Skirting an issue

Okay, normally you’ll find me writing about sexuality and aging (‘cos I’m, you know, over 50 and somewhat disposed to thinking about that kind of thing), but I stumbled across an interesting article that now has me thinking about issues on the other end of the life scale.Just the title of the article from Sunday’s  NY Times Fashion & Style section gives you an idea of what’s coming up:

Can a boy wear a skirt to school?

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Last week, a cross-dressing Houston senior was sent home because his wig violated the school’s dress code rule that a boy’s hair may not be “longer than the bottom of a regular shirt collar.” In October, officials at a high school in Cobb County, Ga., sent home a boy who favored wigs, makeup and skinny jeans. In August, a Mississippi student’s senior portrait was barred from her yearbook because she had posed in a tuxedo.

Other schools are more accepting of unconventional gender expression. In September, a freshman girl at Rincon High School in Tucson who identifies as male was nominated for homecoming prince. Last May, a gay male student at a Los Angeles high school was crowned prom queen.

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

But this paragraph really sums up the trend:

“This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with,” said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. “A lot of youths say they won’t be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field.” Adults, she added, “become the gender police through dress codes.”

Now, you’d think that this would be a Yay! moment for our society, and personally, I’m glad that we have a society that is, in some part, acknowledging the fluidity of gender and sexuality, especially at that age. But on the other hand, I’m reminded that not that many years ago some feminist and LGBT groups expressed concerns over the growing acknowledgment of lesbian sex by way of those titillating evening dramas in which lesbians were almost always portrayed as young, thin, and attractive by straight-appearing standards.The concern was that such media portrayals reduced the lesbian community into a stereotype no less restrictive than the old short-haired gym teacher stereotype that it seemed to be replacing.

Why am I reminded of this?

At minimum, more students are trying on their curiosity for size. Typically during “Mix ’n’ Match Day,” at Ramapo High School in Spring Valley, N.Y., students might wear polka dots with stripes, said Diane Schneider, a teacher who is a chairwoman of the Hudson Valley chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. But this year, she said, “about 50 kids came as cross-dressers.”

The point is that, teens being how teens are, it’s quite possible that many are simply adopting gender-bending attires for the sake of being a little rebellious, without giving any thought as to what it means for those who actually have sexuality issues.

Interesting, too, although not exactly surprising, are the comments seen on the several web forums discussing this and similar articles. Most of them can be summed up as such:

Yeah, it’s great and all, but guaranteed that kid will get the crap beat our of him on the way home from school next week.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that, although unless something has changed since I went to high school back during 19*coff coff*’s, somebody always got picked on after school. Maybe if some of the football players take to wearing skirts (Skirt? No, no, this is a kilt, I tell ya!) as a sign of rebellion, then eventually nobody will notice — or care — what anyone else is wearing, and we can get down to learning the more important skill of minding our  own business.

The Case of the Freed Penis

I’ll bet that the chastity enthusiasts saw this post title and are expecting a tale of frustrated please, or perhaps a description of a device gone wrong.

No, this post is about the sad, and perhaps pathetic Mr. Albert Freed.

Allow me to quote from the Sexuality & Gender Law Blog:

Albert Freed sued the Hanes underwear company for damages when “his dream trip to Hawaii was ruined as a result of a manufacturing defect in the new underpants his wife had bought him for the trip. It seems that Freed, an admittedly heavy-set fellow, could not fit his entire manly estate into the undies, and the briefs “gaped open and acted like a sandbelt on his privates,” causing him actionable discomfort.

And all this time I’d been concerned about not spilling hot coffee in my lap. Who knew that there were more likely possibilities of injury?

If you can bring yourself to read the S&GL commentary without becoming disgusted at our legal system, click on over to Above the Law, which has a slightly drier account, and a few questions:

A question for the guys out there: How long would it take you to correct a problem involving sandpaper and your penis? Don’t you think penis chafing is something that requires immediate attention and decisive action?

And while we’re here, how long does it take for you to notice your stuff hanging out where it is not supposed to be?

And if you’re so inclined to read a PDF of the court’s final judgment in this case, here it is.

This is the part that gave me pause:

Just how out of touch do you have to be in order to not take any steps to check out your manly bits when something is amiss? I mean, two weeks of painful chafing?

More sad is that he felt that he couldn’t ask his wife to take a look, either. I’m totally aware that some people become extremely embarrassed about their genitals and their sexuality, but come on. In two weeks of a vacation to a tropical island, she didn’t have the opportunity or inclination to notice, nor he to ask?

On a side note – as somebody who often goes commando in the warm weather, I found it, well, weird that Mr. Freed has such a non-standard method of donning his undergarments.

Plaintiff testifies that he dresses by placing the underwear inside the pants that he plans to wear that day and pulls both on together.

Guys? Any of you ever hear of this?

This case is sure to generate a lot of head shaking, all the way around.

Take it, bitch!

Dev posted an interesting picture, cribbed from Male Submission Art that depicted an angel sodomizing Satan (or possibly another demon). That led to a discussion about the cultural perception that whoever is penetrated is somehow identified with submission.

The flip side of that perception, of course, is that whoever is doing the penetrating is in a position of dominance. A side issue is that nobody wants to be penetrated unless they have a reason to be submissive. Not surprisingly, these types of issues are often discussed in those groups in which people — men and women — have an interest in strap-on play, specifically, men who enjoy being penetrated by their women partners.

Take it, bi... er, cheerleader!

With that fresh in mind, I was startled by this picture from one of my new faves, Sociological Images. Apparently, fans of a Texas high school football team — that’s a high school, not college, mind you — had a small number of these shirts printed up to show their support of the home team against some long-standing rivals. Note that despite the blatant images of two stallions violating the cheerleader (because that’s what this, in context, most certainly represents), they chose not to make the shirt too offensive by abbreviating the word “Fucking” so as not to be too obvious.

We should all be proud of such sensitivity.

This picture pretty much sums up the “take it, bitch!” attitude that is so prevalent among the sexual hoi-polloi — and indeed, even among those who really should know better.

Recently I was watching some “reality” tv show (actually, Mrs. Edge was watching it while I was net surfing on the laptop), a scene with a groups of 20-something guys happened to catch my attention; they were identified as “players” and made comments about how they a) made a point to have sex with as many women as possible, and b) decided that women who gave in (i.e., decided to have sex) were no longer worthy of their respect. What kind of convoluted logic is that? More irritating is that these idiots talked about the women in terms of hunting and conquest, and not in terms of enjoyment.

But let’s take this a step farther.

Some people enjoy the subjugation aspect of BDSM play. I’ve read of women getting so wet that they actually drip their lubrication when they think about past or upcoming scenes. I’ve read about men who go weak in the knees when thinking about being forced to serve under cruel, dominating women. Some men — and some women — become sexually excited when told by their partner to “take it, bitch!” while being fucked; their turn on is their own subjugation and submission by someone more powerful.

And yes, this is fantasy, not real life. That should make it different, right?

Yeah, sure. But if you consider that fantasies play out in the context of the culture of the the partners, isn’t it possible that those of us who enjoy sexual subjugation can only do so when the concept of real subjugation is extant in society? That is, in a culture in which “Fuck you!” never had the connotation of penetrative violence, could such fantasies arise?

Maturation

Somebody found my blog through the interesting phrase “Mature Spandex.” I’ve long since given up trying to figure out why certain phrases lead people here (and yes, Marina Sirtis is still in the top 10), but this one caught my eye. I searched on it, just to see what came up, and as I scrolled through the hits, I saw a website promoting a woman named Jilly King. Curious to see what a “mature” woman in spandex looked like, I checked the pictures.

Damn.

My first thought wasn’t “Wow, she’s hot,” or “Jeez, I wish she would…” or even “Get this freakin’ chastity device off of me.” No, my first thought was “She’s mature? She’s younger than I am!”

Holy freakin, cow! I mean, ignoring the part about me not living up to all of the definitions of the word, when did “mature” indicate 30 or maybe 40 years old, instead of, say, 50 or 60?

Okay, not that I’m denying that at 40, one should be considered as mature, at least in some context. But in the world of online erotica, the term “mature” has the connotation of “no longer young.” And when I see that, I’m reading “no longer young enough to be attractive.”

Ouch.

To me, Ms. King is young. Well, at least, younger. And it’s not just her, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of other women who advertise themselves as “mature,” in hopes that you will pay for a subscription to their website.

Maybe I’m just surprised to discover that I’m now — quite literally –twice the age of most erotic models, and that even the women to whom I am attracted are of an age that now has to be labeled.

Labeled, apparently, because anyone that *enjoys* looking at 40 year old women obviously has a fetish.

No Surprise

So, Mrs. Edge is in the kitchen, baking some apple crisp and banana bread. I wander in foraging for some food, and eat a few potato chips from the bag on the fridge. After a few mouthfuls I get irritated for going off my diet, so I decide to look for something healthier.

Spotting the large plastic spring clip that keeps the bag closed, I grab it and make some snapping motions toward Mrs. Edge — or more correctly, her boobs. “Get out, I’m busy,” she says in an exasperated voice.

So I walk behind her, saying “Hmm…” in a loud voice. I then snapped the clip and say “Ow! Ow! Ouch!”

She turns around. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

I start laughing. “No, I just wanted to see the look on your face when you’d *thought* I’d hurt myself.”

Mrs. Edge rolled her eyes and turned back to baking. “No surprise, Tom,” she said. “If you’d really done it, it would not have surprised me one tiny bit.”

Huh. Wait until next week when I try that trick with the vacuum cleaner…

Real Lifeguards Gain Weight

Okay, at some point in the last couple of months, The Edge of Vanilla has gone from Tom Allen’s Chastity Blog (which seems to be how half the searchers find this) to Tom Allen’s Size Acceptance Blog.

I really don’t know why this has been on my mind lately, but I find that for some reason I’ve been getting tired of looking at stick-thin waifs in ads and commercials. And I do see the irony in that I’ve been exercising, and building muscle, and getting generally pretty darn fit, and at the same time, I’ve been posting media stories about attractive women who are larger than a size 2.

Anyway, I’m not going to try to analyze it. I’m just going to enjoy the pictures that I keep coming across.

I just ran across an amusing video starring Baywatch star Nicole Eggert. You know, the other blonde lifeguard from that show. Now pushing 40, she signed up for the VH1 show Celebrity Fit Club. This is a teaser in which she reprises her former role.

Dang. I think I’m going to give up biking and take up swimming.

Alternative Barbie

Sometimes I don’t feel like a heavy discussion about size acceptance, power exchange, relationship dynamics, political/religious stupidity, or even about chastity devices. Sometimes things just strike me as funny, and I feel like mentioning it because I know that quite a few of my readers have a warped sense of humor.

From the website Altered Barbie:

Spurting Fountain of Youth

I’ve really been enjoying some of the interesting science and health news lately.

Chemical in sperm ‘may slow ageing process’

Researchers in Austria say that human sperm might be the next weapon in the fight against ageing.

By Tom Chivers
Published: 9:26AM BST 07 Oct 2009

A new study by scientists at Graz University found that spermidine, a compound that is found in sperm, slows ageing processes and increases longevity in yeast, flies, worms and mice, as well as human blood cells, by protecting cells from damage.

Cell ageing happens when a natural process called autophagy – a sort of cellular cannibalism whereby damaged cells or parts of cells are recycled – goes wrong.

Spermidine concentration has been shown to decline with age.

Adding spermidine suppressed various processes associated with ageing, as well as reducing free radicals and increasing lifespan. Treated fruit flies lived 30 per cent longer than untreated ones, while worms lived 15 per cent longer.

While one researcher, Tobias Eisenberg, has been quoted as saying that this is the “holy grail of age research”, and a British newspaper has prophesied the coming of a “wonder pill that could extend lifespan by up to 25 years”, the truth is that human trials, let alone treatment, are a very long way off.

In an article titled “Key to a long life found (again)”, the patient information website NHS Choices points out that while this is an exciting area for future research, it will take many more years of study including lab tests and further animal trials before it can be safely tested on humans.

The article also points out that this is at least the second elixir of eternal youth that has been ‘discovered’ in the last few months.

===============

So, someday they might make a pill. That’s great, but for anyone who wants to get a head start, I’m willing to be a donor. Right from the source.

Just thought I’d mention it, is all.

FS: Jewelry, versatile, slightly used

Found while perusing Fail Blog. I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination.

Aesthetically pleasing is not normal

It seems like once a week I run across something interesting with regard to fashion and culture.

From The Guardian (UK)

Brigitte, Germany’s most popular women’s mag,
bans professional models

• Will only use ‘real women’ in photoshoots
• Editor sick of ‘fattening girls up with Photoshop’

Brigitte, which is Germany’s best-selling women’s title with more than 700,000 copies, offers readers a familiar diet of fitness, lifestyle, recipes and sex, which tends to appeal to upwardly mobile younger career women.

German magazine Brigitte wants to feature more images of ‘real life’ women. Photograph: Public Domain

“Today’s models weigh around 23% less than normal women,” Lebert said. “The whole model industry is anorexic.”

He said the move was a response to complaints by readers who said they had no connection with the women depicted in fashion features and “no longer wanted to see protruding bones”.

“For years we’ve had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up,” he said. “Especially their thighs, and decolletage. But this is disturbing and perverse and what has it got to do with our real reader?”

Germany’s most popular women’s magazine is banning professional models from its pages and replacing them with images of “real life” women instead.

In what is seen as the latest attempt to stamp out the “size zero” model, the editors of Brigitte said it would in future only use women with “normal figures”.

“From 2010 we will not work with professional models any more,” said Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief, adding that he was “fed up” with having to retouch pictures of underweight models who bore no resemblance to ordinary women.

There’s a certain irony in that as I’m typing this, I’m sitting in the family room with Mrs. Edge, who is watching “The Biggest Loser”, an American “reality” show in which two personal trainers push their respective teams of overweight “normal” people through a 4 to 6 hour per day routine for up to 4 straight months.

Anyway, not everyone is applauding the move.

Model agencies reacted with scepticism to the Brigitte plan.

Louisa von Minckwitz, owner of Louisa Models in Munich and Hamburg, where models have to be “size 36 (UK size 10), tending towards size 34 (UK size 8)”, said she understood the rage about underweight models but doubted that readers really wanted to buy a magazine to look at ordinary women.

“The fact is that women want to see clothes on beautiful, aesthetically pleasing people,” she said.

This is just one more example of how some of the people in the media business simply are not living on the same planet as the rest of us.