I know I haven’t been writing a lot this week… I’m percolating. I suspect it’ll bubble up for you in the next few days.

Tonight I’m just reposting something I wrote on my other blog 18 months ago. I was trying to find something else and happened upon it and thought, “Fuck. And the genocide is ongoing, even now,” in Darfur, so, I thought I’d use my little soapbox here for this cause.

Darfur is a genocide. We, the world, need to step in and stop it. Sudan needs to be overruled, and we need to say “Not on our watch.” People don’t die, shouldn’t die, on our watch.

I wrote this 18 months ago and yet it is still current? What a fucking travesty. We’re better than that.

***

I am reading a harrowing account of the atrocities that transpired during 1994 (and beyond) in Rwanda. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our familes: Stories From Rwanda is written by Philip Gourevitch.

This book, this depressing, morbid, tragic, bitter, woeful book, evokes much of what has always made me want to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be the travelling kind of writer. I write well of cultures and differences. I’m observant. I notice the ways and means in which we all differ, but, more importantly, I sense the ways in which we are all the same. When speaking, I can’t do any of it justice. I’m sure I’ve sounded racist more than once, but it’s a crying shame if that’s how it seems. Sigh. Travelling and writing don’t yet seem to be in the cards. I’m sure that hand’s to be dealt sometime, though, and when it is, I’ll pounce.

A particular passage struck me like a brick this morning, in which Gourevitch is setting the scene to make us understand just how a genocide must be orchestrated — like any dance or wedding or ceremony, the execution of such an undertaking must be done meticulously. And most importantly, must be an easily sold concept that one can convince hundreds of thousands, if not more, to become a willing part of. Genocide doesn’t happen because a few guys had some beers and wanted to off a few folk they disagreed with. Genocide happens en masse because a message has been bought and sold by the masses, and a fit-in-or-fuck-off mentality has been adopted nearly universally by one party versus the other. But I fumble, and Gourevitch explained it all so succinctly. Here’s his words:

But mass violence, too must be organized; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute.

Too true. Simple, yet absolute.

One wonders, then, if it’s so simple and so absolute that it simply can’t be sold as a news story. I mean, “They don’t like them, and never have, therefore they’re killing them by the hundreds of thousands” just doesn’t seem to work when you tack it onto African place names like, oh, say, Rwanda or, say, Darfur. I mean, it’s such a dull story. Or is it?

I’m only 50 pages into this book, but it’s hitting an awful lot of chords within. It reminds me, too, that I like to read books on aspects of history. Not vast, expansive books that cover countries and such, but books on topics that ultimately seem only a footnote in humanity’s tome. Like King Leopold’s Ghosts or The Nutmeg Wars or To What End?

Y’know, I went into the journalism program at the age of 17, dreaming idly of being a foreign correspondent. I would have loved the danger and excitement of that life. The movie Welcome to Sarajevo evoked a lot for me in that vein, so does any rivetting moment of correspondence I see. I never had the confidence or courage to pursue it, though. I’ll always regret that, and I have few regrets. I would have liked to be the person on the ground that finds the stories the rest of the world absolutely needs to hear. It would have been amazing to be that little footnote in the story, the person who the story’s not about, but who birthed it.

Gourevitch wasn’t even on the ground when the killings came down. The world didn’t even notice, really, as 800,000 people were killed — most by hand, with machetes, to save money — in less than 100 days. Gourevitch saw scattered news stories, and then, when all the dust began to settle, went to the country with a couple Canadian soldiers and tried to make sense of all that had happened. Of course, I’m sure he’ll find the truth, that there is no sense. There seldom is.

And that’s why the media can’t sell us on Darfur. It’s why nobody wants to get involved. How do you solve a problem that defies sense? How do you propose a solution when the problem itself is barely intelligible?

“Look. They’re dying. A lot of them. All the time. It doesn’t stop. Women, raped. Children, orphaned, killed. Men, slaughtered. No one, safe. Nothing to do. No way to stop. Help, please.”

We would rather ignore it and believe it’s impossible, a figment of our overworked, deluded imaginations. It’s a twist to that old conundrum: If a scream is ignored, did it ever really happen?

I don’t know how the media can make people care about Darfur. It has become apparent to me that it’s not the governments’ inaction about the slaughter in Sudan that’s the problem, it’s that the media doesn’t know how to make the public care. Or maybe it’s that we’re so hell-bent on having nice, digestible news so we don’t upset our tummies as we chow down on tacos in front of the telly. I don’t know. But I blame society for ignoring it.

There’s a scene in Hotel Rwanda that made me physically ill. They’re driving on a bumpy road in dense fog native to the area, and it becomes impassable. They get out only to find out the bumps are corpses, not potholes, and that the road is now a mass grave.

We wish to inform you tells of how the rare survivors managed to stay alive in the jungles. They’d look in the air for hordes of vultures and other scavenging birds — signs a massacre had taken place below. They’d steer clear, they’d stay alive. Only just.

If you feel like an ass for never giving a shit about the fact that 300,000-400,000 people are dead and 2.5 million are displaced, and the West has done nothing, nothing at all, then you can go here and sign a petition for the powers that be to do something. Of course the Sudanese government doesn’t want aid organizations or NGOs of any kind there. So? They’re abetting a systematic slaughter — what the hell do they know, eh? Maybe there’s no solution to this Darfur Problem. But I think the firepower needs a little evening out, to say the least. If it’s a numbers game, then let’s jack up the underdog, then, shall we?

So, Barbara Walters, one of the greatest female journalists ever, has written her life story, Auditions, and is doing a massive media blitz for its release.

I haven’t read it, but as far as bios go, it’s one I’d be interested in. She talks about everything, from her affair with a black senator in the ’70s, to why Star Jones was ostensibly booted from The View.

Walters maintains that it was ludicrous for Jones to never fess up to having gastic bypass surgery on the air. Apparently Jones never wanted to admit to the bypass, and it caused tensions on the show as a result of the other hosts feeling they had to fudge the truth to help Jones skirt the issue when confronted by press and such, as Jones always alleged her weight loss was due to Pilates and portion control.

Here’s a bit from CNN that covers Walters’ side of the story here:

Walters says Jones, who’d dropped 160 pounds in three years, changed her mind after telling Walters she’d talk about the procedure on the program. Walters says she didn’t want to be the “poster child” for the procedure.

“I understood that, but it put us all in a terrible position,” Walters writes. “It meant we virtually had to lie for Star, especially when she said again and again on the air that her weight loss was due primarily to portion control and Pilates. … Joy (Behar), in particular, resented having to go along with the lie that implied that all one needed to do was sit-ups and ingest one cookie instead of two.”

Jones is flaming Walters for any number of reasons now that the book is out, saying “It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character.”

It’s not a sad day when an icon like Walters writes about her life before she hits the end of it. She branded herself as a lover in a dangerous time, with an interracial affair at the peak of the civil rights’ movement while she was an upcoming star of the journalism industry, not just an “adulterer”.

What is sad is someone feeling they have to lie about gastric bypass surgery, or that they have to fool the public because they’re ashamed of themselves. Last year she finally wrote about the procedure and said she was “ashamed at not being able to get (herself) under control without this procedure.” On some levels, that’s understandable. Imagine how useful that feeling might be to someone facing the option of bypass or death from obesity, knowing the shame was a normal feeling?

What’s sad is that she had the opportunity to share her struggle with millions of viewers who may well have supported her, or even changed their lives, and she failed to sieze that chance.

Speaking as someone who’s been losing weight, it is BY FAR the hardest struggle of my life. I have had to change myself from my thinking on down, and it is a daily struggle and war. I’ve had to learn so much about myself, and still am, so much so that there are times it breaks me down to tears. It is a fucking HARD struggle.

I believe, truly, that my life is on the line– perhaps not in a “CODE BLUE! STAT!” kind of way, but I was at that point where the slope was getting very slippery and it seemed like the only way to go was down, down, down. The fight mainly came from “If I don’t, if I continue this unhealthy life, it will kill me, and not in a nice way.”

I think it’s incredible when people can drop 160 pounds or so, naturally, but if it takes gastric bypass surgery, then so be it. Maybe she knew she could have truly lost the weight herself with more control. Who knows, but it’s bullshit to ask that question now, or even worry about it. She made her choice, she’s succeeded with it, and that’s what’s important.

The point is, when you live a public life and you try to pretend you’ve lost your weight by just controlling your portions and doing Pilates three times a week, that’s just not fair to the people who are maybe trying to follow your example, but are depressed and angry when your sensational results don’t follow. It’s not fair. Losing 160 pounds will NEVER happen that way. EVER.

A friend on Facebook yesterday emailed me to say “Wow, 30 pounds, huh? How’d you do it?” By working really fucking hard and being conscious of my choices every single day, whether for the good or bad, I more or less said. It’s not about switching cereal brands or drinking less juice. It’s about CHANGING EVERYTHING.

Weight is by far one of the most damaging issues one can face in their own lives. It affects everything– mood, self-esteem, finances, emotional strength, communication, and more. When I’m not fat anymore, who will I be? I don’t know, but finding out will be incredible.

I think Star Jones had a responsibility to own up to the truth about her weight loss, and that she was a coward when she let her shame talk her out of using her opportunity to allow others to know of her own difficult journey. She made the wrong choice, and it affected her life in every way. Had she stuck it out on the View, been honest with her public, who knows how it could have strengthened her relationship with her fans?

Weight loss is too fucking hard for people not to be more honest about how they get there– whether it’s by completely changing their lives and working out all the time, like I’m trying to, or by gastric surgery– because people do stupid, unhealthy things to try and change their weight, and we need the successful people to share their routes, even if it’s with bypass surgery.

Besides, people can die from gastric bypass, and it’s a dangerous surgery that does not solve obesity on its own. Jones had to work, had to control her eating for it to be a success, so it’s not all the surgery’s doing, and she has a right to be proud of what she accomplished, regardless of the method. But because gastric bypass isn’t just an elaborate Band-aid, she should have taken the opportunity to enlighten people on how it impacts one’s life.

She was a host of a current affairs/talk show run by a journalist. How could she possibly think skirting the truth was going to fly? It’s ridiculous.

Be honest about your struggles, people. We all have them. We need to support each other, we need to understand each other’s struggles. It’s the only way we’ll ever really unite.

And so the primary season rolls on.

The mighty Obama has taken some blows of late. He’s being tacked with every left-wing extremist Clinton can muster; Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan, and then Michael Moore comes along and throws his support behind Obama, like he somehow thinks his support counts anymore.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m for Obama.

But these recent tactics by Hillary Clinton have been bothering me long before Carl Bernstein wrote on the Huffington Post that she’s employing, in his rather esteemed opinion, McCarthyist tactics to taint Obama via the “guilt by association” method.

You know: Your friends are losers, so you can’t possibly not be a loser, too. That’s what it all comes down to.

But it’s so much worse. It’s so horrible to think that, in a time and age with so much division, we should allow a would-be president to say “You’re unsavoury because of the company you keep.”

I mean, oh, my god.

I’m too young to have lived under the threat posed by the McCarthy era, as are most of my readers, I would imagine, but I’m pretty familiar with the tactics employed in those days, and it terrifies me. (Think of an America like that one in the months following 9/11, where everyone’s a little scared and, where everyone informed on everyone else, embraced by a cult of suspicion. “Oh, he’s a communist/terrorist/radical, I heard him at a party.” Imagine speculation or rumour or guilt-by-association and context-twisting to cause you to have to testify at the notorious McCarthy hearings for “UnAmerican Affairs” and resulting in you losing your job because you’re a suspected “Red” or terrorist or radical. This is what Clinton’s doing these days, reopening old traditions of judging someone solely on the company they keep.)

I, for one, feel that Americans can’t get rid of one freedom-eroding president in trade for someone who’s either, a) a hypocrite and using false sentiment to raise trouble, or b) really does feel that guilt by association is viable or even reliable when it comes to judging someone’s character.

When this campaign began, I honestly felt like I’d like either Obama or Clinton as president, but some of these tactics have really worn out my loyalty to Hillary. It’s a real shame, too.

As readers of sex blogs, you, dear reader, should be alarmed at this method of guilt-by-association that Hillary Clinton’s using against Obama. Especially since she’s been really roasted over the years for her wildly, radically left youth spent working summers with a law firm that defended Black Panthers back in the bad ol’ days of the late ’60s. Is she a murderer because she’s defended a few?

If she was the one doing the judging now, she would be. She’s trying to tell us all that Obama’s a radical (with the middle name Hussein) because he associates with a now-mainstream former member of the extreme left, guilty of some bombings in the ’60s, when Obama was 8, but she’s been known to hang with some Black Panthers? Besides, her hubby used his presidential pardon to give Ayers, the “terrorist” guy Obama’s known on the board of some organizations, a full and complete pardon, for which his wife is now totally dragging the guy back through the muck.

It’s really, really incomprehensible. But as I mentioned, as readers of sex blogs, you, reader, could be some perverted sex-addled horndog that should never be left alone with children, or is that just a ridiculous assertion?

Yeah, do the math, right? It just doesn’t add up. That’s guilt-by-association for you, and it’s never a fair way to judge anyone. It’s tantamount to judging on appearances, because it’s easy to connect the dots into shapes you want, if you know what you’re looking for, right?

Sigh. I’ll be glad when the nomination’s finally made and I can just run with whatever the choice is, but I hope to hell it’s for Obama.

I know I’m Canadian, but the American election’s important to all of us this year. Look at the climate in the world with the oil crisis and the food shortage and the subprime mortgage disaster and the plumetting American dollar. Serious solutions are needed, and we’re all getting invested in what Americans decide this year.

And regardless of the sheen that’s come off his shine in the recent weeks, most of the world’s thinking Obama means hope for everyone. Crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

Just play nice, Hillary. This is so unbecoming of you. A real disappointment. I thought you were better than this. Obama, at least, still seems pretty dignified. So, there’s that.

With scientists only a few years off, they predict, of creating a means of female-only reproduction– meaning no men jacking off into cups, sperm popsicles, or anything like that being required, just a woman and her eggs — the reality is, women will be getting a whole lot more than just “empowered” in the coming years. But at what price?

“A woman needs a man
like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Margaret Atwood

One acclaimed geneticist (Bryan Sykes, a prof at Oxford) has made the startling pronouncement in the past couple weeks, that he thinks the Y-chromosome (the “male” gene) is slowly but surely degrading and deteriorating so substantially that, in a mere 125,000 years, there will be no Y-chromosome, meaning, no men.
The geneticist has met with a barrage of anger, men writing him with fiery letters basically all saying “How can you betray your gender?” Seriously, that’s just ridiculous. Science is science, there’s no betrayal.
But if the very nature of men is in question, what does the old chiding of “Oh, be a man” really mean in the modern age?
What is a man? Is it that sexy, heroic, but emotional post-9/11 “fireman” kinda guy who puts others before him, overcomes his fears, and gets shit done in the face of all adversity? Is it the well-rounded office guy who’s a great dad and a weekend adventurer? How “manly” does a man need to be? Does he need to be “manly” at all?

“The Y chromosome is passed from father to son, it’s what makes babies into boys. Basically the human template is a female: the Y chromosome kicks in a few weeks after conception and makes a boy. “Men are genetically modified women,” explained Sykes. But unlike other chromosomes, the Y chromosome can’t repair itself and will, says Sykes, disappear altogether in about 125,000 years.
“Every generation one percent of men will have a mutation which reduces their fertility by 10 percent,” explained Sykes. Unlike most chromosomes, the Y does not travel through the generation in pairs, so can never repair itself from a mirror. Flaws are never repaired. “So if that goes on for generation after generation,” Sykes argued, “eventually there are no functioning Y chromosomes left.””

Read the whole article here.

Men aren’t what they used to be– I mean, they’re not knuckle-dragging Cro-Magnons who’d grunt, beat their chest, and drag their wimminfolk around by the hair. Women may have come a long way, baby, like Virginia Slims used to claim, but men have come pretty fucking far, too. Maybe the deteriorating Y-chromosome is just part of evolution. Maybe the Y-chromosome’s just a defect after all, and its non-repair-ability means it’s just righting itself to become what it should’ve been after all… a pure X chromosome.
I don’t know, I’m being the devil’s advocate here. I’m a fan of men. I have a vested interest in seeing their kind propagating and succeeding, particularly their penises.
Still… we live in the post-98-pound-weakling world, where geeks are celebrated and bench presses don’t matter. Men get manicures, even buy makeup, and are no longer strangers to wax hair removal. If it wasn’t for the penis and tits, one would think the divides between our orientation just ain’t what it used to be, deteriorating Y-chromosome or not.
Is the fact that men are becoming more sympathetic, more expressive part of this ever-declining Y-chromosome? Is it all Germaine Greer’s fault for emasculating men? Enquiring minds want to know. Are men really, like this genetics doc says, just “genetically modified women” after all, in far more ways than one?
All the kidding aside, it’s time we seriously start studying our genders, and in far more probing ways.
Alfred Kinsey got the ball rolling with his landmark sexual studies more than half a century ago, but no huge advances have been made since, no big surprises, although I would like to extend a collective thank-you from the female race for enlightening us about the clitoris and the g-spot. We liked that. Useful, that bit of wisdom.
However, no study of that scale and magnitude has since been completed. We understand so much more about hormones and mind/chemistry connections, we have so many more resources at our disposal so that we can not only undertake an epic study of Kinsey-ian proportions, but also study the scientific causes and consequences of our desires and wants and in an interconnected sort of way; and, beyond that, to study those in a genetic history context. Compare who we’ve become to who we were, and not just genetically, but societally.
Whether it’s to explore links between mens’ sperm counts dropping (a whopping 20% in 50 years) over the same decades that desk jobs became more predominant, or to understand how women change when they make that change from being unable to orgasm to finally experiencing sexual bliss and how that impacts their lives, if it even does, or to just understand what the emotional ramifications of living in a touch-deficit, electronic-communication society might have on, well, all of us… these studies need to occur more often and in more far-reaching ways.
Gender and sexuality aren’t just fun things to chat about. They’re imperative to understand better. Men’s sperm counts bottoming out by 20% over just 50 years is just one startling example of how quickly we’re changing. To say that the Y-chromosome has a guaranteed 125,000 years shelf-life is as laughable as the scientists who, even 10 years ago, were saying we had a hundred or more years before the climate would be a real issue. Now they’re changing predictions every couple years. One could never have guessed a hundred years ago that men’s sperm counts would decline by a quarter before the century was through.
Gender roles have changed so completely in the last 50 years that we really don’t know where we stand sexually anymore. Who the fuck knows where we’ll be standing in the years to come? How can we possibly know what societal impacts might be doled out over the next centuries? Look at how much our globe has changed just since the internet was born in ’94. Nonetheless, science is our friend. We may not like the answers it provides us, but it’s sure as hell better than going blindly into the night. Even still, we certainly can’t marry ourselves to the information science yields; life moves too fast for science. But at least it’s a starting point.
In the meantime, girls, get yer men while the gettin’s good.

Ahh… masturbation. Not everybody does it, but everybody should.

The trouble is, most of us that do do it are routine about it. Hey, even I have my go-to tricks. Masturbation’s usually something like this: “Well, I’m horny, I’d rather be post-horny with the fun of having had an orgasm, so let me just touch myself here and I’ll get that over with…” …but without all the fancy thinking stuff, because, really, who among us plots out our masturbatory plan in advance? Half the beauty of masturbation is that no scheming needs to come into play. A bit of privacy and a willing hand, and you’re half way to post-orgasmic bliss.

Here’s the thing, though. Putting the “play” back into playing with yourself could yield a bigger, better self-serve orgasm than the ones you’ve been having all your life, and might even introduce new things into your sex life. If you’re a woman and you’ve never yet been able to orgasm (you’re not alone, don’t worry, read my posting on it here), “playing” with yourself is THE most important thing you can do that will help you get to that point where you’ll finally be able to orgasm after all.

Here’s a letter from a reader that gave me a good chuckle and prompted this mini-posting in the first place:

I came across your website and started reading, and there was this article about handjobs. Well, I am a guy, so I got some serious practice in spanking the monkey, but damn! The thing about being really sensitive at the base of the penis? I never knew!

The really sad thing is that I had to get to the advanced age of 37 years to find out. All these man-years of wanking, and the hand was always a couple inches too far up.

Oh well. The good news is I am single at the moment, so I can put this newly acquired knowledge to good use. You’ve really improved my sex life.

So, readers, start touching surrounding areas in a variety of ways. Things to consider:

• Grope yourself in other areas, caress yourself, try to heighten your arousal. For example, try using your free hand to squeeze a nipple as you play below.
• Close your eyes and try a variety of touching techniques on areas surround your favourite spots. How does it feel? Finding anything new?
• Try bringing sex toys into the equation, and don’t just follow the instructions. Using a vibrator to play over genital-surrounding areas can be very surprising. This goes for men, too! Imagine a nice vibrating toy resting under your balls as you jack off. Lovely, yes? [And you’ll have a vibrator to use with women (learn how to sterilize it, though) for those times you finish before her yet still want to please her.]
• Try taking yourself to the brink of orgasm, then stopping, and go back to watching a movie or something, and finish the orgasm a couple hours later– it’ll be bigger and with more bang for your buck, and teasing–even yourself–can be entertaining at times. (I’ve posted before about orgasm-denying masturbation before big dates when you know you’re getting laid.)

No one should be able to come into YOUR house and show you how to get things done, right? It’s all about mastering your domain. Explore self-play. It’s safe, free, and you’ll never get rejected.

(New readers: I did a series on masturbation and women way back, which I consider very worth reading, among some of my best work. They include: Why 40% of Women Don’t Masturbate, Why Women Should Masturbate (Particularly the 40%), and my rant against a misogynist who said women shouldn’t be allowed to masturbate is also worth a look.)

Some questions, I just hate receiving, and it’s because I know there’s no happy ending. Like this one.

My g/f is very lukewarm towards sex. She just doesn’t enjoy it that much, and does it for me, which by itself is a bit of a turnoff. My ex-wife and I had a very good sex life, and I have had good sex with many women over the years. But my g/f is just not much into it. I want to marry her, and I will not let the sex issue stop that because I love her and she’s my best friend, but I’m kind of bummed at the thought of bad sex for the rest of my life. It’s a subject that we don’t even seem to be able to talk about.

Now, it needs to be known that this woman’s on an anti-depressant for chronic depression, so that’s quite possibly lowering her libido.

But.

The problem here is that this woman isn’t just not talking about it; she’s not trying to like sex more, she’s not initiating, she’s not willing to investigate what might be causing the lack of libido, and, of course, she won’t even talk about it.

I mean, if I’m understanding things, this isn’t a dry patch here. This is a status quo. You’re in the pre-marriage stage, when sex is supposed to be happening all the time, right? And it’s not, right? Well, THAT’S not the best of omens, now is it?

But you seem to be doing this whole “Well, she’s a fantastic friend, I love her… she’s not much of a lover, but, boy, is she swell” thing. Admirable, yes, but you hit the nail on the head:

“I’m kind of bummed at the thought of bad sex for the rest of my life.”

Well, YEAH. Of COURSE you are! You should be! It’s not about “sex”. It’s about everything that it encompasses. Sex is tenderness, a lowering of guards, raw animal instinct, it’s even slow, lingering moments that seem to suspend time. It’s so much more than just some thrusting and grunting. It’s not just sex.

Sex is that altered state of our relationships. It’s when we’re able to strip away all the bullshit of our lives, and just get down to two naked bodies sharing a moment.

Sex and its passion have spawned great art, great literature, and great stories for all of mankind’s history. Love and lust are things that transcend time, generations, geography, and even culture. We all long to be loved, but there are those of us who are great romantics, passionate people with great libido and desiring of intimacy in all its forms, and that’s not just us being needy, that’s milleniums of cultural reinforcement and biology speaking. That’s who we are, right down to our DNA, man. Who are you to fight that?

It is absolutely insane that so many people are willing to say, “Oh, but they’re such a great person– who cares if we don’t have sex?” before signing up for marriage. What the fuck are you people thinking?

After all, every time you have bad sex that they’re not really in the mood for, or they “grin and bear/bare it”, or they just don’t want to, they’re rejecting you.

We all need to accept a little rejection, it’s part of life, we don’t always get what we want. But when it comes to wanting sex in a marriage, I don’t think it’s wrong to want what you want, or even to expect to get a little of it from time to time.

But I think you’re kidding yourself if you believe you can live with rejection as a status quo and not have it change you as a person. Do you really think signing up for what’s essentially a lifestyle filled with rejection will ever make you happy and content, regardless of what a great “friend” your wife is?

People seem to get this really silly feeling that they’re being selfish for wanting to have good sex. No, you’re simply trying to be true to what your biological requirements are. Some of us are more sexual beings, and it’s part of who we are. We can’t pretend that it’s not the case, but what we can do is, mate with people who are similarly driven.

Your girlfriend doesn’t just not like sex, she has no interest in trying to change that. Which means you either have to take what you get and like it, or you have to decide now, before you put both your futures into a marriage contract that is very likely to be something you one day break or end if you make this sacrifice that makes you “bummed out” now before you’ve even gotten before a minister, whether or not you can spend the rest of your life possibly never having that great sexual union (or any sex at all) with this woman you love but can’t really call a “lover”.

If she’s not willing to at least meet you halfway, then you seriously need to consider making her your friend, and not your lover.

The reality is, she needs to see this as being a problem. If she fails to believe it is one, and refuses to take steps like counselling, weekly sex, libido tweaking via diet, exercise, or even a change in drugs, then marrying her might be the biggest mistake you could make.

Seriously. You are a sexual guy. You deserve to know what knee-shaking, gut-wrenching, explosively intimate yet animal sex with a woman you truly love feels like. That’s not selfishness. That’s understandable, even biological. If it’s something you crave now, imagine what it’ll be like 10 years down the line, even 20. You want to be the guy cheating on his wife that he “loves” but who doesn’t ever show her love to him via intimacy and sex? You want to be wracked with guilt because you think you’re not man enough to overcome your sexual urges? Do you?

The choice is yours. You need to MAKE this conversation happen. She needs to KNOW you crave intimacy and love and affection and even orgasms. She needs to know that not only do you deserve it, but that you think she deserves it from you, too, and you have it to give. She needs to know that you guys need to be somewhat on a sex-friendly page, or this marriage can’t happen.

If she won’t work with you to at least get you both in a better place, then maybe all you have is a good living arrangement with a great friend. But even if she does start trying to be a real “lover”, then you need to take at least a year or longer before you finally do marry, because it’s easy to have sex for six weeks and then stop. You need to make sure any changes she adopts are going to be more than just temporary. You need to be sure she’s starting to feel the passion, too.

I wish I could a lacking sex life an easy thing to overcome, but it’s not. Sex and money cause the majority of the divorces out there, and it’s because of making naive decisions like “sex isn’t that important”… because it really is. Be very, very sure.

I’m not trying to prevent a marriage here; I’m trying to prevent a divorce. Think about it. Divorces happen over moments of indiscretion or years of inattention, so don’t go gently into thy good night, reader.

Earlier, at the grocery store, I got shaken out of my pouting about money, thinking of my heady week, by this adorable little two-year-old Asian girl. All dressed in pink, a plastic golden tiara perched atop her precious little head, bubbling up and down the aisle as she giggled and babbled at her mother. She radiated glee.

“Aww, how cute,” I gushed to myself. I turned the corner, pushed my way up, and thought, “Man, she gets too into this princess thing, she’s gonna be one high-maintenance teen one day. Fuckin’ Disney!”

Last year when I was working at an arts centre and had to do registrations, I used to be endlessly amused by all the adorable little girls wanting to sign up for ballet because they thought it was the first step one took toward becoming a real, live princess. A pretty pink dress, a twirl and a pose, it’s all a girl really needs, after all, isn’t it? Paris thinks so.

There are those of us who want to flat-out blame Disney for all of it. It’s Disney’s fault for everyone– the over the top two-year-old at the store, Britney Spears, Paris fuckin’ Hilton– all the bubbly, looks-first, diva-in-training girls. They’re all Disney’s fault.

Disney and their endless parade of fairytale females, girls all victimized by life in varying ways, all left clinging to hope and wishing against all wisdom that some gorgeous man’ll come along and sweep ’em off their feet, solve all their woes, and, yes, it’ll all end happily ever after.

Which works GREAT when you’re a two-dimensional figure in an animation world with a roaring soundtrack and the genius of editing to keep you at your rhythm.

Reality, however, is a wee bit trickier.

There is hope, though. There’s hope that girl who’ve seen the Incredibles will rather be ass-kicking, name-taking toughies who do some saving of their own, ‘cos they know men are just as fucked by fate as females are, and every now and then, even boys need a little savin’.

(Want to explore the alleged evils of Disney, well beyond the social ramifications of their princessifying of a whole generation of girls? Check out Carl Hiaasen’s Team Rodent. Funny but startling expose on the great Kingdom.)

Anyone who’s read me for forever and a day will know I draw upon Hunter Stockton Thompson as probably my strongest writing influence.
I was about 18 when Hunter got introduced to me by Whipped Boy, who’s lasted through the crowds of friends I had way back when, and is one of two people I’ll call to Dead Body Removal Services when required.
The other body-removing-friend is GayBoy, who I barely even knew at the time, but who I then proceeded to indoctrinate into the writings of the Good Doctor.
Who I knew better was Dan, but only for that short year that we hung out together. But we’ll come back to him in a moment.
Hunter blew my mind, and helped me figure out my own writing style, which I suspect emulates HST from time to time, but I think it’s more that his writing made my mindset finally feel all right, like it was okay to be a bit rageful and over the top. It was all right to think my opinion was the only one that mattered. If he could get away with it, then what did my journalism professors know after all? Objectivity? Fuck objectivity! Oh, how freeing that became.
Seldom have I ever truly tried to borrow HST’s style, but I bring it out on special occasions, usually ones involving drugs and travels, because sometimes imitation really, truly is the finest form of flattery.
One such time was when I tried to capture the experience of my first exposure to marijuana.
My story I wrote way back then is only on paper, somewhere in my boxes of writing… but I almost want to go digging through everything, as I’d love to see it again.
Still, I remember the start of the story, but only two people have read it, as it was before the advent of blogging, before I had an outlet. It was one of the few times back then I felt like I might be an all right writer, so it’s a bit nostalgically that I can recall my being excited enough about this one to actually show it to anyone else.
“We were somewhere around Cambie and 65th when the drugs began to take hold. I began feeling a bit light-headed and said, “Maybe you should solder–” when all of a sudden…”*
A completely honest and blatant rip-off of the brilliant opening to HST’s iconic novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it was a story about a night that forever changed me.
It was about the night that Dan introduced me to pot. He never pressured me, just let me go there if I wanted, since he and GB were indulging. The three of us hung out a fair bit for a while there, but Dan began to grow away from us. Now and then we’d still get together, and this was one of those happy convergences where we all had a good time, after when I’d begun becoming much better friends with GayBoy, and Dan was off becoming some new guy with new friends.
But the introduction to pot was huge, and changed me to my core (over time). I’m not encouraging anyone to try it; I vehemently believe a lot of people should never touch the stuff, and a lot of the people who are doing it could maybe use a break. I’m not one of them.
Yet I had been radically antidrug at that point. I’m still pretty radically anti-anything-not-pot, but I was really judgmental of potsmokers, thinking they were all unmotivated losers, swallowing Anslinger’s big ol’ myth on that count. So, y’know, toking up wasn’t exactly something I’d ever itched to do.
Thing is, this Hunter Thompson guy I’d read not too long before that, well, it made me sort of start to realize how linear my perception of the world was. Could I see more of the big picture? Was I too uptight and rigid in my assumptions? Was I missing out?
So, I tried it. Nothing huge happened. It didn’t blow my mind… it just made me feel less restrained and happy and pleasantly amused at, well, just about everything.
Not long after that, I moved up north. Within a matter of weeks, really. I’d only smoked up a handful of times, hadn’t bought it, so when I moved to the Yukon, I didn’t touch any dope since I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have a connection.
GayBoy cured that conundrum, bringing some ganja up for a visit in the spring, after I’d been up there for six months or so. It wasn’t till after he headed back south that I had the chance to finally, at long last, try dope on my own, sans company.
And it blew my mind. The Northern lights were playing on the skies and I just… got lost in it all, finally understood my smallness, and how beautiful it was that I got to plug my smallness into a world this big. I felt gifted, fortunate, and ready for the world. And the sounds! The crunch of snow under tires, the whistle of the wind… Wow. For someone born with a hearing impairment, even the most fleeting moments of aural clarity can just stop one’s heart. Amazing, amazing experience to just suddenly hear things in nature you’ve never picked up on before.
On Saturday we’ll be laying Dan to rest. 33 years old. A 10-day-old baby girl left behind, fatherless. She’s the only really sad thing in all this, but Dan certainly wasn’t robbed of life; life was robbed of him.
I may not have been friends with Dan the last 10 years, but for a short time he was someone who pushed me to write, helped me try things, and set an example as someone who may not have made millions, but who really fucking lived his life while he could. The guy really understood that “live” is a verb.
As I forge through this year of change and growth in my life, he’s already been in the back of my mind. That I should hear of his death really rocked me a bit this week, despite him being so far removed from my life of late. I’m sad he’s gone. I’m sad he and I drifted apart. I’m fortunate to have had the gift of his friendship while I did.
I cycled home from work last night, and stopped at the highest point of my ascent over the city, stared down at the skyscrapers and the inlet and across to the mountains as golden light from the setting sun washed over the peaks and the scattered marine clouds dotted their space, lit up a bowl of dope, smoked a bit, listened to MLK by u2 as I took a rest on the grass a moment, and said a prayer of thanks to Dan, because, in a way, he’s the man who taught me how to find “god” in ordinary moments in an extraordinary world.
He exalted our nature, our part of the world, this incredibly rugged, beautiful rainforest landscape that is Vancouver. Fitting, then, that he should die at its hands in a river he’d probably made his bitch time and time again.
Tonight I’m left wondering if I’ve learned all I could from those who’ve been in my life, wondering if I should be less inclined to let people slip from my grasp, wondering who’s next, what’s next.
Saturday, we’ll lay him to rest. Saturday, we’ll all remember what exuberance he had, how indomitable and immortal he always seemed. Saturday, we’ll all go back to our respective lives and, with any luck, the lessons he taught us all about life and friendship and adventure will endure long past his too short 33 years.

*”Maybe you should solder–“… That really does need expanding, doesn’t it? Right, well, Dan didn’t have a coffee table. He apparently had connections with BC Tel and managed to snag an old massive, massive… hmm, the word escapes me. Spindle? The massive 4-foot-round wooden contraptions they’d roll the hundreds of yards of exterior telephone wires around… …all right, “discarded telephone wire spindle” it is, then. So, he had this for a coffee table, about 2 feet high, and he had a soldering iron he’d keep nearby and would plug in when people came over. He’d fired it up and once we’d sparked the doobie, we all started burning sentiments into the “table” top. At some point I realized I had become transfixed in watching the heat searing the wood, the resulting smoke, and I began pressing my luck, egging on the sparks and, potentially, a fire– then I realized I was getting a little too in touch with my inner would-be arsonist and passed off the soldering rod to GayBoy with Dan laughing hysterically at me. Ahh, youth.

I had a little weepy moment at work when telling my bosses I’d need a day off for a funeral in the coming weeks, so they told me to take off for the day.

“I think it’s a sick day, Steff! Go drink a greyhound and toast your pal.”

GayBoy and I will do an impromptu wake later this evening, so that’ll be the theme. For now, though, it’s a movie and curry before an ass-kicking memorial ride for my departed friend, who was passionate about cycling.

But that’s what I’d like to write about — sports/athletics, and women.

I’ve known for a while now, thanks to my chiropractors, that women’s bodies do weird things at different times on their cycles. When I’m on mine, my joints pop in and out like a fuckin’ jack-in-the-box, man. It’s crazy. When I’m athletic, like I was last week, since I was on my period during my whole kamikaze intro to spring fitness, I really, really need to spend a long time stretching, or I could get really fucked up in a hurry.

And now science offers a definitive study that shows this link really does exist, and it’s not just new-age practitioners who buy the whole “hormonal disturbance” thing that a woman experiences on her period.

This is significant for women everywhere who can plan their schedules around their cycles and avoid potentially painful injuries Rebecca Morrison British School of Osteopathy

The study suggests the risk of injury is linked to fluctuating hormone levels which affect the muscles and ligaments.

Both tissues appear to be vulnerable midway through the menstrual cycle, while the ligaments are at greater risk at the end.

Midway through the cycle, the level of the female sex hormone oestrogen, which gives strength to muscles and ligaments, drops dramatically, resulting in sudden weakness.

I shredded my knee by picking up a piece of paper off the ground a couple years ago. I just twisted the wrong way when leaning down (it was recovering from injury at that time, almost healed) and rr-r-r-r-rrip! I felt it pop apart, and I was on crutches for 10 weeks after that. THAT was on my period.

Then again, last week I cycled around 100 kilometres, worked out 90 minutes, and did a lot of work with freeweights, so I’m obviously not suggesting staying home with a ring of garlic around your neck for protection or anything, all right?

Just sayin’, if you’re ever, ever going to take the time to stretch before and after being physical, make sure it’s when you’re cyclically most vulnerable. Learn this shit. Use it.

Maybe I’m in a bad mood because an old friend went and died on the weekend. Maybe I’m in a bad mood because I got up and saw more snow falling when we should be well into a spring that’s never yet arrived. Maybe I’m in a bad mood because it’s Monday.

But I was pretty pissy when I got this comment on one of my best old posts, The Good Girl’s Guide to Giving Great Head (Part 2):

You are a dude. No woman would recall this much detail unless she had a dick herself.

Where to even begin?

One, most average guys couldn’t describe a great blowjob to save their lives. “Well, she… I don’t know, but, man, when I came, oh! And I remember this thing she did with her tongue…” They’re just happy when a woman’s lips are on their penis, but when she starts doing things with it, well, that’s even better. (No offence, guys. 🙂

Two, good writing is ALL about the details, just like blowjobs and cooking, man. It’s all about the details. I aim to be a good writer, in all its definitions. So, I write well, and I capture details very well, it’s why I should really be writing manuals for a living. But then I’d be bored and would have to kill myself, so, no, I blog instead.

Three, you just insulted every woman alive, including yourself. What, you don’t think a woman could get that good at giving head? You think every woman sees a penis and goes, “God, get me out of this as quick as possible. Give him a really itchy trigger. Man, I hate doing this” or something, and then just turns stupid and can’t remember the series of things she did to make him whimper and groan?

I really fucking hate it when people either a) steal this post of mine — which has been plagiarized all over the fucking web (gutless thieving fucking cowards) or b) think I had to be a GUY to know what to do with a penis.

No, I’m not a guy. No, I’m not a “trained professional”. No, I’ve never taken biology class. No, I’ve never taught or have been taught sexuality.

But I give a wicked blowjob, and I love the power it gives me. I make grown men crumple beneath me. It’s fabulous. I’m that person who sees life through hyper-detailed eyes. It yields me terrific results. I remember that everything I do is a collection of smaller actions that build into larger events. That’s what makes life fun. When I do anything sexual, I don’t often close my eyes. Instead, I watch my partner’s reactions, every breath they take and every move they make, and I’m really fully aware of the sensations I’m causing. You throw my great memory and my penchant to detail into the mix, and whew, you get some of this blog, babe.

Sigh. It’s what you get when you throw a philosophy addict into the art of sexuality and get ’em to write about how to make it all good. I live the overthought life. It pays off when I write about giving hummers, it would seem.

But I ain’t no guy. I’ve written about PMS and periods a few times too many to be male. But if you, cynical reader, want to delude yourself into thinking all women are too aloof to write such a thing, then I guess that’s your very-1950s’ prerogative. Go for it.

Oh, let it be known here and now then: I love comments. I’m just fully prepared to throw down when I see cheesy comments that need some commentary. (Fortunately, that seldom happens.)

(By the way, a lot of the older posts, like The Good Girl’s Guide, were originally posted on my old blog, The Cunting Linguist, but I didn’t copy all the comments over. This one was left this morning, so it’s a totally new comment, ergo probably a totally new reader. Or, was. Ha.)