1-900-HOTDOG
“Take this book! It’s too late for me!” screamed the man who leapt through my window. I nodded, mistaking these for the words of a dying man. Instead, he remained alive, saying many, many more things as the night turned into morning. Along with the book, he gave me his life story and several apologies for the window before he left. Still, I’d like you to imagine how chilling and mysterious it would have been if he had thrust this book into my hands with his last breath.
Let’s talk women, ladies, and all the things that make women “Great!” Shoes! Underpants! Shoes! Shoes! Can you name 999 more? Stop, don’t bother! In 2005, “authors” Lisa Birnbach, Ann Hodgman, and Patricia Marx already did it! Their shitlike but feminine minds wrote the definitive guide to dingbat stream-of-consciousness, 1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman.
Lisa, Ann, and Patricia never tell the reader who wrote which ones, but there are three distinct styles in the book. One of the lady authors thought it was her job to just list tired gender stereotypes without context or comedy. I think her goal was to create a collection of lady driver references so joyless it could be sent back in time to undo Steve Harvey. Speaking of tired gender stereotypes, one of the ladies is the kind you find in any group of women two or larger: horny as fuck. She is single-minded in her interest, and it’s cock, yummy and now. And finally, one of the ladies is 107 years old and her brain is misfiring as it accesses ancient pop culture references and debunked social theories.
In what might be a stupid-fucking-tidbit-book record, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia exhaust their premise 2% into the writing of their book. It’s page 11 and their idea of “great things” has turned into trying to think of the female sidekicks from cartoons and nursery rhymes. And it doesn’t even make sense. “Without Olive Oil, Popeye wouldn’t have eaten his spinach?” She doesn’t have anything to do with his spinach. That’s just an unrelated element of the show. It’s like saying “Without Wonder Woman, Superman couldn’t Aquaman and Garfield!” It’s like Olive Oil having sex with a gorilla after a murder rampage and saying, “I did something!”
Thank your local women for “for annoying child actors” and “hell.” And again, fantastic job on the book, ladies. Terrific stuff. Pointless, but not “funny” pointless. Technically words, but not “meaningful.” Congratulations, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia. Most doctors would never be brave enough to put their patients’ dementia on display like this.
This one is a good look inside Lisa, Ann, and Patricia’s creative process. Because if you’re idiots listing female side characters from TV and history to frantically fill a book called 1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman, Eve is going to occur to you. And then it’s time to brainstorm what makes Eve great. “She’s made out of a rib? Two of the numbers from my childhood address followed by a sharp pain in my arm? I say we go with the rib one.” Many fools will live their entire lives and never say anything this useless or dumb. This is nothing. This is not the start of an idea; this is not helpful or cute to any person real or imaginary. Fuck this world for allowing anyone to be this bad at anything without breaking any international laws.
Sure! Who knows? Lisa, Ann, and Patricia don’t! They’re not sure why they brought it up! Or kept it in the book! Or which 4 o’clock it is right now! Or if their nurses are robots like Greta Garbo told them in a dream!
These women barely have a handle on one language and now they’re bragging about how easy it would be for them to learn a second one. Like Ann Hodgman is going to take Aramaic night classes after her nephew comes over to show her again how to add the little flower in a Wordstar document.
Yes, we heard. Truly, the wonders of the female mind are limitless.
Wait. S-so your husband doesn’t? Either these women are randomly hitting typewriter shapes to see what happens or Ann just confessed her child is the product of adultery.
It could be argued women get the better deal in polygamy? Followed by no argument? Hold on, do these three women share a husband? And they’re hoping someone, maybe outside this circle of sister wives, could make a good case for polygamy? “Look, it’d take someone smarter than me to explain why it’s great, but I’m one of the top six servant holes in a pretty exclusive sex cult.”
This is a really positive spin to put on your bitch ass high-jump, Ann.
Jesus Christ, we are 24 pages in and they’re already so out of ideas they’re listing their physical defects. Well, not the defects themselves, but their ability to detect asymmetry? They have droopy eyes? At least one of them has a-a… some kind of long foot? The minds of these three ladies are fucking done with 292 pages to go. This is like signing up for a marathon and shitting out all your blood on the way to your car.
Oh, this is the catty side I was hoping to see out of you ladies! You are bad. This will teach Shelly, that insecure bitch, why she should have confided in you about her low self-esteem!
Well, except Shelly. Fuck you, Shelly! You ruined everything again!
And Shelly knows while she’s up there getting married you goddamn bitches are back there whispering about how she’s definitely pregnant. “I’m so fucking fat,” she thinks on the happiest day of her life.
I know we’re only screwing around here, but I think it’s important to take a step back and remember: this is a book listing reasons women are great and Lisa, Ann, and Patricia chose to include “sometimes we have a hunch babies are boys.” Let me be clear: if the universe allows anything less related to female empowerment than that to appear in a book called “1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman,” it will prove, definitively, we are ruled by nothing but chaos.
“There is no God and we have proven it.”
– Lisa Birnbach, Ann Hodgman, Patricia Marx
Look, I know this is an embarrassing level of horny, but when Senator Joe Biden fucks you in your dreams, you write it down and publish it in a list of feminine achievements. “I haven’t had a chance to read the latest pages yet, but I’ll get back to you after the weekend,” said this book’s editor before dying on a boat trip.
I’m not well educated in gender studies, so I don’t know what’s happening here. Is this like a story? Did one of them have a straw hat with… I swear I’m reading this wrong, w-with fake hair attached to it? And then they lit one of their heads on fire to lure single men from the nearby firehouse? Am I interpreting this correctly? And if not, what the fuck are these ladies talking about? You horny idiots, can you not think straight near the word “fireman?” And, of course, there are socks with false teeth in them. Firemen bring both balls to the bathtub. Oh great, now I’m doing it.
I honestly don’t know enough about panty girdles to know if these facts are great or irrelevant. My gut tells me one of these authors had to pee while she was trying to remember which talkies had girls in them and she put that inspiration into her writing.
This one is kind of fun. Men get cancer in their ass and have to watch each other pee. “Not us ladies,” say Lisa, Ann, and Patricia!
When I consider all the things that set women apart from men, “eligible to fight in the U.S. military” might make my top 4.008, but definitely not my top 1,003. Honestly, if I had to write this book the whole thing would be Susan B. Anthony jokes. Just offensive nonsense about how she’s some lady on the shittiest dollar and nothing else.
Oh my god, yes! Precisely this! This was my exact terrible idea, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia!
I know this one, Patricia. “You point a gun at his panda!”
PATRICIA: Gals, I think we should do an entry about Sex and the City.
ANN: I never watched it, but I heard it was a very popular show.
PATRICIA: Oh my god, Ann. Ann, say that again.
ANN: What?
PATRICIA: Say that. The fuck. Again.
ANN: That, um, it was a very popular show?
PATRICIA: That’s it! That’s the entry right there! “Sex and the City was a very popular show.” Ann, you magnificent slut!
Picture yourself as a teacher teaching any grade in any country with any level of advanced placement or special needs. You ask your class “What are some things that make women great?”
A kid raises their hand and goes, “WHY DO THEY LIKE TRUCKS SO MUCH?”
The kid asking that, without question, would be the dumbest piece of shit to ever disrupt your classroom, right? You would instantly know that child was going to die from an aerosol overdose. You would quote “WHY DO THEY LIKE TRUCKS SO MUCH” while trading drunk stories with other teachers about their dumb pieces of shit. And yet here, in this written book by three professional adult authors, nobody thought it seemed out of place.
It’s the battle of the sexes and the stakes could not be higher! Men are in the lead after liking trucks so much for some reason, but women answer back with how their houses aren’t really clean! Then the ladies follow up with how they, if reminded, will send postcards to their nieces and nephews at camp! Women win again!
Okay, I am choosing this word very carefully here, ladies: lol
Look at the balls on these women. They have all the intellectual curiosity of elephant seal cows waiting their turn to get impregnated and they’re quoting Charlotte Bronte like she was talking about them. They led into this quote about the gender-spanning power of the written word with the words “You finally found the perfect red T-shirt!” It’s beyond the scope of irony. This is like John Travolta telling you to always be yourself while your dick disappears into his face’s elaborate disguise.
Dear Ms. Birnbach, Ms. Hodgman, and Patricia,
We have had a chance to go over your writing packet and while it shows promise, there are no current openings on our staff. However, we can offer market rate of $29 for your joke about women’s magazines and Jell-O.
– The Office of Bill Maher
Lesser authors of a “Great Things About Women” book would have simply written random facts like “panty girdles proved control and comfort!” or “we don’t get prostate diseases!” But Lisa, Ann, and Patricia? They put in the work. They scoured lady medical journals for weeks to see if there were any health complications related to smoking, and since they’re the best– they found one.
This book was published in 2005 when any of the three women or an editor could have used Google to verify a claim like this. I promise I didn’t go into this book thinking I was going to debunk the idea of women being great, but:
The danger of this kind of error is that now I have to reconsider everything these women have taught me. Is this red T-shirt I found not perfect? Were some of those firemen I fucked married? Is the real question why they DON’T like trucks so much!?
Living through an era of chastity belts might explain why Ann can’t go three entries without mentioning rough hands and wet penises (I think I’m starting to figure out which lady is which!).
“We’re too ugly to be eaten! The side effects of menopause are good, actually! Ladies, I don’t feel so good? Good is a weird word, group cycles, where am I, Jane Austen! Jane Austen!”
Okay, no more jokes. I think Lisa had a stroke.
Oh no. Patricia, hang on! Someone help them! Don’t let them keep typing through these brain seizures! This is the most humiliating way anyone has ever died!
Please! Please!! Whatever your motivation, there has to be a more ethical way to collect data on dying brains than this! Surely some of Hitler’s scientists kept notes you could use!
I’m sorry I made fun of you Lisa, Ann, and Patricia! No one deserves to go out like this… confused and alone, punching every stray thought into a typewriter. I’m so sorry!
Ha ha this one is pretty good. She burned to death.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Benjamin Sairanen: Who can actually tell you the single greatest thing about being a woman, though the forbidden knowledge has driven him quite mad.
There is no shortage of knowledge out there. A woman named Annie Hawkins-Turner has the world record for biggest tits, for example. Yet there are so many mysteries left unsolved. Trees? Electricity? The fucking moon!? Name a single thing other than God that can explain them. Let me show you more answers inside the pages of Science 4 for Christian Schools.
We’ll be looking at the 1998 edition of Science 4, which remained unchanged since its first printing in 1976. As we get into it you’ll see why Bob Jones University Department of Science Education had no reason to update anything after 22 years. They nailed all science on the first try, which is pretty impressive when you consider they were just guessing at how any of this shit works. I’m not sure what the stakes are when you’re publishing a Christian science book, but I imagine convincing your reader that science is the work of imbecile liars who don’t trust the moon only makes the case for God stronger. Which seems to be exactly what they were going for.
The faculty of Bob Jones University have stood for the “absolute authority of the Bible since 1927” and their amazing toll-free number, 1-800-BJ-AND-ME, still works. Jesus Christ, this means their business model of making dumb people dumber for money has been working for over 90 years. And speaking of something almost one hundred years old, let’s talk about the moon.
Bob Jones University goddamn hates the garbage piece of shit moon. They open with an exhaustive look at how everybody’s wrong about the moon and it sucks. This book, which covers all of science, seems to be focused entirely around ranting about the moon.
The theories presented in Science for Christian Schools are framed as poorly worded arguments against the very things they’re trying to teach. So they give you enough details about the bitch ass moon’s shitty orbit so you can scoff at it and be satisfied anyone trying to figure it out is stupid. It’s ridiculous, especially when you consider the moon is an egg and its coming hatching makes all other knowledge effectively pointless.
The author’s frustrations with moon theories continue until page 8 when they finally explain how this confusing bullshit thing came to be. It’ll seem obvious after you hear it, but God made Moon instantly because it was better than Not Moon. If it occurs to you that instantly explains anything, maybe you now see the appeal of Christian Science.
So we’ve graduated, right? After 8 full pages of education we’ve learned magic is real and it’s a much better, faster answer than any fussy theory. If we’re not done with all learning, we’re at least done with the moon, right? Right!?
After a few more pages debunking moon facts, the author goes off the rails and starts hammering questions into her typewriter. “Why did God even make the moon!? Or you!? Non-whites!? W-why did God make anything!?” This leads us into our first homework assignment: explain three ways the moon proves God is awesome! Did you guess lights, lights, lights, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, LIGHTS, ha ha HA HA HA HA HA LIGHTS!!!? Close! It was werewolves three times! Look, I’m losing my mind. I think we’re good on The Moon. I’m going to jump ahead a few pages…
Oh Jesus, I think the moon knows we’re trying to stop learning about it.
This is, by any standards, fucking crazy. Why is this an entire page? I can’t picture anything less useful to a 4th grade science student than hearing how God is going to kill them, but not to worry because He’ll blow up the moon first. They don’t even know what horses or wheels are yet! Maybe save this advanced shit for Science 5 or 6? I’m going to go back and check the table of contents to see if there are any non-moon chapters in this goddamn thing…
Okay, good. It goes: moon, insects, electricity, plants, measuring, digestion, moon. That means only two out of the seven sciences are Moon. Let’s keep going!
I want to make sure you understand this isn’t a bit. The author of Science 4 for Christian Schools spent the first 16 precious, outlook-forming pages going over the full history of the moon from its origins of “suddenly made by God” to its final moments of “God is done with it,” and almost all of it is written in the form of questions. Even they don’t know why they did it. If you replaced fourth grade with a season in the NFL, it would do less to fuck a kid’s brain up. They’ve presented all other scientific knowledge as the bad guesswork of protracting fools who could have simply screamed into the night for the answers they sought.
If you presented this book to Joseph Goebbels he would say, “Zis is close to vat I vanted, but I asked for a ridiculous plan to make ze American children stupid, not a stupid plan to make ze American children ridiculous. Two stars.”
Let’s see if the lessons get any better in Chapter 2: Insects, Arachnids, and Myriapods!
This is word association madness. This is something you’d stammer at Denise Richards if she was your biology teacher in Topless High 3: Maximum Nipplage UNRATED BONER POOP EDITION. I get that not every first draft is good and 1976 Christian Science was still mostly Moon Fear, but they had twenty two fucking years to go back in and change this to something, anything resembling knowledge. Maybe the next chapter, Electricity, is better.
Oh, okay. It’s a mystery. They can’t say what it is or what it does or where it comes from; only that it makes telephones ring. I’m starting to see the limitations of using God as the answer to all things since He might refuse to talk to anyone for a couple thousand years. If you’re a Christian Science researcher who wants to write a book about electricity, all you can do is go out into a rainstorm and hold up big metal questions. And even then, He can only say yes or no and one of those answers kills you. So until God tells us how to interpret the leavings of the gloriously electrocuted, there’s just no way of knowing what “electricity” is. Let’s move on to the fourth school of science: Plants.
The first classification of plant, of course, is called Plants with No Tubes. This includes fungi, which leads the author to several questions and observations. For instance, what the shit is a fungi? How do the fungi eat? Are you why strawberries betray me, fungi? Fungi! How do you eat!? You tubeless abominations, tell me how you get foooood!
After Plants with No Tubes, God had a second idea. It was, you guessed it– pediatric diseases! Then inspiration hit– God would take the thing everyone hated about Plants with No Tubes and get rid of it. And that’s the story of what we now know as Plants with Tubes. This is a fascinating classification of plant, but the giant picture of “some unlabeled plants of indeterminate tubing” didn’t leave a lot of space for text. Luckily they were able to squeeze in four Plants with Tubes facts including the most important one: “liverworts have no tubes.”
One thing I’ve noticed as we get further into the book is how the smugness the author had back when she was disproving mainstream moon science is gone. She is now basking in the wonder of the Lord our God, Maker of Tubes. The section on light is basically “can you believe how fucking amazing eyeballs are!? FUCK!”
Scientists don’t even know what’s going on with eyes. They look at eyes and shit. They pull their eyes out of their own skulls hoping it will blind them to science’s lies, but they still see them when they dream. And hey, let me wrap both hands around your neck and scream, “Have you ever thought about trees, or as you may know them Tall Plants with Tubes!? Use the wonder of your self-repairing pocket telescopes to see the majesty of God’s tree science!”
I think this book was written by someone with good intentions who merely wanted to disprove the moon to children, but something happened while they were writing it. Maybe there was a gas leak in the BJ-AND-ME office. Maybe this is what happens to any brain when it gets too close to unmitigated truth. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.
The best thing about Christian Science is how there are sort of rules, but you can turn them on and off when you need to. So if someone points at a big, stupid canyon and says “By the measurable rules of erosion, this is older than the Bible,” you can say, “Not if you account for the Earth Softness of, I don’t know, 1753?” These fuckers saw a child win at tag by saying they had a force field and based an entire field of study around it. In other words, you can learn to classify trees.
Oh, hi! Do you like butt stuff, only you wish it was more of a clinical exploration of the erogenous clusters inside your anus? Then you’ll love the 2003 VHS cassette tape, THE BETTER SEX GUIDE TO ANAL PLEASURE!
Warning: This article is explicit as fuck and technically safe for work, but holy shit is it going to catch the eye of anyone reading over your shoulder.
“Pleasure” is a word invented by gross people to be used only when having uncomfortably frank discussions about sex. “Pleasure” is what a couple explains they share when they eat out of each other’s diapers. “Pleasure” is the word you purr when you list your top five concert fucks to your grandchildren. Anyway, the word “pleasure” appears on the box of THE BETTER SEX GUIDE TO ANAL PLEASURE nine (9!) times.
The box also praises the host, Jack Morin, PhD., as “the world’s leading expert on anal eroticism.”
Almost every tape like this is produced by grifters and crazy people, so the first question a potential customer should ask is, “Is there a single way to prove these wild claims right or wrong?” If it’s a tape on witchcraft or picking the best dog, no. But in this case, yes, of course. You simply walk up to every other anal expert and say, “We each explore five butts; may the most erotic man win. WHO AMONG THE NEARBY WANTS TO GET PLOWED IN THE SPIRIT OF COMPETITION!?”
I’m having fun, but it turns out Jack fell into this role of, let’s call it U.N. Assmaster General, as a therapist in San Francisco where clients had a disproportionate number of anal eroticism questions. It may be entirely academic, but given his dedicated research, data collection, and clinical specialization, he might really be the world’s leading expert on anal eroticism, an absurd claim but awesome first date conversation starter.
In the spirit of this defying of expectations, the structure of my article will be this: I’ll give my initial reactions to each section of the video as an absurd piece of tone deaf pornography marketed as an instructional tape. This thing truly is weird as fuck. Then, after watching the entire 60 minutes plus the generous, lengthy behind-the-scenes featurette, I’ll add my Anal Hindsight, a section where we can compare my newfound butt wisdom with my first impressions. I’m making it sound more complicated than it is, but I am desperate for everyone to know this anal sex guide produced a segment just to show us everything that went into building a fake living room and pointing cameras at the fucking people.
Let’s get started!
The SINCLAIR Intimacy Institute’s logo swirls in while amateur saxophone music honks. It’s, anally speaking, the closest you can be to fart sounds and still count as music. It seems impossible so much care went into designing and animating this and no one ever said, “Maybe let’s try an anal sex production logo without the butt sounds.”
The SINCLAIR Intimacy Institute is basically a group of adult toy salesmen who market themselves as medical experts. They seem to specialize in very common sense advice, but worded a little more gently than the Important Safety Instructions on your butt plug.
This man with no broadcast skills comes on and hisses the words “IT’S HARD TO TALK ABOUT SEXsss.” With panic in his eyes, he scans each line of a dry cue card about the nature of eroticism. He’s the least erotic man I’ve ever seen and I’ve watched Gene Simmons eat a corndog. They probably cut the part where he said, “I was once Important Safety Instructions on a butt plug when the kiss of a lonely Top Amazon Reviewer brought me to life.” It would explain why he never says who the fuck he is or lists any qualifications. If Jack Morin is the “World’s Leading Expert on Anal Eroticism,” maybe this man, whoever he is, is “Cleveland’s Usedest Diarrhea Guy” to offer a counter perspective?
It turns out the man I guessed was Cleveland’s Usedest Diarrhea Guy, who “won’t be beat on yesterday’s and the day before’s loose poop!” is an executive with the SINCLAIR Intimacy Institute, and this was the best of 14 takes. They actually make fun of this in the behind-the-scenes featurette. His employees found him terrible at this unnecessary, unhelpful thing he hated doing and had no reason to hire himself for! He got humiliated in the high-production video he put up the money for! I understand the stakes are very low in the world of introducing anal sex videos, but it’s safe to say he failed much harder than should have been possible.
Let’s meet some of the other participants.
A couple things are made clear very quickly here. This video is going to include real couples sharing anal pleasure, and Ben and Karen aren’t comfortable with any of that. They kiss like two counselors putting on a heterosexual demonstration at Mike Pence’s Teen Camp for Demonic Possession and Gay.
This few seconds of an awkward kiss is basically all the Ben and Karen time we get. The SINCLAIR Intimacy Institute cut them almost entirely from the video. I think we’ve all discovered mid-anal that we may not have a ton of chemistry with a partner, but at least none of us have ever been declared “useless even for the purposes of education” like Ben and Karen.
Wendy and Mike, as is customary, exchange cute little gifts before they let strangers film their all anal action.
Wendy has only had two lovers in her life, which means she went from full virgin to cowgirl-riding a man with her asshole in front of a documentary crew in one step. Erotically speaking, this is like trying your first joint on Thursday night and carving “TU ERES EL SIGUIENTE” on a DEA agent’s body on Monday morning.
These two seem comfortable as hell. I get the feeling Judy and Chris have fucked in front of people before.
Of all the times they performed analingus on each other later, they never did anything to suggest I was wrong.
Here we meet Billy and Julie who seem to be going through a 1955 yearbook to see if Julie remembers Mort Krabheimer who Billy just received word had passed. Ahh, look at these pictures, they were chairman and treasurer of the Wichita High Wagon Burners Segregation Team, respectively. “I remember Mort,” contributes Julie.
I’m making these two sound sexier than they were. Billy has a dick game any medical examiner would describe as “multiple lacerations and stab wounds.” He fucks like he’s specifically trying to remove the lubricant from Julie’s colon in the least pleasant way possible. He fucks himself like that too. Every time the video mentions masturbation, you’re guaranteed to see a shot of Billy cranking off with the determination of the legendary frontier explorers he grew up with. He is a cranky, joyless elderly man and whoever said, “Let’s film him jerk off with crazy eyes and increasingly large things in his ass for hours,” should be arrested.
Eric brushes Wendy’s hair; they seem nervous yet excited. “I hope you brought that hairbrush from home, Eric!” I shout at the TV. He probably did and it’s a dumb joke, but I love this rush I feel from being smarter than the man untangling his wife’s hair with a brush he found at an anal photo shoot, even if he’s completely hypothetical.
They never do show the hairbrush go inside anybody’s butt, but you’re a fool if you think that proves it didn’t happen.
Leila and Charles seem to be going through some informative anal literature together. This is like a weekend project for them now that the garage is done. “Oh, it’ll never be DONE,” says Charles. Leila says nothing. She’s heard this joke too many times and has decided to stop encouraging it.
Charles is super square and very much in love, and he says things like, “We become more comfortable exploring each other’s bodies.” I get the sense Leila is way more than he can handle and this public butt stuff is a desperate way to seem adventurous. He was definitely hoping she wouldn’t see the flyers for this at their couples nude pottery workshop.
Chris and Lisa smooch over a game of mostly naked backgammon, which as a comedy writer would be on my short list of choices for most hilariously unsexy foreplay activity. Chris has the hairless build and bodyfat percentage of a toddler after his first haircut. He’s a slow, soft tube of quiet perversion and Lisa seems like she might be in danger.
Lisa explores Chris’ anus like they’re poorly supervised children playing scientist. And it seems like they play backgammon with Loser Gets Hit in the Head With a Shovel Rules. Chris takes butt fingers with all the enthusiasm and rigidity of a pillowcase full of warm shrimp. I’ll never be able to describe the theme of this video more artistically than Chris when he explains how he came to tolerate Lisa’s anal explorations. This is an exact quote:
We finally get to the main title card and a woman walks onto a living room set, does not introduce herself, and declares, “WELCOME. IN THIS PROGRAM WE WILL LOOK AT ANAL EROTICISM.” She delivers it like an actress playing a newscaster in a movie about undead snakes. And after rephrasing “In this program we will look at anal eroticism” many different ways, they show us her name is Jane Monreal (no medical or sexual qualifications listed). Here’s the thing: there are no shortage of out-of-work sex experts. I hire them off LinkedIn all the time to Skype in and tell me which objects in my office could replace a human vagina. It only costs like $1800. Plus, there’s also no Council For Truth in Erotic Claims. So if they didn’t want to hire a host with a real sex therapy background, they could have simply declared Jane Monreal “City Comptroller of The Butt.”
I made fun of how Jane Monreal sounded like a fake TV anchor before I found out she went on to be a Fox news reporter in Florida. Which means I stumbled backwards into a truly elegant joke. In the behind-the-scenes, the voiceover says she was chosen “because of her comfort level with the material and her professionalism” which implies the existence of at least some applicants who giggled the whole time Lisa fisted Chris.
Jane takes a seat on the set couch NOT for anal sex and robotically lists the variety of options in anal self-pleasure. The copy was written by someone who had to fill 8 minutes with information on anal pleasure and had no way of hiding they had 7 minutes less than that of butt knowledge. Suddenly, and holy shit, wait, no, what, it pans to a tilted monitor featuring a pornographic drawing and the words “A CRIME AGAINST NATURE.”
Jane does not mention this or even seem to know about it. She is still talking about the joy you can smash into your partner’s filthy hole while the video jumps right into the history of criminalized assplay.
I hope you’re ready to get sexy! Here’s a brief history of our Great Nation’s sodomy laws. It was illegal in some states, the ones you’d expect, and now here we are in 2003 where you can disguise a dildo advertisement as a beginner’s sodomy guide.
The vast majority of the video, about 45 of the 60 minutes, looks like this. Couples do things to their butt or the butt of their partner and an inset of Jack talks about the dos and don’ts of body cavity searches. There was no effort to time these two things together, so Chris might be getting beads pulled out of him while Jack talks about the importance of washing your rectum.
There’s a great moment where Chris takes a deep breath and signals Lisa his anus is ready for another finger, nodding to her like she’s a zipline guide and he’s sure he’s the bravest boy on the tour. Meanwhile, Jack is listing dozens of ways you can tell your partner you don’t want something in your butt. “Let’s wait. Let’s try external stimulation. Let’s do it another time…” You won’t be surprised by this, but a huuuuge amount of anal play education is teaching you ways to gently break it to your partner you’re not into anal play. We’re only ten minutes into this video and all I’ve really learned about butt stuff is that most cultures hate it and I can delicately explain to each of them how they’re right.
Let’s move on to the Anatomy section, or as Jane introduced it, “LET’S EXPLORE THE NATURE OF ANAL PLEASURE.“
This is, by any definition, hardcore full-penetration pornography. Still, it does a good job avoiding what you’d call “sexiness.” For one thing, Jack’s head is constantly floating near the genitals and saying things like, and I quote, “elimination is a key function of the anal area.” And each segment is broken up by a newscaster reading another bland cue card about how “rimming” is sweeping the nation. These are amateur couples terror-plowing one another in a deliberately clinical setting. I guess I don’t know the perfect tone for a video like this, but it’s definitely somewhere between this and “Hey, NASCAR fans, I’m professional driver Backdoor Larry– The Rocky Mountain Ass Man! And I’m here to show you and these lucky wet assholes how I lost my sponsors!”
Anal sex is one of those things that seems pretty intuitive, but once you start writing the instruction manual you realize there are a lot of bases to cover. So this man’s head is constantly floating there, rattling off butthacks as they occur to him. “The anus (shower first) contains many nerve clusters (and parasites), but you won’t be able to get to her vaginal sponge through it, so you’ll want to do some clitoral stimulation with your fingers (file your nails down) or a vibrating sex toy (available on the SINCLAIR Intimacy Institute’s world wide Website), and you will rupture something if you don’t relax (practice with a kegel regimen); remove all penises (or objects) slowly! Remember to smile! Communicate! This is fun, in my expert opinion we’re having fun!!!”
To drive home the pleasure part of all this anal pleasure, a big portion of the Anatomy section is watching Wendy clean the parasites and feces off her butt plugs. Speaking of, let’s move on to TOYS.
I’ve been a capitalist long enough to know a commercial when I see one, so I figure this section is going to hard sell me on some kind of “Anal Beginners Kit.”
“The full kit includes 22 ounces of water-based lubricant along with The Regular, The Coward, and The Coward For Her.”
These people spend a lot of time talking about sex toys, but no one -no one- is comfortable with it. This is the safest space anyone will have to discuss vibrating butt beads and they all act like they’re going to crack up or their parents might barge in. It’s so weird. Aside from everyone butt fucking on the same couch, no one involved had any idea what this thing should be.
Yes! There’s a whole title card just for INSERTION! And while we’re talking about the graphic design, we should really take a moment to appreciate the bold decision of THE BETTER SEX GUIDE TO ANAL PLEASURE to use the color scheme of an unflushed toilet. This is, no lie, the actual line I typed in my Notes app while watching this:
“INSERTION is brown still. Good, great choice. No notes on brown. This part is definitely going to be shots of people sticking things up their ass while the inset explains how gross and life-threatening that can be.”
I was right. This part was unpleasant and went over a lot of ground already covered with some of the cast’s less attractive sphincters. So now that we’re very, very, very educated on the mechanics of purchasing items and safely navigating our colon with them, let’s move on to SHARING PLEASURE.
The video seems like it was edited by someone who did not want to spend a lot of time looking at amateur anal, so these chapter titles are pretty meaningless. None of the footage has lined up with the advice and we’ve already seen every couple go at it several different ways. Which means the announcement that we’re about to SHARE PLEASURE comes as a shock– you mean, those people gazing into each other’s eyes while they fisted weren’t?
To be fair, Jack slightly changes his tone here from “you’re going to hurt yourself trying this” to “teach that butthole to sing.” Unfortunately, it seems like the director gave Billy “The Butcher Cock of Jackhammer Street” the note to add some tender communication to his lovemaking. He growls to his wife, “YOUR FINGERS FEEL SO GOOD, HONEY.” I hate it. I fucking hate it so much.
Charles, the man who seems very much a passenger in his sexual adventure with Leila lays down so she can place a pinky in his ass the same way a Subway employee might put a fallen pepperoncini back in your sandwich. He explains in the inset, “With her touching me there and kissing me there, it slowly is becoming kind of an erogenous zone.” He hates stuff in his ass as much as I hate Billy sweet talking through it.
There are definitely going to be some safety precautions in the ass eating section, so I think we’re done with the romance for a while.
Analingus is “popularly called rimming,” which helps demonstrate the gap between academic knowledge of sucking someone’s butt and practical understanding. These filmmakers are taking this raw, filthy thing done almost exclusively by people born after 9/11 and packaging it for elderly anthropologists. My point is, if I already have interest in putting ass in my mouth you don’t need to give me the “street name” for it, Jack.
Anyway, now that I’ve written 3000 words about THE BETTER SEX GUIDE TO ANAL PLEASURE, let’s move on to the final chapter.
ANAL INTERCOU– hold on. We are 42 minutes in, we’ve watched every cast member get plowed multiple times, and we’re only now starting the section on “ANAL INTERCOURSE?” At this point every viewer has a master’s level education in the field of Anal Intercourse. If I was in a taxi and had to perform anal intercourse on the way to the hospital, the headline would be, “COOL PASSENGER WOWS IN ASS FUCKING EMERGENCY.”
For twenty minutes, all we’ve learned comes together to create education magic. Each couple has graphic anal sex while an inset of them describes all the trust, cleaning, work, and communication that went into it. It’s exactly porn, but the performers were probably paid less, and you never stop feeling like an alien observing human mating behavior. I learned a few things, and it’s, without question, the most lavish butt plug commercial that will ever be filmed.
Welcome back, 1-900-HOTDOG readers! We now rejoin my responses to Nintendo Power’s reader mail responses already in progress.
Oh, here’s a fun letter sent to Nintendo Power from a Wisconsin boy named Joe Harrison who lost his home to a stove fire!
When your job is working in a Nintendo building with Nintendo employees on a Nintendo magazine reading letters sent to you from Nintendo fans, I imagine it’s hard to maintain perspective on the importance of Nintendo. But when you get a letter from a little boy who refers to a burnt Super NES as the “death of a family member,” you shouldn’t think, “Yes, of course an affordable piece of consumer electronics is exactly this important; praise Father Mario, The Tanooki-Suited.”
If you sent this letter to the child who assembled that Super NES, whose fingers would have been removed and mailed COD to their parents if they misaligned a Game Pak contact, they would have said, “Kid, take it easy. It’s just a Nintendo.”
Joe praises and thanks God for not forsaking two of his games, and “Hala Luya” for He was listening when Actraiser called His name from the flames. I’m not super religious, so maybe it’s normal to thank the thing you worship for destroying only your copy of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball and your home. But at the end of the letter, Joe asks the game enthusiast magazine, “do you think that my Super Nintendo and games went to heaven? I hope so.” This is sadder and dumber than a human should be capable of being. This is what you would get if you asked a brilliant writer to work backwards from the prompt, “The one question that would make Jesus Himself tell you to fuck off.”
The editorial staff at Nintendo Power would sometimes try to bend the Player’s Pulse section to its will by asking for specific types of letters. Here they asked readers to send in wacky humiliations they would endure to get a Super NES, and oh boy did they disappoint! Jamie Overstreet from Mobile said he would, get this, dress up like a chicken and sing a royalty free song!? Ha ha ha, can you imagine!? I get there’s no reason for anyone to expect this part of the magazine to be good, but try to think of any single way this could be less entertaining. I wouldn’t give you a wet sack of used Billy Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball ashes for this idea, Jamie. I mean, someone had to have told Nintendo Power, “I’d kidnap children from the park until I found one whose parents had $199. Then I’d suck off the dad for 67 of those dollars and repeat the process two more times. Pilotwings looks fresh!”
As you can see from the other response, many readers had the same knee jerk idea of “silly costume + patriotic song” because we’ve apparently always known in our hearts that being American was one of the more embarrassing things a person can be. Nintendo Power probably received 7000 variations of these exact responses, but I like how revealing Jason Destroismaison from Tynsboro’s answer was. When he thought about what he’d do for a SNES, the first thing that popped into his head was “Wear my sister’s clothes WEAR MY SISTER’S CLOTHES AND LET FISH FUCK ME IN THE EARS! USA! USA! U!S!A!!!” I hope you got that Super Nintendo, Jason.
Let’s change things up from letters about things that might happen to letters about things that fucking absolutely didn’t happen:
So let me understand this situation, David Landers from Richmond. It was 2am and you were about to ritually drive over Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy with your 18 wheeler. And “this guy” runs up to you, at 2am, who recognizes exactly what you’re doing. And this guy spying on people in a truck stop parking lot had all the maps and secrets of Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy either memorized or with him. And then he sat there waiting, at 2am, for you to load up your save game and implement his strategies? David. Come on, David. Maybe your wife and Nintendo Power believe this excuse for why a strange man got into the cab of your truck at 2am, stayed there for half an hour, and then left a hero, but come on, David.
The less fun among you might be saying, “How do you know this is a lie? How do you know he has a wife?” Because duh and I found his obituary. He died 25 years after he told Nintendo Power this unlikely story and if his wife ever figured out what he really meant when he said he was “Heading out for some Final Fantasy Legend with the boys,” it was not brought up alongside his surviving family and final resting place.
I’ve mentioned this before, Nintendo Power, but you can just not print some of these letters. This idiot kid invented the idea of going door-to-door and asking for free money. In a state where people spend their days digging meat out of crabs and, maybe partly because of that, murdering. And Nintendo Power didn’t say, “Stop this, Nick. You idiot fuck.” They were like, “Giggle, you’re quite the card!” He might have done this. There’s a decent chance Nintendo Power killed Nick Fulton of Maryland. That may sound like a crazy thing for me to say; however, look at it like this: I am strongly against murder, but ask me again if there’s a knock on my door and it’s some asshole asking me to buy him a Nintendo game. He’ll probably be okay, but I walk away from that less against murder.
Okay, this entire concept has jumped the shark. Masando Jenson from Port Orchard wrote to Nintendo Power to tell them their envelopes taste like carrot juice, nothing else, and they printed it without a response. The Nintendo Power letters section just opens these windows into worlds where a lunatic might be somewhere in Washington sucking off envelopes like a Final Fantasy Legend expert in a truck stop men’s room. Who benefits from knowing this? What need, what fetish does it fulfill? If you lived in Sarasota, screamed “Bayou Billy” into a jar, and told Nintendo Power it had no effect on the mayonnaise would it have any less meaning? Could it help you understand what’s wrong with Masando, this monster searching for the tastiest glue? I don’t know if my mind can take another letter like this, so the rest of the article will be reviews of cakes sent in by readers.
Jason of Corfu, this looks like the last act of someone who died from being terrible at making cakes. “Happy Birthday, kid. It’s a lopsided Mario, but I didn’t have time to draw it all so you have to imagine that’s not a skeleton hand waving a dildo.”
Jason of Corfu, your friend’s mom decorates cakes so badly her ex husband brings it up during family court. And speaking of the law, if you asked a grocery store for a Mario cake and they made you this, they would legally have to sell it to you as dog food.
Happy 41st birthday, Phillip! Are you the cake being held by this 60-year-old sexual solicitation suspect?
You’ve lost control of your life, Phillip J. Vanover from Mesa, Arizona!
I hope you were ready for MORE BAKERY A C T I O N ! Joshua Blalack, named after me trying to explain which Joshua I’m talking about when the other one is white, celebrated in action with this soggy tangle of shapes. Hey, Joshua’s mom, when you’re making a novelty cake, how do you fuck up the rectangle part?
Happy birthday, Jose from Lufkin. Nice Street Fighter II cake you got. Fucking piece of shit looks like a courtroom sketch of Chun Li on trial for trafficking counterfeit cakes. This is a Fightin’ Spirit or World Heroes cake at best, two expertly selected references you can’t even look up because your cake was so dull you fell asleep swallowing it and choked to death.
Hey, Matt Smith of Dayton, did your mom bake this on the engine of a moving tractor? This looks like you’d cut it open and find old pets that went missing. It looks like something the President would use to call an airstrike in a Ghanaian action movie. Anyone who gets a cake like this should be proud their mother was able to overcome so many security measures meant to keep her out of her psychiatric hospital’s kitchen.
You really came close to making frantically smeared infant shit look like a Game Boy screen, Matt’s mom. Fun fact: this 2.0 score is out of a possible 150.5. This is an autopsy photo of a Game Boy corpse found in a swamp, Matt’s mom!
I was making fun of that kid earlier for asking if his fire-damaged Super Nintendo went to Heaven, but seeing Bread Boy makes me think there should be an afterlife where vengeful gods can punish game consoles for crimes against humanity. Giorgio and Daniele, your terrible baking has spawned a thing not bread nor boy, but an abomination violating the laws of both.
Many years ago, I put a thing on the Internet called “Seanbaby’s NES Page” which featured a section called “Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess.” It was about weird letters fans wrote to Nintendo Power magazine which they somehow chose to print. And here’s something fun: That’s what we’re doing today!
Before we start, I want to update you on the main character from the original. You might remember Mark Discordia, a Connecticut plumber who loved Mario so much he asked people to give him the nickname “Mario!” He wrote in to brag about his Milon’s Secret Castle score and to say how he encouraged local children to be the best at video games by staying drug-free!
I ridiculed Mark, which anyone familiar with the word ridiculous would agree: was fair. But Mark did not have a sense of humor about my bullying, so he sent me a series of hate mails. The main theme of them was that he was wealthy, a frequent drug user, and just crushing ass, so in fact, he was the bully in the situation. I guess I can’t prove he was lying, but he told Nintendo Power about a Mario shirt he made, wasn’t handsome or smart, had a violently short temper, and spent his days unclogging toilets and volunteering as a video game coach for children that weren’t his. For him to take the angle of “You nerd, I fuck more than you,” is like a man biting into a dead rat and challenging anyone to bake a more, aiiieeeee, a more delicious pie.
For the record, ladies, I confidently rate the legacy of my sexual conquests somewhere above the winner of “New England’s Least Desirable Middle-Aged Mario Cosplayer (Plumber and Under Division).” Anyway, as time passed, me-readers emailed Mark to offer kind words or to ask for Mario tips, and he responded to all of them. He sent back deranged insults which, over the course of many different people, turned into death threats which turned into accusations of sexual abuse. Eventually he settled on a story about me getting arrested for an underage girlfriend in Seattle, a thing that didn’t happen in a state where I didn’t live, but it’s hard to be sure since the details were half-formed and spread across emails to all these different people. So my point is, if it looks like everyone who writes in to Nintendo Power is psychologically troubled, that’s because they absolutely are and I have proof. Let’s get started!
At first glance you might think, “Is this what it was like to live in the late ’90s?” No, for most of us, it was not anything like this. This is really stupid. This is the opening line about a movie where a warpdrive sends a ship into a dimension made entirely out of stupid. This is a letter you would write to a parole board to prove to the state you can’t be held responsible for marrying a horse. This guy wrote a letter to a magazine hoping it would get selected for their reader mail section months later so he could get an opinion on the difference between two websites, one of which was free to the world while the other was available on a service whose free trial was included with the purchase of literally any product at any retail location. This is like putting “Should I try the new gordita crunch?” in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean.
Think how lonely Edward must have been. He didn’t have a single person in his life he could ask to look up “Nintendo” on America Online? That means all four of his grandparents were dead. It means every single one of his classmates said, “I already told you to get out of my life forever, Edward.” And when this Nintendo magazine, the closest thing he had to a friend, finally responded to him, they said, and I quote, “NOAGeoff, our online honcho says: ‘We’ve recently revamped and jazzed up our Web site… Zip to WWW.NINTENDO.COM!'” So after all this waiting, hoping against hope his question would get noticed, this piece of shit asking a simple question about the Internet gets told to go check the goddamn Internet. This is the tragic legacy of Edward LaRusic, Nintendo Power reader.
Mike Gallagher isn’t here to ask questions– he’s here to give warnings, and he only has one: don’t poke random “unlicensed products” into your Super Nintendo! Warning! Warning! Warning! Not everything inside your electronics is meant to be poked by “unlicensed products!” Warning! Warning! Do not have sex with the Official Super NES-brand Game Pak entertainment port! Warning! My used (VG+) Nintendo game system is broken, dripping! Gooey! Warning, this is less important, but I’ve damaged my mint-in-box penis as well! Warning!
One of the best things about the Nintendo Power letters section is when they checked in with the winners of their weird contests. They would send kids on fantasy dates with celebrities with a high potential for disinterest like golfers or NASCAR drivers. In this one, they sent three children on a Hudson Hawk scavenger hunt, based on the rated-R action comedy of 1991 starring Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello!
Some movie characters endure forever. We all remember how Indiana Jones hates snakes, how James Bond can never turn down pussy, and of course, how Hudson Hawk is always looking for a cappuccino! “Hey! Where can we get a cappuccino?” says Nintendo Power, referencing our collective love of Hudson Hawk always wanting his favorite drink! Terrific!
â–² “Who’s Handsome Hawk?” asked contest winner, Ross Moskowitz, as he walked right past the first clue in his once-in-a-lifetime Grand Prize Hudson Hawk’s Da Vinci’s Lost Treasure Scavenger Hunt Adventure.
â—€ “Why would anyone do this?” asked contest-winning Ross’ father, who told Nintendo Power he had to use three unpaid sick days to fly out for this amazing experience. He raved, “You’re telling me with all that Segasonic Hodgemonster money I’m payin’ for, you couldn’t afford the licensing fee for something more kid-friendly like Barbra Streisand’s Prince of Tides? Maybe they don’t cover this in video game magazine school, but you can’t feed fuckin’ kids cappuccino! I’ve never seen the boy this bored with anything and he was once accompanied by me to a screening of Hudson Hawk.”
â–¶ In the end, the lucky team didn’t manage to solve the mystery or decipher a single clue about Da Vinci’s lost treasure! Better luck next time, contest winner Ross Moskowitz! Hope you at least managed to get that trademark cappuccino!
I actually worked in video game media for many years, so I can say with some expertise that printing a picture of a young child holding up a magazine by a wall of human remains with the expression of a hostage’s proof-of-life is fucking crazy. I’ve also read enough issues of Nintendo Power to know their response of “We’d much rather see piles of creepy bones than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or something really ho-hum like that,” is a very specific FUCK YOU to young Raymond Camarillo from San Jose, California who mailed them this photo:
â–² Nice skeletons, Raymond. Oh, there aren’t any? That’s why you look like a little asshole.
– Nintendo Power
Another theme of Nintendo Power contests is having celebrities come to your home and try out mediocre games their agent sold their likeness to. And if there is a way to make sports stars look like they’re having fun getting their ass kicked at SNES games by a teenager, Nintendo Power never found it. Charles Barkley looks like he’s suffering through a Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt safety orientation. He looks like he’s saying, “Good game, Mamp. But jokes on you, Monty, because I bet your mama $18,000 you would beat me. Ha ha. I’m not playin’, Melt. Go get your mama’s checkbook, or some people gonna come in here and break both our legs.”
From the darkness came a cough followed by a wretched, pathetic voice. “Please… give me free underpants, I have included a drawing of them.” Seriously, Nintendo Power, what the hell are you doing? You can choose not to print some of these. The section editor didn’t even bother to respond to it. They just let this weird idiot in West Virginia’s request for free boxer shorts fall there without comment like the leader of a tour group calling out, “I don’t need to tell anyone here what awaits us at the end of our Officially Licensed Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt…
…
…
…
…
… that’s right! A… cappuccino!”
Nintendo Power often called for Top 10 Lists, but not about anything specific. It was only the format that was important to them, and they had no editorial standards when it came to publishing them. Deranged, neglected children from around the country would mash together vaguely video game-related words and Nintendo Power proudly shared them all. Was the theme of your Top 10 list just “crime?” Okay, Karl Warsop of Gastonia, North Carolina. Was one of the “jokes” in its entirety just the name “Secret of Mana” except “Secret of Murder?” Fine. Did it open with a parody title referencing the World Trade Center bombing? Jesus fucking Christ, Karl.
This is a magazine about the whimsical and exciting world of Nintendo games and they printed this brain vomit from a future serial killer. If you handed this “Top 10 Crime Games” list to the creative director of a Laffy Taffy knockoff for death row inmates, he would say, “It’s a no. This is actually the kind of lazy shit we’re trying to get away from here at Bitchkiller Sour Chews.”
Ugh, Debby, this is worse than the kid listing felonies next to partial video game titles. Did “Someone took it” make the Nintendo Power editors laugh, or were they only trying to finally give a voice to Surinamese children writing jokes about stealing from Blockbuster Video?
10. My machete says Best of the Best: Championship Karate is now mine, coward.
9. Eat this shit instead. My life of hardship does not reward honesty or kindness.
8. Outer space aliens took it!
7. Bouterse’s soldiers are here in my home.
6. They are asking questions for which I have no answers.
5. They do not believe m
4.
3.
2.
1.
Is there a single coherent play on words in any of these? Hey, Ben Salinas from McAllen, Texas, did you learn English from the inside of a Hong Kong shipping container? You write Top 10 lists like the copy on an OK Fun-System Supergame 2000 (19.99 $USD). “16 bits of quality! It is not Sega!” You should be ashamed of yourself.
And look at what you’ve done, Joel Self from California. These aren’t “parodies.” This is nonsense. Did you really fucking write down, “Porthole Kombat: Adventures on the High Seas” and send it to Nintendo Power? I spit on the inbred Santa Clara bloodline that spawned you. I wouldn’t write that cursed series of words on the grave of someone named Porthole Kombat who died feeding flood-displaced refugees with his non-profit, Adventures on the High Seas, Inc.
I think I need to move on to letters with a happier tone than these miserable Top 10 lists Nintendo Power used to fill space between maniacs posing with human remains or asking for free underwear.
No, that’s not what I was thinking. At all. But speaking of AWESOME TWOSOME, this article is one! Come back this Upsetting Day for Part II of Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess!
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This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Mike Stiles, who only writes to Nintendo the normal way: Erotically.