Category Archives: sex

People Still Want Sex on Holiday

politics, sex Leave a comment

Maine town is shaken by Zumba prostitution scandal (Reuters) It figures that a story like this would break when I was hit with the double whammy of a bad sinus infection and planning for an additional teaching gig I picked up in the middle of the term. I can’t think of a story more well-tailored to discuss some major themes of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. It’s hardly been a huge national story because of the election, but it’s had some staying power, so at least…

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Bound to the System

books, kink, music, personal, sex, teaching, writing Leave a comment

“Fifty Shades of Grey” sparks marketing mania (Reuters) Thanks to its inclusion in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic online video anthology, I’ve had the Lonely Island’s song “Threw It on the Ground” stuck in my head on and off for about a week. (Let me add here, as an aside, that I’m majorly bummed that I couldn’t make the pony con that’s going on in Ohio this weekend.) As I teach and encourage my students to question their assumptions, and not to let those…

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The Reality of Fantasy and Imagination

freespeech, kink, sex, teaching, television Leave a comment

Beneath the Bondage, Harmful Effects (wbur.org) With 50 Shades of Grey still selling big, I don’t think I’ll be at a loss for kink-related news articles to blog about any time soon. As it is, though, this article gets to an issue that goes beyond kink, something that I’ve had to deal with in other contexts, although primarily in my advocacy of kink and sexual freedom: The difficulties some people have in separating fantasy from reality and how to best cope with that as a…

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Another Conservative War on Erotica?

kink, politics, rhetoric, sex Leave a comment

GOP Platform Promises to Prosecute Porn, But the Most Porn is Viewed in Red States (opposingviews.com) It’s hardly surprising, but I’m still not comfortable with the fact that traffic to the .org automatically triples whenever I have a blog relating to sex or kink on the front page. Even though I’ve said I’ll be blogging more about those topics now to help promote The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon, I still hesitate to do so because I still feel weird bringing up these things, at least…

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Too Many Shades of Blah

books, kink, sex, shopping Leave a comment

In case you missed it, Amazon.com now has a 50 Shades of Grey-themed sub-store in its “sexual wellness” products. I’m not entirely sure how to take this; on the one hand, I think it shows the progress the kink community has made that Amazon is willing to make such a sub-store, complete with its own promotional images, for something that’s still considered deeply taboo by so many Americans. On the other hand, for another resurgence of kink in popular culture to be tied to a work…

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