Who would have thought that showing your tits became a better strategy for pulling partners the older you get? Since I’ve never tried e-dating, it has never occured to me that it’s a spectacular source of data for epi-nerds interested in sexual networking. My eyes have been opened by OKCupid, whose data nerds have publish [...]
These gems from the delightful “blog” of “unecessary” quotation marks need no comment. Though the comments on “this post” are quite fun. And from my best side: Thanks to dkj for driving me to them.
What’s unsustainable about paying fo sex? I guess it depends on what your budget is, and how randy you are. As Copenhagen turns its thoughts green, its mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to Copenhagen hotels urging climate conference delegates to: ‘Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’. In response, the city’s sex workers are offering free [...]
I’ve always been curious to know what a random investigator would make of my in-box. Lots of people find theirs clogged with offers of penis extensions and tireless nights of love; I have the added joy of getting soft-peddalled syphilis diagnostic kits. I also get alerted when medical journals publish papers on a variety of [...]
The US voted for hope. It (we, I) voted for change. It (we, I) got a president who suggested sensible things like basing health policy on good science. The US even got some senators who followed through with funding for programmes that would teach young people that if you want to have sex and not [...]
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 [...]
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga won’t get laid this week. Or at least not at home — his wife Ida is leading a national sex boycott. And he may not have better luck outside the home; activists have done a deal with sex workers, paying them not to give their men relief in the boycott [...]
I’ve been meaning to write a cross-patch piece about Margaret Wente’s front page Globe and Mail story about the wickedness of gay men, but Chris Dupuis at Toronto’s ever-wonderful Xtra has done it for me. Although he doesn’t even get to the bit that most annoys me about her piece, her complete failure to recognise [...]
In this season of giving, it’s important to be an equal-opportunities purveyor of cheer. So I give you the CIA’s latest ploy in Afghanistan: the spooks are swapping Viagra for intelligence. They’re not just handing out these prescription meds to anyone, of course. That would be irresponsible. But they did note that one particularly uncoperative [...]
I’m not the first to observe that American evangelicals have been taking over the sex agenda. But you have to take your hat off to (Ir)Reverend Ed Young, who challenged his congregation to keep it up for a week. You have to take something off, at any rate. Perhaps the cap on the Viagra bottle? [...]
Christmas is about the Virgin Birth. For those of us not lucky enough to have been blessed by the Angel of the Lord and wanting a second chance, there’s the artificial hymen. A bargain at just US$14.99 (or Suggest Your Price). The product has so many advantages. It comes in discreet packaging — “Your Mum [...]
The conservative northern Nigerian state of Bauchi is running a lonely hearts service for HIV positives who want to get married. Authorities claim that this will reduce the spread of HIV. Predictably enough, some people are whining about this. A UNAIDS official is quoted as saying that it is dangerous, because of the likelihood of [...]
I wasn’t even going to bother to gloat about the goody-two-shoes Republican Vice-Presidential candidate’s swelling family. Plenty of others have done it for me. But the kerfuffle did get me thinking about what’s fair game in science and reporting. And that led me on an unlikely path to rape and bestiality. Yes, Sarah Palin gutted [...]
One of the things I noticed on the left hand side of the Atlantic was how many people took the dust jacket off my book before taking it out in public. No one wants to be seen in the company of “Whores” on the subway. But who is the word offending? Both left and right, [...]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in Prospect about HIV prevention among gay men now that near-universal access to treatment is making AIDS virtually invisible in rich countries. This excited a fair bit of comment over at Metafilter, not all of it pretty. But in any case, I was premature in declaring [...]
The results of the 2007 round of risk surveillance among US high-school kids are out. They find, wait for it, that despite nearly a decade of being told to cross their legs, American teenagers still have sex! The proportion of teenagers having sex drifted downward for the first decade it was measured (the surveys started [...]
We’ve all known for ages that there are essentially two HIV epidemics in the world: a heterosexual epidemic in East and Southern Africa (some would say all of sub-Saharan Africa) and an epidemic driven by drug injection, sex between men and commercial sex in the rest of the world. Now there’s another distinction, too. There [...]
A reader recently sent me a link to Time4Facts, a site that allows parents to download videos about sex and puberty. The idea is that parents can pick and choose from a menu of video clips, and then put together a “curriculum” that will allow their kids to learn about everything from wet dreams to [...]
Though I like to rant that HIV is all about sex and drugs (as for example, in this profile in the Guardian), I’ve got a new thing to think about: football. One of the coolest things about publishing a book, it turns out, is that people start doing your thinking for you. Last week, I [...]
Cherie Blair, the hot-shot lawyer who is married to Britain’s former PM Tony, blames her fourth child on the Queen. Leo was conceived while the couple were staying at the Queen’s Scottish pad in Balmoral. Cherie had left behind her contraceptive equipment, because on an earlier visit the household staff had unpacked everything. “The first [...]
