Sexy South Florida

Oh, you crazy folks in South Florida!

From the Broward County / Palm Beach New Times:

Sex in South Florida: Our Survey Finds That We Sure Like Our Kinks

The survey is clear about one thing: People around [Palm Beach]  like sex. They like a lot of it, and they like it with numerous partners. A healthy chunk of them are into kink — not just whips and chains. Responses to an open-ended question about fetishes included spanking, watersports (Google it, if you dare), and everything in between.

What? That’s normal, right? Well, maybe not:

Compared to nationwide surveys, our readers are randy. A Kinsey Institute survey found that just 3 percent of women and 17 percent of men had 21 or more lifetime partners. That means we have ten times the national average of people who have had multiple partners.

Seriously? But… it’s Florida.What gives?

Then again, sex seems to be in the air around these parts, says Jakob Pastoetter, clinical associate professor at the Orlando-based American Academy of Clinical Sexologists. He says it might be all the sunshine. “It makes you feel good. It makes you feel relaxed,” Pastoetter said. “You trust people more in sunshine than in the fog.” It also doesn’t hurt, he says, that we tend to wear a lot less clothes down here.

[...]

Our survey doesn’t just show that the number of people someone has slept with really isn’t a big thing. It shows that freakiness isn’t a big deal either.

An overwhelming 77 percent majority has said yes to sex in public. More than half said they’ve had sex with more than one person at the same time.

For a mainstream-ish newspaper, this was pretty interesting reading. But what about the kinky stuff?

About 11 percent of readers are swingers, and more than a third have a fetish, though their idea of what a fetish is varies greatly. Some respondents listed things like accents, punks, and redheads. Others got into specifics when describing what makes them lose their minds in the bedroom (or dungeon), including paddles, male chastity, stockings, and doctors and latex. Feet got a lot of mention, as did dominance and submission. More-obscure activities named were bukkake and something called ball stretching. Seven people mentioned watersports.

“Something called ‘ball stretching.’” For some reason I found that amusing. Oh yeah, and there’s that male chastity thing again. Next thing you know, they’ll have them on the Home Shopping Channel.

In South Florida, fetishes have grown big enough to spawn several subcultures. Some consider fetish a lifestyle and have an entire social circle built around it. A woman who identifies herself publicly as Dominant Amanda told New Times that almost every type of fetish has its own subgroup here. They get along, she said, but certain fetish communities, like spanking, for example, don’t typically associate with everyone else. She said swingers don’t come around too often either.

Not unlike Fetlife.

Ahem.

But here’s an interesting insight on the fetish community:

Barbara Winter, a Boca Raton-based psychotherapist specializing in sexuality, sees everybody from prostitutes to sex addicts. Once in a while, someone with a fetish will make an appointment with her and never show up, she says, adding that this might be due to growing acceptance of it. “They probably don’t want to give it up,” she says. “It’s probably working for them.” The fact that there’s a whole community out there that’s in the same boat can’t hurt.

A short, but interesting article. Head on over to the New Times and check out the rest of it.

Just a gratuitous fetish-themed picture.

Baby, it’s rapey outside

It’s mid-December, and approaching winter here in New England, which means that the local radio stations are into playing a month-long orgy of  “holiday music,” which means Christmas carols, Christmas-themed tunes, and a handful of “seasonal” (i.e., winter themed) songs. Personally, I get tired of them after about, oh, 20 minutes, but I manage to tolerate them for a few weeks. But even though I can turn off the radio, I still run across news and blog items about how much a partridge in a pear tree costs, humorous sketches about Santa Claus, and similar items that are not funny for the eleven other months of the year.

Lately, in some of the web forums on which I’ve been lurking, I’ve been running across discussions — apparently having gone on for the last couple of years — about the inherent creepiness or date rapey-ness of the old song “Baby, it’s cold outside.”

A date rape song from the 1930s? Seriously?

[Note: I am not going to offend your intelligence by interjecting at various points disclaimers about the prevalence or immorality of date - or any kind of - rape.  Let's assume that we're all adults, and that we can agree on that point.]

Maybe we’ve gone collectively insane, or maybe my advanced age and privileged social status have given me a different perspective, but this is definitely going in the “What the freakin’ hell?” category.

For those of you who don’t have cow-orkers blasting the “lite” station on their radios or iPods, and have somehow missed one of the few enjoyable winter songs written, it’s a low-key duet about a woman who is considering an overnight stay at her swain’s house. The man’s half of the duo sings some enchanting, seductive phrases which intersect and rhyme with the woman’s part; the woman herself appears to be voicing concerns about what other people would say or think about her if she stayed. One of the points at issue is that partway into the song (after she asks for “half a drink more”) she says: “Say, what’s in this drink?”

And that’s it.

You don’t remember the lyrics? They’re all over the place, but I used this version for reference.

First, in the context of time this song was written, that was a pretty innocuous expression. People from the 1930s still remembered the Prohibition years, and as anyone who has watched the old movies from that era  (Marx Brothers come to mind, as do the Nick & Nora “Thin Man” series, and almost anything with Mae West or WC Fields) could attest, characters often said such things, reflecting the quality of the alcohol available at the time. We probably don’t have anything analogous to it now, because you can buy brand-name liquor at the grocery store. Yes, they had “Mickey’s” that were often slipped into a drink, but the rest of that verse, plus the next one, don’t give any indication that this is a possibility.

Secondly, the male character (sometimes referred to as the “wolf”) is not being pushy or even overly seductive. The funny part about the lyrics is that woman’s character (sometimes called the “mouse”) is actually talking herself into ignoring the societal conventions of the time, and is desirous of staying.

I just learned that Zooey “Trillian” Deschanel and M. Ward have a gender-swapped version of this which is supposed to be less creepy. This would have been funnier if the gender-reversed version hadn’t already been done… back in the 1940s by Red Skelton and Betty Garret in “Neptune’s Daughter.” That version, played for laughs simply because it was a role-reversal, actually does come across as being a bit date-rapey, when taken in the context of being seen 60 plus years after it was made.

If you’re looking at just the lyrics — the way the song was actually written — it’s pretty easy to see how the woman’s side of the duo is thinking about what people will say, the possible talk about her reputation, and how she’ll have to explain her actions later on (and even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, women in media often were seen to have the same concerns as this woman in 1936). There’s nothing that I can see that gives any signal that she feels unsafe, or pressured, or that her partner is forcing unwanted attentions upon her. Various other duets, seen on variety shows from the 1960s onward, generally seem to have highlighted the playful side of these lyrics; that is, the give-and-take of friendly, desired seduction.

There’s a Bob Dylan song from the late 60s or early 70s, called “The Talking John Birch Society Blues,” and I remember it mainly because of a verse near the end, in which the main character, on a mission to root out Communism from our society, discovers that “there are red stripes on the American flag.” In other words, I sometimes wonder if in our collective mania to find something by which we may delight in our feelings of having been offended, we aren’t making things up because in our society, we’ve already run out so many things that are actually offensive.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go marvel at a discussion group in which the members — all of them adults — just discovered that the song “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus” (and I swear that I am not making this up) is not about adultery.

Because you can’t look under the mattress anymore

… to find your partner’s porn, that is.

Well, not that anybody has kept porn under the mattress in the last decade, anyhow. Computer-savvy partners now keep it in sub-sub-sub folders like “D:\windows\system_64\applications\manager\binaries\antivirus\infected\deleted\asian-t-girl-boobies\” or similarly buried directories.

Which is why snoopy wives and girlfriends now have to resort to spyware to find their partner’s fap stash.According to the marketing information on the “Find His Porn” website:

“Technology has advanced to the point where traditional ways for women to keep track of their guys just don’t work anymore.”

You get an RFID device to “keep track” of your pets. You get a cell phone and a Facebook account to “keep track” of your kids. But if you feel a need to “keep track” of your guy, then you need a good, long discussion about your relationship — and ladies? I’m talking to you here — and you’d better be prepared for hearing some things that you may not like.

“Porn has gone virtual – which means no more adult DVD’s or dirty magazines that you will find lying around. Everything he looks at is right there on your computer, only problem is it’s not easy to find. Aren’t you curious what he’s up to? You are not alone. Most women are curious and until now there was little that could be done. Now all you have to do is try Find His Porn today and see exactly what he’s watching.”

Yeah, aren’t you curious as to what he’s looking at? Well, aren’t you?

Okay, okay, I get it. Yes, some guys actually do have a problem with porn; they are addicted to looking at pictures, and some of them masturbate so much that they barely have enough energy for you later on. That’s why you need to lock them up in a chastity device, so they will only be able to…

Hold on, wait,  sorry — That’s the current motto of the chastity nuts on the internet, and is not in any way reflective of real life. Or, at least, real mature, adult life.

And yes, some women become very insecure about the porn that their partners might be looking at because they are constantly comparing themselves, and I think that there is some merit to discussing this. If you are a size 4 woman with B-cup boobs, and your partner is ogling a copy of Big’Uns in the basement behind the furnace, then it’s natural for you to wonder if your partner is thinking about someone else, someone you can’t possibly emulate. 

But these are issues that mature adults should be able to discuss, and come to some kind of agreement or compromise. I’ve heard from real-life woman friends who have bemoaned their husband’s “porn addiction,” only to discover later that hubby’s “porn” was a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, or a Playboy Playmate poster; the latter is especially ironic considering that the tv show “The Girls Next Door”(about “Playmates” living in the various Playboy mansions) is watched mainly by women.

Look, sometimes relationships turn weird simply because people fail to treat each other like adults. I once had a partner that used to think it was her job to “catch” me doing things wrong, whether is was cleaning the bathroom, tracking dirt on the floor, or replacing the toilet paper the wrong way on the roll. Each time she “caught” me doing something that was perfectly normal for me (which wasn’t porn, by the way), but that she didn’t like, we had a huge argument. I spent a couple of miserable years learning to hide things, until one day I suddenly realized what I was doing (i.e., acting like a teenager), and just stopped hiding, and began insisting  that if she had a problem, she was welcome to talk to me like an adult, but until then, I’d continue to do things my way.

The relationship lasted about a month after that, which taught me that some people actually do want to play out their child/parent models, or at least, can’t seem to think in other ways. So, if this is you, then by all means buy the porn sniffers. But don’t be surprised when he starts password protecting his accounts, and finds other ways to hide things from you.