Carin Bondar, the scientist who brought us the web series Wild Sex — about the weird and kinky sex rituals in the animal kingdom — is working on a new show about the wondrous place where sex and biology collide. Called Sex Bytes, this new offering features fast, quirky little weekly videos centered on a specific topic, drawing on scientific literature.
Over the last week, four Americans, two Canadians and two Australians have been detained in separate incidents (and various stages of undress) at Machu Picchu. Outraged, the Ministry of Culture in Peru called the trend a threat to Peru’s “cultural heritage,” and imposed regulations that could very well save the historic site.
The “manifesting” prostitution statute in Phoenix is more than a wacky law that gives law enforcement a wide margin to interpret pedestrian behavior — in practice, it’s effectively turned race, and gender identity into evidence. If you’re a person of color — especially if you’re trans — it doesn’t matter if you’re walking to Sunday mass. Your very existence is a manifestation of prostitution, and you’re fair game to get picked up. This happened to Monica Jones. But she’s fighting back.
Fred Phelps, the founder of a Kansas-based group known for its anti-gay protests and picketing of military funerals, died of natural causes on Wednesday night at the age of 84. Westboro Baptist Church, a small but vocal congregation, was founded in 1955 to warn the world of God’s wrath toward our “deeply corrupted nation and world.” Since the 1990s, they have staged protests meant to disrupt and cause emotional distress to a number of people in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Across the United States, hundreds of thousands of rape kits are still sitting on shelves unprocessed, years after the crimes are reported. In 2009, 11,304 of these kits were found sitting in a Detroit police storage facility. It was a repeat of something we’d seen before — in 2001, New York City had had a backlog of 16,000 rape kits. By the time Detroit’s stash was found, the Big Apple had just barely gotten theirs under control. The Detroit discovery kicked off campaigns across the nation but the going’s been slow.
It’s true that there are several porn producers who are stepping up to help out with the crisis of sexual illiteracy, but they’re doing this as a service. It’s a lot like the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which connects people in science with people in Hollywood to bring some accurate science into movies and television. These are services I’m grateful for. But it’s neither Hollywood’s nor porn’s duty to do what education should be doing.
But it’s neither Hollywood’s nor porn’s job to do what education should be doing.
Traditionally, the butt plug has been used to stimulate the rectum for sexual pleasure, but Florida artist Fernando Sosa wants to repurpose it as a tool of dissent. A week ago, Sosa unleashed on the world a plug based on Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Initially, Sosa wanted to use his 3-D printer to make a voodoo doll, but he determined that casting Putin as an object representative of the thing he considers most corrosive to Russian society was the better bet.
It’s hard to make money with porn these days: there’s a glut of it online and even if you succeed in cornering a niche, it’s hard to cash in. But Nick Stone wants to change that and he’s taking a page from Scott Bedbury to do it. His new venture, SnapGirlz, is a portal that enables a limited number of people to sign up to receive private media daily from porn stars and other women in the adult industry. Basically, SnapGirlz is reshaping commodity into experience.
A U.S. citizen was detained by Customs and Border Patrol agents without grounds and interrogated twice over the course of five hours, a recent lawsuit reveals. She was asked personal questions about her relationship with a foreign national friend who was legally visiting the U.S. on a business visa, including whether they were sleeping together. The agents said they had access to their year-long e-mail exchanges. What had the guy done to get this much attention? He must have done something, right? Nope.
Increasingly, Twitter has come to realize how difficult it is for social networks to allow people to self-express in today’s sex-negative and panic-prone environment. Despite refusing to do away with porn after the “Dildoplay” incident that infuriated Apple, Twitter nevertheless began to hide results for certain hashtags on Vine, like #nsfw and #boobs. And now, a year later, it has finally decided to give in and ban the porn.
