This, concerning the reality show  My Husband’s Not Gay, came across my Facebook stream just now…

I listened to someone compare it to farting once.  In retrospect I’ve wondered if he wasn’t telling me he’d become asexual since we were both teenagers.  Oh well…most Disney characters are after all…

Jesus’ General (an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points us to a discussion about women wearing pants, which Thinking Housewife regards as a despicable feminist renunciation of feminine femininity, and quotes Thinking Housewife Contributor Jesse Powell thusly…

If there was a general societal norm that men wore pants while women wore dresses it would be very clear that there was a difference between the sexes.

To which my low key apologetic libido says…

Or a guy’s ass.   Seriously…pants make it easier to tell a person’s sex.   If both sexes are wearing pants it would not typically be very difficult to identify the sex of the person wearing them.   I admit you can still occasionally be fooled.   I once mistook a gal named Martha for a guy and no she was not big and ugly, she was lithe and handsome and very very cute.   But she had small hips and butt for a gal, and she liked wearing big floppy jackets so I never got a good look at her breasts and it threw me.   But that’s not the usual case.   The usual case is it’s pretty obvious.

But you’d only know that if…you know…you ever looked carefully.   In the A Coming Out Story episode above the joke is I was only looking at guys.   Little teenage me grew up without much of an interest in girls and tons of interest in guys and it showed, to my embarrassment whenever it was pointed out to me, in my artwork.   The joke here I suspect is we’re witnessing more firsthand evidence that a childhood drenched in right wing sexual mores result in grown adults with pitifully arrested sexual development.   If you need gender restrictions in clothing and dress in order to tell the boys from the girls it isn’t society that’s sexually degenerate.

Oh I know…I know…it isn’t that they can’t tell the difference…it’s that clothing as a personal expression of beauty and sexuality is a symptom of evil taking of joy in life.   The clothes you wear should remind you of your place and reenforce keeping you in it.   More then a uniform, clothes must be a prison within which, hidden and contained, is the shameful flesh, within which is doubly imprisoned the damnable human soul.   Else the person inside might escape and have a life of their own.

Via Joe. My God., I see someone is having conniptions visualizing gay sex…

“Permit me to clarify the definition. Sodomy is one MAN inserting his genitals into the mouth or anus of ANOTHER MAN. Say it again. Say it out loud so your ears hear it. Picture it in your mind. Picture Barney Frank and Elton John in action. Barney Frank putting his genitals into Elton John’s. That is what they want to tell us is normal€¦no wait€¦tell our children is normal. Into that ‘union’ they are asking permission to place children. Would you let them put YOUR grandchild into a sodomy-based family? Why would you let them do it to someone else’s child? Have normal people lost their minds?” -Crackpot “Coach” Dave Daubenmire.

Normal people don’t obsess about the sex their neighbors are having Dave, particularly when it’s sex that turns them off.  You on the other hand, clearly can’t seem to get it out of your head.

You have issues Dave. Let me try to address one of them.  If you think opposite sex couples wouldn’t do anything that grosses you or “normal” people out then you really don’t know much about what other people are up to. Perhaps that’s for the best. All in all, I wish sometimes I didn’t know myself.

See Dave…when I was a young gay man, back in the early 1970s, there weren’t many places I could go to get my weekly copies of The Washington Blade or The Advocate. You may of course assume these are gay porn since they’re gay publications and we homosexuals don’t have lives, we just have sex. But they’re newspapers, classifieds and ads for various sexually graphic other publications notwithstanding. And being a young gay man living in a world which at that time was loath to admit that such as I even existed, I needed a source of news and information for my community.

Back then there were no gay publications to be found at the local bookstores and newsstands, let alone the public libraries. There was no Internet.  If you were a gay American back in the early 1970s and you wanted news and information concerning your community you didn’t have a lot of choice.  Luckily for me growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs, there was Lambda Rising. But to get there I had to borrow mom’s car and drive downtown. The Metro subway system wouldn’t reach out to my suburban neighborhood for nearly a decade.

So I was always on the lookout for a place closer to home where I could find my gay newspapers. One day, running errands for mom, I drove past a small strip shopping center near Wheaton Plaza, and I glimpsed a sign: ADULT BOOKS.

Well we all know what “adult” means don’t we? So working up the nerve (and I must have driven around that block several times…) I parked the car nearby and strolled in. I think I had just turned 21 but I might have been only 20 and in any case in Maryland then I only needed to be over 18.

The bookstore was small, a tad rundown, but neatly organized.  There were a few customers inside.  The front area of the store was your usual newstand layout with various magazines and newspapers on the shelves.  As you moved toward the back you saw more and more straight skin magazines of the Playboy/Penthouse sort.  Your usual softcore men’s magazine stuff.  I don’t think Playgirl had yet started publishing.  There was a door in the back with a sign over it that said You Must Be 18 or Over To Enter and a nice older lady sitting at a counter beside it. It took me a few minutes of wandering close, pretending to look at the other magazines before I worked up the nerve to enter that door. I’m certain the old lady at the counter had seen first time customers doing that dance many, many times before and she wasn’t fooled. She knew where I was headed.

Oh look…another room…I think I’ll have a look inside… Inside the door was another room about the same size as the front one.  The light in there was a bit harsher and the shelves seemed starker somehow. Nearly all the titles were wrapped in plastic, presumably to make people pay to enjoy their contents.  But the covers…oh gosh…

As I said, I was 20, maybe 21 and I thought I knew everything there was to know about how to have sex.  Well…no.  As it turned out, there were Lots of other ways.  Lots and Lots and Lots of other ways.  Being a gay guy I felt somewhat enlightened and tolerant by the fact that the thought of heterosexuals getting it on really didn’t bother or gross me out.  But clearly what I had been imagining was only the Reader’s Digest version.  Here before my eyes was the unabridged, and little Baptist boy me was horrified.  No…I won’t go into details.  The details aren’t important.

Eventually I worked my way clear to the back where, in a corner, was the Much smaller gay section. Once more I beheld a universe of sexual possibilities I really had absolutely no interest in, and many of which to be perfectly honest grossed me out considerably.  But I must also honestly admit there were some magazines back there that definitely tweaked my interest. Unsurprisingly these were the ones that matched the imaginings of sex I’d had since my hormones started percolating. Some of the guys in them were beautiful. During later visits I would actually buy a few of these.  But that wasn’t my goal just then.  Mostly I just wanted to see if I could get my newspapers and be out of there.  And sure enough, right at the very bottom of one of those shelves, were copies of the Blade and The Advocate, and nearby, a couple gay softcore titles I’d never seen before.  Playboy could sit in the front, but gay softcore had to sit with the straight hard core porn because…well…it was gay after all.

I much preferred going to Lambda Rising, but for about the next decade, when I couldn’t get downtown, I made the trek to ADULT BOOKS and got my newspapers.

So…dig it Dave…for almost a decade I had to walk a gauntlet of heterosexual pornography just to get my damn newspapers.

I am so sorry for you.  I mean…a coach for goodness sakes…and here you are like a freshly minted teenage boy so fascinated, so completely preoccupied with sex, and yet blissfully naive about it all.  How did that happen to a guy your age?  The thought of one man having oral sex with another grosses you out does it?  I could tell you things that heterosexuals do that would curdle your milk Dave.  You poor sorry soul.  I have a suggestion.  Never…Never…order up one of those adults only channels next time you’re on the road without your wife.  You might have a heart attack.

They say sex is a powerful force for human bonding.  But…no.  It isn’t sex.  It’s touch.  I wrote this back in 2007, when I was going through another bad patch of missing Keith…

Alone

A few moments spent in the arms of someone you love can bring you back.  Even if a few moments is all you get, it can bring you back.  At least, for a while.

This wasn’t as intimate as it sounds.  I was on my way to Key West, and stopping by Hilton Head I’d taken him out to dinner on the island that night.  We shared a hug in the parking lot.  A very, very long hug.  He knew how unhappy I was.  So he gave me that long, goodbye hug.  But that was all it was.  And it lifted my spirits considerably, given how depressed I was after I’d caught that glimpse of his happy domesticity earlier the previous day…

How To Make Your Ex Bleed In One Easy Step…

You want to make someone you dumped bleed?  I mean, really, really bleed?  I mean, Profusely…?  Here’s my little tip:  Don’t tell him about all the great sex you’re having now that he’s out of your life.  Don’t bother telling him that your new boyfriend is so much better in the sack then he’ll ever be in his wildest wet dream fantasies.  Don’t tell him how much your new boyfriend understands you so much better then he ever did.  That’s amateur stuff.  Really.  You want to give him a hurt he’ll take to his grave, and hopefully sooner rather then later, just mention in passing some small bit of domesticity that you and your new main squeeze are currently enjoying…

Me:  So I’ll probably be in town in an hour or so…you want to go grab a bite to eat somewhere after I get settled in…

He:  Um…well actually (XXX) and I are about to go grocery shopping in a bit…  Why don’t you call when you get in.  If you want…there’s some good British comedy shows on TV later tonight you can watch at the hotel.  

STAB!  SLASHHHHH!  Bleed!

BleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleedBleed….

Me:  Err…yeah…

And, so on.  If there wasn’t at least one major heart wound it wouldn’t be Christmas…

It was right after that I wrote a post about how depressed I was that alarmed a bunch of people.  Interestingly enough, it was also shortly after that I got my first nastygram from an anonymous AOL poster.

A few months ago I was overjoyed that Keith was coming up for a visit.  Finally.  I’d been trying for years to coax him to come up here and see the house I’d bought for myself, and the life I was living up here in Charm City, and maybe even meet some of my friends, particularly the group of gay guys I regularly do a Friday night happy hour with in Washington D.C.  And…deep down inside…I wanted to have him here under my roof for a few days, just to picture what it would have been like for us to have been lovers after all. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. 

As the day of his arrival up here in Baltimore approached, that old twitterpated feeling took hold once again, and for days I wore a great big smile and my attitude went way, way positive.  It affected everything.  I spent weeks beforehand, cleaning and tidying up everything around Casa del Garrett so it would be perfect.  My energy levels at work jumped a hundred fold.  I was polishing off work items one right after the other like they were nothing.  I felt Good, in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager in love for the first time.  Everyone at work and in my personal life noticed it.  I was happy.  Content.  Blissful.  Life was good.  Life was sweet.  So very, very sweet.  And he hadn’t even arrived yet.  But somehow, something deep inside knew what was coming. 

My body sang.  My energy levels soared.  The day he came, he called first and said he was in Baltimore and on his way.  And I immediately got this familiar knot in my stomach, just like I did years ago, when I was a teenager, and in love, and expecting any moment now to see the object of my affections.  And when he left after a few days, I dropped into a deep grey funk the likes of which I’ve never experienced before.  Ever. 

When he came here and I was showing him around Casa del Garrett for the first time (he’d never been here before…) and I was showing him the upstairs and the bathroom which had a lot of remodeling done by the previous owner…and he gently mocked how technical I was getting when I described the improvements and I laughed with him and say "Hey…I’m a techno geek…okay?" and he laughed and put his arms around me and hugged…  And…and…  For a moment I saw how my life could have been had I been loved…even for a short time.  But he doesn’t want to be that person in my life and all I have ever been able to do is just imagine how it would be.  Now I can remember how it feels to have someone put their arms around me while we’re laughing together at some foible of mine.  But he doesn’t love me and it seems I will never have love except in my imaginings and my dreams. 

Thing of it is, I Knew I was going to experience a funk after he left Baltimore.  Logically at least.  I Knew it.  I thought I would get through it like I always have. But it was worse then anything this time.  It wasn’t just I was heartsick.  My body Ached.  I lost energy…it was like the floor had been pulled out from under me.  At the office I was reasonably fine…I was able to get my work done and interact with my co-workers almost like nothing had happened.  But at home I wandered around my little rowhouse in a daze.  Like I’d fallen down the stairs.  Like I’d been hit by a car.  Like I’d just had my arms cut off. 

And in a sense, I had.  Now that I’m settled a bit, I think I understand it better.  It’s something like this…

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 5 to 10% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful… 

Although not all phantom limbs are painful, patients will sometimes feel as if they are gesturing, feel itches, twitch, or even try to pick things up…

-Wikipedia – Phantom Limb

That moment we shared while I was geeking out in the bathroom…I kept feeling his arms around me in that moment, over and over again throughout my misery, well into the next month.  It wasn’t just my heart.  My body kept insisting that something was missing.  It was dreadful.

How many times do we hear broken hearted lovers say that loosing that lover, that other half, felt like they’d had an arm cut off?  In 1982 I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse’ Gay Comics and saw a story by French Cartoonist Patric Marcel titled, One For Sorrow…

Imagine having your arm torn off…  There would be pain of course…but more important would be the sudden lacking, and the futile urge to have it back on…

I was well aware of what he was talking about by then.  And imagery like that exists throughout the landscape of lost love.  It’s more then just a metaphor I am convinced now.  It really is something like that phantom limb phenomena.  I’m a geek…okay?  Bear with me here…

We have all these little ways of expressing sociability, fraternity, via various kinds of ritualized touch.  Moments where we are permitted to cross the physical boundary between us.  Handshakes are the most common one I can think of right now.  I’ve heard it said they evolved as a way of letting a stranger know your intentions are friendly.  Look…I’m unarmed…  Some cultures allow for a bit more.  A formalized kind of greeting kiss.  A pat on the shoulders.  Greeting hugs have become more common in American culture in my lifetime then they were when I was a kid.  They serve to introduce and reinforce social bonds.  But these are more, it turns out, then simply acknowledgments of social regard.  Operating below the levels of rational consciousness, below even the lower primate and mammalian brain, is the platform it all rests upon. 

We understand, if incompletely, that touch is a powerful thing, and we need to be careful how we let others do that to us.  Not just as a matter of physical security, but emotional security too.  To get close requires a cultivation of trust.  It’s not just that someone within arm’s reach can take a swing at you so you have to be careful.  It’s when you permit someone’s touch, you are making them a part of you.  I mean that literally.  The more intimate that touch, the more intimately they become a part of you.  It really is that powerful a thing.

Our bodies map themselves, and remap themselves constantly.  We have to learn how to do things like walk, run, ride bicycles, dance, hammer nails, brush teeth.  The alien feel of a new tool becomes, after many hours of use, as if part of the hand and arm.  And to our mind now, to the body’s inner map, it is.  You pick it up, it’s There.  Even something as complex as an automobile becomes an extension of the body, once its behavior has been mapped by the brain.  Accelerate…back off a little…flick up the turn signal stalk…turn the wheel a bit…  It’s not the car moving through traffic, it’s you.  And when you get behind the wheel of a different car, it feels strange for a while, until your body has had a chance to map that one out too.

But the car doesn’t touch back.  A favorite tool lost or stolen can make you angry, but you caress the world with the tool, it doesn’t caress you back.  People (and pets) are different.  They touch back.  And our bodies map that touch to itself.  And more…

Oxytocin Hormone: The Cuddle Hormone is the Body’s Own Love Potion

Research suggests that if a love potion does in fact exist, the mammalian hormone called oxytocin is likely the key ingredient.

Oxytocin is a hormone produced naturally in the hypothalamus in the brain. Studies have shown that oxytocin is associated with our ability to mediate emotional experiences in close relationships and maintain healthy psychological boundaries.

In studies with non-human mammals, oxytocin has been shown to promote nest building and pup retrieval, acceptance of adopted offspring, and the formation of adult pair-bonds.

This important hormone is naturally released in response to a variety of environmental stimuli including skin-to-skin contact, uterine or cervical stimulation during sex, nipple stimulation in lactating women, and as the result of a baby moving down the birth canal.

[Emphasis mine]  They say it’s sex that bonds a couple.  Not…exactly.  It’s touch.  Which happens during sex of course.  But everywhere else in a couple’s relationship too and those ways, I am convinced now, are much more meaningful and fundamental.  Your lover can touch you in ways even a dear friend cannot, and not simply in sexual ways.  Your lover can ruffle your hair, stroke your neck, rest a hand on your cheek.  It’s a private language every couple invents for just themselves.  This touch means one wordless thing…that touch another.  Your lover can reach a hand out and lightly touch yours with just a fingertip, and send a tremble through your body.  And your body knows that person’s touch, has it mapped out and stored in its mindless subconscious automatic understanding of what it itself is.

And when that touch isn’t there anymore, it’s a shock the body refuses to accept for a time.  Like a phantom limb, you can still feel those arms around you, that hand inside of yours, and it is a torment.  One that broken hearted and jilted lovers aren’t really being taught how to cope with, because everyone keeps telling them that it’s all in their mind.  But it isn’t.  Not entirely.  It’s in their bodies too.  They have, in a very nearly literal sense, lost a physical part of themselves.

So on The Local…which is an English Language German news site…I read the following…

Study says teens familiar with pornography and alcohol

Oh…you think…?  And there I read that the study was done via the German youth magazine Bravo, which "combines no-holds-barred sex advice with explicit photos". 

Wow.  I’m sitting here trying to picture what my teen years would have been like if American youth magazines had treated sex that matter of factly.  Damn. 

This has been making the blog rounds today…

Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.

If you’re surprised about this then you haven’t traveled much in the bible belt.  I see more highway billboards advertising strip shows and adult entertainment dives when I take a road trip through the Fundamentalist States of America then anywhere else, except maybe Nevada.  But at least there they aren’t hypocritical about it.  Oh…and guess who is the biggest consumer of online porn in the nation. 

The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says.

Utah.  Where marriage is so sacred they pour millions into California last year to prevent loving same sex couples from being allowed to marry.  Nice.  The magic underwear isn’t working so well I take it.  Or perhaps too well.  Perhaps it was all part of a plan on the part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to drain money out of the faithful’s porn budgets.

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

I keep thumping my pulpit on this but it keeps being relevant.  They need their scapegoats.  Gay people are their handy punching bags for all their own private secret shame, their own pathetic failures of moral character.  They hate us, because we learned to live with our sexual nature and they, locking it in the closet, never learned how to control themselves. 

Denial isn’t a plan for life.  The human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon.  Least of all religions founded by con artists.  No river rises higher then its source.

Via KOS…A wee post from Effective Measure, a public health forum, titled, What Else Did You Expect From Horny Teenagers?   Remember it, the next time you hear some crackpot argue that religion is a precondition of moral behavior…

Evolution has hard wired a drive to reproduce in young, healthy humans. That’s how the species survives. Maybe you don’t want them to have sex and maybe they even promise they won’t, but biology is more powerful than parents or governments.

Or even…religious dogmas.  Like those that insist evolution is nonsense because it contradicts the biblical story of creation…

A study published in the journal Pediatrics followed 289 teenagers who said in 1996 they took a virginity pledge and compared them with 645 non-pledgers, taking into account religious beliefs and attitudes to sex and birth control. This was done because previous studies didn’t factor in the possibility that teens who pledge may be quite different characteristics that affect sexual behavior than those who don’t. So this was an attempt to compare "like with like," the main difference being that one group had promised not to have sex while the other didn’t. "Virginity pledges" are a prominent feature of the Bush administration’s abstinence only sex education programs that didn’t teach contraceptive practices.

Five years after taking the pledge:

• 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge
• Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors
• Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex (Jennifer Warner, WebMD News)

There was one significant difference between the pledge and non-pledge group, however. They were less likely to use condoms or any form of birth control when they did have sex.

You can’t blame them. No one told them how.

Here’s the thing you need to notice about this: Eighty-two percent of them denied ever having taken the pledge.  Not that they broke the pledge and had sex anyway, but that they denied they’d made it.  Eighty.  Two.  Percent.

This is where fundamentalism finds its dead end.  You can accept that the bible is literally true or you can accept the natural world as it really is but you can’t accept them both.  Fundamentalism won’t have it.  The simple, stark, finger of God writing it on the wall truth is this: fundamentalism corrupts its followers.  It has to.  When confronted by a fact, the honest thing to do, the moral thing, is knowledge it.  But fundamentalism demands that you deny any fact that contradicts its own truths.  What it instills in a person isn’t either a love or fear of god, but a casual acceptance of deception, first as a religious duty, then as a necessary part of every day life.  See it in Alan Bonsell testifying under oath that he did not know where the money had been raised to donate sixty copies of Of Pandas and People to his school’s library.  See it in the Proposition 8 advertisements that claimed same sex marriage would result in the forcing of churches to marry homosexuals.  See it in the eighty-two percent of teenagers in that study who denied they’d ever taken a virginity pledge.  Their religion didn’t change their sexual behavior.  It didn’t make them more moral.  It made them less likely to use condoms, more likely to catch and spread VD, more likely to get each other pregnant, and more willing to lie.  What their religion did for them in short, was take away their brakes.

Sex.  Religion.  Fundamentalism.  Thump your bibles all you want people.  An instinct older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, is just going to ignore you on its very single-minded way to making your teenage kids pregnant…

Red Sex, Blue Sex
Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?
by Margaret Talbot

…During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception…

The whole thing is Here.

A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, “maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who—despite their own conservative leanings—admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”

Here’s the reality:  Sex is one of the most powerful drives within us.  Denial is not a stratigy for managing it.  Just ask any gay man who shoved his sex drive into a closet, got married and then later found himself in jail for propositioning an undercover policeman in a public toilet. 

But…just say ‘No’.  Right?  Condoms fail, not abstinence.  Right?  No.  It doesn’t work that way.  Actually, abstinence fails a hell of a lot more often then condoms do…

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.

The human identity isn’t a blackboard you can scribble slogans on.  We carry the history of hundreds of millions of years of life on earth with us in our flesh and blood and bones every minute of every day, and sex is one of the most powerful drives there is among its creatures.  Should be obvious why…right?  Ignorance isn’t a strategy for managing it. 

On the other hand…the more people have sex and feel guilty about it…the more they come flocking back to the priests to beg for forgiveness.  In that sense, abstinence really seldom ever fails…

You can’t make this stuff up…

Smut-case judge posted explicit images

LOS ANGELES – A federal judge suspended the obscenity trial of a Los Angeles porn distributor Wednesday following a newspaper report that the judge had sexually explicit material on his own Web site.

Judge Alex Kozinski on Wednesday granted a joint motion to suspend the trial after the prosecution said it needed time to look into the issue of the judge’s Web site.

The judge told the jury to return on Monday. The panel spent hours at the Pasadena offices of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals watching videos depicting bestiality and extreme fetishes.

Kozinski is chief justice of the 9th Circuit but is serving as a trial judge in the obscenity case.  Kozinski said he thought the material on his Web site couldn’t be seen by the public, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site. The images included a video of a "half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal," the newspaper reported.

This is…not what I needed to be reading in the news feeds first thing in the morning.  Human sexuality is a…strange thing to behold…sometimes. 

Like…here… (via Dan Savage at SLOG)  I probably didn’t need to be reading this before bedtime last night…

The 11th Most Terrifying Guide to Sex

Hey, Cracked, this just arrived in my mailbox—and I actually don’t think it’s the 11th most terrifying guide to sex. I think it belongs somewhere in the top three. I certainly think it’s scarier than your #1 pick, A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting, and way, way scarier than your #2 pick, Intimate Invasions: The Erotic Ins & Outs of Enema Play. I give you… The Toybag Guide to Ageplay…

I get asked all the time what Age Play is. It can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different sexual adventurers or curious roleplaying enthusiasts, but there are key threads that run through it.

Age play is any interaction or roleplay between consenting adults (or enjoyed solo by an adult) involving the concept of age as a dynamic… Age play incorporates a sensual or sexual element, buy many "age players," "kidz," babiez," or "littles" enjoy "pure" age play that is just about the role and not about any hanky panky.

Age play is not pedophilia, child porn, or individuals interested in playing with actual biological children. Age Players may use the props of "bio kids," but we are into the props and trappings, not the kids themselves in any way.

Go check out the cover of that book Savage has on display in that post.  It’s…disturbing all right…

…and I suppose because I am a geek, my mind starts wondering about where the link might be between this behavior, which really squiks me out, and how we humans are always bestowing fond diminutives on the one we love. Ever call your darling ‘baby’?  Now, you didn’t really mean that literally did you…and yet that got in there somehow.  We use words like ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ even though we’re referring to grown adults.  And then…again probably because I am a geek…the words of physicist Richard Feynman bubble into this train of thought… 

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain”, into a blind alley from which no one has yet escaped.  Nobody knows how it can be like that. 

Feynman was talking about quantum mechanics, but there are lotsa more rabbit holes a brain can go down besides that one.  Human sexuality for one.  I guess it’s what you get when you plop that rational logical thinking brain down on top of the old primate brain, down on top of the old mammalian brain, down on top of the lizard brain.  And God only knows what’s below that.  It bears close examination only by interested scientists, anthropologists and other researchers with steady nerves.  The rest of us are probably better off not knowing what our neighbors are up to. 

I am the last person on earth to be surprised to read that a judge in a bestiality case has a web site where he’s posted videos of himself some guy cavorting with animals. Squiked out, yes, but not surprised.  And probably a tad more resigned to it then most of you.  I am a romantic.  I really don’t like seeing this…really don’t like watching sex being dragged into the gutter.  But I know better then to expect it won’t be.  When I was a young man, only a few years out to myself, I had to walk a gauntlet of hard core heterosexual peep show magazines just to buy a copy of The Advocate or get a copy of the local free gay paper, because respectable news stands back then wouldn’t carry them.  I was a Baptist boy and it was an education.  Nothing I ever heard on the school yard playing ground, no dirty joke told among the rude boys, prepared me for what I saw in those adult bookstores.  I consider it one of the few benefits of growing up in more oppressive times because ever since then, whenever some gay hater starts yap, yap, yapping about how perverted homosexual sex is (Hi Pete!) I instantly find myself thinking that they’re either naive, stupid, a liar or all of the above. 

Strange?  Strange?  Well I’m here to tell you heterosexuals know how to get their strange on too and if you haven’t seen it that’s because you haven’t looked.  The human family is just plain strange period.  Gay people have no monopoly on that, and there are plenty of us who find all of that stuff positively bizarre too.

[Update…]  According to Slashdot, the files on that judge’s web site also included  …images of masturbation, public sex, contortionist sex, a transsexual striptease, and a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows…  Wasn’t that a Monty Python skit…?

[Update…] It wasn’t a video of the judge apparently…my bad…

Whenever someone starts preaching to me about how the sex lives of gay people are sad and broken I just cheerfully point them to the tons, literally tons, of articles out there written by heterosexuals, for heterosexuals on how to fix their own broken sex lives.  If the grass is any greener on their side of the fence I’ve yet to see it.  Other then the fact that their marriages are given some security in the rule of law that ours are not, their intimate sex lives don’t seem any less difficult to manage then our own.

And believe it or not, single though I’ve been most of my life, and gay ever since…well, puberty…I read those articles now and then, mostly for clues as to what pitfalls to avoid in the event that my own sex life happens to improve.  Even though they’re written with a basic premise of gender difference in the relationship, a lot of it can I think, apply to same sex couples too.  Conversely, I think opposite sex couples could learn a thing or two from our households too.  How gender equality works in practice being one of them, but also how it is to keep things together in a hostile world.  When all you have is literally each other, and you have to find a way to make it work without the support of the world around you, then you really know what your union is made of.  The same sex couples who have made it in this world, under that kind of relentless emotional stress, are my heroes.

So anyway…I see this this CNN fluff piece about how sexual incompatibility is troubling some marriages and I start reading…

He’s a 38-year-old executive. She’s a 34-year-old homemaker. He says they never fight, and in many ways they’re compatible — but not when it comes to sex.

"It’s almost like a checklist," says Jon (who asked that his real name not be used) of their once-a-month lovemaking. The problem, he believes, is a lack of desire.

Sexually unfulfilling marriages aren’t limited to new parents or aging baby boomers with hormone imbalances. They can ensnare even the relatively young and the recently married. When they are unable to blame kids, stress or physical issues, many couples struggle unhappily to identify — and resolve — the problems behind their lackluster sex life.

Couples end up in sexually unfulfilling marriages for a variety of reasons, says Marty Klein, a licensed marriage counselor and certified sex therapist in Palo Alto, California. One reason, he says, is America’s obsession with marriage.

Laura Berman, a Chicago sex therapist and relationship expert, agrees. "We put the blinders on when we’re dating," she says. "We focus so much on the wedding, we don’t notice the warning signs."

That obsession with marriage being fueled in part, by the fundamentalist kook pews here.  Not everyone is temperamentally suited for marriage, and in any case, after you’re married is the wrong time to find out you’re not sexually compatible.  Having sex while dating and before marriage, or for that matter when marriage isn’t even a goal, isn’t unhealthy unless it’s unloving.  Much as the right hates the sex drive, it’s an important part of our being.  Just ask your gay and lesbian neighbors: It does us great harm to put sex in the closet.

In more ways then one.  As I was scanning down that CNN article, I saw this on the page…

When your spouse announces he’s gay…  Which, wasn’t one of those Surprising reasons you’re not having sex either as it turned out.   A lot of right wing pulpit thumpers say that sex before marriage is responsible for weakening the institution of marriage, but it isn’t.  It’s the padded cell they’ve put marriage into on the one hand, and sex on the other, that’s weakened it.  There is nothing wrong with sex that is truly loving and joyful.  The more gay people know that and accept that there is nothing wrong with them and that their sex drives are as legitimate and as beautiful as those of heterosexuals, the fewer surprised spouses there’ll be.  And the more intimately couples know each other before they tie the knot, the more likely they’ll go into it with that beautiful body and soul union that can make a marriage endure anything.

I’ve seen it happen.  Maybe someday it’ll happen to me.  If the pulpit thumpers would just get the fuck off our backs and out of our beds, it might happen to more of us.

Chris, over at Sex In The Public Square, begins his review of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity thusly…

It’s not immediately obvious, but Robert Jensen and I have a lot in common. We both grew up as scrawny, physically inept boys with no aptitude for athletics. We were the kind of boys who were by default identified as “faggots” by our peers and, at least in my case, sometimes by teachers. On the playground and the streets, our status as “sensitive” boys made us easy targets for insults and physical abuse.

Most importantly, we both grew into men with deep dissatisfactions with what our society told us we were supposed to be, do, and think as men, and with an appreciation for feminism as a vital tool for both men and women to break free of old, potentially lethal gender scripts. And both of us can go on at length about what sucks about porn.

Actually, I can sum up what I used to dislike most about porn in a few words: there was very little romance in it.   But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.  I fit the same pattern of boyhood that Chris and Robert both seem to have had, and while I’m not sure that in porn lies, as Chris says, our salvation, I think he’s  is absolutely right about this in general…

And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.

Jensen’s book is supposedly a critical examination of the relationship between pornography and misogyny.  Amazon describes it thusly…

Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.

If calling anti-pornography arguments anti-sex has ever silenced the debate I sure haven’t noticed it.  More often then not the retort is something along the lines of, Sure…sexual freedom is destroying family life and American morals.  Children born out of wedlock, raised in fatherless households, rising crime and sexually transmitted disease…  You’re damn right we’re anti-sex!  It’s telling that the one reader comment still up on the book’s Amazon page comes from a self identified "biblical Christian".  I guess that’s as opposed to…you know…one of those plain old ordinary everyday Christians or something.  But as Chris carefully explains in his review, Jensen’s book is neither a critical examination of pornography nor a necessary breaking of silence.  If anything, it wants the silence to continue.

Sexual desire is hard wired into us, is a normal, natural part of our flesh and blood lives, is an essential part of our nature.  It is a drive that runs through the fabric of our being, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates.  It is not a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will upon.  Sweeping it under the rug, hiding it in the closet, burying it under layers of shame can only do us great psychological harm and put it utterly beyond our ability to manage decently and honorably.  Witness the torrent of family values republican sex scandals lately.   Just this morning I am reading on the news nets that four more men have come forward to testify to having had sex with Mr. (I Am Not Gay) Larry Craig.  Sex is a powerful, ancient and venerable urge.  You force it into the closet, and all you end up doing is insuring that it’ll come rushing out in inappropriate, and self destructive ways, taking you helplessly along for the ride.

Which makes this remark about Jensen and his kind toward the end of Chris’ review worth pondering:

There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked.

You tend to find that most pornography is just plain trash.  There’s a couple reasons for that.  First..because it mostly Is trash.  In that, it is merely obeying the relentlessness of Sturgeon’s Law that everything does.  But porn is also vastly limited by its very purpose.  It’s job is to happily push our buttons.  But everyone’s buttons are different.  And what makes one person all hot and bothered can positively disgust another. 

When I was a gay young adult, trying to find my way around a gay community that was still mostly hidden from view back in the early 1970s, if I wanted a copy of the local gay newspaper, or The Advocate, I mostly had to go to seedy adult bookstores to find them.  Wandering around the shelves of almost exclusively heterosexual pornography was eye opening, and pretty disgusting and I am certain that wasn’t because I mate to my own, and not the opposite sex.  Even the gay pornography I saw turned me off far more then it turned me on.  I began to realize then that what turned me on was an eroticism that was mostly sensual and not terribly explicit, and which included heavy doses of romance and emotion.  That is me.  My sexual response is inextricably knotted up with my romantic one.  But back in the early 70s, sex was either heavily censored, or grossly explicit.  Commercial pornography was about the money shot and nothing else.  I remember one of my first porn tapes I’d bought on the basis of the very hot looking guys on the cover, only to end up feeling let down that there was nothing on display throughout but rote genital contact.  They didn’t show the slightest bit of affection.  It really was just like the bigots always said homosexuality was…  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  I can hear people laughing now at the idea that I went looking for romance on the porn shelves, and that’s part of the problem.  It didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be that way. 

It would be decades before I began finding erotic art that I could whole heartedly enjoy, as artists, more specifically, female artists, began to freely and unashamedly express their own human sexuality.  I always found it interesting that my favorite gay male romance novels have been written by women.  Now I find that my favorite source of erotic art these days comes from Japan, in the form of comic book stories of torrid gay male love affairs, that are largely written by heterosexual females, for heterosexual females. 

This is, I think, important, because anti-pornography crusaders like Jensen like to posture that they’re about defending women from violent male sexuality.  But if anything can be said to be responsible for the rote objectification of women in pornography, and the absence of images of tenderness and balanced relationships in it, it’s not unbridled male sexuality but the suppression of female sexuality.  That only men, and never women, enjoy sex for its own sake, is a hoary old lie powerful men used to tell everyone so nobody would question their domination of women.  The problem with pornography isn’t that it exploits women, but that women have never, until recently, been allowed their own erotic voice.  That’s why the images you commonly find in pornography are unbalanced.  But that’s changing, no thanks to the likes of Jensen.

Yes, most representations of sex are obvious; our sexual nature reduced to its lowest common denominator.  But there are so many layers, intricate and sublime to human sexuality, to our sexual relationships, even when it’s not so much Mr. Right as Mr. Right Away.  And nowadays, thankfully and I think mostly because more women are producing pornography now, artists are going there now, and when they do it can be awesomely beautiful, and powerfully life affirming.  Ironically enough, if the anti-porn crusaders have their way, all of that will vanish, and we’ll be back to cheap, tawdry, sterile porn that degrades both men and women, that treats sexual desire as nothing more then urges that have nothing to do with the rest of our being, other then to drag it down into the gutter.  

But that’s exactly what some people want.  Better we feel ashamed then proud.  Proud people don’t passively take orders.

There is a sad joke in calling Robert Jensen “radical” in any sense of the word. He has nothing to give us but the same bitter fruit we were fed by hateful priests and timid parents.

If there is anything we gay folk can teach our heterosexual neighbors about sex it’s this: shame rots your soul from within.  It takes away your ability to love someone whole heartedly, body and soul and every playful and ecstatic and wonderful moment of joy you could ever have had in the arms of a lover.  If there’s anything this poor human race doesn’t need any more of, it’s shame over our sexual nature.  There is a place, a wholesome necessary healing place, for an art that is both erotic and humane.  We need an art that holds a mirror to us of our sexual selves, in which we see the wonder and joy of our lives of flesh and blood untainted by fear or shame or guilt.  That mirror is slowly coming to light, thanks I am convinced to the emerging sexual freedom of women.  So naturally, the haters of humanity, and their useful tools, want to stifle that once more, and forever.

Surprise, surprise…kids today aren’t having sex any earlier then their grandparents did…

Youth start sex at same age as their parents, grandparents did

The common media image of today’s youth is that they have, under a steady barrage of sexually charged images, become increasingly precocious – engaging in intercourse at a younger and younger age and with a dizzying array of partners.

But the reality, according to a new report entitled Sexual Health in Canada, is that adolescent sexual practices have remained largely unchanged for decades. "Young people aren’t having sex any younger than their parents or grandparents," Linda Capperauld, executive director of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, said in an interview.

Nor – despite suggestive music videos, ready access to Internet porn and creeping hemlines – are more teens having sex.

Nationwide, only 28 per cent of adolescents age 15 to 17 report having had sex, a figure that rises to 65 per cent by age 18 to 19.

All told, the mean age for sexual intercourse is 16.5 years, about where it’s been since the sexual revolution that was launched by today’s baby boomers.

Despite the closing gender gap – equal numbers of boys and girls now say they have had sex – the primary reason for not having done so remains remarkably unchanged from previous generations: Most girls said they were not ready, while most boys reported a lack of opportunity. The No. 2 reason for both sexes is the same: "I haven’t met the right person."

But when they do, teens are remarkably faithful. The number with a single sexual partner is on the rise.

It’s not all good news though

The 150-page report also contains some grim news. The number of teens with sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis is soaring.

Gosh…that wouldn’t be because they’re being given adequate sex education, on the theory that if we don’t tell them how to have sex they won’t have it?  Sex is a basic instinct, older then the fish, let alone the mammals, let alone the primates, let alone humans.  Human couples are perfectly capable of figuring out how to have sex on their own.  What they need to be taught is how to avoid pregnancy and disease.  And…a little responsibility please.  But responsible sex is the last thing they’ll learn from the Family Values crowd…

Dead Reverend’s Rubber Fetish
Autopsy: Pastor found in wet suits after autoerotic mishap

OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report. Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs. Aldridge served as the church’s pastor for 16 years. Immediately following his death, church officials issued a press release asking community members to "please refrain from speculation" about what led to Aldridge’s demise, adding that, "we will begin the healing process under the strong arm of our Savior, Jesus Christ."

Brown County political leader faces sex charges

GREEN BAY — The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing him with beer and marijuana late last year.

Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.

If convicted on both felonies and all three misdemeanors, Fleischman faces up to 52 years in prison.

Fleischman’s attorney, Jeff Jazgar, said he plans to confront the charges at the preliminary hearing set for Oct. 29.

“My client is innocent of the charges,” Jazgar said Friday. “Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case.”

Efforts to reach Fleischman were unsuccessful.

Fleischman has resigned his post with the Brown County Republicans, said Kirsten Kukowski, communications director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

The teen, now 17, told authorities Fleischman took him to a hotel in Appleton during that time and then to a cabin near Florence for several days before returning to Fleischman’s Allouez home. The boy said Fleischman provided him with beer and marijuana, the complaint said.

The boy told police that when he would go to bed, Fleischman would fondle him and that on one occasion he awoke to find Fleischman at the foot of his bed masturbating.

  
 

Town Is Shaken After Prosecutor’s Arrest in a Child-Sex Sting

To neighbors here, J. D. Roy Atchison was a deft federal prosecutor, an involved father and a devoted volunteer, coaching girls’ softball and basketball teams year in and year out.

His wife is a popular science teacher; his youngest daughter, an honors student who was on her high school homecoming court last year. Their house, with rocking chairs on the porch, oaks in the yard and a wrought-iron fence, is among the prettiest in town.

But in an instant last week, the community pillar became an object of community loathing. Mr. Atchison, 53, was arrested getting off a plane in Detroit on Sept. 16 and charged with the unthinkable. The authorities there said he was carrying a doll and petroleum jelly, and that he had arranged with an undercover agent to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.

Now Mr. Atchison is awaiting trial in a federal prison in Michigan, and the people of Gulf Breeze, an affluent bayside suburb in the Florida Panhandle, are outraged, baffled and repulsed.

…

Mr. Atchison has worked at the small United States Attorney’s Office in Pensacola since the 1980s, most recently handling asset forfeitures in criminal cases as an assistant United States attorney. In one high-profile case, Mr. Atchison oversaw the government seizure of a popular beach bar at the center of a cocaine-trafficking ring.

His is considered one of the most conservative United States attorney’s offices in the country, known for refusing plea agreements and seeking the stiffest sentences.

Mr. Johnson said Mr. Atchison was close with the other prosecutors in his office, going with some on an annual lobster-diving trip in the Florida Keys. A big white fishing boat sat in his otherwise-empty driveway this week. His interests, according to the Yahoo profile that the police said was his, include “surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls.”

And yes…according to a commenter at Daily KOS who looked up the public election records for the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, Atchison was a republican.  Surprise, surprise.   And here’s another anti-gay republican with a wide stance…

Fla. lawmaker arrested in gay sex sting

A Florida state representative and co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign was arrested Wednesday for offering to perform oral sex on a male undercover cop in a Titusville, Fla., public restroom, police said.

Rep. Bob Allen, R-Merritt Island, was booked into the Brevard County jail on a charge of solicitation to commit prostitution, the Orlando Sentinel reported, then released on $500 bail. The charge, a second-degree misdemeanor, is punishable by a year in county jail and a $500 fine.

Titusville police told the Sentinel that they were carrying out a burglary detail in a city park when they saw a disheveled, unshaven man enter and leave the park restroom three times. They decided to send in an undercover officer; minutes later, they told the Sentinel, the man knocked on the stall door and offered to perform oral sex on the officer for $20.

"After he was arrested, he (Allen) mentioned he was a state legislator," Lt. Todd Hutchinson told the paper.

Allen, 48, is married with a daughter, according to his legislative bio.

First elected in 2000, Allen is the chairman of the House Committee on Energy. He received the Rainbow Democratic Club of Orlando’s worst possible rating.

In March, he co-sponsored HB269, the Lewdness and Indecent Exposure Bill, which proposed enhanced penalties for "offenses involving unnatural and lascivious acts or exposure or exhibition of sexual organs committed within specified distance of certain locations." The bill never made it to a vote.

About six years ago, he was one of 21 Florida legislators to sign Gov. Jeb Bush’s friend-of-the-court brief supporting the state’s ban on gays adopting children, Rainbow Democratic Club secretary Carol Bartsch told Gay.com

The ACLU had sued to challenge the ban, which is still on Florida’s books.

"Practically as soon as he got into office, he wanted to go on record as being anti-gay," Bartsch said.

Due to be termed out of the House next year, Allen, however, had been considered a likely state Senate candidate, Sentinel writer John Kennedy blogged Wednesday.

Just a few of your friendly neighborhood Family Values folks who know what’s best for the rest of us when it comes to having sex…

Courtesy Dan Savage…who certainly knows what evil lurks in the libidos of men. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

Stop drooling on your keyboards…perverts…

Imagine a world where the major religions didn’t teach everyone that sex itself was innately wicked and sinful…that sin was only in hurting and taking advantage of others.  Imagine a world where preachers didn’t teach people that their bodies are evidence of their fallen status, objects of shame, and not beautiful in their own right, to be taken care of and treated with respect.

Man cuts off his penis ‘to stop him sinning’

SALAMANCA – A man cut off his own penis and threw it in a toilet ‘so he would stop sinning’.

The 30-year-old was recovering in the Hospital Clinico Universitario in Salamanca in western Spain.

…

The local newspaper La Gaceta reported when relatives called emergency services, he told ambulance workers he did it “so would not sin any more”.   

…

He was bleeding heavily. 

The newspaper said it was not known if the man’s penis could be sewn back.

There was also a suggestion he may be suffering from psychological problems.

I read crap like this and I just find myself shaking my head and wondering how the hell it ever came to this.  What other creature on this good earth, besides us humans, punish themselves for feeling desire?  I can’t believe that just having rational thought capable minds does this to us, because behavior like this just isn’t rational.  If you could, in some imaginary laboratory, start the history of the human race over from day one, and run it as a simulation, would you still end up with the major faiths of the world teaching us to fear and loath our sexual nature, to the point where some people even mutilate themselves? 

What the fuck happened to us…?

From our Now Just Imagine How Much Bellyaching You’d Hear From The Kook Pews If Gay People Were Doing This department…

Color me unimpressed by Mark Penn’s "microtrends" based on Marc Ambinder’s writeup. Penn mostly seems to be playing his favorite sport of defining groups arbitrarily and then finding that if you slice up the population in random ways, you can get interesting-but-meaningless results. That said, this is funny:

Within the past ten years, the number of women who sought younger male boyfriends has quintupled. These are the "cougars," Penn writes.

I’m not sure I understand why they’re cougars? Because it’s an alternative to being a cat lady?

That’s from Matthew Yglesias, who gets himself an education on "Cougars" in the comments to his post.  And so did I actually…

A new breed of predator is stalking LA—and young men are the prey. Sally Emerson joins the pack

Los Angeles is a land where conventional time no longer exists. “There are no seasons, it’s always the same sunny blue sky day after day, so you never feel you’re getting any older,” said a friend, tranquilly. Here you can pause the passing of the years, or even rewind a little — breasts can be pert again, skin taut, forehead uncreased.

Age is no bar to anything in LA, least of all relationships — look at 44-year-old Demi Moore, all glowing and toned on the arm of 29-year-old husband Ashton Kutcher.

So perhaps the rise of the cougars should be no surprise. They’re a new Angeleno phenomenon: rich, powerful and — unlike Demi — predatory older women, whose natural habitat is the high-end shops, bars and spas of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and whose chosen prey is younger men.

Chris Breed, the Brit maestro of the Hollywood club scene — he looks about 28, but isn’t — has seen them in action. “It’s a complete role reversal,” he said over dinner at Maestro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills, a frenzy of mirrors and laughter. “But if you want to get on in this town, you go where the power is, and often the older women have power: power to cast an actor in the right role, power to get a man into the right club.”

“These girls don’t want steady relationships,” said Chris’s friend. “They’ve had that. Some of them have been married four times. They want to keep their money. Their attitude is, I’m rich, I’m in great shape, I don’t give a shit. They shred young men alive.”

“Do the men mind?” I asked. He grinned. “Hell, no.” At that moment, a woman swept in wearing a floor-length leopardskin coat, her hair bleached blonde, her lips cartoon-character colossal and exaggerated with so much lip liner and lipstick, she seemed to be more mouth than face. One hundred per cent cougar. Behind her hovered a slight young black guy, with white trousers slung low, and black beanie hat pulled down in an attempt to keep some street cred.

I later saw her haughtily leave the restaurant, and the doors nearly swung back on the poor guy as he bleakly followed.

“These girls,” the friend continued, “they carry Viagra in their handbags. Viagra and Cialis, the 36-hour drug. They are vicious. They call the shots.”

That’s from an LA Times article, posted up on the website UrbanCougar.Com…a website for older women who like younger men, and lots of them.  Take a wee stroll over there, and ask yourself how loudly they’d be screaming about it on Fox News if that was a web site for older gay men who like younger guys.  For one thing, no matter how much the operators and users of that site made it clear they weren’t about going after teenagers, let along children, the word all over the corporate news media, never mind Fox, would be that the site was somehow linked to NAMBLA, and was facilitating pedophiles.  Middle aged heterosexuals can pursue younger lovers and maybe get an occasional sniff of disapproval, when they’re not getting knowing winks.  Homosexuals are presumed to be child molesters. 

But…never mind.  There’s this foundational myth in western culture about female sexuality being more chaste and demure then male sexuality, and I’ve always been skeptical of it.  I went through adolescence in the free love 60s and early 70s, and I’m here to tell you the girls weren’t any less sexually aggressive then the boys.  But one of the slogans anti-gay crackpots like to throw out there is how male-female couples naturally complement each other in terms of their sexuality.  The female’s less lustful, more maternal sexuality attenuates the male’s predatory sexual nature, while males, provide structure and a firm hand of guidance to the emotionally weak females.  This, they claim, is why male homosexuality is so inherently reckless and promiscuous.  Men need a female to tame them.  Never mind it’s male superiority dressed up in a veneer of junk psychology.  With regard to female libidos, it simply isn’t true. 

Historically, it wasn’t all that long ago in western culture that the notion that women might actually experience orgasm when they weren’t ovulating, let alone enjoy sex for its own sake, was considered implausible.  And even these days, the most rigidly male dominated cultures are without exception also the ones in the deepest denial about female sexuality.  The more male dominated and fundamentalist a culture is, the more likely it is to nail female sexuality into a coffin.   In Saudi Arabia they put women in burkas.  Here in the U.S. we put them into the kitchen and tell them that only boys are allowed to have sex for its own sake, and that’s only because they can’t help themselves…they’re guys.  But women like to dance in the arms of eros too.

In their book, The Myth of Monogamy Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, David Barash
Judith Lipton write…

Early work, both empirical research and theorizing, took a decidedly male-centered perspective on multiple mating, emphasizing how males maximize their paternity by being sexually available to more than one female whenever possible, also competing with each other directly (by bluffing, displaying, and fighting) and indirectly by guarding their mates, as well as by using an array of anatomical, physiological and behavioral techniques – such as frequent copulations – to give them an advantage over other males.

More recently, biologists have begun to identify how females partake of their own strategies: mating with more than one male, controlling (or at least, influencing) the outcome of sperm competition, sometimes obtaining direct, personal benefits such as food or protection in return for these extra-pair copulations, as well as gaining indirect, genetic benefits that eventually accrue to their offspring. A penchant for non-monogamy among males is no great surprise, but as we shall see, the most dramatic new findings and revised science brought about by recent demolitions of the myth of monogamy concern the role of females. Freud spoke more truth than he knew when he observed that female psychology was essentially a "dark continent." A well integrated theory of female sexuality in particular still remains to be articulated…

But that’s half the human race.  If men don’t really know all that much about female sexuality, then how can they say they really know their own?  The dark continent is sex.  Still. 

Why are we still so ignorant about this vital part of our lives?  Because the status-quo doesn’t like being upset…and nothing upsets the status-quo like sex. Female sexuality has been kept in the closet all this time for the same reason that homosexuals were.  Control.  The prerogative of power is that you get first dibs on the hotties.  Otherwise what good is money and status?  In a world without fences, where everyone owns their own love lives, and manages their own sexual affairs for themselves, and are not only free to say Yes, but also No Thanks…then even the powerful have to ask. 

That’s why, for so very, very long, so many of us have been taught not to trust our own feelings when it comes to sex.  There are others who know what’s best for us.  We must always listen to them…never to our own hearts…