Slattern

Get 'em while they're fresh...

You think your search for Mr. Right has gone to extremes.

This lady Chrissy Conant, an artist of sorts, had 1,000 eggs extracted from her body so she could put them on display and at the same time advertise her good genes in hopes of helping her search for her ideal mate along. Over the last few years she has been showing and offering these eggs up for sale, though her website doesn't indicate how many have actually been purchased. It also seems that the search for Mr. Right Sperm continues.

I don't know, girls, what do you think? I mean, on one hand, here's a gal who's putting herself out there in the most extreme way possible. Props for putting Finding Someone first. On the other, are we really that in need of another half that we have to inject ourselves in the ovaries to get it? She told Wired in 2002 that her first harvesting produced 18 eggs. How many freaking times did she have to stick herself--and lord, what are the long-term effects of all those extra hormones--to get 1,000?

Seems like thirty or forty would have done the trick, artistically speaking. Otherwise, one could make the crude comparison that she is the Thomas Kinkade of the fertility world. The more the better! Keep sucking them things out!

I don't know. I kind of like my eggs where they are. And I hate to think some dude would want to be with me because he checked those eggs out and liked what he saw. Last I heard, babies were the product of a relationship, not the reason for one.

Who the hell knows. The world is weird.

Pulling a Rabbit out of a sex shop

In yet another bogus attempt by state legislatures to tell folks what they can and can’t do with their nether parts, the state of South Carolina is considering banning the sale of sex toys. Who cares, you ask? If you live in South Carolina, you've got bigger problems than whether or not you can buy a vibrator. Right?

I am a native South Carolinian (who now lives in a considerably more backward state). So I don't tend to be surprised by the uberconservative weirdness emanating from my birth state. But I am still floored at the way its Powers That Be want to tell me what constitutes healthy and moral sexuality.

Obviously, the people of South Dakota are frying much bigger fish, but it speaks to the same fundamental issue. Whether we say so or not, we're legislating from the pulpit, but we can't even agree on what church--or even what faith--that pulpit should be based in.

If we’re just talking vibrators, I’m waiting for the Front Pew Brigade to produce that verse in the Bible. You know the one:

“Whoa to thee who causes thine own clitoris to quiver! For the flames shall consume thy soul.”

I don’t know what is so upsetting to some people about a person—mostly a woman—taking care of business. Is it the whole “sisters are doing it for themselves” thing? That deep down the fish really does need the bicycle? Or is it just that the “marital embrace” being available in hot pink with a convenient travel case is just Not How God Intended It?

I mean, what’ll it be next? Dancing?

I realize it isn’t as simple as a few blue-haired old ladies and their crusty senators being grossed out. I myself cringe each time I drive a certain stretch of I-75, where Café Erotica, possibly the most gaudy strip club in the South, not only sits right by the interstate but advertises for several miles: “We bare all!” I feel for parents who have to explain what XXX means because a sleazy sex shop is advertising its services via billboard.

But banning sex toys altogether? It’s offensive, and on some level laughable, and on yet another level disquieting for the simple fact that we still allow much more disturbing things like smoking in public. Somehow I think that forcibly inhaling second-hand smoke is a much more dangerous prospect than manually bringing myself to orgasm in the privacy of my own bedroom, in the dark, under the covers. Where no one can see me.

But that's just me.

Quit cunting around and post something

Posted by Emily

For this week's vocabulary lesson, Brain Girl has requested a posting about our new favorite gerund phrase, "cunting around."

cunt around (v.)
1. to piddle, dick around, waste time
2. to be a complete cunt

I started using this phrase last weekend when a friend asked me what I was  up to that day. I had started to say, "Oh, nothing, just dicking around." I have used the phrase a thousand times, but for some reason I analyzed it this time, wondering why the dick part is necessary at all. My ability to waste time and accomplish nothing is a purely feminine animal, see, having nothing to do with the male version of cunting around, which involves lots of cheesballs and searing the letters ESPN into one's retina.

Can you use it in a sentence?

"We didn't make it to the ball, obviously," said Victoria Snatchwell. "We were cunting around in Urban Outfitters and lost track of time."

Try it out today!

He's a complete wank, and I'm knitting a sweater

The last two episodes of Grey's Anatomy should be dedicated to us and the things we do when good men go moron--or when good morons go bad, or...any other time someone with a penis speaks to us. I don't like that Meredith chick all that  much (possibly because she often thinks like me and like me is completely self absorbed), but we do seem to have something important in common--perhaps related to why my bed is now on the other side of the room and my bookshelves are now all in the living room and I am for the first time in six months caught up on my laundry. There is no end in sight to the sprucing.

Why is it that we are the ones who knit and rearrange furniture and pull every single weed out of our front yards even though we have a perfectly good yardman--just for the thrill of ripping something out by its root?

Or is it just me?

I'm going to show this to my kids if I ever have any

posted by Emily

When my kid is like ten or so, I'm going to wait for him to come home from school one day and then sit his little ass down and make him memorize this website, titled The Faces of Meth. The photos are too gross to even post a thumbnail.

This is going to be my approach to parenting. Threats and intimidation. Lies if necessary. Like how your mother would tell you she'd know if you'd had sex because you'd walk different. This was effective parenting! It no doubt made late bloomers out of some of us, but by God it kept us off the street.

I'll just tell the kid that if he even THINKS about cutting class, his face will freeze this way.

Lawmaker Puzzled by Staff's Clear Hatred of Her

Posted by Emily

See, I totally know how this happened.

One of Montana Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson's constituents recently got an otherwise normal reply letter from her, which had the phrase "I think you're an asshole" at the end. The C'woman responds,

We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me.

I used to do this kind of thing when I worked as a secretary putting myself through grad school. Your anal-retentive scientist (or in this case congresswoman) boss has let you know just one time too many that she thinks you are one of those medical mystery kids who manage to function despite only having a sliver of brain at the top of their spinal cords. In another setting, these kids would of course be forced to run relay races and told they are special, but when you work for a microbiologist/congresswoman with his or her head up his or her own nether parts, this makes you a target for abuse and condescension.

Nevermind that you yourself are working on a terminal degree that will one day land you a similarly cushy academic job WITH TENURE, ASSHOLE, but whatever.

I would never have gone quite *that* far, but it's true that there's only one thing you can really do to get these people back. You go in and find a letter that gets sent out frequently, and you bold a letter here and there throughout the text, forming the message of your choice:

Obviously, the little doohickies on the undersides of paramecia are of great interest to the scientific community and, we think, THE WORLD! 

It's a little thing. But it's all you have. You're not going to put this job on your resume anyway. Fuck do you care?

Word, from inside my cousin's girlfriend's uterus

Posted by Emily

This is my unborn first cousin once removed.  It looks like she's keepin' it real in there.

Word.

I guess chicks in hotpants kneeing each other in the crotch is just one of those timeless things.

posted by Emily

Roller derby is alive and well. Apparently.

When I was in seventh grade, there was a rumor going around that my math teacher did roller derby on the weekends. Her nickname was Gorilla, and we believed it because she was just mean enough. That was in 1989. We thought: How messed up. Roller derby is dead.

Yet in 2006, roller derby appears to have been reborn, if it ever really went away. Leagues are popping up from Boston to Detroit to Tuscon, and these chicks are a scary lot. I'm not sure what would attract a gal to one of these teams, other than some deep-seated exhibitionism in the pain department. Or is it all fake, like on WWF Smackdown?

Atlanta has a league called the Rollergirls. They seem like quite something, down to their cute outfits and frightening personas. Notorius R.I.P of the Sake Tuyas is the fictional lovechild of Old Dirty Bastard & Olivia Newton John. Venus Flytramp of the Denim Demons claims to specialize in "Texas titty-twisters, trash-talkin', and trouble-makin'." (Right. Um, sign me up.)

It has a perverse lure, this new generation of knock-down drag-out on wheels. I picture audiences made up half of raging feminists in shit-kicker boots and half of drooling perverts there just to witness the, well, the grasping. It's a phenomenon maybe something like if a couple of clown cars collided. You have to stop and look. It's more than a little disturbing. But more than a little entertaining.

Radio wave technology helps whores keep their legs closed

posted by Emily

Remember on Sex and the City when Charlotte told the other girls that you could reclaim your virginity by abstaining for a year? (Would that be voluntary or involuntary abstention, I wondered...)? Ultimately it is a silly idea: Once you've done that, you've, you know, done it. But I like the premise--that you can erase your past mistakes and past boyfriends and simply start over with a new attitude about intimacy. For those of us living in the real world, that's probably as far as it goes.

But these fun folks at the Society for the Recapture of Virginity are pushing it a step further, claiming that you can literally go back to your pre-sex self--assuming a sane person would want to do such a thing. So much for rites of passage and whatnot. They've even got this deal--and I haven't figured out if they're jerking my chain on this one--where you strap this thing called (wait for it) the Virginator to your wrist while you sleep:

"A miracle of modern science, the Virginator is a fully operational biorhythm restructure band. Based on the information you give to the VRS 3000, a microchip is custom encoded with an unique algorithm. This microchip is then attached to a wristband, which you wear at night while you sleep. During the night, the microchip emits harmless radio waves which adjust and correct your virgin biorhythms. While you dream, your virginity will be restored. You will not feel a thing, but you will wake up a virgin!"

OK, I remember my "virgin biorhythms."  They made me do crazy things like join the Young Republicans club in college. 

But if you're getting a jump on your Christmas shopping, the Virginator a must-have for this year's self-loathing tech junkie who doesn't want to, um, feel a thing. I think they sell them at Best Buy.

Buddha on the Brain

posted by Emily

I just got around to reading the February issue of Wired. It features an article called "Buddha on the Brain: The hot new frontier of neuroscience: meditation!" It is a fabulous read if you're interested in the discussion of religion vs. science and whether the two exclude each other.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin stuck electrodes on some Buddhist monks and told them to meditate on compassion. They discovered that the monks' brain functions altered, particularly in the area of the brain that governs positive emotions. "Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy." Not to mention giving people the means to self-help afflictions like depression.

The kicker is that the Dalai Lama is so freakin' on board with the study.

The March issue is no doubt full of similarly thought-provoking material. I'll let you know in April.