Sex News Roundup.

Damn, I'm good. (Morguefile.)

Chinese official gets thirteen years for bribery in sex video scandal. Some kind of big show trial.

An un-named ‘media personality’ involved in bizarre cat burglary. News at eleven. I’m sitting in for what’s-her-name.

Sweden might adopt ‘total ban’ on bestiality. See also : Elk Might Have Been Stolen. (Just sayin’.) Are you sure that’s justified? (Just sayin’.)

“Slut-shaming victims are violated forever.” Victims were exposed to abuse, anonymously on Instagram. I always thought Sweden was a progressive country. It’s what we’ve been led to believe, but a wave of conservatism has swept the world in recent decades. One can only patiently await the next swing of the social pendulum. They’re just kids being mean. You get that everywhere.

A quick guide to dogging in London. (Old Blighty.) Note the relaxed attitude towards watchers in some locales. Yeah. Maybe they’re just getting a feel for it. Maybe if it was Conan the Barbarian. I might consider it. On some sort of mad whim, which I could probably resist…maybe. Or Karl Malden—that nose is a big turn-on. Of course he’s dead and everything.

Why cunnilingus is like cannabis.

That reminds me of a joke, which still remains classified to this day.

From the files:

Russian billionaire wants all gays and lesbians killed.

Michael Douglas says cunnilingus gave him cancer, but is he right? Like who cares, eh, girls?

Make sure that life insurance policy is all paid up and go to it, boys.

You know you love it.

First Aid.

Giving first aid to a stranger. (Photo: Chmee2.)

I used to have a Bronze Life-Saving badge in a drawer around here. I got it when I was about fourteen. I’m water-safe. I can throw a Javex bottle on the end of a rope something fierce. I know the proper way to deploy a life-ring, launch a flare, or how to pluck someone out of triple-canopy jungle with a helicopter, and even what fire extinguisher to use on an electrical fire…

It’s a good thing, too, as you never know when you might be required to give first aid.

There was this young lady at the food bank. She was rakishly thin, with blue-painted finger and toenails, very minimalist sandals, black, stretchy bell-bottom slacks, and something around her neck on a thin chain. She wore a new-looking T-shirt and a thin hoodie type jacket. She was in the line ahead of me, this is where we take a number and sit in a small waiting room until we get called into the office.

I didn’t think much of it, paying more attention to another girl’s baby, strapped into a bassinette sort of thing with a carrying handle and the like. She had a sister with her, there was a strong resemblance in body type and facial features.

What happens is you show ID and then they check the computer. Then they call out over a loudspeaker.

“One adult and one child.”

The person behind the desk writes the same thing, ‘1A-1C’ on a slip of paper and then you go off to another door where they give you a basket of food. They’ve got a table set up and the volunteers have a cart to wheel the stuff up in, important when it’s a family of four or five, and it won’t fit in a hand-basket.

I came next, and then I got my slip of paper and then went out to the back. She was there, and a guy on the other side of the table was packing her stuff for her into bags. She was in between the table and a kind of end wall, although it meant nothing at the time.

The guy was talking to me.

“Look, look. She’s going down…” And sure enough, the girl, all ninety-five pounds of her, sort of fell forward onto the table.

Her legs were buckling.

I grabbed her under the armpits, and thank God she wasn’t a bigger girl, but she just couldn’t stand.

All I could do was to step back and lower her to the floor, trying to get my left hand under her head as she got close to the concrete. The impression of her mouth being closed, her arms limp at her sides, and those big dark eyes looking up into mine is a strong one. I straightened her legs out as they had bent up under her.

I told her everything was going to be all right.

She wanted up almost immediately, and two or three people were talking all at once. She wobbled and I had to grab her again.

“Stay down.”

She wouldn’t listen, and finally I just hung onto her for dear life, with her sagging and falling, trying not to injure her, while some guy scuttled up with a chair. I put her in the chair and tried talking to her.

She answered questions, and said ‘No,” when I suggested calling an ambulance. They had her in the chair and she kept slumping forward.

Again, they were all talking at once.

“We know what’s wrong with her.” Some gnarly old woman at the back said that.

Well, I don’t know what the hell was wrong with her. One of the employees or volunteers, some guy in a red shirt took over and let me out of there. I got my food and went home.

Hopefully she had someone at home looking after the kid.

###

Sex News Roundup.

Mm.Toronto.

I’ve often wondered if my mom ever burned her bra. She’s about the right age. I’m the youngest child, and mom was in university in the early seventies.

Her bookshelves were easily accessible to all of us and there were some books there that were clearly inspired by, or perhaps some of the inspiration behind, the women’s liberation movement.

It sounds so crazy now. Women’s Lib was strongly based in the civil rights movement and had some initial ties to the whole youth movement. It was all happening in the same era.

It seems strange that the Equal Rights Amendment never passed in the U.S. But we have a kind of de-facto equality now, although some would argue that women still get child custody in the majority of cases, and in criminal cases women are often seen to get a lighter sentence. In fact, the whole attitude towards women and crime is still off the mark in terms of perception and prosecution.

I’m not sure if women are any better-behaved than men, they just do things a bit differently. And still, there are men who simply cannot conceive of making a plate of bacon and eggs, or doing a laundry. They still think in terms of 'women's work,' or worry about what their buddies, equally backward and obnoxious, might think about it.

Hmn...did mom ever burn her bra?

Here’s our weekly sex-news roundup:

Same-sex couples lining up for marriage licenses in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul, (Minnesota.)

It seems strange that we  now have an increasing number of jurisdictions recognizing gay rights, and yet the ERA never passed in the U.S. although equal rights would be recognized as lawful in Canada. But the equal rights for women was a tough sell in Bible-belt areas, where tradition runs strong and women are seen in Biblical terms, in other words as ‘a vessel.’

Town buzzing after elementary school students watch principal having sex with teacher.

The story is from the Jamaica Star and the dialect and accents are authentic.

Detectives in Las Vegas have cleared ball player Jose Canseco in a sexual assault case.

The man’s been cleared and I can offer no comment other than to say the headlines saying he has been cleared should be as big as the ones that said he has been charged. Canseco took polygraph tests and the evidence is considered conclusive. He is considering a civil suit against the accuser.

The U.S. senate and the military are at odds over the military’s response to the problems of sexual assault. Senator John McCain says he is ‘disgusted’ in the typical political sound-bite.

A vessel.

$500 worth of sex toys stolen from car. (Whig.com) Lock them in the trunk if you can't keep them at home, and be advised thieves will pop a window and use the button in the glove box to open the trunk if they see you put packages in there.

Naval Academy shaken by reports of student’s rape by athletes. The victim originally refused to cooperate in the investigation, she felt ashamed and intimidated.

What's interesting is how politicized sex can be and how it has become. At one time, it simply wasn't talked about in polite circles or outside of the rankest smut magazines. So the whole sexual liberation movement has had a profound impact on the way we think and behave in our more modern times. 

We have much to thank our mothers for! 

The Night of the Iguana.

With a face like that...

“Did I ever tell you about my brother’s animal room?” Stoner asked as I negotiated the car through a twisty bit of Bosanquet Township’s Hungry Hollow Road, then climbed up out of the gulley.

“Animal room?” I mused, steadying a tall can of Ice Beer between crotch and thighs.

“I’m sure I must have told you,” he laughed, then grabbed another hefty swig of his own.

By this time, I’m certain he will tell it, given enough rope.

His stories are often worth waiting for. A kind of process ensues.

He gets out one of his interminable cigars, horrid smelling things, and fumbles with his lighter. He has shaky hands and the occasional feminine mannerisms creep through. But Stoner has a mind like a lead trap, and the nerves of something, I don’t know what.

“When we were young,” he begins. “And I mean really, really, young. Grade nine; or ten.”

And he looks at me.

I sagely agree, gently unleashing a belch.

“Young,” I murmur.

The cigar haze is beginning to build as he puffs on it.

“Remember that basement room at my folk’s place? I showed it to you when they were thinking of building some shelves?”

“Yeah,” that was the one about five feet deep in boxes and junk.

“Well, my brother used to keep a lot of animals in there. He had baby squirrels, he had a raccoon one time. It started off small and innocent. The one I liked best was a great snowy owl. It had a broken wing, and he splinted it and bandaged it up…”

I began to break up in laughs at this one, at the thought of Stoner’s brother trying to wrestle with an ornery owl. Takes some nerve. I sucked back a half a beer in contemplation of this feat.

“Well. I was about seventeen years old. And I went out with this girl named Holly. We went to a movie or something. We were all gunned up, I can’t remember the exact details. We went back to my folk’s place.”

Negotiating another turn in the darkness, the last indirect rays of sunset illuminate a billowing bank of otherwise black cloud in reds, oranges and purples. I’ve met Holly, he just doesn’t remember.

“We were in the recreation room, and the folks were asleep upstairs,” he ventured anew.

“You know my mom, she’s like one of the coolest people who over lived. On the other hand, my dad and I never really did get along.”

Stoner’s dad is a fascinating character. He flew in the Battle of Britain, he flew with the Dam Buster’s; and I think at Midway, and he trained U.S. Navy pilots in carrier landings in the Gulf. I mean, he got around.

I have never understood Stoner’s relationship with his father, but then who ever does?

My empty beer can sails off into the deepening gloom, into the anonymous landscape of grass and trees and fence posts and wire. The motor hums along serenely unaware of human foibles.

“Get me another beer,” I suggested. “Thanks.”

Still cold, I note with relief.

“So anyway, we were on the couch, and I’ve got all her gear off. We’re making out, naked. All of a sudden, for no reason she lets out a hell of a scream. She’s screaming to beat all hell.”

"Screaming." I’m already laughing because I can sort of see where this is going.

“She’s got a fucking iguana on the back of her head—it must have gotten out of its cage somehow.” 

I’m roaring with laughter and trying to keep it on the road.

“It was maybe three or four feet long,” he explained, convulsing me in further spasms. “By this time it was all tangled up in her hair and she was screaming and screaming.”

I had this mental vision of Holly, with glossy black hair down to her ass, with three or four feet of reptile clamped onto the back of her head.

“I’ll bet she screamed,” I gasped through a veil of tears.

That was a good one, but no, it wasn’t over.

“You haven’t heard the best part, yet,” Stoner told me. “My father, Wing Commander Stoner, ‘Jabba the Hut,’ comes roaring down the stairs, to see what all the fuss was about.”

“Of course!” I gulped.

“So there he is standing over us, while we tried to untangle that damned iguana, there was my dad, naked except for those old pink and white polka-dotted boxer shorts, all red in the face, shouting stupid questions at us…” 

“One hell of a situation,” I agreed.

“And that’s what I remember most about Holly,” he muttered and I had to laugh again.

“The night of the iguana,” I muttered.

“Yes! The night of the iguana,” he said.

Stoner rolled down the window to dispose another empty can of Ice Beer into the gathering night.

End

Defining Romance.

What is the definition of romance?

I think it goes beyond sex, or companionship, or marriage, or love.

It goes beyond all of these things put together.

Romance has that mystical quality. It is indefinable. It is accidental.

My own parents are divorced and have been for many years. Coming at a young and impressionable age, it may not have been the best preparation for my own life and marriage, and of course now I wonder at the impact on Meredith.

To think of our parents in romantic terms is difficult, for we know them too well.

Romance is the meeting of two minds, the coming together of two people in a relationship that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Romance is, in short, a love affair.

                             

It is an ardent emotional attachment or involvement between people in love.

It is a strong, sometimes short-lived attachment, fascination, or enthusiasm for something. To fall in love with an idea or ideal.

It holds a mysterious or fascinating quality or appeal, as of something adventurous, heroic, or strangely beautiful, for example the ruins of an ancient abbey and the ghosts that dwell within.

It is a long medieval narrative in prose or verse that tells of the adventures and heroic exploits of chivalric heroes, the Arthurian tales of old, a long fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events, usually set in a distant time or place.

It is a class of literature constituted by such tales.

It is an artistic work, such as a novel, story, or film, that deals with sexual love, especially in an idealized form.

It is the class or style of such works.

It is a fictitiously embellished account or explanation. It is a lyrical, tender, usually sentimental song or short instrumental piece. It is, in many words, the Romance languages which developed from Latin, including Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.

It is to invent, to write, or to tell romances.

It is to think or to behave in a romantic manner, i.e., to be ‘a romantic.’

It is to make love to; to court or to woo.

It is to have a love affair with someone that we otherwise may have never known.

END

Beauty covers many sins.

The beast in high-heeled shoes.

Beauty is a gift which is seldom despised except by those who do not possess it.

Beauty is the bait that makes the hook more palatable.

Beauty covers many sins.

Beauty is the beast in high heeled shoes.

I am an animal, but I try not to let on.

What is beauty? Does it stem from within? Does it lie in the eye of the beholder?

Is it art, or science, is it form over function? Or a combination of both?

The beauty of our intentions is so seldom matched by the aesthetic qualities of our results.

Such is life, but then life is beauty, in all of its manifold forms and structures, with all of its sublime transience and enduring geological monoliths, and the fleeting shapes of human attitudes.

Beauty is the ghost of ancient times and the promise of things to come.

Escape from Bondage, an excerpt.

Coming soon.

The night was restless and warm for early December. Huddled under the blankets, she thought she heard a faint rumble. A winter thunderstorm was not unheard of, but hardly welcome right now. She’d only been at St. Marie for a week, but finally her spiritual and physical exhaustion had worn off. All of a sudden she was up again, almost manic in her mood. Today, all day, her nerves were completely jangled. It wasn’t just the move and the transfer, or the thoughts of seeing Braden from time to time. Not after the terrible last three months, where they didn’t see each other at all, ultimately leading up to her transfer. The reality of what she had done was catching up, and she had to start teaching a new class Monday morning at eight-forty-five sharp.

Now she couldn’t sleep. The room was too hot. The blankets were too thick, but to take them off meant a draft and a chill. Air whistled around the window and much of it came in. She was on one side, and then the other, with her upper knee drawn up and supported by the balled-up blankets. It was like her brain just wouldn’t switch off.

Rain lashed the rooftop, less than ten feet away in her third-floor suite, way up under the eaves, a bit bigger than her room for all those years back home. That was one way of describing it. It wasn’t home. She wondered if it ever would be.

She was in a semi-aware state, not unpleasant in itself. If only she could drop off into real slumber. Heather would be ever so grateful. Sleep was the last refuge. She’d read that somewhere.

The place had its own atmosphere, and in the long hours of the night when quiet reigned, the big old house had a set of obscure noises all of its own. Most of them were unidentifiable, but the pish-pish-pish of the heating pipes and the sound of someone in another room flushing a toilet or getting a drink of water were familiar enough. The occasional loud crack or pop could be put down to the age of the building, or the settling of the ground it was built on. It was the expansion and contraction of the maple hardwood floors, when the sun crossed it during daylight hours. The house had a life of its own by now, being over a hundred years old.

The distant crawling whine of transport trucks on the highway, or cars in the street out front weren’t threatening. Voices of people going by were clearly outside and down there, respectively. Branches scraping at the weathered brick wall outside made her hair stand on end, at least until she figured out what it was.

Her eyes opened and she looked at the clock. Only a little after one a.m. She still had time to get a good night’s sleep. God, please.

She had just closed her eyes and rolled over when a solid clunk came against the wall under her window. At first, she though how pleasant it would be to look out into the treetops in summer…

“Ah.” She turned her head and neck against the resistance of the pillow, which was a lot softer than she was used to. “Um.”

It felt good, but it wasn’t sleep.

There were more small sounds, little bumps and a rasping sound. She thought it was the tree branches again, the wind must be really picking up out there.

Her eyes flickered. It wasn’t working…it was like she just couldn’t drop off. Every so often she had a night like that, of course. It was never welcome.

A strong thud came right at the window, looming eight feet away from the foot of her bed. Panes rattled and the curtains trembled.

“Argh.” She thought for a moment and then decided to whisper a single expletive. “Shit.”

There was quiet now except for the sound of light rain on the glass. She was just turning from her right side to the left yet again, when the sound of a regular tapping on the window made her growl in frustration and finally snap on the light and sit up, strongly tempted to go over and reassure herself it was just branches in the wind. She glared in the general direction of the offending window.

“Eek!”

There was a dim red shape in the glass, visible through a narrow gap in the dark brown, patterned curtains, down low just over the sash. It took sudden form in her consciousness.

Her jaw dropped.

Braden! What instinct for self-preservation stopped her from shouting his name, or anything at all for that matter, was a blessing of the first magnitude.

Oh, my God.

His hand beckoned, as he mouthed words silently. His face was wet from the downpour as she swung her legs out of bed and went to the window, putting her toes down first and making a minimum of thumping sounds of her own. She pulled the curtains away and tried to lift the window.

The thing was sticky in the guides. She bent low, put her back into it and got a good grip.

She bit her lip. It made a groaning sound. She shoved the thing up as high as she could get and then stood back, keeping the window up with her left hand as Braden clambered up and over, dripping a trail of water and grinning like a drunken idiot who has just won the lottery after a lifetime of total mediocrity.

Her eyes slid to the window. Braden nodded, and took over. He eased it down until it was up just enough to get his fingers out from under it. She looked around, and settled on a rolled-up magazine to keep the window from dropping the last bit. He stuck it under and gave a small push on the top of the frame. He pulled the curtains tightly closed. They billowed slightly in place from the remaining air flow.

Putting a finger to his lips for silence, he pointed at the bed and so Heather gratefully retreated to somewhere soft and warm.

Sitting with knees up and a blanket over her legs, she watched as Braden took off his ball cap and opened his jacket. The silence of the room was all too loud now. What in the hell was he thinking?

Yet the thoughts of having sex silently, which perhaps might not be truly impossible, stirred her and she wondered if Braden was some kind of a genius. The last three months had been sheer hell. Her groin throbbed at the thought of sex. The first week here, had brought on a kind of desolation of the spirit. She had been struggling with it. He stood at the end of her bed, looking down in total seriousness. His initial smile had vanished.

She licked her lips and watched his eyes, breathing deeply in anticipation.

Unzipping his jacket, he came over and sat down on a small chair she used for dressing. He reached into his side jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like a sandwich bag. She wondered if he had condoms in there. The notion of a snack or something seemed out of odds with what was happening…

He opened the top and proffered a note in her direction.

“Read it.” The words were barely perceptible, but they both flinched slightly from the unthinkable possibility of one of the other sisters waking up in the next room or across the hall.

His eyes traveled the walls and the layout as he held a small flashlight, elbow propped up by the night table, and she opened it up and began to read.

End

Author's Note:

I'll be reading through the novella a couple of more times but the story will be available on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Diesel Books, Sony and Kobo, as well as Amazon very, very soon. Thank you for reading the excerpt.