Chat Roulette is an adventure.

It’s an expedition in human behavior, namely in what people will do to each other when every inkling of accountability is absent. In its essence, Chatroulette.com is speed-dating over the Internet, except it is unspecific to gender, everyone knows that the end point is not love, and nobody gets a second date. There is no login or registration required; you simply visit the site and click play, and enable your webcam. The server instantly hooks you up with another user - a stranger from anywhere in the world – whose live face appears on the video section of your computer screen. You can chat in a dialog window or by microphone.

The most important portion of your screen is the prominent next button, which you or the other person may click at any time to immediately be whisked off to a new stranger.

When users encounter ordinary people they’ve never met in a community they don’t have any ties to, raw behaviors emerge. There is no one to call you out on rudeness after you next them, so cruel comments will be coupled with blatant rejection. There is no one to ruin your professional reputation, no one to charge you with a misdemeanor for indecency. It’s impossible for strangers to cuss you out or shame you for being a prick if you next them before they can respond, so no one can stop you from accosting elderly women, children and the deeply insecure.

Your tactfulness with rejecting someone or patience with uninteresting encounters is completely up to your own conscience. The anonymity and randomness of the game means that there are no social consequences beyond having to re-set your internet connection if your IP address gets banned by a moderator for indecency, if any moderators even exist. You can do pretty much whatever you want – and people do. (read the full article)

A recent French anti-smoking ad campaign only raises more questions than it answers.

Yes, I’m a non-smoker and always will be, but showing wispy, waify, shag-haired French youths symbolically sucking off the corporate Man in an effort to cast smoking as exploitation has deeper ramifications. When done right, oral is not submissive and steeped in victimization, and what if you have a thing for sexy-ass Daddies in business attire? What if you’re the aggressor forcing yourself on vulnerable older men in a role reversal scenario? How about if you’re waxing his sex stick for gum? Is it OK as long as it’s sugar-free? And what if he smokes afterward? What then?

Torn.

The main reason I’ve never been religious: I always feel like faith is really a product.

God always seems to be cash-strapped what with all his overhead — I never get why the physical embodiment of greed is not a vice in the way that other earthy delights are — and so there’s a pay-to-play covenant to piety. Money goes into a collection plate. Indulgences buy salvation. Televangelists weep for donations, and no one who shells out ever asks why they live on palatial estates. Prayer is an insurance policy that will keep you from harm, and Heaven is like a country club membership. The Daily Show’s brilliantly cutting swipe at the Catholic Church’s transparent attempt to lure pissed-off Anglicans into its ranks was one of its finest moments. If you’re not satisfied with your religion, just change spiritual providers like you would a cell phone plan.

(read the full article)

I always thought it was interesting that the French language has a masculine and feminine distinction for nouns. For certain words it’s fairly intuitive, but how do you designate the gender of, say, an object like a spoon or a book shelf that doesn’t trigger an immediate phallic or vaginal association?

Having never been a gender reductivist — as a child I loathed the tendency for certain elementary school teachers to nip in the bud anything they perceived as tomboyish or sissy in kids — I can’t fathom the infantile idea of relating everything we do back to our genitals. The hottest women to me have a hint of cliche “male” qualities to them like husky voices or thick eyebrows, and some of the sexiest men have a little lady in their cheekbones or hands. Even my own face is a conglomeration of masculine and feminine traits; I have the broad forehead and nose usually associated with men, but then I have long eyelashes and full lips that play more girlie. Androgyny is more than just a physical state — it’s also a mindset or an aura.

So, if you’re fixated on biological absolutism, then even food has a butch/femme dichotomy.

(read the full article)

Hets are weird.

We like them well enough, but what the fuck is going on in their topsy-turvy marriages? How many in-name-only, mutually-convenient, put-a-brave-face-on, Fractured Fairy Tale unions gone-off-the-rails have we casually borne witness to?

Where does it all go wrong? Is it the strain of bearing the One Ring (it almost came between Sam and Frodo)? The infantile fantasy of princes, damsels, and the Happily Ever After coda? The social conditioning that says it’s the right and only thing to do? Maybe the self-mythologization of being descendants of a pair navel-less newlyweds and their inbred progeny?

The beyond-tawdry, impossible-to-look-away gauntlet of Tiger Woods-spawned scandals has offered invaluable insight into the private universes of too-pretty and -polished Super Couples. I’ve always suspected that few and far between is the man who actually marries his type; instead, he marries up the ideal spouse/mother and keeps his taste in trashy tarts either held in check or on-the-sly. Beauty is also, mind-bogglingly, not enough to keep a man even though it may be what initially nabs him. In the end, sexual availability will win out over being a perfect ten.

As an Awkward Family Photo enthusiast, I especially know that family portraits fraught with intrigue and secrets ready to be revealed imply far much more than they actually purport to superficially depict. (read the full article)

One of my college sociology professors argued that gay men significantly expanded the sexual options for straight people. Not in the way you might be thinking; he wasn’t talking about straight guys going trade in bathroom stalls in urban areas. In this case he was talking about the world of socially-accepted ideas about sex.

Basically, he argued, gay men pioneered oral and anal sex. With the rise of mainstream awareness of gay lives in the 1970s came the popularization of necessary improvisations for penetrative intercourse, which in turn gave straight people ideas for having fun without getting pregnant.

It is poignant to the case that gay people started coming out in the public realm at the tail end of the sexual revolution, almost exactly when non-vaginal sex among heterosexuals became something safe to talk about publicly. Today, straight porn has it, straight teenagers talk about it, network sitcoms make jokes about it and before you know it straight President Clinton gets the most famous blow job in human history. (read the full article)

Abstinence.

The term sounds so hollow and dated now, like Reaganomics or Compassionate Conservatism.

We watched the doctrine implode in teenage pregnancy for the daughter of a Vice Presidential candidate and would-be Morality Matriarch, then cringed as two young people were again shoved into ill-fitting formal wear and untimely adult roles for a series of awkward photo-ops met with disingenuous applause and self-serving pats on the back.

If you’re one of those godless Liberal types with a perspective on young adult sexuality that rises above the mentality of an eleven-year-old boy, then you have Scarleteen and its doyenne Heather Corinna for offering up a progressive and pragmatic alternative to purity rings, Levitical backwardness, and the politics of virginity.

Tackling every verboeten subject — from masturbation and birth control to sexual abuse and the dreaded Gay — Corinna’s honest and frank magnum opus survives on a combination of donations and independent chutzpah in the wake of over a decade of futile government faith-based abstinence-only grants at the marginalized expense of inclusive programs that offer practical answers.

Traditional thinking cast the Scarlet Woman as a wayward tart, a vulgar hoyden, a bawdy harlot made worldly by her sin of sexual knowledge; credit the brains behind the scenes at Scarleteen for undercutting that hackneyed definition with equal doses of wit, nuance and a lively streak of forward-thinking aplomb in a time when such real virtues are in short supply.

If you’ve a keen eye, you caught the word “donation” above. And that’s how Corinna’s site continues to thrive — by donation. Right now Heather is orchestrating a major drive to keep Scarleteen afloat. Please visit the following page for more details and then find it in your heart (and wallet) to help sustain this high-octane outflow of knowledge and information.

During the next two days Heather has a generous donor in place who will match all donations that she receives this weekend. So reach down brothers! After all, it’s that time of the year. Let your heart be full (and light). The misinformed of the world need you. And Scarleteen.

“What the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it.”
–E.M. Forster

Strip away all the ads and angst surrounding recent gay rights referendums, and the most cogent observational kernel came when Dan Savage averred that much of the dread and revulsion orienting around opposition to gay rights comes down quite literally to our sexual practices.

Candidly, it’s ass sex that riles up every Neo-Puritan to start rattler-handling and speaking in tongues, and the threat of it somehow being taught/instructed/endorsed (where was this course when I was school?) to oh-so-vulnerable school kiddies was the implicit push behind the Yes on 1 Referendum in Maine.

Lesbians get more than their fair share of flak, but really the worst skullduggery is probably associated with men, with everything from child molestation, public indecency, pornography, serial murder, disease, and trannies stalking gender-neutral restrooms likely to conjure up the image of a male predator on the lurk.

Is it that gay women aren’t quite as threatening, their relationships not as disruptive to this natural order we keep hearing about? Certainly we’re all vilified for apparently clutching at the wedding band so we can turn it into some kind of grotesque farce (maybe a Fellini Satyricon hitching at sea, or a Flash Gordon theme wedding?), but in terms of measured public acceptance, it seems to be women who are having an easier time of getting over the wall. (read the full article)