temporary marriages in Islam
“Temporary marriages must be bravely promoted,” the interior minister said at a clerical conference in Qom in 2007. “Islam is in no way indifferent to the needs of a 15-year-old youth in whom God has placed the sex drive.”
(via marginal revolution)
let he who is without sin cast the first one-eyed wonder worm
Members of the Atheist Agenda, a student organization at the University of Texas at San Antonio, are encouraging students to trade in religious texts for pornography this week with their “Smut for Smut” campaign.
A few weeks ago actually.
Amy asked
Is this the only living room in America where husbands are saying they want to do obscene things to Flo in front of their wives?
half cock
Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s a fundamental property of the cells themselves. But this only became apparent when biologists investigated several odd chickens that were half male and half female, as if a line were drawn down the center of their bodies.
Natural Harvest
The seventh taste?
Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food.
Bye-Bye, Boner Party
Today Ned Hepburn shut it down. Boner Party, perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch blog of our time, (I’ll distract you with breasts but really I’m going to talk about how it’d be great to just settle down.) is over and done with.
I’m sad to see it go, but I think the last post sums it all up.
Tampa StripperMobile Grounded
FYI
StripperMobile, the strip club on wheels, will not return to the streets of Tampa Friday night as originally planned.
the spiritual brain
Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.
New research has found that spirituality has a greater effect on the sex lives of young adults — especially women — than religion, impulsivity, or alcohol.
Adventures In Sex City – The Game
Not sure what to say about this.
the biology of design
The biological effects of what you drive:
Theory
Scientists have spent over a hundred years formulating theories to explain the existence of Aston Martins. In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen published his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he postulated that we buy expensive things not so much for their inherent qualities, but for the attention we receive as we experience said object. He predicted the rise of modern image-driven marketing, which accords value to things exactly because they are expensive and seemingly exclusive — the reason why people pay a premium for a Lexus RX over its mechanical twin the Toyota Highlander. In Veblen’s worldview, Aston Martins exist because of how they make other people feel, ejector seats or no.
Practice
Saad and Vongas had 39 male college students drive two different cars for an hour each, first in crowded city (lek) and then in open highway (non-lek) environments. The cars? One was a clapped-out 1990 Camry wagon with almost 200,000 miles on the clock. The other was a 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Cabriolet. During their drives in each car, drivers had saliva samples taken to evaluate changes in testosterone levels while in the lek (city driving with lots of witnesses) and out of the lek (on the highway, with nobody there to witness their driving). To eliminate testosterone level variations due to individuals slaking their need for speed, each student promised not to burst posted speed limits.
I’ve posted on this before, but it’s always interesting.
Proportions and entitlement
For the last six months or so, I’ve had this guilty pleasure. It’s a blog called, Why There Are No Girls in San Francisco.* Here’s an example of the content:
SF females (a scattering of honeys from Serbia and Turkey aside) don’t aim for sexy in their dress or carriage. They aim for anti-Florida. They are reserved, borderline haughty in demeanor and fashion themselves in one of three looks: the always vogue “I run Iron-Mans” guy-girl look, the cluttered Hipster, or the famous and very popular “SF black”, where you cover up every square inch of your body but are still fabulous because the fabric is black and black is daring and sexy, right? Not right. Boobs are sexy. Legs are sexy. Black is just a color. Black is what Batman wears so he can be stealthy. When Bruce Wayne wants to impress the ladies he wears a tank top.
Today I read a story in the New York Times about the shortage of men on college campuses, and how it’s affecting more than just the admissions offices:
“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms. This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ’something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”
W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex.
The pseudonymous author of WTANGISF probably attended one of these disproportionately female universities and now strugges with the reality of living in a disproportionately male city, but I wonder if both situations are just a symptom of Love in the Time of Darwinism:
Women can take a Chinese-menu approach to gender roles. They can be all “Let me pay for the movie tickets” on Friday night and “A single rose? That’s it?” on Valentine’s Day. This isn’t equality, say the male-contents; it’s a ratification of female privilege and, worse, caprice. “Women seemingly have decided that they want it all (and deserve it, too),” Kevin from Ann Arbor writes. “They want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual.”
What’s your take? How do you navigate the modern labyrinth of gender roles better known as sex, dating, and marriage?
* I should mention that I am a girl. And I live in San Francisco.
90%
Almost all of my spam emails are a variation of a deal on VIAGRA®. Where are my offers for Russian love? When I meet the AARP member of my dreams, I will be stocked and ready.
Fun facts about special sauce
As John Hodgman would say, more information than you require:
Click to embiggen
Dear clusterflock
Two questions, separated by your ability to answer each:
1. Do you have a beard? Why or why not?
2. Are beards sexually attractive? Why or why not?
quote out of context
I will never be able to listen to George Clinton and Parliament’s funkadelic classic, “I just want to testify, what your love has done for me,” in the same way again
pork!
“I didn’t know that eating pork improved sexual activity,” Fernandez said in a meeting with representatives of the swine industry late Wednesday. “It is much more gratifying to eat some grilled pork than to take Viagra.”
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
The committee will “determine the extent to which the challenged material supports curriculum, the educational appropriateness of the material and its suitability to the age level of the students,” according to school district policy.
quote out of context
“In his closet, among his vestments, there was hung on a clothes hanger a particular kind of belt for pants, which he used as a whip,” Oder writes.
Protogez – vous
There’s a brilliant safe-sex ad running in France, which isn’t exactly safe for work.
But then again, it’s the weekend.
(via)
Update: [Deron] I moved it above the fold. I don’t want us to be too worried about NSFW.
same-sex sexual behavior in animals
Scientific theories for the adaptation of same-sex sexual behaviors in animals.
First, there are the adaptive hypotheses, which provide an explanation for same-sex behaviour that would boost the biological fitness of one or more of the individuals involved. For example, several species, including bottlenose dolphins, seem to use same-sex behaviours to promote social bonding. Others may have evolved them as a form of intrasexual conflict. Indirect insemination, as in the flour beetle, provides a third possible adaptive advantage. Then there is the practice hypothesis, that individuals are honing their skills for mating, which seems to hold good for male fruit flies at least.
Several other adaptive explanations have been invoked to explain same-sex behaviour in humans, including kin selection – helping to further the genes you share with close family members – and “over-dominance” – the idea that certain genes somehow increase fitness in individuals who possess a single copy of them but are associated with same-sex behaviour in people with two copies. Then there is “sexually antagonistic selection” – the idea that alleles promoting same-sex behaviour in men are favoured by selection because they increase the reproductive chances of their daughters.
There are also various non-adaptive explanations. Mistaken identity could indeed be one cause. Van Gossum’s damselflies exemplify another idea, known as the prisoner effect, in which depriving individuals of interaction with the opposite sex prompts them to mate with members of their own sex. Then there is the evolutionary by-product hypothesis – selection for some other independent trait, such as high sexual responsiveness, might make individuals more likely to participate in same-sex sexual behaviour. It has also been suggested that same-sex behaviours appear when organisms are imperfectly adapted to their environment.
Also, it feels good.
Elena (possibly spam)
I must be the luckiest guy in the world:
Hello.My name is Elena. I think my email for you is surprise. And i hope it is a nice surprise.I think you will have a question about “where did i find yours email address. I used a services of dating agency,They asked me what kind of men i like, and then they offer me to start a correspondence with you via email.This agency said me that your email address they found at dating site.
And now i want to tell you a little about myself. I hope it will be inetersting for youand we countinue our dating.
As i said you before my name is Elena. And i am 29 years old. And i am absolutely lonely girl.I was born and live now in Russia in small town in central part. The name of my town is Pavlovo.My birthday is 18 of December. My sign of zodiak is Sagittarius. I have no children, but i love them.And i think that children love me too. Because i can talk easy with them. And i am sure i can be perfect mother in future.I have parents, mother and father, they are pensioners. And i live separately from them now. I live alone.
Ofcourse, you will ask about my work. I work as a librarian in school library. I like read books very much, and ihappy that my work with books and children.It is a little about myself. I hope it was interesting for you, and we will countinue our corespondence.I will be waiting your answer very much. Please tell me some about yourself too. And if you can send me your photo.I sending you my photo with this email. And hope you will answer me quickly.My email ellolett@gmail.com
Yours new friend from Russia. Elena.
I like read books too.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
my posting of this image, and attending text, in no way endorses the media frenzy — or scurrilous sanctimony — surrounding Tiger Woods dipping his wick
The bottles, found in several grocery stores, displayed “Unfaithful” rather than the usual “Focus” message. Obviously, they were fakes; this isn’t the kind of collectors’ edition that a company generally manufactures. Gatorade naturally issued a statement distancing itself from these creations.
Missed Opportunity
I can’t help but feel we’re missing a certain journalistic opportunity by not sending good correspondents to write about the Adult Entertainment Expo, which rolls out year after year almost untouched by good reporters. I mean, you can actually buy molds modeled after (and that supposedly emulate) your favorite pornstar’s anus or vagina. Pornstar vaginas! That’s how far they’ve taken this manufactured reality. Tell me this isn’t a gold mine of psychological and sociological commentary.
Of course, DFW had his day.
the tiger woods stock market crash
A new study – not yet published in a journal – finds the market value lost to companies that had the golfer as a sponsor is already as high as $12 billion.