Dan Q
This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
The original link was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiIHQBlPKvE
It’s asexual awareness week. Go hug an asexual.
Or, if you’ve not got any asexual people around you, that you’re aware of (remember, though, that some asexuals are closeted), here’s a special mission for you:
While asexual people don’t face the same kind of discrimination as other minority sexualities (for example, I’ve never heard of “a-bashing”), they’re still widely-misunderstood and often asked stupid questions like “How do you know you don’t like sex if you’ve never tried it?” (if you don’t know why that’s a stupid question, I refer you to the aforementioned FAQ)
So yeah: go hug an asexual today. In a non-sexual way, I’d suggest.
In my office at the Bodleian, we’ve got a calendar on which employees mark their annual leave. The theme of the calendar is supposed to be paintings inspired by flowers… but – and maybe it’s just my dirty mind – this month’s image seems just a little bit saucy:
Click to embiggen. It can’t be just me that sees… it… right?
A conversation I had this morning with JTA, via text message:
I sent:
Boiler update: this is getting silly. The probability-weighted Markov-chain based predictive text system I’m using this morning saw me type “boi” and suggested “Boiler update:”? /sighs/
On the upside, I’ve successfully arranged for the new distributor valve to be installed on Friday, when I’ll be around.
To give a little background, we’re having trouble with the boiler on Earth. You may have observed that it broke last year, and then again this year: well – it’s still broken, really. Nowadays it’ll only produce a little hot water at a time, and makes a noise like that scene in Titanic where the ship begins to tear in two. You know – a bad noise for a boiler to make. Over the last two or three weeks we’ve repeatedly fought to get it repaired, but it’s been challenging: more on that in a different blog post, if JTA doesn’t get there first.
JTA replied:
On the plus side, at least this saga is overriding your phone’s memory of your previous life as a male prostitute. :-)
I was once mistaken for a gay prostitute, actually – by a gay prostitute – but that’s another story, I guess. In any case, I responded:
Until now! you’ve just mentioned that again, which means it’ll be the “last message received” when the paramedics go through my phone if I’m killed on the way to work this morning. And they’ll say, “yeah; I’d pay to have sex with him.”
Quickly followed by:
And his mate will say:
“Now he’s dead, you don’t HAVE to pay.”
If my corpse is raped by a paramedic, I’m blaming you.
To which JTA said:
You’re talking about people who drive blacked out vans full of drugs. I’m pretty sure they never pay.
From prostitution to necrophilia to date rape over the course of only a handful of text messages. What a great start to a Wednesday morning. I do like the image of an ambulance as “a blacked out van full of drugs,” though…
Just when I think that I’ve gotten the hang of humans, they do something even stranger than ever before.
There’s a new fragrance for men that’s about to be hitting perfume counters around Europe: Vulva Original [NSFW]. Just… click the link, and watch the video that appears. Your first thought will almost certainly be: “They’re selling a perfume… that smells like sweaty vagina?”
Continue to explore into the site and you’ll see that this is exactly what this product is.
I agree with Alex Day: unlike every other fragrance ever marketed at men, this perfume isn’t about trying to attract women (well duh: I’m pretty sure that walking around smelling like a vagoo will only attract a particular kind of woman, and it’s not the kind that’ll be interested in you as a man)… this product can only be targeted at men who just want to be able to sniff the back of their hand in a crowded elevator and pretend that they’re nose-deep in pussy.
That’s probably a fetish in itself.
This weekend, I was at BiCon 2009 (my third BiCon – I guess that makes it a tradition), and it was awesome. Here’s a short summary of the highs and lows:
Travel
Worcester’s closer than I remembered, and – once Claire‘d gotten used to the Vauxhall Astra we’d rented – we made good time there and back. It’s a really simple journey, really – you just drive along the A44 until you get there, and then you stop (well, okay, there’s a brief stretch on the A470 near Rhayader, but that doesn’t really count, does it?). The biggest difficulty we had was on the University of Worcester campus itself, which is a maze of twisty little passageways, all alike.
Accommodation
The usual student halls affair, although with rooms far larger and kitchens far better-equipped than those in, say, Penbryn. Also, the organisers must have run out of regular rooms, because the flat Claire and I were in had en-suite rooms, which was an unexpected luxury.
An interesting quirk in the halls of residence at Worcester is that they’re very, very keen on motion-sensor-activated lighting with very short timers. The lights in the hallway outside my room would come on for barely seconds, and when I first checked in, I’d only just worked out which was my door and dug my key out of my pocket before I was plunged into darkness and had to leap around to get the attention of the sensor and get the lights back on. The one in the kitchen was even worse – while playing board games on the first night, we eventually grabbed an anglepoise lamp from one of the study bedrooms to use, as it was simply too frustrating to begin your turn right as the lights turn off, and have to wait for a few seconds until your movement is enough to turn them back on again.
On the other extreme, the light (and the – noisy – linked extractor fan) in my bathroom was so sensitive that it would turn on if I so little as walked outside the door to my bathroom, while it was closed, and often wouldn’t turn off for several hours.
Registration
Registration was the usual fun and games, with less time than usual setting up our badges in accordance with the “sticker code” (sort of a handkerchief code, but with a key and an atmosphere of being a little more playful). As usual the sticker code started small (and, unusually, with a distinct and separate “official” code) and expanded over the course of the weekend, such that by the end of the conference it looked like this:
I didn’t spend very long on my badge and stickers this year: just enough to get a core message across… plus a not-on-the-key “Q scrabble tile”, as a reference both to being a board gamer and to Claire and I’s unusual surname. There’s probably at least half a dozen others I could have legitimately added to my pass.
To save you squinting at the pictures (or clicking on them to see bigger ones: that’s allowed, too), I’ll decode my badge for you: polyamorous, likes hugs, possibly available (as in: I’m theoretically open to new relationships, but seriously – where would I find the time?), and the aforementioned “Q scrabble tile” and another “Q” that I found in the sticker stash.
Claire volunteered for a shift of reception desk duties, which is cool, because they’re always in need of more folks there.
Other People’s Workshops
I didn’t go to as many workshops as I have in previous years: many of the things I was interested in clashed with one another, and other slots were simply full of topics that didn’t catch my attention. Also, I’ve found that going to a workshop in “every other” timeslot is a perfectly good way to get by, and spending the alternating periods hanging out, meeting people, and playing board games is a great way to keep energy levels up in the otherwise quite draining busy-ness of BiCon.
My Workshops
This year was the first year that I ran a workshop (last year’s impromptu purity test party doesn’t count), and, because I like a challenge, I ran two:
BiCon Ball
The theme of the BiCon Ball was Crime and Punishment, and so there were – predictably – plenty of burglars with swag-bags, police officers, superheroes and villains, and the like. The standard of body-painting was even better than normal (a number of people opted to wear virtually nothing, instead being painted as, for example, Wonderwoman, who didn’t wear much to begin with).
Just to be that little bit different – and to take a metaphor to it’s illogical extreme in our characteristic manner – Claire and I decided to actually dress as a crime itself. She dressed as a salt shaker and I dressed as a Duracell D-Cell, and together we were… a salt and battery. Get it? Everybody else we spoke to that evening did, too, eventually, although many of them needed some prompting.
And There’s More…
Other highlights and notable moments include:
Right; that’ll have to do for a BiCon 2009 Roundup, because Ruth‘s cooking me dinner so I need to go eat.
This was one of my most-popular articles in 2009. If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:
Warning: Not safe for work. Not even a little.
[wow; this has been a long while in the writing: I started writing this early in 2009 and finally finished in August – thanks for your patience, folks I promised this to!]
Sex toys are fun. Whether you’re playing alone or with friends, there are a million excuses to let a bit of silicon, plastic, leather or metal get involved, too. But all things said, I’m pretty vanilla: or, at least, I feel that way when I look at the sheer variety of fetishes that are represented on the Internet.
And I’m pretty open-minded. By the time I’m in a sex shop and I’ve turned my head sideways to work out what you’re supposed to do with whatever thing I’m looking at, I’m cool with it. It doesn’t have to be something that I’d want to put up my butt (or whatever) to make it so that I can understand how somebody else might like to.
But once in awhile, I come across something that simply makes no sense to me. Perhaps one of you guys can explain some of these to me:
“…make Baby Jesus the centerpiece of your magnificent Dildo Creche.” – Divine Interventions
I’m an atheist, but this seems to be a little disrespectful even to me. But more than that: supposed divinity aside, who wants to put a baby up their bum anyway? What’s the attraction in putting a small pink lump of plastic up your pooper? It’s not even like it’s a real baby and you’d have the excuse that you were just trying to stop it crying.
Who is this marketed to? Christians who want to show how much they really love Jesus? Anti-theists who want to show their disdain for the Son of Man in the sexiest way they could think of? People who want to experiment with anal play but want their toy to be one that they can leave out and not worry about people seeing?
I’m not even sure that it’d be a particularly good buttplug. Okay, there’s a slight ridge there so you’d be in a good position to grind the Lamb of God’s face into your prostate, if that’s your thing, but if I really wanted a religious-themed sex toy – and I don’t – I’d be looking at something with some substance, like a Jackhammer Jesus. Or go for everybody’s new messiah, Barack Obama, with the Head Of State Pleasure Toy (why do we never make sex toys out of British politicians?).
“You gotta check our resident ass-pig-in-training BOUNCING and FUCKING HIMSELF on this crazy new toy.” – Fort Troff
Do you remember Space Hoppers? Can you think of anything more childish, more innocent, more fun than bouncing around on a big rubber football with handles? It was a time of simple things, when my friends and I would have Space Hopper races up and down the garden. A time of paddling pools and climbing frames. And they’d be memories I’d cherish, until I saw this… umm… toy.
What happens if you take a space hopper and replace the handles with a six inch ribbed cock? You get this, the “Bouncing Ball Fucker”. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how you’d use it, but if you’re somehow in the dark – or you want to see for yourself – there’s a video.
I’m no prude, but I don’t think I’d be able to take my sex partner seriously if they came into the bedroom bouncing around on a bean bag that happened to be raping their arse at the same time. I can’t think of a way you could use this without laughing. And while I’ve got no problem with a good sense of humour, it’s rarely always the most conducive thing to sex.
“Pound the seductive vibrating pussy while fondling the pert breasts.” – LoveHoney
Somewhere in the world, right now, there’s a mad scientist who’s busily working on genetic improvements by which he plans to build the next generation of humanity. And he’s got an idea about what the women of the future should look like. And it’s shown above.
Seriously, that would be a great premise for a horror film. Because I’m more scared of that… thing in the picture than I ever was watching John Carpenter’s The Thing.
There are so many things wrong with this sex toy that I’m not sure I know where to start:
There’s one further possibility: perhaps this is a toy to cater to the fetishes of those people who were turned on by the floating bits of organs and shit in jars in Alien Resurrection. That’d go some way towards explaining this monstrosity.
“A cross between an alien and a dragon, the Xenogon has all the desires and needs of both parents. Here at Bad Dragon, we know that dragons are nigh-insatiable, but aliens are a whole new breed of desire, and this Xeno takes after his alien father! Be a test subject, and submit yourself to his dominant nature, we’re sure he could think of over a dozen experiments to do on you…” – Bad Dragon
What happens when you cross extreme furrydom with modern silicon production mechanisms and put it all on the Internet? You get people making dildos based on the imagined genitals of anthropomorphic fictional creatures. Like this toy, which is apparently based on what the penis of a dragon/alien hybrid would look like.
To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between a dragon penis and an alien penis without being told. And you know why? Because we made up what they look like. Why bother making a dragon/alien penis dildo at all? Why not just call it a dragon penis: after all, nobody’s seen one anyway – you can call it a unicorn penis if you like, it won’t change the fact that you’re making it up as you go along!
Now I’m not denying the existence of dragon fetishists – one wrote in to Savage Love last year – but I’m just amazed that there’s such a market for these toys: just Google around if you don’t believe me: there a lots of sites selling this stuff (my favourite is Yiffy Toys, just because their site design is cool). Maybe I’m the odd one.
The manufacturers of the Xenogon are keen to point out that they can’t manufacture these dragon-penises in an ejaculating variety suitable for use with their “Bad Dragon Cum-Lube“. Apparently we know enough about dragons to make a lubricant in the consistency of their semen. Who knew?
“Insert the breathing apparatus into your nostrils, rub the clitoral stimulator against your favorite coral reef and start with the tongue action. With the Pussy Snorkel, anyone can be a dive master.” – SexToys.com
Perhaps I should be expected not to “get” this. After all, I don’t have a pussy to speak of. But even in my furthest imaginings, I can’t see how this can be a winning idea. First, I’d like to pick holes in the quotation from SexToys.com, above: coral reef? Coral reef? Who calls a clitoris a coral reef?
But secondly, how wet do you have to have gotten your female partner before you’re in need of a fucking snorkel to go down on her? The website indicates that it’d be good for muff-diving somebody in a hot tub, but it doesn’t take a genius to observe that the design of the snorkel is such that it’d be pretty much useless for actual underwater use: the tips of the tubes point downwards: after a quarter-lungful of air (and the associated minute or so of hot slippery licking), you’d have to come up for a refill… and I can see this becoming quickly frustrating for your partner, who’s probably just about got long enough to get into it before you come up again, panting for air.
It doesn’t look comfortable. It doesn’t look sexy. It doesn’t serve any practical value. It’s not even a great novelty, because if you gave one to somebody you’d have to explain to them what it was for before they would “get it”.
Do you know what I think? I think that the manufacturers of the beer hat one day realised that they’d saturated the market (quite literally) and that they needed to come up with another product that can be built with food-grade adjustable tubing pre-cut into head-circumference lengths, and invented this silly product. At least the beer hat let you drink while you had sex.
“Jackson is the model for our largest toy yet, measuring 21 inches of insertable length. His size has intimidated most, including the mares. Due to the size, his toy is one of our most detailed when it comes to veins and glans. But don’t just listen to us, try one for yourself!” – BB5T Industries
Whoah. That’s just… not possible. To give you a context of the scale of this dong, that’s a 2L drinks bottle next to it. It’s a shocking 21 inches tall – that’s about the distance between the vagina and the neck of an average woman.
This cock is so large that you could use it as a baseball bat. You could beat somebody to death with it. It’s in the region of four times as any penis you’re ever likely to have inside you. So why the fuck do you want one?
In case it wasn’t obvious from the quote, above, it’s a replica model of a horse’s penis. Yes, an actual horse – there’s pictures of him on the website, if you want to take a look, and he’s certainly hung like a… well, you get the idea. And he’s big for a horse.
I’d like to be able to pretend that the people who buy this toy do so to pleasure some horny mare in their stable, but I know that’s not going to be the case, and I’m sure you do too.
What’s the attraction? Can anybody enlighten me? We’ve heard breasts described in terms of “more than a handful” being a waste – surely the same is true of a cock – that any parts that are simply too large to fit into any of your orifices are a little bit pointless? Or maybe, somewhere, there’s a woman who can take this inside her? I’d like to say that I’d like to meet her, but it’s quite possible that we all actually live inside of her, like little insects in a microcosm of stars and planets, all inside her humongous vagina. And there’s another horror film plot, right there.
“It’s pussy-shaped mouth, 3 supples [sic] breasts, suction cup fingers and ass-shaped ears make it the kinkiest love slave in the galaxy.” – SexToy.com
And for the first time since the dragon thingy, we’re back to aliens again. For those of you who really want to be taken for a flying saucer ride and given a good probing (and who doesn’t), there’s this thing… the Area 51 Love Doll. She features purple skin (pretty alien), three breasts (very alien), and three – yes, three – fuckable holes (not so alien).
Is this actually somebody’s fetish? If so, I’m sorry to disappoint them: a little searching found this picture of what she actually looks like when she’s inflated (with thanks to this guy):
I’m not sure what the trading standards authority has to say about sex dolls, but that doesn’t look much like the thing depicted on the packet to me. Equally unarousing, but not the same, see?
It’s possible that I just don’t understand the attraction of inflatable sex dolls. I mean: I don’t see how putting your dick into a plastic-feeling novelty balloon with a surprised look on it’s face (and it’s always a look of surprise, isn’t it?) is an improvement on just having a wank the old-fashioned way: throwing your hand down onto the bed and raping it. Rotten.com did an article about inflatable love dolls, and I looked through it and thought: I wouldn’t fuck any one of those. Maybe it’s just me, again.
In other news, I frightened myself almost to death when I saw the Frankenstein’s monster-like mess that these guys came up with when they attempted to build their own sex doll out of parts. Take a look.
“I noticed what looked like a bright pink projector in the store window. But instead of a lens, the machine had a faux-flesh orifice with ‘Heaven’ scrawled across the side. And instead of a lightbulb, it seemed to have a motor churning away, tirelessly.” – Gizmodo
I am not popping my peter into that. Aside from the fact that it looks like it’s been converted from what was once a Polly Pocket (or, failing that, looks like it might be built in the body of what was supposed to be “my first tazer”), I can’t read any of the writing on it: what happens if I accidentally hit the “castrate” button instead of the “oh God, please, don’t stop” button? And how would I tell the difference given that I don’t speak a word of Japanese.
Also, I’m having difficulty imagining how this even works. Bear with me: I’m guessing from the photo that the “cartridge” (the bit on the left, labeled “Heaven”, can be removed when, umm, “spent”, and replaced with another: and they come in a number of different varieties based on what sensation you’re looking for) moves in and about of the barrel of the plastic body. It might rotate, as well. So: where do I put the device?
If I put it on the bed, I’m pretty sure that it weighs less than me, and even Newton wouldn’t need to run an experiment (although he might like to, if you gave him one of these for his birthday) to prove that what will happen is that my cock will stay exactly where it is and the machine will jump around on the bed, giving virtually no friction at all. Or you could grab hold of it, but by that point you might as well just be holding the damn cartridge and save yourself the two-million yen or whatever one of these pretty-coloured toys will set you back.
Maybe I’d be surprised: the Japanese have come up with a number of great things, such as Pocky, and maybe this is another one of them. But I doubt it.
“This toy is designed to stretch you out as you use it, the straight parts act to let you “rest” a bit before going on to the next level.” – Zeta Paws
Sooo… it’s a training sex toy? That you can use to “widen yourself up” in anticipation of even bigger sex toys? Oh-kay.
This beast of a toy stands a clear 8½ inches long and starts at 3 inches across at the narrow end. By the base of the thing, it’s 5½ inches wide. So; a little like putting a regular penis into you… sideways.
Okay, for sheer size, it doesn’t really compete with the horse penis we saw earlier, but, shit – 8½ by 5½ inches? That’s not a sex toy, that’s a doorstep! And I’m not sure it was wise to make it out of whatever that shiny material it’s made from is, because every time I look at it I think it’s not real – that perhaps it’s some cheaply-rendered 3D effect, like something The Lawnmower Man might put into his bumhole.
“His softly noduled throat will send you into overdrive. The mustache will make you remember that he’s a guy, and that he craves your juicy cock down his
throat.” – Heartsfire Leathers
A man with the throat of a sandworm, what could be sexier than that? Oh, I know: a piece of rubber made to look like the mouth and chin of a man with the throat of a sandworm: that’s right! The thing that makes it most obvious that this sex toy is bad news is the same test that you can use to prove that anything is bad news: just write “I WILL DEVOUR YOUR CHILDREN” under it, in a speech bubble. If it doesn’t look out of place, it’s time to be alarmed. If you’re supposed to be putting your tool into it, be doubly alarmed.
I’m not sure what it is about Mr. Jack that’d be most likely to give me nightmares. Is it the mouth riddled with “nodules”, which makes it look either like he’s the child of a shark of that he’s got some horrible oral disease: either of which does not incline me to let him suck me off. Or perhaps it’s the obviously-fake mustache, somewhat reminiscent of the eyebrows of my old high school history teacher, that I’d be able to glance down at and imagine leaping off, like ravenous caterpillars, and biting into my balls. Or maybe, and this could be the big one, maybe it’s because fucking half of a disembodied face is fucking creepy.
Seriously. I’ve seen triple-breasted aliens, breast-vagina-penis hybrids, and plastic feet with vaginas in them, but even though they looked like mutants, at least they weren’t half a face. Half a face is the kind of thing that nightmares are made up of. If you fell asleep after spunking into your Mr. Jack, and woke up the following morning to find half a fucking face in bed next to you, well, you’re likely to need some new sheets afterwards. Please, please, manufacturers of sex toys, please stick to dismembered genitals and don’t start making half-bits of human faces. It’s just scary.
Thanks.
It fills me with warm fuzziness. After a weekend away doing all the things she mentioned (as well as a number of unmentionable things in The British Museum), I’ve got a pile of e-mail and blog entries to get through this lunchtime, so I shan’t waste time blogging myself. Instead, I’ll just point you at Ruth‘s blog entry and leave it at that. Oh; wait – I already did.
As some of you no doubt know, I’m a huge fan of Savage Love, the world’s coolest sex, love, and relationships advice column. A few weeks ago, author Dan Savage revisited his “campsite rule,” which can be summarised thusly:
If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less-experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!
The single biggest complaint about the campsite rule could be said to be that, by omission, it seems to imply that it’s okay to be a dick to your older or similarly-experienced partner, but that’s not the intention, I feel – it’s just less of a concern because the campsite rule is specifically about protecting the vulnerable.
In any case: after it last got mentioned, the column received a spectacular number of letters from readers, talking about their experience with (or without) the campsite rule, and it’s just spectacular. It’s a long read, but you’ll see some beautiful, some inspiring, and some heart-wrenching stories from people about their young relationships (or their relationships with the young). Go read it.
Just read a great article on brain activity during sexual stimulation and specifically upon orgasm: scanning people’s brains while they’re engaged in sexual activity with their partners has lead to some fascinating results. From the article:
In men, greater activity was seen in the insula, which deals with emotion, and particularly in the secondary somatosensory cortex, which rates the significance of physical sensations. This suggests that the sensory input coming from the genitals is being judged highly important and pleasurable by the brain.
Women, however, show very little increased brain activity, and only in the primary somatosensory cortex – which registers purely that a sensation in the genitals is there.”In women the primary feeling is there, but not the marker that this is seen as a big deal,” Dr Holstege said.”For males, touch itself is all-important. For females, it is not so important.”
I fascination turned to amusement when I read about some of the difficulties the participants had under experimental conditions, though:
The experiments also revealed a rather surprising effect: both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. Draughts in the scanning room left couples complaining of “literally cold feet”, and providing a pair of socks allowed 80 per cent rather than 50 per cent to reach a climax while their brains were scanned.
This was fun even before I realised that tickling her in different places when she was in different positions had different effects.
I like it.
Many years later, I’d go on to recreate this advertisement using modern web technologies.
Yay, my underwear from Figleaves turned up today, I have new bras which fit. Now my breasts look enormous, which is a bit scary…
Let me see, let me see!
(awaits slap)
The Gender Genie is quite remarkable. Copy-paste a heap of your journal entries (and state that journal entries is what they are) and it will attempt to guess your gender, based on the language used (and partially explain it’s reasoning).
I’m apparently male, with a two-thirds certainty. Not bad.
Perhaps the most disturbing dream yet since I started on this weird medication. And I promise you that if you know the people starring in it, you’ll be scared, too…
Warning: Sexually Explicit Content – You Have Been Warned
I only remember fragments of the dream, but two particular images stand out:
Just thought I’d share those images with you so you know what my head’s going through. Fucking weird.