4 Awkward Scenarios You Only Tolerate from a Sexual Partner

I remember with great clarity the first time I took a shower and was shocked to discover that my testicles had somehow gotten themselves into a noose and I was choking the life out of them while I bathed. There was a brief moment of utter bafflement as I stared down, unable to see anything besides my resplendent dong and pubic thicket, and pondered if I was having some kind of schizoid episode. Was my scrot afflicted with some kind of virus? Did I have a dick ghost? Was gravity no longer operating around my junk? It was a tense few seconds. Then I realized I had a long hair lassoing my business and I was inadvertently pulling it tighter and everything fell into place.

Getting someone's hair caught up in your tender zones is a workplace hazard in the business of sensual kanoodling. You put your face here, your hands there, a pillow here, and eventually things end up in exotic locations. It's not a big deal for the most part. And although every subsequent time you pull a foreign hair out from your crack you're always just a little surprised to see it, it's like the surprise you feel when you see there's still one beer left in the fridge.

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It's like Christmas had a baby with kung fu movies and you can drink it.

All this being said, I defy you to present any other situation you will ever find yourself in that would not lead you to squeamish, awful discomfort upon finding someone else's hair anywhere near your genitals. If you hit the shower at the Y and get even the barest hint of an idea that someone else might be thinking of letting their hair get near you, you'll clench up tighter than a clam being attacked by an octopus.

If you ever discovered one of your friends' hairs in your ass, you'd be rightly mortified. I'm going to assume women would handle this situation differently from men; perhaps they'd even share the story and laugh about it afterward, while most dudes would engage in some serious panic scrubbing while they desperately tried to piece together how such an unfortunate thing could have occurred. Of course women are also more likely (in my experience) to end up finding an errant pube on the soap or the toilet seat, as opposed to a long head hair choking the life from their junk, so maybe that's the trade off, but at least it's still arguably familiar. If you just run afoul of a strange hair, forget about it. I found a stray hair on my jeans after being on a bus once and I rubbed my entire body against a brick wall to get it off rather than touch it because in my mind everyone I don't know likely has crabs that have herpes. Is that normal? Probably not.

According to most polls on the subject, flying, spiders, and snakes are three of the most common fears in the world. Things like ghosts, public speaking, dogs, and other predictable phobias pad out the lists. I've long had a fear of people using my toothbrush. If I think anyone has used it, I will just throw it out and get a new one. If it touches the floor, it gets thrown out, too. Why? Because it's for cleaning my mouth. I don't want the decayed food particulate of anyone else's head holes coating the bristles and potentially finding their way into my mouth. I feel like it's basically on par with taking a hobo's face in your hands, forcing him to smile, and then thoroughly licking his teeth and gums. I understand it's not really like that at all -- why should it even be a hobo? That's just how I feel.

Chances are, no matter how less insane and neurotic you are, there's definitely a double standard in life when it comes to your personal grooming products. If your special someone uses your toothbrush, you may not immediately microwave it within a bowl full of bleach and then throw it in the garbage afterward anyway, but your reaction will absolutely be different than if you have guests over for a party and you discover some random drunk in your house brushing his teeth with it.

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"At first I was just brushing my teeth, but before I knew it, it was all up in my ass."

When a loved one uses your toothbrush, you sigh, maybe not even audibly, and you stare at it, and then you rinse it for a lot longer than you normally would, and then you try to focus on something else until you're sure it's going to be as sanitary as it ever was. Likewise if they use your deodorant: There's that brief moment of feeling like you've been violated -- one that's extra special for the ladies when they find that errant pit hair I mentioned earlier mashed into their Lady Speed Stick -- and then you shrug it off.

The only time I'd ever allow a stranger to partake of my toothbrush and deodorant willingly would be in some kind of apocalyptic scenario in which I was forced to bond with another human being, Riggs and Murtaugh style, and even then, he can just have my toothbrush, I'll use a twig and some baking soda. The deodorant I am willing to wash off in between uses. Again, this may be extreme neuroses on my part, but let's be reasonable -- isn't sharing a toothbrush a bit like waiting for someone to wash their ass with a washcloth and then rinse it clean and hand it to you for you to do the same? There's no reason for that. We're not animals.

If you were to list some of the most horrible things you can ever run afoul of on a city street, somewhere nestled among roadkill and vomit would be a stained mattress. We've all seen them on the side of the road or in alleys; this wizened, yellowed relic looking like a portly, depressed murder victim discarded by society and rightly loved by no one. And you would never dream of touching one ever because a used, filthy mattress is the physical embodiment of the sound the person in the stall next to you makes in a buffet restaurant washroom. It's the manifestation of everything you don't like about other people in a conveniently sticky, musty form.

Human stains are the worst kind of stains, and ones Tide still refuses to address in their commercials (with the exception of bloodstains, which they never really go into because let's just keep that between us). Despite the fact that we all have the same fluids for the most part, we tend to only want to be involved with our own and those of a few chosen outsiders. A lot of this stems from the fear of disease, and rightly so -- the last thing you want is some dude at Subway making a cold-cut combo for you while his ears and nose drip fluids all over your salami and end up giving you Legionnaire's disease or yeast sclerosis.

When it comes to your own bed, there's a lot you're willing to put up with, especially when factoring in what causes any number of those stains to appear. The erotic fluids are only allowable when you have an active part in producing them, which is why no one ever wants to watch one of those investigative reports of a hotel when they bust out the black light because it makes us all grossly uncomfortable. We all know strangers humped in that bed, we just want to believe it's been sanitized since then. The bed, the shower, the carpet, the writing desk, the balcony, the coffee maker -- all of that has been sanitized. We believe that. We need to believe that.

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"Do you need any more towels? The towels are made of sperm-covered scabs."

Only with someone we have a sexual relationship with will we ever tolerate lying in a puddle. And even then you should probably change the sheets, but we've all had that 4 a.m. blitz that ends with dehydration and head trauma and we're not firing on all cylinders so we just pass out and when we roll over there's a shucking sound as the sheet peels away from our bare flesh. Right? Right.

A fart's existence gets exponentially more offensive the closer to you it is when it's born. Fart across the room? Eh, whatever. Fart next to you in an elevator? Fuck that person and their rancid ass. But the rules fly out the window when you find yourself lying on your side late at night and you notice, a split second before it happens, the ass of the person you're sleeping with, all bare and warm and pleasant, nestled up against your flesh. Then the fart comes, and because they're so close, you can actually feel the stink hit you. The stink literally depresses your flesh and ripples across you and you just take it. Sure, you might scooch over a bit and make a terrified face there in the dark all by yourself, but you're not getting out of bed. You're going to hold the covers a little more tightly so that it can't creep up into your face and you're going to lie there. Warmer than you were a moment ago. Warmer and sadder.

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That's it, just relax, let the fart coat you like a damp rug made of chalupas.

The sleep fart is one of the great, quiet tragedies of our time. No man is going to wake up his girlfriend or wife to let her know she just farted into the small of his back, barring those who thrive on confrontation and/or are in the death throes of a failing relationship. If you're happy and in love still, you know she doesn't want to know she farted into the small of your back and will resent you for even mentioning it, and even if you suspect she's actually awake and just pretending to be asleep out of shame or humiliation, you'll still just lie there. The only time in your life when you willingly accept being someone's gas sponge.

The only other times I can think of when you might accept someone farting directly on you involve being in prison or some kind of underground German club, but those are really niche scenarios and don't apply to the general theme here.