Nicolas Guéguen is a
researcher in human behaviour who runs curious and somehow whimsical experiments. With the help of a small army of "confederates", he studies the effects of various stimuli, including
dogs,
smiles,
fireman uniforms,
bust size (inflatable),
hair color,
music,
flowers,
figurines,
touching,
mirrors,
names etc. on the courtship, sexual, helping, chivalrous, tipping, buying, hiring, compliance or eating behaviour of unsuspecting victims. Because not all experiments are successful, he has also published one
failure in the
Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis.
Selected papers are listed below the fold.
[more inside]
posted by elgilito
on May 17, 2013 -
6 comments
Chako Paul City is a women-only city in the north of Sweden, established in 1820 by a wealthy widow. It is "a place that is respectful of women's love, but with a rule that men cannot enter"; the few who have tried have found themselves beaten half to death by the formidable Amazonian sentries at its gates. It has a castle, and its main industry is forestry, with a sideline in lesbian tourism. Of the 25,000 women, from all over Europe, living in Chako Paul City, those wishing to seek male company are allowed to leave, but may only reenter after having bathed and undertaken several other measures to avoid negatively affecting the mental state of the other residents.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Apr 24, 2013 -
76 comments
Suffice it to say, Persepolis is quite a work. It’s a testament to the power of the graphic novel. The art’s simple linework helps the story feel unpretentious and direct. Persepolis was adapted as a 2007 French animated film, written and directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. Among other honors, it was nominated for an Academy Award. Why would someone want to ban such a book?
posted by Artw
on Mar 16, 2013 -
33 comments
Natalie Reed, who often writes about gender politics and social justice,
calls out "born this way" (especially in a gender/trans* context) as its own form of gender essentialism:
“Gender identity” is still gender-essentialism. It’s just a gender-essentialism where we get to continue thinking men are men, and women are women, and these are inherent parts of who you are, but we also get to ignore the uncomfortable demand of DEFINING “man” and “woman” and what we mean by that, and thereby dodge the uncomfortable fact that any such definition within any essentialist framework necessarily invalidates, undermines, insults or excludes at least some trans or intersex people. It’s a way to go right on believing that our womanhood, or our manhood, or whatever “gender identity” we have, is an immutable and intrinsic quality of ourselves, and thereby maintain the comforting belief that it’s concrete and stable and unassailable, but without having to deal with any of the difficult implications of that, without having to interrogate our definitions, without having to worry about what we mean, and without having to really think about gender beyond the generally received notions. It’s a way to be transgender but still think of our genders the way cis people do.
posted by divabat
on Mar 12, 2013 -
87 comments
I realized that if something had happened to Henry James' testicles, that my friends didn't know about it, because if they did, it'd just be weird that they didn't mention it - given what we were talking about. And I thought this was sort of neat because one of my friends had done his Ph.D. on James, and even he didn't know about the guy's self-castration! I instantly resolved to solve the mystery.
"Look," I said, exited now, "I'm pretty sure something happened down there, so I'm going to check it out. And when I do find out - "
"You'll let us know.
"We'll look forward to it."
posted by carsonb
on Feb 13, 2013 -
22 comments
Aneta Bartos is a photographer whose most recent show,
Boys, features lush, pictorial images of young men masturbating in the Carlton Arms Hotel (and is on display at the same hotel). All of her work, aside from her commercial portraits, is explicitly sexual, including male and female nudity.
[more inside]
posted by klangklangston
on Feb 7, 2013 -
31 comments
Right now, though, you can google “polyamory” and get a whole lot of nearly-identical polynormative hype articles, and you can meet up with locals who’ve read the same articles you just did, and you can all get together and do polynormative poly exactly the way the media told you to. And if that’s all you ever bother to do then essentially you are selling yourself short. You are trading in the monogamous norm for polynormativity, which relatively speaking isn’t all that much of a stretch, and stopping there because you may very well think that’s all there is (and you already racked up a whole bunch of cool points anyway). You aren’t encouraged to really think about this stuff without any imposed models at all, which means you never get to figure out what actually might work best for you. As such, the most fundamental element of polyamory—that of rejecting the monogamous standard, and radically rethinking how you understand, make meaning of and practice love, sex, relationships, commitment, communication, and so forth—is lost in favour of a cookie-cutter model that’s as easy as one, two, three. The deepest and most significant benefit of polyamory has become increasingly obscured by media representation, and as a result, is getting farther and farther out of reach for anyone who’s just starting out.
the problem with polynormativity, at Sex Geek
posted by davidjmcgee
on Jan 28, 2013 -
221 comments
The Geography of Abortion Access -
Forty years ago Tuesday, the Supreme Court ushered in legal abortion for American women when it decided in Roe v. Wade. Today, states—particularly in the South and Midwest—are eroding that right by legislating hundreds of provisions intended to impede access with burdensome obstacles. To understand more fully the complex state of access to abortion services in America, The Daily Beast identified and confirmed the location of the country’s remaining 724 clinics and calculated the distance from every part of the country to its closest clinic. (
more)
posted by Artw
on Jan 24, 2013 -
26 comments
"Men across all cultures reported higher sex drives and less restricted sexual attitudes than women, but women were consistently more variable than men in their sex drives. Another important, if not entirely surprising pattern, suggests that these differences are not entirely biological, and are due in some part to social and cultural ideologies."
An io9 article looks at the results from a number of sex surveys.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Jan 21, 2013 -
92 comments
Does having sex with you entail becoming married, whether legally, magically, physiologically, or some other de facto permanent relationship? Y/N If Yes, please describe our new life together.
It's an unpredictable dating world out there when you're a fanfiction protagonist. With the proliferation of anonymous
kink memes populated by imaginative,
trope-savvy slashers and other fan-writers (usually women), you can never be quite sure when your next amorous encounter in fic may veer into the dubiously probable or physically impossible. Luckily for sexually-active fic-heroes everywhere, fan-writers Coruscera and Linbot have created a helpful meta-fandom survey to ensure your future romantic interludes run smoothly for all partners involved:
"
Special Circumstances Questionnaire for Sexual Partners (Male): Long Form."
[NSFW for explicit sexual language. Possible trigger warnings for discussion of sexual consent and very unusual sexual practices.]
posted by nicebookrack
on Jan 18, 2013 -
19 comments
To some, Canada's greatest guilty pleasure is Poutine (here are
38 variations, all on one page, THANK you Foodbeast) or William Shatner (who is bringing his one-man show to
MY town tomorrow evening). But there are things most of us don't know about the Nice Folk to the North. Therefore, a new site for
CANADIAN SEX ACTS, kind of a Kanada Sutra. NSFW and age restricted, this new site may have performance problems (insert snarky comment here); if so, just enjoy the list of names of great white north positions (Reverse Rick Moranis, Montreal Meatpie, Five-Legged Caribou...)
posted by oneswellfoop
on Jan 18, 2013 -
66 comments
The Delights Of Disgust I confess I am disgusted by a great many things about people (and about myself, but let's put that aside). I do not believe it is particularly urgent for me to overcome my disgust, even if I recognize that this emotion must remain entirely separate from my thinking about which laws would be most just. I am disgusted by other people's dandruff, facial moles, food stuck in their beards, yet I do not accept that in feeling this way I am judging those people to be subhuman. I take it rather that humanity, while endearing, is also capable of appearing disgusting.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jan 16, 2013 -
23 comments
Adults over 50 are the fastest growing demographic for online dating sites, according to a recently [sic] study from UCLA’s department of psychology. Yet while older adults often value companionship over passion and marriage, experts say frisky behavior by seniors should never be underestimated. “I hesitate to generalize that they’re only having gentle, intimate moments,” says Melanie Davis, co-president of the national Sexuality and Aging Consortium. “Older adults can have really hot sex.” But not, typically, in long-term care facilities.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey
on Dec 21, 2012 -
34 comments
Both characters remained fully clothed and there were no genital shots. But this was still the most explicit sexual content Wildenborg had seen in a video game. “It was at this point I decided to release the patch to the public,” he says. “I tossed the name 'Hot Coffee' on the file, based on the fact that the girlfriends would ask CJ in for some 'coffee' as a euphemism for sex. Hot Coffee was the first modification for San Andreas.” -
The history of Grand Theft Auto's infamous "Hot Coffee" mod.
posted by Artw
on Dec 9, 2012 -
37 comments
Just when you thought it was safe to open a book... it's the
Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award! (
Previously) This year's nominees include works by
Tom Wolfe,
Ben Masters,
Nicola Barker,
Paul Mason,
Nancy Huston,
Craig Raine,
Nicholas Coleridge, and
Sam Mills. Not on the list? J.K. Rowling's
The Casual Vacancy--despite "a couple of queasy moments," in the
words of TLR senior editor Jonathan Beckman--and E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey, since the award "is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature." Snippets from the nominated books can be found at the Guardian link.
posted by Cash4Lead
on Nov 21, 2012 -
33 comments
Guys don't want casual sex: "This stereotype 'tells us that guys are primarily interested in sex, not relationships... This contributes to the notion that guys are emotional clods who are incapable of connecting with their partners because, hey, they’re just guys, and guys are only interested in sex.'... the Wake Forest University professor lays out the current data on young men’s sexual desires and behavior to make a case against this insidious stereotype." Salon interviews
Andrew Smiler, author of
Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male.
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 19, 2012 -
122 comments
"Emma Stone was my dream best friend for a number of weeks. We'd see movies together. Get drinks and gossip. I remember one dream where we just texted. She resurfaced as my best friend last fall after I saw The Help. An actual friend of mine once told me a story about meeting Andrew Garfield's best friend, which meant Andrew Garfield and I were dream best friends for the following few nights. Again, there was texting." The Awl asks people:
What Was Your Weirdest Celebrity Sex Dream?
posted by The Whelk
on Nov 15, 2012 -
113 comments
How I Lost Faith In The Pro-Life Movement: "What I want to share here is how I came to this realization. And if you, reader, are one of those who opposes abortion because you believe it is murder and you want to save the lives of unborn babies, well, I hope to persuade you that the pro-life movement is not actually your ally in this, that you have been misled, and that you would be more effective in decreasing the number of abortions that occur if you were to side with pro-choice progressives. If this is you, please hear me out before shaking your head."
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 7, 2012 -
544 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
"In removing the associations with genitalia, the messiness of bodies mashing together is obfuscated. Men no longer have to worry about being replaced. Women no longer have to worry about the psychic implications of being penetrated by a penis. Society doesn’t have to worry about gender norms being disturbed. And expectations of what defines sex remains stable." --
Jenny An on "The Pleasure Model" (a jokey NSFW pic at the top)
posted by bardic
on Oct 18, 2012 -
66 comments
