Philosophical fancies aside, the intricacies of the human heart are known most plainly to chemists.

We can spend years musing about the psychological precursor to our tastes or behavior, but can often learn as much in minutes from a scientific explanation. And while the full complexity of conscious experience is mysterious and unknown, there are clear links between certain chemicals and our most basic drives - explaining, for example, why we feel horny one moment and mellowed another, or why our sex drives are highest after exercise.

At the core of sexual pursuit are the yin and yang of lust, two vastly different substances but with complimentary roles of switching desire on and off: dopamine and prolactin. They regulate more than sex, but for our purposes we can summarize; dopamine plays a central role in generating horniness - while prolactin shuts it down.

Chances are you’re familiar with the effects of each. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter and relatively small molecule, is your brain’s sense of pleasure and reward. It fires when we see a pretty face, taste sugar, puff a cigarette, or touch skin-to-skin. When your dopamine levels are highest, sex is number one on the agenda, sometimes by so much that you’ll have lower-than-normal interest in food or sleep. (more…)

Furry porn must be the natural conclusion of when kids who are infatuated with Disney’s Robin Hood hit puberty.

Furry enthusiasts are, generally, people who love a certain style of cartoonish, anthropomorphic animal characters, and often dress up as such at Star Trek-style conventions to find others who share their interest. But its easier to understand the movement’s popularity when you recognize the sexual element, which is all I can think of to explain how adults show so much interest in such obscure material.

Run a Google search for “furry fox” and you realize how real and pervasive “furry fandom” is. A term like that should be a reasonable descriptor for a fox in the wild - like “scaly lizard” or “large elephant” (both of which return images of animals in nature). But the Internet sees our furry fox as drawn cartoonish images of slender, grinning animals, some of which are in overtly sexual poses with enormous genitals or breasts. (more…)

America’s last mass-produced export: Paranoia.

With Debt and Greed now battling to the death like a mongoose and a cobra in a crumbling garden of fading delights, it’s only manic suspicion tinged with primitive superstition that the U.S. seems capable of galvanizing to any real effect. Sure, xenophobia still makes for a fine bordeaux of self-contaminating dread — Muslims in the White House! Communism shackling the Free Market! Mexicans besmirching the snowy white, God-given face of the nation! — but it’s ultimately disdain for our own home-grown lusus naturae that’s the meat and potatoes entree of a diet built upon meaningless plenty gone sour. The greatest of all threats walks among us, your own neighbors and co-workers the agents of subversion bent on eradicating all you hold dear.

The discourse making the rounds in the wake of the wildly hypocritical Prop 8 passage comes down to homosexuality not having the cred to be a civil rights issue because it doesn’t hinge on skin color or other such physiognomy. Second class status is apparently the price tag attached to being a self-willed ethnicity. Heterosexuals have lives; gays have “lifestyles,” which I infer means owning luxury cars, eating quiche, and using “summer” as a verb.

So that makes it okay then. (more…)

In anticipation of the January 29 broadcast of The Trials of Ted Haggard on HBO, an older and perhaps wiser Haggard was quizzed by the press on , what else, his sexuality and previously announced “cure.”

“I’m completely heterosexual!” he had declared with a big toothy grin back in 2007 after he went on a wonder diet of what we can only imagine was the complete Jenna Jameson catalog — although Jesus not Jenna got the hosannas.

And it took just 3 … count ‘em … 3 weeks of “intense therapy” — make that non-licensed Christian “counseling,” renown for its regimen of round-the-clock prayer and magical thinking.

But that was then.

Today, well 100% ain’t what it used to be.

“The stereotypical boxes don’t work for me” he told a roomful of glib-faced reporters at the HBO event announcing the documentary. “My story’s got some gray areas in it.”

This, only after being grilled by one reporter after another, asking the same question in slightly varied form. And only after a largely nonsensical preamble about sexuality being “confusing and complex.”

Hey, Ted, it’s call a hard-on. Either you get one or you don’t. Few things in life have this clear a litmus test. It’s not one’s own sexuality that’s complex and confusing but the willingness to name it frankly. It’s the barbed wire that megachurches have thrown around it, the religion-based shame about the human body itself — fragile and humble and temporary though it be — that makes such issues “difficult.” (more…)

Shower rooms.
Locker rooms.
Jockstraps.

The words alone cast a drowsy, aphrodisiacal spell on us. And it’s no wonder. They take us back to the days when the jumble of adolescent male bodies in a high school locker room was the first place, as far as our secret desires were concerned, where the rubber met the road.

Our first sight of a jockstrap might have been in the mirror but it didn’t take on real force until it was glimpsed making its grooved, scooping way around a buoyant pouch, just slightly above eye-level as we sat tying our sneaker amid the slam of locker doors.

The trio of shower room, locker room and jockstrap has been plot enough for many a porn film, and as soon as we see the familiar bench in a deserted room with a row of lockers looking on like somber tin soldiers, we pretty much know what’s up ahead. Blowjob City: Population 2. With casual walk-ins dropping their towels and swelling our small town to, at times, an orgiastic metropolis. (Bukkake Nation, anyone?) Then everyone ends up in the shower for a bangup reprise, but with different partners. Wash, rinse, repeat. (more…)

One of our favorite, hot, hot stories from the Inner Circle, Steve Giammarco’s B-52 at Edwards AFB, has been given the royal treatment by our new friend, excellent cartoonist Kenzie LaMar.

This is naughty stuff, and we can’t keep it to ourselves. For your enjoyment, a favorite passage, and a couple of Kenzie’s kick-ass drawings:

Gripping the elastic of his boxers, I let go of his toy. It quivers but remains at the same angle rising up toward his navel as I stretch the band up to clear his bone and slide them along with his fatigues down until his kneecaps show. Fuzzy blonde haired balls are pulled tightly against his body. What a studpup. From this angle I can see the cleft of his ass pressed against the steel grate that serves as flooring on Deck One. How will he explain the cross-hatch marks on his ass and thighs?

(more…)

Reader, you have to climb to the top of Mount Everest to get to the Valley of the Ho, Ho, Ho Big Giant. Visual aid at left.

If anyone is living a charmed life, surely it’s the porn stars. And yet, boys, guys, bros, believe it or not, they put on their jockstraps one leg at a time! Just like you and I!

And like the rest of us, porn stars are reporting back to work today, bleary-eyed and a bit unsteady on their pins, the confetti of Times Square and the glitter of 101 morning parties still embedded in the woof (woof!) and weave of their well-tanned flesh.

Ah yes: New year; same old same old. Wouldn’t you know it: they’re just working stiffs, after all — if somewhat stiffer than the temp agency usually sends out.

And in their own way, they are joining the universal chorus or Workers United. But that’s not the Internationale the comrades are singing. No, this is a hip-hop vocalaise, a beatbox anthem to the acquisition of More, More, More. More bling, gaudy and gold and made out of chrome

All together now. Shake those money-makers. Do that thang. And the colored girls sing: Welcome to Hell. Welcome to Hell. Let us show you to your desk. (more…)