Sex

How it started. How it’s going. pic.twitter.com/cJ0JnjhP97

— (@SouthPoleRJ) October 19, 2020

Spotter Jonathan

The New Yorker magazine has suspended one of its long-time staff writers, legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, while it investigates a report that he was allegedly masturbating during a Zoom work call earlier this month.

“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera,” Toobin said in a statement on Monday about the situation, first reported by Vice.

He added: “I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I thought I had muted the Zoom video, I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me.”

He has so far declined to confirm details.

Whether the camera was on or off it’s an odd thing to be doing during a work call. although, people who work at the New Yorker……

What happens when one of the most famous pop stars on the planet suddenly announces that they are non-binary?

Answer – see headline.

Reliable data on the proportion of the population that is lesbian, gay or transgender will be gathered for the first time in next year’s census, with members of the public asked to provide information about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

The questions – which will be voluntary and for people aged 16 and over – will help to build a clearer picture for policy-makers and service-providers, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

“Without robust data on the size of the LGBT population at a national and local level, decision-makers are operating in a vacuum, unaware of the extent and nature of disadvantage which LGBT people may be experiencing in terms of health, educational outcomes, employment and housing,” Iain Bell, the ONS deputy national statistician, told the Observer.

The question begging being, well, that assumption that there is a disadvantage being suffered by LGBT in terms of health, educational outcomes, employment and housing.

Employment for example, gay men earn – on average, on average – less than het men. The usual route is thought to be they’re less likely to have children and thus under less pressure to earn. Lesbians, on the other hand, earn more than het women. The lack of children and childcare being the supposed reason there. So, advantage or disadvantage?

During the reign of King Cnut, the ruler of substantial territories across northern Europe in the 11th century, there was a law code which called for the removal of the eyes, nose, ears, upper lip and scalp for crimes considered worse than theft. It also stipulated the removal of the nose and ears in the case of a woman accused of adultery.

Cnut might even have been a right anagram but I really, really, don’t think that was true. The mutilation of a woman they thought was guilty of adultery quite possibly but suspected or accused? I think not.

And equally obviously it shouldn’t:

More than 50 women have accused aid workers from the World Health Organization and leading NGOs of sexual exploitation and abuse during efforts to fight Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In interviews, 51 women – many of whose accounts were backed up by aid agency drivers and local NGO workers – recounted multiple incidents of abuse, mainly by men who said they were international workers, during the 2018 to 2020 Ebola crisis.

The majority of the women said numerous men had either propositioned them, forced them to have sex in exchange for a job or terminated contracts when they refused.

Blokes with financial power will do this. As will women looking for resources – well, what description, give in, accept, be oppressed?

This though does seem just a tad over the top:

…either propositioned them….Some women said they were plied with drinks….

Err, yes?

Elaine, 82, Spring Lake, Michigan

I’ve been widowed now five years since my second husband passed away. I know I don’t want to get married again, and maybe this sounds horrible, but I really just want to have a man in my life. Both of my husbands were very loving and affectionate men, and I miss that horribly.

Entirely fair and good luck. This though is very fun:

And so I really would like a younger man in his 70s because too many men in their 80s have just let themselves go. You can’t believe some of the, um, some of the pictures that come up on my accounts, and I just think, “Really?”

Overall, the price range for users under 30 was typically lower than for those over 30: the former being charged between $6.99 and $16.71 per month for the service, the latter being charged between $14.99 and $34.37.

The cheapest deal, at $6.99, was offered to queer females aged under 30. City-based straight men over 50 were meanwhile given the most expensive rate, at $34.37. Choice investigators could not find a pattern to explain the differences,

Err, the pattern is that older cis and het males get to pay more. As is true of everything of course.

It’s not the headline part that concerns here:

Police in Vietnam have confiscated an estimated 345,000 used condoms which had been cleaned and resold as new, state media reported.

The difficult and expensive part of any recycling operation is the collection of the thing to be recycled.

Where in buggery – possibly not le mot juste given the minority sport that is – do you collect a third of a million used johnnies from?

Please help with some basic maths. If it takes two people to make a baby, then two people should be prepared to deal with contraception. Right?

Yep, and one will be interested and the other committed.

Why is it that, even during a pandemic, contraception remains primarily a female concern?

Because committed.

Women, for obvious reasons, will probably always feel the need to be proactive about contraception

Quite, so what’s all the previous whining about?

Wouldn’t you?

Now, however, Southgate has had to deal with a scandal that risks undermining the fresh clean-cut image of England. It emerged yesterday that Mason Greenwood and Phil Foden, two of the brightest talents in the Premier League who had just made their international debuts, had been sent home in disgrace after smuggling an Icelandic beauty queen and her cousin into the England team hotel in Reykjavik on Sunday night.

Yet this approach can be problematic. Bill Gates can become fixed on addressing a problem which is not seen as a priority by local people, in an area, for example, where polio is far from the biggest problem. He did something similar in his education philanthropy in the US where his fixation on class size diverted pubic spending away from the actual priorities of the local community.

My life in sex: the queer woman who’s scared of vaginas

A pool boy-turned-business partner to Jerry Falwell Jr, one of America’s most influential evangelical leaders, has claimed he had a six-year relationship with his wife.

Giancarlo Granda, 29, met Mr Falwell, 58, and his wife Becki Falwell, 53, in March 2012 when he was working at a hotel in Miami. From that month until 2018, Mr Granda said, he had sex with her as her husband, whom she married in 1987, “enjoyed watching from the corner of the room”.

I mean, seriously now, a pool boy?

Wittingly or unwittingly, the hospital inspector and former NHS paediatric nurse seemed to have chosen his moment well. He made his claims of terrible abuse at the hands of named and nameless individuals – among the former were Sir Leon Brittan, Lord Bramall, Harvey Proctor and Sir Edward Heath – in 2014. They fell on credulous ground, in the wake of the 2012 Jimmy Savile scandal, which had proved beyond all doubt that extraordinarily evil behaviour by prominent people could go unchallenged and either ignored or actively covered up for years.

Carl Beech actually causing more sensible people to have a rethink about more than just a few of the Saville allegations…..

An elderly millionairess accused of trying to “seduce” a celebrity dermatologist in a campaign of harassment was trying to seek redress for botched treatment, a court has heard….

OK, there are women like that out there but “I’m going to punish you by having sex with you” is still a fairly low estimation of one’s own worth….

It might even be beneficial if such places existed. But just try it:

Having a space where LGBTQ people can simply exist in their own skin and experience, without judgment or pressure to hide for the benefit of cisgender, heterosexual people, can be enormously beneficial.

But in recent months, queer and trans people have been feeling the loss of affirming LGBTQ spaces since cities and states began shutting down nonessential public spaces in mid-March.

Goose and gander comes to mind…

Sometimes gender really does matter:

In the new study, this combo marketed as Truvada was tested against intramuscular injections of the experimental drug cabotegravir or placebos in men who have sex with men and transgender women.

If trans women are entirely, wholly and totally female then there wouldn’t be this distinction in who the trial subjects have sex with, would there?

That we should all be polite and address people as they wish to be addressed doesn’t change this.

A London Underground manager sacked for sexually harassing a female colleague has been awarded a £14,000 payout after bosses took too long to dismiss him, an employment tribunal has ruled.

Olushola Adenusi, 59, was subject to disciplinary proceedings after he told a woman he wanted to sleep with her and that he could tell she was fit by her body shape.

The customer services manager was sacked for gross misconduct but took legal action against London Underground on the grounds of unfair dismissal.

An employment tribunal found that while the decision to fire him for harassing the woman, known only as C1, was reasonable, the 16-month investigation took so long that it became unfair.

So when do those investigated for kiddie fiddling get compo for the length of time it all takes?

Or doesn’t that work because the Carl Beech victims were in fact innocent?

This really is a surprise, isn’t itisn’t it?

Their findings confirmed what health professionals nationwide had predicted: through complying with measures to physically distance, the public are having less “risky” unprotected sex with new partners. This alone has helped slow the rate of HIV transmission, but a prolonged period of sexual inactivity in Britain has other benefits in the attempt to slow new cases of HIV.

So, all that was necessary to slow/stop the spread of HIV was that people stop shagging around. Hmm, well, OK, but that might have been a simpler solution all along, no?