Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

sex

Joining the Boys’ Club

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I have never been “one of the guys.”

Except for live-nearly-nude-dancing-girls, apparently.

I don’t do a lot of typical dude things, like ogle women or watch sports. Most of my friends are women. Even in my dim memories of kindergarten, I surrounded myself with girls.

That’s not to say I don’t have any close male friends. We just don’t do dude stuff together, like … uh, I’m out gender stereotypes already. This is how little I am connected to my dudeness.

That said, I have found myself in the groom’s party of one of my longtime male BFFs and – unlike my wedding party – this one is a single sex affair. A fest of sausage, if you will. Which means not only am I in for some guy-on-guy quality time, but I was in for a bachelor party.

Prepared as I might be to drink other men under the table while watching sports (seriously, just try me), inherent in the looming bachelor party was a looming visit to a strip club.

I dreaded the concept. The only time I was nearly convinced to attend a strip club with friends I wound up having dry heaves before I could even get in a cab. I’m too little of a stereotypical dude and too much of a feminist. Paying to objectify strange, naked women is really low on my list of things that sound fun.

(To wit: my own bachelor party was a co-ed 80s prom entitled “Like a Virgin.”)

I can't deny it - I honestly did resemble him a bit on Friday. You know, with the unbearable hotness of me.

Yet, at a strip club is where I found myself on Friday night. Well, they had tops and bottoms on, so I guess it wasn’t a strip club. A pole dancing joint? Is that more accurate?

Hilariously, I turned out to be a live-nearly-nude-dancer magnet. E thinks it’s because I looked like Bradley Cooper in the episide of Alias where he pretends to be an Australian rock star.

She was probably right.

And, folks, point numero uno everyone failed to tell me about strip clubs? You might have to be careful how you touch the women, but they do not have any hesitations about how they touch you.

Yeah.

You know, I can’t not be polite and chat for a minute if someone is nuzzling me with her breasts, and then I feel bad for taking up her time, and then I am obligated to fold dollar bills and slip them into improbably small straps holding together even more improbably small garments.

The whole thing is ooky and disgusting slippery slope (not unlike a stripper pole … HEY-OH!)

After the first hour I was tipsy and having fun with the guys and alternatingly glowering at my cell phone in an attempt to ward off further elbow-molesting bosoms, having driven off the last woman by going on at great length about how my beautiful wife helps me select all of my fashion after she complimented my scarf.

I can't even contemplate the coordination it would take for me to be able to do this. I'm still working on mastering tree pose.

I felt another pair of breasts at my elbow (seriously, my elbow = SO POPULAR), and turned for my casual brushoff. This woman’s opening gambit was to ask me what I did for a living. When I said, “communications – marketing, really,” she exclaimed, “That’s my major! Well, really I’m journalism.” Which, as we know, I was too.

That’s when I started to have a little fun at the strip club. At first it was a room full of strange women, none of whom where even vaguely as attractive as my wife. As aerobic as their gyrations were, it didn’t feel much different than watching a class at a gym.

Then I actually took the time to meet one of the women – a perfectly sweet Italian girl – and give her advice on how database classes are going to help her if she ever has to do any direct marketing. And then I met another woman who was a fitness instructor and collected comic books.

You know what, I didn’t mind watching them dance. They were real people with great legs. And we kept chatting after they danced.

(Of course, there was still the inherent weirdness of having to tip a girl to have the sort of conversation I’d have at a networking night at a bar…)

Does this story have a moral?

I am one of the guys, even if I’m not a stereotypical guy. I can drink and carouse and have fun without being a chauvinist, so I need to get over my fear of “The Boys Club.”

Also, I was reminded of something important: attraction is context. My wife is more attractive than any stripper not only because she is smokin’ hot, but because she’s my mega-talented best friend. Similarly, I think my friends’ wives and girlfriends are beautiful. Why? I know them. They are not random pretty faces on the street – they are dynamic people with a myriad of skills and interests.

So are the women in a strip club – but you don’t really get the chance to hear about that (unless you keep tipping them). I guess most men are fine with that, but my not being fine with it doesn’t mean I am not a man, guy, dude, or boy.

Next up? I hear it’s traditional for us to kidnap the bride at the wedding and barter in liquor with the groom for her return.

That, I think I can handle.

Lambert Crosses the Gay Rubicon?

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A strongly-worded NYT Style Article about my American Idol obsession Adam Lambert, whose “is he or isn’t he” gay controversy is DOA.

Interesting, though, that the article is ostensibly about the recent Neil Patrick Harris effect – wherein “He crossed the Rubicon. He did the ‘sudden death’ play. Supposedly you come out and your career is over. He came out and his career is in better shape than it ever was” – and yet carries a sidebar pairing Lambert with Bowie, Liberace, and Prince – two flamboyant straight men who managed to plausibly deny any actual homosexual tendencies and a gay man in deep denial who was finally outed by his own lifestyle.

Essentially, NPH is the only example to date of the mythological Rubicon-crossing that Lambert is currently forging through.

And, not every hot, talented, triple-threat gay guy was Doogie Howser.

(from my stalkee J. Clifton on Twitter, who may have just hinted at having a farcical virtual Tori Amos listening party with me next month, the mere thought of which slays me. Oh, the list of bloggers in this country I could get into trouble with (Jett, I am looking at you).)

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about you or me.

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This post is about three things Crushing Krisis has habitually avoided for a number of years – snap reactions to current events, personal opinions on politics, and sex.

Maybe this September CK will be about getting out of my comfort zone?

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Today’s morning Metro declares “Bloggers face calls for Palin restraint” – which, hilariously, could refer to bloggers backing off of any number of major Palin-related embarrassments that arose over the weekend – have you heard the one about how she fired the local officials that didn’t support her bid for Mayor? – but clearly pertains to the unplanned announcement of the unplanned pregnancy of her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol.

I do feel a certain amount of restraint is due on this matter. Obama himself yesterday reminded the press that family is off limits. It wouldn’t be fair to make Bristol the focus of partisan crossfire, nor is her pregnancy a reason to assail the personal family values of her mother.

What we should not be restraining ourselves on is how Bristol’s pregnancy pertains to actual campaign issues, and to the poor political judgment of her mother Sarah Palin and her partner John McCain.

Make no mistake – Sarah Palin is a woman, but she does not support women. She does not support their right to choose, and furthermore she is a figurehead in a party that largely supports abstinence-only sexual education – something that Pennsylvania’s typically beloved governor Ed Rendell just accepted funding for on the state level.

Let’s me be very clear: abstinence-only sex ed does not work.

I could state this as a matter of personal opinion. I could even state it based on data that supports the assertion.

However, allow me to state it based on the fact that I was a peer educator for four very defining years of my life – high school.

In those four years I believed, practiced, and taught that abstinence was the best possible decision for a high school student when it came to sex. However, I also believed and taught that abstinence is not the only option, just like pregnancy doesn’t only result from missionary position vaginal intercourse.

Teenagers don’t come pre-equipped with this information. Someone needs to communicate it to them, or else they wind up as misinformed adults who think the withdrawal method is a valid way to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease, or who think they can’t get pregnant if they have sex just before or during or after their period, or who don’t realize that mutual masturbation or trading oral sex can deliver sperm just as effectively as intercourse, or who can’t recite that the four bodily fluids that transmit HIV are blood, semen, vaginal fluid, and breast milk.

That’s why teens need sex education, and why the best sex education is often supported by peer education. Peers are not afraid to talk about condoms, whether it’s how to put them on or how they feel. They are are not afraid to disclose facts that parents don’t know or are afraid to admit: that sex is about a lot more than intercourse, and that teens can abstain from any or all of it while still developing and affirming their sexual identity.

Many teens are put in the position where their abstinence is no longer an option, let alone their best or only option. That situation is different for each teen, and it’s not the place of the mainstream media or political bloggers to contemplate what that situation was for Bristol Palin.

However, if all teens – Bristol included – received education on contraceptives that was supported by their peers and parents, they could be better protected from pregnancy, and from the risk of disease.

And, let me ask you, how would this be playing out differently if the headlines blared, “Bristol Palin: HIV Positive”?

That’s just as likely a result not only of her actions, but of the ignorance of her mother and the Republican party. Birth control is not just about birth. Pharmaceutical birth control is about regulating the body, and physical barrier protection is about just that – protecting yourself.

Sarah Palin does not care about any of that, and by extension, neither does the Republican party.

This dissonance is an example of the ultimate failure of the GOP – how they barely practice what they preach, and even in practice the preaching tends to fail. And it’s a single issue indicative of all the reasons McCain and Palin are the wrong choice to lead our nation.

Forget Bristol. Forget, even, that Palin is pro-life, as that is an issue equal parts personal and political.

Remember that Palin wants to swap out sex-education programs for abstinence-only programs.

Remember that Palin supports creationism being co-taught with evolution.

Remember that Palin believes global warming may not be entirely a man-made phenomenon, and Palin also believes global warming might not even being happening.

Remember that Sarah Palin does not feel that crimes motivated by discrimination against sexual orientation should be classified as hate crimes, because in her opinion “all heinous crime is based on hate.”

Remember that in Sarah Palin’s opinion the message written on my door last month – the cat shit shoved into my home – was motivated by normal hate. And so was the deaths of Matthew Sheppard and Larry King. Not hate based on bias, on fear, on lack of acceptance. Not hate that requires specific regulation and punishment to dissuade others from acting on it. Just regular, run-of-the-mill hate that wasn’t meant to threaten me based upon my identity, real or assumed.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care about women, teenagers, or our planet. And she doesn’t care about me.

A vote for John McCain is a vote that endorses all of those positions – the policies of a party that’s no longer just assaulting logic, but outright denying it.

Bristol Palin is just one small example – teach abstinence, knowing that isn’t effective but claiming that it’s more moral, and when the teaching (and the associated morals) fail convert that failure into success by endorsing the family values that will raise and love that unplanned baby, and support that unwed mother.

Nevermind that not every young mother in the nation has a determined state governor for a mom. Nevermind that for every potential baby there is also potential for another life marked by HIV. Nevermind the implicit failure of abstinence-based education in the very home of the potential Vice President who supports it.

Nevermind?

No.

And that is why we cannot and will not restrain ourselves.

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(A big thank you to Five Thirty Eight for planting this kernel, and for many of the links.)

Imagine There’s No Heaven

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When I was in grade school a frequent topic of conversation and consternation was heaven.

As the Born Agains would have us believe, every thought we had or action we performed – from doing math to running on the playground to watching television at night – had a direct relationship to our eventual destination. Heaven. So, we ought to pay good attention to every decision we made, lest we get diverted from said destination, thus sharing the fate of the gays, Jews, catholics, &c.

It mostly seemed like bunk to me from the start – did god really care which version of the Our Father I recited, so long as I was still name-checking him? Or, to put a finer point on it, did he mind if I listened to a tape of the B-52’s Cosmic Thing on the bus to our field trip?

I didn’t think so, but my principal did. He, and the entire staff of the school, shared that same opinion about all popular music, which increasingly lead me to rebel in tiny ways, like asking if we could pray for Gloria Estefan when she had her big accident (“we don’t pray for those people”) and writing The Immaculate Collection as my favorite album in a survey for class (“it’s Conception, and it’s not an album, Peter” … “No, not this one”).

If you think you understand where they were coming from – that the B-52’s and Gloria Estefan and Madonna were actively sexual and inappropriate for grade school – then you’re only seeing a symptom of their insanity, rather than the depths to which it ran.

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I was a precocious reader, and by fourth grade I had exhausted the Nancy Drews and every other Young Adult novel in the school library. My mom, who was in danger of being run out of house and home by fueling my voracious reading habit with monthly trips to the book store and weekly trips to the library, decided I could start reading her books as long as she read them first to screen for anything truly inappropriate.

At the time my mother (and most of America, I suppose) was on a heavy Stephen King kick. All the classics – Pet Cemetery, It, The Stand, and every other one that wound up as a movie. Some of them she rightfully screened from me for a year or two, but others she passed along.

One was The Eyes of the Dragon, which was not horror so much as a dark fantasy. Or, at least that’s what I remember from the first 20-or-so pages, because after that it was snatched away from me (on yet another field trip) by a teacher.

“Where did you get this?”

“From my mother?”

“You shouldn’t steal books from your mother.”

“I didn’t steal it, she gave it to me to read on the bus.”

The teacher clearly did not believe me, but my mother – as always – came to my defense. “He’s a smart kid,” I imagine she argued, “and he needs stimulation.”

Of course, they couldn’t be trusted to trust my mother, and so I received long, personalized sermons from everyone from my teacher to the janitor about why reading Stephen King books was a bad idea. Why would I want to jeopardize my spot in heaven for some gory horror novel? It just didn’t make sense.

Well, they were at least right about that. Every time I thought I had them figured out they’d find a new way to paint me into a decidedly unheavenly corner. Reading fantasy books was frowned upon if the fantasy wasn’t directly derived from god. GI Joes were not an appropriate toy, because they had guns (nevermind that they all supported Iraq #1, and I’m sure Iraq #2 as well). And, AIDs was a plague the gays deserved, and anyone else who caught it was just collateral damage.

It was around the time of that last one that I decided I was definitely not going to be a Born Again Christian.

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So, yes, they talked a lot about heaven. Or, at least, a lot about getting into heaven. Not so much about heaven itself.

It seemed strange to me, that they were so focused on getting to a place they didn’t know much about. It seemed analogous to begging your mother to go to an amusement park without knowing how many loops the roller coasters had.

(Clearly my Stephen King reading had left me a little remedial in studying up on the concept of Faith.)

(Or, maybe I’m just not wired that way.)

Gradually, I started to make my own concept of heaven that would match all of the tedious effort they put into getting there.

The whole point of heaven, it seemed, was to be awesome. Clearly it was always blue-skied. All of the food would taste great. You would never have to sleep, and you could re-watch television shows you missed by mistake.

(Yes, heaven imported TiVo from the future. Heaven is that awesome.)

God, I decided, was sortof a hard-ass – what, with all the smiting and sending Jesus to pal around on Earth for three decades just to get himself killed. I mean, the “only begotten son” bit just didn’t ring true to me – god was definitely the same Old Testament hard-ass he always was, he just looked softer because he had a kid. I had seen the same thing on television.

God was effectively Gargamel – old, batty, mean, and chasing around little people who barely came up to his shin with a big club. But, in a wacky, non-threatening, recurringly eposodic way.

By contrast, Jesus was definitely John Lennon, walking around singing “Imagine” – or, if you asked very nicely, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” It definitely put his “bigger than Jesus” comment into a particularly ironic light, I thought.

However, I determined that the greatest feature of heaven was that you would know everything anyone ever thought about you. Not in an intrusive way … just a tally. Like, Leah, the girl I had a crush on for four years, would be able to see every distinct time I thought about her. Or Victor, the bully, would be able to discern the times I feared him versus the times I just felt sorry for him.

It made a certain amount of sense to me; if you were going to spend the rest of your life mingling through the clouds, you ought to be on equal footing with each other.

(Slightly later I amended the list to include people being able to get a tally of how many times people thought of them while having an orgasm, with a second tally indicating how many times that was during an orgasm had with someone other than you.)

(In retrospect, that might not be the kind of thing you find out in heaven.)

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I still remember our last exchange with anyone on the staff in the sharpest possible focus. It was after our sixth grade end of year assembly, and we were all running around behind the stage drinking carbonated punch, which I claimed made me feel a little tipsy since I had never drank anything carbonated before in my life.

My mother was talking to the wife of the school’s principal, and as I ran past her I overhead this snippet of conversation…

Mom: “It would be nice if you held some events where they could just socialize together.”

Wife: “Oh, yes, that’s always nice.”

Mom: “Maybe even something like a dance.”

Wife: “A dance?”

Mom: “You know, with music? Around this age the kids in public schools and Catholic schools start to have dances.”

Wife: “Oh no. No. No no. We could never…”

I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I zoomed out of earshot, inebriated on bubbles. Or maybe my mother excused herself and ushered me out to the car. Either way, it was the last time I ever set foot in the building, or spoke to any of them other than my best friend Monica.

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I still dream about them sometimes, about the teachers and janitors and principal’s sons. Sometimes I dream that I am 10-years-old but still myself, desperately trying to escape their serpentine corridors without notice. Sometimes I dream that they invite me to a twentieth reunion and I try in vain to explain to them how they made me so hateful and distrustful of religion.

Sometimes I dream that they all wound up being gay, and that they each confessed to me in turn that they were afraid they would never get to heaven.

I really hope they all get to heaven, since their whole lives have been dedicated to the practice – to the exclusion of school dances, Stephen King novels, and Madonna albums.

I wonder if when they get there they’ll see how much time I’ve spent worrying about them.

I wonder if they’ll care.

Twist & Shout

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Early in college i had an ongoing argument with my at-the-time only male friend, whose name i will decline to share because i’m still hoping for an appointment when he becomes president, or interplanetary tyrant, or whatever he’s going to turn into in a decade or two.

The argument was about which was a better, more valuable life experience: having great sex or a attending a great concert.

Obviously a lot of work goes into both events, and their quality can vary wildly.

My friend would argue that sex is a participatory, tactile experience; part of amazing sex is under your control. Amazing sex was uniquely personal played upon the dynamic between two people, possibly lovers or friends, but maybe just strangers.

He completely acknowledged that concerts could be amazing – better, even, than some sex – but that the best concert would never hold up against the best sex.

I would argue that a concert involves a connection not only between the performer and the audience member, but amongst all of the members of the audience to the music. I acknowledged that not all concerts were good, and that the concert-going experience is largely out of the control of the listener.

However, an amazing concert was much greater in scope than a single sexual experience – it was an alignment of thousands of details into a perfectly realized artistic expression that could be could be recalled (and recorded) by many – sometimes thousands – of other spectators.

With a few years of retrospect i see that our creation of a concerts/sex dichotomy was an artificial one. It’s rare to have to choose between the two, and over the course of a life they both have to compete with other sorts of memories to be counted as a “best ever” life experience.

However, i still think i won the argument by default because amazing life experiences beg to be shared, retold, and and transformed into personal mythology, and most concerts filll that role better than most sex.

Also, bands are much more open to reading praise for their performance on the internet than former lovers.