Sports

According to LELO, the design-conscious sex toy manufacturer, in the weeks before a major sporting event, four out of five purchases on their site are made by men. This is a big contrast to other times during the year, when purchases for the Swedish luxury pleasure brand are pretty even between men and women. Purchases by men hit 88 percent before the Champions League finals and are predicted to go even higher in preparation for the World Cup.

Sex sells, goes the saying, but that isn’t applicable to unabashed sex destinations; unless they’re caught in some kind of legal issue, news outlets are not likely to report on porn sites. But Pornhub’s very clever — they’ve taken a page from the dating site OKCupid, and are running a blog that looks at the trends in people’s porn browsing habits. This Super Bowl Sunday, their insights team sat down to work. What they found was obvious but absolutely fascinating just the same.

Grantland’s story “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” has created a sensation online for its questionable reporting on Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who took her life shortly before the publication of the piece, quite possibly as a result of fear of what its exposure would bring. For those who have not yet read the piece, the author, Caleb Hannan, outed the creator of the Oracle GX1 putter as a transgender woman, both on the piece which ran after her death and before — to one of her own investors.

In 2022, the FIFA World Cup will be hosted at last in the Middle East and Qatar — the country that won the bid to host the tournament — has been hard at work building new stadiums. A few days ago, some of the plans by the design firm AECOM escaped, enabling the world to see what Qatar had in store for soccer fans the world over. The greatest minds in design, engineering and architecture are unanimous: there’s no greater structure than that of the human vagina.

In June, Russia passed into law a ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors.” Supporters defend it, saying it doesn’t outlaw homosexuality, simply restricts the discussion of nontraditional relationships among people who are below 18 years of age, but recent brutal clashes between lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans activists and allies have already shown how desperate the situation is for anyone who identifies as LGBT. How can anyone see this position as anything other than a government sanction of homophobia? And how will it affect the 2014 Olympics?

We’ve all heard what happens to athletes who don’t abstain from sex before the match: they lose. We don’t know how we know or when we first heard it, but we know it and somehow, it seems to make sense. Is it true? The media has been having a field day with this question, especially after digging up a review from the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine from 2000 (um, slow news day?). We can’t be sure they actually read it, given their conclusions.

It’s World Cup time and the web is clogged with all manner of information about the teams, the matches and the players. Awesome. Our editrix is a huge soccer fanatic, so we’ve suffered more games than we care to recount. In any event, just because we’re bitter doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the spoils of the match: n00dz!

The Wold Cup will bring some 400,000 people to South Africa this June. Mostly male, the soccer fans attract a specific sort of service provider: the sex worker. According to South Africa’s Drug Central Authority, some 40,000 sex workers will be arriving as well from all over the world. The Global Post reports on other…continue reading.