I guess I am posting heavy stuff today...

They're like potato chips, these blogging posts...can't just stop at one.

From Sept. 2004

ALL WORKED UP ABOUT “SMUT CHIC”
By J. T. Benjamin
Copr. 2004; All rights reserved

Late one night last month, I was alone in the house.
My Lovely Wife and kids were away visiting friends,
and I was on the couch, flipping channels, when I had
an epiphany. These moments of clarity usually happen
while the recipient is in a mind-altered state; in my
case, insomnia, Heineken, and home-made buffalo wings.
I was half-watching two or three programs and
debating whether to give up and watch some porn, read
some porn, or find something else porn-related, when
the lightbulb went off over my head.

At some point in the not-too-distant past, smut
entered our cultural mainstream.

I’m not talking about the easy access we have to porn
on the internet, (God, how I love it so). I’m talking
about the fact that, without warning, porn, smut,
erotica, whatever you want to call it, has emerged
from our social closet and is shamelessly parading
around for everyone to see, sample, and, most
importantly, make a few bucks from.

Of course, the premium cable channels have been giving
us softcore porn for years, but these days they’re
offering lots more. HBO features documentary shows
like “Real Sex,” “Taxicab Confessions,” and
“Cathouse,” which profiles life in a legal Nevada
brothel. Showtime now hais in its fourth season
“Family Business,” a reality-TV show which chronicles
the life of Adam Glasser. Mr. Glasser, better known
as Seymour Butts, produces and directs “gonzo” adult
movies ike “Assgasms,” “Through The Sphinct-door,”
and “Tushy Girls Con Carne.” One of his colleagues,
porn movie star Ron Jeremy was featured in a
well-received 2001 documentary, called, oddly enough,
“The Legend of Ron Jeremy.”

If you only get basic cable, TV shows featuring
swinging, S/M and other taboos, and the history of sex
can be found on MTV, VH1, and even the Discovery
Channel.

And if you’d rather turn off the TV and read
something, most of the major bookstore chains such as
Borders offer entire sections of erotic writings.
Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt has a new
biography. So do porn actresses Jenna Jameson,
Christy Canyon, and Traci Lords. The adult film
company Vivid offers, How To Have A XXX Sex Life: The
Ultimate Vivid Guide with tips offered by several of
the company’s actresses.

Moving away from pornographic non-fiction, but staying
in the risqué section, you can try Striptease: From
Gaslight to Spotlight by Jessica Glasscock, Burlesque
and the New Bump-n-Grind by Michelle Baldwin, a
textbook on stripping called Striptease, Lap And
Bellydance Routines by Leah Stoffer, and, of all
things, The S-Factor: Strip Workouts for Every Woman
by Sheila Kelley.

In the news recently, a Texas woman, Joanne Webb, had
criminal obscenity charges brought against her (and
subsequently dropped) for being a saleswoman for
Passion Parties, Inc., which markets and sells sex
toys in the home. Think Tupperware only with dildos.
Of course, former G.O.P. Senate candidate Jack Ryan
had to bow out of the Illinois race when it was
revealed that he’d taken his then-wife, actress Jeri
Ryan, to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans, and
Paris.

And then there’s New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy.
When faced with a bevy of scandals, including aborted
blackmail schemes, payoffs, and rumors of cronyism,
(in addition to his homosexuality and his sham
marriage), McGreevy opted to come out of the closet
and resign. In the twilight of his political career,
McGreevy decided it would be better to go down in
infamy as a gay politician instead of as a corrupt
politician. This is, in my eyes, progress.
Especially for New Jersey.

It’s not just in the mass media, either. This past
July, I sat in on an interesting conversation with a
couple who’d recently attended “Swingstock,” an annual
gathering of swinging enthusiasts in the great
outdoors of Minnesota. Frankly, the shocking thing
about the conversation was not that this couple had
gone to “Swingstock,” or that they were openly
discussing it, but that nobody else was shocked to
hear of their experience. It made for one hell of a
barbecue.

On another personal note, last Independence Day, while
the steaks and burgers were grilling and our kids were
playing together in the back yard, a friend of mine
asked if I could help him find an entertainment
lawyer. It seems he doesn’t want to run afoul of
local obscenity statutes, as he’s trying to get into
the adult film industry.

People everywhere are openly talking about sex,
watching it on TV, reading about it, and trying to
find new ways to indulge in it.

On the one hand, I find the whole situation
deplorable. I’ve spent years carefully crafting a
reputation for open and frank talk about sex. If
everyone else is doing the same thing, my conversation
starters have lost their shock value. Or, putting it
another way, what’s the fun of indulging in deviant
sexual behavior if it isn’t deviant anymore?

On the other hand, if smut has indeed become
fashionable, any open discussion will bring the real
weirdos out of hiding, and we can finally bring up
some truly crazy notions.

For example, the “Understanding Pornography In
Australia Study” has concluded that porn can be good
for you. In an article in Australia’s News
Interactive website, (http:news.com.au), Dr. Alan
McKee, one of the report’s authors, “said porn users
reported it had taught them ‘to be more relaxed about
their sexuality’ and marriages were healthier, while
porn made people think about another person’s pleasure
and made them less judgmental about body shapes.”

And here’s another wacky idea. Salman Rushdie, the
British novelist, argues in XXX:30 Porn Star Portraits,
that the measure of a free society should be made in how
well it tolerates pornography. In his essay, called,
“The East Is Blue,” Mr. Rushdie
says, “Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but
when it comes into societies in which it’s difficult
for young men and women to get together and do what
young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a
more general need…While doing so, it sometimes becomes
a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even
civilization.”

These are, of course, points I’ve been making for
years.

It’s kinda cool being a trendsetter.

Nothing big today...

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Student graduation speaker denounces women who use birth control as "selfish."

What an asshole.



UPDATE

Well, it seems the asshole has apologized.

which makes him a contrite asshole, but he's still an asshole.

St. Thomas is, no surprise, a Catholic college. What is a bit surprising is that so many of Sphincter-man's fellow graduates were inf act outraged by his comments. Haven't had time to dig up the link yet but something like eighty percent of American Catholics actually use birth control, so it's apparent that not all of the mindless indoctrination has sunk through.

And yes, I was a Catholic for the first twenty-five years of my life, so I've been up to about here in papal indoctrination.

Still more...some good news, for a change

Awhile back I wrote about how the Holy Terrors actually objected to a proposed vaccine to combat Human Papilloma Virus, which can cause cervical cancer. One of the Family Research Council's spokesassholes disliked the idea of distributing the vaccine as it would encourage women to be promiscuous.

Bridget Maher, spokesperson for the Family Research Council, believes that last bit of good news may not be such good news after all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”

Anyway, the vaccine's on its way to approval.

Interestingly, Merck is also figuring that the best defense is a good offense. They're countering the FOTF propaganda machine with a publicity campaign.

Girls as young as 11 could be approved to use the vaccine. But the idea of children that young being inoculated against a sexually transmitted disease is upsetting to many parents and parental groups.

So Merck's recent educational campaign has focused on prevention of HPV and cervical cancer, and de-emphasized sexuality.

"Merck continues to work with all organizations to understand diverse positions and make people feel comfortable about broad use of Gardasil," said Merck spokeswoman Kelley Dougherty.

And that has apparently been a winning strategy. Dougherty the company has managed to win growing support for Gardasil over the last year.

"How could anyone be against vaccination against a common virus that causes cervical cancer?" asked Ryan. "I think, in that way, [Merck] is successfully walking down the path that will minimize complications along those lines."

The Holy Terrors have carefully danced around the issue, after the initial spate of bad publicity:

Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, both faith-based conservative policy organizations, recently have spoken in support of HPV vaccines from Merck and GlaxoSmithKline because of their life-saving potential. But the organizations still promote abstinence before marriage as the best way to prevent infection.

"The HPV vaccine does not, in any circumstances, negate or substitute God's plan for sexuality, which is sexual abstinence until marriage and sexual faithfulness within marriage," said Focus on the Family spokeswoman Linda Klepacki in a statement on the organization's Web site.

There's also some discussion about whether the FDA could still kill the drug for political/pseudo-moral reasons like the recent stink about emergency contraception.

J.P. Morgan's Rubin observed the FDA will be closely watched to make sure it doesn't reject Gardasil based on morality instead of science, as the agency is accused of doing in its failure to approve birth control pill Plan B for over-the-counter availability. The FDA said it did not approve Plan B for OTC use because there was not enough data involving girls under the age of 16, even though its advisory committee had recommended approval.

"I think the FDA's failure to approve Plan B [as an over-the-counter drug] despite the FDA advisory committee's support on this probably backfired on them," said Rubin.

Funtleyder of Miller Tabak said that Gardasil won't be as politically difficult to get past the FDA as Plan B, because Plan B is a birth control drug and Gardasil is not.

"Certainly the same political forces that were in operation then are in operation now," said Funtleyder. "But [Gardasil] is a different product. [Plan B] was closer to contraception [than Gardasil.]"

First of all, hooray about fighting cervical cancer. Secondly, boo that this issue has to even come up. The Holy Terrors are so extreme in their fundamentalist views they are actually opposing the advancement of science to protect their own belief system. One wonders whether they'd still have a problem with treatments for epilleptic fits or depression or even (horrors!!!) the female orgasm.

More distress from the Righties about the mongrelization of the races

More from the Ministry of Propaganda, this time from Bill O'Reilly:

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

An open-border policy and the legalization of millions of Hispanic illegal aliens would deeply affect the political landscape in America. That's what The New York Times and many others on the left want. They might get it. And that's the "Memo."

Of course, my last post quoted John Gibson who ranted about the duty of the members of the Master Race to keep crankin' out them white babies. The sex can't be about love or companionship or just a fun way to spend an evening. Nope, it's all about keeping the demographics up.

"Procreation, not recreation."

All this time, I couldn't help but wonder why the Righties were so anti-whoopie and pro-making babies (within the bonds of marriage, of course). I used to assume their rationale was simply, "If it was good enough for the Old Testament, it's good enough for us."

Now it all makes perfect sense.

So much to blog, so little time!!!

Wow! Step back for a few days and the excrement really smacks into the rotary cooling device!

Where do I begin?

First, from the Washington Post a few days ago...

The opening paragraphs are killer...the headline is "Forever Pregnant"

New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon.

Among other things, this means all women between first menstrual period and menopause should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking, maintain a healthy weight and keep chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes under control.


While most of these recommendations are well known to women who are pregnant or seeking to get pregnant, experts say it's important that women follow this advice throughout their reproductive lives, because about half of pregnancies are unplanned and so much damage can be done to a fetus between conception and the time the pregnancy is confirmed.

Shades of "The Handmaid's Tale." (P.S. Read the book. Although the movie is good and Natasha Richardson is great, the book is better still.)

I've got nothing against recommending a healthy lifestyle, but the motive behind it is what gets me. "Women, be prepared to get knocked up at any time! Whether you want to be or not! It's your duty as an American."

I know, I know. Maybe I'm making too much of this. Jumping to conclusions.

Maybe.

But then, some of the Reich's top talking heads from the Ministry Of Propaganda start shooting off their mouths.

From Fox's John Gibson:

GIBSON: Now, it's time for "My Word." Do your duty. Make more babies. That's a lesson drawn out of two interesting stories over the last couple of days.

First, a story yesterday that half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far, the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably, the ones Hispanics call "gabachos" -- white people -- are having fewer.

Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.

Why aren't they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life. Peanut butter fingerprints on the leather seats in the BMW. The Euros are particular -- in particular can't be bothered with kids. Underscore that second point.

A second story, today, reports that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin is so concerned about the declining and imploding population of Russia, he is paying couples to have babies. Imagine, procreating for cash in Mother Russia. Putin has taken this step because at the rate things are going, Russia will lose close to 45 million in population in the next 45 years. Russia will be two thirds of today's population.

This is not a good trend for Russia and it won't be here either if that should happen. To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way -- a slogan for our times: "procreation not recreation." That's "My Word."

Not sure whether this is simply xenophobic or if it's flat out racist. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the connection. At least for me. The Master Race must be preserved!!!

The New York Times Magazine weighs in on the War On Whoopie

Interesting article in the New York Times magazine yesterday...

think they read "All Worked Up?"

Russell Shorto writes:

For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

***
The American Life League is an organization with its roots in the lay Catholic community, naturally enough. However, the Holy Terrors have picked up the ball and run with it in a big way.
***

Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

***
Pardon my own little asides, here. What happens if the wife sees her husband as an object of sexual pleasure? Doesn't that ever happen? (Happened to me last night, as a matter of fact.)

***
R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies."

...
Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.
***

The article spends a long time discussing the war within the government regarding making emergency contraception available over the counter. There's also a discussion of when life begins. The anti-choice armies have always advocated that "life begins at conception," or when a sperm cell fertilizes the egg. However, that's not entirely accurate. Technically, the case can be made that life begins when the woman's body begins nourishing the egg, or at "implantation" which occurs later.
***
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, however, pregnancy begins not at fertilization but at implantation. The medical thinking behind this definition has to do with the fact that implantation is the moment when a woman's body begins to nurture the fertilized egg. The roughly one-half of all fertilized eggs that never attach to a uterine wall are thus not generally considered to be tiny humans — ensouled beings — that died but rather fertilized eggs that did not turn into pregnancies. Federal regulations enacted during the Bush administration agree with this, stating, "Pregnancy encompasses the period of time from implantation until delivery."
***

The article concludes:

***
And, around the world, countries in which abortion is legal and contraception is widely available tend to rank among the lowest in rate of abortion, while those that outlaw abortion — notably in Central and South America and Africa — have rates that are among the highest. According to Stanley K. Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute, recent drops in abortion rates in Eastern Europe are due to improved access to contraceptives. The U.S. falls somewhere in the middle in rate of abortion: at 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, it is roughly on par with Nigeria (25), much better than Peru (56) but far worse than the Netherlands (9).

The Netherlands, where the teen pregnancy rate also ranks among the lowest in the world, has long been of interest to sex educators in the U.S. for the frankness of its approach. The national sex education course, called Long Live Love, begins at age 13. One of its hallmarks has been dubbed "Double Dutch" — encouraging the use of both condoms and birth control pills. "It's proven successful," says Margo Mulder of STI AIDS Netherlands, the Dutch health education center. "It shows that when you discuss contraception and protection with students, they actually are careful. And I know that some people in the U.S. say that when you promote contraception, you're also promoting sex, but we've found that when you educate people, they don't have sex earlier. They think about it. So you're not promoting sex, you're helping them to be rational about doing it."

The problem with this, as far as American social conservatives are concerned, is that it treats symptoms rather than what they see as the underlying disease: an outlook that is focused on the individual at the expense of family and society. Their ultimate goal is not a number — the percentage of abortions or unintended pregnancies — but an ideal, a way for people to think and behave. As Mohler says of the Dutch approach in particular: "The idea is to completely sever the sex act from reproduction, and then train teens to do it. It treats sex as a morally meaningless act. I find it profoundly anti-humanistic."

While Americans as a whole don't hold such a dark view of comprehensive sex education, many do feel there's something wrong with a strictly clinical approach. This ambivalence, according to Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, gets to the root of the problem and may explain the numbers. "One of the things I'm most often asked is why the abortion and unintended pregnancy rates are so much lower in Europe," she says. "People talk about the easy access to contraception there, but I think it's really a matter of the underlying social norms. In Europe, these things are in the open, and the only issue is to be careful. Here in the U.S., people are still arguing about whether it's O.K. to have sex."

***

Not to sound like I'm bragging, but I've been saying this for some time. While the Holy Terrors are rarely bold enough to say so outright, they've got as much of a problem with birth control as they do with abortion. And it's not just a matter of taking the position that all life is sacred and that all life begins at conception. They're seeking to barge into people's bedrooms and prohibit them from having sex for fun.

Indeed, it's a veritable War On Whoopie.

Especially telling is how frank, honest talk about sex actually reduces the abortion rate, while pseudo-fascist religious psycho-babble increases the abortion rate. Coupled with the Holy Terrors' abstinence-only sex ed agenda (which also increases sexual activity and pregnancy rates), they seem bound and determined to advocate courses of action which actually INCREASE teen pregnancies and abortions, the very activities they claim they want to stop.

Madness.

In case you didn't know...

or knew but had simply forgotten, this is the premier site for erotica on the web.

I feel it's entitled to have a fresh link every once in a while.

And while we're at it...

this guy's got a few words to say.