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Ever wonder where S&M bondage gear—whips, straps, masks, assless pants—is made? No? Well, you should have. The Times has a fascinating video piece about a company in Karachi, Pakistan that manufactures fetish wear and exports it to the West. (None of it looks quite as fanciful as the colorful, strange lingerie coming out of Syria). "Most of our customers are from New York," one of owners says. "Seventy percent are Democrats." Natch.
Two brothers from a poor family started the company, AQTH, in 2001. It now makes a million dollars a year, employs dozens, and only rarely runs into trouble with the devout Muslims who live next door. Though AQTH is flourishing, manufacturing "the famous spanking skirt" in Karachi ("it has all the back open for the spanking, while lovemaking," one of the brothers explains) is a little more complicated than manufacturing other less outré leather goods might be. The owner's wives haven't been told what the company produces and many of the employees don't know—or don't want to know—what they're making. One man thinks the sex swing he's crafting is actually a black-leather, silver-studded beach chair.
That said, the brothers are refreshingly unembarrassed about their product line, equating the items to the "spices of sex." One of their sales executives, a 25-year-old woman, refuses to pick a favorite piece, admonishing sternly that she has several. "I have a desire to wear some of the items," she goes on to say, "but not all of them."
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Ever wonder where S&M bondage gear—whips, straps, masks, assless pants—is made? No? Well, you should have. The Times has a fascinating video piece about a company in Karachi, Pakistan that manufactures fetish wear and exports it to the West. (None of it looks quite as fanciful as the colorful, strange lingerie coming out of Syria). "Most of our customers are from New York," one of owners says. "Seventy percent are Democrats." Natch.
Two brothers from a poor family started the company, AQTH, in 2001. It now makes a million dollars a year, employs dozens, and only rarely runs into trouble with the devout Muslims who live next door. Though AQTH is flourishing, manufacturing "the famous spanking skirt" in Karachi ("it has all the back open for the spanking, while lovemaking," one of the brothers explains) is a little more complicated than manufacturing other less outré leather goods might be. The owner's wives haven't been told what the company produces and many of the employees don't know—or don't want to know—what they're making. One man thinks the sex swing he's crafting is actually a black-leather, silver-studded beach chair.
That said, the brothers are refreshingly unembarrassed about their product line, equating the items to the "spices of sex." One of their sales executives, a 25-year-old woman, refuses to pick a favorite piece, admonishing sternly that she has several. "I have a desire to wear some of the items," she goes on to say, "but not all of them."
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The hoary old evolutionary explanation for gender differences is that males are slutty and females are choosy. Males sleep around in order to fertilize as many eggs as possible, while females guard their virtue until Prince Charming comes along. But with the advent of genetic techniques (and in my opinion, female biologists), scientists have found that nature overflows with wanton females. Figuring out evolutionary reasons for looseness in ladies is harder—since each egg can only be fertilized once, having lots of sex won't necessarily lead to more babies. A study on a European songbird, published in last month's Current Biology, reveals one possible reason for female infidelity—bastard chicks are bigger and stronger than their legit half-siblings.
The delighfully named blue tit (scientific name: Cyanistes caeruleus) is a common European songbird with a common songbird lifestyle—they mate for a season, the male defends his territory with song, and the female lays and incubates the eggs. But over 40 percent of the female blue tits are getting around all over blue tit town, cuckolding their mates right and left. When researchers examined the fate of chicks sired in and out of wedlock, they found that the illegitimate chicks were healthier because they were laid and hatched sooner, therefore getting more food and attention than the later-born chicks. If chicks born of cheating hatch earlier, survive better, and live to pass on mama's ways, no wonder female blue tits can't keep it in the nest.
The bastard advantage in blue tits is yet another demonstration that the natural world does not conform to conservative talking points. In fact, all that finger-shaking on premarital sex hurting women's ability to bond with future partners was based on research on the prairie vole. Thought to be a paragon of monogamy, those naughty, bad rodents were caught cheating on their partners-for-life last year. The free-flying blue tit lifestyle is no more unusual than living in a harem or inside your sweetie's intestine—it's monogamy that's hard to find.
Photograph of Blue Tit by Luc Viatour/Wikipedia
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In case you haven't heard, magazines are dying right and left. Who knows which one will be next? One day, that may be the sound of Anna Wintour's head rolling across the floor. Not unlike the adult movie industry, which thought it was so ahead of the curve, technologically-speaking, that it neglected to jump on the Internet bandwagon until its product had gotten away from them and it was far, far too late, magazines and newspapers have failed to exploit the Web to their advantage. Now, they're suffering for it.
No one will ever say so of Nick Knight, the British fashion photographer who created SHOWStudio.com, a website dedicated to closing the gap between high fashion and aspirational fashionistas. Most recently, Knight pulled back the curtain on a provocative shoot for Wallpaper* magazine's sex-themed July issue. On a set art directed by designer Peter Saville, Knight shot model Mariacarla Boscono et al. for a stripped-down, hyper-sexualized layout that, according to the site, "fetishis[ed] furniture, fashion and flesh alike." But rather than play the engimatic editorial game in which readers have to wait months to see by-then bygone fashions, SHOWStudio live-streamed the whole thing so you could peek behind the scenes at life live on a fashion shoot. And they tweeted it, too.
Now, the full series of clips from the shoot are available online. Be forewarned, the videos, which can be found here, feature more than one female breast and at least one not-turned-on sex machine. In other words, they're NSFW—unless you work for a bondage gear manufacturer in Karachi, Pakistan, that is.
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Ever had the feeling that your male is getting restless? Think he's not ready to settle down with you and have 10,000 larvae and a white-picket mud burrow? If you've got a hard time finding a man, a dwarf male might be right for you. Dwarf males have evolved to be tiny semi-parasites, forgoing feeding and swimming for a life of providing you with sperm-on-demand. Since dwarfism makes a good man easy to find (there he is, stuck to your shell or living in your gut!), it's perfect for gals on the go. Here are three easy ways to keep your dwarf male with you for ever and ever:
Attach him to your hip. The deep sea anglerfish (as seen in that hallmark of marine biology, Finding Nemo) keeps six or seven males by her side—literally. Anglerfish spend their lives in the pitch-black water, luring prey to their doom with a little light dangling off their foreheads. When a male encounters a female, he bites into her side with his giant scraggly teeth and hangs on for the rest of his life. Eventually, his organs degenerate and his blood supply fuses with that of the female, leaving him to function as simply a scrotum. Sure, a scrotum might not be so good for conversation or long walks on the beach, but he's not going anywhere.
Choose a live-inside boyfriend. In the whale-bone eating worm Osedax, dwarf males inhabit the female's intestine. In this case, sex is determined by the environment—if a larva lands on a nice fresh whale skeleton, it turns into a female. But if a larva gets ingested by a female, it turns into a male and spends its life inside her gut with up to 100 harem-mates. As long as you don't get indigestion, he'll never leave you.
Make him give up a big something. If he won't permanently attach, there are still ways to make it hard for him to go anywhere. Amongst the free-living triangle spiders, the male body size has shrunk, but the female anatomy remains the same. In order to please their ladies, male triangle spiders have to drag around enormous, disproportionate male organs called "palps." Upon reaching adulthood, a male breaks off one of his two palps in order to be able to walk. The remaining palp is for you—and if you aren't pleased you can always tear it off and eat him.
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Don't you hate it when you accidentally have sex with your sister? This happens to Indian meal moths, a common kitchen pest that feeds on grains and cereals. Being moths, they don't really care about the moral issues, but offspring of an incestuous moth union are likely to be infertile. And since the moths have only a week get busy before heading off to the Great Pantry in the Sky, they can't afford too many reproductive dead ends.
But new research, published in this month's Animal Behavior, shows that male moths can stop worrying about fruitlessly spending their sperm on their sisters. Male Indian meal moths are tantric masters. If they're getting down with an unrelated lady friend, they give her ejaculate chock-filled with the very finest of sperm. But if they met their sweetie in the next cocoon over, they only release half as many sperm. That way, the moth isn't wasting energy on a whole Flowers in the Attic scene and can save his sperm for a less related lady.
While many female insects have a built-in morning-after pill that allows them to discard sperm they don't like, it was thought that male insects just had to thrust and think of England. But apparently even male moths yearn for control over the ultimate fate of their gametes. After all, when a single sperm can make the difference between being a grandpa moth or evolutionary roadkill, every sperm is indeed sacred.
Photograph of mating Indian Meal Moths by Richardus / Wikipedia.
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It must be the season of the listicle. Too lazy to write an article, or, heck, even create a charticle, print and online writers turn to the list in an attempt to draw as many list-loving readers as possible. The latest comes from the folks at Nerve.com, who have seen fit to list: "The Twenty Sexiest Ugly People." Fair enough. I've long been enamored with the "beautiful uglies," or what the French refer to as jolie laide: "the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter: a bump on the nose, eyes that are set too closely together, a jagged smear of a mouth."
Nerve's collection of the seemingly hideously sexy—or is that sexily hideous?—includes Daisy De La Hoya (if you don't watch VH1, never mind), Marilyn Manson (his screeching anthem "The Beautiful People" comes to mind), Iggy Pop (for some reason I can't quite explain, I must admit I would not kick him out of bed for eating crackers), Sandra Bernhard (a "jagged smear of a mouth," indeed), and Biz Markie (interesting choice, no matter how you slice it).
Some picks are spot on, I think: Tilda Swinton I adore, Mickey Rourke embodies the concept perfectly, and the twisted features of the terrifically transgendered Amanda Lepore hypnotize (me, at least). Some others, I don't get: Woody Allen? Amy Winehouse? Paul Giamatti? I can't say I associate any of those three with any kind of burning sexuality, above or below the surface. Of course, it's all so subjective when it comes to looks, sexuality, attraction. In any case, it's sort of delightful to see a list that celebrates something other than the cookie-cutter looks of Brad, Angelina, and George. Enough of that already. Bring on the sexy freaks.
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An interesting new study reported on by Science Daily suggests that evolutionary psychologists might be wrong to speculate that women are choosier than men about mates. In the study, 350 undergraduates participated in a speed-dating situation in which women as well as men moved from prospective partner to partner. In typical speed-dating scenarios, the men move while the women stay put. This simple change had a profound effect on how women rated the desirability of their prospective dates. As the article puts it,
Regardless of gender, those who rotated experienced greater romantic desire for their partners, compared to those who sat throughout the event. The rotators, compared to the sitters, tended to have a greater interest in seeing their speed-dating partners again.
"Given that men generally are expected—and sometimes required—to approach a potential love interest, the implications are intriguing," Finkel [one of the study's designers] said.
As regular readers of this blog know, I'm skeptical of most evolutionary psych explanations of "why" women are a certain way and men another, and it doesn't surprise me to find that what ev psych types want to see as "essential" behavior (women are choosier about partners because having a child involves more risk and investment for them) doesn't entirely hold up. It may be that women tend to be choosier and more passive about approaching mates for just this reason; but that is hardly a cut-and-dried social quality, as this study suggests.
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Recently, British film censors cut a movie scene where a woman appeared to ejaculate, because they believed the fluid must be urine, and British obscenity laws forbid urinating on fellow actors. But female ejaculation is a well documented medical phenomenon, according to this history of female ejaculation in the New Scientist, and only resisted by the medical establishment because, well, women can't be equal in everything.
The Kama Sutra mentions "female semen." One 17th century Dutch physician mentioned "liquid as usually comes from the pudenda in one gush." The researcher who discovered the "G" spot and then named it after himself documented cases involving so much liquid they required a large towel to clean up.
More recently, a few gifted women have demonstrated for dumbstruck gynecologists. But the establishment insists this is just some form of incontinence. Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist at Mount Sinai and author of How Sex Works, is out to prove them wrong. She has tested the fluid to prove that it has low urea, a hallmark of urine. In her singular quest for equality she is out to prove that the fluid originates in a female prostate—a part of female anatomy often left out of women's anatomy textbooks. She is even studying whether it has the same chemicals that are found in semen.
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Last month, Pat Robertson fretted that hate-crime legislation would lead to the protection of people who "like to have sex with ducks." His remark resulted in a delightful Robertson-mocking pro-duck-sex song released last week by musical group Garfunkel and Oates. Robertson doesn't have to worry too much about human-on-duck sex - it's clearly illegal since quacking doesn't qualify as consent. But ducks are no innocent victims. Rather, their giant members and coercive sexual practices make them the perfect posterbird for heterosexual sex gone awry.
Most birds forgo genitalia for a single all-purpose opening called the cloaca. Waterfowl are the well-endowed exception. The Argentinian lake duck is the most impressive—one individual had a phallus as long as its entire body— but most ducks, geese, and swans have some kind of phallus. Female ducks have equally elaborate reproductive tracts, called oviducts, with spirals and twists and dead ends. (Incidentally, while male duck phalluses have been studied for years, no one noticed the ladies' oviducts until 2007, when researcher Dr. Patricia Brennan figured "Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.”)
Ducks with teeny weenies do live the nuclear family dream (at least for a season), with a daddy duck, a mommy duck, and some adorable little ducklings. But amongst the webfooted Ron Jeremys, phallus and oviduct size is related to sexual violence. Female ducks in large-phallused species choose a mate for the season, but other males will still try to forcibly copulate with her. Since several males can assault a single female, duck sex can be an alarming sight.
Though a duck female may not be able to avoid her attackers, researchers suggest that complicated internal anatomy prevents unwanted fertilization. In other words, if the female duck isn't into it, the bends and twists in her oviduct make it hard for the male to get his phallus position. Considering only 2 percent to 5 percent of ducklings are conceived during forced matings, most of that sperm probably ends up in one of the oviduct's dead ends.
If larger phalluses mean greater fertilization, male and female ducks could be locked into a competition, with males evolving larger and larger phalluses as females evolve twistier and turnier oviducts. Between the giant phalluses and the violence, anyone who wants to have sex with ducks is going to have to really commit to that lifestyle. Somehow, I don't think Pat Robertson has too much to worry about.
Image of male Argentine Lake Duck by K. McCracken/Nature.
