Here’s a charming and sexy video vignette starring Allison Brie and Gillian Jacobs. Never in my wild dreams did I imagine that such a playful video would exist. These women are remarkably talented and smart and very sexy. They did this as part of a GQ profile and photospread. The Community show they did had so many fun double entendres, and the writers and showrunners played a lot with the sex appeal. More than once I have gone down the rabbit hole of fun & sexy Community video clips.
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The literary obituary of gay author Edmund White had a surprising amount of fun.
“I do feel some degree of guilt,” he said. “It’s also hard not to feel numb, and the worst thing for a writer is to feel numb. Your natural tendency is to want to forget; but your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.”
Mr. White had many decades to fulfill that obligation. He produced some of his most original work while in his 80s. In “A Previous Life” (2022), a married man and woman holed up in a ski chalet in 2050 share their sexual histories, including details of the husband’s affair 30 years earlier with an elderly writer. The writer is named Edmund White.
Wow, it takes chutzpah to mention that a fictional character once slept with the author! I wish I had thought of that idea first. I own a few books by Edmund White which I’ve never read, but his literary reputation has always been high. Here’s 4 audio interviews Don Swaim did with Edmund White in the 1990s: the 1983 interview, the 1985 interview, the 1988 interview and the 1991 interview.
I confess it’s easy to clutter these posts with lots of links to risque comedy sketches. From SNL there’s Supresssex, The First Three Way, Sex Tonight, Themyscira, Bedroom, Nude Beach (SNL)There’s also Genie on Hard Times, (great last line!). I admit I enjoy the compilation clips as well: Lesbian clips from Will & Grace, Quagmire and Quagmire on Tinder.
Although it’s not really sexual, the Sakeru Gummy Long Man TV ads is replete with double entendres and sexual innuendos. This video consists of a sequence of several Japanese TV commercials for chewing gum. It’s also extremely funny.
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I’ve been reading about attempts in some US states to punish teachers and librarians for sharing with minors books that have sex scenes. It’s shocking. I attended a private Catholic high school. Despite the religious angle to instruction, teachers were free to do what they wanted. In sophomore year of high school, I remember reading 1984 and Catcher in the Rye with little fanfare. Yes, there was sex, but it was no big deal. In junior year I was in honors English and we read books and stories that brought up homosexuality, masturbation, sexual harassment and promiscuity. I guess discussions urged sexual responsibility, but I don’t remember that really constraining the discussion. In senior year (ironically when I had turned 18) we read mostly sex-free stuff except for perhaps portions of the Canterbury Tales. A few years ago I observed a high school English class discussing Handmaid’s Tale — which seemed a little advanced for high school students. But students really were adept at discussing the themes in an adult way. This book seemed nothing unusual. We could assume that almost all teenagers had already watched a lot of streaming R-rated (and perhaps X rated stuff), so it seemed odd to single out books for legislation. It’s kind of odd to imagine reading fiction without sex in it. (I remember 6th grade passing around Judy Blume’s Forever book among friends. It kind of shocked me, but it was even more shocking that my female friends were passing it around).
It’s sad enough that younger generations are reading less; it’s even sadder that teachers are more hamstrung about what to teach. One would think that by the time you got to college, you could study literature with enlightened teachers and daring reading lists. Unfortunately college lit classes and humanities classes seem less interesting to students — especially because they haven’t really developed the habit of reading. I am 59 and come from the generation of readers who were exposed to virtually everything — Anais Nin, Nabokov’s Lolita, Henry Miller, Erica Jong, etc. It’s hard adapting to a world where this freedom is dependent on the whims of the right-wing autocrat.
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Here are some interesting ebooks to add to your collection:
- Imaginative Sex by John Norman. Strange and almost anachronistic scripts for couples to use when doing sexual role playing. Norman is a prolific sci fi writer who authored the Gor series.
- Devil At Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller by Erica Jong. In-depth review of Miller’s life and works, plus some of Jong’s thoughts. Looks great. I read Henry Miller in college — mainly for the sexual lyricism — and regarded him as a second tier writer, but am willing to revisit that judgment.
- Whatever You want: We Write, You Decide by Rachel Timms and Laurence Hayes. A spicey adult-themed maze story.
When I was in 7th grade, I got in trouble for bringing a National Lampoon magazine to school and reading aloud parts of an X-rated story to friends during lunch in the cafeteria. The story was called My Vagina — about a teenage boy who wakes up and discovers he has a vagina. I remember being fascinated by the concept and the story itself.
A year ago I randomly thought about that story and googled it. To my delight I found that it was written by legendary 1980s director John Hughes (who did Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, 16 candles, etc). Here’s the original story and a similar story he did called My Penis.
Here’s a thoughtful and informative history by Geoffrey R. Stone of how sexually explicit content has been handled by different generations of Americans.
I’ve been busy getting volume 2 ready for publication in December. I guess I will do a separate post about that.
During this political season, it’s important to remember that the Republican Party has talked about prohibiting porn. Project 2025 says “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders,” and “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” (SOURCE) Sure, this is just an aspirational policy, but it’s neither moral nor grounded in good social science or policy. At the state level, there’s a lot of age verification laws (currently under review at the US Supreme Court. Here’s one critique of the policy and another longer critique. I definitely understand the impulse to keep adult content away from minors, and I think the bigger platforms definitely need to keep their hardcore content in URLs for logged in users only. Frankly though, the ambiguity of content standards make content creators avoid lots of borderline content. Requiring that adult-themed sites pay for ID check services is an undue burden on free expression — especially because it applies to individual creators running simple sites (like this one).
I particularly worry about fiction sites like this one and maybe artist portfolio sites (for comics and paintings, etc). Maybe the government can pay 100% of the costs for these age verification services? About a decade ago I came across the blog of a radical-minded blogger who once posted a handful of nude photos of himself on his blog. Is this guy going to need to pay a third party an annual fee just to keep the state of Texas off his back?! (See also my thoughts about how to prevent your minor child from viewing this site).
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