Priapus

My father bemoaned to me today the use of tax dollars to study behavioral correlation with penis size among gay men.  Not shockingly, men who have above-average cocks tend to identify as tops, while men with below-average penis size tend to identify as bottoms. While it's true that the organization that performed the study receives NIH grants, those grants are for tuition-like expenses related to AIDS research and weren't actually used to perform this study.

But, thank you, study, for noting oh-so-astutely the social pressures that can effect identification as top or bottom.  Priapus would be thrilled that you confirmed his status as sexual dominator (although I note that historians tend to assert that the classical world found smaller penises more attractive, if not more...er...pungent).  Permit me to submit a new query for your investigation.

I heard an amazing hook-up story from a female friend with what could only be termed a glorious ass.  I'll call her Pria for now.

Pria connects with a male friend of a friend at an event located in a hotel where she has a room, and she takes him upstairs.  As she shuts the door behind them he whips her around, lifts her dress, and starts tossing her salad. "I mean...if you wanna do that...that's fine with me...just don't kiss me after," she recounts, with more than a small smile on her face.  Fortunately no further kissing appears to have been requested.  He goes at the tossing for a while, and they continue removing clothing, engage in some more traditional petting, and make their way to the bed. To her surprise, as Pria begins to lay on her back, expecting to get penetrated, no doubt, she is AGAIN flipped over and tossing begins anew. This dude tossed twice.  That salad was hella dressed.

So I ask you, study authors, to analyze this man who flies in the face of every thought I've ever had about eating ass: (1) that it would never be totally voluntarily - at least some measure of situational coercion would have to take place and (2) that one would never toss the salad of a person whom they'd just met (honestly how would you know they weren't on the verge of an IBS flare-up?) Top or bottom?  Thx. Friends, tell me of the axis orientation of those who have tossed your salad, won't you?

Best Chart Ever

In his article The Teratogenic Grid, Holt Parker makes an excellent point. Perhaps it's an excellent point only if you are a nerd of ancient sexual cultures.

He makes he point that the Roman world did not base its "division of sexual categories on the axis of same versus other" as we do upon the axis of gender when we say "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Instead, they contemplated an axis of active and passive.

Our bifurcated categorization is "a rather parochial affair and a comparatively recent development even in the culture of the West." I love the word "parochial" here.

In other cultures (past and present) sexual categories are instead based on "age, social status, ritual category, or power relations and often cut across of simply ignore the biological classes of male and female." More than two genders are recognized in "various" cultures.  You can't make absolute choices about whether you like only boys or girls where some people are both, or decide to be "homosexual" or "heterosexual" if you are some measure of both.  But you can make choices about whether you're active or passive.

America ignores its intersex population in an offensive way. (My spell check just red-lined "intersex").  Estimates of the children born intersex range from .018-1.7% of live births, but it seems obvious that most intersex births are not reported and kids are often "corrected" at the discretion of some inhumane nongeneticist (Wikipedia agrees).  America has reached the point where it feels like it should tell ~576,000-5,440,000 of its citizens they aren't proper humans by not recognizing them as a natural part of our culture, and it's gross. And that's only the 576,000 to 5,440,000 Americans who outwardly exhibit both gender's organs, that's not even considering all the folks who have a little chromosomal swap going on.  But, I digress.

Holt Parker went on to build a grid to show how language worked when you had gender identifications (as male, female, or intersex) but where homosexual can only be an adjective that describes discrete and brief acts of one's life. And where homosexual and heterosexual acts can happen simultaneously or interchangeably, across and between class levels.  Different acts are taboo to Romans than to us. The lord, the lady, the soldier, the slave boy, or the other slave girls could fuck a slave girl and it was a-ok. No one thought anything of this because the slave girl's social status and gender computed to being passive - to being penetrated. The senator should never be penetrated, be passive.  Dirtying your mouth with a sex organ was not proper for anyone and would have been scandalous for the upper classes.    If some senator were found being passive at all, that would be an undue scandal.

The chart has two parts.  First, the active role:
------------------Vagina-----------------Anus---------------Mouth
Activity:         futuere                  pedicare                 irrumare
Person:           fututor              pedicator/pedico        irrumator

Notice the grammar depends upon the orifice, not the gender.  In a sense, this is because men are presumed to be active.  Male Roman writers were disincentivized from talking about active women. But I have seen almost all of these words applied to women's activity in primary sources.  When they are, the writer generally thinks something is awry. As Seneca said, women are pati natae - "born to be passive." Don't tell woman number 5 (I'm calling her "Sporty Spice" until she gives me a better nickname).

In the passive, gender categories return:

------------------Vagina-----------------Anus---------------Mouth

Activity:       futui                        pedicari             irrumari/fellari

Person:        

   male          cunnilictor      cinaedus/pathicus          fellator 

female          femina/puella       pathica                     fellatrix

     

They had one quick word for "one who [had/has/is having] cunnilingus performed on her by a mouth" to "one who [fucked/fucks/is fucking] a mouth" and another for "one who [sticks/stuck/is sticking] a cock into an ass." With those kind of words, an intersex person never has to search for how to describe herself/himself.

Early in my academic career I began to play in this space and it irrevocably destroyed my allegiance to the categories "homosexual" and "heterosexual."  This destruction was facilitated by the fact that I had entered my first relationship with a woman, during which I still fantasized about and hooked up with men.

I no longer believe in "gay" and "straight." As a consequence people often comment that I think everyone is "gay." More accurately, I think that most everyone might enjoy some measure of homosexual acts or relationships.  In a fraternity house, I think there's a lot of male-male love and sometimes some male-male blackout drunk sex to match.

If you made it all the way through that diatribe, email me at bacchus.paine@gmail.com so I can subscribe you to this blog.

Marlena's

At the corner of Hayes and Octavia, where the crack addicts of lower market clash with the hipsters of Hayes Valley, sits a very old bar run by an even older tranny named Marlena.

I would never profess to be recalcitrant about trannies - one of the funniest moments of my life was when one canoodled my little sister's boyfriend into rubbing his face against her thigh - but I was not prepared for Marlena's. Four magnificent transvestites, one a polynesian-themed glory who swung blue eyeshadow in a way I have seen no one else achieve, graced the bar, but they were the least remarkable of the clientele.  I was more taken aback by the presence of yuppy straight couples, or the "regulars" who spend every night at Marlena's but never remember that they have met my friend's dog (Marlena allows dogs) roughly twenty times. The berber carpet, the 80s music, the cutie bartender who looked like he might just be straight - the place looked at first glance like the perfect tranny dive bar.

That is, until I realized Marlena was a pedofile. Looking up at Marlena's this day in early July, we slowly noticed three separate alters to the Lord Harry Potter.  Marlena had every move poster ever printed pasted up on her grey concrete bar walls.  She also had a reproduction of the Elder Wand (yeah, I know what that is), a first edition of The Tales of Beedle and Bard (that I don't), little Harry Potter medals.  Most of her magazine cutouts featured the 11 year old Daniel Radcliffe, not his post-Equuis man-form.

A couple of the present trannies gave me eyes.  My Southern grandmother would never guess that some transvestites prefer fucking women.  Clearly Marlena is not one of them.  But they do.