The explosive lawsuit alleges on January 16, 2012, Travolta picked up the masseur in a black Lexus SUV, which had “Trojan condoms in the console of the vehicle” and the duo went to a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. […] The masseuse tried to complete the deep tissue massage, but the lawsuit alleges, “Travolta, had removed his draping and was masturbating. Travolta’s penis was fully erect, and was roughly 8 inches in length, and his pubic hair was wirey and unkempt. […] The documents state that Travolta said there was a Hollywood actress staying at the hotel that “wanted three way sex, and wanted to be double penetrated.” Travolta said they could have that later, but first they needed to have sex together before calling her, so this way they would be in-sync with each other sexually.

{ Radar | Continue reading }

Sex addiction is big business, there is an American Society of Addictive Medicine that says addiction is a “chronic brain disorder” but this is unsupported by research. There are many clinics where the wealthy (males) can go to be cured. About 900 people have been certified as sex addiction therapists (CSAT) at a cost of about $5000. Chapter 4 covers this well.

Check out Chapter 3, Valley Girl Science, for an interesting view of sex addiction being “like” so many other things. If you are feeling sexy, go to Chapter 6. Chapter 13 is “The Ignored Aspects of Masculinity” where the sex addiction field focuses on men as intrinsically selfish, focused on “scoring” and virility. It ignores the part of men that are seeking love and trying their best to please their partners. This is an especially powerful chapter. Actually, there are no chapters in this book that you would want to skip over.

{ Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality | Continue reading }

photo { Lee Friedlander, R. O. Blechman, New York City, 1968 }

Are straight people born that way? (…) We have to start with a more fundamental question: What do we mean when we say someone is “straight”? At the most basic level, we seem to be imagining female bodies that are specifically sexually aroused by male bodies, and vice versa.

Laboratory studies (…) suggest that, while such people probably do exist — at least in North America, where many sexologists have focused their attentions – it’s not uncommon for straight-identified people to be at least a little aroused by the idea of same-sex relations.

The media has tended to broadcast the news that gay-identified men and straight-identified men have quite discernible arousal patterns when they are shown various kinds of sexual stimuli. And that’s true. But if you look closely at the data, you’ll see that most straight-identified men do tend to show a little bit of arousal across sex categories (as do gay-identified men).

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

painting { Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856 }

The first perspective produces legislative atrocities like the proposed New York City bill that would have penalized taxi drivers for transporting prostitutes. (…)

I’m in favor of legalizing all forms of sex work for adults—not because I think it’s necessarily such great work, but because I think being a legal worker is better than being an illegal worker.

{ Jacobin | Continue reading }

Despite what’s written in sex advice books, the scientific search for the female erogenous zone known as the G-spot has proved surprisingly elusive. But now one physician claims to have found the first anatomical evidence of the fabled structure.

Gynecologist Adam Ostrzenski of the Institute of Gynecology Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla., reports online April 25 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that a surgical dissection revealed a sac of erectile tissue in the front wall of a woman’s vagina that Ostrzenski believes is the G-spot. If he’s correct, the discovery might help pave the way for therapies to treat female sexual dysfunction, Ostrzenski says.

Yet several respected sex researchers, including one who helped name the G-spot, are skeptical of the claim. (…)

In the new study, Ostrzenski dissected the vaginal wall of an 83-year-old woman who had died of a head injury less than 24 hours earlier.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

photo { Pina Bausch, Bluebeard, 1977 }

{ 1.Francesco Ercolini | 2. Calla }

quote { Pierre Louÿs, Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l’usage des maisons d’éducation, 1926-1927 | full text | Wikipedia }

Why should we deal with pornography from a feminist perspective? The answer to this question is straightforward. Pornography is the key mass media genre in which sexuality is made visible and performed. Sexuality, on the other hand, is one of the main areas where gender and gender relations are negotiated. In this article, I will examine different – and in particular conflicting – feminist positions with respect to pornography which have been developed from the 1970s until today. The focus will be on the issue of the construction of sexual and gender identities. I will analyze how these identities in regards to the pornographic body are negotiated or even shifted within these different feminist discourses and practices. Dildos and cyborgs will be discussed in the final part of this article, which deals with current queer-feminist debates in the field of so called post-porn.

At the beginning of the seventies, in a phase of almost complete legalization of pornography in most of the western countries, the pornographic movie left the underground and was allowed into new public spheres. Pornography as a film genre developed into a mass product and was increasingly available even in cinemas. It was during that period that the sexual revolution came to an end, or rather began to transform itself into something new.

{ Gender Forum | Continue reading }

image { James Victore }

Victorian-era doctors disliked dealing with female patients. This highly masculinized profession saw women as overly emotional and barely capable of rational discussion of their bodies. (…)

One of women’s most common medical conditions was broadly called “hysteria.” By this, doctors meant any number of symptoms that described “irrational” female complaints. (…)

Male doctors found their hysterical and neurasthenic patients especially frustrating. Many doctors suggested that women would feel better if they engaged in sexual intercourse until its natural conclusion with a male orgasm. But given the ineffectiveness of vaginal penetration in satisfying many women, doctors resorted to other solutions. Doctors manually massaged the women’s clitoris until she achieved relief, i.e. experienced an orgasm, although it was not recognized as such. Annoyed doctors complained that it took women forever to achieve this relief; moreover, they thought this condition beneath their respectable professional demeanor to treat. On the other hand, the repeat business of these women was good for their pocketbooks.

Beginning in 1869, inventors developed steam-powered massage machines for medical offices. By 1900, doctors had a wide variety of devices to choose from, helping relieve the tedium of digitally massaging female patients. Even better from medical professionals’ perspective was the invention of a hand-held vibrator in 1905, allowing women to treat their own hysteria without visiting a physician. Soon, companies began advertising for the home vibrators.

{ AlterNet | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

It’s a debate that’s been running since at least the days of Sigmund Freud: Can women climax from vaginal stimulation alone? And is there any difference between so-called clitoral and vaginal orgasms?

Now, a new series of essays lays out the evidence that vaginal and clitoral orgasms are, in fact, separate phenomena, activating different areas of the brain and perhaps revealing key psychological differences between women.  (…)

Arguably, unraveling the mystery of whether vaginal orgasms exist should be simple: Ask women if they have them. But in practice, it’s a bit harder to tease out the exact sexual stimulation that leads to orgasm. French gynecologist Odile Buisson argues in her Journal of Sexual Medicine essay, for example, that the front wall of the vagina is inextricably linked with the internal parts of the clitoris; stimulating the vagina without activating the clitoris may be next to impossible.

Other research, however, would tend to suggest two distinct types of female orgasm. Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers University has conducted multiple studies in which women masturbate while having their brains scanned with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The results show which sensory brain areas activate in response to stimulation. (…)

Most provocatively, some research links vaginal-only orgasms with both physical and mental health. The research is correlational, so it’s not entirely clear whether healthier women are prone to vaginal orgasms, whether vaginal orgasms somehow promote health, or whether some unknown factor links the two.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Red seems to affect us in a way that other colors don’t. (…)

Johns and colleagues test an hypothesis for why red on women looks so attractive to me. The hypothesis is that red is sexy because it reminds men of… lady parts. (…) One version of the hypothesis is that as females are approaching ovulation, the vulva becomes more red than is is at other points in the cycle.

If this “red is code for female sex organs” hypothesis is true, you might predict that men would judge female genitals as more attractive as they became more red.

Explicit images of anatomically normal, un-retouched, nonpornographic, similarly-orientated female genitals were surprisingly difficult to obtain… We selected photographs that … did not contain other, potentially distracting, objects (fingers, sex toys, piercings etc.) and were hairless to account for current fashion.

They showed their pictures to 40 males. Most of the men were in their 20s. (…) They rated the attractiveness of each image.

The ratings of attractiveness were the exact opposite of those predicted by the signalling hypothesis. The reddest images were rated the least attractive.

The authors are then tasked to come up with an hypothesis as to why redness is less attractive. Their suggestion is that red is suggestive of menstrual blood.

{ NeuroDojo | Continue reading }

After my hopes of having sex with my lesbian friends were dashed, there was a lot of talk about how exactly I would catch and transport my sperm to them for insemination. (…)

It’s four in the morning and I’m sitting in front of my computer trying to jerk off into a disposable plastic container.

{ Davis Williams/Hippocampus Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Réka Ebergényi by Eric Fischer }

While sex purges our genome of harmful mutations and pushes biodiversity, it’s a costly exercise for the average organism. (…)

Their new estimates for the origins of reliable eukaryotic fossils now rest at 1.78 to 1.68 billion years ago, and this is where we must currently park the idea of when sex first became popular.

The age-old question that follows is why did sexual reproduction begin? Why didn’t life just keep evolving through cloning and asexual budding systems? (…)

Sex is not an efficient way of sharing genes. When we mate sexually we combine only 50% of our genetic material with our partner’s, whereas asexually budding organisms have 100% of their genetic material carried into the next generation. And Otto highlights what biologists call the ‘cost’ of sex, in that sexually reproducing organisms need to produce twice as many offspring as asexual organisms or they lose out in the population race.

Despite these drawbacks, evolution has shaped the living world in such a way that few large creatures today actually reproduce asexually (only about 0.1% of all living organisms, excluding bacteria). Sex generates variation, and that is certainly a good thing when dealing with constant and unpredictable changes in our environment.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

By all rights, sex shouldn’t exist. Ask most non-biologists what sex is “for,” and they’d probably answer “reproduction,” but they’d be wrong.

In fact, sex is quite simply a terrible way to reproduce.

The reality is that living things can easily make babies without sex, and many do just that. Lots of animals breed asexually, via parthenogenesis (development of an unfertilized egg, without any involvement by males); the list includes many insects, crustaceans, rotifers, flatworms, snails, even some vertebrates including certain species of shark, lizard and the occasional bird.  And it’s quite common in plants.

The evolutionary conundrum is that compared to asexual reproduction, breeding sexually poses a daunting number of disadvantages, so many, in fact, that a number of highly regarded evolutionary theorists have concluded rather glumly that sex may actually be a biological liability, something that we—and other species as well—are regrettably stuck with.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

sculpture { Bernini, The Rape of Proserpina, 1621-22 }

Previous studies identified a number of common cycling injuries, including neck and back pain, chafing, and genital numbness. In fact, 50 to 91% of men and women cyclists report experiencing genital numbness. The relationship between bicycle setup and genital sensation in women cyclists, however, has, until now, not been investigated.

In order to study this relationship, scientists (…) recruited 41 female cyclists who rode an average of at least 10 miles per week, and who positioned their handlebars lower than or level with the saddle. (…)

The Medoc Vibratory Sensory Analyzer 3000, not your average vibrator, was used to measure sensation at eight genital regions: the clitoris, the left and right perineum, the anterior and posterior vagina, the left and right labia, and the urethra.

(…)

This increase in perineum saddle pressure resulted in a significant loss of genital sensation in the anterior vagina and in the left labia, where the threshold at which women were able to sense genital stimulation increased by 34% and 29% respectively in women with lower handlebars.

{ Salamander Hours | Continue reading }

University of Alberta study explores women’s experiences of public change rooms and locker rooms; finds many don’t relish the experience of being naked in front of others.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

In recent years, a small number of researchers have been working to develop the science of post-coitus.

{ Salon | Continue reading }

Sperm Can Do ‘Calculus’ to Calculate Calcium Dynamics and React Accordingly

Sperm have only one aim: to find the egg. The egg supports the sperm in their quest by emitting attractants. Calcium ions determine the beating pattern of the sperm tail which enables the sperm to move. Scientists have discovered that sperm react to changes in calcium concentration, but not to the calcium concentration itself. Probably sperm make this calculation so that they remain capable of maneuvering even in the presence of high calcium concentrations.

{ Science Daily | Continue reading }

quote { Barnard, Columbia at War Over Obama, Feminazis, and Cum Dumpsters | via Joe! }

Although female orgasms were reportedly most commonly experienced during foreplay, their vocalizations were reported to occur most frequently before and simultaneous with male ejaculation. So basically the women’s sex noises most frequently accompanied their partner’s orgasm. Why? It turns out, it’s because they wanted to help their partners out. Sixty-six percent reported making noise to accelerate their partner’s ejaculation. Ninety-two percent believed these vocalizations upped their partner’s self-esteem (87 percent reported vocalizing for this purpose). Other reported reasons included speeding things up, “to relieve discomfort/pain, boredom, and fatigue in equal proportion, as well as because of time limitations.”

{ Salon | Continue reading }

photo { Johan Renck }

It’s estimated that 1% of the world’s population is asexual, although research is limited. Annette and others like her have never and probably will never experience sexual attraction. She has been single her whole life, something she repeatedly says that she is more than happy about. (…)

Listen to asexual people talk about everyday life and you realise they face social minefields that don’t affect people of other sexualities. “Living in a world that holds the romantic and the sexual as the highest ideals possible is difficult,” says Bryony, a 20-year-old biology student from Manchester. “The most pervasive effect on my life at the moment, as a student, is how many conversations revolve around sex and the sexual attractiveness of certain people that I just don’t really want to join in with.”

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

related { Some people never find the love of their lives. And live to tell about it. }

First of all, shemale is a derogatory term. (…)

Of course tops who want to penetrate have to keep their penises. Since I’m a bottom I want to be penetrated vaginally, which is why I am going to have my penis removed.

{ Arts & Opinion | Continue reading }

First she hired T-Symmetric, at the time when she was banging asses in video booths for 50 bucks a pop. She learned bondage by doing it and before long she could make the Williamsburg Bridge out of ropes.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

photo { Joe Skilton }

May 31, 1884: John Harvey Kellogg patents flaked cereal. (…) He was highly incensed by masturbation and campaigned zealously, if not rabidly, for its discontinuation. He warned that masturbation caused acne and recommended the “treatment” of carbolic acid on the clitoris in order to stop females from participating in the unsavory practice. Carbolic acid is very dangerous when applied to skin.

{ Little Bits of History | Continue reading | Wikipedia }

photo { Steven Meisel }