Are we a society of Shoshannas?
3. After Jessa discovers that Shoshanna has been watching her have window-sill sex with her hat-wearing ex-boyfriend, she accuses her of being a “batshit little perv.” Given that the television audience is also avidly watching this sexual encounter, are we not also “batshit little pervs”? Should someone step on our balls?
Jessa is most likely on meth, and if the argument is that by watching a (fictional) sexual experience, we are somehow all voyeurs, than we have a lot bigger problems on our hands. I would probably be thrown in gross jail already for all the To Catch a Predator marathons I’ve sat through. Anyone who watches Law & Order: SVU would be chemically castrated. Also, the news.
Part two of this question deals with Adam telling Hannah to step on his balls. For this, I will refer to a “Savage Love” column from 2005:
I’ve been sleeping with this man for two months. The sex is phenomenal – he loves to eat pussy, he tosses my salad, there’s some digital anal play. That’s all good. My problem is, he’s into rough ball play. It turns him on when I knee him in the balls, punch them or squeeze them. I’m OK with all this, but he wants me to “pop his balls.” He’s a young-ish doctor, so he knows this is dangerous. I don’t want to make him a eunuch but he’s hell bent on me “destroying his manhood.” Should I do it for him? He says he doesn’t want to have kids and that he doesn’t care if he loses his ability to have an erection or ejaculate. Should I do this for him? I’m 23, if that helps.
Reluctant Ball-PopperPopper,
Before you destroy your boyfriend’s manhood, RBP, there’s one question you need to ask yourself: how will you feel if five years or, hell, five minutes after you do this for him, your boyfriend decides it was a big mistake? And I promise you, RBP, if you go through with this, your boyfriend will come to regret it – and when that day comes, he will resent and/or blame you. So just say no to ball popping, RBP, OK?
And while I don’t think it’s possible to have a healthy, long-term relationship with someone so insanely self-destructive, RBP, I can understand why you might want to keep seeing this nutjob in the short term (phenomenal sex, enthusiastic cunnilingus, tossed salads, etc). There are ways to indulge his castration fetish without destroying his balls. Buy him a male chastity device (just Google “CB-3000″) and throw away the key. If that’s not extreme enough for him, chemically castrate him by injecting him with Depo-Provera, a drug that sexual predators are sometimes ordered to take and one he could, I presume, prescribe to himself. Maybe after experiencing a short-term, reversible castration, your boyfriend will conclude that castration is a better fantasy than it is a reality.
In conclusion, never step on a man’s balls, unless it is figuratively. Even if he asks you too. It could literally kill him. Hannah’s reaction “Are you fucking kidding me?” was an appropriate response. So was taking a $100 from his dresser, because she deserves it!
4. A flashback sequence is set at the Galactic Safe Sex Ball at Oberlin in 2007. Were you at this particular event? Is the party favor that makes Marnie so fucked up really called a “poprati” with a Jell-o shot on top, or did I hear that wrong? What is it? Can you hook me up?
I think it’s a pot brownie with a jell-o shot on top, which is something I’ve never personally experienced. However, if you look closely in the background of that scene, you can see me and my taking turns being blindfolded and swinging at a Klonopinata, which is like a regular pinata but filled with delicious pills. It is also true that all our parties were in someone’s off-campus basement, and we only listened to the Scissor Sisters. Every three months in Brooklyn, alumni gather for a reunion where they drink 40s, eat too much pot, and then spend the rest of the night giving one another panic attacks. Maybe that was the “poprati” or “pot party” being referenced?
Ira Ames is so confused (HBO)
5. Hannah invites her boss, Rich, to have sex with her because “I am gross and so are you.” But seriously, why does she do this? Why does she subsequently quit what seems like a pretty good job?
Hannah tries to sleep with Rich because Jessa told her too, and Jess is the expert when it comes to healthy boundaries at work. Hannah believes that sleeping with her boss will give her great material for her upcoming collection of personal essays, which she is not wrong about. (“The time I slept with my gross boss” is definitely a New Yorker piece in the making.) After being rebuffed by an older man who had previously shown sexual interest–or at least was really touchy–Hannah is understandably upset. No one wants to be the person to gross to get molested, especially if the molester looks like a rabbi and is best known for playing the dad on Bored to Death. (Or ex-boy scout Stanley Uris in It, with Tim Curry as the scary clown.)
In this scene, it is Rich who acts nonsensically. No boss in history would continue to employ someone with no skill set because she’s “great.” Especially after said employee threatens to seduce her superior, quit, and start a class action-lawsuit against her boss for sexual harassment. In that order. Unless Rich secretly wants his balls crushed, Hannah’s behavior is not only nonsensical, but cause for a restraining order.
