Long ago, I stumbled over an infographic (though I don’t think anybody called them that, it was so long ago) on how to tie a Japanese rope bondage harness. Only trouble was, with the blogging tools back then I only knew how to use things that were small enough to be cropped or reduced to 320 pixels wide; plus, it was an ugly graphic (because somebody had slapped a nasty repeating watermark all over it). No matter, I was all “Woo, bondage! Must be edgy and post about it!” Hey, I was a newbie, and this was 2003 — kink still had a smidge more of a taboo edge back then.

So I fired up my primitive cropping tools, did the best I could, and made a post, with a poorly-cropped thumbnail and a link to the ugly over-watermarked monstrosity. But I wasn’t ever really happy about that post — the graphic was poor quality and my thumbnail was even worse.

Fortunately, the internet is like the ocean; if you wait long enough, it will eventually wash treasures up on your beach. Today’s treasure was a huge, clear, bright and unsullied .jpg of the same infographic that I butchered so badly back then. So, seven years later, I went back and updated the post:

Japanese Bondage Illustrated

Like the lady says on the defunct Tumblr said, “if it’s got sprinkles and frosting, I’m probably going to lick it.”

And since I can’t seem to get my head out of the Tumblr gutter today, may I present:

Two dicks rubbing together.

Duels have been fought over the issue of whether it’s “gay” for you to rub dicks with another man in that situation. I’ll probably never be young enough or adventurous enough or limber enough to have to worry about that myself, but my considered opinion is: “Dude, if that’s what’s got you worried at a time like that, you need to learn to relax and live more in the moment.”

If you can’t fuck a woman in the ass without also stepping on her head, maybe you’ve been watching too much gonzo porn.

I’m just sayin’.

You know, I just had one of those satori moments that can be years in the making.

I was surfing a random tumbler when I saw a random bondage photo of a perfectly charming young lady in a rope harness, giving a big smile at the camera. Emblazoned on the photo was a watermark and URL that was something similar to, but not quite, sluts in rope dot com.

And it just hit me, the impatient and dismissive thought, as if this particular batch of pornographers were wasting my obviously-precious time: Bullshit!

She’s not a slut. She’s just a girl, a woman, a person.

I don’t even know what the fuck a slut is. I don’t have a category in my head for that.

Oh, I know two or three definitions, I just never once in my life have felt the need for that collective/descriptive noun. There’s never been a case where the woman I was trying to describe fit one of those definitions better than she fit some other handier or more descriptive word, like her name or “woman” or “girl”.

I’m not talking about biting back an epithet on the tip of my tongue, either. I know what that feels like. Take the word “bitch” if you will. I don’t believe it’s a word to be thrown around lightly, and I don’t; it escapes my lips rarely indeed, and only when I believe it to be richly and earnestly deserved. But it comes to the tip of my tongue perhaps a few times more often than that. I swallow it again, for reasons that seem good.

Not so with “slut”. It simply doesn’t occur to me. I don’t get what the big deal is. I don’t understand what it is about “sluts” that gets under so many men’s skins. Women who have a lot of sex? That’s good, right? We likes them our preciouses, yes we does? Women who enjoy sex? We want that to be the whole category, surely? Women who have sex easily and readily with anybody who asks? A mythical creature I’m sure, but you’d be as interested to see one as you would a unicorn, not full of contempt and disgust, right?

It’s not a new idea to me that I don’t need the word. But I guess I always figured there were sluts out there somewhere I just never met, or people whose relationships were so fluid and fragile they were threatened by “sluts” and needed a ready way to identify them. It took a completely-daft use of the label in an utterly-pointless context to finally ram the point home: there really is no such thing as a slut.

What “slut” is, is a label of convenience. People (male and female alike) slap it on women and girls they need power over — personal power, marketing power, sexual power, emotional power. If they can make it stick, they may get some of the power they seek. Of course, some women defuse the tactic by adopting the label first, making it their own; this may have costs, but it can be very effective too.

In general, though, when you hear the word slut, somebody is trying to pull a power play on a woman by labeling her. It’s not actually a real category. Sluts don’t exist.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Leaving "Slut" To The Happy Sluts
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Sometimes I worry that the intellectual tradition of the good internet rant is falling out of favor. Oh, the stupid and noisy ranters on television will be with us always — but the finest thoughtful internet rants seem to grow increasingly rare.

A couple of weeks ago, though, Emily Nagoski delivered a barnstormer, on why it is not (and should not be) respectable to conflate sex and sin:

Believing that gay people are going to hell gives a cultural purchase to hatred and violence. Like a little bump on a rock where over years barnacles accumulate, the idea of sex as sin is a foothold for discrimination, bullying, harassment, and violence.

That’s just the tiniest taste of an epic and righteous rant. Like all good rants, it’s a one-piece; I can’t snip three paragraphs without doing horrid violence to the art form.

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• Religion Is Bad For Your Sex Life
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I would be remiss if I did not link you to William Salatan’s article The Riddle of the Sphincter: Why do women who have anal sex get more orgasms?

The survey data is real; it’s the explanation that’s uncertain. So he lays out more than a dozen possible theories to explain the data, and it’s quite an interesting read:

9. Love and trust cause orgasms and anal sex.

One woman writes:

The more I love and trust someone, the more likely I am to have an orgasm while with him–and the more likely I am to be okay with pushing society’s “norms” with him. Similarly, the more he proves that he knows what he’s doing, the more likely I am to let him do something that could potentially really, really hurt me.

This is the most uplifting theory. It implies that the sample of women who report regular anal sex is heavily biased toward intimate relationships. The data strongly support this. Compared with women who are single and dating, women in a relationship are only about 50 percent more likely, at best, to report vaginal sex in the last 90 days. But they’re two to three times more likely to report anal sex. And women who live with their boyfriends are more likely to report anal sex–but not more likely to report vaginal sex–than women who don’t. Anal sex, more so than vaginal sex, seems to correlate with intimacy and commitment.

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