sex and brains

"Sex and creativity are tightly tied. Not much is more erotic to me than creativity, and not much is more creative than the erotic."

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No, no, no! Victorians didn’t invent the vibrator | Fern Riddell

Fern Riddell: The idea that orgasms were administered to women by doctors is pure fantasy

“So can we please stop saying Victorian women were having unknown orgasms stimulated by their doctors?”

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etymology (#2)

blow job (n.) also blowjob, 1961, from blow + job. Exactly which blow is meant is the subject of some debate; the word might have begun as a euphemism for suck (thus from blow (v.1)), or it might refer to the explosive climax of an orgasm (thus blow (v.2)). Unlike much sex slang, its date of origin probably is pretty close to the date it first is attested in print: as recently as the early 1950s, military pilots could innocently talk of their jet planes as blow jobs according to the "Thesaurus of American Slang." Compare blow (v.1).

My friend and I were pondering this on a walk a while ago, and neither of us could come up with a plausible explanation for why a sex act involving sucking was called a blow job. Well, there you have it.

[sexandbrains]

Sam Harris and Kate Darling on the ethics of child sex robots. (28:50 - 38:00ish) 

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Trailer for the five Nikkatsu Roman Porno reboots. Background: “Nikkatsu gave its Roman porno directors a great deal of artistic freedom in creating their films, as long as they met the official minimum quota of four nude or sex scenes per hour. The result was a series that was popular both with audiences and with critics. One or two Roman Pornos appeared on the top-ten lists of Japanese critics every year throughout the run of the series. Nikkatsu's higher-quality sex films essentially took the pink film market away from the smaller, independent studios until the mid-1980s, when adult videos began to lure away much of the pink film's clientele.” [more]

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“We believe in the validity of male emotions more than we believe in validity of female emotions. We are a society that doubts women who report their own experiences of what a man was like or what an experience was like. [...] It functions across numerous variations on how relationships work. Maybe he’s this. He’s a good guy at heart…We make excuses for men left and right, back and forth. It’s really not a courtesy we do to women… “If I was in a relationship and we broke up and I went into my bedroom and cried for a month and didn’t eat but didn’t bother my boyfriend or didn’t talk shit about him…That is like a really unhealthy state of mental health. We don’t call that woman crazy. We call her crazy when she calls out a man for what he did. We don’t call her crazy if they break up and she moves to Paris and doesn’t talk to him. It’s only when she says, 'Fuck you. You did a horrible thing. I’m getting back at you. I’m doing a thing. I’m asserting my power. I’m taking your money. I’m taking your land. I’m burning down your house because you have wrecked my life,' that we consider them crazy because they are breaking the mold of we-don’t-talk-about-what-men-do-wrong. We forgive men. We understand masculinity is complicated thing. These women are like, 'Nope.' They have crossed this social line that they get punished for. That’s why I view that essay as a battle cry. 'Bitches be crazy' should have a colon in it. Go buck wild. Make them afraid that you will fucking tell on them — that you will not go quietly because ill treatment is ill treatment.” --Alana Massey, 2017 interview

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Loneliness never ruined a life but the fear of being alone ruins lives every day.

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[sexandbrains]

Perry Bible Fellowship, “Not Today Little One”

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consent

The only difference between “no” and “maybe” is that “maybe” suggests the possibility of a future “yes.” In any given moment, however, this distinction is irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, a “maybe” is still a “no.” And it’s not asking to be persuaded. 

[sexandbrains]

Sex ed sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)

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“I have watched my female friends’ reactions as they’ve met some of my girlfriends. I could see them thinking: Really? (People of the same gender, or impartial sexual orientation, can see more easily through the camouflage of beauty.) These friends are like my sisters; they know me well and love me, and I respect their opinions and trust their judgment. And yet, on those occasions, I smiled defiantly into their eyes, beaming the telepathic message back at them: It doesn’t matter what you think. Later they would get to hold me as I wept. There’s no reasoning with someone in that state: your best option is to cold-cock them and dump them on a boat bound for Hong Kong with a note pinned to their shirt: Sorry. Doing you a favor. Thank me later. I’ve known so many people who claimed to be happy in relationships in which, to the outside observer, they appeared to be miserable. When they finally broke up with their beloved antagonists they described themselves as bereft, even though to everyone else around them they seemed possessed of new energy, health, and good humor. What the people in these relationships are is not ‘happy’; it’s something more necessary than happiness, for which we don’t have a word in our language.” --Tim Kreider, “The Creature Walks Among Us,” from We Learn Nothing More necessary? Not sure if that's the word I'd use. But I like Kreider's general idea here, perfectly encapsulated in the phrase, “the camouflage of beauty.” It reminds me of one of Ambrose Bierce’s definitions in The Devil’s Dictionary: Bait, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

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[sexandbrains]

[via harpers.org]

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the golden rule

Don't urinate onto others unless you would have them urinate onto you.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         --s&b 1:24

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Long but worth it. Although this is episode 3 of Horace and Pete (2016), it works well as a stand alone piece. Watch before it gets taken down. (And yes, it is erotic--provided you don’t lack imagination.)

[sexandbrains]

--Henri Roorda, My Suicide (1925)

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“Like a bad sex partner, boring theater doesn’t feel present. The actors do not feel truly in the same room as you. You are not affecting the action and the action is not affecting you. The actors might as well be onscreen, and you might as well be watching porn.”  --Jordan Tannahill, Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama (2015)