Author: Brian

http://abcnews.go.com/US/lifestages/story?id=3464575&page=1

To many, “open marriage” is a phrase so laden with 1970s nostalgia that the idea can’t be considered without imagining its practitioners leering at each other across shag-carpeted conversation pits, their chest hair spilling out of maroon polyester leisure suits.

While many of today’s adherents are aging swingers from the old school, a new generation — well organized and committed to legitimizing a lifestyle — continues to push traditional notions of marital fidelity by having sex with people other than their spouses.

But do marriages — fragile institutions traditionally built on the fidelity and sexual intimacy of two people — work when the doors of the bedroom are thrown wide open?

“That’s like asking if monogamy works,” Deborah Anapol, a psychologist and author of “Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits” told ABC NEWS.com. “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends almost entirely on the people involved and their willingness to tell the truth and do the work.”

“Polyamory,” which literally means “many loves” is a new name for an old practice.

http://abcnews.go.com/health/reproductivehealth/story?id=6845031&page=1

Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder. In Japan, some women turn to electrically charged squid for sexual satisfaction. In the American world of masochism, one man begged to be tied on a spit and roasted over sizzling coals. His counterpart, a latex-loving dominatrix, reached ecstasy merely watching his pain.

What is abnormal may not necessarily be unnatural, according to sexologists who study the outer limits of the human psyche.

And, increasingly, as seen in a plethora of new books and films — not to mention thousands of sites on the Internet — kinky sex is getting more attention.

“To badly paraphrase Alfred Kinsey, [who pioneered sex research in the 1940s and 50s, filming couples in flagrante in his Indiana attic], ‘the only unnatural sex act is the one you can’t perform,'” said Robert Dunlap, a California sex therapist and filmmaker.

Paraphilias — or socially unacceptable sexual practices — are more common than most ordinary “vanilla” teleiophiles [those who desire adults] would imagine, according to Dr. Judy Kariansky, a sex therapist from Columbia University.

Though there is no hard data on what whether a spike in interest means a spike in actual activity, experts say anecdotally that couples are showing a marked interest in exploring new sexual intensity.

http://www.details.com/sex-relationships/marriage-and-kids/200902/take-a-break-from-monogomy-and-restore-your-marital-sex-life

I’m in a taxi late at night, drunkenly putting the moves—rusty but surprisingly effective—on a friendly young publicist, when I’m struck by several buzz-killing realizations: My son has swimming tomorrow and his bathing suit has gone AWOL. I have to reschedule a conference at my 4-year-old daughter’s school. There are only two chicken nuggets left in the freezer. And my wife’s birthday is next week.

The last one is really important—the woman deserves something nice; without her, I wouldn’t be getting it on. A few months ago, inching past 40, I was overcome by a midlife crisis the pain of which wasn’t diminished by its being a cliché. On paper, things looked pretty good. I had a job, a family, and a house. But the responsibilities of parenthood had turned my marriage into a sexual no-fly zone. Which made it no less surprising when the person who persuaded me to look outside my relationship was my wife.

“Maybe you need to see other girls,” she’d casually offered one night, prompting my jaw to drop onto the kitchen table. “You should be free.” She added that while she had no interest in sleeping around, if I sowed a few oats she would turn a blind eye.

And thus began, after 15 mostly happy years of marriage, a new phase in our union. Call it negotiated wedlock, open fidelity, or monogamy 2.0. Call it every guy’s fantasy. In my case it’s a limited pass, authorization to tomcat without sacrificing my primary saucer of cream.

The very idea of sleeping with someone else raised a host of thorny issues (commitment, jealousy, how to put on a condom) I thought I’d resolved years before.

Apparently I’m not the only one trying it. Ask around a little and it’s clear the institution of marriage is under siege—not as you may have heard, by all those homosexuals bum-rushing the huppah, but by the growing legions of bored couples who, while perfectly okay with that “for richer, for poorer” stuff, are iffy on “forsaking all others.”

Take Brendan (not his real name), a 31-year-old editor who lives in Manhattan. Brendan has been married for five years to Lisa, his college sweetheart. “We got together young, and neither of us really felt done sleeping around,” he explains. So from the get-go they agreed to see other people. There were a few verboten targets: no mutual friends, no exes, no coworkers. Condoms were required, the deal was limited to one-night stands, and trysts had to happen when one of them was out of town. The final stipulation was full disclosure.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1880634,00.html

“Everyone should be abstinent,” Bristol Palin said during a Feb. 16 Fox News interview, just two months after the 18-year-old daughter of Alaska’s Republican governor gave birth to a 7-lb. 7-oz. baby boy. But abstinence is “not realistic at all,” she added. Evidently not.

Suppressing one’s earthly desires until marriage is a tenet of nearly all religions, though the burden of premarital abstinence has largely rested on the bride. Prepubescent marriages and gruesome practices like genital mutilation and the imposition of chastity belts have long been used in the name of guarding a girl’s “purity.” Tales of famous (and famously celibate) females like Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I and Florence Nightingale, to name a few, have helped uphold this chaste ideal, while medical literature from as late as the 19th century advised men to preserve their semen to boost vitality–a notion that dates back to Hippocrates and continues to this day among superstitious athletes. In recent years, the case for abstinence has broadened to include sexually transmitted diseases, with members of the True Love Waits movement arguing that celibacy is the only way to prevent AIDS.

Palin’s anecdotal evidence aside, federal studies have shown that abstinence-only education has done little to curb teen-pregnancy rates, despite the nearly $1 billion in federal funding that such programs have received since 2000. More than a third of all births in the U.S. are to single women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That an unwed teenage mother, the eldest daughter of a prominent politician, no less, can chat about the birds and the bees on national TV speaks volumes about changing attitudes–even if the young lady’s message contradicts itself.

http://www.advocate.com/Politics/Election/Pride_and_Prejudice/

The night before Election Day, a black woman walked into the San Francisco headquarters of the No on Proposition 8 campaign. Someone had ripped down the No on 8 sign she’d posted in her yard and she wanted a replacement. She was old, limping, and carrying a cane. Walking up and down the stairs to this office was hard for her.

I asked why coming to get the sign was worth the trouble, and she answered, “All of us are equal, and all of us have to fight to make sure the law says that.” She said that she was straight, and she told me about one of the first times she ever hung out with gay people, in New Orleans in the 1970s. “I thought I was so cool for being there, and I said, ‘You faggots are a lot of fun!’ Well, that day I learned my lesson. A gay man turned on me and said, ‘A faggot is not a person. A faggot is a bunch of sticks you use to light a fire.’ ”

The next day, Barack Obama was elected president, and gay marriage rights in California were taken away. At the same time, Arizona voters amended their state constitution to preemptively outlaw gay marriage. Florida went further, outlawing any legal union that’s treated as marriage, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions. Arkansas passed a vicious law denying us adoption rights.

The combination of Obama’s win and gay people’s losses inflicted mass whiplash. We were elated, then furious. I’d spent the week in the No on Prop. 8 office in the Castro, a neighborhood where our defeat was existential. For the next few days, wherever I went — barbershop, grocery store, gym, bars — I heard people talk of almost nothing else. Incredibly, strangers on the street walked up to me and started conversations about Prop. 8. Taking the long view, some found hope and consolation: 52.3% of Californians voted against us, but 47.7% voted with us, which was the closest we’ve ever come to winning a ballot measure for marriage equality in the state. Other election results were even more encouraging: In New York State, where a marriage bill is pending, we won enough legislative seats to secure a pro-equality majority; Connecticut voters rejected a constitutional convention that could have reversed that state’s legalization of marriage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html?ref=style

EVEN in a culture in which sex toys are a booming business and Oprah Winfrey discusses living your best life in the bedroom, a coed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm hovers at the extremes.

The founder of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, Nicole Daedone, sees herself as leading “the slow-sex movement,” one that places a near-exclusive emphasis on women’s pleasure — in which love, romance and even flirtation are not required.

“In our culture, admitting our bodies matter is almost an admission of failure,” said Ms. Daedone, 41, who can quote the poet Mary Oliver and speak wryly on the intricacies of women’s anatomy with equal aplomb. “I don’t think women will really experience freedom until they own their sexuality.”

A core of 38 men and women — their average age the late 20s — live full time in the retreat center, a shabby-chic loft building in the South of Market district. They prepare meals together, practice yoga and mindfulness meditation and lead workshops in communication for outside groups as large as 60.

But the heart of the group’s activity, listed cryptically on its Web site’s calendar as “morning practice,” is closed to all but the residents.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html

During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who “got it” by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was “the future.” But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.

Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can’t possibly stand.

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.