IN fairy tales, marriages last happily ever after. Science, however, tells us
that wedded bliss has but a limited shelf life.
American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who got married and
stayed married over the course of 15 years. The findings were clear: newlyweds
enjoy a big happiness boost that lasts, on average, for just two years. Then the
special joy wears off and they are back where they started, at least in terms of
happiness. The findings, from a 2003 study have been confirmed by several recent
studies.
The good news for the holiday season when families gather in various
configurations is that if couples get past that two-year slump and hang on — for
another couple of decades — they may well recover the excitement of the
honeymoon period 18 to 20 years later, when children are gone. Then, in the
freedom of the so-called empty nest, partners are left to discover one another —
and often their early bliss — once again.
When love is new, we have the rare capacity to experience great happiness while
being stuck in traffic or getting our teeth cleaned. We are in the throes of
what researchers call passionate love, a state of intense longing, desire and
attraction. In time, this love generally morphs into companionate love, a less
impassioned blend of deep affection and connection. The reason is that human
beings are, as more than a hundred studies show, prone to hedonic adaptation, a
measurable and innate capacity to become habituated or inured to most life
changes.
With all due respect to poets and pop radio songwriters, new love seems nearly
as vulnerable to hedonic adaptation as a new job, a new home, a new coat and
other novel sources of pleasure and well-being. (Though the thrill of a new
material acquisition generally fades faster.)
Hedonic adaptation is most likely when positive experiences are involved. It’s
cruel but true: We’re inclined — psychologically and physiologically — to take
positive experiences for granted. We move into a beautiful loft. Marry a
wonderful partner. Earn our way to the top of our profession. How thrilling! For
a time. Then, as if propelled by autonomic forces, our expectations change,
multiply or expand and, as they do, we begin to take the new, improved
circumstances for granted.
Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation.
Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony
Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have
repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual
fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that
it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: “The first kiss is magic.
The second is intimate. The third is routine.”
There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is
unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and
had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very
productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health. (To
quote a line from the 2004 film “Before Sunset,” about two former lovers who
chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, “we would end up
doing nothing at all with our lives.” ) Indeed, the condition of being in love
has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it
will eventually exact a toll.
WHY, then, is the natural shift from passionate to companionate love often such
a letdown? Because, although we may not realize it, we are biologically
hard-wired to crave variety. Variety and novelty affect the brain in much the
same way that drugs do — that is, they trigger activity that involves the
neurotransmitter dopamine, as do pharmacological highs.
Evolutionary biologists believe that sexual variety is adaptive, and that it
evolved to prevent incest and inbreeding in ancestral environments. The idea is
that when our spouse becomes as familiar to us as a sibling — when we’ve become
family — we cease to be sexually attracted to each other.
It doesn’t take a scientist to observe that because the sex in a long-term
committed monogamous relationship involves the same partner day after day after
day, no one who is truly human (or mammalian) can maintain the same level of
lust and ardor that he or she experienced when that love was uncharted and new.
We may love our partners deeply, idolize them, and even be willing to die for
them, but these feelings rarely translate into long-term passion. And studies
show that in long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose
interest in sex, and to lose it sooner. Why? Because women’s idea of passionate
sex depends far more centrally on novelty than does men’s.
When married couples reach the two-year mark, many mistake the natural shift
from passionate love to companionate love for incompatibility and unhappiness.
For many, the possibility that things might be different — more exciting, more
satisfying — with someone else proves difficult to resist. Injecting variety and
surprise into even the most stable, seasoned relationship is a good hedge
against such temptation. Key parties — remember “The Ice Storm”? — aren’t
necessarily what the doctor ordered; simpler changes in routine, departures from
the expected, go a long way.
In a classic experiment conducted by Arthur Aron and his colleagues, researchers
gave upper-middle-class middle-aged couples a list of activities that both
parties agreed were “pleasant” (like creative cooking, visiting friends or
seeing a movie) or “exciting” (skiing, dancing or attending concerts) but that
they had enjoyed only infrequently. Researchers instructed each couple to select
one of these activities each week and spend 90 minutes doing it together. At the
end of 10 weeks, the couples who engaged in the “exciting” activities reported
greater satisfaction in their marriage than those who engaged in “pleasant” or
enjoyable activities together.
Although variety and surprise seem similar, they are in fact quite distinct.
It’s easy to vary a sequence of events — like choosing a restaurant for a weekly
date night — without offering a lot of surprise. In the beginning, relationships
are endlessly surprising: Does he like to cook? What is his family like? What
embarrasses or delights him? As we come to know our partners better and better,
they surprise us less.
Surprise is a potent force. When something novel occurs, we tend to pay
attention, to appreciate the experience or circumstance, and to remember it. We
are less likely to take our marriage for granted when it continues to deliver
strong emotional reactions in us. Also, uncertainty sometimes enhances the
pleasure of positive events. For example, a series of studies at the University
of Virginia and at Harvard showed that people experienced longer bursts of
happiness when they were at the receiving end of an unexpected act of kindness
and remained uncertain about where and why it had originated.
Such reactions may have neuroscientific origins. In one experiment, scientists
offered drinks to thirsty subjects; those who were not told what kind of drink
they would get (i.e., water or a more appealing beverage) showed more activity
in the portion of the brain that registers positive emotions. Surprise is
apparently more satisfying than stability.
The realization that your marriage no longer supplies the charge it formerly did
is then an invitation: eschew predictability in favor of discovery, novelty and
opportunities for unpredictable pleasure. “A relationship,” Woody Allen
proclaimed in his film “Annie Hall,” “is like a shark. It has to constantly move
forward or it dies.” A marriage is likely to change shape multiple times over
the course of its lifetime; it must be continually rebuilt if it is to thrive.
The good news is that taking the long view on marriage and putting in the hard
work has calculable benefits. Research shows that marital happiness reaches one
of its highest peaks during the period after offspring have moved out of the
family home.
The nest may be empty, but it’s also full of possibility for partners to
rediscover — and surprise — each other again. In other words, an empty nest
offers the possibility of novelty and unpredictability. Whether this phase of
belated marital joy lasts, like the initial period of connubial bliss, for
longer than two years is anybody’s guess.
WILL women soon have a Viagra of their own? Although a Food and Drug
Administration advisory panel recently rejected an application to market the
drug flibanserin in the United States for women with low libido, it endorsed the
potential benefits and urged further research. Several pharmaceutical companies
are reported to be well along in the search for such a drug.
The implication is that a new pill, despite its unforeseen side effects, is
necessary to cure the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country.
But to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical
reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving,
white upper middle class?
In the 1950s, female “frigidity” was attributed to social conformism and
religious puritanism. But since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, American
society has become increasingly secular, with a media environment drenched in
sex.
The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety. As
respectability became the central middle-class value, censorship and repression
became the norm. Victorian prudery ended the humorous sexual candor of both men
and women during the agrarian era, a ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare’s
plays to the 18th-century novel. The priggish 1950s, which erased the liberated
flappers of the Jazz Age from cultural memory, were simply a return to the norm.
Only the diffuse New Age movement, inspired by nature-keyed Asian practices, has
preserved the radical vision of the modern sexual revolution. But concrete power
resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with
their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.
In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the
same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and
gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while
ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in
real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs
in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso
super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of
children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian
delirium.
Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department:
visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts,
loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes,
which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from
over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.
The elemental power of sexuality has also waned in American popular culture.
Under the much-maligned studio production code, Hollywood made movies sizzling
with flirtation and romance. But from the early ’70s on, nudity was in, and
steamy build-up was out. A generation of filmmakers lost the skill of
sophisticated innuendo. The situation worsened in the ’90s, when Hollywood
pirated video games to turn women into cartoonishly pneumatic superheroines and
sci-fi androids, fantasy figures without psychological complexity or the erotic
needs of real women.
Furthermore, thanks to a bourgeois white culture that values efficient bodies
over voluptuous ones, American actresses have desexualized themselves, confusing
sterile athleticism with female power. Their current Pilates-honed look is taut
and tense — a boy’s thin limbs and narrow hips combined with amplified breasts.
Contrast that with Latino and African-American taste, which runs toward the
healthy silhouette of the bootylicious Beyoncé.
A class issue in sexual energy may be suggested by the apparent striking
popularity of Victoria’s Secret and its racy lingerie among multiracial
lower-middle-class and working-class patrons, even in suburban shopping malls,
which otherwise trend toward the white middle class. Country music, with its
history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy
scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned
way.
On the other hand, rock music, once sexually pioneering, is in the dumps. Black
rhythm and blues, born in the Mississippi Delta, was the driving force behind
the great hard rock bands of the ’60s, whose cover versions of blues songs were
filled with electrifying sexual imagery. The Rolling Stones’ hypnotic recording
of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster,” with its titillating phallic
exhibitionism, throbs and shimmers with sultry heat.
But with the huge commercial success of rock, the blues receded as a direct
influence on young musicians, who simply imitated the white guitar gods without
exploring their roots. Step by step, rock lost its visceral rawness and
seductive sensuality. Big-ticket rock, with its well-heeled middle-class
audience, is now all superego and no id.
In the 1980s, commercial music boasted a beguiling host of sexy pop chicks like
Deborah Harry, Belinda Carlisle, Pat Benatar, and a charmingly ripe Madonna.
Late Madonna, in contrast, went bourgeois and turned scrawny. Madonna’s
dance-track acolyte, Lady Gaga, with her compulsive overkill, is a high-concept
fabrication without an ounce of genuine eroticism.
Pharmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra — not
in this culture driven and drained by middle-class values. Inhibitions are
stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist.
In a further break from the Bush administration’s ideologically driven
policies on birth control, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to let
17-year-olds get the morning-after emergency contraceptive pills without a
doctor’s prescription. It is a wise move that complies with a recent order by a
federal judge, based on voluminous evidence in F.D.A. files that girls that
young can use the pills safely.
For much of the Bush administration, the agency — ignoring the advice of its own
scientists — refused to let the pills be sold over the counter to anyone. It
insisted that women obtain a prescription, a time-consuming process that could
often render the pills useless. The morning-after medication, actually two pills
taken in sequence, blocks a pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of intercourse
and is most effective within the first 24 hours.
Facing intense Congressional and legal pressure, the F.D.A. finally relented in
2006 and made the pills available to women 18 and older without a prescription.
So far there has been no measurable effect on abortion or teenage pregnancy
rates. But individual women in distress have surely benefited from easier
access.
Now the agency has announced that it will not appeal a federal judge’s ruling
that it must lower the age limit by another year. Still to be determined is how
the F.D.A. will respond to the judge’s additional order that it consider
removing any age restrictions, as recommended by health authorities. There is no
indication that the manufacturer plans to seek the agency’s permission to market
to girls 16 or younger.
December 12, 2008
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage
and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes
across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the
rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.
Her death was reported by her agent, Mark Roesler, on Ms. Page’s Web site,
bettiepage.com.
Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20 years,
had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to be
released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of CMG
Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she died.
In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the
most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million
locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion
industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography
investigators.
But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades
her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental
illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern
California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends.
Then in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page
renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later movie
character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer’s girlfriend. Fashion
designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs, reincarnated Bettie in
Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore, Madonna and others appeared
in Page-like photos.
There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts and
beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan clubs
sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and
kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared,
including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide said
in 2006.
Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page: The
Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in 1996. It
was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson.
A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and
directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in 2006,
adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May Page was born
in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page’s six children. The
father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters, Ms. Page said
years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10. She and some of
her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She attended high school in
Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student, graduating second in her class.
She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn’t control my students,
especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy Neal
in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a few years.
She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes.
She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting that
changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a
police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup portfolio. By
1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw, who ran a
mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page image with
spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager’s pictures featured her in jungle
shots, with and without leopards skins.
Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other
magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name was
often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when
she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree. Money and
offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was becoming depressed.
In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator
Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was
never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures drove her to quit
modeling two years later. She moved to Florida. Subsequent marriages to Armond
Walterson and Harry Lear ended in divorce, and there were no children. She moved
to California in 1978.
For years Ms. Page lived on Social Security benefits. After a nervous breakdown,
she was arrested for an attack on a landlady, but was found not guilty by reason
of insanity and sent to a California mental institution. She emerged years later
as a born-again Christian, immersing herself in Bible studies and serving as an
adviser to the Billy Graham Crusade.
In recent years, she had lived in Southern California on the proceeds of her
revival. Occasionally, she gave interviews in her gentle Southern drawl, but
largely stayed out of the public eye — and steadfastly refused to be
photographed.
“I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” she
told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman who
changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
In the 21st century, technology is allowing
people to express their desires
and
fulfil their fantasies
in ways never before possible
– and all at the touch of a
button.
Catherine Townsend logs on
to the new sexual revolution
Interviews by Esther Walker
Saturday, 6 December 2008
The Independent
After watching Blade Runner recently on late-night television, I wondered:
whatever happened to all those scientists' predictions that humans would be
having sex with robots by now – or at least in the very near future? After all,
Ridley Scott's film is only set in 2019.
I still can't imagine having a hot replicant boyfriend any time soon – a
battery-operated vibrator is about as high-tech as it gets for me. Others,
however, are fast becoming accustomed to using technology to take things a step
further: men already go online to purchase custom-made "real dolls", which are
like silicon Stepford Wives minus the vocal cords, and cost several thousand
pounds. Fans claim they are a viable alternative for the lonely and socially
awkward. But can it really be healthy to seek out intimacy with an inanimate
object?
At the same time that technology is causing some people to withdraw from the
dating game – preferring online porn and virtual sex to the real thing – the
sheer volume of specialised websites means that huge numbers of people are now
connecting in ways that they never have before. Though most deviant sexual
behaviours have been around for ages (the Romans were having orgies, after all)
the Noughties have ushered in the normalisation of fetishes – and made it vastly
more easy to find others with similar tastes. These days, BDSM (Bondage,
Domination and Sado-Masochism) has gone from underground fringe clubs to
housewives browsing spanking paddles online and in high-street sex shops.
Sex parties, too, have shed their image of dumpy, middle-aged couples circling a
bowl of car keys, and now upmarket swinging events such as Fever and Killing
Kittens cater to young and more conventionally attractive couples by using their
website to vet applicants. These days, more and more single women are taking the
plunge.
Technology has also made casual hook-ups – and infidelity – simpler than ever: a
well-placed digital photo and a reasonably witty online profile can bring dozens
of responses within a few hours. And there are niche markets for everything
(among the more obscure I've come across: love connections for the freakishly
tall and even for devotees of the American writer Ayn Rand).
But what a friend of mine calls "the crack cocaine of online dating" does have
its risks. Ultimately, it's much easier to hide one's true intentions behind the
anonymity of a keyboard, and to lie. I've met men who happily crop out years of
their life (and children!) as easily as the woman standing next to them in their
profile picture.
Of course, not everyone online is a cheater. Some people are completely open
about their alter egos, and use their "avatars" to have cybersex on sites such
as Second Life. And many see it purely as a form of escapism, and have no
intention of actually meeting in person.
The internet does, of course, provide people with fetishes with an easy way of
finding each other. I personally would not want to change an adult baby's nappy,
but it seems there are people out there who want to breast-feed and role-play a
nanny scenario. And it's much easier to send an e-mail through a website than to
mention the subject casually on a first date.
In a world bombarded by hyper-sexualised images, even those who identify
themselves as asexual or celibate are able to surf over the sea of pornography
and connect with people who understand them.
Modern sex, to me, is about easy connectivity, and open-mindedness – whether
your sexual soulmate wants to be spanked over a desk or likes to dress up as a
giant squirrel. Today, there really is something for everyone.
The doll fetishist
James, 52, civil servant
I suppose you could say that I am a recluse. I've always lived on my own and
find it hard to make friends or have happy relationships – I've got a history of
unsuccessful relationships with women. I did hope that eventually I would find
happiness settling down with a partner and I have tried internet chatrooms and
online dating but nothing worked. A few years ago I watched a TV documentary
about men who live with "real dolls" (see introduction) and thought it might be
the perfect solution as I was extremely lonely at the time. I contacted an
online company that makes dolls to order and although I was very nervous about
the whole thing they put me at my ease and helped me decide what sort of doll I
wanted.
Alice cost me about £6,000 and via the company's website I was able to customise
every area of her looks and physical attributes – I admit it seems childish but
I got a real kick out of creating my fantasy woman. She's aged about 25 and has
dark hair and the perfect body. I also enjoyed being able to choose all her
clothes at the click of a mouse; perhaps it's the power thing that appeals –
being in control of every aspect of her.
Whe she first arrived, it was a very surreal feeling having this gorgeous and
life-like silicone creature sitting opposite me in the lounge.
Very gradually, however, I have got used to having her around and now I have
grown to love her as I would a real woman. I know it must seem pretty sad, but
for me, she's everything. I think of her primarily as a companion, although
obviously she fulfils my sexual needs too – in my experience it's a lot easier
and more pleasurable than the real thing! I like the fact that she's always
there for me; she eats with me, sits and watches TV with me and sleeps with me.
I haven't told anyone about Alice; my work colleagues would laugh at me and if
my neighbours saw her they would probably freak out too. To me, however, it's
the perfect partnership – and what harm am I doing to anyone else?
The internet sex addict
Simon, 38, regional sales director
I got into internet sex by accident; I wasn't even looking for sex. I was at
work about four years ago and a friend was registered to one of those dating
sites, and he was having a whale of a time.
He was single at the time and went out on lots of dates with different women and
met them once or twice and then slept with them and after that he didn't really
see them again. I joined my first internet website for a laugh when I was bored,
and I couldn't believe how easy it was to meet up with women. I said I was
single on my profile but I was married, of course. I hooked up with one or two
girls in the first couple of months but they were all looking for relationships
and I wasn't. I felt a bit guilty, to be honest. I was already lying to my wife
and I didn't want to have to start lying to another woman as well.
After that I discovered some other specialist websites where married people can
contact each other for a bit of flirting and then hooking up. I usually meet the
women in a bar first and then maybe we'll go to a hotel.
I spend a fair amount of time surfing the sites, maybe an hour or two a day when
I'm at work and then maybe an hour or two at home. I don't think it's excessive,
though – people spend hours and hours on Facebook, don't they?
It's not that I don't love my wife or that we don't have sex – we do! But we've
been married for 12 years now and we've got small kids and it's not really the
same as it used to be. I suppose you might call me highly-sexed. It's just sex,
pure and simple. I don't sneak around with the same woman, and I'm not having a
big romance behind my wife's back. And I never really have to worry about her
finding out because, first, the women I sleep with are married, too – so it's
not in their interests to tell my wife – and second, I'm incredibly careful. My
wife could go through my computer with a toothcomb and she wouldn't find a
thing.
What surprised me about it all was how many women there are out there who were
really up for casual sex with someone who's not their husband. I know so many
men who say things like, "Oh my wife wouldn't cheat on me," and I laugh and
think, OK, whatever, mate – she probably already has, with someone just like me.
The modern Mrs Robinson
Marian, 54, interiors consultant
I was with my husband for 25 years and then he ran off with one of our
neighbours and we got divorced. It was quite funny really, looking back on it. I
don't miss him at all; it was the best thing that happened to me. But at the
time I was really angry and sad.
I kept the house after the divorce and my children were grown-up and I had
plenty of money and I sat down one day and thought, "What the hell am I going to
do with the rest of my life?" Eventually I hit on the idea of starting my own
interiors company, and I was contacted by this woman who was having her whole
house re-done after getting a divorce, just like me. We started chatting and she
told me about a website where she met young men online for sex. She said it was
brilliant and I should give it a go.
So I went online, and within a fortnight I was dating this amazing boy. He was
only about 30. He was amazing-looking and wanted to do all the things that men
my age just aren't interested in. We went out to the theatre and to the movies
and out for dinner and he was just so fun and alive. We saw each other for about
three months and then he sort of disappeared, and I didn't mind at all. When I
was younger I would maybe have been a bit upset but I didn't give a damn.
When men get into their forties and fifties they don't want to do anything. They
just talk about their new cars and sit on the sofa flicking through the channels
with the remote. And now I've got so much energy. Ten years ago I felt totally
dead, like a zombie, but now I jump out of bed in the mornings. Life is so
exciting.
No one believes me when I say it, but going out with much younger men is not
just about the actual sex – even though the sex is great and young men these
days know much more about it than men my age. The fundamental thing for me is
that men in their twenties are a better match for women in their fifties and
sixties than men of the same age are. I went on some dates with men my own age
after Keith left and all they wanted was a replacement wife to wash their pants.
I wasn't having any of that.
I'm seeing a couple of boys at the moment, but nothing serious. And I don't care
really. This time in my life is just for me – for as long as I can remember it's
been about other people, my husband and my children. Now it's just for me and I
love it.
The party animal
Gemma, 23, shop assistant
People think that sex parties are really seedy but actually, they're not.
They're much less seedy than most nightclubs, in a way. Firstly, there are so
many sex-party swinging sites on the internet, so you can do lots of research in
the comfort of your own home. Once you decide to actually go to a sex party,
there's no pressure on anyone to do anything; it's usually just a fun atmosphere
with people standing about chatting – quite often just drinking tea or
something.
I got into swinging, at first, with my then boyfriend Tim, when I took him to a
swingers' party in Brighton for his birthday present. He actually didn't enjoy
it that much, but I thought it was really fun. The people were nice and there
was hardly any drinking or taking drugs or anything like that.
There were living-room areas, where you couldn't get up to anything particularly
racy, and then bedrooms upstairs, some with the lights on and some with the
lights off, where you could go for more explicit action.
I broke up with Tim about a year later. We hadn't been back to any swingers'
parties but I had had sex with someone else at that first party with my
boyfriend looking on in the same room and I don't think he enjoyed it; we both
realised that we had such different levels of inhibition. I'm not at all shy!
After I broke up with Tim, I went online and signed up for what I suppose you'd
call an orgy. It's just the same as a swingers' party, really, except that not
everyone is in a couple. It was just really fun. I met so many like-minded
people; it wasn't just about sex, it was about being yourself and letting go a
bit. There's no pussyfooting around – so if you meet someone and think, "I
really like you" and if they like you back, you can just have sex without anyone
judging you or thinking you're weird.
I'd never tell my family or some of my more straight friends about this. I don't
think they'd get it and there's no point in trying to explain to someone who
isn't open-minded what you get out of it. They'd just think I was being a bit of
a slag, and I'm not at all.
I don't feel ready to have a steady relationship now. Even if a prospective
partner was really amazingly cool, I wouldn't introduce him to the idea of a
swinging party because nine times out of 10 he'd be scared off by it.
The asexual
Mark, 44, scientific glassblower
I've always known that I was different from other people, especially when I hit
puberty and found that I just wasn't interested in sex in the same way that my
friends were. I also found my own gender more interesting and nicer-looking than
the opposite sex, so I thought I might be gay. Back in the Seventies, there was
still a lot of homophobia.
I started hanging out on the gay scene, which led me to being in bed with
people, sometimes men, sometimes women – and I realised that I'm not capable of
sex. I just don't get aroused. I did have relationships, but they tended to be
very short-lived. I greatly enjoy physical contact, such as hugging, as well as
companionship, but unfortunately once people realise that there's not going to
be any sex, the relationship usually comes to an end.
My longest relationship was in 1997 with a man. We were together for 10 months
and it was a sort of mutually beneficial arrangement whereby he tolerated my
affections and I was his ticket to friends and parties. When that ended I
thought: this is a pointless pursuit.
My brother, to whom I'm really close, went through a divorce a couple of years
ago and I was driving in a car with him and talking about relationships. And I
told him. I said, "I'm asexual." And he said, "You lucky bastard!" We laughed so
much! I think some people still assume that I'm gay but if they do then it's not
an issue. My brother later told me that my parents had asked him more than once
if I was gay. I suppose they thought it was strange that I never brought anyone
home.
My life really changed when I saw a piece in the paper in 2004 about the
differences between asexuality and celibacy – in the former there is no sexual
attraction and in the latter a conscious decision is made not to have sex. I saw
it and it was a total epiphany. I was so thrilled to find there were other
people like me. There's a range of different kind of asexuals – some are born
that way (like me) and some become that way over time. At the end of the article
there was a reference to AVEN (asexuality.org), the website for the asexual
community, and I joined up straight away. When I went to the first meet-up it
was a revelation to meet other people who felt the same way as I did. There's
always a lot of stuff going on and I've got a busy social life – although I do
worry a bit about what things will be like when I get older and I'm on my own.
The adult baby
John, 45, computer programmer
My mother walked out on my family when I was four, so I think I always craved
being nurtured by a female figure. My two older sisters and I were looked after
by a very strict nanny at our house in Nottingham, who showed us no affection.
My father would come home late from work and was of the "children should be seen
and not heard" school of thought. My sisters and I spent a lot of time on our
own and would invent games where they would play at being nurses and would give
me baths, get me dressed and so on.
I have always been quite sexually dysfunctional and my sisters haven't managed
to form lasting relationships either. When I was in my early twenties I started
a string of relationships with older women and realised that I was fantasising
about a mother figure. Things started to spiral out of control when I had strong
fantasies about dressing up as a baby – it's called infantilism. At the
beginning, being honest about my desires was very hard. I felt like a pervert
and didn't know who to turn to. Then I confessed to one of my older girlfriends
and she encouraged me to seek professional counselling. My counsellor helped me
to understand the root causes for my predilections – a lack of love in childhood
– but although she encouraged me to stop dressing as a baby I wasn't able to
achieve this.
I then discovered an online adult-babies' club in south-east England where I
found like-minded people who wanted, as I do, to dress up in adult-sized baby
clothes and behave as a baby might do. This might include being bathed by
"nannies", wearing nappies and being "breast-fed". I realise that it sounds
weird, but it gives me some sort of comfort at the same time as addressing my
sexual needs. The fact that it's all done anonymously through the web provides
me with extra privacy, too.
November 24, 2008
The New York Times
By GRETEL C. KOVACH
GRAPEVINE, Tex. — And on the seventh day, there was no rest
for married couples. A week after the Rev. Ed Young challenged husbands and
wives among his flock of 20,000 to strengthen their unions through Seven Days of
Sex, his advice was — keep it going.
Mr. Young, an author, a television host and the pastor of the evangelical
Fellowship Church, issued his call for a week of “congregational copulation”
among married couples on Nov. 16, while pacing in front of a large bed.
Sometimes he reclined on the paisley coverlet while flipping through a Bible,
emphasizing his point that it is time for the church to put God back in the bed.
“Today we’re beginning this sexperiment, seven days of sex,” he said, with his
characteristic mix of humor, showmanship and Scripture. “How to move from
whining about the economy to whoopee!”
On Sunday parishioners at the Grapevine branch watched a prerecorded sermon from
Mr. Young and his wife, Lisa, on jumbo screens over a candlelit stage. “I know
there’s been a lot of love going around this week, among the married couples,”
one of the church musicians said, strumming on a guitar before a crowd of about
3,000.
Mrs. Young, dressed in knee-high black boots and jeans, said that after a week
of having sex every day, or close to it, “some of us are smiling.” For others
grappling with infidelities, addictions to pornography or other bitter hurts,
“there’s been some pain; hopefully there’s been some forgiveness, too.”
Mr. Young advised the couples to “keep on doing what you’ve been doing this
week. We should try to double up the amount of intimacy we have in marriage. And
when I say intimacy, I don’t mean holding hands in the park or a back rub.”
Mr. Young, known simply as Ed to his parishioners, and his wife, both 47, have
been married for 26 years and have four children, including twins. They have
firsthand experience with some of the barriers to an intimate sex life in
marriage, including careers, exhaustion, outside commitments, and “kids,” a word
that Mr. Young told church members stands for “keeping intimacy at a distance
successfully.”
But if you make the time to have sex, it will bring you closer to your spouse
and to God, he has said. You will perform better at work, leave a loving legacy
for your children to follow and may even prevent an extramarital affair.
“If you’ve said, ‘I do,’ do it,” he said. As for single people, “I don’t know,
try eating chocolate cake,” he said.
The sex-starved marriage has been the topic of at least two recent books, “365
Nights” and “Just Do It.” But Mr. Young’s call from the pulpit gave the
discussion an added charge.
It should not, in his view. This is not a gimmick or a publicity stunt, Mr.
Young says. Just look at the sensuousness of the Song of Solomon, or Genesis:
“two shall become one flesh,” or Corinthians: “do not deprive each other of
sexual relations.”
“For some reason the church has not talked about it, but we need to,” he said,
speaking by telephone Friday night on his way to South Africa for a mission
trip. There is no shame in marital sex, he added, “God thought it up, it was his
idea.”
Those who attend Fellowship’s location here or one of several satellite churches
in the Dallas area and one in Miami are used to Mr. Young’s provocative style.
(The real “f word” in the marital boudoir, he says, is “forgiveness.”) But the
sex challenge was a bit much for some of his church members, who sat with arms
crossed in uncomfortable silence, he recalls, while many in the audience gave
him an enthusiastic applause.
One parishioner, Rob Hulsey, 25, said his Baptist relatives raised their
eyebrows about it, but he summed up the reaction of many husbands at Fellowship
Church when he first heard about the sex challenge — “Yay!”
A week later, he and his wife, who are expecting a baby and have two older
children, could not stop holding hands during the sermon. His wife, Madeline
Hulsey, 32, said she was just as thrilled to spend a week focusing on her
husband. Usually, “we start to kiss, and it’s knock knock knock, Mom!” she said.
Others found that, like smiling when you are not particularly happy, having sex
when they did not feel like it improved their mood. Just eight months into their
marriage, Amy and Cody Waddell had not been very amorous since Cody admitted he
had had an affair.
“Intimacy has been a struggle for us, working through all that,” Ms. Waddell
said. “This week really brought us back together, physically and emotionally.”
It is not always easy to devote time for your spouse, Pastor Young admitted.
Just three days into the sex challenge he said he was so tired after getting up
before dawn to talk about the importance of having more sex in marriage that he
crashed on the bed around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night.
Mrs. Young tried to shake him awake, telling her husband, “Come on, it’s the sex
challenge.” But Mr. Young murmured, “Let’s just double up tomorrow,” and went
back to sleep.
July 27, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN L. ALLEN Jr.
FORTY years ago last week, Pope Paul VI provoked the greatest
uproar against a papal edict in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church
when he reiterated the church’s ban on artificial birth control by issuing the
encyclical “Humanae Vitae.” At the time, commentators predicted that not only
would the teaching collapse under its own weight, but it might well bring the
“monarchical papacy” down with it.
Those forecasts badly underestimated the capacity of the Catholic Church to
resist change and to stand its ground.
Down the centuries, Catholics have frequently groused about papal rulings.
Usually they channeled that dissent into blithe disobedience, though
occasionally a Roman mob would run the Successor of Peter out of town on a rail
just to make a point. In 1848, Pope Pius IX was driven into exile by Romans
incensed at his refusal to embrace Italy’s unification.
Never before July 25, 1968, however, had opposition been so immediate, so public
and so widespread. World-famous theologians called press conferences to rebut
the pope’s reasoning. Conferences of Catholic bishops issued statements that all
but licensed churchgoers to ignore the encyclical. Pastors openly criticized
“Humanae Vitae” from the pulpit.
In a nutshell, “Humanae Vitae” held that the twin functions of marriage — to
foster love between the partners and to be open to children — are so closely
related as to be inseparable. In practice, that meant a resounding no to the
pill.
The encyclical quickly became seen, both in the secular world and in liberal
Catholic circles, as the papacy’s Waterloo. It was so out of sync with the hopes
and desires of the Catholic rank and file that it simply could not stand.
And in some ways, it didn’t. Today polls show that Catholics, at least in the
West, dissent from the teaching on birth control, often by majorities exceeding
80 percent.
But at the official level, Catholicism’s commitment to “Humanae Vitae” is more
solid than ever.
During his almost 27-year papacy, John Paul II provided a deeper theoretical
basis for traditional Catholic sexual morality through his “theology of the
body.” In brief, the late pope’s argument was that human sexuality is an image
of the creative love among the three persons of the Trinity, as well as God’s
love for humanity. Birth control “changes the language” of sexuality, because it
prevents life-giving love.
That’s a claim many Catholics might dispute, but the reading groups and seminars
devoted to contemplating John Paul’s “theology of the body” mean that Catholics
disposed to defend the church’s teaching now have a more formidable set of
resources than they did when Paul VI wrote “Humanae Vitae.”
In addition, three decades of bishops’ appointments by John Paul II and Benedict
XVI, both unambiguously committed to “Humanae Vitae,” mean that senior leaders
in Catholicism these days are far less inclined than they were in 1968 to
distance themselves from the ban on birth control, or to soft-pedal it. A
striking number of Catholic bishops have recently brought out documents of their
own defending “Humanae Vitae.”
Advocates of the encyclical draw assurance from the declining fertility rates
across the developed world, especially in Europe. No country in Europe has a
fertility rate above 2.1, the number of children each woman needs to have by the
end of her child-bearing years to keep a population stable.
Even with increasing immigration, Europe is projected to suffer a population
loss in the 21st century that will rival the impact of the Black Death, leading
some to talk about the continent’s “demographic suicide.”
Not coincidentally, Europe is also the most secular region of the world, where
the use of artificial contraception is utterly unproblematic. Among those
committed to Catholic teaching, the obvious question becomes: What more clear
proof of the folly of separating sex and child-bearing could one want?
So the future of “Humanae Vitae” as the teaching of the Catholic Church seems
secure, even if it will also continue to be the most widely flouted injunction
of the church at the level of practice.
The encyclical’s surprising resilience is a reminder that forecasting the
Catholic future in moments of crisis is always a dangerous enterprise — a point
with relevance to a more recent Catholic predicament. Many critics believe that
the church has not yet responded adequately to the recent sex-abuse scandals,
leading to predictions that the church will “have to” become more accountable,
more participatory and more democratic.
While those steps may appear inevitable today, it seemed unthinkable to many
observers 40 years ago that “Humanae Vitae” would still be in vigor well into
the 21st century.
Catholicism can and does change, but trying to guess how and when is almost
always a fool’s errand.
(Reuters) - New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the one-time "Sheriff" of Wall
Street who campaigned on a promise to clean up state politics, is embroiled in a
sex scandal that threatens to force his resignation.
Following are some other sex scandals involving politicians in the United
States.
* IDAHO SEN. LARRY CRAIG was publicly admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee
for improper conduct after his arrest in a sex-sting operation in a men's toilet
in June 2007.
The Republican lawmaker pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he was caught
in an undercover investigation of lewd behaviour in a men's room at the
Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. He later tried to recant saying he agreed to a
misdemeanour charge without consulting a lawyer and in hopes of quickly
disposing of the case. He remains in the Senate.
* LOUISIANA SEN. DAVID VITTER, a Republican and social conservative, apologized
and admitted "a very serious sin" after he was linked last July to a Washington
escort service. Vitter said his misdeeds occurred several years previously and
he had dealt with them in confession and marriage counselling. He remains in the
Senate.
* MARK FOLEY, a Florida Republican, resigned from the House of Representatives
in 2006 after it was disclosed he had sent sexually explicit text messages to
teenage boys who served as interns in the House. The revelations led to charges
that Republican leaders tried to cover up the matter.
* NEW JERSEY GOV. JAMES MCGREEVEY, a Democrat, stepped down in 2004 over a gay
affair with a man whom he hired in 2002 to head the state's Homeland Security
department.
* PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, a Democrat, had a sexual relationship with intern
Monica Lewinsky, then 21, which led to his impeachment after accusations he lied
about it under oath. He survived the impeachment process and was able to serve
out his term but his presidency, which ended in 2001, was badly damaged.
* FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH, a Republican, has admitted he was having
an extramarital affair while leading the impeachment charge in Congress against
Clinton.
* SEN. BOB PACKWOOD, a Republican from Oregon, resigned in 1995 after 26 years
in Congress. He had been accused of sexual misconduct with 17 women, among other
charges.
* REP. BARNEY FRANK, a Massachusetts Democrat who is homosexual, was reprimanded
in 1990 after it was learned that a lover had run a prostitution ring out of his
Washington apartment.
* SEN. GARY HART, a Colorado Democrat, saw his second presidential bid end in
1987 when it was learned he spent the night on a yacht, named the Monkey
Business, with a woman who was not his wife.
* REP. DAN CRANE, a Republican from Illinois, and REP. GERRY STUDDS, a Democrat
from Massachusetts, were censured in 1983 for illicit affairs with underage
pages. Crane, who had had sex with a teenage girl, was voted out of office but
Studds, who had had an affair with a boy, was returned to office many times.
* REP. WILBUR MILLS, a Democrat from Arkansas and chairman of the powerful Ways
and Means Committee, was caught in 1974 with stripper Fanne Foxe, who performed
as "the Argentine firecracker." Foxe leapt from Mills' limousine after it was
stopped by police and jumped into the Tidal Basin. Mills went into treatment for
alcohol and retired two years later.
August 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:18 a.m. ET
The New York Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why
people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for
mostly the same motivations. It's more about lust in the body than a love
connection in the heart.
College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex -- they
were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical pleasure and
''it feels good,'' according to a peer-reviewed study in the August edition of
Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25 reasons given for having sex
were the same for men and women.
Expressing love and showing affection were in the top 10 for both men and women,
but they did take a back seat to the clear No. 1: ''I was attracted to the
person.''
Researchers at the University of Texas spent five years and their own money to
study the overlooked why behind sex while others were spending their time on the
how.
''It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes ... that men only want sex for the
physical pleasure and women want love,'' said University of Texas clinical
psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study's co-author. ''That's not what I
came up with in my findings.''
Forget thinking that men are from Mars and women from Venus, ''the more we look,
the more we find similarity,'' said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of sexual
medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego. Goldstein, who wasn't part of
Meston's study, said the Texas research made a lot of sense and adds to growing
evidence that the vaunted differences in the genders may only be among people
with sexual problems.
Meston and colleague David Buss first questioned 444 men and women -- ranging in
age from 17 to 52 -- to come up with a list of 237 distinct reasons people have
sex. They ranged from ''It's fun'' which men ranked fourth and women ranked
eighth to ''I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease'' which
ranked on the bottom by women.
Once they came up with that long list, Meston and Buss asked 1,549 college
students taking psychology classes to rank the reasons on a one-to-five scale on
how they applied to their experiences.
''None of the gender differences are all that great,'' Meston said. ''Men were
more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and
available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women. Women were more
likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner.''
But this is among college students, when Meston conceded ''hormones run
rampant.'' She predicted huge differences when older groups of people are
studied.
Since her study came out Tuesday, people are coming up with new reasons to have
sex.
''Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found
that there should be some added,'' Meston said.
------
On the Net:
University of Texas study ''Why Humans Have Sex'':
Friday July 20, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Press Association
The amount people are spending on secret affairs is rising
rapidly, with Britons collectively lavishing £189m on liaisons in the past three
months, research showed today.
An estimated 260,000 people are currently engaged in an ongoing
affair, spending an average of £297 per couple on each encounter, according to
website IllicitEncounters.com.
The group said spending on extra-marital dating soared by 60% during the second
quarter of this year, compared with the same period of 2006, to reach £189m.
It added that it estimated the "affair economy" to be worth around £557m in
2006, and this could rise to more than £700m for this year.
An IllicitEncounters spokeswoman said: "Our research indicates that a number of
pressures are being brought to bear, but the key element is that people are
choosing to develop secret extra-marital relationships rather than file for
divorce.
"Life is complicated and expensive enough, they seem to be saying, plus there is
a deepening concern that the harm a divorce can cause to children."
The research found that most couples spent between £120 and £200 on a room in a
four-star or higher rated hotel when they met up, with dinner and drinks costing
a further £62.50 to £100.
Travel could cost up to £100, while many also spent up to £200 on a new outfit
or lingerie for their date.
Once an affair was under way, most couples met and spent the night together an
average of 1.64 times a month.
Overall, they spent an average of £1,461 on their affair during the three months
to the end of June, up from £1,275 during the previous quarter.
The spokeswoman said: "Most of our members have indicated that they prefer to
lean towards a little luxury when meeting up, and are perfectly happy to spend a
little extra to ensure their encounters are special."
Around a quarter of men paid for the full cost of the encounter, something that
just 5% of women did.
On average men picked up two-thirds of the cost, with women generally making a
contribution towards drinks, cabs and entertainment such as cinema tickets.
IllicitEncounters questioned 1,287 people during June.
HALLSVILLE, Tex. — When Jami Waite graduated from high school this year in
this northeastern Texas town, her parents sat damp-eyed in the metal bleachers
of Bobcat Stadium, proud in every way possible. Their youngest daughter was
leaving childhood an honor graduate, a band member, a true friend, a head
cheerleader — and a steadfast virgin.
“People can be abstinent, and it’s not weird,” she declared. With her face on
billboards and on TV, Ms. Waite has been an emblem of sexual abstinence for
Virginity Rules, which has risen from a single operation in nearby Longview to
become an eight-county abstinence franchise.
For the first time, however, Virginity Rules and 700 kindred abstinence
education programs are fighting serious threats to their future. Eleven state
health departments rejected abstinence education this year, while legislatures
in Colorado, Iowa and Washington passed laws that could kill, or at least wound,
its presence in public schools.
Opponents received high-caliber ammunition this spring when the most
comprehensive study of abstinence education found no sign that it delayed a
teenager’s sexual debut. And, after enjoying a fivefold increase in their main
federal appropriations, the abstinence programs in June received their first cut
in financing from the Senate appropriations committee since 2001.
But the final outcome is in question. Some $176 million in federal support has
survived several early maneuvers in the House, and the full House plans to
debate the issue July 18 as part of the proposed Health and Human Services
budget.
Lost in the political rancor, however, is that teenagers throughout the country
are both abstaining more, and, especially among older ones, more likely to use
contraception when they do not abstain.
While the reasons are not all understood, government data show the trend began
years before abstinence education became the multimillion-dollar enterprise it
is today. Through a combination of less sex and more contraception, pregnancy
and birth rates among American teenagers as a whole have been falling since
about 1991. Texas, however, has seen the smallest decline despite receiving
almost $17 million in the name of virginity.
No state has more to lose in this battle than Texas, which draws more abstinence
money than any other. Drive through the piney woods of northeastern Texas, and
the earnest faces of adolescents appear on billboards with slogans like “No is
where I stand until I have a wedding band.”
The Longview Wellness Center, which sponsors Virginity Rules, collects almost $1
million annually in abstinence financing, and serves 33 area school districts.
Even in this state, where President Bush acquired his loyalty to the policy,
abstinence cannot be typecast. Megan Randolph of Dallas, who like Jami Waite
just finished high school, believes in the abstinence message. But she is
bothered by courses that try to scare teenagers with harrowing talk of ruined
lives. “In those classes, there are going to be kids who have had sex and that
hasn’t happened,” Ms. Randolph said. “So they’re going to think that doesn’t
apply to them.”
Teenagers, she said, crave unfettered information — the kind restricted under
federal abstinence education law, which discourages intimacy outside marriage
but provides no instruction for safer sex.
At her school, Ms. Randolph, 19, was the “sexpert,” the one girls often called
late at night, asking questions. And this year, before leaving Dallas to attend
the Air Force Academy, Ms. Randolph was hailed as volunteer of the year by the
area’s Planned Parenthood — part of abstinence education’s axis of evil.
In northeastern Texas, advocates of abstinence education vow to fight for their
mission because to them, it is not just a matter of sexuality or even public
health. Getting a teenager to the other side of high school without viruses or
babies is a bonus, but not the real goal. They see casual sex as toxic to future
marriage, family and even, in an oblique way, opposition to abortion.
“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East
Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds
of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was
designed to bond two people together.”
To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh
pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt,
lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the
marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips.
“Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”
Shoring up marriage was Robert Rector’s vision a decade ago. A fellow at the
Heritage Foundation, Mr. Rector wrote the first bill that legally defined
abstinence education, and got it attached as a stowaway to the 1996 welfare
overhaul, backed with $50 million for the states. A later Congress, irked at
states’ finding loopholes in the original intent, designated a second pool of
abstinence money in 2001, now the lifeblood of the movement.
Mr. Rector says viewing abstinence primarily through the lens of public health
distracted the focus from marriage. “Once you understand that that’s the
principal issue,” he said, “you understand that handing out condoms to a
17-year-old is utterly irrelevant.”
Strengthening marriage this way may resonate with teenagers like Ms. Waite,
whose conviction is planted in a deeply held marital value, but not necessarily
with Ms. Randolph, who says she is more preoccupied with succeeding in the Air
Force than with marriage.
In abandoning abstinence education, states have largely said that comprehensive
sex education programs, which discuss contraception beyond the failure rates,
have a better scientific grounding. New laws in Colorado, Iowa and Washington
state that sex education must be based on “research” or “science” — which is
often interpreted as code for programs that include discussions of safer sex.
Much of the data cited in support of the efficacy of abstinence programs are
from surveys taken immediately before and after a program. These commonly find
an increase in intentions to stay abstinent, but do not necessarily mean that a
year later, high on emotion, teenagers will follow the script.
Most studies so far have found no significant impact on behavior, and the few
that do see only modest changes. In April, Mathematica Policy Research released
a report that was nine years and $8 million in the making. Scientists followed
middle school children enrolled in four separate abstinence programs for about
five years, and found no difference in the age of first intercourse between them
and their peers.
Opinions vary on whether the absence of evidence — to borrow from Carl Sagan —
is evidence of absence. One of the leading experts on sex education programs,
Dr. John Jemmott of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania, says some abstinence education programs in the future might show
promise. He is hopeful about an abstinence curriculum that he has designed
which, unlike many, tries to get teenagers to think long-term about their
behavior and its consequences, questioning, for example, whether a boyfriend
would really love you if you had sex with him. Many programs dwell on the risks
of sex, not the reasons.
Dr. Jemmott knows many colleagues view abstinence education as a failed
experiment. “I think that is unfair,” he said. “I think what they should say is
there is not enough evidence to state whether it is efficacious.” On the other
hand, he said, it is also unfair to say that sex education that discusses —
without maligning — condoms encourages sex. Data from many programs, in fact,
find the opposite.
[Those who thought abstinence education financing would decline swiftly under a
Democratic watch were wrong: On July 11, the full House extended state grants
through September — a reprieve at the edge of expiration. That same day, the
House Appropriations Committee increased spending, a political move to make the
proposed Health and Human Services budget more appealing to Republicans, said
Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, the committee chairman.]
While the future of abstinence education is unclear, Mr. Love, back in Longview,
believes “the message will go on, whether the government decides to fund it or
not.”
Just ask Jami Waite. The former cheerleader is carrying her resolve to college,
where she is on her way to becoming a nurse. One day she plans to wed. Until
then, she says, virginity will rule.
Jacqueline Palank contributed reporting from Washington.
Sat Jul 22, 2006
1:33 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Vera Rhodes has come a
long way from her conservative upbringing in Pennsylvania's Amish community.
There she was a virgin until she married at age 30. Now, she is an enthusiastic
54-year-old member of the millions-strong "swinging" community who speaks openly
of her encounters with multiple sexual partners.
"Last night it was really special," said Rhodes, who is divorced and makes a
living giving massages in the Midwestern state of Iowa. "There was a couple from
Mexico, a couple from Virginia and a couple from Ireland, from Australia."
"I like to participate in life as much as possible," she said with a broad
smile.
Rhodes was among some 3,000 people gathered on Saturday at the Stardust Hotel in
Las Vegas for the annual Lifestyles conference, a five-day, $700-per-couple
event that offers a mix of seminars, socializing and sex.
Early on Saturday, Rhodes was back for more, joining the action in a suite where
more than a dozen couples were having sex.
The conference organizer, Robert McGinley, 72, president of The Lifestyles
Organization, estimates that there are 3 million swingers in the United States
alone. He founded his group in 1969 and began holding the annual conferences in
the 1970s.
He said his firm brings in millions of dollars in annual sales from organizing
tours to swinger-friendly resorts, Internet sites and from conferences. The Las
Vegas event is the largest annual U.S. swinging event, he said.
"The lifestyles community is rapidly expanding," he said. "It's an expanding
economic powerhouse."
MOSTLY MIDDLE-AGED
The crowd at the Stardust appeared mostly middle-aged and middle-class. And many
were nowhere near as active as Rhodes. Organizers estimated that perhaps 40
percent of the couples were attending their first conference.
"I'm still thinking about it; we've been monogamous for 26 years," said one
middle-aged newcomer from Palm Springs, California, who said she was raised a
Roman Catholic.
At one seminar, several women were overcome as the presenter demonstrated a
sexual device -- one passed out in the packed room.
For all their enthusiasm, few of the swingers tell family and friends about
their hobby.
"Socially, we're pariahs," said Drew Alexander, 40, who attended with this wife
Tina, 38. "We're behaving in a way that's completely against the ingrained
Catholic values."
Another couple did not want their names printed but were far from shy. They made
love early on Saturday in the hospitality suites where couples wandered from
room to room to watch the action at close range. They emerged from their
experience beaming, saying seeing others sparked more passion.
One attendee who stayed completely on the sidelines was the man behind the
event.
"I've never been a big swinger, that's not the point," McGinley said. "What I
would like to do is bring a new understanding of sexuality in our lives and our
relationships."
It is only a band of silver, imprinted with a
Bible verse, worn by a schoolgirl.
But the decision by one of the country's top
state schools to ban American-style 'purity rings' - increasingly worn by
Christian teenagers to symbolise a pledge not to have sex before marriage - has
prompted not just a standoff with local parents, but a debate over religious
expression and sex education.
Heather and Philip Playfoot have spent almost two years in dispute with Millais
School in Horsham, West Sussex, over their 15-year-old daughter Lydia's ring.
While the school's uniform rules forbid jewellery, they argue that the rings -
given to teenagers who complete a controversial evangelical church course
preaching sexual abstinence - hold genuine religious significance.
'The ring is a reminder to them of the promise they have made, much the same as
a wedding ring is an outward sign of an inward promise,' said Heather Playfoot.
'There are Muslim girls in the school who are allowed to wear the headcovering,
although that isn't part of the school uniform, and Sikh girls who are allowed
the wear the bangle although that isn't part of the uniform. It's a
discriminatory policy.
'We don't want her education to be disrupted because of it but we do want her to
feel free to wear something that is very significant.'
The family claim that Lydia and up to a dozen other pupils wearing purity rings
have been forced to take lessons in isolation as punishment for breaking the
rules, threatened with detention and that - in Lydia's case - the school
governors intimated she could be expelled for repeatedly defying the rules.
Heather Playfoot said the school had told them it was a health and safety issue.
Lydia has now stopped wearing the ring in school. 'It makes me feel quite upset
and angry as well, and in a way betrayed a little, because the school are always
teaching us to be safe and we are trying to stand up for something,' she told
The Observer. 'We get picked on and called out of lessons to see if we have got
[the rings] on. I do actually keep to the school rules and I don't like stepping
out of line or anything, but I just think this is really unfair.'
Her ring came from the Silver Ring Thing, an evangelical initiative recently
introduced to Britain from the US, with which her parents' local church is
involved.
The organisation is highly controversial, with some experts arguing that
abstinence pledges are actually less effective than conventional sexual
education which advocates teenagers waiting until they are ready, but emphasises
safe sex.
Silver Ring Thing is critical of contraception, suggesting it is dangerously
fallible - which critics say only encourages teenagers who do break their
pledges to have unprotected sex.
The Playfoots however are equally critical of standard sex education. 'Here you
have 12 girls who want to live an alternative lifestyle: we are not asking the
school to subscribe to it, just respect it,' said Heather Playfoot.
The issue has now been taken up by the Tory MP Andrew Selous, chair of the
Conservative Christian Fellowship, who raised the wearing of purity rings with
the Schools Minister Jim Knight in the House of Commons last week.
Knight told him in a written parliamentary answer that while school governors
had freedom to set uniform rules, government guidance states that they 'should
have regard to their responsibilities under equalities legislation' and be
'sensitive to pupils' cultural and religious needs'.
Selous said while many schools banned jewellery he did not see a problem with
purity rings, adding: 'Given that the government is failing to avchieve its
teenage pregnancy targets, you would have thought that schools would do
everything in their power to help children help themselves.'
However Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society defended the school,
adding: 'If the school has the uniform policy I don't see why it should make an
exception for this. I'm deeply distrustful of these Silver Ring Thing-type
initiatives: the research is quite clear that they don't work.'
Leon Nettley, headmaster of the Millais School, said in a statement that the
school's own sex education programme already stressed the illegality of underage
sex and encouraged pupils to discuss the issues, adding: 'In relation to the
issue of wearing a purity ring, the school is not convinced that pupils' rights
have been interfered with by the application of the school's uniform policy.'
The abstinence debate
Hundreds of British teenagers are thought to have gone through courses organised
by the Silver Ring Thing, created a decade ago by two Christian activists in
Arizona as a response to rising teenage pregnancies. It promotes abstinence
before marriage and sexual fidelity within it, using Bible teachings and DVD
clips to emphasise the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases and abortions.
At the end of the course, children prepared to pledge chastity can pay £10 for a
silver purity ring to be given to their spouse on their wedding day: even
non-virgins can be 'born again'.
US President George Bush has heavily advocated abstinence teaching, budgeting
$170 million a year for it. However, research by Columbia and Yale Universities
found while those who pledge chastity may delay first sex, 88 per cent of them
eventually break the promise, and are then less likely than non-pledgers to use
contraception.
A MORI poll for The Observer found a fifth of British teenagers had had underage
sex. The average age of losing virginity was 17. Almost a third of women
questioned wished they had waited longer.
Children were made to watch
an attack on a
woman
who was forbidden
to marry outside her caste
June 17, 2006
The Times
By Steve Bird
A BUSINESSMAN is facing a life sentence for
stabbing his sister to death in front of his two young daughters in a so-called
honour killing.
Azhar Nazir, 30, and his cousin, 17, used four knives to cut Samaira Nazir’s
throat and repeatedly stab her after she fell in love with an asylum-seeker from
what they saw as an unsuitable caste.
Miss Nazir, 25, had rejected suitors lined up to meet her in Pakistan and had
been summoned to the family home in Southall, Middlesex.
The father, also called Azhar, Nazir and the youth launched the attack and at
one point dragged her by her hair back into the property.
Miss Nazir, a businesswoman described as “strong-willed”, was heard to shout at
her mother, Irshad Begum: “You are not my mother any more.” She was then held
down as a scarf was tied around her neck and her throat was cut in three places.
Nazir’s daughters, aged 2 and 4, were screaming and were splattered with blood.
Police fear that they were ordered to watch as a warning to them. Neighbours
called the police after hearing the screaming.
Nazir was found guilty yesterday of murdering his sister; a day after his
cousin, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted for his part in the
murder. They were remanded in custody and will be sentenced at the Old Bailey in
London next month.
The court was told that the 17-year-old believed that Miss Nazir had become a
victim of black magic at the hands of Mr Mohammad, an Afghan asylum-seeker.
Nazir denied murder but told police that his sister “had to be stopped”.
The father was also charged with the murder but fled to Pakistan, where he has
gone into hiding. Charges against the mother were later dropped.
The court was told that Nazir and his father ran Rana Brothers, a successful
grocery store on Southall Broadway. The son also owned a recruitment company, S
& F Staffing, which supplied workers for the Hilton hotel chain and had made
Miss Nazir a director.
She was articulate and well-educated and had studied travel and tourism at
Thames University. She was described as the brightest in the family.
She clashed with her family when she told them that she wanted to marry Mr
Mohammad, who become known to the family after he came to the country illegally.
After the couple fell in love,Mr Mohammad tried to ingratiate himself with the
family by arranging to bring the 17-year-old cousin to Britain from Pakistan. Mr
Mohammad and Miss Nazir kept their affair secret for years.
He told jurors: “We were as boyfriend and girlfriend for about five or six
years. But we couldn’t tell her family because Samaira said her father was a
very strict man who would not allow any female in his family to marry outside of
his caste or tribe. We had discussed marriage. Samaira wanted to tell her family
herself. Her father was very upset and said I was only after their money.”
When the couple announced their engagement, Mr Mohammad, who ran a stall selling
phone cards, said the father went at him with a knife and threatened to kill
him.
In April last year Miss Nazir was summoned to the home to be killed to protect
the family’s honour. As she screamed for help one neighbour banged on the front
door, but the father emerged claiming that his daughter was having a fit.
When police arrived they found a trail of blood from the front of the house to
the back door and then to the hallway where Miss Nazir’s body was slumped in a
pool of blood.
The amount of blood on the children suggested that they were only feet from the
attack. A neighbour spotted Miss Nazir’s bloodstained arm emerge momentarily
from the front door before she was dragged back inside and the door slammed
shut.
She received 18 stab wounds and three cuts to her throat.
Extracted from The Art of Kissing (1936) by Hugh Morris.
Approved methods of kissing
A man must be able to sweep a woman into his strong arms, tower over her,
look down into her eyes, cup her chin in his fingers, and then bend over her
face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting
ones. All of these are impossible where the woman is the taller of the two. When
the situation is reversed, the kiss becomes a ludicrous banality.
Preparing for the kiss
The breath should be kept always sweet and pure so that, when the lips are
opened, the breath will be like an aromatic breeze. Sometimes it is advisable to
touch the corners of the mouth with perfume. The teeth should be kept cleaned
and polished. Nothing can dampen a young man's ardour, or a young woman's, for
that matter, than a row of brown-stained, unkempt teeth.
How to approach a girl
In kissing a girl whose experience with osculation is limited, it is a
good thing to work up to the kissing of the lips. Only an arrant fool seizes
hold of such a girl, shoves his face into hers and smacks her lips. Hold her
gently but firmly and allay her fears with kind, reassuring words. Your next
step is to flatter her in some way. All women like to be flattered. They like to
be told they are beautiful even when the mirror throws the lie back into their
ugly faces.
The French "soul" kiss
There is more to your tongue than its tip. Probe further. Gently caress
each other's tongues. For, in doing this, you are merging your souls. That is
why this kiss was called the "soul" kiss by the French, who were said to be the
first people to have perfected it. It is because of the fact that they dropped
Puritanism many years ago that the French were able to perfect themselves in the
art of love and, particularly, of kissing.
Learn from the French.
The "vacuum" kiss
Open your mouth a trifle, then indicate to your partner that you wish her
to do likewise. Then instead of caressing her mouth, suck inward as though you
were trying to draw out the innards of an orange. If she knows of this kiss
variation your maid will act in the same way and withdraw the air from your
mouth. In a short while, the air will have been entirely drawn out of your
mouths. Your lips will adhere so tightly that there will almost be pain, instead
of pleasure. But it will be highly pleasurable pain.
Electric kissing parties
Some few years ago, a peculiar kissing custom arose which deserves mention
here. An excerpt from a contemporary writer will, perhaps, give us some idea of
what happened.
"The ladies and gentlemen range themselves about the room. The ladies
select a partner, and together they shuffle about on the carpet until they are
charged with electricity, the lights in the room having been turned low. Then
they kiss in the dark; and make the sparks fly for the amusement of the
onlookers."
In time, you will become so inured to the slight shock that you will seek
more potent shocks. These can be obtained with the use of any device worked from
a battery and a coil which steps up the weak three volts of the battery.
WHETHER you're predatory Pisces, teasing Taurus or charming
Cancer, your star sign rules your tastes between the sheets and the type of
lover you're drawn to.
According to top New York astrologers, Stella Starsky and
Quinn Cox, the zodiac offers one of the best clues to our sex lives. Unlike many
stargazers, they believe male and female versions of the same sign are markedly
different - especially when it comes to sex.
Here, in the first part of their exclusive Daily Mirror
Sextrology series, they outline the 24 gender types, examining the sexual
make-up of each sign and revealing their biggest turn-ons.
Aries March 21 - April 20
ARIES MAN - alpha male (Star Arians: Daniel Day
Lewis, Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell)
BENEATH the Ram's clean-cut appearance lies a
hormonally-raging animal ready to take the sexual lead. He is known for being
rough in bed, treating women like either princesses or playthings.
Sexy secret: Prefers the missionary position, as he likes to
take the dominant role.
How to turn him on: Call him 'Master', and ooh and ahh at the
sight of his equipment.
ARIES WOMAN - original Eve (Stars: Victoria Beckham,
Keira Knightley, Mariah Carey)
NOTORIOUSLY cool customer, she sees herself as the 'Catch of
the Century'.
Aries woman has strong physical needs for sex every day and
craves instant gratification.
Sexy secret: Likes it on top and a little rough.
How to turn her on: Introduce a shock factor such as outdoor
sex or nookie on the train - Aries woman would just love to be caught!
Taurus April 21 - May 21
TAURUS MAN - the idol (Stars Taureans: George
Clooney, Bono, David Beckham)
HE wants to be wanted and is attracted to dominant females
who'll treat him like a trophy. Strong and silent, he is the epitome of manhood,
but always expects the woman to make the first move.
Sexy secret: Loves epic foreplay.
How to turn him on: Fit a mirror on the bedroom ceiling -
watching you drives him wild.
TAURUS WOMAN - living doll (Sign stars: Renee
Zellweger, Zara Phillips, Penelope Cruz)
FEMININE and beautiful, she longs for a man to play Ken to
her ever-adoring Barbie. She is wild in the bedroom in order to satisfy her man,
unashamedly lusty and instinctive.
Sexy secret: Nibbles, licks and kisses every inch of her
lover.
How to turn her on: Work on your pecs, because she loves to
be dominated by a beefcake.
Gemini May 22 - June 22
GEMINI MAN - smooth operator (Star Geminis: Johnny
Depp, Prince William, Jonny Wilkinson)
MERCURIAL by nature, he works hard to make himself an
exciting prospect. But sex must always be fun, so Mr Gemini thrives on
experimentation - for some, even if it's sleazy - and detests routine.
Sexy secret: Good with his hands ... a real craftsman
How to turn him on: Dress up as a high-class callgirl and
tell him your fantasies. You'll send him wild.
ACUTELY aware of her feminine wiles, she takes no sexual
prisoners. Often feigns naivety, but can't resist putting on a show in the
bedroom. Some can easily lose themselves in sex and become dismissive of the man
who is only there to provide the ride.
Sexy secret: Likes it on top where she can control pace and
positioning.
How to turn her on: Offer to roleplay as her teacher.
Cancer June 23 - July 23
CANCER MAN - Prince Charming (Star Cancerians: Tobey
Maguire, Johnny Vaughan, Tom Cruise)
FOR this romantic hero, sex is an act of worshipping the
woman. Notoriously courteous in bed, some are almost cloying, and are aroused by
a woman's dominance. A softie, he loves a cuddle and has a breast-fixation.
Sexy secret: A penchant for being tied up with his lover on
top.
Turning him on: Brandish a whip and make him lick your shoes.
CANCER WOMAN - Cinderella (Stars: Courtney Love,
Pamela Anderson, Liv Tyler)
A MAN'S woman who makes her lover feel like the big, strong
protector because she sees him as her saviour. Has a voracious sexual appetite
and is a willing recipient of almost anything that is being dished out!
Sexy secret: Cancer Girl is up for most things and loves
experimentation.
How to turn her on: Ask her to roleplay as your secretary or
nurse to your doctor.
Leo July 24 - August 23
LEO MAN - the golden boy (Star Leos: Matt Le Blanc,
Antonio Banderas, Thierry Henry)
PASSIONATE and caring, he can only perform if his heart is
really in it. He prefers raw, natural, unadorned sex with no frills and, with
his belief in his own superiority, the traditional male dominance role.
Sexy secret: Enjoys a head-to-toe massage
How to turn him on: Lead him into the garden for sex under
the stars or among the rhododendrons.
LEO WOMAN - the knockout (Stars: Madonna, Melanie
Sykes, Halle Berry)
A FIERCELY energetic woman who, like the lioness, is a
wildcat in the bedroom. She always battles with her lovers for dominance and
plays cat and mouse with potential partners. Won't get out of bed until she's
had two orgasms.
Sexy secret: Loves to put on a show.
How to turn her on: Boast about your incredible stamina and
she'll try to match it.
Virgo August 24 - September 23
VIRGO MAN - the mentor (Star Virgoans: Hugh Grant,
Colin Firth, Sean Connery)
A GENTLE giant, he is the ultimate caretaker in the bedroom
with a startling empathy for women's needs. He has a Svengali-streak and sees
women as either madonnas or whores. Likes routine and little fuss in the
bedroom.
Sexy secret: Likes the woman to lead the way.
How to turn him on: Pretend he's the doctor and you're one of
his patients.
PLEASING a lover tops Virgo's erotic agenda and she treats
men like lord and master. Simultaneously sacred territory and sexy bombshell,
she is driven to nurture men. Sees sex in terms of mating and seeks partners
with staying power.
Sexy secret: Enjoys submission so won't say no to the
missionary position.
Turning her on: She has a hygiene fixation so suggest a
shower together.
Libra September 24 - October 23
LIBRA MAN - the perfectionist (Star Librans: Sting,
Simon Cowell, Viggo Mortensen)
HAS a high-minded, ethereal approach to sex. Witty and
charming, he talks women into bed. Sex must be beautiful and he indulges in
lavish foreplay, determined to gratify a woman early on. An expert lover.
Sexy secret: He hates rules, so likes to experiment with
different, athletic positions.
Turning him on: Dress up as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast At
Tiffanys.
LIBRA WOMAN - the activist (Stars: Susan Sarandon,
Catherine Zeta Jones. Kate Winslet)
UNCONVENTIONAL in relationships, some can favour casual sex
and are wary of commitment. Fights against male adulation and traditional gender
roles in bed, preferring the equality of giving and receiving pleasure.
Sexy secret: Loves positions that keep both partners happy.
How to turn her on: Arm-wrestle her into bed.
Scorpio October 24 - November 22
SCORPIO MAN - the stranger (Star Scorpios: Joaquin
Phoenix, Wayne Rooney, Leonardo DiCaprio)
A SEVERE individual, he is insular but lavishes attention on
his lover. Most Scorpios enjoy experimenting and some are even turned on by
kinky sex.
Sexy secret: Likes to take total control and may get a kick
from blind-folding his lover.
How to turn him on: Turn up wearing a mac - with nothing
underneath, but a suspender belt.
SCORPIO WOMAN - femme fatale (Stars: Meg Ryan, Bjork,
Julia Roberts)
INVENTED the term "hard to get" but skilfully works her way
into her lover's psyche without lifting a finger. Highly-sexed and demanding,
she sees herself as the ultimate prize. Woe betide he who doesn't meet
expectations.
Sexy secret: Likes it fast and furious, anywhere but bed.
Turning her on: Buy her a sex toy she hasn't tried before.
Sagittarius November 23 - December 21
SAGITTARIUS MAN - the maverick (Star Sagittarians:
Brad Pitt, Benjamin Bratt, Samuel L Jackson)
WILDLY romantic, he has an untamed energy and sees his lovers
as playmates and has incredible luck with the ladies. Any sex is good - he wants
to experience it with woman of every kind.
Sexy secret: Loves role reversal with the woman on top and in
charge.
Turning him on: Swap underwear.
SAGITTARIUS WOMAN - the leader (Stars: Lucy Liu, Kim
Basinger, Britney Spears)
A HIGH achiever, some are obsessed with the idea of choosing
only successful, charismatic partners. In bed, her modus operandi is to
'empower' the man, turning him into putty in her hands.Generous and
enthusiastic.
Sexy secret: Rope swings are her fantasy.
Turning her on: Get her to act out a scene from 912 Weeks.
Capricorn December 22 - January 20
CAPRICORN MAN - A real gent (Star Capricorns: Jude
Law, Olivier Martinez, Orlando Bloom)
AN anachronism, he is deeply old-fashioned and is attracted
to traditional, lady-wife types. Tries hard to repress his libido, but some will
have fetishes, kinks and hang-ups.
Sexy secret: Prefers the missionary position - with his lover
wearing a lace nightie.
How to turn him on: Offer to be spanked.
CAPRICORN WOMAN - a thinker (Stars: Dido, Annie
Lennox, Helena Christensen)
NATURALLY cautious, she never rushes into relationships and
seeks a spiritual connection first. Has a wild fantasy life and invents dream
lovers. A fairly conservative sexual character, she won't be coerced into
anything.
Sexy secret: Likes routine - with him on top.
How to turn her on: Borrow a sailor's uniform and act out her
fantasies.
Aquarius January 21 - February 19
AQUARIUS MAN - an eccentric (Star Aquarians: Justin
Timberlake, John Lydon, Robbie Williams)
He seems sorted and self-sufficient but some Aquarian men
have a notoriously skewed, even kinky side in bed. Thinks no woman is out of his
league and many are emotionally detached from sex. Some are even turned on by
humiliating their mate.
Sexy secret: Has a penchant for cyber and phone sex.
SHE loathes over-dependent lovers but, as the zodiac's
cheerleader, is her partner's biggest fan. A low-maintenance mate, hates
formality and routine. Spontaneity is her big arousal and sex is pure physical
pleasure.
Sexy secret: A quickie at the bus stop will excite her.
Turning her on: Take her to an orgy - where she'll only want
to watch.
Pisces February 20 - March 20
PISCES MAN - the drifter (Star Pisceans: Shane
Richie, Rob Lowe, Bruce Willis)
BEHOLDEN to nobody, this dreamer is his own boss and is drawn
to raw, grounded women who are his polar opposite. Super-relaxed about sex,
nothing embarrasses him and some Piscean men have a prolific number of partners,
many of them one-night stands.
Sexy secret: Dreams of joining the mile-high club on a plane.
How to turn him on: Rent a hard-core porn film with him.
PISCES WOMAN - Prima Donna (Stars: Sharon Stone,
Patsy Kensit, Rachel Weisz)
A WALKING, talking paradox - all virtue and all vice wrapped
in one, deceiving package. Insists on being treated like a princess in bed.
Often finds sex dirty and can behave like a martyr. But secretly adores being
adventurous.
Sexy secret: Loves spooning and being taken by surprise.
How to turn her on: Read to her aloud from an erotic novel.
__________
Adapted by Jane Ridley from SEXTROLOGY: The Astrology
of Sex
and the Sexes by Stella Starsky & Quinn Cox. 2004 Market LLC. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Published
in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishersUS, price £12.99. To buy a copy call Mirror
Direct on 0870 0703 200.
