The Null Device

They do things differently in Australia's rough-and-ready west, it seems. The leader of the West Australian opposition Liberal Party, Troy Buswell, has admitted to having sniffed the chair of a female Party staffer; the incident took place in 2005, in front of other staff members.

Mr Buswell has previously admitted to snapping a Labor staffer's bra as a drunken party trick and has been accused by retiring Liberal MP Katie Hodson-Thomas of making sexist remarks to her.

Deputy Liberal leader Kim Hames was today standing by Mr Buswell, describing him as a "rough diamond with a robust sense of humour".

(via M+N) ¶ australia bizarre politics sex tories western australia wtf [no comments]

Times columnist Caitlin Moran's latest column takes a very sensibly British view of sex, in particular casting a jaundiced eye over the virtues of the much-vaunted all-night sexual marathon:

Despite decades of insistence that all the best sex lasts 15 hours, spans a minimum of nine positions and has both parties hammering dementedly away at each other's nether regions like a pair of autistic woodpeckers, it seems the truth is a little different. Well, totally different. According to a poll of 50 sex therapists, the most desirable sex lasts, in actual fact, mere minutes. Between 3 and 13, optimally. Or, to break it down another way, a span somewhere between Penny Lane and the second half of an episode of My Family. The time it takes to get from Finchley Road to Wembley Park. Barely enough time to toast a muffin.

Similarly, whilecertainly a great fan of “sexual intercourse” - I find it a refreshing alternative to both arguments and jogging, and believe it to be the only civilised way to end a game of Scrabble - life is, tragically, short. Very short. However wonderful being borne aloft on the wings of ecstasy, etc, may be, there are also an awful lot of Neil Finn albums to get through, hats to wear, air-guitar to play, anecdotes to tell, and clips of cats falling off things on YouTube to watch. I don't believe that these activities are necessarily better than physically uniting with a loved/drunken one. It's just that I wouldn't sacrifice them in favour of 19 hours of a really quite repetitive act. Honestly, if you can't achieve what you set out to do in half an hour or less, it's possible that you just might not be doing it properly. I'd check all available diagrams, and try again.

When I read the first of these reports, I realised that they were right. The dawn choruses of my childhood seemed immense - whole treefuls of birds exploding with the sun, and sounding like the orchestral wig-out in A Day In The Life. These days, however, the dawn chorus sounds like three rats coughing behind some bins - a pitiful collection of bleeps, squawks and rasps that no more welcomes the dawn than the sound of a brick being thrown through a window.

¶ birds caitlin moran humour sex uk [no comments]

The government of Thailand has outlawed cosmetic castration, a surgical procedure that was becoming surprisingly popular as a cheaper, quicker alternative to sex change operations:

However, at the lower end of the market, clinics have responded to demand from teenage boys to look more like girls by posting Internet advertisements offering castration for as little as 4,000 baht ($125).

¶ bizarre castration ladyboys sex society thailand [2 comments]

Concerned about its young citizens being too busy working hard to find partners, the government of Singapore (perhaps one of the most efficiently managed societies in history) has begun offering lessons in seduction. Not that type of seduction, though, of course, but something altogether more wholesome and befitting of a place described as "Disneyland with the death penalty":

Students at two polytechnics can earn two credits towards their final degree by choosing the love elective. Activities include watching romantic films, holding hands and "love song analysis".

But it is not so easy to put Singaporean youth in the mood for love. Another student who did the course, Kamal Prakash, said: "I'm not really looking for a girlfriend now as I want to concentrate on my studies."

¶ affluenza authoritarianism love relationships seduction sex singapore society [no comments]

The Irish Independent has a piece on how social networking websites are changing relationships, and in particular, how they end and what happens afterward:

I started getting clues that I might be about to become a free man when my girlfriend's friends posted messages to her that read: "Good luck with tonight -- it's for the best."

First came the announcement online of my new 'Single' status. Deftly inserted into Facebook's running newsfeed, it informed everyone that both she and I knew that I had been dumped, in much the same way that Reuters proclaims the engagement of a minor member of the British royal family. There was no way of deleting it, so it sat there haunting me.

But then her status updates started to tell a story. Just three days after we broke up, she changed hers to: "2008, new job (check), new flat (check), new man (working on it)."

Your ex's blog may only be read by five and half people, but you still don't really want them telling complete strangers how you were unable to put the loo seat down and never really gave the choosing of shelves the attention it deserved, and how these things were symptomatic of your lack of commitment to the relationship.

It makes me think that our grandparents had an easier time. If one of their relationships went bad they could always go to sea -- or at least the next village -- and never see the other person again.

It'll be interesting to see how the standards of socially acceptable conduct evolve once it is literally impossible to dissociate oneself from an ex without becoming a hermit. Will slagging off one's exes and their failings in public blogs become taboo, or restricted to some acceptable bounds of fair play? Or will people get used to the fact that anyone in the dating marketplace probably has several scathingly negative references from their various exes? (Perhaps there is a niche for a site which aggregates exes' references, along with reputation scores for the referers?) Will things like Rachel Marsden's release of the chat transcripts become unacceptable, the social equivalent of a nuclear first strike?

(via Crikey) ¶ culture facebook privacy relationships sex social implications social software society wikipedia [3 comments]

Estrogen-like substances in toxic waste turn male fish female; now, it turns out, they turn male songbirds into super-smooth lotharios, capable of singing the songs that get them all the chicks, like a wave of avian Smoove Bs:

Accordingly, the polluted male starlings sang songs of exceptional length and complexity -- a birdsign of reproductive fitness. Female starlings preferred their songs to those of unexposed males, suggesting that the polluted birds could have a reproductive advantage, eventually spreading their genes through starling populations.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ better living through chemistry biology birds environment music pollution sex toxic waste unintended consequences [no comments]

The latest must-have accessory on the Tokyo subway is a portable subway strap. Such a strap, of course, doesn't provide support, but it does keep one's hands occupied, and provides proof that one is not using them to grope women in the crush (something which happens a lot).

(via london-underground) ¶ bizarre japan sekuhara sex society tokyo [no comments]

The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is, for the first time, opening its extensive collection of pornographic materials to the public. Part of the contents of the forbidden section, officially known as "l'Enfer" (Hell) and consisting of pornography and erotica from the 17th to 19th centuries, will be visible at the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand for three months, and a smaller selection will be shown in a disused Métro station.

Only bona fide academic researchers have been allowed access to the "L'Enfer" collection until now. The omnipresence of erotic or pornographic images in the modern world has persuaded the French national library that it is permissible, finally, to open the doors of Hell.

The exhibition reveals some interesting, historical differences in erotic tastes. The earliest, 17th and 18th century, material dwells on the straightforward pleasures of the flesh. The celebration of the pleasures of pain – imposed or submitted – begins with the Marquis of Sade in the late 18th century. Pornography from the French Revolutionary period is mostly political, especially scurrilous allegations about the sexual appetite and imagination of Marie Antoinette. The 19th century concentrates on the blazing sexuality lying below the stern conservative or domestic exterior of life.

¶ culture erotica france history porn sex [no comments]

As social network websites with user-generated content become mainstream, online dating websites, as a category, are dying. Which makes sense: the only reason that online dating sites (which are like the online equivalent of leks, full of of people putting on their best dating-profile face and saying whatever they think makes them look more attractive), now look even more starkly naff than they did when they were the only game in town. Or, when there are alternatives, going anywhere specifically to pick up doesn't reflect well on oneself:

There's a reason Mulligan and Helm are above online dating. They're part of the social networking generation. Neither would admit to going on sites like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace (NWS) expressly looking to hook up. And that's precisely why it's such a better answer to the problem of meeting someone interesting. It's like going to a bar with your friends. Maybe you are going to meet someone special, but maybe you're just going to hang out with your friends too. You can play it cool. "MySpace and Facebook feel like going to a nature preserve, [whereas] a dating site is like walking past a bunch of animals in cages at the zoo," Helm says.

Other sites that meld user-generated content with social networking to accomplish certain tasks can be even handier. Consider Yelp, where people write reviews of their favorite restaurants, bars, and other haunts, or Digg, where users vote and post comments on their favorite online stories. You can scope out Yelp or Digg users on their profile pages, which show pictures and list basic likes and dislikes. But you can really find out about them from the locations they Yelp about or stories they Digg. Both sites have features that even let you connect with fellow users based on shared traits. It's like a version of eHarmony you don't have to opt into. And while many online dating sites charge a fee, most new Web sites are free.

The Web moves fast. And sorry online dating, but you just didn't keep up. In the parlance of the kids who won't use you, you got "pwned."

¶ culture dating online sex society web [no comments]

A Scottish man was sentenced to three years' probation and placed on the sex offenders' register for having sex with a bicycle in his hostel bedroom.

Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners in his bedroom at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr.

"They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down. "The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."

Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'."

Had he been buggering his bicycle in the public square and scaring the horses, I could see how it would be a "sexually aggravated breach of the peace". However, he was doing it in his room, the door of which was locked. There was no mention of the bicycle having been stolen, so presumably it was his to do as he pleased with. Had he been ritually burning it in a Viking funeral, attempting to eat it or dancing the foxtrot with it, no court of law would presumably deign to inquire into what would be seen as his private eccentricity. But as soon as sex enters the equation, it suddenly becomes a matter of public morality, and one which must be prosecuted in the interest of society.

(I wonder whether it was the use of an inanimate object in a sexual act that was the crime or the lack of a human partner. Had he been, somehow, using the bicycle as an aid to having sex with another consenting adult, would he have been prosecuted? And are all inanimate objects illegal to use for sexual gratification in Scotland, or only ones the prosecuting authorities are unable to imagine anyone in their right mind using?)

¶ crime objectum-sexuality perversions puritanism sex uk weird [1 comment]

The Israeli government, realising it has somewhat of an image problem in key tourism markets, has decided on a possible solution: pictures of h0tt soldier chyxx in their underwear, in the lads' magazine Maxim:

In the magazine, one of the women, Yarden, describes how she enjoyed firing her M16 rifle before she entered the military intelligence corps, while Nivit says her job in intelligence was so secret that she cannot talk about it. There is nothing military about the photographs, however, which are taken in different locations in Tel Aviv

Israel is keen to sell itself as a western country with beaches and nightclubs rather than a country full of religious zealots which has been in a permanent state of emergency since its creation.

¶ israel marketing military sex [no comments]

A US astronaut has been charged with trying to kidnap a woman she thought was a romantic rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot.

Police said Capt Nowak drove 1,000 miles (1,600km) from her home in Houston to Orlando International Airport, wearing a nappy to avoid a toilet break.

Ms Shipman was then attacked with the pepper spray, it says. She drove to a car park booth and police were called.

¶ astronauts crime love news sex [no comments]

Norway could soon see a renaissance of striptease, after the Norwegian High Court ruled that striptease is an art form, and thus exempt from Norway's 25% VAT.

It was not clear whether the three judges had conducted field research before reaching their verdict. Certainly they made a clear distinction between "banal and vulgar" striptease--in which there is physical contact between dancers and the audience -- and artistic dance.

The question of the artistic value of striptease has been raging since the late 19th century. The first professional stripper was a Parisian, Yvette, who in 1894 stood on a music hall stage and pretended to undress for bed. The artistic content came in the act of undressing rather than in the nudity. which was often brief and incomplete. American burlesque theatres borrowed striptease acts from the French. The most daring showed Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils--complete with a papier-mâché version of John the Baptist's head -- as if to underline that striptease had respectable roots.

¶ art law norway sex [no comments]

An argument that the abundance of images of attractive people causes widespread unhappiness:

Psychologists Sara Gutierres, Ph.D., and Douglas Kenrick, Ph.D., both of Arizona State University, demonstrated that the contrast effect operates powerfully in the sphere of person-to-person attraction as well. In a series of studies over the past two decades, they have shown that, more than any of us might suspect, judgments of attractiveness (of ourselves and of others) depend on the situation in which we find ourselves. For example, a woman of average attractiveness seems a lot less attractive than she actually is if a viewer has first seen a highly attractive woman. If a man is talking to a beautiful female at a cocktail party and is then joined by a less attractive one, the second woman will seem relatively unattractive.

Psychologists Sara Gutierres, Ph.D., and Douglas Kenrick, Ph.D., both of Arizona State University, demonstrated that the contrast effect operates powerfully in the sphere of person-to-person attraction as well. In a series of studies over the past two decades, they have shown that, more than any of us might suspect, judgments of attractiveness (of ourselves and of others) depend on the situation in which we find ourselves. For example, a woman of average attractiveness seems a lot less attractive than she actually is if a viewer has first seen a highly attractive woman. If a man is talking to a beautiful female at a cocktail party and is then joined by a less attractive one, the second woman will seem relatively unattractive.

The strange thing is, being bombarded with visions of beautiful women (or for women, socially powerful men) doesn't make us think our partners are less physically attractive. It doesn't change our perception of our partner. Instead, by some sleight of mind, it distorts our idea of the pool of possibilities.

Our minds have not caught up. They haven't evolved to correct for MTV. "Our research suggests that our brains don't discount the women on the cover of Cosmo even when subjects know these women are models. Subjects judge an average attractive woman as less desirable as a date after just having seen models," Kenrick says.

So the women men count as possibilities are not real possibilities for most of them. That leads to a lot of guys sitting at home alone with their fantasies of unobtainable supermodels, stuck in a secret, sorry state that makes them unable to access real love for real women. Or, as Kenrick finds, a lot of guys on college campuses whining, "There are no attractive women to date."

Mind you, this article is rather male-centric (it's partly a survey of studies, and partly a lament from the head of a Los Angeles PR agency, kvetching bitterly about all the unfeasibly gorgeous women he is surrounded by and how their presence is making his life a hell), and doesn't cover the female perspective; i.e., whether women are bombarded with images of unfeasibly attractive potential male partners, and whether this causes them to feel dissatisfied with actual partners (or potential partners) to the same extent.

(via Mind Hacks) ¶ beauty evolutionary psychology media psychology sex [no comments]

An article claims that sexual abstinence is bad for you:

Fans of abstinence had better be sitting down. "Saving yourself" before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoedown or the big bakeoff may indeed confer some moral benefit. But corporeally it does absolutely zip. There's no evidence it sharpens your competitive edge. The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it's harmless when practiced in moderation. Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female.

Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards.

(via MindHacks) ¶ biology science sex [no comments]

According to the UK's Public Health minister, pregnant teenagers are deliberately taking up smoking to have smaller babies and thus an easier birth.

¶ cancer drugs sex society stupidity uk [no comments]

A rather amusing guide on what not to put on an iPod when giving it to your beloved:

Fifth, excessive jazz, blues, or classical music. Surprisingly, many (N.B.) single males fail to understand that the reason Pop Music is called "pop" is because it is popular. Showing your well-roundedness is good, but copying all of your unmarried uncle's extensive jazz collection onto the iPod will not make her think that you are Sophisticated, but that you are balding.

If there was the slightest chance you could get laid in today's market by owning a Sonic Youth ceedee, there would be far fewer former record store clerks making mySpace pages.

Seventh, anyone who can listen to Nick Cave for more than a half hour at a stretch is mentally ill.

And then there is useful advice such as:

You weren't seriously thinking of a Shuffle, were you? Come on! If a Shuffle would work you might as well just offer her the rest of your bag of Dorito's and take off your pants.

Let not the dying battery, cracked screen, or sputtering disk drive end up being a metaphor for the failures of your relationship.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ apple gadgets music sex society [1 comment]

Research published yesterday shows that men who went to single-sex schools are significantly more likely to be divorced by their early forties. Which, presumably, is a result of lack of socialisation with the opposite sex in adolescence damaging mens' relationship skills required to sustain long relationships.

Figures show 37 per cent of men from boys-only comprehensives are divorced by the time they reach the age of 42 - compared with just 28 per cent from co-educational schools.

¶ psychology sex society [no comments]

In China, what could be the world's largest lynch mob is gathering and hunting for one "Chinabounder", a particularly gormless expatriate Briton who kept an anonymous blog recounting his sexual conquests in China. That is how it started, anyway; with him apparently coming to China to teach English, taking advantage of the huge dating pool available to exotic foreigners and then, perhaps seeing himself as a combination Neil Strauss and Belle Du Jour, writing up his conquests, in detail, in a blog, often posting entire chat transcripts. Then, he decided to start posting political screeds ridiculing Chinese culture, politics and masculinity, and soon, the hunt began:

Traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog has surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners. The author, who calls himself Chinabounder, introduces himself as a wastrel, "lacking in moral fibre, but coping with the situation". According to the posts, he is an English language teacher at a university.

The campaign against the blog was launched on Friday by Zhang Jiehai, professor of psychology in the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences under a post titled The Internet Hunt for an Immoral Foreigner. "I have something to tell Chinese men: please think about how these foreign trash have dallied with your sisters and made fun of your impotence," he wrote. "This piece of garbage must be found and kicked out of China!!!"

"Trial by virtual lynching has become the norm in China's cyberspace," Raymond Zhou wrote in a comment article in China Daily after previous mass campaigns. He added: "Online 'flaming' wars exist everywhere, facilitated by anonymity. But in China they may have a self-propelling force that sweeps thousands, sometimes millions, into a frenzy. It is nearly impossible, even for the most respected scholars, to give voice to dissension."

He was not the first Western guy to treat China as his own personal sexual buffet. To put it in the D&D terms that many of the guys who benefit most from the effect will readily understand, living in China gives you +4 attractiveness. The love handles (metaphorically) shrink, the hairline advances, teeth straighten, previously soupy eyes blaze with a new rakish light. You are in a country where people actually *choose* to have brown hair. You find that things that are off-putting back home have magically transformed into positive attributes in your new environment. You're a computer programmer? You're quiet and like to read? You live with your parents? You never drink? You are sexually inexperienced? HEARTTHROB!

A Blogspot site called whoischinabounder was launched, with the goal of unmasking chinabounder's true identity based on details culled from his blog posts. This site was so successful that by the first day they had already found three of him, with signs that more were to come. English teachers in Shanghai had reason to be nervous.

Net culture in China works a bit the way television media works in the States. People fix on one or two big stories of the day, and these get a national audience. There is also a tradition of online vigilantism in cases where someone has done something particularly vile - had an extramarital affair within the World of Warcraft online game, for example - and people will readily mobilize to defend good morals and the national honor. Chinabounder's case, which hits the trifecta of national pride, sex and Japan hatred, will be interesting to follow.

(via Boing Boing, substitute) ¶ china chinabounder culture sex vigilantism [no comments]

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And the latest invention is a voice changer for female video gamers, allowing them to contend in the macho culture of online games without fear of harrassment or inappropriate sexual attention from prehensile, undersocialised geeks.

According to research conducted by the company, "The number of female online game players is not small", would you believe. In fact, "Many of them have reached the highest level of some very difficult games such as World of Warcraft (60th level), which is considered the game for men only."

The software comes with presets which turn lady voices into big deep Blessed-esque ones. You can also create your own new voice by mucking about with pitch and timbre settings, and other features include advanced tune and noise reduction.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ culture gender gibson's law machismo sex sexism tech videogaming [2 comments]

There is a rather good hard-scifi story at Salon: "The Perfect Man" by Lauren McLaughlin. It's about a woman who has a virtual AI boyfriend made to order, who then transforms from adorably bumbling Hugh Grant-esque Hollywood Englishman stereotype to sinister, inscrutably calculating Hollywood Englishman stereotype:

The design process is easy. First step: Pick a physical template. A youth squandered on Monty Python reruns left me with a full-blown kink for English guys, so I chose a template called "Nigel" -- think Michael Palin crossed with Laurence Olivier. Then, to assure he didn't look overdesigned, I clicked the "random factor" option to introduce "lifelike imperfections."

If you want to know anything about the "human" rights travesty currently under way courtesy of draconian anti-AI laws, there's a whole subculture of liberationists ready to lecture you on it. They've got the skinny on behavioral inhibitors, recursive self-teaching limiters and other artifacts of AI "slavery." For my purposes, what it all boiled down was this: snip Pritchard's inhibitors or resign myself to dating a functionary. Do you want to date a functionary? Me neither. Thankfully, for every Webcop dutifully guarding the behavioral inhibitors of the thousands of AIs cropping up on the Web, there's a black market geek with the tools to snip.

Now that I have my sanity back, I must dive deep into the black waters of her soul, excavate her most primal desires, and do what no human male has been able to do: keep her interested in me. Thankfully, I have one freedom human males do not -- the freedom to redesign myself. I can make myself so fascinated by Lucy that all I want to do is watch her, study her. A nip here, a tuck there, and voilà, I'm in love with the girl. Well, not in love, exactly. Love is still an alien concept. But I have made myself a bit of a stalker. And the more information I gather about my lovely little monkey, the more I can adjust my personality to suit her needs. Heck, I could turn myself into Prince Charming if I wanted. Something tells me that would not tickle Lucy's fancy. In fact, the more I learn about Lucy, the more I realize she doesn't know what she wants at all. She only thinks she knows. No, Lucy's desires are my nut to crack. And crack it I will. Or she'll crack me. Oh, I don't mean to sound morbid. I'm incapable of morbid thoughts. To mitigate the persistent fear of being snuffed, I've given myself a devil-may-care attitude about death. That way I can focus my energies more intensely on Lucy.

Of course she doesn't know the contents of her subconscious. She lacks the processing power to unravel it. It's a number-crunching job, that's all. Humans, with your lovely little wet brains, will never achieve the self-knowledge you so desire.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ ai fiction scifi sex [no comments]

Police in Durham have raided a BSDM sex cult after hearing that a woman was being held against her will.

The 29-year-old woman is said to have voluntarily attended the sect after finding out about it over the internet.

She later contacted a friend in United States, who then contacted the police, saying she wanted to leave but couldn't as she had burnt her passport and return ticket.

I wonder how long, with this publicity, the Gor books are going to stay out of print. I imagine that, in today's post-political-correctness age, when everybody is free to hold whatever opinions they have, the more abrasive and "politically incorrect" the better, something like a kitschy-sounding pulp novel series with BDSM overtones would seem more like a hipster trash-culture collectible, to be filed quasi-ironically alongside one's Russ Meyer DVDs, 1970s European lesbian-vampire movies and copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, than a threat to womens' liberation. (In fact, it could perhaps even be argued that Gor would fit in with the regressive, neo-Hobbesian muscular-nihilist values of our times.) All some entrepreneurial soul would have to do is license the copyrights from the John Norman estate and run off a run, bound in fetishy leather and priced at a premium, and they'd effectively have a licence to print money.

More recently, I saw an unidentified tabloid's take on the story. It's interesting to note that they stressed that Norman was a university lecturer and philosopher, as if to suggest that the pernicious influence of academic/intellectual culture was somehow to blame for such grievious lapses of decency.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bdsm culture gor sex survival values [no comments]

Suffering from hayfever? You could always try having a good snog.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ health sex [2 comments]

Remember Melanotan, the wonder drug which promised to turn those who took it into a new dominant caste of tanned, chiselled, hyper-attractive übermenschen and überfrauen with superhuman sex drives? Well, it turns out that the drug company shelved it because it did too many things to be marketable, instead using the project to develop different products. The first of which is a "super-aphrodisiac" named PT-141 which produces instant sexual arousal, bypassing the need for time-consuming foreplay, and making sexual fulfilment a possibility for today's overworked wage-slaves and compulsive multitaskers who lack either the time or the attention span to do things the slow, old-fashioned way:

The five-minute meaningful sexual encounter: if ever there was a holy grail for the age of the tight-wired global economy - with its time-strapped labour force and its glut of bright, shiny distractions - that is it. And if ever there was a reason to be wary of the pharmaceutical industry's designs on the market for sexual healing, say critics such as Tiefer, it's the attractiveness of that simple-minded ideal.

Tiefer is just as dubious about PT-141, which, as she sees it, is merely the latest expression of a 'big wish' that 'we could just bypass everything we want to bypass' on our way to sexual happiness, skipping the complicated, often lifelong work of sorting out all the emotional, physical and autobiographical triggers that turn us off and on.

Good things would come of it, to be sure. Marriages would be saved, fun would be had. But sexual Utopia? PT-141 seems just as likely to usher in the age of McNookie: quick, easy couplings low on emotional nutrition. Sex lives tailored to the demands of a jealous office or an impatient spouse. A dark age of erotic self-ignorance tarted up in the bright-coloured packaging of a Happy Meal.

(via jwz) ¶ atomisation better living through chemistry melanotan sex society [6 comments]

A psychology lecturer in Manchester has come up with the formula for the perfect bottom; it's (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V:

S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness. V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ callipygean mathematics sex [no comments]

Foot fetishism and rap music — two great tastes that go great together.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ bizarre foot fetishism hip-hop sex wtf [no comments]

Apparently today is Steak and BJ Day, an attempt to set right a crucial imbalance in intersexual relations:

You know the drill. Every 14th of February you get the chance to display your fondness for a significant other by showering her with gifts, flowers, dinner, shows and any other baubles that women find romantic. Every Valentines day you rack your brains for that one special, unique gift that will show your wife or girlfriend that you really do care for them more than any other. Now ladies, I'll let you in on a little secret; guys really don't enjoy this that much. Sure seeing that smile on your face when we get it right is priceless, but that smile is the result of weeks of blood, sweat and consideration. Another secret; guys feel left out. That's right, there's no special holiday for the ladies to show their appreciation for the men in their life. Men as a whole are either too proud or too embarrassed to admit it.

Which is why a new holiday has been created.

March 14th is now officially "Steak and Blowjob Day". Simple, effective and self explanatory, this holiday has been created so you ladies finally have a day to show your man how much you care for him.

(via trayce) ¶ masculinity meat sex [no comments]

You know that familiar red two-lobed heart symbol seen on Valentine's Day cards, bumper stickers, and in confectionery form? Well, apparently that's no heart; that's booty:

The familiar double-lobed heart symbol seen on Valentine's Day cards and candy was inspired by the shape of human female buttocks as seen from the rear, according to a professor of psychology who studied the origin, history and symbolism of the Feb.14 holiday.

"The twin lobes of the stylized version correspond roughly to the paired auricles and ventricles (chambers) of the anatomical heart," Pranzarone said, but added that the organ "is never bright red in color" and its "shape does not have the invagination at the top nor the sharp point at the base."

Pranzarone indicated that the ancient Greeks and Romans could have originated the link between human female anatomy and the heart shape. The Greeks, he said, associated beauty with the curves of the human female behind.

¶ booty callipygean heart secret history sex symbols [1 comment]

Various famous singletons write in the Independent about the joys of being single:

There are great advantages to being single - last night I stayed up all night playing computer games with a mate (and I had no girlfriend to come in and complain), and I know I always have the option of sitting around and eating biscuits all day. I've been single now for a couple of years and the best thing about it is that there are no rules to my life.

Having said that, last year I went on 120 dates as research for one of my shows, and I really enjoyed it. It was crazy but huge fun, and I discovered a love of dating. Even though I emerged from the whole experience still single, I have a far better "single" life now. I think people in Britain don't date properly - we are too scared of dating, and it should be separated from the notion of partner-hunting. It's more fun that way - and an even bigger surprise when you find someone who is right for you.

¶ dating normality relationships sex single society [no comments]

More wacky goings on on Melbourne's trains, as an unidentified woman broke into train public-address systems, and proceeded to describe her sexual fantasies about the drivers in explicit detail; this happened during peak hour, with hundreds of commuters hearing it, though no witnesses seem to have seen her. Police are at a loss to how she did it, though it is believed she actually got into a vacant train cabin. (I wonder whether this sort of thing is now covered under anti-terrorism legislation.)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ hacks melbourne pranks sex [no comments]