Hope You're Not Feeling Too Sexy, Because It's National Graham Cracker Day!

Graham crackers were invented to keep you from masturbating.

Happy Weekend!

Today is National Graham Cracker Day, and if you know anything about graham crackers, it is probably that — much like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes — they were invented for the purpose of preventing masturbation. Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian preacher who was real, real het up about people eating meat, people drinking alcohol, and, perhaps most of all, people masturbating.

What’s actually kind of interesting and unexpected, however, is that he was a bit of a feminist. In fact, there were at least two documented riots over the fact that he was preaching about equality between the sexes — in Portland, Maine, and Providence, Rhode Island, two cities we now consider quite liberal (though, to be clear, you can’t blame that shit on the amount of Italians in Providence, because we did not get there until many years after he died; in the early 19th Century it was all WASPs). Granted, his vision of “equality” was not so much “women should be able to have regular human rights like voting and whatnot!” but rather “Everyone should be equally celibate! And not eat meat or any food with weird additives in it!” which did not go over especially well with the menfolk. At the time, the general consensus was that bread should be super white even if that meant adding chalk to it, men should do whatever the fuck they want, and women were supposed to be as holy and virginal as possible. It was a bad time for everyone, if you ask me, but most were okay with it.

I actually try not to be too hard on the Temperance Movement writ large these days, because so much of it was rooted in women not wanting to be abused by their drunk husbands at a time when there were no battered women’s shelters, no easy divorces and often no way for women to support themselves and their children without a husband. And that’s fucking fair! As much as I love my gin, I can see how that would have been a problem.

Anyway! Your first present for today is a song I can’t actually watch in the bar where I’m at right now, but which I’m sure is a jam.

Also too, I have not vetted this (again, I am writing in a bar while some dude is very aggressively hitting on me), here is a bunch of clips of recently deceased actor Julian McMahon’s best moments as Cole on “Charmed,” one of my very favorite CW type shows ever. I am doing a super good job, for the record, of not texting the dude I used to date who looked a lot like him (please clap!).

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