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 Will [...]
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 [...]
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 in [...]
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 had [...]
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 [...]