quizzical pussy

Ever wondered why the woman on the left is so unattractive?

Some people get very, very specific about what kind of people they’re physically attracted to.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Feeling guilty for having a type is a bit like feeling like a heel for preferring pecan waffles to strawberry Poptarts. It’s subjective, and you’re the subject. As long as you’re treating people who fall into your type like human beings rather than fetish fuel, follow your dreams and pass the syrup. It would be irrational to expect someone to be physically attracted to everyone, and you don’t owe anyone your attraction any more than they owe it to you to conform to your ideals.

But then there are those who take having a type to a whole new level, and get skull diagrams specific about what’s attractive to them. Take Erik Holland, the man behind femininebeauty.info (Warning: May contain body shaming in flavors both typical and exotic, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and gratuitous evolutionary psychology). Erik seems preternaturally concerned about the mainstreaming of “masculinized women”¹ as attractive, and infiltration of the fashion industry by gay men, who promote (you guessed it) masculinized women as a beauty ideal!

What’s a masculinized woman? So glad you asked. Apparently, any woman (typified by high fashion models, apparently) with a strong jawline, prominent cheekbones, a waist-to-hip ratio over .65, and/or other physical properties that seem to matter a lot to precisely Erik Holland. Also, I increasingly suspect the more I read through the site, any woman who is not white is hopelessly masculinized.

You can read here about all the features that are undesirable on a female body, and view the skull diagrams that I was totally not making up. Never before had I wondered, even for only a split second until I remembered I don’t give a shit, if maybe my ribcage is too big.²

Do not ask me why these features, even if they are “masculine”, are undesirable. He can dress it up as a crusade to save women from eating disorders or something, but I’ve pretty sure this is just about what’s desirable to this one guy. What’s more, I don’t understand what he’s even seeing half the time. Heidi Klum up there? Practically a man. The woman on the right? That’s a real woman. I do not understand why, exactly, but there you have it.

Pretty sure this is just what happens when you confuse “what I’m attracted to” with “objectively attractive”. Even if you have a shrewdness of statistical studies saying that people generally agree with you, that doesn’t magically make it Truth. It just means that many, maybe even the majority, of people agree with each other. But that’s not actually what objective reality is made out of.

There’s no objective beauty standard. If everyone suddenly adhered to any one rigid ideal there would be throngs of disappointed people, mourning the loss of the most attractive (to them) bodies on the planet. If masculinity and femininity are even meaningful words, I consider them accessories rather than musculoskeletal markers. But even buying into this website’s strange paradigm, “masculinized” women look just fine to me. So do “feminized” men. In all seriousness, what on earth he even talking about most of the time?

In conclusion, one man has clearly put in an immense amount of effort to exhaustively define and glorify his ideal woman, but that’s not the extraordinary thing. The really impressive part is what a prick he is to everyone else ever in the process.

P.S. Ladies, if you’re still in doubt after studying those graphs, keep in mind you can send him your pictures and he’ll tell you if you’re feminine enough! Let me know how that goes, won’t you please?

1. Scare quotes because what the fuck? [↩]
2. Answer: No. My lungs are not rattling around inside there, and it has not as of yet broken through my skin. [↩]

So, I’ve been thinking. ConTuesday has, to my knowledge, never posted a confession featuring ghosts, werewolves, or Indiana Jones. Am I to suppose, then, that these things don’t exist?

We’ve had one or two about unicorns, though. That’s reassuring.

This week’s confessions:

I had an affair with a married man on a business trip. Emotionally he was just a friend with benefits (I don’t miss him or want more than friendship), but the sex was some of the best I ever had, and I can never tell anyone about how good it was, how sexy he was, how incredible that two-month affair was. God, it was good. I still see him at work, but we mutually agreed it was over and never to be spoken of again.

The most ironic part? He introduced me to his wife after the fact. She’s my best friend. Some days this bugs the shit out of me.

All that guilt, (possibly one-sided) awkwardness, potential drama, and no more best sex ever? Ethics aside, this is why cheating sucks.

So there’s this guy I met online– he lives about half the country away from me, but we really hit it off. We’ve been talking a lot– most of the day– and he’s been really nice, flirtatious, talking about sex, telling me I’m pretty and there aren’t a lot of girls like me. But he’s more experienced than the type of guy I usually go for (i.e. he’s hit on girls before) so I think if he REALLY liked me he would make some kind of move, and maybe he thinks the distance or the fact that we met on the Internet or my polyamory is a dealbreaker. Or maybe he’s this flirtatious with everyone and I’m building it up to be a big deal because I have a crush on him.

I know, I know, just fucking say it, what’s the worst that could happen, right?

He also mentioned a while ago that playing hard-to-get gets one more dates. Is this some kind of hint or something that he wants to chase me? Or is he just making conversation? I suck at hints, why can’t people just talk to each other?

I’m also stymied by the proper asking-someone-out method via the Internet. Do you send an email? Do you do it in chat? Maybe over Skype? (Does he even have Skype?)

Sorry for the marathon confession…

I bet I have a reader or six who have been in this situation, more or less, and perhaps they’ll have suggestions for you.

But really, email, chat, or Skype seems fine for confessing a crush. If I were into you too, I’d get all melty inside no matter which one you used. I doubt I’m alone in that.

So far the only thing I dislike about Roller Derby is that after practice my muscles hurt so much I can’t masturbate properly.

The sacrifices you make for being one of my fetishes! Thank you. A thousand times thank you.

I was watching a documentary featuring animator Nick Park creating a Wallace and Gromit film. It shows him working wtih the clay figures for the stop-motion animation and one little blob of clay was not quite doing what he wanted it to do. He sort of growled at it to ”do as you’re told” and I was instantly *wet*. ”Ooh, make me, Mr. Park. Pretty please?”

I like the way your mind works. That is all.

Have a confession, secret, boast, or lamentation? Give it to me.

I’m on Fetlife, but I don’t use it much. My curiosity about BDSM is steadily growing, so I think that will change, but at the moment I only visit occasionally.

To tell the truth, I’m kind of trying to work myself up to going to my first munch. It seems like it’d be either terrifying or boring (possibly both) to go to one alone. Hey, Courage? You’re needed in the general vicinity of the sticking place.

But there is one task for which Fetlife is uniquely suited, and I will always, no matter what, maintain a profile there for this purpose. When I’m considering cities I might like to move to in future, I always hop on Fetlife and see how many users are in that area. If their ranks are strong, I feel okay about the possibility of living there one day. If not, I mentally scratch the place off my list.

This might not be rational, but it is immensely reassuring. I may not have a whole lot of kinkster cred, but I prefer to know that I can find a respectable number of  joyous, responsible perverts in my area at any given time, and I probably always will. It makes me feel less alone, somehow.

(image source)

Look what I pulled out of an old trunk in the attic of the internet, lovingly wrapped in Netscape’s trousseau: groupiedirt.com

I’m so relieved that I’ve finally found somewhere to go when I need to know what the Goo Goo Dolls’ drummer was like in bed. Back when the Goo Goo Dolls were a thing.

Which I’m assuming they’re not anymore.

Have I mentioned yet that I kind of like sex toys? Have we covered that? Yes? Oh, good.

Well, I might start reviewing toys for Babeland, one of my favorite purveyors of sex toys, soon. Notice there’s a little banner for them on my sidebar now. That’s how excited I am about this (plus the banner has a hot chick, so there’s that too).

If you like sex toy reviews, the good news is that they may be coming in a little thicker over here in the not-too-distant future. If you don’t like sex toy reviews, feel free to send me other things to review. I particularly enjoy British roadsters.

“I want to visit a swingers’ club one of these days, just to see what it’s like.” I was sprawled out on Laramy’s bed chattering away, which is one of my newer hobbies. Laramy Fuquerton and I have been fucking for a few months now, with sterling success.
“Are there even any around here?” he wondered.
“Of course there are. They’re everywhere!” I said in the authoritative tone I save for bullshit. “…Well, I heard about one once.”

I’m not pretending I’d be visiting a swingers’ club strictly as an anthropologist, or a journalist, or to gawk at the sideshow freak adulterers, or as ambassador from Finland. It’s just that to participate in playful, no-strings sex with strangers (which I’ve never done, not even having had a single one night stand) I’d have to feel both comfortable and interested in record time. I wouldn’t rule that out, but I also wouldn’t bring an economy-sized tub of lube in anticipation. So yeah, really. I actually just want to see. Sometimes in a person’s sex life an idea presents itself that appears to have equal potential to be either hideously awkward or kind of neat, and sometimes you gamble on neat, because it’s a new experience. Barring actual trauma, the alchemy of time usually softens awkward to hilarious anyway.

One of the cool things about Laramy that I’m coming to understand more and more is that he’s very game. If I said “Hey, I’ve been thinking lately that it might be fun to try naked judo-style grappling, but in an igloo,” I’m starting to think he’d say “How do we make this happen?” and start researching how to avoid frostbite (stay tuned for the upcoming entry on how that went [you should probably know I'm lying]). Maybe it shouldn’t seem especially odd that a guy would respond with at least a tinge of interest to the prospect of going to a sex club, but his total lack of hesitation signifies a willingness of attitude that’s all too rare, in my experience. Anyway, he pulled up a listing of clubs in our state and we got down to business.

Not wild monkey sex business. Reconnoitering business.

I conspicuously didn’t say I haven’t a single anthropological bone in my body because that would’ve been a blatant lie and I never lie on the internet. Swingers as a subculture are fascinating. I want to ethnographize the shit out of them. Like most groups, they have their own little shorthand language. Of course it has many cognates in BDSM, regular sex-literate culture, and the sex industry, but some elements are idiomatic. Hard swap (two couples switching partners for full-on intercourse) vs. soft swap (switching that’s limited to oral play), for instance, is something I’ve never come across outside of swinging parlance because really, where else would you have opportunity to invoke these concepts but in (as they say) The Lifestyle? Swingers’ clubs are either on-premise or off-premise, which essentially means you can play on site or you can’t. Many of these seem to be more like Fight Club-style organizations that only exist when they’re in session rather than brick-and-mortar nightclubs. They all claim to be “upscale” and “drama-free”, and will likely repeat both these terms several times in their About Us pages and FAQs. Most will try to keep things innovative with woefully unsurprising themes: wet t-shirt contest, leather and lace, bad boys and naughty school girls, and so on. Some of them even use those wrist band sex codes of urban legend, which probably teeters on the line between whimsical and tawdry, but I think comes out on the adorable former side after all.

We waded through a lot of these clubs’ websites, and something happened to us that may happen to real anthropologists in the field: we came up against a cultural difference that seemed almost insurmountable. The website design was uniformly terrible. No. It was really, really terrible. It looked like the bastard child of 1997 and a terrible animated flash ad had thrown up all over a geocities account and then beat off to its death throes. I have no right to be, nor am I, too much of a web design snob. I don’t demand anything too marvelous when I visit a site, but I do ask that it be clean, legible, and proofread within a reasonable margin of error, or else unflattering thoughts about the author start to insinuate themselves, unbidden. I guess it’s like looking at someone’s profile on an internet dating site and noticing that the owner can’t grasp the difference between “you’re” and “apple”. Sorry about your illiteracy and all, but damned if I’m going to fuck you.

Is it because swinging is a throwback to the seventies and attracts an older crowd than I’d anticipated, and maybe they’re a little out of touch? Is it because they’re too busy having naughty school girl fun to bother to spend any time or energy on web presence? It is a mystery! The first terrible page we went to made us laugh. By the fourth the trend was becoming worrisome. When the tenth had a bad animated .gif of a woman in a sparkly bikini, it seemed like it was time to quit for the day. “Seeing a website like this makes me determined not to have sex with the person who made it,” said Laramy.
“I’m actually turned off now,” I agreed.

Swingers’ clubs: I’m not ready to give up on you. I’m still curious. I’m still hoping things will work out between us, but I need you to meet me halfway. I just want to be able to read about your toga orgy parties and masquerade balls without getting queasy. I mean, aren’t ANY of you geeks? Please say that there are geek swingers and nerd swingers and dork swingers, and maybe even a bookworm swinger or two. I know this sounds terribly xenophobic, but in this specific sense I think I really do prefer to have sex with my own kind.