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Found this on Craigs List...
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Pink Upholstered Vagina Couch Date: 2008-01-15, 11:46AM PST
For Sale - beautiful pink "vagina couch" that I made in art school and no longer have space for. The couch is large: measures 5' 3" long, 3' 3" wide at the middle, and stands 2' 3" tall (and is heavy like a couch). The pics are from my portfolio and are several years old; as a result, the couch has some scuffmarks and stains around the bottom from being moved, but otherwise is in excellent shape. A professional upholsterer helped me build the couch, so it is also functional and durable as a piece of furniture. The couch must be picked up in Mendocino, a 3-hour drive north of SF. I am asking for $600 and a loving home! Call Willow at 802 579 9456 or reply to posting.
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Vagina Couch for Sale |
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Tommorrows Masterbation Technology is here today! |
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It may not compare to the fabled "BlowJob Machine," but naughty gadget maker Tenga has unveiled their "New Adult Concept" lineup of "onanism cups" that offer male users five "never before experienced sexual sensations." Choose from the Deep Throat Cup, Soft Tube Cup, Rolling Head Cup, Air Cushion Cup, and the invigorating Double Hole Cup. The devices are disposable, and Tenga stresses that you shouldn't be using them repeatedly by "rinsing them out." Ha Ha...gross! The devices are available now starting at 1500 yen ($14) —Japan only (sorry horny Westerners!). [Product Page via Digital World Tokyo via Wired]
Update: The device is available in the States. Horny Westerners rejoice! $18-$27
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Latest in Sexual Technology |
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Jennica St. Fox has been under heated investigation for her racial slurs... more news here. |
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The industry is in shock over Jennica St. Foxs' racial slurs...
There is more here to the story...
Use Of 'N-Word' May End Porn Star's Career |
Rascism for use of the 'N' Word |
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By Sinead Carew Wed Jan 30, 1:00 PM ET
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Size matters in pornography, except when it comes to tiny mobile phone screens, the next frontier for erotica.
If the adult entertainment industry has its way, Americans will soon get a choice of free porn on cell phones -- or at least some photographs of good-looking girls in bikinis.
Unlike in Europe, mobile porn has yet to take off in North America as carriers have been afraid of offending political and religious groups and parents concerned about children being exposed to adult content.
That may change this year as phone companies plan to loosen control on their networks to allow a wider variety of gadgets and services, while introducing new tools to shield minors. More advanced phones with better Web browsers like Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPhone also offer higher quality pictures and video.
"It will be impossible to stop the adult business exploitation of mobile entertainment," said Gregory Piccionelli, a lawyer specializing in adult entertainment at law firm Piccionelli & Sarno.
He predicted that U.S. consumers may soon be offered free porn on mobile phones alongside paid services like live video or "adult dates," a term for prearranged sex with strangers.
A conference being held in Miami this week is devoted to discussing mobile opportunities as the porn industry seeks to find a new driver of growth. A surfeit of free online porn sites has cut into profits that have so far come mainly from DVDs, videotapes and pay-per-view or subscription-based Web sites.
To survive, adult entertainers need to be on top of phone trends, said Jay Grdina, president of adult entertainment provider ClubJenna Inc, which he co-founded with his wife, world-famous porn star Jenna Jameson.
"If you don't evolve you're going to die. ... We need to make sure we're ready," Grdina said in an interview before his keynote speech at this week's Mobile Adult Content Congress, where adult entertainment and technology companies are brainstorming over how to make mobile porn a viable business.
Popular video-sharing site YouTube.com's plan to expand to about 100 million advanced cell phones may help the cause, even if it means some ClubJenna content -- which includes everything from glamour photographs of scantily clad models to hardcore videos -- is seen for free on phones. ClubJenna was sold to Playboy Enterprises Inc (PLA.N) in 2006.
"It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's giving away content. ... On the other hand, it's expanding the brand," said Grdina, adding that ClubJenna needs a boost in the U.S. market, where it generates "pretty much zero" mobile revenue compared with "very healthy" revenue in Europe.
While he has had trouble winning deals with U.S. phone operators so far, Grdina hopes for a deal within 18 months to sell photographs of bikini-clad models without nudity.
TITILLATION TO GO
Pornography has made inroads on cell phones in Europe, where it was a $775 million industry in 2007 that will grow to $1.5 billion by 2012, with the global market reaching $3.5 billion in 2010, according to Britain-based Juniper Research.
In comparison, North America generated just $26 million last year as carriers shied away from porn sales. Canada's second-largest phone company Telus Corp (T.TO), for example, withdrew a mobile porn service last year after complaints from hundreds of customers and criticism from the Catholic Church.
Gartner telecoms analyst Michael King said he expects mobile porn to be more prevalent around 2009, when there will be more phones that can show high-quality graphics.
Porn is "one of the bigger pieces of Web revenue. You would assume the natural extension would be on mobile," King said.
Piccionelli said the iPhone -- which Apple has forecast to sell 10 million units by the end of 2008 -- is ideal for viewing porn due to its graphics and Web browser that mimics computer browsers. Most phones have stripped-down browsers.
A new phone system being built by Google Inc (GOOG.O) may also boost consumer choice as the Internet company has pledged to support any type of mobile software.
But the key to development of mobile porn may be willingness by carriers to open their networks to more content. Even if they don't sell porn they would benefit from additional fees paid by consumers if mobile Web-surfing increases.
Verizon Wireless, the second-largest U.S. mobile service, has promised to let customers use any device or software that can work on its network this year.
Similarly, Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N) said it will support a wide array of gadgets for a fast wireless Web service it kicks off in 2008.
Spokesman John Polivka said customers of the service would be able to view anything they like. Sprint will also provide Web filters to help keep minors from adult sites.
NeuStar (NSR.N) sells an age-verification system for which it aims to have both a U.S. carrier client and a content customer within six months.
"Two thousand eight is when the first people are going to be sticking their toes in the water," said John Ticer, a NeuStar marketing executive.
Piccionelli said mobile porn will always face uncertainties, such as a possible privacy backlash against age-verification systems as consumers need to give personal details.
"However, that does not mean that uncertainty will prohibit enormous profits from being made in this business," he said.
(Editing by Brian Moss)
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Porn to spice up cell phones |
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You may be interested in reading today's New York Times article, reproduced below, which discusses one of the firm's obscenity cases, and our efforts to establish community standards using the Google Trends tool.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/technology/24obscene.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
By MATT RICHTEL |
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Published: June 24, 2008
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?
Related
Google Trends: Relative popularity in Florida of the search terms "surfing," "orgy" and "apple pie." (External Link)
Readers' Comments
Considering the accessibility of online pornography, how should communities shape local obscenity standards in the digital age?
• Post a Comment »
• Read All Comments (21) »
That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.
The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.
It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.
But the tactic is another example of the value of data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts, interests and desires of their users.
“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said Mr. Walters, the defense lawyer. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed,” he added.
Mr. Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more specific search data, including the number of searches for certain sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the company was reviewing the subpoena.
Mr. Walters is defending Clinton Raymond McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene material through a Web site based in Florida. The charges include racketeering and prostitution, but Mr. Walters said the prosecution’s case fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is obscene.
Such cases are a relative rarity this decade. In the last eight years, the Justice Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, according to Jeffrey J. Douglas, chairman emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been hundreds involving child pornography.) Prosecutions at the state level have followed a similar arc.
The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive or appeals to a prurient interest in sex — definitions that are based on “contemporary community standards.”
Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit magazines and movies available locally. A better barometer, Mr. Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics, because they show what people consume in private. But that information is hard to obtain.
“All you had to go on is what was available for public consumption, and that was a very crude tool,” Mr. Douglas said. “The prospect of having measurement of Internet traffic brings a more objective component than we’ve ever seen before.”
In a federal obscenity case heard this month, Mr. Douglas defended another Florida pornographer. In the trial, Mr. Douglas set up a computer in the courtroom and did Internet searches for sexually explicit terms to show the jury that there were millions of Web pages discussing such material. He then searched for other topics, like the University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, to demonstrate that there were not nearly as many related Web sites.
The jury was evidently not swayed, as his client was convicted on all counts.
The case Mr. Walters is defending takes the tactic to another level. Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.
The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.
Mr. Walters chose Pensacola because it is the only city in the court’s jurisdiction that is large enough to be singled out in the service’s data.
“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”
The Google service does, however, show the relative strength of many mainstream queries in Pensacola: “Nascar,” “surfing” and “Nintendo” all beat “orgy.”
Chris Hansen, a staff lawyer for the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the tactic clever and novel, but said it underscored the power of the Internet to reveal personal preferences — something that raises concerns about the collection of personal information.
“That’s why a lot of people are nervous about Google or Yahoo having all this data,” he said.
One question is whether the judge in the case will admit the data as evidence; it was given only in a deposition this month. Mr. Walters said he was confident the information would be allowable given that there has been a growing reliance on such data.
Russ Edgar, the Florida state prosecutor, said he was still assessing whether he would try to block the search data’s use in court. He declined to discuss the case’s specifics, but said that the popularity of sex-related Web sites had no bearing on whether Mr. Edgar was in violation of community standards.
“How many times you do something doesn’t necessarily speak to standards and values,” he said.
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What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer |
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Don't be as clueless as Eliot Spitzer! Plus, does he really try to satisfy? |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 5:56 a.m. PT, Thurs., July. 3, 2008
Brian Alexander
When does swinging fling outside of legal bounds? And why accepting PayPal payments for kinky sex isn't such a bright idea. Sexploration offers pro bono advice to keep our readers out of jail. Got a question? E-mail us.
Q: Just wondering if you’ve heard about this … It’s a swingers party with 5,000 couples and porn star Mary Carey as the hostess along with [attorney] Lawrence G. Walters talking about how to keep your swingers club from getting shut down. It’s coming to Florida in July 2008, and I’m wondering, if we go, is this legal?
A: I have sometimes wondered this myself when reporting on the nation’s expanding sexual menu. I’d see something, stand there with my jaw dropped to my chest, and think “Is this even legal?”
I have occasionally had my doubts, but according to the man himself, Lawrence G. Walters, one of the nation’s leading defenders of porn producers, swing clubs, and adult Internet sites, the swing party you refer to is perfectly legal.
“There is nothing illegal about participating in, or attending events focusing on the swinger lifestyle,” he tells me. “It is not illegal to have more than one sexual partner in the United States of America. It’s a free country. The government is not in the bedroom to that extent and if the government did try to pass a law, it would be invalid under the right to privacy.”
Some legal theorists, like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, say there is no such thing as a “right to privacy” because there is no mention of it in the Constitution. So while Walters is correct for now, he may not always be so correct depending upon the makeup of the Court.
Walters warns that swingers can face legal consequences if, say, they hold events in a private home for a fee, or post public notices of swinger parties to be held at residences, and do not have locally required permits. They could also wind up in violation of nuisance ordinances. But host hotels usually make special arrangements, often by booking the entire hotel for only that event so junior’s memory of his big Disney vacation isn’t blotted out by the sight of a platoon of nipple-pierced 60-year-olds in red Lycra thongs.
Q: I am a very high profile public figure. If [the truth] were known about my sex life I might be asked to step aside from my job. While I am of the Woodstock generation, [my wife] is younger and she is the one pushing the envelope. We go to [swingers] parties in Orlando. She has profiles on several of the sex sites. She gets guys to pay a lot for sex with her. There is no Mafia involved and no organized crime. Guys deposit funds into her PayPal account and meet her for sex. This used to bother me in the past, but not at all now.
A: If you think you’re running a risk by leading a kinky sex life, you haven’t grasped the half of it. You are married to a prostitute.
You might not think of her that way, but legally speaking, Walters explains, she is, and unless she’s meeting the sugar daddies in select locales in Nevada, she’s breaking the law.
“The Internet has changed the way lots of people perceive prostitution,” Walters explains. “You have all these escort sites, [hooker] review boards talking openly about ‘the hobby’ as it is called, and people sometimes forget this is very illegal, can be prosecuted, and regularly is prosecuted.”
It doesn’t matter if the payment runs through PayPal, or even if it’s comprised of something other than cash, like jewelry, airline tickets to attend a swinger’s convention, or third-base seats to the World Series. A promise of sex for a payment is prostitution. If some vice-squad detective wanted to get prickly about it, Walters says, something as simple as dinner could be considered pay, which could place a date’s request for the Beluga caviar and the Château Pétrus in a whole new light.
Q: Do men really care if the woman has an orgasm or not?
A: There is something almost existential about this question, like, “Is there really a merciful God?” or “Will Mick Jagger ever retire?”
I am here to ease your angst, and not just because I’m a man, but because I think it’s true. Not true for all men, of course, but I’d bet most of us do care and, like Boy Scouts, we strive to do our best.
Data from the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s sex life, “The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States,” showed that roughly one-third of women surveyed said they ALWAYS had an orgasm with their male partner. Not sometimes, or most of the time, but always. These numbers are even more impressive when you consider that many women report that due to some physiological or psychological barrier they rarely or never orgasm even if the guy is working like a Spartan. Then realize that the survey’s data was collected nearly a generation ago — before the explosion of porn in every possible form of media made fiery female orgasms the (completely unrealistic) standard, and before giving great oral sex became a datability requirement akin to having a job.
Even if you don’t trust our altruism, consider our egos. Many, many reader letters to this column come from women asking how they can soothe their men’s wounded pride over the women’s trouble reaching orgasm.
We care.
Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25401785/ |
Is this even legal? Pro bono sex advice |
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Angelina finds it a turn-on, but some are apprehensive if baby's on board... |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 5:54 a.m. PT, Thurs., July. 17, 2008
Just a month before her twins were born, Angelina Jolie boasted to Us Magazine that pregnancy is “great for the sex life. It just makes you a lot more creative. So you have fun, and as a woman you’re just so round and full.” Her statement prompted one pregnant friend of this column to grumble about how life is wickedly unfair if Angelina Jolie gets to be Angelina Jolie and also gets to enjoy great sex during pregnancy while many other women are having trouble keeping down lunch.
Well, some people really do have great sex during pregnancy. Some people also have lousy sex, or no sex, and are miserable about it. But many of those miserable people don’t have to be miserable, say experts, and sex, or at least intimacy, can be helpful to parents and baby alike.
As one Polish study put it, “research makes it evident that experiencing sexual satisfaction by pregnant women improves their self-esteem, facilitates [the] mutual relationship between partners and tightens the marital bond.”
But sometimes, says Armin A. Brott, author of “The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips and Advice for Dads-to-Be,” men and women aren’t sure what to expect when she becomes pregnant, nor how their mate might be feeling about everything from body image to desire.
“There is lot of second guessing that goes on about sex during pregnancy,” says Brott, who has talked to “thousands” of men on the topic of pregnancy. “As soon as a woman begins to notice her body change, lots of guys say ‘She is self-conscious about her body. She is not feeling good. I will leave her alone.’ But at the same time many women find their growing bodies to be somewhat erotic and may be more into having sex than before. But she says to herself ‘He does not find my changing body much of turn on any more.’ So they both back off a little bit even though they both may be turned-on by her body.”
Ups and downs in the bedroom
Study after study shows that most women go through a somewhat predictable trajectory of desire during pregnancy. Libido drops during the first trimester, often rises during the second, and then falls off precipitously in the third. The reasons are pretty obvious.
“You can imagine making love and suddenly having to get up to vomit,” Brott says, not uncommon during the first trimester. But things usually settle down during the middle three months before some significant discomfort can take over — often requiring new and sometimes challenging positions — during the last three.
UCLA reproduction researcher Dr. Kari Sproul surveyed 30 women (divided into two groups of infertility patients and non-infertility patients) for a 2004 study and found that the non-infertility patients had intercourse 6.6 times per month before the pregnancy, 3.8 times per month in the first trimester, 4.3 in the second, and 3.1 in the third. The infertility patients, perhaps reflecting heightened concern after their struggle to become pregnant, had intercourse less than once per month during the first trimester, 1.3 in the second and .07 in the third.
Subsequently she surveyed the women in both groups using a measurement called the Female Sexual Function Index and found that while desire remained virtually unchanged from the first trimester compared to the third, some physical indicators, especially lubrication, dropped significantly. On a scale ranging from 2 to 36, overall sexual satisfaction by the third trimester was 18.92, which isn’t too bad, Sproul says, all things considered.
“We inferred that even though during pregnancy there is a decline in the frequency, the actual function or quality of intercourse does not change,” Sproul explains.
Hitting the baby on the head
Though women are often depicted as the crazy ones during pregnancy (think Lucille Ball ordering Ricky out to get sardines and ice cream) men are sometimes the irrational ones. Men can feel as if they are being watched by their future offspring, or that they will hurt the baby usually by hitting it with their penis.
Such worries are unfounded. It would be virtually impossible for any man to bonk Junior on the head or poke his eye out with that thing, for example, because the penis would have to be very, very long and even then it’s unlikely to bother the baby. (Sorry, men.)
But, says Sproul, research has proven that “the chances of doing something to the baby is small,” and that unless the pregnancy is fraught with complications like bleeding or contractions, there is no reason not to have sex and enjoy orgasms throughout the pregnancy if both partners feel like it.
Almost as important as what’s going on in her body is what is going on inside his brain.
As Brott says, some men find their pregnant lovers very desirable, and some do not. Some do at first and then don’t later. And for some, a pregnant woman is practically a fetish. But often his desire, or lack thereof, have little to do with her body. As one journal article bluntly states it: “Pregnancy represents a life crisis …”
Putting on the moves or building an extra bedroom?
Brott says many men are terrified of being able to financially handle the new responsibility. They worry about their mate’s health. They start thinking about home additions. None of which is conducive to hot libido. Surprisingly, men can also be surprised at the fact sex led to a pregnancy in the first place. (Apparently, it is one thing to take a sex ed class and know how it all works, and quite another to actually be half the equation.)
“They sometimes think ‘I could not be the father,’” Brott says. “They think it is impossible that they have done something so powerful.”
But a rich sexual life during pregnancy is possible by doing what Sexploration always begs readers to do: Talk. First, make your health care provider address sex during pregnancy. Ask questions. Then talk to your lover. “People who have the habit of communicating about sex will be much more communicative during pregnancy, too,” Brott believes. “They need to have those conversations, like ‘I am finding you turn me on now. What do you think?’ as opposed to second guessing and imagining you know what somebody else is thinking.”
This will help after the baby arrives, too. When attention is divided, downtime nonexistent and both parents are exhausted, sometimes all anybody needs to hear is “I love you and you are amazingly hot, but I have spit-up running down my spine. Maybe tomorrow, after ‘Teletubbies’?”
Brian Alexander is the author of the book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25707457/ |
Three’s a crowd? Pregnant sex stirs thrills and fears |
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‘Unlikely Hot Girls’ transcend age and physical flaws.
Sexiness is as much about posture and voice intonation as it is about cleavage or skirt length or the size of our behinds. |
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By Meghan Daum
updated 5:44 a.m. PT, Fri., July. 11, 2008
Sexiness, like love or nostalgia or sinus congestion on a pollen-free day, has a way of sneaking up on us at the most improbable moments.
How do we account, for example, for that ineluctable feeling of desirability that can come over us when we are traipsing home from the yoga studio in sweaty leggings and flip-flops that reveal more about our pedicure history than we'd like? And how, by the same token, do we explain the ease with which many of us can slip into our most reliably fabulous Balenciaga dress and Louboutin slides and still feel as sexy as a bag of carrots?
There are, of course, as many reasons for this cruel dichotomy as there are ways to feel bad about ourselves.
We can blame hormones, headaches, pimples, bloating, bad moods, bad hair, or bad lighting. We must also consider what it is we're staring into. Mirrors, as all women know, are highly politicized entities. For reasons that I am convinced are more complicated than national health care, it is entirely possible for me to look and feel reasonably hot in front of my own mirror and, less than an hour later, catch a reflection of myself that suggests some shapeless creature from Jim Henson's workshop has borrowed my outfit and copied my hairstyle, and is blithely chatting up my friends, all of whom are too polite to say anything.
There have, of course, been times when I have felt almost unbearably sexy for no apparent or justifiable reason: retrieving the newspaper in pajamas and clogs, standing over the kitchen sink washing dishes, pondering the produce selection at Whole Foods. None of these occasions led to or had anything to do with an actual sex act.
In other words, let's get one thing very clear: The phenomenon I'm discussing has to do with sexiness, not horniness. There is a sizable, if nuanced, distinction. If this were the analogy portion of the SAT, we might say that sexiness is to horniness as epicureanism is to hunger. Whereas lust tends to limit its reach to particular people or stretches of time (and, like hunger, can presumably be sated via fairly standard channels), sexiness is a state of mind. It is inextricably linked to sex as a concept but wholly separate from fornication. Despite our preoccupation with the sexiness of women, sexiness applies to both genders. Despite the youth-centric tyranny of our times, it transcends age. As much about posture and voice intonation as it is about cleavage or skirt length or the dimensions of our posteriors, feeling sexy is, at its root, about owning ourselves. It's being at home in our own skins. No wonder it is so damn elusive.
After all, pretty much anyone can have sex.
Capturing the essence of sex and customizing it to our own needs and tastes is more difficult. Hence, another analogy: Having sex is to being sexy what conceiving a child is to raising a child. The first, age and health permitting, is more or less a biological function. The second is an art: a complicated, ever-evolving process that no two people can possibly do the same way. And just as the parents who are most successful at child rearing are often those who pay the least attention to its fads (heated diaper wipes) and socially constructed paranoias (the idea that the child will suffer due to unheated diaper wipes), women who possess an innate eroticism tend to do the least amount of worrying about how they measure up to popular images of sexiness.
The Unlikely Hot Girl
Enter the Unlikely Hot Girl. We all know at least one of her, more likely several. She's the less than totally attractive woman who mysteriously draws men to her as though she were the last female on a remote tropical island. In other words, men don't simply like her, they want and need her; they require her. It's not that she's ugly. She's just notably imperfect. Maybe she has crooked teeth or substantial hips or a bump on her nose. Maybe her breasts are too small or saggy or possessed of any of the myriad flaws that, here in the Plasticine Age, are avoided only by way of artificial mammary enhancement. Maybe the worst thing we can say about her is that she's not as attractive as we like to think we ourselves are. So why is she being madly pursued by the guy we've met several times but who never remembers our name?
Conventional wisdom might say, "It's the pheromones, stupid!" Most often associated with insects and those intriguing advertisements in the backs of magazines — "Attract the Mate You Want: Order Now!" — pheromones are chemicals that trigger a variety of biological responses. There are pheromones associated with danger from a predator, with the marking of a trail, and with claiming territory. In other words, pheromones are the chemicals released when bees sting, when ants travel to and from their nests, and when dogs urinate on everything they pass.
Notice that none of these examples involve people being asked for their phone numbers in bars. That's because despite the widespread assumption that pheromones are inextricably linked to erotic appeal, there’s a long-standing debate as to whether humans even have them. (William Shatner has said, "I'm told that my pheromone count is very high and that I am just naturally attractive to women and, I think, sexual deviants.")
"The whole notion of human pheromones was a popular thing with psychiatrists in the 1970s," says Mary Roach, author of "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex" (W. W. Norton), which looks at the elaborate lengths researchers have gone to in order to untangle the mysteries of Eros. "But increasingly it looks like a nuts-and-bolts chemical thing. It has to do with the insect world."
Still, as Roach describes in "Bonk," the idea that a human sex hormone can be identified and isolated (and even packaged and sold) has long captured the scientific imagination. In 1971, University of Chicago psychologist Martha McClintock, then a Wellesley College undergraduate, published research suggesting that, thanks to pheromones, women who lived in groups tended to get their periods at the same time each month. That same year, Richard P. Michael, a British behavioral neuroendocrinologist studying rhesus monkeys, professed to have isolated whatever compounds in vaginal secretions cause male monkeys to initiate sex when they sniff them. The assumption was that, due to genetic similarities between primates and humans, the existence of monkey pheromones must prove the existence of human pheromones. Unfortunately, in 1977, when a sample group of married women were asked to apply synthetic rhesus monkey hormones on their chests at bedtime for three months in a row, they reported no change in their husbands' interest level or behavior.
The art of attraction
But that hasn't stopped other researchers from fighting the good fight. In 1986, research biologist Winnifred Cutler and George Preti, a chemist from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research institute in Philadelphia, published data showing that male sweat extracts secreted from sexually active men's armpits promote more fertile menstrual cycles.
Cutler went on to claim that in the same way that women who live together experience a synchronization of their periods, "women with unusually short or long menstrual cycles get closer-to-average cycles after regularly inhaling the male essence." (That essence, according to Cutler, is comprised of male hormones, sweat, and body odor. "You just walk into a male locker room," she told a reporter in 1998. "That's the odor.")
That scent isn't exactly a recipe for feeling like hot stuff. But further research — such as a study suggesting that women who applied armpit secretions donated by other women to their upper lips had sex more often — led Cutler to extrapolate that human pheromones attract members of the opposite sex.
Preti, who now questions some of his and Cutler's research methods and conclusions, is no longer associated with Cutler. Meanwhile, if her name sounds familiar, it may be because her pheromone potions, which include an "aftershave/cologne additive" for men and a "cosmetic fragrance additive" for women, are advertised in magazines and sold on her Web site. The prices: $99.50 and $98.50, respectively, for one sixth of an ounce.
In case you're wondering, I've never heard of anyone experiencing any effects, positive or negative, from mail-order pheromones. Back in 1999, Roach tried them as part of research for an article in the online magazine Salon, and reported that people made more eye contact with her, but only because she was staring at them trying to discern if they felt uncontrollably drawn to her. That's not to suggest that William Shatner doesn't have a "high pheromone count." It's more likely, however, that what he really has is a healthy dose of ego. As we've been told by every self-help author, talk-show shrink, and platitudinous celebrity, the many portals to feeling sexy are accessible via a single key: self-confidence.
"It's all about knowing who you are, about owning yourself," says April Masini, author of "Think and Date Like a Man" (iUniverse), which essentially tells women to stop sabotaging themselves with needless self-loathing. "To any woman who walks into a room and feels too old or not sexy, I have three words: Camilla Parker Bowles," Masini says. "She wasn't as conventionally sexy as Princess Diana. But she got the prince."
Granted, Parker Bowles isn't everyone’s idea of a femme fatale. But the fact that Prince Charles held deeper affections for this relatively ordinary-looking woman than for the princess whose beauty and sex appeal were universally recognized and relentlessly celebrated serves as further proof that what Mom told us is true: namely, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Also, stand up straight. (Diana, for all her loveliness, never mastered that one.)
Sexiness is evanescent
The Unlikely Hot Girl, on the other hand, has the posture of a dancer even if she's zaftig, the smile of a beauty queen even if she has a space between her teeth, and, perhaps most importantly, a fashion sensibility that truly places sensibility over fashion. That is to say, she does not purchase clothes solely on the basis of having seen them on the body of a 16-year-old celebrity. She also, according to author and sexologist Yvonne K. Fulbright, doesn't ignore her flaws so much as embrace them.
"She recognizes that she's sexual and that there's no excuse for how she was made," says Fulbright, who's now an expert on CherryTV, a new video-based Web site focusing on women's sexuality and health. "She's good at channeling her energy to focus on desirable traits."
Moreover, says Fulbright, a lot of Unlikely Hot Girls have figured out how to resist the pervasive cultural message that being sexually attractive requires impersonating a stripper or a porn star. And on that front, their closest allies can be the very forces that less enlightened women live in fear of: age and wisdom.
Mary Roach suggests that the trick to feeling sexy is to tap into the freedom we can feel in a dark bedroom. "In this culture, what's hot is tits and youth," Roach says. "The majority of us don't have enough of one or the other, or either. That's why it’s easy to be sexy in a dark room. In your own mind you can be Jennifer Lopez. But when you walk into a bathroom with unflattering light, it makes you crumple. So perhaps the thing to do is focus on that feeling of having the lights out, of being anything you want to be, rather than thinking about how big your ass is."
That's an interesting angle, but most of us live chiefly in daylight (or, worse, under an unforgiving fluorescent glare), where flaws are relentlessly pointed out and commented upon with an eye toward correcting them. So how do we own our natural sexiness in a world that’s constantly selling us an artificial version of it? Self-confidence is great, but where does it get us in those moments when sexiness, like a name we can't summon at a cocktail party, has escaped our grasp? When our elaborate lingerie stares menacingly at us from the drawer; when we can't accept a lover's compliment; when we're convinced we've lost our looks; when we wish that the Unlikely Hot Girl would, for once, look in the mirror and consider the possibility that she's not all that hot — we need guidance.
What do we do? Perhaps we do nothing. The answer — insofar as there are answers to this fundamentally unsolvable puzzle — is to realize that sexiness, by its very nature, is evanescent. It makes appearances only on the grounds that it will soon disappear. Like a skilled flirt, it always backs down before we start to take its affections for granted. Like a wise teacher, it reminds us that true knowledge means knowing we'll never really know.
True appreciation, on the other hand, is an infinitely worthy goal. Most of us will never feel sexy all the time, or even most of the time. But there's something to be said for taking what we can get — and enjoying it while it lasts.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25394136/page/2/ |
Secret to feeling sexy: It's all in the mind |
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Westerners getting too racy on the beaches; police crack down on nudity. Unlike elsewhere in the conservative Persian Gulf, tourists in Dubai are often seen wearing skimpy bikinis on public beaches and walk the city's streets in shorts. |
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updated 1:57 p.m. PT, Mon., July. 14, 2008
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Westerners were getting too racy on the beaches of this Persian Gulf tourist haven, and a police crackdown on topless sunbathing, nudity and other indecent behavior has resulted in 79 arrests in recent days.
Undercover officers are strolling the sand while others stand guard in new watchtowers to enforce the social mores of this Muslim city-state, which is a booming business center that is attracting growing hordes of foreign tourists.
Authorities said they began the decency campaign after police detained a British man and a woman who were allegedly having sex on one of Dubai's sprawling beaches earlier this month.
Over the past two weeks, police have detained a total of 79 people whose behavior was "disturbing families enjoying the beach," Zuhair Haroun, a spokesman for Dubai's Criminal Investigation Department, said Monday.
First-time offenders may be issued a warning, but if caught twice, tourists could be referred to the public prosecutor for possible criminal charges, authorities said.
Thousands of European and Asian expatriates live and work in Dubai, where native Emiratis make up only about 20 percent of the estimated 1.2 million residents. Shopping malls and fast food restaurants have replaced traditional Arab houses, and English has overtaken Arabic as the emirate's lingua franca.
Skimpy bikinis, nudity draw complaints
Many Emiratis and Arabs visiting from other Persian Gulf countries increasingly feel Dubai's ambition to become a cosmopolitan metropolis and tourist destination is overrunning their own traditions and contradict what they feel is culturally acceptable.
Unlike elsewhere in the conservative Persian Gulf, tourists in Dubai are often seen wearing skimpy bikinis on public beaches and walk the city's streets in shorts. Alcohol is freely available in hotel bars and restaurants in this regional businesses and entertainment hub.
While pursuing the police crackdown, Dubai has embarked on a public awareness campaign to remind its Western visitors and foreign residents that the city may have flashy hotels and glitzy skyscrapers but it also is a Muslim country with traditionally conservative values.
The city is installing signs warning tourists in Arabic, English and several other languages not to sunbathe topless or change clothes in public, said Abdullah Mohammed Rafia, an official with the Dubai Municipality whose office is overseeing the public awareness campaign.
Authorities are "taking action in response to numerous complaints" filed by people who visit the city's beaches, Rafia said. Complaints have ranged from families "offended by displays of nudity" to women sunbathers who say groups of men stare at them while at the beach.
The police campaign also will target people who harass beachgoers with acts "deemed offensive, immoral or disrespectful," including loitering and voyeurism, said Dubai's acting police chief, Maj. Gen. Khamis Mattar al-Mazeina.
Some tourists who were enjoying Dubai's simmering sun Monday said the new campaign left them confused about what is considered appropriate in Dubai.
"I understand that I have to respect the rules of the country," said John MacLean, a British tourist on holiday with his girlfriend. But, he added, "I am not sure if I can kiss her or touch her in public."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25678939/ |
Dubai detains 79 for indecent beach behavior |
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State cancels contract, faces investigation after posters plaster London |
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By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
updated 9:33 a.m. PT, Tues., July. 15, 2008
A state employee has resigned and officials have disavowed an international advertising campaign that led to calls for an investigation of tourism posters proclaiming “South Carolina is so gay.”
The campaign, which plastered the London subway with posters advertising the charms of South Carolina and five major U.S. cities to gay European tourists, landed with a resounding thud in South Carolina, where the issue of gay rights has long been a political flashpoint.
The advertisements were timed for London’s Gay Pride Week, which ended Saturday. The posters touted the attractions of the state to gay tourists, including its “gay beaches” and its Civil War-era plantations.
Similar ads were posted for Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., none of which reported any negative backlash. But in South Carolina, reaction to the posters — dubbed “the gayest ever mainstream media advertising campaign in London” by Out Now, the Australian advertising firm that designed the promotion — was swift.
After The Palmetto Scoop, a South Carolina political blog, uncovered the promotion last week, Republican state Sen. David Thomas of Greenville protested the campaign and called for an audit of the advertising budget overseen by the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.
“South Carolinians will be irate when they learn their hard earned tax dollars are being spent to advertise our state as ‘so gay,’” Thomas said in a statement.
The tourism department quickly said it was canceling payment of its $5,000 fee for the posters, which it said were approved by a low-level state worker who did not run the idea by senior officials. The employee, who was not identified, resigned last week, the agency said.
A spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, who has been mentioned as a possible running mate for the Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said the governor agreed that the posters were “inappropriate.”
The was no immediate reaction from Out Now.
‘Just great to be so gay’
The campaign was designed to “send a clear message to everyone who sees this campaign that it is long past time that ‘so gay’ should be used as a negative phrase of disapproval,” said Andrew Roberts, chief executive of Amro Worldwide, the travel agency that commissioned the ads.
“From where we sit, and for all our many customers, being described as ‘so gay’ is not a negative thing at all. We think it is just great to be so gay,” said Roberts, who called the campaign a success, having reached more than 2 million people in London.
State tourism officials insisted that they had known nothing about the campaign. But when the promotion was first announced last month, the tourism board said in a statement that “it sends a powerful positive message.”
“For our gay visitors, it is actually quite wonderful for them to discover just how much South Carolina has to offer — from stunning plantation homes to miles of wide sandy beaches,” the statement said.
The agency reversed course last week after many South Carolinians disagreed.
Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative activist group in Columbia, the state capital, said that at first he thought the ads were an Internet hoax.
“I think with today’s economy, we have to be really smart with our tourism dollars, and South Carolina’s market, very clearly, is the family-friendly market,” Smith said. “So if we want to spend our dollars in a way that’s wise, we need to go after our market, and our market is families.”
Said Ventphis Stafford of Charleston: “We’re so gay? Nah. Wrong state. Go to California.”
Activist: Right message, wrong place
Gay tourism is a $64.5 billion market in the United States, the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association estimates, and more than 75 cities around the world have gay-themed campaigns that create no controversy. But the campaign drew special attention in South Carolina because it emerged only weeks after widespread debate over gay rights in the schools.
Eddie Walker, principal of Irmo High School, in suburban Columbia, announced that he was quitting rather than approve the creation of a Gay-Straight Alliance at the school, one of the state’s largest.
“Our sex education curriculum is abstinence based,” Walker wrote in a letter to the school. “I feel the formation of a Gay/Straight Alliance Club at Irmo High School implies that students joining the club will have chosen to or will choose to engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex, opposite sex, or members of both sexes.”
Such attitudes remain prevalent in the state, said Warren Redman-Gress, executive director of the South Carolina Alliance for Full Acceptance, a gay and lesbian advocacy group. He praised the motives behind the campaign but criticized it as poorly thought out.
“I wish the folks at the tourism board had done a little more of their homework,” Redman-Gress said. “I get calls regularly, people want to know before I come and spend my hard-earned money, my souvenir dollars in South Carolina, is it a place where it is OK for me to be gay?
“The answer is yes and no,” he said. “You live on the edge with the simple fact that you can come to South Carolina, spend your money getting here, and someone can come in and say, ‘I’m sorry; you can’t stay here because you’re gay.’”
NBC affiliates WCBD of Charleston, S.C.; WIS of Columbia, S.C.; WSAV of Savannah, Ga.; and WYFF of Greenville, S.C., contributed to this report.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25677373/ |
Gay tourism ad causes uproar in S. Carolina |
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Agency barred from recognizing same-sex union despite two-state approval |
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updated 12:36 p.m. PT, Thurs., July. 17, 2008
WASHINGTON - Same-sex marriage is legal in two states, but not a single one will show up in the 2010 census.
The Census Bureau says the federal Defense of Marriage Act bars the agency from recognizing gay marriages in the nation's 10-year count, even though the marriages are legal in Massachusetts and California.
The agency's director, Steven Murdock, said in an interview Thursday that the 1996 federal law "has that effect, in terms of being a federal agency. We are restricted by it."
The Census Bureau does not ask people about their sexual orientation, but it does ask about their relationships to the head of the household. Many gay couples are listed in census figures as unmarried, same-sex partners, though it is an imperfect tally of all gay couples.
Murdock said the bureau will strive to count same-sex couples in the 2010 census, just as it has in the past. But those people who say they are married will be reclassified as unmarried, same-sex partners.
Same-sex couples with no children will not be classified as families, according the bureau's policy. Those with children who are related to the head of the household will be classified as families.
'Discriminatory and shameful'
Gay rights advocates complained that the Census Bureau is depriving them of a hard-fought legal recognition.
"To completely whitewash us out of existence is hurtful, discriminatory and shameful," said Molly McKay of Marriage Equality USA, a California-based group that advocates for same-sex marriage. "It's like the federal government is trying to say that we don't exist."
McKay said an accurate count of same-sex married couples would help policymakers determine the costs of providing benefits.
McKay, 38, said she plans to marry her partner of 12 years on Sept. 1, now that they are legally able to marry in California. She said they consider themselves "an old married couple," even if the government doesn't.
"This is a very sweet moment in our life. It really is an absolutely joyous time," McKay said. "The notion that the federal government is going to come in and erase our existence is un-American."
The Census Bureau is required by the Constitution to conduct a comprehensive count of the nation's residents every 10 years. Every question is either mandated by federal law or used to administer a federal program, Murdock said.
Same-sex marriage was not an issue in the 2000 census because it wasn't legal in any state. The Census Bureau's policy on same-sex marriages was first reported in the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
The bureau relies almost entirely on people's responses to classify them by race, ethnicity, age and income. But not marital status — at least not in 2010.
"It really should be what you say you are, not what I perceive you to be," Murdock said. But, the agency director added, "We have some limitations. This particular act limits us in regards to this issue.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25724116/ |
Census won't count gay marriages in 2010 |
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Island residents asked for a ban on use of 'lesbian' to describe gay women.
Greek-American Paul Thymou, resident of the Aegean island of Lesbos, holds a banner reading: "If you are not from Lesbos, you are not a Lesbian," outside of an Athens courthouse on on June 10. |
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ATHENS - A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.
Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, brought a case last month arguing the use of the term in reference to gay women insulted their identity.
In a July 18 decision, the Athens court said the word did not define the identity of the residents of the island, and so it could be validly used by gay groups in Greece and abroad.
The ruling ordered the plaintiffs to pay court expenses of $366.2.
"This is a good decision for lesbians everywhere," Vassilis Chirdaris, lawyer for the Gay and Lesbian Union of Greece, told Reuters. "A court in Athens could not stop people around the world from using it. It was ridiculous."
He said the plaintiffs were free to appeal the decision in a higher court.
Lesbos, which lies just off the Turkish Coast, has become a gathering spot for gay women from around the world, especially at the village of Eressos which is regarded as the birthplace of the poet in the 7th century B.C.
Several residents testified during the trial that the use of the word lesbian had brought recognition to the island and boosted its tourist trade.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25798114/
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Greek court rules lesbians not just from Lesbos |
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Popular men's pill may ease sexual side effects, small study shows |
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CHICAGO - Viagra's effect in women has been disappointing, but a new small study finds those on antidepressants may benefit from taking the little blue pills.
The research involving 98 premenopausal women found Viagra helped with orgasm. But the benefits did not extend to other aspects of sex such as desire, researchers report in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.
"For women on antidepressants with orgasm problems, this may provide some wonderful relief," said psychologist Stanley Althof, director of the Center for Marital and Sexual Health of South Florida in West Palm Beach, who was not involved in the study. "But it will not improve their desire or arousal."
Antidepressants can interfere with sex drive and performance even as the drugs help lift crippling depression. Switching drugs or reducing the dose can help. But many people, men and women, stop taking them because of their sexual side effects.
The complaints are common. More than half the people who take antidepressants develop sexual problems, prior studies have found, especially for people taking Prozac, Paxil, Celexa and other drugs that work by increasing the chemical serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is thought to slow down orgasm, perhaps by diminishing the release of another brain chemical, dopamine. Viagra increases blood flow to sex organs.
No plans to seek Viagra for women
Pfizer Inc. spokeswoman Sally Beatty said the company currently has no plans to pursue FDA approval for using its drug Viagra as a treatment for female sexual dysfunction. The company ended its internal research on Viagra for women in 2004. While Viagra was found to be safe, the results were inconclusive, Beatty said in an e-mail.
The search for a Viagra equivalent for women has been disheartening. A testosterone patch was sent back for more safety study by the Food and Drug Administration. A handheld vacuum device that increases blood flow to the clitoris does have FDA approval, and BioSante Pharmaceuticals Inc. is testing a testosterone gel called LibiGel.
The new Viagra findings are based on an eight-week experiment. The 98 women were using antidepressants successfully but were having sexual problems. Their average age was 37.
The women agreed to attempt sexual activity at least once each week. Each time, they took a pill, not knowing whether it was Viagra or a matching dummy pill.
While 72 percent of the women taking Viagra reported improvement or stayed the same on an overall scale, only 27 percent of the women taking the placebo reported improvement or stayed the same.
Headaches, flushing among side effects
Althof said it's "worrisome" that 43 percent of the women on Viagra experienced headaches, compared to 27 percent of the women on dummy pills. Indigestion and reddening of skin (flushing) also were reported more often by the women taking Viagra.
Psychologist Leonore Tiefer of New York University School of Medicine said industry-funded research has oversimplified women's sexual experience. She noted the new study, funded by a Pfizer grant, found more side effects than benefits.
"Where's the question to the women: Is it worth it?" Tiefer said.
An earlier study in men taking antidepressants found more pronounced sexual benefits with Viagra than the benefits found for women, said lead author Dr. George Nurnberg, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque.
But the message for men and women who need antidepressants is that Viagra may help them stay on the drugs, he said.
"We're not talking about a lifestyle issue. We're talking about a medical necessity issue," Nurnberg said.
Pfizer had no influence on the design, findings or manuscript, Nurnberg said. He and several of the other authors disclosed financial ties to Pfizer and other drugmakers.
From:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25800764/ |
Viagra may revive women on depression drugs |
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Study: Victims of dating violence more likely to have symptoms of PTSD |
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updated 2:28 p.m. PT, Tues., July. 22, 2008
NEW YORK - About 3 percent of 12- to 17-year-old girls are physically or sexually assaulted by a boyfriend or date, a U.S. study suggests.
In interviews with a nationally representative sample of U.S. teens, researchers found that 2.7 percent of girls and 0.6 percent of boys said they had been the victim of serious dating violence — including physical abuse, sexual assault or being threatened with a weapon.
The findings offer some insight into the prevalence of the problem, as well as some of its consequences, according to lead researcher Kate B. Wolitzky-Taylor, who is now at the University of Texas at Austin.
She and her colleagues at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, found that teenagers who said they’d been the victims of dating violence were nearly four times more likely to have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression.
“Overall, these findings suggest that dating violence in adolescence is a significant public health issue to address, particularly for older adolescent girls,” the researchers report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
The study did not look at less-severe forms of violence, such as being shoved or slapped without injury, and it did not assess verbal abuse. So the percentage of teenagers in abusive relationships may be much higher.
The bottom line, according to the researchers, is that dating violence needs to be detected early — by parents, doctors or school assessment — and prevented whenever possible.
Teaching middle school students how to handle conflicts in their relationships, for example, might help them later on to manage romantic relationships and possibly prevent violence, the researchers note.
In addition, Wolitzky-Taylor said that teenagers who have a friend in a violent dating relationship should be taught to report the situation to an adult.
The study also found that certain factors seemed to put teens at greater risk of dating violence — such as a history of stressful or potentially traumatic events, like witnessing violence or losing a parent, sibling or friend.
Older teenage girls were also at greater risk than boys or younger girls.
Wolitzky-Taylor said that “we might want to be more on the lookout” for signs of dating violence in teenagers with risk factors.
Study participants were presented products ranging from cordless phones to lawn mowers. The goods were presented in three ways:
* One choice was clearly superior to the other two (asymmetric dominance)
* One choice was intermediate to the other two (compromise)
* Two options that were somewhat equivalent (control)
After participants made choices, they rated the products and their satisfaction. In five tests that shifted the products and setups, the participants' preferences were affected by presentation. The bottom line: A product presented as clearly superior to other products on a store shelf makes for a happy customer, regardless of the product's inherent qualities to some degree.
“A pen selected from a set in which it asymmetrically dominated another pen produced a more positive writing experience and a greater willingness to pay for the pen than if the same pen was selected from a set in which it did not dominate another option,” conclude Song-Oh Yoon of the Korea University Business School and Itamar Simonson from Stanford University.
The study is detailed in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
A study last year by a separate group, published in the same journal, reached a similar conclusion. Study participants were presented with two sofas. Sofa A was softer, but Sofa B was more durable. Sofa A was preferred by the minority — 42.3 percent of the participants. Then both sofas were presented with three other sofas that had very low softness ratings. Preference for sofa A jumped to 77.4 percent.
Tricks of the trade
There are many ways retailers encourage you to open your wallet. None is more obvious than putting things on sale.
Researchers have known empirically for more than 20 years a "50 percent off" sign leads consumers to assume a price is attractive, even if they have no knowledge of the original price or reasonable prices for that product.
In fact, shoppers as a whole seem quite clueless about sales values.
Studies have also shown that frequent but modest discounts — such as the constant sales at a car dealership — lead to perceptions of greater value than less frequent but deeper discounts.
And when math is involved, most of us can't cope. For example: See if you can calculate the total savings in the setup: 20 percent off the original price plus an additional 25 percent off the sale price. How much is that item marked down? If you said 45 percent off, then your math skills are as pitiful as the 85 percent of college students who also got this wrong in a study last year by researchers at the University of Miami and the University of Minnesota. The right answer: 40 percent off.
More tricks
Other tricks, such as this one documented in a study last year, are more subtle:
A salesperson can totally alter a window shopper's inclination to buy something by simply asking the right question. When a salesperson asks a shopper which of several items she prefers, the shopper tends to skip the whole "Should I buy it at all?" question and go straight to the "Which one should I buy?" phase. The study was done in simulated tests and in real-world retail situations.
“Stating a preference appears to induce a which-to-buy mindset, leading people to think about which of several products they would like to buy under the implicit assumption they have already decided to buy one of them,” wrote Alison Jing Xu and Robert S. Wyer, Jr. of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Consequently, they are more disposed to make a purchase than they otherwise would be.”
Amazingly, the gimmick worked even in selling unrelated products. Just 2 percent of a control group bought candy in one test. But in a group who had been asked to indicate their preference among mp3 players, restaurants, and mobile phones, 28 percent bought candy.
Some tricks are downright nasty. One sales technique is called “disrupt-then-reframe.”
Frank R. Kardes at the University of Cincinnati and colleagues found that by presenting a confusing sales pitch (such as telling a potential customer that a candy bar costs 300 cents) then restating the pitch in a more familiar way, they were able to increase sales of a candy bar in a supermarket. The same trick increased students’ willingness to accept a tuition increase or to pay to join a student interest group.
Loyal shoppers
Any good salesperson knows that if you really want to sell something, you just need to know what the customer wants.
Another study by Simonson, the Stanford researcher, with Ran Kivetz of Columbia University, focused on loyalty programs, in which a consumer joins to gain discounts or some other rewards but is required to make a certain number of purchases.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25803781/ |
Nearly 3 percent of teen girls assaulted |
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Leader Warren Jeffs accused of sexual assault; five others to be arrested.
Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is accused of sexual assault. |
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ELDORADO, Texas - A Texas grand jury on Tuesday indicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs and five of his followers.
Jeffs was charged with felony sexual assault of a child.
Four of his followers were charged with one count of sexually assaulting girls under the age of 17. One of the four faced an additional charge of bigamy, Attorney General Greg Abbott said.
A fifth follower was charged with three counts of failure to report child abuse, Abbott said.
The charges followed an ill-fated child custody case in which more than 400 children were placed in foster care. The Texas Supreme Court ruled child welfare authorities overstepped in taking all the children from their parents even though many were infants and toddlers.
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints leaders have consistently denied there was any abuse at the ranch and vowed not to sanction underage marriages.
Secret proceedings
Grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret, but documents released as part of the separate child custody case involving the FLDS children have revealed some of the evidence collected by law enforcement during the weeklong raid of the ranch.
Among the hundreds of boxes of photos, documents and family Bibles, investigators found photos of Jeffs kissing and intimately embracing several apparently teenage girls.
A journal entry purportedly from Jeffs attached to a report by a child advocate indicates he married his daughter to a 34-year-old man the day after she turned 15. The girl turns 17 on Saturday and has denied being married, though the child advocate report indicates intimate notes between the girl and man were also found in the raid.
The girl, who playfully climbed a giant oak tree while waiting to be called to testify last month, left the community building frowning as she talked to her lawyer. The Associated Press is not identifying her because authorities believe she may be a sexual abuse victim.
Plural marriages
Under Texas law, a girl younger than 17 cannot generally consent to sex with an adult. Bigamy is also illegal in Texas, although FLDS members in plural marriages did not get Texas marriage licenses.
In addition to discussions of the girl’s marriage, the Jeffs journal entry also indicates he blessed marriages of two other underage sect members.
A call to a spokeswoman for Abbott was not immediately returned Tuesday.
The FLDS, which believes polygamy brings glory in heaven, is a breakaway sect of the mainstream Mormon church, which officially renounced polygamy more than a century ago.
Jeffs, who is revered as a prophet, is jailed in Arizona awaiting charges related to the marriages of young girls. He was convicted in Utah of rape as an accomplice for his role in the marriage of a 14-year-old last year.
from
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25802446/
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Grand jury indicts Texas polygamist members |
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Ruling against man who argued crime impossible because she wore jeans |
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updated 3:21 p.m. PT, Tues., July. 22, 2008
ROME - It was less than a decade ago that Italy’s top criminal court ruled that it was impossible to rape a woman who was wearing jeans. The court concluded back then that nobody could forcibly remove a woman’s jeans unless she cooperated.
Since then, the court has changed its mind.
It has now upheld the sexual assault conviction of a man who argued that it would have been impossible to carry out the attack on a teenager because the girl had been seated and wearing jeans at the time.
The court says the jeans were "no chastity belt."
The opposite ruling nine years ago prompted outrage across Italy’s political spectrum.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25804366/ |
Italian court says jeans are no barrier to rape |
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New phone service makes it easier to get through life's awkward moments.
New phone service Slydial makes it easier to get through life's awkward moments by sending you directly to voicemail. |
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By Rachel Metz
updated 7:20 a.m. PT, Wed., July. 23, 2008
NEW YORK - The old song had it right: Breaking up is hard to do. But a free new phone service called Slydial might make it easier to get through that and other awkward moments — without actually having to talk to anyone.
Slydial lets you connect directly with another person's cell phone voice mail, bypassing the traditional ringing process that often results — sometimes disastrously — with someone picking up on the other end.
Users call (267) SLY-DIAL from either a cell phone or a landline, and are prompted to enter another person's cell phone number.
After playing a short advertisement — unless users pay a subscription fee or 15 cents per call to skip ads — Slydial puts callers directly into their target's voice mail.
Recipients should then get a voice mail notification, and sometimes they will see a caller's number show up as a missed call, too.
Gavin Macomber, co-founder of MobileSphere Ltd., the Boston-based communications company behind Slydial, said there were currently some technological limits. It can only be used in the U.S. right now, and generally won't work with prepaid cell phones.
Also, sly dialers must have the caller ID feature activated on their phones, which Macomber said is meant, in part, to prevent people from using it to harass people undetected.
Macomber thinks it can be useful not only in the dating scene, but also in the hectic business world.
"Everybody has gone through the scenario where they've called somebody and just hoped they got voice mail so they didn't have to have a conversation," he said.
Nora Rubinoff, 45, who runs an administrative support company, At Your Service Cincinnati Ltd., has found Slydial helpful both for business and personal situations. She has left reminder messages for people one of her clients intends to interview. And when her husband travels to a different time zone for work, she can leave him a Slydial message without disturbing him at an odd time of day, she said.
"It's been really handy," she said.
Macomber said the idea for Slydial came up while MobileSphere developed the voice mail routing component of a service meant to lower the cost of international roaming on cell phones.
The company rolled out a private test phase of Slydial in March, and has added about 5,000 users since then. The service opened to the general public in a "beta" testing phase on Monday.
The ability to call straight into someone's voice mail is not new. Most major cell phone carriers offer subscribers the option of sending voice messages to other people, but usually only to customers of the same wireless company. What's different here is that Slydial makes it possible to do it with any major wireless carrier's customer.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25815705/ |
Dump your lover directly on voice mail |
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Female hormone found in tofu products affect semen quality, study finds. |
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updated 8:49 a.m. PT, Thurs., July. 24, 2008
CHICAGO - Eating a half serving a day of soy-based foods could be enough to significantly lower a man’s sperm count, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
The study is the largest in humans to look at the relationship between semen quality and a plant form of the female sex hormone estrogen known as phytoestrogen, which is plentiful in soy-rich foods.
“What we found was men that consume the highest amounts of soy foods in this study had a lower sperm concentration compared to those who did not consume soy foods,” said Dr. Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, whose study appears in the journal Human Reproduction.
“It was a relatively large difference,” Chavarro said in a telephone interview.
Chavarro said studies in animals have linked high consumption of plant-derived estrogens known as isoflavones with infertility, but so far there has been little evidence of their effect in humans.
“We wanted to know if it would affect sperm production and could serve as a marker for the effects on the reproductive system,” Chavarro said.
Striking difference
Chavarro’s team analyzed the intake of 15 soy-based foods in 99 men who went to a fertility clinic between 2000 and 2006.
They were asked how much and how often in the prior three months they had eaten soy-rich foods including: tofu, tempeh, tofu or soy sausages, bacon, burgers and mince, soy milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream, and other soy products such drinks, powders and energy bars.
Because different foods have different levels of isoflavones in them, the researchers set a standard for serving sizes of particular foods. Then they divided the men into groups according to soy consumption levels. Men in the highest group on average ate half a serving per day.
“In terms of their isoflavone content that is comparable to having one cup of soy milk or one serving of tofu, tempeh or soy burgers every other day,” Chavarro said.
The difference was striking. Men in the highest intake category had 41 million sperm per milliliter less than men who ate no soy foods. A normal sperm count ranges from 80 million and 120 million per milliliter, and a sperm count of 20 million per milliliter or below is considered low.
“It suggests soy foods could have some deleterious effect on the reproductive system and especially on sperm production,” Chavarro said.
The researchers found the association between soy foods and lower sperm count was stronger in overweight men, which might suggest hormones are playing a role.
“Men who are overweight or obese tend to have higher levels of androgen-produced estrogen. They are converting a male hormone into a female hormone in their fat. The more body fat you have, the more estrogen you produce in your fat,” Chavarro said.
Chavarro said the study was not sufficient to suggest that soy intake would have health implications such as inducing infertility. Much bigger studies would be needed to answer that question, he said.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25833435/ |
Soy-based foods may lower sperm count |
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Overweight men more likely to have poor semen quality, researchers say |
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BARCELONA, Spain - Too many fatty foods are dangerous not only to men's waistlines, but to their sperm production.
In research presented Wednesday at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, scientists found that obese men have worse sperm than normal-weight men.
"There is a very long list of health hazards from being overweight," said Ghiyath Shayeb, the study's lead researcher at the University of Aberdeen. "Now we can add poor semen quality to the list."
But experts aren't sure if that necessarily means obese men face major difficulties having children.
"If you have a man who isn't fantastically fertile with a normal partner who is fertile, her fertility will compensate," said Dr. William Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Britain's University of Sheffield, who was unconnected to the study.
But if both partners are heavy, Ledger said that could be a problem, since obesity is known to decrease women's fertility.
Shayeb and colleagues analyzed the sperm samples of more than 5,000 men in Scotland, and divided the men into groups according to their Body Mass Index. Men who had an optimal BMI (20 to 25) had higher levels of normal sperm than those who were overweight or obese.
Fat men had a 60 percent higher chance of having a low volume of semen, according to Shayeb's research. They also had a 40 percent higher chance of having some sperm abnormalities.
Fitness linked to fertility
Shayeb and colleagues found that underweight men were just as likely to have the same problems as obese men. "But there were not many underweight men in Scotland," he noted.
The researchers adjusted their analysis to account for other factors that could have affected men's sperm count, like smoking, alcohol intake, history of drug abuse, and age.
"Male fitness and health are clearly linked to a man's fertility," said Neil McClure, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Queen's University in Belfast.
There are several theories about why obese men might have bad sperm. Because fat tissue influences the metabolism of sex hormones, scientists think it might also disrupt sperm production.
It could also be a temperature problem. Sperm is best produced at a temperature two degrees cooler than normal body temperature. But because obese men have more fat, Shayeb said their bodies might be overheated.
Another study presented at the conference concluded that diabetes in men damages their sperm and is linked to male infertility.
Con Mallidis and colleagues at Queen's University in Belfast examined semen samples from nearly 40 men who were being treated for diabetes, but were not overweight. They found significant DNA damage linked to the excess sugar in the body from diabetes.
They found that diabetic men had twice the rate of DNA damage in their sperm as men without diabetes.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25604138/ |
Another reason to watch your waist: Bad sperm |
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70-year-olds said they get it on now more than they did 30 years ago |
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updated 4:34 p.m. PT, Tues., July. 8, 2008
CHICAGO - More 70-year-olds are having good sex more often, Swedish researchers said on Tuesday in a finding bound to bring a smile to many an aging baby boomer.
They found 70-year-olds of both sexes are having more sex than they did 30 years ago, and many more women report being satisfied with their sex lives.
"Attitudes are more open-minded and positive today, at least in the elderly themselves," said Nils Beckman of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, whose study appears in the British Medical Journal.
Beckman and colleagues interviewed four groups of 70-year-olds in Sweden about their sex lives between 1971 and 2001. They found that 68 percent of married men said they were having sex in 2001, up from 52 percent in the early '70s.
The number of married women having sex rose to 54 percent in the group interviewed in 2000-2001, up from 30 percent in the early 70s.
And 12 percent of unmarried women interviewed in 2000-2001 said they were having sex, up from less than 1 percent in the early '70s. The number of women reporting high sexual satisfaction also increased, with more women reporting an orgasm during sex and fewer reporting never having had one.
Interestingly, the number of men reporting low sexual satisfaction rose. Beckman said in an e-mail this might be because men are now more open in talking about sexual failure.
Overall, he said the changes reflect shifting attitudes about sex in Western societies over the past half century.
"Hopefully it will inspire elderly people to seek help if having sexual problems, and make doctors and other health professionals aware that even elderly people can be or would like to be sexually active," Beckman said.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25593696/
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Sex gets better with age, study says |
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Court will decide if stripping is a form of art allowed under state law. |
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updated 1:45 p.m. PT, Sun., July. 27, 2008
DES MOINES, Iowa - Iowa doesn't have any all-nude strip clubs — but it does have performing arts centers where women dance naked.
However, the loophole in the state's public indecent exposure law that allows nude dancing at "art centers" is under attack in the small community of Hamburg, a town of 1,200 just across the Missouri River from Nebraska.
The case pending before a Fremont County judge effects only one business in Hamburg, but if he agrees with the prosecutor, it could eventually threaten the legal standing of nude dancing clubs across the state.
District Judge Timothy O'Grady heard arguments in a one-day trial on July 17 and took the case under advisement.
Sheriff's niece strips naked
It all began on July 21, 2007, when a 17-year-old niece of Sheriff Steven MacDonald climbed up on stage at Shotgun Geniez in Hamburg and stripped off her clothing. Owner Clarence Judy was charged with violating Iowa's public indecent exposure law.
Judy responded that the law doesn't apply to a "theater, concert hall, art center, museum, or similar establishments" devoted to the arts or theatrical performances.
"Dance has been considered one of the arts, as is sculpture, painting and anything else like that. What Clarence has is a club where people can come and perform," said his lawyer, Michael Murphy.
Murphy noted that the club has a gallery selling collectible posters and other art, and it provides patrons with sketch pads.
Nonsense, said Fremont County Attorney Margaret Johnson, an underage girl danced naked at the club, and that's illegal.
"Are you saying that minors can't be protected? Can a group of 12-year-olds come down and go in and dance nude and it's OK? I don't think that's what the Legislature had in mind when it made those additional provisions," Johnson said.
Johnson said the intent of the law is to allow movies in a theater where there's brief nudity or for an art gallery displaying paintings of nudes.
Teen snuck into business
Murphy said Judy bans anyone under 18 from entering the five-year-old business. The problem, he said, was "a group of girls snuck in a 17-year-old."
"While she was there, she felt like dancing so she got up and danced on the stage and then she took her clothes off. Trouble with that is she's the sheriff's niece," he said.
Johnson denied that the teen's relation to the sheriff was connected to the charges filed against Judy.
“Her parents were absolutely appalled with the situation," Johnson said.
The sheriff declined to comment. There was no comment from his niece, whose name wasn't given.
As part of his defense during trial, Murphy cited a 1998 ruling that found nude dancing is a form of art. In that case, the owner of the Southern Comfort Free Threatre for the Performing Arts in Davenport was charged under the public indecent exposure law for allowing nude dancing. A judge found owner not guilty.
The current case deals only with Judy and Shotgun Geniez, but there could be an appeal if either side loses.
Johnson said that would take it to the Iowa Court of Appeals and perhaps the Iowa Supreme Court. That would make it a statewide case that could affect dozens of other clubs in the state.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25874214/
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Sheriff’s niece strips naked at Iowa ‘art center’ |
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White House seeks to protect health-care workers who object to abortion. Critics worry a Bush administration proposal to deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who object to procedures is so broad, it may threaten access to hormonal birth control. |
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By Rob Stein
A Bush administration proposal aimed at protecting health-care workers who object to abortion, and to birth-control methods they consider tantamount to abortion, has escalated a bitter debate over the balance between religious freedom and patients' rights.
The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.
Conservative groups, abortion opponents and some members of Congress are welcoming the initiative as necessary to safeguard doctors, nurses and other health workers who, they say, are increasingly facing discrimination because of their beliefs or are being coerced into delivering services they find repugnant.
But the draft proposal has sparked intense criticism by family planning advocates, women's health activists, and members of Congress who say the regulation would create overwhelming obstacles for women seeking abortions and birth control.
There is also deep concern that the rule could have far-reaching, but less obvious, implications. Because of its wide scope and because it would -- apparently for the first time -- define abortion in a federal regulation as anything that affects a fertilized egg, the regulation could raise questions about a broad spectrum of scientific research and care, critics say.
"The breadth of this is potentially immense," said Robyn S. Shapiro, a bioethicist and lawyer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "Is this going to result in a kind of blessed censorship of a whole host of areas of medical care and research?"
Broad implications
Critics charge that the proposal is the latest example of the administration politicizing science to advance ideological goals.
"They are manipulating the system by manipulating the definition of the word 'abortion,' " said Susan F. Wood, a professor at George Washington University who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration over the delays in approving the nonprescription sale of Plan B. "It's another example of this administration's disregard for science and medicine in how agencies make decisions."
The proposal is outlined in a 39-page draft regulation that has been circulated among several HHS agencies. The FDA has not objected, but several officials at the National Institutes of Health said that the agency had expressed serious concerns.
"This is causing a lot of distress," said one NIH researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. "It's a redefinition of abortion that does not match any of the current medical definitions. It's ideologically based and not based on science and could interfere with the development of many new therapies to treat diseases."
Since a copy of the document leaked earlier this month, outside advocates and scientists have voiced growing alarm that the regulation could inhibit research in areas including stem cells, infertility and even such unrelated fields as cancer.
Letters of protest
Dozens of members of Congress have sent letters of protest to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, as have scores of major medical and health groups that say their supporters have sent Congress, the White House and HHS thousands of letters protesting the proposal.
HHS officials declined to discuss the draft, saying it is in the very early stages of review. But HHS issued a statement that reads in part:
"Over the past three decades, Congress has passed several anti-discrimination laws to protect institutional and individual health care providers participating in federal programs. HHS has an obligation to enforce these laws, and is exploring a number of options."
The draft states that numerous cases have been reported of health-care workers being "required to violate their consciences by providing or assisting in the provision of controversial medicine or procedures." It adds that many states have recently passed laws requiring health plans to pay for contraception, pharmacists to fill prescriptions for birth control, and hospitals to offer Plan B to women who have been raped.
"In general, the Department is concerned that the development of an environment in the health care industry that is intolerant of certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions, and moral convictions may discourage individuals from underrepresented and diverse backgrounds from entering health care professions," the document states.
Targeting birth control?
The regulation would require any entity receiving HHS funding to certify that it does not discriminate against organizations or individuals who do not want to provide services they consider objectionable.
The most controversial section defines abortion as "any of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation."
That definition would include most forms of hormonal birth control and the IUD, which most major medical groups believe do not constitute abortion because they primarily affect ovulation or fertilization and not an embryo once it has implanted in the womb.
The regulation would apply to anyone who participates in "any activity with a logical connection to a procedure, health service or health service program, or research activity. . . . This includes referral, training and other arrangements of the procedure, health service, or research activity."
If the administration decides to adopt the regulation, it would undergo public comment and further review before becoming final.
Critics argue that the broad definitions of abortion and the types of workers who could object would cover everyone from the top doctor at a hospital to the janitor.
Regulation could trump state laws
Cecile Richards of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America said, "At a time when access to health care is at an all-time low, the idea that the Bush administration would be creating more barriers is frankly incredible."
The regulation could trump dozens of state laws that require health plans to cover birth control, pharmacists to fill prescriptions for contraceptives, and hospitals to offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped, critics said.
"You could imagine a group of people with less than honorable intentions seeking to get hired at a family planning clinic with the specific objective of obstructing access. Under this regulation, there is little you could do about it," said Jill Morrison of the National Women's Law Center.
Others said the rule could have additional implications, including justifying discrimination against gays, single women or others seeking health care.
"As soon as you have a definition in one part of federal law, it can become the inspiration for the reinterpretation of other statutes," said R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Supporters dismissed such predictions.
"This would essentially simply require people to comply with laws that they have been required to comply with for decades," said M. Casey Mattox of the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Religious Freedom. "That does not mean any organization or state can't keep doing exactly what it's been doing. It means they have to make room for people who have sincere moral or ethical concerns about doing something."
Support from conservatives
Conservative groups including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Concerned Women for America and the Catholic Medical Association said the regulation is needed.
David Christensen of the Family Research Council said: "Health-care professionals should not be forced to engage in an action that they see is the taking of a human life. Federal funds shouldn't be used for that kind of pressure."
Christensen and others said the regulations spell out legitimate differing views about what constitutes abortion and when life begins.
Richard S. Myers, a law professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., said: "Religious freedom is an important part of the history of this country. People who have a religious or moral belief should not be forced to participate in an act they find abhorrent."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25940818/page/2/ |
Does Bush proposal threaten access to the pill? |
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Survey: Two-thirds of men, nearly half of women aged 75-85 still rocking |
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CHICAGO - Getting old does not mean saying so long to sex, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
More than three-quarters of American men aged 75 to 85 and half of women that age are still interested in sex, a survey of the elderly by University of Chicago researchers found.
"It's not age per se; that when you get to 80 it's all over with," said sociologist Edward Laumann, who led the study of 3,000 American men and women aged 57 to 85 who lived at home, not in nursing homes.
"It's driven by more proximate factors such as if you become obese, or you're smoking too much, or you contract diabetes. Medications can depress sexual interest. The aging process itself is not a major factor driving these results," he said in a telephone interview.
Laumann and his team, who performed a companion survey of younger adults nearly a decade ago, found that sexual dysfunction such as experiencing pain during sex or an inability to achieve orgasm tend to increase as adults reach middle age but then plateaus.
In the survey of elderly Americans, two-thirds of the men and nearly half the women had been sexually active in the past year, they reported in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The reasons for losing interest in sex are wrapped up in several physical and mental health factors, Laumann said.
"If sexual health goes to hell, it may be a canary in the mine shaft. It may be a sign of health problems," Laumann said, urging doctors to investigate if sexual problems arise.
Chronic urinary tract infections and incontinence often suppress sex lives, he said.
Anxiety a big factor
Having a partner to have sex with can also be problematic for the elderly. Among women aged 70 and older, 70 percent have outlived or are separated from their spouses. Among men in that age group, 35 percent have lost a long-time partner.
If the surviving relationship is bad, that can snuff out the couple's sex life, Laumann added.
"Anxiety is very clearly a big factor (in sexual dysfunction) for women, and depression in men," he said. "And men can become very depressed because of sexual dysfunction."
Erectile dysfunction increases from 31 percent among men aged 57 to 64 to more than 40 percent among older men. Laumann said he had found in other research that 14 percent of men of all ages had tried erectile dysfunction drugs.
Those who have attended college are less likely to have sexual problems than the less-educated, Laumann said, presumably because the educated tend to dismiss myths about sex and aging and are more likely to seek out answers.
Last month, Swedish researchers reported that 70-year-olds of both sexes are having more sex than they did 30 years ago, with 68 percent of married men and 54 percent of women saying they were having sex in 2001, up from 52 percent of men in the early 1970s and 30 percent of women.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26176462/ |
For elderly, sex doesn't have to get old |
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Belief in abstinence doesn't negate intent to have sex for some adolescents. Abstinence? From what? For how long? Teens and adults have murky, conflicting definitions when it comes to not having sex. |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 5:50 a.m. PT, Wed., Aug. 13, 2008
Brian Alexander
• E-mail
If you already worry about the way your teenager can swing wildly from one viewpoint to another, you probably don't want to hear this.
“Kids can believe in abstinence, but also intend to have sex,” said N. Tatiana Masters, a social scientist at the University of Washington and author of a new study on teens' contradictory attitudes about abstinence and sex.
The research, published in the current issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, shows that adolescents and teens often hold seemingly irreconcilable ideas about having sex, confounding the abstinence-only sex education message supported by over a billion dollars of federal funding.
The finding adds to a growing body of evidence eroding confidence in abstinence-only sex education.
Roughly $1.5 billion in federal grants to state education authorities have been distributed to finance abstinence-only curricula since the Clinton administration. But some states, like California, Wisconsin and Ohio, have stopped accepting the grants because the money is tied to a mandated abstinence-only message that studies have shown to be largely ineffective.
The problem with that message, Masters said, is not that adolescents ignore it. In her survey of 365 young people ages 12 to 15, she found that many had a positive view of abstinence, and those who did had less chance of having sex during the following 12 months.
But there was a catch. So-called “sex intention” powerfully modified “abstinence intention.”
In a range from 1 to 3, with 3 being the highest intention to abstain or to have sex, teens who scored very low on their sex intentions (1s) were not likely to have sex regardless of their abstinence intentions. But among teens with high scores (3s) on their sex intentions, those who also held the highest abstinence intentions were actually most likely to have sex.
"Increasing a kids' abstinence intentions has little impact on the bottom line," Masters said. But if a teen with a high sex intention obtains higher abstinence intentions, "he may become, we think, confused or conflicted and those heightened abstinence intentions may make him more likely to have sex in a kind of boomerang effect."
Masters isn't sure why this is, but speculates that the conflict might cause kids to feel out of control and less able to make rational decisions.
Teens often have complicated feelings about sex, viewing abstinence as a stage in their development, while many adults view it as a semi-permanent state to be maintained until marriage or at least full adulthood.
Masters used the metaphor of an escalator to explain the apparent contradiction.
“Say you have a kid who is 15 or 16 and she is madly in love,” Masters said. “She may say, ‘You know, I want wait to have sex with this person. We do not know each other well enough yet, or I am not old enough, so right now I have intentions to be abstinent. But if I am still with him in a year, I might consider being sexually active. She has just stepped onto the sexual escalator.”
You don’t have to be a kid to hold contradictory views, especially about sex, said Dr. Mark Schuster, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and chief of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Other research has shown that many teens who take a so-called “virginity pledge,” do wind up having sex before marriage. The danger is that “those teens may not have the information and tools, once they are having sex, to make the healthiest choices,” said Schuster, also author of "Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask).
Part of the problem, he argued, is a lack of definition about what adults mean when they say “abstinence.” When he speaks to parent groups, and asks them when they would be comfortable with their children having sex, “they say ‘Not until they are 35!’” he said. “But then you get past the joke and ask ‘Well, until they are married? In their 20s and ready to get married? In college? What if they were in high school and have been dating the same guy for two years?’”
Kids use the same sort of self-definition for abstinence, Masters said. They may endorse abstinence from sex, but that endorsement can be conditioned upon circumstance.
“We hear confusion from kids about the term ‘abstinence’ and what it means,” said Bill Albert chief program officer of Washington D.C.-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “They say ‘abstinent from what?’ and ‘abstinent until when?’”
Albert, who interacts with thousands of teenagers across the country, explained that young people don’t see the dichotomy that animates the political battles over sex education.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26159311/ |
The opposite of sex? Adults, teens beg to differ |
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A teaching moment or the start of years of therapy? Plus, when Viagra fails |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 6:58 a.m. PT, Thurs., July. 31, 2008
Brian Alexander
• E-mail
Will you spend the rest of your life paying for therapy if your kid walks in on you having sex? Is the pill to blame for one wife’s low libido? And when Viagra doesn’t work, what are other options besides the little blue pill? Got a question? E-mail us.
Q: How traumatic is it for an 11-year-old boy to walk in on his mom having sex with her boyfriend? My girlfriend’s son came home early from an overnight at a friend’s house, barged into my girlfriend’s bedroom and caught us in the act. He locked himself in the bathroom for hours, and weeks later, he freaks out if he hears I’m coming over. What do we do? Is he permanently damaged?
A: Well, it depends on who you look to for child-rearing advice. If it’s The Who, he could become a “deaf, dumb and blind” pinball wizard. If it’s Sigmund Freud, the boy has just experienced “The Primal Scene,” and he’s liable to wind up a middle-aged mess.
Or you could look to experts like Dr. Ellen Rome, the head of adolescent medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. How parents approach this whoops! episode, she says, “can make the difference between a teaching moment for the kid and open a door to building a child’s healthy sexuality, or it can be a door closer.”
Your case is complicated because you are not this child’s father, but even if you were, seeing Mom and Dad have sex is a little traumatic for every kid. “There are two groups who do not have sex,” Rome says. “Your parents and your children.”
Taking into account the maturity level of the boy, and your intentions for the relationship, both you and your girlfriend have roles to play. “With a clearly angry 11-year-old who is protective of Mommy, it is worthwhile having a mother-son dialogue where she can clarify, using words, her feelings,” Rome says. “Words like ‘This is somebody I love. This is somebody I can see as my happily-ever-after person’ put it into context so he knows it was not something done casually.” (If it was casual, this is much more problematic.)
It’s important for his mother to be a parent, not a best friend, not to share too much information, but she can have an open dialogue. She can say “I care about this person, but I care about you, Son. Your feelings are most important to me,” but also say that you, the boyfriend, are part of her long-term happiness.
His mother should also admit that it wasn’t fair to the boy that he saw what he did, Rome says.
As for you, make an effort to have some time alone with the boy. Explain that you intend to have a lasting relationship with his mother, that you care deeply about her and about him. Tell him he is very important to both his mother’s happiness and yours. Let him know his feelings matter.
If the boy begins acting out in a disruptive way, or begins “acting in,” like showing signs of depression, you might seek some professional help, Rome suggests.
No more sex in the house, either, at least for awhile. And by the way, you do know that doors have locks, right? Geez.
Q: We are in our early 40s and have been married for 10 years. My wife’s libido is low. She takes the birth control pill. We have talked about me getting snipped so she can get off the pill. Is it true that would raise her libido? If I get snipped and shoot blanks, would that affect me physically and mentally?
A: Ever heard of an IUD (intrauterine device)? IUDs got a well-deserved bad reputation a generation ago, but they’ve changed and doctors say they are woefully underused. They’re not permanent like a vasectomy and your wife can choose an IUD without hormones.
As to the pill and libido, here’s a quote from my favorite study of the subject: “Overall, women experience positive effects, negative effects, as well as no effect on libido during [oral contraceptive] use.” That study, from doctors at Columbia University in 2004, distilled lots of other studies and found results all over the map.
No wonder. As we have said before, libido is a very complicated thing. If your wife’s is low, maybe the pill is to blame. Or maybe it’s your pepperoni addiction, the household budget, Nas playing in your kids’ iPods, or her blood pressure. Oh, and do you two get along OK?
As for vasectomies, there was once concern that men who had them had a greater risk of prostate cancer or cardiovascular disease. But most such fears were debunked by the late 1990s. Vasectomy does carry a risk of post-operative scrotum pain (Ow!). Though they sometimes can be reversed, don’t count on it. Some studies indicate vasectomies increase libido and sexual satisfaction, perhaps because men aren’t worried about Yale’s tuition 18 years from now.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25936129/ |
Oedipal emergency: If Junior sees too much |
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Ability to sniff out a compatible partner affected by taking contraceptives |
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By Jeanna Bryner
updated 10:17 a.m. PT, Wed., Aug. 13, 2008
Birth control pills could screw up a woman's ability to sniff out a compatible mate, a new study finds.
While several factors can send a woman swooning, including big brains and brawn, body odor can be critical in the final decision, the researchers say. That's because beneath a woman's flowery fragrance or a guy's musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.
Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.
MHC genes churn out substances that tell the body whether a cell is a native or an invader. When individuals with different MHC genes mate, their offspring's immune systems can recognize a broader range of foreign cells, making them more fit.
Past studies have suggested couples with dissimilar MHC genes are more satisfied and more likely to be faithful to a mate. And the opposite is also true with matchng-MHC couples showing less satisfaction and more wandering eyes.
"Not only could MHC-similarity in couples lead to fertility problems," said lead researcher Stewart Craig Roberts, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Newcastle in England, "but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odor perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners."
Sexy scents
The study involved about 100 women, aged 18 to 35, who chose which of six male body-odor samples they preferred. They were tested at the start of the study when none of the participants were taking contraceptive pills and three months later after 40 of the women had started taking the pill more than two months prior.
For the non-pill users, results didn't show a significant preference for similar or dissimilar MHC odors. When women started taking birth control, their odor preferences changed. These women were much more likely than non-pill users to prefer MHC-similar odors.
"The results showed that the preferences of women who began using the contraceptive pill shifted towards men with genetically similar odors," Roberts said.
Pregnant state
Based on the work by Claus Wedekind, a University of Lausanne researcher who preformed similar studies in the 1990s, Roberts suggests a likely reason for the pill's effect on a woman's odor preferences. The pill puts a woman's body into a hormonally pregnant state (the reason she doesn’t ovulate), and during that time there would be no reason to seek out a mate.
"When women are pregnant there's no selection pressure, evolutionarily speaking, for having a preference for genetically dissimilar odors," Roberts said. "And if there is any pressure at all it would be towards relatives, who would be more genetically similar, because the relatives would help those individuals rear the baby."
So the pill puts a woman's body into a post-mating state, even though she might be still in the game.
”The pill is in effect mirroring a natural shift but at an inappropriate time,” Roberts told LiveScience.
The results are detailed in the current issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
© 2008 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26180187/ |
The Pill makes women pick bad mates |
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Unconsummated marriages are more common than you think, experts say |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 5:34 a.m. PT, Thurs., Aug. 14, 2008
Brian Alexander
• E-mail
Suppose you were married in June, all blushing with wedding night anticipation, but now find yourself in August still waiting for the train to enter the tunnel or the Apollo rocket to shoot into space.
Is such a thing possible? Do unconsummated marriages still happen in this age of 24/7 porn, reality show fraternization, and sex columns from respected news organizations?
They do — more often than you might think. Dr. Domeena Renshaw, a psychiatry professor at Loyola University Health System outside of Chicago, has treated hundreds of unconsummated unions.
“I would have thought it would have vanished by now,” she says, “but [we're currently treating] two couples.”
Nobody knows how many relationships — married or not — have yet to include intercourse despite both partners wishing they could get the party started. Educated guesses hover around 1 percent. Over the course of the 36 years she’s been in the business, Renshaw has treated 202 couples. Another expert, Talli Rosenbaum, a private practice physical therapist in Israel who works with couples in unconsummated relationships, says she has treated “a couple hundred” over the past 15 years.
The stand-off can be the result of physical problems, poor knowledge about sexual functions, religious conservatism, or other complicated emotional reasons, they say. Anxiety — no mystery why — often builds, so much so that couples can go years without ever having intercourse.
Sometimes even the 79-year-old Renshaw, who has pretty much seen it all, is surprised by how long the train remains in the station. One couple she treated had been married 23 years without consummating. The wife was a 44-year-old teacher; her husband a 47-year-old engineer. They had been to 13 different doctors before coming to Renshaw's tiny sex therapy clinic, which she founded in 1972 as part of Loyola's health center and still runs.
When Renshaw asked the couple why they had finally come to her, "she looked at me and tears ran down her cheeks," Renshaw remembers. "She said, ‘we did not know there was a place.’”
'Derision and sarcasm'
Too often, Renshaw says, couples can suffer so long without getting proper help due to the dismissive attitude of medical professionals. In a 1956 article in the British Medical Journal, a psychiatrist named Hilda C. Abraham wrote, “many patients might find help much sooner if their first attempts were not so often met with lack of understanding and impatience, if not derision and sarcasm.”
More than 50 years later, it still isn't uncommon for doctors to tell women to "just have a glass of wine and relax.” But alcohol and Barry White songs aren't always the solution.
The female half of Renshaw’s couple who had been married 23 years, for example, suffered from extreme vaginismus, an involuntary clamping down of the muscles so the vagina is sealed tighter than the White House Situation Room. Renshaw treated them through a combination of counseling and gradually coaching the woman on how to insert first her own finger, then her husband’s finger, then his penis. “By week four of the seven-week treatment, they had come to the point they had intercourse,” Renshaw recalls.
Other women suffer from vulvodynia, an often unbearable pain when the genitals are touched. Men can have erectile dysfunction.
These possible organic causes are why most therapeutic sessions start with a thorough physical exam, followed by counseling and confidence boosting.
Rosenbaum sometimes prescribes pelvic floor exercises for women, along with the use of plastic “dilators” of increasing thickness. Of course, men can be prescribed ED drugs, too.
Taking the pressure off
Often, however, unconsummated marriage isn’t really due to the workings of the penis or vagina. For example, medical reports show such marriages are more common in countries with strict religious cultures. A clinic in Istanbul reported treating 404 unconsummated marriages in just four years. An Iranian hospital evaluated 200 cases in two years.
For some men in these cultures, the wedding night is something like being thrown in to pitch for the Chicago Cubs with the score tied in the bottom of the ninth and the bases loaded. “The main factor associated with an unconsummated marriage was the intense social pressure to accomplish hasty coitus with an unfamiliar woman (some men having had no social contact with their new bride), and in the presence of relatives waiting nearby for evidence of the bride’s virginity and confirmation of coitus,” one Iranian doctor reports.
That sort of pressure could wilt any guy.
Women raised to place most of their self-esteem and identity in virginity can have a tough time “taking on a new role as a married woman and a new identity as a sexual human being,” Rosenbaum, who often treats Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews, says. Their nervousness and anxiety can create vaginismus.
“Educating a couple to take their time, experience sexuality and intimacy rather than view it as a performance or a test, or as a task you either pass or fail, often takes the pressure off,” Rosenbaum says.
Treatment does not always work if the circumstances are complex. According to Rosenbaum, “sometimes, even after the education has been provided, the anxiety reduced, and the sexual dysfunction has been treated, we find that the couple still does not have intercourse” if, say, one member of the couple is blaming another. Sometimes “outside intervention — community, parents, religious leaders — can perpetuate this condition.”
The good news is that treatment usually works. Renshaw, for example, boasts an 80 percent success rate at the low, low price of just $1,400. The relatively cheap cost is one reason so few doctors venture into the area, but both Rosenbaum and Renshaw say the happiness payload is worth the effort.
Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26161185/ |
When the train never leaves the station |
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Strangers really do look sexier when you drink booze, science confirms. Other people really do look better to us if we've been drinking, a new study confirms. |
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By Charles Q. Choi
updated 2:12 p.m. PT, Thurs., Aug. 14, 2008
For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real — other people really do look more attractive to us if we have been drinking.
Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to just the opposite sex among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study — they also rated people from their own sex as more attractive.
Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka equivalent in alcohol to a large glass of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer.
After 15 minutes, the volunteers were shown photos of 40 other college students from both sexes. Both men and women who drank booze found these faces more attractive, "a roughly 10 percent increase in ratings of attractiveness," said researcher Marcus Munafo, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol in England.
The researchers also asked volunteers to rate their mood, "and there were no differences on those measures in the alcohol group compared to the no-alcohol group," Munafo added. "This suggests that the effect we observed wasn't due to a general change in mood."
It did not escape Munafo that the results are rather obvious.
"Everyone knows about beer goggles," Munafo said. "But some of our results suggest that there's more going on than we might have thought."
The discovery that the effect is not specific to the opposite sex was surprising. One possibility is that alcohol generally makes us see things as more attractive, but when this occurs in social situations, such as at a bar, "this might become targeted at opposite-sex faces," Munafo said. By repeating the experiment with video clips shot at bars, the scientists hope to recreate those social cues and see what happens.
"The main question is whether these effects are specific to faces, or whether we would rate anything as more attractive after a drink," Munafo said.
Future research could expose people who have been drinking to landscapes or the faces of puppies and other animals, "to see if alcohol has a more general effect on perceiving beauty in the environment."
"It's also surprising to see this effect is happening at lower doses than you might think," Munafo said. "We're trying to build up a more complete picture of what happens when people go out for a drink, and we're interested in certain behaviors that are more common after drinking, such as unsafe sex, or violence. If this effect is happening at lower doses than expected, it might be helpful for people who are predisposed to such behaviors to anticipate those situations and prevent them."
The scientists would also want to vary the levels of alcohol that volunteers receive, "but there are practical and ethical constraints around how much alcohol we can give people in the lab!" Munafo told LiveScience.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26205250/ |
Hot or not? Look again —'beer goggles' are real |
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By Chris Hedges
If I had to choose between George W. Bush, naked and neighing on all fours while being ridden around the Oval Office by a spurred cowgirl Condoleezza Rice, or enduring his shredding of domestic and international law to wage an illegal war and bilking of the country on behalf of his corporate backers, I could learn to stomach a wide array of sexual escapades.
Let our elected leaders and candidates have quick homosexual encounters in airport bathrooms, bring as many hookers as they want to their hotel rooms, and screw around with their campaign staff as long as they exhaust their libidos on lusts other than war, torture and economic mismanagement. Adolf Hitler, after all, was an abstemious and monogamous vegetarian who loved his German shepherd.
But, unfortunately for us, and hapless politicians like John Edwards, our press finds it more lucrative to report salacious sex scandals than the death and maiming of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, although the mainstream press showed, for once, a remarkable restraint until Edwards was forced to confess. We hear more about pricey hookers and the bathroom code of cruising homosexuals than the revoking of habeas corpus, the use of torture as an interrogation technique, and the plundering of our country by rapacious corporations. Television dominates our news content, and its ethical standards hover around those of the National Enquirer.
The press has become our arbiter of personal morality. Have an affair and they will trap you in the middle of the night in a Los Angeles hotel bathroom; they will dig up the escort you met in a Washington hotel room and splatter your private foibles across television screens and news pages. These stories gratify our prurient fascination with illicit sexual liaisons. They are part of the blurring of news with the tawdry world of reality shows and television entertainment. They produce titillating rituals of public humiliation and disgrace. They also lacerate the secret guilt of those who have felt or acted upon lust while in committed relationships. It is all Jerry Springer, all the time.
Reporters often know the sins of which they speak. They can shame John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig and Bill Clinton and then head off to a hotel bar to do the same thing. The moral lapses of our media inquisitors, which I witnessed for over two decades as a reporter, can be as reprehensible as the behavior of those they cover.
I do not trust or believe most politicians. I have covered too many. The question is not how we can get good people to govern. The question is how we can limit the damage of mostly mediocre, callow men and women, who comprise the majority of those who yearn for power, from doing the most harm. This comes through the rigorous checks and balances of a functioning democracy, not self-appointed political saviors. But we always prefer saviors, those who make us believe they have attained moral and heroic summits that elude us.
There is something sad and pathetically human about Edwards’ affair and his cowardly attempt to lie about it. I never liked Edwards. He is all flash and sparkle with his boyish $400 haircuts and oily sincerity. He preached a faux populism, one at odds with his record in the Senate, to sell himself to voters. But, even as I do not condone what he did, I feel sorry for him. He is being crucified by journalists and politicians, and a public, who often behave no better.
We demand that our politicians play superhuman roles. They cannot exhibit the weaknesses and temptations we carry within ourselves. They must appear to be perfect parents, wives or husbands. We insist that they behave like the idealized couples we watch on television or in the movies. Campaign appearances, with the dutiful spouse as prop, are scripted mini-dramas. We live in a society so saturated in lies that we can no longer distinguish between a married couple in a sit com and on the campaign trail. Bill and Hillary continue to act out their sham roles of committed husband and wife. And, despite all the evidence to the contrary, people continue to believe in the Clintons’ charade.
Political leaders no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. The most essential skill in political theater, which has no room for knowledge or debate or trust, is artifice. Those who are most able to entertain, that is, to deceive, succeed. Those who cannot play these roles, like Ralph Nader, are pushed to the sidelines.
There are worse things done by politicians than illicit sexual adventures. Ask an Iraqi. Ask an Afghan. Ask a detainee at Guantanamo. Ask an unemployed steelworker in Ohio. But in an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not want honesty or even reality but the reassurance of old clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives. We want leaders who are willing to pretend they live in a make-believe world of happy couples and perfect relationships. We want to feel that they like us and we want to like them. This gives us what television gives us, a simplistic narrative around which to frame our lives. This narrative defies the messiness and disorder of the real world. If politicians adhere to this ridiculous narrative of personal happiness and fidelity, designed to reassure us that the world is ordered and neat and constant, they can commit egregious war crimes and strip us of our power. If they do not we will find better actors.
Edwards’ dishonesty does not compare to Bush’s impeachable crimes. But Edwards’ political career has been cut short, unlike Bush’s, because he had the bad luck to get caught out of character behind the curtain.
from:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080809_whats_sex_got_to_do_with_it/ |
What’s Sex Got to Do With It? |
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A court finds that the couple's antics violate a noise abatement order |
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updated 5:49 p.m. PT, Thurs., Aug. 14, 2008
LONDON - A British man has been banned from visiting his girlfriend's home after neighbors complained about noisy sex, a local official said Thursday.
A court barred Adam Hinton, 32, from being within 110 yards of the apartment of his 29-year-old girlfriend, Kerry Norris, Brighton and Hove City Council spokesman Mike Taggart said.
Residents of Norris' publicly owned home had been complaining since 2006 about thumping music, banging headboards and screamed obscenities, Taggart said.
Neighbors also complained about Norris sunbathing naked in her yard, and were upset that a 6-year-old child in the building had been "subjected to the sort of obscenities you wouldn't want a 6-year-old to hear," the spokesman said.
"She is a classic nightmare neighbor," Taggart said, insisting the case was not about sex. "It's about allowing your neighbors to have a normal decent life without being disturbed."
The court granted the city council's request for an injunction banning Hinton from the apartment because Norris had ignored a previous court order demanding that she be more quiet, Taggart said.
Norris last week was forced to pay $560 in fines and court costs for breaking the "noise abatement order," Taggart said.
Neither Norris or Hinton could be immediately located for comment. Brighton and Hove is located in southern England.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26207560/ |
Noisy sex gets man banned from apartment |
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A woman's stride indicates how easily she can orgasm, researchers claim. A seductive walk isn't necessarily associated with orgasmic ability, says psychology professor Stuart Brody. |
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By Brian Alexander
MSNBC contributor
updated 5:34 a.m. PT, Mon., Sept. 15, 2008
Brian Alexander
The way a woman walks might be giving away a lot more about her than she knows, a new study says.
“Gait may be associated with orgasmic ability,” is the title of a study appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
But not just any old walk, according to researchers. A woman who steps with an energetic, fluid stride is the one who's most likely shaking the Richter scale. “The discerning observer may infer women’s experience of vaginal orgasm from a gait that comprises fluidity, energy, sensuality, freedom, and absence of both flaccid and locked muscles.”
In order to test a theory linking blocked muscles to sexual function, researchers from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and the University of West Scotland in Paisley asked students to complete questionnaires on their sexual behavior.
The students were then divided into two groups, those who said they “often” or “always” have vaginal orgasms and those who said “never” or “rarely.” The women were asked to walk 100 meters while thinking pleasant thoughts, as if they were on a warm beach, and then another 100 meters with the same scenario but adding a male about whom they had loving thoughts.
Two sexologists, blind to which women fell into which group, assessed the walks and correctly placed the students into either orgasmic or non-orgasmic groups 81 percent of the time.
For women just getting used to airport scanning machines that can see through their clothes, the result could be disconcerting. Will the airport security guards not only know what you look like naked, but whether you have orgasms?
Don’t worry just yet. The walks don’t easily fall into colloquial categories like “swivel hips” or “hootchie momma” or, my favorite from Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot," “Jell-O on springs.” Researcher Stuart Brody, professor of psychology at the University of West Scotland, calls these terms “silly” and says none of them apply.
“It is that the vaginally orgasmic women do not have blocked pelvic muscles. As a result, the walk is natural, with the natural unobstructed connection between leg, pelvis, and spine movement," says Brody.
That sounds vague, but Brody and colleagues do suggest that the sum of the length of a woman's stride, plus the amount of rotation of her vertebrae, might signal vaginal orgasm potential.
Also, all the women walked in flats, because “high heels distort the walk,” he explains. So, women in heels are inscrutable, orgasmically speaking.
Evolutionary adaptation
In other words, an orgasmic walk may not be a seductive walk. Instead, Brody argues, it may be a sign of good mental health, confidence and a good sexual relationship. Ability to pick up those signs may be an evolutionary adaptation allowing potential mates to assess those qualities.
Other experts aren’t quite ready to embrace any of this. The study, as Brody himself points out, was only on 16 Belgian university women. Second, Brody is among those who argue strenuously that there is a difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms and that women can tell the difference.
The whole issue of female orgasm is still murky.
“There is absolutely no consensus whatsoever on the thing that makes a woman orgasm,” reports Tierney Ahrold, a sex researcher at the University of Texas, Austin. “Female orgasm is a kind of unstable web of factors.”
Brody and colleagues, in a statement sure to pique male anxiety, say men have a lot to do with it. Two women in the study were misdiagnosed as orgasmic though they reported never having had a vaginal orgasm. “It might be that the women have the capacity for vaginal orgasm, but have not yet had sufficient experience or met a man of sufficient quality to induce vaginal orgasm,” the authors write.
Ouch.
Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26676622/ |
Your walk may reveal more than you think |
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Casinos want ‘gentlemen's club-type entertainment’ without crossing line. |
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LAS VEGAS - Brittany McClain spends her nights stripping at Sapphire gentlemen's club in Las Vegas under the stage name Electronica. By day she sunbathes topless at an adults-only pool at the Rio Hotel and Casino.
"My life now is, if I'm not stripping or at the pool, I'm sleeping," McClain said of the new partnership between the Rio and Sapphire that keeps her busy day and night.
The partnership also flirts with a longstanding separation between sex and gambling in Las Vegas. The desert city was built on gambling and has never shied away from sex, but Nevada laws have long kept the two vices strictly separate.
This reflects a new trend in Vegas, where casinos like the Rio, owned by Harrah's Entertainment Inc, are always looking for new ways to make money, especially in the current downturn.
"It brings the sexy angle to the casino business and that is what Vegas is all about right now," said Sapphire Senior Vice President John Lee. "All of the casinos are trying to get gentlemen's club-type entertainment without actually crossing that line."
Caesar's Palace, Mandalay Bay, the Mirage, the Venetian and the Wynn have also opened topless pools, but the Rio's Sapphire Pool is the first formal partnership between a casino and a strip club to keep its lounge chairs stocked with bare-breasted women.
The idea is for the women to attract men who will stick around and gamble at the Rio's tables. The Sapphire Pool charges men $30 to $50 admission and is fenced off from the Rio pool, where the women keep their swimsuit tops on.
What happens in Vegas ...
McClain, 21, said the pool is a hit with Sapphire's strippers because of the opportunity to network. Men they meet often turn up at the Sapphire Club later. "You get to kind of advertise yourself, promote yourself a little bit."
Las Vegas Hotels And Casinos
Vegas then and now
See Las Vegas images, past and present, that make the city "fabulous."
The Strippers who frolic topless under the attentive gaze of the male guests also get incentives from the club and free poolside food and drinks. No cameras are allowed.
The trend toward an edgier, sexier vibe in Las Vegas casinos is a dramatic shift away from the 1990s, when the city briefly tried to clean up its image to attract families.
With that approach abandoned and replaced with the slogan "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," most of the major resort casinos along the Las Vegas Strip now incorporate adult-themed entertainment, from the Playboy Club at the Palms to burlesque-style shows at the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay.
In addition to its topless pool, Venus, visitors to Caesars can drink at Shadow Bar, where women appear to dance naked behind a screen, and party at PURE, still one of the largest and hottest nightclubs in the city after four years, featuring performances by the lingerie-clad Pussycat Dolls.
Nevada state law does not expressly bar topless dancing from casinos. But gambling halls have long been refused licenses to operate strip clubs under rules that require them to operate in a manner consistent with public safety, health and morals, said Renee Shaffer, deputy chief of enforcement of the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Shaffer said women sunbathing topless, in a fenced-off section of a casino pool, do not violate that rule. Strippers giving lap dances to gamblers would.
The Rio and Sapphire say they would like to explore further opportunities from their partnership, including possible night-life venues, within the law.
"Whatever the (line) is, we will abide by it," Sapphire's Lee said. "We want to be good corporate citizens."
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26836100/ |
Strippers by the pool: Vegas casinos get sexier |
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The California Supreme Court has just overturned the state's ban on same-gender marriage. |
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People (gay AND straight) who support full civil rights for all Californians are celebrating; those who believe people forfeit their routine civil rights if they have same-gender sex are outraged.
Memo to this latter group:
I've read your denunciations of this court decision. When I look beyond the lies and distortions, I see your fear and anger. And I sympathize. Appreciating your pain helps me forgive--well, at least understand--your destructive, undignified lying, your desperate cries that civilization is collapsing.
So let me address some of your lies:
Lie: "These are liberal, activist judges inventing new laws."
Fact: You know that three of the four judges affirming the decision were appointed by Republican governors. They describe themselves as conservatives who consider the Constitution the final authority, not themselves.
Lie: "This will destroy traditional marriage."
Fact: You know it hasn't done so in Massachusetts, or in Spain, an even more traditional society. Traditional marriage has been destroying itself quite energetically in America for years, BEFORE gays could marry.
Lie: "Marriage is intended to facilitate procreation."
Fact: You know that if this were true, marriage would be denied to couples who were infertile, post-menopausal, or committed to being childless. The state doesn't do fertility tests before issuing marriage licenses.
Lie: "Children are better off with a heterosexual couple."
Fact: You know there are no reliable studies showing that kids do better with straight parents. You know there are LOTS of studies showing that kids do as well with gay parents as with straight parents with similar incomes and education. And you know that half of all heterosexual married couples get divorced. Do you argue that having divorced heterosexual parents is good for kids?
You tell these degrading lies because you're afraid. Afraid of this homosexual "other," this monster you're convinced is different from you. If you knew how many gay people you saw today at Starbucks or Target or the gas station you might not be so afraid. If you knew that that helpful woman three cubicles down from yours is gay you might not so easily deny her the basic rights that you enjoy.
Being a psychologist, I have to add that you (or your best friend) tell these lies because the whole idea of a man kissing a man's penis is creepy. A creepy idea that you (like ALL men) think about once in a while--which is way too often for your comfort.
You tell these lies because you're angry. Things are changing way too fast for any of us to absorb. Everyone who isn't young feels old. It seems like no one's really in control. We can't blame the Communists, and the terrorists aren't molesting our kids, or demanding we commute 90 minutes to work everyday in horrible traffic.
Your churches and political leaders are telling you who's ruining America--gays. You can't kill them or deport them, so you try to limit their rights and their impact. You're failing. You're getting angrier.
And now it looks like gays are going to share what you value most--the right to love, and the right to have that love blessed by the state (with, of course, the tax advantages and hospital privileges that come with that blessing).
I understand your pain.
But quit lying.
Gays don't want to seduce you or your spouse, don't want to molest your kids, don't want to undermine your marriage. Each gay man and lesbian has their own life to lead, their own petty little problems to work out. It's not all about you and your little marriage, which NO ONE except you cares about.
So I understand your pain.
But quit lying.
from:
Dr Marty Klein
http://www.sexed.org |
Anti-Gay-Marriage Activists--I Feel Your Pain |
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A judge owns a car and drives it legally. Should she be allowed to preside over a trial that will determine if a car was used illegally? |
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A judge collects guns, even displays his collection on his website. Should he be allowed to preside over a trial that will decide if a gun was used illegally?
A judge belongs to a religion which believes that masturbation is a sin, using pornography is a form of infidelity, and sexual purity is the battleground between God and Satan. Should he be allowed to preside over a trial that will establish if something's obscene?
Answers: Of course, of course, and of course--if we believe in the integrity of the judicial process.
So why can't a judge who owns a porn collection preside over an obscenity trial?
Answer: Because when it comes to "obscenity," the judicial system isn't fair.
Obscenity is the only crime you can't know in advance that you're committing. Only a jury can decide if you've created or sold something obscene, and juries across America keep disagreeing with each other.
More to the point, local, state, and federal prosecutors across America keep demanding that juries decide this. Now that's obscene.
You may have heard that Judge Alex Kozinski was asked to run a trial about four DVDs the feds claim are obscene. Apparently the judge has a website that contains essays, legal writings, music files, personal photos--and oh yes, sexually explicit material, including images of masturbation, women's crotches in tight clothes, naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, and a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.
The judge is a highly respected scholar appointed to the Federal bench by President Reagan over 20 years ago. But when the L.A. Times reported on His Honor's website, the blogosphere lit up: an adult man (who happened to be a judge) who looked at porn! It was a real dog-bites-man story, but so-called morality groups saw their opening and pounced.
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council proved that he needs a basic lesson in American civics when he brayed, "Kozinski not only defended the rights of people to sell revolting--and potentially illegal--smut, Kozinski is ill-equipped to try an obscenity case when he clearly does not understand the definition of obscene. We call for his recusal in this case and a reexamination of his fitness" as a chief judge."
We expect extremist "decency" groups to undermine American democracy on a weekly basis, and here the FRC didn't disappoint: "potentially illegal"? "The definition of obscene"?
But we expect better from Kozinski's own senator. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, intoned "If this [website content] is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge."
So this is the latest pinnacle of America's porn hysteria: being interested in the (legal) stuff now disqualifies someone for a federal judgeship. An interest in porn affects a man's mind so deeply--or reflects a pathology so deep--that he can't be depended upon to think about legal principles or fairness.
So are divorced judges now unwelcome in family court? Are judges who drink now unacceptable in DUI cases? What about judges who are 20-year sober members of AA? Must judges in bankruptcy cases be rich or poor, stingy or generous?
Demanding Kozinski's recusal from the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial--indeed, questioning his fitness to be a judge altogether--is a fundamental failure of faith in American democracy.
While most people tried on criminal charges are assumed innocent unless the government can prove their guilt, people arrested for the creation or distribution of "obscenity" have to prove that their material has some merit--artistic, scientific, or political. Kozinski's real sin is believing that the government has to justify censorship, rather than believing that the burden of defeating censorship falls on arrested Americans.
Americans would howl if the government tried to criminalize pictures or stories about anything other than sex. As it is, the public--uncomfortable with their own sexuality, easily frightened about others'--is complicit in destroying their own rights. Instead of damning Kozinski, we should be questioning why we care so much about his sexual fantasies, and so little about the terror our neighbors feel about ours.
from:
Dr Marty Klein
http://www.sexed.org |
A Judge's Porn: America's Latest Obsession |
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July 31 was National Orgasm Day throughout Great Britain.
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We don't have such a day here in the U.S. (although good Americans do observe National Masturbation Day on May 7). In a country that criminalizes vibrators and classifies contraception as abortion, celebrating orgasm is a little advanced.
But let me speak against National Orgasm Day for a moment.
Because as a sex therapist, I observe people making way too much fuss about orgasm.
Don't get me wrong, I think orgasms are fine--hey, some of my best friends have them.
But orgasm lasts, what-six, eight seconds? As good as those 8 seconds can be, they're not worth a whole lot of aggravation. Or boredom, or guilt. Or doing a bunch of stuff that you don't really want to do.
If you're with a partner, that's what those eight seconds frequently cost. That's part of masturbation's appeal-most people get an orgasm without a lot of hassle. You don't have to take anyone out to dinner, kiss someone who needs to brush their teeth, or give anyone else head. You touch yourself, think about something pleasant, and in a few minutes a little magic door opens. Momentarily.
Depending on how you and your partner do things, it's anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour from the time you undress until you climax. Ideally, people would enjoy every single one of those 10 to 60 minutes. But frequently they don't. They're thinking about their saggy butt, their unreliable erection, how their vulva smells. While many people love every part of sex, too many others are just trying to get through it, hoping to be competent, wanting for the Big Payoff that give the whole thing meaning.
That's so sad. It's people like that who give orgasm a bad name.
Orgasm is not the point of sex. It's a little bonus, a fine bit of punctuation. If it's the best part of sex for you, you're missing a whole lot. If it's the only part of sex you enjoy, it can't possibly be worth it.
National Orgasm Day? How about National Relax & Enjoy Sex Moment-By-Moment Day?
That would be something to celebrate. And not just one day per year.
from
Dr Marty Klein
http://www.sexed.org
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Beyond Orgasm |
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Apparently John Edwards, who holds no public office, slept with someone other than his wife a few years ago. Like any rational person would, he apparently lied about it to the press earlier this year. |
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I'm trying to think of something I care less about than this. Brittney Spears' mental health? The price of yak butter in Outer Mongolia?
It's bad enough that the National Enquirer actually pursued this pointless story. But that's their disgusting, soul-destroying job: getting people excited about pointless crap.
But ABC News spent months investigating the rumor. ABC News, which claims it doesn't have enough money to cover the actual news anymore.
We're told that the extramarital affair of a would-be presidential candidate is news because it reflects on his "character."
Nonsense.
George Bush has given America the ultimate lesson on "morality" and "character." Here's a born-again, church-going, non-drinking guy who believes in no-sex-until-marriage for everyone (except himself), and what did this outstandingly "moral" man do?
He knowingly lied to a nation, led us to war, authorized torture, and destroyed the Justice Department. If this is what a God-fearing, monogamous President does, how can anyone believe that someone having and lying about an affair predicts the "morality" of their governance?
America's mass media have already sunk as low as they can, as have its consumers. "Everyone" knows that "everyone" loves a good sex scandal. Well, this one isn't even a scandal--it's just a simple story about people doing what people do. It's the equivalent of someone stopped on the freeway shoulder fixing a flat tire--and everyone slowing down to look, ruining traffic for hours. "Look Mabel, a tow-truck!" "Look Al, a po-leece car!"
Americans' lives are filled with more stimulation than any other people in history, from ipods to blackberrys to DVD players to GPS navigators. There are almost no public spaces in America that aren't soiled with the sounds of muzak or a TV (seasoned with people yelling on cell phones). With all this stimulation, why do we still crave the details of others' sex lives?
It's additionally pathetic that the media and public alike dress up this lurid voyeurism as civic involvement: from "it tells us something about the candidate" to "the public has a right to know." What self-delusion.
That's America--no more noble than the people we look down upon, and completely unable to admit it.
As far as I'm concerned, John Edwards--Senator, Presidential candidate, or private citizen--can screw whomever he wants. I'm way more concerned about the screwing we're all getting from George Bush and his destruction of our fundamental rights. Three months from today, we'll have forgotten the first and still be suffering with the second.
from:
Dr Marty Klein
http://www.sexed.org |
I Don't Care Who He Slept With; Why Does Anyone? |
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Geoffrey Miller's work could affect the earning potential of exotic dancers everywhere. Sara Kembriri from Albania performs during September's Miss Pole Dance Europe competition in Amsterdam. Psychologists found that the average earnings of professional exotic dancers rose when they were at peak fertility — which earned the researchers an Ig Nobel Prize. |
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Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, and his colleagues knew of prior studies that found women are more attractive to men when at peak fertility. So they took the work one step further — by studying earnings of exotic dancers.
In the 18 subjects Miller studied, average earnings were $250 for a five-hour shift. That jumped to $350 to $400 per five-hour shift when the women were their most fertile, he said.
"I have heard, anecdotally, that some lap dancers have scheduled shifts based on this research," he said.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26996167/ |
Strippers earn more when ovulating. |
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Deborah Anderson had heard the urban legends about the contraceptive effectiveness of Coca-Cola products for years. |
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BOSTON
So she and her colleagues decided to put the soft drink to the test. In the lab, that is.
For discovering that, yes indeed, Coke was a spermicide, Anderson and her team are among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the annual award given by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for oddball but often surprisingly practical scientific achievements.
The ceremony at Harvard University, in which actual Nobel laureates bestow the awards, also honored a British psychologist who found that foods that sound better taste better; a group of researchers who discovered exotic dancers make more money when they are at peak fertility; and a pair of Brazilian archaeologists who determined armadillos can change the course of history.
Anderson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University's School of Medicine, and her colleagues found that not only was Coca-Cola a spermicide, but that Diet Coke for some reason worked best. Their study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985.
"We're thrilled to win an Ig Nobel, because the study was somewhat of a parody in the first place," said Anderson, who added that she does not recommend using Coke for birth control purposes.
A group of Taiwanese doctors were honored for a similar study that found Coca-Cola and other soft drinks were not effective contraceptives. Anderson said the studies used different methodology.
A Coca-Cola spokeswoman refused comment on the Ig Nobel awards.
from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26996167/ |
Formula for Ig Nobel fame: strippers and Coke |
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Joe Francis and Larry Flynt claim the economy has made America's sexual appetite go limp, so they're going to the one place where sex is always rampant -- Congress. |
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Flynt (the "Hustler" guy) and Francis (the "Girls Gone Wild" dude) are asking the government for a $5 billion bailout, claiming the adult entertainment industry has taken a huge shot to the face because of the downturn -- citing the fact that XXX DVD sales are down 22% from a year ago.
"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind," Flynt says. "It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."
Francis sees his industry like the big three automakers, only BIGGER: "Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation's most important businesses; we feel we deserve the same consideration."
Francis says he's going to D.C. to personally make the pitch. Sounds like someone has a bone to pick.
More info
http://www.tmz.com/2009/01/07/porn-kings-help-us-through-hard-times/
Posted Jan 7th 2009 9:15AM by TMZ Staff |
Porn Kings to D.C. - Help Us Through Hard Times |
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You must see this...
this page showcases the
30 Strangest Animal mating habits
Ah, sex. Birds do it, bees do it. Wait a minute! How exactly do they do it? The mating rituals of some animals are wonderfully bizarre. For example: did you know that some insects’ genitals explode during sex? Or that some fish can change gender?
Intrigued? Read on for 30 of the most bizarre animal mating habits. |
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Honey Bee: Exploding Testicles.
The reproductive cycle of bees is fascinating – and complex. But here’s the short story: a queen is selectively bred in a special "queen cell" in the hive and fed royal jelly by worker bees to induce her to become sexually mature.
A virgin queen that survives to adulthood without being killed by her rivals will take a mating flight with a dozen or so male drones (out of tens of thousands eligible bachelors in the colony). But don’t call these drones lucky because during mating, their genitals explode and snap off inside the queen!
Strange as it is, this actually makes evolutionary sense: the snapped-off penis acts as a genital plug to prevent other drones from fertilizing the queen. But tell that to the dead drone whose penis just exploded.
[Note: this strategy is so successful that it is apparently employed by other species of animals, such as the male wasp spider]
(Image Credit: Veebl [Flickr])
Bonobo: Make Love Not War
Bonobo, striking a pose (Image Credit: Kabirdas [Flickr])
Who said that violence is the only way to solve fights over food or territory? Instead of fighting, bonobos [wiki] have sex! Actually, their whole societal structure seems to revolve around sex.
Bonobos use sex as greetings, a mean of solving disputes, making up for fights, and as a favors in exchange for food. They tongue kiss, engage in oral sex, mutual masturbations, have face-to-face genital sex and even have a strange "penis fencing" ritual!
In their 1996 book titled Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson wrote:
"Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today. They have evolved ways to reduce violence that permeate their entire society. They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable".
Flatworm: Make Love AND War.
Penis fencing flatworms. (Image Credit: PBS/The Shape of Life)
If bonobos "penis fence" as foreplay, flatworms do it for real.
For flatworms, sex is more like war than love. Like all sea slugs, flatworms are hermaphrodites (they have both male and female sexual organs). In this case, the male organ turns out to be two dagger-like penises that they use to hunt as well as mate. During mating, two flatworms fight (i.e. "penis fence") to stab each other, while avoiding getting stabed.
The "loser" who gets stabbed will absorb the sperm through its skin and then scoots off to bear the burden of motherhood! (Source, with a cool video you shouldn’t miss.)
Frigatebird: Fanciful Big Red Balloon.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
Those fanciful male peacocks have nothing on frigatebirds! A male frigatebird has a throat sac that it can inflate with hard work – it takes over a period of twenty minutes – into a giant red, heart-shaped balloon. He then waggles his head from side to side, shakes his wings and calls the females to check him out.
A female frigatebird will mate with the male with the biggest and shiniest balloon. During sex, the male bird will sweetly put his wings over her eyes to make sure she doesn’t get distracted by other males with even nicer balloons! (Source)
Red-Sided Garter Snake: An Annual Mating Ball Orgy
Red-sided garter snake mating ball (Image Credit: Robert Mason, professor of Zoology at the Oregon State University, from News and Communications Service at OSU)
Strange Fact 1. The annual mating of red-sided garter snakes is a tourist attraction in Manitoba, Canada. That’s because when a female garter snake emerges from hibernation, she releases a pheromone that attracts hundreds of male snakes in the vicinity to rush her and create a large squirming "mating ball."
Strange Fact 2. Like many snakes, the male garter snake has two penises, called "hemipenes," on each side of its body. The male will try to use the best-positioned penis to mate with the female in the center of the mating ball.
Strange Fact 3. As if the two facts above aren’t strange enough, turns out there is a "she-male" snake who releases pheromones just like the females do (and fools hundreds of other males to pile up on him/her). Why? Scientists think that this gives the she-male warmth and protection (and attention, too, I’m sure). (Source)
Bonus: From Current Science:
The annual red-garter mating balls are a big tourist attraction in Manitoba—and a source of many tales. One unsuspecting couple built a house on top of an empty snake pit one summer, only to find their property swarmed by thousands of red-sided garters returning to their traditional hibernation den in the fall. The couple quickly relocated their new house. (Source)
Hyena: The Females Got Balls!
Spotted hyena. (Image credit: LA Dawson, Wikipedia)
Female hyenas wear the pants in the family. They’re bigger and stronger than the males. And definitely much more aggressive. Heck, they even got balls. Really.
A female hyena has a pseudopenis, basically an enlarged clitoris, that they can erect at will. To mate, the meeker male has to insert his penis into her pseudopenis. That’s difficult for the males, but still nothing compared to the female having to give birth through a penis!
Biologist Laurence Frank describes something else that is strange about hyenas – the way they say hello to each other:
After being separated for a few hours, spotted hyenas engage in "greeting" displays that entail lifting their legs and exposing their erect pseudopenises for inspection. Subordinate females often initiate greetings and this is the only known case of an erection being a submissive gesture. "This unusual display is not without its risks [because] each hyena puts its reproductive organs in immediate proximity to very powerful jaws," says Frank. "On the rare occasions when the aggression escalates to fighting, the resulting damage may be severe enough to destroy or seriously compromise the reproductive competence of the injured party." (Source)
Manakin: Moonwalking to Impress the Ladies
There’s dancing and there’s dancing – like the moonwalk that the male Manakin does to impress the ladies! Michael Jackson has nothing on them manakins!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks Xopl and Kamilf!
Giraffe: Not in Estrus? No Thanks!
Male giraffe nudging the female’s rump to induce urination. (Image credit: Liz Leyden)
With that ridiculously long neck of theirs, mating is hard work for male giraffes. So, when a male happens upon a female giraffe, he will perform a procedure known as the "fleshmen sequence" to see if she is in estrus. First, he nudges her rump to induce urination. He then takes a mouthful of urine. If it tastes good to him, then he begins to court her.
Actually, "court" may be too strong a word: the male giraffe basically follows her around until she gives in and lets him have her! (Source)
Emperor Penguin: Starvin’ for Love
Emperor penguins and chicks (Image Credit: BrynJ [Flickr])
Emperor Penguins, the subject of the popular 2005 documentary March of the Penguins, have a strange “marriage”. Penguin couples spend their lives apart from each other and meet once a year in late March, after traveling as far as 70 miles (112 km) inland – on foot or sliding on their bellies! – to reach the breeding site.
Once there, penguins look for their mates by making a bugling call. Male penguins generally stay in one place, lower their head to their chest and call out to the females. Once they find one another, they would stand breast to breast, repeatedly bow to each other and sing (okay, “bugle”).
Now, onto the mating itself: Like in most birds, penguins have no external genitalia. That’s right, male penguins don’t have penises and the females don’t have vaginas. The male’s sperm is produced in the testes and stored in his cloaca (kind of an all purpose orifice for defecating, urinating, and reproduction). The female also has a cloaca that leads to the ovaries. The female penguin lies flat on the ground and the male penguin presses his cloaca onto hers and passes the sperms through.
Once the egg is laid, the female Emperor Penguin transfers it very carefully to her mate (if the egg touches the ice, it would freeze and die), who then keeps the egg warm by tucking it under a large fold of skin until it hatches. The female penguin immediately returns to the sea to feed, leaving the male without food for about two months. The male penguins would huddle together in large groups to conserve body heat in the cold and harsh environment, where winds can reach up to 120 mph (200 km per hour). When the female returns, she finds her mate (and chick) by listening to one particular bugle over thousands other.
When it was released, March of the Penguins sparked a controversy when the Christian right claimed it as a parable of monogamy amongst other things. Turns out, Emperor Penguins are serially monogamous – meaning that for that breeding season, they only have one mate. However, if they can’t find one another the next season (and most can’t – only about 15% of pairs find each other in subsequent year, and just 5% in the third year) they will choose new mates.
Dolphin: That’s Not His Hand.
A pair of dolphins mating (left), while a friend swims nearby without a hint of embarassment (Image Credit: Carmelo Aquilina [Flickr])
Here’s something you probably don’t know about Flipper: he has retractable penis. And if that’s not cool enough, here’s something else: his penis is prehensile. And it swivels. In fact, a male dolphin can use his penis to explore objects just like a hand.
Male dolphins also have a very strong sex drive. It can mate many, many times in a day. Now here’s the bad news: male dolphins aren’t that much of a stud. The average time to ejaculation? 12 seconds.
Another hushed-up fact is that male dolphins have a ravenous sexual appetite: they often try to hump inanimate objects and even other animals like sea turtles. When a pack of male dolphins happen upon a female, often times they will attempt to force her to mate.
Percula Clownfish: Your Mommy Was Your Daddy.
Clownfish in Kayauchi Banta, Okinawa (Image Credit: Nemo’s great uncle [Flickr])
In Disney’s animated movie Finding Nemo, the animators forgot to tell you one thing about clownfish: they can change gender!
Clownfish live in a group consisting of a breeding pair of male and female, as well as some non-breeding males. There is strict hierarchy based on size: the largest is the female, next largest is the male, and then the non-breeding males.
If the female dies (or gets fished, I suppose), the male will change sex and become the female! Then the largest of the non-breeding males will get a promotion to become the breeding male.
Giant Panda: X-Rated Panda Porn!
Who cares about sex? Let’s eat! (Image Credit: peiqianlong [Flickr])
For a while, zookeepers had trouble getting pandas raised in captivity to breed. In fact, male and female pandas showed little interest in sex – that is until someone at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base in Sichuan Province, China, had the bright idea of showing them panda porn!
Now, when pandas reach adulthood, zookeepers there show them steamy videos of panda sex as part of their initiation rites.
Galapagos Giant Tortoise: The Longest Neck Wins.
Link [YouTube].
To determine who gets to mate, male Galapagos giant tortoises will rise on their legs and stretch their necks. The shorter tortoise will cry uncle and leave the taller, larger tortoise to mate.
The victor then proceeds to attract a female by bellowing and bobbing his head furiously. When he has found a mate, the male rams the female and nips her legs until she draws them in, thereby immobilizing her. He then proceeds to mount her.
Mating can last for hours, during which the male grunts and roars loudly (see video clip). If he seems terribly excited about the whole deal, that’s probably because he’s been waiting a long time for sex. See, it takes 40 years for Galapagos giant tortoises to reach sexual maturity.
So what happened to the short "loser" male tortoises? Frustrated males have been observed humping rocks and even other frustrated males (why, there’s even a YouTube clip).
Garden Snail: Love Darts
Roman snails mating: the gallery (Image Credit: Robert Nordsieck)
Snails’ genitals are on their necks, right behind their eye-stalks. Not weird enough? Read on.
Snails are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female sexual organs, but they do not self-fertilize.
Before two snails mate, they shoot "love darts" made of calcium at each other. People used to think that these sharp darts are nutritional gifts, like you give someone you love a box of chocolate.
Snail love dart (Image Credit: Prof. Ronald Chase)
Scientists now think, however, that these darts serve a more sinister purpose. The mucus on the darts allow more sperms to be stored in the snail’s uterus (and thus helped it gain an edge in reproduction).
There’s no advantage to the target snail (getting hit may even be dangerous as snails are really, really bad shots). Indeed, snails jostle each other not only to get into a better position to fire their darts, but also to avoid getting hit themselves! (Source)
Bedbug: Traumatic Insemination
Here’s chivalry for you: the male bedbugs don’t even bother with the female’s sex organs. Instead, a male bedbug uses its scimitar-like sexual organ to impale the female bedbug’s body and deposit his sperm!
Scientists even have a cute name for this sort of thing: "traumatic insemination." Ouch!
Porcupine: Wee Marks the Spot.
Quick: how do porcupines mate? If you answer: "carefully," you’d only be half right – it’s also "bizarrely." Indeed, porcupines have a very bizarre mating habit:
First of all, female porcupines are interested in sex only about 8 to 12 hours in a year! Second, to court a female during the short mating season, a male porcupine stands up on his hind legs, waddles up to her, and then sprays her with a huge stream of urine from as far as 6 feet away, and drench his would-be paramour from head to foot!
If the female wasn’t impressed, she’ll scream and shake off the urine. But, if she is ready, then she’ll rear up to expose her quill-less underbelly and let the male mount her from the behind (that’s the only safe position for porcupines!). Once mating begins, the female is insatiable: she forces the male to mate many times until he is thoroughly exhausted. If he gets tired too quickly, she will leave him for another male! (Source)
Red Velvet Mite: The Love Gardener
Red Velvet Mite (Image Credit: erica_naturegirl [Flickr])
Red velvet mite, which is as big as one of the letters in this sentence, has a peculiar mating habit.
The male releases its sperms on small twigs or stalks in what scientists call the "love garden", then lays down an intricate silken trail to the spot. When a female stumbles upon this trail, she will follow it to seek out the "artist". If she likes his work, then she will sit on the sperm.
However, if another male spots the garden, he will trash it and lay his own instead! (Source)
Bowerbird: Obsessive Decorator of Bachelor Pad
Satin Bowerbird in front of his bower (Image Credit: bdonald [Flickr])
To attract a mate, the male bowerbird [wiki] builds an amazingly complex structure called a bower. It is made of twigs and often shaped like a small hut.
The male bird then decorates his "bachelor pad" bower with a variety of objects as gifts: flowers, feathers, stones, and even bits of discarded plastics and glass. Hundreds of pieces are carefully arranged in monochromatic themes (i.e. all blue items). The bird is so anal that it will get really angry if you mess up its pile (say, by putting one differently colored pebble in its pile).
The male bowerbird spends hours sorting and arranging things. In fact, it will break its focus only to go to a different males’ bowers to steal stuff and mess the place up!
Don’t miss: David Attenborough on Bowerbird [YouTube]
Macaque: Sneaky Attackers
Is it time to attack yet? (Image Credit: Hunda [Flickr])
Male macaques will pay (in form of fruits) to get a peek at the hind quarters of a female macaque.
Actually, that’s not all: they will also pay to gaze at pictures of dominant "celebrity" monkeys (i.e. the high-ranking males) in their pack. Huh.
Anyways, if that isn’t enough bad behavior for you, think about this: macaque males will attack their enemy when he is at his weakest: during orgasm.
Attackers often use considerable cunning to get near their victim without arousing any suspicion. They may feign indifference by barely glancing at him, digging casually in the sand or pretending to collect handfuls of pebbles. But the moment their victim ejaculates, they jump him, hitting, biting and tugging at his fur. (Source)
Fire Ant: Queen and Workers "Negotiate" the Colony’s Sex Ratio
Ants have a complex social structure. Case in point: some scientists used to think that worker ants are all females who control the queen (a simple egg-laying machine) and kill their brothers while still larvae.
It turns out the queen has more say than this: she controls the number of females and male eggs she lays.
But why does a colony’s sex ratio matter? A queen wants to propagate her line by producing another queen, which needs male drones to mate and produce a colony. Worker ants, on the other hand, have no use for males (which die after mating).
So, the queen and her daughters negotiate a rather violent solution: when she needs male drones, the queen will "overwhelm" the colony with male eggs. The female workers will kill many of their brothers, but they can’t kill them all! (Source)
Sea Hare: Mating Chain
Aplysia dactylomela, a genus of sea hares, in a mating chain
(Image Credit: Anne DuPont)
Sea hares, like all sea slugs (see flatworm above), are hermaphrodites. But that’s not all – they’re efficient hermaphorodites! When sea hares mate, they form a mating chain of several animals!
The sea hare in front acts as the female to the one directly behind it. Sometimes, they even form a giant circle, with everyone inside happily mating the day away. (Source)
Argonaut: Detachable Penis
Argonaut or paper nautilus is a weird species of octopus. First, they have a highly divergent sexual dimorphism. That’s science-speak for the difference in body sizes between males and females. A female argonaut grows up to 10 cm (~ 4 in.) with shells as large as 45 cm (~ 18 in.) The male, however, is only 2 cm (3/4 in) long!
But that’s not why argonaut is on this list. The male argonaut produces a ball of spermatozoa in a special tentacle called a hectocotylus [wiki]. When meeting a female it fancies, the male then detaches its penis to swim by itself to the female!
Hectocotylus (Image Credit: Julian Finn, Macalogist)
This detachable swimming penis was actually first noted by an Italian naturalist back in the 1800s, who mistook it for a parasitic worm!
Whiptail Lizard: Sex? No Thanks! We’ll Clone Ourselves Instead.
Whiptail Lizard in pseudocopulation (Image Credit: Tino Mauricio, Daily Texan)
How does a whiptail lizard have sex? Trick question! There are no males – all whiptail lizards are females, so they can’t have sex at all. Wait a minute – so how do they reproduce? By cloning themselves:
In the bizarre life of a whiptail lizard, reproduction is preceeded by pseudocopulation, where two females act out the roles of a male mounting a female (they switch roles later on).
Apparently, this is required to stimulate egg production in both lizards. When the eggs hatch, they will be all-female clones of the mother lizard. (Source)
Straw Itch Mite: Incestuous Brothers
After they are born, the male straw itch mites (pyemotes) hang around their mom, stinging her to suck out her body fluids.
The male mites are born sexually mature. In fact, they will immediately grab and mate with their sister within minutes of her birth!
(Image Source: Ronald Ochoa, Systematic Entomology Laboratory)
Banana Slug: Penis Stuck? Chew It Off!
Banana slugs checking each other out for size (Image Credit: Husond, Wikipedia)
Banana slug, the beloved mascot of UC Santa Cruz, has a weird mating habit. First of all, they have an enormous penis. (In fact, their latin name dolichyphallus translates to "giant penis.") The average size of a banana slug penis is 6 to 8 inches. This is incredibly impressive, considering their entire body length is 6 to 8 inches as well!
Banana slugs are hermaphrodites, so two slugs will try to fertilize each other. To mate properly, a slug must choose a mate roughly its own size – if it miscalculates, its penis will get stuck during copulation.
This isn’t just an embarrassing faux pas, the other slug will actually bite off the stuck penis, a term scientists euphemistically called "apophallation." (Source)
Anglerfish: Let’s Me Be A Part of You. Literally.
The Prickly Deep Sea Anglerfish males becoming one with their female (Image Credit: David Paul/Mark Norman, Australian Conservation Foundation)
Anglerfish, a deep sea fish named for the spiny appendage on its head that it uses as bait to "fish" its prey, has an unusual mating habit. As it spends its time in the bottom of the ocean, finding a mate is a problem – but the species solved this evolutionary challenge beautifully.
At first, scientists were perplexed because they’ve never caught a male anglerfish. Also, all female anglerfish have a lump on their body that looks like a parasite. Only later did scientists discover that the lump is the remain of the male fish.
The tiny male anglerfish are born without any digestive system, so once they hatch, they have to find a female quickly. When a male finds a female, he quickly bites her body and releases an enzyme that digests his skin and her body to fuse the two in an eternal embrace. The male then wastes away, becoming nothing but a lump on the female anglerfish’s body!
When the female is ready to spawn, her "male appendage" is there, ready to release sperms to fertilize her egg.
Barnacle: Inflatable Penis
Yes, that long thing is a barnacle penis mating with its neighbor (Image Credit: Sue Scott, MarLIN)
Barnacles, those crustaceans that stick themselves to the bottom of boats (much to the consternation of sailors everywhere), are stuck in one position all their lives.
So, how do they mate? The solution, turns out, is brilliantly simple: the barnacle has an inflatable penis that is up to 50 times as long as its body. In fact, it has the longest penis in the animal kingdom, relative to body length!
Fruit Fly: World’s Longest Sperm
The title of world’s longest sperm actually belongs to a tiny fruit fly called Drosophila bifurca. When the coiled sperm is straightened out, it measures about 2 inches which is over 1,000 times longer than a human sperm. In fact, the testes of a fruit fly makes up 11 percent of the body mass of the male!
Turns out the very long sperm is evolutionarily driven by the just-as-long female reproductive tract, which is like an obstacle course, complete with harsh chemicals to weed out weak sperms. (Source)
Argentine Lake Duck: Very Well-Endowed, Can Even Lasso a Female.
The very well-endowed Argentine Lake Duck (Image Credit: K. McCracken [pdf])
The Argentine lake duck may be small, but don’t take pity on it. See, the drake (male duck) of the lowly fowl has the longest penis of any bird species in the world.
From head to tail, the Argentine lake duck measures about 17 inches. That also happens to be the length of its corkscrew-shaped penis when stretched out. The tip of the penis is soft and brush-like, which the drake uses to brush away sperms deposited by a previous suitor.
University of Alaska Kevin McCracken explains that the ducks are promiscuous, and the long penis may be an evolutionary adaptation for the males to become more attractive to the females. That, and the drake also uses his penis to "lasso" a female who tries to escape from it. (Source)
Gorilla: Big, But Not So Big.
Silverback (a male gorilla): size ain’t everything! (Image Credit: dbarronoss [Flickr])
Let’s end this lengthy article with the gorillas, the largest of all living primates.
Upside: Mature male gorillas, called silverbacks, are huge (up to 425 lb., sometimes even more). A silverback lives in a troop of 5 up to 30 females, with which he mates all year long. There is little competition for females, since a large silverback is scary and can easily protect its group from challengers.
Downside: 1 1/2 inch (~ 4 cm) penis. (Yeah, no competition for females remember?). So, remember that next time someone say you’re an "800-lb gorilla" – it may just be an insult! |
The 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits |
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