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.

The Second Axis

Kinsey missed something, I fear. For every analysis of persons 1 through 7 (one has already changed sexual course) there is an alternate consideration: Is she a top or a bottom? I'm purposefully abandoning the words "masculine" and "feminine" because they're about as helpful as "grey" and "pink" in actually conveying a concrete characteristic. As I know each of these persons quite well, I feel competent to make an initial assessment of where they sit on the second axis of an improved Kinsey scale. On the second axis, 0 is totally passive (bottomy) while 6 is totally active (toppy). I hope you all will correct me if I am wrong.

1. Man #1 is a 6 on the Kinsey scale, with no interest whatsoever in pussy (in fact, he harbors a bit of revulsion for pussy). Yet he is rather active, with some limited passive tendencies. I'm pegging him a 4.

2. Man #2 is a 5.5 on the Kinsey scale - he only likes black chicks, and otherwise is strictly dickly. He is rarely aggressive (which has the pleasant side effect of making him a very nice person). I'd guess he's around a 3, maybe 2. That's not to say he never tops, of course, this isn't about sex (I've never fucked him) but about how likely I imagine he is to throw the first punch at the bar.

3.Woman #3 is a 6 on the Kinsey scale. You would undoubtedly describe her to me as a universal top if you saw her in a bar, but honestly she's a mere kitten. I'm putting her at 2 despite her athletic ability.

4. Woman #4 is perhaps my greatest enigma. She's sitting squarely on Kinsey number 3 at the moment. Undoubtedly in bed she is topped often, but her personality strikes me more around a 4.

5. Woman #5 now sits pretty comfortably at 1 Kinsey-wise (at least she implied that when I tried to holla). But I challenge anyone to try to give her shit - she will school you. 6.

6. Woman #6 I'm putting at 4 Kinsey-wise, given her recent assertion that pussy is just SO much more compelling than cock. I wouldn't want to face her in battle, but her toppiness doesn't seem absolute. I'll put her right in the middle at 3.

Why do this? Other than making my friends hate me for their ranking, I'm hoping they'll correct me. When they do, I believe I can begin a graph I expect to take years to finish. Now to publicize. Anecdotes welcome.

Why

I have long questioned the narcissism of the "Weblog." How, I would think to myself, can I be so bold as to proclaim that anyone in the world would care to subscribe to my random thoughts? The simple answer is that they shouldn't, but I am a narcissist nonetheless.

In the course of yesterday, I spoke with one of each of the following types of people:

1. A man who has known he was attracted strictly to men since childhood, but who only began telling his closest friends about it at 21.

2. A man who realized he was attracted primarily to men in his mid twenties, to the surprise of none of his friends.

3. A woman who has always known she was attracted only to women.

4. A woman who only dated men until very recently, when she fell in love with a woman.

5. A woman who proclaimed herself a lesbian in high school, but has been with only men in the last decade.

6. A woman who was in relationship with women from childhood through graduate school and a few years beyond, with a boyfriend in between, who now dates a man and loves him.



Naturally the day also brought acquaintance with many, many persons asserting heterosexuality, at least two of which I feel confident have had sex with a person of the same gender at one time or another. My friend's reference to Kinsey was not unexpected. He is (now) gay and we discuss my admiration of Kinsey's insight regularly. What my friend undoubtedly fails to appreciate is that I think Kinsey's insight is only part of the story.


Kinsey said, in brief, that humans do not fit neatly into the categories of heterosexual or homosexual. I don't believe that "bisexuality" was contemplated then. Humans instead fall evenly distributed along a scale. 0 on this scale means entirely heterosexual; 6 means entirely homosexual. A 2, then, is primarily heterosexual with more than a passing interest in persons of the same sex. Kinsey asserted (at least in the movie) that a person's "number" could change over time.

This is insightful for its scientific assertion of what now seems an obvious principle: there is more than just "straight" and "gay." IMHO, straight and gay don't even exist. I formed this opinion long before I knew who Kinsey was, based on personal experience and historical research into times before Christianity and times in spite of it.


The purpose of this narcissistic exploit is to explain why it seems that Kinsey's insight was incomplete and seek feedback on the contours of the complete story. Kinsey (through no fault of his own) lived in a time where men were men and women were women and those terms have very concrete sociological and psychological applications across the human species. They do not. "Male" brains and "female" brains are as fictional as hetero and homo.

Men, it is said, are better at hand-eye coordination and math. Women, by contrast, at language and communication. Yet what of men who are grossly uncoordinated in comparison to particular women? What about "lesbian" soldiers who exhibit all the best characteristics of the ideal male infantrymen, or "gay" men with an uncanny knack for nonverbal communication?

I am female. I like sports (a lot), I'm good at math, I can throw better than at least some men with more accuracy, and I paint my nails religiously. So what of me? I heard once that the only athletic world record held by a woman was long distance swimming, an accolade that the speaker (not this guy) attributed to our comparatively generous body fat percentages. There are obvious evolutionary justifications, of course, for the hunter to be faster than the gatherer. But, a few thousand years of societies that physically and sociologically subjugated women seem to have obfuscated the reality that there is some play in these stereotypes. That play is what's missing from Kinsey's scale, and probably holds the key to explaining why anyone falls where they do.

I'll start with this personal observation: I am generally more attracted to women when I have been working out a lot, particularly when I have been building much muscle.

Enough is Enough

Amidst a discussion of our various friends variable sexualties, my good friend said dismissively: “What do you, have a list of everyone’s Kinsey number going?”

“No,” I replied, “but you’ve just borne my new blog.”

For this first entry, I note only that Microsoft Word does not recognize the spelling of the word “sexualties.”