Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Sex
Everything I know about sex I learned from my tarantula
Karen mated her Avicularia metallica pair today, her first breeding effort thus far (not counting Jake), and I am happy to report success.
This was a quiet male, not a Mr. Tappy-Toes like Karen’s P. metallica. However, judging from the impressive menschlichkeit* of today’s performance, he must have been tap-tapping away and setting up his sperm web.
If tarantulas were humans, sex would go something like this. The man goes off into the bathroom, does the deed, and comes back into the bedroom with a loaded turkey baster. You’re thinking: yup, not very romantic. Or perhaps you’re thinking: eeeww.
But you’d be wrong. Yes, the male ejaculates long before having sex. He does it into a sperm web, and then he charges up his pedipalps (anterior appendages, quite near the fangs) with a nice hot (cool, actually) load of spunk. Intercourse requires that the male insert his pedipalps into the female’s epigynum. Without, mind you, getting eaten first.
Karen placed our studly A. metallica into the female’s cage and that bad boy crawled right on up to her. He signaled his interest by thrumming her web. She ran to the other side of the cage. He gave her a bit of space but never let up on the thrumming. Soon enough, he had her in the mood. He got beneath her and was so confident he didn’t even bother to hook her fangs. (Males have hooks on their forelegs just for this purpose.) Then he started to work his pedipalps closer, closer, making small circular motions over her twitching epigynum.
Okay, it wasn’t twitching. I made that part up — but only that part.
One pedipalp found its way home, probing deeper. Deeper still. Then, no slouch he, he came at her with the other pedipalp! “Faster,” she moaned —
Sorry.
Bottom line, he did the deed and Karen got him out in one piece. She’ll let him charge up another sperm web, and maybe bring them together again next week. For today, he’s back in his cage, toweling off. I dropped a cigarette in his cage — a reward for a job well done.
D.
*Manliness, for everyone out there who is neither Jewish nor Gabriele.
Sex is Proactive
Getting back to Michelle‘s question:
. . . how about a post for female writers on what guys really
think/feel/do [during sex]?
28,000-year old multi-tasker
Thanks to Scott for pointing me towards this BBC News story about a 28,000 year old phallus:
Ah, the British. So in love with their puns; so proud of their wit. He said tool. Heh heh. Heh heh.
The author goes on to say that the “tool” may have been used as a sex aid, but “was also at times used for knapping flints,” according to Professor Nicholas Conard, who knows a thing or two about knapping flints. Or sex aids. I figure they must have talked to an expert, for God’s sake.
I’d never heard of “knapping flints,” but could figure it out from context. I pictured some Ice Age proto-person diddling herself/himself with it, getting bored, then turning it over to bang out a few flint arrowheads. Hell, it’s not like you can do that with the real thing.
I must have a tapeworm, or maybe I’m pregnant. So far tonight, I’ve had a buffalo burger (no bun), slice of red onion grilled on the barbie, and a romaine salad. That was my Atkins dinner. Still hungry, I had more than a few pretzels, a bowl of Tasty Bites Madras Lentils (Tasty Bites sounds like cat food, no?) garnished with red onion and Swiss cheese, a Girl Scout cookie, a few of my son’s Kit Kat bites (more cat food), and 9 Kalamata olives.
Did I mention the chili anchovies (from the Chinese market) and sardines for lunch?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, my muse has her head up her ass this evening. She pulled it out briefly this morning, allowing me to write this entry for the ‘Worst First Sentence’ contest at Writers BBS:
P— was a dashing sailor, strong of biceps and large of groin, keen for his spinach, a fellow of few words and fewer letters.
Okay, I’m pushing my luck.
D.
Only thin white women have orgasms. News at 11.
I was leafing through the July ’05 issue of Wired when I found Annalee Newitz’s story about female orgasms, “The Coming Boom”. The subtitle says it all: “Big Pharma has made billions pumping up the male population. Now neuroscientists are reverse engineering the female orgasm.”
You can read the story online here. The article itself didn’t capture my interest, though. I’d recently seen something that covered the same ground on one of the health & science networks. No, what caught my eye was the very eye-catching photo-mosaic of twenty-four women caught in the throes of orgasm. If you follow the above link and click on the photo in the left margin, you’ll see what I mean.
I really don’t consider myself a member of the Political Correctness Police, but what’s going on with the racial mix in this photo? I count three Asians, one Hispanic, and twenty-one white women. I see one, maybe two women who look overweight. Oh, and nearly all of them are attractive. They must be beautiful women, because they’re making that face (I’m having a twelve pound baby, and he’s coming out sideways!) and they’re still cute.
If you follow that photo link, you’ll find a second link at the bottom for Beautiful Agony, a website that sells mpeg videos of men and women experiencing la petite mort.
The Rulez Part Deux
In 1929, Bronislaw Malinowski published The Sexual Life of Savages. Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was an early pioneer of ethnographic field work. He (or perhaps his publisher) also knew how to title a book to move it off the shelves, but that’s neither here nor there.
Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders are gone now. Even in 1929, you could have legitimately asked how closely Malinowski’s analysis corresponded to reality — ethnographer bias, and all that lot. Nowadays, his work lies somewhere between history and fantasy.
I mention this because I’m about to do a mini-Malinowski: report on the sexual mores of a culture as described to me by one informant (yes, I’m sure M had several) regarding a people long since transformed by time and history: the French, circa 1955. Furthermore, I’m remembering this conversation twenty-two years later. How accurate is this? The sexual proclivities of Tolkien’s elves may have a firmer basis in reality.
The Rulez
A while ago, I mentioned how I broke some key rules when I courted Karen. My faux pas didn’t trash our budding romance, and may have even helped things along. For me, that proves something: there are no rules. Rules are bullshit. At least, they were in 1982 when I came a-courting, and I can’t believe things are any better today.
But wouldn’t it be nice if there were rules? What could be better than a universally agreed-upon code of behavior to ensure that no one would be humiliated, ever again? Or is it unnatural for men to think about the rules when we’re used to thinking with our jewels?
Unrequited lust
John Scalzi openly flaunting his metrosexuality got me thinking: how many times has a gay man made a pass at me? I can count this on one hand, and that would be the hand of some guy who likes to use his band saw after two bottles of Thunderbird. Trouble is, that number still totes up higher than the number of hetero come-ons pitched my way.
Not that I’m complaining. Gay come-hithers leave me feeling good about myself. After all, what could be more flattering than the approval of some fella who might one day star on Queer Eye? But the hetero advances never fail to leave me nauseated and vaguely confused. After nearly 21 years of marriage, I’m still getting used to the idea that my wife is willing to have sex with me. Of course, it might be relevant that, left out in the cold, I become unbearably pissy. Whining: Spanish Fly for the 40-something Guy.
Back to gay men, and the few who thought I was hot stuff. In med school, I took my Preparation for Clinical Medicine rotation at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Administration Hospital. I’d partnered with Fred, a classmate with biceps big as my thigh, a guy credulous enough to accept, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, my tale of the Latest Proceedings of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yet Fred couldn’t believe me when I told him about the slight-framed, red-headed male nurse who couldn’t pass me on the ward without giving me the eye. Homosexuality was not part of Fred’s world view. That sort of thing happened up the Peninsula, in shops like Hard-on Leather or bars like The White Swallow. You’d never — never ever ever — have to face that sort of thing here in the VA Hospital, surrounded by hordes of Bronze medal-punctured amputees with faded DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tatts.
One day, I got my chance to open Fred’s eyes. I spotted my admirer from thirty feet away and elbowed Fred in the ribs. “Watch, okay?” I said. “Just watch.” As we passed my little red-head, he winked at me with his whole face. It looked something like this:
I’m really sorry you had to see that.
Fred dragged me off into a stairwell, nearly dislocating my shoulder. “You weren’t kidding!”
“Of course not. I never kid. And, oh, by the way, we were discussing the fate of Your People at last week’s IJC rally, and I’m afraid there are going to be a few changes around here.”
Kidding about that last bit.
Flash forward to 1990. Internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital, which at the time (pre-Northridge earthquake) ranked as the nation’s largest hospital complex. You would most likely know County from the exterior shot used for the opening credits of soap opera General Hospital.
Mandatory reading for any new intern: Samuel Shem’s The House of God, guaranteed to fill you full of misconceptions on the mechanics of internship — the chief misconception being that every female in the hospital, from medical students to attending physicians, nursing students to ward clerks, would, sans warning, drag you off into a vacant call room/operating theater/pharmaceutical cabinet to jump your living bones.
True enough, there were occasional sparks of interest, like the zaftig Filipina nursing student who always had a smile for me, or the Jewish medical student who had me pegged as a Jew the very first day, and whom I had to beat away with an IV pole because when I told her I’m married her response was So? But, with rare exception, no one got laid at LA County. No one.
Men of ambiguous sexuality abounded: nurses, aides, clerks. You never knew where you stood with these guys; wedding rings didn’t necessarily mean anything. Gay or straight, nearly all wore scrubs, so you couldn’t pick up on visual cues.
I remember one fellow in particular: a night clerk named Bub (not his real name — for a change, I’m not being a total dickwad). Bub was a fifty-something Filipino who wore white shirts stained with Ensure and the various other brands of kibble County fed its patients; white shirts that did remarkably little to conceal his whopping V-bagging elephant scrotum-sized man-titties.
One night, fueled by tapioca, Ensure, graham crackers, and Saltines (the only things available after the cafeteria closed), I worked past midnight on the ward, charting. I sat at the front desk across from Bub’s torpid form. The night nurses floated in and out of my field of vision like huge clumsy moths. My zaftig cutie was there, fighting with an IV drug abuser who insisted on smoking in the central hallway, tangling up her femoral line in the process. I had just reset the femoral line, and I was busy writing up the procedure note. Not easy, considering that every two minutes Bub roused from his heavy-lidded fugue to ask me for medical advice.
BUB: So. Doctor Hoffmah. What do you think of this thing on my neck?
All of my nights on the ward had a dreamlike quality, and this one was no exception. Comes from being half-asleep. My pen kept scratching across the page; the nurses kept flitting about behind me; Bub left his station to fuss with a chart rack. At the dimmest boundaries of consciousness, I felt him behind me, moving about. You know how you can sense when someone’s in your personal space, particularly if you don’t really like that someone? I knew he was back there, but I kept on working, because the sooner I had finished, the sooner I could get back to bed.
Then, without warning, I felt two of the warmest, plushiest breasts I have ever felt squeeze ever so voluptuously into my back and hold there for two full breaths, not that I was breathing, because (tapioca and graham crackers rising in my craw) I was too busy thinking
and then he moved away.
I jerked my head around —
I didn’t know what I was going to say to him but damn it I was going to say something. Interns are paid less than minimum wage! This is harrassment! What did I do to deserve this?
I jerked my head around, and saw my zaftig cutie walking away.
God damn! I wanted to scream. Get back here so I can enjoy it!
D.
Born-again virgins and other sex dwarves
Isn’t it nice
Sugar and spice
Luring disco dollies
To a life of vice
Listening to Soft Cell’s Sex Dwarf today, my spaghetti bowl brain meandered over to John Mason, wannabe groom to runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks. Mason, you’ll recall, declared himself a born-again virgin. Stop snickering. I’ve heard all the jokes, and none of ’em were very funny. Rather than ridicule the guy, I began to wonder what would drive Mason to take a vow of chastity, and to call himself a “born-again virgin.” Ignore for the moment the obvious explanation (he’s a newbie born-again Christian, and thinks “born-again” is a way cool adjective), and consider the possibility that maybe he really, truly wants to be a virgin again.
And now, ask yourself this question: if you could have it all back in a Samantha Stevens nose-twitch, would you take the offer? Would you recapture your lost innocence?
All of her lovers
All talk of her notes
And the flowers
That they never sent
And wasn’t she easy
And isn’t she
Pretty in pink
The one who insists
He was first in the line
Is the last to
Remember her name
There’s a bit in The Rocky Horror Picture Show where Frank-N-Furter sings, “I want to come again,” and the audience responds, “So does Brad!” The joke being that Frank-N-Furter has just deflowered not only Janet (Susan Sarandon) but also her beau, Brad (Barry Bostwick), and Brad isn’t complaining. Rocky Horror delights in the loss of innocence, and it’s not alone. Think of The Graduate, Summer of ’42, Dangerous Liaisons, and, for you youngsters, American Pie. Here in America, anyway, we really seem to love cherry-popping.
But it’s a love-hate relationship. Apparently, we draw the line at single-digit-age homosexual pedophilia; Fox News convicted Jackson even after he’d been acquitted, and that seemed to be the mob’s reaction, too. Only the cognoscenti — like author-lawyer Andrew Vacchs — seemed unsurprised by the acquittal.
and you shouldn’t have to pay for your love
with your bones and your flesh…
Loss of innocence isn’t necessarily sexual. When Jackson’s “little friends” think back to their time at Neverland, what will sting the most — memories of undercover cuddles (at least), or of their parents, who put them in that position (and for what?)
Deflowering is an inadequate metaphor for loss of virginity, which is itself an inadequate metaphor for the loss of innocence. This has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with the sudden ejection from childhood’s illusory sense of security.
Abuse victims lose it in one acid instant. The rest of us lose it by degrees. For me, two moments stand out above all others. The first occurred soon after my high school girlfriend and I broke up. We’d only been together for three years, but at 19, that seemed like forever. There came an evening when we finally said goodbye to one another for good. For keeps. We wouldn’t see each other ever again — quite possible, too, since I was going to college 400 miles away. And I felt like a bird kicked from the nest long before he’d been fledged.
The second time: roughly two years later. I’d been with Karen for about a year, and we were sure we’d get married. We had it all planned out — I’d been accepted to med school at Stanford, and she’d been accepted to Stanford’s graduate program in Chemical Physics. We were down in Southern California visiting my parents over Christmas vacation when she got sick. A bit of numbness at her ankle, spreading up her leg. Once she got to the hospital, things happened fast. On the way to X-ray (this was pre-MRI, mind you), a nurse gave her a shot — “To shrink the tumor,” she said. They let me stay with Karen in the hospital room that night, which surprised me since we weren’t married and this hospital had a bunch of nuns running around in it. They treated us both really nice. This was scary.
I think I had my big moment the following night. The tumor scare had passed, but the diagnoses the doctor tossed around weren’t too reassuring (even at that early date, I think MS was fairly high on the list). So we didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed increasingly likely that it would not go away anytime soon.
That night (don’t laugh) it struck me that life wasn’t fair. Yup. That was the first time it hit home. It should have hit home a long time before that (another story for another time), but I guess it never did.
She waves
She buttons your shirt
The traffic
Is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes
These cars collide
Maybe we focus on the sexual angle because that, at least, is a pleasant (or at least humorous!) memory. And, maybe for some people, the loss of virginity does equate with the loss of innocence. But for me, and I suspect for most people, loss of innocence meant coming to terms with the real world. I wouldn’t take that innocence back no matter how much you paid me — because it would only mean having to lose it all over again.
John Mason: abstain all you like. You can’t regain your flower. You wouldn’t want to.
D.