* I am in love with Kerry Howley's book review of Paco Underhill's "What Women Want"—an examination of the consumer behavior of what Underhill terms "the female of the species" of humans. Marry me, Kerry Howley's book review:

Instead of telling us what women actually buy, Underhill considers a product and deigns to divine its male or female origins. Often, the thing he doesn't like is the "male" thing. The product he does like he attributes to the growing and glorious power of the woman consumer. McMansions, which Underhill considers vulgar and atomizing, he deems male. For New Urbanist communities, we are told without benefit of explanation, you can thank women. And because women are in charge now, McMansions are going out of style. ("Good-bye, McMansions. And hello to a new species of home that accommodates the female of the species.") In a typical passage, Underhill notices that pillow quality in American hotels is improving. He attributes this, on a hunch, to pillow-demanding women travelers, which sounds plausible. But might good pillows merely be a response to the taste preferences of an increasingly wealthy society? Would a world without women necessarily be a world with a smaller proportion of soft pillows?

* Who wants to go see Love Ranch with me? Alyssa Rosenberg describes the plot: "Older couple fights for the legalization of their brothel and prostitution in general while [wife] falls for a much younger, exceedingly sexy Latin American boxer." I'm sold.

[youtube:v=cC4i83ejkbo]

* Via THE LINE, it's a headline fail!:

Hmm!

* Speaking of pillows: Are dead ladies sexy, and are they sexier having expired from a girls-only pillow fight? Sociological Images points to some recent instances of sexualized violence for fashion's sake, including "a fashion shoot in which women were depicted as having died in a pillow fight."

* Amanda Marcotte on D.C.'s "modesty police" who shame Supreme Court nominees for leaving their legs uncrossed and First Ladies for showing just a touch of cleave:

The modesty police here or in Saudi Arabia use sex as cover to shame women for having the temerity to walk around in public while possessing lady parts. Creating a situation in which everyone is staring at your crotch or boobs in hopes of finding some transgression from arbitrary modesty standards is just a way to pick on women for being women. I've often been tempted to take pictures of what I was wearing when some guy on the street harassed me, just to point out that if your harasser is determined enough, a hoodie sweatshirt and a pair of jeans can be considered hoochie-mama clothes that somehow demand harassment.

Photo via Romantic Crafts, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

A few weeks ago, chief "Male Studies" proponent Lionel Tiger accused me of not having read his book. Guilty as charged! But now that Tiger tipster Dan has sent along the first two paragraphs of Tiger's latest, God's Brain, I can say with confidence that I've read about as much Tiger as humanly possible. Namely: "The first impulse animating this book was simple if  enchanted puzzlement about the remarkable difference between what the brain created about religion and the vast and long-lasting social systems that were the result." But which fires occupy the world in which the United States is inextricably embedded? The world in which the United States is inextricably embedded may never know.

Give me the worst, most vile, funniest, most ridiculous, saddest, most pathetic pick-up line you've ever heard. Give me some context to convince me it's real. Bonus points if the line actually worked.

Here's some inspiration: I've just started digging into "I Don't Care About Your Band," and Klausner has already dropped a pick-up line that falls squarely into the "vile" category:

I haven't even included the story about the guy I met at a Korean barbecue restaurant who said, after I remarked on the grill built into the table, that the place was perfect for a blind date, because, "if you don't like your date's face, you can just mash it into the grill."

So, file your pick-up line in the comments, or send it over by e-mail here. (If you leave it in a comment, please use a valid e-mail address so I know where to find you). I'll pick a winner and send out the book early next week.

Lambda Rising, Dupont Circle's LGBT bookstore since 1974, is set to close early next year. When Deacon Maccubbin, the shop's longtime owner, retires, he plans to begin work on his own book. "Every bookstore owner thinks they've got a book in them," says Maccubbin, 66. His story, he says, will be about "life at Lambda Rising." But with Lambda Rising gone, who will stock it?

With Lambda Rising's closing, D.C. will lose its sole gay bookstore. Maccubbin has already sold the storefront at 1625 Connecticut Ave NW to an undisclosed buyer who "hasn't figured out what they're going to do with it yet"—there are no particular plans for a new LGBT outfit in the store's stead.

But Maccubbin says that part of Lambda's mission has always been inspiring a crossover appeal. "When we started the store back in 1974, bookstores simply didn’t carry gay books, or they didn’t classify them as having a gay author with a gay story to tell," he says. Now, a typical chain might carry "100 or 200 gay titles" on its shelves.

That selection pales in comparison to Lambda's collection of 20,000 titles, but Maccubbin still sees any "Gay and Lesbian" section as a victory. "Part of the impetus of opening the store was to convince authors to write these books, convince publishers to finance these books, and convince bookstores to stock those books," he says. "And we have been successful in getting them to do that."

Over the years, the narrative of the gay bookstore entered into the mainstream. When the store first opened, "we experienced a lot of homophobia. A lot of threats—telephone threats, bomb threats, windows broken. The Washington Post and [other outlets] didn’t want us advertising with them, and they refused our money." In the absence of city resources devoted to the LGBT community, the bookstore functioned as a "de facto community center," sponsoring its first Pride Parade in 1975, and hosting a line outside the store "for five days straight" during the 1993 March on Washington.

But as time passed, advertising policies changed, D.C. got an official LGBT community center, and the homophobic scares slowed to the occasional "after-school kids running through the store and yelling 'faggot'." Now, property damage is of the apolitical sort: "We had a broken window a year ago," says Maccubbin. It wasn’t an anti-gay thing,  though. Someone just fell into the window."

"It's bittersweet," says Maccubbin of the store's ending. Maccubbin attributes the closing to both business and personal reasons—beyond the book plans, he's excited to travel to "many, many" countries with husband Jim Bennett. But he also wanted to make sure the story didn't end with Lambda's fall. "We didn’t have to close right now. We could probably have held on for a year or two or five, but I didn’t want to be in a situation where the quality of our stock and the quality of our service would start to slide," Maccubbin says. "The gay and lesbian community gets enough crap from the world in general. We've always had a very clear idea that if our store was going to cater to them, it should treat them well."

Photo by allaboutgeorge, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

"Books": it's the most dangerous section of a young lover's Facebook profile. A bad favorite novel—whether revealed by accident, or deliberately placed on one's bedside table as an act of intellectual seduction—has the power to put a damper on a once-exciting courtship. I've never stopped seeing someone based on their favorite book, but looking back, there were signs. Here, I'll note that heated literary disagreements can actually help to build a healthy and intellectually stimulating relationship. Or, it can devolve into resentment, condescension, and spirited book-burning. Here are my deal-breaker books:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Maciej Cegłowski hit the nail on the head when he described Milan Kundera as "the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters." He goes on: "Kundera has a sterile, cleanroom writing style meant to suggest that he is a surgeon expertly dissecting the human condition before your eyes, but if you look a little more closely, you see he's just performing an autopsy on a mannequin. Or more accurately, a RealDoll." Personally, I'm wary of any book which glamorizes cheating as some sort of tortured philosophical exercise. Just keep your pants on, dude, it's not that hard.

The Catcher in the Rye (see also: Lord of the Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird). I'm all for celebrating the classics, but if your favorite book still contains highlights from your 7th grade humanities class, maybe it's time to mix it up a bit.

Atlas Shrugged. I dated a guy in college who kept his collection of Ayn Rand novels hidden underneath his bed, next to his Magic: The Gathering cards. When you discover that your significant other has a secret Rand fetish—and if you're dating high-school or college-aged males, this is a significant possibility—you may be occupied with concern that their idea of good literature is a thousand-page glorification of capitalism. But don't forget about the sex!

Rand's Ideal Woman, Dagny Taggart, is a self-made railroad baron and defender of industry. Taggart defers to no one, except for basically every dude she has sex with. In sex, Taggart submits fully to Man, an act which symbolizes surrender to her sex partner's superior industrial capabilities, or whatever. Many critics have described Rand's sex scenes as "rape," but in Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, Wendy McElroy explains that it's not rape, because Rand makes Taggart secretly want men to take her by force. "With our godlike perspective we can eavesdrop on Dagny's psychology as she silently pleads with him . . . Our knowledge of Dagny's unspoken desire for sex with Reardon converts what seems like an act of rape into one of passionate and mutual consent."

So, not only does the Ideal Woman submit sexually to the Ideal Man, the Ideal Man has the crazy ability to discern a woman's secret rape fantasy without asking! Did I mention it's 1,000 pages long?

Photo by Fly Navy

Those sexy librarians who are tweeting their way through the American Library Association conference aren't content with burying their innermost secrets into the social networking ether. Now, some conference attendees are preserving their stereotype-busting contributions to the nerd-sexuality canon in the slightly more permanent form of online document-sharing. Can sexy secret powerpoint presentations be far behind?

If you'll recall, this year's ALA attendees began airing their "secrets"—nerd-crushes, wi-fi frustrations, and sexual exploits—on Twitter via @alasecrets. It wasn't long before the book-nerd confessional was shut down—-likely by one of their own. The Twitter account has since been reborn in the form of @ALASecrets2009, a den of impropriety even more sexually explicit than the first. Before the fall, however, the sex-starved librarians and stern conference brown-nosers Tweeted their secrets as one.

One ALA secrets completist has thwarted those who would silence the librarian secrets, preserving all the previous account's Tweets in an online document for all to peruse. It's titled "TRANSCRIPTS FROM @ALASECRETS 2009 BEFORE BEING SHUT DOWN BY A TIGHTASS KILLJOY," and it's probably much more interesting than whatever cataloguing powerpoint they're all pretending to appreciate right now. So let's check out the sexiest, sternest, and downright creepiest tweets to come out of the first half of the American Library Association conference!

THE SEXY:

5. "not discrete enuf. We had to go to Starbucks restroom for quickie. Missed start of next session :( ALA get it sorted."

4. "Using Web 2.0 tools to build community, even if it is a community of hung-over sex-crazed librarians, McCormick W-177"

3. "Last night kinda hazy. Very tired, not focused this morning. Kinda sore down *there*. Need more coffee. Poss. meds later."

2. "you don't like the way you're being presented then go set up an account for @sanctimoniousgetoveryourself"

1. "Who you calling 'middle aged'? I'm sixty-six."

—

THE STERN:

5. "Librarians need to learn how to silence cell phone ringers. And don't answer your calls during a session!"

4. "Are they still playing Neil Diamond on the shuttle?"

3. "conference hookups are never worth it. don't be stupid."

2. "other people's one-night stand stories are just as exciting as other people's drug stories, i.e., NOT VERY"

1. "This twitter account is disgusting. It's just a sewer of depravity. Is this the image librarians wish to proect to the world?"

—

THE CREEPY:

"Not only big but have never cum that hard b4. Bet there won't be a box for that on the #ala2009
evaluation form ;-) Thanx; u know who u r."

—

THE PROBABLY LYING:

"Hope she was on the pill last night. She was hot. I never got her name. I'll never drink again. Shitting myself with worry."

Photo by gruntzooki

Romance writer Moriah Jovan notes a disturbing new trend among the youngsters in "Romancelandia" (that would be the realm of romance novel fan-dom). Women "who love romance novels" are mocking older romance novels for their fantastically retro covers, dated cultural references—and rapist love interests. Not fair!

Writes Jovan:

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a host of “rape romances” that are routinely sneered at by younger romance readers and/or people young to romance reading. The device is that the hero is cruel, arrogant, and (as I saw in a comment about my favorite one, written in 1974) he “rapes her until she loves him.” Sounds harsh now, right?

Yes. Raping a woman "until she loves him"—shit, that could take forever!—does sound pretty harsh. Kids today, with their expectations that the idealized coupling presented by the romance novel not involve incessant raping! Jovan?

Let me put this in some context. [Great -ed.] In the early 1970s, a lady named Nancy Friday interviewed women on the subject of their sexual fantasies and published them in a couple of books: My Secret Garden (1973) and Forbidden Flowers (1975), just at the cusp of the “rape romance.” Without taking Friday’s scholarship into account, I find it interesting that many women’s fantasies at that time featured rape prominently. I also find it fascinating that these books were published nearly simultaneously with the early rape romances and thus, probably didn’t inform each other.

Mind, this definition of “rape” is not a legal one; it’s a highly stylized one in which it allows the female to retain her Good Girl status while still A) having sex and B) enjoying it because the hero is a different kind of rapist: One who is attractive, who is uncontrollably attracted to the heroine, and who gets her off after he’s made it possible for her to have an out, i.e., “I was raped.”

Why did she need an out? Because, at the time, a woman’s enjoyment of sex (especially outside of marriage) was still taboo.

Jovan's insight into why women were attracted to "a different kind of rapist" isn't invalid. And the idea that women might turn to fantasies of sexual control in order to satisfy their own desires while wiggling out of societal constraints didn't expire in the 1970's.

But if young fans of mainstream romance novels now find this idea silly, outdated, and ripe for mockery, why not respect their own idea of what's romantic? Shouldn't we focus on the positives—girls feeling comfortable expressing their desire for consensual sex—instead of attempting to force young women to appreciate rape in context? Remember: The great sin these women are committing is nothing more than gentle mockery—putting concerns like "I can't believe that guy is so rapey!" on the same level as "I can't believe they printed that ridiculous stallion on the cover!" or "I can't believe they're listening to Fleetwood Mac!"

Still, Jovan tries to convince young readers to appreciate the "zeitgeist" of the romance novel—even though they've expressed a clear "unwillingness to go along with [it]":

I’m not sure why there’s this unwillingness to go along with the zeitgeist of the time in which the book was written, but instead to apply today’s standards of fashion or technology or pop culture as markers of timelessness. We don’t expect that of our historical novels, so why do we expect it of “contemporary” romances that cease to be “contemporary” the moment the galleys are finalized?

I'm not a fan of romance novels myself, but I do think these vintage genre works can prove relevant to modern women—just not in the way Jovan suggests. Young readers don't just find the fashions and soundtracks of 70's romance novels ridiculous—they find the very romantic ideals they're based on offensive. To me, that's a sign that the role of women in sex and relationships is flexible, socially informed, and changing fast—even in the relatively mainstream world of romantic paperbacks. That doesn't mean we throw out vintage romance entirely—Jezebel's Sadie Stein, for example, has done some great work discussing the trappings of dated romance novels from a modern context—but if we're not allowed to mock, why would we even read the old stuff?

After all, romance novels are written to indulge women's sexual and romantic fantasies. If the fantasies in the book—like, you know, rapist boyfriends—aren't getting the job done anymore, what's left to appreciate?

When the American Library Association's annual conference kicked off in Chicago last Thursday, some attendees wanted the world to know that librarian get-togethers aren't all about shushing and stacking: There's a lot of fucking, too.

The nearly week-long librarian meet-up, which began July 9, delivers "over 300 educational programs" to professional bibliophiles each year—including workshops like "Collection Development: Decision Making With Data" and "When Is Nice Too Nice? Strategies For Disengaging From the Talkative Patron." Some attendees, however, haven't been entirely satisfied with the ALA programming. So they launched a "secret" Twitter account for librarians to share more intriguing professional insights. A typical anonymous ALA tweet:

Some librarians are exhausted by the conference's material ("I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.") Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian's sex life ("I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?"). Most of them, for whatever reason, are talking about fucking—that's the "sexy" part. Not everyone is happy about it. That's where "stern" comes in.

According to the librarian-blogger at not all bits, ALA's first anonymous Twitter free-for-all, @alasecrets, was accessible via a username and password circulated among conference-goers. Less than two days into the festivities, however, the account was shut down by a fellow librarian. Writes not all bits:

Well, it saddens me that a member of the library profession took exception to @alasecrets and shut it down by logging in and changing the password. They protected the updates thereafter so, supposedly, people couldn’t see them.

You’re going to have to pardon my language here but FUCK that. I despise censorship in any form and I especially loathe the idea that a librarian shut down that Twitter account. So I did something about it.

The sexy librarian gossip site has now been re-born in the form of @ALASecrets2009—and re-illustrated with an icon of a Naughty Librarian Halloween costume (pictured). Conference attendees can now only post to the new feed by e-mail, meaning that fun-hating librarians can't tinker with the account details to quiet the masses. For the less horny librarian, the #ala2009 hash tag still offers up plenty of non-sexual ALA chat fare.

The first go-around of librarian fucking Tweets has now been "protected" from the public. Below, the ten sexiest nerd tweets from the feed's second incarnation:

TEN:

NINE:

EIGHT:

SEVEN:

SIX:

FIVE—THREE:

TWO:

ONE:

UPDATE: The American Library Association annual conference will be held in Washington, D.C. next year. Yesss.

UPDATE 2: Some sexy preservationists have uncovered the lost secret tweets!