In which I am inspired by a snarky comment on another blog.

My normal routine involves a fair amount of procrastination, but I tell myself that's OK (really), because sometimes it leads to work ideas. Like, a couple of months ago, when I was browsing through the Onion AV Club and stumbled over the headline, "By 2100 Everyone Will Be Part Duggar."

Naturally, my response was to wonder whether that might actually be true. After all, back in 2003, researchers figured out that 8 percent of all men living in central and east Asia--a huge proportion of the global population--are likely descendants of Mongol ruler/horde-leader Genghis Khan. I contacted some of the researchers involved in that project to find out whether we can project that kind of genetic impact forward in time as well.

Image courtesy TLC.

News reports earlier this month created a global stir around an odd "made in China" product marketed to the Middle East - cheap artificial hymens. They're intended for use by brides who feel compelled to fake virginity, in countries where not being a virgin at marriage is a very big, very bad thing. Conservative Egyptian politicians wanted to ban the product. One curious (male) blogger in Egypt decided to order one.

Mohammad Al Rahhal picked up the contraband gyno-goods at his local post office in Egypt:

it had been opened by various puzzled customs and postal employees who, at a loss, defined the product in writing as "containing an unknown red liquid" - and awaited my description.

Al Rahhal told inspectors it was "cinematographic make-up," and took his hymen home.

Marwa Rakha over at Global Voices has more from Al Rahhal's product review (he explains how it works, sort-of NSFW if only for use of anatomically specific language). Also, a report at the UK Guardian.

Spoiler: Al Rahhal's verdict? This thing, and the thinking behind it, are totally stupid. "Morality is worst interpreted by anatomy," he says. Bravo, dude.

Vincent Pearase, of Oak Park High School in Winnipeg Canada, writes:

One of our talented Oak Park students, Andrew Vineberg, helped make this hilarious short, Hiding Your Sexual Orientation From Your Parents 101. The kid is a vlogger, too. He does an amazingly erudite, funny vlog under the moniker Volatile Chemical. Check it out! Andrew has asked to show this at our next school assembly.

Yeah, I'm just going to put this whole NSFW thing behind the jump. Read on for an in-depth look at bat blow-jobs, and insights into the evolution of such work, in general.

If America's law students continue to be this amusing, there may be hope yet for the future of America's lawyers. From Craigslist:

You & Me Doing It v. You & Me Not Doing It (2009)
Using that IRAC method we've been learning about, a compelling brief on why we should hump each other's brains out.

Facts, Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusions follow.

Thanks to Sarahpi, one of my favorite lawyers-in-training!

Newsweek.com has a gallery of images that shows the evolution of contraception (or what we believed to be contraception at the time), from olive oil — recommended by Aristotle in the 4th century BC — to the hormone-releasing options that we can get at the gyno today.

The History of Birth Control

Susannah Breslin pointed me to Marilyn Minter 's latest video months ago, but I didn't get around to blogging 'til now. Green Pink Caviar is described as

A lush and sensual voyeuristic hallucination. Filmed with macro lenses, the video was inspired by a photo shoot where Minter directed her models to lick brightly colored candies while she shot photos from underneath a glass plate. The models' tongues mixed the colorful sugar with saliva, slurping and pushing color across the glass surface to simulate painting.

More: greenpinkcaviar.com, some viewer reactions, Los Angeles Times interview with the artist, NBC LA, and apparently there's some controversy over the billboard installation in Hollywood.

If we humans weren't so bare, we would probably not wear robes. And then there would be no reason to disrobe. If there were no bare skin, there would be no Hefner as we know it.

And, according to Mark Changizi from the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the reason we're bare is because we can see in color.

More talk of nudity and other dirty things after the cut...

Chinese alligators like a good sing-a-long, but they don't worry about carrying a tune. They also don't much care what the opposite sex thinks of the song choice, according to a story on National Geographic News.

Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences ran some tests to see whether alligator "songs"--it's really more like sustained, extremely loud croaking, which the researchers compare the sound to thunder--attracted mates to the singer. Surprisingly, it didn't work quite that way.

More story and a video of singing alligators after the jump!

Yahoo has apologized for paying lap-dancers ("Hack Girls") to grind against attendees at its Hack Day Taiwan open event. For the second year running.

Because, you know, it's the kind of thing that you can just accidentally do, hiring sex workers to come to your everyone's invited, inclusive Hack Day event. Two years in a row.

What a blot on technology culture this is. As a father of a young daughter whom I hope will be excited about technology, hacking, and making stuff, Yahoo's vile behavior makes me want to puke purple exclamation points. For shame.

I wanted to acknowledge the public reaction generated by the images of female dancers at our Taiwan Open Hack Day this past weekend. Our hack events are designed to give developers an opportunity to learn about our APIs and technologies. As many folks have rightly pointed out, the "Hack Girls" aspect of our Taiwan Hack Day is not reflective of that spirit or purpose. And it's certainly not the message we want to send about our values here at Yahoo!. Hack Days are about making everyone feel welcome, including women coders and technologists.

This incident is regrettable and we apologize to anyone that we have offended. Rest assured, it won't happen again.

Regrettable? I can think of some choice words to describe this, and regrettable is so far down the list that you'd need to scroll for a week to reach it. Love how this is all in the passive voice -- "the incident" is regrettable. As though it occurred in a vacuum, untouched by human hands. A kind of lightning strike of ghastly, stupid, boorish thoughtlessness. An act of God, perhaps.

Sorry

This shouldn't be the image of Hack Day

I was about to say that I'm just one of those people who understands things more fully once I see them in visual form, but I think that, when it comes to statistics, "one of those people" really just means "most of us".

Case in point, this great visualization of the facts about HPV vaccine safety and cervical cancer risk put together by the Information is Beautiful blog. For me, this really bridged the gap between knowing the facts and intuitively understanding them. Follow the link to check it out.

Comics artist Frank Brunner has done a series of Frazetta-esque Alice in Wonderland nudes that are sexy, retro, and lovely.

Nudes (via MeFi)

Today's XKCD webcomic examines the limits of protection offered by the talismanic anti-static wrist strap that RAM companies send you with your purchase.

Static

What do you think you know about Brazilian women?

When Racialicious blogger Wendi Muse lived in Brazil she found that the first question her American friends would ask was, "Are the girls hot?"

It turns out, the answer is a little more complicated than you might think. Understanding beauty in Brazil means understanding how the concept intersects with gender, race, and class...in ways that are often very different from how the system works here.

...what we would consider "high maintenance" in the United States is the accepted norm for women's appearance. A woman must always be "bem arrumada." This means that even when one goes grocery shopping, heels, nice clothes, and styled hair is the norm. One of my students once told me that she felt absolutely dirty when her nails were not done, and another informed me she would never leave the house with wet hair because that was super "pobre" ("ghetto").

All three issues affect Brazilian's women's concept of themselves and our concept of them from the outside. Very interesting stuff and worth a read. Check out the posts on Gender, Class, and Race.

Regretsy is a blog that chronicles the more special craft projects for sale on everybody's favorite handmade products Web site. The bit I find most interesting about this blog (and, by extension, Etsy, itself), is that there's a whole, separate category for vagina arts/crafts.

Yes, vaginas.

At present, it includes the felted placenta shown above, plus knit tampon cozies, celebrity-inspired uterus dolls, and a few other things. (Elsewhere on the site, you'll find a catnip toy in the shape of a fetus.)

I'll admit, I have a hard time getting these projects from any angle other than humor. But once I stop sniggering, I find myself fascinated by the decision to take a cutesy, "comfort food" medium--knitting, home-made dolls--and use it to illustrate parts of the body that (like most organs) aren't exactly the most visually attractive. In fact, I kind of wish the artists would branch out into spleens, kidneys, or maybe various glands. Or does the meme only work with ostensibly "dirty" organs? What do you think?

BTW: If you want to purchase your own felted placenta, you can find them on the real Etsy. They're made in Australia by user lumiknits.

(Re)cycler is the sequel to Lauren McLaughlin's fantastic debut YA novel, Cycler, an sf story about Jill McTeague, a high-school senior who turns into a boy for four days every month. Like Cycler, (Re)cycler is a smart, sensitive story about gender, sex and sexuality, leavened with a lot of wit and sass.

(Re)cycler picks up where Cycler left off, with Jill and her two best friends leaving small town Massachusetts for parts elsewhere. Jill lands in Brooklyn with her pal Ramie (who is also dating her male alter-ego, Jack) and commences to come of age in a setting that is frightening, dangerous, exciting and exotic.

Both Jack and Jill's voices are carried off fantastically in this story, coming across as confused but confident, and both characters grow in ways that are unexpected and extremely satisfying.

There's plenty of YA literature that treats sexuality as a problem to structure a morality play, but McLaughlin transcends cliche, and delivers instead a book that is sexy, smart, surprising and fun, without skimping on the hard emotional stuff.

(Re)cycler

Say you're an average medieval Euro-Joe and you want to have sex with your wife. But first, you need to know, IS IT SINFUL? Digging through all those manuscripts of canon law can take forever (plus, as average medieval Euro-Joe, you can't read, anyway). Luckily, James A. Brundage has prepared a handy flow chart for sexual decision making the summarizes the medieval Christian church's take on when sex was OK (Think: In the dark, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays only), and when you were totally going to go to hell.

Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to figure out how to gank a picture from a Google Books page, so you'll have to follow this link to see the flow chart in all its glory.

Johannes writes in with the news of this year's sex/tech Arse Electronika conference in San Francisco:

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century. Don't you think, replicants?

Arse Elektronika 2009 (Thanks, Johannes!)

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

My friend Corey Mintz is so proud of his well-stocked, spotless refrigerator that he sends pictures of its interior to girls he's wooing and has used it in place of a headshot on his online dating profile (high-rez link).

Now, this is no ordinary fridge- Corey is a chef and food writer (a good one, for the Toronto Star) so his fridge is filled with wonderful delights- top-notch doggie-bags, fancy mustards, homemade pickles and the occasional action figure. He obsessively packages and labels his sauces and glazes and eliminates any item at the first sight or smell of rottenness. He's actually indexed and published his fridge's contents (link).

But I still contend that a clean icebox does not a man make. Corey insists otherwise- he thinks these pics provoke the same response in women that nude shots inspire in men.

So ladies, I put the question to you: does this fridge turn you on?

Back in July, Michael Duvall, a second-term California assemblyman who "is the vice-chairman of the legislature's commerce committee and a member of its ethics committee, are married with two children and are known as a staunch defender of conservative family values" was to appear on a televised committee meeting. Not realizing his mic was already live, he began to brag about his sexual conquests.

Make sure your microphone is OFF before bragging about and giving disgustingly lewd details of your affair with a much younger woman who is also a lobbyist whose clients have business before your committee, and also laughing about the fact that you are simultaneously cheating on your wife and your mistress with yet another woman...

Not content with mentioning the fact he was having an affair, which would have caused problems enough, Duvall -- who I am now officially christening "Open Mike" -- launched into explicit details, many of which are too nasty to reprint here, and all of which were captured by his microphone. (Among them: tiny underwear, spankings, and the 19-year-age difference....

It gets better:

"She wears little eye-patch underwear," said Duvall, who is married with two children. "So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And
 so, we had made love Wednesday--a lot! And so she'll, she's all, 'I am going 
up and down the stairs, and you're dripping out of me!' So messy!"...

During his political career, Duvall has unabashedly espoused conservative
 principles and is known as a partisan Republican with a knack for theatrics:
 He has noisily driven his Harley-Davidson motorcycle to functions. In 2008, 
Duvall blasted efforts to condone gay marriage. Legislatively, he has 
proposed bills to aid the insurance industry and government contractors 
feeding off the state's massive transportation kitty.


 He has offered a law to alter the First Amendment rights of Americans by
 banning anti-war activists from putting the names of fallen soldiers on 
T-shirts with messages such as "Bush lied" on the front and "They died" on the back; he observed that the dead soldiers fought to protect freedom, and "opportunists" should not be allowed to "exploit" the sacrifices with political messages opposing war.


Such thinking impressed certain constituencies. Earlier this year, the man who never graduated from high school received "100 percent" approval scores 
by the California Republican Assembly, the state's leading conservative outfit, and the Capitol Resource Institute (CRI), a fierce guardian of traditional family values.


And best of all? He's refusing to resign (though he's taken to actually running away from reporters).

Open Mike Likely to Close Out Legislator's Career

OC Assemblyman In Bed With Lobbyist . . . No, Literally In Bed

Update: He resigned.

Over at Needles and Sins, Marisa Kakoulas DiMattia blogs:

Yesterday was the US launch of the racing game Dirt 2, and what better way to promote virtual off-road rallies than, ya know, a Flash app that lets you tattoo some woman's breasts. The app is called "Dirty Tats." And that's not even the worst part.

The obviously sex starved Codemasters who created the tattoo game know how to do creepy well, albeit unintentionally. After the intro of loud and just plain bad pop-metal, you're treated to gooey come-ons from a volumptuous vixen who purrs "I like the personal touch," or "Looks like you have some hidden talents." My special talent was not vomiting while trying to get the words "misogyny" across her chest via the Lettering tool.

And like all bad tattoo Flash games, there are the bad tattoo flash stencils that you can stick on her, like the Tribal fish and Kanji for "why am I wasted my time."

"Dirty Tats." The Game. The Tragedy. (Needles and Sins, thanks Susannah Breslin)

The New Scientist's "Ten things we don't understand about humans" is a head-scratching tour of humanity's inexplicables from laughter to pubic hair:

Pubic hair: Scent radiator, warmth provider, or chafe protection? The answer to why humans have clumps of hair in private places is still open for debate...

Teenagers: Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases - so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?

Ten things we don't understand about humans (via Kottke)

An article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about men in Japan who are in love with anime characters is online now. The print version will be in this coming Sunday's magazine. I should point out that this phenomenon is not unique to Japan, or to men, but I think it's safe to say that that is where it originated. In the interest of space the editors and I had to cut out the sections about 2D love in the US and elsewhere, and among women.

Nisan didn't mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter -- at a comic-book convention that Nisan's gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo -- was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan's bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver's license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west -- to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends' couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. "I've experienced so many amazing things because of her," Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan's leg warmly. "She has really changed my life."

Nemutan doesn't really have a leg. She's a stuffed pillowcase -- a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or "big brother," a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix "tan" to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she's not real, but that hasn't stopped him from loving her just the same. "Of course she's my girlfriend," he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. "I have real feelings for her."

Love in 2D [New York Times Magazine]

Link to complete image. What's the name of the guy who does these? I'm sorry, but I do not know Created by the extremely funny Doogie Horner. (via @galadarling via @reversecowpie)

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

The Independent did one of those things where they ask someone famous a bunch of questions, and this time they asked Ron Jeremy. The Hedgehog. The San Fernando Valley's Hirsute Thespian of Our Times.

There's a lot of pressure to perform when you're the best-known [porn] actor in the world; my biggest fear is that I'll be in a scene and I'll suck, and people will say, "Just look at that flaccid noodle." I'm getting older and it feels more of a strain, but I'm still enjoying doing the scenes.

Credo: Ron Jeremy, porn star, 56 (Image credit: Robert Yager)

A tombstone for the famed German sex-worker and advocate Domenica Niehoff has been turned down as too sexual by the cemetery where she was buried.

The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...

Ungerer and Niehoff were friends for decades, and even shared a flat for a while in 1984. He published drawings of Niehoff and her colleagues in a book entitled "Guardian Angels of Hell" at the time...

Niehoff, who gained fame for advocating the rights of sex workers in the 70s and 80s, died at age 63 in February 2009.

Famous prostitute's gravestone deemed too 'slutty' (Thanks, Rosa!)

Here's the results from the first-ever survey of European fertility tourism:

Hundreds of women over the age of 40 are travelling to fertility clinics in Europe to try to get pregnant because NHS clinics in the UK will not take them, the first-ever Europe-wide study of fertility tourism shows.

The research shows considerable movement across Europe, with women seeking out procedures that are banned in their own country. Italian women are crossing the border in droves following tough legal restrictions on IVF imposed in 2004, while large numbers of gay French women bypass a ban by seeking treatment in Belgium.

NHS restrictions prompt fertility tourism boom

Flickr user What Makes The Pie Shops Tick? has posted a complete, high-rez) scan of the 1964 Frederick's of Hollywood catalog!

1964 Frederick's of Hollywood Catalog (Thanks, copyranter!)

David Marusek's Mind Over Ship is the long-awaited sequel to his groundbreaking 2005 debut novel Counting Heads, and it was worth the wait.

Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model-ee's consent) and a thousand other fragments. Each of these factions battles for the best deal it can get -- even as the individual members of each clade fight for their own personal best interests.

Mind Over Ship is so complex, with so many storylines and so many incredibly inventive premises, that it trembles on the verge of breakdown, acrobatically walking on a tightrope over the pit of too-weird. It's a book that demands and rewards attention, as it explores a hundred important philosophical questions about free will, destiny, bioethics, intelligence, and duty.

For example, there's the story of the betrayal of the cold-sleep deep-space ships, which are meant to be launching by the dozens to distant, unexplored stars (but which have been co-opted for use as space-condos in a hostile corporate takeover). This leaves their erstwhile owners -- semi-sovereign collectives of Jesus freaks, defective spare-organ clones of VIPs, fatalistic Ukrainian Chernorbyl survivors, and other disaffected groups yearning to breath the air of distant worlds -- out in the cold.

Then there's the biowar flu, "the 24-hour nonspecific grief flu," which causes its victims to feel, well, nonspecific grief for 24 hours, before their immune systems fight the bugs off. Or do they?

NASTIEs are nanoweapons, the scale of a dandelion seed, which take root and begin coopting nearby matter, sending out tree-like roots to seek out the raw materials to assemble themselves into "deadly weapons of mass destruction." The army that launched the NASTIEs disbanded sixty years ago, but the seeds still flutter on the wind, periodically dissolving whole housing complexes as cloned first-responders seek to disassemble them before they can realize their destiny.

Clones are in trouble -- different kinds of clones, provided by different workforce vendors, are all going through massive, wrenching existential trauma. Do they have "clone fatigue" that causes them to run against type? And of course, every clone wonders if his creators imbued him with "musts" (secret, tailored cocktails of trace minerals whose absence will kill a clone in short order) and "candy" (like "musts," except that these cocktails evince extreme ecstatic responses, acting as a powerful Skinnerian conditioning agent).

There's even weirder life in Mind Over Ship: a beheaded tycoon whose head is grafted onto a cloned baby's body; her mother, secretly alive, encoded in the modified brains of "panasonic" fish around the world. And then there's the lively media: nits and the nitwork, micro-, mezzo- and nano-scale spybots that form a ubiquitous surveillance grid around the planet, a grid that can only be avoided by taking powerful purgatives that destroy the artificial fauna populating your outer and inner self before passing through an airlock.

Marusek's hyperfuturistic, hyperimaginative soap-opera is a tour-de-force of imagination, philosophy, dark humor and humanity. Let's hope he writes the next one quickly!

Mind Over Ship

Robbie Cooper's "Immersion: Porn" builds on his earlier work making video-recordings of gamers playing their favorite games; only this time, it's people talking about their relationship to pornography intercut with amazing, intimate footage of their faces as they watch the porn they enjoy.

Video: Robbie Cooper: Sex, Sighs & Videotape

Immersion: Porn By Robbie Cooper | Video

(via Kottke)

In this brief but compelling Vanity Fair interview with Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor and attorney general of New York, the reporter repeatedly presses Spitzer to explain why he was having sex with a prostitute while campaigning against prostitution. Spitzer's responses are fascinating: it sounds like he had divided his life into two pieces, the values he believed in and the things that he was compelled by.

It reminds me of the scene in Stephenson's Diamond Age in which a neo-Victorian recounts, "Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none."

"I'm not going to make excuses," he replied evenly. "Let me ask you a question: Is there a difference between politicians and anybody else? Or is it that the lives of politicians are so very public?"

"There is a difference, Mr. Spitzer. You were elected to a position of public trust."

"That's right," he conceded. "It's why I resigned without delay. Some said I could try to ride it out. But I didn't see it that way. What I did was heinous and wrong..."

"You knew the risks. Either you felt you were above the law or you had some kind of death wish."

His response was that neither was the case. "It's a story that has been repeated since our earliest days as a species. It's both obvious and not susceptible to an answer," he insisted. "Nonetheless, we are led down a certain path. It wasn't hubris or a death wish--but frailty, temptation, and common miscalculation."

Lunch in the Park with Eliot (via Kottke)

Sociological Images expertly dissects the new Axe exfoliant-for-men ad, which suggests that it's the perfect thing to use after sexual relations with "Jessica" and "Jessica's Mom":

The heterosexual male fantasy of being sexually serviced by two women is so common as to have become a cliché, but what about the less-frequently endorsed but still prevalent fantasy about those women being sisters (or better yet, identical twins!) or a mother-daughter pair? Is it simple attraction (i.e., if you're attracted to one woman in a family, it's likely you'll be attracted to other women who look/act like her)? Is it the taboo element? Or does the power to coerce women into an incestuous situation serve as it's own reward?

Still, Axe got one thing right with this product. When I think about a guy who would buy this sponge in the hopes of securing sexual relations with a woman and her mother, I can't help but think of him as a, well...tool.

Geez, what a tool!

Webphemera has a great gallery of many species of insects making the beast with two backs, 18 legs and 96 eyes.

Insects In Flagrante (Thanks, RJ!)

Susan Hughes and Willow Dawson's graphic novel No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure tells the story of six real-life historical woman heroes who defied the limits society put on them because of their gender, dressing as men and kicking ass (there are seven stories in total, but one of them, Mu-Lan, is likely mythological).

It's a great and inspiring read intended for young adults, and it runs from 1470BCE (the Egyptian Pharoah Hatshepsut) to the mid-1800s, and the stories will appeal to anyone who revels in tales of people who overcome the unfair limits others place on them. No Girls Allowed ties the quest for gender equality in with stories of racial and economic injustice, as with the amazing story of James Barry, a woman who lived her whole life as a man, becoming a young army surgeon who went on to lead controversial reform movements in South Africa and Canada, standing up for what was right in the face of punishment and even though she had so much to lose.

This is a great companion volume for Dignifying Science, a great graphic novel collecting the true-life stories of pioneering woman scientists. I'm putting it away to read to my daughter in a couple of years.

No Girls Allowed: Tales of Daring Women Dressed as Men for Love, Freedom and Adventure

Update: Tate sez, "Just saw you posted No Girls Allowed! Great book, thought you might be interested in the YouTube video we did on it--posted just last week as part of Whazamo--part of the same thing as the TCAF 2009 video."

Mary Roach's TED Talk, "10 things you didn't know about orgasm," will have you scratching your, um, head, in amazement as you learn the particulars of pig-wanking, the delicate matter of explaining foreplay to royalty, and the business of measuring the human penis's muzzle-velocity.

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm (via MeFi)

Apple has rejected Eucalyptus, an ebook reader that facilitates downloading public domain books from Project Gutenberg, because some Victorian books mention sex (many of these same books can be bought as ebooks through the iPhone Kindle reader or purchased as audiobooks from the iTunes store). It's amazing to think that in 2009 a phone manufacturer wants to dictate which literature its customers should be allowed to download and read on their devices.

Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. to the App Store. We've reviewed Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains inappropriate sexual content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."

Please view the attached screenshot for further information.

Remember, Apple is also petitioning the government to make it illegal to install any application on your phone that they haven't approved.

Whither Eucalyptus?

Jen sez, "Amusing scans and illustrations from a 1941 guide to sex. For some reason, most of the glands and body parts they illustrate look like Cthulhu monsters. There's also an amazing chart of comparative clitoris sizes, with each sample sketch life-sized but looking like Popeye chins."

So, Dr. Keller claims his images make sex better. This one shows how nerves and glands dance the maypole around the brain.

Studies in Crap Unveils Picture Stories of the Sex Life of Man and Woman (Thanks, Jen!)

Disneyland and Walt Disney World will no longer pay dedicated toplessness-checkers to examine the photos snapped of riders and displayed at the end of the ride. Not enough flashers these days, apparently.

Disney confirmed Tuesday that it has reassigned employees at Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure who watched for breast-baring riders because "actual inappropriate behaviors by guests are rare."

Disneyland spokeswoman Suzi Brown says the changes took effect Sunday at Splash Mountain, Tower of Terror, Space Mountain and California Screamin'.

Riders are photographed on the attractions and can then buy souvenir copies. Some have exposed their breasts in hopes that the picture would make it onto a photo preview screen at the ride's exit.

Disney Parks Stop Scans for Topless Riders (Thanks, Dan X!)

Yes, Dorothy, it is true: the image at the top of this post is none other than the Queen of All Media, the controversialicious Perez Hilton, in drag as Bettie Page (photographer: Austin Young). Click on this link, if you dare, and ye shall see false bewbs exposed in the full, uncropped image (NSFW).

The lovely Lenora Claire, whose talent and bodacious curves were introduced to us by recent guestblogger Richard Metzger, shares word of an art show opening this weekend in LA in appreciation of the late Bettie Page. The image above is part of that show.

Lenora tells Boing Boing:

For me and for many women (and a few men) I know, our discovery of Bettie Page during our adolescence shaped our beauty aesthetic, as the black-banged beauty was our first introduction to the world of corsetry, sky high heels, and other important elements of our sometimes painful personal style. Over the years my tastes (and cup size) have evolved, but it's been joy to watch Bettie rise from counterculture cutie to full blown legend. After the nationwide success of my Golden Gals Gone Wild show which featured erotic art based on the Golden Girls and was featured on everything from NPR to National Enquirer, I knew I needed a follow up with some serious knockout appeal.

I'm thrilled to present Bettie Page: Heaven Bound which opens with a gala opening reception Saturday, May 2nd at the World of Wonder gallery in Hollywood and runs until May 29th.

The show features over 20 years of Bettie-inspired work including stunning new watercolor images by the queen of pin-up Olivia (who I still can't believe I had the opportunity to pose for let alone work so closely with on the dream project) as well as Bunny Yeager who shot many of Bettie's most iconic images; Austin Young who shot beautiful images of myself and of celebs including Perez Hilton, Cassandra Peterson aka Elvira, and Jane Weidlin from the GoGo's as Bettie; Colin Christian who just completely blows my mind; and a slew of other artists I'm so proud to present. Since Bettie wasn't a traditional gal and neither am I, the opening night reception will feature a spanking machine complete with costumed cuties dressed as Nurse Betties to help you after your turn on our weapon of ass destruction, a photobooth by PoliteinPublic.com, celebrity guests such as Dita who will be attending but not performing, as well as Bettie's actual high heels on display and other exciting surprises. Hope to see you all there.

Below, Lenora spanking herself dressed as Bettie Page. (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

My friends' 3-year-old son, Will, asks, "Do cockroaches have a penis?" This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

First off, most basic sources will just try to give you some fluffy answer about how to tell a boy cockroach from a girl cockroach, which doesn't have anything to do with penises (or lack thereof) at all. In fact, apparently, the easiest way to sex your cockroach is to count the number of of segments on the underside of its abdomen, according to roach expert Joseph Kunkel, a biology professor at the University of Mass., Amherst. Girls have more segments. Boys have fewer

Second, there appears to have been a lot more research done on female cockroach reproductive anatomy. And for good reason: It is more noticeably freaky. Female cockroaches carry their fertilized eggs around in these pod-like sacks called ootheca. Some cockroaches will tote the ootheca around attached to their bodies until the babies hatch. Other species, however, simply drop the ootheca off in some hidden corner, where the babies can incubate safely while you beat their mothers to death with a shoe. Stumble upon enough ootheca in the basement, and its liable to be the first thing you take to the lab.

But, while useful, this information does not answer the young man's question. For that, I had to turn to Cockroaches, a 2007 book by William J. Bell, Louis Marcus Roth, Christine A. Nalepa, and (yes) Edward O. Wilson. Their description of the male cockroach junk helpfully explained why I'd been getting so much confusing (and conflicting) information from other sources. To wit:

A number of intromittent structures in the male cockroach have been called a penis ... Although these structures may be associated with the ejaculatory duct ... penis-like organs function in some capacity other than to convey sperm directly

So there you have it. Cockroaches: They have no penis. But they do have a lot of things that are frequently called a "penis". Many of these bits and pieces seem to actually be used for cockblocking, so to speak. Let me explain. Instead of the familiar-to-us method of copulation, male cockroaches produce a hard, little packet full of sperm, called a spermatophore, which they transfer into their favorite gal. But, unless it's her first time around the block, there's a decent chance that somebody else's spermatophore is already in there. A male cockroach has a better chance of passing on his genes if he can get rid of the competing sperm. Whether hooked, whip-like, barbed or spiny, those not!penis structures are likely used by male cockroaches to clear out rival spermatophores, according to the august authors of Cockroaches, the book.

Beach-bunny cockroaches provided by kthypryn.

(Snapshots from the BBV Throbbing Gristle shoot by Chris Cooper).

Boing Boing Video and Richard Metzger shot an interview with art-damage/industrial music godfathers Throbbing Gristle in Los Angeles. They're on a limited tour of the USA, with a show tonight in San Francisco, and dates scheduled in Chicago and Brooklyn (info on dates, venues, and tickets here).

The resulting BB Video is yet to come, but I wanted to share some notes, photos, and ephemera from the experience.

Metzger is a super-mega-otaku fan of TG, and covered their legacy extensively through Disinfo publications and video releases. My knowledge is nowhere near as comprehensive as his (he's even stumped TG members with knowledge of early songs they've forgotten!). But I have been fascinated with them since I was a teenager, when a friend in a punk squat loaned me a beer-stained copy of V. Vale's 1983 RE/Search book about industrial culture.

When I phoned TG's manager Paul Smith on Monday to ask for permission to shoot for Boing Boing Video, I explained that I believed TG were the cultural ancestors for much of the "mutant" culture we explore here on Boing Boing. Sappy but sincere. Without their early experiments in nihilistic machine song we would not have "industrial music." The projects that split off when TG first disbanded -- Chris And Cosey, Coil, Psychic TV -- only expanded their cultural footprint. Countless acts owe them a huge genetic debt -- everyone from Einsturzende Neubauten to Skinny Puppy to NIN to Aphex Twin to Radiohead to every other act you're likely to type in the comments.

COUM Transmissions, the experimental performance art collective which preceded Throbbing Gristle, was responsible for legendary shock-events so extreme, they'd make Tubgirl, Goatse, and the Two Girls with One Cup blush.

The TG show we witnessed (and shot for BBV) this week reflects less of that shock, anger, and taboo-bombing, and was almost entirely instrumental. More moody, doom-y, Faustian. But the physically overwhelming sounds "took the meat off the bones," as Metzger put it. And it was fucking amazing.

Tuesday night's performance was a reprise of a live, improvised soundtrack TG composed for the 1980 Derek Jarman film In the Shadow of the Sun (you can watch a snip of the original version here).

"These people are the wreckers of civilisation", said conservative Member of Parliment Nicholas Fairbairn back in 1976. He was talking about Throbbing Gristle. During the BBV interview, we talked about what it's like to go from being "wreckers" of culture to being celebrated as cultural heroes. We talked about Twitter and Flickr. Gen asked what the difference is between blogs and websites, and announced s/he'd recently acquired her first Blackberry.

Ruth has some snapshots of the shoot and the soundcheck here. TG member Chris Carter is on Twitter here, and his photos are on Flickr here -- don't miss this incredible photoset of historic "lost and found" TG photos. TG member Cosey Fanni Tutti is on Twitter here. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is here. And Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson is here.

Some archival interviews I've been reading and re-reading, as we edit the interview: This one with Cosey, about her art and her explorations of the sex trade (for her, one and the same). And this amazing interview purportedly from 1978, by an Australian reporter for NME, which was apparently never published in NME. This article in Artlurker by Federico Nessi. And this review of a box set in Artforum.

Thee Boing Boing Video episode(s) are "coum-ing" soon.

(Special thanks to Richard Metzger, to Boing Boing Video's production crew, and friends who helped along the way: Ehrich Blackhound, Ruth Waytz, Chris Cooper, Jason Louv, Suzan Jones, and Greg Chong, to name a few. Very special thanks to Paul Smith, and to the members of Throbbing Gristle).

AWARE, a 25-year-old Singaporean women's right organization, recently found itself in turmoil after a coup orchestrated by conservative fundamentalist Christians who signed up in large numbers just before the annual general meeting, then elected a new executive that immediately purged the organization of all its traditional leadership down to the subcommittee chairs.

AWARE held its annual general meeting (AGM) on 28 March 2009. There were over 100 people present. Of them, about 80 had only joined the organisation between January and March, one to three months before the meeting. Nine out of 12 executive committee (EXCO) places, including four Office Bearer positions, went to newcomers, who were voted in by wide majorities. There are wide-ranging suspicions that this "leadership grab" has been orchestrated by a well-organised group who do not share AWARE's values and who are seeking to use the name and the resources of a well-respected institution to further their own agenda. These concerns have been expressed not only by onlookers, but by older members of Aware...

# The new president, Josie Lau and 5 other Exco members belong to the same church, Church of Our Saviour. Given this, it is very likely, in our view, that they have acted in concert to take over AWARE. We do not know why as they have refused to disclose their reasons to either members of AWARE or to the press and this makes us even more worried. They, or persons whom they have been associated with, have written homophobic letters to the press. While that is their personal conviction to which they are entitled, we do not want AWARE to be made into a vehicle for any hidden agenda.

# Josie Lau, was in charge of the DBS Charity Drive in support of Focus On The Family, US-based Christian organisation that is opposed to abortion and equal rights for sexual minorities. This created a controversy last year which was well-documented.

# 160 members, including former AWARE committee members and founder members, petitioned for an extraordinary general meeting to consider a vote of no confidence in the New Exco on the basis that the New Exco has not acted and is not acting in the best interest of AWARE; does not appreciate or share the values of AWARE and does not have the requisite experience of carrying out AWARE's work or is otherwise inadequate to further AWARE's objectives. An EGM will be held on 2 May 2009.

WHAT HAPPENED (via IZ Reloaded)

danah boyd tweet-points to this "chilling story of educator in a sexting mess," and says "We should all be horrified by the prosectors' obsession with 'sexting'." Ting-Yi Oei, the Virginia high school teacher in question, is male. All charges against him have since been thrown out of court. But as in the case with Julie Amero, that final acquittal doesn't erase the personal and professional damage caused -- nor does it make up for the reckless tech-stupidity of prosecutors and school officials involved in the case.

Ting-Yi Oei's "sexting" witchhunt story begins about a year ago, when a fellow teacher told him about a rumor that some teens at the school were texting naked self-portraits around to one another.

I called a student I thought likely to have such a picture into my office. In the presence of the school's safety and security official, he quickly admitted that he did. He pulled out his phone and showed us an image of the torso of a woman wearing underpants, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her head was not in the picture. The 17-year-old student claimed not to know who the young woman was or who had sent him the photo.

I immediately took the picture to the principal, who instructed me to transfer it to my office computer in case we needed it later. Being unfamiliar with camera features on cellphones, I asked the school's technology resource teacher for help, but he didn't have an immediate solution. The student then said that he could text the picture to my cellphone. That left the problem of getting it to my computer, whereupon the boy said that I could send the picture to my school e-mail address.

In hindsight, of course, he could have sent it directly to my computer himself. But it never occurred to me that my actions could be regarded as suspect: I was conducting a legitimate school investigation with children's welfare in mind, and I did so in the presence and with the full knowledge of other school officials.

I interviewed more students with the security specialist, but we found no more pictures and were unable to identify the woman in the photo. We concluded that she probably wasn't a student at the school. I reported our findings to the principal and assumed that the matter was closed.

I left the building quickly that day -- the start of spring break -- to join my wife, Diane, at a doctor's office to discuss her upcoming surgery for a potentially malignant tumor. I told her about the sexting photo, but we had other things on our minds. When I returned to school two days after break ended, I confronted a new problem: The boy with the photo on his cell was now in trouble for having pulled a girl's pants down in class (another teen phenomenon known as "flagging"). I informed his mother that I was suspending him, and in the discussion I also told her about the earlier incident. She was outraged that I hadn't reported it to her at the time. She called me at home that night at 10 p.m. and again at 7 a.m. the next morning, agitated and demanding that the suspension be revoked and threatening to involve an attorney. I told her as calmly as I could that the suspension was for the deliberate act of pulling down the girl's pants. A couple of days later, after an appeal hearing with the principal and me, she shouted at me, "I'll see you in court!"

The story quickly takes a turn for the surreal. Soon, the teacher who claims he sought only to protect the kids he taught was himself charged with possession of child pornography. Read the rest of the saga here: My Students. My Cellphone. My Ordeal. (Washington Post)

There's been a lot of talk of "teabagging" lately. Conservative anti-tax advocates in the United States have been organizing "tea party" protests, fashioned after the colonial-era protests of British rule. In doing so, they and the right-wing TV punditards who cheer these spectacles on for ratings have ranted about "teabagging," and the desire to "teabag Barack Obama" and such, without apparent knowledge of the word's more common street use.

More recently, news anchors and bloggers have giggled knowingly over that sexual reference, but nobody has acknowledged how the word first entered popular American slang.

I'll tell you how. John Waters.

Here is the email exchange:

XENI: Dear Mister John Waters: We at Boing Boing are devoted fans of your work, and we consider you one of the greatest heroes of the "happy mutant" culture we celebrate. Where does the term "teabagging" come from? Is it true that the term was first popularized, or originated, in one of your films? Also, what is the deal with right wing nutbags (if you'll pardon that term, too) appropriating a perfectly good term for a sex act in such an offensive manner? Your humble devotée, -- Xeni.

JOHN WATERS: "Teabagging" is by my definition the act of dragging your testicles across your partner's forehead. In the UK it is dipping your testicles in your partner's mouth. I didn't invent the term or the act but DID introduce it to film in my movie "Pecker." "Teabagging" was a popular dance step that male go-go boys did to their customers for tips at The Atlantis, a now defunct bar in Baltimore. Hope this helps. -- John Waters

* Yes, this is an actual transcription of an email exchange between Boing Boing and John Waters.

Below, the clip from his movie "Pecker" that started it all. (YouTube Link).

Mr. Waters' work in sculpture and photography is currently the subject of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles: REAR PROJECTION. Snip from show description.

"Rear projection" is a movie term for the process whereby a foreground action is combined with a background scene filmed earlier to give the impression the actors are on location when they are, in fact, working inside a studio. In Waters' latest work, this artificial and outdated visual effect is embraced, attacked and taken to extremes.

Glorifying the struggle, humiliation, and wild excitement of a life in show business, Waters uses an insider's bag of film tricks and trade lingo to celebrate the excess of the movie industry. Rewriting and redirecting existing film imagery snapped off the TV screen, he assaults, elevates, subtitles, and startlingly alters these one time classic, respected, even honored movies to attain a new kind of equality: a cult film that only needs one viewer - John Waters himself.

And finally: below, a rare John Waters short praising the merits of smoking in movie theaters.

(Special thanks to Mr. Johnny Knoxville and the incredible Richard Metzger, who you really ought to be following on Twitter instead of Ashton Kutcher or CNNBRK.)

The adult film legend died at age 56 on Sunday. She was found in her mobile home by a family member.

Chambers' death was a "total shock," [fellow adult star Ron] Jeremy said, because they had been scheduled to sign a contract Monday to perform together in an off-Broadway "tongue-in-cheek" re-enactment of the porn classic "Deep Throat." "What's strange is that she was at a stage where she was totally happy and totally content with her life," Jeremy said. "Her life was falling together, and she was doing really well."

Above, an interview with Ms. Chambers from 1977 on a NYC public access cable TV show. The porn title for which she is best known: The Mitchell Brothers production "Behind the Green Door."

The newspaper headlines around this one are funny: "House passes bill too gross to talk about," cringes the Oregonian. Bottom line seems to be that they've outlawed bukkake. Here's a pretty straightforward wikipedia entry about the act, popularized first in Japanese pornography, then made famous through American titles.

Today's Oregon ruling was sparked by a really awful non-consensual crime that involved a single perp and a single intended victim. Not funny, and I'm all for the maximum possible penalties there. But the language of the bill appears to cover the consensual but equally icky Porn Valley phenom, which typically involves lots of multiple participants, some of whom are paid as performers:

The proposed new law nobody wants to talk about would make it a second degree sex abuse crime to propel "a dangerous substance at another person." That substance being semen or other bodily fluid flung out of sexual desire.

Yep. Apparently such behavior is part of a gang initiation rituals.

The proposed law follows an incident last June when a man threw his semen on a mother in a Portland area Target store. Her little girl saw it first.

(via Susannah Breslin)

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger.

If you've never heard of Jobriath Boone, don't worry, you're not alone. Obscure even by "rock snob" standards, Jobriath was the first really openly gay rock star. David Bowie and Lou Reed flirted with bisexuality, nail polish and make-up, of course, but Jobriath was in his own words, "a true fairy." He wasn't just "out of the closet" he was out like a police siren with the volume turned up to eleven!

I've been a Jobriath freak for about 20 years when I stumbled upon his first LP at a New York City flea market. "What is THIS?" was my initial reaction to the cover, obviously influenced by the artwork for David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs." Clearly from the image on the cover, Jobriath was a 70s glitter rock wannabe. Make that perhaps a "neverwas," for aside from a massive advertising campaign that saw his image on 250 New York buses and a 40 foot high poster in Times Square, two solid LPs (recorded with the likes of Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and Peter Frampton) and a memorable "Midnight Special" performance, Jobriath was a massive flop at the time. Too gay for mid-America in 1974? For sure, but that hasn't stopped Jobriath's Broadway showtunes meets glam rock oeuvre from being rediscovered by fresh ears this decade. Championed by Morrissey, Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys and singer-actress Ann Magnuson (who once told me that I was "the only straight guy in the world who's ever even HEARD of Jobriath" back in the early 90s), the tiny cult of Jobriath got a lot of new members when the CD compliation "Lonley Planet Boy" was released in 2004. His life was also a major part of the inspiration for Todd Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine" although few people realize that fact (the Maxwell Demon album covers are direct homages to the original Jobriath records). Admittedly, his music isn't for everyone --some people just HATE it-- but for those of you who embraced the equally obscure Klaus Nomi, you'll probably love Jobriath.

"I'maman" on The Midnight Special

"Rock of Ages" on The Midnight Special

"I'm Ready for my Close-Up" an informative Jobriath article from MOJO.

Why You Should Like Jobriath

Artist Justine Lai's new project is a set of oil paintings of her having sex with every president of the USA, in order.

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

NOTES ON JOIN OR DIE (Thanks, Frank W!)