The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

March 8th, 2009

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This is the Jeff Booth Show for March 8th, 2009, brought to you by the Center for Sexual Expression and Education, and Erotic University. I’m Jeff Booth. This is Sex Science Sunday, so we have our monthly round-up of all the latest in sex science. Plus we have the usual political and entertainment news. By the way, happy birthday Nina Hartley. She turned 50 yesterday.  Just click on the topic to the left that you want to listen to, and thanks for clicking in.

Politics

The California Supreme Court met this week to listen to arguments over proposition 8, and it doesn’t look like they are inclined to invalidate it. It sounds like they do plan to leave alone those same-sex couples already married in California, which will leave California with the largest population of married same sex couples anywhere in the world.  The standout at the hearing was Kenneth Starr. You remember him. The douche bag given unprecedented legal powers to go on a personal vendetta against a sitting president, who ultimately only came up with an affair with an intern. His arguments on behalf of Proposition 8 seem more like arguments against it to those of us with a shred of sanity and an actual love of constitutional protections. What is unique about this case is that a simple majority in California voted to take away rights from a minority. In constitutional government, that is something you try and avoid when you have recognized rights.  Starr said that proposition 8 "does not erode any of the bundle of rights that this state has very generously provided.” As if guaranteeing people rights under the constitution is generous. Rights are not a generous gift from a government- they are the right of the people. If they are a right- government should not be able to take them away- even if popular sentiment supports it. Star also claimed that he did not want to invalidate the marriages for same-sex couples already married- he just wanted the state not to acknowledge the. Talk about twisted logic, but from Starr, twisted is what you generally get. Even more concerning, Starr argued that a simple majority vote could take away other rights- including those of free speech. The people who voted for prop 8 were motivated by religion, not constitutional rights, and motivated by the fear-mongoring and lies of the pro 8 side. You ask most supporters and they say they voted for it to help the children and protect their marriage, which makes absolutely no sense, but ask a little deeper and what they really want to do is stand up for the bible. And voting based on trying to promote your own religion is a lousy way to make law and deny people rights, which is why you should never ever ever let a simple majority take away people’s rights. But we did it here in California, and it looks like the California Supreme Court is going to go along with it. Shame on us.   

Tomorrow Obama will overturn Bush’s moronic stem cell research ban. Its not just that the few stem cell lines Bush would allow were pretty much useless for serious research, even if you could get your hands on them. It was stupider than that. Say, for example, that your research lab had used federal funds to pay for new air conditioning in the entire building. That would mean that nowhere in that building could you do research on newer stem cell lines that would actually be useful for research incurring diseases. It entangled researchers in endless paperwork and red tape. Under Obama, it looks like the United States will get back to doing the work of actual science, something Bush abhorred and little understood.

An interesting study just came out that looked at the relationship between voting and porn consuming states. It had some interesting results. Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election. And can you guess the number one porn consuming state based on adult content Internet subscriptions? That’s right. Utah. Good guess.

Louisiana Senator David Vitter only uses high-priced call girls  who kake enough money  that they can afford birth control. But the hell with everyone else. The man caught up in the DC Madam prostitution scandal and with allegations of regular visits to New Orleans hookers, that great family man and champion of traditional family values, introduced an amendment to the omnibus spending bill before the Senate to drastically cut funding for family planning programs. Vitter’s amendment states that “none of the funds appropriated under this Act shall be made available to Planned Parenthood for any purpose under title X of the Public Health Service Act.” Of course, in a time of economic crises the first thing you want to do is take away birth control from poor people so they have children the state gets to pay for. According to a report released last month by the Guttmacher Institute, publicly funded family planning services prevent 1.94 million unintended pregnancies each year Vitter is the ultimate hypocrite, but how can he also be this fucking stupid?

What do you do when your opponent’s political actions are extremely popular, and you are generally unpopular? You could always try bald faced lies about them. That is what Rep. Trent Franks tried. To attack Senator Harry Reid and the stimulus package, he was interviewed by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, and agreed with her that that the 2009 omnibus bill included funding for a train traveling straight from “Disneyland” to Nevada’s most famous brothel, the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. Kelly called the rail funding, “a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada.” She’s not kidding. She’s just lying. In keeping with Fox News policy of showing racy pictures of women whenever possible even when not appropriate, they flashed a graphic of a women with her arms suggestively around two other women, all in skirts so short they might technically not be street legal, with the text “09 earmark in focus: Senator Reid’s Red Light Express”. And Representative Franks simply agreed with her, saying that majority leader Harry Reid fought strongly for this project.  What they were actually referring to was funding for the restoration of a historic rail line between Gold Hill, NV, and Carson City.  There is no funding in the bill for high speed rail between California and Nevada at all. Admittedly, if the two were much closer together, it would be very handy for people be able to drop the kids off at Disneyland and hop on over to the Bunny Ranch, but in reality, it’s just not very practical. They probably should have asked Senator David Vitter about this. I think he is much more up on the whole brothel situation.

Entertainment

Siegfried and Roy performed for the first time in over five years, since Roy’s near death experience after being mauled by his tiger Monticore. You might have caught their performance on 20/20 last Friday. It was for charity, and raised more than 10 million dollars for brain research, something very important to both of them since Roy lost significant parts of his brain in the attack. I used to know them. Not well, but I did have the opportunity to hang out with them on a few occasions back in my teens when I was making a living as a comedian and magician. They were both very gracious, and one of the first gay couples I had ever met. Sure, they did not officially announce that they were gay until 2007, but we all knew. I think the general public pretty much knew. No one was surprised when they officially announced. Siegfried and Roy were a very high-profile gay couple long before that was acceptable. They never made it an issue, but they were role models for many gay people.  I’ve been backstage with tigers and played with tiger cubs who were amazingly strong even at that age- so I knew the danger. I just never thought it would happen to them. It was the sad end to an amazing career. They were enormously respected in the magic community, not just for their skills on stage, but also for their graciousness and charity as human beings. I am thrilled they were able to give a farewell performance, and saddened that most likely, this was the very last one.

The famous Bay to the Breakers run in San Francisco has been undergoing a crises. Officials wanted to tone down the foot race, the oldest in the country. Sure, it has gone way beyond being just a 12k run. There are floats, and Elvis impersonators, and giant running condoms, and a sub-race generally referred to as Bare to the Breakers that involved running in the nude. And of course, there was drinking. Lots of drinking. Event organizers decided they were going to ban alcohol, nudity, and floats. That leaves them with, what? An uninteresting 12k run that no one would care about. In these economically depressed times, people need opportunities to let loose. In a compromise, floats have been allowed, but alcohol is still banned. Little was said officially about the nudity issue, but without the alcohol, I suspect a lot fewer people are going to run it in the buff.       

Radio suffered two losses recently. One was famed commentator Paul Harvey, one of the most famous newscasters in broadcasting history. Okay, he was more a commentator than a newsman, and maybe more a storyteller than anything else, and his news was slanted to reflect his extreme conservative views. In a lot of ways, he was a precursor to Fox news. Salon magazine called him the "finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves”. And no one did radio commercials better than he did. He was a salesman at heart, and he sold right wing conservatism just as hard as he sold Bose radios and Select Comfort mattresses. And yes, he probably did rip off a lot of his style and idiocyncratic presentation from 1940s sportscaster Bill Stern. And yes, he reported as actual news a lot of urban legends and stories that could not be verified. A serious newsman he wasn’t. Actual facts seldom got in his way, especially when he was trying to make a conservative point. And he was a strong supporter of McCarthyism. As much as I disliked the man and abhorred his conservative propagandist leanings, he was not all bad. While he seemed stuck in the 1950’s, he did moderate his views on homosexuality. Which may be why the notorious Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket his funeral on Saturday. Less a church than a clan of people related by blood, their maturely named godhatesfags.com website announced the picket, but their typo laden childish rantings are nearly indecipherable, so I have no idea specifically why they are picketing him. They just need a constant influx of people to hate I guess.    

Paul Harvey was known for his dramatic pauses. Only one person I know in radio exceeded him in the pause department, although they were not as dramatic. That was Tom Lykis, the L.A. based radio host noted for his misogyny. And now that his home radio station, KLSX, has changed format to all crappy top 40, Lykis is out of a job and off the air. Lykis had such long pauses I think an hour of his show consisted of maybe 10 minutes of actual words when you factored in commercials. The very corpulent Lykis, who seemed to really and truly hate women except for sex, always bragged about how easily he got women. That may be a little tougher now when he approaches them as a fat, aging, used to be famous and rich radio personality.

You’d think you would want a few lesbians in your online gaming community, if just to get a few women at all. Microsoft thinks otherwise. A woman who described herself as a lesbian in her online profile for Xbox Live was banned from the site. Now, it is not all Microsoft’s fault- and admittedly they have been a pretty gay friendly company for an evil empire. The problem is that a group of people got together to harass the user and complain to Microsoft. I’m guessing this is not a community noted for its maturity. Some complained that using the word lesbian was inappropriate for children. As they were mindlessly blasting their pixelized opponents into oblivion, they did not want to think about the possibility that their might be a lesbian fighting beside them or that children might be aware of such a thing amidst the carnage.

Did you hear that Northwest Airlines is now selling penis on its flights?  That might attract some and repel others, but CNN anchorwoman Zain Verjee repeated the tidbit 3 times in her report. She even noted that Georgia was a top penis producer. And I am guessing that maybe Verjee needs a little penis herself to get that off her mind so she can properly report on the new in-flight peanut sales.

And in porn news, it’s another Night in Chyna from Red Light District. In this case, Chyna is spelled with a y, referring to former wrestler and Surreal Life star Joanie Laurer, known in the wrestling world as Chyna. Its an hour of hardcore footage of Chyna and her boyfriend/wrestler Sean Waltman (also known as X-Pac). You can go to xxxchinaonline.com, with china spelled without the why, to see a trailer. Which was enough for me to satisfy my curiosity.

Science Sunday

Welcome to another edition of Sex Science Sunday. The second Sunday of each month we look at all of the latest in sex science research- the good and the bad.

Kissing feels good. But why? Science now has an answer. Research conducted by Wendy Hill, professor of psychology at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania found that kissing involves a complex series of chemical processes. In both men and women, kissing decreased the level of cortisol, a stress hormone. But in only one gender did it increase the level of oxytocine, a hormone linked to social bonding. And that gender was? Men. But don’t think that means that women are missing the buss. All sorts of other things are going on- things that help women assess men and perhaps a transfer of testosterone to women through open-mouthed kissing – as well as an exchange of pheremones. This all needs more research. I wonder if they need volunteers? The results of the current research were presented at this year’s annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago

Did you know that pornography can be highly addictive, and that brain scans of people looking at pornography show effects similar to that of cocaine? Doesn’t that seem like a good justification for banning pornography? Except I lied. These are not scientific findings dealing with pornography. They are actually scientific findings dealing with studies of romantic love. That’s right. The effects of love on the brain are similar to those of cocaine. This research has been around for years, but I suspect you won’t see conservative jumping on the ban love bandwagon.

According to Doctoral candidate Kristina Durante and Assistant Professor of Psychology Norm Li, Women with high levels of the sex hormone Oestradiol (a form of Oestrogen linked to female fertility and reproductive health) tend to consider themselves more attractive and are often found to be more attractive than women with lower amounts of the sex hormone. They also found that these women are more likely to have affairs, and to change partners more frequently. I’d be very interested to know whether women in the swing community tended to have higher levels of Oestradiol. The study “Oestradiol Level and Opportunistic Mating in Women” was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London journal Biology Letters.

There is a lot of questionable sex science research out there, but the bigger problem is the way this stuff gets reported. For example, here is the headline: Wealthy men give women more orgasms. This is in reference to a study by Dr Thomas Pollet at Newcastle University. That’s right- the diamond commercials are right- women are whores by nature. At least, that is what one is led to believe. But everything I have learned about sex and sex research over the years tells me this is just junk science. It is unclear what controls were used or how they weeded out alternative explanations. The study was based on women in China, and despite the profound cultural and social differences, the results were extrapolated to fit Western women as well. The sampling was not all that large- just 1500 women for this part of the study. That from a possible sample of over a billion seems pretty small. And people do lie about sex. It is hard enough to do this type of research in the culture you are from, but doing it in a country so different is even more difficult. How does the importance of social status and perceived sexual success effect self-reporting? How does this correlate to education, which might impact orgasmic potential?  How much does increasing wealth reduce stress, thus having an impact on orgasmic potential? They had women choose  between never, often, sometimes, and always as to frequency of orgasm. Even if these terms were specifically defined, that is still only four data points. If these terms were not specifically defined- then they are meaningless, as one woman’s often could be another woman’s sometimes. I can’t see how you could extrapolate anything meaningful from this self-reporting of orgasm frequency without specific numbers. Besides, female orgasm is a complex process, and can be affected by so many factors, including the sexual skills of their partner, their emotional attachment, and so much more. You’d need to take all of those factors into account. I really doubt that these results have any real world meaning at all.

I am equally skeptical about a Nottingham University study that shows that increased frequency of sex in your younger years leads to an increased risk of prostate cancer. This contradicts a lot of other studies that show that frequent orgasm empties out the prostate, possibly eliminating toxins that might build up and increase the risk of  prostate cancer. Like the China study- this was based on a quiz. They asked 800 men, half of whom had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, how often they had sex or masturbated when they were younger. SO this self-reporting is based on recollections of what they did 20 or 30 years ago. A fairly small sample, and memories of youth that are not necessarily accurate. And unlike the opposing theory which proposes some explanation for why frequent orgasm might reduce prostate cancer risk, this offers absolutely no explanation for why frequent orgasm would increase risk. So, young men, until there is more meaningful research done, fell free to wank and boink away.

I enjoy romantic comedies. But relationship experts at Heriot Watt University believe they are bad for your love life. Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic. They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, You've Got Mail, Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner and While You Were Sleeping often fail to communicate with their partner, buying into the notion that if someone really loves you they know what you are thinking. Similar studies have found that robbers who enjoy caper films like Oceans 11 are more likely to be caught, and less likely to be satisfied with the success of their criminal activities. Fans of films such as Lord of the Rings are more likely to believe in Hobbits. Obviously, there is a clear cause and effect from watching these movies, and we can completely discount any notion that people predisposed to certain ideas might also be predisposed to enjoy movies that feature those ideas. An entire 100 college students were sampled, and of course, their wealth of real life experience with love and relationships can easily be extrapolated to the population at large. 

What they did not cover, and something that I think is even more harmful to love lives, is soft core porn. Sex is quick, passionate, and foreplay and things like oral sex are at a minimum. When will there be a study showing that softcore porn is bad for your love life because it is not explicit enough and is even more unrealistic than hardcore porn? At least in hardcore porn you can see enough to at least get an idea of how things work. And in today’s abstinence only sex education environment, porn is where our youth are learning about sex. They’d certainly learn more from hardcore than softcore.

She sneezes. Should you say “gessundheit” or “would you like to go to my place?” According to a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr. Mahmood Bhutta and Dr. Harold Maxwell report that there are some unexpected links between sexual arousal and sneezing. For some people, the signals in their brain get crossed and they sneeze when they think about sex. There are also reports of people who sneeze after orgasm. So why might this be? One theory is that the nose contains erectile tissue that becomes engorged as the genitals do, triggering a sneeze. There is also a condition known as honeymoon rhinitis, in which men and women experience nasal stuffiness during sex.

Could research on frozen Wooly mammoths give us better sex lives? According to some scientists working in the icy permfrost of Siberia digging up extinct mammoths and woolly rhinos, that just might be the case. They found a bacterium in the permafrost around them that seems to have some remarkable properties. A bacterium completely new to science, with an estimated age of three to five million years old.  In experiments on mice, injections of the bacterium increased vitality, mental alertness, physical prowess, and sexual activity. The discovery by Professor Anatoli Broushkov has been dubbed “pre-historic Viagra”.  This would be a remarkable find- almost too remarkable. It got my skeptic senses tingling, since it was all over the net but I could not find it on an actual science site. I checked the Tyumen University site to see if they really had a Professor Anatoli Broushkov working there, but the site didn’t list faculty. I finally tracked the story back to its source- an article in the British Daily Mail by Moscow correspondent Will Stewart. This reduces the likelihood that it is a hoax, and a Google search did not turn up any articles calling the story a hoax. So maybe it is the real thing.

Stranger still is a story about a woman who recently had twins. But they were not womb mates. The mother’s name is Sarah Reinfelder, and she was born with two uteruses- a very rare condition. Even rarer are twin births like this, with each baby developing in a separate uterus.

And in our final science story, Merideth Chivers knows a thing or two about primate sex. She studies bonobos, pygmy chimpanzees noted for their sexual activity and use of sex as a social activity and way to defuse violence. Chivers is also member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. And she did some research with some very interesting and for some, unexpected results. She made a short film with clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude, and bonobos having sex. She showed this film to both men and women, and had them report on their arousal from each clip by using a keypad. She also measured genital bloodflow, a scientifically accepted method of measuring arousal.  For men, there was generally no response to the bonobos, either through the keypad or through bloodflow measurement . Gay men responded to the mages you would expect them to, and heterosexual men responded to the images you would expect them to, both self-reported and through measurement. Women as well, both gay and straight, self-reported about what you would expect. But the bloodflow measurements told an entirely different story. It showed arousal to almost everything, including the bonobos, despite claiming no reaction at all. The only thing they did not react to was the chiseled man walking naked on the beach- and yet they did react to the well-toned nude woman exercising. We are told that women are less visually stimulated than men, but this study suggests just the opposite. Through my direct observation, it does appear that when removed from social and religious restraint, female sexuality is more polymorphic than male sexuality. You see it in the swing community, where bisexual activity amongst women is relatively common, and research by Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton has shown a link between high female sex drives and attraction to both genders, while in men the opposite seems to be true.  Chivers’ research is very preliminary, and not conclusive, but it is certainly interesting. There is still an awful lot we do not know about female sexuality. After ignoring it pretty much from the beginning of science, there are now quite a few researchers like Chivers trying to look at female sexuality with fresh eyes. It’s about time.