Living In Sin

Living In Sin: Three's a Crowd

Dear Jen,
After years of frank discussion, my wife and I recently decided to open up our marriage and explore things with other people. We've each had a few experiences on our own, and a couple of threesomes together, and although we've had a wonderful time, I have one problem.

Sometimes in our threesomes I feel like I'm the necessary evil for the girls who want to be with my wife. It always seems to be "about the girls," and while I can certainly sit back and enjoy watching, sometimes I feel like the third wheel who’s there only because the new partner feels like she has to include me. I'm sure these girls would be thrilled to be by themselves with my wife, and it's kind of a blow to the ego!

Do I just suck it up and be grateful that I'm getting to have a threesome at all? Or am I right in wanting to feel like an equal? A lot of the women we’ve been with are quite new to expressing their bisexuality, so maybe it’ll change if we find a regular partner and the novelty of the girl-girl sex starts to wear off?
-Why can't I have my cake and eat it too?

Dear Cake
I have a friend who has an extensive owl collection. It all started when she innocently purchased a wooden carving of an owl in front of her mother one afternoon– hmmm, isn’t that cute? – and has led to her being the horrified owner of owl pot-holders, clocks, earrings, slippers, “I don’t give a hoot!” t-shirts, needle pointed owl pillows, salt and pepper owl shakers, stuffed owls, owl soap-on-a-rope…On birthdays, holidays and graduations, the dreaded swarm descends, perching on her shelves, flapping up her wall-space, peeking out from her closet - it’s like a horror movie.

“I don’t know how it got so out of hand,” she moaned one day as she unwrapped an “Owl Always Call You Friend” cross-stitch wall hanging from her sister-in-law. We decided she had to put a stop to it, to thank them very much but declare her world an owl-free zone from now on. Her friends and family were surprised and indignant, and although the onslaught stopped, they treated her like she was nuts. “Fine, if that’s what you want, but…”

People love to tell you what you should and shouldn’t want, regardless of what you have to say about it. Especially if you should, gasp, change your mind about something. As a virile member of the heterosexual male population, for example, you are supposed to knock over tables to get near anything having to do with girl on girl sex. It’s the undisputed Holy Grail of sexual experiences, the ultimate high-five, and you got your wife to agree to it – score! It’s no wonder you feel weird and ungrateful for being unsatisfied. What kind of man does that make you anyway?

Luckily you have the option to value your opinion over the opinions of others, so if being left to watch from the sidelines of a threesome doesn’t float your banana, then it doesn’t float your banana. It’s really just that simple.

Just as with any other activity on the sexual playing field, if one of the participants isn’t into it, it means game over. You need to start by telling your wife how you feel and then make sure that all the ladies who come home with you understand that you come as a set, that you are not sold separately. If a lady isn’t into the male part of the equation, then you need to file her under a solo snog for the wife (assuming you guys are still messing around separately), accept that for this particular round you’ll be all eyes, or blow her off and find someone who is. Going ahead with it and feeling lousy is not an option.

As far as repeated trysts making a woman more open to including you in the mix goes, I have no idea. It totally depends on the woman. The important thing is that you’re honest with yourself and your wife, and that you try not to get your ego involved. If these women are only interested in girl on girl action, the fact that you don’t fit the bill isn’t something to take personally. That’s like feeling badly about yourself because you didn’t get invited to your neighbor’s lesbian pot luck.

Sex is supposed to be fun and make you feel good. So if you don’t like what’s being offered to you, don’t accept it because if you do, before you know it you’ll have an unwanted collection of disappointments and resentments cluttering up your relationship.

Living In Sin: Back on the Bus

Dear Jen,
What happened to your column? Did I get booted off the list or something? I haven’t gotten it in months. What up?
- Troy

Dear Troy,
I am not proud to report that I didn’t, as planned, sit down and write several week’s-worth of columns before leaving on my big traveling spree to India. And today I was going to just slide back into the old smut Q&A and hope nobody noticed, but not only have I gotten several emails like yours, but I learned so much about humans and relationships over there that it seemed silly not to share the light, my column being about humans and relationships and all. Plus it’s the New Year and an opportune time to take stock of what we have, what we don’t have and what we want to change. So let’s do so, shall we?

India is about a third of the size of the US with more than three times the population. It’s a place heaving with humanity, full to the brim, sitting on top of you and sticking its filthy bare foot in your face while you fight for space on an overbooked train. Your only options are to go with the flow and chat with your neighbor or grow a big fat stress-related tumor, and the thing that made perhaps the biggest impression on me was how nearly everyone I met went for option number one. That and the fact that there are cows everywhere, even on the beach.

Indians will roll down their windows to chat with you in a traffic jam, spoon you on a train should you fall asleep next to them, stare unblinkingly at your whiteness, help you if you’re lost, insist you get in their family photos at historical monuments, invite you in for tea, burp, fart and laugh in your face - it’s like the entire country is a giant kindergarten class. It’s totally annoying. And sweet. And clearly knows something important that we forgot about.

I didn’t darken the doorway of an ashram or partake in any of the other thousands of spiritual options the country is famous for offering – who needs it? As far as I’m concerned you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about life by taking twelve hour bus ride through India during wedding season.

When I bought my ticket on the Super Deluxe Express Bus to Delhi, I was told I was paying a wise four hundred rupees extra for the luxury of a five hour trip that made only two stops as opposed to the ten hours and countless stops of the local. I was so extremely exhausted from the three sleepless days I’d spent whooping it up at a camel festival up in the mountains that the thought of hunkering down on the Super Deluxe and sleeping all the way to Delhi sounded good to me. But what I got instead was a seat next to Mr. Friendly, a middle-aged man who spoke three words of English and insisted on chatting me up, even though I was doing what I thought was a very convincing job of fake sleeping and a very real job of having no frikken idea what he was saying.

The bus left an hour late due to massive confusion and overbooking and took almost two hours to get out of town because it was peak wedding season. Weddings in India involve a ceremony followed by a parade through the streets complete with horses, marching band, explosives, a car with a loudspeaker blaring crackly music and important wedding announcements and a bunch of guys carrying table lamps on their heads. Apparently some god had done some important thing thousands of years ago that made this particular week an ideal time to get married – I read there were 20,000 weddings in Delhi in one day. My bus ended up getting trapped in wedding festivities pretty much every ten minutes, which meant that everyone on the bus, instead of freaking out and hollering complaints out the window, kept skipping on and off to join the party.

When we finally did get out of town, we kept stopping to let various people on and off (in the middle of nowhere), have some tea, a smoke, a chat, maybe light a fire in the brush by the side of the road and to strap giant burlap sacks full of something large and bulbous to the roof. At some point this guy got on and stood at the front of the bus, right next to my seat, and began hollering at us in Hindi. My bus mates responded by cheering, chanting and sitting in silence while I responded by seeing if I couldn’t find another seat farther away from his mouth. I got up and joined the group of people sitting on rickety benches around the bus driver who was in this "room" behind a wall of glass. The people huddled around him made room for me and suddenly I felt like I was watching an action movie on a screen the size of a giant bus windshield. We were careening through the narrow dirt streets of tiny villages with crazy Indian music blaring over the speakers while people, goats and monkeys leapt out of the way. The only time we slowed down was for the almighty cow, but I swear this guy drove our huge bus through spaces I'd be scared to ride a bike. Then all of a sudden, in some tiny nowhere village, he pulls over yet again. More chai perhaps? Maybe he's going to go visit a friend? Has to pee? Wants to take a walk for an hour while we all sit there? The driver waves for me to follow and gets off, as does the entire bus. It turns out that Mr. Yell In My Ear was some sort of holy man who was just warming up the crowd for a tour of the temples in this small, gorgeous skinny-alleyed town called Vrindavan. It is, I learned, the place where Krishna met his wife Rada and where they have over 5,500 temples in his honor. So for the next two hours I found myself wandering through ramshackle temples, gaily tossing flowers onto shrines, skipping in a circle around a statue of Krishna, solemnly listening to sermons, praying, clapping and all I could think was how fully freaked out a bus of New Yorkers on the express from NY to DC would be in a similar situation. Meanwhile not one person on the bus was expecting this and not one person complained, even though when we finally got back on the bus it was well past the time we were supposed to be arriving in Delhi and we were still a good five hours away. Instead they all thanked, and tipped, the holy man and spent the rest of the ride chatting up a storm. After that we stopped at a roadside "restaurant" for dinner, then another pee break, then I was waking up the family I stayed with in Delhi at 2am who, of course, acted like it was the middle of the afternoon and insisted I share a cup of tea.

Here are some things I am going to do in 2008:
Talk to more strangers
Expect, and appreciate, the unexpected
Find the humor
Join the party
Share my space
Loosen my bone, Wilma

I’ll be back with the booty next week…….

Living In Sin: Meat. It's What's For Dinner

Dear Jen,
I'm a 37 year-old guy who has recently started seeing someone who could very well be Her. She's all the right things: Stephen Hawking-smart, artistic, sweet and hot as the hinges on the gates of Hell. The only problem is that she's bisexual. I’m worried about pursuing a long-term relationship with her, not because I think she's the cheatin' kind, but because that biological urge to be with women could prove too much for her.

I'm not looking to change who she is (which is pretty effin' amazing) or
what she likes, but do you think it's possible for someone who has moved past the 'curious' stage to be okay with only turf, not surf, at home?
- Man Enough?

Dear Man,
I know this guy who lies awake at night panicked that some giant piece of space debris is going to slam into the earth and scatter our parts like dandylion seeds. He also washes his hands forty nine times a day, refuses to eat out and one time I picked him up at the airport and watched him white knuckle it all the way home. “How can you blindly trust all these other drivers?” he whispered. “You have no idea what they’re going to do!”

Although we refer to him as The Phobe and sometimes do mean things like take a sip out of his beer so we can watch him pretend not to want anymore, he does have a point. There’s an infinite amount of awful things out there – just getting out of bed in the morning is somewhat arrogant in the face of it all. But there’s also an infinite amount of good, and since you get what you focus on, I’m going to go ahead and surround myself with thoughts of bunnies and brown paper packages tied up with string. If we wind up getting obliterated by a giant piece of space debris someday, so be it. I will most certainly blame it on The Phobe.

Handing your open, naked, fragile heart over to another carnivore takes the same kind of letting go, but you have to do it because what are your options? Safety is an illusion, and trying to protect ourselves does nothing more than protect us from experiencing a full, evolved and juicy life. Ho hum.

This idea that bisexuals are untrustworthy horn dogs is a common misperception and quite an unfair one if you think about it for more than a second. Everyone who gets into a committed, monogamous relationship has to resist the biological urge to hump outside the lines, not just bisexuals. So even though seeing her off on a girls’ night out might make you a tad more stressed out than the average boyfriend, she has to trust you too. And ours is a large planet full of sexy people, perfect opportunities and lots of tequila. It’s a wonder anybody pulls it off.

You obviously appreciate how fabulous she is so I say go for it. But make sure you focus on the fact that she’s chosen you as her one and only, not that she might trade you in for something more feminine, because what you ask for you will get.

Living In Sin: I'm Too Sexy For My Wife

Dear Jen,
I love to watch porn and have fantasized about group sex with my wife and this is causing a problem in my marriage. I’ve never pressured her into pursuing a swinger’s lifestyle, but she says I make her uncomfortable by buying her sexy clothing – it’s not even sleazy, it’s stuff like mini skirts, low cut blouses, etc. I could understand if she was overweight, but she’s very attractive and even doctors tell her she’s in great shape for here age. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me watching porn, but it destroys her when she finds out. I’ve never cheated on her in the 10 years we’ve been together, but I just can’t help looking at sexy women. Do I have a porn addiction?
- Porn Dog

Dear Porn,
My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. In her lifetime, she was witness to the invention of such pivotal things as the car, the TV, the plane, the fax machine, the computer and the electric can opener. The two things that blew her mind the most, however, were putting a man on the moon and the soda dispensers at McDonalds. She’d stand there watching, gripped by disbelief, as an employee placed a cup (small, medium or large) beneath a spout, pushed a button and walked away while the machine filled it exactly to the top. “How does it know where to stop?” Nana would shake her head, mortified, “how does it know?!” After we figured out how to clone a sheep, she pretty much threw in the towel on trying to understand anything. I overheard my nephew telling her some stupid story about his friend who’d chopped off a finger in shop class only to miraculously grow it back by rubbing the stub on a battery every night, and Nana simply said “well I’ll be.” That was the last time he bothered playing that game. She’d buy anything. The thrill was gone.

With all the miraculous things that I’ve seen in my, ahem, short life, the one that amazes me the most (other than Labiaplasty) is the happy, harmonious, long- term romantic relationship. There are so many things that two, complex people have to either have in common or have no problem with, that I’m always more amazed when it works than when it doesn’t. You have to want to live in the same place, hang out with similar people, be simpatico with feelings about sex, money, child-rearing, politics, dogs or cats, communication, religion, drugs, recycling….really, the places it could go wrong are infinite. But this is a good thing. The whole point of these tangled webs we weave is to help us grow and evolve. If there was nothing to untangle, we’d grow fleshy and limp, like a finger chopped off in shop class.

The important thing to remember is that almost every single thing we need to untangle has to do with ourselves, not the other person. There is nothing wrong with watching porn, as long as it doesn’t stop you from showing up for work or replace your actual sex life, just as there is nothing wrong with her feeling self-conscious about showing off her melons, regardless of how hot you think she is. You both need to focus on changing yourselves and stop trying to force each other to be the people you’re not because if you can’t (going to a mediator or therapist can help) your marriage will be in deep doo doo.

The sad and sorry truth about other people is that you can’t control them. I have attempted to prove this theory wrong for years and have yet to succeed. It’s much more productive to be very clear about what you need to be happy, change what you can about yourself, communicate clearly with your partner and treat all those totally stupid and infuriatingly unchangeable things about them with a simple, “well I’ll be.”

Living In Sin: Neighborly Nookie

Dear Jen,
I’ve been in love with my neighbor since we were 6 (we’re both 21 now). We recently hooked up a couple of times - he kissed me for the second time (the first time was 8 years ago, my first kiss) and I blew him twice. The problem is that he's a virgin and is CLUELESS, meanwhile I've been in two long-term relationships since I was 16. I don't want to force myself on him, but I really wanna fuck him! Or at least make out, but I’m very shy around him.

I've been sleeping in bed with him every night for the past three weeks and he never makes a move. Can you give me some advice on how to move things along, or if I even should? By the way, he's a man of few words, it would be a very tricky subject to approach verbally.
- Silently Suffering

Dear Silently,
My friend’s husband is a tri athlete who was recently in a race where they drop a bunch of guys off on some island with nothing but a bike and a bag of nuts. Then they run, pedal, climb, crawl, limp and swim for 2 weeks from one end to the other. He lost all his toenails, ate bugs, ripped open his face on a tree branch and rode five miles on nothing but metal rims when the tires on his bike blew. And he did it purely for the challenge, not because he was being chased by a rhino.

We the people love our challenges, be they physical, intellectual, emotional or involve holding our hands on a car for days at a time. Believe me, most women have fallen for your same guy at least once in our lives. I had a crippling crush on a gorgeous Cave Thing in high school who was so introverted he’d pull his chair out into the hallway and listen through the open door to the rest of us hanging out.

What is it about that which we cannot have that is so appealing? Why does the prospect of unreciprocated oral sex and zero communication have you all hot and bothered? Because not only is it a challenge, but it confirms your feelings of unworthiness in a way that only being with someone who doesn’t really want you can.

Virgin or not, if you’re lying in bed next to a guy whose Mr. Johnson you’ve already oh boyed, he’d go for it, or at the very least kiss you if he really wanted to. (How on earth did you wind up in bed together btw- did you tell him yours broke or something?)

My advice to you is to move on and find someone who can actually push words through his throat, but when it comes to a crush that’s gone on that long, with a guy who’s that irresistibly shut down, that’s not going to happen. So if bone him you must, you’re going to have to get over your shyness and roll on top of him one night. Then you’re going to have to suffer through awkward silences and endless hours of trying to get him to pay attention to you followed by a severely broken heart and years of getting over him. But at least you will have conquered him, right?

Living In Sin: Proactivate Your Sexlife

Dear Jen,
One afternoon I found myself waiting for your column to arrive in my inbox. Since that wasn't happening, and I like to be proactive, I went to your website to see what I could find. I was delighted to see that you host workshops and parties for bisexual and bicurious folks, but I was disappointed to discover that they are for "ladies only." I don't begrudge the bi girls their dick-free experimentation, but why don't you (or anyone else) host parties and workshops like this for bisexual and bicurious men, or for men and women together? Don't you think we bicurious guys could benefit from such events?
- Bisexual Man Seeks Same

Dear Same,
I would like to take a moment here to talk about merkins. For those of you yet to be enlightened, a merkin is a pubic wig. The thing that’s always baffled me about the merkin, other than how you actually put one on, is that it has a name. Naming something implies that enough people use it to warrant needing something to call it, but I recently polled 20 friends (and I have some special friends) and not one of them claimed to have ever used, or known anyone who’s ever used, a merkin. Meanwhile, the thingy you slip under a table leg to keep it from wobbling remains nameless, as does my 20-pound cat, The Big Guy.

There are countless examples of haves and have nots in our unfair world, and it’s up to all of us to do what we can to close the gaps. To do my part, I’ll try calling the cat Buick and see if it sticks, and hereby suggest that the great table equalizer be called a “weenit” so please pass it on. As far as your dilemma goes, of course I think you and yours could benefit from parties and workshops like mine, as could foot fetishists, furries, bondage enthusiasts, and people who like to dress up like babies, but honey, mama can only do so much for so many people. If you can’t find what you need in your life, you have to get your fine proactive self out there and make it happen. Rally the bi-boys and get a list going, show me that there are enough of you who want me to step up to the plate and I will gladly get off my girl-focused ass. Or even better, get a space, fill it with people and ask me, or someone else, to host. Also, get on the internet – I know there are classes and events for the bisexual community. Just because I’m not doing them at the moment doesn’t meant they’re not out there. My girl parties came about because I got flooded with emails from women asking where to meet other women so you are on the right track.

On that note, I’m having another party for the ladies this very weekend, September 8th, in Venice, CA. Details on my website www.jensincero.com/events.html. I always appreciate suggestions from my mighty fine readers so please keep it up and mebbe I have a party for you next, yes?

Living In Sin: From Orgasm to Over It

Dear Jen,
I'm a 20 year-old, bisexual-leaning lesbian who has not done anything sexual with either gender. I get turned on easily and love to masturbate all the time. My problem is something that I can't seem to admit freely and you seem like the person who will (finally) understand.

I can't keep going after I come, even though I'd love to. During the build-up I'm thinking "I could do this for hours" but as soon as I come I can almost feel the whoosh of my hormones receding and I feel exhausted, disgusted and uninterested - almost to the point where if I were to keep going for another one, I'd vomit. I've had this problem since I started masturbating when I was 14 and I just can't seem to force myself to shake it.

I'm afraid this is going to translate into my sex life when I finally have one, and I don't know how to improve the situation! Do you have any tips?
- One Hit Wonder

Dear One,
Every year I go backpacking in the wilderness areas of southeast Utah with two friends of mine. We stumble around an endless landscape of giant blobular crazy swirling taffy-colored rock that I can’t really describe, but suffice it to say that anyone who’s ever smoked crazy glue has been there. There are no other people and there are no trails, so if you’re anything like me, you either go with friends who have super-human navigational skills or you spend the end of your trip being eaten by birds.

One year a very rare thing occurred and we actually saw another human being out there. We were perched on top of this purple cone-shaped rock overlooking a little valley, and off in the distance was this guy skittling around like a little cartoon character. We couldn’t figure out what he was doing, darting around like he had ants in his pants, deedly deedly dee, but it was incredibly entertaining. Until we saw him bend down to fill his water bottle in a tiny, fully-foul desert puddle. We realized he must be delirious and lost and started yelling and waving at him. In mere moments he was at our feet, bug-eyed with terror and nearly weeping with relief. We gave him some water, fed him an apple and pointed to his tent, which was about 500 feet away. That was when he really started crying.

You remind me of this guy because you’re also blindly stumbling around while the answer is just around the corner. If you weren’t so ashamed of your “problem” and felt like you had someone, male or female, that you could talk to about it, you would understand that you are perfectly normal.

I don’t know if you’ve been too busy masturbating to notice or what, but one of the oldest jokes in the book is about the guy who gives you his two minutes of thunder and then rolls over and goes to sleep. Here’s my favorite one of late:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WGOohBytKTU

Women can usually re-charge faster than men, but the clit has 8,000 nerve endings, all of which get flushed with blood when you come, which means it can actually hurt if you try to play with her right after an orgasm. So even though men are more famous for it, lots of women join the snooze crew once they come, too.

Anyway, the real issue here isn’t your lack of ability to rev up again, but rather the gag reflex you have towards your own sexual pleasure. I’m thrilled to hear that you masturbate like the dickens, but I don’t like the way you feel all pukey afterwards. This may have something to do with why you haven’t slept with anyone else, btw. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a virgin, but I’d hate to think that you’ve remained one because you’re disgusted and nauseated by sex somehow, not because you don’t feel ready. If you get mighty real with yourself and decide that this is indeed what’s going on, it might behoove you to talk to a therapist who can help you navigate your way into someone else’s pants.

Living In Sin: Holes Vs. Poles

Dear Jen,
I have a question that's been driving me NUTS. I can't decide between boys and girls. It's killing me. Have you ever felt this way? At first I thought it was cool to be bisexual, like there were so many more possibilities for love, but now I feel like I just need to make a decision between the two genders. Why? Because I am 26, in NYC and want to one day get married and have a family.

I spend a lot of my time in lesbian bars and I love my lessie friends, but sometimes I feel like it's all a big waste of time if I will one day end up with a guy. If I want to marry a man I should be on fucking J-date dating dudes. I've loved both men and women. My male gay hairstylist told me, "if you don't have to be gay...don't be,” and that's really stuck in my mind, as I feel like I have a choice in the matter. I don't want my life to be harder than it has to be and I want to be happy. How can I find out which sex I will be happiest with? I don't want to waste anymore time. I want to make a commitment to dating, and then marry either a man or a woman.
- Biconfused

Dear Biconfused,
I know several people who went through law school, who put their brains in a vice grip for three fun-free years, ruined their eyesight, went into debt as deep as the deep blue sea and stumbled out with a fancy law degree only to discover that they’d really much rather make muffins for a living or something. I think it’s safe to say that these are the people who went to law school because they thought they should, not because practicing law made their hearts happy.

Your letter reeks of a similar, deadly “shouldness” that is going to land you in unhappyville too if you’re not careful. You say you could just as easily be with he or she, but from the sound of your letter, she is way more interesting to you at this point in your life. Finding a dude because it’s easier/because you live in NYC/because your hairdresser told you to are not exactly the kinds of reasons to do anything, let alone find someone to settle down with. As you half-heartedly mentioned in your very last sentence, you can also marry a woman. And have a family. And a really great life. If that’s what you really want. So what if it’s harder – if that’s what you decide you want, wouldn’t you rather work at being happy than take the easy road to misery?

The whole deciding which gender to be with can be confusing, but why do you have to decide? Why not just do what the rest of us do – date people who make you feel funny down there and when you find a really super good one, stick a ring on their finger? For you, it’s about the person, not what’s in their pants, so keep your eye on the prize.

The whole missing out on the other gender once you commit to one is a bummer, but that’s what commitment is all about: missing out on stuff and other giant bummers. That’s why so many of us run screaming from it like we’re on fire. Nobody, be they straight, gay, bi, whatever, is ever thrilled about the sudden lopping off of other options once they commit to another person, but we do it because the benefits far outweigh the fact that we may never go to another lesbian orgy again (depending on who we wind up with, of course).

So please, stop worrying about it, stop trying to force yourself to do what you “should” and just enjoy your life. If you really wanted to be on fucking J-date, you would be, but you’re having fun at the lesbian bars at the moment so have fun at the lesbian bars. Who knows, you may bump into the man of your dreams on your way there? You have no control over who you’re going to fall in love with so stay open, keep putting yourself out there and listen to your heart, not your hairdresser.

Living In Sin: Dr. Strangelove

Dear Jen,
Recently it was revealed that the Pentagon, under Bill Clinton, was working on a secret Gay Bomb.

It apparently involved a strong-enough hormonal attractant to turn entire opposing ranks homosexual and hopelessly in lust with each other. They (we) spent a few million, but now it's supposedly a shelved project.

I must admit, I'm hopelessly heterosexual and can't imagine a chemical that would change that. But I’ve always been interested in the role of smells, and presumably that's how the secret Gay Bomb would have worked. Opinions?
- I Smell a Homo

Dear Smell,
Well, now there’s an idea. I smell a great movie, no, wait, a great musical. A bunch of queens sneak into the Pentagon, steal the bomb and suddenly life is a cabaret! Figure skating is declared the national sport, overpopulation, unwanted teen pregnancy and abortion become non-issues and Cher finally takes her rightful place as president.

Yes, it is sad, and staggeringly insulting to the gay population, but true: the macho pinheads who run our country did pull such a stunt, wasting millions of our hard-earned dollars (7.5 to be exact) appealing to their own homosexual neurosis. Why on earth would turning the opposing team gay make them any easier to fight? Do they think they’d just be like, “ow, quit it!” when they got shot? That they’d be too busy carving their initials inside little hearts on the barrack walls, and grinding to the latest Kylie single, to go out and fight? That straight women are tougher than lesbians?

If anything, it would work against them. The gays I know work much harder at staying in shape than the straight boys do. And, as a seasoned fag hag who’s said the wrong thing to the wrong queen on several occasions, I’ve found that they’re a hell of a lot more creative at retaliating when you piss them off. And who wants to fight against people who are intimately involved? Defending someone you’re in love with is a much stronger, and immediate, impulse than defending your country. And if we’re just talking about lust – if I found something I liked, I know I’d do whatever it took to keep that fine piece of ass in one piece.

If you could change someone’s sexuality by smell, I think Dick Cheney would have made sure we’d figured that out by now. And that the powers that be, especially Bill Clinton, would have figured out how to put it in pill form to facilitate more hot girl on girl action.

The research into what causes homosexuality has been going on for decades, and it’s still murky as to whether it’s biological or learned. And apparently, since there is no Gay Bomb, the government didn’t have much luck figuring it out either. They should have used the resources that were right in front of their faces, and our 7.5 million dollars, and made a Dumb Bomb instead.

Living In Sin: Sexy Is As Sexy Does

Dear Jen,
Am I likely to remain single forever because women might view me as being weak for being on anti-anxiety/anti-psychotic/anti-depressant medications? I know this probably isn't true at all, but please bear with my irrational paranoia.

I know this sounds stupid, but I have actually met some people who think that I really don't need the medications, or that somehow a good long roll in the hay will cure all that biochemical shit in my head...

On the other hand, I’ve met both gay and straight people who maintain relationships while being on any number of medications. What gives?
- Medicated and Single

Dear Medicated,
Considering the fact that forty? fifty? sixty? percent of the population is on some sort of mood-altering drug, there would be an awful lot more people wandering around the video store on Saturday night alone, in their slippers, if what you say is true.

And I don’t know whether or not you should be medicated, but I do know that many people who aren’t, but sorely need to be, are getting laid right and left and they still wash their hands thirty seven times a day. So there goes theory number two.

Your problem isn’t the fact that you’re on medication, your problem is the perception you have about the fact that you’re on medication. Yes, we live in a society that has yet to graduate from high school and move beyond our obsession with being part of the cool crowd (rich, thin, under thirty, mentally and physically fit, popular, perfect, numba one) but the majority of us don’t fit that criteria. And the only ones who’ve found true happiness are the ones who’ve learned to love themselves just the way they are. Take, for example, this woman I saw in a bar the other night with my friend. She had a big fat ass, fleshy arms, a pudgy, dimply face all poured into this revealing little hoochie mama outfit. She was having so much fun and just thought she was the sexiest thing and I will tell you, so did everyone else in that bar. We couldn’t take our eyes off her (and neither could her sad sack, skinny, gorgeous friend). That is the kind of person you want to take your cues from.

So please stop referring to yourself as stupid, irrational and paranoid because people (yourself included) will start to believe you. The sooner you focus on how fabulous you are, the sooner you’ll attract someone who feels the same, regardless of how many pills you choke down each morning.