From Buzzfeed:
Thursday mail - March 26th.
Have any questions or comments? If so, fire away.
Legos act out Canada's new sex work laws.
From the Ottawa Citizen:
Results of CIHR-funded research on sex work in Canada.
in Sex Work
From Maclean's, in its entirety:
First national study sheds new light on sex work in Canada Rachel Browne talks to researchers behind five-year study by Rachel Browne
Earlier this year, Justice Minister Peter MacKay promised that Bill C-36 would eradicate prostitution in Canada and protect the most vulnerable in the sex industry by “going after the perpetrators, the perverts, those who are consumers of this degrading practice.” Despite criticism and repeated calls for the bill to be withdrawn, it will likely become law before the government’s December deadline.
Sex workers are concerned for their future. And while the bill’s opponents voiced their concerns even before it was tabled, they haven’t had much influence on it.
Researchers from around the world are in Ottawa this week to hear findings from the first national study on Canada’s sex industry that seriously undermine the bill’s assumptions that most people who sell sex are victims and those who buy sex are fiends. While the study is unlikely to influence the new legislation, it provides rare insight into the lives of Canadians who buy and sex sell. It also adds to the body of evidence available for the inevitable Charter challenge.
“Sex workers are average Canadians. They’re Caucasian, in their 30s and 40s, and have education and training outside of high school. Most of them don’t feel exploited, they don’t see buyers as oppressors,” the study’s lead author Cecilia Benoit, a researcher at the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia, told Maclean’s. “They’re not weird, unusual people. They are people trying to do the best they can with the tools they have to live their lives.”
The five-year study began in 2011 and is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Researchers interviewed 218 sex workers, 1,252 clients, 30 spouses or intimate partners of sex workers, 61 managers of escort or massage businesses, and 80 law enforcement officials. The interviewees were from six cities: St. John’s, N.L., Montreal, Kitchener, Ont., Fort McMurray, Alta., and Victoria.
Throughout the justice committee hearings on Bill C-36 in July, the bill’s supporters claimed the average age of entry into the sex industry is between 14 and 16. For the sex workers in this study, the average age was 24; 29 per cent of the sex workers interviewed said they had engaged in sex work before they turned 19. And while 43 per cent of the sex workers said they were satisfied with their work and 82 per cent felt appropriately rewarded, about one third of those surveyed reported having negative childhood experiences, and the same number grew up in foster care or other child services. The research team plans to examine the link between childhood abuse and the sex industry.
Benoit, who has spent decades researching the sex industry, says she was struck by the interviews she and her husband, fellow researcher Mikael Jansson, did together with the sex workers and their spouses or partners. “I realized just how similar they were to us,” she says. “They were dealing with the constraints of life, trying to support each other.” More than half of the sex workers in the study were in “significant intimate relationships,” and 59 of them were married or living in common-law marriages. Almost half the clients reported being married or in a common-law marriage with a non-sex worker.
Many of the interviews were conducted shortly after the Supreme Court struck down the criminal code provisions on prostitution last year. “People in the industry felt a little bit more at ease then, [and] open to tell us what they were doing,” says Benoit. She’s worried the new laws criminalizing buyers and advertising will push swaths of the industry underground. “It will be harder for clients to help anyone they see being victimized, because it will be illegal. The same with managers in the industry,” she says. “I’m a bit sad about what is going to happen.”
Canadians should also be worried that C-36 makes sex workers targets, says Chris Atchison, a sociologist from the University of Victoria who contributed to the study. “We see exacerbation of conflict and unsafe sex practices when we force people to engage in hostile, criminalized climates,” he says. Clients, or “johns,” in Canada represent all strata of life, so when we adhere to stereotypes, it ignores the diversity of the population and glosses over the bad apples, he says. And the small number of people who prey on the vulnerable in the sex industry will have greater cover, because johns won’t be willing to divulge their anonymity once it becomes illegal to buy sex. “People who are raping and murdering sex workers, they’re not clients,” Atchison says. “Nobody murders a sex worker and then puts $500 down on her corpse.”
Jean McDonald, director of sex-worker support group Maggie’s Toronto, says although C-36 is very similar to the provisions struck down by Bedford, her group is coming up with new ways to navigate the changing industry. She’s also confident some police forces will continue to leave sex workers and their clients alone. “There are some police services, such as in Peterborough, Ont., who, for the last 10 years, have made a point of having a policy of non-enforcement of prostitution laws,” she says. “There is that shimmer of hope I have.”
This is reflected in the report, which finds that police and municipal approaches to sex workers and johns are highly inconsistent across the country. Calgary Police Chief Rick Hanson applauds Bill C-36, for example, whereas Victoria police officers shy away from arresting those engaging in prostitution. The Victoria municipal council recently passed a resolution urging the federal government to abandon C-36. One Montreal police officer told report authors that his force focuses instead on “other crimes that are more serious, such as the trafficking of crack cocaine and the trafficking of firearms.”
Even if prostitution were decriminalized, which the report authors and those interviewed say ought to happen, Benoit says that wouldn’t be enough to make the lives of those in the industry better. “We need societal change, not just at the federal level. We need to change at a more personal level by examining our attitudes and how we discriminate against people,” she says.
Animated global map of same sex marriage.
Sadly, the blog from where it originated is gone. From the Nerd Up North:
Gay rights by jurisdiction: Civil Union (light blue), Equal Marriage (dark blue). Jurisdictions are highlighted (bright blue) in the first year of marriage equality
Here we have the first version of another animated map, this one showing marriage rights around the world. It begins in 2000 for no particular reason, other than perhaps to show which countries allowed civil unions before the first to confer marriage equality (the Netherlands, in 2001). It's noteworthy that Canada and France, among others, only began offering civil unions to gay couples in 1999.
Of course this is an imperfect map -- Argentina, for example, allowed civil unions in one state prior to marriage equality in 2010, as well as in three cities. Obviously I've chosen not to attempt to include municipal recognition of same-sex relationships as those tend to pre-date national or sub-national recognition by leaps and bounds. Australia, on the other hand, offers many of the same benefits in the states that don't allow civil unions as those that do -- it is often the case that civil unions don't confer some or even most of the rights that actual marriage provides. In Canada prior to 2005 each province had different criteria for recognizing common-law partnerships and conferred a different set of rights, even though it was a federal court ruling that began the process.
Gay rights remain controversial even in Canada, where even if it seems like the fight was over a long time ago, most of the country hasn't enjoyed marriage equality for a full decade, and LGBT people are not as of yet explicitly protected by our constitution or human rights legislation. But as this map shows, the fight for LGBT rights has marched inexorably forward, at least throughout the western world. Within the next few years, Israel or Nepal may become the first Asian nations to grant marriage equality rights, and with groundbreaking victories in Latin America in just the last three years, the tide has not only turned but accelerated; 2013 has been the biggest year for marriage equality so far.
It is interesting to compare the progression of gay rights in the countries broken down into their states and provinces on this map. Brazil and Canada saw court decisions and laws rapidly bring each from no recognition to full marriage equality within a matter of years. The United States and Australia, on the other hand, seem to make very little progression each year -- but progression nonetheless.
Of course, this map doesn't indicate the many countries where it's illegal to be gay, a handful of which even carry out the death penalty for any degree of sexual activity between members of the same sex. And there are countries where gay rights have taken major steps backwards in recent years too -- this year, Russia passed a law limiting freedom of expression and association for LGBT citizens and non-citizens alike. In fact, the Canadian government advises its LGBT citizens not to travel to Russia except for urgent business, as advocating for the advancement of gay rights or even showing PDA can now land a tourist in a Russian jail.
The Japanese porn titan.
in Pornography, Sex Work
From Details:
Meet the Hardest Working Man in Porn At 35, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, a $20 billion industry that produces more than double the number of adult films that America does. The only problem: He's part of an endangered species—1 of only 70 (maybe just 30, by some estimates) male actors in a business that churns out thousands of videos a year—and while he keeps coming, the reinforcements don't. Why won't anybody help this guy out, for f***'s sake?
By Paige Ferrari, Photo by Jeremy Liebman
On a sunny Saturday morning in eastern Tokyo, a silver Audi pulls into a parking lot and sparks pandemonium. Out of the driver's seat bounces a small, stocky man with bulging biceps, spiky orange hair, and a broad smile spread across his effulgent, spray-tanned face. He bounds onto the pavement wearing a hoodie and a T-shirt that reads SEX INSTRUCTOR. To his left, the mostly male crowd leans forward, en masse. "Shimiken!" several shout, and a clatter of smartphone shutter sounds follows like a round of applause.
"Let's go," Shimiken whispers to a handler attempting to clear a path through the throng. He raises one arm over his head to air-high-five his riveted fans. It's the morning of the Japan Adult Expo, and the crowd has been waiting for tickets. Inside, they'll get to meet the stars of their wildest fantasies. Outside, they've already caught a glimpse of something rarer: the man who has actually lived them all.
At 35 years old, Shimiken is the king of Japanese porn, more often referred to here as AV (adult video), and there is essentially nothing he won't do or hasn't done while getting busy with more than 7,500 different female costars, including a former teen pop singer, Hungarian exchange students, and a pair of 72-year-old twins. In 18 years and more than 7,000 films, Shimiken has refused only one scenario: having sex with an actress after she had sex with a dog. (He agreed to a rewrite in which the dog merely licked butter off the woman before their scene.)
Read the rest here.
Some women in Delhi talk about masturbation.
I'd be curious to know how many women had to be interviewed before they found some willing to talk openly about masturbation (just these ones? some? a lot?). I'd also be curious to know how representative these women are (i.e., education, social class, religiosity, etc.). None-the-less, an interesting clip.
Pornhub: The impact of 50 Shades of Grey on porn searches.
Pornhub, one of the huge porn aggregator tube sites, has its own research wing (how nerdy!). They analyze search data, and some of it gets reported on Pornhub Insights (check it out here). A recent project examined the impact of 50 Shades of Grey on porn searches. Here's what they found (in its entirety):
50 Shades of Pornhub
Cinema has come to affect our lives and views in real and meaningful ways. For instance, after the release of the film Sideways, Merlot became more difficult to move off of shelves while Pinot Noir enjoyed a 16% spike in sales. Deer hunting decreased by nearly half for a few years after Bambi. In the same vein, the recent release of the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey has been shaking things up over here at Pornhub. Specifically, people are getting freakier in their pornographic preferences and we’ve got the data to prove it.
Not So Grey Area
There’s no real debate here; since the now infamous film was released overValentine’s Day weekend, BDSM related searches have seen a significant increase on Pornhub. The charts below trace BDSM related searches during the days leading up to and then immediately following the film’s February 13th release date. When comparing this activity in the US to the rest of the world as well as to women versus men, the specific traffic patterns follow the same general rises and falls, with a few exceptions. Overall, it seems that the press tour leading up to the premiere helped things along a little, with a decent increase in BDSM searches having been observed the weekend before, over the 6th through the 8th of February.
The 13th marks the real threshold though, with searches for words like ‘submission,’ ‘spank,’ and ‘bondage’ among others, increasing in the US by over 20% and by nearly 40% in women. Suffice it to say, our female users have definitely been channeling their inner Anastasia Steele’s.
Handcuffs and Flogging and Whipe, Oh My!
Now for a look at which specific search terms Pornhub users have been employing to access their new favorite kind of content. Here, action words like ‘submission’ and ‘dominate,’ top the chart, both having increased in the range of about 50% in searches since the movie premiere. Other tools of the trade type terms like ‘whip,’ ‘master,’ and ‘leather’ all also saw some notable spikes in search activity during this time. According to some research by our friends over at Refinery29, these last 3 words are interestingly some of the most used throughout the 50 Shades novel as well.
Femme Domination
It’s no secret that the intended audience of both the novel and subsequent film adaptation of 50 Shades of Grey is women. Touted for a while now as ‘mommy porn,’ it seems that after having experienced the film women are now looking to have a red room experience of their own, at least according to these numbers. In this last chart, the Pornhub statisticians have whipped up this impressive list of which kinky terms women are more likely to search for than men, proving some dominating female tendencies. Following the release of the 50 Shades film, women appear to be more curious about most BDSM terms, searching upwards of 200% more for certain terms in some cases than prior to the release date. Men have been exploring these new waters as well, with increases closer to the range of 20% having been observed with these same terms. Again, action words like ‘submission,’ ‘dominate,’ and ‘spanking’ all skyrocketed by 150-220% by female Pornhub viewers. Suffice it to say, the desire for less vanilla type videos is strong among the ladies – the only thing we can’t say for sure is which side of the paddle they’d prefer to be on.
Thursday mail - March 19th.
Have any questions or comments? If so, fire away.
Things guys say to lesbians.
Another classic from Davey Wavey (many more here):
France contemplating BMI limits for models.
in Attraction, Body Image
From the CBC:
France likely to ban super-skinny models Proposal would also ban pro-anorexia websites and forums encouraging eating disorders
The link between high fashion, body image and eating disorders on French catwalks may lead to a ban on super-skinny models.
France's government is likely to back a bill being discussed in Paris banning excessively thin fashion models as well as potentially fining the modelling agency or fashion house that hires them and sending their agents to jail, Health Minister Marisol Touraine said on Monday.
Style-conscious France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of dollars, would join Italy, Spain and Israel, which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.
The union representing fashion agencies opposes the ban, arguing that regulating a model's waist line will take a toll on the agencies' bottom line.
Under the proposed legislation, any model who wants to work has to have a body mass index (a type of height to weight ratio) of at least 18 and would be subject to regular weight checks. Health Minister Marisol Touraine says the ban would protect young women who see models as the ideal female form. Plus, many models in France are still in their teens.
So, a woman who is 5-foot-7 would have to weigh at least 121 pounds. The normal weight BMI range is around 18.5 to 25.
Fines, jail time
The law would enforce fines of up to $79,000 US for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for any staff involved, French Socialist Party legislator Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told newspaper Le Parisien.
The bill’s amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestylesand forums that encourage eating disorders.
In 2007, Isabelle Caro, an anorexic 28-year-old former French fashion model, died after posing for a photographic campaign to raise awareness about the illness.
Some 30,000-40,000 people in France suffer from anorexia, most of them teenagers, said Veran, who is a doctor.
In 2013, designer Hedi Slimane was chastised for casting shockingly thin male models at an Yves Saint Laurent show in paris. It was not immediately clear whether France's proposed legislation would apply to male models as well.
OK Trends: Impact of race on messages received.
in Attitudes, Attraction
I've posted tidbits from OKTrends previously; it's the research blog for the dating website OKCupid, and it's both nerdy and amazing. It's also very helpful if you do online dating, as it provides excellent feedback on what works and doesn't work. I was alerted (thanks!) to an old but interesting post on the relationship between race and messages received. It's kind of depressing but worth reading none the less. I've also linked the 2014 update at the bottom - nothing much has changed.
From OkTrends (this is a very cursory selection from the article; if you have the time, the full article is awesome with tons of great data visualizations):
How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get by Christian Rudder
Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if other big websites would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people generating those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.
When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:
[…]
Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.
[…]
Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
White guys respond less overall. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often. It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they in turn get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed.
How many?
From the description:
Telling someone how many people you’ve had sex with is a lot like tripping in the middle of a busy sidewalk: People might act like they couldn't care less, but deep down, everyone is judging you. A lot. Sharing "The Number" with someone can be especially awkward when you're dating them. Most people don't get aroused by the thought of their partners having sex with other people.
To the people who do: You do you -- and someone else, probably.
We managed to track down a few couples who managed to avoid this particular conversation until we thrust them in front of a camera and asked if they'd be willing to share the number of people they'd gone all the way with (only we phrased it differently because it isn't 1957).
Heterosexual men holding hands.
From Stuff Indians Like:
Unlike Iran, homosexuality probably does exist to some extent in India. With so many dance remixes, styles patterned on Bollywood kitsch, open-toed shoes and silk, how can it not? In India, though, homosexuality is one thing, and holding hands is quite another.
In many places throughout Asia, holding hands amongst men is considered a common demonstration of hetero friendship. While crossing chaotic streets or sauntering down the sidewalk chewing paan, Indian men show no shame in interlocking fingers and pressing palms.
One NRI even claims to have seen "macchans," the alpha males of college campuses, locking arms with the lieutenants of their pack in India, and "goondas" holding hands just before launching an assault on a local tea shop that refuses to serve their gang free chai.
In America, though, hand holding between male friends is strictly prohibited by heteronormative social mores. Locking feet in a bhangra circle, however, is completely acceptable and straight. Lifting weights together in sleeveless tees and making eye contact in the full body mirror at the gym while executing synchronized bicep curls is also allowed. But hand holding between close friends? No, that'd be totally gay.
If you are an Indian male visiting family in India, do not be alarmed if upon first meeting you after several years of absence your cousin Anirrudah immediately grabs your hand and holds it next to his thigh for a long period of time. Also do not be alarmed if he is several years older than you, pushing 30, living with his parents and still single. This is the Indian custom of saying, "How have you been, brother? I'm not allowed to touch girls in my family's presence so this is as good as it gets."
Anirrudah will continue to hold your hand as his parents give your family a tour of their flat and introduce you to the goats that roam freely through their back yard. If you jump in alarm at the sight of wild animals, even for a second, Anirrudah will clasp your hand tighter and laugh a toothy grin in your face. "Are you frightened?" he will ask. Never, under any circumstance say yes. Just smile and breathe. It's not gay, just totally uncomfortable.
First successful penis transplant.
From the CBC:
Penis transplant successfully performed in South Africa Doctors replace penis after botched circumcision ritual
A South African university said Friday that it had performed a successful penis transplant. The transplant was done in a nine-hour operation last December by specialists from the faculty of medicine and health services at the University of Stellenbosch. The patient had his penis amputated three years ago following complications from a circumcision performed in his late teens, the university said.
The 21-year-old patient, whose name was not released, "has made a full recovery and has regained all function in the newly transplanted organ," the university near Cape Town in southwestern South Africa said.
It was at least the second time the procedure had been attempted. The university did not give any details of the organ donor, but said "finding a donor was one of the major challenges."
A man in China received a penis transplant in 2005. That operation also appeared to be successful, but doctors said the man asked them to remove his new penis two weeks later because of psychological problems experienced by him and his wife.
Rapid Recovery
Prof. Andre van der Merwe, head of Stellenbosch University's urology department and leader of the South African surgical team, said they had predicted that their patient would have full use of his transplanted organ in about two years.
"We are very surprised by his rapid recovery," van der Merwe said in comments released by the university.
Circumcisions are performed on boys and young men as a rite of passage to adulthood in some rural parts of South Africa. Stellenbosch University said experts had estimated that there could be as many as 250 penis amputations a year in the country because of botched circumcisions.
TED: Christopher Ryan - Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?
This is one of the authours of the book, Sex at Dawn, that shook things up several years ago:
Thursday mail - March 12th.
Have any questions or comments? If so, fire away.
Dr. Ray Blanchard on biological theories of homosexuality.
Dr. Blanchard is one of the heavy hitters in the world of sexual orientation research and theory. In this video, he briefly explains some of the biological correlates of sexual orientation, and goes into detail discussing his fraternal birth order theory.
More PostSecrets.
in Humour Etc.
Cheating: What's worse, emotional or sexual?
From Science Daily:
Research on jealousy: Impact of sexual vs. emotional infidelity
In the largest study to date on infidelity, Chapman University has learned men and women are different when it comes to feeling jealous. In a poll of nearly 64,000 Americans this study provides the first large-scale examination of gender and sexual orientation differences in response to potential sexual versus emotional infidelity in U.S. adults.
According to the findings, heterosexual men were more likely than heterosexual women to be most upset by sexual infidelity (54 percent of men vs. 35 percent of women) and less likely than heterosexual women to be most upset by emotional infidelity (46 percent of men vs. 65 percent of women).
Participants imagined what would upset them more: their partners having sex with someone else (but not falling in love with them) or their partners falling in love with someone else (but not having sex with them). Consistent with the evolutionary perspective, heterosexual men were more likely than heterosexual women to be upset by sexual infidelity and less likely than heterosexual women to be upset by emotional infidelity. Bisexual men and women did not differ significantly. Gay men and lesbian women also did not differ.
"Heterosexual men really stand out from all other groups: they were the only ones who were much more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity rather than emotional infidelity," said David Frederick, Ph.D., and lead author on the study. He went on to note: "The attitudes of gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women have been historically understudied and under theorized in psychology, particularly in regards to tests of evolutionary perspectives."