A "lonely and disturbed" Hong Kong man had to call police to try and free him after getting stuck on a park bench he had apparently tried to have sex with.

Emergency workers took four hours trying to free Le Xing in the deserted park after dark.

Eventually they had to take him to hospital with the bench's 2.5-metre-long metal base still attached to him.

UNIVERSAL CITY, California -- It's the ultimate revenge of the nerds as product developers use their big brains to create sex machines that kick pleasure into overdrive. In fact, the very nature of the sex "toy" is changing as a new generation of sex-positive engineers infiltrates the industry.

From the smooth, silent glide of the Monkey Rocker Tango to Le Chair's ability to put two people into a dozen compromising positions, the new products and prototypes unveiled at this week's Adult Novelty Expo straddle the line between toy (a passive, frivolous object) and machine (a substantial apparatus that inspires commitment and even emotional attachment).

Here are some of the most interesting.

Power Bullet

The gigantic Power Bullet gives you the stealth option, because it doubles as a muscle massager and hides its complex machinery inside a velvety, matte-black cylinder. It wouldn't be out of place in a Pilates studio or a physical therapist's office for people to roll up and down their quadriceps, but straddling it on a pillow is going to be a lot more effective at relaxing muscles and relieving stress. Its motors provide a deep throbbing touch and its single button offers a simplicity much appreciated by tired tech workers with wrist pain. I'm just sayin'.

- - -

Imatah

As you can see in this photo, Imatah spokesmodel Danka takes the machine's debut very seriously. That's a custom-made dildo mounted on a plate connected to a mechanism that can pump straight in and out or move in an oval pattern. The Imatah weighs about 5 pounds and comes with a fabric sleeve that hides its legs and prevents the machine from falling off the bed when you use it.

"The machine becomes part of you!" gushes inventor James Hatami, who is working with Fleshlight (NSFW) to add functionality for male users. The Imatah requires only a 12-volt power supply "so you don't electrocute yourself," Hatami says.

- - -

Monkey Rocker

The original Monkey Rocker (NSFW) is an amazing cybersex accessory, a silent machine that responds to your body motions without any complicated control panels or need for batteries. It's handmade from powder-coated, 100 percent recovered and recycled wood fiber -- PermaCore MDF, if you want to get technical -- and supports up to 400 pounds.

- - -

Monkey Rocker Tango

The new Monkey Rocker Tango brings the cybersex experience offline -- when you meet your online lover in person, you can both ride it at the same time (as long as your combined weight is less than 450 pounds). The Tango also works for folks who skip the whole cybersex thing and just have a regular ol' fashioned, in-person relationship. (Weird!)

- - -

Le Chair

In a surprise departure from its inexpensive signature collections from porn stars and sex therapists, an upcoming robotic sex chair from California Exotic Novelties (NSFW) is based on love furniture already available in Japan.

This prototype, called Le Chair, comes with motors in the seat and back supports that can pound, vibrate or stroke. One seat adjusts up and down to place lovers in optimal positions for various intimate activities, and both sides provide arm and leg support as well. A representative confided that the company plans to work with programs to help get Le Chairs to war veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at low or no cost.

At right, we have Le Chair with people in it, to give you an idea of its scale. For this picture, we have raised one seat and reclined its back support. If the woman were to lie back, her pelvis would be positioned conveniently for her partner's mouth. The target audience for Le Chair is "adventurous people" and "people with physical limitations," says California Exotic Novelties, although of course it's fun for everyone.

- - -

Menage-A-Tool

I'm convinced that the man who goes by "Preston Penobscott" developed the Menage-A-Tool (NSFW) simply as an excuse to spend more time in his machine shop, machining things. The tool is an adjustable, lightweight rod with two attachments for various dildos, so you can penetrate two people at a time and still have one hand free for someone else.

"The next one's gonna be hydraulic," he enthuses, already sketching out how he wants to make the new version even more adjustable so the dildos can go closer together for double penetration or further apart if whatever you're doing requires more space between your partners.

See you in a fortnight,

Regina Lynn

July 18, 2008

http://www.wired.com

Aussie couples will soon be able to reinvigorate their love life with a daily pill that the manufacturer promises will bring back spontaneous sex.

The erectile dysfunction (ED) drug Cialis has been approved in a once-a-day formulation designed for men who have sex at least twice a week.

The drug differs from standard Cialis and Viagra tablets, which are taken before a planned sexual interlude.

Manufacturer Eli Lilly is marketing the new product as the latest tool for sexual spontaneity, as men on this regime will be able to have intercourse without advance planning.

The drug, the first of its kind approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, will cost about $190 for a pack of 24 pills.

Professor Doug Lording, an andrologist at Melbourne's Cabrini Hospital, backs the drug saying continuous 24/7 coverage promotes a more "real" sexual experience.

"This is an important new option for men with ED because it separates the pill from the pillow, which can give them back a more natural sexual experience with flow-on benefits to their overall wellbeing," Prof Lording said.

The consumer support group, Impotence Australia, welcomes the drug's approval, with chief executive Brett McCann saying ED has a definite impact on Australians' ability to enjoy spontaneous sex.

An industry-funded Galaxy poll of 800 Australians released at the launch found 74 per cent of men rated spontaneity an important part of sex.

Almost 90 per cent of Aussie women said they preferred spontaneous sex over planned intimacy - a good insight for men, as the survey showed that taking advantage of unscheduled opportunities increases their chances of having sex.

About two million Australian men suffer ED, a problem triggered by blood vessel constriction or a blockage limiting penis blood flow.

Erection drugs work by targeting an enzyme to amplify blood flow to the penis.

Brisbane-based medical sex therapist Dr Jane Howard welcomed the once-a-day formulation and said trials had indicated efficacy and safety was in line with the on-demand formula.

The most common side-effects of both products include upset stomach, back pain, muscle ache, flushing and nasal congestion.

Men, beware!

For a woman, one look is enough to make out whether you’re wooing her just for a one-night stand or marriage.

Researchers at the Durham University have carried out a study and found that a person’s attitude to sex are written all over the face – in fact, the clues lie in the shape of the jaw, the size of the nose and the shape of the eyes.

According to the study’s lead author Lynda Boothroyd, “It’s possible to judge someone’s sexual strategy simply from looking at their face. This shows these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates – or potential rivals – when we first meet them.”

The researchers came to the conclusion after surveying 700 men and women in their early 20s. The participants were all asked to look at photographs of the opposite sex and judge how attractive they’re and what their attitudes to sex might be.

The answers were compared with the real-life behaviour and attitudes of the people in the images. The researchers found that instant perceptions not only had a role in people’s selection of partners, but that their interpretation of faces was more often right than wrong when determining the attitude towards one-night stands.

According to Reuters — which follows two white English women, aged 56 and 64, as they troll for “big young boys who like us older girls” — the country’s tourism board isn’t pleased with the “unwholesome” situation, wherein women exchange gifts for sex. Officials stopped short of condemning it in the way they have male sex tourism, however. And the women Reuters interviews seem to see it as a far lesser crime — comparing it to ordinary courtship rituals like a man buying his female date dinner.

It’s certainly not so tame, despite sugar-coated terms for the trade like “romance tourism” and a slew of films that neuter the sexual fantasies and fetishes which many female pleasure-seekers want to fulfill. Before “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” there was “Shirley Valentine,” a British housewife bored of preparing her husband’s meals, who wins a vacation and finds her groove with a Greek man. Even the gritty, straightforward “Vers le Sud” — featuring the ever-experimental Charlotte Rampling — explores what happens when the female sex tourist feels romantic and even falls in love. 

Responses to the female sex tourism trend vary from disgust to vague unease. No one’s willing to make this out as a victory for feminism, even if it’s a case of women acknowledging sexual desires and having purses of their own to gratify them. (Heidi Fleiss would be proud, and possibly annoyed that her future clientele can find the frisson they seek for cheap overseas.) And it's older women at that—not the ones who are usually chided for "having sex like men."

I’m going to put my vote in the “vague unease” camp. The acts can be considered consensual or, at worst, mutually exploitative. Establishing consent is a bit easier here than where men are concerned, as Catherine Price noted on Salon, since a female purchaser is unlikely to have the physical power of a man, and can’t dominate or abuse her escort. (In any case, danger is probably a desired part of the female sex tourism package.)

But mostly I’m uneasy because the United Nations links the sex tourist trade—mostly male, but also female — to severe child exploitation of both boys and girls in Kenya. Also, prostitution is illegal in Kenya — though, as one Kenyan official notes, unofficial exchanges of hotel stays and meals for compliments and sex may not qualify. Then there’s the reluctance to use condoms despite Kenya’s 6.9% AIDS rate.

And more abstractly, there’s the obvious racial fetishes sex tourism perpetuates. Even Reuters wasn’t immune. The article says that one solicited Kenyan male named Joseph resembled an “Olympic basketball player.” (They all look alike, don’t they?) The story then describes a dance club as filled with “Joseph look-alikes.” (Hey, they do all look alike!)

A study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University finds that men report a variety of different experiences involving sexual desire and arousal.

Men participating in focus groups expressed a range of experiences and feelings relating to such matters as the relationship between erections and desire, the importance of scent and relationships, and a woman's intelligence. The Kinsey Institute study, appearing in the April issue of the journal "Archives of Sexual Behavior," is unique because few studies so far have examined how closely the findings of decades of laboratory studies on sex actually reflect the experiences of men.

"We have a lot of assumptions about how men think and feel and behave sexually," said Erick Janssen, associate scientist at the Kinsey Institute. "We use all kinds of methods to measure men's sexual responses; in addition, we use questionnaires and surveys to ask about sexual behaviors. It's less common to sit down with men and ask them to talk about their experiences."

The focus groups involved 50 men divided into three groups based on their age (18-24 years, 25-45 years and 46 and older). Below are some examples of the different experiences reported by the men:

• Some factors, such as depression or a risk of being caught having sex, were reported by some men as inhibiting sex, while other men found that they can enhance their desire and arousal.
• An erection is not the main cue for men to know they are sexually aroused. Most of the men responded that they can experience erections without feeling aroused or interested, leading researchers to suggest that erections are not good criteria for determining sexual arousal in men.
• Many men found it difficult to distinguish between sexual desire and sexual arousal, a distinction prominent in most sexual response models used by researchers and clinicians.
• The changes in the quality of older men's erections had a direct effect on their sexual encounters, including, for some, a shifting focus to the partner and her sexual enjoyment. Older men also consistently mentioned that as they aged, they became more careful and particular in choosing sexual partners.
• The sexual history of women also mattered to the men -- but differently for different age groups. Sexually experienced women were considered more threatening by younger men, who had concerns about "measuring up," but such women were considered more arousing for older men.

Janssen and his colleagues at the Kinsey Institute have been working for more than 10 years on a theoretical model that focuses on sexual excitation and sexual inhibition. They refer to this as the dual control model of sexual response. It holds that separate and relatively independent activating and suppressing sexual systems exist within the central nervous system and that the balance between these two systems determines a person's sexual response in any particular situation. Janssen relates this to the gas and break pedals in a vehicle -- both can influence a car's behavior (you can slow down by letting go of the gas or by pressing the brake) but they do so in different ways.

This model is used around the world by sex researchers in studies on topics as varied as sexual dysfunction and sexual risk taking. To measure the propensity for sexual excitation and inhibition, the researchers designed a questionnaire.

The original questionnaire was developed for men, leading researchers at the Kinsey Institute to conduct focus groups with women in an effort to create a similar questionnaire that would be more relevant for women. Janssen said the success of women's focus groups led him and his colleagues to conduct the focus groups with men.

The findings of this latest study ultimately could lead to a more effective questionnaire for the dual control model but also can inform research efforts to better understand the variability in sexual behavior.

"One of the main conclusions of the focus group study is that, just like women, men are different," Janssen said. "Sex researchers tend to focus a lot on differences between men and women, while not giving as much attention to the differences that exist among men, and women. This research is part of a larger agenda at the Kinsey Institute of looking at individual differences. This dates back to Alfred Kinsey's original research, but in our current research we not only try to capture the variations in men and women's sexual experiences -- we also try to understand better what explains variations in those experiences."

Co-authors of the study are Kimberly R. McBride, IU School of Medicine; William Yarber, Department of Applied Health Science; Brandon J. Hill, Department of Gender Studies; and Scott M. Butler, Georgia College and State University.

Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Do our laws really protect kids, or are they misdirected reactions based on myths, misperceptions and stereotypes?

Most people reading this will remember when there were no public sex-offender registries—no online portals where you can type in your address and find out if a sex offender is living nearby or sign up to receive an e-mail alert when one moves into your neighborhood. A decade ago, there weren’t folks who memorized names and faces and went door-to-door to let their neighbors know that a sex offender moved in down the street—no one putting up fliers in apartment-building lobbies and laundry rooms.

No sex-offender registry or neighborhood watch would have kept a babysitter from molesting me when I was 6. He was around 16 or 17, the brother of our regular babysitter who filled in whenever his sister was busy. I don’t remember how many times it happened, but I know it was more than once. Years later, I found out that he molested my sister, who was 4, and my best friend, who lived across the street.

At some point I told my mom what happened, but I don’t know what words I used. At 6, “penis,” “vagina” and “sex” weren’t part of my vocabulary. Whatever I said, my mom didn’t believe me—at least that’s what she told me.

Looking back, I think she knew I was telling the truth, but she just didn’t know how to respond.

And then I simply forgot that it ever happened—until my first serious relationship in high school, when I had to admit to the guy that, in my mind, the male penis was a diseased, disgusting thing. A year later I ended up in counseling for severe anxiety and depression. There was a box on a questionnaire asking if I’d ever been the victim of sexual abuse, and that opened the door.

A couple of weeks ago, I threw the babysitter’s name into a national sexual-offender registry. A match came up, but the photo was a guy from Texas who happened to have the same name. I doubt the babysitter went on to become a habitual child molester—statistics suggest that he didn’t. I think it was a case of a sexually confused teen who made a bad decision.

In nine out of 10 sexual assaults, the victim knows the perpetrator. In roughly 35 to 40 percent of those cases, it’s a relative. And if it’s not a relative, it’s mom’s new boyfriend (one of the more common victim-offender relationships) or, as in my case, a babysitter.

“The mythology of the dirty old man in the trench coat with the candy lurking around kids at a school yard is misplaced,” says San Diego County Public Defender Marian Gaston. “The vast majority of sex offenders, they don’t look like that…. It’s not this easily identifiable group of outsiders who can then be cast away. It’s your sister’s new boyfriend; it’s your stepdad.”

The term “sex offender” conjures the kind of monolithic image Gaston refers to—one that’s reinforced by the news media and tough-on-crime politicians, despite evidence to the contrary. Misperception and fear, rather than good empirical research, seem to be what drives sex-offender laws.

A case in point is a new law that takes effect this week in San Diego.

The “Child Protection” ordinance, passed unanimously by the City Council in March, is a spin-off of California’s Jessica’s Law, approved by voters in 2006. Among other things, Jessica’s Law created mandatory sentences for sex offenders, requires that certain sex offenders be outfitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices for life and expanded the list of what constitutes a sexual offense. Most controversial are the 2,000-foot-radius “predator-free zones” the law established around schools and parks in which sex offenders who are paroled after Nov. 7, 2006, are forbidden to live (for a look at how this maps out in San Diego County, click here).

The law was named after Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old Florida girl who was abducted from her home, raped and killed in 2005 by John Couey, a registered sex offender who lived about 100 yards from the Lunsfords. Couey abducted Jessica by entering the home at night through an unlocked door.

Four unnamed plaintiffs—two from San Diego County—are challenging Jessica’s Law before the state Supreme Court, arguing that the law’s residency restrictions are too broad. None of the four’s crimes involved children.

Despite the court challenge, San Diego went ahead and added more locations to the list of safe zones: city libraries, city parks, amusement parks (SeaWorld, the zoo), video arcades, licensed daycare facilities and businesses that cater to children, like Chuck E. Cheese. (The map factors in only schools and parks.)

Additionally, the San Diego law creates “presence” restrictions that forbid registered sex offenders from being within 300 feet of any of the above locations. While the city’s enhanced residence restrictions apply only to people who commit a sexual offense after the law takes effect, the 300-foot restriction applies to all registered sex offenders.
Sgt. Mark Sullivan, who supervises the San Diego Police Department’s Sex Offender Registration Unit, said enforcement of the presence restriction would likely be complaint-driven.

“We used to get complaints from mothers that would take their kids to the park and say, ‘There’s a weird guy staring at my kids,’ and they’d call the police, the police would show up [and] realize they’re talking to a sex offender,” Sullivan said, “but there was no law that would allow an officer to tell him to leave.”

Now, under the new city law, the individual could be arrested, he said.

Unlike Jessica’s Law, which has no defined punishment for anyone who violates the residence restriction (unless the person’s on parole and, in that case, it’s a parole violation), San Diego’s ordinance makes it a misdemeanor criminal offense, punishable by up to six months in jail.

At the meeting where the City Council voted to implement the law, only one person spoke in opposition. Laura Arnold, a public defender, presented each council member with a 10-page memo that summarized what a number of studies have found: Restricting where a sex offender lives has no influence on whether or not he’ll commit another crime. In fact, Arnold told the City Council, research has found that such restrictions can be counterproductive, pushing sex offenders into low-income communities and rural areas or, worse, onto the street.

In 2006, the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, an umbrella group for 84 rape crisis centers and sexual-assault prevention programs, issued a strongly worded position statement opposing Jessica’s Law: “Residency restrictions… don’t make communities safer. Residency restrictions don’t reduce recidivism, don’t improve supervision of offenders and ultimately do not protect children from sex offenders.”

And, according to a study by the Minnesota Department of Corrections that looked specifically at repeat offenders, it really does come down to relationships and not geography: “What matters with respect to sexual recidivism is not residential proximity, but rather social or relationship proximity.”

In 2006, the year before Jessica’s Law went into effect, 2,000 sex offenders registered as transient with their local police agencies. According to recent numbers from the state, 3,140 sex offenders have registered as transient—a 63-percent increase in less than two years. In San Diego, roughly 200 of approximately 1,880 registerd sex offenders have declared themselves homeless.

Sex offenders with permanent addresses are required to register annually or when they move, but transient registrants must check in with the police department every 30 days and provide officers with a general idea of where to find them, Sullivan said.

“They’ve made it very difficult for this population to find housing,” said Steve Kubicek, supervisor of adult parole operations for San Diego County. “With the city, now you’re adding [more locations]. It’s almost as if they’re purging the city of all registrants.”

Transient registrants, Kubicek pointed out, are more likely to commit other crimes. “We may see an increase in drug use when they go on the streets,” he said.

“Jessica’s Law was passed hurriedly in an election year,” he added. “And here we are in an election year.... I think [lawmakers’] intent was absolutely valid, but I think [the city law] was passed prior to evaluating the impact of the residency restriction.”

In Iowa, where a similar 2,000-foot rule has been in place since 2002, the Iowa County Prosecutors Association and more than three-dozen local governments have demanded that the state’s legislature repeal the residence restriction because of the number of offenders who’ve gone underground. And in Miami-Dade County, a reporter for the weekly Miami New Times discovered roughly 30 men living under a freeway overpass, the only place they could legally reside from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. or risk violating probation or parole.

There are other consequences of residency restrictions. Laura Arnold recently had to find a way around the law to get a client into a drug treatment facility that was too close to a school. The client, a former prostitute, is a registered sex offender because she once said “Show me your dick” to a vice cop. “Counseling” a person to expose himself is a sex crime.

Unlike most new laws the City Council enacts, this one got very little discussion; council members talked in general terms about needing to protect children, and Councilmember Ben Hueso talked about how a similar National City ordinance was pushing sex offenders into his district and so the city needed to push back. There was no factual evidence presented to the public as to why the ordinance was needed.

Not only does the ordinance lack any clear reason for being, but also, as written, it contains wrong information, specifically a portion included in the “whereas” statements that lead off the document:

“According to a 1998 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, sex offenders are the least likely to be cured and the most likely to re-offend and prey on the most innocent members of our society, and more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under the age of 18 and sex offenders have a higher recidivism rate for their crimes than any other type of violent felon.”

No such study exists. The information, rather, comes from a talk given by Florence Shapiro, a senator from Texas, at a 1998 conference organized by the Department of Justice. Shapiro was there to discuss “Ashley’s Law,” her overhaul of Texas’ sex-offender rules, prompted by the highly publicized death of Ashley Estell, a 7-year-old who, in 1993, was abducted from a playground and later found strangled. A man named Michael Blair, who’d helped search for the girl, was convicted and sentenced to death for her murder. Though an autopsy found no indication that Ashley had been sexually abused, Shapiro stuck with the story that the girl had been raped, and that’s what she told the audience who gathered for the conference. Blair, 23 years old at the time of the trial and already a convicted child molester, damned himself by telling the jury that he saw nothing wrong with consensual sex with underage girls. (Blair’s conviction is currently on appeal since repeated DNA tests of physical evidence suggest there were two men involved, neither of them Blair.)

Because Blair had served a shortened sentence for a child-molestation case, he became Shapiro’s poster sex offender—if he’d remained in prison, she argued, Ashley would still be alive.

“Sex offenders are a very unique type of criminal,” Shapiro told conference attendees. “I like to say they have three very unique characteristics: They are the least likely to be cured; they are the most likely to re-offend; and they prey on the most innocent members of our society.”

Those words—attributed to a “U.S. Department of Justice study”—have made their way into various pieces of sex-offender legislation, like Jessica’s Law and San Diego’s new ordinance, even though the DOJ included a disclaimer along with the transcript of the conference, saying the contents “do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.”

One part of the statement is true—more than two-thirds of victims of rape and sexual assault are under 18. But the rest of the information isn’t accurate. A number of studies, including two by the Department of Justice (one released in 1997, another in 2003), have found that sex offenders have a much lower recidivism rate than any other type of criminal. According to the 1997 DOJ report, for which researchers tracked 272,111 parolees for three years, only 5.3 percent of the 9,691 sex offenders in the group were rearrested for another sex crime. As for the non-sex-offender cohort, 68 percent were rearrested. Other studies have found higher rates of recidivism among sex offenders—14 percent, on average, and as high as 26 percent—but still lower than for other criminals.

Parole’s Kubicek said his own experience confirms what the studies have found. “It’s very low for us for a new sex offense,” he said.

As the state’s Sex Offender Management Board put it, in its 219-page analysis of California’s sex-offender laws, released in January, “Statements that sex offenders cannot be ‘cured’—a concept generally accepted by experts in this field—have often been misinterpreted to mean that they will inevitably re-offend. In fact, the majority of sex offenders do not re-offend sexually over time.”

Ultimately, though, debates about recidivism mean little when it comes to the population most affected by sexual assault. As Phyllis Shess, the deputy district attorney who heads the DA’s sex offender unit, pointed out, “You have to ask, is 1 percent [recidivism] acceptable? Is 10 percent acceptable? When you’re talking about these kinds of issues, no it isn’t.”

So what’s the answer? Jessica’s Law mandated that all “high-risk” felony sex offenders must wear a GPS device for life, so that their movement can be monitored by law enforcement. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began outfitting all newly paroled sex offenders—regardless of risk level— with some form of GPS device beginning last July.

In December, California was spending $21,000 a day on GPS monitoring, which comes out to $20 million a year. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s office estimated that within 10 years, the cost for GPS monitoring could grow to $100 million annually and continue to increase. Right now local governments are expected to pick up the cost after a person completes parole, an idea that no municipality has yet embraced.

While some studies have found that GPS-monitored offenders have lower recidivism rates, pilot-programs in San Diego and Tennessee found no significant difference between GPS-monitored sex offenders and those not on GPS. It’s not necessarily going to stop someone who’s dead-set on reoffending “It’s GPS, it’s not real-time; you’re not going to get the information until the following day.”

If anything, it stops an offender from absconding, though the device can just as easily be cut off. The Tennessee Department of Corrections warned that GPS devices are a resource drain when used too broadly and shouldn’t be used for life-long monitoring. Successful rehabilitation requires that an offender be given a goal to work toward, the study found.

At a community forum on San Diego’s Child Protection ordinance, Al Killen-Harvey, supervisor in the trauma counseling program at Rady Children’s Hospital, questioned whether GPS devices were the best use of limited resources:

“We only have so much money, and that money’s now gone to looking at these kinds of tracking devices.  We’ve wiped out early prevention and education programs that we used to have 15 and 20 years ago where we taught kids about healthy touch and bad touch and how to report it. We’ve wiped out funding for mental-health services for families that are economically distressed, which is a factor that may lead someone to cross a boundary that they wouldn’t have crossed before.

“In the macro sense, yeah, we’ve missed the mark here and we’re allocating way too much money in an area where the bang for the buck is minimal compared to where the real risk level is,” Killen-Harvey said.

His point on prevention is an important one. Eighty-seven percent of sex crimes committed each year are first-time offenses by people who aren’t already known to the police. It’s a statistic that turns public policy on its head—why put all the attention on the guys we already know about?

“There are agencies out there that have demonstrated that if you do a good public health, public awareness campaign, including a [hotline for] people who are afraid they might hurt a child… you can actually reduce the incidence of sexual assault in your community,” said Marian Gaston, the public defender. “Why wouldn’t we spend money on that? And instead, we’re busy spending how many millions of dollars on GPS for people who are in their 60s and who are statistically just not going to do it again.”

Then there’s the issue of treatment. The public’s perception is that treatment doesn’t work—a sex offender is a sex offender for life. But not everyone who molests a child fits the clinical definition of a pedophile, for one thing—sometimes other self-destructive factors drive behavior, like drug addiction. Recent studies have shown that, for repeat offenders, therapy does, in fact, lead to lower recidivism rates. California, however, is one of the few states that don’t offer in-custody treatment; only once a person’s released from custody is treatment mandated. It’s puzzling, given that Jessica’s Law is putting people behind bars longer.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has plans to build a new locked treatment facility for sex offenders, but, as the state’s Sex Offender Management Board pointed out in its January report, nothing’s moved beyond the planning stage. Anyone who falls into the category of “sexually violent predator,” based on a pre-release assessment, is turned over to one of two state mental hospitals, rather than paroled, where the individual goes through a multi-phase treatment program, is reassessed and then, if he’s found by a judge to be stable enough, released back into the community.

Once someone’s off probation or parole, treatment ends and it’s rare that those who need it will seek it voluntarily, said Shess, the deputy district attorney.

“We did an experiment through the [county’s] Sexual Offender Management Council, offering resources to people who felt like stresses—whatever it was in their life that might be putting them in a situation where they might re-offend—and no one took advantage of it.” The counseling wasn’t free, but it would have been low-cost, Shess said. And, even then, the county would have made arrangements for someone who couldn’t afford to pay. “We didn’t even get that far. Nobody called to say, ‘Hey I’m a prior offender, I’m feeling like I might need help—no one.”

Around 90 percent of sex offenders aren’t under state or county supervision, Kubicek noted. “The 10 percent that are on parole are receiving the best supervision available,” he said. “My concern is, how do we enforce the 90 percent who are receiving no supervision, who are just registering?”

One might assume that when a sex offender goes in to register with the police each year (or, each month if he’s a transient), there might be a brief talk with a counselor or some other kind of assessment that happens. But, aside from an initial assessment when an individual first registers, there’s not much follow-up. The city of San Diego has only five officers dedicated to the sexual-assault unit (which includes sex-offender management): one sergeant (Mark Sullivan), two detectives and two code-compliance officers who staff the office where more than 100 people go to register each week.

What if, rather than putting restrictions on where a sex offender can live and move about town—strategies whose effectiveness isn’t supported by evidence—the City Council pledged to fund a risk-assessment counselor for the police department? Sure, money’s short, but it’s hard to argue when it comes to protecting kids. Hire an intake counselor or set up a hotline that someone like my mom could call to find out how to respond when her kid says the babysitter’s asking her to do things she doesn’t understand.

Another thing to think about: It’s difficult to turn in a friend or relative when you know that, unlike any other crime, this is one that will follow the person around for the rest of his life. Would my mom have turned the guy over to police if it meant a lifetime of public scrutiny and, in essence, banishment?

Well, then there’s always the Marilyn Monroe sex tape. You heard - there’s a Marilyn Monroe sex tape. A tape of Marilyn Monroe gobbling on a man’s penis for 15 minutes. It really exists, but don’t get too excited.

A private collector has just bought the Marilyn Monroe sex tape for $1.5 million, and he’s sworn to keep it from the public in order to protect the dignity of Marilyn Monroe. Well, that and to masturbate himself scabby over the Marilyn Monroe sex tape 12 times a day for the rest of his life knowing that he’s the only one who knows what Marilyn Monroe looks like when she does blowjobs.

That’s it - this is the end of the world. We believe it was Nostradamus who said ‘all will be well when Lindsay Lohan copies Marilyn Monroe, but when Marilyn Monroe copies Lindsay Lohan we’re all fucked.’

And that, friends, is exactly what’s happened. Just a couple of weeks after the Lindsay Lohan sex tape leaked, Marilyn Monroe has got in on the act as well. Never mind that she’s been dead for 46 years - if you want to see Marilyn Monroe shove a bloke’s penis into her mouth and keep it there for 15 minutes, the Marilyn Monroe sex tape means you can.

Except you can’t. Everyone knows that a Marilyn Monroe sex tape would be the holy grail of celebrity sex tapes. More than that, in fact - since the discovery of the Marilyn Monroe sex tape, the holy grail has been papally downgraded to ‘the Marilyn Monroe sex tape of grails’ - but because of this, the man who yesterday bought the Marilyn Monroe sex tape has promised to keep it private forever, as Reuters reports:

A 15-minute film of Marilyn Monroe engaging in oral sex with an unidentified man will be kept from public view by a New York businessman who has bought it for $1.5 million, the broker of the deal said on Monday. Memorabilia collector Keya Morgan said he recently arranged the sale of the silent, black-and-white film from the son of a dead FBI informant who possessed it to a wealthy Manhattan businessman who wants to protect Monroe’s privacy. “The gentleman who bought it said out respect for Marilyn he’s not going to make a joke of it and put it on the Internet and try to exploit her.”

A good thing too, because who really wants to see one of the most iconic women of all time giving a blowjob to a man on film? Oh that’s right - everyone. Everyone wants to see Marilyn Monroe debase her own mouth in a sex tape, and if anyone says they don’t they’re lying.

But it looks like it’ll never happen now. Not until he dies and his heirs flog the video to the first website to turn up with a chequebook, anyway. Only then will be able to see a creepy dead woman silently fellate a man, and it can’t come a day too soon.

Of course, the real tragedy is that Marilyn Monroe died before this sex tape got out. Then the possibilities would have been endless. Maybe Marilyn Monroe would have been able to star in her own E! reality TV show just like Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson and Kim Kardashian, who are all equally good at filming themselves having sex. But, alas, she died before she could sell out her own life for a tawdry meaningless faux-documentary series. We don’t think we’ll ever be able to cope with that.

On the plus side, though, the existence of a Marilyn Monroe sex tape will be great news for Elton John, because it means he can bash out another lazy rewrite of Candle In The Wind to commemorate it. We’ll start it off for him: “It seems to me, you lived your life like a candle in the wind/ and by candle I obviously mean penis and by wind I mean some bloke’s gob/ you dirty great cow.”

A steamy 15-minute sex tape of Marilyn Monroe performing oral sex on an unidentified man has been sold to a New York businessman for $1.5 million. The long-buried sex film recently hit the market, a memorabilia collector told the New York Post.

The footage, which appears to have been shot in the 1950s before Monroe became famous, first surfaced in the mid-'60s. Then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reportedly spent two weeks trying (unsuccessfully) to prove that Monroe's sex partner was either then-President John F. Kennedy or his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, according to FBI documents.

In the silent black-and-white film, Monroe is on her knees in front of a man whose face is out of the shot, reports the NYPost. It appears he knew the camera was there, but Monroe never looks at the lens. The feds eventually confiscated the original film, but an FBI informant copied it, which is the footage that was just sold to the unidentified NY businessman.

Newly declassified FBI documents state that an informant "exhibited [to agents] a motion picture which depicted deceased actress Marilyn Monroe committing a perverted act upon a unknown male."

FBI documents also indicate that former baseball star Joe DiMaggio (who was once married to Monroe) knew about the tape and had offered [the informant] $25,000 for the film, but the informant refused the offer.

"You see instantly that it's Marilyn Monroe - she has the famous mole," according to an NYC memorabilia collector. "She's smiling, she's very charming, she's very radiant, but she's known for being radiant," he said. "She moves away, and then it [the footage] stops."

Fortunately for Monroe, the tape will never see the light of day if its new owner has any say in the matter. The wealthy New York businessman reportedly wants to keep this unseemly part of Monroe's past buried. He said: "I'm not going to make a Paris Hilton out of her. I'm not going to sell it, out of respect."

If his intentions are genuine, the guy is a class act and a true gentleman. If not, he's a total loser and douchebag, who's in the same class as sleazebag porn-meister Joe Francis and Rick Salomon (who made and sold the Paris Hilton sex tape).

The research published in Evolution and Human Behaviour is an insight into how people can use their perceptions to make more informed partner selection depending on the type of relationship they are pursuing and is a significant step in further understanding the evolution of partner choice, according to the research team from Durham, St Andrews
and Aberdeen Universities.

The men who were most open to casual sex were generally  perceived as being more masculine-looking, with facial features  including squarer jaws, larger nose and smaller eyes, confirming that women see masculine men as more likely to be unfaithful.

It also showed that women who were open to short-term sexual relationships were usually seen by others as more attractive, though not knowing why. Contrary to this, women are usually all over men who are potential long-term relationship material.

Men generally prefer women who they perceive are open to short-term sexual relationships while women are usually interested in men who appear to have potential to be long-term relationship  material.

Participants in the research were asked to judge the attractiveness and attitudes to sex of the opposite sex from  the facial photographs of people in their early 20s. These  perceptual judgements were then compared with the actual attitudes and behaviours of the individuals in the photographs.

It was found that the 72 per  cent of the 153 participants  (both sexes) could generally correctly judge from photographs  the potential suitor for short-term relationship.

Lead author Dr Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University’s  Psychology Department
said: “This shows that these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates.”

"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Orgasms" was the theme of the Erotic Justice event held at The Fred Pfelil Community Project last Wednesday, April 2 , featuring special guest speaker Megan Andelloux. The event was organized by Amanda Persad '10 for her "Sexual Labors in the United States" course, with Stephanie Gilmore, Visiting Assistant Professor of History and American Studies.

Persad summarized it best, saying, "[Andelloux] is helping to strengthen the sexual movement. What she does stands for all of that."

Part of the course involves conducting an interview with a sex worker, to be included as part of a bigger work, "an audio tribute," as Persad put it, called "Voices of Sexual Labor," put together by Gilmore. This is where Andelloux came in for Persad. Andelloux works as a dominatrix and foot fetish model, as well as a gynecological teaching associate. She also works at a feminist-run sex shop.

"I feel my mission in life is to bridge the gap between the medical and the pleasure centric models of sexuality and I aim to do this in a sex-positive and sassy, yet professional manner," she says on her Web site, www.OhMegan.com.

"She is more than just what she does for a living," Persad said. "She is an educator and very well-informed. People here have very narrow views, and they should hear the stuff she has to say."

Andelloux echoed the statement: "We need to get people talking about sexuality. I provide a safe space, so people can do that. It causes a commotion, which is something a math class doesn't do, although sex is just as important as math."

For her presentation, Andelloux was wearing a little black dress and bright red heels, completing her signature look with square frame glasses. According to Persad, this was actually Andelloux's fourth visit to Trinity College. However, there was a sparser crowd than usual at Andelloux's appearances - only a few dozen people were in attendance.

To start off the night, Andelloux began by showing a YouTube video called "Dildo Diaries," a documentary-style clip about a woman who was unable to buy the sex toy in Texas, as sex toys were illegal. (Very recently, this law has changed; however, their sale is still illegal in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi South Carolina, and Tennessee.) After hearing the audience's bewilderment, Andelloux said, "We're not dealing with medical facts tonight; we're dealing with politics." She emphasized the fact that everyone's civil liberties were slowly being taken away, without anyone even realizing.

Andelloux made sure there was an ongoing discussion about all of the topics she broached. "I'll start breaking out into hives if I'm the only one talking," she warned.

After her introduction to the whole subject, Andelloux had all the attendees draw two pictures: one of something general that disgusted them, one of something sexual that disgusted them. She then asked for the pictures to be taped to the wall, and for everyone to gather around and discuss them. The pictures ranged from things like rotting garbage and unflushed toilets to bestiality and anal sex. Her point was that what some people find repulsive, others see as acceptable and even turn-ons. She said, "Some of you are probably going to go home tonight and think to yourself, 'Wow, I do that, and somebody thinks it's gross.' Mull it over. You shouldn't feel like a bad person, but you should think about it."

The interactiveness of Andelloux's presentation seemed very effective. Also, her forthright manner with it all made what could have been an uncomfortable, awkward conversation into something easy and informative to take in, without being clinical or lecture-like.

The discussion moved then to the religious right and their attempts at controlling and limiting what people can and cannot do in their personal lives. She used many good examples of current cases and trials that are going on in the courts today to illustrate what she was saying. Andelloux also brought up activist judges, as well as such organizations as the XXX Church, passing around a sample Bible that they hand out at porn star conventions. She showcased a video on their Web site called, "Save The Kittens," which declared that, "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten." The conversation about these topics was so captivating that it lasted for over two hours.

"I thought it was interesting," Daisy Ramos '10 said, "It was my first time attending one of [Andelloux's] talks and it wasn't at all what I thought it was going to be like. I was surprised at how open everyone was to talking about subjects that are sometimes a little uncomfortable to talk about. It was also another reminder of just how much politics affects our daily activities."

Betsy Perez '10 agreed, "Events such as these are crucial to dispel ignorance about sexual health. Furthermore, the information that [Andelloux] provides dissolves the stigmas surrounding active sex lives that should not at all be stigmatized."

This was Andelloux's second event at Trinity this year. She also spoke during the Fall semester at a Fred event on the art of the female orgasm.