Confessions of A Failed Slut

by Kathy Shaidle

  Well, I have indisputable proof that the Japanese aren’t as smart as we’ve all been led to believe.

  Why else would they decide to mess with one of their biggest exports?

  I’m talking about the Hitachi Magic Wand.

  No, this isn’t a Japanese Harry Potter knock off kid’s toy. “The Hitachi,” as it is commonly referred to for short, is a toy all right, but for grown ups. One of the “sex” variety.

  The Hitachi Magic Wand is, ironically, one of the least erotic “marital aids” imaginable. It’s unwieldy. It’s comically loud. It’s hideous and vaguely antique, something you’d picture finding in your grandma’s bottom dresser drawer between the heating pad and the enema bag.

  Whereas most vibrators are battery powered, the Hitachi plugs into the wall, which somehow compounds its off-putting resemblance to an artifact in the Mütter Museum.

  And for many women, it’s the only thing that can bring them to orgasm, whether they want one, or two, or twenty. (Or not: “forced orgasm” plays a part in many BDSM porn flicks, and almost always, the Hitachi is the tool of “choice.”)

  For an less explicit, almost prim, depiction of a well-placed Hitachi’s affect on the female anatomy, watch photographer Clayton Cubitt’s “performance art” videos of fully clothed women trying to read aloud from their favorite novels while being pleasured under the table with a Magic Wand.

  Sex therapists have been practically prescribing Hitachis to frustrated patients since the 1970s. For almost as long, fans have been souping up the “Cadillac of vibrators” with unofficial (and almost as funny-looking) after-market attachments, like Mods tricking out their multi-mirrored scooters.

  Except I don’t ever recall Vespa expressing any embarrassment or regret after the Brighton Beach riots. Not so Hitachi.

  At the 2013 International Lingerie Show in Las Vegas, the “bombshell news amongst the sex toy crowd” was the announced “re-branding” of that Japanese company’s most famous contraption.

  The Magic Wand has always been marketed as a mere “muscle massager.” Its “as-seen-on-TV” packaging features now-borderline-vintage photos of the device being directed at various non-erogenous zones by feather-haired male and female models who, come to think of it, could very well be dead by now.

  Decades on, having accidentally acquired the kind of one-word name recognition that brand managers spend millions trying (and usually failing) to achieve, the firm’s simmering embarrassment about the Hitachi name being synonymous with orgasms boiled over.

  It would be like famously uptight Kleenex® — they’ve been insisting upon that “R” in finger-wagging Writer’s Market ads forever – suddenly getting snotty about the fact that their product is primarily employed for nose-blowing.

  Yet that’s pretty much what happened. Hitachi, like the neighborhood “moped,” longs to be known for something other than sex. They do, after all, manufacture other electronics, dammit. Roseanne Barr once quipped, “Hitachi makes such a good vibrator, I think I’ll buy one of their TVs!” – but I can only assume most consumers didn’t make that leap. Then there’s the afore-mentioned trend towards voluntary celibacy that’s apparently sweeping the Land of the Rising Sun and its unrising sons.

  So, according to one report, the Japanese were all set to take their toy and go home, vowing to stop making the thing once and for all. Luckily, their U.S. distributor talked them down off that ledge, convincing them to simply wipe the Hitachi name off the Magic Wand. (And splurge on some new packaging, finally.)

  Fans have been repeatedly assured that the new “Hitachi” will be almost identical in everything but (slightly abbreviated) name.

  Fans do not believe this.

  Like Jack Nicholson’s pathetic old roué in Carnal Knowledge who can only perform if a prostitute acts out a precisely scripted routine, these folks are now so Hitachi-dependent that they fear even a tiny adjustment of its circuitry may sabotage their sex lives.

  Reports of hoarding soon started coming in.

  The “Hitachi” crisis couldn’t have come (as it were) at a worse possible moment: right when actor Michael Douglas told a reporter that the throat cancer which nearly cost him is life had been caused, not by a lifetime of drinking and smoking, but by performing cunnilingus.

  Some doctors have questioned Douglas’s claim, and not just because it first appeared in the Guardian.

  However, expect that highly original alibi to become the male equivalent of “I’ve got a headache” in bedrooms around the globe.

  Ladies, start your engines – while you still can.

  It’s not just that many women don’t normally orgasm during intercourse. These days, as we’ve already seen, plenty of men don’t seem interested in doing the deed at all. And even the ones who do don’t exactly advertise it.

  Call it a hazard of big city living: I’ve automatically assumed every guy I’ve met over the course of the last twenty years was homosexual, then worked my way backwards as evidence of his straightness piled up. (Say, spontaneous, repeated expressions of appreciation for Monica Bellucci, Motörhead or both.)

  Can you blame me? Consider the allegedly straight dudes you see on the subway, at the office, at the coffee shop, sometimes with wives and even offspring in tow. Add up all the man-purses, the too-visible hair “product,” the precious, pretentious eyewear, the borderline anorexia, the TinTin hairdos, the finicky food fetishes, the little dogs in adorable outfits.

  (His note addressed “For Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite (sic)” has prompted the scratching of not a few heads since 1895, but maybe the Marquess of Queensbury wasn’t stupid or furious, just accidentally ahead of his time.)

  We started mocking this personal style as “metrosexual” almost twenty years ago, but that word was always problematic. The “metro” prefix is utterly apt; it’s the “sexual” part that’s off. These nominal heteros are consciously or subconsciously mimicking gay twinks, and those fellows usually want to get laid. Their fragile straight counterparts, in contrast, don’t look like they could manage it, or even want to.

  Back in the 1960s, hard hats complained they couldn’t tell the longhaired boys from the girls anymore. But at least hippie guys – from Spahn Ranch to the Weather Underground townhouse – were obsessed with sex. These days, a dude who expresses too much interest in getting girls into bed can end up on an Southern Poverty Law Center “hate group” list, as happened to a bunch of “pick up artist” websites. In that much maligned “manosphere,” the term “beta male” is the most popular pejorative. Fresher and more accurate than “metrosexual,” I’ll be using that phrase henceforth, along with that unfairly neglected anachronism “faggotry.” It’s ideal for my purposes because it doesn’t necessarily mean “gay” so much as “gay-ish.” So I’m trying to bring that word back. Call it artisanal invective.

  Here’s just a single representative seven days in Beta Male Faggotry, culled from news stories that broke during the first week of April, 2013:

  With the fruity blond Latino voted off, the remaining male contestants on American Idol were the fruity black dude and the fruity dark Latino. Earlier this season, a leading male contender named “JDA” – pronounced “JADE-a” — wore dresses, makeup, face veils – and five o’clock shadow. Then when one of last year’s semi-finalists returned to perform, he sported a full beard and a bun in his hair, looking like the bastard son of Grizzly Adams and Frau Blucher. At one juncture, the most macho guy on the AI stage was the 2012 winner: shy, ectomorphic Philip “you can tell I’m a vegan just by looking at me” Philips.

  An advice column at the Disney-owned parenting site Babble gave new moms and dads one more thing to panic about: the “Bronie” phenomenon of grown men who’ve embraced the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. They collect colorful equine dolls and play with them at special conventions. The advice lady adds, “I’ll be proud if my son joins your ranks.”

  A depressingly large num
ber of Internet forums host handwringing conversations about “masculinity,” another word the Left has domesticated and castrated so that it now means the exact opposite of its original definition. The first such site I ever encountered was The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, but the upstart Good Men Project throws off so little testosterone, it makes the League look like the gladiator holding pen beneath the Roman Coliseum. Over at the Good Men Project, “5 Ways Disavowing Masculinity Changed My Life,” counts as a fairly typical essay. The writer confesses proudly that he now “sits down to pee” and “wears women’s clothing accessories.”

  Which brings us to author Buzz Bissinger’s gut-curdling confession in GQ that he blew over a half-million of his Friday Night Lights money on clothes. And by “clothes” he means, among many other items, a pair of $5,600 leather pants and some thigh high boots with six-inch stiletto heels. The 58-year-old married father of three says he “began to seek sexual expression in the form of high fashion,” and discovered that “Tom Ford makeup is divine.”

  Yes, I know: complaints about creeping effeminacy are as old as ancient Greece and Rome – both of which are extinct, needless to say. But what brought on this latest epidemic?

  For some right-wingers, the hormones excreted by Pill-taking females are the guilty party, and have replaced fluoride as the waterborne toxin endangering our “precious bodily fluids,” but the scientific jury is still out on that one. And besides, beta males only drink bottled H2O.

  Whatever the reason, the rest of us are doomed to reside in a dystopian alternative universe, in which the 98-lb weakling is the beau ideal, and Charles Atlas shrugged.

  But are these “new” “progressive” “men” really an advance over the supposedly awful “old” “patriarchal” variety? Have you noticed how often the former reveal themselves to be just as creepy – if passive-aggressively so – as the latter?

  “I’ve been married to a capitalist, a communist, and a fascist, and none of them would take out the garbage,” Zsa Zsa Gabor supposedly said.

  During my Reagan-era stint on the left, I met white-ribbon-wearing “male feminists” who were sincere, thoughtful, and decent. That said, many others ranged from patronizing to abusive.

  So sexist “progressive” men such as Anthony Weiner, Bob Filner, and Eliot Spitzer don’t surprise me, but why is anyone else shocked by their hypocrisy? I’m not just thinking of Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy; second-wave feminism began as a revolt not against mean old fathers and bosses, but against the misogynist college boys running the ’60s peace movement. (Eldridge Cleaver, anyone?)

  In contrast (and contra Zsa Zsa), the “right wing” guys I know are matter of factly gender-blind.

  No neocon’s ever called me “honey.”

  Which brings me to Hugo Schwyzer.

  Schwyzer was a 46-year-old professor of History and Gender Studies at Pasadena City College when he began making headlines – first, the sorts he approved of, then later, not so much.

  An ambitious controversialist, he branded himself as a “male feminist,” opining about porn, body image, unpleasant sounding sexual practices, and modern masculinity at our old friends Jezebel and xojane, along with that aforementioned proving ground of beta-male faggotry known as The Good Men Project.

  Schwyzer was “Internet famous” on the left while remaining a near nonentity on the right, even as a figure of fun.

  Until late summer 2013.

  On August 1, Schwyzer wrote on his highly polished, headshot-heavy site:

  I’ve said my goodbyes to the internet for the time being. (And those of you betting on when I’ll be back, it won’t be soon, and those of you betting on my suicide, fuck you.)

  That night, he tried to kill himself.

  What brought that on? An avalanche of new revelations that, compounded with older, equally sordid stories, finally drove Schwyzer (almost) over the edge.

  The old flakiness? Schwyzer converted to Judaism so he could marry his fourth wife. He was voluntarily circumcised at 37 because, he wrote, “I wanted to feel as if I was starting over sexually.” According to one critic, “He systematically picked on Women of Color.” Oh, and he once tried to kill a girlfriend and himself.

  Here’s what’s new:

  After selling himself as a devoted family man and recovering alcoholic, Schwyzer has admitted that he’s lied about his sobriety and has had two physical extramarital affairs along with one virtual “sexting” fling with a “sex worker activist” who, like him, has borderline personality disorder. (“It made her even sexier.”)

  That crazy chick is also nearly 20 years his junior, a particularly embarrassing detail since Schwyzer had condemned older men who chased younger women as “creeps.”

  Unable to stay out of the spotlight—especially when New York Magazine is on the other end of the phone—Schwyzer stupidly tried to explain himself after his suicide attempt. In doing so, he threw out a phrase that his delighted detractors have been using as a beach ball:

  “I had an affair, which is very off-brand for me.”

  A nasty online backlash ensued. Schwyzer, a social-media compulsive, claims this torrent of Internet hatred drove him to his most recent suicide attempt. By mid-month, his Twitter timeline was a sadly comic stream of tweets about “getting his meds right” and how he’s going to shut down his computer. Any. Minute. Now.

  One more thing:

  Hugh Schwyzer has tenure.

  And—I suspect before too long—a book and movie deal.

  Now, I don’t know what house the moon was in or anything, but at the very same time the Schwyzer meltdown was roiling the online feminist movement, the “atheist community” was experiencing a broader crackup, also related to progressive male acting out.

  The editors of both Skeptic Magazine and Skeptical Inquirer stood accused of serial rape and sexual assault, respectively. Two other atheist celebrities—physicist Lawrence Krauss and (egad!) Bill Nye the Science Guy—were accused of similar nastiness.

  They say that when women hang out together long enough, their menstrual cycles sync up. For whatever reason, liberal chicks across America suddenly got it into their ugly little heads to throw out a dumpster full of male movement “garbage” en masse.

  Not every female is ready to purge men from her life entirely, though…

  “Seasoned blonde SWF seeks sophisticated SWM Democrat. Must love dogs, topiary, major (and minor) holidays. Turn offs: processed food, dust, dirt, disarray OF ANY KIND!!! No davenport potatoes need apply. I’m a woman of many talents, from paint stripping to pole dancing. You won’t believe what I can do with a pine cone!”

  I wrote that fake Martha Stewart online dating profile before I clicked on the real one she put up at match.com in the spring of 2013. I’d actually deleted the word “antiquing” as not only too predictable but too vulnerable to mockery, given her age (Martha’s a well-Photoshopped seventy-one) — but she went ahead and included the word herself.

  I figured Martha had only signed up with an online dating site because she wanted to help out her nephew, who’d written a book about finding love on the web. But then again, during that publicity campaign, she actually announced on national TV that she wanted to “sleep with someone.” So maybe Martha’s sincerely gasping to get her groove back, although it’s hard to believe she ever had one, what with her “don’t mess my hair” WASP ice queen persona.

  Now, I own a “FREE MARTHA!” t-shirt from the days of her Atlas Shrugs-style prosecution for “insider trading,” i.e., “following her broker’s advice,” i.e., “being smarter and richer than the rest of us.” Tall poppies must be stomped down so the opiated masses can keep up with their joneses, don’t you know. That’s why I was somewhat distressed, watching her doing something so… pedestrian.

  Online dating still seems awfully faddish and desperate, even though almost everyone knows one couple who “met” that way. (That said, that oft-quoted “one in five” stat is merely marketing tabl
e magic, cooked up by… match.com. Anna Harte at 21stCenturyLoveTriangle.com did the math on the company’s oft-cited survey and came up with the more realistic-sounding ratio of one in twelve.)

  It’s easy for me to be dismissive, since I’m no longer single and haven’t been for some time. I (like to) forget how abysmal that condition can be, even to a hermetically sealed introvert like me.

  Were I to find myself in the market for a matchmaking service, I doubt I’d have much success signing on with the ones whose ads seem like commercials for tampons and beer:

  You’ll go horseback riding then shoot some pool and do all kinds of other pretend-fun things like take a cooking class together!

  (Can you imagine that date with Martha?)

  And then there’s obligatory profile picture. That’s something I’d like to avoid at all cost.

  Besides, I’d be looking, not just for Mr. Right, but for Mr. Right Wing. Back in the Bush years, I could’ve joined Hannidate, run by conservative pundit Sean Hannity. The now-defunct enterprise billed itself as the place “where people of like-conservative minds can come together to meet. (…) It’s fun, interactive, safe and anonymous” – which sounds too much like that old liberal line about abortions to be really enticing.

  Speaking of abortions, Hannidate proved unviable. Maybe its intended customer base was confused by the site’s “Men Seeking Men” option. Or perhaps fewer people than expected wanted to hook up with someone who yells, “You’re a great American!” when they orgasm. Hannidate even failed as fodder for liberal fun; blogger Jesus’ General abandoned his snotty “Hannicatch of the Week” feature after five posts.

  I’m surprised raving entrepreneur Glenn Beck didn’t snap up Hannidate, re-brand it, and add it to his growing media-apparel-survivalist gear empire.

  You know who does have a radio show and a dating service?

  Alex Jones.

  Alex Jones is that guy you think must be an actor portraying a hysterical, paranoid, cliché-spewing talk radio host in some minor 1990s satirical movie you’ve stumbled upon, until you realize after a few minutes that he’s not acting. (Maybe.)