Wednesday,
January 30, 2002
Tongue-Piercing
Declines in Popularity
Tongue-piercing,
the trendy practice made famous in the Martin Steamer film "Ass
Tango", is seeing a marked decrease in popularity. The reasons for
this trend are threefold.
The
Pus Comment Was Hers
The
primary reason for the decrease in tongue-piercing has to do with the actions of
a Seattle woman named Jenni Marlowe. Ms. Marlowe, 27, had been planning on
getting her tongue pierced like her best friend Stacey, but changed her mind at
the last minute.
"Well, on the one hand, I wanted guys to know that I like to give
head," Marlowe explained, "but on the other hand I didn't want to be
gargling with pus from an infected hole in my tongue every night like she did." Marlowe's solution to the problem was novel. Using her
own design, she had a t-shirt created for herself that was emblazoned with the
words "I Like to Suck Cock" in bold red lettering. The concept
took off, and in addition to fellating legions of men she hardly knew, she
quickly began to earn a considerable income by selling her t-shirts to
like-minded men and women. Thus, the decline of the practice of
tongue-piercing commenced.
The
Emperor's New "Enhanced Pleasure"
The
second reason for the decline was the recent dispelling of a certain widespread
myth by John Mulsberry. The 45-year-old Portland club owner was the first
man to report, back in 1976, that tongue-piercing dramatically enhanced the
pleasure of oral sex. In November, 2001, in an article for the Boston
Globe, Mulberry confessed that had he not been so horribly inexperienced at the
time, he might have realized that it was not his girlfriend's piercing that gave
him such pleasure, but that it was in fact the mouth surrounding the piercing.
"I feel bad about it. I really do," stated Mulsberry.
"That's a lot of money wasted for some people." Mulsberry
further speculated that people may have realized on their own that the 'enhanced
pleasure' claim was false; but that nobody wanted to be the fool to admit that
they'd skewered their tongue for the sake of a lie. "And it's not
like any guy's going to tell a girl that it didn't feel good."
Mulsberry continued, "but for the life of me I don't know why anybody ever
listened to me in the first place. I mean, I was smeared in my own shit
half the time. Why the hell would anybody ever listen to a guy smeared in
his own shit?"
The
Danger of Pride
Lance
Gentry represents the third reason for the reduction in tongue-piercing.
He is a 21-year-old heterosexual male who did not realize at the time he was
having his tongue pierced that he would thereafter be identified as a
homosexual. What is unusual in his case, however, is how he reacted upon
learning of the sexual connotations of such a piercing. Rather than have
the metal bar removed from his mouth, he refused to acknowledge that he had made
a mistake, choosing instead to alter his behavior to match his mouth.
"I'm not about to have everybody laughing at me because I'm the idiot that
didn't know what a tongue-piercing's for," Gentry stated. "I'm not
going to lose face over this. So if I have to suck some dick, you know,
whatever."
When asked if he might perhaps actually be quite gay, Mr. Gentry became
defensive.
"I suck cock now, but I'm not gay. I know I'm not gay. I mean,
you go out with your buddies and play a little football, but people don't call
you a football player, do they? Asshole."
