bluprnt 4 rvolution: Sex

Oh! The Woes of the Porn Industry

Apparently the porn industry has its panties in a bunch over HD TV. Becasue of all the detail, porn stars are lining up to have plastic surgery, heaven forfend their faithful minions realize they are actual women.

The biggest problem they find with the technological conversion? Razor burn.

Women, testosterone, and desire

Yet another article from the NYT, this time on testosterone and female sexual desire. Apparently there are about a million testosterone treatment creams being researched by such altruistic angles as Proctor & Gamble (also currently marketing a tampon for girls who haven't gotten their periods yet). Once I had the opportunity to see such a testosterone cream at a Cake Party long ago. Would you believe that the instructions said to rub it in, around your clit, for like 5 minutes? This struck me as completely hillarious.

Anyway, I've been speaking with some girlfriends with babies these days about loss of desire and apparently its so widespread for like a year after birth. You don't even start ovulating again after giving birth until you're breast feeding less than 6 times a day (i.e. when your baby is on solids). So I feel like there's this MASSIVE pink elephant that no one talks about surrounding pregnancy and sexual desire. I am here, doing my part for the ladies.

Interesting factoids:

In a study from 1992 by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociology professor, and others, 43 percent of women reported some sexual dysfunction, the most prevalent being loss of libido.

Until menopause, women produce, on average, a tenth of the amount of testosterone that men do.

Although the neuroanatomical path of testosterone can be mapped, its underlying behavioral mechanism is not known.

German researchers, writing in The Journal of Endocrinology in 2001, posited the following: "Testosterone might have direct effects on cognitive behavior, e.g., influence the awareness of sexual cues, but it is also suggested that testosterone may act peripherally to enhance sexual pleasure and thereby increase sexual desire and even sexual activity, circumstances and partner permitting."

Professor Laumann's study indicates that by age 30, three-quarters of Americans are either married or living with someone, but they are starting to have "partnered sex" less often than people in their 20's. In their 30's, more people are having sex with a partner a few times a month, and fewer are having sex a few times a week. By their 40's, this disparity more than doubles for both men and women.

Sexual incompatibility is cited as a top reason for divorce in the United States.

Helen Fishcher, our favorite oxitocin researcher, devided up human feelings about these matters into three groups:

LUST: the craving for sexual gratification; Lust is associated primarily with testosterone in both men and women

ROMANTIC LOVE:a focused attention on another, often compared to an opiate-like state; Romantic love is linked with the natural stimulant dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and serotonin

ATTACHMENT: the feelings of calm, security and union with a long-term partner. Feelings of attachment are produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which at elevated levels can actually suppress the circuits for lust.

very interesting.

selective hormaonal excrution

This is amazing. Elephants have this gland between their eyes and ears that discharges this phermone called frontalin from their temporal lobe. As if that wasn't cool enough, there's two types of frontalin mixed in their come-hither concoction. They are called minus and plus.

Young males have more of the plus frontalin.
But as they mature, the mixtures of plus and minus even out.

So, when the elephants are young, the plus frontalin does nothing for them.
But the even mixture attracts females and repulses males.

It was also cool because they said it's easier to study this in elephants, rather than rats, because when elephants respond to something, it's easy to tell what they think.

Elephants are amazing.

Artists have more sex

Acording to thisthis study, professional artists and poets averaged 4 to 10 sexual partners, while other (British) people averaged only 3.

Aside from both being surprisingly low, this is interesting because it backs up a theory I've always abhored. One Dr. Miller decided that men developed artistic ability in order to woo females. Like bower birds. And females developed the ability to appreciate art so that we could better pick a mate. Booo.

I guess to test the theory, one could see if artists had more babies than others. But still, I think I will automatically hate all theories in which females just evolved things because males were evolving them.

Also interesting, "Volunteers were also assessed for character traits associated with schizophrenia which has previously been linked to creativity. "

Old Sex

This is a beautiful new blog that posts rare old erotica daily. It's just lovely.

Oestrogen makes you pretty

This article falls into the catagory of things I just don't know what to do with. It claims that the more oestrogen you (being female) had in your body during puberty, the prettier and healthier you will look as a woman. They did a study of 59 women and said there was a "very strong coorelation" with the 30 guys and gals who judged beauty.

But I just can't believe it! That one hormone would govern such a complicated affair as beauty. It's social! And political! And has a lot to do with diet! Just one hormone is far too simplistic. And scarey! What happens when New York socialites get their hads on this stuff for their pre teen daughters? I guess it was bound to happen....

Ethnoanimalistical breast augmentation

From the ever-fascinating Stu:
(apparently he's working on bringing them to North America)

BETTER THAN SILICON

Young girls from East Africa (mostly Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda) use whirligig beetles (Gyrinidae) and predaceous diving beetles (Dytiscidae) to stimulate breast growth. The girls will hold the live beetles up to their nipples, where the beetles bite in a defensive reaction. This practice was most widespread in girls in rural communities that were from 7 to 12 years of age.

The bite of the beetles is described as a stabbing, burning pain that eases after 30 to 60 minutes. Two to three days after the bite the breast will be slightly swollen. Most of the girls also reported that their breasts grew bigger in the 6-12 months following the treatment. This bit of ethnobiological knowledge is unique in that it is almost entirely passed on amongst the young girls and not from mother to daughter as would be more common for other traditional knowledge.

In practice in Uganda is slightly different than in Ethiopia and Tanzania. It was common in a bit older girls, from 14 to 15, if they found their breast development to be unsatisfactory, and they would be told about it by their grandma instead of their peers. Also, antlion larvae would sometimes be used instead of the beetles.

Similar practices have also been recorded in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Congo, although it isn't as widespread there.

Water beetles in general produce a wide variety of compounds that are antibacterial and antifungal, as well as often acting as an anaesthetic, narcotic, or toxin to vertebrates. Gyrinids produce a variety of unique norsesquiterpenes in their pygidial glands. These compounds are structurally related to nepetalactone, the active component of catnip. Dytiscids have prothoracic glands that secrete large quantities of a great variety of steroids. Some of the steroids that have been isolated are: progesterone, androsterone, deoxycorticosterone, testosterone, estradiol, cholesterol, and mirasorvone.

Reference:
Kutalek, R., and A. Kassa. 2005. The use of gyrinids and dyctiscids for stimulating breast growth in East Africa. Journal of Ethnobiology 25(1): 115-128.

iDolltry

This is a fascinating article from Salon that it is worth watching their advertisment for.

It's about Real Dolls, these life-sized, silicone, posable, fully-pennetratable, dolls that sell for over 6 grand to lonly men. Amazing. You can even buy different faces and swap them. The article is very wholistic and thankfully does not take the "oh my god , the perves!" angle.

The interesting men are those who have chosen to make the dolls the object of their love rather than just a toy. Those who have been spurned by women and will never go back. There are even tons of websites for these men to show off their dolls and all the hot sex they have convinced themselves they have.

I know, no one's surprised by any of it.

It's just all so modern.

sperm shopping

This is a fascinating article about the history of sperm shopping and the man who took it upon himself to beg genuses to masturbate into cups in order to save humanity.

Super natural selection.

Darwin would have fainted.

Hitler would have jumped up and down and clapped his little leather hands together.

In the end it's about marketing. How to sell the stuff of life.

The "godiva of sperm, prime cuts of American man."

Bizarre Hairworm Reproduction Strategies

First of all, I would just like to say that I knew about this ages ago and if you're interested in finding out even more about the hairworm and other strange organisms, JUST YOU WAIT, becasue "Even More Bizarre Earthlife Reproduction Strategies" by yours truely and Stuart Crawford will be out any day now, that is, any day we get around to starting it....but it will be done soon, by Christmas.

So, the worms, they are aquatic, but they infest grasshoppers, no one knows how, and they slowly eat them and grow and grow. They somehow create protines that cause the grasshopper to only eat what it wants the grasshopper to eat. THEN, when the grasshopper is but a head and an exoskeleton, and the worm is litterally four times the length of the grasshopper, the worm causes the grasshopper to jump into a body of water, so the worm can escape, which it does, and the grasshopper drowns. AMAZING! You can see the grasshopper poised for suicide in the picture.

They also mention another awesome reproduction strategy, that of a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.

"The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.

Somehow the larva reprograms the spider into executing, over and over again, just the first two steps in a five-step subroutine from the early phase of web-building.

If the larva is removed just before it can kill its host, the orb weaver will spin a platform-style web that and the following night, but revert to its usual web on the third night, as if it has shaken off some mesmerizing chemical the wasp has injected into its nervous system."

How girl are you?

According to the BBC's online brain gender test, I am 75% male, despite my B cup and apparently functioning uterus.

It's FUN! You are given a series of visual, emotional, and intellectual tests and they tell you how men and women usually score.

Yes, duh, it's flawed, but I'm sure any survivor of childhood therapy will find it as thrilling as I did.

In case you are curious, I'm better than most men and most women on everything except for word association. I got angles perfect, a balanced brain for spot the difference but almost in the guy range, I'm left brained, I'm ever so slightly worse than most women for empathizing, and ever so slightly worse than men for systematizing, my finger ratio is 1:1, I totally ROCKED 3-D shapes thinking I would suck, I split the money 50:50 like any good Montessori child, and I prefer only the manliest of man faces.

Sex crazed anthropologists

You know how funny it is to read studies from the 50's and how they thought black people had smaller heads so they were not as smart? I think there's a lot of that sort of possibility in this study in Discover, but it's still completely interesting.

An anthropologist at U of Arkansas decided that Lucy, everyone's favorite Australopithecus afarensis homonid, was promiscuous because the few male body parts they have from her same species are on average 50% larger than her. This, according to people who apparently do not have anything better to do with their time, means that a few big males probable dominated the mating.

Apparently species where the males are much larger than the females are that way so that males can fight each other for the females. And normally pair bonding species are of similar sizes. So I have two questions:

1) What about species where the females are larger, as is the norm in the animal world?

and 2) If large males are large to fight off other males, does this not imply that winning males simply took the females they were fighting for? And if so, are we forced to once again examine rape as a driving force behind human evolution?

Porn makes you blind

I don't know what to think of this study. It claims that people, more-
so for certain people, will go blind after seeing pornographic images or super gorey ones. I think the use of the word "blind" is just fun because of the stereotype of masturbation making you go blind. Becasue it would seem like people were just distracted more than unable to see.

But what is interesting is that they think the brain might work differently for shocking images than common ones. But I have to think about my whole porn addiction theory. I wonder if people who get addicted to porn are similar to people who get addicted to gore? I mean, it would be nice if all of Gwar's fans were also fans of irony but some of them are completely serious.

Also, I just think the link between sex and violence is always fascinating.

Don't read this, you might cry

You can always trust Stu to uncover studies like this:

Reed et al. (2003) did a study to look at what the causes are of reoccurring yeast infections. They started with a sample of 148 women with yeast infections, 33 of which had a reoccurance of the infection during the study. They then looked at what factors made it most likely for the yeast infection to have reoccurred.

What they discovered was that it didn't matter if their partner was harboring lots of yeast or not (disproving the theory that men act as a reservoir to reinfect women with yeast). There's already lots of the yeast (Candida spp.) all over us, it's presence on the woman's partner didn't really matter.

What they did find is that women who had cunnilingus performed on them were 2.94 times more likely to get a yeast infection again. The next most likely cause was if the woman masterbated using her own saliva (making her 2.66 times more likely to become infected again).

This study didn't look at nonoxynol-9, I hope cunnilingus isn't quite as bad as that...

Eating lots of bread, and not drinking milk, also increased the chances of yeast infection.

REFERENCES

Reed, B. D., P. Zazove, C. L. Pierson, D. W. Gorenflo, and J. Horrocks. 2003. Candida transmission and sexual behaviors as risks for a repeat episode of Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health 12(10): 979-989.

Reed, B. D., D. W. Gorenflo, B. W. Gillespie, C. L. Pierson, and P. Zazove. 2000. Sexual behaviors and other risk factors for Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health & Gender-Based Medicine 9(6): 645-655.

You are your genes

This is perhaps one of the best article I've read in a while. It's from the NYT and about how recent science has discovered a variety of genes in animals that govern complex behaviors, even a mating dance (see picture above). I coudl pull out neat excerpts but you really need to read the entire thing. It will make you change how you look at life.

The article was offline at NYT so it's all in "more."

July 19, 2005
A Gene for Romance? So It Seems (Ask the Vole)

By NICHOLAS WADE
Biologists have been making considerable progress in identifying members of a special class of genes - those that shape an animal's behavior toward others of its species. These social behavior genes promise to yield deep insights into how brains are constructed for certain complex tasks.

Some 30 such genes have come to light so far, mostly in laboratory animals like roundworms, flies, mice and voles. Researchers often expect results from these creatures to apply fairly directly to people when the genes cause diseases like cancer. They are much more hesitant to extrapolate in the case of behavioral genes. Still, understanding the genetic basis of social behavior in animals is expected to cast some light on human behavior.

Last month researchers reported on the role of such genes in the sexual behavior of both voles and fruit flies. One gene was long known to promote faithful pair bonding and good parental behavior in the male prairie vole. Researchers discovered how the gene is naturally modulated in a population of voles so as to produce a spectrum of behaviors from monogamy to polygamy, each of which may be advantageous in different ecological circumstances.

The second gene, much studied by fruit fly biologists, is known to be involved in the male's elaborate suite of courtship behaviors. New research has established that a special feature of the gene, one that works differently in males and females, is all that is needed to induce the male's complex behavior.

Social behavior genes present a particular puzzle since they involve neural circuits in the brain, often set off by some environmental cue to which the animal responds. Catherine Dulac of Harvard has found that the male mouse depends on pheromones, or air-borne hormones, to decide how to behave toward other mice. It detects the pheromones with the vomeronasal organ, an extra scent-detecting tissue in the nose.

The male mouse's rule for dealing with strangers is simple - if it's male, attack it; if female, mate with it. But male mice that are genetically engineered to block the scent-detecting vomeronasal cells try to mate rather than attack invading males.

The mice have other means - sound and sight - of recognizing male and female. But curiously, nature has placed the sex discrimination required for mating behavior under a separate neural circuit aroused through the vomeronasal organ.

"It was very surprising for us," Dr. Dulac said.

The gene that was eliminated from the mice is a low-level member of a presumably complex network that governs the inputs and outputs necessary for mating behavior. The most striking behavioral gene discovered so far is a very high level gene in the Drosophila fruit fly.

The gene is called fruitless because when it is disrupted in males they lose interest in females and instead form mating chains with other males. The male's usual courtship behavior is pretty fancy for a little fly. He approaches the female, taps her with his forelegs, sings a song by vibrating his wing, licks her and curls his abdomen for mating. If she is impressed she slows down and accepts his proposal. If not, she buzzes her wings at him, a gesture that needs no translation.

All these behaviors, researchers discovered several years ago, are controlled by the fruitless gene - fru for short - which is switched on in a specific set of neurons in the fly's brain. The gene is arranged in a series of blocks. Different combinations of blocks are chosen to make different protein products. The selection of blocks is controlled by a promoter, a region of DNA that lies near but outside the fru gene itself.

So far four of these fru gene promoters have been found. Three work the same way in both male and female flies. But a fourth selects different blocks to be transcribed, making different proteins in males and in females. This difference, it seemed, was somehow the key to the whole suite of male courtship behaviors.

Last month Barry J. Dickson of the Austrian Academy of Sciences provided an elegant proof of this idea by genetically engineering male flies to make the female version of the fruitless protein, and female flies to generate the male version. The male flies barely courted at all. But the female flies with the male form of fruitless aggressively pursued other females, performing all steps of male courtship except the last.

How does the male form of the fruitless protein govern such a complex behavior? Dr. Dickson and his colleagues have found that the protein is produced in 21 clusters of neurons in the fly's brain. The neurons, probably connected in a circuit, presumably direct each step of courtship in a coordinated sequence.

Surprisingly, female flies possess the same neuronal circuit. The presence of the male form of fruitless somehow activates the circuit , in ways that are still unknown.

Fruitless serves as a master switch of behavior, just as other known genes serve as master switches for building an eye or other organs. Are behaviors and organs constructed in much the same way, each with a master switch gene that controls a network of lower level genes?

Dr. Dickson writes that other such behavior switch genes may well exist but could have evaded detection because disrupting them - the geneticist's usual way of making genes reveal themselves - is lethal for the fly. (Complete loss of the fruitless gene is also lethal, and the gene was discovered through a lucky chance.)

Though researchers like to focus on specific genes, they are learning that in behavior, an organism's genome is closely linked to its environment, and that there can be elaborate feedback between the two.

Honeybees spend their first two to three weeks of adult life as nurses and then switch to jobs outside the hive as foragers for the remaining three weeks. If all foragers are removed from a hive, the nurse bees will sense the foragers' absence through a pheromone and assume their own foraging roles earlier. As the colony ages however, there are too few nurses, so some bees stay as nurses far longer than usual.

Gene Robinson, a bee biologist at the University of Illinois, has found that a characteristic set of genes is switched on in the brains of nursing bees and another set in foraging bees. This is an effect of the bees' occupation, not of their age, since both the premature foragers and the elderly nurses have brain gene expression patterns matched to their jobs.

Evidently the division of labor among bees in a hive is socially regulated through mechanisms that somehow activate different sets of genes in the bees' brains.

A remarkable instance of genome-environment interaction has been discovered in the maternal behavior of rats. Pups that receive lots of licking and grooming from their mothers during the first week of life are less fearful in adulthood and more phlegmatic in response to stress than are pups that get less personal care.

Last year, Michael J. Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal reported that a gene in the brain of the well-groomed pups is chemically modified during the grooming period and remains so throughout life. The modification makes the gene produce more of a product that damps down the brain's stress response.

The system would allow the laid-back rats to transmit their behavior to their pups through the same good-grooming procedure, just as the stressed-out rat mothers transmit their fearfulness to their offspring.

"Among mammals," Dr. Meaney and colleagues wrote in a report of their findings last year, "natural selection may have shaped offspring to respond to subtle variations in parental behavior as a forecast of the environmental conditions they will ultimately face once they become independent of the parent."

A full understanding of these behavior genes would include being able to trace every cellular change, whether in a hormone or pheromone or signaling molecule, that led to activation of the gene and then all the effects that followed. Dr. Robinson has proposed the name "sociogenomics" for the idea of understanding social life in terms of the genes and signaling molecules that mediate them.

The genes discovered so far mostly seem to act in different ways and it is hard to state any general rules about how behavior is governed.

"It's early days and we don't have enough information to develop theories," Dr. Robinson said.

A question of some interest is how far the genetic shaping of behavior exists in people. Larry J. Young of Emory University, who studies the social behavior of voles, said that, in people, activities like the suckling of babies, maternal behavior and sexual drives are likely to be shaped by genes, but that sexual drives are also modulated by experience.

"The genes provide us the background of our general drives, and variations in these genes may explain various personality traits in humans, but ultimately our behavior is very much influenced by environmental factors," he said.

Researchers can rigorously explore how behavioral genes operate in lower animals by performing tests that are impossible or unethical in people. "The problem with humans is that it is extremely difficult to prove anything," Dr. Dulac said. "Humans are just not a very good experimental system."

The nose knows sex appeal

An article from New Scientist talks about a new study finding that women prefer odours from potential partners who are genetically dis-similar. This contrasts to earlier studies that claimed women prefered the faces of men who were genetically similar.

Apparently, it all has to do with "the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) - [har har] the huge molecule on cells, unique to each individual, which helps our immune systems to distinguish native from alien cells....The underlying theory is that humans avoid the dangers of inbreeding, and maximise the chances of having genetically fitter children, by selecting partners who have a vastly different MHC from their own."

I think it's rather silly to say "women prefer this, men prefer that." Human diversity is so vast. I think certain people are inclined to find people who are genetically dissimilar and somepeople like to keep it in the family. Humans specialize like bees. There are so many different strategies.

Chicken safe sex

Male cocks [let's all be mature about this] will sometimes have sex with their hens without ejactualting and wasting sperm. Apparently, this keeps them faithful and well satisfied.

This is a great sentence: "The finding may explain why males of many species - from insects to mammals - engage in seemingly meaningless sperm-free sex. "

Har har.

Crazy!: "In 2003, Pizzari and his colleagues showed that male chickens allocated their precious seed according to the likelihood of fathering children. Unfamiliar females always received a fulsome dose, while hens with which the cock had already mated several times ended up receiving little more than ruffled feathers."

Oh man, those mad scientists: "Using cleverly designed harnesses, which prevent cocks from depositing semen into a females’ reproductive tract, the team was able to create two distinct groups - hens that had been mounted, but received no sperm, and hens who had successful, sperm-transferring copulations. ...They found that females that experienced fruitless mountings were equally resistant to subsequent courtship from other males as those females who had received sperm. In fact, the more mountings each female received, the longer her period of fidelity."

Another great sentence: "It is tough to tell why hens, so apt at choosing the best cocks - and expunging semen from undesirable mates just seconds after copulating - could be led astray by such a simple ploy"

A great Article from New Scientist.

A reason to circumcize

If you know me at all, and you very well might not, you know that I'm completely against circumcision. I think its a sick and outdated practice with no basis in actual heath for men who are not going for months without showering. I also think it might be one of the reasons men are so obsessed with their dicks. Imagine that your first experience in life is having someone chop off a piece of your genetalia, it must be traumatic.

BUT, low and behold, my (circumcized) ex boyfriend just sent me this article about how circumcision can lower your chances of contracting HIV by as much as 70%!!!!

Why woudl this work? "Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets of HIV."

This is amazing. Although it should be put in context. The study was only partially completed because the researchers didn't want to make uncircumcized guys feel bad or something. Very strange. It was done in Africa, in regions where HIV infection is at 30% (east and south Africa).

But, "the lower risk may be the result of cultural practices among those who circumcise. HIV rates are low in Muslim communities, for example, which practice male circumcision but also engage in ritual washing before sex and frown on promiscuity."

So I'm not sure the extent to which this study applies to people in North America.

Gay, straight, or lying

This is really the sort of study I live for.

In a recent and huge study (5,000 men), only 6.9% of men said they were attracted to other men, and a mear 1.7% said they were bisexual.

THEN, and this is the good part, "a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men."

They used 101 young men: 33 bisexuals, 30 heteros and 38 homos.

So, they're implying that that 1.7% is lying. Possibly to themselves.

Apparently, "And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual." Interesting...

This is great: "Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men. Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about 3/4 of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals."

I love the "using a sensor." Phrases like that are my main reason for going for the primary source to read things like "we attached the electrodes to the scrotum after shaving it, bla bla bla." How can you imagine to get an honest response after an experience like that?!?!?!? The scientists act like "This is the truth. What you say is questionable but what your penis tells us in out labratory is the real truth." But maybe those guys who aren't getting hard for girls in the lab really ARE aroused by actually sucking on someone's tits. EVERYONE loves boobs! We're hard wired to.

And 1/3 of the guys in every group were not aroused at all. According to our friend Dr. Loyd, this should be ample proof that men, in fact, have not evolved to have erections. But I digress.

The article goes on to have the rational people of the world say "everything is more complicated that that" like we usually do. And good points are made.

In a similar study, only 1.5% of women were found to be bisexual. Which I think is odd. I woudl imagine more what with how cool it is and how we're completly trained to lust after girls from the get go. But apparently women who claim bisexualty actually increase the blood flow to their genetalia when shown images of naked women and men.

The best sentence: ""You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"

Full article in "more"

July 5, 2005
Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited

By BENEDICT CAREY
Some people are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. And some, if Sigmund Freud, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and millions of self-described bisexuals are to be believed, are drawn to both sexes.

But a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.

The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.

People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. "You're either gay, straight or lying," as some gay men have put it.

In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.

The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires.

"Research on sexual orientation has been based almost entirely on self-reports, and this is one of the few good studies using physiological measures," said Dr. Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender identity at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study.

The discrepancy between what is happening in people's minds and what is going on in their bodies, she said, presents a puzzle "that the field now has to crack, and it raises this question about what we mean when we talk about desire."

"We have assumed that everyone means the same thing," she added, "but here we have evidence that that is not the case."

Several other researchers who have seen the study, scheduled to be published in the journal Psychological Science, said it would need to be repeated with larger numbers of bisexual men before clear conclusions could be drawn.

Bisexual desires are sometimes transient and they are still poorly understood. Men and women also appear to differ in the frequency of bisexual attractions. "The last thing you want," said Dr. Randall Sell, an assistant professor of clinical socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, "is for some therapists to see this study and start telling bisexual people that they're wrong, that they're really on their way to homosexuality."

He added, "We don't know nearly enough about sexual orientation and identity" to jump to these conclusions.

In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.

The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.

Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.

Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.

But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.

"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study's lead author.

Although about a third of the men in each group showed no significant arousal watching the movies, their lack of response did not change the overall findings, Mr. Rieger said.

Since at least the middle of the 19th century, behavioral scientists have noted bisexual attraction in men and women and debated its place in the development of sexual identity. Some experts, like Freud, concluded that humans are naturally bisexual. In his landmark sex surveys of the 1940's, Dr. Alfred Kinsey found many married, publicly heterosexual men who reported having had sex with other men.

"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," Dr. Kinsey wrote. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats."

By the 1990's, Newsweek had featured bisexuality on its cover, bisexuals had formed advocacy groups and television series like "Sex and the City" had begun exploring bisexual themes.

Yet researchers were unable to produce direct evidence of bisexual arousal patterns in men, said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the new study's senior author.

A 1979 study of 30 men found that those who identified themselves as bisexuals were indistinguishable from homosexuals on measures of arousal. Studies of gay and bisexual men in the 1990's showed that the two groups reported similar numbers of male sexual partners and risky sexual encounters. And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual.

"I'm not denying that bisexual behavior exists," said Dr. Bailey, "but I am saying that in men there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men arousal is orientation."

But other researchers - and some self-identified bisexuals - say that the technique used in the study to measure genital arousal is too crude to capture the richness - erotic sensations, affection, admiration - that constitutes sexual attraction.

Social and emotional attraction are very important elements in bisexual attraction, said Dr. Fritz Klein, a sex researcher and the author of "The Bisexual Option."

"To claim on the basis of this study that there's no such thing as male bisexuality is overstepping, it seems to me," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center in San Francisco. "It may be that there is a lot less true male bisexuality than we think, but if that's true then why in the world are there so many movies, novels and TV shows that have this as a theme - is it collective fantasy, merely a projection? I don't think so."

John Campbell, 36, a Web designer in Orange County, Calif., who describes himself as bisexual, also said he was skeptical of the findings.

Mr. Campbell said he had been strongly attracted to both sexes since he was sexually aware, although all his long-term relationships had been with women. "In my case I have been accused of being heterosexual, but I also feel a need for sex with men," he said.

Mr. Campbell rated his erotic attraction to men and women as about 50-50, but his emotional attraction, he said, was 90 to 10 in favor of women. "With men I can get aroused, I just don't feel the fireworks like I do with women," he said.

About 1.5 percent of American women identify themselves bisexual. And bisexuality appears easier to demonstrate in the female sex. A study published last November by the same team of Canadian and American researchers, for example, found that most women who said they were bisexual showed arousal to men and to women.

Although only a small number of women identify themselves as bisexual, Dr. Bailey said, bisexual arousal may for them in fact be the norm.

Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.

"Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn't preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex," she said. "You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"

"There's a whole lot of movement and flexibility," Dr. Diamond added. "The fact is, we have very little research in this area, and a lot to learn."

from The New York Times

Penis on the brain

From New Scientist:

AT LAST we know where the penis is represented in the male brain.

The genitalia's location on the "homunculus", the brain's map of body parts, has been in dispute since the 1920s. Now Christian Kell at the University of Frankfurt in Germany has put eight men into an MRI scanner to help settle the question. Using a soft brush, Kell stroked parts of each volunteer's body while recording brain activity.

Each man's penis was represented in the same place - flanked by the areas for the toes and abdomen - Kell told the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping annual meeting in Toronto. "The only depressing thing," he says, [...wait for it...] "is that the representation is very small."

genetic basis for female orgasms?

The much-blogged New Scientist has an article on a study that just came out on the genetic factors behind female orgasms. Expect to see it in the New York Times in....two days. Anyways, the study was done by Tim Spector who apparently has a lengthy phone list of twins who he can call and ask about whatever he wants. Those responses, people seem to feel, tell us the difference between what is genetic and what is not. I remain suspicious.

The article says genetics explain 45% of the variability of female orgasms, i.e. those women who can and can't achieve orgasm. "Whether that basis is anatomical, physiological or psychological remains uncertain" says Tim. I think we need to add "social" to that list but I can't imagine an evolutionary biologist would agree with me.

So, the results, 35% of women said they could always achieve orgasm through masturbation and 14% of women could never have an orgasm, regardless of the stimulation. And the twin factor explains 45% of the variability.

What would also be interesting would be to look at those women who can achieve orgasm and then look at the size of their clits.....

They also make no distinction between clitoral orgasms and G-spot ones. Which would be quite important when comparing intercourse to masturbation.

But then they just take the ball and run like hell with it. Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd (can you hear the feminists Booing?) used that 14% of women who can't have an orgasm to say that there is no biological reason for females to have an orgasm. (can you hear the feminists laughing?).

Perhaps, one day, Dr. Lloyd will google herself, come upon this site, and respond to my many problems with her logic. That would be wonderful.

So, if I may, Dr. Lloyd, first of all, because we cannot find the reason for something, must we assume that it does not exist?

Secondly, do not human embrios default to female and, only when triggered, do the labia fuse together and the ovaries sink to make the male reproductive system?

I am also really sick of evolutionary biologists acting like everything always is considered beneficial only if it makes us have more babies. Humans are SOCIAL creatures. Things (bahaviours) can be beneficial on that level as well and be selected for, even if they dont make us reproduce like crazy. Let's look at our friends, the bonobos. Female orgasms are clearly beneficial to their society because they make for strong social bonds. To be fair, they do bring that up in the article.

Even so, I don't see the logic in this statement, "The finding that many women cannot achieve orgasm because they do not have the genes for it shows that the ability to orgasm is not a trait for which there has been strong evolutionary selection." 14%! Come on people! What percentage of women have been raped? What percentage of women live in loveless marirages for economic reasons and have zero desire to have sex? I would imagin that patriarchy alone could account for 14% of women not being able to achieve orgasm...

If I am wrong on this, I would appreciate it if someone coudl set me straight.

Full article in "more"

Genes blamed for fickle female orgasm
00:01 08 June 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper

Is this the ultimate excuse for poor performance in bed? “Sorry, darling,” the man says, just before falling asleep. “It’s your genes.”

According to a study published this week, up to 45% of the differences between women in their ability to reach orgasm can be explained by their genes. Despite decades of surveys and conjecture about the role of culture, upbringing and biology in female sexual function, from Freud in 1905 to the Hite report in 1976, this is the first study of the role of a woman’s genes.

Its findings suggest there is an underlying biological basis to a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm. Whether that basis is anatomical, physiological or psychological remains uncertain, says Tim Spector of the twin research unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, UK, who carried out the study.

“But it is saying that it is not purely cultural, or due to peer pressure, or to differences in upbringing or religion,” he says. “There are wide differences between women and a lot of these differences are due to genes.”

Mixed results
Spector’s team asked more than 6000 female twins to fill out a confidential questionnaire about how often they achieved orgasm during intercourse and masturbation. They received 4037 complete replies, which included answers from 683 pairs of non-identical twins and 714 pairs of identical twins. The women’s ages ranged from 19 to 83, and about 3% were lesbian or bisexual.

Only 14% of the women reported always experiencing orgasm during intercourse. Another 32% of the women reported that they were unable to achieve orgasm more than a quarter of the time, while 16% never achieved it at all. Comparing the results from identical and non-identical twins suggests that 34% of this variation in ability to orgasm during intercourse is genetic.

The idea behind twin studies is that pairs of twins grow up in similar environments. So if identical twins are more similar in some way than non-identical twins, then that similarity must be down to their identical genes rather than the environment.

Unsurprisingly, more women were able to achieve orgasm through masturbation, with 34% saying they could always do so. However, the figure for those who could never achieve it was only slightly lower, at 14%. The analysis suggests that 45% of this variation is genetic.

Men cleared
Spector says he was surprised by the similarity in the numbers of women unable to experience orgasm either through intercourse or masturbation. “With masturbation there are fewer external factors – i.e. men,” he says. “So the higher heritability value for masturbation gives us a clearer picture of what’s going on.”

The discovery of a genetic basis for the ability of women to orgasm raises questions about its evolution. One theory is that it is a tool for mate selection, the idea being that males best able to bring females to orgasm are also the best males to help raise children. Another is that the female orgasm produces movements that increase sperm uptake, and therefore fertility.

But studies of other primates suggest otherwise. Female stump-tailed macaques have orgasms too – but mainly during female-female mountings, which hardly supports the fertility or mate-selection idea.

Bonobos engage in highly promiscuous sex and mutual masturbation, complete with orgasms, a practice that is thought to promote group cohesion. This supports yet another theory: that orgasm is important in bonding.

Accidental echo
But even if orgasm does play this role, it cannot be crucial in humans. The finding that many women cannot achieve orgasm because they do not have the genes for it shows that the ability to orgasm is not a trait for which there has been strong evolutionary selection, says Elisabeth Lloyd of Indiana University in Bloomington, author of The Case of the Female Orgasm. This supports her theory that as far as orgasms are concerned, women have been riding on the genetic coat-tails of male evolution, and that the female orgasm is merely an accidental echo of the male one, the equivalent of male nipples.

Lloyd says the findings also challenge the notion that the failure to achieve orgasm represents “female sexual dysfunction”, an idea popular with companies keen to sell remedies for this so-called disorder. “What definition of ‘normal’ could possibly justify labelling a third of women as ‘abnormal’?” she asks.

Even if struggling to achieve orgasm is nothing unusual, Spector says it might be possible to find ways to make it easier. Though hundreds of genes could be involved, “that doesn’t mean we couldn’t find the genes and pathways, if this was taken more seriously as a problem”, he says.

Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0308)

More fun with Oxytocin

So the world will soon know all about oxytocin because it makes people trust each other more, even to the point of handing over cash.

Yet you, my faithful blog reader(s), have known for years of the power and mystery of oxyticin!

I would like to believe that my blog had some small part in the growing popularity of my favorite neuropeptide, but I don't.

Maybe it will be available on the market soon and I'll finally get to try out my expirement of trying to fall in love with random people....my friend said it woudl more just make me lactate....so it might never happen.

I never know about these studies though, when they ask people to pretend they have $5 and how much of it would they give away, I just can't imagin a person woudl act as they woudl in real life...so I remain suspicios.

Newscientist article and Wired article.

Sour grapes on female orgasms

This woman, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, has decided that, because the clitoris is made up of the same tissue as the penis in males, and because all women don't have G-spot based orgasms every single time they have sex, that the female orgasm is a left over remnant of male-based evolutionary biology and serves absolutely no evolutionary purpose, akin to the male nipple. (the full article is in "more")

I feel bad for her.

Let's figure out why she's wrong.

* Women who have more orgasms want to have sex more and would have more kids. Plane and simple.

* Just because the cervix has contractions during the day does not mean that those a woman has after an orgasm and during sex could not serve to pump sperm towards the egg and, as I've heard, alter the Ph of the acidic vagina, which can be toxic to sperm.

* I don't get what she means by saying the clitoris was "left over" from male evolution. Is she assuming males evolved, hung out for a while, and then females evolved from them, out of a rib perhaps? No. I've heard also that all fetuses are first female, and then morph into males if hormones/chromosomes dictate it.

* This is a perfect example of why evolutionary biologists are so absurd. You simply CANNOT take such a complex thing as the female orgasm, and its absense in the lives of many unfortunate women, and look at it from a physical and evolutionary aspect alone. You must consider the social context. MAYBE there is a lot of bad sex out there? Huh? Dr. Lloyd? Know anything about that? Maybe there are a lot of women who have been trained by our culture to think of their sexuality as scary and sort of bad and simply do not have the comfort levels necessary to have an orgasm.

* If anything female orgams have *driven* a massive amount of evolution. As they alluded to in the article, it does seem that it is far easier to orgams from partners one has a relative level of comfort around. If we're going to look at sociobiological evolution, then we must assume that emotions are also the cause and result of a lot of evolution as well. And emotions play a huge role in whether or not that orgasm occures. Which can tell a women a lot (consciousoly or subconsciously) about compatability and reliability of a partner.

* Women also relased tons of endorphens when they orgasm. Some scientists have even gone so far as to speculate that they are one of the driving hormonal factors behind love.

* As women get older, they have more and more orgasms. This could be behind a drive to have sex as the ideal repruduction time dims.

* Think of your own and post it in the comment section!

May 17, 2005
A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm
By DINITIA SMITH
Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant - doing their part for the perpetuation of the species - without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring's chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution," has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts - a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while "females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan."

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

While nipples in woman serve a purpose, male nipples appear to be simply left over from the initial stage of embryonic development.

The female orgasm, she said, "is for fun."

Dr. Lloyd said scientists had insisted on finding an evolutionary function for female orgasm in humans either because they were invested in believing that women's sexuality must exactly parallel that of men or because they were convinced that all traits had to be "adaptations," that is, serve an evolutionary function.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because "men's expectations about women's normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions."

"And men are the ones who reflect back immediately to the woman whether or not she is adequate sexually," Dr. Lloyd continued.

Central to her thesis is the fact that women do not routinely have orgasms during sexual intercourse.

She analyzed 32 studies, conducted over 74 years, of the frequency of female orgasm during intercourse.

When intercourse was "unassisted," that is not accompanied by stimulation of the clitoris, just a quarter of the women studied experienced orgasms often or very often during intercourse, she found.

Five to 10 percent never had orgasms. Yet many of the women became pregnant.

Dr. Lloyd's figures are lower than those of Dr. Alfred A. Kinsey, who in his 1953 book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" found that 39 to 47 percent of women reported that they always, or almost always, had orgasm during intercourse.

But Kinsey, Dr. Lloyd said, included orgasms assisted by clitoral stimulation.

Dr. Lloyd said there was no doubt in her mind that the clitoris was an evolutionary adaptation, selected to create excitement, leading to sexual intercourse and then reproduction.

But, "without a link to fertility or reproduction," Dr. Lloyd said, "orgasm cannot be an adaptation."

Not everyone agrees. For example, Dr. John Alcock, a professor of biology at Arizona State University, criticized an earlier version of Dr. Lloyd's thesis, discussed in in a 1987 article by Stephen Jay Gould in the magazine Natural History.

In a phone interview, Dr. Alcock said that he had not read her new book, but that he still maintained the hypothesis that the fact that "orgasm doesn't occur every time a woman has intercourse is not evidence that it's not adaptive."

"I'm flabbergasted by the notion that orgasm has to happen every time to be adaptive," he added.

Dr. Alcock theorized that a woman might use orgasm "as an unconscious way to evaluate the quality of the male," his genetic fitness and, thus, how suitable he would be as a father for her offspring.

"Under those circumstances, you wouldn't expect her to have it every time," Dr. Alcock said.

Among the theories that Dr. Lloyd addresses in her book is one proposed in 1993, by Dr. R. Robin Baker and Dr. Mark A. Bellis, at Manchester University in England. In two papers published in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argued that female orgasm was a way of manipulating the retention of sperm by creating suction in the uterus. When a woman has an orgasm from one minute before the man ejaculates to 45 minutes after, she retains more sperm, they said.

Furthermore, they asserted, when a woman has intercourse with a man other than her regular sexual partner, she is more likely to have an orgasm in that prime time span and thus retain more sperm, presumably making conception more likely. They postulated that women seek other partners in an effort to obtain better genes for their offspring.

Dr. Lloyd said the Baker-Bellis argument was "fatally flawed because their sample size is too small."

"In one table," she said, "73 percent of the data is based on the experience of one person."

In an e-mail message recently, Dr. Baker wrote that his and Dr. Bellis's manuscript had "received intense peer review appraisal" before publication. Statisticians were among the reviewers, he said, and they noted that some sample sizes were small, "but considered that none of these were fatal to our paper."

Dr. Lloyd said that studies called into question the logic of such theories. Research by Dr. Ludwig Wildt and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany in 1998, for example, found that in a healthy woman the uterus undergoes peristaltic contractions throughout the day in the absence of sexual intercourse or orgasm. This casts doubt, Dr. Lloyd argues, on the idea that the contractions of orgasm somehow affect sperm retention.

Another hypothesis, proposed in 1995 by Dr. Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and two colleagues, held that women were more likely to have orgasms during intercourse with men with symmetrical physical features. On the basis of earlier studies of physical attraction, Dr. Thornhill argued that symmetry might be an indicator of genetic fitness.

Dr. Lloyd, however, said those conclusions were not viable because "they only cover a minority of women, 45 percent, who say they sometimes do, and sometimes don't, have orgasm during intercourse."

"It excludes women on either end of the spectrum," she said. "The 25 percent who say they almost always have orgasm in intercourse and the 30 percent who say they rarely or never do. And that last 30 percent includes the 10 percent who say they never have orgasm under any circumstances."

In a phone interview, Dr. Thornhill said that he had not read Dr. Lloyd's book but the fact that not all women have orgasms during intercourse supports his theory.

"There will be patterns in orgasm with preferred and not preferred men," he said.

Dr. Lloyd also criticized work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, who studies primate behavior and female reproductive strategies.

Scientists have documented that orgasm occurs in some female primates; for other mammals, whether orgasm occurs remains an open question.

In the 1981 book "The Woman That Never Evolved" and in her other work, Dr. Hrdy argues that orgasm evolved in nonhuman primates as a way for the female to protect her offspring from the depredation of males.

She points out that langur monkeys have a high infant mortality rate, with 30 percent of deaths a result of babies' being killed by males who are not the fathers. Male langurs, she says, will not kill the babies of females they have mated with.

In macaques and chimpanzees, she said, females are conditioned by the pleasurable sensations of clitoral stimulation to keep copulating with multiple partners until they have an orgasm. Thus, males do not know which infants are theirs and which are not and do not attack them.

Dr. Hrdy also argues against the idea that female orgasm is an artifact of the early parallel development of male and female embryos.

"I'm convinced," she said, "that the selection of the clitoris is quite separate from that of the penis in males."

In critiquing Dr. Hrdy's view, Dr. Lloyd disputes the idea that longer periods of sexual intercourse lead to a higher incidence of orgasm, something that if it is true, may provide an evolutionary rationale for female orgasm.

But Dr. Hrdy said her work did not speak one way or another to the issue of female orgasm in humans. "My hypothesis is silent," she said.

One possibility, Dr. Hrdy said, is that orgasm in women may have been an adaptive trait in our prehuman ancestors.

"But we separated from our common primate ancestors about seven million years ago," she said.

"Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it's phasing out," Dr. Hrdy said. "Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about."

Western culture is suffused with images of women's sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

"Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function," Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is "natural" to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

"Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women," Dr. Lloyd said. "And indirectly for men, as well."

Dangerous men are cool.

Yet another "duh' article from New Scientist. Well, sort of, I guess. It's not big surprise that men preform for each other. Feminists wrote about this decades ago with the whole "homoerotic triangle" thing: the idea being that much of male womanizing is for the sake of other males, rather than the woman in question. All you have to do is watch men look at each other for approval and you can see what's happening.

But part of me distrusts the article. No rational woman would say "yes, I think it's hot when a guy does a backflip off a swing." but you've got to admitt that it's cool when you see it. And you can't help but be impressed. Or, I can't, I guess.

But then again (watch, as rebecca argues with herself in blog form), in one particularly blissful event in my recent past, I was surrounded with 5 guys, all hot, all wanting to make out with me, as we swang on the swings under the stars at a park in Victoria. One of them showed us all how to do backflips and we all tried and it was lovely. And then we had a contest to see who could jump the farthest off the swings. Except one guy didn't participate in this plumage flaunting, was thuroughly disgusted by the whole affair, and let me know it the next day. We dated for 6 months. So maybe there is some truth to it.

But for the record, I could jump the farthest.

"WHETHER it's driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.

Futile risk-taking might seem to have little going for it in Darwinian terms. So why were our rash ancestors not replaced by more cautious contemporaries?

One idea is that risk-takers are advertising their fitness to potential mates by showing off their strength and bravery. This fits with the fact that men in their prime reproductive years take more risks. To test this idea, William Farthing of the University of Maine in Orono surveyed 48 young men and 52 young women on their attitudes to risky scenarios. Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men (Evolution and Human Behaviour, vol 26, p 171).

“Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men”Reckless thrill-seekers might be trying a more subtle route to women's affections. Men say they prefer their same-sex friends to be risk-takers, and women prefer high-status males. "So if he has higher status among other men, women might like him for his status, even though they don't like the risk-taking in itself," Farthing says."

Bird assholes

Anthopomorphization runs wild!

I think it's funny that there was that study of bird personalities a while ago and now they've discovered that there are bird assholes. "In conclusion, it is our observation that the male great grey shrikes are complete assholes."

Just kidding of course! I'm resisting, RESISTING, the urg to bring my morality into the animal kingdom...but it's so hard. Anyway, I wonder if they found any male birds who decided to stay at their nests with their lovely wives and not leave them for younger birds with firmer breasts....

Real diamonds for the mistress...
(From New Scientist)

IT IS not just human males who seduce prospective paramours with expensive gifts while bringing home cheap trinkets for their long-term partners. Some male birds do it too.

Great grey shrikes mate for life and raise offspring each breeding season. But the males also sneak away and mate with other females. To charm both long-term partners and mistresses the males offer gifts of food.

To test whether the males put more effort into their dalliances than their "marriages", Piotr Tryjanowski at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, and Martin Hromada at the University of South Bohemia in Ceské Budejovice, the Czech Republic, recorded gifts made by 22 male shrikes to their partners and mistresses. They found that the average energy content of a gift to a mistress was 75 kilojoules, while gifts given to partners averaged about 19 kilojoules. Males often caught lizards, voles and other birds for their mistresses, which required six times as much effort to catch as the insects that they gave their partners (Animal Behaviour, vol 69, p 529). "It is like a saying in Polish," says Tryjanowski. "Artificial jewellery to the wife and real diamonds for the mistress."

The sexiness of oyseters and clams

From New Scientist:
Oysters may deserve their sexy reputation

FABLED for its power to turn ordinary mortals into sex gods, nothing beats the oyster as the prelude to a night of passion. And no, it's not all hype.

High levels of a chemical that boosts libido have been found in clams, a close relative of the oyster, suggesting that their reputation is not undeserved.

Even their texture is enough to turn some people on. "Oysters are so sensual just in their nature," says Diane Brown, the Los Angeles-based author of The Seduction Cookbook, "They have that slippery, slurpy sensation when you eat them that makes them very seductive."

Raul Mirza at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and his colleagues compared levels of the amino acid N-methyl-D-aspartate in Mediterranean clams and other animals. Previous studies in animals have shown that the chemical affects sex drive by raising testosterone production. The clams had around double the level found in rat brains, the team told the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in San Diego, California.

Monkey Sex

I just watched a National Geographic documentary on Gorillas from the 70's, back when National Geographic actually got political. It was really funny though. They had all this footage of when the US and English societies were first exposed to this massive dark ape through pictures and even film from the 1920's. There were numerous horror films and of course King Kong.

If you know anything about gorillas, you know that they don't attack people unless they're being attacked, but all of the older pictures and footage were of course picturing these violent creatures. But what's more is that in most of them, they had the gorilla taking their women to have sex with them. AMAZING! HILLARIOUS! The white man's fear of huge black sex extends into the animal kingdom! They never said it in the documentary but it was obvious from the footage. This is such a pop psychology dissertation waiting to be written, if it hasn't already.

You have to think, 1920, women just got the right to vote. Jazz is luring white women in just about every major city into the heart of black neighborhoods. And suddenly everyone knows about an even BIGGER, even BLACKER creature, and all the movie people can think about is how it will take their white women.

Or who knows, maybe women were like "hmmmm...." You never know.

Evolutionary basis for perversity

From NYT article: "Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel....The question is "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

DUH! That's all I have to say. Well, no it isn't.

Recently I came up with a theory to explain modern perversity: There exist humans who want to fuck anything, quite litterally. Animals, fruit, little kids, their own kids, bottles and just about anything else with a hole in it. I really have no idea if these perversions are universal but they do seem so wide spread. Men seem born with this "what can I stick my dick in?" sort of natural curiosity. Lord knows half of the appeal of Star Trek was the idea of having sex with aliens.

So I think this makes sense as far as evolution goes. In dire situations, we have the ability (and desire) to keep reproducing by having sex with whatever happens to be lying around. Yes, those desperate selfish genes could be behind all those rural people supposidly having sex with their families and farm animals.

So yeah, duh, Homo sapiens and Neadrethals had sex. But the article makes a good case against them ever reproducing.

Full article in "more."

For Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, Was It De-Lovely?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: February 15, 2005

he scientists did not get around to the nitty-gritty question until the fourth hour of a two-and-a-half-day symposium on Neanderthals, held recently at New York University.

A strong consensus was emerging, they agreed, that the now-extinct Neanderthals were a distinct evolutionary entity from modern humans, presumably a different species. They were archaic members of the human family, robust with heavy brow ridges and forward-projecting faces, who lived in Europe and western Asia from at least 250,000 years ago until they vanished from the fossil record about 28,000 years ago.

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Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel. The two people almost certainly came in contact in Europe in the last centuries before the dwindling Neanderthal population was replaced forever by the intruding modern humans.

Taking his turn at the symposium lectern, Dr. James C. M. Ahern, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wyoming, acknowledged: "Neanderthals are different. The degree of difference is relatively vast, but that is not the most interesting question out there."

The question was, he continued, "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

There it was, out in the open again, the question that has persisted since the first fossils of these people were discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856. Could the two people with a shared distant ancestry and family resemblance have interbred? Is there any evidence that Europeans today carry some Neanderthal genes?

For the international gathering of scientists, the issue exposed the uncertainty over the definition of species. Its conventional meaning is a group of interbreeding creatures that are reproductively isolated from others. Hybridization of species is rare in mammals. One common example is the mating of an ass and a mare, producing the sterile mule.

The conferees debated, but never resolved, the possibility that Neanderthals could have been an evolutionary and anatomical species, distinct from Homo sapiens, but not strictly an isolated biological species. That is, the two species may have been enough alike to mate and produce fertile offspring.

Again, Dr. Ahern encapsulated the issue, "How much difference is too much" for viable interbreeding to occur?

Dr. Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, noted that some species apparently less close than Neanderthals and modern humans can interbreed and produce hybrids. Dr. Stringer is a leading proponent of the theory that modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa as early as 150,000 years ago and then spread to Asia and Europe, replacing the remnants of archaic humans they encountered there.

Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not at the meeting, contends that the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy found in Portugal appeared to be a Neanderthal-Homo sapiens hybrid. The interpretation has so far been viewed with skepticism.

Dr. Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said that he and colleagues had looked for answers in the patterns of genetic variation in contemporary human populations and the analysis of ancient DNA from fossils of Neanderthals and early modern humans. Neither approach, he said, provided any indication of interbreeding between the two species.

"That does not rule out some genetic contribution" from Neanderthals to Europeans' ancestry, Dr. Stoneking said.

Dr. David Serre of McGill University in Montreal described the analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA found in 24 Neanderthals and 40 early modern human remains. The results seemed to exclude any significant contribution of Neanderthal genes to Homo sapiens, perhaps less than 1 percent. Therefore, he concluded, they were "two distinct biological species."

Dr. Katerina Harvati, also of the Planck Institute in Leipzig, recently conducted research applying a "quantitative method" to determine the degree of anatomical difference that justifies classifying specimens as different species. She and colleagues examined the variation of specific parts of the craniums and faces of modern humans and Neanderthals as well as 12 existing species of nonhuman primates. The two living species of chimpanzees, for example, appeared to be more closely related to each other than Neanderthals are to humans.

Dr. Harvati and Dr. Terry Harrison, a paleontologist at N.Y.U., organized the symposium, "Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives."

More than species differences may have kept Neanderthals and humans sexually apart, if indeed that was the case. Their opportunities may have been limited.

Dr. Ahern said in an interview that it was "surprising how little overlap there was" between the two species in Europe." It had been thought that modern humans from Africa began arriving in Europe about 40,000 years ago and so could have competed with and mingled with the local population for at least 12,000 years. But the dating of fossil and archaeological evidence is now being revised, leaving much less time when the two species could have had close contact.

"It's a real scientific problem," said Dr. Randall White, an archaeologist specializing in European ice age culture at N.Y.U. "How to interpret the overlap of Neanderthals and modern humans, their interactions and cultural exchanges, the causes of Neanderthal extinction, all depends on what are the real dates of their possible contact."

Some of the most solid evidence for overlap, the researchers said, does not appear until toward the end of the Neanderthals' known existence, when their populations were probably sparse.

Dr. Stringer said some explanations for Neanderthal extinction were being re-examined. Perhaps the technological superiority of modern humans was "not as clear-cut as some of us thought," he said. Perhaps Neanderthals, though adapted to a cold climate, could not survive the rapid and repeated changes of cold and warm periods of that time.

"It was not bad genes but bad luck for the Neanderthals," Dr. Stringer said. "Modern humans may have had no direct effect on Neanderthal extinction. They actually walked into empty spaces where Neanderthals had already disappeared."

Dr. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History was not entirely joking when he suggested that few genes were exchanged because "no self-respecting Neanderthal female would fancy a Homo sapiens male."

In making a case for the distinct differences between the two species, Dr. Tattersall showed slides of upright skeletons of the two. But skeletons are unrevealing of Paleolithic desire.

I'm doomed

This article from the NYT reports on a study claiming men are attracted to women who are less powerful, smart, and gainfully employed. They keep falling for their secretaries and maids and such.

"The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise. "

The study likes to imagine it's all biological. They say it's because evolution has selected for men who like lesser females so that there's less of a risk of infidelity and they won't have to raise other men's children. Which is dubious at best. I seriously doubt we could find a correlation between powerful women and infidelity. Although it would be an interesting study.

I think a better sociobiological hypothesis would be male's subconscious desires to marry women who would raise offspring well rather than be their partner in crime. I consider this tragic but it seems to be a complete trend in my life that my smart male friends go out with hot dumb girls who don't make them think and might even suck in bed. I call this the "pet girl" scenario. And do the men care? no. Why? because they suck. And they also might be inclined that way biologically.

But that is only part of the picture. To deny there are social influences on a dynamic like this in a society like this would be absurd. American society was/is patriarchal, or at least there are impressions of it still floating around. And feminism was a huge ball buster for so many men. You could totally read this as a backlash. A retreat into cozier times and paradigms. You can see it on TV with all the fat ass dumb ass guys married to hot women who treat them like babies - the Homer scenario.

Also no one mentions that perhaps smarter women are choosing themselves not to marry. Maybe they consider their carreers before having kids. This seems like an obvious omition.

Although in reality, I totally understand it. I just don’t think a pet boy would entertain me for long enough to sustain a long term relationship. I guess it just means I have to date brilliant men....sigh....

Full article in "more"

January 13, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Men Just Want Mommy
By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.

In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.

The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.

As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame."

A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.

As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.

A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.

"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."

Forget lavender... it's breast milk!

This is a great little snippet from New Scientist that claims that the smell of breast milk to women without children increases sex dive by 24% and fantasies by 17%!!! Amazing!

The logic is that there's a chemical cue in the milk that encourages women to conceive when times are favorable (because other women could do it). BUT, I disagree with the chemical cue part. The article says that they can't locate the chemical responsible and I think this might be one of those things that are partly social and partly biological.

Acording to studies I've read in the past, the biggest turn on smell for women is baby powder. At first it's sort of perverse, but it's serving the exact same function as breast milk. It's reminding women of babies and the smell means that other women are able to have them so conditions must be favorable. And there's obviously no chemical cue in baby poweder that triggers brain activity in women, but through social mechanisims, we've come to associate baby poweder with babies, so it can serve the same function. Which is interesting: that a smell with a socially derived meaning could have biological responses.

After that, I've heard that women also get turned on by lavender and men get turned on by licorace so go figure.

Your brain in love

Anterior Cingulate - This section of the human brain shows the Anterior Cingulate Cortex activated. This part of the brain is known to be involved in responding to synthetic drugs that induce feelings of euphoria. It is associated with happy states, attention to one's own emotional state, and especially social interactions which involve assessing one's own emotions as well as the emotions of others.

Medial Insula - This section shows the Medial Insula activated from a section of the brain viewed from the top. This area of the brain is related to a variety of emotional functions. The appearance of lesions can indicate severe emotional consequences, among them are those related to the interpretation of visual input.

Putamen and Caudate Nucleus - This is a rear view of the brain. It shows three of the love hotspots activated: the Putamen, the Caudate Nucleus, and the Medial Insula. The Putamen and the Caudate Nucleus both lie deep within the brain and are two of the most commonly activated areas with regard to both positive and negative emotions.

These fMRI brain scans were done by Professor Semir Zeki and his team at University College London (and come from the Discovery website). They tested women and men by showing them images of the person they were in love with and then showing them pictures of others, then recorded increased blood flow to these areas of the brain.

Professor Aron at State University in New York found that a way to induce love and attraction in both partnerships and total strangers is to stare into the other person's eyes for 4 minutes straight without blinking. Also, he claims that we can missattribute emotions of fear and excitements as love, so it makes sense to watch scary movies and such. Here is an interview with the Professor. He says kindness is the strongest indicator in having a successful long term relationship and that makes me think he's hokey, but who knows.

Handsome men have better sperm

This is an extremely fascinating article that I forgot to post from months ago. It pretty much says that men who were rated most attractive by women (i.e. most symmetrical according to the latest research) have the most healthy and fast sperm.

I've recently been thinking about how people with stereotypically hot faces most often have stereotypically hot bodies and why that it. I guess this pretty much explains it: when you're genetically awesome, all features of you are more attractive, face, body, voice, all of it.

But at the same time, it important to remember that diverisity is an evolutionary strategy as well and we are not all attracted to the same things.

mechanical sex

You knew it had to happen. Hell, I guess it's been in the works for a while.

The URL really says it all:
http://www.fuckingmachines.com/meetthemachines/

I don't know why I find the above so obsurd and the idea of vibrators so liberating...Women really get the benefit of the double standard on sex toys these days.

Here's a link back to the fascinating and terrifying days when we didn't:
It's the Antique Vibrator Museum.
Supposidly, women who were being treated for "hysteria" would be cured by treamtments with these machines by altrusitic doctors with *only* the best of intentions. "Never mind the corset, a death by slow asphyxiation, and sexual respression you silly girl. Here, I can cure you with my calming wand of vibrating medicine." Actually, that sounds sort of hot....well, maybe it would be if the women's innards didn't sometimes get squeezed right out of them like a horrible abortion simile from the tight lacing of corsets...

It's funny to look around and think of current social customs that people in the future will look back on and be like "What in HELL were they thinking?!?!?!" Circumcision comes to mind: plastic surgery...for babies!

I guess I AM a gay man...

Yet another fascinating article that very well might be complete bullshit from the New Scientist claims that "researchers discovered that women tend to have more children when they inherit the same - as yet unidentified - genetic factors linked to homosexuality in men. This fertility boost more than compensates for the lack of offspring fathered by gay men, and keeps the “gay” genetic factors in circulation. "

And what does Simon LeVay have to say about it? “We think of it as genes for ‘male homosexuality’, but it might really be genes for sexual attraction to men. These could predispose men towards homosexuality and women towards ‘hyper-heterosexuality’, causing women to have more sex with men and thus have more offspring.”

I personally think Simon LeVay is a total boob, in the worst sense possible of the word. He's the mastermind behind both the Gay Gene and the Lesbian InnerEar. Plus he has an AOL webpage. Can we take a scientist seriously who uses AOL? I didn't think so. Plus he lives in Hollywood and the Gay Gene study that made him famous only used ten men as his sample! Although I am not averse to the idea of individuals being predispositioned genetically towards inclinations that might trigger them into the homosexual realm, I'm still a big fan of polymorphous perversity (it's also fun to say).

talk about sexual selection...

This is CRAZY! It's all about the technologies available for you to be able to choose the gender of your baby. They weed out the X-chromosome sperm from the Y-chromosome sperm. Apparently in the West 77% of request have been for female babies.

They also talk about how in China, the ratio of males to females born is 121:100 for reasons I'm sure you are familiar with. But a new book predicts that this will have grave consequences for the future because it "will create a hoodlum army of 30 million single men that by 2020 will be a menace to world peace." They're effectively breeding an army.... I would not want to be a woman in China in 15 years... I wonder if they will resort to polygamy... or just mass rape... or tons of gayness? The book is from MIT press so you know it's legit.

This is the article specifically about the future of tilted sex ratios. It getting worse becuase of ultrasound and selective abortion. You don't even have to deal with messy infanticide anymore! It's messed up world, man.

Interesting quote: "Anthropological studies have found, for example, that female infanticide and son-worship sometimes emerge in warring nomadic communities that frequently lose many men in battle, or that are vulnerable to having their women and children kidnapped by a rival group. In such situations, the theory goes, a group can preserve its integrity by tightly controlling the number of women within it."

The mythological G-spot

An interesting article from CAKE NYC on the G-Spot:

Despite decades of quality research and the experiences of millions of women, misinformation about the G-spot still runs rampant, gets passed off as truth and on top of it all, receives praise. Just check out an excerpt from a recent book on sexuality by Leonard Shalin:

"To many male reproductive physiologists, the G spot resembles the mythical unicorn, the horned white stallion that some women can easily see and know exists. For some women and the majority of men, despite a diligent search, the magnificent creature continues to remain elusive...If the clitoris evolved in humans only to confer upon a woman exquisite delight, what would compel Mother Nature to create a secondary pleasure center in an inaccessible region that is difficult to find and unlikely to be stimulated in the course of prosaic lovemaking? "

From: Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, 2003

A mythical unicorn??? This needs to stop once and for all!

The G-spot is not obscure, inaccessible or remote. It is a term that refers to the female prostate, which is made up of real, live erectile tissue, ducts, glands and nerves. And while it may relate to reproduction, it is more often associated with pleasure.

Much of the "confusion" about the G-spot is simply due to terminology, The term, the G-spot, was coined by Alice Ladas, Beverly Whipple and John Perry in 1982 to refer to an area on the upper wall of the vagina, where women reported sensitive to stimulation. In particular, the researchers identified that for some women, a "spot" behind the public bone was most sensitive. There is a basic, anatomical reason for women reporting pleasure from stimulation of the upper wall of the vagina. We now know that like the boys, girls have erectile tissue surrounding the urethra that becomes engorged when we are turned on. This erectile tissue can be reached through that area on the vaginal wall. Ok – so now we are getting somewhere.

All women have erectile tissue that surrounds the urethra, running parallel to the upper wall of the vagina and this erectile tissue is responsive. In other words, it can feel good to stroke it. Sound familiar? This tissue has glands that can produce fluid and ducts that lead this fluid out the body through the urethra. Because of this form and function, we now call this network of ducts, glands and tissue the female prostate, and we call the fluid female ejaculate.

The concentration of glands and ducts within the erectile tissue differs from woman to woman. Your G-"spot" is the area along the erectile tissue, which you find most pleasurable when stimulated through the vaginal wall. You may find that where your erectile tissue is more concentrated with prostatic ducts and glands, you are more sensitive. Pleasure is individual; some women like this stimulation, some women do not.

But since there is a lot of sexist, incorrect information out there, including a recent article in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology calling the G-spot a gynecological “UFO”! - it is high time to give some clear cut directions through this “mysterious” world of female pleasure. So Leonard, if you are with a gal that likes her prostate rubbed, here are some tips on how to stimulate this easily accessible area.

Tips for the guys (for the girls who love them):

Just like you can find the penis through pants more easily when it is hard, the female prostate is easier to feel through the vaginal wall when a woman is turned on. If aroused, the erectile tissue increases in size, part of which presses down on the upper wall of the vaginal canal, which can make penetration more pleasurable for some women.

If you are luckily endowed - no not length wise, but with a penis that's got a slight curve - missionary style sex will easily stimulate the upper wall of the vagina. Otherwise you can try other positions like legs up and feet by the head, or doggie style to rub the upper wall.

If you are more of a straightforward guy, use your fingers to stimulate the prostate. With your girl lying on her back, take two fingers and put them at the vaginal opening, with your palm facing up. Instead of going straight back and finding a space for your finger, curve your fingers and push them up, following the tissue on the upper wall. By pushing up against the top wall of the vagina, you are stimulating the erectile tissue that surrounds the urethra.

There are toys, like the crystal wand, which are shaped specifically for targeting this area. Get one and try it out!

The female prostate can have different shapes, which accounts for different areas of sensitivity. For some women, the area of sensitivity can be close to the vaginal opening, other's midway in, and still others back towards the cervix.
Female anatomy is really that straightforward - some would say as easy to figure out as the male anatomy just outside in! In this day and age, it makes no sense that this information is mucked up and murky.

What we need now is to continue to use women's experiences to push for more research and more mainstream information. There is still a lot we can find out about the female prostate and female pleasure. Though the female anatomy functions as a unit, women report differences in orgasm relating to where the stimulation occurs and for some women the G-spot provides a distinct type of pleasure. So, if you have seen the unicorn, please report your sighting and respond to this week's byte! Tell us what kind of direct vaginal stimulation you like, what area you find most sensitive, and how this relates to your orgasm, so we can spread the word on options for female sexual pleasure. Speak truth to power!

Nonoxynol 9 sucks!

I have recently come across some interesting information and thought was important to share, even though I'm sure most of you know it already. Basically, nonoxynol 9 is horrible stuff and no one should use it. Please don't think I'm a horrid skank, I just think the fact that you can even buy condoms with this in it is absurd. Plus I find the level of ignorance in Canada regarding the delicate vaginal ecosystem terrifying and am doing my best to combat it. All I have to say is, yay for private health care.

This is a World Health Organization article on N-9. It says that N-9 might encourage the contraction of HIV and herpes, doesn't prevent cervical gonorrhoea, and chlamydia, and causes yeast infections and bacterial vaginosis in women.

WHO officials heard of an increasing number of complaints by women using spermicides and contraceptive sponges with nonoxynol-9 who experienced vaginal and cervical ulcers, burning sensations, and recurring yeast infections.

They are not exactly sure why but they think that nonoxynol-9 can disrupt the epithelium, or wall, of the vagina, thereby potentially facilitating invasion by an infective organism.

http://www.ehn.clara.net/chemicals.html
Women who use diaphragms with Nonoxynol-9 (N9) spermicides have twice to three and a half times the risk of contracting a urinary tract infection (UTI). The spermicide inhibits the growth of normal, beneficial vaginal bacteria that naturally protect against infections such as lactobacilli and gardnerella vaginalis, thus encouraging the overgrowing of the harmful bacterium escherichia coli (E-coli). Condoms are another major source of exposure to N9. Spermicide-coated condoms were responsible for 42% of E coli UTIs among women who were exposed to these products.

from a healthy sex site:
How does Nonoxynol-9 work against HIV?
HIV is a virus that has a fatty membrane around it, just like our own cells have. Nonoxynol-9 is essentially a detergent. Detergents cut through grease, and that's exactly how N-9 kills HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. But it only does the job in a test tube. What we found in this study was that once you put N-9 in a woman's vagina, it will also cut through the fat of her cells, which makes it easier for HIV to get into those cells. Women who are highly exposed to N-9 actually show ulceration on the tissues of the vagina, and those ulcers can enhance the ability of HIV to get in. The same holds true for men. The rectum is even more vulnerable than the vagina to the effects of N-9.

Problematic case study from Canada:
Of 64 women commercial sex workers in Canada who used condoms lubricated with nonoxynol-9, 28 reported vaginal discharge, five reported increased thrush infection and four reported a burning sensation or numbness. Another study found 43 percent of women suffer irritation.

Here is a great article from Wired, which claims N-9 doesn't do much for contraception either.

And here is an article from the WHO stating (on page 7 of the PDF) that there is no conclusive evidence that condoms with N-9 prevent pregnancy better than other lubricants in vitro.

Sexy Names

This is the sort of thing I should be doing:

Aug 12, 9:40 am ET

LONDON (Reuters) - As Shakespeare said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Right?
Wrong.

Scientists say the right name can make you sexier.

Linguist Amy Perfors, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, posted photos of men and women on the U.S. Web site "Hot or Not," which lets viewers rate pictures according to how attractive they find them.

When she posted the same pictures with different names, she found that the attractiveness scores went up and down depending on the vowels, the London-based magazine New Scientist reported.

Men with "front vowels" in their names -- sounds formed at the front of the mouth like the "a" in Matt -- were considered sexier than men with "back vowel" sounds like the "au" in Paul, she concluded.

The opposite held for women, who were sexier with back vowels than front ones.

Perfors said front vowels are often perceived as "smaller" than back vowels, so the difference could be a sign that women are seeking men that are sensitive or gentle, traits usually perceived as feminine.

But men who might be thinking of taking more feminine names to become sexier should be careful not to go too far: men with women's names were rated least sexy of all.

Cleavage is nothing

This is a funny short snippet about how women of the courth often went bare breasted in 17th Century, England. There's also a great picture.

Make your own porn

This is crazy! I found it by mistake. When I was looking for some tribal clothing company on google. It's pretty much for people to create thir own realistic pornography digitally. There's a whole program for various stockings. Lip colors. Shoes. The native guy is hilarious. The little girls are troublesome. Does that count as child pornography if you draw it yourself? I wonder. I think it's odd too how much the women look like they've had plastic surgery. I mean, plastic surgery used to be in the name of making women look like cartoon versions of themselves, now the cartoons look like what real fake women actually look like.
The fantasy became the reality, then that reality was idealized back to fantasy. How convienente...

Foreskin Revolution!

Apparently the foreskin replacment industry is thriving.

I wonder how it comapres to the hymen replacment industry....

Hormonal

According to this article, the birth control pill Provera has been shown to inhibit sexual desire and increse anxiety and aggression in female macaques.

--> So fake estrogen makes women angry, anxious and not want sex.

According to this article, progesterone, the "female" hormone promts male mice to be excessively aggressive and threaton their pups. In a natural setting, male mice generally committ infanticide, but when progesterone receptors were blocked, they started acting like "good dads."

--> So real progesterone can make men want to kill their offspring.

Fuck for Forest

http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/english/article250240.ece

Excerpt: "The goal is to take over the entire commercial porn industry and transfer all the money to protection of the environment"

Yes, there are pictures.

Save the penis.

Woo hoo! That anti-circumcision movement is growing! It really blows my mind that this continues to be an acceptable practice (beware, the pictures are totally graphic). Honestly, I've wondered in the past if it doesn't have anything to do with the penile obsession of so many men. I mean, if the first thing that happens to you is your parents chopping of part of your penis, you're GOING to be phallocentric for the rest of your life. I think it's pretty funny that Freud thought castration fear came from sex when there's such an obvious source in circumcision. Although I doubt Austrians were getting chopped in the 1920's....

There's even a documentarycoming out about it.

feminists are annoying me

Give me a break, woman. Does she honestly think she is saying anything new with the rant about girls on film being way too porn? Is this news to anyone? And the whole part at the end about Uma being lame in Kill Bill because of her desire to be with her daughter is complete hypocrisy and totally anti-woman. I feel like the feminist movement has evolved beyond opinions like this and if people don't stop giving them air space, it's going to make the rest of us look bad.

Viagra for Iraq

This is a GREAT article found on Drudge about what the US has give Iraq besides pretend democracy.

"Viagra sales have at least doubled since the war ended. Lives are not good. There's bombs and tension. When you see bodies and destroyed houses, you have psychological disturbances that affect sexual desire."

Male monogamy pill

Everyone who reads my spams with any regularity will know all about oxytocin and prairie voles, but for those of you who don't: oxytocin is the hormone/neurotransmitter/peptide that is released in the brains of women when we fall in love and breast feed. It enables social bonds by releasing dopamine. Anyways, one species of prairie voles has receptors for a male version of the hormone, vasopressin, and one doesn't. As you may have expected, one species is monogamous, the other isn’t. The article below relates a recent successful experiment in which promiscuous voles were turned monogamous by increasing the receptors for vassopressin. Way better articles are in Nature, but you have to be a member to read them. IMAINGE THE IMPLICATIONS!

Gene treatment for male monogamy
From AFP, The Australian, June 18, 2004

YOU'VE just met the man of your dreams. But will he love you forever? Or will he love you and leave you? If only there were some sort of blood test to find out for sure...

Well, if one day a "fidelity test" for men does emerge, women may have the humble vole to thank, according to a study published Thursday in the British science journal Nature.

In a remarkable experiment in hormone chemistry, behavioural scientists implanted a single gene into promiscuous male voles, transforming them at a stroke into faithful, attentive and caring partners.

The rodent in question is the meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus -- and he is the original love rat.

The male vole thinks nothing about mating with several females at one time and leaving them to rear his offspring while he wanders off in search of his next conquest.

In contrast, the meadow vole's cousin, the prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) is a model of fidelity.

After mating, the male prairie vole sticks close to his partner, protects her jealously and looks after the little ones after they are born.

This is such a rare thing in nature -- fewer than five per cent of all male mammals are monogamous -- that the prairie vole has become quite a celebrity in biology labs.

Previous studies have shown that its brain is studded with receptors for a hormone called vasopressin, which appears to encourage pair-bonding.

Intrigued by this, researchers led by Miranda Lim and Larry Young at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, implanted a gene for the V1a receptor in question in the brains of naughty meadow voles.

They tucked the gene into a harmless virus which then delivered the V1a gene to the ventral pallidum region of the voles' brains.

What happened next was dramatic. Once, the voles were Don Juans forever on the cruise. Now, they had a chosen partner, and would only ever mate with her.

Even when temptresses came by and flaunted their voley charms, the genetically-modified males only had eyes for that one partner.

The study theorises that when the modified meadow vole has sex, his brain release vasopressin, which is picked up by the V1a receptors.

They, in turn, unleash serotonin, a "feel-good" chemical, to flood the brain. Put together, it means the vole associates the feeling of reward when he has sex with this specific mate, and does not want to prejudice that sensation by having sex with others, according to this notion.

In a commentary, also published in Nature, US anthropologist Melvin Konner, says the work helps strengthens theories that an "organic subculture" -- our genes and the chemicals they produce -- lies at the root of the psychology of relationships.

That theory is bitterly contested by sociologists, who say social forces and environmental influences are the primary moulds which condition human bonds.

"We are a long way from a commitment pill, but perhaps closer to a neurology of romance," says Konner.

He adds: "We do not yet know if a similar system helps explain male attachment in non human primates, much less humans. But a medicine that might someday be offered to certain men is an interesting prospect."

Sex on film for Girls

The interesting thing about the article below is that it claims that what women need to get off in porn is "context." I like this much better than the "emotional security" and "lovemaking" people have used as rationals for the apparent disinterest of women in porn previously. Personally, I think context is great and while of course not applying to everyone (Lulu for instance could care less about context) I can see how a sense of what the people are feeling can make things more sexy.

Girls on top By Lilly Bragge
June 16, 2004, published in The Age

It’s called chick porn, pornography that is made by women for women, and it’s now doing for the X-rated film industry what Playboy did for the nude centrefold 50 years ago — legitimising explicit sexual entertainment for the mainstream.

While in the past porn was widely considered fetishistic or the domain of men in grubby raincoats, pornography is moving away from its secretive underground and is becoming discreetly popular, particularly among middle-class women and couples.

The world has a voracious, never-ending appetite for explicit sex on video and the internet. Ten thousand new film titles are made each year in the United States alone.

Leading the international suburban charge to make porn more palatable to women is American Candida Royalle. The former porn star turned writer, director and producer, is the world’s most successful purveyor of XXX films aimed at women and their partners.

Royalle created her Femme line to give XXX movies a woman’s voice and explore what women desire from sex. Since 1984, her production company has produced 15 films.

She says adult entertainment is no longer the sole domain of male cravings and inclination, and that women are actively seeking it out.

“Women are eager to explore erotic entertainment and to create a sexual language of our own. Men also want to share the fun of adult films with their female partners — an activity that was not easy to accomplish until movies like mine came along.”

So what sort of porn do women want? Royalle says women like to see a context. They do not want a wham-bam mechanical approach. They want to see lovemaking the way they want to be made love to.

“They want real women with real lives; they want to see women where men treat them well and make love to them.”

Traditional adult movies stick to a formula of seven scenes that include certain sex acts and specific camera angles. Royalle’s biggest complaint about her male-oriented counterparts is their misogynous predictability.

“They all have at least one girl-on-girl scene, fellatio, cunnilingus, anal sex, double penetration and group sex. The camera angles and the way it’s shot — they have to show things as grotesque and graphically as possible.

“Cunnilingus looks like open-heart surgery. The ‘money shot’ is always the external ‘come shot’ — it’s like your typical bad sex — no imagination and it’s always over when the man comes.”

For the men making these movies there has been no need for creativity. Women’s pleasure was, and continues to be, of no great concern. Royalle’s films are less “goal oriented” and focus on sensuality, reminding people that the whole body is an erogenous zone. She says, “We get right away from the Three Step Sex approach.”

Most XXX movies are made in California, whereas Royalle’s are shot in her native New York.

The cover on a video or FVD can make or break a porn film. Even the cheapest gonzo flick will have a high-end production cover to help it move off the shelves. Royalle says often distributors spend more on the cover than the actual film. She recommends that people choose movies by the director and not the cover.

“You’ll never confuse a Candida Royalle film with a Seymore Butts movie.” (Not surprisingly, a Butts film is a festivity of devotions to all things anal).

Femme films have a distinctive Mills and Boonish motif. One glance and the aficionados know it’s a Royalle production.

Anyone unfamiliar with her work might be forgiven for thinking these films are little more than risque, amusing tales of romantic seduction. Indeed, each film comprises such elements, but they are rated XXX for a reason.

While perhaps not quite as gynaecological as the blokey ones, they feature myriad graphic hard-core sex scenes.

Most Femme protagonists are “real” looking women with “real” looking breasts.

Roughly 20 per cent of the actors have had some kind of surgical enhancement or procedure. The characters are high-minded career gals who are often juggling postgraduate studies alongside their sexual hijinks.

An advocate for safe sex, Femme productions insists its performers have proof of negative HIV status before filming begins.

Condoms are always used unless the actors are a real-life couple, clear of the virus.

Straight porn has a short shelf life — a mere two months. Royalle says people’s continued thirst for the medium means a constant supply is churned out.

Taking time and care with a film seems to make a difference. Of Royalle’s 15 titles, at least three are considered “classics” and continue to sell well.

Statistically, from 1986 to 1996, women have become the consumers to be reckoned with in the industry. Most orders for Femme films and products (she also does a line in female vibrators), are from women.

Interestingly, Royalle maintains that couples have always indulged in her movies — (usually at the woman’s behest), and none of them are really intended for solitary practices.

Royalle was brought up a Catholic, and while no longer practising she defines herself as an “ethical and compassionate person”. People who criticise her work misunderstand her, she says.

“It’s as if being religious or spiritual or whatever I would call myself would preclude working in the sex industry. I believe I am doing good things for people, helping them to appreciate and see their sexuality in a positive way. Helping women to embrace their sexuality and helping couples to come together in better understanding, which only furthers their overall relationship.”

A committed feminist, and now in her very well preserved 50s, she says, “In my day (the ’80s), it was very taboo for a woman to direct a porn film. I would say that it all changed in the ’90s.

“Women in their 20s are now wanting to do very explicit stuff. They are not looking to do art, they are looking to do racy, in-your-face sexy XXX movies and they make no apologies about it.”

So is there still a shame factor attached to the women who watch?

“Amazingly, I think there is. Although, I’m feeling a very fast level of change occurring now. It seems like there is a big growth spurt in women’s comfort level, their sexuality and being open about it.”

Gallery Entertainment distributes Royalle’s films in Australia. Brett Allen manages the Canberra division and says the Femme line is popular in Australia, but the figures can’t be compared to the huge number of sales in the US where Royalle has a large media presence.

“The female vote has always been hard to get,” Allen says.

Royalle is often asked to speak on talk shows and at conferences on sex, women and pornography. A regular guest at the annual American Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists, she says therapists tell her again and again how often they recommend her films to clients.

Australia has a booming amateur and gonzo XXX-rated film industry. Allen says it’s surprising how many “normal couples” film their shenanigans and offer them up for the public gaze.

Royalle has long encouraged her female friends and contemporaries to direct and write films under the Femme label. Her Star Director Series includes Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Hart, Veronica Vera and Gloria Leonard.

In 2002, Melbourne feminist and erotic filmmaker Anna Brownfield co-wrote and directed a low-budget film, The Money Shot.

Rated R, it was a comedy-drama based on the Australian porn industry.

Coming from an art background, Brownfield says just because it is porn doesn’t mean it has to be bad filmmaking.

Having watched “a lot of porn”, she nominates the German Expressionist film, Caf Flesh and a lesbian porn flick Madame and Eve as her two all-time favourites in the genre.

“Candida’s (films) are a lot more interesting than the usual crap porn films,” Brownfield says. “Her women actually partake in the sex scenes — they are not just being f-----d, stereotyped and submissive.”

With its virtual anonymity, Brownfield says the internet has totally changed porn consumption for women. What was taboo has become a lot more mainstream and openly discussed.

In the interests of equality Brownfield wants to use naked men in all her films. “The more penises on screen the better. I want to objectify them as much as possible.”

She also wants women with natural bodies. “No blonde Barbie dolls with silicone tits and plastic homogenous surgery to the max whatsoever.”

Brownfield is touting for funding for a semi-autobiographical script about being a “door bitch” in the Melbourne rock ‘n’ roll scene that she wants to make as an XXX feature film.

Since it is illegal to film live sex acts in Victoria (and most other states), she will have to shoot her sex scenes in NSW or Canberra. Brownfield is also in talks with Royalle regarding another script she has written.

Like Brownfield, Royalle is a self-confessed ethicist. Her motto is: Enjoy life to the fullest and do the right thing.

“I believe I am doing good things for people, helping them to appreciate and see their sexuality in a positive way.”

Candida Royalle’s book, How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do: Sex advice from a woman who knows, will be published in Australia and New Zealand by Piatkus Books at the end of the year.

Joan/John suicide

Subject of famous Joan/John case commits suicide.

oxytocin homepage

This is a webpage dedicated to the exploration of the effects of oxyticin, the love hormine. It is truely fasinating. Enjoy.

testosterone versus love

This article is about testosteron effects in those in love. It is fascinating in light of other hormonal articles I've spammed in the recent past.

sex patch

sexual desire now available in patch form.

(well in two years if P&G have anything ot say about it)

BONOBOS!

such wonderful animals, ravaged by war. Full article below:

May 3, 2004
KINSHASA JOURNAL
The Gentlest of Beasts, Making Love, Ravaged by War
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

INSHASA, Congo - Upstream from this dog-eat-dog capital, where the Congo River spills its tendrils into the belly of the equatorial rain forest, lies the jungle home of one of mankind's closest cousins and one of the most endangered primates on earth: the bonobo.

Genetically, humans and bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, are more than 98 percent similar. Socially, it is another matter. Matriarchal as a rule, bonobos eschew conflict. They do not fight over territory. They do not kill. Any small friction they resolve through sexual contact: a playful rub, oral sex, full intercourse.

Peace-loving they may be, but during Congo's latest war, the bonobos' jungle habitat fell smack on the front line between fighting factions.

Fishing and farming all but ground to a halt during the war, which officially ended last year. Civilians and soldiers alike turned to the forest to fill their bellies.

More and more, the bonobos turned up as supper. Their smoked remains showed up at riverine markets. Babies were orphaned, which is to say they were more or less destined to die: the bonobo infant, accustomed to staying on its mother's back for the first several years of life, has great trouble making it on its own.

So it was that the bonobo orphans of the central African rain forest found themselves hurtling hundreds of miles down the Congo River to this gritty metropolis and into the arms of a redheaded Frenchwoman called Claudine André.

Ms. André recalls it as love at first sight. More than 10 years ago, after a famous, ruinous pillage of Kinshasa, Ms. André, then a businesswoman, went to the ravaged city zoo and chanced upon a bereft infant bonobo. He looked as though he wanted to die, she recalled. She named him Mikano, took him home and became, in her words, his surrogate mother.

When the war came, more orphans trickled in. She kept them on the grounds of an elite American school. Then, last year, when peace came, she opened Lola Ya Bonobo, a sanctuary for orphaned bonobos on a 75-acre patch of green on the fringes of the capital.

Infants are paired up with surrogate mothers. There is an endless supply of bananas and sugar cane (bonobos have an incurable sweet tooth). An electric fence encircles the park, so as to keep the apes from scampering out of the woods and into Kinshasa's traffic. The park is open to visitors.

On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, the park's 31 young charges did what young bonobos do: chewed on blades of grass, swung from palm fronds, kissed, frolicked and fondled.

"It's the hippies of the forest," Ms. André said, taking their wrinkled hairy hands in hers. "When they feel anxious, when they are afraid, they have sex. And they calm down."

As if on cue, a big bonobo mounted a small bonobo. They rolled around on the grass, rubbed against each other and went on their merry ways.

Bonobos are not proprietary about mates, and sex is not always about procreation. Homosexuality is au courant, and sexual play begins when they are barely a year old, though intercourse must wait until they are teenagers. Much to Ms. André's delight, a teenage orphan, a male, arrived recently. Hopefully, she said, mating will soon begin.

"It's really make love, not war," Ms. André said of the bonobo way of life. "It was so sad to see such a pacific animal so destroyed by war."

The plight of the bonobos, a species found only in Congo, is a window into the repercussions of war on the ecology of the Congo River Basin, one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world and home to more than 400 species of mammals. Mining, logging and a sustained trade in bush meat have all put the squeeze on their habitats.

War having made vast swaths of the country inaccessible to researchers, it is impossible to know precisely how these creatures have fared. Certain habitats may have been left untouched, others devoured.

In the Virunga Highlands near the border of Uganda and Rwanda, the mountain gorilla population has grown, according to a census by the Wildlife Conservation Society. By contrast, in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the eastern lowland gorilla's population has fallen by 70 percent to fewer than 5,000, according to Conservation International. The elephants in the same park may well have vanished.

As for the bonobo population, scientists have no reliable numbers but fear the species may be nearing extinction. Late last year, the United Nations Environment Program reported that the bonobo, along with the gorilla, chimpanzee and orangutan, could disappear in 50 years.

Peace is likely to present a new challenge to forest dwellers: Congo's rain forests have once again opened up to logging companies, and today the first batches of timber can be seen floating downriver from Équateur Province to the port here in Kinshasa. With blessings from the World Bank, 150 million acres of rain forest could be opened up for logging.

As the World Bank sees it, timber concessions could pour hundreds of millions of dollars into government coffers. Environmentalists fear that the logging could also endanger the habitat of the Pygmy people, who have eked out a living in the forest for centuries. The bonobos are sometimes called Pygmy chimpanzees, because Pygmies too are averse to conflict; they too prefer to hunt and forage in the forest rather than fight one another for territory. United Nations investigators suspect that some of them had been eaten during the war too.

More on porn and HIV

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0418/taormino.php

(lookout for the appropriate banner ads)

talking about very interesting bullshit

I'm going to start the discussion group for the article I ranted about on
Friday night tomorrow.

I really do find it fascinating. I reread it and you've got to wonder if
it's a communiqué directly from the propaganda desk of The Man himself. The
study they did to determine if women were sexually responsive to the pill is
hysterical.

Picture it:

A white lab in a basement of some hospital.

Five women sitting in chairs with their legs in stirrups, spread eagle, with gauges stuck to their vaginas to keep track of blood flow.

Most likely, if their are Pfizer's target group, they are married, middle age women, possibly slightly overweight, have trouble feeling sexy, and maybe need a little extra cash seeing as they did sign consent forms to do this. Their husbands no doubt complain about their lack of desire and possibly wetness. Maybe they worry the men will leave. Maybe they're sick of sex being boring, and don‚t have the option not to have it. But maybe they just want to feel young and vital again, who knows. All the women feel like there is something wrong with them. All of them think it could be solved with a pill.

So they find themselves, again, in a lab, in a chair, with things strapped on to that very organ that's been giving them all this trouble and most likely remains a source of mystery to them.

The very nice female nurse leaves the room and switches off the light.

The TV in front of them clicks on to begin the romance of some hulking man and a woman who is no doubt blond. I'm guessing Pfizer has allowed the women to choose their own type of pornography, "Now, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, would you prefer the 70's classic Deep Throat‚ or something with a little more anal play?"

The scientists could not allow one of those female-friendly new releases with a plot line and no silicon, lest this induce feelings of intimacy that would complicate that raw "desire" aroused in all healthy people at the sight of waxed, tanned, taught, white flesh getting banged by the cheerleading coach, someone else in a position of authority, or her twin sister.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick sits back and tries to relax like the nurse told her to.

She watches the woman moaning while getting it from behind and thinks to herself that she doesn‚t look like she's enjoying it that much. She thinks about her husband taking her from behind and how she doesn't like it much either. And all that moaning, is that really necessary? She thinks about the wires attached to her vagina. She's glad she shaved before coming in. She wonders if she should take yoga. She wonders if the Stevensons are coming for dinner tonight. She returns to the wires attached to her vagina. Now the guy is going down on the girl in the movie. That type of thing has never appealed to her. It would just make her uncomfortable. Plus it would be really messy. And who would want to stick their face there anyway? She thinks about the wires...

The nurse returns.

"Hi there Mrs. Fitzpatrick, did everything go OK? Good. Now, can you tell me, how much do you want to engage in intercourse right now, on a scale of 1 to 10?"

OBVIOUSLY, there must be something wrong with Mrs. Fitzpatrick. How could she possibly not want to jump into bed after that sultry scenario? What she needs is security, intimacy, and yes, some well-timed coaxing.

Not that I'm implying that there are no differences between men and women. There are. But Pfizer has no idea what they are. So yeah--if you want to discuss the ins and outs of male and female sexuality, let me know and you can be in the club.

very interesting bullshit

I find this particular piece of bullshit so very fascinating.

the things i find so intriguing about this bullshit are that:

1) they get all excited about saying once again that women's sexual arousal is totally complicated and back up all these stereotypes about how it's not really "sexual" but more emotional and possibly has something to do with security. THEN they're like "but really it's hormones." Which is what it really is in everyone and i dont see how this is any less physical than blood inhibiting enzymes.

2) This is really just a wonderful example of complete bullshit:

"Dr. Marianne Legato, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and director of the Partnership for Gender Specific Medicine, said that the disconnection between arousal and desire in many women was so profound that they "often don't have any desire for sex until they are physically in the act of lovemaking."

Indeed, getting a woman to connect arousal and desire, Dr. Legato said, requires exquisite timing on a man's part and a fair amount of coaxing. "What we need to do is find a pill for engendering the perception of intimacy," she said."

NEVER HAS SUCH EGREGIOUS BLASPHEMY FALLEN UPON MY EARS! Ok, first of all, the definition of "arousal" is "to stimulate sexual desire in" so right there they're completly wrong. what they should say is that there is a dissconnection between "the lack of enzymes that inhibit blood flow" and desire. FUCKING BASTARDS MAN! And the *next* paragraph, I will just let that speak for itself because my response will be far too laced with profanity to be deemed literate. but I would just like to point out the use of the words "man," "COAXING," and "intimacy."

and 3) I am SO sick of this empty headed men who are only driven to have sex myth. it's just not true. believe me, sometimes i think it woudl be nice if it were true, but it isnt. i can say i've known a few of these men in my life - they do exist. but the cast majority of men are not like this and only uphold the stereotype out of insecurities. Listen to this:

"Men consistently get erections in the presence of naked women and want to have sex. With women, things depend on a myriad of factors."

This is DEMEANING. You need to shed the sexual insecurities and stand up for yourselves. and NO, it does not count to be thinking about sex all the time because, I've got news for you, just about everyone thinks about sex all the time.

This is also a great reply by CAKE NYC

"The success of Viagra for men is based on isolating and treating a very specific "dysfunction." By increasing physical arousal, Viagra allows men to physically act on their mental sexual desires when their bodies would otherwise not be able to rise to the occasion. But the desire to have sex is directly linked to how pleasurable it is for you when you do. If "sex" - intercourse between a man and a woman - does not reliably equal orgasm and pleasure for women, then of course simply achieving physical arousal would not drive us girls to grab a partner and get laid. We bet that if you guarantee each woman in a study a mind-blowing orgasm with her partner (or by herself), then maybe you'd see a more direct link between women's physical arousal and the desire to get it on.

Perhaps women are always labeled as needing more of a mental context for sex than men because our cultural context ALREADY encourages and caters to men's mental desire.

Next up for Pfizer? Drugs that affect brain chemistry "could be an extremely interesting area of investigation," according to one researcher. Um - that's scary. Maybe we should condone drugging women into being turned on by the current cultural state of sexuality, rather than CHANGE the current state???"

CASE IN POINT:
98% of health insurance companies in the States cover Viagra.
33.3% cover the pill

how the hell am I supposed to get off to that?

replies would be most welcome and anyone who wants to turn this into a
discussion, let's do it.

Ms. Jackson if you're nasty.

a great article regarding ms jackson's wardrobe malfunction.

Frank Rich: My Hero, Janet Jackson

February 15, 2004

It may be a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Two weeks after the bustier bust, almost no one has come to the defense of Janet Jackson. I do so with a full heart. By baring a single breast in a slam-dunk publicity stunt of two seconds' duration, this singer also exposed just how many boobs we have in this country. We owe her thanks for a genuine public service.

You can argue that Ms. Jackson is the only honest figure in this Super Bowl of hypocrisy. She was out to accomplish a naked agenda - the resuscitation of her fading career on the eve of her new album's release - and so she did. She's not faking much remorse, either. Last Sunday she refused to appear on the Grammys rather than accede to CBS's demand that she perform a disingenuous, misty-eyed ritual "apology" to the nation for her crime of a week earlier. By contrast, Justin Timberlake, the wimp who gave the English language the lasting gift of "wardrobe malfunction," did as he was told, a would-be pop rebel in a jacket and a tie, looking like a schoolboy reporting to the principal's office. Ms. Jackson, one suspects, is laughing all the way to the bank.

There are plenty of Americans to laugh at, starting with the public itself. If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set? Apparently nothing short of a simulated rape would do.

Once the deed was done, the audience couldn't stop watching it. TV viewers with TiVo set an instant-replay record as they slowed down the offending imagery with a clinical alacrity heretofore reserved for the Zapruder film. Lycos, the Internet search engine, reported that the number of searches for Janet Jackson tied the record set by 9/11-related searches on and just after 9/11.

"That a single breast received as much attention as the first attack on United States soil in 60 years is beyond belief," wrote Aaron Schatz, the columnist on the Lycos Top 50 site. (Though not, perhaps, to the fundamentalist zealots who attacked us.)

For those who still couldn't get enough, the cable news channels giddily played the video over and over to remind us of just how deplorable it was. Even though by this point the networks were blurring the breast with electronic pasties, there was still an erotic kick to be milked: the act of a man tearing off a woman's clothes was as thrilling to the audience as whatever flesh was revealed therein, perhaps more so. But to say that aloud is to travel down a road that our moral watchdogs do not want to take. It's the unwritten rule of our culture that the public is always right. The "folks," as Bill O'Reilly is fond of condescending to them, are always the innocent victims of the big, bad cultural villains. They're never complicit in the crime. The idea that the folks might have the free will to tune out tasteless TV programming or do without TV altogether - or that they might eat up the sleaze, with or without young 'uns in the room - is almost never stated on television, for obvious reasons of fiscal self-interest. You don't insult your customers.

Since the public is blameless for its role in creating a market for displays like the Super Bowl's, who should be the scapegoat instead? If you peruse Mr. O'Reilly's admonitions in his first three programs dealing with the topic, or the tirades of The Wall Street Journal editorial page and right-wing direct-mail mills like the Parents Television Council and Concerned Women for America, you'll find a revealing pattern: MTV, CBS and their parent corporation, Viacom, are the exclusive targets of the invective. The National Football League is barely mentioned, if at all. To blame the country's highest-rated sports operation, after all, might risk insulting the football-watching folks to whom these moral watchdogs pander for fun and profit.

But the N.F.L. is in the sex business as assiduously as CBS and MTV, and for the same reason: it wants those prurient eyeballs. It's now been more than a quarter-century since Super Bowl X, when the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders first caught the attention of the nation. "The audience deserves a little sex with its violence," Chuck Milton, a CBS sports producer, said back then.

The N.F.L. has since worked tirelessly to fill that need. This year was not the first MTV halftime show that the league has ordered to try to expand its aging audience beyond the Levitra demographic. The first such collaboration, Super Bowl XXXV three years ago, featured Britney Spears all but falling out of a halter top and numbers in which both Mr. Timberlake (then appearing with 'NSync) and Nelly grabbed their crotches. There was, to my eye, twice as much crotch-grabbing then as there was this year, but that show generated no outrage whatsoever.

It did, however, attract two million more viewers than the game itself. The N.F.L. wanted more of the same for 2004, which is why the league's commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, released a statement saying, "We're pleased to work again with MTV" when announcing the encore. Or pleased up to a point. When MTV proposed that part of the show be devoted to a performance of the song "An American Prayer" by Bono to increase awareness of the horrific AIDS epidemic in Africa, the N.F.L. said no - even though Bono had done the league the favor of giving the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show a dignified musical tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The mention of a sexually transmitted disease might dampen the libido of the salacious MTV show that the N.F.L. wanted this year and wanted so badly that the league remained silent even when MTV's pregame publicity promised that the performance would contain "some shocking moments." As one participant in the production told me, the N.F.L. saw "every camera angle" at the show's rehearsals and thus was no less aware of its general tone than CBS and MTV were. You don't hire Ms. Jackson, who's been steadily exposing more of her breasts for over a decade on magazine covers, to sing "Rock Your Body" if you have a G-rated game plan. Nonetheless, Joe Browne, the league's flak, pleaded total innocence after the event, releasing a hilarious statement that the N.F.L., like the public, was the unwitting victim of a show that it had both commissioned and helped supervise: "We applaud the F.C.C.'s investigation into the MTV-produced halftime. We and our fans were embarrassed by the entire show."

That investigation, piggybacked by last week's Congressional hearings, is an election-year stunt as full of hot air as the Bud Light horse flatulence ad. "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration," declared Michael Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, upon announcing that the entire halftime would be examined. A celebration of what, exactly? Didn't Mr. Powell, the nation's chief television regulator, watch the previous MTV halftime show?

He promises to conduct the investigation himself - a meaningless gesture, though it may gain him an audience and perhaps a photo op with Ms. Jackson. Mr. Powell's real agenda here is to conduct a show trial that might counter his well-earned reputation as a wholly owned subsidiary of our media giants. Viacom has been a particularly happy beneficiary of the deregulatory push of his reign, buying up every slice of the media pie that's not nailed down. Should CBS be found guilty of "indecency" by the feds, the total penalty would amount to some $5 million, roughly the price of two 30-second Super Bowl commercials. Congress's new push to increase those fines tenfold is just as laughable. Viacom took in $26.6 billion last year.

Not for nothing did the company's stock actually go up the day after the Super Bowl. The halftime show was great merchandising for both MTV and CBS, the go-to network for "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show." Not to be left without a piece of the action, even NBC got into the act. Citing the Jackson flap, it decreed that two split-second shots of an 80-year-old woman's breast in an emergency room sequence in "E.R." be excised. But the "E.R." star Noah Wyle then went on NBC's "Today" show the morning of the broadcast to joke about the decision, and the network-owned NBC affiliate in New York used the banned breast as a promo for its post-"E.R." news broadcast: "What you won't see on tonight's episode of `E.R.' - at 11!" Thus did NBC successfully transform its decision not to bare geriatric flesh into a sexual tease to hype ratings. This is true marketing genius, American-style.

What's next? Some are predicting that all the tape delays being injected into TV events to pre-empt future wardrobe malfunctions will be the death of spontaneous, live TV. But the moment an awards show takes a ratings hit, this new electronic prophylactic will be quietly abandoned by the networks even faster than the N.F.L.'s vague threat not to collaborate with MTV next year.

Ms. Jackson, the biggest winner in this whole escapade, is already back on the air. Her official rehabilitation began right after the Super Bowl, when BET started broadcasting a 10-part series of "special Black History Month" spots in which she profiles historical luminaries like Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier.

"Her tone is serious and focused, with the air and diction of a seasoned lecturer," says the network's news release, which also notes that "the spots feature Ms. Jackson clad in classic black." Wasn't her Super Bowl dominatrix costume classic black as well? Well, never underestimate the power of synergy. BET is another wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom.

pornographied

This is a great pair of articles from New York magazine on modern porn
consumption and its effects.

"It's just something to amuse you when you're bored," he says. "It's just
there--like white noise."

I find it really fascinating the way people can get addicted to porn. I
don't know why it becomes so fiendish, possibly because there is still some
level of taboo and shame left... I always seem to read about men describing
themselves being devoured by it....yes, you can read into that....

And a commentary on the situation by Naomi Wolf:

Sort of predictable - "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening
male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and
fewer women as 'porn-worthy.'" - and she gets quite carried away with the
"other cultures" but it's interesting. I like her description of sex in the
70s: "If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a
pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up."

Of course, both articles completely ignore the fact that there exist women
who are into porn as well... for a more femme-friendly take on porn and the
erotic, check out www.cakenyc.com

history of pasties

this is a great interview regarding the history of the striptease. all the
interesting stuff is further down, as with most things...sorry, i couldnt
resist... anyways apologies for not just sending the link but it was premium
content on Salon and they would have made you watch a commercial to read it.

ALSO, not that this is in any way appropriate in this context, but today
marks the sad death of Edward Said.

OK, on to the sex stuff:

Salon.com Sex | A naked woman is never ironic

Historian Jessica Glasscock chats about the first striptease, pasties, pubic landing strips, and the nude-friendly hippies who raised her.

By David Bowman

Sept. 26, 2003

I love to look at naked women. I bet you do too -- even if you're a girl. We may also especially love the act of a woman undressing -- her mystery being revealed bit by bit. Have any of you ever seen a good old-fashioned striptease show, say, Ann Corio or Watermelon Rose? Back in the '80s I saw a modernist strip show at a Manhattan performance space called the Kitchen. I watched a female "performance artist" strip out of a huge octopus costume, then return to the stage to strip out of a cheese costume. This was certainly not Sally Rand hiding naked behind bowling ball-size bubbles. Or Rosita Royce standing naked beneath a costume of nesting pigeons. The golden striptease shows of yesterday are gone forever no matter how many modern housewives practice pole dancing to empower themselves and spice up their marriages.

Every generation gets its own version of history, whether it's about Civil War battles or the making of the atom bomb or the invention of the striptease. Historian Jessica Glasscock has written a postfeminist history of bump and grind, "Striptease: From Gaslight to Spotlight." Smartly written and marvelously illustrated, Glasscock charts the stripper's progress from the original Victorian "Venus in Fur" Pauline Markham to America's foremost peeler Gypsy Rose Lee to "the World Famous *BOB*," a modern stripper who stands on stage agitating a martini shaker with her breasts.

Glasscock's history is certainly not your mother's striptease book. This is no feminist condemnation of Western society's exploitation of women. Glasscock's political bent is a form of loose postfeminist Marxism. Her book is a history of "undercurrents, underclasses, and underwear. And it is a history of undeniable fun aimed not at the head, the heart, or even the stomach, but just south of all three."

I meet Glasscock, age 33, in a greasy spoon across from my apartment on Second Avenue in New York. Glasscock sports a Louise Brooks bob. Her nostrils flare as she laughs and there is a tattoo of a Lalique Art Nouveau design on her left arm. A tiger prowls on her right. She is dressed in a 1940-ish blouse and dark slacks. I have to laugh when she tells of working for the ACLU in a room staffed with prim middle-aged feminists from the 1970s. "It really upset them how I dressed," she laughs. "The ACLU didn't have a dress code and they couldn't vocally disapprove of the fact that I wore a corset every day to work."

So how on earth did a girl like you write such a book?

I've been interested in transgressive women. That goes all the way back -- my mother was a feminist. She started a women's art group in Alabama where I'm from. She's been with feminists fighting pornography. When I started getting into stripteases, it was not my mother's kind of feminism. I felt like stripping and striptease related to the idea that you can control what someone can do with their body.

How did you get from Alabama to New York?

I always wanted to come to New York. In Alabama I was always, "I'll be out of here soon and in New York." I'm been in the city since I was 18, in 1988. I also ended up working for the ACLU because I thought I was going to be a lawyer, but after working for lawyers for four years, I thought, Why would I want to do this? So I got interested in costume design, and met a designer who did a lot of club clothes for drag queens and dominatrixes. I wanted to get my graduate degree in costume studies and wanted to write a book. My first idea was to write a book on Mardi Gras, but I found someone else was doing a book on that. Then I thought about striptease because I'd been very interested in turn-of-the-century Salome dancers, which was considered the first striptease. I did my thesis on the birth of striptease, tracing its costumes. That ended up being my book proposal.

I can't imagine a woman older than you desiring to write such a book.

I'm 10 years older than you. When I remember the vast number of girls who got naked for me in the late 1970s, I realize that to gaze upon a naked girl in appreciation was considered "objectification." Back then, in order to not be a sexist, you had to look without taking in what you were looking at. The idea of hooting at a striptease show would have been considered the lowest rung of cheap sexism.

But in the 1970s, you didn't need striptease because everyone had pornography. And it was private. You didn't need to worry about being seen objectifying a woman because you had this other way to objectify a woman privately.

But there was no wonderful glory of finally seeing someone naked. When were you married?

Two years ago.

Before you were married, what ran through your mind when you finally presented yourself naked to a man?

I was raised by hippies. I grew up way in the country. Hippies in Alabama -- which is a weird subbreed.

So you went skinny-dipping?

Exactly.

And saw your father naked?

Exactly. And my mom. And her friends. Also my mother was an artist so there was nude modeling in her art classes. It was a normal thing to invite a man over to sketch him naked. I myself was sketched in all-women art classes. Nudity was really normal to me. So it was really weird when I turned 11 and had to start wearing my shirt during recess at school. I didn't get any of that. I had trouble keeping my clothes on.

But when you were 18 and 19, did you still get naked for anybody?

No. I'm sexually -- fairly -- I was a very, very clean teen. Part of having parents who were living a different lifestyle than other nice Southern Christians around me is that I had no desire to rebel. In high school I was a very good student. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke. I didn't do anything like that. Which is how most kids in high school end up getting naked for someone for the first time. Then when I came to college I didn't date much. I didn't think about it that way. And when things like that happened [getting naked] in college it was in a haze of inebriation, so it wasn't in the context of "Oh my god, this is happening now." It was more: "Hey! Time to take our clothes off."

Only a clothed civilization could have invented striptease.

Absolutely. Just nakedness doesn't really work. Because there is no tease. There is no narrative.

This is turning into a chronologically backward interview because the whole tradition of striptease was lost in the late 1960s.

I would say so. A lot of the people that worked back then would say so as well. By the '70s it was a whole other thing. Although there were always "gentlemen's clubs," where you might have topless and bottomless all day, but then some kind of headliner would come in. But it was never the same atmosphere that was in the 1950s, where striptease was almost a cabaret.

Let's go to the 19th century when striptease was invented in -- Paris, wasn't it?

I would argue that striptease is an American invention. There is a very commercial aspect to it that I would consider very American. Now when you think of Paris you're talking about the cancan and Moulin Rouge.

I remember reading that some Parisian artist model took her clothes off in a cabaret and the audience dug it.

Striptease probably came out of the collision of Orientalism and vaudeville trying to adapt it. There was this idea of an Oriental woman -- barbarian, sexually free, open, available, colonized -- Oriental women were huge in vaudeville.

Don't you think it can also be seen as a reaction against the "binding" of women by the corset? When was the corset invented?

They say Crete because of little figurines that wore them. But that's not really the Western corset. It goes back to the 15th century -- they were really just supposed to make you rigid. Then as the technology evolved you could make more of a waist with it. It's not until the late 19th century that you get the boning that can displace everything above and below the waist.

So striptease was invented during a time when wealthy women were wearing tons of stuff, like corsets and bustles and slips.

One history places the first striptease in France at the 1896 World's Fair where an exhibit ran called "A French Woman Goes to Bed." It was just a show of a woman taking off all her stuff and getting into bed. Then later you have the Dance of the Seven Veils at a time when the corset is going out of style. After the corset went away, women were wearing less and less, and you had this problem of just flesh. It's not much different from now, where you are supposed to be firm and toned, and not supposed to expose extra weight.

[A woman walks by the window with an absurd pair of breasts jutting out like watermelons.]

I just finished reading a book on the history of plastic surgery and breast argumentation, which goes back to the 19th century. The first boob job is 1896. And there are things like paraffin injections that go back to the 1910s.

They injected their breasts with paraffin?

Paraffin, mixed with vegetable oil. It's really no less gross than silicone. There had been implants in the 1950s, and there had been problems with them, but then in the 1980s suddenly it was OK to get boob jobs. I think it was related to the feminist movement. Suddenly it was OK for women to make this "decision" for "themselves." Doctors used the rhetoric, "This is a decision you are making for you, you big powerful woman you." It was amazing until the bubble burst -- as it were -- with all the conflict of implants in the late '90s.

I am as American as any guy, but I am not obsessed with large breasts. I used to think the whole 1950s obsession with big breasts was a mom's mammary
obsession, but it came to me that big breasts are the one erogenous zone that can never be hidden by clothing. Men didn't realize they were obsessed with the idea of breasts, rather than the actual breast revealed.

I think the emphasis on breasts in striptease is just this whole shaking, moving jelly body -- the emphasis on "bigger is better" is about what registers from the stage. You might be 50 feet back in the room. A good stripper has to have a body that registers in the back of the theater.

Who invented pasties?

I don't know. It probably goes back to the 19th century. Before there were pasties there were "fleshings" -- full-body stockings. Pasties are an obvious thing, a jokey piece of stage business. But I don't know who invented it.

What about a performer revealing pubic hair?

It wasn't as much of a problem as it is now. Remember that Black Crows record cover that showed a girl wearing an American flag bikini bottom and she had big pubic hair coming down her legs. It had to be airbrushed out in America, but not in Europe. [She shakes her head.] It is much more of a problem now. The whole "landing strip" line of hair -- I don't get that at all.

The whole "landing strip"?

It's like a line. Everything is gone except for that line. I call it the landing strip. [Pause.] During the many obscenity trials that the Minsky brothers went through in the late 1930s, they brought in these fake merkin things and claimed that these were what their dancers were really wearing, and they hadn't been completely naked at all. Morton Minsky later said, "I don't know of any women who wore anything like that." So I think there was full nudity in the 1930s, and it was a problem.

How did striptease and prostitution intersect?

That's a really interesting question that I couldn't get into as much as I wanted to in the book. There is no such thing as prostitution in the 19th century as a legal category. If you were a certain type of woman you may be called a prostitute. There was a lot of casual prostitution in the 19th century. There were tenderloin districts and full brothels, but prostitution wasn't something you could get arrested for like you can now. It was a weird amorphous zone for women who weren't quite "right." At the same time, there was the whole Storyville thing in New Orleans. The city didn't make prostitution legal in Storyville. They just made it illegal everywhere else in the city.

So it was a restrictive act, not a liberation?

Exactly.

How did the audience for striptease change over a century?

I had a terrible time about this in my book because I would read about vaudeville, and then I'd read about burlesque, and these were separate things,
but then when you read the Broadway theater reviews in the 1910s you realize all these things overlap. Something you could do on the "legitimate" stage at Ziegfeld in the 1920s would be called striptease if you did it on the Bowery. So this dictates who is going to see it. In the 1920s and 1930s, a woman and her husband might go out to see a star strip, especially if she was in the context of a couple or more cabaret acts. By the 1950s, there were stars and there were the B-drinking girls who got paid for the number of drinks they got patrons to buy. Striptease was for businessmen and bachelor parties, very similar to what you would think about now.

Pretty much after the 1980s, any kind of striptease was ironic. I remember going to the Kitchen to see this woman strip out of a lobster suit. She thought she was making an ironic statement, but I just wanted to see her naked body. A naked woman is never ironic.

Good for you. She probably wanted to be seen naked, too. You were in on the joke. That's the thing with the new burlesque people right now because their goal is ironic and being in on the joke and being seen as well as being sexual. It overlaps with drag queens and queer culture. It's OK to want to be sexual and be funny, which hearkens back to original striptease.

A naked woman may be funny, but never ironic!

Those naked women were being funny a lot of the time. Gypsy Rose Lee was a comedienne, and beautiful, and willing to strip and she did really interesting things. Someone like Blaze Star, who had all these set pieces -- like a couch that went up in smoke -- she must have known that was funny and hokey. That's a big part that people don't remember that [strippers] were being funny. And in the cabaret, you'd have strip, and juggle, and a comedian, and maybe another stripper.

The whole art of early 20th century striptease was a bubble dance/fan dance when you never really saw as much as you thought you saw.

There was a lot of nudity in the 1930s, but that was squashed, so by the 1950s you had pasties. In the 1930s Minsky would have his girls come off the stage and walk among the audience. That is the key point; when the performer is in the middle of everybody you get the sudden shift in what could be seen and what could be performed. Then in the 1960s, go-go dancing brought people together. My mom was actually a go-go dancer for a pizza place for a week. Her friend, who was very buxom, was asked to work there, and she wouldn't work there unless my mom went with her. My mom only lasted a week. She got fired for being a sharp-tongued lady. I'm proud of her for that, both dancing and getting fired.

Have you yourself done a striptease?

Oh no. I had some friends in the late 1980s who did it for a week. To start to strip at Scores is like being a waitress with better tips. You're on your feet all day, and you have to put up with people who aren't that great. I have a friend who is a stripper in New Orleans, and the rest of her life is devoted to bodybuilding, and dieting, and her hair and doing nails.

Does she actually strip or does she just dance naked on a pole?

She strips. Some people come onstage in less than others, especially young girls who tend to get into costumes. My friend is someone who has been at it for a long time, so she goes out in a spandex kind of dress, and then goes around to do lap dancing. As for me doing "new burlesque," I don't know if I'm up for
it. All the girls I know who do it up here are spectacularly buxom. [She looks down at her chest.] I don't know. I'm a married girl so I've got to go talk to my husband about it. [She looks up and laughs.]

About the writer: David Bowman is the author of the novel "Bunny Modern" and the nonfiction book "This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century."