Pontiff thought be be responding to conservative critics after sexually explicit book by cardinal resurfaces
“Sexual pleasure is a gift from God” but Catholics must avoid pornography, Pope Francis has said.
The pontiff made the remarks during a catechesis devoted to the “vice of lust” at his general audience in Saint Peter’s Square on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Video surfaced in which Aidan Maese-Czeropski was allegedly having sex in the judiciary hearing room
A Senate staffer accused of filming himself having sex in a congressional hearing room is threatening legal action after getting fired.
The explicit footage, published by the Daily Caller on Friday, shows two men having sex in what appears to be Hart 216, the judiciary room. Aidan Maese-Czeropski, a legislative aide for Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, was widely named on social media as one of the men in the footage.
Continue reading...St Charles city-county system to remove Bang Like a Porn Star: Sex Tips from the Pros after critics claim it is too sexually explicit
A Missouri library system will ban a book that critics are calling too sexually explicit – but they are allowing the 20 people on the book’s waiting list to read it first.
A committee with the St Charles city-county library system in eastern Missouri has moved to ban the book Bang Like A Porn Star: Sex Tips from the Pros, but will allow everyone on the book’s waiting list before 21 November to read it first, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Continue reading...The 23-year-old was arrested at Balmain police station and charged with one count of use carriage service to menace, harass or offend
Police have arrested a man who allegedly threatened author Yumi Stynes, the co-author of an educational book aimed at helping teenagers understand sex and sexuality that was recently removed from shelves at Big W after staff members were abused.
Stynes – co-author of Welcome to Sex: Your No-silly Questions Guide to Sexuality, Pleasure and Figuring it Out – has reported receiving death threats and violent, graphic, racist abuse from critics of her book.
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Continue reading...Publisher of Welcome to Sex by Dr Melissa Kang and Yumi Stynes defends book after conservative campaigners claim it is ‘teaching sex to children’
The publisher of a sex education and consent book aimed at adolescents has defended the title after it was taken off the shelves of Big W stores amid backlash from conservative campaigners.
Welcome to Sex, co-authored by the former Dolly Doctor and adolescent health expert Dr Melissa Kang and feminist writer Yumi Stynes, is the fourth book in a series on topics such as consent and menstruation.
Continue reading...Freedom to use devices could curb prostitution, divorce and sex-related crimes, says Democrat party politician
A conservative Thai political party has backed the legalisation of sex toys as it seeks to revive its appeal before a looming general election.
The Democrat party representative Ratchada Thanadirek said sex toys were being smuggled into Thailand regardless of laws that prohibit their sale, and that the government was missing out on collecting taxes and regulating such products.
Continue reading...Lingerie and sex toy chain’s boss tapped into the female market by embracing Britain’s peculiar erotic humour
When Jacqueline Gold arrived to shake up Ann Summers, the company had already been in the family for a decade, bought by her father, David, and uncle Ralph Gold. They had made the initial leap from sex shop to what they styled as a “lingerie boutique”; it would be more accurate to say they took it from a shop women never went into to a shop women did go into, while still selling the same sex toys and lucky knickers.
The impact of Jacqueline Gold, who has died aged 62, went far beyond the shops themselves or even the operation. The irony is that British culture in the 80s was hardly a stranger to images of women in their underwear, but these images were pretty well always used to sell random things to men. The notion of erotic imagery and shop frontage aimed at women was quite novel, and freighted with innuendo – this is one sense in which I can just about allow that Britain is exceptional, the peculiar humour it derives from sex: that Carry-On, seaside postcard, slightly mirthless and dutiful performance, where anyone revealing a sexual identity is considered to make themselves ridiculous, becoming the butt of some inexpressible joke. It was not cost-free, therefore, for women to go browsing in Ann Summers, and Gold attacked this from two directions.
Continue reading...Global study shows significant shift in UK attitudes on matters such as casual sex and assisted dying
The UK has overtaken Canada, Germany and Australia to become one of the world’s most socially liberal nations towards divorce and abortion, the latest wave of a global study has revealed.
Significant increases in the last five years in people saying the practices are justifiable is mirrored by sharply increasing acceptance of homosexuality, casual sex and prostitution over the same period, the World Values Survey found.
Continue reading...Consent can include a nod, or reciprocating a move such as removing clothes, as well as verbal cues
Victoria has adopted an affirmative consent model, shifting scrutiny off victims and back on to perpetrators of sexual violence.
Under new laws, which passed Victorian parliament late on Tuesday, a person must have a clear and enthusiastic go-ahead for their belief in consent to be reasonable.
Continue reading...Incontinence, bleeding and STIs among consequences, say two surgeons, who want doctors to raise the topic with patients
Women in the UK are suffering injuries and other health problems as a result of the growing popularity of anal sex among straight couples, two NHS surgeons have warned.
The consequences include incontinence and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as well as pain and bleeding because they have experienced bodily trauma while engaging in the practice, the doctors write in an article in the British Medical Journal.
Continue reading...Glastonbury makes me revel in my sprung mattress from where I can watch RMT boss Mick Lynch dressing down media pundits
Hurrah! After an enforced three-year hiatus (there was this pandemic thing – I can’t get into it now) Glastonbury is back! The older I get, the more I love this music festival of music festivals, its noise, its mud, its people. The knowledge that I don’t have to endure any of it gets sweeter with every passing year. The sheer Jomo of it all far outpaces the delights of birthdays (they start to pall once you’re past seven and I’ve had 40 of them since then) and even Christmas (so much work now that I have a child of my own and can’t slip into a mimosas-bellinis-prosecco stupor over the course of the day).
Continue reading...With gags, tunes and dance, The Family Sex Show celebrates sexual pleasure, equality and independence. What is there to be embarrassed about, asks theatre-maker Josie Dale-Jones
‘I remember the tampon dipped in Ribena,” says Josie Dale-Jones, her fingertips pressed together as if holding on to the string. “The way it swelled up immediately.” In school, Dale-Jones recalls her sex and relationships education as being “near to non-existent”. There was the purple-soaked tampon, the classic condom rolled on to a banana and the “general fear-mongering” of pictures of STIs pinned up on a board. “But never a mention of why you might want to have sex,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Never anything about empathy or pleasure, or how any of it might impact other people.”
With a team of eight performers, Dale-Jones is making a show about sex and relationships for ages five and above. Accompanied by workshops and panel talks, The Family Sex Show tackles topics including boundaries, gender, relationships and masturbation. Through a series of artistic responses and conversations, the group want to help make it easier for anyone, of any age, to talk about these sticky, tricky topics. “I don’t know another subject that we only talk about once and then we tick it off as if it’s done,” Dale-Jones says. “The learning is never over.”
Continue reading...Urban dwellers tolerate screeching subways, traffic and noisy bars. But late-night sounds of coital revelry are the breaking point
A wave of “sex mayhem” has apparently been sweeping New York City, prompting residents to lodge an increasing number of noise complaints to a government helpline.
New York is no stranger to noise complaints – New Yorkers file as many as 75,000 a month – but new 311 call data obtained by Patch has revealed that many recent complaints arise from those disturbed by their neighbors’ late-night ventures.
Continue reading...The novelist Niamh Campbell on why describing intimacy is so difficult and how creative writing about sexuality is changing. Plus, she picks 10 of her favourite examples
One of my favourite literary sex scenes is a swift and quiet one. In Colm Tóibín’s The Pearl Fishers, a gay man having dinner with a former lover and this lover’s – fanatically Catholic – wife thinks, with a flash of candidness, of anilingus past. It doesn’t read like a calculated shock, just pleasure; the story moves on and the image melts out. No point is made, nobody humiliated, no corny gotcha! occurs. There are only three people: one deceiving (husband), one pious (wife) and one emboldened but alone. The point is nuanced humanity. It’s hot.
It has been remarked upon that recent writing about sex by, in the main, young women tends towards the squalid, abject and confrontational. I can tell you that this partly down to the fact that app-based erotic culture in the metropolises of late capitalism really can be squalid, abject and confrontational. If people’s lives become miserable mills of boredom and humiliation they will tend to take it out on one another. I know this because I am Irish. People think this country was deranged for most of the 20th century by the church, but it was also deranged by poverty and, relatedly, shame. #NotallIrish of course; some people belonged to a more sex-positive cosmopolitan elite class, some were able to smuggle in condoms. And yet, the fact that it still feels impossible to discuss sex and Ireland without mentioning penitentiary laundries says a lot.
Continue reading...For those looking for inflight fun, without having to squash into a tiny toilet, a new Las Vegas venture has the answer. But will the idea take off?
Name: The mile-high club.
Appearance: Sexy, up in the air.
Continue reading...The movement championed the right to enjoy sex and was supposed to free women from guilt or being shamed. But now many are questioning whether it has left them more vulnerable
Lala likes to think of herself as pretty unshockable. On her popular Instagram account @lalalaletmeexplain, she dishes out anonymous sex and dating advice on everything from orgasms to the etiquette of sending nude pictures. Nor is the 40-year-old sex educator and former social worker (Lala is a pseudonym) shy of sharing her own dating experiences as a single woman.
But even she was perturbed by a recent question, from a woman with a seven-year-old daughter who had caught her new partner watching “stepdaughter” porn involving teenage girls. Was that a red flag?
Continue reading...There has been a sharp drop in one-off encounters, researchers say, but more people are enjoying friends with benefits and getting experimental in bed
A one-night stand, people used to say, is like a short story: if it is any good, you want it to go on for longer; if it isn’t, you could have done with 15 minutes’ more sleep. To which the retort is: sure – but a lot of people really like short stories.
A lot of people, in the pre-pandemic days, used to really like one-night stands, too. The sex therapist Jenny Keane hosts a wide-ranging sex chat through her Instagram account. On it, one woman wrote appreciatively: “The sex is purely focused on pleasure. You’re not thinking about your relationship dynamics, them not doing the dishes. It’s about being served and cared for physically. It can be a very empowering and beautiful thing.”
Continue reading...Lacey Haynes and Flynn Talbot want to improve the world’s love life – starting by doing it live on air in every episode
Lacey Haynes is a women’s “intuitive healer”, and guides couples in yoga-informed “elevated sex”. When she opens her front door, the first thing I notice about the Canadian podcaster is her fashionable faux fur slippers and chic blunt fringe. Where is the western wellness guru uniform of linen tunic, elephant-print trousers and culturally inappropriate head jewellery, I wonder?
Inside the living room, I spot the hot-pink sofa that Haynes’ Australian husband, Flynn Talbot, a men’s life coach and fellow elevated sex practitioner, calls “love island”. Fans of their podcast – Lacey and Flynn Have Sex – will know it as one of many locations around their house where they take the title literally, recording themselves having sex in the bedroom, on the kitchen barstool, and beyond.
Continue reading...The night of the party, I put my heartbreak aside. With nothing to lose, I walked up to a man and told him he was the most handsome one in the room
In a warehouse in Ladywood, Birmingham, with a papier-mache spine down my back and breath like a dustpan, I walked up to a man and said, without any preamble: “You are the most handsome man at this party.”
It was December 2004, the theme of the party was dinosaurs and, being a fan of puns, I had decided to go as a thesaurus. In my little room in Lupton Flats – the cheapest halls of residence at Leeds University at the time – I’d sat on the floor, beside my single bed, and patiently glued down layers of paper into a string of points. Reluctant to sacrifice my actual thesaurus, I had rooted around my reading list for another book, eventually choosing The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Listening to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and drinking PG Tips, it had taken me at least two hours to make the dinosaur spine, which would attach around my neck like a backwards pendant. Slipping it on and looking in the mirror, I wondered if anyone would even notice me.
Continue reading...A compatible friend needs treasuring. You might need to look elsewhere for sex
The question I met Tom online. We have now been dating for nearly two years, sometimes on Zoom as we live three hours away from each other. This is long-term relationship potential – except, from my side, for one thing.
I am a deeply sexually alive person. Sex is an immense joy to me. Not only the explicit physical acts of it, but also the sharing, the play, all the openness and openheartedness. Tom is divorced and I suspect has not had much sexual experience. I think he is sexually repressed. I have always been open with him about wanting our relationship to become fully sexual. It never has been.
Continue reading...