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Innie or Outie? Female Ejaculation Without the G-Spot: The Blowfish Blog

Please note: I talk about my personal sex life a fair amount in this piece and the piece it links to. Family members and others who don’t want to know about that, be advised.

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I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog: Innie or Outie? Female Ejaculation Without the G-Spot. The piece talks about the G-spot and female ejaculation, and it makes what I think is an important and often-overlooked point about them. Here’s the teaser:

A huge amount of sex education has been done in recent years on female ejaculation and the G-spot. But there’s a crucial piece of information — crucial to me, anyway — that often gets overlooked. And that’s the fact that the former doesn’t necessarily require the latter.

Or, to put it less formally: I can and do squirt without my G-spot being touched. I ejaculate from external stimulation all by itself.

And it’s highly improbable that I’m the only one.

To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Innie or Outie? Female Ejaculation Without the G-Spot: The Blowfish Blog

Carnivals and Circles: Liberals, Skeptics, and Women

Carnival time! We’ve got blog carnivals this week from liberals, skeptics, and women! Hey, if we added pagans, queers, and abortionists, we’d have Jerry Falwell’s whole “Secular America, 9/11 is your fault” cabal!

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First — in no particular order — Carnival of the Liberals #49, at Tangled Up In Blue Guy. My contribution this time: How Gay Marriage Is Destroying Normal Marriage — No, Really. My favorite other piece in this carnival: The Religious Right Hates America by Daylight Atheism.

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Next: Skeptic’s Circle #71, at Infophilia. My piece in this Circle: The Galileo Fallacy, and the Gadfly Corollary. My favorite other piece in this Circle: The Woo Handbook by Skeptico.

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Finally: All Women Blogging Carnival at Women Start Your Business Now. My piece in this carnival: A Losing Battle: Is Weight Loss Counter-Productive?.

Bloggers who want to participate in these blog carnivals: here are guidelines and submission forms for the Carnival of the Liberals, Skeptic’s Circle, and All Women Blogging Carnival. Happy blogging!

Carnivals and Circles: Liberals, Skeptics, and Women

How I Write Porn

This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog. Please note: While this piece doesn’t talk about my personal sex life per se, it does talk about my taste in porn, which may be TMI for family members and others.

*****

Disclaimer: I’m aware of the pitfalls of writing a “how to write porn” piece using your own porn writing as an example. So if you don’t like my porn writing — the passage I wrote for this piece, or any of the rest of it — please feel free to ignore this advice.

I usually start with the physical actions. What the characters are doing, what they’re saying, which body part is going where.

“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back.”

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It’s what I call “the skeleton.” And the problem with most bad porn fiction is that it stops there. Too many porn writers think that a description of sex acts is all a porn story needs.

I have more sympathy with these writers than you might imagine. When I’m writing a first draft, I get very excited about these things, too. After all, when I’m having a sex fantasy, these are the things I fixate on: the breasts spilling out of a low-cut blouse, the cock pushing into a tight asshole, the hand smacking down on the bare bottom again and again. I know how those sex acts make me feel. Vividly.

And it’s easy to forget that conveying the sex acts doesn’t convey the feeling.

But it doesn’t.

So then I move on to how the sex feels: the emotions, the sensations.

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It’s what I call the flesh of the story. How does it feel to be this person, or these people, having sex? How do these sex acts feel physically — soft, tight, sharp, gentle, smooth, cold? And how do they feel emotionally — nervous, urgent, giddy, relieved, beloved, dirty?

So not just, “He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back,” but:

“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame.”

And that’s better.

But it’s still not enough. Not for me. I’ve read plenty of porn that stopped there, and if it pushes my personal erotic buttons, it’ll be enough to get me off. But it’s not enough to make a story linger in my mind after I come; to shift the way I look at sex; to make me jerk off to the story again and again. For me to be happy with a sex scene, it’s definitely not enough to just describe the sex acts that are happening — but it’s also not enough to convey how the sex feels physically, or even how it feels emotionally.

It has to convey what the sex means.

Why the people are having it. Whether it’s giving them what they’d hoped for. What about it is surprising. Whether anything is going to be different now because of this sex.

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That’s the nerves of the story. And the nerves are what gives a story life.

So not just, “He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame,” but:

“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back; his nails dug sharply into her skin, and she felt a rush of excitement, followed immediately by a flush of shame. She had specifically asked for this, had spelled out the fantasy in some detail. And now that it was here, digging into her flesh and forcing her face-down onto the floor, it was too much: not just the helplessness, but how exciting the helplessness felt. She didn’t want to be that person, that cliche, the powerful woman who deep down just wants to be mastered by a more powerful man. Her safeword bubbled up in her throat, but she gritted her teeth and choked it back down. She had asked for this, by God, and by God she was going to see it through.

“He forced his knee between her thighs and fumbled with his zipper, and she whimpered, in something resembling real panic, as she felt a flash of wetness inside her pussy. I don’t want this, she thought. I don’t want this, I can’t do this, please stop. The words in her head made her pussy wetter, and the sharp fingers forcing her cunt lips apart made it wetter still, and she moaned in humiliation and rage at her treacherous pussy that was begging for his cock to force itself inside her against her will, and that was getting off on her shame and fear.”

You may notice that this passage suddenly got a lot longer. And it’s not just the “why” stuff that made it longer — there’s more “what” and “how” as well, more skeleton and flesh.

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Here’s why. It’s usually the skeleton of a porn story that gets me started — some fantasy image of some physical act. But it’s the nerves that drive it. Once I find the meaning of a story, once I know who these people are that I’m jerking off to and why they’re having the sex that they’re having… that’s what tells me what happens next.

And when I’m rewriting and polishing a story (if the acts and feelings and meaning of a porn story are the skeleton and flesh and nerves, then the rewrites and polishes are the skin), a lot of what I’m checking for is the balance between the three. Does a section feel tedious? There’s probably too much physical description: I need to sink into the character’s bodies and get at what they’re feeling. Does it seem cliched? I need to remember what makes these characters unique, why they’re there and what they’re getting out of it. Is it starting to lose momentum and sexual heat? Maybe there’s too much deeper meaning stuff, and I need more strong visual images of what’s physically taking place.

So if I can get all three of these things in balance — clear descriptions of sex acts, vivid evocations of emotions and sensations, and unique characters and motivations — there’s a good chance that this will be a story I’m happy with.

How I Write Porn

Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance

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A friend of ours was telling Ingrid about this new woman she’s been dating. Things were going along swimmingly… until it turned out that the new inamorata, a youngish thing in her early thirties, was an AIDS denialist. She was swallowing all that bullshit about how HIV doesn’t really cause AIDS, AIDS drugs are what causes AIDS, and the whole thing is a vast conspiracy by the drug companies to get rich selling people drugs they don’t need and that just make them sick.

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This was absolutely the wrong thing to say to our friend, who had been an AIDS activist since the early days of the epidemic, had nursed several beloved friends through the illness, had seen way too many of those friends die… and had seen others come back from the brink of death when the protease inhibitors and combination therapies finally came out.

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So Ingrid and I were talking, not only about how ignorant AIDS denialism is and what a perfect example of the Galileo Fallacy it’s proving to be… but also about how profoundly insensitive and clueless it was for this woman to talk this way to someone who’d been through the worst days of the epidemic. Doesn’t she remember? we said. Doesn’t she know what AIDS was like before the drug cocktails came along?

And it occurred to both of us:

No. She doesn’t remember.

And that’s the problem.

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There are some AIDS denialists who were around in the ’80s. But an awful lot of them don’t remember. They weren’t around during the early days of the epidemic, when there was absolutely no treatment and your life expectancy when you got diagnosed was a few months, a year or two if you were lucky. They don’t remember the days when a diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence — a sentence to a slow, painful death. (Some people with AIDS lived through those days to tell the tale, but not many.) They don’t remember having half their gay male friends get sick and die. They don’t remember people lying in the streets screaming for the medical establishment to fucking pay attention and work on a treatment, some treatment, any treatment at all.

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And they don’t remember what it was like when the cocktail came along, and suddenly people started getting better and living longer. They don’t remember the wonderful (although not entirely trivial) “problem” of people with AIDS who had quit their jobs and run up huge credit card debts, and now actually expected to live for a while. They don’t remember what it was like when AIDS turned, almost overnight, from a deadly illness to a chronic but often survivable one.

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To them, AIDS has always been what it is now. They look at HIV and AIDS, and they see a bad disease, one that still kills a lot of people and makes a lot of people pretty damn sick, but also one that people have a decent chance of surviving for a good long time. They see the cocktail making some people feel crappy. And they see the cocktail being really expensive, and making drug companies very rich indeed.

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What’s more, they have little or no awareness of what AIDS is still like in Africa, and other places where prevention and treatment still range from lousy to non-existent… and where the pandemic is as bad or worse as it ever was in its early days in the U.S.

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So it’s much easier for them to ignore or dismiss the effectiveness of the cocktail, and to treat it as a drug-company conspiracy. It’s easier for them to see themselves as brave Galileos for resisting the “lie” of HIV drugs… because they have no memory of the harsh, horrible truth of HIV before the drugs came along.

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And I think the same thing is happening with the vaccine resisters: the people who insist that vaccines — measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, what have you — are useless poison, foisted on an unsuspecting public by a Big Pharma cabal of cackling men in expensive suits.

The problem, again, is that they don’t remember.

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They don’t remember what the world was like before the vaccines. They don’t remember the polio epidemic that killed thousands of children and disabled tens of thousands — in 1952 alone. They don’t remember the rubella pandemic of the 1960s, when tens of thousands of babies were born dead or with birth defects because their mothers were infected. (FYI, I could easily have been one of those babies — my mother got rubella shortly after I was born, and it could easily have been just a little earlier when she was pregnant with me.) They don’t remember the time when people routinely died of lockjaw… and they don’t live in non-industrial parts of the world where people still do.

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All they see is a world in which polio, rubella, tetanus, etc. almost never appear… and people are immunized against them for no apparent reason.

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See, this is the problem with public health efforts that work. When they work, they quickly become invisible. It’s very hard to see prevention working: when it works, you don’t see it. So it’s easy for people to see things like immunization as pointless. They do happen for no apparent reason… “apparent” being the operative word. The reason is very good indeed, the reason is unassailably excellent — but unless you’ve lived in a world without immunization, the reason isn’t very apparent at all.

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(Interestingly, the conspiracy theorists linking vaccination with, for instance, autism don’t seem very interested in the actual, documented, verified conspiracy in which the researcher who originally published the now-discredited “vaccines cause autism” study was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by trial lawyers trying to prove that vaccines were harmful. Links here and here, via Wikipedia.)

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Look. I’m no great friend of the drug companies. I get that the way health care is handled in this country is — how shall I put this? — evil. Its purpose is largely to make insurance and drug companies rich, not to help healthy people stay healthy or sick people get better. Ingrid works in health care in this country, and she could tell you stories that would curl your hair. See “Sicko” if you don’t believe me.

But that doesn’t mean that AIDS drugs don’t work. And it doesn’t mean that vaccines don’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that they do.

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Yes, our country’s health care system sucks. But our educational system sucks as well. And one of the ways it sucks the most is in its failure to teach reasoning, cause-and-effect… and history. The history of AIDS drugs, and the history of vaccines, are a history of the prevention of pointless suffering and death — millions of times over.

P.S. I will warn you right now: I am not going to get into debates with AIDS denialists or vaccine resisters in this blog. I don’t have the patience, and other people make these arguments better than I can. AIDS denialists or vaccine resisters are hereby directed to Denialism and to Skeptico. My apologies in advance to the keepers of those blogs. I’m putting you both on my blogroll to make up for it.

Addendum: Or you could go to Aetiology, where they linked to this post and are having a lively discussion about it. And thanks to both Aetiology and Denialism for the links!

Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance

Why Religion Is Like Fanfic

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I was reading some unusually wacky Christian theology in Disinformation’s new book, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong (more on the book when I’m done with it — the thing is great, but it’s huge). Specifically: In the Middle Ages, there was all this theology about the immaculate conception virgin birth and how exactly Mary got impregnated by God, with several theologians putting forth the theory that — get this — the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary in her ear.

No, really. In her ear.

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What’s more, there’s other theology of the period seriously discussing the question of how, physically, Jesus was born. Did he just teleport out of Mary’s womb, or was he born out of her ear (since he was conceived there, after all), or what?

Because, after all, the pussy is a disgusting, putrid font of sin and evil, and God would never go there. Or be born out of there.

But I digress.

I was reading this, and I was suddenly struck with how familiar it all seemed.

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It reads exactly like fan-written blueprints for the Enterprise in “Star Trek.” Or fan-written explanations for discrepancies in star dates, or why the Enterprise has completely reliable lie detectors that they only use in three episodes.

Continue reading “Why Religion Is Like Fanfic”

Why Religion Is Like Fanfic

She Blogs Carnival #1

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There’s a new blog carnival in town: She Blogs, Issue #1. Unlike most carnivals, it’s not devoted to one particular topic; instead, it’s devoted to blogging by women on all topics, making it more like a general-interest magazine a la the New Yorker, rather than a special interest magazine like The Nation or The Skeptical Inquirer. They were kind enough to include my piece The Catholic Church: Pedophilia as a First Amendment Right, so many thanks for that.

If you’re a female blogger and want to participate in the She Blogs Carnival, here’s their submission form. Happy blogging!

She Blogs Carnival #1

Good Thing They’re Not Atheists

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And the hits just keep on coming. Via Pharyngula and about sixty billion other atheist blogs comes the story of Richard and Lindsay Roberts, son and daughter-in-law of Oral Roberts, who are being sued for treating the budget of Oral Roberts University as their personal bank account: spending it on fancy cars, on tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes, on remodeling their home multiple times, and more. They allegedly used the university jet to send their daughter to the Bahamas; Richard is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign (a big, big no-no for religious non-profits); and according to the suit, university and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts’ home to do the daughters’ homework. (The original story is well worth looking at, if only for the photo of the giant Oral Roberts U praying hands with the police car parked in front of them.)

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And that’s just the beginning of their wacky shenanigans. The punch line: Richard is now saying that God is speaking to him and giving him advice on how to handle this lawsuit. According to Roberts — excuse me, according to God — “We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not. This lawsuit… is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”

I just want to say this:

It’s a good thing they’re not atheists.

Because if they were atheists, they’d have no morality or decency, no reason to follow a code of ethics, and would act as if they could just do whatever they wanted.

Good Thing They’re Not Atheists