A Polite Society Soiree

This is a blog about sex, but we like to focus on everything that leads to and follows after sex, too. To not do so would be an abrogation of our responsibilities to you, dear readers, and that just won’t do.

One of the things we set out to do when we first launched Sex and the 405–other than inform you about sex and relationships and inspire you to give and get some often and well–is to bring a little charm back to living. So it should come as no surprise that we’re now pimping I See Rude People: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite society by Amy Alkon.

The Los Angeles Press Club is throwing her a soiree at World Café in Santa Monica next Wednesday, January 27.

WHEN: Wednesday, January 27, from 6:30 to 9:30PM
6:30 – 7:30PM: complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres
7:30: reading, followed by open bar and more hors d’oeuvres

WHERE: World Café, Santa Monica
2820 Main Street (at Ashland Way)
Santa Monica, CA 90405
310.392.1661

To RSVP, go here.

I don’t know about you, but it could be a charming little date on top of being, you know, a book by a brilliant, absolutely hilarious woman.

John Edwards Confesses, Enquirer Nominates Itself for a Pulitzer–You Know, Typical Post-Sex Scandal Stuff

John Edwards has finally confessed what we already knew: that he’s the father of Rielle Hunter’s two-year-old child.

Below is his statement, as reported by the Washington Post:

I am Quinn’s father. I will do everything in my power to provide her with the love and support she deserves. I have been able to spend time with her during the past year and trust that future efforts to show her the love and affection she deserves can be done privately and in peace.

It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me. I have been providing financial support for Quinn and have reached an agreement with her mother to continue providing support in the future.

To all those I have disappointed and hurt, these words will never be enough, but I am truly sorry.

John R. Edwards

Edward and his wife of over 30 years, Elizabeth, have separated.

His confession session comes two weeks before the publication of a tell-all book by his former aide Andrew Young, whom, if you remember, at one point said was the father of the baby. The Politician is due out Tuesday, February 2. Yum, yum.

In related news, The National Enquirer is nominating itself for a Pulitzer based on their scoop and coverage of the saga.

Nerd Says: “No Glove, No Love”

And because you can always trust Craigslist to bring you the best of the best when it comes to our innermost desires, I present to you The Power Glove Handjob:

I can’t think of anything nerdier–but no nerds may apply!

From GamerCrave:

The Nintendo Power Glove, released in 1989, was an early Nintendo attempt at motion control. Players who donned the glove were granted no sexual favors, but instead the ability to control video games by moving a hand around. We all freaked out after seeing it in The Wizard, but it was too gimmicky and expensive, and it flopped. Good thing someone’s trying to put it to use, though I’m not sure what’s worse: Someone asking for a Power Glove hand job, or a sex toy that’s been collecting dust in a basement for 20 years.

I wonder what the GirlGamer community would have to say about this?

Oh, and PS? Here’s a Nintendo Power Glove on eBay, for those of you who think this is a brilliant idea. You’re welcome.

Screencap and information via GamerCrave.

Crowdsourced Sex: Coming & Crying

“It’s not the business of all sex writers everywhere to solve the world’s sex problems.”

Written by tech and sex writer and sex educator Melissa Gira Grant, this statement would become the premise of the book Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed. Using crowdsourcing to fill the book with real stories, Grant and Meaghan O’Connell recently completed the first round of pledges to have it published.

(In fact, demand is so huge, they doubled the amount of money they initially set as a goal in the first three days.)

Unsurprising, especially once you read Grant’s development on the original premise:

Sex writing within the limited scope of “erotica” has been unfairly burdened with rehabilitating sex in public. We as writers have to turn in work that exalts sex, always treats sex like the hottest, the most revelatory thing two (or however many more the CFS required) bodies can do together.

Sex within “real” “literature” doesn’t fare much better, where even if only a very tiny group of writers insist we write in a “post-sex” world, the rest are left making sense of how to not just fade-to-black on fucking.

Or worse than all of that and certainly within that, sex is never treated as a site of inquiry in its own right. Sex stands in for “freedom” or “cultural disintegration” or “womanhood” or whatever. Sex is asked to be too much, and “sex writers” are expected to answer to all of it. Oh, and make it really hot, too.

For some reason, the internet gives sex writing the room to breathe and be more than someone else’s platform to sell a thing or be a thing, anything but what it is: storytelling from a raw and flushed and necessary place. Sex, as commercialized and stupid as it gets online, is also still ours. The continuous partial disclosure of blogging (as in, you would never maybe say this much if you had to do it all at once) makes writing sex even more human, gives us nigh infinite space to say what needs to be said and not have to worry about how well it will do on a rack at the airport.

If we’re successful, we’ll have a beautiful, crazy, lovely book and before it even hits our shelves, a whole lot of people will have let us know how much they want that, too.

Watch the book trailer:

Now go get a copy.

Image from Coming & Crying. Information via Melissa Gira Grant.

Britney, Sugarbaby

I’m not a golddigger. Actually, scratch that: I’m not greedy.

I’m smart, really. All I ever wanted in my life was stability and security. If I have those two things, everything else seems to flow elegantly along in my life.

I’m actually not about playing a game with men. I’m actually turned on by money and material wealth.

If a man demanded I bend over for a grand, I would quiver all over. The idea of a man showering me in gifts makes me want to fuck all day. I’m aroused by the power and possession a man could have over me. Rip my dress and panties off. But I insist you keep the Manolos on, the ones you just bought me. I’ll play hard to get, but all you have to do is enforce your power and open your wallet. Then I’m all yours.

Fashion is my foreplay. Cars are the lube. Money is the key to my dark heart.

BEGINNINGS

Not even 30 years old, and I’ve had my taste of the nuclear family life and built a business. My father could never provide. My men could never provide. In fact, I was often the sugarmomma, to my dismay. I took care of my men, who tended to be distressed or despondent amidst their menial tasks. God forbid they lift an arm or take a risk for something important. One fluttered between jobs on whim. The other was an emotional sideshow.

I’d grown emotionally detached, even moreso than I had been during my childhood. I had no room for love, as much as I truly needed and wanted it. I worked until my hands bled, until my soul felt no warmth anymore. And it filled me with an envy for the women out in the world getting what they needed at the wink of an eye or tousle of their hair. I was beautiful and talented. Why was I working so hard to please others and make them happy, all the while I was fading away? I had all the heart in the world for adventure, and desperately needed it to thrive, for my own work and business to bloom.

I decided to make a change. I have a fetish for money and power, I’m sexual, I’m young, pretty and emotionally unavailable–I have all the components to being a successful, and delightful sugar baby.

I’m single, untethered by anyone or anything.

I’m game.

This is where I will archive my experiences in the transition.

Britney du Jour (@britneydujour) blew in to Los Angeles from Wholesome USA in the name of a Hollywood-style ever-after. Now that she sees this isn’t going to pan out, she’s decided to take charge… and start charging. Check back every Thursday for posts about her journey from hard working girl-next-door to working girl. Image in this post is by missmareck.

The World’s Ultimate Libertine Gets Jealous?

Yes.

I was in college when The Sexual Life of Catherine M. came out. That, for me, was the perfect time to indulge in the auto-biographical account of the French critic’s orgies and anonymous sex days. That book and I enjoy a somewhat adversarial relationship now due to its detached, blatantly unerotic nature, but even so, I love that an intelligent, established woman came out about her sexual exploits.

“I reveled in it,” Millet says when she looks back on it. “It’s what I was truly good at–what I was the best at. I loved particularly the anonymity, the abandonment of orgies. The sensation that one was glorying in this unbelievable freedom, this transcendence… My sex life was always very important for me, for the construction of my personality, the definition of myself.”

Millet is back, this time with a book to shock us because of its emotional and psychological honesty. Her new book Jealousy covers three years during her marriage to Jacques Henric, when she discovered he was having infidelities. She had her own lovers, but the discovery still destroyed her. The Guardian elaborates:

“I had no need,” she has written, “to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships.” And: “I had love at home. I sought only pleasure outside.” So this sudden and vicious attack of “the timeless and universal malady”, she explains, was “a real crisis. Physical. I felt like there was no way out; I was living a contradiction. I knew I could never make him understand the pain he was causing me; I could only agree when he said: But how can you possibly reproach me, with the life you’ve led? Morally very difficult to deal with.”

“The Sexual Life of Catherine M took a long time to write,” Millet explains. “But that was mainly just my own technical difficulty in writing. For Jealousy, I had to make a real effort, not so much to describe the crisis itself, but to relate the way I had behaved. Going through his papers, opening up his drawers, reading his letters–it doesn’t exactly cover one in glory, does it? That took me ages. Forever. These are very deep impulses, and they’re much more difficult to write about than mere sex.”

The jealousy is sprung not just at the idea of Henric with others, but also at the notion that sex was no longer what it had been for her.

“It was in the period when I was taking less and less pleasure in orgies,” Millet recounts. “And the discovery that Jacques was having relationships with other women perhaps exacerbated a feeling that I was returning to the state of self-doubt I’d known when I was younger. It’s as if I no longer possessed the sexual excellence that was mine when I was young; Jacques had it now. This was his moment, not mine. I imagined him enjoying a pleasure, a privilege, that I had once enjoyed. I suffered more from that than from any fear that he might leave me.”

Jealousy details the spectrum of her emotions and thoughts as carefully as her previous books does orgies and sexual positions.

When The Guardian‘s Jon Henley asks her whether the experience had changed her perspective in regard to having relationships, Millet doesn’t hesitate:

“I continue to believe that love and sexual desire are feelings you can experience divergently,” she says. “You can be attracted to and love many people at the same time. Of course, there are relationships that are more important, deeper, than others. But there are an infinity of ways in which a person can experience love. We’re fighting against the heritage of romanticism, mon ami. I hate giving advice, but we need to rid ourselves of the notion of l’amour unique. It’s not like that in real life. Romantic love affairs generally end in tears, you know. The point is that even having a relationship like that doesn’t stop you having others. Even from loving others.”

Jealousy is now available in the U.S.

Image from Groove Press. Information from The Guardian.

Lindsay Lohan Sex Tape (NSFW)

It’s been five days and we have still heard nothing on that story of a supposed Lindsay Lohan sex tape. Needless to say, we’re crushed. As some of you may know, our editor here at Sex and the 405 has a huge thing for redheads, and even though LiLo’s blonde at the moment, after her shoot for Muse mag, we were left quite desperate for this alleged 47-second sex tape which the starlet supposedly made with a money-grubbing waiter looking to score a quick $200,000.

London’s Daily Mirror reports Lohan enjoyed a brief affair with the waiter last year and cites a spy who says the vid is dynamite: “It’s pretty seedy and shows Lindsay engaging in a particular sex act which, obviously should remain behind closed doors.”

I get short and sweet, but 47 seconds? That’s a quickie record.

According to Fleshbot, the footage was offered to Hustler, but they declined.

The 23-year-old Lohan is allegedly “devastated,” though I honestly don’t see how 47 seconds is any more “damaging” to her reputation than the yummy video she shot for Muse.

Come on, Lindsay, you tease, GIVE IT TO US!

Information from PopCrunch, The Daily Mirror, Fleshbot and The Huffington Post.

Marriage: A Sweet Deal for Dudes?

It looks like marriage is a sweet deal after all–for dudes.

A new Pew Research Center report has uncovered that a larger share of today’s men, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, and a larger share of women are married to men with less education and income.

“In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men,” wrote the report’s authors, Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn. “In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men.”

Median household income rose 60 percent between 1970 and 2007 for married men, married women and unmarried women. It went up only 16 percent for unmarried men.

In 1970, according to the report, 28 percent of wives between 30 and 44 had husbands who were better educated than they were, outnumbering the 20 percent whose husbands had less education. By 2007, only 19 percent of wives had husbands with more education, compared with 28 percent whose husbands had less education.

Only 4 percent of husbands had wives who earned more than they did in 1970, compared with 22 percent in 2007.

During that span, women’s earnings grew 44 percent, compared with 6 percent growth for men, although a gender gap remains. According to 2009 Census Bureau figures, women with full-time jobs earned salaries equal to 77.9 percent of what men earned, compared with 52 percent in 1970.

The Pew report found that unmarried women in 2007 had higher household incomes than their 1970 counterparts at each level of education, while unmarried men without post-secondary education lost ground because their real earnings decreased and they didn’t have a wife’s wages to offset that decline.

Unmarried men with college degrees made income gains of 15 percent, but were outpaced by the 28 percent gains of unmarried women with degrees.

Ladies? One word: pre-nup. Trust me.

Information from the AP.

Social Media Is Bigger Than Porn

I can count the number of times I accessed porn online in 2009–it’s under 50. The number of tweets I sent out, on the other hand? I’m going to guesstimate around 4,000. And that’s just Twitter. Social media is my porn.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. A few months ago Reuters reported on this phenomenon:

Bill Tancer, a self-described “data geek”, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.

Some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows, belly button lint and ceiling fans are on the list of people’s top fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.

Others give an indication of people’s interests or emotions, with an annual spike in searches for anti-depression drugs around Thanksgiving time in the United States.

Tancer, in his new book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters”, said analyzing web searches did not just reflect what was happening online but gave a wider picture of society and people’s behavior.

“There are some patterns to our Internet use that we tend to repeat very specifically and predictably, from diet searches, to prom dresses, to what we do around the holidays,” Tancer told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

Although maybe I should probably disclose that I use social media as a primary screening tool for lovers and that, while porn provides great visuals, social media actually gets me some ass.

Information from Reuters, via Callie Simms.

Blondes Have More Fun? They’d Better Or They’ll Kick Your Ass

Good morning! How about a little pseudo-science to kick off the day?

A study by the University of California, Santa Barbara is suggesting that blondes are more “warlike” than brunettes and redheads. The researchers, led by Aaron Sell, speculate that this aggression comes from a lifetime of attracting more attention than women with darker hair color. They’re calling this “the princess effect.”

And it’s not just limited to natural blondes–box blondes and attractive women are equally vulnerable to the princess effect.

“We expected blondes to feel more entitled than other young women — this is southern California, the natural habitat of the privileged blonde,” said Sell, who led the study which has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “What we did not expect to find was how much more warlike they are than their peers on campus.”

The research indicates that the more special people feel, the more likely they are to get angry to reach their goals.

“Blondes are more confident in their abilities, although the results do not necessarily support their confidence,” said Catherine Salmon, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Redlands, California. “Maybe responding to their own stereotypes, brunettes tend to work harder and expect less special treatment. Women who go blonde quickly get used to the privileges of blondeness — usually male attentiveness.”

The study, which examined the link between confidence and aggression, involved a small (and questionable) sample of 156 female undergrads. I put stock in Survival of the Prettiest, but this needs more development.

I was blonde once in my life (triple-process, which took some six hours) and I’m trying to remember if I got my way more than usual. I can’t really remember. I usually always do. The roots were a bitch, though. Every thirteen days. Like clockwork. Now that makes me warlike just to think about.

Image from Anne Bowerman. Information from the BBC, TimesOnline, via Guy Kawasaki.