30 Days of Kink: Day 2.

 Day 2: List your kinks.

1. Butts

2. Butts

3. Buttttttsssss

With that out of the way... this one is difficult for me.  I've never really experienced sexuality as an itemized list of fetishes.  I can't say, like, "rope bondage, feet, having my nose tickled with an ostrich feather by a man dressed as my third grade teacher."  There's nothing so specific.

I'm more like "confronting the physicality of my own flesh," and that's great for poetry readings, not so much for actually figuring out what the fuck I'm going to do tonight.

I also say "I don't know yet; I'm still discovering" a lot.  I've been in the scene for, shit, seven years now, and I still feel like a newcomer when I see just how much is out there.  Or a kid in a candy shop, and I'm too caught up in "I want to try one of everything!" to start narrowing myself down.

And secretly, part of the reason I get all "I like almost everything, really I'm just into this for the philosophy" is that I do have some specific kinks, but I feel weirdly embarrassed and shy about them.  Like saying "I like to be dominated" is vague and sanitized enough to feel totally chill, but when I get too close to what really makes me squirm in my pants, saying "I like to get threatened that someone will shove a huge thing up my ass" gets uncomfortable.

Not so uncomfortable that I won't do it, though!  So, in no particular order:

1. Biting, punching, wrestling, and other forms of no-tools SM.  On a physical level I like flogging, but I liiiike skin-to-skin rough body play.

2. Things in my bum.  Like, a lot.  Like, I don't talk about this much because I know that if I get started I'm going to start sounding weird as it progresses from "oh yeah, anal sex, lots of people are into that" to "no, you don't understand, I would put a traffic cone in my ass if I could."

3. Related but not totally overlapping: the general concept of putting way too much phallic object in way too little orifice.  Again, it gets weird fast--I don't just mean "big dicks," I mean "...maybe two traffic cones."

4. Being held down and forced to do things, assuming that the things are exactly what I wanted to do anyway.  Inclusive of when I feel like doing them and who I want to do them with.  This all hinges on a very generous interpretation of the word "forced," obviously, but once we've established what exactly I want to be forced to do, the scene can get plenty rough.

5. Humiliation, but only in a specific way.  I don't want to be told that I'm useless; I want to be told that I'm useful, and the top will be using me now.  I like the feeling of being used.

It's weird how shy I felt about saying those things, and how "oh, is that all? that's not so bad at all" I feel having actually said them now.  Kind of a huge relief actually.



Next up: I'm finally getting back to Fifty Shades of Grey!

30 Days of Kink: Day 1.

I live!  I live!  I graduated nursing school, am still waiting for a test date for my boards, and I live!

I live, and I want to write again.  I've been writing every day on my tumblr, but that's not the same.  It's a big mishmash of puppy pictures and askboxes and stuff.  The Pervocracy is my real home on the Internet.

So, to get back in the swing of long-form non-puppy blogging, I'm doing a 30 Days of Kink challenge.  You can read all the questions here.

Day 1: Dom, sub, switch?  What parts of BDSM interest you?  Give us an interesting in-depth definition of what that means to you. Basically define your kinky self for us.

I'm a bottom, an occasional switch, and harbor a deeply guarded but deeply treasured capacity for submission.

The kinky thing I do most often is get hit.  I like getting hit.  It’s such an OOMPH of a feeling, a sharp snap into the physical reality of my body, the tough meatiness of my muscles and fine-grained sensitivity of my nerves.

It’s also a challenge.  Because although I like getting hit, I don’t have much pain tolerance.  Sometimes that means we keep it light, more of a manhandling than a real beating, only hitting me hard enough to make a little noise but not enough to cause serious pain.  (This kind of play usually involves a lot of giggling.)

Other times I go into a subspace trance and enter an ecstatic altered state where pain don’t hurt.  This requires a lot of trust, because once I’m in that state my communication gets either garbled or absent, and I don’t have much sense of my own limits.  Feels so good though.

And other times, more rarely… I go past my pain tolerance.  I get to a level of pain that makes me think “I can’t possibly deal with this” and I deal with it.  I look at the pain head-on and transform its image in my mind into heat, into cold, into red, into simply nerves firing.  I find a moment when I can tolerate intolerable pain and I hold myself in that moment.  It’s not as sexy-fun as the other two ways of dealing with pain, but when I’ve done it, man, I feel good about myself.  Tolerating the intolerable, even for half a second, makes me feel like the champion of the goddamn world.

I know how to hit, too, and I get a little thrill, but it’s usually much less visceral.  The best times have been when I’ve been comfortable getting really physically into the bottom’s space—hitting someone while we were skin-to-skin, pressed together so close that I could feel every gasp and flinch, every time their muscles tensed or relaxed, every deep or shallow or ragged draw of breath.

As for submission… there lurk the things that still feel wrong.  Gloriously, tantalizingly wrong.  These are the kinks, that for me, still hold the delicious flavor of taboo.  The flavor, so hard to find as an adult, of sneaking out through the woods at night, of dirty comics under the mattress, of awkwardly sincere love poems hastily passed and quickly concealed.  These are the things that don’t make me feel like “you know, it’s just another way of experiencing pleasure…”; they make me feel like a god damn pervert.  I love them.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 17!

I'm not dead!  I'm in the last month of nursing school.  I haven't had much time or energy to write.  I'm utterly exhausted, a bit demoralized, and so, so close to a new chapter in my life.

I think I'm at the point I was at when I left Seattle--of looking at my life and thinking there's nothing at all wrong with it, except that I can't see this being my only life.  I want to reincarnate.  There's so much stuff out there to experience, and I have the freedom and opportunity to go out and experience some more, and I intend to.

I've been going through my grandfather's slides lately.  My grandmother died a few months ago, and I took the slides from her house.  My grandfather loved to travel, and I'm not sure I fully understood that until I started going through these slides.  There's wild leopards in them, and thousand-year-old synagogues, and million-year-old glaciers, and a stunning variety of things that look like penises.  Just pages and pages of rock penises and wood penises and gourd penises, interspersed with all the glories of the Earth.  I love my grandfather now more than ever.  I want to travel as widely as him, to live as fully as he did, and to see as many penises.

And so I'm going to leave Boston. I don't yet know when or for where.  I still love Rowdy dearly and the idea of leaving him breaks my heart--but I also know he doesn't want me to stay here just for him, and deep down neither do I.  I'll visit often and I'll email and I'll always love him.  But I may move away from him.


Anyway.  Wherever I go, Fifty Shades of Grey will still be with me.  Unfortunately.


Content warnings for this chapter: Stalking, mostly.  Physical and emotional abuse, although the physical is not quite so intense as in some other chapters.  And one sketchy-ass gynecologist.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 16!

I'm back!  Unfortunately, I've been going through some bad depression once again, so... yeah.  That's why.  I'm getting treatment and hopefully will be on the up-slope soon.

(No, I'm not depressed from reading Fifty Shades of Grey.  I'm depressed from the stuff that made me so good at spotting abusive behaviors in Fifty Shades of Grey.)


In our last installment, our Brave Hero threatened to rape the heroine, and then they went off and had consensual sex, or as consensual as it can be immediately after a rape threat.  Making jokes about this book has become increasingly difficult.  It's like, I want to write about things besides abuse, but literally nothing else happens!

Content warnings for this chapter: Kidnapping, extremely graphic physical abuse, sexual assault for the umpteenth time, homophobia, even more emotional abuse than usual.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 15!

ANNOUNCEMENT: I will be speaking at the University of Chicago Sex Week again this year!  I'll be talking about "Sex Outside The Lines" at 7pm on Saturday, February 8, on the second floor of the Logan Center (915 E 60th St.)  It's free and open to the public, and last year was a great time, so I highly encourage you to attend if you're in the area.



Well, here we are.  Past the halfway point.  Before I get into this one, I want to tell you a little bit about my weekend.  (Graphic BDSM coming. FYI.)

On Saturday night, I went to a kink party with Rowdy and his girlfriend Artemis*.  We walked around for a bit watching people scening, then I asked if they wanted to do a scene where they both topped me.  They did, so I stripped down to underwear and we talked.  I told them I wanted to be punched and flogged, mostly on the back over the shoulderblades, and we agreed how I would let them know if I was having a good time or a bad one.

And then they started hitting me.  Rowdy and Artemis took turns, first bare-knuckled and then with leaden sap gloves, then with a heavy leather flogger.  It started out slow with a lot of "how's that? harder?" and quickly got more primal.  For a while I was laughing with every blow, then gasping as the pain built up.  While Artemis punched me, Rowdy held me from the front, hugging me to his chest as I alternately giggled and moaned.  Artemis dug her fingers deeply into my back, grabbing the bruised and tender muscles, twisting them.  That's when I started to slip into a trance.  I closed my eyes tightly and stopped laughing and everything turned inward.  The blows stopped being "pain, but good" and started being "good, but good."  Rowdy and Artemis took turns a few more times.  They were holding my hair, kissing each other over my shoulder, biting my skin.  I was less and less aware of time and of what specifically they were doing, and more aware of... flying.  Just flying through endless inner space on a rocket made of endorphins and sweaty leather.

I came back to Earth on a plushy sofa, with Rowdy holding me and kissing me and giving me sips of water.  "That was amazing," we both said.  "I love you," we both said.  "My back feels funny," I said.

*Oh, right.  Rowdy broke up with Sprite like three years ago and he's been dating Artemis for more than a year now and she's pretty awesome.  Probably should've mentioned this at some point.

So that's real BDSM for you.  It's not the only way you can do BDSM, for sure--there's a million ways--but I think it's not a bad example.  I asked for it, and I could have stopped it without fear of retaliation.  My tops asked me--and gave me--what I wanted, not merely what I could tolerate.  The whole thing was full of a spirit of fun and experimentation, not anger or bitterness.  And I loved the hell out of it.  I didn't come away thinking "that wasn't so bad" or "I had that coming." I came away thinking "I feel fucking fantastic."

So you can see why I'm completely appalled and disappointed by the way my beloved kinks are presented in Fifty Shades of Grey.  It's one of the most joyous things in my life, and it's being forced on someone who hates it, and E.L. James is saying this is okay and sexy.  It breaks my damn heart.



Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse, you know the drill. Also rape threats and graphic sex immediately following rape threats.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 14!

When we last read Fifty Shades of Grey, our hero was threatening our heroine with rape and furiously badgering her any time she disagreed with him over petty little things.  ...That could describe any chapter in the book.  You don't have to read this one too closely to keep up.

I like this picture. It was originally illustrating a guy going "wow, I can never live up to this amazing Christian Grey fella, I'm just an ordinary man."  But it is also, for very different reasons, the exact face I make when I read this book.

Content warnings for this chapter:  The force-feeding thing, the child sexual abuse thing, the adult sexual abuse thing, the continuous rampant emotional abuse thing... boy has this book numbed me out.  You know, the thing, with the horribleness.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 13!

In the last chapter, our hero broke into our heroine's house and raped her.  So.  Really nowhere to go but up from here, I guess.

Content warnings for this chapter: emotional abuse (like, a LOT), sexual harassment.  You know the drill.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 12!

This is not going to be a very funny chapter. I would not blame you one bit if you skipped it. I'm going to go through it, for the sake of complete commentary, but there's a point in this chapter where there's no hope of making any jokes.

Plot summary if you choose to skip: Ana "jokingly" breaks up with Christian Grey. He thinks it's real and breaks into her house and rapes her.

MAJOR content warning: Rape. Not rape references or "that's kind of like rape"; outright graphic rape. Also home invasion, emotional abuse, child sexual abuse.

Cosmocking Catchup: October-December '13!

How could I have let Cosmocking slide?  What has become of me?

Rather than stretch things out by doing the three (!) backlogged Cosmos I've got separately, I'm just going to make a mega-post with a little bit of the worst from October, November, and December.

Covers!  "The Scary Thing 90% of Men Fantasize About" is having sex with someone who isn't their partner! "Weird Things Guys Do When You're Not Around" basically comes down to sometimes they're naked!  I can understand the need to be shocking on the cover, but I can't forgive faking it, not in a world where "female kangaroos have three vaginas" is an actual fact!  And then there's Miley!  Wearing an otherwise see-through suit covered in rhinestones and encouraging us to "twerk your ass off"!  Yes, dear, you're very scandalous. Good for you. We're all very scandalized.

The kind of woman who's really rising in her career in her 20s tends to be high in testosterone [...] High-testosterone guys tend to be more aggressive, tough-minded, and competitive--and not as compassionate or emotionally expressive. High-estrogen guys, on the other hand, have no problem expressing their emotions and are trusting and empathetic but can be indecisive.

And guys who are high in black bile tend to be dry and cold and associated with the element of Earth.

This would almost be interesting if it was validated with blood tests and not the author going on to speculate that Barack Obama is probably high-estrogen because he called his wife "the boss."  As it is, it's just yet another weird attempt to go "oh no, I would never hold sexist and transphobic opinions, but you can't argue with science!"

Well, guess what?  I just put on glasses and a white lab coat.  Now I get to decide what objective truth is!  And, using some very long and newly-discovered words, I can tell you that according to SMIM1 Vel antigen levels and dynamic computed tomography, you are a poophead.

Slick his fingers with shower gel, and have him reach around and give you some digital pleasure.

Ow. No. Ow.  You know that feeling when you get soap in your eye?  Transpose that south a little and let me know if it sounds sexy.

You wake up with 2.5 minutes to spare before your alarm rings.  Rip off the cami you slept in, and tie it over his eyes. Now you can spin a fantasy using nothing but your words.  Here, we'll get you started: "All the neighbors are crowded around the windows right now, watching us..."

Since "try springing BDSM on him when he's least expecting it" was a couple issues ago, Cosmo has now upped the stakes to "try springing BDSM on him when he's goddamn asleep."

I do want to use this fantasy, though, because I live on the second floor.  "All the neighbors are crowded around the windows right now. They're hovering.  Sickly green flames flicker in the places where their eyes used to be."

Q: My boyfriend is a unicorn. He's not into porn or strip clubs. But I am. I'd love to watch porn while we're having sex or have a wild night at a strip club together. Are we incompatible? 

A: Guys who say they're not into porn are either lying or repressed... and lying.  [...] suggest a girl-on-girl scene to eliminate the possibility of him being intimidated by porn penises.  If he says no, you need to decide if you're okay being with a guy who's so closed off and unwilling to explore with you.

I'm not even explaining why this is wrong.  I can't.  It's like being asked "why wouldn't tinfoil make a good tampon?"  There's so many different layers of wrong that I'm just going to trip over myself trying to pick which one to talk about first.

I've never come even remotely close to playing make-believe in the bedroom. The truth is, I've been too scared! It's challenging enough to feel comfortable being yourself during sex, let along someone else.  Plus, what if my partner found my fantasy freaky? What if I bungled the dialogue?  What if I started giggling... or worse, what if he started laughing at me?

Then you'd be just like people who do this all the time, because we fuck up all the time.  What keeps the play hot is that we get good at rolling with it.  We get the giggles, but we can laugh together or shut it down with an evil "what are you laughing at?"  Our dialogue isn't perfect, but what we do is too intense to worry about critiquing the dialogue.  The standard we aim for isn't "seamless" but just "fun."

(Credit where credit's due, by the way; this article actually did a decent job explaining negotiation and safewords.)

Q: During my internship in college, my boss and I flirted a lot but never got physical. I used him as a reference to land my current job, and now that we don't work together, he's been asking me out. [...] 

A: [...] If you keep saying no, he could very well be so hurt or confused that he won't be able to serve as a reference for you (at least, not the kind of enthusiastic, professional reference you want).  So if you really do like him and he likes you, then say yes.

The new, feminist Cosmo, you guys!  Now with extra feminism!  And the occasional barely-veiled threat to sabotage your career if you say no to a date!

The weird thing is that the letter writer doesn't imply anything about her ex-boss withholding references or blackmailing her.  She just says he's asking her out and she's not sure if that's appropriate. The advice columnist (Ky Henderson) is the one who decided this needed a little extra spice in the form of explicit sexual harassment.

Lure his tongue into your mouth, and when he pulls it back, wrap your lips around the tip, sucking like you would during oral. It's an R-rated preview that will have him aching for the feature presentation.

Gluaghchkauh.  (That's not my reaction. That's the noise he would make.)

Set up a movie night on the couch, and tell him he's only getting to first base.  It's an innocent come-on that will make you both want more.  Letting him try to "convince" you to go further is half the fun.

I'm going to let Louis CK take this one:
(NSFW and talks about rape)

Geese mate for life. Riff on this concept of eternal intertwinement and wrap your leg over his back, which gives him access to your clitoris.

...Dammit.  I just can't stay mad at you, Cosmo.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey! Chapter 11!

It's a double post day!  Because I decided to, that's why!  And because nothing happens in either chapter, so really it's like getting zero chapters for the price of two!

(And because I really want to do more original writing, and I'm hoping getting more FSoG out of the way will motivate me to do that.)

I hope you like fakey, blatantly illegal legal documents, because most of this chapter is one of them!  In its entirety!  Right down to the signature page and appendices!  Because EROTICA!

Content warnings for this chapter: A legal document that somehow still manages to incorporate emotional and physical abuse and total disregard for consent.  Also forced exercise.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey! Chapter 10!

Nothing interesting happens in this chapter, but I made a really good joke in Chapter 11, and we won't get to that if I don't post this.

Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse (which is almost continuous in this chapter), child/adolescent sexual abuse.  You know, light fluffy romance stuff.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 9

Last time on Fifty Shades of Grey, our heroes were having blandly mechanical sex while Buff RockGroin continued to pout and fume any time he didn't get his way about everything, and Ana continued to act like "I don't mind, it's sexy when he doesn't consider my needs" isn't something a lot of people convince themselves at some point in a really bad relationship.

Content warnings for this chapter: Emotional abuse, sexual coercion. As per usual.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey! Chapter 8!

When we left off, Dirk HardPec was raging out at Ana because she admitted to him that she was a virgin. I remind you that this is our romantic hero who is supposed to be the epitome of the sexually appealing man.

Content warnings for this chapter: graphic sex, general abusive dickheaddery. I tell some icky personal stories, one of which involves coerced ickiness and both of which involve blood.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 7!

When we last saw our intrepid heroes, they were entering Hack BlowFist's playroom, and she was playing "I'm too innocent to know anything about sex ever" while he was playing "I'm too domly to make any accommodations for that."

Content warnings for this chapter: disordered eating, plus coercion and emotional abuse all the hell over the place.  (And detailed BDSM talk, but I feel weird "warning" for that, lumping one of the happiest parts of my life in with all those terrible things.  Also, you're on a blog called "The Pervocracy" that has "BDSM" at the top of every page.  ...Anyway, there's detailed BDSM talk in here.)

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 6!

When we last left our intrepid heroes, he was committing sexual assault in an elevator, and her inner goddess was doing a samba about it.

Content warnings for this chapter: Stalking and emotional abuse, mostly.  The rape themes are still hanging around, too.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 5!

When we last left Fifty Shades of Grey, a man had found a woman by tracing her cellphone and now was taking her unconscious body up to his hotel room.  Which would be fine, if this were a spy thriller.  Unfortunately, it's a BDSM romance.

Content warnings for this chapter: sexual assault, a LOT.  Plus stalking and general "you might not want to read this while eating" grossness.

The Sexcalator.

By the time I was out of my early twenties, I'd done some fairly hardcore BDSM.  I'd been beaten, whipped, cut, bound, shocked, peed on, done most of the above naked in front of strangers, and frequently during sex.  Which raises the question--where do you go from there?  When you're so young, and you've already had such intense experiences, what's left?

Cuddling on the couch, for one.  Or having slow sleepy sex at the end of the day.  Or--not to make this sound like "but then I discovered that sweet gentle love was the most daring of all!"--getting beaten some more, not necessarily in a harder or more shocking way than before.



One of the many, many unspoken assumptions out there about sex is that it's an escalating process.  Think about how kids talk about it when they're starting to experiment--how far did you go?  Did you get to second base?  Third?  Did you go all the way?  It implies a system where oral sex is more sex than a handjob, and should be an experience you have later.

(This ended up being rather hurtful for me when I gave a guy a handjob before ever having a real kiss, and went through quite a bit of "does that mean I'm too dirty and corrupt for anyone to kiss now?" internal strife before discovering that kissing was still available to me and quite nice.)

The assumption doesn't really go away when you grow up.  It just adds on the idea that you have to stop at an appropriate point on the escalator, or you'll end up on a slippery slope.  ...Which sounds like an awesome waterslide to me.  But the point is supposed to be that if you go "past" penis-in-vagina intercourse by too much, you'll have gone "too far" and you might never return.

Then the inclined planes metaphor turns into a drug metaphor, and you get the idea that "overdosing" on sexuality will make you build up a tolerance, and then "normal" sex won't get you high any more.  You'll have to start fucking donkeys or something just to feel anything.  (I think this has some kind of folkloric connection to the frat-boy myth that vaginas are single-use and will always be the size of the largest object that ever penetrated them.) If your sex tolerance gets too high, you'll keep doing more and more depraved things, until kinky has given way to outright evil, your life falls apart completely, and you become a sex addict and maybe a sexual predator.



There's all kinds of micro-fuckups built into this macro-fuckup paradigm.  Like how sex with people of the same gender, people of a different race, trans people, or people with certain disabilities gets moved to the "more depraved" side of the escalator.  Or how activities people didn't consent to are counted as moving them up the escalator; or someone's position on the escalator is used as an excuse to ignore their consent.  Or, of course, how all this is much more intensely and dangerously enforced against women than men.

Or how something's position on the escalator, rather than its potential to harm, is used as a benchmark of "obscenity."  Or how relationships are expected to escalate, and failure to gradually ramp up the escalator to a certain point ("spicy," which is just a couple steps above center) is taken as failure of the relationship.  Or how even individual sex acts are supposed to have their own escalation, and after you've started groping you're not ever supposed to go back to just kissing.

Or how child molestation and rape are sometimes described as the end of the escalator, like they're what happens when kinkiness goes "too far." and oh my god fuck everything about that.  Or how PIV intercourse is positioned at the exact center, the gold standard which no man should fall short of and no woman should exceed.

Or how lost you can get saying "we shouldn't consider X dirtier than Y," when you ought to be setting the entire idea of sex-as-escalation on fire.


(So it's a baseball game, an escalator, a waterslide, a drug, gold, and it's on fire.  Work with me here.  Take some Claritin if you can't handle analogy.)


In the end, sex is like... it's not really like anything.  Freed from analogies and paradigms and fixed linear progression, sex can get amorphous.  There's no order to do things in, no right or wrong (consensual) things to do, no guarantee of how it will or won't change you, no idea how it does or doesn't correlate with romantic attachment, no guide to what will come next.  It's not even entirely clear what sex is.  Sex could be freakin' anything if the people doing it want it to be.

Good.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 4!

I have to head down to New Jersey for another round of family drama, so you get a new chapter of FSoG!

When we last saw our intrepid heroes, Ana was falling down because clumsiness is the Designated Harmless Romantic Heroine Flaw, and Buff HardBack was using catching her as an excuse to paw and stare at her because he is gross.

Also, this is the beginning of the part of the book where we're going to want warnings going in, because hoo boy.  CONTENT WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Stalking, rape threats, sexual assault, abuse of drunk people.

Let's Read Fifty Shades of Grey: Chapter 3!

First, a (somewhat last-minute) ANNOUNCEMENT:

I will be speaking on "How To Have Sex On Purpose" at the University of Pittsburgh Rainbow Alliance this Thursday (Sept. 26)!  Members of the public are welcome; the event will be at 8:45 PM in the Kurtzman room on the main floor of the William Pitt union, on the corner of Fifth Ave and Bigelow Blvd (4200 Fifth Ave).  If I have any Pittsburgh readers... come say hi!



We continue with FSoG where we left off--with Splint ChestHair acting like an insufferably self-satisfied stalker, and Ana acting like she needs Giles to run in and yell "she's under some sort of thought control spell!"

This is probably the last chapter of the book that does not require a major trigger warning.  (It does feature stalking and general creepiness, but nowhere near as bad as it's about to get.)

Cosmocking: September '13!

Pink cover!  Nina Dobrev!  Which is odd because the main interview/profile (which is almost always the person on the cover) is with Rebel Wilson!  I guess they didn't think Rebel Wilson was cover material because she's clearly too fat to be glamorous!  "Mind Blowing Sex Moves You've Never Tried Before!" God, I hope they really are, because that means they'll be hilarious! I can't work with Cosmo when they just do shit like "amazing newly-discovered sex secret: touch his penis!"

During sex, she asked me if I would say "Parsons," which is where she went to college.  I thought it was weird, but because I was drunk, I went with it. Then she asked me to say "Park the car in the Harvard Yard"--she said my Boston accent turned her on!  So I continued to say random sentences for her.

The sex must've been pretty damn good, because most Bostonians will flip you off if you start "PAAHHHK THE CAHHHH"ing at them.

(Then again, I'm a hypocrite, because I still think it's funny to make Rowdy say "roof" and "bag." Not in bed though.  Although I did once sleep with a different guy from the Upper Midwest and he said "ooh jeez, ooh jeez, OOOH JEEZ" the whole time.  This has nothing to do with Cosmo. I just really wanted to tell that story.)

Take some sexy fabric with you when you two travel together, and use it to make a normal hotel look like a love motel.

Sexy... fabric?  If this were about sexy sheets, I'd sort of get that. But it's not sheets.  You just bring some, like, red satin with you and tack it up to the headboard. Okay.

Man, and some people think condoms interrupt the spontaneity of sex.  I hope they end up with partners who want to stop to reupholster the room first.

Fifty Shades of Grey has made its mark abroad: Light BDSM is the most popular sex trend in the world right now.

I'm writing in extreme detail what I think of Fifty Shades of Grey, so I won't get into that here.  But god, I hate that phrase "light BDSM."  Or "light bondage."  Places like Cosmo always use it to mean "acceptable BDSM that is for normal people and not weird degenerate freaks."  I'm not sure what makes it that way.

Mostly it seems to involve keeping yourself pure by staying ignorant of good technique or safety measures.  Negotiating and then tying someone up with hemp rope and two-column ties and safety shears is heavy freaky BDSM; surprising your partner by tying them up with a slipknot in a silk scarf is--by Cosmo standards--light BDSM.

Q: Sex with my boyfriend has become meh. How can I talk to him about improving it 

A: Having a serious conversation can be overkill. Take action instead.

Yeah, because if you talked about this, it would be a challenge you had to work on together!  But this way, it's something he can be oblivious to while you bust your ass trying to "spice things up"!  Of course, there is the slight drawback that if there's an actual reason your sex life has changed, you're never going to know it; you'll just grow gradually more resentful that he isn't responding to your efforts.  But that's a small price to pay for not having to take the massive, drastic step of communicating with your partner.

Q: I was having sex with a guy I've been hooking up with, and he said to me, "I don't want you doing this with anyone else."  Is he asking me to be exclusive?

Yes. Yes, that is what those words mean.

Although he's not offering to be exclusive himself, so unless you have a well-negotiated intentionally asymmetrical relationship, and I can absolutely guarantee you do not, he's being kind of a double-standardy asshole.

Q: My fiancé is sensitive to my needs and always makes sure I have an orgasm. But sometimes, I wish he would just push me down and have his way with me. He was like this once, after we went out and had a few drinks, and it was amazing. How do I get him to do that again 

A: Uh, was that the only time the two of your ever got drunk together?  Because it sounds like getting drunk together worked pretty well. Whether you're drinking or not, I'd recommend going out wearing a hot dress or skirt and whispering to him at some point that you're not wearing any underwear. It'll build up his anticipation until it explodes back home.  You can also, you know, tell him what you want.

So, basically you should try and entice him to attack you, as men are compelled to do to women in sexy clothing who are drunk.  Gahhh.

I do like that Cosmo finally raises the possibility of communicating, though. Maybe they should have put that before the "drive his animal side so wild that he'll want to hurt you and have no idea you're actually enjoying it!"

the Footsie Roll: Place the condom securely on the tip with your hands, then lean back and balance on your forearms. Place your feet on either side of his penis, and gently roll the condom down with your big toes.

This is going to go down really, really differently depending on how he feels about feet. You might want to check on that first.

 [on women's dating profile pictures] The World Traveler: On a camel, on the top of a mountain, on a beach, on a boat... I admire the adventurous spirit, but will I ever be able to keep up with her?  Is she ever at home?  What's she running away from--him?

Women who take vacations: clearly fleeing a dark past.  You heard it here first, folks.

 [a Zales jewelry ad] All of the carats. None of the calories.

Diamonds: a low calorie food! Winner of this year's Technical Truth in Advertising award.