Daniel Rodosh of Rodosh.net was kind enough to send along this Study Guide to the Complete Porno Films of the Bard of Avon. Example: “Finally, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew for everyone who thought Ten Things I Hate About You was too cleverly written.” Ouch!

There’s a long and fascinating article in The Atlantic called “The Wifely Duty” about the decline of sex in modern marriage. (Alina is owed thanks for the link.) This phenomenon is of interest to Bacchus, who (though never married) once spent more than half a decade sharing a household with a woman he loved who nonetheless somehow usually managed to reject all his sexual advances, or else efficiently deter the making thereof, for up to three or four months at a time. (The article calls this “launching a sex strike of an intensity and a duration that would have impressed Aristophanes.”)

Although interesting, the article is fairly unsatisfactory inasmuch as it whiffs of nostalgia for better days gone by, on the thinnest of evidence that they were in fact better:

In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband’s shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was with some regularity going to have relations with the man of the house. Perhaps, as some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently composed the grocery list. Or perhaps not. Maybe, as Davis and her “new” findings suggest, once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling.

Or maybe not. Thank you for playing.

This much, at least, rings true:

Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

Alina’s take on this (scroll waaaay down) is perhaps more encouraging than the author of the Atlantic article:

Marriage without hot sex is like prison, add the mortage payments. A couples’ sex life also matters for the development of their children’s emotional and sexual maturity. I want my kids to see me kiss my husband in ways that indicate there is more between us than a shared mutual affection. Kids who grow up around affectionate, passionate parents tend to be more comfortable and less repressed with in their own adult sexual lives.

Marriage, in this young ladies’ opinion, is about tying your fate and your dreams to those of another, binding yourselves together knowing that sometimes the temptation to cut loose will be agonizing, but that your union is more important than your individual recklessness. Don’t blame marriage for a bad sex life– if you must blame anything at all, blame the notorious Wittle Wabbit. Boys, you’ve got competition. All the more reason to lobby your government for that classic French right to a 2-hour lunch break…

Quick, boys, somebody marry her before she gets away!

Here’s a fellow who seems perhaps to have read one too many Gor novels. Herewith, his list of “Rules for My Slave Girls“. All seventeen of them. (That would be seventeen rules; if this guy has seventeen slave girls, Bacchus is a Baptist.) A sample:

6. Slave girls sometimes disobey or are insolent and must be punished. This, of course, is the Master’s privilege and his duty, for if a slave is not corrected, she will not improve. Slave girls are punished if, when, and as I please. When I desire to punish a slave, I will tell her why she is to be punished and how. If instructed to bring a lash or paddle, she must do so quickly and obediently. Her hands must never touch it, or any weapon, so she must bring it in her teeth, and when she reaches me she must be on her hands and knees. I will then inform her which position to take, and they must obey instantly.

At the risk of offending pet owners and PETA activists, maybe this guy should just get a dog?

Clean Sheets has just published “A Beginner’s Guide to Polyamory“. So the author calls it anyway. It’s interesting, but it reads like a warning to travelers — “here be dragons, enter only if ye seek adventure and bloody death, abandon hope….” Well, that’s stretching a point. But the article makes an interesting observation:

Yes it’s messy and painful sometimes. Yes, relationships end and yes, people get hurt. But (and this is where my mind-fuck came) people get hurt anyway, right? They make messes of their relationships, they fall in love with new people, and relationships end. That’s humanity, not polyamory. It’s monogamy, it’s heterosexuality, it’s homosexuality; it’s religious and secular bonds, it’s legal and non-binding binding contracts; it’s life.

Begs the question, however, of whether those bad things happen more often to the polyamorous.

Lotta text going by lately, time for a picture. How about fun with snow sculpture?

Carly at Pornblography has posted a 25-step program for conducting a porn spring cleaning. Take special heed if you have cats, because they will resent the elimination of the dunes and piles of porn tapes over which they were wont to clamber:

Step 1: Take a look around your house. Do you have so much porn that it’s bursting from your hiding places, no longer fits in the 300+ videotape holder that you bought from Ikea or causes your closet doors to frequently jump from their tracks because of the sheer force of the massive amount of smut tapes crammed in behind them? Well then, friend, it’s time to clean out your porn collection!

Step 2: Start by removing all of your porn from wherever you keep it and place it in a central location so that you may accurately survey how far your perversion has progressed.

Step 3: Once you have finished struggling with your Catholic guilt, sort through all the titles and make three piles: Keepers, Givers and Trashers. Keepers are for yourself, Givers are for your friends, Trashers are to be disposed of accordingly.

Step 4: Marvel at some of the titles you’ve acquired over the years. What were you thinking when you picked up You’re Never Too Old To Gangbang, you fool?!?

Step 5: After sorting everything into appropriate piles, grab a garbage bag or six. Do so quickly so that your cats don’t knock over the pile you’ve carefully cultivated.

Step 6: Curse your cats.

Step 7: Repeat steps 3 and 4.

Step 8: Take the Trashers pile and start loading up your garbage bags. If you’re like me, you’ve got about 10 bags to fill.

Step 9: Stand back and allow yourself a moment of silence as you fully absorb just how much porn you’re about to dispose of.

Step 10: Curse yourself for having bought white trash bags rather than the customary green or black. Now everyone can clearly see you somehow wound up with more than one copy of Lex The Impaler!

Step 11: After convincing yourself that even though the titles are clear as day nobody will actually make the effort to examine the bags, get help from someone who is strong enough to lift half of the bags you’ve filled to the dumpster so that you don’t have to make more than one trip, therefore increasing the potential of neighbors spying you in the halls or elevator of the building carting around enough porn to make even the likes of Skeeter Kerkove blush.

Step 12: Open your front door and look into the hall. The coast is clear. Go for it!

Step 13: Hurriedly run back into your home when you hear the single mother down the hall exiting the elevator with her young son.

Step 14: Have your stronger companion check for other residents milling in the hall, then have them retrieve the elevator and lock the controls so that you can load your porn trash quickly and peacefully without interruption.

Step 15: Upon arriving at the basement level where the dumpsters are, look around and make sure that nobody is right outside the elevator doors. If they are, don’t panic! Just hide the bags behind you and hold their eye contact. If someone is just pulling in and unloading their groceries, no worries there, either. They’ll be too consumed with not cracking their eggs to pay mind to two individuals running for the garbage bin with 10 see-through Hefty bags full of porn.

Step 16: Have one person stand watch while the other starts throwing the bags in the bin.

Step 17: Throw a mild fit when one of the bags explodes, throwing numerous tapes across the concrete floor of the parking lot into mucky puddles and underneath cars.

Step 18: Ignore the grocery shopper’s offer to help.

Step 19: Dispose of the rest of the porn in a discreet and timely fashion, making sure all of the loose tapes from the explosion are accounted for. If possible, arrange some other garbage over top of the porn booty so that others aren’t alerted to your viewing habits.

Step 20: Cackle maniacally as if you’ve just done something really sneaky and clever, when really you haven’t.

Step 21: Make care packages for your friends across the country out of the givers pile you made, ensuring that you’ve packaged them in plain brown boxes so that nobody will know what you’re sending, helping for maximum impact when they arrive at the receiving end.

Step 22: Wait for the joyous and thankful phone calls and e-mails to roll in.

Step 23: Grow tired of waiting and instead organize what’s left of your collection, making sure that the tapes match the boxes and everything is alphabetized.

Step 24: Enjoy one of the titles that you found while doing your purge. (What happens during or after viewing need not be explained.)

Step 25: Call the City and thank them for the bouquet of roses that were left at your door the following day.

Got a belly button fetish? You’ll like The Belly Button Page then. Heck, fetish or no fetish, you might like it anyway — some of them belly buttons is cute.