Web Log Archives: December 29, 2002 - January 04, 2003
Saturday, January 4, 2003
A depressed houseguest barricaded herself in Al Goldstein's Florida home with several guns, leading to a five-hour standoff with "legions of law enforcement personnel, who brought a firetruck, two ambulances, a SWAT team's RV-sized mobile command center, two K-9 units, the bomb squad's robot and dozens of other vehicles to the scene." She eventually surrendered and no one was hurt. Odd connection to another recent Daze story: "In April, Pustay was named in a federal indictment detailing the workings of a national ring of high-priced call girls known as The Circuit."
Salon sex editor Karen Croft reviews a variety of sex toys, including a comparative discussion of the Fukuoku 9000 and Hitachi Magic Wand vibrators.
The cable network Oxygen has launched a reality series called Girls Behaving Badly. "Once envisioned as the home for smart working women -- as opposed to the stodgy Lifetime -- Oxygen now shows women yanking men's pants down to answer the 'boxers or briefs' question, Cheryl Tiegs' bondage equipment and a woman straddling a stranger to test a new chair."
Reason has a hilarious short piece on cloning crackpots Severino Antinori and the Raelians. Did you know that before the cloning venture, the Raelians successfully created the world's largest structure made of hay bales?
Friday, January 3, 2003
Sex is good for the brain: "A hormone that generates new brain cells after sex could be the key to stroke recovery, according to groundbreaking research by University of Calgary scientists."
Wired looks at online sperm banks.
The British Medical Journal has Ray Moynihan's article "The making of a disease: female sexual dysfunction" online complete with summary points, footnotes and a picture of fluffy bunnies. Also worth checking out is the activist FSD Alert Campaign. (Link snagged from La Di Da.)
Reuters: "Pharmaceutical firms on Friday rejected claims they had created a new disorder known as female sexual dysfunction to build a market for Viagra and similar drugs among women. An article in the British Medical Journal said researchers with close ties to industry had defined the new disorder at company-sponsored meetings over the past six years to encourage use of the same medicines that have helped men with impotence. The result was that female sexual problems were being wrongly 'medicalized' and the number of women affected greatly exaggerated." More and more.
Paul McCartney's daughter Stella built an open-air shower on the roof of her Notting Hill house. ITV helpfully explains, "The 30-year-old designer was hoping to enjoy showering in the nude in the summer months." But her neighbors have complained that it's an eyesore and have petitioned the local council to make her tear it down. (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
A CBC foreign correspondent explains why he always packs whiskey and pornography when traveling in the Mideast: "throughout the Middle East, liquor and pornography are banned or extremely difficult to get, and therefore valuable. When MacDonald has to cross a border or a checkpoint, he's hoping that bored guards will take the whisky and porn at the top of the bag rather than the really important stuff such as a hand-held Global Positioning System, tent or sleeping bag."
Not all Romanians are angry at the three former Olympic gymnasts — Lavinia Milosovici, Claudia Presecan and Corina Ungureanu — who posed nude for a Japanese magazine and shot a softcore movie. The mayor of Bucharest, Traian Basescu, wants to honor them with the keys to the city. "The world must understand their former professional activity and the gesture they recently did are two different things. Now they are allowed to do whatever they wish with their lives."
Two year-end sex news recaps: one by Tristan Taormino in awards format, another by Emma Taylor in quiz format.
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
Clonemania has died down a little, but here are some notable articles.
The first is a think piece from two weeks ago; the second a good overview of the reasons most scientists are skeptical; the latter three good background about the Raelians and Clonaid.
First Globalgasm of the new year tonight. Globalgasm is "a monthly digital orgy with the intent of healing the planet" and the brainchild of John Halcyon Styn. Elsewhere, read John's humorous account of being one of the subjects of an MTV documentary called "Sex2K: Naked on the Web."
Pravda reports that women on both sides of a civil war in Sudan have declared a sexual strike to pressure their men to make peace, a tactic famously depicted in the Aristophanes play Lysistrata. (Pravda seems to have evolved into the National Enquirer of post-Soviet Russia, so who knows if this is true or not.) . . . UPDATE: Here's another story about the Sudan women's sex strike from a more reliable source.
San Francisco Chronicle: "Just five years ago, President Bill Clinton's decision to appoint gay San Franciscan James Hormel as an ambassador provoked an ugly, prolonged national debate. But President George Bush has quietly nominated six gay men for positions in his administration, including the recent appointment of another gay San Franciscan to a board that could play a key role in the war on terrorism -- and the nominations have been approved with comparatively little opposition." (Link snagged from Gary at Amygdala, who writes, "Good. Good for the Bush Administration, and for the Congressional Republicans who didn't continue the Neanderthal behavior they engaged in when Clinton nominated gay appointees." Agreed.)
Daphne Merkin remembers Linda Lovelace in the New York Times Magazine's year-end "The Lives They Lived" issue.
Jim Goad pens a scathing, hilarious, bitter account of his brief tenure editing a free sex industry weekly in Portland, Oregon.
Nowhere on Earth, with the possible exception of Annie Sprinkle’s dungeon, does pornography struggle so boldly to paint itself in redemptive, artistic, community-building, "sex-positive" strokes. Pornland’s porn apologists go one step further than trying to make it respectable. They make it cutting-edge… empowering, even. No other city on Earth more aggressively nurtures the idea that taking off one’s clothes in a dark smoky bar filled with swollen prostates automatically qualifies one as an artist, or at least a "sex worker," rather than a stripper or, Goddess forbid, a whore.
[...] If there’s one thing more retarded than pornography, it’s the attempted intellectualization of pornography. Porn is theorized to death up here. Most of the "literature" that attends Portland’s sex industry is glutted with fatuous, transparent, misguided screeds about our "rights" and "free speech" and "pro-sex attitudes," and "educating society," as if leaving a trail of Twat Slime up and down a brass pole was not only the ultimate act of artistic expression, but also of political commentary.
An invigorating read even if, like me, you don't agree with all of it. (I had never heard of Jim Goad, but Obscure Store — where I snagged the link — calls him a "zine legend.")
A British TV commercial for Marmite will feature a same-sex kiss. "Viewers will see the lifesaver munching on a Marmite sandwich when he spots a drowning man in the water. As he gives the kiss of life, the man pulls the lifeguard's head towards him and begins to kiss him back." Ananova has a frame from the ad.
