Keeping It Up With The Joneses
"Sex makes us happier as long as we think we're having more than our neighbours, according to a new scientific study."
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I Don't Think "Sex Tape" Means What It Used To Mean???
So, back in the day, there were these things called "sex tapes." Like people would record themselves having sex on a phone or something, and then they'd email it around, and then, blammo, on the Internet. And people would be like "oh no, don't show that to everyone, oh my stars." And then—or maybe from day one!—people would realize the publicity value in this was immense. So then a number of sex tapes "leaked" with varying degrees of publicist denials or threats of legal action. (Most legal action in the sex tape arena has to do with dividing rights for sale. It's actually a fun aspect of copyright law, [...]
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Ask Polly: I Can't Resist Great Sex With My Crazy Ex!
Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Eat two custard-filled doughnuts and call me in the morning."
Dear Polly,
So, this is going to sound so dramatic and stupid and of-course-you-already-know-the-answer-to-this-why-are-you-even-asking? But I'm confused and I want to talk about this with someone. I moved to this cold, Midwestern state from the South (which I loved, but didn't want to stay in for career reasons) two and a half years ago for law school. I left partially to get away from a bad relationship. A couple months in, I met someone else in law school. Things moved very quickly. I'd [...]
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The Only Lesson From the Petraeus Scandal Is About Email Habits
The head of the CIA and former commander of the war in Afghanistan has fallen in a tawdry scandal involving marital infidelity, leaked national security secrets, weird FBI agents and a whole network of high-level grifters in Florida. What can we learn from this huge, bizarre conspiracy at the very top of the national security state? Watch out for that crafty "send" button on the email program! Especially if you're 60 years old, like David Petraeus. According to the important morning program The Today Show, older people must constantly watch out for the young people's Hotmail.
There’s a valuable lesson everyone can learn from the scandal involving CIA Director [...]
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Soundtrack To A Hermaphrodite Snail Orgy
“They have orgies. I’m serious. When they mate, they’re connecting male and female, female and male.” —Mary Stewart farms snails in Northern California and knows lots about them. They are hermaphrodites, for example, and, as part of their mating ritual, they shoot each other with sharp "love darts" that inject a mucous chemical into the female reproductive system that allows more snail sperm to find purchase. Mary says the darts are very painful for humans, and they appear to be painful for snails, too. As The McGill Tribune's Ian Popple reported in 2002, "Copulating snails are commonly seen jostling in an attempt to hit but not be hit" [...]
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The Social Phone
The rotary dial was a building block of civilization, the key that unlocked the phone system for millions of people. It was an integral part of your parents' lives. Imagine your father stuffing his dirty fingers into the waiting greasy dialpits, over and over and over again, over and over and over and over again, ringing your mother's bell until finally she shudders and reaches—for the phone and says: “Hello? This is [YOUR MOTHER'S NAME].” “Hey,” says your father, “this is [YOUR FATHER'S NAME].” “Well, how do you like that?” asks your mother even though she likes it very much. He asks her out to dinner. “Let me [...]
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"Then it’s time for the gang bang"
"At 3:15 the models take a break to text and snack on rainbow Twizzlers. Then it’s time for the gang bang." — I've known plenty of happy long-term threesome couples, so I don't find this tale of a very content throuple particularly shocking or exciting, but you sure gotta love having these two sentences together.
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The Internet's First 12-Step Program
Emily Witt's great piece today on the nofap movement-thing—all about the subreddit where men get together to talk about not masturbating!—points out that it's mostly all about men trying to get their "alpha" back. Or get it for the first time.
When you look at the subreddit, the themes come up again and again: "I relapsed less than a month away from my one year milestone." "Skeptic hooks up with chick he's been trying to bag for months. THANK YOU NOFAP!" "At Day 39, first 'Super Power.'" Magical self-realization!
And then the rest of their talk is couched in the language of 12-step recovery: relapse, shame, triggers, [...]
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Ask Polly: How Do I Stop Faking Orgasms With My Boyfriend?
Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Concrete, explicit instructions in the time of emotional cholera."
Dear Polly,
My problem started innocently enough, a little white cLIEmax that rolled along and gained momentum until it became a large-scale inescapable avalanche of deceit-gasms.
Paradoxically enough, I met him at a bar on a girls' night out that a friend had organized for me as a "screw men" celebration following yet another breakup in a string of less-than-great short-term relationships. When we started dating, my expectations were down to zero and I was more interested in casual fun than a meaningful relationship. [...]
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Ask Polly: Why Do People Always Think I'm Gay?
Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Does your soul ever feel, you know, not so fresh?"
Dear Polly,
I finally garnered the courage to write to you about my particular problem, and I hope you can shed some of your wisdom on the situation.
Ever since the 6th grade, people have been asking me if I'm gay. Back then, the other kids thought any person who was any bit different from them was gay, and attached a bad meaning to the word. I'll be the first to say that I've never been the most "masculine" individual. I love to read [...]
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The Way We Electronically Sex Now
Remember when "the equivalent of phone sex over e-mail" was called "cybersex"? RT @newyorkpost:nyp.st/TZrJyq (via @moorehn)
— Farrah Bostic (@farrahbostic) November 14, 2012
Well? Do you???
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Hideous Birth Control Methods Through The Ages
Some things aren’t as good as they used to be, but that isn't true of birth control. Some tips from the footnotes of history, used by women (and in some cases, men) far less fortunate than us:
• A pessary made of dried crocodile dung (Ancient Egypt)
• A mixture of olive oil and oil of cedar, placed in the vagina (recommended by Aristotle)
• Bloodletting, as current medical tradition held that sperm was merely blood turned white by the heat humor. The French physician Jacques Ferrand, author of A treatise on lovesickness, recommended that, if moderate bloodletting failed to dampen libido, the man must be bled until he "is [...]
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People Are Trying To Sell You Things With Sexy Sex Ads
I hope you're sitting down: "Sexy advertisements are up in magazines from Playboy to Time and Newsweek to Esquire, according to new research from the University of Georgia. Since 1983, the percent of ads using sex to sell products rose from 15 percent to 27 percent by 2003. Though sexual imagery is used to sell almost everything, even banking services, the bulk of the increase has come in ads for impulse buys: alcohol, entertainment, beauty supplies." Even more shockingly: "Women are overwhelmingly the vehicles by which advertisers portray sexuality, the researchers found."
Photo by conrado, via Shutterstock
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I Am Listening To The Wrong Music
"Listening to great music is as good as sex, according to new research." This conclusion makes more sense when you realize that the study was conducted by Canadians.
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No Point In Having Sex
"In fact, having sex burns calories at about the same rate as walking at a pace of 2.5 mph. 'Given that the average bout of sexual activity lasts about 6 minutes,' the authors write, a man in his early to mid-30s might burn 21 calories. But wait, it gets worse: Considering that this man could burn 7 calories just watching TV, the true benefit of having sex is only 14 additional calories burned." —Many common beliefs about dieting and exercise, such as the one about how sexual intercourse burns 300 calories, are not at all true. So go ahead and take the night off.
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Tucker Carlson Calls Bob Mendenez a "Latin Lover"
Did you stare at your computer until midnight waiting for Tucker Carlson's blog exclusive about an elections sex scandal? Of course not—it was Halloween, and there's still this power outage thing for millions of people, and who cares. But many conservative pundits on Twitter did stay up past their bediimes to see what the Daily Caller website would post, even though some other wingnuts on the Internet had already claimed the scandal was something about Senator Bob Menendez. The hot news finally went live, hours after the promised midnight posting: The Daily Caller claims that a lawyer in the Dominican Republic got two legal prostitutes to look [...]
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That's How People Grow Up (Into Whores)
"One of the most difficult things to witness is when you see some young boy, at 23, who has joined a hookup site and has a dorky and witty profile with a photo of himself in glasses and a frumpy blazer. He says things like 'Well, I don’t know what I am looking for but maybe to get together with someone and explore! I love Harry Potter and big ideas!' And then, over the course of a year, you see him understand how he needs to signal, and he ends up naked, on all fours, with a practiced porno look on his face, exposing his anus."
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Sleep On Your Face For Sex Dreams
"For a study released last week in the journal Dreaming, [some research guy] sampled 670 people, mostly university students, two-thirds of whom were females. He had them complete surveys about the intensities of their dreams, how often their dreams contained specific themes (such as flying, being chased, suffocation, and so on), and personality traits. They also indicated how often they slept on their sides, face up (supine), or face down (prone) on a five point scale from 'never' to 'almost every time.' When he analyzed the numbers, he found that the prone sleepers, as a group, were much more likely to score highly on what he calls the Dream Motif [...]
