This piece is fucking brilliant. Granted it’s an UK editorial but I feel like it applies to America too:

The only difference between the girls - always ‘girls’ - of FHM and the women I meet in real life, is that real life is a lot more diverse. My friends have dimples, and freckles, and curvy bits, and complicated personalities; they make amusing facial expressions, and one has ginger hair. Qualities which are ruthlessly purged from FHM’s parade of near-identical Stepford wank subjects.

Nobody I’ve ever seen really looks like Cheryl Cole, and that includes Cheryl Cole. Yet almost everybody in FHM’s list looks a bit like Cheryl Cole, with only minor variations allowed in age, breast size, body shape or even skin colour: it seems Beyonce marks the acceptable limit of darkness for black people

FHM’s ‘study’ uses a cohort of men self-selected according to their preference for the kind of women who feature in FHM, conditions them with a monthly barrage of images labeled ‘sexy’, and then asks them to name some sexy women. Even if you accepted the bogus premise that sex appeal could be ranked on a universal scale, this would be a rubbish way to do it.

To see just how rubbish, here’s an experiment you can try at home: go to any porn site that ranks its most popular clips, and have a look at the top 100 clips that people actually pay for - the range of outfits, body types, situations, ages and skin colours far exceeds anything you’ll find in FHM’s list. When it comes to what people find sexy, there’s a truth in porn considerably purer than the sterile, manufactured consent of glossy magazines. The predictable industry counter-argument, that lads’ mag editors select cover girls who drive sales, scarcely deserves the effort required to insert a link to recent figures showing their vertiginous downturn in circulation.

Forget political correctness, we live in the era of sexual correctness gone mad. A stream of dubious research - often based more on PR than science - is regurgitated by the press: informing women how much they should weigh (to two decimal places), what their hip-to-waist ratio should be (0.7), how long they should allow their face to grow (“ratio of the length of the face to the width of the face should be 1.6”) and giving much-needed advice on nipple placement (“The ideal is a 45 to 55 per cent proportion - that is the nipple sits not at the half-way mark down the breast, but at about 45 per cent from the top.”).

Sexual correctness is a fundamental failure of journalism, and not just in the moralistic right-wing end of the press. I can’t remember the last time I saw an informed discussion of porn in a mainstream news publication. Many of those touted as ‘sexperts’ simply aren’t; a situation not helped by the craven attitude of bodies like the British Psychological Society. Features on alternative sexual choices, lifestyles or fetishes invariably resort to cheap smirks at the expense of its subjects; while journalists interviewing figures in the adult entertainment industry seem compelled to demand that they justify their ‘aberrant’ behaviour.

All of this. Serious.

Our revisionist history on sex and sexuality doesn’t match up to reality (shocking):

Men have stronger sexual desires than do women…Women are the more monogamous gender…Homosexuality is an unnatural sexual behavior.

Sexual beliefs, like these, are so widespread that we have collectively come to view them as being embedded in our biology. Cross-cultural data collected from pre-industrial societies, however, tells a different story. That data suggests that culture – including religion – has played an important role in ingraining these “truths” about human sexuality into our collective psyche.

Just to give you an example of our modern perspective, a few weeks ago, when we were talking about the origin of marriage, one of the commenters asked the question: “Why the obsession with pre-marital virginity (and extra-marital children) that we see emerge across cultures from a very early point in time?”

I find these types of questions revealing. They illustrate our belief that conservative sexual values today are representative of historical sexual values (across societies) and, as a result, tell us something important about who we are as sexual beings.

Thanks to the exhaustive efforts of anthropologists like George Murdock, Douglas White, and dozens of others who contributed to the Standard Cross-Cultural Survey, I can tell you quite emphatically that there is no uniformity of human beliefs about sexual behaviors across cultures and from an early point in time.

In fact, cross-cultural evidence collected on 1167 pre-European contact societies suggests that much of what we believe to be true about human sexuality is socially constructed rather than biologically pre-determined.*

Read the entire article, it isn’t particularly long and makes the point that our attitudes about sexuality have never been ‘fixed’ but constantly fluid and evolving (or devolving) depending on the time period and cultural shifts.

Quality reading:

Did you know that The VICE Guide to Eating Pussy is still one of the main articles to bring people over to VICE.com? The reason for this is because unless you’re five years old, an unadventurous straight girl, or some other manner of person who sucks, you’ve probably had your mouth on a vagina and want to grow better and better in your skills as your life moves forward. Don’t you wanna be a winner? Don’t you wanna succeed in the ongoing battle of mouth vs. pussy? FUCK YES YOU DO! I figured that maybe it was time for a new guide, from the perspective of someone who both has a vagina, and is also BFFS with vagina (sexually). 

As I was writing that thing that I just wrote about people who may not have ever had their mouth on a vagina, I had to stop and think about what sort of creature would fall into the “no thanks, no vagina for me” category. I thought about this for a long time, as though I was trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem because, after eating vagina for TWENTY-ONE years now, I can’t imagine life without it. It’s one of my major food groups. 

Oh, hello. I’m a humongous lesbian. Perhaps you didn’t know that. Fact numero uno about lesbos is that, unless we’re chumps/fakers, we know a shit ton about flippy flaps, namely, how to wear one as a hat. Much with anything else in life though, enthusiasm doesn’t always equal skill. You can love a thing (like pussy) and still suck at that thing (like eating pussy). In the world of lesbian sex there are two acts that are at the upper echelon of difficulty 1) Strap-ons 2) Going down on a crotch in a really amazing way. This post is going to focus on the second one, and will hopefully be helpful for lesbians, soon to be lesbians, straight dudes, whoever.

The words we pay the least attention to in conversation—connectors like ‘the’, ‘this’, ‘there’, ‘and’ and ‘that’—reflect our sexual desire and our place in society, says U of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker. By analyzing conversations recorded during speed dates, Pennebaker could predict which couples were sexually interested in each other and which were likely to see each other again after the first date. “Pennabaker found that when the language style of two people matched, i.e. when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.”

Ha:

It’s long been theorized that many hardcore, anti-gay homophobics are often repressed homosexuals themselves. There certainly has been a lot of anecdotal evidence from notable political figures to support this theory, but now science is stepping in with some raw data.

The paper, recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, covers six studies conducted in the U.S. and Germany, using a total of 784 university students. Students were first asked to rank their sexual orientation from 1 (highly gay) to 10 (highly straight).

From the group that identified themselves as “highly straight” a subsection emerged—about 20 percent of them indicated a high level of same-sex attraction. Further, those that self-identified as highly straight but exhibited homosexual impulses were “significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming).”

Dr. Ryan notes that the test doesn’t indicate that all those who are anti-gay are secretly in the closet, but if we extract the numbers from the study (20 percent of self-identified “highly-straight” people), one could theorize that one out of five might be. That not an insignificant number.

Read the entire article as it goes into the methodology of the study which is very interesting and clever. I don’t think it makes any sweeping proclamations about homophobia (which isn’t the point) but I think as time goes on, more people will find accept human sexuality operates on a sliding scale, not ‘fixed’ ideas (and this is coming from a straight person).

Awesome interview with Dan Savage. ‘Savage U’ is probably the best show on MTV since… since a long time:

At what point did you decide to branch out into radio, TV, speaking tours, etc? Were those ventures deliberate moves on your part or did other outlets just start coming to you?

People began reaching out to me. I get letters every day from people asking me how to syndicate a column — because obviously I must know since I have one — and I have no idea how you syndicate a column. I started writing a column and people started contacting me, asking me if they could run it too. I never got out there really and marketed the column. The person I’m doing the television show with, Brian Pines of Hypomania Content, he was trying to get a meeting with me for two years before I would have lunch with him. And even then, he had to fly up to Seattle to meet with me — I wasn’t going to fly down to L.A. I’m too lazy and self-hating and self-loathing to run around in circles and saying, “They ought to put me on television.” Brian had to convince me to go out there and do this, and I’m glad that he managed to do that.

You’ve said that Savage U aims to counter the fact that young people don’t get good sex education. How much do you think the media is to blame for that?

I don’t think the media is to blame for it. I think politicians are to blame for it. I think there’s cowardice. There’s not a lot of good sex ed. on television, but television I don’t think is the venue. I don’t think television, the medium, is charged with providing young people with good sex education. I think that’s parents and schools and [students are] failed by it. There was just another bill passed in Tennessee; any kind of sex ed. is abstinence-only, and this new abstinence-only education in Tennessee has to encourage children from gateway sexual activities like hand holding. I read about it and said they should just start calling these bills the “Dan Savage Employment Protection Act of 2012.” I will never be out of work so long as politicians keep churning out kids who have no info and don’t know their holes from asses in the ground. I will be employed. We need good sex ed. in the schools. That’s about parents and teachers, politicians and churches. I don’t think that’s about the media.

Of course, read the entire thing because Dan Savage fucking rules.

This article ties back to the point I made in the last article I posted. Plenty of men (including many high-powered types) also have the desire to be dominated but since that operates way too far outside of mainstream cultural narratives, you’re not likely to see any media frenzy about it:

Many men who turn to submissive fantasies do so for precisely the sort of vacation from responsibility that Roiphe suggests women are seeking. Olivia Severine, a transsexual dominatrix living in San Francisco, says most of her clients were “very high-powered” men weighed down by responsibility. “They came to see me as a brief escape when no one was looking at them for direction or leadership,” she says. “The time with me is when they were told what to do, what to feel and how to act … and all the weight of their careers, families, lives, is lifted from them for a cherished few hours.”

Mistress Shae Flanigan, a Los Angeles dominatrix, says her clients are “CEOs, high-ranking managers, lawyers and wonderfully brilliant men from all over the business spectrum.” What they have in common is “that they come to me to create an environment where they don’t need to think,” she says. “Where they can trust me to keep them safe while I weave together an enticing, thrilling, euphoric and painful world where it is literally impossible to think.”

It isn’t that these guys wish they had less real-world power — it’s just, power is stressful, and submission provides a release. “BDSM is a hell of a lot more affordable of a vacation than the Bahamas, I promise you,” says Flanigan.

I encourage you read the entire thing, it’s very interesting.

*hangs head*:

1. The Netherlands

The Netherlands has a reputation for being one of the most pro-sex countries in the world, and it isn’t hard to understand why. From comprehensive sex education to legal prostitution (Amsterdam has one of Europe’s most famous red light districts) to nude and topless beaches, the Netherlands is a social conservative’s worst nightmare. On top of that, the Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage (the Netherlands legalized same-sex civil unions in 1998 and gay marriage in 2001). But while Rick Santorum would no doubt view Amsterdam and Rotterdam as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, the reality is that all that sexual openness is having positive results in the Netherlands. Sociologist Amy Schalet (author of “Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex” and a professor at the University of Massachusetts) has done extensive sex-related research on the United States and the Netherlands, often asserting that Americans would be much better off if they had the sexual openness of the Dutch.

And the data bears that out. The United Nations reported that in 2009, the Netherlands had a teen birth rate of 5.3 per 1,000 compared to 39.1 per 1,000 in the United States that year (teen birth rates provided by the United Nations, the Guttmacher Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Advocates for Youth and other organizations typically look at females in the 15–19 age group). Advocates for Youth has reported that the Netherlands had an abortion rate of 8.8 per 1,000 in 2006 compared to 14.8 per 1,000 in the United States in 2007 (abortion rates, as a rule, are based on the number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44). And Advocates for Youth has also reported that in 2009, the United States had three times as many adults living with HIV or AIDS as the Netherlands (0.2 percent in the Netherlands compared to 0.6 percent in the United States). Also, in 2006, there were roughly 13 cases of gonorrhea per 100,000 Netherlands residents in the 15–19 age group compared to roughly 458 per 100,000 in the United States that year. So when it comes to sexual health, the United States is clearly dropping the ball compared to the Netherlands.

If you like depressing yourself like I do, read about the rest of the countries on this list…

I still have to actually go through this month’s issue of Esquire to read the original article but I heard plenty about it from female friends of mine. I fuck with Rachel Kramer Bussel’s (one of my favorite sex writers by the way) on this:

In the latest issue of Esquire, writer Goeff Dwyer frets that “[t]he blowjob has fallen on hard times.” What he really means is that the female-delivered not-so-enthusiastic average quality male-received blowjob is on the wane, but even sticking to heterosexuality, Dwyer simply doesn’t know where to look. Firstly, he pits fellatio against cunnilingius in some kind of oral sex bracket game, as if the two cannot coexist peacefully and be enjoyed mutually. Secondly, he ignores the spaces where men and women are celebrating women who love to open their mouths.

Blowjobs are, in fact, popular enough that Violet Blue’s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio was revamped for a second edition, while sex educator Jamye Waxman is teaching a bjowljob bootcamp at Toronto sex toy store Come As You Are in May where you can “Learn about the frenulum, the taint and how to go down deeper. Find out why gagging can be sexy, and why enthusiasm gets you farther.” Other books on the market: Fellatio 101, Going Down: An Illustrated Guide to Giving Him the Best Blow Job of His Life, Blow Him Away and Oral Sex He’ll Never Forget: 52 Positions and Techniques Guaranteed to Blow Your Man Away. Camille Crimson and her partner Mike Flirt have a whole series of videos dedicated to The Art of the Blowjob and she writes, “From an industry standpoint, although blowjobs are really popular, they’re either treated as a boring prelude to sex or they’re really rough and there’s very little skill involved. We wanted to show that a blowjob can be beautiful and something exciting for both men and women, so it felt like a calling.”

Like I said, I won’t personally speak on it too much because I haven’t read the original article but I will say this: that writer is probably meeting the wrong girls anyway and if a girl doesn’t like giving head, I prefer she skips that step. Because to me, a shitty blowjob is worse than no blowjob at all, not to mention it achieves absolutely nothing for either party involved.