Austin, Texas, is considered the center of the known universe, mostly by people who live here. It's not. It also indulges itself in fantasies of being both "liberal" (nobody seems to seriously ask themselves more liberal than what?) and "weird" (Austin now tries to market "weird" in a shop down at City Hall, but mass produced weirdness for sale at City Hall loses its weird-appeal). It's not. And it's not. Austin didn't even make the top 10 on the recent Forbes magazine list of the top U.S. cities to live in as a single person despite the fact that there seem to be lots of single people living here. Austin ranked Number 12 (tied with Minneapolis-St. Paul, whoopee!), several places behind Dallas-Fort Worth (#9) and just ahead of Houston (#14). Austin puts on airs about places like DFW and Houston. Meanwhile, the city is being stampeded by suburbs and condomized by condominiums.
I live in Austin but it is not the center of my universe. I am neither single nor ever planning to be; I am not planning to move anywhere. But I couldn't wait to read the Forbes list. I found San Francisco at the top of the heap. Actually, that was no surprise. I already knew San Francisco was at the top of the heap. Violet Blue told me.
Violet Blue is the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. I found it a curiously and unlikely undertaking for such a staid publication as Forbes to rank top cities for singles. And I would like to be able to say "unlikeliness" and "curiosity" were the reasons I took a look at the rankings, but they aren't. I took a look because Forbes took the even more unlikely step of having a sex columnist write the feature story about San Francisco's wonders. Her column is called "Violet Blue: Open Source Sex." I read it. I like it.
Violet is a sex educator, writer, editor and a bunch of other stuff (including "fetish model"), according to the biography at the bottom of her column. The titles of her books seem to say what they need to say: The Smart Girl's Guide to Porn; The Adventurous Couple's Guide to Strap-On Sex; The Smart Girl's Guide to the G-Spot; The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio (and another Ultimate Guide for Cunnilingus). Violet seems to figure if everybody's doing it, they might as well know what they are doing. And she goes after her subjects with a schoolmarm's bluntness and a good writer's sense of touch. Sometimes she is almost enough to make a straight old guy wish he could wake up singing, "I enjoy being a girl!"
The first Violet Blue column I read was: "Violet and the Dildo Factory." It concerned the search for -- and discovery of -- a better and healthier dildo (Violet says health is a big thing in San Francisco). I was not in the market for one. But it was the kind of column that would have made me go right out and buy one if I were a young woman who has put men in general into proper perspective (i.e. she has better things to do with her time, she's tired of 'It ain't love, but it ain't bad,' always finds healthy relationships -- and this would be a healthy relationship -- just out of reach), but doesn't want to give up the sex part.
"I also got to see the goop being poured into almost whimsically molded penis holes -- and I immensely enjoyed the champagne-like 'Pop!' each faux penis made upon extraction from its mold. Somewhere, almost certainly, every time this particular cork pops, an angel gets her wings."
What woman wouldn't want to order one after a paragraph like that?
Now, just imagine Violet Blue's column in your hometown newspaper (and the Chronicle is the hometown daily newspaper for San Francisco). Imagine these headlines: "Burning Man and safer sex -- Free your mind, but watch out for crabs;" "Madison Young: Bondage Model, Artist, Feminist -- Violet Blue finds out how much porn it took to fund a feminist art gallery;" "Hard Lessons in Local Pathology - What are the Bay Area's most common rectal objects? Violet Blue finds out;" "Conservative Sexual Fetishes: A hardcore guide -- New to right-wing kinks? Violet Blue explains them all."
And, finally, this one, which deserves a paragraph all by itself: "Lesbian Gangs: A National Threat? Bill O'Reilly's homoerotic fantasies go nuclear."
So what does Austin get when it comes to columns in the local newspapers? Well, let's say, it certainly isn't Violet Blue.
Austin has John Kelso at the American Statesman, a newspaper whose recent new design -- heavy on the pastels, even lighter on the news than it used to be, car ads leaking into the news columns -- has rendered it even more meaningless than it was before. Kelso is so chronically unfunny that he makes the late Lewis Grizzard seem like a comic genius. Which he wasn't. As Roy Blount Jr. once said: "Lewis Grizzard is to Southern humor what Stuckey's Pecan Logs are to Southern cuisine" -- or something pretty close to that. Let's just say that column by column, Kelso's archive has accumulated into a huge pile of those Stuckey's pecan logs. The locals claim to like him; I think they are simply stuck with him.
And over at the Austin Chronicle, the "alternative" newspaper, which sometimes seems to confuse unreadable density and teeny-weeny type with serious content, Austin has Louis Black. Famously pompous, he writes a column called "Page Two" in which he dazzles the locals with sentences like this one from his current column: "All of these are the 'you' that you are, and they are from where you come." I am not even sure the Reader's Guide to Hallmark Greeting Cards and a poster with a picture of a kitten on it could help anyone figure that one out. But then Black has the audacity to begin the very next sentence with the words, "Last week, I went on and on...." Last week! Black's "on-and-on" has been going on-and-on for some 479 columns now.
Maybe Austin is lucky it's not Number 1 in the Forbes ratings if somebody like these guys would have been writing about it. And maybe Austin is right where it belongs -- somewhere provincial, a bit lower than Dallas-Fort Worth and a bit higher than Houston.
San Francisco has Violet Blue and is Number 1. Austin is stuck with Kelso and Black and is Number 12. I guess it's just proof that if life gives you lemons they will probably rot in the drawer at the bottom of the refrigerator along with the celery and make you wonder where that smell is coming from. There is no need for a Violet Blue here. Austin simply isn't sexy enough to squeeze.
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A WORD OF CAUTION: I like Violet Blue so much I even read her blog. That is how I found out she did the Forbes article; it is also how I discovered that she did a smart girl's guide to porn piece for Oprah magazine. Violet's blog is not for the faint of heart or the puritanical, unenlightened, thin-skinned, easily offended, sexually uptight, homophobic, etc. Violet's blog is called Tiny Nibbles. But remember. Anything goes. You have been warned.