Wine, Rorschachs, and naked rugby

Angie Dickinson

“Tumblr, as a user-directed medium, releases porn from those traditional visual cues. It allows the viewer to look at porn without feeling like she is, you know, looking at porn.”

“San Francisco … is the perfect home for an institution like the Center for Sex & Culture [CSC]. I spoke with another institution, its co-founder, Dr. Carol Queen.”

“Spermatorrhea (an excessive discharge of semen) was such a source of panic in the mid-19th century that there were even cases of suicide among those who had convinced themselves – or been led to believe – that they were suffering.“

Declining sperm counts? “According to their results, global sperm counts had dropped by 50% in the five decades before the report.“

Male infertility and the missing coat: “Sperm wears a protein coat that helps it sneak past the female immune system – or it should. Going coatless could be a major cause of male infertility.”

“In this video from the University of Surrey … the first research project Hegarty discusses is … on the categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness, including the inclusion of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association from 1952 to 1973. Hegarty’s interest is in how the rise and fall of the Rorschach test as a psychological instrument related to efforts to detect and diagnose homosexuality as a mental illness during this period. “

“Waxing . . . is the most common method for extensive depilation, and complications include burns, mechanical folliculitis, infectious folliculitis, other infections of skin and soft tissues, and contact dermatitis and/or vulvitis. Removal of hair causes skin microtrauma, with inoculation of pathogens and subsequent mechanical spread of infection.“

“The finding that regular moderate intake of red wine is associated with higher FSFI scores for both sexual desire, lubrication, and overall sexual function as compared to the teetotaller status is intriguing. While this finding needs to be interpreted with some caution … it nevertheless suggests a potential relationship between red wine consumption and better sexuality.”

Photo by Chema Madoz

pdf: “Right Orbitofrontal Tumor With Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign”

“It’s what women have been telling men for decades: stimulating the vagina is not the same as stimulating the clitoris. Now brain scan data has added weight to their argument.“

“For the peahen, choosing a mate who has a beautiful long tail increases the chance of her male offspring growing one, and so also be attractive. Of course, for her there is very good reason to be choosy. Males can and want to spray their sperm around willy‑nilly, but producing an egg and offspring levies a prohibitive tax upon her metabolism.”

“The monkeys live in groups of three to nine, in which multiple adult males mate with a single breeding female and then cooperate to raise her young. This mating system, called polyandry, occurs in less than 1 per cent of bird species, and is even rarer in mammals.”

“Spider sex is unusual in that males transfer their sperm to the female on small limbs called pedipalps. … Dr Aisenberg and Dr Barrantes observed the process 17 times in pairs of Leucauge argyra. On the 14 occasions a sexual plug was made, the female produced it without assistance from the male. On ten of these occasions the male’s pedipalps then seemed to get stuck while he was transferring the sperm … and he had great difficulty freeing himself. In two of those ten instances, he was eaten as a result.“

“Some male insects also give females what’s called a spermatophylax to increase their chances of mating. A spermatophylax, which can weigh up to 30 percent of a male’s body weight, is essentially like a really good snack attached to their sperm.”

“Pornography, Society, and the Law in Imperial Germany“: “The view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society’s pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object.”

Uschi Digard

New Zealand vs. Fiji in a game of naked rugby

Bert and Ernie are not gay (according to a press release).

Transhumanists discuss sexbots for women.

Sex in the stands at a Red Sox game, captured on film by an ESPN cameraman.

“Mistressdom, like celibacy, is a crucial lens through which to explore how women relate to men other than in marriage; mistressdom is, in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage. Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere.”

A gallery pinup collection of Bettie Page

Balls, bad boys and blue-footed boobies

Fleshpot: cinema’s sexual myth makers & taboo breakers. “With contributions from experts and cult film personalities worldwide-including Kenneth Anger and George Kuchar-Fleshpot -covers the sex education film, the secret history of American gay cinema, radical Japanese sci-fi porn, the British hardcore underground, and many other steamy subjects.”

A 2008 legal account of why prostitution’s illegal but porn isn’t

Testicles: Balls in Cooking and Culture. “The book opens with a discussion of balls, of pairs, of virility and the general significance thereof; it then delves more deeply into the culinary use of testicles, in history and across cultures; there follows a recipe section that ranges the continents in search of good dishes, from lamb’s fry with mushrooms, to balls with citrus fruit, to the criadillas beloved of bullfighters, and Potatoes Léontine, stuffed with cocks’ stones.”

“They found that the most common precipitating factors of sleepsex are sleep deprivation, stress, alcohol or drug consumption, excessive fatigue, and physical overactivity in the evening. Being male and under the age of 35 is also a major factor.“

“A new study, published in the latest issue of the journal Emotion, finds that when humans see red, their reactions become both faster and more forceful. “Color affects us in many ways depending on the context,” explains Elliot, whose research also has documented how men and women are unconsciously attracted to the opposite sex when they wear red.” I linked to that earlier research last October.

“A new study … shows that women find happy men much less sexually attractive than those who brood and look proud and powerful, or even moody and ashamed, helping explain the stereotype of the appealing “bad boy.” The study also finds, not surprisingly, that men are just the opposite, finding happy women more sexually attractive.”

“Women can more accurately identify a man’s sexual orientation when they are closest to their time of peak ovulation, say researchers.”

“It would make sense that genes that gave rise to asexual reproduction would win out in the evolutionary race. Clearly that hasn’t happened. The world is rife with sex. Animals do it. Plants do it. Even mushrooms do it. So evolutionary biologists have carried out a number of studies to get an answer to the question, “Why sex?”“

“Our ancestors separated from gorilla ancestors further back – some 13m years ago – but geneticists have found that the human pubic louse is related to the gorilla louse and the parasite only adapted to our ancestor’s pubic region 3m years ago. This was a surprising discovery.”

“Researchers have recently discovered that the sperm of blue-footed boobies declines with age. And … the blue feet of the boobies also fade with age, revealing that one reason why female boobies tend to mate with brighter-footed males is to ensure the robustness of the sperm and the health of their offspring.“

A 2009 review of The Courtesans: “I’ve recently finished reading a fascinating book, Joanna Richardson’s The Courtesans, a history of the twelve greatest women of pleasure in the Demi-Monde.“

“We found that parental smoking correlates with increased attraction to smoking in self-reported hetero- and homosexual males. Maternal smoking was associated with an increase in attraction to smoking both in hetero- and homosexual males, while paternal smoking was associated with an increase in attraction to smoking only in males who prefer male partners.”

“Pillow Talk satisfies the entertainment expectations of a more sophisticated audience than those of the famous Red Light nightclubs. It is a touch of class, celebrating the words of women, and … [making] the audience feel appreciated, empowered and adored. … All is set to the gorgeous backdrop of entertainment including … a special performance by US Puppet Master Greg Ruhe, and an appearance from the infamous Burlesque puppet queen-Mz. Lulu La Rue.”

A review of Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women: “[Leila Rupp] explores the social aspects, and the social implications, of lesbianism in various cultures through the art and literary works, as well as though court records, legal texts, personal memoirs and anthropological documents.“

Wilhelm “Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea for all ills, he thought, including the fascism that forced him from Europe.”

The Times of India on the “Hottest Kamasutra sex positions”

Genital Massage & Tantric Sex: “The man has to focus all of his concentration on his genitals – as though … that is where his soul is located, and forgetting about the rest of his body. And when he feels he is on the point of ejaculation, he has to hold his breath, and contract his anal muscles in order to try and prevent it.”

“The Worship of Female Pleasure” via orgasmic meditation: “Before long, Daedone is hunched over and vigorously stroking the woman’s most sensitive “spot” — the “upper left quadrant” of the clitoris — with just her forefinger. The recipient moans wildly as though she is being taken over by a spirit.” And more: “The space also offers yoga classes, lunch hour discussions, happy hours and workshops like “Orgasm Is…Not Just for Younguns!…” and “Behind the Scenes of the 15 minute Orgasm …”"

Celestial bodies, Rampling and Playboy’s influence

“Women in both countries [USA and New Zealand] rated mesomorphic (muscular) and average male somatotypes as most attractive, followed by ectomorphic (slim) and endomorphic (heavily built) figures. … In both countries, the image lacking any trunk hair was rated as the most attractive, with a steady decline in attractiveness as hirsutism became more pronounced.“

“An extensive experiment was conducted using high-quality photographic stimulus material, several systematically varied figure parameters (weight, hip width, waist width, bust size, and leg length), and a large sample of 34,000 participants. The results showed that women prefer slightly wider hips, a narrower waist, and longer legs than men (highly significant but small effects). A clear difference was found with regard to the ideal bust size: 40% of men but only 25% of women preferred a large bust.”

“Physical Attractiveness: the Influence of Selected Torso Parameters” — “Front-view line drawings of male and female physiques were rated for attractiveness. Both subject sexes rated female physiques with greater curvature as less attractive. Male subjects’ ratings were unaffected by breast size while female subjects showed slight negative evaluation of large breasts. Both subjects sexes rated broad shoulders as attractive in male physiques. Greater chest muscularity resulted in slightly higher attractiveness ratings; waist slimness was also judged attractive, particularly in female subjects.”

“Although in his later years Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) vehemently rejected astrology, he earlier used it in a variety of ways, but primarily to provide further evidence for positions to which he had arrived by other means. One such early use appears in his commentary on his friend Girolamo Benivieni’s love poetry, the Canzone d’amore, of 1486-1487. In the passages discussed here, Pico presents an intensive Platonic natural philosophical analysis based on a deep astrologically informed understanding of human nature as he attempts to explain a perennial question, namely, why one person is attracted to a certain person (or people), and another to others.“

“In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates …. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner’s body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.“

In Bachelors and Bunnies, Carrie Pitzulo argues that Playboy has a “surprisingly strong record of support for women’s rights and the modernization of sexual and gender roles.” Scott McLemee discusses this book and other works on Playboy. And here’s a piece in Vanity Fair about the Playboy clubs: “Bunnies who worked in New York and London remember serving various Beatles. Tony Bennett was a regular in New York, as was Johnny Carson, who then became a “rabitué” of the Los Angeles club, as Playboy would style it, after The Tonight Show moved west in 1972.”

“A sexual diary seeks to hold on to experiences not only by recording—crystallizing them through obsessive inscription—and sharing them with others, but through the repetition of more or less the same experience again and again. Generally the pornographic project is to repeat a series of moments of supersaturated meaning.“

“This essay examines L’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L’Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. … Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. … The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites.” A French translation of L’Alcibiade.

“While the film The Night Porter, which was originally released in 1974, ostensibly portrays a detailed account of the development of a sado-masochistic relationship, it may also be read as a political metaphor. The film’s director and writer, Liliana Cavani, explicitly links the two protagonists’ obsession with each other as originating in an earlier shared experience within a concentration camp. … This paper is a detailed psychoanalytic exposition of the development and nature of that relationship.“

Charlotte Rampling in "The Night Porter"

There are a couple of Rampling stories in this post

“In 1971, I made a film entitled Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer in which I explore the objectifying ‘male’ gaze on my body in contrast to the subjective lived experience of my body. The film was a radical challenge to the gaze that objectifies woman – and thus imprisons her – which had hitherto dominated narrative cinema. Since the objectification of women has largely excluded us from the privileged phallogocentric discourses, in this paper I hope to bring into the psychoanalytic dialogue a woman’s lived experience.“

A sequel is rumored to be in the works for the 3-D Chinese porn film 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy

Here’s a good history of pelvic surgery, with gruesome attempts from the ancient world into the early 2oth Century.

One of the men mentioned in that history was James Marion Sims, an early gynecologist. He’s touted as a great man in Alabama, but there’s a less favorable view of him due to his experimental surgeries on slaves.

“Of the 55 transsexuals who participated in this study (52 male-to-female and 3 female to male), 7.5% showed a prolapse greater than or similar to ICS-POP stage 2, and 3.8% required surgical intervention. For bladder symptoms, 47% reported voiding difficulties, 24.6% urgency, 17% urge incontinence, and 23% stress incontinence. Fecal urgency and incomplete emptying of the bowel occurred in 9.4% and 7.6% of patients, respectively. In addition, 23% reported that they were never satisfied with their sexual function.“

Topless duels, sauciness, & patriotic sex

Topless dueling

A German kids’ show gives tips on how to hide an erection (YouTube clip)

Dear John, “a magazine for men written by women“

Chester Brown‘s graphic novel, Paying for It: “The book begins with a record of Brown’s slow disillusionment with the concept of romantic love, then follows his carefully planned and budgeted forays into the world of being a john.“

“Prostitution 2.0: The Changing Face of Sex Work” (pdf)

On the history of “the tits tee”

A review of Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe

Jean M. Auel, author of Clan of the Cave Bear, has a new book: “Sex turns out to be central to The Land of Painted Caves: ‘What does a Cro-Magnon woman do if she finds herself pregnant, but doesn’t know the cause? Was it because she bathed in a stream, ate certain foods or had relations with a man?’“

A review of Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, who wrote gay erotica under the name Phil Andros

A. Chee on sex in the writing of Jame Salter

Source

Diana Athill‘s old stories about happy-go-lucky quickies: “For Athill’s characters are innocent opportunists, finding sexual encounters where they can and for the most part enjoying them in the moment at face value.“

“[Angela] Carter gets away with shamelessly exploiting sci-fi B-movie conventions for serious aesthetic and ideological purposes. In some of her other works Carter uses structurally primitive kinds of narrative (the fairy tale, pornography) in much the same way: she taps into their basic structural and mythological power as a way of roiling the waters of the unconscious … then proceeds, by means of hyperbole, irony, structural reversals, and the layered development of character, to give those obvious stories thematic complexity and density.”

Keeping the British End Up — a re-issue of a book on those saucy 60′s & 70′s British sex comedies, which featured such memorable actresses as Sue Longhurst and Sally Faulkner. Faulkner later appeared in the lesbo vampire movie Vampyres.

Sally Faulkner in Confessions of a Driving Instructor

On 1970′s pornographer, Al Goldstein

Benjamin Franklin on why older women are preferable: “Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.“

Franklin also features in One Nation Under Sex, a new book by Larry Flynt and David Eisenbach, according to which “Ben Franklin helped save the American Revolution by seducing French women, Dolley Madison slept around, …. Abe Lincoln liked to share beds with men … and Eleanor Roosevelt’s lesbian affairs helped her become a crusader for equal rights.“

Franklin attended meetings of the Hellfire Club in England, where he met John Wilkes, an English radical who inspired the American revolutionaries, who “loved books, booze, sex and freedom,” and who co-wrote the porn poem, An Essay on Women

“Taking Virginia editor James Jackson Kilpatrick’s publication of The Smut Peddlers in 1960 as a starting point, this article shows how southern segregationists used the battle against pornography to build a constitutional coalition determined to prevent the Supreme Court from wresting further power from the states, this time under the rubric of upholding morality – itself a front for undermining civil rights.“

“Oral sex puts men at risk for oral cancer“

Academic sex scandals, from the dominatrix English professor at the University of New Mexico to a squirting demo at Northwestern to the strippers in the class at La Salle University to the emeritus professor of surgery who recommended giving semen to women on Valentine’s day instead of chocolate (and whose off-color humor triggered a major overreaction)

“If beautiful people have more daughters, and if physical attractiveness is heritable, then it follows that, over time, women become physically more attractive than men.“

Carry on sauciness

Veruschka and pet

Veruschka (aka Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort), whose father Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, was killed in 1944 due to his participation in the July 20 Plot to take Hitler’s life.

Iwan Bloch, “father of sexology”

“In 1776 and 1777 five living electric eels exhibited in London became a sensational spectacle that appealed to anatomists, electricians and connoisseurs of erotica. … Some participants even grasped the eels firmly in their hands and felt the ‘electric stroke’ of the eel in addition to observing the spark. In their observation of the electric eel some of these spectators transposed the vivid electric spark from the sphere of electricians and anatomists into that of satirical and erotic literature. Here the erotic electric eel proliferated in the literature …. The story of the electric eel in Georgian culture charts the creation of the electric spark and stroke as objects of observation and encounter, their exhibitionary context, and finally their divergent meanings as the electric eel became erotically charged for a metropolitan masculine elite.“

“The second part of the book, and chapter 3 specifically, deals more intimately with the importance of Venetian writer Pietro Aretino and the relationship between Elizabethan England and Italy. The fourth chapter examines “the anxieties about effeminacy and the italiante that surface in the highly charged polemic between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey.” Focusing on Nashe’s erotic narrative poem, “Choice of Valentines” (c. 1592), Moulton discusses Nashe’s respect for Aretino as a model for his own writing practices.“

The bawdy politic in Stuart England, 1660-1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution by Melissa Mowry — “Mowry widely consults and deftly engages with literary and historical scholarship on her subject, and her original research encompasses previously overlooked satires, including such broadsides as The Prentices Answer to the Poor-Whores Petition and The Poor Whores Complaint to the Apprentices of London, as well as archival legal documents related to the Bawdy House Riots and to prostitution in London.“

Veruschka

“Sarah Toulalan’s Imagining Sex rewrites a variety of current scholarly assumptions concerning seventeenth-century pornography literature in England. These varied assumptions include: the beliefs that seventeenth-century “pornography” did not exist, that it contained little aesthetic value compared to “erotica” or “literature,” and that it did similar things as modern pornography.“

Reading sex in the eighteenth century: bodies and gender in English erotic culture

“The scientized movements for sexual control born of nineteenth century anxieties concerning changing conceptions of class, race and gender spiraled into dark applications …. Intentionally or not, pornographers in the United States helped undermine the paired movements of purist authoritarianism represented by Anthony Comstock and William J. Robinson before either reached its brutal apotheosis.“

“Saucy stories: Pornography, sexology and the marketing of sexual knowledge in Britain, c. 1918-70“

“The very first Carry On film – Sergeant – came out 50 years ago this August and its appearance spawned a series of 30 over the next two decades. I decided to put in an idea to make a documentary marking the golden anniversary – not the sort that had been made many times before, focusing on the saucy lines and, at times, the desperately sad story of the troupe of actors who became such familiar faces to us all.“

“It is commonplace to observe that pornography drives the development of media technologies. Examples abound, from the mania for capturing naked bodies that led Charles Baudelaire to complain in 1859 that photography had been coopted, to the story of how American pornographers in 1976 decided that JVCs VHS would dethrone Sonys Beta videotape format. [However,] of the hundreds of stag films made before 1965, only five were shot in sound, and only four were shot in color. Although the whole point of a hard-core genre would seem to be graphic realism, stags clung to primitive technology.“

Before the Green Door: “This is the first of a two-part article exploring how hard-core porn evolved through the efforts of Jim and Artie Mitchell and other pioneers, with some help from San Francisco s vibrant counterculture.“

“There is widespread concern that deviant sexual fantasies promote corresponding behaviors. The authors investigated whether that concern is valid in nonoffender samples. … The association between pornography use and deviant sexual behavior held only for participants high in psychopathy.“

“Increased use of an online educational archive of photographic dermatology case materials indicated unexpected pornography-seeking behavior and misuse. … Of all referrals, 14.3% originated from nonmedical (pornography/fetish) Web sites. … CONCLUSION: Online photographic dermatology archives are vulnerable to misuse. Monitoring and intervention are necessary to preserve their availability and integrity.“

“This article examines two internet websites — Nerve, a magazine devoted to `smart smut’, and SuicideGirls, an `altporn’ site where softcore sexual display is a major component of a participatory taste culture. … [T]he article investigates how some new forms of pornography are developing to construct sexual display as a form of recreation, self-presentation and community building.“

“Some scholars have suggested that new media technologies are opening up spaces for the sexual emancipation of … marginalized groups. These ‘DIY’ web cultures would facilitate … more authentic, representations of gender and sexuality than conventionally available in mainstream pornography. This study examines these propositions by analyzing a sample of 100 user-generated ‘amateur’ videos on YouPorn, an adult video-sharing website.“

Here’s a clip about Peter Beard’s great photos of Veruschka:

Sacred prostitutes, sexy books and why sex is worth it

Charlotte Rampling

Another excellent treasure trove of Veruschka pics. An older Veruschka: “My eyes carry more than happiness.“

Western Sexual Mysticism: “The vast range of possibilities for hidden, erotic mysticism demand a closer look.”

Sex in the Dionysian mysteries, and sex in the Orphic mysteries

From a journal on endocrinology and metabolism, “Baubo: a Case of Ambiguous Genitalia in the Eleusinian Mysteries“

Sacred prostitution in Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough

“Sacred prostitution and Aphrodite“

More about sacred prostitution, and still more

Michael Coogan on “God and Sex”

“Sex and the Renaissance Nun: Why Venetian Nunneries Were Once Hotbeds of Passion“

Dr. Debby Herbenick’s research interests range “from examining attitudes toward vibrator use to investigating the relationship between sexual lubricant and pleasure.”

The Veruschka segment from Blowup:

Rhesus Macaques “pay” for monkey porn (pdf)

“Sex differences in relative foot length and perceived attractiveness of female feet“

“While outbreaks of koro (a culture-specific syndrome involving belief that the genitals are shrinking and retreating into the body) are most common in China and other parts of south-east Asia, sporadic cases have also been reported in other countries such as Thailand, India, and even western nations such as Canada.“

Hooters opens in Japan

Two kinds of Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder

“This mind trick – called the Belladonna effect – is helping the team’s research into attractiveness. Large pupils is [sic] a known signal of physiological arousal, say the authors, so they predicted that making the pupils seem dilated would make a face appear more attractive.“

From almost five years ago, Susie Bright on Playboy‘s list of the 25 sexiest books. Adam Ross recommends James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime.

Laura Miller against the Bad Sex in Fiction Award

Charlotte Rampling (1974)

“In this review, we summarize neural regulation of sexual function and neurological causes of sexual dysfunction in women.“

“Dr Abecassis performs a “hymenoplasty” as it’s called, at least two to three times a week. Re-connecting the tissue of the hymen takes about 30 minutes under local anaesthetic. … With Chinese manufacturers leading the way, there are now non-surgical options on the market as well. One website sells artificial hymens for just £20 (23 euros). The Chinese hymen is made of elastic and filled with fake blood.“

“When it comes to the age at which boys and girls first have sex, boys are far more influenced by what their peers are doing and by the number of available sex partners than are girls.“

“Several standard sex differences replicated across cultures, including women’s greater valuation of social status and men’s greater valuation of physical attractiveness.“

Hypothesis: “Sexual frequency would moderate the association between neuroticism and relationship satisfaction.“

Sex costs much time and energy. Is it worth it?

Alla Nazimova

“Additionally, the mating dance is another cost of sex. Individuals expend time and energy seeking out mates, and may have to compete and display for the attention of all. Why bother?“

“Men, they’ve found, are less likely to continue a relationship with an unfaithful partner who’s had a heterosexual affair, as opposed to a homosexual affair. For women, it’s the other way around – they’re more troubled by their male partner going off with another man.“

“Some historians have proclaimed that America’s first gay president was really … the now-obscure James Buchanan. (He was the 15th president, serving from 1857 to 1861). Buchanan is the only bachelor to ever have held America’s top office, and his private life raised many eyebrows while he was alive.“

“In Search of Looks, Status, or Something Else? Partner Preferences Among Butch and Femme Lesbians and Heterosexual Men and Women“: “Previous research posited that butch lesbians are physiologically similar to heterosexual men, and by implication, femme lesbians physiologically resemble heterosexual women. The current study sought to compare partner preferences among butch and femme lesbians, as well as heterosexual women and men.”

Porn, safety and tech

"Pornokrates" by Félicien Rops (1879)

“Pornography is the eroticism of others.” – Alain Robbe-Grillet

An LA gallery hosts an event in memory of David Aaron Clark, of the “artporn” elite

“It has been found everywhere it was scientifically investigated that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.” Here’s an older opinion piece defending the same idea.

From down under, an interview with Patchen Barss on porn’s role in stimulating tech advances

From up above, details on the Canadian ruling that liberalizes prostitution; how it has divided feminist groups

Why Charlotte is happy she became a prostitute

Students in sex work: “she conducted a survey of 39 off-street sex workers. Ninety percent of respondents indicated that they had some postsecondary training, while 35 percent had earned a bachelor’s or master’s degree.”

Melissa Petro — a stripper in college and a prostitute in grad school, now a grade-school teacher. Petro wrote a piece in defense of prostitution ads on Craigslist. Now, after being pulled from the classroom, she’s written another article for the Huffington Post. She’s apparently got “her balls back.”

Wikipedia entry on “sacred prostitution”

Trade Secrets — “a blog devoted to health and safety in the sex industry”

A list of movies about prostitutes (with clips)

Shadows, Kotzwara & Eunuchs

Margo Lion

First recorded case of death by kink? Franz Kotzwara in 1791 (more)

All you ever wanted to know (or not) about erotic asphyxiation but never even dreamt of asking. Mistress Matisse says it isn’t for novices

The Washington Post’s Carolyn Butler on the Indiana sex survey

‘Do prostitutes enjoy sex with their clients?‘

Female sex tourists? Strictly speaking, they seldom pay for sex. But they do offer their holiday ‘boyfriends’ money, gifts, a new house, etc.

“Modifications induced by dopaminergic drugs in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) are … not taken into sufficient consideration …. Modifications of sexual urges and behaviours are of particular importance …. Although rare, such modifications may assume the connotations of an aberrant sexual behaviour with criminal implications, in line with a diagnosis of paraphilia. The authors report the case of a 51-year-old male PD patient who … developed … frotteurism and delusional jealousy.“

“Delusional jealousy or Othello syndrome (OS) is a … disorder with paranoid features …. In organic psychoses, the disorder occurs more frequently among chronic male alcoholics and in demented patients. … Six patients with OS were identified. They were all male, with a relatively recent diagnosis of PD.“

“Men viewed the opposite sex for a significantly longer period than did women, and women viewed their own sex for a significantly longer period than did men. However, gaze times for the clip showing intercourse were not significantly different between sexes.”

“Women near ovulation (when they’re most fertile) report that they’re more easily turned on and have more interest in sex. They also tend to have redder lips! By putting on reddening lipstick, women are accentuating a natural signal of fertility.“

“This suggests that physical attractiveness may enhance distinctive accuracy both because consensually attractive targets provide better information than less-attractive targets, and because perceivers pay more attention to them and are more motivated to understand them.”

“Overall, 96% of the participants reported post-orgasmic clitoral hypersensitivity and a comparable percentage indicated aversiveness to further post-orgasm clitoral stimulation.“

Joggers have more active sex lives

Farrah Fawcett & Lee Majors

“The 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach’s normative sample of American youth.“

“Well-organised men, especially from twenty to thirty-five years of age, who remain absolutely free from sexual intercourse or any other causes of expenditure of seminal fluid, are in a state of excitement, giving them a great, although abnormal, physical and mental activity.“

Serge Voronoff put monkey ovaries into women and tissue from monkey testicles into men

Bush crickets have the biggest testes: “Delicate measurements of the tuberous bush cricket, Platycleis affinis, showed that its testes accounted for 14% of the insect’s body weight. If the same proportion were applied to a man, his testicles would weigh the equivalent of six bags of sugar each.” Why indicate weight in terms of bags of sugar?

“Particularly illuminating is her account of 19th-century Western reactions to Katsushika Hokusai’s erotic woodblock print “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” in which two octopi pleasure a naked woman with their tentacles. … If only the critics had been able or willing to translate the Japanese text …. There, Ms. Kawaguchi notes, they would have learned that the woman is ecstatic, even praising one of the octopi for its superior sexual skills.“

More women opt for vaginoplasty and labioplasty down under

Your mind is less likely to wander during sex

“Biotechnological opportunities have immense significance … in that they invalidate ‘eternal’ limitations of sex, procreation and embodiment. An explanatory concept, generative identity, is postulated, to account psychologically for the increasing diversity of reproductive patterns. … Disturbances in generative identity manifest as unconscious ‘shadows’ expressed as inhibitions to creative agency [etc.]“

Photo of Assia by Dora Maar (1933)

“To explain the existence of female orgasm in an evolutionary context, then, biologists have two options: (1) discover a way in which female orgasm shapes reproductive success indirectly, or (2) conclude that female orgasm isn’t an adaptation.“

A batch of links to orgasm studies

“Now to my mind, this wasn’t a perfect study: they compared ejaculate in 52 heterosexual men looking at pornography with two men and one woman, against pornography with three women, whereas I think it would have been better to use comparison images with one man and one woman, but there you go. … Yamamoto and colleagues … studied 19 men masturbating into a jar, either alone … or with “sexually stimulating videotaped visual images” at hand. Sperm volume, total sperm count, sperm motility, and percentage of morphologically normal sperm were all higher when the men had pornography.“

“Techniques for training boars for semen collection“

“Do men with deep voices have more children?“

Well it’s about bloody time! India starts paying its eunuchs

‘Ten robots you can date,’ with links for each one

Rocco Siffredi interviewed

Abbey Lee Kershaw photos in Vogue Italia

Slut-o-ween, unmasking and Christoph Haizmann

Sexy Halloween Costumes

A history of the phantom penis

Edith Wharton’s erotic tale

The original vamps

Carny strippers in the 50′s

Lady Gaga and the death of sex

Clarisse Thorn asks why men who are honest about their sexual needs are demonized

Subterfuge, spies and scarlet women

Can people mask their orientation? Perception of sexual orientation based on facial cues

Alexa di Carlo unmasked. I fell for the Alexa persona, and now I feel dumb and creeped out. Belle de Jour and Dr. Petra Boynton reflect on this scammer in this comments thread. More here and here.

A 1994 doctoral dissertation called ‘Exorcism Seekers: Clinical and Personality Correlates’

“When Max Eastman visited Sigmund Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria, in 1926, he noticed a print of John Henry Fuseli’s (1741-1825) The Nightmare hanging on the wall next to Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Anatomy Lesson. Freud did not refer to Fuseli’s most famous painting in his writing, but his colleague Ernest Jones chose another version of it as the frontispiece of his book On the Nightmare, a scholarly study of the origins and significance of the nightmare theme. However, the nightmare did not fit easily into Freud’s model of dreams as wish fulfillments.” Here are some reflections on Fuseli’s The Nightmare, which, according to this pdf, is “the consummate image of sexual terror.”

Hipocresia by Felicien Rops

Cacodemonomania: “The experience of having had intercourse with the devil ….“

Freud’s reflections on the case of Christoph Haizmann, a 17th-Century painter with cacodemonomania

Some items about Freud’s treatment of the Haizmann case

More about Haizmann in the History of Psychiatry

An old blog devoted to sexy witches

Confessions of a Porn Addict — The Devil is a Woman

'Sin' by Franz von Stuck

“Malleus maleficarum means ‘Hammer of Malefactresses’. Maleficus (fem. malefica), the adjectival noun for ‘malefactor’, had become the common term for ‘wicked magician’, but the two Dominican friars who compiled and published this book in 1486 used the feminine form because they asserted that most of the adherents and practitioners of this satanic heretical sect were women.“

The final issue of the first volume of a neat new journal called Psychology and Sexuality. Most of the papers are about psychological theories of sex from the 1700s until the early 1900s. On a related note, here’s the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

“The Natural and the Normal in the History of Sexuality“

“Using [fMRI], we identified the common and distinct brain systems processing the value of erotic stimuli and monetary gains. … Whereas the anterior lateral OFC, a phylogenetically recent structure, processes monetary gains, the posterior lateral OFC, phylogenetically and ontogenetically older, processes more basic erotic stimuli.“

“Men (and women) in black uniforms“

Beatrice Knop as the evil stepmother in Snow White

Tracy Clark-Flory against raunchy Halloween costumes

“In Defense of Slut-o-ween“

Porn stars discuss horror movies

Ladies in red, scary mothers, more sex cannibals and cabaret

“When a lady wears red it prompts men to ask her more intimate questions and to sit closer to her.”

“A percentage-point increase in the male-to-female ratio of a man’s graduation class led to a percentage-point increase in his likelihood of dying before the age of 65.”

“Following all three election cycles, individuals located in states voting for the winning political party tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often than individuals residing in states voting for the losing political party.”

A review of porn.com, an edited collection that examines porn as a driving force behind tech (esp. internet) innovations

“The Old Pornographers: Richard Nash and Mike Edison on Banned Books“

“Fifty of those women … were randomly chosen to receive a placebo instead of a drug treatment for low sexual arousal. … The findings … show that on average, one in three of the women who took a placebo showed an overall improvement.”

Bayer’s new vaginal atrophy drug

A skeptical challenge of the notion of a porn-addicted brain

A skeptical challenge directed at recent waist-to-hip ratio research

Twiggy

A neat post about Twiggy, the too-thin, not-very-curvaceous 1960′s super-model

“According to the researchers, reduced contraceptive use is most likely the result of a decade of abstinence-only sex education.”

Psychologists at Temple University find “no evidence that the initiation of sexual intercourse is hastened by exposure to sexy media.”

Lindsay Beyerstein rounds up some sex ed links and takes a recent study to show that “nearly half of teenagers are already having sex, and many others are doing their best to get in on the action. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect audience for comprehensive sex ed.”

Simon Baron-Cohen wrote of the autistic mind as an “extreme male brain,” and now Mark Brosnan et al ask, “Can an ‘Extreme Female Brain’ be characterised in terms of psychosis?”

These researchers went looking for male-female brain differences but found none in the ‘resting’ state, using fMRI

Canada tosses most of its laws restricting prostitution: “Judge Himel found that laws set up to protect prostitutes actually endanger their safety, forcing them to furtively engage in hasty transactions conducted in shady locations.”

“The well-known eastern Munich bordello told Bavarian daily tz on Thursday that taxi drivers are paid up to €120 for every ‘John’ they bring to their rivals during the annual autumn beer festival, when hundreds of thousands of visitors are in town for a good time.”

Matt Ridley on hard-wired sex differences: “In virtually every mammal and nearly all birds, males are more aggressive, females more nurturing. It is a distinction that goes right back to active sperm competing for stationary eggs. … Wombs are worth fighting over—and granting to favored applicants only.”

“Females produce only a few, large gametes while males produce a greater number of small gametes. Because females invest more, and because their productivity is not usually limited by the availability of male gametes, females should be the choosy sex. … There are only a few examples of organisms that have reversed the usual relationship, and the [seahorses and pipefish] are one such group.”

“Jacobus Boomsma … has argued that strict monogamous behavior, such as an ant queen mating for life, spurred the evolution of cooperative breeding in some social insects. Monogamy helps fulfill Hamilton’s conditions, because all siblings are equally related to each other and to each parent. Promiscuity, on the other hand, leads to many half-siblings and lowers the relatedness of individuals in a group.”

“We hypothesized that men’s relationship satisfaction and investment would predict interest in their partner’s copulatory orgasm, and that sperm competition risk would moderate the association between relationship satisfaction and interest in partner’s copulatory orgasm.”

The 2011 German farm-girl calendar is out

“This study clarifies the adaptive significance of infertile sperm castes, which has remained elusive in Drosophila. … We suggest that spermicide and male countermeasures against it are more common than is appreciated and discuss how spermicide could drive the evolution of several key male traits, including sperm size and number.”

“By varying the adult sex ratio of populations of the Indian meal moth … we altered the frequency of male and female copulations, and thus the level of sperm competition experienced by males. As predicted by theory, males evolving under higher levels of sperm competition increased investment in sperm production and differed in their sperm allocation patterns across matings.”

“We assess this key assumption in seed beetles where genital spines in males physically injure females. We demonstrate that male spine length is positively correlated with harm to females during mating but also that males with longer spines are more successful in sperm competition.”

Otto Dix's painting of Anita Berber

On sexual cannibalism in black widows, red-back spiders, etc.: “Why not eat him; he’s not much use later anyway. Mating success is so variable among males, there’s no guarantee that living another day will pay off for him.  Most males fail to mate at all and some research suggests that males become functionally sterile after mating. So, why not?“

“Penis captivus describes an event that occurs in rare instances during heterosexual intercourse when the muscles in the vagina clamp down on the penis much more firmly than usual (a form of vaginismus), making it impossible for the penis to withdraw from the vagina.”

“Information from species in which females remain in their natal group … shows the importance of kin support, especially from mothers, on the reproductive success of their daughters. Therefore, one might expect a similar effect on sons in species in which males remain in their natal group like bonobos.”

Bare naked 1960′s psychotherapy: “Perhaps most notable was an exercise called “crotch eyeballing”, designed to dispel guilt about the body, in which participants were instructed to look at each others genitals and disclose the sexual experiences they felt most guilty about while lying naked in a circle with their legs in the air.”

Joey Heatherton

“Humans in the highest economic bracket leave more grandchildren through sons than through daughters. Therefore, adaptive variation in sex ratios is expected, and human mothers in the highest economic bracket do give birth to more sons, suggesting similar sex ratio manipulation as seen in other mammals.”

“Results showed (a) that greater maternal harshness at 54 months predicted earlier age of menarche [and] (b) that earlier age of menarche predicted greater sexual (but not other) risk taking“

Piper Laurie plays the mother of Carrie (Sissy Spacek) in the 1976 movie Carrie

“A talk with Museum of Sex curator Sarah Forbes“

The Museum of Eroticism in Paris — 7 floors of erotic art inside an old cabaret

The strippers of Shoreditch

A neat blog: Cabaret Berlin — “exploring the entertainment of the Weimar era”