Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not [...]

The Asian Sex Trade

“The sex trade now accounts for 14% of Thailand’s economy.” Your Thoughts?

American Academy Of Pediatrics Reverses Support For Female Circumcision “Compromise”

The American Academy of Pediatrics had proposed permitting American doctors to ritually “nick” the clitorises of girls whose parents want to maintain their customs in America.  The thinking was that this compromise would prevent such parents from going underground to have a fuller mutilation of the clitoris carried out instead.  Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that [...]

Is Belief In Love Like Belief In God?

Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually [...]

Marrying For Sex

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has an interesting and accurate seeming account of the effects of conservative American Christianity’s obsessive and draconian opposition to all premarital sex and its implications for contributing to the hysteria about children learning about same sex couples: I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, [...]

Nobody Cares About The Losers

Robin Hanson notes that as sensitized as we are to various marginalized groups there are other categories of people who suffer from huge inequalities but for whom there are no sympathies to be found.  Hanson writes: There is no social pressure whatsoever against maligning these groups. Especially striking are inequalities in attractiveness as a friend, [...]

Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?

Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism.  The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion.  Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin.  Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]

How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems as a recommendation for human psychology it is hopelessly unrealistic. In this part of the series, I sketched out a theory [...]

A Materialist View Of Transcendence

Greta Christina specifically addresses the meaning of sex from within a materialist’s mindset but her points can extend to more aspects of our experience as well, I think.  The transcendent aspect of sex and of numerous other aspects of our experience can be derived from our meditative realization that we are participating in processes that [...]

Kantian Reasons To Lie To The Murderer At The Door?

Michael Cholbi thinks he has some: First, the lie is not meant to advance the happiness either of the liar or of the potential murder victim, but to thwart the abuse of the victim’s autonomy that her murder would represent. Hence, if lying to the murderer is manipulation at all, it is manipulation in the [...]

“The Myth of Sexual Spontaneity”

Greta Christina attacks what she calls “the myth of sexual spontaneity,” defined as the idea that “for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately” on the grounds that arises from and implictly reinforces negative views of sex: Our culture tends [...]

Feminism and Vampires

Feministing breaks down Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood for their implicit (and explicit) views on sex.  While comparing and contrasting True Blood and Twilight, Latoya Peterson drops this tidbit, which is the first thing to make me curious to peek at Twilight (though I’m 99% sure I still won’t): In both series, [...]

Worst Statistic of the Day

Go to Psychology Today for solutions for dealing with this bit of bad news: Only 25 percent of women are consistently orgasmic during vaginal intercourse.

Sex: The Horror and The Horrible

Teeth Sometimes people disagree about what makes for a horror film. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive feature of the genre is that it deals with frightening transgressions of nature and of morality. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is horror that situates itself purely in terms of this defining characteristic. The horror is not in the [...]