An ancient paga festibal honoring Dionysus lives on in Greece:
If you want to eat phallus-shaped bread, drink through phallus-shaped straws from phallus-shaped cups, kiss ceramic phalluses, sit on a phallus-shaped throne and sing dirty Greek songs about the phallus, then you should visit the little Greek town of Tyrnavos each year on “Clean Monday.”
Is the quaint coinage of San Jose city councilman Pete Constant. Second hand porn is caused by people searching for adult content using public library computers. Mr. Constant views this with grave alarm.
And - perhaps envying the Chinese government - frets about what people my see while searching on Google. His solution is to impose a filter on searches.
A recemt demonstration:
With a satisfied look on his face, Constant queried “orgasm” into Google — while the audience watched on three huge projection screens placed in the room. Then he tried “women’s asses,” then “bush tits”.
Ultrasound scanning answers the ancient question as to exactly what the penis is doing during heterosexual coitus:
[Robert Latou]Dickinson was eager to rebut claims being made that a man’s penis, during sex, drives straight on into the cervix and that the two interlock …
At the very least, the paper laid to rest the hokum about penises routinely interlocking with cervixes. Also, we learned that the penis - root and stalk together - “has the shape of a boomerang” during intercourse.
That older men and women were expected to not have sexual needs is just another proof that our society has imposed sexual trauma on millions of people:
Retirement homes have struggled to acknowledge senior sexuality. In the past, elderly people who were “caught” making out or even masturbating in their own beds were chided like naughty teenagers. That’s changing, with more private rooms, better training for staff members and more open discussions of intimacy and sexuality.
In Sweden a man claims he was unaccountably overcome by a desire to swipe a chocolate phallus:
“I lost my head. I even had money with me. I don’t know why I took the stuff,” the 28-year-old said to the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper.
Even if you don’t believe in pure “freedom of speech” here’s one reason attempting to censor adult web sites is a bad idea:
From two in 2002, the number of governments filtering the net has risen to two dozen, according to Rob Faris, research director at the Berkman Center at Harvard and part of the OpenNet Initiative. Faris’s maps show that social filtering – pornography, gambling – is far more widespread than political filtering, but that the overlapping diagram of who filters what shows a lot of “mission creep”.
Foot fetishists must be about the most aggressive, addicted folks. Week after week retifists and stockings addicts appear in the news. They invade women’s privacy, sometimes even their homes.
The latest is a well-dressed man in Riverside California:
“It’s a nuisance at this point,” said Riverside police spokesman Steven Frasher. “Invading their space, acting weird. We’re not pre-supposing there are other incidents. But if there are, we want to know about them.”
Time for a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which defines more or less the official list and descriptions of mental illness in the US.
Those of us with atypical behavior would probably all agree that:
… all paraphilias, like sexual sadism, sexual masochism, transvestism, should be removed from the DSM, insisting that “the DSM criteria for diagnosis of unusual sexual interests as pathological rests on a series of unproven and more importantly, untested assumptions.”
Controversy erupts over creation of psychiatric rule book’s new edition
HighJoy Products the makers of a vibrator designed to be used over the internet forget that for some people in person sex may not be an option.
“It’s just for fun. It’s not intended to replace sex. We feel that only losers or weird people would do that, whereas it’s the sexually adventurous, open people who are doing it,” she says.
Teledildonics are electronic sex toys that can be controlled via the Internet
From a Scientific American survey of neurobiologists using brain imagine to explore the underlying physiology of human sexual pleasure.
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”
While I tend to take a fairly reductionist view of these things I have to wonder how they define emotion - if they really can evaluate the quality of consciousness. Emotions are subjective.
The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure