Monk

After years of separation, Sarah and her old teacher, Daniel Carr, have gotten back together. He is divorced and single and she has moved in with him. And their deviant passion only continues to escalate, becoming so bizarre that the story begins to strain credulity for me, but remained interesting. I loved the first three-quarters or so and got lost near the end, but would still recommend the book to someone looking for a sexy, dark novel. In the excerpt below, Mr. Carr has introduced Sarah into choking sex, and she has asked what was that about.

_ _ _

“Ever used poppers? Nitrates?”

“Yeah. This DJ I used to see was into that shit. Made me want to climb the walls, and not in a good way. But I was speeding all the time back then and I don’t think it was a good mix.”

“Jesus, Sarah.” Daniel frowned, his eyebrows knitted together. “Anyway what you experienced was the non-chemical equivalent of inhaling nitrate at the moment of climax. I restricted your oxygen supply and the cerebral cortex went to sleep and stopped inhibiting the areas of the brain which stimulate sensation.”

“You strangled me to make me come harder?”

“Basically.”

“Oh.” Sarah touched the tender flesh on her neck, glancing back at the mirror to see again the black marks his fingers had left.

“Don’t just say ‘oh’. You’re supposed to be terribly impressed. It cost me a lot of money to learn that technique. It’s considered a specialty.”

“What if I’d died?”

Daniel bared his teeth and spoke from the back of his throat. “I would have cut my throat and slowly bled to death over your corpse.”

-- “Taming the Beast” by Emily Maguire

A new study confirms old wisdom: men and women cannot really be just friends. Men are naturally attracted to those gals with whom they accept the gelded status of 'just friends', all the while fancying that she is attracted to them as well, and that it is just a matter of biding one's time until they get to ring her bell on bouncing bedsprings. It is the male curse to be so single-track minded when it comes to feminine charms.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

After Sarah’s affair with her teacher, after he leaves the school to save his marriage, she becomes an insatiable sex kitten, or an addict if you prefer, and it dominates her life. Jamie is a classmate and her best friend, a guy who always had a serious crush on her, seeing her as the love of his life. The excerpt below comes after high school; she is in college with a life that is always threatening to run off the rails. Jamie tries to settle her down and give her some security.

_ _ _

“Thanks, Jamie-boy, but living with your family would totally kill my sex life.”

Jamie smiled, but in the tight, tense way that he did when he was frustrated. “Do you ever wonder if maybe your priorities are out of whack? I mean, really, Sarah, it’s just sex.”

That’s what Jamie didn’t understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognizing that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?

-- “Taming the Beast” by Emily Maguire

I thought I would nab a few quotes from my late-night reading, Emily Maguire’s “Taming the Beast”. I regard it as a quasi-porn read, about a fourteen-year-old girl, Sarah Clark, who gets seduced by her teacher, Daniel Carr, kicking off a lifelong sexual obsession that is mutually shared and mutually destructive. The book comes from Australia, and it seems to enjoy some broad popularity. Part of its appeal is that the lovers also share an obsession with literature, and the book is fairly full of rich literary allusions. But the story gets really wild, and I lost credulity during the last quarter of the book, when the lovers get back together and start to literally destroy each other in their bestial passion. They never really seem to tame the beast. I thought it a bit bizarre, but an interesting read, especially for a quasi-porn novel. The excerpt below comes early on in the story, while she is still his underage student.

_ _ _

For two hours each weekday, Sarah Clark ceased to exist. Afterwards she could never identify the exact moment it happened, but always there was the crossing over, the melting, the absorption. There was no border where her body ended and Mr. Carr’s began. Mr. Carr explained that this is what Shakespeare meant by “the beast with two backs.” When two people were completely bound in the expression of love, they ceased to be separate individuals and became one creature. The act of passion when properly performed, created an organism larger than the sum of its parts; it created a beast with two backs, but one soul. Sarah knew it was no metaphor: if anyone were to stumble across their secret meeting place between three and five each day, they would not see a girl and her teacher making illegal, impossible love. They would only see a bucking, screaming two-headed monster. A dumb creature with no awareness outside of oneself. With no desire except to become more itself and less everything else.

-- “Taming the Beast” (2004) by Emily Maguire

Porn is about male fantasy. The fantasy is that women like everything you do to them, as man.

So how does this translate into real life? Women spend a lot of time and energy trying to please men. We learn early on that we are being looked at – that we are to be looked at. That we are performers. It took years before I actually started enjoying sex. YEARS. I think what I enjoyed most about sex, when I was younger, was the feeling of being desired. The actual sex part was super boring for the first while.

We learn, as girls and women, that the performance is more important than the actual feeling.

-- Facials, feminism, & performance: On f**king men in a patriarchy

Victoria's Secret comes out with a "Sexy Little Geisha" outfit.



And, oooh, the controversy:

The negative reactions began several weeks ago. On Racialicious, Nina Jacinto took Victoria's Secret to task for essentializing Asian identity and reducing "Eastern" culture to a stereotype of exotic sexuality. "It’s a narrative that says the culture can be completely stripped of its realness in order to fulfill our fantasies of a safe and non-threatening, mysterious East," she argues. Done at the corporate level, "it’s a troubling attempt to sidestep authentic representation and humanization of a culture and opt instead for racialized fetishizing against Asian women."

Cripes, we are not grade-school children! Can't we have a little fun sometimes? How can people have such a rarefied attitude and remain tolerant of the extreme economic inequality that people really have to live under?

(Source: ONTD)

The conservative radio host pointed to an Italian study which found that the average male penis was 10 percent smaller than 50 years ago. Researchers cited weight gain around the waist, smoking, stress and environmental pollutants as factors.

But Limbaugh wasn’t buying that explanation.

“I think it’s feminism,” he declared. “If it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male's] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else.”

-- David Edwards at The Raw Story

Well, it probably is objectively true that penises are not as much fun as they used to be, now that women have a lot more veto power.

I am reminded of why I want to get around to reading "The Virgin Suicides" one of these days. Here is a nice passage by the author Jeffrey Eugenides on the awkwardness of going to college and first dealing with being in a more sexually open environment with one's expectations boiling over but still not over that delicate line oneself.

_ _ _

The signal event of my first-year orientation was the showing of an X-rated film called "Debbie Does Dallas." This was long before porn had gone mainstream on the Internet. Most of my fellow 18 year olds had never seen anything like it before, and if we had, we’d certainly never watched it with members of the opposite sex around. But now we were in college. We were, by universal agreement, all grown up.

And so we sat there watching the acts being performed on the screen, acting as though it was funny to us, or reason to cheer or holler. I remember one jock shouting, "Why doesn’t my girlfriend do it like that?" In actuality, we were all extremely uncomfortable. College, we’d been told, was going to feature a lot of sex. But we weren’t quite ready for the rules to change so quickly. We had to pretend to be more seasoned and blasé about the whole thing than we actually were. I don’t remember a single thing about that movie. All I remember was how everyone was trying to pretend to be someone they weren’t yet and maybe never would be.

-- Jeffrey Eugenides

“Do you come even though your clit isn’t being worked on?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I have an orgasm every time I get screwed in the throat.”

-- Linda Lovelace, “Ordeal”

This porn confessional was my bedtime fun-read. I remember when I first laid my hands on the book. I was in high school and spending the night at a friend’s house. It was the first time that I got caught with my dick in my hand, so to speak. I was only racing through for the hot parts back then. Thirty years later and I have finally given it an honest cover-to-cover read, and I was delightfully surprised by how absorbing the story is. It really takes you into that twisted relationship between Chuck Traynor and Linda, the sexual sadist and the corruption of a good Christian girl, as she tells it, and the story of how a supposed sex slave becomes the darling of the porn world and a guest of honor among the mainstream celebrities, becoming a regular at the Playboy mansion as well as a regular at Sammy Davis Jr.’s feet.

The way it ends makes me think of Nabokov’s Lolita and Humbert. According to Wikipedia, “Traynor died aged 64 of a heart attack in Chatsworth, California on July 22, 2002, three months after Lovelace died from massive trauma and internal injuries as a result of a car accident.” Of course, Humbert is repentant at the end and Chuck Traynor is not, but I guess that is the difference between high literature and real life.

Courtney Stodden is finally legal. So, more than her husband can now see some of her action without risking serious prison time. Apparently she is even getting some porn offers.


_ _ _

Courtney Stodden turned 18 years old today ... which means she can vote ... or play the lotto ... or accept any one of the FOUR offers she's already received to be a HARDCORE PORN STAR.

Stodden -- who married a 50-year-old actor when she was 16 -- has been shamelessly teasing her lady parts for years ... exploiting the hell out of her underage sexuality in the hopes of staying famous.

Now that she's "legal" -- at least 4 porno companies are hoping she puts her money (and a whole lot more) where her mouth is ... offering her up lucrative XXX contracts.

One of the companies is Brazzers.com ... which says it wants to "showcase [her] talents" by featuring her in a scene with male porn star Keiran Lee ... who Brazzers describes as the man with the "million dollar penis."

Stodden also got an offer from Babes.com ... which says it already penned a porno movie specifically for Courtney based on her real life experience. The flick is called, "Happily Humping My Hubby."

TMZ obtained a copy of the script, which contains the following line for Courtney:

"I may be young but I can s*** a d*** like a much, MUCH more experienced s***. I’ll d*** t**** it, l*** his b****, do whatever I gotta do to get that m**** l*** all on my f***."

So far, it's unclear if Courtney is considering any of the offers.

-- ONTD

_ _ _

I was unable to fill in the asterisked words in the last half of that scripted line, but fortunately an ONTDer has helped us out: "i may be young but i can suck a dick like a much, MUCH more experienced slut. i'll deep throat it, lick his balls, do whatever i gotta do to get that manly load all on my face."

Happy birthday, baby!