BijouBlog

The crowd historian Elias Canetti claims in Crowds and Power that invisible crowds have always existed.

The most numerous, according to him, are those microscopic entities like bacteria and sperm.

Crowds of them that can't be counted, there are so many.

Think numbers stretching into infinity...

There are some average numbers, though, based on some serious scientific observation.

Hate to disappoint you, guys, but human males don't even close to the top ten in the average number of sperm per ejaculation in mammals.

According to The Book of Lists 2, here are the top ten:

Swine: 45,000,000,000
Jackass: 14,000,000,000
Horse: 8,000,000,000
Dairy Cattle: 7,000,000,000
Zebu (humped ox): 5,098,200,000

Beef Cattle: 4,000,000,000
Eurasian Buffalo: 3,978,000,000
Sheep: 3,000,000,000
Goat: 1,755,000,000
Dog: 1,500,000,000
 

 The above numbers are in the billions! What I find interesting that humans often call each other swine and jackass to insult each other.

(Except those in certain parts of the gay community who are proud of being and behaving as   various types of sex “pigs.”)

Perhaps these numbers would make you think twice, if quantity is your guide to value judgments, about using those terms as insults. In fact, I'm surprised pigs and asses haven't taken over the world, based on their sperm counts.

(By the way, the median sperm count for human males is about 255,000,000 per ejaculation, according to Wikipedia's article on semen analysis. Again, sorry, guys.)

And guys, try to think quality, not quantity.
 

It's pretty much a given, that, as humans, we often laugh at what others think is taboo, or in fact, anything that really makes us uncomfortable.

(My students, though technically adults, still laugh at the word toilet.)

The greatest comedians have known that a joke about sex usually gets a laugh, and the best ones don't always have to necessarily be that graphic.

Here are a few zingers from The Big Book of Famous Sex “Quotes.”
 

A terrible thing happened to me last night – nothing. – Phyllis Diller

Home is heaven and orgies are vile
But you need an orgy once in a while. – Ogden Nash

The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4 a.m. – Charles Pierce

I know so much about men because I went to night school. – Mae West

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets. – Andy Warhol

Pornography is in the groin of the beholder. – Anonymous

Oral sex: the taste of things to come. – Anonymous

Gordon Grant! He's the total rock solid muscle hunk with a 9 inch uncut cock who's featured in several magazines and brochures we carry and on the covers of our titles Pleasures in the Sun and Hot Truckin'. In Hot Truckin', tough-looking Gordon, called Buck, is a handsome deliverman who sucks and fucks blue-collar types while on the job - first a carpenter, then a painter - both young, handsome, and horny. He and his co-worker (Nick Rodgers) end up picking up a hitchhiker … in more ways than one.
 

Born in Alaska of Dutch and Nez Perce Indigenous heritage, he appeared in such films many of the FalconPacs, like The Lifeguard, Working Late, and The Crotchwatcher in the 1970s and 1980s.
 

He also appeared in Dirty Words, billed as Falcon's first feature film (as opposed to loops). He also went by the name of Don Bowman.

According to a vintage Colt magazine, he worked for two years as a construction worker on the Trans-Alaska pipeline. Ripe fantasy material …

Gordon also did some stunning Colt photo spreads, often modeling two figures in the Village People gamut: cowboy and construction worker. Wow! Such big arms!
 

 

He pretty much epitomizes the original Colt man, a direct descendant of all those muscle beefcake types that appeared in magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.

Gordon has passed on, but information is obscure. A couple of sources claim he died in the early 1990s from AIDS related causes, the fate of so many porn stars of that generation, but I could find nothing specific.

Still, he pretty much has entered the Mount Olympus of gay porn icons.
 

Was the Will and Grace duo (gay guy and his “BFF” straight woman) that epitomizes, for many heterosexual audiences, a slice of gay life really that much of a groundbreaking novelty? Yes it was, because the show was aired on national TV, so it created a lot of discussion about that type of relationship. But believe it or not, in a late-sixties publication called Sex Play: A Marital Guide for the Gay Male (from our extensive collection of gay sexual history materials) there is an hilarious article on the gay guy and his “BFF” straight woman.

In the late sixties, once the Post Office lifted censorship restrictions about showing full frontal nudity, homoerotic publications started showing not only cocks, but couples in a variety of sexual positions (still rather risky for that time period). In order to continue to cover their asses, these publications advertised themselves as “how to” or “guide to” material, and often included articles on various aspects of gay life that may or may not have had anything actually to do with the sucking and fucking going on in the pictures. Thus, this supposed marital guide, though offering relevant articles about gay couples getting married (yes, they did at this time period) and why it is beneficial to be a homosexual, is billed as “educational material not to be sold to minors.”

But why is there material on, as the term on the street labels them, “fag hags,” in this publication? In accordance with its educational mission, the article “Living It Up Together” purports to offer a heterosexual reader a glimpse of the “homosexual life,” which includes feelings of love which can result relationships not dissimilar to “straights,” the author claims (including marriages in “homosexual churches”). But the author also claims to offer insights into some a special relationship prevalent when gays and straights mix in social settings (apparently a more common occurrence during that time period, though either group would be in the minority depending on the party). That relationship is the gay man-straight woman. The article proclaims:

Many “straights” get a tremendous charge out of the company of inverts and actually prefer associating with them rather than their own crowd. Older women are constantly added to the list as patronesses or benefactresses because they adore the flattery and attention lavished up them after the “normal” society has given up complimenting their fading egos. They are caught up in the gaiety and effervescence (more sham and pretense, but usually convincingly so) of the seemingly light-hearted, brilliant conversationalists and exhibitionists of which this (gay) crowd is comprised.

Pretty heady, campy stuff! I won't get into the use of the term invert (now an old-fashioned word for gay, meaning that somehow the usual sexual attribute and desires of one's gender are inverted, turned around, even reserved in gays and lesbians), but what I find really interesting is the now-offensive stereotype here in full force, one that was assumed, hinted at, but not necessarily shouted from the rooftops for many years. For example, gay icon Joan Crawford surrounded herself with gay men (her best friends were a gay, by all practical purposes married, couple, William Haines and his lover Billy), but the darker side of this relationship also applied to her. According to some of her biographers, a few gay men, then called “starfuckers,” supposedly took advantage of her good will as she aged.

I think there's more going on here than “times have changed” since the late sixties. Straight women apparently (so I've heard from private sources) can hang out in gay bars with their gay friends and not be derided as “fag hags” as the core parts of what used to be the “homosexual lifestyle” become assimilated into the mainstream. But is the stereotype totally dead? After all, there is a show on the LGBT Logo channel called "1 Girl 5 Gays," in which five “outlandish, fabulous” gay men tackle topics ranging from love and sex to celebrity pop culture, with a female host acting as “ringleader.” Is this show more like entertainment or reality, I wonder...

Whatever the reality, I wonder if we finally are starting to realize that whatever relationships end up coming our way, we need to see ourselves as whole persons, not get so bound up in dualisms that lend themselves to potentially harmful stereotypes like gay guy/straight woman.

I am of a “certain age” that remembers prank phone calls, heavy phone books, payphones (do any exist anywhere these days?), and calling the operator.

And, gasp, rotary phones. We had two rotary phones, one on the kitchen wall, and one down in the basement. You had to obtain phones ONLY from the phone company at that time. If you screwed up a number, redialing could be quite painful. I wonder how many people just dialed the operator and had her (yes, they were invariably of the female gender) to connect them.
 

I worked at one place, before the days of voice mail, where the switchboard was required to page people they could not put through. The woman who worked evenings, Helen, used to be an operator for the phone company, and I could swear her voice was exactly like the female voice you used to hear when you dialed a disconnected number: “The number you have reached, 555-555-5555, has been disconnected. No further information is available.” I wonder if they used her voice for that recording …

Now, prank phone calls are still alive and well and have adapted to the new technology (check out the Judge Judy and Dr. Phil soundboards), but ironically, such technology, especially caller ID, makes it quite easy for such calls to be traced. In the days before caller ID, it was open season for bored suburban kids whose parents were not home. Once my mother started working in order to make up for the loss of income that occurred during the rampant inflation of the seventies, we were sometimes at home, unsupervised. Supposedly too old for a babysitter.

We didn't do the usual, “Is there a John there? No. Then where do you go to the bathroom?” ones. One of my brothers and I prided ourselves on our geeky esoteric knowledge of Star Trek and Greek mythology. We would call people (and organizations; for some reason, we liked to call The Church of the Nazarene) asking for characters in Greek mythology like Zeus and Agamemnon or obscure Biblical figures like Miriam the sister of Moses.

We found a guy who had an answering machine (still a rarity at that time) and left messages that Troy was falling or that Lieutenant Uhura was trying to obtain a signal from his number. Nothing obscene (I did call someone once and make a farting noise into the phone, and one time we held the phone up to the flushing toilet, if that qualifies).

At least we weren't doing drugs or having sex or going to the bathroom outside (a major social evil in our house) when Mom was at work. I consider our activity, actually, quite creative, though I'm sure, to our prankees, incredibly annoying.

One time we almost got busted. On one episode of The Brady Bunch, Jan, poor Jan, is trying to fake she has a boyfriend, George Glass. In order to orchestrate her ruse, she calls the operator and asks her to ring back the number, claiming she though something was wrong with the phone. The phone rings (no one is there; I would think it would the operator), and she fakes conversations with George.
 

My brother and I decided to duplicate this ruse. My brother was always able to pull off the more elaborate ones (I would tend to start laughing). He put on his “sexy woman voice” (hear Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, but slightly deeper and huskier) and dialed the operator. Instead of compliance, the operator began asking questions. I could hear my brother saying, “Well … um … it's not just working properly.... I think it is the bell.” My knees felt weak. I asked him after he completed the call what had happened, shaken. He looked perturbed, his face flushed. “She was asking me all these questions, like, what seems to be wrong with it?” For God's sake, it worked on The Brady Bunch!

No more prank calls that day. I thought the operator would call back when Mom got home. We would be so totally in deep trouble. Deep. Mom got home from work, in her usual crabby mood, and about ten minutes later, the phone rang three times, then stopped. She looked at both of us. “Have you two been fooling around with the phone?” she barked. “No,” I replied, trying to sound perplexed. Mothers always know. She had no evidence to convict us, other than a certain look in our eyes (she always claimed she could spot liars that way).
 

In hindsight, I dread to think what we would have concocted if we had been able to use youtube or other media for our outlandish pranks. I laugh about the incidents now, but then I think also about the horrific harm caused by cyberbullying and the like, in many cases, by unsupervised kids.

For unsupervised men who want to have sex and use pre-cellphone technology to contact other unsupervised men who want to have sex, check out some of our classic porn films.