Today's post isn't really about sex. But this makes up for it, no?

I was born in the United States, and that’s where I live. Today is Independence Day here. It commemorates not any victory or truce, but simply the intention to stop being a trodden-upon colony. This is kind of like celebrating your anniversary with a paramour on the day you first admitted you wanted to fuck each other rather than the day you actually did for the first time. Which is fine, really, just an interesting choice that becomes completely meaningless unless there’s some decisive follow-through. Which, in the case of the Declaration of Independence, there was. It was called the Revolutionary War.

I’m somewhat conflicted as a U.S. citizen. It always feels awkward that there’s not a proper word for us. “American” is desperately broad and kind of pushy, as if the manifest destiny myth gives us the right to claim ourselves the sole possessors of all flavors and varieties of Americas, some of which are entire continents. Sure, “America” in this case is just shorthand for “United States of America”, and no one else seems to need it as much as we do (try saying United Statesian. It just doesn’t work), but it bothers me anyway. Other things bother me more profoundly. Our country was never, even once, all integrity and liberty and pie. The United States government and its citizens systematically slaughtered and displaced the people of sovereign native nations to get us where we are today. They enslaved and exploited those people and so many others for generations. No ends justify those means.

I don’t believe our founding fathers were infallible or indefatigably noble. I don’t think that they necessarily planned for “all men are created equal” to mean seriously fucking everyone someday. They were, as we are, products of their era and culture, and that means they had some pretty shitty ideas about plenty of subjects. Instead of perfect intentions and godlike wisdom (or even the moral high ground), though, they gave us wonderful promises and forged them into law. That’s their beautiful legacy.

What I love about my home are the promises it was built on. Those flawed men gave us the framework to grow into an honest, fair, and free society, or as close as we’re likely to ever get. I intensely believe this, and it makes me grateful and yes, proud.

But just because those promises were made doesn’t mean they’re automatically kept. I don’t just think, I observe that we’re not as free as we think we are in this country. Votes become increasingly difficult to verify as paper ballots are phased out. Appointing corporate lobbyists to White House cabinet and advisory positions has become de rigueur. People are lining up to hand in their reproductive rights, relinquish free speech (funny how limiting someone else’s rights also compromises your own), and to thwart the one provision in the Constitution that seems designed to give us a fighting chance if everything goes irretrievably to hell. We’re losing cherished friends, family, and compatriots in two interminable wars that most of us don’t seem to believe in. Our president, who was stridently opposed to the Patriot Act while he was campaigning, recently extended it by a year, and was met with precious little outrage.

The government can do bad things. It will sometimes try to do them in secret. There are recorded, admitted instances where this has happened in the past. So I have to ask, has any government in history ever cleaned up its act and restored its integrity on its own, without a coup, a war, or at least the undeviating insistence of an incensed public? What makes us think a government that, for example, covertly performed mind-control experiments on many of its citizens without their informed consent mere decades ago can be trusted today?

And yet, apathy thrives. Helplessness encroaches.

I realize that everyone has a different vision of the ideal America (mine has a lot of naked frolicking). I don’t know the answers to everything, and I’m not pretending to. I just feel very strongly that no good can come from a nation’s citizens having fewer rights and sitting idly by while more important promises are broken. Even if you’re not using all your rights or you don’t particularly like some of them, aren’t they… I dunno… kind of nice to have? Just in case?

My fellow United Statesians, have a great Independence Day. See fireworks. Grill meat (or tofu, if you’re kinky like that) over fire. Celebrate your state’s relaxed sodomy laws. Do something outdoors. Our nation is beautiful and you have every right to love it. But today I feel bound to remind myself that freedom isn’t something you’re necessarily born with and get to keep. That’s the way it should be, in a perfect world, but in reality freedom can be taken away at any time. That’s when you have to decide whether or not you’re going to declare your intentions to fight for it. And then, fucking follow through.

Countless times I’ve heard and read about how a woman is inescapably and biologically submissive: the penetrated, the supine, the taken. The image of being overcome and driven into is the source of apocryphal radical feminist notions that all penetration is at best a violent act, at worst automatic rape.

But to me, having something plunge inside an orifice that’s all-too-happy to accommodate it doesn’t feel all that passive. Nor does gripping that something in the crush of my mighty orgasm. Of course I’ve felt myself in the submissive position in sex before– in ways both lovely and horrible, but being penetrated wasn’t the factor that made it so.

One of the most alarming and saddening articles I’ve ever read on the subject of sex was Virginia Vitzthum’s 1999 Strap-on Epiphany. In it, Virginia recounts her experience of pegging (before it was called that) her boyfriend, Adam.

The article starts innocently enough. Sure, it flirts with the idea that a woman allowing someone to enter her body is empowering in its vulnerability or something, but it really doesn’t disturb me until she actually starts fucking Adam. Once she penetrates him, shit gets weird. (I refuse to resist pointing out that the link to the second page of this article says “Defiling Adam”. This is indicative of exactly the attitude you’re about to see.) Observe:

As “my” huge appendage disappeared inside him, his eyes showed shame, trust, fear and a sort of helpless adoration. In a way I’d never understood those words before, he was mine. The knowledge I could really hurt this person by being less than careful made me feel responsible, protective. The vulnerability appalled me at the same time; it was vaguely disgusting that he would let someone do this to him. Mixed in with the disgust was possessiveness. The thought of anyone else penetrating him seemed revolting. These observations clicked into place in quick succession; I felt like a projector being loaded with slides of maleness, of male seeing.

…I was conquering, silent, responsible, the taker. With his legs spread, Adam was agreeable, inviting, ashamed, taken.

When I first read this I was shaken. I’d never used a strap-on, and I wasn’t a man, so I felt completely unequipped to answer the question of IS THIS TRUE? Does penetrating someone really give you contempt for them? Is the act of being penetrated disgusting and weak somehow? This Virginia bitch had really upset me by suggesting that the sexual interactions I was having may be entirely different (in troubling, corrupt ways) to the people I was sharing them with.

I asked a few male friends, my boyfriend at the time. Some said, “Yeah, that sounds about right,” and some said “She’s overthinking it.”

In truth, I think that some people might equate penetrating with power, but it’s not an inevitable conclusion. Virginia’s views here weren’t objective, and they tell us more about her than they necessarily do about “men”. They tell us nothing about the native symbolism of a sex act.

Are you submissive to the food you eat? Is a canteen at the mercy of the water inside it? Eclipsing, holding, consuming, overlapping, absorbing aren’t words of weakness to me. We choose to think of the partner who welcomes the other into his/her body in such passive terms, but that’s choice, that’s perspective. It’s not innate to the nature of sex; it’s a commentary on our social paradigm.

I’ve had moments when I had a cock inside me and I was conquering, silent, responsible, the taker. Well, not silent, but close enough. And I refuse to be surrendering, tractable, helpless, and (wtf?) ashamed just because it feels good to fill my holes anymore than I would presume to project those words onto a guy I was pegging. It’s fucking piffle, is what it is.

…So 1999, anything else you want to tell me about sex? I’m all ears.

(image source)

Don’t you dare tell your little girl there’s no monster lurking in the closet. Because I just read the abstract of his paper on Nerve-Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty. And actually, I think he’s not so much in a closet as practicing pediatric urology in New York. Either way, he’s out there and he’s the stuff of nightmares.

I don’t know how parents determine their daughter’s clitoris is “too big”. I don’t even know what that means. I was under the impression that big clitorises were sexy anyway, but no one should be evaluating a child’s genitals in such a way unless they’re presenting an actual medical problem. “Being bigger than average” isn’t a medical problem. But somehow, a bunch of parents decided their daughters’ clitorises were too big, and turned to Dr. Dix P. Poppas for help (you probably think I made that name up, but I didn’t even!).

Dr. Dix P. Poppas is nothing if not helpful. According to this and this and this he’ll helpfully hack into your child’s healthy clitoris (as young as 4 months) and pare it down to some arbitrary acceptable size. Then he’ll stimulate her clitoris with a vibrating device and ask her how it feels… not just once, no! Every year. He’ll keep a chart. A chart of your daughter’s mutilated clitoris’s sexual response. Across years.

There’s no way to convey this in normal-sized font, so…

Creepy. Evil. Creepy.

Why this is guy allowed perform experimental surgery on children and then systematically molest them is anyone’s guess.

I posted about this on twitter the other night, and comparisons were naturally made to male circumcision, which I’m also entirely against (concerning male circ, Holly Pervocracy wrote about it recently, and made some excellent points, as she tends to do). I’m not sure if we’re talking equal atrocities considering the potentially-scarring, prolonged aftercare involved, but to me these seem like obvious civil rights issues. We’re talking about the physical integrity of a person. You don’t fuck with that, even if you’re that person’s legal guardian. What am I missing here?

Maybe it’s down to the fact that I don’t want kids and can’t realistically put myself in the position of a parent, so maybe there are complexities to this I can’t grasp, but when we’re talking circumcision I’m appalled when otherwise-intelligent people whose opinions I respect trot out tired, unsound reasons for cutting off pieces of their hypothetical babies’ genitals. I’m not going to fight all the stupid pro-circ. myths right now because Intact America does a thorough job here. But really, the bottom line is that I just feel that cutting a child’s genitals for arbitrary reasons is never justified. Trust me, when they’re adults they’ll have plenty of time to decide if they want to mutilate their own genitals.

Why would anyone force a child to submit to any surgery that’s medically unnecessary? Or does that just go back to the “Why is there evil in the world?” question.

(image source)

She's measuring.

My hair is currently– for the first time ever– short enough to easily determine which direction the whorl goes. It opens up a whole world of possibilities. Like, I can finally figure out whether I’m a gay man or not.

In the early to mid aughts we started hearing about research that suggested that more gay men had counterclockwise hair whorls (about 23%) than one finds in the general population (about 8%). This accompanied other modern-day phrenology like relative finger lengths, thumbprint ring density, left-handedness, that all seemed to correlate (according to some studies) in varying degrees with gayness.

But it seems like the finger length and whorl things are trotted out most often, probably because you can compare them more easily in a social setting, but they’re subtler than left-hand dominance. Can you imagine saying, “Oh, you’re left handed! Surely you’re gay!” It would be absurd! But I’ve heard people say that a counterclockwise whorl means someone’s gay, having a longer index than ring finger means that you like guys, or having a longer ring finger means you’re attracted to women.

I don’t know about you, but by varying the pitch of my fingers slightly I can make either one look longer, although I think my index finger is slightly longer, which means OH GOD I’M NOT REALLY A BISEXUAL! I also have a clockwise whorl and I’m right-handed. Oh, god. But actually, no one seems to study the physical differences in the bisexual population. I guess they’re just waiting for us to make up our minds.

I feel like things get dangerous when the public gets a hold of data from (more or less) scientific studies or surveys. Holly’s post on Monday points out a perfect example of this phenomenon, discussing some article that dimly justifies tired gender stereotypes with the decrees of some monolithic entity call science, which doesn’t appear to function quite like any actual scientific community I’ve ever heard of.

Take the whorl thing. The only study I’m aware of that examines the population of counterclockwise whorls on homosexual heads occurred at a Pride Festival in Southern California. Its sample size was about 50 men, which isn’t large enough to “prove” much of anything. We could say that the study suggests that gay men may be more apt to have counterclockwise whorls, but without actually knowing if there was adequate control we could also say that counterclockwise whorls could be disproportionately represented in Southern Californians, or in extroverts, who might be more liable to attend an outdoor festival, or maybe there are more counterclockwise whorls in men who are out, but closeted men have the standard 8% of whorls. We don’t know. We didn’t do the study, and unless we have access to all the information we might just be parroting piffle.

There are reasons it would be cool if we could prove that homosexuality was genetic. All that talk about “choice” might melt away, and maybe people would stop being jerks, right? Right? Maybe. But finding a “cause” for gayness is pretty damn close to protesting that it’s “not their fault”, isn’t it? And there’s no fault anywhere, so we definitely don’t have to go looking for whom to blame. At this time in history, isolating a “gay gene”, or the non-simplistic form of the same concept, would invariably spawn a movement to cure it. Same-sex attraction existing is awesome. It adds to the rich tapestry of human experience, and I personally don’t want to be cured of it because chicks are hot.

The thing is, it makes a good story to say that there are physical “symptoms” of gayness, but as far as I’m concerned the only reliable tell is the whole “sleeping with someone of the same gender” thing, and even that can sometimes steer you wrong.

…Oh wait. Maybe it kind of is. Ugh.*

Laramy and I watched porn together for the first time on Monday night.

Actually, it was the first time I’ve ever watched porn with a partner, and I’m not sure why I haven’t before. I’ve never been one to take exception to my partner enjoying porn, and I enjoy it on occasion myself, so why no one wanted to watch porn with me until now is a mystery. Maybe previous partners thought I’d get in the way of their enjoyment or something, gumming up their fantasies with my flesh-and-bloodiness.

This isn’t to say that I want to watch porn while having sex, especially not as a routine. I can’t imagine too many things more joyless than getting ready to get it on with someone and hearing, “Oh wait, let me just put on this movie of people fucking to distract me from the fact that I’m fucking you, non-buxom, non-blonde, pale girl without a tramp stamp whose name I can’t recall just now. By the way, could you move your head so I can see the screen? Don’t want to lose my erection.” That would be depressing.

In fact, as someone who usually masturbates to pictures or just doesn’t use visual aids, I think porn is fun to watch, but it’s very hit-or-miss for me in terms of arousal. But watching it with someone cool always seemed like it might be fun and sexy: laughing at the cheesy parts together, critiquing techniques and positions, getting turned on and forgetting the movie halfway through. All fun, right?

Never happened that way for me. The closest I’d come until recently was when Edwin Pomble’s roommate pulled out Pirates one night and informed us it was the funniest porn of all time. “This I have to see!” I declared. Edwin agreed that we could all watch it together as long as we fast-forwarded through the sex scenes. …Yeah. This was shortly before I realized I’d rather be fucking his roommate.

When Laramy asked me if I wanted to watch Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy, a 1976 musical porn starring Kristine DeBell, with him my only misgiving was that I find nearly everything made in the 1970s ugly–not people, obviously (call me), but TV and movies, etc. I’m not sure what went on with film processing or whatever during that decade, but it’s unacceptable. But hey, I finally had an offer to watch porn with someone hot, so I was going to take it! Plus, Laramy loathes musicals and likes porn, so I was looking forward to a hilarious internal conflict at the very least.

The film is pretty ridiculous. Which is fair, because Alice in Wonderland is a literary tribute to the sublime within the ridiculous. On the plus side it didn’t take itself too seriously, there were some crazy hot chicks in it (I watch gay porn for the men; straight porn is all about the girls for me), and there was one section where, shortly after a lesbian nurse scene, they actually had sing-along lyrics posted: “His ding-a-ling up! His ding-a-ling up! We got his ding-a-ling up!” referring to Alice’s  messianic lifting of Humpty Dumpty’s erectile dysfunction where the hot nurses had failed. Needless to say, it was a fun movie.

The problem was, neither of us found it all that arousing. Sure, there were a couple brief moments where I felt myself getting into it, but then some new absurdity would get in the way and they’d all have to sing about it or stumble through some halfhearted rhyming dialog. It felt a lot more like watching a hilariously bad movie than a hilariously hot one.

Oh, we still had awesome sex afterward. But we both agreed, not without a twinge of disappointment, that the musical porn we watched beforehand had very little to do with it.

I must say, I’m fairly excited to see the upcoming Erica McLean’s Alice starring Sunny Lane and featuring April Flores as the Queen of Hearts (see Epiphora’s glad tidings about the project here). Fleshbot indicated that maybe it was scheduled to come out on Monday, the very day we watched the old Alice, which would’ve been a freakish coincidence since I thought it was coming out later. But I’m not so sure that it has, since the website doesn’t seem to have any clues as to how to get it.

Anyway, our porn-watching experiment was a blast, and I think we’re going to make this a regular thing. Musicals, probably not so much, although I did make him suffer through The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. early on in our relationship. Love me, love every single one of those 5,000 fingers, dammit.

*Or maybe it’s just our dirty, dirty minds and he was just being very nice to that little girl. The world may never know.

Sometimes I go on Facebook and notice that my little teenage cousin has once again changed her relationship status. She’s openly gay, except for a brief interlude with a boy during which she was “interested in” women and men, but then switched it to women a week later.

Every time her status switches back to single again I do a little internal wince for her because I know breakups are hard. Every time it swings back to “in a relationship” I grin because I know that starting a new relationship is exciting and heady, and I like to think that’s what she’s feeling.

I don’t talk to her much. I don’t even Facebook chat with her. It’s safe to say that I would never learn about these little ins and outs of her personal life if it weren’t for the magic of social networking.

I came a little late to the Facebook party. I graduated university shortly before it launched, and considered it a college thing when it first started getting popular (you know, cause it kinda was).  I saw no reason to join until my little brother stopped answering emails and phone calls and it became increasingly clear that the best way to reach him was through Facebook message. That’s when  I folded and signed up.

I’d been in an exclusive relationship with Edwin Pomble for a few years at that point, but when filling out my profile info I just left the relationship status blank. I wasn’t “single”, I wasn’t “in a relationship”, “it” wasn’t “complicated”… it just wasn’t anything. It wasn’t like I was planning to use Facebook as a dating site, and all six of my Facebook friends had met my boyfriend, who wasn’t even on Facebook himself. So I figured, what was the point?

Part of me automatically tries not to fall into the trap of defining myself by my relationship status. It’s probably a fairly common and natural reaction after being in a relationship where one has lost one’s identity (see: Reginald Sleeth). I want to be me first, and then someone’s girlfriend or whatever. I’ve gotten that very wrong in the past. My feminist side influences this too, demanding to know why it should make any difference to anyone whether I’m single or seeing someone. I’m the same person either way, dammit!

The wincing and grinning that I do when I read my cousin’s announcements aren’t meant like that, though. I don’t think she’s worth more when she has a girlfriend; I just sympathize with the feelings that likely come along with her status changes. I think most people are the same way. I could easily have been overthinking this “stop telling me I’m nothing until someone loves me in full digital view!” stance. In fact, I probably was.

But, my decision to leave my relationship status blank wasn’t all political. I didn’t even pretend to myself that it was. See, I also wasn’t very happy in my relationship with Edwin. Even as I was signing up and not disclosing my relationship status I felt very relieved to be avoiding the inevitable change when I finally successfully ended things with him in the future. I felt more and more comfortable with my choice as our relationship disintegrated. Meanwhile he signed up for Facebook and several of his friends friended me, and still my status was blank. When we finally broke up I didn’t have to change a thing in cyberspace.

Did I avoid Facebook drama altogether this way? No. When Edwin decided months later that he didn’t want to stay friends or remain in any kind of contact I unfriended him on Facebook. It seemed the thing to do. But he called me, very upset, as soon as he saw, and told me he’d changed his mind and wanted to try to be friends after all. Ironically, I guess Facebook had just made it all too real.

I actually kind of met Laramy Fuquerton through Facebook. We had tons of friends in common but hadn’t met yet when he friended me and we started chatting. After we’d been properly introduced and had been hanging/making out a little while, he joked “We should be each others’ ‘it’s complicateds’,” referencing the old xkcd (see above).

But we didn’t do that. Months passed and my relationship status didn’t appear and Laramy’s didn’t change.  Now, I’m not so afraid of commitment I can’t tell the internet I have a boyfriend, and I don’t actually feel like I’m pandering to some patriarchal standard if I disclose my relationship status. But part of me felt like I’d taken a stand that relationship status wasn’t important, and I should stick to that.

But lately it occurred to me that I wanted to be “in a relationship” with Laramy anyway. No, it’s not important if you tell your second cousins and coworkers of yore and people you were sort of friends with in 8th grade that you’re dating someone. But all my close friends know me as someone who avoids commitment and tries to steer clear from all the sentimental trappings that can creep into the room while you’re just trying to fuck someone. And this was one of the most decisive gestures I could’ve made to indicate that it’s different this time. Because this time I’m really, really happy with someone rather than just tolerating his personality to get some sex. I know, I’m such a romantic.

So we talked about it, and he was into it, and we did it. We became boyfriend and girlfriend on a website rather than just in boring old meatspace. And a few people whom I’d mentioned Laramy to several times were all like “congrats on ur new relationship! ^_^” because apparently the status change had a lot more impact than actually saying the words “my boyfriend”.

More and more we’re hearing that it’s not official until it’s on Facebook. Horsefeathers. But still, sometimes it seems that way. Now that I’m in a relationship that I really don’t mind being official, it seems like there really just might be a point in broadcasting it.

This past fall/winter was truly a time of prodigious fucking. I say this because out of my friends and family, roughly 6,000 people have babies due this summer. It’s madness.

I don’t get the whole baby thing. My reproductive drive, my biological clock, is completely absent. I’ve never wanted kids; I’ve never even thought “maybe someday…”. I didn’t like to play with dolls as a kid (My Little Ponies FTW), I wish I were sterile now, and nothing has ever shaken my utter disinterest in baby-having. Which is weird considering that my baby-making (read: fucking) drive is insatiable and biologically you’d think those two things might be linked. I guess I just prefer orgasms to changing diapers. Actually, when you put it that way it’s not even slightly weird.

I realize that everyone is different, and evolutionarily speaking, I’m the one who’s broken here. I’m an evolutionary dead-end and all these happy mommies-to-be are passing on their genes. Still, it boggles my mind that there are people so enthusiastic about living my worst nightmare. But however hard it may be, I try to be polite when people are getting excited about their waxing bellies and baby registries and so forth, and I make an effort to listen to their thoughts on impending parenting challenges.

One of my friends (due in August, I think) is a feminist and an engineer. She’s unsure of whether she’s carrying a boy or a girl, but either way she intends to practice gender neutral parenting as far as practicality allows. Gender neutral parenting, as I understand it, tries to insulate a child from expectations to conform to gender stereotypes (e.g. girls wear princess dresses and play with dolls, boys get all the cool toys), allowing children the freedom to make up their minds about interests and preferences. This parenting style sounds awesome… idealistic, difficult, and probably frustrating at times, but awesome.

My friend mentioned several things, including the fact that she’s becoming more and more sensitive to gendered sayings like “boys will be boys”, and that she doesn’t intend to dress her child in the traditional pink or blue to denote her/his sex.

I don’t dislike pink, but I really, really dislike the practice of slapping pink on something (e.g. a cell phone, skateboard, or gun) and expecting it to automatically appeal to women. I also dislike the fact that little boys– hell, even men– are discouraged from wearing and liking pink for no good reason. Far be it from me to say that you can’t dress your little girl in pink or your little boy in blue. I don’t care how you dress your child. But I’m not sure I buy the suggestion that these are innate color preferences dictated by gender.

One study performed a few years ago by Newcastle University researchers reported that female test subjects tended to like colors at the redder end of the spectrum compared to men. Apparently because they found that this pattern was true for a handful of subjects born and raised in China, so the researchers concluded that the preference is biological. According to one of the researchers: “Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – reddish fruits, healthy, reddish faces. Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preference.”

I don’t understand how you get to exclude social conditioning and cultural impact as factors just because 37 of your subjects come from a non-isolated foreign country. That seems wildly assumptive to me.

In Western society, pink=girl blue=boy is a very recent phenomenon, emerging in the last hundred years or so. More interesting still, many sources suggest that in the past these colors were reversed, and many magazines and books listed blue as the correct color for girls and pink for boys. Blue was seen as delicate, pretty, and feminine, while pink was seen as the diminutive of exuberant, manly red. The current color standard definitely doesn’t date back to the earliest flickers of civilization.

It doesn’t really matter if women generally prefer pink to blue. Maybe they’re just taught that pink is for girls, or maybe their primitive minds really are seeking out ripe berries. Maybe it’s a little of each, or maybe there’s something else altogether going on. It’s intellectually worthwhile, though, to challenge anything that reinforces cultural stereotypes by saying “we’re just wired that way”. Reducing our behaviors and thoughts to the remnants of a simpler time when all humankind was interested in was eating, fucking, and raising young is lazy. It lets us just ignore thousands of years of social pressure, and countless other variables. It’s too easy, and it’s too easily manipulated. You can end up with lots of hilarious assumptions, but often not much science.

I have precious little tolerance for the intolerant. When people get all judgmental and sexist, racist, heterosexist, cisgenderist, vanillaist, or any one of a number of other kinds of “ist”s I haven’t made up yet, my hackles tend to raise. But then I realize that, to a point, I’m talking about the man in the mirror. Because I’m not immune to being judgmental myself, and not just against the judgmental.

You see, I’m really kind of a dick about furries.

I’ve recently learned, through the mystery-annihilating magic of multiple social networking sites, that a few of my friends and acquaintances are attending a furry convention. I’ll say it again. They are going to a furry convention.

I don’t know why, but furries are that thing for me: the thing that strikes my “that just ain’t right” reflex in that oh-so-special way, to the point that if I learn that you like to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal to get your kicks, I’m going to start thinking less of you. It’s something I’m trying to grow past, but for now it’s the truth.

I understand that not all people within furry culture consider it a sex thing. I guess for some it might just be an extension of cosplay/dressing up/costuming. Or something. But it seems like many argue that it’s not just a sex thing. Which means, correct me if I’m wrong, that it partly is.

This prejudice against furries is not sex positive, open-minded, or even rational of me. In fact, the rational side of me is happy that they’re having their fun. But at the same time, another side of me is thinking “Ew. That’s…it’s…that just ain’t right.” I definitely don’t have a particular distaste for any other costuming hobbies. I also wouldn’t have this reaction to most sexual fetishes, even though I share–as far as I know– none of them. Do you like to pee on each other? Glad you’re enjoying yourselves. You want to coat yourself in liquid latex? Have at it. Beat each other with lit sparklers while climaxing? Can I watch? Oddly enough, I think pony play is kind of cute. Weirder still, if you’re a zoophile all I really care about is that you’re not abusing your animal sex partners, and that you honor consent inasmuch as you actually can. Hell, if I eat a hamburger and you let a bull fuck you, who’s doing more harm?

But furries? That’s, inexplicably, my line. In my book, it’s just slightly less appalling than scat. Why? I don’t know!

Well, I kind of know. For some reason, animals that are too anthropomorphic have always creeped me out. Beatrix Potter and Winnie the Pooh characters are fine, but anything approaching Hanna Barbera or team mascot level distortion unsettles the hell out of me, actually gives me goosebumps. I have no idea why that is, but it’s been true for as long as I can remember. So furries work that particular hypersensitive nerve for me, and sexualizing something that’s already creeptastic makes it even more troubling. This is why most of us don’t like to picture people we find repulsive having sex.

However, I suspect I’m also buying into the social stigma against furries, the “let’s all make fun of the plush-fuckers because it’s easy” crap that we all seem to get away with and don’t even bother to examine. And even now, my brain is serving up all these excuses, like “But it’s icky! And you know some of them are into some really weird shit.” (because of my terrible bias I have no idea how disturbing these links actually are, but I think very, so take care) But so what? That’s their fantasy world. I don’t want to be a part of it, but do I have to go out of my way to judge it?

Shame on me and my that-just-ain’t-right-ism.

…But still, ew.

Oh, man. Some people are not happy about the new Candie’s Foundation PSA featuring Bristol Palin.

The Candie’s Foundation, founded in 2001 by Candie’s, a shoe/apparel/fragrance brand, was started to “shape the way young people in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” and “…educate America’s youth about the devastating consequences of teenage pregnancy.” My snarky side can’t help but wonder if this foundation carries an air of overcompensation about it, considering the fact that Candie’s has drawn heat over racy ad campaigns in the past, such as a print ad photograph of Jenny McCarthy sitting on a toilet, and this fragrance ad (see right) that had to be modified to a “tamer” version for certain publications by removing the condoms and butt crack (because, you know, depicting an unsafe sexual situation is much tamer), but remains hypersexual and (to some) disturbing in either iteration.

I don’t disagree with the Candie’s Foundation’s purpose. They state on their website that the “only 100% way to avoid pregnancy is to not have sex. If you do have sex, you need to use protection every time.” And guess what, urban legends about semen-laced bullets notwithstanding, they’re right! Their discourse is abstinence heavy, but stops short of advocating abstinence-only education. I have no problem with promoting abstinence to a point. After all, many teenagers aren’t ready for sex, and it’s perfectly okay to try to encourage them to wait until they are ready. Candie’s Foundation has used spokeshotties like Hayden Panettiere, Beyoncé, Usher, and Hillary Duff, people that their target audience might look up to, as well as famous cautionary tales like Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, to drive this point home.

One aspect I dislike about the Candie’s Foundation’s methods is that they promote a “Don’t be a slut! Be a tease!“ message. This is not their only message, but it is very well-represented in their campaigns. They offer t-shirts and tank tops that have “I’m SEXY enough… to keep you waiting.” emblazoned on the front. I don’t think it’s wise, helpful, or empowering to pressure young women to try to be sexy (i.e. an object of someone else’s desire), while telling them that if they actually act on their own sexual desires they’ll be devalued.

The foundation’s new PSA features Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin and single teenage mother of some kid with a name that’s just about as weird as hers, saying “What if I didn’t come from a famous family? What if I didn’t have all their support? What if I didn’t have all these opportunities? Believe me, it wouldn’t be pretty. Pause before you play.”

I’m assuming that “pause” here means to either stop and obtain birth control or stop and think, inclusive. I don’t interpret it as a strict “no sex until marriage” message, but you can watch it below and come to your own conclusions.

I’m not sure if you’re into the whole Easter thing. I consider it an annoying, primarily religious, holiday, particularly since I’m not a big candy eater these days. My one fond Easter association is this book, which I guess is a feminist parable according to all the Amazon reviews. I never thought about that before. It was just one of my favorites as a kid.

Anyway, have a bunny with a bullet through his head:

P.S. It’s a cock ring!