Human sexuality

Interesting headline in the Herald today.

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News just in, porn isn’t so bad after all…and there is a study to prove it.

Studies have linked porn consumption to sexual aggression, problems with intimate relationships and losing one’s virginity at an earlier age. But the influence of sexually explicit material on some risky behaviors may be more modest than previously thought.

In a new study from the Journal of Sexual Medicine, four Dutch researchers argue that previous studies on the subject have been too narrowly focused when it comes to drawing a connection between X-rated materials and negative outcomes. Such research has often asked some form of the same question: whether what people see will affect what people do—and the results didn’t paint porn in a flattering light. The latest study found that the connection may be less significant than other studies have suggested, though the work still provided plenty of support for the anti-pornography contingent.  Read more »

Petal asks a valid question, in the post on Maurice Williamson’s stance on same-sex marriage. It is the same question which I have been bombarded with all day yesterday, but his is far more polite than the ranters who were emailing me. I’d love for Kevin Hague to write another guest post explaining Petal’s concerns so everyone can understand and we can cut through the emotive drivel put out by  Family First.

I had a chat with you about a month ago when you took the time to have a short but serious discussion with me, and I really understood, for the first time, where you are coming from in terms of your need for “equality”. And I support you in that aim. I “get it”.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care that the words “bride” and “bridegroom” may disappear from marriage licences, to be perhaps changed to “spouse”.

Even though I’m still completely in your corner, I mourn the loss of the idea that the price of equality for you is the loss of a bride and a groom from official state law and/or documentation. It doesn’t sit well with me, and I hope there is going to be someone who can create a more inclusive solution rather than to make it completely sterile of language that has been completely normal for a long, long time.

Why do straight couples have to lose something for gay couples to become equal? It was your aim to be equal, not to reduce the concept of marriage to something less than it was before, for any of us.  Read more »

via Andrew Sullivan

This series of videos from John Corvino is very interesting.

In support of his new book, John Corvino has produced a series of video that provide succinct versions of his core arguments. The first tackles a common trope in debates about gay people, “Love the sinner, hate the sin”:

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Jeremy Irons uses the gayest excuse yet to oppose gay marriage.

Jeremy Irons, the Oscar-winning actor, has provoked outrage by suggesting that same sex marriage laws could allow fathers to marry their sons to avoid paying inheritance tax.

He also expressed fears that the battle for equal rights could “debase” marital law.

The 64-year-old said he “doesn’t have a strong feeling either way” on gay marriage but suggested it could be manipulated to allow fathers to pass on their estates to their sons without being taxed.

He said: “Could a father not marry his son?”  Read more »

Melissa Iaria suggests the church should rid itself of celibacy:

The Catholic Church should get rid of celibacy as a way of preventing clergy from preying on children, an inquiry has been told.

Former clinical director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Health, Professor Paul Mullen, says celibacy has no basis in theology and is just a form of discipline in the priesthood.

Prof Mullen added the issue is a financial one for the church.

“I’ve have heard a Catholic bishop say that the reason celibacy is maintained is that they could not afford to pay priests, they couldn’t afford to pay them pensions, they couldn’t afford to pay them enough if they had a wife and children,” he told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry on Friday.

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Yesterday in Open Mic I posted a response by Kevin Hague to the mis-information of Family First over the marriage equality bill currently before parliament.

Predictably we had the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to bang on about “the gays”. The funny thing was, as is often the way with blogging the exact same issues that we were debating are also being debated elsewhere and the exact same results are happening.

Glenn Fleishmann encountered a person much like Andrei or Lucia in their world view. He wrote a post called the Sanctity of Logic about his encounter. It is very enlightening…though perhaps not for Whaleoil readers as we have seen the exact same tactics and arguments deployed here.

I got into a long debate a couple of nights ago with a self-identified Catholic pro-lifer, Suzanne Fortin (@Roseblue), who has an answer for every question as to why same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. None of them rely precisely on legal precedent; rather, they seem to stem from a specific set of historical values, a reading of what “natural” means, and an insistence on a property that only a pair of men and women can share.

I spent hours engaged with this woman partly because I wanted to know exactly what people who maintain this line of reasoning are really espousing. Here’s what I came away with.  Read more »

Vice has an interesting article about asexual people…or as I prefer to describe them…dud roots:

Minerva isn’t gay. A fluid conversationalist, the Massachusetts native has been artfully rehashing this point for the last three hours.

“I have been told I could easily be mistaken as a lesbian,” she says, gesturing to her cropped, copper hair as evidence. “Which is not a bad thing.”

Minerva isn’t a lesbian, she says, but she certainly isn’t straight. At 29 years old, Minerva, who asked that she be identified by the name of her Tumblr, has never had a romantic relationship. She calls herself “asexual,” meaning she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. To anyone.

To the deep chagrin of some members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, Minerva also uses the word “queer” to define her sexuality. A re-appropriated term of endearment for sexual minorities, “queer” is as emotionally charged as it is oddly exclusive, and there is an ongoing, online debate about whether she should feel comfortable using it to self-identify. In some corners of the internet, that debate has turned to all out war.

In October 2011, an outreach organization called Asexual Awareness Week released a “Community Census” that polled data from over 3,000 asexual-identifying people. In the survey, more than 40 percent of respondents said they consider themselves members of the LGBT community, and another 38 percent said they consider themselves “allies,” or supporters of the community.

The community isn’t so quick to oblige.

“Practicing sex/sexuality slightly differently, or not at all, does not make you queer,” “Aria” wrote in a Tumblr post earlier this year. “People don’t shout ‘queer’ at an asexual person on the basis that they are not (sexually) attracted to anyone.”

Even the poofs think they are dud roots…basically if they aren’t rooting then they are duds. The gays aren’t having a bar of dud roots muscling in on their spot.  Read more »

It turns out that despite all the hype over mummy-porn trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey” there is actually f*ck all sex. An article by Rob Orchard in The Economist explains how he came up with a ‘Kinkiness Index’:

[Full Infographic Here]

An infographic like this is always going to have a slightly subjective and impressionistic element to it—what one person thinks of as the height of sauciness, another will see as unexceptional—but we tried to make it as scientific as possible. We mapped out the sexual acts, locations and paraphernalia for the books, then rated them against scales we had created, running from 1 (Vanilla) to 5 (Kinky). So the sex acts scale ran from foreplay to flogging, sex locations ran from “in the imagination” to the infamous Red Room of Pain, and sex paraphernalia ran from Ben and Jerry’s ice cream to leather shackles and vibrating wands. The Agglomerated Kinkiness Index just pulls together all three ratings to provide an overall kink reading.

What are the one or two revelations that the charts uncovered that you hadn’t known, or like best?

It’s interesting that the sex levels tail off in the third book (“Fifty Shades Freed”) after Steele and Grey are married. However, they do have some of their kinkiest sex in this novel: it contains one of only two sessions rated at 15/15 on the Agglomerated Kinkiness Index in the entire trilogy.

hat tip Andrew Sullivan

Cock Tax is the age old problem confronting many. A possible solution has been envisioned:

Sexbots are coming, and we will cum with them. Three times a week or whatever our physician / longevity coach recommends. Because orgasms — especially the hormone-exploding O’s we’ll eventually enjoy with carnal cyborgs — are excellent for mental and physical health.

Remember the most convulsive, brain-ripping climax you ever had? The one that left you with “I could die happy now” satiety? Sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes thrice as gigantic because they’ll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices. Sexbots will heighten our ecstasy until we have shrieking, frothy, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms. They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes — this will all be ours when the Sexbots arrive.