Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Well this is about as random as my posts get. So since the beginning of the year my family has been watching an episode per day of the teenage-Superman soap opera Smallville. Go Netflix. For some reason the combination of angst, adventure, intrigue, romance, danger, lust, and parental modeling has just worked to keep us in all-ages conversation about all sorts of things. We’re currently toward the end of season seven, which is probably more episodes of anything I’ve ever watched. Go figure. But I digress…

Today for some reason I decided I wanted to know what Michael Rosenbaum looks like with hair. He’s the guy who plays the perpetually, almost delightfully complex Lex Luthor character.

Anyway (yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the point) I found a bunch of photos on Google Images (the link, again) and randomly clicked on a thumbnail, expecting to get a better look.

What I didn’t expect, but what I instead got, was a link to page “M” of a blog called Ticklish Male Celebrities, hosted by Lady, evidently from Bulgaria (judging from her email domain’s country code) who’s description reads

I’m a woman of art, who has one weird… weakness – ticklish guys :)

The side description says

The blog’s besically an alphabetical list of famous actors/musicians/writers/footballers, etc, who’ve admitted they’re ticklish. You can check the “Tickling Media Forum” to see their list of male celebs, so you’d know where I got most of the information from. Myspace mesaging also helped LOL :) I’d also upload photos of the guys in question, barefoot if possible.

That’s pretty much exactly what the blog is about. It’s been around since September, 2008, which makes it fairly venerable in blog years. And though the unusual method of just adding new entries to one of 26 “alphabetical” posts makes it hard to tell, Lady keeps it active and up to date.

Anyway, if you’re into very, very soft-core “man candy” images, or if you’re into mostly-barefoot men, or if you’re into ticklish men, or you’re just looking for unusual celebrity trivia the site could be just the ticket.

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Doh! While researching fetishes (there’s this persistent but obviously mistaken belief, going back to Freud no less, that only men have fetishes) I discovered that, according to The Manual of International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10 version 2005), something is technically a fetish if and only if it involves a fixation on or use of inanimate objects for sexual gratification. If one is instead attached to activities instead of inanimate objects then the technical vocabulary is “paraphilia.” I think most people have probably heard the term paraphlia. What I didn’t know was that when one is erotically fascinated by specific body parts like feet or hair it’s called “partialism.” Since most people’s sexual attachments to objects, activities, or body parts aren’t obsessive enough to count as “diseases and related health problems,” though, it’s fine to lump them all together or to mix or match them. Or you could just call it all “kink.” Or, as long as it really isn’t interferingly obsessive, since appreciation for sexual variation is actually pretty common you could do what I do and call it “normal.”

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Getting back to my original obscure intention, the photos of Michael Rosenbaum didn’t really show what he looks like with hair so my search continues. But just for the record here’s her entry on Rosenbaum, bare feet and ticklishness quotes included.

Michael Rosenbaum (plays Lex Luthor on “Smallville”) This is how his AOL Live interview went (9/02)..
Hi Michael! Are you a ticklish guy? If so, where?

MichaelRLive: “Sure. Where am I not, that’s the question.”
http://www.michaelrosenbaum.com/aol.html

Scroll way down to find the entry.

Cool and completely unexpected discovery.

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper’s TheSexist blog has a great takedown of the whole slut-shaming extravaganza surrounding any women, but particularly
“celebrity” women, who ever, anywhere, for any reason, mix sex and cameras. And while you should definitely go read the whole thing (a conversation with Sadie Doyle who’s also just sharp) one particular piece really stands out.

It’s about tisk-tiskers who fret endlessly about “vulnerable” victims without… well, here’s Amanda

...while I understand the practical concerns involved here, and think everyone should be educated about the risks of sexual intercourse, people who trump up “personal responsibility” while doing no fucking work to help make bad “consequences” of sex any better just essentially think people who have sex OUGHT TO BE punished for it. These are the same arguments against abortion, the same arguments against working to stop HIV, the same arguments against working to stop rape.

She said it here.

The reason they do no fucking work to help make bad consequences is that at the end of the day they endorse the consequences! 100% The victim’s suffering and humiliation makes them object lessons (cough, objects, cough) that ideally encourage others not to follow suit.

In hashing out the debates between, say, Violet Blue’s new Our Porn, Ourselves and this weekend’s Stop Porn Culture conference it’s really important to make sure everyone’s defining their terms the same way.

In conversations this week I was reminded again how many bitter opponents of “porn” will add the qualification that they have no problem at all with “erotica.”

This is a bigger deal than you might think.

For a lot of people the word “pornography” means, by definition, arousal-oriented text and images that are calculatedly exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful.

For instance Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon defined it very specifically in their model antipornography civil rights ordinance

“Pornography” means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words, including by electronic or other data retrieval systems

See the rest of the model ordinance here.

If that’s your definition, and then if someone else tells you they’re on their way to the Feminist Porn Awards there’s going to be a little cognitive dissonance. If that’s your definition then “feminist porn” is going to sound as intentionally, incomprehensibly, insultingly disingenuous as “vegetarian beef.” If that’s not the other person’s definition then there’s going to be a… communications breakdown.

Here’s the problem: A lot of people who define porn the way “anti-porn” activists do define material that’s not those things as “erotica.” And just so you know, in numbers that might surprise you a lot of people who are “anti-porn” can speak very fondly about the pleasures of erotica. Similarly, the vast majority of progressives and feminists who speak fondly of porn are also opposed, often bitterly, to “arousal-oriented text and images that are calculatedly exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful.”

In other words many people who see themselves as “anti-porn” are actually perfectly comfortable with porn (i.e. erotica.) And many people who see themselves as “pro-porn” are actually anti-porn (i.e. unsafe, non-consensual, etc.)

You can quibble about the terms, and it’s certainly not the case that it’s just all one big misunderstanding. For instance some anti-porn really are opposed to any kind of representations of erotic material at all, period. And people really are so committed to tolerance of free speech that they refuse to condemn any kind of porn, period. No matter what terms you use, reconciling those two extreme positions is going to be very hard. On the other hand there’s still a lot of room in the middle where using the same terms would be very useful for discussion.

But if you don’t get that there’s a technical definition of “porn” that’s different from the way it’s more generally used then clear debate is going to be pretty much impossible.

One of the weirder, much-less noted phenomena of internet and porn culture is that a lot of people now have a better idea what a penis looks like erect than how they look most of the time. Even if they don’t participate in online dating websites! :-) But seriously, chances are that thanks to the pervasiveness of porn and its collateral practices most people have now seen more naked men with erections than men without.

If you’d been making predictions about the future of the internet back in, say, 1992-1994 I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have made very many people’s lists.

Speaking for myself my days of posting penises, of any sort at all, are pretty much over. But as long as I’m here I might as well add that I am still quietly participating in the Half-Nekkid Thursday photo meme. (No penises but not especially safe for work either.)