date machine : sex machine

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Sex Machine: Because I Can

amboabe — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:09:00 GMT

I was out over the weekend and a woman asked me to come home with her.

There’s a theory that scarcity makes sex more desirable. The harder a person is to attain the more we yearn to possess them. We catch glimpses of what their sex might be like; the smell of warm skin on the first hot night of the year, the darkening shadow in the space between the breast and bra, the teasing line tossed out without thought for the strained urges it might inspire.

I don’t believe in it. Having sex is not an achievement. Finding someone you’re attracted to feels good, but it doesn’t make you a better person. I tend to lose interest in people when they present themselves as unattainable. (That line is probably eliciting groans from a few friends who, having followed along the underbelly of my romantic life for the last few years, would argue that the opposite is true.)

Conspicuous consumption has become intuition for many of us. I grew up watching my brother feed his belts through the label on his jeans so that everyone could see he was wearing Calvin Klein’s. Value is created on the supply side. We can be made to want something because the label tells us it’s something worth wanting. Few could tell the difference in the fabric, threading, cut, and dye, but we let the label assure us that the jeans are worth $150. It’s an act of faith or self-perpetuating intuition.

In the same way, an unattractive man in a shabby suit might suddenly become intriguing if he walks into a bar with a beautiful woman. Or the woman might become dramatically more desirable because of make-up, body type, or a style of dress that mimics something upwardly mobile. We want people to believe that we’re better than them to bait their pursuit, which blots out our own insecurities for a moment or two.

But so there I was, drunk and talking to a woman running her index finger along the small of my back and suggesting I crash at her place instead of trudging 30 blocks uptown. I knew from the minute I saw her that I didn’t want to sleep with her. She was pretty, had a nice body, and was personable. I also felt that our personalities were at loggerheads. There was no sexual grist, no foreboding. Like her sense of humor, everything about her seemed earnest and deliberate. We would have bad physical chemistry.

She could have been as aloof and unattainable as she pleased, I wouldn’t have felt any greater need to be with her.

When the proposition came I had to reconsider everything. The fact that she was so forthright and deliberate about stating what she wanted made her more attractive. Her attainability was an aphrodisiac. I didn’t feel any more or less attracted to her physically, but I felt more willing to take a gamble. I didn’t especially want her but knowing that she wanted me made me wonder if I hadn’t overlooked something. For a few minutes I was more attracted to her than I would otherwise have been.

I didn’t go home with her. It was late, I was tired, I felt nauseous from too much booze, and I knew, from past experience, that things generally go poorly when I jump into sex with someone without an animal yearning. But I was dangling by a thread for a few minutes, a sex deer in the come-on headlights.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Am I Romantic Enough?

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Sex Machine: Picking Up Women in Gay Bars

amboabe — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:51:00 GMT

So as you’ve probably heard I had drinks with Airheadgenuis and Zeitgeisty the other day. We spent the better part of the evening in a gay bar, with softcore porn playing in monitors underneath the tables and big ticket Hollywood movies like The Great Santini and Polanski’s Tess projected against the far wall.

According to guy lore, gay bars are the easiest places for a straight man to meet a woman. I remember casting the first short I directed several years ago. I posted ads in Backstage West and met with dozens of actors afterhours in my boss’s Beverly Hills office.

I remember one guy I spoke with jumped very quickly from telling stories about his acting background into tales of his sexual prowess. It seems some male actors in LA are more excited about their prospects for having sex than they are about working. Hey look, ma! Somebody fucked me! Can you believe it?

This man swore that he could have sex with any woman in a gay bar. Their defenses are down, they feel safe, they vamp suggestively without having to worry that some guy is going to get the wrong idea, and they tend to drink heavily, chugging fruity two-for-one specials.

I had originally planned on shooting the short as an all-nude production. When I mentioned this to they actor he immediately stood up from his chair. “I’ll strip right now, if you want,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of my body at all. You want me to get all the way naked?”

I’ve always had mixed feelings about gay bars. I don’t like the idea of separating social groups based on sexual preference. Bars are bars. People get drunk, they dance, they try and meet someone new, many wind up bringing someone home later on. You’re a little less likely to hear Tom Petty or Dire Straights in a gay bar, but otherwise, the idea is basically the same.

On the other hand, the gay bars I’ve been to have felt less serious and weighted down with social posturing than other straight bars. Would that there were more straight bars with porno playing on the walls and colors outside of the red and black vinyl variety.

The first gay bar I remember going to was in Austin. It was a lesbian night at a place called Boyz Cellar. All the bartenders were topless and covered in bodypaint. It was surreal to be in a room filled with women and not a single one paying attention to me. Knowing in advance that everyone in the bar was outside of my sexual purview took a lot of tension out of the air. I felt like I could stroll around leisurely and talk to anybody about anything. There was no worry about having intentions misconstrued or being shot down by a cranky tyrant.

After a couple of hours one of the friends I was with reached a level of dramatic intoxication and decided she needed to vomit in the corner. The bar manager saw her and asked that she leave. She was still lucid enough to feel insulted by this and she went nose-to-nose with the pasty man for a few minutes trying to pick a fight before finally relenting.

I don’t like the idea of having to pick someone up, no matter what the context. There has been a lot said for the thrill of the chase and wanting the unattainable, but I don’t see the value in either. I don’t believe in unattainability. We’re all born out of the same primordial question mark. We all want to believe in someone. We are all attainable.

Chasing after someone is equally uninteresting. Why should I have to pursue someone who resists the idea of my companionship? If they don’t want to spend time with me, what does it benefit me to convince them otherwise? I want to fight for the people who’ll fight for me, and not chase after a trophy to validate my sense of achievement.

Those two ideas hang heavy in straight bars, like wooly fogs across the neon light. It might be easier to pick someone up in a gay bar. But it isn’t any easier to fall in love.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: Diary of a Sperm Donor

amboabe — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:51:00 GMT

A few years ago a friend asked me if I would be willing to donate sperm to her and her partner should they choose to have a child. The idea freaked me out and made me excited all at the same time.

I don’t like children nor do I get along with them all that well. They seem so helpless and inexperienced. Of course they have good reason to be, and I was just as helpless, if not more, when I was a kid. I marveled at some of the stupidest things in the world. One Sunday when I was four years old, I forced myself to watch a full episode of Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. When it was over I sprinted into my father’s office to tell him what I had done.

What would you do if a small kid lacking even a full set of teeth and the ability to wipe himself came bounding into your office to announce he had just watched Charles Kuralt for a full hour and a half? There are some people with an instinct towards patience and nurturing; selfless creatures able to set aside their own agendas to help shape a new life in a healthy and stimulating way.

When we were younger my friend P told me that I would be a terrible father because I’m too selfish. I was shaken at the time, but the more I think about it the more I think he might be true. I don’t know if I could listen to my child enumerate the lore of Dragonball Z or tell tales of fishstick wars in the cafeteria with a straight face. Would I have the restraint to not nod off midway through or take advantage of the time to catch up on deleting old text messages?

Still, I’ve wanted to be a parent for a long time. I remain uncomfortable with my selfishness, and for whatever life is worth, I feel like there’s nothing more meaningful than passing something along for the future. The idea that I might be able to cheat my way into half-accomplishing that metaphysical task seemed like a good deal. I could have the satisfaction of passing along my helical secret for another generation while avoiding the more uncomfortable challenges of actually raising a child into a healthy and functional adult.

Now that I’m “freelancing” for the foreseeable future I started to wonder whether or not it would be worth it to become a sperm donor to earn a little extra money at the end of the month. I know the money in sperm donation is marginal, but fifty bucks is still fifty bucks.

I decided that I couldn’t give sperm to my friends because I didn’t think I could handle the idea that my child was out there in the world without my being able to be a regular part of its life. I may have no idea how to handle a child and my brain flips over at the thought of returning to those adolescent discoveries of all the things taken for granted in adult life, but if a part of me is reborn somewhere in the world than I want to confront those things.

Also, I was in love with one of the women involved and I thought that might be a little awkward.

Now that my own immediate survival is slightly less certain, the idea of auctioning off my future babies seems like a much more realistic possibility. Maybe there is a place in the world for my junior, and maybe it might be better if I have nothing to do with him or her. Maybe it’s an even trade: fifty dollars for an anonymous scrap of immortality, playing happily in the green fields of a ranch house out in the country side, flying a kite or chasing raccoons through the forest. I’d masturbate to that.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: A Revised History of Whores

amboabe — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:19:00 GMT

I was out with some friends over the weekend. After some polite peacocking about taste in obscure music, the talk turned to women. “My sister used to be a whore in college. No judgment,” my friend B said. “She’s married now. But when she was younger she’d had every dick on campus.”

B’s sister had never charged money for sex. But making this slur seems to be the only social shorthand we have for talking about a woman who has more than a polite amount of sex with her one true boyfriend. A man who has barrel loads of sex is a “stud,” a top-tier specimen prized for his reproductive value. A woman who has had between 10 and 100 dicks inside her various parts can only be compared to a prostitute.

A sexually active male with a horsey appetite for women is something that engenders pride. The female analog is shame and social disrepute; a penile spittoon for the licentious and decrepit men in a society who must stoop so low as to pay for a hump. Some progressive men will admit that there’s nothing wrong with a woman being a “whore;” no judgment. But still, there is no easy and deliberate way for a woman to talk about her sexuality without entering the Bermuda triangle of whoredom.

This is anecdotal, but the most sexually active of my friends are women not men. Not all, but the majority. They are not whores, no matter how euphemistically the bounds of meaning might be applied to that term.

I hate the idea of pursuit in romance. It connotes an imbalance in values. If men are supposed to always be in pursuit of the mythical “lay,” then women must surely have that magical wunderbeast lurking somewhere under their skirts. Men get lucky. Women get fucked.

I am an imperfect lover, but I don’t believe what I have to offer a woman in physical terms is any more or less valuable than what any woman has to offer me. Sex is a shared experience, something two people choose to give to one another. There are physical differences, but holistically it shouldn’t be any better or worse for one side over the other.

So why is there still such an entrenched legacy of men begrudging women breadth of sexual experience? Even when there is no conscious judgment, there is a strong implication of historical immorality.

Before I moved to New York, my friend P told me stories about how hard it is to find a steady girlfriend here. Meeting women is easy, but New York is a hotbed of eligible men. I’ve never been in a place where there is a higher concentration of well-educated, well-dressed, attractive, and generally interesting men. Women have choice in partners here in ways that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s intimidating. What’s the incentive to settle down into a regular movie-renting habit with one guy when it comes at such an opportunity cost? It’s not hard to imagine a lot of nice men in the city pulling up the sheets over their exposed nipples in the morning, calling after the woman as she dashes out the door. “Call me!”

I’d rather imagine two people happy to share a new experience with each other, finding the momentary dilation of a new mouth, a new vessel filling the swollen ripple, pushing against one another, finding the same beats and measures. Holding onto each other while pushing apart.

Is there a need to create a separate iconography for people who like that experience? Isn’t it something that everybody likes? Who wouldn’t rather be having sex right now, instead reading these words trapped in the pixels of a thousand different monitors?

I propose that B’s sister is not a whore, judgment or not. She is a woman who would rather be doing the same exact thing that most of us would rather be doing. And at one time she did. Again and again and again. I envy her.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents

amboabe — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:45:00 GMT

My dad came to the city for an afternoon to help me mail some boxes the day before my move. As we were talking about times to meet, I mentioned I had an appointment for an HIV/STI check.

My dad was quiet for a second, then said "Uh huh. Well, how about the next day then."

I grew up in a religious home. My parents are Seventh Day Adventists. My brother and I had to go to church every Saturday morning growing up. We had to observe the Sabbath too, which meant from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday we weren't allowed to watch TV or spend the night at our friends' houses. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and, certainly, pre-marital sex were also frowned upon.

I took all of these restrictions as unavoidable inconveniences when I was a kid. When I was sixteen I read the bible in its entirety and tried to believe in my parents’ dogma. It didn't take so much. The more I read and thought about it, the less I believed.

By the time I left for college I was on my way to leaving their religious cocoon for good. Caffeine, alcohol, pork, and pre-marital sex all worked their way into my day-to-day life (though the sex part was comparatively tricky for a long while). I would happily debate the principles and rhetorical validity of religion, but with sex, I would almost never make reference to my own life. And my parents never showed any interest in learning more about my sex life.

It was taken as read that I would avoid sex until marriage. I didn't want to go out of my way to be dishonest with them, but there weren't many occasions to bring up my sex life in the course of normal holiday conversation. It's not that I don't want to tell them. But I never feel like I have a reason to. I assume both of them were virgins until they married so I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be to have a conversation about having sex with my best friend's ex.

I don't avoid the topic, though. I sent them links when I first started writing here. I'm not proud of a lot of the stories I've told here, but they were all choices I made and have become a part of who I am. I don't want to hold that back from my parents.

I have no idea if they read any of this. They never bring it up, and I rarely mention it. I don't have children so I'm not sure what it's like to cross the last border of sexual reckoning with a son or daughter. What is it like for a parent to reckon with their child's sex life, especially when it is based on such different choices from their own?

After my dad and I had dropped all my boxes off at the post office and finished the last round of errands for the move, he looked at me sideways and then looked down again. "So when will you get the results of your test?" he asked.

"I got it back already," I told him. "They can do most of it on the spot now. It was all negative."

"Mmmhmm," he said.

He looked straight ahead, one hand on the steering wheel. I wondered when it was that he last had sex. I didn't ask.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test

amboabe — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:24:00 GMT

I went to a free clinic in the Castro tonight to get an HIV/STD test. It's been five months since my last test. Throughout my 20's I was tested sporadically. Every couple of years I would wind up with a new physician or have to complete a form physical. I never worried about the results.

My sex life was intermittent and I used condoms whenever I had a regular partner. I didn't think anymore about the HIV test anymore than I worried about the testicular cancer check. There's always a possibility, but I felt young and in control of my life. Finding someone to have sex with was a bigger priority than worrying about the consequences.

Going through my recent experience with possible HIV infection, it occurred to me that I was being irresponsible in not getting tested more frequently. Going in once every couple of years isn't enough. So I've decided to be tested at least twice a year from now on. It feels like a byproduct of age. Sex is no longer a lucky indulgence; it carries a real and heavy responsibility.

I don't like thinking about it in those terms. I'm impulsive and swoon at the faintest suggestion of romance. Thinking of sex in terms of an infection I might have given to someone else makes me want to vomit. But confronting nausea is a part of adult life, like eating brussel sprouts.

I had unprotected sex in the end of September. My last test was in early November. My inner den mother tells me I'm due for another test.

So I looked up the closest free clinic, found one that offered after hours testing, and made my way to it after leaving the office for the night. The clinic was at a crowded intersection, right across the street form a disco. It had a bright neon sign outside, advertising its services. I felt a flash of shame walking to the front door. I still have some remnant stigma about sexuality inside; I wondered if people were looking at me, the stupid slut walking into the STD shop for a tune-up.

There were six or seven men sitting in the clinic waiting room, reading magazines. Nobody looked up as I walked to the reception desk. It was 7PM. They were open until 9PM. I thought I had plenty of time. I caught a hint of confusion cross the receptionist's face as I approached, undercutting his practiced smile.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

I didn't know what to say for a split second. Was there a proper and discrete way to get the point across? Was there an unspoken protocol I should have been aware of?

"I'm here for an HIV test," I told him.

He started looking around the reception desk and didn't respond immediately. He handed me a card and then explained that they were booked for the rest of the night. Apparently getting an HIV test at a free clinic isn't as simple as showing up and asking to be seen. He told me there were eighteen people already in line when they opened that morning. He told me to come back the next morning and expect to wait the whole day.

It looks like responsibility costs a full Saturday waiting in a lobby and not just sneaking in an hour before closing on a Tuesday. Sex has such long and inconvenient tentacles.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof

Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?

amboabe — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:24:00 GMT

I had a pressing need to venture into the heart of the suburbs this weekend to find a Target. I rode BART to the end of the line in Richmond. I had never been out that way but my roommate told me that all my retail needs would be taken care of in that mythic borderland where the city meets the suburban wastes.

I got off the train in a gray drizzle and soon realized I was in the middle of nowhere. There was a sign announcing this was Downtown Richmond, but all I could see was a Burger King, some empty office buildings, and long corridors of stucco apartment buildings reaching towards the horizon.

I started walking towards the Burger King, hoping it would be the start of a commercial trail of cookie crumbs that would lead me to anodyne sprawl of Target. I was wrong. I kept getting further and further into a residential kaleidoscope. There wasn't anyone out on the sidewalks; streets were lined with ramshackle houses hemmed in with cold chain link fences.

I zig-zagged through the neighborhood for an hour, feeling my tether to the BART station grow tighter and tighter as I went. Richmond reminded me of Fresno, the Central Valley town where I grew up. It was peaceful, unassuming, and deathly quiet. You could see someone walking towards you from a quarter mile away and minutes would pass as you watched each other draw closer, tense and uncertain.

I went back to Fresno a couple years ago, taking pictures for a movie project that fell apart. I stopped at the neighborhood grocery store in the afternoon to get some water. It felt smaller than when I was a teenager, like a toy approximation of what I had been expecting. I walked past the bakery and someone called my name.

I looked behind the counter and saw a cross-eyed women with frizzy hair barely contained under a hairnet. She had crooked teeth and a blackeye. "You don't remember me, do you?" she said as I walked towards her.

"I don't think so," I told her, trying to place her face. It was pale and riddled with liver spots under the harsh lighting.

"I was your second grade teacher!" she said. "I remember you."

I had a faint memory of my second grade teacher, but it was impossible to reconcile this woman with that silhouetted shape. I was tiny then, and the orbit of my life was a blip, happily filled with the sugar rush of childish pleasure. The world was above me and I felt like I was gradually rising to meet it, a watery mirage waiting on the other side of the surface.

Then here was my teacher, cross-eyed somehow, bruised and withering (I kept wondering who in her life could have given her a black eye), baking cakes with industrial-sized equipment in a chain store. The more we talked the less I could reconcile our past and present states. I felt like I was watching someone drown while being drawn further and further away.

As I was walking back to the BART station, defeated in my attempt to find Target, I walked into a narrow pedestrian alley through an underpass. I saw a woman ahead of me, stubby and round, sauntering through the walkway in heels and a tight mini skirt. As she walked the mini skirt rode up her hips until her buttocks were drooping onto her dappled upper thighs.

She was walking slowly and I was catching up to her. The smell of piss and car exhaust was trapped in the underpass. When I was a few feet away she turned around as if she knew I had been there the whole time.

"Can I ask you a question? Does my butt show when I walk?" she asked. It looked like she was grinning to herself.

It did, but I didn't want to tell her so I lied. "No, not that I can see."

I asked her if she knew where the Target was. She said I was still a long way away, twenty blocks down. I knew she was lying. She smiled at me, it felt lascivious and confrontational.

On the other side of the underpass I peeled away towards the BART station and she kept walking straight ahead, wobbling on her heels and in no rush to get anywhere. Her butt was still showing. And I was still looking at it.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman

Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers

amboabe — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:53:00 GMT

I was arguing with my friend S at a bar this weekend when I found myself blurting out, "I could be in an open relationship." I wasn't expecting that statement to come storming out of my mouth. It's something that sounds like it could be true. But I'm not really sure if I could manage it without imploding.

I've never felt a strong need to sleep with someone new while in a relationship. I don't think I would begrudge a partner for having those feelings. It's impossible to distill sex down to any one thing. It's everything in a relationship. It's the intimacy and the love. It's the athletic silliness. It's the indulgence and pleasure. It's something new every time. Even when the form and rhythm becomes repetitive there is something new happening. It doesn't always point to good things, but every encounter is particular and irreplaceably its own.

When I think about it rhetorically, the idea of a girlfriend wanting to sleep with another man seems fine. If sex is the proverbial glass of water, an act of physical exuberance and exploration, then there's nothing at all threatening about a girlfriend sleeping with someone else. Statistics suggest a huge percentage of people, close to half depending on whose study you believe, cheat during long-term relationships. It's shocking, but I think of all of my friends and it doesn't seem quite so improbable. Close to half of the people in my circle of friends have cheated on their partners at one time or another.

Most of those were random one-night encounters and not the drawn out affairs we secretly fear will be the end of us all. It was sex in the moment. Drunk and alone for a night, flushed with body and feeling, they decided to indulge themselves with some new stranger or a secret crush. Thinking about sex in those terms makes it seem like a body function. It's not pissing or shitting. It's a deep urge for affection and physical expression and little more than that. In that rhetorical vacuum, monogamy seems like a product of insecurity and antiquated social norms.

But the more I think about it in specific terms, relative to real women that I've dated, the more squeamish I become. The most uncomfortable thing is that I don't think I could cheat on someone else. I am probably monogamous to a fault. I'm single-minded in the same way that a dog is. There's only one voice that cuts through the rabble, one smell that pulls me away from a momentary curiosity. One hand whose touch settles me instantly.

A few years after I graduated from college I went home for Christmas. On Christmas Eve I went downtown with my parents to an old Spanish hotel that had stood in their town for almost a hundred years. Every year it was lit up with thousands of small lights, poinsettias, and flannel drapery in a show of old time ostentation.

When we got there it was dark. There was a sea of people spilling out onto the sidewalk and down the street in front of the hotel. My mother and father pushed into the back of the crowd and I followed after them maintaining a disinterested orbit, trying to ignore the holiday cheer.

The group moved forward, inch by inch. Small shuffling steps created a tidal pull that eventually drew us into the middle of the crowd. I was alternately staring at my shoes and out into the empty sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. I noticed that my parents had moved ahead of me a little bit. Three or four people separated us. They looked like a little sphere of familiarity in the swell of strange faces and foreign smells; all their bitter fighting and incongruities tucked into their wool jackets and forced public smiles.

A few minutes later, I looked up and saw that they were still further away. I was mulling in the crowded courtyard and they had been sucked up to the front entrance twenty feet away. The courtyard was draped with small white lights overhead. The light of the hotel lobby was a loud yellow blare. I saw my dad turn around on the threshold. He grinned at me and nodded his chin. I could see the shadows in the pits of his eyes; the gray of his hair and the harsh lighting made his face look old and fragile.

He turned around and kept moving forward with my mother. After a few more minutes they were so far away that I could barely tell where they were. The backs of their heads were almost indistinguishable from any other couple in the sea of people. I felt terrible and alone.

Everything changes with time. Everything goes away. Sex is like a life jacket against that inevitable pull. Every new moment of sex with someone you love is a small victory of togetherness, a reminder that the other person is still there, for a while longer. Thinking about them out there, clinging to some other body, I wouldn't feel jealous. I think I would just feel terribly, horribly sad, reminded of the fact that one day they'll have gone out so far that they won't come back. And then what will I be?

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl

amboabe — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:59:00 GMT

I've never had sex with anyone I've met online. Almost every internet date I've had has been an intellectual experiment, trying to build something visceral and sordid from the personality bric-a-brac of an online profile.

The format encourages people to retreat to a comfortable distance and offer the least genuine portrait of themselves in the hopes of maximizing their allure. Online dating is a space for apparently evolved and mature people who are capable of finding a romantic partner through appreciation of mutual hobbies, common backgrounds, and interesting conversation. When I ask my women friends who date online about whether or not they hooked up with a date after an evening out, they are usually agog at my presumptiveness. "Of course not! I'm not that kind of girl."

A couple of years after college, my friend P spent a year traveling through Europe and Asia. I remember an email he sent me describing the fabled attitude of Scandinavian women towards sex. No one would seriously think about starting to date a man unless they had slept together already. You might get along perfectly well with someone, but if there wasn't any physical chemistry, what was the point? And how could you really know if there was any physical chemistry until you had slept with someone?

One of the most frightening things about meeting someone out at a bar is that you only have physical qualities and some vague hunches about personality to go on. It can feel reductive and carnal in the most basic form, seeing someone you're attracted to and finding a way to insinuate yourself into his or her evening. For some reason, sitting politely through dinner and talking about politics and nostalgic childhood memories is a more legitimate way of connecting with another person.

That may be a great way to make friends, but I don't think it's an appealing way to think about meeting a lover and partner. Of all the women I've ever loved in my life, my response to them has been immediate and primal. When I was fourteen I prank-called a girl and just hearing her voice say "Hello" for the first time was like sprinting into a tripwire and tumbling to the ground in a woozy pile. I didn't know what to say back to her; I was stupefied and tingling with the sudden flush of new nerve endings opening in my chest.

There's an inherent risk in dating. It can be as simple as risking rejection or as terrifyingly serious as courting new disease and infection. The "good" girls are the ones that are mindful of these social traps and maintain disciplined and formal conversation until a man can prove his reliability and interest in more than a quick and sweaty good time.

Those are the ones I hope to avoid. R was my first friend who used Nerve for dating. She told me that she hadn't met a single person from the website and not had sex with him. One of my closest friends in San Francisco is a woman who I had sex with after six hours of being first introduced. We've never had sex again and I'm pretty happy just being friends with her, but I certainly don't regret having pushed the outer limits of our attraction.

I like women who drive fast and take chances; who don't apologize for their sex and don't feel the need to adjust their behavior based on fear of what someone else will think about their expressions of sexuality. I want a woman who trusts her instincts as much as her intellect, and has faith in her ability to manage the consequences of leading with her heart and gut.

I've never met that kind of woman online.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Sex Machine: Nipples

airheadgenius — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:52:00 GMT

I had a weird day today. Something just didn't feel right.
I did my usual thing - pitching this, managing that, but, to use one of your charming Americanisms, I was a little off my game. Am I getting sick? Even more tired than usual? Stressed about the accelerating demise of the Western world?

Maybe, yes and yes, but that wasn't it.
Nope, larger forces were at play here, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Until I took an early evening shower.

And made the unsettling and almost unbelievable discovery:

I learned, much to my chagrin, that I was wearing mismatching lingerie.

Yes, both items were black with cream lace trim. But one was a balconette by Agent Provocateur, whilst the other was (dare I confess?) from George at Asda.

I'm amazed that I made it through the day.
Which brings me to my love of underwear and my heartfelt desire to bring nipples back.

Seriously, when was the last time you saw someone else's nipples? As in, in public. At work. At your friend's birthday party. (I am, of course, talking about the impression through clothing, not the real naked deal)

Nipples have been eradicated from the public domain in America and are only to be seen in the privacy of your own home with a lover or a porn site.

What are you people so afraid of?

Nipples used to be a common occurrence. They were to be viewed everywhere you went. As a teenager enmeshed in the horrors of puberty, I remember dreading a stiff breeze or an erotic thought. I have memories of a particularly perky breasted, bra less teacher and a friend with nipples like Roundtrees Fruit Pastilles. (I betcha can't put a roundtrees fruit pastille in yer mouth without chewin it)

Distant memories though. Because the day of the nipple is over.

Amboabe posted about padded bras the other day and whether or not they are misleading, but what he may not know is that it is virtually impossible to buy a non padded sexy bra in this God forsaken country. At some point in the last decade, the T-shirt bra became de rigeur and, since it's inception, it has become a females responsibility to make sure her nipples are well and truly reined in.

I have no desire to falsely advertise my bosomage, but the girls do need a little assistance in maintaining a reasonable altitude and thus I require a bra with at least a little boost. And boost without padding is a rarely sighted beast it would seem. Unless it's plain white and utilitarian and I just refuse to go there.

And it pains me to admit that this phenomenon has crossed the pond. In my last trip to M&S's lingerie department (which, for the uninitiated, is equivalent to Mecca for the reasonably priced lingerie lover) and was nonplussed to find nary an unpadded scanty to be had.

So, in conclusion brothers and sisters, I'd like to invite you to get behind this new cause, get thee a placard and begin shouting to the rooftops:
Down with padding! Up with nipples!
(as it were)

Here are some I made earlier:
Too hot to internet date?
Bed
Where do these losers come from?
How many sexual partners have you had?
The time I dated Zeitgeisty
F*ck off yer ol git
It's not funny being single
The V Word
The taste of kitty

Sex Machine: Lying Lovers, or the Padded Bra

amboabe — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:07:00 GMT

I was talking with my new roommate tonight and she admitted to a habit of telling men she is about to have sex with that she wears a padded bra. This reminded me of a few horrific moments I spent with an old girlfriend when we had sex for the first time.

I've never dated women with large breasts and I don't really care one way or the other. Breast size is pretty low on my list of wants in a partner. I've been with a lot of women who had smaller cup sizes and wore padded bras. These bras always struck me as bizarre machinery.

I admire a nice bra, a functional girding ornamented with lace and Victorian detail. There's something honest about the dual vanity and purpose of a bra. If the weight must be supported, then let it be supported beautifully. Extra padding in the cup doesn't have any purpose other than to mislead. Seeing a padded bra is always faintly disappointing. I never feel duped that someone's naked body didn't live up to the promise of the swells and slopes of the clothed silhouette. The idea that person I'm with wanted me to think they were something else, even superficially, is sad in some small way.

After spending an evening watching TV together, my ex and I moved to her bedroom together. We had kissed on the couch for a long time, slowly and without any great sense of urgency. I slid my hand over her body and she demurred. She would pull back for a moment and smile at me coyly, and then we would kiss again. I thought she wanted to move slowly and so I didn't try and escalate things.

Then she asked me to come back into her bedroom.

After a while, I was on top of her and began undoing her bra. I wanted to feel her skin against my own. The bra was a jarring obstruction every time it rubbed against my chest. We kept kissing as I slid the bra down and moved my hand across her bare breasts for the first time. I immediately panicked.

There was no breast there. Where I thought I might have felt some small mound I found only skin and rib cage. In the darkness it felt almost concave. An idea started to form in my head, her reluctance to escalate things in the living room, the slowness of our kissing, absence of anything beneath her bra. She must have had a mastectomy, I thought. I couldn't come up with any other explanation, so dramatic was the disparity between the poofy B cup bra and the planar landscape of her upper body.

Am I ready to have sex with a cancer survivor? Is there a proper method for making love to someone who's had a mastectomy? Was I doing something earlier that made her not want to tell me? What does it look like with the light on?

My mind was running away with itself, inventing an elaborate set of irrational conclusions in a few seconds. I was on the verge of asking her about it when she shifted her weight and I felt the thin layer of her breast ripple. I suddenly felt like an ass. She hadn't had a breast removed, it was just that her breasts were exceptionally small and all but disappeared when she was on her back.

I had no issue with her breast size. I wouldn't have given it a second thought had I known to expect it. I wasn't reeling at her body, it was the disparity of the projection and the reality. I wasn't there, naked and in bed with her, because of her body. I wanted to be with her, to feel like what it was like. I didn't want ideals. I wanted particulars, her particulars.

That can be the hardest thing to have faith in when you're having sex with someone for the first time. It's so much easier to let the person see what they want to see, to willfully mislead their gaze to an idyllic exaggeration. It's frightening to not apologize for yourself, to put it out there in all its adorned honesty and trust that whoever it is that you end up with will be able to take it and love it for what it is: a part of you.

Previous Posts:

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation

amboabe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 06:39:00 GMT

When I was in high school I imagined that being able to hold out for more than three or four minutes was a rite of passage. Watching porno and listening to other men talk about their sexual experiences I figured it was something that just inevitably happened, like baldness. I was wrong.

I always experience a moment of doubt when I'm sleeping with someone new and we're about to have sex for the first time. It's hard not to get carried away on the wave of excitement and physical discovery, which is usually when I start to wonder whether or not my sprinkler head is going to go off too soon after entry. There are few things quite as soul crushing as feeling like you've got to apologize for something after sex.

I have a decent understanding of the varying levels and intensities of my own arousal and what it means for my prospects of coming. With a little extra management and thought it's easy enough to keep everything at a maintainable level of arousal without getting the sneezy tingles. Still, there are times when it all evaporates into a vague momentum that suddenly materializes in a few irreversible seconds of spasm.

It's nice to think that lovemaking can be reduced to a handful of colloquial rules of thumb, but sex always surprises me. I can't think of a single experience I've had where there wasn't something new or unexpected. I'm surprised enough by all the subtle shifts and new aspects of my own body: a fleshy callous felt from the underside, the tangle of my hair in the mornings, the veins of my forearm. The more you get to know something, the more it changes.

Having sex with someone new is a flood of new detail. Feeling the touch of a new hand, the taste of a new mouth, the sweat of skin, a new rhythm, new contours; there's so much happening all at once that keeping track of my own arousal slips a few notches in importance. Then the moment is irrevocably at hand.

Other times, I come too soon because I just don't care about lasting longer. I get infatuated with my own immediate feelings and don't want to moderate them at all. I want the galloping rush to carry me in as far as it can. This is usually the least satisfying kind of sex. In the moment it seems like a great idea; the impulse to keep pushing farther and faster is totally logical. Then it all evaporates, the starry chariot that seemed to be ascending heavenward minutes earlier is transformed into a sweaty hulk with only a distant echo of that thrill left inside.

I suspect this kind of low-level joy, the natural equivalent of popping a whip-it, is what makes it so easy for men to celebrate sex as something worth bragging about. This kind of sex is the ego running unrestrained, the dog off the leash bounding through the park with no understanding of where it's going or why.

For how much anxiety I've experienced over coming too soon, I've never gotten any real flack for it from the women I've been with. "Don't let it get to your head," S told me the first time we had sex for a good three minutes.

I look at orgasms during sex like punctuation in a paragraph. They don't make me tired, or lethargic. They're energizing and they make me more interested in continuing. It makes me hungry to see and feel even more of my partner. When I masturbate, I avoid doing it late at night because it will keep me up with a racing heart and restless mind.

There's something private about having an orgasm. It can be like a little departure, watching your partner leave her body for a moment, eyes closed, moving in a silent rhythm of her own making. In the best cases, both people can go along to the same relative height, like looking at someone on opposite sides of an elevated chasm. Coming early is like being on a pretty mountaintop and not seeing anyone else, it's pretty and lonely. Narcissistic and irresistible.

Previous Posts:

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: How Soon, Sex Toy?

amboabe — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:18:00 GMT

I got a cock ring for my birthday a few years ago. I had never considered using a sex toy for my own benefit before. Sex toys are an implicit taboo for straight men. It's become generally accepted that women require vibrators and dildos for their own self-pleasure (how could a woman get off without a phallus?), but a man with a sex toy is a greasy kink monster.

One of the benefits of being in a relationship is that you are given leeway to experiment with new ways to arouse yourself and your partner. Sex toys lose their fetishistic edge and become more functional and exploratory. They aren't lurid artifacts but new intermediaries with which to break new ground. Being single is a different matter. How can you reasonably try and break new ground with someone when you're only vaguely acquainted with their body and person?

I used to tease a woman I was seeing that we could use a truck battery and alligator clips together. "It'll be out thing, just for me and you," I told her. "We're not using alligator clips," she would tell me with a deadpan glare.

I've never used an electrical current during sex, and my offer wasn't serious. But the irony wasn't meant to be totally dismissive either. I know what's felt good to me in the past, but I can't say what will elicit that reaction tomorrow. In the worst of times, we get so familiar with ourselves, and the bodies in bed with us, that we forget to move forward. We tell each other myths about "good" sex and "bad" sex, and then assemble a mountain of books, websites, seminars, and television shows that create a rubric for what that is.

Sex is both mundane and ecstatic. It is fundamentally unknowable. The more familiar it becomes the more it loses its defining quality. All of which is a lot to saddle a lover with, servicing the mundanity and ecstasy or our bodies. Can a person's imagination really be so expansive as to keep the act a continual discovery day after day or year after year?

I also own anal beads, though I have never used them with anyone else. I'm not sure I like using them on myself. I like the attempt, it's an experience I've never had before. I fumble and do things awkwardly; it's not the most intuitive of processes and is even less so without an extra set of hands. But it's an adventure, something I'm happy to have embarked on.

At what point does the introduction of sex accoutrements become acceptable with a new partner? Is there a dictum requiring polite society to avoid anal beads until the third date? Is the use of a cock ring a masochistic affront to a man's hetero-virility?

I bought a woman I had dated a vibrating dildo once. It sounds like an easy task, but I wandered around the back of the sex store for an hour debating different shapes, sizes, and functions. Would it have been rude to buy a big ten-inch dildo? Would it have been sad to present her with the narrow five inch instead? We weren't seeing each other anymore so I felt doubly at a loss. Whatever my choice, it would be up to her to make the best use of it. My seat on the exploratory committee had been abdicated.

I settled on something pink and soft, with a gentle motor and an approachable length. I played it safe, not wanting to push the line with something crass and vulgar. Later, she told me she had used it for a few months and thrown it away. I should have gotten her something that connected to a truck battery. Or better yet, we should have gone shopping together, before we stopped having sex.

Previous Posts:

Sex Education Machine: Abstinence, or Waiting is Easier Because...

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: The Funny Thing About Handjobs

amboabe — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:30:00 GMT

I used to have a stupid habit. I would go into a social setting and announce a challenge. I'd wager some arbitrary sum of money that no one in the room could make me come in less than ten minutes. I thought it was an innocuous icebreaker, but once somebody actually took me up on it.

I had forgotten the word "handjob" existed until I saw Rushmore. There's a scene in which two fourteen year-olds debate the claim that a mother is giving out handjobs in a local swimming pool. The idea of someone touching my penis in the buildup to sex as being anything worth bragging about is ridiculous. It's just a part of what happens during sex. I wouldn't have singled it out anymore than I would have described the kind of mustard in the sandwich I ate for lunch today. There was definitely mustard in it, and it was an important part of the sandwich. But saying there was mustard does little to really describe the experience as a whole.

Hearing the debate about the sexual version of condiments was a small revelation for me. I had forgotten about the adolescent fixation on sex as achievement. "Oh my god, this is great. I've got to hurry up and finish so I can tell my friends," as the comedian once said. The term handjob is so hairless and deliberate. It's entirely juvenile to think of being in the same room with a woman and emerging with nothing more interesting than a manual pistoning. It's something only a fourteen year-old could marvel at (and I, most definitely, used to be that fourteen year-old).

Coming from an adult, bravura about "handjobs" is absurd. That's why I got stuck in the habit for so long. It amused me to walk into a room of comparative strangers with a crass line soliciting a handjob, in the form of an ineptly transparent wager. To my thinking, it was a good way to loosen a stiff crowd and bend conversation towards territory that was more personal. I become the vulgar buffoon by going too far, but hopefully some people will feel a little bit less timid about taking conversational risks of their own.

Then one time, a friend of mine took me literally. I was trying to pass out on a couch after a party when my friend S coerced a woman into calling my bluff about the handjob bet. I heard some muffled conversation coming from outside and suddenly I felt a warm body lying on top of me. I felt someone's tongue licking my lips, and a hand worked its way into my pants. I had spent the evening drinking rum and snorting Phenobarbital (which was a bad idea).

I opened my eyes and recognized my friend L above me. We had hooked up once before so it made a little more sense that I was suddenly involved in foreplay when I had just wanted to go to sleep. But I knew what was happening and it was disconcerting to be called out about something so openly ridiculous.

I was in bad shape. I felt like the inside of a bar drain, grimy and sick. I liked L. She was smarter than me and wore glasses that darkened in the sun. I wasn't sure if I wanted to have sex with her, but I probably would have been convinced had I been in better shape.

Instead, I became the butt of my own joke. She couldn't make me come in less than ten minutes.

So ended my phase of making handjob jokes.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: Show Me Your Penis

amboabe — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:41:00 GMT

It's strange that there aren't more penises in movies. I see my own penis everyday, several times. There's nothing remarkable about it. I admit to looking at it with a fond eye sometimes, imbuing its sloping pink dangle with a certain metaphysical nostalgia. Still, genitals have somehow become danger signals to many people, giant red X's that can't be looked at without tearing the moral fabric of the universe.

Penises aren't any more or less attractive than vaginas. They can have unpleasant qualities, but in terms of visual appeal I'd say they're at least an order of magnitude more attractive than the average foot. Of course anyone can go barefoot, regardless of what calloused and veiny claws they might have, but penises need to be treated like a controlled substance. Though you might have one of your own, you must be of a certain age before you're allowed to see someone else's in the media.

The videogame is not often cited as a figurehead of social progress, but I saw a trailer for a new expansion of Grand Theft Auto IV today that features a conspicuous penis appearance. Penises have appeared in games before, many of them, probably too many to recount. What's remarkable is that GTA IV is not a marginal or pornographic game. It's one of the biggest franchises in videogame history. Having a penis in GTA IV is like Harrison Ford showing his male rudder in an Indiana Jones movie.

There's nothing remotely interesting about the scene that the nudity is used in. It's filled with stereotype and cheap jokes about how gross the male genital is supposed to be. The politician, consciously delivering his orders while naked is an extension of the dick-centric machismo that thirteen year-olds have been giggling about since time began. Dick's are disgusting, but the most powerful man in the room is so confident in his position that he is unaffected by the revulsion of his audience. Their reactions, for better or worse, are immaterial. Even if he doesn't literally have the biggest dick in the room, he's still aware that he's got the biggest figurative dick.

The punchline underscores how completely absurd all of those abstract phallocentricities are when taken literally. For an organ whose size is always a point of interest, it's almost anti-climactic to come to the end of a three-minute scene only to see the flaccid, middle-aged, polygon appendage. Sometimes a penis is just a penis.

I still don't understand what's so shameful or disgusting about seeing a penis. I've met a lot of people who seem preprogrammed to scrunch up their faces and squint every time the subject arises. It's as if the existence of genitals were as repellent as boogers or cooties. The imperfections of the penis, the veins, the pubic hair, the alien skin of the scrotum, the suggestion of autonomous movement when it flexes; it's all cause for recoil.

Many men certainly have similar knee-jerk reactions to the idea of vagina. There is the idea of the vagina as the mystical honey box from which all life flows, but further talk about menstruation, queefing (or vaginal flatulence, if I might be so bold), or hairy labias are unwelcome.

If those issues exist, it seems like art would be the perfect place to exorcise them. In the same way that zombies and heartless fascists armed with nuclear warheads dance around the flickering mobile of the film world, it seems only natural that genital anxiety might be an undiscovered genre for storytellers to mine for material.

It's like we live in two different worlds: the anatomically safe one where gender is based on personality stereotype and facial features, and then a kinky underworld where the ugly grammatical points of our bodies rub against each other in the darkness. It's always surprising to me when I go into the bathroom at work and unzip my pants for a piss and don't see that dangerously unpredictable underworld come rushing out like the ghosts inside Pandora's box.

Instead, it's just another body part, a mistranslation, a lost remnant from a parallel universe where feelings don't have to be kept separate from the vessels that transport them.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Sex Machine: The Kink In My Hair (and other weird fetishes)

spjv840 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:38:00 GMT

When it comes to fetishes, I'm pretty vanilla. I'm not into toe sucking, toe licking, being whipped, beaten, choked, donkey punched, being pierced by large needles in strange places. I don't get off on latex, being watched or watching others, orgies sound more like a huge collection of germs than a good time and people with stumps do not turn me on. F*ck me in the ass and I'm happy. But not everyone is so easily satisfied...

I saw an ad on craigslist recently in the "strictly platonic" section (because we all know how well that rule sticks) from a man looking for women with medium to long hair who would be willing to let him wash their hair and nothing else. And he's willing to pay! I'm imagining a new kind of hair salon here where women and men go in and get paid to have their hair washed by people with kinky hair washing fetishes.

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to go on a search of various sexual fetishes to see how weird some of these get. Strap in, or strap on, it might get bumpy.

Things that turn some people on, in no specific order:

Vorarephilia - eating or being eaten by others; usually swallowed whole, in one piece

Vomerophilia - being attracted to VOMIT

Hybristophilia - criminals, particularly for cruel or outrageous crimes

Coprophilia - Poop play

Diaperism - attraction to diapers or people wearing diapers

Frotteurism - rubbing against a non-consenting person

Apotemnophilia - being an amputee

Lactaphilia - attraction to human breast milk

Mammaphilia - female breasts (.....)

Ondinism - pee play

Peodeiktophilia - exposing one's penis in public or non-consenting person

And then it gets really weird. There are sites dedicated to:

- Trampling (women walking over men, usually in heels)
- Girls eating sandwiches
- Gut flopping (use your imagination)
- Girls sneezing
- Crippled women

And don't get me started on Objectum Sexuals, or people who are in intimate, emotional, sexual relationships with inanimate objects.

Sex Machine: Sex With 19 Year-Olds

amboabe — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:05:00 GMT

I was waiting for the subway after work the other day when I noticed a nervous looking woman glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. She had bleached blonde hair cut short and scruffy like a boy's. She was in tight black jeans and black eyeliner, meandering up and down the platform chewing on her lower lip. When she would come closest to me we'd look at each other for a second, then she would turn around. Then she'd come back and we'd catch each other staring again. I was about to talk to her when I looked closer and realized she was much younger than I had thought, probably nineteen at the oldest.

It's strange for me to think of age as a barrier to attraction, but it is. Men are supposed to want delicate young things. There's some vestigial proof of virility in the idea of bedding a young woman. If men are to project authority as the ultimate fulfillment of their macho-ness, then quelling a trembling fawn of a young woman with an assured stroke must be the very embodiment of all that is man.

It's hard to understand what ageing really is. I remember one summer I spent a week in a cabin with a friend and his parents. I was twelve. I remember sneaking out to the porch one night and looking out at the dark trees and impenetrable blackness beneath them. The air was just cold enough to excite the bare skin on my arms. I looked up at the stars and I felt a vast sameness inside. It felt like I was just as I was when I was a small boy. I felt totally unchanged inside.

I still feel the same way now, almost twenty years later. I have all those same questions I had before, the same excitements, the same longings, the same contentment in just being alive.

But I am older. I look older, my speech is more convoluted, my thoughts riddled with a gypsy trove of collected facts to support all my metaphysical hunches. When I look back on pictures of my nineteen year-old self it's hard to not feel stunned at how different my comportment was. If I felt the same then as now, why did I wear those strange expressions, have that embarrassed posture, wear those terrible clothes designed to make me a part of the unnoticed background?

Looking at the young girl giving me moon eyes in the subway, I felt a flush of ego. If I talked to her, bummed a cigarette, snuck her into some skanky dive bar, walked around the dirty cement corridors of the city letting her exorcise her nervous stories of anxiety and disbelief, we would eventually have sex. If that happened my inner caveman would surely sprout a new chest hair.

I went out with a woman several years younger than me a while back (I was twenty-nine, she was twenty-two). We went dancing and she tried to teach me how to dance, offering to show me what to do before we had even stepped on the dance floor. She had a similar kind of mania, filled with nerves and bravura, confident in the fact that there was a right way to do something as personal as dancing. Being with her that night was exhausting, it was like having fun by algebra or assimilation to some social standard that finally amounted to her bouncing around on the balls of her feet to a 4/4 beat. Later, headed back to my apartment she assured me that she was going to blow my mind in bed because she was bisexual.

When I was younger, I felt like I had something to apologize for, but I wasn't sure what. I always felt like I was the one puzzle piece that was out of place. I overcompensated by trying to appear impenetrable. I tried to control my vulnerability and embarrassment by projecting it on other people. I believed there was a right way and a wrong way to do something, to dance, to talk to a woman, to wear some article of clothing.

When I think of having sex with someone so young now, all I can see is my own cagey self, full of mania and a constant fear of being discovered as a fraud. I would have kissed like a blender and had sex like a broken spring. When the subway pulled up I watched the young girl get into the last car on the train. I thought about following her for a second. Instead, I went into the car ahead of hers and put on my headphones. I tried to remember all those things I've always felt while the metal roar of the tracks shook the whole train around me.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Sex Machine: If I don't get laid soon

airheadgenius — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:43:00 GMT

If i don't get laid soon I am going to flat out die
That's how serious it is

If only I could bring myself to fuck idiots I would be home and hosed.
Damn my picky self.

(p.s. comments are not posting to my blog. At least not when I post them. So if I don't reply to your witty and pithy and/or supportive comment about my current lack of dick access, then I apologise. Nerve tech people: get yer finger out. As in fix the problem. Personally, I advocate fingers in)

Here are some I made earlier:
Sex standing up
Is this the best you can do?
Are you insulted?
Juicy Lips
Dear John, F*ck Off Select Blog to Manage
Cry, get mad, move on soundtrack
Obama Babies

I've posted this before, but it's all I can think about...

Sex Machine: Sex standing up

airheadgenius — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:44:00 GMT

I am a big fan of sex standing up.
I am also a fan of tall men.

The two are very often mutually exclusive. Especially amongst the 35+ set when the cartilage in the knees starts to wear out.

I had a FWB a year or two ago who, at 5'6" was shorter by far than my average conquest. Given that I wear heels pretty often, we were perfectly compatible for standing up sex.

We made great use of this compatibility.

At the time, I was in the process of having my house renovated and he had a bunch of properties that were also being worked on, so we found ourselves in construction sites pretty often. Now, I am not one for exhibitionism and have no desire to be watched whilst having sex, but the ease of a quickie stand up was too overwhelming and we had sex many times with the sound of contractors hammering away in the background.

Another notable stand up was from a dozen years ago. A quasi relationship this time. We were in bed one day, with me on top, when he abruptly stood up and walked me over to a wall. He moved as if he didn't have a 120lb woman attached to him. It was impressive and I told just about everyone I knew. He was pleased that his tremendous thighs had become almost legendary.

Just thought I'd share.

Ok, off out on a date. Have a lovely evening. I wonder how a stand up in the snow would be?

Here are some I made earlier:
Is this the best you can do?
Are you insulted?
Juicy Lips
Dear John, F*ck Off
Cry, get mad, move on soundtrack
Obama Babies
Granny Porn
Seriously, what is the point?
3 Basic Needs

Jeff Buckley. Gorgeous. Dead. Shame.

Sex Machine: Don't Forget to Masturbate

amboabe — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:16:00 GMT

I came home yesterday after almost a week away. Within ten minutes of walking through the door I was masturbating. It was quick and perfunctory, but when my come spurted out over my shoulder and fell inconveniently onto the floor behind me I realized it had been too long. For months I've meant to put myself on a daily masturbation regimen. I exercise every morning, I eat three times a day, I spend most of my waking hours hurling my brain at work projects, so it seems like short shrift to not give my sexual side a trot in the park more than once or twice a week.

I used to masturbate everywhere I could. In high school I would get a bathroom pass in the middle of a class to sneak down the hall and pleasure myself. I've done it on more flights than I can remember. When I lived in Madagascar, I went for a walk out into the countryside surrounding the village I lived in. I trudged through the sand and loping shapes of cactus for a few miles. The sun was starting to go down and I stopped for a moment in total silence. The only thing I could hear was the dim reverberation of the air in my ears and the occasional brush of wind.

There was empty wilderness in every direction, dry and gnarled. The village looked like a small collection of toys clumped together, an isolated refuge against the harsh lunar landscape. In the same way I could hear the air in my ears, I felt it against my skin. The sun was falling and the air was returning to a neutral chill that the mid-afternoon heat had covered up. I felt it all over, like water ebbing upwards in a high tide. I felt gravity pulling against my penis.

Every breath I took broke the silence, every step I took sounded amplified, like I was listening to it through headphones. I felt a strong impulse to strip and feel the air against my body. I took a few steps off the footpath I had been following and stepped behind a dried bramble of dusty thorns. I dropped my shorts to my ankles and started to masturbate.

My head was a total blank and there was nothing remotely arousing to see. It felt clinical; the cold in the air was the impersonal metal of some doctor's instrument. The closer I got to coming the more bizarre things felt. It was like trying to stay in a dream with a bright flashlight shining in my eyes.

Then I heard a cow low. The sound of sand crunching came from somewhere nearby just as I finished. I pulled my shorts up in a chill of adrenaline, kicking sand over the pile of come at my feet.

Less than a minute later, a lanky farmer came strolling down the footpath with a few cows out to graze on the sparse clumps of weeds that sprouted underneath the cactus. He seemed surprised to see me come out of the brush. I greeted him and made it back home by dark.

Masturbating is like trying to reconcile two realities; one is always retreating. I didn't have time to masturbate tonight. My hope for some kind of daily sexual endeavor seems farther away now. Tomorrow morning, I'll sit on the BART, listening to my headphones, doing kegels, staring at all the other people reflected in the glass, with the darkness speeding by underneath. Tomorrow.

And then tomorrow again.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: Thanks But I'll Pass, or Handling Rejection

Naked Machine: Buying New Underwear, or Sex in a Dressing Room

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Sex Machine: Bigger Isn't Always Better

spjv840 — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:52:00 GMT

I once dated a man who had a very large urethra opening. The kind of large where you can't help but stare at it in surprise for a second before realizing that maybe you shouldn't be staring at it with a look of shock on your face. That sucker was BIG, man. I could probably have stuck my thumb up there, but I'm not into that kind of thing (NSFW).

I've never seen anything like it and quite honestly, hope I never do again. Not to be mean or anything, but it was really unattractive - like a big eye staring right at you. I remember catching a glimpse of pre-ejaculate fluid pouring out of there and thinking "EW, that's going to be in me in any second now".

My question is this: Why do some men have larger urethra openings than others? Does it get stretched? Or is it like ears and noses and it just comes (...) in different sizes?

Have you had experiences with larger than normal urethras?

Sex Machine: Juicy Lips

airheadgenius — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:20:00 GMT

This is not remotely important, but I just want to share that I cannot abide Addison Montgomery (Kate Walsh) from Private Practice. She pulls the weirdest "my brain just left the building" type faces which just aren't appropriate for a surgeon and her "sexy face" is enough to make me vom. This example is less about sexy and more "is it my imagination, or did he just fart?" She doesn't move me in other words.

It's not her fault, poor love, it's nature. She has been unfortunately smitten with excruciatingly thin lips. A feature that I just cannot bear to contemplate. Another one of the crew - TIm Daly, aka Pete, is equally irritating for the same reason.

I cannot and will not trust people with thin lips. They skeeve me. And the thought of kissing a skinny no padding no juice mouth is a prospect just too awful to contemplate.
Kissing, as discussed here, is a wonderful past-time and something I am happy to engage in at any time, but a kisser is only as good as their equipment. Sometimes, when I see a really fat couple, I wonder how the hell they have sex. When I see two zip-lipped people, I wonder how on earth they can bear to kiss each other.

So now you know.

(I've am blessed with full lips and so am nonchalantly able to adopt this prejudiced position. Cry me a river you miserly mouthed muppets)

This man has been my DailyKnob before, but he made it back due to his juicy lip action:

Here are some I made earlier:
Dear John, F*ck Off
Cry, get mad, move on soundtrack
Obama Babies
Granny Porn
Seriously, what is the point?
3 Basic Needs

Sex Machine: Drunk Men Do It.....Better?

spjv840 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:22:00 GMT

It figures this survey would come out a week after I decide to give up booze for good.

According to this survey by Western Australia's Keogh Institute for Medical Research drunk men are better in the sack than the sober fellas.

"We found that, compared to those who have never touched alcohol, many people do benefit from some alcohol, including some people who drink outside the guidelines," Dr Chew said.

Is this the universe playing a cruel joke on me?

After studying the effects of alcohol on 158 Australian men researchers found that men who drank within the recommended guidelines had 30% fewer problems during sex than their sober peers. Clair Weaver of The Sunday Telegraph said that "Even binge drinkers had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who never drank, although this type of drinking can cause other health problems."

And to fuck with my universe even more, researchers said that ex-drinkers were the ones with the highest rate of problems in the sack.

It's not all that surprising, I suppose. After a few drinks inhibitions fall, the sex is hot and everyone ends up (at least somewhat) satisfied because there's no holding back. When you have too many drinks the only thing that falls is the man's limp dick and the woman's hopes for the night.

The article went on to say that "After other risk factors were excluded, weekend drinkers, high-risk drinkers and those who exceeded alcohol-intake guidelines had lower rates of erectile dysfunction than those who drank one day a week or less. Ex-drinkers, however, had the highest risk."

So what happens to all those other studies that said alcohol turns a man's penis soft and makes drunk sex sloppy? Gimme a minute...I'm trying to think of all the drunk sex I had versus the sober sex......................Jesus, they might be on to something here.

Thoughts?

Love Machine: The Hooker on the Corner

amboabe — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:55:00 GMT

There's a hooker who works on the corner in front of my building sometimes. When I first moved in a little over a year ago, a couple of my guy friends drove up to visit me from out of town. As we were headed into the lobby after spending the night at a bar, she asked why we didn't have any women with us. "Ain't no one gettin' laid if you go up there by yourselves," she half-shouted after us. She sounded almost angry. She seemed insulted that we hadn't offered her to join us.

She hasn't said a word to me since that night. I don't see her very often, but every few weeks she's out on the corner again, in short pants and high heels, walking with a friend or staring anxiously down the street. I live on the third floor with a sliding glass door and balcony that looks out to sidewalk below. I leave my blinds open at night until right before I go to bed because I like the city lights and the way the buildings tuck away into shadows in between. I see her down there some nights, and I'll watch her for a minute, forgetting that she can look back up and see me in the wide open glass door just as easily. She never looks back up.

I've seen her leaning into a car that's pulled up to the curb. Sometimes she gets in, other times the car drives away and leaves her shifting her weight from heel to heel. She's not the only hooker that works my neighborhood. Sometimes she's not around for weeks at a time, but new girls in sequined strips and plastic heels take her place. One night I was walking home from work after staying too late in the office and saw a man sitting in a parked car. His right arm was extended over the passenger seat and it looked like he was staring at the steering wheel. When I got closer I saw a woman's head pressed into his lap, just barely moving.

He looked at me and I immediately felt like I was trespassing. I turned away, staring down at my shoes. I didn't look back.

You pay the prostitute to leave at the end. I used to work with someone who told me that, and it seemed so perfectly opaque to me that I thought it must have been a lie. I was still young and thought that there was some great secret to sex. It seemed like there was some private language to finding a partner. I could see it happening all around me but I didn't understand the words.

When I had sex for the first time, I was twenty-three. It was a delicious anti-climax. It was like a good shit crossed with an indulgent soak in a hot tub. I had romanticized things so hopelessly up until that point, I hadn't been able to discover how stupidly easy it is to find someone to have sex with. I thought there would be some elemental signpost drawing me to my missing half then something vaguely mystical would happen, like inadvertent levitation. I thought sex lay buried in some glyphic tomb of intimacy.

But no, it was just a body function in the end, an empty vessel. It could be filled, but alone it was an empty serving plate covered over in garnishes. Once I got my sex legs beneath me I found out how strangely awful it can be to wake up with someone you don't want, to have their taste in your mouth, and their smell around your body. Sex was a cheap parlor trick when I didn't care about the person on the other side of the bed. As good as it was at the height, the drop back down to the morning after seemed to last so much longer.

When I see the hooker on my corner, she seems invincible. She walks with her back straight, she struts, she speaks loudly, yells at passersby when moved to do so. She seems strong and unbridled to me. She would have to be to spend so many nights being told to leave, over and over again. Just for a little money.

Previous Posts:

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

Sex Machine: Having Sex on Inauguration Night

amboabe — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:17:00 GMT

Pictures tell lies. They trap a moving, changing moment into a single frame that points to a vague encapsulation of the truth. I saw a picture of Barack and Michele Obama dancing face to face at the inaugural ball, and I immediately started wondering if they were going to have sex on inauguration night. I can't fully imagine what it must be like to be so close to a lifemate after having gone through such a dramatic transformation, from gangly law student to American figurehead. Does sex have place in that world anymore? Is there time for physical intimacy with so many dire threads dangling on the periphery of the celebration?

Watching someone evolve is inevitable in long-term relationships. For many that I know, this constitutes a kind of gradual slackening. Getting married is a finish line, a celebratory goal after which two people can give over to the pursuits of property management, consumption, and an annual vacation to a postcard somewhere in South Western Bavaria or the West Indes. How many people get to see their partners actually excel over time? How many loving spouses watch their mate become more than he or she was as an awkward undergrad?

This is me projecting, but seeing the Obama's dancing against a blue sea of heads gazing up in the darkness, it's hard not see the sex there between them. Barack's forward-leaning posture, his chin jutting hungrily into Michelle's face, I can almost see the thoughts in his head. The wetness, the warm touching of skin, the rhythmic thrust inwards, straining to ascend, the hips rising in anticipation of his momentum. The arch up, the coming together, the falling back, the dilated pupils, the clenched hands, fingers interlocked.

It all becomes a metaphor in the picture when I look at it, the two people there project sexual silhouettes, stuck in the gaze of a political machine, but still holding onto the mundane mystery of a human relationship.

One of my greatest fears about long-term relationships is thinking about the ways that I'll change over time. I don't feel any different inside now than I did when I was a boy, but pictures tell me that I have changed. I can only imagine what changes are left for me in the coming decades. This image terrifies me: a woman looking at me in twenty years, wondering where the wave broke, wondering when the man I used to be transformed into the slouching, wrinkled reduction sitting on the couch.

It makes me woozy to imagine a relationship that is still on the upslope twenty years later, cresting unimagined territory, moving forward in tandem. I can't imagine experiencing it from that height without needing the expression of affection to take a physical form, to put in primal action all the things words miss.

But it's just a picture in the end. A stolen frame, a fraction of a second in a night that must also be larded with hand shaking, obsequious coddling, political ingratiation, and impersonal pomp. How much of that momentary flush of desire can be left after a maelstrom of toothy smiles and flashing bulbs? I don't know. When I imagine myself in that position, the secret service is guarding the door while I'm in the bathroom fucking my wife, trying to hold on, in momentary freefall.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Obama Babies

airheadgenius — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:39:00 GMT

So, today America got it's first bi-racial president. Who would have thought it?

I am pleased that he's president because he is clearly intelligent and, I suspect, he actually understands his own material. That's new.

I also like his stance on education and health care. Although it's astounding at the same time that some of the policies he's talking about haven't been in place for years already. What have you been smoking oh great American people?

But, most of all I like him because he just made my family the most fashionable thing out. We are this year's New Look. (This is the bit where dvalerley gets that I am being ironic and many of you peeps just get a bad attitude)

For those of you that haven't been following along, my kid's dad is black and I am, yep you've guessed it, white and so our kids are mixed race. Carmel is the cliched description, although they happen to be lighter than that given my extreme paleness.

My kid's dad and I split up 5 years ago, but we've always done things as a family because, although we're no longer a couple, a family we remain. His peeps are In Chicago, mine are in England, so it's especially important that the four of us maintain a family unit at least some of the time. The kids like it.

A few months back, when the race to the White House was hotting up, the four of us were at an exhibition at the Natural History Museum. Some old lady sauntered up to the ex with a beaming smile on her face and whispered something conspiratorially to him. He gave her a polite smile back, but I know him and it was not benign. I whispered "what did she say?" and he rolled his eyes at me. Once we got off the elevator, he told me she'd said "Your kids are beautiful and one day they could be running for president". Whoop de dooo! I wonder if she'd said that to each and every cute white kid she saw that day.

My family has had it's own share of drama because, as anyone living in a mixed race situation will tell you, you've now got two sets of people you can simultaneously (and completely inadvertently) piss off. Yep, we get it from all sides.

But, in New York at least, and since November 4th, we've just been beamed at any time we've been out and about. Ahhh, look at those cute little Obama children. Aren't they just adorable? Tonight, we're going out for dinner to celebrate in Fort Greene. We're probably going to beat our "how many times can we be beamed at?" record.

Yep, the four of us were cute from the get go, but today, we got a whole lot cuter. Expect to see more kids looking like mine coming to a magazine, TV and movie screen near you.

The Obama effect.

But hey, it's better to be smiled at than spat at. Maybe a change is gonna come.

Had to really...

Here are some I made earlier:
Granny Porn
Seriously, what is the point?
3 Basic Needs
Piercings - love or loathe?
Deviant Sexual Practises
When good email goes bad
Age again, with more feeling
How young is too young, how old is too old?

Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time

amboabe — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:37:00 GMT

So a while ago I wrote a tear about some women I've been with being too passive in bed. One of the many things wrong with that argument was the assignment of a gender stereotype based on an incomplete series of experiences. I've never had sex with a man, so I never really considered that a lot of women might have similarly dispassionate experiences with passive men. Earlier this year, I found myself having sex in the same room that my friend A was hooking up in. I remember looking over periodically, seeing him draped on top of his date in a Romanesque recline. He looked like he was idling away an afternoon on one elbow, nibbling grapes out of a bowl with his mouth.

He and his date were still mostly clothed and making subtle head movements that looked tender and sweet. What looked like a coy moment of prom night hesitation on the threshold of sex was water being tread to make up for the lack on an erection. At one point, after they had spent an hour kissing , A said, "If you can get me hard, I'll show you a good time."

It was a sad little gauntlet being thrown down. We can have sex if you're willing to do the heavy lifting.

A word about A, before you get out the torches and pitchforks: he's a disaster of a man, but a lovely one. The first time we met he farted loudly and without apology, as if flatulating were a kind of greeting. He is also a spectacular alcoholic. I booze a lot, I binge drink. A is a drinker in excess of my understanding of alcohol intake. He drinks so much his doctor gave him an Adderall prescription so he could concentrate in class (he's a grad student) in spite of his hangovers. I can't think of a time I saw him when he wasn't wearing something with a hole in it. At the wedding he was wearing a pair of shoes one of our friends had found in a public trashcan and given him as a joke. He laughed and then put the shoes on.

If I didn't know A, I would be inclined to write about how men are acculturated to treat sex as an acquisition, the ultimate expression of which is being so alluring that your woman is driven into a sexual frenzy through sheer proximity to your alpha-ness. The ideal scenario is for this man to smugly put his arms behind his head and watch his subject blow him, then ride him, then curl up in the crook of his shoulder and fall asleep in cartoonish exhaustion.

A is not that stereotype, even if I might have described him in a way to support that conclusion. Nobody is that gender stereotype. I got that wrong before. Sex is a communal activity, something two people decide to share with each other. Sometimes you wind up in close quarters with someone you thought you would want to share with, but at the close range you realize your assumptions were wrong. You have less to give them than you thought, there's nothing to say.

I've been in A's position before, with someone I didn't want to be with but didn't realize until it was too late. I faked it. I went through the motions begrudgingly. I lied. I blamed the fart on someone else, explained it away as some weak spot that other people have, but isn't a part of me.

A never got hard that night. He was too drunk and hopped up on pills; in a bed he didn't want to be in, with a person he would feel bad about having disappointed in the morning.

Previous Posts:

Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction

Date Machine: Rate My Politics

High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies

Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Getting Laid

amboabe — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 07:13:00 GMT

I can't easily substantiate this idea, but I feel like it's safe to say there are more euphemisms for sex than for any other word in the English language. Many of them are cheap puns that help to take the edge of the mysterious vulnerability that happens in the throws of animated sex. The more carried away with arousal and affection a person becomes, the more irrationally transcendent everything seems. All while a person is sweating, breathing like a galloping horse, and swiveling their hips to some erratic and primal rhythm. It is definitely not a thing that someone "gets," like finding a twenty-dollar bill in between the sofa cushions.

A woman I was seeing asked me to come over after work one night to help her move some old furniture out of her apartment. As I was trying to negotiate the small puzzle of hallway, doorframes, and an ungainly couch, she said, "I'm pretty sure you're going to get laid tonight for all the trouble." "I'm pretty sure that was going to happen regardless of moving the couch," I told her.

At my worst, I'm prone to improvising sanctimonious sermons about the terms people use around me. A flirting phrase of affection can, through my prism of logic, become grounds for a quasi-legal discourse about the etymologies of sexuality. I had never heard her use that phrase with me before, and I hadn't yet expounded on my deep loathing for the implied passivity and possession contained therein. Like love, sex is not something you get, it's something you already have which you agree to share with someone. I don't get vagina; it's not a status symbol waiting to be unwrapped and embraced like a new iPod waiting under the Christmas tree.

The "laid" part doesn't do much for me either. It makes me think that I'm going to wind up flat on my back with sex miraculously happening to me while I watch in a comfortable recline. It makes sex seem like getting a massage. The implication is that there is a possessor of this mystical "sex" and a person is lucky to find himself or herself in the passive role of the receiver.

There's a larger gender stereotype at work in the phrase, in the way I see it. It reaffirms the overbearing necessity of the man to always be the pursuer, foraging for sex like a bear in a thawing wasteland trying to find berries. Men are taught to celebrate their ability to get sex, to demonstrate their prowess to their peers based on the volume of their encounters. Men don't talk about the qualitative experiences with sex, only the underlying arithmetic that can be used as competitive leverage. Blowjob? Check. Doggy style? Check. Titty fuck? Check. Facial finisher? Check. Got 'em all. I'm that good.

Hauling the couch down the rectangular staircase, trying to keep from knocking all the pictures off the wall, I kept chewing on the phrase. I gnawed at it, wondering if I shouldn't pipe about all the ugly images it connoted for me. I felt slighted almost. That wasn't the kind of sex we had ever had, and if it was going to start being that way, then I didn't want it.

When I was in high school, I remember raising my hand in English class to answer an open-ended question about something we had been reading. I don't remember what we were talking about or what point I wanted to make, but I remember the feeling of smug urgency emanating from inside. When I finished my ramble, my teacher B, looked at me for a quick second. He jutted his chin out and furrowed his brow, then turned away and walked towards the center of the class. "You know, Mike, if you were half as smart as you think you are, that would really be something," he said.

When I got the couch to the curb my jaw loosened, and I let all the flustered thoughts of indignation fall down. Those were mine; they existed in my head, and weren't transported there by the words she had told me. It would have been an argument with myself to protest any further.

It makes me a little sad now, to think that I had the momentary impulse to contort her words for my own subjective reasons just to make a point. It was a small thing, probably not even worth remembering in the larger scope of things, but those small choices are the ones that form behavior patterns in relationships. We choose what's acceptable and not acceptable to ask our partners to put up with. It becomes easier and easier to expect them to shoulder the brunt of our worst tendencies as a relationship ages.

This is part of what I fear most about being in a long-term relationship. I don't want to become someone cruel, but I'm afraid I'll lose the ability to separate my best self from my worst self in the rhetorical fog. In the end, every relationship becomes a fight with yourself.

We walked back upstairs together and looked at the new empty space in her living room. I grabbed my bag and put on my jacket. She put on her jacket and took her purse. We walked back downstairs, found somewhere to eat. Then we went to my apartment and had sex until three in the morning, until it was so late I had to stop because I had work in the morning.

We should have stayed up all night. The sleep wasn't worth it.

Previous Posts:

Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?

Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home

Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays

Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date

Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson

Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction