the perils of sketchy internet dating

A slice of beefcake … just because! Read on for Hayden Darkwith’s three dangers of Craigslist and Manhunt.

lately i’ve been hearing that athens’ homosexuals have been using craigslist to find sex, which i find both shocking and exciting. shocking because i thought craigslist was just for hopeless attempts to give away kittens. exciting because craigslist provides even more anonymity than manhunt, and despite years of downloading arthouse fetish porn, manhunt still makes me blush. so with absolutely nothing to identify the posters, craigslist couldn’t fail to disappoint . (i don’t know what “TT” is, but i can guess!) it heartens me to think (teletubbies?) there’s leather dungeons and free kittens within fifteen minutes of my house! why have i been wasting all this gas driving to atlanta for food for my boa constrictor and TT (tasty treats?) when i can get it through my local craigslist!

but then reality sets in. i don’t want to run into CntryBoy666 again in chemistry class and fumble with a micropipette while sneaking glances at the dude i think was wearing a gimp mask 12 hours ago. i fuck up enough labs already.

also i suspect that craigslist suffers the same failings as manhunt, where i’ve been getting my sketchy internet dating fix.

don’t get me wrong, manhunt’s great. the reason manhunt is great is this: everyone’s honest on manhunt. when you walk up to someone in a real life bar, they’re not going to come out and tell you, “hey, i only get off to mixing ecstasy cut with coke and viagra while watching old reruns of the Love Boat.” which means you then have to go through two to three weeks of dating to get to their house and come to the mutual, horrible discovery that you don’t like the Love Boat, or that it’s difficult to perform CPR with lube all over your hands. manhunt saves time. and if the people on manhunt want three weeks of dating first, then they’ll say as much, cause nobody’s going to judge them for not saying it.

on the other hand, you might notice that on manhunt (and craigslist), everyone is a “masc, fratty, country boy, looking for same.” (“masc” is the masc way of saying “masculine.”)

if you haven’t lived in georgia long, or athens, then you might not be aware that fewer than 10 percent of UGA students are in frats, farming is mostly corporate, and you have to drive many many miles away from atlanta, athens, augusta, macon, lawrenceville, alpharetta, roswell, etc. if you want to find a southern accent. but not on the internet. apparently, this is where all those guys in the movies and in the Marlboro ads and on the Abercrombie and Fitch bags hang out after the tractor pull.

this intimidated me at first. “i don’t know how to hitch a combine to a tractor!” i thought. “i don’t even know if those two things go together! does a combine have its own engine? fuck! damn me and my suburban upbringing!”

but, as it turns out, it’s all a bunch of bullshit. of the “masc country fratty farm boys” i met up with, half were theatre majors, none were in frats, and i could have handily beaten them all in arm wrestling. and my twang was stronger. (maybe this says more about me than them, or rather what puts the “power” in powerbottom. but i digress.)

but God help you if you point any of this out. if you want to get laid in Gay Land, be prepared to let these guys maintain their illusion that they are a Masc Dude, trapped/lonely in a world of queens giving “us” a bad name. you’ll be tempted. you’ll really want to say, “it doesn’t get anymore faggy than a marketing major with a long sleeve shirt underneath a polo you toolbag” but you CAN’T. you have to keep these thoughts to yourself. because if you do point out that you could throw them across the room with one hand, they’ll assume that you’re the real butch here and expect you to top, and then you’ve got a real mess on your hands. so stay cool!

but this is not the only danger of sketchy internet dating.

big danger number two: meeting people you know already

people rarely use face pictures on these things. it’s much more common to just put up a picture of your chest. or penis. (p.s. only go with the penis shot if you have a bad chest.) as a consequence, you don’t know who you’re chatting with most of the time, until you agree to exchange face pics. this is the moment of truth. this is when there’s a small chance you’ll receive something like this:

CntryBoiiii45: HAYDEN????!!!

you are now fucked. cause the guy who’s been talking to you about 69′ing for the last thirty minutes is actually your (fill in the blank) english teacher/neighbor/grocery store checkout guy/friend’s friend/mom checking up on you (”since when were you a vers/top? take out the garbage!”).

if you were interested in this person, it would have happened already, so you have to extricate yourself in a manner friendly enough so as not to prompt them to tell everyone you know that you were cruising on manhunt.

pwrbttm72: Well, isn’t that a funny coincidence! See you in class I guess! Haha! Don’t tell mom! Haha!

danger number 3

but maybe the face pic comes in, and it isn’t anyone you know, but they’re fuckin hideous. the easiest way to get around this is to say that they’re not your type, because you only like X, where X is any racial minority which is not them.

pwrbttm34: Sorry, I only like black guys and asians.

sure, it sounds bad, but it’s a lot better than:

pwrbttm34: Sorry, you’re fuckin’ ugly.

and get ready for plenty of these rejections yourself. as always, no rejection should upset you, because you have four other possibilities set up. never chat with fewer than three guys at once. you’re buying lottery tickets here.

subject for next time: writing a profile that doesn’t make you look like a big toolbag

Related Posts:

• finding the hot mens in the athenian wonderland: part 2

 

finding the hot mens in the athenian wonderland, part dos

they are out there

In case you missed part 1, here it is.

hello mo’s,

yesterday, i set out to answer, and probably failed, the common query for the young gay homosexual man who wants to meet other hot young gay homosexual men because he, quote, does not do the bar scene.

of course you do the bar scene. what you mean is, you don’t do THAT bar scene. that’s ok. it’s probably the same people who were there last week, and i certainly didn’t ask any of them out. no judgment here! at the same time though, due to the sheer power of numbers, you’re not gonna have better luck at Bourbon Street. (p.s. firehouse and barcode on the other hand…!) thus, i continue attempting to give you insight as to where to go on your journey of searching for the hot mens, and specifically, hot mens who look and act kind of like you. it’s an understandable problem, really. for example, if you’re super frat-tastic and you want fellow fratty guys, well, joining an actual frat will just mean a lot of time watching what you can’t have. after the hazing is over, anyway. (p.s. delta t….)

so, without further ado, (adue?) more places to go besides Blur, or Detour, or whatever they’re calling it now:

THE INTERWEBS

There is no shortage of social networking sites

don’t be a hater. you have a range of sketchiness of course: facebook, gay.co

m, manhunt.net, etc. again, rule number two: everyone’s either looking for a relationship or pretending not to. closeted people aren’t going to be visible on facebook, so if you want to meet everyone, and not just the people who are out to all of their friends and family, try the more obscure web sites. create a few free dating profiles and you’ll have tons of dates ready to go with people so similar to you you might get a little bit freaked out. want someone who’s also a math grad student and who also likes Snow Patrol and who also likes to get spanked while wearing a bunny rabbit costume? the internet is it! imagine trying to find that 200 years ago! people in the 1800’s had to go to the town well to search for that! Snow Patrol wasn’t even born yet! they were screwed from the outset, really.

if you do use facebook, or stumble on someone you like on there, don’t be a little bitch and click the poke option. send them a message telling them you do or have an interest in something they do. don’t just tell them you think something they do is cool. give them something to ask you about. people usually put the most obvious things about their life on their profile, and thus they’re usually tired of answering questions about whatever it is. identify something else to talk about. this goes for real life too.

START YOUR OWN GODDAMN WHATEVER IT IS

start a club or a frat or sports team or something. if you want to meet people like you, we live in the best age ever for finding people like you. you want to meet other gay judo black belts? other gay D&D players? use the internet! start a club! they’re out there. if there’s not a space for you to go, create it and bring them to you.

FRAT PARTIES

i don’t really go to these very much cause i don’t have the frat boy fantasy everyone else seems to have, but if you do, jesus your lord and savior has blessed you with weekly opportunities to meet 50 or so drunk and sexually frustrated young men with free music and free booze. wait about an hour for all of the straight ones to pair off with girls, and then go to work. again, not my thing, but if you want water, go to the sink.

also, some frat parties require an invitation. this does not really mean invitation. it means bring a hot girl with you. it won’t get you past a downtown dress code, but it will get you into a frat party. walk in like you own the place.

some more general rules…

GENERAL RULE #5

ignore the advice given to straight people. places that work for them won’t work for you. typical restaurants, coffee shops, art galleries, whatever, won’t work unless those are places that happen to be popular among the queer set. at least in, say, the ramsey weight room, you have a 25% chance that the guy you’re talking to is someone you could conceivably have sex with. regular places will drop it down to ten or five. don’t deal yourself bad odds. straight people have the luxury of sitting back and chatting up the attractive people that stumble by them. if you do that as a gay person, you’ll go on one date every twelve months. fuck that. go out and meet some people and do it on purpose.

GENERAL RULE #6

don’t pay attention to the clothes they wear, or other obvious, easily changed aspects of their appearance. clothes are something you exploit to get people to talk to you, but don’t let them be something that prevents you from talking to them. yes, this sounds obvious and trite and patronizing. but i see lots of people, particularly fratty people and indie rockers (although this phenomenon is not limited to them) avoid ridiculously good looking people because they didn’t portray the right image. nobody does a very good job of projecting the right image. whatever lifestyle you think will come across in someone’s most immediate outward appearance often doesn’t. all of the stuff you’re looking for probably isn’t going to be actively broadcasted; you’ll have to find alternative ways of identifying and searching for it. if you’re looking for people who go camping and know how to start a fire in the woods, you’re much better off typing in a facebook search with “camping” as an interest than looking for people wearing North Face windbreakers, and yet, the latter is the kind of approach people take. it’s inefficient. instead, whatever it is you like to do, ask them to do it with you.

GENERAL RULE #7

shoot big. if you only set up one date with one person two weeks from now, your whole life will revolve around it, and you’ll be so nervous that you’ll probably fuck it up. so go on more than one. you’ll be more relaxed because at least if you fuck up on date #1, guy #2 is meeting you for lunch next monday at that cookie joint at the intersection of clayton and broad.

as a side note, i actually hate dating. it feels more like a necessary evil to meet someone cool for something more substantive. the only way i can tolerate it is to always go to a nice restaurant, because hey, at least i’m eating something tasty, and the end of the meal is an easy place to end the date and go home if it isn’t going well. on that note, DON’T do a movie as a first date. terrible idea. if you like them, you’ll wish you were able to talk to them, and if you don’t, it’s two horrible hours of close proximity. sitting across from someone at a table is much better for getting to know them. you have a barrier, but it’s small. a conversational condom, if you will.

CONCLUSIONS

you should have picked up on the overriding theme here: figure out what you want and be proactive about getting it, don’t be a little bitch, don’t be afraid to play with your own identity by checking out a bunch of new spaces, and search for the partly-hidden signs of the personality you’re after so you don’t end up with some charlatan.

next week’s topic, in the unusual event i get asked to write again for GayInAthens.com: I’ve Got a Date, What the Fuck Do I Do Now?

Finding the hot mens in athens georgia

• finding the hot mens: the perils of sketchy internet dating
• finding the hot mens in the athenian wonderland: part 1

 

finding the hot mens in the athenian wonderland, part 1

Finding a hottie in Athens may be easier than you thought.

alright mo’s,

so you want to know where to meet hot guys in athens, and you don’t want to go to the local gay bar.

first off, you’re right. the gay bar sucks for meeting people. at least people for sex, or relationships, or relationships that might one day lead to sex. it could be because people there are lame. i’m lame, and i go, so that’s probably why. in any event, in the years i’ve lived here, i’ve never met anyone at the local gay bar that led to anything. i think it’s something about being around fifty people you kind-of sort-of know that makes it impossible to hit on anyone.

but not to worry. back when i was a freshman, i had maybe one date every three months, and each one was something i got really excited and nervous about. two months ago, i set up five dates with five different people on five consecutive days because i was bored and felt like doing it. i look the same then as i do now, it’s just there’s a trick to it. which hopefully i’ll explain.

GENERAL RULE #1: put aside all the crap you have in mind about what you think the person is going to be like, and where you think the person you’d be attracted to is likely to hang out. you probably find yourself in all kinds of weird places where you find yourself uncomfortable. so do the people you could hit it off with. go everywhere. don’t worry about what people will think. don’t just sit in Nowhere Bar all day long because you think one day your pool-playing doppel-ganger will come in. maybe he plays in the Tate center. maybe he’s on facebook. be everywhere.

GENERAL RULE #2: nobody’s just after sex. the people who act like they’re just after sex are actually having sex in the hopes that they’ll find someone for a relationship, or more frequently, not having sex at all and just pretending. the only people i know who have tons and tons and tons of hookups are impossible to distinguish with the naked eye. so don’t avoid places because the people seem sketchball. everyone’s sketchball. given the right circumstances, you would be sketchball. whether you’re at a star trek convention or a leather party, 95% of the population is equally sketchball. so relax, and talk to everyone. college is not high school. you don’t have a fixed identity. be everything.

GENERAL RULE #3: don’t rely on friends. don’t ask friends to set you up with people. don’t ask friends to talk to people you think are interesting. friends suck at this. setting up friends is a lost art, as in, lost lost. it isn’t coming back. do it yourself. friends are a crutch. note that this does not apply to gay friends. gay friends can introduce you all day long. they still suck at it, but not quite bad enough to make it pointless.

PLACES TO MEET PEOPLE BESIDES BLUR:

you probably want something more practical than the stuff above, so i’ll just run through all of the types of places i met people who i liked enough to date.

ORGANIZATIONS

obvious. there’s lots of them. there’s lambda, which you’ve already heard of, queer graduate group, the queer athletic group, the vet school group, and so on. they all have vastly different types of people and it may vary from meeting to meeting. stop in for a few of the more popular events, and ditch if it gets lame.

PLACES OVERRUN WITH QUEERS BUT WHICH AREN’T EXPLICITLY AIMED AT THEM

mixed crowds are the best. this is where you’ll find the widest range of people, because people who aren’t quite out to the entire world will feel comfortable going to these places. the scene varies… a year or two ago it was krush girls. now, maybe mercury lounge or go bar, but probably somewhere else. the ramsey weight room: overrun! ask to alternate sets with someone using the bench press. maybe they’ll chat you up, maybe not, find out. hit up concerts by artists with a big queer following: metric, ani difranco. the places where the mixed crowd hangs out will shift, but if you pay attention, you’ll find these places.

CRASH SOME PARTIES

queer people in athens love having their parties crashed. if you hear about a gay friend of a friend of a friend throwing a party, go. the more degrees of separation, the more reason to go, because it’s all the more likely you’ll meet someone you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. and for that reason, all the more happy they are to meet you. talk to everyone. if you’re not having fun, leave.

TO BE CONTINUED…

i’m told that in the modern world nobody can handle reading anything longer than 1000 words, and thus i must continue my exposition tomorrow.

Finding the hot mens in athens georgia

• finding the hot mens: the perils of sketchy internet dating
• finding the hot mens in the athenian wonderland: part 2

 

gay first date

i’ve gone on about ten first dates in the last month, most of them with really hot guys working on cool graduate degrees, which provided ample distraction for the first ten minutes or so from the fact that most of them were annoying douchebags.

by the tenth date, i could have written a script for them.

so i will.

SCRIPT OF GAY FIRST DATE

1. moment of truth: each person discovers that the other is at least as good looking as they are in their photo.  unless they don’t, in which case, DATE FAILS.

2. idle chatter about how cold it is outside.  observe who opens door for other.  if neither one attempts, you’re both bottoms.  DATE FAILS.

3. decision over whether or not to order appetizer

4. questions about what the other person does, usually a very subtle equivalent of, “so, are you going to be rich and successful?”

5. either A) yes response.  example: “i’m going to be a tax lawyer working in private practice.”

or B) “no” response.  at this point, they have the opportunity to make a joke about their liberal arts degree, at which point you can evaluate their sense of humor, and thus whether or not they’d be more fun to fuck than the tax attorney.  if jokes bad or nonexistent, then hell, you might as well roll out with the guy with some cheddar. DATE FAILS.

6. by this time you’ve gotten a glass of wine.   if the dude’s lame, hopefully you’ve ordered a big one.

7. now test for whether other person is adequate conversationalist.  if so, they will find an appropriate segueway from the answer to the “rich and successful” question to talk about something else.  alternatively, they will stare at you for a few seconds and then ask you what movies you like.  DATE FAILS.

8. evaluate eye contact.  people good at fucking will sit back and look you in the eye and not worry about whether they’re responding immediately.

9. there is now a race to see who can be the first person to find a way to keep the flow of the conversation and still ask how the other person’s last relationship ended.

10. the only acceptable answers to this question are “it was only three months in and i got bored” or “he/i moved”.  much more likely: “he didn’t call me enough, and i need someone who’s there for me.”  DATE FAILS.

11. after drinking, and sharing about prior relationships, other party finally feels comfortable enough to complain about something they don’t like.  if you don’t soapbox about something at this point, you’ll seem like a stale loser who’s stuck in smiley date mode.  but you also risk complaining about something the other person likes, destroying everything. millions of otherwise good dates ground disastrously at this point when only one person is morally ambivalent about the environment, prostitution, or capitalism.  most likely: they go on a tirade about how effiminate gay men are ruining the image of the rest of gay society, and that if gay people would just act like straight people, then they could fit in with straight people, at which point you reveal that you pseudoanonymously write a blog espousing violent queer takeover and forced sex changes for the non-believers.  DATE FAILS.

12. check comes.  sneak glance at how much other person left on tip.  if they notice that you’re looking and they still leave less than 20%, well, you know what happens then.

13. they invite you to come over to their apartment. if not, it’s because they don’t like you.

14. you feign work deadlines, illness, or death.  or you agree to come over, either because they were especially witty or interesting, or you know from their internet profile that their dick is gigantic, and if you had to endure a dinner that lame, damn if you’re not going to at least see it.

Next time: You’re at their place!

 

violent queer takeover: now slightly less violent!

darien asked me what my reasons were for the violent queer takeover.  i informed her that the heterosexuals in power have created a power structure based around indiscriminate violence, and that this needed to be stopped.  darien then pointed out that it may be somewhat hypocritical, after the violent queer takeover, to, as i had planned, kill all of the heterosexuals.  i am afraid she may be right.  although i did not mention the second reason for the violent queer takeover, which is to stop the movie industry from producing films about responsible heterosexual couples forced to deal with irresponsible house guests.  this is the most important principle of the violent queer takeover.  but assuming those movies can be stopped by queer control of all satellites and tv stations, then we can fulfill both principles of the violent queer takeover, ending both indiscriminate violence AND bad movies.

this of course introduces a great problem, which is what the Queer Nation does with all of the heterosexuals after the violent queer takeover. there are several possibilities.

1. RESERVATIONS

the problem with reservations is that instead of becoming an authentic preserve where people are free to live out their lives unburdened by the restraints of the majority culture, everyone on them instead seems to end up resorting to alcoholism.  and that’s alchol that we could be drinking!  we can’t go to all this trouble of a violent queer takeover just to make a reservation off-site that’s more fun.  reservations would also just end up being a tax drain, and we need the heterosexuals to carry their weight.

2. SLAVERY

heterosexual people could become our gardeners, house cleaners, pool boys, etc.  but there’s another problem: what fun is it to have a sinewy pool boy if you can’t fuck him?  because if you do have sex with him, he’s no longer heterosexual, and thus, you’d have to fire him.  it’s a no-win scenario.  the queer nation would be deprived of the dramatic stories of love across class lines, and the queer nation must have drama.  in the literary sense.

3. BABY FACTORIES

darien proposed that women work the fields while the men raise children, like some kind of gender-inverted little house on the praire dystopia.  the problem is that straight people are simply not good at raising chidren.  stalin, hitler, and osama bin laden all had straight parents.  case closed!

another problem with the little house on the prairie plan is that it requires that the heterosexuals form couples with a husband and wife, and the Queer Nation has no plans to recognize such relationships.  without any kind of official structure laid out for them, the heterosexuals woud devolve into a haphazard orgy of polyamory.  this raises the same problem as the reservations.  we cannot go to the trouble of a violent queer takeover just so we can deport the heterosexuals somewhere better.

4. THEY LIVE AMONG US

none of these options is acceptable, so the best plan is to allow them to live among us.  they could work the same jobs, use the same buses, share the same apartment complexes. and not only that, the Queer Nation will ensure that they are kept safe from danger, discrimination, or radical attacks in the street.  so long as nobody discovers that they are not in fact queer.  otherwise they’re fair game.

 

why straight women are to blame

i was telling my roommates the other day about my blog calling for a violent queer takeover, which just so happened to include the killing of all straight men, and they asked me why i had excepted straight women.

“they’d have to go too,” i said, “i just haven’t written a blog entry about it yet.”

my straight female roommate darien asked why.  i replied that “sure, maybe the oppressors are mostly men, or women propped up by men.  but the women are still ultimately responsible.”

this is because straight women have failed, for the past ten thousand years, to explain to their respective boyfriends and husbands that they are not achieving orgasm.

society would change overnight if women actually told men that they are not achieving orgasm. but instead, they let their men go to their respective jobs or voting booths, thinking that a pump-and-dump in the missionary position is not only the best that it can get, it’s god’s way.

it’s not like they’re failing to point out that sex would be just a little more pleasurable with a vibrator, or some candles, or vibrating candles, it’s that they’re not even claiming an orgasm.  if straight men were forced to do what was necessary to get women to come, e.g. rimming them while stimulating their vagina with a vibrator powered by gasoline, then all of the things gay people do wouldn’t seem so freaky anymore.  they’ll say to themselves, “sure, maybe gay people do a few strange things, like making molds of their own penises after fisting each other, but that’s nothing compared to what i have to do to get my wife off: scented candles and yeats!  i’d rather get double-fisted!”

my straight female roommate pointed out the suppression of women as a mitigating factor.  but they’ve had the right to vote for 88 years now, and they outnumber us 51 to 49, more than enough to vote in a referendum informing the straight male populace of their sexual failures.

straight male readers might be asking themselves, “am i part of the problem?”  if your straight femae wife or girlfriend or F.B. hasn’t told you specifics about what it takes to get her off, then i promise you: you don’t know.

there is no way to guess.  just like there’s no way to guess that you have a secret urge to dress up as a bunny rabbit while somebody spanks you.

this brings me to another reason why straight women are not exempted from the violent queer takeover.  queer people, in particular gay men, must listen, without payment, to the details of your sexual inadequacies, because it seems that straight women are determined to complain to everyone except the person at fault.  occasionally we hear about the successes–the guys who open up with rim jobs or an excruciatingly long and intense carpet munching marathon.  these men, unsurprisingly, are not the ones oppressing us (and thus, after the violent queer takeover, we may anoint them as Fertilizers).

 

miss miriam

“Oh Linda, I had the most embarrassing moment the other day.  I was
at the porn store…”
“Oh Miriam!  You didn’t!”
“I did!  I ran into one of my students!”
“Who?”
“Mike from my genetics class.”
“Well, I suppose worse things happen.  You think he’ll tell anyone?”
“Oh but Linda, that’s not even the worst part!”
“It’s not?  Oh Miriam!”
“Well I was walking by the magazine rack, and you know how they have
those weird fetish magazines?”
“Oh Miriam!”
“I was just curious!  I’d never seen one before!”

*

“Oh man guys, you will not believe what I saw at the porn store.”
“What?”
“Miss Miriam.”
“Oh man!  Miss Miriam!  I thought she stayed home all day, bakin’ cookies.”
“Oh but Linda, that’s not even the best part!”
“It’s not?”
“No!  I ran into her when she was browsing through a copy of, get
this, S&M World!”
“Oh man!  That’s awesome!

*

“Oh man Linda, the funniest thing happened at work today.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, there’s this little old school teacher who comes in like
clockwork every month to buy the latest copy of S&M World, and get
this, she runs into one of her students yesterday while she’s buying
it.”
“Oh man!  That’s awesome!”
“And that’s not even the best part!”
“It’s not?”
“No!  He’s on page five!”

 

blind lube test

there’s not much you can do on a wednesday evening when you discover that you have ten different brands of lube in your sock drawer, except… have a blind lube test!

so my roommate darien and i decided to conduct a blind lube test on our kitchen table with eight of the lubes in eight unmarked pods of tinfoil.  i set the pods out and darien tested each one with her hands, and then i tested.  no sex was involved, but in addition to rubbing between our fingers, we used armpits to simulate looser skin.  lubes were evaluated based principally on loss of friction, but durability was also a factor.

elbow grease – performed ok.  was middle of the pack on slipperiness.  it’s oil, so you won’t get that characteristic water-based catch, but since you can only use oil based lubes with polyurethane condoms (which are difficult to acquire, expensive, and aren’t big enough if your penis is even just slightly over average), this would have needed to perform far better to stay in the running.  the only reason i think you might choose this over the others is if the top two decrease the friction too much and you feel like you’re fucking an ice box.

KY warming liquid – ky’s only liquid lube in the test; we didn’t notice the warming element.  performed poorly, with little decrease in friction.

ID choco-raspberry liquid – this flavored lube performed surprisingly well, besting all of the liquid water based lubes.  still, the squeaky feeling characteristic of liquid texture water based lubes remained.  when sliding your fingers together, rather than making a continuous glide, there’s slight friction catches.  in my opinion, that squeaky feeling you get even with completely lubed up skin contributes to the unique burning feeling you can get with condoms and lube during anal sex.

WET strawberry flavored lube – but performed the worst of all the lubes.  even with gobs of it, still plagued with squeaky friction catches.  only redeeming factor is that it smells nice.  darien: “buy a candle.”

WET platinum silicon lube – this was the surprise disappointment of the evening.  after hearing rave reviews about silicon lubes, we expected great things.  and yet: squeaky friction catches!  the only thing going for this lube was that it seemed to last forever, but that got annoying when it came time to wash it off.  better than plenty of the liquid consistency lubes out there, but this didn’t make me a silicon convert.  (are there jelly consistency silicon lubes?  must investigate later.)

astroglide – i think this one is totally overrated.  i hear lots of people swear by it, but to me it just feels like any other slippery-but-not-really liquid consistency water based lube.

KY jelly – this gel lube was a very close second best to the best lube of the pack.  and unlike the winner, is available almost everywhere, even in walmart.  with lubed up hands gripped tightly together, we still couldn’t feel any squeaky dish soap friction with this one.  seems like the clear winner if you’re not ordering online.

“anal lube” by california exotic novelties – in terms of slipperiness and durability, this narrowly bested the KY jelly.  this stuff also had a mega jelly consistency (maybe i should say more like peanut butter than jelly), giving the impression that you could paste the entire contents of the bottle to the ceiling if you wanted to.  we appreciated this. nobody wants to try to slop on a bunch of lube and have most of it run down onto the bed.  no friction, and definitely did better than the ky when we rubbed a lubed up finger against a not-yet-lubed part of the body.  (although the brand is officially “california exotics” they seem to go by “calexotics” or “cal exotics” in the online stores.)

* * *

i think one thing i noticed was the impact of the testing method on the results–although the blind testing confirmed a lot of what i had felt before using the lubes “in the field”, the blind review, immediate comparison, and discussion of the feeling really helped distinguish what made some lubes better or worse than others.  we had to put the ky gel and the calexotics on opposite hands and rub for the same duration to finally distinguish which one was better.

also, darien and i had very similar evaluations of the lubes (with the exception of our thoughts on the smells).  perhaps the best lube is not in the eyes of the beholder?

the biggest surprise was that two water based lubes came out on top — suggesting that you don’t have to switch to the far messier silicon or the latex-busting oil-based to achieve friction-free access.

 

prostate treble

i think from now on my life will be defined in terms of before, and after, i acquired the WATERPROOF MEN’S PLEASURE WAND with ATTACHED SCROTUM MASSAGER.  now, i ran into a few problems.  for one, the ATTACHED SCROTUM MASSAGER is nowhere near long enough to do any scrotum massaging.  anybody who looks at it can see this.  i’m not even sure scrotum massaging would be comfortable, in fact, that’s one place (the only place?) i prefer things don’t go.  i think they just put that on the packaging because they wanted to keep pace with the Rabbit, which has an ATTACHED CLITORIS MASSAGER, and they very well couldn’t write on the packaging ATTACHED TAINT MASSAGER and feel like they were tailoring to men, because everybody has a taint, unless you’re one of those porn star chicks with the gigantic floppy clitoris that doubles as a windvane.  the taint is generally disrespected for reasons i haven’t quite figured out yet; probably because it’s more useful for foreplay, but considering what you have to pass through to get there, foreplay is already over.

but enough about taints.

the main feature of the “men’s pleasure wand” is of course the fact that it basically takes a normal vibrator, makes it small, and then angles the end right toward your prostate.  i can’t describe what it’s like, except that i feel intense sorrow for the 95% of the male population who, due to cultural constraints on heterosexuality, will never experience man’s closest thing to multiple orgasms.

there’s been a lot of talk lately about the direction of the queer rights movement.  i think a lot of resistance to gay rights comes from people who are grossed out about butt sex–to them, butt sex makes such little sense that it justifies privileging vagina-penis relationships.  queers haven’t helped correct this.  so far, the gist of the gay rights movement has been something like, “what we do in our bedrooms is our business,” and associated bullshit.

this is all wrong.

we need a new message:

“BUTT SEX FEELS REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.”

there are plenty of things out there that make no sense until you try them–okra, cell phones, fried chicken.  FRIED CHICKEN MAKES NO SENSE.  think about it: when given the choice, most gay men prefer to bottom than to top.  when given the choice to stick their penis in something, or jack off while someone else sticks their penis in their something, they take the latter.  and let’s not forget that sticking your penis in a butt is more pleasurable than sticking it into a vagina (i’m relying on anecdotal evidence here) which means that, in anatomical terms, vaginal sex makes less sense than butt sex, and even less sense than receptive butt sex.  (caveat: we’re talking about men here, women don’t have prostates.)  this can be expressed in the following mathematical rule:

Pleasure for Man:

penis in vagina < penis in butt < penis in their mangina

so when haters say that “the parts don’t fit” or “baby jesus wouldn’t have built us that way if we were meant to do that,” take the offensive:

“no, YOUR parts don’t fit.”  or, “if baby jesus intended you to be heterosexual, he wouldn’t have put your prostate in your ass and built your wife’s vagina like a car-port.”

you might be questioning my logic by now.  “hayden,” you say, “what about women?  where does that leave them?”

that one’s easy.  just like god designed woman, god designed the Rabbit.  and turkey basters.

 

RIP

i would like to dedicate this post to memorializing the death, or rather permanent malfunction, of my purple vibrator.  it had served me well over the past year.  sure, of the four different vibrating modes, i only used one (i prefer not to use a vibrator that feels like someone is communicating something to my prostate in morse code).  and at times it was a bit thick.  but it’s passed now, killed by too many trips to the shower, when i dropped it or caught the wire on something.  (everything is always so slippery during post masturbatory clean-up, and my mind is so focused on which hand or object went where that i get clumsy.)

which means i have to go out and get a new vibrator.

i used to feel awkward about this, staring at the rack of vibrators in the store, staring at the store clerk, staring at the rack of vibrators, staring at the sales clerk, staring at the rack of vibrators, and then suddenly grabbing one and foisting it on the clerk with two untraceable twenties.  now i just ask the clerk, who i’m pretty sure is on my college’s football team, where the oil based lube is and whether this really tickles the prostate and put everything on my amex so i can get my frequent flyer miles.  (they should award double mileage for sex toys.  if you get double miles for gas and all the other expenses for going somewhere, why not double miles for coming?)