If I Were Gay

Today is National Coming Out Day and while I have nothing to announce, I just want to share this video clip which is Bert and Ernie mashed up with my fourth favorite Avenue Q song.



My absolute favorite Avenue Q song is still "The Internet Is For Porn" in its many incarnations. Coming in second and third respectively are "Everybody's A Little Bit Racist" and "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love)". Now ranking your favorite Avenue Q songs could be considered a little bit gay, but not nearly as gay as Noel Fielding from the Britcom "Mighty Boosh".



Now a good blogfriend insists that Noel is straight and I have no reason to doubt it. After all, I also indulge in activities that make people suspect my orientation. On a recent trip to New York I did all of the following things in a single twelve hour period:

• Had brunch in Chelsea.
• Saw Next To Normal, which is not gay in and of itself but hanging around the stage door afterwards for autographs is a little suspicious.
• Went to a cabaret show at Don't Tell Mama. This could have been a lot gayer since our perform was an ostensibly straight Latina. While waiting at the bar we did see the Judy Garland performer come in sans drag.
• Ogled Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in a show with aforementioned post-show stalking.
• Staked out Jude Law leaving his performance just because we were there.

Throw in my love for Glee and my nearly complete lack of interest in professional sports and the case against me grows. But it's not like I'm Lyle The Effeminate Heterosexual. But then it's not like most of the gay men I know are particularly swishy. There were two gay guys in my wedding party, The Greatest Roommate Ever and The World's Biggest Cher Fan (who saw her 'farewell' tour three times, which even he admits is pretty gay). For those long-time readers of this blog, through the miracle of Facebook, my wife has hunted down WBCF who is living in New York. On the day after my Big Gay Day described above, we met for brunch in the East Village (which is hardly gay at all any more) to catch up.

Since we last saw him twenty years ago, he has bounced around in a few careers and then learned he had leukemia while uninsured. He seems to have licked it but it took three years of his life and all his life savings to do so. He is now couch surfing in Brooklyn while training to become a social worker.

And here is where the Very Special part of this post comes in. There is much more to life than sexual orientation. Health and friends and self-worth are much more important than who you want to sleep with. Someday I hope there is no need for a Coming Out Day. We should all be appreciated for who we are and not who we like.

And just to mellow out, let's have one more YouTube clip. And this time let's all sing it with the kick-steps.

Rachel Ray and Rubber Bands

This is the filthiest video I have ever seen on YouTube. It goes to show you that Rachel Ray can make anything look exciting.



Yummo.

Sidewalk Sex Party

When I walk in my neighborhood, I notice lots of things strewn on the grass or in the street. Usually it's normal stuff like broken bottles or empty fast food bags. My dog used to be particularly good at finding out if there were any chicken bones or rolls left over.

Now I live in a nice suburban development. One time there was a dead deer in the road. Another time I found a crack pipe. I assume it belonged to the moving crew that was working that day and not one of the neighbors. Another time, while riding my bike past a local cemetery, there was a bra in the road.

But Sunday morning, I found a pile of things that just baffled me. It just didn't seem like the stuff people would leave between the sidewalk and the curb.



You can click on the picture for a bigger version, but here is the list of what I saw:

A roll of clothesline
The wrapper for a garden hose (hose missing)
Several latex gloves
A roll of clear wrapping tape
Bottle of rubbing alcohol
Length of black nylon strap
DSW Shoe bag (not pictured)
Wooden paint stirrer
Tube of Astroglide
Buttplug (or dog chew toy, but hopefully not both)
Two unopened condoms

I am just at a loss to put these items in any sort of narrative that makes sense to my not-so-sheltered mind. I mean, I know what you can do with these things, but why were they where they were. It had rained the day before and nothing looked weather-soaked. I stumbled past this about 8 am, well into the morning jogging/dog-walking hours, so plenty of other people had already walked right past it. And for the record, none of those items were mine. And they were all gone when I went by later that evening.

Help me out and tell me what I stumbled across. A BDSM lawn party? A roadside gay orgy? A disrupted fraternity hazing? A post-Republican National Convention celebration? What? All suggestions, bizarre or innocuous, are welcome.

Smuttiest Strip In Print

For a long time the comic strip Arlo and Janis has held the undisputed title of Smuttiest Strip In Print®. While 95% of this strip is typical domestic slice of life stuff, every now and then one slips past the censors. Like this one from last week:

Click on images for official site.

Someone please come up with the explanation that you can use to a comics editor that explains that this is not a reference to a little light bondage play that went wrong and eventually required that aid of paramedics, a locksmith, and/or a hacksaw.

But now a new strip has jumped into the breach. While Doonesbury is on yet another hiatus, the Washington Post has been running a test strip so new the ink is still wet. Daddy’s Home is about a work at home dad and the trials of tribulations of being in a non-traditional domestic relationship.

In many respects it resembles the similarly themed Adam@Home, but like Arlo and Janis, it occasionally goes to a dark space. Take this one from yesterday:
Nameless Dad is getting all excited (literally) about the possibility of an unexpected Special Occasion Sex Act only to have his hopes dashed by his smirking wife that just wants to catch a little late night television to help her fall asleep.

This would be a slightly risqué one-off it weren’t for a previous strip where Mom and Dad find some time for a little kitchen countertop afternoon delight that plays out like this:
Yikes. Nothing deflates a work at home dad like a negative reference to his staying power. No wonder he spends his days lusting after cooking show hotties.Yummo. I'm sure the lotion bottle and box of tissues are just off-panel.

And being home all day he could be chasing after the other daytime denizens of his illustrated Wisteria Lane if it weren’t for his cock-blocking kid.
So in a three week trial we have learned that Daddy is a sexually frustrated couch potato who is regularly ridiculed by his sassy wife. It’s as if Ted Forth never got a new job. And speaking of My Hero, there is nothing like a business trip with the wife to put a little lead in your strategic sourcing pencil. This is the smirk of a very lucky lady, or at least one that is about to get lucky.

In the meantime, Arlo needs to watch his back. Daddy’s Home. And he’s gonna give you a run for your money.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What other comics work blue?

Plagiarism Police: Savage Sex Stealing

It’s been a long time since I did a Plagiarism Watch, but this story is an excuse to download the accompanying prurient image. The New York Press, a weekly alternative newspaper that is the lamer rival to the famed Village Voice had to fire it’s latest sex advice columnist. It seems that instead of soliciting letters from hapless folk on the web that seem only too eager to air dirty linen, she stole old letters from Dan Savage’s "Savage Love" column. If you are going to steal, be a little more discrete. This is like submitting a John Updike story to the New Yorker. You are going to get caught. See if you can notice the similarities (and see Jezebel for longer quotes):

New York Press, 2007 I'm beginning to be weirded out by her relationship with her brother. They're always touching in each other. Then, one day, I come home and my girlfriend is in her brother's arms on the couch. As soon as I walked in the door, they jumped up, and I saw a clear view of the outline of his boner. They both looked guilty.

Dan Savage in 2006 Two weeks ago I came home and found my girlfriend in her brother's arms on the couch. They freaked at my sudden arrival and jumped up, providing me with a clear view of the outline of the boner in his pants. Guilt was on their faces.

This is a clear case of someone trying to get away with Plagiarism Excuse® #7 (I didn’t copy. I changed a bunch of words.) but the official excuse was closer to #5 (It was a youthful indiscretion.):

She has told us she was unaware that using questions from Savage's column was a breach of journalism ethics. She has offered her resignation, and we've accepted it. We apologize to our readers, and to Dan Savage, for this error in judgment.

In his podcast, Savage Lovecast, Dan has said that one of the most common questions he gets is “How do I get your job?” His answer is to not bother. There is only one of him and he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Out of context that sounds incredibly arrogant, but the germ of truth is that the alt-weekly sex column niche is pretty narrow and if you are going to compete with the market leader, you need to find a better gimmick than just rewriting letters about siblings that are a little too close and the sterility of urine. Dan has officially stayed classy, but he can afford to. In an e-mail to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he says it doesn't quite rise to the level of plagiarism:

"I don't think she did this on purpose," Savage wrote in an e-mail Thursday. "The borrowing was an accident, not malicious, and doesn't rise to the level of plagiarism, in my opinion. She could've avoided this ... if she'd said, 'I don't have any letters yet, so here are some I swiped from 'Savage Love.'' And I would've given her my permission to use 'em."

Now the Press is taking open auditions for their smut advice writer. If I knew it was that easy, I would have gotten into the sex columnist business. Any questions?

Pregnant Pause

I noticed an alarming trend in my choices of entertainment lately. I seem to be drawn to works involving unplanned pregnancies. A week or so ago, we rented Waitress with Keri Russell playing the titular small town diner waitress that gets knocked up by her abusive husband. Then, based on critical acclaim, we went to see Juno, which is also about an unplanned pregnancy, this time to a smart-mouthed tom-boyish high school kid. And just the other night I finished Nick Hornby’s foray into Young Adult fiction, Slam, which is also about teenage out-of-wedlock pregnancy, this time from the point of view of the unlucky dad.

Of the three, as the parent of a seventeen-year-old, I found Waitress the least distressing because at least Keri Russell was playing a married woman as opposed to real life where she married the father of her kid a scant four months before the due date. The other two works feature characters my son’s age or younger and that is more frightening than Saw IV followed by a power outage.

Kids have been having sex in books since at least 1975 when Judy Blume published the forever-banned Forever. And teenage sexual exploits on the silver screen were old hat when I saw Porky’s back in my own teen years. These newer works are different in that they deal with the consequences of all that hormonally charged activity. And they confront the issues in a non-hysterical un-“Afterschool Special”-ish way.

Some of the concerns these kids having kids face are an inability to express emotions, trouble dealing with parents, and difficulty navigating social scenes. In other words, being knocked-up is just like regular high school except in maternity clothes. Also, in a contemporary twist, both works have the girl being the initiator of the ultimately unwise act. I think that is a smart narrative angle because it peels away the guy-bashing that would otherwise over shadow the other points of the story. Also, the actual procreative act is dealt with perfunctorily and with a minimum of prurient appeal. Neither of these is going to appeal to the Girls Gone Wild fans out there.

What they do emphasize is the absolute and total embarrassment this condition results in. In Slam, Sam and his preggers ex-girlfriend go to a birthing class only to run into one of his teachers. Similarly, Juno has to awkwardly cross an abortion clinic picket line that consists of one of her classmates. The take-away message is that having a baby is an incredibly humiliating hassle. Juno refers to her inflated self as a “cautionary whale.”

And cautionary tales these are. Depending on how you read the stats, teen pregnancy rates were actually much high a half century ago. But back then they gave out wedding rings instead of condoms. Not to throw out any spoilers, but there aren’t any wedding marches in either of these stories. That is another modern touch. Nowadays, having a kid doesn’t always lead to a matrimonial union. Some of the strongest marriages I know were conducted with moonlight glinting off a shotgun barrel, but times have changed for the most part.

And from a parent’s perspective, these stories have a strong “but for the grace of God go I” ring to them. Until my son is out of college and established in a career, I have to whistle past the maternity ward. One thing both Slam and Juno make clear is that even the dorky kids get laid. And that anyone can make a baby, but not everyone is cut out to be a parent.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Shotgun weddings – a terrible idea we are glad to be rid of? Or another fine forgotten American tradition?

Update: Ellen Goodman saw Juno too and bothered to look up facts and shit.

Horny Teens Aren't Hoodlums

National Blog Posting Month Day 12

Here at FomaCentral we are just a little obsessed with the sex habits of teenagers. This is perhaps a little prurient, but I defend it as a necessity as the parent of a teenager. The latest hooking up news is a study that shows that despite conventional wisdom, losing your virginity is not a valid predictor of criminal behavior. One of the lynchpins of abstinence education (news flash: still not working) is that by deterring sexual activity, there is a halo effect in lowering criminal activity. Right.

The new report as detailed in Sunday’s Washington Post article by Rick Weiss debunks the causality link between teen sex and crime. One problem with the online story is that it doesn’t include the graph in the dead trees edition that I was interested in, the age at which teens first get their freak on, so I have recreated it as a public service to my similarly curious readers.


One problem with news reporters is their complete lack of graphing skilz. I don’t care how many kids have sex exactly between the Quinceañera and Sweet Sixteen parties, I want to know how many kids have been knocking boots BY the time they are seventeen, so here is a better graph.


By the time the eighteenth birthday rolls around, they can't legally drink but 69% of them have already done the dirty. What is more alarming is that 18% of kids have danced the horizontal bop before 15. Age of consent laws have not kept up with reality, and like speed limits, so many people are breaking the law as to become meaningless. Unless you are a teenager in Atlanta getting a hummer from your fifteen year old girlfriend. Then you can be thrown in jail for three years as a sex offender until the Georgia Supreme Court declares that cruel and unusual punishment.

These public relations fiascos result from vagaries in the patchwork of state laws as another recent WaPo article explains. Maryland, like many other states, has what is called by creepy internet-only lawyers as the "four-year rule". If you are under 16 but your partner is within four years of your age, you are in the clear. The problem in Georgia was that sexual acts were treated different from sexual intercourse which, as Bill Clinton will explain, makes all the difference in the world. Nobody cared until somebody went to jail. And all you pervy guys on the web that seem to know all the rules by state: If you have to check a lawyer, you shouldn’t be checking out the chick.

But back to the UVA Study. Counter-intuitively, the study even found that while juvenile delinquents have has more sex than most teens, they didn’t commit crimes BECAUSE they have had sex. In fact the study found the reverse. Here is how the Post explains it:

Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person's readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.

Somehow I don’t see the Bush Administration rushing to hand out condoms as an anti-crime program.

Every time I write one of these posts, I get accused of wanting to deny hormonally flushed youngsters from enjoying their bodies while they are still fresh and attractive. No such thing. I just want the sexual activity to follow the emotional readiness, which as any parent of a teenager will tell you is long after they get out from under their roof.

Besides, these little graphs contradict an earlier post I made about college students, even the lucky ones, not having as much sex as everyone thinks. That article mentioned that half of MIT undergrads were still virgins. I better keep my fingers crossed for my son's application. And study up on the concept of causality.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: If you had a teenager and you caught them in a compromising position, would you call the cops, the other kid's parents, or the family doctor? Or just laugh?

College Cold Showers

Since I spilled the beans about those frisky geezers, it’s only fair that we check out the other end of the demographic. This is back to school season and parents of college kids are fearful that they are dropping their kids off at a four-year orgy and footing the bill for it. They have less to fear than they think according to the writers of the IvyGate blog. In their Sunday Washington Post Outlook piece called College Sex: Going Home Alone, they let on that perhaps things are not as wild as all those teen sex comedies make it out to be. In their words:

But as the Class of 2011 settles in on campus this month, we're betting that the students are discovering the cold-shower truth: The type of action they're likely to get is more hanky than panky.

I have no idea how the hanky line got past a clueless editor, and they also turn “heat up a Hot Pocket” into an innuendo-laden metaphor I really don’t want to explicate. Still, it’s good to know that things haven’t changed much since my college days.

One of the college secrets they let leak is the complete ambiguity of the phrase “hook-up”. At least two books have been written raising the alarm. WaPo writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who discovered the phrase “wingman” about a decade after beer commercials did, wrote Unhooked about on-campus lust. White-suited Tom Wolfe wrote a completely clueless essay about Hooking Up that later formed the base research for his instant classic I Am Charlotte Simmons. I recommend Charlotte Simmons to all the parents of female high school seniors I know. The rather over-the-top set pieces are typical Wolfeian masterpieces, but the overall level of hysteria is Reefer Madness hilarious. But it still terrifies parents of teenagers.

These parents spend the high school years wishfully thinking out loud “I don’t think my daughter is sexually active because she would tell me if she was.” Once their daughters become college coeds and legally able to sign Girls Gone Wild releases, the parents lock down into don’t-ask, don’t-tell mode even as the kids bring newly found boyfriends or girlfriends home on the weekends. Fortunately, statistics are on their side:

In a 2000 Zogby poll, 40 percent of students nationwide reported that they were not "sexually active" -- a term left vague enough to include everything from kissing to soliciting strangers in a Minneapolis airport men's room. At the country's top schools, the dry spells approach levels not seen since 1930s Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Harvard's health department reported last year that 47 percent of students there said they had not yet had vaginal intercourse. (Numbers not adjusted for homosexuality, apparently.) At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a 2001 survey found that only 51 percent of undergrads had lost their virginity; at Princeton the same year, the student body was 44 percent pure.

Parents and other interested parties often confuse having had sex with having sex regularly. One landmark 2000 study found that kids have an average of 10.8 hookups in college. That seems like a lot. But the math works out to only 1.35 hookups per semester -- and remember, some of these incidents are merely make-out sessions.

In 2005, a survey of four universities found that...80 percent of students had had one sex partner or fewer in the previous year.

So if those kids are having sex, they are keeping too busy with studies and activities to get TOO busy. These stats aren’t that much better than the numbers for kids in high school, meaning that if you didn’t get laid on prom night, your odds don’t improve much in your dorm room.

Of course, like the similar binge drinking stats, these beer glasses are half-full or half-empty depending on your situation. The primary purpose of sex surveys is to make you think everybody is having more sex than you. College students already erroneously think the other guys (and gals) are getting three times as much action as they really are.

And if you want a squeaky clean look at the travails of a college freshman as hot as Amanda Bynes, I heartily recommend the silly flick Sydney White. The film is loosely based on Snow White but also steals shamelessly from Revenge Of The Nerds toned down to a family friendly PG-13. And if I had to choose between fairy tales, I would have to guess that Sydney is much more true to life than Charlotte.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: College sex, over-hyped fear mongering or not that big a deal?

Porn Star Tips

It’s only natural to be interested in the glamorous world of adult movies. Since most people have had sex at some time or another, it sure looks easy. The best possible way to dissuade yourself is to watch this video from the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) Health Care Foundation. They are a non-profit group founded by a former adult film actress that administers health screening tests to keep sexually transmitted infections (STI) out of the porn industry.

The first half of the two hour movie is a catalog of all the various STIs you can be exposed to. It could form the syllabus for an entire semester of high school Family Life class. They cover AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, HPV, genital warts (you’d be surprised where you can get those), hepatitis, and herpes. They graphically detail the symptoms, transmission vectors, and treatments. If you make it through that gauntlet, they move on to a more general discussion on the adult film industry. For this portion they have the famous (or so I'm told) porn star Nina Hartley (fully clothed) explaining the ins and outs of the business.

Just in case you don’t have the free time I seem to have too much of, I have summarized the more interesting points:

Don’t do anything anyplace you are uncomfortable with. And by uncomfortable place, they don’t mean the back of a Volkswagon. If you haven’t done it in your private life, don’t do it on camera. You can’t ever undo it, but people get to watch it forever.

Don’t get overexposed. That is their pun, not mine. Grabbing every job you can get will burn you out. They will still be making dirty movies next month or next year. Take your time and make it last longer.

Your kids will find out. And your grandmother, your elementary school teacher and all your neighbors. If you can't explain what you do for a living, don't do it.

Reverse cowgirl is great for the inner thighs. Nina and Sharon pantomime some of the more popular positions. They say that one of the trickier moves is the fingercuffs style since the rhythm of keeping both ends in synch can be tough.

Cowgirl

Reverse Cowgirl

Doggie

Some acting is required. If you are female, you have to be able to convincingly say “Gee, I’ve never done THAT with a girl before.” A lot.

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it's forgivable to go ass to mouth. This is good news for you fans of the Dirty Sanchez. They do warn that there is an increased risk of hepatitis. However, going ass to vadge is complete no-no. Their rule is “change the hole, wrap the pole.” Anything that has been through the back door has to get washed, dried, and wrapped before being allowed to knock up front.

There are no fluffers. Sorry, guys. Getting up for a scene is completely in your hands. Viagra and Cialis are miracle drugs, but you still have to prime the pump.

Make-up sponges make terrible tampons. If your friend visits while at work, don’t go to the stylist for a stop-gap measure. Those things are not very absorbent for a reason. A better choice is a specially shaped natural sponge.

The video emphasizes that the adult film industry is a career field requiring good financial management, perseverance, and sound judgment. That sounds too much like real work. I think I will stick to my day job.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are you cut out to be a porn star?

BonusScavengerHunt™: I’ve used three Kevin Smith movie references in this post. Can you find them? Identify the lines and the movie.

High School Nude-ical

Every generation thinks they invented sex, despite what all those frisky geezers could teach them. The latest victim of the hubris of presumptive novelty is High School Music star and Teenage Girl President finalist Vanessa Anne Hudgens. Somehow, a photo of her nekkid as a jaybird found its way to the internet.

It’s a hard way to learn the lesson to never have a picture taken you wouldn’t want your mother or potential employer to see. Astoundingly, and perhaps suspiciously, the authenticity of the picture was immediately confirmed and apologies were spread all around. Then more interesting questions started getting asked:

Who took the picture? The general graininess and flash flare makes me think this was a crummy camera with a self-timer set on a dresser. I doubt there was anyone in the room with her.

When was the picture taken? If it was before Vanessa’s eighteenth birthday last December, it would be technically kiddie porn. Since nobody is waving that flag, it must be within the past eight months or so.

Who was the picture for? Opinions here are split between current boyfriend and HSM costar Zac “Too Cute To Be Straight” Efron and Drake Bell of rival tweener network Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh. Zac in a well publicized beach romp with her must already be aware of how smokin’ her bod is. Drake is a rumored former crush and supposedly the recipient of previous advances. As a gentleman, he is denying everything.

Who leaked them onto the internet? The trail here is pretty cold. It could be someone with access to the camera it was taken with. Or it could be a friend of the recipient’s with access to his e-mail account. It could also all be a particularly puzzling publicity ploy since negotiations for HSM3 are still underway.

Is too big a deal being made of this? Most definitely. By sex scandal standards, this is astoundingly tame. Plain Jane nudity is almost quaint in this post-Paris world. We see more every time Britney Spears steps out of a limo. It almost makes Vanessa seem more wholesome. She doesn't have any tattoos or a Brazilian wax. She even took out her belly piercing for the photo. If anything, it shows that her budoir posing skills are every bit as wooden as her acting.

Am I a perv for hunting down this picture? That goes without saying. In my defense, it wasn’t hard to find and I was completely unaware of it until it made every entertainment news outlet ever. I'm not like the guy that found my blog by Googling “Jordan Todosey naked”. The Life With Derek costar has at least six years before her amateur cheesecake is fair game.

How creepy should I feel for thinking she is hot? Creepiness depends on age. Using the “half-your-age plus seven” guideline she’s off-limits to anyone over 22. Even by the more liberal “young enough to be your daughter” rule, I’m in hot water. My son is a senior in high school and actively dating. I just hope none of his girlfriends are sending him their private modeling sessions.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Vanessa Anne Hudgens - Naïve waif or shameless tramp?

Frisky Geezers Get Freaky

As Baby Boomers hit retirement age, there is a lot of ink being spilled over how gracefully they will age. But we already have the example of the slightly older generation that is well into the Geritol years and they seem to be living it up. A recent study that made a lot of headlines surveyed the sexual habits of golden yearers and found that they are not going silently into that good night. They instead seem to me coming into their sunset years quite loudly.

Between the ages of 57 and 64, 84% of men and 62% of women had had sex within the previous year. I don’t consider 60 to be particularly old, so this doesn’t surprise me. By the age of 75 to 85, that stat falls to 38% for men and only 17% for women. Even better news is that among the sexually active old farts between half and two-thirds are getting action several times a month. I know some McBloggers with children that would love to break into that range.

A lot of this gender difference is pure demographics. Women live longer than men. By a certain age, 9% of men are widowers but an astounding 42% of women are widows. I have a theory that a guy in a retirement home with a valid drivers license that doesn't drool too much is the cock of the walk. In a way, old age mimics high school. A whopping 60% of the surveyed oldsters claimed to have had oral sex in the past year. Now despite the paranoid warnings of the TV news, that is a market penetration that the typical teenager can only dream of.

And they are not always being shy or coy about it. A Florida retirement center had a herpes epidemic from all the saggy skin slapping. At retiree haven Sun City West a few years back, they had a rash of outdoor sex sightings of it's senior sexa(and older)genarians. All I have to say is “Get a room!”

It seems that granny porn is everywhere in society now. Helen Mirren is a bona fide sex symbol. More explicitly, a new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me" supposedly pushes the boundaries for even pay cable. One of the stars is sixty-seven-year-old Jane Alexander who plays a marriage counselor with her own rather active love life. As Tom Shales describes:

Where the show becomes discomforting is when it explores the therapist's own sexual relationship with her mate; both are in their 60s. The filmmakers want us to be aware that sex is not something restricted to the young and the cute, and so if you're inclined to think "gross" at the sight of the couple in bed, you've only helped the filmmakers prove a point.

It’s not TV or HBO, it’s Over 50 on film.

Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post Outlook Section examines the vigor of what he calls Frisky Geezers. The money quote is:

Much of the revolution takes place out of sight. Recently we all read the front-page story about older people having sex like bunnies. According to the University of Chicago study, 53 percent of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 remain sexually active, along with 26 percent between the ages of 75 and 85, despite the fact that 100 percent of their kids and grandkids would rather not picture it. Now we understand that special twinkle in Grandpa's eye when he looks at Grandma and says, "I'll show you an Early Bird Special you'll never forget."

Thank goodness my parents just left town, because they are big fans of Early Birds and I will never be able to hear that phrase the same way again. Dealing with amorous parents is awkward for all involved. Many years back, we all rolled our eyes as my dad gave us grown kids the bum’s rush one evening. He had an early flight to catch the next day and time was wasting. Eeewww! I know how I got here and I have a good suspicion of who the culprits were, but I don't need to be reminded.

The only reason I'm tolerant of the whole sexy senior citizen phenomenon is that I hope to be one too someday. Then I get to gross everybody out.


BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do frisky parents embarrass you?

Birth Control and Boobs

I am very easily confused. A post by my blog-buddy trusty getto got me thinking about some newspaper articles I had read in the Washington Post recently and things didn’t add up. Try to follow this with me:

August 31, 2005: The FDA indefinitely defers the approval of “Plan-B” or “morning-after” birth control pills as an over-the-counter drug for women 17 and over because it would remain by-prescription only for women under the age of 17 and the FDA can't figure out how to keep 16-year olds from buying it over-the-counter. Susan Woods, the FDA director of the Office of Women’s Health resigned in protest.

September 20, 2005: The FDA announces that Norris Alderson, a FDA staffer whose specialty is animal husbandry, would replace Susan Woods as the director of the Office of Women’s Health. This announcement is met with universal derision, and the Ministry of Truth erases all evidence of the announcement.

September 19, 2005: The FBI announces the formation of a task force aimed at the prosecution of companies creating pornography involving consenting adults. This is met with snickering and eye-rolling. By FBI agents.

September 22, 2005: The FDA approves, on appeal, to allow a second company to manufacture and market silicone gel breast implants, which previously had been banned for over a decade.

To summarize:

Over-the-counter birth control: Bad

Appointing people to jobs outside their expertise: Good, until caught.

Pornography: Bad

Big boobs: Good

Is this all part of a sinister agenda, or is it merely bumbling incompetence?
Does anyone else see anything inconsistent or hypocritical here?
Wouldn't banning breast implants destroy the porn industry without an FBI task force?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: In a Friday afternoon news dump, FDA chief Lester Crawford resigned after only being confirmed to the job two months ago. No word if the reason for his departure was that he found the recently announced porn squad openings too enticing to pass up.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Washington Post, Marc Kaufman, Lester Crawford, Susan Woods, Norris Alderson, birth control, breast implants, FDA, FBI, pornography

Survey Says: People Have Sex

I love reading the newspaper because there is so much smutty stuff in it. And that's not even counting the department store lingerie ads. Most of dirty stuff is usually crime associated, so there's a certain "Ewww!" factor associated with the typical run of stories about teachers seducing students, guys soliciting FBI agents over the internet, and governors knocking up their secretaries.

This week a major survey of American sexual habits was released. I stay away from surveys taken by magazines that are sold at supermarket checkout lines because I know the statistics are completely demographically invalid. I've never met any women that read Cosmopolitan, let alone share 101 great bedroom tips with them. And I know there aren't enough straight readers of Details to come up with a sample size that would pass any chi-square test.

This study was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, which sounds very credible. The best part about reading new reports on sex studies is noting the facts that different news groups want to emphasize. Obviously, they want to emphasize the stats that will make you want to read the article.

The AP newswire as carried by the Baltimore Sun went all Lesbian Chic by trumpeting that 11 percent of women between 18 and 44 and 14 percent of women under 30 have had a same-sex encounter at least once in their life. That's almost disappointingly low for those of us whose knowledge of female openness to experimentation comes from Forum letters. Especially when reading the find print and finding that what qualifies as a same sex experience for women is left to the respondent's interpretation, as opposed to the much more detailed breakdown for male-on-male action.

The Washington Post instead focused on the teenage oral sex rate of 50% that rises to 70% for 18 and 19 year olds. And the breakdown between males and females isn't as one-sided as stereotypes would have you believe. Good to know college students are finding more than one way to get busy.

The New York Times had the least sensationalistic headline, but hits both the bisexual and teen-sex parts of the survey pretty hard. They had graphs showing that a typical 15-year old has a 3 in 4 chance of being a virgin, but only 1 in 4 shot of staying pure until the age of 20. And guys have to wait a little longer than gals to get lucky. All this is based on the assumption that teenagers tell the truth to anybody, and survey takers in particular, about their sex lives.

As a painfully straight married guy in his 40's, none of this had much relevance to me until I found buried in the report that 80% of the people surveyed had one or fewer sexual partners in the last year. I guess that just isn't sexy enough to put in a headline.

Update: The online edition of the Times did not include the very cool graphs, so I have scanned them. Click on the image to see the full size version.



Update 2:(9/22/05) if you think my post or the articles it links are too graphic, Slate has an article on the parts of the study the mainstream media are ignoring. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Technorati tag:hummingbird rump, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, New York Times, teen-ager, sex, survey, bisexuality