You probably weren't aware of it. I wasn't. But we're aware of it now. And before you snicker about Clitoraid—what is that? a sports drink?—you might wanna read this.

Nick Nelson shares the touching story of his first sexual experience—an experience that was sweeter and more intimate than he could have anticipated. (Via Mystery Show Box.)

But are they crazy?

Emily Heil at the Washington Post says Mitt Romney gave a commencement speech at the University of Virginia over the weekend. Part of his advice for graduates? Don't wait until you're in your 30s or 40s to get married and have kids:

“They’re going to miss so much of living, I’m afraid,” Romney said of the sad, single losers who opt to spend their 20s without a ring (he says, unsurprisingly, nothing of those who might want to get hitched but can’t.).

Of the Bible, he tells the young folks: “When it says ‘marry,’ listen!...Have a quiver full of kids if you can.”

As Heil mentions, Romney was against gay marriage all during the six years he was running for president, even signing a pledge to vigorously defend DOMA. So he's not for everyone getting married. (And depending on the day, he's not even in favor of gay couples adopting kids.) But that's pretty much par for the course for Romney; one of his favorite rhetorical tics is ignoring the people he disagrees with rather than even dignifying them with a slight. You can read a full account of Romney's speech at the Roanoke, but why would you want to?

Seen in the Shell on Beacon Ave....

A slew of slog tippers just sent in this great story, via Thinkprogress.org:

A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”

George Washington High School recently hosted a conservative speaker, Pam Stenzel, who travels around the country to advocate an abstinence-only approach to teen sexuality. Stenzel has a long history of using inflammatory rhetoric to convince young people that they will face dire consequences for becoming sexually active. At GW’s assembly, Stenzel allegedly told students that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” She also asserted that condoms aren’t safe, and every instance of sexual contact will lead to a sexually transmitted infection...

It's a really great article. Go read the whole thing.

Posted by news intern Ansel Herz

First conviction of domestic violence in Ohio? A $1,000 fine.

If you're a repeat domestic violence offender in Ohio and you beat up your partner a second time, expect a $2,500 fine.

But teach kids in public schools about sex? A $5,000 fine—assuming Ohio Republicans get their way, which they very well might, since they have majorities in the senate and house.

Mary Anne Mosack of the National Abstinence Education Foundation calls their budget proposal "very, very, very wise." The Columbus Dispatch reports that the House Finance Committee approved the budget along party lines:

The sex education addition says that any instruction must not promote “any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with sexual activity.”

It goes on to prohibit distributing certain materials, conducting demonstrations with “sexual stimulation” devices, or distributing contraception.

If a student receives such instruction, a parent or guardian can sue for damages, and a court may impose a civil fine of up to $5,000.

It's tough out there for teachers in Ohio. As Cienna wrote yesterday, a Catholic high school just fired a teacher for—wait for it—mentioning her same-sex partner in an obituary for one of her family members.

Ohio, get with the program.

(Thanks, Slog tipper Amanda.)

Staring at "See Video of Bats Having Oral Sex" and trying to decide whether I was going to click on that shit at 6:45 AM.

And straight ladies? Read it and weep:

Initially, males groomed their penises to go erect before approaching females. When they gently touched females with their wings, females typically moved away, and males followed. When the females stopped moving, the males started licking the females’ vaginas—the act known as cunnilingus. This foreplay may help arouse and lubricate females, the researchers said. Each case of cunnilingus typically lasted about 50 seconds. The males then mounted the females for 10 to 20 seconds, and then went back to cunnilingus for 94 to 188 seconds. The researchers found that the longer the stints of cunnilingus before mating, the more copulation was prolonged.

A carefully groomed penis? And two-to-four minutes of the act known as bat cunnilingus for every twenty seconds of BPIBV (bat penis in bat vagina) intercourse? Math is hard, like Barbie said, and it's especially so at this hour. So I'm not going to try to figure out what the precise ratio is of intercourse-to-cunnilingus for lady bats. But I imagine that figure would make most human females jealous and/or depressed. Maybe it would be better for all if no one attempted that calculation. Let's just leave it alone, shall we?

Daily Dot reports:

A plague is striking Chinese officials in the southeastern county of Shuangfeng. One by one their photographs are being nabbed from government websites, their faces cut out and then pasted into pornographic movie stills—explicit Photoshop mashups that would surely horrify the morality of any good Communist.

The Chinese Photoshop masters share the photographs with their victims, along with a threat: pay up, or we'll post these all over the Internet.

...sports!

Thank you, Turkish oil wrestlers. Thank you, Buzzfeed. Thank you, Slog tipper Ben. And thank you, what happens at 1:32 mark.

William Saletan has an anti-BDSM screed up at Slate. He doesn't approve of BDSM generally, but Saletan seems particularly tormented by the idea of a coworker at Slate bringing her girlfriend to the office Christmas party on a leash. (As that's never happened at the Stranger, William, I can't imagine it's going to happen at Slate anytime soon. So chill.) While I agree with the distinction Saletan makes between sexual orientations and sexual activities (a distinction I've made myself), Saletan goes out of his way to shock vanilla readers by linking to shit like this without so much as a "NSFW."

But yes to this: straight, gay, bi, or lesbian is something you are, BDSM is something some of each of the above do. A lesbian can't have a relationship—she can't date or marry or start a family—and keep her sexual orientation "private." But a kinky lesbian can date and shack up and get married without disclosing her kinks to friends, family members, and coworkers. No one is harmed if she is open about her kinks, of course, but her sex partners are the only people who really need to know about them. And most of us—kinky or vanilla—run our sex lives on a "need to know" basis. Into bondage? Your girlfriend needs to know. Your mom? Not so much. That Saletan guy in the cubicle by the photocopiers? Not at all.

There are certain assumptions we make about the sex lives of our friends, family members, and coworkers. We assume the straight couples we know are having vaginal sex, the gay couples are having anal sex, the lesbian couples (and everybody else) are having oral sex, etc. And most of us are perfectly comfortable with not knowing more than we need to about the particular interests, kinks, and fetishes of our friends, family members, and coworkers. It isn't hypocrisy. It's boundaries.

But Saletan seems terrorized by the thought of all the BDSMers in his life—he knows he knows people who must be into BDSM—coming out about their kinky sexual lives en masse. That's no more likely than his vanilla friends coming out about the delight they take in giving or receiving head. Most people into BDSM are like most other people: content to keep the particulars of their sexual activities private. But in our post-Fifty-Shades world, the only way for vanillas to make sure the closeted BDSMers in their lives stay closeted, Saletan's piece implicitly argues, is for vanillas to ramp up the fear-mongering and start reviving defamatory stereotypes: BDSMers are crazy and dangerous! To that end Saletan lards his post with links to hardcore images sure to traumatize as well as links to the idiotic blatherings of self-appointed BDSM "experts" on YouTube.

But it's unfair—unfair bordering on unhinged—of Saletan to describe consensual BDSM as "domestic violence." I don't know who should be more offended: good people into BDSM or actual victims of domestic violence. And here's a sadistic twist of the knife: Saletan holds up the kink community's own discourse about abuse and abusers—the willingness of the kink community to address the issue—as evidence that abuse is somehow unique to the kink community or more widespread in the kink community. Is there data on that, William, or is that just prejudice? And can you name a single community that doesn't have abusers? Some BDSM relationships are abusive, of course, but some vanilla relationships are too. There are "normal" straight guys out there—guys who are only interested in missionary-position sex—who beat their wives and girlfriends. Sometimes to death. I could write a post packed with links to stories about vanilla abusers. And what would it prove? That no one should fuck anyone at all?

Yes, BDSM can be dangerous. Yes, there are dangerous idiots and asshole abusers out there. Yes, the D/s dynamic is tricky and it can complicate negotiations and some bad players exploit it. People into BDSM need to be smart and cautious and on their guard. (Same goes for people who aren't into BDSM.) The potential for injury in BDSM is why you don't want someone pinning your cock to a butterfly board unless she know what she's doing and it's why you don't let someone you know nothing about tie your ass up. That's why it's important for kinksters to have a community—however imperfect—that shares information, teaches safe practices, and provides a degree of accountability. That community can't exist without a public face and that means some kinksters—for the good and safety of all—need to be out. Even if traumatizes William Saletan.

There's lots of talk lately about sex trafficking, women and girls and boys forced into prostitution, ways for lawmakers to crack down, and police stings to bust prostitutes and johns. But are we better off legalizing it? We could bring the whole thing above board (like we just did to pot) so we can separate the responsible players from the dangerous, illegal ones, undercut the some demand for human trafficking, establish legal standards for safe sex, regulate the market, and tax the fuck out of it.

If not, why not? And if so, how should we regulate it? Discuss.

"I can only think of two kinds of handjobs. Left hand, right hand. Or both hands! There's three."

If you don't have tickets to the Valentine's Day party at the Neptune on Thursday—which is also a live taping of a Savage Lovecast—uh, you're going to have to stand outside and beg someone, cuz it's sold out.

Vice's Kat George—doing her best impression of a Jezebel writer (and I mean that as a compliment (I read Jezebel every day, Vice not so much))—interviews the founders of Bang With Friends, a new app that allows you to, well, let Kat explain:

Do you click through your friends' Facebook photos furiously masturbating? No? Well friend, get with the times, because according to the new app “Bang with Friends” everyone has a secret hard-on for their pals, and moreover, a burning desire to, as the moniker would suggest, bang with friends. Bang with Friends allows you to peruse photos of all your Facebook friends, and anonymously select who you’d like to fuck. The friends you chose will only ever find out that you want to bone them if they want to bone you too.... And nevermind that you’re not even consenting to have your image used on this glorified whorehouse (the founders’ email is simply “Online Pimp”), because being sexually objectified is “flattering,” just like being catcalled in the street.

The guys who created Bang With Friends explain what they were thinking:

How do you think people will feel about having their image used as a sexual object without their consent or even knowledge?

Flattered? This happens all of the time offline and online via Facebook. We're all adults here. Let's be honest about our sexuality!

You talk about wanting to take the "awkwardness" out of sex. How is your app doing that?
It can be awkward to breach the subject of your sexual interest in a friend unless you know it's mutual. We take down that barrier. It should be something that is celebrated and open, not something anyone should feel awkward admitting is their goal.

As a woman, I find the homepage image you guys use on your site quite disturbing. An inert, faceless woman on a bed with a dress pulled up over her head doesn't exactly scream "equality for the sexes." Why did you choose a woman and not a man?
We liked the erotic, laid-back, and whimsical nature of the photo. But rest assured, we'll be updating it for the ladies and gents who swing that way.

When I log on, I'm only able to see males from my friends list. Why the heteronormative standard?

To be honest, we built this in two hours and never expected it to take off. We built the most basic version we could to keep it simple and get to the result of getting people bangin buddies! We are working on expanding it to help everyone.

Two things:

1. When did Vice start tossing around Queer Theory lingo like "heteronormative standards"? I thought Vice was proudly heteronormative. And some of the most disturbing images I've ever seen were in Vice.

2. This new attempt at a Grindr for straight people... just might work. A previous attempt, Blendr, didn't take off because it was designed to help people hookup with strangrs. Lots of gay men are into anonymous hookups, and lots of straight men would like to have anonymous hookups, but not that many women are willing to risk 'em. Which is why I predicted that Blendr wouldn't work:

Continue reading »

We're gay and all, both of us are highly susceptible to underwear ads, we've been known to enjoy nearly-naked men... but Calvin Klein's first-ever Superbowl underwear ad didn't do much for the gays at my house. How about your house?