Sex News: Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Putin, One Million Morons, Sex Crimes

Let’s try this again, shall we?*

• Steve Coogan plays the UK’s answer to Hugh Hefner in his fourth collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom. And it is ultimately more compelling as a long, colorful look at Swinging London in the 1960s than as autobiographical drama.
  Look of Love (NY Post, vido above via)

• A U.S. State Department officer formerly assigned to Georgetown, Guyana has been accused of selling visas for sex and money in what may have been a massive human trafficking operation, The Daily Caller has learned. The scandal began when executives and tourists complained that their visa applications were being held up, and local media began reporting that a visa official was demanding bribes and sex in exchange for visas. The Daily Caller has identified the suspect as Edy Zohar Rodrigues Duran, formerly of Mission, Texas, and currently living in Falls Church, Virginia.
  U.S. Embassy official in Guyana removed in alleged sex-for-visas swindle (Daily Caller)

• Pastor Dennis was inspired by his staff’s concerns about pornography in the church: wives who’d caught their husbands, moms worried about their sons. And so he pumped out a website, “Join 1 Million Men” where men can pledge to live porn free by getting “on The Wall”, and encouraging other men to do the same. Since good Christian women obviously would never watch porn – how can they get in on the action? Why, by joining the “Women Warriors” – one million women committing to praying heavily for the One Million Men…
  Pornography: the New Bubonic Plague (A-News Reports)
  Florida pastor urges men to destroy computers in quest to live ‘porn free’ (Raw Story)

• Like scabies and syphilis, Manic Pixie Dream Girls were with us long before they were accurately named. It was the critic Nathan Rabin who coined the term in a review of the film Elizabethtown, explaining that the character of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. She pops up everywhere these days, in films and comics and novels and television, fascinating lonely geek dudes with her magical joie-de-vivre and boring the hell out of anybody who likes their women to exist in all four dimensions.
  I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (New Statesman)

• “President Vladimir Putin has signed into law the new anti-gay Bill that criminalises LGBT freedom of expression. The adoption of children by gay couples has been banned by the Russian parliament and gay organisations are being fined as ‘foreign agents’. These are the latest examples of escalating homophobic repression in Russia,” said Peter Tatchell, Director of the human rights advocacy organisation, the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
  Russia cracks down on LGBT human rights and introduces blasphemy law (Secularism)

• Warning, disturbing: Probe investigates claims Canadian soldiers told by superiors to ignore incidents in which Afghan boys were assaulted by allied soldiers.
  Canadian military still investigating Afghanistan sex assault claim (The Star)

• Sex education makes teens hot and bothered and other claims from our fearless leaders: Daily Beast has a roundup of politicians in various states doing utterly bizarre and misguided things in regard to sex and passing restrictive laws.
  The Fringe Factor: The Perils of Sex Ed (The Daily Beast)

• Nearly 300 female Canadian Mounties are now involved in a lawsuit against the organization, claiming rampant gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the force, which failed to do anything about it. Thirty-five of those women are from Alberta and 15 of are still within the force. The complaints range from being in a stressful toxic work environment to sexual assault and the inability to work.
  Hundreds of female Mounties suing the force (Toronto Sun)

• “When a movie is as testosterone-soaked as Fast and Furious 6, it can accumulate a curious sweetness in spite of itself, fumbling for thoughts it scarcely has the wit to express. Boys have feelings too, made (as any 13-year-old boy will tell you) no less pointed for any total inability to articulate them properly. The Furious movies are what happen when those feelings grow up, get no closer to competent expression, but get bankrolled to the tune of $150 million.”
  Destroy All Monsters: Car Sex and Muscle Memory (Twitch Film)

• A Philadelphia-area couple was caught doing the nasty by a cadre of bicycle cops when the officers rode by to find the two mid-coitus in a public park. Richard McBride and Jennifer Harvey were stopped by a swarm of Upper Darby police officers on the baseball field of a neighborhood park. Officers confirmed that they were well past first base, reports Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV.
  Baseball Field Sex Romp Busted by 25 Cops on Bikes (Legally Weird)

• Massive warning for sexual assault and trauma survivors: “I don’t think my story is particularly rare or special. It happens all the time – according to RAINN, a rape occurs in the US every two minutes. And just like 97 percent of rapists, my attacker walked free. I would like to share my personal account of what it is like to file a rape accusation, so if you haven’t gone through the process, you can learn about all the fun that comes with it.”
  I Got Raped, Then My Problems Started (VICE)

• Dr David Weeks, former head of old age psychology at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, said sex has a number of health benefits which can make people look between five and seven years younger. It causes the release of endorphins, the ‘feel good’ chemical which acts as a natural painkiller and reduces anxiety aiding sleep; exercise boosts circulation which is good for the heart; and it also causes the human growth hormone to be released which makes the skin look more elastic.
  Sex is the secret to looking younger, claims researcher (Telegraph UK)

• This article was passed around over the weekend on social media as possibly the most ill-informed article about porn and the internet ever cobbled together – it’s like someone wrote down an extended game of Internet Porn Telephone as told by mainstream porn industry PR representatives. And no, it’s not from 2005. Peep it for the lulz.
  PORN: The Hidden Engine That Drives Innovation In Tech (Business Insider)

• More warnings: The Justice Department first discovered a startling form of abuse in 2010, when it surveyed more than 9,000 youngsters living in juvenile halls and group homes. More than 10 percent of the respondents said they’d been sexually abused by staff and 92 percent said their abuser was female. In the last three years, the numbers haven’t changed much.
  Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them (ProPublica)

• A 15-year-old girl was arrested on a child pornography charge for allegedly showing several classmates a photo on her iPhone depicting “two juveniles engaged in oral sex,” police report. The girl admitted to “taking the pornographic photo,” according to a complaint affidavit filed by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office. The document, sworn by a detective, does not identify the juveniles in the photo, though a sheriff’s spokesperson said that the teen herself is one of the minors depicted.
  Girl, 15, Faces Child Porn Rap For iPhone Pic (The Smoking Gun)
  Girl charged with felony child porn over photo of friends having oral sex (NY Daily News)

* The last Sex News post saw me accidentally posting an item that was satire. It was sent to me by a trusted source who was equally as mortified as I was when readers, Twitter friends, and more let me know in a flood that the item was not, in fact, actual news. It was from a website that wants to be like The Onion, but sadly is not funny, and so flew under, over and right through our radar. I wasn’t the only site to post it, and the item was unsettlingly close to a possibility (anything Texas and sex, you know?) – but none of these are real excuses for letting you down. As bad as I felt (and as much as it made me want to kiss my editors at CBS just for existing), I realized very quickly that I would have felt a trillion times worse if no one had said anything. Imagine if you made a mistake and it was in a vacuum? That is way more horrifying, to me, than being wrong. So this is my way of saying thank you – thank you for reading, and thank you especially for giving me tough feedback when I need it most. Please don’t stop. This is why I believe writers need to talk to, and -especially- listen to, their readers. Without a real relationship with you, we become nothing but that tree dying in the forest, falling for no one to hear.