Month: June 2012

The hathos continues; Men's Health isn't any better than Cosmo at sex advice. Three faves out of 36:

"Try facial intercourse. This smooch mimics sex from foreplay to penetration, beginning with a tongue exploration inside the mouth. Rub your tongues together in small and large circles, then dart them in and out of your mouths as if you were having intercourse."

Here’s a second take on that one: don’t try facial intercourse.

"Girls like explicit texts, too. So next time you're bored waiting in a queue for lunch, text her the rudest, naughtiest thing you can possibly think of and inform her of when exactly you plan to do it."

Don't think too much about this one. Just do it.

Take a pearl necklace and "…lightly lubricate the pearls and your penis. Have your partner wrap the pearls around the shaft and slowly stroke up and down with a gentle rotation."

Just don’t tell Mother.

Tracy Clark-Flory highlights the challenges:

A new article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics takes nursing homes to task because elderly patients’ "sexual expression" is often "overlooked, ignored or even discouraged." … The problem — beyond the privacy-destroying lack of single rooms or locking doors – is that many nursing home patients struggle with diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia, which come with cognitive issues that can complicate consent. (These conditions can also ramp up sexual behavior.) As Daniel Engber put it several years ago in a piece about nursing home nookie, "Break it up, and they may be depriving a dying man or woman of physical pleasure and companionship. Leave them be, and the nursing home may be exposed to negligence claims from dismayed relatives or a forgotten spouse."

Nicole Cliffe dug up a great speech by Sheila Heti that considers the question:

Why go out? Because if what we want more than anything is to attain self-confidence, health, energy, and peace of mind, we should stay in. We could be like little Buddhas, meditating and masturbating and watching TV. And we could imagine ourselves to be brilliant, and kind, and good lecturers, and good listeners, and utterly loving – and there’d be no way to prove it otherwise.

But she finds that the perils of going out are often worth it:

I’m always super-conscious of how whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And I’m always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed. And I’m never in my pyjamas.

And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. …. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short… because we want to learn how to be good at being people… and moreover, because we want to be people.

Heti's new novel, How Should a Person Be?, was recently reviewed by James Wood (paywalled at The New Yorker) and Chris Kraus. The Paris Review's Gchat session with Heti is also worth checking out.

A fascinating profile of a drug dealer in New York:

Jessa Crispin touches on it while reviewing Eva Illouz's Why Love Hurts:

[P]erhaps most damaging of all is our myth of the soul mate. We have certain expectations — nothing short of total emotional support from our spouses. We also require rocking sex, a perfect other half of the parenting team, and our go-to playmate. We expect to share everything in our lives with just this one person, and then we wonder where all the magic went. There’s no magic if there’s no mystery, and there’s no mystery if you are sharing space with your significant other every moment of every day. Add to that the instant buffet line of possible replacements that you can find on any dating website, and it’s no wonder people are finding it difficult to commit.

Crispin asks Illouz about the "self-blame" that often accompanies dating:

This is what the hackneyed "you've got to love yourself first before someone else can love you" comes to express, without really knowing it—it comes to express the idea that you must make your self-worth independent of others' love of you, because their love cannot be counted on, whereas yours for yourself can. The problem however, at least for a sociologist, is that you can never be the source of your own self-worth. This is an idea concocted by psychologists, which does not have any sound sociological basis. We can only build self-worth through and with others. This is why building good and nurturing environments, as families, schools, workplaces, is so crucial.

"I Am Learning To Abandon the World" by Linda Pastan:

I am learning to abandon the world
before it can abandon me.
Already I have given up the moon
and snow, closing my shades
against the claims of white.
And the world has taken
my father, my friends.
I have given up melodic lines of hills,
moving to a flat, tuneless landscape.
And every night I give my body up
limb by limb, working upwards
across bone, towards the heart.

Continued here.

(Photo: A long exposure by astronaut Don Pettit while aboard the International Space Station, via Petapixel)

Topeka, Kansas, 9.45 am

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano looks at the research:

Compliments given from man to man were accepted 40% of the time; only 22% of compliments given from one woman to another were accepted. … When it was a man, not a woman, giving a compliment, women accepted it 68% of the time. 

She elaborates in a follow-up post:

With the exception of women accepting compliments from men, responses along the line of "thank you" only accounted for anywhere from 10 to 29 percent of compliment responses in the study. Why, when saying "thank you" is the known proper response, do we suddenly feel like we don’t know what to say?

The answer lies in the true meaning of embarrassment: We feel embarrassed because we care about the relationship we have with the person we feel embarrassed in front of. We may feel embarrassed that we didn’t say something complimentary to them first, or that we’ve done something (or worn something) that separates us from the other person status-wise, or that we’re suddenly acutely aware that the person holds us in some sort of esteem. We know full well that "thank you" would suffice, but it can also feel like "thank you" leaves something out.

Painting the town bright:

SWEATSHOPPE Video Painting Europe from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo.

(Hat tip: Laughing Squid)

In a review of Saul Bellows' letters, Kevin Stevens points to this key passage from an exchange with Lionel Trilling about the contemporary writer's duty:

Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That is perhaps the world’s own secret. Really, things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow … Yes, there’s a great disease, an ancient disease now greatly magnified by our numbers. Man is sick of man; man declares man superfluous. ‘But,’ some say, ‘there is no society which gives us our value and creates importance for us.’ And this is to argue that a man’s heart is not itself the origin and seat of importance. But to assert that it is so and to prove and proclaim it with all one’s powers – that is the work and duty of a writer now.

Read Bellow's Paris Review interview here.