All the Sex That's Fit To Print

You know spring has sprung itself when the birds are out-tweeting the Twitterers (can we call ourselves Twats?), mold spores are hatching with greater fervor than a Glenn Beck soliloquy, and everybody’s offended again. The instigator of this week’s offensiveness is none other than his royal Emineminence himself, the one and only Eminem—otherwise known as our national arbiter of good taste and Zen-love.

Upon release of the video for his new song “We Made You”, the blogosphere blew up in its yawningly predictable cries of misogyny, homophobia, and credophila (the act of leaning on Dr. Dre for musical/street cred). In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap: Kim Kardashian has a bounteous booty, Sarah Palin has boobs, Jessica Simpson is a cheeseburger-inhaling fattie, Bret Michaels is bald, Lindsay Lohan needs to be converted back to the ways of heterospectacularity (as does Portia de Rossi), Dr. Dre is Captain Kirk, and Eminem is an idiot savant shown to the electric chair.

Pulse: a breezy 68.. Nothing new to see here.

What We've Learned: The economy might be in the crapper, but sex still sells just fine. Controversy sells even harder. Put the two together with some Dr. Dre production and our libidos swell up like a tick fattened on the blood of incensed bloggers. Meanwhile, someone’s laughing all the way to the bank.


But for once in his life, Eminem’s been forced to take a backseat to the real Biggest Sex Story Ever This Week. Seth Rogen, America’s favorite bearlike bromantic, stars this week in the dark comedy Observe and Report. And, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve almost certainly heard about one of the film’s scenes—specifically, the sex scene. Or, as it’s come to be affectionately known, the funny date-rape scene. Or something like that, apparently.

Pulse: What happens when mercury explodes? Is there a comparable pulse rate for that?

What We've Learned: Unless we missed a chapter in our “How to be a Person” guidebooks, we’re pretty sure that there aren’t any gray lines in the area of consent. So we’re gonna skip this one, and instead go re-watch season one of Eastbound and Down and learn from the great one—Kenny motherfucking Powers.


Super-Size US
We don’t trust most fly-by-night studies that seem to show up on Fark before they do any of the meatier scientific journals (not that Fark isn’t a scientific institution in its own right), but we do like quoting random bits of half-assed data to our friends. And so it is with a heavy (re: sagging) heart that we do report that Australian women appear to have overtaken their American counterparts in the escalating breast-size race.

“Experts blame the cleavage boost on obesity, contraceptive pills and artificial hormones.” Or, as they themselves put it—obesity, contraceptives, and hormones—Australian for titty!

Pulse: Unverified, due to excessive hormonal supplements.

What We've Learned: Oh, great—now we’ve outsourced our boobaliciousness!


Smut Comes Out of the Closet...and it’s in German?
But this week’s sex didn’t come solely from the screen—this week saw two books so smutty that Anderson Cooper has to be blushing. Cooper’s mother, renowned socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, came out of her own closet this week with advance copies of her first erotic novel, Obsession: An Erotic Tale, which the New York Post agreeably pronounced “pure, elegant, unadulterated smut”. We hear there’s at least one full-on around-the-world featured in there, so we’re going to offer our own subtitle: Gloria Vanderbilt 360°.

But that’s not the only smut crashing our shores this week. Charlotte Roche imported her German smash novel Wetlands, complete with all its WTF-ness intact (the ‘f’ stands for ‘filth, feminism, and ficken’), asking the question “what’s grosser than gross?”

Pulse: Socialites; 250—but that might be partially due to the presence of anticoagulant agents. Germans; 300.

What We've Learned: Anderson Cooper would probably like to shove his mother into the closet along with his sexuality. The Germans, on the other hand, never pass up an opportunity to shock and revile.


Your Weekly Sarah Palin Update
In this age of super-conductive telecommunication, we tend to conduct our flame wars by proxy: on message boards, social networking sites, and by decapitating the pixilated effigy of your enemy on Second Life. That’s why it’s almost refreshing to see an old-fashioned family blood feud ooze itself out onto the headlines and talk-show circuit—just like the good ol’ days. Thus, for the umpteenth week in a row, the sexed-out row between MILF of the Year Sarah Palin and excommunicated teat-suckler to the Alaskan throne Levi Johnston escalated up a few more notches, as Johnston made the talk-show rounds. On Tyra, Johnston did precisely what you’d expect: he gave mostly monosyballic answers, shrugged a lot, and looked nauseatingly uncomfortable.

Tyra, for her part, did exactly what you’d expect her to do as well: an effluence of feigned empathy, punctuated by a few condescending knee-pats, and, of course, went straight for the money shot, asking Levi if Sarah Palin knew that the two teens were sexing it up:

“I'm pretty sure she probably knew. Moms are pretty smart.”

Pulse:
• Of Tyra’s creepy batshittery: off the charts
• Of Levi’s 15 minutes: flatlining rapidly
• Of our enduring obsession with the Palin-Johnston blood feud: varies with moon cycles, preponderance of wild game, and the apportionment of Governor Palin’s décolletage: sadly, still insatiable.

What We've Learned: We’ll let Bristol’s pre-Sarah-ized words stand for themselves here: “I don’t want to get into detail about that. But, uh, I think abstinence, is like...like, the...I don’t know how to put it...like...the main...everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.”


It’s All about the O
And speaking of talk shows and smut, this week Oprah took a giant leap forward into the open pastures of progressive sex-education, when she wholeheartedly endorsed providing vibrators to teenaged girls for both sex-ed and safer sex purposes. That weird slam-and-hum sound you heard was the sound of a million housewives slamming their legs shut in contempt, sticking their fingers in their ears, and chanting “la, la la, la, la!”

Moving right along...a Fark-less new study out of Great Britain raises concerns that the over-45 set may be eschewing the articles of safer sex. In the survey, nearly one-fifth of those aged 45 to 54 stated that they had unprotected sex with someone other than a long-term partner in the last five years.

Pulse: Dangerously low.

What We've Learned: That we really don’t want to get a call from Mom saying she’s got herpes.


But we understand that in these times of questionable moral turpitude, one might feel the need to reassess our deepest desires. So, for good measure—or, to re-determine our moral center of WTFedness—Rep. Spencer Bachus (R, Alabama) has compiled his list of Socialists currently in Congress. Unfortunately, he’s not sharing it.

PULSE: Excessively high and kind of throbby, especially if your name is Michelle Bachmann. Because if you’re going to stage a witch-hunt, who better to lead the mob than someone named Bachus?

What We've Learned: We like the old Bacchus better. So we’ll tell you what: we’ll bring the wine and lube; Oprah’s bringing the dildos; Anderson Cooper’s bringing the porn. You bring the dental dams and everything’ll be A-OK.

See you on the other side.