I keep getting press releases that assure me that while all other retail is slumping, sex sales are doing just fine. The number and somewhat forcedly gleeful tone of these makes me suspicious — but I also am a firm believer in positive thinking. If retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers and producers of sex stuff want to tell me multiple times that their industry is doing well, then that’s fine by me. Better than the fearmongering that We The Media are so diligently spreading.

Besides, sex supplies do make wonderful gifts. Like books and DVDs, your recipient can enjoy them again and again. And if you’re giving them to a lover, why, it’s also gift for you and for the relationship. How efficient! Everybody wins! Hey, you could even package them with a copy of Sexier Sex, which is chock-full of creative and practical things you can DO with your new sexy doodads. (Not to mention, it stimulates my personal economy, as every book sold gives me a better chance when I pitch the next one … LOL)

I’m sure all the sex stores have their own gift guides to help you select items for lovers, siblings (yes, sisters give each other vibrators), friends. My personal preferences, for gifts, lean toward quality and beauty in equal measure. Especially toward items a person might not buy for themselves. I’ll list some brands below, with the caveat that some are (significantly) more expensive than others, and that some are more effective than others depending on how you use them. That is, an Elemental Pleasures vibrator or an Eroscillator deliver more effective vibrations than the rubber duckies at Big Teaze, but they’re also several times the cost and are much more serious than a black rubber duckie in a purple boa. Likewise, I have a beautiful LELO vibrator with flowers painted on it that feels wonderful in the palm of my hand whether it’s on or off. I feel sensual and romantic when I stroke it, but it doesn’t do much for me as a vibrator.

My list mostly links to the brand website; you can get most of these products from various sex stores, or from Amazon or Drugstore.com. Note that these are not the only great sex gifts available. They are items I’ve used personally and feel good about recommending.

In order only of memory, not of preference:

Big Teaze Toyz cute vibrators
OhMiBod music-driven vibrators
nJoy stainless steel toys
Liberator shapes
Monkey Rocker gliders
ForYourNymphomation toy storage
Natural Contours pretty vibrators
LELO pretty vibrators
Onyx Game
Bliss Game for Lovers
Tantus dildos
O’my flavored lubes
JT Stockroom leather ‘n’ more
Kink.com subscriptions
The Guide to Getting It On (new edition)

Edited: I thought of more nifty sex-tech during dinner…

Aneros toys
Fleshlight male stimulator
Logitech webcam and Skype (free!)
RetroRaunch vintage porn subscription
Click Fore Play erotic audio drama (with sexy British accents)

Tons more, but I don’t want to keep adding things, especially if that makes this post go out on the feeds over and over again. Please feel free to add your sex-tech wish lists/recommendations in the comments!

Last month I prepared my L.A. house to rent out and moved to northern California in 17 days. (The other 10ish were spent out of town working full time onsite hours for day job clients.) Suffice it to say, I’m crawling back to blogging somewhat battered and bruised, but landed in the new place with the DSL set up.

If I were still writing Sex Drive for Wired, I would have written about this story for this week:

Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

…the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.

A year ago, scientists achieved the illusion of an out-of-body experience in subjects, using virtual reality. The new research manipulates the brain even further - out of itself and into another body.

[snip]

The object of the projects was to learn more about how the brain constructs an internal image of the body and how we come to feel like we are located inside our bodies, a concept called embodiment. The new experiments, the first to move beyond experiments on just a single limb, show that matching of our multisensory and motor signals from the first-person perspective is sufficient for producing the experience of owning one’s entire body…

I have dreamed, and I have deliberately imagined, what it feels like to be in a male body, doing various things male bodies can do with themselves and others. How cool to think that in my lifetime it might become possible to don another body as a matter of course. Because, you know, I’ll be fabulously wealthy and able to afford whatever setup this will require….

It’s the kind of cool techie research that has obvious and multiple implications for sex, but that people won’t want to admit is sexual. The closest they will get is how such technology will help people with disabilities, spinal cord injuries, and the like experience greater sexual engagement — which is important and good and right and I don’t want to belittle it by any means. Yet somehow presenting this kind of research with “oh yeah and it’s gonna be really cool for sex, both cyber and physical!” seems to drive away both funding and respect.

It’s too bad, as sex is a universal human experience that involves mental, emotional, spiritual and physical elements (in varying degrees at various times). The sexual applications of this kind of research should be acknowledged, encouraged and celebrated, if you ask me.

For those of you just now stumbling into the sexrev2.0, here’s a bit about how and why it began:

Plugged into sex & technology

Here’s that piece I kept Twittering about, finally finished after a month that included a death, a wedding, and the beginning of my move back to northern California.

My Computer Made Me Gay
A computer game introduces one woman to bisexual experimentation—and a girlfriend. By Regina Lynn.

“I see an exciting adventure in your future, a new sexual experience that forever changes you,” she said, tracing the sole of my foot with one soft fingertip. Her husband grinned at me from the bed. I sat half-naked in the overstuffed armchair and trembled with nerves.

This is not how I’d imagined my first — or any — threesome. I’m not bisexual, and I can count the number of times I’ve been physically attracted to a woman on one hand, with two fingers left over.

Yet here I was in a cute little southern California inn with a couple who have been married for 25 years, playing an adults-only computer game that would have us girls riding double before dinnertime. [Continued at Tango...]

Got this in my Sexual Intelligence newsletter this morning and thought it was pretty good, so here it is with my notes:

Dear President Obama:

For months, I’ve been predicting that when you win, nothing will change regarding sex. I’ve said you won’t stop the government’s War On Sex; you won’t demand respect for sexual rights as human rights; you won’t prevent religious fanatics from controlling non-believers’ sex lives.

You now have your big chance: prove me wrong. Here’s what you need to do:

* End funding for abstinence-only training in public schools.

* End the Department of Justice’s war on adult entertainment. Keep the war on child porn. Make it clear they’re two different things. [[Regina's Note: Notice Marty's semantics here - adult entertainment vs child porn. Absolutely right to use different words for two very, very different things. Go Marty!]]

* Decriminalize all consensual sex that teens have with other teens. Decriminalize teens sharing photos of themselves having sex. [[Regina's Note: Tech enables us to extend our sexual behavior, as well as create "new" sexual behaviors. I agree with Marty that teens sharing photos with their peers is not a criminal act -- and that their lives should not be forever wrecked for the "crime" of being young and hormonal. Besides, sharing pics is robably the quickest, most effective way to learn discretion and to think about one's own limits and the limits of one's friends. No need to send them to jail. Their peers will teach them the lesson more deeply than the adults ever could.]]

* Increase financial support for Planned Parenthood, an investment proven to reduce poverty and domestic violence. [[Regina's Note: Several of my adult friends, unmarried and married, go to PP for STD screenings and birth control, because they are young working adults who don't have health insurance. It has nothing to do with politics, abortion, feminism or any other "issue" -- except the desire not to bring issue into the world before the women are ready for them.]]

* Take the moral leadership to decrease abortion–by funding contraception services and comprehensive sex education, not by criminalizing abortion.[[Regina's Note: Duh.]]

* Require all sex education programs to be scientifically accurate. Isn’t that required by the policies of car manufacturers, meat-packing plants, and toothpaste makers?

* Require all municipalities that want to restrict commercial sexual expression (strip clubs, adult bookstores, swing clubs, etc.) to actually demonstrate a need to do so, rather than simply claim “effects like crime, disease, and blight are well-established.” Because they’re not.

* Require all federal judges to take a Continuing Education course about sexuality. Healthy sexuality, not “sex addiction” or child molestation. Make this education mandatory for anyone aspiring to be a judge.[[Regina's Note: This is my soapbox as well. So much of what we write, research or study about sex starts with the "something's wrong" -- but what about what's not wrong?]]

* Get the FCC out of the censorship business. Let Americans use the “off” and “change channel” buttons on their TV remotes whenever they want; it’s good practice for voting.

* Remove the blocking software from every federally-funded computer in America–libraries, universities, airports. Start with the computers in the White House and Congress.[[Regina's Note: There's a scene in Cordelia's Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujuold, in which it comes out that the lowest standard of living Cordelia can imagine is not having a comconsole and full network access in a home, much less in the village. When the Barrayarans express astonishment at this naive worldview, Cordelia, a Betan, explains that it's the first item on the Beta Colony constitution: the right to information access shall not be abridged.]]

I’ve said in dozens of lectures this year that you won’t make a difference in America’s War On Sex.

Please, prove me wrong.

I’d be happy to see progress on one or two of these, honestly. I’m not greedy. I don’t expect everything to change all at once for everyone. Even though I think all of Marty’s points are fairly simple, sensible, and easily implemented, I know how hard it is to get 300 million people to agree on anything.

-
Reprinted from Sexual Intelligence, © Marty Klein, Ph.D. (www.SexualIntelligence.org).

The Tanni Machine is a lightweight, lovely functional art piece made of oak that makes it possible to penetrate yourself without an awkward reach. It costs about $200, comes in Natural or Black, and while it doesn’t match the smooth, hands-free glide of the Monkey Rocker, it’s also a quarter of the price.

The comparison is inevitable. Both machines are hand-made. Both aim for a subtle aesthetic, not an industrial or high-tech vibe. And both have caused me to re-think the role of dildos in my sex life, partnered and solo. I’ve always leaned more toward vibration and could take or leave the dildo … but not having to crank my hand around at an awkward angle and pump makes a huge difference.

The Tanni, like the Fantasy Glide (aka Jack Hammer Johnson, reviewed in this Sex Drive column), puts the “handle” of the dildo within easy reach. Unlike the Fantasy Glide, it has no spring. It does translate a small amount of hand motion into a larger amount of vaginal or anal penetration, so that a small push with the hand becomes a nice thrust with the dildo. (I suppose you could use it for oral, too, particularly in a BDSM/humiliation context, if whoever is at the helm works the thing carefully.)

I used it in conjunction with the Eroscillator, both on the stable surface of the hard floor and the unstable surface of my pillowtop mattress. In both cases it was easy and natural to steady the base of the Tanni with my feet or legs, and to work it into place one-handed even when the dildo came all the way out on a particularly enthusiastic stroke. My only complaint was that I didn’t have a hand free to hold a book.

The motion is a bit clunky and if I pushed too hard or at a bad angle, the nuts and bolts clanked. Much of the wobble it has on its own goes away once it’s inside you, though, as your body steadies the thrusting arm. I’ve had this prototype for two months (yeah, yeah, just call me Scoop) so he might have figured out a smoother solution since he sent me this sample.

The handle moves in a full arc, so a friend can maneuver it for you. There’s also a way to use two Tannis at the same time for partner play, and you can see simulations and videos on the website for more ideas.

Now, I don’t assemble, so I can’t speak to how hard it is for a normal person to put together. The friend who assembled mine said it was a snap. Way easier than anything from IKEA. I will reserve judgment on that, and please feel free to let me know, if you get one, how it all came together for you.

You need a dildo with a vac-u-lock attachment or a hole for a bullet vibrator (I was able to squeeze a Tantus on there).

I’m not sure if the inventor will let me name him, but I can tell you this: he put this together over the summer and seems to have launched himself a new “retirement career” by accident. He has a couple of stores interested in carrying the Tanni already and is working on other accessories and machines as we speak.

Overall, I like it. I’d like it better if it were in the $130 range, but that’s probably impossible given the quality of the materials and the “individually hand made” aspect.

… I’m a Tango blogger crush of the week.

I’m writing the threesome/Onyx article in thirds and have completed the first third. Between deaths, weddings, travels and day job crises, I’m way behind. Many thanks to my editor Maureen for understanding. I will earn that crush, you’ll see …

I just got an interview request from a journalist working on an article for a big men’s magazine on the following topic:

..this is the 2nd great sexual revolution - the first, in the 60s, when abortion & the pill shifted sex from being about procreation to recreation. Along with other scientific advances, I think it fundamentally led women to ask the question: do we need men at all?

Driven by sex-machines and love-computers (ie vibrators, teledildonics, even at a simplified, 1.01 level internet dating), this 2nd sexual revolution is automating love and sex, shifting it away from people to machines. It may lead to the question: do we need women at all?

I told him I’ll overnight him a copy of The Sexual Revolution 2.0 and that we can talk next week.

I can’t believe how vindicated I feel, that this niche I’ve been documenting for five years (and then some), a niche I poured into a book that my own publisher didn’t want to promote, is indeed infiltrating the mainstream … even if the magazine editorial board is approaching it from the predictable naive angle of “gasp machines are going to replace us! i mean, just look, the washing machine replaced laundresses and the car replaced stagecoach drivers, now robots will replace husbands!” … even if I get tired and cranky repeating the message of why tech won’t replace humans … every time I can get even a piece of my sensible point of view out there, it’s a Step, because I know someone will get it. And that’s one more person who will stand up to the fearmongering.

One benefit to audio erotica is that it keeps your hands and eyes free, unlike books and videos. It’s also a convenient way for two or more people to experience the story simultaneously. But I was neutral about the newly launched clickforeplay and its adult radio plays … until I listened to a sample.

Hot.

My hopelessly Californian ears can’t identify the type of accent other than “sexy British” but honestly that was enough for me. These aren’t stories read aloud or moans and panting with the occasional dialog thrown in — these are scripted radio dramas that just happen to be erotic, and each lasts about 12 minutes. They’ll be a nice addition to the old-timey Mystery Theatre podcast that keeps me company on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Our plays, which last around 12 minutes each, are designed to set your imagination running into all sorts of places and situations. As each one builds to its climax through thoughtfully devised plots, many of which could happen to you, you will picture in your mind’s eye each character and feel what they are feeling, such is the power of the stimulated mind. Some people describe our plays as porn, and they might be right, but we believe that it’s the classiest form of pornographic entertainment on the web

They also pay 50 pounds if they produce your scene.

In a tip almost worth of Sexier Sex, entertainer Aubrey O’Day

gives women a sex-tech tip for safe steamy sex: watch your homemade sex video — and then watch your man delete it.

O’Day Insists Boyfriends Delete Sex Tape Footage
The singer admits she gets turned on by filming her steamy sex sessions and then watching them afterwards but she takes precautions to make sure the footage never ends up online or on a DVD.

She tells Complex magazine, “I’ve made all of them delete it right after we watched it. … I watched them delete it.”

I have an even better idea, though. Bring your own laptop and camera and delete it yourself.

Meanwhile, if you want to thumb your nose at all those researchers who claim that putting a television in the bedroom kills your sex life, O’Day has another tip for those who like to watch video but don’t want it captured at all:

“If you do a live feed through the TV, you can watch it on the TV while you’re doing it and it never records.”

The Calgary Herald has a nice introductory piece about consumer-grade teledildonics:

Sending good vibrations over the Internet
Cyber sex isn’t just the late-night pastime of techno-tarts, sex addicts and pedophiles.
[snip]

“That mental and emotional connection you make during cybersex, even when you’re just typing words or sending emoticons or photos, makes the body respond. Now there’s a physical device that — albeit still too clunky — your partner can control, which augments the experience,” says Regina Lynn, a Los Angeles-based columnist for Wired magazine.

“It not only bridges the gap between mental and physical, but now you can be stimulated without typing one-handed.”

Can’t make it home for a lunchtime romp with your lover? Why not put a “do not disturb” sign on your office door and log in to a private chat room for a cyber-quickie with your spouse?

“It’s a nice way to send that extra-special message home from work,” says Lynn. “Or if you’re a soldier, you can schedule time at home with your wife and connect intimately.”
[snip]

Techno-tart? I think I want a t-shirt that has that emblazoned across the chest.

The second life/ohmibod party starts at 10pm in-world time, which is Pacific time for those of you who only have a first life. *evil grin* I’m going to the in-person event since it’s only 20 minutes away, but if I can get on a machine, I’ll be there in SL too.

I asked Stroker Serpentine when the HUD/toy demo would occur and he said “early,” and I have the impression that they’ll try to do it within the first hour or two of the party. Presumably it will take place when enough people have arrived in person and in-world, and when all the tech is working as it’s supposed to. No one seems to want to commit to telling me a particular time, though; sounds like it’s a go-with-the-flow kind of thing.

(Stroker also asked me what time I’m arriving. I said “ten o’clock, isn’t that the time on the press release?” and he laughed at me. I added, indignantly, “I grew up in the sticks and to me ten o’clock means be there at ten o’clock even if it’s a hipster Hollywood thing.” Grrrrr.)

I’ll keep you posted on twitter/facebook/myspace. (Search by email, ginalynn@gmail.com, or by name “regina lynn” and request to follow/friend. I’ll do a last check at the computer before I leave for Hollywood and accept all the invites.)

I got this nice-but-also-sad email just now, from the Playboy Radio producers I work with:

First and foremost I want to say thank you so much for being a part of our team and doing our Sex in the News for so long. We’ve absolutely LOVED having you on! Due to our merger w/ XM Radio, which launches on Monday, Sirius has asked us to make some changes to the show. We are taking the Sex in the News segment and the show in a different direction and will no longer need you to come in every Tuesday to do the news. Again, we’ve loved having you. Please stay in touch with us and let us know when you are promoting something, so we can have you as a guest. We will miss seeing you every week!

I’ll miss it too. I am grateful to have had the opportunity — and even as I indulge in some personal mourning at the loss, I look forward to what’ll show up next. Because something always does. Right? Right.

Here’s a badly cut-out screenshot of the OhMiBod HUD (”heads-up display,” or in normal-people talk, “controller”):

You can use the keyboard and drumpad (which looks like the Simon Says game) to create your own sounds for the OhMiBod vibrator to respond to, or bring in music tracks for a richer experience. I haven’t figured out yet how to grant someone else control of my OhMiBod but I’m pretty sure that’s the point of the HUD, it being teledildonics and all.

Tomorrow is the official demo and launch so today’s top-secret, available-only-if-you-know-who-to-sleep-with HUD might not even be fully functional; after work I’ll test it out with my OhMiBod and see what I can figure on my own.

But it’s pretty, with a look-and-feel that matches the OMB rather than some weird cybertechno design or , and the big buttons are easy to click even for a Second Life dabbler like me. I was able to hear the music when another friend played with his copy of the HUD, which I like - if someone else is using music to control my vibrator, I want the whole room to hear. Heh.

You can use your OMB with Second Life without this HUD, by plugging it into the audio jack and going anywhere in-world with music or sound. But this promises to add that extra dimension of erotic connection between people.

It seems like someone picked up the calendar by February and tilted it so that all sex-tech events fell into September: this Saturday in particular. I can’t get up to San Francisco for Arse Elektronika after all, for a variety of personal reasons (and I’m very sorry about that, I hate to miss you), but because the live celebration of the OhMiBod / Second Life interface is happening in Los Angeles, I will be able to go to that.

The live party is at a private house and I’m not in charge of the guest list, but you can attend in Second Life, at Sextoy Dave’s Party Place in Eros the North Pole, home of Virtually Adult.* They’re doing all those Hollywood Lifestyle things (live and virtual), with strippers and celebrities and giveaways and DJs and swimming pools, but the important thing is the OhMiBod / Second Life HUD is finally out of NDA and that means I can talk about it.

For now, I’ll stick with the press release description, as I haven’t seen it in action (and Brian and Kevin, why haven’t I, hrmmmmm?).

The new interface uses a specially designed heads-up display (HUD) to control OhMiBod technology virtually. Players can get the HUD for free at Strokerz Toyz and VirtuallyAdult (two adult stores within Second Life) as well as at virtual social events sponsored by the OhMiBod Squad.

Once activated, the OhMiBod HUD allows the player to create music to affect the patterns of vibration, as well as control the intensity of those vibrations. Back in the real world, the OhMiBod also reacts to the music played at virtual events, where avatar DJs spin music at raves, parties, and nightclubs.

I’m not very good at publicly documenting things while I experience them, although my thorough test of the horrible Blowguard — a blowjob accessory so awful I didn’t even publish my response to it — proves that I can take pages and pages of notes with old-fashioned pens and paper while actually, er, testing.

But I’m going to ask my companions to remind me to twitter the OhMiBod demo if I have cell service up there. My Tweets aren’t public so you’ll have to request to follow me by, oh, noon on Saturday, so that I can approve you (and I won’t be hurt if you un-follow after the event, no commitment expected, heh).

*Correction from the organizers: SexToyDaves Party Place isn’t on Eros, it is at the North Pole, home of Virtually Adult. This is also where we will premiere the brand new Virtual Vending system that allows you to purchase real life products using virtual currency, in this case Lindens. What this does as you can see, is allows anyone in a virtual world to be anonymous with their purchase history, much like the “plain brown wrapper”!

Franklin Veaux, creator of the sex game Onyx, offered Playboy Radio listeners a discount code so you can register your copy for $29.

Onyx guides two to six players through hours of sexual exploration in a Monopoly-meets-Truth-or-Dare-meets-Cranium kind of way. Look for my full report in a month or two, when the magazine publishes my article; but the gist is that the game is surprisingly fun and will provide hours of entertainment through the cold dark winter to come.

You can download Onyx and play at the make-out level for free, but to get to the spicy stuff, you’ll want to register. The code is playboy08. (All lower case, btw, as caps probably won’t work.)

Reason number 439 that I’m a better columnist than a blogger: I forget to post things ahead of time. I’ve known for almost a week that this week I’d do the Monday Sex in the News instead of Tuesday, but did I think to tell you? No. It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s not a deliberate plot on my part to keep you confused and guessing. It’s simply that my writing rhythm is too geared toward a weekly deadline (still!) and that I am not used to writing about things I’m a-gonna do, versus things I (or others) have done and had time to think about.

I am better at alerting people to things via Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, btw, if you want to follow/friend me there. (I’m “regina lynn” on all of them, or search ginalynn@gmail.com.)

And now, the news!

In good, groundbreaking news, a federal district court ruled it unconstitutional to discriminate against a candidate who interviews as a bio-male but accepts the job as a transgendered female. I don’t know why I’m still surprised that these kinds of things are even at issue — that people argue that the law prohibiting gender discrimination in hiring should not apply to transgendered people (huh? why not?) or that it would matter that someone looking for a job would also be in the midst of a sex change.

After that, we had a bunch of oddballs.

A 60-year-old Japanese widower disposed of his love doll by wrapping her in a sleeping bag and dumping her in the woods, where hikers stumbled upon her and reported the “corpse” to the police.

A South African couple died Friday when they were having sex on the railroad tracks and got run over by a train.

Birth control campaigns jump on the “fight global warming” (presumably hybrid) wagon, noting that preventing unwanted pregnancies can help save polar bears. Not to mention saving young folks from becoming parents before they’re ready.

And in Georgia, a couple caught having sex in their car took off at speed, rather than roll down the window when the officer tapped on the glass. They didn’t get away unscathed though; they fled the scene after wrapping their car around a utility pole.

Yeah, yeah, whatever, there’s a sex machine in Dacia’s new short film, but LOOK AT THAT WALL OF BOOKS! *droooool*

Dacia’s Love Machine chronicles Audacia Ray’s efforts to sell a sex machine — namely, The Love Machine — on Craigslist. The 25-minute film costs $2.99 to download and is DRM-free.

What better way to celebrate the advent of sex machines in mainstream film than to check out Dacia’s documentary? It’s perfect timing, what with the success of Burn After Reading last weekend (which I got to see with the Monkey Rocker inventors, whom the Coens’ propmaster called upon for consultation and design work during the development of the sex machine in the movie. I was one seat away from fame-by-association! LOL).

Meanwhile, I have a new, not-yet-on-the-market sex machine in my office right now that I promised to test and review for its inventor, as soon as I either a) find my one vac-u-lock dildo or b) acquire a replacement vac-u-lock dildo. The details are still NDA but it’s so exciting to see what people come up with.

On that note, here’s a column about sex machines that debuted at the Adult Novelty Expo in July.)

My alumni magazine reports that a UC Davis professor of communications published a book about “applied interpersonal communication,” which here means “flirting and carrying on,” in which he found reasons for why a female “no” sounds like “yes” to many young men.

He notes that when a woman says “it’s getting late” as a way to stop or slow escalation of sexual intimacy, her male partner may hear “let’s speed things up.” The male interprets her indirect communication by imagining what he would mean if he voiced the same words.

In other words, each judges the other by themselves, a common human trait that gets us into all sorts of trouble.

However, when a person is direct (”Stop”), the other person is more likely to get it for what the person means, vs when a person is indirect (”I have a partner”).

In Sexier Sex, I noted that women who say “just dinner” need to stick to it, no matter how much they then decide they want to have sex, because otherwise it just trains others to persist in the face of adversity. “Ah ha!” they think. “The thought has crossed her mind! I’m winning!”

If you change your mind and want it, call ‘em tomorrow and go for it — before breakfast if necessary, eh? Or, if you have the slightest suspicion you might be open to sex, don’t set up the dinner date as “just dinner.” Women shouldn’t have to be coy about sexuality, pretending one hunger to justify another.

On air, we talked a bit about how being direct does not have to mean being hurtful, rude, snide, or snarky.

“We need to stop here, as we’ve reached a line I don’t want to cross,” is honest and not hurtful of feelings. “It’s getting late” is vague and leads to misunderstanding and possibly regrets or deliberate manipulation. “You’re disgusting and I never want your tongue in my mouth again” is direct but insulting. Even if it’s true.

We’ve all been there, of course. I’ve had accidental makeout and accidental sex in my life, before I knew it was okay to say no to someone who wanted to. (I know, I know, silly of me. But those experiences taught me otherwise and I don’t regret them. Not even Jeremy Blow-n-Go, about which I’m finally not even embarrasssed.)

But man I tell you whut, women are taught from such an early age never to be direct, never to risk “hurting someone’s feelings,” and they (we) end up causing so much more annoyance/pain/frustration for everyone involved because of our dancing around. Men learn early on that if they just keep pushing, they can wear women down into a yes, because it’s easier for her than to stay true to her own desires and communicate them honestly and respectfully and, yes, kindly.

That’s a skill you can learn and practice online, by the way, if it’s hard for you to speak up directly in person.

Apologies for not posting show notes last week - the day went pear-shaped and then I never got back to it. And since this week’s could easily be 2000 words, I’m breaking it into two posts. And next week I might start spreading the posts out over several days, so I have more room to discuss and start discussion, and am not blasting you with a huge digest almost-every Tuesday.

First, I jumped on the “revise the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) so it doesn’t assume kinky behavior is a mental illness” bandwagon and the recent petition circulating among sex-positive folks.

(Well, actually, FIRST, I described my adventure in rescuing a puppy from the streets and finding its home and returning it to the lady — and I did this all in Spanish, of which I’m proud. SECOND, I noted that I got to have teh sex yesterday for hours and hours until I could barely sit down in the studio this morning and was still rather aromatic. But THIRD, I dove into the news with … the petition.)

Kinky Is Not a Diagnosis
The petition calls on the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) to rethink its section on paraphilias, which are traits and behaviors involving “nonstandard” or “unusual” sexual interest. Some of the statements in the DSM have been contradicted by scientific research and it’s time to revise them to reflect the evidence rather than the cultural bias. Kink is not mental illness, and while some mental illnesses get expressed in sexual behavior, it’s the illness, not the behavior, that gets the diagnosis. (Some people do “nonstandard” and “unusual” things with food or alcohol but that doesn’t make eating or drinking a mental illness for everyone.)

Oral Sex Down Under
Australians have “discovered” oral sex, a funsie formerly confined to sex workers, claims news.com.au. Really? I always thought Australians invented oral sex, and that’s why we called it “down under.” Ba dum pum pum. But seriously, I can’t help but view the sexual health experts somewhat askance — it’s not possible that oral sex was Not Done before the sexual revolution and women’s lib. Perhaps they didn’t talk about it, if it was so taboo, but I bet you $5 that it was done. Oh yes.

Walking the Walk
Sex researchers guessed 80 percent correctly about whether women could have orgasms and whether they had “vaginal orgasms” by watching videos of how women walked.

Virginity Dumping Kit
Quirk Books released a First Timer’s Kit for those wanting to lose their virginity. But it’s missing something pretty important: a condom, a backup condom, a third condom in case things go well, and some lube.

[I tried to put the picture here but wordpress is balking me, so if you want to see it, follow the link. It's very "church of the subgenius" style.]

Social Media More Popular than Porn
Bill Tancer, data geek, analyzed 10 million web users (well, their information, anyway) to find that we are what we click: internet searches and usage reflect societal change.

So many “duh” moments to this, my wrists hurt too much to type ‘em. It starts with “everyone uses social media including kids but believe it or not, everyone doesn’t go for porn online” and goes all the way down to “sex is more engaging, takes longer, and requires more repeat visits than porn, so comparing social media traffic to porn traffic online is pointless.”

But it’s nice to see someone officially pointing out that we are who we are, online or off, and that we don’t dump all our cultural conditioning when we log on and then pick it up the instant we log off. (Er, duh.)

And it was also fun to tell Tiffany that she and I are MySpace friends, which she didn’t realize.

CNN says that Philips is launching a sex toy in the UK and muses about whether other big electronics companies will follow.

You mean like Hitachi?

I realized the only other sex-tech — not sex and sometimes tech, not tech and pop culture which sometimes includes sex — columnist I know is Bonnie Ruberg’s Click Me in the Village Voice.

[Personal aside: Click Me is both fun and achey for me to read, because she's covering a lot of the same stuff I have, but with a different perspective and voice and slant and also it's a different time. So much can happen in a year or more online; a person I interviewed or a website I covered four years ago has changed greatly since then, so Click Me has been a good way to see what's goin' on. At the same time I confess to a twinge that's both nostalgic and mournful.]

Audacia Ray, who wrote Naked on the Internet, also hits the sex-tech thing most of the time, although she expands beyond the tech as well, covering the sex worker angle.

I list a number of names in the left margin of this blog, many of whom cover sex-tech more than most. (And I know I need to update and add to that list; time time time time time.) But who is covering it exclusively? Is the distinction even still .. distinct? Or is tech so woven into our sexual relationships now that it’s silly to give it a beat of its own?

If you’re out there, whether it’s a blog, a series of features, an investigative report, a book … let me know, willya?

FWIW, I don’t think it’s silly, just like some sex writers focus on monogamy, others on youth, others on polyamory, others on gender issues, others on health…

Sex in the News was on vacation this Tuesday but that doesn’t mean no one was making sex-tech news.

The BBC reports that Japanese geeks have tied ultrasound to computer images to engage the sense of touch. Think we’ll see it at next year’s Virtual Worlds Expo?

Takayuki Iwamoto and colleagues from the University of Tokyo have now demonstrated a simple haptic device that employs a number of ultrasonic transducers, which emit ultrasound.

Sound is a pressure wave, meaning that as the inaudible sound waves from each of the transducers interfere, they can create a focal point that is perceived as a solid object.

The team’s prototype system includes a camera which tracks the position of a user’s hand and shifts the output from the transducers to move the focus around with the hand. The result is a feeling of tracing the edge or surface of the virtual object.

Canadian researches discovered a group of Kenyan female sex workers whose bodies resist HIV infections.

The discovery could lead to the improved design of vaccines and drugs to fight the deadly virus, which infects an estimated 40 million people worldwide, the scientists say in a new report.

In the new study, Adam Burgener and colleagues note that 140 of more than 2000 sex workers studied in Nairobi, Kenya, appear resistant to HIV infection. Although evidence suggests that certain biological factors in their vaginal fluid may play a role in resistance, the exact identity of these substances was unclear.

The scientists used a high-tech analytical method to compare differences among proteins in vaginal fluids from HIV-resistant women and those infected with the virus or susceptible to it. HIV-resistant women had proteins significantly different from other women. Vaginal fluids of the HIV-resistant women had higher levels of proteins with anti-viral and anti-inflammatory actions.

One of the sessions at the upcoming Arse Elektronika* is “the erotic of the machine.” Which got me thinking about Sex Drive and sex-tech and my body of work and how people have often assumed that I am “into” machines.

I’m not. The machines, for me, are a means to an end: connection with another human. I love fuckingmachines.com not because the machines turn me on, but because the communication between the machine operator and the machine receiver turns me on. Even if said communication is only in my head, isn’t that what porn is? The fantasy in your head? I imagine myself on the machines and the subtle cues the operator would follow, taking things beyond where I think I can go, but not so far that I can’t go there. The skill not just at controlling machines but at understanding the sexual experience and the person you’re fucking by proxy — that’s hot.

Likewise, I don’t have “sex with a computer.” But I’ve used computers to have sexual interaction with people, who were using computers to have sexual interactions with me. For some, the computer itself is sexual. But not for me.

I’m interested in hearing what the panelists have to say about that, the difference between the erotic potential of the machine itself versus the role of machine as a conduit among humans having sexual experiences. Do people like it both ways, or do we tend to fall into one camp or the other?

*I only just realized the conf dates clash with a previous engagement and now I’m trying to figure out travel and schedules to see if I can do both. If I can’t be there in person I’m sure I can follow it by Twitter - and perhaps someone will post recordings of the conference online after it’s all over.

If I were to combine all of my interests and projects into a brand spankin’ new career, I think I’d open a horse camp for broken-hearted women.

We’d provide horses and Parelli Natural Horsemanship foundational instruction for the women to build relationships with those horses. (PNH is perfect because you learn so much about love, communication, relationship give and take, responsibility — and not just as it pertains to horses. Wimmens dig it.) Probably we’d have to have a side business of buying and selling horses, for women who fall in love with a particular one. The only way to afford that is to rescue horses and let horses and humans heal each other.

We’d have a variety of other girl stuff - hiking, swimming, yoga, gourmet food, wine tasting, writing workshops, reading room, fast internet, sex ed. Oh yes, sex ed. And I’m not just talking about health information, although that’s important too.

Sex-tech workshops, for starters. (See? I’m on topic!) This is where women can discover, or rediscover, their sexuality, their pleasure, their power. Whether they want to jump right back into dating and/or sex, or keep sex a solo experience for a while, or become an online burlesque performer — whatever a woman wants to learn and even try next, she could learn about it here. Everything I’ve ever covered in the column, the books, the radio — we’d let the topics emerge from the clients in addition to a set seminar schedule to provide structure for those who don’t even know what they want to know.

Put Monkey Rockers in the guest cabins. Hand out gift bags from Babeland, Good Vibrations, Stockroom — whoever is our sponsor that week.

I’d have to set up in Colorado, I think, or Montana; much as I’d like to stay in California, it’s too expensive. Ditto Florida. Mexico would be ideal but I’d hate to add the logistics of passports and international travel to a woman going through an intense breakup. OTOH would you really want to be somewhere it snows? O! the logistics!

It’s amazing, how many women I’ve met since I bought my horse who also got back into horses in their late 30s to late 50s after a divorce. They look back and think “I gave up my horse dreams to get married, raise kids, have a career … and now I’m starting a new phase of my life and dammit it’s going to have horses in it.” That’s simplifying it a bit, but you know there’s an element of truth there.

(Which makes me realize I don’t know what the men do. Sports cars? Motorcycles? Sex with improbably young things? Completely break down without a woman to take care of them?)

Just in time for back to school, Dr. Klein’s book is FINALLY available in paperback. Not a light read, but an interesting one, and one that includes proposed solutions rather than simply ranting against the status quo.

America’s War on Sex
Contents
Forward: Nadine Strossen (President, ACLU)
1. You’re the Target; Why a War on Sex?
2. Battleground: Sex Education–Where Children Come Second
3. The Most Powerful “Minority” in the United States
4. Battleground: Reproductive Rights
5. The Sexual Disaster Industry
6. Battleground: Broadcast “Indecency”
7. Yes, They Really Said That
8. Battleground: Adult Entertainment–Feverish Dreams, Real Estate Nightmares
9. How They Do It: Ammunition in the War on Sex
10. Battleground: The Internet
11. America Does Not Guarantee Your Right To Be Comfortable: The Lowest Common Erotic Denominator Project
12. Battleground: The War on “Pornography”
13. Extreme Religion and Public Policy
14. Battleground: The Rights of Sexual Minorities–Civil Rights or Immoral Privileges?
15. Revolutionizing American Government–Bad News for Democracy
Footnotes
Appendix: A Declaration for Human Rights Day

If your local sex shoppe put internet kiosks in for customer use, what would you use it for? To look up a nice place to have dinner after you’ve shopped? To search Amazon for the toy you wanted, so you can show the clerk what to bring you? To read porn reviews before you pick through the 3 for $10 DVD bin?

If you’re at the Deja Vu Love Boutique in City of Industry (southern California), you can’t do any of that yet, as the city has told Deja Vu to take its internet access out. Apparently it violates their business use permit.

The LA Times blogger does a wink-wink-nudge-nudge and implies that the only reason for an adult store to provide internet access is for customers to surf porn (Love Boutique vs. City of (not every) Industry), but honestly, I can think of a number of additional reasons customers would use the service. Check your email to see if you have to be home soon, see if your Craigslist hookup is still waiting for you and your bag o’ toys to show up, etc.

Odd that the city claims an internet kiosk is not a permitted extension of adult retail. I realized, reading the story, that my default position is “everywhere should have internet kiosk in case I’m out and about and need to look up an address, a map, a phone number, check my email, etc” even though I have a phone that can do those things. Internet access, even if I have to pay for it, is more like … like I wish all retail would also provide drinking water and a bathroom. Or like phone and air conditioning, although the cost of that is usually worked into the prices of the items rather than a per-minute charge.

I also default to “they get harassed because sex is an easy political target” but for all I know, it’s very clear in the rules what you can and can’t have at a business, fair or not, stupid or not, and Deja Vu deliberately flaunted the rules. My instinct tells me that’s not the case, but I don’t have enough information to state any facts beyond what the LA Times says. I’m just musing on the whole situation, because it would never have occurred to me that internet access could be considered something separate from existing business operations.

[via Melissa Gira]

Confession of weakness …

Can you believe that I’ve not seen Lars and the Real Girl, and have no plans to see Vicky Christina or whatever that poly/threesome/swinger/group movies is?

I should, of course. Especially the real girl movie, which looks poignant, real, and funny. Not to mention directly related to my beat.

But I have no oomph for it. I so rarely get to the movies anymore (at home or at the theater) that I just lack the patience to pick something even remotely related to work. Movies have always been my freelancer vacation — three hours away from clients and contacts, immersed in a completely different world where Life and Death, Salvation and Destruction hang in the balance. What’s a missed deadline or an embarrassing grammar mistake compared to mummy armies or rings of power that must be destroyed or psychics so politically powerful they dissolve the senate of a federation of hundreds of planets?

For some reason I can’t make my brain shift into “this is enjoyable and also information that I need to stay well-rounded in my topic, and to know what other people are learning and thinking about in this area” when it comes to video. Text, certainly. Bring on the articles, studies, charts, treatises, books … bring on the scripts and the transcripts. I’ll read it faster than I could watch it, and probably remember more and comprehend it better too.

So if you see any great film related to sex-tech, and you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned it, that’s why. Feel free to email me your review of such content and I’ll post it here (or link to your own blog or article or video or whatever media you prefer) if it’s relevant to sex-tech.

I’ve resisted Facebook since it launched, despite personal and professional (including day job, gasp) reasons to sign up. But I think I have to, now, ’cause LoveHoney introduced the “world’s first personalised Facebook sex toy!” about an hour ago. Richard Longhurst, the gentleman who keeps me apprised of LoveHoney’s doings, says:

The Love Bunnies [Facebook] app lets you create a pet Love Bunny which you can name and use to flirt with, and even have Bunny babies with other bunnies.

At any time you can buy your personal named Love Bunny for real (in vibrator form), which comes delivered complete with its unique Love Bunny birth certificate.

More at the Love Bunnies website, plus this cute video that doesn’t actually tell you much.

I’m gonna get one and will let you know what I think.

I suppose maybe my hiatus is over? Oh no! The pressure!

Cory Silverberg notes that several sex-related panels have been pitched for South by Southwest next year. I won’t be attending (but am totally flattered at the invitations to be on panels, thank you!) but if YOU are, and you want to explore sex-tech, you can vote for your favorite panel topics. Cory highlights a handful of relevant proposals or you can go to the main SXSW panel picker and vote for your favorites.

You have until August 29 — that’s Friday — to vote.

… I’d put more thought into my plan than just showing up with duct tape, handcuffs and a stun gun. Although honestly I have no interest in bullying someone to be with me.

Not that duct tape and handcuffs aren’t fun in the right context.

AP: woman charged in ’second life’ kidnapping plot

CLAYMONT, Del. (AP) — A woman is charged with plotting to kidnap in real life a boyfriend she met through the virtual reality Web site “Second Life”.

Thirty-three-year-old Kimberly Jernigan from Durham, N.C., was returned to Delaware to face charges including attempted kidnapping. She was arrested in Maryland last week after fleeing the 52-year-old man’s home.

Court records say Jernigan drove to the man’s Claymont apartment armed with a stun gun, handcuffs and duct tape. But she fled the apartment when the man came home Thursday, discovered her and called 911.

Police said the two had met online on Second Life, a social interaction site where people create three-dimensional alter egos. But the man broke off the relationship after they met in person.

After our Sex in the News segment, during the one break the Afternoon Advice host Tiffany Granath gets (it’s two minutes — just long enough to pee!), we talked about the differences between live radio and writing for the web.

One is that writing is archived forever — and it isn’t instant. So when I start to write things like “you can annul a marriage in California up to the five-year mark,” I can then go verify that I’m right. Then I find out I’m wrong, by an inch or a mile, and I revise my writing. On air, I can’t do that, so I say these things and then I go “wait! I’m not sure!” and the producers go looking stuff up but meanwhile I’m hanging there live on air being wrong with stuff people might depend on me to be accurate with. (In the spirit of live radio I’m not going to revise that poorly constructed sentence into a more readable one.)

So, to clarify, in case you missed the correction on air: In California, you can get a summary dissolution within the first five years of marriage, not an annulment. Annulment (talking legal term here, not religious) is specific to certain conditions such as incest or bigamy and does not depend on the amount of time married. Here’s a summary of the law from the Superior Court of Sacramento.

I think that’s it for this week’s corrections, so now, on to Sex in the News.

The divorce/annulment/dissolution subject came up in the context of the story about Germany considering making marriage licenses renewable, in hopes of cutting back on the divorce rate. In this way couples would have to renew their legal marriage on a periodic basis — or not renew, which would be a different legal action than filing for divorce. Dina over at This Marriage Thing has a nice summary and an invitation to conversation on the issue.

On air, we compared it to the Scottish tradition of handfasting, where you pledge a year and a day of “as-if” marriage, and on that day decide whether to get married, split up with no legal/social repercussions, or renew the handfast.

I think this concept recasts relationships because it changes the default from “stay together” to “split up.” It forces couples to decide actively to stay together, otherwise legally their status as a married couple dissolves. (I know that in marriage people make active decisions to stay together every day, sometimes every hour - I’m talking on a larger scale than that, here, about legal status.) As it is now, marriage licenses default the relationship to staying together, making divorce the active decision.

I wonder how that would change things, if the renewal period fell within one of the inevitable bad spells of a marriage? Would couples, faced with losing their marital status whether they like it or not, just let things dissolve? Or would an inevitable renewal date help couples see beyond the temporary horribleness and misery and grasp for some reason to work it out? How would letting a marriage expire affect the emotional aspect of a breakup, even if legally it’s a different action/status than divorce?

(I want to get these show notes posted quickly so I’m going to leave it at that, but this is an idea I’d like to revisit in the future and would have totally written a column about, back in the day.)

We also talked briefly about this cosmetic surgeon who “did not attempt to stop” a patient from blowing him, and who also chose to perform her nose job anyway. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the 22-year-old woman thought she could get away with something by blowing the 50-year-old male doctor and later suing him, and the case was dismissed. But I couldn’t help but laugh at this quote: “Knowing her nose better than anyone else, I was in a unique position to take care of the problem.”

Really? And what position was that, Doctor?

Also, I’d like to know what a “celebrity plastic surgeon” is and how that differs from non-celebrity plastic surgeons.

We didn’t get to the story about the German phone sex addict who has a history of checking into hotels, running up the phone bill, then running away without paying. His latest transgression is a six-day stay and about $10,500 in phone sex bills.

And we spent the first 25 minutes of the segment discussing the Bondage lovers happier than normal sex counterparts study, because as it turns out, the column I wrote on the subject was inspired by a conversation with Tiffany and the fishbowl while I was a guest on the show last year.

I’m still technically on break but since I’m doing radio today, I decided it was okay to blog, because this story has me steamed despite its happy ending. (Irony: Since going on hiatus, I’ve come up with five intense ideas, all deeply personal and chock-full of insight and epiphany. Yes, indeed. Sheer brilliance, I tell you. But I haven’t taken notes and I’m afraid I’m going to forget them, since I no longer have those looming deadlines to meet. Ack!)

Bondage lovers happier than normal sex counterparts!

Melbourne:Contrary to the general assumption that people involved in bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) are sexually deficient, a new sex survey has now shows that such people are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise “normal” sex.

The study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales has revealed that two per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role-play.

The findings suggest that these people do not do so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are “sexually deficient” in some way.

The happy ending is the researcher hopes the study will help dispel myths particularly among professionals — therapists, doctors, etc — that kinky people are sick, criminal and dangerous.

I was going to rant about the idiotic assumptions, the definition of normal, and the misunderstanding of BDSM … but then I realized I already have. Here’s a Sex Drive from last year:

Is Internet Normal the New Sex Normal?

Kind of an oddball week for Sex in the News (playboy radio, afternoon advice with tiffany granath, 11am pacific, sirius channel 198), with several international stories bringing laughter and puzzlement to the fishbowl.

First, though, I have to clear up a misunderstanding: While I did squeal with delight at the chance to flash