Thanks to my student J for this tip. According to KENS5, Shades of Love, an "adult novelty store" in San Antonio is being forced by the city to pay $230 per year for a food permit and submit to annual health inspections. Why? Because they sell technically edible items that are "more for licking and tasting. Edible? No. [These items are] not going to fill you up."
A search of the Shades of Love website didn't return any items with "chocolate" or "edible" in the name, so perhaps the store has responded by changing their inventory. But the news clip features some standbys: edible bra and panties set made of candy necklaces, chocolate body paint, and lickable oil.
Here's what the government stiff had to say:
"Any facility in the city of San Antonio that sells food...edible substances...requires a food establishment permit. For one, it's the law, and two, in case there's a recall we certainly want to know the source."
A recall? Like because of an outbreak of food-borne illness? Riiight. Somebody ought to tell the health department that nobody actually eats these products--they're almost exclusively used as bachelorette party gifts and thrown out directly.
The City of San Antonio's website's own directions for getting a Food Establishment Permit recognize that "food establishments" either prepare or sell prepared food, and must have an on-site commercial kitchen or use a licensed commercial kitchen elsewhere. The site makes no mention of manufactured, packaged foods in a store. There is no license for having, say, a vending machine in your beauty salon.
Clearly this is just a cash grab on the city's part. But the clip above is television journalism at its finest. Who says the medium is dead!
I do not shy away from discussions of how hormonal birth control can cause a reduction in desire (among other, more acutely disagreeable side effects) in some patients--indeed, I experienced it myself. But I wanted to add a few points to the debate about this research. Jezebel posted* on a German study on the sexual side effects of birth control and here is my take.
First, this study's sample is large but very homogenous--every participant was a German medical student. The authors say: "Although this [homogenous sample] simplifies interpretation for this specific group, the results cannot be applied to broader populations."
Secondly, the researchers specifically examined whether different preparations of pills had disparate effects on the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) scores of participants, and there was no difference between pills that had androgenic or anti-androgenic progestins nor was there a dose-response relationship among pills that had low-, medium- or high- doses of estrogen ethinylestradiol. This doesn't necessarily mean that hormonal contraceptives don't affect sexual desire and function--indeed, we know they do--but it means that there is a more complex problem that has yet to be solved. From the researcher's conclusion:
"According to our online investigation, neither androgenic or antiandrogenic progestins in OCs nor the EE dosage in the OCs used significantly influenced sexual function in German medical students. Oral contraceptive users, however, did have lower FSFI scores than users of nonhormonal contraceptives or no contraception at all. These results could be explained by two alternative hypothesis: (1) The difference in FSFI scores between users and nonusers of OCs is not due to biological actions of the steroids but due to differences in psychosocial variables (personality, relationship, sexual script, etc.) between the two groups. (2) The difference in FSFI scores may indicate that even small dosages of steroids have a direct influence on the sexual response of women. This effect would then not be dose or type dependent. We will need further studies to understand these interactions better and to clarify which hypothesis holds true."
I'm inclined to go with hypothesis #2, but we have yet to see research proving it true. Further, I would caution casual readers of research to be wary of the measurements taken in this study because while the researchers declare no conflicts of interest and the research itself was not funded by any pharmaceutical company, there is tremendous bankroll behind the effort to zero-in on Female Sexual Dysfunction is and create profitmaking drugs to treat it.
This paper seems transparently critical of hormonal contraception's role in female sexual desire (and for that I applaud it) and function but there is a real risk in the medicalization of women's sex lives. Women respond to and enjoy sex in a variety of ways and save for the very few who have real, diagnosable, treatable dysfunctions, I implore those who comment on this type of research to keep in mind that putting weight behind the specter of "female sexual dysfunction" will not necessarily help women--it will line the pockets of pharmaceutical companies interested in exploiting women's insecurities.
You can read extensive critique about the invention of Female Sexual Dysfunction at the New View Campaign founded by one of my heroes, Dr. Leonore Tiefer.
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Annals of Obvious is an occasional series wherein Julie Sunday reads popular research articles in full because nobody else does.
*And also, they headlined it "No Shit"--methinks somebody is reading HTHSIT and stealing story ideas.
Sigh. J. Crew and I have had a tumultuous relationship since I was in high school. They used to go around to various appropriate college campuses and recruit students to model for the catalog--my cousin K who went to Swarthmore was featured in the early 1990s--but I was never under the illusion, even when they started including the occasional gorgeous black or Asian model in the catalog, that the company was trying to appeal to anyone who wasn't white.
So imagine my dismay when I got the above email this morning. Lest you believe that the last catalog was welcoming a rainbow of young prepsters into Crewland, be reminded--J. Crew is for white people. And, in fact, a world for "Great Whites" is a "White Paradise."
No, really. At last night's fundraiser for "Pregnant? Scared?" billboard pushers Heroic Media Sarah Palin said the following about Texas: it's "Alaska's little sister state." I guess the textbooks up in Alaska are even more hilariously inaccurate than ours since Texas is both older and while Alaska may be bigger than Texas in surface area its population is so small it only has one congressional representative to Texas's 32. Take that, Palin.
Imagine my shock when I came to work on Tuesday to find the glossy insert above tucked into in the Daily Texan shouting that 49% of female students at UT fake orgasms and chiding dudes for being bad in bed. But chin up, Longhorns, because a whopping 64% of Harvard ladies fake it (nevermind that, from what I hear, only 5% of Harvard students actually have sex).
While we don’t believe that The Crimson truly hates female masturbation (btw, totally their loss if they do), something strange is going on behind closed doors at Harvard’s newspaper. They are fine with advertising an instructional sex guide, but the second a piece of blog content involved Harvard, they determined that this information was not appropriate for dissemination to Harvard students. Perhaps they see themselves in the role of junior cop for the administration. If so, this seems like a bizarre role for an independent student newspaper at a top university.
Dang, Harvard.
On the heels of the anti-sex "iChoose" advert of a few weeks ago, I had to get to the bottom of this. So I did some digging and scored an interview with Paul Penfield, the director of marketing for H-Spot, the parent website of HPDI. Here's what we talked about. JS: What are you doing? PP: We wanted to create a platform where normal, nonswinger/sexcrazed folks can go to learn and have a conversation about sex. Reading is not that appealing, so adding an element of "this is fun" is a huge piece of what we're doing. JS: Why are you doing this? PP: When we looked around at what was out there, what we found was the Better Sex video series, which makes sex really unappealing. Eighties lighting, weird looking people. And guys need a little more help; girls are a little more complicated. Magazines are the dominant source [of sex advice] and they continue to exist on two opposite sides of the pole [male v. female]. We need to bring them together. JS: Who worked on this project? PP: We had a great team of researchers, writers, filmmakers and artists. We had a great sex educator who watched the videos to make sure they were okay. JS: What techniques do you cover in HPDI? PP: what do girls want? It's non-dirty, informative, how the vagina works, what feels good, what doesn't. [We cover] fingering, oral sex...everyone who has seen it has liked it. We go from kissing to sex to anal sex and there's narration. JS: What about safer sex practices? PP: We cover that in the beginning of the movie and prior to the how-to sections. The couples in the film didn't use condoms but they had all either been tested before filming or were real-life couples. The anal scene does include condoms and lube, and we talk about that as a part of the scene.
You can check out the trailer below.
I watched the trailer, and I've read the website, but I haven't seen the video yet. Paul is going to send me a copy and I'll review it later. As someone who talks to college students about sex all day, every day, I can attest to the fact that guys do need some instruction--in how to talk to their partner about what she wants them to do to her.
Not that learning some new tricks isn't a good idea, but it doesn't matter how many instructional videos you watch or articles you read in Men's Health about how to MAKE HER COME TONIGHT, GUARANTEED! if you can't say to her, "Baby, I want to make you come, what should I do?" Maybe that'll be in the next video.
OMG! The best sex movie about Texas to have ever graced the Broadway stage and the silver screen (I don't think "Debbie Does Dallas" ever made it to theaters) is being redone by Universal Pictures for a 2011 release. No word yet on who's being cast but the team doing the writing is the same duo that wrote Julie Sunday's signature film, "Legally Blonde." So it's gonna be good.
I wonder if they can get Rick Perry to play the sneaky, lying, singing and dancing governor:
This morning there was a little bit of a hullabaloo on the feminist blogs about this accusation from Just Out:
"For all the flack gay men get for their sexual antics, it turns out the ladies have them beat for an oft-chastised but ever-present-in-porn act — barebacking."
Ouch, straight girls. Amanda Hess, beloved writer over at The Sexist, responds thusly:
It does take two to bareback (or three, or four...) but among straight people, condom use is often initiated at the demand of the female partner. Yes, I know, it's not fair that the responsibility for condom use is on women who are already mostly responsible for pregnancy prevention. But the priority for most men who are under the fuckluence is putting their dick in the desired hole and rates of condom use are higher among girls who say "Wait! Put on a condom!" than those who don't.
I wondered how different states stacked up on unprotected sex, since the survey that made its way around the blogosphere was done by the NYC department of health. Turns out Texas, as always, is high up on the list. Of sexually active high school students, the % below are those who used a condom the last time they had sex:
#1: Hawaii, 54%
#2, New Mexico, 55%
Tied for #3: Texas and Arizona, 56% National Campaign analysis of CDC-YRBS data
Yikes. That means that 44% of sexually active high school students in Texas didn't use a condom the last time they had sex. Even scarier? A mere 13% of Texas high school students used birth control pills at last sex. Guess that goes a long way to explain our sky-high rates of teen pregnancy and chlamydia.
