I am very comfortable with the size of my dick, thank you very much

One of the most annoying things about male dick size complexes is that they generate a huge amount of spam being sent to my email indiscriminately. The emails advertise all sorts of treatments designed to improve my penile size and strength. The jury is out on whether these products actually work (most don’t). However, I can guarantee that they do not work on women and I wish that I would stop getting 50 emails a day promising me a bigger penis, as I am very happy with my current penis size.

Pass the turkey, please

Last year, I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time in about 5 years. My in-laws (mother, father, and brother) and of course my husband came to Chicago with me. It had been awhile since the in-law family dined with my blood relations, but I figured they’d more or less known each other for 10 years and should know to expect the unexpected. Clearly, though, they were unprepared for the production of “The Vagina Monologues-Grandma Style” that brought dinner to a screeching halt.

My grandmother was telling us about her obnoxious neighbor, who has a misguided belief that she has the right to park in front of my grandmother’s driveway and block it because my grandmother doesn’t drive. However, when my aunt and my mom go to pick Grannie up, they would like to pull in and out of the driveway. One night my aunt came by and found the driveway blocked, so she called the cops who came and towed the car. After my aunt left around 10:30 PM, bitch neighbor came over and rang my grandmother’s doorbell and started yelling at Grannie about being an inconsiderate neighbor. (Unbelievable nerve, right? You repeatedly inconvenience your neighbor, and you call her inconsiderate?!?!? Picture Grannie: she’s a cute little shrinking woman, a little under 5 feet tall. She has white hair and glasses, just like Mrs. Claus. How anyone can yell at her like that is beyond me. She’s just so cute!)

As my grandmother is telling the story, my aunt interrupts and says, “You know what Suzanne would have done in that situation? She would have called her a bitch and shut the door.” My mom disagreed, “No, she would’ve called her a fucking bitch.”

That really got my grannie going. “Why did you use the f-word, Sherry? I hate the f-word. You can say cunt, but don’t say the f-word. Cunt is fine. There’s nothing wrong with saying cunt. I won’t say the f-word, though. You should say cunt instead...” and on and on about how you should never say fuck because it is rude, but calling someone a cunt is perfectly acceptable.

My cousin, who was about 16 at the time, nearly fell out of her chair laughing, but pointed out that some people are trying to reclaim the word cunt as woman positive, as evidenced by the popularity of “The Vagina Monologues.” I agreed wholeheartedly. My friends and I call each other cunts as terms of affection all the time. (Although the insult I save for the worst people is to call them cunt-face whores, so I guess I use it both ways.)

During all this discussion, my in-laws are sitting straight up in their chairs, staring at the wall, not eating. You can tell they clearly wonder how they hell they wound up at a Thanksgiving dinner with an 83 year old woman ranting about the proper usage of the word cunt. I think to myself, “Ah, home sweet home.”

"Would you like some gravy on that?"

When I was a little girl, my grandmother called vaginas butter biscuits, as in, “Be sure to wipe your butter biscuit after you go to the bathroom.” This caused severe embarrassment later in life when people would talk about eating biscuits. I had assumed that all people called girls’ crotches biscuits, and I could not understand why no one else was embarrassed to order them in restaurants. (I was recently at an abortion rights conference in Atlanta, and a bunch of us went to a local restaurant called The Flying Biscuit. My friend Steph loves biscuits - the baked pastry, not vaginas - and so I told her about how much I loved The Flying Biscuit. We decided that The Flying Biscuit would be great name for a lesbian bar if only other people used the same slang.) To this day, it still freaks me out a little to eat biscuits, although I do enjoy them very much with butter and strawberry jam.

CUSS Victory #2

When my husband and I bought our apartment, the seller asked us if we planned to join the fancy gym across the street.  I told him that we did not, as that gym is for rich assholes.  We already belonged to a gym down the street and around the corner from the new apartment.  Our gym was for average assholes like ourselves.  A few months after we moved in, however, my husband learned that through his work we could get all access memberships to the fancy gym for the same price we paid for restricted access to our adequate gym.  (We got the special rate for models and B-list stars.)  Understanding a good deal, I agreed to make the switch.

The fancy gym was quite different from what I was used to.  At our previous gym, people of various sizes and colors sweated next to each other.  During our orientation to the new gym, I noticed that we were the fattest people in the building, which is scary because we are not especially overweight.  Over time, I have seen some boy mass index diversification among the members, but it is still dominated by rich (white) assholes.

Here’s what freaked me out most about the new gym in the first few months, though: the locker room.  Generally, I change into my workout clothes at home and use the locker room to store my coat and backpack.  In my few minutes stashing and locking things up, naked women always surrounded me.  Not naked in the sense that they just got out of the shower and were changing back into their clothes.  That would be normal.  No, they were hanging out in little groups, chatting it up, gossiping, combing their hair, and putting on make up while they were buck naked.  And worse, many women had a tendency to bend over and lotion up before they put their underwear on.  Now many guys have gotten a dreamy look on their faces when I mentioned this.  But imagine bending over to tie your show and finding someone’s ass and cooch in your face.  It is just plain gross. Of course, as stylish, thin, rich naked women, their pubic hair was professionally removed.  (The gym knows it’s market: there’s a sign in the locker room advertising the “best Brazilian wax ever” can be obtained at the gym’s spa.)

So my victory this morning was especially sweet.  I noticed as I was grabbing my stuff that several women were getting dressed in their stylish, opaque or mesh bikini briefs or thongs.  Those women all had pubic hair clearly visible.  Now, they definitely maintained their bikini lines, so no pubic sprawl was going on, but they still at least had normal looking bushes.  And no one was lotioning up, so I didn’t get any vagina in my face, either.  Really, two victories for the price of one.  Go CUSS!

Please don't cook the penis

Once my roommate in college, Kay, shocked me and my other roommate Dianne by insisting that she would never have sex. Generally, this was a very progressive and intelligent person, so I asked what the reasoning behind this was. She said didn’t believe in birth control, and pointed out that the Pill pulls a serious number on a woman’s body by messing with her hormone levels and menstrual cycles. I thought that was a fair enough point, but also noted that there are forms of birth control that don’t involve altering a woman’s body, such as condoms. Kay could not have been more horrified by this suggestion. No, she told us very matter-of-factly, her older sister told her that it is not worth it to have sex if you use condoms because you can’t feel a thing. Both having had sex using condoms, Dianne and I said that that was not true and that many people enjoy sex even more with condoms because some of the worry factor was removed. And while dick socks clearly reduce some sensation, it’s not like numb rubbing someone. Otherwise, why would anyone bother? Yet hundreds of thousands of condoms are used successfully and discarded every year. This threw my roommate into a rage. “RAW DICK!!!” she bellowed. “I ONLY WANT RAW DICK.” Somehow, Dianne and I did not fall down laughing until much, much later when recapping this insane conversation for other friends. Subsequently, I find it hard to look at certain uncooked vegetables and not think about raw dick.

Do not try this at home (or anywhere)

I once unintentionally wound up with a bikini wax. I was going to Buenos Aires and didn’t want to worry about shaving my legs while I was there, so I booked an appointment at a spa/salon. I didn’t know any better, so I asked for the full leg. As I learned, a “full leg” includes a very intimate bikini wax. I was a little suspicious when the waxer asked me to change into a ridiculous tiny, see-through g-string thing. I asked why and she said it was so that wax wouldn’t get on my undies. This made sense, so even though I felt like an exposed idiot with my fat hanging out over and under the g-string and my hair hanging out everywhere else, I went along with it. To whit: hot melted wax was then smeared on my pubes, allowed to harden, and then yanked out by the root. I did not expect this, and asked what the fuck she was doing. (In reality, I asked very nicely. You do not yell at someone pouring hot wax on your crotch area.) She explained that it is hard to tell where a leg ends and crotch begins, so the full leg procedure includes the bikini line and a little more. It was pretty damn clear to me where my leg stopped and my private business began, but I had to plead with her to leave my cootch alone. I swore I’d pay for the full procedure, but she had to make the agony stop. At least after that I knew why she looked so extra horrified when I took my pants off. I guess she knew what a nightmare she was in for in trying to make me look acceptable to society.

Sprawl sucks

Recently, I was thinking about the challenges of urban sprawl and I noticed that urban sprawl and pubic sprawl actually have a lot in common.  Both begin urban communities and pubic hair begin developing in a central area.  As more growth occurs, space becomes less available, and new development begins to take place outside of the hub area.  Suddenly, untouched territory is now seeing large amounts of development.  Over time, the growth takes place further and further from the hub, requiring more infrastructure to deal with it, whether that means more highways and public transportation (urban sprawl) or more shaving, waxing, or depilatories.

Scary how similar they are.