It’s ridiculous for a guy to even try to fake an orgasm. I mean, there’s hard fucking evidence of a dude’s climax, making it mind-numbingly obvious when he doesn’t. I’ve caught one man attempting to fake an orgasm in my life, and it was probably the darkest sexual experiences I’ve ever had. He was a guy who struggled to become and stay aroused, and I think in an attempt to impress me or assert his virility or something, he pretended to cum during a love-making session after weeks of us having unfruitful sex. I was suspicious from the outset, given his dick wasn’t all the way hard, and he was so dramatic with the noise making. It felt forced.
Because I am a psychopath who likes crime shows, I foraged through the trash looking for the used condom after he fell asleep. And once I found in the darkness, I stuck my finger inside to see if it contained the requisite man juices. Nada. Although I did feel pretty chuffed imagining myself as the foxy, not-afraid-to-get-her-hands-dirty star of my own sexy cop drama, SSI: Sex Scene Investigation. Sexy case closed!
I guess dudes probably fake orgasms for different reasons than women—women often fake orgasms to reward the man pummeling them, or to end unsatisfactory sex. I think maybe men fake orgasms in order to prove something to themselves and to the woman they’re doing it to. I guess there’s a whole other examination about how the fake orgasm shows the expected passivity of women and the activity of men (or to quote critic John Berger, the way “men act and women appear”) in society, but you came here today for the practical not the psychoanalytic. So if you are a whiskey-dicked conqurer or just a dude who has a hard time bringing it home, here are some tips about faking the big-O.
Wear A Condom
I know what you’re saying, “This shit happened on Friends. Monica totally thought Chandler made a baby insider her, but then he was like ‘Nah, I was faking it.’” But I am here to tell you, as a non-PG sitcom character, that Monica is an idiot. Even a day after protectionless intercourse, cum drips out of a vagina hole. No woman will believe you shot your load inside of her without physical evidence of that load. It’s just too easy to detect. In fact, if there’s a whole bunch of it, you can push it out in disgusting little globs if you strain a little bit opening a jar or taking a poop. So it’s going to be a big giveaway if you claim you’ve cum in a girl and there’s absolutely no wheatpaste snaking down her leg or raining in droplets when she finally stands up.
Don’t Over Dramatize
Traditionally, or at least in my experience, men are not very good at lying. Likewise, male perception is often a little bit skewed by their man brains, so what they think they’re doing is not actually what they’re doing at all. Case in point was my own experience with a guy who’d never let out so much as a barely audible gasp during sex, started yelling in my face while shamming a climax. Don’t do anything over the top, unless that’s your regular style. Girls are basically sitting around just looking for reasons to get pissed off at you or catch you out about something or anything, really, so don’t make it any easier for them than it already is.
America’s First Hippie: Living, Learning, and Going Long with Gypsy Boots
Photos courtesy of Kees Van Voorthuizen
My mother hated hippies. She also wasn’t keen on meeting strangers, long-haired or otherwise. And her mood was especially dark that day in 1970 when the two of us were vacationing at the Hilton in Beverly Hills. She’d been waging a long battle with my father, her ex-husband, over me, their seven-year-old, and worried that she’d either lose custody or I’d “turn hippie” thanks to California’s corrupting influence. So when a hyperactive senior citizen with shoulder-length silver hair, a scraggly beard, and love beads around his neck approached us in the hotel lobby while banging a tambourine, shaking maracas, dancing a Russian cossack jig, and chanting, “I’m-a the Gypsy Boots, I live on nuts and fruits,” I wasn’t surprised when my mother yelled at him to get lost. I wanted him to scram, too. Ordinary hippies—the ones I saw on TV or hitchhiking through our New Jersey suburb—they intrigued me, but this one seemed crazy. Scary crazy. Why was this man who looked older than my grandparents behaving like a kindergarten escapee?
“Make him leave, Ma,” I whispered.
She certainly tried to. But Gypsy Boots was a man on a mission, which was to cheer up the sad-sack divorcee and kid he’d just come across. And, being irresistible, he succeeded. Within minutes, Gypsy had my mother and me smiling at him, then laughing with him, applauding his antics, trying out his musical instruments, and humming along to his inane ditties. Boots wasn’t drunk or on drugs, as I had heard other hippies were. Like the female protagonist of the film Harold And Maude, this guy was just chronically jubilant, the archetypal holy fool. After he was gone, leaving me with a free autographed copy of his self-published memoir, Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat, my mother admitted that she hadn’t felt this happy since before my father left her. It amazed me to hear her say that. And it amazed me to realize I felt the same way.
What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t know for a long time, was that Gypsy Boots was important, nationally important, an odd figure who had changed the course of American culture. He wasn’t just an old hippie, he was the ur hippie. His journey started in the late 1930s, when Boots, nearing 20, left the working world, grew his hair and beard long, and went “back to nature.” This was way beyond Thoreau at Walden Pond: For years at a time, Boots would sleep in California forests, bathe in mountain streams, feed himself by foraging for nuts and fruits and vegetables, practice yoga, and wear practically nothing in the way of clothing. A dozen other Nature Boys, as they were called, kept him company (including eden ahbez, who wrote “Nature Boy,” the hit song for Nat King Cole, supposedly about Boots), but Gypsy was the most visible of the gang, the one who would eventually become a star.
Long before the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, “Hollywood’s ageless athlete,” as Boots was known, created a counterculture for them to inhabit. He did this by performing fitness demonstrations on network television and in movies, opening one of America’s first health-food restaurants, racing around LA in his crazily painted van with organic treats for a network of customers—all to spread his message, which was deadly serious in spite of his constant clowning: “Why cling to sickly, fretful, conformist ways when you can be your healthiest, happiest, most authentic self?”
Gypsy died in 2004, just short of his 90th birthday. With his centennial coming up next year, I’ve been thinking a lot about him—what he meant to history and what he meant to me.
Two and a half decades after our encounter in Beverly Hills, Gypsy reappeared in my life. By this time, my mother was long gone—she’d died of breast cancer at 49—and I was living in New York City, volunteering as a cook at a soup kitchen for the homeless. I didn’t think much about Boots; he was a luminous childhood memory, nothing more. Then, while browsing my shelves, I came across the memoir he’d given me, and I decided to bring it to the soup kitchen. Maybe we could use some of the vegetarian recipes he’d included in his book. As I consulted Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat while cooking, a middle-aged woman I worked with noticed the book and grinned and said, “Wow, Gypsy Boots! When I was a flower child in Hollywood in the 60s, Gypsy was such an inspiration. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s still going—I just ran into him last year!”
“Wait,” I said, “he’s still alive?”
“Sure, and he hasn’t changed one bit since the old days. He came roaring into this ashram I was at, shouting, ‘Don’t panic, go organic,’ and making everybody crack up.”
Until then, I’d never met anyone who’d known of Gypsy. So, he was still around, inhabiting the present as well as the past! That night, I called 411 in Los Angeles County and requested a listing for Gypsy Boots. I was doing this out of curiosity, but also as a sort of tribute to my late mother.
Harmony tells us some stories from behind the scenes of Spring Breakers, with personal production photographs by Annabel Mehran and never-before-seen footage from the set by producers Chris and Roberta Hanley.
This is a screenshot of Buzzfeed’s post Goth Day at Disneyland. Our followers might recognize some of these pictures from like an hour ago, when we posted them on this very tumblr, linking to the VICE post Goth Day at Disneyland!
As you’re probably aware, content theft is an issue on the internet. VICE, like a lot of sites, comes across this quite a bit; sites (usually just small blogs, but sometimes not) take pieces we put up, and run them (usually photos, but sometimes videos or text). This is a problem because websites rely on traffic to sell ads. No ads means no money to run a website.
What Katie Notopoulos’ Buzzfeed post does (I should point out that I’m a big fan of both Buzzfeed in general and Katie’s work in particular) is not content theft. Below each photo, she credits VICE and links back to our post…
We (and the internet!) need to get better at this. But another nice thing about the internet is that when you ask people to change things, they can change!
Buzzfeed updated their post to point directly to VICE. Thanks!
Music writer Sophie Saint Thomas wrote this latest installment while on a romantic vacation in Paris with her penis friend. It ended with her barfing, but at least she was able to feel freaky nasty for a little bit.
“Pictures of You” by The Cure
Home from school, finally. I just finished off my after-school snack of cheese, crackers and a cream soda and now I’m lying in my twin bed exhausted about to take a nap before I wake up in time to copy the answers from the back of my algebra book before dinner. I turn, and make eye contact with Robert Smith on the Cure poster that hangs on my wall. I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you, that I almost believe that they’re real. Later in life I will understand it is the makings of my bisexuality and affinity for gender bending, but at the time I am confused as to why his eye liner makes me wet between my legs. Hesitantly, I push my hand down my panties and begin to rub. I imagine Bobby on top of me, grease paint dripping on my forehead, while he spreads my legs and pushes himself inside of me. Bobby, you were bigger, and brighter, and whiter than snow. Rubbing circles, I muster up the courage to insert a finger. I feel an intensity building up, warmth, fear, excitement, and BOOM. And you finally felt the courage to let it all go. So, I suppose this is what an orgasm feels like. Awesome.
