What's so bad about shuffling Republicans and Democrats together for the State of the Union Address?

The Washington Times hates the idea:

A letter to congressional leaders signed by proponents of this exercise in musical chairs claims...

Musical chairs? Clearly, the Washington Times has never played musical chairs. Musical chairs would be quite funny: Make the Congresspeople scramble for what are too few chairs, and kick out everyone who can't find a seat. Where's your kinder, gentler more civil politics then?

... "the choreographed standing and clapping of one side of the room - while the other side sits - is unbecoming of a serious institution. And the message that it sends is that even on a night when the president is addressing the entire nation, we in Congress cannot sit as one, but must be divided as two." [Senator Mark] Udall is clearly focused on the wrong problem. Presumably orgiastic clapping, not sitting stonefaced, is what offends the seriousness of the august institution.

I don't know much about the Washington Times's sex life, but I think it's got orgasms wrong too. I'll bet, if you did a scientific study, you'd find that, during orgasm, remaining stonefaced is much more common than applause. But I do agree that it would offend the seriousness of the august institution if the President's admirers really acted like they were having orgasms.

Shifting the seats around will not alter the president's applause lines. Democrats, wherever placed in the chamber, will still faithfully rise and clap at the appointed times. If such demonstrations are what Mr. Udall believes are "unbecoming" to the Congress, then Democrats should instruct their members to refrain from such demonstrations, similar to how the NFL has tried to promote civility by cracking down on post-touchdown celebrations.

I think the Democrats should instruct their members to show a little more NFL-style enthusiasm:

If clapping isn't banned, the primary effect of the seating change would be to distribute standing ovations across the chamber, making it appear that the president enjoys more congressional support than he does in fact.

That's the theory that's going around, but I'd like to see how it really would look. When the cameras can't zero in on a clump of idolators and must show the President's friends next to his enemies skeptics, we will see exactly what is going on: We've got a partisan Congress. There are a lot more Republicans than Democrats these days: The disproportion may be more likely to look obvious if they are all mixed up. And the juxtaposition of fans and sourpusses will be more amusing in close-up shots.

I say mix it up!

"Voting is a pleasure" ad, depicting female voter experiencing sexual pleasure, is criticized as "misleading" and an "attack on the dignity of women."

It's a socialist ad — in Spain — and the critics are conservative.

"Montauk Chia."

Whatever the hell that is...



... orgasms are involved, in amongst other incomprehensible nonsense.

Another photo from the New Age bookstore — called Whole Life — that we stumbled into after the movie last night.

ADDED: Chia petting?

Raisins, orgasms... what's the difference?

Here's another big NYT Magazine article for women that I didn't want to read, but I'm reading now to use in a Bloggingheads episode. It's been on the most-emailed list all week, this "Women Who Want to Want" business. I looked at it when it came out and the intro about staring at raisins really irritated me. I felt like I was reading the 1969 bestseller "The Sensuous Woman" again. 40 years later, I still remember the advice — for women in search of an orgasm — to get an ice cream cone and pay a whole lot of attention to every detail of the thing. But jeez, at least you got an ice cream cone. Orgasm or not. In 2009, it's a damned raisin?!

"I’d like you to start by examining your raisin... Study its shape, its contours, its folds. Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips."

This is going to help you want to have sex — to "want to want"? When I read that, I want nothing. Nothing at all. And get that raisin out of my face.

But I will go on, because I said I'd talk about it. Get past the raisin.

[Lori] Brotto is careful to keep in mind that not all women who feel erotically uncharged are desperate to change. Some may not be dismayed in the least.... [B]etween 7 and 15 percent of all young and middle-aged women... feel distressed over the absence of desire....

So you could either find a way to feel sexual desire or get over feeling bad about the way you really do feel.

Brotto is now studying... a sample of 70 women who... are sent home with assignments — to observe their bodies in the shower and describe themselves physically in precise and neutral language, in phrases that hold no judgment; and, after another session, to repeat over and over, “My body is alive and sexual,” no matter if they believe it. They are taught about research that shows that belief doesn’t matter, that the feeling will follow the declaration. And they are instructed, in their sessions, to place the raisins in their mouths, to “notice where the tongue is, notice the saliva building up in your mouth . . . notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth, the flood of saliva, how the flavor changes from your body’s chemistry.”

Back to that raisin. Is there a fruity nugget in this big bowl of oatmeal? Is it that women really have sexual feelings, but they emerge during a sexual encounter and may go unnoticed because we aren't good at noticing them? Or is this mainly about defining mental disorders in the D.S.M. — there's something called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (H.S.D.D.)? I'd like to hear less about raisins and Buddhist — it's always Buddhist — techniques of mindfulness or whatever, and more about who's channeling money where....

As is so often true in the poorly financed realm of sex research....

8,000+ words on Elizabeth Weil's marriage.

In the NYT Magazine. Seriously, I did not see the value of all this. Help me out. I agreed to talk about it on a Bloggingheads episode, to be recorded in a few hours, and I cannot figure out what is interesting here... aside from the fact that the husband's cooking obsession entails the use of very expensive ingredients. There were those "Taoists Thrusts" for the "Multi-Orgasmic Couple," which were mainly about visualizing one kind of animal or another burrowing into some sort of hole, but really, I found nothing to justify all this blather about one couple. And this is a condensation from a memoir. There's nothing even wrong with Dan. He works out. He cooks.

He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine....

On a ho-hum weeknight Dan might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction.

She's vaguely dissatisfied with the man even as she feeds us the stuff of envy. Yes, your man is very muscular and he feeds you delicious food and you feed me 8,000 words.

Let's talk about "The Hot Issue" of Cosmo.

I was just waiting in line at Walgreens, trying to buy some toothpaste, and this grabbed... well, I don't want to say it grabbed me by the balls, but that's the kind of thing it would say, just like it would say "5 things that can BLOW a JOB interview."


(Enlarge.)

Cosmo is just so sexually aggressive. It tires me out. It makes me want to to find out how not to look tired. Get hit on all the time? Get hit on to annoy your friends? Can't I just quietly contemplate whether my breasts are normal or what pittance I might spend to make my skin amazing?

And now you want to tell me about 125 sex moves — in rank order, no less. 125! What if I'd just like some — maybe 40 — little tiny ways to connect with a guy? (One guy!) Not even sex ways, you know? Duh! Sex is just the 41st way, and we already know about it. It's so desperate to need that one thing broken down into 125 parts.

And maybe I don't want thousands of men sent over the edge. That sounds dangerous! Like some kind of war. Over the edge! Come on, back off a bit, ladies. Cosmo has been handing out secrets to drive men wild for decades, to the point where I've been wondering why the streets aren't, by now, teeming with rampaging wild men, all these secrets being so widely dispersed among so many women for so long.

Then there are the 5 things — always with the lists — you should never let your "gyno" do. That underlining, frankly, scares me. You mean there are some rather disturbing things you might occasionally let your gyno do, but there are 5 of them that you really never should let him/her do? What kind of crazy shit are gynos trying to get away with, anyway?

And that leaves us with the Orgasm Whisperer, which I guess is like the Horse Whisperer or the Dog Whisperer, but for orgasms, so supposedly this is a man — woman? — who is has a special, highly effective way of talking to orgasms and extracting appropriate behavior from them. I don't really understand. Maybe it's a little like playing Mozart recordings to unborn babies in the womb. Still, if the orgasm is there, what's the problem? And if the orgasm is not there, what are you whispering to?

Oh, lord, I just want to know some beauty tricks from top models and the real deal on the guys Taylor Swift sings about.

Did you see how Glenn keeps talking about "maintenance sex"?

What's going on here?

And, finally, this. Preacher: InstaPundit needs more sex. I respond with this post.

"This post" says:

“MAINTENANCE SEX?” So what do you think? Is this important in a relationship? I wonder if we’d see something of a male/female split on this. Maybe not!

"Maintenance Sex" goes to this book "Lube Jobs," by Don and Deborah Macleod, about which Library Journal says:

"Maintenance sex,"say the Macleods..., can keep intimacy going with a husband who may want sex more often than the wife or when she's not really interested. It's a realistic rather than a sexist assumption, given power couples, having-it-all womanhood, roller-coaster hormones, and real-world parenting. Such "lube jobs" consist of affectionate, speedy, varied, and regular sexual encounters that ensure a husband's orgasm with minimal effort and optional arousal on the wife's part — not as a replacement for but a supplement to more leisurely and shared sexual sessions. Some 20 suggested scenarios include creative manual, oral, toy-enhanced, and coital approaches, including body shots (a porn staple), front-seat fellatio, backseat bonking with porn on the laptop, bathtub blow jobs, and closet canoodling. While the constant servicing-a-car wordplay may annoy some readers, the advice is sound and fun. Lighthearted illustrations would have been a nice touch, but the book does quite well as is. Most people spend the largest part of their adulthood slogging through committed relationships, and they need books like this. Recommended for public libraries."

Recommended for public libraries? Are there some library scenarios? Oral sex near the audio books? Canoodling among the cookbooks? (What the hell is canoodling anyway? I think noodles are involved. Meade says: "How about in a canoe?")

Hunter was hired to make videos of Edwards, "but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform."

The Daily News gossip column quipped about the report that there's a John Edwards/Rielle Hunter sex tape.

This sets Popehat off, riffing wildly on sexual wordplay, for example, here:

This brings us, of course, to pirates. How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm? Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system. When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole. The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty. No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure. Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything... And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in English suffered under the weight of too popular a press. We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

Maybe you'd better go over there and see how this all fits together.

Best. Sex. Ever.

I had to put in some hours at the salon. I wanted to read some exams, but as my new lowlights were cooking under the heat lights, I couldn't help myself:



Oh, no! That looks dangerous.

All that advice! Where to eat lunch...



... how to float in a sea of guys...

... what on earth to say to this male flotsam ...



Is it me or is this magazine kind of insane?

Mary Roach says a lot of surprising things about orgasms.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who focuses on the sonogram of a fetus masturbating and says "Just a small effort to get K-Lo's head to explode." Odd. I would have thought that the fact that fetuses masturbate supports the pro-life side of the abortion debate.

An image from a sad, dystopian film?

No. It's a real theme park. A sex theme park. In China.

"We are building the park for the good of the public. I have found that the majority of people support my idea, but I have to pay attention and not make the park look vulgar and nasty."

..."These things are too exposed. I will feel uncomfortable looking at them when other people are around."

... "These vulgar sex installations will only make people sick."

Helping the people "care more about female orgasm." Good luck!

"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now."

"There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent there will be no need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."

#2 on the list of most depressing quotes from George Orwell's "1984."

Linked in the comments to this Metafilter post on an article titled "The masterpiece that killed George Orwell."

"In our culture, women have been conditioned to have closed sexuality and open feelings, and men to have open sexuality and closed feelings."

From a ridiculous article about a commune dedicated to the female orgasm.

AND: I'm concerned about the dedication of communes to female orgasms.