So wait a minute: are you telling me that there's a giant twat with teeth in the middle of the Dune Sea? How come I never saw this before? Coulda sworn there's just sand out there, and... ugh... what an image. Honestly, though, if Freud was right and vagina dentata is a universal fear locked in the subconscious of every human male - a latent image system just waiting to roar out and make us scared of the kitty cats - then I must have been born without that gene. I was probably well into my twenties before the Sarlacc was anything other than just "big hole in the ground." "Slowly digested over a thousand years." "Boba Fett is a loser." "Koos Yuma." Maybe I just grew up with a more kindly vaginal viewpoint. Or maybe Freud did enough cocaine to kill a small horse? Yeah, that thing.

Collecting together the Hunt footage over the weekend put me in a high-schooly frame of mind and I was reminded of something that I honestly haven't thought of in probably close to a decade: why I broke up with my first girlfriend. I was late coming to the party as many of my over-educated under-stimulated brethren generally are, and the Girl in Question had a bit more experience than me and was therefore very exciting and all kinds of "the hot." She had this boyfriend, who we'll here call Biffy, who was a self-styled artist-warrior-poet type who had the smallest penis I've ever seen on an adult male (though his pride of it set the standard of "size doesn't matter" for ever after) and who made the mistake of going off to South America for March break, leaving me all alone with his girlfriend. Push came to shove, yadda yadda etc., and by the time Biffy got back, the Girl in Question and I were making the goo-goo eyes and some tentative smoochies. Biffy was actually okay with this - big Mr. Free Thinker and whatnot, and he'd probably scored like crazy in Cartagena or wherever the frick he was - and he wished us well. But then he slipped in the deuce, the most obvious deuce of all time in retrospect, but I was so patently naive back in those days that I didn't see anything nefarious in his plotting until years later: he said something along the lines of "I hope you can handle her." I gave the blank stare. He expounded: he asked me if I'd ever gone down on a girl. I gave the blank stare again, because - and I'm not 100% sure on this point, but I suspect - I had never heard that term before. (I mean I knew what oral sex was by this point, but "going down" must have given my lexicon the clean slip.) And then, and I remember this very clearly, he mimicked the throes of ecstasy to which his own oral ministrations had caused the Girl in Question to succumb, which involved a lot of screaming and slapping the wall behind him. I sloughed it off at the time, playing confidence I didn't have, and (though it took me a few days to get up to my running speed) I fled shortly thereafter from anything and everything having anything even remotely connected to the Girl in Question. There is nothing in the world that is easier than convincing a teenaged boy that he can't make a girl happy.

Now here's the thing: when I finally did first get around to making a girl slap the walls and bite holes in the pillow cases, this incident must have been (mercifully) completely erased from my mind, because I was not intimidated at all. I count this a dear gladness, because otherwise the freight of Biffy's moment of brilliant sexual terrorism would probably have destroyed something that I otherwise immediately took to like the huppiest duck in the biggest pond in the whole wide world. There's the first time I had sex, and there's the first time I went down, and I have no illusions about which was more fun. No unconscious fear, no conscious fear either. Maybe Freud had a fanged asshole.