The Wisdom of Whores

The test-and-treat debate has been getting a bit hot and heavy of late. I think we all deserve some light relief. I offer this: Thanks to Txema, who is always ready to make a girl smile.

Few companies are posting rising profits in these hard times. But hard times are what SSL, maker of Durex condoms and other good-sex products, like best. As more people stay at home use of sex toys, the warming Play O orgasm gloop and condoms have all risen, driving pre-tax profits up by almost a third [...]

When the New Statesman New Scientist asked me for my idea of God, I described God as a ventriloquist’s dummy, worked by puppeteers in the religious bureaucracies. But in this video Canadian director Patrick Boivin delightfully makes puppets of the puppeteers also: Thanks to Paul Canning for pointing me to Patrick’s work. Readers might want [...]

I, like many who’ve written to me, am speechless with rage at the Pope’s first direct pronoucement on condoms. (Well, not quite speechless. I had a little vent about it in today’s Times.) To oppose condoms on dogmatic grounds is one thing. That’s the Pope’s job, if he considers it his job to defend Catholic [...]

Thanks to David

Though I’ve been wrestling the dreaded PowerPoint more than I’d like to recently, I haven’t posted for a while on data presentation. So I’m stealing this absolute gem that Environmental Graffiti ran under the title “World’s most expensive place to have sex” and Presentation Zen relayed under the title “When bar charts go bad”. What [...]

Some Sunday silliness courtesy of Lazygal.

I was pleased to read of the marriage of Bishop Gene Robinson and his partner of 20 years Mark Andrew. Well, not marriage actually, but civil union, the closest we allow gay men and women to get to the sacrament in most States in the US. Bishop Robinson is Episcopalian (which is pretty High Church [...]

I’ve been remiss about posting links to electronic versions of all of the references cited in The Wisdom of Whores (or at least abstracts, where academic journals or others continue to restrict copyright to full text). I just have not found time to post several hundred documents and links to the site yet; though I [...]

Malaysia’s deputy health minister recently urged Malaysian women to carry condoms. And he was especially attentive to the Malay majority, recognising that about three quarters of reported HIV cases in Malaysia are among ethnic Malays, who make up just under two thirds of the population. Many of these are men who inject drugs. Good for [...]

They went down well with the breakfast crowd at Hay. Especially with the gay Bishop.

Anyone out there going to the Hay Festival this weekend? Because I’m dashing to the Netherlands, I had to give up a nice, gentle mid-day spot on Bank Holiday Monday in favour of a talk on Sunday morning at 9. Mornings are not my best time of day, and Sunday mornings rarely creep in to [...]

The Wisdom of Whores is born tomorrow. This ad more or less sums up how I am feeling this evening. Thanks to the beyond cool Nicholas Gourlay for finding this for me.

I assume that Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, who died on Saturday, believed in an afterlife. I wonder if he’s given any thought to the millions of people he’ll meet in that afterlife who died young of AIDS because they didn’t use condoms. Some didn’t use condoms because they don’t like them, perhaps. Some because condoms [...]

It’s five years since the first London school opened an on-site clinic that dishes out contraceptive advice and condoms to schoolkids. And it seems to be working. Not a baby at the school ever since, compared with nine pregnancies in a year shortly before the programme began. Writing in the Guardian, Fran Abrams points out [...]

I’m not easily shocked. Really. But I have to say that the hairs rose on the back on my neck when I saw this: A catholic NGO, calling itself Human Life International, has put up three of these billboards in Tanzania. It’s president, Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, crows about this achievement on a Catholic web [...]

Easter and the spring equinox. In the Christian parts of the northern hemisphere this time of year is all about sex and death. Here’s some advice on how to enjoy the one without courting the other. I’m heading for the hills for a couple of days, and will be resurrected next week. To those who [...]

Also from Scientific American, news of self-healing rubber. If there were a way we could build in an early warning system for the tears, it could open up whole new horizons for safe sex, no? Though I’m not sure whether we’d really want to recycle it….