The magical thing about the United States is that our nation is a rich tapestry — of gonorrhea cases and bankruptcy, that is. Find out what surprising, ignominious category your home state leads the country in. Who would have guessed that Mormon Utah is porn-crazy? Concocted by Pleated-Jeans:
________… Read the rest
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries writes on the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog:
Amazon.com has removed a how-to guide for pedophiles that was appearing in its Kindle store, after a day of online outrage and threats of a boycott.
The e-book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct,” and its removal raise questions about how Amazon reviews self-published works and what types of books are allowed on the e-commerce site.
Amazon on Wednesday defended the sale of the $4.79 book, telling technology blog TechCrunch that it “believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.” But by early Thursday morning, the book was removed from the site. Amazon did not immediately return requests for further comment about the book or its disappearance from the site.
Other books about pedophilia remain on Amazon, including those that have previously prompted calls for boycotts.
Cathy Alter writes in McSweeney’s:
Psychoanalysts sometimes speak of the epistemophilic instinct, an unbridled love of learning that grips scholars like fingernails in their backs. But when a reader at London’s Public Record Office literally ingested The Abortive Treaty of 1604 (after first ordering the Treaty of Union with Scotland as an appetizer), that was taking the passion for primary sources a little too far. And, according to Helen Wood, who recently received her Masters of Archive Administration and Records Management from the University of Liverpool, this sort of conduct takes place in archives all the time. Forget the tales of sexual politics in the faculty lounge — the kinkiest stuff occurs between the sheaves at your local library.
Wood’s dissertation, “The Fetish of the Document: An Exploration of Attitudes Towards Archives,” gives new meaning to Special Collections. Her essay centers around the participatory role the archivist has in creating and influencing fetishistic behavior — in themselves and in those who use, and sometimes abuse, archives.
Another great find from Cyriaque Lamar over at io9.com. How times have changed:
In 1967, psychologist Paul Bindrim introduced the world to the salubrious properties of naked psychotherapy. Despite the treatment’s somewhat lurid connotations and relative obscurity nowadays, nude psychotherapy did garner its share of press attention, professional consideration, and happy, naked adherents.
Bindrim’s theories were inspired by the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow (you know, the fellow with the hierarchy of needs) and focused on the acceptance of the naked body as a whole. This message wasn’t particularly unorthodox even if his methodology was. Historian Ian Nicholson describes Bindrim’s birthday suit treatments in his eminently readable paper “Baring the soul: Paul Bindrim, Abraham Maslow and ‘Nude psychotherapy”
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
I’m not very altruistic, as most of you already know. I’m of the opinion that it’s every man for himself, whether you like it or not. You can’t really expect other people to take care of you and security is just coping mechanism. No one is really secure.
However, I do find the sexual dysfunction of many Americans troubling enough to warrant intervention. You have a vast number of women who are downright latently asexual, you have shit-load of straight men who are terrified of the implication that they might be gay, you have teens and young adults being told in one ear that abstinence and chastity are the only way, while in the other ear streams the most vulgar and perverse sexuality in the form of festering silicone tits and hooker culture, which celebrates coldly detached sex acts but shies away from real sensuality and pleasure.
Oh man, Joe Biden must be loving that anti-masturbation/Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell is up for his old Senate seat:
My name is Christine O’Donnell. I am the President and Founder of The S.A.L.T. The S.A.L.T. stands for “The Savior’s Alliance For Lifting The Truth.” We choose sexual purity in our lives. We have God-given sexual desires and we need to understand them and preserve them to be used in God’s appropriate context. Our members are committed to be role models, committed to be the salt of the earth … We need to address sexuality with young people and masturbation is part of sexuality but it is important to discuss this from a moral point of view … The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.
Holy cow as the Washington Post reports. For more on O’Donnell check out this post from Irin Carmon on Jezebel and the mashup video below:
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
That sounds like a Warren Zevon song from hell, but it’s not. It’s what I saw on someone’s car on the way to work today. Three bumper stickers, right in a row; the first one said Jesus Saves, Obama Spends. The second said Obama is Socializing and Sodomizing America. The third said Body Piercings by Glock.
Let me pull up my favorite arm chair and give this guy a go. I think his choice in bumper stickers has less to do with his distaste for Obama and his policies and more to do with his fervent desire to get reamed long and hard by a Jewish hippie. Of course, that’s really none of my business. But is it appropriate to put your deep seated sexual fantasies on the back of your car?
Also, I thought christians were supposed to be anti-sodomy?… Read the rest
The Daily Telegraph reports:
Cigarettes may contain traces of pig’s blood, an Australian academic says with a warning that religious groups could find its undisclosed presence “very offensive”.
University of Sydney Professor Simon Chapman points to recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig — including the use of its hemoglobin in cigarette filters.
Prof Chapman said the research offered an insight into the otherwise secretive world of cigarette manufacture, and it was likely to raise concerns for devout Muslims and Jews. Religious texts at the core of both of these faiths specifically ban the consumption of pork.
“I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive,” Prof Chapman said.
Another chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, inspired by historian Howard Zinn, who passed away earlier this year.
For more me, check out: The Memory Hole.
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During the harsh winter of 1609–1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown, Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn’t make it into very many U.S. history textbooks, and the state’s official website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so overpowering that this episode can’t be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic, A People’s History of the United States.… Read the rest
The following is the second chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on me: go to The Memory Hole.
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Before he was Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was a poet, scholar, diplomat, and rakehell. And an author. In fact, he wrote a bestseller. People in fifteenth-century Europe couldn’t get enough of his Latin novella Historia de duobus amantibus. An article in a scholarly publication on literature claims that Historia “was undoubtedly one of the most read stories of the whole Renaissance.” The Oxford edition gives a Cliff Notes version of the storyline: “The Goodli History tells of the illicit love of Euralius, a high official in the retinue of the [German] Emperor Sigismund, and Lucres, a married lady from Siena [Italy].”
It was probably written in 1444, but the earliest known printing is from Antwerp in 1488.… Read the rest
