Sex ties people together and is as likely to be a part of a greater social web as confined to two people, if I am interpreting this snippet of archaeologist Timothy Taylor’s research correctly.

Study: Prehistoric Man Had Sex for Fun
Practices ranging from bondage to group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were widespread in primitive societies as a way of building up cultural ties.

According to the study, a 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman - the Venus of Willendorf - and an equally ancient stone phallus found in a German cave, provide the earliest direct evidence that sex was about far more than babies.

Timothy Taylor, reader in archeology at Bradford University, reviewed evidence from dozens of archeological finds and scientific studies for his research.

“The widespread lay belief that sex in the past was predominantly heterosexual and reproductive can be challenged,” said Taylor.

Judging from the comments, he’s already frightening and angering a lot of people. I haven’t read the whole book and therefore am not going to judge his science or analysis just from a newspaper press release.

However.
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In America we believe a teacher loses her authority if her students have seen her naked. In Belgium, apparently, getting naked just shows that you have a sense of humor — and a serious purpose, should you be elected as a senator.

Click the link for the pictures, which are just barely safe for work.

Sexy politician goes naked and crazy in Belgium
“Tania Derveaux, leading candidate for senate of the NEE party in Belgium goes completely naked for the party’s campaign and for Belgium’s most popular men’s magazine.”

Quickie:

Future technologies may destroy sex as ultimate pleasure for humans - Pravda.Ru
The public morals have been dictating to people for hundreds of years in what manner they must have sex and threatened that any deflection would end in infernal tortures. Luckily, in the course of time people are getting more disregardant of what the public morals say about the modes of having sex.

The U.S. refused to allow a Canadian to enter our country because said Canadian had written about his experiments with LSD, which took place 32 years ago.

globeandmail.com: A few trips decades ago put an end to this one
Because Mr. Feldmar had never been charged with possession of the once-popular illegal drug, privacy advocates are even more alarmed by the way U.S. border guards at the busy Peace Arch crossing near Vancouver found out about it.

The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head.

Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer involved in privacy issues for 20 years, said the incident sends a frightening message to Internet users, particularly those who bare their souls online.

“Don’t ever put anything about any illegal activity on the Internet,” Mr. Oscapella warned yesterday. “It leaves a digital footprint for all to see, and it’s there forever.

“We’ve gone beyond Orwellian measures. The state can now do things with a flick of the switch that used to be incredibly labour intensive.”

I wonder if my plans to travel around the world for a few months when I’m 45 (after Jedi dies and before I get a new puppy) will be curtailed by having written all that I have written? At least consensual sex with adults isn’t illegal in most of the places I’d like to visit.
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Researchers confirm what Sex Drive readers already know:

Early condom use by teens reduces risk of sexually transmitted disease: study
(CP) - A U.S. study finds that teens who use condoms the very first time they have sex are half as likely to test positive for sexually transmitted diseases several years later.

The survey involved more than 4,000 sexually active adolescents who were questioned between 1994 and 2002. In addition to having lower rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea, they were 36 per cent more likely to say they had used a condom in their most recent sexual encounter seven years later.

This, plus the recent legislation that requires public school sex ed to be medically accurate, reassures me that we are thinking about these things, we are trying to find the right balance, and that while change doesn’t happen as fast as (many of us wish, it does happen. (It’s hard enough getting 9 people to agree on a restaurant; getting millions to figure out a sex ed policy is at least as complicated, don’t you think?)

Good news for Julie Amero and other teachers caught in these kinds of situations (emphasis is mine):

Amero case gets longer look
NORWICH — A second delay by the state in sentencing a substitute teacher convicted of exposing seventh-graders to Internet pornography may signal state prosecutors are taking another look at the case.

Julie Amero, 40, of Windham was scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in Norwich Superior Court. She faces a maximum of 40 years in prison — 10 years for each of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.

For the third time since March, sentencing was postponed, this time until May 18.

Here’s what I had to say on the subject: Protect the Children from Porn.

Here’s hoping for a sensible resolution.

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen to me tomorrow on my way to Seattle:

Adult Toy At Center of Bomb Scare
An “adult toy” toy from China has been held responsible for a bomb scare that saw the closure of New Zealand post center on Thursday.

The package set off alarm bells when first discovered by an x-ray machine in China, where airport cargo staff placed the item in an overnight explosives safe.

Emergency services in Auckland, New Zealand, who were notified that the parcel was on its way, called for an evacuation of the building. Upon investigation it was revealed that the package was actually a sexual aid.

Thanks to everyone who sent me this link:

Dilbert 4/20

I just got this email from a toy buyer for adult retailer PleasureMeNow NSFW:

So, after reading your articles about the Je Joue, and your anger towards retailers who won’t carry an item that they think is too complicated for women to opperate, I convinced my bosses to add the Je Joue to our inventory. I’ve come a different conclusion about why companies won’t carry it - customers aren’t buying it! It’s rather expensive, and at the end of the day, it’s a vibrator. Granted, it’s a very advanced, woman-friendly vibrator that deserves a fighting chance in the over-populated, low-quality world of adult novelties, but it’s still a vibrator that costs hundreds of dollars. Now, our customers aren’t afraid to pay some good money for an item they think is worth it - we sell tons of Love Machines, Sex Swings & Stands, etc., but we have yet to sell a single one of these nifty vibrators. A $50 rabbit vibrator, most people won’t think twice about. But a $300 vibe that you have to program yourself? That seems to make people blink a bit. So, while I completely agree with you, that women are more than capable of enjoying and experiencing the Je Joue with a minimal level of brain-strain, I think the price tag on it scares too many people away. Maybe in the future, the savvy designers can come up with a way of reducing the price without reducing the uniqueness and quality.

Maybe the Je Joue folks should ship the units with more than 10 pre-set programs on the handset, drop the price by $50, and stop with the romantic-but-vague “personal pleasure” copy and start emphasizing just how well the thing simulates oral sex? Because vibration isn’t all that it does, and in fact if all you want is vibration, you might as well get something cheaper.

I don’t know if the thing is “worth” $300. It depends on how much money you have and whether you’ve already bought an iPhone and an MP3 player. It’s one of my favorites and yet I still don’t use it as often as I use one or two of my other vibrators, because most of the time I’m looking for a quick release (”push the reset button”) rather than a more leisurely and more intensely pleasurable experience.

For phone or IM lovemaking, the Je Joue is the best, whether you customize the programs or not. It’s the closest thing to cunnilingus other than an actual tongue, and it doesn’t get tired or neck cramps either. (Which is not a dig at humans, by the way - we call get tired and neck cramps, and that’s part of it, and that’s fine!)

So tell me: why would you not buy one? What could PleasureMeNow do to sell what they’ve got? Is it an awareness thing? Do we need to catch a celebrity with one in her purse to encourage more development along these lines?

For a while, the Je Joue was on the bestseller list at Babeland. Maybe you have to be able to touch it to realize it’s worth buying.

Comment away.

My first thought about Assembly Bill 1551, which adds a sales tax to adult businesses and products and designates the money to fund programs to fight criminal activity, is that it’s not the first time we’ve taxed something to pay for something unrelated. California taxes things like gasoline and cigarettes and then directs the money into vaguely related things, like health care for kids.

But reading through the Adult Video News piece NSFW I was reminded of the difference. Porn is speech. Well, content is speech, anyway; I suppose a DVD might be a commodity. And you can’t tax speech on the basis of its content.

According to AVN, the Free Speech Coalition is going to Sacramento on April 22-23 to protest the proposal, although it doesn’t seem to have any information about that on its site.

Weird. I actually wrote about six more paragraphs about Hillary, Hugh and Larry — explaining that I know the difference between campaign contributions and buying a politician, for one thing. I have no idea why it didn’t post and of course now I don’t remember everything I said. Mainly, though, I was hoping that Hillary’s inconsistency of taking money from adult businesses now but not two years ago shows growth on her part. And also I mused about where we draw the lines, for ourselves - is Playboy ok but Hustler not, is Hustler ok but Gent not, etc. - and how the lines change over time as you see more and learn more and relax about it all. And sometimes you draw your lines closer in, too. The important thing is that you draw your own lines without trying to force your lines on other people.

Another accidental porning costs a substitute teacher her job:

Glimpse of porn in class leads teacher to resign
…a substitute teacher on Wednesday read the day’s lesson plan and started to show students what was supposed to be an instructional video about volcanoes.

“When the videotape began to play, pornographic video images appeared on the screen,” the letter said. “The substitute teacher promptly shielded the screen away from the students and immediately stopped the tape.

“Although students were exposed to inappropriate material for approximately 15 seconds, this event demonstrated a profound error in judgment on the part of the regular classroom teacher.”

It’s that lesson one learns about presentations — always do a dry run before the audience comes in, even if the regular teacher has already set the video up for you. I guess in a classroom situation, you turn the video to where only you can see it, mute it, play it without sound for a minute, and see what’s on the tape? Because you have so much spare time for this kind of nonsense?

I don’t have enough facts to make any sort of intelligent comment on this particular incident — but I want to know a couple of things. One, has this kind of thing happened before, more quietly? We’ve had VHS for what, 20 years? This can’t be the first time. And two, how many students are even now scheming to bring porn into the classroom as a prank or an attack on a teacher or other staff member? And three, where did the tape come from? Her own home, where someone might have accidentally (or deliberately) put a porn tape in the science tape box? Or the school tape library?

[Thanks, Nathan, for the link. And thanks to numberless for the correction in the Comments!]

Larry Flynt’s response to Hillary Clinton’s rejection of his $1,000 contribution two years ago (for her Senate campaign) is stranger to me than her accepting Hugh Hefner’s recent $2000+ contribution (for her Presidential campaign):

AVN: Hillary Clinton Says ‘Yes’ to Playboy, ‘No’ to Hustler NSFW
“She has every right to denounce me, and to denounce pornography – but she can still take my money,” Flynt said. “And if she can’t take my money, she’s lost something much more important – my vote.”

It seems to me that if you agree with a candidate’s objectives (or at least, prefer one candidate’s to another’s) and want them in office enough to contribute to their campaign, you’d still vote for them even if they didn’t take your money. Unless you decided to contribute to everyone even though you already planned to vote for the other candidate.

It doesn’t seem like $1000 is enough to buy a politician, though, is it? I’m not sure what the going rates are these days — I always assumed I couldn’t afford it. But I could scrape up $1000 if i had to (although not this week, gasp gasp).

I couldn’t blog yesterday because every moment I didn’t have to be working, I was reading this:

Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

It’s a collection of columns he wrote over 20 years or so, before leaving newspapers to write novels. Masterful writing, unerring sense for story and character — he puts you right there, no matter what he’s writing about.

I am now both intimidated and inspired.

Sam Sugar summarizes why Danni.com’s dumping of DRM is a good thing, not just for that company but for the online adult business as a whole.

Danni Drops DRM | SugarBank
Windows Media DRM, the flavor Danni.com and the rest of the jizz bizz most often use, is clunky and almost impossible to work with on a Mac, so while adopting it gave Danni.com a false sense of security, it cost them the thousands of members who cancelled due to problems viewing video. The decision to remove DRM means Danni.com will lose fewer subscribers and that’s money straight to the bottom line. That’s why whatever happens with their free to copy content, they’ll still be richer without DRM than with it.

I wonder if the music biz — and film, and TV — is paying attention. They’d better. The People are already taking media matters into our own hands but that doesn’t mean we don’t want the professional stuff. However, put enough barbed wired fencing and Alsatians between us and content, and we will stop buying it and the fears about “giving it away is bad for business” will become self-fulfilling prophecy.