Latest News

Red Umbrella Diaries are storytelling events where sex workers share their experiences with an audience. Over one hundred sex workers have told their stories since their inception in New York’s Lower East Side. Now, the organization that runs them, RedUP, is making a documentary to bring the Diaries to the world. Formatted in the style of the concert documentary, a crew will follow seven sex worker story-tellers as they prepare to go live in front of 200 people at New York’s multicultural musical clearinghouse, Joe’s Pub.

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.

We had been talking about marriage. Would she ever get married? She sent me a photo from Brazilian designer Samuel Cirnansck’s summer 2012 show, during which models strutted his designs in various stages of restraint. With no qualms whatsoever about upending the wedding industrial complex, of which he, as a designer, is a part, he strutted in with a wicked smile and festooned his models in shibari and bit gags as easily as if these were lace and embroidered details. The show caused a sensation in the wedding industry and the imagery won’t leave us alone.

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?

Eels and sperms may look similar, but their method of moving is very different, as their Reynolds numbers are far apart. In fact, we can now answer the question, what would it feel like to swim like a sperm or a bacteria? Prepare yourself for a romp through the world of fluid mechanics — with sperm!

From tentacle porn to the success of vampire romance, inter-species sex has slowly made its way from the unspeakable corners of our minds to the spotlight. Today it occupies a place almost as mundane as nurse and teacher fantasies. But how did dinosaurs (and pterosaurs, which are not technically dinosaurs) get into it? Science goes deep into the most perverse corners of two authors’ minds and a decade-old porn flick-turned-shock video.

The United States has stalled. It’s been a week since Congress failed to pass a spending bill to provide the government funding to do what it needs to do. While Congress and the president continue to get paid, some 800,000 furloughed government employees and people who depend on government assistance are on hold without paychecks. It’s tough times nationwide, but online, sex work-lite sites such as Seeking Arrangement and What’s Your Price are reporting a jump in new accounts. Will the shutdown help normalize sex work?

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.

The family-held Italian food company Barilla came under fire last week after its chairman, Guido Barilla, said that the company would never feature a same-sex family in a commercial. “I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don’t agree with them,” Barilla said during an interview with Italy’s national Radio 24 station. “Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role.” Barilla, an internationally recognized brand, is known for advertising that depicts a happy family. Their slogan is, “Where there’s Barilla, there’s home.”