Silver Jacket

Category: Sex

  • Godhead

    Pi_1Today, March 14, is Pi Day. (Get it? 3.14?)

    Almost as exciting, today is also Steak and Blowjob Day. This year, I thought I might take the time to reflect on a Momus song titled "Coming In A Girl's Mouth." In the first line he asks, "What is the cultural meaning of coming in a girl's mouth?", and he spends the rest of the song trying to answer that question. A noble cause.

    You must read the lyrics, but they alone do not convey the full brunt of the song's humor. The voice is soothing. The tone alternates between playful and heartfelt. I believe the main accompaniment is a toy harpsichord. Superficially, it could be a children's song. (It's even funnier when you know what the guy looks like. Here's a photo of Momus with my friend Ken.)

    In any case, in light of the theological issues Momus raises, I asked a member of the clergy for comment on the lyrics. During our discussion, he noted that, in terms of filth, it is the one who ejaculates who would be considered dirty (temporarily), rather than the recipient. So the sperm consumer is "off the hook."

    I concur.

    Now, in light of the theological issues raised by 3.14159…, maybe I'll sit down and rewatch my DVD of Pi.

  • No Balls

    Snowglobe

    I’m disappointed in this week’s finalists for the New Yorker caption contest. They are:

    A.) “I think the Manhattan skyline is getting suspicious.”

    B.) “I just wish we could talk about something other than global warming.”

    C.) “Well, that was abominable.”

    I don’t get A. I think I get C, but it’s not very funny. [BTW, when I was young I thought it was the abdominal snowman.] B is pretty funny but a bit pedestrian. I bet 1000 people submitted similar lines. I much prefer the one I sent in:

    "Do all the frozen sperm banks offer seasonal specials?"

    The most obvious, and yet unprintable, caption, of course, would have made reference to snowballing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if The New Yorker received submissions on that theme. I can only imagine relative obscurity of the term among their dignified readership as an excuse for not selecting one of those; surely prudishness would not have stopped them, as they are not the New York Times.

  • Brokeback Wordplay

    GaybatmanRecently I noticed that Brokeback Mountain had spawned a new snowclone: when people want to say that X is gay, they might refer to "Brokeback X." So I emailed Mark Liberman, a linguist over at Language Log, about it, to see what he had to say. And I sent him the first three relevant examples I found, which he initially hesitated to post, deeming them offensive. (What could be offensive about a Broadway show in which Mohammed and his followers pray by forming daisy chains?)

    Anyway, here’s his post, with larger commentary on the zeitgeist, and a note on the "competitive high-stakes field of lingua-blogging."

  • Astroturf

    Kelly_dressHow great is this:

    •Article title: "Our Vaginas, Ourselves" (NYT Mag, January 1)
    •Choice line: "The future as I see it is also – how to put this? – reforested."
    •Author’s name: Daphne Merkin

    That photo, by the way, is of my friend Kelly, taken right before our outing to the Days of Our Lives party. (She’s the one on the right.)

  • Bootstraps or Leather Straps? Your Call.

    BouncerDo people with better memories store more information in their brains? Maybe not. Last month a cognitive neuroscientist (Edward Vogel at the University of Oregon) published a paper in Nature showing that certain types of memory capacity may have less to do with how much raw data you can store than with how selective you are at letting in relevant information. (Here‘s a press release describing the experiment.)

    Notably, Vogel describes the brain filter that keeps the bad stuff out as a nightclub bouncer. Regrettably, I think my brain hires bouncers from a temp service. Sometimes I get the "come one, come all" circus caller who will let in hobos, Hiltons, and stray cats ("Hey look at that piece of lint! Oh, wow, tin foil!") and sometimes I get the off-duty SWAT team member ("I’m sorry, did you just say something?").

    (more…)

  • At this VERY moment?

    DoctorGina Kolata has an article in the New York Times Health section this week about docs with poor bedside manners. It includes this gem:

    The woman, who lives in Washington, asked not to be identified because she did not want her mother to know about her sex life. Her problem doctor was a new gynecologist she saw for a routine checkup. The doctor began the examination, inserting a speculum into the young woman’s vagina.

    "She asked if I was sexually active," the woman said. "I said I was. She asked if I was sexually active at this moment. I said yes."

    The woman, presumably, also did not want her mother to know that she got off on speculum play.

    (more…)

  • Eye of Le Tigre

    LetigreRemember the LeTigre clothing line? Those Izod wannabe’s from the near side of the pond? They’re attempting a comeback [pun intended. pun will become clear later.] but seem to be struggling with their identity. Go to their homepage and scroll through the marketing wankery. It begins: "LeTigre is an American classic…" and ends: "Sported by American icons such as Ronald Reagan, Wilt Chamberlain, Peter North, and LL Cool J, LeTigre is worn today by YOU!"

    An odd collection of characters. Wait, Peter North? Hmmm… let’s Google him. Whoa, Nelly! Um, maybe there is another Peter North, one who is obscured on Google by the popularity of certain recreational bodily functions. So we go to Wikipedia’s Peter North disambiguation page. Well, there’s the first one, and then the only other options are a Canuck and a Limey. Looks like we had the right guy.

    So what does LeTigre want with Peter North? It kind of puts a different spin on their interpretation of iconic Americana, but Wilt and LL "Big Ole Butt" Cool J do indeed seem to fit that picture. With Reagan, it’s more of a linguistic metaphor. With the screwing of the masses, and all of that.

    If you click on the "Contest" link, it takes you to http://www.collegehumor.com/hottestgirl/. So that’s LeTigre’s intended audience: young males, who we know are horndogs. But still, I can’t believe this knowing wink, this most rancid of Easter eggs, really made it past LeTigre’s PR office. Oh well. Ronald Reagan and Peter North. Two great communicators, brought together by style.

    update:
    It all makes sense. It’s been suggested to me that LeTigre isn’t aligning itself with the likes of Izod (and J. Crew and Polo). They just have a slightly preppier take on the American Apparel manifesto: using porn to go after the hipster ironist.

  • He Said, She Said

    BombNice to see the boys and girls playing together.

    In a fancy bit of service journalism, Maxim has offered a translation segment intending to broaden the horizons of horny dudes too insecure to open the pages of Cosmo. It goes as such:

    "DIRTY TALK
    BODY LANGUAGE
    Match the correct sexual term to its classy gal mag euphemism. (We can read!)"

    I'll stop there, but suffice it to say I've never heard "internal bliss bomb" around the locker room.

    Ah, what the hell, here they all are, correctly matched:

    (more…)

  • Tiger Style!

    KamasutradollsWhy do we buy furniture? To have sex on, right? Right. Finally a furniture seller has faced up to reality and offered a web interface that lets you animate people having sex on their wares. This is shopper-centric merchandising without the BS.

    Tok&Stok, Brazil’s answer to Crate&Barrel, provides for your enjoyment three tables, three couches, a beanbag chair, and what look to be two dog beds(!). Fun for the whole family…

    Under the description of each item, there are five "Suggestions of use." You’ve got your doggy style, your 69, your reverse cowgirl, and a few other standards (and exotics) I don’t recall the names of. (The muscle memory is strong though.) Take your pick and watch Moby and Sinead O’Connor rub naughty bits right there. In case they didn’t include your favorite Kama Sutra position, there’s a SuperSpecialBonusFeature that I just LURVE. Click on "my own style" and play with 27 variables, creating the most bizarro antigravity freakazoid borderline-non-Euclidean mf lovemonkeyness you can fathom. (You cannot, however, toggle off the damn floating hearts.)

    Presumably they created their Valentines Book of Styles after receiving too much icky returned merchandise or witnessing too many unmentionable incidents on floor demos. "Try before you buy"? Not so much. "Um, yeah, Union of the Tiger isn’t compatible with these arm rests. Oh, sorry if the cushions are stuck together."

    update:
    My friend Jack–who is a chaplain and a grandfather–looked at the site and wrote: "I enjoyed the furniture thing but thought it was not very diverse. In Massachusetts we would hope the narrowness of heterosexuality would not be celebrated."

    Indeed. At Brown we would have called it heteronormative. At Brown that’s about the worst insult there is.

  • Sperm Like Porn Too

    WoodyallenspermNews @ nature reports today on a paper published in Biology Letters showing that "men looking at explicit pictures of two naked men with a naked woman have been shown to produce higher-quality sperm than those watching pornographic images featuring women only." Apparently males of many species produce better sperm in the face of competition. Not literally in the face of, but, I mean, er, you get my drift.

    Why stop with two competitors? When I fall in love and settle down to start a family, I’m totally stocking up on gangbang videos. Only the best for my progeny. I can see it now:

    "Darling, it is time for that most special moment, when we spark the life of our first child, whom we will love and care for with unyielding attention. A new, wonderful person shall flourish before us.  Oh, how I love you. Hold on a sec while I put on The Lonely Slut’s Pile-It-On Cum Drainage 7."