Sexism vs. Sexuality

Okay, okay, I admit that I cheated on the last blog. I had only a sketchy idea on what to talk about, so decided to stall by writing a blog advertising SEX and the AMERICAN MALE (still just $2; oops, sorry) by not so cleverly talking all about SEX. Well, the current presidential election caught my attention because it basically alludes to something I've mentioned before. Too many people don't know the difference between sexism and sexuality.

Of course, there's the easy route. You could be like the Angry Feminists who hate this blog and state that anything that they don't like that is uttered by a male is proof that the guy is a sexist pig. I get this thrown at me a lot, for example after I pointed out how women are afraid to make first contact or the time I talked about things that women seem to get away with but men can't. It doesn't matter that women admit they won't ever make the first move nor that men dare not enter a biker bar in shorts. I must therefore be a sexist pig.


 


However, Merriam-Webster defines sexism as prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially :  discrimination against women.

Based on that definition, my blogs don't make me a sexist pig because I'm not discriminating against women, I'm just saying something unflattering that many don't like. Is it discrimination? Is it prejudice? No, it's just snarky comments that females don't appreciate.

On the other hand, Donald Trump is a sexist pig because he believes women are just eye candy. It's to the point where he makes appearance a battle between good vs. evil. If a woman is hot, she's useful to him, if plain well, she's useless.

Now, I could repeat some of Trump's quotes (Trumpisms?) to make the point, but I figure since the news media reports on him every single day as the top news story there isn't much need. Don't believe me? Well, did you hear about the suicide bomber in Russia that happened about a week ago? The near civil war going on in Azerbaijan? That rebels shot down two jets in Syria? Of course not! You had to get your daily quota of Trumpisms by the daily news.

Another definition by M-W says it's behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex. Again, this doesn't include me (unless you're an Angry Fem who wants to stretch and distort my words) because I'm not fostering stereotypes, I'm commenting on female actions.

Of course, the main-stream press also comments relentlessly on The Donald, so you may have missed news about how the policeman who killed an unarmed man is getting probation—but no jail time. If a civilian did the same, he'd be getting the chair.  But you didn't hear about this abuse of justice because the news people wanted you to know about Ted Cruz' wife.

So if I were to say women couldn't be lawyers because they don't make first contact, then you could call me sexist. However, I didn't do that. I instead inferred that they were cowards. So you could call me rude, but not sexist.

You might also call Republicans sexist because they always pass laws to restrict health choices of women, but never of men. You most likely don't know about this though, especially that it almost always is done by older white men without a single woman's input. You didn't hear about this due to all the coverage of Hillary's refusal to release a transcript of a speech which the Main Stream Media (MSM) deemed more exciting.

Many other Angry Feminists declare I'm objectifying women by constantly posting pictures of scantily-clad females. As I've also stated in a previous blog, this is more of a sex fiend trend than a sexist pig one. Does a guy who looks at a woman and dreams of wild, kinky sex with her imply that she is incapable of fulfilling any other role in society? Okay, it is possible that some men view women that way, but unlikely that it's a majority. Most men work alongside women they believe are competent and capable people, who just so happen also would be fun to have a carnal escaped with.

Now Donald Trump marrying one hot model after another might be considered objectifying women. Of course, you may not have noticed this behavior because the MSM has been spending it's time talking about how right-wing evangelicals have fallen in lock-step behind Trump because they believe that although he doesn't show signs of Christian-like behavior, he has to be better than that pagan, Satan-worshipping Hillary.

The only conclusion you can draw from all this is that those Angry Feminists, who may tar and feather me next week, don't know the difference between sexism and sexuality. They are so outraged by pictures of semi-nude women that they will likely pass out in the voting booth and accidentally put a check by Donald's name because they were so pissed off that I appreciate beauty and enjoy sex. Of course, the MSM wouldn't report on this turn of events because they just heard that Trump might be going to a debate. Or maybe not. They'll be there just in case. And of course while they are there patiently waiting for The Donald, they won't be mentioning how Republicans in congress overwhelmingly voted to NOT give aid to children in Flint, Michigan who have been poisoned by water deemed safe by the GOP governor.

So as you can see by all of this discussion, this blog is not sexist but blatantly sexual. I hope you will check back for the next blog when we—NEWS FLASH: we interrupt this blog to report that Donald Trump's plane just landed in New York! We repeat, Donald has landed—we're sure it will really get those Angry Fems in a bloody rage!

(The Thurber Brigade just learned that those Angry Feminists hacked into our computers! They read our pre-edited version and have publicly declared their anger that not only do we relentlessly point our finger at them in disdain, but also how they believe this blog is really another notorious political sidestep into how the MSM is failing in their job of reporting news and instead pandering to ratings by reporting about sensational nothingness. Ummm, well, maybe.)

This cartoon has absolutely nothing to do with the above blog. We at The Brigade just like James Thurber and decided that with all the pictures of Trump we needed to add something that might soothe the soul a bit. Ahhh, James Thurber.

Sex! Hot SEX!

A note from the publisher of SEX and the American Male

   (The Thurber Brigade was approached by the owner of BIG BEN BOOKS who wanted to make a public statement about the book. After he made a large contribution to The Brigade Retirement/Party Fund we relented)      

So, did the title of this article excite you? Of course it did! You are a warm-blooded human and so you love SEX. Who wouldn't? That's the power behind the great book I published: SEX and the AMERICAN MALE.

Hello, I am Benito "Big Ben" Cantolini, and I just wanted to set the record straight about this hot, lurid book. I know that many readers have complained because the author of SEX and the AMERICAN MALE keeps declaring that there is no SEX in his book. Nonsense!


There is a ton of lurid, raunchy SEX in the book and also plenty of explicit photos to go along with the ribald words. Pictures like this:

Of course this picture is not as explicit as in the book because the author won't let me show that in his blog, but trust me, the pictures are twice as hot as this one.

This is another example of the hot sex you will encounter in SEX and the AMERICAN MALE (but again because of the author this one is relatively tame).

People have also told me that they were disappointed that the author didn't use graphic descriptions and evocative language in describing the incredible SEX acts in the book.  Bull pucky (dang author won't let me use expletives)!

I can't believe the number of times he uses the words penis and vagina (but of course the more lurid versions) in SEX and the AMERICAN MALE!

(the author insisted I add this)

And the penises in the book are huge! Not wimpy like that certain businessman running for president, but gigantic! The author goes to extremes describing the male SEX organ and how it interacts with the female genitalia (darn author won't let me describe that either).

Now, some folks keep saying that I came up with the title of the book to stimulate more sales. They also say it is a cynical allusion to how advertisers use SEX and erotic images to lure unsuspecting customers to their product. These are atrocious lies! The title is purely a declaration of the blatant and plentiful SEX scenes in the book.

Because of the lurid SEX in the book, similar to this photo but much more graphic, book sales are through the roof!

I especially don't want you to be fooled by some of the reviews of the book you'll find on Amazon.com. Ones like:

 Reviews

✯✯✯✯  Sex and the American Male by Jay Williams has absolutely nothing to do with sex, but everything to do with advertising and the messages it sends you.

✯✯✯✯ The twists are unexpected as exemplified case and point in the notion that sex sells, and Williams finds a clever way of reminding us of this throughout.

No the real reviews were censored by Amazon because they too were too graphic! They said things like:

✯✯✯✯ "Man when Zack ---- to Mist ---- and repeatedly ---- the ----"
✯✯✯✯ "I can't believe the author was allowed to describe ---- and ---- ---- not to mention the time he ---- a---- ----"

As you can tell, that's some lurid, steamy and maybe illegal SEX.

So I hope this clears things up about SEX and the AMERICAN MALE and the gargantuan amount of SEX in the book.

Get yourself some SEX at these HOT websites:
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
BookBaby
Scribd.
Copia
Ciando
iTunes
GoodReads

Also, be on the lookout for these future steamy books from Big Ben's Publishing:
SEX at Sea
SEX on a Plane
SEX and the American Female
SEX, SEX and more SEX

The Thurber Brigade apologizes to those readers offended by the above comments from the publisher as well as those offended by the repeated and blatant use of the word SEX since we know there are a ton of angry feminists out there who already think that we are SEXist pigs and too often use SEX to make a point or stimulate readers through the arbitrary use of that word and SEXual imagery. We also want to apologize if we continue to imply you are wimble-brain prudes who have the sense of humor of a sea slug and the intellect of Donald Trump supporters and wouldn't recognize satire/parody if it kicked you in a SEX organ. Sorry.

Ahhhh, James Thurber!

A Not So Close Shave

Like most male children I loved to watch my father shave when I was a tyke. He was an engineer and so when those newfangled electric shavers came out, he got one to be a modern guy. So as I was growing up it was fun to stand outside the bathroom listening to that loud buzz early in the morning as he got ready for work.

Needless to say, when I was getting ready to go to college, and right as I had enough peach hair, my dad gave me his old Schick shaver. Pure elation describes my feelings as I would run that thing over my meager few hairs on the chin in the dorm room. It probably ticked my roomy off, since he had to settle for a razor, but I didn't share.

Of course, when I stopped out of school for a few years and headed to the army, the shaver went with me. I fearlessly stood in the crowded, noisy bathroom of the barracks and while all the other new recruits scraped their faces with a razor blade, I happily buzzed away with my old Schick shaver.

However, on the second week of boot camp at Fort Polk in Louisiana (not so lovingly called little Vietnam) I stood at ridged attention on the front row of the formation as the drill sergeant inspected the platoon. Sgt. Fisher looked at me as I tensely stood in 1st squad and then he slowly sidestepped to the next worm. It seemed like slow motion as he turned his head my way again then stepped back in front of me.

"Williams, did you shave his morning!" He shouted. He always shouted I should point out. In fact, I had doubts he was capable of quiet, reflective conversation.

"Yes Drill Sergeant. I used my electric shaver and..."

"It doesn't look to me like you shaved at all!"

He then yelled at me to get out of formation and stand facing the platoon. He also yelled at a fellow terrified newby to go get his razor from his footlocker (a small wooden chest where we kept our few possessions).  When he returned, Sgt. Fisher had him dry shave me right there in front of the rest of the maggots. The drill sergeant then gave all of us a high decibel account how we must shave every day or we'd rot in hell for the rest of eternity—and he'd be there right behind us kicking our butts.

So from that day on to the present I have always shaved with a razor blade instead of an electric shaver. My cherished shaver now was a traitor to me and I gave it away to a fellow scumbucket who wanted to use it to somehow give himself and others tattoos.

It wasn't the pain of being dry shaved—and yes, it was and old razor and yes quite painful—it was the humiliation of standing in front of my fellow dirt balls and made an example. I guess the drill sergeant did this to teach us wimpy rejects an important point about army life. However, all I got from it, besides further hatred of Sgt. Fisher, was that you should never trust that your cherished notions will be regarded the same way by others.

Someday I'll tell you about the agony of getting care packages from mom while in basic.

(I know, I know. Those of you who have "Liked" any of my books' FaceBook pages—
• https://www.facebook.com/SexAmericanMale

• http://tinyurl.com/FB-Wings

• http://tinyurl.com/taxbreak-facebook
—are saying to yourselves, "what a lazy guy" because you saw that I posted this story there as a "FaceBook short story."  Well, I apologize, but right now I'm wrapping up my taxes and haven't had time to come up with any other clever content. So as soon as I file I'll get with it and come up with something witty and clever to add to The Brigade. By the way, remember you can still get a TAX BREAK for just 99¢ at: http://tinyurl.com/taxbreak-amazon  Yes, more shameless self-promotion. Sorry.) 

James Thurber served in the Army from 1918-20 encrypting/decrypting messages in Paris, but due to the loss of eye didn't have to serve during WWI

 

In(k) Excess

Back in the 80s a great bar to hit in Austin was The Back Room. A gigantic place divided into two halves. One side a game room with pool tables, video games, air hockey, etc.; the other a music venue. The bands that played ranged from headbangers to blues. I saw all sorts of groups from The Genitorturers, Anthrax and The Cramps, to Al Stewart, The ThunderBirds and Tragically Hip. For the most part though, I'd say the flavor was hard rock. The Back Room was popular with bikers after all.

I mainly hung out on the music side, but between sets or if I didn't want to pay the cover I'd hang in the game room. Although it could be loud in there too, it was the place I often tried to pick up women because I could hear them.

One night I stood along the wall, slowly drinking a beer while scouting out the night's targets. At The Back Room women often dressed much more provocatively than at some of the other haunts of mine, such as Liberty Lunch or Steamboat. This night I spotted a really hot female with painted on latex pants and a backless blouse. Her Pat Benatar-esque eyes and shapely body drew a lot of attention, including me.

However, she turned to look at someone playing pool and I noticed that she had a gigantic tattoo on her back. I casually moved a little closer and discovered that it was a panther. It's head on her right shoulder and its tail snaking off somewhere below her waist underneath those latex pants.

Although she had seemed intriguing, that gigantic tattoo turned me off.  Back in those days most women didn't have much in the way of ink. Well, unless they were biker chicks.

I also had a double-hit mindset against it because I had grown up as a youth in the middle-American Midwest. Us God-fearing whitebread kids were taught by our elders that men who had tattoos were either old sailors (which was deemed acceptable but you could still smirk) or else criminals or carny folk (not acceptable).  Obviously, to these people, it was impossible to think that a female would sport a tattoo.  Tsk, tsk was the phrase used when you passed a person such as this (people back then were PC—not prone to being jerks—before that became a way of behaving).

However, besides my youthful brainwashing, I had another reason I didn't like the idea of tattoos. Way back then a horrible man named Richard Speck butchered eight young nurse trainees in a dormitory. I distinctly remember the police saying we'd be able to identify him if we saw him because of a “Born to raise Hell” tattoo on his shoulder. Oh, it wasn't the tattoo that caught my attention, it was that a tattoo was a way for you to be found.

Now before you say that I obviously had been thinking about a life of crime and so didn't want to give myself away, it really was because I was slowly getting radical ideas. I also realized that ideas often scared people, and so radical ideas could get you into trouble no matter that we lived in the "land of the Free."  Yeah, the Vietnam years.  My ideas weren't really anti-war thoughts though, but that's for a later discussion.

(Yes, a youthful Jay at a civil-rights protest looonnnngggg ago)

This anti-tattoo concept also followed me into the army.  There was tremendous pressure to get a tattoo or two if you were in the military. I had a friend who went nuts about them, even had a contest of sorts with another of his friends to see who could get the most. This was before the day when you could get full arm tats. They were all individual things. So I got a lot of pressure from him as well as my other army buds. On several drunken nights I almost succumbed to the most common (in my unit) "82nd Airborne" insignia tattoo. But I resisted.

In the army I really had become a big radical threat to the establishment because I dared to advocate for enlisted people's rights. I figured that any day some general would decide I must be incarcerated on some trumped up charge, so no way would they ID me by a tattoo.

So I escaped the military tattoo-less and carried those same concepts well into the 80s, 90s and 00s. A gigantic Panther tattoo could only mean trouble and just didn't spur my sexual desires enough to give me the courage to throw a line her way.

Nowadays tattoos are the rage with today's hipsters. It's a common sight to see men AND women sporting complete arm/leg/body ink. Where in the old days even a peek of ink under the shirtsleeve could result in the job applicant getting shown the door, now it's accepted—or at least tolerated.

Even I have slowly come around to accepting some tattoos on women. I often get involved in rousing discussions over beer with male friends about what is acceptable. They usually have absolutely no qualms about any ink on a prospective date (okay, a lot of my friends are younger and avoided that middle-American brainwashing), while I argue for discretion.

 
I still would prefer to just see a small butterfly above a breast (an homage to "Papillon"), and even find it a little seductive to see a small sun barely peeking above the back of the belt. Ironically, this latter one is called a “Tramp Stamp” which got its name through similar brainwashing/stereotyping as what I experienced but in later decades.

However, it will take some major adjustment to ever get me excited about a prospective date who has tattooed her entire life's history on her back; or have a dragon shooting fire on one arm toward a knight on the other; or a gigantic cobra slithering up one leg and a mongoose on the other. Yes, a little too much ink for me.

Some brainwashing just can’t be undone.

(okay, you young readers may not have gathered that the title of this blog is a play-on-words referring to INXS. Yes, another 80s band; yes, I know I'm in a rut. No, they have nothing to do with tattoos although I'm sure they had one or two).

The Smirk of Reality—A Thurber Brigade Sidestep

Congress became enraged the other day during a committee hearing about how Martin Shkreli raised the price of an important drug by about 5000% (Daraprim went from $13.50 to $750 per pill). He had the audacity to smirk at those asking him questions. Often he would not even pay attention while they spoke. Just as often, he scoffed when he was called upon to answer them.

To further inflame them, after leaving the hearing, he tweeted that the inquiring congress folk were imbeciles.

I suspect their outrage wasn’t influenced so much on how the most hated man in the US raised the price of vital medicine as much as they hated the way he treated them.

How dare he not show this august group of people the respect they believe they deserve!

However, the truth is he just treated them the way all of Big Pharma perceives them. He treated them like the bought and sold patsies they have become. He treated them like the people who take millions of dollars in their money to do their bidding. He just didn't show the reverence for them that the other Big Pharma honchos do to present to the public a contrite face and therefore hide their true feeling for these pawns.

 

In other words, Shkreli treated them exactly the way Big Pharma would really like to treat them, but doesn’t so that congress people can keep their façade of being the people’s representatives alive.

The United States has the highest cost for medical drugs in the industrial world. For example Seroquel, which is used for insomnia, is $33 in Canada vs. $124 in the US.  Also, for the cancer drug Campath here is the price in various countries: United States: $2,400; France: $760; Sweden $660; Britain $570; Italy $500.  The cost of Nexium (used for acid reflux) is only $23 in Holland, while if you buy it here you pay $215.

The reason for this disparity is because congress refuses to regulate Big Pharma. In fact, they’ve even passed legislation that makes it against the law for the government (yes, the entity they work for) to shop around for cheaper prices for US Medicare recipients.  This way congress keeps Big Pharma happy and they keep getting big bucks from lobbyists for their political campaigns.

So congress will continue to ignore regulating Big Pharma (as well as Big Oil, Wall Street, etc.) so they may continue to get the largess they adore.  However, they will also continue to express their anger at Shkreli and may even level a “contempt of congress” fine of several thousand dollars. By my reckoning, that will be equivalent to about three or four of those pills he sells.

**The Thurber Brigade apologizes for once again veering off the road of the War Between Men and Women and assures everyone that it will return to the straight and narrow soon. We had really planned to write about something else (and will shortly publish it) but couldn't miss the chance to not only make fun of this evil man, but also get a stab in at congress. I know, too easy of a target. Sorry. 

Ahhh, James Thurber