Brains, Now With Illustrations!

Glenn Greenwald rips the Wall Street Journal a new one for lying about Bush & Obama

( The mendacity here is overwhelming )

Analyzing a single panel of The Watchmen

( Brilliant stuff )

Analyzing P.D. Eastman's Sam and the Firefly

( More brilliant analysis. )

No whistleblower protection in stimulus bill

( Fed employees who point to fraud can still be screwed by the fraudsters )

Kansas legislator seeks to block netroots campaigns

( Sore winnings )

Republicans fail at "the twittering."

( Funny, but also a security breach )

The Club was full of sad vampires.

The club was full of sad vampires.

Omaha and I had managed to find a sitter for Wednesday night. Lisa, who had recovered from a terrible chest cold, offered her services and even offered to take the girls to the weekly family swim at the local pool, so we took her up on the offer and swept outselves out to a restaurant and then over to the club.

The restaurant we hit was the Flying Fish, a place on 1st Avenue famed for their seafood and feared for their prices. Omaha and I shared a bowl of steamed mussles, then she had crab cakes and I had the cold-seared Ahi tuna. When they say "cold seared," they mean it: the fish is lain cold on a hot skillet just long enough to sear the outside and kill any bacteria, then served with the core of the thick fish cool and still quivering. A hash of diced onions perfectly herbed complemented the meal wonderfully. The price was outrageous, and not something to be repeated often, but it was still exceptional.

We went to the club. Our first sign that this wasn't going to be our night was the music: surf music. Inside, the club was dead, maybe 25 people, a third of its usual draw. The theme was surf night, with Hawaiian shirts and grass skirts. As we walked into the socializing area we passed by a buxom woman wearing a red bra and brown cotton skirt. Three men had been buzzing around her politely, only one of whom I recognized. The woman looked up at me and Omaha and said, "Hi! Are you new here?"

We both bust out laughing, and so did one of the three around her. Our ID cards are sub-100, and more than that I've got ID cards from Beyond the Edge, which was before the Wetspot, which was before whatever the current club is really called.

Omaha and I stayed less than an hour, and eventually left. The place was... sad. There was bad porn on the TV-- Astrid and Freya, guys, if you're gonna put on girl-girl porn, make it good girl-girl porn. There was really bad surf music playing through and, I'm sorry, fucking to the Beach Boys is just not Omaha's thing, or mine.

But more than that, the club was full of lonely men in street clothes there to fill their eyes and memories to serve their later masturbatory moments. We call these guys "vampires" because they suck all the pleasure and fun out of any scene you might be having with their avaricious gaze.

[Elf pauses to tie an onion to his belt.] Twenty years ago, the overwhelming rule at these parties was that you had to bring someone. Those events were called "Kinky Couples" for a reason. You had to have at least one friend who'd go to this kind of thing with you. While I understand the economic realities that force the club to be open to singles, I don't have to like it, and I don't.

I understand that having children has blown a big hole in my social life and I can't be the once highly-visible advocate and educator for my personal kinks as I once was, nor can I interact with all the different flavors of sexuality being supported by the club these days. But I miss the days when being kinky and leather meant something, and we had a unified idea of that meaning strong enough to discourage trolls.

Damn, I'm starting to sound a lot like the generation of gay men and lesbians who taught me about leather, aren't I? "You kids, you just don't understand how hard it was." Ah, well.

The most irresponsible piece of sex journalism yet for 2009

"Sex is the sewer drain of a healthy body, sir. Any use of the sexual act other than procreation is a waste of vital energy. Wasted seeds are wasted life. Masturbation is the silent killer of the night." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg Well, okay, that's the quote from TC Boyle's novelization of Kellogg's life, but apparently all of these are taken from Kellogg's book Plain Facts for Young and Old.

I was reminded of Kellogg and his obsession this morning, when several sources, most notably Violet Blue, drew my attention to probably the most wrong-headed and ill-informed article about the online kink community ever written: ABC News' Susan James's Therapists Say Kinky Sex Is on the Rise.

It starts out with the worst definition, a "paraphilia" is a "socially unacceptable sexual practice," and then contrasts that with "teleoiphiles." First, the word paraphilia is simply wrong here; it implies that kink is a "requirement," not a flavoring or recreational extra. Susan James claims that if you like kink, you can't have it any other way.

But worse, she contrasts "paraphilia" with "teleoiphilia." Have you ever heard the word "teleoiphilia?" I did, when I was considering becoming a psych major many years ago. It is not an antonym for "paraphilia." It's an antonym for "pedophilia." Her first on-topic paragraph starts by tarring all kinky people with the broad brush of accusation: We're not just weird, we're dangerous, we haven't gotten the message about what's normal or we don't care about what's normal, we'll be inappropriate all the time so you had better watch out for your children.

James's reportage is utterly incompetent, designed to be sensationalistic. She quotes from a "sexpert," Susan Quilliam, who apparently did the current revision of The Joy and Sex, (My opinion on the previous work is not a kind one, and given what little she's allowed in this column, I doubt I'll find the third edition any more enlightening. Go buy The Guide To Getting It On instead) and writes: Creating a "safe" arena for experimentation is critical, she said, and couples should have special words, should they be uncomfortable, to call for "an immediate halt to the activity." Huh. That never occurred to us before. Thanks, "sexpert." If only there was a word for that, and if only we'd been using it twenty years ago.

James's pet sexpert makes irresponsible connections, and James eats them up uncritically. Did you know, for example, that you might start off a swinger and end up a cannibal? It's true! You start out with one perversion and, according to Quilliam, you'll end up at "one of the fastest growing perversions on the Internet — cannibalism." Quilliam, meet Dolcett. Meet fantasy.

Even worse, she talks to a documentarian of the kink scene, but someone who's not kinky himself apparently, and takes this quote from him:

After the pain threshold is crossed, they describe a type of ecstasy called 'flying." It is no longer painful and gives an entirely sexual as well as psychological, transcendent place. Flying is bigger than any drug.

Okay, anyone who's ever read any of my flogging stories knows damn well that I've described the "pushed past pain" point several times, both as a top and a bottom, and describing it as drug-like both demeans it and sensationilizes it. This is language chosen to arouse the anti-sex forces, to legitimize the concept of "erototoxins," and to legislate against us.

The stupid, it just irritates. She goes from singular, criminal examples (like the Hans Miewes case) to a general "It's everywhere! On the Internet! It's not just bad for children! It'll get you! Run for your lives! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" All psychologists know that paraphilia are the result of childhood trauma. And sado-masochism [sic-- what's wrong with her dictionary, anyway?] is never fantasy or light, and eventually your dominatrix will toss you on a spit and roast you alive.

And she makes the claim that once you've tried something kinky you can never have "normal" sex. Because, you know, people who love hot sauce can't stand ice cream or a decent burger without one, right? I'm reminded of Kellogg again, and his obsession with keeping "stimulating" foods away from teenagers because, so his logic went, if they were stimulated in one thing they might become stimulated in others, and that would lead to the victim "dying by his own hand," as Kellogg tried to make wit.

The entire article makes sex out to be this Big Scary Thing, and kinky people are playing with the Big Scary Thing in Dangerous Ways, and maybe They Must Be Stopped.

Grrr. Hulk Smash.