Cosmo: Burning Man Erection Contests Are Really Hard

Tom Anderson at Cosmopolitan brings us a “deep behind the scenes” look at what goes on at Burning Man’s Slut Garden camp.

From Cosmopolitan:

Cosmo: Too irrelevant to make fun of since the '70sThe first boner to rise gets the prize,” says Brad McCray at the start of the event.

McCray is a beast of a man who leads the Burning Man theme camp Slut Garden with his wife of 10 years, Tammy. In front of him, five men stand exposed from the waist down with their scantily clad female partners dancing around them, encircled by a cheering, dust-covered crowd of hundreds. Every man is trying to produce an erection as fast as he can without touching himself. Their partners can encourage the sexletes but not by using their hands.

This is the Speed Boner challenge, the finale to McCray’s fourth annual Slut Olympics. Other events include Deep Throat (a pretty self-explanatory contest that involves a 13-inch dildo), Guess-A-Willy (a blindfolded woman has to identify her partner’s penis out of a lineup of naked men), and a Best Balls beauty contest. Speed Boner is still the biggest draw.

 
 …Slut Gardeners are strictly swingers, married couples who range from their late twenties to early forties and want to experiment. Of the 54 campers staying at the garden, women slightly outnumber men. “There is a lot of cross pollination,” McCray says, but to be clear, they are not polyamorous. “Swingers are looking for sex, and the polyamorous are looking for a relationship.” One year, Burning Man organizers put Slut Garden next to a polyamorous camp. They did not get along. Slut Garden campers were looking to hook up while the polys were working out the complicated geometry of triads, quads, and other romantic shapes.
….McCray made a new rule that contestants “cannot come to Speed Boner with a boner.” 

…Since its inception, the Speed Boner competition has been plagued with difficulties. The first year, no sexlete got an erection. So the second year, McCray decided to let the contestants use their hands. The competition quickly turned into an ejaculation blast, which McCray describes as “grotesque.” Last year, a man came to Speed Boner packing wood. McCray made a new rule that contestants “cannot come to Speed Boner with a boner.”…”it ain’t a bone if it doesn’t stand on its own.” McCray explains the rules to the contestants from Slut Garden’s DJ sound booth: No touching your penis with your hands. Partners can rub on each other but no touching with the hands. And no “insertion,” he adds.

…The dancing turns to grinding as the crowd grows impatient. The women rub their breasts on their partners’ penises to move things along. Perhaps out of frustration, perhaps misunderstanding of what McCray meant by “insertion,” or maybe because they were carried away in the heat of the moment, four of the five women start fellating their partners. A referee disqualifies all of them as Graham taunts them for breaking the rules. The last man standing by default is “Shylar,” a porn producer from Los Angeles. He gets a gold medal for his partial stiffy.

…machismo aside, the pressure of a large stage may make the difficult task even harder, and fewer boners is the last thing Slut Garden needs in 2015.

 

Read the full story here. Congratulations to Shylar for his boner accomplishments.

 

Cosmo Says You’re in a Cult for Losers

by Whatsblem the Pro

Cosmo: Too irrelevant to make fun of since the '70s (Image: Harvard Lampoon)

Cosmo: Too irrelevant to make fun of since the ’70s (Image: Harvard Lampoon)

Anna Breslaw, writing about sorority life for Cosmopolitan:

“Greek life lost me when, as a freshman, I heard a rumor about sorority pledges having to sort Froot Loops for their pledgemasters all night long. In the dark. (I’ve also heard wayyy worse, but I don’t want to scar anyone.) It’s always seemed to me, like Scientology or Burning Man, a cult for the lost, the lonely or the drunk.

Uh oh, Anna. . . a cult for losers, really?

The members of the Burning Man group on Facebook, always notorious for their wonderfully snarky vitriol, seem to have taken notice:

Sam Davidow: A writer for Cosmo bagging on sororities. And drinking. And cultish behavior. And comparing burning man to all three. Let’s see if she wants to go! Maybe she can camp with Krug.

Steve Foxfur Fox: Lost, lonely and drunk? Sounds like a country music cult, lulz.

John William Fairclough: I tried to get lost there, but every time I looked up, I was at Burning Man. Have you ever tried to get lost while you were home?

Sam Davidow: Here’s another gem by her, in which she writes “Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror— visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms. . .

Jake Gin: “How the cancer victim at the center of the AMC series justifies my skepticism of Holocaust survivors” It must be nice to go through life with no hope of ever finding a clue. Ya know, just blissfully babbling away.

Sam Davidow It’s just. . . fuck, it’s mind boggling.

The backlash has just begun to hit the comments on the article at Cosmo’s own website, and promises to swell into a veritable tsunami of amply-warranted Breslaw-bashing, with people weighing in both from the Facebook group and independently. So far, the comments range from civil-but-chilly to absolutely caustic:

Michael Watkiss: Burning man isn’t a cult. And the lost and lonely often have the most interesting stories. But thank you for your casual generalization.

Sam Davidow: “It’s always seemed to me, like Scientology or Burning Man, a cult for the lost, the lonely or the drunk.” I was raised in a cult, and was an alcoholic. I’ve also been to burning man, and you couldn’t be farther off in your analogy. Are you drunk, or just ignorant?

Angi McFarland: So Sam, how often do you read Cosmo? 😉

Sam Davidow: Well, it’s entertaining. Whenever I want broad generalizations of what “all men want”, I give it a look over, ‘cuz if there’s something that I want and don’t know that I want, i wanna know.

Peter EarthBiscuit: I’m so glad you clumped cults, the lost and lonely, drunks and sororities in there with Burning Man. Because that’s all it is! A bunch of lost, lonely, drunk people desperately trying to fuck anything that will increase their social standing and get them a better seat to the burning of the cult god at the end of the week. Bravo, Cosmo has a real gem on their staff and I’m sure they know it. Can’t wait to read your next piece, “How I know you’re a slut because you use your phone in the toilet.”

Hal V J Muskat: Why would author Anna Breslaw want to camp with Delta Gamma at Burning Man anyway? Why does she troll for Scientology? Did she NOT ever get laid at Burning Man? Why not? Could she not get laid AFTER? Why not? Did she in fact, GET LAID at Burning Man? Why?

Anastasia Marie: wtf did I just read. . .

You can join in the fun and comment too, if you’d like to tell Anna Breslaw and Cosmopolitan Magazine just exactly what you think of being told that you’re in a cult for lost, lonely, drunk people. Hurry, though. . . there’s no telling how long Cosmo is going to leave commenting open on this one. Let’s get in there and show some them that if they want burners to read their publication, they need to avoid filling it with the kind of ignorant, insensitive drivel that Ms. Breslaw seems so prone to writing:

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/celebrity/news/insane-maryland-sorority-email