Apologies for not posting show notes last week – the day went pear-shaped and then I never got back to it. And since this week’s could easily be 2000 words, I’m breaking it into two posts. And next week I might start spreading the posts out over several days, so I have more room to discuss and start discussion, and am not blasting you with a huge digest almost-every Tuesday.

First, I jumped on the “revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) so it doesn’t assume kinky behavior is a mental illness” bandwagon and the recent petition circulating among sex-positive folks.

(Well, actually, FIRST, I described my adventure in rescuing a puppy from the streets and finding its home and returning it to the lady — and I did this all in Spanish, of which I’m proud. SECOND, I noted that I got to have teh sex yesterday for hours and hours until I could barely sit down in the studio this morning and was still rather aromatic. But THIRD, I dove into the news with … the petition.)

Kinky Is Not a Diagnosis
The petition calls on the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) to rethink its section on paraphilias, which are traits and behaviors involving “nonstandard” or “unusual” sexual interest. Some of the statements in the DSM have been contradicted by scientific research and it’s time to revise them to reflect the evidence rather than the cultural bias. Kink is not mental illness, and while some mental illnesses get expressed in sexual behavior, it’s the illness, not the behavior, that gets the diagnosis. (Some people do “nonstandard” and “unusual” things with food or alcohol but that doesn’t make eating or drinking a mental illness for everyone.)

Oral Sex Down Under
Australians have “discovered” oral sex, a funsie formerly confined to sex workers, claims news.com.au. Really? I always thought Australians invented oral sex, and that’s why we called it “down under.” Ba dum pum pum. But seriously, I can’t help but view the sexual health experts somewhat askance — it’s not possible that oral sex was Not Done before the sexual revolution and women’s lib. Perhaps they didn’t talk about it, if it was so taboo, but I bet you $5 that it was done. Oh yes.

Walking the Walk
Sex researchers guessed 80 percent correctly about whether women could have orgasms and whether they had “vaginal orgasms” by watching videos of how women walked.

Virginity Dumping Kit
Quirk Books released a First Timer’s Kit for those wanting to lose their virginity. But it’s missing something pretty important: a condom, a backup condom, a third condom in case things go well, and some lube.

[I tried to put the picture here but wordpress is balking me, so if you want to see it, follow the link. It's very "church of the subgenius" style.]

Social Media More Popular than Porn
Bill Tancer, data geek, analyzed 10 million web users (well, their information, anyway) to find that we are what we click: internet searches and usage reflect societal change.

So many “duh” moments to this, my wrists hurt too much to type ‘em. It starts with “everyone uses social media including kids but believe it or not, everyone doesn’t go for porn online” and goes all the way down to “sex is more engaging, takes longer, and requires more repeat visits than porn, so comparing social media traffic to porn traffic online is pointless.”

But it’s nice to see someone officially pointing out that we are who we are, online or off, and that we don’t dump all our cultural conditioning when we log on and then pick it up the instant we log off. (Er, duh.)

And it was also fun to tell Tiffany that she and I are MySpace friends, which she didn’t realize.