is sex for your brain -
The Village Voice: What They Left Behind by Jennifer Gonnerman
A rather poignant article about the personal histories of mental patients in an upstate New York institution. One wonders how many millions of men and women have vanished into asylums, misdiagnosed and mistreated. One wonders how many people are in this situation right now.
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Shafer of Slate does a follow-up to his piece questioning the validity of statements in the NY Times article about sex slavery in the US. Apparently a number of alternative news sources share his skepticism about claims and characters in the original story. After the Jason Blair scandal, how much dissection can the Times stand? The further I live from NY, the more I've come to mistrust the Times myself. When you live in NYC, the Times is the world--the accepted and ultimate purveyor of "news fit to print." Will this story, on top of the other recent scandals, finally force people to accept that the Times is as apt as any other paper in the US to make major mistakes and to show its biases?
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I guess Dee's got a whole new set of "Aqualungs" now... You go, girl!
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Ah, it's sad when one of the best die. His photos were so dark. Long before I knew I was an SMer, I was fascinated by them.
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In the mid-1990's, I did a sex survey for Cosmo, asking women about their biggest turn-ons. Roughly 90% said that cunnilingus was their favorite way to climax. For some, it was the only way they could come. But, in the same survey, 80% admitted that as much as they loved oral sex they seldom had it because they didn't know how to tell their men what they wanted.
One woman scoffed at a lover whose oral performance was apparently a race against the clock. He lapped and licked her as if he was on speed. His manic slobbering aggravated her. Still, she didn't stop him or tell him to slow down. She was afraid it would seem unladylike to offer instructions. He would think less of her if she did. Put another way, she had no problem opening her legs to him but revealing her thoughts about what he was doing went over the line.
Time and again, I hear from women who are having sex with people they can't talk to about sex. To me, it's like shopping for meat but being too embarrassed to ask the butcher for the cut you want, instead just gesturing vaguely at the meat-case and accepting anything he gives you.
Existentialists call the phenomenon "inauthenticity" and therapists call it "disassociation." Your lover may be "down there" fiddling with your palpating pink parts but you yourself are up here, in your safe, non-threatening brainpan, where nice girls don't do such things. Or as an old song lamentingly inquires: "how can you be in two places when you aren't anywhere at all?"
Before I let a man get between my legs I want to know that he at least possesses a clue to the manifold sexual mystery that is Gloria; otherwise, I consider it in my own best interest to tell him--in exacting detail. In life, as in bed, as in butcher shops, the way to get what you want is by asking for it.
Yes, I know: communicating about sex is hard for women. Nice girls don't talk about sex. Nice girls don't think about sex. They may learn tips and techniques so they can please their men. They may even like sex. But they can't like it too much. If they do, they cross the line between nice and nasty.
Never mind the lusty headlines blaring from magazines on grocery store shelves about how to boost our sex-lives. The magazines aren't telling women how to have better orgasms. They almost exclusively focus on ways for women to please men. "Surprise him by doing it standing up," "wear sexy lingerie," or "talk dirty to him in bed," the articles breathlessly advise. The logic here is that the woman's biggest sexual reward comes from doing things that will turn a man on. But in real life, giving a man the world's best blow-job is hardly a guarantee that one will get anything out of it beyond a sense of a job well done and possibly a nice gift at Christmas.
I guess there really is no ladylike way to say, "This time, put your tongue inside as far it will go, but first, could you sort of swirl it around the opening for a while?" It's hard to melt with passion when you are frozen in embarrassment. But if you don't tell him, who will? The Great God Pazoozah?
Even in the confines of a female sexologist's office, women are surprisingly delicate about admitting to their sexual proclivities. It's infinitely easier to get a man to describe his sexual fantasies than a woman. Men use plain language to describe their genitals ("penis," "cock," etc.). Women tend to refer to their vagina and clitoris as "down there...you know" or "between my legs." While discussing masturbation is tense for both men and women, males will eventually relax enough to discuss it openly. Women seldom do. They may say "I use a vibrator" but they are tongue-tied when it comes to describing the techniques they use.
Some female clients simply don't know what they want in bed. They've read stories that have made them hot, and some fantasize about doing it with movie stars or famous politicians. They want passion and romance and other sublime experiences but the basic mechanics of their own sexuality is uncharted territory.
"What kind of sex do I want," a patient once mused. Then she playfully chirped, "Good fucking!"
"OK. What do you consider to be good fucking?"
"Fucking that gives me orgasms," she said.
"And what kind of fucking would that be?"
"What do you mean?"
"What kind of intercourse gives you orgasms?"
She stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language.
"Any favorite positions? Do you like slow, erotic sex?" I prompted her. "Hard, sweaty thrusting? What kind of physical feelings do you enjoy?"
"Ohhhhhh." She turned crimson and stared at a point somewhere near her toes. "You know, some of this and some of that. I like it hard. But not too hard. But not too slow either. You know what I mean, right?"
To this day I don't know what she meant. She had come to me seeking answers to why she never seemed to be able to have satisfying sex, no matter how many different men she dated. When I suggested that the problem might be her difficulty in identifying what actually turned her on, she lost interest in the therapy and never returned.
Like a lot of the women who show up in my e-mail box and practice, the idea that a woman had the right, if not the obligation, to be an equal partner in the bedroom was something she could relate to intellectually but couldn't put into practice. She wanted to have great sex without ever figuring out what great sex meant to her, personally.
I've counseled women in their 50s and 60s, married women with grown children, who have never experienced orgasms; who have never masturbated and are too embarrassed to start; whose entire sexual experience was limited to missionary position intercourse. They had, of course, read about women having daring sexual adventures. Some were avid romance novel readers. Publishing empires are built on fictional novels about women who fall in love and have great sex, and not always in that order. Why? Because the modest lady readers who devour such books know that beneath those heaving bosoms, the fictional heroines are secretly having the kinds of orgasms of which secret female fantasies are made.
None of these women were shy. In their professional and family lives, they had power and independence. When it came to asking for better pay or a fairer distribution of household chores, they were entirely self-confident. But when it came to the bedroom they turned into nervous virgins. It was simply beyond them
to ask for the kinds of sexual experiences they fantasized about and craved. I am not talking about SM things either: I mean women who would have been overjoyed if their partners gave them foreplay before penetration.
The best lovers, male and female, don't just know how to turn other people on; they know what turns them on and they don't hesitate to let their sex partners know either. The path to better sex starts by knowing what you want and need and then sharing that vital information with your partner. Whether it's oral sex, anal sex, kinky sex, or any other kind of sex, communication will set you free.
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(written December 2001)
A woman I'll call Sondra contacts me with an urgent email begging for emergency counseling. I agree and schedule an appointment by phone immediately. When she calls, she sounds desperate. She quickly spills out her story. She is living with Mark. She wants to stay with him forever but she's frightened of him. He periodically flies into rages and emotionally and verbally abuses her. Lately, the episodes are more frequent and are increasingly ugly. Sondra is afraid that one day Mark may physically strike out and harm her. She wants me to give her advice and tips on how to avoid putting her partner into these rages, and how to cope with them when they occur.
Sondra is terrified that Mark will find out she has consulted someone about their private lives. If he knew she was telling anyone about their relationship, it would trigger one of his anger episodes. I reassure her that, unless she tells him, he will never find out from me.. Still, her voice remains tense and hushed throughout the call, as if she's afraid he will walk in at any moment.
Sondra says that she knows she should leave Mark but she can't do it yet, she cannot "abandon" him. She is in love with him. He needs her. She tells me he doesn't act this way all the time. When he isn't angry, the "good times" are wonderful. Sondra says it's possible he will never have a rage episode again, and in that case, leaving him would be a terrible mistake because he's the one she loves. She she doesn't feel strong enough to leave, but insists that it isn't weakness that is keeping her there. She believes that if she could just him to stop lashing out at her, things would be fine.
Sondra and Mark work together and have a lot of mutual friends but there seems to be a fair amount of conflict and discord in those areas. The most successful part of their relationship is clearly their sex life. When she talks about that aspect of their lives, she sounds happy. Mark turns her on as no other man ever has. I echo her words back at her and suggest that the sex was influencing her decision to stay. Sondra strongly denies it. In her mind, the sex is great because she loves him. I ask if it's possible it's the reverse--that she loves him because the sex is great--and she is silent. She changes the subject and tells me she is hoping therapy will help her to figure out a way to maintain her relationship with Mark.
I question Sondra about Mark's general behavior for hints about his state of mind. From everything she tells me, it's clear that her lover is a seriously troubled individual. I ask Sondra if he's ever been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and she nervously whispers that Mark is bipolar. He won't take medication for it and Sondra is afraid to nag him about it.
Finally, I tell Sondra the only way to avoid future harm is to leave him. I urge her to do so sooner rather than later. I explain there is nothing anyone can do to prevent a mentally unbalanced person from fits of irrationality if they refuse treatment. If Mark is prone to fits of rage and psychotic outbursts, and won't take medications to control his bi-polar, then no amount of tip-toe-ing around will change him. He can't be manipulated into better behavior and certainly not by a girlfriend who is afraid of him.
It wasn't the answer she wanted. She wanted a magic bullet. She thought a counselor could give her simple instructions on how to manage her dysfunctional relationship so that she could keep having great sex without fearing for her life outside the bedroom.
No counselor can help people who don't want to help themselves. When people are so sexually addicted to a partner that they are, in effect, willing to die for the sake of maintaining the relationship, it is an almost impossible task to save them.
When Sondra realized the answers to her problems were complicated, and that she would have to change her life, she ended the session. We still had time on the clock, and I asked her to continue talking with me, but she refused. She wanted the magic bullet and was angry that I wouldn't give it to her. I tried to follow up with her several times, but she didn't want to speak to anymore. She felt betrayed. Perhaps she felt I was concealing the secret to her happiness. Or perhaps, and more likely, she didn't want to face the truth.
There is no magic bullet for people like her. There are only tough choices and the courage to make them.
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(written December 2001)
A client I'll call Lucy says she is deeply in love with a man. She has left him several times. Their last official break-up was six months ago. They had recently begun dating again and she is now considering moving back in with him again--this despite his many lies, betrayals and emotional cruelty towards hers throughout their rocky relationship. Her reason: she is in love with him. A part of her knows it would be a big mistake to get involved with him all over again. Lucy feels she must remain true to that love, despite everything that has happened. Still, a nagging sense that she may be making a big mistake has prompted her to seek counseling.
After talking to her at length, it's clear that she doesn't respect him, she doesn't trust him, she doesn't like the way he treats her or her children. She is much more professionally accomplished, better-educated, and responsible than he, which she readily admits. He has a history of lying; she is scrupulously honest;
he is an atheist; she is religious; he doesn't like children; she has four. Their time together is fraught with discord and petty arguments. They can't agree on anything. What do they have in common? Nothing I can detect. Except for one thing: he is the most exciting lover she's ever had.
Although she's a mom, Lucy is fairly sexually inexperienced: of the two or three men she's been with, this one has given her the most intense orgasms and continually incites her to knee-drenching wetness. Yet, she claims it isn't the sex that's keeping her in this relationship. That goes against her moral code and conflicts dramatically with her religious beliefs. In essence, it CAN'T just be about sex for her because that would be shameful, evil. So she believes it is true love: love purifies her and makes it possible for her to continue to indulge her sexual obsession with him.
What makes him so exciting to her in bed is that he seems forceful and dominant. He knows what he wants sexually. He's convinced Lucy that knows what she needs in bed too. His self-confidence makes her melt. His lack of inhibitions allows her to be more sexual with him than she's ever been with any other man. No one else could give her such intense orgasms. No one ever has made her so wet. He knows her inside out. He can read her mind. In effect, he can control it because he owns the key to her passions.
As long as she believes he is the only man in the world that can make her feel this way in bed, Lucy will cling to him. But before we can work on strategies to help her take control over her own sexuality, and not to depend on this man for her sexual pleasure, we have to work on simply accepting that her hormones have been doing the talking in this relationship.
Put another way: when the pussy does the talking, common sense goes walking.
So, our first task in therapy was to compare the man in his real life with the man in her erotic life. In real life, he is the antithesis of all the qualities she attributes to him in the bedroom. He may seem to read her mind in bed, but everything he has done in reality points to a man who is completely out of touch with her emotional needs. He may seem self-confident in the bedroom, but when it comes to real-life commitments and making decisions for them, as a couple, he is ambivalent about almost everything and leaves the decision-making to her. His passion for her is real: but it seems to be predicated on her compliance. Any signal from her that she has real-world expectations of him and his interest flags.
Is he really two completely different men, one in the bedroom, another one outside? Or is the man she is having sex with, to some degree, a figment of her erotic imagination? Does he really have sexual power when the least sign of resistence from her and he packs up his toys and leaves? (Or, to be more precise, grows limp.) Is he reading her mind--or simply relieving her of the responsibility of thinking for herself when they're having sex?
After a few sessions, Lucy begins to reconcile what she knows intellectually with what she feels emotionally. She sees that the man he is in real life is, indeed, the real man and the one in the bedroom is largely a fantasy figure they have created together. There is little possibility for a complete, positive long-term relationship with him. He has amply demonstrated that he would be a lousy father for her kids and an unreliable, passive husband.
I realize she's made enormous progress when she admits that in order to fully respond to him sexually, she has to block out what she knows about him. She has to forget the whole man and focus on how it feels to be with him in bed.
It wasn't too long afterwards that a pivotal even occurred. He tried to back out of yet another promise he'd made to her. She took the risk of expressing her disappointment loud and clear. It was a first for her. She said that her heart pounded as she heard herself tell him that she wouldn't let him off the hook. She felt guilty and ashamed; she was afraid she sounded like a bitch. But she gritted her teeth and calmly ended by telling him that he that if he broke another promise to her, she would never see him again.
She was astounded when instead of arguing, he sulked like a child, whining that she was being mean. He agreed that Lucy was right and grudgingly did what he'd promised. That night, he slept in another room. Lucy walked in at one point to retrieve something and found him lying fully clothed on the bed. Apparently, by standing up to him she had so unnerved him, he was afraid to undress in her house. At that moment, her her view of him shifted. The masculine god she had worshipped in the bedroom was a frightened little boy. Lucy's world changed in that moment.
Almost all of my female clients struggle with the very basic fact that they have sexual needs. They can accept being driven by finances or romances but the notion that their hormones are ruling their lives upsets them. Intellectually, they know that sex is important. But emotionally, their needs make them feel dirty.
While it's a given that men often make foolish choices based on their lusts, it's surprising how many women have difficulty acknowledging that they've done the same. They reject my suggestion that their decision to be with a particular lover is not based on a love worth dying for but on lust, which is never worth dying for. They don't want to see themselves as sexual creatures. They think nice girls should be ethereal spirits, not bodies made of flesh and fluids. They need sex but they want to feel chaste. They laughingly accept that men get spontaneous erections sometimes at the oddest moments and most inappropriate places. But they think that if anyone ever found out that their own vaginas were burning with lust under their neatly-pressed clothes, the world as they know it would come to an end.
Women are at least as driven by sex as men--perhaps even more so. Perhaps the reason we put so many constraints on women's sexual behaviors, and give girls so many anti-sex rules to live by, is because the underlying reality is that if female sexuality were fully unleashed, no man could ever hope to keep up.
History is filled with tales of lustful women changing the course of civilizations. We see women destroy their lives for sex and lust just as men do. Women have premarital sex, extra-marital sex, sex for money, and all kinds of other illicit and allegedly immoral sex all the time.
So let's be honest and not pretend things are about true love when they are really about great sex. Until a woman can accept and embrace the power of her sexuality, she won't be able to control it. And if she doesn't control, someone else will.
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2004 update on Lucy: I heard from her about a year ago. She took my advice and directed her energies at finding another partner, and not making a commitment to any man until she felt confident they were compatible in areas outside the bedroom. It took her a little time, but she is now very happily engaged to a man who really does fulfill ALL of her needs.
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Sometimes I want to write letter to Freud.
I want to offer him a possible answer to his burning question, "What do women want?" The truth was right before his eyes in the form of Victorian ladies who he and his colleagues diagnosed as hysterics and neurasthetic. The missing piece of the puzzle of female sexuality for Freud, the Victorians, the pyschiatric community at large, and more than few contemporary feminists too, is the reality that women are as driven as men by their sexual lusts. Sexual repression is the enemy of mental health. I'd be hysterical too if I never had orgasms.
The long-standing view of women is that they are passive receptacles, and that their needs are triggered by men's desires. Female sexuality is still viewed as compliant, submissive, gentle. The factual evidence paints a different picture of female sexuality. In my practice, I see that women's lives are often dictated by their lusts, that women are just as preoccupied by sexual fantasies as men, and often so frustrated by their thwarted desires that they cannot find a balance within themselves nor a place of peace.
The intensity of the female sex drive helps explain why abused women often don't leave partners who continue to excite them in bed. Sexual frustration is key in studying female violence against men (including spousal abuse). And female sexual inhibitions are contributing factors in stress-related disorders, depression, anorexia and other eating disorders, body image disorders, and a range of other pyschological problems.
Once you begin to adjust your thinking and accept that women's sexual needs are as powerful as men's, and that women are entitled to relieve their needs as much as men, the world becomes a more
understandable place.
When they are sexually repressed, frustrated, and shamed into sexlessness, of course women grow neurotic. In some cases, and under the right (or wrong) circumstances, women become sexually violent.
Witness Lorena Bobbitt, among thousands of others over the centuries who have slaughtered and mutiliated men who did not keep them happy in bed. I'd go so far as to conjecture that it is, in fact, a biological imperative that sexual frustration leads to violence. The female bonobo--our closest biological relative--has been well-documented as a feisty, sexually aggressive lover who will grow enraged and beat a male bonobo who won't pleasure her on demand.
Sexual jealousy--being tormented by thoughts of your lover in someone else's arms--is another directly sexual force that can transform ordinary women into vengeful monsters. Would such jealousy be as strong if thwarted sexual needs were not involved?
I've often used the playful prescriptive, "An orgasm a day keeps the neuroses away." Clients giggle but they get it: sexual release takes the edge off of life, makes the daily grind just a bit easier to bear, and--in the best case--lightens the heart. This applies to women every bit as much as to men.
What do women want, Dr. Freud? We want sex! And plenty of it.
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Yahoo! News - First Christianity-themed nudist resort to open in Florida
Nudist schmudist. When will they open the first Christianity-themed BDSM club? After all, there's plenty of Biblical precedence for bondage and crucifixion.
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Here's something transgenderists and those who love them already knew, but I suppose an official medical study will help others to understand.
STUDY CHALLENGES GENDER IDENTITY
from The Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Male babies surgically turned into girls at birth because of a rare birth defect frequently continue to feel like boys and may eventually switch their gender back to male, even with no knowledge of their history, according to a new study.
The finding, reported in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests there is an intrinsic, biologically determined feeling of sexual identity that is hard to override through rearing, experts said.
The study also suggests that surgeons should reexamine the practice of altering the gender of babies born with this condition.
http://snipurl.com/3zt6
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I've been building a blog for the past few days and decided to make it public today, after adding a couple of essays. Please bookmark this page: lots more content coming soon.
To find out more about me, click one of the links in the left column.
Cheers,
Gloria
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Balls. Testicles. Rocks. Nuts. Jewels. Whatever you call them, those curious appendages that swing between a man's legs have been objects of fascination throughout history. In some cultures, testicles are the be-all of masculinity and lodge card of social dominance. In many cultures, animal testicles are fried up into tasty dishes reputed to add verve to a man's virility. In all cultures, castration and emasculation are viewed as monstrous humiliations and the end of a man's life as a man. A man without balls is not just a eunuch...he's a woman! At least that is the way people have traditionally derided and taunted men who do not bear those meaty little orbs. According to a famous joke, Queen Victoria once said, "Balls! If I had them, I'd be king."
Men's relationship with their testicles are often as complex as their relationship with their penises. They worry about the size of their balls and the shape and symmetry of them. They worry about how they hang and how to disguise them in clothes. Some hate the dense hair which grows on them and shave them
smooth. Others worry that sparse hair growth makes them look effeminate. And, while a big penis is generally considered sexy and desirable, big balls are not touted as being more beautiful than their smaller cousins. Balls simply aren't part of most heterosexuals' erotic vocabularies. The man who may broadcast the exact dimensions of his penis over the Internet will not offer any details on his balls --and I guess many women are grateful he doesn't.
We may not admit it out loud but there is an unspoken social consensus that testicles are unattractive, somewhat silly-looking and just plain bothersome. They bobble. They sway. They need frequent adjusting. They sweat. They droop with age. They drop with hernias. Frankly, most people would just as soon forget that they're there.
And for the most part, people do. With the exception of sex education courses where testicles are analyzed clinically with garish charts and Latin words, testicles are pretty much one of the Great UnMentionables of literature and social study. Even erotica usually gives them short shrift. Their role in pornography is to fill to
bursting with semen, and then leave the main action to the penis which hogs center stage, gets all the pleasure, receives all the praise ("oooh! it's so big!") and finally explodes with magnificent fireworks.
The balls simply crawl behind, emptied and ineffectual.
There is, however, one more paradoxical fact: from early boyhood through old age, men routinely expose their genitals to one another in public toilets and locker rooms. Now, the idea of women peeing side by side in an open space where they can get a good look at a neighbor's vagina is unthinkable. But casual communal nudity is the social sea in which most men swim --well, except for the ones who refuse to use public facilities precisely because they are terrified of homoerotic flashing in heterosexual settings.
Men grow up looking at other male genitals and comparing their own equipment to their neighbors'. This may partly explain why men so frequently worry about penis size while women seldom worry about the size of their vaginas (although there is as much variety in the size and shape of vaginas as there is in the size and shape of male genitals). Whether or not men will admit it, they can't help the natural impulse to sneak glances at others; nor can they thwart their natural competitive urge which makes them measure themselves against their fathers, brothers and friends.
All these weirdly mixed messages about genitals, and particularly about balls, are especially confusing to boys coping with puberty. Testicles are the source of a man's strength, but they are also make him vulnerable.
Adding further to social schizophrenia about male genitalia is the increased awareness in recent years of prostate and testicular cancer. Is there not some poignant, even mystical irony in the fact that the male body part that is most hidden and shameful is one most vulnerable to cancer? Or is there some secret mind/body connection between the unspoken social distaste for testicles and the high rate of testicular disease among older men? Perhaps it is a chicken and the egg question; perhaps it is something medical researchers may one day answer. Whatever the explanation, what I do know is that little boys grow up to be adult men with various degrees of fear and insecurity about their testicles.
Why can't balls get a break? Is it because the penis--in its ability to dramatically puff up to the size of a cucumber, to spurt body fluid sometimes clear across the room, and then to deflate sometimes to the size of a button mushroom--simply demands more admiration as a truly unique feature of human biology? Maybe it's because balls look somewhat like distant--albeit far hairier and nipple-free--cousins of female breasts. Or one could speculate that testicles are despised because they are perceived as fragile.
As a primary symbol of masculinity, they are also popular targets of violence against men. "Crushing," "busting," "cutting off" or "breaking" someone's balls are international metaphors for the humiliating defeat of an opponent. Innumerable warriors across time and culture have castrated their foes and taken the scrotums as trophies. And in metaphor, if not in life, balls are also used to express admirable qualities: having "big balls" or "brass balls" or "balls of steel" are accolades for people with courage.
Still, I wonder if it's their appearance and features that affect people most. I once had a humorous conversation with a gay friend about the way that scrotum skin moves when a man is excited. My friend was perfectly enamored of the snakelike rippling and wrinkling of his lover's scrotum. "I could watch it wrinkle and unwrinkled for hours," he said. "There's something so sexy, so strange about it. It's fascinating." Homosexuals who celebrate the masculine physique naturally appreciate the charms of the mysterious testicles. Some gay men express preferences for balls of different sizes, much as heterosexual men express preferences for different size breasts. They may favor the youthful appearance of a small, tight scrotum; or they may hunger for low-hanging giants. As with all preferences it often comes down simply to personal aesthetics and what different sizes mean to you subjectively.
In contrast, I have never heard women compare the size of men's balls, though they often talk about the size of men's cocks. When women do talk about balls, and especially the phenomenon of the wrinkling scrotum, they often do so with uneasy laughter and snide remarks. A client once described the way her lover's balls looked during arousal as something like primitive sea creatures undulating to ancient rhythms. And she meant that as a compliment. Her attitude towards his penis was very different: since it was a chief source of pleasure for her, she saw his cock as a worship-worthy tower of power. When she was in bed with him, she was infinitely more amorous towards his penis. His balls struck her as slightly creepy, and when he once timidly suggested to her that she suck on them during oral sex, she was revolted. "They smell funny," she said primly.
Women have also confessed to me that they are reluctant to handle testicles because they are afraid they will injure them. Another friend once confided that she perceived men as irredeemably fragile because of their balls. When she was growing up, her nervous mother regularly warned her to be careful not to injure her younger brother in the groin lest she cripple him or render him sterile for life. As a woman, her mother's message carried over to her perspective on adult males: Have Balls, Will Be Crushed would sum up her attitude.
While there's no denying that testicles are sensitive, for the most part, people exaggerate the risks. Unless you sharply poke, compress or otherwise use force on them, testicles can quite safely be rubbed, stroked, caressed, kissed, nibbled, and otherwise stimulated without any danger whatever of causing a man any pain. Needless to say, the key here is common sense: balls are sensitive but they are built to last and can usually stand up to quite a bit of sensual manipulation.
In any case, whatever the reason people feel queasy about balls, the widespread social ambivalence and disdain for them is openly reflected in popular culture. Many years ago, when I was active in an on-line movie forum run by film critic Roger Ebert, a new member began posting queries about movies which contained scenes showing women kicking men in the balls. When he didn't receive the replies he was hoping for, he began listing such films himself. Until then, it had never occurred to me just how common a phenomenon this was. A long discussion evolved from his messages. In a nutshell (so to speak), he proved his point that it was fairly typical to see men assaulted in this way. More often than not, the audience was made to feel that the man somehow deserved the proverbial "swift kick to the balls" (an expression which, itself, implies a just punishment).
He also noted that there was no female equivalent --you never see men punch or kick women in the breasts or between the legs in movies or on tv, though in real life, those similarly vulnerable areas are often subject to attack by violent men. Why is it more socially permissible to depict men being hit in the crotch than women being hit in the chest? In many shows and movies a kick or other impact injury to the groin is a comic set-up, intended to make the audience laugh. Think about it: how many times, in tv shows and movies, particularly ones about athletic competitions, does someone double over in pain from a blow to the groin while onlookers laugh? If we saw such injuries inflicted on women we would be outraged.
What is probably most confusing of all is the absence of conversation about testicles in terms of the pleasure they can bring. As a hedonist, I have had lovers who felt comfortable with their bodies and didn't hesitate to include sensation to their balls in our erotic repertoire. As a sexologist, however, I've found that men
more likely than not communicate negative messages about their testicles to women. Most typically, they fear accidental injury and warn their lovers to avoid hurting them. It is considerably rarer to find men who are self-confident enough to allow a woman to explore on her own or, better still, to show their partners how to properly caress and pleasure their testicles. Stimulation to the balls enhances male sexual pleasure, yet most women never get past the penis when it comes to their love-making techniques. Caressing and rubbing the scrotal sac, gently cupping the balls and lightly massaging them, or kissing and sucking lightly on the scrotum during oral sex are all loving sexual gestures that increase male excitement.
When men won't tell their women how to do these things, it's often because they are shy or slightly ashamed of their balls, and fear they would offend a woman with such talk. But sometimes, it's because men are out of touch with that part of their anatomy. More than a few of the men I've talked to over the years have revealed a near-ignorance of their own testicles beyond their biological function. They treat their balls like unpleasant biological vulnerabilities, appendages they have to protect from injury and safeguard against disease.
The people most likely to discuss stimulation to testicles are sexual masochists. Over the years, I have spoken with a few dozen men whose testicles are at the center of their pain and punishment fantasies. Some of them, like the film buff on-line, were fascinated by images of women kicking men in the groin. The fascination was sometimes intense enough to qualify as a kind of quasi-fetish. Surfing the Net, one can find a range of sites devoted to ball-crushing, binding, piercing, trampling, and other hardcore punishments. There are entire cottage industries in the porn world that specialize in testicular torture. For het male masochists and submissives, in general, the vision of a powerful, cruel woman grinding her foot into his genitals is very erotic. It is the paradigm of masculine helplessness. The details of the fantasy vary from person to person. One may fantasize about a cruel dominatrix in spiked boots grinding her stiletto into his naked, vulnerable sex. Another may imagine a perky cheerleader accidentally flipping her sneaker hard between his legs. Yet another dreams of being locked in mortal combat with an Amazon who suddenly unmans him with a powerful kick to his groin. When I worked a phonesex line many years back, one of my regular callers fantasized about having his balls tied to a rocking chair occupied by a beautiful young woman. He imagined her rocking backwards and stretching his balls until he screamed, then rocking forward to give him relief, and then doing it all over again, and again and again.
A gentleman we interviewed for Different Loving told us that some form of pain to his genitals had been at the center of his erotic impulses for as long as he could remember. Even as a young boy, he had experimented with painful sensations to his balls. He would find prickly seedpods and stick them in his underpants, delighting in the sharp pains all day. In his adult fantasies, cruel women prodded his balls with needles and knives, keeping him on the edge between terror and excitement.
The most extreme fantasy I've dealt with was told to me by a client I worked with only briefly. His story still haunts me. I wish I knew how it ended.
I suspect that into every therapist's life, such patients will wander: good people, moral and interesting people, who somehow find themselves on the verge of some terrible decision, and about to make a choice which could destroy their entire lives. A psychologist once told me about his experience with a young man who came in only once for a consultation. The fellow had a fetish for auto-asphyxiation (self-strangling, usually with a noose) and what is called a "terminal fantasy--a sexual fantasy scenario in which the ultimate erotic act is death. The patient had only mentioned it in passing, but something about his tone and the look in his eyes made my friend understand that the patient either was already experimenting or was planning to experiment with taking that fantasy to its extreme.
My psychologist friend was frightened for him but felt helpless. A responsible therapist isn't there to morally instruct people or to make their choices for them. A therapist's job is to listen and to understand, and hopefully to guide someone to make better choices by laying out the bigger picture that the patient cannot yet see for himself. Still my friend was distraught when the patient did not return and was haunted by the thought that he may have gone ahead with his dangerous obsessions and possibly done so with fatal results.
The patient who consulted with me was not embarked on quite so perilous a path. A lifelong bachelor, he was a successful, well-educated, extremely articulate and pleasant middle-aged man from a conservative state. He was socially well-adapted; had cordial relationships with his family; functioned well at work; exhibited no signs of depression or aggression and seemed remarkably at peace with himself. He was nervous about talking to me but quickly grew comfortable and spoke in a friendly, normal voice.
He was completely obsessed with castration. The fantasy was of relatively recent vintage, not something he had fantasized about in his youth. Sometime in his thirties he had stumbled across pornography involving castration scenarios and his imagination feverishly latched on to the drama of castration to the near-exclusion of all other types of sexual fantasy. For years he had been masturbating to thoughts of having his balls removed.
During his free time, he thought about it constantly. His fantasy was precise. He knew exactly how he wanted them removed, and it was important to him that he be able to see them immediately upon removal. In his fantasies, the sight of his excised testicles, held up in front of him on a metal surgical tray, brought him to orgasm. Now in his early forties, he had conducted scrupulous research and had located a doctor in another part of the country who performed elective castrations, somewhat on the sly. Finding a doctor who would perform this surgery was no easy task: and the doctor's credentials were, to put it mildly, questionable. But he was a licensed M.D. and was well-known and recommended on the secretive network of castration fetishists that my patient had hooked up with on the Internet. So despite some misgivings, my patient was determined to go ahead with the surgery. Before doing so, however, he decided to discuss his situation with a counselor. He called it a reality check, and wanted to be able to say, later, that he had covered every base before fulfilling his overwhelming desire for castration.
As I spoke with him, I was amazed by his clear-headed resolve. Yes, he had indeed considered all the consequences, and from all angles. He understood there was a risk that he would regret it forever afterwards. Yes, he knew the kind of doctor who'd perform the surgery was not likely to be the most trustworthy physician. Yes, it would change the course of his life and yes, it might make it impossible to find partners afterwards who could understand or appreciate his transformed physique. We talked about his childhood and youth, and his feelings about his testicles. He did not reveal any surprising secrets; he'd had no particularly traumatic experiences, no major sexual epiphanies, not even any remarkable sexual quirks; he claimed that his childhood was relatively normal, his parents' home typically Southern --conservative and Christian. I posed question after question, and though he politely answered them all without hesitation, and even though he agreed with me that the surgery he was proposing held a multitude of potentially dangerous unknowns, he was like a man who had steeled himself for a suicide mission and could not be talked out of it. There was only one thing he could focus on and only one path that felt real to him. Castration.
Was he being completely honest with me? I doubt it but it's never possible to know just how truthful any client is. In therapy, truth takes many different forms --sometimes you understand a client by his lies. In all cases, though, you have to take your client at face value: you have to trust that he is telling you is, at the least, his version of the truth. It is, in a sense, your job to believe your client's story, even if that story is filled fantasy--fantasy though it may be, it is still their emotional reality.
So, I tried to walk the line between compassionate support for his choices and responsible counseling. I had to balance my personal horror at the self-mutilation he planned with my professional commitment to treat each client with respect. I assured him that while I would not spend our sessions trying to break his resolve, I would offer as many alternatives as I could think of to get him to postpone and perhaps even ultimately cancel his trip to the surgeon.
He was willing to listen and thoughtfully discussed some of my suggestions. Since his fantasies involved the most punishing kinds of pain imaginable, I asked him if he had ever considered getting a genital piercing. While this isn't something I'd normally recommend, in his case, I was hoping that a controlled and non-permanent experience like genital piercing--which has become fairly common and generally quite safe among piercing aficionados--might help satisfy his urges. I told him that with a qualified piercer, he could get multiple piercings to his genitals with very limited health risks, and that perhaps the degree of pain would help him cope with a fantasy that could present untold dangers, physically and psychologically, in reality. He said he was willing to explore this option and that perhaps it would be a good intermediate step even if he did go ahead with the surgery.
The following week we spoke again. I was cautiously optimistic when he decided to postpone his surgery. I hadn't realized it but he had already scheduled a date only a few weeks from the time he first contacted me. I was relieved that he wanted to give the counseling more time, and hopeful that perhaps we could work towards finding the key to why he wanted the castration and perhaps to defuse the obsession so he could make another, safer choice for himself.
We spoke again about piercings, and I asked him more questions about his life, searching for clues that might help me untangle the mystery of his desire to be rid of his testicles. Was it disgust? Loathing? What did his balls represent to him that he wished to discard them so brutally? Was he rejecting his manhood? His identity? Or that part of him he felt most shame about? I had so many questions but his mild-mannered, thoughtful replies gave no clues. He was one of the sanest-sounding people I've ever counseled, which was in itself a bit unsettling.
After that chat, he never contacted me again. I tried to reach him without success: he wouldn't answer my emails. My guess is he decided to flee counseling before I changed his mind. Although he said he was open to change, I think he was kidding himself: it had taken him too many years to work up the courage to
pursue his strange fantasy. There was no turning back for him. I suspect that he went ahead with his plans after all and that now, even as I write this, he is out there, leading his quiet, ordinary, working life in his small, typical American community, but now as a eunuch.
I wish I knew where he is now and how he is doing. I hope he found what he was looking for. I can't pretend to understand it, but then sex is like that: mysterious, inexplicable. Some people, for whatever reasons, must do things that horrify others of us, and they must do them for the same reasons we must do the things we do: because it brings satisfaction; because we have free will; because people have the right to make their own decisions about their bodies; because are all entitled to make mistakes; because this is how we were made and we have no choice but to live out our destiny, no matter what other people think.
Still I'd like to know...does he miss his balls? Is at peace now, in some ball-less state? Does he feel that, without balls, he at last is a king?
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If I hear it one more time, I will scream. "The whore with a heart of gold." The expression is supposed to demonstrate that even the vilest woman may, beneath her depravity, possess a good soul. People will say this as though they are being very open-minded and enlightened about prostitutes and sex-workers. What's wrong with this statement is the insulting assumption that whores are naturally different from other people and that women who earn money from sex generally have unclean souls.
I have never worked as a prostitute, but I did for a few months work for a phonesex company and briefly as a professional dominatrix. In some peoples' eyes, I suppose the nature of those jobs would put me on a level with hookers. This is fine by me since I don't see shame in sex-work of any kind. Not only is it the oldest profession, but it's a universal component of societies, no better or worse than other jobs.
The chief difference among sex-workers is the price they can command. As in all professions, the people who can do the least amount of work for the largest sum of money are at the top of their field and the least likely to be despised. So, for example, a madam like Heidi Fleiss or Sydney Biddle-Barrow, women who maintained rich and famous lifestyles, is infinitely more glamorous than a working class woman who walks the streets for chump change. What really determines a sex-worker's respectability is the bottom-line, and
this is true in capitalistic cultures as well as non-capitalistic ones.
Some of the great women of the Bible and history were in fact concubines and sex slaves who depending completely on men for their financial well-being. Noblewomen of yore too were commodities who
could be bought for the right price. Today's typical female social-climber and empty-headed socialite cling to this top rung of the sex-for-money social ladder. They may get married in mighty churches
by somber clerics but they are marrying for money and, in exchange, understand that providing sex is their part of the financial transaction. Some have even signed pre-nuptial agreements that detail the compensation they can expect for their feminine services in the event that those services cease to be required. No matter how dry and legal the language the meaning is clear: women expect
to be financially compensated for the pleasure of their company.
The sex-for-money standard is handed down from mother to daughter. How many moms have told their girls, "It's just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man"? How many women have felt obligated
to indulge a man's kisses or fondling because he bought them drinks or dinner or gifts? The convention of men paying for women's meals and covering their expenses on dates springs from the economic assumption that men have the money, the best men have the most money, and that by spending a lot of money on a woman, a man proves he's an Alpha and thus has the right to demand erotic favors. Put another way: ugly, disgusting men who can buy their women a Hermes purse seldom have a problem getting laid while poor schlemiels line up for love on the Internet.
Of course, there are degrees to everything. The women who sleep with a dozen or more men a day for money lead different lives from those who marry men for money. The biggest differences are the job conditions. The nature of sex work--the unpredictable and sometimes cruel treatment by customers; the risks of disease and injury; the instability of the money flow; and the frequently abusive and sordid conditions that sex-workers labor under all affect the integrity of the individual. Talk to anyone with a
crappy job and you will find the kind of cynicism and despair you will sometimes hear from low-level sex-workers. The hours are terrible. The pay is never enough to compensate for the stress.
Conditions are appalling. Bosses and customers are hell to deal with. Health risks are high. Job satisfaction is non-existent.
But some sex-workers make a good living at what they do. High-priced call-girls, well-paid strippers, popular adult movie stars, and others in the sex industry may earn more than waitresses and factory workers will see in a lifetime. Predictably, they have not been quite so roughed up by life. They don't
feel forced into their choices by economic pressures or limited options: instead, they do sex-work by choice, because they find it pleasant or easy or interesting, lucrative and even creative, and far more rewarding than a nine-to-five job. Some are just happy, healthy hedonists who feel delighted that they are getting paid to do something they love.
In my line of work, I have had the pleasure of knowing and speaking with hundreds of sex-workers, spanning the entire range of the porn and adult entertainment industries. I've counseled professional dominatrices, a breed of sex-worker which rarely actually has direct sexual contact with the client but instead caters to fetish interests, punishment scenarios, and psychological domination. I've attended parties organized by politically-active prostitutes who take up the cause of legalizing sex work and who
speak articulately and passionately about freedom of choice.
One of my favorite people is porn diva Annie Sprinkle, a sweet, Jewish girl from a typical middle-class family who, long ago, decided to change her name and identity and to devote her creative energies to sex work. She began in adult movies, where her supremely voluptuous breasts, playful attitude and absolutely
uninhibited enthusiasm for all types of sex made her an instant star. Eventually, she decided that she was not satisfied working for the men who, until the 1970s, held exclusive control over the adult entertainment industries. She, along with a handful of similarly intelligent, aggressive female entrepreneurs, such as Candida Royalle and Veronica Vera, began producing independent works, often with a female audience in mind.
As Annie got older, she transitioned from adult movie star to live performance artist, mounting outrageous stage shows in experimental theaters. To help dispell taboos about female genitalia, she would parade her cervix in public, climbing on a table on stage and inviting audience members to come up and peek up her
vagina. To shock people into greater awareness of transsexual issues, she toured for a while with her lover at the time, a female-to-male transsexual named Linda/Les. Annie dressed in a nurse's white uniform and cap and would buoyantly explain all about sexual reassignment surgery and the differences between pre-operative transsexuals and post-operative ones. Linda/Les served as her living demo model, obligingly exposing her post-surgical hermaphroditic sex organs (though she had a kind of penis now, Linda/Les had kept her vagina so she could continue to enjoy penetration).
I first became aware of Annie when I was a teenager, secretly reading copies of SCREW magazine loaned to me by a neighbor boy. I was both shocked and fascinated by her astonishing boldness. She
was way wilder than I could ever be. Indeed, she seemed seemed light years beyond me me in every possible way. It wasn't until I finally spent some time with her 2000, that I discovered she is actually only a few years my senior and that our backgrounds are very similar.
But what makes Annie one of my favorite people in the world is neither her fame or reputation for outrageousness. She is simply one of the sweetest women I've ever met--a lovely, decent, warm-hearted human being.
I'd seen her performance on stages in New York, and in old X-rated movies, but we didn't actually meet until the night I was awarded a PhD in clinical sexology at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, a notoriously off-beat, counter-cultural graduate facility founded by Dr. Rev. Ted McIlvenna,
an ordained Methodist minister turned internationally respected sexologist.
As Ted was delivering the award, I glanced into the audience and saw Annie Sprinkle's famous face gazing back at me. It was thrilling to see this icon of untrammeled female sexuality just a few yards away. As soon as the ceremonies ended, I went over to speak with her. As it turned out, she knew who I was and had read my book. We told each other we were mutual fans and chatted about her latest projects. She had recently enrolled at the Institute. (She has since graduated and is now Dr. Annie!) In her 40s, and feeling a little old to peel off her clothes with the same abandon she felt in her 20s, she'd decided to pursue a
doctorate and to add therapy and scholarship to her repertoire of erotic services.
After the cocktail party for the PhD awardees ended, we walked outside together. It was raining furiously and Annie offered to drive me back to my hotel on Union Square. I gratefully accepted and as we drove, she shyly asked if it would be possible to use the shower in my room. The year before, Annie's precious
houseboat had burned down. The house-sitter who was tending the place for her while she was traveling had left some candles burning and the boat caught fire. Everything Annie owned--decades of
original art, masters of unreleased videos, all her clothes, and a lifetime of memories--vanished into ash. Since then, she had been living in a commerical space in Sausalito, granted her by an artistic
cooperative which provided work studios to creative arists. Plumbing was basic; there were no showers or baths, just public toilets. I assured her that my shower was her shower and that if she needed more towels, I would order them for her as well.
She parked in the hotel garage and as we walked to my room, we chatted about simple things. People who saw us would never have guessed that we were a couple of sexual radicals, women who have been labeled as perverted and depraved and other terms that are intended to offend but which, actually, women like us wear as badges of honor.
We easily passed as two modestly dressed, middle-aged but still hot babes, who spoke in soft, friendly voices and smiled a lot. She was happily involved with a new lover. She was putting her life
back together after the fire. Perhaps the fire was a divine sign that she needed to move on to a new stage of her life. Going for the doctoral degree was a positive move in this direction. She spoke in a
charmingly youthful voice, filled with energy and humor. If I had little kids, I'd want her to be their teacher. She radiated so much positive, loving energy that I thought, wow, if I had little kids,
I'd want her to be their kindergarden teacher.
When we got to my room, I showed her to the bath facilities then went to my laptop in the main room to log on and check email. As I sat there, I marveled at the fact that a sex goddess was showering just a few yards away from where I typed. It occurred to me that there were probably thousands of people who would have given anything to be a fly on my hotel room wall that night. More than a few, conjuring the image of Sprinkle and Brame in a hotel room together, would assume that we fell upon each other and had raucous, kinky sex. When you work in and around the sex-industry, you discover that your audience often expects you to live our THEIR fantasies of who and what you should be, and the kind of sex you should have--particularly if it's a kind of sex they aren't having.
My evening with Annie, however, was warm and fuzzy, not hot and heavy. We had things to talk about; we had things to say; we understood each other; and the closest we came to physical involvement was the long and friendly hug we shared before she finally left, fresh as a daisy from the shower and off to meet with
friends for dinner in another part of town.
Although Annie is not a prostitute, she is the Ur-sex-worker. Words like slut and whore don't faze her. No one can make her feel ashamed of her life because she has come to terms with it.
There is a funny bit in her terrific autobiographical book, "Post Modern Pervert," in which she and her pal Veronica Vera create a pie chart to analyze the pluses and minuses of their lives of sex work. They weigh the pain and embarrassment they've caused their families against the money they earned and their fame in avant garde sex circles. Annie is nobody's fool. Nor is she is anybody's victim. She knows exactly what she's doing and why she's doing it and she has surrounded herself with people who appreciate her spirit.
Which brings me back to the "whore with heart of gold" conundrum. Having been around so many different types of sex-workers, I can honestly say that some are sweet, loving and very lovable individuals who have nothing but kindness in their souls; and some are miserable bitches with a nearly sociopathic disregard for
the needs and desires of others. The vast majority are neither especially saintly nor particularly malign but reside in that gray space which most of humanity inhabits: a mix of good and bad, prone to weaknesses and mistakes, but overall responsible and moral people, struggling to get through life as best they can.
In other words, they are exactly like everyone else. They are us with different jobs. And, possibly, a lot more orgasms.
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Romney Orders $17,000 TV to Be Sold
BOSTON (Jan. 21) - Massachusetts' former public safety secretary spent $17,000 in state anti-terrorism funds on a 60-inch plasma screen television for his office, although the set has no special capabilities.
Read the whole article: http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20040120150809990014"
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Hey that's no fair!
That's bigger than my tv!
What I really want to hear about, though, is the $40,000 marble toilet he installed. It probably has all kinds of special capabilities.
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Is it just me, or was Howard Dean's wild rebel yell as he announced his plan to rampage through the remaining primaries and "take back the White House" oddly reminiscent of Slim Pickens riding that bomb to glory in "Dr. Strangelove"?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
A little-known fact about John Kerry: he's a poet. Now, I might say that Kerry fancies himself a poet. But actually, he can write well, or at least well enough to have received a bit of attention in poetry circles some years back. Perhaps he's internalized Shelley's notion that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Perhaps he should list to Auden instead: "poets make nothing happen."
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Spam E-Mail Plays on Men's Deepest Fear
NEW YORK (Reuters) - For many American office workers, the day begins with deleting spam. These days, a lot of electronic junk mail hits below the belt by seeking to profit from many men's deepest fear -- that their penises are too small.
From the vague "Expand your horizons" to the blunt "Want to increase your penis size?," the hard sell of penis-enlargement products plays on men's insecurity, experts say.
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Well, at least they didn't say it was men's biggest fear. I would like to hear more about "the hard sell of penis-enlargement products." I suppose the soft sell would be self-defeating.
And, for the sexological perspective, here's something I wrote back in 2003 in response to a man asking about pills to enlarge male organs:
"Medical science has yet to find a successful method for enlarging a penis past its natural size. There is absolutely nothing you can take orally (herbs, potions, medicines, hormones, etc.) which will make any difference whatever in your size.
"Worrying about the size of one's penis is a self-defeating obsession--plus men worry much more about penis size than their women. Guys look at porn stars and wish they had massive organs but most women (unless they have a fetish for big guys, and there are certainly women who do) neither want nor could enjoy someone who is built truly huge. Guys who are built unusually big (which means anything over about 7 to 7 1/2 inches) often encounter problems because some women (particularly petite partners or partners who are built small themselves) cannot accommodate an organ that big; achieving full penetration can be a challenge they never meet. Men who are built really big encounter their own problems, among them difficulty in finding condoms that fit comfortably, and difficulty in finding partners who can comfortably engage in intercourse with them. And those really truly HUGE guys you will occasionally see in porn (over 10") have it worst of all, to a point where it often creates significant psychological and intimacy problems for them.
"Average penis size (length, that is) is roughly between 5 to 6 1/2 inches (I've yet to see any stats on average thickness, by the way--some guys who are not terribly long may be quite thick and vice versa). Men who fall below the average (as lots of men do) can still completely and totally satisfy a woman in bed. If he can't, the problem is more likely his own lack of self-confidence and anxiety, his technique, or he's one of the very unlucky few who's bumped into a "size queen." In my experience, though, even women who tend to like big penises are *perfectly* happy to be with a man of average or even below average build if he is a good lover.
"What annoys me most about all the SPAM promising men bigger penises is they prey on male insecurity by suggesting that you can't satisfy a woman unless you're built big. That is so wrong as to be truly insulting. Unless one's penis is abnormally small (I'd say less than 3 inches/75 mm. is on the unusually small side for an average-height adult male) and as long as it can do the jobs Nature intended, your best bet is to learn to love your little man for who he is. In my experience, men who worry about the size of their penis and fear it isn't big enough to please a partner have other self-esteem issues. So this may really be a problem you need to sort out in a therapist's office, rather than a medical doctor's.
"Instead of focusing on size, focus on training yourself to control your orgasms so that, for example, you can give your lover hours of pleasure. Experiment with sensuous toys, such as cock rings (slipped down to the bottom of the shaft): they trap blood in the penis and make it stand full. Get in touch with the wonderful feelings your penis gives you instead of the image you have in your mind of what size it should be. Exercise your pubococcus muscles to keep him nice and perky. He may not be the biggest boy on the block, but that doesn't mean your penis can't be the sexiest. "
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Oh, yeah--and don't click on my "huge cock" links unless you understand deep in your heart that PhotoShop is responsible for half the X-rated content you see on the Web.
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Is it just me, or does the American public seem to have an unquenchable thirst to see these two, Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton, humiliated?
A Court-TV ad for a show about celebrity misdeeds caught my eye when the terminally dyspeptic Dominick Dunne announced that the show would reveal "every humiliating secret"--and the director cut in a 1 second image of a stripper rubbing her buttocks, and then an image of Martha Stewart. Hello? Martha following a stripper? Shouldn't that be someone at Enron?
It reminded me of the time reporters went wild over a cameraman capturing Hillary Clinton's panty-line. I could swear I've seen all kinds of bulges and creases on Laura Bush. Where's the panty patrol now?
Now, I'm ALL FOR humiliation. Even public humiliation. In fact, I rather think that for less serious offenses, public humiliation is a much more humane and instructive type of punishment than jail-time. And, believe you me, if there was equal-opportunity humiliation abroad, I'm sure I could find a way to enjoy it (even if I never admitted that outside a small circle of perverts).
But it drives me crazy that it's almost always women, and of course only POWERFUL women, who are targeted in a particularly snarky way that aims to humiliate through sexual innuendo, if not accusing them of outright murderous intent as vicious as Lady MacBeth's. I know why the panty patrol retired when Laura came to town: she is perceived as submissive to W. In other words, she knows her place so the press doesn't have to try and knock her down.
Meanwhile reports on Martha and Hillary literally overflow with gleeful malice. People are pissed off that these women are self-made millionaires. I don't remember Ivan Boesky's weight, clothing choices, hair-styles etc. coming under such sharp scrutiny, do you? I recall some mention, way back when, of Mike Milken's toupee, especially when he finally took it off (and, one hopes, burned it). I met Milken when I worked on Wall Street in the 80s. That hairpiece looked like an odd bit of muskrat fur that he had hastily scotch-taped to his head. We all held our breath when we saw him, waiting for it to fall off. Yet I don't recall anyone chortling as giddily over his fashion faux-pas as they did when Martha's weight soared.
Whatever you think of these women, there is no proof either of them has ever done anything wrong. Remember innocent until proven guilty? Yet people hate them, loathe them, consider them horrible bitches (without ever having met or spoken with them), and revel in orgasmic fantasies about their fall from grace.
I say it's a fear of dominant women. Fear of women who seem "too" competent, "too" successful," "too" strong and even "too" smart.
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