Tag Archives: romance

September 14, 2016 · 6:42 am

Another Manuscript Complete!

Just a quick announcing today and then I promise, I’ll get back to talking about fun, fuzzy topics like hugs and orgasms. I have an announcement to make and one that always puts a smile on my face. I, Jack Fisher, finished another manuscript. That’s right! Another elaborate tale from my creative (and at times perverse) mind is complete and it feels so good.

I love this part of the creative process. I like to think of it as the writing equivalent of afterglow. You did all the foreplay. You worked through each position. You achieved what you wanted. It may or may not have gotten a bit messy and uncomfortable at times. You still did it though. You finished the job and it’s a damn good feeling.

It’s a great feeling. It kind of reminds me of some other great feeling that involves physical exertion, intense focus, a touch of creativity, and intense satisfaction that makes you want to light up a cigarette and smile. I’m not sure which feeling it is right now, but I’m guessing most of you can figure it out for yourselves.

This story, which is still untitled, ended up being longer and more elaborate than I planned. I announced it months ago as a sci-fi thriller mixed with a little romance and erotica. I originally intended it to be short, focused, and concise. As is often the case, those intentions got thrown away faster than a used condom once I got into the dirty details of the story.

Overall, the final word count ended up being over 73,000 words. Without any revisions, that would make it the second longest book I’ve written after “Skin Deep.” Make no mistake though. There will be revisions. That’s a big part of the writing process. Anyone who writes a story with more plot than “Go Dog Go” knows this.

Revisions can be tedious and cumbersome. Like most pranks involving alcohol and fireworks, there are some concepts in a story that seem like good ideas at the time. Then, you read them over with a fresh set of eyes and question how sober you were when you came up with that idea.

I’ve certainly done my share of revising. Every book I’ve written has been subject to extensive revisions. I think “The Escort and the Gigolo” ended up being several thousand words shorter after I got done with it. When you’re trying to add polish to a story, especially one that emphasizes erotic and romantic elements, you want it to shine.

This book will be no different. It’s one of those projects that I’ll probably keep on the back-burner for a while until I can get a publisher or an editor to help me finalize it. That’s something I’m still working on with my other manuscripts. At the moment, it’s the biggest obstacle that stands between me and becoming a marginally successful writer.

I’m still wondering if I should pay for “Writers Market” services to find myself a publisher. I’m also still waiting to hear back from publishers like Crimson Frost on my previous submissions. Waiting sucks, but good things are worth waiting for. I hope this is one of them.

So now I have yet another completed project in my portfolio. In my line of work, you can never have too much. That also means I’m just about ready to start my next project, which I’ve already discussed in a previous post. I hope to start that soon once the afterglow wears off.

As always, I’m interested in what others have to say about my ambitions. I’m not a success yet. I’m an aspiring writer, not a successful one. That means I don’t have the luxury of turning away advice, criticism, and general comments. I know this blog gets about as much traffic as store that sells only used gum, but I’m willing to put in the work to make this endeavor a success. Another completed manuscript is just another part of the process.

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September 13, 2016 · 6:09 am

Being A Hugger In This Day And Age

I’d like to get personal again. I’ve already confessed to sleeping naked. I’ve also made clear that I see foreplay as the highest of virtues. Now, I’d like to highlight another important trait of mine, one I actually mentioned in my post on foreplay. This trait isn’t as lurid or sexy as others, but it’s one of those traits that has the potential to be in the right context. So what is it? Well, here it is:

I, Jack Fisher, am a hugger.

Yes, I understand that it’s one of the least macho things you can do these days. It’s right up there with wearing makeup and crying over soap operas. It’s a taboo and a bad one at that. I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know why it happened. For reasons that defy logic, understanding, and basic human nature, it actually became cool to be a callous, detached, unemotional douche-bag at some point. I usually try to research the complex cultural reasons behind such a movement. This time, however, I found next to nothing.

The only educated guess I can make, which is pushing it because I’m not that educated, is that society’s collective fears and scorn over men sexually assaulting women went a tad overboard. It’s a perfectly legitimate concern, wanting to discourage sexual assault and sexual harassment in general. It’s a terrible crime so I can’t blame society for overdoing it, but there’s a fine line between fighting crime and turning people into callous douche-bags.

From a purely evolutionary standpoint, there’s no reason why hugs and intimate contact should be discouraged. According to Dr. Fahad  Basheer at Collective Evolution, there are at least 11 medical benefits to hugs. These benefits include, but aren’t limited to, relieving pain, elevating mood, alleviating depression, improving immune function, and reducing stress. If hugging were a pharmaceutical drug, it would be hailed as wonder drugs and probably banned by the DEA.

These health benefits, much like the health benefits of orgasms, strongly indicate that we’re hard-wired for hugs. Nature wants us to hug each other. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lover, a family member, or a stranger. Our biology, being so basic and crude, doesn’t care where the hug comes from. It still benefits us.

The benefits aren’t even restricted to humans. Nature is rarely that specific. Animals do it to and they seem to gain similar benefits.

My parents and siblings seemed to understand that. I come from a family that is big on hugging. It’s not necessarily a cultural thing. It’s just how we are. However, I notice when I go out into the modern world, I’m terrified of making too much intimate contact with others. I don’t think that’s healthy.

I don’t exactly know where this fear comes from, but I have a pretty strong feeling it started during my time in the daily prison sentence that was public school. I don’t know if anyone knows this, but public schools have a big problem with students touching each other in any way. How big a problem? Well, in 2013, a student in Georgia got suspended for a year for hugging his teacher.

That’s right. A school punished a kid for hugging someone. Let that sink in for a moment. Hugging is not like sex. It doesn’t cause pregnancy. It doesn’t cause disease. It doesn’t cause emotional distress of any kind. It has so many natural benefits that transcend species, yet we punish kids for doing it. Then, we wonder why they grow up to have emotional problems and personality disorders.

Now the school I went to never did something this extreme, but I do remember from a young age hearing all sorts of lectures about harassment and inappropriate touching, as they called it. I may have been a dumb-ass kid, but even I knew what they were getting at. They wanted to discourage kids from getting too sexual when they were too young and immature.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth repeating that I was a dumb-ass kid in a whole building full of them. How are we supposed to know what constitutes inappropriate touching? A hug for some people might as well be slap on the ass with a wooden spoon for someone else. We never learned much about context and communication. Most of the time, we just got a thorough run-down of all the terrible punishments we can expect if we ever got caught inappropriately touching someone.

Being kids who still had some respect for authority figures, we naturally focus on the punishments. We don’t want to get in trouble. We don’t want to explain to our parents why we got suspended or sent to detention. Naturally, we’re going to play it safe and just avoid it all together.

As kids, fear of punishment tends to make us overcompensate. It’s just human nature. Again, it’s caveman logic. We’re not going to just stand a few feet away from a shady area where a lion might be hiding. We’re going to make sure we’re a long ways away from that danger.

It doesn’t just affect us as kids in school either. After spending our entire childhood terrified of making too much intimate contact with other human beings, we carry that terror into the adult world, both in college campuses and in the workplace.

We currently live in an era where harassment doesn’t even need to occur. There only needs to be an accusation that a man assaulted a woman and that’s it. No trial. No jury. No indisputable evidence of any kind. Just the accusation is enough to assure guilt in the eyes of the public. This leads to legal clusterfucks like the Duke Lacrosse ordeal and the false UVA rape case.

So as a man, it’s dangerous for me to hug someone. It could cost me my reputation, my freedom, and a boatload of time and legal fees. It only takes one woman to misinterpret a hug, accuse me of assault, and my life is over.

This actually played out very recently. Earlier this year, I went on a date with a girl to see the movie, X-men: Apocalypse, which should come as no surprise to anyone. I really liked this girl. I thought she was cute. I thought we had a good connection. However, I didn’t know how she would react to a hug so I was fucking terrified of getting too intimate too fast. That may have worked against me because we never went on a second date.

As a self-professed hugger, how the hell am I to function in a world like this? How am I supposed to find love, affection, and intimacy with others outside my immediate family? This modern world sends so many conflicting messages. We’re more connected than ever thanks to technology, but a single hug can get us sued for sexual assault if we hug the wrong person.

I don’t like this trend. I don’t think it’s good for huggers like me or people in general. We’ve become too callous and isolated. We’re scared to death from a young age, albeit indirectly, into avoiding contact with one another. It goes against our own nature. It goes against our own humanity. I may never live to see the day where hugging a perfect stranger won’t get you sued, but I’d like to aspire to such a future, both through my love of hugs and through my books.

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September 12, 2016 · 6:58 am

Important Life Lesson From An X-men Comic: Don’t Skip Foreplay

Growing up, we all learn valuable life lessons from various sources. For some people, they get many of their lessons from reruns of “Leave It To Beaver.” Others get it from new episodes of “Modern Family.” Others still will cite the works of the Bible, J. R. R. Tolkien, William Shakespeare, or Weird Al Yankovick. Not all convey the same lessons. Not all of those lessons are healthy either. The point is we derive them from our own sources.

For me, I’ve derived most of my lessons from superhero comics. I think I’ve already made that clear on this blog. I’ve used superhero comics to cite sex-positive heroes like Starfire and to demonstrate the worst possible example of a love triangle gone wrong. Today, I’d like to cite superhero comics again to convey another valuable lesson that I think every man and woman can appreciate.

What is that lesson, you ask? How valuable can it possibly be? Well, during times like this when our culture is driving us farther and farther apart, this lesson cannot be more vital. So to all the men and women out there, young and old, gay or straight, please heed this lesson. It comes courtesy of the X-men once more and from Ororo Munro, aka Storm, so you know it’s not something you should ignore.

stormforeplay

This scene comes courtesy of Amazing X-men #1, a comic released back in late 2013. The woman with the red hair is Firestar. She’s a new teacher for the X-men. The short guy with the manliest mutton chops in the universe is Wolverine, a man whose romantic history alone is more epic than any other hero. The woman next to him, who makes pretty damn clear that foreplay is not to be skipped, is Storm.

That’s right. The same woman who controls weather, unleashes hurricanes, and further enhances Halle Berry’s sex appeal has a very important policy with respect to foreplay. It’s a policy we should all adopt. Hell, let’s make it a brand new commandment. Let’s all agree that whatever gods or goddesses we worship have delivered upon us a new revelation that shall henceforth be among mankind’s highest morals.

Thoust Shalt NOT Skip Foreplay

The human race can’t agree on much. I think we can make an exception here. In the X-men comics, Storm was once worshiped as a goddess. It’s not just because she can end droughts, kick-start tornado, and shock your ass with lightning if you get on her bad side. She also looks like this, in case you’ve forgotten.

Would any sane heterosexual man or homosexual woman dare deny this woman foreplay? Unless you’re itching for a lightning bolt to the spine, I think not. She is not one to do anything callously or half-hearted. If she’s going to let anyone into her panties, they damn well better put some effort into it. That means foreplay is right up there with air in terms of importance.

It’s a damn good policy from a damn good character. There’s a damn good reason why Storm is played by the likes of Halle Berry and why she’s widely seen as one of the greatest female superheroes of all time. She commands respect. She exudes charisma. The fact she’s also sexy as hell is a nice bonus too. So when she says foreplay is that important, it’s a lesson we ought to heed.

It doesn’t just apply to one gender as well. Ladies, I’m going to let you in on a little secret about men that really shouldn’t be a secret in the first place. Here it is:

Men really enjoy foreplay.

I know. Shocking, isn’t it? Well, it shouldn’t be. I don’t know why it became popular that men don’t appreciate foreplay. It’s a bad joke, the idea that men just want to bend a woman over a dirty table and get right to the humping. I’m sure there are men who do that. I’m sure there are women who do that too. It’s not the template on which most men build a satisfying intimate encounter.

As a man, I can say without reservation that I love foreplay. Hell, what’s not to love? The kissing, the touching, the sentiment all work in conjunction to build a satisfying experience. I love it even more when the woman puts just as much effort into it. I can’t speak for all men, but I think I speak for plenty when I say we like to share in the work.

As a point of reference for the ladies, allow me to paint a clearer picture. Look back at that snapshot of Amazing X-men #1. Then, remember for a moment that Hugh Jackman played Wolverine in the X-men movies and he looked like this while doing it.

Ask yourself honestly, ladies. Would you skip the foreplay with a man like that? I’m not gay, but even I’d want to get a feel for those manly ass muscles.

Now please don’t make light of the message I’m sending here. Some may read this post and think of it as just some naughty satire from an aspiring erotica writer. It’s not. I really do believe that this is a vital lesson for men and women alike. Foreplay matters. Intimacy matters. Don’t skip it.

We live in an increasingly detached world. We also live in a world where one too many gestures can be classified as harassment. It’s making us reluctant to embrace each other. As someone who is a hugger by nature, this worries me. Even WebMD agrees with me and Storm that foreplay is vital.

Human beings are social creatures by nature. We seek intimate contact with one another and not just for sex. So whether you’re gay, straight, man, woman, trans, or something in between, please heed the lessons of Storm and the X-men. Do not skip the foreplay. Enjoy the intimate company of your partners. It’s good for your body and your soul.

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September 10, 2016 · 10:57 am

An Idea For My Next Book

After spending the week discussing distressing topics like circumcision, including a distressing anecdote about my own circumcision, I’m ready to move onto topics that don’t completely kill the mood. I’m trying to be a successful romance/erotica writer, damn it! I need to keep that mood sexy on this blog. Maybe this will help.

With that in mind, I thought I’d provide a quick update on my current work. For the past couple months, I’ve been writing the first draft to a sci-fi romance story. It’s a story that has turned out to be much longer and much bigger than I initially planned. That tends to happen with my stories. I start writing them, but they go in directions I don’t expect, hopefully for the better.

Despite the size of this story, I can say that it’s almost over. I hope to finish it within the next few days. Even with the end of another book in sight, I like to think ahead to my next book. It’s just how my mind works. It’s not enough to just finish something. I have to have another project waiting in the wings that’ll help me improve. I’ve done this ever since I wrote Child of Orcus. Part of getting good at any craft is always seeking to improve.

As it turns out, the stuff I do on this blog actually helps me explore new ideas. By writing about certain topics, be they insights into sex-positive comic book characters or my love of sleeping naked, it gets my brain in the right state, among other parts of my body. One topic in particular got me thinking.

A while back, I explored the issue of jealousy. I asked whether or not this was a truly natural emotion or a byproduct of our cultural and societal attitudes. It’s not a question I expected to answer. It’s one of those questions that can’t really be answered for everybody, but does make us think differently about concepts of romance.

This leads into this new idea. I don’t have a title for it yet (although I am open to suggestions), but I feel like this is an idea I should pursue. Here’s the scenario:

We have two people, a man and a woman who married young and did all the right things. They love each other. They support each other. They both have fulfilling careers that keep them busy. By all accounts, they followed society’s rules towards relationships, sex, and romance. Despite this, they’re still deeply unsatisfied.

Did I mention that the man works as a body guard at high end clubs that cater to beautiful women and aspiring Hollywood stars? Did I also mention that the woman works as trainer to top male athletes? If not, I guess I should mention it because this line of work surrounds them with all sorts of beautiful people and a lot of temptation. Think about it. If your work involves hard-partying women and sexy male athletes, wouldn’t you be tempted?

Some people can brush off that temptation. These two can’t. Following the unspoken rules that society says they should follow just isn’t enough for them. It leaves them feeling stressed, frustrated, and incomplete.

Finally, they come to one inescapable conclusion. They can’t be monogamous. It just isn’t how they’re wired. They need to step outside these rules. They need to explore the temptation that surrounds them. If for no other reason, they need to see if this fulfills them.

This leads them to join a special private club in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a club run by a mysterious woman who claims she can make their love stronger by immersing them in a world of sex, decadence, and excess. It sounds crazy. Hell, it’s the outright antithesis of the rules they so ardently followed. So why not give it a try?

This is the main base of the story. Larger details, like the names of the characters or the names of the club, haven’t been fleshed out yet. I intend to wait until I finish my current book before I work on issues like that. Until then, I feel like this is the story I want to tell next. This is the concept I want to explore.

There are already so many romance/erotica stories out there about two people falling in love and facing challenges to their relationship. Hell, I’ve written some of those stories myself. Sure, they’re fun and titillating in their own right. I want to try a different route. I want to tell a different kind of love story.

I admit it is counter-intuitive, the idea that two people can love each other and still give into temptation. It’s basically the basis of 95 percent of all bad pornos. I think there’s a more meaningful story to tell. I think there are more relevant issues to explore. I hope to do that with this book. I also hope I can get a publisher to take a chance on it.

I’ll provide additional details and insight later on. Until then, I’m always happy to hear back from others. What do you think of this idea? Is it something you’re interested in reading? Is it something you’re interested in discussing? I’m only an aspiring writer at the moment. That’s code for, “I’m not a success and have a lot of free time.” So I’m more than happy to chat about this or any other sexy/romantic topic.

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September 6, 2016 · 6:35 am

Profiles in Prudishness: John Harvey Kellogg

History is full of crazy, if not deranged, periods of sexual repression. It comes and goes like seasons, but like hurricanes in Florida or blizzards in New York, some seasons are more severe than others. Every nation, society, and culture has their own unique sexual climate so-to-speak. America, contrary to everyone on Fox News, is no exception.

I’ve discussed current trends in sexual repression on this blog before, from the myths of porn addiction to the toxic proclivities that hinder intimacy in modern society. While it may seem bad now, it’s child’s play compared to what our society has experienced in the past.

To give you just a faint idea of how extreme sexual repression got at one point in American, I’d like to do a quick profile of one of this country’s Grand Poobah of prudes, John Harvey Kellogg. If his name sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same Kellogg behind the breakfast cereal brands that most of us eat or have eaten at some point in our lives. By the time you learn about the man behind the meal, you may never look at cereal the same way again.

So who was John Harvey Kellogg? Well, before his name became synonymous with breakfast food, he was a respected doctor and an active participant in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.However, as is often the case with the devoutly religious, he took his religion more seriously than most and this is what led him down the road to repression.

By and large, his views didn’t differ much from most other ardent Seventh-Day Adventists of the time. This is a religious sect that is repressive in more than just sexuality. It recommends a strict vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, and regular exercise. Kellogg was said to have adhered to this regiment, but he just had to take it several steps further.

Rather than go into the complex theological and psychological underpinnings of Kellogg’s personal views, I’ll just come out and say it as simply as I can. John Harvey Kellogg was obsessed with masturbation. I’m not talking the kind of obsession that leads to 10-hour masturbation contests. I’m talking about the kind of obsession that drove one man to make it his life’s mission to stop men and boys from masturbating.

It sounds like a bad joke from a Sunday morning sermon at a Mormon Church, but it’s true. John Harvey Kellogg really obsessed over masturbation. He wasn’t alone either. During the late 19th and early 20th century, America found itself in a good old fashioned moral panic over masturbation.

Was it logical? No. Did it have any science behind it? Of course not. Moral panics don’t work that way. They don’t have to. It just has to involve a large number of people being totally convinced that all the ills in the world are caused by one thing and one thing only, as though the human condition is ever that simple.

Let’s face it though. We’re human. We like easy answers. Back then, for reasons that religion and bad science helped fuel, masturbation was that easy answer. As such, John Harvey Kellogg took it upon himself to rid the world of this horrific vice.

So how did he plan on accomplishing this? Well, this is where his famous breakfast cereal comes into play. True to some of the other tenants of his church, he sough to use diet as a means of curbing the desire pleasure one’s self. He believed corn flakes would temper dangerous passions and limit the dangerous desires that lead to masturbation. Absolutely none of this is made up.

Remember this the next time you eat cereal with the Kellogg brand. While times have changed, its founder really wanted you to not masturbate. He thought diet and nutrition would accomplish that. The fact that dildos, lube, erotic fiction, and internet porn are still major industries shows just how badly he failed. However, Kellogg didn’t stop at diet. Remember, this guy was really obsessed with masturbation.

When diet and nutrition just weren’t enough, Kellogg favored an even greater extreme. In his seminal (pun totally intended) work, Plain Facts for Old and Young, he also recommended using circumcision as a means to discourage masturbation. Want to know why circumcision is so common among men in America? Well, you have Mr. Kellogg to thank for that.

Before he and his kind came along, circumcision was primarily a Jewish rite. It was rarely performed for medical reasons and was fairly uncommon. However, that changed once masturbation became public enemy number one. The idea was that the presence of the foreskin made masturbation too easy and they can’t have that. If someone is going to self-indulge, they need to make it challenging.

Once again, Cracked.com does an admirable job describing how these fears shaped the modern world that emerged in the 20th century. They also quote one of Mr. Kellogg’s recommendations for using circumcision. If you’re a man and you have a weak stomach, you might want to close this page.

5 Insane Ways Fear of Masturbation Shaped the Modern World

“The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.”

Still with me? Are you done cringing? Good, because as a man, it is pretty distressing. The idea of a young boy or a baby going through this procedure should make anyone feel queasy. It’s one thing to just preach and lecture others on the evils of enjoying one’s self on one’s own terms. It’s quite another when it involves involuntary mutilation.

This is how far sexual repression can go. People like John Harvey Kellogg can become so obsessed with this one act of sexual expression that they are willing to actually torture and mutilate others to stop it. We still see that happening today with female circumcision, an equally horrifying process that I’ll save for another blog post. However, even today’s ardent prudes would cringe at what Kellogg recommended.

The anti-masturbation crusade of the late 19th century still affects America to this day and not just because of the lack of foreskins on many men. At the time, masturbation was part of a moral panic that believed this one particular vice would destroy society. It set a pattern for future panics.

We had panics over alcohol, which resulted in Prohibition and the crime it inspired. We had panics over marijuana, which are still being fought today. Now, thanks to the likes of Pamela Anderson, we may be on the cusp of a new moral panic over porn.

In every case, there’s no inherent logic to the moral panic. In the same way that the anti-porn crusaders of today shroud their panic under the guise of public health, John Harvey Kellogg did the same with his pro-corn flakes, pro-mutilation policies for curbing masturbation. It’s all for “public health” or “the welfare of children.”

Now it’s easy to ridicule men like Kellogg for their obscenely extreme views on sex, vice, and overall fun. However, I think that ridicule needs to be tempered to some degree because men like him, as well as women like Pamela Anderson, are very likely sincere in their beliefs to some degree. They’ve really convinced themselves that these vices are a problem.

Again, there’s no logic to this conviction, but they don’t care. They just need to grasp at whatever evidence, be it anecdotal or completely made up, will affirm this conviction. John Harvey Kellogg had a valid excuse to some extent because he lived during a time when our understanding of biology, physiology, and sexuality was still limited. However, in the age of the internet and Wikipedia, the anti-sex crusaders of today have no excuses.

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September 3, 2016 · 8:27 am

Porn and the Hypocrisy of Pamela Anderson

Let’s face it. We’ll forgive celebrities for damn near anything, so long as they keep entertaining us. It’s a flaw in society. It’s a flaw in us, as a species. Our caveman brains will bend over backwards and even beyond that in order to rationalize our love/obsession/fixation with celebrities. We don’t care if the President himself is getting blowjobs while in office. We just want them to keep entertaining us.

However, there is one sin that even our flawed society has a hard time overlooking. It’s a sin so egregious that our brains will simply not allow us to ignore it. It is the alpha and omega of dick moves. It’s so disgusting and distressing that no amount of entertainment value can make up for it. So what is this horrendous sin? It comes down to one foul word:

Hypocrisy

We’ll forgive Olympians for cheating. We’ll forgive athletes for animal cruelty. Until very recently, we even forgave spousal abuse to some extent. We just can’t handle hypocrisy. It’s one thing to just lie to our faces. We all deal with lies. We all lie to ourselves and others to some extent. We can understand that to some degree. It’s only when someone elevates themselves with that infuriating holier-than-thou  spirit, only to be guilty of it themselves, that we get truly outraged.

This week, famed Playboy star, Pamela Anderson, joined the infamous ranks of celebrities who either are revealed as hypocrites or willingly embrace it. In this case, Ms. Anderson did the latter. She penned an opinion piece in the Walls Street Journal denouncing the porn industry that made her rich, famous, and relevant. She took a page out of the playbook of every anti-sex crusader, calling porn a “public health crisis” and decrying the effects it has on its users.

Now, it’s one thing when some sexually repressed, overly uptight, puritanical moral crusader denounces porn. We expect that from those people are are happy to ignore them. There’s no law against being uptight or puritanical about sex, nor should there be. They’ve always existed in society and will continue to exist to some degree. We can tolerate that.

What Pamela Anderson does here is far more egregious because she’s denouncing the very thing that made her successful. If she were to pay back all the money she ever made from posing naked, acting sexy, or just giving men something to jerk off to, then she’d give her words some weight. As far as we know, Ms. Anderson is still living a luxurious, celebrity-style life and isn’t planning to give it up anytime soon.

It’s asinine, dishonest, and just plain ridiculous. It’s not a moral stand. It’s a joke. That’s what hypocrisy does. It takes an issue and removes any critical, substantive context from the conversation. It gets reduced to a case study in what an asshole someone is for having the audacity to claim moral superiority over others, despite not living up to those morals.

Now I admit that, as a teenage boy, I fantasized about Pamela Anderson. A lot of men did. She’s a beautiful woman and she used that beauty to get ahead. There’s nothing wrong with that. Hell, that’s the the entire premise of my book, Skin Deep. I doubt Ms. Anderson would ever read my book, but I think it would be pretty revealing for her because it confronts the impact of beauty and how we use it to our advantage.

It’s not so much a flaw in our society as it is a byproduct of our biology. We’re inclined to be attracted to things and people we find beautiful. It denotes health, vigor, energy. To condemn us for this attraction is to condemn the very mechanisms that keep us alive.

Those same mechanisms are what drive us to these irrational rationalizations about everything from sex to religion to politics to tastes in movies. If I had a chance to talk to Ms. Anderson (and avoid looking at her tits long enough), I’d try to talk to her about why she feels this way about the porn industry now. I don’t claim to be psychic, but human biology does often utilize certain patterns.

As I’ve explained before in previous posts, and will likely continue to do so again in future posts, our brains are not wired to be rational or logical. They are wired for two primary functions: survival and reproduction. If there’s a force that hinders both, then our brains will work as hard as possible to avoid or overcome it, even if it means resorting to hypocrisy.

Being such a social, empathetic species, mental distress caused by guilt is a powerful hindrance. Guilt can impact our ability to survive in that the distress makes us incapable of fighting off a lion or a bear. It’s also not an attractive quality to the opposite sex. Nobody really finds excessive guilt sexy, either in our species or any other. So guilt causes a lot of distress.

To avoid this distress, we’ll lie to ourselves. We’ll forge thoughts, memories, and beliefs in our minds that are completely detached from reality, but they’ll make us feel less guilty and distressed so we’ll accept them. That way, our brains can function again. We can function again.

I suspect that, as an aging woman with children and multiple failed marriages, Ms. Anderson does feel guilty to some degree. She may not admit it. Admitting guilt is right up there with getting open heart surgery from a hammer in terms of unpleasant experiences. By denouncing the industry that made her rich and calling it a “public health issue,” she eases her own distress. Her brain can function a bit better now. It’s selfish on some levels, but understandable on others because we’re just not wired to accept such a distressing state. We’ll do or think anything to escape it.

Now to those who read her article, take comfort in the knowledge that it contains little in terms of actual research into sexual addiction. This is still a topic that is poorly understood. However, given the ubiquitous nature of porn, we do know enough about it to conclude that Ms. Anderson’s assertions are bullshit.

According to the American Psychological Association, pornography does not meet the same criteria for addiction that would put it on the same level as cigarettes or alcohol. It can be damaging to some individuals, but you can say that about many addictions from biting your nails to getting tattoos. While we’re all wired for survival and reproduction, there are many variations of that wiring and sometimes that wiring means porn will be unhealthy for some people. By and large, though, it’s not harmful to most.

There’s still more research to be done and for Ms. Anderson, it still won’t be enough. Like creationists, vegetarians, or Bigfoot enthusiasts, there’s no amount of scientific evidence that will change their mind. Their brains just aren’t wired to accept it. Even so, that doesn’t make this level of hypocrisy any less egregious. She can say what she wants, but she can’t expect the words of a hypocrite to carry much weight on this or any other issue.

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September 2, 2016 · 9:31 am

How To Craft A Love Triangle That DOESN’T Suck

I’ve spent most of this week complaining about how much I despise love triangles and why they’re the worst invention since the concept of sparkling vampires. I’ve explained why they suck and singled out one that sucks the most. Well, now I’m done complaining.

My parents raised me to understand that complaints that aren’t followed up with solutions is nothing more than glorified bitching and moaning. I will not permit bitching and moaning on this blog. Instead, I’m going talk about solutions instead of problems. It’s a step 95 percent of complaints on the internet never bother to make. I’m taking that step here.

As much as I hate love triangles, I know they’re not going away. So long as people keep telling love stories, with or without vampires, love triangles are going to manifest in some form or another. Enews even did an article a while back ranking the “hottest” love triangles on TV. I contest their characterization of these love triangles, but I don’t deny their appeal.

It’s inevitable that plenty of these love triangles will be god-awful for the same reasons I described in previous posts. With that in mind, let me just say that this post isn’t about those. I’m directing this post to those yet-to-be-told stories that have some sliver of hope of being decent.

So how do we go about it? How do we utilize love triangles in a way that doesn’t destroy the story? It requires a little more work and effort on the part of the writer. Those who make porn parodies and fan fiction may not be inclined to do that extra work, but it’s definitely worth doing. There are enough bad love triangles as it stands. Do we really need another reminder?

The primary problem with love triangles, as a concept, is that it narrows the characters. It reduces them to serving singular, shallow roles that limits their development. If a character’s sole purpose is to serve as a source of tension for a particular romance, then that character has as much depth and appeal as a speed-bump. Since we want to inspire love and not road rage, it’s important to have a focused approach.

With this in mind, here are Jack Fisher’s four key tips for making a good love triangle.

1. Make sure the emotions between all parties involved are balanced.

Let’s face it. Lopsided victories are boring. Would a Rocky movie be entertaining if Rocky Balboa got his ass kicked in every fight? Even if you’re going to have a Biff Tanner somewhere in this story, make sure there’s some meaningful depth to the emotions involved here.

This applies to romances involving two men and one woman, two women and one man, or multiple men and multiple women of various sexual orientations. It’s vital, regardless of which body parts are involved. The emotions with everyone involved should be sincere. The people in the love triangle can’t just be attracted to one another. They have to have real, genuine passion for one another. If it’s not genuine, then it’s just creepy and misguided. Look at Wolverine in the X-men movies for proof of how bad this can get.

2. As a plot, a love triangle must be a secondary plot at most.

This isn’t as easy as it seems. I’ve noticed this in reading other romance stories and trying to craft my own. Whenever a love triangle enters the picture, it often comes to dominate the underlying plot of the story, so much so that it derails whatever major plot came before it.

I’ve seen this happen in fan fiction, comic books, animes, and erotic thrillers. The tension within a love triangle tends to consume the story, becoming one big distraction that keeps the audience from getting too engaged. That’s why a love triangle must always be, except in the rarest of cases, be a secondary plot.

This is challenging, but it is possible. Books like The Hunger Games and TV shows like True Blood (at least the first few seasons) are able to do this in a meaningful way. If done right, it can make stars out of Jennifer Lawrence and Anna Paquin superstars.

3. Don’t force the emotions. Let them manifest naturally.

This is actually easier than it sounds, but it can be tedious. I know this because I found myself taking a lot of extra steps when writing my book, Holiday Heat. That entire story is structured around a pseudo-love triangle of sorts, but no vampires are involved and there’s nobody resembling Biff Tanner. As such, I needed to add a few extra steps to develop the characters so that their emotions made sense.

This is critical because if a romance feels forced, then you’ll make the same mistake that Chris Claremont and the X-men movies made with Wolverine, essentially forcing emotions into a character for all the wrong reasons. If any character is going to have any genuine passion for another, it can’t just be for the hell of it.

4. The end result of a love triangle must be satisfying to all sides

This may sound hypocritical coming from an erotica writer, but try to make sure nobody gets screwed over too badly. This is what happened to X-men. This is what happened to Twilight. This is what happens with almost every bad love triangle. One character gets horribly screwed over and unless that character is a Biff Tanner type, it’s not going to be satisfying to the audience.

Most human beings who don’t have personality disorders tend to have an innate sense of justice. When we see injustice play out in the fictional world, it tends to upset us, just as it does when it occurs in the real world. So if there’s a character in a love triangle who doesn’t win the heart of his or her lover and gets unceremoniously cast off, then that’s not going to be satisfying. That’s going to be the literary equivalent of a dick move.

Again, this requires a bit of extra work. It means crafting a more complex plot wherein all parties involved achieve some kind of satisfying resolution to the emotional upheavals. It doesn’t always have to mean finding another love or forcing some other character to fill the void. Sometimes, it requires some extra layers to a plot, but it’s worth the effort if we, the audience, feel that everyone ends up satisfied on some level. It’s kind of sexy when you think about it.

So there you have it. Those our my four tips for making love triangles that don’t suck. I hope to employ them to some degree as I write more romance and erotica. I hope others can make use of them as well. This world has enough terrible love triangles. Let’s not create more. After Twilight, I think our civilization has had enough.

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September 1, 2016 · 5:59 am

Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine in the X-men: The Worst Love Triangle of All Time

I’m not a successful writer yet. I’m not certain that I’m an overly skilled writer either. However, as someone who has been writing almost every day since he was 15-years-old, I like to think I know something about this topic. As such, I’m of the opinion that any overly bizarre or frustratingly inane plot can work if written well. With enough skill, a writer can make a story about snake handler hooking up with an alien compelling.

Then, there are certain plots that are so poorly structured, so inherently weak, and so intrinsically flawed that the combined efforts of Shakespeare, Tolken, and Faulkner can’t save it. For me, that plot is that of the love triangle. I even dedicated an entire post about why I think it’s one of the most overused, poorly written plot devices in all of romance.

I avoided getting into specifics in that post because I wanted to focus on the bigger picture as to why love triangles as a concept suck in general. For this post, I’m going to reach deep into the steaming pile of shit that countless stories featuring bad love triangles have excreted over the years and discuss the worst of the worst.

So which love triangle is the worst among the vast mountain of shit that occupies such a prominent position in popular culture? In this case, the worst comes from the world of X-men and involves the characters Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine.

For the sake of this blog, it’s very convenient that the absolute bottom of the pit that is terrible love triangles takes place in the world of superhero comics. This is, after all, a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. I’ve made my love of superhero comics known on this blog before. I will likely cite superhero comics again in future posts as I discuss similar issues. In this case, however, it really is an issue of pragmatism because I really could not find a worse example of a bad love triangle than this one.

What makes it so mind-numbingly terrible? Well, to answer that, here’s a quick rundown of the structure of this worst-of-the-worst brand of romantic drama. Cyclops and Jean Grey are founding members of the X-men. They were among the original X-men that were first introduced in 1963 by the ultimate creative dynamic duo, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. They’re also, by far, one of the most iconic couples in the history of X-men, if not all of superhero comics.

Wolverine didn’t enter the picture until later. He doesn’t join the X-men until 1975, which is a while after he makes his first appearance as a supporting character in The Incredible Hulk. As the X-men’s resident bad boy, he’s basically the opposite of Cyclops. He’s brutish, crude, ill-mannered, quick-tempered, and bad-ass to an insane degree. So naturally, he pulls in a lot of ass. There’s actually a chart documenting Wolverine’s many romantic entanglements and it’s even more confusing/impressive than it looks.

So the very idea of Jean Grey falling in love with him while being in love with Cyclops is akin to a man being in love with both a nun and a crack whore. However, that discrepancy alone isn’t what makes this love triangle so horrendously bad. It’s all the circumstances surrounding it that make it the poster child for everything that sucks about love triangles.

First and foremost, the entire reason why Jean Grey developed an attraction to Wolverine in the first place is ridiculously contrived. X-men writer, Chris Claremont (also known as the most prolific X-men writer ever), indicated in numerous interviews that the attraction between them was extremely shallow.

“He sees Jean, Jean sees him, hormones kick in, the rational brain checks into the Happy Hour hotel, and everyone else runs for cover.”

There’s nothing wrong with basic attraction. That’s the sort of thing men feel whenever they see an attractive stripper or the sort of thing women feel when they see Channing Tatum without his shirt on. It’s a good setup for a one night stand. It’s not a good foundation for a meaningful romance, which is the only thing that makes a love triangle functional to some degree.

That never happens in X-men and for a very bad reason. Due to editorial decisions within the X-men comics that are too convoluted for a single blog post, Claremont soured on Cyclops as a character and openly despised his relationship with Jean Grey, despite having done more than any other X-men writer to solidify their status as the premier romance of the X-men. So what does he do? He tries everything he can to break them up and had editors not thwarted him in 1991, he would’ve succeeded.

That’s the entire reason that this love triangle exists. A writer grew to despise a certain character and decided to punish them by making his girlfriend fall for someone who is the exact opposite of him. Think about that long and hard for more than 15 seconds. Seriously, think about it as rationally as any human mind can manage on topics involving fictional characters.

Are you done? Then, I hope you can now see just how flawed that reasoning is. The writer hates one character and uses that as the sole justification for an entirely separate relationship between two characters who have next to nothing in common. That’s akin to loving soccer just because you hate American football. It’s a bad reason to love a sport and a worse reason for a love triangle.

In my post about why love triangles suck, I pointed out that they tend to devalue characters. It turns them into prizes to be won. It tends to override other meaningful traits a character may have. For Wolverine, it turns him from this bad-ass loner into an obsessive, petty asshat. That’s the trait of an insecure teenager, not a bad-ass loner.

The effect is just as bad on Jean Grey, who effectively becomes the ultimate prize of sorts for Cyclops and Wolverine. This is pretty insulting to her character because Jean Grey does so much to set herself apart as a strong female character from an era where the concept hadn’t been refined yet. She is the center of the Dark Phoenix Saga, also known as the greatest X-men story ever written. Reducing her to a prize for two men undermines a character with so much more to offer.

The comics do a terrible job setting up this love triangle, which the writer himself admits was created for petty reasons. However, it’s the way it plays out in the X-men movies that make this love triangle truly the worst of the worst.

How can the movies actually make this worse? Well, somehow they found a way. To this day, I have a hard time believing that the writers at Fox didn’t actively try to make this love triangle worse than it already was. What they came up with still confounds me, both as a writer and an X-men fan.

Anyone who has seen any of the X-men movies knows that most of them are structured around Wolverine. That’s entirely fair. He’s the most popular X-men character of all time and he’s played by Hugh Jackman. In case you’ve forgotten, Hugh Jackman looks like this.

I’m not gay, but even I think he’s sexy. Naturally, he’s going to have a love interest. A man this sexy has to have one. The problem is, the writers of this movie don’t realize how terrible the love triangle is with him, Cyclops, and Jean Grey in the comics. That, or they see it and think they have a way to make it worse.

First and foremost, they gave no reason for Jean Grey and Wolverine to be attracted to one another. Hell, he tries to stab her when he first wakes up at the Xavier Institute in the first X-men movie. That alone should ensure her panties stay dry around him for the entire trilogy. Instead, the chemistry between them is outright forced.

It has to be because these two never really have a meaningful conversation. They never really get to know each other. They’re just physically attracted to one another and the only reason they don’t bone is because Jean Grey is engaged to Cyclops. As a result, Cyclops is reduced to the role of being an obstacle to Wolverine. That’s pretty much his only role in the first three X-men movies, being a hindrance to Wolverine getting into Jean Grey’s panties.

There isn’t even an effort to balance things out. Cyclops is portrayed as someone who’s not nearly as badass as Wolverine, but he’s still respectable and likable to an excessive degree. He helps save Wolverine the first time they meet. He offers to shake his hand, which Wolverine flat out refuses. He never gets overly upset with Jean about her being attracted to another man. He’s bland, but likable.

If anything, Wolverine does everything he can to make himself the asshole you don’t want Jean to end up with. He steals Cyclops’ motorcycle. He steals Cyclops’ car. When he dies in the third X-men movie, he doesn’t give a second thought to making out with his girlfriend. He does this after he tells Cyclops earlier that she chose him at the end of the previous movie. He couldn’t come off as more of an asshole without pissing on Cyclops’ grave and stealing Jean Grey’s panties.

As bad as this is, it actually gets worse. At least in the comics, Wolverine actually knows Jean Grey as a person to some extent. He’s worked with her. He’s been on the same team as her. He’s lived under the same roof as her. Chances are he knows how she takes her coffee, what she watches on TV, and what her favorite brand of cereal is. In the movies, he knows none of this.

I’ve seen all these movies and based on the sequence of events and the time that passes between them, it’s clear that Wolverine didn’t know Jean Grey for more than a few days at most. He leaves at the end of the first movie. Jean Grey dies shortly after he returns in the second movie. There’s never any indication that they remained in contact. There’s no hint of tortured love letters, long phone calls, or dick pics being exchanged. They literally have no time to get to know one another.

That’s what makes the events of the third X-men movie all the more infuriating. Towards the end of the movie, Wolverine professes his love for Jean Grey before he kills her, at her request. Never mind the fact that this is the exact opposite of what happens in the comics. He proclaims her to be the love of his life despite the fact he doesn’t even know her. He doesn’t know her hopes, her dreams, or even her middle name. So how are we, the audience, supposed to believe that this love is genuine?

It ruins Jean Grey, as a character. It makes her nothing more than a prop for Wolverine. She’s not just the prize he pursues. She’s the only reason he has any emotional development. The fact that he barely knows her makes his affection for her all the more shallow. On top of that, it reduces Wolverine to this mopey pretty-boy instead of the bad-ass loner he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be Wolverine and not this guy.

The combined efforts of the movies and the comics ensure that the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle is the alpha and omega of terrible love triangles. It’s a horrendous plot that still plagues the characters to this day.

The biggest tragedy is that the Cyclops/Jean relationship has been shown to function well as a meaningful romance. Just this past month, there was an entire issue dedicated to showing how these two are a romance of equals who can make each other better, just like a good romance is supposed to. Good love stories don’t need a love triangle to develop, grow, and thrive. They just need some actual effort and a basic understanding of what makes a relationship work.

As an aspiring writer who hopes to encourage other aspiring writers, I would only cite the Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine love triangle as a case study in what not to do. There are few ways in which a love triangle can actually work in a romance story. None of those ways are used in this case. In fact, some of those ways are turned upside down, inside out, and gutted.

Quality romance and quality characters, be they superheroes or ordinary people, deserve better. In the same way it’s almost impossible to make a quality meal with bad ingredients, it’s almost impossible to craft a quality love story around a love triangle. The convoluted, misguided clusterfuck that is Cyclops/Jean Grey/Wolverine is just a tragic testament to how bad it can get.

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August 31, 2016 · 6:53 am

Love Triangles and Why 95 Percent of them Suck

He loves her. She loves somebody else. That somebody else doesn’t love her back. Somebody’s heart gets broken. Somebody kisses somebody in some exceedingly overdue moment. We’re then left with an ending that satisfies some, outrages others, and confounds many.

I just described the most basic formula for a love triangle, also known as one of the oldest, most predictable tactics in all romantic narratives. It’s right up there with the classic will-they-or-won’t-they narrative that Ross and Rachel drew out for way too long over multiple seasons of Friends. As an aspiring writer who specializes in romance and erotica, I can’t ignore its presence so let’s talk about it.

First off, let me acknowledge that love triangles have their place in popular culture. I understand that they’re part of a tried and true formula in romance that goes back to a time when our ancestors were washing their hand in cow piss and calling it hygienic. They tap into a powerful set of emotions in all of us. Unless you’re born rich or have the body of Ryan Gosling, you know what it feels like to see someone you love choose someone else. That said, they can tap into more annoying emotions and that’s what I’m going to focus on.

As anyone who hasn’t slept through English class knows, love triangles have been part of some of the most iconic stories in history. The most famous is probably the one that plays out in the legends of King Arthur. That affair involved King Arthur, his wife Guenivere, and the perpetually friend-zoned Sir Lancelot. That love triangle is a small, but important component of that whole mythos and it did not take away from it in any way.

Flash forward 800 years, throw in reality TV and vampires, and the whole concept of the love triangle has been overdone, over-used, and twisted to a point where it’s more of an annoyance than a plot device. At its worst, it derails the larger story that’s supposed to be unfolding. We all know the kinds of stories I’m talking about here. Do I really need to remind anybody of this?

I’ll try to limit my references to vampires in this post, but they symbolize just how bad love triangles can get. From a writer’s perspective (and I am trying to be a writer, mind you), it often narrows the narrative considerably. It immediately ascribes roles to certain characters that limits their development. When a character’s sole purpose is defined by who they want to bone and who is standing in their way, that effectively overrides every other trait of that character.

It plays out in way too many ways in every kind of media. Characters like Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer dedicated 90 percent of their energy towards winning someone else’s heart. The same thing plays out in books like The Hunger Games, movies like Tron, and even video games like Final Fantasy. Think of any form of media, new or old. At some point in the past or at some point in the future, a love triangle will infect it and its characters.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the extent to which love triangles permeate comic books. As some of you already know, I love comic books and I’ve crafted entire posts about them. If there’s one non-vampire medium that abuses love triangles more than most, it’s definitely comic books. I’d love to get into specifics, but rather than risk derailing this entire post into a personalized rant from a message board, I’ll save that for another discussion.

Why do these stories persist? Well, as I said earlier, they do tap into some very basic emotions that are fairly universal across cultures. With this appeal in mind, maybe we should ask another question. Why do these stories about love triangles have to be so god-awful?

The biggest problem, in my opinion, stems from another problem that seems to be ingrained in our culture to some extent. When we tell love stories, we have this ideal in mind. One person finds their absolute soul mate. That soul mate is 100 percent in love with them and returns 100 percent of their affections. That’s all well and good in terms of romance. I certainly have a soft spot for those kinds of fluffy romances. I think those of us without personality disorders all have some affinity for those kinds of stories.

It’s that same affinity, though, that makes love triangles so untenable. A love triangle is often used as an obstacle. It’s a wedge designed to prevent two lovers from coming together. It can make for a good story, but it also comes at the expense of another character along the way.

Sometimes that works because the character in question is a total asshole. There’s no effort to make Biff Tanner in Back to the Future on equal footing with George McFly. He’s supposed to be an asshole. The problem comes when we want that character to develop dimensions other than being an asshole and that can be a problem.

The way a love triangle works essentially makes it so there’s always one character that gets screwed over and not in a good way. Someone is going to have their heart broken. Someone is going to come off as the loser and the bad guy. In some cases, as we see in Back to the Future, it works out in a way that’s satisfying. In others, especially in vampire-themed stories, it turns the character in to a sacrificial lamb of sorts. It means they never get a chance to stand on their own and show that they have worth.

I find that kind of approach troubling because it throws away opportunities to create quality characters. It also ensures that the character that loses is going to be flat, boring, and dull. If it’s a male character, he’s some sort of bad boy, Dirty Harry wannabe who just needs the right nudge to being a full-blown asshole. If it’s a female character, she’s some sort of Mean Girls uber-bitch who generates as much sympathy as a hungry shark.

That makes the outcome of the love triangle fairly predictable. Before it even has a chance to get sexy, we already have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to play out. The nice guy/nice girl is going to win. That’s all well and good in that it plays into our innate sense of justice, but it doesn’t make for very good stories.

It’s for this reason that I’ve generally tried to avoid using love triangles in my books. The closest I ever came was “Skin Deep” and even in that, I made a concerted effort to give each side sufficient depth. I’ll let those who take the time to read the book to decide whether I did a good enough job, but I think love triangles in general need to be either retired or overhauled.

How do we go about that? Well, I have a few ideas. I’m not going to share them just yet because I want to turn them into books first. I believe this is an idea that can sell if done right. If I can’t sell it, then I hope others figure out a way as well. A bad love triangle is the easiest way to turn quality characters into trophies/obstacles. It turns women into prizes to be won, men into powerless tools of their passions, and everyone else into overly emotional vampires. I think we can do better.

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August 30, 2016 · 6:05 am

An Honest Question: How Open Should We Be About Sex?

How much is too much? Isn’t that an existential question that can apply to so many issues? How much government is too much? How much sugar is too much? How much violence is too much in a PG-13 movie? We ask this question about so many things. Naturally, it comes up a lot during issues about sex.

That’s to be expected. Human beings are sexual creatures. We’re programmed to do two things: survive and reproduce. Thanks to the advent of AK-47, fighter gets, and everything associated with Chuck Norris, we got the survival part down. We used to fear tigers, snakes, and wolves. Now they’re either endangered or they’re our pets. We won the survival game.

With reproduction, however, it’s a different story. Sure, as a species, we’re pretty good at sex. There are over 7 billion humans on this planet. Clearly, we’re doing something right. The problem is that our attitudes about sex are more eccentric than Andy Dick on a double dose of LSD.

We need to reproduce. It’s part of our biology. At the same time, however, we’ve created all these weird cultural attitudes that make us anxious and uncomfortable about sex. It manifests in religion, media, and cultural practices. I’ve talked about it before on this blog, but now I’d like to open the discussion up a bit.

Just how open should we be about sex? It’s an important question to ask. I know I’m asking it from an odd angle because I live in America. This is a country founded by Puritans. As the late Robin Williams once said, these are, “people so uptight, the English kicked them out.” So even though we call ourselves a free country, we have exceedingly prude attitudes towards sex. In fact, it wasn’t until 1965 that the last few obscenity laws that prohibited the distribution of materials on birth control were struck down.

It’s fairly clear that, as a society, we need to be more open to talking about sex. It can’t just be with our kids either. That thought alone is enough to make parents want to vomit violently. Even consenting, mature adults have problems talking about it.

In many cases, there are all these unspoken rules about sex. We’re not supposed to talk about our ex-lovers. We’re not supposed to talk about the really good sex we’ve had with partners who aren’t our spouses. We’re not supposed to talk about the sex we had when we were young. So what the hell are we supposed to talk about?

Again, this is an honest question. I talk a lot about sexual issues on this blog. Some, like various types of orgasms, are just fun little tidbits about our biology. Others are a bit more serious, relating to religion and sociopolitical issues like feminism. So what are the limits? What can and can’t we talk about?

I’ve confessed to sleeping naked. That’s pretty tame by internet standards. Seeing as how I write erotic stories, I feel it’s pretty important to know where that line is how far I should take it. So I’ll open this question up for others to discuss. How much is too much? How open is too open? We humans know a lot about being sexually repressed. How much do we know about being sexually open?

As we contemplate this topic, here’s another video discussing this topic from the fine folks at ThinkTank on this subject. I sincerely hope this generates some meaningful, yet sexy discussions.

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