Callipygian.
Of, pertaining to, or having well-shaped or finely developed
buttocks. A nice bum.
Category Archives: sexuality
The Mufia
Yep, you read that right … the Mufia are out and about tomorrow.
Apparently tomorrow (Saturday 10/12) will see a “The Muff March against ‘designer vagina’ surgery” along Harley Street, London’s centre private medicine.
High time to stop the medicalisation of the normal!
Links of the Week
This week’s collection of links to items you may have missed …
First off something scary. Just look at the size of this giant bug!
Not all critters are quite so scary … For instance, we know the crow family are highly intelligent, now Ravens have been shown to use ‘hand’ gestures to communicate.
But then who would have thought that there are cognitive benefits to chewing gum.
Now here’s a job that you never even dreamt existed, nor wanted … castrating sheep with teeth, which has been shown not to be a great idea!
Here is a list of ten of the most dangerous chemicals in the world. And to think I’ve worked with some of those, as well as a few which aren’t on that list!
Talking of dangerous, this one is really worrying … ‘End of virginity’ if women drive, Saudi cleric warns. WTF do these people think they are! Made me see red.
But then again the Egyptian authorities are clearly no better (and equally make me see red), prompting a young Egyptian woman to stand up for women’s rights and argue that modesty objectifies women. She reinforces this by appearing nude too. Two reports in a weblog here and this one from the Guardian. More power to her elbow. Let’s all hope for her safety.
Finally, for amusement, more on the vulva cupcakes. Maybe a new fashion statement?
Reasons to be Grateful 2
OK so here’s week two of my experiment: this week’s things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful:
- Autumn Colours^ — there are still some gorgeous golden leaves around as well as bright red fruit on our ornamental crab apple, especially in …
- Sunshine* — which makes those autumn colours all the more vibrant
- Vagina Cupcakes — they’re a hoot!
- Beaujolais Nouveau* — I’ve now tasted three different ones and they’re all excellent
- Sleep — it’s so restorative to sleep well and undisturbed as I did last night
^ Click the image for a bigger version, and for other photos.
* No-one said I couldn’t choose the same things as last week!
* No-one said I couldn’t choose the same things as last week!
Quotes of the Week
What a strange mix we have this week …
If your dog had your brain and could speak, and if you asked it what it thought of your sex life, you might be surprised by its response. It would be something like this:
Those disgusting humans have sex any day of the month! Barbara proposes sex even when she knows perfectly well that she isn’t fertile – like just after her period. John is eager for sex all the time, without caring whether his efforts could result in a baby or not. But if you want to hear something really gross – Barbara and John kept on having sex while she was pregnant! That’s as bad as all the times when John’s parents come for a visit, and I can hear them too having sex, although John’s mother went through this thing they call menopause years ago. Now she can’t have babies any more, but she still wants sex, and John’s father obliges her. What a waste of effort! Here’s the weirdest thing of all: Barbara and John, and John’s parents, close the bedroom door and have sex in private, instead of doing it in front of their friends like any self-respecting dog!
[Jared Diamond; Why is Sex Fun?]
The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself.
[George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”, Horizon, September 1941]
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters however … the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within.
[Sigmund Freud]
If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.
[George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, 7 November 2011]
Fact of the Week : Phallocarp
This is from Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond:
A hint that the large human penis serves as some sort of signal may be gained by watching what happens when men take the opportunity to design their own penises, rather than remaining content with their evolutionary legacy. Men in the highlands of New Guinea do that by enclosing the penis in a decorative sheath called a phallocarp. The sheath is up to two feet long and four inches in diameter, often bright red or yellow in color, and variously decorated at the tip with fur, leaves, or a forked ornament. When I first encountered New Guinea men with phallocarps, among the Ketengban tribe in the Star Mountains […] I had already heard a lot about them and was curious to see how they were used and how people explained them. It turned out that men wore their phallocarps constantly […] Each man owns several models, varying in size, ornamentation, and angle of erection, and each day he selects a model to wear according to his mood, much as each morning we select a shirt to wear. In response to my question as to why they wore phallocarps, the Ketengbans replied that they felt naked and immodest without them [despite that they] were otherwise completely naked and left even their testes exposed. In effect, the phallocarp is a conspicuous erect pseudo-penis representing what a man would like to be endowed with. The size of the penis that we evolved was unfortunately limited by the length of a woman’s vagina. A phallocarp shows us what the human penis would look like if it were not subject to that practical constraint.
Teenagers and Sex …
… go together like, well, err … rutting animals?
Well maybe not so much.
I’ve written several times before (eg. here and here) although not recently.
Regular readers will know that I’ve long advocated the more liberal Dutch approach rather than the American (and British) proscriptively controlling approach. So I was interested to see yet more expert opinion and research supporting this view under the title “What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex“. The article is inevitably American, but in my view it is just as applicable to the the Vatican, the UK or indeed any culture.
I’ll leave it to you to read the complete article and, I suggest, some of the linked items therein. What interesting is that Amy Schalet (author of Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex) who is being interviewed has experience of both the Dutch and American systems, and based on that experience is firmly of the Dutch persuasion. Here are a few quotes which struck me.
Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch. What are they doing right …
[What] I’d noticed with my American friends is that there wasn’t a lot of conversation between parents and teens about sexuality and there was a lot of discomfort around the issue …Coming out of the sexual revolution the Dutch really decoupled sex from marriage, but they didn’t decouple sex from love. If the first piece is that there weren’t these immediate associations of teen sex with danger, the second is that it remained anchored in the concept of steady relationships and young people being in love …
[The Dutch] say ‘We permit so we can control’ and that’s also their attitude toward drugs and prostitution. It’s worth pointing out that US teens are more likely to use drugs than the Dutch, even though there are more liberal policies [in the Netherlands].
That idea of ‘It’s actually a form of control’ is for most people in the US counter-intuitive. But if you expect self-control and give people an opportunity to exercise it, you might get more of it …
Something that did strike me when I came in early ’90s to this country [USA] is that one of the differences in the aftermath of the sexual revolution is that Dutch society became a lot more secular.
What stood out to me was that so often [in the US] people seemed to think you can only have morality and a strong social fabric if you believe in a higher authority, a God that would otherwise punish [people]. There isn’t a belief that people are naturally cooperative, which lots of research suggests they are.
Schalet then goes on to expound her ABCD approach. Here are the one-liners.
A is autonomy. A lot of times people do realize that adolescents are supposed to develop autonomy during that phase of life, but that doesn’t get applied to sex …
B is build good, positive relationships. We need more emphasis on healthy teen relationships …
C is connectedness. It’s possible to really challenge the assumption that teens and parents have to be at loggerheads …
D is diversity. A lot of sex education doesn’t recognize diversity [and] I don’t just mean differences in orientation …
I wish I knew how we could change the prevailing ethos. It would be so much better.
Links of the Week
This week’s catch-up on things you may have missed, and which I missed writing about. This week: Sex and Science.
Now I know all maps are a 2D projection of a 3D surface, but I’d never realised before quite how many different ways there were of doing the map projections.
Does bestiality increase your risk of penile cancer? Why would anyone even think to want to find out?
First there was the Human Development Index — a sort of generalised national “happiness rating”. Then someone decided to add some greenness and turned the whole thing upside down.
Lots of interesting, quick and easy video explanations of physics at Minute Physics. Worth a look — and not just for geeks.
Vulvanomics — on female genital cosmetic surgery. Why would anyone? But then as a fully paid up mail I will never understand.
Antibiotics with a side of steak. Worrying commentary on agribusiness.
And finally …
Some lucky women are having orgasms in an MRI scanner. Now how cool is that?
But they’re doing it to show that only Epilepsy brings more activity to women’s brains than does “self-stimulation” to orgasm.
We live in a strange world!
Links of the Week
This weeks collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed …
Lord Norwich makes some sly remarks about Popes. But how does he know what Pope Nicholas V was like?
Now apparently out gut bacteria may be causing obesity. And you thought it was because I ate too much.
Scientists also think they’ve discovered why some of us hate Brussels Sprouts. Yes it’s all in the genetics, and our taste buds.
In other news, speculation is rife that Palaeolithic man went in for piercing his penis. It all sounds pretty tenuous to me, but then there’s nothing new under the foreskin sun.
And finally … And finally someone in “authority” has come to realise that what we’ve been saying all these years might just be helpful: prostitution could be solved by decriminalising brothels. Government: smell the coffee … it ain’t going to go away and if you licence it you can tax it!
Weekly Links
Here’s this week’s selection of interesting articles you may have missed. And what a selection it is!
Turning the lights off won’t save oil, says Melissa C Lott in the Scientific American blog. Maybe not, but it will save coal and gas, reduce emissions and stop wasting our (increasingly expensive) electricity.
“Put that fly down! You don’t know where it’s been.” But Rob Dunn does. Again in the Scientific American blog.
The Divided Brain is an 11 minute video in which Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. It’s not simply “emotion on the right, reason on the left” but something far more complex and interesting. Love the cartoons!
Max Davidson in the Daily Telegraph defends old-fashioned words against the influx of new text-speak.
And here’s yet another from the Sci Am blog … Ingrid Wickelgren goes looking for the secrets to a happy marriage. And finds some unexpected answers.
The right to keep your pubes. A feminist perspective on shaving for childbirth. I dunno what’s so feminist about it; seems like a basic right to me.
And lastly, if I hadn’t read this here, I wouldn’t believe it. Londoners are being told to stop shagging for a bit, ‘cos the Mayor doesn’t want girlies dropping bairns in the streets during the sacred cow Olympics. Maybe Boris needs to make sure we keep the lights on!
