Gloria's Oversexed Mind

If your cable service doesn't carry it and if you are serious about getting a non-mainstream source of hardcore investigative news, I really strongly urge you to check out Link TV | Television Without Borders on the Web. The channel delivers all the important news stories -- national and international -- that mainstream media suppress. Spend a little time clicking around. I guarantee you'll find news stories worth reading. It's a wonderful site.

We watched a superb show the other night on Link, about how the Republican party may try to hijack the 2008 elections, much as they did in 2004, through bullying, dirty tricks and racist election manipulations. Scared the shit out of us. The threat is real. Hosted by the eternally-sexy left wing activist/actor Peter Coyote.

March 31, 2008 in Post-Modern Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

As sometimes happens when I find an erotic artist but not enough of his work online to merit a full show, I stumbled upon the luscious nudes of David Warren while researching another Australian fine artist.

See more David Warren

March 31, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of outrageously controversial subjects.

A couple of years ago the international media seized on the very sad story of a brother and sister who were raised completely apart and got married as adults (she was actually only 15 at the time, but their marriage was legal). They met and turned to one another for comfort, and as so often happens between two lonely, desperate, emotionally wounded people, one thing led to another.

LINK

....They are a loving couple, who have been together for seven years and want to be with no one else. They have had four children. Beyond these details, however, the story gets more troubling. Patrick and Susan Stübing, who live in Zwenkau, near Leipzig, are brother and sister. Two of their four children have developmental problems, and all four have been taken into care. Patrick, 30, has served more than two years of a prison sentence for incest. Asked if she felt guilty about this breach of one of the last taboos, Susan, 22, simply shook her head and said: "No, I just want us to be able to live together."

Their case is raising much prurient speculation in Germany, not least because their reaction to the threat of further imprisonment for him has not been apology and shame, but defiance - an attempt to overturn paragraph 173 of the German legal code, which forbids sex with a close relative.

Pretty fascinating case. The great tragedy that has befallen their children is the best defense of incest laws. To ignore the genetic reality that children of incest are likely to have numerous physical and psychiatric disorders directly resulting from inbreeding is or should be a crime.

Unfortunately, it appears that the couple in question are simple. As the article presents them, they seem incapable of managing their own lives, much less of grasping the medical, legal and moral ramifications of their choices. And, one might well ask, where were the social workers and doctors all this time, as they continued to bear one disabled child after another?

Meanwhile, consider this research on incest which suggests that GSA (or genetic sexual attraction) is a known physiological phenomenon.

What has been discussed less, is that the Stübings seem to be a textbook example of a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It occurs between blood relatives who have been separated for most of their lives, and meet in adulthood; it has been known to happen in all sorts of permutations - father/daughter, birth mother/son, siblings - even, occasionally, same-sex relationships between people who would not otherwise identify themselves as homosexual.

I don't think Germany will change its laws regarding incest to accommodate this troubled couple, even though science proves that GSA is a known phenomonen. But this case raises yet another interesting question. The husband has recently and voluntarily undergone sterilization. If adults were willing to undergo sterilization in order to marry a sibling, cousin, or other family member, and therefore no real harm to others could come of their relationship -- should incest in such cases still be a crime?

March 31, 2008 in Sex and Relationships, Sex Laws and Crimes, Sexual Health, Sexual Science and Medicine | Permalink | Comments (0)

A kiwi was just sentenced to community service for phoning the police and claiming he had been raped by a wombat.

A New Zealand man has been sentenced to community service after telling police he had been raped by a wombat and the experience had caused him to start speaking "Australian".....

Now for the real shocker:

Prosecutors said alcohol played a large part in Cradock's life.

Really?

I was thinking LSD.

Kind of sad that the courts saw fit to punish him for the stoned/drunk call. I wonder if NZ is in the habit of prosecuting everyone who calls the cops to make weird alcohol-induced claims, or whether they singled out the wombat-rapee for special treatment.

March 31, 2008 in Sexual Strangeness | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh dear me. Or as my Jewish forebears killed in the Nazi Holocaust would say, OY GEVALT.

Formula One's governing body is keeping its distance from sexual allegations in a British tabloid newspaper about its president, Max Mosley....

The News of the World reported in a front page story that FIA president Mosley, 67, had taken part in a "sadomasochistic orgy" with five prostitutes that reportedly involved Nazi role-playing.

According to a story posted by the London-based Times Online on Monday, Mosley and others "re-enacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate."

A video was also reportedly posted on the News of the World Web site. A check of the site Monday didn't find the video in question.

The News of the World printed pictures of a man who appeared to be Mosley, chained over a "torture" bench while being caned by a woman, and said that the acts took place in an apartment near Mosley's London home on Friday.

Link

Right. Because we all know how Nazis gave their victims consensual canings to get them aroused. Jeez. If the guy was being murdered in a gas chamber, I might raise an eyebrow (okay, both eyebrows), but he was doing consensual SM -- maybe with some uniforms and fake Nazi nonsense thrown in to get everyone off.

But then there's another detail which complicates things even further, Mr. Mosley's parentage is an issue. A very BIG issue.

Mosley is the son of the late Oswald Mosley, founder of the pre-war British Union of Fascists.

Oh dear God, or rather, oy vey iz tsu mir.

So the son of a Nazi sympathizer is caught doing Nazi role-play with a bunch of sadomasochists. Is this supposed to be a big surprise? My guess is that the people most likely to do Nazi role-play are people who have a morbid fascination with Nazi war crimes and/or uniforms -- and that those people are most likely to be people who were affected, in one way or another, by Nazi ideology. A child of someone who aligned with fascists would seem to be the number one candidate for precisely this kind of fetish.

The reaction from many quarters now is "how dare he! the bastard!" While from certain elements of the Holocaust education community the cry rings out that he should immediately be dismissed on account o' he's depraved.

"This is sick and depraved," Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said, according to Times Online. " ... I am absolutely appalled."

Stephen Smith, director of the Holocaust Centre, said: "As Mr. Mosley has condemned the racism in motorsport he should live up to the standards he sets. This is an insult to millions of victims, survivors and their families. He should apologize. He should resign from the sport."

I have news for this Mr. Smith (and what kind of a Jewish name is Smith anyway? that's about as Jewish as Brame. Only I'm a Mrs. with the excuse that I married a Brame. Is Smith's maiden name as distinctly Jewish as my humble Yiddishe Glickstein? Hm).... Anyway...I have news for Smith, whatever his religion.

I AM NOT INSULTED! I am the child of Survivors, and I am totally NOT insulted that someone had a Nazi sex fantasy and chose to enact it (one hopes safely) with other consenting adults. So please do NOT speak for me. That is just presumptuous.

I realize that there are indeed many who object to Nazi play. It is always a hot topic among SMers, raising a lot of violent emotions among Jewish SMers who react much as Ms. Pollack, feeling appalled and horrified that people could find it erotic.

To them I must say: nu, so get over it already. We can't help what turns us on. And coming from a world where "Master/Mistress/slave relations," "dungeons," "torture" and so on are commonplace -- essentially playing with themes of medieval abominations and American pre-Civil War slavery - how exactly (and why) do you draw the line at Nazi fantasies? Is a medieval dungeon really a happier, safer, saner place than a concentration camp? Have you ever VISITED one (a real one, in Europe) to see the unrelenting horror of those places?

What one man, raised with conflicting emotions (clearly) about fascism does with his penis and other body parts on his own time, and in private, does not in the least bit bother me. Why the fuck should it? To anyone who understands anything about sexuality, the fact that someone has a far-flung or bizarre fetish based, possibly, on the mixed messages (or even thrilling jack-off fantasies) about Nazis, means ab-so-fucking-lutely nothing about the choices they make in their social, religious, or political lives.

You don't choose a fetish. You can't cure a fetish. A fetish just IS. It isn't an indictment of your moral character, no matter how weird or morally unappealing to other people. It isn't a reason for you to lose your career. What counts in life is what a person does in the WORLD, not what he or she -- through a series of forces that no one can explain - gets off on in bed.

To me, the most depraved aspect of this story is that reporters or photogs actually followed this man around to snoop on his private sex life.

(Thanks to Will and to Todd for the link)

March 31, 2008 in Sex and Sadomasochism, Sexual Politics | Permalink | Comments (4)

Oops! This should've gone into the Friday art show....

March 30, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another victory in our war against terror. Make the nice lady remove the ring in her tit before allowing her to board a plane. WTF?

I don't understand why the TSA felt the ring needed to be removed in the first place. Surely it wasn't the first time they had a passenger come through with a body piercing -- and it's difficult to believe they make everyone who has them remove them before boarding. Have any of you pierced frequent fliers ever encountered such bs? It reads like some kind of a sick prank. And to think our tax dollars are paying for it.

Flier Blasts TSA Over Piercings Removal

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

March 30, 2008 in Sexual Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

(thanks to Mitch for sending this in!)

March 30, 2008 in Sexual Humor, Sexual Politics | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the pervert who has everything, labia enhancers. Though according to Gizmodo, these panties are for men.

Huh??

via Gizmodo:

Camel Toe: Japanese Party Pants Say "Read My Lips"

March 30, 2008 in Sexual Strangeness | Permalink | Comments (0)

Would you play with her?

via Boing Boing:

I've got no idea what the story is with this awesome CGI Flash woman, except that she appears to have been created by a Brazilian design firm, and that she has made every person I've shown her to say, "Oh. My. God."

Link

CGI like this could utterly transform the world of adult entertainment. Wonder what it could also mean to the world of Hollywood movie budgets: cgi is a lot cheaper than paying actors. Kind of scary to contemplate, actually.

March 30, 2008 in Sex and Technology | Permalink | Comments (1)

You can't make this shit up.

Missing NY rev. found at Ohio strip club

Police say a pastor who was reported missing from his home in western New York has been found at an Ohio strip club.

A police officer patrolling the K.C. Lounge parking lot Friday morning in the Dayton suburb of Riverside spotted out-of-state license plates on 46-year-old Craig Rhodenizer's car.

The FBI and New York authorities had been searching for Rhodenizer, who disappeared Wednesday after telling his wife he was getting his computer fixed at Best Buy. He is the pastor of a church in Lyndonville, N.Y....

March 30, 2008 in Post-Traumatic Tabloid Disorder, Sex and Spirituality | Permalink | Comments (0)

A woman wrote in to Salon, asking if she's shallow for suddenly feeling like her husband is a little too short to be sexy to her and satirical sexpert Cary Tennis answered.

(I can answer that in one word: YES.)

Tennis' advice, however, cracked me up. Some choice excerpts.

from....
Help! I married a short man!
A Since You Asked column on Salon.com by Cary Tennis

If your husband really cared, he would grow a few inches.

Many husbands start out short. That is no excuse.

Perhaps he is obstinate. See if you can break his will.

Interestingly, Salon has removed the article!. Maybe a coalition of short people bit their ankles in protest.

(pssssssssssssst, I'm only 5 feet tall, I am allowed to make short jokes)

March 29, 2008 in Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (5)

Reading an article about Japanese sex toy to super-size your semen, I saw a picture of an even stranger Japanese sex toy.

So...would you...?

March 29, 2008 in Sexual Health | Permalink | Comments (5)

And here, a sampling of the kind of bondage goodies -- across an array of decades and genres -- that children gawked at long before there was an Internet. Full set behind the cut.

March 28, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (2)

As mentioned last week, I've been collecting images of Wonder Woman as prep for a Friday show on the busty super-heroine's powerful (and powerfully kinky) charms. Along the way I've become distracted by a range of other superheroes and heroines who were either famously or (as with Lois Lane last week) not so famously tied up or otherwise put through an SM-y wringer.

The result: an almost overwhelming trove of sexual perversions and sex fantasies of every possible kind. Given how many boys and girls gobbled down comic books from the 1930s through the 1980s, one can't help but wonder what kind of a role, if any, sadomasochistic comic art played in their adult sexuality. This would make for an interesting study for several reasons, first and foremost because of the common claim that exposure to so-called perversion rubs off on children.

IF perversion is something you can "catch" by being visually exposed to it, then I guess it's already too late now to turn back the sordid hands of times. To judge by the comic art our parents and grandparents were consuming, every one of them who read comic books should have grown up to be sexually kinky.

Or, just possibly, the rhetoric is stupid and simply biased against sex. I'm willing to bet for every Wonder Woman fan who wants to be tied up, there are plenty of others who completely missed the directly sadomasochistic overtones and focused on her breasts.

I think the comic books struck a common sadomasochistic chord in us all (i.e., bondage is exciting! being helpless is thrilling! inflicting pain is a rush!). That may indeed explain why kids became so addicted to them. Comics portrayed (and still do, more than ever) uninhibited landscapes where the wildest sadomasochistic and fetishistic themes played out. I realize these were billed as "thrilling adventure." Still, there is a reason why so many of these thrilling adventures also involved getting tied up, humiliated, and transformed.

I'm going to defer Wonder Woman one more week and instead take you along on a couple of my bondage/fetish detorus, starting with an amazing little super-critter known as "Doll Man."

I've seen the movie Dollman (hilarious cult fave, starring Tim Thomerson) which may have been inspired by the series, but must say the comics are more my cup of sadomasochistic tea. For reasons I don't think I need to explain here (ahem), I've personally always been fascinated with the notion of a mini-man. I mean, imagine what you can do with just the tiniest flick of a fingernail! *BREATHLESS*

Especially this one: he's hung, he's muscled, he's a total hunk. And he's the size of the average penis. OOH.

The rest of the covers are behind the cut but first, some history from Wiki:

...Doll Man is a fictional superhero from the Golden Age of Comics, originally published by Quality Comics and currently part of the DC Comics universe of characters. Doll Man was created by comics legend Will Eisner and first appeared in a four-page story entitled "Meet the Doll Man" in Feature Comics #27, the December, 1939 cover date of which makes Doll Man one of the earliest costumed comic book heroes....

The secret identity of Doll Man, "The World's Mightiest Mite," is research chemist Darrell Dane, who invents a formula that enables him to shrink to the height of six inches while retaining the full strength of his normal size....

Read more on Wikipedia

March 28, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (2)

Someone better release me in time for the Erotic Art Show!

March 27, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (1)

Be honest, now. Have you ever seen him hug Laura with so much affection?

March 27, 2008 in Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (3)

from "the best of craig's list:

Just fucking fuck me, already

Dear Men of Craigslist,

Look, I know you men have it difficult. Women are just about impossible to understand, much less please. In a post-feminist society, you never know exactly what you should be doing. Women are bloody picky, I know we are. It can be scary, too, when women freak out about what appear to be benign issues. And men who do their best to be respectful, female-positive humans, I salute you, I do.

But please, please just fuck me already. Honestly, I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I like that you want to take things slow. I can totally get behind the idea of emotional connection, but dearjesusinheaven, FUCK ME. We've done dinner and drinks. We've gone dancing. We've cuddled and watched a movie. I'm wearing a low cut shirt and you've been staring at my breasts all night. Goodgodalmighty, get to it and fuck me.

Read the rest of her plaintive appeal

March 27, 2008 in Sex On-Line | Permalink | Comments (3)

Or, as I like to think of them, Knickers against Guantanamo.

Being auctioned on eBay right now....

Limited Edition Agent Provocateur Knickers for Reprieve

as Featured in Vivienne Westwood's London Fashion Week Show

Legal Action charity Reprieve and Agent Provocateur recently unveiled a new line of Guantánamo-orange underpants emblazoned with the slogan: Fair Trial My Arse. All proceeds from this ebay auction go to Reprieve, the UK charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners held in the “war on terror.”

March 27, 2008 in Sex and Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

What every girl needs: a whip with a crystal-encrusted handle.

Lingerie by Agent Provocateur - Whip

March 27, 2008 in Sex and Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

on eBay now:

Nude Woman Pendant .999 Silver Artisan One Of A Kind

March 26, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (0)

An interestingly oddball piece on the state of prostitution in Sweden. What detracts from the point (which I'll address below the clip) is this reporter's bizarre need to inject anti-Swedish biases. (Calling Swedes bland is sort of, uh, racist, and describing them as self-appointed "moral guardians" makes me question not just the idea but the quotation marks: did any Swedes claim that or did the reporter make it up? These pointless barbs throw the analytic portions of this piece into question.) Nonetheless, I'll assume the facts about Sweden targeting johns instead of hookers are true, and will comment on that. First, some excerpts.

This land of the blond and the bland is largely credited with launching the sexual revolution of the '60s with their liberal attitudes toward loving and lusting. Groundbreaking blue cinema, erotic literature and live sex shows in Stockholm stoked a "Swedish Sin" culture of permissiveness teetering – to the morally outraged – on promiscuous.

But nearly a half-century on, there are precious few prostitutes left in the country. That's what the police claim, anyway, though reliable statistics are hard to come by.

Somewhere along the line, Swedes apparently got to feeling a bit abashed about their society's carnal excess. This is still, after all, a country that has long appointed itself as "moral guardian" to the world, superior about its political neutrality and inventor of cradle-to-grave state welfare.

It is also vigorously gender-neutral, with alliances in government – and ideology – between the family-values right and feminist-grim left. Thus was born the view, accepted now by all parties, that prostitutes are always victims of a societal order that makes women subordinate to men.

This sounds nearly like Andrea Dworkin cant – a radical concept, heavy on the lesbian tilt, whereby intercourse is always and innately invasive to the female, intrinsically unequal.

Sweden hasn't gone quite that far, as the sexual pendulum swings back. They remain, as far as a visitor can tell, hardy and unrestrained in their attitudes toward delights of the human body, while progressive and non-judgmental about most personal choices, 50 per cent of children born outside marriage, gays allowed to adopt.

But you can't buy a sex-trade worker anymore, as even a Supreme Court judge found out a couple of years ago, when he was charged with purchasing the services of a male prostitute.

"We don't have a problem with prostitutes," Kajsa Wahlberg, of the human trafficking unit at Sweden's national police board, told the International Herald Tribune last week. "We have a problem with men who buy sex."

The Sex Purchase Law, passed in 1999 – largely on the advocacy efforts of hard-core feminist politicians, weirdly aligning themselves with the Mrs. Grundy faction – regards all prostitution as an aspect of male violence against women and children. Government literature about the law makes clear that legislators believe gender equality will remain "unobtainable" as long as men buy, sell and exploit women for sex.

It is not illegal to be a prostitute in Sweden. They are never charged. It is presumed their "victimhood" is not their fault and the decision to trade in flesh not a reasonably considered choice. To this end, prostitutes are always treated as, well, children or an abused and traumatized minority, with tons of money thrown at programs and public education, to "counteract the historical male bias that has long stultified thinking on prostitution."

from Sweden's sex law tough on johns

It's always troubled me that governments punish prostitutes while allowing johns to walk free. It's become almost commonplace in the US for "famous madams" to get busted but Eliot Spitzer is one of the few johns whose identity has been confirmed and who may face prosecution for this sex crime.

I respect Sweden's attempt to rectify that wrong and to inject a strong dose of feminist theory into the debate about how to prosecute sex crimes.

There's only one problem.

There shouldn't be laws against prostitution in the first place. Against involuntary prostitution, yes, absolutely. But the idea of eradicating consensual adult sexuality of any kind, including the capitalistic kind, smacks of ass-backwards Puritanism.

People will always need sex. And there will always be people for whom access to sex will require a trade or barter or payment. More than that, by their very human nature, humans will always be turned on by the transactional nature of sex. It's in our genes. And the genes of most other species too. Lovers lure the beloved with the promise of something tangible. Whether it's the male sparrow who keeps building bigger and better nests until the object of his avian affection consents to bear his babies in the one she likes best; or the male seahorse who takes on the job of incubating and bearing the fruit of his and his seahorsie girlfriend's spiny loins. We humans ritualize and condone transactional sex through the social construct of marriage. To vastly oversimplify: "he" provides financial/economic stability, "she" provides pussy. Prostitution is just another twist on the same biological impulse that leads mothers to tell their daughters "It's just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man."

You cannot eradicate transactional sex, even if you outlaw a particular form of its expression. It isn't truly IMHO feministic even to argue for the end to it. It's a hollow, intellectual game to reduce sex into two camps: the "what's sexually okay" camp and the "what's sexually wrong" camp. Unless they've been coerced into prostitution, a sex-worker is no more a victim of the system than a waitress who works at Waffle House.

Truly progressive politics argue for the legalization of prostitution, not new ways to oppress people who are doing what our bodies and minds were programmed to do.

What bugs me most of all, though, is this: prostitution has been around as long as civilization and people have never been able to eradicate it. Can't they learn a lesson from history? It's a part of human behavior. Laws can't change biological destiny.

March 26, 2008 in Sex Laws and Crimes | Permalink | Comments (1)

For reasons I don't think I need to elaborate (or do I?), I just luuuuuuuuuurv this cartoon.

March 26, 2008 in Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (5)

Author Tammy S. Grimes is working on a book about the people who become animal rights advocates. Ms. Grimes is asking dog-lovers to take a brief survey which delves into our personal lives and motivations. Her goal is to find out what makes dog lovers tick, and towards that end she asks some pretty personal (but important) questions. Be prepared for questions about your childhood home, your experience with abuse, your religious/spiritual practices.

Animal Advocacy Background Survey

I'm working on a book for animal advocates, and I'd dearly love your input. I'm striving to find out what different backgrounds animal advocates come from, and ascertain if there are family patterns or other factors that seem to lead us in the direction of advocating for animals. Some of the questions are personal...you may always skip a question if it makes you too uncomfortable, and you may remain absolutely anonymous. Most of all, try to be truthful, even if it hurts. There are many opportunities for you to add comments...the more information you can give me the better for me to understand you and the background you come from, so feel free to elaborate on any answer that has a comment box. If you'd like to give me your contact info at the end, I would respect your privacy and your answers, and only contact you further in the event that I need more information. But as I say, you may choose to remain totally anonymous.

I'll definitely be interested in seeing the results of this one. Would be very very interesting if she can establish correlations between personal history and the choice to speak up for doggies.

Thanks to Via GGracie at Sex-Kitten-Net for sending me the link and info.

March 26, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love | Permalink | Comments (0)

In case you thought being a man is hard, consider the male squid.

via Boing-Boing

.....males get round their inferior size by being endowed with a particularly long penis, which means they can inject the female without having to get too close to her chomping beak. The male's sexual organ is actually a bit like a high-pressure fire hose and is normally nearly as long as his body - excluding legs and head.

"But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body....

Oopsie! Don't you just hate when that happens?

March 26, 2008 in Sexual Strangeness | Permalink | Comments (0)

I showed this to Will last night and asked "could you piss in a bathroom like this?" "Are they alive?" he peered. "No, no, they're mannequins." "Oh," he said, "no problem."

Hm.

Urinal in Portugal

Imagine a toilet with male mannequins posed like that. Women -- would you? Could you?

March 26, 2008 in Post-Modern Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (2)

A truly wonderful and hilarious flash-back/flash-forward: 1930s designers predicting how people will dress in 2000.

March 26, 2008 in Sexual Beauty | Permalink | Comments (2)

I think I'm gonna have to do a whole series on the sadomasochism of vanilla people.

This just blows my mind. I think I saw something similar on InSex long ago....though they had the common sense to use leeches.

Circus "slave" forced to swim with piranhas

Police rescued two teenage Bulgarian sisters from a circus in southern Italy which forced one of them to swim with flesh-eating piranhas for the amusement of guests, police said.

While the 19-year-old sister swam in a transparent tank, the younger, 16-year-old was forced into a container where the circus staff tossed snakes at her. She was injured by one of the snakes, police said.

These poor brutalized children. Thank God they were rescued. I hope the circus owners' lives are destroyed by this.

March 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

I mentioned "extraordinary rendition" in my rant about Iraq earlier today. Here, from Wiki, some excerpts about its techniques. If this doesn't sound like a hardcore Adult Baby's UseNet fantasy, I don't know what does....

According to a December 4, 2005 article in the Washington Post by Dana Priest:

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons.

LINK

The irony is that people who get hot thinking about this (as a safe, sane, consensual play scenario) are viewed as sick by the same government which now conducts military business this way.

March 25, 2008 in Post-Modern Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (1)

Would love to see a study some day which tries to quantify the relationship between religion and physical/emotional abuse. Think anyone will ever have the balls to do it? Unlikely they'd get any funding!

One wants to believe that clergy (and their spouses) are a little wiser and more compassionate with their families that the rest of us. More spiritual. More forgiving. But secrets revealed keep demonstrating that some of the scariest and most dysfunctional relationships hide behinds the walls of clergy's homes. The heartache from such experiences has spilled into my office and I daresay the offices of thousands of therapists nationwide.

This letter just appeared in "Dear Margo" (whose advice is so much better than her mom's, it's unbelievable).

Everyone Deserves an End to Victimhood

DEAR MARGO: I grew up in a minister's family (the oldest girl of four children), but it was a dysfunctional one -- something I've never been able to reconcile. From a young age until I was in high school, I was regularly whipped with a belt as punishment, and as this was being done, my mother would laugh.

March 25, 2008 in Sex and Spirituality | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to a news story today, news about the Iraq war plays second fiddle to gas prices and stupid human interest stories.

Iraq war disappearing in US media

The US death toll in Iraq had just passed 4,000, but on Monday the most viewed story on Yahoo News was "Oil fluctuates as dollar, stocks rise." And the most emailed story was: "1986 message in bottle drifts 1,735 miles."

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq began, Americans' interest in the war, and press coverage of it, is flagging.

Uh huh. Turn on the news and, even when events in Iraq are reported, they're squeezed in alongside non-news, such as celebrity drunks on sprees and the new world-record in fly-swatting.

Why, to go by the news, one could almost forget that we are fighting a war in which men and women (and children too) die every day. A war we started for -- in retrospect -- no real reason and which we may be fighting -- according to Dick Cheney's latest pstatements -- for many more decades.

Come to think of it, while I'm sure that thousands of reporters will swarm Britney the next time she shaves her head, no one (except Jon Stewart, to my knowledge) made a big deal out of Cheney's comment about future generations of Americans continuing to kill and be killed, while our economy and our patriotic spirit freeze up and die.

But, wait, it's even worse than that. Thousands of Americans have been rallying against the war, just like in the Vietnam War era. There are marches and demonstrations all over the U.S., and this time it isn't just a bunch of hippies. It's moms and dads, college students and combat vets, marching together as one. Did you read about it? See the exciting footage of the movement growing legs across America? No? Gee. That's funny. Me neither. At least not in big media or outside the liberal blogosphere. Media aren't just filling us up with idiot news instead of news about Iraq; they are deliberately burying news about anti-war social actions.

Is America in a state of national denial? Has the war and all its facts become too big a bummer, even for people who once defended it? Or maybe it's cognitive dissonance: the American public wanted to believe the BS that politicians fed us about Iraq. When it turned out that the politicians were lying, instead of demanding that they be thrown out of office everyone's strangely quiet -- not unlike children who stay loyal to abusive parents which, frankly, is how I see it. This White House could have united us into a better nation than we ever were after 9/11. Instead they abused our trust, wasted our money on an insanely expensive war that is breaking the back of our economy, and have proven incompetent to provide even a modicum of relief, much less compassion, to Americans in need (think Katrina). Meanwhile, the media is either reflecting our national state of denial or helping to forge to it, depending on your POV.

I remember when the war started, an ex-mil. buddy of mine (who was, at the time, pro-Bush and pro-war), telling me how confident he was that we'd be in and out of Iraq in a year's time, just as the president was predicting. I haven't been in touch with him in a while -- and I wonder occasionally if he is watching the news about the deaths and atrocities (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, "extraordinary renditions," water-boarding, etc. etc. etc.) and thinking to himself, "Holy crap, I was so wrong!" ....or if he, like (apparently) most Americans, has just decided not to think about it anymore because it's easier to close your eyes to the truth than to deal with accepting responsibility for the mess.

Unfortunately, the more we deny and avoid what's really going on, the worse things will get. The truth is the truth and it will prevail, whether we discuss it or try to sweep it under the carpet. There will be consequences for this miserable fucking war that we started. 4000 American men and women and their families have already paid. Thousands more who've returned crippled, disfigured, and psychologically shattered are paying. Civilians are beginning to feel it in their pocketbooks. As I see it, America will continue to pay for this war -- economically, politically, spiritually and morally -- for decades to come.

An aside: Remember the people who were vilified when Bush first ordered troops to Iraq. Shouldn't someone apologize to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon for the way the nation treated them like traitors for questioning a war which has kind of turned out the way they predicted it would?

March 25, 2008 in Post-Modern Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (3)

Fascinating fascinating.

U.S. man claims to be pregnant

An Oregon man who used to be a woman says he is pregnant with a baby girl.

Thomas Beatie's first-person story appears in the April issue of The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based newsmagazine for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

According to the story, Mr. Beatie was born a woman but decided to become a transgender male and legally changed his sex to male. He had his breasts surgically removed and started bimonthly testosterone injections, but kept his vagina.

Now identifying as male, Mr. Beatie legally married Nancy Beatie, the story says. The pair wanted a biological baby but Ms. Beatie was unable to carry a child. So they decided Mr. Beatie would carry the child.

March 25, 2008 in Sexual Health | Permalink | Comments (3)

With commercials like these, Emerald should consider creating a special brand label for cross-dressers and people with forced feminization fantasies.

March 24, 2008 in Sexual Humor | Permalink | Comments (0)

This time, it's a 1972 movie poster. Gotta love the tagline: Women so hot with desire they melt the chains that enslave them!

They sure made some interesting movies in the 70s -- or at least some interesting posters!

March 24, 2008 in Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (0)

This brought back memories of the kind of stuff I used to find in the hidden racks in tobacco shops in the Village ca. 1985, right down to the cover art by Bill Ward. I'm guessing it's ca. 1970s? early 1980s? Anyone remember this publication?

March 24, 2008 in Sex and Sadomasochism | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few years ago, I got my first mailing from the AARP. WTF? I wasn't even 50. I tore it up. Since then, well, let's just say I did cooperate with the time/space continuum and got older. Now they routinely hound me with junk mail which I keep destroying with malice.

It's not just that I don't want to join the club I'm being invited to -- it's that I fucking resent that these people even knew my birth date in the first place. WTF. Did they get it from the IRS? What gives them right to that information and what else do they do with it? Meanwhile, it bugs me that their powerful PR machine can make even the most reasonable people convinced that the secret to your longevity resides in their pages. While I recognize that they do a lot of really positive things, and genuinely applaud their sex reporting (the only mainstream magazine I can think of which covers senior sex), I resent the unwanted intrusion and the hard-sell.

Not to mention the implication that I will ever be so much as a day over 30. ;)

(Post-modern pop quiz: if 50 is the new 30, shouldn't AARP be waiting until we're 70 to bombard us?)

Anyway, looks like at least one person out there can't WAIT to be an official member. AARP has done another amazing PR job in promoting the new issue featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, with claims that she "stripped bare" for the shoot spilling all over the Net. After all the PR that jammed my newsreaders claiming she was naked for the camera, I was definitely expecting nipples.

Story Link

March 24, 2008 in Sexual Beauty | Permalink | Comments (8)

Link.

March 24, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the great things about living with an archaeologist (now former but still a walking encyclopedia of anthropology) is that he can always add some bizarre cultural information to the mix when we're discussing politics or history. Can't remember the original subject the other night but he mentioned the Sambia tribe of New Guinea and its masculinization rituals. The details were so mind-boggling, Jen and I immediately starting googling.

In brief, the Sambia believed that semen is a limited resource that must be shared among men. Initiation into manhood means that young boys must live as homosexuals throughout puberty and adolescence to build up their supply of semen.

There are plenty of links out there but I picked a page from an academic site. Excerpts below.

Intro to Cultural Anthropology: The Sambia

At the age of 7 to 10, Sambia boys are taken away from their mothers (girls continue to live at home);

* Boys are taken to a men's house in the village, where they will live for the next ten or so years of their lives.
o In their first three or four years in this house, mature men start teaching them men's ritual secrets, threatening them with death if they tell these secrets to women......

What is this key act by which their maturation is insured?

o Regular fellatio ‚ putting the penis of another male in their mouth ‚ regular fellatio of an older youth, physically and sexually mature, aged roughly 14-18 [we'll come to their point of view when we get to later stages of this] ‚

o the younger boys are taught to fellate the older teenagers, and -- all important, to bring them to orgasm and to ingest (swallow) the semen or sexual fluid the older boys' penises produce.

For this is the whole point of Sambian initiation ‚ or one of its main points ‚ to build up the poor little dry baby tingus of the young boys by feeding them the semen of older, stronger, late-teenage young men.

March 22, 2008 in Sex and Culture | Permalink | Comments (2)

Found somewhere somehow in the blogosphere, a link to an equestrian site where someone diligently advises horse owners on how to care for their animal's penis.

My favorite excerpt:

Fiction: My horse swishes his tail and sometimes raises a hind leg when I clean his sheath, but he'd never kick me.

Fact: Don't be so sure! Some horses really resent this procedure.

from Cleaning a Horse's Sheath

Shouldn't someone let Mike Rowe know that there's a dirty horse job out there waiting for him to do it?

March 22, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love | Permalink | Comments (1)

via Creative Loafing

Link: Atlanta tornado scored direct hit on at least one bedside drawer

March 22, 2008 in Sex and Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)

In solidarity with (and in the spirit of) Sebastian Horsley.

March 22, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lo, thanks for reminding me...the story about Sebastian Horsley being tossed out of this county for "moral turpitude" when we let real moral dirtbags like Dick Cheney travel freely makes a person wonder if the US is turning into the former USSR!

Really admire Sebastian still making us laugh in the face of this outrageous censorship. Or maybe he's just been thrown out of better clubs before. ;)

U.S. denies entry to British sex, drugs memoir writer

"I was wearing my dandy uniform, but the customs officials were wearing uniforms too and I didn't object to them," he said.

"They said I was suffering from moral turpitude," Horsley said. "I was very surprised. I'm feeling quite well. I've never drunk turpentine in my life."

Horsley claims to have slept with more than 1,000 prostitutes, worked as a male escort, been in and out of rehab to treat drug addiction and staged a self-crucifixion in the Philippines in 2000.

Horsley said that after several hours of questioning in which customs officials asked him whether he used drugs, had solicited prostitutes or been convicted of any crimes, he was put on a plane back to London.

"God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the home of the depraved," he said.

March 22, 2008 in Sexual Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have completely fallen in love with Lauren Bergman's work. I can't recall how I first found it -- trawling blogs, I think. But the instant I saw her work, I was hooked. She is distinctly American in her colors (think John Sloan), her figures (including Josephine Baker and Bettie Page) her landscapes, which are often set in the world of feminine expectations ca. 1950s and she seems to have been as much influenced by magazine ads of the 1950s as by Dadaism and Magritte. Which makes Bergman like no one else I've seen. Her work is both sensual and intellectual; surreal and photoreal; feminist and political yet sexy and flip. In other words, WOW. You can enjoy the lingerie. Or you can contemplate, at great length, what the images and their text mean.

I wasn't quite sure how she'd feel about being featured here and waited a while before dropping her a line. She was as sweet and generous as could be, and immediately gave me permission to republish a chunk of her stuff here. So now I'm totally a fan. By all means, visit Lauren Bergman's website to learn more about her unique and spectacular vision.

Now on to the show.

March 21, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (1)

Faster than a speeding pervert! More powerful than a weighted single-tail! Able to leap to depraved conclusions in a single bound! Look! Up on my blog! It's a show! It's an Erotic Show! It's....

LOIS LANE??? WTF?

Erotic Art Show fans know that sometimes you get fine, classical art here (--and by the way I am featuring a brilliant contemporary erotic fine artist later today--), sometimes fascinating little erotic baubles, an occasional focus on personalities (from Houdini to Marilyn Monroe), and even deliciously sleazy kitsch, including graphic arts of the pulpiest kind -- from movie posters and Mexican lobby cards to old detective magazine covers.

My goal: to cover as many different genres of visual art as possible, from high to low to everything in between. My diabolical motive: to demonstrate through art that sex and particularly kinky/fetishistic/sadomasochistic sex is pervasive. You may not recognize it seeing one image at a time -- but when you take a group of images and put them side by side, suddenly they add up to some stunning realizations.

For example, realizing that Superman's girlfriend is, as we pervy people like to describe it, "VERY VERSATILE." It all started when I was looking at some Wonder Woman comics (and yes, fans of the super-hero, I'm going to do a little tribute to her in coming weeks), and stumbled across this:

Huh. Well, look at that. I always knew I liked Superman, but I thought it was because of George Reeve's rakishly kinky good looks. And then there was that form-fitting fetish suit he wore....

But what about Lois again? Oh yeah. I searched. And I found. Boy, did I find.

Great Caesar's Ghost! It's an SM party! In comic after comic, Lois is tied up (and tied up again) or transformed into everybody's kinky playmate: a furry, a giantess, a queen, a catfighter, a devil, a centaur, and more more more. All of which you'll find behind the cut, along with a bonus Jimmy. The covers are simply hilarious.

But first, if you're a fan of the classic TV series , you might enjoy checking out this little piece NBC ran a couple of years ago about Noel Neill and Jack Larson (the actors who played Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen). For obvious reasons, I'm clipping the opening and best sentence in the piece.

TV's Lois and Jimmy return, too

Noel Neill and Jack Larson spent some of their best years in bondage, trussed up together waiting for Superman to break down a wall and save them.....

Here's your bonus Jimmy!

March 21, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (7)

You better promise me you'll see tomorrow's Erotic Art Show!

March 20, 2008 in Sex and Arts | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't forget, girls and boys, you've got 11 days left to tell me.

March 8, 2008

This month, I'm running a contest for readers. I post so many different things here on the blog. But one thing I've never done is just flat out ask...

If I was doing this blog JUST FOR YOU, what would I be writing?

Send me email telling me what you think I should write about and why. Be creative. Be bold. Be honest. Aim high. Aim low! Just play the game.

The grand prize: Me. What more could anyone ask for? If you're the lucky winner, for one full day in April, I will write as if I was your bitch working for you.

Think of all the perverts you will impress in years to come when you breezily say, "Gloria Brame? Of course I know her. She was my verbiage-slave."

Send me email and control my mind for a day. Or, if that's just too scary to contemplate, just send me email, you subbie thing, you.

Contest Rules:

Who needs rules? Just remember that if you ask me to do the redonkulous, you lose.

March 20, 2008 in Caption Contest | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hang in there...just one more day...and it will be Friday! Oh yeah, baby! Shake it!

March 20, 2008 in Pets and Animal Love | Permalink | Comments (0)

from my email, and for all you emerging and established erotica writers, Rachel Kramer Bussel is soliciting contributions for two upcoming erotica anthologies.

Public Call for Submissions
Holy Sex
Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel
To be published by Cleis Press

Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel is looking for erotica that touches on religion or spirituality. This can be interpreted widely, whether sex that brings you closer to a given deity, following or disobeying religious rules around sex, sex between clergy or between clergy and laypeople, combining sex and prayer, etc. Please use your imagination; creativity will be rewarded. The emphasis of this book is not on sacrilegious stories, but on displaying as wide array as possible of erotica that encompasses various religious viewpoints and practices. I'm looking for stories from across the religious spectrum; stories can be humorous, serious, realistic, etc. Stories featuring all genders/sexual orientations are welcome. Please note that the more unique your story, the better its chances (hence, hold off on the generic screwing in a church tale unless you have a new angle on it). To get a feel for the kinds of stories I like, please read any of my previous Cleis Press anthologies. Original stories are highly preferred, but a limited number of reprints will be considered. If your story has been previously published, you must own the rights to it and must state the previous publication title and date in your cover letter.

All characters must be over 18; no incest or bestiality.

Payment: Contributors will receive $50/story and 2 copies of the an