Frightening speculation via The Next Web this morning, though not entirely unsurprising. Apparently, The Telegraph is reporting that a number of erotic novels have disappeared from the top UK sellers list of iBooks.

They report this seems to have occurred overnight. Analysts with whom they spoke told the paper, “Book chart analysts said it was unlikely that all the erotic titles could have dropped out of the list at the same moment without being deliberately removed.”

Apple, of course, declined to comment. Chad Catacchio at Next Web writes:

Let’s for a second say that Apple is intentionally removing them from either the charts and/or altogether (which we’re not saying it is doing either, but just for argument’s sake): this could become a very large issue. Aside from outright censoring of books (which is what this would be) what would it mean for other ebook apps on iOS devices? Does Apple plan to ban the Kindle app because of the kinds of books it sells? And if it doesn’t, why wouldn’t consumers just buy their erotic novellas from Amazon instead, skipping iBooks all together?

While we’re not 100 percent sure this is what occurred here, the fact that we suspect Apple of this is enough. We cannot trust that company to let us make our own decisions when it comes to sex. They have regulated what’s appropriate before and it’s ridiculous to think this will change any time soon.

Think about that next time you buy one of their products, iSheep. If you think hype and “slick design” is worth your freedom, you don’t deserve that freedom.

We here at Sex and the 405 are about education. We support sexual education, we support things like “oral sex” in the dictionary and so on. Generally, we believe kids should dress however they want and be allowed space in their discovery of identity. But this is ridiculous:

This is a bandeau bra for kids ages 4 to 6. It has cups and clear straps. Yeah, we get it, baby wants to be like mommy. But come on. What next? Baby corsets? We already have baby heels.

We never thought we’d hear ourselves say this but that’s just inappropriate.

Via Jessica Gottlieb.

There is nothing like a sex scandal to rock the local press and that’s exactly what we’ve got on our hands here.

According to KTLA, the Rialto Police Benefit Association’s union building has a sex room, which is more like a nondescript room to which officers have keys and which they use for their liaisons.

A woman by the name of Nancy Holtgreve came forward recently stating she had sex with officer James Dobbs while he was on duty in this room. She became pregnant and later gave birth to their son. Her statements come as a result of Dobbs allegedly missing child-support payments.

But this isn’t an isolated incident. The two had sex several times last year in the sex room. Holtgreve also reported that other officers routinely meet there for sex. So far, four officers being placed on paid leave.

“This is not representative of this department,” Police Chief Mark Kling told KTLA. “We are going to hold these officers accountable if these allegations are true. And if the allegations aren’t true, we are going to do everything we can to clear their names.”

Holtgreve told several media outlets that the ordeal has been a “living hell” for her.

“Just because you’re a police officer, it doesn’t give you the right to use intimidation,” Holtgreve said. “I guess if you pay your union dues you can do anything you want.”

Uh oh. Heads are going to roll for this one.

Information from KTLA, via Eric Richards.

Scientists didn’t have a good idea about how the cephalopods – octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish – of the deep get in on. The problem is in the way the body is set up. Most of what appears to be the body and head of, say a squid, is actually a hood, called a mantle. They use the mantle both to move through the water and to force water across their gills by forcing water out of the bottom, like jet propulsion. But that also means that their sex organs are protected inside.

That makes a pretty big problem for the dudes. How do they get their sperm past the female’s mantle? If they spray some sperm up in there, it won’t stick around long since it will get washed out as she propels all that seawater through her mantle.

Shallow-water dwelling cephalopods have figured out a solution. They have short penises which produce small “packets” of sperm called spermatophores. One of their eight eponymous limbs is actually modified to transfer this sperm into the proper receptacle on the female cephalopod.

But scientists still had no good idea how their deeper-dwelling cousins got the job done. Deep-water male squid are known to use a more primitive method, which involves somehow injecting their sperm into the female’s body. But how? “Obviously a strongly elongated penis is the solution,” says Dr Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department, who explains how he and his colleagues made the discovery:

“The mature male squid was caught during a deep-water research cruise on the Patagonian slope. We took the animal from the catch, and it was moribund with arms and tentacles still moving, and chromatophores on the skin contracting and expanding,” he told the BBC.

“When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment, we witnessed an unusual event.

“The penis of the squid, which had extended only slightly over the mantle margin, suddenly started to erect, and elongated quickly to 67cm total length, almost the same length as the whole animal.”

…

The squid uses its lengthy organ to reach into the body of the female, and it then injects the sperm directly to prevent it being washed away.

How the sperm injected into a female’s body then reaches her reproductive organs remains a mystery.

Male with erect penis and ejaculated spermatophores on table (penis is white tubular structure in lower half of the picture).

I’m not really sure what the moral of this story is. But next time someone calls me a squidfucker, I will take it as a compliment.

Signing off, polyps. Remember! You don’t know Dick.
…But don’t worry. We’re here to help you.


Information and photo from BBC Earth News.

Dick Feynman (@feynmandick) is a Los Angeles-based scientist, specializing in diluting scientific research findings into tasty, bite-sized bacon-flavored snacks for the unwashed masses.

We here at Sex and the 405 think that science is totally hot and sexy. As such, we endeavor to bring you every opportunity we can for you to participate in sexy science yourself.

We’re cool like that.

So, get this: researchers at McGill University are studying male genital self-perceptions.

The purpose of this study is to better understand how men evaluate certain features of their genitals, and the factors that influence this perception. It is hoped that better understanding of male genital image concerns and the factors involved may improve body image treatment in the future.

This seems like pretty important research to us, so we hope you’ll participate. Plus, when the instructions include the line “you will need to measure the length and girth of your flaccid AND erect penis before completing this survey,” well, how could we NOT encourage participation?

Find the survey here.

As in sex, consent is crucial in human subjects research. Please participate responsibly – be sure to read the entire consent form before proceeding.

Photo by flickr user iliahi.

Dick Feynman (@feynmandick) is a Los Angeles-based scientist, specializing in diluting scientific research findings into tasty, bite-sized bacon-flavored snacks for the unwashed masses.

The new iPhone is out! Lines at all Apple stores, like club openings for unfortunate-dressed people. Sadly, the device is apparently having some issues. A lot of users are reporting reception issues. Per Engadget:

So, we just spoke with Apple and got the straight dirt on the reception issues that have been plaguing users today… and it’s a little surprising. In essence, Apple cops to the fact there are reception issues with the new iPhone — namely, that if you cover the bottom-left corner of the phone and bridge the gap between the notch there with your naked flesh, you could see some signal degradation.

Jobs’ response?

Yeah. That’s what he said.

Via Engadget.

A common superstition among strippers is that earnings are directly related to their menstrual cycles.

When they’re ovulating, the theory goes, they make more money.

Well, guess what?

There may be some truth to that.

Research conducted by Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur and Brent D. Jordan at the department of psychology at the University of New Mexico surveying the earnings and cycles of 18 dancers over 60 days found that there was an interaction between the phase of a dancer’s cycle and her earnings:

Earning average per five-hour period:

• During estrus: $335
• During luteal phase: $260
• During menstruation: $185

Participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak.

“These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting,” the researchers stated. “These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.”

Indeed!

Photo by Nicole Faraday (damn, that girl can hustle!). Information from Discoblog, via Dick Feynman.

Are humans the only species that masturbates? Well, yes and no. We may not be the only species that likes to play with ourselves, but we appear to be the only species that does it for the explicit purpose of cumming. And we do it A LOT.

Scientific American blogger Jesse Bering tells us:

In a now-classic, pre-Internet-porn study (PDF) by British evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, male university students were found to masturbate to ejaculation about every 72 hours, and “on the majority of occasions, their last masturbation is within 48 hours of their next in-pair copulation.” If they’re not having intercourse every day, that is to say, men tend to pleasure themselves to completion no more than two days prior to having actual sex.

Any casual visitor to the zoo has probably seen monkeys pleasuring themselves, though. Right? Well, maybe. But again, not to completion, and this has only reliably been seen with captive individuals, in research labs or zoos for example. Not in the wild:

In a 1983 study from the International Journal of Primatology, the sexual behaviors of several groups of wild gray-cheeked mangabeys were observed for over 22 months in the Kibale Forest of Western Uganda. There was plenty of sex, particularly during the females’ peak swellings. But just two incidents of male masturbation leading to ejaculation were observed. Yes, that’s right. Whereas healthy human males can’t seem to go without masturbating for longer than 72 hours, two measly cases of masturbating mangabeys were observed over a nearly two-year period.

University College London anthropologist E.D. Starin didn’t have much luck spying incidents of masturbation in red colobus monkeys in Gambia, either. In a brief 2004 article published in Folia Primatologica, Starin reports that over a 5.5-year period of accumulated observations totaling more than 9,500 hours, she saw only 5–count ‘em, five, incidents of her population of five male colobus monkeys masturbating to ejaculation, and these rare incidents occurred only when nearby sexually receptive females were exhibiting loud courtship displays and copulations with other males.

So why don’t other species get themselves off like we do?

Bering thinks it has to do with the fact that we can imagine. That’s right. We can conjure up wild, steamy, erotic, orgasm-inducing scenarios full of friends, lovers, acquaintances, Marisa Miller, AV Flox, Dick Feynman, the toaster (hey, people have strange fantasies and we support it), or people we’ve never even met. We can visualize them in our mind and we can imagine how they would feel and taste.

Go home tonight and just TRY to masturbate successfully without having some sort of mental imagery playing out in your mind’s eye. Think only of pure whiteness. If you come back and tell me you can do it, well, you’re lying. In fact, the ability to dream up those delicious fantasies may be the thing that allows for masturbation in the first place.

And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?

We here at Sex and the 405 certainly hope not. That would suck. And not in a good way. Mmmmmmm. Sucking. You’ll have to excuse us while we, er, address our own mental imagery.

Signing off, polyps. Remember! You don’t know Dick.
…But don’t worry. We’re here to help you.


Information from Scientific American Blogs.

Dick Feynman (@feynmandick) is a Los Angeles-based scientist, specializing in diluting scientific research findings into tasty, bite-sized bacon-flavored snacks for the unwashed masses.

Our fearless editrix finds herself this evening pacing about the Sex and the 405 newsroom (naked, of course) bemoaning the lack of white bread to be found in California. But fear not, for while the rest of the staff attempts to distract her with Star Wars porn, I am here to educate and entertain.

Introducing: A ball sack for your ball sack. A sling for your thing. A sock for your cock. A thong for your dong.

According to Scicurious at Neurotopia:

For many years now, scientists have been trying to come up with a reliable form of male contraceptive that…isn’t a condom. There’s a lot of burden on women when it comes to contraception (in terms of the pill, the ring, the patch, etc), and so for a while scientists have been looking for a way to give men more of an equal say. But hormones don’t appear to work very well.

So what did the scientists do? Polyester underpants. And they made the guys wear them for a whole year (the editrix pipes up: “ew, did they wear them during sex?!” we hope so.) Apparently sperm are sensitive to polyester, but not cotton. And not only that, research had shown that men who wore polyester underpants had lower sperm counts than those who prefer their testicles to be enshrined behind other materials. Scicurious continues:

So one of the ways in which polyester might work to reduce sperm count would be by causing it to be too warm, and thus making it difficult for sperm to mature. And having your balls too warm is probably a better contraceptive option compared to sitting on ice to send your balls in the other direction.

The other reason, however, is a bit more odd: electrostatic charge. Apparently polyester rubbing up against the skin produces an electrostatic charge which could somehow prevent sperm maturation.

And not only that! They did this to dogs also. And the dogs wore them for two years. According to blogger Jason Goldman at The Thoughtful Animal:

For the polyester group, there were no real changes in testicular temperature. But there was a significant decrease in sperm count and in motile sperms, which are sperms that are good swimmers. The Michael Phelpses of the sperm-o-sphere. There was also a significant increase in abnormal sperm count. There were small but statistically insignificant changes in hormones during the experiment. The testicular biopsy showed degeneration in the seminiferous tubules. After the underwear was removed, sperm counts reached pre-experimental levels by the eleventh month in ten of the twelve dogs in that group.

For both the cotton group as well as the control group, there were no changes in any of the measured variables throughout the entire three years of the experiment.

… We thought polyester shirts were a pretty effective contraceptive to begin with. Right?


Signing off, polyps. Remember! You don’t know Dick.
…But don’t worry. We’re here to help you.


LEGAL: We here at Sex and the 405 hereby absolve ourselves of all liability from attempts to create an electrostatic potential across your, or your partner’s, testicles.

Image from: Shafik, A. (1992). Contraceptive efficacy of polyester-induced azoospermia in normal men Contraception, 45 (5), 439-451 DOI: 10.1016/0010-7824(92)90157-O via Neurotopia. Information from Scienceblogs.

Dick Feynman (@feynmandick) is a Los Angeles-based scientist, specializing in diluting scientific research findings into tasty, bite-sized bacon-flavored snacks for the unwashed masses.

Help us! We’ve fallen into a Hawthorne novel and we can’t get out!

OK, not really. But get this — a New York woman recently arrested for lewd conduct after she was allegedly caught having sex in a park with her lover is facing an additional charge: adultery.

Suzanne Corona, 41, was busted getting down on a picnic table with Justin Amend, 29, last week, The New York Daily News reports.

“[The police officer] asked them what they were doing, and they said, ‘Just talking,’ and obviously they weren’t just talking,” said Officer Eric Hill, of the Batavia Police Department, where the crime took place.

They were charged with public lewdness and when it was found that Corona was married, the adultery charge was added. She faces up to 90 days in jail or a fine of $500.

Corona did not enter a plea at court on Tuesday. She vows to fight the constitutionality of the charge.

“One of the reasons you don’t see this charge more often is that the law in New York State requires that there must be corroboration,” Genesee County District Attorney Larry Friedman told the Daily News. Of course, in this instance, the infraction happened in a public park and there were witnesses.

“The police are not out conducting investigations looking for people committing adultery,” Friedman assured the public. “At this point, the charge is still pending.”

According to ABC News, nearly a dozen others have been similarly charged statewide — Scarlet Letter, much?