If any one sort of image made explicit Japanese animation or computer graphics notorious in the United States, it was tentacle sex. Usually a nubile young lass is shown entangled in long wormlike tentacles, which both restrain her and probe slimily into every available orifice.

Usually, but not always. This time, it’s a guy…

Naomi Darvell at Clean Sheets wrote this roundup of sex blogs while I was away, and had some kind words for ErosBlog:

Bacchus is very much into pictures, ranging from the cute to the edgy. Although he focuses on the female body, he does it without the grating lasciviousness of, say, The Man Show. His is clearly a male point of view, but most of the time it feels friendly to this bi woman.

Naomi has picked up on a very deliberate philosophy of mine. I’ve always felt it should be possible to express my unabashed appreciation for the female form without that stinking aura of leering misogyny that’s found in, say, your average Maxim magazine. I want ErosBlog to always feel friendly to everyone. As Robert Heinlein said: “Sex should be friendly. Otherwise stick to mechanical toys; it’s more sanitary.”

Drat it, now I’m going to start worrying about that “most of the time it feels friendly” line. “Most of the time?” Where did I slip up?

Oh yes, and for the record I can’t stand to watch The Man Show. Why don’t they just expand that “Girls On Trampolines” segment that currently runs during the closing credits? I’d watch that for 22 minutes. Mmmm, oh my yes.

“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.”

Or so Garrison Keillor was quoted as saying in “The Sun”. (I found the quote in the October 2003 issue of Utne magazine.)

Of course, why not just have both?

A while back I reviewed the excellent sex documentary Marie And Jack: A Love Story from Comstock Films. My review copy was on VHS, but they’ve now released, and were kind enough to send along, a DVD version. The DVD is notable for including as an extra the entire hot lovemaking session around which the documentary was made, only this time, it’s in a “choose-your-own-camera-angle” format and is has none of that documentary talk going on. So if you liked the documentary but wished you could watch the sex as pure porn, now you can! Only it’s still the good kind of married sex, which makes it hotter than most of the porn in your collection.

I do so love getting goodies in the mail!

Hey everybody, believe it or not Bacchus is taking a real live vacation. Sunday morning I’m out of here, and I’ll be gone until the end of September, or near enough. I’ll be mostly off the net and I’m not taking a laptop. So you won’t be hearing from me, although I may get some email. (Or not; at the current rate of worm spams I’m getting my email box will be full in a week.)

While ErosBlog stands idle for a few weeks, I hope you won’t forget me! I will be back, and ErosBlog is not going away! Trust me on this one, and thank you for your support.

Someone emailed me this. I howled with laughter. I hope you will too:

Thanks for sending it along!

Here’s Derek on some structural problems with dating in this modern world:

There ought to be a class for people who positively suck at talking to members of the opposite sex.

This thought occurred to me the other day. I mean, let’s presume for the moment that you were not the sort of person to pick up that social skill-set during high-school. Where exactly are you going to learn it in today’s society?

First impressions, especially on the topic of romance, are so terribly crucial, and if you screw it up, it doesn’t matter how much chemistry you and the other person might have had if given the chance, it’ll all be for naught because the first impression will have already been blown.

Meanwhile, you really have no constructive feedback loop on what it was that made it “not work” for them in the first place. Sure, you can try and approach the problem “scientifically”, trying slightly variant versions with different people and seeing which ones garner the best/worst responses, but that’s not exactly the point of the entire operation, and certainly isn’t an efficient use of a scarce resource (that being “available members of the opposite sex”)
…
Here’s the worst part, in my opinion — It causes you to doubt the value of the attempt itself. You start saying things to yourself like, “Why bother, it’ll just be another annoying exercise in wondering what little thing I did wrong this time?”

Admit it, everyone out there has had times in their life when they thought that, a time when they would say to themselves, “Why should I bother putting it all on the line to get rejected, knowing that I’ll probably never even know why I was rejected?”