This is an engraving from The Secret Companion, a medical work on onanism or self-pollution, with the best mode of treatment in all cases of nervous and sexual debility, impotency, etc., by R. J. Brodie, 1845, Plate 2.
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What a long way we’ve come — well, all of us except maybe for Christine O’Donnell.

Via MorbidAnatomy.

A little book about sex inspired by Dr. Seuss is making the internet rounds. Before you panic, allow us to remind you that this is not a book being handed out on street corners to children, but one that resides online with so little SEO as to render it impossible to stumble upon unless someone has a direct link.

Having gotten that out of the way, allow us to introduce you to Now That You’re Big by Simon Greiner, a hysterical combination of wordplay and images in the style of Dr. Seuss. Here’s a little gem from its pages:

You can wank on a boat
You can wank on a ball

You can wank at your school
You can wank in the hall

Oh the places you’ll wank
You’ll wank most everywhere

Sending icky sticky spunk
Flying up in the air

While incredibly amusing, we think the book could have benefited from a little more attention to the joys of masturbation and sexual expression for girls. A commenter makes a critique of the book content on the site itself, “The section for guys reinforces the idea that it’s ok to ogle girls, and masturbate. The section for girls is all about ‘be careful because you might be pregnant.’” We didn’t see the section about sex as the “girl” section, but didn’t like that women were left out of the narrative except to mention that one “may manage a squirt.” We think the critique is definitely something the author should consider, along with creating a coffee table book for those of us who tend to gravitate to such clever oddities.

In 2010, Karen Healey authored Guardian of the Dead, a book for young adults that interweaves teen relationships, adventures, and Maori lore. In the midst of excitement surrounding the leaked sex scene photographs of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Healey took to her blog to call bullshit on the general perception as it regards teenagers, sex, and sex in fiction for teenagers. She lists them:

- Teenagers should not have sex.
- Teenagers should not have sex unless they are in love.
- Teenagers should not have sex unless they are married.
- Teenagers should not have sex in any combination other than one cisgendered boy and one cisgendered girl. [The term "cisgendered" means gender normative, which means that a persons gender identity, their bodies and the gender they were assigned at birth all match.]
- It is okay to call a girl who dresses in revealing clothing a slut.
- It is not okay to shame girls for having sex, unless they sleep with more than [arbitrary number] of people in which case it is okay to call them sluts.
- It is okay to call girls who sleep with a lot of people sluts if you also call boys who sleep with a lot of people sluts.
- If an unpleasant girl who dresses in attractive clothing and makes a move on someone else’s love interest is sexually assaulted, she deserves what she gets and it’s okay to call her a slut.

The combination of these ideas, commonly present in young adult literature, perpetuate slut- and prude shaming and feed into a culture that victimizes sexual predators and guilts victims of sexual abuse. Literature imparts lessons and it is impossible to expect teenagers to grow into sexually healthy adults if writers continue to perpetuate damaging concepts. Healey goes on:

Teenagers have an obligation to ensure that if they are having sex, it is consensually, and as safely as possible, with full awareness of the possible consequences. That includes paying attention to the laws of their area regarding legal ages of consent. Teenagers have an obligation to listen to their partner(s). They have an obligation to talk to their partner(s), as honestly and with as much disclosure as possible.

… What is not okay is shaming anyone else for having sex – or for not having sex. It is not okay to shame anyone, directly or indirectly, for having sex in combinations that are not one cisgendered boy and one cisgendered girl. It is not okay to call anyone a slut under any circumstances, no matter what they wear, who they make a move on, or how many people they have sex with. … Calling someone a slut (or, indeed, a prude) indicates that you think that they should feel ashamed for their consensual sexual behaviour, and that is not fine.

And if someone sexually assaults somebody, it is not the fault of the person who was assaulted. Ever. No matter what they are wearing, where they are walking, what they have been drinking, or who they have previously had sex with.

Read the entire post here.

Via Maymay.

We’re all familiar with the fireworks of passion decreasing as people settle in to being together, but did you know there is an actual name for this? According to Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of The Science of Kissing, it’s called “The Coolidge Effect” — and yes, that “Coolidge” refers to U.S. president, Calvin Coolidge.

As the story goes, First Lady Grace Coolidge entered a government farm’s chicken coup while a rooster was mounting a hen. She was told the cock copulated dozens of times a day, and reportedly responded, “Go tell that to the president.”

When her husband was informed of the bird’s sexual exploits, he asked whether each rooster routinely serviced the same hen. Upon learning there are many females for each rooster, it’s said that the president replied: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

“Somehow it’s OK for moms to have their wine nights. But try getting dispensation for a weekly bender with your fellow dads,” writes author and playwright Rick Marin. “Never happen. At a certain point, your typical Family Guy stops seeking out the Company of Men ‐‐ and all his references are Netflixed. We don’t get out much. We turn hermit, unless thrust together by forces beyond our control. Like our wives. ‘Do you enjoy the friends your wife has picked out for you?’ a buddy asked when we moved to L.A. a couple of years ago. Matter of fact I do. But there’s only so much quality bro time you can squeeze in at a 5‐year‐old’s birthday party.”

OK, before you get too caught up in the discussion about whether husbands and dads get equal treatment in the Nights Out department, focus on who’s leveling the complaint (however sweetly cushioned it is). It’s Rick Marin.

The Rick Marin who wrote Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor about his personal contribution to the neuroses of New York women. The man who wiped his hands with the dignity of 80 percent of New York’s female population. That Rick Marin.

Guess that whole yearning for love and stability thing wasn’t just a literary device. He found his woman. Now he lives in Los Angeles and has so little freedom he has to resort to co-founding a book club to watch YouPorn.

Life is too funny.

Literary perverts the world over can rejoice! The Literary Review‘s eighteenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner has been announced: Rowan Somerville’s second novel, The Shape of Her.

Somerville accepted with grace,joking in a release: “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.”

Below, some choice bits for you to giggle at, emphasis is ours:

He caught her rhythm, pulling and releasing, cradling and crushing; pushing up through his fingers with each swing, mining up, like an otter through wet sand. Her sounds shifted from moans to grunts, insistent, almost desperate cries from the throat … He unbuttoned the front of her shirt and pulled it to the side so that her breast was uncovered, her nipple poking out, upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing in the night. He took it between his lips and sucked the salt from her. He hooked his fingers into her waistband, caught the elastic of her underwear and began pulling down. The knot on her light cotton trousers held fast as the fabric reached the curve of her backside. She twisted from him and stepped back.

“I want to suck you,” she said, descending … She loosed his trousers, pulled away his underwear and gripped him with fingers tender enough to hold a tiny bird. As he felt her mouth’s engulfment, he acquiesced, disappointment melting like ice in hot cream.

Oh, but it gets better.

Naked from waist to toe, a faint wedge of paleness from a few hours of sun, streaked with shadows in the candlelight; the triangle of pubic hair, blond, a thin line bunched darkly, like desert vegetation following an underground stream. He placed his hand on the concave stretch that was her belly, letting two fingers rest in the yawn of her navel. He slipped downwards, grazing the tight skin of her waist with his fingertips. He reached her hair line and the muscles of her belly hardened as she raised herself up onto her elbows. She stayed his hand and drew him, yanked him, into a smothering kiss. She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself, her movement so brusque his chin bounced off her head.

He grasped the side of her hips, pushed her away and pulled her to him with a slap. Again and again with more force and velocity. Tine pressed her face deeper into the cushion grunting into the foam at each thrust. The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

We can’t wait until the establishment tears our books a new one for bad sex. We have to confess that we were very taken with Somerville’s hat tip to Nabokov, however. That’s how it’s done, even if your sex is kind of lolsy.

Heaven is a novel with pacing like a Dan Brown novel: the book’s many short chapters are shot through with scenes where the action stops and people have long conversations on interesting topics.

In Heaven, those topics are on sexuality and spirituality. The spirituality is of a predominantly Christian sort, but it’s the kind of Christian spirituality found among the refugee camps of those disaffected souls who chafed on the boundaries of their parents’ church.

Yet many of the ideas espoused in the book are fairly familiar to theologians despite being foreign to American Neo-Puritanism. For example, the primary metaphor of the book — stripping as a spiritual act of surrender, vulnerability, and transparency, and sexuality as intimacy — is theologically right in line with traditional understandings of the Song of Songs, that book of erotic poetry in the Bible.

When the Christian church was less than three hundred years old, one of the earliest Christian commentators (named Origen) explored the Song of Songs as an allegory for the relationship of the seeker’s soul and Christ. Sexuality thereby became a key allegorical symbol for the way in which you accept Christ into you. This symbol surfaces in mystics like Julian of Norwich and continues to influence mystics even to the present day. Using stripping as an allegory for tempting people towards the Divine seems to be a natural extension of that tradition, and Kimberly Cain lays out a story that really makes sense of that allegory and shows much of its beauty.

That said, the book was at times a bit hard to relate to. It became easier once I realized that the main character — Eve — is intended to be archetypal: in many scenes, she seemed more angel than human, and once you realize that’s what the point is, you read the book a slightly different way. There were also cases when I felt like the book was targeting a different audience: this is especially true of those scenes that rejoiced in affirming feminine sexuality. Having been indoctrinated as a child with the “male” set of sexual neuroses instead of the “female” set, those scenes didn’t manage to land.

All in all, the book was pretty good. And coming from me, “pretty good” is pretty high praise for a novel. It’s a relatively easy read, playful in parts and dense in others. It is obviously an authentic book: unlike the Dan Brown novels, there is an air of truth and sincerity in the conversations and actions of the characters. It was nice to end the summer with that book, and it’d work well as an escape when surrounded by a family gathering. The book also comes with a CD in the back which has some solid up-beat, base-heavy songs, just in line with the theme. You can pick it up at HeavenTheNovel.com.

Those are the words of Rabbi Irwin Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life.

“If the forbidden is what is exciting, we have to work hard to bring the taboo into our most intimate relationships,” he goes on. “If transgression is so titillating, we have to learn to transgress where we’re most safe. Our relationships can be nothing less than pleasure chamber. But we need to create situations and takes risks that are out of the ordinary and push the envelope.”

Via Tinamarie Bernard.

On her site, Blume writes about censorship:

I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen.

Today, it’s not only language and sexuality (the usual reasons given for banning my books) that will land a book on the censors’ hit list. It’s Satanism, New Age-ism and a hundred other isms, some of which would make you laugh if the implications weren’t so serious. Books that make kids laugh often come under suspicion; so do books that encourage kids to think, or question authority; books that don’t hit the reader over the head with moral lessons are considered dangerous.

Since the 1980s, when she found herself the target of censorship, Blume has been reaching out to other writers, as well as teachers and librarians, under fire, and working tirelessly with the National Coalition Against Censorship to protect the freedom to read. She is the editor of Places I Never Meant To Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers.

Thanks for telling it like it is, Judy. Happy birthday.

Image via Answers.com.

This, according to the Washington Post is the passage that caused Culpepper County, Virginia, school public officials to pull the book from the shelves.

This passage is present in the Definitive Edition of Anne Frank’s memoir, written between 1942 and 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

This book is usually assigned to eighth-graders.

“What we have asked is that this particular edition will not be taught,” said Jim Allen, director of instruction for the school system. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. So we listened to the parent and we pulled it.”

The book will still be taught; the original work published by the girl’s father, Otto Frank, was heavily edited before publication in 1947, eliminating young Frank’s criticism of other people living in the Annex and all her discussions about sexuality.

It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death, in 1995, that the Anne Frank Foundation published the unedited, definitive version, which contains the passage. From now on, the edited version free of these passages will be used.

“I’m happy when parents get involved with these things because it lets me know that they are really looking and have their kids’ best interest (in mind). And that’s where good parenting and good teaching comes in,” Allen said.

Sex is evil! Water it down! Cut it away! Sanitize everything there is to read about it! Come on, world! This will definitely help our children grow up informed and aware!

If our sarcasm isn’t clear in the above statement, we’ll make it clear: we here at Sex and the 405 do not approve of this move.

I would also like to take this moment to thank my parents for sending me to private schools all of my life, most of which were run by super-progressive heretics.

Image from Amazon.com. Information from The Star Exponent and The Washington Post, via Eric Ludzenski.