HELLO BEAUTIFUL

http://www.alternet.org…
By Michael Bader, AlterNet
Posted on October 28, 2008, Printed on October 28, 2008

The following is a response to Robert Jensen’s recent AlterNet article, “Porn’s Dirty, Dangerous Secret.”

When I was 13, a new friend, Andy, came over my house to watch television. We were watching the show, Time Tunnel. As the show neared its climax, I noticed that Andy was quite nervous. When I asked why, he said that it looked like the hero was about to be killed. I said, “Are you an idiot?! Of course he won’t be killed … this is a TV series and it’s on again next week!” It turned out that Andy’s family didn’t allow him to watch television and, therefore, he didn’t know that the hero of a television series never dies. He didn’t know the code.

Robert Jensen writes about pornography like someone who doesn’t know the code. He seems incapable of differentiating fantasy from reality. He keeps mistaking the reality of the sexual enactments depicted in gonzo porn with their meaning in fantasy to the men masturbating. If the woman on the screen is having 4 penises shoved into her, something that would demean and degrade any real woman reading Jensen’s article (and probably the actress performing such scenes), he automatically infers that the degradation must be the source of the male viewer’s arousal. It isn’t.
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By Robert Jensen, Last Exit
Posted on October 21, 2008, Printed on October 21, 2008

Ed. Note: AlterNet has run a series of articles on the frequently ignored role of pornography in contemporary society. At the bottom of Robert Jensen’s article you can find links to more stories addressing the many questions that pornography poses.

There are a finite number of ways that human bodies can be placed together sexually, and as one pornography industry veteran lamented to me at the annual trade show, “they’ve all been shot.” He sighed, pondering the challenge of creating a sexually explicit film that is unique, and mused, “After all, how many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?”
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By , The Frisky
Posted on October 17, 2008, Printed on October 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/103338/

What’s it like to be a sex writer? Inquiring minds want to know. To find out, we asked Lux Alptraum, editor of sex blog Boinkology and Gawker Media’s Fleshbot. After spending a decade covering the wild world of sex, Lux reveals what a day in the life of a sex writer is like, how covering sex affects her love life, and why sex will never be boring.
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By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee
Posted on October 10, 2008, Printed on October 11, 2008

Leopard-print spandex, Lee press-on nails and orangey-foundation used to be the signs of a cougar sighting: a single, man-hungry, 30-something woman. Oh, the good old ’80s.

But that’s not what a cougar is anymore. In the current pop culture vernacular, “cougar” simply means a sexy woman over the age of 35. The word “desperation” seems to have disappeared from its definition; words like smart, successful and funny have often taken its place. It no longer even necessarily means single — just hot and older.
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I should feel dumb adding this disclaimer but ya never know what people will do, so here goes. Coke is NOT a suitable spermicide and neither is douching. There, on with the regularly scheduled silliness. ~ E.

http://www.reuters.com…

Fri Oct 3, 2008 3:11pm EDT
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A researcher who figured out that Coke explodes sperm and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough won alternative “Ig Nobel” prizes Thursday.
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http://www.alternet.org/story/101143/
By Josey Vogels, My Messy Bedroom
Posted on October 2, 2008, Printed on October 2, 2008

“Everyone should have to go through a dry spell at some point in their life,” Miss Cute-as-a-Button was telling me as I was half paying attention and half eyeballing the cute red-head shooting pool across the bar (hey, I’m still allowed to look).
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By Margot Canaday, The Nation
Posted on September 16, 2008, Printed on September 18, 2008

On the June day in 2003 when the Supreme Court announced its landmark decision in Lawrence v. Texas holding state sodomy laws to be unconstitutional, I was working in the library of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, as part of a summer workshop for historians of sexuality. This was an appropriate place to be at that particular moment. Dr. Kinsey, after all, had been in his day a fierce critic of those laws. And the setting was even more fitting because our party of historians included several who — led by George Chauncey — had written an amicus brief in the case that was influential in Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. So when one of our group checked the headlines and then alerted the rest of us that the Court had announced its decision, we all clustered excitedly around a computer monitor, checking the available news. A joint cheer went up. But that was really it. Minutes later, we shuffled back to our tables and quietly resumed our research.
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http://www.alternet.org/story/93519/
By Dagmar Herzog, Perseus Books
Posted on August 4, 2008, Printed on August 7, 2008

Editor’s note: From the book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics by Dagmar Herzog. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008

The Religious Right is a capacious tent in which many agendas and approaches have found a home. There are conservative evangelicals who promise worldly prosperity and success (if only you trust enough in God’s plans). There are others who gird themselves for Armageddon. There are the vehement defenders of “Merry Christmas” and school prayer and the enemies of evolution and intellectualism and “liberal elitism.” There are highly intellectual (and themselves elite) members of the Religious Right. There are those who see the culture clash with neofundamentalist Islam as the current big threat, and those who work to justify the ongoing war in Iraq as a properly Christian cause. There are those who raise money for and organize tourism in Israel in the expectation that at the End of Days a majority of Jews will convert to Christ. But right-wing evangelicalism achieved power in American politics primarily through its sex activism. And in fifteen years of steady effort, it managed to undo the most important achievements of the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s.
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By Monica Shores, $pread Magazine
Posted on July 10, 2008, Printed on July 11, 2008

Last week, just after writing an article praising the adult industry for supporting a Max Hardcore, a man that largely disgusts them, I came across a drawn image of a naked girl pinned to a wall by knives, including one that was wedged between her legs. There was blood at at every point of contact. I couldn’t imagine what type of person would want to post this on their personal blog (which was where I encountered it) and, in a clear case of poor judgment, I followed the link back to where it the image was found.
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http://news.yahoo.com/…

Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Fri May 16, 5:31 PM ET

As gay couples celebrate their newfound right to marry in California and opposition groups rally to fight the ruling, many struggle with this question: Is homosexuality natural?

On this issue, Nature has spoken: Same-sex lovin’ is common in hundreds of species, scientists say.
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