This movie looks great!

Given that even elementary schools are eliminating recess (oh yes, oh yes, Google it), I find this rather amusing, in a macabre kind of way:
Office workers at risk for blood clots
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Office workers glued to computer screens are at greater risk of deadly blood clots forming in their legs than long-distance air travelers, the author of a New Zealand study on thrombosis said Monday.

I’m enough of a hypochondriac to have self-diagnosed my own thrombosis, and enough of a problem-solver to come up with a creative solution: get off my ass and move around often.

I even bought a timer that lights up, makes noise and vibrates.

Jon Carroll is half the reason I wanted to be a columnist when I grew up (Dave Barry is the other half). This week I learned that Jon and I have a few things in common: we both write on Wednesday what gets published on Friday, and we’re both sick this week. (Although in my case, I write on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and gol-darn-it-I’m-late-again Thursday mornings despite a Wednesday 3pm deadline). He has strep throat, I have bronchitis, and both of us have experienced feverish thoughts about souls, sins and writing as time travel. Only he wrote about his, and it’s brilliant.

Brilliant.

I was going to quote some of my favorite lines but I don’t want to ruin it by taking things out of context, so here — treat yourself:

JON CARROLL

Here are the final results of the Talk Sex with Sue sex-tech survey:

Episode 138 - Sex-Tech Special

I’m delighted to find that about a third of the 13,500 respondents said that sex-tech has has helped their love lives, versus only seven percent who feel it has harmed them. Also, men and women responded to this question pretty much the same — no huge disconnects here.

What’s interesting is how one defines sex-tech. More and more I find that people immediately think internet porn, as if that’s all there is. Certainly, that’s mostly what we hear about in mainstream news, that and child molestation (in part, I think, because we want to believe that strangers are the biggest source of sexual abuse, and not family and friends). (I had a radical point of view on that — see Net Effect: No More Sexual Abuse.

On the show last night we took calls from people for whom sex-tech has been a problem or at least a source of confusion. But the folks in the control room said afterward that toward the end, people were calling in with their happier stories, about falling in love online, coming out online, finding themselves, and so on. And that’s great to hear.

Feel free to email me directly with your stories (and questions), good and bad and everything in between. I’d love to hear about sex-tech at work in your life.

(Picture: Regina Lynn, Dan Savage, Sue Johanson, Richard Cazeau)

Just back from Talk Sex with Sue — thanks everyone who watched and who called in. The hour zips by so fast when you’re on set and we didn’t get to all the callers and topics we’d hoped to, but there ya go. I told ‘em they should do a sequel in the fall. LOL

After lugging my Nikon D50 all the way to Canada, I forgot to take it to the studio with me. I still think like a writer, not a multimedia content producer, I suppose. Either that or my normal absent minded professor tendencies were at work again. So I’ve no behind-the-scenes photos to share but I’m pretty sure Dan Savage will blog about it soon, and HE was taking pictures with his cell phone. Which, for some reason, I wasn’t. Tired, me? Harrumph.

I’m researching teledildonics this afternoon, and re-discovering that sex-tech coverage comes in the following categories:

- Hahhaha look at this kinky thing the geeks are doing, aren’t they lame (and yet somehow I managed to write about it anyway)

- Hey look, it’s a gadget, that means it’s tech and we get to write about sex in our tech magazine (with varying degrees of respect, from giggles to mature acceptance)

- I’m in the adult industry and incorporating tech to help me make money

- SEX-TECH IS SCARY AND EVIL! PROTECT THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN! BAN IT! BURN IT AAAAAAALL!

- I sell this product and therefore have a description, a review, and an advice article wrapped around it

- I try things and share my experiences, opinions, analysis and predictions without embarrassment or fear, so we can all (a) be aware of interesting new sex-tech developments and the many ways in which tech affects sex and relationships and (b) use that awareness to shape a more sex- (and tech-) positive culture and (c) make informed decisions and (c) not get all caught up in the fear-mongering about things that really aren’t scary

And as far as I can tell, only a small handful of us fall into that last category. Which is sad, because I think it’s an important category. How else will we be able to learn from each other, keep abreast of what inventive folks are doing, and balance the shame and snootiness and giggling and sarcasm and carefully cultivated jadedness that appear everywhere else?

I know Violet Blue sometimes has to defend her column to her publisher (the SF Chronicle). I very, very occasionally have to do the same, although my editors have always been wonderfully supportive of Sex Drive. (Of late, there has been some squeamishness about “gadgets,” so I’m giving them a break from columns about tangible sex-tech. But no worries; I’ll keep you posted one way or another.)

Sex is natural. Tech is human. Putting them together makes so much sense, it’s amazing that we can’t just relax about it.

Imagine what we could write about then, of we didn’t have to battle the “omg it’s SEX!” bias and re-justify our existence every time.