Who said suburban living was bland and banal?

Here is some more sex writing that uses the up-front “this stuff doesn’t turn me on and by the way I’m a feminist” disclaimer. Come on, guys, ball up, find your nuts, and write about sex without all the wussy disclaimers!

It’s right here in paragraph three — this guy wanted to get it right up front:

But I never quite recovered from the blow to my libido, going from interested to bored to downright queasy within an hour. It’s a shameful confession for a sex-positive feminist to make.

From an otherwise fairly decent article on porn.

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?