Sex

Changing gender?

A leading charity for young people has called on the SNP to allow children as young as 12 to legally change their gender without their parents’ consent.

Children in Scotland, which receives more than £1 million a year in public money, said allowing pre-teens to obtain gender recognition certificates could prove “extremely beneficial” and would help “normalise trans identities”.

That socially constructed bit that leads to being regarded as a bird or a bloke?

Who cares?

Ah, that biological bit of male and female? Chopping bits off, drugs?

The difference between sex and gender is important, isn’t it?

The obliging couples were trained with a device to measure their nasal airflow before sex, immediately after sexual climax and at regular time points thereafter. According to the team’s report, sex was as effective at clearing blocked noses, for an hour at least, as commercial decongestants, though Bulut concedes he did not get firm data from everyone. “I think some people couldn’t focus on the device,” he said. How sex might unblock the nose is not entirely clear, but Bulut sees a number of factors in play. “I think it’s a mixture of excitement, physical exercise, and hormonal changes that come with orgasm,” he said.

The tissue inside the sinus (sinii?) is erectile, not that that’s the right word. But blood supply to it increases with sexual excitement and it thus expands, as with willy and wimmins bits. Which acts as a decongestant.

Which is why, when caring for the ill a bed partner, there’s a task before the making a sammich bit.

Risk of death from HIV-related disease was about 50 times higher for transgender women compared to cisgender women, and the risk of suicide was almost seven times greater.

The HIV part seems simple enough. Whether pre- or post- transition those who changed – for the finding is in the early years, decades back for HIV – were more likely to be having sex with other men. Given the physiology both pre- and post- that’s more likely to have been back bottom than other forms.

The correct test for “higher risk” is therefore against gay men I would have thought. And mortality there, from HIV, was rather high back those decades, no?

The researchers found most of the deaths from suicide and those related to HIV occurred in the first decade studied,…(…)…The data spanned five decades, beginning in 1972,

We might also ponder that the surgery itself wasn’t quite as good back then and that there was rather more disappointment with the decision taken.

Although it should be said that finding significant HIV deaths in the 70s would be a bit of a surprise. Well, maybe late such into the 80s.

How can anyone be this stupid?

Sociologists have long been interested in the concept of preferences, whether they’re favorite foods or people we’re attracted to. Preferences may appear natural or inherent, but they’re actually shaped by larger structural forces – the media we consume, the people we know and the experiences we have.

The guy’s trying to explore racism within gay dating.

If you told him that being gay were not inherent or natural but was, in fact, shaped by larger structural forces he would denounce you as a hater.

But he insists that a preference for the same race – or another one even – is not innate or natural but is only shaped by larger structural forces.

Insisting upon mutually contradictory beliefs is a sign of mental imbalance, no?

With serious mainstream dating apps sliding into the past and a desire for casual dating soaring following months of lockdown, ….. has just closed an exciting crowdfunding campaign where it exceeded its investment target by a staggering 172%. With public demand reaffirming an interest in self and sexual exploration, …. is the app at the forefront for all casual daters, with the potential for non-monogamous, casual dating to become the new mainstream, encouraged to go beyond finding the one.

Shagging around is new is it?

The Pocso law was introduced in India in 2012 to tackle rising child sexual abuse. Under the law, any sexual activity involving a person under 18 is illegal. It makes no allowances for sexual relationships between consenting young people, which child rights activists say is punitive and not the intention of the law.

Activists are now calling for the law to be clarified to allow for a more nuanced understanding of young people’s sexuality.

If you’ve a law that says “thou shall not do this” then that’s it really, isn’t it? Nuance is rather difficult.

That also being why running a place centrally, through the law, doesn’t really work.

Elite Model Management’s founder, the late John Casablancas, has also been accused of repeatedly engaging in abusive and exploitative sexual conduct, announcing, for example, that he was dating a 16-year-old model.

Odd really.

Yes, rape happens and it shouldn’t. Find those who do and the no key treatment and the like. Yes, abuse of power, shouldn’t happen and all that.

However. We also have those laws running the other way. The age of consent is exactly that, the age at which we, as a society, say that someone is old enough to decide for themselves who they bump uglies with. 16 is also old enough to decide upon an abortion, there are those who insist that’s old enough to vote.

So, why is it taken as absolute proof that a 16 year old bumping uglies is abuse?

More controversially, the wages of sex workers have been described as ‘high’ for a ‘low skill’ occupation and explained by the loss of position in the marriage market (Arunachalam and Shah, 2008; Edlund and Korn, 2002).

But this is not just some random paper.

“The evidence we bring indicates that the increased stigmatization of prostitution that has taken place in the UK over the period 2000-2012, during which prostitution was progressively criminalized, does not support the expectations of a significant reduction in demand as the policy intended and corresponds to a change in the type of clients that are observed through successive waves of the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL henceforth). We conclude that this provides further support for the idea that demand for sexual services might be inelastic to both the market price and the implicit price of stigma, whereby criminalization is not likely to be conducive to decreases in demand as is hoped for. Rather, it might jeopardize the working conditions and safety of existing prostitutes thus raising the welfare cost of abolitionism. 

Well, alright then, it is just some random paper. But that bold there is the part that Al Roth chose to highlight. And Al Roth did gain the Nobel for his work on market design and the like.

The Swedish approach is counterproductive that is, it’s the German, legalised, method that should be followed.

Well colour me surprised. She didn’t see this coming? That a potential boyfriend wouldn’t like the fact that she’s been exposing herself to all and sundry on teh interwebs. Well, blow me down, what a surprise.

Gary Becker did point out that there’s something of a little conundrum in sex work. Very large numbers of people are qualified to do this relatively unskilled labour (sure, skilled labour here is preferable). And yet the prices paid for this unskilled labor are very much higher than other unskilled labour.

What gives?

The answer being that there’s some consumption of capital going on here. Transference of the long term wealth – through marriage – opportunity into short term income.

Tarts tend to – tend to, there are always a few who hypergamize – marry less well than they would have, ceteris paribus, if they’d not been tarts.

OK, we might not talk about marriage these days but the lady above is an exemplar of exactly this point. Yep, sex work produces cash now but at the expense of reducing future opportunities. Capital consumption to produce that income.

Of course, there is a solution here. Date some of her OnlyFans. But then which “beauty” wants to date those sort of sad little men?

Samaritans volunteers abused their position of trust by having sex with vulnerable callers, The Telegraph understands, prompting the charity to ‘listen in’ to conversations for the first time.

Who needs premium rate phone lines even?

The “shocking” incidents are believed to include volunteers meeting up with callers for inappropriate relationships.

It is understood that there was a “specific demographic” of some “middle-aged men” who were abusing female callers by meeting up and having sex with them.

Ah, so real world, not just over the wires then.

It’s possible that having a jolly might lift depression in some. It’s also entirely possible that this isn’t quite what we’d like a suicide prevention line to be doing.

But it does still stick more than a little in the craw that sex with a consenting adult female is being defined as abuse.

More than 250 Scout leaders have been convicted of child sexual abuse in the UK and Ireland, new analysis has found.

Offences including rape, indecent assault, voyeurism and the possession, creation and distribution of indecent images made up scores of cases involving either leaders of the Scout movement or those in a position of responsibility.

The abuse cases stretch back as far as the 1950s, but also include convictions in recent years, including two men who were jailed last year.

Oliver Cooper, a Scout leader from West Sussex, was jailed for six years in October for a string of offences committed two years earlier, including three counts of sexual assault against two six-year-old girls.

Another former Scout leader, Graham Avison, of Audenshaw, Greater Manchester, was jailed for five years after pleading guilty to four counts of indecent assault against a teenage boy in the 1990s.

The revelations, first reported by The Guardian, have led to questions about the rigour with which safeguarding is enforced in the Scout movement.

What was happening 70 years ago isn’t all that much of a guide to what is happening now, is it? And even the word safeguarding is pretty new, let alone the practice.

There is also the more obvious problem. Counting incidence by the number of people convicted doesn’t really work. Because the more you prosecute, the more you come down like a holy hail of terror, then the more seriously you are taking the safeguarding idea but also the higher the incidence seems by this method of counting.

Actually, despite 28 types of KitKat, we’re not:

Birth rate will take years to recover from Covid baby bust
A V-shaped recovery from the plunge in births during the pandemic is ‘highly unlikely’, analysts warn

It still only takes 9 months from getting jiggy to arrival…..a sudden change in one direction of the birth rate can reverse just as quickly…..

Well, I’ve long identified as Danish: after all I’m from Yorkshire, a county spattered by the DNA of marauding Norsemen,

Well, yes, although it tends to be true that creating the next generation works a little better with a little less spattering and a tad more aim.

Roman emperors, for example, created harems of females guarded by eunuchs,

There were undoubtedly those who had such but it wasn’t a usual thing, certainly not formal as with the Ottomans.

And as for this:

In his handwritten documents, Smith relays how the Lord told him: “And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him… But if one or either of the ten virgins, after she is espoused, shall be with another man, she has committed adultery, and shall be destroyed… according to my commandment.”

Not surprisingly, women often find this sexual hypocrisy baffling and logically inconsistent.

Yet versions of this sexual double standard persist, even in the most sexually egalitarian countries on Earth, such as Norway. And recent studies of more than three dozen cultures found that it’s women, not men, who receive the brunt of the criticism for having casual sex and cheating on their partners.

Very little about sex is going to make sense without considering the identification of paternity in the days before DNA testing….

This though is true:

It all comes back to the fact that women’s sexual psychology, like that of men’s, evolved in the brutal and amoral furnace of sexual and reproductive competition. Women’s fundamental competitors have always been other women,

‘Iconic gay image’: history of sailors and sex explored in Barcelona exhibition
Catalan city is hosting new show looking at relationships between men who spend their lives at sea

There’s rather more eroticism about it than there was reality.

Hmm, well, being so categorical might not work. But the RN was determinedly against such things. Even back in the Georgian Navy, when on land there were those couple of hundred death penalty crimes, there were really only two that the Navy really did – often that is, not just in the most egregious cases – hang for. Theft and sodomy.

The theft was because it was so disruptive of the necessary cooperation on board. Nothing breaks up a crew faster than not being able to trust after all. The sodomy, well, I’ll not ascribe a reason why. But facing a court martial for sodomy was more likely to bring that dangling from a rope than even mutiny was – mutiny, within certain accepted and known boundaries, being regarded as an entirely reasonable reaction to bad officers. Breach those boundaries and yes, viciousness followed.

Matt Hancock has declined to comment on reports he is having an affair with his aide Gina Coladangelo in the Department of Health.

Clearly, takes all sorts to make a world.

Isn’t this a lovely comment?

During a talk at the Cambridge Union last month, Megan Barton-Hanson – who is bisexual and appeared on the 2018 series – said the programme needed a “whole gay season” to avoid tokenism.

Umm, teh gayers are some 2% or so of the male population, perhaps 1% of the female, and we’re to avoid tokenism by running a season of a sex show about them?

There is this which seems like a reasonable issue though:

Last month, executive producer Richard Cowles told the BBC that bringing in LGBT contestants was “not impossible and it is not something that we shy away from … but there is a logistical element which makes it difficult”.

Well, yes. There are those flavours within being gay. As far as I’m aware – not having ever seen any of it – the show’s interest is in seeing who will pair off with whom. We could employ old tropes and prejudices and think that an all male gay one would have the answer “Everybody” and an all female gay one “Nobody but there will be lots of talking about it”.

Or we could abandon such vilenesses and think in more detail. By selecting bear and twink, bull and femme, even top and bottom and so on, we’d rather be directing who paired off rather than awaiting to see. Which isn’t really the point of the show.

And then there’s the one more thought. Given the 98% of the population’s heterosexuality and the presumed vicarious experience the show offers who would be the viewing audience?

This was the Mosley modus operandi: ignore the unpleasant facts staring you in the face; challenge instead the basis on which those facts might be relayed. It was the tactic deployed when in 2008 he sued The News of the World for reporting his involvement in a sadomasochistic orgy, in which he had whipped prostitutes dressed in striped pyjamas while counting in German.

I thought he was the one being whipped?

Just as a matter of business practice I would have thought it rather easier to find professional ladies to do the whipping rather than be the whippee.

One of the country’s leading preparatory schools has alerted parents that boys as young as ten are having “pornographic” conversations.

Eaton House The Manor, a £21,000-a-year school in Clapham, south London, has warned that some boys in Year Six have been caught using “sexualised” language.

The school wrote to parents to explain that it has become “increasingly apparent” that a small number of boys have “either engaged in conversations of a pornographic nature whilst at school or indeed been subjected to listening to conversations of a pornographic nature”

It’s a little twee to be worried about boys and sexual language, isn’t it? Ten year olds might quite know what it all means but this is hardly unusual, is it?

Disabled people can be taken to prostitutes by care workers, judge rules

Exclusive: Hugging expected to get go-ahead by June 21

Only 7 or 8 weeks to wait……