It’s election season and even the Anti-Girlfriend is feeling a little political. And even if the first presidential debate, which was supposed to focus on domestic policy, didn’t mention women’s reproductive health, every other Republican politician has seen it fit to weigh in over the last year so we’ve got plenty of slut shaming nonsense to contend with.
Check out the first installment (of three) of the Anti-Girlfriend’s quest for some emergency contraception in America’s heartland. Will she get it in time? Or will she get pregnant off of a one night stand and decide to implausibly have the baby like Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up?
The world is small, even in a city like New York, and even on the Internet.
As anyone who has done some online dating and cruising knows that if you search for matches nearby, you’re bound to come across someone you already know. And last night that someone was a person I encountered at a friend’s birthday party a couple of years ago that took place in a nightclub. I don’t remember his name, but I call him the Knuckle Cracker.
He was moderately attractive in a nerdy Jewish sort of way–dark hair, dark eyes, glasses–and he was single and male. (At birthday parties that take place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, that is no mean feat.) Anyway, as the party tapered off and more people left, I f0und myself sitting next to him on a couch in the dimly lit club.
This is when you’d think he make his move. And he did, in his own weird way. Grasping my hand, he tugged on my ring finger. Hard. Till the knuckle cracked.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Cracking your knuckle,” he responded.
“Why?”
“Because I want to,” he answered. “Do you like it?”
He looked at me like he expected me to say “yes.” He reached for another finger, getting ready to give it a tug. I pulled my hand back and stood up. “What are you doing?”
I walked away and hovered near my friend for the remainder of the night until she was ready to leave her own birthday party. On my way out, I passed the “knuckle cracker” and perhaps because I hoped to help girls he would flirt with in the future, I gave him a bit of advice. “Never crack a woman’s knuckles,” I advised him.
I hope he listened to me. And if he didn’t, I hope he at least listed this predilection on his OkCupid profile.
[Here is the original blog post about this incident.]
Over the last few months, I’ve had several versions of the following conversation with female friends and acquaintances (because people I barely know tell me the darndest things). They begin by talking about a date with a guy they’ve been seeing that seemed on track for sex.
Me: And then what happened.
Friend: Nothing. We went back to my place but he was too tired to have sex.
Over and over, the point being driven home was that despite what every romantic comedy has taught us, men aren’t necessarily the ones who are more desirous of sex. We’ve been warned/educated by the media that men always want sex and that women are often withholding it from them.
But women, in my experience, are at least as libidinous if not more than some men.
As I was having some version of this conversation with a barista at my local coffee shop, I speculated that maybe it has to do with our respective ages. Both of us are in our late 20s, which for many women is when their sexual “peaks” begin. The men, however, peaked in their late teens and early 20s. Sexually speaking, men and women might be like two ships passing in the night. “Could that have something do with it?” I wondered aloud.
The barista agreed that this sounded plausible. Yes, it might boil down to the fact that men and women’s sexual peaks (and valleys) are wildly out of sync. Men’s desire to have sex is highest at the times they (and their partners) are least experienced and skilled. Women’s come at a point where they and their partners are much more capable yet not as enthusiastic as an 18-year-old boy.
My barista friend chimed in with an even more alarming thought: since many women date older than their own age, even if just by a few years, does this mean that we are destined to forever be out of step with our partners? Will we always be begging for sex? I sure hope our hypothesis is incorrect because I didn’t really date 18-year-olds when I was that age. I certainly don’t want to start now at 29.
Or might we be generalizing from far too small, self-selecting sample size–educated women in cities with liberal (or as conservatives might call us “promiscuous”) bent.
Or perhaps we’re being egomaniacal, thinking that these guys would otherwise want to sleep with us if it weren’t for nature taking their libidos down a notch. To put it into the annoying parlance of Greg “Soul Patch” Behrendt, maybe they just weren’t that into us.
Or maybe they really just were tired and had an early morning meeting.
Over the Jewish holidays, I was invited to a few meals, very friendly, fun, and delicious affairs. As always, I brought something with me to contribute and because I wasn’t raised by wolves. (In both instances, I was asked to bake chocolate chip cookies, which I love doing.)
Anyway, the holiday meals I attended were a healthy mix of single friends and wonderful married couples. And everyone brought something–a salad, a bottle of wine, a dessert.
But as I looked around the table, I couldn’t help but notice (as I have on many other occasions) that while I, as a single person, brought cookies, the couples each chipped in one item per two people.
How has this come to be? Why do couples get to skirt by with just one gift? Do they eat off of the same plate? Do they eat and drink half as much? Nope.
They eat with the same gusto and appetite as any of the single folks present, but for the purposes of gift giving, they’ve melded into a unit just as they have on their tax returns in order to pay lower taxes. (I can’t blame them for that. I’d get married for insurance and the ability to file a joint return.)
Am I being shrewish and obnoxious? Or is this yet another small way that single people get screwed? (I guess the same idea applies to wedding or baby gifts.) When did we decide that when you get married you get to go halfsies on all presents?
I guess that the next time someone asks me to bring a bottle of wine to a dinner, I could drink half of it ahead of time and tell my hosts that I left the other half at home for my partner, Babo the Ugly Doll.
I probably won’t do that because of backwash. Instead I’ll be grateful for all the evenings I get to spend alone, enjoying sushi delivery and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix and the little dance I get to do before I go to sleep without anyone’s judgment. Except for Babo’s.
I just spent fifteen minutes crawling on the floor, helping a friend search for a dropped birth control pill. (We found lint and two runaway Advils, but alas no hormonal pink pills.)
Eventually we gave up but my friend asked what is probably an oft asked question–why doesn’t each pack come with one or two extra of the actual pill (not the placebo) in case you drop one on the floor. Or down the toilet. Or down the drain. (I’ve managed to lose three quarter of acne medication by spilling down the bathroom sink.)
“Sort of like the extra button packs that come with blouses,” I said.
So why don’t we get one extra pill to take in the event of slippery fingers? I promise I wouldn’t hoard all of the extra pills to sell to teenagers in Texas. I would never do that. I would give it to them for free.
Because I know we’ll probably never top last year’s suggestive card and because my wishes to you guys remain unchanged, I’ve decided to repost FEMA Fatale’s fabulous design. Look at it as long and as hard as you’d like–it’s sort of like a Rorschach.
If you’re like me and other folks in their 20s and 30s, you were probably very upset to hear that Amy Poehler and Will Arnett ended their nine year relationship. (I’ll be honest–I was embarrassingly distraught over the breakup of a couple wholly unconnected to me.) Together, they were hilarious, adorable, successful, and supportive of each other’s career.
Of course, we know that no relationship is perfect and while it was surprising to learn of the split, there are probably several excellent reasons they ended their marriage. Just none that we will probably ever be able to surmise since they are probably very specific to their relationship.
But of course that doesn’t stop reactionary dating coaches and matchmakers from speculating. Patty Stanger–of Millionaire Matchmaker fame–weighed in with perhaps the most misogynistic post-mortem analysis. Though issuing the caveat that she is not privy to the particulars, she used it as an opportunity to bring up the old sexist trope–that if a woman is more successful than her husband, her relationship will suffer. “Their breakup did get me thinking about how being a woman with a successful career affects relationships,” she wrote.
She goes onto recycle all of banalities about pairings with successful women are fraught because of the expectation that men should provide. The “me hunter/wealthy finance guy, you Jane/underpaid and under-appreciated public servant/stay-at-home mom” paradigm.
But let’s say your man is cool with you making more money than him, you still should worry because what about the rest of the world? Ms. Stanger, by “the rest of the world” did you actually mean to write “people like me who create entertainment by perpetuating the traditional romantic setups”? Just wondering. Anyway, she observed:
There will undeniably be comments and questions about your relationship dynamic. At first, these may seem like not much more than a silly annoyance, but these comments burn and eventually, they’ll wear away at your man’s confidence. He’ll start to notice the difficulties of your untraditional financial situation and even if the financial dynamic doesn’t bother him, the attention to it might.
Stanger seems to subscribe to the same notions of evolutionary biology that prompted Kevin Williamson (disappointingly not the one of Dawson’s Creek fame) to write this National Review essay about why women should flock to Romney. Of course, this neglects study after study that shows many women are outperforming men professionally. If Stanger’s theory holds true, I think we’re going to see the divorce rate climb even higher.
Or maybe we can give men like Will Arnett a little more credit and the benefit of the doubt that his marriage ended for more mundane reasons.
Today’s post comes courtesy of an anonymous guest writer who is more sexually adventurous than I am.
Menaj et toi. Oh, that fearsome act that always leaves one person the odd man (or woman) out. Or so they say.
Everyone knows someone who will say that while threesomes are great for checking one more thing off “Ye Old Bucket List,” they are pretty crappy if you are actually hoping to derive any pleasure from the proceedings. They tell you, “Oh, we were having great sex and Susie was just sitting in the corner feeling left out and not being any fun.”
Well, I’m here to tell you that a threesome can be fun for everyone. I recently had my first one because, like everyone else, I had to hurry up and get it checked off the ol’ BL while I’m still in my 20s.
Anyway, on this night I was competing in my hometown’s signature sport–drinking–along with my friend *Chloe and her new boyfriend. She’s one of my best friends, and happens to be bisexual. So, on a Tuesday night in a small city in the Midwest, we decided why not have a threesome?
We stumbled back to his place, opened some wine and climbed into his bed. Chloe stripped me naked and started kissing me. Eventually, we all ended up lying horizontal, one next to the other. At one point, both her boyfriend and I reached to finger her, and just both kept doing it. Strangest feeling ever–both to be on the giving, rather than receiving end of this act, and to do it in concert with another person. And yeah, as you’d expect, they both went down on me and me on them. All that stuff. I refrained from actual penetration with *Dave, because well, at the moment it kinda felt like stealing. Having heard that threesomes can cause a jealousy later, I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable at all or cross the line. Plus, I felt like a big point of the encounter was to bring us closer as friends, so it didn’t feel necessary at the time for me to have sex with her boyfriend.
Looking back on it, perhaps what made it fun was our shared affection for her. After knowing someone for 10 years, it just feels natural to get to know their body and what they like in bed. Plus, I had heard her having sex with boyfriends so many times that I already knew she likes her sex to be loud, dramatic and theatrical. Although her boyfriend knew her for a shorter amount of time, there was still a familiarity there that made it seem like she was our tie that held the whole ordeal in place.
And you may say to yourself, “Bah! That’s not a real threesome!” Maybe it was more like a two-and-a-halfsome, but I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. I later awoke to them having loud sex next to me, which was, if anything, the most awkward part of the whole experience. While a big part of the “success” of my own experience was our shared love for my friend, it seems a threesome can be enjoyed by most anyone with the proper boundaries and as long as everyone is on the same page. So if you want my advice, go for that threesome when it comes along because chances are you’ll enjoy yourself.
And hey, that opportunity might never come knocking again.
Or you could take Dan Savage’s advice on the matter:
But here’s a fabulous video montage of the new queen of the Olympic Games, 2012 All Around Champion, Gabby Douglas. She can even teach you how to dance:
I know that I spend a lot of time making fun of online dating on this site even though I partake in it often. But as awful as it sometimes can be, its predecessor was way worse.
Video dating.
Way back in the halcyon pre-Internet days, if you couldn’t meet someone through friends, at a bar or a party, you might’ve chosen to resort to video dating. In video dating, you’d record yourself describing your personality, interests, and what you’re looking for in a woman. Though none of the men has discussed “living life to the fullest/living hard, playing harder” and bullshit like that, there’s plenty in this montage to cringe at.
Before I even get to their words, let’s just discuss their appearances. Never before have I seen so many awful Christmas sweaters in one place. Well, actually that’s not true. I do live in Brooklyn. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of those sweaters on many guys around Clinton Hill. Maybe the sweaters that I’ve seen in my neighborhood are the exact ones that are on display in a video, bought and sold at many different vintage and thrift stores until they made it to New York. It’s the circle of (sweater) life.
Now for the video so you can judge. (And judge you will. It would take a saint-like figure not to.)
Now clearly there are too many amazing things to quote and you don’t need to transcribe it for you so here are just a few of my favorites from the giggle fest.
“I like to talk to people deep into the night.” Is that what they used to call it?
“What I’m not looking for is some big overgrown monster who is always thinking about food.” So sir, you wouldn’t date Cookie Monster? Have you not seen this video, “Share It Maybe”? (Of course you haven’t. You’re from the past.)
“I’m interested in most phases of data processing.”
“Fire breathing dragon.”
“I’m really looking for someone I can feel special about.” Says the guy dressed as a Viking.
He should only kiss your face. That's it. (Photo via CC)
I’m currently dogsitting for a lab with an extra sensitive stomach, which requires medication. In order to get her to take her pills, I stuck them in peanut butter and fed them to on a spoon. I was telling a friend how hilarious it was to watch the dog I’m sitting for lick peanut butter–seriously, who needs cable when you can watch a lab eat PB–and this reminded her of a particularly disturbing incident.
As a high schooler, she was babysitting for a young girl and her charge presented her with an issue that not even Kristy from The Babysitters Club would know how to handle. (She was the bossy, all-knowing one, right?) The girl asked my friend if she wanted to see something cool and like any good teenager forced to look after children for money, she did her best to seem interested in anything this kid had to do or say. The girl lifted up her dress and the dog proceeded to lick her. My friend was stunned and unable to react. And then the girl exclaimed, “It works even better with peanut butter!”
I asked my friend if she told the girls’ parents what had happened. “No,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say.”
Not that this girls parents would’ve known what to say to their young daughter unless they happened to read the parenting classic, When to Talk to Your Daughter About the Birds, the Bees, and Receiving Oral Sex from Canines.
Wherever she is now, I hope this girl learned the all-important lesson–sweet and sticky foods are for dessert, not for sex. (And that you should leave your pup out of all sex acts–coital or post-coital.)
This weekend I went to the beach with friends to escape blistering heat and humidity. The ocean, however, was quite churned up due to a storm the night before and full of seaweed.
In the midst of discussions of how women on the Upper East Side pay good money at spas to be wrapped in seaweed and here we were, floating in the Atlantic’s version of miso soup for free, I bemoan the fact that in addition to the fact that I will be peeing sand for days after this beach excursion, I will also have to pick seaweed out from bikini bottoms and presumably, crotch.
To which my friend responded that it was just like Eve’s, post-Tree of Knowledge incident, or mistletoe down there.
Miseltoe, this Jewess wondered, aren’t you supposed to put that where you want to be kissed?
Why yes–yes you are! Typically that refers to a location in the home but why not a body part too? Some mistletoe on the nape of your neck if you so desire, the small of your back, or you can wear it Eve-style.
I announced this to my friend, that ideally mistletoe should be placed where you’d like to be kissed, either in the geographically or scatologically speaking.
And if it’s the summer and mistletoe is not readily available then seaweed could be a suitable substitute. You can have Christmas year round.
You’re watching reruns of Frasier and as the ending credits roll and Kelsey Grammer sings the “theme” song and gets to the lyric “And maybe I seem a bit confused/Yeah maybe but I’ve got you pegged” and instead my mind leaping to the obvious meaning of “pegged,” meaning “all figured out,” my mind flitted to the sex practice called “pegging.”
This comic was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend of mine who is going through a bit of a dry spell. Lord knows, we all have been there (and there have been times that I’ve gone longer than 4-5 months. I’m going to go weep now).
The longer the streak lasts, the more monstrous one begins to feel. Hence the comic. (And I hope that this keeps you from looking at the New York City skyline in the same way again.)
Also, this is the first comic by the Anti-Girlfriend’s new resident artist. I think she is quite amazing and I hope you enjoy her work.
When it comes to online dating, the first date–the one where you take your chat from virtual to face-to-face–shouldn’t count as a date. It’s the pre-date. It really counts as that first conversation you might’ve had with a cute guy or girl at a bar.
You see, when you see a cute guy at a bar and go up to talk to him, you’re sussing him out. Beyond what hearing what he’s saying (job, hometown, alma mater), you’re determining whether you’re attracted to him, whether there’s any sort of chemistry, whether you’d be interested in seeing him one on one on a different night, in a different place. This first encounter would never count as a date.
But in online dating world, that first encounter seems to count as a real date because unlike bumping into another person at a bar or a party, this meeting has to be scheduled and arranged like a date would. You’ve got agree to a time, place, activity as you would on any first date. So even though you’re doing the same thing you would if you were randomly thrown together at a dinner party–sizing the other person up–this feat of scheduling goes down in the dating ledger as an actual first date.
Which is why I think that when it comes to counting up the number of dates you’ve been on with someone you met online, you shouldn’t really include the first one in the tally. But it probably will be counted because of all the effort that goes into it. Dates are work. Accidental encounters are effortless.
In this formulation, it would be thirteen “dates,” not twelves that would be considered a dozen, akin to a baker’s dozen. (Of course, it’s pretty weird if you’re still counting at this point.)
What do you guys think? Is it a date? Or is it an overly formal first encounter?
Nora Ephron, as most know by now, passed away on Tuesday night. The journalist-screenwriter-director best known for her romantic comedies (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle) also said/wrote many smart things over the course of her long, illustrious career. This is one of them:
“Food has brought me joy in times when there wasn’t love or work or sex or money. It’s something that brings you pleasure even when you have little control over the lack of other pleasures. You can bring food into your home; when you’re a single girl who doesn’t have plans in the evening you can make yourself dinner for four.
And feel that you are not sad, because you’re not eating yogurt. And then if you’re having a good life, it adds something wonderful. I have friends who really do not understand why I would drive 40 miles for this cheese thing that we once drove 40 miles for in Italy, and I just feel terrible for them. What’s wrong with them? Uphill, also. On a winding road.”
I know that we’re told not to eat emotionally but I don’t see the harm in doing it every once in awhile. I dance out my feelings often and occasionally when I’m feeling down, I’ll order in something delicious and watch a movie on Netflix and between the food and the entertainment, I’m a much happier person by the end of the evening. No harm done. Yummy food goes a long towards making an evening spent at home a whole lot more exciting.
Of course, I’ll always be grateful to her for the movie scene that gave me my first bit of information about orgasms:
Apologies again for my absence from blogging. It’s an Olympic year, which means my gymnastics expertise is in high demand right now. But don’t worry–I’ll go back to being wholly insignificant after the Games are over. But in the meantime–squee!
Anyway, I will try to post once or twice a week, especially when an idea pops into my head or I hear/witness something interesting. And when I was out of town this weekend, I heard something verrry interesting that I will share.
At a bar in a midwestern town, I met Aimee*, a young woman in her late 20s with a do-gooder job. Shortly after our group conversation began (there were two others in the crew), she started talking about the guy she recently met that she was texting back and forth as she also spoke with us. Like the busybody that I am, I prodded her for details because very little is happening, romance-wise, in my life so I must live vicariously through others, even through people I just met.
Who is he? Where did they meet? How long have they been going out?
She dutifully answered those questions and then added something unexpected. “Oh and I should probably mention that I have a boyfriend,” she said, explaining that she has been with him for five years.
“Are you going to break up with him?” I asked, taking her interest in this other guy as a sign that her desire for her boyfriend has waned and it’s time to move on.
“No. I like what I have with him, too,” she said matter-of-factly.”I’m just someone who needs more than one guy.”
As someone who regularly listens to Dan Savage, I often hear discussion about how monogamy isn’t for everyone yet I hadn’t met a person who just straightforwardly said as much. No beating around the bush or strange rationalizations. Even the guy who unwittingly named this website wouldn’t have been quite so honest and say that even when he is in a relationship, he is kind of on the prowl for someone else.
The big problem–her boyfriend does not know about the other guy nor are the two of them in an open relationship where they are free to pursue others outside of the primary relationship.
And that has led Aimee to go to extreme measures to hide her infidelity. She met up with this new guy while her boyfriend was out of town (as he is on many weekends) and he had left behind a hickey, which should be illegal to give to a woman after high school. Come on guys. A neck is not a nipple. Anyway, she hadn’t initially noticed it until a few hours before her significant other was due to return.
“I’ve never been more desperate in my life,” Aimee explained as she recalled what she did next. She picked up her hot curling iron and burned the spot on her neck where she had been marked. In the dim light of the bar, the red burned welt was still somewhat visible, like a lumpy scarlet A on the side of her neck, like a modern-day Hester Prynne.
I’ll admit that this is unfamiliar terrain for me. I’ve never cheated nor been cheated on so I’ve never been in danger of being caught for anything illicit in that department. Has anyone else out there gone to such extremes to hide an affair or hook up from a significant other? (Note: It doesn’t have to entail physical scarring. The emotional kind is also acceptable.)
I am probably the last red blooded female on earth who still hasn’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, the light BDSM book that has swept the nation. And now I don’t need to. Gilbert Gottfried was kind enough to record an audio version of the book. Nothing says erotic like the nasal screeches of Mr. Gottfried.
I could listen to this guy say “vagina” and “clitoris” all day long. Someone get this guy into a production of The Vagina Monologues.
From the duo that brought you “Pregnant Women Are Smug” (they are!), here’s a hilarious song about the difference between being a single female at age 29 and 31. The key distinction–hope.
My favorite part:
“When God closes a door, you see, he opens a window,” sings 29.
31 sagely responds, “You realize that’s a smaller opening, right? You used to be able to walk out the front door and now you have to climb out some slightly ajar window somewhere, possibly falling five stories to your death.”
It’s about time someone logically deconstructed this adage. Windows aren’t better than doors! I’m going to run for public office on that platform, just like “The rent is too damn high” guy.
A little more for the self-promotion files. Sorry!
Yesterday over at Slate’s DoubleX section (for the lady-folks), I had a short piece of cultural analysis published about the origin and implications of the term “baby bump,” which I’ve never been fond of and have grown more and more annoyed by with every new celebrity pregnancy.
I won’t say that researching the term and speaking to academics has turned my frown upside down. But when asked, “Well, what would you call it [pregnant stomach] instead?” I had no satisfactory answer. Nothing that I thought of sounded like something a reasonable, adult woman would want applied to her body. I then realized that part of our problem with “baby bump” is not necessarily the term itself–it’s the highly politicized and charged discussions that take place about women’s bodies and their reproductive functions. Given this climate, it’s hard to imagine any word that will find favor with the majority of women-kind.
What are your thoughts on “baby bump”? Are those of us that find it irritating/harmful simply overreacting? Or is there something problematic there? And finally, any ideas as to what to call it if not “baby bump”?
