This is the Jeff Booth Show for December 14th, 2008, brought to you by the Center for Sexual Expression and Education, and Erotic University. I’m Jeff Booth.
This week we have a repeat of the most popular segment we have ever run- A Visit With Santa Claus. Plus it is Sex Science Sunday, with our roundup of all of the latest in sex science.
This is our last show of the year- we go on holiday hiatus and won’t be back until January 18th. There will be some changes when we come back- one of them you can already see. We are no longer Internet radio with pictures. We’ve done the synchronized picture thing for almost two years now, and while I really like the idea, it just isn’t practical. We’ve skipped stories because we could not think of a visual for them. We have spent far too much time gathering the pictures, and often making them when we could not get a licensable image, and it takes time to synch them up. We decided that it would be a better show without them. We’ll still have pictures, in a new behind the scenes gallery section, where we will be able to include lots of pictures when a subject merits it and none when it doesn’t. And since we suspect that we won’t have as much political news to cover without the constant anti-sex assaults of the Bush administration, we will go lighter on the political news and do a lot more interviews. We will keep the ability to listen to just the segments you want, but we will also have the option of a downloadable podcast in MP3 format so that you can listen to the show on the go. We look forward to a better new year, for all of us and the country as well. Have a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll see you again in 2009.
News
Sure, we won’t have the Bush administration doing dickish anti-sex anti-women things after January 20th, but we’ll always have the Catholic Church, home of anti-women anti-sex dickishness for around 2000 years. Here is some of the latest. Roman Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina in Chile complained about the pop star Madonna, whose appearance in that country is causing "crazy enthusiasm", unlike the crazy enthusiasm one sees when the other Madonna’s face appears on a tortilla. He said “This woman comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, impure thoughts." This is no minor cardinal- he was chosen to announce the election of Pope Benedict XVI. Here’s the kicker- he made this statement at a mass in honor of the mass murdering former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw the murder of over 3,000 dissidents. Criticizing a pop star for being too sexy while honoring a mass murderer- that kind of dickishness can only be found in the Catholic Church, a Church that fought against birth control while protecting their priests who were fucking children either too male or too young to get pregnant.
But wait, there’s more. The Vatican permanent observer to the United Nations has opposed a U.N resolution calling on governments to decriminalize homosexuality. We are not even talking about gay marriage here, but putting people in prison just for being gay. But not just that- In some Islamic countries it carries the death penalty. I guess they oppose the death penalty only for heterosexuals.
And you don’t think I’d stop just there. They are like the ShamWow of dickishness- there is always more they can do. They just released a 32 page document on bioethics, the first authoritative statement on the subject in 21 years. And guess what. Its kind of dickish. It condemns as immoral the destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells- you know, the ones that would be destroyed anyway, but since it also opposes infertility treatments or in vitro fertilization, that’s no big deal. It denounces any attempts at more futuristic possibilities such as cloning people (I’m assuming because with their anti-contraception policies designed to ensure more Catholics, they don’t want any competition on the baby making front). It also opposes using gene therapy to enhance the human race. It opposes genetic testing of embryos to identify those with defects- making sure women can give birth to children guaranteed to live only a short agonizing amount of time. In addition, the document condemns the morning-after pill and the RU-486 abortion pill. Nice to know that the Church is taking over more and more hospitals with their fine sense of ethics.
Even though YouTube prohibits explicit content, the adult industry has used it to promote adult content in a non-explicit way. YouTube announced that as of December, they will be clamping down on that sort of thing as well. They have not specifically defined what they will prohibit, but apparently, they’ll know it when they see it.
So, do all stores that begin with Wal have to be evil? In the case of Walgreens, it appears that just one of them is. It’s the one in Oxford, MS. A woman went in to buy Plan-B, the emergency birth control pill, and she was told that she needed proof of insurance to buy the over the counter product. She had to call the manager, and they finally gave her the pill, along with adoption literature. My brother is going through the process of trying to adopt, I can tell you from his personal experience that the adoption system in this country is seriously screwed up. It takes years, tons of money, and endless hassle dealing with redundant and conflicting policies, understaffed agencies, and endless problems. Before we start trying to force women to go through childbirth and then give their children up, maybe we need to reform our adoption system. And if Bush gets his way and changes the rules, Walmart would be able to refuse the woman access to any birth control, even if she had a prescription, and even if state law prohibited them from doing it.
E-Harmony settled the lawsuit against them accusing them of discrimination because they did not offer same sex matching. They will open a new site for gays and lesbians called Compatible Partners. And while I am a very strong advocate of gay rights, I’m not sure I see this as a victory. There is a big difference between a gay matching site and a straight matching site. I mean, you need an entirely different set of pseudoscientific criteria. And should bisexuals sue because there is not a site for them., or because to take full advantage they’d need to sign up for both sites? And what about the specialty sites such as the one that matches up Jewish men with Jewish women- will they have to add a gay Jew matchup service? And this doesn’t even get into the people that E-Harmony rejects because they have personalities incompatible with their system. Like the people who answer yes to questions like “Have you ever felt depressed at any point in your life?” or “Do you realize that computer matching for relationships is sort of bullshit?”
Sex Science
Science
Everyone wants to see a cure for AIDS, right? Right? Well, apparently not the Bush administration. A new study published in the academic journal PLoS Medicine, reported by Joanna Kempner of Rutgers University, shows that research to reduce HIV infection may have been intentionally prevented. Why? Apparently, because scientists have censored their funding requests knowing that they would be attacked by the Bush administration and Republicans. Among 82 researchers seeking grants from the government-backed National Institutes of Health polled, almost a quarter had dropped or reframed studies around sexual behavior they judged to be politically sensitive, and four had made career changes and left academia as a result of the controversy. Under Bush, sex science research was seriously damaged.
One of the world’s largest online communities for lesbians, Pink Sofa, has done a survey of 5,000 members and the conclusion is- they did not choose to be lesbians. Big surprise there, but only if you are a conservative fundamentalist. Only 6 percent responded that some life event made them gay. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell that would be. Seven percent responded that their being lesbian was a conscious choice, I’m assuming as in waking up one day and deciding, “Hey, I think I’ll be gay”. Maybe it was a conscious choice as in “I can’t imagine having sex with a guy and women are so yummy, I think maybe I’ll try being gay.” Because really, I don’t think you can just think your way to gay, any more than when you are gay, you can just think yourself into being straight. I’ve yet to see any science supporting that idea.
Inventor Le Trung has introduced what he calls the perfect woman, a robot he created named Aiko. It says a lot about these loner inventors and how they see women. She looks like one of those sex toy Real Dolls, but she moves and talks and can respond to touch and visuals. Unlike the Real Dolls, she is not anatomically correct, at least I don’t think so, and when you touch her breasts, she says, "I do not like it when you touch my breasts!" SO she is definitely not the perfect woman.
This is only sort of a sex science story- it actually has more to do with the science journal from the Max Planck Institute, where they focus on particle physics. They wanted some elegant Chinese characters on the cover of their journal. It would have been better if someone could have read Chinese. What they wound up using was actually an ad from a Macaua strip club, offering hot housewives in action who provide an enchanting and coquettish performance. Next time they should probably spend just a quantum of effort in figuring out what the printing on the outside said- while for the rest of us, we’ll probably never understand the printing on the inside.
Remember all the times they have reported that men were having more sex partners than women and if that was so you had to wonder where the guys were finding all of the sex partners. Assuming you leave out gay sex and gangbangs, it never made much sense to me. A new survey shows that women in their 20s actually have more sex partners than men do. And in today’s world, that makes a lot more sense. Female bisexuality is a lot more acceptable, which really helps you double up. And I have seen women at sex parties leave a wake of exhausted men behind them, so I know they have far more capacity than men do. According to the study, the average 21-year-old woman has had nine sexual partners, compared with men who on average have had seven. They polled 2,000 young people, and also found that far more women than men had over 10 sex partners. This was reported in the science journal Marie Claire.
Speaking of surveys, in an international index measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain comes out ahead of America, Australia, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. 14,000 people in 48 countries filled in questionnaires about casual sex and how many people they expected to sleep with in the next five years. Okay, I might take the guys responses about how many people they expect to sleep with in the next five years with a grain of salt. The study was overseen by David Schmitt, a professor of psychology at Bradley University, Illinois. Another study tells us why. According to a YouGov survey of 2,000 British adults, they found that sex was the most popular free activity, ahead of window shopping and gossiping. SO if you are looking for a one night stand, its off to jolly ol’ England, where you can knock someone up without even raising an eyebrow.
The study by Epidemiologists Morten Frisch and Henrik Brønnum-Hansen to be published in the January American Journal of Public Health should come as no surprise. The conclusion is that since 1996, the mortality rate among gay men in same-sex marriages has been virtually equivalent to that of heterosexuals. Why is it important? Because it refutes the notorious pseudoscientific study done by Paul and Kirk Cameron. No, those two are not a gay couple, it’s a father and son team of raging homophobes who claim to be doing scientific sex research but actually just make up all of their conclusions- which all point t the same thing- homosexuality is one of the most horrible things on earth.
They are frequently quoted as authorities by anti-gay groups, but in fact, according to the scientific community, they are quacks. The Cameron study supposedly showed that gay men have an average lifespan of just 42 years, and almost as short for women. Sure, it is well-known that Cameron’s research is riddled with methodological errors and sampling errors, and lots of other kinds of errors, but this study refuting one of Cameron’s studies is late in coming only in because doing real science takes a lot more time than just faking it. As to the Cameron’s earlier study, Morten Frisch wrote “Cameron and Cameron’s report on life expectancy in homosexuals vs heterosexuals is severely methodologically flawed. It is no wonder why this pseudo-scientific report claiming a drastically shorter life expectancy in homosexuals compared with heterosexuals has been published on the internet without preceding scientific peer-review. The authors should know, and as PhDs they presumably do, that this report has little to do with science.” Paul Cameron was quoted in Rolling Stone saying that homosexual sex was more pleasurable than most hetereosexual sex, and as a result, if homosexuality were tolerated then it would become predominant within a few generations. So we actually have a new condition to describe Paul Cameron- Homo-envy. I wonder what hunk he imagines when he is doing his wife.
And in other studies with obvious results, a study from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has shown that there is no scientific support to claims that “an abortion causes psychological distress, or a ‘post-abortion syndrome.’ They reviewed 21 studies involving more than 150,000 women and found that there are “no significant differences in long-term mental health between women who choose to abort a pregnancy and others” Despite this, conservatives will continue to cite fake studies that abortion makes you crazy and depressed and suicidal and all sorts of other bad things, as the conservatives on the Supreme Court recently did when they ruled against late term abortions. Nice to know the Supreme Court relies on pseudoscience to make their conclusions.
There is a new study on anal sex and teens out from the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Now, personally, I am going to be skeptical of any research from a hospital with the same name as two toy companies. They conclude that there is an increase in anal sex amongst teens. Well, duh. Information about anal sex is a lot more prevalent than it used to be. Over a three month study of young people ranging in age from 15 to 21, they found that 16 percent had engaged in heterosexual anal intercourse within the timeframe, with condoms being used just 29 percent of the time. Sure, this should raise some red flags, but I am automatically skeptical of any conclusions drawn from a study that includes both adults and teenagers as young as 15. They are a world apart, and what applies to a 15 or 16 year old hardly applies to someone of legal age who may be living on their own. In fact, the study actually found that females who had heterosexual anal sex were more likely to be living with their partners. In most cases those are going to be monogamous relationships, so I am a lot less worried about HIV for them- in fact, they are in a much lower risk group.
Fifteen years olds having unprotected anal sex with multiple partners would be a lot more concerning, especially with drugs involved. According to the study lead, Celia Lescano, "These findings suggest that the factors associated with anal intercourse among females in the study relate to the context and power balance of sexual relationships. We must teach teen girls and young women how to be assertive in sexual relationships, such as refusing unwanted sexual acts and negotiating for safer sex, whether it's anal or vaginal." I agree with the second half, but it seems that the first half has a built-in bias that these women are participating in anal sex even though they don’t like it or just because they are pressured.
Women throughout history have used anal sex as a way not to get pregnant. I am unclear how she comes to her conclusions, and it also seems that they cling to the same absolutist thinking about AIDS prevention. If you use their thinking, you’d also be telling married people to also use condoms, and that is not, I repeat, not ever going to work, nor is it even a scientifically supported suggestion. There are different risk groups and ways to reduce risk, but you also have to take into account actual risk and actual behavior. Condoms do reduce sensation and pleasure, and deprive women of the beneficial mood adjustment aspects of sperm, and no, I am not making that up- studies have shown sperm to be a mood elevator for women. So unless there is a specific quantifiable risk, you are not going to get heterosexual adults in committed relationships to use condoms. And realistically, you shouldn’t even try. There are more important things to focus on.
A new sex record has been set. SMA / Sex Machines Australia at Sexpo in Melbourne facilitated women to have 204 Orgasms in public, fully clothed. This breaks the Sydney record as Sydney achieved 184 Orgasms over the four day event. It still does not break Erotic University’s record of 8 simultaneous fully clothed female orgasms live on stage, though.
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