Many more here.
Technology: Bra that unhooks at signs of love.
in Breasts
From Dangerous Minds, (with tongue presumably planted in cheek):
World's First Bra That Only Unhooks When True Love Is Detected
According to this ad, women have no clue when they’re confronted with true love andwho they should take their tops off for. None. But never fear, Japanese lingerie manufacturer Ravijou has it all worked out for us clueless ladies: A bra with a front clasp that only unhooks when “true love” is detected. Yep! You heard me.
"The bra comprises of a sensor which monitors your heart rate and other vitals, the data is constantly transmitted via Bluetooth to a mobile phone which processes the data using a special app and measures the heart rate elevation using special algorithms and preset data and it is only when your heart has truly found that special someone would it beat in a way that the app would recognize and wirelessly unhook the bra.
Ladies can relax as not any changes in heart rates will unhook the bra as the experts at Ravijour say it is only when a woman falls in true love does she get excited enough for the Adrenal Medulla to secrete Catecholamine which affects the autonomic nerve and increases the heart rate which is detected by the sensor and processed by the specially developed iOS app."
Thanks for sorting this out for me, Ravijou! I would have never known who’s truly worthy of my boobage without you!
If this wasn’t from Japan, you wouldn’t believe it was real, but because it is from Japan, I think it’s safe to assume this is a real product.
And the video:
How much does having a vagina cost?
In an article from 2012, Jezebel broke down how much it costs to have a vagina. Of course, costs will vary widely depending on a woman's preferences and needs. Also, we're lucky in Canada that some of this stuff is covered by our medical plans.
This Is How Much It Costs to Own a Vagina: An Itemized List by Tracie Egan Morrissey
Given the national debate regarding birth control coverage, it's increasingly clear that many people have no idea how much it costs it to own a vagina — folks are getting up in arms about the idea that the pill could set uninsured women back about $1000 a year, but in the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. Do you even know just how much you're shelling out for your clam? Were you aware of the fact that in your 20s alone, you will spend over $26,000 on vaginal maintenance? Herewith, we do the math on just how much that cooter is costing you.
Note: Annual quantities of drugstore-type purchases and personal grooming treatments are estimates based on Jezebel staffers' personal experiences.
[…]
Tampons & Maxipads
Yes, there are reusable devices, like the Diva Cup (which has its own cult-like following), but about 70 percent of American women use tampons. And on average, a woman will, in her lifetime, use more than 11,000 tampons or pads. That's a lot of disposable cotton. And it's a necessity. Could you imagine if we just free-flowed? The entire world would look like a murder scene.
$6.79 per box at Drugstore.com, at 9 boxes of tampons per year: $61.11 $7.99 per package of maxi pads at Drugstore.com, at 7 packages a year: $59.43
[…]
Pubic Hair Removal
Recent studies indicate that most women, aged 18 - 39, engage in pubic hair removal—whether partial or total—through various methods (waxing, shaving, laser removal). A 2009 survey released by the American Laser Centers claimed that the average woman shaves 12 times a month, spending about $15.95. Women who are committed to waxing do so every 6 weeks.
$35 per waxing at 9 times per year: $315 $15.95 for shaving products per month at 12 times per year: $191.40
Reusable pads.
in Menstruation
GladRags Day Pads, Pantyliners, and Night Pads have it all. They’re comfortable, easily washable, good for the environment, and will save you money, too! Soft and breathable, you'll never suffer through the chafing and irritation of disposable pads again. All pads are available in colored cotton and organic undyed cotton.
You can check out all their products by clicking here.
Family Guy: DeBussy.
in Humour Etc.
Juvenile, yes, but funny - channel your inner 13-year old.
Thursday mail - January 23rd.
Have any questions or comments related to sex or sexuality? If so, fire away.
Artificial hymen kits.
There are several online sources for artificial hymen kits. From the Hymen Shop:
Restore your virginity in five minutes with this new technologically advanced product. Kiss your deep dark secret goodbye and marry in confidence for only $29.95 … no surgery … no needles … no medication … no side effects …
[…]
An artificial hymen also known as artificial virginity kit (and popularly referred to as a "chinese hymen" or "fake hymen") is a type of prosthetic membrane created for the purpose of simulating an intact human hymen.
Since hymens can be broken via physical activity or even by the use of a tampon, many women are concerned about restoring their virginity. Hymen repair, hymen reconstruction, hymen surgery or revirgination are all terms that refer to Hymenoplasty - cosmetic surgery that restores the female hymen. While the Hymenoplasty procedure requires admission to a clinic and can cost thousands of dollars, the artificial hymen provides much cheaper and convenient way to become a virgin again!
How it Works
Insert the Artificial Hymen into your vagina carefully. It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrates, it will ooze out a liquid that appears like blood, not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans and you will pass through undetectable! It's easy to use, clinically proven non-toxic to human and has no side effects, no pain to use and no allergic reaction. Here is close up photo of the Artificial Hymen:
And a really poor-quality video of how they work:
Canadian porn habits.
in Attitudes, Pornography
From the Huffington Post:
Canadian Porn Habits Revealed, Thanks To Pornhub (NSFW)
Western Canadians like their “teen” porn, the prairies are into MILFs and central Canada is all about lesbian sex.
Those are some of the sordid details of Canadians’ porn habits, as revealed by porn streaming site Pornhub (link is safe for work).
Canadian visitors to Pornhub, which bills itself as “the world’s largest porn site,” searched for “lisa ann,” “massage” and “yoga” more than any other search term, the site finds. Among genres of porn (if you can call them that), “teen,” “MILF” and “babysitter” came out on top.
But there were notable regional differences for the top search term [see photo above].
This actually makes Canadians fairly normal. Worldwide, Pornhub found the most common terms to be “teen,” “milf” and “anal.” So apparently Canadians are slightly less into anal, and slightly more into yoga, than other countries. (Check out the worldwide stats here.)
Canadians also spend somewhat more than the average amount of time on the site, lasting an average of a bit more than 10 minutes and visiting an average of eight pages. That compares to a global average of eight minutes and fifty-six seconds.
Mondays are the busiest days for porn viewing in Canada, the site says, which is also the case for most other countries surveyed. Weekend days generally see the lowest porn traffic.
But there are events that cause porn traffic to plummet. What could pull people away from their smut? Well, in Canada, hockey games definitely can.
During an Ottawa-Pittsburgh semi-finals game last year, porn traffic in major cities dropped by more than 20 per cent, with traffic in Ottawa down nearly 50 per cent, the site notes.
“If that’s not love, [we] don’t know what is. Spezza, congrats, your fans really love you!” Pornhub exclaims.
Skiing in the buff.
Letting it all hang out, literally (NSFW - Not Safe For Work):
Hyemenoplasty.
The procedure is explained near the end:
Vice: Buttloads of pain.
in Attraction, Body Image
From Vice:
Buttloads of Pain Illegal Ass Enhancement May Be America's Next Health Epidemic By Wilbert L. Cooper
The horror that befell Oscarina Busse’s backside began in July 2009. The 35-year-old Floridian felt a dull but persistent itch deep in the meat of her buttocks, one that was impossible to scratch.
It wasn’t long before Oscarina noticed that her butt was changing colors—first turning purple, like a throbbing finger that had been wrapped too tightly with string, and then a cadaverous gray. From there, things got much worse. Her flesh started to crust and painfully peel off until, a few months later, the whole mess collapsed like a badly baked cake. The cheeks of her ass drooped down, loaded with a stew of poisonous goop that collected around her lower buttocks. What had once stood high and felt supple to the touch had become hot and hard and stinging. Oscarina’s derrière had transformed so much that it no longer looked like it was part of a human’s body; her five-year-old daughter mistook her fluid-filled cheeks for a poopy diaper, calling it a “full Pamper.”
Like thousands of women across the globe and increasingly in the US, Oscarina was suffering from the side effects of a black-market butt injection. Because of its clandestine nature, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many people in the US are illegally getting their butts pumped up like a pair of Reeboks. But the number is definitely growing; due to the proliferation of reported disfiguring cases like Oscarina’s and even deaths, law-enforcement officials and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons view black-market butt injections as a burgeoning epidemic in the US.
The crude inflation procedure consists of shooting a liquid substance such as silicone or mineral oil directly into a client’s butt cheeks and hips through a syringe. There is no substance that is safe to inject into your body to create more volume, not even medical-grade silicone, but these black-market “butt doctors” have, according to victims, allegedly used harsh substances like concrete and the industrial silicone sold at hardware stores in their procedures. After the injections, the exterior flesh wounds are sometimes closed with Super Glue to prevent the toxic slop from leaking out.
Read the rest here.
And the trailer for the mini-doc:
See the full documentary here.
Thursday mail - January 16th.
Have any questions or comments related to sex or sexuality? If so, fire away.
Documentary: The Purity Myth.
From the Media Education Foundation:
Produced & Distributed by the Media Education Foundation Featuring Jessica Valenti
In this video adaptation of her bestselling book, pioneering feminist blogger Jessica Valenti trains her sights on "the virginity movement" -- an unholy alliance of evangelical Christians, right-wing politicians, and conservative policy intellectuals who have been exploiting irrational fears about women's sexuality to roll back women's rights. From dad-and-daughter "purity balls," taxpayer-funded abstinence-only curricula, and political attacks on Planned Parenthood, to recent attempts by legislators to de-fund women's reproductive health care and narrow the legal definition of rape, Valenti identifies a single, unifying assumption: the myth that the worth of a woman depends on what she does -- or does not do -- sexually. In the end, Valenti argues that the health and well-being of women are too important to be left to ideologues bent on vilifying feminism and undermining women's autonomy.
The trailer:
And an interview on Anderson Cooper:
The Swiss cheese masturbator.
From Gawker:
That man you see above is holding a slice of Swiss cheese over his dick. He is currently driving around the Mayfair area of Philadelphia asking women to use the slice of cheese while jerking him off.
The man, who has yet to be identified, is being sought by cops in Philadelphia after a number of women have filed complaints with police stating that he has driven up to them in parking lots and exposed himself while asking to be masturbated with a slice of Swiss cheese.
The Philadelphia Daily News has also talked to a 20-year-old woman named Gabby Chest who claims that the same man sent her a message on OKCupid asking her to "perform masturbation on him with cheese." The Daily News obtained an excerpt from that message in which the man explains the genesis of his fetish:
"I started to compare girls to cheese due to their milky complections [sic], girls are soft, smooth feeling and tend to like dairy products more. That and typical advertising, always using a girl to advertise dairy products. So cheese is what I started to use as a replacement for having sex with girls."
This is what it means to be a woman in America. If a 50-year-old man isn't harassing you online about executing a specific food fetish, he's driving up to you in a parking lot with his dick out and a slice of Swiss cheese literally in his hand.
TED: Al Vernacchio - Sex needs a new metaphor. Here's one ...
in Sex Ed
From TED:
For some reason, says educator Al Vernacchio, the metaphors for talking about sex in the US all come from baseball -- scoring, getting to first base, etc. The problem is, this frames sex as a competition, with a winner and a loser. Instead, he suggests a new metaphor, one that's more about shared pleasure, discussion and agreement, fulfillment and enjoyment. Let's talk about ... pizza.
More PostSecrets.
in Humour Etc.
Many more here.
Short: Why Blowjobs Are More Intimate Than Sex.
From College Humor:
Winning bidder pays $42,000 for an hour-long cam session with dominatrix.
From Kinky.com:
The Art of the $42,000 Webcam Show
If webcams are the future of porn, they may just have had their moon landing. While the tech world hovers over the Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas, Maitresse Madeline, San Francisco-based domme and Kink.com porn director, has auctioned off a private hour-long webcam show for an astounding $42,000. Beat that, Bitcoin.
The bidding in the two-week long auction began in the hundreds of dollars, but quickly escalated to thousands — and then tens of thousands of dollars. The winner, who wishes to remain anonymous, will get a one-on-one webcam session with the femdom director.
[…]
A lot of people will think $42K is an incredible amount of money for an hour’s work — it puts you on par with Lady Gaga and Oprah in terms of earning power. What do you tell people who wonder how it can be worth it? Again, people are paying for something they don’t get in their normal life whether that’s a fetish that they are afraid to live out in real life or maybe their partner won’t give them what they desire and they look to cams to fulfill that missing part of their sexuality. People want to remain anonymous and they pay for anonymity. Some men are looking for financial domination and that’s what gets them off. Often it’s a chance to get to know your favorite performer. Whatever your reason is, it’s a custom made experience just for you in real time with no strings attached, whenever you want.
Read the rest here.
Thursday mail - January 9th.
Have any questions or comments related to class or otherwise? If so, fire away.
The Sexplainer.
Marnie Goldenberg is a sex educator from Vancouver (check out her Facebook page here and her blog here). Her work is brilliant and ties in nicely with the themes discussed during the section on Sex Ed that we're covering this week.
The Vancouver Sun recently published an in-depth article about here work:
Sexplain that!: Raising sexually intelligent kids is a job for parents By Denise Ryan
When I told my son that I was going to a get-together of parents to talk with an expert about how to talk to our kids about sex, he flashed me the kind of look you would expect from a 12-year-old boy.
A mix of horror, revulsion, and something else I couldn’t quite identify. Curiosity, maybe?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked.
He struggled to find the words, finally settling on these: “It’s just that I think you moms are a little bit naive.”
Armed with that assessment, he was dispatched to spend the evening with a friend and I set off to find out just how naive I was.
Marnie Goldenberg launched her Vancouver “Sexplainer” salons after making a career switch from lawyer to sexual- health educator. Now she’s offering sexual-health education for parents, aimed at helping them raise “sexually intelligent kids.” In the casual atmosphere of private homes, parents get together, split the cost — about $300 for an evening — and have a facilitated discussion focused on how to communicate effectively about sexuality with kids of all ages.
“Educated kids are safer kids,” says Goldenberg. “I want to give people skills, and empower them to be proactive.”
Goldenberg is tapping into a growing need. Parents want, and need help navigating conversations with kids that are growing up in a culture of sexuality that is changing at warp speed.
Read the rest of the article here.