FUCK WINTER

Romenesko is getting into meteorology: "Weather forecast is dickish." [Romenesko]

I GET EMAIL

"whatever .any wards u hear about your self thay not can give you the real words about your breaty  and i cant say aword exept you are the sex gades"

PINK AR-15

I had an interesting time doing this post for my Forbes blog on a new pink AR-15. It's made by SIG Sauer. I would like to shoot an AR-15 but haven't had a chance to do so yet.

"More women are taking up arms for a variety of reasons, she says: they’re interested in self-defense, they’re living alone or single mothers, they want to learn how to shoot. Curious to 'see what else is out there,' some women who’ve mastered handguns are buying bigger, badder guns. On the shooting range, an AR-15 can be a 'status symbol.' She owns a purple Bushmaster AR-15. 'It’s my own personal stamp on my gun,' she says. 'It makes it mine.'"

[Forbes]

WORK IT

"I guess it feels like a lot of pressure to be up for anything all the time, like a porn star."

[Refinery 29]

KATE MOSS, PLAYBOY [UPDATED]

Fashion Copious has the first peek I've seen of the Kate Moss-covered January/February 2014 60th anniversary issue of Playboy.

Additional images posted to the Instagram account of photographers Mert and Marcus indicate there's an "Exclusive Marc Jacobs" edition that features a different photo of Moss, this one with more bottom.

Update: Here's a better shot of the cover and some of the pics inside.

[Fashion Copious]

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S UNFIT TO PRINT: 11.30.13

Maybe you did

"How did you first realize that you had a big dick?" [The Hairpin]

The mile-high club comes with a very discreet pilot. [Gizmodo]

Maybe You Touched Your Genitals Hand Sanitizer [PandoDaily]

How a woman in a Nascar pit crew works out. [NYT]

This infomercial isn't selling you a blender. [Twitter]

Tito Ortiz traded in Jenna Jameson for this babe. [Instagram]

Neanderthals were swingers. [New York Post]

Stick out your tongue. [WSJ]

Car porn. [Forbes]

But who will wear the naked Oprah dress to the Oscars? [The Cut]

What condoms and fish skin have in common. [Death and Taxes]

"This is about capitalism." [The Price of Sex]

Git 'er. [GIF]

The MPAA does not like your female sexual pleasure. [Defamer]

Fuck the earth. [Craigslist]

Bands Who Posed Topless Together for Album Covers. [Daze Reader]

This is the dope game. [Newcity]

Chuck Palahniuk is a fan of Sex Criminals. [Twitter]

Japan cannot get enough of your porn. [Mike South]

Nice Face but the Cunt? considered. [Blog]

WHAT'S NOT THERE

Earlier this week, the New York Times had a nip slip on its front page, above the fold. The photo, by Rina Castelnuovo, of a woman's breast, her areola partly exposed, offended some, likely titillated others. The image served as a companion piece to a story on Israel's high breast cancer rate and the complicated question as to what to do about it.

For me, the image may as well have been a selfie. From November 2011 to April 2013, I underwent treatment for early-stage breast cancer. Today, I'm cancer-free and not expected to recur. (Knock on wood.)

During my treatment, I took my camera with me often. Anyone undergoing protracted medical treatment knows intimately the copious amounts of time one spends in between places: waiting rooms carpeted in odd patterns, examining rooms hung with limp blood pressure cuffs, mechanical beds preparing to feed you into doughnut-shaped devices that scan you from stem to stern. 

I used my camera to preoccupy, distract, relax myself. The medical industrial complex is a system in which things are done to you. I suppose raising the camera was my way of feeling like I was in control. Which, of course, I wasn't.

There is nothing less erotic than the announcement of a personal malignancy. Suddenly, it occurs to you that the two flesh pads affixed to your front are not what you thought they were. They are trying to kill you.

Your breasts are debated by two people in white coats standing in front of you as you watch in silence. Your breasts are punctured by needles and the tissue cored like apple flesh as you lay face-down on a cold metal table. Your breasts are sliced open on an operating table so a surgeon can peer inside and extract what's gone wrong with you. Your breasts are sutured, bandaged, and sent home, where they inflame, ooze fluids, and take on shapes not found in nature. Your breasts reveal to you a great irony: what makes you female could be what exterminates you.

Today, I've formed a tentative alliance with my breasts. In bed, late at night, I wonder, Can I trust you? Mammograms provide an answer. So far, Yes.

Discussing the Times photo, I asked my husband if my breast cancer had changed his relationship to my breasts.

"It's just some cells," he said. "It's not all of you."

TEACHING SEX

Dr. Jason Winters, a professor at the University of British Columbia, teaches the very popular, sex-focused PSYCH 350: "The Psychological Aspects of Human Sexuality."

The course has a companion blog, which mentions several projects I've done, Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls.

His past research includes a "'boner-measuring' phase," during which "[I measured] sex response in sex offenders." 

[The Ubyssey]

FREE WHAT?

The Busy Body

When you run a strip club, signage is everything.

"A Southern Indiana strip club is getting a pretty sweet amount of publicity thanks to some creative wordplay and an angry response from locals. The Busybody Lounge in Evansville, Ind. was ordered by local police to take down a sign displaying 'free blow job with private dance.'"

[Chicagoist]

SHE'S A ROBOT

Porn stars Charlotte Stokely and Xander Corvus star in Destructo's "Technology." [YouTube]

CHINA'S LONELY MEN

The New York Times has a report on the rise and increased openness of sex culture in China. The Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival was overrun by men in a country that makes over 3/4ths of the world's sex toys.

I went to China three times in the last year, and I wouldn't say sex is exactly high-visibility there. You do find shops selling adult toys not infrequently, but the stores are more like the sex version of a head shop: random items on shelves manned by bored salespeople.

It's a far cry from the marriage market in Shanghai's People's Park, where I wandered amidst parents camped out with folding chairs and umbrellas to find the perfect mate for their unwed offspring.

[NYT]

SHE BLUNTED

I had a lot of fun doing this piece for my Forbes blog: "For Marijuana Smokers, A Weed Manicure Is High Fashion." Kat was my gateway drug to what she's deemed a "weedicure." That's a manicure with real ganja in it.

Kat's shows off her "weedicure"

"'I told her I wanted to do that, and she told me, "Bring your own green,"' Kat explains. 'We just took a bud, and broke it up small enough that it wouldn’t be too lumpy, and then mixed it with acrylic powder and green, gold, and orange glitter. It’s the same process as getting an acrylic set with glitter tips, except with pot. I wanted to add orange and gold glitter, and I love how it looks like kief.'"

I spent quite a bit of time searching Instagram for chicks with #weednails, talked to a guy who lobbies for pot in DC, and checked out Dzine's bootleg nail salon.

Nope, I didn't get a dope set -- yet.

[Forbes]

SO MUCH FOR TELEDILDONICS

According to XBIZ, AEBN will no longer be selling its RealTouch devices.

This is your date
 

Last year, I encountered a RealTouch in the wild at a porn convention. An excerpt:

"'It feels like having sex with a robot,' I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table."

[XBIZ / Forbes]

AMERICAN ECSTASY

"AMERICAN ECSTASY is a memoir in pictures and words of the twelve years photographer Barbara Nitke spent shooting stills on porn movie sets in New York City. The book takes place in the 1980's at the end of the Golden Age of Porn, as the industry transitioned from high budget, scripted film productions to smaller and ever cheaper video shoots. Nitke's images reveal the contradictions inherent in the business - great beauty, tinged with sadness, punctuated by surreal silliness. As she chronicles the sights and sounds of life on the sets, her stories also reveal her own struggle to come to terms with the end of her marriage and her fascination with the sexual outlaws of the porn world."

[Amazon via Unscathed Corpse]

THE SMASHER

Entertainment Weekly

Sandra Bullock is 49 and hot as hell.

Now that she's split from ex Jesse James, who cheated on her with a stable of women, she's single; although, she reports, she's not ready to mingle.

"'If [a relationship] should come along, great,' Bullock told Entertainment Weekly, gracing the cover of its entertainers of the year issue. 'But I feel like I'm not missing anything yet. Maybe one day I will.'"

[People]

SEXUAL POLITICS

Harvard Book Store

How much does sex have to do with politics? A lot, apparently. According to a longitudinal study of men begun with a group of 268 Harvard undergrads in 1938, the aging liberal male has a great deal more sex than the aging conservative male.

"With regards to income, there was no noticeable difference in maximum income earned by men with IQs in the 110-115 range vs. men with IQs above 150.  With regards to sex lives, one of the most fascinating discoveries is that aging liberals have way more sex.  Political ideology had no bearing on overall life satisfaction, but the most conservative men on average shut down their sex lives around age 68, while the most liberal men had healthy sex lives well into their 80s.  Vaillant writes, 'I have consulted urologists about this, they have no idea why it might be so.'"

[FEELguide]