At Santa Monica College a professor took a group of students on an “EcoSexual Sextravaganza”, during which they “married the ocean” and were encouraged to “consummate” that marriage. To encourage the students to be more in touch with nature, the event was about loving the environment more through “exocentric passion and even lust.”

The leaders of the trip were UC–Santa Cruz professor Elizabeth Stephens and pornographic actress/writer/sex educator Annie Sprinkle — both of whom are “the effective leaders of the ecosexual movement,” according to an article in the school’s student newspaper, the Corsair.

According to the Corsair, the students were handed plastic rings and gave their own personal vows to the sea before Sprinkle said, “With this ring, I thee wed, and bestow upon the sea, the treasures of my mind, heart and hands.” Stephens continued, “As well as our body and soul,” and Sprinkle concluded, “And with that, I now pronounce you one with the sea” — officially making all of the participants married to the sea, apparently.

Thank you to The National Review for information on this event. A one of a kind for the students I am sure.

What to think of this? As an open-minded person even I struggled with the meaning and message trying to be relayed. Loving nature and actually making love to nature seem to be two completely different things. Any thoughts?

 

By Korin Miller for Women’s Health

May 25, 2016

Love how often you and your partner knock boots? You can go ahead and pat yourself on the back for that, because new research says it’s all thanks to your attitude.

A new Florida State University study asked 278 heterosexual newlywed couples to keep daily diaries for two weeks, tracking how often they had sex and how satisfied they were (on a scale of one to seven). Each person also took a personality test measuring how they stacked up on the “Big Five” personality traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, neuroticism, and extraversion.

On average, couples had sex three to four times during the 14-day period. But how often they did it wasn’t random: Researchers found that the more open and agreeable the wife was, the more often the couple got it on. However, the husband’s personality traits had nothing to do with it.

What’s up with that? The study’s authors point out that previous research has shown that, on average, men want sex more often than women, so we play a pretty big role in how often it actually goes down.

That’s sounds about right.

But when it came to sexual satisfaction, the personalities of both partners mattered. Men and women who were more neurotic had lower levels of sexual satisfaction—no shocker there. But, weirdly, husbands who ranked highly in terms of openness were less likely to be sexually satisfied (the opposite was true for open women).

Of course, if your partner is open to new experiences, it doesn’t mean he thinks your sex life is crap. This study was short and only tracked people in the honeymoon phase, so researchers admit there’s still a lot left to be explored before their findings can be applied to all couples.

However, there’s one major finding you can take away from all of this: If you’re not happy with how often you’re getting laid, you can do something about it.

An assistant professor at Texas A&M University may have just changed the condom game forever. Mahout Choudhury, PhD, created a rubber-less condom infused with flavonoids that, in the event the condom breaks, can prevent the AIDS virus from reproducing upon release.

Safe sex just got safer

The Edge: Flavonoids, which are natural plant-based antioxidants, not only keep people safe and healthy but increase blood flow and relax muscles for happy condom wearing.

Credits to The Edge for this information.

 

How many people count the number of sex partners they’ve had,  do you suppose? Does it vary between men and women? Does it really matter how many partners a person has had other than theoretically the risk for acquiring an STI increases with the number of partners?

Men in particular, from my own personal observation, fall very directly on one side or another when it comes to the relevance of how many partners a potential mate has had. The more conservative male frowns upon high numbers of sex partners for a woman, say, over ten partners, perhaps even tossing around the word slut in his mind. The more lenient male likes the promiscuity of a female partner for at least two reasons. One is that if she has been with a variety of other men she is more likely to be skilled at pleasing her partner compared to a woman with only several partners. The other reason is the fascination with imagining this potential mate with other men. It is a huge turn-on, as much so as considering his new partner could be promiscuous or the often forbidden term — slut.

Women will surely know where the man stands once engaged in discussions about sex. And she is likely to feel diminished if a man suggests that excess partners is a bad thing or lets her know she has had more partners than he has. The slut-loving man will go to great extent in showering a woman with attention and praise over her promiscuous behavior, not wanting her to change anything about how she lives.

So promiscuous or not, counting yes or no. What do you do?

When my boyfriend and I started dating two years ago, we fell in love pretty instantly. I got on birth control faster than you can say “baby,” we both took an STD test—and then, like many exclusive lovebirds, we ditched the condoms.

Now I live in a safe little bubble where all my fears of contracting an STD have disappeared. This is because conventional wisdom tells me that if my boyfriend and I are both STD-free and only having sex with each other, we will remain in the clear.

But monogamy is not always perfect—and people do lie. This reality is the basis of a new study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which compared the relative safety of monogamous relationships to open relationships (“consensually non-monogamous”) in terms of sexually transmitted diseases.

If you think you’re safe as a bonafide member of the monogamy club, you may want to think again.

For the study, Justin Lehmiller, director of the Social Psychology Graduate Program at Ball State University,recruited 556 participants aged 18 or older who were in relationships (351 monogamous and 205 consensually non-monogamous). Of the sample, 77.9% identified as heterosexual, 3.8% identified as gay/lesbian, 14.4% as bisexual, and 4.0% opted to write in their own identity.

Each participant was asked about his or her current relationship, past sexual experiences, condom use, and how often they were tested for sexually transmitted infections—as well as any additional sex partners outside of their primary partner.

They were also asked if their primary partner was aware they were having sex with other people. The point of all of these questions was to figure out if having more sexual partners—i.e., being involved in an open relationship—would increase one’s risk of contracting an STD.

It turns out it did not.

Despite having more lifetime sexual partners, people in open relationships were not any more likely to have an STD than those in monogamous relationships. Not only that, the people in open relationships were actually much safer about sex. They wore condoms with all their extra partners and got tested much more frequently. They were also less likely to lie to their primary partner about an extra-sexual dalliance.

For example, in the non-monogamous group, 72.4% of participants reported sexual involvement with someone other than their primary partner. Of those, 36.7% reported that their “primary partner did not have specific knowledge of this information.” So about a third of the sample wasn’t being totally upfront, but wasn’t technically breaking any relationship rules since they were in an open relationship.

In the monogamous group, on the other hand, 24.4% reported sexual involvement with someone other than their primary partner. Of those individuals, 75% reported that their primary partner did not have specific knowledge of this information. Almost all of them were keeping it a secret.

Not only that, people in the monogamous group were less likely to wear condoms with their side sex partner. Which makes sense—if you’re in an exclusive relationship and not using condoms ever, you might carry that practice over to extra sex partners as well. Combine that with less frequent STD testing, and suddenly, monogamy isn’t as fool-proof as we might have thought. This led Lehmiller to state in his paper:

The present findings reveal that monogamy is often implemented imperfectly. Persons who have made monogamy agreements often break them, and when they do, they are less likely to take safety precautions, get tested for STIs, and disclose those extradyadic encounters to their partners than persons who agree to some form of negotiated nonmonogamy … Thus, many people in monogamous relationships may not be as safe as they assume.

Lehmiller noted that the finding that one in four people in the monogamous group were cheating lines up with previous research on infidelity. “The potential danger of monogamy is that, if your partner puts you at risk by cheating, you’re unlikely to find out until it’s too late,” Lehmiller told me over email.

Finally, to cover all his bases, Lehmiller compared the STI rates of those in the monogamous group who actuallyremained monogamous to those in open relationships—and again, found no difference in prevalence of STIs.

“People in open relationships seem to take a lot of precautions to reduce their sexual health risks,” Lehmiller told me. “They have more open communication with their partners, a greater likelihood of using condoms with all of their partners, and higher rates of STI testing. Altogether, this means that open relationships aren’t as risky as people think.”

In conclusion—monogamy is not a guarantee, so continue getting tested. (Duly noted!) And just because someone chooses to be polyamorous doesn’t mean they also have herpes.

Thank you to Fusion for this article.

“…the only way for divorced Catholics to receive communion is by practicing strict sexual abstinence, “continence through the strength of grace.”

An excerpt from a commentary on Pope Francis found in The New Yorker, October 2015. Who made the comment is less important than what is said. Granted, some people choose to wait for marriage to lose their virginity based on religious beliefs. However, stretching that requirement to presumably adults,  requiring strict sexual abstinence, once divorced, is akin to asking for continual penance for the deed of leaving one’s legal partner. We all make mistakes or perhaps end up in less than desirable or dangerous situations, but this shouldn’t be cause for forced sexual prudity.

Ask some men, and I have, and they will tell you women they meet seem unable to fully release themselves sexually. As if holding back their sexual side, they are retaining some pureness despite having sex outside of marriage. Even for those not religiously inclined, the societal implications of being free sexually are worse than being considered prudish. To become aware of one’s own sexuality and express it without repression is to risk being called a slut. Men are praised for their promiscuous ways while women are still looked upon less favorably for having multiple sex partners. The double standard alive and well.

THE DAILY BEAST

The Perfect 3D-Printed Penis

BY SAMANTHA ALLEN

Forget about tissue engineering and chocolate sculptures. 3D printing has finally achieved its true purpose: helping scientists discover the size and shape of the perfect penis.

For the first time, a group of researchers from UCLA and the University of New Mexico have used 3D-printed phalluses to ascertain women’s penis size preferences. Previous studies on the subject have asked women to state a length in centimeters or to select “small, medium, [or] large,” as if they were ordering a side of french fries. Other experiments have presented women with 2D drawings, but what is a penis, really, without the third dimension?

The study—published today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One—contains good news for men: Women prefer a penis size only slightly above average, and their preferences differ slightly depending on relationship context.

To perform the study, sexual psychophysiologist Dr. Nicole Prause and her team generated a matrix of 100 different erect penises with varying lengths and circumferences but eventually narrowed them down to 33 options, reasoning that “such a large choice set could overwhelm participants.” These 33 representative choices were then 3D-printed in blue plastic “to minimize racial skin-color cues” and sorted into baskets from which 75 women selected an ideal penis for both a long-term partner and a one-night stand.

To ensure that the women’s choices were not arbitrary, the researchers also required them to complete a pretest in which they attempted to recall the shape of a randomly selected phallus, both immediately and after a delay. The subjects proved themselves adept at remembering penis length and especially skilled at recalling penis circumference, which may indicate that they “care more” about the latter measurement.

But enough methodological foreplay. Here is the size and shape of the ideal penis according to this sample of 75 women. For a long-term partner, the women reported an ideal length of 6.3 inches and an ideal circumference of 4.8 inches. For a one-night stand—described by the researcher conducting the experiment as a man who is “kind, intelligent, funny, and has a great job”—the sample indicated that 6.4 inches long and 5 inches around would be best.

There’s an economic paradox at the heart of the porn industry. Consider:

The amount of porn that has already been produced is more than anyone could possibly watch. A single tube site, like Pornhub, can have well over 200 terabytes of porn on it–which works out to something like 50,000 hours. What’s more, according to Rule 34 of the internet, if you can imagine it, there’s porn of it. As a result, there’s little obvious reason to produce new porn: everything has already been done, probably better, by somebody else, and is already freely available online.The cost of porn to consumers, after falling for decades, has now reached zero. Once upon a time, men would pay large sums to assiduously amass large collections of “erotica.” Today, porn, even more than music, lives in the cloud, and effectively unlimited quantities of it can be streamed for free. As a result, selling porn has never been harder.

If it’s all been done and new pornographers are finding it harder than ever to get paid for their efforts, the consequence is pretty obvious: the industry should be dying. Yet, if only by sheer volume, it’s flourishing: more new porn is being made, every day, at volumes never seen before. One report has a new porn video being made in the U.S. every 39 minutes.

So, what’s going on?

One explanation lies in the fact that while porn stars are making money, they aren’t making most of it directly from porn anymore. Instead, they’re offeringvideos for free, in hopes that doing so will help them sell more intimate sexual services to their fans. (Fusion did adocumentary series on the changing porn industry over the summer and it’s well worth watching.)

Porn used to be a product: something which was made and then sold. That was true for a long time even after it got onto the internet: porn sites were historically the very best at being able to charge for content online. But over the past several years, a new copyright-busting monopolist named MindGeek has taken over, and completely changed the game.

MindGeek owns most major tube sites, including PornHub, YouPorn and Red Tube. Its network reaches over 100 million people every day. Each set of eyeballs tends to spend a substantial amount of time on the sites—over 10 minutes, in the United States. That kind of reach can produce massive profits from ad revenue alone. MindGeek sites tend to have many banner ads on each page, as well as large popunders. (Interestingly, they don’t tend to have prerolls.)

MindGeek is a complex and fascinating business, which is based almost entirely on advertising revenue. My efforts to speak with MindGeek executives for this column were unsuccessful, but I highly recommend you read David Auerbach’s Slate piece on the company if you want to get a feel for how it works, how it makes money, and why copyright owners feel forced to work with it rather than try to fight it. MindGeek’s sites tend to feature rampant copyright violation, but in many ways the only thing worse than having your porn video pirated on Pornhub is not having your porn video pirated on Pornhub.

Since MindGeek has become what’s known in economics as a “dominant distributor,” it has had profound effects on the way the entire sex industry works. The big story here is not how much money MindGeek is making, or even how MindGeek makes its money. Rather it’s how, in upending the X-rated economy, MindGeek has brought porn back to its roots.

After all, the word “pornography” comes from the Greek pornē, meaning prostitute, and graphein, meaning to write, or record. It literally means “a recording of prostitution.”

Modern society makes an important distinction between porn and prostitution: the former is generally legal, while the latter generally isn’t. With the rise of the tube sites, however, the line between different types of sex work has become much, much blurrier.

Most of the men and women appearing in porn today are not “porn stars” in the way the term would have been understood in the 1970s or 1980s. Like the porn stars of old, they’re sex workers, but they make money in a very different way.

Porn videos, today, have become free advertising for other business lines—whether that’s camming, or stripping, or outright prostitution. Even in the world of escorting, tube videos are increasingly replacing the photographs of old. As a result, it can make financial sense to appear in porn films even if you get paid very little for doing so, because developing an online following is a great way to build a fan base. And that is where today’s porn stars earn most of their money: fans will pay to see stars like Veronica Rodriguez in a strip club, or for one-on-one Skype sessions, or for IRL sex. It’s the “freemium” business model: most people will be perfectly happy with the free product, but a small minority will pay for more exclusive services.

Meanwhile, the cost of appearing in a porn film—both in terms of production costs and in terms of reputation—has never been lower. We live in a world where young adults are freer than ever to explore and express their sexuality, and where everybody has a high-def video camera in their pocket at all times. The shame factor of porn has been nearly eliminated in popular culture: just askKim Kardashian, whose sex tape essentially launched her career.

Porn can be—and often is—exploitative. And to be clear, many porn workers are unhappy about the dominance of MindGeek, because of the pirated videos it hosts and because it has forced them to change their business models.

But because MindGeek’s monopoly is so deeply entrenched, they have very little choice in the matter. As a “dominant distributor,” it is similar to Amazon in the world of book publishing. When there were many bookshops and a few big publishing houses, publishers held most of the power. But when there’s one enormous bookshop, the balance of power changes, and Amazon can start dictating terms to publishers.

Similarly, when a few big porn studios dominated online distribution through their own sites and the sites they licensed their content to, the creators of pornography held all the cards. They determined what was available for free and what consumers would need to pay for. Now that MindGeek has become the industry’s dominant distributor, the tables have been turned.

Studios might hate the idea that enormous amounts of their content are available online for free. But they can’t afford to demand that their material be pulled from MindGeek’s servers any more than publishers can refuse to allow Amazon to sell their books. MindGeek’s sites have become the discovery mechanism for porn, and everybody else needs to make peace with that. (There are still a handful of porn creators who try to exist outside the MindGeek system, but many of them first became famous on MindGeek’s sites, and few have had much success.)

MindGeek’s rise to industry dominance has coincided with a digital revolution that has encouraged the production of ever-greater quantities of porn. Setting up a basic studio is cheaper than ever, and once you’ve done so, the marginal cost of shooting another video and uploading it to the web is basically just your labor costs.

Those dynamics inevitably result in a lot more porn being produced. Today’s porn industry no longer needs to support a massive value chain, where many people would take a cut: producers, directors, studios, distributors, theaters, wholesalers, retailers, and so on. Most of those players have now been disintermediated and, in turn, costs have dropped significantly. The days of films with million-dollar budgets are long gone.

MindGeek has been cast as a cutthroat operator that steals other people’s content, massively reduces the industry’s total profit, and has gobbled up a huge slice of that smaller pie. That’s true. Certainly the big studios are suffering, or they’ve ended up being bought by MindGeek. But MindGeek isn’t completely monopolizing all porn profits: it also acts as a platform on which individuals and small studios can try to build relatively modest businesses.

Small-time porntrepreneurs like Lance Hart upload free videos to sites like Pornhub because it’s the only way to get noticed, and because it has a massive audience. Their goal: to persuade a tiny portion of Pornhub’s visitors to then subscribe to their content—or pay them for other sex-related services. It’s not an easy business to be in, and it’s likely to get even harder if Pornhub’s own subscription offering proves a success. But the barriers to entry have never been lower, and the number of people entering the industry—even when they end up earning very little as a result—has never been higher.

The whole ecosystem bears very little resemblance to the studio system of yesteryear. But maybe the best way to think about this transformation is to look at sex work more generally. MindGeek has become the single most important player not only in the porn industry, but also in the sex industry as a whole.

Sex and money have been entwined for millennia, but generally in a highly fragmented manner. Porn was in many ways the first big revolution in the sex industry because it allowed sex work to scale—to reach thousands or millions of customers—in a way that was never previously possible. MindGeek, in turn, is transforming the sex industry for a second time, bringing the platform revolution to sex workers around the world.

If you’re a worker seeking to turn sex into money, you need a platform to advertise your wares. MindGeek, impressively, has managed to create that platform; the massive disruption it has caused in the porn industry is merely a symptom of the much larger effect it has had on sex work. Using MindGeek’s suite of websites, sex workers can reach more potential customers more safely and more cheaply than ever before. That might be bad for porn studios. But if you’re a camgirl, or an escort, there’s a good chance you think of Mindgeek quite fondly.

Thanks to Fusion for this article.

What: A strain of ‘shroom found in the islands of Hawaii is giving women orgasms via smell.The Phallus Indusiatus, aptly named because, uh, it literally looks like a dick, has similar hormones to the neurotransmitters women release during sex, so after one whiff they’re off to Pleasure Town.

Thanks to The Edge for this information.