Milton Diamond, who is otherwise best known for being the person who exposed John Money’s failed “experiement” that was the life of David Reimer, has a new article in The Scientists on the cultural, societal value of porn.

Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women. There is no doubt that some people have claimed to suffer adverse effects from exposure to pornography—just look at testimony from women’s shelters, divorce courts and other venues. But there is no evidence it was the cause of the claimed abuse or harm.

I’ve always been a fan – mostly because I grew up in a family where we were born fully dressed, and where no one was going to show me photos of what a vagina actually looked like (which, if you’re a woman, is hard to see for yourself). It can also be a useful instruction manual that’s actually fun to watch.

That said, I know there are plenty of feminists, and non-feminists, who hate porn and will only ever see the side of it that degrades women. I think of it more like comedy – sure, a lot of it’s lousy and mean-spirited and serves no cultural function, but the cultural function it does serve can’t really be fulfilled in any other way.

Read more: Porn: Good for us?

Dairy Queen – whose name is funny enough, really, & kind of obscene – sells something they call a Dilly Bar.

A Dilly Bar. It sounds obscene in so many ways, doesn’t it?

But what makes me laugh the hardest is that “dilly boy” is slang (in Polari) for a male prostitute. So theoretically, a bar where male prostitutes hang out should be called a Dilly Boy Bar.

(Okay, so my mind’s in the gutter. And?)

A lovely article at gizmodo.com has illustrations of six turn-of-the-last-century masturbatory machines. My favorite is the chair that simulates the jerkiness of train travel, since perhaps its existence explains my great love of trains.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Together or apart, single or poly, it is obvious that there is no excuse not to feel the love, or at least the pleasure. If the Victorians could create machines to meet your needs, then surely you can find something that scratches your itch. (The romantic itch is much harder to reach, so maybe it’s better to take care of the ones that are more easily scratched.)

(Thanks to Jacq Jones @ Sugar)

I’m not surprised by much, but this one got me: a scent called Vulva that isn’t a perfume but an erotic aid.

It’s not a joke, & it’s NSFW. They say smell is our strongest sense, so it makes perfect sense, except – well, wow.

(via Bilerico)

For those of you who are following the DSM revision controversy as it unfolds, here is a recently launched website by the Association for Women in Psychology Committee on Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis, spearheaded by Paula Caplan. It takes on the problems with a number of categories, including Gender Identity Disorder, Parental Alienation Syndrome, and Female Sexual Dysfunction.

Some highlights of the upcoming DSM V:

[1] The Paraphilias Subworkgroup is proposing two broad changes that affect all or several of the paraphilia diagnoses, in addition to various amendments to specific diagnoses. The first broad change follows from our consensus that paraphilias are not ipso facto psychiatric disorders. We are proposing that the DSM-5 make a distinction between paraphilias and paraphilic disorders. A paraphilia by itself would not automatically justify or require psychiatric intervention. A paraphilic disorder is a paraphilia that causes distress or impairment to the individual or harm to others. One would ascertain a paraphilia (according to the nature of the urges, fantasies, or behaviors) but diagnose a paraphilic disorder (on the basis of distress and impairment). In this conception, having a paraphilia would be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for having a paraphilic disorder.

This approach leaves intact the distinction between normative and non-normative sexual behavior, which could be important to researchers, but without automatically labeling non-normative sexual behavior as psychopathological. It also eliminates certain logical absurdities in the DSM-IV-TR. In that version, for example, a man cannot be classified as a transvestite—however much he cross-dresses and however sexually exciting that is to him—unless he is unhappy about this activity or impaired by it. This change in viewpoint would be reflected in the diagnostic criteria sets by the addition of the word “Disorder” to all the paraphilias. Thus, Sexual Sadism would become Sexual Sadism Disorder; Sexual Masochism would become Sexual Masochism Disorder, and so on.

and

Transvestic Disorder
A. Over a period of at least six months, in a male, recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, sexual urges, or sexual behaviors involving cross?dressing. [11]
B. The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Specify if: [12]
With Fetishism (Sexually Aroused by Fabrics, Materials, or Garments)
With Autogynephilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Female)

and

302.85 Gender Identity Disorder in Adolescents or Adults
Gender Incongruence (in Adolescents or Adults) [1]
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months duration, as manifested by 2* or more of the following indicators: [2, 3, 4]
1. a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or, in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics) [13, 16]

2. a strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or, in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics) [17]

3. a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender

4. a strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

5. a strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

6. a strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)

Subtypes
With a disorder of sex development
Without a disorder of sex development
[14, 15, 16, 19]

and

For the adult criteria, we propose, on a preliminary basis, the requirement of only 2 indicators. This is based on a preliminary secondary data analysis of 154 adolescent and adults patients with GID compared to 684 controls (Deogracias et al., 2007; Singh et al., 2010). From a 27-item dimensional measure of gender dysphoria, the Gender Identity/Gender Dysphoria Questionnaire for Adolescents and Adults (GIDYQ), we extracted five items that correspond to the proposed A2-A6 indicators (we could not extract a corresponding item for A1). Each item was rated on a 5-point response scale, ranging from Never to Always, with the past 12 months as the time frame. For the current analysis, we coded a symptom as present if the participant endorsed one of the two most extreme response options (frequently or always) and as absent if the participant endorsed one of the three other options (never, rarely, sometimes). This yielded a true positive rate of 94.2% and a false positive rate of 0.7%. Because the wording of the items on the GIDYQ is not identical to the wording of the proposed indicators, further validational work will be required during field trials.

More…

Valentine’s Day is five days away, so consider this foreplay.

There’s a reason Joan Jett is called the original riot grrrl, after all. So what would JJ do? I think that’s pretty damn apparent, no?

Bestiality porn has been banned in the Netherlands, where until recently, it was legal:

Sex with animals had been legal in the Netherlands, as long as it could be proven the animals were not injured.

& How did they know that? Did they ask?

I assume the corniness is typical for daytime TV, but there’s no reason a same-sex sex scene can’t be as corny as anyone else’s. With fireworks, even.

For someone who went to see My Beautiful Laundrette about a dozen times – in theatres, people! – it makes me happy to see this on regular old television.

Love is love is love.

(h/t to Alex Blaze @ TBP and to Feministing)

It’s an ongoing bit of news: women who have no libidos, & how we must “fix” them (instead of, say, acknowledging that some people have little to no interest in sex). That we make a regular variation in libido abnormal & try to fix it is one thing, but when the pharmaceutical companies start looking for a cure…

The fact that so many women have a bitter-sweet relationship to Sex in the City, wishing they were a Samantha or a Carrie, yet feeling so sexually flat, may have less to do with a physiological problem than it does with their hard jobs, their demanding children, or their partner leaving dirty dishes in the sink.

Oh, right! Women & their pesky lives, and problems, and responsibilities. Nutty that should bother them or get in the way of their libidos.

Or, like I said, some people don’t have very high libidos. If it’s so hard for women to admit – who at least have some cultural “permission” not to be horndogs 24/7, I can’t even imagine how many men admit they’d rather live without (much) sex.

Courtesy Bilerico & Gloria Brame, a lovely YouTube slideshow of the erotic works of Egon Schiele. I’ve long been a fan.

I’ve done a few workshops on mismatched libidos over the years, and what surprised me the most when I started out was how many men profess to having lower libidos, and how much shame men can feel when they don’t have the kind of libido that’s on all the time no matter the circumstances. That men always have those kinds of libidos is a myth which is sadly reinforced by how almost all coverage of low libido issues is about women, such as in this NYT article of a week ago.

It’s problematic because it confirms a lot of unfortunate cultural mythology. Along with the expectation that men always have the higher libido is the one that says women always have lower ones. (That one is true doesn’t mean the other is, by the way. More bullshit binary thinking at work there.) Aside from the obvious heterocentrism that’s usually at the heart of this kind of gender essentialism — as if, in lesbian relationships, libidos are matched because both people are women! – the added hurdle of feeling gender atypical when you’re already feeling sexually atypical makes working on this stuff, or even admitting it, doubly difficult.

So for the record: lots of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have low libidos, & all kind of people of all kinds of genders in all kinds of relationships have high libidos. The problem, as many of you know firsthand, is when your libido doesn’t match your partner’s. The one thing that I repeat frequently when I do these workshops is that having a low libido that’s satisfied by having sex once a season is not a problem — if you’re partnered to someone whose libido is the same/similar. It’s when the quarterly libido partners with the twice a weekend libido that problems arise.

Black Friday is nearly over – hopefully you survived if you went out shopping & gots lots of lovely presents for your loved ones. That said, Tristan Taormino’s latest movie Rough Sex just came out, & along with lots of her other titles, might be the holiday present that you get for you.

*intentionally spelled wrong to evade censoring.

It’s not something a pervert like me would ever understand, but it’s damned cool that there is now a dating site for asexual peeps.

Of course the image at the site is heteronormative, which is problematic, but I’m sure they needed to communicate that the site is still about dating and romance and intimate relationships that aren’t sexual per se.

(via Queers United)

I was looking up the condition commonly known as “blue balls” (you know, because I could) and found this little gendered bit on Wiki:

Homologous condition in women

Women can also experience discomfort due to unrelieved vasocongestion as their pelvic area also becomes engorged with blood during sexual arousal. They can experience pelvic heaviness (aka blue walls, blue labia, blue box, or blue curtains) and aching if they do not reach orgasm. The general term pelvic congestion refers to such pain as it occurs in either sex.

I’d never heard any of these but have argued for years that women can, indeed, experience something akin to what guys describe as blue balls. Turns out I was right.

These are straight guys: how queer is that?

(btw, FB is blocking this content. feh to FB.)

Someone asked me recently if I knew what WWJD meant, and if so, how I would answer that question as per LGBT community.

My answer was: Honestly, I think Jesus would be working with the LGBT teenagers who are thrown out of their homes every year & forced to engage in survival sex to live.

You really wonder why, as Americans, we get so hung up on sex, and on sex work. You’d think in an uber-capitalist economy, monetizing fucking would be a good thing, but we get hung up anyway.

I’ve been very pleased while reading Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys that I thought I knew almost nothing about sex work, but some of it is familiar – the substance abuse, the “first time” story happening when the woman in question was 13. But what I didn’t know was how much a 17 year old hustler might not hate having to go down on an 82 year old woman, or how, for an American living in Mexico, sex work could be both dangerous and sweetly naive. The stories in this book are good, even if they occasionally make you wish that really really great writers had done sex work and written about it, but in fact, there are at least a few really remarkably well-written pieces in here, & then a whole bunch of fascinating but proficiently-written stories. There is very little that isn’t good in one way or another (which, imho, could be said about sex itself, too).

Do check it out if you’ve ever had any curiosity about sex work. I’ve never been on either side of a sex-for-money equation but this book’s stories kind of made me wonder why I haven’t.

They finally got Roman Polanski.