Equality of the sexes

It's all too easy to forget that "women's liberation" hasn't even begun in some parts of the world, and that women aren't even given the dignity of being treated as second-class citizens.

In Saudi Arabia, an illiterate woman is set to be executed after she was tortured into confessing to using witchcraft to make a man impotent. And tribal elders in Pakistan decide that women shouldn't vote.

Here in the western civilized world (and I make no apology for using that term), there are people who want to roll back the clock and return to their imagined glory days where women knew their place. Childless old men like Pat Buchanan and macho wanna-be Patriarchs are trying to frighten European women with scare stories that if they don't give up their jobs, stay home, obey their husbands and have lots of babies, the terrorists will win and the Muslim Hordes will take over. It's the Yellow Peril redux, only now it's the "slightly off-white, not quite brown, Islamo-fascist Peril".

I believe that many feminists have well and truly lost their way, but don't imagine that means that feminism is no longer relevant or necessary. The forces of evil are still out there.

But it's not all bad news. Although the meme of sexism dies slow, it does die. When a religious school tried to ban a woman from refereeing a basketball match, her male colleagues boycotted the game:

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs.

[...]

"I said, 'If Michelle [Campbell] has to leave, then I'm leaving with her,'" Putthoff said Wednesday. "I was disappointed that it happened to Michelle. I've never heard of anything like that."

Fred Shockey, who was getting ready to leave the gym after officiating two junior high games, said he was told there had been an emergency and was asked to stay and officiate two more games.
"When I found out what the emergency was, I said there was no way I was going to work those games," said Shockey, who spent 12 years in the Army and became a ref about three years ago. "I have been led by some of the finest women this nation has to offer, and there was no way I was going to go along with that."

Isn't that something?

Technical Virgin

The things that offend people, or that people are afraid will offend people (not necessarily the same thing!) often astounds me.

In 2006, actress and mother Melanie Martinez was sacked from her job of host of the PBS television program "The Good Night Show" because of two 30 second videos she had made over five years earlier. The videos, for the now-defunct "TechnicalVirgin.com" website, were send-ups of public service announcements for abstinence-only sex education.

Here are the two videos:

Boys Can Wait



Also viewable here.

I Have A Future



I'm amused (in that "have to laugh or else I'd cry" way) by this comment defending PBS:

But I think in her case she openly lied to her employers. Every job interview has that "prior history" question where if you did anything that would effect your job, it's best to say it then.

"Every" job interview? I've been to a couple of dozen job interviews (some of them were even successful) and I've never been asked if I'd done something that would make me morally unsuitable for the position. And for all we know, she did disclose the videos when she was hired. But if she didn't, it doesn't follow that she lied -- far more likely she just never imagined that they could possibly be an issue.

The dissolute doctor

I stumbled across a blog -- alas, no longer being maintained -- from a British doctor, "Venial Sinner", who writes about the daily traumas of being a doctor in the British hospital system. Not a lot of humour there, except perhaps the gallows variety, but he writes good blog.

There's his frustration at seeing the only chance of identifying a mysterious disease disappear because of the interference of ignorant, judgmental, self-appointed god-botherers:

We have a single lead: an area of infective looking tissue on CT which we could biopsy and culture. Sharon cannot consent to the procedure; she does not currently have the capacity. In the morning, we spoke to her mother who agreed that the biopsy should go ahead all the same and that she would consent to this in place of her daughter (as the law allows).

That was the morning. By the afternoon everything had changed. Sharon's mother had some news. She had gone to the church and spoken with the Elders. The Elders has listened to the story, considered, and pronounced their verdict. Sharon had had no brain infection. God punishes those who live dissolute lives and Sharon had taken drugs. God does not like drugs. His punishment had been severe but he had heard the prayers of Sharon's mother and, being a good and merciful old chap, he had relented. Sharon would recover and all would be well. There was no infection and, ergo, there need be no biopsy. Sharon's mother, a devout Christian, swallowed it whole. She withdrew her consent for the biopsy immediately.

There's his example of how modern medicine can utterly fail to cure patients, and in fact make their life even more miserable and the common problem of patients with medically unexplained symptoms.

On learning that the new Polish government was cracking down on homosexuals, and that the Party Boss had declared that "The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can't agree to it.", Venial Sinner remarked:

Downfall of civilisation, you say? Goodness, sounds bad. Who’d have thought it? You start off by letting two men hold hands in the street and before you know it the whole of mankind is poised to plunge backwards into benighted barbarity.

Cheers doc, where ever you've got to.

Those wacky Republicans

It certainly seems to be a pattern... Republican politician makes a career out of discriminating against gays, then gets caught in some sordid, dirty, anonymous tryst with another man.

Last time it was Bob Allen; before him it was Larry "Wide Stance" Craig; and now, Representative Richard Curtis -- what is it with men with a personal name as a surname? -- finds himself in a gay sex extortion scandal after allegedly promising a young man $1000 for unprotected sex, then claiming he only had $100.

Curtis denied he paid the man for sex, and said he had given him gas money.

Now, I don't really care what body parts people insert in other body parts, so long as everybody involved is a consenting adult, but this is newsworthy because Curtis has a history of voting against bills giving homosexuals equal protection under the law: in both 2005 and 2006, he voted against granting civil rights protections to homosexuals, and then in 2007 he voted against a bill creating domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.

Update: Tom's Modern World has a good cartoon covering my thoughts on this issue:

Dumb senator goes down

Schadenfreude is such an unworthy emotion... but so fun!

Republican senator Bob Allen was arrested for soliciting for sex in a Florida public toilet. Whoops! For a senator from the "Family Values Party" (ha! there's a joke) that's embarrassing. But what came next takes the story to surreal levels of stupidity: he tried to blame the black men in the park for it.

But having been caught doing something stupid, Allen, who is a pudgy white fellow, has decided to double down on his stupidity by offering what is a truly, spectacularly -- indeed, magnificently -- dumb reason for soliciting another man for sex: Fear of a Black Planet!

"This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park," said Allen, according to this article in the Orlando Sentinel. Allen went on to say he was afraid of becoming a "statistic."

[...]

Allen, during the middle of the work day, was at the park, just minding his own business, enjoying the Florida sunshine or whatever, like you do, when he suddenly noticed that the park was full of black men. Fearing for his own personal safety, he decided that the best course of action was to go into the public restroom, peer over a stall -- twice -- to locate a black man, and offer that black man $20 and a blow job if he'd just leave him alone.

It speaks volumes that Allen would rather his constituents see him as a terrified, cowardly racist willing to degrade himself and grovel at the feet of a random black man, than take responsibility for his own actions, admit he gets off on giving anonymous black men blow jobs, and take his licks like a man. Pun intended.

I believe this is why a certain breed of conservative is so keen to talk loudly about responsibility and are constantly accusing progressives of not taking responsibility for their own actions: they're projecting. Because they would rather make excuses than face up to the consequences of their actions, they imagine that everybody else is also making excuses.

But regardless of that, I personally don't have any problem what so ever with gay men giving each other happy endings in public toilets, so long as they're quiet and discreet and clean up after themselves and don't frighten the kiddies. Consenting adults, dontcha know. I'm also aware that homophobic cops have been known to entrap gay guys so they can make an arrest.

But in this case, I've got no sympathy, not one iota. Because the irony just piles up: Senator Allen was one of the co-sponsors of a Florida law against public lewdness.

What is it with these hypocritical GOP politicians? A year and a half ago, it was Congressman Mark Foley, now it's Senator Allen. Do these Bozos honestly believe that the laws they pass don't apply to them?

Sex education

Jonathan Adler from The Volokh Conspiracy mentions briefly another study showing that abstinence-only sex education ("Just Say No To Sex, or you'll go blind") has no effect on teen sex rates.

A new study in the British Medical Journal confirms prior research indicating that abstinence-only education has no effect, positive or negative, on sexual behavior. As critics have long maintained, this review of available empirical research indicates that abstinence-only education does not prevent teenagers from having sex or reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. At the same time, and contrary to the claims of some critics, abstinence-only education does not appear to increase the rate of unprotected sexual activity.

Some of the comments are worth reading too.

Gay Marriage and the War on Terror

Thanks to that reasonable conservative, Jon Swift, two articles of the utmost importance:

1. How the scourge of gay marriage has caused New York Mayor and Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani to cheat on his wife, and Louisiana Senator David Vitter to seek the services of "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey:
   

   Rated 100% by the Christian Coalition for his pro-family voting record and his support of such issues as abstinence-only sex education, Vitter first went to Congress in 1999 when he was elected to fill the seat vacated by Speaker of the House Robert Livingston after it was revealed that Livingston, who had attacked Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair, had himself had extramarital affairs.



2. According to conservative pundits, what the USA needs, more than anything else, is a really big, successful terrorist attack:
   

   According to Fumento all of those liberal New Yorkers who screamed when the World Trade Center collapsed were actually screaming with laughter. Who knew?
   
   In contrast to liberals' glee over the prospect of terrorist attacks in their hometowns, conservatives are all torn up about it, the way we are about wars that kill a lot of civilians and torture and other regrettable necessities. Unfortunately, there seems to be no other way of convincing people how wrong they were to vote for the Democrats and what a disaster it would be to leave Iraq.

The War on Terror and homosexuality

According to the Christian Right, the West is in a fight for survival against the forces of darkness: Islamofascists who want to introduce a Caliphate across the entire world, starting with Iraq and ending with Washington D.C., London and Paris.

Against this dire threat, no act is too extreme:

• Spend $408 billion (and climbing) on invading and occupying Iraq? Sure.


• Hand Afghanistan over to a bunch of corrupt, drug-dealing, woman-hating Fundamentalist warlords? Why ever not?


• "Extraordinary rendition"? Of course.


• Torture innocents? We can't afford the niceties.


• Cozy up to murderous Third World dictators? Absolutely.


• Cut civil liberties and introduce sedition laws? Don't blame us, blame the terrorists.


• Widespread, illegal spying on citizens? A necessary evil.



• Hire Arabic and Farsi translators who happen to be gay? Um... perhaps not.

Despite a chronic shortage of fluent Arabic and Persian linguists, the U.S. military and government continues to fire any linguist they discover is gay. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has only six fluent Arabic speakers. Six. And despite the need to interrogate all those dangerous terrorists, the U.S. military has recently fired twenty-six Arab and Persian speakers for being gay.

"SusanUnPC" from the No Quarter blog quotes a lovely exchange between an anti-homosexual activist and The Daily Show's Jason Jones:

The Daily Show's Jason Jones sat down with Paul Cameron, one of the nation's leading anti-gay activists, said, "I think the country, on the aggregate, is safer without Bleu in the military." Asked why, Cameron explained, "Guys don't want to think about other guys, other fellas, ogling them in the shower or whatever."

Jones responded, "I know I'd rather die in a terrorist attack than suffer through an uncomfortable shower with a gay." Cameron grudgingly responded, "Yes."

Never let it be said that the Christian Fundamentalists don't have their priorities in order.

Defence of marriage

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not...

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v. King County. This decision, given in July 2006, declared that a “legitimate state interest” allows the Legislature to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together. Because of this “legitimate state interest,” it is permissible to bar same-sex couples from legal marriage.

The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

Absurd? Very. But there is a rational basis for this absurdity. By floating the initiatives, we hope to prompt discussion about the many misguided assumptions which make up the Andersen ruling. By getting the initiatives passed, we hope the Supreme Court will strike them down as unconstitutional and thus weaken Andersen itself. And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.

http://www.wa-doma.org/

Dominance rituals, the President and the Terrorist

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published a review of "Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait" by Israeli journalist Uri Dan. Dan was the former adviser, close confidant and friend of the late Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon.

In the book, Uri Dan discusses a meeting between Sharon and US President Bush, and Bush's fantasy for what he would do to Osama bin Laden if he every got his hands on him. Because I'm trying to keep this blog nannyware-safe, I'll just point you here for the description of what Bush would do if he caught bin Laden. But here's a couple of hints:

The President used to be a frat boy.

There's some serious analysis as well, not just cheap gags. Dominance and sexuality are intimately linked in our species.

(An interesting aside: in the book, Dan also hints obliquely that Palestinian President Yassar Arafat may not have died of natural causes, and that Sharon may have been involved.)

Pro-Life community prefers cancer to sex

...and I smell a rat on both sides of the debate.

The Human Papilloma Virus (actually a number of different viruses) or HPV, causes genital warts and about 70% of all cases of cervical cancer. It is not fully blocked by condoms, and doesn't require full penetrative intercourse for transmission. Infection rates are very high, and while the infection rate increases with the number of sexual partners, it doesn't take many to give a very high risk: one study found that over a third of school girls who had only a single sexual partner were infected. Admittedly, they were a high-risk cohort, and that figure probably doesn't hold for the wider population. Nevertheless, the HPV virus is moderately dangerous, and really, really good at spreading, and the virus doesn't care what your morals are. The overall infection rate for the general population in the USA is probably somewhere between twenty and forty percent. (Statistics suggest that infection rates are significantly lower amongst liberal nations with a positive attitude towards sex, like Finland. I'm just saying.)

So why is the HPV vaccine controversial?

Naturally, the "Culture of Life" is up in arms against it. As Mark Kleiman from the Reality-Based Community points out, Right To Lifers have come out from under their rocks to either oppose it outright, or to defend the right of irresponsible parents to let their daughters get cancer by making the vaccine Opt In rather than Opt Out. The argument I see again and again and again is "it will reduce the consequences of having sex" -- like that's a bad thing.

Imagine the "Culture of Life" arguing against refrigerators and pasteurization, because they reduce the harmful consequences of food poisoning. Imagine they argued against seat belts and air bags and ABS braking systems, because they reduce the harmful consequences of car crashes. Wouldn't people say "Of course they reduce the consequences, that's the whole point you moron!"?

It just goes to show our crazy attitudes to sex that even the supporters of the HPV vaccine merely argue that the vaccine won't necessarily encourage women to have sex, instead of coming right out and saying that it is a good thing that it will reduce the harmful consequences of having sex.

But naturally, things aren't always as they seem... if you scratch beneath the surface of the HPV controversy, things become a little murkier. Yes, the wingnuts are against it for all the wrong reasons. But I wonder whether being against it is the right position to take?

Libertarian Jane Galt wonders why there is so much opposition to the vaccine. Naturally, most of the responses on her blog are from libertarians, so the arguments basically boil down to four kinds:

• "My body, you won't tell me what to do, I'll cut my daughter's nose of to spite her face if you try!"


• "Nobody tells me what I should spend my money on!"


• "If the sluts would just keep their legs closed, this wouldn't be a problem."


• Misunderstandings of the medical evidence and faulty analogies with thalidomide.

But buried within the mass of bad reasoning and emotive arguments are a few disquieting facts about the way the vaccination campaign has been handled by the pharmaceutical company behind it, Merck. The push for mass HPV vaccinations seems to have been handled with unseemly haste, given the actual risk of cervical cancer from HPV. I'm hardly one of those luddites who see thalidomide behind every medical advance, but I'd like to see a little more long-term data on the vaccine before we rush off and give it to every schoolgirl over the age of nine.

And then there is the stink of corruption: Texas governor Rick Perry (who has close ties with Merck) has pushed mandatory vaccination through under a very curious condition: under the law, the Legislature is prevented from repealing the law.

Hmmm. Something is rotten in the state of Texas. I'm in favour of vaccination, I'm even in favour of compulsory vaccination in principle (although compulsion isn't on the table here -- the "mandatory" is a poorly chosen term meaning Opt Out). But the way this is being handled just smells wrong to me.

Stripping for the TSA

Violet Blue writes about her public stripping experience:

Sometimes there are women, but it's always mostly men. They are there to watch me, and I am there to be watched. I start at one end, smile at the first man I encounter, and begin. Slowly. Carefully, I take off my glasses and fold them neatly, just like my nighttime bedroom ritual. Then I lean over and unzip one long black platform boot, and then the other. I present each piece of footwear as proof -- as if the sudden shortness in my height, and its message of vulnerability isn't evidence enough. [...] I'm usually still smiling now, because it's time to take off my belt. I know what's going to happen. I unbuckle the metal and leather, sliding the belt through its loops around my waist, which serves to loosen my pants and move the denim to and fro as I work the belt free.

She's not being a naughty girl -- she's boarding a plane.

There is no coincidence that since I've started editing the Best Women's Erotica series that I regularly get erotica submissions about airport security screening search scenes.

Violet Blue lists ten reasons why airport security searches have become eroticized, including:

• While you undress, you are being watched and sized up.


• Your submission is unspoken, it is a rule, and it is unconditional. Your submission is for public consumption.


• There is a constant threat that a stranger will touch you. They can touch you anywhere, and in your most intimate places if they want to.


• It is nonconsensual. And in garden-variety BDSM practice, even this is forbidden territory.

No doubt this is all just annoying, even distressing, for most people. But as Violet says, "I think people pay like $700 an hour in New York dungeons for this kind of thing". There is no doubt there are people -- passengers and security guards as well as writers of erotica -- getting off on this.

Grey Naughtiness

This just goes to show that when it comes to human sexuality, the range of behaviour is enormous.

The New York Times is running a story about the "Graying of Naughty", the growing kink market for middle-aged porn.

DE'BELLA — or Debbie, as everybody calls her — decided late in life to become a porn star. This year she turned 50, time, she knew, to chase her dream.

"I love sex," she explained, biting into a Burger King special before embarking on her scene for the day at a rented house in the San Fernando Valley. She was wearing a bright pink satin and black chiffon nightie with a matching thong and heavy makeup.

"I decided I wanted to do something different," she said. "I'd been working behind the scenes, and my friends said: 'Why not do movies? Have some fun, and get paid for it?' "

So she has. Since May, De’Bella (she did not want her real name published) has used days off from her job as an administrative assistant at a sex-related entertainment company, Platinum X, to shoot about 30 scenes, with men mostly 19 and 20 year old.

And while she is sort of a novelty — appearing on "The Howard Stern Show" to talk about her new career — it is no longer unusual (hey, Hollywood, pay attention) to see women, and men, of a certain age performing in sex movies.

[...]

The biggest change is in the sexual desirability of women old enough to be the viewer's mother. It has been fueled in part by pop culture's embrace of the sexy 40-something women of "Desperate Housewives" and "Stacy's Mom," the 2003 hit song about a teenager's mother who "has got it going on."

[... ]

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. "I shoot specialty films," he explains during a break in filming, adding that he has been in the business for 17 years. "Fat women, old women, hairy girls — all kinds. We feed the niche."

The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women "is oversaturated," he says. "This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home."

Underarm hair

Echidne has a good rant about the conservative obsession with female body hair:

A recent wingnut cartoon adventure story (read: incitement towards civil war) has the picture [below] about the horrible enemies of all right-thinking wingnuts: animal rights activists and I guess the animals they protect. They're coming to get you and your Bible!

But look at the stubble on the woman's legs. That is a signifier that she is a feminist, a feminazi, a woman who will probably eat her children. She's having leg hairs! Eek. She probably has hairy armpits, too. Pardon me while I vomit.

(Click for larger image.)

I'm as much a product of my culture as the next person, so I'm not going to discuss the aethetics of body hair (female or male!) except to note that I was surprised to see letters to American Playboy running four to one in favour of centerfolds with neatly trimmed pubic hair instead of completely shaved. What interests me more is the sociology of the armpit wars.

Especially fascinating is the double-standard of the American conservatives, who on the one hand declare that the nature of women is not just biologically fixed but that it is God-given right and proper that it be so -- except for body hair. Woman who choose to keep their natural, "god-given" body hair and not shave it off are at best freaks and unnatural, and at worse evil.

Just think about that. It is unnatural to not actively remove your natural body hair.

How does this belief differ from the horrific tribal belief widespread across Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia that it is unnatural for women to keep their external genitalia? Of course shaving hair off is not the equivalent of permanently removing bits of your flesh, and there is a vast gulf between the social pressure to shave (whether women's legs or men's faces) and the sometimes forced practice of female genital cutting, but I'm talking about the attitute behind it. In both cases, it is natural to be unnatural, or if you prefer, unnatural to be natural.

Of course, it isn't just women who feel the sting of conservative social disapproval. In conservative circles, men who grow their hair long as god intended (why else would hair continue to grow after it reached the length of a short-back-and-sides?) are disparaged and suffer vituperation -- despite the Biblical precedent of Samson, and traditional drawings of Jesus Christ with long hair. It wasn't that long ago that long-haired men risked physical attack if they wandered into the wrong conservative area.

Beards, for some reason, come and go as fashion, and apart from the occasional outlawing of beards by (say) Russian czars, I don't know of any period in recent Western history when men suffered more than the lightest social disapproval for their facial hair or lack of it. (Although that disapproval can be pretty severe: try running for election as president with long hair.)

Another interesting factor is the double-edged way that conservatives use body hair as a weapon against women. If a woman shaves, then clearly she's (at least partially) submitting to particular social conventions. Any particular woman may or may not care about that -- after all, not all social conventions are bad. I don't see the social convention that people of both sexes shower and keep clean as particularly oppressive. But if a woman chooses to buck the convention, it gives conservatives two angles of attack: on the one hand, unshaven legs and armpits become a sign that the person isn't a real woman, that they are ugly, manly, unable to attract a man and therefore their entire motives become suspect: "they're just an angry man-hating feminazi".

But on the other hand, and at the same time, they are also condemned for wasting their time on silly trivialities. To the conservative mind, female body hair is simultaneously a trivial matter of grooming not worth getting upset about and a significant symbol of femininity that colours not only the entire personality of the woman but also the credibility of her message. It is as if somebody said "Oh, I don't care what the mathematics says, Professor Hawking's theories about quantum mechanics are all nonsense -- just look at the tie he is wearing!"

Hmmm. I'm reminded that Australia's Prime Minister, then Leader of the Opposition, rose massively in opinion polls when he started plucking his eyebrows. As Mrs Impala reminds me, we're all baboons obsessed with pink bottoms really.

Hoist by his own petard

Republican ("family values") Party Congressman Mark Foley was one of the co-sponsors of "the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006", which was signed into law by President Bush this year. This law makes it a criminal offence to discuss sexual acts or solicit sex from people under the age of 18.

So it is sweet, sweet justice that Congressman Foley has been hoist by his own petard. It seems that Foley has been soliciting sex from 16 year old Washington interns for years, and the GOP leadership has known about his predatory abuse of power for almost a year and done nothing about it.

Many of these are the same people who treated Bill Clinton as a criminal and monster for his consensual relationship with adult Monica Lewinsky, and now have been caught out ignoring one of their own committing serious sexual abuse against minors. Unlike Clinton, Foley wasn't involved in consensual relationships, but was pressing his intentions where they weren't wanted.

Amusingly, if he had actually had sex with these teenagers, it would be legal in almost all American states, if not for the pesky law which he helped write. Seems that the age of consent in most US states is 16. What was he thinking to co-write a law that made his own actions a criminal offense -- and then keep doing them???

It also shows the foolishness of the law he wrote -- it is a criminal offence to talk about sex to 16 year olds, but not to have sex with them. Puh-lease!

Link via Jim Lippard.

Heroin-chic models not wanted

A Madrid fashion show has banned underweight models:

"The restrictions could be quite a shock to the fashion world at the beginning, but I'm sure it's important as far as health is concerned," said Leonor Perez Pita, director of Madrid's show, also known as the Pasarela Cibeles.

I wonder how long this will last?

Too much information

A comedian recently had her trademark application turned down because one of the words in it (three letters, starts with C, ends with M, has a U in the middle *wink*) was "deemed scandalous" and therefore not eligible for registration.

United States Patent and Trademark Office examining attorney Patrick Shanahan is clearly very eager to do his job properly, because in his rejection he sent the comedian ten megabytes of photos, 21 pages worth, taken from two websites as proof that the word is "directly associated with degrading sexual acts".

More on BoingBoing.

Guilty even if innocent

According to a report in the Toledo Blade, Ohio's government has rubber-stamped a new law which will allow people to be publically listed on the Internet as criminal sex offenders (complete with photo and current address), even if they have never been charged, let alone convicted.

As a listed sex offender, they would be subject to strict restrictions on where they can live, the sorts of work they can do, and required to notify both authorities and the local community whenever they move.

According to the Toledo Blade:

No one in attendance voiced opposition to rules submitted by Attorney General Jim Petro's office to the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review, consisting of members of the Ohio House and Senate.

The Roman Catholic Church suggested this new legislation, as an alternative to lawsuits against them for child sexual abuse. What a great win for the Church: in return for listing Father O'Molester, who is now 75 and living in some church hospice out of the way somewhere, the Church gets out of their responsibility for protecting the abusers, the victim doesn't see a cent, and a horrible precedent is made. Forget innocent until proven guilty. It will be guilty even if innocent.

Thanks to Echidne.

Abstinence-only sex education

Jim Lippard reports that the main result of eighteen years of abstinence-only sex education in Timken High School in Canton, Ohio is that, last year, 65 of the 490 female students (or 13%) in the high school became pregnant.

And people are surprised at this?

MX survey

Last Friday, the free news gossip-paper MX ran the results of a survey on Melbournians sexual attitutes. One highlight was "Lois", 18, from Hallam:

Sex on a first date?

No, I believe in sex after marriage.

How many partners have you had?

Five.

Do you expect to get married?

Of course, probably when I'm about 23 or 24.

O-kay.

And then there was the young man "Taylor", 20, of Vermont:

How many partners have you had?

Let's just say I'm not a slut.

He might as well put up a screaming neon sign on his forehead "Virgin!!!".