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Sex

Who should front the advertising campaign?

Rio de Janeiro aims to become world capital of gay tourism

Brazilian city\’s diversity week follows series of gay-friendly government schemes to capitalise on growing market

I hear Peter Mandelson* is out of a job currently.

 

 

*Yes, yes, I know, slightly unfair but couldn\’t resist.

Teaching gay history

California is poised to become the first state in America to make the teaching of positive contributions made by gay and lesbian people to US history and society compulsory in public schools.

OK

Supporters argued that it would give gay teenagers role models and help combat homophobic bullying.

Mebbe

During debate about the bill, supporters gave examples of historical figures they said would be featured, including Friedrich von Steuben, a military adviser to George Washington forced out of Prussia because he was gay, and the British mathematics genius Alan Turing.

Not entirely convinced personally. Teaching everyone how our forefathers persecuted gays is going to make gays less persecuted?

Is that really the way teenagers work?

Lies about trafficking *again*

Over in the Observer. My comment there:

Umm, you\’ve got confused here over the definition of \”trafficked\”. Bit like Julie Bindel which isn\’t company that any self-respecting journalist wants to keep (as a polemicist she\’s fine, factual journalism not so much).

1) Those forced, against their will, into sex slavery.

2) Those transported illegally but with their consent into the sex trade.

Definition 1) is the correct one: it\’s what the Palermo Protocol calls it for example. It\’s also a vile, vile crime and very much illegal. It\’s also extremely rare: recall Operation Pentameter in which every police force in the country went looking for victims and found enough evidence to prosecute precisely zero people of the crime.

Definition 2), well, sure, lot of people are upset about it. But since it is legal to be a prostitute (which in the UK it is) and there\’s lots of poor women out there happy enough to be one compared to the meagre rewards on offer at home: well, fine and dandy to be upset about it but it is an entirely different problem, isn\’t it?

Unless you want to equate fiddling visas with the repeated rape of a sex slave?

Musing on Gay Pride marches

but I was left wondering what exactly happened to LGBT activism. We started out as a genuinely counter-cultural subversive movement; Stonewall wasn\’t named after a riot for nothing. Now we\’re a demographic to be marketed to.

Yes, that means you won.

Rightly so.

Your preferences in gonad/gonad encounters are no more counter cultural, odd, strange or outre than mine for big redheads.

This is the promised land of equality and civil liberties.

Big surprise in the Strauss Kahn case!

No, really, who could have guessed this would happen?

They believe she has lied about their encounter, has links to a drug dealer and received strange payments into her bank account, according to The New York Times.

The woman\’s account of why she received asylum in the US, and even her claim to own only one mobile phone, have also been called into serious doubt, the report said.

Citing unnamed law-enforcement sources, the newspaper reported that New York prosecutors had admitted to Mr Strauss-Kahn\’s lawyers that there were serious problems with their case.

CNN, citing an unnamed \”official close to Mr Strauss-Kahn\’s defence team\”, also said there were \”serious issues regarding the credibility\” of the maid.

Stories about how the rapee is a very naughty person indeed who shouldn\’t be believed. My, my, I am shocked. Just can\’t believe it, when an immigrant woman accuses a rich and powerful man, that such things might be said!

Note that no one\’s even hinting that sex didn\’t take place so this is all smokescreen to cover the he said/she said.

No, really, I am surprised.

So it\’s not harassment by Twitter then

Best line of the case:

Michael Wolkind QC, argued that his client had a right to expose Mr Haynes’s behaviour. “His websites are his scream of frustration and even his scream of pain,” he told the court.’’ Mr Wolkind added: “He wouldn’t take it lying down – unlike, sadly, his wife did for years in her relationship with Tim Haynes.”

Banning circumcision in San Francisco

You know, normally, using the law to insist that other conform to your sexual preferences is considered naughty.

\”When a group of activists proposed banning circumcision in San Francisco last fall, many people simply brushed them aside. Even in that liberal seaside city, it seemed implausible that thousands of people would support an effort to outlaw an ancient ritual that Jews and Muslims believe fulfills a commandment issued by God.

\”But last month, the group collected the more than 7,100 signatures needed to get a measure on the fall ballot that would make it illegal to snip the foreskin of a minor within city limits.

At least I assume it\’s the uncutistes running this campaign.

Seriously, very boring indeed

Royal Bank of Scotland\’s head of group resourcing, Susan Bor, is leaving the company as part of a restructuring exercise.

…….as part of these changes Bor has decided, after 12 years at RBS, that it is time to leave.

An internal e-mail states that \”Susan feels that now is the right time for her to explore other options outside the organisation\”.

How boring

The mistress of disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin has resigned from her role at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

During Sir Fred’s tenure, the woman ran a large team but now wants to explore other options.

In which I am slightly snarky about Megan McArdle

But I also don\’t think it works to say that it\’s nobody\’s business but the couple\’s whether people keep their marriage vows……..Why was it so important to call it marriage, if everything about it is entirely private?…….Society takes a greater interest in marriages than in other relationships because society, as well as the individual, has an interest in strong marriages.  Strong marriages support a strong society.  And society supports the marriage by encouraging people to do the very hard work of keeping their promises.  One of the ways in which society ensures strong marriages is by tut-tutting (or worse) at people who don\’t keep to their vows: who abandon spouses, treat them badly, or yes, violate their trust by engaging in covert sexual activity…….I think that social sanction can be very helpful in assisting us in doing important but difficult things.  Marriage is stronger if people who find out that their friends are cheating don\’t say, \”Awesome, is he hot?\” but \”How could you do that to Jason?\” Marriage is stronger if people who cheat are viewed with slight revulsion, and so are the (knowing) people who they cheat with.  Marriage is stronger when people who decide not to care for seriously ill spouses are met with an incredulous \”What the hell is wrong with you?\”, not \”Yeah, I couldn\’t handle that either.\”  Of course it would be nicer if we didn\’t need this sort of help.  But we are a flawed species……..This is, to be sure, a bit trickier in an era when people like me and Andrew accept that there can be healthy non-monagamous marriages.  Maybe, folks have suggested, she was totally okay with this!   This seems possible, but not really very likely.  I know a decent number of people in open marriages, but they are very far from the majority of the people I know.  Looking at what polls and research we have on this sort of thing, plus an unscientific survey of my friends and the women who have written me, I\’m going to go out on a limb here and speak for heterosexual married women as a class: I\’m pretty sure that most of us are not okay with our husbands sending racy photos to strangers, or engaging in phone sex with same within weeks of our wedding day.  And if she\’s totally okay with this, how come she hasn\’t said so?  ……

Well, you get the picture.

Call me old-fashioned

Nooo, that\’s not the description I would use if I were to be snarky about it.

\”Recently married\” would be.

Hugh Bonneville article spotted

As the Mail ponted out, Hugh Bonneville is so uxorious as to be known as the Ryan Giggs of the thespian world.

So it\’s with great interest that we follow the interesting stories about this great actor through the press.

The actor, who has become a family favourite for his role in the 1910s costume drama, is understood to be up for election to the committee of the exclusive London gentlemen’s club. …..(The Garrick this is)…..One member described the divisions over Bonneville’s candidature for the committee as “baffling” adding that it was “still a very old fashioned place”……..

Quite why there should be any division isn\’t certain. Although, given the Garrick\’s reputation, it might be the quite outrageous rumour floating around that Bonneville really is heterosexual.

Amanda Marcotte and Weinergate

You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh over this one. So Our Amanda comes out in The Guardian telling us all that Anthony Weiner just didn\’t send pics of his (covered but excited) genitals to various women, oh no, this is just the righties manufacturing a scandal about good little lefties.

Extreme scepticism that Weiner is anything but the victim of a political hit job is more than warranted in this case, and not just because of the lack of evidence or the fact that this is being heavily promoted by Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of disseminating falsified evidence to support his claims (see the Shirley Sherrod affair etc). Nor should you be sceptical only because of the timing of this story – remarkable, if true, that this should happen right after another New York congressman resigns from office after sending an inappropriate picture to a woman online, only to see the Republicans lose his seat to a Democrat in the special election to replace him. Nor should you be sceptical only because the photo in question so crassly lends itself to puerile \”weiner\” jokes at the congressman\’s expense.

No, we should be sceptical of this story chiefly because it fits a larger pattern of rightwing culture warriors ganging up and sexually harassing random young women after floating facetious insinuations about improper relationships between these women and Democratic politicians.

Blame Monica Lewinsky. Or, more specifically, blame rightwing nostalgia for the year of Monica Lewinsky, when conservatives were able to openly indulge their hatred of a popular Democratic politician, their prurience and their love of smacking down young women who devote their energies to pursuits other than being good Christian housewives. The days of Monica Lewinsky were a heady time indeed for the right; ever since then, they\’ve been trying to recapture the magic. In the process, they\’ve built up a long list of deplorable vilifications of innocent young women and their friends and family, usually for no other reason than said young women look how conservatives imagine the next Monica Lewinsky will.

Now let us fast forward a week, an entire 7 days:

His admission came hours after new topless photographs that he emailed Meagan Broussard, a 26-year-old single mother from Texas, were published by Big Government, a conservative website.

They cast fatal doubt over Mr Weiner\’s unlikely claim that a picture of a man\’s crotch, which was sent to another young woman in Seattle from his Twitter account last week, was sent by hackers.

Mr Weiner\’s explanation raised eyebrows when he could not say \”with certitude\” that the crotch was not his, but continued to insist that he had not sent the picture.

He admitted last night that he meant to send it privately but inadvertently made it publicly viewable. \”I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked,\” he said.

He also confirmed a claim by the website that he had also sent an \”X-rated\” photo of his body to Miss Broussard. \”This was me doing a dumb thing, doing it repeatedly and then lying about it,\” he said.

Earlier in the day, a third woman – who remains unnamed – gave radaronline, another website, a selection of sexually explicit Facebook messages she claimed were sent to her by Mr Weiner.

Well done Ms. Marcotte!

Add this to her defence of John Edwards and her insistence that the Duke lacrosse players were obviously, clearly, guilty of rape and…..well, let\’s just say that Amanda is good evidence for the contention that the problem with feminism is some of the self-declared feminists.

What truly ads to the amusement is that four years back, Huma Abedin, Congressman Weiner\’s now wife, was rumoured to be Hillary\’s lesbian lover, the great sex scandal that would kill her presidential run. That probably was a piece of political manouvering, not something based in any form of reality. Although who was doing the leaking, well, in 2007, during the Democratic primaries, who would have benefitted most from Hillary leaving the race?

Strangely, probably not any of the Republicans……

Who was Sir Fred shagging?

As a fresh attempt was made to lift an injunction banning the identification of the woman in the case, a judge was told: “Sunlight should be shed on what at the moment are the dark corners of this case”.

It\’s all becoming slightly boring, isn\’t it?

Sex in Britain

But 16 year-old skank, Lucy McIntyre, said: \”What the government needs to realise is that I, and millions of my fellow teenagers in the full blossom of skankhood, couldn\’t be kept off the cock by an army of disapproving Ninjas.

\”We are going to rut away like a Danish version of the Duracell bunny and frankly there\’s very little David Cameron can do, unless he plans to hide behind every KFC in Britain with a fire hose and a taser.\”

Why weren\’t it like that when I were a lad?

The Vatican and condoms

Expect the usual outrage here:

The Vatican has renewed its criticism of the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, saying they made the problem worse by promoting a false sense of security.

But do note that they are actually on to something.

Written by Matthew Hanley, a US public health expert who has worked on HIV prevention programmes in Africa, it warns of the emergence of phenomenon of \”risk compensation\” in which people who used condoms had more casual sexual encounters with more partners than those who did not.

It says that statistics show that AIDS continues to spread in the condom-using group because, even with \”perfect\” use, the failure rate means that some 12,000 infections are expected from every million people.

The infection rate is in reality much higher, however, because people frequently use condoms either imperfectly or inconsistently, says the report, The Catholic Church and the Global Aids Crisis, which will be published by the London-based Catholic Truth Society next month.

Yes, yes, we know, the Church is using this to bolster its argument that monogamy within marriage and abstinence outside it is the only way to go.

But they are still on to something.

The accident rate for cyclists wearing helmets is higher than that for those who do not. The accident rate for drivers wearing seatbelts is higher than that for those who don\’t. Protection from the consequences of aggressive actions does seem to increase the number of aggressive actions taken.

We can compare it by analogy to Jevons\’ Paradox, where making energy use more efficient can actually increase the use of energy: because we\’ve just made energy costs a much smaller part of the value added.

What amuses slightly is that those very people who insist that Jevons is absolutely correct about energy (and thus that lower consumption of everything is the only possible solution) and resource use are likely to be those who absolutely insist that the Vatican must be wrong about condoms.