The Russian Sex Wars: “Let’s Do It Together.”

If you lose sleep worrying, as I sometimes do, that Russia’s nascent democracy has been torpedoed by the rising tide of Neoliberal oligarchs and centralized political power within a small ruling elite with total disregard for human rights and egalitarian democracy, let me reassure you that, “Well, maybe they’re not really democratic over there in…

Some Fascinating Argentinean LGBT Rights PSAs

The above Argentinian PSA got me all verklempt. It shows a series of transgender Argentinians talking  about how it feels to have the name on one’s ID not match one’s identity. It’s in Spanish, with English subtitles added after-the-fact by Blabbeando (the link comes via Charlie Glickman at Good Vibrations). With its perky, music, straightforward…

Sexual Assistants in Switzerland and Sex Surrogates in the US

An article today on South Africa-based News 24 leads me to a fascinating piece of information I was somehow unaware of. In Europe, there is a profession called “sexual assistant” — and in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, it’s a fully licensed profession with “proper legal status.” Though I’ve never heard this specific term, a…

Do German Catholic Bishops Own a Porn Company?

In a story headlined Catholic Church Makes A Fortune In The German Porn Business, Worldcrunch condensed and simplified a sensationalistic story from the conservative German newspaper Die Welt that didn’t stop at throwing around accusations not just about porn, but about atheism, magic and Satanism. I’m willing to bet that the only things most porn-savvy…

If you like puppets, googly eyes and trans pride, you’ll squee like I did over the above trailer for the 10th Anniversary San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, which kicks off this coming Thursday with a night of performance by transgender and gender-variant artists, and follows it up with full two nights of short films. As…

TSA Misses Loaded Guns, But Finds Silver Bullets

As you may know, the Transportation Safety Administration doesn’t have an impeccable record when it comes to sex and sexual assault issues, the simple sanctity of passenger bodies, passenger privacy, et cetera. Sure, sometimes that can be pretty funny — because, hey, what’s not hilarious about being non-consensually groped? Other times it’s just weird. Certain…

GOP Frontrunners Would Make Contraception Illegal; Rachel Maddow Responds With Basic Sex Ed Lesson for Romney

As you may know, one of the big questions in the Republican U.S. Presidential primary is just how rabidly anti-choice each candidate can be. Afraid of being labeled not-rabidly-anti-abortion-enough by Republican voters, the candidates have been struggling to one-up both each other and themselves — with anti-choice positions migrating ever further right — in some…