There’s an ancient comedy song by Ray Stevens in which an obscene phone caller who has been arrested uses his proverbial one phone call to contact not his lawyer but his victim, promising her that when he gets out of jail they’ll have “a big old time” and he’ll bring “a WeedEater, a live chicken, and some peach preserves!”
Exactly what he has in mind is not specified, but it’s not impossible it would wind up looking something like this scene from the 1981 porn move Extremes, featuring Aaron Stuart and Brooke West covered in chicken feathers and grease:
The Ray Stevens song? It’s called It’s Me Again, Margaret:
Everybody needs a fetish, sure. How about feathers? Sure, feathers could be a fetish. You could hold out for a guy with feathers. Make him a feather suit, or get him to hold still while you glue them on his skin. But wait, you want an actual angel? Like, an angel of God? Or, like, an archangel? Where you gonna find one of those to have sex with? You’re gonna need to turn to the sex comics for that:
These panels are from #147 of the long-running Italian sex comic Corna Vissute, the issue named Amore e Psiche.
Ok, so that first get-together with the new internet prospect can be real awkward. We know this. But there are clues:
The constant signing of emails with master so-and-so was a huge fucking clue.
The request to call him sir after three email exchanges and one phone conversation was a clue.
The ridiculous comment that “even though I haven’t met you, I miss you — do you miss me?” was the motherfucking clue of clues.
Showing up to meet her in a public place with a fucking parrot (yes, a parrot…did I fucking stutter or something?) on his shoulder was a clue.
The couple sitting next to her who were gossiping…”
Stop! Whoa! All ahead stern! Screech! Stop the music! Nobody move!
Did she really say “parrot”?
Parrot? As in, like this?
In all the ink (real and virtual) that’s been devoted to “what not to do on the first date”, I don’t think anybody ever considered the need to write “Wait until the second date to introduce her to your parrot. Do not under any circumstances take take your bird when you go to meet a woman for the first time.”
Consider it written now.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like the feathery little bastards. I bought one for a girlfriend once. I don’t miss her, but I sorta do miss that bird. And, like any pet, they can be pretty good company when you’re lonely.
Remind me, why were we going on that first date again? Oh, yeah, to find another freaking human to bond with / fuck / enslave / spend time with / preen my feathers. Which of these things is not like the others?
Why do pirates take their parrots everywhere? Because they don’t have any secure place they can leave the bird without it flying away or following them. Which is the same reason they carry all their doubloons in their underwear, or bury them in a sea chest on a moonless night (not such a good option for parrot housing).
If, like a pirate, you suffer from lack of a permanent place to park your parrot, it’s best you try to conceal this factoid from your new prospective internet submissive for as long as possible.
That is all.
Well, almost all. If your internet date brings a parrot to your first meeting, you know it’s going to wind up like this:
Susie Bright has created an Amazon list of must-have sex stuff, and in explaining the list, she’s dashed off several valuable mini essays on vibrators (wall current rules, battery-operated sucks, The Rabbit isn’t all that), lube, and the history of the sex toy industry. The lube portion I particularly like, because she simplifies down to the essentials:
Sex educators are famous for a particular cliche: “communication and lubrication” are what make people happy in bed. But truer words were never spoken.
So, given that essential fact, what lube do you get? My Amazon list is a little truncated because of what I could list on their site.
Vegetable oil is fantastic. Pre-AIDS, it was my lube of choice. If you’re aren’t using condoms, get your favorite oil– almond is really nice, maybe add a little coconut to make it creamy– and go at it. Or just grab the olive oil off the kitchen counter if time is of the essence. It feels great, it won’t hurt you, it’s sexy…. who could ask for more?
For water-soluble lubes, I always liked Probe because it has no taste! The biggest hassle with commercial lubes is that they usually taste AWFUL and make oral sex completely undesirable.
Are there other taste and scent-free lubes? Yes, Probe is my old tried-and-true. Works great with condoms, doesn’t make you ill, doesn’t cause cancer… what a treasure!
However, sometimes you need a lube that goes BEYOND. Sometimes the drugs you’re on, or menopause, can turn you into a prune. How do you get that high-flying crazy slippery feeling that goes on and on and on?
Silicone lube.
That’s why I recommended Liquid Silk for my desert island. It also is the first lube that makes hot tub and shower sex possible and even fun. It’s not water soluble– you’ll have that slippery feeling in your vagina or ass for several hours. But the slickness is so intoxicating. Just don’t use it with other silicone products or they gum each other up! Get that spatula out of your hot tub!
I do, however, find an important omission in Susie’s discussion of power sources for vibrators. She writes:
1) Electricity is essential. I don’t care what sex toy retailers say about battery-operated vibes– the main reason they push them is because they are dirt cheap, (wholesale), and they are lightweight to ship and transport (without the batts, of course!). A Hitachi magic wand is only marked up double its cost to the retailer… so if it’s $40, maybe they paid $20.
But a battery vibe might be a dollar to them and they’ll sell it for $10 or $20.
This reasoning has nothing to do with how it feels, or if women can get off on it. And the “sound” of batteries vibrating against plastic doesn’t mean it’s powerful. They can make an awful racket and not deliver any appreciable sensation.
Can women get off on battery-vibes? YES, some can, some are their mother’s darlings– I’m not on a crusade to get rid of them. But the reason they are hyped the way they are is because of money, not because of universal sexual satisfaction.
The vibrators that are produced by the mainstream appliance manufacturers like Hitachi and Wahl, were originally introduced as “massagers.” They’re quality appliances that will last years and years. I still have the first ones I ever bought in 1981. They have warranties. They have a following that’s been going for decades, based on technology that’s over a century old now.
I always hated selling a woman a battery-operated model for her first vibrator because there was a 50% chance she’d find the whole thing a hoax. However, if I sold her a motor-driven or coil-operated electric model, she’d come out of the ‘try-out’ room with this amazed look on her face, and say, ‘OH! I GET IT NOW!”
I agree wholeheartedly about the puny vibrations you can get from a couple of “C” or even “AA” batteries. When I’ve got a vibrator in one hand and a lady’s labia and clitoral hood in the other, I want some serious jiggle and buzz. “Can you feel it now?” is not the game I am here to play. I have pink bits to vibrate and I want them V*i*B*R*a*T*e*D, not tickled. (For tickling, I have feathers.)
On the other hand, as any roofer can tell you, there isn’t an electrical outlet handy under every current bush, and dragging a power cord behind you is a pain in the ass. The same technology that lets a guy with a tool belt and a hairy ass crack drive sheet metal screws for forty minutes at the top of a sixteen foot ladder (rechargeable ni-cad or lithium-ion batteries, ta-dah!) makes a perfectly acceptable power source for a vibrator. I’ve raved before about the Phantasy Sinnflut, which is a tool-grade rechargeable vibrator that any man could be proud to dock on its charging base in the garage next to his DeWalt drill and his Makita reciprocal saw. It’s nobody’s budget option, but it’s handier than anything with a cord, safer in the shower, and functionally far beyond anything with a disposable dry cell in it.
Do you hate blog comment spammers? Bondage Blog has a sure-fire prescription: give ’em a touch of the old strappado. Hey, it’s more elegant than the bubbling-hot tar and feathers they truly deserve, and less messy, too.
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.
