Author: Brian

http://www.examiner.com/sex-advice-in-philadelphia/king-of-prussia-mall-denies-sex-positive-store

Last week, Dan Savage posted a blog about a local entrepreneur who has been denied a store at King of Prussia Mall (KOP). Jill McDevitt, who is known in the West Chester area as the owner of Feminique Boutique, applied to the KOP mall to open a new branch of her sex-positive, female-friendly lingerie and sex toy store. They denied her, citing the sale of sex toys as their reason. Dan Savage’s blog sums it up pretty well: “Some Vibrators are More Equal Than Others”.

McDevitt’s store has an array of lingerie in all sizes, t-shirts with quirky and positive messages (“Real men beat their meat. Not their wives and children”), condoms, phthalate-free sex toys and offers informative classes (even one about how to please a woman). All of the employees have been formally educated in human sexuality and believe in their slogan, “Women are sexual subjects, not objects.”

Other stores that are currently in King of Prussia Mall selling similar items as McDevitt’s, include Victoria’s Secret, Frederick’s of Hollywood and Spencer’s. To take action and support a new Feminique Boutique, sign the petition here

http://www.dallasvoice.com/date-set-for-hearing-in-lesbians-suit-over-senior-prom-1012786.html

Constance McMillen will get her day in court. And that day will be Monday, March 22.

The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Constance, a senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Miss., after IAHS officials canceled the senior prom rather than let Constance wear a tuxedo and take her girlfriend as a date to the prom. The judge has set the first hearing in the case for next Monday.

The prom was originally set for April 2.

In a recent interview with Dan Savage, Constance said that she has had a hard time in her hometown since th prom was cancelled. She told Savage:

“The locals don’t like me, but I can’t help it. And things were really hostile in school last week after they cancelled prom. People were rude, and if people talked to me at all it was real short answers. There are a few people who are with me, my real friends, people who are intelligent enough to realize what’s really going on here. But the majority are not on my side.”

She also asked that supporters who want to write letters to IAHS officials “please be respectful. No one hears if you’re screaming and mad and cussing and stuff. Tell them exactly how you feel, but in a respectful way.”

A Facebook page in support of Constance already has more than 320,000 fans.

http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=24979

March 11, 2010, Greencastle, Ind. — Dan Savage, an author whose weekly “Savage Love” advice column appears in more than 70 newspapers worldwide, will visit the campus of DePauw University on Tuesday, March 16. Savage, a regular contributor to the public radio program This American Life and to HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, will appear in Meharry Hall of historic East College for a 7 p.m. program, which is free and open to the public.

Savage is the author of Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist, a collection of his advice columns; Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America; The Commitment: Love, savage love dan savage.jpgSex, Marriage, and My Family; and The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant, an award-winning memoir about adoption which is the inspiration for a new musical from the producers of Avenue Q.

“Probably the most read sex columnist in the United States, Savage is also widely regarded as one of the great humorists of our time,” noted Library Journal. ” Anyone who reads his nationally syndicated ‘Savage Love’ column weekly well knows his power to burst the bubble of the pompous.”

http://www.dakotastudent.com/2.5855/columnist-gives-und-a-real-lesson-in-sexual-education-1.1348756

Graphic and incredibly honest west coast relationship advice columnist Dan Savage took questions from a UND audience on March 3rd. Attendees’ questions ranged from wondering why they had gotten dumped to a discussion on monogamy.

Savage has a widely popular blog, “Savage Love,” and a podcast under the same name.

For anyone unfamiliar with Savage, he is about as far from your mother’s advice columnist as you can get. Savage didn’t arrive at UND with anything in mind to speak about; his format is completely crowd-sourced. He began by saying, “I have no agenda. We are going to talk about what you want to talk about. Wherever we go, you took us there.”

Audience members wrote their questions down on index cards and had them collected by members of the Multicultural Awareness Committee, who sponsored the discussion.

Savage took the first question, “My boyfriend dumped me for school but a month later he’s dating someone else?” Sitting there, I thought it was going to be a sugarcoated reply, sparing her feeling; it certainly was not.

Savage answered every question without hesitation, honestly and intelligently, in ways most UND students have never heard.

Sometimes they were obvious truths you never hear: “Nobody is ever shy about being heterosexual.” Sometimes, and this is where Savage really shines, they were status quo-challenging suggestions: “We should treat monogamy like sobriety. I’m monogamous right now, but I did fall off the wagon a while ago.” Savage had more to say about the m word. “Monogamy is something we, as primates, didn’t evolve for and socially are not good at. We need to be realistic. Look at the odds. You need to decide when it happens, are you going to be Hilary Clinton or Jenny Sanford about it?”

Interesting point, however as a male I had to assume I was automatically biased toward crowing him the Sex Ed Messiah, so I decided to get the fairer perspective. A female UND student said this about the event: “I liked his ideas of not looking at sex, as just sex, but as all the possibilities. I also really liked when he talked about how he wished females could ejaculate. I thought that was really funny.”

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/bangtown/2010/03/29/when-mom-wants-sex-advice/

Over the weekend, I decided to spend time with my mom.

We were having a good time, until she asked me a strange question.

“What can I do to spice up my love life?”

Really? My first thought was to ignore her question. I mean, this is mother and father. I don’t even want to think about them having sex. (Shivering at the mental image)

Then I thought, what would Dan Savage do? He’d answer the question. Granted, I’m no Dan Savage. But Mom knows that I spend a good part of my day writing and thinking about sex. So, I decided to offer her some advice.

All long term relationships lose that luster some times. So, in order to keep things exciting, you have to think out of the box.

http://www.times-herald.com/local/coweta-passes-tighter-obscenity-ordinance-646015

The sale of sex toys, and perhaps even the sale of some condoms and lubricants, is now prohibited in Coweta County.

The Coweta County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to approve a new obscenity ordinance and a new ordinance regulating sexually-oriented businesses at a specially-called meeting Monday afternoon.

The obscenity ordinance prohibits sale or distribution of obscenity, and prohibits anyone from “knowingly” selling, or possessing with the intent to sell, “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

The county’s old ordinance specifically exempted condoms from being considered as a stimulation device. The new ordinance makes no such distinction, and would appear to apply to items such as ribbed condoms and various lubricants marketed as having a “warming” or “tingling” sensation. Such products are commonly available at most drug and grocery stores.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?_r=2&hp

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

http://abcnews.go.com/story?id=6588896

Although 18-year-old Bristol Palin has made headlines in recent months for her pregnancy and the birth of her son, Tripp, she has a lot of company — in her state and in the rest of the nation.

According to the newest numbers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teen births increased by 3 percent nationally in 2006, reversing a 15-year decline of more than a third. And Palin’s home state of Alaska — one of 26 states to see a rise — led the way, with a 19 percent increase in the teenage birthrate from the previous year.

“It’s concerning because there was so much effort made to encourage teenagers to avoid pregnancy starting in the early 1990s,” said Stephanie Ventura, an author of the study and director for natality statistics and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The numbers showed a 3 percent increase in births among women of all ages — an increase in every age group — as well as the first decline in the average age of mothers giving birth (from 25.2 to 25) for the first time since the CDC began tracking it.

The reversal of the trend in teen births is what most concerns experts.