Tag Archives: sex

Adventures in Europe, Chapter 29: What Rhymes with “Slinky Hex”?

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It’s a trick question. There are many things that rhyme with slinky hex, like blinky rex or tinky dex or linky necks. The answer that’s probably on your mind, though, is “kinky sex,” at least if you’re a veteran, seasoned pervert like I am.

Choose about a score and change of smart, creative, sex-positive folks, make sure they’re all veteran, seasoned perverts, make ’em all members in some sort of capacity of the same amorphous poly network, and put ’em in a 14th century castle in the south of France, and a certain level of slinky hex is the inevitable result. And just to clarify, when I say “a certain level,” I mean “rather a lot.”

Now, had I had my wits about me, rather than being addled by a day-long ride in a van with more than a dozen other folks and all their various and sundry bits of luggage, musical instruments, computers, sex toy bags, and other assorted implements of destruction, I would have photographed every room of the castle immediately upon our arrival, before the debauchery began. As it was, I barely managed to get any shots of the castle’s interior, and had to rely on the fact that another of our entourage was more proactive in that regard and kind enough to dump her camera’s card onto my laptop.

This is the main downstairs living area of the castle. This room, like the upstairs turret room, was soon converted into a play space, a process which had already begun by the time this photo was taken:

That’s a king-sized mattress; the fireplace is bigger than you think.

It’s also weirder than you think. There’s a big metal plate in the back of the fireplace, which is adorned with a relief sculpture that looks to me like a bunch of heretics being burned at the stake, which is rather grim decoration if you ask me.

There are also a bunch of big iron chains hanging down from the chimney, ending in a wide assortment of different hooks, some of them very large. I assume they’re probably for cooking or something; I’m sure I wouldn’t know about such things.

The odd religious imagery wasn’t going to deter such a group of seasoned perverts, though, and soon there was a roaring fire going in the fireplace. Not long after that, there was a roaring orgy going in front of the fireplace, though I didn’t attend that particular event as I still hadn’t met many of the folks there, most of whom had long histories with one another.

As the week progressed, though, I had the opportunity to engage in rather a lot of slinky hex, and to get many wonderful photos, some of which are quite lovely and one or two of which are quite sweet as well.

Most of those photos, you won’t see, as the folks involved chose not to have them posted. This is an unfortunate loss, but think of it like cell phone service to a Bronze Age tribesman: you can’t miss what you’ve never seen.

There are, however, some pictures which I do have permission to post. If you’re reading this at work, or you have delicate sensitivities easily offended by carnal images of the human form, or if you are living in China or Australia or any other place where sex is strictly forbidden by law, you might want to consider not clicking on the cut below.

If, on the other hand, pictures and descriptions of orgy in a castle seems your cup of tea, click here!

Five love languages aren’t enough

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In 2005, a guy with an obsession for the number five wrote a book called “The Five Love Languages.”

The premise of the book is pretty straightforward, and in hindsight reasonable; different people express love and affection in different ways. The author, Gary Chapman, went on to start an entire empire around the notion, and has even trademarked the phrase “five love languages™”. Since then, he’s continued on to explore the number five in other aspects of human interpersonal relationships; there’s a new book out or coming out or something called “The Five Languages of Apology.”

Which is all well and good, as far as it goes, but I’m a little skeptical about the number five. Why would there be five different ways to express love and also five different ways to apologize? Why not four or six or seventeen? Is it because five is half of ten, and we human beings have a deep sense of emotional resonance with the number ten? Is it because the number five has some sort of magical connection with the ways we interact with each other? Is it just a load of bollocks, and five happened to be the number of ways that Mr. Chapman could think up off the top of his head?

I suspect the answer is the latter. According to Chapman, the five l”love languages”–the five ways that people express love for one another–are words of affirmation, spending quality time together, giving or receiving gifts, giving or receiving acts of service, and physical touch.

And to be fair, there’s some merit in that list. I know people who express affection in each of those ways, and for someone whose preferred way of expressing affection is, say, through words of affirmation, giving gifts might not be as effective. (I personally don’t care much for gifts, giving or receiving, but physical touch is very important to me.)

Problem is, I think that folks have built a religion around the notion that there are exactly five and only five love languages, and I think the reality is that the list is woefully incomplete. There are at least three more that are important to me, and I bet there are still more important to other people.

The three that are missing for me are:

Creating together. This is not the same as “quality time.” It is, instead, the act of bringing another person into the process of making something new, which for me is an extraordinarily intimate thing. When I have created something with someone, I am quite likely to feel much greater intimacy for that person; the birthing of something new is something that’s powerful to me, and sharing it is an expression of love.

The thing itself, once created, becomes a tangible representation of that love. There’s something incredibly powerful in being able to see and touch and hold a thing that would not have existed save for the act of will I’ve shared with another person in bringing it to life.

Nesting together. I would not have guessed this about myself before I moved to Portland. The making of a shared space with zaiah has been something that I feel very strongly about. It’s not an expression if love in the creation of the space, although there’s something of that in there as well; it’s about having that space, which I share with a partner, that carries with it each of our unique signatures.

I’ve lived with partners before, and even built a house with a partner, but that was different; those spaces did not carry our own personal touches the way the home I’m building now does.

Sex. Anyone who thinks that “sex” is merely a spacial case of “physical touch” doesn’t have sex the way I do. Past a certain point, physical touch alone isn’t enough to carry the day. There is a unique kind of vulnerability in sex that is absent from any other kind of touch, and that unique vulnerability, at least for me, carries a tremendous ability to create intimacy.

Note that “sex” in this context does not necessarily imply sticking tab A into slot B. Sex is highly contextual; in the right context, whipping is sex. It’s not the slippery bits touching; it’s the thing that we become when I’m sharing sexual intimacy with a partner, or partners. When I have sex, especially good sex, I let down barriers that other sorts of touch don’t pass through.

And, like I said, I bet there are others as well that Mr. Chapman, in his near-religious fixation on the number five, has missed. Got any more? I want to hear ’em!

Sex Toy Roundup: Santa’s List for Naughty Girls and Boys

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I’ve just posted a quick rundown of the ten best things to put under the tree for the naughty people on your list over at weeklysextip.com — and I’m sure you’re all dying of curiosity to know what made the list. Check it out!

Well, I’ve finally got ’round to an old project…

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…an update to the interactive version of the Map of Human Sexuality.

Finally solved the single biggest problem with it, which was that you could not correct a mistake while you were creating a map. With the new version, you can now remove a pin if you accidentally place one in the wrong page…a simple idea that took a lot of head-pounding and hair-tearing to implement.

Next on the List of Things To Do is to make a login system so you can go back and update/change your map later.

And in honor of the revamped map software, I’ve created a new personal map that reflects some of the new things I’ve tried since doing the original!


Find out where I’ve journeyed
on the Map of Human Sexuality!
Or get your own here!

DragonCon!

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ZOMG. I’m trying to think of a balanced and reasonable way to describe the past several days. I’d say things like “best con ever” and “the most amazing five days a human being can ever hope to imagine in this life or the next,” but I don’t know if they really convey quite how I feel.

Unfortunately, I’m still totally exhausted (despite about twelve hours’ worth of sleep), and I’m nowhere near cogent enough to be able to write about Dragon*Con. So instead I’ll do something I generally don’t do, and just re-post messages from my Twitter account. The following text is probably not safe for work

Group Sex Meets Information Theory

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A while ago, I got to wondering, as I sometimes do, exactly what makes an orgy. For example, if fifteen people are all in a room having sex, but only within existing partnerships, and there’s no “extra-partner” sex happening, is it an orgy? If four people are all fucking each other, is that an orgy, or is it just a foursome?

As it turns out, the dictionary is of precious little assistance with answering questions like this. I consulted a number of different dictionaries, and got a number of different answers–one said an orgy is five or more people having sex, one said more than two, one said an event dominated by “excessive” sexual activity (whatever the hell that means), and so on.

Now, to me, three people having sex is a threesome; four people having sex is a foursome; it doesn’t get to be an orgy until you’ve got five or more people.

But is a play party an orgy? Clearly not all orgies are play parties, but is a play party an orgy? What about a play party where people aren’t having penetrative sex? How about a mutual masturbation event…is that an orgy? My impulse is to say “no;” it isn’t an orgy unless there are five or more people and there’s fucking going on, so mutual masturbation doesn’t count. (Edit: There are many kinds of sexual activities that aren’t penetrative sex that I would consider to be an orgy, so I’m still not quite sure exactly where the borderline for the definition of “orgy” is.)

From there it was a short intellectual hop to wondering how many different kinds of group sex there are1, and what the relationship between them is.

So I started working on a Venn diagram of group sex. Then I started enlisting the help of all the people around me.

Then I started realizing that some of the potential overlaps are complicated beyond what you might at first think. For example, not all swing parties include group sex, yet most folks would probably think of a swing party as a group sex event.

And it soon became clear that certain rules of geometry2 precluded doing this as a traditional Venn diagram, because it’s not possible to show all the overlaps and exclusions with circles.

So the project got a little more complex.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with: Where group sex intersects with information theory!

Some assumptions I’ve made for this chart:

1. An orgy must involve penetrative sex of some kind (including manual sex) but can not involve all the participants being sexual with one and only one person; a gang bang and an orgy are exclusive, non-overlapping sex.

2. An orgy can never bee a threesome or a foursome.

3. If penetrative sex happens, it is no longer a puppy pile; ergo, orgies and gang bangs exclude puppy piles.

I have the feeling I missed some categories of group sex, though, and I don’t know how universal these assumptions are.

1 As opposed to how many different kinds of sexual activity you can have in a group sex situation, which is a completely different question altogether.

2 Specifically, group theory, about which I know less than what would fit in the white space of a postage stamp.

Art meets sex

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Back when i was still living in Atlanta, zaiah came out to visit a couple of times. During her last visit, I ended up with what I thought was a nasty cold but which actually turned out to be antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

Now, I don’t know if you have had any experience with pneumonia, Gentle Reader, but in the likely and fortunate event you have not, I can inform you that it will cause certain biological urges of a licentious nature to wither in much the same way that a snowman wilts under a flamethrower. Which is a damn shame.

Anyway, while I was miserable in bed and sleeping most of the day, zaiah started drawing on me with Magic Markers, and took a picture of the result with my iPhone.

Since then, it’s become something of a standard part of our sex lives. She loves drawing on me, and I love being drawn on…and yes, it is sex. Many things other than the insertion of Tab A into Slot B are sex, legions of horny teenagers who’ve taken Purity Pledges but still want to get their funk on notwithstanding (“you mean if you do me in the ass I’ll still be a virgin? Oh, okay then!”).

I have quite a collection of iPhone photos now, which are all kinda fun and cheerful and which you can see if you don’t mind looking at possibly not-safe-for-work images that might include some portion of my butt

More on George Sodini

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My sweetie figmentj has written a well-considered rebuttal to my last post, which I think deserves more attention than being buried in a very long comment thread, so I want to point people at it here.

Edited to add: It was a locked post, but it’s unlocked now.

Epiphany and George Sodini

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“You’re polyamorous? That’s so greedy!”

I’ve heard that about a zillion and eleventy-four times, and it’s totally baffled me every single time I’ve heard it. I hae never, ever once quite understood how the notion that my partners are free to form attachments to and relationships with anyone they choose, and how I am free to form attachments to and relationships with, anyone we choose so long as we all choose to treat one another with reciprocal respect and kindness, is “greedy.”

Quite the opposite, in fact. To me, “you are my partner, and therefore I forbid you to make your own choices about relationship and I forbid you to have certain kinds of relationships with anyone except me” seems more than a little greedy.

It took an asshole with a gun to make me understand where “You’re polyamorous? That’s so greedy!” comes from.

This is George. George is, or was, an asshole. In the unlikely event that you’re not aware of him, George spent many, many years unable to get any woman to go out with him, so George decided to solve the problem by walking into a women’s fitness center, shooting the place up, killing a bunch of women and injuring a bunch more, and then shooting himself.

So, yeah, asshole.

This particular asshole kept a long, rambling online journal just stuffed full of the most boggling array of misunderstandings and misapprehensions one could ever expect to see outside of a Creation Science seminar. His site is currently offline (which I think is a shame; the insight it offers into the mind of a profoundly fucked-up person is worth preservation), but bits of it have been picked up and scattered all over the Net. Those barely coherent noodlings on misogyny and racism are, paradoxically, what gave me the insight into what a person who says “You’re polyamorous? That’s so greedy!” is actually saying.

George’s Web site is kaput, but nothing on the Internet ever really dies. There are Web sites all over the place which have picked up and preserved some of his journal entries, and it’s quite a sewer of racism and misogyny…but what struck me is how ordinary his particular flavor of misogyny is. what’s really scary is that George’s rants are not too far from the sort of stuff you see in places like LiveJournal, OK Cupid, and other blogs and dating sites every day.

Take this, for instance:

Moving into Christmas again. No girlfriend since 1984, last Christmas with Pam was in 1983. Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. No sex since July 1990 either (I was 29). No shit! Over eighteen years ago. And did it maybe only 50-75 times in my life.

Or this:

Just got back from tanning, been doing this for a while. No gym today, my elbow is sore again. I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne – yet 30 million women rejected me – over an 18 or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend. This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded. Every other guy does this successfully to a degree.

Or this little gem:

I was reading several posts on different forums and it seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little hoe has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason. Thanks for nada, bitches! Bye.

I spent quite a bit of time talking with my sweetie figmentj about George; these journal quotes got me to thinking about the nature of interpersonal relationships and expectations, and she’s an awesome sounding board for that sort of cognitive noodling.

The things he wrote reek to me of…well, not objectification, precisely, but certainly of a sense of entitlement. There’s also a very deep sense of disconnect; I don’t know if he ever really thought of women as being quite fully human.

And I don’t think he’s alone in that.

There are two things in particular that jumped out at me, reading these journal entries. The first is the idea that “getting” a woman is a bit like getting a car: it’s a quantifiable process. To get a car, you go into the dealership, the dealer looks at your credit rating, you pick a car that matches the amount of money you have available for a down payment, and as long as you have enough money and your credit rating is OK, you leave with a car. It’s an easy, defined process.

A lot of men seem to think the same thing is true of getting a woman. As long as you are not “ugly or too weird” and you have enough money, you can get a woman. You pick out someone who you can afford and are attractive enough to have; she looks to make sure you’re not too weird, and as long as there’s nothing wrong with you, you go home with her.

This might not be objectification per se, but it’s awfully close–it seems, I think, to see women as an undifferentiated mass, rather than as a group of individuals, each of whom has her own ideas about what she wants.

The second part that struck me is “A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend.” It reeks of an entitlement perspective; I need you for the things you do for me, and I deserve to have those things. A man needs a toaster to make toast, a coffee maker to make coffee, a computer to get connected to the Internet, and a woman for confidence. As long as he has money and is not too weird, he deserves to be able to have these things.

And seriously, I see this kind of thinking just about everywhere. “How can I get a woman to have sex with me?” is a popular refrain on the Internet. (To a person who thinks it’s a question of “getting” a woman to do what he wants her to do, I suspect the answer is likely to be incomprehensible; you don’t “get” a woman to sleep with you, you become a person who is interesting to other people, and those other people will then…er, find you interesting.)

“You’re polyamorous? That’s so greedy!” The statement is loaded down with exactly the same sort of world view that I see clearly in George’s writing. There’s an entire world of preconceptions and assumptions bundled up in those five words.

It starts, I think, with a group conception of women that sees the world’s females as an undifferentiated mass resource; there are about as many women as men, and women expect certain things in exchange for companionship and sex–it’s simply a question of giving women what they expect and you, too, can walk off the lot with a woman of your own, whose attractiveness depends on how much currency you have to spend. Each man is entitled to a woman by right.

Polyamory upsets the balance. People with multiple women are somehow walking into a dealership with no cash and no credit but still driving off the lot with a bunch of cars; they’ve discovered some kind of way to hack the system, to upset the economic exchange, leaving fewer women for the other men who deserve them.

And men shouldn’t be allowed to have a woman if they are too weird. You accept social norms and adopt normative behaviors in exchange for having a woman. That’s the way the system works. (In a very literal sense. I actually had a person tell me recently that he couldn’t figure out how a weird, creepy-looking guy like me could even “get” one woman to sleep with him, much less several. How do you “get” a dealer to give you a car when you don’t have credit? What manner of black magic could persuade a woman to have sex with a man who is too weird?)

Okay, so maybe there’s a bit of “well, duh” going on here. But seriously, I was so busy being baffled by the “WTF is selfish about allowing a partner to make her own choices about her lovers?” to see the “women are a rationed commodity and if you keep taking all of them that leaves fewer for me; I’m not too ugly or too weird, so you’re taking away something I am entitled to have a share of myself.”

Honestly, I do think there has to be just a pinch of objectification and more than a little sense of entitlement to make a statement like “polyamory is selfish.” It would never occur to someone who doesn’t see women as some kind of amorphous group; a person who sees women as a collection of individuals would be more inclined to say “A woman who wants a polyamorous relationship would be a poor match for me, so a polyamorous person isn’t taking anything away from me; I wouldn’t choose these women even if they were single, because we have different relationship goals.”

George believed that he was entitled to have a woman, because he wasn’t too weird and because every man needs a woman for confidence. I imagine that the smell of misogyny probably oozed off of him; he wasn’t rejected by women as a group, he was rejected by each individual woman unlucky enough to cross paths with him.

So thank you, George Sodini. You’re an asshole who exemplifies a certain kind of misogyny so clearly that you make other misogynists more comprehensible.

But you’re still an asshole.

Today’s devil’s choice

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So, before I introduce the poll I’m about to introduce, let me start by saying that I like sex. I really, really, really like sex. It’s fun, it’s enjoyable, it’s an amazing gateway to intimacy and shared experience, it’s an awesome tool for getting to know someone (and yourself), and it’s fun.

No surprise there.

So, here’s the poll. It’s a simple, one-question, yes/no thing:

Someone comes up to you and offers to place you into a fit, healthy, 23-year-old body. This new body will be completely immune to all diseases, and also totally free of the ravages of aging. You’ll never get old and you’ll never be sick; excluding accident or deliberate choice, you won’t die.

But, there’s a catch. You’ll never have sex again. You won’t feel the urge, you won’t have a sex drive, nada.

Do you take the deal?

Me, I say “yes,” for the very simple reason that giving up sex for radically extended life seems like a no-brainer to me. After all, I can’t have sex when I’m dead! So to me the question actually reads “Would you like to not have sex and also be dead, or would you prefer to not have sex but still be alive?” Since I take joy in many things in life other than sex, like bacon and cats and friends and blue skies and spinning fire and World of Warcraft and Leonardo da Vinci and vodka cranberries and VNV Nation and flying kites, the choice between “no sex and also dead” or “no sex but still alive” is an easy one.

Plus, I think that if I were given enough time, I’d probably find something just as good as sex. zaiah thinks that I’m an optimist.