• Tigra – Dimesso (above)
• Kaila – Differencia
• Tatu – Smussato

• Engelie – Naked Chef (sound alert)
• Dominika C – Anal Teasing Massage (sound alert)
• Maya – Pantyhose (sound alert)

• Stacey, Ariel, Dominika – Irresistible
• Gina D. – Oiled
• Lorena G., Belinda – Alpenglow

• Lena N. – Sweet Beauty
• Holly M. – Couch Games
• Brittany and Tom – Wake Me Up

• Liza Del Sierra and Angell Summers – French Fisting (image at right)
• Miss Lilith – Three Way
• Marta – Hardcore Solo

• Annika Albright – Fucking Machines
• Amy Brooke – Fucking Machines
• Gia DeMarco + 3 others – Whipped Ass

Three new sites from indie Alt Porn Network, explicit tours:

• Pfef Parrys Sex Illustrated (erotic art)
• Evil Cam Live
• Mikey and Mandys Most Original Porn Emporium

• When commissioned to outfit the iconic tunnel-like staircase at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Irish artist Bryan McCormack took on a wholly different base material as his launching point: condoms. Paris Adorns an Iconic Building In Condoms (The Atlantic Cities, image above)

• Match.com’s data on US singles, Megaupload reviled by Perfect 10, China’s sex toy spam industry and more. Sex Tech Weekly: Megaupload, Match Singles Data, Obscenity Copyright, China Porn Spam Kings (Pulp Tech)

• Dozens of condoms, vaginal films, jellies, foams and sponges containing the Nonoxynol-9 spermicide are available online or at local pharmacies without a doctor’s prescription. Though N-9 was once thought to protect against HIV, public health officials now know that it can actually increase a person’s HIV risk. Even so, people who use these products may not be fully informed. What Spermicide Users Should Know, But Often Don’t (WBUR & NPR)

• From the upcoming tell-all by former White House intern Mimi Alford, “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath,” an early copy of which was obtained by The New York Post. President Kennedy was, shall we say, a complicated man. 20 Creepy And/Or Cute Revelations About JFK’s Affair With An Intern (Buzzfeed)

• With rare exceptions, all known human cultures have policed the sexual behavior of girls and women, and America, circa 1959, was no different. Before women obtained the power to control their fertility, they had compelling reasons to comply with whatever arbitrary double standard their society imposed. How the Sexual Revolution Changed America Forever (Alternet))

• Breastfeeding women are protesting Facebook policies for removing their images and blocking their accounts. Their method? They are breastfeeding outside of Facebook’s offices around the world. Breastfeeding women protest outside Facebook offices (Friending Facebook)

• [SSEX BBOX] is an ambitious documentary project: Their goal is to explore sex-positive communities in San Francisco, São Paolo, Berlin, & Barcelona and explore the different ways that people in these locations are examining and discussing sexuality. [SSEX BBOX] Episode 1 Is Out! (Dr. Charlie Glickman)

• The health department in Free State province (South Africa) is recalling 1.35 million condoms that may not be up to snuff. TAC’s testing with water-filled ["Choice"] condoms found “they were leaking like sieves.” More Than A Million Condoms Recalled In South Africa (NPR)

• New website Pass the Herpes is an ongoing collection of stories, personal anecdotes and all kinds of information about herpes. Taylor herself was diagnosed at 18 and has been dealing with the stigma that surrounds it for a long time. Pass the Herpes (Xtra)

• The Guardian reports that Sony Pictures has cancelled the scheduled February 10 release of Dragon Tattoo after India’s Central Board of Film Certification insisted that 5 scenes be pulled from Fincher’s cut. Both the director and the studio refused to make the adjustments, opting to abandon the open altogether. Sex scares: ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ will not be released in India (HitFix)

• Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn had just one thing in common – apart from being movie superstars. They both used a handsome young gas station attendant for sex – in Tracy’s case personally, and in Hepburn’s case to procure her lesbian lovers, up to 150 of them over a lifetime. Sex fixer to the stars lifts lid on scandal in Hollywood’s golden age (Guardian UK)

• A uniboob gown? Designers there know as well as any others that the best way to draw attention to your collection is to flash a lot of flesh. Alta Roma, Gianni Molaro: Designer unveils bizarre ‘boob gown’ at Rome fashion week (Mail Online)

• Vice video journalist Elizabeth Glover point blank asked Newt and Callista Gingrich if they are in an open marriage. The question – caught on video – went down at a crowded campaign event in Miami. Video Journo Asks Newtista About Open Marriage (FishbowlDC, Vice)

• Adult performer Keiran Lee told XBIZ Thursday that Brazzers has taken out a $1 million insurance policy on his penis with Lloyd’s of London. Brazzers Insures Keiran Lee’s Penis for $1 Million (XBIZ)

• More than $50,000 in sex toys were taken by HPD in the raid on Adult Video Megaplex; now, according to the Houston Chronicle, police say all the stuff is missing. HPD Loses $50,000 Worth Of Sex Toys (Houston News)

• Jada Fire, the woman who portrayed the former Secretary of State “Condoleezaa Wright” in the unforgettable film “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?” has officially announced that she is quitting the film industry for good.Porn Star Jada Fire Announces Retirement (News One)

In an article headlined Super Bowl: Volunteers Prepare to Stop Pimps, Sex Traffickers, the Christian Post reports on what may be the very weirdest sporting-event-related promotional giveaway in history: Super Bowl anti-sex-slavery soap. No, I’m not making this up:

Theresa Flores, founder of Save Our Adolescents from Prostitution (S.O.A.P.), told The Christian Post that major sporting events like the Super Bowl generally have more men in attendance who are visiting from a different city, and often do things they wouldn’t normally do at home. This creates a demand that “traffickers and pimps are there willing and waiting to supply,” she said.

Because of this, about 150 volunteers for S.O.A.P. are heading to Indiana before the event, not to tailgate, but to pass out soap at Indianapolis motels.

Each bar of soap will have a label on it with phrases like “Are you being threatened?” or “Are you witnessing young girls being prostituted?” The soap provides the number for a human trafficking hotline so that those at the hotel, or young girls who are being trafficked, will see it and can call for help.

S.O.A.P. volunteers will distribute the bars Feb. 1-2, in conjunction with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students who will hand out fliers to raise awareness for the trafficking issue with football fans.”

[Link.]

This has been an ongoing theme over the last week; the anti-trafficking activists are coming on like runningbacks. A Texas group called Traffick 911 has even started a petition trying to force the NFL to post their “I’m Not Buying It” posters opposing human trafficking. That’s called “free advertising.” The NFL is a business. If the New York Department of Public Health has to pay for their posters on the subway, my thinking is that some half-baked foundation ought to do the same for their misinformation spreading anti-sex hysteria at the Super Bowl. Would those same groups have been happy if public health groups tried get the NFL to put up posters encouraging safer sex?

Even Catholic nuns are getting into the act — at least eleven different congregations of them, according to this post at the LA Times:

[Sister Ann Oestreich] is coordinating the Super Bowl 2012 Anti-Trafficking Initiative for the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility for Indiana and Michigan. The group says it has contacted the managers of 220 hotels within a 50-mile radius of Indianapolis to help spot trafficking.

…Major events such as a Super Bowl or Olympics often attract a host of illegal activities, including sex trafficking and gambling.

To deal with an expected increase in prostitution, Indiana passed a law, which went into effect on Monday, designed to make prosecution of sex trafficking easier. Among other things, the law makes it a felony to recruit, transport or harbor anyone under the age of 16 for prostitution or other sexual conduct, punishable by 20 to 50 years in prison.

Another nun, Sister Nancy Conway, is quoted as saying, “If one woman is saved at the Super Bowl, it will all have been worth it,” in a WCKY Cleveland article that quotes some unbelievably sketchy statistics. The piece claims “The federal government estimates human trafficking is a $15 billion a year business. It’s also estimated about a 1000 girls are trafficked every year in Ohio alone.” Sister Pat Bergen quoted even more outrageous statistics in her article for the Chicago Tribune.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. Hooray for Flores, Conway, Traffick 911 and their parade of fanatics for opposing human trafficking…if that’s what they’re really doing. But it pays to remember that what they’re supposedly selling in this case is not the idea that human trafficking is bad, but that it happens more during the Super Bowl. Does it? Or have these groups cooked up a crazed response to a fictional phenomenon, in order to sell a few unrelated ideas — the ones about how sex is bad, sex work is bad, all sex workers are victims, and events like the Super Bowl encourage men to be somewhere other than church on a Sunday?

If the Sisters and the soap-wielding Crusaders have really convinced themselves they’re trying to make the world a better place, maybe their intentions are good. But that’s meeting them more than halfway, because in order to believe that these kind of tactics actually address issues of human trafficking, you have to be fantastically uneducated on the subject. At a certain point, ignorance is indistinguishable from malice.

The idea that sporting events cause a surge in prostitution has been an enduring myth told and retold for some years. I heard it when Germany hosted the World Cup. In fact, the LA Times, which so credulously reported the claim as fact, debunked it back in 2010, when the before-the-fact estimate that 40,000 prostitutes would enter Germany for the 2006 World Cup was repeated in the South African press, verbatim, as an estimate supposedly made for South Africa — five full years after the Germans had debunked the claim in relation to the World Cup.

“Sporting events bring prostitutes into town” have been reported for the last several years, like clockwork, before each Super Bowl, as well as before the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And it’s not just anti-sex activists who are spreading the hysteria. Law enforcement jumps on the bandwagon, claiming that prostitution will skyrocket before the Super Bowl. In every case, this is reported before the fact. Want to know why? Because after the fact, the numbers don’t hold up.

Mind you, the cops know this. All they have to do is call their fellow cops in other cities, which is what Dallas/Ft. Worth’s WFAA-TV Channel 8 did. Yet that doesn’t happen…why? Is it justification for overtime? Lobbying for new Grizzly APCs with water-cannon turrets?

WFAA-TV Channel 8 published this exposé day before yesterday, making it grotesquely clear that that there’s been no connection established between large sporting events and prostitution, let alone “human trafficking.”

DALLAS — For weeks now, police, politicians and non-profit agencies have warned that a wave of prostitutes will be coming to North Texas for Super Bowl festivities.

But News 8 has learned there is no evidence supporting such claims.

“I think it will be like nothing we’ve ever experienced before,” said Deena Graves, executive director of Traffick 911, a Fort Worth organization dedicated stopping the sale of children into sexual slavery.

Graves is among those warning of an alarming increase in underage girls sold for sex during the Super Bowl.

“Traffickers follow the money, and there’s a whole lot of money that comes with the Super Bowl,” she said.

Police and politicians have also issued similar statements.

“The Super Bowl is, unfortunately, a major draw for human trafficking,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said during a news conference on the topic at Dallas Police headquarters recently.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott gave reporters similar warnings in Arlington.

But no one can answer the question, “How do you know?” since pimps and prostitutes don’t register anywhere.

…Similar stories about the sex trade surround almost every major sporting event — even the Olympics and the World Cup.

To investigate their validity, News 8 began checking with police departments in other cities that have also hosted the Super Bowl…Phoenix hosted the big game three years ago. Police there told News 8 they received similar warnings about an increase in prostitution and prepared for it, but never uncovered any evidence of a spike in illegal sexual activity…Phoenix police spokesman Sgt. Tommy Thompson [said], “We did not notice an increase or anything out of the ordinary.”

[Link.]

WFAA-TV goes on to investigate Tampa, which hosted the Super Bowl in 2009 — where the entire week leading up to the game, Tampa saw only 11 prostitution arrests. In Miami, the 2010 host, the number of arests were 14. “Those figures are not uncommon for large cities during a seven-day period, experts said.”

You might remember that similar claims were made about the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, where the province of British Columbia’s study discovered that “sex trafficking and mega-events are not linked.” And WFAA-TV adds:

A European group called The International Organization for Migration arrived at the same conclusion in Germany after rumors that 40,000 prostitutes would go to the 2006 World Cup. The estimations are “unfounded and unrealistic,” the IOM reported.

Ernie Allen, director for The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he was misquoted last year when predicting 10,000 prostitutes would show up in Miami for Super Bowl XLIV.

Allen said the Super Bowl likely doesn’t attract more sex traffickers than any other large event. What’s more, he also conceded there is no way to quantify the problem.

Sports events are favored as targets for other “activists” obsessed with “protecting women’s welfare,” too. Similarly spurious claims were made a few years ago about the rise in domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday, as pointed out by this commenter on a credulous article on right-wing hate-fest FreeRepublic.com. That claim was debunked on Snopes, in an article that has a great timeline about how the lie was invented and perpetuated.

These kinds of claims are based not on information but self-perceived “logic.” They derive from the same source as most sex-related evolutionary psychology findings. That source is the vast storehouse most people think they have of “conventional wisdom” about “how things work,” usually based on not knowing anything about them — things like prostitution, human trafficking, domestic violence, crime, law enforcement, and wieners.

Urban legends about the Super Bowl sometimes show an inflammatory, hateful quality, displaying transparently anti-liberal sentiment and blatant racist lies about American cities. Religious organizations worried about football fans behaving badly might do more good if they concerned themselves with the “one” woman they might save from getting hit by a drunk driver if they offered rides home from Super Bowl parties.

Like so many anti-sex fanatics, the “anti-trafficking” activists are not actually anti-trafficking at all. They’re anti-sex. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they’re simply ignorant. They’ve confused the issues of prostitution and trafficking. I also suspect these groups are using the term “sex trafficking” to mean a broad range of things partially because they’re not all that sure what people actually do in bed, let alone what sex workers do. Apparently unclear on what they’re talking about, they’ve opted to give away promotional soap, come up with soundbites about saving “just one woman,” and demand free advertising out of the NFL instead of actually educating people — which, to be fair, would have to start with them educating themselves. Unfortunately, spreading hysteria is always far easier than researching the sticky question of how to make the world a less shitty place, and the most jingoistic flavors of Christianity have always thrived more on fear than on genuine Christian concern for fellow humans.

To that end, the anti-sex commandos have been spreading the terrifying message that the Super Bowl is a veritable slave market, resulting in a huge influx of helpless slave girls to satisfy the animal lusts of those beasts that some consider to be the most dangerous element in society — those who prefer football and sex over church. The game they’re playing is about shaming sexuality out of existence, not about making life better for women in the sex trade — even those who are there non-consensually, including underage sex workers. If the Super Bowl really is a slave market, handing out soap is going to have about as much impact as Ashton Kutcher’s whacked-out anti-trafficking campaign last year.

But hey, the so-called activists will have accomplished their real goals: spreading sexual shame, and painting female sex workers, and women in general, as helpless victims to dangerous male lust. Go team!

If it sounds like I’m making light of real-life slavery, please understand that I’m not someone who believes it doesn’t exist. I just believe it doesn’t look a damned thing like what Christian anti-sex activists seem to think it looks like. I believe they tar all sex work with the same brush because they honestly can’t tell the difference between right and wrong. They’re too busy being grossed out by the fact that anyone has sex in a different way than they have it.

Human trafficking is a real issue in many places in the world. It’s endemic in Saudi Arabia, for instance, where domestic workers from Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere are obtained to live in what amounts to virtual slavery. They’re not trafficked “for sex,” they’re trafficked as labor — but in a domestic situation in a nation choked by its sexual taboos, domestic workers, male and female, are often subjected to sexual violence.

Oh, and did I mention workers in virtual slavery “not being trafficked for sex”? Well, in China, that iPod you might fondle daily is made in factories where workers are transported far from their hometowns to work long hours in horrifying conditions for wages that amount to slavery. All over Africa, transit to Europe is a sought-after commodity, and the economy of the European Union wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly as it does, for all its impending doom, if there hadn’t long been a semi-underground economy of immigrants living in dangerous conditions and working for horrifyingly low wages. And that’s leaving out the issue of what economic conditions in their home countries made that trip to Europe to become a de facto indentured servant seem like the best damned idea in the world. One of the most destructive trends in Africa in the post-Colonial era is the large-scale requirement that men travel long distances to find work. In fact, it contributed not just to an enormous rise in sex trafficking within Africa, but to the spread of HIV — particularly along the Kinshasa Highway, also known as the “AIDS Highway,” that runs through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an enormous exodus of workers in the ’80s and ’90s resulted in a huge number of men away from their homes and wives — and a resultant explosion in prostitution, often by women who choose that way to make a living, all right, but only because they don’t have another choice.

In short, any half-baked crackpot who thinks that the global phenomenon of “human trafficking” is first and foremost about sex — well, I’d lay odds that they have a problem with sex, not slavery. “Sex slavery” may titillate and horrify the Normals, but it’s de rigueur for the poorest of the poor in many parts of the developing world, and it doesn’t have jack kitty crap to do with the Super Bowl. In fact, it has very little to do with what the average anti-sex religious crusader in the United States even recognizes as sex. The context of human trafficking in the developing world is so tragic that any serious consideration of it makes the self-righteous Chastity Commandos passing out soap at the Super Bowl seem like pathetically clueless, self-obsessed idiots. I would say they’re well-intentioned…but the truth is, they’re not.

As I said, willful ignorance, at a certain volume, becomes indistinguishable from malice. And, in the case of some self-appointed “anti-trafficking” activists in the United States, it’s malicious to begin with. These activists have convinced themselves that the way to fight evil is to fight not slavery, but sex. To do that, they’ve concocted a mess of half-truths and outright lies about who U.S. sex workers are and what they do.

Human trafficking is about global economics. It’s a poison cocktail mixed from two giant waves of decolonization: Western European decolonization from the ’40s through the ’70s, and Soviet decolonization post-1990. The Cold War flooded the developing world with small arms; post-Cold War market forces merely altered the currency used to pay for them — from dollars and rubles to smuggled Emirati gold and Sierra Leonean diamonds. Add to that an avalanche of Neoliberalism, in which Milton Friedman’s followers like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Hu Jintao and Boris Yeltsin built a world where public infrastructure was auctioned off to private individuals for private gain — all while blathering out the lie that privatization and deregulation provide more freedom. (They do…for the ultra-rich.)

Yet media reports always focus on trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, not for labor profiteering.

And yes, in a globalized world where women’s sexuality can be controlled by cartels, governments, and criminals, the phenomenon of women being lured from other countries by being promised jobs and then being compelled to work in brothels or massage parlors is real — and yes, it’s happened in the United States. But do such phenomena, trotted out by anti-sex activists when they’re sex-related and ignored by those same activists if they’re related to corporate profit motives, indict sex work as a whole? No — they indict human trafficking. Pretending that “human trafficking” is primarily about sex, or that sex work itself is somehow the problem, ignores the pro-big-business, anti-employee, anti-union economic apocalypse that has made workers in many parts of the world virtual slaves. And it’s dragging the United States and Europe down the exact same path.

Hysteria focused on some mythic phenomenon that can’t be addressed because it doesn’t exist is a win for two camps: the anti-sex conservatives, and the businesses that benefit from economic slavery.

All that is profoundly different from the consensual, voluntary exchange of money for sex by women who are empowered to make choices. And even that doesn’t go up during the Super Bowl, based on the data provided. Cops and crackpot activists need to direct their attention elsewhere.

Speaking of which: As I said above, sometimes ignorance isn’t just indistinguishable from malice; it is malice.

Well, institutional malice should be called what it is: Racketeering.

Many of these activists are Catholic nuns. So…being part of an organization that’s fostered the systematic institutional protection of serial child abusers for decades…is that more or less of a bad thing than cooking up an imagined phenomenon to sell an anti-sex message? Might some of these activists have directed their efforts toward fixing the Church’s own problems, instead of ones that don’t exist?

If you had spent your time saving “just one” child from abuse by a priest, Sisters…how many bars of soap would that have been worth?

Image from Photobucket.

Did you know that on Trojan’s 2006 report card on sexual health on college campuses, Yale was the only university with a perfect score, praised by Trojan for its excellent student sexual health resources?

One of the reasons Yale students rate as such sexual smartypantses is the annual Sex Week at Yale (SWAY), which kicked off today and runs through February 14. It’s been an annual event since 2003. Sex Week is “an interdisciplinary sex education program designed to pique students’ interest through creative, interactive, and exciting programming.” It’s long been the state-of-the-art event when it comes to sex education on college campuses. This year’s event features oodles of interesting programming, including programs by friends-of-Tiny-Nibbles like Maggie Mayhem, Babeland‘s Claire Cavanah, Bawdy Storytelling‘s Dixie De La Tour, The Center for Sex and Culture‘s Carol Queen, and more.

Unfortunately, not everybody has been stoked about the inclusive, sex-positive nature of SWAY, and as a result, it looks like the event’s undergone some unsettling changes. Sex Week At Yale 2012 almost didn’t happen. Anti-sex, pro-marriage activists tore into it last year under the euphemistic name “Undergraduates for a Better Yale College,” with a headline “Why Say No to Sex Week?”

And why, pray tell, should Yale “just say no?” Because Sex Week At Yale was too cozy with that old demon, pornography, and its bestest friend, BDSM.

Here’s what “Better Yale” says:

As we approach and prepare ourselves for Sex Week 2012, we ought to ask ourselves if these are really the messages we want to reinforce, and if these are the “experts” and role models we want to seek out for advice and instruction on the preciously important questions of love, intimacy, relationships, and our sexual nature.

[Link.]

See what they did there? Clever of them, huh? They called Maggie Mayhem and Carol Queen “experts” instead of experts. It’s passive-aggressiveness at its classiest, which is apparently one of the relationship values these cats “want to reinforce.” In protest, Undergraduates for a Better Yale College is sponsoring its competing “True Love Week” at the same time as SWAY. Because nothing says “no sex” like “true love,” right?

The backlash resulted in Yale’s decision in November to cancel SWAY, which caused gleeful fandangos from ultra-conservatives. That decision was based on the findings of a panel of inquiry that expressed horror that although Sex Wek does “promote consideration of some serious topics like international sex trafficking, in recent years it has prominently featured titillating displays…”

Hey, I’ve seen “titillating displays” that were about as serious as a display can get, but the panel’s statement was among the least nasty of the anti-SWAY propaganda out there. This delightful National Post article accuses the event of being “evangelical Paganism.”

After the event was cancelled late last year, the event organizers created a new proposal for a SWAY and submitted it to Yale’s administration, who approved it, and SWAY went forward. The price? The “messages we want to reinforce” at SWAY now includes abysmal, imaginary non-science in the service of an arch-conservative social agenda. One of SWAY’s presenters is Gail Dines, whose anti-porn, anti-sex, anti-feminist, anti-female views were cheerfully refuted on Tiny Nibbles last year

Dines is not the only anti-sex activist at SWAY this year. But for what it’s worth, the programming overall seems to have (mostly) retained its generally pluralistic and sex-positive nature, even if some of the event appear to be steeped in anti-sex hysteria. There are such treats as classes on sex-positive writing — including a XXX haiku workshop — pegging-positive performances and a gender-neutral swing dance lesson. This year also features a wide array of international programs, such as a lecture about perspectives on masturbation in the Middle East.

Even if the SWAY controversy cost the event some of its sex-positive flavor, is it still important? Hell, yes — because the chief enemy of sex-positivity is not anti-sex propaganda, but lack of information. Institutional sex ed in this country is largely bankrupt, and it’s getting worse every year. SWAY is one of the few places where genuinely broad discussions about sexuality are happening on college campuses at this large a scale. I think Yale Daily News put it this way:

Beyond a handful of presentations offered by Yale Health, Sex Week is the closest many students come to a sex ed class in college. As buzzwords like “rape culture” are thrown around and freshmen await mandatory workshops led by undergraduates trained as “Communication and Consent Educators,” issues of pure sexual health have seemed to fall by the bedside.

It’s easy to think of sex education as a topic that was beaten over our heads in high school. But the truth is that it wasn’t beaten over all of our heads. Many students come to Yale without any comprehensive sex education. A study by L.D. Lindberg, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, found that in 2002 a smaller fraction of teenagers were taught about birth control methods than in 1995. The New York Times reported that according to research done by the Guttmacher Institute, 25 percent of US teenagers between 2006 and 2008 were taught abstinence-only curricula without any mention of contraceptives.

[Link.]

SWAY’s own page said it fairly well, too, explaining some of the reasons behind the shift in programming:

Sexual culture is not homogeneous. We differ not only in the way we understand sexual culture, but also in the way we negotiate our place inside of it. Conversations about sexuality matter to us because they implicate ideas about what we should and should not do with our bodies; ideas that affect not only our physical, emotional, and mental well-being, but also the social environment around us.

This year, Sex Week is collaborating with a wide variety of Yale student organizations and seeking constructive input from faculty and students alike. We want to create a communicative network of individuals and organizations on campus, in order to provide the most effective educational resources for Yale students on sexuality, intimacy, and relationships.

As Directors of Sex Week 2012, we care deeply about these issues. Like any educational program, Sex Week is not a neutral event; we are not without individual assumptions or opinions. But our strongest conviction is that an open and multifarious dialogue about sexuality is essential to the safety and well-being of our peers.

[Link.]

One of the challenges of a meaningful sexual debate is getting in bed with people you disagree with. So even if SWAY has changed, in my opinion, for the worse, I’ll still say “Hooray that it exists.”

Image from Blackboards in Porn, via Popcorn And Sticky Floors.

Hmmm… What’s insulting, reductive and straight-up shitty about the new ads for .XXX?

Maybe that porn is not, in fact, moving its prime .com real estate to .XXX?
Maybe that women are not pieces of sexualized furniture?
Maybe that the women in porn are people – not objects 24-7?
Maybe that a representation of a permanently sexually receptive woman is rapey?
Maybe that some porn webmasters are also women?
Maybe that all of these things are an inaccurate representation of porn?

I’m just guessing. Feel free to add your opinion in the comments.

It’s not much better than the first round back in December, which has *interesting* African-American stereotypes in it.

The other two new ones:

Boston indie publisher Circlet Press has been publishing erotic science fiction and fantasy since the early 1990s. One of my very favorite books they ever published was Nymph, a little hardbound collection of linked erotic stories by Francesca Lia Block.

Cooked up in a gumbo pot from equal parts ultra-hotness and ultra-gothness, Nymph is an amazingly sexy exploration of a Southern California fantasyland in which a scorchingly erotic love affair with a lost mermaid can be a Venice Beach surfer’s 6 a.m. — before he even gets coffee. Packed with melancholy eroticism and urban loneliness, Nymph pirouettes across the sexual spectrum in unpredictable ways. It shows the full range of Block’s “sensual, dream-like” approach to fiction, but in Nymph, it’s soaked in explicitly romantic sexual description that can be as beautifully heartbreaking as it is erotic.

In case you’re missing my point: Nymph is one of my favorite erotic books ever. And it just came out in a new ebook edition, available at the Circlet Books website for just $4.99, in PDF, mobi and epub formats. Here’s how Circlet describes this brilliant collection:

As in her other works, Block weaves together themes of subtle magic, youthful hopes, modern urban decay, and deep emotion, told with lyrical storybook language.The stories in NYMPH bear all the hallmarks of classic Francesca Lia Block — punk-spirited characters who celebrate love, life, and art–with one important difference: this time the author carries her vision through the full range of emotion and erotic interaction that her mature audience appreciates.

An interconnected series of stories, NYMPH is a special journey through the lives and loves of characters like Plum, a Crayon-haired girl who has a gift: if she makes love with a person, that person will then meet their true love, or Tom, a burned out surfer whose luck changes when he is rescued by a mysterious, wheelchair-bound woman, or Sylvie, a chronically depressed poet who finds beauty in unexpected places. Block’s erotic explorations of these smoky, kaleidoscopic fables are anything but conventional; these are stories of love, loss, and life, about the healing power of sex and bonding.

[Link.]

When it came out a decade or so ago, this book raised more than a few eyebrows. That’s because Block is primarily known as the creator of the Weetzie Bat books, a six-book series for young adults.

Weetzie Bat is every bit as interesting as Nymph, and far more important in the history of sexuality, for completely different reasons. Despite its young adult audience, the Weetzie Bat series shamelessly portrayed sexual orientation, attraction and choice as mutable across a range of options. Its main character chooses to be a single mother, and invites her two gay best friends into a Beatles-fueled threesome so that the child will belong to all of them. With its celebratory pro-queer view, the Weetzie Bat series radicalized the sexual politics of adults writing young adult fiction, without including a single explicit sex scene or the faintest whisper of exploitation. Wrapped up in magic and sexuality and set in the dreamland known as “Shangri-L.A.,” the series revolutionized queer representation in young adult fiction, portraying a wonderfully wholesome exploration of alternative lifestyles, chosen families, and even true love.

Plus, it’s just a damned lot of fun to read. Unfortunately, Block’s prominence within young adult fiction meant that booksellers and libraries didn’t know what to do with Nymph, and in my opinion it’s never gotten the recognition it deserves. When it comes to urban erotic fantasy, Block’s Nymph is sui generis and, more importantly, mind-bendingly sexy.

It may be short, but it’s lingered longer in my consciousness than many a one-night stand. Like so many of Block’s erotic love affairs, the book’s brevity only makes that last kiss sweeter and saltier as you turn the final page. Because every kiss in this beautiful book is laced with Venice Beach salt spray…and tears.

Just so you know, this website is explicit.

• Ashley Bulgari, Angelica Kitten – Relax in the Caribbean
• Monicca, Frida – Double (pictured above)
• Nika – Park
• Svetlana – CASTING Svetlana
• Bella Babe – CASTING Bella Babe
• Satine – Especial
• Oksi – CASTING Oksi

Imagine the tragedy if, during a hot party with one or more of your bestest battery-powered and/or silicone friends, one of them suffers from vibrator breakdown or nipple clamp metal-fatigue. And if a toe-curling orgasm causes you to accidentally propel that dildo out the window before you’re finished with it? Never fear…if you’re in Brooklyn, at least!

That’s because Babeland’s Park Slope location delivers sex toys by bicycle — within an hour! According to this piece in The Brooklyn Paper, the women-owned Babeland has partnered with Clementine Courier to offer faster-than-fast sex toy delivery. Best of all, while bicycle delivery is usually $30, “It’s free on Valentine’s Day — just like last year, when workers on two-wheelers wore bow ties for the occasion.”

The door-to-door of service works like this: whoopie-makers can scope out items online, then call Babeland to place an order. A receptionist at the shop, which is located on Bergen Street near Flatbush Avenue, then assigns the delivery to a cyclist at the forward-thinking bike messenger company, Clementine Courier. A pedal-grinder then drops a “discreet-looking box” at any address in Brooklyn, usually in less than an hour.

[Link.]

The story says it was Babeland shoppers who made the suggestion that the store begin offering bicycle delivery. And check out this tidbit of information:

Babeland staffers say shoppers use the service most on three-day weekends and claim hotels get the majority of the action when it comes to delivery.

…For some, getting dressed and heading to the sex shop could ruin the mood. For others, a broken toy could cause a bedroom emergency. And, of course, there’s bad weather — one of the main reasons people order delivery in general, and a great incentive for frisky Brooklynites to stay in bed.

[Link.]

What I find most interesting about the whole thing is that hotels get the majority of the orders. I love the idea of adding a hand-delivered sex toy to a romantic weekend away — and, not having to fly with it.

According to Babeland spokeswoman Pamela Doan, it’s the venerable Hitachi Magic Wand that gets the most delivery orders. That’s not surprising; it’s versatile, powerful, and in a pinch it can bring almost as much pleasure to a sore back from a day spent at the Met as it does on erectile tissue!

Update: The folks at Babeland inform me that it isn’t only their Brooklyn store that delivers! They offer local delivery from all their locations — that is to say, their Seattle store plus three locations in New York (SoHo and the Lower East Side, in addition to the Brooklyn store).

Lead photo from A Twisted Spoke.

North Carolina Pastor Patrick Wooden is a rabidly anti-gay preacher who’s, well, a little obsessed with anal sex. Now, in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with being obsessed with anal sex — I can get a little obsessed with it myself, especially on Tuesdays. Hey, what’s not to be obsessed with about anal sex? Simply put, it rocks.

Pastor Wooden, however, doesn’t think it rocks. To Wooden, any male-male contact is flat-out wrong in God’s eyes, so the two-guy buttfuck is right out.

One might think that’d more or less be the end of the conversation, right? But no! Pastor Wooden can’t stop talking about buttsex! In fact, he’s spent a significant portion of his ecclesiastical career going into grotesque and stupendously excruciating detail about exactly why gay anal sex is an abomination, to the point of — if you’ll forgive the pun — making shit up. In attempting to justify his objection to gayness overall, the Pastor comes up with a spicy gumbo of urban legends and misinformation that’s as stark-raving psycho as it is unintentionally hilarious. His claims, it pains me to tell you, are…ugh…crap.

In this podcast interview with Michelangelo Signorile, transcribed here at The Huffington Post, Wooden goes the extra mile in trying to justify his bizarre statements about anal sex and a few other choice sexual variations…but mostly about anal sex. In fact, It’s not — oh, I just can’t help myself — it’s not a stretch to say that Pastor Wooden has butt on the brain. Like so many hate mongers, is — Ow! Somebody stop me! — Pulling things out of his ass.

And speaking of things coming out of Pastor Wooden’s ass: Is it just me, or does the guy seem to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying his anti-gay sentiments by talking specifically about shit? He’s more hopped-up on shit-steria than a scat freak on Imagefap. Those of us with a healthy love of anal sex — honestly, we deal with shit when we have to, but most of us don’t go out of our way to spend the whole day talking about it. As so much with Pastor Wooden, I’m left wondering what he’s hiding under his polyester Hagars that makes him think about butts and poop seemingly 24/7.

Anyway, among Wooden’s oft-repeated claims? The one that “gay men” — by which he means men who engage in receptive anal intercourse — invariably end up in diapers and must use butt plugs not just to “stretch the anus” but to prevent incontinence, apparently owing partially (to hear Wooden tell it) to the widespread practice of anal fisting, “in some cases up to the armpit.” (“The homosexual community, they know I’m not lying,” sayeth the preacher.)

Then there’s Wooden’s awesome “anecdote” about the guy who put a cell phone up his ass and had to have it removed at the emergency room:

The surgeon asked, “Will anybody get that?” And of course, no one answered the phone. And to add to it, that the individual, when they were released from the hospital, called back and wanted their phone.

[Link.]

Does Wooden actually believe what he’s saying, or does he realize he’s making it all up based on half-remembered locker-room jokes and homophobe horror stories? Figuring that out would take an army of psychoanalysts and more couches than Ikea sells in a year.

As interviewer, Signorile plays devil’s advocate, soft-pedaling any challenge to Wooden’s Dadaist assertions. This gives the guy more than enough of a well-lubed eighteen-incher to thoroughly impale himself. Given how far Wooden is prepared to take is confused anti-logic, that’s not surprising.

What makes Wooden different than any other garden-variety anti-gay preacher is his reliance on “medical information” and “factual” claims. That makes the argument especially graphic, unsupportable, and…well, weird. The result is that the strange-to-begin-with debate eventually jumps the rails into WTFisms that hurt my brain. Wooden is particularly out of his depth when with Signorile as to why it’s okay for “man and wife” to engage in anal or oral sex, but not for two men to do so. He kinda runs like a scared rabbit when Signorile starts asking about vaginal fingering. That’s my favorite of Wooden’s recurring themes — his desperate attempt to explain why female butts are okay to fuck, but male butts are not.

For instance, after Wooden’s lengthy and exceedingly uncomfortable rant about exactly what occurs at glory holes, Signorile suggests maybe straight people have group sex, too, resulting in this amusing exchange:

Signorile: But you know many heterosexuals have sex clubs, swingers’ clubs…They’re saying Newt Gingrich wanted an ‘open marriage’–

Wooden: So you then believe that the anus and the vagina are the same —

Signorile: No, they’re not the same.

Wooden: Let me tell you, the anus does not lubricate itself.

Hard to argue with “logic” like that, I’ll admit — even if it’s not 100% true. (The rectum does produce a small amount of mucus that can act as lubricant, but it’s almost never enough for comfortable or safe anal sex.) On that topic, there follows a strange discussion about whether vaginas need lube. Later, after saying husband-wife anal sex is OK, Wooden tries to start an argument about where shit comes from:

Wooden: This pastor is telling you without apology that the Bible allows a husband and a wife to enjoy each other –

Signorile: Including anal sex? Including anal sex?

Wooden: I guess so, if that’s something that they agree to.

Signorile: But you said that that place is the place for feces.

Wooden: Well, do you disagree with that?

[Link.]

While I do think the good Pastor’s brain-benders are hilarious, it’s sometimes hard not to cry as I laugh. That’s because Wooden is just a symptom of a broad-based culture that justifies homophobia through any means necessary, including straight-up medical lies. A member of Newt Gingrich’s staff just claimed AIDS can’t be transmitted through heterosexual sex. When homophobes no longer rely on the magical thinking of scriptural claims but retreat into a wholesale reinvention of physical reality and the human body to spread their hatred, aren’t we straying into dangerously Orwellian territory?

When I was in junior high and high school, I heard all of Wooden’s claims (and more) repeated to me as fact — they’re classic urban legends. I didn’t just hear them from other youngsters, either; teachers and other adults helped spread the shit. Years later when I, a straight man, asked a physician if there was any medical risk for someone with irritable bowel syndrome using an anal toy, I was told that gay men often end up in diapers. This physician was a gastroenterologist. It wasn’t in North Carolina. It was in San Francisco, in the mid-1990s.

Prejudice and hatred thrive on misinformation. The great advantage held by blatant liars is that shit spreads faster than fact. It takes a pantload of reason to wipe away a dingleberry of hate.

I’m happy to laugh my ass off at liars and lunatics like Pastor Patrick Wooden. But in doing so, I run the risk of painting his flavor of bigotry as “quaint.” His views do seem antiquated with all the progress that’s been made in the last 20 years on the front of sexual freedom. But those repetitive, hateful, homophobic, sexphobic lies have been with us for years. And sometimes they seem like they’re here to stay.

Lead image from this hot gallery.

While I can’t decide if I want to ignore or embrace Valentine’s Day this year, the always sweet and never bitter Matthew Inman – aka The Oatmeal – makes it all better with new greeting cards conveying comic messages of twisted, tainted love (and lust).

Don’t miss his new Horrible Valentine’s Day Cards. They’re actual cards that you can give to a person in real life. That’s pretty neat. You can pay him money for them, and they start at $5. There are a number of sexytime ones, such as one card that explains how “in a sea of chest hair a man’s nipples can help you find his penis in the dark” and another one involving cheetah balls, and yet another that features a cruise missile covered in wiggling cocks. I hope that next time I see Matt I get to ask him about the science behind creating cards about farting in bed for love, and anal adventures involving man-eating cats. There’s got to be a sex guide waiting to happen in there somewhere…

• Many of you know I love FEMEN (Site: FEMEN). Police detained and later released three topless protesters this weekend after they stripped to the waist outside a World Economic Forum event in Davos, Switzerland (attended privately by wealthy elite like Arianna Huffington and Facebook’s Sherl Sandberg). The trio, from the Ukrainian group FEMEN, carried banners while shouting “Poor because of you.” Topless FEMEN protesters arrested in Davos (GlobalPost)

• To say that I’m a fan of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would be the understatement of the century. The new version? Not so much… Here’s how Hollywood got Dragon Tattoo SO wrong: “It’s unacceptable to take a woman made into a phenomenon because of her solitary strength and particular moral compass and drive, and turn her into a romantic girl saved and guided by a man.” Softening and Sexualizing Lisbeth Salander (Movies.com, via The Sexadmeic)

• Sex educator Corey Silverberg heard about new location-based app Pee In Peace that helps trans people find safe bathrooms where they don’t have to worry about gender violence, and interviewed them about their brilliant app. Pee in Peace: Using Technology to Counter Bathroom Violence (About: Sexuality)

• A wealthy Californian pornographer who sued Kim Dotcom for infringing copyright on thousands of nude images says he is delighted the FBI and New Zealand police have smashed Dotcom’s Megaupload file-sharing business. But Norm Zada, owner of soft-core porn website Perfect 10, said he would be happier still if the US government was instead attacking the search-engine giant Google, Kim Dotcom In Porn Wrangle (Stuff.co.nz)

• At right: see why this poster for Shame was banned? Banned Hungarian Poster For “Shame” (Buzzfeed)

• Dr. Hai Hong is one of a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs: Hong sells sex toys manufactured in his Chinese factory, but you can get just about anything from these guys. Need a few thousand iPad cases? They’ve got your back. GPS trackers for your fleet of trucks? No problem. They say that they’re legitimate businesses. They just happen to be spammers too. Who Sent That Sex-Toy E-mail? Your Friendly Chinese Spamufacture (Wired, thanks netik!)

• One of our favorite male porn stars may just crossover into mainstream film. Bret Easton Ellis has been tweeting about a film script he is writing with James Deen in mind = having sex with both women and men. Hot! Porn Star James Deen to Star in New Bret Easton Ellis Movie? (FishbowlLA)

• The history of straightness is much shorter than you’d think. An expert explains its origins… The invention of the heterosexual (Salon, thanks Damon!)

• It’s not new news (as you can see in the fleshlightyet Twitter timeline) but the minute that Gizmodo found out that male masturbation sex toy company Fleshlight is developing an iPad Fleshlight masturbation case, they confirmed the upcoming device. I can personally tell you that Steve Jobs would not approve… Fleshlight Developing an iPad Case You Can Have Sex With (Gizmodo)

I’m so excited to see that the Latex Stormtrooper Catsuit by the rubber couture designers at Shhh! is not a one-off (like this one), and is now for sale. It’s not cheap (£510.00), but the Brighton, England company is one of the finest latex houses on the planet so you know you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

Lust, Love and Latex has a terrific post about the item, its designer, and an upcoming Stromtrooper latex dress – with matching hood.

Every Friday on Pulp Tech I do a sex and tech news roundup – I think that the intersections of sex and tech are where we find the interesting bits. Often, these bits reveal intentions by people that want to use sexuality for something other than positive reasons, and where people try to control others (I believe porn is one of the most powerful speech censorship tools).

So I hope you check out Sex Tech Weekly when you can. This week’s installment includes a digital dating conference report, the Grindr hacker goes unpunished (with info on the hack), ICANN responds to the Manwin (YouPorn, etc) .XXX antitrust suit, and porn’s filesharing lawyer is busted for violating alleged porn filesharers’ privacy to reach his sue-happy ends. Of note is that Grindr hasn’t fixed the security hack and it’s been eight days, and that Big Porn thought to make money off torrent/pirate lawsuits but the lawyer that spearheaded the campaign is looking dirtier than the genre he represents (and not in a good way).

This week in sex and technology Big Porn’s piracy lawsuits lawyer has to pay for misconduct, the digital dating conference took place in Miami, Big Porn’s lawsuit against .XXX and ICANN got a response, and a popular location-based sex app was hacked – and it seems the hacker may go unpunished.

Digital dating destined for disruption

At the three-day digital dating conference in Miami this past week, companies brought their best pitches to show that the online dating world is looking to take its methodology, reach and profits to the next level.

Attendees spanned the online dating and hookup gamut. This included reps from Google, Bing, Match and OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Grindr, marriage sites and startups eager to disrupt the space, such as TheComplete.me. (…read more, Pulp Tech)

Image of Dani D. via this gallery.

My goodness this gallery (and video) is hot.

The cheeky monkeys at adult retailer LoveHoney UK decided to send a bit of special sauce into my inbox this morning when they emailed me about their new ad for Bacon Lube. It looks like the bacon flavored lubricant I told you about back in November is now commercially available!

The cool peeps at LoveHoney (they of the sex toy zombie survival videos and who also now have a US store and recently acquired CoCo de Mer) clearly had a lot of fun with this one – extra fun points for the “thumbs-up” shot and the cute boy who seems to have put his bacon on the line during the making of this video. Oh – and because they’re in the UK, they obviously had to make a techno remix of the video.

In a bizarrely credulous article, the Telegraph has answered the question of what causes war. That’s right! You guessed it…it’s boners. Not economics, resource scarcity, ethnic and racial prejudice, acquisitive and incompetent political leaders, short-sightedness or failure to learn from history. Nope! It’s just plain boners, pure and simple. They’re bad.

Here’s how the Telegraph puts it, in an article titled “Male sex drive ‘to blame for world’s conflicts’.”

The male sex drive is to blame for most of the world’s conflicts from football hooliganism to religious disputes and even world wars, according to scientists.

The “male warrior” instinct means that men are programmed to be aggressive towards anyone they view as an outsider…In evolutionary terms an instinct for violence against others helped early men improve their status and gain more access to mates, but in modern terms this can translate into large-scale wars.

In contrast women are naturally equipped with a “tend and befriend” attitude which means they seek to resolve conflicts peacefully in order to protect their children, researchers said.

The “tribal” attitude of men, ultimately aimed at boosting their chances of reproducing, is similar to the territorial behaviour of chimpanzees, it was claimed.

The study also examined evidence which suggests men have a stronger sense of group identity than women, and that they will develop closer ties with others in their group if they are in competition with rivals.

Although men’s hostile responses most likely evolved to combat the threat from outsiders, they “might not be functional in modern times and are often counterproductive,” experts said.

Over time this has resulted in full-scale wars between countries and empires, and also in scraps and skirmishes between rival groups of football supporters and urban gangs.

[Link.]

My bullshit detector goes ding-ding-ding whenever I read journalists writing about human behavior by drawing such broad strokes. “Full-scale wars between countries” and “skirmishes between…football supporters and urban gangs” is a ludicrous generalization. The study itself actually goes even further — and includes fights between rival groups at high schools. Talk about the shotgun approach…

You can point to all the data you want; there are too many moving parts to wars, and even to urban gangs, to claim that violence is caused by one source, like male sexuality. What’s more, there are a lot of moving parts to male sexuality. Treating men as simple beasts is insulting, and treating our sexuality as nothing more than the Boner Patrol is so simplistically sex-negative it boggles my mind that it still exists in this day and age.

But there’s a more insidious side to “research” like this. Treating wars as the inevitable side-effect of boners is de facto sex negative, yes. And if the data supported it, I’d be all for it. But the authors of the study rely on comparing apples and oranges, tossing in everything from tribal societies to chimpanzee behavior to terrorism, and using it to draw enormous conclusions about history.

That’s where I think the study turns truly dangerous. It’s a way of cheapening the malfeasance that actually causes wars — oftentimes deliberate malfeasance on the part of politicians. War literature is filled with humankind’s helplessness to change its destiny. Maybe individual combatants are helpless sometimes. But at a macro-level, human beings don’t get into wars because they’re helpless puppets dancing on evolutionary strings. They get into wars because some people deliberately act like assholes. Specifically, powerful people (usually men) abdicate their responsibility to safeguard their constituents’ well-being. Do the Telegraph’s editors — or the researchers — really want to winnow Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Tahrir Square, or World War II down to outdated human behavior patterns caused by “men trying to reproduce?” In a world where lopsided economics, racial and ethnic prejudice, homophobia, sexism and misinformation play such a role in most forms of violence, why does male sexuality have to get a bad rap?

The answer is, again, that male sexuality should indeed get a bad rap — if the argument supports it. But I don’t see a damn thing in this article that convinces me any real research has netted such a result. The arguments are too glib and general, the reported conclusions too explosive.

What’s more, the Telegraph presents the article as a “study,” which may be technically accurate in terms of a sociology journal, but is a gross misrepresentation when reporting on something as specific as the connection between war and sexuality. It is a study of the existing literature. That means it’s basically what’s called a review article, in which authors have come to conclusions. This is very different than, for instance, a “study” in which X drug was tested on patients and found to have greater impact on libido than Y drug. This is armchair science at best.

Here’s an example of how general the thinking is in the article. This is a summary quote from one of the authors. Incidentally, I don’t think he’s actually the study leader as the Telegraph reports — at least, he’s not the first author, he’s the last author; that usually means he’s a mentor or senior member of the team, not the leader. In fact, the Telegraph using that term implies to me that they might be misunderstanding the important distinction between the use of the term “study” in social vs. biological sciences. Anyway, here’s the quote:

Prof Mark van Vugt, who led the study, said: “A solution to conflict, which is an all too common problem in societies today, remains elusive. One reason for this might be the difficulty we have in changing our mindset, which has evolved over thousands of years…Our review of the academic literature suggests that the human mind is shaped in a way that tends to perpetuate conflict with ‘outsiders’.

Oh, no you di-n’t. “The human mind is shaped in a way that tends to perpetuate conflict with ‘outsiders’”? That’s science? That results in an indictment of male sexuality as the source of war? The Telegraph’s shooting-fish-in-a-barrel examples could as easily be representative of a million other arguments:

There are several historical examples linking the male sex drive and conflict, such as Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan who studies suggest has 16 million direct male descendants today as a result of his appetite for women.

Vikings also left a strong genetic fingerprint in areas like the Scottish Western Isles, the Isle of Skye and Iceland because raiding parties would take local wives as a reward for successful raids.

Genghis Khan and the Vikings are favored examples pulled out in pseudoscientific comparative history, so I’m not surprised to see them here.

Here’s the full text of the original article, published in the current issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B — yes, that’s the journal’s real name. This is one of the two currently publishing versions of the oldest scientific journal in the world, which was founded in 1665 (!) and in 1887 split into two journals, “A” serving the physical sciences and “B” serving the life sciences. The article in question is tagged as a research article, “Evolution and the psychology of intergroup conflict: the male warrior hypothesis,” by Melissa M. McDonald, Carlos David Navarrete and Van Vugt. (It’s Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B March 5, 2012 367 (1589) 670-679, in case you were wondering.)

This is a theme issue, titled “The Biology of Cultural Conflict,” including such articles as “The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences” and, interestingly, a review article titled “The puzzle of monogamous marriage,” which should be Newt Gingrich’s casual reading this week.

With this piece, we’re once again in the field known as evolutionary psychology. If you’re familiar with the field, then you’ll know it holds a seductive power over members of the news media. Evolutionary psychology is known for some practitioners who tried to explain why who let blatant racism, sexism and other prejudices not just taint their thinking, but guide it. The news media love to report on evolutionary psychology “findings,” because it offers easy “answers” to why people behave the way that they do. And, as might be expected, a large amount of the evolutionary psychology the news media finds “sticky” just happens to be about sex.

But much of the time evolutionary psychology “findings” on sexuality tend to reassert strangely familiar racist and sexist clichés — like the “idea” that white women are more sexually attractive than black women, as Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa claimed last year. Actually, what Kanazawa did was to take as accepted fact that black women were sexually less desirable than women of other races. He then set out to explain why.

In my experience, a lot of evolutionary psychology has a suspiciously similar reliance on “conventional wisdom,” and much of the research ends up reasserting what plenty of people think they already know.

Although some evolutionary psychologists claim that such prejudiced thinking is not representative of the field, plenty of us don’t buy it. Personally, I’m still holding out for some valuable contribution to come from the world of evolutionary psychology. But the more bullshit trotted out by scientists who try to explain complex systems with glib soundbites so the boneheaded media can report it, the more evolutionary psychology founders, in my eyes. Dr. Stanton Peele claims that the entire field is not just tainted but represented by Kanazawa and his racist ideology. I agree with Peele that too often, evolutionary psychology “findings” look like the repetition of an idea that researchers have decided is true…then find half-assed science to dubiously explain it. It’s absolutist thinking, in total opposition to a truly descriptive approach.

Since the ’80s, I’ve been told again and again that male sexuality was responsible for all violence, particularly war. Back then, the argument was made by a broad spectrum of people, from radical feminists to radical queer activists to apologists for rape. I thought it felt glib then, and I’ll think it feels glib until someone makes a convincing argument for it. Throwing chimpanzee behavior, tribal societies, urban gangs and high school hooligans at the wall isn’t going to do that.

Now, just for the record, those of you about to skip to the comments and mansplain to me why male sexuality being responsible for war is a perfectly reasonable conclusion… skip it. My problem is not with the suggestion that human males and human females show certain evolutionary patterns both sexually and in terms of social interaction. Feel free to argue that’s the case; that’s not what this is about.

The question here is not whether humans can find a pattern anywhere, but whether that pattern, in a complex system, is more compellingly argued than other patterns, after allowing for observer bias. I submit that such argument has not been made, or even seriously attempted. Instead, the authors of this “study” have merely helped add another turd to the septic tank that is mainstream reportage on psychology, sociology, anthropology and human behavior in general.

My problem with the media’s reporting on human science is the rampant obsession that scientists and the media show for finding soundbite explanations for incredibly complex systems like sexuality and war.

What do sexuality and war have in common? They’re both fantastically complicated matters. I feel confident in saying that three scientists reading the existing literature didn’t just figure both war and sex out while sitting in corner offices at universities.

Image: Vintage Gay Media History.

• Aroused (release: Spring 2012) features a look at the lives of some of adult film’s most recognizable stars such as Jesse Jane, Belladonna, Katsuni, Allie Haze, Kayden Kross, April O’Neil, Francesca Lé, Lisa Ann, Brooklyn Lee, Alexis Texas, Asphyxia Noir, Teagan Presley, Ash Hollywood, Tanya Tate, Lexi Belle and Misty Stone. Witness the Classiest Trailer for a Documentary About Porn Stars That You’ll Ever See (Film School Rejects)

• Sex educator Dr. Charlie Glickman faces off against Newt Gingrich’s “open relationship” and the popular conflation of consensual non-monogamy and nonconsensual infidelity. Open Relationships, Infidelity, and Cheating (Dr. Charlie Glickman)

• Iran to execute alleged porn programmer, Reddit’s SOPA porn apathy, Microsoft wants gay marriage, erotic book plagiarism at Amazon. Sex Tech: Iran Execution, Reddit Apathy, Microsoft Gay Marriage, Amazon Plagiarism (Pulp Tech)

• ICM Registry filed its response to the .XXX lawsuit filed by Manwin (YouPorn, etc.) and Digital Playground, which was recently acquired by Manwin, asking the Court to throw out the case. ICM Responds To Manwin’s .XXX Suit With Motions To Dismiss (Thedomains.com)

• Hazel Jones, the British woman who recently revealed that she has two fully formed vaginas, turned down a $1 million offer from Vivid Entertainment CEO Steve Hirsch to do porn. Hazel Jones: Woman with Two Vaginas Turns Down $1 Mil Porn Offer (International Business Times)

• In which the commercial porn industry appears to be anti-safer sex… As the adult-film industry held its annual gathering in Las Vegas this week, back in Los Angeles, where a large percentage of commercial porn originates, the city council had voted 9-1 earlier this month to require condoms on male actors in film shoots within city limits. One option seemingly not being considered by anyone The Daily Beast interviewed: starting to use condoms. The Porn World Says No to Condoms (The Daily Beast)

• Forever ensuring you’ll never think of Harry Potter the same way again, Ralph Fiennes indulged Andy Cohen, Watch What Happens Live viewers, and Voldemort fetishists with a reading from a piece of erotic fan fiction during his visit to the Bravo talk show on Thursday night. Ralph Fiennes reads Voldemort erotic fiction (PopWatch)

• This is an interesting article about Indian culture and pro-porn Indian women that not only like porn, but enjoy the rough stuff. Porn and women: Some like it hardcore (DNA India)

Porn convention 2012 coverage:

• Here is a well-shot slideshow of the industry magazine’s 2012 porn awards, and a skin-tastic gallery of photos from the porn convention trade show floor. Hey – Belladonna is bald again – and she did an aerial performance for the awards event. Photos from the 2012 AVN Awards and Expo + 2012 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (Examiner.com; Las Vegas Vegas, image at right via)

• Sarah Estrella looks at the award winners: “The biggest winner among this year’s crop of adult films, hands down, is Elegant Angel’s Portrait of a Call Girl.” 2012 AVN Awards: A look at this year’s award-winning adult films (Examiner.com)

• Joan Rivers‘ daughter Melissa Rivers dates Vivid’s Steven Hirsch, and they appear to have hung out with Joe Francis (of Girls Gone Wild repute). Melissa Rivers — From the Oscars to the AVNs (TMZ)

• Classy. The 2012 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo kicked off at the Hard Rock Hotel, bringing with it a slew of parties and events. One of them was the IsAnyoneUp.com AVN Launch party at Mandalay Bay’s Foundation Room, hosted by site founder Hunter Moore. Despicable me: Q&A with Is Anyone Up?’s Hunter Moore (Las Vegas Weekly)

• Looks like anti-porn profiteers XXX Church had a nice, big presence at the convention. Jesus, lawyers and 3 other unexpected sights at the porn convention (Las Vegas Sun)

• Kaila – Differencia
• Tatu – Smussato
• Belle – Belleza
• Felicity – Equilibrio

• Ruth Medina – Cheek
• Sakura – Presenting Sakura
• Nikky Case – Superstar (pictured, top)
• Frida – Kitchen Sink

• Engelie – First Session (sound alert)
• Dominika – Horny (sound alert)

• Marta – Solo
• Liza and Angell Summers – Duetto (image at right)

• Jolie, Leonelle and Candy
• Beatrix and Katika
• Nikitta and Aiden
• Krissy, Caprice and Regina

I don’t usually go for the erotic Disney stuff, but the 2012 calendar created by comic book artist J. Scott Campbell is really amazingly sweet, sexy and dirty all at once. In fact, all of his work in this genre suggests a delicious fascination with fetish, fantasy and exaggerated (unreal) body types that push lines which turn us on while reminding us that titillating sexual fantasy is exactly that.

• Sexy 2012 Disney Princess Pin-up Calendar
• Disney Princesses Get Sexy Comic Makeover

Tonight (Saturday January 21) is Burnlesque, our annual SFSI fundraiser – and awareness-raiser – where we get great DJs, sexy dancers, sex nerds and more together to dance, drink and flirt with you on our friskiest night of the year. SFSI is where for nearly a decade I’ve been volunteering alongside, teaching with and working amongst the best and brightest sex educators in the world to bring free, accurate, confidential sex-positive sex ed to the world. SFSI is a nonprofit that has been around for over 30 years, and this yearly event helps us keep the phone lines open and emails flowing to anyone and everyone that needs sex, gender and orientation questions answered, from sex advice to sex emergencies, resources for help and community, and much more. We help people. People that often have no where else to turn.

This year’s Burnlesque theme is Animal Style, and flirty animals of all kinds are welcome to attend. We’ll have a sex advice booth and much more… I’ll be helping with setup and then arriving later to dance and pop into the advice booth to help out. Or spread the word. Tickets are $15.

The other event tonight is much racier – if you’d like something kinkier, Femina Potens is having an outrageous Prohibition-era themed bondage and wine evening – it’s Art of Restraint: Speakeasy. This is also a fundraiser for the amazing pro-porn, queer feminist gallery operated by Madison Young (disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors). Performers include Fivestar, Madame Butterfly, Monk, JP Robichaud, Coral Aorta, Danarama Bellino and Madison Young – and the event takes place in a stylish, spacious and private SOMA loft. I’ll be dropping in for a while to say hi and look at the beautiful ropework – these kinky superstars will not disappoint. Tickets are $50.

Photo by The Dirty Story.

• Anneli and Mr. X – Dream Girl
• Angle and Seth (who is way way too gorgeous to be a porn guy) – Afternoon Delight (pictured)

• This week, in a widely anticipated vote, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance requiring condoms to be used in all permitted adult films shot within city limits. Lorelei Lee, who’s worked with and without condoms, argues that mandatory enforcement is misguided. Porn Performer: Why I’m Against Government Mandated Condom Use in Porn (AlterNet)

• Arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and sexual assaults on transgender persons have increased in Kuwait during the last four years, says the Human Rights Watch (HRW). ‘They hunt us down for fun’. Police accused of transgender torture, sexual assault (Kuwait Times)

• Iran’s supreme court has upheld the death sentence for a web programmer who faces imminent execution after being found guilty of developing and promoting porn websites. Saeed Malekpour faces imminent execution on basis of confessions he retracted in letter, saying they had been beaten out of him. Iran confirms death sentence for ‘porn site’ web programmer (Guardian UK)

• Fabian Thylmann isn’t a familiar name to most people outside the adult entertainment industry. But while the 33-year-old managing partner of Manwin (Brazzers, Twisty’s, Playboy online, Digital PLayground, Wicked Pictures, YouPorn) lacks the icon status of Hugh Hefner or the grand showmanship of Larry Flynt, he has quietly become one of the most powerful people in porn over the past two years. Porn Convention 2012 – Meet the New King of Porn (CNBC)

• Online piracy continues to nip at the earnings of porn studios, and new legislation could dramatically impact how adult companies do business. So it makes sense, in a way, that the porn industry’s annual convention is facing big changes as well. Porn Convention 2012 – Is the Porn Industry Imperiled? (CNBC)

• Mad props for a cheeky headline… Worldwide conglomerate Virgin forgot to register the richardbranson.xxx domain name, and the company wants it back. Virgin loses control of porn domain (London Calling)

• As their virginal white megastores suggest, Apple doesn’t condone “overtly sexual content” in its 500,000+ iPhone Apps. However, searching for the term “sex” reveals plenty of tired Cosmo-inspired position guides and boobie pictorials in the App Store. Want an on-the-go program that’s actually sexy fun? Well, there are seven apps for that. Digital, Digital Get Down (The Valley Advocate)

• After watching the promo video for Lingerie Bowl IX, certain ad industry males have come to the conclusion that the LFL is beginning to look a whole lot more like a real sport with hot muscly women, and a lot less like an excuse to watch femmey women parade around a football field in their underwear. Too bad for them! Those of us that love tough babes are happy as clams, thankyouverymuch… Lingerie Bowl Less Sexy, More Like A Real Sport (Adrants)

• It’s not something shown very often on the morning news: pole dancing. After interviewing a local pole dancing fitness instructor, who showed off some of her moves, WNWO reporter Joe Galli dressed up in spandex and shiny leather boots and mounted a pole (video). Reporter Pole Dances During Morning Newscast (TVSpy)

• The corset has a bad reputation. And unfairly so, according to Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, who says this undergarment of centuries past is not nearly as evil or confining as modern folks have come to believe. Everything You Know About Corsets Is False (Collectors Weekly)

The New York Times review of Crazy Horse – a documentary about legendary Parisian erotic dance club – isn’t very high on its praise for the film, but perhaps we can just chalk it up to the Grey Lady’s legendary prudery. The doc opens tonight in New York, and I very much want to see it.

When I was in Paris in 2009, I wanted to vist the club but was unable to for various reasons – I’ll make up for that as soon as I can, tempted by the excitement in the Crazy Horse trailer above. Here’s a snip from today’s NYT review:

“Crazy Horse,” Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, invites the viewer to contemplate the intricacies of the creative process, the daily rhythms of a complex organization and the tensions between artistic ambition and practicality — and also to look at very beautiful women wearing very little.

(…) Crazy Horse, which opened in Paris in 1951, offers a particularly French blend of sophistication and vulgarity. The choreographers and directors speak in high-flown philosophical terms that don’t seem nearly as profound, or as sexy, in the English subtitles. It’s true that some of the numbers, like the club itself, have English names — “Baby Buns,” to take one example — and that many are accompanied by Anglo-American pop songs of eclectic vintage. But the grinding, teasing and undulating are shrouded in gauzy Gallic abstractions that would be out of place at your local pole-dancing emporium: l’érotisme, la séduction, la beauté, le désir. (…read more, )

OFFICIAL SELECTION 2012 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: Mike Sullivan has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing miniature robot porn stars, his apartment overflows with thousands of figures.

The short film Meaning of Robots, screening at Sundance later this month, tells the story of one man’s 10-year-long dream of making this a reality. The trailer speaks for itself: Mike Sullivan has made Metropolis-meets-steampunk robots (human and otherwise) with interesting anatomical variations in his pursuit of the robot sex film. It’s great to see the documentary short film is still a strong field, and Lenski seems to have found a fascinating and off-the-wall (in the best possible way) person and subject. (…read more, twitchfilm.com)

• CES 2012 booth babes told press that women prefer raising kids to being in technology, men publicly harassed the babes for dates, and female attendees probably wondered if they’d accidentally wandered onto the set of Mad Men. The CES 2012 booth babe problem (Pulp Tech)

• The Los Angeles City Council approved a new mandate Tuesday requiring that all adult film actors wear condoms when filming within city limits. Cue the lawsuits. Los Angeles Makes Condoms Mandatory for Adult Film Actors (NY Times)

• Tomorrow Reddit, Wikipedia, and many other sites will turn the lights out from 8 am to 8 pm in support of a free and open internet. Redditors are urging porn users to write an email to their favorite sex sites’ administrators, asking porn sites to join the SOPA/PIPA protest. So far, they don’t seem to be having much luck. It could be that they serve, as Reddit puts it, a “largely politically apathetic userbase.” SOPA, PIPA, the AVN Expo and Porn! (Oh My) (The Measure)

• “A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Hugo Schwyzer for his article He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, But Not Why You Think. The notion that it’s women’s job to civilize or redeem men is nothing new. And ironically, there’s a parallel between the idea that women’s virtue is responsible for saving society and the belief that a sexual act between men and women can give men the validation they seek.” Where Does Validation Come From? (Dr. Charlie Glickman)

• “Just before Christmas I finished my latest short film I.M. In Love and hurriedly submitted it to the Cinekink film festival in New York. I’m pleased to say that the film has been selected to screen at Cinekink during the “Coupling” Program on 10th February 2012.” I.M. In Love Trailer (Ms. Naughty)

• A student in Oxford, Jenni is one of the estimated 1% of people in the UK who identify themselves as asexual. Asexuality is described as an orientation, unlike celibacy which is a choice. What is it like to be asexual? (BBC News)

• Hot, and well-hung: that’s Michael Fassbender… OMG, he’s naked: Michael Fassbender in ‘Shame’ (OMG blog)

• Human DNA factory Trent Arsenault—the prolific DIY Silicon Valley sperm donor who happens to be a prolific amateur porn star is on Anderson Cooper’s daytime talk show today, where he’s admitting to being a 36-year-old virgin with more than a dozen kids. Famous Porn Star Sperm Donor Is Also a 36-Year-Old Virgin (Gawker)

• A blogger who characterised anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist as a ”fundamentalist Christian” says she has been asked to apologise – or be sued. Tankard Reist – who briefed lawyers to warn off liberal blogger Jennifer Wilson – says it’s not being called Christian she objects to, but the claim that she is ‘deceptive and duplicitous about her religious beliefs’. Anti-porn activist threatens to sue blogger over religion claims (Sydney Morning Herald)

• Google and Facebook fought in the Delhi High Court yesterday to quash criminal charges that they are responsible for obscene online content. The companies, which are set to be joined in their action by Microsoft and Yahoo, have filed petitions asking for a lower court case brought by a local journalist against 21 internet firms to be stayed. On Friday, the Indian government gave its sanction for the firms to be tried for serious crimes such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord, offences that could land company directors in prison. Google and Facebook fight back over ‘obscene content’ (NZ Herald News)