Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

During the frigid Northeastern winters, anything involving sex and heat starts to sound good. But Miss Poubelle draws the line at the hot carl, a practice brought to her attention by a thoughtful reader. What is a hot carl? The internet has a variety of definitions and disagreements about the details.

The most popular definitions, Blanche is sad to say, involve men shitting on women during some part of a sexual act. Some marginally less disgusting versions involve saran wrap as an intermediary between the shit and the woman's body. In some sites, the same sort of sex act is called the steaming Cleveland or the hot lunch.

View our poll archive

Blanche generally thinks that so long as everyone in a sex act is sane and consents to be there, then what takes place is nobody's business. That rule applies to those who want to be bitten, beaten, tickled, humiliated, and pissed or shit on. Lots of people get off on things that others consider appalling or disgusting, but no one ever said that fetishes are rational.

But what is disturbing is that in many of the definitions, the recipient of the carl, Cleveland, or lunch is a surprised or unwilling woman. This alleged sex act bears distinct similarities to a number of other, possibly mythical, types of sex that are detailed on various web sites. In fact, lists of bizarre and aggressive sex acts are fairly common on the internet.

Perhaps one of the most common on such lists is the dirty Sanchez, in which a man is described as sticking his finger in a woman's ass during sex, then smearing it across her upper lip to leave a fecal moustache. Other appalling possibilities include the Bismark, where the man comes on the woman's face, then punches her in the nose and the Ram, where the woman's head is banged into a wall during sex. For a sense of the range of disgusting possibilities, enter dirty Sanchez into Google.

Miss Poubelle suspects that many or most of the kinds of sex described on these internet lists are purely fictional. They sound like what a bunch of drunk frat boys might come up with during a bull session. She can't know exactly why people then post these lists, but she would guess that some guys find them funny.

But even if the lists are fictional, Blanche wonders about the kind of mentality that invents long lists of ways to humiliate women during sex.

An insightful straight friend connects the sadistic overtones of certain heterosexual pornography to the feelings of powerlessness that some men have in trying to convince women to have sex with them.

For whatever cultural or biological reason, women tend to serve as the 'gatekeepers' for heterosexual sex. They are the ones who usually decide whether it will happen, what kind of sex will go on, and how frequent the sex will be.

Straight men who are habitually frustrated by women are those most likely to engage in the revenge sex fantasies that make up dirty Sanchez lists. And they are also willingly gulled into believing that some secret combination of phrases, pheromones, clothes, and penis size will change the sexual calculus and give them the upper hand.

From all of this behavior, one might think that available women are like Super Bowl tickets-- desired by millions, but only available to thousands. In a sexual market like that, frustration and anger at unavailable women would be understandable.

But at least among Miss Poubelle's circle of acquaintances, the problem is actually the reverse. There are many, many single women who are unable to find partners and almost no single straight men.

Why the disconnect? The problem seems to be that too many men only want to have sex with women in their twenties with slim waists and big tits. And while there's no shortage of women generally, there certainly aren't enough supermodels to go around. Most available women look more like Marge Simpson than Jessica Simpson.

Of course, straight men have no monopoly on unrealistic expectations of their sexual partners. Gay men, too, may let their dreams of bedding Ashton Kutcher prevent them from settling down with their own personal Jason Alexander.

It seems to Blanche that happiness comes from dealing with the reality of our own limitations and those of others. It's better to forget about the porn stars and supermodels and focus on making the best life we can with what's available to us. And more satisfying to have real sex than to focus on fantasies of revenge.