Category: Sex
This is your brain on… ahem
Last year, we published a snapshot of Contrarian’s brain as he listened to Costas Halavrasos on Maritime Noon. Psychobiologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutger’s University in New Jersey has done me one better, by releasing a stop motion animation showing sequential MRI brain scans of 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist Nan Wise as she manually stimulated herself to orgasm.
It is not known whether Wise was listening to Halavrasos at the time.
The first portion of the video shows a sequence of 20 snapshot fMRI images, taken over a 12 minute period, during which Wise approached orgasm, achieved orgasm, and entered a refractory period.
The scan detects oxygen levels in the blood that reflect the varying activity in 80 different regions of the brain. The animation uses a “hot metal” colour scale, beginning with dark red (low activity) and progressing through orange and yellow to white (highest activity).
H/T: Vicky Salazar
How a sensible country teaches sex ed
Remember the kerfuffle when the Province of Nova Scotia’s official sex guide for seventh graders, called Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource, was unveiled in 2004? Some school boards refused to distribute the guide because, of course, knowledge encourages teen sex and ignorance prevent it. That’s the guide’s chaste cover, at right.
Want to know how a sensible country does sex education? Check out this sex ed kit for kids of comparable age in a European country. From the outside, the kit looks like this:
And inside:
The sensible country is Finland. Click here for a translation of the news story describing it. The paper expected a huge backlash, but as a subsequent story reported, of the 6,500 comments they received, 75 percent were favorable.
H/T: James Fallows
In defence of airbrushed cleavage
Contrarian finds itself in the awkward position of having received 30,000+ hits for a throwaway post about an MP who airbrushed* a modest trace of cleavage from her official Parliamentary photo. The two complaints I’ve received have not dissuaded me from my initial judgment the story was both funny and peculiar enough to be worthy of posting. In the interests of equal time, though, here is an alternative view from Edmonton restaurateur and local food activist Jessie Radies:
The only reason you find someone airbrushing their cleavage funny, is because you are not a women with cleavage.
I’ve done exactly the same thing. Go for a photo shoot, get the pictures and then realize, “Oh, I love this picture but it has too much cleavage and it is not appropriate for a business head shot.” And have the photographer retouch the picture.
I bet it had nothing to do with Tamil culture or modesty. It is a professional making a decision about how she wants to be presented and what is appropriate.
(Radies supplied the photo shown here, the airbrushed image she describes in her comment. She no longer has the ‘before’ picture.)
I’m happy to close this thread now.
—
* MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan isn’t saying, but the evidence seems to be that she or her staff ordered the retouching.
Parliamentary cover-up
The Globe and Mail says Scarborough-Rouge River MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan, 29, might be “the most compelling of the new crop of young NDP MPs.”
She’s the first Tamil-Canadian MP, and so has become the de facto standard-bearer for thousands of Canadians who have felt defeated – militarily, in their country of birth, and politically, in their new home. As a 29-year-old woman from political cultures – both Canadian and Sri Lankan – in which older men make most of the decisions, she exudes the poise, organizing skills and confidence of an old-school political veteran.
How awkward for Contrarian, then, to report alert reader Mark Austin’s discovery of an evident cover-up concerning the estimable Ms. Sitsabaiesan (pronounced SITS-a-bye-EE-sin, according to the Globe). Driven by what we are certain was only the purest of citizenly motives, Mr. Austin carried out a Google image search of the compelling Parliamentarian and stumbled upon the thumbnail at right.
Seeking further edification, he clicked through to the underlying webpage source of the image, which turned out to be Ms. Sitsabaiesan’s official online Parliamentary profile. There he found the image at left, close inspection of which reveals — how to put this delicately? — certain modification.
The Google thumbnail that connected to the official Parliamentary page now seems to have disappeared from Google’s image search results, leading us to conclude that Mr. Austin’s search occurred in the brief interval before Google’s image search caught up with a change in the underlying page. A similar thumbnail, however, still cleaves to MP Sitsabaiesan’s page at the open-source OpenParliament.ca website, which credits the image as “House of Commons photo.”
This persuades us that the photo on the official website of Parliament must have originally appeared in the (please forgive us) cloven version, only to fall under the Parliamentary PhotoShopster’s digital airbrush. This makes us wonder whether the bowdlerization took place on request from the NDP caucus, from MP Sitsabaiesan’s office, or on the Parliamentary website’s own authority.
In any case, Mr. Austin puts the entire question into healthy perspective:
[T]he anomalies of the last federal election have resulted in greater youth and diversity than ever in the House. Let’s hope it injects new life.
Amen, brother.
Headline, lede, & pic of the week
Salon sex columnist Tracy Clark-Flory clucks disapprovingly at what she deems excessive media coverage of that award-winning New Mexico state trooper busted on security cam having sex on duty and in uniform with a woman splayed across the hood of her Honda.
Contrarian takes a different view. You cannot spend as much time in newsrooms as we have without developing a grudging admiration for the comic extremes of tabloid chutzpah. We particularly admire the Hispanic-oriented, Chicago-based website Hispanically Speaking News for shining a spotlight on the small but curious dog that wandered in for a closer look at the steamy curbside quickie, and for linking both cop and pooch to its core demographic.
The story’s lede and photo illustration evinced similarly admirable attention to detail:
As a thoughtful bonus, Hispanically Speaking News provided a (possibly NSW) animated gif of the carnal canine-cop caper.
A Saturday spike in Google searchs for Jack Layton
Since the debate, we’ve kept an eye on searches for the five party leaders, using the Google Trends tool that famously notices ‘flu outbreaks before the Centres for Disease control. (Previous examples here and here.) Extreme caution is required, but look what happened to Jack Layton yesterday.
On its face, this means a lot of interest in Jack. I assume that’s mainly a result of the found-in story, but a friend argues otherwise:
[I]ndications from previous elections (check 2008) seem to suggest [it reflects] popularity as well, though I don’t know why. It’s quite a spike, though.
It is quite a spike, and quite a leap to assume it reflects an increase in popularity, given that it occurred in the 24 hours after the campaign took a salacious incoming missile. Still, it’s intriguing—and noteworthy that Layton searches have consistently outpaced those for Harper, which consistently outpace those for Ignatieff, May, and Duceppe. Searches for Iggy and Harper remained flat yesterday.
What women look like – dissent
Lawrence Boothby doesn’t think much of sculptor Jamie McCartney’s plaster vulvas:
Pale, monochrome, rigid, dry, repeated – it was interesting to me how the medium of plaster, the context of the exhibit, the isolation of one part of a woman’s body from the rest of her body (and emotions), and repetition, alters a viewers’ perception. For artistic purposes, the 400 tiles could have been of almost any set of objects that were similar yet unique. Four hundred color photographs of the same size would have better captured the beauty of vulva including their hair, but he wouldn’t have been able to charge the women as much for photographing them. In watching the video interviews on his site, I was reminded of the recent dental casting of a broken tooth I just underwent.
McCartney, who has a background as a theatrical prop maker, does have a business making and selling many varieties of custom body casts. But I think Lawrence’s assertion that he charged the women who posed for this exhibit is not correct.
What women look like – feedback
An anonymous reader writes:
Marriage is the cruelest form of celibacy, so I thank you for the reminder of what women look like.
What women look like
English sculptor and prop maker Jamie McCartney arranged 400 plaster casts of vulvas into a nine-meter polyptych, to be displayed at the Brighton Festival Fringe in May. The project took five years and a quarter ton of plaster. Subjects ranged in age from 18 to 76, and included mothers, daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women, one woman before and after giving birth, and another before and after labiaplasty (a practice McCartney hopes his exhibition will discourage).
For many women their genital appearance is a source of anxiety and I was in a unique position to do something about that. Vulvas and labia are as different as faces and many people, particularly women, don’t seem to know that.
Subjects talk about the project in this video; McCartney in this one.
Spirit Place? How about Atheist Heights instead?
My netizen pal Angela Mombourquette makes a good case for the proposed seven story housing project that has stirred opposition in the otherwise low-rise, middle-income neighborhood where church elders want to build it.
Venerable St. John’s United Church, which currently occupies the lot at Windsor and North in a residential neighborhood of Halifax’s West End, has reached its best-before date. The congregation proposes to replace it with a building, called “Spirit Place,” that will house both a place of worship and an independent living facility for old people — all wrapped into a seven-storey structure. Furthermore, St. John’s specifically promotes Spirit Place as “an affirming, welcoming space [for] seniors of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) community.”
The hitch? The neighborhood is zoned for 2-1/2-storey, one- and two-unit dwellings not exceeding 35 feet in height. Spirit Place weighs in at 65 units and 72 feet in height. It would turn this neighborhood…
…into this:
I have a vested interest in the issue, because my own part-time, low-rise abode sits just four short blocks away. I could conceivably be a resident someday, if the Ross Ferry wing of Baddeck’s Alderwood Home wont take me in! Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Ange’s endorsement, I bristle at everything about the way the church folks are promoting this project.
The effort to wrap their quest for a very substantial variance in a holier-than-thou display of welcome to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered residents smacks of a diversionary tactic. The church elders are, in effect, starting a fire at one end of Main Street, so no one will notice them robbing a bank at the other.
Every apartment building in Nova Scotia welcomes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered residents. That’s the law, which forbids landlords and land developers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Is there any evidence — a study, a survey, a public opinion poll, a rumor? — that old gay folks face discrimination in housing? If so, please bring it forth for public inspection and debate. Otherwise, please remove these red herrings from the path to a zoning hearing.
My suspicion deepens in light of the haste with which proponents of this housing development have cried homophobe at anyone who objects to the massive variance they seek. If Wal-Mart planned a seven-storey superstore at the same location, but offered to host a garden for endangered wildflowers at the rear of the parking lot, would we take seriously any attempt on the company’s part to paint opponents as anti-conservationist?
Mistrust festers further in light of the proponents’ churchy, Goody Two-Shoes language. There’s the name, for starters. While objectively no worse than once fashionable tropes like “Windsor Arms” or “Willow Manor,” the proposed moniker smells of daffy New-Age spiritualism. Speaking for myself, I’d rather move into a building called “Atheist Heights” or even “Homo Haven,” and I’d be mortified to put “Spirit Place” on my personal stationery.
In the same vein, a board member speaks not of planning the development, but of being called to build it. Called by God, one presumes, or at the very least, by the Still Small Voice. Great! Now anyone opposed to doubling the height restriction is not only homophobic but anti-God and perhaps a friend of Satan.
I remain undecided about this development. I see its size and height as big drawbacks, but they may be necessary to allow affordable housing. I wonder about parking. I dislike Halifax’s habit of fearing, then thwarting, every new development, but I bristle at the promoters’ patronizing dismissal of concerns about this one as mere “resistance to change.” I personally tend to seek out social settings featuring mixed incomes, backgrounds, ages, and sexual orientations, so I wonder at the wisdom of ghettoizing the elderly. Would the neighborhood be better off with a mixed-age apartment building?
I do agree with Ange on one point:
[W]ho has the most potential to be seriously awesome neighbours? Gay seniors, of course. Imagine the incredible dinner party circuit.
If any Spirit Place-supporting gay seniors are planning such a meal, I’m open to offers.
