Ah, the lovely rays of the sun as they beat down, intensified by the smog. The sound of traffic on the 405, which almost sounds like the Pacific, just a few miles west. It’s the city where dreams are made and shattered, and to commemorate our devotion, here’s an eye-opening ode, from Laura Mannino, “LA vs. NY: You’ve Been Served”:

In LA, no one cares about the name on your purse quite like the name of your yoga instructor, or Pilates instructor, or your Yogalates instructor.

In New York, it’s whose party you’re invited to and who you’re wearing. In LA, it’s whose vacation home you stayed in and who rejuvenates your vagina.

In New York, it’s how expensive you look. In LA, it’s how much money you spent to look like you don’t care.

What defines your social status in LA the most is who and how many serve you: personal trainers, stylists, shoppers, assistants, concierges, organizers, dog walkers, groomers & whisperers, spiritual readers, life coaches, relationship coaches, gardeners, estheticians, and event planners.

How many people do you pay to ensure your personal well-being? In LA, there’s an onslaught of professionals offering personal services. This all exists in New York, but I didn’t feel its presence as strongly as I feel it in LA.

Why? Because in LA, what else are out of work actors going to do after they quit? Sure, there’s plenty of out of work or former actors in NY, but there’s plenty of office buildings that need temps. In LA, once you spent a year in Coffee Bean with your laptop being your own “boss” and “writing” your script, there’s no going back to a 9 to 5 cubicle world. If you can’t make a small business as an actor, you can make a small business of teaching actors how to make a small business as an actor. Or you can do this.

Ah, Los Angeles. It’s so true.

Image from Paper Castle Press.

“Beauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down.” — Elaine Scarry

I have been mulling over the idea that beauty is, in essence, a particular trait over the past few weeks in considering my own conceptions and occasions of beauty. And it is true: ubiquity renders beauty meaningless. Prolonged and repeated exposure to the same instance mutes its vibrancy and reduces its intensity to marginality. Moreover, beauty, in the absence of a particular, in the absence of an object in which to attach itself, is merely an abstract, intangible idea, rather than a visceral experience that causes aesthetic arrest and curiosity. It is in the application of beauty to a particular object or event that reveals its form and intensity.

If beauty always takes place in the particular, the same seems true for the erotic. For instance, I have noticed that through the mass production and sale of orchids, the flower, once a symbol of eroticism, has become dead and neutral to me. Or, I may have an idea of an erotic concept, but without embodiment and experience, without knowledge of the particular way in which my beloved’s skin responds under my fingers, for instance, the desire remains dormant.

In order to engage with the erotic, the particulars must be either experienced or, at the very least, thoroughly imagined. The visceral experience of an erotic moment is dependent on the participation of both the erotic as an intangible desire and the erotic as a specifically embodied phenomenon.

The movement between imagination and action is crucial: one informs the other. In fantasy, one finds impetus for action; in action, one is surprised by the exact physical sensation, previously unknown in its full capacity: that is at once shattering, exhilarating, and inspiring in the creation of new fantasies. It is shattering in that to experience a fantasy is to step into the unknown and unexpected world of reality wherein the possible becomes real, the un-thought-of becomes replaced with known facts. There is a point at which there is always some fear present, even if only slight, in the enactment of a fantasy: to live so fantastically, so intensely, can be overwhelming.

Therefore, if I fantasize about a certain scenario, the act of actually experiencing it inherently changes the content of the fantasy by informing of it real-life details. Although the realization of fantasy is often discussed as an annihilation of allure and mystery — both of which often serve to facilitate and prolong fantasy, it is also true that the actualization of a desire, with known facts, can instead inform fantasy and the creation of new desires. Action and imagination, then, can inform and feed each other in a self-propelling cycle.

Dawn Kaczmar (@SemperAugustus) attempts to distill the exquisitely useless beauty of information; across theory and practice, across possession and obstruction, she seeks the fleeting and overarching truths of eros. Dawn is currently a freelance writer with a background in philosophy and literature.

In Greek mythology, Eros is a primordial god of sexual love, beauty, and fertility distilled from the chaos that created our universe. Although contemporary conceptions of eros focus on harmony and unity, in classical Greek culture eros was thought of as an agent of madness as well as a creative influence: it overwhelms and seemingly derides both sense and sensibility. It has seemingly addictive properties: it delivers intoxicating pleasure for as long one is immersed in it, enforced by withdrawal symptoms of mind-numbing pain.

Here I will tackle the erotic from an analytical and intellectual position, examining the ways in which eros permeates our interactions. From Socrates, Freud, to Bataille, sacred to profane, nothing is beyond inquiry.

The Role of Absence and Longing in Eros

In order to sustain eros, the object of desire must remain in a state of non- or only semi-possession. To desire something logically requires its absence: you cannot desire something you already completely possess. Desire is the result of feeling unsatisfied or sensing some potential lack which the object of desire will then fulfill, even if that lack is simply of the object of desire itself.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates finds fulfillment in the very absence of his object of desire: wisdom. In claiming ignorance, he subsequently increases his capacity for deficiency and desire to be a lover of wisdom, a chase that he understood as unending. For Socrates, eros embraced both carnal and intellectual longing.

Moreover, the natures of truth and of possession are inherently temporal and fleeting. Although Socrates conceded to an absolute and overarching truth, he theorized that man can only ever glimpse a shadow of that blinding, brilliant light– a shadow that is, by nature, transient. This temporal aspect of knowledge informed his courtship with it: the allure of both knowledge and its pursuit is that it is always in flux, seemingly within reach but too slippery to hold.

I believe Socrates’s relationship with knowledge can be transcribed to human romantic and erotic relationships. People, like truth, are not static entities. The rate at which people evolve (and occasionally devolve) in their own individual ways may vary from the explosiveness and unpredictability of a supernova to the slow, constant shifts of subterranean tectonic plates, but even the most obstinate responds and shifts in the naturally fluctuating environment of our world.

Even in the theoretical absence of change, every individual carries with them an abyssal well imperceptibly flooding with primordial and subconscious dreams and desires. There is a fertile chaos embedded in each individual from which to pluck and create. There is never a point at which we have concluded in knowing, and thus in desiring, another person. Moreover, if we follow Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the mere act of interacting with that individual changes, modifies, and informs their state. The relationship is interactive; the moment of ostensible conquer changes the object in question.

The tragedy, of course, is that we often assume we have arrived at our erotic destination. We cease to regard our lovers in awe, and take them for granted. We lose our sense of wonder. Our fearless Editrix commented on this very topic in a recent Formspring post:

The greatest mistake anyone can make is to assume that they are finished showing how much they desire someone. You’re never finished. People think that progressing a relationship is to commit to their desire. It isn’t. Marriage, for example, which is often seen as the ultimate commitment, doesn’t make you feel eternally desired.

Desire a thing to be shown daily. And to enable it to retain the intensity, you have to engage in a dance. You have to give passion space to simmer, then pull them close to stoke the flames again. It should never end.

Understanding the impossibility of truly obtaining or possessing one’s desire reveals the destructive and life-affirming nature of eros: nothing is beyond inquiry. Desire is something to continuously return to, re-examine, and inculcate each day. The burgeoning of desire requires cultivation, curiosity, and wonder. In recognizing its absence and our longing, we enact a creative and fulfilling dance with both our own desire and that of our beloved.

Dawn Kaczmar (@SemperAugustus) attempts to distill the exquisitely useless beauty of information; across theory and practice, across possession and obstruction, she seeks the fleeting and overarching truths of eros. Dawn is currently a freelance writer with a background in philosophy and literature.

I really hate booty-calls that end without a sleepover. It usually ends with him in the shower, and me driving home with my legs still shaking as I furiously try to get a good grasp of the wheel.

My phone vibrates between my legs, another ping. Probably from him. I break the law and ping him back saying, “I’m re-playing everything we just did and I can’t help myself.” I drop the phone and softly massage my panties and feel the wetness return.

And then I get a call when I’m all settled in; it’s him again. He sounds frustrated. He says, “So, was I not enough for you? You didn’t even get home yet and you’re already touching yourself in the car. What the fuck.”

I hate this. Is this going to happen to every single man I sleep with? I was trying to be sexy. This was supposed to be a compliment. I liked it so much that I made myself wet again just by thinking about it. Why does that automatically mean that whatever happened before wasn’t enough? If anything it was more than enough — so much so, it’s making me get off all over again.

But of course men aren’t going to see it that way. They think I’m some super crazy feen that can never have enough sex so she has to masturbate before and after it. Well, why can’t I love it that much? I’m not resorting to masturbation because I need to finish myself off, I’m just reminiscing about the pleasures I had down there and am re-fueling my drive.

I can’t help it. It’s like a ritual, always masturbate before and after sex. Especially after. Before can be done with accurate foreplay if we have enough time for that. But post-sex masturbation is like a healing process, no, like a rejuvenation process. Or something like that. Do you feel me?

Amanda Chen is a Toronto-based writer who loves to expose everything sexy and share her lavish lifestyle within the fashion and entertainment industries on Body Noise and other places. Her sexual desire is all-encompassing, from human beings to physical or mental objects. Her passion lies within the aftersex.

British graffiti artist Banksy came back to L.A. and left his mark. Greedy as we are, it wasn’t long before someone stole it. Oh, Los Angeles, city where dreams are made, shattered or simply stolen from under our noses!

In a piece for the LA Weekly about his film Exit Through the Gift Shop, the infamously anonymous artist gives an ode to our city worth sharing:

In Los Angeles, you can rise without a trace. There is a moment in the film where you see a dude joining the back of the line at an art show. He says he doesn’t know why he’s there, but he joins it anyway. The first time I saw that, I laughed — it was the emperor’s new clothes, the triumph of hype and hot air.

But now I’ve thought about it. I love that guy — he’s prepared to give anything a shot, to try something new. Cities like New York and London might pride themselves on being more hard-bitten and cynical than Tinseltown, but you have to ask yourself: what’s actually so great about that?

Image and picture from the LA Weekly.

I love blowjobs. I’m male, so that pretty much goes without saying. But I really love blowjobs. Epic blowjobs. Intense, full depth, sloppy, slobbering, gagging, tearing, face-fucking, extended eye-contact, fully consuming blowjobs. The kind that cause you to take pause when you see or experience one unexpectedly. Again, that probably isn’t much of a revelatory statement coming from a man, but for me a proper blowjob is almost a fetish. In fact, it might be my one and only fetish. And that single sexual preference has unfortunately been an obstacle that has kept me from having a serious, long-term relationship for many years.

Now I don’t mean that in the most absolute sense. It’s not as if any girl I consider dating must have a total lack of or complete control over her gag reflex. There’s no chart at my front door that says “You Must Swallow This Many Inches to Ride the Zipper.” But it’s a preference. Just in the same way I’m sure size queens have liked, fallen for, and dated guys of average stature, but in the end realized they couldn’t be with someone who didn’t fulfill all their needs, both personal and physical. That’s where the trouble starts for me; finding the combination of both personal and physical chemistry.

Admittedly, I’m something of a contradiction. After a handful of wild years I’ve calmed down for the most part and settled into a slower lifestyle. I don’t go out that much anymore, and when I do, it’s usually to a more intimate bar with friends, rather than a loud, pulsing club full of expectation. But when it comes to sex, there’s no slowing down. Your libido doesn’t downshift. Or at least mine doesn’t. To miss-quote the genius comedian Jim Jeffries…

I want everything that everyone wants in this world. I want to fall in love, get married, have kids, all of that. But I’ve lived this life for so long that I can’t go back to nice girls because they’re shit in bed.

Once you push your limits a bit, experiment, and find something you enjoy there’s no undoing it. So, since I’m living with these two halves of myself, my ideal mate must be similarly bifurcated. A secret freak, like me.

Allow me to explain how difficult finding such a woman can be.

In my sexual experiences, I’ve found that maybe 7-10% of women give the kind of fellatio that I’m talking about. Unfortunately, so far I’ve only met two types of women in that percentage; party girls and BDSM enthusiasts. Now I have nothing against party girls, they’re part of the reason I discovered great head in the first place. But I’m not like that anymore, I’m older and tired and already have a commitment to Netflix.

So why not date the kinksters, you ask? Well, I have them to thank as well. They helped show me where my limits are. While I have no judgments against people who enjoy it, I have zero interest in anything BDSM-related. Sure, I’m obviously the dominant type in bed. I like to pull a woman’s hair, smack her ass a bit, get a little rough just for fun. But whenever games or rules or costumes or role-playing is involved, I lose interest. It’s too much work; I don’t really see the point. There are so many fun, amazing, intense things you can do with just a couple of naked people, why complicate things? It’s just not for me.

Such is my conundrum. Trying my to find the smart, opinionated, independent, creative, mousey brunette who will spend an afternoon with me reading in the park, stay in and watch horror movies on a Friday night, join me for the occasional night of heavy drinking, and lovingly impale her face on my cock. Now some women think that sounds degrading, and even scoff at the idea of doing that to any man, and that’s fine. But please know that my obsession with this isn’t about discomfort or humiliation, it’s about effort. One of the reasons why crazy deepthroat blowjobs are so hot (besides the obvious physical pleasure) is how much effort one requires to be done properly.

When anyone willingly takes your erect penis, forces it down their throat, cutting off their airway, causing them to gag, making tears stream down their face, and they still look you in the eye with that same twinkle they get when they smile… there is nothing more attractive. They’re fighting their own instincts and reflexes to give you the most intense sexual pleasure they possibly can and they’re enjoying it. That’s the greatest gift in the fucking world.

So I’m picky. About both personality and sexuality. I admit it. But I refuse to settle. It takes a lot of time, experience, and therapy to realize what you want from yourself, let alone a partner, so why should we compromise? Commitment and dedication is personal, not universal, and we all have very different but equally fucked up fetishes, fantasies and tendencies. The trick is finding someone whose fucked up-ness fits well with yours, and it would seem I’m just not playing the odds.

Aaron is an east coast transplant who works in entertainment and new media, you can leave your comments for him here or write him at Aarononthe405 AT gmail DOT com.

Our editrix has a sex and relationships column on BlogHer, not that you should know, because usually it’s more relationships than it is sex, but we thought this week’s offering would amuse you. Her theory is that a woman can tell everything she needs to know about how a man fucks by how he dates. An excerpt:

In her autobiography Sinner Takes All, porn star Tera Patrick talks about her horrible relationship with Erik Schrody, the lead singer of Everlast. Their first date would spell out the modus operandi of their entire two-year relationship:

Our first date was a movie date at his house. Ladies, don’t ever let a guy take you to a date at his house: (a) It’s cheap, (b) It shows disrespect (What? He didn’t want to be seen with me in public?), (c) It usually means all he wants from you is sex, and (d) It’s just plain lame. We deserve dinners and romance, don’t we?

I should have known how lame Erik would end up being by that very first date … and unbeknownst to me at that time, we started a pattern that would be the basis of our relationship: I come to his house. We sit on his couch. We watch TV. We have sex. I go home, utterly unsatisfied.

For two years, I would follow that pattern. The sex was never mindblowing. You can tell if sex is going to be good by how much effort a guy puts into you when you’re not under the sheets. Erik put zero effort into dating me, taking me out, or making me feel special or beautiful, and that selfishness extended into the bedroom.

While I don’t agree with Patrick that a house date is entirely out of the question (imagine how sexy it can be with some degree of effort: a home-cooked meal, a tour of the art and antiques he has collected over the years, a soundtrack and lighting he can control for mood and an open bar that never closes), I do agree that the way you date says everything about you.

You can read the whole thing here and comment there. Or you can just tell us what you think here.

As a man, I felt somewhat slighted when I saw the top ‘trending topic’ on Twitter this morning: “Happy Women’s Day.”

Huh? This must be some sort of Twitter in-joke, like when everyone tried to fool their friends into thinking that some balloon-faced Canadian kid named “Justin Bieber” was in the Billboard Top 40.

< epic eye-roll > Right. < /epic eye-roll >

Crushing a half-smoked Lucky Strike into the ashtray, I launched Safari on my iPhone, typing out the following: “Women’s Day.”

Something looked… off. The capital letters, the apostrophe — all of it legitimzsed things. This bothered me to such an extent that I retyped it, as follows, with the surrounding quotes: “womens day”

Search. Loading…

Merde.

It’s, uh… real. With its own official website, even. I’ll save this audience from muddling through the holiday’s Atlas Shrugged-length history, and instead summarize:

International Women’s Day was first observed around a century ago after being declared a holiday by the Socialist Party of America; during its early years it was influenced by lots of Eastern European and Soviet-Russian themes. Today, it’s seen in most of the world as a sort of cross between St Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

Well, Freud certainly would’ve been keen.

However, I find it asinine. The very idea of celebrating women’s achievements tends to invalidate them. Why? Because, at a basic level, it says, “Yeah! Let’s celebrate human progress and achievement! … oh, but only when spurred on by individuals with female genitalia.” I’m surely not alone in supposing that most of the women who historically achieved were quite a lot more preoccupied with doing amazing things than they were about ensuring placement for “Women’s Day” on calendars every 8 March.

Besides that, it’s also essentially a holiday to commemorate women for being born as women. Why should I commend that as though it’s some sort of fantastic accomplishment? Perhaps we ought hold a celebration once a year for gingers? “To commemorate the achievements of red-headed people across the world!”

Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. What say you?

Eric Ludzenski (@ericludzenski) is a visual artist who currently resides in Austin TX.

Almost a decade ago, a woman named Laura Roberts reached out to me with some compliments on my blogging skillz (has it been that long? Jeez). She was also a blogger and also interested in sex. Soon, we had developed a correspondence — about writing, about sex, about writing about sex — and when Laura launched the web zine Black Heart Magazine in 2004, I was one of the first people she asked to submit a piece.

Eventually, I’d join the Black Heart team as a sporadic columnist and sex news reporter, or, what Laura called “in-house badass.” Without any hesitation about the combination of sex and cultural commentary, Black Heart ran four shorts from my series on consumerism and apathy in America, an ode to Hunter S. Thompson aptly titled Reverse Cowgirl: A Savage Thrust into the Cunt of the American Dream.

That was the thing about Black Heart — it was sex, yes, even shallow, just-in-it-to-get-off sex — but it wasn’t afraid to be smart, either. That’s what I liked best about the rag. Whether she was flashing her tits for cheap thrills or charity or getting into huge arguments with Vladimir Nabokov’s son about the legacy of Lolita, Laura Roberts made Black Heart a combination of the filthiest gutter and ivory tower.

In the years that Black Heart was running, whether I was writing or not, Laura and I kept in touch. We talked about how hard it was to monetize content like ours, to herd around writers who were doing it more for the love than for the money, to keep the content of a publication consistent with its original vision even though you, the person running it, are not static.

I learned more about running a blog from Laura and Black Heart than from just about anyone or anything else on the web. And that’s saying something considering the kind of web pioneers I count as my nearest and dearest.

So even if you have no idea what Black Heart Magazine was, know this: if you like this blog, if anything you have read here, has offered you absolutely anything, then you owe a thank you to that little zine.

The Black Heart chapter is closed now. Laura has moved on to other things. We’ll make a valiant effort to continue the tradition of mingling the filthiest gutter and ivory tower.

You’ll be missed, Black Heart. And thank you for everything. Especially this:

We’re humbled and honored.

Suzanne Reisman over at BlogHer had a very thought-provoking piece regarding abortion that we here at Sex and the 405 didn’t think you should miss. An excerpt:

January 22, 2010, marked the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion across the United States. This is not to say that abortion was not legal at all before Roe — it was legal in 1/3 of states before Roe, and it was legal in the US before the Victorians more or less ruined everything with their horrid morality issues. But don’t get me started on the Victorians…

Anyway, for a little while, Roe changed things for women who lived in states that did not have legal abortions. But in the long run, as a staunch supporter of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy within a reasonable time frame for whatever reason, I actually think the national legalization of abortion did more harm than good. What it did was open the flood gates to little laws that chipped away at the right to have an abortion so that while abortion is technically legal, it is not necessarily accessible. This keeps most Americans complacent, wondering why pro-choicers are complaining when abortion is legal. At the same time, the protesters remain whipped up in a self-righteous frenzy because abortion is legal, even though abortion services are not available to many women in America.

Consider: The good folks at The Guttmacher Institute* reported that 87% of counties in the US lacked an abortion provider in 2005. Over one-third of American women (35%) live in those counties. As a result, 25% of women seeking abortions in non-hospital facilities travel 50 miles or more, and 8% of women traveled more than 100 miles to exercise their legal rights to a medical procedure. Given that these access issues are most pronounced in states that did not have legal abortion before Roe, I’m not sure how things are so different for women who live in those places today. Legal or not, they still can’t get the services they need.

Read the entire piece here.

Information from BlogHer.