Indiana Univ study reveals sex to be pleasurable with or without use of a condom or lubricant [iu.edu]

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — American men and women rated sex as highly arousing and pleasurable regardless of whether condoms and/or lubricants were used, according to a study led by Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington researchers and published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Led by Debby Herbenick and Michael Reece, co-directors of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, researchers reviewed a nationally representative study of men and women ages 18 to 59 to assess characteristics of condom and lubricant use during participants’ most recent sexual event, and the relationship of their condom and lubricant use to their ratings of sexual quality.

Data were from the 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, which involved the administration of an online questionnaire to a nationally representative probability sample of U.S. adults. Results showed that men and women consistently rate sex as highly arousing and pleasurable with few differences based on condom or lubricant use. More than twice as many women than men were unsure whether the condom was lubricated — 26.6 percent vs. 11.4 percent — or from what material it was made — 23.6 percent vs. 8.9 percent.

“This may be because men are more likely than women to purchase condoms and to apply condoms,” Herbenick said. “However, it’s important for more women to become familiar with the condoms they use with their partner so that they can make choices that enhance the safety and pleasure of their sexual experiences.”

Additionally, no significant differences were found in regard to men’s ratings of the ease of their erections based on condom and lubricant use.

“The U.S. continues to grapple with high rates of sexually transmitted infections, HIV and unintended pregnancies,” Herbenick said. “We need to understand how people make choices about the products they use, or avoid using, and how these products contribute to the safety and pleasurable aspects of their sexual experiences. This is particularly important as the products themselves evolve and become more mainstream in American society. We also need to understand what men and women know, or don’t know, about the products they use so that we can better target public health education messages to individuals and groups.”

“The epidemiologic studies assessing human sexual function and behavior in the U.S. that were started 60 years ago by Kinsey are continued now by Herbenick and Reece. Gathering sexual data regarding condom use is highly relevant,” said Irwin Goldstein, M.D., editor-in-chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. “Understanding current condom use offers health care providers an opportunity to educate those people uncomfortable with condoms but for whom lack of use may lead to significant sexually transmitted infection health risk.”

A PDF of “Characteristics of Condom and Lubricant Use Among a Nationally Representative Probability Sample of Adults Ages 18-59 In the United States” is available at sciencenewsroom@wiley.com or online in the Wiley Press Room for media with log-in access. (To request a login, click here). It will appear in the February issue.

The study was supported by Church & Dwight, Inc., the maker of Trojan Brand condoms and vibrators. Co-authors include Vanessa Schick, Nicole Smith and Brian Dodge, Center for Sexual Health Promotion at the IU School of Public Health-Bloomington; Stephanie Sanders, The Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction and Department of Gender Studies, College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington; and J. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D., IU School of Medicine.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/23720.html

How to Get Out of a Hook Up When the Guy Is Already in your Apartment [jezebel.com]

by Katie Halper / jezebel.com

It’s awkward when you realize you don’t want to hook up with a guy who you’ve invited into your apartment for that purpose. But you can and should always be able to stop a hook up you don’t want to have. (Duh). This [Law and Order dum-dum] is my story.

The Background: A few years ago, I was working on a documentary film about a play. One of the actors was very talented and good looking. We didn’t really get to know each other over the course of the week-long shoot, but we exchanged small talk and smiled at each other, like, a lot! The last night there was a cast party. As I was about to leave the party, the actor asked me where I was going. I told him I was going home and when he asked me what neighborhood I lived in, it turned out, that, lo and behold, he was going to the same neighborhood! It was late, so, being two economical people, in a terrible economy, pursuing our artistic passions and hence not making any money, we decided to share a cab.

Game On? During the cab ride, he was perfectly fine and we were getting along swimmingly. So, when we got to my apartment and he asked if he should come up too, I said, “Sure.”

Realization: Once we were in my apartment, however, his behavior changed. He seemed sure of an imminent conquest, and started acting like a douchebag. He started asking me questions about the sex life of my lesbian friend and colleague (whom he met through the shoot). It was a charming mix of bro-ish enthusiasm for all things lesbian and casual homophobia. While I had been attracted to the guy five minutes ago, now the idea of even kissing him viscerally repulsed me.

Click to read the rest of the article…

We’re All Female For About 5 Weeks of Our Lives

Guys and Dolls No More? [nytimes.com]

by Elizabeth Sweet / nytimes.com

IMAGINE walking into the toy department and noticing several distinct aisles. In one, you find toys packaged in dark brown and black, which include the “Inner-City Street Corner” building set and a “Little Rapper” dress-up kit. In the next aisle, the toys are all in shades of brown and include farm-worker-themed play sets and a “Hotel Housekeeper” dress.

If toys were marketed solely according to racial and ethnic stereotypes, customers would be outraged, and rightfully so. Yet every day, people encounter toy departments that are rigidly segregated — not by race, but by gender. There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to building, action and aggression.

Gender has always played a role in the world of toys. What’s surprising is that over the last generation, the gender segregation and stereotyping of toys have grown to unprecedented levels. We’ve made great strides toward gender equity over the past 50 years, but the world of toys looks a lot more like 1952 than 2012.

Gender was remarkably absent from the toy ads at the turn of the 20th century but played a much more prominent role in toy marketing during the pre- and post-World War II years. However, by the early 1970s, the split between “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys” seemed to be eroding.

During my research into the role of gender in Sears catalog toy advertisements over the 20th century, I found that in 1975, very few toys were explicitly marketed according to gender, and nearly 70 percent showed no markings of gender whatsoever. In the 1970s, toy ads often defied gender stereotypes by showing girls building and playing airplane captain, and boys cooking in the kitchen.

But by 1995, the gendered advertising of toys had crept back to midcentury levels, and it’s even more extreme today. In fact, finding a toy that is not marketed either explicitly or subtly (through use of color, for example) by gender has become incredibly difficult.

Click to Read the Rest of the Story…

California Law That Allows Unmarried Women To Be Raped Will Be Fixed [laweekly.com]

by Dennis Romero / laweekly.com

An Eastside state legislator was quick to propose fixing an 1872 rape law that got a defendant a new trial for having sex with a woman he duped into believing he was her boyfriend.

California’s Second District Appeals Court yesterday said L.A.-area suspect Julio Morales should get a new trial because the old law does not specifically protect unmarried women from rapists who impersonate their boyfriends. The letter of the law only protects married women from people who would impersonate a husband in order to get sex:

News of the ruling yesterday was a sensation. Folks couldn’t believe that married woman could be protected by such “rape” under the law while an unmarried one couldn’t.

The court urged the legislature to fix the law’s language.

Jimmy Gomez, who represents the Eastside and neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Silver Lake, today said he would “vow” to fix the “archaic” law.

A statement from his office:

The reversal of the rape charge is based on a seemingly-archaic law in the California penal code that states: any person who fraudulently obtains the consent of another to sexual relations escapes criminal liability unless the attacker masquerades as the victim’s spouse…. After hearing of the legal travesty that could allow a rapist to walk free, Assemblymember Gomez vowed to fight for a change in the law that would assure that never again will a rapist be able to walk away from their crime.

Prosecutors in the 2009 case allege that Morales climbed into bed with an 18-year-old who had been drinking and fell asleep at a house party.

He started to have sex with her and when she came to she thought he was her boyfriend, according to authorities. At one point she said she realized he was not her boyfriend and tried to push him off but he resisted. He ultimately left.

A first trial ended in a hung jury. A second ended with a conviction. Morales already served his sentence — 3 years — for the rape.

The appeals court cited the letter of the law, which states that rape in such a circumstance is limited to a situation …

… [w]here she submits, under the belief that the person committing the act is her husband, and this belief is induced by any artifice, pretense, or concealment practiced by the accused, with intent to induce such belief.

Link > Sex With Sleeping Woman Not Rape Because She Wasn’t Married

Link > Law That Allows Unmarried Women To Be Raped Will Be Fixed, Says Jimmy Gomez

 

101 Facts About 101 Women of the House and Senate [jezebel.com]

by Erin Gloria Ryan / jezebel.com

Yesterday, a record 101 women were sworn in as members of the US House of Representatives and Senate, which means that now, a mere 80% of federal elected officials are male. Woo! Girl power! It’s the end of men! But before we get ahead of ourselves celebrating women’s total 20% domination of the legislative branch, let’s take a minute to get to know a cocktail party fact about each of the 101 women who will be spending at least the next several weeks pretending to usher in a new era of bipartisanship in Washington.

Glowing, hopeful writeups of the 113th Congress describe the lawmakers sworn into office as the most diverse group in the history of the country. Still, 19 states — Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia — didn’t send any women to the House of Representatives this time around and all of those states except Alaska, Louisiana, Nebraska, and North Dakota are without female Senate representation as well. Still, both of California’s Senators are female and the entirety of New Hampshire’s Washington legislative delegation are women. So, progress. Kind of.

And now, without further ado, here are some fascinatingly share-able tidbits about the ladies who legislate, from Allyson Schwartz to Zoe Lofgren.

1. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D) PA Schwartz served as the executive director of a Philadelphia Planned Parenthood clinic from 1975 until 1988.
2. Amy Klobuchar (D) MN Sen. Klobuchar’s senior thesis at Yale was about the politicking around the building of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, ex-home of the Minnesota Twins and the world’s crappiest place to watch a sporting event.
3. Ann Kirkpatrick (D) AZ Kirkpatrick was raised on an Apache Indian reservation.
4. Ann McLane Kuster (D) NH Her great-grandfather was elected Governor of New Hampshire in 1904.
5. Ann Wagner (R) MO Wagner is the former ambassador to Luxembourg and currently occupies Todd Akin’s old House seat.
6. Anna G. Eshoo (D) CA Eshoo has served in Congress since 1993, and has never won with less than 57% of the vote.
7. Barbara Boxer (D) CA When she ran for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1982, the future Senator Boxer won with the campaign slogan “Barbara Boxer Gives a Damn.”
8. Barbara Lee (D) CA Lee was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against authorizing use of force after the September 11th attacks.
9. Barbara Mikulski (D) MD Rumor has it that Bill Clinton wanted Al Gore to choose Mikulski as his running mate during the 2000 elections rather than Sen. Joe Lieberman.
10. Betty McCollum (D) MN McCollum has caused conservatives to flip their shit twice in the last couple of years — once when she supported an amendment to a bill that would have stopped military sponsorship of NASCAR teams and once when she was recorded on video omitting the phrase “Under God” from the pledge of allegiance. SOMEONE FETCH ME THE FOX NEWS SMELLING SALTS!
11. Candice Miller (R) MI Candice Miller did not graduate from college.
12. Carol Shea-Porter (D) NH Volunteered in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and was so disgusted by the federal government’s slow response to the disaster that she ran for Congress.
13. Carolyn Maloney (D) NY This tough-ass broad is the one who asked “Where are the women?!” during that infamous all-male panel on birth control last year.

Click to Read the Rest of the Story…

What if you woke up in a different person’s body every single day? [io9.com]

by Michael Ann Dobbs / io9.com

There have been plenty of young-adult novels about young people searching for their identity — literally or figuratively. But few have taken the concept as far as Every Day, the new young-adult novel from David Levithan, the co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. This is a coming-of-age story that manages to pack some age-old philosophical questions about selfhood and the body into an unconventional love story.

In Every Day, A is an identity without a body. Each day, A wakes up in a new body of another 16 year-old. A has almost none of the usual markers of identity: A is genderless, sexless, without race or eye color, neither attractive nor unattractive. A takes these qualities from the bodies A inhabits. While A has access to the bodies’ memories, A experiences the world differently from the individuals he or she inhabits. And A has no control over whose body he or she will end up in tomorrow. A has, over the years, developed a sort of moral code built primarily around a strict non-interference policy. Which all comes crashing down when A wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin’s girlfriend Rhiannon.

A tries to stay in touch with Rhiannon, which is difficult when A is different person each day. Eventually A tells Rhiannon the truth about his or her existence. From there, the book focuses on the young couple’s struggles to establish a relationship, when A is never sure who he or she will be tomorrow. A’s experiences as all these different people could have been nothing more than vignettes, but A’s love for Rhiannon and desire to see her again is in the background of each of these lives, complicating everything A does.

There are plenty of signs that the book could have turned into a more run-of-the-mill thriller about a unique supernatural being discovering its race or some other ridiculous plot. Luckily, Levithan stuck to the love story. He also uses the first person — thus avoiding the unfortunate “he or she” that I’ve used above. The book has an overall dreamy, fantastic quality that fits A’s wise beyond his or her years personality. While many of the daily episodes and interactions are very grounded, together they add up to something poetic. A’s life is, necessarily, deeply internal and this is reflected in the language.

 

One of the things I loved about the book was it defies easy labels just as much as A does. It’s a contemporary YA romance, but it’s also not just a romance book. It’s a fantasy book, in that there is no technology or rational scientific explanation for A’s existence or ability to move between bodies, but it’s not like any other fantasy books. It’s like a science-fiction book, to the extent that it’s about big difficult-to-answer questions, explored through an incredible narrative, but again there’s no tech or science. It’s just a unique lovely book about young love and identity, wrapped up in the impossible.

This isn’t necessarily Levithan’s first venture into speculative fiction — his poetic novel Boy Meets Boy takes place in what could only be described as an alternate or near future universe in which the school’s popular, quarterback is also a drag queen — but he is better known for his co-authoring of realistic teen fiction like the aforementioned Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. He was also involved in editing The Hunger Games. In fact, he’s probably the busiest person in YA fiction. Aside from writing and editing, he also organizes readings and teaches in the Writing for Children program at The New School (where, full disclosure, I had him as a professor).

Ten Things I Wish the Church Knew About Homosexuality [Jim Rigby]

The Olympics Showcase Diverse Body Types, Body Snarking [jezebel.com]

by Doug Barry

For two weeks, the Olympics present the viewing public with a diverse range female body types, many of which will remain unrepresented in future advertising campaigns. Women who compete in the games, argues Time‘s Sonia Van Gilder Cooke, provide a counterbalance to all those glossy, airbrushed photos of magazine cover models and actresses who offer only a single, unrealistic physical standard.

Though women in the Olympics are creepily objectified, they also help expand the public’s idea of the many shapes women’s bodies can have. According to Jo Swinson, a British Member of Parliament and founding member of the U.K. Campaign for Body Confidence, the Olympics are “one of the times we actually get to see women without makeup on on television.” Swinson believes that, because athletes spend years honing their bodies to perform a single, highly specific task, there’s an “honesty” about their bodies that most celebrities, by contrast, do not demonstrate. That’s because female Olympians are trying to win competitions, while celebrities and models are essentially helping create the illusion of a certain kind of physical perfection in order to sell something.

Still, the Time piece opens with an investment banker taking his friends to a women’s beach volleyball match simply because the volleyball players are wearing bikinis. And even though the Olympics showcases the diversity of the female form, it also presents body snarkers with an opportunity to judge female athletes on their physical proximity to the cover model aesthetic. That’s part of the reason why NBC’s “Bodies in Motion” video features volleyball, field hockey, and track and field athletes prominently, and why there’s nary a female bodybuilder in sight.

Though certain male body types (the swimmers and divers, let’s just say) are ogled and idealized, male shot putters, weightlifter, or basketball players aren’t subjected to the same snarking as their female counterparts. British weightlifter Zoe Smith, for example, fought back against Twitter criticism that she looked like a “bloke,” which is just a Britishism for “bro.” British swimmer and four-time Olympic gold medalist Rebecca Adlington showed the world how cruel strangers can be when she retweeted something sent to her in June: “You belong in that pool you f— whale.” Australian swimmer Leisel Jones also became the subject of a terrible “fat or not” newspaper poll that, thankfully, readers took for the mean and stupid editorial decision it was.

Female athletes lose out in the endorsement race that follows the games because, according to Phillippa Diedrichs, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England, scoring endorsement deals “becomes very much about [athletes'] bodies and their appearance and their being shown to be attractive as opposed to what their bodies can do.” As women’s sports gain popularity among spectators (the U.S. women’s track and field team, for instance, did waaaaaaay better than the men), that endorsement disparity between male and female athletes may start to change, which would go a long way, in turn, toward helping change the prevailing advertising industry’s aesthetic preference for impossibly thin (and exceedingly airbrushed) women.

http://jezebel.com/5934001/the-olympics-showcase-diverse-body-types-body-snarking

The Crossdressing Room [gawker.com]

by David Torrey Peters

When I was six, my mother left a box of small garbage bags lying around. I found one, cut the bottom off, and used the cinch-tie at the top to make a small, crude dress. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. As my reflection stared back at me, a wave of well-being surged over me, sweeping away any real specifics of that moment. All that remained was a feeling of correctness, like finding just the right word to describe something: a reflection of myself as I knew myself to be, but had yet to see. I turned away from the mirror with a new sensation of beauty and lightness buoying my step. I descended the stairs to show my parents, who sat in the enclosed porch.

Passing through the kitchen, I spotted a coffee cake on the counter. Brimming with satisfaction, I felt a sudden inspiration, a desire to be generous. I pulled the coffee cake off the counter and held it in my arms before me. In my garbage bag dress, I walked into the porch and carefully placed the cake on the coffee table. Hands on my hips, I announced to my parents, who stared at me with their coffee cups in hand: “I’m a waitress!”

There was a moment’s pause, during which, but for the sparrows flitting past the windows, time appeared frozen. Then my mother shifted her glance to my father and the two of them burst out laughing. I held still, wearing only my underpants and the garbage bag, confused, because I felt beautiful, and why couldn’t they see that? The notion that I should be embarrassed crept up on me—and then with the force of a physical blow, I was. I fled the room, tripping and sliding on the makeshift hem as I went, the plastic clinging to my suddenly hot skin. “Oh, come on!” my father yelled back at me. “There’s nothing wrong with being a waiter.”

Click the link below to continue reading the article:

http://gawker.com/5933857/the-crossdressing-room?comment=51776316