Susan Elizabeth Shepard started stripping shortly after her eighteenth birthday. She continued to dance during university and after receiving her bachelor’s degree in English, decided to forego the newsroom in favor of the more lucrative opportunity offered by stripping. Over the summer, she chronicled her experience chasing the best returns in modern American boomtowns. It’s an incredible piece about what it means to take such chances, about this country, and about what it’s like, sometimes, for strippers.
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Human clinical trials are starting this month in the United States for SAV001-H, a vaccine developed by a team of researchers at the University of Western Ontario’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry led by Dr. Chil-Yong Kang. The vaccine recently passed the first phase of trials, which were conducted on 40 HIV-positive individuals.
Disrupt came under fire after programmers showcased Titstare, an app for people to post pix of themselves ogling women’s breasts. The presentation praised the app as a way for men to stay healthy, citing junk science about how looking at breasts increases a man’s life and hypothesizing that a recent decrease in male life expectancy was the result of the widespread adoption of Cleava, a strip of fabric that can be worn by women over a bra to hide cleavage in low-cut shirts. The internet exploded.
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.
The powerful muscles running across a dolphin’s back and tail stalk (called the “peduncle”) that helps it move its flukes up and down in order to propel itself are the inspiration behind what we know as the “dolphin kick.” This style of movement underwater is so powerful, the governing body of competitive swimming restricts it. Guess what else dolphins do that they might restrict?
“Why is there porn explicitly only for women?” adult performer James Deen asks. “By saying there needs to be porn for women, you’re basically isolating women as a gender, and saying, ‘This is how women should think. This is how their sexuality should be.’ It’s counterproductive (from what I understand) to the equality movement. Who says that one woman’s take on sexuality is the right way to think?”
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.
This summer sure hasn’t helped clarify the question of monogamy — and I’m not just talking about your escapades, you player, you. In July, two papers digging into the roots of monogamy hit the news simultaneously, one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the other in Science — but instead of bringing the issue closer to rest, the papers offered somewhat contradictory conclusions.
It’s been hyped for its alleged anti-depressant properties. It’s been featured prominently in cookbooks and mixology texts. The late Helen Gurley Brown, then editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan, recommended that women use it to diminish the appearance of wrinkles. And now, it comes in lube form, complete with realistic smell and texture.
In Korea doctors at Aone Plastic Surgery don’t just want to neutralize the frown, they want to create a permanent illusion of a smile. According to the Atlantic, Aone recently patented a new procedure that deviates from the traditional heart-shaped (or “Valentine”) incision, and creates more upturned corners. They’re calling this $2,000 procedure a Smile Lipt — “lipt” being an awkward portmanteau of lip and lift.
