Sex educator Violet Blue's site for sex culture commentary, accurate sex information, erotica and more.

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The cheeky monkeys at adult retailer LoveHoney UK decided to send a bit of special sauce into my inbox this morning when they emailed me about their new ad for Bacon Lube. It looks like the bacon flavored lubricant I told you about back in November is now commercially available!

The cool peeps at LoveHoney (they of the sex toy zombie survival videos and who also now have a US store and recently acquired CoCo de Mer) clearly had a lot of fun with this one – extra fun points for the “thumbs-up” shot and the cute boy who seems to have put his bacon on the line during the making of this video. Oh – and because they’re in the UK, they obviously had to make a techno remix of the video.

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In a bizarrely credulous article, the Telegraph has answered the question of what causes war. That’s right! You guessed it…it’s boners. Not economics, resource scarcity, ethnic and racial prejudice, acquisitive and incompetent political leaders, short-sightedness or failure to learn from history. Nope! It’s just plain boners, pure and simple. They’re bad.

Here’s how the Telegraph puts it, in an article titled “Male sex drive ‘to blame for world’s conflicts’.”

The male sex drive is to blame for most of the world’s conflicts from football hooliganism to religious disputes and even world wars, according to scientists.

The “male warrior” instinct means that men are programmed to be aggressive towards anyone they view as an outsider…In evolutionary terms an instinct for violence against others helped early men improve their status and gain more access to mates, but in modern terms this can translate into large-scale wars.

In contrast women are naturally equipped with a “tend and befriend” attitude which means they seek to resolve conflicts peacefully in order to protect their children, researchers said.

The “tribal” attitude of men, ultimately aimed at boosting their chances of reproducing, is similar to the territorial behaviour of chimpanzees, it was claimed.

The study also examined evidence which suggests men have a stronger sense of group identity than women, and that they will develop closer ties with others in their group if they are in competition with rivals.

Although men’s hostile responses most likely evolved to combat the threat from outsiders, they “might not be functional in modern times and are often counterproductive,” experts said.

Over time this has resulted in full-scale wars between countries and empires, and also in scraps and skirmishes between rival groups of football supporters and urban gangs.

[Link.]

My bullshit detector goes ding-ding-ding whenever I read journalists writing about human behavior by drawing such broad strokes. “Full-scale wars between countries” and “skirmishes between…football supporters and urban gangs” is a ludicrous generalization. The study itself actually goes even further — and includes fights between rival groups at high schools. Talk about the shotgun approach…

You can point to all the data you want; there are too many moving parts to wars, and even to urban gangs, to claim that violence is caused by one source, like male sexuality. What’s more, there are a lot of moving parts to male sexuality. Treating men as simple beasts is insulting, and treating our sexuality as nothing more than the Boner Patrol is so simplistically sex-negative it boggles my mind that it still exists in this day and age.

But there’s a more insidious side to “research” like this. Treating wars as the inevitable side-effect of boners is de facto sex negative, yes. And if the data supported it, I’d be all for it. But the authors of the study rely on comparing apples and oranges, tossing in everything from tribal societies to chimpanzee behavior to terrorism, and using it to draw enormous conclusions about history.

That’s where I think the study turns truly dangerous. It’s a way of cheapening the malfeasance that actually causes wars — oftentimes deliberate malfeasance on the part of politicians. War literature is filled with humankind’s helplessness to change its destiny. Maybe individual combatants are helpless sometimes. But at a macro-level, human beings don’t get into wars because they’re helpless puppets dancing on evolutionary strings. They get into wars because some people deliberately act like assholes. Specifically, powerful people (usually men) abdicate their responsibility to safeguard their constituents’ well-being. Do the Telegraph’s editors — or the researchers — really want to winnow Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Tahrir Square, or World War II down to outdated human behavior patterns caused by “men trying to reproduce?” In a world where lopsided economics, racial and ethnic prejudice, homophobia, sexism and misinformation play such a role in most forms of violence, why does male sexuality have to get a bad rap? [SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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I don’t usually go for the erotic Disney stuff, but the 2012 calendar created by comic book artist J. Scott Campbell is really amazingly sweet, sexy and dirty all at once. In fact, all of his work in this genre suggests a delicious fascination with fetish, fantasy and exaggerated (unreal) body types that push lines which turn us on while reminding us that titillating sexual fantasy is exactly that.

• Sexy 2012 Disney Princess Pin-up Calendar
• Disney Princesses Get Sexy Comic Makeover

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