HuffPost readers may not realize that it's been masturbation month for almost two weeks already. I know, I know. It's just a Hallmark holiday, but don't tell me you'd use that excuse with your mother this Sunday.
Recognition of the holiday seems to be taking place on a city-by-city basis. San Francisco, for one, is spank happy. While four weeks of celebrating self-love may be shocking to the good sensibilities of real Americans, for years now bloggers have normalized e-wankery amongst a certain pale, hollow-eyed, comment-happy crowd. Masturbation could also be prescribed to cabin-fevered Mexicans. And for the economically anxious looking for ways to cut back on pricey summer vacations, what could be closer to home than one's bed/home computer/bathroom?
According to a Romanian, you can also have a twittergasm. But the HuffPost and other such media seem too distracted by teabagging and cholesterol to devote needed time to chicken choking and bunny petting.
Do not worry, dear readers, there are still three weeks to catch up on any false starts or sluggardly behavior.
But how is Obama doing on sex, fifteen years after the last Democratic President threw Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders under the bus for mulling over pot and masturbation? (Indeed, Masturbation Month was allegedly founded in 1995 by San Francisco sex positive, worker owned toy emporium Good Vibrations to protest her firing.) While our dear president must be too busy to have an awful lot of it himself (I know, ladies, that we'd all like to imagine otherwise), what about sexual health for the rest of us?
While the last time most of us were paying attention was when Fox alerted us that Obama wanted to give sex-ed to kindergarteners, Washington has been getting busy for the session's first 100 days.
The FDA recently decided that 17-year olds could now get Plan B contraception without required parental snooping. And it looks like Obama's getting ready to stop neurotically fundamentalist nurses and doctors from blocking women's right to reproductive healthcare.
Yet all is not well in Ameri-land. Michelle may have brought sexy back to Washington, but the True Love Waits Facebook groups still dwarf the membership of Oral Sex=World Peace and our hypocrisy riddled, female purity obsessed society continues to truly fuck people up: "Abstinence-only education during the day and Girls Gone Wild commercials at night!" The media is still all too eager to aid and abet popular belief in the daily hysteria -- remember last year's mythic Gloucester pregnancy cults? And Bristol Palin, for some reason under the impression that she is someone's role model, told Greta Van Susteren, official Palin-family biographer at Fox News, that pregnancy is not "glamorous." Honey, wait, put that diaphragm back in!
Anyways...Congress jumped into the debate over pill parity by cracking down on borderline porno Viagra ads -- Michelle Bachmann, however, is concerned that the legislative branch has already "spent its wad." North Carolina is sext messaging our youth, circumventing the state's abstinence only laws -- but woe to the teen who adds a photo. While some states reject federal abstinence only funds, the Deep South tells their teen sex addicts to say no to sin -- to no avail. And some of our kinkier friends in the Senate are asking America to get REAL, proposing legislation that would steer federal funding to junior-sized latex products.
Some queer activists say that Obama has been all talk, but Fox disagrees. I say that it's complicated, with a pleasant long-term forecast. Some feminists say that Obama does good on condoms but not so hot on truth-in-advertising, as the new budget continues to pour millions into teaching the bald-faced lie that teenagers can have fun without sex... It is also unclear if Obama will break with Bush's faith-based theory of HIV/AIDS prevention. But perhaps the whole culture war thing is overblown, as interwebs specialists say "Millions of Americans...masturbate frequently to the thought of Sarah Palin with a gun." So there.
Happy Masturbation Month. It seems that a slightly different political landscape would allow the masturbators to unite with the no-sex boring crowd -- Jocelyn Elders thought as much. What saner way to stay abstinent?