Dirty (and fun) emojis.

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From The Verge:

These are NSFW emoji for sexting We talked to Flirtmoji artist Katy McCarthy about designing tiny, sexy icons By Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Emoji aren’t sexy. They’re simple, tame, and accessible icons that work wonders if you want convey basic emotions. But when it comes to sexting, they're pretty inadequate. Winky faces, eggplants, and bananas have their uses, of course, but if you want to be a little sexier, you’re going to have to use your words.

Fortunately, four designers in California have come up with a solution, and they're calling it "Flirtmoji" — sexy stickers designed to look like emoji that you can paste into messaging apps as needed. The project launched on Tuesday, so The Verge contactedKaty McCarthy, one of two artists attached to the project, to talk about the design process.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How did Flirtmoji come to be?

It’s been many months in the making. All four of us had experience with jokingly and poorly substituting the existing emojis into text conversations to try to communicate sex, and it never worked. But the game-changer came because one of the guys in the group was having really elaborate texting engagement back and forth with a long distance girlfriend. We realized that we needed to do this, to draw up sex as icons, and make it completely comprehensive, funny, and diverse.

I showed some of the Flirtmoji to a friend, and she wasn’t surprised when I told her that you’re a woman.  She said that men don’t tend to draw breasts like that. What do you think of that reaction?

Well, I did draw them! And that’s so beautiful, coming from another woman, that she saw that. We had so much dialogue about [the drawings]. The boobs, in particular, were really hashed out. Everyone looked at them, everyone talked about them, everyone had their two cents, and then being the only woman in a group of guys discussing body parts, obviously there are moments that are a little hairy, but…

…That’s an interesting choice of words.

Well yea that’s a whole other conversation, because how do you make hair in simple line strokes?

Read the rest here.

Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends: Bodybuilding, physical attractiveness, and paraphilic sexual preference.

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Updated with available video. Louis Theroux, in collaboration with the BBC, has done a series of shows on strange (to most people) sub-cultures. His series is called Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends.

It would be fair to say that the show has an exploitative feeling to it - its whole purpose is to expose the audience to bizarre people for the sake of entertainment. It's far too easy to pass judgment on the individuals Louis meets and interviews.

But, the show does allow a rare glimpse into sub-cultures that most of us would never normally encounter. And, to his credit, Louis does try to be genuinely empathetic (or at least, convincingly pretends to be). He is unassumingly dorky, which seems to cause people to let down their guard.

In this episode, he travels to the US to meet professional male and female bodybuilders. Much of the show is devoted to the men who have strong sexual and romantic preferences for extremely muscular women (sthenolagnia). To see the women shown in class during the section on anabolic steroids, and her husband, skip to about 34:00.

17:35 - beginning of section on muscle worship (i.e., men that have a sexual preference for female bodybuilders) 26:30 - he meets a female bodybuilder who also does sex work 34:10 - Louis meets the woman whose photo was shown in the class slides (and her husband)

Androgens and bodybuilding.

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Testosterone (an androgen) plays an important role in male sexual development, and in sexual arousal and response (although its role is nuanced). Androgens, including testosterone, stimulate muscle development, which is why anabolic steroids, which are androgens, are so popular with bodybuilders. By injecting large doses of anabolic steroids, bodybuilders can put on much more muscle than they could naturally.

Androgens, in large concentrations, can have a freakish effect on muscle development (along with lots of hard work in the gym):

Its great, its huge, its very huge... See it to believe it.

 

And not to be outdone by the men:

Caroline Wang, NABBA Austrian Championships 2012, Miss Physique - Place 1 * http://www.sportnahrung.at

Alternatives to disposable tampons and pads.

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From HerCampus.com:

The Uterus Instruction Manual: Tampons, Pads and…wait, I thought that was it? By Jessica Schmidt
Why hello there, fellow uterus owner. I am sure you have had to deal with that lovely monthly gift that Mother Nature bestows upon us at some point by now. Whether you belong to the camp of pads, tampons, or both, I am sure that most of you have a box of your favourite brand stashed somewhere in your bathroom, ready for action. But what if I told you that pads and tampons aren’t the only products available? The companies that produce tampons and pads are a multimillion-dollar industry. These companies can keep their overhead low by creating cheap products, and the fact that tampons and pads are disposable means that the demand for them is constant. Beyond the money issues, there is a growing trend of health related problems stemming from the bleaches and other chemicals that go into these products to keep us and our nether-regions squeaky clean. Personally, I was tired of stuffing chemically bleached, Sahara-desert-dry wads of cotton into very sensitive areas. But what other options are there?
Cups
Okay, anyone who does not already use a cup or know what it is may be initially disgusted or simply taken aback by this suggestion, because it is exactly what it sounds like. Usually made of silicone, a cup sits inside of your vagina much like a tampon, but instead of absorbing all that shed uterine lining, it simply catches it for disposal later. This means that once every 12 hours (yeah, you read that right) you simply remove the cup, dump it in the toilet, rinse and reinsert to be on your way. The downside of this type of product is that you do actually see a cupful of the stuff upon removal. Go ahead, stick out your tongue, make some blech-ing noises.
Good? Alright, moving on. Given that all my vagina-training prior to using a cup taught me that period blood is a shameful fluid that should never been and needs to be disposed of as quickly as possible, I did find it weird at first. For myself, it is not the end of the world to witness the results of my period once every 12 hours, especially if it means I don’t have to stuff my vagina full of cotton. Because honestly, when you think about it, without the pressure of societal norms, which option is weirder?

Check out the other gear here.

Princess Joules: Sex Change Journey.

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Passed along by Diana (thanks!), with this email:

I wanted to share an interesting YouTube channel I follow with the class or to post on the blog. I went to high school with this individual and tutored her when she was still identifying as Male in our high school dance program. Her youtube channel is an extensive vlog about coming out as a M2F Transgendered individual. She posts videos throughout her journey of changing her gender identity and documents her sex-reassignment surgery. She really allows an inside look at what this transition is like and is very inspirational to those going through a similar situation. Thought the class would enjoy it!

The following clip is part 1. Check out the other 9 parts plus some videos related to her transition experience on her channel here.

I will be documenting my whole transition from now on. Expect to see videos uploaded on a daily basis. I will try to the best of my ability to record everything. My surgery date is April 28 2014 with Dr. Brassard in Montreal. Each video will be numbered off.


Micropenis AMA.

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For those of you not familiar with Reddit, it's a website featuring links and content from users. Once something is posted, other users can comment, and comments can be upvoted or downvoted. This means that the best comments move to the top of the thread and the worst comments disappear off the bottom (or are hidden). It's great, in that you don't end up with the trolling and ridiculousness that typically clogs up and ruins traditional internet forums. There are literally zillions of subreddits, or special-interest pages. One of those is /r/AMA. People start threads describing themselves and then do a Q&A. /r/AMA has become so popular that many celebrities and others to whom we look up to (e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson) have participated. Some consider it a necessary part of their branding and some just do it for fun. Probably the most famous AMA was with Obama.

There was AMA a while back from a guy with a micropenis. The questions and his responses provided an extremely intimate look into how his penis has affected his life, and how he's now come to terms with it. Here are some samples (click to make larger):

Check out the entire thread (with photos and video links)here.

A student last term submitted a link to a site with photos of micropenises. Check it out here.

TED: Cindy Gallop - Make love, not porn

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Cindy Gallop isn't opposed to porn, per say. But she does have some concerns about the way it's affecting expectations when it comes to sex. From TED:

Cindy Gallop talks about the personal experiences that led her to launch MakeLoveNotPorn.com in 2009; the extraordinary response that site received, that then motivated her to launch MakeLoveNotPorn.tv; and why her mission is to socialize sex, and make #realworldsex socially acceptable and as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram.

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Women describe their vulva.

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These descriptions come from a fun study done by the people that run LargeLabiaProject.org. The sample is clearly not representative, and the study is not peer-reviewed. Nonetheless, they report some interesting findings. The section in which they provide women's descriptions of their vulva is particularly compelling. You can read the whole paper here. And some of he descriptions (check the main document for many, many more):

Page from Labia Minora and Vulvar Appearance
Page from Labia Minora and Vulvar Appearance

Facts about vaginas.

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Surprisingly accurate. Buzzfeed has historically taken a beating for click-bait and credibility, but this is pretty spot on.

29 Things Everyone With A Vagina Should Definitely Know by Carolyn Kylstra
1. The clitoris is not a button — it’s more like a wishbone. When most people think of the clitoris, they think of the small visible part. But research indicates that it actually has branches that extend down underneath the skin, along either side of the vulva, kind of in a wishbone shape. “These branches can potentially be stimulated from the outside,” Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., associate professor at Indiana University and author of The Coregasm Workout (Seal Press, 2015), told BuzzFeed Life. GOOD TO KNOW.
2. What you think is your vagina is probably actually your vulva. The vulva refers to the outside, visible parts of your genitalia. It encompasses basically everything you can see — the labia, the clitoris, the urethra, the vaginal opening, and so on — and it’s usually what most people mean when they say “vagina.” The vagina, on the other hand, is the muscular passageway that connects the vulva to the cervix.
3. Vaginas (and vulvas) come in lots of different shapes, sizes, and colors. There’s a good deal of variation from person to person, and there’s no such thing as a “standard” vulva — and that’s according to science.
4. When aroused, the vagina can expand to around twice its normal size. Unaroused, the average vagina is about three to four inches deep. But during sex it can expand to about twice as big, Dr. Herbenick told BuzzFeed Life. That’s partially because of a process called vaginal tenting, which is what happens when you get aroused. “When women become aroused, there’s more muscular tension in the body,” Dr. Herbenick says. “That muscular tension draws the uterus upward, creating more space in the vagina lengthwise.”

Documentary: My Penis and Everyone Else's.

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By Lawrence Barraclough:

The follow-up to My Penis and I, explores why men find talking about anxieties they have with their penis so difficult.

The follow-up to My Penis and I, explores why men find talking about anxieties they have with their penis so difficult.

And the original, My Penis and I:

This is a film I made in 2005 for the BBC.

“I guess this thing is about having a small dick, and it’s horrible saying that because it’s true….

And why is it such a problem? This is what this film is about”.

My Penis and I follows my two-year journey to discover if size matters.

It charts the effect my penis has had on my life, my family and my relationship with my girlfriend Nicola.

The film is now out of BBC licensing and I am free to distribute it non-commercially.

This is a film I made in 2005 for the BBC. “I guess this thing is about having a small dick, and it’s horrible saying that because it’s true…. And why is it such a problem? This is what this film is about”. My Penis and I follows my two-year journey to discover if size matters. It charts the effect my penis has had on my life, my family and my relationship with my girlfriend Nicola. The film is now out of BBC licensing and I am free to distribute it non-commercially.