Culture

Playboy and other publications of its time, played an important role in creating the legal structure that currently upholds our right to sexual self-expression. It wasn’t always like this. Once, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was considered obscene. Once, any article dealing with sexual matters — however educational — could result in a $5,000 and up to a decade in prison. The suppression of sexual discourse has always come hand in hand with the suppression of literature, as well as that of scientific inquiry.

The kinky social network Fetlife doesn’t take measures to protect user content and has shown incompetence or negligence in regard to user privacy, all the while prohibiting victims from warning others about predatory behavior in the BDSM community. As users, by enabling FetLife to continue espousing a code of silence and allowing them to spin security issues as “attacks,” we are letting our community become a breeding ground for exploitation.

Whatever I may think about Cosmopolitan now — and even some of the ideas in this book — it’s impossible to deny that Helen Gurley Brown took a machete to the notion that women needed marriage to be fulfilled. I respect that immensely. Get a job, get your own place, screw the idea that you need anyone, make time for your self, take care of your body, have the epic sex you deserve. Yes. We had our differences, but in that, she and I were on the same page.

For Scott La Force, what began as an examination of restive sexual dysfunction centered on the suburban complacency of 21st century America has become a moment of truth. And now, those of us who happen to be in Portland, Oregon before the end of August can share that moment at the Cock Gallery, where La Force is exhibiting his vision as a photo essay.

Octomon Nadya Suleman still has not had much luck securing economic stability for herself or her children. In a last-ditch attempt to avoid getting evicted from her home, which was foreclosed in June but received no bids at auction, the mother of 14 has done everything from stripping to porn. Now, looking to raise $150,000 to buy a new home, she’s taking a step closer to the less legal side of the adult industry by offering herself up on the pay-for-dates site WhatsYourPrice.com.

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.

You’ve got an issue overflowing with pieces about the 101 best eats around the world. How do you make the cover pop? A totally irrelevant image of a woman practically blowing an asparagus spear, that’s how! If Newsweek‘s editor Tina Brown hoped the image would inspire an avalanche of conversation online to drive meatspace sales, she didn’t take into account how pervasive this form of trolling has become.

The body of her relationship with long-time boyfriend Mark Griffiths wasn’t even cold when rumors started to circulate that actress Gillian Anderson was dating her former X Files co-star David Duchovny. According to gossip site Celebrity Dirty Laundry, Scully and Mulder have been shacking up in his L.A. home.

Remember Charlie Sheen’s “goddess” Bree Olson? Looks like the former Penthouse Pet and adult film actress is adding band manager to her resume after signing to represent Tight, a band made up entirely of porn stars. “The biggest challenge a porn star band faces is being taken seriously,” she says. “These are very talented musicians but not everyone is willing to give them a chance.”

Playboy’s safe-for-work site, The Smoking Jacket has a list up of the seven hottest female characters in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Unfortunately, the only thing we could think about as we went over the characters collected by TSJ, was how shitty female armor in gaming continues to be.