I’ve discussed T&A in these pages before, and I surely will again.

There are websites that discuss sex with taste, manners, morals, that kind of thing. Then there are the kind that I’m about to profile. Some of this stuff is dark, dark enough that Geraldo will wear his sunglasses at night. This is one link dump, however, in which the most gratuitous bit of weirdness will be the least disturbing. Geraldo may not be entirely right, but as we’ll discover shortly, he isn’t as wrong as the kind of people who lead cults of mushheaded feminist ideologues and undersexed shut-ins.

Speaking of tits, I’m just about to link to some: probably not ones that you’d like to see, but if that was one of the search terms that brought you here, you might want to refine your search terms for specificity.

Selfies are wrong. You, too, will look like a damn fool preening at a mirror with a flat phone in hand, and equally a fool for having a forearm awkwardly extended in front of your self-portraits at popular tourist sites because you were too witless or bashful or something to ask anyone else to take your picture. On the other hand, when one is drunk and Geraldo Rivera at 2:30 am, there may not be anyone else present to take one’s nude self-portrait and post it to Twitter. Truth be told, if you have any more taste than I have, you probably don’t want to look at the result, but in consideration of the libertarian ethos on this site, I’ll let individual readers make their own decisions about viewing the masterpiece, on the understanding that they have been given fair warning and consequently bear full responsibility for any psychic damage.

In fairness, notwithstanding his rocking the Transitions Lenses and nothing else, much as Eliot Spitzer loved him some socks, Geraldo’s selfie isn’t nearly as weird as Anthony Weiner’s adventures in the Carlos Danger Zone. Geraldo had a certain confidence, even badassery, about him that Weiner inevitably lacked. Crucially, he also posted his self-portrait publicly instead of addressing it to specific female recipients, the better to freak them the hell out by being an overly familiar weasel.

Of course he’s from Long Island.

Why do I say such a thing about a place that I haven’t even visited? Because its reputation precedes it. #TeshTips: They raise ‘em right on the Guyland. Well, not always. And this. But(t) some names you just can’t beat. 

But let’s move off that terminal moraine while there’s still hope, and find us some even weirder stuff.

Here, Ken White responds to an accusation from Vox that he is a bully of other, slightly less creepy men and a “white-knighting gamma.” In this context, gamma is one of the letter designations used by “game” bloggers to shoehorn men (and, rarely, women) into fixed categories dictating their sexual attractiveness. To these bloggers, anyone below an alpha, or more charitably, anyone below a greater beta, is a loser who will never bed a woman unless she has run out of options and is forced to grudgingly settle for a member of the supplicating dregs of manhood. It’s a crude, paranoid worldview, and one that, judging from comment traffic on these blogs, is disturbingly resonant for a lot of people. It’s a nice pat explanation for why they’re losing out sexually, although the viciousness and crudity of the prevailing jargon on these sites can’t help socialize these guys to the point that women will start finding them attractive. Actually, I know for a fact that it is pernicious: one of the people I follow on Facebook is a dweeb who routinely alienates others by using the same kind of language because he finds it amusing and is too clueless and puffed-up to know when to hold his damn peace.

Vox also has some odd things to say about Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, among them, that Clinton isn’t handsome and that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a lesbian whom he won over “through traditional Gamma acts of service.” Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense.

Next, we have an avowedly Christian mother who unabashedly uses a lexicon that includes “carousel-riding slut” and “whore,” the latter used as a slur with no regard to whether the target has ever used her sexuality in a mercenary fashion. Sunshine Mary’s often understated writing style minimizes the extent to which she’s a shrill Chicken Little authoritarian. The context of the “slut” reference in the second link above was an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who spent fifty years pining after the irresistibly aloof man who took her virginity, the premise being that the woman in question is typical of all women everywhere. Because the UK doesn’t have a gutter press that seeks out the most grotesque people in my country, too, so that it might luridly give their weight in stone. (The last article has been put behind a paywall since I first found it, but I haven’t forgotten about that lady’s custom truck. Or the stone measurements, because my Scotch battle ax of a great-grandmother was always weighed in stone.)

The disappointing truth is that anything less than thirty-stone dysfunction is too boring for the British gutter press. Just because you don’t read about it in the Sun doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Its absence from the tabloids will, however, limit its capacity to influence game bloggers towards something resembling sobriety and away from mouth-frothing idiocy on the basis of cherry-picked examples of lurid brokenness. Women who don’t get ruined into their old age and unto divorce by dormitory Lotharios are so boring.

The Daily Mail story about the woman forever ruined by teh Alpha Fux was originally dredged out of the English gutter and aired in the international manosphere by Chateau Heartiste. CH is more or less what would have happened to Richard Nixon had he become a professional cockhound instead of going to law school: brilliant, but clinically paranoid and all kinds of wrong. The biggest problem, as I’ve alluded to, is that weird guys with limited social stimulation read this sort of moral rot and become fully infected, with no defenses against the evil. I often feel that I should wash my mouth out with soap after reading some of the stuff on CH, and there’s no way that I’m at the socially stunted or socially isolated extreme of its readership. Extrapolating the reactions of the really hard cases is a sad thought experiment; many of those guys, I’m sure, go forth and earnestly regurgitate in public what they’ve read on sites like Chateau Heartiste, not fully grasping that it’s sick shit that they found in a weird cul-de-sac of the information superhighway.

Some of the greatest treats on CH are comments from Great Books for Men, who has parlayed his membership in the Chateau peanut gallery into his own blog. GBFM has been compared to James Joyce, but I think he’s much more readable. He’s a minor literary genius who specializes in strings of neologisms, most often about Ben Bernanke and anal sex.

At the opposite extreme from the manosphere, after a superficial fashion, is Hugo Schwyzer, professor of history and gender studies at Pasadena City College, “male feminist,” and grand lodestone of internet derp. For those who can’t get enough humblebragging from weirdos, he’s a blogger, too. His shtick is to abjectly self-flagellate for being a horndog, dramatically exit stage, then return for some more abject self-flagellation and pornographic luridness.

Even before his most recent quasi-downfall, Schwyzer had some eccentric takes on sex. Here, for example, he earnestly extolled the social benefits derived from straight men submitting to anal stimulation from their girlfriends.  Do we need Larry “Wide Stance” Craig to stand up and call bullshit? Maybe:

Want to make straight men better in bed — and better feminist allies? The path may be simple: fuck them up the ass. According to one brand new book, the path to making men more compassionate, appreciative and playful may be straight through their butts.

In The Ultimate Guide to Prostate Pleasure: Erotic Exploration for Men and Their Partners, Charlie Glickman and Aislinn Emirzian make the case that straight “men who get into anal penetration are among the most secure in their masculinity: because they’ve examined themselves, faced their fears.” Despite the title of the book, the authors make the case that the payoff for prostate play — specifically by a woman using a dildo or other toy — isn’t just pleasure. It’s liberation from the masculine straitjacket, with happy consequences that extend well outside the bedroom.

I feel for men who enjoy their butt play without the politics that Schwyzer and his ilk insist on accreting to the practice.

That’s far from Schwyzer’s career low. This eruption of craven flattery of sophomoric drama queens and inchoate anger was definitely worse:

Remind Girls They Have the Right to Want Sexual Attention From a Select Few.
When harassers are confronted on their behavior, they often offer the same classic defense: “she wouldn’t dress that way if she didn’t want attention.” Of course young people want attention — often sexual attention. Very few (if any) want that attention indiscriminately from every post-pubescent male with a pulse. “We always behave as if it’s a really selfish, dangerous and ultimately naïve way for girls to dress revealingly,” Clementine Ford wrote in an email. “A young woman isn’t allowed to dictate what attention she wants, because that’s her making a judgment on the kind of men she deems good enough for her.”

The virgin/slut dichotomy has long meant that a young woman is given two choices: have sex with no one, or give it up to everyone. One key way to fight slut-shaming is to reiterate that girls have the right to want to turn on whom they want to turn on – and still be treated with respect and care by those whom they don’t. That’s only an unreasonable expectation in a culture that expects very little from men.

In that case, I hereby demand sexual attention from my own select few, specifically, Christine O’Donnell, Mariska Hargitay, and Sarah Palin. I shouldn’t be getting attention only from Betty White types just because I’m chubby, balding and an underemployed farm laborer. Actually, a really cute barista in Orange County had a thing for me a couple of months ago, but that’s no excuse for Mariska Hargitay’s failure to force herself on me. Mariska, you’re pwetty!

I have to agree with Schwyzer’s critics that he’s a moral cretin. I don’t mind if he has Charlie Sheen-style three-ways, but he really should stop trying to atone for his horndog lifestyle by belittling other men and encouraging women to be immature, irresponsible and entitled. He is exactly what Vox accused Ken White of being. Apparently it actually helps him get laid, but it’s a scummy way to go about it.

Finally, I’ve written some other stuff about sex here and here. Not the most dignified stuff, perhaps, but my efforts at self-promotion are a bit more dignified than Schwyzer’s, and you’ll never see a selfie of me in Transitions Lenses. I’ve never owned a pair.