Travis D'arby's Open Salon Blog

When Being Honest About Sex is a Bad Idea

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 11:10:07 -0400

Honesty is the best policy.

It is a cliche you hear spewed everywhere, from Oprah to the pages of Cosmo. Even omissions are treated as lies by these honesty junkies. But is an open, honest relationship in which you share everything with your partner really such a good idea?

The director Bobcat Goldthwait reminds us of why sometimes it is best to let Sleeping Dogs Lie in his 2006 film of the same name. After being goaded by her fiancé, the film's heroine reluctantly reveals her darkest secret.

The result? As you might expect, the fiancé did not cotton to the idea that the pooch got more head than him at first. But being a typical guy, what first repulsed him then attracted him. Naturally, he wanted to see her do it again.

The moral, at least for the women in the audience, is clear: unless you're willing to give that kink you told us about another try, don't go telling us about it in the first place.

My own wife kisses our Golden Retriever on the snout every night before bed. Does it go any further than that? I'm on a need to know basis and this is one thing I do not need to know.

Apparently I am alone in this opinion. Confessing sexual secrets has degenerated into a high stakes game of poker. "I'll raise your ménage à trois with a gangbang." Have the three little letters TMI forever lost their meaning? As long as you've had your rabies shots, why should it be anyone's business but your own who or what you slept with?

I came of age during the nineties when it was commonly understood that you lied about sex. We all knew President Clinton lied when he proclaimed "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky" but we didn't care because back then because we did it too. Clinton's approval ratings actually hit an all-time high right after the scandal broke.

Lying helped me lose my virginity at the ripe old age of 22. When my partner asked about my sexual past, I told her I had been with half a dozen women. Sex is like surgery; do you really want to be operated on by a fresh-faced surgeon straight out of medical school or be boned by a guy whose only partner sprung a leak?

Did my lie hurt anyone? No, in fact it benefited both parties. A committed virgin will outperform a lazy Lothario every time in the bedroom. In the buildup to my first time, I trained like Rocky getting ready for Apollo Creed, only I chose Missy Elliot's (I Don't Want No) Minute Man and Mandelay over Eye of the Tiger and HGH as my theme music and performance enhancing drugs of choice. I slid under the sheets for my first time as a well-lubricated, tantric fucking machine. Like Peter North, I could delay my ejaculations indefinitely. Try getting that level of commitment from any rock star save Sting!

Obviously if you're carrying around more STDs than a med student with a petri dish, do share. But if you got bored one afternoon in 1992, when the only thing you could find on TV were Saved By the Bell and Duck Tales reruns, and the bulldog started looking mighty appealing . . .

Well, keep that one to yourself.

Great Moments in MILF History: From Cher to Diane Keaton

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:07:29 -0400

Imagine a 50 year-old woman seducing a 32 year-old man. Fifty years ago, the woman would have been portrayed as a faded movie star, her advances would be spurned and the scene would prove just how pathetic and out of touch she was, as it did in the Oscar-winning 1950 drama Sunset Boulevard.

But today? It's just another episode in the life of Alex Rodriguez, the 32 year-old slugger who left his gorgeous young wife last year for a fling with a 50 year-old pop star.

Instead of being creeped out by Alex going for a woman old enough to be his mother, we fans wished we could be him. After all, what man wouldn't want to find out exactly which kind of acrobatic positions the Kabbalah enthusiast Madonna could contort herself into?

So when did Really Legal replace Barely Legal as the sexual fantasy of choice for the discerning male?

The transformation has been a long time coming and closely mirrors the development of indie rock. Much like the Velvet Underground and MC5 began their musical odysseys as reactions against the prefabricated bubblegum pop groups of the '60s like the Archies and the Monkees, the MILF movement began in the late '60s as a protest against such manufactured Hollywood sex symbols as Raquel Welch and Jane Fonda. The final insult was the 1967 film The Graduate, a movie as insulting to fans of MILF as the Archies hit Sugar, Sugar was to fans of good music. This mean-spirited propaganda piece portrayed Mrs. Robinson not as every schoolboy's fantasy, but instead as our worst nightmare.

Four years later, Rod Stewart courageously sang of his love for an older woman in his hit Maggie May. The song delicately chronicled the love a teenager felt for his middle-aged lover and gave a voice to our closeted yearnings: "The morning sun when its in your face really shows your age; But that don't worry me none in my eyes you're everything."

Later that same year, the Hal Ashby film Harold and Maude brought the May-December romance to the big screen, as the suicidal teenager Harold finds both the love of his life and a reason for living in the 80 year-old Maude.

The next twenty years proved a fallow time for both indie rock and the MILF. While disco and then hair metal dominated the charts, young starlets like Farrah Fawcett, Brooke Shields and Tawny Kitaen dominated television, movies and music videos respectively. The MILF movement appeared to have gone the way of the pet rock and the CB radio, a '70s fad that no one felt comfortable owning up to in public.

It would take a mythic figure to reverse the tide of corporate rock and feathered hair.

Luckily two such figures arose like a pair of phoenixes out of the ashes of '80s excess.

Their names?

Cher and Kurt Cobain.

While everyone knows the success of Nirvana's Nevermind CD slayed hair metal and ushered in the grunge era, Cher's contribution to the MILF movement is a story that has yet to be told.

Flash back to the late '80s. Hollywood's hottest young hunks like Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer and Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora mysteriously swore off the teenage poontang to rock under the sheets with the forty-something Cher. At the time, this blew my teenage mind. Cher was like old enough to be their mother. What could these young hunks possibly see in her? To be frank, it grossed me out. And then the If I Could Turn Back Time video came out and I saw two cheeky reasons why these guys chose Cher over her younger contemporaries like Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.

Both this new sound and this new lust that Nirvana and Cher each respectively brought to the mainstream needed a name. Initially music critics settled on indie rock, but with acts like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden all signed to major labels, the irony proved too much, and the original label soon gave way to grunge and then the catch-all of alternative rock.

Meanwhile the lust for women old enough to be one's mother remained a love that dared not speak its name, mainly because it lacked a name. That is, until 1995 when the term MILF first appeared on an alt.mag.playboy USENET post. The term went viral thanks to the 1999 film American Pie and today refers to any attractive woman in the 35-50 age range. An actual brood of whining children is not required.

While Cher blew her status as a MILF with a series of embarrassing infomercials and box office flops like Faithful, Kurt Cobain one-upped her by not only blowing his career but also his brains out, effectively putting an end to grunge as we knew it.

With Nirvana and Cher no longer in the picture, the late '90s gave way to glorified bar bands like Hootie and the Blowfish and Train. Old was out and pop ingenues such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguliera became our new sex symbols. Intolerance spread across the land and the courts tore us apart from the women we loved. This open hatred culminated in the greatest travesty of justice since the Rodney King verdict: the August 7, 1997 sentencing of sixth grade teacher Mary Kay Letourneau for the bogus statutory rape of her student Vili Fualaau. True love always finds a way in the end though and after serving several years in prison, Ms. Letourneau finally got to marry the love of her life Mr. Fualaau on May 20, 2005. Imagine Romeo & Juliet with a happy ending and you have these two beautiful lovebirds.

Only a madman would come out of the closet during such a hostile time and that madman was me. My parents kicked me out of the house for dating a woman 18 years my senior. At the time, I would never have predicted these two counterculture movements would both take over the mainstream a few short years later.

But take over they both did. The line between alternative and mainstream rock became increasingly blurred, with the biggest bands of the era such as Creed, Nickelback and Daughtry all paying tribute to the sound of alt-rock gods like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains with their every hit single.

And while I cowardly hid in the closet and let people think my girlfriend was in fact my mother, a man much bolder than I strode like a Colossus onto the MILF scene. Ashton Kutcher: you are our Martin Luther King Jr. and your glowing tweets about the glory that is Demi Moore's ass are our movement's Letter From the Birmingham Jail.

Ashton courageously opened the floodgates to a new era of MILF pride--the only thing missing are the parades. Taboos were broken as fifty-four year old Kathy Bates bared it all in About Schmidt. The following year, in a performance so convincing he couldn't possibly have been acting, the usually wooden Keanu Reeves showed off his charm as he courted the fifty-seven year old Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give.

Whether it be the 2003 Fountains of Wayne hit Stacy's Mom or this May's Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg collaboration Mother Lover, the MILF movement has also sparked some of this decade's greatest musical moments.

Justin Timberlake/Andy Samberg -- "Mother Lover" Music Video

Every decade must have its moniker, from the roaring '20s to the swinging '60s. If the '80s were the Me Decade, it seems only fitting to call the aughts the MILF Decade.

Did Controversy Help Michael Jackson's Career?

Tue, 7 Jul 2009 07:07:41 -0400

Even from the grave, Michael Jackson can still sell out. An amazing 1.6 million fans registered in an online lottery for tickets to attend today's morning memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Of those entrants, a lucky 8,750 were chosen to receive a pair of tickets each. Despite the best efforts of authorities to curb scalping, tickets have reportedly sold on Craigslist for $9,000 a piece.

While many contend death boosted the King of Pop's allegedly flagging career, the numbers tell a different story. This March over two million people from 200 countries attempted to buy pre-sale tickets to Michael Jackson's final series of concerts--all set for this summer in London--in the span of 18 hours. To meet demand, the concert promoters had to expand the shows from ten to fifty.

Michael Jackson getting booed off the stage at his last concert appearance at the 2006 World Music Awards makes these sales figures all the more remarkable. Could it be that child molestation allegations actually helped the King of Pop's career by keeping him in the public eye years after his hits ran dry?

Let us compare Michael Jackson's career with that of his closest contemporary Prince to prove the point. Whose music is more relevant today? Turn the dial to an '80s station and you will quickly discover you can time the muffins to Prince songs. Try that with the songs of MJ and those same muffins will be burnt to a crisp. As you will see, Prince topped the King of Pop in practically every aspect of music:

Songwriting

Yes, Michael Jackson was a member of the songwriter's Hall of Fame but I could be too if I had Quincy Jones and a team of session musicians to turn my beatboxing into music. Prince on the other hand proved so prolific that he not only wrote and produced an album a year but also wrote and produced albums for his side projects like Appolonia as well. Remember "Manic Monday" by the Bangles? Prince wrote that one too.

Lyrics

Has one man given us more nonsense lyrics than Michael Jackson--the Dr. Seuss of pop music? While other lyricists sought the aid of a rhyming dictionary, MJ simply made up new words when stumped, from the cries of "Shamone" that pepper Bad to the "mama se, mama so" bridge of Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'. Prince wins by default.

Vocals

Michael Jackson's singing was tarred by too many vocal hiccups and other affected mannerisms. Prince meanwhile excelled at everything from straight-up rockers like Let's Go Crazy to falsetto pieces like Kiss.

Musicianship

Michael played no instruments while Prince can play practically any instrument he puts his fingers upon. About the only edge Michael had over Prince was dancing thanks to the fabled Moonwalk.

What happened when these two icons of the '80s went mano a mano? Michael Jackson won in a walk. His 50 sold-out concerts at the O2 arena in London shattered Prince's previous record of 21 sold-out shows at the same arena.

Why was Michael Jackson so much more popular while Prince was so much better? Even Michael noted this discrepancy, going so far as to name one of his sons Prince. This is just another case of bad publicity being better than no publicity at all. While millions tuned in to hear Michael Jackson extol the virtues of sleeping with little boys to Martin Bashir, Prince quietly kept churning out the music instead of the controversy.

After a while, fans become inured and take great music for granted. But controversy? That is something for which we have an insatiable appetite and that MJ provided us with in droves. Michael put his life on display for all the world to see and we each found a little part of it we could relate to.

For some it was the abusive father, for others the plastic surgery--after all, who among us would not like to change an aspect of our appearance from time to time? For me personally, it was the lost childhood. While Michael's father drove him to become the world's greatest entertainer, my own drove me to become the world's smartest boy. While other kids played dodge ball and kick the can, I had to crack the books. It paid off for a while. I won geography bees, spelling bees, TV quiz shows and became a local celebrity but I lacked that which I wanted most: friends.

So I could relate to Michael's Peter Pan complex. I eventually learned childhood is like virginity: once it's gone, you can never get it back again. But sadly this is a lesson Michael never had to learn, thanks to his fame and accommodating handlers.

RIP King of Pop. May you find the childhood in the afterlife you could never quite recreate here on Earth.

All My Wife's Facebook Friends Are Men: Should I Be Worried?

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:07:02 -0400

I joined the 21st Century a few weeks ago and signed up for Facebook. While the Facebook software loaded up the names of friends it found in my AOL inbox, one in particular surprised me: my wife's. Hers was an invitation only page so I sent her a friends request. Days passed without a reply until I confronted her about it one day while she checked her e-mail.

"So I'm good enough to marry but not good enough to be your Facebook friend?"

"I never check my Facebook page."

I playfully took the mouse and clicked through several pages of spam until I spotted my Facebook request.

"Well, you can do it now. It'll only take a second."

She gave me that "don't tell me what to do" look only a wife can deliver then promised to get around to it later.

I waited a few more days and still nothing. At first, I didn't think much of it. She will go days without putting her laundry up until I get seeing a freshly laundered basket of clothes on the kitchen table and put her unmentionables away myself. Procrastinating in regards to my friends request seemed perfectly predictable.

But last week I decided to have a little fun at her expense. I typed "cute guy" into Google Images and created a fake Facebook profile for my chosen hunk. While my wife hogged the desktop, I sent her a friend request via my laptop. Guess what? Within minutes, she accepted my request!

While I snooped around her Facebook page, a few peculiarities caught my eye. First, no wedding pictures nor mention of her marital status. And secondly, all her Facebook friends were cute guys!

When I foolishly asked her why all of her friends had Y chromosomes, I naturally got my ass handed to me for sticking my nose in places it did not belong. She left in a huff this Sunday night, allegedly to buy fish food. Three hours later she came home empty-handed, which was not unexpected since all our pet stores close at 6 on the Sabbath.

I have yet to broach this topic again and am debating my next move. Personally I don't mind if she wants a little action on the side; it's the being lied to that I find unacceptable. She was still a virgin when we met so I imagine a little sexual curiosity about other guys is perfectly natural.

And if we're being frank, I feel at times like I retired from the dating game too early in life. Like Roger Clemens did numerous times, I've got that itch to play again. You see, dating is a lot like baseball. Each sport is cyclical: dead ball eras are soon followed by home run eras and back again. Unfortunately I began my own dating career during what we playboys refer to as the "blue ball" era. Guys remember the time well: both Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton found themselves embroiled in sexual harassment suits while the Miller Brewing Company fired Jerold J. Mackenzie from his $95,000-per-year job for discussing a Seinfeld episode with a female co-worker.

While the frustrated baseball players of the early '90s began using performance enhancing drugs like Steroids and HGH to up their power numbers, we single men adopted our own dating enhancing drugs such as alcohol and roofies to up our own numbers.

While those around me indulged in the date rape era, I can proudly say every notch I carved unto my bedpost I came about honestly. I have never knowingly used dating enhancing drugs. Admittedly, I did take Paxil during the 1998 dating season--a drug that is now known to cause four hour erections in those who use it--but at the time a doctor had prescribed it for social anxiety disorder so I consider myself clean.

Now that I am married, our society has seemingly entered a sexual Shangrai-Lai. There is no longer a need to get a woman drunk or slip some Flunitrazepam into her drink if you want to get lucky. As Good Morning America puts it, "oral sex is the new good night kiss".

The language of infidelity is quickly fading into the past. A decade ago we used words like cheating, adultery and swinging to describe sex outside marriage, words that connote lies, hellfire and really bad aftershave respectively. But today? The broken marriage has been replaced by the open marriage. Every day more and more people are realizing monogamy is a medieval institution that breeds jealousy and possessiveness propped up by Republicans who don't even practice it as a campaign wedge issue to win themselves the votes of the Religious Right. Monogamy has outlived its usefulness in a modern society where the pill, abortion and DNA testing are all readily available.

Is polyamory--which dictionary.com defines as "participation in multiple and simultaneous loving or sexual relationships"--the wave of the future? For the good of mankind, I hope it is. Both my wife and myself had really let ourselves go during our first year of marriage. She put on some weight while I stopped working out, lost my muscle tone and began to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shaggy of Scooby Doo fame. Since my wife put up her Facebook page, she has started working out every day and watching what she eats. Meanwhile, I've actually shaved, cut my hair and joined my hometown gym. We both look and feel better already!

* * *

My wife and I did come to an understanding of sorts last night. She belatedly apologized for snapping at me while I told her it was alright, that she no longer had to hide anything from me and that love and understanding had replaced shame and guilt as the zeitgeist of our time.

Now if only I could get her to call it something other than fish food . . .

What's Wrong with Political Correctness?

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 10:07:06 -0400

Like welfare queens and trickle down economics, political correctness is the canard that keeps on giving. Fifteen years after Politically Correct Bedtime Stories topped the New York Times best-seller list, the American obsession with making fun of political correctness continues unabated on websites like Stuff White People Like and TV shows such as 30 Rock. Cracks about political correctness are now as tired and outdated as mother-in-law jokes so could we please give it a rest already?

When it comes right down to it, political correctness is just good manners yet we Americans are acting like spoiled little brats who refuse to say please and thank you. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, people of color with a preference would rather be called African-Americans by an almost two-to-one margin. So why do so many whites insist on saying blacks? We already pretend Snoop Dogg is cool a decade after Fo Shizzel passed its expiration date so what's an extra five syllables going to hurt if it improves race relations? And yes, I would write European-Americans instead of whites if there were a similar groundswell of support for that term.

Yet to listen to whites tell it, you would think African-Americans are asking for reparations when all they want is to be known for something more than their skin color. We stopped calling Asians yellow people decades ago yet we persist in labeling African-Americans as blacks. What gives? The only time I hear whites use the term is sarcastically, as in "What do they call themselves nowadays? Oh yeah, AF-ro Americans". I could understand this sarcasm if we're discussing Marshall Mathers, who goes by either Eminem or Slim Shady depending on his mood and the time of day. But for the previous 40 years, black was the accepted term and today it is African-American. Now really, how hard is that to keep straight in one's head? Enough with the snideness.

And while we're at it, how come--in a nation in which 70 million of us are either illiterate or functionally illiterate--do we all suddenly become experts in etymology where the word niggardly is concerned? Would we insist on using it if, like a naughty schoolboy, we didn't derive some guilty pleasure from being able to say a word that sounds so similar to the "n" word in casual conversation?

The most famous controversy occurred in 1999 when a white aide to Washington D.C. African-American mayor Anthony A. Williams used it in a budget meeting. Michael Myers of the New York Post wrote of Howard's African-American colleagues offended by his use of the word: “STUPIDITY has no color, but ignorance sure is transparent.”

Frankly, I think the offended African-American aides were the only ones who displayed any intelligence throughout this entire affair. Allow me to tell a story from my own high school days. Our English teacher assigned us to read Oliver Twist then asked after we finished our reading, what secret we discovered about Oliver at the end of the novel. Naturally, I raised my hand and answered "He was a bastard" to the delight of my peers. Technically, he was a bastard but that usage of the word is archaic today and we use illegitimate instead. The same concept applies to niggardly: it is archaic and synonyms like stingy and miserly convey the same meaning so why use it unless you're deliberately trying to get a rise out of your audience?

I've spent a lot of years in college and whenever the topic of Affirmative Action is brought up in class the general consensus amongst the white students is it puts a lot of unqualified African-Americans in high places.

It does not take a major leap of logic to think David Howard considered himself smarter than his fellow African-American aides, who he probably assumed got where they were because of Affirmative Action, and he wanted to prove it by using a word that sounded provocative in the hopes of creating a cause celebre which he could weasel out of by pointing to the dictionary. I think the aides were perceptive enough to know what was going on and that's why they objected.

The problems we have with political correctness are based on perception, not reality. Using terms like African-Americans and physically challenged are no more onerous than a simple please and thank you. And as for niggardly, there are over one million words in the English language. Is sacrificing one to curb misunderstandings really that much of an inconvenience?