Last Tuesday, Haluk Murat Demirel opened what he believes is the first Muslim sex toy shop online. The concept of sex shops for the faithful isn’t new, however. In 2012, Poland saw the first Roman Catholic sex shop. The previous year, Orthodox Jews welcomed the first kosher sex shop. And Christian sex shops have been a thing even longer. Come explore how the faithful spice things up within the boundaries of their beliefs.
The parade of bizarre Halloween sexifications continues with this gem from Rent the Runway, which turns a sequin romper by Robert Rodriguez into Abraham Lincoln. Goodness! They couldn’t have picked a less sexy president, at least as far as the ladies are concerned. One of the women to whom he proposed described dear Abe as being “deficient in those links which make up the chain of a woman’s happiness.” Who says bad ideas aren’t a springboard for amusing political factoids?
The internet is up in arms! James Cook at the Kernel recently reported on a not-widely-known feature of OKCupid — its premium tier, which enables users to filter search results in more categories than it does for users with free accounts. “Once you’ve paid a monthly subscription fee, you can start hiding all the overweight people from your matches page,” Cook writes. But the option isn’t to weed out self-described overweight people. It’s to weed out any type of person you believe won’t fit what you have determined is important to you. Is this wrong?
Mileage most certainly varies, but I think the current dictum of “sexy all the things!” has resulted in some rather universal what the fuck. This is a round-up of the weirdest sexifications in the name of Halloween costuming. Swallow before browsing. You’ve been warned.
Last week Funny or Die released Alyssa Milano’s purported sex tape. The “tape” shows Milano about to get it on but just as she positions the camera to film, her “partner” comes up behind her, grabs her, and the camera is kicked off position, focusing on a televised discussion on Syria instead. Milano’s statement is clear: people care more about celebrity gossip than what’s happening in the world, and the only way to reach them is to make sex the Trojan horse. But sex isn’t always just a Trojan horse.
It was an average Tuesday in 1990 when HBO first aired Real Sex. No one had any idea at the time that it would captivate 2.8 million households across the nation, or that what had initially been designed as a 60-minute documentary special would become a successful series spanning two decades. Real Sex showed us a wider spectrum of sexuality long before accessing the unknown through the internet became the norm.
Many women are working to take their bodies back by bringing representations of the female body to the public. In Africa, an artist has turned a former jail into a walk-in vagina. In the United States, another artist is using the rodeo to educate the public about the clitoris. In Australia, a student newspaper put 18 vulvae on its cover. The only thing more interesting than the art are the reactions the pieces have inspired.
News outlets do a stand-up job of publicizing incidents of impropriety on the parts of teachers, whether it’s because they are sleeping with students or because they are hiding previous involvement in some facet of the sex industry, but we never hear about the harassment that teachers and other faculty face at the hands of their own students. It’s not that it doesn’t happen — a survey by the American Association of University Women found that 36 percent of high school students report instances of student-on-teacher harassment, with four percent of students polled self-disclosing their harassment of a teacher.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything which works the same in movies as it does in real life. Movies are, first and foremost, narrative art: they’re trying to tell a story, which means that everything which isn’t part of the story will be stripped down, which means that meaning and structure will be imposed on the sequence of events that you’re watching. Yet there seems to be a particular perversion that porn sex needs to be “real.”
Jonathon Green, slang lexicographer and author of Green’s Dictionary of Slang, has released two timelines revealing our changing attitudes toward our genitals. The VAGINA timeline focuses on terms historically associated to refer to the female reproductive organs and associated features and dates back to 1250. The PENIS timeline, on the other hand, goes back to the 1300s and focuses not only on male genitals but their various features.
