Sex educator and pornographer Tristan Taormino will be the host at the U.S. debut of "The Feminist Porn Show” sponsored by the She Bop female-friendly sex boutique in Portland on June 5.

Show organizers said the event, to be held at the Mississippi Studios, will showcase feminist porn's growing movement.

Taormino will introduce the audience to the concept of feminist porn and discuss its history, along with a screening of selected short clips from filmmakers around the world.

Taormino told XBIZ, “I think it's [feminist porn] gaining serious momentum. The Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto were bigger and more sophisticated this year than ever before. There are new filmmakers on the scene and there is a sense of community among the directors, producers, performers, retailers and fans who support feminist porn.”

The clip show features the work of both pioneers and newcomers, including Fatale Video, Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Jackie Strano and Shar Rednour, Petra Joy, Erika Lust, Shine Louise Houston, Anna Brownfield, Carlos Batts, N. Maxwell Lander, Emilie Jouvet, Louise Lush, Jaiya, Maria Beatty, Buck Angel, Madison Young, Courtney Trouble, Morty Diamond, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Kelly Shibari, Loree Erickson and more.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion exploring current issues surrounding feminist porn.

“Tristan Taormino is a leader in the growing feminist porn movement, and the show she has put together is fantastic. We are so thrilled to bring her to Portland for its U.S. debut. We know people will find it inspiring, thought-provoking, and very sexy,” Evy Cowan, co-owner of She Bop said.

A pre-show featuring a sexy performance by Felice Shays will also be presented.

DVDs from the featured filmmakers and Taormino will be on sale. The host will also be available for signings.

A show after party is also scheduled at the adjoining Bar Bar.

Tickets are $25 and available at She Bop, 909 N. Beech Street, at Mississippi Studios, 3939 N. Mississippi, ($1 box office fee), or online via Ticket Biscuit ($4.40 service charge).

Forthcoming in the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 2012
Bonnie Mann, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oregon

The burdens of poverty affect most, if not all aspects, of social relations. Most prominently (and unsurprisingly), women carry the greatest burden of the social predicaments that arise from a dire lack of economic security.  Women in groups hit hardest by financial strain easily become seen as sources of further strain on their families. Education is often either inaccessible or seen as an unnecessary part of a young girl’s growth and life.

This is not always necessarily the case, as there is much evidence that shows support of girl-child education by, specifically, mothers who realize the role education can play in providing a better life for their children. Yet, despite this, in many instances across the world (primarily in developing countries, but not limited to them), young girls are forced to accept the strain upon their families that they are perceived to pose. This position can lead many young girls, either by coercion by family or by “choice,” onto the road towards prostitution, sex slavery, or even suicide.  Yet perhaps the most common result is marriage.

An article published earlier this month on EurasiaNet explores the impact of poverty on “early marriage” in Tajikistan. The article cites a recent study by the Eurasia Foundation that looks at the issue of “informal justice” in Tajikistan. While looking at a variety of issues, the article dedicates a good amount to gender relations, specifically the issue of non-state-administered justice for women in unregistered marriages, which come in a variety of flavors, one of which is early marriage. Marriage before the age of 18 is illegal under Tajik law and subject to harsh punishment.

However, it is commonly practiced and encouraged by many religious clerics who not only feel it is sanctioned within Islam but also believe it to be a solution to the problems of poverty faced by women in a country ravaged by years of war.

Daniel Kruger and Susan Hughes, evolutionary psychologists at the University of Michigan and Albright College in Pennsylvania who have been working on uncovering the secrets of post-sex behavior. “There is so much attention, in the popular literature in psychology and even in evolutionary research, looking at everything leading up to the act of sex,” said Kruger. “But then there isn’t anything about what happens after.  It’s as if the attitude is, ‘oh, of course sex is the end goal, right?’ We’re making the point that the time that couples spend together after sex is an important part of healthy sexual relationships.”

Counter to popular opinion, a dated study, and the great wisdom of many lady mags, researchers have not found that men fall asleep faster than women after sex. In fact, according to a recent study of heterosexual pairings by Kruger and Hughes, a woman is just as likely as a man to be out first. But — and here’s the interesting part — regardless of gender, the partner who stayed awake longer reported that they weren’t getting enough post-sex hugging, kissing or talking – what evolutionary psychologists call “pair bonding” activities. (Somehow, Marie Claire got this exactly, 100 percent wrong.)

Both Kruger and Hughes are interested in what the post-sex sleep study says about male behavior. “This shows that men are concerned about partner bonding too,” said Kruger. “Human males are notable among primates for their high levels of paternal investment, so men may have a lot to lose as well if their partner leaves them.”

And what about the other activities people move on to after sex, like hanging out in bed, ordering Chinese food, or smoking a cigarette? Earlier in 2011 Kruger and Hughes published a report in the Journal of Sex Research, considering a wider range of after-sex impulses. In that case they found that our post-coital behaviors – again considering only heterosexual sex – tend to split along gender lines. Eating, fixing yourself a drink, smoking and asking your partner for favors – all activities that sound pretty good to me – were more likely to be taken on by the men. The women, in this case, placed greater importance on behaviors related to intimacy, like cuddling and “professing their love.”

The researchers interpret these results as related to the women’s need for “pair bonding.” Men in the survey were said to be more interested in gaining “extrinsic rewards” after sex – getting a new high from food, alcohol, cigarettes or some other non-sexual activity – or, in trying to have more sex.

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.

As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.’

This gem comes from the Spring 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, entitled Means of Communication, which previously delighted us with the first usages of famous words

WAC 314-11-050
No agency filings affecting this section since 2003
What types of conduct are prohibited on a premises with a liquor license?

  


(1) Licensees may not allow, permit, or encourage employees (including him or herself) to:       (a) Be unclothed or in such attire, costume, or clothing as to expose to view any portion of the breast below the top of the areola or of any portion of the pubic hair, anus, cleft of the buttocks, vulva, or genitals. 
(2) Licensees may not allow, permit, or encourage any person (including him or herself) on the licensed premises to:       (a) Perform acts of or acts which simulate, or use artificial devices or inanimate objects which depict;

•     Sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, or any sexual acts which are prohibited by law;

•     The touching, caressing, or fondling of the breast, buttocks, anus or genitals; or

•     The displaying of the pubic hair, anus, vulva, or genitals. 
        (b) Show any film, still picture, electronic reproduction, or other visual reproduction that depicts pornography, or a sexual act prohibited by law.

Three years after the voluntary medical male circumcision (MC) campaign rolled out in the Orange Farm Township in South Africa, the first “real world” results are available showing a marked reduction of HIV acquisition among circumcised adult men with a 55 percent lower HIV prevalence (proportion of HIV-infected people) among circumcised men compared to their uncircumcised counterparts and overall reduction in HIV incidence (the number of new cases) among men 15 to 34 years old of 76 percent.

Earlier randomized controlled studies have shown medical male circumcision to reduce the risk of men acquiring HIV through vaginal sex by up to 60 percent. It is rare indeed for on-the-ground implementation of an intervention to yield even greater efficacy than was measured in a randomized clinical trial.

The ANRS 12126 trial involved 110,000 adults and shows MC roll-out is effective at the community level in curbing the spread of HIV. The free service was offered to all willing male residents 16 years of age and older.

More than 25 separate studies in the past two decades find that marital quality takes a dive with a baby's birth: babies raise stress, reduce happiness and otherwise upset the household, experts say. The movie, out Friday, points to that in a tagline: "Love. Happiness. Kids. Pick two."
"Kids do lower marital satisfaction and there's not much we seem to be able to do to prevent it," says Brian Doss, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. He is among researchers whose intervention studies haven't succeeded in stopping sharp declines in relationship satisfaction. "The fact that we've been largely unsuccessful may suggest it's a really difficult and tough experience and it's not necessarily a deficit in these couples' relationships or how they're approaching it."
Ninety percent of the 218 couples in an eight-year study Doss co-authored experienced a decline in satisfaction, he says.

Showcasing how ignorance is a life-threatening, clear and present danger, a "Virginia school district is considering banning cross-gender dressing in a move proponents said aims to protect students from harassment," Matthew Ward reports. The ban is being considered "after teachers […] said some male students were dressing like girls, prompting complaints from other students."

Although wanting to protect youth from harm is noble, misguided bans on expression are functionally equivalent to censorship, and serve no protective purpose. Worse, ignorance of gender diversity "could actually make the students more susceptible to bullying," not less, according to the executive director of Equality Virginia, James Parrish. "They're calling it cross-dressing, but if [one wears] clothes that reflect their gender identity [then] that's appropriate gender dressing," he said.

The increasing popularity of intermarriage. About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%). Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out. Looking at all married couples in 2010, regardless of when they married, the share of intermarriages reached an all-time high of 8.4%. In 1980, that share was just 3.2%.
Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. About 24% of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. About 36% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17% of Asian male newlyweds. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender.
At first glance, recent newlyweds who “married out” and those who “married in” have similar characteristics. In 2008-2010, the median combined annual earnings of both groups are similar—$56,711 for newlyweds who married out versus $55,000 for those who married in. In about one-in-five marriages of each group, both the husband and wife are college graduates. Spouses in the two groups also marry at similar ages (with a two- to three-year age gap between husband and wife), and an equal share are marrying for the first time.
However, these overall similarities mask sharp differences that emerge when the analysis looks in more detail at pairings by race and ethnicity. Some of these differences appear to reflect the overall characteristics of different groups in society at large, and some may be a result of a selection process. For example, white/Asian newlyweds of 2008 through 2010 have significantly higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than do any other pairing, including both white/white ($60,000) and Asian/Asian ($62,000). When it comes to educational characteristics, more than half of white newlyweds who marry Asians have a college degree, compared with roughly a third of white newlyweds who married whites. Among Hispanics and blacks, newlyweds who married whites tend to have higher educational attainment than do those who married within their own racial or ethnic group.
Intermarriage and earnings. Couples formed between an Asian husband and a white wife topped the median earning list among all newlyweds in 2008-2010 ($71,800). During this period, white male newlyweds who married Asian, Hispanic or black spouses had higher combined earnings than did white male newlyweds who married a white spouse. As for white female newlyweds, those who married a Hispanic or black husband had somewhat lower combined earnings than those who “married in,” while those who married an Asian husband had significantly higher combined earnings.
Regional differences. Intermarriage in the United States tilts West. About one-in-five (22%) of all newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14% in the South, 13% in the Northeast and 11% in the Midwest. At the state level, more than four-in-ten (42%) newlyweds in Hawaii between 2008 and 2010 were intermarried; the other states with an intermarriage rate of 20% or more are all west of the Mississippi River. (For rates of intermarriage as well as intra-marriage in all 50 states, see Appendix 2.)
Is more intermarriage good for society? More than four-in-ten Americans (43%) say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while 11% say it has been a change for the worse and 44% say it has made no difference. Minorities, younger adults, the college-educated, those who describe themselves as liberal and those who live in the Northeast or the West are more disposed than others to see intermarriage in a positive light.
Public’s acceptance of intermarriage. More than one-third of Americans (35%) say that a member of their immediate family or a close relative is currently married to someone of a different race. Also, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, the public was divided about this. Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) said people of different races marrying each other was not acceptable for anyone, and an additional 37% said this may be acceptable for others, but not for themselves. Only one-third of the public (33%) viewed intermarriage as acceptable for everyone.
Divorce. Several studies using government data have found that overall divorce rates are higher for couples who married out than for those who married in – but here, too, the patterns vary by the racial and gender characteristics of the couples. These findings are based on scholarly analysis of government data on marriage and divorce collected over the past two decades.

You need to understand that humans are fucked up creatures. It's very difficult for anyone to change. Abuse is cyclical in nature, meaning we often repeat what we have seen or endured through perpetration or victimization later in life. A child who is witness to or the victim of consistent abuse may not take on the behavioral patterns as an adult, but he or she still knows the process like the back of their hand. We engage in dysfunctional behavior even if we are aware of its effects because it is comfortable.

When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

New Zealand gynecologist Dr. Albert Makary recently created a bit of controversy by saying, in response to a Durex sex survey that found Kiwi women amassing greater numbers of sexual partners than Kiwi men, that lovemaking had been "downgraded to paddock-mating," and that a national anti-promiscuity campaign was called for. Makary told a conference on families that "We have to stigmatize this behavior, the same way we stigmatize littering in the street."

As we know, the free-love ethos of the '70s met its demise with the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early '80s, but the pendulum has slowly swung back to the side of a more permissive sexual climate in recent years, especially in regards to female sexual empowerment in a post-Sex and the City world where men are expected to be more "cliterate" and less vibrator-phobic.

With this in mind, Dr. Pantea Farvid, a casual-sex expert who has studied the casual-sex psychology of both genders for the past six years, took issue with Dr. Makary's comments, as well as those of fourth-year Canterbury psychology student Emily McKenzie. (McKenzie told the New Zealand Herald that the sexually-casual behavior of her peers only had negative consequences. She said, "What I've seen is young girls that are sleeping around to try and find love and boost their self-esteem.")

Research supports what most of us know from experience: messages have a higher likelihood of getting through – and changing attitudes and behaviors – when recipients believe that the messengers are similar to themselves. This phenomenon is especially prevalent among teens, whose still-developing brains respond strongly to social rewards.

While many fear the effects of peer influence on teens, others see it as a tool that, when harnessed properly, can be used for positive outcomes. That’s the philosophy behind the peer education programs of Community Healthcare Network’s Teens P.A.C.T. (Positive Actions and Choices for Teens). Peer education is based on the premise that young people are more likely to change their behavior if peers they like and trust advocate change. To be effective, it requires careful understanding of the context in which young people live.

Teens P.A.C.T. trains selected “Peer Leaders” in communication and community action project development, and educates them about relationships, STIs and contraceptives. After eight weeks of training, they are entrusted with the task of empowering young New Yorkers to make healthy life choices. As part of this mission, Teens P.A.C.T. launched “More Than Just Sex,” a unique initiative in which Peer Leaders write, direct, produce and act in a series of PSAs that address sexuality, teen pregnancy, prevention of STIs and HIV and unhealthy relationships.

The mom, Beck Laxton, said that she wanted to keep her child free from stereotypes and let it (now him) be free to develop his "real personality." A move the child's father, Kiernan Cooper, supported.
"I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said in a quote from the Telegraph article.
"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes? … Gender affects what children wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person they become."

As a hormonal gay adolescent in the pre-internet age I cherished those very occasional -- and usually incidental -- moments of shirtlessness. Marc Silvestri's Havok in a torn-up costume as the Goblin Prince? John Romita Jr.'s Matt Murdock in tighty whities? Alan Davis's Captain Britain in drawstring pajama pants? Joe Mad's Banshee flashing his abs as he pulls on a sweatshirt? Any comic set in the Savage Land? These were my sacred texts. (And yes, I was a Marvel kid.)

Straight boys never have to hunt for that sort of fan service. The whole industry caters to their libidos. Gay boys and straight girls do not enjoy the same level of pandering. Sure, the men in these comics are usually buff and handsome, and they're all dressed in skin-tight clothes and they all have six-pack abs. If you enjoy looking at athletic, attractive men, you will find athletic, attractive men in these books, especially when drawn by artists like Chris Sprouse, Dale Eaglesham, Nicola Scott and Olivier Coipel.

But it's not equivalent. Superhero men are idealized, yes, but they're rarely sexualized. While women are presented as broken-backed boob hostesses whose every move is a bend-and-snap designed to flatter and entice the presumed-male, presumed-straight reader, the men are sexless paragons of strength, with propaganda poster good looks that serve as visual shorthand for their masculine, heroic bona fides.

Safe & Sexy documents women in the public space in two modes; one for comfort, one for attraction. Through portraits, interviews and audio, I explore how social conventions, economic structures, personal history and location shape our visual and psychological landscape. This seemingly simplistic approach invokes a complex dialogue on the layered realities of individuals navigating a terrain of vulnerability, power, comfort and attraction.

The women choose their outfits and a location familiar to them.
One persona does not exclude the other- at times interchangeable or the same. The diptych presents a dual ‘first impression’ and highlights that a woman’s appearance and body language function as a barometer for their level of interactivity with those around them. These portraits reference an anthropological survey and mainstream media’s fascination with self-transformation through “before and after” advertisements and TV programs.

This project developed out of a performance series titled, Do You Have the Time?, where I asked  people on the street for the time while in various character modes; businesswoman, trashy slut, jogger, etc. I asked the same question in a variety of locations to observe the response based upon my appearance and persona.

I plan to continue Safe & Sexy in a few additional parts of the world, publish the series as a book with a touring exhibition. I also look forward to expanding the project by working with men and exploring themes of comfort, power and masculinity.

I'm not sure how far back the saying goes (if you can find an early literary use of this aphorism, please share). Presumably, its origins lie in the not-so-distant past when women were far more dependent on their husbands than they may be today. As historians like Stephanie Coontz have shown, the ideal of marriage as a lifelong love affair — or even an enduring friendship — is relatively new. Many of what we think of our as deepest romantic ideals date back only a little more than a century.

Yet the fact that marriages in the more distant past were more concerned with property (and with reassuring men that they could know who their children were) doesn't mean that a husband's romantic devotion didn't have a vital purpose. In a world where women were essentially chattel, marriage marked the moment at which a woman was transferred from father to husband. The choreography of the familiar American church wedding service reflects this still. At marriage, a husband acquired the right to beat or otherwise mistreat his wife. But legally sanctioned opportunity is not automatic obligation. A man could, if he wanted, refuse to exercise any of the rights of domination he had. What would hold him back from doing the violence that he was allowed to do? Love. Or so goes the theory. In reality, as experts in intimate partner violence agree, plenty of abusive men claim to be head over heels in love with the women they harm.

In our own world, this tenacious bit of conventional heterosexual wisdom reflects a different assumption. A man who loves his wife (or a boyfriend who loves his girlfriend) more than she loves him in return will, as my friend's little sister told us at the engagement party, be less likely to cheat. Greater male passion isn't about protecting a woman from intimate violence as much as it is about reducing the risk of infidelity. Based on the intuitive but unverifiable assumption that men in love are less likely to be unfaithful, the theory also offers a secondary reassurance to women. If he loves you more than you love him, and he cheats on you, at least your diminished investment will inoculate you against the worst emotional effects of sexual betrayal.

University researchers asked groups of men to read news articles suggesting that their local population had either more men or women. They were then asked to indicate how much money they would save each month from a paycheck, as well as how much they would borrow on credit cards for purchases.
When the articles suggested there was a surplus of men, the savings rate fell 42%, and the men were willing to borrow 84% more each month.
The study also found real-life evidence of this behavior. In Columbus, Ga., where there are 1.18 single men for every single woman, the average consumer debt was $3,479 higher than it was 100 miles away in Macon, Ga., where there were 0.78 single men for every woman.

Sex ratios don't affect women's financial decisions, but they do affect their expectations of how much men should spend on them, the study found. After reading an article stating that men outnumbered them, women expected men to spend more on dinners, Valentine's Day gifts and engagement rings.
In 2010, there were eight unmarried men for every nine unmarried women in the USA, the Census Bureau says. For unmarried Americans age 15 to 49, though, there were 11 unmarried men for every 10 unmarried women.
In some parts of the country, the ratio is more pronounced. Cities such as Birmingham, Ala. and Peoria, Ill. have a higher ratio of women, while Denver and Las Vegas have decidedly more men. The lopsided ratio for Sin City might disappoint male tourists, but it's a positive for the casinos, Griskevicius says. "Having more men than women might fuel gambling behavior," he says.

For more than a decade, I’ve worked as a psychologist, treating issues of sexuality in my clinical practice, in several states in the American south west. I’ve seen scores of patients who have what most people would consider to be a highly active sex life, but I haven’t diagnosed anyone, ever, as being “addicted” to sex. I’ve publicly challenged the validity of sex addiction, and this has brought me trouble. I’ve been accused of being “evil”, “dangerous” and “heartless”. Sex addiction therapists have attacked me — I’ve even been accused of being a sex addict myself, told that I am in “denial” about the danger of my own sexual desires.
But the fact is, there’s no standard definition of sex addiction. It hasn’t been recognised as a bona fide disease by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the medical profession’s bible when it comes to mental health, so, instead, there are a dozen or so competing definitions and no two psychotherapists who apply the concept in the same way. A diagnosis is based on a therapist’s own idea of what constitutes an excessive amount of sex. But the mistake all these “experts” make is to try to apply the characteristics of drug and alcohol addiction to sex, claiming too much sex works like a drug, causing cravings, withdrawals, tolerance (the need for increasingly powerful “hits”) and a downward spiral in which sex “takes over their life”.

Researchers in America questioned 18 and 19-year-old men who were starting their first year of college.

They asked a total of 78 teenagers, who were mostly heterosexual and from high-income families, about their health and attitudes towards safe-sex practices such as condom use.

Researchers also took a saliva sample from the men from which they could measure their testosterone levels.

And despite young, testosterone-fulled men often being portrayed negatively in terms of their sexual behaviour, the study found that the complete opposite could be true.

The results revealed that those men with the highest levels of testosterone were more likely to have a positive attitude towards condoms.

New research by the University of Ottawa documented women’s aggression against other women wearing revealing outfits. Women showing too much leg or cleavage are likely to be ostracized from female social circles as dangerous rivals, the scientists stated. Apparently even in this time of independence and self-expression, most women still find short skirts and skimpy tops awfully threatening – so much so, they couldn’t resist making catty comments even to total strangers.

The study, published in the current edition of the journal of Aggressive Behaviour, made use of an experiment in which pairs of women were left in a room thinking they were participating in a study on conflict. While they were waiting, an attractive woman wearing provocative clothes entered to talk to another researcher setting up the cameras. After the attractive woman left the room, the reactions of the waiting women were recorded. “Their hostility was obvious,” said psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt, lead author of the study, who coded their reactions on a “bitchy” scale.

“They were saying thing like, ‘oh, she’s dressed to have sex with her professor,’ or ‘oh, her boobs are about to pop out. They were looking her up and down, and as soon as she leaves the room, they start laughing hysterically.” By comparison, when the same woman carried out the exact same task – but this time dressed in chinos and a high-neck t-shirt – almost none of the participants in the study even noticed her.

“We can’t tolerate anyone giving the milk away for free. We are living in a modern context, but we are operating with an old brain. We have this instinctual response to people who defy social conventions in a way that threatens the group. It’s women who suppress the sexuality of other women,” Vaillancourt concluded.

Source: Digitaljournal

Vaillancourt T, & Sharma A (2011). Intolerance of sexy peers: intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive behavior, 37 (6), 569-77 PMID: 21932332

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

What’s needed now is a better grasp of (and comfort with) relationships of all kinds. And this is the kind of thinking and problem solving that is most natural to women:

Women are intuitively systems-thinkers
Women seek balance
Women care more about solutions than who gets credit
Women are the worlds’ experts on collaboration
When they are passionate about something, women never give up
While I am supportive of any and all efforts to move women into the C-Suite, the boardroom, and the President’s office, it’s hard to ignore the fact that in these traditional places, women are making slow progress, if any at all.

“Like, I fuck people I hate too. Sometimes it’s even more fun to fuck someone you hate,” he says. “But what is sex? You open your legs and I’m going to put something in there? There are so many other things more emotional than sex.”

On a basic level, I don’t disagree with him. Sex isn’t really a deciding factor in whether or not I feel close to someone. He adds that he wouldn’t care if his potential girlfriend also had sex with other people as long as she was safe and she made him a priority.

This time around we surveyed 4000 parents with children aged 10-13. Those parents admitted that 58% of their kids had access to a ‘mainstream’ social network, such as Facebook or Twitter, or regional specific sites like the Spanish Tuenti.

In Spain and Italy most are on at age 10, in the US, US, UK, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand it is 11, while in Germany most ‘graduate’ to these sites at 12 years old.

Remember that we asked parents, so they are fully aware that their kids’ are on these sites.

So what are they doing to monitor their children’s behavior on there?  Well 60% are looking at their PCs. Two-thirds of parents claim to know their kids’ passwords and 6/10 access their children’s computers while they are not on them.

However, this still leaves 40% of parents who are not checking their kids’ behavior at all and how effective is monitoring activity on a PC anyway. Our fourth Digital Diaries study also shows that kids are increasingly able to circumvent parental supervision.

A majority of 10-13 year old kids in every country except New Zealand and (significantly) Japan have their own PC. In the UK, most 10-13 year olds have the PC in the privacy of their own bedroom, so away from parental eyes. Australia is the one country where it is more likely to be in the living room.

Not only do many 10-13 year olds go online in their bedrooms, a significant number are using social media on their phones – often outside of the family home.  44% of 10-13 year olds access social networks from their phones.   In the United States, the figure is 56%.

Europeans have been fascinated with the sexuality of “savages” since the Middle Ages, long before they came into contact with Africans. (The Irish were “lewd, lustful, lascivious” and so were the savages of the Americas.) During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several English travelers had made references to the “Large Propagators” of the African men, which whetted the imaginations of many Europeans, It was immediately assumed that the large propagators [penis’s] made African men oversexed, sensuous, and lustful, and their nudity was evidence of uninhibited and restrained sexual behavior. It is Rushton’s conclusion that Africans thus beget a lot of children to whom they give little care.
Moreover the RK theory flounders in the light of some obviously contradictory and incontrovertible facts. The MOST reproductively successful population in the world are the Chinese. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they had one of the highest fertility rates in the world. Today they number more than 1.3 billion people despite small penises and presumably little interest in sex!
Race in North America: Origin And Evolution of a Worldview by Audrey Smedley. pg. 302-303

Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said?
When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure and simple.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.
I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional manipulation and we need to use a word not in our normal vocabulary.
I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.

If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation.


As Quiverfull Believers dig ever-deeper into their Bibles in search of the truly “biblical model” for godly marriage, ideas about courtship and “betrothal” are becoming increasingly savage and brutish. It would seem unlikely that Courtship standards could get even more oppressive considering that Christian notions of “biblical match-making” have already been taken to outrageous extremes.

Josh Harris started a back-to-bible-living revolution among Christian young people when he advocated the courtship model in his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. What – no dating for teens? Now that’s a radical concept! As “bible believers” jumped on the bandwagon of father-led pairing of qualified young men and women in serious pursuit of marriage, popular Quiverfull patriarchs took biblical courtship to a new level of paternal domination as they pointed to Old Testament examples of “betrothal” as the very best way to ensure the future success of Christian marriage.

Cyclists of both genders are less likely than average to have sex on a first date, according to survey by a dating website. The finding stands out because elsewhere in the survey, conducted by FreeDating.co.uk among 10,000 of its members, clear divisions are found between men and women.

In terms of body shape, for example, overweight women are more likely than those described as slim or simply large to finish the evening in bed with a new partner, while among men, it is those described as being of athletic build.

Women who said they are interested in cars and spend time in bars were also more likely to say that they would have sex on a first date, while in terms of level of education, it is better educated men but less well educated women who do so.

Married men who are members of the site were also more keen on getting into bed on the first date than single ones – a bit of a no-brainer, we imagine, since you they’re unlikely to have joined up with thoughts of bigamy on their mind.

Unsurprisingly, the survey doesn’t record whether they are up front with their prospective partners beforehand, nor what their wives think of their behaviour. The website itself says that it “actively discourages” married people from signing up, and asks those that do to at least be honest about their status in their profile.

And as for cyclists – well, respondents who said they have an interest in cycling, across both genders, were less likely than average to put out on a first date, putting them alongside those in their 40s and above, as well as non-drinkers, as groups where being male or female made no difference to the response.

My boundary work has been crucial in my personal relationships, as well. As I started doing this work to protect myself and center myself in the jails, I realized that I could do it with the people in my personal life, too.

I began to see immediate effects in my relationships, as well as in the quality of my everyday life.

Even though I no longer work in prisons and jails, I still do this work just about every morning. When I let it slip, when I don’t take time to ground myself and honor my boundaries, I can feel a big difference.

Nowhere has this work impacted my life more than in my personal relationships. I used to feel like every person who I spent a lot of time with blew me around as I got caught up in their life. I noticed myself taking on aspects of their personalities and lifestyle and losing myself.

After doing this work, I now surround myself with people who are really attracted to me because of who I am. How I show up in the world: by my strength, my motivation, my passion—how absolutely me I am.

Basically, symmetrical people don't have to be nice, because they can accomplish things on their own through genetic superiority — or just get people to do stuff for them because they're so hot. Of course, not all studies have found a link between symmetry and attractiveness, and attractiveness in general is a slippery and difficult thing to study. But if being hot does make you meaner, it could also make you richer — according to a study released earlier this month, men who scored low in measures of "agreeableness" — a tendency toward helping and cooperating with others — made 18% more money per year than those who scored high. For women, the difference was a more modest 5%. So being mean pays, but less if you're a lady.

Some studies show attractive people make more money than their less-attractive counterparts — could some of this be the result of their meanness? Unclear, but it's worth noting that asshole behavior is actually bad for companies — research has found that "incivility" increases employee turnover, which isn't surprising at all.

In this piece, comic artists Rachel Swanson and Abe Lambert talk boobs, comics, and feminism. They're part of a new series called "LadyDrawers" on Truth-Out.org that began as a class at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago taught by Anne Elizabeth Moore. LadyDrawers looks at how comics--and the publishing world at large--are influenced by a lack of women content creators.<br />
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For a good read that underscores Rachel and Abe's points about boobs and mainstream comics, check out the comic strip "In Comics World, Women are Invisible--Except When They're Naked" on Truth-out.

Yeah, the trouble is, although these characters were marginally better than the original Damsels in Distress, they still ended up having to be saved in the final act by the male hero.  There would usually be a scene (or three) where the “Strong Female Character” would be trapped by the villain and put into sexy clothing, I guess as a punishment of some sort.  And even when she was being strong, she was always doing it in the sexiest way possible.  She’d never, say, get a black eye or a broken nose in a fight.  Her ability to fix cars (a powerful, masculine trait) would basically allow her to get sexy grease all over her slippery body.  Her ability to shoot a gun was so the film’s advertisers could put her on a poster wearing a skimpy outfit with a big gun between her legs.  All in all, the “strength” of her character was just to make her a better prize for the hero at the end – and for the horny male audience throughout.

I was re-reading my five billion goddamn posts about rape and force, and I realized (surprise!) there is a more succinct way for me to express what I was thinking. I tend to go on and on, circling a subject, trying to get out everything in my head that possibly relates to it, and then sometimes find I didn’t really address the subject at all. So, here is what I wanted to say in those five billion posts about rape:

If women are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that:

it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed (“mean bitch”)
it is not okay to appear distraught or emotional (“crazy bitch”)
it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others (“stuck-up bitch”)
it is not okay to refuse to agree with somebody, over and over and over again (“angry bitch”)
it is not okay to have (or express) conflicted, fluid, or experimental feelings about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your desires, and your needs (“bitch got daddy issues”)
it is not okay to use your physical strength (if you have it) to set physical boundaries (“dyke bitch”)
it is not okay to raise your voice (“shrill bitch”)
it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you (“mean dyke/frigid bitch”)
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Lost in all the hoopla was the fact that there already exists a crop of openly queer rappers who have been making music for years. They’re talented, proud, but when it comes to mainstream media, they’re often ignored. So I reached out to some of the industry’s best and brightest to get their take on the really gay rappers who should be getting our attention. Writer and activist Kenyon Farrow summed up the bigger picture nicely when he wrote in an email: “I wish we could focus more energy and our money on artists in the community, rather than falling all over ourselves for straight people to validate our existence.” 

f you’ve ever watched any female dominant porn, looked at a prodom’s website, or generally not lived under a rock for the past few years, you know the dress code consists of:

high spiky heels
skin tight clothing
a corset
a scowl (very important)

No matter how often people tell me they think knee-high black leather boots with 4 inch spike heels look great and turn them on, I simply don’t feel very toppy when my feet hurt and my footing is uncertain. You try throwing a flogger when you’re worried about falling over on your ass and tell me how confident you feel.

The dress code for dominant women has nothing to do with what actually makes those women feel toppy, and everything to do with porn producers trying to appeal to straight men. This image of female domination actively turns women away from the idea of kink because so very few women can actually relate to it.

The behavior code is even worse.

Personyze offers the most advanced SaaS platform in the market for real-time Visitor Segmentation and Website Personalization.

Personyze was founded in 2008 by a group of entrepreneurs with experience in web analysis and advertising who realized that websites should be able to offer their visitors an experience that is significantly more personal and relevant to their needs.

Websites who use Personyze see a dramatic improvement in their engagement with online visitors, while increasing retention and conversion rates.

Despite momentum for same-sex marriage in legislatures, the courts and public opinion, there's one place that seems out of step with this shift: the workplace. A recent study finds that about half of gay and lesbian white-collar workers are not "out" when they're in the office.

This image of a “submissive boy with a rosary” was suggested by Emily Marigold. I like it in part for the obvious talent in the drawing, the signs of anguish, evinced by lacerations on the man’s shoulder and the smudged eyeliner, and the fact that he’s wearing eyeliner in the first place. And, yes, I also like seeing the broken rosary, since it offers a narrative hook to imagine him as someone religiously persecuted—a martyr.

Martyrdom is a common narrative among BDSM players; “I’ll take it for you.” Certainly sexy, but many utilize the script to abdicate personal agency; rarely do these bottoms remember the more important words: “I want to take it for you.” As Dr. Staci Newmahr writes, “Martyrdom bottoming does not rely on the ultimate denial of pleasure, but in adherence to a martyr script.”

It’s unfair to levy blame on the bottoms who display such unthinking loyalty to this cultural script, though, especially the men. Other than martyrdom, common characterizations of men bottoming rely on archetypal feminization, whether implicitly (the meme of submissive men doing housework is a particularly sexist example) or explicitly (“sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty”). These are obviously problematic formulations for any masculine-of-center individuals, not just men.

I have seen too much cruelty and negativity bring people down – people who do not deserve to be brought down. I want this to be the place that holds people up, fosters creativity and connects like minds. If you want to be negative or if you feel like saying mean things, then this is not the place for you. And although it’s none of my business, I challenge you to not say anything at all, or if you must write something mean, put it in a place where no one will find it.

We think that mean comments are bad. We hate them! We don’t want you be mean to each other and so the interface of this website was designed specifically with that in mind. My awesome co-founders, Sophia and Molly, and I are so lucky to have this opportunity. Ultimately, HelloGiggles is for all of you who read and contribute to this site. We truly appreciate that you share with us and allow yourselves to be vulnerable. We take this very seriously and we want to protect you, so you can grow up to be big and strong and successful at whatever the heck you want to do, to become the artists you want to become and support others in their endeavors.

We are counting on you, ladies and gentlemen, to help keep the love alive! So like your mothers probably told you, if you don’t have anything nice to say, please, don’t say anything at all.

We adore you all. Thank you for being a part of our world (and yeah, I am quoting The Little Mermaid!)

It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, "I'm not completely nuuuuts!" Upon further consideration, a more explanative response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there.

"There" would be Haiti, where I'd just spent two weeks covering the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that shook the country into ugly chaos. There, a local regular at my hotel restaurant who is not accustomed to taking no for an answer had gotten desperate. After proposing for the 87th time that I have intercourse with him, he was grasping for anything that might change my mind, trying eventually, wildly, "We can do this at gunpoint if that sells it for you." And actually, it did, yeah.
On that reporting trip, I'd been fantasizing about precisely what the local guy proposed, my back against a wall or a mattress with a friendly gun to my throat. But the plan was vetoed about as soon as it was hatched, when I asked him if his firearm had a safety and he said no. Like I say: I am not completely nuts.
I realize now that I was undone. Journalists put themselves in threatening situations all the time, but they rarely talk about the emotional impact. It's not easy to complain about the difficulties of being around trauma when you've chosen to be around trauma for a living, and it certainly isn't cool. When CBS correspondent Lara Logan went public that she was raped in Egypt five months after I returned from Haiti, most people reacted with the appropriate amount of horror. Some, though, blamed the reporter for putting herself in a risky situation, and for being reckless enough to enter one when she's so hot. No wonder it's a rarity for correspondents to discuss their pain, and practically unheard of when it regards sexual harassment or assault. The handbook of the Committee to Protect Journalists didn't even mention it—until 20 days ago, when the organization published an "addendum on sexual aggression."

If the handbook had a section detailing "symptoms of a journalist who really needs counseling and should probably go home," I would have fit the description. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stay sober. When the power went out, I just sweated in the stifling heat because I was too scared to open my windows even though they weren't the kind someone could fit through. When a French UN peacekeeper I'd met went AWOL to knock on my door, wanting to know, when I gladly unlocked it for him, please if he could to kiss me, I couldn't feel him. Literally. I watched, confused, as he climbed onto me weightlessly, though he was clearly much bigger than I am. When we met again to say goodbye more than a week later, I grasped for anything concrete: my hands on his muscled, uniformed ass, my pelvis against the gun at his waist. Still, I could feel only something static and empty in the places usually occupied by my limbs. When he walked away—telling me he loved me, god bless 'em—I cried my face off.

There’s something that still fascinates people about the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner. Despite the magazine’s falling circulation numbers (which, with an internet is full of free porn, seems like a forgone conclusion) and rumors about the mansion being sold to pay off Playboy’s debts, coverage of the goings-on of Hefner and his buxom blondes continues to proliferate. Case in point: the recent “Crystal Harris runaway bride, Hef left at the altar” story. When the “news” broke 5 days before the wedding it spread like wildfire through the Twitterverse. Hefner chose Twitter to let people know the wedding was off, and it was immediately passed along by people from all walks of life with different reactions to the news, ranging from “well, duh” to suspicions the bride had been planning this stunt as a promotional tool for her new single.

Why do we still care so much about this old man and his empire of naked ladies? We’d argue that our ongoing fascination with Hef reflects a younger generation’s curiosity about a man who with each passing day seems more like the relic of a past era that couldn’t exist today. We’re watching the Playboy dynasty on life support.

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.

A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving.

Sex work has been the catalyst for positive change in the lives of many of the women and men I spoke with.

African-American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistent in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.

This spring, the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Law School took the bold and necessary step of organizing a day-and-a-half free event titled, “African American Girls and Young Women and Juvenile Justice System: A Call to Action.”

Sociologist Nikki Jones of UC Santa Barbara and Meda Chesney-Lind, from the University of Hawaii opened up the conference with a look at the statistics.

“No,” said Jones, “black girls are not committing more crimes, even though they are being incarcerated in record numbers.”

“I’ve been studying this for decades,” Chesney-Lind said. “We have never seen these kind of numbers before. National policies like zero tolerance are responsible for the school to prison pipeline. And a dual justice system that treats white girls differently from black girls is disproportionately impacting African-American girls.

“In 2008, we knew the arrest rate in California was 49 out of every 1,000 for black girls, 8.9 per 1,000 for white girls and 14.9 per 1,000 for Latinas.”

The cause of the over criminalization of African-American young women is best understood by looking back through the lens of American history and the ideological construction of black criminality.

“In order to sustain these systems, de-humanizing stereotypes of black women were created to maintain the difference between white and African-American women,” said Priscilla Ocen, a professor at UCLA’s Critical Race Studies. “Black girls are still dealing with racial and gendered stereotypes that were used to justify punishment.”

“These historical stereotypes laid the groundwork for the creation of a dual criminal justice system – one where African American women and girls are treated differently for the same behaviors,” Ocen added.

The difference in attitudes between those aged 18 to 34 and those aged 55 and older was stark when it came to pornography, with 42 percent of the younger group polled by Gallup saying that it was morally acceptable, in contrast to 19 percent of those in the older group.
In general, Americans in the "broadest" sense agreed on certain behaviors they believe are morally wrong, Gallup reported.
For example, at least eight in 10 U.S. adults interviewed in the survey said extramarital affairs, polygamy, cloning humans and suicide were wrong, while least six in 10 people surveyed said pornography and cloning animals were morally wrong, Jones said.
On the question of gay and lesbian relationships, 66 percent of younger Americans said they were moral — 13 percentage points higher than among the older cohort.
While there is no final tally on the number of lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans, those surveyed believe the number was higher than nine years ago, with half of those polled saying at least 20 percent of Americans are gay or lesbian.

When it comes to premarital sex, Americans aged 18 to 34 were even more enthusiastic, with 71 percent approving. But just 47 percent of older Americans approved of sex before marriage.

55 percent of Democrats, for example, said abortion was acceptable, while only 18 percent of Republicans believed abortion was morally OK.

Hiding the 4-month-old's sex from the outside world is a "tribute to freedom and choice" that they hope will let Storm grow up unfettered by the values of others, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker have been quoted as saying.

Experts, however, question whether the odd experiment will work or be good for the baby, and note that gender identity is a complex, mysterious force that has at least as much to do with biological factors present at birth as the person's social interactions.

In fact, there is little hard, scientific data on exactly what does make people feel and act like a boy or a girl, but some evidence points to gender identity being hard-wired, says Michele Angello, a U.S. psychologist.

Angello specializes in helping "gender-variant" people - those born with the body of one sex but convinced they are the other. Many go on to have sex-change operations. The way people act toward them certainly affects how they feel about themselves; whether it actually moulds their identity to start with is another question, she said.

The Supreme Court has declined to take the case of a Texas high school cheerleader who was kicked off the squad after refusing to cheer for the basketball player whom she alleges raped her.  The Fifth Circuit ruling not only upheld the school’s right to punish her for refusing to cheer, but dismissed her suit as frivolous, requiring her family to cover the school’s legal fees.  The victim, who was 16 at the time, was allegedly raped at a party by Rakheem Bolton, one of her high school’s star athletes.  Though Bolton was arrested, he plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault, was sentenced to probation and community service, and was back on the basketball team.

When Bolton stepped up to take a free throw, the victim, known as H.S., crossed her arms and refused to participate while the team cheered his name.  School officials ordered H.S. to participate in the cheers, and when she continued to refuse, she was kicked off the cheerleading team.

Not only does this case represent a tragedy of criminal justice, with Bolton pleading guilty to an assault but not a felony and without serving a day in jail due in part to the backlog of DNA testing of rape kits, the civil suit is a gross perversion of the victim’s right to free speech.  H.S. was not on the sideline screaming obscenities at her rapist while he tried to take a free throw (which would be totally understandable).  She was simply standing quietly refusing to cheer for him.  She did not interfere with the basketball team or any other cheerleaders.  She simply stood there.

TAM, Las Vegas, July 14-17, 2011

The Amaz!ng Meeting (TAM) is an annual celebration of science, skepticism and critical thinking. People from all over the world come to Amaz!ng Meetings each year to share learning, laughs and the skeptical perspective with their fellow skeptics and a host of distinguished guest speakers and panelists.

Here are a few other red flags from Southworth and the whole team of experts at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, both for you and -- in case you’re worried about a friend -- for her:

Watch out if your guy:

Is so crazy about you he wants to settle in as soon as you meet.
Is really, weirdly jealous. (He should be uncomfortable if you go away for the weekend with your ex-boyfriend, but if he accuses you of flirting with every guy you encounter -- the waiter, the cashier, a gay buddy -- it's a red flag.)
Texts so much, it sometimes creeps you out.
Doesn’t think your friends and family value you enough, or even at all.
Also watch out if:

You are always tired because he keeps you up at night.
You’re always explaining to people “I can’t go.”
Your anxiety soars if you’re just a few minutes late -- you know how upset he’ll be.
Things are always your fault.
You get a lot of apology emails or make-up gifts from him.
You find you don’t do anything without him, or without him approving of it.
Run if:

!! You find out he had a violent relationship with a former girlfriend.
!! He stalks you -- at work, online, with GPS in your car.
!! He beats up a teammate or has a punch-out in a bar.
!! He’s ever been cruel to animals.
!!! He is ever physically violent to you.
And if you’re worried about a friend? She might be in trouble if:

She starts saying she can’t come to things you invite her to (because she has to be with her boyfriend).
When you’re with her, she’s always on-edge about returning his messages immediately or being late to meet him.
She has bruises or scratches she can’t explain or tells you they were caused by an accident.
She stops doing things she loved before meeting the guy -- hobbies, shopping, school, even working.
You just feel like you’re losing her.
Have you or a friend ever witnessed any of these warning signs?

A 17-year-old high school student from a Chicago suburb was arrested Monday for allegedly creating and distributing a list of 50 classmates ranked in terms of their sexual desirability.
"The girls were ranked using derogatory nicknames," Katherine Foran, communications director for the high school, told the Huffington Post. "There were some racial, ethnic slurs [and] much of it was about their alleged peccadilloes."

Foran likened the list to a similar one in "The Social Network," where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed by actor Jesse Eisenberg, rated college co-eds.

To be sure, it must have been humiliating for these girls to be derided with nicknames like "Fallen Angel," "Blond Bombshell" and "The Hangover" -- and to have their body parts and supposed level of promiscuity rated on a 10-point ranking system -- while the lunchroom gang howled in amusement.

But as troubling as these accusations are, could a charge of misdemeanor disorderly conduct, which the boy now faces, possibly stick?

Not according to one expert.

"I don't know how they came to the conclusion that this is criminal," Mark Gottesman, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Santa Monica, Calif., told The Huffington Post.

"The list" -- as the infamous document is simply being called -- "was posted online and a printed copy was circulated at the high school," David Powers, a spokesman for the Oak Park Police Department told The Huffington Post.

At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, professor Marina Adshade teaches a popular undergraduate course called "Economics of Sex and Love," in which students apply the analytical and statistical tools available to economists to examine human sexuality. Topics in the course—which Marina will explore in this blog, too—include dating and marriage, promiscuity, infidelity, risky sexual behavior, the relation between sex and happiness, and markets for sex such as prostitution, pornography, and lap dancing.Economic theory suggests that sex makes people happy. Marina finds that economics plus sex is also very satisfying.  May this blog be as good for you as it is for her.

Melissa Petro, the teacher who was open and unashamed of her past as a sex worker, couldn't be more different, superficially, than a fat flamboyant math teacher. But they do share something in common: both were pilloried by an intolerant public and cowardly administrators over perfectly ordinary and human traits that just didn't match an unrealistic expectation of teachers as bloodless mannequins of perfect propriety.

Advertising Messages and Gender

Asked to evaluate the reasons they got married, married respondents place the greatest value on love (93% say this is a very important reason), followed by making a lifelong commitment (87%), companionship (81%), having children (59%), and, at the bottom of the list, financial stability (31%). Unmarried adults order the reasons the same way when asked to evaluate why they would consider getting married. But if economic security is no longer a key reason people marry, the lack of economic security nonetheless appears to be a key reason people don't get married. In 1960, there was virtually no difference by socio-economic status in the proclivity to marry: 76% of college graduates and 72% of adults who did not attend college were married. By 2008, that small gap had widened to a chasm: 64% of college graduates were married, compared with just 48% of those with a high school diploma or less. During this same period, the income gap between the well-educated and the less-educated -- and between the rich and poor -- also widened substantially. A 2010 Pew Research survey finds that among the unmarried, there are no significant differences by education or income in the desire to get married; just under half of the college educated (46%) and those who have a high school diploma or less (44%) would like to get married. Likewise, roughly similar shares of the unmarried who earn above and below $100,000 a year would like to marry. But the survey also finds that the less education and income people have, the more likely they are to say that in order to be a good marriage prospect, a person must be able to support a family financially.

The government-funded research looked at the risks for sex, alcohol, illegal drugs, or suicide attempts reported by more 9,000 high school students who took part in a nationwide survey.

The study looked at the heaviest high school kids -- the ones who top the growth charts for their height and weight and have a body mass index (BMI) greater than or equal to the 99th percentile. That starts around 220 pounds for a 15-year-old of average height.

Extremely obese girls were about twice as likely as slimmer students as to have ever tried cigarettes or to be current smokers.

Extremely obese boys were about 50% more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to have ever tried cigarettes or to have started smoking before age 13.

Although heavy girls were about half as likely as their slimmer peers to have ever had sex, when they did have intercourse, they were nearly five times more likely to do so under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on sexual behavior that used this technique with laptops to gather data on Americans’ sexual behavior, attraction and identity by age, marital status, education and race.

The researchers got a 75 percent response rate, very high for a household survey, when they interviewed more than 13,000 people ages 15 to 44 from 2006 to 2008.

They found a large reduction in sexual activity among young adults ages 15 to 24. According to the survey, about 29 percent of women and 27 percent of men had not had sexual contact with the opposite sex. This was a sharp increase from 2002, when about 23 percent of young adults had never had sex.

Among men and women older than 25, about 99 percent had had vaginal intercourse. About 90 percent of men and 89 percent of women had had heterosexual oral sex, and 44 percent of men and 36 percent of women had had anal sex with an opposite-sex partner.

Forty-year-old virgins were rare: In the 40-to-44 age group, only 1 percent of men and even fewer women had never had relations with the opposite sex. But in the 15-to-19-year-old group, 43 percent of males and 48 percent of females reported never having an opposite-sex partner.

Over all, about 13 percent of women and 5 percent of men reported same-sex sexual behavior.

Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.

It wasn’t because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge — fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting — didn’t actually contain a baby.

For the past 6Œ months — the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School — the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.

Only a handful of people — her mother, boyfriend and principal among them — knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.

Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn’t realize they were part of a social experiment.

Neither did six of her seven siblings, including four older brothers, her boyfriend’s parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.

“You saw the side comments and the looks at her stomach,” says Myers, who says he wasn’t disappointed — “just concerned” — when she told him she was pregnant.

He says he wondered: “How are we going to take all of the potential that’s in this girl and make sure it manifests itself and not let this define who she is and let it be a roadblock to what she wants to accomplish?”

It’s a question Hispanic teens are more likely to face than white teens, Gaby found in her research. Black and Hispanic teens continue to have higher pregnancy rates than white teens.

And most teens at Toppenish High School — about 85 percent — are Hispanic.

Kissing is not universal, leading some experts, like anthropologist Vaughn Bryant of Texas A&M, to think it might actually be a learned behavior. The Roman military introduced kissing to many non-kissing cultures (after its conquests were over, presumably); later it was European explorers who carried the torch. The earliest literary evidence for kissing comes from northern Indias Vedic Sanskrit texts, written 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. A portion of the Satapatha Brahmana mentions lovers setting mouth to mouth.

Being close enough to kiss helps our noses assess compatibility. In a landmark study, evolutionary biologist Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland reported that women prefer the scents of men whose immunity-coding genes are different from their own. Mixing genes that way may produce offspring with a stronger immune system.

Love Is the Drug: Dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of desire and reward, spikes in response to novel experiences, which explains why a kiss with someone new can feel so special. In some people, a jolt of dopamine can cause a loss of appetite and an inability to sleep, symptoms commonly associated with falling in love. Dopamine is produced in the ventral tegmental area of the brain, the same region affected by addictive drugs like cocaine. In men, a passionate kiss can also promote the hormone oxytocin, which fosters bonding and attachment, according to behavioral neuroscientist Wendy Hill of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
Holding hands and kissing reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol, thereby lowering blood pressure and optimizing immune response.
And a passionate kiss has the same effect as belladonna in making our pupils dilate.

Today's 18- to 29-year-olds value parenthood far more than marriage, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of attitudinal surveys.

A 2010 Pew Research survey found that 52% of Millennials say being a good parent is "one of the most important things" in life. Just 30% say the same about having a successful marriage -- meaning there is a 22-percentage-point gap in the way Millennials value parenthood over marriage.

When this same question was posed to 18- to 29-year-olds in 1997, the gap was just seven percentage points. Back then, 42% of the members of what is known as Generation X said being a good parent was one of the most important things in life, while 35% said the same about having a successful marriage.

I was lucky in being able to see how a rape victim should be treated afterwards: with love and respect, acceptance for what happened. She was never blamed for the rape. But she was also portrayed as completely innocent and the rape was implied to have been violent.

What I also took away from the conversation with my mother was this: rape makes babies. So for a long time, I thought rape was the verb for sex. I mashed my bootleg Ken and Barbie together, Barbie saying "rape me."

The thing about this is that even in these imaginations, where in my head, women are more or less always seducing men, the word I used was "rape". Because the one time I used the word "fuck" I was told it was a bad word. My family didn't speak any Chinese dialects around me (and certainly NEVER sex-related topics in dialects) nor did I know Malay well enough. So in my understanding, this action which tended to result in pregnancy, which I knew anyway was something adults did for pleasure, was "sex" when it was a noun, but the verb was "rape".

It would be a few years before I understood that rape is a bad thing, only after several newspaper reports using the word to describe really awful situations.

When it comes to mowing the lawn, cleaning the kitchen and performing other household chores, Southern European and some Asian men are the least likely to take part, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Paris-based think tank surveyed 29 countries to determine how much time people spent doing unpaid work.

The results showed women spent considerably longer than men doing daily chores, a factor that could hinder their ability to take part in paid employment, the study says.

Italian and Portuguese men spent less than two hours a day helping out at home

An estimated 9 million Americans -- or nearly 4 percent of the total population -- say they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to a new report released this week from the Williams Institute, a think-tank devoted to LGBT research at UCLA.

Bisexuals make up slightly more than half that group, 1.8 percent of the total U.S. population, and they are substantially more likely to be women than men.

The report is the most up-to-date assessment of that population and produced a lower population percentage than the 10 percent number that advocacy groups have used in the past, which was based on Alfred Kinsey studies from 1948.

The new data comes on the heels of another recent report published by the Institute of Medicine for the National Institutes of Health emphasizing the need for more federally funded research on LGBT health problems.

Other key findings were that an estimated 19 million Americans, or 8.2 percent of the population, said they have engaged in same-sex behavior, and 25.6 million, or 11 percent, acknowledged some same-sex attraction.

The 3.5 percent of those who identify as LGB may or may not include those who are "closeted," according to Gates. "We actually did commission data within the survey and asked about to what degree they were closeted," Gates said, "and 13 percent who identified as LGB had never told anyone about it."
Among bisexuals, who made up about half of the overall LGB population, 25 percent said they were closeted.

Gates also cautioned against the results that 11 percent of all Americans had same-sex attractions. "That was only from one survey and it was restricted to 18- to 44-year-olds," he said.