The courtroom was silent, save for the faint sound of screaming emanating from the jury box. Fourteen District jurors, outfitted with court-mandated headsets, watched excerpts from gonzo porn titles Milk Nymphos and Storm Squirters 2: Target Practice in the course of the federal obscenity trial against pornographer John “Buttman” Stagliano last week. An audience of about 50 onlookers watched them watch it.

“Yes, it was nasty,” says juror Terri Crawford, 46, who spent the bulk of the viewing looking sad. “There was things in that video that was degrading to humans.”
In opening arguments, the U.S. government had warned the jury of those things: Performers using “syringes and tubes to pump milk into women’s anuses and vaginas,” then expelling the milk from their orifices and “into each other’s mouths.” A performer inserting his “penis into a woman’s anus” and then immediately into “another woman’s mouth.” “Drills” in “women’s vaginas.” “Extreme close-up shots” of “women squirting liquid” across the room. A “foot inside a vagina.”

The government also warned the jury of what it wouldn’t see: a “real plot-line.”
What the government failed to detail is why the jury should care. “This wasn’t any of our business,” juror Stephanie Mordecai, 43, said after the trial. Throughout the viewing, Mordecai held the base of her headset defensively in front of her face, as if the thin swoop of plastic could shield her from the parade of milk enemas unfolding on screen.

Last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon threw out the government’s case against Stagliano due to lack of evidence. But before he did, the jurors were forced to watch 50 minutes of Milk Nymphos and 36 minutes of Storm Squirters, porn titles Stagliano was charged with transporting from California to a D.C. post office box. The jury never got the opportunity to decide whether the films violated D.C.’s “community standard” for obscene material.

Too bad: The government had cherry-picked the titles for the express purpose of riling them. “Looking at the covers [on the website], it appeared that those movies emphasized the excretory function and squirting,” FBI Special Agent Dan Bradley testified on the witness stand. “So that’s why I ordered them.” The Milk Nymphos soundtrack contained a little extra trigger for District jurors: In it, porn actress Annette Schwartz entreats fellow performer Jon Jon to “come on you nigger, fuck me in the ass,” then instructs Lorelei Lee to “look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock.”

But after the trial, jurors were more concerned with what wasn’t in Milk Nymphos: Violence. Rape. Bestiality. Kids. “These people were adults and they were willing. No one put a gun to their head,” Crawford said. “Had they brought a child out in pampers, then we would have been like, hell no,” Mordecai added. In opening arguments, the defense emphasized that the only entity forcing anyone to watch porn is the government. “The movies are not—and are not meant to be—distributed to these 14 strangers sitting in a federal courthouse,” defense attorney Paul Cambria said. The films feature “adults putting on a performance...for another adult, who would make that choice [to watch it] if that were his or her cup of tea.”

After watching two (or three) consenting adults engage in milk enemas and vaginal squirting in open court, Stagliano jurors may not be clamoring for more milk in their tea—but they’re not crying over it, either. After the trial was dismissed, one of those adults, Milk Nymphos’ Lee, passed quickly by a group of jurors in a court hallway. “We’ve seen you before. Aren’t you the milk girl?” a juror called after her. Lee waved. The juror turned back to her fellow jurors. “She should get her teeth fixed,” she said. “I guess the milk isn’t doing too much for her.”

“That’s because they keep spilling it all,” Mordecai said.

A lot has changed in the 30 years since the government last brought a high-profile obscenity case to D.C. In 1973, a city jury was tasked with deciding whether the Swedish adult film Hot Circuit was obscene enough to require jail time for Louis K. Sher, who’d been charged with “distribution and exhibition” of the title. According to IMDB, the film is an ensemble porn featuring a salesman, a stripper, a babysitter, a feminist, an anti-feminist woodcutter, a forest’s nymph, a secretary, and a hustler who accidentally spills whipped cream onto the stripper.

Unlike Milk Nymphos, Hot Circuit’s dairy play failed to amuse District jurors—they found Sher guilty of violating federal and local obscenity laws, including “knowingly presenting” the film in D.C. and shipping obscene material from New Jersey.

In the three decades since U.S. v. Sher, the government’s approach to obscenity cases hasn’t exactly evolved with the times. Despite the proliferation of adult material online—where anal milk is hardly the strangest fetish on display—Stagliano was tried for the antiquated offense of physically shipping obscene material across state lines.

The government made a half-hearted attempt to modernize the prosecution by introducing the online trailer for Belladonna’s Fetish Fanatic Chapter 5 as evidence: Minors could access in as few as “four clicks” on Stagliano’s website, prosecutors said. But the trailer was thrown out of the trial after prosecutors couldn’t figure out how to play it for the jury without it freezing mid-way through the display of vaginal drilling.

In the end, the prosecution’s case fizzled not on the obscenity test, but on simple facts: The government failed to prove that Stagliano actually sent anything to anyone.

Obscentity prosecutions have ebbed and flowed over the years. Once a culture-war touchstone—Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese famously authored a 2,000-page report that blamed porn for a variety of ills—smut-versus-state battles slipped from the headlines during the ’90s. George W. Bush’s administration made some efforts to revive the war on filth, nearly doubling the number of prosecutions. And now they’ve fallen again under Barack Obama. But Stagliano’s trial, like many of the obscenity cases still languishing in federal court, was originally the work of a Bush-era task force.

The Justice Department declined to offer a rationale for the prosecution—or any predictions about whether D.C. residents can expect a less bumbling repeat performance anytime soon. For his part, Stagliano told reporters outside the courthouse that today’s government simply lacked the “passion” to prosecute him. One of his attorneys, though, said porn cases were doomed not because of missing passion on the part of the government, but because of free-speech sensibilities on the part of potential jurors.

“Jurors have a difficult time with the government telling people what they should think, see, or believe,” offered Robert Corn-Revere, who served as local counsel for the defense. “That will likely be a lesson for the government going forward.” After hearing that a group of female jurors had convened post-trial to make milk jokes, Cambria was more direct: “Women!” he exclaimed. “Fantastic.”

Juliana Brint contributed to this report.

* Sarah Silverman on losing her virginity:

He sat up on the side of the bed to smoke another Merit Light, carefully ridding the end of any excess ash, molding the red tip of it into a constant point. He put out his cigarette and pulled back the sheets to get up, revealing a Rorschach-like pattern of blood. Like a red butterfly stamp, getting lighter and lighter with each imprint.

There was a long moment of silence before I worked up the moxie to say,

"That came out of you."

"Um. No it didn't."

Another long pause, broken by him,

"It's okay. Just buy me new sheets."

* The Abortioneers are bored by the whole abortion-is-black-genocide argument:

You know what's boring? The whole black genocide conspiracy theory. It's hardly worth talking about, except as a person of color I feel obligated to defend against such ludicrous proselytizing. I don't understand how blacks, by and large, can support affirmative action on the premise that black folks in this country need a leg up, but are horrified that there are minority funds for abortion care.

IT'S THE SAME THING!

* To LGBT or not to LGBT: John Avarois weights in on acronyms:

I think LGBT is a cop out for straight people. Much easier for a politician to laud the LGBT community than the GAY community, because no one outside of the gay community knows what the LGBT community even is. I've seen signs at rallies proclaiming something or other about "LGBT", and I'll bet everyone at the rally who wasn't gay was scratching their head. In an effort to be more inclusive, we've shoved ourselves back into a sort of linguistic closet.

* How many bags of heroin could you fit inside your vagina?

* Tortoise / shoe sex, EXTREME CLOSE-UP:

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Photo via wit, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Jesse Bering is "curious about the . . . immediate, subjective experiences of girls who are faced inexplicably with the fact that their uterine linings are literally falling out of their vaginas," he writes in his Scientific American column. There's just one thing standing in the way of Bering gaining an intimate knowledge of a girl's first uterine-dumping: Feminism. "There’s a smattering of empirical studies on girls’ firsthand experiences with menses, most coming with a rather heavy-handed feminist slant," he writes. Leave it to this dude "research psychologist" (the kind who, for the record, refers to an elderly woman as a "spirited old ape before me") to cut through all of that bullshit to tell us what women really think of their first periods.

Bering's stunning conclusion: Vaginal blood brings either (a) shame or (b) nonchalant acceptance, depending upon which culture you are vaginally bleeding in! Incidentally, feminists have also observed this phenomenon, but they are wrong and he is right, for some reason. Bering explains it all:

This curious air of embarrassment, secrecy and shame surrounding menarche is a recurring theme in the empirical literature, and in fact this negative view of menstruation displays a surprising cross-cultural regularity. Even in some African nations where the first menses is publicly celebrated and the girl is doted on with special attention and gifts (perfumes, dresses, pajamas, towels), adolescent females are often deeply uncomfortable with their new biological state of affairs. A Zambian woman interviewed by York University psychologist Ayse Uskul described how embarrassed she’d been that her menstruation had become public and pointed out how she’d in fact shied away from all the attention being showered on her by her relatives.

Such anecdotes would appear to pose some serious problems for traditional feminist theories, which tend to argue that Western negative attitudes toward everything from menstruation to vaginas at large are simply the result of cultural constructions. “How society officially views and treats menarche does not mean that the girl who is having her first menstruation will experience the event in the same positive way,” says Uskul. Communal ostracism of menstruating girls is also fairly common. One woman from South East Asia said that she decided to become an atheist when she was told that she couldn’t participate in any religious rituals or even enter the temple while having her period. But there are also a handful of societies in which menarche is more or less shrugged off as just one of those things and public menstrual bleeding seems to stir up about as much awkwardness as a sneeze. Among the Kayapo of the Amazon, for instance, there is no such thing as makeshift sanitary protection or hygienic napkins; rather, the word there for menstruation is translated literally as “stripe down the leg.”

Let's slow this down for a second and follow Bering's reasoning here:

(a) Menstruation brings shame to women in a variety of cultures.

(b) Even in Zambia, where women are publicly celebrated with towels and stuff on the event of their first bleed, one Zambian woman was nevertheless embarrassed by the public attention to the inner workings of her vagina.

(c) The nuanced experience of this single Zambian woman—who illustrates how both "positive" and "negative" cultural responses to menstruation turn women's bodies into public property —apparently threatens to debunk all feminist work claiming that the shame associated with menstruation is culturally constructed.

(d) Uhhh, also, there are a few cultures where menstruation is neither punished nor celebrated and everyone is pretty much nonchalant about it, so I guess the feminists were right that reactions to menstruation actually may be culturally constructed, but I'm not going to admit that because feminists annoy me. Heh, women. What do they know about this shit?

Bering's column touches on some hugely interesting research on menstruation, even if he then uses it to bash feminists and conclude with this baseless attribution of menstruation shame to evolutionary forces: "I’ve often wondered if the tremendous reservation that most parents have in communicating with their children about sex has the ironic consequence of making their children more curious about it—a curiosity that translates into earlier and more frequent sexual activity," Bering writes. "And that makes me wonder if there weren’t (and aren’t) perhaps some natural selection pressures at work here, forces favoring parental modesty over candor in the sex education of children." And it makes me wonder if there aren't some natural selection forces favoring mansplaining over research in the field of evolutionary psychology. Get Bering on it!

Photo via amy b, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* Attention feminist nerds: "Portal," the first-person shooter that Games Radar described as "the most subversive game ever," is being offered for free until May 24. What Portal is not like:

The gun is typically regarded as a phallic symbol of masculine agency, through which power is won and maintained. In any first-person shooter, a power dynamic is reinforced between subject (the player's subjective sense of self) and object (the rest of the game world.) The player is forced to accept militarism and conquest by violence, historically masculine behaviors, as the only course of action. To play a first-person shooter is to enter into a context in which only the male perspective exists, regardless of the gender of the character or player.

The playable characters in first-person shooters are almost always men. In the rare event that a female character is playable, she serves as an object of male fantasy and her interactions with the game world are still forced through the male-oriented lens described in the previous paragraph. Interestingly, playable female characters are usually presented in third-person action games (think Lara Croft) — again reinforcing a visual power dynamic that in this case furthers the objectification of the female form by a predominantly male audience. Rather than the player assuming the identity of the heroine, she becomes a controllable other.

* Also available: Not the most subversive game ever! In "Privates," the "first twin-stick shooter set in a vagina," condom-hatted Marines take aim at infections, infestations, and ingrown hairs.

*Geek Feminism asks what a feminist social network would look like.

* Broadsheet interviews the man who created the "marriage saving" anti-flatulence blanket. He's awesome!:

I bow-hunt for deer, and to do that you have to get really close to them, close enough that they can smell you. They’re pretty sensitive. So I started buying these military surplus chemical protective suits, from the army surplus store to block my odor. One time, I noticed that if I passed wind in there you couldn't smell a thing. And a light bulb went off. I took a couple of the suits, cut them into pieces, sewed them together and made a blanket. My wife and I used it in our bed for years, and it was great. Fifteen years later I made the first prototype and had a number of them produced.

* Sexuality and Society has more on Marquette's canning of a lesbian sociology professor: "So if O’Brien wasn’t disqualified because she is gay, per se, what is 'really' going on? Maybe it’s just the sort of gay she is, the sort who likes to talk openly about sexuality, and moreover to discuss it critically within the context of social institutions such as religion and family."

Photo by randy.troppmann, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Dr. Val Lambros is five years into a 20-year study of how the face ages. Every five years, Lambros sits a group of study participants in front of a 3-D camera, maps out their faces, and then painstakingly aligns the images to see what time has wreaked upon their pores, wrinkles, and facial structures. Lambros’ “Longitudinal Facial Aging Project” culls its subjects from those who will most benefit from its results—aesthetic surgeons. “Plastic surgeons reliably show up to meetings every year throughout their careers,” Lambros explains. At the annual American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) conference, held last weekend in National Harbor, Md., surgeons dutifully filed into Lambros’ exhibit booth to face the camera.

Lambros’ sample, while reliable, has one major limitation. “I need beautiful women!” Lambros called out to one female surgeon passing by his ASAPS booth, who agreed to get mapped. “The problem is, the vast majority of them are men,” says Lambros, who estimates that less than ten percent of his aging faces are female. “It’s a guy-dominated field. And men don’t age in the same way that women do,” he says. Lambros chalks that partly up to cultural perception, partly up to biology. “Society will see a 60-year-old guy as looking better than a 60-year-old woman,” says Lambros. “But women’s skin is thinner, too.” And Lambros’ female sample is not necessarily aging naturally: “Typically, female plastic surgeons will do fillers on themselves—the Botox and stuff,” he says. “You’ll be able to see that in the photographs, and it will invalidate some of the findings, but not all of them."

Over 90 percent of plastic surgeons are men; over 90 percent of their patients are women. Aesthetic plastic surgeons do not seem overly concerned with why that is. Despite the recession, the business model is strong—cosmetic procedures only decreased by 2 percent from 2008 to 2009. The demographics are shifting slightly—last year, women’s procedures were down 3 percent, while men’s were up 8—but the industry remains focused on the ladies. At the kick-off of the ASAPS annual conference, four male plastic surgeons convened at the head of a large, U-shaped table to announce the launch of “Project Beauty,” ASAPS’ new editorial arm focused on the way women look. After airing a few sample video testimonials from women—“I wanted to look more feminine in my clothes, and have more self-confidence!” one breast augmentation patient claimed before breezing down the street in a revealing top—the men took questions from the crowd.

When asked why the vast majority of plastic surgery patients are still female, there was an extended pause, followed by a collective shrugging of shoulders. Robert Singer, a short, balding surgeon who greeted everyone with a kiss on each cheek, took a stab at it: “There are a variety of reasons. Men don’t want to give up control. They can’t put aside the time. They have a resistance to change. They’re not like women, who change their hair all the time.” At least one consumer found fault with the idea of a bunch of men dictating beauty standards to a bunch of women. Joan Kron, an octogenarian Allure columnist who writes an aesthetic surgery column for the beauty magazine—and whose smoothed face reveals a personal interest in the industry—assessed the project from behind a pair of oversize sunglasses. “I would trust your opinion on plastic surgery,” she told the men. “I wouldn’t trust your opinion on beauty. And I certainly wouldn’t trust your opinion on fashion.”

The ASAPS conference was teeming with gatherings like this one—male surgeons discussing how best to fix women’s bodies. During the conference, a panel of male surgeons convened to discuss the importance of jowl management, illustrated by a collection of middle-aged female jaws; a panel of male surgeons demonstrated how best to mark up a (female) face before a face-lift procedure; a male surgeon clicked through a series of photographs of the lower halves of women’s bodies—all dressed in identical white thongs—and recommended the number of joules he’d apply to each one.

But on the exhibit floor, where the surgeons are inundated with new products and procedures to help augment their practice, women were everywhere. The floor was bursting with photographs of them—their faces wrapped in the latest in post-operative garment technology; their eyelashes fluttering from the effects of artificial lash-grower Latisse; their heads thrown back in ecstasy as their augmented breasts faced the camera. Across the floor, dozens of silicone breast implants were served up on platters, ready for prodding and squeezing; videos of their bloody insertion into women’s bodies abounded. A couple of live ones in bikinis and wedge sandals were splayed out on exam chairs as a non-invasive body-contouring machine canvassed their asses and thighs. They were not the only pieces of meat in attendance: In the corner of the exhibit hall, a sweating slab of pork stood in for human flesh; a couple of Megadyne reps sliced away at it with an electrosurgical pencil.

Ronadró, a 75-year-old artist specializing in surgical art, has spent two decades casting the aesthetic surgery gender divide into bronze. On the exhibit floor, Ronadró displayed a dozen original sculptures specifically crafted for aesthetic surgeons. In New Dawn, a surgeon’s gloved hands peel away a woman’s wrinkled face, revealing a new, youthful visage. In Renaissance, a naked woman admires herself in a mirror as her discarded, old face piles on the floor with her robes. Art of Aesthetic Surgery depicts the aesthetic surgeon as an artist, creating a beautiful woman from a paintbrush; Magic Hands depicts him as a genie, conjuring a naked woman from a magic lamp. Ronadró’s masterpiece, In His Hands, situates the surgeon as God; in it, Jesus places his hand on a surgeon’s shoulder as the surgeon reaches out to touch the hand of his patient. “This piece was inspired by the Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, where God is almost touching Adam’s hand,” Ronadró says. All of Ronadró’s surgeons on display in his ASAPS booth were men; all but one of the patients were women.

Dr. Laurie Casas, a Chicago-area aesthetic surgeon, was one of the few female surgeons who had a visible role in the conference leadership this year. Casas, who is president of the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation, says the gender divide in ASAPS is easily explainable. “The number of women in surgery is low. The number of women in plastic surgery is low. The number of female plastic surgeons who can meet the rigorous requirements to be a member of ASAPS is even lower.” Why an estimated 94 percent of Casas’ surgery patients are female requires a more complicated explanation. “It’s not that men aren’t interested in looking good—they wear nice clothes, they groom their hair. But unlike women, they’re not conditioned into thinking about making a significant change. They don’t even think of surgery as an option for altering an aging sign like excess eyelid skin or hanging neck skin,” says Casas. “For women, over the years, we’ve watched other women have plastic surgery. We’ve seen other women go through major changes in the way they look. It’s on our radar as an option. For men, I don’t think there’s a lot of open discussion about this. I think sometimes men are uncomfortable even thinking about the topic.”

Women, too, have suffered from a culture of silence surrounding their aesthetic surgical procedures. In the ASAPS exhibit hall, a representative for Innogyn hawked a laser employed in a form of aesthetic surgery that has finally hit the mainstream: “designer laser vaginoplasty.” “This has been going on for 80 years, behind closed doors,” says the rep, who declined to provide his name. “A woman would come in after childbirth and say, hey, doctor, while you’re down there, could you do a little tuck or a pull or a cut? Before, people thought that vaginoplasty was just for the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous set, and strippers. Only now is it finally out in the open.” The representative referred to this development as “empowering.”

Finally, women are free to talk about our vaginas and what’s wrong with them. Someday, men, too, will be empowered like us.

* Dan Savage weighs in on vajazzling:

So I have to know, Dan: What is your opinion on vajazzling? – Vajazzle Azzle Gadazzle

Asking for my opinion on vajazzling, VAG, is like asking a vegan for her opinion on the wallpaper in a steak house. I’m simply too revolted by what’s on the menu to take much notice of the décor.

Vaginas: Revolting no matter what, so why bother with the appliqué?

* Via Feminine Things, the argument for why schools should not alert students to acquaintance rapes on campus.

* Old, but good: I Blame the Patriarchy on men in wedding dresses:

When I got a spam for “men in wedding dresses” this morning I thought, hell yeah! I sure do wanna see some men in wedding dresses. I bet men look even more asinine in wedding dresses than women do. And who doesn’t want to look at something asinine first thing on Sunday morning?

Men universally look asinine in women’s clothes, yeah? The reason for this, and for mild funniness in other low forms of humor, is incongruity. Nothing says “I submit to my species’ disdain and surrender forthwith any claims to my own humanity” quite like a wedding dress. Women’s clothes are designed, according to a rigorous standard of misogyny, to communicate that the wearer is totally up for self-abasement. Men, on the other hand, are required by law not to be totally up for self-abasement. Therefore, in accordance with the laws of patriarchy, comedy and gender, a dude in a wedding dress is improbable and unnatural, thus causing the observer to laugh or retch or curl a cynical lip.

*  s.e. smith writes a Dear Dear Abby: Please do not explain away sexual assault by calling it "hitting on another woman."

* John DeVore of the Frisky advises women to ask men out on dates, then insists (thrice!) that the woman need not foot the bill:

If a woman asks a man out on a date, she is not obligated to buy dinner. I just wanted to clear that up. . . . don’t worry about the bill. I’ve actually been asked this question. The dude will take care of it because that’s what dudes do. There are some things the male species will always be in charge of, like bear defense. You know what else? Buying dinner on the first date. (Dear Testicles: She’s going to spend time and money getting her hot on anyway.) . . . Now make sure you look gorgeous. And don’t worry: He’ll get the check. If he doesn’t, he’s a donkey pizzle.

I love that DeVore's imaginary female reader is so afeared of being expected to pay for anything ever that she avoids social situations because of it.  You figured us out, man! We're so nervous about the possibility of whittling away our petty women's salaries on the beers of our suitors that we have instead spent centuries waiting for men to initiate all romantic contact. Also, we refer to men who have earned our disdain as "donkey pizzles."

Image via freeparking, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

SEXUAL EUPHEMISM: "Stanky Leg"

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DEFINING MOMENT: The video for GS Boys' "Stanky Legg," a single released in 2008, shows several men and women performing the titular dance. The lyrics detail how it's done:

When I hit the dance floor, you know I'm doin' the stanky leg.
Southside merengue, then you rub it cross your head.
You an [unintelligible] you can do it too.
Jack your feet up in the air and check your Myspace too.
Now you can lean wit it,
Now you can drop wit it.
You can switch to the other leg and you can stop wit it.

Or as Urban Dictionary explains, it's a "dance where you stick out your leg and rotate it around."

UNDERLYING MEANING: Oddly, the GS Boys' video does not feature any partners performing the stanky leg upon each other, as the colloquial understanding of the term refers to the transference of the scent of a woman's vagina onto the leg of another. As one Urban Dictionary contributor defines the term:

Once again the young ones are doing something that they do not know what the meaning is, in the past (80's) when a couple used to dance toghether and the female became aroused the male ended up with a stinky Leg or in some situations when that time of the month ended on the males pants we call that the same, so next time you decide to dance something like this get informed first...Good Dancing.

The sexual connotation didn't stop "doin' the stanky leg" from becoming a popular slumber party activity.

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Soulja Boy has also done the stanky leg.

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This week, The Daily Beast takes on the female condom's new marketing strategy, which has attempted to combat the prophylactic's reputation as a noisy, expensive, and awkward option (you heard it here first!). Reporter Joyce C. Tang doesn't find any regular women—women who do not work as female condom advocates—who have actually tried the unconventional condom. But she does point to some customer reviews on Amazon.com, which reveal one potential fan group for the prophylactic: "men with huge penises."

The female condom is being aggressively marketed as an empowering option for women who want to take charge of their own STD and pregnancy prevention (One Amazon reviewer calls it "the best protectant any women can use without worrying about 'him'!!!!!!!!"). But on Amazon, the female condom is also being hailed as a quick fix for the man who cannot comfortably wear a condom, for he is too huge. A sampling:

It is an excellent condom for those men with huge penises
These condoms are extremely excellent for those gentlemen with huge penises. Trust me, my better half has trouble finding condoms that fit, they are to tight on him. So we use the reality female condoms because they have a superb fit not tight, not loose, just perfect. Thank You! Rocio

Best condom by far! Much stronger yet far more sensitive. Not damaged by hot car glove compartment temperatures. I'm allergic to latex but not to this. OK for use with oil based lubricants for underwater fun. Does not degrade with age. Can be put in place hours in advance for completely spontaneous love making. Does not strangle a large diameter penis. Whether you are straight, bi, or gay – try it! You will like it!!

So worth the extra money!

My boy is little bigger then average and uncircumcised, so wearing normal condoms didn't do anything but make his penis flaccid. So when I read reviews about how a female condom may help out I had to try some. Let me tell you THEY WORKED WONDERS! He was able to stay hard for a long time and it felt like there wasn't a barrier down there at all. Using the female condoms can be awkward at first, but they feel and work so much better then male condoms.

But beware: While the condom neglects to "strangle a large diameter penis," it is also reportedly uncomfortable for men with penises of a certain length:

Not fit for all...

Female condoms are wonderful and I fully endorse them, HOWEVER: Depending on your partner's "length", it is possible for the condom to be pushed up inside the female, rendering it useless.

And, of course, the condom's superior fit for men with thick penises does not necessarily translate to a comfortable fit in all vaginas (and all anuses):

DO NOT BUY! very uncomfortable for my girlfriend

I wanted to try an alternative to traditional condoms and was hopeful that this product would be a good replacement. However the plastic ring was terribley uncomfortable for my girlfriend and we took it out immediately. I'm going to keep looking for an alternative but I do NOT reccommend these. Learn from my mistakes; save your time, money and an awkward bed conversation.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The video for Erykah Badu's latest single, "Window Seat," is a stunning recrimination of the policing and exploitation of black women's bodies in America. Hey, what a great opportunity to sell a bikini wax!

In the video, Badu walks through the city of Dallas, removing her clothes piece by piece as she passes the city's confused, gawking tourists. Badu's stage is not far from the site of the JFK assassination; the video is shot in the faded colors of the Zapruder film. After she strips down to naked skin—with only blurring pixelation covering her breasts, genitals, and eyes—Badu falls to the ground, and a blue substance reading "GROUPTHINK" oozes from her head.

District beauty salon D'Brows, which offers eyebrow design, eyelash extensions, and a $68 Brazilian bikini wax, decided to capitalize off of the buzz around Badu's video with a promotional press release. "Erykah Badu must have read this before shooting this video," the release said. "Erykah Badu has the confidence that comes with a good waxing and so can you. . . .  Watch this Erykah Badu video [VIDEO] and then arrange your waxing at D'Brows today!!"

A few thoughts:

(a) How could Badu have read this e-mail before shooting her video? This e-mail is about her video.

(b) Since Badu's genitals are obscured by pixels in the video, you really can't tell what's going on down there.

(c) To my knowledge, Badu hasn't delivered her opinions on genital waxing, but she has said this: "I love my natural hair, I love my skin the way it is, I love my breasts the way they are . . . I don't want to be augmented in any way."

(d) Badu hasn't said much about the intent of her video, beyond clarifying that JFK "was one of my heroes, one of the nations heroes . . . He was not afraid to butt heads with America, and I was not afraid to show America my butt-naked truth." But I'll go out on a limb here and say that Badu's message has little to do with razing your pubic mound in order to achieve a socially acceptable vulva, and more to do with defying a social order that exploits black women's bodies as dangerously sexual. Badu's point was confirmed when Dallas police stuck her with a charge of disorderly conduct for performing the shoot in public. John Cheney-Lippold, writing on the differing cultural responses to Badu's video and the similar Matt & Kim video on which "Window Seat" was based, notes that Badu's strip was seen as a disturbing erotic display, while Matt and Kim's disrobing in Times Square was regarded as a childlike and lighthearted stunt:

So is it that our society still reads sexuality through blackness, providing an eroticization of Badu that Matt and Kim’s video doesn’t have? (Yes). Is it that two scrawny naked white musicians can appear to us as childish in Times Square, while one naked black musician can appear dangerous and disorderly in Dallas, Texas? (Yes). And is it that race still matters in our society—that we should constantly think not just of how we personally understand race and racism but how race itself is constructed to mean things other than a group of people with a certain skin color? (Of course). Here’s to hoping Badu fights the disorderly conduct charge.

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(e) In an unrelated note, Wanda Sykes is hilarious:

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Since it seems to be body hair week here on the Sexist [Exhibit A, Exhibit B], it must be fate that I happened to catch Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" on the radio yesterday—didn't immediately switch the radio dial—and discovered that the song actually includes this lyric: "I'm so obsessed / my heart is bound to beat out my untrimmed chest."

"My untrimmed chest" is not the only ridiculous lyric in this song, of course: The tortured wordplay begins with "Your lipstick stains / on the front lobe of my left-side brains," continues through "Hey, soul sister / Ain't that Mister Mister on the radio," past that chest hair thing, and onto "So gangster, I'm so thug / You're the only one I'm dreaming of."

This song inspired me to do three things:

(a) Lobby for the use of the phrase "my untrimmed labia" in a Top-40 pop song;

(b) Respectfully request that alt-rockers never use the phrase "I'm so thug" again;

(b) Survey male Sexist readers on their grooming habits.

Last week, after the whole Vajazzling conversation blew open, Jill at Feministe asked her readers how they prepare their vaginas (there, I said it!). She received almost 200 comments from (mostly) female readers about how they shave, wax, trim, pluck, and bedazzle—or don't—their pubic areas.

But with all this focus on what us ladies do to get our vaginas closer to the current beauty ideal, I'm left wondering how much time and effort men actually spend managing their own body hair. Train seems to be suggesting that having an "untrimmed chest" is something to boast about these days. So. Fellas. Do you spend time cultivating your untrimmed chest? Shave your pubic hair? Wax your back? Propecia your chest? Have you been pressured by a partner to do so? Do you wish you could trim up, but feel like you'll be dismissed as overly feminine? Do you feel the need to adopt an aggressively heterosexual posture in order to feel comfortable engaging in the possibly girly realm of personal grooming?

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Discuss.

Following my post on vajazzling last week, I received several responses from commenters who were concerned that I was questioning a woman's sacred choice to vajazzle.

While I appreciate commenters' willingness to engage with feminist talking points (you know how we love choice), I'm afraid that responding to the new trend of women applying heat-activated crystals to their pubic mounds by simply concluding, "A woman's choice! A woman's choice!" only functions to preempt discussion about just what women are choosing. In this instance, defending "choice" without question discourages women from making informed choices for their pubic mounds. So let's talk vajazzling.

Listen: Vajazzling is no stranger to the feminist talking point. In last week's post, I floated the following equation:

Sexual Repression + Capitalism + Sexism = Vajazzling

I think it would be appropriate to add "Pseudo-Feminism" to the list of Vajazzling's contributing societal factors. But first, let's tackle the good old fashioned anti-feminism at play here: Capitalism will find a way to exploit any weaknesses in our society, and sexism is one of them. Take Liz Lemon's analysis of Valentine's Day from 30 Rock: "Valentine's Day is a sham created by card companies to reinforce and exploit gender stereotypes." You could say the same thing about the cosmetics industry, plastic surgeons, and Vajazzling technicians.

When it comes to personal appearance, it's no coincidence that femininity is marked by performance, while masculinity is just as often defined by men not performing things. Shaving your body hair is feminine; not shaving is masculine. Plucking, waxing, or bleaching stray facial hairs is feminine; growing a few days of stubble is masculine. Applying makeup is feminine; not painting your face is masculine. Dying, styling, blow-drying, and curling your hair is feminine; keeping a low-maintenance hair cut is masculine.

I suspect that this is because women are encouraged to achieve societal power through their appearance and sexuality, while men are encouraged to achieve power from . . . reaching real positions of power, like running companies and governments. Sure, women who are very successful at performing femininity can gain some real power, too. Maybe there's a two-year window there where women can translate their success in this field into posing for Playboy, or shaking in a music video, or stripping, all of which can translate into money in the bank—until they get a little bit older and fall out of favor in those industries. Maybe some women can aspire to be trophy wives and get their social validation by being married to a successful man. The majority of women won't be able to make a career out of performing femininity. And yet, we're still shaving and waxing and plucking and dieting and padding and inflating and cinching and painting and dyeing and surgically trimming our labia and, now, vajazzling like it's our jobs—even as we have been successful in claiming real power as Senators and CEOs and lawyers and doctors and journalists. In these fields, the performance of traditional femininity can either help us or hurt us—either way, the focus is back on the way we look instead of our qualifications. The societal investment is the appearance of women is still going strong.

Why is that? Well, for one thing, capitalism hates to lose a consumer. And at some point, it figured out that this feminism stuff that was helping to put women into positions of power could also be used as a tool to sell things (girl power scholars place the exact date ar0und 1994). The interesting thing is that feminist ideals like choice and personal empowerment are now being used to sell the exact same things that sexism was shilling—like corporate-made supergroups of scantily-clad women with inconsistent musical talents; vice-presidential candidates with anti-woman policies; and expensive and elaborate personal grooming procedures like Vajazzling.

So when Jennifer Love Hewitt appears on television to shill for Vajazzling, she doesn't say, "Ladies, Vajazzling is great because the guys love an uber-feminine, totally infantilized vagina." That would be too obvious. Instead, she insists that women Vajazzle for themselves. "After a breakup, a friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady . . . and it shined like a disco ball," she announced. "For the ladies: I was feeling awful, I had been through a horrible breakup. And I was like, oh, this is just awful, and I need something to make myself feel better. And it was the one thing I hadn't tried after a breakup, so I gave it a try. And it's great!"

I don't doubt that Hewitt truly loves having her vagina Vajazzled just as much as she loves promoting a friend's Vajazzling business. Many women do find personal fulfillment in obsessing over their appearance They really, truly like to apply lipstick and slip into a pair of high-heels and have doctors cut off parts of their genitalia, because that's what makes them feel sexy. No man is forcing these women to perform these behaviors (although that happens, too). In fact, there's evidence that men are often mystified by these activities. We love it because we live in a society that values us for loving these things.

This is where the "a woman's choice!" defenders come in. How could we possibly deny women the choice to engage in these behaviors, if that's what they love? Look: I don't begrudge women who make the choice to perform the behaviors of femininity. I perform many of them myself, on a daily basis! Resisting engaging in these things is almost impossible. But I don't kid myself into thinking that I just love wearing lipstick because I was born that way, or that I shave my legs because I have somehow independently decided—without any influence from my culture!—that that's the way I personally prefer my legs to look.

It's a sexist world. We just live in it. For women in this world, the choice not to convert our bodies into a tool for the beauty industry to exploit is the one that's seen as odd, different, and weird. For us, the simple choice not to invest the time, money, and concern into shaving our armpits is the one that marks us as somehow less of a real woman. But really, the choice not to shave is the one that requires more energy for women, because we stand to be dismissed as dirty, masculine, man-hating hippies if we abstain. When the "woman's choice!" advocates argue that deciding to Vajazzle or not Vajazzle—for that truly is the question—is just a matter of personal taste, they are putting their fingers in their ears and talking really, really loudly in an attempt to deny the culture in which these choices are made.

For women, the choice is not between a preference for looking "natural" or a preference for looking "groomed." The choice—if you take a look at what is really going on—is between challenging sexist beauty standards and receiving negative attention for leaving the house looking like "a man," or just giving in and shaving our pits because we have more pressing shit to deal with right now than singlehandedly dismantling sexism today—like keeping our jobs. Remember those?

For now, the more extreme performances of femininity, like breast implantation, vaginal "rejuvenation," and Vajazzling aren't considered the norm for women. I'm not going to be met with shock when I remove my pants and reveal to my sex partner that I haven't converted my pubic mound into a shiny disco ball. But these days, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for him to be shocked that I'm not perfectly waxed. The body hair ship may have sailed, but vaginal modification is at a point right now where we are still in a position to fend off the tide. And my greatest fear is that someday, we will wake to find that our girls are being routinely Vajazzled upon puberty, and realize that we never stood up to say, "This shit is fucking ridiculous."

Photo via Tsar Kasim, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Vajazzling, the latest trend in Swarovski crystal vaginal bejewelment, debuted on the national vaginal stage this January. And somehow, it has not yet retreated to the dark recesses of minor celebrity Jennifer Love Hewitt's panties, from which it came. Vajazzling has reinvigorated Hewitt's celebrity ("It shined like a disco ball"). Vajazzle specialists are popping up everywhere ("Aww, c’mon, this is gonna be great by the time you’re all done Vajazzling!”). Vajazzling has even caused one man, who we will call Jason, to look directly at a vagina ("It’s mesmerizing . . . This is probably the longest I’ve ever stared at a vagina").

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I discuss the latest trends in Vajazzling (vajazzle your vagina in the shape of a vagina!), why some men who like putting their penises inside vaginas are adamantly opposed to any other aspect of vaginas, and vajazzling's inevitable male counterpart: Dickerating.

SADY: I have to tell you, to see you here today is as dazzling a sight as a gloriously bejeweled vagina!

AMANDA: Ah, yes. A butterfly bejeweled vagina or a kitten bejeweled vagina? For vaginas come in many forms of bejewelery.

SADY: I myself am having my vagina bejeweled with the face of Biggie Smalls.

AMANDA: From what I understand, the only shape in which you can not bejewel a vagina is the shape of a vagina, as I suspect the motivation of Vajazzling is to distract from the idea that the vagina is there, and it is in fact a vagina.

SADY: RIGHT? Like, I mean: I hate to be a jerk here, but if you need my vagina to dress up for this party, my suspicion is that it is not going to be much of a party. Not to be all second-wave, but the continuing impulse to make ladyparts look less like themselves and more like gifts you would get from your dingier variety of novelty shop, next to the lava lamps, bespeaks some ill to me.

AMANDA: The good news is that for the most part I think everyone believes this to be a ludicrous practice. Then again, I have not rolled with Jennifer Love Hewitt's posse, so I may not be aware of the full scope of opinions on how much a woman's vagina ought to look like the back of a 7th grade girl's cell phone.

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SADY: Right. I mean: I think "Vajazzling," much like Chat Roulette or the Sex & the City bus tour of New York, is one of those things that everybody writes about because no-one actually thinks it is a good idea. And yet... there are people on Chat Roulette? And I don't know, man. Like: I talk to girls about their Maintenance Routines, and it seems like there is always some new and trendy way to deal with what is going on there.

AMANDA: There are people who can write from experience: "Then we had sex, and none of the crystals fell off."

SADY: WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THAT AT SUCH A MOMENT????????

AMANDA: Yeah. And there's not a ton of self-reflection going on there. Even the most obvious of questions—like, Why am I bedazzling my vagina? And why has the dude I'm casually dating suddenly taken an interest in my genitalia?—are not being asked.

SADY: Right? Like, "Jason"—oh, Jason—is complimenting her with "this is the longest I've ever stared at a vagina." And given that Jason has grown up in our modern, pornographically-enabled age, I... doubt that this is the case, actually? But it might be the longest he's ever stared at HER vagina, and maybe that is the real issue here, you know?

AMANDA: Perhaps it is the closest he has gotten to like, putting his face close enough to maybe put his mouth on it?

SADY: "Sweetheart! I just noticed that there's something down there! Have you taken a look at this, because it's really wild!"

AMANDA: It is like people who bleach their assholes. How can you recover from an asshole-bleaching session and not wonder what the deal is with you requiring your asshole to be bleached?

SADY: Right. Like: I won't put bleach in my eye. FOR ANYONE. I don't care if you write me beautiful sonnets, if you are also like "and ah, the way you make me sigh / please stick some bleach into your eye," the answer is STILL NO. And I really don't think your asshole should be negotiable territory for bleaching EITHER. But what it reminds ME of, to take an even more extreme example, is that operation where you get your Business SURGICALLY CUT UP to be more attractive? "Labiaplasty!" It is a thing! And people do it! And then a year later their boyfriends or whatever STILL FEAR THE VAGINA so they have to make it look like a My Little Pony with vajazzling, I guess.

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AMANDA: I just wonder why they still want to put their dicks in it? I mean, take the anal bleaching example—you're basically making your anus look less like an anus, so that your partner who enjoys placing their penis in your anus can do so without thinking about the fact that it's actually a real functioning asshole? Same with all these guys who claim to enjoy Tab-A-in-slot-B old fashioned heterosexual sex which includes sticking penises in vaginas, but who hate vaginas, actually, because they are icky. How do they rationalize those thoughts?

SADY: I have no idea. I mean: I do think it has got to be a fear thing. (JASON'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: "Okay, champ, this is going great, but whatever you do just don't look down! If you see the vagina, you'll panic! Play it COOL, MAN.") But also we need to note that although there ARE cosmetic procedures for penises, of the more or less invasive variety... nobody's really requiring dudes (with penises) to invest in them, you know?

AMANDA: Yeah. My theory: Sexual repression + Capitalism + Sexism = Vajazzling

SADY: Right. It's this very basic deal, as expressed by the fact that the Washington Monument is not an ovoid hollow in the ground, whereby penises are super and vaginas, although necessary, are basically H.R. Giger shit that would freak any reasonable person out. So you have to make them... like, really, REALLY infantilized, like to the extent of making them pink and sparkly and Lisa Frank binder-looking, to signify that they are female in the "harmless" sense rather than the "oh my God aaaaiiiiieeeeeeee" sense.

AMANDA: I am interested to know what a penis would look like if men were instructed to groom their penises so as to make them look less like penises.

SADY: Top hats? Draw a smiley face on it? I don't know. I know you're not putting crystals on that business any time soon. But when I start my new Dickerating business we'll find out.

AMANDA: I understand the crystals may not adhere to the male penis for a sufficient period of time. But there are places where our genital situations are not so different. So ... why aren't men encouraged to wax off all of their pubic hair?

SADY: Well, some are! But I've known girls who have expressed the idea that for a man to do so would be a sign of His Secret Gayness, and thereby a dealbreaker. I mean, why aren't men expected to shave their armpits? Hair is manly. For MEN.

AMANDA: So I just Googled the phrase "manlier penis"

SADY: OH GOOD. I ALWAYS KNEW IT WOULD COME TO THIS.

AMANDA: And I came across a Web site which suggests that men who want to visually lengthen the penis might want to trim their pubic hair, in order to create an illusion of sorts.

SADY: Wow. It's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat!

AMANDA: HOWEVER, "the ladies may want a manlier penis ‘ so to speak ‘ and this comes with pubic hair." Someday, when we achieve full gender equality, washed up male actors will write books about illusory pubic hair techniques.

SADY: You know, I don't necessarily NEED to have that much information about Freddie Prinze, Jr.? And yet, like you, I look forward to that day!

Photo via Dawn Ashley, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

This week, it was revealed that accused Mary Landrieu phone-tapping conspirator Stan Dai, 24, was once a promising aspiring playwright. In 2004, while a student at the George Washington University, Dai penned a dramatic piece entitled "The Penis Monologues" for campus conservative newspaper The Patriot.

In the great anti-feminist tradition of college-aged male Republicans, there have been many "The Penis Monologues." Over the years, dozens of these men have been brave enough to bare the innermost thoughts concerning their genitalia. Mainly: "Wahhh! Why is 'The Vagina Monologues' only about vaginas! Pay attention to my penis!"

Having trouble paying suitable tribute to every 20-something Republican dude's genitals? A quick primer on the many "The Penis Monologues," after the jump:

"The Penis Monologues," 1990's, by Penn State student Jason Cassidy.

Penis Insight: According to student newspaper the Daily Collegian, "'One monologue is about a guy—after having sex he tries to pee but he can't control his penis so he's peeing all over this girl's bathroom and eventually pees on the girl,' [explained one] performer . . . At the end of the show, each performer will make one last appearance clad in just his underwear. He will then tell the audience his favorite nickname he has heard for a penis and make different orgasm sounds."

Anti-Feminist Ire: "A guy wrote a script that's kind of mocking Vagina Monologues—well it's more so a response to The Vagina Monologues," a performer told the Collegian. "He put together a series of monologues performed by all men. It's all about sex, masturbation, peeing and all of the crude testosterone things guys talk about."

—

"The Penis Monologues," 2002, by Oregon State University student David Rapoza.

Penis Insight: Due to a birth defect (?), David Rapoza's penis is incapable of gaining your consent (or something?):

So I thought about my penis. I'm positive he'd sport a black leather trench coat and titanium sunglasses. He's got a terrible case of Keannu-envy. He'd also drive a Beamer while head-banging to the harmony of 'NSYNC. What does he say? Nine times out of 10, he begs for more attention. Yeah, he's demanding like that. The tenth time out of 10, he asks you to repeat yourself. He lost his ears during the third trimester and sometimes has trouble reading your lips.

Anti-Feminist Ire: Um: "Bobbitt has become a trendsetter. A firestorm of insane copycats rages after the spark of her famous gender-war crime. According to Time Magazine, over a hundred cases have been documented in Thailand alone. The penis is a symbol of power. Cut the symbol off, and what do men have left to rule you with? Their brains? Ha! This must be the rationale supporting penis decapitation."

—

"The Penis Monologues," 2004, by George Washington University student Stan Dai.

Penis Insight: "MY PENIS IS ANGRY!!!!!!! You want to know what happened to my penis? Joan happened to my penis! There I was, sleeping peacefully when Joan stormed in and dragged me out for 'an educational program.' I thought was going to see Mr. Rogers! But nooooooo! It turned out to be the 'Whine-gina Monologues!'"

Anti-Feminist Ire: From the piece's Editor's Note: "What are these vaginas angry about? Tampons, thong underwear, and gynecologists. Shouldn't feminists be more concerned with encouraging women to go to the gynecologist to prevent cervical, uterine, and breast cancer (which, of course, are the fault of evil repressive men)? Why must the only reference to the sanctity of motherhood be given to a lesbian couple? Can't men be more than just sperm donors and rapists in a feminist's world? Justice Blackmun doesn't even get a shout-out!"

—

"The Penis Monologues," 2005, by Roger Williams University College Republicans.

Penis Insight: In order to combat a presentation of the Vagina Monologues on campus, Roger Williams College Republicans constructed a gigantic penis, dubbed "Testaclese." From the National Review:

''Testaclese' tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus 'Penis Warrior,' the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.

Anti-Feminist Ire: According to the National Review, "Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play."

—

"The Penis Monologues," 2006, by University of Rhode Island student Chris Ferdinandi [Update: not a Republican!]

Penis Insight: Chris Ferdinandi discovers the shocking secret of the "Penis Monologues"—that there's nothing progressive about a bunch of guys talking about their dicks:

So how about it, guys? Feel liberated? Yeah, me neither. I could go on and on with more examples: stories about men circle-jerking as they learn how to enjoy their penises together; a lament about all the injustices committed against penises—'turn and cough,' ungroomed women, kung-fu grip; me shouting the word dick louder and louder to free the word from its negative social connotations.

Anti-Feminist Ire: Surely, the feminists are to blame for this. "But honestly, none of that does anything to express the true value of manhood and masculinity. If anything, it reduces men to their genitals, and it's quite obvious that The Monologues does the same thing to women. Ironically, that's something they accuse men of doing to them on a fairly regular basis."

Photo via Sundve, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Last week, MomLogic.com contributor Allison Henry bravely detailed her battle with vaginal prolapse—or gradually experiencing her vagina falling out of her body. At the end of Henry's tale—after a year of gushing blood, gangrene, and all the insides on the outside—Henry lets us in on her consolation prize. “The experience has been a total nightmare, but I’m happy to say I’m on the mend," Henry wrote. "We just had a cocktail party to celebrate me feeling healthy. And I do have the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin, with a perfect labia, as a bonus."

Henry's prepubescent vaginal joy left some commenters . . . confused. (You didn't think I was going to give up my newfound perfect vagina audience just yet, did you?)

recursiveparadox wonders:

Does that make her 1/4 jailbait now?

jules is getting self-conscious:

jeezus that vag story made me so nauseaus. and why are women so hung up on what their labia look like anyway? is that a thing? should i be thinking about it too??? i thought my vag was just fine but now i can’t stop thinking about the fact that my labia might be a little droopy or something!

nick wants to know what the point of a pretty vagina is if you're not going to show it off to all your girlfriends:

+1 on the befuddlement re:labia “beauty.”

Knowing that other external beauty efforts (fashion, makeup, hair, etc.), in practice, is really about how other women see you rather than men, where does all this private-parts-vanity come from?

Smashy Smashy turns to WikiAnswers for some clues:

So you weren’t willing to google “the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin” but i was. This is one of the first things to pop up:

Q: How deep is a 15 year old girl vagina if she’s not a virgin?

A: The vagina doesn’t look like a balloon. It has no far side wall. It can accomodate a very large penis. If a guy had a 12 inch (or longer) penis the vagina would expand to accept his size. There’s no way to measure a vagina.

So yeah, you were better off not googling. I’m going to scrub my mind now. I don’t even understand how we got to “THE VAGINA DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A BALLOON.

Nikki never knew that 13 was the best year for vaginas:

The husband bought her a cheerleading outfit? That is super creepy, he wants to dress his wife up so her looks match the teen vag, gag! I hope that couple will be able to leave the bedroom eventually, I mean who knew 13 year old vag’s were so fuckable.

ssickn, on the other hand, sounds convinced:

i think i’de nail a milf with a 13y/o vag, sounds interesting and it’s like nailing a milf and her teen daughter at the same time and thats always a plus hahahaha

G introduces us to "vaginecro":

And where exactly do these teenage vagina’s come from? does this mean her husband has to be a vaginecro now?

Emanon is thinking of the children:

I truly hope that the 13-year-old’s parents don’t read this. Some lady dressing up in a cheerleading outfit to take the virginity of her new vagina isn’t something they would ever want to know about their dead daughter’s genetalia.

Photo by SLPTWRK, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Allison Henry had a rough year. A lot of  bad shit went down, but long story short, her vagina fell out. Today, Ami Angelowicz at The Frisky detailed Henry's story. "I am going to spare you the details because I am squeamish and feel too pukey to write about them," explains Angelowicz. She does pass along this little tidbit about Henry's lady-bits, however: "As a consolation prize for all of her suffering (and it was a lot of suffering), she now has the vagina of a 13-year-old with perfect-looking labia."

Allow me to list all the horrific medical details of Henry's vagina-falling-out that are far, far less puke-tastic than the phrase "the vagina of a 13-year-old with perfect-looking labia." From Henry's testimony on MomLogic.com (emphasis mine):

• "About ten weeks into my pregnancy, I was doing prenatal yoga and it felt like someone had rammed a pitchfork up my butt."

• "when I ran to the bathroom, I saw I was gushing blood everywhere."

• "I kept bleeding for 15 weeks straight."
• "One day in the bathroom, I felt something kind of strange when I was wiping. There wasn't really a hole there—it felt kind of flat."
• "I had a massive emergency appendectomy, I got gangrene, and I was hospitalized."
• "One night, I took a look down there, and it was like my insides were on the outside and they were coming out."
• "I went to my doctor and said, 'My vagina is falling out of my body!'"
• "It was literally falling out of my body."
• "It turned out I had complete uterine prolapse, where the uterus is falling out of the body. I also had rectocele, where the walls of the vagina are weakened, and your rectum is pushing into the back wall of your vagina. That explained why I had been constipated for months."
• "I had to have surgery, and they took my uterus out. All the ligaments that hold the uterus in place were completely shredded by all the blood I'd lost in my second pregnancy."
• "My doctor . . . had to untwist my bladder and place it right-side-up. It had twisted and turned upside down."
• "seven days after my surgery, I was watching 'Snow White' with my daughter when my son came into the room. He didn't like the seating arrangement and sort of lunged on top of my daughter. I had to push him off her, and when I did, I heard a loud ripping sound. Oh, no. I looked under the comforter, and my entire bed was covered with blood. It was like a horror movie—you could see the blood filling the entire white bed."
• "In 15 minutes, I had passed 10 huge palm-sized blood clots."
• "the ER doctor was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from, but couldn't see because there was too much blood gushing out. . . He called my doctor and said: 'I can't see where it's coming from. She's bleeding so fast and so much, I can't see. I'm killing her!'"
• "They put me on an antibiotic that I was allergic to — I got a full body rash and was covered in red bumps from my head to my ankles."
• "Six months later, I started having this weird discharge that had a funky odor. I was still in pain. It turned out my body was now rejecting the second set of sutures."

Yep! I would rather hear about gangrene, hand-sized blood clots, full-body rashes, twisted bladders, loud internal ripping, weird discharge, anal pitchforks, month-long genital bleeding, and vagina loss than the happy ending that comes at the conclusion of this medical horror:

• "The experience has been a total nightmare, but I'm happy to say I'm on the mend. We just had a cocktail party to celebrate me feeling healthy. And I do have the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin, with a perfect labia, as a bonus."

Listen, Henry. I'm happy for you. I am. You went through some bad shit, and now your vagina is back inside your body, and I think that's wonderful. But I never, ever, ever, ever again want to have to think about a grown woman having a "the vagina of a 13-year-old virgin." That's some messed up heebie-jeebies shit. I don't even want to Google that phrase, ever, for fear of what I might find.

Apparently, virginal pre-teen is kind of the gold standard for new vaginas on MomLogic.com. Hear the testimony of "Sara," a 37-year-old woman who recently became "a virtual born-again virgin" with her brand-spanking-new genitalia:

So now I'm on the mend, with a teenage-sized vagina. My husband has been such a doll since I've been home; cooking, vacuuming, cleaning and dressing the kids, taking them to and from school, buying me chocolates and cheerleader costumes . . . how sweet. My sister replied to this, "Well, how many husbands get two vaginas out of the same old wife?" As far as how this new organ is going to work in six weeks, when all restrictions are lifted, who knows? The way things are at present, no man's apparatus, even of the Fisher Price variety, could ever fit down there. Still, I'll try to write a follow up report when it happens. That is, if my husband and I ever leave the bedroom again!

Eww! Earmuffs! I know you're all excited about your new vaginas or whatever, but could you please refrain from referring to them as "teenage-sized," admiring your newly "virginal" look, and especially–-I'm begging you—invoking Fisher Price?

Photo by clango, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Morning, everyone. So, you know how members of your community—your boss, a police officer, officials from South Africa's track and field federation—will occasionally pull you aside and suggest, politely, that your entire existence up to this point has been a complete fraud, and everything you've ever done has been targeted at destroying the very moral fiber of society, and would you please show your genitals to everyone?

No? That's never happened to you? Weird, because it seems like whenever a transgender or gender variant person tries to do their thing—go to work, run fast, or steal a really hot, expensive dress—they're invariably labeled a "fraud" (okay, maybe the last one is a fraud, but not in the way you'd think!). Their gender identity is reduced to some hair-brained scheme to invade The Opposite Sex and oppress it by refusing to flash their possibly variant genitals, stealing all their gold medals, or . . . just confusing people a little bit. This has been happening A LOT lately:

Exhibit A: That star female runner isn't just quick as a whip. She also might be a liar, a cheat, and a pervert . . . if complicated and ultimately bullshit gender testing reveals that she's a man!

Exhibit B: That female employee isn't just trying to get a paycheck. She's also trying to sneak in the women's locker room . . . to change, and stuff! And what if she has a penis? Hand over the photos!

Exhibit C: That "cross-dressing" shoplifting suspect isn't just trying to steal a killer $2,400 Chanel dress. She's also trying to dupe the cops by wearing dresses while she steals dresses to conceal her true identity . . . a man!

This whole trans panic trend is out of control, you guys. And I think it's time for a Sexist Beatdown. Join the incomprable Sady of Tiger Beatdown as we talk Juwanna Mann, our own personal gender test, and why we've never been asked to include 8-by-10 glossies of our vaginas with a job application.

SADY: hello!

AMANDA: hi!

SADY: first of all: i think we should be required to discuss and/or disclose the precise details of our tender bits before being allowed to have this conversation.OH NO WAIT THAT IS HORRIBLE.

AMANDA: ok, because i have some photos, if everyone thinks that's necessary

SADY: right. well, as a person, i cannot be comfortable unless i know the precise details of everyone elses' swimsuit areas at all times.

AMANDA: and you, as a ladybusiness blogger, surely had to undergo the proper tests as part of the job application.

SADY: i am only shocked that i was not required to disclose it at ALL former places of employment. there i was! doing light filing! and nobody knew how my genitals were shaped! but, in retrospect, as I am a cis woman with a fairly girly gender presentation and most people gender me as female when I walk into the room VAGINA PHOTOS OR NO, perhaps i should not be shocked. perhaps – PERHAPS? – it would only have mattered if my gender presentation and/or body shape did not adhere to some elusive "norm!"

AMANDA: yeah, or if you did manly things for a living—like ran extremely quickly and had rock hard abs. can we talk about this situation first? because i think it's really interesting

SADY: yes! i believe that we should!

AMANDA: so ... here is a group of women who are a lot stronger and faster and ripped and everything than most men in the world. i mean, obviously, there are going to be aspects of their gender which are going to be perceived as more masculine. and so—the very complicated, weeks-long test they're conducting to decide aside—how do you determine what is too masculine for a female sport? the very reason these women are successful is because their bodies are exceptional

SADY: right! like, basically they called for the test because she was TOO GOOD AT SPORTS, right?

AMANDA: and who knows what gender variant aspects of all bodies will turn up after weeks of mysterious testing?

SADY: exactly. and no matter what the totally humiliating and invasive "gender test" she is forced to take concludes (my gender test: pronoun = she, person = lady), the fact is that someone saw her excel at a traditionally masculine thing and concluded on that basis she was gender-suspect.

AMANDA: yeah and the WEIRD thing was, the suspect thing was that she IMPROVED too much. she had run before and was so-so and now she's amazing ... it's not she just burst masculinely onto the scene and stole all the titles. so if she were in men's sports, she'd be undergoing steroids testing right now, probably

SADY: right! like, if someone gets THAT much better THAT much more quickly, my thought is drugs. their thought is, basically, the plot of "juwanna mann."

AMANDA: i wouldn't be surprised if they tested her for drugs and then were like, hmm ... well, maybe she's a man.

SADY: what is interesting to me is this quote: ""If there's a problem and it turns out that there's been a fraud ... that someone has changed sex, then obviously it would be much easier to strip results," Davies added. "However, if it's a natural thing and the athlete has always thought she's a woman or been a woman, it's not exactly cheating." l like, being trans now constitutes FRAUD? SRSLY?

AMANDA: haha that quote is amazing. davies obviously has no idea what davies is talking about! it's natural if she's always thought she's been a woman ... which is clearly something that will be conclusively decided in our sophisticated medical testing period, somehow. thank you.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and don't a whole buttload of trans women say that they... have always known they are ladies? this conception of transness as a DELIBERATE FRAUD undertaken for the purpose of running real fast and winning some races is what blows my mind. like, considering how fucking complicated and inconvenient it would be to ALWAYS have to live in a gender not your own, i severely doubt people would undertake it just so that they could run in the (assumed to be not-that-great) women's division! like, to be a trans woman and to have to live as a dude instead of a lady would be similarly inconvenient, i am thinking!

AMANDA: i know, like when in the history of sports has a male athlete said "i'd rather get gold in the women's division than bronze in the men's" if someone offered the women's trophy as a consolation prize, he would probably choke someone.

SADY: but it reminds me of that story you posted about the lady-clothes thief who pulled off all of "his" heists whilst "disguised" as a lady.

AMANDA: and yet, the fraud narrative consistently arises with trans athletes. yes. yes. the very best part of that story was that this suspect, who is pretty obviously a trans woman, was pegged by the police as a devious cross-dresser who was only wearing women's clothing to dupe the police while ... stealing women's clothing and so the police, at the end, when they arrested the "man" (still in women's clothing) got to run to the press and say, See! We figured it out! We broke the devious thief's lady-clothes code! We have discovered that the dress thief was ... a man! when really, they probably would have found their suspect a lot easier had they known a goddamn thing

SADY: yeah, precisely. the thing that strikes one, looking at the "fraud" narratives people cook up to explain the existence of trans (or suspected to be trans!) people is that they are WILE E. COYOTE LIKE IN THEIR CONVOLUTIONS AND LACK OF COMMON SENSE.

AMANDA: haha yes. like trans men are all applying their moustaches with permanent glue and then wielding their comical trans anvil in the hopes of getting a better salary at their jobs because they're dudes now.

SADY: right? and, like, who does not realize that being outed as trans or gender non-conforming is actually WAY MORE DANGEROUS than shoplifting? WHY WOULD YOU TAKE ON THIS INCREDIBLY STIGMATIZED DANGEROUS IDENTITY for the purpose of lifting a skirt from a mall?

AMANDA: apparently members of the police and media who seem to not even understand that trans people exist! and i understand that to some people this is a new and uncomfortable thing, but there's really no excuse, because every trans activist i've spoken to is always extremely patient and thorough in explaining all the issues and intricacies to people who are out of the loop.

SADY: it's seriously alarming to me, this basic lack of knowledge. it's like somebody who sees a squirrel and is like "what be this small and furry man? behold! he is as tiny as a homunculus! what magic doth he possess to shrink himself to this size? WHAT IS HE PLANNING, THIS FURRY NUT-SEEKING WIZARD?"

AMANDA: is the nut wizard in a dress? because ... i think the cops might be looking for it.

SADY: OH NO. from now on, i will view all people in dresses as potential thieves. i myself am in a dress at this very moment! WHAT AM I HIDING????

AMANDA: i am too. my god. well ... i know i'm hiding my genitalia. i'm turning myself in.

SADY: well, there you have it! deceiver! all HONEST people show their genitalia AT ALL TIMES! oh, no, that is crazy sex predators that i am thinking of.

AMANDA: in conclusion, i just looked up juwanna mann on imdb, and these are the relevant plot keywords:

* Basketball
* Cross Dressing
* Beautiful Woman
* Hit In Crotch
* Male Nudity
* The Star Spangled Banner
* Character Name In Title

and it only has 4.1 stars!

it seemingly has everything.

SADY: that's a darn shame.

Photo via JuwannaMann.com

1976: "This invention relates to inserts for use within the vagina of a woman for the harming of a man who may insert a penis into the vagina of the woman. This invention represents improvements in such inserts and it provides more efficient means to lock on the penis and to lacerate the locked on penis."

Pros: Claims to be an improvement on previous penis weapons stored within the vagina.

Cons: Improves upon penis weapons stored within the vagina by locking onto the penis you don't want inside you.

—

1977: "An anti-rape device adapted to be inserted into the vaginal cavity of a human female, comprising a base member, elongated penis penetrating means attached to the base member to project outwardly toward the mouth of the vaginal cavity when the device is operationally positioned within the vaginal cavity of a human female, and retractable means normally surrounding said elongated penis penetrating means to protect the walls of the vaginal cavity from contacting said penis penetrating means, said retractable means being adapted to be retracted upon penetration of the vaginal cavity by a male penis to permit penetration of the penis by said penis penetrating means."

Pros: At least attempts to "protect the walls of the vaginal cavity" from the penis weapon.

Cons: Where does the tampon go? What if I have to pee? How do I explain this to my consensual sex partner? "Will you excuse my while I slip into something less likely to elongate from my vaginal opening to irreversibly damage your genitalia?"

—

1978: "An anti-rape defensive weapon is provided comprising a barbed shank similar to a fish-hook barb carried in a barrel like hand grip arranged to expose the barbed shank when the device is pressed against the flesh of an assailant."

Pros: Does not go into your vagina; "is not illegal to carry because it does not meet the description of a lethal weapon."

Cons: So, this anti-rape device works by not stuffing a barbed shank inside a vagina? I'm . . . not exactly following.

—

1979: "An anti-rape device having a hollow housing adapted to be worn within a human vagina. The housing has a front opening and contains a hypodermic syringe having a volume of rape-deterring fluid and a needle facing and aligned with the front opening."

Pros: It's . . . elaborate.

Cons: Seriously, what woman would consent to putting a hypodermic needle inside her vagina? Is her dad making her do this? If so, she should tell a trusted friend, because she should not have to be doing this. Also, couldn't we put this rape-deterring fluid technology to use somewhere else? Like in a handbag?

—

1983: "An anti-rape device is adapted to be worn in the vaginal cavity of a female. The device comprises a hollow housing with adhesive means on the interior of the housing to adhere to any rapist and an irritant-containing pouch positioned within the housing which ruptures upon forceful contact with the rapist. The adhesive means ensures the device will adhere to the rapist thereby causing continued discomfort."

Pros: It's like a science experiment in your vagina!

Cons: I'm no scientist.

—

1993: "A rape prevention device including a belt adapted to encircle the waist of a wearer and a shield portion extending through the legs and crotch of the wearer from a rear region of the belt to a front region of the belt. The shield portion includes a plurality of shield segments adapted to cover the genitalia of the wearer."

Pros: Again, not technically insode the vagina.

Cons: Just a chastity belt.

—

1997: "A female security device placed within a vaginal cavity to protect and minimize physical damage caused by physical sexual intercourse. The female security device includes a cylindrical housing including a first open end and a second closed end. The second closed end is inserted deeper within the vaginal cavity than the first open end and an inner surface of the cylindrical housing is able to absorb any fluid dispensed therein. Pressure sensors are positioned there- around for sensing contractions in walls of the vaginal cavity and a pressure sensor is positioned therein for sensing pressure caused by insertion of an object into the cylindrical cavity. A needle is positioned to extend into the cylindrical cavity for contacting the object inserted therein and retaining a tissue sample of the object. A microcomputer is connected to the external and internal sensors for determining when an object has been inserted therein and a reservoir is connected for releasing an identification dye to discolor the object upon making such a determination. Furthermore, the needle is able to inject a tissue irritant into the object upon contact therewith and thus cause an irritation to form. An auditory recorder may also be connected to the microcomputer and activated upon a determination that an object has been inserted therein for recording all sounds occurring during the sexual intercourse and a vibrating ring may be activated at that time to notify the user that the device has been activated."

Pros: Pressure sensors? Check. Microcomputer? Check. Airbag? Check. Tissue irritant? Check. Auditory recorder? Check. Vibrating ring which alerts you that your vagina has  been breached, in case you didn't notice? Check.

Cons: Not for the woman unequipped to land a spaceship into her vagina.

1. Menace to Sorority, in which the sorority message-board-dwellers simply cannot quit me.

2. Trans Slammer, in which D.C.'s transgender inmates win some battles, lose others, and gain some very persistent commenters in the process.

3. The Great Mexican Cartoon Porn-Off, Part 3, in which I review Spanish-language cartoon porn culled from the beaches of Mexico.

4. The Great Mexican Cartoon Porn-Off, Part 1, in which Part 2 does not get nearly so much lovin' as do the other parts.

5. Saws in Vaginas: Dangerous, in which a saw inside a dildo inside a vagina painfully breaks free of its rubber and flesh captors.

Oh, that's just like Nancy, Jackie, Hillary, and Michelle* to show off their feisty, satin-clothed vaginas on the White House lawn. Only Laura Bush is spared. I'm already working on my Feisty First Dudes primer, a campy look at the men behind the nation's feisty governors and Secretaries of State, illustrated by a photograph of Todd Palin and Bill Clinton wearing short shorts and grabbing their junk whilst lounging in front of the Washington Monument.

* last-minute draft pick