women's bathrooms

You can always tell the sign of a good restaurant/party house/hotel by the condition of their women's bathroom(s).
That's just a fun little fact.

If you want to know if you should plan any kind of event at a place, send some random female into their facilities and just observe the look on her face when she walks out.

If she comes out with a look of total disgust - don't even think about eating there.
It's as simple as that.

The look is unmistakable too. It's that clenched jaw, eyes half closed, every muscle in her body is tense and there is usually some subtle, if not full on, sneer on her face - stance.

For the male gender who may not yet be informed, let me explain.

We take our settings very seriously. We expect it to be clean. We expect to be able to see when we look in the mirror. We expect all the locks on the doors to work. We expect there to be plenty of supplies at our disposal.

We expect room to move. We expect there to be somewhere for us to put our purses and whatever other junk we happen to have with us.

We expect hooks on the backs of our doors - even if some of us aren't comfortable throwing our stuff up on said hook because we also know how easy it is for someone to just reach over and yank our stuff up and out.

NOT THE POINT!

We expect to not feel like we need to shower when we leave a public restroom.
Yes, I said it.
We expect this.

I always crinkle my nose whenever a bathroom is a) some one room thrown together with no thought enclosure or b) co-ed. Bite me. I don't want to share a bathroom with a male in my own house, let alone a bunch of strangers.

No offense. You men are wonderful. I just don't need to know *that* much about you. I see no real need to bond with you in that way. Stop peeing in front of me for crying out loud.

Now, a really well run place who cares about it's guest/clients/customers will build a real bathroom for women.

This will include up to three separate rooms. A foyer, a waiting area and the facilities themselves - which is large and has stalls on one wall and across from the stalls will be an entire wall side to side of mirrors and sinks.

The sink dispensers won't have the equivalent of Lava soap in them. It will be something fruity or flowery, usually some Yardley something or other that you wouldn't bother to spend the money on to put in your own house.

There will be lights - everywhere, so you can actually see what you're doing when you go to fix your make-up. There will be a large garbage can with a swinging lid on it so you don't have to actually see the garbage in it (if not two - one on either side of the room).

There will be a hand blow dryer AND a paper towel dispenser. Half of them have a folding changing table for babies attached to the wall that you can pull down and make your life easier. There is usually a machine that you can get tampons and pads from if you pay the quarter charge or whatever it is these days.

Each individual stall has a metal box for tampons and pads to dispose of and there is usually a huge roll of toilet paper (and another one behind it) and most of the time there will be a dispenser for those toilet seat covers which are more trouble than they're worth. It's nice to know it's available anyway.

There is at least one handicap, over-sized stall. This is not like a handicap parking space. The same rules do not apply. It's acceptable for anyone to use provided that no one is wheeling themselves in to the room before you go to use it.

Our sitting areas contain couches and nice chairs and mirrors with elegant frames on them. Some will have tables that contain baskets with items such as: bobby pins, safety pins, hair spray, spritzer, nylons, handiwipes, cotton balls, Q-Tips, pads, tampons and sewing kits in them. There is art on the wall, low lighting lamps on the table (designed to make our jewelry sparkle, no doubt) and either carpeting in these rooms or very nice tiles; usually carpet.

This is the norm.

Our bathrooms aren't just bathrooms.
They're conference rooms.
and yes, we *are* discussing *you*...

Now, let me set the scene now that you have all of that information floating around fresh in your head.

We were driving from Maryland back to New York. We found ourselves in the middle of East Nowhere, Pennsylvania when we decided to stop at a Citgo.

Seems normal enough, right?
Wrong.

My daughter and I go in search of the restroom. It is, of course, a one room hovel that we both squeezed into.
Fine.

We made our comments and then I looked up at the wall thinking that the dispenser was the usual tampon/pad dispenser.
Wrong, again!

I pointed to the dispenser silently until she looked up at it. When it registered what it actually was, she started laughing out loud.

Condoms!
In all my years, I've NEVER seen condoms sold in a women's bathroom.

But wait!
Not just condoms - adult novelty items too.
That was on the left side.

On the right side was - aspirin.
Seriously, aspirin.

All for the low, low price of $0.75 each.
We found the cracker jack mother of all dispensers!

You may get a condom or you may get an adult item - how lucky are you feeling tonight?! The right side was solely aspirin, but the left side - total guesswork!
She is, unmistakably my child. So we did what anyone would expect us to do left in a situation like this -- We wasted $4.50 on crap we wouldn't buy over the counter and laughed our asses off every time we dropped in three quarters and turned the knob. We had the added bonus of the bathroom wall being 5' from the outside cashier counter too and a full line in front of it.

We didn't care. It was too much for our senses as soon as this dropped out...

Tattoos.
The Ultimate in Fun & Fantasy.

Clearly, I have a lot to learn if tattoos are the ultimate in Fun & Fantasy. I've been doing it all wrong then. I'm going to have to rethink everything!

Grant must have given up on waiting for us because we found him outside at the car checking the oil. We maintained our silence on our newly purchased stash of Black Magic condoms, tattoos and massage oil.

That is, until we couldn't take it anymore and started laughing again.
Then he made the distinct mistake of finally asking us what took us so long.

My daughter and I exchanged a bonding smirk and then I casually said, "Oh, we were buying condoms..."

He rolled his eyes.
Like he didn't believe me.
Then he must have taken a second to think about it.

Because he knows that if whatever I say sounds really off - there is a 99.997% chance that it's 100% true...

Grant: "Did you really buy condoms?"
Me: "Yes."

silence...

Grant: "You did not."
Me: "Okay."

silence...

Grant: "Why in God's name would you be in there buying condoms?"
The two of us in stereo, all excited: "Because we've never seen a condom dispenser before in our bathrooms! It wasn't JUST a condom dispenser either!"

more silence.. at this point I can see why he's confused... I've had my tubes tied for the last 14 years and my daughter is waiting until after she graduates high school at least... this is SO NOT THE POINT!

We produced our bounty so he could bask in our excitement with us.
He still wasn't getting it.

Grant: "You know those are the kinds of condoms you get when you want to get someone pregnant or take your chances of getting an STD from the condom itself from a place like this..."
Me: "DON'T RAIN ON OUR PARADE!"

a whole lot of staring at our excited little faces while trying to figure out what in God's name to say to us to get us to stop...

Grant: "I'm not sure what the big deal is - that's standard in our bathrooms."
Me: "Yeah, we went into your bathroom too (WE HAD TO!). You had a two sided dispenser too. One side, regular condoms. Other side, ribbed condoms, "for her" - no aspirin..."

a whole fuckload of silence...

That's when I felt it was time to break open the marital aid package with the massage oil in it, you know, to break the silence. And what did I get for my efforts?

NOTHING!
That's what!

The freakin' box was EMPTY!
Empty, I say!
What the Hell kind of rip off bullshit is that?!

I looked at my daughter and said, "I think we should go back in and complain!" - being my offspring, she was all for the idea of witnessing that.

Grant: "Get in the car..."
Me: "Fine. I'll write them hate mail instead."

If any of you B&I employees are reading this:

Dear Barnett International Corporation,

You suck. We hate you.
Oh, and you owe me $0.75

Signed,
A Disgruntled & Disappointed Dispenser User
And that, is my condom story.

Oh, and by the way - the tattoo box contained a scorpion and a cartoon kitten playing with a green tennis ball...I don't even want to know who thinks that's the ultimate in Fun & Fantasy...

I don't even know what to say about this...

By Brian Alexander
msnbc.com contributor
updated 8:59 a.m. ET, Thurs., April 23, 2009

Vaginas with teeth — and other sexual myths
A romp through history reveals a host of absurd beliefs once held as truth

Your genitals are connected to your nose. Women are infertile males. Orgasm is necessary to make a baby. Masturbation leads to insanity. Menstrual blood is actually sperm gone bad. At one time or another, medical science believed all these statements. What is it about sex that allows the imagination of doctors and the scientifically-minded to run free?

A walk down the memory lane of misbegotten sex theories reveals that such fanciful “truths” often grow from the fertile soil of bias and prejudice.

Aristotle, for example, believed that “a boy actually resembles a woman anatomically speaking and a woman is, so to speak, an infertile male. She is female because of a kind of inadequacy being unable to concoct semen from nourishment … owing to the coldness of her nature.”

The idea of a woman as an imperfect man was popular in western thought for more than a thousand years because most of the writers were men.

“That’s the most plausible theory we have: fear of female sex," said Rachel Maines, visiting scholar in Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies and author of “The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, Vibrators and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction.” "I mean, the vagina dentata [vagina with teeth]? If there was ever a male paranoid fantasy, that was it.”

The idea of a vagina with teeth dates as far back as Greek mythology and is rooted in the idea that the female body has hidden, dangerous secrets and that a man who has sex with a woman may risk castration. (While largely the stuff of fiction, such as the 2007 movie "Teeth," at least one real-life case has been documented. In 1989, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology reported a benign embroid tumor containing teeth growing in the wall of a woman's vagina.)

But it's not just women who are the targets of absurd sexual myths. When the female prioress and early medieval medical thinker Hildegard of Bingen wrote “the strength of man in his genital member is turned into poisonous foam,” she wasn’t exactly giving sex with men a big thumbs up.

Myths about sex in the western world waxed and waned depending largely on the state of sexual attitudes. The more restrictive the view of sex, the more prominent medical sex myths became.

Dangerous sex
By the 1800s, fear of one gender or another had turned into fear of sex itself. Doctors promoted the idea of danger.

While advice to the newly-married up until the 1820s and 1830s often included the idea of female pleasure and the importance of clitoral stimulation, things soon began to change, said John S. Haller, professor emeritus of history and medical humanities at Southern Illinois University and author of “The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America.”

After about 1840, Haller said, advice manuals began to focus on the vagina. “You begin to see manuals saying that women should not be experiencing that pleasure, and if they do, they are exposing themselves to harm.”

Much of this anti-sex attitude was rooted in economic class prejudice after the industrial revolution started creating the bourgeoisie. The poor, the uneducated, immigrants from southern climes, were the types to enjoy sex. Proper people didn’t.

“The ‘Irish maid’ is a good example,” Haller said. “Bourgeois people did not want them to nurse their children because of what might be carried through the breast milk; it could bring the bad traits of the Irish into the home of the Anglo-Saxon family.”

Masturbate and you'll get flat breasts
Anti-immigrant attitudes even affected the willingness of women to discuss sexual health complaints. “There was a very Protestant focus,” Haller explained, to distinguish oneself from the more swarthy, and lusty, recent arrivals. So “women were not encouraged to discuss or complain about the problems of menopause because they’d be admitting in a public way that they had abused themselves in their youth” since masturbation was thought to bring on menopause later in life.

Masturbation has a been a bugaboo for thousands of years; the Catholic Church still regards it as a disorder. In the Victorian era, after French physician Francois Lallemand published his “Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Spermatorrhea,” something of a medical panic ensued. Doctors at a Boston insane asylum reported that inmates there masturbated and soon a flood of anxious young men flowed into clinics fearing insanity, wasting, and even death.

Self-pleasuring, a typical advice manual stated, leaves “the nerves wasted and depleted … the entire nervous system will eventually become shattered and ruined beyond all hope of complete recovery.”

Girls could be affected, too, though to a lesser degree. “Girls who have followed masturbating habits … show usually strong indications of it in the failure of their glandular development,” an advice manual stated. “Such persons are apt to be flat-breasted, or, as we term it, flat-chested."

Joy on the job
When mechanical sewing machines arrived, a few lucky women using a model with two foot pedals found that by rubbing their thighs together, they could reach orgasm, which could certainly make working in a garment factory a little more fun, but it also posed a danger. “Doctors thought all sewing machines were bad for women,” Maines explained. “They thought the women would turn into lesbians.”

Some of the advice was an attempt to apply science to what had been largely superstition or religious stricture. But science often fell flat.

In 1897, for example, German physician Wilhelm Fliess published a treatise called “The Relations Between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Aspect of Biology.” In it, Fliess expanded on an idea he’d been developing for some time, the “nasogenital reflex.”

Perhaps with the bias of his field — he was what we would now call an ear, nose and throat specialist — Fliess argued that the nose was intimately connected to our genitals and that problems with one could manifest as problems in the other. He identified a region inside the nasal cavity, a bony projection called the nasal inferior turbinate, as being especially influential.

He described a set of symptoms like headaches, aches and pains, breathing difficulties, disordered mood and difficult menstruation in women matching the 28-day female cycle (men had a 23-day cycle, he said), and argued that these symptoms often began in the nose. The result could be a full-on neurosis.

Click for related content
Her husband feel guilty after sex. What gives?
After the hysterectomy, her engine is revving
‘Sex surrogates’ put personal touch on therapy
Adultery site not the end of marriage
Best of Sexploration: Where are they now?

Fliess and his friend Sigmund Freud decided that one could treat the neurosis by huffing cocaine. Freud did so and it seemed to work. Voila! You could treat a genital problem — and the mental illness those problems create — by treating the nose. So Freud had Fliess operate on a woman named Emma Eckstein. Fliess removed Emma’s turbinate bone, but left a wad of gauze behind which created an infection. When the gauze was finally removed, she nearly bled to death. The episode left her disfigured for life.

Haller cautions against what he calls “presentism” when we look at such wrongheaded episodes. For example, while much of the Victorian era advice was laughably wrong, it was also progressive. An admonition that women should deny their husbands sex for up to eighteen months after the birth of a child was really a way for women to gain control of their own bodies.

We shouldn’t be too smug about our modern sexual sophistication, he said. Medical science may be getting better at figuring out what makes us tick, but it’s safe to say that some of the dogma we think is true now will later turn out to be false.

Brian Alexander is the author of the book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction," now in paperback.
© 2009 msnbc.com

----------

Seriously, for once, I don't even know where to start.......................

pillow talk

We have a California King bed.
It's 6' x 6'.

Which means that I have all this extra space and Grant is still short two inches of space unless he sleeps diagonally; which I don't ever see happening.

I sleep on my left, he sleeps on his right.
I have to be the closest one to the door.
He likes facing a wall.

I'm the more violent one and if someone breaks in - I'm going to be the first one looking for blood since I'm the Mom and that's how we react if we think our kids are in danger. Aside from that, I don't tend to be the one that sleeps as if I've slipped into a coma.

The way I see it is if someone breaks in, being the female and not straying from our instinctual belief that if that person isn't dead - we're going to have to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulder waiting for them to come back and finish the job - me being closest to the door is the best bet.

If I'm the one that happens to be whacked instead, Grant should be awake enough at that point to complete the killing-of-the-intruder task.

He would be really fucking pissed if someone killed my ass.
He waited 25 years to date me.

As luck would have it, my left side sleeping requirement and the door co-exist nicely together with his habits and the whole wall facing thing.

Win/win.
If we ever rearrange the room, we're both totally screwed and we'll probably have to break-up or go to counseling.

Okay, you've got the general layout now, right?

Now picture four foot of open space between us.
laughs...
This is NECESSARY!

It's been pointed out to me in 4,000 horrendous different ways that I sleep like a wild animal. He's all cocooned in his little straight line and I... am not.

I've heard it all.
These are among my favorite:

"Did a hurricane come through the room when I wasn't looking and just whip through your side of the bed?"

"You're like a bird. I expect to wake up and find sticks and leaves in the bed because you're obviously building a nest..."

"Are you alright? Because it looks like there was a 12 person struggle going on up in here!"

"Really, did you have an imaginary fight in your sleep with a pack of wolves? I can't tell who won."

Meanwhile, if there was enough room between the bed and the wall for him to slide out from underneath the sheet and his pile of blankets and comforter - his side would look like it was never slept in. I always joke that I'm going to get a comforter with a stripe down his side and I guarantee you that that stripe will stay in a single straight line.

I don't know how he does it.

I finally broke him of the BAD HABIT of trying to cover me up while I'm asleep. To do this, he would literally yank out bits of comforter I was laying on. NOT gently either, might I add.

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW FUCKING ANNOYING THAT IS?!

I understand that gesture is suppose to be very sweet.
I really do.
I do!
Seriously!

Great!
You get credit for the thought.
Now, STOP WAKING ME UP AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE.

Oh my God.

I understand that you like to be covered to your ears and evenly under every square inch of smooth blanket and all that.

Me?
I could live without a flat sheet - entirely.
They're just a pain in the ass.
You'll find that kicked to the bottom of the bed by morning.

I want my blankets swirled around me like a nest (no comment) and I want one leg sticking out from under my comforter with the rest of it trapped under me. I LIKE IT! I know where everything is! If I get cold, fuck me - eventually my dumb ass will twist into a position where more of me is covered. Whatever.

I'm totally fine with whatever I'm wearing hanging off my shoulder and my pillow squashed in unrecognizable shapes under my head. I'M HAPPY!

I'm FINE.
Don't touch me unless you mean business!

It took a YEAR to make him understand that trying to sort out my disaster area and waking me up, was not a pleasantry to me - it just makes me cranky. For no reason. There is NO benefit.

Then I just lay there wide awake trying to figure out why the hell he insisted on doing that before he left the room and went about his day all happy like.

I lay there and seeth because NOW I'm miserable, cranky, tired and questioning what the hell I did that you're getting even with me for. Stop it!

hiss...

Anyway, for some odd reason, Grant and I share some of the same idiosyncrasies. I don't know why. Maybe it's because we shared the same water supply as kids. I don't know. But for whatever reason, we're both a little retentive about reading before sleeping.

To ME, this means shutting up and reading quietly to myself.
To GRANT, this means announcing to me every little fact he reads about that he finds interesting in the news.

The following is a recreation of the conversation that took place the last time...

Grant: "Hey, listen to this"...
putting my magazine down to look at him...

"Research confirms a theory first put forth in 1973 that magnetic fields drive both the in fall of matter into black holes and the production of light energy created by the process."

Me: Great.
goes back to reading said magazine...

Grant: "A black hole's gravity is enough to draw matter in and keeps it spinning in a stable accretion disk. But before it can take that final plunge, the material must lose some of its rotation speed, called angular momentum."

Me: nods

Grant: "Many people are familiar with the phrase 'bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, and bodies motion tend to stay in motion,'" said study team member Jon Miller, an astronomer at the University of Michigan. "The same thing is true for orbiting bodies — they tend to stay in stable orbits, unless acted upon by a force."

Me: trying to figure out a polite way to say I don't care... I just smiled instead and then went back to reading...

Grant: "If angular momentum from the disk were not dissipated away, gas in the accretion disk would circle the black hole forever in a stable orbit, like the planets around our sun."

Me: I'm not even looking up from my magazine at this point, or responding... he's all into space and I don't know jack about it other than what I've learned from him... I stick firmly to the earth and interest in our bodies of water...

Grant: "Magnetism's role - Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the researchers studied GROJ1655-40, a binary system made up of a seven-solar-mass black hole that is stealing gas from the surface of a normal star. The siphoned gas accumulates in an accretion disk around the black hole."

Me: staring at the ceiling... one page, I'm just trying to read ONE PAGE...

Grant: "The spinning gas generates its own magnetic field, and this field powers a "wind" of charged particles blowing away from the black hole."

Me: ...all's fair in love and war, right? So I say back...

"Now they have a birth control ring that you put in and don't have to remove it for three weeks. It offers a full month of pregnancy protection by delivering a continous low dose of hormones. It's called NuvaRing. HEY! Did you know that you can get text messages to your phone from places like babycenter.com that will notify you when you're likely to be most fertile."

silence... I got my tubes tied 15 years ago... this isn't even an issue, but still, it was fun to say out loud...

10 minutes later
he must have forgotten...

Grant: "The wind, which Chandra detected, transfers angular momentum from the inner regions of the disk outward. This slows down some of the spinning gas, allowing it to fall onto the black hole."

Me: "Listen to this question! 'My Guy's condom tends to slip off. Why?" and the response is: Sounds like the condom is too big or too small for his size. While he's thrusting, it either slides away or pops off, explains Mary Jane Minkin, MD, professor of ob-gyn at Yale University School of Medicine. "there's no standard condom size, so have him try different brands and styles until he finds one that stays put," she says. If the rubber tends to come off post ejaculation but before he's pulled out, your guy is likely waiting too long and needs to withdraw his penis sooner. "After orgasm, a guy instantly starts to lose his erection, making the condom loose," adds Dr. Minkin."

more silence
finally...

Grant: "Did you really just read the answer to that question as being, "The condom is too big or too small"?

me being all proud of my profound and insightful reading material... I pipe in with a resounding...
..."Yes!"

deafening silence

Grant: "The magnetic field also causes turbulence and friction to build up within the disk. The friction heats up the gas to millions of degrees, causing it to glow brilliantly in the ultraviolet and X-ray bands."

twitch

Me: "Know what a pale or whitish tongue usually means? Iron deficiency. Shows up more often in vegetarians and vegans, since top sources of iron are red meat, poultry and shellfish"

stare
silence...

Grant: "The researchers believe magnetic fields play an important role in the activities of black holes of all sizes, whether they are stellar-mass ones whose accretion disks are fed by companion stars, or even galaxy-anchoring supermassive monsters whose disks are formed from the stellar winds of multiple stars. The finding should also apply to other objects that have accretion disks, such as neutron stars and white dwards, Miller said."

Me: "Gradasil is the only cervical cancer vaccine that helps prevent against 4 types of HPV; two types that cause 70% of cervical cancer cases and two more types that cause 90% of genital warts cases. It's only for girls between 9 and 26 though. They don't know how long it'll last either."

clearly I was being too quiet...

Grant: "What are you reading NOW?!"
Me: An Astroglide ad.
Grant: ...

Me: "Want to know the names of date rape drugs?"
Grant: "Not really..."
Me: "GHB, Rohypnol and Ketamine"
Grant: ...
Me: "Hey! A G-spot article! I MUST read this. Shhhh..."

it's quiet...
then...

Grant: "We already know that disks around some young stars are driven by [magnetic] processes," Miller told Space.com. "It would not be a major surprise if all accretion disks rely on internal magnetic properties, at least partially."

Me: "Did you know that 1 in 5 people in the United States over the age of 12 are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes? That's like, 45 million people"

Grant: "OKAY! Can we go to sleep now?!"
Me: "Sure"

So, what have we learned from this story...

One...
It's best to read to yourself at night in this house.

and...

Two...
He reads intellectual stuff at bed time.
I apparently read smut.