Quakers and Shakers

Although February is supposed to be Black History Month—anyone else notice it’s the shortest month of the year? I’m just saying…—at Penn, February may as well be called Vagina Appreciation Month.

Valentine’s Day, on the 14th, is a (stupid, ugly, fat, etc.) holiday aimed at elating (or depressing) the vagina-bearing half of the human race.  Completely vagina-centric. And then there are The Vagina Monologues.

Each February, you walk down the Walk and are bombarded with flyers, posters, signs and about a 1,896 Penn girls all begging you—in a high-pitched squeal, of course—to “come watch The Vagina Monologues this Wednesday and Friday in Irvine!!!!!”

As much as I love “The Vagina Monologues,”—and the subsequent screaming of the word “VAGINA!!!!!” in my face as I wander toward Fisher-Bennett—if I were a penis, (or a Penn boy who had one) I’d feel pretty left out. Why do vaginas always get all the attention? Why do people assume they are the only genitals with something say?  Penises long to be heard too, though they are easily distracted by conflicting desires to be touched, licked and stuck in people. Read more…

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Nature—The Museum of Victoria

I’ve been reading the journal Nature weekly since 2003 and occasionally skimming through Cosmopolitan’s website since about the same year. Almost invariably, the articles about sex in Nature are more interesting and relevant than those in Cosmo. This week is no exception.

This week’s Nature features fascinating research detailing the discovery of fossil embryos inside of 380 million-year-old fish. What this find suggests is that the origins of penetrative sex in vertebrates originated around the same time as the jaw bone (a date much earlier than previous estimates). Further fossil finds lead the researchers to believe that these placoderms may have mated in a manner similar to that used by sharks, with males inserting a long, articulated, cartilaginous organ into their female partners and internally fertilizing the female’s eggs.

Aussie PI John Long explains the finding: “We have an expression that humans like to get a leg over,” Long says. “But these placoderms actually like to get a leg in.”

More proof that Australians are just the hippest/flyest/coolest cats around.

Newsworthy arthrodire embryos, placodermi

I’m generally not opposed to decorating or arranging one’s living space in a way that’s designed to make hospitality easy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting guests to feel comfortable and at home. What gets a little creepy is when it’s clear someone’s personal living space has been decorated exclusively to make guests feel welcome. Really, really welcome. All night long.

While browsing through the recent posts on It’s Lovely! I’ll Take It (a blog of surprisingly bad real estate listings), I stumbled upon the image at right.

This is WAY past chucking your dirty underwear in the closet before going out so you don’t bring someone home to a mess. This is way beyond buying a houseplant to project sensitive and approachable to potential lays. As far as I’m concerned, “Clothes off!” on a guy’s wall actually reads: “Run away from the almost famous VIP ASAP”.

Uncategorized poor taste

Looking for exciting new ways to add spice bitterness to your favorite recipes? Look no further than
Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen Based Recipes

For the super-frugal among you, this might be a nice way to skip the ramen without upping the grocery bill… And let’s be honest: can it really be that much worse than Commons?

Sexxx

map out your sexual history with this interactive website

Recently I found myself playing “Never have I ever…” with a group of Penn women of all years and sexual persuasions. I don’t consider myself particularly sexually experienced or adventurous, but turn after turn my fingers kept dropping like panties around the ankles.

About halfway around the circle it became clear that I was the frontrunner for the title of “kinkster”. When I was called on to share, I was eager to assert my vanillaness. “Never have I ever given a rim job.”  I was met with at least a dozen blank stares and only two or three looks of recognition. “What’s that?” “How do I know if I’ve given a rim job if I’ve no idea what one is?”

I spent the following week sitting shiva for my innocence. How was the same girl who five years ago flinched when the Lord’s name was used in vain was now flinching at the stinging blows of leather riding crops?

Then, I discovered this, Franklin Veaux’s Map of Human Sexuality. Suddenly I didn’t feel so contaminated by knowledge. Though I’m pretty familiar with the “Land of Mundania,” I have almost no idea what 60% of the provinces north of the Great Barrier Mountains are. My innocence is not entirely lost—though I suspect if it were, it’d be wandering around somewhere between the City of Harry Pottersville and Teledildonics.

The website is interactive so you can plot where on the great continent you’ve been and where you’re hoping to travel. Have fun poking around the fantastical world that is human sexual fetishes. Have even more fun imagining what would happen if you suggested “mudlarking,” “puppy play” or “forced rectal prolapse” to a random hookup.

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It’s one of those nights.  You and your friends decide to go to Mad 4—the place where fakes go to die—and the bouncer takes one glance at “Donna Pfeffercorn” and takes it away. On your way back home, you bump into that professional douchebag from last year who took your virginity and never called you. The wind was blowing your hair in the wrong direction, so you looked like Ugly Awkward-Bangs while he looked like Adrian Grenier. Fantastic.

Grabbing for your iPhone to text your boyfriend, you think a little action will erase all of the nightmarish events that have just transpired.  You’re phone’s gone. Now you really need some sexual healing. You barge into his single in Harnwell—its always unlocked—and find him passionately going at it with your (fugly) biology lab partner.  You just introduced them, yesterday.  You think: Fuck. My. Life. Or more specifically, fuck my sex life.

Fmylife.com is a website where poor, self-pitying schmucks like us can post about crappy things that have happened to them.  In that same way that watching someone trip on Locust stirs within you a giggly splash of satisfaction, reading the horrific tales of other people’s failures is sickly amusing. Because sexual slip-ups are oh-so-frequent, there is an entire section of the website dedicated to “fmylife moments” that have occurred in the boudoir.

Here are two of my personal favorites:

Today, I finally hooked up with a boy I really liked. We were lying in bed and my panties were already off when he asked me : “Would you also have sex with me if you weren’t drunk?”. I responded “Yes!” and asked him the same question, at which he responded : “No, probably not.” FML

Today, after some very passionate sex with my girlfriend, she exclaims “that was amazing Drew…” She quickly tried to turn “Drew” into my actual name which does not sound a thing like Drew. FML

Whenever your sex life is sucking, you can always peruse fmylife.com, take at peek at other people’s sexual blunders, and feel a whole lot better.  Did your boyfriend buy you a gift certificate for a bikini wax for Valentine’s day? Did your girlfriend say, “Never have I ever had an orgasm,” when playing 10 fingers with you and your friends? Let’s hope not, but if they did, fuck your life.

Uncategorized fuck my life

There is almost no denying that Barack Obama is one yummy-looking dude.  As I cruise through the magazine section of the Penn Bookstore, looking at that chiseled jaw, those deep, brown, penetrating eyes and that perfect grin smiling back at me from the covers of different magazines, one or two inappropriate thoughts have crossed my mind.

Though my fantasies about being the Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama’s Bill Clinton may never come true—I’ve always wanted to see the inside of the Oval Office—it is now possible, for the low price of $34.95, to have Obama in my oval office. 

The “Head O State,” the official Obama Pleasure Toy made by the Ozam Group, is seven and a half inches in length, 2 inches in diameter, waterproof and comes in a “Democratic Blue” or “Presidential Gold.”

Yep, they went there.  It’s a dildo in the shape of Obama’s torso. The slogan, “You Love your President, Let Him Love You Back!” is pure pleasure toy gold. While Bill Clinton’s drawl, sax-playing charm and lies about “sexual relations with that woman” were sexy, in a bad-for-you frat boy kind of way, I don’t want a phthalate-free rubber version of his head in my vagina.  George W. Bush, on the other hand, is about as attractive as he is intelligent.  His whole idiot cowboy thing didn’t make me want to drop even one article of clothing.  Read more…

Uncategorized barack obama, dildos

A disproportionate percentage of the men I find myself attracted to have a quick wit and a fierce commitment to being funny even at the expense of social appropriateness. Usually, this means that our conversations are lull-free and our pre-coital flirtation at least one standard deviation heavier on light-hearted smirking than average.

Last semester however, I found myself periodically getting cozy with a man so devoted to his sense of humor that he seemed to sacrifice his libido at the altar of cleverness. Our sexual exchanges were catalyzed not by lust, awkward erections or drunken flirtation, but by gems like “I’m the regional representative of the no pants club—can I talk to you about the benefits of membership?” and “I read an article detailing the negative correlation between the amount of clothing a woman is wearing and her attractiveness—would you like to be more attractive?” While at first endearing, this insistence on silly before sexy rapidly became a source of consternation: were my sack skills so dismal that a spoonful of saccharine drollery was needed to make the man go up?

A recent conversation with a friend has me wondering whether Penn is breeding men incapable of conceptualizing sex and romance except through the lens of their own wit and intellect. Typically, the bedroom is a place where one showcases one’s physical flexibility, not one’s mental dexterity, but from my vantage point it seems like many of Penn’s men are mixing their Geertz and their girls. Is this really that surprising? This is a campus where professors commend intelligence and those with vast quantities of useless knowledge are applauded.

One must also wonder to what extent we women have brought this upon ourselves. We insist on the highest levels of intelligence and eloquence and pass judgment on the simpletons who fail to meet our standards. We then demand that the same men we have asked to impress us with their cleverness shed the obscure literary references that kept them safe from our ridicule and exhibit forthright honesty. Perhaps if we expect sincerity from the men we fancy, we should actively seek out these qualities in men, for I suspect that particularly on this campus they’re far rarer than a way with words or a familiarity with Rothko.

Uncategorized penn boys

On the morning of February 10^th, when I was doing my usual pre-class routine, stalking all sorts of celebrity gossip sites all over the World Wide Web, I got a horrible shock. People.com—the only reliable source of celebrity news—reported that star couple Chris Brown and Rihanna were driving from a Grammy’s pre-party to their Los Angeles home when a heated argument ensued.

This lover’s quarrel escalated into a violent brawl that, according to Police sources—and those disturbing photos on TMZ—left Rihanna with “a swollen and split lip and two red and purple contusions on either side of her forehead.”   And then, there were the bite marks on her arms and her fingers.  This was not a little scuffle.  This was a beating and a biting.

I am extremely sensitive to the issues of domestic violence.  It is absolutely unacceptable, and I understand that this situation is devastating for everyone involved; however, I must be honest.  I have been anti-Chrihanna since the beginning of their relationship.

As an avid celeb-blog stalker, I’ve seen their photos and read articles about their romantic getaways, but I’ve always thought their relationship was one of convenience. They’re both young, famous, hot and horny pop sensations.  Why wouldn’t they hook up?

I’m not a body language expert and don’t personally know Mr. Brown or Ms. Umbrella-Ella-Ella, but looking at the photos of them before the incident, you can tell that he’s just not that into her.  Photos of C. Breezy gallivanting with sexy, Rihanna-look-alike groupies all over Europe, confirm these beliefs. Read more…

Uncategorized Chrihanna, domestic violence

Thanks to the impeccable, airtight logic of the folks over at Sex in Christ you may never again need to pussyfoot pussyfist about whether or not you can logically reconcile slamming your hand into some hottie’s rear with your cultural ties to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In a lengthy piece titled “Fisting and God’s Will,” Sex in Christ argues that within the context of a heterosexual Christian marriage, fisting is encouraged by the Bible and functions to strengthen the couple’s relationship with the Lord. Read more…

Uncategorized fisting, religion