Of Sex and Science

A new study has determined that there is no firm link between promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases. They point to the fact that nations with the highest rates of HIV/AIDS are not the nations with the highest rates of promiscuity.

Sometimes, scientists fucking kill me. I don’t know what part if "sexually transmitted" is confusing.

Don’t get me wrong, in general, I love them. I question everything, have the hots for Jamie and Adam on Mythbusters (I know, they’re not actually scientists,) and become utterly provoked when pseudo-scientists like ghost hunters claim what they do is science though they’ve clearly never heard the words "scientific method."

But to deny that promiscuity has any correlation to sexually transmitted disease defies reason. Any fool knows, if you continue to dip from the well, eventually, you’ll pull up the goldfish that’s been down there.

Their reasoning takes into account only one factor contributing to the spread of one STD. The scientists themselves displayed a lack of cultural understanding when they said they expected to see the most promiscuous behavior in regions like Africa where the virus is most concentrated.

Africa... where so many people are devout Muslims or Christians. This is where they expected the highest concentration of promiscuity.

Morons.

Of course the disease is spreading rapidly when a good potion of the continent had HIV before we knew how to prevent it and few people could afford condoms once we understood they protection they afford.

Nowadays, every African woman who sleeps with a single man, and make no mistake, that’s the average number of partners for an African woman, has a fifty-fifty chance of contracting the disease. And every single woman who has the virus can give birth and pass it down to more than one child before she dies. It’s amazing there are any Africans left, with or without promiscuity.
They may as well have said "there are more dark people in Africa than in Europe, ergo, sleeping with dark people has no direct effect on the outcome of your potential offspring’s skin tone." It makes about as much sense.

It’s simply not possible to determine the effect of promiscuity on the spread of disease without removing other factors which would skew the results. No credible scientist would run such a study and call the results conclusive. I’m confidant when the test subjects are all from a relatively equal socioeconomic class and all have equal access to condoms, you’ll find sexually transmitted disease is more prevalent in the more promiscuous population.

And lest you think condom use is the single difference in the spread of disease, and promiscuity may be dismissed as a factor, you should understand condoms do not prevent all STD’s and won’t prevent any at all if improperly used. Many people are not aware of the basics principles of condom use for disease prevention and either don’t use condoms for the entire duration of all sexual encounters or don’t use condoms and dental dams during oral sex.

Ok, so why am I getting all worked up about this? Well, for one, I like to beat dead horses, and this bastard’s still needs one last kick. But mostly because the claims of this study are dangerous. They promote a false sense of security. And the people most at risk are the ones we should be most passionate about protecting. They are the young, who have more time and drive to be promiscuous and less experience discerning when something is nonsense.
I’m pissed because I have children, who will one day want to have sex, and I will have to combat the dangerous misinformation coming from people who, at first blush, seem to be experts.

200 years ago, everyone knew the prostitute down in the red light district was going to die of the pox before the holy housewife. It took modern fucking science to deny what common sense has always known.

You can find an article on the study I'm bitching about here.

The advertising think-tank is filled with intellectual guppies

I normally prefer to stay away from the war between the sexes. They usually end up being ugly accusations which cite extreme examples of behavior as a justification for the attack of half the population. It’s ridiculous and the attacker ends up looking more foolish than the attacked.

That said...

Some men are so fucking stupid I could have an aneurism just thinking about it!
There’s an old truism in advertising that says simply "sex sells." Let me be the first to raise my hand and testify to the truthiness (I love you, Stephen Colbert) of this statement.
The heavily male dominated advertising industry has been pitching sexy ads to the heavily male dominated executive businesspeople almost since mass media and branding were created. For the most part, it’s been a great success.

An new study conducted by three University of Florida professors is saying that for women, the theory is a falsehood.

The study showed women who were shown advertisements featuring attractive female models and asked to both categorize the type of beauty the model represented (classic feminine, sensual exotic, trendy, cute, girl next door, and sex kitten) and rate their level of response from bored to interested.

The data showed that the more sexually charged the model seemed, the less interested the women were. The conclusion? Sex does not sell to women.

OK, here’s a pop quiz who can see what is wrong with this statement? They were basing their conclusion on the responses of women to images of attractive *women*. No study was done based on the responses of women to sexy men.

Now, I don’t know if the studies participants were surveyed on their sexual orientation, but presumably, it was the same 90% heterosexual as the rest of the population.
So let’s analyze this equation. We are heterosexual women who aren’t attracted to images of sexy women, ergo, sex does not attract us in advertising.

And the Diet Coke guy had no part in boosting sales of Diet Coke that year. And Fabio’s books sold so well because he was a really brilliant author. (I said that sarcastically, but really, Pirate was a great book.)
For decades, Advertisers have been pitching sexy women in advertisements to women, hoping to entice the buyers to emulate the models. But the first rule of communication is to know your audience. Before we ever picked up a magazine telling us what products we want, society taught us not to be whores.

Damn society.

It took three PHDs to figure out that I really don’t want to buy toothpaste from a Victoria’s Secret model. How many of them will it take to figure out I’d buy any freaking floorwax you’re selliing if you just put Keanu Reeves’ half naked body on the kitchen floor.

Gilbert Gottfried's too unsexy for the Taliban

The Boston Pheonix has released a list of the unsexiest men alive and Gilbert Gottfried topped out at number one.

At first glance, it's perfectly reasonable. He's a physically repellant little person with a grating voice and a propensity toward offensive humor. (Rumor has it he's told Holocaust jokes to death camp survivors and once asked a preteen girl if she had pubic hair yet.)

Yes, Gilbert Gottfried is a troll in need of a bridge.

But then I look further down the list and see that to get the number one spot, he beat out Osama Bin Laden. Now, I don't feel any attraction for Gottfried, but it must be said, at least he doesn't look like he has fleas in his beard.

Perhaps I'm a bit predjudiced. I'm an American and a New Yorker. I'm still kind of bitter about the whole 9/11 thing and it no doubt colors my perception of Bin Ladens manly charms. Who knows, maybe his multiple wives actually dig the tall, dark, and psychotic persona and they aren't just victims of a sexist society that treats them like chattel. But I don't get the sense that The Pheonix interviewed many Afghani women anyway.

I'm surprised that American sensabilities would permit anyone to be less attractive than our public enemy number one. Even if he wasn't the orchestator of what is arguably our greatest national tragedy, he would still be skinny and scraggly, with a big nose, hollowed out eyes, and lousy fashion sense.

What's funnier than Gilbert Gottfried being less sexy the Bin Laden, is that he had plenty of company. According to The Pheonix, Randy Johnson, Roger Ebert, Dr. Phil, Alan Colmes, Chad Kroeger and Mike Mills are all less sexy than Osama Bin Laden.

Other amusing notes from the top one forty list:
Jerry Seinfeld is less sexy than Larry David
Ron Howard is ledd sexy than Clint Howard
John Lovitz is less sexy than Chevy Chase, who is less sexy than Chris Kattan, Who is less sexy than Al Franken.

At this point, I'd like to point out that over 30% of all the world's least sexy men have either hosted, acted, written for, or otherwise appeared or contributed to Saturday Night Live. And you know if John Belushi and Chris Farley had lived, they'd be on the list too.

For more than thirty years Lorne Micheals's tryanny of the unsexy has ruled late night television with an iron fist and an ugly stick. What's worse, spin-off movies basedon unnatractive SNL characters have brought the unpleasantness into the daylight.

I guess they weren't kidding when they said comedy isn't pretty. But does it really have to be monkey-butt ugly?

I hope you'll help me do something to end this plague of ugly. Please boycott SNL and their advertisers until they agree to employ only the aesthetically pleasing.

Remember, it's not nice to laugh at ugly people.

Michael Jackson is found Not Guilty?

And I thought I was clever for smiling my way out of a few tickets.

I am SUCH an amateur!

Phone Sex Operator Gets Settlement For Masturbation Related Injuries.

A Florida phone sex operator has won a workers' compensation settlement claiming she was injured after regularly masturbating at work, her lawyer said.

The lawyer told Reuters he was not sure whether the Fort Lauderdale woman's claim was the first of its kind, but it certainly was out of the ordinary.

He said his client agreed to a "minimal settlement" earlier this month. He declined to disclose the amount.

During the course of her claim for workers' compensation benefits, the now 40-year-old employee of Fort Lauderdale's CFP Enterprises, Inc. said she developed carpal tunnel syndrome -- also known as repetitive motion injury -- in both hands from masturbating as many as seven times a day while speaking with callers, said the attorney, who spoke about the case this week on the condition that his client's name not be revealed.

"She was told to do whatever it takes to keep the person on the phone as long as possible," he said.

The woman used one hand to answer the telephone and the other to note customer's names and fetishes and to give herself an orgasm during the verbal exchanges. The calls usually lasted about 15 minutes, although callers who asked for the woman by name were given 30 minutes of talk time, Slootsky said. In her petition for workers' compensation benefits, filed with Florida's Department of Labor and Employment Security in April, the woman claimed she received her injury from "repetitive use of the phone." She claimed weekly benefits of $267 a week -- based on an annual weekly wage of $400 -- and also asked to be reimbursed for $30,000 in medical bills after a neurosurgeon operated on her hands to relieve her pain. Slootsky said his client was too embarrassed to tell her doctor the real cause of her injury and the lack of disclosure led a mediator to advise her that she would have difficult case to prove at trial.
*****


OK, so this isn't exactly news. The earliest version of this story I can find seems to come from back in November of 1999. But I didn't have a Blog back then did I now? And besides, I think this bears repeating. The woman won a settlement over masturbating for crying out loud! And here I've been faking it all along, like a sucker.