When I was 14 years old, my mom apologized for having me circumcised as an infant.

I was in the back seat of the car while my dad was driving, and though I don’t quite remember how the issue came up, I do remember feeling, naturally, horribly awkward about discussing my penis with my parents.

My mom said it hadn’t been explained well by the doctors, and that once the nurse brought me back to her with my “fists clenched and white,” she knew she’d made a mistake.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“I don’t think about it — can we just change the subject?”

I didn’t even know what an uncircumcised penis looked like. I knew something about it having skin that would cover the tip, but I couldn’t picture where that skin attached. Did it just hang down from the head like a second scrotum or an earlobe?

The mysteriousness of it turned to a perverse curiosity, and it happened that my first boyfriend, who I dated when I was 19, was uncut. By then I’d learned what to expect by watching porn, but I couldn’t have predicted how turned on I’d be to see an uncircumcised penis in the flesh. The shaft seemed more thrust forward and determined, without that circular scar in the middle that would break up the shape, and I loved the way my boyfriend’s cock could tuck itself into a sheath when flaccid — it looked just as hot to me then as it did hard. (read the full article)

“We can’t focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we’re constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years.”

– Matt Taibbi

It’s been two weeks since we checked in with Celebrity Psychic, Miranda Celeste-Walters, about the inner worlds of Hollywood’s hottest studs. We needed our fix, so we called her direct line to ask for a personal peek into the daily dalliances of heartthrob, Pierce Brosnan. Here’s the revealing interview that transpired:

Nightcharm: So what can you tell us about Pierce?

Miranda Celeste-Walters: I can tell you that he’s eating a lot of crackers these days, and I don’t know why. (laughs) I’ve just been feeling this from him. These could be health-oriented crackers.

NC: So more likely, these are Triscuits and not Cheese Nips?

MCW: Well, if you compare the nutritional data of Triscuits versus Cheese Nips, you’re going to find a lot of the same things. You’re going to be shocked at how similar they really are. We’re only talking about a 30 calorie difference, per serving, for instance. These crackers, for Pierce, are not Triscuits or Cheese Nips. Maybe Vegetable Thins. (read the full article)

Arab men are now one of the hottest niches in gay porn.

The niche is not exactly new; it is the Arab nature of it — primarily those young Arabs who have flocked to Europe for work — that gives it a new face.

Visual Aids? Above are several scenes from Arab Men (Part I), one of the most popular titles in this category; at right the porn star Huessein, who through his adopted porn name and porn bio promotes his Turkish ancestry and who set off a comments war in these pages when we dared to describe him — and please don’t start up again — as “a beautiful ugly man.”

But the niche itself — well, it’s a classic archetype of the erotic imagination.

The Great Dark Man, Quentin Crisp used to call this eternal figure. Not exactly dreamboats, but dream brutes.

The Great Dark Man, while never fully detailed in Crisp’s brightly-lit epigrammatic prose, could be readily inferred from the writer’s autobiography The Naked Civil Servant.

The politically correct reader is certain to disagree with me, but it seems clear that our fey, outré Quentin had a rather Jane Eyre-ish sense of himself — as a lowly, compliant substitute female — whom this Great Dark Man would set off, as black velvet sets off pale but completely artificial pearls. (read the full article)

Beware Nightcharmers!

The evil bunnyman is back to haunt our Easter morning dreams.

Not one thing or another, he appears as a sort of manthing, a creature with buff body and hellish costume head.

How many men have been led astray by this sinister hallucination, who comes always during the nighttime of the soul, chatting James Stewart out of his mind in Harvey or opening a portal into yet another mad world for Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko?

It was the bunnyman, was it not, cinema scholars, who sent Jack Nicholson right around that final bend in The Shining when the spooky cottontail was spied out of the corner of the eye, sitting eerily on a hotel bed in full head-to-toe rabbit suit, about to give a blow job.

Oh, evil is the evil bunnyman. How evil? Just ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall. (read the full article)

She’s a certain character type played by actresses of a certain age in a certain type of horror movie genre.

She’s a Horror Hag.

After all the big bugs, saucer men and pod people of the Eisenhower Era horror movies had abdicated the throne, the Horror Hag became Queen of the new tide of terrors made up of Psychos, Bad Seeds and Peeping Toms.

This matronly malefactor embodied all the mistrust toward Picket Fence Babylon we’d come to harbor. Like chocolate cookies laced with gilt-edged razors, her nurture instinct had grown sick, delusional, deadly.

While her subgenre may have largely fallen by the wayside, the Horror Hag’s shadow still remains in popular culture. Every year there’s a notable real-life contender who takes a cue from the big screen and proceeds to go publicly bat shit and just dares us to bar the door at Thanksgiving.

This year it’s erstwhile Psycho-Biddy and Oklahoma Legislator Sally Kern (above right: upper left pic) who seems to be clutching like mad for the current title of Hag Supreme. (read the full article)

Homo-sploitation? Homo-fraternization?

When dealing with a certain sector of the hetero male population, the line gets too hazy to distinguish. The Crypto-Queer — like the cryptozoological missing links of an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure paperback or Peter Pan’s faction of Lost Boys — is reliant on a dominant male hierarchy and a pack mentality social system. Whether it’s the thrill of pushing a self-imposed boundary or the effects of too much sexual frustration, men (or more technically, man-children) who are the most rigidly heterosexual will flirt with bemusing nasty-boy behavior gays themselves wouldn’t be caught dead acting out.

Sure, it’s a good thing to be in touch with your animal nature. It’s just that some guys maybe need to consider hormone suppressants.

Crypto-Queers have their own highly-specified customs that constantly verge on the brink of all-out gayness but never actually dare to take the plunge. Common markers include: living in close quarters with other members of the herd in the form or brotherhoods and fraternities, spontaneous bouts of public nudity, skinny dipping, circle jerking, pantsing, taking forever to get dressed in locker rooms, rough-housing standing in for actual sexual interplay, spraying one another with beer and putting maximum effort into contorting the body in order to suck their own dicks. (read the full article)

News of the verdict exploded across the Net like a Peter North money shot:
Italy’s highest court ruled last week that a 42-year-old workman broke the law by “ostentatiously touching his genitals through his clothing” and must pay a fine.

The fact that this decision was handed down in Italy — a country that has fostered phallic veneration and worship for centuries — seemed absurd. As Slate pointed out today: “The crotch grab goes back at least to the pre-Christian Roman era…”

Yes, long before Marky (Mark) Wahlberg was pawing his jewels for Calvin Klein or Michael Jackson was proving his manhood by repeatedly cupping his tackle, Italian men were doing corno (the bulge grab) to conjure protection and good luck around their person.

What is it about the male crotch that generates so much self-touching? (We love questions like this). Slate tells us even (read the full article)