Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Sunday, during the Gaia class on HIV/AIDS, 8elements handed out some 'swag' from a de-funded county health program of abstinence education. Some of the things purchased for this program were beach balls, calculators, and other cheap plastic crap imprinted with the phrase "Self-Respect: the ultimate contraceptive".

I'm getting a good look at why abstinence education fails.

First off, kids, it doesn't happen to be true that when you screw, you'll only get pregnant if you hate yourself. That would be a lie. Lots of people I know who like themselves very much have children.

Second, what the fuck does that even mean? I mean, I don't know about you lot, but for me, I can't even work it up to get laid if I'm lacking in the self-respect department. For me, there's a minimum threshold of competence that I have to feel like I have, or else, hey, I'm not feeling very sexy. In fact, in those situations, I'm feeling like if I even bothered to have sex, I'd probably do it badly, and it wouldn't be any fun.

Third, I don't know how the kids today do things, but my range of sexual behavior very rarely involves calculators, and has never yet called for beach balls. I'm going to take this moment to wonder bemusedly about the sex lives of the people who designed this program.

On the bright side, the hardworking citizens of 8elements' county don't seem to be paying for this steaming pile of monkey crap anymore. But you have to figure, at some point, basic health services were not being provided because the budget included Abstinence Beach Balls instead of vaccine doses, nursing hours, and suchlike. That bothers me.

World Orgasm Day to Promote Peace in War-Torn Countries

Oui! Si! Da! Ja! Yes!
Any way you scream it, one group hopes you'll be having an orgasm in the name of world peace this Friday at 6:08 GMT.At the exact moment of the winter solstice, the world is urged to get busy at the second annual Global Orgasm for World Peace.

People across the world — but especially in countries with "weapons of mass destruction and places where violence is used in place of medication" — are being asked to synchronize their orgasms, according to the group's Web site.

This group session of sexual healing, aka The Big O, is designed to be an "instantaneous surge of human biological, mental and spirtual energy" that organizers hope will reduce levels of violence, hatred and fear around the world during this, the longest night of the year.

Global Orgasm is the brain child of Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell, co-founders of the anti-war organization Baring Witness, a group of activists who strip to make public peace displays with their naked bodies.

Newsflash: Smart chicks get crazy laid, says the Boston Globe (and it ain't so bad being a smart guy, either).

More dispatches from the No Shit, Really File, as interpreted by this article's author, and then re-interpreted by me:
- Highly educated people tend to form more egalitarian family/love relationships than less-educated people.
- The level of equality in a relationship seems to be correlated to its stability and the level of satisfaction reported by the partners. (No shit, really? If people don't treat their partners like servants, the relationship is better? Who would have guessed?)
- College educated women both give and get more oral sex than less educated women. (No statistics on how people with college educations and penises fare in this area, but one can imagine, I suppose. Also, this was an example cited by the reporter as "being more adventurous in bed". That alone speaks volumes about American sexual repression.)
- Men are less likely to be misogynistic asshats than ever before. Women are less likely to be tolerant of men who are misogynistic asshats than ever before. (Again, no data on how women treat men, or how men tolerate women, or how anybody who isn't in a heteronormative monogamous gender-normative relationship relates to their partner(s), but hey.)
- Other interesting stuff. Read the article, would you?

Apparently, I am the last person on earth to know this, but in case I am not, I will pass it along. In addition to being pretty much impossible to clean (which I knew), 'jelly' sex toys are also made of unstable materials that leak irritants and may be carcinogenic.

The sort of plastic that these things are made from apparently used to be used in chew toys for babies and dogs, but has been pulled from the market in those applications. So anyways. I'm basically getting cancer, is what.

The Intarweb has our... er... backs on this one though. Several folks with online shops have a policy against selling anything made of phthalates (the bad guy in this story), among them Womyn's Ware and The Smitten Kitten. Womyn's Ware's website also features some truly stunning product reviews, under the link BuyerBeWomyn'sWare.

Susie Bright's blog is so educational.

triadruid and I had to get up too early this morning. It is the only possible explanation. We're in the car, driving to the office. It's his car, so he gets radio control. He pops in a Danzig tape (our selection of tapes is somewhat limited, since most of us stopped buying tapes circa 1991, but nobody has a car with a CD player. But I digress). He says to me, "Do you mind Danzig in the morning?". I say, "No, not unless I'm hung over. Today is fine."

We ride on, and eventually hit the inevitable Danzig love song. triadruid shakes his head, and says something like, "I have to keep reminding myself that there was a day when Glenn Danzig could have used lines like this and there were any number of girls that would be delighted to go to bed with him." I shrug. "I'd fuck Glenn Danzig," I say, with a certain nonchalance. He gives me The Look. It is a look that can be easily translated as "Dood. That is fucked up.", but the "dood, that is fucked up" is silent. I do the only thing a person can do in that sort of a situation, which is widen my eyes slightly and say "What?" in the tones of injured innocence.

But this alone would not serve, so I have to do the other thing a person can do in that situation, which is post about it on LiveJournal, and seek allies. Hence, today's Stupid Poll.

[Poll #909191]

Last night, I was talking to wildnsquirrelly, who expressed regrets over the usual content of my subconscious, and asked if I didn't ever have any really good dreams, the sort where one has wild succulent sex with people one would never really get to screw, and so on. I told him that I do, but that I don't usually post them on LJ. He says, "Oh, okay," and moves on.

triadruid picked up the thread this morning: "Why don't you post that? In fact, you hardly ever mention anything in your LJ about sex at all. It's not like anybody minds. You post all this awful stuff in detail, things that make you feel worse, but you don't post about things that make you feel better." He goes on to say that my LJ is like the conversations you have with your parents when you've first moved away to college; they say "What are you doing?", and you, percieving that they don't want to know about your frat parties, drug experimentation, intense work with community theater, and other vices, say "Nuthin'..." and drag your feet.

And that could be true. I could be selectively reporting my crap events, leaving out whole worlds of happy times. But I kind of figure that you don't want to know about my sex life. Or that the other people involved in my sex life would perhaps prefer that I didn't discuss it. Or that posting about one's own sex life is attention-whoring behavior. Or that I wouldn't be able to write about sex in an entertaining manner. Or any number of other things. So if you were wondering why, that's why.

After reading some pretty intense stuff on the flist about people's pornography addictions and the other associated evils of porn today, I am left with a single stupid question that is completely out of place in the original thread:

Why doesn't anybody ever complain that porn objectifies/degrades/devalues men? (I mean, provided that there are men in the porn. Obviously, lesbian porn doesn't objectify men, but, you know.)

(Also, can you tell it's a slow day? I can.)

I dedicate this entry to labstar, who wanted more sex and less politics on LJ today.

niveus_tigris and I are going to write a romance novel about demonic possession. It's a story that pretty much writes itself, but in order to do this thing the right way, I think we're going to need some input from the VURD. Here's how you can help:

Please comment with a euphemism for genitalia of any flavor.

Archaeologists ten centuries from now will determine that this was a bad idea.

The fantastic thing about the internet, other than porn (although sometimes related to porn), is the dramatic increase in the chances that whatever it is that you do, you can find somebody else that also does the thing. And if you can find one other person that does the damned weird thing that you do, to my mind, you're no longer a freak -- you're a part of a very small subculture.

This week, my invitation to a very small subculture came in the Rob Brezny's Free Will Astrology email. I like to read Brezny, even though my selection of personal beliefs usually does not include astrology, because I enjoy the weird optimism and sense of empowerment to perform great feats of surrealism that comes along with the horoscope.

So this week, Rob invites his readers to consider that funny might be sexy, which is a proposition I can wholeheartedly support. (Link is not really worksafe.) This is probably the part where at some point in my life I would have talked about sex with clowns, or something, but I try to be less alarming than that these days. :)

Content-free Friday wants redheads!

See, I had a dream last night, in which triadruid hooked up with a tall, slender boy with long red hair, and this was very compelling. We approve of such things, in fact. So the question was raised whether triadruid did in fact find redheaded boys attractive, to which he responded that he hadn't seen enough of them to know.

So, vast and unpaid (and underworking) research department, if you happen to have any pictures of attractive redheaded lads to hand, please be so kind as to post them in the comments thread. Also, for the sake of gender equity, if you have any pictures of attractive redheaded women, or attractive redheaded persons of indeterminate gender, you can post those here too.

As my mother once said upon discovering my gay porn, thanks for contributing to the downfall of civilization! (Hee!)