Sexuality – Page 11

If You’re At All Sensitive About Your Masculinity, Look Away Now

Published on June 18, 2007

Proof that parties, intoxicants, temper and vulnerable external genitals don’t mix: I don’t even have balls, except in the purely metaphorical sense, yet I’m wincing at this BBC Merseyside story:

Yes, this is a real product.

Woman jailed for testicle attack
A woman who ripped off her ex-boyfriend’s testicle with her bare hands has been sent to prison.

Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: “That’s yours.”

Monti admitted wounding and was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

‘Pulled hard’

Sentencing Monti, Judge Charles James said it was “a very serious injury” and that Monti was not acting in self defence.

The court heard that Mr Jones had ended his long-term but “open relationship” with Monti towards the end of May last year.

The pair remained on good terms and on 30 May she picked him up from a party in Crosby and went back for drinks with friends at Mr Jones’s house.

An argument ensued and Mr Jones said there was a struggle between them.

In his statement, Mr Jones said she grabbed his genitals and “pulled hard”.

He added: “That caused my underpants to come off and I found I was completely naked and in excruciating pain.”

The court heard that a friend saw Monti put Mr Jones’s testicle into her mouth and try to swallow it.

She choked and spat it back into her hand before the friend grabbed it and gave it back to Mr Jones. Doctors were unable to re-attach the organ.

More…

Finally, An Outbreak Of Clue

Published on June 7, 2007

Connecticut ‘Porn Popup” trial teacher Julie Amero has won a retrial, with the help of geekdom:

A US judge yesterday ordered a retrial of a schoolteacher found guilty of computer porn charges after a sustained campaign by internet specialists proclaiming her innocence.

Julie Amero, 40, was convicted in January of being responsible for a series of sex advertisements that popped up on a classroom computer and were seen by pupils, in a case that has caught nationwide attention and raised important questions about content control on computers.

The prosecution at the trial in Connecticut had claimed she must have clicked on the websites for the adverts to begin appearing. But after the trial, 28 computer science academics in the state sought to prove that the rapid-fire sequence of pop-up sex advertisements could have appeared automatically.

More…

Common sense 1, stupidity 0.

You Shall Know Them By The Company They Keep

Published on June 5, 2007

[UPDATE: Ann Winterton’s bill was defeated yesterday, but there’s two more coming right along behind. This is not over by a long chalk.]

The Catholic church in Britain, buoyed up by the rise of the religio-fascist Pope Ratzo, the presence of some prominent Catholics in the UK giovernment and the huge influx of Catholic migrants, is getting way too big for its boots: it’s threatening, the 70 Catholic MP’s who don’t toe the church’s anti-abortion line with excommunication (though they insist not, that’s effectively what it is) and worse, should they even so much as abstain from voting on new legislation tightening abortion rules. Catholic MPs include Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, and John Reid, the Home Secretary. The head of LifeLeague, James Dyson, said the pressure group would “out” Catholic MPs who took communion and abstained on abortion measures.Aiding them in this profoundly undemocratic exercise are some of the most rabid rightwing nutjobs British politics can produce.

The leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics yesterday questioned whether politicians who backed abortion should remain full members of the church, and also compared Scotland’s abortion rate to “two Dunblane massacres a day”. In a sermon marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, Cardinal Keith O’Brien attacked both the practice of abortion and pro-choice members of the Scottish parliament.

[…]

“I think it’s far beyond time that the present Abortion Act of 40 years ago was re-examined,” he said. “We are killing, in our country, the equivalent of a classroom of kids every single day. Can you imagine that? Two Dunblane massacres a day in our country going on and on. And when’s it going to stop?”

The Dunblane reference was just gratuitously unpleasant and ill behoved a cleric – but it proves that this is about poitics and power, not conscience. That a priest would commit such an offence to common decency as to use a tragedy and parents’ grief to make a political point says he is a political, not a spiritual man. But then the anti-abortion movement has never been spiritual or about the sanctity of life but about the subjugation of women – and that goes double for the Catholic church.

British Catholics are in an invidious position. Allegiance to the Pope is required for Catholics as a matter of doctrine and this allegiance extends to the Vatican, it’s cardinals and all of their doctrinal instructions. Those instructions are infallible as they come from God directly, Catholics are told: the church’s position is that temporal powers are are strictly limited by God and God’s instructions trump the state’s. The Pope speaks directly to God, ergo the Pope’s instructions trump the state’s because abortion is considered a spiritual, not a temporal matter.

However, I suspect that should anyone else from any other religion give their primary allegiance to another city-state and its leader ahead of their own nation and compatriots they’d be called traitors, with prominent Catholics like Ruth Kelly in the forefront of the name-calling, especially so if they were Moslem.

The church can obsfuscate about liege lords and loyalty as much as they want, but their own statements of doctrine say it’s so.

This puts many British Catholics in a very delicate and ambiguous position: their loyalty has been constantly historically suspect and this has more than once resulted in bigotry and violence, so much so that the church has had to become an underground, secret, and dare we say it, even a terrorist organisation at times. This state of affairs has formed the basis of much of the long history of anti-Catholic bigotry in England but we had begun to get over it, at least until the ascendance of Ratso to the papal throne and the subsequent empowerment of the worst of the right wing of the church.

Oooh, Matron: Comedy Double, Bumper Sex Ed Edition

Published on June 1, 2007

Today’s comedy double is all about sex education The first group is a collection of public service safe sex and condom ads from all over the world, and because they’re ads they’re pretty much worksafe, depending on how tightassed your boss is – or you are, if you’re working from home. But then if you’re such a tightass, what on earth are you doing here?

The bonus clips are longer and much more graphic, though equally funny. Probably not safe for any workplace though. The cats had to go and hide in the bathroom at one point, poor sensitive loves.

On with the motley then.

I love condom ads; unwritten boundaries of sexual taste and decency vary so widely from country to country, testing the transgressive creativity of ad-makers to the benefit of us viewers. So to soften you up for the condomfest to come here’s a sex-ed ad from Canada and oh god, we’ve all been at this school event or something very like it:

An ad like this next one, also from Canada, might prove more effective in its aim. Works for me.

First the stick, then the carrot, hur hur; from South Africa comes a condom ad that does it with subtlety, style, humour and ooh, eyecandy:

Then there’s the typically idiosyncratic Dutch approach. I’ve never seen them do this on KLM, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they did:
.

But some people really do need the message hammered home, if you see what I mean and I think you do.

If you’re male and at all sensitive about the family jewels, I’d suggest you don’t watch this next one, or maybe you could watch it from safely behind your chair. How not to test a condom:

Right, now that we’ve got our condoms and know how to use them, it might be wise to use them responsibly. This one’s from France on the side-effects of easily available contraception:

It’s funny, but I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying there – that contraception makes women bad mothers?

Now for the bonus clips: they’re quite long, so you might want to save them for your lunch break or at home. First, Family Guy on abstinence ed:

Abstinence, schmabstinence. You might as well ask a cat not to lick its itching nads as to ask a teenager to be sexually abstinent. But they tried, and still do: here’s a mashup of American ’50s sex-ed films:

I dunno though, sometimes understanding parents can be worse. Much worse….

That is one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve seen in a very long time.

Far from hymning abstinence or trumpeting fake understanding, this next ad takes humourous acceptance of sexual diversity to whole new levels. I don’t think they’ll be seeing this one in Kansas, do you? What a great ad though:

The last bonus clip is an animated short which I think may be Czech: it’s pretty sexually graphic so definitely not safe for work, but what an excellent safe sex video, funny and touching with great animation.

Now my work here is done, mwahahaha. I’m off to sit in the garden in the sun for a while, at least until disturbed by local cat politics in action.

Clean Floor Outbreak Predicted

Published on May 19, 2007

Oh dear. This is a very, shall we say, enterpsrising idea, but I’m not sure it really appeals, given the 3 cats-worth of hair and dander in my own hoover. Still, first prize for imagination.

Ananova:

Vacuum screamer

A US mother-of-three has invented a sex toy that connects to a vacuum cleaner to give an orgasm in just ten seconds.

The gadget, called Vortex Vibrations, works by concentrating the air flow to create a rapid and gentle vibration, reports the Sun.

Inventor Joanne Drysdale claims it can give multiple, back-to-back orgasms lasting up to a minute a time – and it does not even touch the skin.

The 49-year-old former toolmaker was cleaning her carpets when she came up with the idea for Vortex, which sells for £35 through lovehoney.co.uk.

She saw how a piece of rubber that had got caught in the nozzle was gently resonating in the air flow. She also felt a soft stimulation to her fingertips as she tried to remove the rubber.

At the time Joanne, from Utah, had not had sex for 15 years following her divorce.

She said: “In my attempts to alleviate frustration, I began to think what I could do. I noticed how the rubber moved in the top of the vacuum.

“After several hours, I came up with the prototype. The first time I tried it I reached an orgasm within 10 seconds.

“That was when I knew I was on to something that could potentially bring pleasure to all women.”

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.