ARTICLE 1
TSA Agents Conduct ‘Full Monty’ Pat-Down On Henry Kissinger – May 14, 2012 2:46 PM
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger speaks to introduce China’s Vice President Xi Jinping to leaders from the private and public sectors at a luncheon co-hosted by the US-China Business Council and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations with the support of several cooperating organizations in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 15, 2012. (credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
Henry Kissinger, pat down, TSA
NEW YORK (CBSDC) — Even a Nobel Peace Prize winner can’t avoid a pat-down.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got searched by a Transportation Security Administration employee while going through a security checkpoint at LaGuardia Airport in New York Friday, The Washington Post reports.
Kissinger, who was in a wheelchair, was told by a TSA agent that he needed to be searched.
“He stood with his suit jacket off, and he was wearing suspenders,” freelance reporter Matthew Cole told the Post. “They gave him the full pat-down. None of the agents seemed to know who he was.” Cole added that Kissinger was given “the full Monty” search.
Kissinger negotiated the Paris Peace Accords which helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.
Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was detained at a Nashville airport after refusing to be searched by TSA officials.
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‘Even a Nobel Peace Prize winner can’t avoid a pat-down.’ Demogoguery? EVEN?!? Even a homeless bum has a right to refuse TSA pat downs either AND rather. We don’t care if Kissinger submits to TSA, nor does this justify the existence of the TSA.
A supposed ‘personality’ submitting to a pat down by TSA in a highly publicised and high profile feature on MSM, cannot speak for 99% of people who do not want that. If 99% of the people do not want that, TSA will not exist.Vote properly moron Americans. And who cares if Congress enjoys submitting to the TSA? TSA cannot speak for anyone who does not want their privacy invaded.
ARTICLE 2
“The Bold and the Beautiful” Princess Theodora of Greece- 07 December 2011 / 20:12:16 GRReporter
Theodora as Alison Montgomery in the series “The Bold and the Beautiful”, Photo: nypost.com
The youngest daughter of the last King of Greece Constantine, Theodora has begun her career in show business.
The episodes of the soap “The Bold and the Beautiful”, which is broadcasted in hundreds of countries,
started on Monday.
The 28-year-old blond princess who uses the name Theodora Greece appears as Alison Montgomery, secretary of Bill Spencer, whose role is played by Don Diamond.
The scene is as follows: Dressed completely in pink, she appears in Bill’s office, bringing a press kit featuring an alluring photo of his daughter-in-law Steffy, for whom he still has romantic feelings.
“Mr. Spencer, I wanted to drop this off to you,” says Alison. “This is the latest press kit for Forrester’s ‘Intimate’ campaign… I know of your interest in the subject matter,” she adds.
“Yes, my son’s wife. You can just put it down here – and you can go,” answers Bill Spencer.
The spokeswoman for the soap saga that has continued for decades now said that Theodora will appear in the role of Alison in other episodes and that she will have “meatier scenes”.
Apart from “The Bold and the Beautiful”, the Princess of Greece and Denmark appears as Peggy in the big screen remake of the popular, in the 60s, TV series “The Big Valley” with Jessica Lange and Richard Dreyfuss.
Theodora also plays in the film “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” and will appear in “Little Boy”, also starring Kevin James from King Queen and Emily Watson. The film is due out next year.
The princess dreaming of a career in Hollywood was born in 1983 and she is the next to the last child of the Greek royal family. She graduated in performing arts after two years at the Northeastern University in Boston and four years at Brown University, member of the so-called Ivy League. Now, Theodora is specializing at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. In April 2010, her mother Anna Maria confirmed the information that Theodora left for Los Angeles to start a film career.
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Given the right fertile Grecian virgins, King Constantinos looks like he could still father childen every night for the next 3 decades. How about a few consorts or a harem to ensure the Greek Royal line does not die out ‘Conster’? This ‘last’ Greek King article is nonsense, father humanity a pantheon of Grecian princes Constantinos! Now THAT would be truly bold and beautiful. Any young Grecian ladies up for ‘national service’ as Royal Consorts? Greece needs a prince to continue the bloodline!
ARTICLE 3
Joan tweets in fury at Theresa May over Heathrow hold-up… And look out Home Secretary, she has 68,000 followers – by James Slack – PUBLISHED: 18:05 GMT, 15 May 2012 | UPDATED: 06:57 GMT, 16 May 2012
Joan Collins yesterday joined the attack on Britain’s shambolic border controls after getting stuck in a queue of ‘thousands’ of travellers at Heathrow.
The actress took to Twitter to complain about the delays to Home Secretary Theresa May.
Her intervention – read by her 68,000 followers – came as MPs were grilling the immigration minister about continuing chaos at Britain’s ports and airports.
Globetrotter: Joan Collins at Heathrow
Joan Collins attends a private view for Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950
Globetrotter: Joan Collins at Heathrow, left, and, right, at an event at the V&A Museum in London last night
Tweeting mad: Joan Collins went online to complain as soon as she arrived back in London
Miss Collins, 78, who fronted an advertising campaign for BA in the 1980s, said: ‘Arrived LHR after great trip on @British_Airways but 1000s waiting at passport control – listen up Ms. May – need more officers!’
Miss Collins flew in on a BA flight from Los Angeles that arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5 at lunchtime. Airport staff said queues yesterday were not as bad as on Monday but they could ‘ebb and flow’.
Heathrow operator BAA said: ‘The queues have been markedly reduced in recent days since the problems at immigration became more high profile.’
Under fire: Theresa May has been attacked for cutting Border staff at Heathrow
Under fire: Theresa May has been criticised for cutting Border staff at Heathrow
Miss Collins’s comments overshadowed an attempt by ministers to get on the front foot over airport queues, which they sought to blame on a string of factors – including the wind.
Immigration minister Damian Green told the home affairs committee that even if all passport controls were fully manned, passengers could still face delays depending on the amount of time between arrivals.
He said: ‘That will depend on the wind, over which . . . airlines and the Border Force don’t have the control.’
Labour said: ‘At every turn this Tory-led Government wants to blame the wind, the weather – anything but themselves.
‘You don’t have to be a mathematician to work out that if you cut the number of staff too far too fast, it will take longer to get people through immigration.’ In his evidence session, Mr Green attached some of the blame for queues to the airlines, saying three times as many passengers arrived at Heathrow on Monday morning than were expected.
On Friday, the Border Force was told to expect 2,500 passengers between 6am and 9am on Monday. This rose to 5,000 at six hours’ notice, but in reality 7,500 passengers turned up, said Mr Green.
‘The better the information the Border Force can have from the airlines, the more likely it is the right numbers of people will be at the right desks at the right time,’ he added.
But MPs criticised the way the borders are run. Committee chairman Keith Vaz said that, on a visit to Stansted Airport, he had seen passengers queuing from the passport desks to the plane.
Logjam: Passengers at Heathrow have faced long waits as the UK Border Agency struggles to process the numbers passing through passport control
Logjam: Passengers at Heathrow have faced long waits as the UK Border Agency struggles to process the numbers passing through passport control
Just half of the desks handling EU passengers, and a quarter of those for non-EU travellers, were staffed last Sunday.
Mr Vaz said: ‘Most of these were British holidaymakers. I felt pretty ashamed as a British MP watching them . . . trying to get back into the country.’
He pointed out that special electronic gates that allow pre-screened passengers to pass through were switched off at midnight each night.
This means passengers arriving in the early hours must join the regular queue instead.
No cure-all: Immigration Minister Damian Green, pictured at Terminal 3 of Heathrow Airport, told MPs the scale of the problem would depend largely on landing times affected by wind
The runways at Heathrow will be used more flexibly for take-offs and landings in a trial aimed at cutting delays. Usually one runway is used only for take-offs, and the other for landings. But the trial, starting in July, will investigate if the runways can be used for both take-offs and landings.
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Joan ‘F—in’ Collins can well afford a private jet and a private airstrip alongside so many Alec Baldwins and Gagas. Use that money to raise yourself above the ‘masses’ who need to use the TSA dominated airport entertainer plutocrats! Meanwhile the alternative to spare the locals the TSA abuses, is to have separate local airports which serve only local-to-foreign flights from ‘international only’ airports.
ARTICLE 4
Topless Ukraine activists open anti-Euro soccer campaign – May 12, 2012
Security guards detain a demonstrating activist from women’s rights organisation Femen near the Euro 2012 trophy during its unveiling to the public in central Kiev May 12, 2012. The activist was protesting against prostitution during the upcoming UEFA Euro 2012 soccer tournament. Kiev is set to host the final match of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament. – Reuters pic
KIEV, May 12 – A Ukrainian women’s rights activist stripped to the waist and seized the Euro-2012 soccer trophy while it was on public display in Kiev today in a protest against the exploitation of women during the forthcoming championship.
The young woman, 23-year-old Yulia Kovpachik, strode up to the silver trophy, which was on display as a tourist attraction in central Kiev, ostensibly to be photographed alongside it like hundreds of other sightseers.
But she then pulled down her red T-shirt to reveal the words “Fuck Euro 2012” scrawled on her chest. As she grabbed hold of the cup with both hands, she was seized by security guards, who appeared to have had advanced warning of the protest.
They covered her with a sheet and took her off to a waiting police car.
The protest appeared to be the first action in a campaign against the championship by Femen, a Kiev-based women’s rights groups which regularly stages bare-breast protests in Ukraine – and sometimes beyond – to highlight what it sees as political injustice, social abuse and the exploitation of women in Ukraine.
Femen says Euro-2012, which Ukraine is co-hosting with Poland next month with the final in Kiev on July 1, will be a magnet for sex tourists – one of the group’s main targets.
Organisers expect Euro-2012 to attract about one million foreign tourists.
Conscious of Ukraine’s growing reputation as a new destination for sex tourism, Euro-2012 organisers say they are taking steps to curb prostitution during the month-long tournament.
After Kovpachik’s protest, Femen activist Olexandra Shevchenko told reporters: “We came here today to stop this Euro fan low-life from making a bordello out of Ukraine.”
City authorities have mounted the Henri Delaunay trophy – which weighs 7.6kg and is 60 centimetres high – in a temporary display area on Kiev’s Independence Square.
Hundreds of sightseers were queuing up under the blazing sun for souvenir photographs alongside it when Kovpachik staged her demonstration.
Independence Square itself will be the centre of a huge ‘fan-zone’ during Euro-2012, capable of holding tens of thousands of football supporters. – Reuters
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I speak for the human rights conscious Johns who would never knowingly indulge in trafficked persons, and also for the consensual or lifestyle sex workers when I say to the Ukrainian ‘topless’ activists :
a) please leave mainstream adult services industry alone and do some real work by lobbying for legalising red light districts
b) help identify abusers by posing as prostitutes or getting your friends to pose a clients to ferret out trafficked and non-consensual persons in sex work
c) developing and funding quick and easy to use disease tests
; instead of running amok while naked against those poor football fans.
The Euro Soccer John influx is the equivalent of a ‘bonus’ for sex workers in any country. The state also should legalise prostitution and give insurance and pensions to those who have gone at regular levels for checkups and worked for a set period of years or have serviced a set number of clients – every 3000 should provide a single year of pension?
In many ways these women’s contribution to society is incalculable as they give the lower earners who cannot afford marriage some form of relaxation and a who knows a geisha (temporary wife) type relationship-friendship. Something to look forward to at the end of the work shift and socialise about. This is a different form of caretaking profession, for what ails the soul of poverty, much like nurses take care of the ill. Think through on the issues properly if you want to make a difference you topless feminists! Persecuting Johns is wrong. Persecuting those identified as traffickers is right. Running around naked instead of advocating nudist zones to run around naked in is also wrong.
I’d say ‘Femen’ in appearing naked among massive crowds is expressing a hidden desire for either nudist legal zones, legalised public sex venues or sex orgy clubs. Start a legal sex club based around orgies or legalise dogging and sex booths in red light districts for Ukraine. Do some real work not foment meaningless chaos (some chaos can be meaningful, but maybe this was a cry for ‘instructions’ that I now give . . . )! Gotta love those Freudian slips! Create the spaces for everyone FEMEN, not take spaces away from society! John-space in the form of Red Light Districts for consensual sex workers and their clients is NOT trafficking and does not deserve to be lumped together via poorly thought protests like these!
ARTICLE 5
Did Time’s breastfeeding cover go too far? – May 12, 2012
Was it just a desperate attempt to sell magazines?
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Time is overstepping into the territory of other magazines. That is the only offense. Losing focus Time? Breastfeeding is not exactly some Captain of Industry or Social or Religous figure. As for breastfeeding periods that is between mother and child to decide though if they do or do not, should not be something that is shared with the general public more so local community. TMI for some as Sandy Rios said, but no issue for others. To each their own. But Time?!? No. Time is NOT a maternity magazine.
ARTICLE 6
In the realm of the senses – Toshio Saeki, Japan’s master of erotic illustration, devours the world with his demented images of outre – by Stephen Lemons Thursday, Feb 8, 2001 8:33 PM UTC
Think of Toshio Saeki’s work as a gaping, red maw consuming all women (and some men), salivating over their bodies and licking them into a sexual frenzy before swallowing them whole, like giant pieces of sashimi (look up the term : Vore). Japanese schoolgirls in uniforms, elderly matrons with wrinkled skin, attractive young women in kimonos and the occasional horny businessman or samurai — all are sucked into Saeki’s imaginary, Jabba the Hut-like pie hole, forced down his rapacious gullet and chased back with copious quantities of sake.
Saeki, 66, is the godfather of Japanese erotica — the one illustrator in the frenetic, oversexed, comics-crazy nation whose imagination outpaces all others. For decades, the art cognoscenti of Japan and elsewhere have hailed him as a psychosexual dream weaver who traverses all taboos with oozing, bloody scenes of insatiable carnality. Now he’s being rediscovered by young adults in America and Europe for whom Japanese illustration, anime (animated cartoons) and manga (comic books) are perpetual sources of fascination.
Sexual incontinence is Saeki’s overriding theme. In collections of his drawings such as “Chimushi I & II” and “Toshio Saeki: The Early Works” (both published in Japan by Treville Co.), he has navigated the outer limits of sexual obsession with a monomaniacal intensity. In France, his monographs have sold more than 20,000 copies. And Last Gasp, Saeki’s distributor in the United States, has difficulty keeping his books in stock. “Chimushi,” a two-volume set issued in the mid-1990s, completely sold out its first run here and is now a collector’s item.
In Saeki’s bestiary, immense turtles, octopuses and slugs ravish ecstatic Japanese maidens. Japanese goblins, known as tengu, poke their crimson, Pinocchio-like proboscises into the vaginas of willing teenage girls. Pockmarked dwarfs with misshapen, encephalitic heads gangbang young virgins. And hideous, hirsute trolls gnaw on umbilical cords that are still attached to mother and child.
Just when you believe Saeki has shown you his most outré image, you turn the page and find additional macabre hallucinations of murder and lust. In one, a Japanese schoolgirl flies down a road on her bike, her haunches lifted in the air and her skirt flapping in the wind. She looks behind her in horror to see that her bicycle seat has morphed into a man’s groaning face. In another, a young woman sips green tea as she rubs the freshly decapitated head of a soldier against her genitals, his body still upright beside her. There are drawings of necrophiliacs humping corpses and of crazed onanists sawing limbs off others with which to masturbate.
Unusual sexual fantasies are certainly common in the world of Japanese manga and anime. And popular adult anime (sometimes referred to as hentai) such as “La Blue Girl,” “Imma Youjo: Erotic Temptress” and “Twin Angels” can be found on the Web as well as in video stores in major American cities.
In addition, a number of photographers and artists in Japan are renowned for their explorations of fringe sexuality. There’s Hajime Sorayama, whose cyberwomen appear regularly in Penthouse; Masaaki Toyoura, whose bondage photos can be viewed in various Larry Flynt publications; Yoshifumi Hayashi, the master of erotic pencil art, whose drawings delve into the nether regions of coprophilia; and Nobuyoshi Araki, the photographer whose book about the Tokyo sex trade, “Tokyo Lucky Hole,” is truly a pervert’s delight.
Still, Saeki is in a class all by himself. Erick Gilbert, an editor and Saeki expert at Last Gasp, points out that Saeki’s art transcends that of his contemporaries.
“It’s like the man has a direct link to his unconscious, and to the collective unconscious of the Japanese people,” says Gilbert. “He can mix myth, that dream quality and pure libido. There are very few people who do that. I remember one image of a child standing outside of his parents’ bedroom. His parents are sitting on the bed, and the man has his hands between the legs of the woman. But the woman, instead of having a vulva there, has a face, and the man’s fingers are inside its mouth. That’s a powerful image from the unconscious, the vagina dentata.”
Saeki’s work is quintessentially Japanese — from the ethnicity of his subjects to his portrayal of traditional housing with futons, tatami mats and sliding paper doors to his borrowing of various monsters from Japanese mythology. The theme of obsessive sexuality leading to madness and death is common in the film and literature of Japan, and there’s a long tradition of Japanese shunga, or erotic prints and paintings, that has been traced back at least to the ukiyo-e (floating world paintings) of the Edo period (1603-1867) in books such as “Sex and the Floating World” by Timon Screech. Screech’s book, for instance, contains shunga prints of vaginal inspections (with a cervix’s-eye view), dogs humping women and men with colossal, spurting cocks.
“If you look at Saeki’s art outside of its cultural sphere, you may be troubled by its violence. But once you go inside that cultural sphere, you know that this violence is well-understood, that ‘it’s only lines on paper,’ to quote cartoonist Robert Crumb. This extreme imagery of Japanese artists, and their characteristic need to go as far as possible, can be traced several centuries back to the so-called bloody ukiyo-e of the 19th century. A number of examples from that era are very violent — with characters being tied up and swords put to them. That’s part of this strain of art,” asserts Gilbert.
However, even in Japan, Saeki’s morbid aesthetic delicacies have earned him a reputation as an iconoclast. Speaking to me by phone from his isolated home in the mountains of Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo, Saeki explains that he has run afoul of Japanese censors in the past.
“My books have received cautions from the local government agency that monitors such things,” says Saeki. “If you receive three cautions in a year, your book is prohibited from being sold in a bookstore. Of course, my publications have been unpopular with the police, but not enough to be banned. At one time, in the late ’70s to early ’80s, I couldn’t draw the schoolgirl images that are so popular now. Publishers were afraid to publish them. The media had labeled me ‘schoolgirl Saeki.’
“Today, such images are much more accepted. I’ve been lucky to have my work published in erotic publications as well as art publications. Not all artists who do this kind of work have been accepted in both circles. Not that I’m a household name or anything. It’s interesting, when I have a new book come out, most of the fan mail my publisher receives is from doctors, lawyers and college professors. [Laughs] I find that very amusing.”
Saeki perceives himself as connected to Japan’s shunga tradition. He mentions an artist of the Meiji period, Yoshitoshi, who did the same kind of work. And he cites ukiyo-e artist Hokusai’s famous image of a woman having sex with an octopus, which he did not copy directly, he says, though he was aware of the reference he was making. But Saeki was not always a maestro of shunga art. Rather, his evolution into the most important erotic Japanese artist of his generation occurred haphazardly.
Saeki grew up mostly in Osaka. He studied art in high school, and after graduating pursued graphic design. He worked briefly for an advertising company, but disliked the job. At 24, he took off for Tokyo to try his hand at freelance illustration. With money he had saved, he holed up in a small apartment to develop his portfolio. It was then that he seriously began to create erotica.
“I did some fantasy erotic drawings and put to paper some scary dreams I remembered from my childhood. The images just flowed. During my teenage years at the art high school, many of the boys had an interest in erotic art. I was good at copying shunga, and the other boys would ask me to draw dirty pictures. I became quite popular because of it. So these images were in the back of my mind. I think it’s just my personality. When I was a teenager, there were boys who noticed when the wind blew girls’ skirts up and those who didn’t notice at all. Well, I was a boy who noticed,” says Saeki.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Saeki did illustrations for a then popular Japanese youth magazine, Heibon Punch, and from there his career took off. Galleries started showing his work, and he published his first books. Underground writers and artists hailed his outlandish creations, and to this day he retains the fanatical devotion of erotic art aficionados.
Late LSD guru Timothy Leary penned an introduction to “Chimushi I and II,” describing the artist as an “erotic engineer” who “weaves webs of designed dementia.” Yet Saeki himself realizes that his audience is limited, especially in the relatively repressed United States. But this might be changing.
“There’s a new generation interested in Japanese things now, especially Japanese animation. For instance, there’s a writer in New York who plans to use one of my paintings on a book cover, and there was a rock festival recently in California that used one as a giant backdrop,” he says. “I’m also getting more calls for gallery shows in America, so my work is receiving more exposure there now.”
I wonder aloud if Saeki is a sex maniac. After all, why does he always paint and draw images filled with sex and death?
“Hmm, why do I?” he asks, pausing for a moment. “I’ve never really thought about it. I guess I’m just mischievous and like to surprise people. I don’t really do art for self-expression. I’m more conscious of the people who see my work. I see it as a form of entertainment. It can’t be boring; it must be entertaining. The more I produce the work, the more I want to top myself each time, to shock people even more. I’m not a violent person myself. I don’t engage in the morbid acts I depict.”
Stephen Lemons is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Salon. He lives in Los Angeles.
Am not too much into guro or vore but heres a tame sampling (Japanese Rope Bondage) by Toshio Saeki (the artist not the Ju-on character) . . .
Scarirer stuff in : http://www.111minnagallery.com/2012/toshio-saeki-2/
ARTICLE 7
A night at the vibrator museum : Early vibrators were hand-cranked, two-person jobs — and prescribed by doctors. How far we’ve come since then – by Tracy Clark-Flory – Sunday, May 20, 2012 12:00 AM UTC
[A night at the vibrator museum] (Credit: Antique Vibrator Museum)
I can now say that I’ve used a turn-of-the-century vibrator — on my hand, but still.
The silver, hand-cranked contraption is usually kept behind glass at Good Vibrations’ Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco — but staff sexologist Carol Queen made a rare exception. “This is very special,” she whispered, unlocking the case and carefully pulling out Dr. Johansen’s Auto Vibrator, a relic from 1904. The “auto” part is not so much: It was a two-person job, with her having to crank the device’s handle to get it thrumming. Pressing my finger tips to its inch-wide circular platform of pleasure, I was pleasantly surprised by its power.
As I was by the two other vintage vibrators that I got to try out — the White Cross Electric Vibrator from 1917, which has a pronged aperture that makes it seem like the ancestor of Jimmyjane’s Form 2, and the Beautysafe Vibrator from the 1940s, which is reminiscent in look, feel and sound to a car waxer.
The U.S. release this week of “Hysteria,” a Maggie Gyllenhaal flick about a Victorian-era doctor who invents an electric massager and uses it to bring about “paroxysms” of relief in female patients with “hysteria,” seemed like a good excuse to get a private tour of the museum, which provided vibes that appear in the film, to learn about the history that’s left out of the movie’s fictionalized story line — and, of course, to try out antique pleasure devices while on the clock.
While the movie is set in the 19th century, doctors’ “manual manipulation” as a treatment for female hysteria goes back as far as the second century. “That took too long,” said Queen. “So doctors started training midwives to do it.” In Rachel P. Maines’ “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” she quotes a 1653 medical book that advises:
When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.
Of course, this paroxysm was orgasm, but it was rarely acknowledged as such. Instead, it was said to be the exorcism of hysteria, a vague, catch-all diagnosis for female ailments thought to arise from a displaced uterus or, charmingly, a “wandering womb.” “Some of these women probably had PTSD, some of them were overworked, some of them had extreme stress in their lives, some of them almost certainly had sexual issues going on,” Queen explains. As Maines points out, “many of its classic symptoms are those of chronic arousal: Anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” Married women were often given the prescription of sex with their husbands.
Eventually, doctors turned to technology to speed up the laborious treatment. “It started with hydraulic devices, water jets, but that really only worked well at spas,” said Queen. In 1869, an American physician patented the Manipulator, a padded table with a steam-powered vibrating mound that rested between the legs. A decade later, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville – who’s at the center of “Hysteria,” albeit heavily fictionalized — patented a battery-operated vibrator for treatment of muscle pain. Interestingly, he was vehemently against the device being used for hysteria. He wrote, “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.”
Ads selling vibrators as home appliances began to appear in women’s magazines, often showing “women in attractive nightclothes, using it on their chest,” Queen said. “You see facial massage shown from time to time.” These spots referred to them as “aids that every woman appreciates” and promised “all the pleasures of youth … will throb within you.” But when vibrators started showing up in stag films in the 1920s, the ads started to disappear, Queen says.
“Within the next 10 years or so, the doctors close up shop,” she said, perhaps in part because it became impossible to deny the sexual nature of these therapies. “In 1952, hysteria is taken out of medical books,” Queen explained. “The medical associations voted to say, ‘Nothing to see here, there’s really not a disease – no, no, no, we haven’t been treating this with clitoral and vulva massage.’”
Vibrators were still sold direct to consumers, but manufacturers made no mention of hysteria and instead “talked about body massage and vague promises of health, vigor and beauty.” The ’60s did away with the subtlety and euphemisms: Maines explains in her book, “When the vibrator reemerged during the 1960s, it was no longer a medical instrument; it had been democratized to consumers to such an extent that by the ’70s it was openly marketed as a sex aid.”
Asked whether doctors or patients saw the treatment as sexual, Queen said, “One of the schools of thought is, ‘How could they not?’ They’re touching the genitals, she starts to sweat and flail around and vocalize and her breathing changes and she gets a flush.” But others argue that “the definition of sex and sexual functioning for a woman was so associated with intercourse,” it was so male-centric, that this treatment, which was most often external, wasn’t seen as sexual. As Maines puts it, “Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”
Paradoxically, Queen explains that hysteria was overtly linked to sex “in that they said women without husbands who were spinsters or widows or whose husbands had become incapacitated were more likely to suffer from it,” she said. “So there was a subtext of, ‘What this lady needs is a good fuck and, sadly, she can’t have one — but this is the next best thing.’” Maines attributes the demand for the treatment to two sources: “The proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in most women.”
We haven’t exactly escaped the expectation that women should be able to climax from penetration alone, but we’re slowly improving on that front — and the mainstreaming of vibrators has played a big part. That point was only driven home as I left the museum, which is located in the back of a Good Vibrations store, and walked past scores of sleek and sexy toys in every color of the rainbow, all unabashedly advertised as what they are: Tools for sexual pleasure.
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mike@vibratormuseum.com is going to be a very rich person if this concept is turned into a must have franchise in every RLD worldwide . . . how’s that ‘Legalisation of RLD drive for International Cities‘ world wide movement coming along? FEMEN wanna join in on this?
ARTICLE 8
On the rack: A cultural history of breasts : Did breasts evolve for lactation or to enhance sex appeal? A new book explores why they matter – by Tracy Clark-Flory – Thursday, May 10, 2012 12:00 AM UTC
It’s hard to be boobs. Sure, breasts are cherished as givers of milk and the pinnacle of sex appeal, but the modern world hasn’t been good to mammaries.
As Florence Williams writes in “Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History,” they’re the most tumor-prone organ in the human body. They “soak up pollution like a pair of soft sponges,” and transmit environmental toxins to babies through breast milk. “Breasts are bellwethers for the changing health of people,” she says. While we’ve “genetically modified our crops to be able to protect them from the ill effects of pesticides,” Williams writes, “we haven’t yet figured out how to modify our breasts.” Aside from using saline and silicone, of course.
Speaking of, breast implants are more popular than ever: It’s the most common form of plastic surgery, above even nose jobs and liposuction. Even cosmetic enhancement notwithstanding, breasts are bigger than ever, and girls are getting them at increasingly younger ages. These recent dramatic changes are the heft of Williams’ book, although she also covers evolutionary basics, like why we have them, what they’re made of and how they work. It’s an interesting and engaging read peppered with factoids the kid from “Jerry Maguire” would no doubt appreciate (e.g., “the average breast weighs just over a pound”). Occasionally, it veers into technical territory that will put some readers to sleep, but overall it’s a much-needed look at why breasts matter more than we realize, even in our boob-obsessed society.
I spoke with Williams by phone about the myth of the perfect pair, growing bra sizes and toxic breast milk.
One of the trickiest questions posed by the book is the simple one of why breasts exist. After all of your research, where do you stand on that question?
It’s a pretty contentious debate and surprisingly so. I think both sides have some biases and also some logic behind them, but where I see it coming down is between natural selection — like, “Are these breasts for women and their babies?” — or sexual selection, as in, “Are they signals for men?” Ultimately, I really fall down on “Let’s look at how breasts work and what they’re made out of.”
So, for me, it made sense that these are naturally selected organs, which is true for mammary glands in every other mammal that we know of. There are no other mammals in which breasts are sexually selected. It just makes sense that in our deep evolutionary past we really needed those extra few percentages of fat, and breasts gave us a place to put that, and really helped gestate and lactate the human infant, which has these unique fat requirements. The mammary gland in the breast in humans is filled with estrogen receptors and those actually make fat. There’s this relationship between fat and estrogen, and where there’s estrogen, that’s going to tell cells to start storing fat, and as there’s more fat, that’s going to help make more estrogen.
So it’s possible that breasts are the result of natural selection but they also play their part in sexual selection?
Yeah, absolutely. There’s no doubt at all that a lot of men are really, really attracted to breasts! But it could be that that attraction came later or was secondary, and it’s never really been satisfactorily proven that all men in all cultures across all times are obsessed with breasts.
It so totally goes against common wisdom, but it’s common wisdom that hasn’t been proven?
It hasn’t been proven. In fact we have such strong cultural biases about breasts that it’s easy to see how some of these anthropologists may just be projecting their own beliefs back into evolutionary times, and that’s just a classic no-no. We don’t really have fossil evidence of when breasts evolved because you can’t dig up a fossil of an early human and know what her cup size was.
So, there’s no “perfect” breast in terms of male sexual preference?
Well, certainly Hollywood and plastic surgeons would like us to believe that there’s a universally preferred large breast, but the evidence just doesn’t really bear that out. There are a lot of men out there who like small- or medium-size breasts, and there are some men out there who don’t seem particularly interested in breasts. In fact, breasts are so varied in humans that if there really was this evolutionary or even sexually selected preference for large breasts, you’d think we’d see a lot more of them. Women with small breasts are just as capable of nursing infants and that’s why those traits persisted.
Speaking of plastic surgeons: You actually had one evaluate your own breasts for the book. What was that like?
It was really bizarre and funny. I always thought my breasts were sort of perfectly fine. I kind of went in there thinking, “Oh, he’s gonna tell me that, ‘Congratulations, your breasts are fine,’ because he’s this great judge of breasts and presumably he’s seen all these incredible deformities.” I walk in there and take off my robe and he squeezes me and squishes me and pulls out a measuring tape and gives his final pronouncement, “Well, let me just say you would be a perfect candidate for augmentation.” I had to just crack up. So much of that industry is about the soft sell — they’re just so good at making women think that they’re not good enough the way they are.
When did breast implant mania really begin?
The first silicon breast implant was performed in 1962, so 50 years ago. It was up and running pretty quickly after that. It was particularly popular among women who made their living onstage — the go-go dancers and the burlesque dancers and the topless dancers and then Hollywood. Eventually it leaked into the broader culture, and certainly by the ’70s and ’80s women were going for this. Then there was the implant scare of the ’90s, in which a lot of women had problems with their implants, and the FDA actually banned them for 14 years. But now they’re back; they’ve never really been proven to be linked to disease or cancer. In fact, more women are getting implants now than ever before — over 300,000 a year.
And breasts are getting bigger in general, not simply because of plastic surgery. What’s going on there?
The main factor there is, of course, the American diet. Women’s bodies are getting bigger and their breasts are getting bigger along with it. Men are getting bigger, too! In fact, men are getting breasts more often and male breast reduction surgery is becoming more and more popular.
There also may be other factors at play that have to do with hormones in food and birth control pills and in hormone replacement therapy, and of course we have all these estrogenic chemicals in our environment. All of those things appear to be interacting with our breasts on some level.
Somewhat related, why are girls experiencing puberty and getting breasts earlier and earlier?
I would say similar reasons. We don’t know for sure, but it appears that diet is the major factor there. Girls are sort of undergoing what’s sometimes called over-nutrition. A third of kids now are overweight or obese. You’re also seeing skinny girls getting breasts earlier, so the obesity theory does not seem to fully explain the phenomenon. There are researchers out there that have tried to examine the role of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, but the jury is still out.
Turning to the function of breasts for feeding infants, one of the purposes of breasts that’s not actually up for debate: How and why did lactation evolve?
Lactation evolved 200 million years ago, even before there were mammals as such. It evolved in the precursor to mammals, probably not as a food but as an anti-infection substance. It helped fight pathogens and helped the immune system, and many of those qualities have been conserved. Breast milk today is not just filled with nutritional substances but it’s filled with these immune system-boosting substances that scientists are just beginning to understand. There are proteins and enzymes and complex sugars that are really quite amazing at inhibiting parasites and killing E.coli on contact. It also seems to be filled with bacteria too, and so it may be inoculating the infant’s immune system or educating it as to which bacteria are good and which are bad.
It’s an amazing, complex, highly evolved substance. It’s the only food on the planet that’s really meant to be eaten by humans.
It seems that nearly everything breast-related is controversial and lactation is no exception. What’s your position on the breast-is-best debate?
Really, throughout human history there have been women who just didn’t want to breast-feed, and I totally get it. Breast-feeding can be really hard. One of the earliest professions was not prostitution but actually being a wet nurse.
Certainly in Western societies it’s really safe to be raised on formula. Where you see the more dramatic benefits from breast milk are with preemies; they do much, much better. When you go to developing countries where the water isn’t safe, formula isn’t a great option, and you can really use these extra immune-boosting benefits because of these pathogen rich environments. It makes sense from a public health standpoint to really advocate breast milk in developing countries. In our country, what would be great is to really support women who want to breast-feed through better workplace policies.
We see negative entities in breast milk as well. The weight of the book is devoted to ways that our breasts are, as you write, “the catchment for our environmental trespasses.” Why are we seeing toxins show up in breasts and breast milk, of all places?
A lot of these substances, if they exist in the breast they also exist in the blood and in a lot of cells in our body. But many of them are attracted to fat and our breasts are among the fattiest organs we have next to our brains. So breasts are these soft sponges and they soak up a lot of things in our environment. They’re incredibly good at converting these substances into breast milk. It’s a little creepy.
What about the transmission to nursing babies?
It appears that the benefits of breast milk still by far outweigh the risks, and even though we have these unnatural substances in our breast milk it still exists for the most part in small quantities. Nonetheless, we don’t really understand what the health effects of this are. It seems wise to look harder at these chemicals. If they’re not proven safe, maybe we should try to use something else. It would be great to provide greater incentives for manufacturers to put safer chemicals on the marketplace.
I’m so curious what you think of sexualized attempts at raising awareness about breast cancer — ads like the “Save the Boobs” PSA, which pictured a pair of bouncing bikini-clad breasts, and the explosion of “I (heart) boobies” bracelets.
I guess the sexualization of breasts is a reality and we’re not going to change that any time soon. I did like that those ads tried to reach a younger audience, so there you have it. Breasts are filled with contradictions and conflicting messages, but the more we can understand their complexity and appreciate that complexity, the (psychologically) healthier we’ll be down the road.
Korean pornstar Minkaxxx poses size KKK polypropylene breast implants . . . in a few years the next generation of pornstars will be GROWING 100% natural flesh and blood implants from their own cells . . . somethings (breasts) never go out of vogue . . . (photo copyright belongs to respective owners) Minka has left an impressive body of work and at a stated age of 51 and probably has retired . . . how about setting up a Playboy mansion in Korea’s RLD eh?
ARTICLE 9
Russian protesters test Putin’s police – May 14 2012 at 12:14am – by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya – Associated Press
Marchers make their way along a street in downtown Moscow during a demonstration led by opposition literary activists. Around 10 000 people took part, skirting the law by remaining silent and carrying no posters.
Moscow – Almost 10 000 people staged a mass “stroll” through central Moscow on Sunday to test the state’s tolerance a week after police beat and scattered demonstrators upset over Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency.
With few police in evidence, demonstrators gathered at a statue of revered poet Alexander Pushkin and walked down Moscow’s Boulevard Ring to the site of an Occupy-style, 24-hour protest two kilometres away. Police took no action.
“We are all here because we want justice in the country, we want an honest transition of power, we don’t want a throne succession,” said Nina, 45, a foreign language teacher who gave only her first name.
President from 2000-2008 and prime minister until his inauguration to a six-year Kremlin term on May 7, Putin has angered Russians who want change and fear the continuation of his rule will bring stagnation and repression.
Some 10 000 people turned out for the “test stroll”, some wearing white ribbons reading “Russia without Putin”.
It took place a week after police clashed with demonstrators on the eve of Putin’s May 7 inauguration, beating some on the head with batons in the worst violence since a series of protests started in December.
Riot police detained more than 400 people at the May 6 protest and hundreds more on inauguration day, when they cleared streets near the path of Putin’s convoy of peaceful protesters and bystanders, and grabbed people sitting at a sidewalk cafe.
Two opposition leaders detained last week, Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov, are serving 15-day jail terms.
Following the crackdown, Boris Akunin, a popular detective novelist who has become a Kremlin critic, called for the event on Sunday to test whether Muscovites would be allowed to peacefully walk in their city.
The unsanctioned mass walk snarled traffic – and a woman handing out white ribbons advertised them as “free tickets to a police van ride” – but police left demonstrators alone and there were no reports of detentions.
“There are no police vans here, no police, no helicopters. They really let us walk free in the city now,” said Nina.
Demonstrators ended their walk at the site of a round-the-clock protest dubbed Occupy Abai, named after a monument to a Kazakh poet that is its focal point. Akunin was met with applause at the monument and declared the stroll a success.
“We can all congratulate each other, we have re-established a law. In Russia, there is a law protecting demonstrations,” Gennady Gudkov, a lawmaker with the opposition Just Russia party, told the crowd. “It was forgotten and now it is revived.”
The turnout on Sunday will please opposition leaders eager to maintain momentum, but the fate of the round-the-clock protest – where the crowd has numbered from dozens to 2 000 – is unclear.
Putin, 59, has largely ignored the unrest that greeted his inauguration, the latest since anger boiled over in December over allegations of fraud in a parliamentary election.
But his spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has been quoted as saying that the police had acted too softly and has hinted the round-the-clock protest could be dispersed.
Gudkov’s son, Dmitry, also a lawmaker, invited people to meet on Tuesday by a Karl Marx monument near the Kremlin and said the round-the-clock protest would continue until at least June 12, when the next big opposition rally is planned. – Reuters
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
The same 10,000 people should go round collecting voters to displace MPs who put Putin in power. What does this march achieve? Nothing on paper, nothing in black and white. Please use the legal and binding method. Marching peacefully or violently really does nothing legally! Civilisation and ousting of dictators is via laws, not migrations and cirumambulations.
malaysiandemocracy 