Diogenes the Cynic roamed about around ancient Greece with a lantern searching for an honest man. But that was then and this is now. At the University of Montreal a group of scientists searched for men who had never looked at porn, but were unable to locate a single one!
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”
Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examine the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them.
Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.
This lost gem of late-sixties psychedelic erotica by “Mary Sativa” (har har) documents the sexual exploits of a young woman while on seven different drugs (one after the other). Now that’s proper journalism, about actually important things. Check out this customer review:
Acic Temple Ball describes the loves and lovemaking of a young lady during the very peak of the psychedelic era of the later sixties, the height of glorified sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This book is truly a classic of it’s era. Our heroine in “Acid Temple Ball,” experiences lovemaking while using at least seven different types of drugs popular or available at the time. Her experiences while on LSD and other chemicals is both surprisingly seductive and amazingly accurate and believable and actually well written. Sharon Rudahl, shows her talent as a writer capable of fascinatingly realistic descriptions of feelings and emotions even in hallucenigenic and altered consciousness affected states, even at the young age of 21 when she wrote this paperback. This is clearly a paperback for adults only, something you wouldn’t want even mature young teenagers to read without some adult supervision. Nevertheless, this book is an unique trip into it’s time, focusing on the pleasures and sensualism of a young female during the height of the love generation and her experiences through the use of at least seven different types of drugs in various combinations. I recall reading this book in 1969, the year of it’s first edition. I think my beautiful Sri Lankan cosmopolitan girlfriend gave me a copy (or should I say “turned me on to it”), before she threw me a surprise birthday party in an old historic stone church in the University district of Minneapolis, complete with rock band, light show, and mescaline punch sponsored by the cosmic vendors association. “Acid Temple Ball,” by Mary Sativa, (Sharon Rudahl Peters), is part and parcel of the time, seen through the looking glass and mystic smoke of mind blowing sexual narrative unbalanced by the bummers, by-products and general downers of drug use - but what a trip it was. Sharon Rudahl later was a pioneer of “underground feminist comix” and most recently released the 2007 paperback novel “A Dangerous Woman: the Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman”, which is also well written and has been well received.
A huge collection of films by “other cinema” pioneer Lutz Mommartz is available at the Internet Archive. Music in the first clip is by a group called The Iceni about whom I can find no further info. Anybody ?
Check out this article I just wrote for h+ magazine on re-sexualizing space now that Obama has cut NASA’s budget to nothing.
I can’t say that I’m particularly surprised by Obama’s new plan to scarper plans of government-funded human space exploration. NASA’s till has been empty for decades—yet with this continued elimination of space agency funds for getting people into space, it feels like we’re letting go of something vitally important.
We weren’t supposed to just get up there to plant some flags and analyze some rocks, and then give up because we’d won the game of King of the Hill. What happened to the Great Dream?
It’s been twenty years since the Cold War ended. Now, in our global bureaucratic paper shuffle, it feels like we’ve lost some of the fight, the big project, the sense of having a goal. Now we’re drowning in our lack of motivation, bereft of that big vision of space that, for a small period of time, gave us a forward imperative, something inspiring enough to get our minds out of our collective crap, our business-as-usual-on-planet-Earth nonsense. Resource skirmishes, religious friction, global warming, and Obama just don’t really cut it in the same way the Space Race did; now, in the twenty-first century, it seems like we’re just coping and making do instead of pushing forward. We’ve taken a big step backward from “one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.” We lost interest because space isn’t sexy anymore—and that’s the problem right there.
Blood, shadows, a pregnant woman screaming…the below trailer looks like it’s teasing some kind of It’s Alive knock-off. But it’s really a promo spot for the “horror film” 2028, one of fifteen anti-teen pregnancy spots sponsored by the United Way of Milwaukee’s Healthy Girls organization.
Hoping to deglamorize Bristol Palin-type pregnancies, the trailers end with the message, Get pregnant as a teen and the next 18 years could be the hardest of your life,” and a Web address for BabyCanWait. The campaign’s print ads are no less subtle with their “images of teen boys with pregnant bellies and a baby diaper with a brown scratch-n’-sniff spot.”
And while BabyCanWait isn’t per se of an abstinence-only mindset (they provide information about STDs and contraception), Broadsheet’s Tracy Clark-Flory (breathlessly) wonders:
Are these shock-and-awe tactics the best way to reach kids? While I sympathize with the goal, and appreciate the clear and creative commitment to it, something about the trailer didn’t sit well with me.
For one thing, horror movies are glamorous, too. (Older) teens and women like Saw, say. Not saying it’s aspirational, but the genre itself is seen as a double-dog-dare lark, not a cautionary tale about (say) losing your virginity at summer camp REE! REE! REE! You know? So there’s that. There’s also something about it that contributes to an ugly stigma. Teen mothers as screaming bloody victims. The baby as some sort of evil spawn. Or something like that. Ick. Not helpful.
Finally, I don’t think kids are running around getting (people) pregnant because Bristol and Jamie Lynn made it look so, like, cute. Or even just because ADULTS ARE LYING TO THEM ABOUT BIRTH CONTROL, which they are. There are so many naive, misguided, melancholy, ironic reasons that teens want to get pregnant, be parents. They’ve seen their sisters and brothers and friends do it. And it’s hard hard hard. But based on what’s become normal to them it’s not a horrorshow. I’m not sure you can convince them it is in a one-minute trailer when the rest of their life says otherwise.
The Guardian discusses the “fun” of sharing a bed with somebody. Various positions and all. The article checks in with various British media people (?!) on how they do it. American mileage may vary, I think we’re all too drugged up on ambien and slathered in fried chicken grease to care as much…
It’s one of the first things to go in the war of attrition between romance and pragmatism ?Ǩ the idea of spending all night nose to nose, tightly entwined in a lover’s embrace. The arrangement represents a commitment to passion that simply cannot be maintained for more than a few days before someone says, “I love you and everything, baby, but I really need some sleep.”
According to Evany Thomas, author of The Secret Language Of Sleep, there are 39 distinct sleeping positions, ranging from common or garden Spoons to the more exotic Stairway. It’s tempting to interpret these as manifestations of the nature of the relationship of the couple ?Ǩ it’s hard to look at the Springloader, say, without thinking that somebody has some issues ?Ǩ but let’s not forget that these people are unconscious.
Individuals come into relationships with odd sleeping habits of their own, habits that must ultimately be accommodated. Finding a mutually satisfactory layout is usually a matter of trial and error. Who among us has not e xperienced the barely coherent, middle-of-the-night debate about duvet coverage, edge proximity or position relative to the north-south axis? No single arrangement is going to last for the full seven hours. For security’s sake, you may need to expand your repertoire ?Ǩ ?Ǭ?experiment with the Scissors, the Zipper, the Koala and Tree. On some nights you may need them all/
Just think of this as a guide to modern life, having an orgy is a great way to meet people, have some fun and let off some steam after a busy week in the office. The end result is a culmination of careful planning and of course inviting the right people ?Ǩ Looks like great fun!
Feeling depressed and suicidal over not being able to visit the “real” Pandora? Wondering what it might be like to copulate with 9-foot tall blue aliens? Well, Dangerous Minds reader, if you answered yes to both of those two questions, you are not alone! And as a possible consolation to your despair/curiosity, Alternet suggests it’s only a matter of time before Na’vi pornography hits our event horizon. Author Vanessa Richmond explains why that might not be strange at all:
Early designs for the Na’vi ?Ǩ?were much more alien,” according to Cameron, the creator and director of the movie. In the early drawings of Neytiri, the young female love interest, ?Ǩ?she had fins on her back and gills and all kinds of weird protuberances and so on in odd places.” The beta testing went something like this: ?Ǩ?We just kept asking ourselves?Ǩbasically, the crude version is: ‘Well, would you wanna do it?’ And our all-male crew of artists would basically say, ?ǨNope, take the gills out.’ It was pretty simple.?Ǩ
In other words, Neytiri was created to be a sex fantasy. As one of my male friends said, it?ǨѢs as if they took Gisele Bundchen and made her even taller with longer legs, and elongated her already slim waist, which is a super signal to the male, of fertility.
Even the blue part isn?ǨѢt so strange. As a female friend of mine said, blue is everyone?ǨѢs favorite color. It?ǨѢs like water. It would be different if they were diarrhea-colored or yellow or something. That smart friend also said the eyes are key?Ǩthe Na’vi have big eyes like a baby’s, a creature we?ǨѢre programmed to find irresistible.
Second installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is here.
Happy 2010! We’re starting off the new decade right with the first installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part two will be posted next week.
Sister Wendy, the art lovin’ nun and a clearly flummoxed Bill Moyers discuss Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph “Piss Christ”. There’s something delightful about the way in which she calmly damns Seranno with faint praise and generally defends her appreciation for erotic imagery in this clip. Go Sister Wendy, go !
An industry not known for giving freebies—ever—has decided to offer its services gratis, just in time for the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen. When Copenhagen’s mayor, Ritt Bjerregaard, sent off a message to local hotels urging them not to assist hotel guests in town for the event hooking up with… well… hookers, the pros struck back.
The postcards the city council sent read, in part: “Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes.” The local prostitutes became furious, protesting that the council had no right to interfere with them plying their perfectly legal—and the world’s oldest—profession.
“This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don’t understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way,” SIO Spokeswoman Susanne M?ɬ?ller tells avisen.dk.
M?ɬ?ller adds that it is reprehensible and unfair that Copenhagen politicians have chosen to use the UN Climate Summit as a platform [to target] sex workers.
“But they’ve done it and we have to defend ourselves,” M?ɬ?ller says.
, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is 
, the art lovin’ 
discuss 
controversial photograph “