How to do the wrong thing right
Heeeere’s January! And what time is it, boys? A little louder, please, I can’t hear you: Yes, Sir-eee, it is diet time! So blow the cocaine dust off those Equinox cards, donate your “fat jeans” to Genesis and start whipping that marshmallow-ass back into something half-way tight enough to bounce a Tom of Finland Vibrating Bullet Egg off of come Easter (which arrives, my pudgy deviants, way early this year: April Fool’s Day, to be ironically precise). Work up a good, hard, musky sweat for Howard now, for all you poor dears having to endure whatever queasy, sunrise-walk-of-shame followed that so regretted, fat sloppy smooch ‘neath the mistletoe with, you remember, what’s-his-fuck — that one with the waterbed, in the double-wide, and the pet water moccasin.
Let’s just get resolutely to it.
Dear Howard,
I’m so sick and tired of being single but especially of being pool-boy-poor on top of it. I’m 34. This year, please, I just have to catch a husband — some decent daddy type with money. I think what’s stalling me are these stubborn last 20 pounds; apparently, or so I’m told, I just don’t weigh “wealthy spouse appropriate.” But it’s, like, no matter how hard I hit the gym or how much I starve myself dizzy, I always still look like the Jenny Craig “before” shot. My ex, a skanky snorting razorback, keeps reminding me that of the three ways people make money in this world (earning it, inheriting it or marrying it) my only “dimly still open” option’s the wedded-bliss route. Howard, I try dang hard at obeying the starvation anthem, “Nothing tastes so good as thin feels,” but guess Karen friggin’ Carpenter what? Devil’s food cupcakes with chocolate icing sure do taste a whole belly-bloat lot better than thin feels. So does fried catfish. I’m getting desperate here, man. Do I stand even a flying pig’s potential of snaring a loaded daddy/husband, being just a tad, well, roly-poly? — Skynyrd
Dear Lynyrd,
Ha! No, it’s not at all possible to marry a rich man being overweight—wealthy men only marry the wickedly skinny. It’s those sweet home Alabama Denny’s daddies who land the roly-poly spouses, whereas the consorts of Ritz-Carlton daddies are, one and all, self-starved “social x-rays,” to borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase: One can see lamplight through their bones. Only then does it transcendently become, “What’s yo’ name, lil’ boy, what’s yo name?”! And you might wanna keep this following tasty little cracker in mind whilst you’re dieting down as well, my portly free bird: For every hard-won inch you can actually manage to eviscerate from your waistline, it adds another $100,000 to the annual salary your potential future daddy/husband earns; hence, either starve yourself down minimally 10 lbs. underweight or your only other desperately lazy, white-trash option, Lynette, is to pack on an orgiastic additional 100 lbs., and thus qualify for a bariatric bypass balloon. Of course, that’ll still only put you right back where you started once the tonnage melts off, ’cause ain’t no man of any genuine affluence ever marrying some gaunt queen flaunting stretch marks and flappy, excess skin pockets, either. Last resort, girl, just open your own cupcakes/bait-&-tackle shoppe and refer to your penurious self as, resignedly, a simple man — who’s only just begun.
Dear Howard,
I feel like a moron asking you this: It pertains to preference for sexual positions: My longtime partner passed away just over a year ago. Hesitantly, I’m reentering the dating scene, but it’s just a whole new Bizarro World out there, and my ability to communicate behind-closed-doors is somehow either getting lost in millennial-translation … or I’m just a totally rusted-out wreck. I can still actually recall the differentiation, of course, between a “top” and a “bottom,” but it’s the fifty-shades-of-gray area in between that has me so flummoxed nowadays, especially whenever I hookup with someone who advertises himself as a “versatile top” but then expects me to fuck him (I, the bottom!) the very second we hit the sheets. Howard, could you please acquaint me with this new pecking order — in plain, unvarnished English — as to exactly what the delineations now mean, top to bottom, so that I don’t keep making the same online “position-preference” mistakes over and again? — Ed G.
Dear Edgy,
Will do, but time-out first, for just a moment here, to give all of my, um, less-learned followers a quick briefing on what you’re exactly asking me: “Pecking order” is a colloquial term, kids, for any hierarchal social system; or, in plain, unvarnished Gayville English, “the lucky dude who always snags the boner up his bum first versus the order of those in line who must do the boning of him.” So, with that now all cleared-up, Edge, are you sure you truthfully want me to dispense it to you “straight” here? Honestly, I don’t think you can handle the brutal, sexual-positions’ truth of this chivalry-challenged, shame-free new morals-free dating world; nonetheless, you’d better grab a handy dildo to bite down on hard, ‘cause here it sure dom/sub comes, top to bottom:
TOP: A frustrated, closet-bottom who long ago abandoned any sour hope of getting to be fucked again himself, because either he’s reached that daddy-by-default age territory, where he’s all but required by gay law to exclusively top now anyhow; or, soon as he whips out his schlong, no one’s going to remotely ever let him bottom, regardless (or worse, both).
VERSATILE TOP: An indifferent bottom who’ll nevertheless fuck if just nobody else there in bed is willing to volunteer do the grunt work except him; recalcitrantly, he’ll give whoever stole “bottom” his gamest (albeit robotic) top shot.
VERSATILE (or VERS): A stealth bottom who’ll feign just enough magnanimous bedroom sportsmanship to obligatorily top if he has to, but only if cornered into no other alternative (i.e. bottom) option; however, be forewarned, should he additionally be such an exceptionally bone-lazy bottom as to use the amended “verse,” then by all means, Edge, feel perfectly free to take his cutsie-pie abbreviation literally, and culture-kill your mentally atrophied numbness whilst pounding away at his gaping anus (just hell-for-leather/six-ways-from-sideways!) via reciting poetry to this devious fuckhole for the next solidly sweating, hideous hour, if not two.
VERSATILE BOTTOM: A scheming, anything-goes “farmyard” FF bottom, who always makes damned well certain, beforehand, that whomever the fuck he’s stripping naked for will, by god, top him, make no slut-hole mistake about it.
BOTTOM: The only 100-percent totally honest queer member in this whole entire church-social congregation.
In essence, Ed, it’s not you who’s confused here; it’s just that everybody now has turned twistedly selfish in bed. The culprit is unarguably too much easy free access, 24/7, to internet porn’s every sleazy, sordid, sorry fetish imaginable; consequently, the XXX-extreme sexcapades’ ante just keeps getting upped ever higher, to the point that everything has become pervert-warped in the bedroom, everybody’s turned shamelessly bottom, everybody requires nothing short of a foot-long erection to play with (be it plastic, latex, or real human flesh), and everything must either vibrate or come with electrodes attached or lock your junk up in ecstatically shackled agony: The sole thing that matters from your end, Edge, at all, is putting on a mighty damned good nekkid show for the other dude’s seen-it-all/done-it-all smart-phone audience: The only crime anymore is to be boringly-vanilla in bed.
— Howard Lewis Russell
Do you (attention-seeking freaks and all) have a question — about etiquette, love, life or work — that needs a special spin from Howard? Send your problem to AskHoward@DallasVoice.com and he may answer it.
