A day too late, I learn a new vocabulary word that I sorely needed for the title of this post. Thanks, of course, to Eugene Volokh.

I think this picture is evidence that sometimes recycling can be taken a little bit too far:

I just stumbled over a fascinating series of blog essays entitled “Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You.” If this is a topic of interest to you, as it was to me during a six-and-a-half-year doomed relationship, you’ll want to set aside a couple of hours and read through the whole series.

G’wan, do that now, before I poison it for you with my opinion.

Back already? Gosh you read fast.

Anyway, it’s a very thoughtful series, clearly written by a woman with a level head, an introspective disposition, and a lot of good will. Her observations are useful and interesting and I wish I’d had a chance to read them before my girlfriend, who I loved quite a lot but who had serious sexual issues, got rid of me and picked another man not to have sex with.

That was supposed to be funny.

Moving rapidly along. So I’m reading this excellent series of essays, nodding and agreeing and going “Hmm, that explains a lot” and generally getting myself edified, when suddenly it struck me. There’s a unifying theme to the whole essay series, and it’s this: “Your wife won’t have sex with you because you’re doing something wrong or failing to do something right.”

Yup, it’s all about you, buster.

And I suppose, in a weird definitional way, that has to be true. If getting it right as a man is defined as doing whatever it takes to get laid by your chosen woman, then by definition if she’s not willing to be intimate you need to get your act together.

Still, I’m concerned by the way this approach utterly disposes of the concept of an intimate partnership between two responsible adult humans. If it’s never about the woman, if there’s never any concept that by cleaving unto a partnership relationship she undertook some responsibility for maintaining the intimate part of the relationship, then there’s no partnership. There’s just another pea hen watching from the sidelines, waiting to see whether any of those strutting peacocks ever manage to wave their tail feathers just the right way to make her tingle.

Maybe that’s the way the world is. But I was raised to afford women a bit more humanity than that. I’m concerned that this essay series dehumanizes women by, effectively, absolving them from any responsibility for intimacy.

Go read the essays. If nothing else, you’ll learn to be a better peacock.

2012 Link Update: The original Salon.com link went 404 in 2009. I’ve replaced it with an archives.org version. The author also moved much of her Salon material to an archive blog, possibly with some curatorial changes: Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You.

Enough is enough.

When I started this blog eight months ago I decided to use the pseudonym “Bacchus” in an effort to enjoy, while it lasts, the thin and temporary anonymity that pseudonymous blogging provides. But, for some reason I never quite managed to articulate to myself, from the beginning I referred to my Bacchus persona in the third person.

I’m going to keep the pseudonym for the nonce. But the third person business has got to go. It leads to excessive use of passive constructions and other perverted crimes against literacy. And, more importantly, it makes it bloody hard to express an unequivocal opinion.

I’ll see how it goes.

It’s tres chic to criticize pornography; probably every literate person does at some time or another, despite the shooting-fish-in-a-rainbarrel nature of the enterprise. But few manage to do it with such elan:

I find almost all porn to be insufferable. The inflated breasts, the blond hair, the absence of the merest trace of thespian ability. But the thing that repulses me most of all, is the stupidity. I’m not talking about the inane dialogue that is written to give porn films a plausible scenario. I’m talking about the insipid direction, lighting, cinematography. The men’s gym-tits and deli-window dicks. The women’s gonfle tits, cookie-cutter measurements, greasy sheen. Their interchangable clonedness. The repetitive and unimaginative scenes in which the same buttons get pushed over and over and over and over again. It’s like a printing press that prints out the same newspaper day after day, and we’re supposed to be interested.

Thanks to Madame G.

By the way, anybody know what “gonfle tits” are? It sounds like a dessert to Bacchus….

Here’s a cute image of abject slavery, as envisioned in the absinthe-soaked photography salons of turn-of-the-century Paris:

This image was snagged from a passing Ebay postcard auction, where it was going for a sum that should have been large enough to ensure that the models were included in the deal.

Yesterday the Reverse Cowgirl posted a link to an appeal from Fantagraphics Books, which is in a dangerous cash flow crunch that might alternatively be described as a “bulging warehouse” crunch. Book rich and cash poor — who among us can’t be sympathetic to that universal plight of the literate?

Anyway, this whole matter cut no onions with Bacchus, because he’s not generally a comic book guy and the Fantagraphics guys apparently are. And here’s the mind-boggling part — nowhere in their “buy our books!” appeal did they mention their ownership of the Eros Comix imprint, to whom we all owe thanks for the kinky insectile slitherings, moanings, and writhings of comics like Bondage Fairies, not to mention the wholesome spankings and 1950s June Cleaver dildo shenanigans of Housewives at Play. And too many other quality erotic titles to count.

This oversight on Fantagraphics’ part is possibly forgivable, as they’ve doubtless got good reasons for separating out their adult business and being low-profile about it. But it’s inexcusable for the Cowgirl not to have mentioned this trivial detail (unless, like Bacchus, she did not know it.)

Fortunately for all concerned, a mysterious stranger who calls himself Sam dropped an email. So now we know: Go buy some dirty comics today, if you want to be able to buy them tomorrow! It’s a good cause….