ATOMIC DOG

The Atomic Dog is a weekly feature that isn't necessarily about weight training or bodybuilding. Sometimes it's about sports in general, sex, women, or male issues of some kind. At times it's inspirational, but it can also be informative, funny, and even a little weird, but hopefully, always interesting and a little controversial. We hope it reflects the nature of Testosterone magazine in that, just as no man is completely one-dimensional and only interested in one subject, neither are we. If it makes you think or laugh ? or even get angry ? it's served its purpose.

I got a toilet seat for Christmas.

No need to feel sorry for me; I'd asked for one.

My old one was cracked, yellow from the sun, and as cold as Mr. Scrooge's heart, so I was overjoyed when my visiting in-laws put a new toilet seat under the tree.

It's a nice wood one, too; dark oak with a fine finish that'll surely put me in spiritual touch with legendary outdoorsmen and naturalists like Jeremiah Johnson, Daniel Boone, and Henry David Thoreau every time my fine bum hits the xylem. (All those guys probably crapped in a hole in the ground, but you get the idea.)

I look forward to many pleasant hours polishing my wooden toilet seat with Carnauba wax.

But I guess it isn't uncommon for presents to have their icicle-hits-Ralphie-in-the-eye moments, and that was true of the toilet seat, too.

After opening it, I laid it at the bottom of the steps with the intent of installing it on the toilet in the bathroom attached to my upstairs office.

A couple of hours later, I went up to use the bathroom only to discover that the toilet seat had already been installed by my father-in-law, who's one of that dying breed of men from the Midwest who always has a wrench in one hand and some caulk in the other and whose hands are one big callous from never having done a dishonest day's work since he was Baptized.

You're probably thinking that this was a nice gesture, right? Sure, maybe, if it didn't cause me more embarrassment than I've ever felt in my life.

Caligula, Guccione, and Hefner Would Approve

You gotta' understand, no one's ever been allowed in my bathroom before, let alone my office. Maybe your office and bathroom have pictures of your kids or the family schnauzer, perhaps the occasional inspirational poster with some kitty hanging onto a windowsill and the words, "Hang in There" underneath, extolling you to persevere, but not so much with my office and bathroom, the décor of which would probably have been met with approval by Caligula, Guccione, Hefner, or any other perv you can think of.

First there's the slightly damaged, stiletto-heeled, demi-bra'd and crotchless-pantied Real Doll I got when I did an article on the factory. She's hooked to the wall, her pink nipples and anatomically exact pudenda fully exposed to the oxidizing effects of the sun and air streaming in from the open windows. The walls are decorated with works by Sorayama, the Japanese illustrator known for his precisely detailed, erotic paintings of women, many in sado-masochistic situations or poses.

The décor of the bathroom is in the same "motif," if you can call porn a motif. There are various photographs of women bathing or in shower scenes, all naked and highly erotic. And then, then, on the back of the toilet, presumably to make it more convenient to whack off, is a stack of magazines and catalogs, many of which are of "an erotic nature." (In my defense, there are also plenty of copies of The Atlantic mixed in between the porn, along with a copy of The Sun Also Rises.)

And then the embarrassment coup de grace! Next to the mags, a giant, Costco sized bottle of Lubriderm!!!

My father-in-law no doubt thinks my whole office is a whack-off room! Sure, his sick fuck son-in-law buys Lubriderm by the truckload and fist-froths it into a frappe every chance he gets! Shine a black light on the walls and ceiling and the cum streaks would look like a Pollack painting!

It gives the iconic sing-songy refrain from the Christmas Story a whole new meaning!

You'll shoot your eye out, you'll shoot your eye out!

The only thing that would freak him out more is to find a Jeffrey Dahmeresque barrel filled not with floating heads, but with marinating vaginas!

He's no doubt wondering what kind of sick bastard his daughter married!

"Maybe if I shoot some of this silicone caulk down the pervert's pie hole while he's sleeping, the police will think he offed himself..."

He doesn't say a word, of course. He's much too considerate for that. Plus he's probably just as embarrassed as I am. I wish he would say something, though, just so I could at least explain that the presence of the dirty mags is not, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, masturbatory fodder; it's just generic bathroom reading material.

The fact that they're skin mags is pretty much incidental as I subscribe to probably 20 different magazines and the odds are that in any of the multiple stacks of mags around the house, a few of them are going to specialize in female nakedness.

Likewise, the erotic "sculpture" and art is just because I prefer it to sports memorabilia or pictures of kitties and boring landscapes.

And the Lubriderm? Ain't no way he'd ever believe me, but it's for my goddam elbows that, sans liberal amounts of Lubriderm, look like the skin of Grady the Lobster Boy at Coney Island. Putting it on the back of the toilet reminds me to use it.

(Besides, when I really do whack off, it's without moisturizer, oil, or any lubricant, and when the happy-ending masseuse asks me if I want oil or dry, I always choose dry.)

And so the erotica in my office remains the elephant in the room, the one wearing a massive pink strap-on and massaging its nipples with its supple and voluptuous trunk.

Peed on Her Jambalaya

I still haven't talked to him about it, but I did mention it to a group of friends, mostly couples, at dinner a few nights later.

Most of them had a few laughs at my expense, but then one of the women asked if I wasn't worried that my porn-infused office was interpreted by my father-in-law as a signal that maybe I didn't really love his daughter.

"After all, when you're truly in love, you don't want to have sex with other people," she added.

It's a point I've heard several times over the years, one that I've always had trouble digesting. Never mind that simply having dirty pictures on the wall, or looking at porn on the Internet, doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have sex outside your relationship, but I took her statement at face value.

To put her assertion to a small test, I asked my dinner companions, eight of them, if they'd have sex with other people if their spouse said it was okay.

Three of the four women quickly demurred, explaining, in essence, that their husbands (a sorry looking lot, if you ask me) were "all that they needed."

None of the men dared answer, instead choosing to look at their dinner plates and play fork hockey with morsels of food. The one sole female dissenter was my wife (the slut!), who rattled off a list of celebrities she wouldn't mind entertaining.

In an attempt to explore the topic further and get an idea of everyone's perspective, I asked one of the women, an Irish Catholic, what she'd do if her apple-cheeked daughter, now 13, chose to live with a man out of wedlock when she turned 18, "just because she liked sex."

You'd have thought I peed on her jambalaya. She snorted at the notion, explaining that it wasn't possible because they'd taught their daughter otherwise, that it was wrong and besides, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?" Man, I hadn't heard that old chestnut in a long time.

I, of course, realize that society has long taught women that they're not supposed to be sexual without falling in love, but I thought this kind of thinking was dead, if not dying. Likewise, is having lust in your heart towards anyone but your partner really evidence that you're not in love?

Maybe it's just me, but I think this type of thinking has cost a lot of people untold amounts of happiness throughout the ages. Now I'm just some schlub writing his thoughts down in his porny office, but let me throw some thoughts at you.

My Irish-Catholic dinner guest had made her perspective clear. She thought of sex as a commodity, owned by women, to be given in exchange for favorable legal arrangements.

If sex is a commodity, then men may learn that women themselves are commodities.

If women are commodities, they're seen as little more than cattle, or more accurately, chattel. As such, they're seen as having no equal rights and they're considered inferior. After all, how can property be equal, rights-wise or intelligence-wise?

A Gorilla With Two Heads

This is a situation you can trace back, at least in Western society, for a pretty long time.

Need proof? Remember that women weren't even allowed to vote until the 1920's. The notion of a woman as a physician, lawyer, or scientist was ludicrous until practically the 1980's.

Sure, most everyone knew an intelligent woman or two, but they were regarded as anomalies. Consider the following excerpt from France's most respected anthropological journal, written in 1879 by Gustave Le Bon, a student of Dr. Paul Broca's School of Anthropology:

In most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion.

All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.

Further, Le Bon fretted mightily over the rumblings in America that women be granted higher education on the same level as men:

A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera... The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles: on this day, a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of family will disappear.

Is it any wonder that women were considered property, virtually mindless creatures in which you poke with Le Bon-er?

Master's and Johnson didn't study women's intelligence, but they did study female sexuality (and male sexuality, too) in the 50's and 60's. I think they chucked another dildo into the machine-work when they discovered that women enjoyed sex just as much as men, probably more because the lucky wenches were multi-orgasmic.

Boy, that must have messed up some men of the time!

"You mean women actually get pleasure from sex, too?"

Suddenly, men saw their wives as libidinous creatures that might stray when they weren't on a tight leash and this probably strengthened the "sex and love (and consequently, marriage) go hand-in-hand (gland?)" drumbeat.

Food and Sex

The wide acceptance of the birth control pill in the 60's changed things a bit in that it removed one of the social stigmas of out-of-wedlock sex: pregnancy. That and the sexual revolution it fostered went a long way in creating a sexual equivalency between men and women, but it seems that this sexual open-mindedness isn't as widespread as we might think, as the views of my dinner guests might attest.

There have been some other interesting changes, though, one that might be of particular interest to this audience.

I read a paper the other day titled "Is Food the New Sex?" by Mary Eberstadt, in the February/March 2009 edition of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review.

Eberstadt conjures up a typical 1958 household kitchen, overseen by homemaker Mary. Her kitchen is filled with dairy products, red meats, refined sugars and flours. Various canned goods abound. If there's anything fresh on the table, it's probably the lowly potato. If anything concerning food is a sin, it's that you don't leave anything on your dinner plate.

Regardless, what Mary eats and serves to her family is based largely on personal aesthetics. There is nothing moral or immoral about varieties of food.

In stark contrast, Mary, on sex, has some very firm moral beliefs. Sex outside of love and definitely, outside marriage, is verboten. Sexual indiscretions bring punishment, punishment in the form of unwanted pregnancies, disease, and social stigmas. Young girls that get pregnant get kicked out of school and are shunned by their community. She not only doesn't believe men should love men, she probably isn't aware of such relationship constructs!

But let's take a look at Mary's 30-year-old granddaughter, Jennifer.

Jennifer has some very strong moral beliefs concerning food. Her kitchen doesn't harbor any canned goods, she doesn't eat meat or any endangered fish, she abhors genetically altered fruits or vegetables, she avoids dairy, eats tofu, shops organic, and uses a juicer.

Sexually, Jennifer has views that are completely opposite her grandmother's. She thinks living with someone before marriage is a useful "trial run." Sexually contracted diseases are between you and your doctor and for the most part, easily controlled. Sex between two people is pleasurable and doesn't necessarily require love. She has no problems with the concept of gay sex and gay marriage.

Unwanted pregnancies can be "remedied" through abortion and if not, they don't warrant any negative societal stigmas, unless of course you're Quinn Fabray from Glee and your pregnancy gets you kicked off the Cheerios.

Sex is, for Jennifer, all about personal aesthetics.

Explains Eberstadt:

"Moral poles of sex and food have been reversed, Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind, and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse."

Eberstadt's essay makes a larger point about exploring what happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings have all the sex and food—two things she posits are closely connected—that they want, but the part of her paper that interested me was the moral reversal I highlighted since it has some direct and interesting points to add to our discussion about sex and love.

Clearly, there's a generational shift going on. Younger women don't think of themselves as possessions. Their views on sexuality differ from that of their mother's or grandmother's. Do the two beliefs have a causal relationship? Has the fact they grew up in a time where, largely, men and women are treated equally, at least in the workplace, given them a more liberal view towards sexuality?

I believe it has, but let's look at the male viewpoint. When male morality is the issue, words like honesty, loyalty, and integrity come up. When female morality is the issue, it's all about who she's sleeping with and how often.

And where women seem to have adopted a moral stance towards food, men, by and large, remain the same sugar and flour and baby seal-meat eating slobs they've always been.

By and large, their moral stance hasn't flipped all that much, at least as evidenced by what I see and hear all around me. Today's men are still much like Jennifer's grandmother, Mary, except that they believe all those rules about sex outside of marriage or relationships apply only to women, of course.

There appears to be no right answer—at least no right secular answer—to the question of whether love and lust and sex can be easily separated. It appears that sex and love are more fashion than fact, to be determined by the two, three, four, or whatever number of people you're involved with.

And what about my universal lust towards anything in a skirt? What of the idea that I'd love to shove Le Bon-er in just about all of them, if my wife didn't mind? Do I think it diminishes my feelings for her? Hell no. Not a bit.

Now let me sit on my wooden toilet seat and crack open the latest Victoria's Secret Catalog while I think on the matter some more.