Two reviews of Up For Grabs have appeared in the last few months, both of which single out Ontological Engine for comment. That's twice as many reviews as my free fiction ever got, which just goes to prove...something.

At Rainbow Reviews, Erin Schmidt wrote:

The real crown jewel in this treasure chest of sci-fi, though, is Vinnie Tesla's magnificent "The Ontological Engine, or, The Modern Leda." In this tongue-in-cheek (pun intended) tale set in the Victorian era, Daedalus Tesla (cousin of the famed Nikola) carries out bold sexual experiments. It has all the turn-of-the-last century charm and magic of the novel or film The Prestige, but with many more saucy ejaculations.

(she does not clarify whether "saucy" is here being used in the literal or metaphorical sense, so you are free to take your pick)

At The Erotica Readers Assoication. Lisabet Sarai wrote:

The final story in the book in Vinnie Tesla's bizarre and hilarious pseudo-Victorian opus, “The Ontological Engine, or The Modern Leda”. This bawdy tale, which reads like The Pearl on acid, seemed to me to have little connection to the book's theme, but it is so funny that it's worth the price of the book all by itself. Here's the first paragraph:

It is imperative that I make this utterly clear from the start: my motives in the affair of Miss Pertwee were the very highest. Desire for personal gain, worldly fame for the name of Daedalus Tesla, or selfish pleasure of any sort were absent from my mind at all junctures. I hope that my setting down the bare facts of the case will suffice to clarify that the dreadful outcome which resulted arose despite the noblest intentions on my part, and could never have been reasonably foreseen.

It continues in this vein, a delirious marriage of Frankenstein and Thorne Smith, until my stomach hurt from laughing and my husband begged me to stop dragging him away from his own book to read him juicy snippets.

In other OE news, ceciliatan tells me that the four part podcast reading will start appearing on the Circlet website Any Day Now. You can be sure I'll be pointing you to it when that happens.

And a sequel is starting to emerge, even more perverse and over-the-top than the last one. But hopefully shorter. The current working title, just to pique your cuoriosity, is Miss Pierce's New Position.

Penis-Fencing: Dangerous or Decadent?

Certain hermaphroditic flatworms don't come with a sexual orifice pre-installed. Instead, they battle over who gets to penetrate whom. This article, though, isn't just about this fascinating mating stategy--it also touches on the ways political and aesthetic baggage can color what scientists see.

A Breeding Congress

Marbled Salamanders of the eastern US mate in vernal pools in the fall, gathering in masses that sometimes contain tens of thousands of individuals. These are called, awesomely, congresses.

Spermatophores, for the uninitiated, are the packets of sperm laid down on a jelly-like base by male salamanders at the peak of sexual stimulation. A female salamander at the appropriate stage of receptivity will straddle a packet, squat, and incorporate the sperm mass into her cloaca. In many species, the courtship activities between male and female are elaborate, with behavioral signals and mating dances lasting for an hour before both individuals are "ready." Such is not the case with marbled salamanders. The frenzied activity of the congress results in spermatophores being deposited everywhere.... Females hardly need to squat, just pick up a spermatophore on the run.

What She Said, from Sparkymonster
What She Said, from Jill Alexander Essbaum, via mthrtongue, by way of Primroseport
What She Said, from Greta Christina

You may have noticed that I'm lousy at follow-through. Back in May, I promised a Porn That Doesn't Suck Week, and got as far as posting one image I liked before RL and technical issues distracted me enough to totally drop the ball.

Meanwhile, the dauntingly prolific trinityva had engaged very constructively with the project, opening with a bunch of links to favorite smut, then digging into the baggage of my terminology. It's good stuff and worth a read, so here's that link again: Trin's wicked smart post

She raises the issue of shame in the self-identified sex-positive community, and it resonated for me rather strongly.

In college I acquired a substantial little stack of Libido magazines which I displayed proudly on my badly-overloaded bookshelf. I also had a small collection of more traditional porn magazines, which I kept in a cardboard box in my sock drawer, theoretically underneath a layer of socks (by laundry day, the cover was pretty much gone, of course. My dedication to slobbishnss trumped my dedication to hypocrisy).

My point is that as I groped towards being a more openly sexual person, there was still that surplus--the sexual media of which I was still ashamed, or at least not proud. Even today, as I write this, there's a stack of hardcore DVDs in my linen closet, left over from my abortive career as a porn reviewer.

Even within my own chosen medium--online writing--I'm not always proud of my tastes in porn. The urge to be furtive about what actually turns me on is always with me--surprisingly undispelled by my posting my own smut.

I'd like to be more relaxed in talking about what I enjoy. One of the things I admire and envy about the fanfiction world is their healthy culture of recommendations, with well-known and popular specialists dedicated to passing around word of stuff worth reading.

General online sex fiction has never developed such a thing really. We've had a half-dozen or so reviewers appear and disappear over the years--with some occasionally rancorous controversy over whether reviewing is even appropriate.*

Particularly in the post-Usenet era, we direly need more interconnections to help readers find the exciting stuff. For me, the temptation is to emphasize the writers I most admire, such as Nick Urfe and Mat Twassel, at the expense of writers whose work I reach for when I want to masturbate, but who don't really excite me as much on other levels, such as Jetstream and David Shaw.**

One of the dilemmas in talking about this stuff is this: on the one hand, you can stay general and abstract, running the risk of being dull, vague ,and questionably applicable to any actual human experience. On the otherr, you can haul in particular examples, and drag in all the messiness and subjectivity of actual art in the world, with its innumerable axes of variation. There's a dozen good reasons to find Jetstream's stories unbearably silly; anatomical inaccuracies being not the lest of them. Yet so long as I'm shy about saying that his stories excite me, I'm contributing to just the sort of obfuscation that I try to cut through in these little essays.

Can we make a distinction between aesthetic snobbery and political? Are they different? My first instinct is to say that my own hesitations are of the first sort, that my embarrassment is at liking dumb stuff. But Shaw's stories are clever, well proofread, with sophisticated pacing and scads of local color. Why am I shoving him in the cardboard box file? Largely, I fear, 'cause my favorites of his stories are non-consensual or coercive, and I find myself still uneasy presenting that with a "Vinnie Tesla Recommends" stamp. So I distance myself a bit. And the gap between the public and private selves is maintained, sort of.

Trin's points force me to tease apart two categories (certainly not exclusive ones) that I was conflating--"porn that excites me sexually" and "porn that makes me want to show it off to my friends." On the one hand, I think that spending time and energy on the latter category is fine and worthwhile. On the other, the warning against letting the difference harden into shame and furtiveness is well taken.



* My own fiction, for example, has been reviewed just once.

** Shaw has an official site at http://www.alphamalestories.com/menu1.html but it's mostly just teasers with pirated photo 'illustrations.' Still, he's entitled to the link.

I'm deeply leery of trying to generalize out loud about what people find sexy, but gathering data points is always great fun. One of the great gender myths of our culture is that men find pictures sexy, and women don't. Over in her journal, sushis is asking women to post images they think are hot. So far, disappointingly, this has produced a bit of discussion and zero images. I bet you guys can totally fix that.

UPDATE: I screwed up and A) failed to notice the BIG BOLD UNDERLINED LINK at the bottom of Sushis' original anouncement, which caused me to B) fail to click through it and see what was already posted. The link above is now fixed, and the erroneous whine struck through. With extreme prejudice.

Via a path both arbitrary and tangled, I discovered yesterday that Spanking Blog had featured an old story of mine that I'm particularly fond of as their link of the day earlier this week.

Then, this morning, I found that ErosBlog, a pretty much top-tier sex blog, had picked up the link, and posted a different favorite bit.

Coming as it did on the heels of trinityva's double linking, this all left me feeling smug enough to need to brag about it here.

Full Disclosure: I've exchanged a couple-dozen friendly emails with Mat over the last five years. In 2005 he handed off the Flash Stroke Festival to me. At the time there was some discussion of self-publishing an anthology of the results. That never happened, but eventually he put out this book of his own short-shorts.


Mat Twassel is that most unfortunate of combinations--the self-effacing self-publisher. In an e-mail exchange the other month, he was startled to find out that I was one of the two people who'd bought his book. "How did you happen to hear of it?" he wanted to know. I don't know if sales have picked up since then, but you can be confident that buying your own copy will make you part of an extremely small fraternity.

The first thing you notice about the stories in Laura's Toes is that they're short--very short. Most are under a page.

The next thing is the bubbling exuberance of the language. Mat's narration spills over with vivid similes and playful alliteration . His images of innocent (mostly) sexuality are bright, vivid, and surprisingly hot. His sentences are almost child-like, not just in their simplicity but in their clear-eyed, unaffected honesty. Mat covers a broad range of distinct styles in this little book, but his own voice remains unmistakable throughout.

Something like half of Mat's shorts are about his unabashed and carnal adoration for his wife, Laura. As delightful as those stories are, he can be even more impressive when he reaches out into stranger territory. One of my favorites in the book is Lucky Girl in the Fifth at Hialeah. Attempting to summarize an eighteen-line story is absurd, so suffice it to say that he packs enough storytelling, characterization, and bizarre plot hooks into that piece for a novel, and without ever seeming hurried.

Mat reminds me a little of newspaper cartoonist Pat MacDonnell. Each produces work with a surface simplicity that can conceal, at first, the subtlety, sophistication, and sincerity that goes into their work. There's a fifth 's' that goes into their storytelling that many less-confident writers avoid: sentiment. Both are unafraid to show strong emotion without ironic distance (though they're capable of biting irony as well).

Like McDonnell, Mat often structures his potent emotions around sly formal games, turning his stories on a pun or a reference. Without the hook, his stories could tip over into insipid sweetness--"flabby," as the wine critics say. With it, the story coheres, with a perfect balance of astringent intellect and sugary emotion.

Take Oceans of Time, for example. It's a charming, sexy little story in itself, responding to his wife's orgasm as if it were a piece of music. However, in the context of the quote that inspired it, its ingenuity is revealed, and the whole thing comes together in a vastly more satisfying way.

As I mentioned, I dropped by the Scarleteen message board last week.

Scarleteen originated as a spin-off of Scarlet Letters, a rather well-regarded online erotic/literary magazine. Founder Heather Corinna wanted to make a non-judgemental sex information and advice site for teenagers. Federal abstinence-only sex education rules mean that such material is appallingly rare. Scarlet Letters eventually rolled to what appears to be a permanent stop, but Scarleteen has soldiered on, providing a safe, supportive environment, welcoming to all genders and gender expressions, and all orientations. I've been an enthusiastic supporter of its goals and its methods.

After last Monday's post, I found a thread I wasn't so happy with.

You know what? I'm not gonna try to summarize it. Lengthy paraphrase won't really accomplish much here except obscuring subtleties. Go have a look for yourself and form your own opinions.

UPDATE: The thread in question has been removed. If anyone has a backup somewhere, I'd dearly love to lay my hands on it.

---

You're back? Okay.

( Exorcising Incorrect Kink )
( On the Origins of Spankos )
( Death of a Thread )
( Heather on BDSM )
So it's context that makes all of this so depressing. If...I dunno...the Boston Globe, say, had a sex advice forum, and I found all this writing there, I'd be vaguely relieved that it was so tolerant. It's finding this in what I thought was a haven of acceptance and sex-positivity that's painful.

This one isn't about visitors to my journal. I happened upon an entry by LJ fetish diva kumimonster the other day with two comments worth reading carefully.

The entry itself is Kumi kvetching, not unreasonably. about a flight on which the person next to her was so large that she only had use of about 2/3 of her own seat.

The first comment that caught my eye was from bluknight, who describes himself as "a bit... 'larger'..." What struck me was this bit:

Even better, it's almost impossible to buy a 'second seat' from the airlines websites, even if I wanted to. I can't get two seats registered to the same name... And if I CALL to book, I get a surcharge for 'telephone reservations'! JESUS. And that doesn't even note the fact that I'll now be paying TWICE the normal fare to get somewhere... Using my last trip, for example, turning a $650 flight to Boston into a $1300 flight.

.

I hadn't realized that the airlines make it that difficult for a fat person who wants to to accommodate other passengers.

The other notable comment was from sokkmonkey, and it's not nearly such pleasant reading. He writes:

Oh you know how I feel about this.
Fat can be helped.
I understand being a "larger" person. I'm 6'7 and magage to pack my ass into a seat without making other people uncomfortable, christ knows I'd love to sit at an angle and use the space of the chair next to me. Now If I could exercise and eat less and make my legs shorter I would.
People can eat less, and exercise more and make themselves less fat.
If they choose not to... (and no I don't buy the thyroid and genetics excuses. If I saw your ass in the gym four days a week and you said that, I would buy it, but you don't so I wont.)
Bottom line is if your lifestyle choice affects my life, I'm going to be pissed.

It's as blunt an articulation of the 'you have a civic responsibility to conform to my standards of appearance' thesis as I've seen lately. Not only do you have a responsibility to be a shape that is pleasing to him, but if you want an exemption, you have to belong to his health club. I particularly like how he switches to second person in that bit, so as to shake his finger at the unacceptably chubby reader on the other side of the computer screen.

Someone calls him on this shit, and he retorts, with the favored tactic of the ignorantly arrogant everywhere: made-up statistics!

Yes, there are exceptions based on health conditions, but that in and of itself is an oreborus[sic], heath conditions cause obesity, but obesity causes heath conditions;
In that case, people will get better, or they will die young.

But in 80% of cases, it’s not because of a pre-existing health condition it’s just a lack of discipline.

I remain fascinated by the argument, "I scold and deride fat people because obesity leads to health complications." In the universe I come from, health problems are inherently unpleasant. You don't need to punish people for having them.

Some months ago, my discussion of Evangelical sex-advice site The Marriage Bed provoked a visit from co-author Paul Byersley, who offered a legitimate criticisn of one of the points I'd made: ( Male desire, female desire, and the gravity well )
( Return of the Magic Prostate )

* I am creeped out by the repeated use of 'release' in such discussions to refer to sex. It's like if you had a website about how to enjoy your meals more and kept referring to eating as 'fueling up.'

for something so amazingly big, the internet is fuckin' tiny, and search engines make it smaller. Sometime in the late eighties, James Parry started monitoring usenet for mentions of his pseudonym. Two decades later, Marshall McLuhan is always lurking just offscreen, ready to tell you you're full of shit.

This can be entirely innocuous and trivial, such as when bloggers Andrew Rilston and Marc Robinson dropped by to say hi, or it can be a little more tense.
( Return of the Porn Stars Who Stole Easter!!! )

BearNaked.org = gay sex parties.
BearNaked.com = organic granola.

I'm gonna step down off my usual pontificatory hobbyhorses here, and talk practical like.

For the past several years, I've been in the habit of buying my condoms in bulk from RubberTree.org, Their extremely no-frills site was more than made up for by a good selection and generally unbeatable prices.

When my sweetie discovered that her cunt is happier with non-latex condoms, comparison shopping found that RubberTree was actually being undercut for once. Where you can easily pay $2 per for Avantis at your local CVS, and RubberTree was offering them for $1.25 each in bulk, Ohio megapharmacy Hocks.com actually gets down to a dollar per if you order more than 200 at once, which I was happy to do.

For oral sex and sex with other partners I was still favoring latex, and so still ordering from RubberTree. I placed my most recent order with them in January of this year. I got a confirmation e-mail, but my credit card wasn't billed, and the condoms never arrived. Their contact e-mail is bouncing, and they're not responding to any of the voicemails I've left them, so it would appear to be a ghost site at this point--still accepting orders, but not actually doing anything with them.

This means that I'm in the market for a new condom supplier. Any recommendations?

My choices of products:

For coitus:

The Pleasure Plus. Tangled history notwithstanding, it delivers the goods. Most women in my experience are pleased-to-indifferent with them, but some find its extra folds a little irritating.

For fellatio:

My current fave is probably the Durex Natural Feeling Unlubricated,* but I'm still shopping around. LifeStyles Assorted Colors Unlubricated are surprisingly nice...and so festive! My great frustration here is that reservoir tips trigger my sweetie's gag reflex. I know of exactly one brand of condom without lube and without a reservoir tip--Trojans, and they are just thoroughly thick & unpleasant if you want to actually feel anything through them.

For cunnilingus:**

Saran Wrap. $2.60 for 100 feet at Shaws. Also comes in pretty colors, and makes a fun bondage material, though my inner Al Gore recoils at the waste.

Lube:

Liquid Silk in a slam dunk. It doesn't get sticky, it doesn't pill, and it doesn't cause yeast infections. Sadly, it's expensive as fuck (usually $20 for 8½ ounces) and not always easy to find. Good Vibes offers a clone, but I prefer Liquid Silk slightly, and the imitation isn't all that much cheaper.

What do you guys like, and where do you buy it?


*Durex gets big points off here for a flashulent, broken website that thwarted my attempts to extract the actual product name.

** Or cunnilinctus if you prefer. And you thought I was pedantic...

I finally finished expanding my Write Club story from last month. The new, porntasticer, version is now up at my site. Have a look and tell me what you think.

NSFW Pastry Alert

One of the serendipities of blogging turns out to be other people writing your best stuff for you. The most popular entry on this journal is almost certainly my friend Balan Nubilis' Brief Essay on the Sad Lack of Imagination in Invertebrate Oriented Erotica.

More quietly, my piece on a new type of condom that hasn't gotten much attention in the US attracted a series of vivid, in-depth anonymous reviews. I'd been planning to move the reports up to an actual entry for a while now. The latest update today includes a plea for help finding a new distributor for the things, which is as good an excuse as any.

I am genuinely ignorant of the author (or authors), so you should rely on his word with caution. Given the dearth of English-language info about this stuff, though, I'm delighted to have any first person reports at all.

( Orientation )
( Unisex, Megasex, Unique )
( Other Materials )
( Unisex and Megasex )

You know about how leopard slugs mate?

It...

You see, they....

Just watch the damn video, okay? It involves twining their blue, parachute-like penises together. I am totally serious.

Is it worksafe? Damn, dude. That depends on how imaginative your co-workers are, I guess.

Stark raving mad props to urbpan for pointing this out.

*




* I'm painfully aware that my own writing is not devoid of this quality. In any porn written from a toppy point of view, it's damn hard to avoid it ending up like, "I waggle my eyebrows seductively and you fall at my feet in rapture." I'm still trying to figure out my way out of that bind, but in the meantime it's fun to mock those further into it than I am.

A lot of ASSTR folks have a page on their sites devoted to fanmail they've gotten. I've resisted the temptation to do this myself, primarily cause I have trouble imagining that many people would want to read such a page. I got an anonymous note last week, though, in response to TINASAA, that was nice enough that I can't resist sharing it:

This is the first sexually oriented story I have ever read where I did not skip ahead looking for the sexy parts, but instead slowed down and read the writing...just for the pleasure of the words and the way that they're put
together. You have a fine writing style. Its fun to read.

Okay, the sex isn't bad, either. (g)

And just to make my head swell a little more, the legendary Eli the Bearded, founder of alt.sex.stories.moderated and no mean avant garde pornographer in his own right, was interviewed for the latest issue of ASSTR's Journal of Desire:

HJ: Who are some of your favorite authors? Favorite stories? What do you look for in a good story?

EtB: Mat Twassel. Vinnie Tesla. Jack C Lipton. Hammon Wry. Shon Richards. Vulgar Argot. Alexis Siefert. Kenny Gamura. Bronwen SM. Ann Douglass. Anne747 (aka Anon747 and Anne Jet). Celia Batau. Crimson Dragon. Daphne Xu. Dr Spin. Dulcinea. Katie McN. Probably others I'm not thinking of.

My Week of Bad Sex Reporting began with a New York Times headline: Ideals Collide as Vatican Rethinks Condom Ban. The actual subject of the article turns out to be the almost comically narrow issue of whether married couples where one partner is HIV+ can use condoms. One Catholic theologan complains: "That will be picked up as 'Church O.K.'s Condoms,' and that would seem to undermine the whole church teaching on sexuality and marriage." He's right, of course, as demonstrated by the Times' misleading headline. However, it's a rather odd test to apply to church rulings. I'd say if his goal is to hold the church exclusively to doctrines that are immune to misinterpretation or distortion, he has his work cut out for him.

---

This weekend, The Boston Globe ran a piece, originally from the L.A. Times, about the porn stars who stole Easter:

Neighbor Kerry Cohen, a paralegal and mother, was on her way to organize a charity event. As she squeezed past several large production trucks, Cohen saw ''scantily clad" women heading toward the same house.

As far as John R. Johnson was concerned, ''that was the end of Easter Sunday."

Johnson, another neighbor, told his 9-year-old daughter to stay inside while what he described as a ''prison-yard break" -- a large film crew, many of its members covered in tattoos -- entered the house. Outraged, Johnson called the city seeking to shut down the porn shoot. But everything, he was told, was perfectly legal.

The article contains a bunch more verbiage, but that's the news story. It's apparently legal for tattoed people to enter suburban neighborhoods, even on Easter Sunday. That this is considered newsworthy enough for at least two newspapers to run hand-wringing pieces about blows my mind.

---

There's been a fair amount of press lately for the acquittal of South African politician and head of the government's Moral Regeneration Campaign Jacob Zuma (no relation to the addictive web game so far as I know) on charges of rape. After the trial, he very specifically apologized to the nation for not using a condom when he fucked the HIV positive friend of the family who subsequently pressed charges against him (he maintains that the sex was consensual). The thing that's strikingly absent from the recent coverage is a little context. In particular, his outspoken advocacy of virginity tests for young women:

"Girls knew that their virginity was their family's treasure," Mr Zuma said speaking at an event near Umtata in the Eastern Cape on Wednesday, where some 40 girls took part in a virginity-testing programme.

"They would only have sex when permitted to do so by their families after marriage," he said.

The BBC site refers to this as "traditional African family values.

---

Perhaps the most ludicrous piece of reporting I have to share with you is the Washington Post's article on the phenomenon of collegiate impotence. Now, you all know what "trend" means when a reporter says it: it either means "I found three people to quote" or "I read an article in another paper about it."

In the case of this particular trend, reporter Laura Sessions Stepp has her excuse ready: "Statistical evidence is difficult to assess because surveys are few and vary in definition, from the occasional problem to the long-term condition." However, she cites one campus health professional who's noticed an increase, and insists that she spoke to several other unnamed cargivers with the same experience. Further, she's found several young men willing to speak extensively and on-the-record about their crushing terror that anyone might find out about their performance problems. I guess nobody they know reads the Post...

What's the cause of this burgeoning phenomenon? Why, sexually aggressive women of course! "According to surveys, young women are now as likely as young men to have sex and by countless reports are also as likely to initiate sex, taking away from males the age-old, erotic power of the chase."

But isn't female empowerment a good thing? Pshaw!

One can argue that a young woman speaking her mind is a sign of equality.

"That's a good thing," says [UMD Human Sexuality teacher Robin] Sawyer, father of four daughters.

"But for some guys, it has come at a price. It's turned into ED in men you normally wouldn't think would have ED."

Need I point out the contrasting of women speaking their minds with normality in the above quote?

Other hings to note:

• The dismayed young men of the article say "even though she was really good-looking," not "even though I was really attracted to her."
  
• Apparently PIV sex is the only kind of nookie there is.
  
• The boyx interviewed seem to talk entirely about sex as a means to status rather than pleasure.
  

I'm confident you can find half a dozen appalling things of your own without my help. I have faith in you guys.

Part of me suspects that the whole thing is a work of sly misandry--you know, "look at all those would-be cocksman frat boys with their limp little willies," but I don't really think anything so intellectually coherent is going on here. The density of dumb unexamined assumptions about sex and gender may be some kind of record here.