#which is so profoundly unsexy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thekimspoblog · 1 year

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Do it for Her (WIP)

The soft curve of a pregnant belly was featured prominently in every poster on every wall, along with the cover page of the magazine Kim was reading.

The nurse entered the waiting room and looked at his clipboard. “Sammy Donaghue?”

Jimmy stopped twiddling his thumbs and got up to follow him.

“Good luck!” Kim did her best to shoot him a reassuring smile.

They took his vitals, asked him some basic questions, and then they left him in the room with a magazine and a plastic cup. They assumed he didn’t need any further instruction.

The room had that hospital smell; it brought back too many bad memories. Should he take his clothes off? Just his pants? How was this supposed to work again? How could he do what comes natural, with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead? He leafed through the Playboy; the models were pretty enough. “Nubile” if anyone still used that word. He pulled his phallus out of his open fly, reached over to the squirt-bottle of lube, and began to stroke himself.

Still he felt numb down there; flaccid and nothing was working to wake the little guy up. He’d held off for three whole days, it’s not like he was spent, but he was nervous and couldn’t concentrate. Maybe his body was listening to what his mind already knew: this whole expedition was so stupid! God should strike him dead for his hubris, thinking a baby was still in the cards for him. He spent his prime years financially struggling and he had missed his chance; why couldn’t he accept his lot in life? If the process was going to take all the fun out of sex, if it was going to become a big sterile bureaucratic production, why not just adopt? But he already knew the answer to that one: they wanted a monster of their own blood. Jimmy’s train of thought trailed off to complex questions about ethics and identity: could this special bond he and Kim shared really be reduced to compatible DNA? Less than 100 of her eggs had been deemed “viable” by the clinic; could the technicians point to the exact spot which held the “silver tongue” gene? The whole thing brought up thoughts which were ridiculous, upsetting, and profoundly unsexy. His eyes were on the magazine, but his mind was stuck picturing clusters of frogspawn. He let out a growl of frustration.

Just then, the door cracked open. “Thought you might want some help…” Kim smiled.

“Did you ask if you were allowed back here?”

“No,” she smirked, shutting the door behind her, “But what’s the harm?”

She crept up towards him and gave him a deep, open-mouthed kiss. Her hand blindly groping lower and lower until it found his member.

After a minute, her tugs got slower and more gentle. “What is going on down there? You’re stuck in the OFF position” He’d never had this problem with her.

"It's a lot of pressure," he laughed nervously, "We've only got two chances. Are you sure you don't want to use a donor? Some star athlete with a clean bill of health on both sides of his family for eight generations back? I mean really... this guy? This nose?"

Her free hand went to caress his cheek. "You're being ridiculous," she looked deeply into his eyes. ""Of course it's you. Jimmy, when I heard you were alive I felt like I was given a miraculous opportunity. I'd be a fool not to seize it. We aren't doomed. I know that we can still put the pieces together and make something good."

"And if this doesn't work?"

She smirked, "Then this still got us to quit smoking. Gave ourselves more time together"

She turned around and rubbed her body against him, "Besides. You realize this could backfire in the opposite direction too, you know..."

"What do you mean?"

“Twins are pretty common using this method,” she breathed, “Even triplets. We might bite off more than we can chew”

Something bestial about her inflextion, the way she growled in his ear, finally took his mind miles and miles away from this claustrophobic office, to the thought of them living au naturale in the wilderness, sleeping naked huttled around the campfire, with one or two infants folded into her protective embrace. And her, fat, warm and proud.

“There we are…” she commented, feeling his blood rush into her waiting palm. “Does that do it for you? The thought that after all this excruciating waiting, I’m finally going to let you knock me up?”

He raised an eyebrow, sarcastic; “Oh I see how it is now, Ms. Wexler. This is all you wanted me for all along!”

She was about to interrupt him and deny it, “No no of course not!” but then she saw the begging look in his eye. He didn’t want her to deny it.

“Yes. Okay I admit it,” she dragged her nails across his shirt, “It was truly a long-con. Men are… accessories. Like a purse, but less useful. Oh sure, I can - and do - work like a machine, cutting reality to pieces and shaping it into a more agreeable truth every time my fingers touch the keyboard. But what’s the fun of all that power without someone to share it with? Before I met you, I was ignoring my body. Haven’t I already told you this? I didn’t want to feel cold, tired, and hungry, so I shut myself off from pleasure too. But there you were, wearing down my defenses before I even had time to notice. Already burrowing under my skin too deep to dig out. I had a vibrator, but why reach for a hunk of plastic when you were always just one call away? Day or night! Ready with your own personal touch, ready to make me laugh until I cried… or do anything until I cried. Sure, every major milestone for us has come with its own surprises, but on some level I always knew this was the end goal, as soon as I made you my pet”

#mcwexler #smut #wip #mature

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anghraine · 2 years

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squirrelwrangler replied to this post:

I know nothing about GW except what I half remember for your posts, and what I do makes me grateful that you cannot play as a Garlean.

Heh, probably for the best on my end!

WRT GW1, it's not strictly necessary to know anything in it for GW2—it was always understood that GW2 would be the much bigger game (as it is) and needed to supply enough information independently that GW2 could stand on its own. But GW2 is certainly richer (if sometimes more frustrating...) with GW1 familiarity, and I'm happy to explain the backstory for anything if you do end up trying GW2 out!

Even though your Ascalon grudge-blogging tells me Stormblood is the comparison to be made (I would SHOCKED if you played anything but an Ala Mhigan Hyur), I'd still love to take you through the free trial of ARR and HW. But I keep hearing about how well XIV and GW2 work as complementary opposites.

I have heard this also! I might try it someday—I do like trying new games, even if I don't have the mental bandwidth rn with grad school etc.

which hmm- using my Hellguard FemRoe BRD as a guide (support focused dps, least played female race, tall) - tell me what race/class you think i’d gravitate towards in GW2

Hmm.

I'm not sure what's the least played female race in GW2 (I would guess Charr or Asura, because there isn't a whole lot of sexual dimorphism with either and female Charr are profoundly unsexy unless you're into that). If you want a tall female character who is neither human nor Charr, you'd probably want a Norn, though—they look basically human (vaguely Scandinavian themed) but are like eight feet tall and sort of hulking. But I doubt they're the least played, for sure!

For class, which is much more important mechanically, I'm inclined to go Guardian based on that description, though my GW2 followers who play more classes than I do might judge better (I strongly favor the classic spellcasters). Guardians are sort of like paladins—they have a lot of support capacity, they wear heavy armor, they use straightforward weaponry in general, but they also deal in fire and radiance. So depending on how you specialize, there's plenty of potential for both damage and support, and they're also one of the best 'starter' classes because they're so strong.

#squirrelwrangler #respuestas #anghraine's gaming #ascalonian grudgeblog #long post

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b-else-writes · 28 days

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The Great CLAMP Re-Read Part 9: Miyuki-chan in Wonderland

Runs both my hands slowly down my face. Miyuki-chan in Wonderland ran intermittently from 1993 to 1995, when CLAMP was asked to fill a slot in Newtype, a magazine geared towards largely male otakus. CLAMP has made no pretenses about what Miyuki-chan was intended to be: a fanservice-filled, barely plotted excuse for Mokona to draw sexy women and cash that Newtype paycheck. Despite (or perhaps, because of that), Miyuki-chan proved popular enough to receive a tankoban release of its 7 chapters, with Tokyopop doing the now out-of-print English version. It also has an image CD and OVA adaptation, and technically exists in the same universe as X/Tokyo Babylon/CLAMP School, if you believe the CLAMP School Detectives anime to be canonical. And like ferrets.

I do like ferrets. I don't much like Miyuki-chan in Wonderland.

This is CLAMP's first (and only) gesture towards a wlw story, and their first foray into the ecchi genre. Neither element (as handled by CLAMP specifically, which I'll elaborate later) filled me with great confidence. This is one of the few CLAMP manga I hadn't read but did know existed; I knew instinctively I would dislike it and so actively avoided it. I read this entirely online, and wouldn't pick it up unless I felt like being a completionist. "Spoilers", I guess.

Synopsis: Miyuki-chan is an average, chronically late Japanese schoolgirl, who finds herself pulled into various worlds populated by buxom, scantily-clad women who find her hot. Miyuki-chan fends off their advances, but was it all just a dream?

The Story: Miyuki-chan is doing ordinary activity. She gets pulled into world filled with sexy ladies, usually parodying and fanservicing some aspect of otaku and wider Japanese pop/mass culture. They attempt to rip her clothes off and grope her. B-b-ut nobody will have me if I don't remain pure and virginal! Miyuki-chan, potential closeted lesbian, sobs. She attempts to fend them off. There's an abrupt conclusion out of nowhere, where she wakes up/escapes. Oh it was just a dream! The final panel then flashes "Neverending" or some variation. Rinse, repeat, for 7 chapters.

Miyuki-chan commits the greater cardinal sin than its male-gaze, which is that it is just boring. Much like Duklyon, CLAMP apparently thinks a comedy equates to telling the same joke over and over. The chapters blur together due to how repetitive they are, and I only got one genuine laugh, in Chapter 3 with the legs poking out of the TV screen. Despite its short length, I took months to read this, because every chapter felt like a waste of time. There's no punchline to the entire piece, or even within each chapter. It's the worst sort of edging, leaving you confused, and irritated. And frankly, despite being ostensibly a sex comedy, this manga is profoundly unsexy.

The Themes: lol

The Characters: Look. This is a manga to look at hot girl not to consider hot girl's interior life. I wish I could attribute some greater meaning to Miyuki-chan - that this is all a result of her deeply closeted lesbian desperately trying to fight her own sex fantasies. But I think that's wishful thinking (and generous interpretation from fandom, when CLAMP and Newtype magazine are not attempting anything remotely introspective here). Miyuki-chan textually is one-note. Her best chapter is Miyuki-chan in Mahjong Land where she shows a bit of mischief and confidence.

The Art: There's some pages I find very beautifully rendered with screentone (this is probably their heaviest screentone manga barring X), but its also bogged down with mostly mid-shots and close-ups, with little to no backgrounds. Panel-to-panel storytelling feel very disjointed, likely because the story itself is very disjointed, and action is often unclear. It's some of CLAMP's weakest visual storytelling. The character designs don't stand out much. I liked the vaguely "ethnic" (oh, CLAMP...) priestess from Miyuki-chan in Video Game Land, and that was largely because she had a slightly different face than the typical CLAMP face.

Also. I have to say. CLAMP people look FRIGHTENING naked. There's a fully nude lady in I think Chapter 6 (didn't write the chapter down in my notes) and I was horrifically entranced by her enormous, nipple-less breasts attached to her long, rib-cage less torso, strange pelvis, and spidery legs. In general, CLAMP anatomy does work against itself, in that I found a lot of it anatomically mystifying than I did sexy. This is of course, personal taste, but by and large, I think they are much more beautiful but stupid manga to purchase, if you want to look at pretty pictures.

Questionable Elements: CLAMP, to this point, has had a mixed track record with lesbians (all dead, unable to be together, some psycho lesbian tropes). They have also had, being frank, a mixed to poor track record with female characters. CLAMP are Japanese women born in the late 1960s. Miyuki-chan's fascination with her purity for marriage, the male-gazey depiction of sexuality and the predatory lesbians are dismal, to say the least, but frankly, not unexpected. It's not surprising given its target audience, but the result is a strong heterosexual and male eye to lesbian interactions. It's not actually as offensive as I make it sound, largely because the manga is actually quite sexless and mostly boring, but it's an added layer of irritation.

Overall: I was right to suspect that Miyuki-chan in Wonderland would not be for me. It's a sex comedy that is neither sexy nor funny. CLAMP, I have decided, are just not adept comedy writers. They're good for a pratfall in a wider story, but they can't seem to break the formula of repetition + zaniness = humour. I have criticized Duklyon and CLAMP School Detectives for the same, but they could at least rise beyond their weak writing on the strength of charming characters (and for Duklyon, some occasionally funny story commentary). Since Miyuki-chan has no plot and no real characters, it must succeed on either being hot, or being funny. It does neither, and the male gaze-ness doesn't help. I would not recommend this manga at all.

#miyuki chan in wonderland #clamp

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1921designs · 3 years

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My uniform

THERE’S A PAIR of pants I wore almost every day for the first five years I knew my husband. They were what I like to call sport pants, which differ from all-out sweatpants (or yoga pants, as fancy people now like to call them) in that they were made of a sturdy cotton twill rather than jersey material. Cut comfortably loose, the elastic waistband was the only place where the pants made any contact with my body. Anything could happen inside those pants without detection. I could be fat or less fat or kind of slender. They were extraordinarily utilitarian and patently unsexy. Nuns might opt to wear them. Or park rangers. Or seventyyear-old piano teachers. Or butch lesbians who captained coed Ultimate Frisbee teams. Or me. I wore them so often my husband took to referring to them as my uniform.

I wasn’t always so blasé when it came to my husband and clothes. The first time I slept with him—back when he was essentially a stranger to me, on the second night I knew him—I wore a black lace getup that’s called a baby-doll nightie. It was a little handful of a thing I’d purchased at a Goodwill just before I met him, when I was twenty-seven and constantly roaming thrift stores on the hunt for something that would help me project the sexy image of myself I was hoping for. I bought it even though I’ve always been profoundly confused by lingerie. Isn’t sex about something that clothes are the opposite of? I could never quite discern when, in the order of things, I was meant to put lingerie on when the whole point was ripping things off.

These were the questions in my mind on the second night that I knew the man who was not yet my husband, after I excused myself from the bedroom where we’d been ferociously making out and ducked into the bathroom across the hall. As I went, I grabbed the just-purchased nightie from the top drawer of my dresser, a gob of cheap black lace in my hand. Alone, before the mirror, I removed my regular clothes and put on the nightie and studied myself. The nightie had thin shoulder straps, a form-fitting see-through bodice that gently mashed my breasts upward, and a flouncy short-skirted bottom. If the outfit had a title it would be either Slutty Cowgirl or Pretty Pirate. I looked awesome but felt ridiculous. Was I really going to return to the bedroom dressed like this? It seemed desperate and dumb and yet I couldn’t help myself. I wanted him to see me like this, to seem to him to be the kind of woman who nonchalantly ranged around her place in a black lace thingamajig that scarcely covered her rear, so I walked into the bedroom and stood ever so briefly before him as he gazed at me, reclining on my futon on the floor, and then I got into bed with him and he pulled the damn thing off.

I never wore that baby-doll nightie or any other piece of lingerie again. My future husband and I became lovers and then we got married and the idea of putting that nightie on became just about the last thing on this earth I would do. I’d bought it for the sole purpose of finding and fostering intimacy, but in fact I wore it on the night when we were the least intimate, when I was projecting a slightly fraudulent image of myself to him instead of the actual me. Which, for better or worse, is a woman who wears pants a nun would find appealing.

The cool thing is, my husband finds them appealing, too. We fell in love while I wore and wore and wore those pants. The pants inside of which undetectable things can happen.

The black lace nightie disappeared soon after I wore it that one time. I handed it over to the Goodwill, tossing it back into the endless thrift-store stream from which it came, into the hands of another woman with fantastical dreams about herself. The pants lasted and lasted, for five years or more, until one day I understood it was the end of them. They’d served their time. I’d worn them so long and so often they’d become threadbare. The elastic of the waist had given way; the hemline had frayed. Instead of putting them on, I put them in the garbage can.

My husband was out of town at the time, working on a project that kept him away from home for a couple of months. It didn’t seem right that he wasn’t there to witness the end of the pants. My uniform. Our history. So I fished them out of the garbage can and cut out the crotch with a pair of scissors. It was a neat black rectangle of fabric that only two people on the planet would recognize for what it was.

I folded it into an envelope addressed to him. I didn’t include a note. I put it in the mail and sat for a long time thinking about it, imagining him. How he’d laugh when he opened the envelope and realized what he was holding. How he’d press it to his nose and inhale.

KELLY SUNDBERG

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solli · 4 years

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“i sent a selfie of myself to the wrong number but you responded and you’re really hot” AU (x)

mentions of smexy pictures and suggestive imagery. also I now have a drabble spree collection on ao3

Blaine is about to die.

He would like not to, but he can see the life he yet has to live slipping right through the fingers of his cold, clammy hands.

“Fuck.” he mutters under his breath. He’s surprised he still has breath to waste.

“What’s wrong, Blainey Day?” Tina asks from the other side of the breakfast table.

“Fuck.” he says again.

He has no idea how he’ll say anything different ever again.

“Blaine?” Tina asks, more worried, looking up from her own phone.

He shuts down his phone and shoots on his feet.

“I forgot I had a capoeira lesson.”

“You have those on Mondays and Wednesdays.”

Fuck Tina and her obsessive knowledge of his schedule.

“I have an extra one. It’s a seminar. That’s why I forgot.”

She doesn’t seem particularly convinced, but he doesn’t wait around to answer any question. He picks up his messanger bag and runs out of the apartment. He has no idea were to go, he just knows that he should probably avoid river banks.

He ends up holing himself away in a Starbucks, because nothing says millenial misery like crying over a missent selfie in a coffeehouse chain.

He can’t bear the thought of taking his phone out of his pocket.

His thigh buzzes. Then again.

He’s supposed to tell his mother how many of his friends he’s bringing to the housewarming of their new vacation house by the lake.

He tentitevely takes out his phone.

He’s got a text from his mother and two more for the stranger he sent a photo of himself kneeling on a bed. Thank God he had underwear on. White boxer briefs he was pulling down on one side so low that some hair that shouldn’t be seen were in fact showing, but still. At least he isn’t butt naked.

Curse the day he decided that there wasn’t much difference between a bathing suit and underwear anyway.

He’s terrified of opening that chat. How did he even think that sending Eli a selfie was a good icebreaker to go from instagram DMs to texting he has no idea.

Okay, he has a few. Thank God he didn’t send a back pic, he tends to take those naked. Tended. Past tense. He isn’t sending another risque pic in his life.

He takes a deep breath. It’s better to just rip the bandaind off. He knows it’s pics already, he’s looked at them long enough to realize it surely wasn’t Eli he texted.

All of his blood rushes to his dick. He doesn’t feel his feet anymore, nor he has enough circulation in his brain to think. He can just stare.

One of the photos is a bird’s-eye view of a lean, pale guy lying on white sheets, hips up, white skin scattered with freckles and beauty marks. He’s got a hand just above his bully button, at least six rings stacked on three fingers, and God those are abs, just defined enough that Blaine could lick through the ridges.

All of which he takes in in the corner of his eyes because nested next to it is a shot clearly taken balancing the phone of said lickable abs, framing black briefs pulled down on one side (smartass), a rather snug buldge, and very very long legs, one raised to show a lean slim thight that Blaine just bets would feel incredibly firm if he was to, say, dig his fingers into it as sucked him off.

Whomever he was.

The dick hasn’t included a face pic. Which is extremely unfair since Blaine’s is completely visible- which might have been a grave mistake but it wasn’t like his mirror selfie was that bad. He wasn’t tecnically showing nothing.

He’s aware of the extreme irony of this trail of thoughts, but he can’t help shifting on his chair and reading the texts below the pics.

It occured to me that my spontaneous photoshoot might have contribuited to the growing archive of a ring of nudes trading and not, as I originally thought, to give something back to a misguided hot guy who happened to have a wrong number.

In that case, I’d like to retire my application.

He snorts. He types back before he knows he’s doing it.

What if it is really was a misguided hot guy who typed in the wrong number because he has two brain cells to budget and he likes to waste it all on photography and stage lighting?

Well. It depends. Has the misguided hot guy enjoyed what he saw?

He might be half hard in a Starbucks

Who hasn’t been at least once.

But how can I be sure you’re not catfishing me?

Blaine bites his lips. Oh, hell. He already has a picture of his face. He snaps a selfie, cute smile with a hint of embarassed wrapped in a photogenic smize.

Fuck, you’re pretty.

Blaine blushes.

Would like to say the same but I only know you have a ring fetish :/

A pic comes in a few seconds later, and Blaine thinks he might have just fallen in love.

He’s gorgeous. Wild hair, pale skin, red thingreengreyblue eyes, even more freckles, even more beauty marks. He’s resting his cheek against his hand and he’s indeed making a :/ face.

Another pic immedietely comes through. It’s him smirking in a knowing way, and he had to have already took it before Blaine even responded.

He’s tempted to snap another fic but he’s a splotchy blusher and he would hate to ruin the surprise for him.

So, you’ve got a NY number.

I was about to ask you your whereabouts but that was profoundly unsexy.

Almost as much as your full stops

I find them very sexy, I like to finish things off properly.

Smooth

It doesn’t work like that. You either put it at the end of the sentence or you don’t.

I was planning to send you another selfie after finishing things off properly later tonight but if that’s what you think

You have to know the rules before you can break them

Blaine laughs and ignores his face burning hot on the hand he’s leaning his cheek against.

I do am in NY by the way. Tisch

Columbia.

Of course

What does that mean?

Hot, gorgeous, witty and smart. Where’s the catch?

You tell me. I’m still not convinced you’re a sleazy sixty something balding men trying to find escape from an heterosexual marriage.

Tell me your name.

Only because you put a full stop. It’s Sebastian.

He does sound like a Sebastian. Blaine writes it with a pen on the side of his coffee cup, adding an “Hi, Sebastian, I’m” over the black marker “Blaine”, and a “:)” right after.

Hi, Blaine. Hope you’re not being held hostage.

Why don’t you come and check on me?

He attaches his position. The Starbucks is crowded enough that it doesn’t feel like a complete idiocy.

Give me 20 minutes.

He ends up giving him 31 minutes and one more coffee. He’s scrolling through instagram when someone crashes with grace on the seat in front of him, coiffed hair, a deep red t-shirt and a cheeks reddened by the early summer sun.

”So?” Sebastian asks in a scruffy drawl, ”Where’s the catch?”

Blaine is way more flustered that he thought he’d be, considering he basically told Sebastian he was going to jerk off to his pictures later in the night.

Sebastian checks him out and Blaine is glad he knows how to play his cards, if the way Sebastian’s eyes linger around the height of his flushing cheekbones tells him something.

”I think we both have an entire coffee date to find that out.” he smiles leaning over to rest his temple on his hand.

Sebastian smiles back, and Blaine might have to text his mother he’s bringing one more guest to the housewarming party.

#seblaine #seblaine fic #this is way longer than it should have been #also it's 1am and i'm writing another one #editing? i don't know her

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mekkebikmsilmu-blog · 4 years

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Step by step instructions to Feel Sexy

Here are my attempted and tried tips that get you from feeling like a cleaned out dish material to femme fatale.

Take a gander at your self in the mirror and state "Hello there flawless!"

In the event that you can't force yourself to do that since you feel excessively monstrous, wrinkly, fat, unkempt make prompt move that will fix it. Brush your hair, apply red lipstick, put mascara on. Squeeze your cheeks. At that point take a gander at yourself once more, and state, "not all that awful considering I've been overlooking you." Make a pledge to love and deal with you - state it while you gaze profoundly at you.

Grin at each body you meet. You'll get loads of grins back.

Be friendly to each one even those individuals you don't care for. The response you get from them will be inestimable.

Tease, don't stress over anything. Being a tease will make additional customary reactions from men - it'll cause you to feel great. Being a tease is a great method for demonstrating that you are playful and responsive. Men love it. The thing here is that when you're having an affinity you can feel great regardless of whether you believe you're monstrous, fat or what ever. In the event that you simply let the correspondence occur and quit agonizing over what the other individual is thinking about you. Have you at any point thought about that they might be agonizing over what you consider them?

Lay off the espresso and sweet beverages.

These are energy executioners - they lift you up quickly yet you'll return thudding down. At the point when you're down it's hard to impart. Also, not just that - being down gives all of you those unsexy musings like: for what reason am I so fat?, for what reason wouldn't i be able to be so...? Bla. Rather remain in one positive sentiment place at that point go from down to up and afterward down once more.

Eat sexy nourishment.

For me sexy nourishment implies nourishment that is still in it's unique structure. New products of the soil. On the off chance that you accept that new nourishment is causing you stomach issues, at that point discover which ones you should blend and match. I guarantee you genuine nourishment beats any prepared or canned nourishment.

Chocolate bars, cakes and confections are awful for you however you realize that as of now isn't that right? Chocolates are just sexy when they've been exceptionally picked by somebody unique and afterward gifted to you. It's sexy and amusing to eat gifted chocolates particularly together with the conveyor of the gift. It's likewise an excellent plan to gift some body with extraordinary pralines.

Look at your closet.

Is it true that you are wearing any old thing? Wearing any old thing is fine in the event that you feel great in it however on the off chance that somewhere inside you that any old thing is causing you to feel not tantamount to you could be go change right away.

I'm constantly astounded that women save their extraordinary garments for uncommon events. Consistently you are as yet breathing and participating in life is extraordinary. I without a doubt don't have unique garments I love them all and wear them all. For planting I wear my old variety of my once new garments.

A decent tip is to wear garments that sit well and are agreeable. On the off chance that you articles of clothing are awkward you'll act naturally cognizant. For instance I don't wear little skirts or dresses since when I plunk down I discover I'm pulling on them to attempt to cover up.

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seventhstar · 6 years

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spy zine promo, part 1

anyways i’ve had this fucking burn notice au lying about half-written for eighty years, so here, enjoy. this a promo fic for @yoispyzine. we are on sale now here!

update: part two here

“My name is Katsuki Yuuri. I used to be a spy, until…”

When you’re burned, Yuuri thinks, you have nothing. No cash, no credit, no job history. You’re stuck in whatever city they decide to dump you in. You’re stuck living wherever you can find an unscrupulous landlord who’ll rent you a place without a lease or a background check.

Even if that means living directly over a swinger’s club.

Yuuri has slept in the desert during artillery fire. Yuuri has slept on a college campus during dubstep night. Yuuri has even slept through Minako snoring. But nothing could have prepared him for Viktor Nikiforov’s string of passive aggressive one night stands, all of which seem to end with him and his hapless victim rutting against Yuuri’s front door.

Once might have been an accident; twice might have been coincidence. Seven times is a pattern. A petty, awful, sexy pattern. He’s not even sure what Viktor’s endgame is--if he’s being punished because Viktor is still mad about Yuuri breaking up with him by fleeing the country, or if this is Viktor’s way of seducing him. Both of those are terrible options, because it’s not like Yuuri has gotten over Viktor, and it’s definitely not like he’s not spending his nights hard and aching and longing with the knowledge that Viktor is only ten feet away.

Either way. It has to stop. And not just because Viktor sounds like he’s enjoying himself thoroughly every evening, and Yuuri knows that if he was weak enough to open his front door and interrupt, Viktor would let Yuuri have him. Even a saint’s self control would be tested by Viktor shamelessly begging to be fucked ten feet from Yuuri’s bed.

“Tell me you found something.”

Phichit sighs. Chris sighs even louder. They probably practiced this instead of doing any work. Yuuri counts five empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter, and notes the open Photoshop window on Phichit’s laptop. He’s been sitting outside a noodle shop for six hours, waiting for his old handler to pass by, and so far has had no luck. Eventually, Celestino will have to come by the only place in Hasetsu where decent Italian food is sold. But that still leaves Yuuri unsuccessful, tired, sweaty, out of cold beer, and trapped in a loft apartment situated over an illegal sex club.

An illegal sex club his so-called friends refuse to help him put out of business.

“You know, Yuuri, just because you aren’t getting laid doesn’t mean you have to be bitter,” Chris says. He waggles his eyebrows. “It’s really a nice club. Very comfortable.”

“No,” Yuuri says. He cannot imagine being comfortable anywhere where people are having sex, in pubic, repeatedly. The whole place is probably like a public locker room, but with more semen. It probably smells like sweaty ass. It’s probably profoundly unsexy, like used toilet paper, or puppies, or Yuuri when he’s not pretending to be someone else.

“Just fuck him already,” Phichit says.

Yuuri hates it when he does that. Is he secretly a mind-reader? Can’t he let Yuuri repress in peace?

“I told you. He’s tactical support.”

“Is ‘tactical support’ Japanese for ‘guy I wanna bang’?”

“Phichit!”

“What?”

“Are you going to help me get rid of the club?”

“Who’s getting rid of the club?” Viktor asks. Yuuri turns; he didn’t even hear Viktor come in. “And why?”

Viktor sidles up behind him; his fingers brush across the back of Yuuri’s shoulder. Yuuri doesn’t shiver, but it’s a near thing. He waits for Viktor to move away, but he doesn’t. His breath is hot against Yuuri’s ear.

“Yuuri,” he says.

“Viktor.”

“I brought you breakfast.”

“It’s two pm.”

“There are hash browns.”

Yuuri glares at the floor. Viktor knows he’s weak for fried potatoes. He accepts the bag Viktor is proffering and opens it. The hash browns smell amazing, and they’re still warm.

“I thought Carlito’s didn’t serve breakfast after eleven,” Chris says.

“Oh, Raul made an exception for me.”

“Is he the one you’re fucking?”

Viktor hums in thought. “…yes?”

“Anyways,” Yuuri says. He shoves a hash brown in his mouth — it’s fluffy inside, crispy outside, dusted with salt — and groans with pleasure. He is supposed to be on a diet. First Viktor ruined sex and now he’s ruining food, too. “There’s no way this club isn’t committing a crime.”

“…about that,” Chris says. He sounds entirely innocent.

Yuuri is suspicious as hell. “What?”

“If you really want to investigate the club, I have an in,” he says. “But you have to promise you’ll take the job.”

“Is this about your bootleg sex toys?”

“They’re not my bootlegs! And it’s a legitimate public health issue!”

“It’ll get me into the club?”

“It’ll let you find out everything you could possibly want to know.”

Yuuri squints at Chris, who grins. Phichit grins, too. Yuuri can’t see Viktor, but he’s probably smiling, too.

Yuuri is so fucked.

“Fine.”

“…you own the club downstairs.”

“That’s right. I’m Shanice.”

“And you want me to help you keep the place open.”

“Look, I’m trying to create a safe space for people to explore their desires without being shamed. I started this place after I moved here with my husband and he then ran off in the middle of the night with all the money. It’s all I have. Hideki and his crew want to turn this place into one of their brothels. Which would you rather live above?”

Yuuri stares at her. If he lived above a brothel, Viktor couldn’t get laid there. On the other hand, Hideki is a human trafficking piece of shit. If Yuuri was a better person, this would be no choice at all.

As it is, he can’t stop himself from regretting having moral standards, just for a moment.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says. “On one condition.”

“I can’t believe you had me banned,” Viktor says. He’s sitting in Yuuri’s favorite chair, bare feet propped up on the coffee table, ankles crossed. He’s wearing jeans and a plain tshirt, and glittery highlighter. The highlighter is tacky. He looks deeply irritated.

Yuuri keeps looking at him, torn: one hand, this is hilarious, and on the other hand, Viktor has a point, Yuuri is being petty as hell. Whatever. Viktor should have expected this. He knows how much Yuuri loves sleep.

“You deserve it.”

“You realize I can get laid elsewhere?”

“I don’t care about you getting laid, I want to sleep for eight hours uninterrupted.”

“You once slept through a volcano erupting.”

“The volcano was in another state and I was drugged.” Yuuri sighs. “Never mind. The job.”

“Mm.” Viktor picks up one of the files sitting on the desk. Phichit and Chris came by earlier with the results of their recon, and now they’re off dealing with one of Phichit’s internet people’s minor blackmail problem. They’d promised to be back in the evening to get the details ironed out.

Which leaves Yuuri with Viktor to figure out the approach. Hideki and his goons generally come by once a week to do their ‘give us your club or we’ll ruin your business’ song and dance, but Hideki himself comes by even more often to enjoy the club’s services. According to Shanice, he’s driving off customers with his bad manners and the way he treats his subs.

“Some of these subs are are probably bodyguards in disguise,” Viktor muses. “He never comes with one?”

“Shanice says he always has a naked woman on a leash with him. And he rents the back room for business meetings, and he provides them with subs, and sometimes they mysteriously wash up on the beach with stab wounds in the groin.”

“A two man job, then. You need someone to play sub for you.”

“I guess.”

“Unless you want to be stabbed in the dick.”

“You in?” Yuuri asks.

Viktor snorts.

“Okay, I’ll just ask Chri—”

“Fine, I’ll do it.” Viktor leans back in his chair, ankles crossed, and taps his lip with his index finger, the way he does when he’s thinking. “Just like old times,” he murmurs, smiling to himself, and Yuuri shivers. That’s the whole problem, he thinks, but he nods.

Taking his ex-boyfriend, who used to actually let Yuuri sexually dominate him, on this mission is a terrible, terrible idea. Either Phichit or Chris would be safer options. Yuuri shouldn’t.

Viktor traces the floor plan of the club, and says, “Tonight?”

“We can plant the bug, yeah. Phichit and Chris can put together my cover.”

“And mine?”

“If anyone asks you anything, play dumb.”

“Tch.” Viktor rolls his eyes, but Yuuri ignores him. Viktor is exceptional at playing dumb. Despite being almost six feet and made mostly of muscle, he always manages to give the impression that he’s soft, harmless, and stupid. Even though he destroyed Yuuri completely within the first minute of their first meeting.

“I’ll meet you here at nine,” Yuuri says. He gets up. “Wait, are you just doing this to get unbanned from the club?”

“You’ve caught me,” Viktor says, laughing, and he’s still chuckling behind his hand as Yuuri slips out of the apartment, the door closing behind him.

Yuuri picks up his dry cleaning so he’ll have clothes for the club tonight, buys some ugly sunglasses as part of his disguise because he doesn’t want his good Armani ones associated with this shitty cover, and scouts out the workplace of a potential government contact for his burn notice for three hours. Then, before he can think better of it, he stops at a pet store and buys a plain black collar and a leash.

#yoi #yuri on ice #yoi spy zine #fanfiction #victuuri #promo fic

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johnvitajame · 2 years

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uncloseted · 6 years

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Have you noticed a trend lately where it's become "cool" for girls that are skinny to pretend they eat tons of junk food and never work out? I know some girls definitely have fast metabolisms and really can eat junk food all day/not workout so I'm not talking about those people. I've just noticed in the past couple years girls who I know eat at least fairly healthy or workout try to act like they don't have to do any of that stuff. I just don't get the appeal tbh. I don't see what's wrong about

Anonymous said to effys-closet: admitting that you workout and eat healthy. I do both of those things and I have no problem being honest about it

This definitely isn’t a new thing. I think there’s always been this idea of the effortlessly beautiful girl who puts no effort into being beautiful and perfect, she just is, and I think this is an extension of that. It’s the same reason people like the “French Girl” idea or Jennifer Lawrence. And I sort of get where that comes from- I”ve been calling it the “Anne Hathaway Effect” which is apparently a totally different thing, but basically it’s that any effort is perceived as profoundly unsexy, and the minute you can see any effort coming through, that’s when the person stops being attractive. There’s a lot you can say about why that happens, but I think in the broadest terms it’s a product of our culture and the expectations we put on women. To get back to your original point, I think dieting and working out is part of that. I think what it comes down to is a lot of people are afraid of being *that girl* who’s always *watching her figure*, and so they pretend like they’re not even when they are.

On a side note- the fast metabolism is a thing (sort of) but it also has to do a lot with portion size. If you pay attention I bet you’ll see that those girls who eat junk food all day never finish any of their food.

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how2to18 · 6 years

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THE #METOO MOVEMENT, at its core, highlights failures of consent. What’s gone wrong in the underlying cases is that a person, usually in power, acted without explicit permission, forcing another person into an unwelcome situation. At best, it’s been uncomfortable; at worst, it’s been assault.

Participants in the movement — victimizers and victimized, men and women both — are publicly sharing their stories. Many of these traumatic outcomes have been brought on by professed ignorance of or indifference toward norms and habits of appropriate sexual conduct.

Part of the reckoning with these transgressions has been renewed debate about the meaning of sexual consent. For example, a British PSA drew plenty of attention for charmingly explaining it in terms of serving tea: “If you say, ‘Hey, would you like a cup of tea,’ […] and if they say, ‘No thank you,’ then don’t make them tea. At all. […] If they’re unconscious, don’t make them tea. Unconscious people do not want to drink tea, and they can’t answer the question, ‘Do you want tea?’” But such explanations, no matter how cutely presented, are not enough. Thinking there’s more to the problem than clearer explications of consent can solve, some commentators have renewed a call for cultural adoption of affirmative consent, the view that says the conventional “no means no” must be replaced with “yes means yes.”

Where the “no means no” standard demands that partners interrupt proceedings when they’re not (or no longer) consenting, “yes means yes” instead encourages sexual participants to check in with one another, to make sure everybody’s enjoying themselves and wanting what’s happening.

While “yes means yes” is a relatively recent arrival to the culture at large, “no means no” has been the standard in American sexual consent since the 1990s. Its operation may seem obvious enough: if you’re not into what’s happening, just say, “No.” One of its problems, though, is that people stay silent for lots of reasons, not just that they’re comfortable with what’s occurring. Without enthusiastic affirmative consent, sexual partners, especially new ones, may be left with too much ambiguity about one another’s desire and enjoyment and thus be unable to ensure informed, voluntary decision-making. Affirmative consent demands greater attention to power dynamics, coercion, and the subtleties of intimate encounters. Without it, there’s no guaranteed way to avoid the messy, risky uncertainty of “gray area” sexual experiences, those that wind up unwanted and regrettable, even if not illegal.

“Yes means yes” has attracted critics who hold that it’s both cumbersome and profoundly unerotic. Writing in The New York Times, Daphne Merkin claims, “Asking for oral consent before proceeding with a sexual advance seems both innately clumsy and retrograde, like going back to the childhood game of ‘Mother, May I?’” Arguments like Merkin’s imagine robotic, stepwise encounters, in which participants disengage every few moments to plot their subsequent action. On this telling, after each completed phase of a sexual encounter, partners return to the disembodied sterility of discourse. This, however, misunderstands affirmative consent’s possibilities and requirements. Proponents aren’t asking partners to write up contracts (though there’s a host of smart phone apps for just this purpose). Rather, they’re suggesting that people treat one another as intelligent adults, checking in and sharing feelings and desires rather than acting without concern. It’s about deciding together what comes next. Such conversation can happen during an embrace or in a seductive tone; it can create a space for partners to communicate not just their consent but also what they enjoy, desire, or imagine. Contrary to assumptions, one doesn’t need to put on a necktie and adopt legalese.

The deepest imperative of affirmative sexual consent is that even while exploring and expressing our most primal physical desires, we must remember one another’s humanity. Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of the 2008 Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, puts the need for rethinking our understanding of consent in explicitly moral terms:

Real consent requires us to really be present when we’re having sex with someone. It requires us to see our sex partners — whether they be anonymous hookups or life partners — not simply as instrumental to our own pleasure but as co-equal collaborators, equally human and important, equally harmable, equally free and equally sovereign.

Part of the conceptual shift Friedman offers is from seeing sexuality as something that’s done by one to another to something that’s done together, a mutual planning of behavior for joint pleasure. And though the understanding of consent she endorses is new for many people, the foundation of moral equality on which it rests isn’t at all novel.

The contemporary notion of sexual consent has its origins in a wholly unsexy domain: English legal philosophy. Thinkers from the 17th and 18th century, including John Locke, argued that while, by nature, almost everything belongs equally to everybody, the same isn’t true for the body: “[E]very man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself.” Our bodies are our own, uniquely; if anybody wants to make use of them, they must have our permission. Or, on Locke’s heteronormative telling, “conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between man and woman, and […] it consist chiefly in such a communion and right in one another’s bodies as is necessary to its chief end, procreation.” Voluntary agreement is what makes sharing, enjoying, or otherwise using the private property of another person’s body morally permissible.

But sex isn’t the only element of contemporary culture where consent matters. Signing a contract or taking out a loan requires consent. So does getting married. Accepting a medical treatment plan is, at its best, giving informed consent: the patient understands what ails them and what steps their doctor will attempt to return them to health. And consent is fundamental to US politics. For example, midway through the Preamble to the American Declaration of Independence appears, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” When Thomas Jefferson penned that line, he invoked an English intellectual tradition to explain the legitimacy of American independence from England. That tradition was Locke’s.

Just after arguing how to share bodies consensually, Locke explains how legitimate political sovereignty works: “[N]o one can be […] subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one […] puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another.” The language here couldn’t be clearer: justified political power over others requires each one’s individual consent.

Locke’s account of the origin of the state isn’t without its detractors. Some scholars have pointed out that, historically, many people have been left out of this contractarian political framing. Carole Pateman, in her 1988 The Sexual Contract, argues that Locke downplays women, making them exclusively subjects of contracts instead of parties to them. Likewise, Charles W. Mills’s 1999 text, The Racial Contract, identifies Locke’s social contract as one only between whites. And then there’s the obvious critique, that the ahistorical Lockean telling assumes both an overly individualistic pre-social situation and a clear moment of discourse and agreement that forms the state. From what we know of both the family and the messiness of life before states, there’s no way sovereignty originated from a rational conversation among disconnected individuals.

Those who wish to endorse the Lockean view tend to shrug off these concerns, arguing that the account is a political fiction showing not what occurred to bring about the state but instead what would be necessary in order to have a morally justified sovereign. And though Locke’s telling clearly leaves some people out, this exclusion can be read as an artifact of his social-historical moment rather than as an absolute defect of the theory. Locke’s “every man” can be read more broadly without loss, much as we squint at the Declaration’s “all Men are created equal” and see that it points beyond Jefferson’s sexist, racist time to an eternal truth — or at least ideal — about all people.

Regardless of the fictional character of the Lockean origin of the state, more recent American political figures have embraced it emphatically. Major speeches have been regularly peppered with references to the consent of the governed, with each speaker offering his or her own take, shaded to their own political aims. It’s one of those populist lines that can be deployed by most anybody to support most anything. For example, Abraham Lincoln invoked it to argue against slavery, holding that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” And then Ronald Reagan suggested, in his first inaugural address, that because the government showed “signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed,” he’d downsize it. Even NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden justified his leaking classified documents by claiming “the consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.” One must know what one’s getting into in order to consent truly.

If the Lockean story is right, and justifiable political power requires voluntary agreement to the setup, what legitimates the current American system? After all, no one asks newly born Americans whether they want to be ruled. More troublingly, an August Rasmussen poll shows that 53 percent of likely US voters believe the federal government doesn’t have the consent of the governed. Is it the case that the United States, despite its lofty founding ideals and its politicians’ assertions, doesn’t care about consent?

Locke’s answer to this question — endorsed by both the Founders and subsequent generations of mainstream liberal political thinkers — is that by living peacefully, citizens are giving “tacit,” or silently implied, consent. If people don’t like it here, they should leave or do something about the injustice. If they’re not rebelling, they’re consenting. This understanding of political consent is the analogue of “no means no,” and it’s just as ripe for abuse and misunderstanding as its sexual cousin.

While “yes means yes” may be good for sexuality, some will bristle at the thought of applying affirmative consent beyond this narrow field. Yet it is the standard in almost every other practice that requires consent: the earlier-mentioned contracts, loans, marriage, and medical treatment plan all require one to sign on, not just fail to object.

Governance is one of the few places where “no means no” seemingly remains acceptable. Perhaps this is appropriate in that political consent isn’t the perfect mirror of all the others mentioned. Sexual encounters mostly occur among small numbers of people who can converse face-to-face during their interactions. States, on the other hand, are made up of thousands if not millions or billions of people. Their interactions are mediated by both distance and institutions. For political participants to check in with one another continuously would require unthinkably sophisticated technology and unimaginably flexible political institutions. Despite this difficulty, there are important features both politics and sexuality share. Most notably, both are about other people having a say over key aspects of our bodies and lives.

Our current political system is not entirely without methods for going beyond tacit consent and instead checking in on people’s continuing support and explicit political desires. These include taxation, elections, and public comment sessions. But taxation comes with a threat of punishment for non-compliance, and coercion always undermines voluntariness. As for the other modes of asking for affirmative political consent, the percentage of citizens who take part in elections and public fora is low, and, as with sexuality, the silence of non-objection is not necessarily evidence of agreement with the status quo.

There’s also no guarantee that any individual’s expressed political preferences determine any political outcome whatsoever. Elected representatives regularly sit silently through public comment sessions, understanding them as a ritual to be endured, not as an important moment of contact between government and governed. And even when people have a chance to affect policy directly, not everyone’s desires are realized. Americans make sense of these facts with a nod to “the majority rules,” but this idea doesn’t, by itself, explain President Trump’s election without a majority of the votes cast in 2016. It also doesn’t account for the workings of most non-presidential elections, in which more than half of Americans vote for no one by choosing not to vote, or those cases, like marijuana legality, where the majority of Americans want the exact opposite of the nation’s current laws.

A further trouble in mapping affirmative consent onto politics is that it often isn’t clear to what participants might be consenting. In sexuality, there is, or at least can be, clear demarcation of this action from that, allowing a “yes” to touching here but not there, to kissing but not to intercourse. By contrast, the current political system, with all its assumptions and bureaucracy, has a complexity that can be difficult to understand, let alone to disentangle. The sort of affirmative consent that most easily applies to contemporary politics is that found in accepting a social media site’s terms of service. There’s some scrolling through and skimming of dense legalese, a shrug, and a click on “I accept.” Participants agree because they want or think they need access, without beginning to understand what they’re getting themselves into. It just isn’t clear that this is a meaningful sort of consent.

These disconnects, along with the general difficulty of determining ongoing affirmative consent at scale, lead some political thinkers to reject mass politics and instead to support anarchism. Their position doesn’t embrace the colloquial sense of the term, in which there are no rules and everything devolves to tire-fires and madcap chaos. Rather, it’s the idea that worthwhile consenting requires people to discuss and affirm the rules that bind them: laws shouldn’t hold power over you just because they are laws — but only because you’ve consented to them in a meaningful way. This idea, called voluntary associationism, is, in one author’s telling,

the freedom to form whatever groups and collectives we want without being compelled to participate in any. We never had the chance to say no to capitalism, to government, to police, to all the systems of hierarchy that impose their rule — so clearly those can’t be consensual in any meaningful way.

Anarchist ideas about the operation of legitimate consent and its impossibility in the current system inform anti-state cooperative projects underway worldwide.

For those who believe that states are here to stay, however, the important question must be whether and how political consent may be revivified in light of challenges brought by the ongoing development in sexual consent. The most pressing challenge arises from the shift in seeing sexuality as something done by one to another to instead the planning together of actions for mutual satisfaction. In understanding sexual consent, only this view respects each person’s humanity and equality, their self-sovereignty and their ability to express desires and set ends. Is it possible to understand governance along similar lines?

This is to ask what possibilities there are for both the government and the governed, the politicians and the people, to plan their futures together, explicitly fantasizing about what might come next in the nation’s democratic experiment. Such a shift would require a radical rethinking of what sovereignty means. Without this work, there’s no clear way to distinguish the current silence of apparent political consent from the silence of hopelessness, fear, or abuse.

Steven A. Miller is a visiting professor of philosophy at Ripon College, in Ripon, Wisconsin. He likes cats and justice.

Feature image by Rob Shenk. Banner image by William Chen.

The post Sexual Consent and the Social Contract appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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caredogstips · 7 years

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Are funny parties sexy … or are sexy people funny? | Dean Burnett

Dean Burnett: Humour is often considered a very attractive mannerism in a potential spouse. But does the science subsidize this?

In a recent client pole, Girl On The Net looked at the assumption that females desired a bad son, the clich that females are attracted to more rebellious, undisciplined, aloof personas who play by their own regulates like treat them mean, keep them keen etc.

But never mind the bad guy, what about the entertaining guy? Its an equally common clich that wives are often charmed by a guy who can draw them laugh. It certainly pops up in the media often enough. How many sitcoms have you discovered where the at-best-average-looking bloke purposes up with a woman whos clearly out of his conference, exclusively because hes wacky, or witty, or cuttingly sarcastic?

Real life isnt short of lessons either. The acronym GSOH is essentially mandatory for dating charts. In his brilliant( if psychologically horrifying) autobiography Becoming Johnny Vegas, Vegas gathers no pierces when it comes to criticising his own physical appearance and drawbacks, but highlights how his increased comedy success lead to similarly particular attention from females( much to the exasperation of the more typically-attractive blokes watching, a phenomenon that has been scientifically preserved ).

And for those with a strong constitution, theres Dirty British Comedy Confessions, a area where people profess their sexual fictions about British( and beyond) comedy wizards, in often eye-watering item( thanks to Richard Herrings Leicester Square Theatre Podcast for pennant this up, and the Greg Davies and Nick Helm episodes in particular ).

Ken Dodd has been shaping innumerable parties laugh for over half a century, but still isnt considered a sex symbol for some reason. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Guardian

The link between witticism and sexual attraction has a lot to back it up, as the bishop said to the nun. Humour is widely regarded as a complex anatomy of communication, allowing people to communicate sentiments and information in an pleasant and engaging mode. If youve ever seen a seasoned speaker become jokes( or at the least, attempt to) youve realized how prevalent this notion is. So humour is a complex and valuable tool for modern humen. Nonetheless, when you render a usual human anything at all, one of the main responses will unavoidably be how can I use this is something that get sexuality? And lo, humour has already become profoundly are enshrined in what is questionably refers to as human mating, and in a variety of ways.

At the most basic rank, it constructs sense that united was becoming increasingly drawn to someone we find amusing. We encounter someone, they shape us find amusement by making us laugh, we form a positive association with them, and have more positive pities towards them. Basic associative see, the genu Pavlovs bird-dogs demonstrated. Clearly, its a lot more complex than that; people can find novelty coffee mugs funny, doesnt means that they want to have sex with them( although no doubt people who work in A& E could support evidence to the contrary ).

Another theory is that the ability to stimulate laughs and entertain parties is a sign of mental health and fitness, as it requires ability, speedy believe, versatility etc. All these acts hint the person is a good copulate, from a health and genetics perspective. So maybe puns and wordplay are the oral equivalents of a stags antlers, or a peacocks posterior; undue showings of biological health and fitness.

Again, its clearly most complex than this. Extremely few wives will look at a husband who forms her laugh and think Phwoarr, Id cherished some of his gametes. Also, the assumption that funny= psychologically health isnt a definite judgment; theres attest to suggest that numerous people determine excessive witticism as a clue that someone is psychologically unwell, hence the whole tears of a clown clich.

Depressingly for those who accept being funny can compensate for being physically unattractive, that seems to only work up to a moment. An interesting analyse by Cowan and Little , which looked at humor and attractiveness found that physically attractive people were be considered to be funnier than less attractive parties when the subjects could see the speaker. When presented with audio simply, this impact wasnt so pronounced.

Why would attractive parties be considered funnier? Surely thats not how humour efforts? One interpretation is the halo gist, where our initial notion of person or persons makes a bias in all our other assessments of them. So if you look at a man and think he is attractive, when he makes parodies youre more likely to think he is funny because you already have positive feelings about him due to how he gazes.

Its technically possible to mark witticism from physical figure, but it takes “youve got to” strange lieu. Photo: Alamy

In contrast, because the humour-attraction connection is well established and manifests in various ways, numerous might consider attempts at humor as synonymous with flirting. And if a person you dont find attractive tries to flirt with you, most people certainly dont like that, so you know a negative reaction. Overall, it hints attractive people have a much simpler time of it when it comes to obligating beings laugh. At last, the physically beautiful eventually catch a transgres!

All this come here for many caveats. The style of humour and romantic intent plays a role, because people are complex and arent limited to binary entertaining/ unfunny or sexy/ unsexy judgements. You also cant certainly filter out the countless cultural forces on our sensings.

For example, the study mentioned above shows that humour is linked to attractiveness for both men and women, but the effect is stronger for women. Is this some deep-rooted advanced mechanism, or research results of everyone around us assuming that women arent supposed to be the amusing ones? Any that are are daring convening, so receive negative responses for the purposes of our. Its nonsense of course, but then most women who exposes positive attributes seems destined to be attacked for it. We live in a world where even the most physically flawless maiden can be criticised and mocked in major pamphlets because a photographer with a strong camera viewed some cellulite between 2 adjacent scalp cells.

So its assumed that men should be the amusing ones, and women are the ones who choose funnier guys. But theres no regulation saying it has to be this mode. And this( and nearly every analyze into the region) concentrates solely on heterosexual relationships. Theres nothing to say lesbian interaction doesnt use comedy in same courses, but the stereotypical culture characters would now throw everything off, so cause even more headaches for scientists.

Overall, while it seems clear that humour and sexual interaction are strongly associated, the idea that amusing people are sexier isnt quite so evident. Parties who ever attractive often get perceived as funnier, because the people attracted to them crave them to be, even if it is at a subconscious level.

This isnt an absolute of course, what with humen being as messy and complex as “they il be”, specially when it is necessary to fornication. Some parties certainly are irresistably drawn to someone who prepares them laugh, irrespective of examines. Other beings have no interest in dating a wannabe comic at all. But, with everything that in mind, if youre wondering why so many current comics seem to be attractive young men with trendy fuzz , now you know.

Dean Burnett will be attempting to be funny on stage with Robin Ince at the Guardian Live event about his introduction journal The Idiot Brain, taking place in London on June 2 nd .

The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett( Guardian Faber, 12.99 ). To guild a imitate for 7.99, going to see bookshop.theguardian.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over 10, online orders only. Phone guilds min. p& p of 1.99.