Model Anja Rubik’s new editorial endeavor just launched: 25 Magazine is a high-end fashion magazine, out biannually, that’s dedicated to the erotic perspective of women. In an interview with New York magazine, Rubik explained the sex concept:
Sex scandals are as American as (sticking your wiener in an) apple pie — or should we say your Anthony Weiner? The really unforgettable scandals leave us with a particular phrase or image burned into our brains. We could be a hundred years old and senile and we will still be able to recall Lorena Bobbitt tossing her husband’s penis out the car window; Clarence Thomas asking Anita Hill about a pubic hair on a coke can; and an astronaut driving hundreds of miles in a diaper to confront the lover who spurned her. Here are our nominations for the top ten sex scandals in this nation’s glorious history, organized by the categories in which these events most often seem to occur. God bless (or should we say God save) America!
Or maybe we should say “great music to make love to” (though we’re loathe to use that terminology). It definitely works for making out to. Not frantic rip-off-each-others’-clothes sessions, but more deliberate, sensual interludes that last longer than an hour, the kind earnest teenagers in love engage in. Patrick Watson, the Montreal-based band (fronted by singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, natch), create songs that are ethereal, haunting, and heady — with upright pianos, weepy violins and saws, quirky percussion, guitars occasionally strummed with toothbrushes…
This week a court in Germany ruled that circumcising boys for religious reasons is “bodily harm.” The ruling came as a result of a court case about medical complications following the circumcision of a four-year-old boy. The doctor was acquitted, but apparently the court felt like stirring up a shit-storm anyway. The ruling isn’t binding but it certainly sets a precedent.
Why do we love Justin Bieber? Why did we love Nora Ephron’s films? Why should we love exercise? And why shouldn’t we love old-people lovin’? These questions and more are answered below.
Did you know that when someone “likes” your Facebook status — or, even better, actually comments on it — that warm fuzzy feeling you get is akin to the feeling you get from good food or good sex? Of course you knew that! Why else do you waste so many hours on social networking sites, over-sharing the minutiae of your life, and willingly sharing so much private data with massive technology companies who can then tailor advertising to you?!
Once again, the Internets really DO work! Two-and-a-half weeks ago, we told you about a new app called Peek that tried to make sending dirty pics to the objects of your affection safer. The original idea: You take a naughty picture with your phone via Peek, send it out and the recipient can only view the picture once, through a small circular moveable “keyhole”, for only 30 seconds before it disappears (from both your phones). Cool idea, right? But we discovered one massive hole in the app — if you quickly moved the keyhole around and snapped a bunch of screen shots during that 30-second window, in Photoshop you could puzzle together a pretty revealing composite, sort of defeating the purpose of the app in the process.
Well, color us pink, because we were tickled to receive the following note the other day:
All top ten lists are, by their nature, subjective, but this one is especially so — because one person’s “WTF” sex scene is another person’s monkey spanking material. (Exhibit A: we’d qualify a lot of porn as WTF.)
A few qualifications: David Lynch probably deserves a place in this list (okay, David Lynch definitely deserves a place in this list!), but because we already wrote an entire post dedicated to his effed up sex scenes (you can read it here: Top 10 Effed Up Sex Scenes), we left him off this time. And LAST TANGO IN PARIS should probably be on here, but we are just so damn sick of talking about that freakin’ butter scene. The SHOWGIRLS pool scene is hilarious and weird and WTF hall of fame-worthy, but we already covered that one.
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens…these are a few of our favorite things making the rounds on the Internets of late:
Muppet Dating Advice: An awesome article on Slate explains how everyone is either a Chaos Muppet (Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Animal, Miss Piggy, etc.), or an Order Muppet (Burt, Scooter, Kermit, etc.). If you want a happy marriage, the theory goes, you need to pair up with the opposite type — just like Kermit and Miss Piggy, or Burt and Ernie. (And if you don’t? “That’s where Baby Elmos come from.”) You have been warned.
This week Conan apologizes for a trans joke but unfortunately no one apologizes for genital whitening products, Olympic gender testing, or rape as a plot device to “strengthen” female characters. And we think that everyone who ever judged open relationships as “slutty” should apologize — it turns out that “monogamous” cheaters are way more likely to forgo a condom.
For all you TRANSGENERATION fans out there: here’s a cool t-shirt design on Qwertee called USBgendered “for those of us who think beyond binary.” Like Qwertee the site (and “Qwertee” the name), this design perfectly combines t-shirts with geek love (i.e. the love of all things techie). Like any of their shirts, you can vote to get it printed in a limited edition for only $12 bucks a pop.
In this, the year of the War on Women, it seems important to take a look back on all the hard-won battles women have poured their blood, sweat and tears into over the past 150 years. Seeing how far we’ve come makes it hard to understand why there are so many people across the country right now working to roll back our reproductive rights, restrict our access to birth control, and allow employers to pay us less than men. It’s like they want to erase the ’70s! Let this top 10 list light a fire under your ass so you make sure that doesn’t happen this election year.
Change.org is like AA: it works if you work it. That was made quite clear this week when Holly Kearl of StopStreetHarassment.org posted a petition on Sunday and got results in less than 24 hours.
To follow up on our Vaginagate roundup post from yesterday, now that the trending on Twitter had died down, here are our top 30 picks for best #vaginamovielines Tweets of the past week, so you can avoid scrolling through the endless stream of mediocrity and get straight to the good stuff:
In case you were wondering why all your friends were using the word “vagina” in their Facebook status updates over the weekend, late last week two representatives (both women) were banned from speaking in the Michigan House during a debate over a bill that bans all abortions after 20 weeks, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the health of the mother. The Majority Floor Leader Jim Stamas hasn’t specified exactly what offended him, but one of the representatives, Democrat Lisa Brown, claims it’s because she used the word vagina. “Apparently, ‘vagina’ is another v-word that Must Not Be Named. Like Voldemort,” Brown told Jezebel.com. Here’s a (very abridged!) sampling of Vaginagate coverage:
A lot of assault going on this week, both literally and figuratively: servicewomen are getting screwed over by the government, Lara Croft is the victim of sexual assault, penguins are the perpetrators of some serious sex crimes….Maybe gardening can make the world a happier, safer, more loving place.
You know the worst thing about the movie THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY? Not the semen hair gel gag, or the clogged toilet, or the zipper in the ball sac. Nope, it’s when Cameron Diaz’s character Mary declares that the movie HAROLD AND MAUDE (released this week for the first time on Blu-Ray) is the “greatest love story of our time.” We happen to think she’s right, but all of a sudden it became a bit trite to celebrate this 1971 love story about a 79-year-old free spirited woman and a 20-year-old guy who likes to fake his own suicide to freak out his mom.
No filmmaker in their right mind would advertise the fact that their film has feminist ambitions — we’re pretty sure that’s box office suicide (sad, but true). Despite that, some films have pretty obvious feminist heroes — think THELMA AND LOUISE, G.I. JANE, Jodie Foster’s character in THE ACCUSED, and ERIN BROCKOVICH. And then there are the stealth feminist films — movies that advance the feminist cause without anyone driving off a cliff or shaving their head or or fighting against rape or giving an Oscar-winning, stick-it-to-the-man performance. These movies take feminism for granted and act like it’s no big deal — in fact, they’re so stealth that sometimes maybe even the filmmakers and stars didn’t know what was going on. Here are ten of our favorites:
Ever feel like you could benefit from a therapist but you don’t have the cash or you can’t travel to sessions or you just don’t wan to make the commitment? Now the magic Internet is bringing the therapists to you for only $9.99 per hour-long sesh. Talktala:_ is a brand new site (so new they’re still in the beta stage) that democratizes therapy by providing it in small groups for a low price.
In his recent Class Day speech at Princeton University, Steve Carell closed with his version of the “wear sunscreen” list of helpful hints for grads. (Except, of course, the original “wear sunscreen” advice was not given by Kurt Vonnegut during a commencement address at MIT, as the Internets insisted on telling us for years — it was actually a column in the Chicago Tribune by a writer named Mary Schmich.) Anyway, you can read Carell’s list at the end of the transcript of his speech here. (Our favorites:”Only use a ‘That’s what she said’ joke if you absolutely cannot resist.” And: “When out to eat, tip on the entire check. Do not subtract the tax first.”)Â In the meantime, here is our version of advice for graduating seniors. We can only dream of the day when this list becomes an online sensation falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut.
Used to be you could lie about your genital herpes or cheat on your wife on a plane without anyone paying too much attention. Let’s give thanks to the information age for bringing some good old-fashioned karma back into the picture!
Spider-who? Bat-who? Bourne-who? Forget the summer action blockbusters. This season we’re much more interested in the softer, sassier, saucier flicks. Instead of aliens, action and adventure, sex, love, family and friendship are the big themes with these movies. Women make up a majority of the lead roles (for a change). Most are indie. And for some reason they all come out this month. Guess it makes sense to get your summer love on early.
A reader just tipped us off to this 99 cent app called Peek: it lets you take naughty pictures of yourself and send them to the object of your affection with a little less risk. The recipient can only view the picture once, through a small circular moveable “keyhole”, for only 30 seconds before it disappears (from both your phones). Peek encrypts the picture, then decrypts it once when the recipient views it. The image is never uploaded to a server anywhere.
Just in case The Sound of Music didn’t clue you in: it turns out that nuns can be a bit cheeky. Maria Von Trapp sang out of church, ate too much, and fell in love (oh yeah: and evaded the Nazis). These days, nuns behaving badly are more likely to be waving the feminist flag, it turns out. According to a BBC article, the Vatican just released a report criticizing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — which represents about 80% of American nuns — saying that they were “becoming feminist and politicised, promoting radical ideas and challenging bishops.” Excellent!