Tag: Savage Love

http://gawker.com/5175738/the-appalachian-tackles-the-cum-shot-issue

Appalachian State University’s student paper The Appalachian has just kicked off its long-awaited four-part series on pornography, and it promises to be children’s treasury of hilarity that we will follow closely. Today: Cum shot controversy.

“Lifestyles Reporter” (HEH) Nikki Roberti sets it up with words from the expert:

“Thirty-five to 40 years ago, X-rated films were not part of mainstream America, Associate Sociology Professor Ken B. Muir said. Now they are.”

OH HO? The Appalachian took it upon itself to poll 100 students of the school there, and found scarce middle ground on this contentious and often sexy issue:

“Forty-six percent said pornography was a normal and a common part of life, whereas 34 percent said it was disgusting and wrong. Twenty percent had no opinion.”

Furthermore, 43.4% (how is that possible in a poll of 100 people? I don’t know) lied and said they don’t watch porn at all. But The Appalachian did track down one expert who most certainly does watch porn: assistant sociology professor Amy D. Page.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1886558,00.html

Jewels Morris-Davis is a no-nonsense kind of girl. When the high school sophomore turned 16 recently, she didn’t celebrate with any My Super Sweet 16 foolishness. Nor did she rush to get her driver’s license and race around the back roads in this rural northwest corner of South Carolina. But Jewels did quietly revel in one achievement. “I am,” she says a few weeks later, a proud smile spreading across her face, “the first person in my family to reach 16 without getting pregnant–or getting somebody pregnant.”

Five years ago, Jewels was firmly on track to continue the family tradition of early parenthood. Her mother is a drug addict, and the grandmother who raised her had just died of cancer. Shifted to a foster home, Jewels turned to sex to find the love and attention her absent family couldn’t provide. “I was lost,” she says simply. (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

South Carolina is the only state in the country that mandates a certain number of hours that schools must devote to sexuality education. In 2004, Jewels’ school district in Anderson County decided to do even more. The district partnered with a local teen-pregnancy-prevention organization to implement an innovative relationship and sex-education curriculum that runs through all three years of middle school and into high school, as well as an after-school program for at-risk kids. And that’s when the life of Jewels Morris-Davis began to turn around.

Later this spring, Congress will dive once more into the war over sex education when it decides whether to eliminate $176 million in federal funding for so-called abstinence-only programs, which instruct kids to delay sex until marriage. Advocates will debate at top volume the merits of abstinence-only efforts vs. more comprehensive programs that also teach about birth control and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

At first blush, most people probably wouldn’t consider a documentary about New York City’s most notorious public sex club the ideal “date movie.” But that’s exactly what Mathew Kaufman calls “American Swing,” the nostalgic, often amusing film he co-produced and co-directed with Jon Hart about the legendary swingers’ haven Plato’s Retreat.

“The movie’s got everything,” Kaufman said during a conference call with Hart from Manhattan. “And sex will definitely be the topic of conversation on the ride home.”

Kaufman and Hart (no connection to the famed playwriting duo of the ’30s) met in 2003 when a mutual colleague thought documentarian Kaufman might be intrigued by veteran reporter Hart’s stash of audiovisual materials from the hundreds of hours he once spent interviewing Larry Levenson, Plato’s brash, Bronx-born founder.

“I looked at all this stuff and realized no one’s ever told the real story behind Plato’s Retreat,” Kaufman said. “No one remembers Larry Levenson, but he was a groundbreaker. He really changed the way people thought about sex.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/29/entertainment/ca-swing29

Levenson’s decidedly heterosexual club became an international destination after its 1977 opening in the basement of the Upper West Side’s ornate Ansonia Hotel (and the former site of the gay Continental Baths). A quick tour of the adult playground would include a maze of walled-off “private” areas, a party-sized Jacuzzi, swimming pool, dance floor and, for the orgy set, the infamous “mattress room.” There was also a hot-and-cold food buffet for, well, sustenance.

The clientele, a mix of participants and observers — with couples preferred — included workaday bridge-and-tunnel types as well as fast-lane Manhattanites. Celebrities such as Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Buck Henry and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” would drop by to check out the action. If the celebrities participated, Hart noted, “it was behind closed doors.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/31/eharmonys-same-sex-dating-site-launches/

In response to discrimination litigation, online dating site eHarmony will launch Tuesday the gay version of its heterosexual match-making service.

The site, Compatible Partners, was developed as part of a settlement last fall with the New Jersey attorney general. A gay user filed a complaint against eHarmony in 2005, citing the state’s discrimination law.

Compatible Partners mirrors the features of its sister site, beginning with the same extensive relationship-preferences questionnaire for which eHarmony is known. There are just a few minor modifications between the two 34-page documents. For example, an eHarmony question reads, “I greatly appreciate the physical beauty of the opposite sex.” The Compatible Partners version reads, “I greatly appreciate physical attractiveness when looking at people.” The company changed so little in the surveys that it put a disclosure on the Compatible Partners home page. The notice says the site was developed “on the basis of research involving married heterosexual couples.” It adds: “The company has not conducted similar research on same-sex relationships.”

Patrick Perrine, founder and CEO of myPartner.com, an online dating site for gay men, remains skeptical about eHarmony’s new venture. Mr. Perrine says the compatibility system on his site, matching men with other men, wouldn’t work for other pairings, such as lesbian women. “They’re very different populations that have very different needs,” he said.

EHarmony was founded in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, an evangelical Christian and former clinical psychologist. Dr. Warren is no longer active in the daily management but remains the company’s chairman. When asked if the company’s religious roots would deter homosexuals from the site, eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorf said, “Our mission is to help our users find great long-term relationships,” adding, “We started in the opposite-sex market, which is where all of our experience was. That doesn’t mean we were against something.”

Last month, eHarmony was the sixth-most-visited online personals site, with roughly 2.3 million unique visitors, according to comScore. SinglesNet.com, which includes same-sex couples, was the leader in the category with almost 3.7 million unique visitors.

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=90345

The dust has yet to settle following Miss USA judge Perez Hilton’s question about marriage equality to first runner-up Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who answered that in her personal opinion marriage rights ought to be preserved exclusively for heterosexual couples.

Though that opinion is shared by many, Hilton recorded a video post after the contest’s April 19 broadcast in which he excoriated Prejean for her answer, calling her a “dumb bitch.”

Hilton had posed his question as follows: “Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Do you think every state should follow suit? Why or why not?”

Prejean answered by saying that due to her background, she personally believed that marriage rights should be limited to a couples of mixed gender. “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite,” she noted. “And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.

“No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

Prejean later voiced the belief that her answer was a deciding factor in her not having won the beauty contest.

The brouhaha has crystallized questions and concerns on both sides of the marriage equality issue, including soul searching from members of the GLBT community as to whether unequivocal assertion of gay and lesbian families to marriage equality rights might have strayed into territory marked by unnecessarily mean-spirited attacks, as well as a reevaluation of what role minor–some would say manufactured–celebrities such as Miss USA should play in the culture.

http://jezebel.com/5226420/culture-has-more-to-do-with-promiscuity-than-evolution

The idea that men try to impregnate as many women as possible while women try to hold on to a provider is derived from fruit fly behavior. Its applicability to humans is becoming increasingly questionable.

The initial study was conducted in 1948 by Angus J. Bateman, who showed that female fruit flies had fewer mating partners and their overall offspring had less genetic diversity than male fruit flies’ overall offspring.

Bateman concluded that, because a single egg is more costly to produce than a single sperm, the number of offspring produced by a female fruit fly was mainly limited by her ability to produce eggs, while a male’s reproductive success was limited by the number of females he inseminated. These studies supported the conventional assumption that male animals are competitive and promiscuous while female animals are non-competitive and choosy.

No one disputes the accuracy of Bateman’s work, just its indiscriminate application to human behavior without any regard to social of cultural factors. A new study by Dr. Gillian R. Brown at the University of St. Andrews seeks to provide more depth to our understanding of human sexuality.

“The conventional view of promiscuous, undiscriminating males and coy, choosy females has also been applied to our own species,” says lead study author Dr. Gillian R. Brown from the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews. “We sought to make a comprehensive review of sexual selection theory and examine data on mating behavior and reproductive success in current human populations in order to further our understanding of human sex roles.”

That’s a rather generous explanation for the acceptance of a model that conforms to cultural norms and expectations of men and women’s roles in society and reinforces the idea that women who aren’t seeking to settle down with one sex partner are somehow dysfunctional, but ok.

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/04/18/sexual-masters-of-the-universe.html

Bill Masters may have been the 20th century’s most unlikely romantic. Bald, thin-lipped, stocky and bow-tied, with a white shirt, white ballpoint pen and starched white lab coat, the brusque St. Louis Ob-Gyn appeared almost antiseptic in person, and his milky, wandering left eye convinced most acquaintances that he was as cold and clinical as he looked. Then there was his day job. As the driving force behind Masters and Johnson, the biggest brand in postwar sex research, Masters spent 40 years exploring the physiology of coitus, often with the help of a vibrating optical dildo called Ulysses—hardly the most sentimental of occupations. Least amorous of all, though, may have been Masters’s love life. In the late ’50s, he persuaded partner Virginia Johnson to have sex with him, but only, he explained, “as a way of further comprehending all that they were learning through [laboratory] observation”; they remained together for more than a decade of extracurricular experimentation and, beginning in 1971, an additional 22 years of marriage, even though they “weren’t emotionally tied at all,” as Johnson later confessed. All of which is just to say that Masters wasn’t the sort of sap you’d expect suddenly to announce, at the tender age of 76, that he was leaving Johnson to marry a recently widowed blonde named Dody Oliver whom he’d privately considered the “love of his life” since 1938, when they dated for a single summer. Except that on Christmas Eve 1992, that’s exactly what he did. “I carried a torch for her for 55 years,” Masters explained, giddy as a schoolboy.

The story of Masters’s secret sweetheart isn’t the only scoop in Thomas Maier’s exhaustive new dual biography, “Masters of Sex.” (We learn, for example, that Masters probably fabricated case studies to support the “gay conversion” therapy advocated in the couple’s third book, “Homosexuality in Perspective.”) But for a reader like me, who’s young enough, at 26, to look back and wonder what exactly the beaded, bearded, braless sexual revolution has to do with America’s current attitudes toward copulation, it may be the most revealing. As the story of Masters and Johnson makes clear, rescuing sex from the ancient mists of myth, mystery and religiosity left America a happier and healthier place. And yet Maier’s book—appearing in the midst of a minor Aquarian revival that includes a new edition of Gay Talese’s “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” and screenings last week in New York of “Carnal Knowledge” and “The Graduate” at the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing Mike Nichols retrospective—also suggests that our subsequent attempts to liberate sexual pleasure from the grip of fusty, old-fashioned love had much the opposite effect. Not every hang-up, it seems, should come unhung.

When Masters and Johnson began their research in 1957—they’d eventually observe an estimated 14,000 live orgasms—America’s carnal knowledge was largely limited to the local priest’s preachings on the subject, plus the occasional pinch of Freud or Kinsey. With the publication of “Human Sexual Response” in 1966 and “Human Sexual Inadequacy” four years later, however, the nation finally had a chance to learn the fundamentals of fornication: women can be multiorgasmic; intercourse may continue well into one’s 80s; clitoral orgasms are hardly inferior to their vaginal counterparts; and so forth. The results, of course, were revolutionary, especially for women, and as Maier notes, the vast majority of couples benefited from Masters and Johnson’s therapeutic touch. But despite its necessity, the revolution they unleashed led some libertines to view the bedroom as little more than a lab—a place, in short, where sex needn’t be more than a pleasurable “mutual masturbation exercise,” as Masters himself once put it. Which is when people started getting screwed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026415808636575.html

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

Forget about huge, sweeping megaforces. The biggest trends today are micro: small, under-the-radar patterns of behavior which take on real power when propelled by modern communications and an increasingly independent-minded population. In the U.S., one percent of the nation, or three million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change. This column is about identifying these important new niches, and acting on that knowledge.

This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth. The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, bloggers are becoming the Fifth Estate.

What started as a discussion forum for progressive politics and new technologies has now been applied to motherhood, health care, the arts, fashion, dentistry — and just about every other imaginable area of life. What started as a hobby and an outlet for volunteers is becoming big business for newly emerging sites, for companies that now depend upon their reviews and for the people who work in this new industry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/world/asia/28fetish.html?pagewanted=all

KARACHI, Pakistan — In Pakistan, a flogger is known only as the Taliban’s choice whip for beating those who defy their strict codes of Islam.

AQTH, founded by Rizwan Qadeer, pictured, and his brother, Adnan, earns more than $1 million a year in exports.

But deep in the nation’s commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West.

Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH, earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe.

The Qadeer brothers, Adnan, 34, and Rizwan, 32, have made the business into an improbable success story in a country where bars are illegal and the poor are often bound to a lifetime in poverty.

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/apr/01/isabella-rossellini-green-porno-sundance

There are certain things you don’t expect to hear Isabella Rossellini say. Things like, “I have sex several times a day. Any opportunity. Any female.” Or, “To have babies, I need to mate with another hermaphrodite in the 69 position.” Or, “When needed, I can have an erection six feet long.” But there are plenty of delightfully unexpected things about Green Porno, Rossellini’s series of short films about the sex lives of animals, the second batch of which has just gone live on the Sundance Channel’s website.

The first season, made last year, marked Rossellini’s debut as a director. She had collaborated with Guy Maddin on My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her film-maker father and fellow nature enthusiast Roberto, but she had always struggled over projects of her own that would stretch to television, let alone feature-length. When she learned that Sundance was fishing for attention-grabbing short content suitable for digital platforms, it proved the perfect outlet for her brief directorial attention span, as well as an opportunity to explore her longstanding love of zoology. “And when I thought ‘capture people’s attention,'” she says on a behind-the-scenes clip available at the project’s microsite, one word came to mind. “Sex.”

And so Green Porno was hatched. In each of these very short shorts – none lasts longer than three minutes and up to two-thirds of the running time is taken up with credits – Rossellini expounds with relish upon the mating habits of a particular species. Assuming the first person (or first creepy-crawly), she plays the male, garbed in a series of gloriously expressive handmade costumes in the bold colours and shapes suited to smaller screens; if the distribution model is hi-tech, the aesthetic approach, courtesy of Brooklyn-based artist-turned-production designer Andy Myers, is decidedly handcrafted. Byers’ costumes are made mostly from paper, eschewing digital effects for hands-on craft. Think Michel Gondry meets David Attenborough in the Blue Peter studio after dark.