{ Pre-photoshopped Playboy centerfolds }

Here’s the official line on the prize from The Literary Review:

The Bad Sex Awards were inaugurated in 1993 in order to draw attention to, and hopefully discourage, poorly written, redundant or crude passages of a sexual nature in fiction. The intention is not to humiliate.

(…)

And Adam Ross also made the short list for the well-regarded novel “Mr. Peanut,” which includes:

“Love me!” she moaned lustily. “Oh, Ward! Love me now!”

He jumped out from his pajama pants so acrobatically it was like a stunt from Cirque du Soleil. But when he went to remove her slip, she said, “Leave it!” which turned him on even more. He buried his face into Hannah’s cunt like a wanderer who’d found water in the desert. She tasted like a hot biscuit flavored with pee.

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

According to Slashdot and some awesome guy named Big Alan (AKA Alan Hirsch):

… the key to a man’s heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch’s study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. “Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions,” said Hirsch.

{ OmniBrain/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Young Kyu Yoo }

It’s time modern women got down on our knees for something other than a yoga class — to really worship his penis. (…) How do you practice phallus worship? Make love to his penis. Not him, his penis. (…)

Perfect BJ Prep
First: Get down on your knees, grasp that big boy and look at it. Have you ever really done that? A penis is a beautiful thing. Each one is a different work of art.

{ Susan Crain Bakos /Lemon Drop | Continue reading }

You think it would be really fun to have sex with me. Because, I think you can tell from my posts, I’ll do anything. But maybe you can also tell from my posts that it’s a little bit weird. Because you know that I’ll say anything, too.

Asperger Syndrome compromises one’s ability to read nonverbal social cues. A simple example of this deficit is answering the question, “How are you?” It is loaded with so many nonverbal issues that I simply freeze. Even if you tell me, “Just say fine,” sometimes the situation looks special to me, and I can’t figure out why it’s special, so I can’t talk.

So I’ve spent my life teaching myself the rules for what to do in each social situation. I study people, make notes for myself, and then test the notes to see what other situations my notes apply to. (…)

When I think about my sexual history, I think it is me basically not understanding that there are rules.

In college, where most people are experimenting with the rules of sex, I was missing them. Maybe because I was raised by my grandma, I honestly believed that if you had sex, it meant you were getting married. So I lost my virginity to a guy who said he’d marry me.

And on that day, I had no idea how sex worked. I don’t know why I had not bothered to find out.

He was propped up on his arms when he couldn’t find my vagina with his penis, so he said, “Put me inside.”

I said, “What?”

“Inside you. Use your hand.”

“I don’t know where the hole is.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“There are a lot of holes down there. I don’t know which one is for sex.”

“You are so stupid.”

He eventually put his penis in. He said, “Am I in?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

Then he came. And I returned to doing homework. (…)

So then I get married. The first time. We both have Asperger’s. We both like reading about sex, but having it is more traumatic. He would not go down on me, so I started writing obsessively about his not going down on me. (…)

We had sex two times in six years after we had a kid. And I got pregnant both times because I have studied my ovulation since I was 24, and I’m an ace at sticking my finger up my vagina and 1) gauging how open my cervix is and 2) pulling out some mucus on my finger and checking to see how elastic it is.

Even now I can’t help getting excited about ovulation. Go to the bathroom right now and check your cervical mucus. It’s fascinating. If it’s elastic you are ovulating. I can peg my ovulation to the hour if I check every half-hour, which I can do because I can stick my hand in my vagina anywhere—even in a job interview, if the person leaves the room to get some water. So that’s why I was able to have a kid (and a miscarriage) only having sex two times. (…)

And now, here I am with the farmer.

At this point, sex should be low pressure for me. I am one of the one percent of women who can have an orgasm just by thinking about having an orgasm. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because my mom taught me to do Kegel exercises before I even got my first period. I can orgasm ten times before the guy has one.

{ Penelope’s Trunk | Continue reading }

photo { Christophe Kutner }

An Irish jury awarded nearly $14 million in damages on Thursday to a man who claimed that his former employers had slandered him by insinuating that he had made improper advances to a female colleague during a business trip.

The man, Donal Kinsella, insisted that he had been sleepwalking during a trip to Mozambique in 2007 when he showed up, naked, at the door of a female colleague’s hotel room three times in one night, The Irish Times reported.

He later filed suit against the mining company that employed him at the time because it had referred to the incident in a press release explaining why he had been asked to resign from the company’s audit committee, on which the same female colleague served.

During the trial, the court heard that Mr. Kinsella had also been drinking and taking painkillers on the night in question.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ Ixone Sádaba }

Raymond Moore recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.

Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

photo { Barnaby Roper }

Researchers create ‘lesbian’ mice by deleting a single gene.

Deletion of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene causes masculinization of the mouse brain, so that female mice lacking the gene avoid the advances of males and try to mate with other females instead. The findings probably have little relavence to human sexual orientation, however.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

painting { Atilla Adorján }

The physiology of the dream state may be one reason why sexual content is so often reported. In the REM state, our muscles are in paralysis but the body is in a state of excitement.  Even though sleep paralysis doesn’t feel like a dream, it has been shown in the lab that the expeirence occurs during REM intrusion after awakening or just after falling asleep. In REM sleep, whenever it occurs, men typically get erections, and women’s genitalia become engorged. Orgasms have been documented countless times in dream labs, and in sexual lucid dreams it is possible to experience orgasm too.  Dreaming sleep is simply a sexy place to be.

Even when we are scared, and sometimes because we are scared, sexual excitement does not diminish.  Sexuality and terror are deeply intertwined, neurologically speaking. So it’s not that outlandish to believe the medieval court documents in which men tell of being forced to have sex with mysterious she-demons and witches, even though this testimony was used in service of misogyny and the destruction of indigenous religious practices.

{ Dream Studies | Continue reading }

An incubus (from the Latin, incubo, or nightmare) is a demon in male form who, according to a number of mythological and legendary traditions, lies upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have sex with them. Its female counterpart is the succubus.

An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, as in the legend of Merlin. Religious tradition holds that repeated intercourse with an incubus or succubus may result in the deterioration of health, or even death.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ The country’s first abortion ban based on the belief in fetal pain took effect this week in Nebraska. | Images: Illustrated Birth Control Manual, 1957 }

{ 1. 2029 | Thanks Daemian | 2. Mimi }

According to the research, over 95% of males have masturbated to orgasm by age 20, compared to around 60% of women (with some studies suggesting an even larger gap).

The discrepancy with regard to masturbation is doubly problematic because masturbation, it turns out, is a particularly important predictor of sexual health and happiness for women, more so then for men. One of the best predictors of whether a woman will be able to achieve orgasm in her sexual relations is a history of masturbation in adolescence.

Why such a gap? One reason may be men’s higher sex drive. If you define sex drive as preoccupation with sexual behavior and thoughts, including sex crimes and paraphilias, then men routinely manifest higher levels of it than women. Such elevated interest may lead to higher masturbation rates. Structural differences may also play a role. A penis is highly accessible and regularly handled in the act of urination, which may lead to greater familiarity with its potential uses. (…)

According to Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, masturbation was not a topic of great interest to the powers that be until 1712, when a con man named John Marten anonymously published a book spectacularly entitled: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both sexes Considered…

{ PsychologyToday | Continue reading }

photo { Nobuyoshi Araki }

Now, medical professionals have known for a very long time that the vagina is an ideal route for drug delivery. The reason for this is that the vagina is surrounded by an impressive vascular network. Arteries, blood vessels, and lymphatic vessels abound, and—unlike some other routes of drug administration—chemicals that are absorbed through the vaginal walls have an almost direct line to the body’s peripheral circulation system. So it makes infinite sense, argue Gallup and Burch, that like any artificially-derived chemical substance inserted into the vagina via medical pessary, semen might also have certain chemical properties that tweak female biology. (…)

semen has a very complicated chemical profile, containing over 50 different compounds (including hormones, neurotransmitters, endorphins and immunosupressants) each with a special function and occurring in different concentrations within the seminal plasma. Perhaps the most striking of these compounds is the bundle of mood-enhancing chemicals in semen. There is good in this goo. Such anxiolytic chemicals include, but are by no means limited to, cortisol (known to increase affection), estrone (which elevates mood), prolactin (a natural antidepressant), oxytocin (also elevates mood), thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent) and even serotonin (perhaps the most well-known antidepressant neurotransmitter).

Given these ingredients—and this is just a small sample of the mind-altering “drugs” found in human semen—Gallup and Burch, along with psychologist Steven Platek, now at the University of Liverpool, hypothesized that women having unprotected sex should be less depressed than suitable control participants.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

illustration { Sen Hesse }

Over the last century, 98pc of the world’s tiger population has been wiped out, first by big game hunters, and latterly by poachers, who kill these magnificent creatures and hack them to pieces.

And for what? Well, money, for one thing. The rarer tigers become, the more valuable they are to the poachers, who sell their bones and organs on the black market for traditional Chinese medicines. (…) which is said to have aphrodisiac qualities. (…)

Scientific studies have shown that the claims made for tiger penises are, if you’ll pardon the expression, bollocks. But so far that’s failed to prevent the carnage escalating.

There are only a few thousand tigers left in the wild. They could well disappear off the face of the planet within 10 years.

{ The Evening Herald | Continue reading }

It is a cliché that the brain is the “largest sex organ,” but the repetition of the phrase doesn’t make it any less true. The mechanics of its role during sex are less obvious and less well understood than that of the body’s other sex organs, but by using brain imaging scans, neuroscientists have begun to get a sense of what parts of the brain light up during sex, especially at the moment of orgasm. (…)

One early study of orgasms suggests that the subjective experience of orgasm is very similar between men and women. Despite having different anatomies, men and women seem to be hard-wired to experience sexual pleasure in the same way. But does this translate to a similarity in the brain? (…)

Much more so than men’s brains, female brains go mysteriously silent during orgasm. In particular, the left lateral orbitofronal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, areas involved in self-control and social judgment, respectively, are deactivated. Brain activity also fell in the amygdala, suggesting a similar, albeit more drastic, drop in vigilance and emotion as in men. “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” Holstege was quoted as saying.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

painting { Mark Sheinkman, Lourel, 2010 | oil, alkyd and graphite on linen }