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Category: sex (page 2 of 3)

Why the Australian Sex Party?

18 August 2010 / / 3 Comments

I’m volunteering to help the Australian Sex Party. Yep, this election Saturday, I’ll be at my local polling place, handing out ‘How to Vote’ cards and answering questions.

One question I’ve already gotten is “What on earth are you helping them for?” I’ll confess, it does go deeper than the desire for a bright yellow ASP t-shirt, or to make fundy heads go asplody.

When I first heard about the Australian Sex Party, I thought, “Ha. Funny.” Then when I saw their policies, I thought, “Wait a minute. I agree with most of this.” Here are my favourite ASP policies.

To overturn mandatory ISP filtering of the Internet and return Internet censorship to parents and individuals.

The Internet filter is Labor’s idea, and it’s a shame they’re clinging to it. Even the Liberal Party has disavowed it.

To bring about the development of a national sex education curriculum as a first step in preventing the sexualisation of children.

Yes, yes, and yes. This is what prevents pregnancies (and abortions): better information and availability of contraception.

To create total equal rights in all areas of the law including same sex marriage.

Neither of the major parties has had the courage to come out in favour of this. When someone who’s an otherwise progressive thinker refuses to condone gay marriage, you know what that tells me? They’re willing to let prejudice prevail, for no good reason. And that they’re probably beholden to some religious ideology.

To enact national pregnancy termination laws along the same lines as divorce law — which allow for legal, no-fault and guilt-free processes for women seeking termination.

It’s a medical matter, not a political matter.

Overturn restrictions on aid to overseas family planning organisations that reference abortion.

Why is this even happening?

Convene a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in the nation’s religious institutions.

This should have already been done.

An Ethics course along the lines of the current NSW trial, developed by the St James Ethics Centre, to be incorporated into the national curriculum.

I love the idea of getting young people to examine secular ethics and ethical issues. Much more relevant than the bronze-age tribalism they’re currently getting.

Supports stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research, and maintains it is a vital medical issue, not a religious issue.

Automatic yes.

The public education system should be secular in nature and not provide for any religious instruction whatsoever.

‘Religious instruction’ is an oxymoron.

Ending the tax exempt status for religions.

Cessation of tax-exempt status on all but the charitable work of religious institutions.

Religions don’t pay their fair share, and we end up paying their tax burden. Let them pay taxes like all other businesses.

To be fair, there are planks in the platform that I find uncomfortable, unappealing, or complicated.

To bring about equal numbers of women in the Parliament through enabling the Federal Discrimination Act to have jurisdiction extending to political parties.

This is worded funny. You can’t force equal numbers.

Decriminalisation, not legalisation, of purchase, possession and consumption of all drugs for personal use, such quantity to be defined as an amount equal or less than 14 day’s supply for one person.

I can’t stand drugs and don’t use them (including alcohol), but I see the value of moving enforcement to the supply side. Dealing would remain illegal.

Minors (under the age of 16) may obtain an abortion without the consent of a parent/guardian.

Touchy, but actually that’s the way it is now.

I understand the reasoning behind these positions, but I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with them. Even so, these aren’t deal-breakers for me. No one’s going to agree with every party position, and this will be more pronounced when the party takes a strong stand on issues, as does the ASP.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a volunteer info meeting, or as they call it, ‘Slave Training‘. You have your choice of two meetings; they describe one as ‘vanilla’. I’m going to the other one! (Pictures soon.)

Americans: Don’t you wish you could vote for a Sex Party? Oh, I forgot: Republicans. Let me reword that. Don’t you wish you could vote for an unrepressed non-self-hating sex party?

Wait ’til they go with a fellatio joke.

20 June 2010 / / Comments Off on Wait ’til they go with a fellatio joke.

Whatever lifts your luggage

12 May 2010 / / 1 Comment

I second Dan Savage’s call to idiom.

Dan Savage dishes out sex advice to troubled souls. His column is not for those easily offended by the variety of human sexual experience. In his latest offering, he touches on the recent outing of noted Christian homophobe George Rekers.

Says Savage:

Rekers is a towering figure in the religious right. He’s the cofounder of the Family Research Council; a member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, a group that claims it can cure homosexuality, and the go-to guy for “expert” testimony about how gay people threaten and endanger children. And last week, Rekers got busted coming back from a 10-day European vacation with a 20-year-old male escort he found on Rentboy.com. Rekers told two reporters from the Miami New Times that he “can’t lift luggage,” so what other choice did he have but to hire a 20-year-old with an eight-inch cock?

To mark the downfall of yet another crazy, hypocritical closet case, I propose that “whatever floats your boat” be immediately permanently retired in favor of “whatever lifts your luggage.” This will be George “Rentboy” Rekers’ legacy, his lexi-colonic gift to the English language. Help spread the meme.

Yessir!

Though credit is also due to Jesus and Mo.

Atheist YouTube party

6 May 2010 / / 4 Comments

For this week’s UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society meeting, it was Atheist YouTube Party! With me as programmer. I really enjoyed the chance to share some of my faves. Here they are, as a YouTube playlist. Prepare to be offended and/or enlightened; the choice is, as always, entirely up to you.

NOTE: I think there might be a bug in the YouTube embedded playlist feature. The embedded playlist below skips the first video, which in this case was Tim Minchin’s “The Pope Song”. If you want to see it first, you can either click here to go to my blog post of a few days ago, or click here to find a working playlist on a different page.

Since I didn’t have a rock-solid net connection in the lecture room, I decided to take the precaution of downloading the videos as mp4’s using KeepVid, and then making a playlist in VLC. It made things go much more smoothly.

The Pope Song: A linguistic analysis

1 May 2010 / / 5 Comments

Been enjoying this new video from Tim Minchin. It’s catchy, but it does have a wee bit of profanity. Entirely justified.

Here are some stats about the song.

  • some variant of ‘fuck’: 84 times
  • some variant of ‘mother’ + ‘fuck’ in the same word: 35 times
  • some variant of ‘cunt’: 0 times
  • That’s one ‘fuck’ every: 1.54 seconds
  • Ratio of ‘fuck’ words to other words: 1:3.85

Other songs, for comparison:

  • Fuck tha Police by N.W.A.: One ‘fuck’ every 9.32 seconds
  • Too Drunk to Fuck by Dead Kennedys: every 8.89 seconds
  • Fucking in Heaven by Fatboy Slim: every 2.29 seconds
  • Bodies by the Sex Pistols: every 1.0 seconds (but only that one part in the third verse)
  • Fireflies by Owl City: every 0.6 seconds (subliminal)
  • Number of other songs I know that rhyme ‘papist’ and ‘rapist’: 0.

Sex causes earthquakes

20 April 2010 / / 2 Comments

As humans, we naturally want to find the reasons for things. It’s what makes us such inquisitive critters, and it’s done us a lot of good so far.

Except that it also makes us superstitious. Why aren’t the rains coming? We should do something, but what? Pray to a god and starve ourselves? Believe in Allah? How about getting our daughters to plow fields naked? And so on.

If superstition is a normal human tendency, it’s one that can be overcome with a bit of practice. On the other hand, some people like to wallow in it.

Extramarital sex ’causes more earthquakes’, Iranian cleric claims

Attractive women who snub traditional Islamic clothing to instead wear fashionable clothes and apply heavy make-up, caused youths in the country to “go astray” and have affairs, Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi said.

The hard-line cleric said as a result the country, bounded by several fault lines, experienced more “calamities” such as earthquakes, the reformist Aftab-e Yazd newspaper reported him saying.

Iran is prone to frequent quakes, many of which have been devastating for the country.

“Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes,” he told worshippers at a Tehran prayer service late last week.

Heh. He said ‘taint’.

“Calamities are the result of people’s deeds.

“We have no way but conform to Islam to ward off dangers.“

Except perhaps to find out what really causes earthquakes, and how to make buildings that don’t fall down. You know, all that sciency stuff.

No word yet if the Iranian government is planning on putting more funding into morality-based tectonics. Perhaps they could also throw a little money toward political volcano research.

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Goings-on

13 March 2010 / / 4 Comments

In the time between sessions, people grab food, buy books (everyone’s promoting a book here), and talk to each other. Check out the photo — that’s a lot of atheists, that’s for sure.

I used to think that atheists were usually ex-believers (because who else would care?), but here I’ve met quite a few folks who have never been religious and still identify closely with the aims (loosely defined though they are) of the atheist movement.

There’s quite a connection between political liberalism and atheism. There are but few conservatives here. There was a funny moment where Philip Adams asked for a show of hands: Who’s politically left-of-center? Thousands of hands. Everyone I could see. Conservatives? I couldn’t see everything from my vantage point, but I could see maybe one or two hands out of thousands. I think there are also more vegetarians. I wish there were a survey going around. It would say some interesting things about the more committed atheists, anyway.

I also met Sarah from the Australian Sex Party. Slogan: “Where you come first!” Yes, that’s right. In Australia, there are many political parties, and your vote is not wasted if you vote for a smaller party, because votes from non-winning parties flow on to your next preference. If America used Instant Run-off Voting, they could have a sex party too!

At first, I thought “Australia Sex Party. Right. Catchy.” I actually wondered what they were doing there, since it seemed kind of orthagonal to atheism. But when I read their platform, I thought, “Hey, wait a minute, I support lots of these!” They’re for things like:

  • Equal marriage for gay people
  • Convening a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in the nation’s religious institutions
  • No government-sponsored Internet filter
  • Better sex education in schools

which I think lots of atheists would be down with.

Me with Sarah from the ASP.

Atheist conservatives: here’s your chance to make yourselves known in comments.

Bibles for porn

5 March 2010 / / 2 Comments

A pretty edgy idea from Atheist Agenda at the University of Texas at San Antonio: Smut for Smut!

The concept: Trade in a holy book, and get some porn! I think it’s brilliant. Get those Bibles, Qur’ans, and Hubbard books off the streets where they’ll just harm somebody. Those things are full of the most vile misogyny, sex, and violence.

Pornography on the other hand, while not wonderful, is at least better than religion in a few important aspects:

  • Nobody pretends that a god is behind their porn, and that if you don’t accept it, you’ll be damned.
  • Nobody’s ever had a holy war over what kind of porn is better.
  • Nobody tries to legislate other people’s behaviour on the basis of their pornographic values.
  • Unlike religion, there are laws against exposing people to porn if they’re too young for it.

Talk the Talk: unfriend

26 November 2009 / / 2 Comments

In my latest ‘Talk the Talk‘ interview on RTRFM, I discuss the Oxford Word of the Year for 2009: ‘unfriend‘. Does anyone remember their pick from last year: ‘hypermiling‘? ‘Unfriend’ has a better chance of getting remembered, I’d say.

I also discuss ‘teabagging’, and why I am an amonokerist.

Watch out for that link: it starts playing immediately. I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through.

Teabagging in the corpus

22 April 2009 / / 3 Comments

Teabag Wednesday in the USA really only had two good outcomes: first, we got to mock libertarian/republican rightwads for their cluelessness on sexual terminology, and two, they got to add a new item to their vocabulary, if not to their repertoire.

As a linguist, I tend to be pretty hip with the lingo, taking into account how hard it is to be hip over 40 when we’re talking about sexual acts no one actually does. (Be honest.) But Dan Savage’s latest article has thrown me into a spin — he asserts (and he should know) that teabagging is performed by the one with the teabags. That is, a male teabags a female and not the reverse, as I had always assumed.

To teabag someone, you need a scrotum with which to teabag them: The teabagger dips sack; a teabaggee receives dipped sack. It’s a little confusing, I realize, in that it’s the opposite of a blowjob: The person with a dick in his or her mouth is giving the blowjob; the person being sucked is receiving the blowjob. But language is funny that way.

I tend to side with Mr Savage, not only because of his expertise on all matters sexual, but also for his influence in bending language to his will. He did, after all, introduce us to ‘santorum‘, and while it hasn’t lasted, I give him props for getting it as far as he has. What I mean is that if teabagging meant what I thought it did before he wrote his column, it has a good chance of meaning what he thinks it does by right about now.

I can’t be the only one to have had this misapprehension, if my reading of ‘Overheard in New York‘ is representative.

Husband: Then I can teabag you.
Wife: Wait. They go in my mouth. Wouldn’t I be teabagging you?
Husband: My teabags, my act of teabagging.
Wife: That doesn’t sound right.
Husband: Whatever. Teabagging will occur.

So, to the Corpus. I took a somewhat selective view of the top Google hits for the term “I was teabagging” (minus ‘halo’ — don’t ask).

This page has it both ways:

[A commenter]”So the other night I was teabagging the hell out of this sexy ass bitch…”

[Another commenter] “I love teabagging- well, at least in the sense that I always understood it: putting a man’s balls in your mouth while giving head.”

This page has a bit of both as well:

“Because you kept telling me how much you liked my big balls when I was teabagging you, and I’d hate to think that you’d lie to me at such an intimate moment.”

“I’d just like to point out that, in the phrase, “I was teabagging you,” the teabagger is not the one dipping the bag, but the one receiving it.”

The Official Ninja Forum is fairly unambiguous:

Long story short, while I was teabagging Ashley my male member slithered out of the apartment…

A Wonkette commenter agrees with Savage:

“Personally I wouldn’t want to teabag any of those people. If they’ve come from the CPAC conference, then who knows where their faces have been.”

A little more research turned up this interview from director John Waters, who popularised the term in his film ‘Pecker’.

“Teabagging” is by my definition the act of dragging your testicles across your partner’s forehead. In the UK it is dipping your testicles in your partner’s mouth.

Regional variation, but both definitions put the action onto the one with the teabags.

And can we really argue with Urban Dictionary? Teabagging as an action-with-nuts is far and away the most upvoted.

That does it. I’m convinced. Now to contemplate the physical improbabilities of the act, barring cold water. YMMV.

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