Why do political wives stand by their lying, cheating men?
In the comments about the Spitzer Scandal, velvetpuppet wished that political wives would show a little more gumption and display their disgust with their husbands.
Since Hillary Clinton set the standard on "stand-by-your-cheating-politically-powerful-man," it's now become the political wife's duty to over-act the Saint Role and demonstrate -- live on camera, with pursed lips and glazed eyes -- that she has reached a place of peace with her husband's misbehaviors. The message: the American public should now do the same. After all, as the spin goes, "if his wife can forgive him, shouldn't we?"
It's political manipulation of the first water. With the specter of the wife's forgiveness shining down like a newly resurrected halo over his head, the politician is granted the grace to "begin the process of healing" (which we all know is politician-talk for burning evidence and getting a new hotmail account). So we know what the politicians get out of it. But what do the wives get?
In no particular order, a list of reasons I think politicians' wives stand behind their philandering men (some of which are no different from the reasons most spouses will remain in a marriage after they catch a partner in an affair).
They're as hypocritical as their husbands. They have deluded themselves into believing that the ordinary rules of life do not apply to them, so as long as they give lip service to morality, they don't have to practice it at home.
They knew all along and didn't care. They reached an agreement long ago, they just pretend to look aggrieved in public so the right political message comes across.
They both have something to hide. It's as much in her interest as his to maintain the public lie.
They are ambitious. They don't love their husband: they've made an investment in him. They're determined to make that investment pay off because they have ambitions of their own. You know, like maybe they're hoping to become president themselves some day and know that a divorce from Mr. Famous could nip that opportunity in the bud.
They're star-fuckers. Lights! Cameras! Celebrity action! Not to mention the best tables at fine restaurants and first-class flights courtesy of lobbyists. Whether or not their spouse is a lying dirt-bag they'll kill anyone who steps between them and Mr. Gravy Train. His money and fame smell better than pheromones.
They love him codependently. They tell themselves they're doing it for the children, or their families, but they're really doing it because they are afraid to be alone. They wouldn't know who they were if they weren't Mrs. So-and-So.
They believe in their marriage vows to a point of self-negation. In other words, they believe that even though their spouse broke his/her vows, they will stick to their vows no matter what. Kind of like a slave who keeps honoring a slave contract long after the dominant broke all his/her promises.
They are financially dependent. They can't give up their standard of living. The fear of being a struggling single mother is worse than putting up with a skunk.
They are abused. They've been quietly putting up with more shit than you could ever possibly imagine because their self-esteem is in the gutter. His philandering is just another humiliating betrayal in a long history of humiliating betrayals. And probably not the worst betrayal either.
Finally, and perhaps the rarest breed of all:
They love him unconditionally. It's a true love. As long as he admits his mistakes and shows true repentance, they can forgive him almost anything.
Category: Sexual Politics
Posted on 3/11/2008 3:01:56 PM by Gloria Brame
Just for shits and grins
from Cracked.com
The 10 Most Bizarre Military Experiments
The Plan:
Military forces have been playing with this idea for decades. A number of smells have been patented, including the smell of human feces, which makes us think we probably owe a hell of a lot of royalties to someone every day at about 8AM. In the Second World War, some intrepid people invented the hilariously named Who Me? as a way to make Germans disperse as well as humiliate them by making them smell worse than people on the bus.
The US has something called US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor which is apparently so bad, people who have experienced it actually start screaming within seconds. Written accounts describe it as smelling like every bad smell you can think of, put together, times ten. Reports say it actually creates visible cartoon stink lines in the air. The military thinks that's as hilarious as we do and wants to throw it at people.
What went wrong:
Though the ideas are still being developed, the fact is, historically, they don't work out so well on account of you're going to end up smelling like unbelievable ass too. Back in WWII, Who Me? couldn't really be effectively used since it not only made the target stink, it made the bomber stink and the entire area where the bomb went off stink.
Earlier, the first stories about Gov. Spitzer being "involved with" a high-priced call-girl ring reminded me so much of The Wire - and particularly the ironies that always piled up behind the political scenes. Last night was the series's (awesome!) finale but when I saw the Spitzer headlines, it was as if The Wire was magically dribbling into today's news.
Now it turns out that Spitzer - a Democrat who swept to office on his do-gooder agenda of rooting out corruption - was CAUGHT BY A WIRE the Feds had rigged to catch the owners of the prostitution ring. (Also his "involvement" was as a client, not an operator. )
Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.
Link
In itself the allegations (that he visited expensive hookers) is a big fat yawn. What makes this scandal delicious, though, is that Spitzer went AFTER hookers as a prosecutor. I love when sexual hypocrites are exposed.
As attorney general, [Mr. Spitzer] prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.
In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.
“”This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. ”It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”
Link
Now you've gotta wonder - was he angry and revolted because they didn't send any girls to HIM?
BTW, one news source says the pro's who worked for this service charged up to $5k for an hour. Holy humming vibrators. What kind of perks or special services does the service offer that would make anyone pay that kind of money?
Category: Sex Laws and Crimes
Posted on 3/10/2008 7:20:42 PM by Gloria Brame
Breaking News: Gov. Spitzer will need a shpritzer
Stay tuned for a major media frenzy as NY's governor tries to dig himself out of this one. No details yet.
NY governor linked to prostitution ring
The New York Times is reporting that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has told senior advisers that he had been involved in a prostitution ring.
Category: Sex Laws and Crimes
Posted on 3/10/2008 7:19:44 PM by Gloria Brame
Uhhh---is the tradition in question "Non-Consensual Humiliation"??
Unbearably cute!! I just hope it's a boy dog.
A dog in traditional costume takes part in a mass as part of San Lazaro celebrations in the indigenous community of Monimbo in Masaya City link.
A sobering report on how the Catholic Church in the US is now bleeding cash in order to cover costs associated with the crimes of pedophilic priests.
US Catholic church paid 615 mln dlrs for abuse cases in 2007: report
The Roman Catholic church in the United States paid out 615 million dollars (400 million euros) last year for child sex abuse cases involving members of the clergy, or 54 percent more than the previous year, an official report showed Friday.
Of the monies paid out by the church, 526 million dollars went to settling cases -- almost double the amount paid out in 2006, the annual report on how well the church is implementing a charter to protect youngsters said.
Here's a unique advertising campaign. Urologists are urging basketball fans to offer the ultimate excuse to their partners for planting their asses in front of the tv. "Honey, bring me a beer while I recover from my vasectomy." Hey, hope I can get a tubal ligation in time for the Forensic Files marathon!
Clinic: have vasectomy, watch NCAA hoops
For guys who park in front of the TV during college basketball's March Madness, the Oregon Urology Institute has a suggestion: Why not use that time to recover from a vasectomy?
"When March Madness approaches you need an excuse ... to stay at home in front of the big screen," the clinic's radio ad says. "Get your vasectomy at Oregon Urology Institute the day before the tournament starts. It's snip city."
Category: Sexual Health
Posted on 3/10/2008 7:16:47 PM by Gloria Brame
Just when you think you've seen it all
..someone makes a video of himself dressed in a fur suit and having sex with a beachball and puts it on the Internet.
Category: Sexual Strangeness
Posted on 3/9/2008 9:43:23 PM by Gloria Brame
It's Winkee, it's Winkee
Obviously there is a market for everything - including women who want to wear the same dress to church and to swing clubs. Handy!
The Winkee | The Ultimate Solution For Plunging Necklines!
Category: Sex and Culture
Posted on 3/9/2008 9:42:25 PM by Gloria Brame
la la la la life goes on
Brief share:
Was happily munching some pizza late Friday night when a bolt of lightning went through my jaw. As in "YEEEEOOWWW!" Almost blacked out and stayed kinda shocky for a couple of hours. I've had tooth-aches and broken bones and other unpleasant stuff but never felt anything close to this in sheer overwhelming intensity. Thanks to the kindest dentist in the universe, who agreed to see me off hours, I found out it was an abcessed wisdom tooth (ow), which is not half as bad as what I was expecting to hear (root canal! agh!). Pretty hard to write anything or even to think clearly when you're throbbing in pain from scalp to clavicle. But with antibiotics and pain meds, I am now feeling WAY better. Will probably have it extracted mid-week so there will be at least another day or two of being away from my laptop. But thought I would just share this exciting (not) event with y'all. And a comment: my family was amazed at how well I was handling the pain. I just want to say: I owe it all to my dog, Bobo. :) Really. When you live with a dog who has been through so much agony, and endured it all so bravely without complaint (much less self-pity), it makes you remember that the force of will is sometimes the best medicine for getting through life's little (and not so little) vicissitudes. So I didn't really let it get me down. Viva le Bobo. (And viva my dentist, to whom I incredibly grateful.)
This month, I'm running a contest for readers. I post so many different things here on the blog. But one thing I've never done is just flat out ask...
If I was doing this blog JUST FOR YOU, what would I be writing?
Send me email telling me what you think I should write about and why. Be creative. Be bold. Be honest. Aim high. Aim low! Just play the game.
The grand prize: Me. What more could anyone ask for? If you're the lucky winner, for one full day in April, I will write as if I was your bitch working for you.
Think of all the perverts you will impress in years to come when you breezily say, "Gloria Brame? Of course I know her. She was my verbiage-slave."
Send me email and control my mind for a day. Or, if that's just too scary to contemplate, just send me email, you subbie thing, you.
Contest Rules:
Who needs rules? Just remember that if you ask me to do the redonkulous, you lose.
Category: Caption Contest
Posted on 3/9/2008 1:17:18 AM by Gloria Brame
Erotic Art Show: Tsubasa
Prepare to be blown away by the amazing digital fetish work by the artist known as TSUBASA. Huge thanks to the artist for letting me share his work here (and special thanks to Mr. Frisky).
I'll begin with this fabulous video he created which brilliantly weaves together various of his works into one compelling animation.
Visit
The Digital Erotic Art of Tsubasa to see many more images, and to order his amazing dvd BREED. Or pick up his collection of work, Binarotica -- the perfect coffee table book, especially if that table's located in your dungeon.
Category: Sex and Arts
Posted on 3/8/2008 3:40:35 AM by Gloria Brame
Erotic Art Friday - 03/07/08: Viernes Gigante!
This afternoon's art shows will feature the superb fetish art of Tsubasa, but this morning is devoted to a salute to the Mexican Lobby Card -- the final piece of the show that last week's computer problems prevented me from sharing.
As a (very small-scale) movie memorabilia collector (posters and lobby cards, particularly with SM/horror themes), I've often wondered why and how Mexican lobby cards get away with being so much more graphic than the ones we see in the U.S. More than that, they were produced at a prodigious rate. A search on google yields gezillions of links to a seemingly infinite variety of wondrously kitschy Spanish-language lobby cards. Mexican artists could take the world's lamest and most vanilla films and create lobby cards that made them look like breathlessly depraved adventures. No doubt many cards were much more exciting than the films themselves -- indeed, some of the cards bear only the vaguest resemblance to the movies, as illustrators threw in images to tantalize potential viewers regardless of whether or not those images appeared in the movie. Similarly, they'd take a scene and then spice it up by making it much more sexually graphic, making clothes skimpier and lusts wilder. Forget about truth in advertising, folks! I suppose Mexican movie-goers must have eventually figured out that what you see in a lobby card is just not what you get inside the theater. Either that or there were a whole lot of very angry pervs outside box offices demanding their money back. WTF. Too funny.
Enjoy the show. You definitely don't need to understand Spanish to get some kicks from these.
Category: Sex and Arts
Posted on 3/8/2008 3:39:39 AM by Gloria Brame
Intimations of Immorality
Hey, you, get back here! No! I don't want to be late for tomorrow's erotic art show!
Category: Sex and Arts
Posted on 3/7/2008 5:20:04 AM by Gloria Brame
ART EXTRA: Jean Giraud/GIR/Moebius
Couldn't find enough erotic images to fill a Friday art show so am sharing this handful by renowned comic artist Jean Giraud, aka Moebius and GIR.
Category: Sex and Arts
Posted on 3/7/2008 5:19:07 AM by Gloria Brame
FOUND: leather sisters in bikinis
Another great B-movie find.
Just one question. If they're sisters in leather, why are they wearing bathing suits?
Category: Sex and Culture
Posted on 3/7/2008 5:18:09 AM by Gloria Brame
X-treme Tube and the new sex sprach
Funny little piece about the charms of X-tube, You-Tube's very twisted, pornographic sister.
via The Daily Californian:
Seeing is Believing
There was a time when I didn't know what urethral sounding was. I'll be honest: I miss those days....
Never before has porn been so accessible, so diverse, so well organized with keywords. Those of us who came of age in a pre-XTube era understand how epic an injustice this is-not to mention the fact that teenagers today surely take it all for granted. Why, in my day, we had to walk eight miles for decent porn-uphill, both ways!
...Here's where sounding comes in. (Oh, quit your groaning-I'm only using it to make a point.) With great porn power comes great porn responsibility. Mix the diversity of content XTube offers with its ease of use, and you've got a whole slew of users seeing things they wish they hadn't. Incidentally, I could have looked up CBT without the visual aids, thanks.
As it turns out, sounding is only one of the many sexual quirks you find yourself exposed to when you've got an infinite amount of porn at your fingertips. Snowballing, golden showers, footing-it's all here. In case you're curious, that last one is just like fisting, but with feet. I'm not sure how they do it, or why, but let's hope they clip their toenails first....
Is it just me or has it gotten almost impossible to keep up with all the new sex slang? (Snowballing was new to me.) I mean, the acts themselves have always existed but how and when did people decide they needed specific names for them? Do they derive from Internet porn sites, to make it easier to find the stuff you want among the piles of files?
It's fascinating to see so many new words being created to describe different aspects of sex play -- guess it was a gap in the English language that demanded neologisms. But what do you think -- is it important to have terms that exactly identify acts or is this labeling of each aspect of sex too much? Ironically, to me it all seems somehow clinical, breaking sex down into its components like that. Clinical and even mechanical. (*turning fishy eye at all you kinky engineers*)
Or perhaps the trend was derived from the world of kink (and the old Alt.Sex.Bondage newsgroup), where people obsessively debated BDSM terms (for those who remember the endless arguments that led to the creation of things like "wiitwd"). Would be interesting to know how some of the terms (felching, snowballing, inter alia) caught on so quickly. Any ideas?
a
Category: Sex On-Line
Posted on 3/7/2008 5:17:10 AM by Gloria Brame
Email Karma
Woe is me. I read my email today and discovered
I'm the little guy in the club.
My lovestick is too short.
I pay too much for swingers' sites.
Even worse,
I have the knowledge and the experience but I lack the qualifications.
On the other hand, I was just invited to
hit the showers with Gay Roughnecks!
Thank you, Karma. You make everything even out in the end.
Category: Sexual Humor
Posted on 3/7/2008 5:16:12 AM by Gloria Brame
Kinky chic speakers
Aw darn. Just bought myself some external speakers for the laptop. Wish I'd seen these first. Of course, the dogs would probably end up treating it like a chew toy but still...
via Gizmodo:
Bbudd Speaker System: Looks Like a Bondage Fetish Gone Horribly Wrong