NPR discusses the intimate link between sex and technology — how Internet porn kingpins shaped the web as we know it today and introduced some of the technologies we now take for granted:

Coopersmith says America Online’s popularity was driven by its private chat features. “One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was ‘the house that sex chat built,’ ” he says.

Adult sites also paved the way for the mainstream to adopt several technologies. They were among the first to integrate e-commerce systems to process credit card transactions. “The first part of the Web to make money was pornography,” Coopersmith says.

“You have a lot of some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world…For instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee and you have different levels of membership.”

More obnoxious practices were also readily embraced by some in the adult world, as many people’s junk e-mail folders can easily demonstrate.

You are forewarned, I am not responsible for blindness resulting from viewing of these (many NSFW) pics. LazerTits says:

For centuries the female bosom has been wrongfully held in the prison of maternal duty and manboy motor-boating … It’s time to get ZAPPED!!!!

What will YOU say when your kids ask where you were during the revolution? Don’t burn your bra, BLAST IT!!!

A union representing Dutch nurses will launch a national campaign Friday against demands for sexual services by patients who claim it should be part of their standard care.

The union, NU’91, is calling the campaign “I Draw The Line Here,” with an advert that features a young woman covering her face with crossed hands.

The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.

[Read more at Reuters]

Each of us was the grand prize in an ultimate reality competition, the amazing race a sperm makes on the road to fertilization.

Millions of sperm compete while overcoming armies of antibodies, treacherous terrain and impossible odds to reach their single-minded goal.

To illustrate the full weight of the challenge, Sizing Up Sperm uses real people to represent 250 million sperm on their marathon quest to be first to reach a single egg.

Peep Show Window. Photo: David Shankbone (GNU)

Milton Diamond for The Scientist:

Pornography. Most people have seen it, and have a strong opinion about it. Many of those opinions are negative — some people argue that ready access to pornography disrupts social order, encouraging people to commit rape, sexual assault, and other sex-related crimes. And even if pornography doesn’t trigger a crime, they say, it contributes to the degradation of women.

It harms the women who are depicted by pornography, and harms those who do not participate but are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it. Many even adamantly believe that pornography should become illegal.

Alternatively, others argue that pornography is an expression of fantasies that can actually inhibit sexual activity, and act as a positive displacement for sexual aggression. Pornography offers a readily available means of satisfying sexual arousal (masturbation), they say, which serves as a substitute for dangerous, harmful, and illegal activities.

Some feminists even claim that pornography can empower women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and restrictions.

But what do the data say? Over the years, many scientists have investigated the link between pornography (considered legal under the First Amendment in the United States unless judged “obscene”) and sex crimes and attitudes towards women. And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased…

Read More: The Scientist

Spring is coming, and a young man’s thoughts turn to … you know. Apparently, old men’s thoughts turn to the same subject. According to an article to be published Wednesday in the journal BMJ (British Medical Journal), 67% of men ages 65 to 74 said they had been sexually active in the past year, compared with just 40% of women in that age group. Everyone knows young men think constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex until they are almost dead: more than one-third of men ages 75 to 85 said they had sex in the past 12 months, compared with just 17% of women in that age group.

Some of this surely has to do with Viagra, which makes it easier for older men to be interested in sex. But the disparity in sexual activity between older men and older women isn’t entirely explained by the 1998 release of the little blue pill. One set of data presented in the new paper — taken from the National Survey of Midlife Development, involving about 3,000 adults aged 25 to 74 — was collected in 1995 and 1996. That data set shows that 62% of men ages 65 to 74 reported sexual activity in the previous six months; only 36% of women in the same age group did so.

These differences matter because having a healthy sex life is strongly associated with having a healthy life, period — and also a longer life. Scientists aren’t sure about the causal relationship here. Sexually active people tend to be healthier, and healthier people tend to be sexually active. It could be that the fulfillment of sex gives you a health boost, or that being more fit makes sex better — or, more likely, it’s a little of both.

What we do know, from this new paper, is that if you are a 30-year-old male, you can be expected to have sex for 35 more years…

[continues at Time]

Britain is to give 42m condoms to South Africa in response to a request for an extra billion as part of an HIV prevention drive before the World Cup, the government will announce today.

The request for British help in stockpiling sufficient condoms for the expected influx of thousands of football supporters in three months’ time was made during President Jacob Zuma’s recent visit to the UK to meet the Queen.

“Obviously there’s a big focus on the World Cup coming up and a huge increase in the number of people coming into South Africa,” said the international development minister, Gareth Thomas, who will announce the £1m funding today at an emergency summit in London on HIV prevention and treatment. “The South Africans have identified themselves the need to get more condoms in place. South Africa specifically asked for British assistance and we are responding to that request.” He pointed out that the fans would inevitably spill over into neighbouring African countries with high HIV rates, which would also need to take precautions.

The South African government estimates that up to half a million visitors could travel to the country, raising fears of a rise in prostitution and sex trafficking from neighbouring countries and eastern Europe, and creating a potential HIV timebomb.

Last week South Africa’s Central Drug Authority warned that 40,000 prostitutes were expected to arrive for the month-long tournament…

[continues in the Guardian]

Now, thanks to science it is possible to help those women recover their sense of pleasure…

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) — One of Pope Benedict’s ceremonial ushers and a member of an elite choir in St Peter’s Basilica have been implicated in a gay prostitution ring, in the latest sexual scandal to taint the Vatican.

Ghinedu Ehiem, a Nigerian, was dismissed by the Vatican on Wednesday from the Giulia Choir after his name appeared in transcripts of police wiretaps, published by an Italian newspaper, in an unrelated Italian investigation.

The wiretaps were carried out in connection with a probe into corruption in contracts to build public works, including the planned venue in Sardinia of last year’s G8 summit. The summit was eventually moved to the Abruzzo region as part of efforts to help it recover from an earthquake.

Among four people arrested last month in the corruption probe was Angelo Balducci, a engineer who is a board member of Italy’s public works department and a construction consultant to the Vatican. Balducci was arrested on corruption charges and the allegations of prostitution emerged only later.

Balducci is also a member of an elite group called “Gentlemen of His Holiness,” ushers who are called to serve in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on major occasions such as when the pope receives heads of state or presides at big events.

“Gentlemen of His Holiness” carried the coffin of the late Pope John Paul at his funeral in 2005.

Excerpts of the wiretaps and police documents published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica showed that Ehiem, 40, had been in regular contact with Balducci before Balducci’s arrest last month and the subject of their conversation was gay sex.

A police document prepared for magistrates and published in part by La Repubblica said Balducci was in contact with Ehiem and an Italian who were part of what the police called “an organized network … to abet male prostitution.”

Read More: The Washington Post

Called the Hotshot, the condom has been produced after government research showed 12 to14-year-olds did not use sufficient protection when having sex.

The study, conducted on behalf of the Federal Commission for Children and Youth, interviewed 1,480 people aged 10 to 20. It showed more 12 to 14-year-olds were having sex, in comparison with the 1990s.

The Hotshot condoms, which cost 7fr60 (£4.70) for a packet of six, have been created by Lamprecht AG, a leading condom manufacturer in Switzerland. The company has said the UK would be “top priority” if they expanded abroad, considering that it has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

Nysse Norballe, a spokesman for the company, said: “At the moment we are only producing the Hotshot in Switzerland. But the UK is certainly a very attractive market since there is a very high rate of underage conception. The UK would definitely be top priority if we marketed abroad.”

A standard condom has a diameter of 2ins (5.2cm) in comparison with the Hotshot’s diameter of 1.7ins (4.5cm). Both are the same length – 7.4ins (19cm). According to a German study of 12,970 13 to 20-year-olds, a quarter said a standard condom was too large…

[continues in the Telegraph]

Rowdy curling crowds; spontaneous street parties; public drunkenness. You don’t have to look far for evidence that the crowds at Winter Games in Vancouver know how to have a good time.

And, as if anymore proof is needed that a wild Olympic atmosphere permeates B.C.’s largest city, now there’s an apparent condom shortage. That’s right. As you read this, an emergency shipment of condoms is desperately making its way across Canada to the West Coast city.

Health officials in Vancouver have already provided 100,000 free condoms to the roughly 7,000 athletes and officials at the Games. That’s about 14 condoms per person. But as of Wednesday, those supplies started running dangerously low. So naturally, the Canadian Foundation for AIDS research decided to step and make sure there were no hitches in Olympic action.

“When we heard about the condom shortage in Vancouver, we felt it important to respond immediately,” said Kerry Whiteside, CANFAR’s Executive Director. The organization assembled three large boxes of about 8,500 condoms, much to the relief of libidos at the Olympic Village. They’re expected to arrive on Thursday.

Free condoms first started to be distributed at the Olympics in Barcelona at the 1992 Games. This appears to be the first time that a shortage has struck the Games…

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people’s behaviors come to be.

The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.

“The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward,” said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. “It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people — people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower — are likely to be the ones to do that.”

[Read more at CNN]

A parish priest has been sacked amid claims he offered sex for sale over the internet.

Samuel Martin, 27, posed in his underpants in an advert offering €120-an- hour services for women and couples, reports say. The revelations have caused a scandal in Catholic Spain, after pictures of Martin in his grey briefs were published in newspapers.

The Spaniard also allegedly stole €17,000 from Church donations and spent it on phone sex lines and internet porn. In the advert, which has since been removed, Martin, calling himself Hector, wrote: “Heterosexual man for women and couples. Real photos. Well hung (15cm) for your pleasure and happiness.

“I am open to everything except sadism. Hotels and private addresses. 24 hours. You won’t regret it, I will give you pleasure like never before.”

Martin, who has since gone into hiding, offered 15 minutes for €50, 30 minutes for €75 or an hour for €120…

Violence, drunkenness and all manner of debauchery featured on a six-month voyage on a migrant ship bound for Australia 170 years ago, a newly discovered diary reveals. The raunchy tale of anarchy on the high seas is recorded by a junior officer, James Bell, aboard “The Planter” which sailed to Adelaide from Deptford in east London in 1838.

Alcohol-fueled acts of “great violence” involving officers, mates and even the ship’s doctor are all recounted. In the green vellum-bound journal, Bell tells how the captain regularly entertained two of the 11 daughters of a doctor-preacher from Liverpool called McGowan.

He wrote: “our captain of course could not want a mistress till he returned to his own in England, but made love to two of McGowan’s daughters … The Capt was allowed to keep the daughters company at all hours, and during the whole time of our being in warm weather our bed on deck sufficed for all three.”

Bell, whose 225-page diary goes up for sale at auction in London next month after being bought in a market stall for a pittance, said his crew were no better. “Such an example was soon followed up by all the ship’s company but particularly by the three mates (who) carried immorality to a glaring height.”

Bell told how they blatantly took up with a band of prostitutes in search of a better life in the colonies. He called the women “… natives of some obscene alley, in some obscene street, of that renowned city, London, and who are conveying in themselves all the filth of the place of their nativity, to Adelaide.”…

[continues at Reuters]

“Space is fundamentally about sex. And by eroticizing space, instead of militarizing it, we can do wonders for our limp interest.”

Humankind’s best hope for outer space exploration may be to…eroticize it. “If we could harness the sexual juice poured into the Internet every day and aim it toward the stars, just think what we could achieve.” And in fact, space has a very clear link to sexuality — the threat of world overpopulation! (”Sex makes human beings…And we’ll eventually need to get into space to find somewhere to put them!”)

“Don’t use sexuality to further pollute planet Earth. Use it as a spaceship. Forget Earth, with its grime and disappointment. Forget the last four decades of disaster capitalism and electronic distraction… There’s a whole universe out there waiting to be sexplored.

“What could be more clear? The orgone force must be pointed towards the stars!”

The following is the second chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.

For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.

_____________________________________

Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn’t get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly publication on literature claims that Historia “was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of the whole Renaissance.” The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: “The Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German] Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy].”

It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488. By the turn of the century, 37 editions had been published. Somewhere around 1553, the short book appeared in English under the wonderfully old-school title The Goodli History of the Moste Noble and Beautyfull Ladye Lucres of Scene in Tuskane, and of Her Louer Eurialus Verye Pleasaunt and Delectable vnto ye Reder. Despite the obvious historical interest of this archaic Vatican porn, it has never been translated into contemporary language. (The passages quoted below mark the first time that any of the book has appeared in modern English.)

The 1400s being what they were, the action is pretty tame by today’s standards. At one point, Euralius scales a wall to be with Lucres: “When she saw her lover, she clasped him in her arms. There was embracing and kissing, and with full sail they followed their lusts and wearied Venus, now with Ceres, and now with Bacchus was refreshed.” Loosely translated, that last part means that they shagged, then ate, then drank wine.

His Holiness describes the next time they hook up:

Thus talking to each other, they went into the bedroom, where they had such a night as we judge the two lovers Paris and Helen had after he had taken her away, and it was so pleasant that they thought Mars and Venus had never known such pleasure….

Her mouth, and now her eyes, and now her cheeks he kissed. Pulling down her clothes, he saw such beauty as he had never seen before. “I have found more, I believe,” said Euralius, “than Acteon saw of Diana when she bathed in the fountain. What is more pleasant or more fair than these limbs?… O fair neck and pleasant breasts, is it you that I touch? Is it you that I have? Are you in my hands? O round limbs, O sweet body, do I have you in my arms?… O pleasant kisses, O dear embraces, O sweet bites, no man alive is happier than I am, or more blessed.”… He strained, and she strained, and when they were done they weren’t weary. Like Athens, who rose from the ground stronger, soon after battle they were more desirous of war.

But Euralius isn’t just a horndog. He waxes philosophical about love to Lucres’ cousin-in-law:

You know that man is prone to love. Whether it is virtue or vice, it reigns everywhere. No heart of flesh hasn’t sometime felt the pricks of love. You know that neither the wise Solomon nor the strong Sampson has escaped from this passion. Furthermore, the nature of a kindled heart and a foolish love is this: The more it is allowed, the more it burns, with nothing sooner healing this than the obtaining of the loved. There have been many, both in our time and that of our elders, whose foolish love has been the cause of cruel death. And many who, after sex and love vouchsafed, have stopped burning. Nothing is better when love has crept into your bones than to give in to the burning, for those who strive against the tempest often wreck, while those who drive with the storm escape.

Besides sex and wisdom, the story also contains a lot of humor, as when Lucres’ husband borrows a horse from Euralius: “He says to himself, ‘If you leap upon my horse, I shall do the same thing to your wife.’”

Popes just don’t write books like that anymore!

Reference: Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius (Pius II). The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres of Scene and of Her Lover Eurialus. Edited by E.J. Morrall. Oxford University Press, 1996. • Translations from early English into modern English by Russ Kick.

_____________________________________

Look for more 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know in the next 50 days
under the tag “50 Things” on disinfo.com.

Above Image: The life and deeds of Pope Pius II in the Cathedral Library at Siena
by Pinturicchio, c. 1502.

A cash-strapped New Zealand student who auctioned off her virginity to help pay for university said she had accepted an offer of $NZ45,000 to sleep with a stranger.

The 19-year-old offered her virginity to the highest bidder in an online auction and said there had been more than 1,200 bids. “I have accepted an offer in excess of $45,000, which is way beyond what I dreamed,” the student said on her web page when the auction ended.

“Thank you to the more than 30,000 people who viewed my ad and to the more than 1,200 offers made.” Calling herself “unigirl”, the young woman had described herself as attractive, fit and healthy and said she had never been in a sexual relationship.

She did not respond to media requests for an interview but the proprietor of the website, Ross MacKenzie, told the Waikato Times newspaper he had been authorised to confirm the transaction. The advertisement drew wide reaction in New Zealand, which has some of the world’s most liberal laws on prostitution.

Read More: abc.au.net

Let’s say, theoretically, I’m a pedophile.

I’m not stupid or evil, so I’m not gonna DO anything. I’m not even gonna look at porn, because the production of it involves child exploitation. I don’t even look at kids in public places.

So what the fuck should I do? Chemical castration? But I haven’t DONE anything and I don’t plan to. Am I obliged to tell anyone? Good way to lose friends. Can I keep babysitting my friends’ kids when they need a hand? After all, if I were into adult women, people wouldn’t see anything wrong with leaving me alone with a couple of those.

What the fuck do I do? Live alone and hope Japan starts producing affordable sexbots before I’m too old to care?

You know, theoretically. If I were a pedophile.

Read More of Dan Savage in The Stranger

Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) — To some men, she might seem like the perfect woman: She’s a willowy 5 feet 7 and 120 pounds. She’ll chat with you endlessly about your interests. And she’ll have sex whenever you please — as long as her battery doesn’t run out.

Meet Roxxxy, who may be the world’s most sophisticated talking female sex robot. For $7,000, she’s all yours.

“She doesn’t vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else,” said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Lifelike dolls, artificial sex organs and sex-chat phone lines have been keeping the lonely company for decades. But Roxxxy takes virtual companionship to a new level.

Powered by a computer under her soft silicone “skin,” she employs voice-recognition and speech-synthesis software to answer questions and carry on conversations. She even comes loaded with five distinct “personalities,” from Frigid Farrah to Wild Wendy, that can be programmed to suit customers’ preferences…

[continues at CNN]

The Frankin Scandal is the story of a nationwide pedophile ring that pandered children to a cabal of the rich and powerful. The ring’s pimps were a pair of political powerbrokers who had access to the highest levels of our government. Nebraska legislators nearly exposed the ring in 1990, but its unveiling had the potential to produce seismic political aftershocks.The legislators’ efforts resulted in rash of mysterious deaths and the overpowering corruption of federal and local law enforcement, including the FBI, Secret Service, and Justice Department, effecting an immaculate cover-up of the trafficking network.

Fast-spreading parasite species force sex changes on their victims, induce virgin births, and turn animals into “gross monsters” — among other horrors. Now a new study has decoded how the bacteria may be able to wreak their havoc: by shutting down immune systems.

The parasites, of the Wolbachia bacteria genus, cause a gene in wasps to stifle the insect’s protein-based “alarms” against the bacterial invaders, say researchers who mapped the genomes of three species of Nasonia wasp for the first time. As a result, the wasps’ antibacterial defenses are never deployed, allowing Wolbachia to begin their dirty work.

Read More: National Geographic News

According to NPR, “In 2003, a survey of female veterans found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military. A 2004 study of veterans who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving. And a 1995 study of female veterans of the Gulf and earlier wars, found that 90 percent had been sexually harassed.”

The BBC recently reported on “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq” by Helen Benedict. This book examines the extreme difficulties female soldiers have in serving abroad. Benedict interviewed several women in the military to get a deeper understanding of the issue, and some of their stories were real eye openers.

Army specialist Chantelle Henneberry spoke of some of her experiences in Iraq, “Everybody’s supposed to have a battle buddy in the army, and females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with, or to the showers — that’s so you don’t get raped by one of the men on your own side. But because I was the only female there, I didn’t have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife.”

Read More: News Junkie Post

Sources have told us that, in the throes of their affair, John Edwards and Rielle Hunter made a sex tape that contains “several sex acts.” And that his aide, Andrew Young found it on an unmarked DVD.

The tape, say both our sources, is explicit and reveals that Edwards “is physically very striking, in a certain area. Everyone who sees it says ‘whoa’. She’s behind the camera at first.”

When rumors of the affair first broke Young was so loyal to Edwards that he pretended that he was the father of Hunter’s daughter Frances Quinn, now 2. But part of Young’s disillusionment with the 2004 vice presidential candidate and 2008 candidate came one day as he went through a stack of DVDs at Rielle Hunter’s house.

Read More: Gawker

Surprising few people — especially not the National Enquirer, which has been reporting this story for nearly two years now — former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards admitted that he was the father of Frances Quinn Hunter, the baby daughter of his former mistress Rielle Hunter. He released the following statement to the Today show:

I am Quinn’s father. I will do everything in my power to provide her with the love and support she deserves. I have been able to spend time with her during the past year and trust that future efforts to show her the love and affection she deserves can be done privately and in peace. It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me. I have been providing financial support for Quinn and have reached an agreement with her mother to continue providing support in the future. To all those I have disappointed and hurt these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

According to Edwards friend Harrison Hickman who talked with Today, Edwards is caring for his daughter “both financially and emotionally.” (Edwards himself didn’t speak, claiming he can’t because of an ongoing investigation into whether he improperly used campaign funds to carry on the affair.)…

[continues in New York Magazine]