural interest. Children dying for lack of health care? Outrage. New(ish) and offensive ways to categorize women by perceived attractiveness, not too different from the old ways? Annoyance. And by the way, I pretty much ceded you the column this week and think highly of you, but I was reading along, nodding happily, when I stumbled over “big-boobed brainless bimbo” and landed — thud — wondering how “B-B B B” is any less misogynist than “cougar.” It isn’t, of course. That sort of casual disparagement of other women is so pervasive it’s invisible, and so unquestioned we (all) do it ourselves without even noticing. But we could put “quit that” on our New Year’s resolution lists.
This whole subject reminds me of the time the first friend of ours to get pregnant (we are late bloomers) found herself wailing, hormonally, something like “I don’t want to be attractive just to the sort of people who would want you to know that they find pregnant women attractive!” Likewise, many an older woman could find herself lamenting being attractive only to the sort of men who would want you to know that they find older women attractive. One wants to be found attractive. One does not wish to be exoticized or, God forbid, humored.
I appreciate your spin on the phrase, and am glad you had the enviable experience of being found sexy for being exactly who you are. I don’t think MILF can be redeemed, though.
I recently read on one of the feminist blogs a post attempting to reframe the misogynist use of “douche” as invective (“Ew! It’s for vaginas!”). “Douches are bad for your ladybits,” reasoned the writer (more or less), “so it’s not anti-woman to call a smarmy, self-satisfied jerk a ‘douche.’ It’s pro-woman! Because douches are bad!”
Nice try, I thought. But calling a dude a douche is still pretty sexist. As for the fact that I also think it’s hilarious, well, please don’t be outraged!
Love,
Andrea

Blame it on mom

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Blame it on mom

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

We’ve done "cougars." We’ve done "MILFs." But surely it’s been a while since we did "older women vs. gold-diggers?" We have to give each generation equal opportunity to blame and/or objectify every other generation or we’re not doing our jobs.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m a 38-year-old woman. I like older women and I hope to be one someday. I don’t want to ignore their complaints about men their age dating younger women, but I have noticed something conspicuously absent from the conversation — a discussion of why younger women choose to date older men. For the most part we are not "gold-diggers." Mostly we are tired of dating postadolescent man-children our age.

When I was 26, I met and married a man who was 43. He opened doors for me, vs. a guy my age who actually shoved me into some bushes trying to get into the house before me in the rain. He paid for dinner vs. young men who haggled over every dime. He was an excellent lover who put my needs first vs. guys my age who were done in five minutes then told me I could go ahead and finish by myself. He makes me feel beautiful. He never goes commando because he doesn’t have any clean laundry, and I have never once seen him throwing-up drunk.

So, older women complaining about younger women dating all the men their age — we wouldn’t have to if you had raised sons anyone would want to date. There, I said it. We now have multiple generations of boys who don’t actually become men until they’re around 40. We do not want to finish raising your sons for you. What happens when they’re 25 and think that they’re the best at everything they do, but they don’t know how to do laundry, cook for themselves, or pay rent on time? What happens when they don’t have any manners or respect for other people because you thought it was cute to see a little boy act like a king? Well, here’s what happens — girls their age don’t want to date them. They find older men who will give them respect, affection, and great orgasms and then there are no older men left for you to date.

You can bitch and moan, call us gold-diggers and call the men we date cradle-robbers, but when you’re throwing around blame, just be sure to look around the corner into your 28-year-old son’s bedroom, and then look in the mirror. If you raise sons women want to date, you will ensure that there will be some men your age left when you’re 55 and single.

Love,

Not a Digger

Dear Dig:

Whoa! Whoa there! I was with you until suddenly the brute piggishness of the men you chose to date in your youth became the fault of the older women you would like to be one of eventually. There were better-behaved guys out there, you know. They were the guys who are always complaining that the hot girls think of them "just like a brother." Young women are often attracted to louts, for any number of reasons. Many things can be blamed on louts, but young women’s desire to sleep with them is not one of them.

There is, I admit, some blame to be laid on the parenting styles of the ’70s and ’80s (permissive to the maxi-max-max) for the childishness of (some!) of the young men you knew when you yourself were in your 20s. Some. But let us not lay that on the mothers alone. Indeed, let us watch it with the blaming, period. Yes, it was a permissive era and yes, it turns out in hindsight that children may need more responsibility and less indulgence than was popularly supposed when you and your idiot boyfriends were coming of age, but you know what they say about hindsight. And speaking of hindsight, surely its glow ought to be illuminating the fact that you were choosing the sort of boy-men who spent a lot of time drinking till they puked, and who would (I’m sorry, it’s awful of me but this is hilarious) shove you into the bushes to get out of the rain. Dumb-dumb boys! Don’t date ’em!

Yes, it is hard for young women, who do tend to mature faster than young men do, to find reasonably well-behaved guys their own age to date. I don’t think this is an artifact of any given era; young women have always complained of the immaturity of young men. Yes, older men are attractive to young women for far more reasons than their larger billfolds. Yes, it is unattractive of older women to sling epithets at the younger competition. But it’s also unseemly for you to blame them for the bad behavior of what were, after all, grownups at the time. What would you think of a 26-year-old man blaming his mother because he forgot to do the laundry? I thought so.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

MILFbone

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MILFbone

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Since you were so good as to weigh in on "cougar" ["Cougar Den," 10/22/08], perhaps you could settle the evident controversy around the correct usage of "MILF?" I think a MILF (Mother I’d Like to Fuck) is the mother of someone in your peer group. If your mom seems as sexual as burnt toast but Jimmy’s mom looks surprisingly hot at the ninth grade bake sale, it makes you reevaluate the sexiness of mothers or, generally, adults over 35. Jimmy’s mother is a MILF, and deserves the special category, only from the intergenerational perspective of a 14-year-old or whatever. It seems, though, that it’s being used to mean any woman who has a kid, which totally gets my back up. I’m 26 with an infant — I’d like to think I’m sexy in my own right and MILF is uncalled for, unless my kid’s friends at play-date start using the term way early. What do you think? Is MILF only referring to women of your parent’s age and above, or does it mean any woman who has (gasp!) had a child?

Love,

Still Hot?

Dear Hot:

I think I’ve weighed in on "cougar" a bunch of times, and fascinated as I am by the way the sexually-not-dead-yet moderately older woman has become the Hottentot Venus of our time — sexualized yet grotesque-ified, exoticized, gawped at, and lampooned — I think I need to leave it alone now. As for "MiLF" and MILFs, we have discussed it and them here, but only once, in passing, when some bozo wrote in about his hot former ex niece-in-law, or something, whom he described as "the very personification of the MILF." And indeed, he did want to F her.

"What does it even mean" I wrote then, "by specifying the ‘mother’ in ‘mother I’d like to fuck?’ Does the speaker intend to make a distinction between the rare mother worth fucking and the unfuckable masses? Or is it really the ‘mother’ part that intrigues, that sexy whiff of fecundity, that milkshake that brings all the boys to our yard? My personal suspicion is that it’s the latter masquerading as the former, that the fascination with the pregnant or baby-toting Heidi Klum or Angelina Jolie is not fueled so much by the fact that they still look ‘hot’ as by the implication that if somebody knocked them up, then so, by extension, could you. But I may be getting a little theory-addled here."

And indeed I think I was. Such subtexts are fun to contemplate, and I do think there’s something to it, but it’s obvious the other element in wanting to F Heidi Klum is simply wanting to F Heidi Klum. And while we’re on Heidi, no pun intended, my husband and I got to teach the "sex and parenting" section at San Francisco Sex Information this past weekend and got to tell my Heidi Klum joke, which is actually no joke, and goes like this:

Q: How do you look like Heidi Klum after you have a baby?

A: Easy. All you have to do is look like Heidi Klum before you have a baby.

Now, on to your specific questions. I’m glad it’s not that you actually aspire to being classified as MILFy and are trying to figure out who has the standing to nominate you. You are more than just musing semantically, though, the way I might while washing dishes or pushing the stroller around. This bugs you! I’m sorry!

I think you have the right of it when you narrow the term to what I’ve always felt was the best use of the (icky anyway) phrase: the mother of one of your friends, a full generation older than you "but" still hot. Stacy’s mom. Or, to hark back to the classics, Anne Bancroft in the leopard-skin coat, coo-coo-ca-choo. And by the way, do you know how old Anne Bancroft was when she played Mrs. Robinson? Thirty-five. Thirty-five! No fairsies playing the hot older woman when you barely qualify as "older," Anna Maria Italiano.

I loved Anne Bancroft.

Since its (fairly recent) inception, the "proper" use of MILF has morphed from "Mrs. Robinson" to, yes, anybody female and parous, of any age, whom the observer, also of any age, deems "fuckable." This is sort of nasty in that it clearly divides the fuckable from the un, probably along the most obvious and cartoonish model (you need to be thin, flat-bellied, big-but-perkily boobed, etc. to qualify). And yes, it also casts those of us who have had kids into a special category, needing to be judged, separate from the nulliparous masses, as still fuckable despite having committed the antisexual sin of reserving much of our time and affection and a good deal of the access of our bodies for (small) people who are not the guys doing the judging. Oops! Sorry, dudes!

It is objectionable. It is kind of gross. But it is also silly and far more their problem than yours.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

In the mood

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In the mood

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I get irritable with my boyfriend when he doesn’t want to have sex. This doesn’t happen that often — we’ve been together less than a year and have sex most times we’re together, which is about five days out of seven. But sometimes he’s tired or not in the mood. This should be OK, right? If I were the guy and he were the girl, everyone would say "Stop pressuring her!" But I can’t help feeling bad. What is wrong with me?

Love,

Moody

Dear Mood:

Indeed, what is wrong with you? Could it be that you are simply an irritable person, and if it were not this issue, you’d find something else about your interactions with Boyfriend Boy to make you cranky? No? Then you’re just a normal person who is acting kind of spoiled. You and BFB are occasionally out of synch. And even non-cranky people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this part, but it is nobody’s fault.

It would be a vast and silly oversimplification to say that everyone has a natural libido set-point, like the one that keeps your body-weight unsatisfactory (To you! I do not care!) no matter what changes you make to your ratio of calories-in to energy-out. People certainly do seem to have something of a tendency toward the high, middle, or low end of the libido scale, but life, moving on as it does, changes things. (Actually, body-weight set-points also shift, but shut up, it was a nice simile.) Things do calm down a bit post late-adolescence/young adulthood, and even for those who can honestly state that they feel just as driven as always by their own hormones, stuff gets in the way. And sometimes that stuff gets back out of the way eventually, the kids go to college, or a health issue resolves, or they start sleeping better, and a dampened libido can come roaring back to life. So no way am I positing that sex drive takes a long slow dispiriting slide toward oblivion as soon as we become grownups or anything, just that libido is dynamic. Even yours, sex-wanting girl, is subject to change.

You have got yourself a very minor, occasional mismatch. You want sex five times a week. That’s fine. Sometimes he doesn’t. The tricky part, of course, is that that’s fine too. "Not the same as you" does not mean "broken." It doesn’t mean he owes you anything; nor does he need to change. Neither do you, as far as the sex drive goes. The irritability, well, that could be a problem.

Take a look at how you’re handling the communication end here. Are you telling him, covertly or overtly, that he has been weighed and found wanting? Are you sulking or crabbing at him when he doesn’t put out, or sighing heavily, or doing your best to make him feel guilty? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, all those have been rigorously laboratory tested and found to be potent anti-aphrodisiacs. You want to make sure your own attitudes or actions are not exacerbating the problem, assuming there is a problem. Which, frankly, there isn’t.

You do not have to dial back your natural level of desire, assuming that is even possible. You may need to dial back your expectations; those you have some control over. If he’s naturally content at something like three or four times a week (that’s officially "lots of sex," by the way) it’s fairly unlikely that’s suddenly going to change. So don’t make yourself crazy. I have no idea if Einstein really said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but somebody ought to have.

And now, some solutions: since you sound young and saucy and unabashed, why not suggest a little mutual masturbation on his off nights? You, at least, would emerge dehornified, and who knows? Maybe a little action with no pressure to perform would give him ideas. Sometimes we think we’re a lot tireder or less in the mood than we really are. If he cannot be spurred to mutuality, you can always just say "OK, don’t mind me, then!" and reach for your sex tool (now that I have kids and approximately 1 billion actual toys the word "toys," like "play" and "play date" has been substantially desexified for me, so I’m trying something new here; do we like it?) and have it as though he weren’t there. And if that doesn’t seem doable, excuse yourself and come back when you’re done.

The most interesting part of your question, to me, was actually none of this stuff, but the part that people would think you were awful if you were a guy pressuring a girl for sex. And my answer is yes, they totally would. But that is no excuse to do it yourself.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Return to Cougar Town

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Return to Cougar Town

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

I was going to write more this week about body size, body image, and sex, but I’m stupid sick, so here’s an older one ["Cougar Den," 10/22/08] about age instead. It’s all connected anyway. Don’t get the flu.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

Fourteen years ago, when I was 26, I met my husband, who was then 58. We’ve stayed together through thick and thin and we love each other enormously. It has pained me over the past decade to realize that, even when the woman in question has her own accomplishments and is not a "bimbo," and even when the man in question is appealing and interesting (not a Donald Trump or a philandering cad) — still the nasty stereotypes abound. British comedian Graham Norton, for instance, refers to Catherine Zeta-Jones as "that gold-digging Welsh whore."

I find that otherwise thoughtful women I meet, acting on a mixture of feminism, anger, and what I infer to be unacknowledged personal pain or fear, seem too willing to continue such stereotypes, and I hesitate to open up to women I would otherwise think of as potential friends. I have hoped that as increasingly empowered women realize that they can date younger men if they choose, the rage over the double-standard and fear of abandonment and dwindling romantic options will begin to fade.

Then SNL comes along with, among other bits that belittle older women, their despicable new "Cougar Den" skit, mocking sexually-active older women as ridiculous and disgusting. Fuck you SNL!

These mean-spirited portrayals are destructive. I’ve attempted to convey this message through other venues and have been ignored. I remember a few years ago you wrote that the only regrettable mixed union between adults is "the always unfortunate nice person/asshole combo" — so maybe you’ll see my point and print this.

Love,

Love My Older Spouse

Dear Love:

Ha, that’s a pretty good line. Thanks for remembering it.

I hadn’t even thought about SNL in years until the recent gratifying return of Tina Fey, but now that you mention it (you didn’t), I have conceived a visceral loathing for Sarah Palin so intense that I couldn’t even watch the debate for fear of feeling too sick to cook dinner. And yet I’ve still managed to be offended, feministically-speaking, by some of the endless harping on her supposed babe-itude. Can we not leave her legs (slender and therefore officially babe-ly) and Secretary of State Clinton’s, which have been judged unacceptably stumpy, and everyone else’s out of the equation and judge the candidates on their merits? Gov. Palin, for instance, doesn’t have any. We win!

As for cougars, I have puzzled over the sudden emergence of the stereotype and the unquestioned assumption that the women it is applied to deserve ridicule. After a spate of popular-media articles in the 1990s about older women and their younger men, I suppose some degree of backlash was inevitable. Still, I, like you, am nonplussed by the degree of venom spit at any woman of a certain age who dares not only to date above her age-determined station but to do anything for fun at all beyond book-club, knitting, and golf.

Don’t you think, though, that the reaction of some older women to a young one seen with a man old enough to be the first woman’s first husband is understandable? We can claim the right to date younger men all we like, but who’s to say most younger men will be interested? And there are still legions of old coots advertising for "fit, slender" young things in the personals. There is still a media-driven double standard keeping George Clooney in the "sexy lead" seat while Glenn Close and Cybil Shepherd have to play doughty moms and, yes, cougars. Even the accolades heaped on the glorious Helen Mirren in recent years have a faint aspect of the freak show about them: "Step up and see the 60-something woman who is still sexually attractive!" These forces are still powerful enough to make your fond wish for a time when older women will inevitably gaze upon your union with one of their own with bland approval still a bit of a pipe dream. As long as older women with a sex drive and indeed any juice at all left in them are laughed and pointed at, some will still look at a young woman who scoops up one of the few available men in their bracket as whatever the opposite of a cougar might be. Minx. Bitch. Gold-digging (Welsh) whore. Sad, and frustrating, but human.

Incidentally, I was curious about the origin of "cougar" in this context and found an article dating it to the founding in 1999 of Cougardate, an online dating site. A book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, by Valerie Gibson, came along in 2001. As you can see, these were guides for women, so the term, even with its "rapacious animal" connotations, wasn’t even meant pejoratively. The nastiness accrued to it gradually, it seems, and inevitably. If it’s about women actually wanting sex, that’s gonna happen.

OK, Now I’m mad too.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Fat lot of good

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Fat lot of good

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a feeling this is not the best way to get a sympathetic response from you, but it’ a real problem for me and I like your advice, so I thought I might as well give it a try. Here goes.

My boyfriend and I have been together eight years. I can’t say I’m as cute now as I used to be, but I’m OK. "Brian," on the other hand, has gained weight every year due to a desk job and, I guess, just normal metabolism stuff. By now, he’s actually fat. And I just don’t feel attracted the way I used to. I still love him, but I’m really not feeling it in the sex department. Do I try to get him to lose weight, or just put up with a no-sex partnership (forever?), or try to find someone I do have the hots for? Help!

Love,

Size Matters

Dear Size:

Before we even consider getting into the hopelessness of pinning your future on weight loss — yours or anyone else’s — let’s talk about relationships at the seven- or eight-year mark. This is not, generally speaking, a high point. So common is the "seven-year itch" that sociobiologists have attempted to explain it, alleging that it takes seven years for a man-cub to achieve enough independence to survive without two parents regularly provisioning it. Thus, the hormonal glue that holds a couple together need last no longer than that. And it doesn’t. There are several obvious holes in this theory (it takes longer than seven years to conceive and rear a child to the age of seven; couples historically would have had more than one child, etc.) Plus, the most compelling recent research makes a strong argument against the nuclear family as the essential unit of protohuman and early human society. (See Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers And Others [Belknap, 2009], where she demonstrates, very persuasively, that it takes a village — and always has.)

But we don’t need sociobiology to convince us that relationships often beach themselves on the rocky shoals of not-quite-a-decade together. Six or seven or eight years out, the very last of the initial biochemical rush we call "falling in love" has finally dissipated. Real life is in ascendance. And real life is nowhere near as much fun. Six-seven-eight years is also enough time for individual priorities to deviate from the original, couple-led mandate, which was basically "be together as much as possible and have lots and lots of sex." Careers, families or origin, children yea or nay or present, all conspire to pull you apart unless you make all possible effort to cleave unto each other. Have you done enough cleaving?

You can blame the wad of adipose tissue that has attached itself to your beloved’s abdomen (and I’m not saying the wad does not bear some responsibility here), but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Are you sure you do?

Now: his fat. I don’t have to tell you that he has probably noticed it himself, correct? That your pointing it out is not going to come as some great revelation? So either he does not wish to "do anything" about it; has tried, and, like nearly everyone who attempts to diet off excess poundage, has succeeded only in making himself miserable and possibly fatter; or he will take on the project in his own good time. In any event, nagging him, shaming him, even attempting to inspire him ("We’ll go running together!") are all pretty much doomed to fail. Fail you, that is. He may lose the weight. He may not. But it is his fat, his body, his life, and, well, your problem. Sorry.

I was recently reading over at Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose (kateharding.net) and if you, that is the collective "you," not, you know, you, haven’t read her, you probably should. She and her co-bloggers have the sharpest and funniest take out there on the "obesity epidemic," misogyny, feminism, and fat. Kate also recently answered this question, and she isn’t even an advice columnist. She was just fed up with the way people who are advice columnists have historically bungled it.

Dear Not Attracted to Your Spouse Anymore (writes Kate):

Get over it or get a fucking divorce. And I truly mean you should consider both options seriously. If you believe it is actually possible for you to get over it — by which I mean, you find a way to reframe the way you look at your fat partner, find him attractive again, and go back to whatever you both agree is a normal sex life — then by all means, work on that (provided everything else in the marriage is good and worth saving, which it probably isn’t if you’re not even a little bit attracted to him anymore).

If, however, you’re so hung up on your partner’s weight that you can’t even conceive of being attracted to him anymore? Get a fucking divorce already. (Writes Kate, who is not an advice columnist.)

Hear hear, say I, who am.

Love,

Andrea

The zone

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The zone

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I read an article (I think it was in Redbook) that listed six little known erogenous zones or "hot zones." One was big toes, which they said has a direct connection to the genitals. And one was tip of the nose, which they said it is an erotic area because people get stuffy noses sometimes when they have sex. I don’t know. Is there really such a thing as an erogenous zone? What would it take for something to be a real erogenous zone? And is it worth learning these to turn my husband on? We have a good sex life, but sometimes it does seem like we just touch the same places the same way all the time.

Love,

Looking

Dear Look:

Well, don’t do that. You don’t need a list of unlikely or downright unerotic body parts (I have allergies; don’t touch it if you don’t want to get sneezed on) to inspire you to branch out a little. In the event that you do need such a list, here are some nongenital, sexually responsive spots for your perusal: nipples, necks, ears, armpits, lower backs, inner thighs, backs of knees, feet. Some of these are "erogenous" simply because they are adjacent to more traditionally eroticized areas (by the time someone’s got to your inner thigh, it’s a pretty good bet he’s going to keep going) and/or because the skin there is thin and well-supplied with both blood vessels and nerve-endings. Some do seem to have their own independent set of erotic responses (fingers, toes). And while we’re at the toes, some body parts seem to have sex lives all their own, quite divorced from any nearby genitals. Feet have their own admirers and magazines and special party nights at the sex clubs and more than 4.7 million Google hits. They don’t need a good address near the genitals to throw a party.

I think I found your article. It’s by Judy Dutton, who is, not at all coincidentally, the author of the book Redbook’s 500 Sex Tips. I guess I had Redbook filed as a "ladies’" magazine, but on closer examination, it’s more Cosmo (Dutton was an editor there too) than McCall’s. I found more "Six filthy things men want you to know" and "16 essential sex techniques you’ve never heard of" and "the top 26 mistakes you’re making in bed" articles from Redbook than I could count, though it appears the Redbook editors would have no trouble totting them up. There was even a "Top 40: excerpts from our steamiest sex articles." And in addition to what I think was our article, there were six other Redbook offerings on erogenous or "hot zones."

The Hot Zone was one of the books I read a few years ago while on an infectious diseases kick, after I had exhausted my household’s considerable stock of bubonic plague titles. So I don’t think I’m really comfortable seeing the phrase applied to, say, labia. "Erogenous zones" itself is a phrase so redolent of the ’70s, I can’t help imagining anyone who talks about them as a mustachioed gent in a denim and corduroy patchwork bell-bottomed suit. And that is not in the "hot zone," not for me. So, not knowing what to call them, here are some of the, uh, places in the article.

Big toe We’ve already established that toes and feet are both sexually responsive (to varying degrees) and the object of enormous sexual interest, but we have not established that there is any merit whatsoever to "reflexology." So there is no merit to the claim made here that stimuutf8g them "activates reflexology pathways connected to your genitals." Nor do we know that pressing on the soles of the feet can "cause energy to ‘bubble up’ the legs to the genitals." I’m not saying it can’t, mind you. Just that there’s no particular reason for it to do so.

Nose Swelling of the mucus membranes in there is a fairly common side effect of both Viagra and regular old sexual arousal. It just doesn’t particularly follow that nasal play adds to sexual arousal. And I wouldn’t pursue it during flu season.

Navel "Your navel and your clitoris have a lot in common. In the womb, these two regions grow from the same tissue, linking them neurologically in adulthood." I have no idea what this person is talking about. Also, lots of people cannot bear to have their navels prodded. It’s just too … internal. "It feels like you’re touching my soul," an old boyfriend once said. "And I don’t want you to."

We don’t really have to go on, do we? I have nothing against Redbook, but these list-type articles are a perennial favorite of lazy magazine editors, and writers gamely do their best to produce them, month after month after month. I once had a job writing lists just a tiny bit like this one for an only-just-passably-reputable men’s magazine, and you know how I managed it?

I made them up.

Love,

Andrea


(If you’re interested: www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/advice/surprise-sexy-spots-ll)

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Perv 101

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Perv 101

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:


I guess this is pretty common, but it’s not something I have any experience with, so please bear with me.

I have a lot of fantasies about being tied up, humiliated, etc. and often think about them while my girlfriend and I are having sex. I’m sure you know where this is going, but I’d really like it if she did the tying up and humiliating — but I have no idea how I would bring it up or how to talk to her about it. It’s not like I even know that much about it myself. Should I just forget about it and stick with fantasies? Is it just a stupid idea?

Love,

Unsure

Dear Sure:

I’ll tell you one thing: what with all the "I’m sure you already know" and "I don’t know much about it myself" and "Do you think I’m stupid even to think about this? How stupid? Really stupid?", you are showing a certain natural talent for abjection that I’m sure will serve you well in your new career as a bottom.

This is a perennial topic, and in a way it has gotten easier to answer over time — when I started the column, I had to recommend books (can you imagine?) and about three Web sites I happened to know about (and you’d never find without me because Google didn’t exist). In another way, though, it’s, well, not harder, but more disheartening. A girlfriend who’d never heard anything about bondage and discipline except the phrases "whips and chains" and a few grim episodes of Law and Order in 1997 could conceivably just need a little education and just might jump right in as soon as she knew what you were talking about. A girlfriend who says "I don’t know what you’re talking about, and also, ew!" in 2009 is probably not going to be running down to the Dungeon Hole Gifte Shoppe for a black latex body-bag and a "Gates of Hell" penis cage in your size anytime soon.

It’s possible, of course, that at the very moments you’ve been imagining her stuffing her underpants in your mouth and riding you around the room like Her Little Pony, she’s been thinking "Hmm … underpants, pony, yee-haw." But I don’t think so, and neither do you. She’s probably never given any of this a moment’s thought. But you’ll never know if you don’t try. With a little finesse, s’il vous plait. You don’t want to just suddenly drop to the floor in front of her and go on about how you’re not fit to be trod upon by her rankest gym-shoe and so on — at least, not to start. She’ll think you’ve developed one of those conditions on House that aren’t a brain tumor but make a normal person suddenly say weird stuff. Worse, she’ll think you’ve done something unspeakably shitty, like sleep with her sister.

Neither do you want to run down to Ye Hole yourself and come back with a bunch of expensive, highly specified gear that will only mystify her (and probably you, since you are a mere neophyte yourself).

No, what you want to do is get a little playful while things are already heated up (things do heat up between you two, right?) and give her a chance to see that there’s more out there than the nice, gentle, mutual, equitable sexzzzzzzzz … I’m sorry, I must have drifted off for a moment there … sex you’ve been having. See if you can get her up on top of you, then tell her that you love feeling like maybe she wouldn’t let you back up again. Fun! And see if she thinks that’s ridiculous or at least faintly intriguing.

If the latter, ask her to hold your wrists down. At least you’ll have something to talk about later: "Gee, it sure was fun feeling powerless for a minute there, heh." How about her? Has she ever thought about that kind of thing? Maybe she’d think it’d be fun to boss you around a little, sometime? Don’t get your heart set on the humiliation angle, though — it’s a much harder sell. Anyone can do a little physical control, but far fewer are comfortable with saying a lot of mean stuff to someone they’re used to calling "snugglepuss."

Since we’re now years past having to recommend books to people with outré (or formerly outré) interests, I ought to send you and the girlfriend off to the Web for some Perv 101-level education, but I think, at least to start out, I won’t. Books are safe, they are familiar, and they don’t flash animated gifs of hog-tied ladies getting cattle-prodded. Books never have loud, unexpected sound-files attached to them. Try something like Jay Wiseman’s S/M 101: A Realistic Introduction, or the topping and bottoming guides by Easton and Liszt, which are illustrated with harmless line drawings, like The Joy Of Sex but with less armpit hair. Anyone who is scared of books like these is not going to want to whip you anyway.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Tickling 2.0

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Tickling 2.0

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

It was very interesting to me that you wrote about tickling last week ["Ticklish allsorts," 09/30/09]. I actually had that experience as a kid, being tickled by an uncle (actually he was my father’s cousin, but same thing) and not being able to get him to stop. Nobody thought it was a problem except me, so he did it for years, until I was about 10. Nobody should do that to a kid! It made feel helpless because I was helpless. Yuck. Also, nobody else thought it was a big deal so I felt embarrassed for crying about it. I still feel horrible thinking about it, and I’m 40.

Love,

Don’t Tickle Me!

Dear Don’t:

I’m so sorry! Both that that happened to you, and that I brought up bad memories for you through the column. How very useful of you though, to write in about it and bolster my argument that tickling kids can be, and often is, abusive in a particularly insidious semi-sexual manner, which not only causes pain but shame and makes it hard to talk about.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before, and I’ve certainly talked about it, but it came up for me again recently through some very raw online discussions with women who were abused as kids by stepfathers or family members. Some actually were tickled, specifically, but all spoke about trying to distance themselves from unwanted attention and being told that Uncle So-and-So was just being friendly and why won’t you sit on his lap or let him wrestle with you or whatever. Don’t be such a spoilsport!

It isn’t only the abuse that causes damage, but not being believed and/or protected by the people whose job it is to keep you safe can cause just as much scarring.

One thing that came out of these discussions, for me, was a keener awareness of our duty to let kids develop their own boundaries. And no, it isn’t altogether a matter of "bad touches" and "don’t talk to strangers." Children naturally have a pretty good sense of what is and isn’t OK to do to them. They come with a certain amount of radar-for-weirdness already installed. We can, however, damage our kids’ creep-dar by laughing off their objections. If your kid really doesn’t want that person kissing her, even if it’s your harmless old Great-Aunt Enid, don’t force it. You don’t want to get her in the habit of thinking other people know better than she does about who gets access to her body.

OK, all this seems a bit heavy and dire and over-reactionish when we were just talking about something as inconsequential as tickling. Except, obviously, it isn’t. Just because something makes you laugh doesn’t mean it’s funny.

I was leery of Gavin de Becker’s much-touted books The Gift Of Fear and Protecting The Gift," which I’d heard about for years and distrusted because the author shows up too often on daytime talk shows and seems a bit self-impressed. I finally read the first one a few years ago, though, after enough friends recommended it, and here I go, passing on the recommendation. Of course I can sum up his stuff in 50 words or less (trust your instincts; don’t be afraid to be rude, watch out for people who try to manipulate or embarrass you into "being nice" to them, teach children that no adult needs their help finding a lost puppy), but that’s always the case with "here’s a problem and here’s my patented solution system" books, even the one I hope to write one of these days. No excuse not to buy them and read them carefully!

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I like to tickle women too! Don’t you think you came down on that guy a little harshly in your column? Not everyone who does a little tickling is a sadistic bastard!

Love,

Don’t Slander Me!

Dear Slan:

True, but enough are that I thought I’d take the opportunity to wave my robot arms around and go "Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!" It’s not like ticklers write in so often that we’ve done this one to death here, like the guys who want to try a threesome or something.

I must have pointed out already that what makes tickling special is that, unlike other pain-delivery techniques, it also causes laughter, and laughter is easily laughed off. I don’t care what you do as long as you stop when your victim or "victim" begs for mercy. That’s it. I do realize, of course, that willing and unwilling recipients are going to sound pretty much the same ("Stop! No, no! Please stop!"), but what are safe-words for, if not to allow one the leisure to beg for mercy and not be granted any unless one wants it? Promise me you use one and I’ll grant you absolution.

I just wish little kids got to have safe-words too. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Ticklish allsorts

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have had a fetish for ticklish women all my life. (I used to like tickling my sisters, even, although I guess that sounds kind of weird now that I think of it in this context. But I swear it wasn’t "like that" at the time.) But especially since I’ve been having sex with women, I’ve liked tickling them. Mostly they don’t want me too, so I don’t, but I end up frustrated because tickling really turns me on. There are videos on the Internet and I do watch those, but I want a real-life girlfriend to tickle! I broke up with my last girlfriend (not because of tickling) and am wondering if it’s possible to find a new one who does like it. How would you bring something like that up on a date? And how did I get this way, anyway?

Love,

Tickle-Me Jason

Dear Jason:

Did you like what I did with your name there? Not that that was your real name, Brandon. I’d never do that.

Anyway, nobody knows. Earlier sex researchers spent a lot of time and cycles on the problem and nobody has ever come up with anything more convincing than the original, mad scientist Richard von Kraft-Ebing, who connected constitutional criminality, low foreheads, early masturbation, and the presence of a fetishizeable object or behavior and blamed them for the later development of paraphilic behavior. Absurd as they sound a century-and-a-half later, these theories were all anybody had to go on for a long time, and seem to linger (along with Freud’s) even now, since almost everyone who does have an unusual set of turn-ons looks to childhood to find a probably nonexistent cause. My own sexuality may have been permanently twisted by early exposure to a National Lampoon spoof of Kraft-Ebbing’s masterwork, Psychopathia Sexualis called, I believe, Psychopathia Cheesealis. It involved, like the original, stern governesses and harsh Prussian child-rearing techniques, and also a good deal of gorgonzola and Emmenthaler. But surely this is neither here nor there.

We don’t know how fetishes develop, and we can’t, since the category itself is such a catch-all. One man’s fetish is another’s passing fancy; one therapist’s paraphilia is another’s healthy sexual experimentation. Me, I make a distinction between objects and behaviors that enhance sexual experiences and those that must be present in order for the person to function at all, or which replace a sexual partner entirely and in all instances. Lick a boot? Great. Lick only boots but never people? Maybe we should talk about that. But I don’t know why a boots-only sexuality develops, and neither does anyone else.

Some fetishes are clearly spontaneously generated and read like some sort of synaptic cross-wiring. Others are just as clearly societally generated and sanctioned , like the Victorian ankle fixation or the old-time Japanese obsession with the nape of the neck (or the current Japanese obsessions with school girls and tentacles, for that matter). Some people are born with their fixations (you may be one of these) and others add and subtract them with the passing of fad-seasons. Some things that seem like fetishes aren’t, really, when you look closer — for example, a lot of role-playing types get turned on by the accoutrements of role (uniforms, leather and chains), but wouldn’t get off on those bits and bobs outside of a "scene" context. And capital-F "Fetish" is another scene (almost) entirely, where people wear fetishy stuff because it looks groovy.

But let’s get serious. Unless you are aroused by their ticklishness, unaffected by whether or not you or a surrogate get to tickle them, you don’t have a fetish for ticklish women so much as you have a fetish for tickling women, and frankly, that one is not one of my favorites. While tickling can be deployed as just another source for extreme sensation during a fully consensual power exchange, to put it awfully stuffily, it also can be and often is misused. You see this most often with funny uncle scenarios, of course, where an adult uses tickling as an excuse both to touch and to humiliate a child and nobody thinks anything is amiss since, of course, it’s all in good fun. I’ve heard a number of women say that their sexually abusive relatives or family friends also tickled them. And some ticklers of grown-ups pull the same shit on their victims: "What’s the matter? It’s just a game. Don’t be a crybaby." It all comes down, of course, to whether or not you stop. You would never be so cruel as to keep tickling past the point of fun for the ticklee, right, and certainly not after being begged to cease? Right? If not, we have nothing further to discuss.

You may find a willing ticklee among the more usual devotees of flogging, play-piercing, and the like. You are unlikely to find someone who likes only tickling, but as I said at the top, if you only like one thing and can’t have sex without it, you may need to talk to someone anyway.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

No gag

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is currently on vacation. This column originally ran in June 2006.

Dear Andrea:

About getting past my gag reflex while giving blow jobs: I have no idea of what’s the best way to practice this. I’ve tried bananas, but honestly that was just weird. I never bothered trying to deep-throat my ex because he was happy with a hand job. The new boyfriend has expressed much interest in it, and I think trying to deep-throat without practice first would be really awful. Any books on this? Recommended dildos? Anything?

Love,

Willing but Worried

Dear Will:

Indeed, but first let’s get our terms straight: Are you confutf8g the standard-issue blow job with the X-treme sport called "deep-throating" (taking the penis all the way into the throat), or has the boyfriend specifically requested the latter? "Deep-throating" has long had its place in the lexicon, but it has not replaced and ought not to replace "blow job," "giving head," or "going down on." They are not at all the same thing.

If all you two are interested in is mouth-penis contact, you shouldn’t need a textbook or a night of, you should pardon the expression, "cramming." You can practice a bit with nothing fancier or more banana-flavored than your own finger or a Popsicle stick, just to determine how far back you can tolerate an oral foreign body before you need to expel it. It does get easier with practice. Once you graduate to the real thing, you will find that the more control you take over the process (you do the moving, he just lies there being happy he has a penis), the less gaggy you will feel. If it still feels overly intrusive or out of control, wrap your hand (spit into it generously first, as though sealing a bargain) around the base and move this in concert with your mouth. Some men can easily detect the difference but many don’t care — friction is friction, after all, and warm, wet, and deep are usually good enough without having to get all picky about it. Most men enjoy a blow job, period, and few — I cannot say "none," but let’s not get distracted by the corner cases — get off on making girls gag or produce involuntary Roman showers.

If you can imagine yourself practicing on a dildo and not immediately collapse in giggles, you’re ahead of the game and I give you my blessing. Buy something realistically sized and inexpensive (jelly rubber, probably), pretend it’s attached to your boyfriend (the sillier the color the harder this is to carry off, I imagine) and see how deep, fast, et cetera, you can go without gagging. Keeping your neck straight and head slightly back are supposed to help, although the often recommended lie-on-your-back-with-your-head-off-the-edge-of-the-bed position strikes me as ill advised at best, since we are trying to avoid panic here, and what could be more panic inducing than having your airway and vocal capability cut off while somebody straddles your chest? Try lying prone or crouching, with the dildo upright as though projecting jauntily from your boyfriend’s pelvis as he lies on his back, and practice opening your throat as though chugging a beer or saying "Ah."

You may find, in time, that you really can control your gag reflex. The feedback provided by a real live boyfriend, though, in the form of appreciative gasps and groans, is a motivator the likes of which mere plastic, no matter how colorful, will never achieve. Not, at any rate, with today’s technology. Androids and replicants haven’t yet started rolling off the assembly lines and into our toy boxes.

Faking it with inanimate objects will only get you so far; if you really want to learn, you’re going to have to try it on the real thing. I don’t know your boyfriend, but I bet he’d be game for a little experimentation. Just make sure that the session is approached as an experiment, and that neither of you brings to it unrealistic expectations of immediate, spectacular success. Nobody’s born knowing how to do this sort of thing, at least not until those replicants get here.

If you two get this far and wish to — oh heck, there’s no better way to put this — go a little deeper, there’s good information to be found in instructional videos and DVDs, like the ones Nina Hartley puts out, and in books such as Violet Blue’s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, which contains nifty tips like how to keep your lipstick perfect throughout, as well as, yes, bona fide deep-throating techniques. I think deep-throating is overrated, myself, but then, I only borrow a penis and ought to defer here to those who possess them full time.

One last word of warning: Yes, there can be a somewhat unpleasant surprise at the end of a successful blow job. Inform him that he is responsible for early warning and withdrawal, no "whoopsies" allowed. This probably ought to be considered nonnegotiable at the beginning, subject to later review.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com

Ooo, hard

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is on vacation. This column originally ran 5/21/08.

Dear Andrea:

I’m confused. Are there any guys out there who aren’t at the extremes as far as sex goes? My ex-boyfriend was completely obsessed. Not only did he want it four-plus times a day, he’d want to have phone sex at least twice a day when we were apart. I think of myself as a pretty sexual person, but even I have my limits. Plus phone sex was boring. I like to masturbate, but it’s hard for me to orgasm when I feel the person on the end of the line is waiting. But that’s not why he’s my ex. He was rather immature. He was so obsessed with sex, everything was sexual. If I said it was raining out. He’d say "oooh sounds … wet." If I said something was hard (difficult) he’d say "ooh, hard!" It was like that with everything! He was not some 20-year-old kid, either. He was 48! I’m 31 and I felt I was more mature than he was. So we broke up. Then I fell in love with his polar opposite. We’ve been together a couple years and our sex life has gone downhill rapidly, from two or three times a week to maybe once every three months. I’ve tried to initiate, but I get nowhere. It only happens when he wants it to. I really love this guy and I want to marry him. I just need to figure out how to find a happy medium.

Love,

Opposite Day

Dear Day:

A happy medium in your case would require something like the matter-transporter machine from The Fly — you’d put Mr. "Ooh, Sounds … Wet" in one pod and Mr. Every Three Months in the other and zap them back and forth in space until their DNA was well and truly mixed. Ideally, you’d end up with a guy who wanted to do it about as often as you do, with some room in there for negotiation. Un-ideally, of course, you could make yourself a boyfriend who never wants to have sex but does like to make a whole lot of immature, sniggery jokes about it. On second thought, maybe this isn’t the best plan.

The first guy sounds unbearable. I’m surprised you stuck it out with him as long (ooooh, long) as you did. It must have been hard to … I mean you had to have been open to … I mean on top of — oh, never mind. It must have been like living with Michael Scott with a few drinks in him: "That’s what she said!" Awful. You have my sympathy.

The new guy is a harder nut (oh, shut up) to crack. Are you really as mystified as you sound about where the sex has gone and why, or is there a chance that you do know what’s up (shut up) with him but don’t want to admit it? I don’t think it’s abnormal to experience a drop-off after a few years, particularly, but four times a year is pretty slim pickings. As a mere stripling of 31, I would be very cautious, in your place, about signing any long-term contracts under those conditions. At the very least you ought to know what’s going on with him (and with your relationship) before you agree to marry someone who frankly isn’t going to satisfy you. It would be a different story if you were saying "We only do it every three months and we’re both happy with that." Then I’d dance at your wedding. The way you’re talking about it, though, I’d feel more like I was dancing on your marriage’s grave, and while I’ve always liked Nick Cave, I’m just not that goth. Sorry. It ain’t going to work.

You’re going to have to have one of those sit-downs that nobody wants but nearly everybody needs at some point. This is no time to ask him what’s wrong with him or to suggest that maybe he’s just not man enough for you, not if you actually like him, anyway. It is time to find out what’s going on with him all those times you initiate and you "get nowhere." Is it possible he’s missing your cues? Is there a better time or a better approach? A different act? If the answer is no, no, no, and no, and this is just who he is — a guy who’s interested in sex four times a year and anything extra just seems unnecessary or unappealing — then you’re going to have to figure out if there’s some way you can get your itches scratched. Maybe he’d be happy just holding you while you take care of things for yourself. Maybe he’d be OK if you had a "friend." Maybe he needs a check-up and a meds adjustment and all will be well after that. You’re going to have to find out, is all. I don’t care if it’s hard. And that’s not what she said, or so I hear.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Rear window

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My lover and I have amazing sex. We love each other dearly too. We’ve been seeing each other for three years with no decrease in intensity. I’m 45, he’s 37, and I’ve got two kids (who are older, so they cannot be held responsible for the following problem).

A few times lately when we’ve made love, I have had a small bowel movement. I always have multiple orgasms and there is squirting involved (which he really gets off on), which involves sort of bearing down. This has only happened three times in all, I think. But I’m horrified. He’s a saint (overall, and about this in particular), and just murmurs he’ll get me a warm facecloth, then wipes me off (as I’m generally lying there grinning and sort of unaware of what’s going on til later when I see the sheets).

I doubt he’s getting off on that part — more that he figures it’s a necessary evil (since the sex is so good). But I’m not happy about it, so what to do? Is this a dietary thing? Do I need to lay off the Indian food before he comes over? Try my hardest to do a BM before sex?

Any info hugely appreciated!

Love,

Horrified

Dear ‘Fied:

Why do I do this to myself? I am not a poop fan (yes, I know, but yes, there sure are), and three years of parenthood have failed to move me any closer to poop fandom. I’m just not feeling it. I don’t really even like to read about it. How fortunate that your saintly boyfriend is so much less of a weenie than I am!

It would be gratifyingly simple to blame the saag aloo, which, yes, is delicious, but which you could certainly forego on date nights, if necessary. Sadly, I think your curries are as innocent as they are yummy. I’m not so sure we can let your children, or rather your child-bearing, completely off the hook, though. I think this is a pubocoxxygeus-related problem, brought on perhaps by having had those kids — plus the unfortunate slackening both inside and out that comes in one’s 40s and facilitated by your bearing down to squirt. I think what we’ve got here is a failure to Kegelcize. Kegels aren’t just for vaginas, you know.

Here is a potential program: step up the fiber and see if you can get on a regular full-evacuation schedule, and start doing a whole lot of sets of Kegel-type contractions, making sure you’re tightening the relevant parts. If you’re not getting anywhere after a month or so, see your gyno and get your pelvic floor assessed. Something may be amiss in there. What’s going on may not be devastating, and it’s lovely that your boyfriend is so unfussed, but you find it (understandably) distressing. And actually, it should not be happening.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend wanted to put his finger in my arse, so I eventually let him, wanting to try everything once! I was surprised by how much I liked it and how intense it made my orgasm, and we are now talking about trying full anal sex. But how does it give me pleasure? Surely for girls there aren’t any special spots in there?

Love,

What’s in there?

Dear What?:

Clearly not so!

OK, it’s true, no prostate. But plenty of nerve endings, at least around the anus itself, and many prostate-less persons enjoy the sensation of fullness and pressure. Still, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it was the extra crowding, if you will, that created the extra intensity, in which case the anal intercourse with no vaginal involvement may not produce the desired effect. No way to tell without experimenting, though. Oh well!

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend and I just had sex for the first time last weekend. While I did receive some pleasure, the second time I was too distracted to fully enjoy it. Every time he would push, I would feel like I was going to go to the bathroom. I know for a fact that I didn’t have to go because I tried. Is it normal to feel this way?

Love,

Perplexed

Dear ‘Plex:

Pretty much. I don’t even know if by "go to the bathroom" you meant one or two, but it hardly matters — all the relevant structures are packed very tightly in there. Something pushing into your vagina is putting some pressure on both your urethra (in front) and your rectum (behind), and the unfamiliar sensation can certainly read as bathroom-type urgency of some sort, even if you’ve recently been. I’m going to assume that you are A) young, B) tight, and C) just generally built small. The first two will pass, as will the unfamiliarity. What never does change is the requirement that you be quite turned on before he tries to get in there. It makes a world of difference. You’ll be amazed how much more space there is for him when you’re ready to receive him. Slow. Down.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Wild thing

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Dear Andrea:

I’ve read your column (and other sex columns) for years, and one thing I always notice you saying is that all fantasies are OK, and fantasizing about something can’t hurt anything. But what if you don’t think your fantasy is OK? I’m a lesbian, I have a girlfriend, and we have a pretty satisfying sex life. Even so, I’d understand why if I (or my girlfriend) were fantasizing about other women, or about things that we’re just not going to do, like S&M (some of our friends are into it but it’s not for us) or threesomes. But I’m not. I’m fantasizing about guys! When she fingers me, I pretend it’s a cock. I don’t even like cocks! I haven’t sex with a guy since I was 16, and I stopped because I didn’t like it. So what’s going on? I feel really bad about it, like if my girlfriend knew she’d feel betrayed, and also like I’m betraying myself. I’m happy being a dyke. I AM a dyke! So what the hell?

Love, Confused, guilty, still a dyke

Dear Dyke:

Of course you are, dear. You are a dyke and nobody can take that away from you, so no need to be so defensive. We believe you. The question then is, do you believe you? Are you really a dyke? Really? You really think so, feel so, know so? OK then. What are you worrying about?

Right. Your girlfriend. Well yes, it is entirely likely that she would find your fantasy life appalling, especially if, while cluing her in, you emphasized the part about pretending any part of her body is … one of Those Things. If you do decide to tell her what’s going on, you’re going to want to rephrase that. Fantasizing that there is a Thing around somewhere and fantasizing that said Thing has replaced your girlfriend are not at all the same thing, and you’re going to want to try to spin it in such a way that she hears that you are super-satisfied with her and just happen, also, to fantasize about one of those bad horrible Things that of course she could not possibly have, nor would you would never wish she did have. Are we all clear on that?

You would also want to emphasize that you are not thinking about cheating or answering one of those ads from straight guys looking for the kind of "lesbians" they’re used to seeing in porn movies. You’re not looking for man, just thinking about a Thing. A Thing completely unconnected to a person. An imaginary Thing.

Your other choice is, obviously, not to tell her. This is actually the way most people go, and despite my officially endorsing relationship glasnost as much as possible, I don’t actually believe that you have to tell even your nearest and dearest everything. If everyone did publicly confess every vile thing that had ever crossed their minds anywhere along the sexual response cycle, it might have a salubrious effect on society in general — No more shame! Everybody’s kind of perverted! — but then again, it might just as well make for a lot of really nasty fights and some divorces, and to what end?

I can only think of one reason to tell her, but it’s a big one: there is a chance that she will look startled (which will terrify you) and then confess, all in a rush, that she has similar fantasies and was sure you’d freak out if you ever knew, and then you could both laugh and forgive each other and yourselves and live happily ever after. But frankly, I’m still on the side of don’t ask, don’t tell (and don’t quote me).

But how your girlfriend would react is not really the question anyway, I don’t think. I think what you really need is to feel OK about it for you. I can’t make the fantasies go away (and neither can you). I can’t reach through the screen here and therapize you, or hypnotize you and make you repeat "It is OK to fantasize about things I do not want to do" over and over until you believe it. All I can do is tell you that I have heard the same things from lesbian after lesbian. Whether it’s because the taboo is the hot, or because women appear to be, by and large, rather more flexible of sexual orientation than men are, it seems that a lot of women who would never dream of having sex with a man do, in fact, dream of having sex with men. It’s inconvenient, uncomfortable, and politically incorrect, but that doesn’t make it not true.

There. I’ve normalized it for you. I hope it helps. I did forget to ask you one thing, though, a thing about Things: if you really want to feel a Thing in there, have you considered just buying one? They’re not the same, it’s true, but then again the Things you’ve been thinking of aren’t real either. Like the song says, it’s all only make-believe.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Inflatable darling

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com


Dear Andrea:

We were watching Mythbusters and they were using inflatable dolls instead of crash test dummies. That didn’t work very well, but it did make me wonder, does anyone ever use those for actual sex?

Love,

Blow Me Down

Dear Blow:

Who knows? Any attempt to answer this scientifically would be hampered by the inevitable sample problem: would even the most dedicated enthusiast actually admit to putting the thing to its supposed intended use? If they told you, wouldn’t they have to kill you?

If I had to guess, I’d say yes. Men have been known to stick it into condoms full of warm oatmeal, into watermelons, and allegedly into a piece of liver intended for the family dinner. How could at least some tiny fraction of male mankind not be expected to stick it into what passes for a genital orifice in a vinyl novelty device? Of course some do. But mostly not, I’d assume, and mostly not often, or even twice.

Once upon a time I had a boyfriend who lived in a foul two-bedroom with a roommate of disreputable habits (it was Roommate who was principally responsible for the apartment’s foulness, or so I chose to believe at the time). Before Roommate’s birthday one year, Boyfriend and another equally disreputable friend went off to a Tenderloin sex shop and bought a … fuckhead. That’s what we called it, and that’s what it was, a softish mannequin head, like a Barbie’s Hair Salon head but horribly porny, with a round, gaping maw and frizzly blond curls that shed distressingly when you attempted to grasp the thing like a, well, a head. It was ghastly and we could not imagine anybody ever using such a creation for its intended purpose — nobody even wanted to touch the thing — so they put it in the oven, which was never used for its intended purpose, and left it there to gaze blankly, gape-mouthed, through the glass-paneled door.

No, that story did not have a point. I just wanted to tell it.

Of course, decades after the invention of the rarely-fucked Inflatable Love Doll (and by the way, they make sheep, too, but I can’t remember now if it’s actually sold as a "Love Ewe" or if my friends and I made that up), the Real Doll debuted to enormous media hullabaloo and respectable sales. Fairly or not, and nicely or not, I ascribed those respectable sales to the concurrent dot-com bubble and the sudden wealth it showered upon a lot of guys with good coding skills and not so much experience talking to girls. The Real Doll, in case you were sleeping, is a fairly realistic (only slightly less realistic than Jenna Jamison, for instance), life-sized, customizable silicone sex partner. According to their site, you can buy some models on super-special this month for less than $6,000: "order a female flat-back torso, get the head kit free." In fact, the company is, as they say, "going out for business":

In These Difficult Economic Times, Abyss Creations Is Doing Our Part To Help.

SHIPPING IS NOW FREE ON ALL NEW ACCESSORY ORDERS!

And for the month of July there is a $500 Discount Off all new Doll orders.

We also want you to know that all of our products are made in the U.S.A. As well as all materials and parts. We are doing our part to keep our country working.

They are doing their part. Are you doing yours?

The Real Doll appears to have had its moment in the sun (a good idea, actually, since silicone warms to body temperature very readily). If The New York Times, of all things, is to be believed, the coming thing in fake sex partners is not a semirealistic girl-shaped thing, or the expected, immanent online, plug-in cybermate. It’s a … pillow.

The Times article [www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-2DLove-t.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all] is about Japanese "2-D lovers," a subset of obsessive anime fandom who carry on what at least feels to them like real relationships with representations of anime characters, often, ickily, prepubescent girls. The article never says what, exactly, people like the profiled "Nisan" ("big brother") do with a stuffed pillowcase printed with the image of a 10-year-old in a bikini, besides carrying it around and ordering it a bowl of soup and calling it their girlfriend.

Japan is, of course, kind of a special case. According to the Times article, "more than a quarter of men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan do not have friends of the opposite sex." I’m hanging onto the hope that the fact that the same cannot be said of North Americans will provide us at least partial immunity to the spread of a similar craze here. But I think we can trust a certain subset of geek-hipsters to at least claim to have adopted it.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com.

Nothing ventured

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am straight (?), married 12 years, and have always been faithful to my husband. Before we were together, I had sex with a few boyfriends — nothing crazy. I did used to have fantasies about women, though; like, while trying to have an orgasm, I would think about a woman going down on me instead. Not any particular woman, just a kind of idea of femaleness. But I never did anything about it, or even particularly thought I wanted to.

Now, though, my husband has a lot of business trips, so I’m alone a lot, and lonely. I do have a girlfriend (a friend who’s a girl) who comes over a lot and suddenly I find myself having those kind of fantasies about her in particular. Do you think I could have been a lesbian all along, or could be becoming one now? Or am I just bored? Should I have sex with her if she’s interested?

Love,

Secret Life

Dear Life:

Since you have no idea if she’s interested and she probably isn’t (the majority of random women would not be), it’s probably moot. But let’s say you were having a glass of wine (let’s say it’s the second glass of wine) and all of a sudden she offered you a back rub and then suggested it would be better if you took your shirt off … you know how these things go, at least in fantasy. Let’s say you immediately complied, and things proceeded from there. Let’s say you were compatible and it was great and your husband’s still traveling a lot and you do it again. That’s an affair. It doesn’t matter that the other person is female — she is not your husband! You may be ready to experiment with bisexuality, or with this one friend in particular, but are you ready to cheat on and lie to your husband? They’re not the same thing.

You need to disentangle "bored and lonely" from "interested in women," and "interested in women" from "compelled to explore interest in women." It’s entirely possible, for instance, to be fully bisexual yet completely faithful to the one person you married or partnered. People do it all the time. They relegate one gender to fantasy and go on with their lives, just as other monogamous people do. When you choose one, you lose one. You deal.

Not everyone does deal, of course, or can, or even should. You could be a lesbian who was in deep denial or seduced by the promise of "heterosexual privilege" and now need to get out of there in order to live authentically. You could be a bisexual who can manage ethical non-monogamy and really need a girlfriend and not just a friendgirl, like the one you’ve got. I’m kind of guessing not, though. I’d put money on "bored and lonely." I’m betting, actually, that if that friend who drops by were male, you’d be wondering if he’d like to give you that back rub too.

I’m also wondering if your husband knows you’re feeling this neglected. Maybe he could travel less, or take you along more, or pay more attention to you when he’s home. If none of those do anything, and you ‘re still thinking, "Want woman!" you could always ask him if he’s ever entertained that fantasy, you know the one, and would he maybe like to act it out, or maybe just hear about it after the fact, if you’re not into sharing? These options would be complicated and process-intensive, and require the sort of open communication that everyone plays lip service to but few can really manage in practice, at least not without a lot of sobbing and door-slamming along the way. It can be done, though. People do it, and marriages survive it.

Marriages survive cheating too, actually. More spouses forgive, if not forget, than you’d think. It’s one hell of a blow, though — a marriage needs special, Weeblelike powers to wobble and not fall down. I’m not sure yours has them, what with the frequent separations and, frankly, your willingness to entertain the possibility of cheating without noticing that it’s cheating. I worry.

If I were you, I’d get some girl/girl porn (you can get something funky and homemade — with pubic hair even — if you don’t like the glossy fakey stuff) and a nice vibrator. That should address at least some of the boredom. I’m all for bisexuality and non-monogamy and threesomes and hiring a professional and sex parties and all the other options out there. In theory, anyway, it’s all good. It’s all risky too, and if you’re not up for risking the loss of your nice husband and your nice marriage than you probably want to stick with the nice vibrator. It’s not that it will all blow up in your face the second you try to introduce a new person or element, it’s just that it could. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" is a good adage but it does have a corollary: "nothing ventured, nothing lost!"

And don’t cheat.

Love,

Andrea

Am I blue?

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com


Dear Andrea:

The woman I just started seeing likes fooling around for hours with all our clothes on and isn’t ready for sex. I like waiting too, except I have a medical condition called varicoceles, which means I have to wear tidy-whities whenever I walk around. After dates, I have to use heat and ice on my crotch because I’m so sore from the underwear, and I can’t achieve an erection the next day (irony: if I did manage to get her home with me, I wouldn’t have been able to get it up). I guess I just need to tell her that we can’t make out for more than a few minutes unless I can find a public bathroom to change into boxers and sweat pants, and then back into jeans when we’re done. It takes all the spontaneity and romance out of it, which I think are very important to her, but what else can I do?

Love,

Pants of Pain

Dear Pants:

You do have kind of a special case. The vericocele (a varicose vein of the testes) added to the heavy-petting-fanatic girlfriend is kind of a one-two kick in the balls. I think you’re being extremely accommodating, which may make you a very good boyfriend, but this is getting kind of ridiculous.

I think you are going to have to have a talk with her about what constitutes "sex," since she says she isn’t ready for any. What you’re doing is surely sexual, it just isn’t (a) intercourse or (b) particularly gratifying. To you. Are you absolutely sure she wouldn’t be on board with something that allowed you to move further along the sexual response cycle? I mean yours, obviously, but why not hers too while we’re at it? There’s nothing wrong with not being ready for intercourse, or with being into spontaneity and romance (although those have been known to cause an awful lot of havoc all on their own). Still, it’s unreasonable of her to expect you to go to this amount of trouble every time just because she likes to kiss. We all like to kiss, but few of us have to ice down our privates every time we get a chance do it.

I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she doesn’t know how much discomfort and inconvenience you’re putting up with for her sake. That means you have to stop martyring and start asserting yourself. Just say no to heavy petting! Say you’d like to add in some manual action, and you’d be happy to return any favors she might chose to bestow. You don’t have to go into gruesome detail about it, but you do get to say that the three-hour make-out sessions are hard on you, pun intended or not, as you wish. Alternatively, you could arrive wearing the sweatpants and the jockeys and use the escape-hatch feature in front to alleviate pressure, but I’m really more in favor of the actually telling her she’s torturing you (but be nice about it).

If that answered your question, I now have four for you: What’s with the changing into appropriate action-wear in a public restroom? Are you Superman? And isn’t it tighty-whities? Shouldn’t it be?

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

Are blue balls real? I mean, can it really hurt you? It keeps happening to me with this one girl, but I don’t know if it’s something I’m supposed to do something about or just suck it up.

Love,

BB

Dear B:

Real in what sense? I don’t believe they actually turn blue, and I know for a fact that even an advanced case is not going to hurt you. It’s just vasocongestion, all the little blood vessels and all that spongey erectile stuff getting filled up with blood that does not then go back where it came from in good time. I use the highly technical term "erectile stuff" rather than, say, "penis," because achy congestion and overwhelming frustration are hardly experiences limited to the penis-bearing population. In women, it feels a lot like the mildest menstrual cramp, or rather, the warm, heavy, vaguely achy feeling that often presages the onset of a period. It’s like being made aware of your internal organs, which are sending out "Over here, pay attention to me!" signals. It is not remotely like a kick in the balls, or ovaries, or whatever. Discomfort and frustration are not pain, and even pain does not necessarily signal damage. Blue balls may be safely ignored. Most often, they are ministered to by their owner, in private. Go to it.

Of course, there is such a thing as dangerous — emergency-level dangerous — vasocongestion. This one is pretty much a boys-only affair. It’s priapism, when an erection refuses to abate after a reasonable amount of time and a good-faith effort. This can blow out your blood vessels and leave you limp for life, but since it never ever happens just from some girl sitting in your lap, we can forget I ever even mentioned it.

Love,

Andrea

Don’t forget to read Andrea at Carnal Nation.com.

The one true way

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andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

WebMD sent out this slightly goofy "10 Amazing Health Benefits of Sex." Among the benefits of "healthy loving in a relationship," according to the article (summaries mine) are:

1. Less stress: Volunteers kept sex diaries and were then subjected to stressful situations. "Those who had intercourse had better responses to stress than those who engaged in other sexual behaviors or abstained."

Neat.

2. Immunity: "People who have sex once or twice a week produce more immunoglobulin A (IgA). Subjects who reported having less or a whole lot more sex have lower IgA."

Huh. Moderation in all things, right? I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to find it applies to sex. But does it, or were there other factors here?

3. Calories: "Thirty minutes of sex burns 85 calories or more," claims WebMD. "It may not sound like much, but it adds up: 42 half-hour sessions will burn 3,570 calories, more than enough to lose a pound. Doubling up, you could drop that pound in 21 hour-long sessions."

Forty-two half-hour sessions will take most couples months to achieve. You’d be better off on a treadmill.

4. Cardiovascular: Researchers found that neither having nor not-having sex was correlated with strokes. More impressive, they "also found that having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month."

Both loneliness and the death of a spouse are highly correlated with dropping dead.

5. Self-esteem: "Boosting self-esteem was one of 237 reasons people have sex." Hahaha! 237 is a mighty big number. You could fit anything in there. Reason No. 235: free rent.

6. Intimacy: "Sex and orgasms raise levels of oxytocin, the famous bonding, trust, and generosity hormone." The article goes on to cite a study showing that women’s levels of oxytocin rise after "warm contact" and hugs with their husbands, but you don’t need sex to get that.

7. Pain: "In a study published in the Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 48 volunteers who inhaled oxytocin vapor and then had their fingers pricked lowered their pain threshold by more than half."

Coolness.

8. Prostate cancer: "Men who had five or more ejaculations weekly while in their 20s reduced their risk of getting prostate cancer later by a third."

There are a lot of similar studies supporting this.

9. Sleep: Oxytocin and exercise promote sleep, and lack of same is correlated with every bad thing from divorce to weight gain.That’s … nine. I lost one somewhere.

Of course, few of us need a specific reason to have sex, nor are we likely to be sufficiently motivated by any of the above to go get some, if not already inclined.

Love,

Andrea

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