Deseos perversos

Journal of Sex Education & Therapy; 2001, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p155, 2p

Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex. By Katherine Gates. New York: Juno Books, 2000. 248 pages, illus­trations, photos, bibliography. Paperback, ISBN 1-890451-03-7, $24.99.

    Reviewed by Richard G. Ellsworth, PhD, licensed clin­ical psychologist and psychology professor, Chapman University, Orange, CA.

Deviant Desires presents comprehensive descrip­tions of several little-known fetishes. This volume cer­tainly fills a gap in descriptive sexology by presenting in-depth information about some rarely explored sex­ual subcultures.

The chapters discuss ponyplay, balloon fetish, body inflation, giantess fans, crush freaks, messy fun, fat admiration, medical fetish art, and sexuality-based fandoms (slash fiction, speculative/sci-fi SM, furries, robots, latex masks). Included are extensive interviews with participants and detailed descriptions of these specific paraphilic practices, flavored through-out with Ms Gates’ sympathetic assessments. Indeed, the author’s personal comments lend a lively overall immediacy.

Also included is a “fetish map” (pp. 236-237) outlining how these practices relate to each other, which clearly illustrates the intertwining nature of these fetishistic lifestyles. Practical self-help features include Internet search key words, legal considerations, safety do’s and don’t’s of the fetish community (including a welcome excerpt from the National Leather Confer­ence, “The Difference Between S/M and Abuse,” (pp. 10-11)), favorite examples of the particular fetish in popular media, key publications, organizations, and a list of resources for practitioners and “adventurous neophytes”.

Cabeza afeitada

The bald truth

                                 When Britney Spears shaved her head in public last week, she unleashed a tide of speculation about her mental state. Why does a woman cutting off her hair still have such power to shock? Patrick Barkham reports

Patrick Barkham
Tuesday February 20, 2007

The hairdressers at Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California were locking their doors for the night last Friday when a cavalcade of cars drew up outside. Britney Spears jumped out of one of the vehicles and, accompanied by her bodyguards, marched into the salon. When owner Esther Tognozzi refused to shave off the pop star’s hair, Britney took hold of the clippers and removed her locks herself. As Spears cut, inevitably, she was snapped by the paparazzi who have faithfully recorded her journey from teenage stardom into an increasingly troubled adulthood.

While bids mount for her shorn locks on eBay, theories about Britney shaving her hair have been foisted upon her more quickly than the hoodie and garish blonde wig she has since donned to conceal her baldness. Does losing her hair equal losing her mind? Or is she finally regaining control of her chaotic life? (Control is a recurring theme for the former child star; the fragrance she launched last year was called In Control.)

Throughout history, a shorn head has been heavy with meaning. The bare-headed Christian or Buddhist monks told of their devotion or a renunciation of worldly pleasures. More commonly, shaven heads have been associated with trauma, brutality and the loss of individuality or strength. In biblical legend, Samson was deprived of his incredible power and killed when his hair was cut off while he was asleep. In ancient Greece shaved heads were a mark of the slave. Shorn hair is inflicted on the sick, and has been deployed by armies to both dehumanise their own soldiers and punish their enemies. In the second world war, the heads of French collaborators were shaved as part of their public humiliation. Among skinheads, a shorn head was a symbol of aggression. Among lesbians, a shaved head, or short hair at least, came to be a symbol of their abandoning of traditional man-pleasing femininity.

Buscar pareja en internet

Buscar pareja en Internet, opciones avanzadas

Los portales se especializan cada vez más, incluso según la religión de los usuarios - El segmento que más crece es el de los mayores - En España, más de 50.000 ‘conectados’ superan los 50 años

MERCÈ MOLIST - Barcelona

EL PAÍS - Sociedad - 20-02-2007

Abuelo busca abuela. China busca chino. Judío busca judía. Los estudios psicológicos dicen que ansiamos a un igual en el amor y los portales cibernéticos para buscar pareja siguen el consejo. En Estados Unidos, triunfan los sitios cada vez más especializados, que ponen en contacto a nichos muy concretos de la población. Ahora, la moda es encontrar pareja cuando ya se han cumplido los 50.

A mediados de 2004, el portal de contactos por excelencia en Internet, Match.com, tenía un problema: perdía dinero y clientes en EE UU, su principal mercado. La gente prefería el, por aquel entonces, nuevo fenómeno de las redes sociales, como Orkut o Myspace, no concebidas para encontrar pareja, pero sí para hacer amigos y una cosa llevaba a la otra.

Match arrastraba además el impedimento de ser un sitio abierto a todo el mundo, mientras a su alrededor triunfaban portales de relaciones cada vez más especializados como Jdate, sólo para practicantes de la religión judía; BlackPlanet, para la población afroamericana, o PlanetOut, un éxito entre la comunidad gay.

¿Son tóxicos los juguetes eróticos?

Dangerous Dildos, Part 1

In an unregulated industry, can sex toys be toxic?

by Tristan Taormino

February 2nd, 2007 4:33 PM

 

Many years ago, I did a photo shoot with porn star Chloe for Taboo magazine. It had been a long day of a hundred different poses and we were tired. “Let’s get that double dong and do an ass to ass shot,” said the photographer right before her assistant handed me a red two-headed rubber dildo fresh out of its package, with that shiny film on it that many jelly toys have. I spread lube on one end and began to slide the dildo into my ass, which was already warmed up from Chloe’s fingers. As the head slipped inside, my ass suddenly felt like it was on fire. A burning sensation spread throughout my butt, and when I looked up at Chloe, who was waiting for her end, she said, “I know that look. The toy must be old. Hot poker, right?” I yanked the fiery phallus out and jetted to the ladies room where I used an enema bottle filled with warm water to rinse out my butt. It didn’t do much good. I would later learn that the culprit was phthalates, a group of industrial chemicals with many uses, including, as I found out, being a pain in the ass.

Phthalates (the ph is silent) are added to polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to make it more pliable, so they are often found in soft plastic things, like toys made for small children, animals, and sexual pleasure. Vinyl sex toys containing the chemicals are among the most inexpensive and widely available on the market. But while their texture makes them ideal for insertables, it turns out that what makes them enjoyable may also make them toxic. Because phthalate-spiked PVC is not a stable inert compound, these toys continually leach phthalates, which can cause a nasty odor, a greasy film, and genital irritation (like the burning sensation in my ass?).

Violación y matrimonio

No sex please, we’re drunk: rape ancient and modern

If it wasn’t such an important subject, it would be hard to take seriously the government’s plans for raising the conviction rate in rape trials. One idea is that a woman should be deemed incapable of having giving consent if she was very drunk: in other words, all sex after binge-drinking would count as rape.

This is bonkers. Like many women I have my own rape story (and please read it before you post to say that I am not treating violence against women with due concern). But the idea that drunkenness and consent can be policed in this way, as judges have already pointed out, makes no sense at all.

Ligar por internet

Finding love connections in cyberspace

Reviewed by Paula Priamos

Sunday, February 18, 2007

 

I Love You, Let’s Meet

Adventures in Online Dating

By Virginia Vitzthum

LITTLE, BROWN; 285 PAGES; $23.99

 

An attractive widow finds sudden romance under the Big Top. Within three weeks of online courting, she’s engaged to a circus clown. Another woman, an English teacher, loves metaphors. So it stands to reason that she was crushed when, on her first date with a man with outrageously large ears, she learned that he was not a good listener. These are just two women I know who are part of “an estimated forty million people” who have tried online dating. With such an astounding number, it’s no surprise that Virginia Vitzthum, a former sex columnist for Salon.com, set out to untangle this Web of matchmaking in I Love You, Let’s Meet.

Bars, clubs and parties, the predominant scenes of choice in which singles hook up, has now, arguably, been replaced with an electronic forum that casts the net, so to speak, of possibilities far wider than a mere room full of intoxicated people. Because the majority of us spend our time physically isolated yet attached to our BlackBerries, laptops or cell phones, it only makes sense that we use these devices to reach out to others. “Online dating gives single people a public square to find each other, using whatever criteria matter to them — location, age, beliefs, vices, hobbies, height or income.”

Cómo coquetear

What Social Science can tell you about flirting and how to do it

Why do we flirt?

Flirting is much more than just a bit of fun: it is a universal and essential aspect of human interaction. Anthropological research shows that flirting is to be found, in some form, in all cultures and societies around the world.

Flirting is a basic instinct, part of human nature. This is not surprising: if we did not initiate contact and express interest in members of the opposite sex, we would not progress to reproduction, and the human species would become extinct.

According to some evolutionary psychologists, flirting may even be the foundation of civilisation as we know it. They argue that the large human brain – our superior intelligence, complex language, everything that distinguishes us from animals – is the equivalent of the peacock’s tail: a courtship device evolved to attract and retain sexual partners. Our achievements in everything from art to rocket science may be merely a side-effect of the essential ability to charm.

El lugar de la belleza

The Uncertainty Principle of Beauty

By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
February 16, 2007

For the 20 centuries between Plato and Kant, the study of beauty was a signature concern of philosophy. Recently, however, beauty has largely been dropped from the philosophical curriculum. The story of how this has come to pass is inseparable from a broader story about how philosophy itself has become so hopelessly professionalized. Contemporary philosophers, preoccupied with their small quarrels, have abandoned the discussion of beauty to the likes of Elaine Scarry and Denis Donoghue and their colleagues in art and English departments. It should come as little surprise, then, that beauty has been smuggled back into philosophy by Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, whose previous books have made wideranging inquiries into what he calls “the art of living.” Mr. Nehamas is among his generation’s few heirs to a philosophical tradition in America — which runs from Emerson and William James through Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell — that believes it might have something useful to say to an educated public.
For Plato, beauty was inseparable from eros, or desire. Roughly with Kant, however, philosophers became increasingly “mistrustful of passion” for all the usual reasons: its baseness, unreliability, and emotional illogic. Kantian philosophy sought to eliminate passion from beauty, replacing it with a model of disinterested contemplation. Kant called this category “the aesthetic,” which Mr. Nehamas interprets as “pleasure bereft of desire.” Mr. Nehamas’s brief but reverberant new book, Only a Promise of Happiness ( Princeton, 186 pages, $29.95), proposes that we once again talk about beauty as “identical with the spark of desire.” A beautiful object is, quite simply, one that beckons us to it. In the phrase Mr. Nehamas has borrowed from Stendhal, beauty is a “promise of happiness,” a hint that a closer relationship with the beautiful object might enrich our lives. When we are captivated by beauty — in a person or an artwork — we find ourselves following wherever that beauty may lead, well aware that we might be forever changed by the encounter.

Genealogía de la educación sexual en España

(Prólogo de El placer y la norma. Genealogía de la educación sexual en la España contemporánea. Orígenes (1800-1920). José B. Seoane. Ed. Octaedro, 2006.)

Una historia política del cuerpo infantil

 

En la sociedad preindustrial los hijos eran una riqueza material que garantizaba el trabajo en el taller o en el campo, la protección de los padres en su vejez y la transmisión del nombre y del patrimonio. A comienzos del siglo XXI y en las sociedades de capitalismo avanzado, los hijos no se experimentan como una fuente de beneficios materiales; se tienen y se cuidan porque proporcionan un beneficio psicológico, en clave de la autorrealización personal que aportan a sus progenitores. Esto ha conducido por una parte a restringir la descendencia; por otro lado se produce una idolatría de la infancia que multiplica las atenciones y los afectos y que al mismo tiempo engendra nuevas inquietudes ante las virtualidades que amenazan su integridad. Aquí destacan los terrores suscitados por los atentados contra la sexualidad: «abuso sexual» de menores en la familia, redes de pornografía infantil y siniestras tramas de pederastas.

En el caso español este proceso ha sido en cierto modo más abrupto que en otros países de Europa Occidental. En apenas dos décadas la tasa de natalidad española se ha convertido en una de las más bajas del planeta; al mismo tiempo se ha conocido el rápido despegue de un enorme mercado de bienes y servicios destinado al público infantil. Paralelamente, aunque con cierto retraso respecto a los países anglosajones, se ha conocido en España la expansión de los «pánicos sociales» relacionados con el ataque a la integridad sexual de los niños.

El placer y la norma es un intento de comprender la singularidad de esta situación —de la sensibilidad que rodea a la sexualidad infantil y a sus riesgos— proyectándola sobre su trasfondo histórico. La aportación de José Benito Seoane en su ensayo es doble. Por una parte da a conocer aspectos del pasado que hasta ahora permanecían en sombras. Aunque desde hace algunos años se empieza a contar en España con excelentes trabajos sobre historia de la infancia, el tópico de la sexualidad habría sido hasta la fecha muy poco explorado. El placer y la norma pone al descubierto un momento poco conocido; se adentra en ese «largo siglo XIX» que va desde la difusión española de la campaña antionanista de Tissot, en torno a 1800, hasta las vísperas mismas del éxito de la «cuestión sexual» en el mundo intelectual y literario, en las décadas de 1920 y 1930.

Armarios de cuero

(Prólogo del libro Armarios de cuero, Olga Viñuales y Fernando Sáez, Ed. Bellaterra, 2007.)

 

 

 

 

A modo de prólogo

 

Si nacer es comparecer, como afirma Pascal Bruckner, concebir es un acto de compromiso. Un acto de compromiso con la vida, la sociedad, las personas, independientemente de que cuanto sea objeto de con­cepción sean personas o, como es el caso, libros y colecciones. La colección «Relatos de vida» representa una apuesta, otra más, de la Edi­torial Bellaterra a favor del conocimiento de la sociedad en que vivimos. Se trata de una iniciativa innovadora en el campo de las ciencias sociales en España, donde la publicación de narrativas biográficas goza de menor popularidad y reconocimiento que en los paí­ses anglófonos, francófonos o eslavos. El hecho de que, además, los materiales que se incluyen incorporen las reflexiones y vivencias de quienes cuestionan modelos sociales hegemónicos —incluso en una sociedad pretendidamente abierta y plural como la nuestra— sazona el compromiso de José Luis Ponce con la sal de la valentía y la pimienta de la osadía.

Todo compromiso está emparentado con la voluntad. La idea de dar a luz la colección «Relatos de vida» responde a un posiciona­miento tanto político como intelectual. Siempre he creído en el dere­cho de las personas a existir y vivir según sus criterios, con indepen­dencia de la afinidad que puedan suscitar en mí. Siempre me he rebelado ante las políticas del silencio, la forma de violencia más discreta y devastadora que jamás haya conocido. La realización de mi trabajo de campo sobre lesbianismo me permitió constatar la ausen­cia de espacios plurales en los que las personas que, por motivos diversos, cargan con el peso del estigma social, pudiesen expresar y compartir pública y libremente sus vivencias. Dar voz a los sin voz exige, a mi modo de ver, la determinación de conceder verbo y auto­nomía a sus verdaderos protagonistas, tanto en contenido como en forma. Discrepo de esa sutil apropiación e instrumentalización de vi­vencias ajenas de que hacen gala muchos intelectuales en aras de ob­jetivos no siempre explicitados. Son modos de proceder en los que reconozco un intenso aroma a colonialismo discursivo.

El fracaso de educar para la abstinencia

Abstinence-only sex ed finds few scientific fans

Birth control taught in shrinking number of schools, study says

Mike Weiss, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, February 11, 2007

There is no good scientific evidence that teaching abstinence to teenagers will by itself prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, say the authors of a recent study. Yet they found that comprehensive sex education is declining and that more youngsters are being taught nothing more than abstinence.

As with similar debates over stem cell research and abortion, California and the Bush administration are at loggerheads over an ethical issue with far-reaching public consequences — in this case, the best approach to sex ed for middle and high school students.

More than $1 billion in federal aid has been poured into state-run abstinence-only programs in the past decade after the Bush administration decided there was an imbalance that favored comprehensive sex education and slighted abstinence. State school systems accepting the federal money are required to teach that sexual activity outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects, and that a married, monogamous relationship is the expected standard.

Vida sexual mediocre

Not in the Mood
Why so many women are settling for mediocre sex lives.

Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
Sunday, February 11, 2007; BW08

SATISFACTION

Women, Sex, and the Quest for Intimacy

By Anita H. Clayton with Robin Cantor-Cooke

Ballantine. 263 pp. $24.95

Maybe you’re tired. Or you just don’t feel like it. Perhaps it’s your lover’s fault; he doesn’t know what you like. Or there’s no time, the kids take all your attention, your job drains the life out of you. Or the dishes need to be done, the laundry has to be folded, and your body is not what it used to be. Or maybe you’ve never understood what all the fuss is about. It’s easy to find reasons not to have sex.

“You have to put gas in the car and you have to buy food and you have to pay the electric bill, but you don’t have to have sex,” writes Anita H. Clayton in Satisfaction, “so the sex has to wait.” It shouldn’t, she says. In this wry and thoughtful book, Clayton argues that most women are not satisfied with their sexual lives, but that they could be if they peeled back the layers of their own psyches to discover whatever anxieties, shame or unfulfilled fantasies lie beneath.

Clayton, a practicing psychiatrist, walks the blushing reader through the “dark and tangled, funky and wild” world of female sexuality, from puberty to post-menopause, from hooking up to shutting down. This book is not an exploration of the female body but of the female mind — a psychological guide to sex. Clayton illustrates her points with what she describes in the preface as “composites of several persons whose symptoms would be recognizable were they presented on their own.” For instance, there’s Vera, whose husband left her after she had a hysterectomy; Toni, who can’t see that her obesity is what’s killing her drive; and Karla, who gets excited only when she’s in a lovers’ triangle. Believable (and necessary) as these composites may be, knowing that these are not real women undermines the book’s otherwise frank approach.

Homosexualidad y civilización

Yale Review of Books. Volume 7, number 2, Spring 2004

A History of the Closet

Crompton surveys homosexuality through the ages

Last summer, the Reverend Gene Robinson became the first openly gay bishop of the Episcopal Church. Though surrounded by a swirl of controversy, Bishop Robinson’s confirmation is remarkable in light of the often rocky relationship between Christianity and homosexuality. In Homosexuality and Civilization, Louis Crompton traces the history of this relationship in European civilization and makes comparisons to the societies of ancient Greece, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan to show that outside of the Christian world the two elements of his title were not necessarily incompatible.

Crompton begins his investigation with the earliest centuries of Christianity, examining the intermingling influences of Hellenistic culture and Jewish scriptural tradition in the context of Roman imperial power. He looks first at the cultural influences inherited from classical Greece, especially the practice of paiderastia, or a relationship between an older man and a younger person, usually in late adolescence. Crompton gives evidence that paiderastia was idealized in classical Greek literature, philosophy, and military traditions as a relationship in which the older man served as a protector, teacher, and model of virtue to the beautiful younger man.

Consecuencias de “enrollarse”

Going All the Way
A reporter argues that young women are fooling around with their emotional health.

By Reviewed by Kathy Dobie
Sunday, February 11, 2007; BW08

UNHOOKED

How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both

By Laura Sessions Stepp

Riverhead. 288 pp. $24.95

Articles, op-ed pieces and radio shows have been devoted to the sexual practice of “hooking up,” but Washington Post reporter Laura Session Stepp’s Unhooked is the first book on the phenomenon and, one hopes, not the last. For when someone takes such a volatile aspect of young people’s lives and puts it under a microscope — or in this case, a concerned, disapproving gaze — you want the large, well-lit view.

Stepp follows three high school girls and six college women through a year in their lives, chronicling their sexual behavior. These girls and women don’t date, don’t develop long-term relationships or even short, serious ones — instead, they “hook up.” Hooking up, Stepp writes, “isn’t exactly anything.” It can “consist entirely of one kiss, or it can involve fondling, oral sex, anal sex, intercourse or any combination of those things. It can happen only once with a partner, several times during a week or over many months . . . . It can mean the start of something, the end of something or the whole something.” If that sounds as if hooking up can mean almost anything but “fried fish for dinner,” Stepp goes on to offer something more definite: What makes hooking up unique is that its practitioners agree that there will be no commitment, no exclusivity, no feelings. The girls adopt the crude talk of crude boys: They speak of hitting it, of boy toys and filler boys, “my plaything” and “my bitch.”

San Valentín

Historia, causalidad y sexología

The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 40, number 3, August 2003.

History, causality, and sexology

John Money

In 1896, Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis. Popularly defined as hereditary weakness or taintedness in the family pedigree, degeneracy was called upon as a causal explanation for perversions of the sexual innstinct. Although Krafft-Ebing accepted Karl Ulrichs’ proposal that homosexuality could be innate and probably located in the brain, he paid little attention to neuropathological sexology. Alfred Binet challenged Krafft-Ebing’s orthodoxy by explaining fetishism in terms of associative learning, to which Krafft-Ebing’s response was that only those with a hereditary taint would be vulnerable. Thus did the venerable nature-nurture antithesis maintain its rhetoric, even to the present day. Krafft-Ebing died too soon to meet the Freudian challenge of endopsychic determinism, and too soon also to encounter the idea of a developmental multivariate outcome of what I have termed the lovemap. Like other brain maps, for example the languagemap, the lovemap requires an intact human brain in which to develop. The personalized content of the lovemap has access to the brain by way of the special senses.