Culture

Literary perverts the world over can rejoice! The Literary Review’s eighteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner has been announced: Rowan Somerville’s second novel, “The Shape of Her.”

Back in the day, it was considered beyond the pale to do anything while having sex, but as technology forges ahead and we get better at multi-tasking, some verboten things are apparently no longer raising as many eyebrows.

We find it humorous that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have no regard for the human animal — so what if we all develop massive body image issues, at least the animals are safe!

When Los Angeles’ adult industry was rocked by a positive HIV-test result in October, the media wasted no time in condemning the industry. The LA Weekly’s Informer blog suggested AIM was refusing to report the HIV case to government officials, citing a need for a more comprehensive test to be performed, which the reporter called “bullshitty.” It’s a very firm position to take.

The Carnal Carnival is a site run by a group of wild science writers who want to bring knowledge to us unwashed masses. This month, they’re surveying studies on orgasm. Ready to take a look at male and female genitals during coitus, as delivered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)?

The book Heaven is a book about sexuality and spirituality. The spirituality is of a predominantly Christian sort, but it’s the kind of Christian spirituality found among the refugee camps of those disaffected souls who chafed on the boundaries of their parents’ church.

The studio is buzzing with girls auditioning, girls taking photos for promos, and girls camming with customers. We’re at IP4Play headquarters, a new offering on the adult entertainment landscape to bring some edge to Apple’s products. Oh, yeah. And there’s very little Steve Jobs can do about it.

We’re always looking for ways to give Apple the finger and allow their users to express their sexualities despite the company embargo on anything sex-related in their App Store. Time Flies, a new app for iPhone and iPad, is no different.

Labels. We may claim to hate them, but face it, most of the time, they really help simplify things. And when it comes to relationships, the simpler the better. Of course, few relationships are so cut and dry. Most have little features — or as Facebook, that terrible heteronormative tool of the patriarchy, calls them, “complications” — that make them so much more difficult to define.

Is it supposed to be clever to use a famous scene of a fake one? Is it a kind of elbow-elbow-see-the-difference moment? Is it a marketing technique of sorts — we recognize the scene and thus are more open to the content? Or is it a tribute to the complexity and mystery of female orgasm, which women intuit but men can’t fathom, even if they’re the ones leading the study?